the gold bug variations
  BY
  richard powers
  the gold bug variations




  the gold bug variations. Copyright © 1991
by Richard Powers.


ARIA
I
II
III
IV
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VIII
IX
X
XI
XII
XIII
XIV
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XVI
XVII
XVIII
XIX
XX
XXI
XXII
XXIII
XXIV
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XXVII
XXVIII
XXIX
XXX




       RLS CMW DJP RFP J?O CEP JJN PRG
       ZTS MCJ JEH BLM CRR PLC JCM MEP
        JNH JDM RBS J?H BJP PJP SCB TLC
       KES REP RCP DTH I?H CRB JSB SDG




ARIA
  The Perpetual Calendar

  I.
  What could be simpler? Four
  scale-steps descend from Do.
  Four such measures carry over
  the course of four phrases, then home.

  At first mere four-ale, the theme swells
  to four seasons, four compass points, four
winds,
   forcing forth the four corners of a world
  perfect for getting lost in

  or for filling, by divide and multiply.
  Four secret letters, tetragrammaton,
  start to speak themselves, the tune
  doubling down a net of no return.

  What could be simpler? Not even music
  yet, but only counting: Do, ti, la, sol.
  Believing their own pulse, four tones
  break into combinations, uncountable.

  II.

  From language to life is just four letters.
  How can that awful fecundity come
  from four semaphores, shorthand and
dumb,
  nothing in themselves but everything?

  Gene-raining cascade, proliferating green
  tints, varieties senseless except for their
own
  runaway joy in the explosion. Fresh
phloem-
  pipes, palisades, leaves ripe for
insect-aping.

  All patterns patented: gyro, chute,
receiver,
  fish that track ocean back to first stream
  or steer pitch black by trapped bacterial
beams.
  Can egg-chaos really be all the blueprint
needed

  to father out this garden-riot from just
seed?
  No end to the program except a breaking
out
  in species-mad experiment,
sense-shattered shout,
  instruction-torrent: live, solve, copy This,
repeat.

  III.

   Two men, two women, their requisite
friends,
   acquaintances, strangers and
impediments,
   two couples at arm's length of thirty years
bend
   in ascending spiral dance around each
other.
    All four have traveled far from home
    and, in the hour when they need it most,
    the grace of reference works won't come
    to cure the persistent call of tonic.

  "Picture those pay telescopes," he said,
  "that sprout up at scenic views. Ten cents,
  a minute's panorama, then it snaps dead.
  Clicks shut. Cut off. And you with no more
change."

   All four must make a full tour of the curse,
   and deep in variation, for a moment, lose
   the four-note theme, sight of each other,
worse,
   Drowned by the pump and swell, the
flood of dates.

    IV.

  The calendar's fresh beauty is how it runs
  through perpetual days, calling us on
  to the urgencies of life science, old
names,
  genus, species: May Thirds, March
Twenty-ones.

   Everything that ever summered forth
starts
   in identical springs, or four-note var-
   iations on that repeated theme: four
seasons,
   four winds, four corners, four-chambered
heart

  in four desire-trapped bodies in the thick
  of a species-swarmed world where green
thrills
  to countless change while the calendar
holds still.
  Winter works again, through autumn's
politics,

  its call to action, critical count of votes:
  Look, speak, add to the variants (what
could
   be simpler?) now beyond control. How
can we help
   but hitch our all to these mere four
notes?



I

    The Care and Feeding of Foreigners

   Word came today: four lines squeezed on
a three-by-five. After months of bracing for
the worst, I am to read it casually, jot down
the closing date. The trial run is over, Dr.
Ressler dead, his molecule broken up for
parts, leaving no copies. I can neither
destroy the note nor keep from rereading it.
The news is a few days cold. I've had a year's
advance warning. But I haven't time enough
left in my own cells ever to figure it. The
mechanical music box, his body, has had its
last crack at the staff. Those four notes, four
winds, four corners of a world perfect for
getting lost in are lost in a sample mean.
   Once, when he talked, I could almost
follow in him the interior melody from the
day of creation. For a few months, I'd had
that tune by ear. Now nothing. Noise. I read
the note all evening, waiting for the clause
that will make sense of it. The only volunteer
words are his: Dr. Ressler, leading the way
through winter violence, the snowstorm that
trapped the three of us in a vanished cabin,
laying out all natural history with an ironic
shrug: "What could be simpler?"
   I had a hunch it would come now. For a
week, unseasonably cool—brisk, blustery,
more like summer's end than its beginning.
Last night the cold peaked. I slept under a
parfait of wool, the weight required to keep
me under. Giving in to an irrational fear of
courants d'air brought on by too much
literature as a girl, I sealed the apartment. No
one around any longer to object. Excited by
night chill, the signal hidden in temperature,
I fell asleep only by degrees. I lay in the
metal-cold sheets aware of every pore,
unable to keep from remembering.
Something was about to happen. Hurried
lingering, hope, as always, a function of
weather.
   I passed through that hybrid state just
short of dream, back to that iridescent
weekend in the woods. The familiar world
overhauled, encased in silver sealant. We
three waded again across the glacial surface:
spectral trees glazed with lapidary. Bird and
squirrel fossils marked the drifts. Snow
obliterated paths, spun power lines into flax,
confected hedgerows, dressed our cabin in
gothic buttresses and finials. I walked
through the transmuted place beside my two
males, one in herringbone, the other in navy
pea. Dr. Ressler walked between Franklin
and me, pointing out astonishments in the
altered world, his features as angular as the
shepherd's wonder from my childhood
creche. The seashell loops of his ears, his
fleshless nose, reddened in the acute cold,
while his lashes doilied with flakes that
beaded across his mat of hair.
   We pressed deeper into the snowscape,
the bronchi-passages of a walk-in lung.
Franklin and I placed our hands under each
other's coats, pleading conservation of heat.
In bed, my skin still recorded the year-ago
cold of that boy's fingers against my ribs.
Ressler saw everything: the bark swells of
insect galls, the den entrance punched
through hardened powder. He certainly saw
how Franklin and I kept warm, and treated it
as easily the most explicable of winter
mysteries. At his finger-points, the arcade of
frosted branches became vault ribbing. His
each wave populated the landscape, pulling
Chinese lanterns out of flat sheets. He
crumpled to his knees in the snow, shook his
head in incomprehension, and like the
crystal world, seemed about to splinter. He
must have solved again, with fierce looking,
the ladder of inheritance, because his face
turned and he swung his eyes on us
expectantly.
   Piled in blankets, I slowed the dream, kept
him from speaking, prolonged the
endangered moment that would shatter at
the least formula. His throat tensed; his lips
moved soundlessly like a remedial reader. He
became that pump organ we had played
six-hands, about to produce the one phrase
sufficient to hymn this mass of brute
specifics. The traces of creatures, all the
elaborating trills and mordants of winter
seemed a single score, one breathing
instrument whose sole purpose was to beat
the melodic line of its own
instructions—four phrases, four seasons,
every gene the theory of its own exposition.
He was about to hum, in a few notes, the
encoded thread of everything happening to
us and everything that would fail to happen.
But his lips—thin, boyish, blue, wasted in
middle age—could not shake loose the first
pitch.
   As before, Franklin challenged him.
"You're the life scientist. Tell us what's afoot
here." Every detail of Ressler's face grew
magnified: the interstate lines of folded
neck, his frozen-brittle lobes, the spot on his
chin thawed by breath. His viscera, the
process even then growing more variegated,
already knew the tumor. This time Dr. Ressler
gave no reply. He had gone, slipped out
from under the weight of white.
   Then, this morning, just waiting for me to
commit wrongly, summer chose its moment
to break. The pressure system stalled above
the city passed over, at last bringing the
weather the calendar called for.
Overbundled in the airless room, I woke up
soaked in flannel. I sponged clean, washed
my hair, ate an insignificant breakfast, and
brushed my teeth without conviction. I sat in
the dining nook, in the first, full heat of
summer, trying to retrieve that snowscape.
Awake, I let the man ask the question I'd
earlier forestalled: what could be simpler? He
remained a geneticist despite everything,
partial to the purposive pattern, the
generative thread. But his four-phrased,
simple explanation was as unrecoverable
from my breakfast table as that New
Hampshire weekend, the whole aborted
year.
   Fragment, endorphin-induced, absolutely
commonplace: easier to count the nights
when I don't dream of those two than when
I do. Still, this one torched my morning. I
filled with the urge to make the call, but had
no number. I came within a dot of dashing
off the telegram composed since last spring,
but knew no sending address. The way back,
the suggestion forced open again overnight
was sheer perversity. I sat at the breakfast
table until the moment passed. Then I made
my way to the archives.
    I was first at work, always easiest. I
unlocked the library and headed by rote to
the Reference Desk, my half-dream still an
embryo in me. The day would have been
long in any event. The longest day of the
year, even had I gotten eight good hours. By
ten, I found myself seriously questioning the
charter of a big-city branch library. Our
catalogued, ecumenical clearinghouse of
knowledge was running at about double
average gate. Kitty-corner to me, a pack of
pubescents prowled the genre racks, eyes on
the signaling flesh at adjoining tables. A few
bruised retirees, two years from terminal
Medicare, pored over magazines, persisting
in forcing the weekly news into a parody of
sense. In the adjoining children's room, a
pride of early readers, spirits not yet broken
by summer camps, disguised the fact from
their unwitting parents that books mystified
them more than the real world. Behind the
Reference Desk, on the peak day of our peak
season, I fielded questions from this
community of needs. First day of summer:
briefly, everyone wanted to know something
about nothing. I shook off Dr. Ressler's
rhetorical question, agitating out of all
proportion to the intervening silence, and
busied myself with questions that were at
least answerable.
    This morning, I was glad for the diversion.
By noon, I had solved a burning problem
concerning obscure wording on W-4 forms,
pointed out the Bridge and Dog Grooming
books, and located, for an earnest navigator
of sixteen, a side-by-side comparison of
Mer-cator's, Mollweide's, and Goode's
projections. I went home at noon. I've taken
to it lately, despite losing most of the hour in
the trip. I felt the urge to buy a car, not to
drive, impossible in the city, but as prep for
the increasingly likely evacuation. Home, I
swept the mailbox by limp reflex. Franklin's
note cowered in protective coloration amid
bank statements and time-limited offers. I
took it with the numbness of months. I can't
remember the flight up or breaking through
the deadbolts. I set Todd's calligraphic
scrawl on the kitchen table and began
pulling vegetables systematically from the
bin. Hysterical affectation of indifference:
make myself a bite to eat before settling
down to death. The snowstorm came back,
the hunch that sent me home for lunch, and
I tried on the idea: I'd known. Then I
remembered Ressler's definition of chance:
the die is random, but we keep rolling until
we hit necessity. Hunch long enough, and
premonition will one afternoon be waiting
for you at home. I left the vegetables
salad-bar-style across the cutting board and
sat down, worried open the seal. Stiff, white
invitation card:

    Our Dearest O'Deigh, It's all over with
  our mutual friend. I've just this instant
  heard. The attendant at the testing center
  assures me that all the instruments agree:
  Dr. Ressler went down admirably. No
  message, or, I should say, no new
  message. I wanted to inform you right
  away, naturally.

   Naturally. Also naturally, no signature. He
printed "FTODD" at the end, as if
authorizing a change of date on a bank
draft. But he could not help adding an
afterthought at bottom: "Oh, Jan! I miss you
right now. More than I would miss air."
   I spread my hands on the table and
divorced them. Through a tick in my eyelid, I
pointlessly read the note again. All over with
our friend, his four-letter tune. I knew the
man for a year, one year ago. Before
everything fell apart, he became one of the
few who mattered to me in the world. Once,
when he was young, he stood on the code's
threshold, came as close as any human to
cracking through to those four shorthand
semaphores. Then, for years, he went under.
Slowly, astonishingly, as Franklin and I
watched, he awakened. Now, stripped of
content, he was gone.
   What did it mean, "went down
admirably": resisting or acquiescing? And
what possible difference could it make to me
now? Dr. Ressler was dead. No shock, not
technically. Given his disease, he wasted and
died per timetable. But, backwater organism,
I'm no good at abstraction. A lifetime of
practice unmade in a minute. And I learn
again, in my nerve endings, that information
is never the same as knowledge.

  Today in History

   I met him in ignorance, a day into autumn
of 1982. Another half year passed before I
learned his name. I pinpoint the date
through the Event Calendar, one of those
well-meaning services I supervise daily for an
indifferent audience. Research, edit, type,
and list for the consumption of the dabbling
public what, if anything, happened today in
the past, ignoring the contradiction in terms.
For five years I've posted the day's event,
finding exactly the right bite-sized fact to
feed the public library patron. Five years
times fifty weeks times five days is 1,250 daily
facts. The public librarian's knocking out of
the weekly cantata. Something to do. Until
today.
   The race is constantly sneaking up to
something: space shots, cathedrals, mill
strikes, expeditions, inventions, air disasters,
revolutions, epochally indecisive battles,
world-shaking books, commercial upheavals,
pogroms, putsches, treaties. A few sources
provide enough grist for every day of the
solar mill for years to come. If I'd ever run
out, the human activity since I began
hunting would have carried me through at
least another year. I never fell back on
birthdates of famous people, cheating in my
book. I still have on file every Event I ever
posted. After five years, my selections blend
into a reference work in their own right.
Years after my first run-in with the
ex-scientist, putting together the stray
pieces, I can look up the particular notice
that caused the Franciscan of 4th Street to
break down and—against
character—address a perfect stranger. I
arrived at the library early enough one
September in '82 to pick, type, and post the
item within fifteen minutes of the branch
opening for business:

                Today in History
                 September 26

     In 1918, after four years of total war, the
  Allies launch an offensive along the
  Western Front that will break the
  Hindenburg Line. Two weeks later, World
  War I formally ends on the eleventh hour
  of the eleventh day of the eleventh
  month. The following year, touring the
  U.S. to drum up support for the new
  League of Nations, Wood-row Wilson
  collapses with his first incapacitating
  stroke. With him collapses any hope for
  the League.

   I have the provoking entry here in front of
me. As I pinned it to the board, a hand
chopped me on the clavicle. I fell back at the
capacitance, thinking that someone had
stuck me with a knife. I now know that the
man had gone so long without touching
that his muscles had simply forgotten how
light a tap need be to attract attention. I
turned to see a figure shorter than average,
small-framed, with a beautiful, skeletal face
and skin resisting the sag of age. His
forehead arced down into thin nose
cartilage, and his lower lip shaded
indistinctly into a long chin. Had he not
been anemic, his crew cut might have made
him an astronaut. His extraordinary moist
eyes monitored me with the soft hurt of
animals, encouraging me to say the worst.
He seemed not to blink, like a camp refugee
or feebleminded ward of state.
   He wore a forgettable light suit, a narrow
maroon tie not seen since the fifties, and an
immaculate oxford button-down, carefully
ironed but pilled to exhaustion around the
collar. He emitted the aura—accurate, it
turned out—that he found buying clothes
too embarrassing. He was over the median
age by twenty years. As I stared, wondering
if this was an assault, the figure said, in a
voice rattling like a cracked distributor,
"Excuse me, Miss. There's been a mistake." I
hadn't a clue what he was talking about.
Worse—the ultimate terror for my
profession—I had no source to appeal to.
Just his being here disturbed me; at that
hour, in autumn, the library was the tacit
domain of retirees and transients. A male of
employable age, able-bodied albeit as
emaciated as a Cranach Christ, upset the
statistics. "There's been a mistake. I'm afraid
the date is off."
   Influenced by earlier having identified the
relative strengths of shipmast flags and Aldis
lamps, I thought I'd been singled out to
receive a cryptogram canceling some covert
operation. All-points bulletin: Date off. His
fastidiously soft-toned grammar, in best
academic fashion, removed all trace of
personal involvement: There's been..., The
date is.... I gawked at him, mutely rolling my
head to either side, Galileo's pendulum
experiments with my brain the deadweight.
"I apologize for being so unnecessarily
elliptical," he added. A frail finger directed
my attention to the Today in History. "This
account, which I don't for a minute doubt to
be accurate in particulars, is, unfortunately,
irrelevant." He gave me an apologetic smile,
an attempt to be amenable despite having
just run over my pet dog. I still produced
nothing but an uncomprehending stare. "I'm
afraid those things did not take place today.
In history."
   My response surprised even me and
jeopardized my standing in the ALA. I
blurted out violently, giving in to that
contempt the specialist stores up for the lay
passerby, "And how would you know?"
   He paled and pulled his mouth into a
grimace. "I don't. That is, I wouldn't be able
to tell you when, if ever, that particular item
took place." He trailed off, considering it
unnecessary to explain. Noticing my look
change to clinical concern, he added, "To
resort to an allusion that won't be lost upon
a person in your line: "You can look it up.'"
   I brayed out loud, astonished at the
combination of scenic-route syntax and
citation. I didn't stoop to ask how he could
possibly correct my events while admitting
ignorance of when they'd happened.
Instead, I adopted professional patience and
hissed, "Let's just do that." I set off to the
Reserves without looking to see if he
followed. In seconds I was furiously buzzing
over the historical almanacs, amazed at
myself for losing equanimity. As the pristine
derelict appeared at my side, I hit upon
September 26 with a vengeance, confirming
both Wilson and the Allied offensive. He
passed a cupped hand across that stretch of
forehead—God; his quintessential
gesture!—and nodded. "I'm convinced,
beyond question. Your skill with an index is
impressive. Nevertheless...."
   He pointed politely to the massive wall
calendar that, even from where we stood,
broadcast today for all to see. I broke out for
a branch-record second laugh in one
morning. September 24.
   Just what empirical precision prevented
him from asserting the obvious more
obviously? His radical skepticism had
required me to run the full, clumsy
experiment of heading to the stacks in the
Outside event that the offensive bad begun
on the 24th and I'd committed the less likely
error of date substitution. I sank into the
nearest Breuer chair and exhaled. Thinking I
was put out by the effort required to find a
replacement, he said, "Might I make up for
some of my incurred guilt in this matter by
suggesting a substitute? Say, Eisenhower's
heart attack; 1955." Making matters worse,
he mumbled, "Should that be too obvious,
you could take alternative refuge in 1789.
Congress passes the Federal Judiciary Act. I'd
rate that as fairly crucial, wouldn't you? But
perhaps you've used it?"
   I couldn't decide if this was burlesque or
the fellow's genuine attempt to repair
unmeant damage. I tried for knowing
reserve. "Ike's heart attack will do just fine."
   He straightened like a teen coming clean
from the confessional. "Terrific. We're even,
then." He shifted weight from one leg to the
other and tucked a stitch back into his coat
seam. I reestimated his height: five-nine,
with a full moon. He coughed and took a
nervous step backwards. "I like Ike. How
about yourself?"
   My introduction to Stuart Ressler's sense
of humor. I could think of no answer in the
world to give such a thing, so I returned to
the almanac. Through the miracle of
cross-referencing, I reverse-engineered Ike's
coronary and the Federal Judiciary Act. He
must have arranged the stunt in advance.
But I'd only posted the fact the instant
before he jabbed my shoulder. He watched
my bewilderment for a few seconds,
hunched his back, waved apologetically, and
walked away. He was almost gone when I
called after him. "I give up," I said, offering a
respectful truce. "How'd you do that?"
   "Never complain, never explain." He
looked furtively around as if it could not
have been him, violating this place of public
research by talking in full voice.
   My propriety vanished. For the first time in
years, I stood face to face with another who
wanted to force his way into the indifference
of data. I slid from hostility to good-natured
self-effacement in under a second. "Piece of
cake," I baited him back. "Disraeli. I was born
knowing that one."
   "I'll have to take your word for that. I'm
afraid I'm worse than aphasic with quotes."
And he abandoned me. Too soon to be
leaving. Never would have been too soon.
   The rest of that day was dense with its
own transactions, but erased from the
retrievable record. I half expected him to
return a week later, drop in for another chat
about retrieval. He didn't. The whole
encounter had been an elaborate setup.
With no other way to explain it, I
unprofessionally let the incident drop until
this evening. Friend, why aren't you here
now? The date's off again. I too have grown
worse than aphasic with quotes. What was it
you said to me once? What was it I said
back? What had been so urgent for a while,
so in need of saying?

  But What Do You Do for a Living?

   From that clueless beginning dug up from
corkboard clippings, to Today in History,
6/23/85: Stuart Ressler—who once put his
hands cleanly through the molecular pane,
subsequent second-shift recluse,
late-in-the-day returnee to the world—dead.
I met the man by fluke, the universal
architect. I will not meet him ever again. The
meeting place he opened for us imploded
with him.
   Knowing the course of the disease, I
thought I was prepared for Todd's mercifully
curt devastation. I saw it in the envelope
before opening. But when I sat and read, the
veins of my neck thickened with chemical
fight or flight, as if death dated from the
minute I heard of it. Two billion years, and
my body is still stupidly literal. My
neck-gorge refused to shrink, however hard
I rubbed. No RSVP required; just return to
work, an afternoon dispensing citations. But
I couldn't move from the chair. Something
specific was required, some word I had to
identify before I lost the few lucid moments
grief ever allotted.
   I reached for the envelope, my first
indication in a year where Franklin was. The
name in the cancellation circle pushed me
over the edge. My throat hemorrhaged;
violent self-control broke into hatcheted
crying. Franklin, Dr. Ressler's only student,
had posted the note from that Illinois
university and farming town where the old
man had wandered off the path of human
sympathy. Of all the towns packed with all
the impotent intensive-care facilities in the
world, Ressler chose that one to return his
metastasized cells to at the end, as they ran
him back into randomness.
   I believed, until that minute, that business
as usual was the only consolation life
allowed. But now the idea of going back to
work right away—ever—appalled me. I
returned to the vegetables on the kitchen
counter and heaped them into a semblance
of salad. But eating anything was beyond
me. I put the food on the sill for whatever
not-yet-extinct birds still braved the
Brooklyn biome. A sympathetic mass took
over my chest. The block spread into my legs,
threatened to stiffen them if I didn't keep
moving. So I did what I always do in the face
of unnameable grief. I began straightening
things. I picked up the books dispersed over
my study. I threw away the accumulated
advertising fliers. Dusting the record
collection, I suddenly knew what I had been
delaying, the act I needed to send him off.
   There, in my front room, trembling the
record from its dust jacket, I set on my
ancient turntable the piece of music the
newly cadenced man most loved. I sat limp
and listened all the way through, the way he
had listened once, motionless except to flip
the record. Four notes, four measures, four
phrases, pouring forth everything. The
sound of my grief, my listening ritual, will be
the closest the professor gets to a memorial
service. Franklin, wherever he now is, must
have resorted to the same. Two listeners to
that simple G scale and all the impossible
complexity spun from it. I heard, in that
steady call to tonic, how Dr. Ressler had
amortized bits of himself for decades. Now
he was paid off. Back at Do.
   The music—I can't say what the music
sounded like. Whole now, with none of its
many endings the last word. That emotional
anthology is so continuous that I could not
tell whether my discovery dated from a year
ago, under the dead man's guidance, or this
afternoon, at his private wake. Only Dr.
Ressler's perpetual running commentary was
missing: the amateur's gloss that always
made the piece so difficult to listen to when
he was in the same room now left it
unbearable in his silence. "Here it comes.
There What a chord. Hear? The left hand, the
interior dissonance... ?" Every embedded line
became painfully apparent with no one there
to point it out.
   Only when the reprise, the last da capo
bars resolved their suspension and fell back
into generating inertness did I leave, lock
the place, and climb the blocks back to the
branch. Two hours late in returning. My
colleagues, old maid Marians to a man,
seeing me drag in late, stared as if I had just
sprouted a full-fledged,
handlebar-mustached mania. One of the
eternally punctual, I had committed blatant
inconsistency. Settling behind the Reference
Desk as casually as possible, I resumed
answering the public's questions as if
nothing had happened.
   But everything had. I worked like the
worst of bush-leaguers. It took me twenty
minutes to identify, for a polite woman not a
day less than ninety, the river that had a
funny name beginning with a vowel and
probably lying in Africa or India. She and my
atlas at last compromised on the Irrawaddy. I
did almost as poorly naming the one-armed
pro baseball player from the forties who puts
in an appearance every five years and should
have been child's play. By four, badly in need
of a break despite less than an hour's work,
already suspecting the break I needed, I
attended to the Quote Board.
   Old institution, child of the fresh days of
my M.L.S., when I still believed in the
potential of democratically available facts:
the Quote Board began as my experiment in
free expression. An open corkboard with
blank cards broadcast a standing invitation
to "Add your favorite passage here." We did
well for a while, if not producing any
transcendental insights. But the inevitable
appearance of the limerick Ladies from Lunt
and the Lonely Master Painters soon forced
the notice "All quotes subject to final
approval by Staff." After-the-fact
justification of censorship, first fatal
realization that the body of literature had its
obscene parts in need of covering.
   By the early eighties—just before I fell in
with Todd and, through him, Ressler—the
Quote Board was clearly fighting a losing
cause against creeping nihilism. It filled with
the work of junior Dadaists: random
passages from sports magazines or cereal
boxes, meaningless but too inoffensive to
suppress in good faith. Disenfranchised
blind mouths, wanting nothing better than
to deface any suggestion of need. One
morning the whole wall sprouted Day-Glo,
spray-painted genitalia. After that, the
project shrank from its first, ambitious
conception to a square of plate glass around
a single, daily quote selected by a librarian.
As a sop to the old belief in public speech, I
attached a locked submissions box with the
condescending invitation, "If you have any
suggestions for quote of the day...." The
project kept its old name through force of
habit.
   Not that the public abandoned the Quote
Board entirely. Over the years, it's had the
periodic inspired submission. Much of my
original intention felt paid by one
doubtlessly quarantined high school girl
who, from an astonishingly broad reading,
conscientiously culled the best of everything
she came across. Last year she sent me an
aerogramme from Eritrea reading:

           Even a proverb is no proverb to
you till your life has illustrated it. Keats

   I let that one run two days. This girl and a
few others have kept up a steady
submissions trickle. A few hundred other
contributors give once or twice, usually that
private byword they've taken to heart: the St.
Francis prayer or the Desiderata. Otherwise,
the box bulges with teenage death or torch
lyrics, proper names artlessly altered. Of tens
of thousands who finance the branch, only a
fraction of card-carriers make a point of
reading the quote of the day, and fewer still
ever go out on a limb and contribute. Still,
the Quote Board provides its service.
Recognition, learning a thing by heart: life
will be nothing after these go.
   This afternoon the box was empty.
Cupboard bare, I fingered my skirt pocket
where Franklin's note had somehow
accompanied me back to the library, a
coconut floating to populate a virgin,
volcanic island. Franker once promised to
keep me in permanent quotes: "You'll never
have to stuff the ballot box again." For a
long time he did. But today, as so often
before he began to frequent me, I again had
to come up with a fresh saying, never before
used. One that might mean something,
anything, to that fractional percent of my
clients who hang on the choice of words.
   I felt an urge to use "Two loves have I, of
comfort and despair...." But remembering
the public in public library and feeling little
better than the prolific submitters of
plaintive lyrics, I didn't. Despite my small
stockpile of emergency reserves, I could find
no quote that satisfied. I couldn't shake the
features of the dead man's face, the
constriction of my gut. I took my neck by the
hand and my fingers went all the way in. I
tried to lose myself in the search, to turn up
the quote that had absolutely nothing to do
with grief. I stood in front of the Quote
Board for some time before admitting that
what I required in today's quote was a
private, particular eulogy.
   As I pretended to think, the passage I was
after presented itself. I went straight to the
stacks and found the source, a posthumous
work by Dr. Arendt on the dangerously
detachable, oddly convincing life of the
mind. I remembered the words practically
verbatim. I knocked out the excerpt on one
of the antique staff manuals and posted it.
Stuart Ressler had probably never come
across the passage in his life. But it stood for
him, summed up his permutation as well or
better than any other:

     The God of the scientists, one is
  tempted to suggest, created man in his
  own image and put him into the world
  with only one commandment: Now try to
  figure out by yourself how all this was
  done and how it works.

    Tacking up this charm, locking the glass
cover that would keep it safe from an
uncomprehending audience until I replaced
it, I headed back to the Reference Desk. But
on the upbeat of my return footstep, I felt
the first of Dr. Ressler's astonishing
variations visit. Music. Unasked-for,
self-generating attacca singing. Unable to
help myself, forcing my heels into
professional clicks, I succumbed to
syncopated desire, the skip hidden in the
sound of sole against tile. The most
powerful intellect, the most remarkable
temperament I ever met was dead of a slow
horror. And all I could feel was this urge to
dance. Grotesquely inappropriate— what
could be simpler? —I felt the need to move in
as many directions as possible, to assume all
the virtue of virtuosity. I knew what
measures I would be forced to take.
    The mood annihilated the incapacitating
silence of lunch hour. In the time it took me
to walk the hundred meters back, the
syncopation clamping itself deeper into my
walk, I caught sight of the scientist, the god
of the scientist. Frozen like a dee'r in car
headlights, the thing he'd figured out: how
all this works. Dr. Ressler, hearing the world
burst its reservoir. The empty separation of
the last year dissolved in one upbeat; the
first hint of a two-step, and everything
changed. The constant anticipation of a
handful of months before came flooding
back. I saw the three of us, the small circle
drawn into our orbit, as we all had been. I
heard the words we wasted late into the
night, stabbing at something beyond saying.
I felt, with a mix of hot shame and pleasure,
what a talker I'd overnight become. Months
of verbal drunkenness, when once or twice
I'd even known what I was talking about. I
saw the sharp lines of the design that
obsessed him as if I'd drawn them myself.
    In that instant my afternoon's routine, my
surviving professional life, wholly
unconnected to that other run, sounded the
subtlest exercise in multifoliate
counterpoint: a short-short-long in the right
hand completing a simultaneous
long-short-short in the left. Those two
out-of-step tunes, in their off-beat
separateness, not only seemed deliberately
thrown together, they also harbored, hidden
and distant, other voices peeling off in
parallel structure, coming apart at the seams.
No other way to describe what came over
me: I began to hear music. Literal music,
music flying along under the fingers, the
same music I had listened to earlier this
afternoon, only radically changed. I was at
last hearing, picking out pattern with my
ears, knowing what sound meant, without
translation: that tune—four notes by
four—Dr. Ressler's life theme, the
pattern-matching analog he had always
been after.
   That syncopated dance back to the
Reference Desk—elaborate, contrary
motion—called on me to make a deliberate,
irrevocable sashay. Music, his music, melodic
balls tossed freely back and forth between
the hands, begged me to discover how wide
an arpeggio might emerge from single notes.
He led me to the center of the ballroom with
those thin, cancerous hands, took my body
in his timid, skinless arms and commanded,
"Ready? On one."
   But the meter of that music was too rich
and ambiguous to stick. By the time I
reached the Reference Desk, the
inappropriate euphoria over Dr. Ressler's
life—its triumphant grammar, however brief
and bungled—was gone. Anticipation fell
off into fatigue. I wanted only to go away
from here for a moment, a lifetime, stay away
as he did until I'd forgotten the layout of
this place. Lose the old fixtures, erase what
had happened, then wander back in at the
beginning, take it from the top, enough time
having passed to reclaim the sense of place,
the time of year we had once lived through.
   I spent this afternoon in my usual capacity,
doling out facts. The ten most frequent
letters in English. The weight of protein in a
pound of peanuts. Each answer bitterly
dedicated to my distant colleague in the
information sciences, whom I once met over
the Event of the Day. The events he set in
motion were now the stuff of archives. But
then it struck me, what I'd known and
forgotten any number of times: the calendar
is not a fixed record, an almanac of
everything that ever happened indexed by a
few hundred slots. Every calendar page also
contains the anniversaries of everything that
has not yet happened. Slowly, the
ambushing tune came back—that exercise in
stretching an unassuming dance beyond the
counterbreakingpoint. Quieter, richer in
independent voices, now a confident and
compelling tempo, certain I'd take the
required response. And this afternoon, just
before closing shop, I gave, to the
astonishment of my coworkers, my two
weeks' notice.
   I am not sure, as I write this, too late at
night, what I meant by quitting. I don't know
what I hope to do, what, if anything, I still
can do to put things right. I only know that I
am inextricably involved in what happened
to the man. His story has become my story,
and no one is left to tell his but me. Our
showdown—our fight with the anniversaries
that haven't yet happpened—lasted just a
little under a calendar year. But those few
months were the only ones of my life that I
experienced firsthand. I've wasted a year
since, convinced that my continuing the
quarrel alone was out of the question.
Funny, the idea hitting me only now, so late
in the day, so long after the fact. Tonight, for
the first time in I can't remember how long:
the hint of possibility that always arrives
with death. With news.
   I sit typing in the dark. He's really dead,
then. Nothing works against it. I tick away,
sick in the chest at all that never happened.
Outside my window, on the river, the
shortest night of the year already lifts. This
absurd hour: I'd call Todd in a second, just
to speak to the one other person who
knows Dr. Ressler's tune by ear. His note,
brutal announcement of the end, provides
me with entree. Impossible; no idea how to
reach him. I half expect my force of
concentration to tip him off. Make my phone
ring from sheer telepathy. But air is always
the worst of carriers.
   I must break for an hour's sleep. The urge
for something less ambiguous than more
silence is unbearable. What do I have left to
work with? What have I ever had but four
seasons, four corners, four nucleotides?
How can I name the man's changes with only
that? Only, once, touring the snowdrifted
world, pointing out the spore, he asked,
"What could be simpler? We all derive from
the same four notes."



II

     Who's Who in the American Midsection

   For all that we finally discovered about
him, Dr. Ressler still came from and returned
to nowhere. His life was a cipher, his needs
one of those latent anthologies, safe deposit
boxes filled with tickets to urgent, forgotten
banquets. Our sustained misreading of the
man was my fault. Todd put me on his trail,
and I went after him as an abstraction, a
chemistry unknown that, mixed with the
right reagent, reveals itself by going rose or
precipitating. I looked for a postulate,
completely missing the empiricist's point.
Now, when it no longer helps, I see the
person he stood for is the one who is gone.
   Our search for the reagent began two
years ago. The branch again swelled to
summer capacity with bored children and
adults too ashamed for bathing suits. The
alien figure from the previous autumn who'd
known all about Ike's coronary but hadn't a
sufficiently straightforward command of
syntax to tell me I'd flubbed the day's date
had not returned, and my recollection of the
run-in followed the standard extinction
path. Months on, after a numbing bean
curve of requests, I looked up from the
Reference Desk at a face so untroubled and
trusting as to instantly trigger any thinking
woman's suspicion. A man in mid-twenties
lingering patiently like a parasitic vine for me
to finish. His nose tilted friendlily when he at
last got my attention. His eyebrows flashed
greeting, sure I'd be as happy to see him as
he was to see me. I returned the survivalist's
stare I'd learned on hitting the city: stand
where you like—here, there, under the traffic
in Columbus Circle. His grin persisted as we
slid onto business footing. If anything, he
got a kick at my failing to respond as
effusively as invited. Without a trace of
agitation, he said, "I want to know
someone."
   I squelched the facetious comeback.
Cutting cleverness, the chief weapon of my
social life, was worthless at the branch. I
kept mum until the clear-faced questioner
corrected himself. He did so without the
diffidence I expected from such ingenuous
features. "I mean I'd like to identify
someone. Find out who he is." I waited, but
he was in no hurry. Apparently he felt that
anyone who couldn't sift the evidence
before it was spelled out would be unable to
handle it after. "I'd like some information.
Whatever you can find. I need an ID on this
fellow." He slipped me a scrap torn from a
drawing notebook. Florid acanthus letters
formed a man's name. Aware that his writing
was more cryptic than Linear A, he read out:
"Stuart Ressler. Mean anything?"
   I set the scrap down with exaggerated
care. "Could you please be a little more
vague?" I pride myself on working
impartially, even for those whose sole
purpose on earth is to propagate ravaging
inanity. But this man was clearly too bright
to be forgiven such a time waster. Bright
enough to register facetiousness, in any
case.
   "Perhaps I ought to narrow the scale a
mite. It's just that you're such a mind reader
over the phone."
   "Sir, we have several librarians on staff,
and any one of them..." I tried to catch the
eye of the security guard, just coming
around the periodicals.
   "Oh, no. We've spoken a couple times.
The text of Luther's 95. Fast Fourier
transforms. How much IBM to buy. Names of
the flying reindeer."
   I cleared my throat; we were not yet
amused. But he had proved himself at least
marginally safe, unlikely to tote handguns
down into the subway. "All right. I'll help
you, so long as you pay your taxes. This
name: animal, vegetable... ?"
   "Funny you should ask." He turned his
face away, hiding. When he looked back, his
boyish clarity had changed barometrically.
"I'm certain he did important work once."
   The catch in his voice revealed that this
wasn't a simple round of Botticelli. "All right.
You believe he's in the records. I'll trust you.
What was the man's line of work?"
   My client grinned. "Don't know for sure."
Sheepish, tickled. "Something hard.
Something objective, I mean."
   His odd adjective reminded me of a quote
I'd once identified: Who seeks hard things, to
him is the way hard. That one had fallen
trivially at the push of a concordance. But
this: qualitatively different. Why associate
difficulty with objective disciplines? Certainly
the subjective morass is harder. "We can
eliminate professional sports?" He laughed
in agreement. "You don't know the man's
field, but you're sure he's well-known. What
were his dates?"
   "Oh." My question flushed the
amusement from his eyes. "He's still alive.
And I didn't say well-known. I said I was sure
he'd done something important. Some real
work once." He spoke precisely if
incoherently, sure that intelligibility would
eventually, as with the current
administration's promised economic
prosperity, trickle down.
   "I see." I hid my irritation by taking sparse
notes. "Still living. Born... ?" I finally
prompted, "When?"
   He thought long. Breaking through
triumphantly, he said, "He is about twice as
old as me. I know that for a fact. That means
we can start in the early thirties, huh?"
   I suggested he start a little higher, in the
low forties, Fortieth to Forty-second, to be
exact. "Sir. We're just a neighborhood
branch. If this person is as obscure as you
make him out, you'll have to go over to
midtown."
   He sensed my shame in referring him to a
higher authority. "You kidding? They'd
laugh me off Manhattan."
   "Why shouldn't we do the same?"
   "Heard you don't laugh as much here." At
which, I did.
   Even as I tried to palm him off, I knew I
wouldn't let him go without first testing my
skill. His softheaded question had a difficulty
that hooked me. Solving it would be at least
as valuable to the long-term survival of the
race as determining Dorothy's shoe size or
supplying a six-letter word for a vehicle
ending in U. "All right. What great thing,
broadly speaking of course, do you think he
did? How did you hear of him?"
   "I work with him."
   It took no intuition to hear the warning
buzzers. Those who want to get the drop on
another—from term-papering schoolchildren
to businessmen steeped in interoffice
sabotage—outnumber all my other clients. I
would not be party to spying on a coworker.
But just about to hand back the paper scrap,
I recalled how, at the moment when this man
had joked about his acquaintance straddling
animal and vegetable, he had hidden his
hazel-and-bark face. Rather than return the
name, I stiffened and held it, implicating
myself for good.
   Had I paid attention, I might have been
quicker in drawing connections in the days
ahead. But as in most informational work,
content evaporates completely before the
end of the shift. Specifics disappear, leaving
just the trace of categories, methods.
Archivists aren't wellsprings of fact; they are
search algorithms. The unfolding subway,
the byzantine network of accumulating
particulars—our Pyramid, Great Wall, St.
Peter's, the largest engineering feat of all
time—daily runs a nip-and-tuck footrace
between the facts worth saving and the
technology for managing the explosion. A
single day produces more print than
centuries of antiquity. Magazines,
newspapers, fliers, pamphlets, brochures:
fifty thousand volumes annually in English
alone, ten times what a person can read in a
lifetime. Six new books every hour, each one
the potential wave-tip that will put the
whole retrieval system under. Dictionaries of
dictionaries, encyclopedias of indices,
compression tables into microfilm windows
onto text bases. Even my sleepy branch has
its desktop computer—a genus nonexistent
ten years ago—that scans years of
periodicals by subject, title, or author, in
seconds returning a cartridge that plugs into
a reader that zooms to the complete article
in question, assuming the high schoolers
haven't wedged Slurpee cups into the
mechanism. In summer '83, I had every
confidence in the power of my tools to crack
the script. Two years of even more
spectacular advances in retrieval, and I'm
guttering in the dark.
   One night not long ago Ressler, Todd,
and I—contents, carrier, and cracker of that
first ID—sat together in the hum of the
computer room, its gigabytes of sensitive
data in the sole care of these two vagrants,
over stale bread, grocery-store Camembert,
and Moselle. Expansive in the combination
of tastes, Dr. Ressler remarked that people of
last century could look at a musical score and
hear the piece in their heads. "Name the
work; they could hum the principal motifs.
We've traded that for the ability to lay hands
on a recording in five minutes, or your tax
contribution back." Affectionate burlesque
of my trade, the one that for a moment
recovered him from the heap of lost scores.
   In that professional capacity, I didn't for
an instant doubt I'd be able to find the
nub-penned name. Even without any
contribution, Stuart Ressler was somewhere
in the permanent files, many times, in
immense Orwellian lists. Time, resources, and
brute research could extract him. I needed
only decide how much effort this other man,
in his twenties, with the Bonnard coloration,
was worth.
   I try not to second-guess the social value
of my daily assignments. From each
according to his critical needs, to each
according to my best retrieving abilities. I
must believe that my clients are the best
judge of what information they require. My
colleague Mr. Scott, advanced degrees in
anthro and philology as well as library
science, hovering on the brink of eternally
threatened retirement, pulling volumes to
prove to this year's perpetual motioneer that
the latest ingenious scheme once again
violates the Second Law, likes to sing the
couplet:

    They all laughed at Christopher
  Columbus when he said the world was
  round,
    They all laughed when Edison recorded
  sound.

    Skepticism sweetens Mr. Scott's
countertenor: all that sad, misdirected,
highly trained skill, with only a
once-an-epoch useful solution preventing
his whole career from degenerating into a
waste of shame. Scott, like everyone who
looks things up for a living, prefers
Gershwin to admitting that progress has
destroyed our ability to tell which facts of
the runaway file are worth recalling. Value is
the one thing that can't be looked up. I
myself am sometimes shamefully pragmatic,
cutting losses on a goose-chase, bowing out
on diminishing returns: the awful ethical
calculus that forces politicians to cut a deal,
surgeons to choose which of three dying
people to repair My first impulse was to give
this college boy a list of biographical
dictionaries and ditch him until he'd run the
legwork, by which point I would be safely
over the informational border, joining Mr.
Scott in retirement haven. Defensible, given
the opacity of the question. But pride made
me give it a preliminary nudge. However
ill-defined, the ID was at least as diverting as
rock stars' birthdays.
    We started at the top, the Who's Whos.
The boy annoyed me completely by trotting
ahead, going down the spines saying, "Tried
it, skipped it, tried it...." Months later, he
explained he was being funny. By then, I'd
discovered that Frank Todd was a competent
researcher. The only thing standing between
him and Ph.D., aside from sense of humor,
was excessive thoroughness. He belonged
to the class that can't get started writing,
paralyzed by that last overlooked source.
Franker perpetually budgeted another half
year to mopping up; by the end of the
period, the holdouts had proliferated. When
I accused him of playing dumb at that first
meeting, making me do the scutwork he
could easily have done himself, he said,
"Woman, have you ever seen yourself reach
for the top shelves? Choice."
   I ignored him and began the elimination
sieve. As I thumbed, he stood by, irritating
me further by humming. His hum sounded
like the vibration of the library air
conditioning, so soft and sustained were the
intervals. When I looked up he was standing
shoulders hunched and eyes closed,
conducting himself with the closed
forefinger of his right hand, wrist curled in
front of his chest like a gothic icon. I just
made out the tune, the slow accretion of a
haunting chord. Flirting between major and
minor, it brushed me with the sad
suggestion that I'd heard it before,
something forgotten and irretrievable. It
sounded like a decision I'd made about
myself long ago. But I could only work on
one mystery at a time and so kept reading
rather than add a descant.
   We came up with nothing, which neither
surprised nor disappointed him. We
searched the indices and traced the
biographies back a decade. The mystery man
had, by all appearance, written nothing of
note; we combed the combined abstracts as
far back as credible and came up
empty-handed. The undertaking took us
both—for the solo conductor at last broke
from enchanted humming to lend a
hand—all afternoon. I assured him that
failure still taught us a great deal, narrowed
the scope considerably. "We know, at least,
where the mark doesn't live." I didn't add
that we'd greatly reduced the plausibility of
the original hypothesis. My client stood
dumbly by the card catalog, stuck his hands
in his pockets, and waited for me to say what
happened next.
   I in turn waited for him to volunteer the
reason why this search was so important. But
his patience outlasted mine. In another
moment, he might have gone back to
humming. I gave in, ensuring another
meeting. "I can run some electronic searches.
But these are expensive if you don't know
what you're looking for. Every vendor has a
per-minute connect fee, and if you simply
instruct them to grind away on an
unspecified name...." He continued to smile;
I wasn't sure he followed. "Then charges
add up."
   He spread his palms: Pay as you go? Don't
I always? His voice dropped a notch. "All I
have is yours."
   I'm astonished to think how easily I
slipped into flirtation. "Yes, but how much
do you have?'
   "Think Marx to Dumont on the ship's
gangplank in Night at the Opera." Fifteen
minutes after he left, I would produce the
allusion.
   I haven't had any complaints yet. I
promised to tweak a few angles we hadn't
explored that afternoon. He nodded and
agreed to find out more at the source. Then
he troubled his voice into greatness. "We
won't give up so easily, will we? Not by a
Lamb Chop." I refused to grin. He turned to
leave, but just before quitting the reference
area he swung to face me. In one of those
unexpected shifts in tone I learned to
predict, he asked, "Are you beautiful?" The
question floored me less then than it does
now. "Who wants to know?" I flipped back.
The professional in me beat the provocateur,
two out of three falls. Leaving that evening,
I was still working on his parting shot. Was
she beautiful? I said out loud, to no one,
"Let's answer the hard one first."

  Was She Beautiful?

   I've never thought so. Perhaps he did. Dr.
Ressler lent a gracious second, always
chivalrous. The whole inquiry hardly seems
relevant anymore. Dead issue. Why is that
answer ever crucial? Those third-party
testimonials— she's so trustworthy, loyal,
helpful, friendly, courteous —are superfluous
adjective catalogs without the key
commodity—and so beautiful. Add that, and
bored listeners beg for the chance to judge
for themselves. The soberest article,
mentioning good looks, sensationalizes
mere journalism. She was beautiful. He was
stunning. Porcelain, startling, deep, timeless,
haunting: more than cosmetic. Political.
Historical.
   Custom downplays it, pretends that looks
are a judgment call, denigrates the
superficial. But the faintest suggestion of
beauty and everyone's off, Todd in the lead.
A glimpse, and he couldn't help myself:
pretty form clamped his imagination, a
credential for inner sense. Beautiful faces
kept ineffable secrets he then needed to
reveal. They knew something, something
they might tell him if he could only get close
enough, inhale, smother himself in their
perfection. I've seen him stopped dead by
the line of a woman coming carelessly out of
a shop across the street. Perfect plumage
chilled his heart. A classic face carried the
imprint of another time, like those garbled
message-dreams that distress the dreamer
but reveal, to the skilled explicator,
perpetual homesickness. For my friend, it
was always the first question. Todd's every
ache was desire to return. And beauty
mapped the way back.
   Franklin suffered from uncontrollable love
for lovely women.
   He nostalgically confused the lost domain
with something more visceral: yellow hair,
witch eyes, a pout to the lips, tight crepe
black dresses stopping just south of the hip
and running up the back in little ripples.
Time and again he took the hook, went for
the stamp, the visible spectrum, the package
job, the fatal allure of surfaces. He could not
resist the Vogue look. His Annie was much
more the homecoming-queen shoo-in than I.
I never possessed glamour or high features.
Not even in the ballpark. Passable
cheekbones, nose a bit too Sumerian. Body
sound, but a step below aerobic. After years
of living with me, Tuckwell said my face had
the forbidding attractiveness that
announced, "For office use only. Do not
write below this line."
   Hair between brown and blond is my best
feature; but every schoolboy knows what
hair is. Given Todd's desperation for Glossy, I
don't know what he saw in me worth
buzzing. If I have any surface, it is
anachronistic. And yet anachronism has
always had its fatal Franklin charm. "I know
where I've seen you before," he said once,
stroking my chin, studying it in candlelight.
"The Cluny tapestries. Lady and Unicorn." He
meant it as a compliment. High Medieval
Flemish is his chosen field. But faint praise:
he could see something in me the herd could
not. I pushed my luck by asking, "Former or
latter?"
   I have it on authority that Franklin,
confirmed Platonist from way back, seeing
women who better approximated his rage
for perfection, felt, above anything, distress.
When led into Penn Station by a
breathtaking madonna only to have her turn
and reveal a mulish forehead or mousy nose,
his utter relief was like a life sentence
commuted to death at the last minute. A
hopelessly plain face freed him of
responsibility, while agonizingly perfect
physiognomy attacked his cortex like an
opiate, haunted his sleep for weeks,
whispered to him of missed chances that
might at last have lifted the confines of the
mundane.
   But did I have a face that compelled that
connoisseur to desire? Eyes, nose, expanse
of skin to alert that stranger-stalker? His
repeated insistence contradicted itself. Mine
is a middle-percentile dazzle, smack in the
fat of the normal curve, the
not-bottom-of-a-truck woman who sits next
to you on the bus, attractive but
unrecognized at class reunions. What
Franklin saw on second take would never
have sold cigarettes or survived pastel. But
in the time and place he saw me—Flanders
or Artois, 1500—he insisted I had the stuff
that earth's waters and wild animals wept at
in envy.
    Did he have looks enough to justify that
gangbuster, self-conducting solo-humming?
Oh, he's beautiful. Undeniably,
breath-takingly, in all prosaic senses, the
classic regularity of features. He claimed to
be a little short, a little overweight, a little
caulky. He was none of these when I last saw
him, and he knew it. He hid behind a face
that shone like no other.
    The vertical files now contain us:
clippings, grainy pictures of all four faces.
They show me as a woman somewhat
startled. Only the initiated would call me
attractive. The Wire photo of Frank shows a
young man whose face is a prism. Bent from
its white light is the spectrum of every
autumn day that ever hurt him. For standard
beauty, he had a decided head start. And
yet, all of us would grow infinitely more
attractive. Even I would shoot open, turn
heads like the rarest hothouse flower. Events
conspired to make us all, for a moment,
beautiful. His parting question, insouciant
and impertinent, seemed to create the very
pull it asked about. Somewhere I heard rules
breaking, water trickling through limestone.
Here was a man possessed of boundary-free
confidence, asking not if I was beautiful but
if I was ready to become it.
    He's right: beauty does correspond to a
profound secret. But there's a catch. Not the
emblem of inner power, but its by-product:
the last, faint track of a slowly unfolding
generative order, numb-ingly miraculous,
even in end results—mouth, eyes, hair. The
epi-phenomenon of desperate cells, every
face forms the record of shattering,
species-wide experiment. The perfect face,
the one we ache inside to stand near, is just
the median case. The Artist's composite
criminal, one that destroys us to leave. And
we always leave, once we learn its creases.
    He left me that day with two unknowns
for the price of one: I didn't even get his
name. But he left a trace, another scrap of
nub script discovered that evening before I
left. When I went to update the quote of the
day, making my perfunctory, usually
pointless search of the submissions, I found
a piece of drawing paper torn from the same
notebook:

  Natura nihil agit frustra (Nature makes no
grotesques)
  Signed Sir Thomas Browne, although he
misspelled the name. I used the quote,
paying the price. Few selections have
produced such public bafflement. But I'd
choose confusion even now, over the usual
indifference of days.

  The Question Board

   Mother always insisted I got what I had
coming. From birth, I was addicted to
questions. When the delivering nurse
slapped my rump, instead of howling, I
blinked inquisitively. As a child I pushed the
why" cycle to break point. At six, I demanded
to know why people cried. Mother launched
into the authorized version of the uses of
sorrow. At the end of her extended
explanation, it came out that I really wanted
the hydromechanics of tear ducts. By her
account, I worsened with each year's new
vocabulary. She finally took refuge in a
multivolume children's encyclopedia, parking
me by it whenever I began to get asky. I can
still see the color plates: Archers at
Agincourt; Instruments of the Orchestra;
two-page rainbow Evolutionary Tree. But her
scheme backfired. I could now ask about
things that hadn't even existed before. Whys
multiplied, poking into the places color
plates opened but failed to enter.
   So it righted a cosmic imbalance in her
eyes that I ended up answering others'
questions for a living. She hoped to see me
sit behind the Reference Desk until I'd
answered as many unanswerables as I had
plagued her with all those years. To hasten
that payoff, I invented a way to address
interrogatives around the clock. The
Question Board, with Quotes and Events,
completes the trinity I used to break up the
routine of human contact. Librarian is a
service occupation, gas station attendant of
the mind. In an earlier age, I might have
made things. Now I only make things
available. Another blit in the bulge of the
late-capitalist job curve. Service accounts for
two thirds of the GNP, with the figure
expected to rise well into next century. By
the millennium, half of all service
professionals will specialize in processing
data. My Question Board, then, is both living
fossil and meta-mammal.
   A portion of board duty is always
custodial: disposing of "Why can't Jigs talk
English?" and "How 'bout the phone
number of the girl who does that shower
commercial?" Eight of ten remaining
requests are fish in barrels, solutions
floating off the pages of major almanacs or
last week's periodicals. One in ten demand
tougher track-downs, sometimes lasting days
before breaking. The final 10 percent, not
always demanding, aren't technically
answerable. Formally undecidable, to
bastardize math jargon: heartbreaking,
ludicrous insights into the inquiring spirit,
requiring special delicacy. "Q: Is there any
meaning to it all?" "A: According to Facts on
File..."
   Over years I've squirreled away a mass of
three-by-five Q-and-A's, perpetually
preparing for nebulous further reference.
Backtracing, I dig up the cards displayed on
the day I met Franklin. If, as all facts at my
fingertips insist, I truly live at the crucial
moment of this experiment, if creation itself
is now at stake, it's tough to tweeze from
the whole cloth the significant, saving
thread.

   Q: I need (desperately) to know the source
of the line: "How do you get moonlight into
a chamber?" Please find this. My life's at
stake.
   A.H., 6/20/83

  A: Quince: Well, it shall be so. But there is
two hard things: that is, to bring the
moonlight into a chamber; for you know,
Pyramus and Thisby meet by moonlight.
  Snout: Doth the moon shine that night we
play our play?
  Bottom: A calendar, a calendar! Look in
the almanac. Find out moonshine, find out
moonshine.
  Quince: Yes, it doth shine that night.
  Bottom: Why, then may you leave a
casement of the great chamber window,
where we play, open, and the moon may
shine in at the casement.
  Quince: Ay. Or else one must come in with
a bush of thorns and a lantern, and say he
comes to disfigure, or to present, the person
of Moonshine.

  Midsummer Night's Dream, III, i. If we can
save your life again, by all means let us
know.
  J. O'D., 6/23/83

 Q: Got an anagram for "ranted"? "Roast
mules"?
 R.S., 6/04/83

   A: This one took time. Unfortunately,
anagrams can't be solved by dipping into
Reader's Guide. The first is trivial: "ardent."
The second took our concerted staff two
weeks, although the answer is so simple any
child can do it: "somersault," We hope you
appreciate the tax dollars that went into
these. If your efforts produce any cash prize,
we trust you'll split it with your favorite
library.
   J. O'D., 6/23/83

  Q: Where can I go live where the people
are really well off, money-wise? I don't care
what type of government, because I don't
vote anyway.
  K.G., 6/22/83

   A: For sheer income there's always Nauru,
a Pacific island whose eight thousand
inhabitants are far wealthier per capita than
the U.S. population. They make their money
on one product, phosphates, which run the
industries of Australia, New Zealand, and
Japan. The Nauruans extract the chemicals
from huge deposit of seafowl guano laid
down over thousands of years. Such
affluence has a price. The island is itself
largely a giant guano deposit, and the more
than two million tons of phosphates
exported each year eat it away rapidly. While
everyone on Nauru drives expensive cars,
there are fewer miles of road to drive on
every year. You might as well stay home and
vote.
   J. O'D, 6/23/83

  Q: Has a woman ever given birth to the
child of a goat? What was this creature
called?
  B.R.G., 6/23/83

  A: No. But such an offspring would be a
satyr—Greek mythological hybrids, man
above the waist, goat below.
  J. O'D, 6/23/83

   This last one attracted special attention.
I've marked the card for admittance into my
circumspect list of all-time classics. During my
Question Board tenure, I've been asked
everything at least once. Which is worse,
cancer or heart attack? If Chicago time gives
more hours than New York time, why don't
we go on it too? I'm doing a family tree of
Jesus and need to know Mary's last name;
was it also Christ? Three weeks in the
reference section of the local public would
convince even Saint Paul that caritas is, if
anything, beside the point. Love doesn't
even scratch the surface of what the species
needs. Goat-people arise more frequently
than anyone except reference librarians
knows. I long ago stopped being astonished
at the number of people unable to
distinguish between whim and brick wall,
who choose their newspapers on whether
they are readable on the subway.
   As I left that evening, I thought how the
italic-penned challenge also partook of the
species-wide inability to tell need from not.
All the way home, walking through the
enfeebling city heat, I wondered why I'd
agreed to help find what could better be
learned by asking the man in question. I
came up with no better answer than the
asker's beauty. Reaching the relative safety
of my neighborhood, I heard my father—no
more tolerant than my mother in answering
my endless girlhood questions—whisper his
old litany, "Stranger, Danger," in my
interrogative ear.

  Face Value

   I worked for a humiliating week and a half
without turning up a shred of evidence that
Stuart Ressler had ever existed, let alone
done anything hard. I spent more time on
the job than I should have, rigor
proportionate to my anger at the thing's
idiocy. Half a dozen times a day, on a new
inspiration, I'd labor a page or phone
midtown. I was on the verge of running a
bogus credit check to get his date, place of
birth, and social security. Ethics and pride
prevented me, but only just. The sponsor
called once during that period, more out of
obligation than hope. He'd weaseled some
specifics from the source that he thought
might help. The man was born in 1932,
putting him just over a half-century. He had
been brought up in the East but joked about
time as a young man "in the interior." He
spoke little and read perpetually, everything
from throwaway fiction to abstruse journals.
He was by all appearances celibate. He lived
at work. "You probably can't use this," my
accomplice added, "but the only time I've
ever seen him show emotion was last year,
when that famous pianist stroked out dead."
   I brought up the matter of occupations. "I
know we're after the distant past here, but it
might help to know what line of work the
two of you are currently in."
   Mr. Todd chuckled hollowly at the other
end. "We run the country, the two of us.
Nights. Paper collating. Buck ten over the
minimum." They were the mainframe
operations graveyard shift for a
data-processing firm. "Info vendors. You
and me are practically kissing cousins." He
stopped short of suggesting we improve
relations. As worthless as the stray facts
were, I learned one helpful bit before
disconnecting: Todd's name. He also gave
me a number where I could reach him, "any
hour of the night or night."
   I hit the payoff only by coincidence, after
another week of ingenious, impotent search.
Serendipitous discovery, beloved of science
historians. The trick to blundering onto a
gold mine lies in long preparation. I
undertook no project without testing it for
relevance. But the solution chose to arrive
with such accidental grace that it appalls me.
A wide-eyed schoolboy had come to the
Reference Desk with a whitewashed first
draft of a term paper on civil rights.
Attempting to bring the movement back
from gelded interpretation, I led him to
primary sources, contemporary reports of
1957 Little Rock—the Arkansas National
Guard confronting the U.S. Army. We flipped
through a popular Year in Pictures, the
ingénu discovering that this foregone event
had in fact required a second civil war just
before his own birth, and was not yet
decided.
   As I'd done habitually with every book I
touched for the last two weeks, I scanned
the index. Nothing. Then the next year's
cumulative, reduced to hunt-and-peck. This
time, beyond all hope, an entry. Refusing to
believe, I pulled the citation. A gallery of
black-and-white portraits accompanying an
article on this annus mirabilis in molecular
genetics carried a minor caption that read,
"Dr. Stuart Ressler: one of the new breed
who will help uncover the formula for
human life."
   That was just the first shock. I had seen
the accompanying face before. The eruption
of coincidence made me put off calling
Franklin Todd. I woke that night from a sleep
of secret cabals to make the connection: Ike's
coronary specialist, the man in the pilled
oxford. He was a smooth twenty-six in the
photo, and over fifty when I'd met him the
previous fall. But despite the intervening
years, his face was unmistakable. The cell
paths responsible for aging had failed to
erase his particulars. Lying in bed, unable to
go back to sleep, I did the long division. The
NYPL has over eighty branches serving more
than ten million people. The odds against a
man paying my insignificant branch a visit
followed months later by another who
wanted to identify him were incalculable. I
jumped to conspiracy: the two were
colluding to test my research skills for some
reason I was compelled to figure out. In the
dark of my room, beside a sleeping male
whose breath did not change cadence as I
shot awake, it felt as if Dewey had broken
down: on the shelf, spine to spine beside
the Biography Index where I had begun the
search, came cheap intrigue.
   Suspicion didn't leave me until the day
Frank Todd took me to his office, that
converted warehouse he shared with the still
obscure Dr. Ressler. Only then did the
statistical improbability work out. I laughed
at my mathematical paranoia, at how I had
missed the crucial, obvious splint: their
office, the night watch where they nursed
the machines, was four streets down from
mine. I had swapped cause with effect. The
two lost men were simply both patrons of
the nearest public bookshelf.

  Rule of Three

   I've logged tonight much the same story
as the one I started a few nights ago.
Identical, with changes: the dead man's one
theme. A life in the laboratory made Dr.
Ressler see everything that happened on
earth—everything that ever can happen—all
speciation as a set of variations whose
differences declare their variegated similarity.
Yet in the end, the work he left behind, the
bit he added to the runaway fossil record,
proves that the occasional, infinitesimal
difference, astronomically rare, is the force
that drives similarity into unexpected places.
Tonight I put the scratched record on the
machine again, playing it out loud when my
memory becomes too spotty to call up the
melody. The same tune this evening, same
simple scale as the one that a few days ago
prompted me to end my professional life. But
not a note of Dr. Ressler's piece is in place.
   Last week, the dance seemed a duet,
subtle play between a right hand too close
and courant to hear and a left I left so long
ago I didn't at first recognize it. But tonight:
I definitely hear trio. Love triangle. Dr.
Ressler's story is nothing if not a threesome.
He loved a woman; and he loved something
else, inimical. Research didn't teach me this;
firsthand contamination did. I've been to the
place, picked up the spore.
   Coy cat-and-mouse, familiar Q-and-A
game around since the dawn of Chordata.
The man I loved was of a low opinion of
love's predictability. I can hear him—in the
same voice that wandered up that stacked,
homeless chord while he conducted
himself— singing, "Birds do it, Bees do it;
even shiftless ABDs do it...." I loved Franklin,
and it all seemed a duet once. But every
late-night visit I ever had from him, every
visit I ever paid, took place in the shadow of
an unnamed corespondent. A third party.
Every couple an isosceles.
   I am no calmer tonight. For all that I've
already written, Dr. Ressler's death still
comes on me at odd hours. Worse, more real.
I hit a sentence requiring a fact I can't bring
back intact: Ask Stuart; he'll remember. But
his memory, the finest I've ever seen, is
scattered, lost in small changes. What I have
in mind is no clearer now than on the day I
gave notice. Half my two weeks is over, and
I've still not explained to incredulous
coworkers what's going on. I promise to, the
moment I figure it. Tomorrow, I start my last
week of work, with no plan for after. Every
book I touched this afternoon seemed
strange. I must have been crazy to quit.
Overreacted in a moment's grief. I've thrown
away what little prospect I had of making it
through these days intact. And yet: hurt
demanded that I lose my job. For a week, I
know I must square off against quiet,
coming catastrophe alone.
   Tonight, at the old sticking point, I hear
another voice in the bass, below the love
duet. However entwined the upper lines,
another figure informs them, insists on
singing along. All two-part voice separation
harbors a secret trio in dense fretwork. Three
in nature is always a crowd. A chord. A code.
If science was that man's perpetual third
party, the scientist himself was mine.

      Today in History

   Inappropriately exhilarating to be in the
stacks today, now that I'm a short-term
impostor. Still, work continues until the last
check. This morning, as if nothing has
happened to routine, I posted for the Event
Calendar:

                         June 28
         Half a year before the United States'
      entry into World War II, Roosevelt
      establishes the Office of Scientific
      Research and Development. Vannevar
      Bush, designer of one of the earliest
      computers, becomes director. The OSRD
      coordinates U.S. scientific work with
      military concerns. It presides over the
      development of radar and sonar,
      mass-produced sulfa drugs and penicillin,
      mechanical computing, and the atomic
      bomb. The contributions of science to the
      war effort are widely appreciated. But the
      effects war has had on subsequent
      scientific research are more difficult to
      state.

   Posting, I'd already made my break with
the branch. My thoughts were no longer on
work, but on that other today, twenty-five
years ago, when Stuart Ressler, newly minted
Doctor of Biological Science, nine years old
when the OSRD was born, arrived in the
Midwest to commence adult life and make
his crucial if subsequently forgotten
contribution to progress. His bid for the
Who's Who.



III

      We Are Climbing Jacob's Ladder

   From the window of a wandering
Greyhound, Stuart Ressler gets his first look
at unmistakable I-state phenotype:
unvarying horizon, Siberian grain-wastes,
endless acres of bread in embryo. The most
absent landscape imaginable, it calls to him
like home. Schooled in the reductionist's
golden rule, he sees in this Occam's
razor-edge of emptiness a place at last
vacant enough to provide the perfect
control, a vast mat of maize and peas,
Mendel's recovered Garden. Green at
twenty-five, with new Ph.D., he leaves the
lab to enter the literal field.
    The tedious bus haul catches him up on
the literature. The Journal of Molecular
Biology takes him into Indiana, where he
acquires a seatmate whose disease of choice,
obesity, spills provinces over the armrest into
Ressler's seat. Three articles into the National
Academy Proceedings, Ressler must listen to
the huge stranger's invective on the perils of
reading. "My father could put away a Zane
Grey in one afternoon, and it got him
nowhere. Never touch the stuff. You'd be
wise to go easy on it." Ressler nods and
twists his lips. Not recognizing the dialect,
his seatmate persists. "What do?"
    Quick decoding eliminates Gesundbeit as
appropriate. "I'm a geneticist."
    "Oh, rich! You fix women trouble? What I
wouldn't do to trade places with you. Oh
brother. What I wouldn't do. Heaven on
earth for you fellas, init?"
    Ressler inspects his shoes. "Never touch
the stuff." This too cracks up his fellow
traveler. Fortune extracts the man at
Indianapolis, and the plague of
companionship passes over. Safely into
Illinois, a half hour from his new life,
organics lays a last ambush. A stream of
tortoises possessed of mass migratory
instinct crawl over the highway in the
twilight. Bottlenecked cars take turns
gunning, crunching over the shells. The
tortoise-trickle does not even waver. Ressler
stares out the rear window as long as he can
stomach it. For a hundred yards, he can make
out the horror. The insane persistence of the
parade holds him in fascinated disgust.
    Chelonia has nothing over primates re the
processional urge. Ressler weighs the similar
drive that brought him out here. Four years
earlier, a fellow first-year grad stormed into
his dorm room waving the legendary
Watson-Crick article in Nature. A new
threshold torn open for the leaping. The
awesome, aperiodic double helix—with its
seductive suggestion of encoded
information assembling an entire
organism—spread before him at twenty-one,
wider than the American Wilderness. The
next day, he dropped his four-year
investment in physiology to rush the
frontier.
    To his astonished adviser, he pointed out
how much solid prep he already had for the
curriculum change, how much carried over
into molecular. He'd concentrated on
chemistry, so the scale change would be a
snap. Besides: all significant breakthroughs
were made by novices free from
preconceptions or vested interests. In six
months of ferocious precocity, he'd made
believers of everyone. Research schools
singled him out as a future player, recruiting
him even as he put the last touches on his
thesis. He accepted the post-doc at
Urbana-Champaign, guided exclusively by
heroic impatience. Illinois could get him
started the fastest. From the stack of
invitations he selected theirs, scribbled a
ballpoint signature at the bottom, and
dropped the reply in the nearest box. The
game was afoot; a lab was a lab so long as it
was antiseptic. Hunch, induction, and
technique could put even an I-state on the
map.
   At twenty-five with no major contributions
yet, he's under the gun. Miescher was
twenty-five when he discovered DNA ninety
years before. Watson was twenty-four. If the
symptoms of breakthrough don't show by
thirty, forget it: throw in the lab coat, get an
industry job. Research—America in '57—is no
country for old men. Sure, his dissertation
was a minor tour de force, but just juggled
ideas evident to anyone paying attention.
Quickness and insight, both necessary,
won't suffice to take him where he's headed.
Now he must mint, in the crucible of his new
lab, hard currency. He packs two changes of
clothes and comes to this outpost Eden.
   He acclimates instantly to the box houses,
orthogonal blocks, and infinite corn in
parallel plowcuts running clear to the
horizon. Urbana, at twenty thousand, is just
what he needs. Stagnant backwaters are the
most fecund. He needs only a steady supply
of pipettes and a place to spread his bed.
Stepping off the bus into the greasy station,
he parses the downtown, shoos off a
soliciting cab, walks to campus. All
significant discoveries are made on foot. The
straightedge streets of his adopted town
bear ingenious names: numbers, states,
presidents, and the trees slaughtered to
make way for them. They swell with
whitewood houses, diners, five-and-dimes.
A church pokes Pentecostal finger at the
nimbus of clean linen laid over it, its
promotional postboard announcing
Sunday's sermon: "Can the Guests Morn
When the Bridegroom Be with Them?"—the
"u" deleted in point mutation. The rows
lining each lane seem so many
complementary, self-replicating pairs—the
fifties' fastest-breaking metaphor. In
minutes, Ressler forgets the seaboard, the
flattened Eastern affect of his childhood. He
settles into this emptiness, a symbiotic
bacterium in the belly of his host.
   On campus, he discovers there is no room
at the inn. A superannuated department
secretary, predating fruit flies, scrapes him
up a place in the old army barracks reprieved
from destruction until veterans stop pouring
back to school on the G.I. Bill. Stuart, who
missed the world crisis by enough years to
think that G.I. bills come from internists for
services rendered, also scabbed out of Korea
on dissertation deferral. His thesis drafts him
into another campaign, a magic bullet as
explosive as any gunner's. Fitting then,
military digs: vicarious enlistment. He takes
possession of one end of a single-story
tar-paper triplex in a shanty called Stadium
Terrace. The row huts line the colonnaded
shadow of Memorial Stadium, one of the
country's largest collegiate football
coliseums. He delights in discovering that his
cell number, K-53-C, encodes his precise
locus within the village.
   Cursory inspection turns up ratty bunk,
gas stove, half a black-and-white print of
James Dean with head on steering wheel,
several septic razor blades, and a box of
cereal with both flakes and enclosed coupon
devoured by red ants. He needs nothing
more. He unpacks his worldly belongings—a
tartan suitcase of second hand clothes and a
tote bag crammed with journals. Social
rounds, town exploration can wait. After a
perfunctory trip to the convenience grocery,
he holes up in the barracks. Days he toys
with the coding problem and evenings he
sits on a lawn chair staring at the
pie-wedged fallout-shelter signs plastered
over the stadium across the way. For dinner,
tomato juice minus gin: alcohol is a trace
mutagen and destroys brain cells. The
department must wonder why he hasn't
come by to introduce himself. That's all right;
wonder is the trump of the twenty-three-pair
chromosome set.
   He remains horizontal for days, boning
up, resisting the temptation to indulge in
premature cracking. Feverish, unleashed
vistas tempt him with fat feasibility. He must
first consolidate, gather strength, quiet his
mind, assemble the tools, await, without
expecting, that rare, most skittish visit. Yet
before insight can alight, the outside world
flank-attacks him through the mail. A letter
appears in his box, his first communique
since hitting Illinois:

     July 16, 1957 Dear Stu,
     Heard you're in town and hope you're
  not waiting for official commencement of
  the fellowship to drop by the lab. We
  could use you in the Blue Sky sessions if
  nowhere else. No one's doing much
  biology at the moment, as you might
  imagine. Too much excitement in the air.
  Right now we're all thinking math and
  language. How are you at combinatorials?
  Oh for a spark of Aha! By the way,
  Charlene and I are having the team over
  for dinner and cards or something next
  Thursday. Do come. We'll even have the
  get-together in your honor, if that's what
  it takes.

    Yours, Karl Ulrich
     P.S. Review Adv Biol 4:23 if you haven't
  done so recently, and let me know
  Thursday if you think Gamow's right in
  discarding the diamond code. I never liked
  the layout: too pretty; too much the work
  of a physicist. But too convenient if the
  whole pattern just coiled up and blew
  away.

   Ressler has met his new boss only through
the professional journals. A prolific writer,
the man is to trees what Bill Cody was to
buffalo. Ulrich, at fifty-two (Ressler's age
transposed), is Illinois's grand old molecular
man, guiding spirit behind Cyfer, the team of
microbiologists, chemists, and geneticists
who induct Ressler as new recruit. Stuart
ingests the assignment in place of lunch,
tracking the article down to the university
library. The stacks, third-läfgest in the
country, are, like Memorial Stadium,
decorated passim with orange-and-black
Civil Defense pies. Ressler doubts the
pragmatics of the motif. Four floors of
masonry are not likely to survive an airburst.
Brick and poured concrete do reduce rad
passage, but story-height blown-out glass
does not. And using the library as shelter
until the renovated landscape returned to
safe levels would require keeping survivors
alive for weeks on cellulose alone.
   Nevertheless, this homage to Dewey
Decimal is the most impressive monument
America's Breadbasket has yet shown him.
Several million volumes colonize ten floors
of catwalks and twisting alleys. Every deck
contains, in its hectares, plumbing and
facilities for long-term residents. If the stink
of binding paste didn't offend, he'd go
AWOL from the barracks and set up his two
pieces of luggage here. A sadly vindicating
tour reveals an 824 untouched since Henry
James died. Humanities have clearly slid into
the terminally curatorial, forsaking claim to
knowledge. Ressler finds his niche-to-be,
575, by cytotropic sixth sense, tucked away in
a grotto deep in the cavernous recesses,
incandescence lending it appropriate
spelunker's air. This rarefied branch of a
specialized discipline, barely extant a decade
back, now rates several shelves, swelling by
the hour.
   At any other time, he'd be hopelessly
waylaid by 1930s unemployment lists,
turn-of-the-century novels, hundred-season
sets of symphony programs. A
comprehensively dense map striving for
perfect isomorphism with the outside world
provokes his browser's awe. But
commissioned, Stuart goes straight to the
target periodical without cracking a spine.
He's read Gamow's views on the code—one
of the first formal attacks on how DNA might
embed its protein-plans. But best review the
physicist's retraction; its details are likely to
be of more use at Dr. Ulrich's soiree than the
latest Elvis or Fats Domino. Advanced
Biology 4:23 comes off the shelf suspiciously
easily, plops open to the piece in question, a
penciled scrawl near the title:

  JHB SZI HVA OLP GVX IKZ XHO DBN ZRU
ALW WKH TVI HQQ BTI VSR EP

   Disguised messages hook him by the brain
stem. The cold lure of this adept's sport, text
trapped in nonsense: a face-slap, tapping
impulses fiercer than the urge to pile up cars
or cure the forbidding loneliness of women.
The sanctioned desires of
twenty-five—Warm breasts and cold
chrome—are mere substitutes, garbled
misread-ings of the real pull. All longing
converges on this mystery: revelation,
unraveling secret spaces, the suggestion
that the world's valence lies just behind a
scrambled facade, where only the limits of
ingenuity stand between him and sunken
gardens. Cryptography alone slips beneath
the cheat of surface. Yes, test adrenaline, the
attempt to justify the teacher's faith,
contributes to this nonsense string's siren
song. But this puzzle—clearly planted for his
benefit—this chase, this unscrambling,
waiting, working, worrying the moment
when simple, irrefutable plaintext
explanation descends: this (the cadence of
his thought straying dangerously close to
Protestant hymnody) is the reason why
awareness itself first evolved out of inert
earth.
   Experiment per se has never carried any
special appeal; rare steak aside, Ressler has
never enjoyed cutting into any genus higher
than Anura. But the driving design...He
forgets the article and sets to work on the
pencil smudges. "EP," the closing, sole
couplet: the initials of his antagonist, KU?
He tries a few relations before hitting on a
simple one. P to U is a jump of five letters; E
to K, a jump of six. An incremental
substitution cipher—a good, reversible
garbling scheme. Seven to the final "R"
yields "Y." Eight to the "S," going around
the horn, arrives at "A." The last triplet
comes out "day:" paydirt. The rest of the
reconstruction is brute counting. Soon shell
cracks and sense seeps through:

  IFY OUC ANR EAD THI STH ENT HEP ART
YIS REA LLY WED NES DAY

   Back to native tongue. Grouping by threes
is Ulrich's hat tip to the prevailing idea that
the unit in the genetic code is a triplet of
bases. Regrouping reveals all.
   He passes the rite of hidden passages,
wins his first glimpse of the new boss. The
path from discovery to tinkering to
inspiration to solution takes place outside
time. Returning to deck entrance, he
discovers that he has narrowly missed being
locked in the stacks overnight. Only when he
is safely back at the barracks, flat out on the
bunk in K-53-C, sipping tomatoes and
savoring his victory, does he realize that he's
forgotten even to glance at the article Dr.
Ulrich asked him to review.
   Stuart arrives at the Ulrich doorstoop on
the revealed Wednesday, groomed for the
occasion. The chief ushers him into the party
with only a "Good job." Ressler, the last
guest to arrive, uncomfortable in newly
purchased suit, presents host and hostess
with a box of after-dinner chocolates filled
with greenish fungi. Suit and gift are both
wild miscalculations; soon he'll be unable to
go out in public at all, so completely has he
botched the social code in his haste to crack
the genetic. He makes the rounds, meets his
future labmates. Tooney Blake, dark,
mid-height, a youthful forty, is at the piano
doing a terrifyingly down-tempo version of
"Let's Call the Whole Thing Off." Only he's
missed the point of the song: "Potato,
potato, tomato, tomato," all pronounced
exactly the same. A gracious woman with an
uncanny Eleanor Roosevelt impersonation,
Dr. Toveh Botkin, stands by in great pain,
waiting for the promised formal feeling to
come. Her accent reveals her as one of those
brilliant Central European scientists lured
away from the Russians in '45 by democracy
and cash. Musically illiterate, Ressler can
nevertheless tell by Dr. Botkin's bearing that
the soiree is soul-toughening purgatory for
her. She says as much in her first sentence to
him, declaring with convoluted tact that the
machine responsible for the apotheosis of
Beethoven's Diabelli, not to mention the
transcendent Opus 109 set, had been a
sacred instrument to her until a few
moments before. He nods, without a clue to
what she's talking about.
   Joseph Lovering, five years Ressler's
senior, sits on a sofa noisily denying that he
is now or ever has been a member of this or
any party. He and Jeanette Koss, also near
thirty, heatedly discuss some political bomb
that Ressler lost track of while in grad
school. These two, the only folks close to
Stuart in age, more or less ignore him after
the obligatory hand-grab. Daniel
Woytowich, the other senior Cyfer member
after Ulrich and Botkin, is at work in the
corner, head wrapped in Pyrex eyeglasses,
watching the Ulrichs' rabbit-eared
black-and-white set broadcast Garry
Moore's I've Got a Secret. The show is
interrupted by a flash announcement:
scientists have succeeded in creating today's
modern aspirin, the Ferrari of the
gastrointestinal Le Mans. Faster, Stronger,
and now Improved. "Last year's aspirin only
killed the headache..." When Ressler
introduces himself, Woytowich tells him the
panelist's secret: by marrying the mother of
his father's second wife, he's become his
own grandpa.
   The night's entertainment alarms and
depresses him: how can so human a
collection hope to penetrate its own
blueprint? The code must certainly be more
ingenious than this crew it created.
   Ressler knows Cyfer's considerable
collective intelligence from their published
track record. He needs them; they represent
specific expertise in cytology, biochemistry,
ontogeny, fields wild to him. Yet they sing,
watch prime time, talk politics. Incredible
comedown, awful circularity: no one to
reveal us to ourselves but us.
   The welcome-aboard party—easily his
most nightmarish evening out since
prom—leaves Ressler in serious need of a
purgative. He pays his first visit downtown
since the bus pulled in. There he indulges
uncharacteristically in buying something.
Spending money is not a problem; he's never
been one to form emotional bonds to
crinkled bits of safety paper. The wrench for
him is acquiring more stuff. Since late teens,
he's never owned anything more than he
could carry out of the country on short
notice. Now, in less than a month, he's
already saddled himself with dishes, a table,
even a heap of chicken-wire sculpture that
charitably passes for a chair.
   He buys a record player that folds up into
a box with handle, a pink that has been
coaxed out of the spectrum by suspect
means. He is sold by a matching pink
polyethylene ballerina that snaps on the
spindle and pirouettes slavishly at 78, 45, 33
? , and— whatever happened to 16?—16.
Never musical, he inherited what is
physiologically referred to as a tin ear. His
father carried the tone-deaf gene, forever
going about the house delivering a spectral
version of "Get Out and Get Under."
Discomfort with harmony leaves Ressler not
only ignorant of music but deeply distrustful.
Pitch-writing obeys amorphous, ambiguous
linguistics—a dialect just beyond
paraphrase. Fast and loud is more exciting
than slow and quiet. The rest is silence.
   He needs, without knowing, those old,
Renaissance formulas equating C-sharp
minor with longing, sudden modulation to E
major with a glimpse of heaven. How dare
an obnoxious greaser four years younger
than he turn the Civil War tune "Aura Lee"
into the Hit Parade standard "Love Me
Tender," without a wiggle of concern for the
underpinning chordal message? Either this
language has no content, or tonal tastes
have festered, fixed for 100 years and more.
Both options terrify him.
   He has trouble selecting tunes to keep the
ballerina dancing, and Olga herself remains
noncommittal. At length, he settles on an
anthology called Summer Slumber Party, the
bobby-soxer, center cover behind the pillow,
reminding him of a woman he dated in
college. Straight brown hair and artesian
eyes, she dumped him for never getting off
his Bunsen. With the assistance of a sales
clerk, he secures two other primers: Britten's
Young Person's Guide to the Orchestra and
Leitmotifs from Wagner's "Ring." The latter,
still politically suspect, appeals to him from
the liner description: a story told in a
book-code of memorable riffs. One of these
disks might contain his tonal Rosetta. To
round out his disk library, in the spirit of
Separate Can Never Be Equal, and knowing
the tunes from his father, he buys an album
of spirituals by Paul Robeson.
   A summer night, the last before his
marriage to experiment, and Ressler spends
the few, dark, warm hours soaking in the
deep evangelical minister's voice seeping in
spirituals from K-53-C onto Stadium Terrace's
lawn. Robeson sings, "Sometimes it causes
me to wonder. Ah, sometimes." The sound
ambushes Ressler, slack in his lawn chair. He
watches the waves continue east at 1,134 feet
per second, where they will arrive in D.C.
later that evening. He hears the phrase
knock at John Foster Dulles's window as the
secretary of state prepares for bed. Dulles
curses, shouts for this blackfella to leave him
be. He's promised to return Ol' Man River's
passport as soon as Robeson returns the '52
International Stalin Peace Prize. Last year
Dulles told a Life reporter that a man scared
to go all the way to the brink is lost.
"Brinksmanship" is now the going word.
Dulles, hands full with the Suez and Syria,
his troops in Lebanon within a year, shaken
by the runaway slave's son singing "Jordan
river chilly and cold," shouts out the window
of the State Department at Ressler to turn
the volume down and have a little respect,
forgetting, under stress of the brink, that
democracy is the privilege of not being able
to escape the next man's freedom of
speakers.
   Ressler, a thousand miles west, listens to
the blackfella go on to sing, in resonant
bass, the great ascent up Jacob's Ladder.
Every rung—now the steps of the four
nucleotides up the spiral DNA
staircase—goes higher and higher. On the
darkened, ex-army-barracks lawn, gathering
strength for the work he owes the world, a
physiological trick sweeps over Ressler. His
peace turns to a sadness so overpowering
that, before he can interpret it, tears seep
out his eyes on underground springs.
Avuncular defective lachrymal, until this
moment happily masked, flushed by the
deep voice, the simplicity of the tune, the
hopeless hope of words in a world where
the stadium colonnade declares itself a safe
radiation haven, or just this absolute, still,
summer night in a featureless town.
Spontaneous twitch of gland for a race
capable of grabbing the next rung while
simultaneously leaping for the beloved
brink. Or purely somatic epiphenomenon:
Robeson hits a note, springs a chord
sequence that triggers solute; everything
else lies outside measure. Deeply enfolded,
the tune attaches to the night's lateness,
and suddenly the song is real. Ah!
sometimes it causes me to wonder.
Sometimes.
   There on the lawn, the eve before
uncovering the precise, testable tape that
will change the way life conceives itself, he
feels the first seduction of music, his own
pitiful compulsion for forward motion, the
insistence that we sing ourselves over into a
further place. All the while the runaway
slave's son intones:

            We are climbing Jacob's Ladder
          We are climbing Jacob's Ladder We
          are climbing Jacob's Ladder We're
          soldiers of the Cross.

  As rearguard action, Ressler runs through
the lexical combinations biology reserves for
this five-letter combination: cross stain, hair
cross, Ranvier's cross, crossbreed,
cross-firing, crossing over, cross matching,
sensory crossway.

            Every rung goes higher and
          higher Every rung goes higher and
          higher Every rung goes higher and
          higher We're soldiers of the Cross.

  To this cross list, he adds the crucial test
cross, the only way to tell how he and the
bass are related, to find the miscegenation
harbored in their common ancestor, to trace
the defective ducts. Then he hits on it, the
mark, the label for the spiritual's crucifix, the
deep, reluctant cross Robeson soldiers:
anatomical term. Crux of the heart.

