It was only at lunchtime, when Joe came steaming in with a cheese and tomato sandwich, that the ride resumed.
“Well, what do you think?” he asked as he wrestled his clingwrap.
“About what?”
“Isn’t it obvious?”
“The neurology of the paddle-tail newt?”
“Very funny, Moderation Man, you know who I’m talking about.”
“You sure you want to go there?”
“Why?”
“We had a fairly weird chat this morning – she practically accused me of being a drug dealer.”
“Well, aren’t you?” Joe asked, through a mouthful of cheese and tomato.
“Along with every pharmacist in the country.”
“She’s freaked out over the schnauzers’ cough medicine.”
“I am too.”
“And she did something strange,” Joe continued. “She looked me right in the eye and said, ‘We are nothing without choice.’”
“That’s a little portentous.”
“I knew what she was saying, Tim. It’s like she was channelling the Enlightenment.”
“French philosophy in five words?”
“So what do you think?”
“About French philosophy?”
“Sophia and me – it’s obvious something is happening.”
“You mean like with the neurologist.”
“I’m not channelling Hugh Hefner’s ghost, okay?”
“Then what are we talking about?”
“What she said. She feels like she’s known me for years.”
“But until you met her, you had no idea who she was.”
“No.”
“Ridiculous.”
“I know that, Tim, that’s why I’m asking your advice.”
The look in his eyes was so plaintive I was confused. Joe is an intelligent realist, someone who thrives on deflating delusion and pretence. If our roles were reversed, I knew he’d be merciless; but his naked vulnerability was so real I was embarrassed.
“I know it’s weird, Tim. Well, let’s be honest, it’s crazy. But the connection is significant.”
“And it was there even before you met?”
“I don’t know, comrade, I just know it’s there now.”
“You’re right, it’s crazy.”
“But it feels real.” Blinking through his thick spectacles he looked strangely ashamed.
“Aside from the usual platitudes, I don’t know what I could possibly tell you,” I said. “If you feel that strongly about her, take her to dinner.”
He was aghast. “You mean ask her out? I can’t do that. She’d think it was unprofessional.”
“But she said you’d known each other since you were kids.”
“That doesn’t mean I can ask her out on a date.”
“You’re losing me, Joe.”
He didn’t reply. Instead he took another bite of his cheese and tomato sandwich, lost in whatever vision of Sophia was floating around in his imagined future.
“The thing is,” he said suddenly, as if he’d been given an invisible shove, “I don’t want to ask her out.”
“Why?”
“Because the best way to kill a dream, Tim, is to make it real.”
5
Don’t let dreams become real. It could be a Broadway melody, but the science behind every torch song is accurate. Once the prefrontal cortex starts the process, there’s no turning back. The cascading release of dopamine, serotonin and adrenalin creates a storm of pleasure. It’s there by day, and always in dreams.
The frothing warriors of Islam are caught in the same tempest as the models surging down catwalks for Victoria’s Secret. No part of human history, no race, profession or religion escapes. I’m saying this because, despite our radically different backgrounds, it’s weathering the storm that makes Joe and me friends.
We met as first-year veterinary students at Sydney University and the bonding was instant, although on paper we shouldn’t glue at all. I’m six-foot-three in the old language. Joe is about five-footseven. In anthropomorphic terms, I’m a Border Collie and he’s a finely formed marsupial. I grew up on the Northern Beaches of Sydney. Joe is a product of a cosmopolitan culture where the Torah, Talmud and B’rit Hadasha are assiduously read.
The only thing we really have in common is that we both come from medical families. My parents are suburban GPs; Joe’s parents are specialist surgeons. They were dismayed in their separate ways when we decided to study veterinary science; but there the obvious connection ends.
I love my cricket and footy. I’m always one of those sad figures lurching towards the finishing line in the city to surf annual marathon, and I still surf most weekends. “Jews don’t surf,” Joe once said with an authority that discouraged dissent. He prefers his boxing and he’s never lurched with a sweating mob towards a marathon ribbon.
The differences between us run deep but actually strengthen the friendship, which is even more unusual when you know our family backgrounds. I’m solid Anglo-Irish. Joe is German Jewish, with family roots deep in the Rhineland and Westphalia. His grandparents emigrated just after the Second World War; his father is an obstetrician and his mother a plastic surgeon, two tricky professions for people with their real family name: Frankenstein.
For the record, it’s Old German, meaning “stone of the Franks”, but “Dr Frankenstein” is never going to look great on a brass plate for an Australian obstetrician or plastic surgeon – or a vet for that matter – so for professional reasons they shortened their name to Franken. Although Joe has always kept his real name on his passport, something that often gives him grief. Jokes about viridian skin and bolts in the neck follow him through most airports. “You can’t hide from Frankenstein,” I once heard him say at JFK after the usual neck-bolt crack. “I was speaking to Barry Frankenstein in San Clemente just the other day.”
The Wildes of the Northern Beaches are Anglo-Irish, as I’ve said, with no connection to Oscar, despite my father’s wild assertions. That’s his joke, not mine. My father Bill and my mother Sally are both politically conservative, staunchly Christian GPs, lumbering through gumnut suburbia like a pair of Aryan Goliaths. My mother’s daily reality is homogenised with hospital-strength bleach. My father’s passion is for order, and cricket on TV. The chemical air freshener of my childhood was always fresher than fresh air. Our toilet water was always a vivid synthetic blue.
For Sally and Bill, the Northern Beaches are a safe domain where they help decent families battle skin cancer and whistle hymns to a blond Jesus; but their Protestantism makes them paranoid. Buddhists and Jews are deeply mistrusted in that order. Muslims are Lucifer’s children. My father is vague on the reasoning; for him it’s instinctive, but my mother is the mistress of dogma.
“What’s wrong with Buddhists, Mum?”
“They have no god.”
“Muslims?”
“Devils of the desert.”
“The