Free Origins of the Universe and What It All Means by Carole Firstman

carelessly handle poisonous snakes, traipse the Cataviña boulder fields without a poking stick, and hang out with tuberculosis-infected coughers. So some of Chaka’s humanoid friends perished before reproducing; others, those who feared the right things, survived to pass on their genes.
    When it comes to fear, what doesn’t kill us just might excite us—the gene-passing, DNA-mixing kind of excitement. When the hypothalamus turns on the fight-or-flight response, the sympathetic nervous system and the adreana-cortical system flood the bloodstream with dozens of hormones: the heart pounds, pupils dilate, veins constrict, glucose increases, skin prickles, certain muscles tense, others relax, oxygen intake increases, attention narrows and locks onto the object in question. The effect can be quite pleasurable, even mimic (ahem) sexual arousal. No wonder so many people see scary movies and ride roller coasters with their dates. No wonder the carnal investigation, groping teenage couples in the back rows of movie theaters or skin-to-skin explorations behind steamy car windows, hands and fingers and tongues searching in the dark.
    Scientific evidence supports the fear-attraction connection. Psychologist Arthur Aron, for instance, conducted a study using the very common fear of heights. One group of men walked across a 450-foot-long, unstable-feeling bridge suspended over a 230-foot drop; another group walked across a perfectly stable-feeling bridge over the same height. At the end of each bridge, the men met Aron’s very beautiful female assistant. She asked each subject a set of questions related to an imaginary study and then gave him her phone number in case he wanted more information. Of the thirty-three men who’d walked across the stable bridge, two called the assistant. Of the thirty-three who’d walked across the swaying bridge, nine called. Aron concluded that the state of fear encourages sexual attraction. Which may account for my (still-lingering) wild crush on Harrison Ford. And my personal all-time record for seeing the same movie in a single theater run. One summer, five times, full ticket price. (Many years have passed since he first played Indiana Jones in 1981, but like a good wine, the man gets better and better with age. Still.) One can only imagine the rollicking good time Chaka initiated when he returned to camp late at night after a harrowing day of dark-cave exploration and rattlesnake scares.
    Curiosity, as a concept, occupies a liminal space: it teeters on both edges of the good-to-bad spectrum, pulls the opposite ends together, magnetizes their polarities until the straight-lined spectrum arches, bends into a circle, fuses, and emerges as a ring, a band without beginning or end. For better or worse, curiosity and fear cohabitate, live as one. They are the Odd Couple of human behavior, the Oscar Madison–Felix Unger, love-hate couple nesting in your brain.
    For Chaka, though, it all worked out (not so for his dearly departed brother, Tuktuk, may he rest in peace). In this case, curiosity led Chaka to new food sources hidden in the dark cave; inside the cave, he grabbed the food but then had to fight off the vipers; thoroughly turned on, he went home and banged Mrs. Chaka (and probably his newly widowed sister-in-law, Mrs. Tuktuk, as well); his offspring (and their offspring and theirs) eventually emerged preprogrammed with a heightened sense of curiosity and willingness for adventure, but also a genetically based innate fear of reptiles, which enabled them to easily discern a rattler among flowers and frogs and shaded dry grass.
    In this I take comfort. It is unlikely that my eight-year-old niece will want to bend over and touch the coiled rattlesnake she might discover beneath my brother’s deck. Genetic programming protects the little girl that carries my parents’ (and her parents’) genes.

 
    Twenty-One
    Â 
    From the makeshift sign, I followed my