  Today in History

   Assisted by accident, I was out of the
starting block. Given the locus—a year to
peg him and a special field—I retrieved
everything the limited print trail held about
Dr. Ressler. Three days after coming across
the magazine photo, I turned up two more
citations: the Science Midwest abstracts for
the same year, and the coau-thored article in
Journal of Molecular Biology that brought
the young man his first attention. I even
traced, through the dense, preserved,
late-fifties paperwork, his department's
involvement in varied researches as
molecular genetics unfolded. One colleague
made important refinements in electron
microscopy. Another developed a cheap way
to measure cytoplasmic protein. A third
cropped the copious shady old genealogical
trees beloved of textbooks.
   To have been a virgin post-doc then! I
exhumed the Watson-Crick paper that had
touched off the wholesale gold rush. The
primary sources still exhale the atmosphere
of intellectual dizziness, the articles thick
with a sense that someone would soon crack
the complete caper and seize the ne plus
ultra of the research world, the riddle of life.
I knew that every era since Anaxi-mander
and his vital moisture has tried to explain
the ultimate contradiction: living matter. But
even a hurried review of Ressler's
contemporaries brought home the shock: my
lifetime has seen the breakthrough moment,
the first physical theory of all life grounded
at entry level.
   Each article, every retraction and revision
recorded the heat of the exploding field. I
pored over the background
material—busman's holidays at the main
branch—coming to know Dr. Ressler weeks
before I made his acquaintance, if only a
Ressler decades younger than the one I was
sent to discover. How must it have felt, at
twenty-five, talented but untested, to live at
the same hour, perhaps even arm's length
from the finishing touch, the final
transcription—the first organism to explain
its own axioms?
   Half of what I made out about the
twenty-five-year-old scientist was pure
projection. I began to feel I had not lived up
to my own intellect, that I'd been born too
late, had taken a wrong turn, had lost my
own chance to turn up the edge of the real,
discover something, something hard. This
child scientist, desperate with ability,
somehow reduced to full-scale adult
withdrawal, night shift labor, by something
not explained in the literature: here was my
own irreversible missed hour.
   The race for the genetic code must have
been wonderful torture for one of Dr.
Ressler's abilities. By 1957, the search to
describe all living tissue in molecular
principles was halfway to unmitigated
solution. The pace of revelations staggers
even one habituated to permanent
acceleration. Consensus that DNA was the
genetic carrier had been reached only a few
years before Ressler arrived in Illinois. Its
structure had fallen only four years earlier. In
1957, speculation about how the giant
molecule encoded heredity became open
game for theoreticians. The field is littered
with articles by physicists, chemists, and
other inflamed amateurs. Generations of
patient fly-counters had done the legwork.
The mid-fifties were set for breakout, the
rush of synthesizing postulates. He must
have sensed that this anarchical phase
would pass quickly, perhaps in months. The
prize was bare, exposed for the plucking at
the top of the nucleic stair.
   But something else motivates the euphoric
articles, something more than
self-aggrandizement, more than the desire
to cap the ancient monument and book
passage to Stockholm, that freezing, pristine
Valhalla. The compulsion to find the pattern
of living translation—the way a simple,
self-duplicating string of four letters
inscribes an entire living being—is built into
every infant who has ever learned a word,
put a phrase together, discovered that
phonemes might speak.
   As the journal evidence accumulated, it
sucked me into the craze of crosswords, pull
of punch lines, addiction to anagrams,
nudge of numerology, suspense of magic
squares. I felt the fresh Ph.D.'s suspicion that
beneath the congenital complexity of human
affairs runs a generating formula so simple
and elegant that redemption depended on
uncovering it. Once lifting the veil and
glimpsing the underlying plan, Ressler
would never again surrender its attempted
recovery. The desire surpassed that for food,
sex, even bedtime stories, worth pursuing
with convert's zeal, with the singleness of a
monastic, a lost substance abuser, a true
habitue: the siege of concealed meaning.

  The Question Board

  I put off telling Franklin Todd what my
search had turned up. The trail of the
sure-to-be-famous youth ended abruptly,
dying out in the middle of 1958. Thumbnail
biographies and professional references
both dried up. A void lay between the boy of
twenty-five, in the middle of the
fastest-breaking biological revolution ever,
and the man twice that age, an obscure
computer functionary. I could do nothing
but confirm the same enigma that had driven
Todd to consult me in the first place. I
returned to that hauntingly alien photo,
"one of the new breed who will help
uncover the formula—" The article bore an
epigraph by Friedrich Miescher, the
twenty-five-year-old who had discovered
DNA in 1869:

            Should one ask anybody who is
         undertaking a major project in
         science, in the heat of the fight,
         what drives and pushes him so
         relentlessly, he will never think of
         an external goal; it is the passion of
         the hunter and the soldier... the
         stimulus of the fight with its
         setbacks.

   One passionate hunter had evidently been
shot along the way. I would have gone on
trying to determine how, even had Todd not
returned. Some days after my break, I caught
him hanging around the Question Board,
scouring it as if nothing mattered except this
discontinuous glut of fact stripped of
context. As if, despite the biblical promise,
the world would end in flood after all. Of
information. If Todd lay in wait for me, he
made no sign. "Truly amazing," he said, not
even looking as I approached. "How'd you
find all this stuff? You make it up?"
   It distressed me to enjoy seeing him. I tried
to pull my mouth out of its involuntary grin
into disapproval. "Of course not. What do
you take me for? This is human services. Not
for profit. Bulk mail permit."
   "This one, for instance." He pointed to the
weeks-old question about where in the
world people were best off. The outdated
card was due to be removed; I took it down
as Mr. Todd continued. "How did you know
all that, about the two million tons of bird
shit and disappearing roads and all?"
   My M.L.S. cheekbones crumpled like a
rear-ended economy car. "Nauru? Nauru is a
reference librarian's mainstay. Smallest
republic. Largest per capita income. Typical
instance of List Mentality. You might as well
ask any urban male over fourteen if the
number three sixty-seven means anything to
him." Cobb's average, which I verified every
few months, meant nothing to Todd. He
looked inquisitively at me, not yet daring to
ask if I had results. I wasn't volunteering. I
carried on with my work, pinning to the
board the Q-and-A:

  Q: Who is the head of the CIA and where
can I reach him? This is an EXTREMELY
confidential matter.
  F.P. 7/3/83

  A: William J. Casey, Central Intelligence
Agency, Washington, DC 20505.
  J. O'D., 7/5/83

   Todd took two more cards from under my
clasped arm, careful not to touch my side. He
assisted, pinning the cards into place. It
seemed we had worked together, easily and
quietly, for years.

  Q: What must we do to be saved?
  C.R., 7/2/83
   A: A tough one, but worth looking into.
According to George Saville, Marquis of
Halifax (1633-1695), in A Rough Draft of a
New Model at Sea, "To the question, What
shall we do to be saved in this World? there
is no other answer but this, Look to your
Moat."
   J. O'D., 7/5/83

   My new acquaintance examined our
handiwork. He giggled at the first and took
undisguised pleasure in the second. Then he
looked at me, scrutinized my face, trying to
determine exactly who worked this advice
column for the fact-lorn public. "You've
found something," he declared. "That much
is clear."
   I wanted to contradict him, but couldn't.
"Like the Canadian Mounties..." I began, but
caught myself before ending up in the
double entendre.
   "You'll have to tell me everything. Listen:
turns out I'm the sole patron of a seafood
dive very much ahead of its time." His
burlesque was gentle, with no sadistic edge.
"I'm particularly enthusiastic about their
humane handling of shellfish. Want to do
lunch?"
   It felt good to be asked a question that
didn't require a double-check. I laughed.
"It's almost five o'clock."
   "Almost time for night-shift breakfast. I
thought lunch might be an acceptable
compromise."
   "You cannot have seafood for breakfast. I
forbid it."
   "I've done worse. Can we take that no as a
yes?" He went on, with wondrous,
unassisted certainty, to set the time and
place, not to mention what I would be
eating. He rubbed his hands and made a
curious snapping flick with thumb and
middle finger. I later learned how many
different things that nervous gesture stood
for. "All right then. Meet you there. I assume
you are dependable, Ms.
   O'Deigh?" My paranoia flared as I heard
my name in his mouth. "You'll be there?"
Urgent but decorous library subdecibel.
"Ach, she'll be thare, laddie. Stop with yare
wurryin'."
   All that I know of animal courtship dances
comes from Van Nostrand's. But this clearly
was one; too much bravado and flutter to be
anything else. No man had done me so
elaborate a two-step in several seasons, and
I let it go on, despite myself. Pure, amateur
male theatrics: nothing to take seriously.
While ambivalent about meeting the man
outside the jurisdiction of the shelf list, I saw
little danger in it. Capitulation was easier
than trying to outtalk him. My own curiosity
about the collapse of the precocious
empiricist would have been enough to take
Todd on. I wanted everything his colleague
might tell me.
   But Franklin Todd's soft-shoe polish also
smelled of something else: aromatic locales I
hadn't yet visited, the scent of travel. The
man was genuinely strange. Two people, no
longer young, knowing nothing about one
another, their pasts sharing no word in
common, meet on a day in early summer to
compare notes on a third party. The scenario
had all the charm of travelers' phrases, a
crash course at Berlitz. Sardonic, innocent,
Todd backpedaled from the Question Board.
He stopped abruptly and retraced his steps.
He looked me over a last time and said, "But
you are." Contradicting all advance reports,
yet firm in the face of the evidence.
   "Am what? What am I?"
   "You are looking after your moat, aren't
you?" He'd meant something else, an answer
to his own question of a week before,
deciding that I was, after all, possessed of
surfaces. And the decision surprised us both.
Still pruning the board after he left, I found
an impeccable imitation of one of my own
typed cards hiding amid the others, one of
those marvelous walking sticks or
owl-imitating moths. The impostor-card
asked, "Q: What is the origin of the phrase
'Make the catch'?" It had not been there
before Mr. Todd's visit.

  Persistence of Vision

   At the time, I was not in the market for
dance steps, however novel. Already
involved, as contemporary idiom puts it, tied
to a man in a mutually professional
windbreak stable enough to deflect this new
sea breeze. Stavine toeether for four vears
Droved our complementarity. Keith—slick,
quick to anger, addicted to excitement, at
times insane—countered my own reverse
extremes. Together, we passed in our class
and era, subtly matched opposites in a
country full of couples as incongruous as
Tuckwell-O'Deigh.
   Keithy always made me laugh. The
problem, by summer of '83, was that I'd
begun laughing at his running routine
despite myself. My mate's particular brand of
joke had lost the redeeming secret: the trick
of making disparate reality show a hopeless,
bearable seam. Like everyone I know in New
York, Tuckwell was a prairie refugee. Every
damn person I get close to in this city—all
transplanted Hoosiers or huskers. It would
have been cheaper to stay home. Keith's
dress, speech, and manner were
compensatory— Coastier Than Thou. He
could speak convincingly about everything
on the island from P/E ratios to performance
art. "Appraising, dear heart, doesn't
necessarily require the inconvenience of
knowing."
   He knew the city like a cabbie. The stress
of midtown at 5:00 p.m. rolled off his downy
obliviousness. Keith would have sickened
and died if he'd had to live anywhere else
but this epitome. For years he protected me,
underwrote my survival in this toxic place.
Keith had dabbled in academics but soon
strayed into advertising, "Needs
Manufacturing," as he liked to describe it.
Tuckwell was outstanding at what he did. He
made pots of money without shame. But he
pumped a wellspring of sardonic
commentary, the progressive's estrangement
from his own pursuits. "Ads," he once
defended himself at a dinner full of less
forthright friends, "are our supreme art,
polar exploration, and depth psychology
rolled into one. And the shit that keeps the
GNP blooming, to boot."
   We liked each other well enough. But the
spit holding us together was the power of
mutual facetiae to legitimize affection.
Against my reference-desk reserve, he
cultivated crude anarchy. He was far more
comfortable in the flash of Lower
Manhattan haute Kultur, but he had to come
to me for help in navigating the boroughs,
even our own neighborhood. I kept him out
of debt and he kept me from starving myself.
We divided the household chores
contractually. I did mine in the evenings and
days off; he hired outside help. Tuckwell was
convinced he would die by electric shock. I
milked the opposite fear of wasting away for
decades in a nursing home. Our phobias and
philias canceled out one another, We arrived
at an equilibrium that could go on, like
those fleas on backs of fleas, forever ad
infinitum.
   We conversed well, when we saw one
another. Keith overheated at times, but he
knew the language. People who still love
words have to be forgiven everything. In
what the last century referred to as
mechanical transport, we were scarily
compatible, even after four years. He taught
me abandon. The rule was: recklessness
could always be repented at leisure. With ad
designer's ingenuity, he steadily introduced
wrinkles into our sex life, always managing
to suggest that R and D had future,
new-and-improved packages around the
corner.
   His total shamelessness even made the
awful minute afterwards almost comic. As I
postcoitally recoiled, Keith, still savoring the
instinctual release just served up, would lie
alongside me and wail, in a perfectly timed,
plaintive voice directed at the ceiling, "What
is the Law?" He'd answer himself in animal
sadness, "Not to eat meat; not to go on all
fours—" I always laughed—the dovetail joint
between need and embarrassment.
   Our attraction, unplanned and
mismatched, was the physics of charged
particles, ions pulled toward their
neutralizing not. He was one of the few who
prance through the world with self-esteem.
His absolute views on everything were
manna after a day in the perpetually
uncertain, qualified reference wilderness.
Keith liked himself, a fire worth hovering
near, trying to steal.
   On the day I accepted dinner, I was not
dissatisfied. I'd never been a big fan of
unnecessary drama. Mr. Todd's invitation
was flattering, but not enough to account
for my accepting it, even under guise of
business. Tuckwell and I were, in the rules of
coming and going, hopelessly liberal. His
work was continuous and mine too variable
for us to set up the schedule that ordinarily
substitutes for home life. I tried to call him
that July evening to tell him I'd be late. But
already half sabotaging, I didn't try his
office. I rang up the apartment and listened
to Tuckwell's latest tape: "Your mission,
should you decide—"I then announced to
the machine that I was eating with a
stranger.
   I remember little of the clam shack Franker
took me to. I do remember what he
wore—creased, formal, button-down
bemuse-ment. I remember the soulful look
when he implored me to order the linguini
with calamari, and the scolding brows
leveled at me when I left it untouched. I
remember seeing the chef hack off a living
lobster's tail while the creature's front end
bourréed blithely across the counter to
plunk back into the tank, mix it up one last
time with the ladies. "You should see him do
beef," Todd said.
   And I remember him quickly relieving me
of my discoveries. My disclosure—the young
man in the journals, teetering on the verge
of significant contribution—confirming his
pain. He demanded to hear, in as much
detail as I could muster, about Ressler's early
work and the predictions about him. Todd
seemed to have suspected the worst, all that
had been at stake. When I finished relating
what little story I'd uncovered, I sat silent,
gingerly prodding my unfinished plate like a
bomb squad nudging a black satchel. When
he finally spoke, it was only to repeat,
incredulously, "Twenty-five! My age to the
day, as it turns out." I mumbled a birthday
toast, unsure how literal he was being.
   I naively proceeded to hand over my entire
list of primary sources without securing any
return hostages. My dinner date then fell
rudely indifferent. His interest in me had
been entirely functional after all; despite the
expertly mimicked courtship dance, he
wanted no more than a research assistant. I
felt abused, doubly stupid for not
recognizing the trick. But watching him toy
with a Parmesan shaker, I was astonished to
see Frank Todd clearly grieving for a person
who, given what he'd said about their
working relationship, was as great a stranger
to him as to me.
   Sitting across from me at the hired table,
morose with concern: at last, someone who I
might matter to. I felt a twinge of guilt
toward Keith, just then listening to my taped
won't-be-home-till-late. In that one instant,
Todd seemed about to fold up into himself,
to drop out of sight for good. I wouldn't
have prevented him. In that minute gone
bad, we were an accent away from splitting
the tab and quitting. We were both geared
to be rid of one another when the only real
coincidence of those days intervened. A
fluke, outside chance yanked Frank Todd out
of a reverie he would never have come back
from on his own. The sawdust dive's piped
music, until then an eclectic collection of
Balkan reed choir, Tyrolean zither, and
Memphis twang, turned abruptly and
became solo piano. The boy bolted upright,
listening, alarmed. He shook his head,
amazement moving his lips: the
inappropriate smile at hurt too diffuse to
absorb. "Name that tune," he said bitterly,
slamming the table. "Name it, and I'll
introduce you to the bastard."
   I recognized the music, having learned the
first, trivial thirty-two measures as a young
girl before giving up the piano in favor of
pragmatics. I had even made first forays into
the variations Bach had extracted from the
thirty-two-note ditty. The distillation of the
first few notes held all the chest-tightening
surprise of unlikely visits. "I happen to know
the piece," I said giddily. "But I'm off duty
just now."
   "Name it," he shouted. Conversation at
other tables stopped. I mumbled the name of
the work. By the effect on Todd, I'd just
guessed the one-in-five-billion secret word.
We listened. A few minutes in silence with a
stranger lasts a lifetime. Only after two
variations did he tell me that this
piece—"this particular recording, in
fact"—was the only music our mutual friend
had listened to for the last year. Todd,
reanimated, described how his lone shift
partner sat every night in a sterile chamber
of humming processing units, high-speed
printers, floor-mount disk drives, and
glowing consoles, doing routine work that
any modestly endowed twenty-one-year-old
could do, changing tapes, running the
unvarying deck of punched cards through
the hopper, while all the while this set of
baroque irrelevances spun around on a
cheap grinder perched on top of the digital
check-sorter.
   "All the way through, both sides, three
times a night for the last few months." Todd,
the insult of care cracking his voice, fell
silent as the restaurant sound track reached
the third permutation, a well-behaved
melody beginning all over again against
itself. Two pitch-for-pitch identical but
staggered parts crossed each other,
independently harmonized and
harmonizing, no longer one identical source
of notes but two. The study in imitative
forward motion, the staggered, duplicate
pair of voices stood motionless at the axis of
the turning world. The unison canon,
contradiction in terms, left Todd morose,
ready to replay the older man's
disappearance of years before. He came out
of his trance long enough to say, "You
won't have heard the thing properly until
you see my friend in the flesh." The
invitation I so badly wanted.
   Later, after a stop at the futuristic
supermarket that, like me, had recently
gate-crashed this neighborhood, I found
Keith alone in our apartment, still engrossed
in a lucrative day's work, sprawled on the
floor surrounded by tape splices,
single-stepping through a video of his latest
collaborative effort: the fifteen-second story
of how a young woman and her breath spray
find happiness together. "Dinner OK?" he
asked, intent on the frame-by-frame.
   "Yeah, dinner OK. Four-B's car alarm is
howling again. Buzzing like a shorted
bumblebee. Nobody paying any attention.
Not even the beat police flinch anymore."
   "Speaking of High Security, how's my
Princess Grace?"
   I'd lived with him long enough to follow
every free association.
   I was glad for glibness just then and
retaliated in like currency. "American film
actress. Born in Philadelphia, 1927? No,'28.
Killed in Monaco car crash in September
1982. Almost a year already. God." I went to
the window and held back the curtain. In the
street below, late-evening pedestrians
worked out the details of Brownian motion.
   Tuckwell gave his representative laugh: a
high-pitched, uncontrolled cackle. "Very
good. Been earning your keep, I see. The
Human Reference Shelf wouldn't care to say
what day Mrs. Grimaldi died, would she?" I
sat down next to him, looking for warmth
that wouldn't aggravate the heat. He gave
me a kiss on my exposed collarbone. I made
no rejoinder, and he returned to work,
adding, "See To Catch a Thief tot a
demonstration of life imitating art."
   The television was on, sound just loud
enough to give voice to incestuous bad girls
from Texas and tough but basically good
inner-city cops. We witnessed the last five
minutes of Five Minutes to Meltdown, where
political extremists, natural disaster, and
old-fashioned carelessness conspired to
threaten the nuclear reactor on the
community outskirts nearest you. Four
young, lusty civil engineers narrowly
thwarted the disaster. After, we caught the
late news, fulfilling our social duty. Keith got
his chance to make his favorite joke: "Twenty
million face famine in Ethiopia. First, this."
He made running commentary on all the
spots, from headlines down to the perverse,
trailing human interest. As usual, during
commercials he cut the sound and ad-libbed.
"Terrorism: the mini-series. Thursday, right
here on—" Had he thrived in another
decade, his manic energy might have made
him an activist.
   When one network in its allotted half
hour said all there was to say about Tuesday,
July 5, 1983, we switched to another. The
coverage was identical, a half hour later.
Keith carried on his inspired annotations,
even after I stopped listening and
disappeared into the bedroom. There I
worked on loose ends, preparing for work
the next day. I glanced at the librarian's
trade journal, caught up on old
correspondence, and, while I had the
typewriter fired up, finished tomorrow's
Today in History and the unanswered
Question Board questions. I rolled a clean
index card under the platen and typed "A:".
I remember pausing long enough to feel
proud that what I was about to answer
would have taken the median librarian,
relying on Brewer's, Bartlett's, or the OED,
considerable effort. Experience, private
knowledge, could still stand one in better
stead than mastery of the disjointed
stockpile. I typed:

    A: A "catch" is a form of musical round
  where identical voices enter at different
  times. The catch to a catch is that it is
  printed on one solo line. In the past, as a
  party game, singers would sight-read from
  catch collections, each group responsible
  for figuring out when to "make the
  catch," when to come in at the proper
  moment. Making the catch reached its
  peak of popularity under England's
  Charles II. The phrase may have originated
  earlier. Rounds in general are at least as
  old as the thirteenth-century tune
  "Summer Is Icumen In."

   I stopped, realizing I was straying from the
point, that summer was already two weeks
gone. As the submitter had not deigned to
sign the question, I left my answer similarly
anonymous. The pair are both still on file
that way. As I held the cards next to one
another, checking my work, I knew I would
not, contrary to all I'd ever assumed, remain
a librarian forever.
  Canon at Unison

   My old associates threw me a going-away
party today. It was, as going-away parties go,
a bad mix of parting embarrassment and
exhilaration. For want of a more plausible
story, I spread the word around the branch
that I am going back to school. Loosely
interpreted, never a lie. The celebration was
a sorry affair. Several colleagues brought
homemade cookies, which nobody's diet
permitted. We broke the rules and served
Chablis in paper cups; everyone partook
dutifully, in professional moderation.
Separation—life's major emotion—is being
slowly written out of our repertoire. A few
friends will genuinely miss me, and I them.
My buddy Mr. Scott, he of the eternal
retirement threat, came up to me late in the
afternoon, making no effort to disguise his
eyes. "You beat me to it," he said, shaking
his head. "I can't believe you beat me."
   "I'm afraid I'm abandoning you, friend.
Fight the good fight." Before I could get all
the way through the sentence, he swept me
up in an embrace, which we held for a long
time by contemporary standards. Close to his
ear, before pulling away from it for good, I
whispered, "Work forever."
   We all made the standard plans to stay in
touch, plans we knew, even as we made
them, would atrophy for no reason. As a gag
gift, the collected staff presented me with a
wrapped Facts on File binder stuffed with
miscellaneous soap-opera synopses, gov
pubs, library memos, and those
You-Are-Next fliers collected from the
prophets of apocalypse who hang around
Grand Central. Then they presented me with
my own copy of the Times Atlas. The
combination of my long-expressed girlish
delight in the book, the misplaced
earnestness of the staff, and the hopeless
ambition of the atlas itself—the simple
description of how to get anywhere in the
world—caught inside me. Seeing the effect
the atlas had on me, my friends broke up the
party.
   As ironic token of affection, the staff let
me have a last go at the Quote Board and
Event Calendar. "Made me" might be more
accurate. The work was more than I wanted
to take on today, but I appreciated the
gesture. For tomorrow's Today, I chose the
Homestead Strike: the fifth day's clash
between five thousand steel-workers and
Prick's three hundred Pinkertons. I avoided
my habit of extending the fact into
exposition or mouthing my usual guarded
meliorism. I wish I hadn't chosen that
particular event; I'd hate to suggest that I've
left on a labor dispute. But done is done. For
my last ever selection for quote of the day, I
posted vintage W.C. Fields:

          It's a funny little world. A man's
lucky if he gets out of it alive.

   My final official act at the branch was to
sort the unbound issues of Congressional
Quarterly, which some malicious cit had
mixed up beyond recognition. Alexandria
arranged its scrolls by size— an order useless
except to the initiated. The race's chief
discovery may well be the idea that even a
perfect stranger could retrieve things from
parchments, given the sequence. Filing was
a bit below my skills, but it was basically
what I did for a living, until today. And in
truth, returning the CQs to useful order gave
me the thrill of send-off. I was packing my
bags, feeling my freedom. I took a last look
around my stacks. The collection suddenly
seemed wonderful beyond naming. I had for
a time lived here. Then I snapped the binders
shut and was gone.



IV

  Today in History

   A postcard arrived today. A fifty-cent
picture and message, and for a moment this
morning it seemed I would not be cut off
from all word from Franklin. Nothing for
almost a year, then four lines of friend's
postmortem. A few weeks later, a postcard
making no attempt to explain the gap or
give any idea of how he is. A fair sample of
the man's communication. Still, I was glad for
even this scrap. I remain one of those
unreformable suckers who want to hear,
just hear from time to time, even if the point
of hearing has long since disappeared. The
card carried a pastel foreign-denomination
stamp complete with obligatory royal
sovereign. Frank writes:

             One cannot, I suppose, traffic in
          Flemish masterpieces without a
          passing knowledge of Vlaams. And
          as a beautiful woman not unlike
          yourself once taught me, the only
          way to learn a foreign language,
          natuurlijk, is total immersion.
          Flanders seems the likely place. I
          could live for years on new
          vocabulary alone. Eenvoudig = one
          + folded = simple. Uiteraard = out
          of the earth = obvious. And those
          just the adjectives! Invigorating,
          learning a second tongue.
          (Invigorating to have twigged a
          first one.) The doors that new
          words are opening right now! This
          man has spent sorrows, lacks no
         delight, has hoard and horses and
         hall joys and all a lord is allowed
         had he his woman with him.
         FTODD

    On the card, a late-gothic village,
purportedly in the rolling geest of Northern
Europe but more likely, given the crags
looming in the background, situated just
south of the painter's frontal lobes. Tempera
and oil on panel, it has that gessoed,
patient, long-suffering look that only
painters in that part of the world, in that
century, knew how to make. Ephemeral
transfusion of light through foliage,
discontinuous brushstrokes, the
countryside's green shading into azure and
aquamarine color-freeze the village in
escapist fantasy. The town is more familiar to
me than my own childhood. Ground mineral,
egg yolk, oil, chalk, varnish: an organic
cupboard exudes a lost landscape that
would be heart-balm to look at, were he not
in it.
    I hardly needed to check the attribution:
Herri met de Bles, an itinerant
early-sixteenth-century painter so obscure as
to be almost apocryphal. Franklin has been
trying to write a dissertation on the artist for
years, searching for sufficient motivation to
produce a treatise of interest only to a dozen
specialists in the world. He nibbled at the
project, two years stretching into four.
Procrastination at last exhausted his
assistantship money at Columbia. With the
project still hanging over him, finance forced
him into night-shift data operations.
    Franker spoke of his halted work, his
failed scholarly biography, the second night
we went out. "The son of a bitch had a
bouquet of names. Herri. Henri. Civetta. De
Bles. De Dinant. At least two places of birth
and half a dozen birthdates. Circa 1500;
emphasis on circa. Half the paintings
attributed to him probably aren't his while
half of the ones he did paint are probably
attributed to somebody else. Not a single
signed or attested work. May have been a
pupil of Patinir; emphasis on may. May have
been his nephew. Christ; I don't even know
if I'm dealing with one guy or three."
    I watched his fingers, strangely entwined.
His distress, lovely dressing, was just more
flavor for that moment. "His works must be
very moving," I at last said.
    "Why do you say that?" At that suspicious
snap, the evening changed, modulated into
harsher places. Todd's unkindnesses tore
down pathways he himself couldn't
anticipate or steer. I learned that only by
stages.
    "Well, you wouldn't spend so much of
your life knocking up against those
difficulties if they weren't."
   He laughed, rewarding me for nursing the
flame of logic in dark times. He saw me as a
faithful Chartres peasant, preserving the
cathedral rose in pieces strewn through a
thousand wartime cellars. "Sorry to
disappoint, Miss. He's average. Very.
Passable panels, in a relatively narrow range.
A handful of awkward biblical allegories.
Impatient with human figures, dashes them
off to justify the scenery. Some
compositional interest, slight technical skill,
but spiritually mediocre." He felt silent, the
silence of ancient oracles. Finally, speaking
to himself under his breath: "But landscape !
You ought to see them." As if every
contradiction could be reconciled by jagged,
fantastic rose madder.
   "If the fellow is as average as you say, why
not do somebody more important? Someone
you love. Difficult, I have no problem with.
But difficult, obscure, and trivial? No wonder
you can't get through with it."
   "Believe me, sweet lady," Franklin shot
back, affecting troubadour. "I'd kill for
Brueghel or Vermeer. I'd write on the Mystic
Lamb, pour out a book on the singing
angels panel alone, if it were still possible.
You know how much wood pulp has been
sacrificed on the Ghent Altar already? You
want the sheepskin, you gotta do Herri met
de Bles."
   "Henri," I corrected. He laughed a
compensation, restoring us to other, more
pressing theses in need of writing.
   I flipped this morning's postcard over and
read the tag on back: Landschap met grote
brand. Knowing just enough cognates and
etymology to be dangerous, I translated the
title without the humiliation of showing my
face at the branch within a month of
quitting. Landscape with large fire. Only on
second look did I notice, true to billing, near
the right edge of the pastoral oblivion,
something burning. The most delicate
umbers and ambers twisted into plumes,
shaded to grays, and slipped off into the
cloudscape. Fires were, Franker told me, a
minor specialty of his apocryphal painter.
This one went completely overlooked, even
by threatened villagers.
   Todd gave no address, natuurlijk. I
admired his poise, blowing clear of the
wreck, slipping off to Europe the minute his
mentor was cremated. The Grand Tour at
last, as he always threatened. And making
the catch, reaching the far side of the
Atlantic, he caps the escapade with a
postcard home. No tourist's trinket vista:
that would have been forgivable. The typical
Technicolor snap of donjon or belfry might
have helped me imagine where he'd run to.
But the fool sends a transcription, a
reproduction of a painting of an idea of a
place, if that.
   Nothing would make me happier, even
now, than to think that Franklin has at last
gotten down to unfinished business, tying
up the eternal loose end, spurred by
Ressler's death into at last putting down the
ideas he a hundred times explained so
lucidly to me in private, in streetlit rooms.
But the postcard makes no such claim, no
word of the professor or the uses of death.
The card says only that he has jumped
continent and bought a phrase book. As
sympathetic as I am to the scholar's need to
speak in tongues, as much as I share his
delight in word acquisition, Flemish would
not be the first language Frank has
distracted himself with. He invested years in
French and German and can at least read
Italian, if his pronunciation tends to scumble
into sfumato.
   He's told me enough of the scattering of
Bles's panels to suggest that Flanders would
only be stop one. To do the job right, he'll
need Vienna, Dresden, Copenhagen,
Budapest: excuses to stop and learn Danish
and Hungarian. He doesn't need to read,
see, think, or hear another word in any
language. He's memorized all the sources
already. He has the damn paper complete in
his head, an inch away from written. He's
practically recited it to me. He just has to
work up the nerve to declare, "/ put my name
to all this. Sue me if I'm wrong." It's not even
conscientiousness that keeps him from the
final draft. The real impediment—one as
one-folded as seeing—is Franklin's inability
to convince himself that the project has any
worth. A year ago, our little band breaking
up, I said to him, "At least this is goodbye to
distractions. Now you'll have the time to get
back to Herri." His parting shot: "Why
bother?"
   He meant to slight more than his panel
painter's technique. He meant the whole,
colossal impertinence of studying Art
History— the delicate, gessoed, tempera
conflagration—in a world setting itself on
fire. Franker, in the year I knew him, carried
inside, wound up in his love for
anachronistic art, a contempt for aesthetics
that only the aesthete can feel. Every so
many weeks he tried, despite his
temperament, to turn himself into a moralist
whose ethical code bore one criterion: use.
Frontpage news—the bleakest of which he
clipped obsessively for months—would not
allow him to indulge the pointless pleasure
he needed. Headlines confirmed his worst
suspicion; current events shamed panel and
oil. Like an unfaithful lover, he repeatedly
swore off sin and allure. But repeated
infidelity made the betrayed more beautiful.
   What use could new light on a
sixteenth-century landscapist be to a sick,
self-afflicted present? Dr. Ressler's terminal
nightmare may have decided Franker on that
account. His card is cheery enough; he
sounds worlds limberer than in the closing
weeks of love. But has he really gone to
Dinant to write? Could he sincerely believe
long-postponed looking might now be of
some moral use? New language, any new
language—at best, homage to a lost linguist
he loved. He'll never put his new adjectives
to the use he wants. Acts of care are never
fundamentally useful.
   At least he's made the pretense of getting
down to work. I, on the other hand, entering
unemployment's third week, have done
nothing for days but add up my liquid assets
and divide them by my spending rate,
determining how much time I have before I
run my life savings into the ground.
Depending on the weight I assign the
variables, I'm left with between forty and
sixty weeks. Less than nothing and more
time than I know how to fill. Weirdly
exhilarating prospect: I give this week a
number and begin the countdown. Week
zero, getting closer every seven days, ought
to put an edge on my style. Make me more
supple than I've been in a while. But supple
for what? Having nothing better to do,
finding guilty delight in the pure, useless
exercise of powers, I spent two hours this
afternoon placing the allusion in Franker's
card. The accents and alliterations gave me a
broad hint where to begin. I worked in the
sunny pleasure of my own room, combing
the volumes that have grown over the years,
reproducing themselves into a private
reference collection. I worked—the oddest of
feelings—for myself alone. No one to solve
the citation for but me.
   The line showed up in an Anglo-Saxon
poem, one of the earliest in the language
that mutated into English. A fragment in the
Exeter Book called the Husband's Message.
He closed with it as friendly challenge, for
old times' sake: from a vanished friend to
one left behind. Invigorating, to learn a
language. Aside from that citation hunting,
nothing. Dinner, extravagantly, at a sit-down
place near Prospect Park, savoring spice and
irony, paying for both with two days' worth
of remaining time. The passage of time with
nothing specific to accomplish makes me feel
a little more blessedly, acutely free. I eat, I
walk fearless in the summer air back home. I
sit alone in my room, among the home
reference. I now have all a lady is allowed
had I only an answer. Had I only him.

  Imitation of the Dance

  If the forties' great debate raged over
which macromolecule carried hereditary
material, and if the early fifties fought over
nucleic acid structure, Ressler walks smack
into the contention of 1957 on his first day in
the lab. Conscientious hygiene resulting
from a working relationship with
microorganisms made him bathe this
morning before leaving barracks. A regular
dawn dunking also gives him time for
undirected reflection. Like Luther, his best
insights arrive in proximity to porcelain. But
drying his hair before setting off is time lost
to superfluity. The omission puts him into
the scientific cross hairs.
   While he unpacks his glassware and sets
up a cot in a storage room, Jeanette Koss,
the woman at Ulrich's party steeped in world
polemics, passes his counter and puts a
discreet hand on his. The contact startles
Stuart; her touch, real skin rubbing the fur of
his arm, cuts—so long has he been
without—like an accusation. Dr. Koss
whispers, "If Blake or Lovering catches sight
of you in this condition, your year is ruined."
   In the same soft confidence, she lays out
that Joe Lovering, her soiree spar partner,
and Tooney Blake, the pianist of less than
gershwinning ways, are locked in an
ideological conflict about the hazards of
going outside with a wet head. The two
scientists share compatible lab practices and
commensurate views on the coding problem.
But on this matter, they are bitterly bipolar.
Dr. Koss relates how Blake has devoted
himself to a systematic destruction of the old
wives' hypothesis linking wet hair to open
virus season. For the last month he has
immersed his head twice daily, once before
setting off to work and once before leaving
the lab. "Just a hairsbreadth," Dr. Koss
confides, "between empiric physiology and
abnormal psych." Lovering, on the other
hand, in horrified reaction, not only
maintains bone-dry hair at all times but even
now, in late July, keeps up a steady regimen
of preventive tonics. "You see," Koss
explains, releasing him from her touch, "they
have no experimental control. If they catch
you like this, you're It."
   He's walked into all-out inimical politics.
To date, he's lain low in the exchange
between lab partners Niki and Ike. But his
colleagues in deciphering have brought the
Cold War home. Best avoid getting caught in
the draft. Ressler thanks Dr. Koss for the
caveat, but that's not sufficient. She
produces a supply-room towel and insists on
helping him. She wraps his head in the fabric
and before he collects presence of mind to
object begins rubbing him gently but briskly,
businesslike, from crown to nape of neck.
Buried memory shoots up through scalp: his
mother preparing him for church, a wedding
or funeral. The wince of somatic
recall—thumb moistened with saliva,
rubbing raw the skin behind his ears. The
woman pinches his head into sweet pain.
Woytowich walks in, salutes abstractedly,
not even blinking.
   Koss smoothes back his hair, combs it,
smiles, and crosses the room to resume her
work with the vernier scales. There she
carefully measures the thickness of
near-invisible growing media. In a minute,
nothing out of the ordinary has happened;
in two, Ressler's skin forgets the contact.
He'll have to make allowances for the
woman in the lab. Female scientists are still
rare enough to seem as anomalous as Dr.
Skinner's Ping-Pong-playing pigeons. Cyfer's
employing two is a statistical violation.
Toveh Botkin, the team's senior member
after Ulrich, possesses an antique, clinical
grace that sweeps her into the province of
competent sexlessness. At the welcome
party, he took to the older woman and
refused all but a weak smile at the lone flash
of humor to come from the evening: Joe
Lovering describing her life as a series of
near Mrs. Dr. Koss, on the other hand, a
certified Mrs. in her spare time, is not to be
completely trusted. Young, still
breeding-age, somewhat better looking than
germ culture: might upset the pheromone
levels around here from now through the
end of summer.
   Yet this first afternoon, there seems little
to worry about on that score. Blake, by his
pianistic skills, is prematurely
male-menopau-sal, Dan Woytowich too
B-complex-deficient, and Ulrich too intent
on cash-raising to raise any more disruptive
fund drives. That leaves Lovering, who, by
the time Stuart finishes unpacking, has taken
up a post by a caged pair of white lab rats,
apparently more mascots than experimental
animals. Crew-cut, glasses, starched white
coat with nub tie underneath, Joe shouts,
"Mate, you suckers." Lover-ing's safe too.
   The lab is well equipped. The experimental
world divides into steriles and breeders.
Stuart did his graduate work under a
breeder, a brilliant teacher whose
workplace's itinerant
confusion—proliferating notebooks,
apparatus, scopes, and racks of flasks whose
labels had soaked into illegibility—was acute
torture. Ulrich, happily enough, is a sterile.
Never have supply cabinets so closely
mimicked the pictures in warehouse
catalogs, and the entire team, from post-doc
Koss through veteran Botkin, keep their
rubber-glove boxes prominently displayed.
   The steriler the riper for Ressler. The only
antidote to what ubiquitous radio
announcers call the aches and pains of
today's modern living is hair of the dog:
research alone will cure a world sick on the
aftereffects of discovery. Empiricism is the
only way from ovum to novum. The panacea
he has in mind requires only a lens with focal
length long enough and a sterile place to
stand.
   Ulrich's note was accurate; the lab is
between measurements at the moment. The
day Ressler arrives the group is on extended
leave from titrations, stains, and partition
chromatography. They are after a
transcription axiom, linguistic. For the rule
linking nucleotide sequences to protein
synthesis to be determined experimentally,
Cyfer must first play with its shape, its inner
symmetries. They are up against not so much
the chemistry of biology as the math.
Molecular genetics, stringing the fine line
between experimental and theoretic, has a
first shot at bridging the gap, grounding
organic complexity in fundamental
arithmetic. Ulrich has called a moratorium to
consolidate the lightning results of recent
months and formalize Cyfer's understanding
of the symbolic logic that genetics has
stumbled on. First vocabulary; then the
generative grammar. Time for pure
speculation. No more cigar butts,
fingerprints: just, as the Belgian says, the
little gray cells. Ressler's first day at school is
a day to indulge in that old sworn enemy of
experiment: reason.
   The team was originally called the Ulrich
Group, but that was impossible to say
without coming to a full stop between
words, which no one since Chargaff has had
time for. The year before Ressler arrived, the
team was rechristened the Enzyme Synthesis
Identification Group. But that broke the
unwritten rule of acronyms. At last Tooney
Blake hit upon Cyfer, a compression of
Cytology Ferment. While they weren't strictly
in the wine business, the name was the
catchiest in the hard sciences since Bill Haley
and the Comets. The sobriquet even gives
them an edge with grants.
   A strange brew of personalities the name
stands for. Toveh Botkin bicycles up on a
machine that might have taken her on
annual prewar pilgrimages to Bayreuth.
Tooney Blake enters, abstractedly patting
every empty pocket on his person. Karl Ulrich
pulls into the Biology Building parking lot in
a VW bearing the plate e coli. Ressler has
nothing against this bundle of bacterial joy
so long as it stays in the intestines. But why
dirty one's hands in the buggers when the
problem of pure coding is at stake? All
present and accounted for, Ressler joins his
maiden Blue Sky session. The informal
brainstorming gets underway, everyone
tossing out abstracts of articles and
volunteering to review others for the
following week. Soon talk wanders onto
topics that leave them sounding more like a
clutch of cabalists or college of cardinals.
   From their predecessors—pylons in the
vast, incomplete suspension bridge between
the inanimate atom and the world
ecoweb—Cyfer inherits a list of numbers it
must arrange into a magic square. They work
with an alphabet of four nucleotide letters.
These, if grouped as commonly believed into
trinities of nucleotides, produce a vocabulary
of sixty-four different words. These
three-letter words translate into immense
miracle-sentences in a language of twenty
amino acid actants. Cyfer brainstorms, trying
to weld together these incunabula into a
grand, new gnosticism.
   In this free association, they run the gamut
of human failing. Joe Lovering races in
minutes from embracing the newest fad on
punctuation to discarding it wholesale in
favor of a newer, improved flier. Dan
Woytowich remains, incredibly, the last of
the old guard to refuse to embrace the
Watson-Crick model. His every
static-sparking comment rejects the helical
staircase. He declares, in a folksy singsong
tailored to get on everyone's nerves, "Too
simple to be all there is." Whenever anyone
says anything remotely lucid or steers the
group toward something they might at last
get started on, Woyty shakes his head sadly
and says, "We're overlooking something
here. We're talking the big L, after all."
   Ulrich is a bright spot in the painful group
grope toward mi-crounderstanding. Cyfer's
leader runs the session as a benevolent
dictator, neither encouraging nor
condescending to his charges. He follows
the time-tested policy: let intellect propose
and measurement dispose. He fills the
chalkboard with A's, T's, G's, C's, unzipping
helices, decoding boxes, templates,
diamonds, triangles, every model short of
hex signs. He mutters out loud from time to
time, as do the rest of the team. But Ulrich's
mutterings hold the floor. The part of
Ulrich's presentation that most captivates
Ressler is not molecular, but rhetorical. To
one beautiful scheme that reveals a flaw,
rolls belly-up against experimental evidence,
the chief pronounces stoically, "So goes
poetry. Shipwrecked on shoals of fact."
   Ulrich possesses that critical leadership
skill in the age of Big Science: the ability to
inspire others to work with devotion.
Members compete to win the next stroke of
praise. Ulrich makes them each sense that all
of their names will appear on the resulting
paper. Still, Ressler declines to put forth his
private bias on how to begin cracking the
coding problem. Reticence is not an issue,
nor fear of bruised ego. In his freshman
session at the public trading post, the small
crystal of clarity he now possesses might get
lost in the hypothesizing pandemonium. In a
few weeks, after he learns the ropes, he'll lay
out his vein, the method so new that he
himself can't formulate it yet.
  As Ulrich smoothly wraps up the Blue Sky
session before it turns to Gray and Partly
Cloudy, someone slips Ressler a note. More
spectral theory, a spidery nineteenth-century
hand:

    Dr. Ressler—
    Dismissals of verse notwithstanding,
  Fearless Leader harbors a closet
  predisposition to literature. Ulrich has
  contracted Poe's Gold Bug.
    Communicable, I gather.
    J.K.

   The syntax seems a sequel to this session
in cryptography. But the note, on second
reading, begins to make marginal sense as
plaintext. There already is a "J.K." in the
room; no need for letter substitution. Yet the
note resists ultimate understanding. It
doesn't occur to him, as the brainstorm
session breaks up, to ask the woman herself
what she means. He watches her leave the
room and looks again at the note, the first
he's received in twenty years of school. He
follows Dr. Koss with his eyes across the lab
and out the door. Monk Mendel's chief
lesson returns from first-year genetics: the
rift between inner genotype and outer
phenotype. Surfaces lie.
   Back in his bachelor and still unfurnished
flat, Ressler lies in his bunk at night,
wrapped in the barrack walls, the cradling
vacancy of his adopted town. The day's
stimulation prevents sleep. He runs through
the proposed structure currently entrancing
all biology except Woytowich and a few lone
holdouts. The spiral molecular
staircase—two paired railings sinuously
twisting around one another, eternally
unmeeting snakes caught in a
caduceus—becomes in his fueled brain the
stairs of Robeson's spiritual: Jacob's Ladder,
the two-lane highway to higher kingdoms.
Angels are caught descending and
ascending in two solemn, frozen, opposing
columns. In his soporific reverie, four kinds
of angels twist along the golden stairs.
Bright angels and dark, of both sexes. Four
angel varieties freeze in two adjacent
queues up and down the case, each stuck on
a step that it shares with its exact
counterpart. Every bright man opposite a
dark woman. Every bright woman, a dark
man. Fitful in his bunk, in the blackness, the
unappeasable modelmaking urge. Four
angel varieties to signify DNA's four bases:
thymine, cytosine, adenine, and guanine.
Jacob's helical staircase ladder conjured out
of a single strand of nucleic acid.
   How indispensable models have been in
the fray to date! Watson and Crick did the
trick with tin shapes, interlocking jigsaw
pieces that refused to combine in any
configuration consistent with the data
except the spiral staircase. The great
Pauling's snips of accordion cardboard are
an industry legend, an industry joke until
laughter was hushed by the tool's repeated
success. Pauling's children—molecular
spheres and dowels—pop up in classrooms,
raising a race of clear-eyed students whose
innovative exhalations already warm
Ressler's neck. All the models agree: life
science, to advance at all, cannot start with
big and hope to pull it apart into
underpinning little. It must begin with the
constituents and tease them into a structure
consistent with observation. Cyfer needs a
model as simple and labile as baby blocks, a
breathtaking Tinkertoy indistinguishable
from the thing it imitates.
   Four years ago Ressler, along with every
other hapless haplo-type, noticed that the
double-spiral staircase embodies two
identical informational queues. The
ascending angel order complements and
mirrors the descending stream. Wholly
redundant. Each angel-file sequence can be
entirely recreated from the other. Bright and
dark men, dark and bright women: each
pair-half uniquely mated, each edge of the
staircase carrying the same message. All
there in Crick and Watson's tantalizing
summary: "It has not escaped our notice that
the specific pairing we have postulated
immediately suggests a possible copying
mechanism for the genetic material." The
angel-files in each half-stair must somehow
be capable of latching on to their proper
mates out of angelic bouillabaisse. Chemical
lightning, sundering the staircase down its
middle, unzipping it, creates two severed
parades, each capable of recreating the
entire original ladder. Ressler, in his bunk,
has the wind knocked out of him by the
ingenuity, the rightness of it: a long
molecular chain, stupefyingly massive but
simple, obeying nothing but chemical
requirements, somehow lucks upon
viability—the fundamental, self-replicating
machine.
   Stairway replication, an inanimate
molecule's ability to double, is just the tip of
proliferate miracle. Somehow,
incomprehensibly tortuously simply, coded in
permutations of brights, darks, males, and
females—four bases alone—is all the
sequence needed to conduct the full angel
choir. On this dream of spiral ladders, he
lulls himself into brief, shallow sleep. Rest
does not last long, nor does he wake
refreshed. He is back in the stacks at
opening, armed with the tip-off Jeanette
Koss has passed him. He came to Illinois to
crack the nucleic code. To date the only
triplets he's gone up against are Dewey
Decimal. He looks up her clue in the card
catalog: Poe's "The Gold Bug." Mystery,
suspense: a story in a thousand anthologies.
It's been years since he's read any fiction
except the Oppenheimer charges. But the
library jump-table leads him to 813 as easily
as if he were a regular.
   Squatting between two metal shelves,
Ressler loses himself in the adventure.
Discovery—a piece of heated parchment
reveals secret writing. Pictograph of baby
goat identifies author as Captain Kidd,
language of cipher as English. Simple letter
frequency and word-pattern trick leads
scholar to pirate's treasure. But directions to
treasure are themselves a coded algorithm
for unburying. Two men and blackfella
servant, applying human ingenuity,
measured paces, and plumb line, crack
third-level mystery and uncover wealth
beyond wildest dreams. Only at story's end
does he emerge, shake off the fictional spell.
"Gold Bug" is the ticket all right; he's come
to the right place.
   If he understands Dr. Koss's warning
correctly, Ulrich may be in danger of
confusing the message of base-string
sequences with their translation mechanism.
Bulling through frequency counts and
base-order mapping will never reveal a
simple rule equating the impenetrable
archive of nucleic rungs with hair color,
hand length, texture of skin. The game is
immensely bigger; much more than
gene-reading is at stake. To search for
sequence substitution, to pan for genetic
gold bugs, would be tantamount to learning
a foreign language armed with only a
translating dictionary. They'd get no farther
than a refinement of Morgan's endless
generations of Drosophila: chromosome
bump X produces white eyes. A swap of one
name for the other, no more than a means of
reading individual messages without ever
getting fluent in the tongue they're written
in.
   The heart of the code must lie hidden in
its grammar. The catch they are after is not
what a particular string of DNA says, but
how it says it. For the first time, it is possible
to do more than wedge open the door. They
must throw wide open the means of
molecular articulation. They must learn, with
the fluency of native speakers, a language
sufficiently complex and flexible to speak
into existence the inconceivable commodity
of self-speaking. The treasure in Poe's tale is
not the buried gold but the cryptographer's
flicker of insight, the trick, the linguistic key
to unlocking not just the map at hand but
any secret writing. Ressler must bring the
team to see that they are up against
something considerably larger than the
pleasures of the Sunday Cross-word, fitting a
few letters into empty boxes. Not the limited
game of translation but the game rules
themselves. Sprawled between the girders of
the 8OOs, in the summer of his twenty-fifth
year, he gets his first hint of the word puzzle
he is up against. He must latch onto a
language that can articulate its own axioms,
a technique that can generate—in the
effortless idiom it models—endlessly
extensible four-letter synonyms for Life.

  Quote of the Day

   When I left the library, I took my entire
collection of index cards, the complete file of
the three boards I'd established at the
branch. The records would have disappeared
long ago had I not squirreled them away in
the first place. Still, the data theft will hurt
more than a couple of old friends, who over
the years have come to rely on my pocket
score the way we all rely on Bowker or
Wilson Line. Let them find their own
materials. Yet by taking the card collection
into custody, I've created my own problem.
Squarely on my grandfather's desk, a private
encyclopedia of three-by-fives cries out to be
transcribed.
   Any attempt to extract affidavit from these
facts requires dirtying my hands. Franker,
with his charming idiocy, liked to compare
existence to a mound of potatoes: "You
can't proverbially mash 'em till they been
proverbially skinned." Information theory
phrases the problem more elegantly but not
as well. Yet the thought of putting my card
hoard to account fatigues me beyond saying.
A flood victim's, a chemotherapy patient's
fatigue. July 15, 1985: I look over the options
from the file, the day's previous incarnations.
One stands out from the cycle, one that
positions me on the timeline.
   I was no longer fresh in the field when I
posted it. Much of the novelty of the job had
worn off. But I was working full time, for
myself, for achieved adulthood, for the sheer
pleasure of work.
   The Event Calendar, my pride, had run
smoothly for a couple of years. I posted
everything from Savanarola to Synthetic
Rubber, and people enjoyed the end results.
In 1978, I took a small risk. I posted as
canonical history an event only three years
old. July 15, 1975: two spacecraft, each the
peak technological achievement of two
supernations, inimical enemies at ground
level, take off from the earth. The enemy
craft dock and join crews somewhere in the
endless, frozen, neutral vacuum. The crews
visit one another's quarters. The coupled
craft float soundlessly in orbit. Back on
earth, everything is, for a moment, wonder.
   The risk in posting this had nothing to do
with going out onto a predictive limb.
Beyond doubt the Apollo/Soyuz linkup,
symbolically at least, was the equal of half
the revolutions and three quarters of the
assassinations that mark the usual mileage
posts of progress. My risk was not in
jumping the canonical gun. It lay in my four
lines of accompanying caption—shriller than
public servants were supposed to let
themselves become. I held out the hope that
the event had not come too late to save us
from the rest of history. I announced,
supported by facts I felt no need to produce,
that we were pitched in a final footrace, not
between Manichaean political ideologies but
between inventiveness and built-in insanity.
July 15 tipped the calendar ever so slightly
toward the euphoric, exploratory. The risk I
took was editorial, insisting that event was
real.
   This was years before I met Dr. Ressler and
his clear-faced protege. That same day, six
years later, for a reason preserved in artifact,
I posted, as quote of the day, Aristotle's
critique of the Pythagoreans in the
Metaphysics: They say that things themselves
are Numbers. The risk this time was entirely
mine.

  The Husband's Message

   For days after meeting Frank Todd for
seafood—my dinner, his breakfast—I heard
nothing from him. I'd turned up the facts;
our business was transacted. But we weren't
done with one another. The flavor that kept
coming back at odd hours as I fielded calls or
directed question-traffic was the look that
had come over my makeshift date's face as I
told him of Stuart Ressler's disappointing
early collapse. Todd had looked for an
instant as if he were hearing, after the fact,
the obituary of a childhood hero.
   Time passed with no follow-up on Todd's
invitation to dig deeper. My job was to
discard the content once I'd handed it over.
In those few previous instances where
professional assistance had aroused other
interest, I'd always nipped it quickly in the
stamen. Not that I felt any need to avoid
temptation. Tuckwell had never demanded
monogamy, at least not overtly. Keith
referred to our commitment as a "Five-Year
Plan" or a "Great Leap Forward," depending
on the humor his adwork left him in on a
given day. If I steered a course of
noninvolvement through daily contacts it
was for my own sake: my research skill
exceeded anything else I had to offer
anyone. But Todd's taciturn courtship,
comical when delivered, confused me when
withdrawn. I resented that professed
infatuation with my face—sheer, male
data—bribery. His semantic waffle over
whether I was beautiful, a question more
aesthetic than erotic, was simply clinical
fascination for a woman who had him
momentarily at her mercy.
   I had wanted at dinner to preserve my
informational advantage, to surrender the
hard-won facts only at a favorable rate of
exchange. But for some reason I still don't
understand, I gave in to pity, told him
everything, bared my throat like low dog in a
fight. I heard myself give him abstracts of
every article I'd turned up. When all shred of
danger to him had passed—one of those
predators capable of remaining inert for
hours as prey blunders blithely over it—Mr.
Todd took the proffered parcel and was
gone. My resentment kept doubling back on
that moment when I'd caught him
disconsolate, his confidence dropped. That
quick glimpse of facial bruise told me he
wanted something from me that had
nothing to do with biographies. He needed
what he would never know to ask for. It
wrecked my equanimity: he requested less
and went away satisfied.
   When he called the Reference Desk again,
he did not bother to identify himself. "Can
we try this again? Same place and time?
Round two?" I couldn't imagine his motive
in calling back. No hope of anything fresh,
no new esoterica. I didn't know whether to
cut him or accept with pleasure. I went for a
frosty yes.
   I found the restaurant again, and Franklin
Todd was waiting. I knew instantly the
reason for this follow-up. I could tell from
his posture, his welcoming grin. This date
meant to erase whatever impression of
weakness the first might have left. We were
not to mention the case. We were to be
absolutely upbeat. And afterwards, as befit
cheerful strangers, never see each other
again, I confirmed that he was lamentably
attractive, taller and sandier than I
remembered, his light stubble two years
ahead of fashion. He looked completely
incapable of being devastated by the
deterioration of an older coworker. But then,
I did not then look like a woman capable of
quitting her profession for nothing. He was
in midsentence when I reached the table.
"So what happened this morning?"
   I was about to give the same, daily
nonresponse I gave Tuckwell when, stopped
by a sardonic crook to his face, I caught on. I
returned the look, saying, "Spanish Civil War
on the brink of breaking out, 1936.
Goldwater wins GOP nomination, 1964.
Apollo/ Soyuz, 1975."
   He beamed. "You're so predictable."
   I shook my hair loose and sat down. "You
know, I haven't even met you properly and
already I don't like you."
   "The pleasure's mutual, I'm sure." His face
broke out in all the muted possibilities of the
opening game. "You are extraordinary." He
gave the long word an extra syllable,
intoning it with the same converted
skepticism he had given his measurement of
my beauty. "But you suffer from this terrible
twentieth-century bias."
   "It's not a bias. Most of what has
happened happened in the last hundred
years. Any newsworthy July day is probably
recent."
   "I see. Current events, like traffic,
increasingly clogged until one day soon
some old guy's going to pull out of his
garage in Iowa and poof: universal
gridlock." He ordered for both of us, issuing
instructions throughout the meal: "Squeeze
the lemon like this. Let the taste sit on the
back of your tongue while you think of
Mardi Gras." The imperatives carried the
inbred, dictatorial drive of males—the hand
in the small of the back they always use to
steer the weaker vessel. But something else
in his voice too: inappropriate enthusiasm
for experience that needed sharing. Franklin
in no way passed for a gourmet. He sniffed
the Tabasco cap and made me do likewise.
"Most expedient sinus recipe known to
man." He did not preach good taste so much
as enjoyment. "Cut this end off. Swirl it first
before dunking." Expertise acquired over
long trial and error, offered up now to save
me the bother of the learning curve. It
amused me, his assuming I'd never eaten
food before. He had the ingenuous pleasure
of a novice who sees in everyone a new
initiate.
   We paid and left. Coming out to the
street, turning into the Sidewalk tide, he
took my hand and shook it enthusiastically,
as if I'd been a far more entertaining guest
than I had been. I was supposed to
remember only this round, erase the
unpleasant undertone of the first. I asked
where he was headed. "My night off. Back
home to the Butter and Eggs."
   "You live in Manhattan? What were you
doing at our branch?"
   "Research."
   "/ was doing the research. You were
humming to yourself, as I remember."
   "There's a difference?" He smiled and left.
   Another week went by before Franklin
turned up again. I was cleaning out the
Question Submission Box. To the query "I
want to buy a microwave oven. Are they
safe?" I knew both the desired answer and
informed opinion. I'd been asked the
question often, and I easily delivered the
unimpeachable stats, adding at the bottom
of my response, "Most reports concerning
cooked human kidneys are urban legend."
Number two was "What is the formula for
figuring compound interest?" or something
as trivial. "Trivial," I knew, derived from
trivium, any junction of three Roman roads,
where your basic whores hung out. I gave
the formula with no editorial comment.
   But the third note had been left for no
one's but my eyes. It was in the same
anonymous typewriting as the one about
making the catch. Todd had never had any
intention of disappearing. He meant to
water me with a steady stream of
far-ranging, restless demands for answers
for every imaginable issue, however far from
hand.

   Q: My friend and I (neither a crackpot in
the ordinary sense) are in the middle of an
ongoing argument that we'd like you to
clear up. What is the possibility that we will
someday communicate with life on other
planets?
   F.T., 7/19

  I laughed out loud to read it. I spent the
remaining afternoon answering as if this
were itself an anonymous hello from deep
space. Not that it took that long to compose
my answer. I lingered, let myself down the
luxury of unrelated alleys, the side paths
research always opens up when one pays
attention. The encyclopedia's country lanes.

   A: Serious scientific estimates about the
possibility of contacting life on other planets
are based on the Drake or Green Bank
formula:
   N = R • f g * n chz * f 1 * f 1 * f 1 * L
   where N = number of technical
civilizations, R = rate of star formation, fg =
fraction of stars with planets, n ch2 = number
of planets that are habitable, f, = fraction of
these developing life, f 1 = fraction of these
developing intelligent life, f, = fraction of
these with communications technology, and
L = length of attempted communication. Of
course, the equation says nothing about the
values of the terms. Guesses for these are
hotly debated, resulting in estimates for the
number of intelligent civilizations in our
galaxy ranging as high as 100,000 and as low
as zero. After a quarter century of listening
for messages from unknown galactic
neighbors, all scientists have yet heard is a
very imposing silence. Finding an intelligent
signal would immediately present the
enormous problem of how to respond. A
two-line dialogue between sentient planets
could take centuries; our
great-great-great-grandchildren would have
to remember what we said in order to make
sense of the reply, assuming they could make
human sense of nonhuman words. It is hard
to say which would be more sobering: to
hear someone answer our "Are you there?"
with "Yes," or to learn that the whole
experiment lies entirely in our hands.
   Of course, the real question was not
whether intelligent life existed elsewhere in
the universe but whether there was
intelligent life on Earth. Still, I delighted in
my answer, knowing who was asking. He
meant to let me know that I could hear from
deep space if I wanted to. The two of them
would enter and reenter my life, persistent,
transposed, inverted, retrograde, spread
through different voicings, announcing
themselves in all contexts for every reason,
sounding the capricious, cantabile motive as
often as I let them.
   Three answers in one day was a good haul
by any standard; most people don't arrive at
three definitive answers in a lifetime. And I
had accomplished all three in the interstices,
between the other duties demanded by one
of the NYPL's sixty Brooklyn franchises. True,
I had also fielded the routine phone calls:
armchair investors too lazy to get off their
A-ratings and read their own Value Lines,
high school kids asking for a definition of
S-O-D-O-M-Y (tape machine audible in the
background), the bewildered citizens who'd
crawled out of their paneled dens to request
the names of senators. Those, plus the
archiving, inventorying, and maintenance
work, the box-piling tasks that monopolize
existence.
   But three for the fait accompli file: in that I
took considerable fisherman's pride.
   Back home, I found my POSSLQ—Person
of Opposite Sex Sharing Living
Quarters—hard at work on a campaign
alerting the public to a major dental
development that would, like the Great Wall
of China, provide the long-sought security
of Tartar Control. As I fell into the front
room, Keithy asked cheerily, "So what'd she
do all day?" For the first time all day, I was
stumped. Coming at the end of the stack,
this seemed less question than request for
intimacy. And intimacy was no longer mine
to give. I flopped on the couch, undid some
buttons, and capitulated. The candy dish
stood in for dinner. I listened to Keithy insult
mankind for my amusement. "Looky here.
You hate this photo? How about this text?
Totally humiliating? Good. I think we've got
a wiener, here."
   Lying slack, I thought of something my
mother said, the first and only time she ever
came out from Indiana to visit me. "This is
not a city," she sneered in utter distaste for
the place I'd chosen as home. "This is a
country. A world." I was new here myself
then, and thought she was right. Precisely
the reason I had come here to live. A
country, a world, large enough to lose
oneself in. Now I roused myself enough to
look out of the front picture window onto
the East River, a stunning view that cost
Keith and me half our income. On the far
side, the fanfare of lights, the community
that was slowly killing us. From where I lay I
could see my mother's error. Nothing stood
between me and the insane compression of
midtown. No moat, no ad-campaign
misanthropy could shut out the runaway
numbers, the gang rape of the place.
   Keith watched with me as the lights came
on—Japanese-lantern bridges, street pearls,
block skyscrapers that flared as if half the
executives in the world worked late. He
burlesqued the view, the most
overwhelming display of scale that the race
has yet assembled, dropping into his smarmy
announcer's voice. "Experience the charm of
Halogen." He did it to relax me, but I hated
him for it all the same. I picked a block on
this side of the river and populated it: two
souls of unfortunately high intelligence
sitting alone among precision machinery,
watching over the magnetic data by night,
arguing, as if it mattered, over whether we
were the only going show in the universe.
Clear-faced Todd, obvious closet romantic,
held out for other intelligent life, while his
night-shift companion, a generation older,
told the boy to stop kidding himself.
Imagining this insignificant dialogue in this
uncounted corner of a sprawl too dense to
map adequately, I reversed my mother's
terrified conviction about the city. This was
not a world. It was an abandoned colonial
outpost, a private conversation. Only the
buildings were big.
   Fear of scale came over me: if I lay there
any longer, every uncountable block in these
awful islands would become inhabited.
Clicking heels and chanting "There's no
place like Elkhart" was no longer an option. I
had to do something quickly—leave some
entry on this July 15—or lose myself in the
cycle of torn-off days. I lifted myself like a
wet foal. Without explaining, I left Tuckwell
still talking to himself, in lone possession of
the front room. Shutting the door with a
furtive thump that echoed badly down the
months ahead, I locked myself in our
bedroom. I picked up the receiver and dialed
the number Todd had given me. A number
I'd filed for easy retrieval.
   The half of the night shift I could claim
some knowledge of answered. Franklin
professed to be glad I'd called. "You'll never
guess what has happened. I confronted Dr.
Ressler with your evidence. He was greatly
impressed." I waited for him to go on. Ten
seconds, an epoch over the phone. How do
messages travel simultaneously over phone
wires without colliding? It occurred to me
that while wires did not technically carry any
information when both parties were mute,
passed silence nevertheless required a
phone.
   I looked for anything to fill the gap. "I've
contacted your extraterrestrials. If you come
by the branch—"
   "Maybe it's time you visited us here." He
gave me the address, one that took my
breath away. A dozen buildings from the
branch. I knew the exact place, a brick
turn-of-the-century warehouse that gave
away nothing of its contents. The city, big,
uncountably massive, had a way of turning
viciously small, like Nauru, digging itself into
disappearance. A range of adjoining
neighborhoods that refuse to collect. Ten
million neighborhoods of one. It is not
skyscrapers; it is the bottoms of deep
troughs, deeper than the carved canyons out
west, cut from harder stone.
   Familiar forward motion, bandying
between the two of us: the tone of our first
social phone conversation stated that it was
all right to feel all right, even in mid-July,
even with a bad conscience. Bad conscience
has no survival value. Todd's confidence
cascade gave me a go-ahead to go ahead
and do what I wanted to, to indulge in
whatever worked. But a slight condition, an
extra saddle, was tucked away in the
injunction. I could not beat this conversation
in one. To give in to the rush, the thrill of
voices piling up against voices, colliding
over the phone wires, I had to count the
thing in three. In my mind, I already stood on
a July evening outside their warehouse.
Keith, at last coming in to bed, found his
POSSLQ lying motionless but wide-awake.
He asked if anything was wrong. I answered
no, hearing the word leave me, too late to
retrieve. The first time I ever lied to him.



V

    The Quote Board

  For all knowledge and wonder (which is
the seed of knowledge) is an impression of
pleasure in itself.—Francis Bacon

   "I only ask for information."—Rosa Dartle,
in David Copperfield

    Transcription and Translation

   In those weeks when we were happiest,
and well into that nightmare period when he
learned what was coming, Dr. Ressler's
theme was always the same: the world was
awash in messages, every living thing a
unique signal. We were all cub interpreters
at a babble-built UN, obligated to convert
the covert metaphor, tweak the tuner, read
the mechanism by actively attacking its
surface. The catch to this elaborate
Wissenschaft was the active obligation to
extract cache from courier. I managed to
avoid that imperative, ignore the mess in his
message, until Frank left, Ressler died. Now
time forces the issue. Time, as the Bacon
entry says, just below the quote linking
knowledge to pleasure, is the author of
authors. Time to start my cub translation, to
learn the place, as I'm likely to be here a little
longer.
   The whole day free, hours without end.
How hard to make anything of unbudgeted
time. In my remaining free days, I've decided
to learn something, become expert,
exchange fact for feeling, reverse what I've
done with my life to date. A needy soul once
asked me, through the anonymous
three-by-five, what old film had an important
state secret transported across Europe via
musical code. Hitchcock's The Lady Vanishes,
1938: a banner year for secret European
messages. I remembered the question this
morning, listening to that other musical code
whose message our circle carried through a
similar plague year. I could whistle that
melody in the dark, its pleasure returned
permanently to school by grief. The tune of
my new career.
   My chief problem is what to study.
Something empirical, something hard! My
prospect of success depends on where in the
hierarchy I attach myself. I start with top
magnification, fix my lens on cosmology. If
that level remains abstract, I could drop to
the step below, stop down an order of
magnitude, make due with astronomy. A
working knowledge of galaxies must be of
some use in naming the place where I'm left.
   But the light-year is too long for me to get
my bearing. I must reduce the magnification
another exponent, start my study with the
earth under my lens. A geologist I suppose,
or oceanographer. But the explanations of
this critical niche are still too large. I am after
not earth science but its underwriting
specific. Down another order. The search for
a starting point begins to resemble that
painful process of elimination from freshman
year, spent in the university clinic, a knot
across my abdomen from having to choose
which million disciplines I would exclude
myself from forever.
   This time I narrow ruthlessly. I sharpen my
focus to the raw component populations
inhabiting this planet. Zoologist,
anthropologist? Neither would yet clamp
down on the why I'm after. I go a finer
gauge, assuming that understanding can be
best arrived at by isolating terms. That means
downshifting again to the vocabulary of
political science. The first limb of the
hierarchy that speaks human dialect: what
do we need, and how best to get it? The
question is powerful, but as I zoom in on the
increasingly precise concern, explanations
recede, grow fuzzy and qualified. A faction
of me secedes, insists that political science
can be understood only in terms of
constituent economics. But the study of
goods, services, and distribution produces
more problems than prescriptions.
    Herds, it seems, are hundreds of
individuals. Feeling no edge, I scale myself
down into psychology. Here my lens reaches
that cusp magnification: one-to-one. But a
complete explanation of behavior requires
somatic cause. Focal ratio flips, increases
again, now in the microscopic direction.
Psych shades over the bio threshold. The
gradients, the gauges are continuous. Fields
of study, like spectral bands, differ only in
wavelength. No discrete moment when red
ends and orange begins. Yet every
constituent bent from white has its precise
and particular name.
    The final gloss hovers always one frame
beneath. Physiology. Biophysics.
Biochemistry. More light. Molecular biology,
the transitional rung where Dr. Ressler hung.
Downwards toward delineation, I consider
studying chemistry. Unsatisfied, I pass
another strangeness barrier, into quantum
physics, beyond conceptual modeling. A
push for terminal detail takes me into the
statistics of perhaps. Here, in the domain of
sub-subatomics, where I expect to butt up at
last against fundamental phenomena, I find,
instead, a field veering startlingly
philosophical: eleven dimensions,
su-perstrings, the eightfold way. Like a Klein
bottle, insides twisting seamlessly onto out,
small-scale physics drops off the edge of
formal knowledge back into cosmology.
    The whole hierarchical range up and
down the slide rule of science shares one
aim: to write the universe's User's Manual, to
bring moonlight into a chamber. But what
scale to choose? I'm thrown back on Lewis
Carroll's information theory fable, the map
paradox. A kingdom undertakes a marvelous
cartographic project. They know that an inch
to a thousand miles is too gross, giving only
rough orientation of the largest places. The
royal cartographers improve steadily over the
years: at a hundred miles to the inch, true
roads take shape. At ten per, the map
navigates from village to village. At a mile to
a map inch, individual structures become
visible. The more exact the scale, the more
useful the map. The kingdom's surveyors
launch the supremely ambitious project of
mapping the region at an inch to an inch—a
map every bit as detailed as the represented
terrain. The apotheosis of encapsulation, the
supermap has only one drawback: the user
can't unroll it without covering the
landscape in question.
    This is my problem in choosing a field to
fill the ten months my savings leave me. The
whole hierarchy spreads in front of me in
imbedded frames. But each rung,
cross-referenced, reads, "For more
information, see below." Hinduism says the
world rests on the back of a tortoise
standing on the back of tortoise, etc. One of
those terrapins must reach bottom. Where
can I break in? What discipline will put me
closest to knowing him? A year ago, when
Dr. Ressler received the verdict of his cells
(but not yet the sentence), the three of us
met for a last evening before pulling the
switch. Franklin asked if he felt any regrets
about straying from his training, losing his
career. "What would I be if I could start
over?" Todd nodded furiously at his succinct
rephrasing, so much more accurate than
what he'd asked. Dr. Ressler thought in the
white waterfall hum of the computer
installation. At last he said, "There are really
only two careers that might be of any help.
One can either be a surgeon or a musician."
   I set my magnification, choose my lens.
Since surgery arrives too late, I'll be a
musician. I'll spend what remains of my life
savings studying music. First, I must tackle
theory. And for a good grounding in tonal
fundamentals, I must first learn everything I
can about the genetic code.
   On the strength of that late-afternoon
decision, I rode the D over to the main
reading room. There I drew up a preliminary
reading list. This evening, back home, I sit
armed with a stack of texts on two-week
loan. I toy with this pointless bookwork as if
training for a genuine career change, a way
of making a living after my bank account
runs out. It wouldn't be too late for such an
overhaul. The field is rife with refugees,
immigrants from sister disciplines and distant
relations. I come across a man who began in
physics and earned an undergraduate
degree at the ripe age of twenty-two. Global
war sidetracked his studies, stripping him of
seven years in military science. After the war,
he again postponed an already alarmingly
delayed career to spend two years retraining
in another discipline. Only at the ancient age
of thirty-three did he finally enroll in a Ph.D.
program in his new field. Four years later,
luxuriously older than I am now, he at last
filed his dissertation. But a few months
before, Francis Crick had also cowritten the
Nobel Prize-winning paper revealing the
structure of DNA.
   I set off, late, to make myself expert, with
no pretense of adding to the dizzy swell,
simply wanting to swim it myself. I need to
know exactly what happened to Stuart
Ressler between 1957 and 1983. And only a
sense of the tonal variations hidden in
self-replicating molecules will lead me there.
Having spent my life distributing fact, it was
odd to sit this evening in front of reference
books, see them take on a different
complexion. In my years at the branch, these
works were the final destination.
   Now their pages seem more like customs
clearance prior to departure, the last port
before incognita. With Bacon still open in
the quote book, I go to the well again: if a
woman will be content to begin in
uncertainty, she might end by drawing
provocative maps indeed.
   The scope of the stuff I have set myself is
utterly draining. But I feel a certain
excitement at the volume and novelty of
material I must get through before any of it
starts to cohere. A thrill at wondering
whether coherence will come in the ten
months left to my cash stockpile. I set my
scale at the only gauge I have ever had
firsthand experience of. For my attack on the
life molecule, I fall back on that fine old
obsolete mode of sightsinging:
historiography. Tonight—the overviews, the
outlines. Tomorrow, next week, a month
from now—the big leap, that evolutionary
giant step dear to saltationists. The jump
from information to knowledge.

  The Law of Segregation

   Dr. Ressler and Cyfer were no
spontaneous generation. The more I read of
the first twentieth-century science, the
clearer the chain of ideas about heredity
stretches continuously back through
speculation to the start of thought. The
scenic overview leaves me nursing a
metaphor: the idea of chemical heredity is
itself an evolving organism, subject to the
laws it. is after. Or better: the field grows as
a living population, a varying pool of
proposals constantly weeded, altered by
selection. Theories duplicate or die by
feasibility. Every article floating in the
journal-sea on the day Dr. Ressler began
life's work was an inheritable idea-gene
vying for survival.
   I sift the birth records of consecutive
generations. Pleasant, to disassemble this
random assortment and rebuild it into a
body of thought. The principal names return
from college biology, supplemented by
professional searches from my last ten years.
I see for the first time what an undertaking
the thing is, how stunning the setbacks and
solutions. I begin to view it from the air. Dr.
Ressler assisted in the final push to join
three islands. Mendel on one, observing that
characteristics in intricate organisms were
preserved in patterns. Mendeleyev, with his
atomic construction set on another. On the
third remote tip, Darwin, whose species-mad
pageant was a continuous thread, a
diversifying alluvial fan. Heredity, chemistry,
and evolution, about to be spanned by a
simple, magnificent triple-suspension more
remarkable than anyone imagined.
    For all its necessity after the fact, genetics
advanced on the mark as shakily as nature
toward fur. Every step of the way is littered
with missed discoveries, untransmitted truth.
Research, a poor parallel parker, needs
several passes. Ressler's distant ancestor is
case in point. Mendel toiled obscurely in the
peapatch vineyard a hundred years before
Cyfer. Devout Augustinian, hungry observer,
agriculturalist, meteorologist, philosopher:
variants on surgery and singing, Ressler's
careers of choice. The father of inheritance, a
celibate priest. Celibacy mysteriously
preserves itself, passed on by paradoxical
means. It should have died out long ago.
But I've seen, face to beautiful face, another
Augustinian pass celibacy on.
    Mendel, a failure as a priest, was put to
work as a schoolteacher. Capable but
untrained, he twice failed the staff qualifying
exam. He began research on the garden pea
at thirty-four, devoting ten years to his
hobby before promotion to abbot curtailed
it. By then, drudgework and rare synthetic
ability had led him to one of science's great
insights. He delivered his results to an
indifferent regional society in 1865 and
published them in its proceedings.
Distributed to a hundred scientific
communities, his conclusions promptly sank
like an oil-slicked bird, lost until 1900, when
independent researchers reannounced them.
    In the span of ten years, Darwin
published Origin of Species, Mendel
produced his inheritance paper, and
Miescher discovered DNA. But it took a
century to braid these three. Mendel's
undeniable demonstration lay forgotten for
thirty-five years, delayed by something dark
and surreptitious. The monk's first giant step
toward proving Darwin at the mechanical
level was another human takedown, this
time reducing us from monkey to molecule.
Darwin was instant controversy; why total
oblivion for the monk? Because of the
revulsion produced by mentioning the
fecundity of biology in the same breath as
inert mathematics.
    In Mendel, every characteristic derives
from discreet, inheritable factors—his law of
segregation, the philosophical implication
lost on me until this minute. Seven years'
labor in the garden overthrew Aristotle's
notion of blended inheritance. Offspring of
blond and brunette are not simply sandy.
Rather, pairs of independent commands
from each parent remain separate in the
offspring, passing unchanged to
grandchildren. Wildly counterintuitive: all
immeasurable diversity deriving from rigid,
paired packets. This Augustinian's God was
more grossly architectural than the Deists'.
For each indivisible characteristic we inherit
two paired factors, with an equal chance of
getting either half of each parent's paired
set. The tune accompanying inheritance's
barn dance is aleatoric, more Cage than
Brahms. Individuality lies in the die's toss.
The language of life is luck.
   Mendel rescues living variety by noting
that each gene comes in more than one
tune. Some alleles for any trait dominate
others. The visible result of a gene pair
shows only part of the underwriting
package. A person's genotype, the internal
packet, is not fully revealed by phenotype,
the outward form. Blond may lie hidden for
generations, erupting again in unknown
great-granddaughters.
   I picture Dr. Ressler in his first weeks in the
lab, wondering about the delicately turned
nose of the woman who will nonchalantly
waste him. The allele giving her bridge that
innocent flip floated detached in either or
both her parents. Her Myrna Loy allele might
hide a matched half that codes for Irish pug:
a half-breed, heterozygous. Or she might
need identical alleles from each parent to
achieve that cycloid dip—homozygous for
profile. The same holds for the hazel eyes.
The woman's daughter—I picture him
wondering if she has one—might revert to
any number of recessive traits: square nose,
eyes drab brown. Yet even so prosaic a child
could go through life a secret carrier of
mother's mystery.
   Mendel's Law of Segregation, not to be
confused with the Little Rock affair, is itself a
shade un-American. You can't tell by looking
at a thing what ticks underneath. Two pea
plants, both tall in phenotype, might have
different genotypes—one homozygous tall
and the other heterozygous. Violation of
truth in advertising. The language of life is
not only laced with luck. It also refuses to say
just what it means. The generation of
geneticists who rediscovered Mendel
devised a way to determine a plant's hidden
makeup. If tall allele is dominant over short,
then a tall plant might be either Tall/Tall or
Tall/Short. Crossbreeding against a known
homozygous recessive produces four
possible first filials:
   Descendants of the homozygous plant all
appear tall, while half of the heterozygous
descendants will be short. The test cross.
Ressler referred to his abandoned profession
by a name both sardonic and nostalgic—the
irony of one no longer in the inner circle. To
Frank and me, he always called geneticists
soldiers of the cross.
   First filial generation after Mendel had to
find where these abstract inheritance
packets resided. From the beginning, men
hoped that genes would prove chemical,
tangible. The coordinated effort reads like
the greatest whodunit ever written.
Blundering with desire toward fruition, as
poet-scientist Goethe says. While geneticists
made their gross observations, cytologists
began to elucidate the microscopic
ecosystem of the cell. As early as
mid-nineteenth century, researchers
described dark threads in the cell nucleus.
Improvements in staining and microscopy
revealed that the rods came in mixed
doubles. During the choreography of cell
division, these chromosome pairs split and
moved toward opposite poles. Each
daughter cell wound up with a full
chromosome complement. Chromosome
behavior suspiciously resembled Mendel's
combining and separating pairs.
   The gene factor somehow lay inside the
chromosome, a segment of the thread: a tie
bordering on magic. It must have been pure
fear, to isolate the physical chunk
embodying the ethereal plan, the seed
distilling the idea of organism. The first link
in the chain from Word to flesh,
philosopher's stone, talisman, elixir,
incantation, the old myth of knowledge
incorporated in things. I can't imagine the
excitement of living at the moment when the
pieces began to fall into place: living design
located in matter. On second thought, I can
imagine. This morning's papers carried
another update.
   Traits didn't behave as cleanly as theory
would have them. Morgan and team spent
seventeen years in massive, spirit-breaking
effort, counting two thousand gene factors
in endless generations of Drosophila.
Mendel's predicted ratios for
second-generation dihybrids did not always
occur. Experiment, recalcitrant, gave
different numbers than pattern dictated.
First temptation must have been to squash
the aberrant gnats, take no prisoners.
Morgan, not yet believing the chromosome
theory, found that certain characteristics
always occurred together. Such linkage
supported the notion that groups of genes
lay along shared chromosome threads.
Linked traits lay on the same thread, passed
through generations as a unit.
   But Morgan's team also turned up
incomplete linkage. Occasionally in the
chaos of meiosis, paired chromosomes from
separate parents cross over, break at
equivalent points, and exchange parts. Half
a linked group might thus be sent packing.
Leverage into the unobservable: the odds of
linked traits being split must vary with their
distance on the chromosome. The chance of
a break falling between two adjacent genes
is very small, whereas any split in the
chromosome separates the genes at
opposite ends of a thread. Frequencies of
separation thus mapped relative distance
between genes.
   The chemistry was still lacking. But
chemistry would come. Ressler himself would
join in the cartographic project of
ever-improving scale. Inexorable, but full of
halting dead ends, overlooked insights,
reversals. Morgan's work too was resisted by
the scientific community, while Levene's
incorrect tetranucleotide hypothesis was
embraced disastrously for years. Researchers
have made every possible mistake along the
way. Reject the Moravian monk; doubt
Morgan; ignore Avery's 1944 identification of
the genetic substance. Fits and starts,
endless backtracking, limited less by
technique than by the ability to conceive.
How do you get moonlight into a chamber?
Dress someone up as the moon.
   Mendel's laws have since become more
complex. Linkage, multiple alleles, epistasis,
collaboration, and modifiers enhance his
metaphor. But by the time Ressler took
orders, neo-Mendelism was forever in place.
Cyfer had inherited the idea that all of an
organism's characteristics were written in a
somatic language, generated by a grammar
that produced outward sentences distinct
but derivable from deep structure.
   I live at the moment of synthesis, sense the
work that is almost written, watch the
structure complete its span, register for the
first time how strewn with mistake and hope
the path has been. This place, this night, a
lamp, a typing machine, my books, my
chromosomal map: I grope for my technique,
my leverage into Dr. Ressler's world. The test
cross that will spring the hidden, recessive
gene. How he blundered with desire toward
fruition. How in fruition, pining for desire.

  Public Occurrences Both Foreign and
Domestic

   My private life began to accelerate. Before
Todd, I never thought of myself as having a
private life, let alone one with a brisk plot.
Opening the door a crack on that stray, I
found my after-hours hinting at a first etude,
a study in unmitigated motion. Within
minutes of returning from what I still refused
to think of as a date, I was back on the
phone, arranging to meet Todd again. I
rationalized the secrecy, the closed door: I
didn't want to confuse Tuck-well with
transactions that weren't what they seemed.
Not that I knew what they were, or could
pick out from my old life the complicating
new accompaniment.
   I'm not built for change. I work at
cultivating habit. Pull out tonight's meal to
defrost before leaving; turn right at third
stoplight; issue the collegial, automatic
greeting. Habit is an index, a compromise
with irreversibles, a hedge against auto
wreck or disease. The arbitrary day requires a
pretense of a priori. But defenses atrophy in
quarantine. When I felt that first symptom, I
slaughtered routine before it could dissolve
on me. Crazy schemes—one day deciding to
knock out the living-room wall. The instant
the sledgehammer splattered plaster, I knew
what I'd done. But a sickening sense of relief
too: I'd never again have to worry about the
wall caving in.
   I was sick in my stomach pit, enough to
extinguish a satisfactory existence. Tuckwell
and I began to fall apart, wrecked in event.
We'd committed no offense except the habit
of living together. But all habit ends by
presiding over its obsolescence. Even as I
closed the door to the bedroom to arrange
my next date, I felt I wouldn't be strong
enough to end my old life cleanly. If I
deliberately killed the old arrangement,
everything would be killable. Escape
rendered escapable whatever might follow.
   Everything about Tuckwell—our
apartment, shopping together, our trivial
exchanges—grew horribly beautiful. I'd
never treated him well. We'd failed to do the
things we'd always talked about. I got
nostalgic about the most bizarre items:
shared wine bottles, accidental tears in the
bed linen, utility bills. Even before I started
seeing Todd in earnest, I sank into the
death-denying compulsion of the collector.
Countless times at the library, confronted by
a perpetual crisis of shelf space, I've argued
with Holdings that thirty-year-old
sourcebooks ought not necessarily be
pitched just because nobody had ruffled
them since publication. Yet even as my heart
clamped down to protect a life that had
become as habitual as circulation, I knew
that the place had already gone bloodless.
   Deep in humid summer I felt the shameful
excitement of spring cleaning, the sensory
alertness brought on by an impending
death. Explosion of taste, touch, sight:
colors grew subtler, smells more variegated,
more exciting because of their morbid
source. I profited by another's agony. Three
sick weeks, laced with the flavor of
discovery, loss restoring the insight that
recovery subsequently buries: however much
I made love to it, I detested habit with
everything in me.
   For three weeks, my composure rode an
explosive rush. The novelty of Franklin saw
me through; I could not have gone it alone.
How did I accomplish those leaps, the
terrible intervals of those days? All done
cross-hands. Independent lines somehow
crossing over. Pain and elation in a linkage
group. Departure anxiety, the promise of
new places intensifying the ache. Disasters
stand out: an excursion Tuckwell and I made
to Central Park Zoo. We'd planned the trip
for one of our rare simultaneous days off.
Once there, in front of the cages, we
couldn't for the life of us recall why we'd
come.
   Committed to a formal outing, Keith and I
made the rounds, although we knew in the
first minute it was an awful mistake. The zoo
was grayer, more decrepit than either of us
remembered. As everyplace else, it had
succumbed to creeping graffiti fungus, the
surreal, urgently illegible signatures of the
buried. Animals lay neglected in cages, sick,
overfed, deflated. The few that moved traced
out tight, psychotic circles. A pack of
safety-pinned twenty-year-olds (although
given our infatuation with extended
adolescence, they could have been thirty)
bounced marshmallows off the open mouth
of a panting sea lion, ridiculing the beast for
being too stupid to bite. "Sick, the whole
lot," I whispered violently.
   "It's your generation made us torturers,"
Tuckwell joked, steering me on. I couldn't
keep from attaching myself to each pen, a
mission of pointless distress. Why was the
zoo still standing? Why this irrelevant park
in the first place? Certainly not for solace.
Gruesome ornament, tribute to the sadistic
housebreaking of a force that long ago
ceased to command fear. The cages proved
that plumbing and shag were best, after all.
The worst civilized annoyance was superior
to the dead end of animals. I waved at the
insults tailored to each genus. "What's the
point? No beauty we can't humiliate?"
   "Serves them right. Lower forms of
evolution. They've had just as much geologic
time to get evolved as we have. And look at
them. Just look at them. Pitiful." But seeing
that his patter only irritated me, Keith
resorted to logical blundering. "You're mad,
woman. So the place is on the decayed side.
That's a problem with the tax base, not
humanity." Pragmatics failing, he tried
compassion. The animals did not know their
suffering. And at least here they were kept
alive.
   We tried to salvage the afternoon by
eating out, but fell into a fight over where to
go. Keith had made reservations at the
Chinese place in the 50s where we'd first had
dinner together. He dropped the
announcement on me with a
now-for-what-you've-all-been-waiting-for
flair. "Can't you hear the wontons calling?" I
didn't even fake my usual diplomacy. "No? I
was pretty sure I could hear a won-ton
calling. Something was calling, anyway.
High-pitched, squeaky. Maybe it was an egg
roll that thought it was a..." Making no
headway, he gave up. We began walking
crosstown. After a grizzly block, he stopped
and caught my arm. "I thought you liked the
place."
   "I like the place. I'm glad we're going
there, OK?" But every concession was a
refusal.
   "We don't have to go there, you know. So
they sue us for the canceled reservation.
Take us for everything. I can get a second
job—"I laughed, if through my teeth. Feeling
the victory, Keith chose his cadence. "Is it
those punks? Forget them. Beatniks.
Greasers. Whooodlums."
   "It's our generation made them torturers."
   "Oh. That's it. Sorry. You're not old
enough to be their mother. Maybe a very
much older spinster sister—"
   "Thanks, ass. That's not it."
   "The animals, then? Look, you can't do
anything about them. Lost cause. The least
offensive of our sins. You want anxiety? Zoo
animals are the last thing to get morally
outraged over, at this late a date." I was still
refusing to incriminate myself when we drew
up outside the restaurant. Keith was near
distraction. "Listen. It's obvious, even to me,
that you're trying to tell me something.
What's the secret word this time, Jan? I've
got to guess, evidently. One assumes it's
bigger than the proverbial breadbox, or we
wouldn't have killed a decent day over it.
Damn it, woman. Look around. We're
standing in front of a fine establishment; we
can saunter in and make them wait on us
hand and foot. The best goddamn mu shu
this side of Confucius Plaza. We're more
than reasonably well off, given world per
capita..." Feeling himself on dangerous
ground, he dropped a decibel. "We're both
doing exactly what we want in life. You
realize the odds against that? Look around,
woman. It's your day off. We can do
anything you want. Get a room uptown
tonight, if you like. Anything. Condemned to
freedom, as the Frogs like to say. A perfect
day, if you make it. Unlike any other that has
ever happened."
   Ridiculous, I thought, even as he got the
sentence out. Seven August, one of an
endless series. Ten days earlier, I had passed
over, without ripple, that landscape with
conflagration, the 1976 quake in Tangshan,
China, 8.2 on the Richter, killing a surreal
655,235. I'd passed it by for the Event
Calendar for no other reason than my
deciding that history had to serve some
other cause than ungraspable tragedy. In
contrast, two days before this outing, I'd
posted the Mayflower and Speedwell setting
sail for the New World. Honesty compelled
me to add how the Pilgrims were forced to
return to England and ditch the Speedwell
as unseaworthy. Yet the abortive first run
seemed the one needing commemorating.
The uncelebrated cost of leaving. My own
life was about to modulate to exploration,
and it made me morose. Had I known the
first thing about being alive, I would have
made my last weeks with Keith affectionate,
funny. But I've never known anything. I
didn't even know what he knew: I was
already gone.
   After dinner, I lifted again. The sides of
the absurd Woolworth Building, in low light,
grew oppressively beautiful. I wanted to
save all those horrid skyboxes, paint and
carve them. We walked back east, and the
stone and glass took on the dusk-shades of
Morandi bottles glowing subtly in a
chalk-and-sand rainbow. We skirted the
panorama of Wall Street, the Battery,
Chinatown. We walked back over the bridge,
taut cables pulling the span up in the
middle, a woman arching her back in animal
ecstasy as her mate bit her gently by the
neck. The city sat in the ocean, practically
drifted out, afloat on the water. I could smell
the brine and hear the surf above the traffic,
as if this were not the densest collection of
refugees in the world but only a summer
resort, breakers and gradations of
late-summer light visible from every window
of the great beachfront hotel.
   Night had dropped over the
buildingscape, but every structure
burned—cubist crystal palaces, technological
Oz of local urgencies, with nobody manning
the controls. I turned in mid-bridge and
looked back where we had walked, saw the
miles of fossil-fuel blazing, the millennia of
buried plant beds going up in smoke in an
endless point-tapestry of yellows and
fire-blue greens and incandescent whites—a
rush of unstoppable, jarring intervals. No
matter how I moved or where I stood, I
seemed plunged dead-set in the middle of
the known world.

  Today in History

   Cyfer is not what it advertises itself to be.
The four senior scientists and three
apprentices form not so much a real research
team as a loose specialist confederation.
Each member pursues a personal line aside
from the coding question. A cross section of
disparate disciplines, they have been
brought together by Ulrich for
communication that could produce the
hoped-for experimental avenue, give them a
bead on the big picture.
   Assembling such a band of crossovers
initially struck Ressler as half-baked. How
dare they jump headlong into the hottest
topic now going, a field already filled with
skilled investigators? Yet the more he mulls
it over, the shrewder Ulrich's move seems.
Molecular genetics, precisely because it is
rapidly converging on a cross-disciplinary
synthesis, requires exactly this assorted
band, technically adept but without the
retarding lead.
   The field is dense with DPs: Gamow, Avery,
Franklin, Chargaff, Griffith, Hershey, Luria,
Pauling. The purebred geneticist among
them is the rarest of blood groups. The
coding problem can be approached from any
angle: math, physics, stereochemistry. The
problem in this moment of synthesis is that
the mathematicians, physicists, chemists, and
biologists don't all speak the same
language. It's all interlingual patois. Ulrich's
assembling a few native speakers of the
various dialects to meet weekly increasingly
seems a master stroke. The group has built
into it all the expertise it needs. Ressler
himself is to play a lead role: state-of-the-art
liaison. The only one of them young enough
to have grown up speaking molecular. Hell
of a burden to place on a kid just out of
school.
   So be it. However disarrayed the sessions,
they give Ressler the unique opportunity to
pick the brains of experts in fields he has
only rudimentary exposure to. The first four
weeks of group barn-burning remain
theoretical. Experimental progress must wait
for the recent flurry of development to clear.
The same thing that makes the coding
problem the most exciting project going also
makes it the most opaque. Theory permits a
bewildering array of possible codes, while
DNA sequence data provide no hint of
regularity of pattern. This proliferation of
too many possibilities gives Ressler hope
that Cyfer has as much chance as any to
receive the capricious break that will catapult
them to the fore. The twist, always
unanticipated, like the arrival of a startling
bird one morning at the feeder outside the
breakfast window, may pay its fragile visit at
any moment. Ressler posts, by his office
window, Delbruck's words: "It seems to me
that Genetics is definitely loosening up and
maybe we will live to see the day when we
know something about inheritance.."
   On an obnoxiously hot August day that
melts the streets of Stadium Terrace into La
Brea tar, Ressler takes time out to do a
rudimentary milk run. He hits the futuristic
supermarket with no shopping list except
necessity. Pushing a cart with one oscillating
wheel, he genuflects in aisle four toward
Battle Creek, Michigan, for making survival
possible. The daily cereal, consumed each
evening over journals, if failing to carry him
inexorably toward athleticism, has at least
kept him from scurvy. Likewise, frozen juice
concentrate takes one fifth the space of a
mixed pitcher and requires no maintenance
aside from rinsing the spoon. He ignores the
taste, even enjoys it. Processed foods write
the species' insatiable advance in miniature:
freed from the overhead of care to get on
with the real matter.
   He chooses a meal that promises "Ready in
One Minute," figuring he can eat it in two.
Thus recovering four hours a week for his
own pursuit, he swings his cart leisurely
around the corner smack into none other
than Toveh Botkin. The elderly Western war
prize, whose protein chemistry work Ressler
has studied, keeps cool in the mangle of
metal. "I understand that the auto accident
is a national obsession with Americans, Dr.
Ressler. But don't you think this a bit
extreme?" He grins and waves the curlered
housewife traffic around the wreck. The two
empiricists step forward to inspect the
damages. The fronts of both carts are
mauled. "Are you insured?" she asks.
   Together they restore a pyramid of soap
boxes their wreck has upended. "How
wonderful!" Botkin exclaims, holding one
up for Ressler to see. A green explosion on
the soap box advertises the obligatory
miracle ingredient, Delta-X Sub-2,
dirt-bursting enzyme. "Here our little group
racks its brains to get enzymes out of nucleic
acids, while the rest of the world is busy
figuring out how to get them into laundry
powder."
   They dust themselves off, shift effortlessly
into a notes session. They compare the
relative merits of direct templating of protein
chains on the surface of the split DNA string
to some form of intermediating sequence
reader. The conversation breaks off when
Botkin catches sight of the contents of
Ressler's cart. "My young friend.
Convenience taken to its logical extreme is
cowardice." She looks personally wounded.
"If the universe were as convenience-minded
as you, it would never have proposed so
inefficient an aggregate as life."
   Ressler loves this woman's speech. Worth
the dressing-down to hear her perform. "Dr.
Botkin," he counters. "It's impossible to
cook for one."
   "Nonsense. I've cooked for one for half a
century, occasional dinner party aside. But if
it is the motivation of pair bonding you
need.." She hooks a passing young thing in
white anklets and coos at her, "My dear.
Would you love, honor, and obey this
decent-looking young man so that he can
get a reasonable meal in the evenings?"
   The girl giggles. "I'm already married."
   "Do you expect your husband to live very
long?" At length, Ressler makes a few
dietary concessions, the most important
being his agreement to dine with her at least
once a week. "I will introduce you to the
clarity of thinking brought on by baked
lamb, and you can bring me up to date on
molecular mechanisms. I think I understand
the part about the tall pea plants and the
short, but beyond that... ?" Botkin shrugs,
reverence for the engine of skepticism. They
arrive at the checkout behind a woman
giving herself whiplash by watching the
bagging and the register at the same time.
What a very strange place he has been set
down in, this world. He ought to get out
more often.
   Botkin, whatever her gifts as a
conversationist, is almost as old as the
rediscovery of Mendel. The other extreme in
age, Joe Lovering, beat a time-honored path
out of pure math into muddy population
statistics. Ressler has seen the guy potting
about in the lab, although exactly what the
excitable kid does is anybody's guess. He
looks decidedly gumfooted holding any
equipment more corporeal than a chi-square.
Stuart takes him to the Y for lunch, part of a
court-your-resources campaign. He has the
sub, Levering the congealed mac and
cheese. Hardly are they seated when Joe
whips out a napkin and begins sketching
proofs. He argues that the genetic code, as
an algorithmic formal system, is subject to
Gödel's Incompleteness Theorem. "That
would mean the symbolic language of the
code can't be both consistent and complete.
Wouldn't that be a kick in the head?"
   Kid talk, competitive showing off,
intellectual fantasy. But Ressler knows what
Joe is driving at. He's toyed with similar
ideas, cast in less abstruse terms. We are the
by-product of the mechanism in there. So it
must be more ingenious than us. Anything
complex enough to create consciousness
may be too complex for consciousness to
understand. Yet the ultimate paradox is
Lovering, crouched over his table napkin,
using proofs to demonstrate proof's limits.
Lovering laughs off recursion and takes up
another tack: the key is to find some formal
symmetry folded in this four-base chaos.
Stuart distrusts this approach even more. He
picks up the tab for their two untouched
lunches, thanking Lovering politely for the
insight.
   In mid-month, a departmental review
committee spot-checks the lab, sits through
a free-association session where Lovering
shows the group that the translation scheme
under consideration can't map sequences of
four linear bases into twenty amino acids
and still indicate where a gene message
starts and breaks off. Since the last few
weeks have been devoted exclusively to this
scheme, Cyfer disbands that afternoon
knowing less than it did a month ago. The
review panel is sympathetic to the need for
experimental interludes. Fact-gathering
without theoretic guidance is mere noise.
But theory without fact, the review suggests,
is not science. Incriminatingly large amounts
of glassware in the lab carry that
See-Yourself Shine. They urge Ulrich to
produce some activity, reduce the Blue Skies,
begin investigating something.
   So in midsummer, a dozen weeks into his
tenure, Ressler volunteers to help set up a
showpiece, tracing the incorporation of
traits through daughter cells. He'll use the
elegant Hershey-Chase trick of radioactively
labeling microorganisms to study how
certain tagged strings are passed to the next
generation. His first chance to do hard
science since hitting the I-states.
   Ressler devises a variant on the now
notorious Waring Blendor technique to test
the supposition that DNA information is
transcribed and read like a linear tape. But
the day he goes in to set up the growth
cultures for his first run is a bad one for
experiment. He smells aggression in the lab
air, walks into the middle of a fight. He looks
around but sees nothing departing from the
status quo. Ulrich and Lovering are by the
basins, the only two people in the room.
Their conversation is subdued, their
postures unthreatening. Ressler heads to his
work area, lights a burner, and begins
rudimentary sterilization.
   Soon, however, Ulrich's and Lovering's
raised voices filter into the public domain.
Their words are lost in the flare of his gas jet.
He assumes that the two are hashing out a
labor dispute, currently in vogue. The
McClellan committee investigates Beck,
Brewster, and Hoffa, and suddenly everyone
puts away his Monopoly set and joins the
Mine Workers. It's demeaning for a scientist
to argue over cash; Ressler has always solved
budget problems by spending Saturday
nights in the lab instead of at
Murphy's—exactly the sort of chump that
management loves to have in the rank and
file.
   A few escaping words and Ressler hears
that matters are actually reversed. Joe is
being called on the carpet, or the linoleum in
this case. "You are forcing me to practice
black magic, Dr. Ulrich. Pure popular hysteria
plain and simple."
   "Black magic? That's what you call a
century of cumulative research, Dr. Lovering?
Maybe you'd better give us your definition
of science."
   "What in the hell does Salk have to do
with science?" Ressler shuts off the Bunsen.
This one's a to-the-canvas brawl.
   "Salk is the most systematic mind in
today's laboratories. If we had half his
thoroughness, we'd have the code out by
now."
   "Salk's a technician. An administrator.
'Thoroughness' is a euphemism."
   Ressler strains to see without attracting
notice. But he can't catch either man's face
from where he stands, and he can't move
without getting drawn into the fray.
   "You're suggesting that science is only
science provided it never turns up anything
practical? That's not especially rational, is it,
Dr. Lovering?"
   Ulrich infuses "rational" with so much hiss
that Ressler slips and contaminates a petri.
He looks around the lab to see who else is in
calling distance. Botkin's in her office down
the hall, but an old woman wouldn't be
much help in pulling bucks off each other.
Lovering looks about to bolt from his corner
and tackle his adversary. "This is a witch
hunt. You've singled me out because of my
politics."
   "I'm doing no such thing. You've singled
yourself out, by refusing to take a proven
vaccine."
   "Proven my ass. Read the field trials.
Where are the controls? Polio reduction in
heavily dosed areas; so what? The disease
moves in epidemics. It's erratic by
definition."
   Ulrich becomes cool, compensatory to his
junior's frenzy. "Joe, you're the only one in
this lab who refused the vaccine."
   "You want me to take the doses and cross
myself like everybody else? What's the
paranoia? You've had your three slugs; I
can't hurt you."
   "You can hurt me plenty. If word got out
that a scientist refused readily available
precautions this late, when we're finally
moving towards eradication...."
   "Oh! So funding is the issue. That's not
especially rational, is it, Dr. Ulrich?"
   Ressler can't believe this: the kid spits out
words that could cost him everything. And
the old man lets him. Ulrich grows gentler
than Ressler has ever seen him. "Joseph," he
says, almost singing. "Just tell me why you
refuse it."
   A look comes over Lovering's face: able to
rationalize forever, when asked outright, he
will not misrepresent. "Because my mother's
a Christian Scientist. That's why." Lovering
dashes from the lab, leaving Ulrich to nurse
his victory. Ressler returns to experimental
prep, but his heart is no longer in it. He lays
out the first trial and organizes the
notebook. Then he knocks off for the day.
The lab is suddenly infected with labeled
belief. The charm has temporarily fled the
whole inheritance question.
   Back at the barracks, with nothing to
protect him from night's humidity except his
lawn chair and tomato juice, Ressler
involuntarily recalls a painful joke he himself
helped propagate in grad school days: A
Jew, a Catholic, and a Christian Scientist sit
in the anteroom to Hell. The Catholic turns
to the Jew and asks, "Why are you here?"
The Jew replies, "Well, God help me, but I
couldn't keep from nibbling ham now and
then. Why are you here?" The Catholic
answers, "I had a little trouble touching
myself where I go to the bathroom." The two
of them turn to the Christian Scientist. "And
you? Why are you here?" The Christian
Scientist replies firmly, "I'm not."
   The joke incriminates him. Hypocrite: how
did he fail to see in himself the same
persuasion, the old blessed are those who
have not seen?



VI

  Cook's Tour

   On August 20 I committed myself to
leaving, putting together a portfolio of the
day's restlessness. I began my travelogue in
1597: Dutch East India Company ships return
to Europe with word of a remarkable voyage.
Germ cell of the modern world, its commerce
craze, engine of expansion. I added Bering's
arrival in Alaska in 1741, precisely the
moment—bizarre anachronism—when Bach
unravels his Goldbergs. Another 173 years
later, the Panama Canal's first week of
business opens a short cut between worlds.
The day of exploration seemed a cornucopia
expressly for my use.
   In fact, the date was nothing special. On
any calendar page, exploration rolls out
anniversaries on demand: take every location
on the globe that produced a recorded first
encounter and divide by 365. Each day
approximates what it means to need to be
forever someplace other than here. Faces
pressed to the glass of cabs, a summer
freight's lapsed, transfigured blast, autumn
attic-rattling, the furious slam of screens in
back-door disappearance. Departure was
easy, commonplace, everyday.
   I'd signed on for the full ride. August 20,
after my shift was done and the foreign
legion was just punching in, I showed up on
the doorstep of the converted warehouse
and buzzed to be let in. I'd discovered no
more about Dr. Ressler in the interim. Harder
to prove a thing's absence than its existence.
But in the run of time, the evidence adds up.
His work had clearly come to nothing. He
had produced nothing of consequence that
had entered the permanent record, at least
the record I wasted weeks sifting.
   His non-work began to infect mine. Life
science made raids on events of the day,
colored my choice of quotes. He and
self-appointed sidekick Todd used my
Question Board to settle running
disputes—everything from that calculation
about the degree of our isolation in deep
space to "How far did Goebbels get with
Katherine Anne Porter when they dated in
the thirties?" They used the forum to
communicate with each other, with me, and
with a public that never wrote them, put it to
work for everything from Todd's private joke
about making the catch to Ressler's request
for the name, lost to one of the rare failings
of his memory, of the tendency of languages
to become simpler—to drop inflectional
cases and consolidate. I proudly produced,
without revealing my footwork: A:
Syncretism. The board became their private
tin-can telephone, although I never saw
Ressler inside the branch. He must have
been by regularly, but either he calculated
his visits to avoid my shift or he perfected
invisibility in public.
   As I learned his story, I continued to steal
his quotes for my own use. Even as we set in
motion our own small act of code-breaking, I
posted extracts from that Poe story, the one
that marked for him the bewildering human
propensity for metaphor. "Circumstances
and a certain bias of mind," says the
cryptographer of "The Gold Bug," a coded
persona of his inventor, "have led me to
take interest in such riddles, and it may well
be doubted whether human ingenuity can
construct an enigma of the kind that human
ingenuity may not, by proper application,
resolve." I posted this on August 21, the day
after meeting Dr. Ressler for real. Although
we had exchanged only a few paragraphs,
my head still spun on his long, periodic
sentences, the sense underneath.
   I told Tuckwell I was going out that
evening with a couple of friends who were
in town. The old rot about half-truth being
better than whole lies. Keith was so relieved
at not having to throw our apartment open
to a night of reminiscence that he didn't
even ask who the friends were. He gave me a
blank check for the evening. I had the
warehouse address and a standing
invitation. I needed only walk a few streets
from the branch and satisfy my curiosity,
answer my questions for once. The
nondescript reddish-brown building was
flanked by two sooty, brick, cliff walls, gullies
where sunlight would not shine again until
all buildings fell. It was fronted on the alley
side by loading docks. On the street,
story-length stone-trimmed windows filled
with uncooperative darkness. From the
outside, it was one of those mildewed,
permanently For Let places, countless
late-nineteenth-century brick rectangles that
I no longer noticed after my second day in
the city. I thought: They've lost the deed to
this place. No one owns it. A forgotten tract
squeezed between forgotten tracts, stuffed
floor to ceiling with wooden files from a
hundred years ago, papers slowly
ammoniat-ing. Nothing could have been
further from the truth. In bland buildings
with concrete cornices, everything is
decided.
   I peeked inside the first-floor turret. I
could see nothing through the smoky quartz
and iron bars. In front of the main door, I
scoured the buttons until I found the
suitably corporate monogram MOL—
Manhattan On-Line. "You can remember the
name," Todd had told me over the phone,
"because we're not in Manhattan and we're
not on-line." I debated a last time and
pressed the bell. After a second, a tinny
transcription of Todd's voice came over the
intercom. "Friend or foe?"
   "Do I have a choice?" I heard either static
or his laugh, followed by the magic buzz. I
grabbed the door at the tone's order, and
climbed the stairs in the half-dark. At the top
of the first flight, following the quaintest
layout imaginable, the stairs petered out and
presented an accordion-grated
service-elevator shaft, the only way higher. It
violated all zoning ordinances. I pressed
what passed for a summons button. Cables
tensed like a surprised nest of bush-masters
and a counterweight sluggishly unwound.
Several seconds later, the elevator—little
more than an open cage with forty-watt bulb
strung through the ceiling—sallied down
into sight.
   The antiquated grate made a noise like an
enraged myna. I took my life in my hands and
entered. On the way up, I had to yank a
cast-iron dial crank back and forth in its
semicircle to keep the lurching car in ascent.
Just as I was sure a cable was about to snap,
a man's voice echoed down the shaft telling
me to stop at the next landing. I eased the
throttle and cruised to a halt. I'd entered the
car from the north. The box's exit, however,
lay to the east. To leave the deathtrap, I had
to open a perpendicular grate, revealing a
period-piece, dented, lead-alloy door with
frosted chicken-wire glass—the
non-windows once ubiquitous in office
buildings. Todd's silhouette on the other
side called out, "Ya gotta kick it." I did. The
door swung open on a turn-of-the-century
anthology of alcoves, now a functionless
reception area, Manhattan On-Line being
one of those businesses that never received.
The dozen subdivided walls were of
assorted glass, multicolored brick, and an
afterthought of stucco.
   "Ms. O'Deigh," Todd greeted me with a
formality that might have been mock. He
shook my hand as if we were execs meeting
over power brunch. Every time out with this
fellow was starting from scratch. "Terrific
you've come. I've got so much to show you."
Absolutely unreadable. He led us down the
hall to a restraining door. He punched a
code into the electronic lock, and we entered
a blazing fluorescence reminiscent of fifties
science fiction. Behind massive plate safety
glass, several thousand square feet of room
stood in the pallid postindustrial shimmer of
night shift. The space, once tall, was now
wedged between false floor and drop
ceiling. The room shone as bright as daylight
but with minute, maddening,
near-imperceptible flickers.
   Machines took hold in every niche of the
place, devices in no way mechanical-looking.
Beautiful expanses of metal and plastic, each
enclosed in seductively homogeneous chitin
of earth tones and ochers, formed a ring
around the room as secret and monolithic as
Stonehenge. Todd conducted a Grand Tour,
mapping the layout. The world outside this
nineteenth-century masonry held no sway
here, so self-defining was this fluorescent,
windowless aura. Todd took me to a
console, where he issued a command to a
keyboard, the rites of an inner circle closed
to the uninitiated.
   "Don't be taken in by the bells and
whistles. We're engaged here in one of the
most tediously repetitive routines known to
man. The assembly line of the digital info
set." He punched a few more acronyms into
his CRT and hit enter. Behind us, discharging
pneumatic libido, a punched-card reader
came to life. Todd removed a rubber band
from a card deck and dropped the packet in
the hopper. "Antique input method," he
apologized. The device sucked up the
instructions, spat them out, and fell into
cogitative silence.
   I tried to study his face without staring. He
was different on his own turf, but I couldn't
say how. His melodic voice showed no
surprise at my being here. "I get in early
every evening. Kick these beasts around
until two, three a.m. An hour for lunch." He
smiled faintly. "Procedure for keeping the
wheels grinding is absolutely axiomatic. Let
me show you." He tapped a pen-and-ink
flowchart taped to the side of a nearby
cabinet. "We go in this funnel here. We
follow these arrows. Human intervention at
the diamonds. We get pissed out here at the
bottom. Then it's time to go home." He
meditated on the flow of control. He pointed
at a spot on the chart and said, "You are
Here."
   He showed me the storage
devices—waist-high spindles with removable
packs resembling layer cakes under cover.
"These boys will take an entire thirty-volume
encyclopedia each. I hate to use the word
'gigabyte' in mixed company, but there
seems no way around it." He showed me the
industrial printer, screaming under its sound
hood. He opened the card cage of the CPU.
"When this little electroluminescent display
flashes 'Help me, I'm melting,' you're in for a
long night." He introduced me to a dozen
other devices whose functions I instantly
lost. Decollators; sequencers. Like one of
those five-language bus travelogues
through Rome— never quite sure where the
guide's English leaves off and his German
begins.
   When Todd at last fell quiet I noticed the
hum of the metal, hard at work on
calculations that never ruffled the silky
surface. Constant, low-level drone
permeated the room. Noticing, he dropped
to his knees and spread supplicant-style
across the floor. He put his ear to the
acoustical tile and tugged on my pant leg for
me to do the same. Amazed at myself, I
crawled down with him and did the Native
American trick of listening to the ground.
Sound rushed into my ear, a rumbling chorus
somewhere between Hoist's Planets and
Aristophanes' Frogs. He gestured me to lift
my head. "Know what they're humming?
'Wake up, wake up, wake up you— Get up,
get up, get up, get out of....' Synthetically, of
course."
   We left the computer room, the
alphabet-lock door swinging shut behind
us. The sudden cutoff of noise reminded me
of Midwest childhood, the abrupt end of a
cicada-storm outside my window on a
summer's night waking me from deep sleep
with its roar of silence. The suite extended in
the other direction. "This is the storeroom.
These are the day-shift offices. Here's the
software vault: Authorized Programmers
Only." Indeed, a check-in desk blocked a
door affixed with the same punch-code lock
that had allowed us grudging access to the
machine room. Hidden in this hierarchy of
offices, the rift between information-rich and
information-poor.
   "Here's the lunchroom," he sighed at
length. We entered a twilit cubicle
containing sink, refrigerator, table with
plastic chairs, and microwave. He pointed to
a sign on this last device reading No Metal.
"Obscure political protest, I guess." He made
me coffee and yogurt without asking if I
wanted it. "You see," he wound up. "Not
exactly the glamour of high tech I used to
dream about in art school. I could teach you
to do what I do in two nights, so come back
at your own risk. We are not so much this
monster's brain as its arms and legs."
   "Speaking of 'we'...." The first substantial
thing I'd said since arriving. The sound of my
voice surprised me.
   "Of course! The man you came here to
meet." I protested that meeting wasn't
necessary. I just wanted to see the man the
reference works hinted at but couldn't
identify, the man that could elicit concern
from these otherwise self-possessed
features. Todd led us down a hall that
doubled back behind the main computer
room and dead-ended in a fire door. He
gripped the knob, looked back at me over
his shoulder, and asked, "Ready?" I wasn't
in the slightest.
   But there was no backing out. Forcing
entry, we fell forward into a black cinematic
cavern blazing with point lights. Cathode
rays, a glowing halo of meters, and a tower
of heavily cabled boxes twinkled a Christmas
of continuous bit-streams being transmitted
and received. Against the opposite wall was
a pane of one-way glass that revealed the
computer room with its gigabyte drums and
its silk-smooth calculating cases. Todd and I
had not done our surveying alone. I felt
spied upon, violated, caught in the act of
eavesdropping.
   Above the hum, as the door swung shut, I
heard another sound altogether. Todd had
warned me, in the seafood-and-sawdust
dive. And yet, each time I'd imagined these
two lost boys serving their
abandoned-warehouse night shift, I never
once gave their isolation so ravishing a
soundtrack. Aural obsession, in such
astringent surroundings, was too fantastic.
The music, ground from a cheap stereo that
hid its low tech in a corner, was that same
crotchety keyboard exploring that same
eighteenth-century glaze, testing the keys'
tentative possibilities. Imitative voices
chased and cascaded over one another,
interleaving, pausing at pivots, only to
tag-team pratfall down the scale in
close-interval clashes. In the dark, this
finger-probing was the most perfect sound I
had ever heard.
   Like a shepherd's on breaking into a
buried tomb, my eyes adjusted to local dark. I
made out a figure, tipped forward in a
tilt-and-swivel chair behind a desk littered
with electronic instruments, liquid-crystal
readouts, and a vast, rack-mounted technical
manual that would have been the envy of
Diderot and his Encyclopedic henchmen. I
knew my man right away, although I'd seen
him only once the year before and once in a
magazine photo at twenty-five. We surprised
him in the act of turning over pages in the
massive manual, not so much looking up an
error fix as reading though the entire
yard-wide spine from cover to cover.
   As we entered the confined space and
stepped toward him, he stood and unfolded
himself. He was thinner and shorter than I
remembered; his features, not classic, by the
glow of the machine diodes possessed a
resignation that, like the ambient piano
trickle, was consummately beautiful. In
contrast to Todd's collegiate slovenliness, he
dressed in coat and tie, as if some sentient
presence in all this mass of integrated chips
cared how he looked. Not just presentable;
immaculate. Natty.
   Before Todd could do formal
introductions, Dr. Ressler, with a charming
outdated gesture, offered me his hand. "You
know who I am. But aside from the fact that
you work for the public library, once
considered becoming a professional dancer,
and are called Jan, I know absolutely
nothing about you."
You've-been-in-Afghanistan-I-perceive. It
came off hilariously. That slight, dry, upward
curl of his thin lips convinced me that here
was the last cultivated enclave in the
forsaken world. I loved being in the man's
presence from the first minute.
   We left the control room and stepped
back into the hall where we could see and
hear one another. We might have been
business associates who met frequently in
London or Tokyo, acting together in silent
consensus. On the far side of the fire door,
Dr. Ressler paid me gallant attention: "You
have exactly the sort of complexion required
of the quintessential wronged heroine of
Victorian pornographic fiction. I regret
having to be the one to offer the
observation, but Franklin's reading may not
yet be broad enough to allow him to do
likewise." This rolled out of him intact, with
only the slightest ironic hint.
   Todd rushed to assure me, "That's the
nicest thing I've ever heard this old man say
to anyone." But I wasn't at all embarrassed.
And neither, it seemed, was the old man.
   The instant we assembled in the hall, as if
counting the seconds since his last, Dr.
Ressler offered us cigarettes, which we both
refused. "Am I the only one of this suspect
group with an oral fixation?" He smoked,
inhaling pensively and catching the ashes in
a fastidiously cupped hand. It was by then
the middle of the night. No one seemed in
any hurry to ruin the rare visit with
something so inexact as conversation. At last
Dr. Ressler smiled at me. I can recreate that
grin perfectly: laconic, amused, mixing its
passive enjoyment with a particle of despair.
The smile of a mathematician who cannot
decide if his latest calculation presents him
with a near-tautology of has plunged him
into the heart of the enigma. "So how do
you two come to know one another?"
   I didn't dare look at Todd. Half a dozen
near-truths passed through my head, but I
missed the beat necessary to pull off a
plausible lie. "He came to me and asked me
to look you up."
   Ressler's already high hairline moved
higher as he smiled. "So the fellow said
himself, although not nearly so forthrightly."
He finished his smoke and motioned for us
to wait while he discarded the remains in a
nearby commode. As he returned, the
shrunken figure was picking lint off of his
suit coat. "I'm not sure what anyone could
possibly find to be interested in. I've had no
historical import." It seemed the wrong place
to argue the point, yet something in my
reading had convinced me that the world of
scientific research was one continuous,
shifting, interdependent event, an event still
encompassing him.
   I can't remember exactly how I phrased the
question; I probably bungled it. I was unable
to make a decent sentence in his company,
so self-conscious did his parts of speech
jumping through hoops make me. But hook
or crook, standing in the deserted hall, the
Goldbergs no longer audible through the
control-room door, I asked what had
happened to strand him here. He pulled at
the skin around his eyes; maybe I'd
miscalculated in believing the admiration for
bluntness he professed. But when he
answered, it was again with that look of
bemused pleasure. "Science lost its calm." He
extended an arm, palm up, in a gesture
indicating the renovated warehouse,
Brooklyn, the entire maze of current events
the meek were condemned to inherit. "And
as Poe long ago pointed out, cryptography
begins at home."
   With that, he excused himself; the
machines were calling. He hoped I would
drop by again. "He doesn't deserve it, but
give this young man the benefit of the
doubt." Ressler: if anything, more mysterious
in person than in the elliptical accounts. The
riddle the young scientist had once
faced—how a four-letter chemical language
could describe all life—was more opaque
now than when it had sent him empty away.
The only thing the visit told me was why
Todd so urgently wanted to turn up this
man.
   By next morning I'd checked out Poe. I too
wondered whether human ingenuity could
construct an enigma that human ingenuity
could not resolve. Yet the detective in me, a
hardcover strain crossbred with hardy
paperback perennial, was stumped by
Ressler's ingenuity in displaying himself to
us without revealing a thing. I rephrased
Poe'S dictum: It may well be doubted if
genetic ingenuity can construct an enigma
that genetic ingenuity may not resolve. His
genetic code, the gradual accretion of living
molecular language, had created itself out of
free association. Everything derived from it,
all successive mutations, recombinations,
crossings over— fish in the ocean, eels in the
sea, a thousand Darwinian finches, every
researcher, Todd and I, Ressler himself, all
natural history were elaborate permutations
on an original four-base message. The
young scientist left in this gaunt body was
himself a product of the code he'd been
after, the code that couldn't keep itself
hidden from itself.
   I took his paradox apart from every
direction. Against my policy of not repeating
sources, I hit "The Gold Bug" twice over:

            In the present case—indeed in all
         cases of secret writing—the first
         question regards the language of
         the cipher.... In general, there is no
         alternative but experiment
         (directed by probabilities) of every
         tongue known to him who
         attempts the solution, until the true
         one can be obtained.

   There lay the rub; the language of
Ressler's enigma was the genetic code,
organic chemistry, well-understood forces.
Ressler had known all that; the work of
generations of whitecoats had identified the
idiom the secret writing was written in. But
there the man was, at the end of his working
life, empty-handed, high and dry, alone at
night in a dark room lit only by CRTs
requiring as much attention as wetting
infants.
   The code he was after was not so much a
message written in a language as all
grammar itself. I felt that with my first good
look at his wasted face, his intelligent eyes
that resigned themselves to courteous
elegance. The old vocabulary of research and
exploration, the whole poetics of science still
poured from the man's mouth in rolling,
perfect paragraphs.
   At work, the routine that had taken me
into adulthood came up short. I did not
want my life. I wanted another thing, an
analogy. I wanted to read Poe, all Poe. I
wanted to read science, the history of
science. I wanted to be back with those two
men, listening to the language of isolation
they spoke to one another. Half a dozen
sentences, and I was fixed. Was any grammar
sufficiently strong to translate the inner
grammar of another? Did anything in the
cell, in the code itself, actually know the
code? I needed to win this man's confidence,
to ask him as much. To ask him how he had
guessed I'd wanted, once, to be a dancer.
   Todd had said to call him anytime. I did, in
the middle of the afternoon a few days later.
"Oh God, I forgot. I woke you."
   "No, no," he lied groggily. "There's
something I've been wanting to ask you
forever."
   "We answer anything."
   "What is the origin of the phrase 'Make
the catch'?" Half-conscious silliness:
repeating the question, reproducing the
round he pretended to ask about. Clear
dalliance, an open invitation to come again,
that evening if I wanted. I had passed the
audition. I needed no further lure. I could sit
in that soundproof control room behind the
one-way glass, savoring the banter of
people who understood the scary
unlikelihood of speech. I laughed something
back at Franklin; hard to say which of us led
the flirtation walk. A step-ladder catch,
second voice identical, only higher. He
chases her until she catches him.

  The Nightly News

   Ressler accepts Botkin's standing
invitation to eat with her. Food's gone by
the boards too long. Over venison or Duck a
l'Orange, they might even make headway on
a coding angle. The elder woman's mind is
first-rate; if her science isn't up to the
minute, it's the fault of the discipline's
runaway proliferation, not her ability to
grasp essentials. He himself can't understand
more than three of five articles, even in
those journals devoted to his narrow
specialty. He becomes a regular at her table,
benefiting more than just nutritionally.
Botkin too seems fond of the chance for
conversation. Odd thing: talk's no good
alone.
   By day he frequents her office, the single
place on campus providing that balance
between attention and escape necessary to
concentrate. Over decades, Botkin has
perfected her digs. A heavy oak panel
obscures the pea-green steam pipes, and
lace curtains, white embroidery on white,
meliorate the industrial frosted glass.
University-issue khaki bookcases against one
wall house journal indexes, meticulously
aligned, going back into forties antiquity.
Across from these shelves stands another
case, a varnished turn-of-the-century
hardwood masterpiece. It holds editions of
Werfel, Mann, Musil, essays by Benjamin and
Adorno, and other suspect tomes from the
soft sciences. The spines alone qualify some
as minor triumphs of decorative art. Ressler
likes to heft these, examine the marbled
paper. He is entranced, too, by other items
on the shelf: molding Furtwängler platters
older than he is, pressed, to his delight, on
one side only. "So did this man
collaborate?"
   Botkin smiles sadly. "Half the NSF
collaborated."
   The lid of her centenarian rolltop desk,
long stuck closed, renders the piece
ornamental. Dr. Botkin now employs it only
for stacking; piles of print, heaps of paper of
all religious persuasions, welded into
inseparable masses, ski down the desktop
slope into further piles scattered about the
floor. And yet, the room is meticulous, tidy. A
Viennese overstuffed chair, faded but
impeccable, flanges in ornate wings at the
top; armrests flourish fruits and vines, and
the stitchery on the back, though ghostly
now, still shows the trace of a pastoral
scene. The right armrest bears stains smelling
of anisette, temporary storage spot for candy
when the bone-handled phone demands
answering. Botkin sits there for hours while
Ressler lies flat out on a tooled Moroccan
leather couch, as if for regression analysis.
Botkin abstractly considers the skin on the
back of her hand, which has gone slack and
no longer snaps back when pinched. "And
what is our lesson for today?"
   Ressler, prostrate, grins at the ceiling.
"The surface shape of the split helix. Its
transcription to RNA. Energy considerations
against assembling protein chains directly on
the strand. The possibility of the peptide
chain peeling from the RNA surface as it
forms."
   "If you insist," she sighs. But her
imagination has come alive after a dormant
winter. She once more reads voraciously,
devising tests, learning, freeing herself from
dead preconceptions, leaping for the first
time since the war.
   The room, curtained for minimum sunlight,
smells of tea, rose water, hair oil,
napthalene—nonspecific aromas of the past.
Its scent encapsulates a forgotten
ghetto—Danzig, perhaps, or Prague, though
it would take a hopelessly sensitive nose to
tell. Ressler can concentrate here. What's
more, he can think out loud. Botkin has the
intellectual chops to keep him honest.
Something about the place makes it perfect
for guided associating. Oriental richness,
dark and full, despite a paucity of
decorations. Only two ornaments grace the
walls, two framed photographic prints, one
of Mahler and one of the chemist Kekulé.
The latter dreamt one night of a snake
rolling its tail in its mouth, and woke with
the structure of the benzene ring. The
former composed, in already antiquated
idiom, a staggeringly beautiful song cycle on
the death of a child from scarlet fever, losing
his own to the disease shortly thereafter. The
two contemporaries hang side by side, a
semblance of a shrine. Near them, mounted
under glass, hangs a tiny, inexplicable object
that could only be a gold filling.
   Gradually Ressler ventures farther afield.
Dan Woytowich has him over for a nervous
evening. The group's classical geneticist,
Woytowich has spent his professional life
raising fish and plotting their susceptibility
to disease against their number of stripes.
Full of promise once, by all accounts. No one
knows exactly what happened. Recently,
alarmed by the advanced hour and suddenly
aware that his generational studies have
been all talk and no action, Woyty has
married a grad student in English literature
half his age, a woman both stripeless and
disease-free. Despite the late discovery that
he would even now like to father a real
family, Woyty's only child to date is wife
Renée's emerging dissertation.
   Renée describes her project in detail, after
the get-acquainted conversation falls into
autism: "You know Ben Jonson? O Rare Ben
Jonson?" Ressler nods before she starts
singing "Drink to Me Only." "Someone once
told Jonson that Shakespeare never blotted
a line. Jonson replied, 'Would that he had
blotted a thousand.'" Renée explains;
Ressler drifts, loses the thread. Something to
do with her determining exactly which
thousand lines Jonson wanted Shakespeare
to blot.
   Woytowich is reluctant to talk shop. Stuart
could learn endless classical genetics from
the man; he slighted macroheredity in
school, in the heat of molecular excitement.
But Woyty just sits taciturn throughout the
evening. When Ressler catches Dan looking
at his watch, he apologizes for overstaying
and gets up to go. "Oh, no," Woyty laughs
anxiously. " Tain't that. Only... would you
mind very much if we... ?" He gestures
embarrassedly at the color set, one of the
first quarter million to grace an American
home. "It's news time."
   Ressler defers with pleasure. He watches
attentively, not the new technology or
today's current events, but the behavior of
his colleague, a genuine habitue of
headlines. Woyty sighs. "I'm absolutely
dependent. Jesus; even quiz shows bind me
for hours. But the news; God. I'm terrified of
missing something. Ever since Khrushchev
did his CBS interview...Christ Almighty. The
news is the most gratifying thing life has to
offer. Think of it; we can know within hours,
things all over the globe actually happening
now."
   They watch in silence, the first comfortable
moment all evening. The danger of the
nightly You Are There. Partly developmental,
like the soaps: today's police action is
tomorrow's outbreak, so stay tuned. Only
the stories change faster and more wildly
than soaps. "Catch the broadcast about the
Saigon stabbing of the Canadian armistice
supervisor?" Woytowich asks during the
commercial. "A real whodunit. But what
happens next? Always the question. Catch
Diem's visit, the great scenes of Dwight
personally meeting the man at D.C. airport?
Bloody hell, you know? Gets to be a
problem. I mean, I could sit until the world
ends before they give the wrap-up."
   At the next break, fearing for the man's
well-being, Ressler tries to change the topic.
He describes his last twenty-four-hour shift
manning the rate experiment, the isotope
readings on his cultures. But the elder
partner is unseducible. "Ain't that the
kicker? They fail to tell you in Bio 110 just
how much science amounts to jacking a
knob every hour for three years and jotting it
down in a journal. You ought to look into
one of those portables. Pick one up on
payments. Put it in your office. Go anywhere
with one. Never have to miss an update."
   "There's always the next day's
newspapers, Dan."
   "Not the same, reading about Yemen after
the fact. Like listening to a tape of a
ballgame. What difference does it make if
Mays gets a clutch hit when the affair's a
done deed? Give me live broadcast, the
announcer muffing his words, the station
disclaiming the views of third parties. Give
me simultaneous report." That's it, the
reason Woytowich has sunk into information
dependence: if he hears an event while it's
still going on, he has an infinitesimal chance
to alter the outcome. Not to watch tonight's
segment, even to entertain a junior
researcher, is to commit a sin of omission.
He's Horace Wells all over again, the man
who, altruistically pursuing proper
anesthetic dosages, discovered, instead,
addiction and squalor.
   Summer's almost gone, winter's coming on
when K-53-C gets its first knock on the door.
Given his utter anonymity, Ressler assumes
some terrible mistake. It's the NSA, confusing
him with some other Stuart Ressler of the
same name, or Veep Dick Nixon on
search-and-destroy committee work. What's
he done recently to run afoul of the
authorities? Growing radioactive
microorganisms without a permit.
   The visitor is Tooney Blake. Although
they've worked in proximity all summer, the
two men are still strangers. Blake is a solid
biochemist who has taken up partition
chromatography, a six-year-old technique
that, given patience and precision, reveals
the amino acid sequence in a protein. He has
never voiced anything but irrefutable
clarities at the Blue Sky sessions. Neither
brilliant nor erratic, Blake is the sort of
steady lexicographer Ressler will need to pull
off any coup de grâce. Here Tooney stands,
inexplicably in the doorway on the last
Friday evening ever in August '57. He has his
arm around an attractive woman in her
mid-thirties. Ressler can only greet the
couple warmly, as if they've been expected.
   "You know my lovely wife Eva." Ressler
wobbles his neck. "You've met," Blake
insists. "Ulrich's. Stuart, you'll never believe
this. We just discovered it ourselves, in fact.
We live under the same damn roof."
   Ressler is lost in the vistas of figurative
speech. Eva explains, "You know, K-53-A?
The other end of the triplex?"
   Blake takes up the slack. "Luck of the
draw, huh? So Evie and I found this here
bottle..." He holds it up, as if the label might
persuade the fellow to let them in.
   Stuart pulls himself together. "I'm afraid I
haven't bought a welcome mat yet, so you'll
have to take my word for it." This the Blakes
do, with easy style.
   Within minutes, Tooney has the Summer
Slumber Party on the player, watching in
fascination as Eva does a wonderful
one-step imitation of Olga, the plastic
spindle ballerina. In no time, the two of them
have done Stuart's week of dirty dishes,
singing descant to those teenage death
songs the whole while, even getting the boy
to kick in on the choruses. They graduate to
the Wagner excerpts. "Ah, the hero's motif,"
Tooney says. "Just the tune to welcome
young geniuses to town." Ressler reads the
text on his tennis shoes. Inspired by the
musical Siegfried line, the Blakes crack open
the Riesling. Tooney proposes a toast: "May
your stay here be filled with significant
insights."
   Noticing the empty space in the living
room where a sofa should be, Eva protests.
"You poor boy. Have you been sitting on the
floor all this time? We've an extra one, don't
we, Toon?" Shamefaced at being caught
with more sofas than her share. "Don't say
anything! It's yours on permanent loan."
   Pointless for him to protest. Something in
Eva's extreme generosity toward a total
stranger—pointless, pathetically trusting—
moves him to accept. Before he knows
what's happening, the three of them dash
down the barrack row and begin moving
furniture in the Blakes' parlor. "Shhh," they
giggle. "Don't wake the kid." They spring
the spare sofa, trundle it across the lawns of
K-53 in the middle of the night, laughing
hilariously and daring all Stadium Terrace to
mistake them for sofa burglars.
   As they lever the beast through his door,
Ressler realizes he will be twenty-six in a few
days, too old for discoveries of consequence.
He has done nothing to advance the project,
to locate the approach that will
systematically decipher nucleic acid. The
three of them, gasping for breath, position
the sofa to fill up as much empty space as
possible and then plunk themselves down
on it, exhausted. A failure, he is forced back
on the compromise of companionship.
   They find a deck of cards hiding in the
crack between the back and cushions. "Little
Margaret's been playing hide-the-folks'-stuff
again." Tooney and Eva teach him to play
pinochle, a game whose payoff matrices
would soon addict him but for one
shortcoming: the play of the cards contains
no progression, no development. Each hand,
no matter the outcome, leaves the play of
the next unchanged.
   Eva, giddy with wine and aces around,
waxes astonished over the playing cards.
"These things are amazing. Glossy,
washable, every one different. There's a
miracle for you. What are these made out of?
Not paper, surely. Soybeans? You scientists
are always making things out of soybeans."
   Ressler cannot resist these two. He talks
with Tooney, the only other human capable
of conversing about RNA templates while
the Valkyries skip their way up the slopes of
Valhalla. Eva fascinates Ressler as well.
Undeniably attractive, Eva possesses skills
that can only be called freakish. The three of
them sit outside in Ressler's favorite spot;
the Blakes instantly adapt to the lawn-chair
routine. The couple drink their wine and
Ressler his tomato juice, with just a
smidgin—make that two-thirds of a
dollop—of wine at Eva's insistence. On the
lawn, Blake pressures his wife to roll out her
mental arsenal.
   He asks Ressler to supply two pieces of
paper and two pens. "Now, talk to her about
anything you want, and I'll do the same."
Ressler describes an article on partial overlap
he has just read. At the same time, Blake
babbles in her other ear about the weather,
Wagner, how fine a neighbor they've
discovered. Eva, a pen per hand, takes
simultaneous dictation on separate sheets,
without garbling a word. Right-ear stream
with left hand and vice versa.
   Knocked out already, Ressler learns there
is more. "Give her a sentence," Blake urges.
"Nice and long." Ressler reaches back,
performs a mental feat of his own, and pulls
up from God knows where a favorite quote.
Flaubert, from days when he could still
afford belles lettres: "Some fatal attraction
draws me into the abyss of thought, down
into those innermost recesses which never
cease to fascinate the strong."
   Without a pause, Eva responds, "Strong
the fascinate to cease never which recesses
innermost...." It takes him a moment to
figure out what is going on. The whole
stream, backwards.
   Unbelievable. A living palindromist. "We
could use you in codon transcription." For
all they know, the gene might be read in
either direction, both at once, for that
matter. Who knows what golden patterns
this woman could mine?
   Eva laughs, fetchingly shy again after her
bravura feat. "I've already got a job."
   "Who could possibly make proper use of
you?"
   Tooney breaks out laughing. Eva joins
him, managing to explain, "I work for the
Civil Service. Processing job applications.
You two think you have a coding problem
on your hands. You ought to see ours."
   "Let 'er rip," Blake chuckles. "What's the
code for 'Changed Jobs'?"
   "Let's see....Applicant Changed Jobs—five
point seven E."
   "How about 'Retired'?"
   "Easy one. That'd be five point eight I."
   "Now then. How about illness?"
   "Terminal?"
   "Heck, why not. Live it up."
   "Name your disease."
   "Try cancer."
   "More specific, please."
   "Leukemia."
   "We give that a six point six Q."
   "Q? How in hell do they get Q from
'leukemia'?"
   "My dear husband. There is no wherefore
to the Service."
   "Radiation sickness?"
   "Still in committee. We lump that into
seven point oh, your basic 'Deceased.'" The
Blakes break off their vaudeville, noticing
the unintended effect on the audience.
Ressler has gone silent, the glow of the
corner streetlight unmistakably glinting off
his ambushed cheeks. He feels, for the first
time, his mother's status, something in the
6.6 range. She died three years back, while
he was in grad school. The details of the
woman's decline are intact in memory; only
the nightmare of not being able to name
what was happening remained lost until this
evening, the evening the U.S. fires its first
rocket-powered atomic warhead due west of
this improvised lawn party, in the empty
sands of Nevada.
   Only five months between diagnosis and
death. He took a leave from studies to go
home and sit with her through a pain that
she preferred to the alternative bouts of
annihilating fatigue. His role was to sit and
assure her of the great strides medicine was
making at that moment. He would tell her,
day after day, as her hips wasted to
grotesque ripples, that the most important
thing was to fight the malignancy and live
for the outside shot. Mind as medicine: no
other course. Deny the numbers. Cancer lives
for the onset of common sense. Reconcile
yourself to it, and it wins.
   A nursing more for his sake than the dying
woman's, obsessed, all the way up to the
final metastasis, with proving that mental
function did not altogether dissipate, was
not dispersed by illness and treatment. That
she was preserved inside somewhere. "Read
anything today, Mom?" he would lead.
"Well, yes I have," she would answer, with a
weak smile hinting at the miracle of
deception. He never asked for specifics.
   He does not hear the Blakes stop their
routine. He is elsewhere, thinking how he
used to sit with her on the front porch, just
like this, late in the evening, not daring to
hold her hand, while she said unexplainable
things about the effects of her illness on
perception. "Who would believe what this
place sounds like? I had no idea nature made
so much noise."
   She talked for the first time about her
father, the third child from the right in front
of the shaft entrance in a famous photo of
child mine workers. Now Ressler has never
harbored closet Lamarckism; social traumas
experienced by the forefathers are not
visited upon the sons. But his grandfather's
life underground left its imprint—the dream
of meliorism that child laborers impart rose
up from his mother's lungs on the warm
tufts of her disease. Suffering, her last looks
said to him, must be the precursor to greater
things. Every rung goes higher and higher.
   She died ten days after his return to
school. In a misguided final tribute to her
son, she left her body to medical science,"
meaning, Stuart knew, that third-year
premeds lopped her organs off in anatomy
lab. Because he never saw her body again,
she did not die until this evening, when Evie
Blake assigns her a number. He always knew
the world would one day be like this: a night
of no temperature, sitting outside with no
one there any longer to call him in. Free to
sit forever in the company of strangers, in
the belly of a cold, formless waiting.
   The Blakes, seeing they have accidentally
sent their host off alone, call it a night and
take their leave back to K-53-A. But they read
him wrong. Ressler comes back to the lawn
party, wanting them to resume the careless
evening, extend it, stretch out the mixed
blessing of companionship until morning.
But searching, he cannot find the pointer to
the words "Don't go yet." The Blakes
disappear, waving, across the lawn. He
cannot even find those two syllables for a
departing greeting. Minutes later he
remembers it: "Good night." Come back.
Good night.

  Landscape with Conflagration

   I've reached a sticking point in my
homework, the background reading that
must take me inside the man. Not a barrier to
comprehension: I remember, flexing my
intellect again this season, that given time, I
have the capacity to tackle anything,
however formidable. And I have more than
enough time—time spreading from sunny
sahara mornings alone over onion bagels
and oranges to arctic nights, postponing
sleep as long as possible, armed with only
thick books and a headboard lamp. I've hit a
barrier not to comprehension but to
credulity. How can an assortment of invisible
threads inside one germ cell record and pass
along the construction plans of the whole
organism, let alone the cell housing the
threads themselves? I've grasped the
common metaphor: the blueprint gene
somehow encodes a syntactic message, an
entire encyclopedia of chemical engineering
projects. I feel the thrill of attaching abstract
gene to physical chromosome. But it remains
analogy, lost in intermediary words.
   The task Dr. Ressler set himself was
merely—and only he could have thought
"merely"—to capture the enigma machine
that tweaks this chromosomal message into
readability. Did he believe that nothing was
lost in translation as signals percolated up
from molecules in the thread into him, that
brain, those limbs, that hurt, alert face?
Searching for his own lexicon required faith
that the chemical semaphore could serve as
its own rosetta, faith that biology too could
be revealed through its particulars. Faith
that demonstration could replace faith.
   It grows like a crystal, this odd synthesis of
evolution, chemistry, and faith, spreads in all
directions at once, regular but aperiodic. By
Ressler's birth, enzymes—catalysts driving
the chemical reactions of metabolism—were
identified as proteins. The structure of
proteins—responsible for everything from
the taste of sole to the toughness of a
toenail—strikes me as ridiculously simple:
linear, crumpled necklaces of organic pearls
called amino acids. What's more, the protein
necklaces directing all cell processes consist
of series of only twenty different amino acid
beads.
   It seems impossible: twenty can't be
sufficient word-hoard to engineer the tens
of thousands of complex chemical reactions
required to make a thing live. But lying in
bed under my arctic nightlight, carrying out
the simple arithmetic, I see how the abject
simplicity of protein produces more potential
than mind can penetrate. A necklace of only
two beads, each in one of twenty colors, can
assume any of four hundred different
combinations. A third bead increases this
twenty times—eight thousand possible
necklaces. I learn that the average protein
necklace floating in the body weighs in at
hundreds of beads. At that length, the
possible string combinations exceed the
printed sentences in man-made creation.
Room to grow, in other words.
   The protein bead string folds up, forms
secondary structures determined by its amino
acid sequence. The shape of these fantastic
landscapes, fuzz-motes as convoluted as the
string is simple, gives them their specific,
chemical power. Their jungle of surface
protrusions provides—like so many dough
forms—niches for other chemicals to
assemble and react.
   But if these cookie cutters—in countless
possible fantastically complex shapes—build
the body, what builds the builders? The
answer appalls me. The formula for the
builder molecules as well as its
implementation are contained in another
long, linear molecule. This time the beads
come in only four colors. It says something
about my progress in scientific faith that I
accept the calculation showing that the
possible combinations in one such
foursquare informational molecule exceed
the total number of atoms in the universe.
   But I hang up on the idea of such a linear
molecule encoding a breathing, hoping,
straining, failing, aging, dying scientist. I
find as I read that I'm in good company. If I
still ran the Quote Board, I'd use tomorrow
that gem of Einstein's when meeting Morgan
and hearing of his project to mechanize
biology:

           No, this trick won't work— How
         on earth are you ever going to
         explain in terms of chemistry and
         physics so important a biological
         phenomenon as first love?

   But I no longer run the Quote Board. I run
nothing now except the Jan O'Deigh
Continuing Education Project. And for that, I
have only more history. When counting
aminos fails to put me to sleep, I charm
insomnia by reading Beadle and Tatum's
1940 work on the bread mold Neurospora.
Only seventeen years old when Ressler got
his brainstorm, it must have read like a
classic to a student raised on it. While the
world once more indulged its favorite
occupation, Beadle and Tatum dosed mold
with X-rays to induce mutations. Raising
thousands of test-tube strains, they
produced mutants that could no longer
manufacture required nutrients. Mutated
chromosomes failed to produce necessary
enzymes.
   With an excitement that penetrates even
the sober journal account, they crossed a
mutant that could no longer make enzyme E
with its normal counterpart. Half the
offspring had the mutation and half did not.
Enzyme production precisely mirrored
Mendelian inheritance. One gene, one
enzyme. Each time I read the conclusion, I
hear his perverse question: "What could be
simpler?"
   A unique gene, coding for a unique
enzyme: Cyfer inherited as dogma what
actually arose only through recent, bitter
debate. The limited informational content of
DNA—the four bases adenine, guanine,
cytosine, and thymine—did not seem
adequate to build the fantastically varied
amino acid necklaces. For some time, the size
of DNA was underestimated, and even after
the enormous molecular weight was correctly
determined, many scientists believed that the
four bases followed one another in
repeating order. Redundant series carry no
more information than a news program
repeating, "Earlier today, earlier today.."
   DNA was long rejected as the
chromosomal message carrier. Some
researchers believed that proteins
themselves were the master blueprint, even
though every protein would require others
to build it. Avery blazed the trail out of
confusion. His 1944 paper showed that the
substance transforming one bacterial strain
to another was not protein but DNA.
Inheritance was rapidly being reduced from
metaphor to physical construct. DNA was a
plan that somehow threaded raw amino acid
beads into proteins. These protein chains in
turn catalyzed all biological process. Cyfer's
question—the coding problem—was how a
long string of four types of things stood for
thousands of shorter, twenty-thing strings.
   Before the problem could even be posed,
scientists had first to determine a structure
for DNA that fit the evidence. The structure
fell the year Ressler attained legal
adulthood, one of the most celebrated
solutions in science. X-ray diffractions of
crystalline nucleic acid suggested a helix. The
beautiful Chargaff Ratios demanded the
amount of adenine equal that of thymine,
guanine equal cytosine, and G + A equal C +
T. DNA presented too many structural
possibilities to be cracked by standard
organic analysis. By starting with the
constraints in Franklin's and Wilkins's data,
Watson and Crick tinkered with cutouts until
the shoe dropped. They hit upon the double
helix, where complementary base pairs—G
pairing always with C, A always with T—form
the spiral rungs.
   Temperament, coded in long strings of
base pairs, plays a big part in any
interpretation of data. The full ramifications
of the model were not quickly grasped. It
followed neatly that chromosomes were just
supercoiled filaments of DNA. Mendel's
genes were simply sections of chromosome,
a length of spiral staircase— say ten
thousand base-pair rungs spelling out
auburn hair. But using four letters to convey
the content of all living things seemed like
transmitting every Who's Who of this century
in staticky dots and dashes across a copper
filament.
   How was the message read? How to
determine the language of the cipher?
Understand that question and I've
understood him. Dr. Ressler, receiving intact
the work of the structurists, trained his
temperament on the smallest end of the
genetic spectrum, the connecting link. The
task given him was to determine how
twin-helical sequences of four bases




  strung amino acids into enfolded protein:

   ... threonine-valine-tryptophan...
   Dr. Ressler's question was not primarily
cytological or chemical or even genetic,
although it was all these. Heredity's big
hookup lay in information, pure form. It
floated agonizingly close in the air, an
all-expenses-paid trip to Stockholm taped to
the bottom of some chair in the lecture hall.
Yet prestige played no more than ironically
in Ressler's mind. His was a drive deeper
than recognition, a need to cross that
hierarchical border, that edge, that
isomorph, that metaphor, to get to the thing
itself, to arrive at the enigma machine, reach
it on pattern alone, reach down and take
into his hands the first word, name it, that
string of base-pairs coding for all
inheritance, desire, ambition, the naming
need itself—first love, forgiveness, frailty.

  Canon at the Second

   I know that need. It keeps me up late,
reading. It ruins the best hours of the day, as
I run downstairs every fifteen minutes to
check the mail. But no further word from
Franklin. Only that northern scene, the
lovely, faraway village with the fire forever
frozen in gesso, proves to me the man ever
existed. The painter known only to him, me,
and a dozen experts in esoterica: Herri met
de Bles, Frank Todd's coding problem. How
to find, in the work of a forgotten artist,
evidence of that same message Dr. Ressler
looked for, the same link, only from the
other end, writ large in the outside world.
   Frank's problem from the start was
convincing himself that skill of hand and eye
was its own best excuse for using it. He was
temperamentally incapable of believing his
own ingenious proofs. He was already in
danger of disappearing before I met him.
The pointless proliferation of voices,
dispersed over the map, shouting,
conjugating, declining, declaring nothing
except look at me, look at all this, lost and
leading nowhere except to their own noise,
led him to a place where I can't trace him.
   Already too long out of training, I
remember I own a book that might be good
for something besides proving that people I
once worked with actually liked me. I go to
my private reserves and pull out the Times
Atlas, goodbye gift from my old life. I flip
through the maps and locate the pages
corresponding to his landscape: Dinant, the
Meuse, Namur province, Wallonia, Belgium. I
slip my finger up an inch, over the language
line into Flanders:
   Leuven, Mechelen, Antwerp, a world
away. What does it tell, the geometrical
isomorph, the representations drawn
impeccably to scale? Does it help to know
that Franklin, on 7/6/85, by the postmark,
was near the tip of my fingernail?
   I need more. I return to the shelves, pull
out a bit of esoterica of my own. I fish about
in my two-volume historical atlas for that
contradiction in terms, the same place at a
different time. I find the cartoons—Low
Countries, Burgundy, Hapsburg Sphere. I
follow the ebb and flow of colored lines,
picture Herri moving through this Gobelin
tapestry of economic confusion and
geopolitics. But I can't recover the place,
realize it in imagination. I sidetrack myself on
imagining Franker in his self-described
liberation of new words. I studied French for
four years in school, during which time I
never met a native speaker. All my classes
were taught in English, and all I can
remember is the cheat of making a sound
intermediate between "le" and "la" and the
insistence of the texts that one uses the
formal form with everyone except intimates,
small children, and animals.
   Yet I must have retained some spark of the
secret life of words, Franker's excuse for
more study. Because I also remember being
able to translate, fluently and without
prompting, the one French sentence Dr.
Ressler claimed to know. He rolled it out
wistfully as early as the second visit I made to
their mechanical hideaway, and he repeated
it at odd moments in the course of the year I
was his friend. Je ne fais aucun mal en
restant ici. I do no harm by remaining here.
   He claimed only one other standing bit of
foreign-language repertoire, Bach's favorite
saying: Es muss alles möglich zu machen
seyn. All things must be possible. Tenuous
assertion at best. Both Dr. Ressler and Todd
sacrificed themselves to a corollary
translation: All things that are possible are
real.




VII
  Breakthroughs in Science

   The daily papers have never been kind to
his field. They cover the developments well
enough, in an Ike's coronary kind of way.
They lay out in lay terms the birth pangs of
the science, but wind up promising a bevy of
mail-order life forms by the end of the
decade. The subject matter itself isn't beyond
reporters. The logic of inheritance is
straightforward. Beadle and Tatum are more
coherent than the Mideast. However
complex science becomes, it remains at least
internally consistent.
   The trouble with science journalism lies in
time scale. The average news story wraps up
in a week to ten days. News confuses
significant with novel. I was shocked to
discover, at twenty, that news carefully
culled not the day's most important events
but the most alarming and unusual.
Lingering separatist movements are not
news, except to today's corpse. Species
extinction is too mundane to report. Every
"event" in molecular genetics is made out to
be a fast-breaking story, conspiring toward
an end. A sneak preview of a biological
revolution on Monday implies that the
derivative consumer good will hit the
shelves by week's end.
   His science has done its share to
aggravate expectations. Genetics has
evolved more in the three decades since
Ressler worked it than in the previous three
millennia. It's easy to think that discoveries
will continue to pour out in saturation
patterns. But journalism errs in equating
development with advance. A new postulate
is no more news than a new poem. What
news reports as fundamental progress in
knowing the world may be only a subtle
rearrangement of best analogies.
   A new relation is not conquistador's
plunder. Science is not about control. That is
technology, another urge altogether. The
pursuit of living pattern that possessed
Ressler has nothing to do with this year's
apotheosis of bioengineering. He once
remarked that mistaking science for
technology deprived the nonscientist of one
of the greatest sources of awe, replacing it
with diet as filling as Tantalus's fruit. I had
only to hear the man talk for fifteen minutes
to realize that science had no purpose. The
purpose of science, if one must, was the
purpose of being alive: not efficiency or
mastery, but the revival of appropriate
surprise.
   Separately, the three of us relearned that
truth more times than I thought a body
capable. If Dr. Ressler lamented the
commercialization of science, he despaired
even more over the science of commerce. He
told us of legislation that had come before
the 85th Congress in the wake of the Civil
Rights Bill—the White Coat Ruling. In the
few years that it took sponsors to bail out of
radio's Official Detective in favor of TV's
Name That Tune they'd developed a trick
that threatened the public's ability to
discriminate. Advertisers found they could
dramatically boost sales of just about
anything by having a man in glasses and
white coat hold it up for view. Weed killer,
rubber tires, lipstick: a few Erlenmeyer flasks
in the background, and a sales pitch became
news.
   A well-meaning legislator decided that
blind trust was, like Robeson and
Oppenheimer, a national security risk. He
introduced a measure that would require
every televised commercial where someone
held up anything that bubbled or doodled
anything resembling trig on a chalkboard to
bear the caption "A Simulation." The
difficulty in the bill lay in the shadiness of
implication in the first place. Commercials
worked because actors never came out and
said, "I'm a scientist." Credentials were left
to the audience to infer. If the bill passed,
opponents reasoned, any endorsers who
donned a smock of any kind would have to
prove they weren't simulating. "It's one
thing to legislate on poultry, race relations,
and atomic energy," Ressler said, with that
tightening of mouth muscles that passed for
irony. "But legislating inference is another
matter. Simulation beats legislation nine falls
out of ten."
   He remembered the insignificant bill with
the precision that locked his half century
into his brain. As he tossed off
thirty-year-old details with accuracy, I felt I'd
gladly suffer aphasia at fifty for a few
decades of that memory. "They passed an
invitation around Illinois, asking for expert
witnesses to fly to Washington. They wanted
white coats to sell the bill to the legislators!
None of us volunteered, of course. I imagine
your generation is too sophisticated to
realize what a betrayal of calling it would
have been then to attempt to legislate
thinking. The bill eventually passed, but did
nothing to stop the human mind from
reifying every conceivable sales pitch." All
things must be possible. And all possible
things are real.
  It hurt, listening to him, to think he never
wrote anything but that little sampler, that
one article giving so little glimmer of who he
could be in speech. Starting with a
Resslerism, I would search for a simulation
for my day's quote:

            If we saw as much of the world
          as we do not see, we should be
          aware, in all probability, of a
          perpetual multiplication and
          variation of forms.

  I used Montaigne to obliquely
acknowledge that Ressler aphorism, from
deep in a night's simulated conversation,
too disturbing to post publicly as news,
about how we differ more from ourselves
than we do from one another.

  Countercheck Quarrelsome

   In weeks, he has struck an acquaintance
with everyone on the team. Only Ulrich, like
all effective leaders, remains aloof. Strange:
Ressler actually enjoys the person he
becomes in the company of his colleagues.
He drops without thinking into a different
personality with each—sardonic father to
Lovering's brashness, clowning younger
brother to Blake and Eva, sympathetic cousin
to Woyty's low-grade paralysis, and child
craftsman to Botkin's omnivorous intellect.
With Cyfer's last member, Jeanette Koss, he
somehow falls into awkward reserve. Not his
ordinary, comfortable quiet, but
incapacitating self-consciousness. Irritating
to him and certainly confusing to the
woman, who has gone out of her way to be
pleasant.
   It isn't her attractiveness that puts him off.
Jeanette's features are not the sort that have
ever threatened him. Her curves tend toward
a topographical fullness he associates with
varsity cheerleaders and nursing mothers.
Those women who came closest to causing
his own college coursework to suffer
typically ran toward the homeless waif: You
Can Save This Girl or You Can Turn the Page.
The taste may be consanguine, but was
certainly in place before his mother was
reduced to terminal spindliness by her 6.6.
   To date, he has chosen to turn the page
rather than save, although nights in the
bunk in Stadium Terrace, in half-sleep, he
regrets not having run the proffered
experiment with a meager waif or two. These
private nostalgias of desire reassure him that
the clumsy cadences he suffers in random lab
encounters with Dr. Koss are neither ugly
nor unnecessarily indicting. He can't be hot
for her. Not in so many words.
   Yet it burns him to know nothing, to be in
the dark about her except for the
public-domain data that she is married and a
few years his senior. He spends the first
weekend in September raking up something
substantive on her. Pickings are slim. He
begs the superannuated department
secretary on invented pretext to let him
browse the staff files, but she will release no
information without triplicate request from
God.
    He runs into Dr. Koss in the staff
lunchroom. She smiles awkwardly at him
over her coffee cup. "Keeping the head
dry?" To collect himself, he smiles back,
pretends to be looking for someone, and
leaves. Shortly after, at a colloquium where
she delivers a lucid contribution on
punctuation theory, he thinks to address her
in the hall, ask for clarification. But he falls
back instead on skepticism: she could reveal
nothing that experiment wouldn't expose
more fully. He collars Blake, the closest thing
he has to a confidant in the Midwest. "Dr.
Toon. What do you make of the Koss
comma-free code?"
    "First-rate," Blake answers, grinning
quizzically. "You?"
    Too obvious an audit trail. Ressler swears
off direct questioning and takes to the
stacks. By summer's end, he has gotten
adept at caterwauling down the catwalks,
and the stink of binding paste no longer
distracts him. He digs up her dissertation:
"Simple Non-pathogenic Autosomal
Mutations." He settles in for an evening with
her apprentice piece. The woman describes
some interesting mutagen manipulation. But
the paper, while professional, contains little
further interest beyond her education
(Wesleyan and Cornell) and date of birth,
February 14, 1929—St. Valentine's Day
massacre.
    A thorough search of the journals turns
up references to her as coauthor on those
Illinois publications Ressler already read
before hitting campus. He falls back on the
biographical compilations in the Reference
Room, but turns up only her sterile university
profile. By chance, he finds a mention of her
husband in the Local Interest area: a
praise-laden entry on Koss, Herbert, in a
chapbook, Who's Who Around and About
C-U.
    The fellow is a chemical engineer, a leader
in local food technology. His chief
contribution to the spiral of ingestibility: a
superior method of getting the barbecue
powder to stick to potato chips. The
chapbook reports his guarded optimism on
work toward a chip that will always come out
of the bag intact. Their typical dinner
conversation is too bizarre to consider.
Battle Creek, the spoonful of frozen OJ, will
never be the same.
    Printed matter alone will not solve his
Koss-word puzzle. As a result of killing a day
and a half reading her thesis, he is
unprepared to report on the article he's
been assigned for the next Blue Sky. Ulrich
calls on him to deliver. Ressler sputters; for
the first time ever—as far back as first grade,
when his teacher let him take over her
abortive lesson on the language of bee
dancing—he has come to class unprepared.
He can admit to not having read the article,
blowing his short-term credibility and
profiting the team nothing. Or, knowing
what he does about the authors' previously
published research, the state of the art, and
the article abstract, he can extrapolate a
reasonable opinion. Not intellectual fraud,
just the increasingly necessary short cut up
the print mountain.
   In the critical minute under the arc lights,
Ressler decides that, Schrödinger
notwithstanding, not talking about what he
can't know doesn't in this instance preclude
his talking about what he doesn't. He'll take
a closer look at the article later that
afternoon; if it should turn out that he's off
base, he can give out his reconsidered
opinion at the next session. Science is about
reconsidering, revising one's position in the
light of more light. He takes a breath. The
description comes out easier than he
thought. "I would say, tentatively, that we
don't have to concern ourselves too much
here with the Litner group's angle. It's
ingenious in making the magic numbers fit;
they get twenty out of four all right, but...
Well, I think they may be overlooking a few
stereochemical constraints."
   "For instance?" Ulrich looks up from
scribbling, suddenly interested, choosing the
worst possible moment to sit up and take
notice. That's why Ulrich's in charge. Not
because of the importance of his early work,
but because of his intellectual aggression.
Attentive, noisy, blunt: all dominant genes.
The team leader hasn't shown half so much
interest in Ressler's rate experiment as he
shows in this almost irrelevant paper.
   Ressler goes into a controlled stall. "I'd
like another look at the piece before I
commit, but—" The whole team's attention is
now alerted by that most expressive musical
device, the rest. "Well, for instance... the
article seems to me to be sidetracked on a
code that isn't even colinear."
   "Really?" An unexpected vocal timbre
chimes in. "That's not how I read the
principal thrust at all." A voice as mellifluous
as a mortician's. He turns from his lame
chalkboard illustration to see who could be
so intent on sautéing him in public. The ID is
more confirmation than discovery.
   "Of course, if Dr. Koss can translate
Litner's prose back into English, she's a
better man than I."
   The room, at a cusp of embarrassment,
finds outlet in that remnant of violence,
laughter. Lovering, nervous as the day Ulrich
threw Salk in his stigmata, leads the way,
letting loose a full-blooded cackle. Toveh
Botkin, on the other hand, purses the notch
above her lip crease, grim but forgiving the
entire catalog of human failings. The
deep-set, brown amusement of Dr. Koss's
eyes flashes explicit warning: forced the
issue? Gotten what you want?
   Despite narrow escape, the incident
humiliates him. In a few sentences, he has
fallen monumentally in his own sight, if not
in peer estimation. He wants only to quit this
place, escape everyone, go punish himself.
Succumbed to ridiculous, avoidable boy's
self-deception. It disgusts him to replay the
incident. Shame is not acid enough to
eradicate it. Work is ruined for the remainder
of the day. He smells his own unmistakable
animal odor. Yes, those most capable of
making some noise in the world are precisely
those with the greatest capacity for
shrugging off sin, for distributing their
felonies sympathetically across the whole
hinged circumstance of shameful existence.
But in the face of his own weakness, he
cannot see how to do it. The shame of false
witness mars his perfect record, debases his
currency. Misrepresentation of the facts: no
more forgivable for being mundane. An
indelible blot on the transcript: a Fail,
invalidating all good faith.
   Even by evening, he cannot shake the
afternoon libel. He probes the ugly truth
compulsively, unable to keep from picking at
the wound. Far from salved by knowing how
little consequence his minor lie carries, he is
doubly appalled by how little it took to make
him lose his head. How little it would have
taken to come clean, to ask for an absolution
it would now shame him worse to go after.
   Forgiveness requires not that he forget
the crime but that he remember every other
shame from his swelling past: the shoplifted
library book, the violated confidence of a
friend, the broken crockery deceptively
reassembled and left to break again at the
next, innocent touch. Seamy little mazes of
shame, not even respectably bourgeois,
more disgusting for their avoidable
pettiness. He nurses the catalog, above all,
this afternoon's grubby appendix.
Contemptible desire to represent himself
well. How much easier it would be to
preempt the lie, come clean. And yet—the
heart of the shame—he still could not, even
now, if the whole scenario were his to
correct, bring himself to reveal the real
reason for his lack of preparation: I was
digging up the goods on Mrs. Koss. Not
even a matter of momentarily fouling the
facts. He can't even bring himself to look at
his motive in mucking about, much less
confess it to others in good faith. He has shit
on the truth.
   An even more indicting memory reveals his
betrayal. He recalls, with sick precision, that
day almost twenty years ago: first landmark
of childhood, his seventh birthday. He
awoke that morning with excitement that
doubled when his father explained that his
present would arrive by parcel express. His
parents' anxiety outstripped his own. Then,
producing emotion difficult for a
seven-year-old to grasp—awe,
disappointment, alarm, thrill, and, even then,
shame—the ruinously expensive set of
encyclopedias arrived.
   Stuart, with child's intuition, knew at once
his parents' sacrifice in securing this gift. He
understood the enormity the minute the
delivery man arrived at the flat with four
unliftable cases. He wanted to plead with
them, "Oh, no, no thank you. You mustn't."
Thirty inexhaustible volumes, a yearbook,
and an index. His father calls to him in a
voice that never rid itself of the scratch of
factories, "Look here, the Ivory Coast. Isaac
Newton. Phloem and Xylem. Everything
worth knowing, in these pages.
Alphabetical, too." Mother, father, and he sit
together on the floor and unpack the
treasure cases, poring over exotic entries the
rest of the afternoon, the rest of
remembered childhood.
   An earlier edition had been heavily
discounted, but Stuart's father had resolved
on the most recent human understanding or
none at all. His father never used the
incurred debt, the years of resulting
belt-tightening, against the boy. Stuart
never gave him cause. The spines on every
volume were broken within two years. The
atlas of creases that formed along the
binding—proof that the boy's precocity
exceeded even his parents' guess—became
his father's favorite feature of the set. He
would run his fingers down the prematurely
worn bindings on domestic evenings,
saying, "It's all in there. Everything we've put
together. Only a matter of learning how to
get to it."
   This is the ingenuous faith in
accountability that Ressler has betrayed. For
what? To keep himself from looking foolish
in front of a woman for whom he cannot
even plead the aberration of desire.
Spirit-numbing memories follow one on
another until he resurrects the summit
agony. He was then twelve; the folks, years
after purchase, still paying off the last
encyclopedia installment. They had moved to
Pittsburgh, "relocated," Dad explained, "for
the War Effort." They were vacationing,
camping in Maine, driving up the coast,
when his father, at the wheel, in the middle
of "Does Your Mother Know You're Out,
Cecilia," slumped over in his seat. Stuart
thought it a joke, laughed at the old man's
slapstick.
   But his father had suffered a massive
myocardial infarction. Stuart's mother went
instantly to pieces, as she could be counted
on to do in the pinch of horror, the descent
of real event. His father superhumanly
managed to guide the car to the roadside.
Stuart's mother could not have driven then
even if she'd had a license. They were
stranded in a remote stretch; hours might
pass before they could flag a passerby. It fell
to the twelve-year-old to drive them to
hospital, while his mother flailed at her
man's chest in a pointless effort to revive
him.
   From long afternoons browsing the
encyclopedia paragraphs and plates, Stuart
knew that the clutch was on the left and the
accelerator on the right. Miraculously, from
recall, he taught himself how to drive,
covering the fifty miles to the hospital in two
hours. Next to him on the front seat his
mother huddled over the body, a perfect
parody of the Michelangelo Pietà illustrating
the article on Classical Sculpture. All the
while, his father stupidly tried to get out last
advice for the boy. Stuart repeatedly shouted
at him to shut up, to save his strength.
   He knows now what the man killed
himself trying unsuccessfully to get out: How
wonderful, to have had a child who might
add to the endeavor. What a piece of work it
all was. No sacrifice at all! Thirty volumes, a
supplement, and an index. And all
alphabetical.
   This is what he's perjured. The world has
grown another summer evening, one that
seems the end of all summer evenings. He
puts the Young Person's Guide to the
Orchestra on the grinder. But neither the
musical primer nor Olga's spinning convey
anything to his leaden ear. Music fails him at
the moment when he needs its compassion
most. Autumn is here, an autumn that will
spell the end of his front-lawn vigils. In town
over two months; the pieces that hung so
tantalizingly close to falling in place are
farther now from linking than the day he
arrived.
   Already smelling the mixture of cold air
and burning leaves that will mark the
change of seasons, Ressler assigns himself
penance, the only possible contrition. If one,
clean, unimpeachable nugget lies anywhere
within his ability to explicate, he will
surrender it to Cyfer. First, the busywork rate
experiment Ulrich has assigned him. Then, if
chance favors, the simple laboratory
technique for determining codon
assignments, the leverage so agonizingly
close that he can close his eyes and see it in
the phosphene tracers on his lids. And not
one discovery will be his.
   However close he feels, he may never be
any closer to the method than he is now, no
closer than the baying kitchen mutt to the
invading moon. His only means, not of
adding his name to the volumes but of
partially recovering perjured good faith, lies
in returning to the puzzle, redoubling his
efforts with focus so intense as to shame all
effort he has yet made. He must place himself
inside the isolated problem, feel its full,
unrelenting force, cut himself off from rest,
attach himself to the chance of not coming
out, of never emerging from the search.
   Another summer evening's knock at the
door and Ressler assumes it is Tooney and
Eva, through empathy of unpremeditated
friendship, knowing to come and sit with
him in his moment. The knock is them;
humans are the only species that condition
after one event. He stands, ready for
companionship. He opens the door, jokingly
asking Eva, "So what's the code for
sickle-cell anemia?"
   But it is not Blake or his remarkable Civil
Service wife. In the doorframe stands the
woman who set off this string of
self-Contempt. Out where the welcome mat
should be, incomprehensible, stands
short-sleeved, full-bodiced Dr. Koss.

  Facts on File

   I believe it because it's absurd: the entire
Britannica—not to mention the stacks of my
old branch as well as the entire Library of
Congress—can in theory be encoded by a
single notch on a rod. The whole human
reservoir can be condensed to a single
information-bearing groove with no loss of
meaning. A trillion pages, the complete
journey from Aardvark to Zygote and back,
enpacked, retrievable, in a flick of a nick on a
stick.
   No high tech, no microengraving or
fantastic manipulation of silicon. Just a twig,
a pocket knife, and a grade-school ability
with numbers. Any text, however long and
complex, is a linear stream of characters.
Letters, punctuation marks, typograhic
symbols: fewer than a hundred types. Each
of these hundred can be replaced by a
unique three-digit number. Simple
substitution cipher, the sort even small
children use for urgent communications.
Montaigne's brutal truth "If we saw as much
of the world as we do not see..." becomes
131 006 222 023 005 222 019 001 023 222 001
019 222...
   So far, even the mathless boy I loved with
all my plaintext heart could take this
message and, in minutes, reverse-engineer
the meaning from the emotionless series.
Digitization is now a commonplace, long
since the stuff of grocery-line conversation.
As goes Montaigne, so goes the whole
Britannica: the entire set now represented by
a huge stream of codon digits, a giant,
linear, ma-cromolecular, information-rich
number.
   Now the remarkable twist. If I run the
triplets together and put a decimal point in
front of the number, the result is a rational
fraction running to millions of decimal
places. But a fraction represents, and is
represented by, a portion of any distance,
say from one end of a stick to the other. My
Montaigne number,
.131006222023005222019001023222001019222..
., along with my complete card box of quotes
of the day for every day of the year attached
to its tail, can now be committed to
infinitesimally compact storage. I can
incorporate my box of sayings in a discrete
point a little farther than 13/100 of the way
from tip to base. I might look at the mark
from time to time, delighting in knowing
that it encased the cycle of every famous
saying ever to flesh out my calendar.
   Alien, unnatural, counterintuitive. But
analogous simplicity encodes a far more
complex catalog. The map key, the
compression that put life's Britannica,
information intact, squarely in the palm of
Ressler's hand, sweetly resembles that long,
linear decimal.
   Ressler himself worked out the math back
in 1954, when the cell's translation game was
fast becoming obvious. The math itself was
easy: anyone with a little algebra could do it.
DNA—a long, irregular decimal with A, T, G,
and C as digits—consisted of innumerable
bases lying in line on the inside twist of the
helix. He had first to determine the width of
the coding unit— how many digits of A, T, G,
and C stood for one amino acid. This codon
obviously had to be wider than one base.
Codons one base wide could stand for only
four different amino acids, and proteins
required twenty. Two-base width allowed
sixteen different codons:

  AA AT AG AC TA TT TG TC GA GT GG GC
CA CT CG CC

  A vocabulary of sixteen was still four
words shorter than required. Three
successive rungs of the DNA
ladder—sixty-four different
combinations—at last produced enough
codons to name all twenty aminos, with
enough left over for start and stop codes or
any other special symbols that
protein-building might require. The triplet
codon suffered an embarrassment of riches:
forty-four more codons than amino acids.
What to do with the extras became the
sixty-four-codon-dollar question. More than
one codon might stand for the same amino
acid. Such code degeneracy might even carry
potential survival value, as Ressler intuited
early on.
   In 1957, researchers learned how much
easier it was to encode the Britannica than
to experimentally extract from a given
notched stick the particular Britannica it
encoded. The giant informational molecule
was the protein-constructing blueprint. The
DNA base-pair sequences mapped out
enzyme polypeptide chains. Ressler needed
only intercept the map key. The unit word
was a clump of at least three bases running
along the half-DNA helix. No evidence
strictly ruled out a larger codon, but most
researchers applied the rule of parsimony.
The next step was to determine exactly
which triplet codon linked which amino acid
to the enzyme under construction. Pure
pattern-breaking attracted the lion's share of
fascination: secret-message reading,
ingenuity impeded by no encumbrance
greater than paper and pencil.
   The fearful symmetry of this structure gave
a first glimpse of living logic. Ressler
described to us the days on the threshold,
poised on the brink of cracking the supreme
philosophical crime novel. His voice rarely
straying over the surrounding machine hum,
he imparted his urgency for resolution. He
compared his anxiety then to that anecdote
about Bach entering a party where the
harpsichordist broke off in terror at his
arrival. The composer had to rush past his
host to resolve the suspension with
appropriate cadence before making his
formal greeting.
   "There had to be a surprising aha, a way
we could get the cell to crack the code for
us. That was my bias. It's pure torment to
know that revolutionary, self-evident
connections might be anywhere but here.
We had no idea if a reliable method for
determining codon assignments even
existed. Some of us tried to tackle the
problem theoretically, in ignorance of the
data. On the other side of the tracks, retort
heaters went about gathering data without
grasping the formal problem. Like Brussels,
Balzano: traffic signs so bilingually cluttered
that neither camp could read them. My only
advantage was that, fresh from school, I
spoke just enough of both to put together
something dangerous." He smiled weakly, at
all that fluency hadn't prepared him for.
   He told the story of a friend's short-lived
glory. "Tooney Blake had been killing fifteen
minutes before teaching his seminar.
Doodling, he stumbled onto a stunning
twist. How many one-base triplets were
there? Four: AAA, CCC, GGG, and TTT. How
many had only two identical bases? Four
doubles times three in the last slot makes
twelve. Triplets of three different bases
produced four more combinations, ignoring
order. He did the sum a dozen times: four
plus twelve plus four, refusing to believe it
added up to the magic number.
   "Our chief immediately put him up for
promotion. Others told him to save his scrap
of work paper. Even interest in his piano
playing revived. We were all so intoxicated
by the dead-on simple fit that we
overlooked, for weeks, the fact that
Toon-ey's model treated the codons AGG,
GAG, and GGA identically. At last one of us
came to his senses and pointed out that
such codons could not possibly be read the
same. Tooney took the setback in stride, but
others wanted to pursue the prettiness, even
in the face of evidence."
   Parsing was all-important. If the codons in
the string

  ACGGATCTAGACCT...

  did not overlap, then the triplets
separated:
  ACG GAT CTA GAC...

   But if every codon shared two bases with
each neighbor, the same string would group
into entirely different words:

  ACG CGG GGA GAT ATC TCT CTA TAG...

   This Ml overlap packed more information
into each DNA half-strand but attached
restrictions on the ordering of code words.
The beauty of Gamow's diamond code lent
early favor to overlap models. When his
scheme failed to comply with experiment,
Ga-mow withdrew it but suggested another
full overlap in its place. But by 1957, such
schemes had been all but discarded. In full
overlap, every individual base appears in
two adjacent codons:
   CGAT ? CGA GAT ? x-y
   A mutation altering the single base G
would change both codon words, and thus
both amino acids x and y in the synthesized
enzyme. Even single mutations would then
produce at least two amino acid divergences.
Yet Ingram's famous sickle-cell hemoglobin
structure differed from normal hemoglobin
by only one amino. This argument damning
full overlap contained the germ of an
elegant and overlooked idea. A mutation,
traced from nucleic acid to that text's
observable protein translation, might be the
leverage needed to manufacture a rosetta.
The code could be cracked by tracing how it
read its message's errors. One of the most
powerful ideas in the infant science: the
power of the traceable, testable blit. If the
string itself was too complex to read, a small
mistake in it might nevertheless show up as
a discernible, translated difference.
   Error lay at the source of all change, all
species experiment. It was the author of all
the still emerging, undesignable variations
on life. Ressler's gift lay in understanding
that he stood on the threshold not just of
uniting chemistry with inheritance, but of
joining these both to the grandiose
Darwinian mutation. Tiny, cumulated,
field-tested errors were all that accounted
for the change from one species to
another—a half-dozen chromosomal
inversions between us and the nearest ape.
Advance by analogy: induce a small
alteration, note what value the process
assigns that one ripple. The most baldly
obvious idea imaginable. Yet as that most
quotable biologist J. B. S. Haldane,
instrumental in linking population genetics
to evolution, who attributed all
sonnet-writing to the microscopic speck of
sex chromosome, once said: "It is, in my
opinion, worth while devoting some energy
to proving the obvious."

  Today in History

   Although I still lived in the height of
summer, the days had already gone into
gradual decline, at first unfelt, then
undeniable, shuttling back to their opposite
number. The longest day of the year is also
the day diminishing sets in. In 1983, I lagged
behind the official sunset posted in the
almanac. As late as September, I felt the
expectation brought on by sky remaining
light late into evening.
   Like the student who in the course of a
perfunctory thesis finds a remarkable,
forgotten book, I took possession of my
discovery. Dr. Ressler worked his way into my
daily conversation. In a slow period at the
Reference Desk, I asked my colleague Mr.
Scott what he knew about mutation dating.
He had a master's in anthro, which suddenly
seemed to me a half brother to genetics by
incest. He put his fatherly arm around me
and said, "Dear, I'm afraid M.S. in my case
stands for Mostly Sketchy." He proposed
that general imbecility might be reduced if
people had to renew their diplomas the way
they had to renew driver's licenses. "It
wouldn't make anybody smarter. But it might
slow the nonsense glut."
   Not even Mr. Scott's cynicism checked my
new rhythm. For events, I turned with
increasing frequency to breakthroughs in
science. The Question Board tracked an
influx of interest in patented life. An
anonymous submission of a simple
penny-flipping brain teaser launched me
into an aside on evolutionary statistics. A
question about regional dialect differences
between sodas, tonics, floats, milk shakes,
frappes, jimmies, and sprinkles led me into
linguistic drift and a sketch of the
Sapir/Whorf hypothesis that regional
word-tools predispose ways of thought.
    I'd caught a salubrious dose of curiosity
about the live-in puzzle from nothing more
than meeting a man who had retreated from
it. I must have been waiting for the slightest
push, for when it came, I jumped. A dozen
visits to the night hermitage and the human
program took on conspiratorial beauty. The
science of inherited characteristics was only
my jumping-off metaphor, an entree into
what until then had been neutral material. I
felt the air of a new planet, the hint of
unexpected links leading somewhere, things
about to be revealed. I shed the curatorial,
began to sense the impenetrable mechanism
of mystery. Plainly put, when I woke up each
morning, I knew where I wanted to be.
    I had no idea whether my enthusiasm for
their company was returned any way but
politely. I only knew that when I visited MOL,
in the presence of those two, I discovered my
own powers of talk, undetected all these
years. Real work was still in front of me. I had
been only been resting, gathering strength
for an act of connection about to become
clear.
    The rush of anticipation of those days lent
even the most prosaic routine an edge I had
forgotten. My exhilaration began to
overstep propriety, at least by librarian's
standards. In answering a three-by-five
barely able to mask its terror about whether
"secular humanism" wasn't a
textbook-poisoning of the six-day wonder, I
summarized the Supreme Court majority
opinion, followed with Religio Medici, the
Doctor's religion, and wound up with
Haldane: asked what his work in life science
had taught him about God, he'd replied that
the Creator showed an inordinate fondness
for beetles.
    I received a formal reprimand. Unable to
take the matter seriously, I replied that my
answer contained no intended cheek. I was
notified by committee that nihilism was out
of line. I couldn't believe my ears. Haldane's
beetle sass, so far from the opposite of
nihilism, reveled in the force and grandeur
of accidental creation, a creation following
rules more remarkable than we ever assigned
any Maker. The incident blew over, leaving
invisible scar tissue; the hurt of misconstrual
left me a little more eager for that
somewhere else that MOL began to open up
for me.
    Within a few weeks I became a fixture in
the deserted office suite. In the first throes
of addiction, I saw that converted
warehouse as the last endangered habitat
left in my part of the world. Magic visits left
me impatient when I wasn't there. And when
I was, the lost digital domain filled me with
anticipation. Something was at last about to
happen. Something not in the least
expected.
   Inexplicable: how a room of indifferently
calculating machines and two men on the
beau geste shift keeping watch over
nocturnal computations could stir in me
anticipation profound enough to derail a life
that had worked comfortably for years. I
didn't know what reservoir they tapped in
me, what primitive string vibrated in
sympathetic resonance. And I didn't care to
know.
   There was the obvious explanation, of
course. But an objective female jury would
waffle between Todd and Tuckwell for raw
desirability. Todd had the undeniable
advantage of being new: his hair fell an
unusual way across his temples, and I could
watch for hours while his eyes modulated.
Even level-headed women are programmed
to spread themselves through every
available backwater of the gene pool. At
thirty, though, lust is no longer the
giddy-maker it once was. Hormones will have
the upper hand over me until their
manufacture stops. But Todd's appeal—the
reason I began to watch the library
clock—was something else as well. From the
moment I arrived at the MOL intercom to be
buzzed in, he would pay steady flirtation.
"What did we answer today? Wait, let me
guess: the name for the plastic end-seals on
shoe laces. No, no: how many wheelbarrows
of Weimar marks it took to buy a loaf of
bread." Tuckwell's manic humor made me
laugh out loud. Todd's jokes, always sotto
voce, made me ache with wanting.
   He ran a continuous interrogation; I stood
between him and the world. Frank's
questions had nothing to do with empirical
fact. His were amorphous, soft around the
edges. We would sit in the corporate
cafeteria while he, with a favorite skillet
ported from his apartment, grilled an
omelette with mace and cardamom for 9:00
p.m. early brunch. Out of the blue, he would
ask, "Did you get along well with your
parents?"
   I'd do my best to look abashed, but he
refused to let me off. Whether I answered in
earnest or replied, "What's it to ya, Bud?" he
would smile, ply me with requests for
intimate details, and then reveal the hidden
association. "These eggs, this aroma: my
father's Saturday-morning ritual. Complex
man, my father. Invested thirty-two hundred
dollars—half his life's savings—when I was
born, so there'd be something to send me to
college on. When I came of age, through
amazing business acumen, he had nursed
the investment to a grand total of
twenty-nine hundred dollars. Every Saturday
of conscious existence, he woke us up with
the aroma of omelette. All we need is a little
Coleman Hawkins. Loved music, my father.
Brought me up to play the accordion. 'You
can always make a living with one of these.'"
Then, quick key change: "Could you fall for a
man who played the accordion in his
youth?"
   The hopeless second question was
indistinguishable from the misplaced,
expansive first. He did not ask whether /
could fall for him. He asked me to savor a
sad hypothetical, a current of circumstantial
strangeness. He carried on like
this—questions, stories, self-absorbed
silences—nothing to lose and everything to
gain; pushing past the normal politeness of
terms. His constant word-wayfaring was all
the more romantic because it never struck
him as anything but ordinary. He read wildly,
at random. Dostoyevsky one weekend and
Little Women the next. "Have you read this?
God, it's beautiful! Let me read you one
passage." And one passage would inevitably
grow into a chapter and more, Todd reading
on expressively, obliviously, for forty
minutes, stopping only to feed a
punched-card deck into the hopper. I didn't
mind; I could spend all evening watching the
further hope and hurt that all manner of
words registered in his reading face. I had
forgotten how one could live on just words.
   Manhattan On-Line was my enclave, safe
haven in the middle of nowhere. I could
walk into the warehouse, summon the
rickety, trapezoidal elevator, ride to an upper
room where all the windows were silvered
over, showing nothing of the outside but a
crystal diffraction pattern of night
lights—the sparkle of Whistler's nocturne.
To drop out of the inescapable city from a
trapdoor in its middle was like discovering a
geothermal jungle at the pole that had
somehow evaded all the search algorithms
of man, even the ridiculously detailed
eye-in-the-sky satellite maps.
   MOL took me temporarily through the
forgotten gate to a platform outside, a
fulcrum. Todd became an oasis of
companionship, refuting and strange. His
thought was profoundly different, but not
so foreign that I required an interpreter. He
was capable of endless inventive talk about
any subject. "You know what Nietzsche
says? He says, 'Oy, this headache!' No, really.
He says: if two people are going to get
married, they ought above all to be able to
talk well to one another. Because everything
else disappears."
   But Tuckwell and I could talk too, before I
killed our conversation. Keith was very
bright, peripherally alert. If he had lost the
ability to surprise me, he could still keep me
honest. But his job, his view of people, his
life in the city had cut a rift between us, a
gulf of getting and spending. Tuckwell was
an adman, I a librarian. Should never have
happened In the first place. However
implausibly long our contract had lasted, all I
had left to give Tuckwell was my departure.
But on ambivalent days, when I remembered
the woo we two too had started with, even
that idea seemed rationalization.
   The man I lived with, well-adjusted
ambassador of urban neu-roticism, used
sardonic salesmanship to rouge the bruise of
living here. Todd, Keith's maladjusted
obverse, was sick at heart from believing
that men could live in this grisly grid system
as they once lived in Bruges. And yet that
sad, protective urge—his coming to me to
save a man already beyond repair—drew me
out. I thought—incredible vanity!—I might
keep him company.
   "So what do all these boxes do?" I asked
one night after we had solved the crossword
together. We had been sitting for some time
in the hum that passed for silence when I
realized I still didn't know what all the
equipment was.
   Todd looked affectionately around the
room. "My babies? Bookkeeping, mainly.
Hey. Might that be the only word in English
with three consecutive double letters?"
   "How should I know? Stick to the point."
But he was already on the phone to Dr.
Ressler in the control room. Todd waved to
his superior, although we could not see
through the one-way glass whether the
other waved back.
   "The professor'll write a search routine for
other triple doubles and run it on the
dictionary file. Where were we?"
   'Tour babies."
   "I call them that? Perverse. In any case, we,
if I can use first person plural for a group I've
only seen assembled once in my life, are
what are obnoxiously called Information
Brokers. A fuzzy concept. Close as I can tell,
it means we provide data and services to
other folks—some permanent clients, some
steady customers, and a few one-shot users.
I'm forbidden by Scout's honor to tell you
their names, but I could spell out initials.
Alternately, you could infer them through
Twenty Questions."
   "That's OK. I get the idea. What data do
you sell?"
   "Who wants to know?" He looked around
furtively. "Well, we have two general
categories up for auction. First, the standard
numbers racket. Big-time data processing.
Receivables, Payables, Ledgers, and Payrolls
for a dozen credit unions, even a state
office." I gathered this was the daily,
repetitive processing that made up the bulk
of his evening. "Second, the piece sales. Our
list-crunching spins off information that
either these clients, or others by the same
name, are willing to spend major world
currencies for. Anything from mailing lists
to—" He shrugged, suggesting that no
enumeration could catch all the categories,
cross-references, or calculations someone
somewhere might find useful.
   "The truth is, I'm not supposed to know
myself who we render what services to. This
whole outfit is run on distributed ignorance.
A little like civics. Day and night shifts work
in separate memory partitions. Analysts
aren't allowed in programmers' area.
Programmers are locked out of Operations.
The hardware guys are not permitted in the
listings library. The software guys can't touch
the machines. As an Operator, I'm not even
supposed to know how to program.
Barefoot, preggers, and harmless. But the
professor has taught me a little." His face
reflected that truism about the danger of a
little knowledge. "COBOL's a piece of cake.
No conjugations, no cases, no inflections.
Fortunately for me, I didn't mention
language skills on my application."
   "Officially, then, what do you do?"
   "As little as possible, as you must have
noticed." He took me on a second tour, one
that made more sense to me now that I had
visited the place a few times. "Think of us as
pure functionaries. Wednesday's core
routine never changes from week to week.
We check the chart, any special jobs left by
the day shift, drop the right card deck in the
hopper, answer the questions on the
screen..." He smiled empathetically. "At
certain places during the run, we have to
change the printer to multipart or forms. You
know all those financial statements you get
every day instead of letters from friends?
Well, now you can think of them as personal
communiques." I wanted all of a sudden to
wrap him in my arms, but because we had
not yet jumped that threshold, I contented
myself with pinching his shoulder.
   "Then, we have to swap out packs on the
drive spindles." He let me have another look
into the locked bakery of magnetic layer
cakes. "Each of these contains a whole shelf
full of your pitiful excuse for a library. A
group of programs or a set of data files. 'The
Clients.' A hundred thousand names, but it's
easy to fall into the singular. 'Put that Client
up on spindle three.' Almost as ridiculous as
using 'Washington' or 'Moscow' to stand for
a quarter billion."
   Nor was metonymy his only professional
figure of speech. He called up files, spoke to
the console, shook hands with peripherals,
woke or retired a system partition. Programs
ran and processors crunched. Names were
fields and fields made up records and
records were data and data came in streams,
packets, or blocks. An unassuming word like
"overlay" served as noun, verb, adjective,
adverb, and probably preposition on a good
day. The whole sport made Shakespeare's
functional shifts seem like small-time word
processing. Up time and down time, hot,
warm, and cold boots, and the
apocalyptic-sounding full system crash.
   "If the runner stumbles or falls... then the
fun starts. We're just supposed to check the
hardware and resubmit the aborted job. If it
aborts again, and we're sure it's not a paper
jam or the wrong pack or something equally
imbecilic, we're supposed to dial the field
service men—the Green Berets. Big salaries,
twenty-four-hour beepers. But those guys
are obnoxious, and in hexadecimal to boot.
So Dr. Ressler and I have gone in for a little
underground education in differential
diagnosis.
   "Every job we submit, every command we
issue, is written into a console log.
Fortunately, nobody reads them. They hang
in the listings library, gathering digital dust.
If anybody took half a look at some of the
operations we've performed to keep things
running at night, we'd be in a heap of hot
floppies." He shrugged. "I work. I follow the
list, the flowchart. The key to the entire
process, from beginning to end, even the
exception handling is specifiable by exact
rules. One need only know the context. Not
unlike choreography, I suppose. 'Two
pas-de-bourrées, a ball-change.' But the bit
of chenille fluff in the chorus never gets to
see what all that spinning is all about. It'll be
Robo City in here in another few years," he
said, with serve-them-right enthusiasm at
the prospect. "The only thing that's
prevented their introduction until now is the
superstition that humans are still the only
thing capable of surviving the system crash.
Also, the Doctor and I are still cheaper, for
the time being."
   We sat in front of the console and stared
at the equipment, now completely changed.
The phone rang, disturbing the empty hiss. I
thought: Here is one of the few places where
a phone call late at night doesn't
automatically mean someone has died. Todd
answered. "That was Dr. Ressler.
'Bookkeeper' is unique. And so, my friend, is
your face." I smiled, already skilled at letting
his moments of confrontatory zeal fall away
without crisis. "What do I do for a living? I'm
not sure the question has an answer
anymore. Everyone, no matter what he does,
is kept in the dark about the clients."
   This was the moment of expansiveness
that brought me compulsively to Manhattan
On-Line to sit with this stranger after my
own shift was over. "Do you know Ben
Shahn's great answer to that question? I
take a guilty pleasure in the man's paintings,
knowing his whole pastel, representational
aesthetic has been on the outs for a decade.
But his essays need no excuse. He tells a
story of an itinerant wanderer traveling over
country roads in thirteenth-century France
who comes across a man exhaustedly
pushing a wheelbarrow full of rubble. He
asks what the man is doing. 'God only
knows. I push these damn stones around
from sunup to sundown, and in return, they
pay me barely enough to keep a roof over my
head.'
   "Farther down the road, the traveler meets
another man, just as exhausted, pushing
another filled barrow. In reply to the same
question, the second man says, 'I was out of
work for a long time. My wife and children
were starving. Now I have this. It's killing,
but I'm grateftil for it all the same.'
   "Just before nightfall, the traveler meets a
third exploited stone-hauler. When asked
what he is doing, the fellow replies, 'I'm
building Chartres Cathedral.""

  Home Fires

   We weren't involved. I simply wanted to
spend my free minutes in Franklin's
company. Sitting with him while he worked
felt like repatriation. Franklin, remarkably,
found nothing unusual in my overnight
fixation with this place. He treated both my
forwardness and reserve with the same easy
touch. His intimacy could go on at arm's
length forever.
   I felt so awake, so ready to resurrect old
steps and learn new ones I'd given up on.
Remorse only came when I felt how
blameless I was feeling. Guilt worked its way
in, however. Romance at thirty is shot
through with ambivalence. I was too old to
think that my liberating happiness with Todd
justified putting Keithy to the torch. The
pleasure I felt in Frank's company was
already compromised, and I could calculate
no future payoff worth the surcharge
needed to reach it. But bad conscience is
one of those parasites that makes its host
hungrier.
   The evenings when I took the detour
home produced a chunk of hours I had to
account for. Tuckwell's and my relationship
always pretended to place no bind on one
another. But even Keith's cultivated
obliviousness soon gave in to curiosity. For a
while I got by on transparent excuses. The
irregularity of my work covered somewhat,
made Keith lose track of when I would
ordinarily have come home.
   Hard to confess anything when I had
nothing yet to confess. I had no hope of
explaining to Keith a fascination I didn't
understand myself. Keeping quiet, on the
other hand, was evasion, and I never could
skulk for long. Crawling into bed one night
after my embarrassingly late return, Keith
and I outdoing the other in liberal tolerance,
I resolved to come clean, although I still
didn't know what that meant. Copying
Todd's blunt trust in words, I stoked up to
make a clean break. "I've made a few
friends." I thought once I got going, I could
imitate Frank's easy jig. But after those six
quavers, I softened the contour of the line.
"Eccentrics," I added, choosing the perfect
word to render them harmless. It suddenly
seemed self-indulgent to concern Tuckwell
with exaggeration.
   My time with Keith, if increasingly
infringed on, remained unchanged in all
respects but the important one. We still
lazed together in the front room with the
panoramic vista over the river. We still
watched the nightly news together. We still
needled one another with need. One early
September evening, out of remorse and
nostalgic love, I decided to stay home.
Tuckwell lay spread across the floor with a
portfolio, testing out jingles on me while I
did my next day's homework. Keith was
building a truly bizarre strategy for selling
microwave gourmet meals, using an ad I had
discovered in the September 18, 1939, issue
of Time: "Hitler Threatens Europe—but Betty
Havens's Husband's Boss Is Coming to
Dinner and That's What Really Counts." I
had shown it to him to make him laugh,
something I'd done precious little of lately.
But he'd latched onto it as the perfect piece
of camp with which to run a retro sales pitch.
"Sick sells," he lay on his back repeating.
"Not a pretty fact. But then, persuasion is
not a pretty business."
   I wrapped up a few loose questions. I'd
chosen, for tomorrow's event, the September
3 in that year when there was no September
3: in 1752, when Britain and colonies at last
adopted the Gregorian calendar. By official
decree, September 3 became September 14—
correcting the eleven-day disparity that had
accumulated between man-made time and
the seasons. As had happened elsewhere in
Europe as days disappeared into nothing,
the reform was met by rioting. People's
already too-short lives were cheated of yet
another eleven days: vanished anniversaries,
lost evenings at the pub, almost a dozen
nights of potential pleasure. Paid by the
hour but debited by the month, tenants paid
thirty days of rent on nineteen.
   The nightly news was over, the set turned
off, but the evening's sound track—Bartok's
Piano Music for Children —still hobbled over
fourths and minor seconds, relating strange
Hungarian folktales. I closed my eyes: the
music was about a forest deep in Eastern
Europe where night had fallen for several
hundred years. I opened them again to find
Tuckwell still sprawled across the throw rug,
happily destroying the evening paper. I
loved the man, stayed with him because, for
a manic narcissist with a fierce death wish,
Keith was relatively sedate and regular in
habits.
   Tuckwell stood, stretched, groaned like a
compromised banshee, and went and
pestered the human being nearest at hand.
He came over to the makeshift typing table
where I worked, lifted the hair off the nape
of my neck, and bit the revealed skin.
Choosing not to notice how wrong the
moment had become, he asked, "
"Sappening?"
   I pulled the first card off of the
unanswered pile. Not daring to look at him, I
pitched my voice into soprano and inhaled. "
'Why did the Russians shoot down that
airliner? Hundreds of innocent people killed.
Will somebody please explain this to me?'
Signed, 'A.N., 9/14.'" Facing the far wall, I
monotoned, "What you got on Flight 007
today, Chet?"
   "Not a whole hell of a goddamn lot,
David," Tuckwell replied, but returned to the
papers to see what he could dig up. I drafted
answers in my head, one filled with accounts
of warning shots and tape transcripts, one
beginning "Discrepancies in what the
interceptor saw and what the liner did
persist," still another urging the questioner
to read everything printed on the incident.
Not one reply satisfied.
   I was cut by a sharp grief, not for the 269
latest casualties in the perpetual war, but for
A.N., who didn't have a chance in creation of
getting a simple explanation for what was
going on. It was a reasonable question, but
as with the tacit prices on Upper East Side
menus, if you had to ask, you couldn't afford
the answer. The horrible full-color spreads,
the antiseptic seal torn off of the usually
restrained AP reports, the resulting global
knee-jerk calling for a full accounting on the
part of anonymous trigger-pullers
everywhere: and then the veil of routine
slamming back, once more condemning A.N.
to the bewilderment of local life, while Here
and Now squidded off in a cloud of ink until
the next liner was downed.
   Sadness doesn't capture it. I need a
meatier, nineteenth-century word. Sorrow;
the sorrow of press secretaries failing to
explain away nations. When I looked at
Tuckwell, news scrap over his lap, my sorrow
grew. For the two of us—our last, ordinary
evening at home. I whispered, "What in the
hell am I supposed to tell this guy?"
Alarming Keith more than I had in all our
years of living together, I burst out in violent
crying. I let Keith comfort me, talk me into
giving up on answering, calling it a day. He
led me into our bedroom, where he pried the
typed card out of my hand and laid it to rest
on the night table. It still sat there
unanswered days later, on the equinox. The
first day of autumn in anyone's calendar.



VIII

  After the Facts

   The dead airplane passengers were still on
the night table on September 23. Relations
with Keith hadn't steadied in the interim.
There were light moments—hours as free as
any we'd had. We laid into the old
conversational cadences, careful to avoid
irritation. But chain jumped off sprocket at
the least torque. Something caused one of
us to miss the pickup, and we'd be off,
attacking one another in the highly civilized
diction of private symbols that had caused
the hurt in the first place.
   Tuckwell came to bed on the first night of
autumn, excited by the growing cold. I could
feel in the choreography of muscle
contractions his hope for a reconciling
predoze fondle. He maneuvered tentatively,
afraid to ask outright for a touch I might
deny him. How dare he protect himself from
me, blame me for refusing? Slowly enough
to be above reproach, I removed by
millimeters to my side of the bed. Sheer
perversity; how far away did I need to be
before he asked me to return?
   We lay in bed, outraged in every idiom
short of English. Neither of us could break
the escalation of accusal. Keith flicked on the
reading light and directed the spot to his
side. Even politeness was a threat—the
effort he took not to disturb me. He reached
out for his night reading but grabbed the
question about Flight 007. He slammed the
card down on the nightstand. "Can we get
rid of this shit, please?" he whispered, so as
not to wake anyone. "I'm sick of looking at
it." He went to the kitchen to fish the day's
newspapers from the trash. He returned,
crumpled a couple sheets for my benefit, and
read: "Reasonable prospect of Navy finding
black box.
   Russians are sweeping for it in force. Seen
dragging something out of the waters.
Widespread agreement that the 747 had
been over Kamchatka for some time."
   I grabbed the gap widening in my face
and pinched it shut, pushed it into my
pillow. I turned my face sideways, an efficient
crawl-swimmer coming up for air. "All right,
Keith. OK."
   "OK what?" Nonnatives would have
heard no rage.
   "OK, I'll fabricate some sort of centrist
smear for this person. Face the Nation.
Whatever you want."
   "What I want is not the point. Who said
anything about smear? Why doesn't this
person do her own work? What does she
want you to do, paraphrase the same pap
she can read herself? Cliff Note the mound
of crap it's already buried in?" Typical
Tuckwell: whenever he attacked me, he
worked around until it seemed his one wish
was to protect me from assault.
   "Just the opposite," I addressed the
ceiling. "She wants me to shovel her out."
Covered in cotton and cliches, I molded
myself into the shape of the offending
shepherd's crook, facing the wall. As soon as
he was out of my field of view, Keith seemed
the most decent human being alive,
susceptible to the best of excesses. I felt him
get back into bed and switch off the light.
After a moment, unasked-for, denying that
the flare-up had happened, he molded his
body along mine. We lay flush, curled, the
two fastened alloys in a thermostat coil. I
neither shook Tuckwell off nor returned his
pressure. If I didn't move, I might be able to
drift off despite myself. But not moving only
aggravated the drag holding me against the
bed.
   We were both in absurd occupations; that
was the problem. But pressed, I couldn't
place the standard blame on the office for
ruining my private life. I had only myself to
fault. I repeated silently, like a Baltimore
catechism— Q: Who made you? A: God made
me. Q: Why did God make you? A- To know,
love, and serve Him in this life and be happy
with Him in the next —the one question in
recent weeks I'd managed to answer
definitively: "Q: How do you get moonlight
into a chamber?"
   The next day, behind the Reference Desk, I
typed a long, inconclusive response to Flight
007. My mind was not on the victims or the
absurd geopolitics, but on the man I was
downing with my own absurdity. Every time I
concluded that Tuckwell and I were
genuinely ill-fitted—that we'd forced
ourselves together for years because we
were the age when more exploration is no
longer cost-efficient—I recoiled, knew I was
rationalizing my own new side romance.
   I could no longer tell failed imagination
from realism. The day I admitted that life with
Tuckwell had lost itself to familiarity, I also
felt an urge to run for the crosstown and
gate-crash Tuckwell's familiar office just to
see him. His most irritating habit, the
asymmetry of his sternum, his stupidest
mannerism, the white spots under his
fingernails, had been fashioned exclusively
for me, and I had failed to value them.
   I came home that evening intent on
redeeming myself. Like a literalist from a
liturgy, or coed from a cathartic feature film:
nothing more important, easier than being a
little kinder. Keith must have felt something
similar, for we collided at the door and
kissed without a crackle of static. He let me
fondle him, then slipped his arm around me.
He brought me to the panorama plate glass
running the length of the living room. We
looked down on the same life-threatening
street I had just threaded. The view from
here had nothing to do with the one at eye
level. "Q:," he said, shaking me
affectionately.
   "Shoot." We laughed off the bad word
choice.
   "Is the world getting any better? K.T.,
9/23." Last night's fight was just passing
madness, the end of a fiscal quarter.
   "Every day in every way," I said, silently
struck by how little the billion-dollar
self-help industry had changed in the half
century since Coué.
   "The eradication of smallpox and polio,"
Tuckwell offered.
   "Large-scale dismantling of the old
colonial system," I added. "Fiberoptícs.
Wide-body transport."
   "The New York Mets. Frisbees." A sad
joke, but our own. Keith dragged me to the
kitchen in his wake. The place was a riot of
dissolute Baggies and lidless jars. He was
preparing my favorite of his private recipes,
Neutron Chili. Beating me to the peace
offering. We worked together; I spiced and
stirred while he sliced and carried on a
running burlesque. "I was a very ethnic
child. Born into a mixed neighborhood.
Democrats and Republicans—" We had both
hit upon the same solution: all-out effort to
save the endangered ordinary routine by
doing nothing.
   "Perhaps I shouldn't reveal this to you,"
he said, thrashing in a cabinet above the
stove, "seeing as how you're in a perfect
position to abuse the information. But the
key to really profound chili is this." He held
aloft a nickel bag of cumin that had
somehow evaded the Board of Health. He
made for the stove, playfully chucking me
out of the way.
   "Keithy, stop. Wait a minute. Listen. I
already put in two tablespoons of...."
   "Geet otter here. What do you know from
chili?" He blithely measured what he called a
"guesstimate" into the stew.
   "Tuckwell!" Shrill enough to draw him up
short, but too far. I tripped a surprise rage in
myself and could not back down. "Who do
you think... ? What right do you... ?" I froze
in his gaze: he had every right. I began
again, unnerved. "Don't you think you
ought to at least taste before you interfere?"
Ludicrous; it was his recipe.
   Still clutching the cumin, Tuckwell tried to
salvage tne moment. "Two people who love
each other," he began mock-pompously,
who sincerely want to bridge the solitude
surrounding each one of us ought to display
an unwavering, unqualified trust for
everything the other takes into mind to do.
A woman, for instance, should be able to
sacrifice a meal to her man's screwing about
with the same abandon that Abraham
exhibited in prepping the pot for Isaac, even
in the knowledge that no ram will be waiting
in the bushes when he hacks things up. You,
for instance, should be able to watch me
take this entire bag..." He started off
comically, but quickly fatigued: if he joked
me out of this, the next repair would be
even more strained. I apologized, told him to
do as he saw fit, and left. I looked back as I
shut the front door to see Tuckwell spicing
the meal for one.

  Music Minus One

   Jeanette Koss crosses the threshold.
Ressler can neither prevent nor welcome her.
Still she comes, eyes marking an astonished
arc at the monkish sparsity, asceticism that
registers in her eyes. Only when she leans
against a wall in a girlish slump does he
collect himself. "What in the world are you
doing here?"
   She takes the Ur-punchline, jutting one
arm over her head and slithering a side step.
"The samba." Slowly, sadly, she sings,
"When you can't reproduce 'cause you've
lost all your juice, It's Your Birthday," to the
tune of "That's Amore," inflicting no
apparent damage on the meaning of the
chord progressions. She stops and examines
Ressler, as if the burden of explanation rests
squarely on him.
   "But it's not my birthday. Not for a while."
He feels his stupidity the instant he objects.
   "It isn't? Damn! All the numerology
worked out perfectly! Back to codon triplets
for me. Here. I brought you a present
anyway." She holds out a wrapped
phonograph record tentatively, reluctant to
give it up. Not knowing what else to do,
Ressler unwraps the gift. It's a two-year-old
recording of Bach's Goldberg Variations in a
debut performance by a pianist who has the
bad taste to be both as Canadian as Avery
and a shade younger than Ressler. "I'm sorry
if the surface is a little ground to death
already. But I thought you deserved
something better in life than bobby-soxers
and Britten."
   Ressler flinches at Koss's inside
knowledge. Blake and Eva? Is that
friendship, then, cozy nights made public?
He wonders if this woman might also be
privy to the fact that he's been afraid to put
Robeson on in recent weeks. He stands
paralyzed, unable to extricate himself. "I
don't understand. What is this?"
   "It's a record," she replies, a pouty,
apologetic smile at having to do all the
vaudeville. "You put it on that machine and
music comes out." She lowers her arm, still
thrust in pseudo-samba, and sits
cross-legged on the floor in front of the loan
sofa. She places her neck against the
cushion, tilts her head, and lets her face go
as slack as a sunbather's. She is perfectly at
home in their mutual ignorance.
   Ressler considers his options: deterrence
has failed, and it is too late for a preemptive
strike. His only chance to get his balance
depends on giving Dr. Koss her own terms.
He goes to the phono; for the first time since
he bought her, Olga spins without a
suggestion of complicity. He removes the
record from its worn cardboard,
experiencing difficulty finding side one. "Is
your husband dropping by as well?" He tries
for a neutral lilt.
   "My husband doesn't care much for music.
What Mr. Koss has no interest in could fill
symposia." She faces him, equal parts coy,
ashamed. His first good look at her. She is
more juvenile, lighter than in profile. She
gesticulates for him to hurry and get the
music on: Why do you think I've come all the
way here?
   There is nothing to do except release side
one, track one. He touches the needle down
on the Goldberg aria. The first sound of the
octave, the simplicity of unfolding triad
initiates a process that will mutate his insides
for life. The transparent tones, surprising his
mind in precisely the right state of confusion
and readiness, suggest a concealed message
of immense importance. But he comes no
closer to naming the finger-scrape across the
keys. The pleasure of harmony—subtle,
statistical sequence of expectation and
release—he can as yet only dimly feel. But
the first measure announces a plan of
heartbreaking proportions. What he fails to
learn from these notes tonight will lodge in
his lungs until they stop pumping.
   If the night is complete and the train of
notes advances with certainty, even formal
symmetry can grow as inevitably as a living
thing. The fragmented melody, the
decorated trickle coming from the speakers,
the lights across the dark yard (so many
ships' distress signals), the pile of
slip-delineated journals swelling in the
corner into an unassailable fairy-tale hill of
glass, the foreign woman sitting
cross-legged on the floor not three meters
away: everything aims this moment,
indistinguishable and arbitrary, at his heart.
This fluke, beautiful assortment says they are
here alone. Certainly a message: the sentient
musical line makes that explicit. A
messenger, undeniably, at the piano. But no
sender. No sponsor. Only notes, vertically
perfect, horizontally inevitable.
   Prompted by the aria's first octave, he at
once looks through an electron microscope
at a moment he will never afterwards
succeed in recreating. How can he say what
he hears? He hears a melody (it can't quite
be called that) ornamented, sighing in
appoggiaturas (he has never heard the
word), making its stately way into frilly
irrelevance. He hears something else,
something substantial underneath the
period piece: a bass line as patterned as the
orbit of seasons, fueled by the inexorable
self-burning at the core of stars.
   While right hand tentatively ascends and
turns, left descends in nothing more
ingenious than a major scale. What could be
simpler? Four scale-steps descend from Do,
answered by three rising tones before a
temporary return home. The aria travels only
eight measures, but Ressler has come far
farther. He skids across epochs, shaking
loose time. The ditty insinuates itself
through the most unassuming thirty-two
measures imaginable: a third group of four
notes is answered by a fourth, these eight
together meta-echoing the initial eight. This
four-by-four megameasure is answered in
turn by a further sixteen—a hierarchy where
each internal rung is reflected at a higher
level. A pulse, a row of tones, a magic square
sprung from four letters: its Pythagorean
perfection holds the hint of proliferation,
celestial blowout of uncountable
possibilities.
   The scientist, until this moment incapable
of hearing that every song on Summer
Slumber Party derives from the same 1-4-5
progression as "Red River Valley," can hear
in this spare, fourfold pattern potential
beyond telling: answers and calls, inversions,
oppositions, expansions, contractions,
dissonances, resolutions. He hears all these
hiding in a tune so simple it cannot in truth
even be called a tune. And the variations
themselves haven't even begun.
   How can haphazard nubbiness of grooves
pressed into synthetic polymer, read and
converted into equivalent electric current,
passed through an electromagnet that
isomorphically excites speaker paper,
sucking it back and forth in a pulsing wave
that sets up a sympathetic vibration in thin,
skin membrane tickling electrical
nerve-bursts simulate not only all the
instruments of the orchestra but this most
cerebrally self-invested device, the
hammer-struck, vibrating string? God only
knows what those string vibrations
themselves equate to. But the pattern means
something: he's sure of that. And if he lets
what these signal notes conceal fall back
into the obscurity they have momentarily
raised themselves from, a vast tract of
unsuspected existence will disappear, vanish
along with this woman when she stands up
to leave.
   Underneath the Goldberg aria's graceful
surface is a skeleton, a stripped-down
fragment, a moment not even a moment, a
melody not yet the essential one. The real
melody, the one that will pass with that
trivial bass line through thirty wildly varying
but constant mutations, is the
accompaniment of desire and remorse in
Ressler's listening. That bass is a mere crystal,
periodic, irregular. Like all crystal instants, it
seeps in both directions, back into imprecise
memory of childhood and forward, in a rush
of premonition, to the logical consequence
of its opening phrases, an adulthood
entirely unanticipated. It encroaches in all
directions, a spiral architecture of sound. At
the center of that musical stair, this moment
leaves its fossil impression: a man and
woman, unwitting particulars of a species
frozen forever in the stillness before the
historical calamity that will finish and
preserve them, pressed in statigraphy, here
against the Holocene floor.
   Tone-deaf, he hears the tune breathing.
He is inside it. In its final four bars, the bass
detours back to origin. But at the moment
when it must land on the octave, the
delinquent line pulls one last shock. It hits
and hangs on the note below, a suspended
dissonance that threatens to spread
indefinitely. He wonders if the chord will
ever come home.
   A change comes over Dr. Koss too at the
music. No longer the nervous girl filled with
skittish punchlines. Cross-legged, neck
arched, head tilted, she sheds the sunbather
and becomes a mater dolorosa. At aria's end,
Ressler, scared by how much empty space
has flooded into K-53-C, goes and sits next
to her. His entree to music is exactly this:
wanting, just this once, without compromise,
to close the curve of this woman's body, the
cell surface he has not been able to forget
since the moment she took his head in her
hands and toweled it dry.
   He does not know her, what she is doing
here, why she inflicts him with this tune. She
has no personality but the one she adopts
this instant. Dr. Koss remains, despite his
research, no more than a sketch. He needs
from her precisely this refusal to dissolve
into specifics. Whatever he suspects about
the motive for her visit disappears. All
suspicion falls away somewhere in the
thirty-two measures. They sit through the
first fifteen variations, rooted to the bare
floor a foot from one another. When side
one ends, they listen to a few revolutions of
dull scratching before either can move.
Ressler gets up, flips the record. The fifteen
feet of floorboard to the plastic phonograph
elongate epically. He fumbles with the
cartridge, overwhelmed by aboriginal
wonder at the device. All devices.
   When he comes back to his spot, Koss
reaches without looking and puts her arm
around his shoulders. She touches his bone
blade without hope or threat or promise. A
completely unencumbered, uncompromised,
just-to-be-touching touch. His shoulders
support her arm as if they have known each
other since the start. As if they know each
other now. As if anyone ever knows the first
thing about another.
   The piece proceeds, with the modesty of
the monumental, to launch an investigation
into everything the aria, by permutation, can
conceivably become. After an immense
journey whose contours he only darkly
traces, the piece ends note for note as it
began: da capo. Once more, from the head,
the delicate filigree of sarabande, fleshed
out upon those four unfolding scale-steps.
When the music stops, they continue to
touch immaterially. Olga arabesques on in
silence, not knowing the difference. The
sinusoidal pulse of the needle scratching the
end of the track might be surf interrogating
the continental coast. Ressler is not sure
what he has heard. The little air and
variations, its signal now dampened,
message reconcealed, disperses into noise.
   A voice calls him back to the world's
indifference; Jeanette Koss's, full of a timbre
he has not heard until this moment. "Are
you ill? You look febrile." Automatically, she
places the back of her hand on his forehead.
He at once burns for her to apply that
ancient method, instinctive to women, of
testing the fevered part with upper lip. His
temperature would elude even this most
heat-sensitive gauge—the burning hotel,
plans lost in complexity, night, love's
accident, long September, memory, fever
beyond telling.
   He does not look at her. In another
moment, they rise by agreement and walk to
the door. Their arms link a moment and
unthread. At the open frame, they turn
toward one another in an awkward eternity.
A gulf of ignorance separates their two
mutually unreadable faces. How implausible,
dead-ended, and wrong any visit this
woman might pay him at such an hour; he
wants only to be rid of her without further
calamity.
   She reaches out, straightens his collar.
"Whatever you think about me, try not to
hate me." He cannot even ask what she is
talking about. Deep in this woman, as deep
in her mechanism as in his, stronger than
fear of overstepping norms, than the urge to
be loved or at least not forsaken, must be his
own desire to stand in good faith, to do
right by understanding. Do not hate me for
being an experimentalist, and I will not hold
theory against you. Which one of us knows
the first thing about what we are after?
   "I would like, very much," he begins, but
breaks off in a flush of guilty well-being. He
feels the warm air coming off the lawn, the
light of his unfurnished army barrack at his
back. How much he would like to fold
himself in this woman. How beautiful she
seems; how cut off, without consequence,
they both are from the string of homes
leading from this lot all the way to the black
fields on the edge of town. He stands
surrounded by danger, experience.
   "I want...." He stops again, unable for the
life of him to remember the name of the
thing he wants so badly.
   "I know," she giggles, collapsing again to
the face and voice of a teenaged flirt,
laughing off the game they have begun as
misguided, simple eroticism. Before he can
ask if the record is really his or if she wants it
back, she waves him goodbye.

  The Equinox

   The day is easily recreated. Everything
about September 23, 1983, is on microfiche
or magnetic disk. Only ask one of the quarter
million librarians in the country—85 percent
women—for help in retrieving it. My log is
even closer to hand. Too weak to cut himself
off completely, Franklin left me a few of his
beloved, unfinishable notebooks. He neither
bequeathed them formally nor forbade me to
look at them. Finding myself stalled after
three months of memory and invention, I
consult them freely, falling back on the
unreliable perspective of another.
   If I am addicted to Today in History,
Franklin suffered from an equal and
opposite addiction: History in Today. He was
obsessed with proving that the atrocities of
the last twenty-four hours led in a single
aesthetic conga line back to the slaughter of
Huguenots, the massacre of innocents, and
beyond. The obsession vented itself in
spurts of Schwitters-like collages, scraps Of
newsprint, the day at its most palpably
inexplicable. Like his other notebooks, from
the studious to the sheer caprice, these
lasted a few weeks before sputtering out.
For the last week of September, he clipped
events into cubism.
   I picture him as he arrived for the night
and settled to work. Franklin and Dr. Ressler
had to punch in, the computer's log serving
as time clock. Frank would greet his
colleague in one of a few stock ways, say,
"Those who are about to digitize, salute
you." Then he would sit in the deserted staff
lounge full of jettisoned lunch bags, spread
a ratty copy of the Times over the Formica,
and cut.
   On the night of the 23rd, while Tuckwell
and I lay in bed, irrationally furious with each
other, Frank Todd, who as yet meant no
more to me than a place where I could
escape the city, attacked his news. He
snipped at section one with a pair of lefty
scissors, gluing the composed facts into a
spiral notebook. Whether documentary or
artistic, a handbook for future
archaeologists or a Dadaist handbill, it's
impossible to say. In a neater notebook,
cross-indexed to the clippings by secret
numerals and Mayan icons, Franklin penned
a telegraphic commentary that is now my
keepsake:

     Marcos getting tough with the
  opposition. "Extreme measures" if
  antigovernment activities continue. Senate
  Intelligence Committee

     (who names these things?) approves
  $19 million for Contras. House Foreign
  Affairs extends Lebanon deployment.
  Rooskies refuse our "appeal" to restrain
  Syria. French send 8 Super Etendards into
  Sofar. Retaliation for attacks against
  international peacekeepers. Who
  retaliation is aimed at escapes this
  reporter.

   He worked into his clippings a map of
Beirut, colored delicately by his gifted hand,
embroidered with vegetation, serpents,
spiders, deer, monkeys, savage men, and
angels—facsimile of an illuminated
Burgundian book of hours. Then, perhaps
with a stroll around the lunchroom, a glance
at the abandoned fashion magazines
stinking of perfume samples and color ads of
beautiful hermaphrodites stroking cars, he
would join his shiftmate already at work
down the hall. He would change the printer
paper, mount a disk pack, check the card
decks to be submitted, read the console,
amend the evening's flowchart, then fire up
a machine partition and leave it to multitask.
He would return to the cafeteria, thaw
himself an Entree for One in the microwave.
Then back to his notes.

     Things are heating up. 66% of W.
  Germans opposed to deployment of new
  medium rangers if Geneva talks stall. Chief
  of Soviet Gen Staff threatens "responsive
  measures" if they go in; shares Marcos's
  diction coach. Senate votes 66 to 23 to cut
  UN contributions S5OO mil over next 4
  years. "Taxpayers are sick and tired of
  playing host to our enemies..." says
  Symms, R-Idaho. What you get for
  bringing democracy to the provinces. In a
  related story... first outdoor field test of
  engineered bacteria allowing plants to
  manufacture their own fertilizer
  "tentatively endorsed" by NIH. Ask
  professor about wisdom of this. Lots of
  new books, movies, art, most of it blurry.
  Dow up 14. 'Recovery but No Boom.'
  Nobody died.

   His script leaned to the right like a
shortstop stabbing at a ball up the middle.
He clipped and scrawled zealously into the
journal, making love to this nonemployment.
Amo, amas, amateur. Adieu sweet amaryllis.
   I visited him later that week. For me,
current events meant walking out on
Tuckwell. I sat among the antiseptic business
furnishings and related my news in knotted
excitement. Todd clipped quietly, but
bombarded me with his usual questions,
that barrage that made me feel as if I might,
after all, have a story to tell. Questions from
succinct to silly. "Do you love the man? How
much chili powder did you put in?"
   But that night I didn't answer in the usual
solitude. The last remnant of the first shift
was working late. Jim Steadman, a pleasant,
uncomplicated man in his mid-forties, Chief
of Operations, ostensibly Todd's superior,
although Franker insisted on addressing him
as Uncle Jimmy. Jimmy paced pointedly past
the lunchroom while I told Todd about my
domestic fight. At last, hours after he should
have gone home, he stuck his head in the
doorway and threw on the lights. "You'll
wind up blind, friend. Blind as the proverbial
alley. Blind as a bat."
   "Blind as the philosopher," said Todd.
   "Blind as the eponymous Post Office
Department," I contributed, feeling in my
chest the thrill of forcing the moment.
   Franklin wadded up the excised Times and
banked it into the wastebasket. Jimmy
growled, "You going to put in any hours at
all this evening?"
   Todd nodded. "In a minute. Almost
underway, here."
   "Still bothering over the news," Jimmy
bitched to no one. "Counting editorials, you
two'll be here around the horn again." He
looked at me and added impishly, "Or
should I say you three?" Affectionate,
good-natured, as blind as the day shift was
long. "Most men have productive hobbies,
you know. Like stamp collecting, or toy
trains." He crooked his thumb in the
direction of the machine room. Todd smiled,
sweetly obedient, but snipped on. The older
man sighed and shuffled home, knowing
that the late staff had long since slipped out
of his jurisdiction.
   Franklin glanced down the hall in the
direction of his departing superior.
"Long-suffering Jimmy, up solo against the
technological age." This put him in mind of
his shift partner, already at work, the man
who remained the source of whatever
pleasure Todd and I took in each other's
company. Franker put his clipping away and
punched in to the machine room to help the
old man out. Earn his living for at least a
little while.
   I flip through the aborted notebooks and
the days come back with precision. I turn the
page to another entry:

    CEASE-FIRE ACCORD GAINED IN
  LEBANON WITH SAUDIS' HELP
    A "STEP," U.S. SAYS Role of Marines
  Unchanged

   In his loop-perfect hand, the
impressionable interpreter duplicated the
secretary of state's prediction: "They'll be a
little more comfortable in carrying that
mission out because they won't be subject to
the crossfire they have been in." At page
bottom, he writes: "Interesting tidbit on
computers and privacy says that Feds keep 15
files on each of us."
   I try to connect those fifteen per capita
files with the libraries of magnetic disks in
the room down the hall entrusted to his
care. One and the same, they still don't jibe. I
can no more connect government electronic
omniscience with the antiseptic Mylar bits he
twiddled for a living than Frank could
assimilate global geopolitics into a life that
consisted largely of schemes to delay,
another year, his masterpiece on a minor
Flemish landscapist. What was Haiphong to
Herri or Herri to Haifa? Less than nothing.
Yet Frank, for a few weeks, turned pages
and copied, insisting, against all evidence,
that he and what happened all around him
shared, somehow, the same substance.

     EPA scandal; Capitol Hill sets up killer
  watchdog, whacks it when it barks, and
  again for good measure when it fails to
  bite. "Almost 10 years after the public was
  alerted to the dangers of ethylene
  dibromide as a potent carcinogen, a
  Congressional subcommittee will inquire
  Monday into the reasons for Federal
  inaction on banning or restricting the
  substance, a widely used pesticide and
  gasoline additive...." Chemical "is
  invading food and underground drinking
  supplies ... but the agency has yet to act."
  B11, for Jesus's sake. Big news was last
  night's Emmys.

  I imagine him tending to his
cut-and-paste, affecting a theatrical sigh.
Every attempt to work himself into moral
outrage failed to extinguish the sense of
responsibility wadded up inside him. His
notes filled with toxic poison, his night with
the care and feeding of CPUs. But his
thoughts were consumed by panel and
patina, the incomprehensible landscape, the
local confusion of nights when a stranger
dropped by to keep him company, the
chance to sketch the trivial sorrows of the
nearest feminine face. Those weeks, that face
was mine.

  The Perpetual Calendar (I)

   The breakthroughs in Dr. Ressler's science
open as I explore them, like an unknown
inlet that turns out to be a channel. As his
post-doc went into its first autumn, partial
overlap still seemed viable. If each triplet
codon shared one base with its two
neighbors, the string ACGAAGC would be
parsed into discrete particles ACG GAA AGC.
I make my own feasibility check the way he
once must have. Given a codon ACG, the
next partially overlapped codon must be
Gxx. How many triplets possess that form?
Four possible bases in the second position
times four in the third gives a possible
sixteen. But nothing in protein sequences
places any such positional restriction. All
twenty amino acids can occur freely,
anywhere in a chain.
   Uncanny: my first scientific deduction
before seeing the argument in print. Of
course, I wasn't first. Nor was I unassisted.
But this surge of strange confidence: I have
turned up a solution, attached my scent to
the landmark. A cause for extraordinary
muscle-flexing.
   Dr. Ressler came as close as anyone I've
ever met to demonstrating that saving grace
of Homo sapiens: the ability to step out of
the food chain and, however momentarily,
refuse to compete. That was the quality that
drew Todd and me to him, forced our love,
although we barely knew him. "Nature cares
nothing about the calculus of individuals." I
saw him get angry once or twice. In the end,
he even went after his goal with force. It
wrecked him to admit that the gene is a
self-promotion, a blueprint for building an
armed mob to protect and distribute its plan
throughout the inhabitable world.
   But selflessness too has survival value. To
paraphrase Haldane again, one might lay
down his life for two brothers or eight first
cousins. Ressler knew the calculus and how
far he was condemned to obey it. But at the
crucial moment, he elected for pointless
altruism. Self-denial: the weirdest by-product
of a billion years of self-interest. But in
nature's hands, even altruism furthers selfish
ends.
   So I come down from my overlap
conquest, return to research. I taste, after
making the kill, just between the salt and
sour buds on my tongue, the incomparable
protein soup driving me forward: not blood.
Enzyme wine.
   I solve little by eliminating partial overlap.
The insight, as advances do, only opens
fresh cans of helical worms. I have backed
into the framing problem. If a string of bases
stores instructions without overlap, that
long sequence still has to be framed into
correct instructional bits. The gene segment
ATCGGT-ACGGCCATG has three different
reading frames:




   The string itself might carry some
punctuation device, a chemical comma
indicating how the codons should be read.
The reading frame would then be
unambiguous: ATC,GGT,ACG,GCC,ATG. But
no chemical evidence for a such structure
exists.
   I ask all the wrong questions, raise naive,
misinformed objections that would cause
even that most humane educator to smile.
Might certain codons chemically fit their
amino acid assignments? How literally
should I take the tape analogy? Which half
of the double helix is transcribed for
reading? Can the tape play in both
directions? I am a rookie, a greenhorn, a
tenderfoot in this new country. But so is
science.
   I begin to see one thing, at any rate. The
chemical tumbling act is a mechanism
beyond belief, a language more awesome
than I suspected, perhaps more than I can
suspect. To transpose the line of
information-packed triplets into a
meaningful burst of aminos is to begin to
hear the structure of genes unfold over
time—a virtuosic celebration of ideas trying
themselves out, competing, announcing,
developing, exploring contrapuntal
possibilities.
   As my understanding increases and my
naivete shrinks, the mechanism strikes me as
unnecessarily cumbersome, inefficient. How
might I build it better, simpler? I read, with
distress, that ours is not the only possible
genetic code, nor even perhaps the best way
to keep self-duplicating molecules in
production. I remember the innumerate grief
of Annie Martens—an in-law, like it or not—
when she heard Dr. Ressler describe how
base 12 would have been a superior
counting system to base 10. The woman was
profoundly saddened by this irreversible
impediment.
   Another sadness, stronger than the code's
inefficiency: it hurts to discover how much
my understanding relies on analogy, pale
figurative speech. My tape recorders,
playback heads, builders, blueprints, and
messengers. Scientific method itself—from
diagrams to symbolic formulae to
phenomenal descriptions—relies on seeing
things in reflected terms. The gene as
self-replicating organism, the organism as
pan-gene, the cell as factory, the protein as
robot running a program so complex that, in
Monod's words, "to explain the presence of
all that information in the protein you
absolutely needed the code."
   Will I ever get it? "Code" is itself a
metaphor. "Cipher," the etymological
dictionary says, comes from that profound
mystery, the zero. A term to house my
bafflement at how living things can be made
up of so many nonliving parts. And if I get to
the code, in the months before my savings
run out, will it translate, repair the tear in my
chest opened the day Dr. Ressler's
instructions dispersed? One of the only
sources of real company I've ever
enjoyed—his gray brows, the taut, yellow
smoothness of his face, the brutal, brave
humor, the effortless flow of
sentences—zeroed. "Dead" is too weak a
metaphor. I push the barrow, sift the stone
for a hint at how Chartres might come of
rubble.
   The first time I had a private conversation
with Dr. Ressler, when my repeated visits to
MOL gradually put him at something
resembling ease, we sat in the darkened
control room watching through the two-way
mirror as Todd fired up the end-of-week
processing. Ressler volunteered nothing, but
pleasantly answered everything I asked. Just
to hear him talk, I asked about a bank of
devices, red diode lights flickering rapidly
but irregularly.
   "Those are modems. They translate analog
phone pulses to and from digital sequences.
At the other end of a phone line—who
knows where—some other machine sends
across a datum each time one of those red
lights flashes."
   "What are they sending?" I asked,
suddenly seeing the spasmodic red flashes
as a text.
   Ressler smiled. "It could be the collected
works of Shakespeare. In a single stream,
four hundred and eighty letters a second."
   That is the genetic metaphor that begins
to suit me. Something wilder than all the
plays of Shakespeare written in something as
simple as blinking lights. It fails in the
representation. But then, so does putting
Shakespearean moonlight into a
twenty-six-letter chamber. The closest we
ever come is dressing someone up, calling
him the moon. Clay-derived thought,
capstone of evolution: I count myself lucky
to achieve even that weak analogy. Where
can I go tonight for conversation? He alone
made me feel clever, just in unraveling his
metaphors.
   When I at last got out of the house today,
steppea outside into the open air after ages,
I bussed around Flatbush, Fulton,
discovering to my senses' shock how thick
autumn was in me already. Season of mists
and mellow fruitfulness, to blame it on
Keats. Sap consolidates; the days have
begun going dark before supper. Even here,
in the middle of fifteen million, colors come
on, acquire reputations: umber, burnt
sienna, ocher, iodine, scarlet, rare earths
hued to the first order. With the right
formula of dry cold, for no practical reason,
demure trees slip from lime to lemon, go
down with all the garishness of an historical
atlas. And bless with fruit the vines that
round the thatch-eaves run.
   Well, perhaps no fruit vines in my
neighborhood. But isolated branches
telegraph the first symptoms of epidemic.
Trees shed brittled skin and strip down to
cartilage fighting weight. Twigs scrape
against phase-changed glass, followed in a
week or two by tentative ice traceries,
fibrous, hexagonal, the solid geometry of
crystal water molecules. First day of autumn,
the equinox: New Year's of Phoenicians and
Egyptians, wielding symbolic power as late
as 1939, when we chose the day to bury our
technological message to future species.

  Q: Who decided that the first day of
autumn should fall on September 23? Why
not the 21st, or better yet, October 1, which
makes more sense? Probably invented by
committee. Why doesn't the day move
around, like Thanksgiving and Easter?

    A: This one is trickier than it looks. In fact,
the reconciliation of the solar year was the
first technical bottleneck facing civilization
....The balance points, equal-nights, do move
around—five hours, forty-eight minutes, and
forty-six seconds each year. They do fall at
odd times as the result of that committee,
historical accident. Rotation divides only
reticently into revolution. But then, if the
repetitive calendar had come easily, we
might never have developed astronomers,
mathematicians, scientists, librarians.

  Everything that ever happened happens at
equinox. Wars start, armistices all arrive
between early October and the end of the
year. Symphonies begin and break off on
autumn leave-taking. Governments change;
the only logical time for elections (however
pro forma), for mothers of four to head
dutifully to precinct polls in station wagons
despite a driving rain, to hide themselves
behind curtains and pull the lever of choice.
  Three compressed months of change write
the year in brief. Plants pull back; landscape
retreats into a miniature of muted colors.
Tonight, where I grew up, the cicadas have
their last seasonal blowout, choral storms
outside my childhood window, now serving
some Other Child in the formation of
memories. Even from this distance their
simmer is audible, a sex-soaked group pulse,
a twitch in the dry air swelling to buzz-saw
bandwidth. Wind pitches their group shout
in a mechanical wave sounding for all the
world like a million miniature pieces of
shook sheet tin. Reaching decibel
denouement the noise cuts off at the chaos
instant, fizzling to a few holdouts. The
signal from one swarm sets off another, a
hundred yards off, flaring in pitch before it
too hushes. All down the county line, the
overlapping antiphony of bug choirs.
   Frost stencils the hoods of cars, reveals
internal cross-struts as clearly as an X-ray.
Delinquent husbands return after thirty
years, begging for absolution. The cheerful,
hermetic next-door neighbor, receiving in
his mail the most blunt prognosis medical
technology can muster, turns back to his
house, thinking: Just time enough to get
those problem patches under the shingles.
On every corner, lambent glow of
streetlamps on maple limbs, an inverted
carpet of rust. The moon goes gibbous, the
night stars a drunken dream. Where I grew
up, "Milky" is the only conceivable adjective
for the spread of pebbled, intertidal autumn
sky.
   Combines scythe circumference swatches,
close their noose around holdout corn. At
the last pass, a thousand acres of trapped
rats, snakes, and pheasant break from the
drawn net, most mauled by indifferent
machines. Sundays, as winds whip through
moribund barns, harvesters meet in narthex
and nave to sing how all is safely gathered
in, as if they had the principal hand in
bringing it off. Autumn is the note before
the last melisma, the third stanza, the
congregation fumbling in hymnals to read
both words and music. A plenitude of pies,
pride of drop-in guests, brace of hams,
corsage of table settings, parliament of
mashed potatoes, supplication of network
sports, clatch of conversation, covey of
vacation days, school of parades, volume of
preserves, brood of read-alouds, keepsake
of snapshots: everything running at glut, at
glorious surplus.
   "Healthy Midwestern girl," Todd used to
tease me. "Healthy Midwestern influences."
They have not helped me healthily over him.
All day today, it felt as if this were the last
chance I would have to remember what it felt
like, in the blood, once, to be young. That
synonym list of anticipation, before the
business of thinning out.
   Everything that ever happened to me
happened in autumn. I moved away from
home. I first fell in love. I got my first job. In
autumn, at twelve, I thought I was
hemorrhaging to death. Autumn is sea-storm
warnings a thousand miles inland, everyday
affairs going entirely incomprehensible,
changed by the chance disaster, the autumn
occurrence, the fall phenomenon.
   Once I spent the wet first days of fall
blowing on tea, doing a picture puzzle of
Constable's Hay Wain, the soggy, rocking
card table badly in need of a shim. Racing my
mother for the obvious pieces, the wheel
spokes, the stream, and leaving the uniform
sky for when it wouldn't be so hard.
Working alongside the woman who pieced
me together, who has since put aside both
picture puzzles and procreation for good.
   I bought my first book in autumn, a story
about three girls who swear a perpetual pact
of friendship and set out to do something
slightly forbidden but ultimately laudable
one Saturday in September. Annually, like
celestial clockwork, I acquire more volumes,
seek out the great multistory secondhand
dealers. Through plaster caverns damp with
the aroma of disintegrating bindings, I select
on size, color, the marginalia of former
owners—subjects as obscure as Guide to
Fencing, or Tungsten Mining Commission
Proceedings, 1934. I hedge them up against
winter, and toss them all out the following
spring.
   In the fourth grade, two weeks after Labor
Day, I brought home my first instrument, a
three-quarter-sized 'cello bigger than I was. I
took it upstairs to my father's study,
methodically ground the endpin into the
lacquered floor, and touched the bow to the
catgut C. A bass swell filled the house,
penetrating to the root cellar— the only
successful sound I ever made on the thing.
All subsequent attacks on the instrument
were failed attempts to recreate that first
resonance. I turned the box in the following
Labor Day, after a frustrating summer stuck
in first position. Next autumn I took up
piano. Czerny exercises (Chopin without sex,
Brahms with a bad conscience) every
October from then on.
   September at seven, the cyclic return:
government-instituted torture of youth
peculiar to Western Nations. Spelling bees,
closed-circuit broadcasts of space shots, oral
reports, experimental alphabets, new math.
At sixteen: the sweet fumblings of first sex
under the pines in the dark, on a mat of
needles, discovery without texts,
transgressing the papal demarcation of his
parts and mine. Today, years later: too late to
let the season linger any longer. By thirty,
autumn urgency should have run its course.
The time of year for setting out, as if all
summer had been only a holding pattern.
The thrill of Directory Assistance, adrenaline
of a toll call.
   The electrostatics of wool and cold fronts,
the smell of earthworms across the sidewalk,
the aroma of retreat in the rain, nervous shift
in the permafrost—scent of late September
sets me loose. I can smell it in the center of
Times Square, at Chambers Street,
Rockefeller Center, uptown, all the way over
the Hudson and west into the prairies where
I learned it. The smell of that private, quiet
secret I always had: the neighborhood
getting ready for night. Night that might
bring anything. Crisp, almost here: can't be
far off, can't be long.
   Time to dig out of storage clothes stinking
of cedar and naphthalene. Heinrich
Schliemann Stumbles Across Grandmother's
Trunk. Did I really wear this? As late as last
year? Should have bought the replacement
winter coat last spring, capitalized on old
stock's mark-downs. Too late now; as with
fresh vegetables and apartment rentals, it's a
cellar's market.
   It seemed this week that sixty-eight
degrees would hold out as long as its
constituency. But a seasonal swing of
warmth's buffer, a few dry flakes, the hint of
a pressure system setting sail, and the air is
suddenly cold enough for the frames of my
glasses to numb my temples. The radio
playing in the apartment just below runs
afoul of a flux in the ionosphere, bleeding
the stations in and out across the dial. Partly
sunny skies, breezy and somewhat colder.
Dropping by this weekend, with the lows
ranging into the deo gratias of medieval
monks, or the cheerful idiocy of a
helium-voiced talk radio host who argues
with the home audience that things might
not be half so bleak as they seem. That is,
only twice as bleak as survivable.
   Every year, preexistent in the almanac,
each day already marked out on the
perpetual calendar. Light length on the
downward trend, caught for a moment at
fulcrum. Hours are too small an increment to
think in. Clocks go inconsequential. I need a
wider instrument— the click of tree
branches—to measure the only quality that
has ever counted. Weather is the one
tenuous connection between this year and
two years ago. Then too, the season slid so
deep in me it seemed to change direction.
Ambiguous cusp of temperature; newly bare
branches identical to those on the verge of
budding. With only the lightest push,
tonight's temperature could easily set off in
me the same cell-programmed thaw. Cells
can't tell that no one is around anymore.
Spark of arousal—dumb fixation, stupid
holdover—while paging the atlas for him. I
haven't even pinned him down to a specific
city. But he's there, somewhere among the
burnt umbers.
   In autumn, Herri, the Flemish landscaper
whose rescue from obscurity will never be
written, stood on a hill just outside a
Renaissance village and painted the sweep
of trees turning autumnal tones, harvest
being hauled in, stooks standing in the
vacated fields, departing vees of geese, soft
rub of dusk on the contoured hills. And in
the corner of the panel, almost
overlooked—autumn bonfire. The only
persuasive argument against living
practically. The return of a familiar friend.
   It suddenly occurs to me how I might fix
him to a specific spot. I'm not restricted to
the atlas. Perhaps that landscape—the one
word he's sent since Dr. Ressler's
death—never existed. But the panel itself
exists somewhere, if not the panorama it
imitates. The picture sits in a collection, and
all collections have catalogs, compiled and
archived. I've got a skill. Let me use it,
however irrelevantly. However much my
trying to locate him puts me on par with
those birds whose apparatus does not stop
them returning yearly to the unilaterally
abandoned nest.
   The shape of my day may already have
been printed in the almanac. Sunrise at x.
Sunset at y. H amount of daylight hours. The
arc of prediction intercepting today. And yet:
something about to give, about to happen,
near at hand. Quick, close, behind the
advertising, during the frozen dinner, over
television, after the office politics, waiting its
turn in the queue of current events.
Something fundamental. Something real this
time. The secret will come clean. I will not die
in bed.
   It's good to go to sleep with a project.
Staves off winter for another week. But the
day needs its quote, and one has just
occurred to me. They still suggest themselves
in the evenings— evolutionary holdovers
tonsil or appendix. I juggle today's for a
minute, so tired I can barely spell, before I
get it intact and identified. De Tocqueville's
Democracy in America. "They are all
advancing every day towards a goal with
which they are unacquainted." The only
direction the calendar allows, forward
toward that old friend, leaving. The goal of
autumn.



IX

  Canon at the Third

  Days later, Ressler still doesn't know the
reason for Dr. Koss's visit. Neither seeking
nor avoiding, he sees her everywhere—in
the lab, in conference, in the creaking
Georgian hallways of Biology. He studies her
for flutter, but sees none. She is unaffectedly
congenial. No secrets: so I was wrong about
your birthday. He does his best to be
congenial back. A week after the visit,
coming out of the office he shares with
Lovering, he practically knocks the woman
over. Who knows how long she's been
standing there. "You scared me," she says.
All at once, the pound of blood pressure,
hypertension bruits coming on like Mardi
Gras. Excitement or fear? His or hers?
   "Were you looking for me?" he asks
stupidly.
   Embarrassment clouds her face. She looks
away shyly, confessing something for the
first time since her visit. "No. Your office
mate. Can you give him this?" She hands him
a note and rushes off too quickly. Ressler
battles with ethics for as long as it takes to
peek. The message is unsealed and he kills
no cats by looking. It's nothing; a reminder
to Joe to get his paperwork in. The man has
a mailbox for these things.
   She's taken to dressing differently, but he
can't say how. She seems airier, her walk a
brisker cadence, her shoulders buoyant. She
no longer fits the make he'd assigned her.
She can't quite make the flamboyant
smartmouth stick. He has no idea how to
classify her, let alone interpret her late-night
light arm around him the week before. Only
her gift—those vinyl keyboard variations—
proves irrefutably that she really dropped by.
But that piece is the most ambiguous code
wheel of all.
   He needs real work to distract him from
speculation. He throws himself into the rate
trials, promoting them from the make-work
they were made for. He visits Ulrich's office
without appointment. Rousing the team
leader from a pile of papers, he feels the
force of his ludicrous mission. Low man on
the totem, with no productive work to speak
of, asking a man of thirty years his senior to
humor a proposal he hasn't even
formulated. He sits nervously. "Stuart?" the
chief asks, affecting pleasure.
   "Dr. Ulrich, I—" He seizes up, choosing
just that moment to remember Koss's
departure at his door, his trailing I want,
which he now can too clearly name. "I think
we ought to leave amino sequence analysis
to the chemists."
   Ulrich smiles at the boy's diplomatic choice
of words. "How do you suggest we get to
the translation without the ciphertext?"
   Ressler knows Ulrich to be intellectually
capable of grabbing the heart of things.
"There must be a way to determine the
codon-to-amino map without pacing over
every inch of resulting print. The thing's too
dense. We'll be forever."
   "I agree." Ulrich lets the full weight of
silence spread without comment.
   Ressler fights the urge to run. After an
agonizing half minute, he tries feebly to
elaborate. "The sequences on both sides are
too numerous and complex to correlate
without a key."
   "You'd like some kind of Rosetta
apparatus?"
   "The cell is our Rosetta."
   "Hmm. Have you any argument other than
analogy?"
   "No."
   Ulrich forgives the antagonized
monosyllable, remains the understanding
boss. "Interesting. But let's follow through
awhile longer with what we have. After the
write-up on your trials, we'll see where we
stand."
   Hot-faced, humiliated, Ressler leaves. Yet
in losing his discussion with Ulrich, he's
gone a small step further in the elusive
process.
   The cell itself as Rosetta. Feed it the barest
theme...He lavishes attention on the
radiation-doped microbes in his care. He
hangs about the lab, isolating, repeating,
recording, filtering for telltale mutants that
might surprise, prove him wonderfully
wrong. He fishes for results that will buy him
time to consolidate, gather strength, coax
the next hint into place.
   As he shepherds the petris, almost
contaminating them with overcare, Ressler
replays that day, ancient history, when Dr.
Koss made him bend and surrender his head
for toweling. The imprint will not extinguish.
His temples tense under the contour of her
recreated fingers. He maps his own, slow,
reciprocal finger path over her head, the
bridge over her eyes, the gentle ridge
running along the sides of her skull to its
crown. Her skin's capacitance courses down
the length of his arm into an endocrine
reservoir filling his abdomen.
   These buzzers set off others, until he cuts
the chain reaction, recalls another day when
a clue from Koss sent him into the stacks in
search of the gold bug. One deletion, one
insertion, and one substitution brings him to
goldberg. Too near a variation to be
accidental. Koss, yet another code thug,
infects him with some viral mess, injects him
with some vital message mutation. Before his
paranoia can flail out, finding hidden
significance in every coincidental
letter-string, another message arrests him. A
clipping left on his desk: a cartoon of a
marvelous, machine-age invention
employing two dozen elaborate
programmed steps to butter a piece of toast.
The contraption is pencil-captioned,
"Goldberg Variation #?" Lovering saunters
over from his side of the office. "Dr. Koss left
that. Said you'd know what it means." It
means the woman likes puns. That he's been
a first-class goldberg rube.
   When the Blakes invite him to dine at
K-53-A, Ressler gratefully accepts. He never
imagined human company could be so
welcome. Evie greets him at the door with an
elbow squeeze. "I've prepared something
incredible: a baste-a-bag turkey that ejects a
little flag when done." She leads him into
the kitchen, where the rest of the family
peers intently into the oven. Tooney
introduces him to Margaret, a seven-year-old
marvel of precocity and miniaturization. "I
bet it's a tiny Union Jack," Blake baits his
daughter.
   "Don't be silly," Margaret says, shoving
him. "The bird's from Virginia. A Stars and
Bars." With no trace of shyness, she
commands Ressler, "Watch! Fowl in a
flag-bag. It's going to wave when it's
cooked."
   "Maybe it's a white flag. Surrender?"
   The kid rolls her eyes. "Funny friend
you've got, Dad."
   Ressler wonders what role Herbert Koss,
the man who put Champaign-Urbana on the
Food Technology map, had in developing
the self-semaphoring bird. The family sits
down to eat, making an unbelievable racket
for a trio. Blake begs everyone's silence, then
drops his head. "Bless food thank Lord
selves service." Highspeed blur. Ressler is
stunned; is the man truly devout, racing
through the prayer for the visiting agnostic's
sake? Or is the rapid-fire benediction for his
amusement?
   He looks at Eva, but she just mugs back
pertly. "Service selves Lord thank food
bless!" Retrograde grace, in Eva's mouth, the
purest thanksgiving imaginable.
   Little Margaret giggles and adds, "Amen.
Dig in."
   The invocation wrecks Ressler's appetite.
"Dig in" these days has other connotations
altogether. Home shelters, advertised in the
backs of magazines. If the race knew the
rads they've already released it would roll
over and give up, adrift in a sea of brave
new mutagens. Only this family's free
affection keeps him from the thought. He
and Tooney swap anecdotes about their
colleagues. Eva entertains them with more
Tales from the Civil Service. "I have the
sneaking suspicion that despite the upward
spiral in the standard of living, we're all
getting poorer."
   "Come again?" Ressler says.
   "You realize my wife hasn't really
quantified this."
   "You should read some of these
applications. 'How are you qualified for this
position?' 'I need it real bad.' 'Why did you
leave your last job?' 'False pretenses." One
fellow filled out the space Below the Dotted
Line reserved for previous employer's
comments: 'Would you hire this worker
again?' The guy wrote, Tes indeed.' Only he
misspelled 'indeed.'"
   In the general hilarity, Ressler leans over
and whispers to Eva, soft enough so the kid
can't hear, "You have a beautiful child.
Mailorder."
   Eva claps her hands. "No, I assure you we
got her through the conventional channels.
Oh! That's rude, isn't it?"
   "All right, short stuff," Tooney says from
the head of the table. "Do your thing."
   "Have to?" Both parents nod gravely. The
child groans, clearly delighted. " 'Margaret
are you grieving over goldenglove
unleav-ing?' What the heck is a
'goldenglove,' anyways?"
   "It's 'Goldengrove,' sweet," Mother
corrects. Eva, with her ambidextrous brain
capable of retrograde inversions, must have
a soft spot for postromantic poetry. "As in
groves of plants that have lost their green."
   "Oh. I like 'goldenglove' better. As in
golden glove."
   "So do I," Ressler concurs.
   "Get on with it," Tooney mock-growls.
   "'Leaves....'"
   " 'Like the things of man....' Come on,
girl!"
   " 'Leaveslikethe things of man you with
your fresh thoughts care for can you? Ah! As
the heart grows older it will come to such
sights colder by and by.'"
   As recitation, the half-dozen lines are
mediocre at best. But the child cuts Ressler
to the quick. To a scientist habituated to the
microscopic, her snip nose, proto-mouth,
tiny eyes that actually focus and see are
miracles. Blood courses through Margaret as
she recites. Lungs pump, kidneys filter.
Systems and subsystems weave an intricate,
interdependent free-for-all. Her nervous
system, a fine spray of veil, a cascading
waterfall of paths and signals, subdivides
into web-bouquets, structures more
elaborate and beautiful the more he
imagines their constituent firings.
   This is the awful northern face that
molecular self-duplication must scale, an
ascent as unlikely as the climb of chemicals
out of the primordial soup of reducing
atmosphere. The superstructure alone is
inconceivable. Just the thought that a single
zygote, in less time than it takes the average
Civil Service gang to dig a bed for a mile of
interstate, differentiates into vertebrae, liver,
dimpled knees, and ears complete with
recording membrane is enough to knock
Ressler flat on the metaphorical mat. Yet
nucleotide rungs alone curve this child's
cornea, curl her lashes. Nothing else needed;
he's sure of that. The entire, magic
morphogenesis is explainable as terraced
chemical mechanisms.
   This machine, this polyp, this
self-assembling satellite of two parents with
no special technical ability outside of
inserting complementary parts inside one
another, this self-governing bureaucratic
republic of mutually dependent parasites
(every one incorporating a transcript of the
master speech), has mastered speech.
Mimicked language. Biggest of the big L's,
from fist to lash, the real tissue. Margaret's
cells have found out how to say what they
mean, or a rough approximation. Her
hierarchy of needs insists it is more than
chance initiation.
   This child, all of seven, creates, in a few
phonemes, real grief, the shorthand
sequence until then only metaphored. The
metric, or rather Margaret's meter, invokes
the strangest insight: this morphologically
perfect package is not a little girl, but a
chemical unknown putting itself through
reduction analysis. Her life is the task of
isolation, the desperate longshot of
learning. Margaret's virtuosity denies
objective treatment; he gets sucked into the
shape of the line, the precocious
musculature, the labial coordination.
   He stares at the juvenile a nanosecond
longer than is appropriate, begins to see in
that self-delighting, self-affrighting library of
sentient routines a thing to spook the
strongest empiricist. Design without
designer. Effect, perfect and purposive,
without even casual cause.
   The child—with that sensitivity, like
linguistic preknowledge, built into
children—picks up on his fear. Half into "by
and by, nor spare a sigh," she stops. The
silence does it: his nose flares, blood flushes
his cheeks, his glands secrete. A reaction
mechanism, one of those instincts that
puzzles the issuing organism as much as
anyone. Margaret shoots a pitying look at
him.
   "Peg, my leg," Tooney jokes. "What's up?
Why heck you stop?"
   "That man is crying," she whispers,
suddenly no more precocious than her years.
Ressler looks away, unable to evade this
minutest observation. He has somehow
grasped her, not as a performing child, but
as this trial run. The helix's experiment.
   "Well, maybe this poem is sad. Did you
ever think of that?"
   She looks at Ressler, eyes huge: can this
be? He makes no denial. Incredulous, danger
past, racing through the syllables for sheer
love of the sound, shooting out of the gate
again in amazing breach of decorum, in that
elaborate, cumbersome, ornate,
mathematical, obsolete, and hopelessly
contrapuntal ritual of rhyme, she shouts, "
'Nor spare a sigh though worlds of
wanwood leafmeal lie.'" "Wan-wood
leafmeal" cracks her up. She cannot keep a
seven-year-old's smirk off her face as she
finishes the postponed feat. And yet you will
weep and know why. " 'Now no matter,
child, the name!'"
   But Ressler no longer listens, let alone
cries. He knows the name. He was that little
girl's age once. He knows the layout, the
mortgage of that miracle—the process that
has coarsened features, thickened spirit, and
slowed joy while leaving him a perverse
window through which to see the place he
has left. He was himself that exploration
once, despite his mother's repeated
objection "You were never a child."
   How could the enormous head, passing
only with agony through Evie's conventional
channels, a design resulting in years of
dependent helplessness—the longest
adolescence in the animal kingdom—ever
have been selected for? A liability for
millennia before earning anywhere near its
keep. Yet that outsized organ is his biome,
his stock in trade. He was the prodigy once,
not much older than this girl. He lavished
this precocious love on the home nature
museum—a walk-in catalog of the planetary
pageant. Every Saturday he redrew the floor
plan: protective coloration got pushed
against the kitchen wall and the ant colony
went into the living room, clearing the place
of honor in the front foyer for this month's
cause célèbre, the struggle between
Allosaurus and Triceratops, in 3-D.
   His parents suffered the formaldehyde
stench in happy silence. While classmates
spent their energies on kick the can, he
curated. It took him until sixteen even to
consider running away, and then it wasn't to
join the circus but Byrd. Yes, like the rest of
his peer group, he avoided sidewalk cracks.
But he kept to the clear concrete on account
of Pascal's Wager: the consequences of
coming home to find the ambulance carting
off broken-backed mother prohibited taking
the infinitesimal chance.
   His protoself, a thing independent of who
he has become: a boy completely,
passionately in love with links. The more
esoteric the system, the more ecstatic his
pleasure in tricking out its hidden form. His
sixth-grade math teacher, introducing
summation notation by brutal means, made
the class add up all the numbers from one to
a hundred. The plan was to imprint in the
half-shaped charges how trivial the task was
once one had the formula. But a few
seconds into the assignment, while the rest
of the poor slaves labored to total their
columns, little Stuart raised his hand. "Sir?"
   The dumbfounded educator listened to
the preteen derive a perfect copy of Gauss's
great work. "Look: one plus one hundred is
one hundred and one. So is two plus
ninety-nine. See the pattern? If you split the
numbers in the middle and reverse the
second group, you get fifty sums of one
hundred and one. Instead of a hundred hard
additions, one easy multiply."
   "That's... right," the teacher whispered,
going pale. Original thought, the
once-a-generation find, in his classroom.
Stupidly, he asked, "And what exactly is fifty
times one hundred and one?" As if the
answer mattered. But this simple product
was beyond Stuart. Adult Ressler still takes a
minute to get it. Once he'd rediscovered
Gauss, the problem lost its interest and he
went on to calculate which two rings on his
wooden desktop he'd been born between.
To figure the weather that year, by ring
width. Teacher could solve the multiplication
for himself if he tried.
   His whole childhood was an unsuccessful
effort to show various instructors that the
crucial thing is not fifty times one hundred
and one, but how one got those terms. Not
what a thing is, but how it connects to
others. In the second grade, shown a card
with the words "little wind how today Mr.
ask," and told to make a sentence from
them, he wrote: "My teacher has a card with
the words 'little wind how today....'" The
following year, he discovered that when one
flipped one's tongue over, a touch applied
to the bottom seemed to emanate from the
top. By junior high, he had proved to
disbelieving high schoolers that almost all
possible numbers have an eight in them, or a
seven, or nine, but an infinity of numbers
contain none of these. In late teens, he
announced to an uncomprehending English
teacher that the word "couch," repeated a
thousand times at high speed, deteriorated
into semantic nothingness.
   Each thing is what it is only through
everything else. Life is a crystal,
combinatorial. A surreptitious system. Feel
the pull to uncover it while still a child, or
that pattern will never, not even in the cells'
collapse, open its hidden order. Ressler
remembers this boy, how he usurped
Western Civ from Mr. Jameson, scorned the
Safety Patrol, barked about some ship called
the Beagle, and corrected Mrs. Rapp on the
bituminous/anthracite debacle. Even his
mother gave up trying to teach him anything
outside of never to wear blue with brown.
   He's paid the toll in playground hate. Hate
of his memorizing and explicating the
Gettysburg Address overnight. Hate of his
never, not even in the face of electrons,
Greeks, and other hopeless abstractions,
getting flustered. The annual resentment of
a new crop of classmates at his hearing
sounds and sweet airs of the sweetest
simplicity, a whole home nature museum of
shifting voices, each claiming to be the
melody. His learning everything from scratch.
Everything connected; all classroom
assignments, aspects of one theme. He heard
what the rest of the percentiles had to take
on faith.
   This Margaret already suffers the same
exile. He sees it in her anxious face, her rapid
flashes of recitation. They two are of a piece.
Out of the ubiquitous, sick anxiety of
childhood, he and this girl, skipping past
those classmates blundering through the
accepted steps, are off on their own,
cataloguing, curating their own internal,
interwìred discoveries, attempting to dance,
as fast as lips and breath and understanding
can.
   After Margaret goes to bed, the adults
spend the remaining evening pleasantly.
Suffering community with the Blakes is vastly
superior to another evening of overloaded
solitude. Since Dr. Koss's visit, he has lost his
capacity for productive isolation. He finds
himself driven to company, not sure what
exactly he hopes to find there. They gravitate
to the front lawn, stroll down the street
toward the university. The air is brisk.
Students have poured back to campus, in
the erotic uncertainty of a new term. Eva
relates her latest cerebral misadventures. She
has just mastered the trick of delayed
dictation. With her right hand, she jots
down whatever someone is saying; with left,
she writes the previous sentence in the past
tense. "I'm not sure what practical
advantages this has," she says, smiling
fetchingly in streetlight.
   Tooney puts his arm around his wife. "Do
you know that we are walking in the
presence of a woman who does crossword
puzzles in pen?" Blake shakes his head.
"When I first discovered that, I knew this
was the sexiest woman I'd ever meet. I had
to marry her."
   The rhythm of the evening, the pitiful,
arms-flung attempt to articulate the thrust, is
drowned in cicada swarms. Ressler is shot
through, unable to rid himself of the idea,
the face, the scent of that woman who has
attached herself to his brain like a water
parasite. Why isn't she here? She is at this
minute home, with her husband, while his
thoughts are thick with her shape and spore.
He grasps the slack truth: he is already lost,
the one person alive who knows he isn't a
native speaker. Ressler smiles as Tooney
relates his own courtship. He watches this
man and wife, such obvious mates, and
suddenly decides to risk the infant
friendship on an outside chance that can tell
him nothing except how lost he already is.
"Your wife is phenomenal," he blurts out.
"I'm in love with her."
   "Terrific!" Blake shouts, shaking his hand.
"Hear that, wife?" Eva blushes. "See that?
She thinks you're neat too."
   "I mean it. I want to have an affair with
her."
   "Don't blame you in the least," Blake
chuckles. "But I ain't gonna letcha, lecher."
He cuffs Stuart's ears, rubs his hair with his
knuckles, dangerously close to a hug. "You
may kiss her good night, when the time
comes. But no tongue!" Both cackle
nervously, good-naturedly. The woman in
question pretends outrage, but shoots
Ressler a look that says, Well, we might have
been an item, you and I, in other
circumstances.
   "Suppose it were," he persists, but the
experiment is ruined by descent into
hypothetical. "Suppose it were Eva. Magnet,
built in, like migration. That I had to come
back to her, to that beach, even the first
year, never having seen it. Suppose it were
Eva. And everything depended on my
making Margaret." Ressler rubs his neck,
embarrassed. "You have an amazing child."
   "That time of year, is it? G'wan. Get
married. What're you waiting for? Can
bachelor days last forever?"
   "Does ripe fruit never fall?" Eva adds, her
quota for the day. "Do, Stuart! Not even
science compares with parenthood."
   "Seems irreversible at first," Tooney says.
"Terrifying. You look for the sign that she,
out of every active genome in the species, is
the one you're after. But the one you are
after..."
   Eva interrupts him with a nod toward
Ressler. Tooney, noticing, clams up. Ressler
announces quietly, "The one I'm after is
already married."
   "Stuart, I'm sorry." Eva takes his arm.
"We're so stupid. We had no idea."
   They walk another block, then circle back.
The Blakes ask nothing, probe no further.
How much has Tooney inferred? Ressler's
been here but months, is a notorious hermit,
knows no one except the crew. He can't
believe how obvious he has been. He's just
been waiting for the chance to commit this
carelessness. They wind up back at K-53-C.
Nobody is ready to break up the company,
but the night is clearly over. "Can I still get
that kiss good night?" Eva takes him in her
arms, shoves her husband away.
   "Deep and lasting osculation," Blake says,
as his wife and this stranger kiss fully on the
lips. "Nothing like it."
   Ressler turns his back and lets himself into
his apartment. Closing the door, he enters a
vault, a time vacuum. He feels the first seed
of what could easily become panic if he
nudges it. He goes to the record player. But
the flowering, formal perfection of the music
is so close that he rips the playing arm off
the motionless canon. The needle lurches
hideously across the vinyl. He flings the
record into the corner and with the same
violent, emotionless wrist twist puts the
banished Robeson on. But spirituals,
smacking of theology, only intensify his
shakes.
   He digs in, steadying. Fear? Grief? The
intrusion registering down his nerve
sheaves, the radical dissection has its root
somewhere before words: in the
self-describing semaphore. The home nature
museum. The work undone at the lab. The
fallout shelter signs on stadium and stacks.
That syntax-generating syntax. Jeanette's
genome. The code bug. Now no matter,
child, the name. Sorrow's springs are the
same. It is the blight man was born for. It is
Margaret he mourns for.

  Program Notes

   A handful of visits to Manhattan On-Line
revealed that the night staff were not
completely cut off from the rest of the firm
they worked for. There really was a business
behind them. If I came early enough in the
evening, I caught the remnants of the swing
shift who enjoyed hanging around after
hours, avoiding rush commute or baiting the
company recluses.
   Jim Steadman was a regular, always late
punching out. He had ostensible business:
"Transfer of power, Ms. O'Deigh.
Somebody's got to steer this pitiful ship."
But Jimmy's nautical function was, if
anything, ballast. Compensating for a lack of
skill at the helm, he tried to run things by the
manual. With those two on night watch, that
was impossible. Jimmy was dear: he rarely
transcended the accidents of his life and
time, but was squarely in the camp of good
men. Franklin had trained under him and
took to calling him Uncle within days. Uncle
Jimmy never objected to the sobriquet,
although he was only a dozen years
Franklin's senior. Avuncularity sat on his
chest like a Good Conduct medal. The man
would have made a great counselor, or one
of those folksy district representatives,
prematurely senile, whom the constituency
returns term after term because he's a
harmless institution.
   Convinced that Chief of Operations
included the duties of utility fielder, Jimmy
patrolled the grounds, did minor
maintenance, set rat traps in the attic, swept
the stockroom, cleaned the corporate fridge,
and managed to run the computer in only
three or four times what it would take a
teenager who stuck to the task. He would
come in early, kill the morning, gossip with
the keypunch girls. He would frequently still
be there in the evening when Todd and
Ressler arrived, modestly martyred by the OT,
with horror stories about how he'd been
checking the circuit breaker when he
somehow brought the shop to a standstill
just as the machine was closing out totals.
The three of them would spend hours
restarting the process from the top. Jimmy
would stay on happily, around the clock. The
computer room was his home, the staff, his
family.
   He flirted outrageously with all females, a
snips-and-snails teasing. Jimmy had no wife
or girlfriend. Shyness made him clownishly
aggressive. He was sweetly overweight,
suffered from an emotional skin condition,
and nursed a "bum leg," a circulatory
symptom telegraphing an advance notice
nobody paid attention to. He lived at home
with his widowed mother. He called her each
evening just before leaving. Presumably, this
mobilized supper or instructed her to call the
police if he wasn't home within the hour.
   He struck a wary symbiosis, a
nonaggression pact, with the system. He did
not trust the machine but treated it well and
hoped for the best in return. He had no
explicit grasp on what the computer did. It
seemed to run itself, a part of the mundane
miraculous. He liked to take me aside and
inform me confidentially about the little men
inside the CPU, at the consoles of their own
little machines, which they, in turn, did not
entirely understand, but which kept the
whole she-bang going.
   Todd and Ressler got along with their
colleague, even liked him. But they couldn't
help treating him as a young Walter
Brennan, lost in the vast backroom poker
game of the Information Age. Jimmy would
sit in the lunchroom at ten to seven, eating
his neglected bologna with mustard and
browsing the Daily News as Todd clipped
current events, waiting for the system to do
the afternoon's General Ledger, which Jimmy
should have finished by five. He'd limp to
the computer room, punch the code into the
electronic lock, rush to the printer, and
discover that it had jammed at the beginning
of the run. At this setback, he'd offer up an
oath on the mild side of "Oh, nuts!" Todd
insisted that Uncle Jim would not say shit if
he had a mouth full of it. Jimmy would return
to the cafeteria, throw up his hands, and
half-happy, say, "I give up. Gonna quit and
start that chicken farm."
   He was an affable, engaging, hopeless
plodder who talked in homilies. After a
dozen truisms, winding up with "It matters
not how strait the gate, how charged with
punishments the scroll," he'd head back to
the computer room and rerun GL, bloody,
but unbowed. Todd would match the man's
Victoriana, remarking, "We wander between
two worlds: one dead, the other on the
critical list." Unimaginative, dedicated: in
short, the ideal operations manager. Todd
always said he would die one. Still, for all his
happy ineptitude, Jimmy could point to ten
fully vested years without failing to bring his
machine on-line in time for the next shift.
Franklin had failed twice already by
sophomore season.
   Other hangers-on sometimes strayed into
the late show. Occasionally, an upper-middle
exec in full three-piece regalia worked late,
auditing some process or another. This was
my cue to pretend I'd only dropped by to
deliver a message. The office also employed
a succession of earnest teenagers, their eyes
on Wall Street, to collate and sweep up. A
knot of females sometimes stayed late to
offer Todd bits of their unfinished lunches.
"The Frank Todd Fan Club," Uncle Jimmy
enviously called it.
   In the second month of my regular rounds
at MOL, Dr. Ressler buzzed me in one
evening. He met me at the door, as
charmingly distant as ever. "Ah, a familiar
face! May one presume to call you Jan, after
this length of time?" I nodded
enthusiastically. Although now on first-name
basis, I was afraid to say anything, lest I scare
him off. "What is Jan short for?"
   "I'm afraid that's what's on the birth
certificate." I still knew little more about him
than on the day I made my photo discovery.
His mystery had drawn me here in the first
place. I felt shame at how easily I'd dropped
pursuit, distracted by more immediate
pleasures. I suppose I thought: He has taken
decades to get this lost. I have time to find
him at leisure.
   "On the topic of birth certificates," he
said, grinning in advance at his own
Byzantine connection, "I suppose your
expertise makes it an easy matter for you to
identify what was born today, twenty-six
years ago?"
   I waved my hand for time, but didn't need
it. "Sputnik." My pulse picked up: an event
from the year that Todd and I would have
given anything to hear him talk about.
   "On the nose! A quarter century after the
first transpacific flight. Five years before
Wally Schirra. It would be tough to measure
that kind of acceleration in G's, would it not,
Jan?" The sound of my name in his voice
froze me. Dr. Ressler took my fluster in stride.
"Your friend is in the machine room, with an
artificial moon of his own." He left. But not
before I'd talked to him, come within a
syllable of his past.
   Outside the computer room, I stopped at
the punch-in lock, although I knew the
secret letter combination. Through the plate
glass, Franker entertained a woman in her
early twenties who I could not stop looking
at. Frank must have been at his most
charming, as the woman kept hiding her face
in her hands. In a minute, he saw me and
waved me in, a look of irritation asking why I
was hanging around waiting for an
invitation. "Bon soir, bud. Where you
been?" He grabbed my hand and pumped it,
as always. I was slow returning the pressure.
He smiled and said, remiss, "Ms. Martens,
Ms. O'Deigh, Vice versa," I don't feel
especially attractive, rememberine the
introduction. "Annie here is an affiliate of
MOL.
   A teller for the Mother Ship." The bank
that was parent company of their firm.
"While Jan-o..."
   The beautiful girl cut him off. Her eyes lit
up as if she had just met a celebrity. She
smiled, clearly seducing me with an innocent
display of unearned affection. "You're the
one who discovered all about Stuart."
   I shot Todd a look. He shrugged. "I wish I
had," I said.
   Annie Martens looked puzzled. The dazed
confession of missing something—her "frog
face," as Todd called it—came on her often,
but never for very long. "Franklin thinks so
much of you," she said, eager to start again.
   I'd think highly of him, too, I thought, if I
knew the first thing about him.

  Pocket Score

   No climate can resist colonization; the city
seeped into even that remote outpost. But
my MOL, the place's true state, started
around nine at night when the supporting
cast cleared out. (I say mine, though I won't
be going back.) Only after nine did my
adopted electronic cave take on the full
flavor of dark. For an hour or so before I had
in all conscience to return home, the
deserted office bloomed.
   Their work, starting when most of life was
knocking off, was as aloof as a deep-space
probe. The almanac says that a sixth of the
employed population of industrial countries
works other than standard daylight hours.
But even in a city notorious for staying up
around the clock, the derangement of late
shift put them outside the frame. They
moved about in a world after the
long-expected evacuation, inhabiting one of
those heavily worked mezzotint prints of
vine-covered ruins, two rococo foreground
figures with walking sticks.
   Only people who wake in late afternoon
and spend their lives in polar dark glimpse
the place as it really looks. The nocturnal
world disperses light's artificial still life. Dark
does something to perception, baffles the
rods and cones with a color-flat landscape
where touch becomes the chief navigation,
even in a room blazing with fluorescence.
Certain mood disorders are brought on by
reduced daylight; some sufferers of acute
depression respond to houseplant UV.
Prolonged time in the dark casts the
imagination off. Everyone who lives in it
ends a romantic, permanently jointless,
unappeasable.
   The graveyard world is as big as day, but
abandoned. Inhibitions are at best
irrelevant. Conversation gets strangely
quaint. All earth's supervisors are in bed,
narcotized. Only the outcasts are up and
about, pretending production: decoupled
old Belgians in the Congo after colonial
withdrawal, playing squash on concrete as
lichened as ruined Mayan ball courts. After
nine, Todd and Ressler could choose any
path they wished, providing the disk packs
were processed and the reports in the bin
when the morning shift punched in. The
office was theirs to use as they pleased:
candelabra dinners, masques, music.
   And music first persuaded Dr. Ressler to
open. Frank was sitting with Annie, on
another of her late visits. I joined them for
half an hour before heading down the hall
on an uncharacteristically bold, dark-inspired
whim. I found Dr. Ressler where he always
spent the first hours of the shift: in the
cramped control room, the closet of consoles
and flickering modems. I listened at the
door, although I hardly needed to: on the far
side, the same music that had been playing
the day I met him. I knocked, not even
hoping he'd let me in.
   But he did, as genteelly as ever. I'd already
discovered that frontal assaults would not
overcome his privacy. When I'd confronted
him point-blank with the printed proof of
his earlier profession, Dr. Ressler responded
only with amusement. "You can't be
interested in such inconsequentials." That
night, I easily might have run into the same
impasse. He asked with a concealed smile
how the news scrapbook was going, then
scowled when I told him Todd had already
lost interest in the project. "Our friend's
cultivated character flaw," he said, "is a
refusal to finish things."
   He was attentive; he several times asked if
I would prefer the swivel chair, if I would like
the room a little warmer or cooler, if the
music bothered me. But he just as easily fell
into unselfcon-scious silence, and he never
once asked why I'd dropped in. We might
have sat mute all evening if I hadn't at last
said, desperate for a topic, "I used to play
these things once. In my teens."
   He sat forward as if slapped. "You play?"
   " 'Played' would be closer to the fact. I
haven't touched a keyboard in years."
   "You were good?" he asked, gesturing to
the pealing from the speakers. "Good
enough to play these?"
   "That was part of the problem. I could play
the easiest of the set. With a few, I even
reproduced something more than the notes.
But the harder ones—"I imitated his wave,
not knowing whether to direct it toward the
speakers as he had, or toward the turntable,
where the generation was taking place. One
of the more demanding variations was in the
air, a juggling act demanding three separate
hands each under the control of its own
brain.
   I kept talking, not wanting to do anything
to endanger his alertness. As with stalking,
smooth motion seemed better than sudden,
even sudden freezing. "There are two sorts
of piano students. The first is proud of the
piece she's just mastered. The second hears
the next piece snickering. I started out as the
first, but drifted into the second."
   "I know," Dr. Ressler said. He'd grown as
effusive as a boy on a first date. "Oh, I can't
say I know. I've never taken a music lesson in
my life. I am your classic, digital autodidact. I
can clunk along on a keyboard fairly
grammatically, but with the thick accent of a
Pole who has learned to speak English
through books." He looked at me, and his
eyes shone. "You give me a chance to learn
something from a native speaker." I
demurred, but he took no notice. "As a
self-taught listener, I've often felt, as you
describe, pieces snicker at my inability to
hear a fraction of what's going on in them."
This time he didn't bother to wave at the
offender.
   We listened, quiet in the exertion. Even
his silence seemed preparation. "Certain
pieces," he resumed, "have to be put away
for a long time. I can't listen to them; they're
too evocative. They possess an intensity
incommensurate with everyday life. But
when I take them out again from their place
in the back of the closet where they've
waited for years, I can't stop listening." I
couldn't stop listening to him, to what I'd
first haunted this place hoping to hear. "Not
long ago, around the time your friend took
up as my shift assistant," he grinned, "after
several years of not being able to bear it, I
found I wanted to study this set again." He
contracted his mouth into a grimace: the
architecture of the sound, despite his best
effort, still held his ears' ability in joyful
contempt.
   I took a chance. "You've studied them
before?"
   The grimace broke into a full good humor.
He knew I was fishing—the same pond I'd
pointlessly trawled a few times before. He
was no more eager now to grant an
interview, but as someone who might be
able to tell him something, however modest,
about keyboards, I had him over a barrel
organ. He might never have talked so easily
had Todd been there. Maybe he considered
me a cousin who had also failed to end up in
her chosen field. Maybe he saw that I was
ready, after thirty years, to begin my
education in information science.
    Whatever his reason, Ressler told me a
story. He spoke of a series of nights as a
young man when he first discovered the
Goldbergs. A week of concentration, when
the closed code of music at last broke.
"Dangerously close to turning twenty-six,
paid to do genetic research, I instead spent
evenings lying in an army barracks bed,
listening to that aria over and over in my
ears, eyes, throat, and head. I was trying to
discover why the thirty minute waltzes
reduced me to hopeless emotion, to
neutralize them through over-exposure so I
could forget them and recover an even
emotional keel.
    "I had secured myself a pocket score. You
must understand that as late as my
mid-twenties, I could detect little more in
printed notes than inscrutable black bugs
crawling across the bars of their prison. I'm
still illiterate, to some degree. Some things
one must learn before five or they never
come fluidly."
    I had a hard time imagining this man as
illiterate at anything. But I didn't dare
contradict; he was venting decades of
introspection, and I wasn't about to stop
him for polite objection.
    "Who knows? Perhaps I have repressed all
memory of an unspeakable grade-school
accident involving an unmarked
glockenspiel that left me unable to listen to
rhythmic pitches without suspicion." He
checked my face, to see if he had lost the
cadence of humor. "But oddly," he went on,
shaking his head, "for some reason I am still
trying to puzzle out, from my very first
listening, this piece seemed to me less like
music than a rescue message. Word from a
place I had lived once, but could not find my
way back to. That sounds ridiculously
romantic, especially for an
eighteenth-century piece! But after
uncountable listening to a beaten-up copy
of the variations lent me by a labmate, I
began matching aural events in the rush of
notes with the complex symbols standing for
those events on the page. The day I finally
figured out how the correspondence actually
worked, it took the top of my head off.
Incrementally, over hours of effort, I found
one night that I could actually read the
score. Incredible! Without actually playing
the record, I could transcribe the aria from
the page to my head. I could hear the chords
themselves, just as if the Wunderkind on the
recording were in fact playing it. That, young
woman, is power."
    He paused long enough to shoot me a
playful look. "As you know from
bibliographic snooping, I was then engaged
in tracing the exact mechanism by which
macromolecules code for inherited traits." He
took a breath. For a terrible moment, I
thought he was about to choke. "A big
project. Several of my colleagues are still at
the task. Their offspring will still be at it. We
had arrived at a cusp. We knew a little;
enough to know that further extrapolation
would require a whole new zoo of relational
models. Certain things we already suspected:
a long, linear informational string wound
around its complement, like a photo pinned
to its own negative, for further, unlimited
printing."
   I had only a dilettantish idea what he was
talking about, a modest background from
answering a rash of alarmed questions
about patented new forms of life. I'd been
proud of the bit I had mastered until that
moment, when I saw it would not be enough
to carry me through this discussion, let alone
this decade or the approaching millennium.
   "We were looking for the right analogy,
the right metaphor that would show us how
to conduct the next round of experiments.
We were in a furious, often-mistaken
model-building stage. Exciting—unmatched
for human effort, as far as it went. But
slippery. You see, DNA is itself a model, a
repertoire for proteins. And the
convolutions of protein shape are
themselves analogies for the processes they
facilitate. In programmers' terms..." He
gestured through the one-way glass to the
computer room. On the other side, Frank
Todd stood on a chair, making sublime,
exaggerated, Buster Keaton gestures for the
entertainment of Annie Martens. She was
trying to leave for the evening, and he was
clowning her into staying a little longer. I
watched as he gave up, thumbing nose at
her. She laughed and waved goodbye.
   "You're not supposed to know how to
program," I objected.
   Ressler smiled. "In programmers' terms,
the incredibly complex chemical routines of
the cell blur the distinction between data
and instruction. All this is an overly long
digression to give you some idea of what
preoccupied me when I first heard Bach's
solution for recombining his modest aria. I
lay there in bed, concentrating on a line in a
particular variation. Say, the first entry of a
canon, although I could not at the time have
told you what a canon was. After intensive,
repeated listening, I could hear the first
suggestion of what had covertly fascinated
me. The strain separated like an independent
filament of DNA—part of the melodic line,
but simultaneously apart. I made the
momentous discovery that it was a
note-for-note transcription of the master
melody. My little fragment played against a
copy of the musical idea it had just been, a
moment before. Disengaging my focus,
transferring it from the first to the second
voice, I could hear the same fragment
matched against the shred it would in the
next moment become. When I shifted
awareness like this for any length of time,
the whole variation, at first inscrutable,
dissipated into crabs crawling over each
other in a bucket. Just as my ears got hold of
the rhythm, it would strobe hot potato with
the motive. The two lines would twine
themselves back into a double strand. I had
found my model for replication."
   Dr. Ressler pulled on his earlobes, a
characteristic gesture he used whenever he
caught himself being inexplicably human. "I
thought: 'No wonder this Bach fella is so
great a composer. He anticipates Watson
and Crick by two hundred years.' Idiot! And I
grew worse with the piece before it was all
over. It didn't take me long to discover in the
music all sorts of outrageous parallels. Nor
was it all my fault. The piece has the same
numerology as the systems we were working
with. Do you know how the variations are
built?"
   I shook my head. Music had never been a
formal thing to me. It had always been a run
of expressive moments—urgencies that
words only interfered with. But I watched in
fascination as Dr. Ressler stood and walked
to the turntable, curtly jerked the needle. He
placed it back down on side one, track one,
and to my astonishment, when the music
started again, he began to sing. But not the
melody, not the right-hand filigree I had
concentrated on when learning to hack out
the little aria. He sang, instead, the simple
sequence spelled out in the bass. "This," he
said, "is what the composer will vary
through his gigantic construction. Not the
melody; the harmonic sequence. The first
great analysis of the piece, written at the
moment of Mendel's triple rediscovery, set a
precedent by calling this theme the Base.
Handy English coincidence." He sang,
batching the Base into four-note blocks:




   He launched into numerology: triplet
triads over each theme note. Superimposed
over those first four triplet rungs, a
diversionary tune that, with grace notes,
contains twenty tones. Two halves of the
aria, each sixteen bars, both scored to
repeat, totaling sixty-four measures. He went
to his earlobe again. "All the numbers we
were after. The coincidence meant nothing,
of course. But to a snot-nosed kid of
twenty-five, the exercise was invigorating."
To an old woman of thirty, too. It brought
out the closet gnostic to hear him talk. Not
for the correlations themselves, at best
novelties, but for the look at a mind that
years of night shift had not put to sleep.
One that still drew connections between all
things, if now only with embarrassment at its
own profusion. A mind that looked for the
pattern of patterns, the structure that
mirrored mind itself, gave it something to
recognize in the landscape around it.
   This was my first introduction to musical
experience I had not even suspected existed.
As Dr. Ressler sang along with the record
player, I began to see that he listened to
these variations not as if they followed one
after another, but as if they stacked up
simultaneously, sounding all at once in an
unbearable polyphonic chorus. He listened
to the world, more attuned to its awful
fullness than its expendable melody: a set of
variations all based on one, simple,
thirty-two-note ground bass; a giant
passacaglia preserving the harmonic
structure of the original, fleshing it out into
every conceivable design.
   My hush made Ressler self-conscious. He
snorted. "As you can imagine, I fast
approached the conviction that either
everything in the universe fit into a regular
pattern or that I was, at my tender age,
perilously close to a weekend at what people
in the late fifties were fond of calling the
Funny Farm."
   I looked away from his self-deflation,
through the silvered glass at Todd,
preparing a night's work in the other room.
Although he could not see us through the
mirror, Frank now and then looked up at the
room where his delinquent shiftmate sat
talking. Ressler, anxious to join him, wound
up with that favorite expression of Bach: All
things must be possible. A pedagogical
goading-on to performances that lay just
outside the fingers. What exactly did the
phrase mean? "Everything that is, is
possible" was possible, if redundant. "All
things that might be, can be" rubbed up in
my mind against unlikelihood. Yet an
evolutionist might say the same. All
permutations on an amino acid theme are
possible; given sufficient time and the
persistent tick of the mutation clock,
everything might be tried, with varying
success. Not every experiment will fly; but
every conceivable message string
is—whatever the word means—possible.
   The mind, emerging from blind patterning
in possession of catastrophic awareness,
condensed the eon-work of random field
trials into instants. Did Bach's baroque ditty
harbor the political horrors of Ressler's own
lifetime? Everything that humans can
imagine will be implemented. Bergen-Belsen,
Nagasaki, Soweto, Armenia, Bhopal: he had
lived through all manner of atrocity. These
mutations too were built on the little phrase,
and then some. To listen to a theme and
variations, he suggested, one had to be
prepared for dissonance severe enough to
destroy even the original theme.
   "You see," Ressler at last broke our
moratorium, "once the experiment gets
underway, all possible outcomes are already
implied." He spoke with a spittle of fear in
his throat. "The impossibly delicate pineal
folds of your ear, for instance. Just one of
the infinite ways a child's ear might unfold."
He winced, as if at the memory of a specific
child. He ended our first lesson by returning
to the phonograph and lifting the needle. "I
listened to these miniatures for a year, pulled
out of them the most marvelous genetic
analogies. But at the end, the music refused
to reduce, and it hurt worse than before. I
was a good empiricist, and just as causality
was forbidden me, so was prescription. All
an empiricist is allowed to do about terrible
possibility is describe it. All things being
possible, description is everything."
   He grew curt, perhaps ashamed at
choosing this moment to break so long a
silence. He asked forgiveness with his eyes—
ridiculously inappropriate. Only with a
woman twenty years younger, one he'd
known just weeks, could he reveal his
ambivalence toward human company, the
host in the hermit. Quietly, his back turned
as he punched a few console keys, he asked,
"Do you think it would cost you a great
effort to recover what you've lost?"
   I couldn't for the life of me make out what
he was talking about. Then it hit me: my
piano skills, never more than modest. He
wanted someone to play for him. "Do you
two have a baby grand tucked away in all
this electronics?"
   "I'll get one tomorrow." He laughed, a
sound that went straight into my chest.
   Time passed before Dr. Ressler trusted us
with the rest of the story; he'd dug a great
deal more out of the sarabande than a
handful of genetic metaphors. He had
discovered, in the most painful way, why the
aria and its wayward children made
unspon-sored appearances in his mind's
ears, keeping him awake in his barracks at
night. It cost him considerably to find out.
The music would remain unlistenable for
decades. Love was long over, but what was
lost to him he still loved so harshly that it
prevented him from listening even to its
trace.
   I would never get from him, in so many
words, why he chose the moment of Todd's
arrival to return to the unlistenable piece.
Why take it up again, just then, obsessively,
once more finding in it more than he
suspected? Perhaps it had something to do
with the incurable Bach's other favorite
quote. Asked how he made the keyboard
perform miracles of interchanging voices
when he possessed only the same
finger-bound hands as the rest of mankind,
he would say: It's simple. Just hit the right
notes at the right time, and the thing
virtually plays itself.

  Double Check

   Three months under the bridge; with
frugality and luck, eight more in front of me
before I have to hit the classifieds. Sickening
to consider, so I won't. Human prerogative.
Still: three months of reading, jotting,
recalling. It feels as if I quit yesterday, that
I'm on that most contrived of civilized
symbolic stopgaps, a vacation.
   A quarter year of unbroken booking and I
begin to acquire a layman's understanding
of mutation at the molecular level.
Information in the nucleic acid string is
carried by the order of base pairs, the
sequences of genes. The sum of gene
messages—the tangled program of
genotype—expands from single egg to
runaway cell civilization. The same linear
long set (more possible messages than
atoms in the universe) chemically juggles the
whole fantastic hierarchy until at last it
impairs itself with old age and dissolves.
   I have a rough analogy of the master plan.
Each DNA spiral is two chains. The rules of
complementary base pairing and the
undulating regularity of the molecule give
each half-helix the ability to act as imprint
for the whole. This trick of molecules to sort,
arrange, and assemble odd parts of random
world into copies of themselves arose
spontaneously, from the early chemical mix
and the energy of an electrical storm. Miller
produced the essential building blocks by
exposing hydrogen, methane, ammonia, and
water vapor to electrical discharge and
ultraviolet light. By 1956, Khorana had
synthesized polynucleotides in the lab.
Ressler was then younger than Todd is now,
and I was a toddler.
   Replication is simple enough to model
with a drawing. The split strands separate,
each becoming a template for duplication:




  The two daughter strands are identical 10
the parent. One third of the great bridge:
Mendel's factors, embodied in a
self-perpetuating molecule. That length of
string—TAAGCTCGGA, plus hundreds more
bases in strict sequence—encodes particular
inheritable traits, say smooth seed or
wrinkled. Molecular neo-Mendelism is
consistent with the rules of gross
segregation and assortment, requiring no
metaphysical rules—just the constraints laid
down by chemists: purine with pyrimidine,
electrons in the lowest energetic state.
   But that "just" is enormous. Genetic
mechanism contains nothing transcendental.
Cell growth, organism development conform
to the principles of undergrad chemistry. The
grammar does not change from generation
to generation—only individual sentences do.
A simple lookup table, one or more triplets
of nucleotides to each amino acid, is
universal for all life. Yet to get hold of this,
to learn what it means, I must look into a
creation story more miraculous than any
human genesis myth.
   I try to imagine a machine that, through a
design stumbled upon by trial and error, has
developed the ability to sniff out
compounds that it then strips and welds to
create another such machine. I cannot. Then
I can: deer, euglena, snowy egrets, man.
Self-replication is the easy part of the story,
the simplest way that the purposive molecule
arranges its environment. The sequence of
bases in a gene is nothing in itself. Not
phalanx, strut, tooth, claw, or eye color.
Merely a mnemonic for building an enzyme.
The enzyme does the work, steers the shape
and function of the organism. The gene is
just the word. I must follow it down, make it
flesh.
   I begin to understand how the real power
of this self-duplicating machinery lies not in
how perfectly it works but in how, incredibly
rarely, it fails to work perfectly. If inviolable
process allowed the magic crystal to seed
itself in the first place, occasional fallibility
permits life to crack open the sterile stable of
inorganics and scream out. On the order of
once every million replications, something
goes wrong. Perhaps a base in a daughter
string pairs with a base other than its
required complement:




i
    A mistaken daughter: CAAGCT— Who
knows what this new chain might mean?
Slightly different from its parent, it may
produce a different enzyme, an unexpected
convolution in the unfolding ear. I draw the
repercussions, repeat the replication process
with the impostor cytosine going on to pair
with its normal mate, guanine. One of the
four granddaughters differs from all the
other copies. Noise invades the system. One
bad pairing alters the gene's original
message. Unlike the surnames of American
daughters, the change need not be lost in
generations. This aberrant offspring— with a
new arsenal of enzymes—may be more
successful at making further copies than her
dutiful sisters, though the odds against this
rival the odds against mutation in the first
place.
   Now I must link Darwin and his riot of
proliferating solutions to that
one-in-a-million molecular mistake. I must
trace how chance static—a dropped, added,
or altered letter in the delicate program—can
possibly produce the mad, limitless variety of
the natural history plates. That forethought
and design could come of feedback-shaped
mistake is as unlikely as the prospect of
fixing a Swiss watch by whacking it with a
hammer and hoping. The element I lack is
the odd eon. I have eight months. The world
has all the time in the world.
   Whatever works is right, worth repeating:
not much of a first principle. How can blind
unplan produce a string thick with desire to
reveal its own fundament? Where is the
master program he was after? Somewhere in
the self-proliferating print, the snowy egret,
a keyboard that plays itself when you hit the
right notes. The theme Ressler hoped bitterly
to forget urges me on, whispering in
enzymes to rebuild the buzz all around him.

  The Question Board

  Q: There is an enclosure with ten doors.
When one is open, nine are shut. When nine
are open, one is closed.

   A: Once we held metaphor cupped in our
hands. But it's foreign to us now, the riddle,
lost to our repertoire except in the short
span of childhood and the handful of adult
months when we recover a glimpse of where
we're going. We can predict, measure, repeat
our results better than anything that has
ever lived on earth. But we cannot answer
this simplest of games.
   Its beauty is verbal ingenuity: how well the
hidden comparison fits. The sorrowful
romance of three lines says more in hiding
than it would by spelling out. But what
good are riddles? Why bother with them?
One might as well ask why bother with
growing old. They are ways to begin to say
what wonder means.
   But my lost friend, this one is easy! One
needn't be Solomon to solve it. When the
umbilical is open, all other ports are still
sealed. But cut the cord, and the stitch in
time opens nine. You have one, proved by
your effort to escape it. I have one, a full
complement of symmetric parts; you knew it
intimately once. Forgotten already? There is
an enclosure with ten doors. We are each
locked up in one for life.
   J. O'D., October '85



X

    A Day Without the Ever

   Todd would choose mornings like this to
show up downstairs, ring his private
signal—a monotone but unmistakable
rendition of "La donna e mobile"—and
insist that I come out to play. "All systems
go. The dissertation's in hand. Ready for
committee in six weeks," he would say,
tossing me a softball when I opened the
door. "How's about a little fungo?"
Unflappable in the face of adulthood. This
morning, I'd close his batting hand in the
doorjamb. Just once, I'd leave him something
he might feel for longer than the usual
afternoon.
   The date on his Greetings from Europe
leaves him at most a few weeks to have
stood still and grieved. He never had any
trouble feeling deeply. Just broadly, for any
length of time. Ressler's lecture notes will
never be made good. The ludicrous old
stereo has been farmed out to Goodwill. The
rooftop garden in Lower Manhattan that
kept us in tomatoes all summer has run to
seed. And Franklin's moved on to the next
feel.
   Why waste my limited time narrowing
Todd down to a specific atlas spot? He is
unreliable, skittish, more changeable than
the seasons. But he is the only other person
who knew Ressler. The only person I know
who, even now, I might speak to. If I find the
museum that houses met de Bles's panel,
what will it tell me? Nothing guarantees that
Todd stayed in the neighborhood more than
an afternoon. But a start. Something to use
my training on. Odd comfort, to know the
exact town he was in on 7/6. An anchor spot.
A day like any other.
   I start with the obvious: the Low
Countries. Aided by art catalogs, I search
through northern Belgium, the Dutch Rim
Cities. For a minute, I think I've pinned him
down in Rotterdam. There, in the
Boymans—van Beuningen, a picture that
might have drawn him: one of Brueghel's
two great Towers of Babel. The painter and
subject matter he really wanted to write
about. But no Herris. I find a Bles panel—
Paradise—in the Mauritshuis in The Hague,
and another in a regional museum in the
south of the country. I am dragging my
heels, pursuing the unlikely. The stamp on
his card was in francs, not guilders.
   I cross the border, no douanes to trouble
me over undeclared baggage. I find nothing
in Antwerp but an afternoon of fabulous
distraction. Ghent is a dead end; the
altarpiece must have brought him there, but
I have no proof. No clues when. I save my
chief suspect for last. Brussels.
French-speaking enclave in Flemish
countryside. Musée des Beaux Arts. Voor
Schone Kunsten. Brueghel's Census at
Bethlehem, his Fall of Icarus. Indifferent,
irrelevant, overlooked, unbearably mundane
suffering, depicted dead on. And for a
moment: electric connection. Three bona fide
panels by Bles. But the two landscapes do
not match the view I'm after, and the subject
of the third is all wrong. This painted
apocalypse is of flood. The world I'm looking
for must end in fire.

  The Date, No Longer Off

   Todd was never sufficient motive for
overhauling my life. I knew nothing of his
private affairs, his prior commitments. No
matter; I simply liked to be with him. Time
was wide, broad enough for all manner of
RSVPs. All his solicitous attention made me
feel unique. The decorous handshakes and
hugs—generations out of date—the barrage
of personal questions, the liquid
forest-animal eyes, the detailed monologues
about his father's Saturday ritual or Northern
Renaissance painters made me feel that I
brought about a reciprocal cold alertness in
him, the suggestion of imminent ocean
crossing.
   Five minutes of seeing Todd, through the
one-way glass, smother pretty bank teller
Annie with the same courtier's attention
should have brought home that his flood
could engulf anything that would hold still
long enough to get wet. Sometimes in the
early evening at MOL, the phone would ring
with acquaintances eager for a share of his
voice. Frank would greet every obscure
claimant at the other end like a childhood
blood brother lost for decades. A thousand
people in greater New York considered him
their best friend. Only he was on this island
alone.
   With only the slightest encouragement, I
was prepared to jettison Keith, the
apartment, our circle of mutual dinner
friends— to slash and burn them all,
rewriting the past with brutal efficiency. For
a moment before consigning the old letters
to the bin, I hesitated. Some nights I fell
asleep swearing it would be tomorrow. But
in the morning, the thought of splitting up
the end tables we had bought as a set struck
me not as clearing off deadwood but as
torching the living tree. Tuckwell, sensing
the lumpectomy might yet be avoided,
played on my remorse. Fighting to keep me
around, he put on a heroic show of
lightness, as if that quality would awaken my
fullest nostalgia for him. In October, the air
took on unbearable, crisp clarity. It was
waiting for me. The solid blue of the sky, the
smell of dead leaves insisted that courage
was a little thing. Slight. Easy, in that time of
year when everything happened.
    I was then on weekend rotation, two days
off in midweek. Keith's willingness to market
anything to anyone had landed him in court.
An exporter and a manufacturer of an
ultrasonic antipest device for whom Keith
had done a brilliant multimedia campaign
were suing one another for fraud. Each had
led the other to believe that fortunes were
to be made selling the killer sonic machine in
Australia. Following bankruptcy, both held
the other responsible for failing to
determine that the top three Australian pests
were deaf. On one of my free mornings,
Keith suggested I join him in the civil
courtroom where he was performing. "An
especially interesting item in the docket
today. An animal psychologist who
specializes in vermin defense mechanisms. A
must-see on anyone's judicial list."
    "Keith, I'm not up to it just now.
Besides...."
    "Come on, woman. This is just what you
need. Lose that long face. We're talking
major Constitutional implications here.
Democracy in action. The unmistakable
element of human pathos." The couple that
litigates together, mitigates together.
Whenever the tertium quid settled down
between us, he began to practice an
ivy-league irony that made fun of everything
he did for a living.
    "I can't. I have to meet a friend at the
Met."
    "First I've heard about it." It would be the
first Franker heard too. Todd had extended a
standing invitation to look at paintings
together any daytime I wanted. That
afternoon, I wanted. But unable to move
from one life to the next, I took to
deception. To compound the ugliness, I
blamed the need for deceit now on Keithy.
But skulking had started all the way back
with that first dinner date. I'd thought that
for me to call Tuckwell and tell him "I'm
meeting a man for dinner" would have been
like the secretary of state announcing, in
front of that bas-relief, briefing-room, world
map proclaiming this country's perpetual
escapade in high seriousness, that we have
no immediate plans for amphibious invasion
of this week's hot spot. Tuckwell and I had
always danced warily around formally fixing
the contract. We lived on a perpetual option
to renew. My coming on with the threatened
leverage of a stranger would seem to
telegraph the conventional dictate "Marry or
get off the pot." This I refused to do. So I
withheld the facts, and withholding, week
by week, grew progressively easier.
   By that October morning, I was positively
skilled at fabrication. Truth seemed so small
a thing, against such overwhelming odds.
Lying about plans for the Met had an aura of
novelty, as exciting as hearing the mailman
downstairs. As soon as I invented it for
Keith, my faked afternoon date took on a
sweepstakes feel. Bold and violent decision,
the scent of spice islands.
   I refused to justify my day's plans. Keith
repeated, "Come on. You'll love this. The
technology, the untapped continent, and
the men who dared rid it of its lower forms
of life. The shattered dream, the falling out
of friendship, and the judicial system that
reconciled them. And it's free. Can the Met
offer you even a fraction of that?"
   For years, his ability to stoke up inspired
silliness on demand had saved me from
myself. But today, that was history. "Not very
attractive, Keith."
   "Pest eradication prosecution seldom is,
dear one."
   "Stop it!" I scared myself with the volume.
"It's all a big burlesque, your life, isn't it? But
you keep putting on the power suit every
day, don't you? You jump through the same
hoops as any other little zealot. Then you
parody it all for your friends, so we'll all
know you're only an observer."
   Breaking loose, but in exactly the way I
didn't want to. Keith closed his eyes and got
infuriatingly calm. "OK. Easy, sweet. Let's do
a little breakfast before we get too far into
this. We don't want to start a catastrophe
simply because we skipped today's E, hmm?"
   After a healthy dose of vita-look-alike, I
still declined to come watch the system in
action, if more affectionate in my refusal. To
fault Tuckwell for hypocrisy was even worse.
Keith, private maniac, professional
fair-haired boy of the senior partners, the
perfect adaptation for steel and glass, was
simply more honest about living the split
than I was. The moment he walked out the
door, still trying to seduce me with the
ludicrous court battle, I was on the phone.
By the third ring, I was about to hang up
and disappear into telephonymity when he
answered. "Museum?" I asked, aping his
trick of plunging in in medias res.
   Franklin answered, "Museum,"
enthusiastically on the downbeat, although
sleep still coated his voice.

  Hunger Moon

   Even the Biology Building is lately
promoted to Shelter Status. The need to
imagine safe havens has become epidemic.
Ressler's isolation in recent weeks—winding
up his rate experiment, avoiding the
distraction of his colleagues' company,
exploring in the evenings that inscrutable
musical code—has been so complete that he
has not heard the world-changing news: the
Russians have launched an artificial moon.
For the first time since the first star maps, a
new celestial body circles the sky. Everything
at launch level is changed utterly. For a
moment, the planet discovers itself on the
edge of unforgiving space. Fear is electric:
we've escaped the pull of the world.
   Western alarm is worse, deafening. The
Russian scientist's legendary backwardness
is wiped out in one shocking headline.
Stalinist science has produced its notorious
monsters, notably the state-sponsored
revival of Lamarckism. A body's ability to
develop and pass on beneficial mutations
was deemed ideologically appealing enough
for the party to overrule the demonstrated
direction of genetic translation. Forced by
political dictum, Russian scientists wasted
decades hunting the pangene, proof that
somatic cells could alter the organism's
gametes. When Uncle Joe died in '53, his
Acquired Characteristics died with him.
   But the West's own search for the genome
might itself be biased toward a
representational democracy. Ressler loves
Haldane's quip about terriers growing tails
despite generations of clipping: "Yes, there's
a divinity that shapes our ends, rough hew
them how we will." But on humbler days in
the sophisticated West, he recalls that field
evidence for the neo-Darwinian synthesis is
itself equivocal. That some bump, not yet a
functional eye, can be promoted for
generations before it can see is at least as
implausible as mo lecular-environmental
feedback. Chance and necessity differ only
by degree.
   In labs across the country, the "What do
you get when you cross Stalin with Lamarck"
jokes are hushed furiously this week. A new
respect for Soviet science emerges in
100-point type. They've made a satellite,
while the brightest stars on our
technological horizon are the exploding
Vanguard and the Edsel. The blow to
national pride is a mobilization call. In one
night, science is promoted to unchallenged
prominence. Shaman status, educational
rage, patriotic and pragmatic. The
once-revered business career slips to a
distant second in immigrants' dreams for the
perpetuation of their genes. Stuart's folks'
vision is vindicated.
   Where the public feels knee-jerk fright,
Cyfer expresses hushed elation. Koss, usually
caustic in groups, opens the first Blue Sky
after the launch. "How does it feel to be
alive at the first ground-break since
Columbus?" We've left the planet. Now
there's no stopping.
   Joe Lovering, misreading her amazement,
scoffs. He can explain the Soviets' beating us
to space. "The same thing that got them our
A-bomb so fast. And the Super, just one year
after us. We let them capture too many Nazi
profs."
   The lurch into the Space Age will make
that last jolt from Stone into Iron seem like a
pothole in the road. The dazed, mismatched
layman's response to the alien new place
follows the second Soviet launch. Laika, first
dog in space. The papers demand: Are the
Communists just going to let the poor thing
die out there? They forget that the ongoing
experiment has already taken its every living
victim, each step along the way.
   Sputnik and the space race make less of an
impression on Ressler than they might. He
stands on the threshold of news that could
rival the Russians'. After a bout of intensive
lab work, sleeping little and eating less, he
concludes the radioactive trials Ulrich
assigned him as busywork. His results fail to
support the phenomenon they were looking
for. Yet—basic paradox—the unmitigated
negative result reveals more than any
qualified positive could. The nonre-sults tell
Ressler something serendipitous, critical.
   He can't quantify it yet, but certain phages
remain partly functional even after mutation
should have wiped out enzyme activity. This
degree of mutation survival may confirm that
the gene is read like a linear tape, that the
gene has error tolerance built in, that the
message is more flexible than anyone
suspects. Suppose a codon in the base
sequence mutates from GCT to GGT. If the
enzyme synthesized by the new codon is still
functional, then perhaps GGT and GCT code
for the same amino. Those extra forty-four
codons that have been troubling everyone
could reduce the chance of error.
Redundancy may itself be useful.
   He deduces this much from his data on
enzymatic persistence. But another
unexpected result suggests more. As widely
grasped, individual mutations—insertions,
deletions, or substitutions of base
pairs—garble the stretch of affected message
by rearranging its letters. But as little as a
single deletion near one end of the
asymmetric gene can totally destroy the
enzymatic function the gene codes for.
Conversely, a deletion near the other end
leaves the gene function largely intact. An
enzyme produced by a gene with a single
dropped letter at the tail end remains
chemically similar to the one produced by the
original gene.
   Ressler infers something Cyfer until then
only supposes: the code is read from head to
tail. An error at the beginning of the tape
throws off the remaining reading. But an
error at the end is translated only after most
of the enzyme has been built. The metaphor
fits, substantiates the model that Ressler has
been working on in mental privacy. More
important, in the course of the experiment,
he's come up with a technique that may help
him assemble his Rosetta. He has learned to
use acridine compounds in a way that lets
him control more precisely just where he
places the garble and what shape it takes.
One of the first impediments into the codon
substitution table vanishes overnight.
   Three quarters of the methodology he
needs must be out there in print somewhere,
public knowledge. All he needs to do now is
collect the leads from divergent disciplines
and work them into a coherent whole.
Nobody has yet assembled the pieces,
although he feels the entire field teeter on
the edge of the simplicity just beyond their
mass conceptual block. His head spins with
the immediacy of it: a simple, experimental
means of inducing controlled mutations, the
tool that will permit them to determine the
codon/ amino assignments. Selective
garbling can tell them everything. Inducing
mutations, introducing bits of nonsense into
the gene's message, can force the code to
reveal itself in entirety.
   He sits on a code mine. His mind races to
the choices available should the method
lead into the vein. He can keep the method
in-house a little longer, surrender it to
Ulrich, announce the results to the team. But
as much as he'd like to, he can't keep mum
for long. He must publish the results from
this experiment, hastening the pace of the
accelerating field. He can't refuse to testify,
however much time it might buy. He feels a
strange euphoria, an overwhelming sense of
inevitability. The thing about to make its
grand entrance surprises him by its uncanny
familiarity.
   Leaving the lab in late evening, he fails to
recognize the outside, so deep are autumn's
inroads. He heads to Stadium Terrace,
extended concentration catching up with
him in mild hallucinations. Passing the
sewage facility, he transposes two letters in
its sign: "Flirtation Plant." He hears his name
in a distant car horn. The columns flanking
Memorial Stadium, in inflamed peripheral
vision, become a chorus line of Nike-Ajaxs in
launch position. He knows what causes the
phantoms; he even understands a little of
the physiology involved. That doesn't make
the tracers any less real.
   He recalls his meeting weeks before, his
fumbling attempts to convey the idea to
Ulrich, who instantly intuited how little
Ressler actually knew of his target. Weeks
have slipped by, weeks of self-exile. He
longs reluctantly for friendship with team
members, conversation, any conversation,
even shared silence. What is it that makes it
so urgent to sacrifice the pleasures of
inconsequential contact, to get to the
insight, to be the first to announce a
rearrangement of thought? He is more
driven now than ever. The means are nearer
than he imagined. He needs only another
few months. Time to verify, hunt down
obvious oversight. Flush out the variables.
Add the imminent last links. But can he take
that time in good faith, or is he merely
drawing out, delaying?
   At home, in the dark, he feels why he
needs to race this thing, prove his own
intellect, assign a portion of the unmapped
world a fixed, unambiguous valence. He
knows the cause, but he will not say it. At
night, in the dark, he lies in his bunk and
listens to a brilliant keyboard strain that will
never again sound as it did. The piece flies
along under his fingers, in his substrate.
Even repeated exposure leaves him with no
resistance to her code bug. He imagines the
woman's face an inch from his. He reaches
out, takes her head in his fingers, runs them
over her meridian lines and ridges, around
her ears, down to the slight flip at the base
of her skull, back up to her crown. His
innermost cells want to force up against
hers, fuse, intermarry. He wants to fight for
her, beat experience, propose himself as the
best of all fits, the surviving solution. Yet
part of him—the most recent addition to that
composite surviving act—knows that
knowledge this critical must do more than
survive.
   He is virtually there, on the threshold of a
barrier-breaking as great as earth's first
artificial moon. For the first time in the
procession of biosphere, some part, some
chance permutation threatens the technique,
arrives at the place where it might reach
down, feel its own material base, place its
hands on its own mechanism, its own
inheritance, grasp it as deeply as it can be
grasped. His own contained code can
synthesize the last span. But how can he
begin to press his hands through if he
cannot extract even the information in this
breathtaking tune?

  Night Music

  A neat trick fires my imagination all
afternoon. One lovely demonstration proves
that the genetic tape is indeed written in
triplet codons. I seem able to catch these
things only in rough analogies. I imagine the
string of letters:

  YOUCANRUNFARBUTCANYOUFIXOURBA
DEAROLDMAN

   In that form, the string conveys little. But if
I know the cipher's word length is three,
sense springs from the foliage:

 YOU CAN RUN FAR BUT CAN YOU FIX
OUR BAD EAR OLD MAN

  The sense is still a bit cryptic, but I've shed
enough noise for the emergence of message.
Suppose something damaged this string as it
was delivered. Parsing the letters into
groups, I accidentally drop the first C:

  YOU ANR UNF ARB UTC ANY OUF IXO
URB ...

    Except for stray coincidence, the line now
yields only nonsense. More gibberish results
if I drop two letters near the beginning. But
deleting three letters near the front
produces:

  YOC ANU NAR BUT CAN YOU FIX OUR
BAD EAR OLD MAN

   The message momentarily crumbles, only
to rise again into sense. A single deletion
near the beginning of a gene destroys the
functionality of the synthesized protein. The
same holds true for two deletions. But
surprising modulation: three successive
clipped bases partly restore the nature of the
original protein, experimentally supporting a
reading frame of three. This result, when
combined with the sequential tape
metaphor, provides a clue for solving the
framing problem. If, in the catalog of
sixty-four possible codons, one triplet stands
for the start of the gene's message, such a
marker would not only separate genes but
would also establish the gene's word-frame.
   My hunger for proofs grows as I consume
them. I feel an unearned pleasure in tracing
them, as if I were the first to haul them to the
surface. As I catch the formal bug I begin to
follow, in analogy, the cold joy, the
distinction that had made Dr. Ressler seem
so alien. The simplest, most childlike passion:
he believed in readability—patterns
connecting patterns—long after the age
when the rest of us resign ourselves to adult
confusion.
   That triplet trick returns me to an evening
Todd and I spent listening to the great tenth
variation with him. Franklin should have
been finishing his end-of-day processing. I
should have been home, picking up the
pieces of my domestic wreck. But neither of
us could budge from the room, the formal
spell Dr. Ressler had thrown over us. We'd
been having an armchair discussion of
current events accompanied by the standard
background music for those parts. When the
fughetta began its four bars of
foreshadowing, Dr. Ressler broke off in
midsentence. He announced, "Bass entry,"
and pointed to one corner of the room, as if
the piano producing the line hid there. Thus
instructed, I heard in the phrase an
ornamented descendant of the first four
notes of the sarabande. Not as they occurred
in the original, but as sent out into the
world, harmonically:




   A second voice entered. "Tenor," Ressler
commanded, pointing his other hand into
the opposite corner. I heard the new voice
chime in, duplicating the first, a fifth higher.
Two more lines entered, question and
answer, tonic and dominant, building up a
complex clarity of texture. Ressler
announced both in turn with near-shouts,
"Soprano" and "Alto," cueing each voice,
pointing a finger into the room's remaining
corners.
   At the edge of overflowing, the piece's
motor rhythm stopped. The break lasted less
than a breath. Immediately, a new harmonic
variant on the four-bar subject made its way
through the four-voice rotation again, this
time rearranged, accompanied by a
coun-terfigure. "Soprano," Dr. Ressler called
out from the top, flipping toward the corner
where he had first consigned that voice.
"Alto," answered right hand with left.
"Bass," he cued. I caught his eyes as he
called out, "Tenor!" They were full, liquid
with a throat-stopping delight.
   When the fantastic construction dropped
off into random silence, I looked over at
Todd. He too, under the persuasion of
Ressler's four spatially separate pianos, had
heard something. He looked at Ressler
imploringly, the way a child looks to a parent
to explain the latest infecting crisis. But
Ressler was off elsewhere, remembering,
after three decades, his search for the
underwriting metaphor. "Four-measure bass,
four-base measure," he said, to no one in
particular, as variation eleven already took
the matter further. "Extraordinarily clever
fellow, Bach. Ahead of his time."
   Only tonight, my head full of mutation
tricks, do I begin to name just what I heard,
what connection Dr. Ressler mumbled about.
Four voices, at four measures for each
subject entry, the whole turn-taking
undertaken twice, yielded thirty-two
measures, a map of the thirty-two-note
parent. Not a breath wasted. Nor did the
three of us waste ours for catching it. With
Dr. Ressler pointing them out, I heard the
successive reentrant voices, layering one on
top of another, musical analogs of those
plastic anatomical overlays in biology books.
Each transparent sheet contains its own,
separate hierarchies—circulatory, skeletal,
nervous. But each overlay, flipped on the
stack, adds its system, compacts its parts into
a surprising, indivisible composite.
   Hearing that much, however modest, was
a small triumph. I knew that fugues—while
most not as compact as this one—did not
necessarily require enormous musical gift to
create or hear. Marvelous in my ear, and yet,
every note just as it should be. But that
much was just the surface of the form, one
that went all the way down, as far as I chose
to follow. Listening to the cyclical
subject-passing entrances, I all at once heard
something else. Something going on in the
lines after they'd made their grand, identical
entrances. In between the formal constraints
of fugal entry, percolating up through the
piling voices, was the outline of a musical
idea I'd heard somewhere before.
   My ear flipped back and forth between
figure and ground, focus and periphery.
What was the bass doing in the second four
measures, when the tenor has the subject?
Or the bass and tenor, in exultant dialogue,
four measures along, while soprano took up
the fugue? I heard it in a single stroke,
endowed with new ears: the growing braid
of free voices sang out nothing short of a
mutation on the Base, the original, template
theme.
   The music ran beyond cleverness, outside
admiration. According to my scholarly
reference, it follows that fugues, because the
same subject enters slavishly in each voice,
however brilliantly carried forward, are more
or less determined by the thrust of the
subject itself, in this case, the fughetta's first
four bars. But holding both vertical and
horizontal at the same time, I heard that
theoretical limit being shed, left behind like
a spent chrysalis. Packed in the thirty-two
measures of information was a harmonic
structure informed by but also perpetually
advancing the original aria from which it was
merely descended.
   The compositional triumph of the piece,
both for Bach in the eighteenth century and
the three of us lost in the twentieth, came
eight bars from the end. The bass, taking its
turn with the second fugue subject,
extended the harmonic progression and
completed the constraints of variation in the
same four bars. Breath of air, genuine
surprise although absolutely predictable.
Rigidly perfect, but moldable to all the
nuanced sworls of living ears.
   The whole piece, as well as my brief
understanding of it, lasted forty seconds.
How Bach could meet both horizontal and
vertical constraints with such efficiency of
material, how he could add insight to inquiry
without showing either seam or sweat left
me in awe, even after my ability to hear it
died away. During those forty seconds, I first
felt the resonant, connecting joints holding
together this experiment in reversing the
randomness of inert matter. I heard the
sound that caused Dr. Ressler's eyes to
water, the sound that had once vibrated in
the tones of scientific reduc-tionism. Pure
analogy. No, I need a better name for being
unable to tell where I left off and the piece
began. I heard, for a moment, the explosion
of shape, the diversity of living awareness,
dovetail into one simple, accidental, but
necessary and breathtaking generating form.
For forty seconds, I understood that all
evolution was accomplished by juggling only
four voices. In the fughetta:
   SATB. In us listeners, in the
fughetta-writer himself: GATC.
   The three of us stopped conversing long
enough to follow the shadow of technical
virtuosity at patient work, to listen to the
fughetta map its own grateful ability to map
at all. We eavesdropped, undetected for an
instant, on a discussion supremely urgent
and articulate but entirely without content.
That sound took us, for forty seconds,
beyond the point where experience
commonly defers: beyond cleverness to joy,
outside admiration into understanding,
rubbing shoulders against wonder. I heard,
in a word, my first few measures of music.

  The Enigma Machine

   A line runs down the office he shares with
Lovering, straight as a surveyor's cut, an
osmotic membrane separating the
organization of Ressler's area from the
entropic mayhem of his office mate. On
Lovering's side, arboreal colonies of books,
lush, vegetative pools of mimeograph, and
ruminant herds of manila-enveloped crap
creep up to the divide and abruptly drop off.
On Ressler's side: the formal gardens of
Versailles. He'd feel better if the barrier were
physical—firebreaks, barbed wire—instead
of nothing more explicit than mutual
goodwill.
   His office mate's filing system for the
proliferating piles is astounding. Asked to
retrieve any paper that has ever come into
his possession, Lovering can pull it from the
papyrus morass. Nevertheless, the watering
hole gives Ressler the heebie-jeebies. He
finds it hard to think, seated at his desk; he
can feel tinea corporis in the damp air, jungle
rot crawling behind him, tendrils sucking
him into Lovering's data sprawl.
   This afternoon, he can avoid the place no
longer. Ulrich distributes progress-review
forms to be completed by semester end. He
must describe all lab activity in the last four
months. His one experiment—with its
blaring negative results—must be reported
with great care. He heads to his office,
breathes deeply, and enters. Lovering sits at
the desk opposite, red-lining, dispersing
professional confetti. "Stuart Ressler! You
still on the payroll? Thought you'd skipped
town."
   "Afternoon, Dr. Lovering," Ressler replies,
affable emphasis on the title. "I've been
around. Lab work." He keeps his eyes
diverted, lest they register the excitement of
what he's stumbled upon. Head down, he
cuts a path to open spaces.
   "Work? You know what the good Dr.
Freud says about work?"
   "N-no." Ressler sits gingerly on the edge
of his chair and eyes the border for any
recent incursions. He spreads the form in
front of him. "I can't honestly say I do."
   "But you do know what Saint Paul says
about marriage?" This delivered with sly,
shit-eating grin.
   Quietly, placidly, Ressler resigns himself to
the reproaches of conversation. "What's that
supposed to mean, Joe?"
   "You know damn well!" Lovering rocks
dangerously back in his chair, arms all over
the place. Suit jacket and tie are suddenly
belied by hayseed, goofy, boys'-locker-room
intonation.
   "What do I know damn well, Joe?"
   "Poontang, my friend." Lovering shakes
his head, laughs. "You dog! You animal!"
   Ressler does some rapid cryptography.
"Oh, no. No, Joe. Really. Believe me. It's
nothing like that."
   "It's something, then!" Lovering
proclaims, as if verifying another organism's
distress were cause for publication. "Now
we're making headway. Come on, man. What
else could it be? You found a little
something? No, you haven't. That's the
problem. No poon-tang!"
   "Uh, Joe. Would you mind keeping it
down? This is a university."
   "I knew it! How could you hope to keep
anything like that from your close office
mate?"
   How indeed. "No, Joe. Really. It's not...
loneliness. I've just been winding up—"
   "We're not talking about loneliness, Stu.
We're talking about the hot-to-trots. The
savage scrotum. Your balls're backed up.
Nothing to get embarrassed about.
Wouldn't be surprised if the compulsion
were programmed into the old transistors at
a fairly deep level." Lovering, smirking,
tapping a retort rapidly against an ashtray,
enjoys himself immensely. Ressler wonders
how a nervous distraction he has just
identified himself can already be public
knowledge. For a professional decipherer,
he's shy on a few key secret-communication
commodities. "Fortunately, there's a fairly
specific treatment," Joe insists. "You just
need to find a chick who'll sully herself with
you. Barring that," Joe holds up his hand
and wriggles his fingers, "there's always the
lab assistant's assistant.
   Blood pressure is entirely incapable of
telling the difference."
   Ressler sits mum as a skewered saint,
nauseated by this crowing cockdom. Even
pretending to the ugliest mechanical bias,
Joe lies to himself about what blood
pressure is after. There is a gene, flexibly
distributed throughout the pool. It codes for
a protein...
   How to put this? If rutting truly drives
each organism—and doubtless it does—not
even vilest desire, aroused in violence,
abuse, or smudgy photos, is free of that
linked factor. How did awful tenderness take
hold? What possible survival value has it?
Lovering's enlightened smuttiness is faked.
Heat is by far the easier half of the linkage to
admit. Lust does not exploit tenderness;
tenderness manipulates lust.
   Lovering reaches the heights of
confidential repulsiveness. "See, Stu, I have
this...." He beams, a boy bringing home a
gold star. "I guess you'd have to call her a
mistress." The disclosure promotes him to
King of France. "Her name... I shouldn't be
telling you this."
   "You shouldn't be telling me this, Joe."
   "Her name is Sandy. A remarkable woman.
You know Marie Curie?" Ressler doesn't
bite. "Well, she's nothing like Marie Curie.
But that's Pierre's loss. Not to say Sandy's a
dumb bunny. She knows Diffy Q. But let's
face it: if you could bed down the most
brilliant female yet produced by evolution, or
have your fly zipped for three seconds by
Kim Novak, I mean, tell me... ?" Ressler
rustles his report, but Lovering perseveres.
"That's where Sandy comes in. One month
ago, after much open and healthy athletic
debate, I finally managed to persuade her to
bestow upon me all the corporeal benefits of
holy matrimony without the contractual
obligations. A mere Miss Demeanor. I'd feel
like a heel if it weren't for one thing. She
loves it. I can't come through the door
without her... she's an altered personality.
Crazed. She shivers, for God's sake. She gets,
like, surgically grafted...Let me tell you, the
word 'stamina' has taken on entirely new
threads to me. On top of that, she can turn
stale shrimp into Lobster Newburg."
   Almost to himself, Ressler asks, "If she's
got all that, Joey, why not marry her?'"
   "Where's the crime in that?" This
self-declared fling, the prescribed male
bravura, renders Lovering so heartbreakingly
pathetic that Ressler cannot abide the office
another minute, even if leaving means
abandoning Ulrich's progress report.
Lovering holds forth:
   "Come on! You've read Frazer! That's
science, too. Soft, maybe, but hey? Tilling the
ol' fields?"
   Ressler mumbles apology and retreats to
the hall.
   He arrives without plan at Botkin's office,
knocks and enters. Toveh stops her patient
exam grading to greet him. "Well! Here is a
face absent for too long. Have we clarified
some further coding mechanism?" Ressler
glances at her, startled. But she's simply
making conversation. Alarm unnoticed, he
takes his traditional place on the leather
couch, psychoanalytic-style. Botkin smiles at
the familiarity. "Well then. Today's lesson?"
   Ressler raises only a weak, pained grimace.
He folds his hands. "Tell me everything you
know about music."
   "So I'm in charge of the lecture, today.
Student teaches teacher, is that it? Such a
topic!" Concern crosses her Alpine face. She
presses her eyes with the heels of her palms.
Her accent spontaneously thickens. "One
must learn a language at a very early age in
order for it to stick." Ressler, prone, does not
move. No point in her asking the source of
this sudden cultural interest. Without further
objection, Botkin rises to the challenge of
condensing the complete procession of
Western music into an hour. Assisted by her
archive of 78s, she conducts the tour in the
hushed monotone of a cathedral guide who
tries not to disturb the sanctuary: thorough,
succinct, amazing herself by what she says,
embarrassed by the desperate variety of ways
of singing.
   She begins as far back as she can touch, in
the incense-dosed anonymity of the Middle
Ages. The world as deceptive
epiphe-nomenon. She sings a few bars of
plainchant in a rich contralto, unaware of
the prohibition against public singing. The
mournful intervals of Pope Gregory turn her
Edwardian cubicle into a
Romanesque-capitaled, monk-infested crypt.
She adds two parallel parts to the plainsong
and arrives at Organum. From the Notre
Dame school, she glides across open terrain,
resting momentarily at Conductus, Ars Nova,
an excerpt from Machaut's eerie, unrelenting
mass. She flowers forth into the Renaissance,
demonstrating the startling development of
imitative polyphony with the assistance of
her disks. She speaks of a new
expressiveness, an emotional molding of
discord. Music divides into cold North and
sunbathed South, remote England and
dazzling Italy, although the Venetian school
is overrun by defecting Dutch
contrapuntalists. Proper names begin to
serve as post markers: Palestrina,
Monteverdi, Gibbons, Byrd. Serious music
strays out of the church. She plays him that
party craze, the madrigal. April is in my
mistress's face. And July in her eyes hath
place. Within her bosom is September. But in
her heart: a cold December.
   The monodic revolution saddens Ressler,
as does the advent of opera. Both, he feels
intuitively, are wrong turns, apostasy. The
sensuous music of France and the striving
for new complexity in the Netherlands and
Germany console him a little. Botkin maps
the rise of the fugue through the Northern
Baroque masters, all of whom were required
to have names beginning with "Sch." The
late Mediterranean Baroque is lost on him,
tinkled away in ornament. She talks about
the emergence of a cryptic system called
tonality—a set of rules, mathematical
equivalences and prescriptions. Her
language becomes laced with arithmetic
relations. Reaching Bach and Handel, Botkin
forgoes any hope of wrapping up the
outline in an hour. Rather, lecturer and
audience lose track of time. She stumbles,
unable to sum up this first great watershed.
She mumbles a few words about the High
Baroque rage for unity.
   Mention of the Leipzig cantor throws him
into nervous agitation. 'More on Bach,"
Ressler shouts from the sofa. "What do you
know about this man?"
   "Bach?" Botkin remarks in surprise. Not
the usual starting point for novices. "Of all
the composers in the tradition, Bach is by far
the most..." She looks for the appropriate
hyperbole. Nothing transcendent enough.
"Bach is the most likely to offer to help wash
the dishes."
   "More Bach," Ressler insists. She plays him
the most awful moment in auditory art: the
Barabbas chord from the Matthew Passion.
"More Bach." She plays him the last
movement of Berg's Violin Concerto where
out of the abject, serial mass of
twentieth-century dissonance arises first the
agonized tritone, then the whole Bach
sotting of a resigned chorale. Es ist genug;
Herr, wenn es dir gefällt, so spanne mich
doch aus. It is enough; Lord, if it pleases you,
simply unharness me.
   She pursues doggedly—the rococo, the
classical homophonic reaction against the
Spent baroque. The issue is not progress or
even advancement of technique, however
tenuously that might be defined. Motion is
not forward, but concentric: restless
rearrangement of styles oozing into every
open cranny. She draws him the floor plan of
sonata form, its tug between tonic and
dominant, symmetry and surprise. Resslef
wonders if composers are made to study
algebra and architecture before being
allowed to play with tunes. The joking grace
of Haydn prepares the way for the aerial
escape artist Mozart.
   She plays him the Jupiter. "Listen to him
combine the old fugal with the new sonata
form; as close to sublime as human
engineering gets." Ressler hears, but dimly:
faraway sounds from the next town over. He
feels the essential oddity of this moment—a
young man, hungry for a vocabulary that can
contain him, reaching in progressive
restlessness back into time to revive an
archaism, pouring a tour deforce effortlessly
out of the orchestra like water over stones in
a brook, proving that no ear had ever really
heard the idiom before, even when it was
given up as exhausted. He needs to locate
more notes. To detect with more precision
the relations of time and pitch that evade
him. His clay ear calls out for schooling. But
can one learn to hear?
   Beethoven, Olympian peak, shakes his fist,
cracks a punchline, storms heaven by force.
Botkin does Opus 18 Number 1, Opus 59
Number 2, and Opus 133, the Grosse Fuge,
three string quartet landmarks to give a
blurry route description of that lonely launch
into the unknown. She mentions the famous
intrastaff annotation— Must it be? "Either a
rage against fate, a rejection of metaphysics,
or a reference to his landlord on the
doorstep again demanding the rent in cash."
   In Botkin's version, this flinging wide of
sound's expressive possibilities—contrasting
keys, intensifying form, expanding tonal
vocabulary—paradoxically spells the
beginning of the end of concert music. As
with a tumor that initially stimulates a
patient into rosy vigor, self-destruction hides
in the richest profusion of musical invention
in history. Undaunted, she takes on the
unmanageable rash of romanticism. She
sings with Schubert, Mendelssohn, and
Schumann, indulges the introspection of
Chopin and bravura of Berlioz, puts up with
Lisztian pyrotechnics, and arrives too quickly
at Brahms, the most unbearably beautiful of
all. "Then we have two towering operatics
who might as well have lived on different
planets. The first is Verdi. You know all his
tunes already; you just don't know they are
his. The second, undeniably a genius, I'd
rather not go into just now."
   "All right," Ressler guesses. "We skip him.
Who's next?"
   "Well, music gets mixed up in nationalism.
Every land its spokesman: Norway, Grieg;
Slovakia, Dvorak; Finland, Sibelius."
   "I get the pattern."
   "The names start shrinking and clumping
in groups. The Five. Les Six. " She concedes a
few more individuals: Tchaikovsky,
Rachmaninoff, Debussy, Ravel, Bruckner,
Mahler, Schönberg, Stravinsky. "More
continuously than most realize,
post-romanticism shades off into the eclectic
anarchy of the twentieth century. And here
we arrive at the far end, writing pieces of
unhearable symmetry on one extreme, and
on the other, picking notes out of a hat."
The thumbnail trip has lasted all afternoon.
Outside, the first negative traces of dark.
Botkin, hearing herself compress the whole
story into a few hours, is bewildered at how
a race with fixed needs could get from
Machaut to Milhaud in so few breaths.
   Ressler feels her displacement, the little
light that has gone out in her tent. But
empathy makes him suddenly impatient.
"What incredible sprawl. The stuff makes no
sense. How can I be expected to remember
all this?"
   Botkin turns to him pityingly. "How do
you remember your stereochemistry?"
   "False analogy," he snaps. "That's a
system."
   "History is a system too." She returns to
the dry tone predating their friendship. "You
might try taking a few decades to study it."
   "Too cluttered. Too many names..."
   Botkin snorts. "You want a short list, I
suppose? Tops of the Pops in each critical
period?"
   "Yes. That would be fine."
   "You Americans are all the same."
   "So: all those fellows in the Dark Ages and
Renaissance... ?"
   "Give that to Josquin, with Monteverdi
the transition."
   "Baroque?"
   "Bach. We want help with our dishes, do
we not?"
   "Classical's clearly Mozart. Beethoven his
own class, I suppose."
   "Has anyone ever told you that you are a
quick study?"
   "Romantic? Brahms?" Botkin doesn't
answer. She is hearing a light in the night.
"And beyond?"
   His tutor returns. "Post-romantic... Mahler,
definitely. Twentieth century..." She drifts
into silence that lasts so long Ressler thinks
she has forgotten the question. As he is
about to suggest they quit for dinner, Botkin
smiles. "Our century: Adrian Leverkühn." He
won't get the quip for decades.
   "Maybe I'm not after stylistic history, per
se. Not names themselves—not even the
short list." He smiles affectionately. "I need
to locate the musical message. Do you know
what I mean?" Botkin shakes her head. "Can
you look at a score and tell... simply by the
pattern of notes, whether the composer has
uncovered something correct?"
   He has not said what he means; so not
surprisingly, she misunderstands him. She
tells of Mahler applying for a conducting
job, lying about his knowing an opera he'd
never heard. "He was hired, spent an
afternoon with the full score, and conducted
the piece that evening, from memory."
   She tells the story with such passion that
Ressler asks, "That man moves you?"
   Botkin laughs. "You have discovered my
surreptitious character flaw. Have you any
idea what it means to be in love with
turn-of-the-century suspensions in a world
fixated on drums? Despite effort, I cannot
assimilate to the North American ethos. Do
you recall that supermarket where we ran
into one another? They have, this week, at
every checkout, a tabloid reading, 'Millions
Dead in Epidemic.' I saw that yesterday and
thought: 'So we've brought on the end.' It
did not cheer me to discover that the article
was about the Bubonic Plague.
   "Unquestionably, the music we're talking
about is dead. I will not inquire into the
source of your sudden surge in interest.
Perhaps you shouldn't get started with it.
Surely you realize the extent of the transistor
age, and where it must lead. I can forgive the
children; somehow, they understand the
deliberate decision to permanently militarize
the world. Even our old refuge science—
older for some, granted—is conscripted. So:
an eighteen-year-old needs music that can
be listened to entirely in three minutes. Just
in case.
   "And yet, if we're to be saved, the
prophase must do the saving. Youth. You've
read von Baer, Haeckel, the developmental
ho-mologists?" Ressler shakes his head, says
he knows "of" them. "My God!" Botkin cries.
"Don't tell me they've dropped 'ontogeny
recapitulates phytogeny' from formal
training. Perhaps they still read Rilke, in any
case: 'Glaubt nicht, Schicksal sei mehr als das
Dichte der Kindheit.' Don't ever think that
fate's anything more than the condensation
of childhood. Champaign-Urbana, with more
engineering buildings than pizza parlors, is
already a lost cause."
   "But music," Ressler reminds her.
   "Exactly. But music." She plays him the
first hundred bars of Mahler's Ninth, that
premonition of wholesale disintegration of
the dream—the abandoned condensation of
childhood. She tells of the composer's
anguished marginalia—the "Oh Alma!"
penned into the score upon his discovering
that his young wife was copulating with
another man. She describes Mahler's session
with Freud, how the composer lay prostrate
on a couch in Leiden in 1910 for four hours,
as Ressler has lain all afternoon. "I picture
Freud taking the score of this symphony,
studying its figuration, seeing, as you
suggest, even as an amateur, that the
composer has revealed something terrible,
real, and saying to his patient, 'Don't let me
cure you of this.' That, my friend, is your
musical moment. But we're wasting our time.
Come. Let's go have a meal. There is still
eating, drinking, good talk."
   They walk through the deserted corridor,
leave the building, lock it behind them.
Halfway across the quad, Botkin stops. She
turns on Ressler fiercely. "You've worked in
a lab, you've scribbled in enough notebooks
to know better. I tell you, the world is not
modulations and desire. It is stuff, pure and
simple."
   The attack floors Ressler. He can't think
why he deserves this dressing-down. A
minute later, Botkin is pleasant again,
discussing the choice of restaurants. Over
ordering, she speculates, "Your 'musical
message.' I've always been partial to text. I
don't mean opera; I've never liked flailing.
But let me tell you two litanies, late
mutations on the Viennese tradition. The
first arises in Mahler's Resurrection: 'What
you have loved and striven for is yours.' I
would love to believe that. The second, more
realistic, is from a Webern cantata. You
admire the compaction in a nucleotide
sequence? This man's Opus 21 is a perfect
palindrome: a symphony that reads the same
forward and backward, entirely generated
from a densely threaded theme. Of course,
the ear can't hear that perfect order. As far
as the listener is concerned, the piece might
as well be random! But his text. His
'message,' as you so wonderfully and naively
put it. I paraphrase the cantata: 'Keep deep
down, for the innermost life hums in the
hive.'"

  The Enigma Variations

   I find a footnote to the race for solution in
his day, the story of Beadle's 1958 Nobel
Prize for the elegant experiment equating
one gene with one synthesized enzyme. On
winning the prize, Beadle received a cable
from Max Delbrück, a later prizewinner,
reading:

  ADBACBBDBADACDCBBABCBCDACDBBC
ABBA
ADCACABDABDBBBAACAACBBBABDCCDB
  CCBBDBBBAADBADAADCCDCBBADDCAC
A
ADBBDBDDABBACCAACBCDBADCBDBBBA

   The question could have sat unanswered
on my board forever. I get out my decoder
ring, put together everything I know about
Beadle's and Delbrück's state of knowledge
in 1958, and set to work cracking the
telegram. I break the string into triplets. By
'58, even post-docs knew to begin there.
  ADB ACB BDB ADA CDC BBA BCB CDA
CDB BCA BBA ADC ACA
  BDA BDB BBA ACA ACB BBA BDC CDB
CCB BDB BBA ADB ADA
  ADC CDC BBA DDC ACA ADB BDB DDA
BBA CCA ACB CDB
  ADC BDB BBA

   The message still means less than chance
to me. But in the noise of these codons is a
tip-off, an improbable distribution,
something designed. The four independent
letters appear freely in each position with
one exception. The letter B occurs in the
middle of only one codon: BBA. The unique
nature of this most common trio suggests a
special function, perhaps framing. I try a
space; the message splits revealingly:

  ADB ACB BDB ADA CDC BCB CDA CDB
BCA ADC ACA BDA BDB ACA ACB BDC CDB
CCB BDB ADB ADA ADC CDC DDC ACA ADB
BDB DDA CCA ACB CDB ADC BDB

   Three words end with BDB, the most
common remaining codon. Taking a tip from
Poe, I bank on this one standing for "e." The
two-letter word affords another entree. A list
of common English digraphs and a little
knowledge of combinational restrictions
make the nonsense spurt sense: "or,"
"code." I push on, lost in a perverse
pleasure. The flush of success makes me feel
strong, attractive, erotic. Suddenly, it's over.

  BREAK THIS CODE OR GIVE BACK NOBEL
PRIZE

  Nothing compared to coaxing the truth
out of Neurospora, yet the Nobel nominee
needed help in the cryptanalysis. Beadle
retaliated. He sent Delbrück a comeback
code of his invention, which Delbrück also
needed help in cracking. But Delbrück got in
the last word. Beadle's scientific address
before the awards ceremony in Stockholm
was interrupted by the confused delivery, in
mid-speech, of a package air-mailed Urgent.
Beadle opened the crate to reveal a
toothpick sculpture in the shape of a giant
double helix. The tips of each toothpick
were painted one of four colors. The pattern
was irregular with hidden information.
When Beadle's lecture broke up, the roomful
of premier life science brains pushed up to
the podium, studying the color sequence,
speculating, testing propositions. At last
someone—or not someone, but that
collective twentieth-century organism Big
Science—hit on the solution:
     I AM THE RIDDLE OF LIFE. KNOW ME
  AND YOU WILL KNOW YOURSELF.
   Both Delbrück codes are curiously
self-referent. Break this code. I am the riddle;
know me. What "me" could possibly
proclaim itself the riddle? The cipher? The
plaintext? The coding algorithm? The
riddleness in the coder himself? What part of
the DNA sculpture has the audacity to call
itself "I"? The Delbrück code, the one inside
the codemaker's "I," modified by no criterion
except survival, grows miraculously capable
of games. The I's have it. Know me and you
will know yourself. I spend the afternoon
playing with messages, and on no proof but
my pleasure, feel as if I'm closing in on my
discovery, me.

  The Census

   At night, I put away the substitution
ciphers and return to the painting index. I
search for that particular oil-on-panel. But
only Brueghel surrenders to me. Pieter the
Elder: the man who was what Bles might
have been, had the lesser possessed the
passion of ordinary events. In The Census at
Bethlehem, burghers in a wintry,
sixteenth-century Brabantine town go about
their business—men carting cargo, women
slaughtering animals, children playing
furiously on lake ice—without noticing the
holy couple queuing up in the foreground
to be numbered in obedience to Herod's
order, unaware of the coming slaughter.

           Believing what we count,
         counting what we see:
           A fistfight; gathered firewood;
         gutted pig-
           grease caught in waiting pan.
           These things are here at hand
         and present endlessly,
           an endless repetition of infolded
         theme.

           What was it that we hoped to
         settle
           on by census, counting,
         inventory, roll?
           While earth runs to frozen iron
         ball we number
           Now as if already gone.

            This time we say we'll get it
         straight
            sum the total, number all the
         fear
            that snows the town in at the
         end of year,
            the spur, the memory that drives
         men out

           onto the frozen sea to map its
         edge
           for clues to the mystery that was
          here
              all along sends children out on
          sleds
             with their own keen sense of the
          contested game:
             Believing nothing lost that's
          lived, counted, named.

   Today the Pilgrimage of Grace occupies
York, thirty years before Brueghel's census.
Religious sectarian revolt, same genus as the
violence daily sweeping the Near East to my
absolute bafflement. Today is the first
newspaper to be printed regularly in New
York City, 1725. The first of those loose-leaf
folders filled with Bruegh-elian specific
figurescapes whose holy historicity no one
ever manages to feel. Today is a town square
packed with people: Marie Antoinette
guillotined, 1793; battle of Leipzig, 1813; first
use of ether in surgery, 1846; Harpers Ferry
raid, 1859; excavation of the Cardiff Giant,
1869; British halting the Germans at Ypres,
1914; 1,200 killed in Yangtze troopship
explosion, 1926; Bengal struck by cyclone,
1942; China's A-bomb, 1964. Anachronisms as
persistent as the Flemish church in the
background of a scene showing Mary and
Joseph's arrival in Bethlehem.
   "I have this persistent fantasy," Franklin
told me, holding the cold bed linen to his
neck as he spoke. "Met de Bles seeing that
incredible panel, from the far side, a dozen
years after his death. Knowing at once that
his compatriot has spelled out in specific,
radiant, complex, floating detail the
nomenclature of human ecology that Herri
himself had been born to describe, but died
unable to articulate."

  Near Where the Wheatfield Lies Cut Down

   I met Todd on the steps of the Met, sitting
in the middle of a Brueghelscape of tourists,
pushers, impoverished art students, culture
vultures, religious questers, Van Meegeren
society frauds, footsore pedestrians sitting a
minute, delinquent office workers taking a
late lunch, and the occasional pilgrim of
grace who simply liked looking at paintings.
Frank stuck out of the assembly, even a
block away, the one anomaly in the packed
crowd. The first time I ever saw him in broad
daylight.
   Incredible weather, a June detour en route
to November. I'd walked from two subway
stops away, to discharge the jitters and give
myself another chance to back out. Walking,
I saw Manhattan as I hadn't for a long time. I
remembered why I'd come here— the
epitome of epitomes, the most convoluted,
aggressive, over-stimulating tabula rasa
imaginable. The place was just bizarre
enough, packed with sufficient diversity of
neighborhoods, for me to make of it
anything I wanted.
   I saw him from a block off—outside the
cave. He was exhilarated by the crowd. Here,
in midday, he had lost nothing of the air I'd
assigned him at our first meeting. He met me
halfway down the steps, pumped my hand
vigorously. "Great idea, this. Haven't been
here since late last week." He rushed ahead
and paid our admissions, over my protest.
Then we fell into the quiet of the galleries.
   We could head down any corridor of this
maze, choose our century, school, bias,
genre. We could buzz through, a
masterpiece a minute, or stand all afternoon
in front of one portrait. With every
imaginable way of seeing to choose from, we
made no choice. We wandered, letting each
step determine the next. Franklin knew the
galleries by heart. He could set in on a topic,
wheel slowly around a corner, and land us in
front of a picture that I'd realize had been
the topic's inspiration, even from the
previous room.
   Sometimes he was all formalism, tracing a
lazy zigzag in the air in front of a Claude
Lorrain, the rigid design of seemingly
languid figures in landscape, a pattern
glaringly obvious once pointed out.
Sometimes he was all association and
shameless indulgence. "Look at her gaze,"
he whispered, nodding at Vermeer's Head of
a Girl. "A solitary locked gate, with no
adjoining wall, in the middle of nowhere."
   Sometimes he told unrelated anecdotes.
"When Renoir became too crippled to hold a
brush, he painted with one strapped to his
forearm." His praise was all in his eyes, and
his criticism was so gentle I sometimes didn't
realize what it was. "A skilled painting;
blameless to a fault." He was too funny to be
pedantic. We stopped in front of a cryptic
contemporary piece in the American wing.
"Don't look at me," Todd mugged. "I got a B
in Zen Buddhism." Gazing at one of those
baroque hyperrealist spreads where you can
count the cherubs' lashes, he smirked, "You
know what this painting says to me? It says,
'Press on.'
   "Ain't nothin' here I haven't been drilled
on," he drawled. "Would still be drilling
today, if the alma mater hadn't pitched me
out on my severed ear. Seems they have a
business to run; actually expected me to turn
out some finished product." He tsked at the
academicians' psychological naivete.
   We arrived, as if by chance, at an
enormous gold resonance, a wheatfield
being harvested. In the foreground, among
the stacked sheaves, by a tree, people sat
eating. One exhausted figure lay sprawled
asleep under the tree, breeches loose and
abandoned. Todd would tell me nothing
about this work, but the length of time he
spent looking at it made me realize he'd
been steering us to it all along. Brueghel's
Harvesters. One of a series of Months,
depicting the run of the year. At last, Todd
spoke, bitter with fullness, out of the corner
of his mouth. "If by some accident we get
separated," he said, "meet me back here."
   Under the persuasion of my private guide,
I realized that my own modest
understanding of painting had gathered
nothing of the unlimited vocabulary of sight.
I had never seen paint before; I had never
seen. Not that I saw any better then, but I
began to feel that I might. Shape and form
began to seem dialects of desire. The desire I
started to see between Prussian blue and
cyan owed much to the way he kept his voice
low, came behind me, placed his head on my
shoulder, moved just enough air to register
in my ear: "See the line of that mountain,
how he mirrors it in that tree limb?"
   Slowly, deliberately, I let my focus slip from
the paintings to his descriptions. I gave in to
heat; I hurt, slack across the slope of my
chest. I arched involuntarily from the small of
my back. I could discriminate every hue, every
brushstroke he mentioned. I had dressed up,
made myself a visual lure, come down here
expressly to let this stranger pick me up,
undress me with art lecture. I knew then that
I would leave Tuckwell, that I would tell him
that evening.
   I tilted my face toward my private guide,
pulled his ear to me. "Could we see?" I said,
ashamed at the femininity of the request.
"Could we see the costume collection?" We
went downstairs together. There, amid a
fabulous fetishistic compendium of Belle
Epoque embroidered underclothes, he at last
smelled the rearrangement going on in me.
Having done nothing but brush hands since
the day he first accosted me, he leaned down
toward me, announced, "I think it's time,"
and kissed me. I knew it was coming, I had
solicited it, but for some awful reason, my
mouth ossified. We kissed like two planks
being nailed together. Todd straightened up
with a blameless smile and said, "I think it's
not time." But it had been. Only, in the
moment before our mouths grazed, I saw
myself there, near where the wheatfield lay
cut down, waiting for someone I'd become
inexplicably separated from.



XI

  I Sit Still and Wait for Cloudburst

  Q: And after the private gallery tour?
  I went home and told Tuckwell. It was
eerily easy. After months convincing myself I
could never go through with it, molting,
when the time came, was far less traumatic
than the preparation. Avoidance is always a
dry run. Keith, too, had prepped for the
inevitable. He met my declaration as if he'd
engineered it. When I entered our apartment
fresh from the museum, Keith sensed
something. He said in emcee's voice, "If it
isn't the Jan o' the Day." He rushed at me,
hunched over in playful wrestler's crouch. I
gave in to the squeeze. Then I calmly
dropped my clinch-breaking clincher. A tiny,
pro-tern stem of brain took over, and with a
quiet final whack of the gavel, I announced I
was withdrawing from the Five-Year Plan as
soon as I could find a place.
    Keith and I had met years ago on a
downtown E that had stalled. For the
dubious entertainment of the whole hostile
car, this lunatic in three-piece suit began
telling a story about a Beechcraft Bonanza
amassing a lethal charge while passing
through an electrical storm. The passengers
and pilot had no idea of the potential they
carried. When the plane touched down on a
wet runway, they were all electrocuted. The
train lumbered back to life and coughed us
out at West 4th. Chance put me behind the
stand-up act, and as he touched foot to the
concrete platform, I goosed him in the ribs
and shouted, "Fatal discharge!" He
practically shot up through the sidewalk.
    We had dinner together, discovering we'd
been virtual neighbors before transplanting.
I asked him how a good Midwestern boy
triumphed over regional reticence to
tap-dance for whole trains full of angry
urbanites. He stuck by the story. "That's how
I'll go. I know it. You're looking at a man
who has a standing date with
electrocution." Foreknowledge of what
waited if he ever came to a full stop kept him
on the continuous insulated ride. We left the
restaurant, and he kept at it: everyone we
passed was either a massive anode or
cathode; one couldn't tell, just by looking,
which. "A pasty-faced World Trade exec and
a punk, spike-haired bohunk might carry the
same charge. The two of them can shake
without fear of instant annihilation. But you
and I might be dosed with opposite
capacitance. Brush shoulders, and we're a
spent commodity. Null and void." No more
fitting an exit than to go up in a spurt of
acrid smoke in the middle of pedestrian
traffic on Avenue of the Americas. But that
end, however much it might have appealed
to him, didn't arrive that first evening. Not
until we stopped touching, grounded.
    As he raced to embrace me, wanting
forgiveness for the tiff that morning, I limply
let him pin my limbs to my body in comic
wrestling. Then I discharged. He dropped
me, burned, and sat down with a look I'll
never forget. It crossed our minds at the
same instant—that ancient silliness neither
of us had thought about for years. I'd
confirmed him at last. He put a hand to his
head, shook it, smiling: I always knew it
would be electrocution.
   It was easy. I said, "Keithy, I have to look
for a new place. You know I do."
   "Sure you haven't found one already?" He
looked away and said, "I'm sorry." He fiddled
with a piece of visual camp he'd found
somewhere—a stiff cardboard print of the
Virgin making a curtain call at Lourdes. He
fanned himself with it. "Go on."
   "I don't know how to, quite." I felt alert,
autumn soaking my receptors. "We haven't
been.... We haven't really liked each other
very much lately."
   "No."
   "What do you mean, no?" I shouted.
When he laughed, I felt everything I'd ever
loved about him return in one instant. It had
been forever since I'd dared joke.
Imperceptibly over time, we'd paralyzed one
another. But he was willing to laugh when I
most needed. That hurt. TuckwelPs
aggressive punchlines—his every affectation
of mean spirit—sprang from love of human
absurdity. I owed it to him to pack my bag
and leave quickly.
   It was automatic, once I gave it the first
push. We hardly needed to hash out
logistics. We agreed we were both too
expert at rationalization to benefit from
institutional attempts at patch-up. "It does
seem somewhat presumptuous to show up
at a marriage counselor without a license."
In truth, there was no therapy except
quitting. We both knew that trial
separations are rigged—self-fulfilling
equation in two unknowns. All separations
were final. Our mating simply had not lasted
for life, per our inner instructions. I felt the
residual mammal tract, the pair bond, torn
from me. But it wasn't my mate who was
disappearing.
   We worked out the particulars, adultly
arranged the furniture deeding and cash
transfers. We set a timetable of target dates.
The more painful the depreciation, the more
effortlessly I wrote it off. I looked for signs
that Keith was relieved as well. But he
remained subdued, neutral, if not unhelpful.
We talked through the news hour, skipped
dinner, at last called the day on account of
darkness. But before we climbed into the
now awkward bed, Keith revealed himself.
He cut through my anesthetic, scraped the
nerve he could not have gotten to
deliberately. "Can I ask you one thing?" he
said, lying on his back, examining the road
maps in the plastering. "Let me look over
any place you find before you sign anything.
I don't want you to get stung."
   I grabbed his shoulder, forced him to face
me and accept my embrace. It had been
months since my cells had felt so exhilarated.
Then I saw his mouth pasted with the death
smile, a sickening look of failed bravery, that
amused lip-pinch of confusion when
receiving news too appalling to put
together. Your parents both died. Broad
smirk. You have inoperable cancer. Warm
grin. I'm leaving.
   Q: To whom could a body turn?
   We'd lived so professionally that our
friends came mostly from our respective
offices. Socializing with already incestuous
work acquaintances is so widespread that it
must be a capitalist trick to increase
productivity. All jobs are surrogate families,
complete with oedipal urges, sibling
rivalries, and the ugly rest. To occupation
and family, add primary social contact and
recreational outlet. In another fifty years,
we'll have returned to the medieval
apprentice system, with parents selling their
ten-year-olds into careers appointed by
benevolent aptitude test.
   Sure, Keith and I saw a few people
regularly simply because we liked them. But
those we saw most easily were those already
in tune with who we were all day long. Keith
felt no need to advertise for friends when he
had friends in advertising. And I could
imagine no periodic contact that would
require me to cross the Wilson Line. As such,
we each had to go on working inside our
social circle after we separated. Neither half
of our partisan friends was much help in the
massacre.
   I had two or three major moorings, each in
her way having come, once, closer than
words commonly allow. Had any of them
asked, I would have hopped a jet out of La
Guardia on a moment's notice. But they
never asked. In fact, they called only around
holidays, never with a trace of desperation.
That made it impossible to call them now. I
also had my share of lighter long-term
friends whom I might have called for
steadying: college chums similar enough for
some intimacy, a cast-off amour who had
stayed in touch out of decorum. I'd made
these friends when young enough to risk
friendship casually. I lost that ability after
twenty. By thirty, acquaintance-making had
become a formality with diminishing return.
   I called an old girlfriend in Indiana, just to
tell someone I knew how I'd smashed
domesticity into little bits. In the back of my
mind I had the regressive idea of talking her
into coming out and sharing an apartment.
She upstaged my news: "How did you know
to call? I just found out I was pregnant."
   Had it been death, I would have had
dozens of names to contact. But no one had
died, Tuckwell's smile notwithstanding. I was
just clearing out. Still, I needed to tell
someone closer to hand. Not for emotional
support; I just wanted to go public so I
couldn't back out. But who to announce to?
My regular social contact consisted of
checkout clerks, the muffled sadism from
upstairs, and a host of cheerful, limited-time
phone offers.
   Q: What about the third party?
   He didn't even know he was one. Franklin
was more self-sufficient than I would ever
be. It colored his conversation—that
inappropriate bravado, the ellipses of a
person too long talking to himself. I saw him
charm cashiers, elicit from news vendors
long stories of their boyhoods, wield
phone-devotion over who knows how many
fellow alums, even—how could I fail to see
it?—ask anonymous librarians out to
seafood breakfast. Of the scores who
unrequitedly counted him among their
friends, he must have had a genuine
confidant or two. But Todd stuck to only one
other man I knew: the only man on
Manhattan more alone than he.
   I was the woman who had brought him,
however humble, the contents of Dr.
Ressler's file. That was enough to earn me
visiting privileges. And visiting, up to the
moment when I had the history of art etched
onto my eye with Dürer precision, sufficed to
show that Franklin's days of socializing had
ended with the B.A. He'd hinted as much
over our first date: the look that came over
him at the piped music, the defensive
posture he unconsciously assumed as we
stepped into the street, even his stoic
suggestions for quotes. Franklin's favorite
take on companionship came from Melville.
While survival might force one into
bedfellowship with a Queequeg or two,
"truly to enjoy bodily warmth, some small
part of you must be cold, for there is no
quality in this world that is not what it is
merely by contrast."

  North East West South

   Q: How did he respond to the news?
   The same way Franklin responded to all
news. He clipped my announcement and
added it to his collage. After the day in
Brueghel's wheatfields and night lying
alongside Tuckwell's death grin, I stayed
away from MOL for two weeks. After making
the declaration, my conscience didn't even
allow me to call. Predictably, Todd did not
call me either during that period, not even to
see what was up. Nor did he come to the
branch, although we were just blocks away.
His signal was always the rich, ambiguous,
low wavelengths of silence.
   I wanted to move out without profit, to
get by happily alone, assuming the worst
case. In fact, the prospect of solitary evening
meals, putting anything I wanted on the
radio, warming the linen with my own legs
was all I hoped for. But after two weeks, I
had to deliver my news. The more I tried to
ignore my need to notify the MOL-men of my
decision, the crazier I became to see them. I
was consumed by outlandish fear; their
suite, in which nothing had happened for
years, might have gone up overnight in
smoke. Or perhaps the antique bivalve
elevator had snapped. Perhaps Todd, fired
with dissertation at last, had given notice.
Perhaps Ressler, so long in the process, had
dissolved.
   On the first day in November, after two
weeks of determinedly not thinking about
the two of them—fifteen days, to paraphrase
Todd's favorite joke, but who's counting? —I
could hold out no longer. I had done
nothing at all that day. My contribution to
the molecule's three-billion-year attempt to
name itself was exactly nil. I'd had one
request all afternoon, for an indifferent
statistic, and had directed the questioner to
the PAIS. "The what?" Pointing out the table
where we kept the service was not enough.
My patron looked aghast at the thought of
combing the binders herself. I bit my lip and
did the lookup for her. And as I flipped
through the cutaway grand canyon of back
issues, I remembered how arbitrarily Franklin
had first descended upon me with his plea
for information, a difference that might make
things different. Pathetic, pitiable,
wonderfully smorgasbord, his insisting that
an unknown man had once done something
worthy of print, on no stronger evidence
than the man's face creases and his
command of diction.
   Remembering how furious Todd's italic
name had made me, I needed so badly to see
him, talk to him, tell him my irreversible step,
that I did what I'd never done in all my years
at the branch: I left early. I left Mr. Scott to
field any residual Oscars, walked down to
the warehouse, and buzzed my private
signal. The door barked without a word, and
I rode up in the accordioned freight hauler,
blessing the winch-and-chicken-cage for still
going through its paces. Jimmy Steadman
greeted me at the top of the shaft, having
just punched out. He shook his head sadly
and said, "I sort of hoped you'd outgrown
this place."
   "Why, Uncle Jim?" I asked, touching him
on the arm as we swapped spots. Everything
made me happy—the elevator, the cartons of
three-part paper, this prematurely old man.
   "Because one of these days, these
electronic brains are gonna launch
Operation Rude Awakening." He pushed his
glasses up the slope of his varicose nose.
"You don't want to be around then. You
won't want to admit knowing any of us."
Jimmy waved good night and swung the
iron lever around its semicircle. The grate
swung shut, the car descended, and I was
alone in a silence so great I could hear it
coursing in my ears.
   Franklin was in the cafeteria, taking his
time before commencing his share of the
GNP. Dropping to my knees like a recruit in
basic training, I crawled unnoticed to where
my consolation sat. Only when I lowed did
Frank rock upright, surprised but not
frightened by another sentience in the room.
Seeing it was me and not a dazed
seven-point elk wandering down from
Canada, he laughed explosively, grabbed my
head in his arms, drew it to him, and nuzzled
my neck. This time, no crossed choreography.
"I'll teach you to stay away so long," he
growled, shaking me by the rib cage and
sinking his teeth into my shoulder. The man
was unreformable.
   But from that moment, visa granted, our
way of being with one another changed.
From then on, we could not be in the same
room without resorting to the etymology of
touch.
   I rabbit-punched my way out of his
rib-grip and straightened. Fighting to keep
the guilty triumph out of my voice, I said,
"It's been an eventful two weeks. I'm making
a move. Looking for my own apartment."
   Todd brightened vicariously. "That's
great!" he shouted, cuffing me again by the
waist. Then, realizing, he whispered
gingerly, "Isn't it?"
   I looked at him and decided. "Yes," I said.
"I think it will be."
   Todd turned back to his notebook, and
for a minute I thought he hadn't
understood. When he spoke, I saw that he
knew everything, even the part he played in
my decision. "We must make sure both of
you get through this all right." As if he were
my agent, manager, charge d'affaires. He
asked me a hundred of his patented
questions that evening. Was I ready? What
did I hope to get from it? Would I go on
seeing Tuckwell? Did I have a bad
conscience? Did it help to talk? This last, at
least, I answered unequivocally. Despite the
attention he lavished on me, our new
intimacy, he looked at me the way he had
stared at that Vermeer Head of a Girl: urgent,
quizzical, separated by centuries. He listened
to every detail of my last five years. And it all
went into his new pet journal.
   Q: What was he so intent on?
   As we talked, Todd labored with colored
pens, scissors, glue, and bits of postcard.
The pages he made were so full of hue and
texture I thought they must be visual
studies. When I caught sight of
reproductions of two paintings we had seen
at the Met, I thought he'd at last begun the
postponed apprentice piece he'd once
described as the bane of a decent computer
operator's existence. I imagined our private
art tour had at last brought him to it. "I see
I'm not the only one setting off," I said. Even
as I clamped down, I couldn't hide my
happiness. But Franklin looked up,
confused.
   "Oh, you mean this." He gestured
defensively at his handiwork. "Scrap,
actually. Stupid." He flipped a few pages,
skeptically. "Here we are. Four weeks ago.
Old enough for aesthetic distance, hmm?
Well then. You explain this to me." He held
the page open for examination. At the top,
he'd emblazoned the date in parodic gothic.
Below was no dissertation, no visual study. It
was a base of news copy run into a
Rauschenberg combine, one of those
bric-a-brac assemblages that accumulate
outside the grottos of Spanish saints.
Prominent, en face, he had pasted two
front-page columns, set in the same
typeface: "Missile Issue: 2 Perceptions," and
"America's Cup to Australia II as 132-Year
U.S. Reign Ends." The two headlines were
indistinguishable in emphasis, except that
one had a secondary head claiming "Each
Feels Other Holds the Advantage."
   "Exactly how they appeared in the paper.
All I've added is the paint job. We're to read
them both as news, although only the boat
race passes the novelty test. And look! This
one was wedged in the middle, begging to
be overlooked: 'Beirut Premier Offers to
Resign in Truce Accord.'" He spoke in the
same voice that had whispered the secrets of
canvas in my ear. But the accents of
incomprehension, which in front of the
wheatfield had ached to take in, applied to
Beirut—in light of subsequent
events—registered only bitterness at being
held forever in the dark. Event was clearly
there only to carry the ads. He had worked
other message-threads into the collage:
"Slow Start for Weinberger in Peking,"
"Nicaraguan Rebels Fail in Effort to Seize
Large Town in the North." But the text trim,
now smoke screen, debased to diversion,
was just the thin excuse for a profusion of
visual quotes—Rembrandt, Caravaggio, his
own inked labyrinth.
   We sat, Todd cradling my upper arm,
rubbing it gently to revive feeling. At length,
he relaxed into my arms and kissed me where
the collarbone turns to sternum. He came up
without apology and asked, "What would it
feel like to wake up to an evening edition
finally announcing that something definitive
had at last happened? Something real?"
   No matter what my failings as a mate,
woman, daughter, or friend, I've always held
up my end of a conversation. I answered,
"November first. Pompeii buried by Vesuvius.
Lisbon destroyed by quake; sixty thousand
die. First H-bomb explodes at Eniwetok. Jan
O'Deigh walks out on lover, unprovoked."
   "You've landed fortuitously in my lap. A
woman who already knows what's
happened today." He looked at the cafeteria
clock. "And here we are, with two hours
left." He took both my hands between his.
"I've been very rude. I'm sorry. I know where
you must be, just now."
   He was obligated to complete something
before the day shift returned. But before he
set to work and I returned to what was no
longer my apartment, Todd showed me one
more page of that new journal, the
destruction of his careful clippings under
rococo stuccowork. He explained why he
had given up on the text, buried it under a
wedding cake of filigree. "Most people who
pull apart the Times aren't looking for the
millennium; they just want to explain the
roundup in their corner of the panel.
Everyone has his own port of entry: Business
Day, Style, Science Times, the classifieds.
Mine used to be page one. Quidnunc,
ambulance chaser. But that was last month.
You get tired of that. Look here."
   He retrieved a story, buried alive under
anatomical drawings so expert I was shocked
to realize he had drawn them himself. This
page of his belles heures carried as
background "Youth Advises House on
Computer Crime." Teen tells Committee on
Science and Technology how he tapped into
secret records stored on mainframes at
Sloan-Kettering and Los Alamos. These
ultrasensitive systems still used the
passwords they were shipped with,
unashamed log-ins like "system" and "test."
I could not read the story, as it was lost in
vineyard rows creeping up a craggy
Rhineland cas-tlescape. Todd paraphrased,
barely concealing his delight in the child's
ingenuity, the celebration of American
frontier. He recited half from memory, "When
asked at what point he questioned the
ethics of his actions, he answered, 'Once the
FBI knocked on the door.'"
   Todd smiled crookedly in the direction of
his own mainframe. "The problem with living
in the land of self-reliance is that a fellow
has to do everything himself." I look at the
artwork again tonight, yellowed by two
years. Reportage transcribed to raw color,
Franklin's latest attempt to bring newslight
into the abandoned lunchroom. Shortly
afterwards, this variant too broke off in
favor of a new one. Operation Rude
Awakening.
   Todd grabbed his workbook from my
hands, flipped violently through the pages.
"Lots of fertile stuff here. Two hundred
marines killed by truck bomb. Invasion of
Caribbean nation. Big-time visual potential."
Under his thumb, the illuminated calendar
shot past like those children's animation
tricks. "After a little time for aesthetic
distance," he breathed. "Do you think," he
turned casually, "there is something in the
air?"
   Q: Is there something in the air?
   I asked him what he meant, but he took
me to him again, half-tickling,
half-measuring the flesh of my back. We had
been on hugging terms forever; I'd never
touched anyone before. He walked me to the
elevator, waited, deposited me into the box,
planted the softest, most fertile kiss cleanly
on my lips, and pulled the grate shut as if
tucking me into bed. But before I threw the
lever to descend, he called out, "What day is
today?"
   Q: What day is today?
   My answer was immediate. The day I at last
left home. November first. Perpetual
madness. I called out, halfway down the
shaft, "All Saints'."

  In the Archives

   My father died when I was twelve. I
remember nothing about him except my
suspicion that he would have preferred that
I'd been a boy. But I do remember how in
every situation, he'd say that one needed
"the right tools for the job." At the risk of
having my old instructor in Research
Methods revoke my degree ex post facto, I
admit I haven't had the right tool for the job
until today. I am looking for a town where
he might be, a painting that might lead me
to the hiding place. Until today, I've done
this absurdly, museum by museum, from a
handbook for art hunters making the Grand
Tour. Trying to determine who lives at a
certain address by using the phone book.
I've willfully ignored the capstone of
civilization—pointed arch, vault, flying
buttress launching man's assault of the
vertical—the cross-index. The higher the
indexing level, the higher the civilization.
From the recesses of my dusty reserve, I
remember the cross-index for what I'm after.
A two-volume, compact ordinance survey of
the painted world.
   With the right tool, the job is trivial. I look
up met de Bles in the Painters volume. On
demand, a complete list of everything the
compilers know him to have painted: David
and Bathsheba, Copper Mine, Adoration of
Magi, Mountain Landscape, Village
Landscape, Landscape with Iron Foundry,
with Flight into Egypt, with Good Samaritan,
with Banishing of Hagar — One of these
landscapes must contain my conflagration.
The titles give entry into the Names volume.
There, amid the collections of Florence,
Dresden, Belgium, I find a landscape
matching my description. Even before my
eyes confirm it, I know where the panel
hangs. Museum of Fine Arts, Boston. As in
Mass. USA. Idiot! I was there when he picked
the postcard out. I stood looking at the
scene with him for almost half an hour.
   Todd sent me the scene to elicit a very
specific association. In the depths of winter,
in early 1984, he badgered Dr. Ressler and me
to make a trip to New England. Pivotal visit.
Franklin and I, in that woods cottage,
reached a pitch of intimacy that could
survive every climatic catastrophe. Dr.
Ressler, coerced into the adventure, trapped
with the two of us, at last told us the details
of how he had fallen through the
biographical safety net. Two timeless days
together, isolated in the solitude only snow
can bring on, tracking, talking, singing,
solving mysteries late into the night. A
community of three. For a moment it seemed
we would never return to the city to need.
   On the route up, we'd stopped in Boston,
the Fine Arts, expressly so that Franker could
see the panel. A research stop, he called it.
He must have thought I would recognize it
at once, a telegram of nostalgia held at arm's
distance. Cursed with my visual illiteracy, I
never connected the two images. He must
have carried the artifact with him across the
Atlantic and posted this emigrant Herri back
from its native Flanders. It certainly came
from the Low Countries; not even a
draftsman of his skill could have forged that
stamp and cancellation.
   Now no cross-reference in the world will
give me his coordinates or tell me what he's
up to. I'm thrown back on that synthetic task
of building the index. But how? In one of
his few unguarded moments, Dr. Ressler
confirmed my father on this one: one simply
needs the right tool for the job.
   "In the case of science," he told me, "the
brief euphoria of slipping confusion's
straitjacket reconciles you to a life spent
washing beakers and sweeping up rat feces.
Read the accounts," he urged, trying
unsuccessfully to look grim. "Twelve
milligrams of estradiol from one point five
tons of mashed hog ovaries. Neurochemicals
extracted from ten years' work on five
hundred thousand cows' brains, at six cents
per. Imagine. Someone carries each one of
those lumps up three flights to the lab,
enters them into the tedious ledger." In the
end, that's why I loved him. Ressler knew
how incalculably unlikely it was that a
molecular duplication trick could hit upon a
structure complex enough to probe its own
improbability, willing to spend a life of
profound tedium toward that end. To live
the dull thrill of indexing.
   I stayed in today, no leads on Todd's
whereabouts, no tools for attacking the
mound of scientific treatises that get harder
and take me nowhere. I would give it up,
were it not for the pain inside, remembering
Ressler's dazed acceptance of long odds. "I
have nothing now to give up, of course. But
I would give everything for the chance to
work a little longer."

  The Polling Problem

   She is a natural history, a sovereign
kingdom, a theory about her environment, a
virtuoso pedal-point performance. She
follows a curve, a cadence, an animal
locomotion he cannot help but lose himself
to. Jeanette Koss is her own phylum. He
admits it at last. No sense saving dignity in
the face of onslaught. The moment the
woman slips into the lab, everything Ressler
is after—all careful simulation—is enveloped.
He can attend to nothing, nor concentrate.
She displaces with her texture, the frank
affront of her skin, the arpeggiated toss of
her hair. Dr. Koss walks across the lab to the
dissection table, her legs inscribing a
counterrhythm, the high arc of her
collarbone floating in contrary motion. He is
hypnotized by her approach, his pinch of
chromatic pain enhanced to ecstasy at just
being able to see her, look at her, taste
without touching.
   How can he remain impassive, give this
woman no clue that she throws out his
method, corrupts his buffer rates, soaks his
equilibrium with a wash of chemical
maydays? He has spent weeks ignoring her,
but extended indifference only obsesses him
further, ensilkens her smooth fur, enriches
her odor. He probes, fascinated, cannot help
but palpate the pain, the ulcered place. Oh,
the blot is there, and not at all deep: the
animal inkstain.
   She gives no sign that she has guessed.
But how could she not? The bend of her
limbs, her least motion, her mere presence is
paralyzing. All he can do as she enters the
room is look away, keep busy, breathe
quietly. Press his informant hands against
the Formica. He examines her secretly,
minutely along her entire length, to see if he
might not have made some mistake, some
enhancement of memory belied by empirical
fact. But searching for repulsive detail and
finding none fixates him further. He watches
her gingerly pour the chloroform, pick up
the stainless recurve blade as if puzzled by
how knowledge always requires this
preliminary killing.
   Jeanette, all in white lab coat, a cat burglar
working the day shift, is utterly altered from
that irreverent sass he met at Ulrich's soiree.
Could she always have walked like this? Is
that her same sweep of cheeks, nape, thigh?
He cannot imagine when the new signal has
taken her over. With a subtle muscular
refraction, an imperceptible lip-twinge not
directed at him but still returning his, she
gives him the slightest, recursive suggestion
of mutual cueing, letting him know she
knows. There; it is out. She concedes. For an
instant, she looks back. His silhouette is
under examination. There, clear: she
examines him for trace imperfections that
will save them.
   Or did he project that glance, erased in an
instant? He can no longer distinguish prey,
no longer say precisely who titillates whom.
In the tag, the tangled affinities, her every
labcoat adjustment, her avoiding friendly
greeting is tacit admission of complicity.
Their each move changes the other's. He
studies her technique, indifferent to how the
lines between them separate, oblivious to
which of them is tagger, which taggee.
   Dr. Koss puts the injected, virally mauled
animal out of its misery according to
procedures. With smooth filleting swatch,
she removes the skin and bares the soft
tissue. She locates the organ she is after,
removes it, makes a light mash, centrifuges,
titrates it with reagent from a burette. At
stopwatch intervals, she prepares a time
series and labels each slide. What is she up
to with this experimental detour into higher
animals? Does work in autosomal
inheritance truly necessitate such efficient
rodent murder? Her method springs from
facility.
   When she turns to leave the lab, he can't
help himself, doesn't even want to. He's
compelled to turn his head a fraction,
glimpse her lovely leave-taking. Dr. Koss
chooses precisely that instant to pause, turn
her own wide eyes in time to catch him in the
act of looking. She turns at the lab
door—unforgettable!—inquiring,
challenging, yet timid. They turn
simultaneously to inspect each other.
Undeniable public confession: he heats and
distresses her as much as she does him.
There, the guilty exchange, admitted in her
eyes: he opens analogous gateways in her
senses, awakes her longing to travel beyond
the courtyard, to recite the words that will
throw off this walking trance, the
sleeping-spell of mind.
   Then she is gone, leaving him alone in the
lab with the apparatus he has been
bludgeoning incoherently for the last hour.
His viscera hold the impression—her turning
pertly on that strategic threshold to
announce that, yes, they are together in a
hopeless impasse. He circles the recalcitrant
fact. The woman is married; she made her
selection long before he arrived on the
scene, chose the display plumage of the man
who finally got breakfast cereal to talk when
you pour on milk. Herbert Koss: dependable,
well-off, patient, kind—all those desirable
qualities of mate- and fatherhood Ressler
himself lacks. He can beat the man nowhere;
he has no caught creature to lay at her den
door as dowry. None except—it gives him a
guilty rush—a crack at the secret of life.
   He slows, tries once more to back down
into the reasonable. He is happy with lab
bachelorhood. She has every reason for
sticking to her field-tested bond. There is no
forgivable reason to tamper with what isn't
broken, no possible attraction to exercise
over one another. And yet, there is. Is one. It
alleviates nothing to call it enzymes.
Obscene cat-and-mouse, one that, if they
can just this once transcend the way of the
race, ought to remain cat-and-mouse
forever, never developing into the thing it is
surrogate for. Hot, gratifying confirmation
fills him to recollect her hurried, questioning
eyes. It maddens him, the extent of pleasure
in this prolonged fiction, swarmed with all
the alarm of the event it must never indulge
in.
   She leaves him alone in the lab, abandons
him to the old detective story, the sober
mystification of the bug. Yet Jeanette— fawn
legs, down-scaped neck—has clearly
announced a catalog more inscrutable than
the sixty-four codons. Nature's ciphers are at
least objective, potentially solvable. But Koss
is a thing apart. What the two of them do to
one another may be no more than a
complex-carbohydrate tease, cybernetic
systems feeding back into each other, an
infinite Do-loop, a sentence grammatical but
out of syntactical control, whom looping
around to subject subject who. The moment
arrests him all afternoon: Jeanette, arched,
aroused, frozen at the door in
fight-or-flight, scared nocturnal mammal
caught in the light. What frightened her? It
could only have been him, his own
cross-hands panic, his broadcast desire.
   The marathon sessions with the rate trials
are over; he has verified them with all
possible precision. He must now present his
findings—the survival-value enzymes—at
the next Blue Sky. Cyfer will appreciate the
implications: a colinear, unidirectional,
non-overlapping, redundant triplet code.
They've suspected, but he has demonstrated
it, assembling the facts in a configuration
not entirely anticipated by anyone. He has
checked and rechecked for coherence,
consistency with the literature. The model is
airtight, obvious in retrospect. His bit of
crucial synthesis will in a few days become
public currency.
   He has delayed, savored the edge his extra
lucid pieces give him. By month's end, the
world will have everything he has, all the
cards down. He must lay out his technique
for controlled point mutations, selective
garbling. But is he ethically compelled to
point out that this technique, even more
than the nonresults, holds the possibility of
wrapping up the rest of the puzzle? Is he
honor-bound to harp on a hunch, tip them
off to his own intuitive certainty?
   He looks up to see Dan Woytowich
lugging unusual equipment into the lab.
"You know, they bill this as a portable, but
the damn thing's twice as bulky as a sewing
machine." He sets up the TV in a lab corner,
where it blends into the background
instruments. The tube is the size of the
Svedberg centrifuge and chromatography
equipment combined.
   "Dr. Double-U. What's new? How's the
wife?"
   "Renée's fine. Almost done with the
dissertation. She's blotted more than nine
hundred lines of Shakespeare to date."
   "Great. Just a hundred to go. Has she
tried Titus Andronicus?" Woyty adjusts the
dials, fiddles with the rabbit ears, and in a
flurry of static (residual background
radiation from the Big Bang), Ed Murrow
springs On the Air. The invasion of outside
news seems a violation of laboratory
controls. The two of them sit entranced,
Seeing It Now, Person to Person. Ressler
must at least ask. "Not your ordinary piece of
test apparatus, Dan. Are you working on
something arcane?"
   Woyty doesn't hear. He is submerged,
watching Dulles announce that he won't
give Eleanor Roosevelt a visa to visit China
because China doesn't exist. He surfaces
long enough to unload out of left field. "I
think we ought to quit calling what we're
doing here 'decoding.' Technically,
'decoding' is restoring a coded message to
plaintext by someone who already has the
key. What we're doing is 'cryptanalysis,' since
the genetic code is probably not a code at
all, but a cipher. Distort the description, and
you distort the thing you try to describe."
   Ressler listens to this impassioned plea for
linguistic purity. He may be witnessing the
first stages of total organic dissolution here.
Woyty doesn't blink; he gestures at the set,
where the You Bet Your Life birdie descends
on its wire like a dove ciborium, bearing a
piece of paper around its neck reading
"Grace." "You know, I dreamt I was a
contestant on What's My Line? From the
studio wings, I could see the panelists put
their blindfolds on. I went up to the
chalkboard to sign in, but instead of writing
'Research Biologist,' I wrote, 'Crypt Analyst.'
Then the panelists grilled me about my
profession. Get this: their questions were in
code."
   The news comes on, and Woytowich sits
pasted to the tube. The top embalmer in the
state could not have waxed the man better.
His full-blown mania for current events must
be linked to this other defect, free
association. Ressler, his own work impaired
by the electronic anesthesia, makes one last
try. "Why have you brought a television into
the lab?"
   Woytowich mumbles, "I've some trials that
need attending."
   "So do I, sir." After an afternoon's glance
at eyes hazel and moist enough to explain
why he has been taken out and dropped in
this forsaken place, the last thing Ressler
needs now is Beirut. Berlin. Woyty sighs and
shoots Ressler a strained smile suggesting
that the youth is not seeing him at his best.
Dan, Ressler knows, is a brilliant technician
with every right to be alienated. The sober,
classical generational studies he's produced
for decades are enough to bore anyone to
tears. A now ancient paper, written when
Woyty was a baby post-grad, cried in the
wilderness against the protein-as-gene
climate. Vindication did little to rehabilitate
him with the old guard he'd untimely
challenged. In the early fifties, Woytowich,
churning out disease patterns in fish family
trees, experienced a short-lived rebirth. He
reportedly combed the building for days,
telling anyone who'd listen about a strange
"jumping inheritance" which he could not
duplicate or explain. Three years later,
someone else published the complete
mechanism. By then, Woyty had become an
antinomian pariah, producing the barest
minimum research to survive. Yet he never
once violated the Lafayette Escadrille code of
honor by claiming he'd almost been there.
   "Were you by any chance watching last
year," Woytowich wanders off irrelevantly
again, bringing a blush of shame to Ressler's
cheeks, when Ed Sullivan went on his Really
Big Shoe and asked his audience whether
they should allow Ingrid Bergman to appear
on the program?"
   Ressler shakes his head quickly. "No set."
   "No? Of course not. Well, it was the low
point of modern opinion polling. Granted
the woman is controversial, leaving her
husband to take up with an Italian and all.
Seven years of political exile, denouncement
on the Senate floor, all for falling in love
with someone other than her husband." A
pause sends shimmies up Ressler's spine. "I
never thought of our witch hunts as
anything other than pubescent acne,
aberrations caused by moving too quickly
into the Data Age. Now I'm not that far out
of the mainstream, and I've never given the
green light to extremists, and as far as I'm
concerned, we ought to send nuts like
Levering into Minnesota exile." He snorts a
laugh when Ressler doesn't. "But imagine: 'If
you want to see this adulteress on the show,
write and tell me.' Not exactly a controlled
survey."
   Woytowich comes over to where Ressler
finishes the beaker-washing he'd get a
post-doc to do if he weren't the post-doc.
The way Woyty picks up the electrophoresis
strips and raises his eyebrows suggests that
the difference between cueing an audience
and confirming an experimental hunch is a
question of nomenclature. "I guess I don't
see how Miss Bergman's problems lead to
TVs in the lab."
   Woytowich turns away. "It is just for
tonight."
   "I'm sorry. I didn't mean...I'm just curious."
   Like one of his dazed fish doing slow
loop-the-loops in the tank, Woyty circles
Ressler's table. "I'd like to tell you something
I'm not allowed to tell anyone. That I've kept
to myself until now." Ressler waits until he
realizes the request wasn't rhetorical;
Woytowich really wants permission to tell.
Stuart nods. "Renée and I ... are a Stainer
family." Ressler laughs out loud to put it
together. The Stainer ratings. Stainer, the
national pollster, with his legendary secret
sample group perfectly representing America
in miniature. Woyty a Stainer voter? Ressler
has never met anyone like Woytowich in his
life. And yet: someone has to stand, in those
endless polls of taste that run America, for
every mephisto variation in existence. "I
know it's ludicrous. I was selected in my late
twenties, shortly after my appointment as
assistant prof at Illinois. Renée became
royalty by virtue of marriage."
   "Couldn't you decline the nomination?"
   "Can lab rats turn down their boss's NSF
grant? A median citizen does not turn down
nomination to median citizenship."
   "It doesn't pay, does it?"
   "Actually, being a responsible sample
group member has cost me considerably over
the years. No prestige, obviously, as we're
sworn to solemn secrecy. Knowledge of
Stainer names would be golden." Woyty
gives a hapless look laced with irony: I've
perjured myself to tell you this.
   "I don't understand. Why put up with it, if
it's a burden?"
   "Think about it. There are only fifteen
thousand Stainer members nation-wide.
Only one per ten thousand. We're in the
unique position of rating every televised
message to enter the American home. If a
show passes our chi-square, it becomes the
law of the land. National sacrament. In its
own peculiar way, undeniable power."
   So it's more than lack of collegial support
that has kept this man from realizing his
potential. Woytowich's social obligations
have for some time been tinged with the
moral fervor of a Mormon setting out on his
two-year missionary stint in the Third World.
Woyty's ethical compulsion to influence the
sample mean mimics the first principle: go ye
therefore and replicate thyself, and may the
most persuasive opinions live. His peculiar
polling position has made him purposive, a
thing no scientist can afford to be.
   Woyty breathes deeply. "The way I see it,
in an industrial democracy the size of
Americorp, the vote is pretty much
ceremonial privilege. Your state
representative? Tribal holdover. More an
after-the-fact efficiency check on mass
manipulation. A ballot in the Stainer ratings,
on the other hand, gives me a chance to
manipulate the manipulators. When I rate,
the boys on both seaboards snap to
attention."
   "But wait—"
   Woytowich aggressively cuts him off. "I
know what you're going to say. The
small-denominator fallacy. Well, you're right.
My proxy vote for ten thousand people has
no more significance in the sample of fifteen
thousand than the votes of the ten
thousand Daniel W models from whom I am
indistinguishable in taste in the hundred
and fifty million nation at large. And yet,"
Woyty smiles sadly, imparting the latest
unsupported dead-on prediction of his
scientific career, "the world is not a linear
equation. Big changes come from small
initial differences. You are a good enough
scientist," he accuses, "to know that all polls
are, to a certain degree, self-fulfilling.
Methods of inquiry create possible
outcomes. The great difference between the
Stainer ratings and Citizen Rule lies in the
results each is after. Ike, Stassen, Truman,
Stevenson? Jesus, who are these guys?
Epiphenomena, emblems of the
homogenation of taste, the by-products of
mechanization, not the actors upon it. But
ask a fellow—OK, fifteen thousand
fellows—to judge Gunsmoke, and you start
to zero in on the real substrata of
civilization."
   So this is who Dan really is. For the past
several years, he has gone about in secrecy,
unknown even to his team members, doing
his bit for the elevation of the species. He
has had to be perfectly informed, both about
world events and the hydra of churned
consumer culture. Somewhere last month,
last year, he passed the point, without
knowing it, where he no longer simply
sought the up-to-the-minute. He needed it.
Like enzyme-deprived mutations,
Woytowich's system can no longer function
without a steady source—a glut—of
broadcast.
   Woyty returns to the set, adjusts the aerial.
"The problem with swaying the median is
that I must move selectively, a blow here and
there where it counts. Stay within the
standard deviation. Guerrilla war.
Dienbienphu of shrewdery against
prevailing tastes. To use one's Stainer vote
to subvert popular culture for the better,
one cannot saturation-bomb. Three votes in
a row for the high-foreheads—be they ever
so humble—and Stainer would dump me as
an aberrant ringer."
   "Dan, I had no idea. What's the battlefield
tonight? This Is Your Life? Queen for a
Day?" Two doozies of terminal civilization
built on the premise that sadism is simply
loving attention to one's neighbor's
masochism. Both trace case histories of
individual agony and ecstasy in tortuous
detail, elevating the home audience through
the triple intercession of identification,
catharsis, and aesthetic distance.
   Woyty's elbows jerk as if struck by the
examiner's rubber tomahawk. "Not exactly. I
did those two, months ago. My first urge
was frontal assault, pan them both. I see no
redeeming civilizing value in the public audit
of a guy who is forced to relive through
audiovisual aids his divorce, a bankruptcy
suit, and two years in Sing Sing. But rating
them was problematic. Whatever their
faults, Queen and Life are at least tenuously
nonfiction. Healthy counterbalance to Lucy,
where the end of the episode always reveals
the world to be everybody's favorite crazy
uncle. So let the woman who in one week
accidentally poisons her kid and contracts
leukemia wear a fake crown and scepter on
network TV. I gave the shows a four point
five and a four point two. Low enough to
show I hate them, but high enough to
indicate that I prefer them to the
alternatives. Coincidentally, those were close
to the Stainer norm. The more I strike against
the status quo, the closer I fit the mode."
   Woyty gives the set a palm-slap, tuning it
in. "No. Tonight, we've something a shade
more significant." Just then, the familiar
features of Edward Teller, father of the
H-bomb, emerge from the electromagnetic
gray scan. Teller, brilliant, mad Hungarian
emigre, tes-tifier against Oppenheimer at the
government's This Is Your Life, argues
heatedly with another world-class mind
whose face Ressler recognizes: Linus
Pauling, Nobel laureate, supreme figure of
American chemistry, he of vitamin C and the
covalent bond, structural elucidator of any
number of organic molecules, and
nip-and-tuck runner-up to the
three-dimensional solution of DNA.
   The two sit in a San Francisco studio,
battling toe to toe on the feasibility—no, the
desirability—of a comprehensive nuclear test
ban. "For those of you out in the home
audience," Woyty editorializes, "these men
are not paid actors. They are two giants of
modern science, delay-broadcast, of course.
Any hair-tearing or tossed water glasses
long since edited out."
   Ressler wants the man to shut up so he
can hear; he can't believe it's happening.
The scientists both smile disarmingly. There's
a lot of heavy eyebrow work going on, and a
good deal of finger-pointing as well. Teller's
deep, black eye sockets versus Pauling's
shiny pate. Incredulous, Ressler looks from
combatant to combatant, trying to follow
their reasoning. Teller seems to say that
there would be no way of knowing how
effective or reliable a device would be if
testing were eliminated. Pauling shouts that
that is precisely the point.
   Ressler studies the hook-nosed
Hungarian. Like everyone else in science,
Teller has recently tried his hand at the
coding problem. Ressler read the paper, and
concluded that the moonlighter ought not
to give up the megaton day job. He wonders
how this man can be a devotee of the same
crystalline bracer that has recently awakened
him to the uses of music. Teller's adoration
of Bach is legendary; he reportedly forced
fellow members of the Manhattan Project to
listen to poor recordings and passable
personal renditions in labs ranging from
Columbia to that New Mexico mesa.
   How can these men, researchers of the
first rank, no matter what their politics, take
the debate of so nebulous an issue out into
the public forum? It violates positivism, the
ban on discussing things one can't know.
Their sinking to the fallacies of politicians
horrifies Ressler, grates against his belief
that "is" and "ought to be" are and ought
to be separate. He follows the debate, a
glutton for revulsion. But before he can
name the nausea in this public screech of
intellect, Woytowich intrudes. "Stainer is
canvassing this event heavily. In addition to
figuring out who and how many are
watching, they want an evaluation from any
family that does tune in. They've sent out
that favorite soft-science tool, a
questionnaire.
   Seems they're trying to determine if there's
a market for reality. If there's any future for
world-saving debate on television."
   "World-saving?" Another defection. "You
too... ?"
   Woyty fails to notice Ressler's crisis of
conviction. "Of course. This is the Big One.
The one I'm been rotting my mind on
countless years of Wells Fargos to preserve."
   Ressler watches aghast as the two debate
safety, flipping the hot potato between their
four hands as if the quarrel is just its subject
matter. It's agony to see Pauling, agent of so
many discoveries, talking with such passion
about so messy and unqualifiable a term as
morality. It hurts the way a sports hero's
sellout to soft-drink vending hits a
ten-year-old. Even Ressler can see that
verifiability isn't the real issue. If w e can
build the things, we can find a way of telling
whether or not they're being tested. The
issue is, once set in motion, whether we
want to rein the incredible apparatus in.
What'll it be? Turn back or get on with it?
   In disgust, he feels a gut-tug toward
Teller. We're condemned to test, to develop.
How else can we know the desirability of an
experiment unless we've run it? No ignorant
constraints on knowledge. Yet something
deeper swings him toward Pauling, the
better scientist: aren't we graced with some
degree of foresight? Is what we can do
always what we must?
   "We've got a problem here," Woyty says.
"Do I do my ineffectual bit for history? Pull
out the stops tonight? Give my all to the
cause? Slap the show solid nines across the
board and risk instant ejection from
Stainerhood? Or appease the testors'
expectations by turning in scores only a little
above normal, seven point one or
thereabouts?"
   Ressler's problem is worse. Until this
moment, he was certain that the highest
obligation of science was to describe
objectively, to reveal the purpose-free
domain. But here are Teller and Pauling,
carrying on on national TV as if some things
were more urgent than truth, as if we're
condemned always to fall back on the blind
viewpoint of need. As if observation—the
dismissal of final causes necessary for any
solution of the physical world—can solve
everything except ethics. As if exploration
without ethics were no better than data
without theory.
   Woytowich runs on. "The secret word for
tonight is seven point seven. A rough mean
between what I want to give it and what I
can afford to. Hover around a plausible pip,
win an all-expenses-paid reprieve from
responsibility. Escape a near-brush with
commitment this time around, live to fight
another way. What do you say, friend? Pick a
number. Vote for me."
   At that moment, rasped by this
unexpected irritant, the next piece in
Ressler's maturing experimental procedure
falls into place. Something's been missing
from his model of chemical inheritance.
Obvious, now that it's here: the coding
problem is de facto a polling problem.
Nucleotide triplets, wrapped in a supercoiled
string, are , not inert, static, informational
bits. They are a referendum, a chorus of
self-serving, purposive voices, a proliferation
of experiment whose electoral outcome of
enzyme behaviors decides their fates.
   If he can't read the impossibly complex
code directly, he can at least poll the
encoder, map the mechanism by submitting
it to ballot. Ressler walks quickly out of the
room. Another word will jeopardize the
fragile, crystallizing notion. Woytowich,
looking up from the set, sees his junior
partner disappearing down the hall. He
misinterprets the flight. "Abstaining is still
voting," Woyty calls out to the vanishing
back. "No vote is still a vote, A man's gotta
vote."
   Ressler, not yet out of earshot, ignores
him. He converges rapidly on an idea so
beautiful that it needs his full attention. He
can't foster the notion alone. He needs to
speak it to someone who can follow his
thought, add to it. He races down the
Georgian corridors to his office. He fumbles
with keys, throws open the door, a sea of
Lovering's papers scattering in the gust. He
blesses Joe for choosing that moment not to
be around.
   He sits at the phone, runs a shaking finger
down the names in the staff directory, picks
up the receiver and dials. When the voice
connects, pastel and alive, it shocks him to
hear who he has called. He cannot talk, so
amazing is the spectrum of composite
pitches in that voice at the other end of the
wire. "Hello? Is someone there?" As he
places the handset back in its cradle, Ressler
distinctly hears her catch her breath,
whisper, "Is that you?"



XII

  The Natural Kingdom

   11/3: Arrived again in November. Just being
alive this late in the year is not in itself proof
of having hit on a solution worth
preserving. Here, now, as professional cold
sets in in earnest, all the anticipation of
autumn comes to this: surviving in changed
conditions. New strategy for a new climate. I
have twenty-five weeks left, twenty-seven if I
shower with cold water. What to show for
the months already spent? Only the months
themselves. I've dabbled in the hard
sciences, picked up a hint of chemistry. But
I'm no closer to recovering that tune I
dreamed myself inside of the night I heard of
Dr. Ressler's death. No closer to recording
that score, the dance step that made me quit
the working world.
   I've learned that the one panel Todd has
sent me since running away did come not
from over the ocean but from up the coast.
The definitive cross-reference proves he
brought the landscape along with him,
knowing in advance not to leave traces.
QED: I am here alone. And that's best, when
all is figured. Alone, flat out against myself.
Close to the grain of the neighborhood, no
motive except making it to the next calendar
island. My days familiar, but flavored strange
again. The closure of solitude, the only way
of knowing I am here again in wet
November, still imprinted with every shed
skin.
   I now know the problem Ressler was after.
He wanted to determine how clusters of
inert particles able only to roll down
potential-energy hills could stack themselves
into grammars, loaded configurations
readable and enactable: blueprints for
assembling and regulating other clusters
themselves capable of erecting, dismantling,
rearranging, and elaborating every strategy
that has ever emerged on this sliver of rock.
A modest problem for a by-product of those
same, inert particles.
   11/4: I've learned how the molecular
archives are written in sinuous ribbons
tightly packed into each cell nucleus. How
these chromosomes are demarked into
discrete sentences. My file proves I've
actually relearned this:

  Q: How many genes do I have?
  L.N., 3/23/78

  A: This number is not likely to be
determined with precision anytime soon. The
order of magnitude is 100,000. The complete
genome of a human being is written on
almost 7 feet of microscopic thread. Every
human cell contains 3—6 billion nucleotide
pairs.
  J. O'D., 3/25/78

   I've gotten a first sense of the
tetragrammatonic golem recipe. I've won an
analogic understanding of how seven feet
of aperiodic crystal unzips, finds
complements of each of its billion
constituents, integrates them perfectly
without tearing or entangling, then winds
up again into a fraction of a millimeter, all in
two minutes. I grasp, barely, that this process
is taking place all over my body at this
instant.
   I see in rough outline the dogma Ressler
was out to extend: one gene, one nucleotide
sequence, one synthesized enzyme, one
chemical reaction, one inherited quality. I
accept that synthesis takes place at the
speed of two amino acids per second,
constantly, for countless enzymes in every
cell. I can, in cartoon, conceive how this
codex might be read, how merely speaking
its words creates three-dimensional globules
whose folds make each a miniature chemical
computer. I grant that one enormous
concatenated clause of A's, T's, C's, and G's
is the plan for hemoglobin and another,
every bit as inanimate, for insulin.
   But I lack the critical keystone in the arch
he was after: I cannot see how form emerges
from the same mechanism. When to make
bone, when pancreas, scale, hair, skin, or
bowel? How large should the heart get?
How to start it pumping? How indicate a
heart at all? Take a broad, leafy,
sun-spreading tuber factory, root, plumule,
stolon: does the blueprint read, "Sprout a
villus in the ileum; lace it up with veins"?
   Pattern-juggling pattern actually makes
life. From brittle and spiny to sleek and
silver: an impossible spreading text for four
letters. Even crisp illustrations, the bright
primary pastels by the Herris of natural
history, their unambiguous lines running
from luxurious organ encampments to the
affixing term—"cilia," "thorax," "vascular
bundle"—cannot convince me. How much
worse, a millionfold more incomprehensible,
the passage from monocot to monogamy.
   I find the evolution of eyesight remotely
credible, but the production of perception
from those same four letters baffles me.
Behavior: the retreat of a sensitive plant
from touch, phototaxis of plankton,
nyctinasty in the morning glory, the butting
of rams' horns, neo-Palladian mud-and-twig
palaces, the engineering monuments of
colonial insects, the clicks and whistles of
distress, the motor rhythm of walrus sonar
(irresistibly sexy to their opposites), speech,
for God's sake? Are these enormous
structures somehow in the invisible code?
Can all this babel come from the same idiot
idiolect?
   11/5: And that catalog is a mere draft, no,
the draft of a draft. Years ago I received a
scrawled Question Board submission,
unsigned: Q: How different can you get?
Inside joke, private incoherence. As it was
anonymous, I felt no obligation to answer.
But ever the compulsive collector, I kept the
card, a record of what elbow-nudging
humanity, Brooklyn branch, wanted to know
in the late twentieth century. Now, five
months since I've set foot in my old haunt,
I've read enough to propose molecular
biology's stupefying solution.
   First, in a seven-year-old Scientific
American —already fossil artifact—I learn that
for an average human, almost every
characteristic is homozygous. Only 6.7
percent of human genes are composed of
different alleles. From that small fraction, all
variability in legacy arises. How small is
small? Taking 100,000 genes as a ballpark
genome, 6,700 will be heterozygous. That
gives 2 6700 ways of shuffling divergences—a
number of more than two thousand
digits—to pass on to a child. The growth of
genetics has been the growth of realizing
how huge the gap between individuals is.
   By contrast: the human genome,
considered as a whole, represents only the
slightest divergence from the closest living
trial. More than 98 percent of our DNA is
identical to that of both chimp and gorilla.
Less than 2 percent of that seven-foot text is
proprietarily human. The incredible
conclusion is that two children of the same
parents differ more from one another than
Homo sapiens as a whole differs from the
apes. Superabundance of intraspecies
diversity holds across the spectrum of all the
few million species nature is currently
testing. The ways of varying the original life
molecule have multiplied beyond any ability
to conceive of them. How much do species
themselves differ? I have only to look. Eel on
one hand, elm on the other: two
recombinations on the same letter set. How
many different yous can you have? How
different can you get?
   11/6: So different I can go no further on the
coding problem until I narrow down my
intended landing spot. If I'm to cross the
bridge he was building, I've got to begin
anew, with the question of what, if
anything, all those coded strings are possibly
after with their unbounded text scrambling. I
accredit the ability of inanimate molecules to
arrange themselves in configurations
capable of coding. But I need to find why
they go on coding for ever more elaborate
configurations.
   I must return to the macroscopic world, to
Darwin's tautology. Survival of the
fittest—Spencer's phrase—has a definite
ring. But can it explain that superfluous
explosion of self-generating programs? Is
the famous, world-altering phrase really a
"law"? Survival of those who survive.
Disappearance of those who disappear.
After-the-fact synopsis of species drift,
missing the driving undercurrent, the
molecular surge toward diversity as a way of
staying around, producing more of the same.
   On second look, I see I've misunderstood
evolution as badly as my schoolgirl botch of
Mendel. Education is wasted on those of
school age. Now I find that evolution is not
about competition or squeezing out, not a
master plan of increasing efficiency. It is a
deluge, a cascade of mistaken, tentative,
branching, brocaded experiment, secrets
seemingly dormant, shouted down from the
past, wills and depositions hidden in the
attic, how-to treasure maps reading "Tried
this; it worked for a while; hang on to it,"
program-palimpsests reworked beyond
recognition, churches renovated so often in
a procession of styles that it's impossible to
label them Romanesque, gothic, or baroque.
It is about one instruction: "Make another
similar something; insert this command; run;
repeat." It is about the resultant runaway
seed-spreading arabesques, unrelated
except in all being variations on that theme.
   "Struggle for survival," red in tooth and
claw, is misleading; low-profile passivity is
the strategy of choice in at least as many
niches as aggression. "Struggle" carries too
much individual emphasis. Selection deals in
the economy of individuals, even individual
traits. But evolution deals only in
populations, demanding not that they
struggle but just that they procreate faster
than they perish. No upward march, no drive
toward perfection. Evolution's move is
lateral, spreading out, diversifying until
every spot on the nearest-fit curve, every
accidental juggle, has been auditioned
against experience.
   A day's reading makes plain that evolution
is profoundly conservative. A species, on
energetic grounds, stands to gain nothing
by invention. Payoff lies in stable
maintenance. Diversity, even more
paradoxically, is born in preservation.
"Natural selection," like the chemistry of
self-replicating molecules, needs fleshing
out, bridging. Evolution is circular, post hoc
until I can underpin it, link it to the same
coding problem I've circled around for
months.
   11/7: I read about barnacle geese. Beautiful
creatures, larger than they should be,
aerodynamically improbable, breathtaking in
formation flight. Annually, their goslings pay
the price of the safety of cliff nests. The
flightless chicks throw themselves onto the
rocks below, shielded by a centimeter of
fluff. A few fledglings survive the massacre,
perpetuate the behavior, build new nests
next year in the fatal altitudes.
   11/8: Exhausted, I watch a nature show
shown late enough at night to ensure that
only the already disenfranchised fringe will
be disturbed by it. The film documents a
slime mold so startling it needs seeing to be
believed. A single-celled creature coats
ponds in green scum. But when its food
supply grows scarce, the particles transform.
The cells congregate in huge colonies,
differentiate, form the parts of a composite
beast complete with head and body. The
body grows spore cases that crack open and
scatter single cells. The show cuts to a squid
whose outer skin is an animated Kandinsky,
awash in chromatophores that skitter across
it in pigment ripples. The voiceover explains,
in scientific baritone, that this fluctuating
array is a map of the creature's brain activity:
a visible neural analog.
   Evolution becomes, on second look, an
intricate switchboard, paths for passing
signals back and forth: generation to
generation, species to species, environment
to creature, and back again. Life as exchange
of mail. I think of the medieval bestiary,
Frank's beloved illuminations, circulated in
hand manuscripts—the journals of the day.
That interpretive system seeing the spectrum
of natural form as a mirror of God, eager to
alert us to His nature through every living,
loaded semaphore in creation-.

            The leun slant on hille & he man
         hunten here. Alle hise fet steppes
         after him he filleth....
            The lion stands on hill and hunts
         man here. Fills all his footsteps in
         after him, drags his tail over his
         tracks so he can't be found. When
         he sleeps he never closes his eyes.
         Why?
             Welle heg is tat hil that is heven
         riche. Ure louerd is te leun the
         liveth ther abuven. Well high is
         that hill, that is heaven rich.
             Our Lord is the lion that liveth
         there above. No devil can find him;
         he never sleeps.

   The medieval natural kingdom was not
indifferent object but pointed symbol. How
else to explain the obvious interlocked
design? Even its descendant science,
stripping the world of every motive, reads
like allegory. Even "nature," "evolution,"
still flirt with immanent purpose.
   11/11: I begin to see science as a natural
selection of species' postulates about the
environment. Today, first U.S. patent for
telescope, 1851. Tomorrow: Hooke appointed
Royal Society Curator of Experiments, 1662.
Empirical survivals for every port of call in
the calendar. Survival of the fittest.
Die-tosses developing goals; restless
invention searching for application.
   11/13: I spend the day among the ants,
appalled by the Bulldog variety. They feed
their sterile workers' eggs to larvae and
queen. The queen mates for a day, storing
the semen her whole life, from which she
produces the entire colony. The Weaver, a
near relation, is a bio-universe away. This
strain uses its larvae as web spray guns,
clasping the grubs in their jaws, coaxing
them with antennae, pointing them to spots
to sew up. Weavers raise Blue Butterfly
caterpillars, nurse them to adulthood,
protect them, sacrifice guardians as
caterpillar feed, all for nectar emitted by the
monster babies.
   Flowers inscribed with ultraviolet runways,
detectable only by particular bees. Wasps
that live parasitically in bee bodies. The
Bauhaus finesse of trapdoor spiders. Other
spider strains that fish. Fish that shoot
insects with water streams; fish that fish with
electroluminescent bait. Two-pitch frog calls
where males hear the low warning, females
the high serenade. More bizarrerie than I
feel the outrageousness of what Dr. Ressler
was after: a simple generative axiom telling
where all of this comes from.
Macro-molecular feedback supplies the how
without recourse to metaphysical why.
Darwin gives the first internally plausible
explanation not requiring a leap of faith. But
gaps in the fossil record leave incomplete
the account of how variety itself comes
about. How can pruning produce the
irreducible width of the world lab? That's
where my friend came in. Ressler was after
no less than ancient myth: a physical
explanation of variety. How the creatures
got their nature. How animate arose from
inanimate. How different one can get.
   11/14: Monod, Jacques: Chance and
Necessity, page 48 of my dog-eared
paperback: "[T]he prodigious diversity of
macroscopic structures of living beings rests
in fact on a profound and no less remarkable
unity of microscopic makeup." Many from
one. Complexity from the simple first
principle. The living world as single event.
Speciation is stranger than I've guessed:
unstoppable, incoherent, continuous. All the
parts of speech proliferated from the first
verb. How can that be? Each copy grown
precise in design, everything recorded within
it geared toward undeniable ends driving
every cell, each organelle. How can such
clear, formal purpose arise without a
purposive designer, no plan more steeped in
necessity than chance?
   11/16: Twenty-three weeks left; twenty-five
with cold showers. Six months to discover
how different you can get. To uncover the
answer alone, in the seed-spreading core of
the self-extending program. To validate that
great tautology: survival of those who
survive.

  Canon at the Fourth

   Ressler replaces the receiver even as she
identifies him, picks his voiceprint out of a
field of ambiguous noise. She guesses what
he called to ask, and why he cannot. Koss.
He grows frantic for communication.
Woytowich's polling problem triggers an
infant connection that he must run past
someone. If he cannot find some safe other
with whom he can coax it out, the link
struggling to the surface will be lost. But he
cannot call Koss back; the first phoneme of
her voice already trickles with forgetting.
   He rushes from his office to Toveh
Botkin's Viennese study. Her door is
unlocked, but Botkin is not there. Ressler
scans the lavender, heavy furnishings and
thinks: She will be dead soon. Her century of
science will stop. She will disperse into
ammonias, hydroxyls, aromatic
hydrocarbons. Rilke and Furtwängler will
scatter in auction. A regret passes through
him that he cannot stop and predicate. No
one at all in the building. He remembers:
nighttime. The ordinary world goes home.
Ressler runs out into the autumn air,
following the route by heart. He reaches
Stadium Terrace, K court, then 53, but at that
gauge, his internal pointer veers toward A,
the Blakes' end of the triplex. Ressler has not
visited Tooney since the night he was
shaken by child and wife. But he needs his
neighbors now, needs to sound them out.
Only words will get to the issue, however
much he distrusts the medium. He rings the
bell, stands on the stoop listening to the
muffled sounds of surprise on the far side of
the door. While the porch light floods on
and the door lurches open, a shock of
excitement stretches over his chest. The
world is continuous, unlimited
rearrangement: Jeanette knew his silence.
   The Blakes greet him with great huzzah.
Ressler, here on their turf, so late,
uncoerced. Margaret cheers the reprieve
from bedtime. "Hello," she greets him, wary
with memory.
   "Hello," Ressler grins. "Know any new
poems?"
   Little Margaret turns her face into her
shoulder. Ressler pecks Eva on the cheek
shyly and pumps Tooney's hand, grateful
that the man has survived to be here at this
moment. "Drink?" his host offers. "Eat? Be
merry?" Ressler shakes his head. Blake,
nonplussed but delighted, leads him into
the front room.
   They barely sit down when Ressler bursts
into things. "Tooney. What, in your opinion,
have we been up to?"
   "Don't know about you. I've been putting
the kid to bed."
   Ressler doesn't even break stride. "Cyfer.
These months. Trying to solve the coding
problem by equating specific base sequences
with amino acid arrangements in protein
polypeptides."
   "Now you tell me." But Stuart's excitement
is contagious.
   "And how have we gone about it? Like
bloody Poe. Studying all known enzymes.
Looking for patterns. Letter frequencies.
Clumps where we might wedge a lever of
correspondence. But we're making one,
glaring, freshman presupposition."
   "I give up."
   Ressler is too fired up to be disappointed.
"We're combing amino sequences for some
evidence of prior necessity. Why? There is no
codemaker, Toon." Ressler speaks as if
bluntly urging a child to shake off a scrape.
   "All right," Blake says slowly. "Assume I
follow. I'm afraid I don't see the
ramifications, except..."
   "Except that we've been attacking the
problem ass-backwards." Talking to another
is still superior to talking to himself, even if
he must explain everything. "Listen, Tooney.
I've got to talk dirty for a minute."
   "Wife! Leave the room."
   Eva, in the other room, hears her husband
bellow and enters just in time to hear Ressler
say "In vitro."
   Eva laughs and says, "Et in terra pax."
Ressler, Lutheran, looks blank. But he
latches onto Evie, her unspecialized ears
every bit as helpful as her scientist mate's. He
explains the vitro/vivo dichotomy. To Eva,
the difference between running an
experiment outside rather than inside a
living system seems functional. "I thought
y'all did everything with test tubes," she
drawls. "Don't you choose the most
convenient method? Careful isolation under
glass...."
   "... can stand in for runs on the real
thing?" Ressler informs her of the hitches.
He feels renewed need to make the point
hurriedly. "In vivo—testing with living
things—is like Murrow's report from a street
under fire. Firsthand information, but
chaotic. In vitro gives a coherent but
dangerously simplified recreation, from the
calm of the studio. A whole new can of
helical worms."
   Blake whistles. "You want a cell-free
system."
   "Exactly," Ressler shouts, jumping up. A
moan of resigned fear comes from the
just-dozing child in the next room, and he
lowers his voice. "I knew you would come
through." Blake has supplied him with the
thing he was after. A name.
   "Stuart. I don't know. Even supposing
that synthesis behaves no differently outside
the cell than in. That a reaction's a reaction,
that living things form no special domain."
The whole point of the last hundred years.
"Still..."
   Stuart waits for the objection, the use of
talk. Blake thinks in silence, knowing what's
at stake and measuring ambiguities the best
he can. After some seconds, he says, "In
simulating the translation reactions outside
the cell, reducing the case to manageable
proportions, we might..."
   "Yes?"
   "I don't know. Violate the complexity
threshold?"
   "The what?"
   "I know. It sounds mystical. But can we be
sure that reduction to constituents won't
strip out emergent phenomena?"
   "Is there such an animal?"
   "Jesus. Maybe I'm in the wrong line of
work." Eva sits next to her husband,
squeezes his feet. "In vitro," Blake works out
tentatively, "might give us repeatable
evidence. But would it ignore some cellular
interdependence?"
   The two pore over the new angle while
the third party sits by, asks for occasional
clarification, keeps them honest. They push
on the problem into early morning, hitting a
hard spot that won't budge. Tooney looks at
his watch, laughs, and announces, "I have to
drive to Chicago in five hours." Ressler
apologizes, Blake waves him off, and they
tap the matter another fifteen minutes. It's
impossible to say, as the meeting breaks up
and the Blakes lead Ressler to the door, how
all three know that this talk, so highly
charged, innocent, irrepeatable, will be the
last of its kind. Blake walks Stuart across the
lawn to K-53-C.
   "No coat?" Ressler asks, solicitous in the
crisp air.
   "Don't you start now. You sound like
Lovering. Have you seen that pup recently?
The man is so convinced that cold germs are
gunning for him that he won't even shake
hands. It's one thing to rage against a
wet-head. Another to run around in
permanent parka. I saw the madman
yesterday, wearing gloves, indoors. He
refuses to take off his muffler even to talk.
And here it's still practically summer."
   "Tooney, it's getting cold. There is a flu
virus going around. I can sympathize with
Joe's desire to keep a distance. The idea of a
packet of DNA attaching itself by landing
gear on my cell wall, injecting me with alien
nucleic acid, using my cell to reproduce itself
by the hundreds, and then bio-wing it up in
a grand exit is not especially savory."
   "Tell me. But don't you see how he
practically forces me to bike to the lab in
bermudas? I'm fatalistic about disease. I
mean, if a virus has your cell's name on it...I
always say anyone can have Tea for Two, but
it takes phage to make T4 tumor. Heard the
one about the Cysteine Chapel? I gotta
Millon ovum."
   Ressler draws up short. '"If a virus has
your cell's name on it...'?" But the idea, too
far ahead of its time, is lost to a failure of
concentration. They stand outside Ressler's
door, waiting for the vagaries of inspiration
to visit once more in the pre-sunríse.
   "You want to trace protein synthesis
forward?" Blake asks, summarizing,
although the point is long since solidified.
Ressler nods. "In a cell-free system? But how,
man?" Ressler shrugs. He feels the answer
inching on him, as inevitable as infection.
   Once inside the door, he dusts off the
Goldberg disk and returns it to its absent
place on the player. The music radiates
again, with only a few additional
scratch-induced mutations on the vinyl to
record his fit of a few evenings before. The
tune, suddenly exuberant this morning,
confirms him that a method exists. An
alternative, close to the beating heart of
translation. In the precision of harmonic
structure, he hears his own conviction that
the coding problem rests on a simple
look-up table—at ever lower levels, a
mechanism to explain cell growth, viral
piracy, symbiotic coalition government of
organs, the origin of species, phone
impulses broken off in panic, inexplicable
behavior late in the year, fitful inspiration,
the continuous cold modal rapture in
chords, in vivo.
    He wakes after two hours and walks to the
library, Saturday morning, bucking the
current of fifty thousand Memorial Stadium
football fans. Deep into the season, he still
has not acclimated; getting from Stadium
Terrace to the stacks against the crowd takes
twice as long as normal. Inside the
informational Fort Knox, he pores over the
periodicals in a spiral search back into time,
not knowing what he is looking for but
certain he will recognize it when he sees it.
He is skimming the Journal of Biological
Chemistry back to the early 1950s when he is
suddenly frozen by a muted roar—a tsunami
coming from some distance. The sound
flashes through him, followed by instant
realization: this is it. The magazine ads for
fallout shelters with plush carpeting and
Scrabble sets, the sad government films
teaching kindergartners to survive an
airburst by popping under their school
desks: the age of information has caught up
with itself.
    But just as quickly, the collective howl
collapses into silence. Ressler waits for
another muffled announcement but hears
nothing. Then the leap of inference: the
home team threatening to score. All politics
are local. Curious, he climbs to deck ten,
looks out from this aerial outpost through
the side of the stadium, between the banks
of colonnades. There, a mass of fifty
thousand particles forms a single, eukaryotic
Football Fan. Waving, pink arms become the
manifold cilia of a rotifer rippling across the
membrane of this cooperative cell.
    Ohio State takes the local boys through a
clinic, as they will down the years fading into
time imMemorial. Watching this remarkable
exercise in collective stimulus and response,
the fifty thousand organelles testing and
responding to their environment, he
resolves to differentiate himself. He will give
in to the pressure of selection, employ the
one weapon he has for obtaining the one
thing of any consequence to him: Jeanette
Koss—tasting, achieving her, pressing,
infecting, taking, joining, learning what she
is. He will overwhelm her by sheer display of
lovely force, of preening genotype. He will
bring her an incalculable prize, like those
chocolate-box corpses certain spiders bring
their loves, proofs of potential that also
shield the suitor from serving as meal.
    It relieves him to choose. Weeks he has
held off, waiting for this impossible
complication to become the first of
simplicities. Now he will prove to her that he,
of everyone she has ever met, most merits
the selection of love. He will give her the
most beautiful bouquet
imaginable—objective, freezing, clear: the
top rung of Jacob's ladder. Half blind to
their contents, he checks out a dozen bound
journals and carries them back to his den.
On his way, the collective supercell, its
function over, lyses. He stands helpless, feels
the crowd sweep over him. The walls of the
stadium explode, issuing fifty thousand
viruses into the air. Epidemic this time of
year.

  Learning the Irregular Verbs

   I stopped loving Tuckwell and started
resenting him. No reason. The same reason I
first loved him. I can't imagine how I ever
thought my love might make a difference to
him. Irrational arrival, irrational exit. I asked
myself thirty times a day why I was trading
him for an excellent shot at nothing. I wasn't
even trading. Nothing mercantile about it. I
was giving him away. Throwing.
   In bad moments, I blamed advertising. It
had always depressed me: form without
substance, noise parading as sense. But in
fairer intervals, I knew Keith only did what
most of us do for a living: he sold things,
only a little more honestly than most. He
ridiculed his career himself: "The art form of
the century. Concert, gallery, and holy writ in
one convenient package. How to say 'Eat
Multinational Carcinogen Patties'
appealingly. How to convince the
overcashed that all they need for happiness
is leg weights. Mind-forged manacles."
   For four years, he had shown me every ad
campaign he did. Not for approval—to ward
off boredom, keep us from drifting into
different dialects. In the end, I chose one of
his major accounts to throw a fit over. We
were cooking dinner together, a familiar
menu of acquired favorites. By tacit
agreement, we did not talk about my plans
to move—how far they'd gone, where I
stood. We'd made that mistake twice since it
became reality, and now cut the topic a wide
berth. By dessert, Keith cracked his
affectionate parody of my day at the office.
"Question," he said, mugging for my
benefit. "Is the Human Bean getting any
smarter?" Nostalgic lost offering, reminder
of everything we'd given each other. He put
it forward resignedly, but with an element of
outside shot. After all, the old joke had
always worked before.
   But not that evening. "Answer: If you
have to ask...."
   "Supporting documentation, please."
Behind the burlesque, Kei-thy was trying to
save us. But I didn't feel like playing. He
spread a roll of paper towel and tried to
amuse me by drawing a timeline of
meliorism, marking pyramids, cathedrals,
flotillas, railroads, and particle accelerators in
little dots that broke out in a rash over the
right side of the continuum. I ignored him,
clearing dishes, putting up the leftovers.
   "Einstein," he chuckled. "Lord Keynes.
Pretty heavy hitters in recent generations.
The semiconductor," he challenged, drawing
one at the far right, in a halo of stars.
"Quantum electrodynamics. Got you there!"
He drew a triumphal arch for each one. He
caricatured a baroque staircase leading from
midcentury ever upwards off the map,
bearing a little sign reading "This Way.
Watch Your Step." He would have broken
my heart had I let him.
   "This is absurd," I said, level-voiced, ready
for violence. "Love Canal. Ozone depletion.
Tropical rain forest the size of Connecticut
destroyed annually. A hundred thousand
species extinct by the time we retire. How
smart can you get?" Keithy diluted the
silence by a low whistle. With a few deft
sketches, he infested his staircase with
cracks, broke it off in a shower of mortar and
falling bodies. Mounted sideways on the
resulting chasm, he hung a sign pointing
downwards: "To Holiday Inn." He waited for
a reaction I wouldn't give. "That reminds
me," he said, leaving the room to fetch his
portfolio as I used the timeline to wipe the
table. He returned with the boards for a
national campaign and ran them past me for
approval.
   I must have thought to make things easy
for him by making myself ugly. I still loved
him that much. But real connection between
us died the moment I tried to protect him
from what was happening. I flipped through
his pictures, written in the world's only
ubiquitous language, its syntax carrying the
cozy, intimate delusion of tin-can
telephones. I read his copy with the feeling
that none of it made any sense. I understood
the message. But his whole campaign didn't
mean anything. "Keith, you say 'safer' here,
but you never say safer than what."
   "Hm. Fiendishly clever."
   "And what do you mean, 'We make things
right? What things? How right? Who's this
'we'? There are twenty-five hundred of these
places across the country. Am I supposed to
believe that all the wes do things one way
and all the theys do it another? Grant me
some discrimination."
   He began smiling the death smile. "Aren't
we being a little willful? It's a time-honored,
universal tradition. 'Your Driver'— insert
nameplate here—'Safe, Reliable, Courteous.'
Semiotics, woman. We're not communicating
anything. Folks don't care about facts. They
wouldn't believe them anyway. They just
want the promise of friendship slipped into
the sale."
   "And they believe that?"
   "Who's gonna lie about friendship?"
   " 'We'll love you. All twenty-five hundred
of us.'"
   "It's commercially viable."
   "Is that right?" I asked quietly.
   "Yes. That's right." Still smiling, he knew
we were lost, that I wanted it that way. I kept
flipping through the boards, as if we weren't
in the middle of the last square-off. One
thing I still admire about Keith: despite my
encouragement, he never stooped to killing
as a way to preserve things. He never
pretended any degree of attachment less
than he had. Just as I was on the verge of
giving him further cause, the phone rang.
Keith bounded out of the room to answer it.
I heard him from the bedroom, just short of
abusive, asking, "Who's financing this? Who
pays your salary? Who do I sue for breach of
privacy?"
   He hung up and came back looking
beautifully sheepish. "My poor relations in
the phone solicitation racket. Turns out our
name has been chosen at random to receive
a book of coupons worth several thousands
of dollars, free, at only twenty-nine
ninety-five. Dante placed those people one
circle below real estate brokers. Where's that
timeline? Gotta make some emendations."
   I went to him and put my arms around
him. After a long time, we separated,
embarrassed. I mumbled something about
going to bed. He didn't move. I went into
the bathroom and ran the water. I heard
Tuckwell let himself out the door and lock it
from the outside. He went down the stairs
two at a time. I went to the dark window and
watched until he came out on the street
below. I saw him safely to the next block. He
turned north, cutting a swath toward the
bombed-out blocks. Everywhere, shops had
battened down for the night, the day's
refuse and rinds rotting in the gutter. In the
two and a half blocks I tracked him,
amorphous outlines threatened from
doorways, bumped against him, suggesting
obscure exchanges. Keith kept up a clip that
convinced the wasted, substance-dependent
figures that he was in peak health and not
to be messed with.
   His dependency was the city itself: male
addiction to the unpredictable. Covert
dangers of an evening walk through the
neighborhood, sotto voce threats implied
and periodically acted out, had led him from
the lazy Methodist interior where he had
been raised. The instant the umbilical
snapped, he'd buzzed to the coast, first to a
fine arts school in Rhode Island, a state
whose motto, and not Colorado's, he
insisted, should have been "Nothing
Without Providence." Then Boston for a
year. All staging ground for New York,
shooting into Manhattan's drag like an ion
from a Tesla coil. He had habituated to life
and needed a higher throttle. In North
America, NY, NY was the most potent
over-the-counter drug available. The city
sucked him up as it did all insomniacs. But
even here, familiarity tracked him down.
After five years of Brooklyn, he talked about
moving to the Lower East Side, the South
Bronx. Calcutta perhaps. Someplace a body
could feel.
   But I moved first. Ironic: I couldn't think of
the two miles' sickening diversity between
the South Docks and Prospect Park without
admitting I didn't belong here. One look at
my clothes, one syllable of accent gave me
away. And here I was, combing the
neighborhoods for a place as if it were
coupon-doubling day at the supermarket.
For the past week, I'd had to keep myself
from renting every slum I looked into, they
all, overnight, seemed so full of promise. The
hint of sea change was enough to make the
familiar, forsaken rat warehouses show
overlooked inlay of shining stone.
   I watched Tuckwell until he ducked down
the subway—the same route that took him
each morning to his International Style
steel-and-glass vertical trailer park. I would
never visit his office again. I pictured him
boarding the car, the adored public
transportation, his favorite contact sport. A
subway car could always be counted on to
provide the thrill of confrontation. The
face-off he needed that night.
   I was asleep when he returned. For the
next several days, we maneuvered around
each other. We ate at different times,
arranged our schedules to diverge. Only
before sleep did we talk. We slept six
centimeters from one another, sometimes in
sleep closing even that gap, pressing against
each other, licensed by the confusion of
night. At week's end, I told Keith that a
library friend was marrying, looking for
someone to adopt her place. The end of our
postmortem existence.
   "Have you signed?"
   "I've arranged with her."
   "You agreed to let me have a look before
you did anything."
   "Let's go have a look, then. I can still back
out." But we both knew it was a done deal,
that I had reneged on the one condition
he'd set for our breakup.
   We walked to the new neighborhood.
Keith inspected the street and nodded. "A
little closer to the branch."
   "It feels like home already," I said, grateful
for the sign of acceptance. He winced. Too
late to apologize. After four years of
conversation, we'd lost the phrase book.
Every word now was in pathetic
talkee-talkee, Creole.
   "It's on a corner," Keith said
apprehensively. I was forced to agree. "It's
over a dress shop," he observed.
   "Antiques," I equivocated. We got the key
to the upstairs from the landlord, also the
shop proprietor.
   "An efficiency," Keith said, attempting to
approve.
   "I wouldn't call it that, exactly." Semantic
quibble.
   "Nice. Clean. Quiet. Rent-protected?" I
mentioned the figure. Keith's brow cowered
and his cheek pulled, protecting the side of
his face.
   "I can pay it."
   "Not within the old quarter-salary rent
rule." I thought: Nobody on the Eastern
Seaboard has followed that budget since
1940. He checked the fixtures, outlets, jambs:
a pantomime we saw no way to avoid. The
warrant of his solicitousness was not about
to let me hurt myself for his sake. Now that I
was absolving him from liability, he no
longer had the luxury of letting me hurt
myself.
   He sat on the bed and pounded the
mattress. "Strong enough?" I said nothing.
"When do we move your stuff? Not that I'm
rushing, but..." He drummed his fingers
impatiently.
   I sat down next to him. I wanted so badly
to ask him if he would come visit me here,
once I'd put everything right. But I kept from
sinking to contemptible. After a moment's
looking around the room, Tuckwell reached
and pulled my elbow out from under me,
controlling my roll and bringing my head
down into his lap. He stroked my temples,
his lower lip pushed slightly to the side in
subfarction against his upper. Tell yourself
whatever you need to, but don't look for
confirmation.
   I reached toward his face, thinking to grab
his nose between first and second fingers,
an old game meaning almost anything. But
he moved unexpectedly and my motion
carried my hand into a punch. In a flash, the
whole hierarchy of second-guessing fed
across Keith's face. He squashed it, but not
fast enough to escape mutual knowledge.
He grabbed my hand, automatically
restraining. Seamlessly returning to decorum
he twisted my wrist and gingerly inspected
my watch. "Yikes," he said, slightly flattened
affect. "Getting late. You're coming home at
least tonight, aren't you?"
   I had no change of clothes, linen,
toiletries, towel, toothbrush, or pillow to
give my neck that civilized sleeping crook,
no food nor anything to eat with, very little
cash, and nothing to gain by staying. But his
calling the other place home made it
impossible to return to. I shook my head;
Tuckwell, disgusted, didn't even attempt the
obvious argument. His shrug disowned me.
   "I'll be fine. Camping without the
poisonous plants. I'll come by tomorrow to
grab some things. Take what's left. It's yours.
Sell it to that fence on Eastern Parkway."
   "No way. I'm through with your liquid
assets, lady." I walked him downstairs,
waved as he left, then turned back inside
where my new landlord, uninterested in my
private fripperies, frittered in his shop. I
bought a matched set of Hayes-era curtains
and bedclothes for nothing down. He was
delighted to start a tab. I feasted on crackers
and fresh fruit from the greengrocers, which
I ate slowly in invigorating silence. A bare
apartment: my senses were never so awake. I
took a scalding bath, soapless, squeezing
the water from my skin, standing in the dark,
fanning dry. I took care of my arousal in the
solitary room. I had never before seen it:
happiness required only that I rid myself of
all distraction, I went to sleep against the
antique sheets, feeling parts of my body I'd
forgotten existed. I slept the best night I
ever slept in my life.
   I dressed in yesterday's clothes, finished
the cracker box for breakfast, ran my fingers
through my hair (a surprisingly reasonable
comb), and walked, in the changing
November, to work. The branch seemed a
different building, my corning upon it from
this direction. Delicious disorientation: I felt
I'd changed jobs. I must have looked
appalling. But of my colleagues, only Mr.
Scott remarked on my appearance. "My dear,
you look like you could do with a little
retirement. Care to join me?" I told him I'd
never been more sure: the Reference Desk
was how I wanted to spend the rest of my
life.
   I moved my things gradually over several
days, dragging my heels in a flare-up of
empathy. Keith helped carry, by turns
grateful and exasperated at my drawing the
process out. Already gone, I had the luxury
of loving that old life again at a safe range. I
stayed over, slept once more with Tuckwell: a
slow, sad night retracing, committing the
cadence of one another to memory, realizing
we had gotten it all wrong somehow, but
that it was too late to go back and erase the
maps, restore the white spaces.
   I didn't contact my friends at MOL once
during that period. My move had to be a
moratorium, proof that I'd made the break,
done the pointless violence for
unimpeachable reasons. There had been no
trade. Isolation was its own best reason. I
worked at the branch, and in the remaining
hours decorated the nest, wallpapered,
trimmed. On days off, I learned the new
neighborhood. I was determined to live as if
the move were self-motivated. But I was
sustained by undeniable expectation. Even
the air had a scent of something imminent.
Of course solitude was exciting—how
couldn't it be? Crisis couldn't touch me.
Loneliness, no loss, was something to covet.
The erotic dress-up at the bottom of the
cedar chest.
    Strange place, Brooklyn. Not a place, a
thesaurus of neighborhoods. I never
belonged in any of them. Had things gone
differently in local politics, we'd all be
speaking Dutch. I'd be pinching my guilders.
Todd would have had only to slip across
New Amsterdam to the next colony in order
to learn his latest irrelevant foreign
language, English. Strange place,
Breuckelen. Hudson sailed past fifty years
after Bles's death. Two journeymen on the
same enterprise: the pursuit of panels
perfect for getting lost in. The elusive
Passage, spice routes, epochal expansion,
The world is too well mapped; quadrants
capture it all. Alchemy's four elements,
psychology's four humors. What can a body
do in its quartet of seasons but set fire to
the familiar, take off on the numinous
half-moon?
    I wanted Franklin, beyond a doubt. I could
feel, in bands of tissue under my skin, the
precise place that want had set for him. I
wanted his field, his detached, unbearably
patient art history. I wanted to see this place
that I didn't belong in, its cross-sectional
pigments, each assay suspended one on
another, successive approximations. I
wanted to recover that landscape, the place
I'd forgotten as I got too good at describing
it. I went two weeks without seeing him, two
weeks at my new colony. One Friday I walked
from my place to theirs. It seemed a miracle
to be on foot. The blocks between did not
seem so dangerous as strange,
misunderstood. I buzzed, heard the voice
thin, tinny, treble in the speaker, backed
with a flack of electric static, but inimitable.
He sang a ludicrous parody of a housewife's
guarded "Who is it?" He knew full well who
it was.
    "It's me," I said, burying grammar. "I think
it's time."

  Perpetual Calendar (II)

   The simplest of devices, a model of
informational economy, it fits completely on
a single page. You can take the magic square
and palm it, hide the device in one hand.
Even a small hand. The perpetual calender
exists because the year has only fourteen
possibilities. January 1 can fall on each day of
the week, and once around again for leap
years. The rest of the cycle—days when
everything must happen—falls automatically,
redundantly, according to compact pattern.
1983 starts on a Saturday. So do 1938, 1898,
and 1842. The years of Sudetenland, of J'
accuse, of von Mayer's first thermodynamics
paper duplicate the same dates as that year
when a lost woman of thirty moves across
town. How does it work? A lookup table lists
the years, keying them to a long, repeating
series of fourteen templates for the only
possibilities going. The perfect reference
tool: infinite sequence reduced to formula.
   The cleverest child in every neighborhood,
at fourteen, discovers this table secreted in
the quartos of her parents' bookshelf.
Appalled, unbelieving at first, she warms to
the idea of a compressible eternity. Soon,
she uses it to consolidate a shaman's control
over the block's information-poor. Hiding
the device behind cupped palms, she calls
out her privileged, inside track to a
spellbound audience in the back alley: "You,
Pete, were born on a Wednesday. It will be
Wednesday again in 19...Here's something:
   ten years back, it was Sunday today." It
will be years before she knows that these
facts, in demand, clean and elucidating,
mean nothing. For her clincher, she claims:
"Today was exactly the same as it was one
hundred and eighty years ago." Two years,
twenty years ago, on this day, that child was
me.



XIII

  A Young Person's Guide to the Orchestra

   He reads the stack of journals until the
type decomposes into runic scratchings. He
half dozes, swims awake, is washed under
again for a few minutes, for hours, in tidal
semiawareness. He gives the technical data
rein to assort into spontaneous
visuals—unzipping ladders,
blueprint-imbedding blueprints, complex
wartime gear-machines, families of trapeze
artists linked in aerial streamers. In his
reverie, the edge of biological thought is a
continuous showing of jerky one-reelers.
Every so often, an image-analog jars him
awake with recognition. Bold simplicity of
design knocks him conscious. Lucid, he sees
nothing in the models but comic, clumsy,
cartoon inspirations. Each time he comes to,
Ressler cracks the journal repository for
something he's missed. He loses
consciousness again two or three articles
down the pike, returning in the middle of
the fourth, blindly turning pages.
   He keeps up this routine—reading,
dozing, imagining—for days, paying no
attention to the passage of daylight. He
finishes the juice concentrate and peanuts
left in his fridge from a shopping run ages
before. When the last remaining milk spoils,
he makes cold cereal with water. The phone
rings, but its bell goes languid each time he
fails to answer. At odd hours he saunters to
Olga, his heart full of gratitude at her
patient, permanent Fourth Position stance.
He listens to the independent variations, the
record of that unbirthday visit. The same
record, but different in every particular, just
as the woman herself is now unrelated to
the one he met on first hitting town.
Steeped in the music, he teaches himself a
vocabulary to describe what he hears in the
profusion of notes. He borrows those terms
he is most familiar with. Canon and
imitation, audible even without names,
become transcription. Phrase and motif
become gene. He hears polypeptides in a
peal of parallel structure, differentiation in a
burst of counterpoint.
   Days into his journal binge, intent on
latching onto the remaining piece in the
synthesis, Ressler returns to the musical set
to test a bizarre hypothesis. For weeks he
has assumed that his lack of training would
forever preclude his hearing how each
single-minded permutation was a variation
on anything. But recently he detects an
unexpected pattern. The theme he begins to
hear—the element drawing all filial
generations into a family tree—is not a
theme at all. It is a determining genotype.
The existence of the Base is still a
hypothesis. He will not swear to it until he
hears it underwriting each of the aria's
progeny. Testing the idea takes time. But
listening is exactly the focused release he
needs.
   He began scientific life—natural history's
home museum—a closet Laplacian: solving
the real world required only a set of
differential equations defining the
movement of every independent piece in it.
But a few days into his marathon
session—never once leaving K-53-C,
alternately sampling Bach and teasing
protein synthesis—he scraps the engine. All
measurement is not inherently valuable.
Science is choked by unrestrained data as a
pond is by too luxurious plant growth. Cyfer
has attacked the coding problem by
attending to every amino sequence ever
unearthed. Given an English library and an
identical, jumbled collection in Bulgarian,
they've tried to write a bilingual dictionary
by reading every book in both sets, tallying
tables larger than the two libraries together,
searching for spurts that correlate. Brute
tabulature might work, if the underpinning
translation were preordained, symmetrical.
But there's no guarantee the runaway data
enfold formulaic simplicity. In fact, just the
reverse.
   If nature is truly objective, as the entire
scientific project must assume, then science
can prove nothing except that we don't
speak the same language as the outside
world. Still, the double helix is a better map
than the old homunculus or arcane
pangene, which are both in turn miles
beyond clay and spiritus dei for
correspondence. Man may understand only
artificial shorthand and nature speak only in
innumerable instances; dim Berlitz phrases
may never be the thing they describe, but
they're the only visa available.
    Three quarters of his reading aims not at
throwing open the window but at stopping
down his aperture. First, he discards the
idea, plaguing the symposia since
mid-decade, that specific enzymes are
required to thread each amino onto each
terminus of a growing bead string. Each of
these joiner enzymes, themselves amino acid
strings, would require sufficient
enzyme-synthesizing enzymes to synthesize
it, and so ad infinitum. Regress: he
remembers the lullaby his mother used to
sing, about how she would sing him a
lullaby if he stopped crying.
    Dispensing with enzyme-dispensing
enzymes, he reviews the possibility of direct
template synthesis. DNA might split,
exposing a half-chain plaster cast where
aminos line up into proteins. The idea is
pleasing, but the chemistry is wrong; the
bases don't have the right shape to
distinguish among the twenty amino acids; a
codon and an amino acid aren't even the
same size. Yet just as clearly, some
templating takes place. DNA doesn't leave
the nucleus, and proteins are synthesized
outside, in the immense cytoplasmic sea.
Some intermediary must reproduce the DNA
codon arrangement and carry it out of the
nucleus. He goes to Olga, dips into a
variation that confirms, in a burst of quavers,
the only possible mechanism: transcription.
RNA transcribes DNA, ports its message away
for translation.
    At intervals of a few hours, Ressler gets
impatient with himself for belaboring the
obvious. But cobwebs are only obvious after
they're cleared. He smiles, recalling the Von
Neumann anecdote, repeated endlessly after
the man's death earlier this year. The
cybernaut, considered by some the century's
most intelligent man, while deriving a
complex theorem on a chalkboard in front of
a class, skipped a step, saying it followed
obviously. A student said he didn't see how.
Von Neumann scratched his head, stared at
the board, set the chalk down, left the room,
came back minutes later, and declared, "Yes,
it is obvious," and carried on with the proof.
    By forgetting common knowledge, by
starting again with only the proved, Ressler
begins to hear with new clarity the
composition he is after. Transcription only
shunts the problem of translation from DNA
onto RNA. He must still make a rigid
distinction between code text and code
book. He goes to his door for a gulp of fresh
air. Deep, metallic cold in the lungs might
even be healthy. He stands on the threshold,
sucking in vapor that condenses in each
exhalation. He turns to go in, tripping over a
basket on the stoop. Cold artichoke with
hollandaise, two chicken piccata breasts, and
a bottle of Médoc. He carries it inside, where
he reads its attached note: "Inform us if the
matter breaks. Remember the essential trace
elements. We are all beginners in our own
lives. Best, T.B."
   Ressler smiles, breaks to eat, wonders how
long he has been away, then returns to the
publications, searching for evidence of an
intermediary molecule, a translator that
might align with the transcribed RNA codon
and attach the correct amino acid into the
growing polypeptide. At the back of his
brain is an ironic hint about the most likely
class of molecule for such a go-between, one
capable of reading the subtle, raised-dot
Braille of the nucleotide sites. Finding such
an intermediary is prerequisite to his process,
still only a matter of faith, for determining
codon assignments. If he is to find it, it must
be soon. The field is heating up. Insights are
going public. He might pick the next journal
off the stack and see the first islands of the
transcription table drained of their opaque,
deep-water enigma.
   He bathes. The hot bath scalds his few
fleshy parts a pale rose. Tub
thermodynamics—heat loss, entropy, the
chaff of the system—is hindered by a
nineteenth-century slant: bath as steam
engine, body as conditioned caldron of
excess libido, cathexis cathartized. His bath
cools like soup in a blown-upon spoon, the
water's heat gone as random as recessing
schoolchildren, too quickly for
thermodynamics to explain. It cools only to
him, would still surprise the outside touch.
The analgesic property of hot water is a
message, an instruction in warming. But the
text evades him as he adjusts to reading it.
The code is dimmed to the immersed, but will
spring scalding to the unaccustomed hand.
How to leave the water and still feel? The
question is as still, as paradoxical as any aria.
His skin burns with the fluid's prompting
though the tub is already cold.
   He sleeps a few anemic hours, a dreamless
carpet of feral activity, a tapestry-forest that
proves, on close examination, rioted with
animal communities. Asleep, he thinks:
nothing in the cell knows the code. Neither
nucleotide nor transcription nor the
hypothetical reading molecule nor the target
enzyme contains anything resembling the
codon table. No part of the code, not even
the entire assembly, can say what it is. The
triplet ACG could paint cysteine or arganine
or any of the twenty, or even nonsense, and
what difference would it make? What code
are they after, after all? Where does it
reside? In what level of that steep hierarchy
of cells, the aggregate organism where every
level depends on the one below, and all
depend on the ineffable?
   And should he be
still—astonishingly—alive when the secret
words are at last uncovered, should he of all
searchers be blessed to find it, what will this
self-generating, self-defining
system—residing nowhere, unknown by any
of its constituent parts—what will the
assignment of CAG to glutamine lay open?
What relation, what revealing rule? Will it
be, after all, the first small link revealing how
this flourishing, odds-prohibited
architecture can come about, flower into
militantly uncountable variety, build itself
blindly into ever more complex communities
of communication, all cooperating under the
aegis of that never-itself-comprehended
code, achieving more precarious orders of
order, culminating in a construct that may
just now be growing capable of a grammar
able to articulate, to speak, to code a rough
symbolic analogy, a name for the Code?
   What name? Not nucleotide sequences;
not the codon catalog; not any of the
reading machinery; not the enzymes. Not
even the cell is the code. It is just its working
out. The code is—so near as he can figure—a
figure. A metaphor. The code exists only as
the coded organism. There is no lexicon or
look-up book. Not in the molecules, nor the
cell, nor anywhere else but in that place—
unnameable except by comparison—that
houses all translation, all motivation, all that
self-propagating structure that only by
rough analogy and always in archaic diction
(but not yet in his own words) can only
inescapably be called desire.

  The Food Chain

   A knock at the door awakens him. After a
moment, he establishes the approximate
time of day: late afternoon, deepening sun.
He thinks first to ignore the sound, stay
away from the windows until it goes. But the
knocking persists; perhaps he is due the
intrusion of humanity on work that for the
last several hours has made no progress at
all.
   Ressler opens the front door and sees no
one. He is almost ready to accept the
knocking as hallucination when he looks
down and notices a miniature human on the
stoop. Little Margaret Blake, trekked over
from K-53-A for unknown end to stand on
Ressler's stoop, motionless and martyred, as
if the world were already lost despite her
pilgrim effort. Ressler is taken aback. "Hello
there, little cowgirl," he opens tentatively.
   "Will you let me in please? It's very cold
out here."
   "Your dad doesn't think it's cold yet."
   "My dad is a pacifist."
   Ressler bursts out laughing and lets the
child in. Margaret investigates the place,
awed by an apartment almost without
furniture, decorations, the usual adult
totems. "Wow! Amazing! What do people sit
on?"
   "Same place they always sit on," he says,
making as if to spank her on that spot.
Margaret collapses in a heap of giggles.
When she sobers, Ressler asks, "So, little
lady. What's up?"
   "The sky." This time-honored comeback
sends her into another paroxysm.
   He feels the unforgettable first signs of a
playground pit in his stomach. Terrible at
taunts, he never understood the oppressed
dialect of children, even as a child. He
rejects Wrap your head in bubble gum and
send it to the navy as an appropriate
rejoinder for a Ph.D. "What's the matter?"
   "With who?" Her giggle is nervous this
time as she tests his face. She stops goofing
and works herself into righteous
indignation. "Bruce Bigelow."
   The name signifies little to Ressler. It
sounds vaguely familiar, so Bruce is either
one of Stadium Terrace's preteen terrorists or
the secretary of the interior. He's had a bad
dose of Jesse James Clerk Maxwell Taylor
Caldwell syndrome lately, all personalities,
public and private, fusing into each other,
indistinguishable flip sides of a common
entity. "What about him?"
   "He is Ass Hole."
   Ressler snickers. "You've got to say, 'He is
an asshole.' But don't say it, OK? You have
to go through puberty before you're allowed
to say that."
   This sets Margaret to crying, perhaps at
the thought of one day having to deal with
puberty on top of that asshole Bruce
Bigelow. Ressler looks at her flushed cheeks,
the hot springs leaching to the surface
under her lower eyelid, and recalls the child's
virtuosic sprung-verse performance. He
frowns, chides, "Margaret? Are you?
Grieving?" She smiles in mid-sob, gasps for
air, coughs up a little sputum-laugh at her
own ridiculousness. "What exactly did this
Bruce so-called Bigelow do, woman?"
   "He loosened this tooth. See?" She
wiggles a canine whose time on this earth
had come anyway.
   "So what? Don't you get tooth-fairy
payola for that? You ought to cut Brucie in
for ten percent."
   "You are Strangeness, know that? Strange
Ness." The phrase I'm rubber and you're
glue flashes through his mind, but he
doesn't commit to it. Margaret,
matter-of-fact, asks, "You know how to
fight? You've gotta teach me."
   "Oh I do, do I? Why me? Get your dad to
teach you."
   "My dad? Didn't you hear me? My dad
believes in nonviolence." She sighs, a mix of
incomprehension and pity.
   Ressler laughs to recognize Tooney from
this angle. "Ask him for a few lessons. Tell
him they're hypothetical."
   She doesn't even flinch at the word, but
only shakes her head sadly. "He won't
budge. He says, wait a few decades, and
Bruce will die all by himself. You don't know
how to box either, do you?"
   "OK, kid. Them's fightin" words. Put up
your dukes." Against his better judgment, he
raises his palms and presents them to the
little girl for target practice. Margaret jumps
up in delight, claps her hands, rushes at him
as if to kiss him in thanks, and takes a swing.
   "Not too wild. You're leaving yourself
open. Keep your guard up. Don't lead with
your right all the time. Confuse him. Save
your secret weapon. Left, left, left, then come
in with the roundhouse. Shake 'im up, shake
'im up, then knock 'im down."
   The phrase startles him. Perhaps his father
taught him the cadence, but he has no
memory of learning the words. They spring
unsponsored from some antiquated chunk
of neurons in the limbic, reptilian segment of
his brain. He has always looked on all
physical combativeness short of card games
as evolutionary regression. He has never
fought for anything in his life. That is, he has
never applied overt violence to achieving his
ends. Now the ancient formula of force, the
somatic record of every successful bash that
brought his forebears along their way
upright presents arms, ready to address not
only little Margaret's self-defense but his
own akossting.
   Over eons, undeniable advantage has
conferred the Brute Force gene pretty
ubiquitously throughout the population.
But the last few millennia have produced a
wrinkle—too soon to say if it's a true
evolutionary variation or just a dress-up
game. Capacity for violence—as unshakeable
as any of the body's track record—has found
a way of making itself even more propitious
for survival by remaining latent. He can't
take a poke at the chops of the editorial
board of Nature in order to persuade them
to accept the paper on the rates experiment
he is writing up. Yet the paper is a way of
going twelve rounds with Herbert Koss
without ever once declaring himself in
competition.
   Werewolf, apeman, creature from the
lagoon of lost souls: the killer instruction set
still rattles loose in there. Locked in mock
violence with this laughing little girl, her
fists flaying at his palms as she picks up the
trick of bodily injury, he sees that the unique
achievement of this species, the thing that
recursive consciousness ultimately permits, is
the pretense that one does not actually
manifest a trait even when taking maximum
advantage of it. Everything the hominid
branch has achieved—every treatise, tower,
or diatonic tune—came about from surviving
two out of three falls, prettying up the
results after the fact. Jacob, after all, went all
night against God's palooka, winning
himself a name by avoiding the angel's pin.
Shake him up, knock him down, do him in.
   Man will never be anything better than a
clever boxer. Maybe one that wins by
footwork rather than punches, but still a
creature always accountable to the win. The
realization sickens him: advantage,
self-interest, short-term gain are the only
forces that carve a population. Every rung
not higher, but shrewder, slier. The logical
extreme is a species so clever it overruns its
niche, bringing down the whole round
robin. He quickly drops his target palms,
timing it so that little Margaret's latest
playful jab slams an uppercut to the kisser.
   His lip breaks open. The child screams a
terrified apology. Res-sler comforts her,
assures her it was his fault. But he is as
shocked as the little girl. He puts a dishrag
to his mouth to stanch the blood. How did
that slip in? How can natural selection make
room, in this advanced a model, for such a
pathetic, pointless, destructive little hit me
of contrition? He clots the bleeding and
calms Margaret by letting her eat cold cereal
dry, right out of the box. Distracted by this
novelty, she forgets the tragedy in minutes.
"What do you do?" she asks him, munching
happily.
   "You mean, for a living?" She nods her
head gravely. He thinks for a minute,
helpless to remember exactly what he does
do. "Same as your dad," he says.
   "N-no," she says, curling her lip and
shaking her head skeptically. "No. You don't
do that!"
   Ressler would laugh if it didn't sting, He
can't imagine what Tooney has told his child
he does. "Here," he says, getting an idea.
"I'll show you." He goes to the side of the
sink and takes the long-empty paper-towel
tube off its holder. He tears it down its spiral
seam from one end of the coil to the other. A
three-dimensional helix, possessing all the
magic geometry of the original. He shows
the child the properties of the
self-duplicating curve, all the while proving
there is "always an intermediary analogy
between us and substance, always a
messenger between the mass we are after
and the message it embodies.
   "You study these things?" He nods, asks
her if she knows what cells are. "Of course.
Don't be dumb."
   "You have a billion cells in your body, and
each cell has masses of these."
   She takes the dissected tube, spins it
around, hands it back. "Scratch it. No deal.
This thing? Billions? Me?"
   "Yes, you."
   "Can't be."
   "Then who?"
   Margaret jumps up, her eyes saucers.
"You stole that! How did you know that?"
   He doesn't have the heart to tell Margaret
that every secret incantation she has ever
recited has been around for generations. He
looks at her and wonders: Why Brucie? Well,
at least the kid loosened her tooth. Why
Koss? He has no good data, knows nothing
about her. She has never harmed him, to the
best of his knowledge. She showed signs
once of a bitter sense of humor, but even
that surrogate sparring has quieted. She
does not possess Toveh Botkin's strong
moral sense, with its species-wide, if not
individual, survival value. Her contributions
to the Blue Sky sessions are impeccable but
hardly adventuresome, barely cerebral ballet.
She lacks too the older woman's
indiscriminate kindness, a trait conveying no
survival value, a liability in fact, unless, like
the anti-malarial quality of sickle-cell anemia,
it contains, for certain climates, some hidden
side effect that outweighs benevolence's
impediment. Of course, the whole
comparison is moot, as the older woman has
already committed the sin of aging.
Whatever pleasure Ressler enjoys in her
company will remain nothing more than
irrelevant. Kindly.
   But Jeanette: undeniably topical charms.
Her shape, skin, coloration once upon a time
had not been to his taste. Now her smallest
arch obsesses him, even as he finds the full
allure somehow repelling. How could he
have let himself in for her when she remains
unachievable—as pointless to fix his
unappeasable, sharp, lost affection on as
she is to covet, lust for, crave?
   Little Margaret makes to punch him for
stealing her secret verse—a slow-motion,
platonic archetype of a punch. He intercepts
its parabola and demands, "So how are you
going to pay for this boxing lesson?"
   The child smiles shyly, looks away. "I
learned a new poem."
   "Well? What are you waiting for?"
   And little Margaret begins, disastrously,
sing song:

            "When you are old and grey nd
         full of sleep,
           And nodding by the fire, take
         down this book,
            And slowly read, and dream of
         the soft look
           Your eyes had once...."

   By the second line, Ressler sees it all: he
has built her from scratch, in the lab of his
own imagination. He has dressed her in
clothes that she fits, fills out unforgettably.
He has invested Jeanette Koss with every
quality that might pin him hopelessly to her
hem. And now she has them all, possesses
them in flesh, cannot be divested. He has
taught himself to see her, has named that
recessive allele that manifests itself only once
every hundred generations. Uncontainable
mystery. He has frightened them both into
noticing, and now they can't look away.
   Margaret reaches the part about how one
man loved the pilgrim soul in you. He cuffs
her gently. "Enough, short stuff. You're
terrific."
   "And loved the sorrows of your changing
face," she races to complete the rhyme. She
struggles free and throws another slow
punch to his midriff, stopping short at the
skin to tickle him. "Shake him up. Knock him
down."
   "That's two 'shake him ups,'" Ressler says
sternly. "Make sure to count." The advice
sticks in his glottis, coming up. The
ho-munculus giggles and is gone.
   He toys with his paper-towel tube for
some time. When night comes, he wonders if
it might not be time to get back on diurnal
schedule. He lies in bed, disembodied
underneath the covers. The space in the
room around him does not touch him.
November; he smells the remote aroma of a
disappearing fall in the accumulation of
heating-degree days. He feels his hands
because they are not his arms, his torso
because it is not his legs where they rest
under the sheets, his legs because they do
not touch hers, and her, because she is not
any of this, not his, does not touch any of
these parts that can feel her imprint, so
conspicuous is her solidity in its absence
next to him.
   Not this nor this nor this. But before he
has power to say behold, lyrical awareness is
lost to that sweet, sorry, one-word
contradiction in terms. Nothing in his
analogy for himself knows where tit. is. He
can get no closer to the idea he is after
except through contrast. Except through
analogy. Except through already knowing.
Sleep is as unreachable as the woman. He
has not seen her for weeks. Not in flesh
anyway; he sees her analogy everywhere. He
cannot step out of his barracks bunk
without imagining that some fall of a sheet
or turn of a lathed chair leg holds the
revelation he needs from her curve.
   Has she thought of him in the last several
days? A letter in his campus box, a casual
inquiry at his office? Has she noticed his
absence? That one look at the lab, the
backwards glance they caught each other in
convinces him that the awful hook is also
barbed at the other end. One of those
ignored phone calls could have been her. All
of them. She must think of him.
   He raises himself from bed. By feel, he
retrieves his shirt and trousers from the back
of the chair. Soundlessly in the dark, he
dresses. He returns, by homing instinct, to
the waiting stack of journals. The coding
problem again possesses him. He smiles in
mid-triplet-fiddling: I am only doing what
any childless male is programmed to do. An
alternative means of replication. Oblique,
sublimated—pencil, paper the international
chemical symbols. But he's definitely after a
self-perpetuating, thriving, surviving
genome with his name on it.
   The search continues without sound.
When the spell is broken, it's from the
outside. He looks up, suddenly aware that
extended sleep and food deprivation have
put him in a state resembling those
mind-alterers the DOD is perennially testing.
The frame flickers, and he is startled to see
Jeanette Koss letting herself in through his
front door, a thief in the night.
   He assumes—Occam's razor—that the
vision is just neurons mis-synapsing.
Extended fixation, never far below the
surface of his work, relaying the millisecond
message that the folds of his foyer
lampshade are the coils of her hair. Then the
apparition moves. "Are you all right? Where
have you been?" He hears her exhale fright
on coming close enough to see his face
where he sits reading in the dark. "What
have you done?"
   Before he can put his hands up to defend,
she reaches and touches his lip. He
remembers now how badly it stings. She
withdraws her hand, shows him the fresh
blood. It has broken open without his
noticing. "Oh that." He cannot keep from
grinning, widening the cut. "Beaten up by a
reciter of verse."

  Today in History

   She sponges the swollen split. He relaxes
his face, neck, torso, dropping the journal at
hand. If she chooses to kill him, he trusts she
will at least use the swift skill of the
professional vivisectionist. "This poet," Koss
says skeptically, placing a hand under his
neck and daubing, born to the motion.
"Female?" He can't even smile without
wincing. He closes his eyes, resting his head
in the unknown quantity of her palm.
   Nurse's talk, vessel of calming distraction.
Is this some skill on that fraction of
chromosome his half of the race doesn't
receive? Where has she learned to move
with such certainty? He sees through closed
lids her ironic delight at her unexplained
presence here. She sponges in delicate
spirals, and he forgets all else.
   "I assume it is pointless to ask for
disinfectant in this part of the world." She
searches the bathroom for an analog,
returning empty-handed. "Your immune
system is on its own for this one." She roots
in her handbag for a kerchief, unused.
Before he can object, she presses the fabric
to him, lightly as leaves falling to earth. She
holds the bandage to his broken surface,
making no sound except breathing. Her
fingers, fine instruments, test the damp cloth
for clotting. All time's unraveling advance
affixes to that square of linen, his lips on
one side, her fingers on the other, his
corpuscle stain sucked into the fiber
capillaries like chromopartitioning. The
blood that she dams by this tear pauses in
the loop before its appalling haul back
down to the pump.
   Gauging the moment of drying, Dr. Koss
lifts the linen away. She touches the
congealed spot, brushes a few dry grains,
shows her fingers to prove that the wound
has healed. Then she leans in the most
continuously smooth cycloid descent
imaginable, draws herself flush to his body,
and in one medicinal motion places her
mouth—a mouth on the verge of saying,
already forming the word—over his
just-sealed scar. A sound escapes from her—
threatened, mammalian. Ressler surrenders
completely. He can do no other.
   Jeanette changes: complete, fantastic
reforging, and Ressler is inside the chrysalis
with her. Unbroken, moldable expanse:
moist, circulating tracts just inside her mouth
attach to his awakened cell walls. The
largest, most implausible living organ, the
single membrane without edge, protective
barrier, inescapable border, soft,
semipermeable, resilient, impossibly strong
for its thinness, her interface melanin prison,
her—he dredges up the word: her skin. He
feels himself dragged toward the cutoff of
control. He looks over the drop in front of
him but cannot measure it from cliff level.
Then her mouth moves a certain way, spasms
in a victimized twitch, and at once he no
longer wants to measure. He can want
nothing but to moisten her in return.
   He tries to slow. A return kiss: nothing
compounded. They've gone that ill-advisedly
far anyway. Irreversible. They reach a place
where he can level off for a moment without
betraying further. Let this much be enough.
More than he ever thought possible. Stop.
Soon. At moment's end, seeing as they are
already there.
   Jeanette draws away first, changing
partway back, retracting as much as possible
from this melt. She stiffens her elbows and
puts a hand to her head—frantic
recollection, remorse past appropriate now.
"I'm sorry," she whispers into the night
room, the apology lost on air currents. "This
doesn't help things any." She turns back
toward him, touches his mouth, as if she
meant the cut. "Not what the doctor
ordered."
   The cut has remained remarkably
self-sutured. She tries to laugh, but the
sound deflects in a flush of excitement and
regret. Ressler makes a place for her among
the piles of periodicals and she lies down
next to him, holding him sadly, in mutual
perjury. They say nothing, nor need to. He
laces his fingers behind the base of her
head, having known this shape always, how
it fits in his hands, draped in this shock of
hair. He holds her. The surf of his own
circulation sluices inside him. He slips into
that unforceable place free from the impulse
to interpret. In that briefest space, nothing
signals anything but itself. Dr. Koss answers
silence with silence, the only explanation of
her presence here. Her scent and bending is
fact enough.
   When it no longer is, they return to the
nervous community of words. He extends
the silence a little by reaching over to the
record player, for days kept perpetually
within reach. He chooses indifferently. He
would fill the room with slumber party or
young person's guide—anything except
speech. But to do so without standing up,
he is confined to the grooves already on the
turntable, sound no more significant than
the library of variations he has listened to
continuously since the onset of his retreat.
For lack of a gesture neither brutal nor
clumsy, he lowers his head into her lap. She
loosens her legs, makes a pallet for him in
the softness of her thighs. She bends and
kisses him, now briefer, drier, shallower, not
so felonious. While she cannot claim that the
first was an accident, it may have been an
error in degree. A miscalculation, intended
more so: quick, pertinent, almost acceptable
among straight-ticket, Stevenson voters,
virtually businesslike, therapeutic, preferable
to the health hazard of complete repression.
   But her recantation will not wash. She
knows her transparency and smiles in shame.
She reaches down, kisses him a third time:
full again, but wary not to approach the
extremity of the first. In the calculus of the
permitted, everything less than what they
have already committed cannot, they
whisper, add to the sentence they will be
slapped with. But they do worse with less.
For at reduced volume, they admit to an
eagerness more faultable than desire.
   "I've created a monster," Jeanette says,
breaking the embarrassed silence.
   He disengages, reinstating the protective
empty inch between, them. "Wolfman?" he
says, straining for joke inflection. "Me?"
   Dr. Koss shakes her head, laughs shyly,
tentatively recloses the gap between them.
"Not that! I mean..." She relaxes her focus to
infinity, lifts her eyebrows on an abstraction,
pattern, airy nothingness. On the music.
   "Oh. I'm afraid I have gotten a little
obsessed. They help me think. Or at least
distract me productively."
   "Were they that scratchy when I gave them
to you? What do you play them on, a
Mixmaster?" A flash of the old caustic. The
biting, brittle, almost forgotten woman
thrashing in the wake of frightened
tenderness. Everything she has tried to
be—cold, self-assured, professionally
fond—all the blind come-ons, covert
glances, suggestive sarcasms, concealed
double crosses, casual, intermittent
droppings-by, are not yet her sum.
   "Oh, those," he says. "I hardly hear the
scratches anymore. Surface mutations."
   "An ACA triad in the original becomes
ACG in the copy?" Ressler nods, inches away
from her enormous eyes. The skin beneath is
cream-tinted gold leaf, freckled, fetching,
heartbreaking. His nod turns to a quick
exam: how much has this woman assembled
of translation? Can they help one another to
the construct? He has sought the code in
order to seduce her. Now, with the first taste
of the prize wrapped gently around him, she
seems the recruit to enlist in the wider
campaign.
   He turns from that height of cheeks,
focuses on the music, the surface blips. He
understands, in panorama, the process of
aging. Every cell division, each mitosis—how
many going on each moment?—is subject to
some small chance of mutation. Each of
these mutations slightly degrades the
command set. The more divisions, the more
fouled with accidents the cell information.
The piece decays, variation by variation,
performer to performer, by ear and word of
finger down the intervening years since
composition; it loses its accuracy, laced
through with mistakes. Age might be the
gradual accumulation of noise in the signal.
Static-rich, mistaken; old, gray, full of sleep.
   He uncoils from his cradle and stares at
this woman in self-defense. How will she
age? Will he be allowed to see her? The
cream will have crusted. The soft patina, the
brown, feminine freckled edibility will be lost
in slack pores. In time, the look will be
obscured altogether, not even preserved in
memory of this unforgettable evening, a
guest register smudged beyond recall, lost to
the accretion of mistakes.
   Until that moment comes, he can try to
keep deep down, duck the breakers of
adrenaline, stay stock-still and live whatever
minutes of impossible visitation might be
granted him. Her body, the blank
subjunctive tense that he has conjugated in
a thousand unsupported persons, has
walked through his door tonight. For the
first dozen variations—her tender strokings,
their skittish explorations of mouth and neck
and shoulder salient, surveys afraid of the
data they are after—he finds relief from the
relentless organic trap. Her simple being
here, their simultaneous confession of the
patently clear, is somehow blessedly enough.
   He wants only her safety, her survival. He
will do anything to ensure it. He would even
now perjure himself, petition that tired, old
anthropic metaphor—the bearded,
wish-fulfilling bureaucrat in charge of the
mesh of metacycles—to keep her from harm.
But first he must learn what so badly needs
saving in her. Her arrival, so long willed but
never dared hoped for, at last presents the
chance to discover.
   "Your husband... ?" He can go no further
in naming the conspicuous Other. He's met
Herbert several times, before the man meant
anything to him. He has seen the other half
of the Koss twisted pair slumped behind the
wheel of a finny ballistic shape, waiting to
ferry his wife to and from the laboratory, her
real home. Jeanette looks down, hair red in
the lamp halo. She kisses him on the clavicle,
grabs the small of his back, moans a little.
But except for the contortions, no answer.
"Does he know you... ?"
   "Finish what you're..." Her posture goes
insouciant. She removes her hands and
looks so genuinely abashed that were his
head not still in the nest of her thighs, he
would think he has been wildly mistaken,
that Dr. Koss's reason for dropping by was
to discuss organic chemistry. She compounds
the doubt by producing from her bag a copy
of Biochemistry Society Symposium. "I came
by to return this."
   Back already to optative evasion? He feels
her preparing to revoke, to claim that the
confession was extracted under torture. He
begins to jettison everything, everything. He
is almost ready to dismiss their starved kiss
as a miscalculation brought on by extended
overwork, a psychosis she was too polite to
rebuke. And yet, he clearly recalls her
suckling fast to him. He stares at the journal
she hands him. His eyes well up, stung. He
loads his voice with the simulation of
adulthood. "I'm sorry, but I don't remember
ever having lent this to you."
   "You didn't. But at two in the morning, I
needed some rationalization." She laughs
wildly, claps a hand to her face. She prods
him under the chin, forces his eyes to gaze
squarely into hers. She rebukes him with a
look: Don't be stupid. We are lost,
hopelessly lost, together in the thick. We
don't even know each other, but in seconds,
we have confirmed the predetermined fit.
Irrefutable proof that we'll never be able to
publish. As he shifts to restore blood to
tourniqueted limbs, she adjusts accordingly,
perfect ballet of self-communicating touch.
They join again, flush, and the joint between
them disappears. Organic chemistry indeed.
   In the next rushed second, it is her,
Jeanette in the flesh. She will never again be
able to deny her signal. She shoves her face
to his in breathing arrest, fixing to his lips as
if to an oxygen mask, She pulls away at last
for real air, her heart racing. "I knew you
would never come to me."
   "How could I?"
   She unbuttons him to the waist, not going
anywhere, just looking, marveling at the
chest she uncovers, the person she reveals.
She shakes herself, starting with her head
and graduating hipwards. "I was waiting for
you." Silence, carefully measured, in the
half-articulate rhythms of distracted desire:
silence at her first glimpse of his bare ribs.
She puts her head to his torso, opens her
mouth, takes in his breast. She nuzzles him,
running her teeth lightly in his fur, eyes
closed and head rolling softly from side to
side as if his body were some obstacle. She
gnaws, kisses, works his flesh. She has been
waiting for him to come back from the
mazed pursuit. Waiting all along for him to
return to where he never should have left, to
recognize the place at last, to return home,
to rest, to her.
   They overstep, accelerating into
inexcusable touch. They could still stop, save
the situation. To kiss a face, even unbridled,
is still an adolescent sin—pretty, forgivable
fantasy. To gnaw another's chest is another
purpose. At this instant, they are still one
another's innocence, a place in cut grass, an
orchard under the rushing in of dusk. In a
moment, if they do not stop the accelerando
of friction, they will be one another's spent
attempt, post-coupled, unrealized,
unreachable.
   He lifts her away, laughing desperately,
limping across her face with little diffusing
kisses; it takes the last of his internal
monologue to remain even this much in
control. "You're right," she says weakly,
brushing hair from her mouth. "This isn't
making matters any easier." She wraps
herself into his arms quietly, content, as if
she has had twenty easy years with him in
which to grow aware of his every nuance of
mood. "Change the subject," she orders him,
eyes closed, smiling mischievously, as if his
failure to do so will mean she will have to
return to gnawing. "Tell me what you've
been working on." Listening furiously to the
last of the variations, he cannot, for a
moment, choose between telling her about
the in vitro idea or explaining his theory on
how these musical condensations are all
variations. The two proliferating patterns
seem flip sides, hiding the same
hermeneutic.
   The vast, macroscopic architecture of the
piece flashes into his head. The music, as
familiar to him now as his body, reveals, in
shadow, part of its design. The infolded
Base presides over its independent progeny,
rendering them congruent, concurrent, a
family tree without clearly defined root or
branch tip, a simultaneous as well as
sequential ontogeny, profoundly felt, radial:
each moment of the huge movement
resembles the whole. The strangely
beautiful, mathematical relation rings
through its tonal changes. The Standing
Now of the piece is more being than
becoming. Its self-resembling perfection
moves forward by a germinating process of
periodic imitation he begins to detect but is
still years away from naming.
   "Listen." He glances down at Jeanette's
face, searching for verification. The half-light
molds her features into an empty flask. His
mouth works up syllables, silently, struggling
to hold that stationary morphogenesis he
has at last found a name for. But he sees a
different piece in her face. The form becomes
a presage, information from a reliable
source, a prediction of future news. The
music remaining in the air after all sound is
gone retains the first hint of sadness carried
in the aria itself. Begun in too narrow terms,
it must broaden into numinous sorrow,
making the rounds of every village between
here and the edge of dark.
   He can no more hope to understand why
she is here in his living room at night than to
understand why he is. She waits on this
platform, for this transfer. His head has lain
gently between her legs. Whatever her
motivation—unbalanced brilliance, crass
calculation, random desire, love of intrigue,
compassion, neurosis, retaliation, pity—this
woman cradles him. And that lies as far
beyond explaining as this whiff of
modulation. Something sits hidden, still, in
Jeanette Koss. She is more mysterious here
beside him in the dark than on that day
when she toweled him dry. He cannot reach
her, put his hand on that mystery, the
potential changes in her first four notes.
   The notes are the song of children
inhabiting the dark yard a minute more,
inventing one last game even after being
called to bed. They both hear, in the
stillness, how the notes code the shared
speechless intimacy of this instant, made
complete by apprehension of its inevitable
pain. It is, say, five o'clock in the morning by
the sky. She's been here hours, hours that
have evaporated in mutual nursing. Neither
of them has said much of anything. But both
have heard the functional poignancy
harbored in the first, muted strains of
sarabande. Half of the heart-pounding from
the moment she slipped through his
unlocked door was foresight of the payment
they will, one way or another now, be forced
to make.
   Their silence is not the shyness of setting
out but the stunned assemblage of memory
after a decade of separation. They have
known one another longer than either
guesses. They parted bitterly, years ago, in
mitotic anger, broke off all communication.
Now, they have rejoined, discovering their
utter failure of imagination then, recovering
it in silence and waiting. She strokes his bare
back. The touch opens a strange, two-way
mirror between her fingers and his spine.
Her skin signals to his what it's like to feel
itself from the far surface. His back reaches
and returns her fingertips' touch. The
double-stroking goes on, difficult to say
how long, as the only delineations of time
are the irregular strokes themselves. In this
quiet way, the two bring themselves
dangerously close to believing that a
discovery of the other's axiom might indeed
be possible. A matter of working out the
transfer in vivo.
   She breaks off stroking. She wraps herself
around him as if already for the last time.
"Forgive me. I had to know."
   He rolls over, catches her ribs. How could
you not have? He ruptures his lips, grinning
helplessly. "You know." It will soon be
daylight. Neither has closed an eye, except to
concentrate more fully on the feel of the
other. In all but the colloquial sense,
Jeanette Koss has spent the night. And yet,
as she has just said, it was all heuristic,
hypothetical. She simply needed to verify the
suspicion. Every pleasure of contact has
known it can go no farther. Nothing can
come of it. Nothing. The thought makes him
rise up and begin to undress her.
   She sinks and yields a moment, proof she
would in a different world. Proof she wants
where he is going, but cannot. She places a
hand on his, bends it to a more innocent
place of hayloft and pine, a quick foray of
unrealizable possibility, all that can obtain,
here, just yards from the inhabited picnic
ground. She is right. He catches himself,
slows. But each restraint revives something
more dangerous, the sense of all that the
other deprives herself of. He holds her
cheeks between his hands and places the
smallest, seismic probe on her closed lids.
"Well," he breathes. "What are we supposed
to do now?"
   She looks at him, apologizing,
self-castigating. She touches the flare of his
nose in wide-eyed wonder. They have
already had more than either thought
possible. A half-dozen hours flush against
one another. She shakes herself all over, and
tickles him. "Breakfast!"
   Ressler groans. "It would have to be that.
I'm cleaned out. We can't very well go to the
Pancake House together. Imagine getting
caught without having committed the
felony."
   She nuzzles against him and sighs. "Mm.
You know, maybe you're right." He laughs in
agony. They get to their feet, unkink. She
falls into his chest, stretches her every cord,
then goes limp. He has never felt anyone
relax so totally. "You're the man," she says
dreamily. She nudges him. "Go bring home
the bacon. Haven't you ever played house
before?"
   If she has meant, by spending the night
without cost, to work some crazy blackmail,
she now has the goods. If she means to hurt
her husband, retaliate for past infidelity, she
has accomplished that, too. If she planned
by feigning heat to reduce him to an
emotional appendage, exercise her female
rights over the drone half of the species, she
has handled that much handily. He doesn't
care about her motive anymore. The lie is
enough. Jeanette herself, these unexpected
minutes suffice. He dresses slowly, lingering
over his winter layers at the door. She comes
up beside him, crawls in under his coat
before he closes it. He grabs her shoulders,
holds her at arm's length. "Promise me."
   She raises her right hand. "I'll stay put
until you get back." They laugh, and he falls
outdoors. He has forgotten how weird the
world is, the man-violated world. He
wanders the few blocks to stores that might
be open at this hour, collecting random
provisions— coffee, fresh fruit, obscenely
glazed doughnuts she might find funny.
Giddy, he asks the grocer what women eat
for breakfast. He gets a look: why do nuts
always shop at the crack of dawn? He sees a
newspaper on a stand. He picks it up, unable
to believe this wonderful, forgotten artifact.
It opens like Tut's Tomb to everything that
happened yesterday. "Can I buy one of
these?" He overpays, folds it like a precious
magna carta.
   He returns home with his treasures. She
has waited. She is sitting on the floor,
surrounded by his periodicals, reading the
notes he has scribbled into several
canary-yellow legal tablets. She looks up in
alarm as he slips in, an exact inversion of
their positions hours ago. Her eyes hold a
new admiration, a new fear. "You never told
me you were this close."
   Ressler comes over to her, combs his hand
into one full lock of that swirling rose hair.
He holds the hank as if it were the leash of a
seeing-eye dog. For the first time since it
became light enough to see, he looks into
her face. Her features, malleable enough to
disguise their beauty, are now smashed into
the code for unmitigated anxiety. He has his
first real look at her. She is a scientist.
   Her eyes drink and live and address the
code—the latest twist of the tumbler puzzle.
Close, he wants to say, is not yet there. There
is no more dissonant an interval than a
semitone. We can be closer, he wants to tell
her. Work with me. Let me spread the plan in
front of you, for your appraisal. But all he
can manage to get out is, "See what I've
brought you. Coffee. Fruit. A paper!"
   She takes the provisions from this helpless
boy's hands. She looks at him oddly again as
she moves to the kitchen to prepare their
meal. "Have you a knife? Thanks. Now tell
me everything you know."
   He does, willingly, with growing relief that
someone else is now in part responsible. His
entire stockpile of insight is remarkably
compact. "There must be a messenger
molecule, to get the message from the
nucleus into the cytoplasm where translation
takes place. The messenger must have
stereochemical properties analogous to the
master library. Thus, RNA."
   Jeanette stops slicing fruit, grabs her
elbow, bracing for a fall. "What is it?" he
asks. In all his dictating to the cell what it
must do, has he overlooked what it does?
She tells him to look in the journal she
brought as a visiting excuse. Prominently
featured, a beautiful article by Crick lays out
the same inescapable conclusion. He scans it,
knowing what it will say, and sets it aside.
"That's all right. We're still OK, here. The
idea's in the air. I've traced it back a decade,
in fact, and nobody has gotten any farther.
It's welcome confirmation to hear Crick
behind it." He pauses and giggles nervously.
"I think.
   "Combine Ingram and Neel. A change in
the gene is a change in the enzyme. It's all
sequence; we know that. There may be an
intermediary, a mechanism that reads or
decodes or assembles the protein globule.
But it's informationally inert. The information
we're after has nothing to do with anything
except translating one linear sequence into
another. That's where we must start. Look.
Siekevitz, 1952. 'Uptake of Radioactive
Alanine in Vitro into the Proteins of Rat Liver
Fractions...'"
   "Please. I'm making breakfast." But Dr.
Koss sets the knife down and turns,
comprehension spreading on her face. "Do
you mean we might be able to synthesize
proteins in a tube, without any cell, from raw
homogenate? Get the mapping that way?"
   He looks directly into her, eyes sunk in
eyes. He walks toward her. She turns,
putting up a weakly protesting arm. He
moves against her backside, puts his hands
on the muscle just above her breast, saying,
"You are not only beautiful..."
   "Mm." She rocks imperceptibly up and
down on her heels, her curve against him. "If
you don't stop right now, neither of us will
live to regret it."
   They sit to eat. She plies him hungrily for
the next step. "Sorry," he says. "That's the
missing bit."
   "But what you have already! It feels so...
inevitable."
   She is of a piece with approaching winter,
wanting and postponing, failing to render
the world perfect, palatable, and so
choosing to wrap it under an unbroken
blanket of snow. In a moment, their time
together comes to an end. She must leave.
Jeanette's anxiety smoothes out into her
former, familiar, steady-state equilibrium. The
face put on for departures, the look he
already knows, the not-her look of sterile
good humor. He wraps her to him, arms full
with her, but feeling her already halfway out
the door.
   He finds his voice and says, a little rusty in
the cords, "What can I say?" Not what is
there to say; what is permitted. "Just tell me
one thing." But he cannot ask it, and so
demands, "Are we dead yet? Does your
husband... ?"
   Jeanette laughs bitterly. "It's as sordid as
you think. Mr. Koss is where no word of his
wife's meanderings can reach him. The
Processed Foods Convention,
Minneapolis—St Paul."
   He holds her pityingly. The strength of
their restraint, their intended decency, will
never be known. "You know, I think you
ought to stay here. Longer." She shakes her
head against him. "More often, then." No
again, without looking. "Once more." He
stops short of pleading, of asking everything
that pushes its way up to his still swollen
lips. He understands something he has
forgotten countless times since birth. All talk
is in ciphers.
   Dr. Koss mumbles from her hiked-up coat
collar. "See you next year?"
   "Tonight," he coaxes. She goes limp. "All
right. 'Soon' is my final offer."
   "Stuart." Shocking, the name come out of
her like a violation of taboo. Her mouth,
now fouled, goes straight to his, where it is
wild to throw off its mistake. Her hands are
all in his clothes, and his under hers,
deploying such violence over each other that
it takes the application of an equal and
opposite intellectual violence to break them
from mid-doorway debauch.
   "Oh!" Ressler says, separating,
understanding where they are left. "Heading
toward serious trouble, here."
   "Yes. Trouble. I'd like that very much." But
Dr. Koss quickly changes cadences, urging
Ressler to present at the next Blue Sky
everything he has collected. It's beautiful,
she assures him. Comprehensive, internally
consistent. In line with the data, inviolably
clean. The remaining block, with sustained
effort, must soon fall.
   He watches as she goes down the walk,
thrilled to be present at the day of creation.
She turns, walks backwards like a schoolgirl,
waves to him, indifferent to whoever else
might watch. He is irreversibly in love with
her. She is not yet gone and he wants her
back. They were insane not to force the
issue, to throw everything else away for the
thirty-second crest. The chance will never
come again. The gene has failed of its own
cleverness. It has believed its own trick: the
ruse of care, doomed affection, decency, that
desperate simulation.



XIV

  Desire per Square Mile

   This time Todd waited for me at the top of
the antique shaft. He leaped on me the
moment I opened the accordion grate, my
return promoting us to deep intimates. And I
kissed back. Everything had changed
between us; I lived in a new place. He
greeted me after long absence with effusion,
offering whatever salve was his to give. Even
as I touched him, I thought of that
advertising precept of Tuckwell's: nothing
obligates more than unilateral kindness.
   After a friendly feel, Franklin partly
released me. Our hands remained in contact,
threading aimlessly with each other's from
that moment until the day he withdrew his.
Where had I been? "Since when?" I asked.
He laughed, kissed me again, and tugged me
into the fluorescent computer room. My
pupils dilated in the weird, familiar light of
the old neighborhood.
   "The Old Man will be delighted to see
you," Todd said. "He's asked about you
several times since your last visit."
   "Don't mock."
   "It's true. He seems to have developed a
genuine fondness for you. Lord knows what
the appeal is." I threatened the power switch
on the nearest writing drive, ready to wipe
out the evening's work. "Wait! Let me
rephrase that."
   Todd, I now see, wanted me only for my
ability to tell if he too was destined to
disappear in late twenties after a passionate
start. I would always be subordinate to the
research that had brought us together.
Ressler had from the first been our
matchmaker, awful confirmation of how
many million more ways there are of being
lost than of being found. Frank was
overjoyed I was back, but the spark was the
spark of salvage, the revived hope of
explication.
   He led me down the aisle of tape drives,
past the line of printers under their sound
hoods, a deafening collection that had
multiplied since my last visit. As we
approached the console where Dr. Ressler
worked, my impression bore out Todd's
account of a winter softening. Instead of
delivering one of his restrained politenesses,
Dr. Ressler broke into a warm smile of
recognition, and welcomed me with, "Ah! A
friend."
   The three of us shared that unrepeatable
evening as if I'd come back from years
overseas. Todd ran out and secured our
ritual provisions, pâté on saltines and
grocery-store wine in paper cups. This would
be our standard until Uncle Jimmy,
discovering crumbs in the card reader, read
us the house rules in his inept, egalitarian
way: "You folks want to ruin everything?
You realize that one smudge of mustard
could wipe out ten thousand credit union
members?"
   That night was my homecoming. We went
round the ring, toasting silliness, clinking
paper rims. Todd proposed, "To the return
of the native." I toasted Mylar, the stuff that
allowed the two of them to make a living. Dr.
Ressler thought a minute and supplied, "To
Antarctica." We clinked, sipped, and
demanded explanation. "The anniversary of
a twelve-nation pact turning the last
continent into a scientific preserve." In
toasting the expanse of glacier and
penguins he eulogized the decimated six
other landmasses. But that night, the three
of us set up base camp on the Ross Ice Shelf.
The digitized warehouse became a
sovereign, unreachable polar province, a fair
chunk of the world set aside for responsible
experiment.
   God! What a few months. For the first time
since sixteen, I unfolded into the available
panel. Still regretting the mess I'd made of
things with Tuckwell, I felt remorse scatter in
instrumental brilliance, bravura trills, shakes,
flourishes, demisemiquavers. We were a
self-governing, city-free zone. What other
way is there to survive the place? The last
holdout habitat will be such a niche of
charity. Life at the megapole required that I
decide how many of the fifteen million
adjacent catastrophes I could afford to feel.
In those days—the brief bloom following a
desert flash—I set my empathy at three. The
calculus required consigning entire
boroughs to misery beyond addressing,
stepping gingerly over a baseball-batted
body at the top of the subway stairs on the
way to sharing whatever small delight one
can save from mutilation. Those months,
running at surplus, meant claiming the
criminally privileged birthright of well-being.
In fact, we all knew that a five-minute stroll
from the converted warehouse proved the
impossible mismatch of happiness.
   Once, at late rush hour—his
midmorning—Todd and I, prowling New
York as if it were not so much death camp as
theme park, rode to Chambers Street, the
underground mall beneath two buildings
that alone housed a midsized American city.
We stood watching the nine-escalator bank
that, for half an hour, spewed a shimmering
waterfall of human foam. Frank's fascination
with the ant farm was not Tuckwell's; New
York was no thrilling Indy, adrenaline
smorgasbord, buffet of ways to get killed.
Franker sought the consolation of having
one's worst suspicions confirmed. We stood
at this lookout until the human platelets
threatened to burst their capillaries and
flood our high ground. Franklin turned from
the scene with a gratified shudder and
headed back to a night job where he made
up half the known world.
   Our happiness was pathetically outscaled:
forty thousand homeless; three quarters of a
million addicts. Four hundred radial miles of
contiguous squalor, a deep brown
demographic smear, a disappointment per
square mile that left the three of us several
digits to the right of significance. Still, exile
to expendable stats freed us to do what little
we could to rig the numbers game. The
globe had never been closer to complete
capitulation. The dozen regional and
religious wars, delineated "shooting" to
distinguish them from the ubiquitous
conflict, the daily embrace of toxic spills, the
gaping holes in international economics,
irretrievable loss of a century's topsoil every
ten months, continuous corruption trials,
Esperanto chatter of terrorism: only the
mildest symptoms of a world unaware of its
watershed moment. But in our neck of the
nature reserve, we three breathed the air of
a new planet.
   The secret, sustaining garden, my illicit
fantasy having nothing to do with lucre or
lust, was that by tweaking a few knobs, by
having just these two friends, by clearing a
space as wide as possible in my unstretched
heart, the last living woman in Brooklyn
Heights might contain multitudes, might
grow to fill the dense bruise of killer
buildings carefully designed to eat me.
Might even (how could I have imagined?)
pay back into the general healing fund. I
made the dangerous assumption that
goodwill was somehow enough.
   I lived by myself—yellow glow from the
second-story window over an antique
clothing shop. I could do what I wanted with
my free hours. I chose to spend them in
Antarctica, picnicking by the punched-card
hopper, getting my first lessons in
programmable machines and the people
who run them. I don't know what catalyzed
the reaction, but we fed off one another. I
was learning again, steeping myself in
company. I rediscovered the strangest aspect
of mystery: how much of it is temporarily
knowable, how it chooses the off moment to
come clean.
   Who knows why Dr. Ressler chose late
autumn of 1983 to thaw. I liked to think we
brought him out. Perhaps Todd and I
reminded him of discounted possibilities. We
in turn, scared by his return just before the
onset of winter, waded deeper into mutual
care. Dr. Ressler was instrumental in these
evenings. His approval was everything to
Todd. Franklin brought the man articles, told
him anecdotes, sang him little snippets of
absurd radio songs. Every trick imaginable to
engage an intellect that we'd seen only in
concealed bursts.
   At times Dr. Ressler would slip back into
his native condition. Feeling the man drift
away, Todd would throw himself in after, like
the boy in the news accounts who always
happens along at the instant of the ice pond
disaster. "Did you know," he would ask
when comfortable silence slipped into the
wrong meter, "that Brahms and George M.
Cohan were contemporaries?" He would
look to me for covert confirmation, ready to
recant as a joke if the guess proved
mistaken. Ressler invariably smiled, less at
the invention than at its motive.
   But sometimes, seamlessly, Ressler seeded
us, hosting rambling round tables starting
with the prospects for artificial intelligence,
veering toward the impasse in Namibia, and
winding up with the Pythagorean relations
or plate tectonics and the Mid-Atlantic
Ridge. With his quiet encouragement, we
could talk all evening. He never let us
equivocate or waffle. No matter how far
afield we wandered, he would call us back
with a rounded predicate. Franklin credited
me, some obscure reattachment therapy I
worked on the man. Dr. Ressler liked me,
spoiled me with attention. He treated Jimmy
and Annie Martens affectionately too. If he
was a shade warmer with me, perhaps it was
only that I stayed later into the night.
   The elegant court Dr. Ressler paid me as
our familiarity took hold thrilled Todd. He at
last discovered in me the seed of the erotic.
We kissed constantly, a running,
surreptitious feeding fetish.
   By the elevator shaft, in the foyer, through
the main office, on desks where
aides-de-camp of industry had drawn reports
only hours before. A quick slip beneath the
blouse in a dark utility closet. Hair, hands,
neck, lip: one continuous tasting, sixteen
without the giggle. How long could we
prolong the extended adolescent feel? What
came next? It didn't matter: after evenings of
verbal invention, we needed something for
our mouths to do when they paused to
repair.
   He kissed me through the accordion grate
on my way home late one night—a last
freight inventory after hours of polymath,
polymorphous perversity. "Come tomorrow.
Early, this time."
   "All right," I said. "But I have to tell you
something. Neither of us is twenty anymore."
   "Remind me to teach you how to count in
hexidecimal."
   I cranked the lever to descend, but
stopped at his shout. I set the dial to climb
and came back level. "I have a great feeling
about us these days, Janny." He gave it just
enough time. "It's called lust."
   If I missed two days in a row, Franklin
would leave me notes in the question
submissions box.

       Lovely O'Deigh—
       Come out and Play? Limber those
    lanky researcher's limbs? I will wait
    under the streetlamp at the library NE
    corner from now until you show. If you
    fail, I will be forced to stand all night
    and the following day and miss work
    and be fired and waste away, massive
    species die-off or worse. I have a
    thought for no one's but your ears.
    FTODD.

   FTODD, his system login, doubled as
personal signature. As if shorthand genus
and species were necessary. As if anyone else
in this spreading stain of fifteen million had
used the word "lovely" since the Somme.
   He came to my place, appraised my rooms.
I had by then outfitted them with odds and
ends from my antiquarian landlord,
indulging myself, giving over to darkwood
and damask. "This place is beautiful," he
decided. "Did you dream all this up yourself?
Amazing antimacassars. You're one player
piano short of a New Orleans cathouse done
up by the Rossettis." He loved coming over,
sitting for hours in a rocker, being read to in
embroidered darkness the reverse of the
fluorescent flicker where he spent his
waking life. But when he took to courting
me in force, it had to be outside, in the open
air, grabbing the last December light, the
late heat of months holding on eerily long
after the season. He wanted outside, every
possible moment, as if only by being there at
the instant the change arrived could he read
the encyclopedia of the year in brief, the
masterpiece of condensation, the backlit
landscape, that gessoed, verdigris
panorama.
   Early December suggested that this would
be the last chance either of us might have to
remember what it was, in the blood, to be
young. The day now went dark well before
supper. It seemed an irritant to him, a
command to hold more, soak it up until
saturated, walk another block in the dark.
Tomorrow would be too late. The smell of
dry first flakes carried the weight of
denouement, revelations to secure, sap to
consolidate while the neighborhood got
ready for night. Your rooms are beautiful;
but friend, let's go out while we can.
   Sometimes he would not even come up,
but would shout from street level. Come
play. Unlimber. Northeast corner. For some
reason, I always came down. I had reached
the age when I could no longer resist the
fantastic, especially when carried off with
authority. If his message was for no one's
but my ears, what would become of it if I
failed to listen? I would dress and undress
several times, trying for an effect I couldn't
satisfy, settling on not-quite: linen, a
mid-calf wraparound, and shawl. He was
always under the streetlight when I arrived. I
could make him out blocks away—
confident, calling from a distance, as if I
might lose my way at the last moment. He
dressed up too, after a fashion:
straight-legged gray pants and a maroon
pullover. He would talk without topic, give
me the most forlorn fondle: he liked the
small of my back, my fingers, my neck. We
would find a spot in the park, abandoned
now by even the most desperate
adolescents, and place damp, guarded kisses
in each other's mouth until we lost the
easiness of virtual strangers.
   He would walk me dutifully back to my
rooms, making me promise to visit him at
work, as if I were the undependable one.
Once, when we reached the door of the
shop that still surprised me to come home to,
he said, "I'm glad you came out on such
short notice. Ninety-five out of a hundred
women would not have."
   "Private poll?"
   "Ha! That reminds me. Last night, Ressler
defined the difference between pure and
applied science: pure science was applied
science the Pentagon won't pay for."
   "Don't change the subject, creep."
   "What? It's all the same subject. Data
gathering." He looked in my eyes, deep and
long, fields for future study. "Kiss me good
night?" he asked, clinically.
   "I suppose. Just this once." The next
fifteen minutes lost to oral exploration.
Ninety-five out of a hundred women in their
right minds would have known better.
   When I woke mornings, a sweet,
forgivable embarrassment infused me, not a
little secretly pleased at still being able, this
late in the season, to do something that
would be prohibited in another month or
two. The way I was behaving was its own
sponsor, insisting that my body had not
changed all that much, that it still carried its
old shape and solution. Every turn it had
taken since twenty had been to some extent
wrong. So how could I pass up his notes, his
invitations to be wrong again?
   I had no reason to feel so excited,
considering what I'd spent to get here. Each
morning's anticipation was thick with
anxiety. I was the debutante on the evening
of her coming out who, after three weeks of
screaming adrenals, thinks it might be easier
after all to stay home the night of the ball
and stick to baking gingerbread for the rest
of her life. That waking dream where one
finds a dozen new rooms in the familiar
house: it brought on dry heaves of
expectation.
   Sometimes during the day reaction set in. I
spent my working hours answering
questions as remote from my evenings as I
had grown from the lost cause of politics:

  Q: How long would I have to play
continuous Ping-Pong to make it into the
national record books?

  Q: Could you please supply the words to
the third verse from the theme song of
Branded?

  Q: Who's the most eligible bachelor in the
developed world?

    However numbing the day's list, I took
pains with it, shaping my answers with the
care of a potter to whom nothing mattered
except creating the perfect vessel for today's
flowers. I sculpted every response as if by
outside chance it might signify. However
ludicrous or heartbreaking the three-by-five,
an accurate reply carried some small
possibility of redemption. I did not imagine
myself a pragmatic force, or even a moral
one. I was simply an agent, assuming that
what people wanted to know, they needed.
If I kept my head down, maintained the path
between inquiry and fact, human curiosity
might rise to its subject matter.

  Q: How does the government calculate
poverty level?
  Q: Are there places on earth that haven't
been surveyed?
  Q: What is the Lithuanian for "I need
you"?

  Q: I have heard of creatures that take
energy directly from thermal vents on the
seafloor. Nothing from sunlight at all? How
could they have begun?

   The instant I turned up one of these I felt
recognition, a reminder of what I was doing.
One of them redeemed a week of compost.
Each betrayed the interrogative passion built
into grammar, fueled by that thermal vent
just under the crust. Each looked for an
answer that would keep them from the
absolute zero of blanketing vacuum. Yes,
Ishmael again, in that rented bed in a coastal
inn just before setting off, proving to
himself, by feeling his nose freezing, that he
is "the one warm spark in the heart of an
arctic crystal."
   The Amateur's Almanac
   I learned then how shrewdly stable the
forty-hour work week was. Any longer, and
corporate time chokes the off-hours. Any
shorter, and we might actually sustain a
thought, satisfy ourselves. Either would be
societally fatal. What allowed my friends to
escape the net was how little MOL asked of
their attention. Once a night Dr. Ressler
would put up a File Repack: a massive
process where all the Clients would be
collated, reconditioned, squeezed,
rein-dexed, and streamlined. The repack
required so many spindles and so much
processing time that the system was
committed for the duration.
   While File Repack ran, those two could do
whatever they pleased—kick around the
innovations that daily made a liar of
Ecclesiastes. Recent sighting of the W
particle. Stone Age tribe hitherto escaping
detection. Pioneer 10, passing Neptune on its
way to being the first artificial thing to quit
the solar system. When the day held no
particular revolutions, Dr. Ressler whipped
us into silliness by making us sing
ridiculously long three-part rounds in
polytones until the last cat was gutted.
   We saved no lives on the night shift. But
then, we didn't take any either. It all seemed
happy once. A nightly exercise in the quick
improvisation that had brought us together
in the first place. Ressler puttered with print
ribbons and decollators. Todd sketched
perpetually into ragpaper pads, pads that
grew thinner as he filled them. Late at night,
hours of work still ahead, my friends sent me
home with a handful of curiosities to verify
before the next evening, threads we never
seemed to close out. A renaissance of
contentment. I found myself in a place where
words regained their campfire importance,
explanatory, incorruptible, above suspicion. I
talked myself into thinking that Todd and I
helped repair this diverted man's
considerable gift. Every curve of clavicle
Todd caressed said it was all right to think
so.
   "Tell me everything I need to know about
you," I asked Todd one night. He sat at his
console, shuttling bits of magnetic flux on
distant drive packs through the intermediary
keyboard. Dr. Ressler was in the control
room, soundproofed. The two of us were
alone, discounting the obedient machines.
   Franklin faked a theatrical shudder. "Brr.
Jeesiz. At last it comes to this. I thought you
were the reference. What do you want to
know?"
   I sat by the console table, legs up. I leaned
over, took his arm, placed his fingers high
up in my folded lap. We both felt the
professor's presence on the clear side of the
two-way mirror, but the obstacle itself was
provocative. "Tell me, if you don't mind, how
in the world you managed to get here."
   "Well, my mother and father loved each
other very much," he said, clandestinely
stroking my thigh.
   "Ass. Who are you? Where did you come
from?"
   "Dunno. 'Sconsin." I refused even to
grimace. Franklin sighed. "I was wedged in
the middle of a heap of kids. Must have
been a half-dozen of us. Doubtless where all
the trouble started. Family wanted me to be
an oceanographer. Went on to college, did a
couple years in physics. The universe as we
knew it was too small. Ended up art history,
ABD." He shot me his most opaque grin. "All
but Dissertation."
   He would answer my questions but only to
the letter. "Come -on, Franker. That's not a
curriculum vitae."
   "What are you after? Chambers Bio?
American Art Directory? I don't qualify."
   "How did you get so damn alienated?"
The closest we'd come to friction since our
first meal. I felt a sickening urge to push
until something broke.
   "I'm not alienated. I am a United States
citizen."
   I couldn't help but laugh. We had such
divergent senses of humor that he
sometimes reduced me to giggles just by
losing me in translation. He loved
inadvertent slippage. I once found him
chuckling alone in the coffee room at a flier
announcing: "Power Saws Cut 10 Dollars." In
time, I recognized a Todd ambiguity at first
glance. For several weeks he enshrined on
the side of system A's central processor the
headline I'd brought him proclaiming,
"Incest More Common Than Thought."
   I kept after him. I wanted something that
had nothing to do with personal data.
"Where did you learn to sketch?"
   "You presume I've learned. You haven't
seen my work."
   "Is that an offer?"
   "In lectures," he said, choosing the lesser
of two cooperations. "'New French
Naturalism to the Present.' Irresistible: huge,
scooped halls; faces from every aspect. I
spent genre after genre just sketching.
Problem was, the professors kept turning the
lights out to show slides. Even now, I draw
better in the dark."
   He was telling the truth. I'd seen his hand
skid across a tablet at high speed. He drew
while talking, a nervous muscle-jitter while
his mind was elsewhere. Hatches, shades,
and crevasses sprung up from a hidden
plane beneath the paper. He did not draw,
he dusted: the flour spread over the smooth
stones in a church floor that magically raises
the pattern of gothic letters lying invisible
across a worn-away tomb.
   "I'd start each term in the first row on the
far right aisle. Then I'd discover a perfect
Pisanello in the upper middle, and I'd
change seats. But there were only so many
interesting faces in any given neighborhood.
Had to go track me down that Memling. Seek
out new blood."
   He fell quiet; I'd accidentally sent him
back. His hand played nervously over the
function keys. All at once I received a
tremendous jolt of who-cares courage. "I
want my portrait done."
   He looked around agitatedly, bluntly
examined me up and down. Just as bluntly, I
let him. He squinted, and after an awful
hesitation, clapped his hands. "Why, you're
the same woman who was here last night!"
He took a soft pencil, the same pencil he
used to mark off the Processing to Do List.
He flipped over the nearest green-striped
printout and unceremoniously began that
oldest form of programming. When he came
to do them, the hairs on the back of my neck
moved at his pencil touch. I felt him locking
in to the layout of my bone. The way he drew
me, what he saw there, redefined my facial
lexicon. Terror made me a good deal more
striking then than I am. But he wasn't after
symmetrical features. Not the pretty
composite, but mystery. And the only way to
keep that quantity intact was to transpose it
to a distant, more mutable key.
   Several minutes passed. We talked, as
always, as he worked. As always, he didn't
care if his subject moved. When he finished,
he set the pencil down and said, "Missed it
again."
   "Don't I get to see it?" Faithful to the
strict phoneme, he seemed genuinely
surprised at that clause hanging on the end
of the bargain. He handed the document
over, a contractual captive. I took it, but
couldn't assemble what I looked at. Both a
recapitulation of the Vermeer Head of a Girl
we'd stood in front of at the Met, and a
dazed, physiognomically unmistakable
thirty-year-old, 1983, who showed in her
penciled eyes that she did not quite know
what had happened, today in history.
   "We do all styles," Franklin explained.
"Giotto to Gleizes, inclusive." I could only
stare at the image. "I told you. I picked it up
in a lecture hall. Subliminal seduction. 'Learn
Mandarin Chinese in Your Sleep.'"
   "This is astonishing."
   "Ha! Leonardo, Rafael, Agnolo, and me."
   I demanded the portrait. It was already
mine. Despite a stylistic anachronism that
made it unacceptable to anyone except an
historically indifferent critic, the sketch
betrayed such incredible draftsmanship that I
was furious at him for never cultivating it.
   "I need it back. I have to submit the
printout."
   "You can't. You aren't going to turn over
this report to some, some accountant in city
government with my face all over the back
of it?"
   He took the page and shrugged. "Don't
worry. Nobody ever listens to side B."
   "Give me something from your tablet then.
Compensation. Something of Dr. Ressler. Of
both of us."
   "I dispatch those suckers, soon as I make
them. Can't stand to look at them after a day
or two."
   "You what?" Destroyed sketches of
incredible draftsmanship: it was like news of
burnt Alexandria, or jerky footage of the last
marsupial wolf. I shouted, "Systematically
trashing art!"
   Franklin shook his head rapidly. "Don't
ever confuse art with Draw the Pirate."
Precise, vehement. "I have a steady hand, am
a competent enough imitator. But no
compositional sense. Incapable of making
anything original."
   "And you're a feeble liar to boot." I'd
watched his hand. "Your sketches make
themselves."
   He twisted his lips. "My point exactly."
   "Well, if you aren't ashamed of seducing
public librarians, you should be ashamed of
squandering a genuine talent."
   He froze, turned to face me, and said the
crudest thing I ever heard him say to anyone:
"I thought you were supposed to be
well-informed." He apologized by grabbing
my knees and pressing them for forgiveness.
I gave it to him, took his hands and pressed
back, as I would now if they were in reach.
   "You see the problem," he said. "You've
followed the cult of originality since
autographed toilets? The strait jacketing
Neo-ist canvases full of original black paint?
The original razor blade and follow-up hot
bath?" I didn't catch his references, but he
seemed to mean that we'd reached a
moment in our visual lives when innovation
was itself derivative. All that was left of the
painted portal sat in galleries in Soho,
intelligible only with the aid of program
notes. "A fellow is left with few stylistic
alternatives aside from 'Divest now.'"
   I said nothing in defense—I hardly felt
qualified. Had I words, I would never have
stopped arguing that whatever a person did
well, if it promoted possibility, was worth
doing. Anything that added to the heft,
texture, and density of the card catalog. I
had no technical basis for debate except
conviction, and so I only said, "But you are
good."
   I meant to say something else—"adept,"
or "gifted." Even those would have been
less than I meant. Todd knew what I was
after. But a look came across his eyes, and he
refused to forgo the chance to savor another
slippage. "I don't see what my moral conduct
has to do with anything."
   To find a person both fine and infuriating,
and inside of minutes: I'll never feel that
again. Such a spread, in one evening. It
throws me even now, long after he
has—hardly originally, but with excellent
draftsmanship—divested.

  Quick Sketch

   Those few days before official winter were
our walking tour of the known world. We
walked everywhere, at any hour. I was free in
the city in a way I'd never been before. When
we cut our walking to a third our normal
speed, the particulars of neighborhood took
on specific mass. I tried the experiment again
this evening: walked a block as slowly as I
could without attracting the attention of
unmarked cars. A slow walk—too slow to be
going anywhere— changes the way
everything around me holds itself.
   I didn't care where we were going. We
were there already, under the shed sumacs,
standing a fraction of an inch closer to one
another than ambiguous. The game
developed unspoken rules: we couldn't say
certain things at certain times. We dressed
too lightly for the weather. We spent
minutes looking up into the bone filigree of
tree branches, whose lacework against the
winter sky became brilliant as stained glass.
Sometimes on those walks with Franklin,
one-third Ideological speed, I stopped
moving altogether, needing to fix this, to
find an outlet for the clarity springing up in
me.
   Todd still reached out at odd moments,
took my hand, and shook it in both of his.
He grabbed my fingers for no reason, his
equivalent hopeless search for that
unreachable fixative. The most he could
convey of that one-word contradiction in
terms was affection. He liked me; at the
handshake instant, he again discovered and
meant to take credit for me in our hands'
press, the slow walk still ahead of us.
   We favored a playground three blocks
from the warehouse. By the time Todd took
his first nightly break, the terrain was a
children's Pompeii. Sometimes we tried the
slide, hopelessly slowed by an autumn of
tree gum. We compared old recipes for
greasing. His involved sliding on squares of
waxed paper, and he was on the verge of
routing us to a store eight blocks away to
buy some when I talked him into sense. More
typically, we drifted instinctively to the
swings. Expansive or expectant, however
quickening the night, swinging seemed the
thing. I would rock on mine, hardly kicking,
dragging my feet in the gravel beneath.
Franklin, male, shot for escape trajectory.
   We would chatter or keep quiet—in those
days they meant the same. One emblematic
evening I watched Franklin pump to apogee
and bail out, no doubt escaping one of
those avuncular Flying Fortresses on a
parachute that thighs sacrificed their
stocking silks for. I calculated the parabola
that had landed him between conflicts. We
had a completely distorted historical view, he
and I. By accident of timing, we thought this
playground peace was the status quo.
   Without Todd's weight for pendulum bob,
his swing dampened to a stop. He got back
on and called to me, "C'mere. Show you
something." I hesitated, knowing the
escalation. He motioned me into the sling,
each leg over his, inside the chain. He
helped my legs through, touching them with
mute amazement. "For some reason
shrouded in mystery," he explained, trying
casually to pretend our thighs weren't
touching, "this is called 'Swinging Double
Dutch.'"
   "You think you're teaching me
something?" I challenged, pressing myself
against him. "I was born knowing this." I
relaxed and straddled him, looked deep into
his face. Neither had done this before. Not
since it started counting. And it hadn't
counted until then, that moment of fragile
pressure.
   "Oh yeah? I learned how..." He fought to
remain clear-headed, articulate, but even
pretense took his breath. "I learned this...
how to... before you even got your first
inflatable slip."
   "Right," I said, adjusting myself just
enough to shatter his equanimity. He rolled
his eyes at my little flick of friction. We
synchronized our kicks, swinging in tandem,
slowly at first, gradually gaining momentum.
I could feel my vee riding a fraction of an
inch above his. At the top of each arc we
would press, pretending innocence,
ignorance of contact. I kicked in rhythm,
climbing a sapling on each upswing, and on
each swing back, the sapling me.
   At that moment, I would gladly have gone
down onto the freezing grass and lost my
last ten years all over again. I felt myself at
my coat cuffs, against underwear, inside my
silk collar come within seconds of anything.
Cut loose, I was closer than ever to learning
who this boy was. Rocking and straining,
folding against him to our pulse, I had the
chance to find out.
   I felt it irresistibly unfold, but was
surprised by the rapidity. At our arc's height,
he kicked when he should have drawn in. A
slight stiffening ran up his arms where I held
them. Warm oscillation rippled across the
gap to me—unforced, unconscious. A rush
of conductance, animal-perfect rubato.
Backwash erased all difference between us.
No burst. Just sweet, spreading infusion, for
one instant complete.
   We went slack. Without kick-physics, the
swing settled. Our pulse-pound,
synchronized so briefly, fell into diffraction,
dissipated in moire. I couldn't begin to guess
what was in his heart at that moment, let
alone my own. I climbed off without being
asked. He said, "So they swung Double
Dutch in your neighborhood, too?" He
didn't dare look at me in the dark. Every
second I spent with him was, even in the
absence of hard fact, another slow
assembling of artist's composite.
   We turned back, the silent tactic. By the
time we arrived at his machine warren, I was
alone. He was attentive, arm around my
shoulders. But back at the warehouse, when
Dr. Ressler greeted us, a sign of
collaborator's embarrassment passed from
Todd to me: I had brought him over the
edge with nothing but my body's graze
through winter clothing, the rocking of a
swing.
   When I left, he rode the lift with me down
to the street. The night ended like all its
ancestors: a handshake, the only fingerprints
he conceded. He was turning back to the
office when I panicked. I grabbed and spun
him by the elbows. He must have thought I
was trying to embrace him, for he took me
up, scolded me with a dismissive kiss. "So
passionate as that?" He held me, resigning,
admitting. His mouth near my ear, he spoke,
incredulous. "Here again. At the mercy of
strangers."

  The Console Log

  By then, I came and went as I pleased.
Frank gave me a copy of the front key on
long-term loan. Without incriminating
anyone, I stole the sequence for the
computer-room lock—the four letters
M-O-L-E. I used the password freely until
one evening, punching myself into the inner
sanctum I was met by my sheepish friends
and an angry Uncle Jimmy. Given his older
cousin's crush on me, Jimmy would probably
sooner have entrusted the company's safety
to me than to Todd. But he was Operations
Manager, and this was a clear-cut violation
of, be it ever so ludicrous at this outpost,
corporate security. He demanded to know
how I knew the combination.
   "I peeked over somebody's shoulder.
Jimmy, it just seems silly to make them come
punch me in."
   Jim's bureaucratic bluster was undermined
by recalcitrant kindness. "With the customers
we have, if it had been anyone but me in
here when anyone but you came in like that
unescorted, he or she'd have put her or him
in jail by now." I apologized, and Jimmy
barked acceptance. He went through the
apologetic motions of chewing out Dr.
Ressler, the Night Manager, exacting a
promise to change the combination right
away.
   When I showed up the following night, I
buzzed for Franklin, smiling at the ridiculous
return to pro forma propriety. Frank came to
let me in, wearing that smirk beloved by
mass murderers and the foreign service. Just
as he was about to punch in the new code
Dr. Ressler had set, he stepped aside. "Go
ahead," he said. "I know you're dying to see
how good you are."
   I hadn't the first idea where to begin.
Another four-letter word, reducing the
possibilities to twenty-six to the fourth
power: roughly half a million candidates. I
had only two clues. Dr. Ressler was the
designer. And Frank believed I could guess it
or he would never have set up the riddle. It
also helped to have him stand by humming
the intervals that have run through Western
music from Art of Fugue to Schönberg, with
stops along the way at Beethoven,
Mendelssohn, Liszt, and others. Down a
minor second, up a major third, down a
minor second. I cupped my hand over the
keyplate, guarding my guess. I punched in
the four letter tune, transcribed from German
notation, and the lock sprang open. Todd
emitted his high-pitched trademark laugh
and cuffed me admiringly. He trooped me
into the computer room and paraded me
before Dr. Ressler. "She's broken security
again," he reported. "She's unstoppable."
   "You may find the punchline to this in
your notes file," Ressler told Todd. Franklin
cleared the nearest console. The screen
returned with its eternally patient prompt:

         Command?
  Two-fingered, amateurish, Franklin typed
notes and hit the Return key, that
quintessential late-century punctuation.

       NOTES RECVD: Read (y or n)? y
       Note from jsteadman, @ 12/06/83,
    16:14.

      Take a break! This means you! Ask
    your woman friend out for dinner at the
    Rusty Scupper. That heap of bolts won't
    run any faster with you watching it!
    Uncle Jim.

  "Heartbreaking," Franklin laughed. "The
man apologizes for giving us a deserved
dressing-down."
  "I received a similar one," Dr. Ressler said.
  Todd turned to me and howled. "And
what do you do first thing upon returning?
A shame, for women to speak in church!" He
turned back to his dialogue with the CRT.

        Note @ 12/06/83, 20:23 to:
jsteadman

   Jimmy, We're sorry too. Even the woman
friend. Her only offense is pride in ingenuity.
But I think we've caught her in time. Love
from everyone, FTODD

         Note sent. Command?

   Todd looked up from his typing to the
man whose opinion meant everything.
"What do you suppose Uncle Jim would say
if he knew you were in possession of every
combination in this joint?"
   Dr. Ressler shrugged painfully. "Passwords
are trivial. How many words are there in
English? How many in Indo-European,
including all forms and proper names?"
   Both men looked at me. A hopeless task,
even to estimate the order of magnitude. I
tried a rough, running total, falling back
upon the technical reply, "Lots and lots."
Ressler's eyes flashed; it was bliss to see him
happy.
   "And folks don't restrict themselves to
meaningful combinations," Franklin
objected.
   "Nevertheless, passwords are trivial. One
can employ the brute-force solution. Use one
computer to generate all possible
combinations of letters in words of given
length. Then pipe the results to the
computer demanding the password. Such a
solution is not elegant but is as inexorable
as death."
   I thought out loud. "Every possible
combination? Wouldn't writing the program
be prohibitively difficult?"
   Ressler smiled at my impeccable novitiate's
thinking. He liked being reminded of the old
place. He shook his head and said, "I could
write that program in a dozen lines."
  Todd clapped his hands. "Go to it."
Ressler scribbled on a sheet of scratch paper,
then showed us his handiwork:

       For first letter from A to Z
         For second letter from A to Z
                     For third letter from A to Z
                     ...
                                Word = first
                     letter + second letter 4-
                     third letter... try word
                     ...
                     Next third letter
         Next second letter
       Next first letter

   I looked at his program, feeling the rush
of forgotten terrain opening. He said, "The
ellipses are for longer words. In the loop,
one could start with blanks instead of A's, to
include all words shorter than the number of
imbedded cogs. You see.." And I did see; my
first glimpse of the synthetic achievement of
language. "You see that the nested loops
produce words in simple combinatorial
order: AAA, AAB, AAC, and so on."
   "How long would it take such a program
to run?" I asked, the cumbersome
coordination of loops within loops dawning
on me.
   "Some time. Lots and lots."
   "That's why God invented operators,"
Todd contributed.
   "To speed the search, you could pipe likely
lists—say our online file of the hundred and
twenty thousand most common English
words. That's a gamble, however. If the word
is not on the list, you're left with no
systematic way of picking up the pieces." At
that moment, I saw in the exhausted face a
look so unlikely I almost missed it. Gratitude
at the chance of exchange, at stumbling
across a listener after years of having no
audience but himself. A look full of wonder
that he was being thrown back, after
everything, on the shifting ambiguity of first
letter plus second letter plus third. He
motioned toward the console, asking
Franklin, "Do you have anything running at
the moment?"
   "Work, you mean? What a curious idea."
Franklin turned to the keyboard. At the
system prompt, he typed the command LOG.
   20:36 Dumping console transactions to
log. Mode brief. Begin when?
   "What time did I show up tonight?" he
asked Ressler, his eyes on the monitor.
   "As I recall, you were here ten minutes
before closing, camped over the terminal,
waiting eagerly for the last remote teller to
log off so that you could bring your machine
down and begin the end-of-day
processing." Todd winced at the portrait and
typed a time. A thermal printer embedded in
the tabletop began bruising a roll of paper,
producing a printout that varied only in
detail from the scraps that, hopeless pack
rat, I scavenged for inclusion in the capsule.

     Command? EOD
     18:37 Begin end of day processing.
  Mount Sys Pack on Spindle 1, Master Client
  File on Spindle 2, Client Backup on
  Spindle 3, and scratch on Spindle 4. Oldest
  cycle date tape in tape drive. Hit any key
  when ready?

     18:43 End of day underway; backing to
  tape...
     18:58 Backup complete. Rewind tape
  and unthread.
     19:01 Conditioning Master File...
     19:20 Master File conditioned. Merging
  transactions...
     19:42 Transactions merged. Ledgering
  new trans file. Running new-acct. Running
  purge. Running trial balance.
     19:46 End of day complete. Command?
PAY
     19:46 Begin Tuesday pay cycle
processing. Thread payroll tape, General
Ledger pack on Spindle 3. Position checks in
printer. Hit any key when ready?

  The latest fable from Homo fabulus. Todd
whistled at the history of his evening. "Do I
really live this way?" "Check your partitions,"
Ressler said.

    Command? TASKCHECK
    20:38 Partition 1: Payroll check ok.
    Partition 2: Report Generator check ok.
  No other partitions active.

  "Steady as she goes. What do you have in
mind?"
  "Open a third partition. Give it a half a
meg."
  Todd gritted his teeth and shouted,
papier-mâché-set style, "I don't know if the
engines will stand it, Captain." He tapped a
few keys. "Et voilà. Bute."
  "Now. Do a part reset."
  "Don't know how."
  Ressler hit a key combination I missed, and
the screen read:

         Sys 1652 Exp Ver 4.2 partition reset
login:

  Ressler typed ftodd. The screen prompted
for a password. "Turn around," Ressler said.
Seconds later, he called, "Done."

    password: xxxxxxx
    System Date and Time: 12/06/83 20:40.45
    User ftodd logged in.

   "American Satan!" Todd shouted. "You
couldn't possibly have learned that by brute
force."
   "No, sir."
   "Selected list?" I suggested, and was
rewarded by a warm no.
   He let us savor the trick before confessing,
"I have to admit to charlatanism here. I did
not actually crack your password. I simply
jumped to partition two, called up your
record page, and blind-piped your password
from the user profile to the unsuspecting
partition."
   Even his charlatanism was clever. Todd
was greatly amused by the piracy. "What
would Uncle Jim say if he knew you could
kick this machine around?"
   "Now that is more dangerous to corporate
security than knowing a few passwords." He
turned to me. "Your friend turns out to have
an interesting password that you might be
able to hit using the Short List." Just as I was
about to pump him for data, Todd shouted
from his place at the keyboard. Ressler gave
a yelp and lunged to prevent Todd from
punching any more keystrokes. But it was
too late.

     Command? EDIT
     20:45 Entering editor in partition #3.
  Files belong to user ftodd:
     pnotes eoderrors daybook herri

     Enter name from list or new file to
create: security

     20:45 Opening new file: security File
creation error.

    Command? EDIT

    Command? WHAT GIVES?

    20:46: Command string not recognized.

   "Interesting," Todd said, giggling
nervously.
   "Indeed," Ressler concurred. "Promises to
be a long night."
   I had no idea what was going on. I looked
from one to the other. "System crash," Todd
explained curtly.
   Ressler pulled on his earlobe. "Yes, we
have once again done what the
three-thousand-page user's manual insists is
impossible." He led the three of us into the
command room, where the twinkling LCDs
had frozen solid. He looked at Todd, shook
his head. "I'm mortified. Apparently, one can
simulate a duplicate of oneself, but one can't
actually be in two places at the same time."
   "My fault for keying away blithely. What
about the Report Gen?" They looked
through the two-way mirror. The printers
were drifting dead in the electrical current.
"And Payroll?"
   Dr. Ressler scratched his head. "Fairyland."
   "The long chunk it had already finished?"
   "I think, friend, that as things stand, we'll
be lucky to rebuild the Master File without a
cold reboot."
   Franklin whistled. "Well! I'll take a good
system crash over a crossword any day.
That's why we're working for the
military-industrial complex in the first place.
Right?" The two fell into flowchart,
Holmesian deduction, tapping panels,
toggling switches, volleying terms, injecting
patches, and cross-referencing their way
through the massive metal-bound manual
with masochistic relish. As I couldn't
contribute, I was forgotten in the intellectual
excitement of the fix. They were an unlikely
pair, never more at ease with one another
than at this crisis moment, with a hundred
essential financial trails teetering on the
brink of the ether. In the unreal solitude of
their shift they were at peace, cut off from all
others. Even I was at best a registered alien.
   I went and sat in the lunchroom, glanced
at the day's paper, which Franklin no longer
shredded. I sat quietly in the dark, trying to
recover that spark I'd felt on receiving my
first introduction to programming. Within my
lifetime, we'd built the first prototype animal
capable of behaving like any other—the
universal simulating machine. The complex
behavior of Todd and Ressler's computers
floated on a sea of self-organizing ands, ors,
and nots: a circuit-medium of living
language. Strange slippage: language itself
was the computer; metal and silicon were
just ways of marshaling the syntax. If the
driving language were properly designed, it
might provide a complete, enumerable
description of everything there was. Not just
a description, a semantic table that animated
itself. I tried to formulate, without sufficient
vocabulary, the odd, momentous identity at
machine level of information and instruction.
Every "Thus it came to pass" harbored a
secret, equivalent, "Go ye, therefore." One
of the great, isolate, alert moments of my life.
   In a while, Franklin came to find me.
"Uncle Jimmy was right; I should have asked
the charming Ms. O'Deigh out to eat. Listen
to one's elders; everything they tell you is
right."
   "I'm not going anywhere," I said.
   "It's digital devastation in there. Don't
look! Think the Bosch nightmare of your
choosing. I might get out by nine a.m. If I'm
lucky." He was in no more hurry to go home
than he was to die. He never finished on
time anyway. His second-shift vocation was
innate, self-inflicted, a desire for perpetual
distraction from real work, the thing calling
out to be done. "A shame, too," he said
softly, tilting my head back. "I'd thought I
might be able to visit, tonight."
   "Come by whenever you feel like," I said,
deliberately misinterpreting. "I'll be awake."
   He shrugged; the matter was digital, out
of his hands. He let me out by way of the fire
exit, disabling the alarm behind me. I felt
him, his split, how much he would have
given not to hold back. He restrained me at
the door. "Got an exit visa?"
   "Passwords are trivial," I said, kissing him
good night. The kiss lingered, a
simultaneous interpreter between visiting
heads of state. It contained whole grammars,
self-generating syntaxes. No longer just a
description; it lived like a command.

  Quote of the Day

   In the expansion each day brought, I had
little time for reparations. I visited Tuckwell
one Sunday. Overdue, unable to put it off
any longer, I returned to the old apartment
for the first time since clearing out. I couldn't
believe I'd lived here recently, come back
every day to the settlement. I found Keith in
the posture of eighty million other American
males at that moment: crapped out in front
of the football game. Apparently, nightly
news no longer produced sufficient threat to
satisfy his addiction to event. He was talking
back to the set, also a national prerequisite.
Only Keithy performed the pathetic act in a
style all his own, turning the sound off and
delivering his own play-by-play into the
roarless apartment.
   "Ol' Staubach ran for daylight as if an
entire detachment of Mujahadin were on his
ass. Secondary's fallen apart. The best lack all
conviction. This is the moment when the
entire offensive line must look over that
brink at the inner bogeyman. Of course,
none of this has any bearing on reality. All
Ethiopia could live for a week on these
teams' boiled shoulder pads. You think that
troubles Roger? Nope. The old pro sacrifices
his body, plunges ahead for no gain."
   "Hi," I said. He studied the play. "I came to
say hello. Roger Staubach retired four years
ago after playing eleven seasons,"
   Keith gave me a suspicious look. "How
can you be sure?"
   "Forgotten already? Forty percent of my
livelihood is sports trivia."
   We couldn't talk there; the place was too
loaded. I hauled him out of the apartment,
hanging on to keep him from breaking away.
We ducked into the nearest greasy spoon.
He was in bad shape, worse than I had
thought. We ordered coffee. Tuckwell
floated unopened sugar packs on the
surface of his. He waited, made me ask him
how he had been. At length, he gave me a
manila folder he'd brought along. "Birthday
present." he claimed passively; it wasn't my
birthday. The folder housed a mounted ad: a
grainy aerial photo that Franklin could have
drawn freehand. Photorealism from his No. 2
pencil was child's play.
   On second look, I recognized it as a
vaguely familiar military document I'd seen
reprinted. Tuckwell wouldn't identify; he
wanted audience participation. Given the
time I'd spent on Twenty Questions in my
life, I had no patience for it then. But I'd
long ago learned that when Keith got a bee
up his ass, all I could do was let it
cross-pollinate. I set the image on the table:
a construction site, an empty lot a week
before the circus comes to town. Muddy
ground recently torn up, with man-made
craters filled with water. A few pieces of
blurry equipment, corrugated tin sheds.
Superimposed on the photo was a system of
arrows and Acronymese. I managed to
ignore Tuckwell's pointed silence long
enough to concentrate. Aerial view,
construction site, strategic arrows: I did my
quiz-show contestant stint. "U—2 shot of
Cuba, twenty-one years ago."
   "Very good. Natural-born uncoverer. And
what do you remember about said
incident?"
   "Keithy, I was just nine years old. I swear I
had nothing to do with it."
   "Don't be a Hoosier." We sat and looked
at the icon, knowing that another word
would spell disaster. To self-conscious effect,
he took out of his rucksack an acetate
overlay. He handed it to me, saying, "Forgot
something." I spread the overlay over the
photo, and the scene was transformed. It
now read, in fancy, living color, 40-point
type: "DO YOU KNOW WHAT THE OTHER
GUY IS UP TO?"
   Keith was wired by now. A wrong guess
was worse than none, so I set the composite
image down and folded my hands. He
explained that his outfit had been hired to
free-lance this ad; it would hit the stands in
three big-circulation glossies next month.
His eyes gleamed. "The bastard will sell," he
chuckled. "Apotheosis of vending by fear.
Paranoia—our supreme erotic desire.
Everyone secretly adores having his worst
nightmares orchestrated."
   "I thought we bought things we liked."
   "Wake up, lady."
   "Who's the client?" I asked. "What's the
product?"
   "God damn it, O'Deigh. Who in hell cares?
Haven't you figured this game out yet?
Nobody sells products. They sell slogans."
   He was right: I thought of all the times
patrons had asked me to identify forgotten
commodities by dimly remembered sales
pitches. The best display in adland, the ne
plus ultra of mottodom, was; "The Best
Motto Money Can Buy."
   We stared at the reconnaissance,
pretending to sip at our tepid, distracting
narcotic. I could stand it no longer. "A
beautiful lettering job. The layout's nice.
What would you like me to say?" I had come
to try to be kind, but was not prepared to
find kindness so messy. I could think of
nothing to say that would extricate us.
   But I had misread Keith—flunked the
economics of compassion. Before I knew
what was happening, he was hissing at me,
"You want me to quit my job? Make some
difference? Go chain myself to the fence at
Lawrence Livermore?" He began racing
along a mental tangent angle I could not
intercept. "You think I don't know what's at
stake? You're the one; you don't have the
slightest sense of what we're up against.
You, with all the facts. You won't sum them
up. Look at this." He smacked the photo
with a violent backhand. " 'Twenty-one years
back.' You still haven't the slightest idea
what we're looking at."
   I knew I was looking at a triumph of
late-day, calculated despair. I knew the sort
of product the photo promoted, the market
distraction we have inserted between every
desire and its itch: the ultimate bottled
water, a salt elixir that creates more thirst
than it gratifies. I'd heard him deliver the
same speech when we lived together, but
never so distraughtly, never with such solid
supporting evidence.
   The waitress's hovering maddened him.
On the woman's third return he said, "You
want us out of here? Why not put a taxi
meter in these booths? Or I can leave a
bunch of quarters on the edge of the plexi
here, and you can come by every ten minutes
and pick one up." He was pacing in place,
poking the slots on the napkin holder,
squeezing the mustard pump, spindling the
straws. I took his hands and held them
steady, more wrestler's pin than old flame's
cradle. He turned on me, gave me the most
menacing smile I've ever seen: "You still
don't know the secret word here, do you?
You think the issue is apocalypse? The
missiles are nothing, dear heart. No-thing."
He looked at the photo as if he'd forgotten
what the issue was. "How you supposed to
take arms against something like this?" His
laugh was desperate, falsetto. "Picket?" His
voice popped, like a teenager learning to
drive a standard transmission. "The product
is electronic mail. The advertisement is a
finalist for a national award."
   I knew that such things existed. But I'd
never taken them seriously. "How? It hasn't
even run yet."
   "Novelty is all. These folks are on top of
things. I have to fly to LA next month,
because..." He looked at me with caustic
pride.
   "Because the awards are being televised."
   "Who's the sponsor?" I risked. Keith
cackled.
   "Brought to you by the folks who left you
sponsorless." He breathed, clearing an aisle
down the minefield between us. "Thing is, I
could use a stunning, statuesque, killer
beauty in black elbow gloves to drape over
my arm." He waited until I could no longer
accept gracefully. "Care to help me find
one?"
   I took him home, where he began
communing with the remote control before I
was out of the room. At last I asked him
what I had come to ask, a question no
answer could satisfy. "Keithy, will you be all
right?"
   He shut the sound off and stared. "Why
did you move?"
   I manufactured something about room,
adulthood, self-reliance, the need for
perpetual experiment. I didn't try to explain
that I was after the one thing I already knew
would not be left me at the end: what it felt
like to be alive.

  Books

   I went through my library this morning,
searching for books I might be able to
peddle secondhand A bit histrionic, perhaps.
Premature. 1 still have cash left, if none
coming in. Haven't yet been knocked back
onto necessity. But for a minute this
morning, I got obsessed with the idea of
efficiency, the political economy of plants:
capture the energy I need to build just those
structures that will let me capture all the
energy I need. I forgot for a moment how
inept and archaic nature really is. Grotesque
encumbrance of peacock tails, koalas'
dependence on a single leaf, inexplicable
energy cost of narwhal horn: efficiency
belongs only to ingenious naturalists.
   This morning around ten, I ran out of
sentences. It became impossible to type
another verb. So I attacked my library,
thinking to pare it down. I didn't need both
the Times Atlas and my schoolgirl Hammond;
I could part with the older almanacs; my
Spotter's Sailboats, acquired who knows
where, had stood me in all the stead it ever
would; I could ditch either Bartlett's or the
Oxford Quotes.
   But in choosing between these last I
rediscovered just how differently two
identical purposes could be met and also,
indirectly, the source of the note that first
persuaded me to come out and meet Todd
by streetlight. Running my finger down the
entry "Ears,"
       hath e. to hear
       high crest, short e.
       I have e. in vain
       in e. and eyes to match me
       'Jug Jug' to dirty e.
       leathern e. of stock-jobbers

   I was struck by the ears that were missing.
If not here, then I would need to check one
of those great compendia the rearguard
guerrilla actions against the scattering of
world's word where he cribbed all his love
notes. I found them in "Adam's Curse," by
Yeats.

        I had a thought for no one's but your
     ears:
        That you were beautiful, and that I
     strove
        To love you in the old high way of
     love;
        That it had all seemed happy, and yet
     we'd grown
        As weary-hearted as that hollow
     moon.

   The lines turned up in a superfluous
anthology I'd ear-marked for sale. The note
that had stolen the verses returned to me
intact, and with the note, Todd—more real,
less efficient than I've yet made him out. And
with him, I had what I was after, and my
sentences came back all afternoon. And I
vowed not to sell so much as a single,
redundant letter.



XV

  The Natural Kingdom (II)

  Q: How big is the biosphere? How high?
How wide?
  R.G., 5/12/81

  Q: What is Life?
  E. Schrödinger, 1944, J.B.S. Haldane, 1947

  Q: Is not the life more than meat, and the
body than raiment?
  Matthew (?), ca. 80 (?)

  A. Classification

   Books may be a substantial world, but the
world of substance, the blue, species-mad
world at year's end outstrips every card
catalog I can make for it. If I'm to locate
Ressler's code, I must step back and see what
the nucleotides are after at beast level. But
every system for listing life that I come across
is a map at least as unwieldy as the place
itself.
   In the first nomenclature, what Adam
called a creature was what it was—an exact
lookup table for the living library. But that
perfect equivalence between name and
thing was scattered in ten thousand
languages, punishment for an overly
ambitious engineering project. Schemes to
recapture the Ur-order go as far back as I can
track. Theophrastus classified plants by
human use, not an auspicious second start
to naming, but a popular one in the
centuries following him. Color, shape,
feature, habitat, behavior: successive
methods cast makeshift classification nets
over a school that will not stay still long
enough to be drafted.
   I'd thought the gross macrodivision, at
least, was secure, until I read of unicellulars
neither animal nor plant. A
nineteenth-century patch job, Protista is a
category so diverse it hardly helps. I watch a
fourth kingdom secede: Monera, cells
without nuclei. But subdividing still doesn't
suffice; later treaties draw up five or six
domains. And all this splintering takes place
while I'm still at the top of the classifying
pyramid.
   Descending into phylum, class, and order,
I'm swamped in ever more controversial
flowcharts. Strata shade off into suborders
and superfamilies, overrunning the borders.
Seed-bearing plants alone number 200,000
species. At the third rung, a single class,
Insecta, exceeds three-quarters of a million
species, with thousands more added every
year. Tracking these figures for no one's but
my ears, I realize that I'd stopped asking, for
years now, that first question: how many
ways are there of being alive? What is this
place? How can I say it?
   Bat to banyan, bavarian gentian to baleen
whale: I was expelled from childhood the
day that living strategies began
embarrassing me with their ludicrous
profusion. Too immodest, teeming: I could
memorize a hundred species a day and die
not yet scratching the collection's surface.
Species laugh off the most rigorous
hierarchy. My Baedekers to the biosphere,
government offices packed to exploding
with print, strain under the weight of this
wild violation of the paperwork reduction
act.
   A year too late, a life since I last bothered
to ask the only thing worth asking, I feel
strong enough to take on natural history
again. Girlish-strong, discovering that the
catalog can never be complete. Made strong
by desperation at what's come over the list.
However impaired my vocabulary, however
late my start, I must have a quick look while
there's time. Something's happened,
yesterday, this morning, something
threatening the whole unclassifiable project,
changing the rules of the runaway gamble
forever. Something all my reading leads to.
   Here, in the isolation of my books—clunky
classroom translations of the original—I
learn the first principle of natural selection.
Living things perpetuate only through glut.
How many ways are there of being alive? My
answer lies in a block of code programmed
to generate more copies of itself than are
lost to execution. Speciation, fracturing into
every subniche and supercranny, depends
on surplus of offspring in every breeding
creature on earth, the prodigal gene.
   If the volumes are beyond listing, I try at
least to locate life's bookends. How large is
the envelope? Living cells have been
snagged miles high in the stratosphere.
Dives into the deepest sea trench, under
several atmospheres, turn up diaphanous
fictions that explode before they can be
brought to the surface. Bacteria thrive in ice
currents and boiling ripples. I look for
inhospitable places where living things
haven't penetrated. Even in the Sahara's
desiccating winds, 4 percent humidity, and
33°C daily temperature swings, scrub dots
the dunes, roots descend fifty feet into sand,
grains swarm with microorganisms.
   North of permanent freeze, caribou run in
herds, rabbit and tundra fox find growth
enough to gorge on. Extreme south swells
with seals, krill, birds. Inland Antarctica, the
least habitable place on earth, has its
wingless insects, lichen, mold, even two
flowering plants that wait the narrow
window of weeks when they can colonize
this waste. Living membrane can withstand
the absence of energy: nematodes have
been kept for days close to absolute zero
and thawed out happily.
   Newts requisition caves, go pink, lose
their eyes. Lungfish solve the formidable flux
of tidal flats. Seeds carried in the intestines
of migratory birds convert virgin volcanic
island. Life lives even inside other forms of
itself. Large mammals are walking bestiaries
of fungi, mites, fleas, bacterial colonies. A
single square inch of my skin hosts ten
thousand cells of one bacterium alone. Life
survives even my killer city. Dozens of
houseguests rustle my cupboards, spread
across the shower curtain, bless my bed, raid
a refrigerator designed to deny entry.
Marsupials knock over my trash cans at
night. Peregrine falcons nest under the
Verrazano-Narrows.
   Some variant of the self-rewriting program
succeeds everywhere. Imperialism lies at the
heart of my classification problem: life is as
particular as each locale it has a foothold in.
Any nomenclature I consider founders on
the cartographer's one-to-one-scale solution
to "How many places are there?" The
program ports itself to all four corners,
stopping to seed every intermediary, driven
by the universal firmware kernel buried
inside it. Nothing exceeds like success.
Excess of issue. Surplus of offspring. More
applicants than vacancies.
Overproduction—duplicate, superfluous:
waves of generations testing themselves
against the landlord. The milt of trout turns
whole streams milky. Shrimp are hauled from
the ocean in solid blocks. One male
ejaculate—on the swings in a dark
abandoned playground—releases 300
million half-lives.
   I'm convinced of an infinitely moldable
instruction set. Shape may be an artificial
classification, but how many forms can
duplication take? What range of phenotype?
After long abstinence, I rediscover the
organic paradox, the extremes of living
design. Blossoming chaos: a rough estimate
of chestnut proteins runs into the tens of
thousands. But no algorithm, however long,
begins to describe how this tree branches.
   Radial, bilateral, transverse; symmetries
that change over a life; radical asymmetries.
Sea shells unfurl by Fibonacci. Horn, bark,
petal: hydrocarbon chains arrange in every
conceivable strut, winch, and pylon, ranging
over the visible spectrum and beyond into
ultraviolet and infrared. Horseshoe crab,
butterfly, barnacle, and millipede all belong
to the same phylum. Earthworms with seven
hearts, ruminants with multiple stomachs,
scallops with a line of eyes rimming their
shell like party lanterns, animals with two
brains, many brains, none. Trees whose limbs
root, whose roots blossom, whose leaves
.become needles, beakers, flesh traps,
detachable emigrants. Animals that expel
their organs to eat, that— split down the
middle—become their own Siamese twins.
Organisms that bud, divide, cross-pollinate.
Sedentaries that sprout free swimmers that
mate to make sedentaries. Things that breed
once and die, that birth perpetually even as
they sleep. Females that grow up to become
males. Males that convert to females in hard
times. Dwarf males that live in the bellies of
their mates. Males that bear young.
Hermaphrodites.
   Extremes in size? I find a figure for my
own class: weight difference between blue
whale and pygmy shrew. My desk
encyclopedia says that Balaenoptera
musculus reaches 600,000 kilograms. Suncus
etruscus, on the other end, must eat
constantly to keep up its gram and a half.
The largest mammal is 400 million times
heavier than its smallest cousin. And there
are creatures 400 million times smaller than
the pygmy shrew, smaller than the
wavelength of visible light, detectable only
in the scatter of electrons. Several thousand
could fit inside one human blood cell. Giant
sequoias, excluding the immense roots, are
three and a half times the longest whale. The
Great Barrier Reef is longer than Europe: a
composite mass of two hundred species of
polyp a fraction of an inch long, a living
superspecies spreading in sovereign
continent visible from outer space.
   Genomes range from a few thousand base
pairs for the simplest self-replicating element
to a few billion for humans. Genotype
spread, less extreme than phenotype ratios,
is more dramatic. The length of the program
does not express the ripple effect of
increasing complexity. The entire genome of
a bacteriophage—so simple it only just slips
into the most liberal definition of life—
could be printed in a book the size of a
grocery-store romance. Yesterday, I thought
it would be only a matter of time before we
mapped out the entire program of such a
creature. Today, I discover the feat is already
years old: Sanger etal., 1977: the complete
5,375-nucleotide text for the X174 virus
deciphered. The simplest-known, perhaps
the simplest-possible living program, but a
universe beyond the most complex
inanimate matter. Nine proteins long, the
viral bible is written with an ingenuity
beyond the most sophisticated human
hackers. The sequence coding for one
protein hides the sequence for another, the
way the phrase "a lisp in a chromosome"
embeds the name of a leafy green.
   How much more complicated can the card
deck get? My molecular research only begins
to hint. Bacteria trap energy, metabolize and
manufacture compounds, sense their
environment, go dormant indefinitely,
synthesize their own enzymes, Xerox
themselves. Their leap beyond viruses is
larger than viruses' from inanimate
compounds. Larger than the leap from my
amateur's notes to Ressler's knowledge.
   I read how cells develop distinct nuclei
and organelles, acquire the trick of mashing
other cells and recycling their parts. I
struggle with an unthinkable threshold: the
formation of limited partnerships, shared
responsibilities. You float, you sting, you
prop, you flex, you digest: we feed.
Geometric increases in complexity:
anagenesis exists. Something rises, flies in
the face of entropy. Not better or wider or
finer fits; bacteria can already live locked in
ice, hot springs, even stratosphere. The code
simply learns to do more with the place.
   The arrangement of cells into
bureaucractic corporations takes me two
tiers above X174, itself nine proteins beyond
my comprehension. I move into a mystery
uninterpretable even in outline. Form—the
ravelins of a starfish, the rococo redundancy
of crabs— reveals itself as mere vessel for
behavior, infinitely more varied. Evade this
stimulus. Fly in this formation. Migrate at this
moment. Build this burrow. Train your
young.
   The message, which at the low end of
taxonomy began as a simple impulse toward
excess, learns to communicate, first to
constituent parts, then to coordinated cells
within an organism. Up a second
slope—classes, orders, families of
behavior—the text learns to pass itself
between organisms. One more minor
magnification lights upon language—a
newcomer in the garden dashing off
transcripts, elaborate travelogues to no one.
   Maybe I'm not congenitally adrift after all. I
watch a videotape of the famous gorilla
Koko reading a children's book, signing
learned hand-words into the empty air.
Signing the way I scribble here, for an
audience long gone. These notes, my
evolving, catch-all phylum, live and die,
propagate their own excess. I arrange them,
perpetually revising, inventing writing as I
go, assembling a classification system large
enough to name what Ressler already knew.
   How high is the biosphere? How wide? I
list degrees and kilometers. I'd do better to
steal from Wallace Stevens; classification,
after all, is just a record of neighboring
plagiarisms. "Life consists of propositions
about life." Shape and behavior are guesses
at the place where they've been set down.
Eons-long accumulation, the organism itself
is only a theory of what it might still be. My
hyperactive classroom screams out its
answers, constantly recanting, amending,
reaffirming, anything but silent and
archived, fired by the same single fact that
keeps me revising. However many
un-classifiable ways there are of being alive,
there are infinitely more ways of being dead.

  B. Ecology

   Death too, at the heart of variety. Every
message I turn up whispers it in code.
There's only so much to go around. The
splintering catalog rushes after the same
circuit of available energy. Not all miracles
make it. Each excess program copy is shaped
by limit. Checked by scarcity, populations are
pruned in constant edit. And pruning makes
the garden proliferate. Death is the mother
of experiment.
   The earth is a differential
engine—gradients of heat, cold, dry, w et,
fat, lean. Some terrains snicker at all hope for
a meal; others rain continuous free lunch.
Even this asymmetry shifts. Currents churn
up cold; mountains buckle, wear down in an
era or two. Seas recede; poles reverse. The
pool is played on a table so warped that
players can either shoot or wait for a change
in the rules.
   The game, I figure out, is to figure out the
game. My runaway catalog's every
proposition is about the prepositional
calculus. Two strange succulents, one
African, the other Arizonan, converge by
distant routes. Each is a lab transcript, a
probe of local conditions. Living diversity
maps the diversity of available space. The
race for the curve of best fit fractures at
every rapid into an alluvial fan.
   I pose the naif's Q: Which of these million
unclassifiable experiments is the most
successful? A first, satellite glance gives the
hat tip to my own chromosome set. Five
billion, from Sahara nomads to Antarctic
scientists. Flexible, omnivorous environment
shaper, top of the food chain. But almost
upon arrival, it crests in oversuccess, chokes
on its own effluent.
   My second candidate is grass. As
widespread as man, greater in biomass. And
it rarely annihilates its own niche. A good
enough solution to have diversified into five
hundred genera, five thousand species:
corn, wheat, rice, bamboo, sorghum, reed,
oats, timothy, fescue, Kentucky blue. It
encourages others to cultivate it, the sweet,
sugarcane smell of global success. But even
grass is colossally one-upped by Insecta. I
trace a range greater than grass and man
combined. Undivertable clouds, a single
species can outnumber all humans a
hundredfold. And Insecta contains as many
different species as there are humans in
Lower Manhattan.
   Then I discover bacteria. They coat every
cubic meter of the planet. A gram of soil can
contain 100 million. Every cycle required for
life involves them integrally. They have
remained essentially unchanged since
emergence, three billion or more years ago.
They make their way inside every large
organism. The successes of the pyramid's cap
depend inextricably on success at the base.
Their success is the success of the animate
code, the living engine's linchpin. Supremacy
of the sheet of cells spread passively over
earth's surface is measured in tens of
thousands of duplicating tons per second.
   "Success" mutated from Ur-roots sub and
cedere, to follow after. Its hold on my
English mind is a loaded model where B
competes with, bests, and replaces A. The
word warps my research. Scarcity undeniably
demands competition, but living success
does not mean beating out all comers.
Cooperation of ever tighter skeins ties the
web together, interanimates the nets of
success. Emerson came remarkably close for
an American: "All are needed by each one;
/Nothing is fair or good alone." That one I
learned as a schoolgirl. Successful hunters
are not too good at killing, and successful
prey must be pared and pruned.
   The word I need is not "to follow after." I
need another etymology: parasitism,
helotism, commensalism, mutualism, dulosis,
symbiosis. Local labels for the ways one
solution requires another, from the bribes of
fruit trees to the bacteria in my gut. Joint
solutions everywhere, from ants and their
domestic aphid farms to lichen, a single
plant formed of two organisms that feed and
water each other, breed and reproduce
together.
   One remarkable night, snowed solidly into
a New Hampshire cottage, Dr. Ressler laid it
out. "Mimicry is also an interlock. A
snapping turtle's tongue depends on the
shape of a fly. The beetle that borrows the
look of a thorn lives off the rose's solution.
Half a dozen harmless snakes ape the bands
of a coral without paying to produce the
poison. Jammed frequencies of passed
semaphores, real, faked, intercepted,
abused: everybody trafficking on the river
dabbles in this pidgin." His speech was soft
because the night was late, the kerosene
flame revealed the blanketed world outside,
and we knew we were going nowhere the
next day.
   "Every animal cell is itself a contract. A
primitive cell may have co-opted a bacterium,
enslaved it as the first mitochondrion, a
genetically independent cell enclave. Believe
me, we're all in this together. No cheating
this economy. The books must balance. No,"
he said, breathing, his face obscured by the
lamp, on the far side of the room where
Frank and I lay touching. "The world is a
single, self-buffering, interdependent
organism. Or has been until this moment.
Individual persistence is not the issue.
Neither is species stability. If permanence
were the criterion, nothing in the animate
world could come close to the runaway
success of rocks."
   I would trade what's left of my savings to
hear his monologue again, to jot down even
a draft of a rough transcript of what he said.
But he and his words have gone the way of
probabilities, back into the loop. Death has
returned him to school. I mimic him now, live
off his solution.
   "Why can't we speak that pidgin more
fluidly than we do? Speak it the way
everything else lives it? The definition of life
we've lived with for too long is flawed. We
presuppose the ability to tell haphazard
from designed. The whole community is
about to go under, pulled in by our error.
Why do we want to revoke the contract,
scatter it like a nuisance cobweb, simplify it
with asphalt? Because we still believe,
despite all the evidence, that the place was
made. And what's made, by definition, can
be improved. But suppose the whole,
tentative, respiring, symbiotic message is no
more improvable than chance. The
superorganism takes its local shape—each
part at the mercy of all others—because that
is the configuration that chance conditions
permit. Design might benefit from human
ingenuity. Conditional fit cannot.
   "Oh, it's worse than you think. Worse for
us. Worse for you two." He looked at us as if
at two crosses in a French cemetery dated a
day after V-E. "Your generation, everyone
from now on, faces the most serious
shake-up in history. Because my generation,"
oblique mention of his departure from
science, "has already killed life for you. I
mean the old definition, the vitalist idea. We
did something twenty years ago that people
haven't gathered yet. It's all mechanism now.
Self-creation. The game has changed. Only
we haven't responded."
   The night was silver and deepest blue.
Outside, in the drifted conifers, owls sat
dusted in branches, their eyes night-wise to
the least run of rodents beneath them. Foxes
scoured the surrounding hills. Tufts of grass
poked above the snow like dangerous
shoals, while rock outcrops were slowly
digested by a two-celled limited partnership.
All the while, underground, below the frost
line, life waited its rechance. That night Dr.
Ressler telegraphed me a part of the genetic
code I just now unfold. All of this soft,
conjoined precision—mutable, always
slightly mistaken—was self-assembling,
self-adjusting, self-nurturing information.
   I thought I had the gist, on that oil-lamp
evening, snowbound. I thought he was
faulting science for letting the gene out of
the bottle, disenchanting the natural
kingdom, turning the impenetrable
magnificence of the ecosystem into spent
anagram. Two years later, alone, with time to
think, I see he was saying the opposite.
We've dismantled the biosphere out of fear.
We suffer not from too much science but
from terrified rejection of observation.
Pattern can produce purpose, but it does so
without final causes. Destination, design, is
a lie stripped off twenty years ago. The only
ethic left is random play, trial and error. We
go on in shock, not yet disabused of success,
not yet ready to save ourselves by looking.
   Hopeless, he hoped that we might
reconvene on higher ground, in an ecology
of knowledge. Learning to hear the
underwriting îune might at last affirm our
own derivation from the theme. Adenine,
thymine, a hundred thousand commensal
genes, owls, foxes, the silver and blue forest
of pines. His hope was simply that learning
the layout of the place, the links—identifying
how matter made its escape from matter and
passed irretrievably through this spreading
gene—might rejoin us to the superorganism
at the source. Life, ordered irregularity,
aperiodic crystal, signal in a field of noise,
required that wonder and reverence, both
coded for, beat out success if anything is to
survive.
   He hinted at a new discourse, a new
definition. But tonight it feels like a recovery.
The only, truly unequivocal success is the
aperiodic crystal itself. Accustomed from
long training to viewing life from the
molecular level, my friend based his hope on
our acquiring an awareness of the explosive
potential of the genome, its implausible
beauty. Anyone with eyes to see and ears to
hear would know that the string is big, an
ample world for expression. And anyone
who once adds up the living number must
act ecologically, commensally forever.
   I read a throwaway bit that, like the last
tumbler waiting to turn over, brings home
the idea for good. Huge stretches of code
called introns—in fox, owl, grasses, lichen,
cabin captives—have no identifiable
function. They've been carried along inside,
a free rider, for a billion years. I suddenly see
DNA as an ingenious parasite, a creature
that has struck up symbiosis with every
scaffolding it has ever invented; organisms
are only the necessary evil, the way DNA has
hit upon to make more DNA. To get out and
see the world. Which is the most successful
strain of life? A defective question, one I
now relegate to the bin of exhausted fits.
Life is the sole strain, perpetually becoming,
a single, diversified proposition that
succeeds altogether or not at all.
   I check the etymology for his "pidgin."
Thought to be an English derangement of
the Chinese pronunciation of the English
word "business." But if this business is a
business at all, it must be a lending
library—huge, conglomerate, multinational,
underfunded, overinvested. Ecology consists
of identifying, checking out, poring over,
marking up, and returning all existing
solutions. Passing them around. Running
down another reference, another key,
another published breakthrough. No
competition, no success, no survival of the
fittest. The word I am looking for, the
language of life, is circulation.

  C. Evolution

   The envelope is as wide as the space
granted by the surplus of generations,
sculpted by scarcity. If anything is behind the
accumulation of variations, it's reprimand.
Constraint and condemning somehow
rebound into bounty. Weeding out increases
complexity, like gravity driving a river uphill.
I can't see it; how can the shake-out sieve of
death create more, when its most generous
judgment is "Not quite"?
   My enlightenment arrives in stages,
unfolding historically, inaccurately, like the
thing it researches. The best classification for
gene anthologies must be laid out on the
axis of time. Darwin induced the whole
before he had adequate foundation.
Evolutionary thought evolved only fitfully,
by pangenesis. The earliest recorded text I
can find already suspects the mutability of
living shape. Anaximander, in translation,
reads like the Origin, 2,400 years ahead of
time. Aristotle blunders up against the
notion, then walks bravely away.
Linnaeus—worlds later—knew; he could
have proclaimed it, incomplete, in rough
outline. But he was unwilling to crawl out
onto that geneological limb until humanity
was ready.
   Two and a half millennia after the idea's
appearance, I'm still not ready. Evolution is
the most explosive deflation of all time— the
capstone of history's steady objectification
of nature. I spend a day of quiet privacy
spelling out how this unassuming model
worked the most radical intellectual overhaul
ever, how this near-tautology supplies the
crucial cog that biology has aspired toward
since its appearance. I trace every step in the
synthesis, recheck, give the go-ahead to
each subassembly. Still the complete machine
lies one step outside credibility. I recapitulate
evolution's four prerequisites in embryo:

     1. Excess of issue. Surplus offspring.
  Seedlings rooting in the nook of an
  I-beam on the fiftieth floor of a
  two-year-old plate-glass skyscraper;
  maggots overrunning a scrap of meat.
  Viruses breeding under the electron
  microscope at Cold Spring Harbor, making
  Leo Szilard rush outside and pace the
  porch of his cabin to calm himself.
     Precisely the state this evening finds me
  in.

    2. Scarcity. Common currency from day
  one: no amount of goods are ever enough
  to go around. Not all surplus makes it;
  none makes good in every case. Death
  hones away, a missed heartbeat from
  home.

   These first two innocuous tenets are
reciprocal. Yet hiding in their sum is the
larger part of Darwin's bugaboo. Too much
divided into too little, and something's got
to change. Some die faster than others, a
conclusion as inescapable as its result.

    3. Variation. Differential dying creates
  divergence. This is my sticking point
  tonight. I make the catch only slowly:
  variation is two-tiered. First: the ten
  thousand wrigglers in a pound of anchovy
  spawn are all different. Trivially individual.
  Even dyed-in-wool creationists admit that
  poodles differ from Great Danes, let alone
  wolves. Man too (whatever the nausea of
  knowing) is not an entity, but five billion
  disparate creatures with different eyes,
  hands, and minds. I fell in love with one
  whose hair, height, voice, fear, and
  protective narcissism made him unique. I
  loved one man distinct from all others, or
  at most, two. Already halfway to
  difference's second tier: the difference
  between Franklin and that anchovy
  spawn. A difference of some
  difference—where all the tempest still
  comes from.

     4. Inheritance. Divergence depends on
  a means of conserving difference. Certain
  individuals in a varying population solve
  scarcity better than others. If their
  advantage is handed down
  disproportionately, that population
  changes. Mendel, a great admirer of
  Darwin's book, inexplicably never wrote
  the letter that would have conferred his
  results to his contemporary. His work, had
  it been communicated, might have shown
  far sooner that evolution harbored more
  than that tautology "Survivors survive."

   Even had a letter been sent, the two great
innovations in nineteenth century natural
science still would have faced that paradox:
more comes from less. Paring away
compounds. Something new derives from
the not-quite, under no more enlightened
guidance than annihilation. The rub starts in
that antithesis, conserved difference: the
ability accurately to perpetuate lapses. To
preserve infidelity faithfully, it has taken Dr,
Ressler's death and Todd's variation on that
theme for me to understand that the word
"variation" itself, like "nihilism" and
"ineffable," is among the best of Dr.
Ressler's perpetually sought-after one-word
contradictions in terms.
   The resolution of the paradox that
Mendel's unsent letter would have both
clarified and compounded did not come
until the demonstration that genes were
nucleotide sequences. A rogue protein,
synthesized by a slight variation in the
master base string, was inheritable. And
every variation across the spectrum—fish,
fowl, lichen, redwood, redhead—is born in
divergent protein. Characteristics stay intact
from one generation to the next, but only
within a margin of error. A few capriciously
altered intervals produce a new tune, a song
with crisp shocks of familiar difference
hiding in its four notes.
   Species' diverse qualities slip down the
world's gradient unequally. The specific
gravity of a place settles the trait-spread into
new statistical parfaits. A forbidden secret:
the Bible itself is versed in the linguistics of
breeding. Only, scarcity prunes more
efficiently than any artificial breeder. The gap
between Chihuahua and Great Dane is
negotiable; the same features are visible, just
remixed along a sliding scale. A theist might
concede microevolution and still not throw
creation itself to the dogs. But variation has
a wilder trick, tweaking the quantitative so
far that it kicks out something qualitatively
new—wolves and sheep from the same bolt
of clothing.
   In sexual reproduction, rearrangement of
parental haplotypes produces a genotype
different from either, although cut from the
same constituent stuff. If all the carriers of a
characteristic fail to reproduce, that trait is
lost. But otherwise, it's a closed system,
however unexplorably large. Alleles mix to
create unimaginable variety, but the species
material remains essentially unchanged. I can
rearrange my furniture in countless ways,
resulting in a surprise decorating scheme for
every day I knew the man, but no new
furniture ever enters my place.
   Speciation, on the other hand, seems to
contradict Mendel's perpetuated genes. But
at molecular level, I trace it to a replicating
system complex enough to suffer turbulence,
to err. Something new can come about
through recombination or mutation. I now
have enough molecular biology to find the
source of genetic novelty baldly assumed by
Darwin: a G grabbing a T in its negative
filament instead of its proper C, a sequence
of nucleotides pinched Out or an intruder
taken in and the whole program can change.
   Terrifying, destructive anarchy, bumping
blindly down dead ends and back alleys,
when shaped by destruction, can shoot
living things into undesignable places.
   One changed nucleotide can profoundly
alter the function of the protein it helps
synthesize. The size of evolutionary steps,
the exact scenario for speciation, is still
debated. But all variants on the purposive
molecule are hazards of evaluated chance.
Without molecular mutation, there would be
no amendment, no evolution. And yet, most
bizarre to me of all, mutations are almost
never beneficial. A message, carefully crafted
over time, is altered at random. The text will
almost certainly suffer, if it remains
intelligible at all. The introduction of noise
into a signal is much more likely to garble
than improve. Failure is lots more probable
than anything else going.
   Typing too late at night, I begin to insert
letters that distort my words diseasterously.
Rereading, I piece some alterations back into
partial sense. Only an infinitesimally few
typos—the lucky comma that leaves a
sentence more comprehensible—will
produce clean, let alone enhanced final
copy. Most swift kicks to my bum radio wreak
havoc on its components. But once every
few decades, I improve the signal. Mutations
cause cancer, stillbirth, blindness, deafness,
heart disease, mongolism—everything that
can go wrong. Yet faulty copying is the only
agency for change. Random tinkering, the
source of all horrible mistakes, remains the
"hopeful monster," the Goldschmidt
variation.
    We walked once in the drifted snow, the
three of us, on a day written off, lost,
abandoned to the world. Dr. Ressler, against
the white background, speculated about the
implausibility of those snow tracks, the
creatures that made them. "Birds surely don't
possess compositional sense, musical
volition. They sing; that's all. A species' song
is taught by parent to child. But every so
many generations, something is lost in
translation. A child muffs his riff, mislearns,
wings it. If the mistake—highly
unlikely—works a better attraction, this new
melody will be taught to more chicks than
flock average, and in time the twist becomes
status quo. Insertions, deletions,
transpositions: gaffs ratified or panned in
performance. A species might, over
considerable time, whistle its way from a G
major scale into the Goldberg Base."
    Life doesn't spring to new complexity. But
small bugs, fed back into executing
procreation, produce wrinkles, differences
that are honed into new profiles of spread
and fit. Precursors emerge blindly; purpose
itself erodes out of chance. At bottom, no
cause: only the life molecule, copying or
failing to copy. What good is a blip that
doesn't yet function? Some good; even a
fractional lung could keep a fraction of
tidal-dried fish alive fractionally longer.
Lungs are not revealed or inevitable. They
are arbitrary inventions, reified in
experience. They are postulated, fitfully,
across immense pools of genetic potential,
invariantly inherited. Or mostly invariant. Life
consists of propositions about chance by
chance.
    In the interplay of scale between variant
population, selectable individual, and
occasionally stray gene, I find counterpoint
enough to create a trio sonata rich beyond
all design, exceeding even his hero's
compositional ingenuity. All this from that
hobgoblin Evolution, that drunk trapping
the world into listening to its rambling
shaggy dog story full of fabrication, revision,
gaps, imploring every so often, "Correct me
if I'm wrong."
    I trace the steps, the developing embryo
recapitulating its own evolutionary history. I
follow the observations and inferences,
mirror the young man step by step, a canon
at the fifth, at a quarter century's distance.
His very brain must have been electrified by
the nearness of creation. I see Ressler and
his love, twenty-seven years ago, listening,
lying on his barracks floor in the dark, as if
the danger in the notes will not notice them
if they only keep still. The fifteenth variation,
replication by inversion—the great, halfway
watershed—completes itself as they lie in
silence. A question, framed by the initial
canonic voice, descends frightened down
the scale ladder. A measure later, the answer,
predetermined by its complement, begins an
awful, mirror rise.
   For the first time, unmitigated minor, as
bitter as a belated gift of roses from an
unfaithful lover. Sorrow creeps in, rich,
expansive, and beautiful, discolors the set at
the midpoint. This slow, inevitable seep is a
surrender from which there is no recovery.
Acute cut of chromatic, harbinger of
half-steps. The meandering question,
answered severely at the fifth, tripled by a
bass that tries to preserve the sarabande by
desperately introducing passing accidentals,
combines in harmonies more unforgiving
than any until late this century. The life
molecule's hovering nearness threatens to
sweep over the man I look for, obliterate
him.
   The bass falters, then fails to translate the
Base into distant minors. It capitulates,
lapses into the despair of part-writing
freedom. The canonic lines cross, impossible
for my ear to disentangle. The question
begins a long—excessively, over-and-again
long— terminal descent into obscurity,
broken only by a last, four-note, densely
pitched, failed attempt to lift itself before the
final fall. The answer, constrained by
transcription to rise note by note, continues
to do so, long after other motion stops,
winding up somewhere without footing, in
the far reaches of unsupported space.
   The variation ends. Ressler and his love
untangle their parts, the silence growing as
oppressive as their finally fleshed-out
understanding of just how many
permutations of the four basic steps—G, A,
T, C, is it?—life is condemned to examine,
organize, experiment with over time. They
feel the delicious, sickening thrill of
evolution—lost, not just in its cold,
mechanistic causelessness, but in the
operation's oppressive size, its ability to go
on innovating stray variations pointlessly
forever.
   I hear that forsaken minor tonight,
canonically, at arm's length of three decades.
I hear the awful, magnificently patient
structure of the Darwinian revolution, more
shattering than the sum of its molecular
evidence. The reduction of the once animist
world has thrown the human spirit into
tailspin anxiety, deprived it of soul, except
for the soul's distress. Convinced of the
facts, I still cannot accommodate, make room
in my heart for indifferent statistics. Even
accepting, I am as mythless, as bitterly
stripped as those who deny the evidence.
   Dozing in and out of sleep to talk radio, I
hear a recent poll claiming that a bare 9
percent of Americans accept evolution. Yet
this debate—amazingly still raging—about
the origin of wealth beyond conception is
irrelevant. It doesn't matter anymore whether
a fraction of the race splits off, chooses to
return to a child's Eden. It doesn't matter if
91 percent of my countrymen continue to
insist that species were created by father, so
long as the entire planet instantly unites in
acknowledging that they are, right now,
being destroyed chaotically by child.
Conservatively: several thousand species
extinct a year. Instant, universal
acknowledgment is impossible. In the
hundred acres of rain forest destroyed each
minute I write this, the earth loses species
not yet even described in the catalog.
   The arbitrarily of our origin cuts us adrift,
slack as a severed marionette. In this pivotal
moment of development's first dissonance,
we are too stunned to see that we are
driving the life crystal back into inertness,
erasing the rare hypotheticals it took
excruciating convolution of chance eons to
propose. The situation is hopeless, huge,
advanced beyond addressing. Why do I even
bother to put this down? No reason. The
same reason the gene in me keeps up its
random postulate.
   "The universe was not pregnant with life,"
my friend Monod writes, "nor the biosphere
with man. Our number came up in the Monte
Carlo game." The entire, endlessly
expandable text, "the replicative structure of
DNA: that registry of chance, that tone-deaf
conservatory where the noise is preserved
along with the music," is a fluke lottery we
are losing, rubbing out by the minute.
Awful, chromatic awareness fills me with a
curatorial resolve. "Think of it," another
friend once said. "The proper response
ought not to be distress at all. We should
feel dumb amazement. Incredulous, gasping
gratitude that we've landed the chance at
all, the outside chance to be able to
comprehend, to save any fraction of it."

  D. Heredity

  In the last, delicious twist, the width of the
restless species catalog depends on the
ability of traits to persist in stillness.
Evolution is the exception, stability the rule.
Variation depends on a larger invariability to
begin its trip from home. Procreation is not
creative per se. Sex is easily accomplished by
anyone with a high school equivalence
certificate. I did it myself once, with help. The
resulting product, except in exceptional
cases, is a rearrangement of existing
qualities. Innovation lies beyond even the
most conscientious parent.
   My mother bore three children, low for the
baby boom. She arranged to interleave them
by sex, feeling a good mix to be better for
development. My father, bravely
self-educated, lectured her endlessly about
the X and Y chromosomes, how sex
determination sat in the male's gamete; she
had no say in the matter. She replied, "Yes,
dear," and went about sleeping on her left
side to make a girl and her right for a boy.
The idea that the left ovary produced girls
and the right boys had been passed down in
her family for generations. No controls, no
sample mean. The children were all the
empirical evidence she needed. My father
calculated the probability of her black magic:
one out of eight, impressive but not
conclusive. My mother offered to make it one
out of sixteen anytime my father was man
enough to try.
   Now they're both dead. The constituent
commands that assembled them—voice,
intelligence, even those aggregates of
obstinacy and superstition—are cut loose,
alleles still intact in daughters, ready for
another experiment, another
change-partners. What exactly is lost,
destroyed, with an individual's death? Just a
permutation put to rest. A combination,
devastating, never to be reassembled. Its
elements remain: eyes, voice, mother, father.
   Meiosis, necrosis: the arcs of the ancient
cycle of recirculation I'm caught in for good.
Both carry on, mesmerized, churning out
tireless rearrangements on the first little
nitrogen, methane, lightning spark. Carry on,
despite long since filling the entire surface
of the earth with velvet and scum, as if some
fabulous combination were just around the
next chromosomal bend, waiting to be
revealed. But there is no revelation. Only
endless surplus versus harm.
   To the population, the gene, birth and
death carry no last word. Only in the chest of
the next of kin does that partnership make
any inroads. Slow, conservative, migratory.
Once, a colt, I spoke that language. I've
forgotten it all, the years I spent hungry and
astonished, nights by flashlight over the
illustrated encyclopedia describing
mysterious, interlocked systems—water cycle,
nitrogen fixation, circulation of blood, food
chain. Winter weekends, whole summers out
in the woods, in empty lots, in our immense,
dark backyard, examining the scat of rabbits,
catching bizarre electrical arthropoda in jars,
convinced, sensing firsthand the terrible
expanse of the place.
   I remembered it this morning, to ruinous
expense, so long after first elaborating the
thought. It suddenly was not enough to
rehash natural selection. I had to go put my
hands on the gene, on evolving population,
invariant heredity. I knew it would cost, that
my carefully guarded nest egg would suffer. I
boarded the inbound, not knowing what
part of the unclassífiable, branching catalog
I was after, but knowing that the biome was
midtown. I found myself on the stairs to the
Met, but could not bring myself to go in. Not
without the one I once arranged to meet
there, should we ever be separated.
   Instead, I walked back through the living
park and on to 53rd, the Museum of Modern
Art. Time to see how Brueghel had evolved,
survived, passed down to my own
generation. All morning I discovered again
that every observer's notebook, every act of
seeing even the harshest, most politically
indicting, alienated, abstract, cynical acrylic,
is a frightened, desperate, amazed
recapitulation of the natural kingdom. More:
an effort to mimic it. Always inexhaustibly to
recombine, to classify.
   I stood in front of Paul Klee's Twittering
Machine, a created thing at once both
mechanism and inexplicable bird. It had
been so long since I'd looked at anything
but genetics that the sleight of hand seemed
crammed with associations. I thought of
Emily Dickinson's secret reaction to Darwin,
five years after the publication of the Origin.
Split the Lark—and you'll find the Music.
Loose the Flood—you shall find it patent.
Now, do you doubt that your bird was true?
   On the train back, I knew it would have to
be poetry for me, as well. I scribbled my fllle
de Klee on the back of a MOMA flyer:

            star start itself seeds blueprint
         climb: egg alone and only gear for
         eatrock lichen or unlacing umbel
         veil, chance, the sole mode
         assay-able: tumult of twittering
         ovation is all word forward can
         enlist to move embryo to ember, or
         drive cold scale from first bird.

  It smacks of effusion and will embarrass
me by next week. It contributes less than
nothing to my understanding of Ressler's
aborted bid for love, discovery, the Swedish
Sweepstakes. But as poetry, it doesn't have
to be good. It only has to contain a testable
guess about being alive, the
incomprehensible ability.
  Back in my apartment I remember two
things I long ago lost words for. The
paradoxical breakout of life from mere
preservation to runaway self-threat depends
on two subtle phenomena. First, information
represented in a certain way emerges as
instruction. As in the gene, all observation is
a command to observe. Dr. Ressler once
showed me how an ordinary drinking glass
is a data structure informing liquid where to
go. The information in the life molecule is a
similar vessel, informing itself how to
describe the condition it finds itself in.
   Second, small initial changes ripple into
large differences. The constricted initial
alphabet of four letters produces a journey
many million species long. The only
astonishment great enough to replace that
ectomized maker: all this proliferation results
from one universal and apostolic genetic
code. The fantastic diversity of outward form
doesn't begin to anticipate the leaping,
snaking, wild logic that develops in
response to the far more complex internal,
intracellular environment. Once DNA began
to speak, not only the carrying medium but
the message itself was susceptible to
evolution. Even to approximate that
polyphonic, perpetual baying, I'll have to go
back down, square off against the living,
purposive program incorporated in the
enzyme.
   Tonight in History—12/9/38: A coelacanth
caught off Africa, a third of a billion years
after it was supposed to have vanished from
the earth. Not the first extinct animal to
return from living fossil-hood, nor the last.
Far stranger things are afoot. Quaggas
rebuilt from the residual ghost in their zebra
cousins. Frogs cloned. Talk of reviving
mastodons from single frozen cells. I sit at
my desk, overwhelmed but still among those
throwing their insufficient efforts against
the unlistable world.
   I know nothing about the place. But the
nothing I've ascertained has already
changed everything. I learn that I live in an
evening when all ethics has been shocked by
the sudden realization of accident. I must
ask not how many kinds of life there can be,
nor even how there can be so many kinds of
life. I must learn how, out of all the
capricious kinds of cosmos there might have
been, ours could have lucked, against all
odds, into that one arrangement capable of
supporting life, let alone life that grew to
pose the hypothetical in the first place. How
quantum physics allowed room for a
rearrangement capable of learning the
outside chance hidden in quantum physics.
How this tone-deaf conservatory could
produce the Goldbergs.
   I review the record of care we've given a
spark we once thought was lit for our
express warming. I feel sick beyond
debilitation to think what will come, how
much more desperate the ethic of tending is,
now that we know that the whole exploding
catalog rests on inanimate, chance
self-ignition. The three-billion-year project of
the purposeful molecule has just now
succeeded in confirming its own worst fear:
this outside event need not have happened,
and perhaps never should have. We've all
but destroyed what once seemed carefully
designed for our dominion. Left with a
diminished, far more miraculous
place—banyans, bivalves, blue whales, all
from base pairs—what hope is there that
heart can evolve, beat to it, keep it beating?



XVI

  12/6/85

   Our Dearest O'Deigh, Out of some
terrifying collective unconscious, the phrase
"Greetings from the Old Country" nags at
me, although this place is one continuous
novelty from Cisalpina to the Afsluitdijk. Do
you remember that game show where
contestants were sent into a supermarket for
three minutes (our nation's chief
contribution to world culture—shopping as
a competitive sport)? Europe is exactly that;
I've got this checklist of three-star Schatz
chambres and a rail pass, and I can't come
home until the art treasures have all been
looted. Vermeers in the Rijksmuseum. Speyer
Cathedral. Brueghels in Brussels. Haven't
enjoyed myself so much since
butterfly-collecting days.
   I can haul body around faster than mind
can follow—the goal all civilization has
striven for since the Golden Age. I haven't
words enough yet to tell you what I've seen.
My teacher says (at least I think she says; all
transactions are in Dutch, with scattered
cloudy regionalisms) that words make up for
lack of grammar better than grammar makes
up for lack of words. The language methods
here do no conjugations, declensions,
paradigms. Only reading, speaking, and
restoring sense to texts by supplying missing
words. ("Vocabulary," beautifully enough, is
woordenschat: word treasure. OE's
word-hoard?) Only a little touring and I've
discovered how beautiful Dutch is. On those
city maps set up at strategic places for
out-of-towners, the highlighted red arrow
reads: U bevindt zich hier. You find yourself
here.
   Here's where I find myself. I now know
that a bighearted person, in het Nederlands,
is small-hearted, that the Holy Ghost and
your basic pigeon roosting in the carillon
bear the same name,that pijp uitkloppen, to
clean out one's pipe, is to form a
geslachtsgemeenschap, a "sex community"
(the official term is even funnier than the
euphemism. But then, "intercourse" is pretty
funny at etymological level). Lenen is both to
borrow and to lend, making it hard to
translate Polonius. I've had my first Dutch
dream: I stopped a wimpled woman in a
begijnhof in some forgotten Belgian town
and asked, "Is dit de weg naar de zestiende
eeuw?" Roughly: Show me the way to the
Renaissance.
   I've brought my en face French partway
back from the dead, although you'd be
surprised at how little Racine contributes to
an exchange in your basic Wallonia
pâtisserie. In the tongue of the dreaded
Hun, I begin to take a special delight in
imbedding clauses and dropping fat,
daylight verbal runs at sentence end. I can
now read museum tags anywhere in
Northern Europe, although a disturbing
number are already in imperial Engels.
Toward our Frenchified Anglo-Saxon, the
whole continent seems to have developed a
strange love-hate. Everyone wants to speak
the language of power, but secretly, not far
below the surface, runs the widespread
conviction that ieder Engels is verschrikkelijk.
   Thus a little protective coloration helps.
Not that I can always pass. I asked directions
from a díke-obsoleted fisherman up in
Enkhuizen, and following his directions to
the letter, found myself halfway out in the
Zuider Zee. I had to know where I'd gone
wrong, so I retraced my steps, found the
fellow, and told him exactly what had
happened. 'You followed the directions
fine," he told me. "We always send you
Germans into the water."
   My tutor assures me that research shows
that a core vocabulary of a thousand words
will get one through 75 percent of ordinary
conversation. Unfortunately tempera, patina,
pigment, brushstroke, etc. tend not to be
among the core one thousand. I have thus
become adept at compound neologism. I
learn nouns daily, but the arbitrarily of
gender makes any decent American yearn for
the syllogistic cleanliness of COBOL.
   Everything I do all day depends on
conversion. Exchange rates, distances. The
visual road sign codes—supposedly in
Universal Icon Language—are more
inscrutable than I imagined. I swear to God
there's one indicating that something up
ahead is about to put your vehicle into a
condition of religious bliss. I take no joy in
driving a car, even one dangerously close to
the kind Shriner clowns pile out of, in any
country where mirrors on building walls
assist you to take otherwise blind 90-degree
turns at 90 km/h. But I am, at least, marginally
better off than the Midwesterner on the
Autobahn who kept wondering why he
couldn't find this place Ausfahrt on the map.
   All my primary sources are written in
literary figures nobody has used for
centuries. A greater competence than I'll ever
possess would still not admit me into the
real private clubs. Believe me, every
backwater here has its secret speech. The
more common the item, the more likely that
the villager two kilometers down gives it a
different name. That good Dr. Browne was
right: jabbering is a hieroglyphical and
shadowed lesson of the whole world.
   The hardest code to break out here—not
recorded in any grammar—is greeting kisses.
Every dorp has its own dialect. Do I kiss this
woman one, two, three, or four times? Do I
start on the left cheek or the right? Do I kiss
this guy? They don't put this stuff in the
Michelin. The exchange frequently leads to
jarred eyeglasses and bruised noses. There's
a similar dance to find a common
denominator language for conversation.
Observe clothes, ported books, license plate.
Try a few mumbled words. I overheard two
men in the Liège (Luik, Luttich) railway
station conclude, after halting negotiation,
that their strongest common language was
Latin. A Belgian friend's advice: if you need
to address someone in Brussels and can't tell
whether to use French or Vlaams, speak
English and walk away healthy.
   The whole EC is one, huge, macaronic
verse. Who invented all these ways of
saying? Does the proliferation of dialects
come from innate dissatisfaction with any
one set of tools? Or is it just another case of
Us having to distinguish ourselves from
Them? Even folk songs propagate like
viruses. When one is struck up in a café, I
can generally sing along, although I must
substitute my cowboy stanzas for the local
lyric. In any case, I'm proud of what modest
Dutch I've gotten beneath the knee (under
the belt). I manage a bit like that pooch I had
as a child, who could sit, lie down, beg,
jump, roll over, and play dead, but not
necessarily to the right command. I know just
enough' to get me in trouble with the
"strange police," who did not believe that
an American could really be writing a thesis
on a four-hundred-year-old Flemish
nonentity. They were on the verge of
quizzing me on Rubens's dates before
giving me the visa.
   Herri hangs around my neck. I still can't
say I know the first thing about the man. I've
spent weeks in million-volume libraries, half
a dozen first-rate art history collections, and
no end of regional stadhuizen, and have
turned up only the tip of already familiar
evidence. Bles's life span remains, despite
Yankee ingenuity, framed in question marks.
I've nailed down an account of Patinir, with
a suggestion that Bles was the older man's
nephew or cousin. Fault Flemish; neef means
either. What to do when one language has
two words that the other smears into a
single concept? Modalities continue to elude
me: two kinds of forgetting, living,
believing, remembering. Two distinct
becauses! My attempts to read primary
sources are humbling lessons in how
enormously my own thoughts are bound in
native lexicon. Whatever I call a thing, it is
never quite what I've called it. It's miraculous
that my mother tongue allows me to realize
even that much.
   I've come across a source that confuses my
man's dates with his cousin-uncle's. (I
remember, two years ago, your take on those
art-jargon letters fl. "How beautiful; it
doesn't matter when the man lived—he
flourished around 1542." Believe me: half the
charm of this European supermarket raid is
imagining what you would make of the
Leuven town hall.) Met de Bles, or Blesse.
Topknot. How's about Middle High Dutch:
with the Blaze. An accident of health left a
livid mark across his forehead. Or I could
fake a theory: Blesse, a bleeding in of the
French wound. Where's my co-conspirator
when I need her?
   You want to know whether I have any
new angle on the paintings themselves. The
most convenient conclusion would be that
met de Bles was actually a pseudonym, a
composite of student panelists from Patinir's
workshop, an art factory at least partly
documented. I've hunted down a dozen
panels. In the paintings themselves (all that's
left of Herri, now that his blaze has faded),
nothing but the trace of competence—a
jagged line, an apprentice, conventional,
narrow use of color, a formulaic
compositional sense. None is more than
marginally memorable except the occasional
pastoral arrangement with, somewhere in
the background, the chance
catastrophe—the painted town in the
nonchalant process of being lost.
   Particularly skilled in the depiction of
silent crisis. His single gift is to make flame
realistic but still lazily surreal enough to be
congenial. Trivial, banal, quotidian
cataclysm. He is no accomplished graduate of
the previous generation—no Memling or
Metsys, skilled in the unsurpassed stillness
of reality. He holds up no perfectly
burnished fidelity to the look of surprise. In
verisimilitude, his eye is shaky. If the panels
have any resonance, it comes from their
perch over invention's chasm.
   I've spent hours in front of each,
acclimating, learning to read him. I have
hypnotized myself in the process; his panels,
undeniable Patinir derivatives, grow vastly if
intangibly different. I stare at them, like
Leonardo trancing out for hours on his
spittle, until they become more than
masterpieces—immense, jagged, Mani-chean
battlegrounds between the real and the
imagined. His expertise at depicting the
imminent catastrophe waiting patiently at
panel edge, tucked away in back rooms of
huge art repositories, are scrolls that have
waited four hundred years to tell one sleepy
museumgoer that he hasn't the faintest idea
of the apocalypse waiting in the front foyer.
   I obsess on the idea that it is up to me,
FTODD, to translate these sirens into terms
my contemporaries can comprehend. I sit
down to write, fired with conviction, but can
get no father than "He became a master in
Antwerp by 1535," before I bog down again
in qualifications. Crippled by the
clubfootnote. I attempt to make a case for
his minor, desperate genius, and wind up
trotting out that he was said to have
enjoyed a friendship with Dürer, as if only
this dubious acquaintance with the great
Nuremberger might legitimize my fellow.
What can I say about him that would be
above dispute? That he may have ended his
life in Ferrara, in the blessed South, some
time around 1555.
   The only indisputables are the fantastic,
allegorical landscapes. The handful of scenes
I've been able to find—after the years of
authenticity debates have taken their
toll—contain no stamp of flamboyance,
heartbreak, or eschatological revelation,
nothing to interest the armchair aesthete, no
announcement for anyone except the
ambivalent, diverted, ex-night-shift
computer operator with two degrees from
impeccable schools and two overextended
credit cards. Man and work are
unremarkable, irretrievable blurs— the
perfect topic, in this age of reductionism, for
a dissertation.
   You loved the scenes, didn't you, when I
first showed you them? A flat-out
fascination with the threat, soberly
maintaining that the only thing to do when
the world begins to end is to stand aside
and paint it. Uncover it. Name it. Your belief
in the ability of words to intervene, even
after intervention failed the three of us,
keeps me here. The inarticulate love I have
found for you, the chance that I might in
some impossible future arrive on your
threshold, paper in hand—
   Every morning I wait for the museum
library to open, and every afternoon I ask
what the point is. I swear to God no one
could possibly care. The utter irrelevance of
foliage technique in the face of acid rain or
Afghanistan or the ozone layer, the great
foregone shoot-out: paint versus proof.
Remember what the professor said, just
before we committed to data-terrorism? "A
talking cure must be transacted in the
illness's own idiom." Who speaks art
anymore? At its golden apex, it was already
stilted discourse, a kind of leftover court
lingo. Even at the supreme Quattrocento
moment, the fablespeech of pictures was
doomed by the creeping success of new
prose. The year Herri was born, if I commit to
one of the question marks, Leonardo
invented the parachute. Herri (safe to
assume) was born into the same zodiacal
configuration as Magellan. The year Herri
turned seven, astonished Dias, emerging
from a storm, found he'd been blown off
course around the Cape of Good Hope. New
worlds, no longer the province of the
land-scapist.
   His fate was sealed early, apprenticed from
youth, perhaps against his will, to a painter's
factory, where he gained a modicum of skill
in elevating ordinary countryside to
travelogue. But no technique imaginable
could match the travel reports then coming
in. Even before Herri served out his
apprenticeship, Columbus had made the
most important miscalculation in history. By
the time Herri flourished (your face, in front
of me as I write the word), Europe was
grudgingly accepting the absurd conclusion
that a world existed between Here and
There.
   Let me be blunt: he was in the wrong line
of work. That's why I sought him out, the
patron saint of fallen-away technographers.
He should have been on shipboard from the
start. What he lacked in skill of hand he
might have made up for in his demonstrated
capacity for mental leaps. As fabulous first
mate, he might have told Columbus, after
weeks of skimming the north edge of Cuba:
"This is just pitiful prologue. Think, man.
Think big." Instead, the only chance of
exploration life threw his way came at night,
in the security of Antwerp's back streets,
under cover of dark, annexing uncharted
female isthmuses.
   New skills, new materials, the sluiceways
of travel thrown open: the man lived on the
leading edge of an age of altered maps,
radical overhauls: Copernicus's De
Revolutionibus, apocalyptic showdown in
the Church, Peasants' Revolution,
Mercator's Most Exact
   Description of Flanders. When a man can't
himself taste the main enterprise of the day,
it wrecks him for secondhand excitement. I
speak as one who picked up just enough
computer competence to get his name
paraded through the papers for twenty-four
hours.
   Still, in Herri's brief flourishing, even an
archaic skill provided vicarious thrill, a whiff
of the spark that charged the old
atmosphere. The printed word was suddenly
everywhere, proliferate, vital, and at last
affordable. Even art seemed sufficient, rich
beyond imagining. New perspectives filtered
up from Italy. Genres opened; vistas grew
ambitious. Once over the threshold, it would
never again be enough just to match the
effect of the previous generation. All the
attention once lavished on the past was now
requisitioned by the unrealized future.
   But possibility is only born in a blaze.
Dross must be burnt off. The doors at
Wittenberg got the stigmata, and there was
no turning back. Art, once healing, was
enlisted in the longer war. Painting, if bolder
than ever, was no longer an authority on the
question it had posed since the first cave
scratchings: How did I come to be trapped
here on earth, at the mercy of strangers? For
a long time, pigment had given the answers.
Now panelists were as bewildered as
anyone.
   Jan-o, if it weren't for the collector's
thrill—the chance to sample the mythical
auras of Ghent and Delft, cityscapes whose
views I have wasted my life studying at
second hand—I could not keep slogging
pointlessly. Every day, between the novelty
of new vocabulary and the art treasure map,
I am consumed with the whole debacle, how
badly I abused us. I miss you intensely, in my
sleep. I miss the professor. I need to
talk—one more late evening with the two of
you. Why have we had to keep apart this
year? Tell me exactly: what was it we tried to
pull off? Oh, I know the motive, the virtue
we made of necessity. I've kept the clippings,
the accounts of how we walked away
scot-free from the corporate mauling we had
coming. But I've seemed to walk away with
nothing except the unmistakable sound of
missed calling.
   Me and my Antwerp master: no better
response to looming contemporarily than to
set up on a distant hill and catch the
conflagration in oils. While his fellow guild
members inhaled the whiff of combustion,
broadening their palettes, taking on the
awful, widening world, Herri staked out a
modest line of sight, reworked the Wallonia
horizon—the same three-star valleys I
traveled yesterday—until it became a jagged,
escapist kingdom, more seductive because of
the lazy threat hanging perennially about it.
Perhaps he was the first modern, after all.
   So it is with me: guiltless, evasive
sightseeing. I take the cathedral tours,
sketch in galleries until the guards chase me
out, rediscover the tissue of simile that
passes for linguistics, learn enough Flemish
figures, of speech to pore over obscure,
outdated books: waste, in short, whatever
gifts I might otherwise have staked against
the ascendancy of nonsense. Oh, I've turned
up my share of objective fact. I've even
indulged in small doses of induction. But
data spell out so blessedly little about the
man that I am free to spend my days in
speculation. The principal attraction in
choosing Bles in the first place. His panels
were manageable; I hoped to knock out a
quick study, earn the degree in two years. At
the time, it struck me as courageous, to turn
my back on the present—to proclaim, in
those faraway mellifluous blues of a milky,
indifferent sky, an anodyne for current
event, a technique, if not astonishing, at
least caressing, resonant enough to salve
without shame.
   I write you, seated at a desk by a medieval
stone casement, breaking from a paragraph
to stare out on an enclosing countryside
that, in its essence, Herri himself once
studied. The place I stay at tonight is a town
like any other: a tuck-pointed, half-timbered,
bacon-stripped, step-gabled Flemish village,
circa 1500. It nestles over an expanse of hills
like a case of cowpox. The view is succinct,
following the familiar formula developed by
Bles's predecessors: foreground in brown,
submerged sea-green middlescape, and
background of serene mineral-and-linseed
blue, wandering out of the available frame
and off the edge of the visible spectrum. A
lily pond of slate shingles and mansards, the
ideal place to produce a minor student piece
about a minor genre painter specializing in
minor fires.
   Easy to imagine him looking out the same
window, breaking the scene into constituent
geometries. He still searches for the gnostic
equivalence that will turn the tricks of the
painter's toolbox, the daub-formulas for
producing a bird, tree, or frightened stag
into a vessel able to unleash, from the dark
cave of mind, the animate Original. Science is
still in infancy—unweaned from vital
essences—but already urging the skepticism
of measurement onto the senses. Paint
enjoys its last few years in the lost kingdom
of parable before its exile. Years when the
eye for the last time, alarmed by the
discovery of what actually lies outside the
window, still has half a retina full of the
afterimage of preexistent places.
   Bles's era is the last to hope that even a
journeyman drafter might assemble, from
egg, oil, and slats of hardwood, a graphic
equivalent of essence erupting in halftones.
Painting, for the last time, is not a process of
application but of stripping off, revealing
underpainted layers that had been covered,
steaming the glaze from between the eye
and the form-doused world. Painting and
science, for a brief moment before Bles's last
serene panel, are after the same key: that
book—tucked away in the stacks of a
secondhand vendor the way a master of the
next generation will tuck a nativity in a
hidden village corner—that will prove to be,
under its binding, the forgotten alchemist's
almanac condensing, in one pass of the
alphabet, the whole roll of landscape, the
view from the lancet.
   I trace him, embroidering the sketchy
sources, in his pursuit of this index to
seeing. I see him, up before six for
perfunctory matins, waiting the descent of
journeyman's grace. After a spartan
breakfast, he sets to work in suggestive
silence. There is no time like the early day for
observation. He works alone, in the middle
of this Brabant scene, out of reach of easy
communication, so no man can say exactly
what, if anything, he accomplishes.
   His day's big meal comes on the stroke of
eleven: fish and fowl, sauce, fruit, nuts, fresh
bread to stave craving. After this heroic
undertaking, he naps, to release dreams of
the unity of all living things. He wakes,
spends what remains of afternoon (marked
out in the intervals of new mechanical
clocks) in repetitive labor, waiting for the
visual trick that might unlock the safebox.
Lost to work until dinner, revising and
undoing the morning's base. Now, if ever,
with a few scrapes of the palette knife, he
might turn a competent genre piece into
dangerous prediction, the living syllable that
pierces opaque nature.
   Dinner is light, as light as
breakfast—modest indulgences at day's
ends, falling away from the midday feast in a
curve that science will formulate three
centuries later. There follows the pursuit of
women by night, alluring, unattainable
shapes in stone passages, shadowy
countenances rendering each shiveringly
desirable. He enchants these midnight nuns
with a thousand verbal inventions,
seductions ranging from blunt frontals to
coy flanking maneuvers. None works so well
as the invitation to sit for a portrait, a
misrepresentation as blatant as any, since he
has long sworn off studies of the face, too
important a subject for his own passing
competence.
   Those nights when he fails to procure he
is left alone, recalling that this is how he
likes best to end days, in the tallow-glow of
winter. Waking the next morning to the
blessings of solitude, he throws himself
again into the schedule of early production,
midday gorging, afternoon nap. And further
evenings in pursuit of that other whom he
has never found, who exists only and
precisely nowhere.
   He follows this invariant routine for a year
or three. But at the instant when habit
becomes inhibiting, he upends his carefully
cultivated schedule, reneges on debts,
chases off his few friends, sends them away
berated. He liquidates stock, leaves his rent
in arrears, and packs off to another town,
another time, taking nothing but his private
formulae and all the panels he can carry. He
chooses a direction and begins walking.
When he grows hungry, he stops and sets
up shop. He puts his head down to work,
eat, nap, describe this new landscape, find
out its fires, rousing himself from routine
only when awakened by a surprise ambush
of forgotten fields from another century.
   He flourishes before an ornate gate
unequaled in history. A few years after
Gutenberg, a few before Shakespeare,
unrepeatable era of giants: da Vinci,
Erasmus, Michelangelo, Rabelais. All a fellow
condemned to marginalia can do to avoid
the sink of afternoon is turn back to the
morning's unfinished panel, betray no
barometer of hope except what eye can
observe, hand mirror.
   This, the implicit advice of his paintings, is
what I search for in his biography. But a
paragraph into exegesis and I gaze again
out of this stone casement in the medieval
attic I have sublet. On second glance, the
countryside is overhauled. All vestige of
Brabantine gothic dissolves, and I am in
another small town, just as sleepy. The
window fills with a different formula for
depicting houses, churches, the
tucked-away, unobserved miracle. Bles
becomes, say, Thomas Hart Benton. The era
of infant exploration, its flirtation with
parachutes, cadaver dissections, and the
sextant gives way to the International
Geophysical Year, scientific discovery in full
flower, the year of my birth. The moment
when that centuries-long investigation,
begun on Bles's doorstep, converges on a
complete theory—the revelation that
experiment has spent four centuries
preparing for.
   Dropped into this alien landscape of block
apartments swept by overhead satellites, my
journeyman is forced to abandon painting.
He takes up the vocation of the
times—cashes in palette for vernier gauge.
He has no choice but to go on working at
the same scene, his eye still after the
underlying mechanism that infuses life with
its surprising form. Work remains a question
of catching, in one sweep, the quiet
neighborhood crisis that knowledge always
circumscribes. The world by mid-twentieth
century has expanded unprecedentedly
toward that watershed moment when it will
comprise nothing except measure. Met de
Bles, symbol depictor, takes up a profession
still obsessed with eavesdropping on the
world's interior monologue, but wildly
enlarged in power of material manipulation,
closing in on the symbol table itself.
   You see, I start with every intention of
cranking out a chapter of Bles's bio, but
after a few subordinate clauses, find myself
deep in Ressler's. Obsessed, reticent,
demure, brilliant, intense, driven, asocial,
truculent, lonely, vulnerable, abandoned:
the professor, for all we got from him,
remains a thesaurus of contradictions.
Ressler, at my age, lived for one thing only.
To unravel the complexities of personality at
its source. Being alive is a one-shot affair: a
window, small, blurred, but miraculously
permitting a cramped, flattened,
two-dimensional, distorted view of the
terrain.
    Before the perverse thing closed for good,
the professor wanted to find the first
landfall of the full map, the rule that dictates
his generative unfolding. To name, translate
his own breathing, his own infolded instinct
for love from out of the formal language of
chemistry. He is the one I want to flesh out.
Why did he let us so far into his life, only to
hold us at arms' length? Nature's decoder,
who thought that if he could just get to the
generating tape, say what "A" meant, then
"AT," then "ATG," he would sniff the
source, the panel's panel, and could then let
the window close peacefully over him. But at
bottom, laid bare, solved, the tape read only,
"Obsessed, reticent, demure, brilliant,
intense, driven, asocial, truculent, lonely,
vulnerable, abandoned." The old thesaurus.
    Being in the same room as Ressler, just
sitting with him in silence, was like filling my
lungs with the air of galleries. The chamois
cloth of his eye sockets, those pressed
seersucker suits no one has worn for twenty
years emitted unfinished labwork,
interrupted notebooks, glimpses under the
electron microscope rendering the familiar
mechanics of life alien, less survivable, more
unlikely than any oil. I know more about Bles
than about the man we sat with.
    Think what it must have felt like, to be in
your twenties, to rip out of yourself in
cerebral caesarean the formulation of an
idea two thousand years old. A confirmation
so simple, so unexpectedly whole that the
only available response was militant,
head-bowed humility. Then think the
unthinkable. At the moment of confirmation,
when the connection screams into proximity,
you stumble onto another discovery, one
that will disperse without trace the instant
you formulate it: cracking the program does
not mean exemption from having to follow
it.
    Because Ressler too erased himself from
the guild records, I am free to elaborate.
Even as he rushes the unavoidable outcome,
he gives in to the trivial joy of being
twenty-five, more soaringly ill-considered. He
can do nothing but savor, as long as
possible, that temporary, timid kindness of
doomed courtship. What exactly, at this
watershed, does she seem to him? She
manages to look beatific without being
ludicrous. She commits to precious little on
the surface. She limps through labwork, by
turns bright, sultry, competent, demure,
vivacious, dumb. Joanne Woodward's
contemporary Oscar performance as a
multiple personality has nothing on this
woman. Her body's message alters itself at its
base: in her step, arrogantly light, she
conveys, over the general noise of the lab,
the campus, the apocalyptic meander of 1957,
that all manner of things will be well, now
and in the enzyme.
   For his part, he sinks to a parody of
reconciled Goodwill. The continued
explosion of American Vanguards, the
detonation of Soviet nuclear weapons in the
Arctic—the whole market of current events
fails to flap him. This vestigial, infant
happiness is a chemical sluicegate flushing
him with unbuffered ions; a thickness in the
winter air, his youth triggered by irresistible
stimulus—the mechanism he had hoped to
overcome by translating.
   Admission discounts nothing. The
moment flushes him. He feels the rush, no
matter what the equation. He thinks of her
all day, wants nothing more reprehensible
than to spread over her surface like a
roosting flock. He willingly gives her every
chance to waylay him, to wreck him for what
he is after. If the worst should turn out true,
the contemptible clarity of his love will
redeem everything. The full force of
luteinized want—his body conversing with
its own attraction—leaves him more
laughable perhaps, but no worse off than
others, who must also dodge missiles, fend
off conflagrations, name the crisis of
knowledge. No worse off for his petty
attempts at—call it care. Under the
circumstances, isn't even care born in sexual
aggression sufficient and worth savoring?
   Remember the night when we confronted
him point-blank with the dossier you'd
assembled—every mention of him ever to
appear in print? Confirm me: his shoulders
slumped imperceptibly, he looked off and
cleared his throat, willing to answer
anything, but only this once. Remember how
he shrugged, a stream of sympathy,
invention without cleverness? The slight
catch snagging his words wrung all our
ingenuity out of me, the pride of authorship
I'd felt in his friendship. The valence of the
fellow we'd been trying to ascertain became
real. Ressler's fingers gripped a card deck,
some pointless data-processing task he was
about to shove into the hopper. His
knuckles turned transparent; his veins and
cartilage were the color of an oil-slicked
puddle. A thousand cells in that hand split
and replicated in the time it took us to speak
again.
   He'd set out to uncover the principle
uniting all animate matter and discovered
something simpler instead. Ear to the
clicking telegraph key, to the message
coming across the wire, the sequence he
heard the answer to "What hath God
wrought?" was "Who's asking?" Lost to
science the moment he cannot put into
words, into chromosome strings, why he
loves this woman. Reductionism supplies no
reason except her clothes, random,
mismatched, pastel; her graceful
gawkishness between the legs; the absolute
lightness of her limbs moving against gravity
in all directions at once; her globed cheeks;
her wide, scared child-eyes; her visits, quick
and brief as accident. No specific part but
gives her an uncaring, lissome urgency,
wholly beautiful because wholly ephemeral.
He is condemned to loss, from that day
forward, never quite able to return to the
text he had been seeking, for no reason
except that she has made him realize, at cell
level, that the only message worth receiving
will be intercepted, garbled, lost in
translation.
   He must have seen this before, this
slipping off, recalled it from the histories,
even as indifference came over him. I'm sure
of it. He felt the slow unfolding, long before
he showed any sign. He had all the motive in
the world to keep from disappearing: the
experimental method, all but resting in his
hands, a trick for reading the banished
original. All the magazines predicted results.
Couldn't he have lasted another year?
   But he knew the work would get done
whatever happened to him. If he did
nothing, shut down his tabulations, spoke
not another word of his insights, any of
countless, equally talented researchers
would have his method in a year or two. His
year produced a focus of scientific talent
unparalleled since Herri's. An all-out
marshaling of forces cutting across
disciplines had already begun that
grade-school recruiting process that would
brush the two of us. Sputnik wasn't the
catalyst, for my money. His 1957 was just the
first of a stream of IGYs.
   Before we said goodbye, the night we
took our electronically permanent step, he
reprised for me in a few, condensed
measures his own bitter disappearance.
Before we jimmied the packs, he thought it
only fair to pass on to me details I might be
able to use. "What we need," he told me, "is
the code for the synthesis of the forgiveness
enzyme. Self-forgiveness. Forgiveness for
having wanted what we are born wanting."
   Not that I can now hope to ask you for it,
after everything, any more than Herri can ask
me to forgive him for not being Van Eyck. He
and I were born wanting the same thing,
and neither of us will ever come close to it.
We will never make an Arnolfini Wedding or
a Hunters Homeward in Snow. Herri sees,
through the stone casement, that he will be
forgotten, demoted to shadowy myth,
despite his sole biographer. And with his
unrealized landscapes will go that
compulsion to imitate, to name the crisis
lingering over the indifferent town.
   It has become night as I write. Soft
chiarascuro transforms the casement view
into interior: has any painter ever made such
a composition? The graveyard shift in an
airplane hangar full of infernal calculating
machines and peripherals. The machines
themselves are as serene as Titians. But
underneath the skin seethes a public chaos
of crowds, a roll call crammed with as many
encapsulations of misery as were ever
wedged into any last judgment. The
foreground is still blue, merging into a
sea-green midrange nativity. But the
background now takes its tones from the red
of ambulance lights. About suffering, they
were never wrong, the Old Masters. Even the
minor ones. Even met de Bles, or Blesse.
With the blaze. Or wound. You see I am
thrown in over my head, asked to judge this
contest between observation and invention.
All I can concentrate on long enough to
write about is those overlookable almosts in
his aborted landscapes. I wait by windows,
half-maker of the range of creation I'm
supposed to describe.
   Creation is at present limited to exotic
holidays. Not far back, I was sitting in a
buitenlanders language class full of earnest
young Germans when our teacher
announced that there would be no school
tomorrow. Incredibly, the most towheaded
kid asked why. The teacher tactfully
explained that the day commemorated her
exemption from obligatory German. For
Hemelvaartsdag I went to Brugge, an urban
time capsule, where I took part in the
Procession of the Holy Blood. In the town
center, along a fossil gothic-walled circuit,
with the great cloth hall and belfry as
backdrop, comes this procession of
thousands of townspeople in costume,
acting out, along the length of their parade
ribbon, the history of the world from the
Garden to present-day politicos. Animated
time flowed past me on the street, a ritual
that has been going on, unchanged except
for appended length, since 1150. As the
procession ended, each block of crowd
milled into the street, following the flow,
becoming the last, contemporary, costumed
participants.
   Time, static stuff, is reified here. The
granddaughter of collaboration can't marry
the grandson of underground. I heard a
German ask a price in a bordertown
bric-a-brac shop. The proprietor— Common
Market be damned—gave the standard
reply—allusion to the million conscripted
vehicles that aided the Wehrmacht in initial
blitzkrieg and sped the surviving
sixteen-year-olds reeling from advancing
Americans: "Give me my bicycle back and I'll
answer you."
   Time is a place here, a tangible landscape.
Last week I took a day trip to Münster.
Disconcerting: still attached to the steeple of
St. Lambert's, the iron cages where they
displayed the bodies of the Anabaptists. The
cathedral was softly disappointing. It had its
great astronomical clock: Herri's
contemporary universe as flywheel. But I'd
expected something more articulated,
nuanced. A clause and a half into a wall
plaque on the south porch, I realized I was
reading English. Stone from Coventry
Cathedral, given to the people of Münster.
Let us forgive one another as He forgives us.
Caption in two languages, each translating
the other.
   Stupider than my towheaded classmate, I
get no closer to this place's meaning than
porting over. I will never fully "understand,"
because I can never fully "begrijp." The
verbal myth of standing under a thing is as
unrealizable as that of grasping it. I came to
class last week to discover that my
towheaded friend had suffered an auto
accident. My distraught teacher, confusing
my native tongue with the victim's, blurted
out, "Rudy ist tot." That much I grasped,
stood under. She passed out copies of the
death notice, that final declension. We
students spent the morning looking up, in
our wordbooks, the names of grief in
translation.
   It did not stand in the dictionary, but
these death notices make a local
spreekwoord: "He lies like a remembrance
card." For they are always filled with love,
these after-the-fact summaries. Is what I feel
for you at this moment the distortion of loss,
waiting until separation to say it? I think of
you, want nothing more than to see you and
hear your voice.
   Instead, I send you this botched
dissertation draft. This letter may be the
closest I ever come to writing it. You alone
are easy to write to, perfect audience,
someone who will see, in the weak
paraphrase I here throw together, that I am
building my apology— explaining why I
could not become a sketcher in this world.
Now is not the time for drawing. What
limited skill we've developed to describe the
place we long ago consigned to the
laboratory. It may take generations before
we remember how big the world is, how
much room it has for all sorts of observation.
   According to the professor, one single
science stands between us and our address.
Only we don't see the link; we grasp it only
in bits—the pay telescope that magnifies but
constricts, and that snaps shut on your
quarter after a lousy two minutes. Let me
paraphrase the vulnerable Bede: what I put
my hands on is the sense, but not the order
of the words as the man painted them. For
travel scenes, however perfectly composed,
can never be ported from one world to
another without loss. Perhaps neither beauty
nor exactness nor profundity nor meaning,
but something will not go over the bridge
intact.
   The words that might tell me who the
fellow was are no longer the words of the
original. A coat of metaphor between me
and the life I want to write. Words are a
treacherous sextant, a poor stand-in for the
thing they lay out. But they're all I
have—memory, letters, this language
institute. Translation would be impossible,
self-contradicting at the etymological core:
there would be no translation were it not for
the fact that there is only translation.
Nothing means what its shorthand pattern
says it does. Everything ever uttered requires
cracking. So I keep busy, travel, learn some
words.."I will call the world a school
instituted for the purpose of teaching little
children how to read." Full marks for
identifying.
   You may find it as hopeful as I did to
discover that the Dutch for weather" and
"again" are the same. Let me say at least that
I love you, and all other untranslatables.

  FTODD

   P.S. If I were you, I would write me back
quickly and affectionately, an irrefusable
letter from home. Something along the lines
of "The age of Europe is past. That of
America is ending. Get back fast before it's
all over." In the meantime: Waarom hangt je
was niet op de Siegfried Lijn? Roughly
ported over: Why not hang your wash out
on the Siegfried Line?



XVII

  Halcyon Days

   Ressler's write-up is accepted by the
Journal of Molecular Biology. He will appear
as second author after Ulrich. Standard
practice: the glass-washer takes second
billing to team leader. Ulrich edits his
summary liberally. Ressler initially concluded,
"It has been demonstrated that hereditary
information is arranged in unidirectional,
nonoverlapping nucleotide triplets, each
determining a single amino acid in protein
synthesis. Code redundancy may favor an in
vitro method of determining codon
assignments over analyses of base and
polypetide sequences." Ulrich softens this to
"Our results further substantiate the
hypothesis of a linear arrangement, perhaps
with a triplet reading frame." He strikes the
crucial second sentence altogether. When
the red-penned draft comes back to Ressler,
he springs up and walks the paper back
down the hall to the old man's office, using
the distance to suppress the spontaneous
fight mechanism sprung in his body.
   Ulrich shifts in his chair and drops into
placid register. "The write-up is first-rate. But
we don't want to overstate the results."
Ressler volleys halfheartedly: his conclusion
makes no assertion that isn't supported.
"Perhaps," Ulrich holds firm. "But what
counts is not what you claim for your results,
but what they claim for themselves. You
don't want to dictate how to run follow-ups.
That would be..." The veteran breaks into a
conspiratorial grin. "That would be leading
trump."
   Ressler leaves, rebuked but pleased.
Ulrich's tacit advice to play things close to
the chest unwittingly exonerates Stuart for
not yet announcing his even more sweeping
line of thought. In the premature evening of
his office he follows a bibliographical trail,
searching down another experiment from a
pair of years ago. He dimly recalls a paper
with similar elliptical conclusion that could
vaporize the intractable barrier between him
and the last lab step. His concentration for
work is shaken by the hierarchy of ethics.
Ulrich's edit can in no stretch of the term be
called fraud, or even suppression. Yet
aggregate reticence shades imperceptibly
into misrepresentation.
   He has not, under grant or tenure
pressure, recreated results without
resubmitting them to the experimental
apparatus. No; his data are beyond reproach.
He's not even on the hazier ground of
corner-cutting in the name of efficiency. In
school, he worked for a big-name researcher
who occasionally whipped up extra runs,
substantiating more careful trails but
skimping on controls. The accusation's been
made against Mendel himself: the
smooth-versus-wrinkled ratio is too perfect.
But that was something else altogether—the
unconscious influence of conviction.
Another, more troubling imputation against
the monk asks why he studied only traits
that all reside on independent
chromosomes. Did he examine and fail to
report inheritance patterns complicated by
inexplicable linkage that would have thrown
the infant theory in doubt?
   Simplification, paring back the variables,
far from invalidating results, is indeed
required by the foundations of empirical
design. The success of reductionism depends
on measuring and reporting only that bit of
the cloth that can be understood and tested
piecemeal. Ulrich's advice partakes of the
same reductionist pragmatism: let's establish
the part beyond the slightest doubt, before
we speculate on the whole's make and
model.
   Ressler releases this work—insignificant
compared to the catch he now angles
for—from safekeeping. But the question
nags at him. The question of just what he is
or isn't obliged to telegraph to the
competing scientific community masks a
deeper ethical issue, his secret competitive
motive. Easier to tell all, free himself from the
advantage of insight. He hoards the
self-sabotage urge the way his fellow
children of the Depression hoard tinfoil.
   He lets Ulrich strike the summary and does
not press his own extrapolation. Demurring
is worlds away from the most defensible
fraud. It doesn't begin to flirt with
falsification. Even in the continuum between
subjectivity and chicanery, no one would call
it doctoring. But simple selective silence,
cautious calculation itself, carries along, like
an unsuspecting trouser cuff bearing the
free-loading burr of a seedpod, some
particle of self-servance. The nauseating
calculus of survival flashes on him.
Self-furthering stratagems color even that
perfect, informational openness, the
unedited wonder of the most ideal human
pursuit: good science.
   Cyfer has a greater threat to its survival
than entrepreneurism. Circumstance strips
the team of its clearest-headed member. The
train is set in motion on December 19, when
the world weather engine is traditionally in
almanac respite. The day is too warm for
near-winter. The unusual front that releases
the balmy air in the same breath releases a
burst of tornadoes across the belt of
Missouri, Arkansas, and Illinois. They catch
the states off-guard, well past the usual time
of year.
   Ressler has just returned from the retail
strip, where he has bought himself an early
Christmas present. He has taken his last two
untouched checks and a list prepared by
Toveh Botkin and made a run on the record
store. He returns to barracks with two LPs for
every periodical still strewn about his front
room. He assembles a respectable, compact
music library, from Palestrina's Missa Papae
Marcelli to Penderecki's Threnody for the
Victims of Hiroshima.
   He listens, relaxed, alert, despite just
coming off of a triple shift of journal
scouring, article amending, and experimental
speculation. Finding the music precise, the
notes excruciatingly discrete, he decides that
the need for sleep is vastly overrated. The
intensity of music keeps him from hearing
that the long, sonorous, extended pedal
point arising from the continuo of a bit of
until-then-banal Venetian Opera is, in fact,
the Civil Defense horns crying disaster.
Discovering that the piercing tone is not
shook out of his phonograph's paper
speakers, he wonders if he's skipped ahead
to Tuesday, 10:00 a.m., the weekly CD drill.
But days can't have passed: he's still in the
seventeenth century.
   At the air raid's insistence, he steps
outside his shack to scope out the situation.
Unforgettable: the sky has gone a sickening,
Matthew Passion, faulty-Zenith green, right
out of the Crayola box. Otherworldly:
everyone in Stadium Terrace, from infant to
eternal student, streams in column to the
stadium, toting suitcases, pulling Rapid
Flyers full of belongings. No simulation
would bother to be this elaborate.
   Tuning in the radio strikes him as
superfluous. He stares at the sky creeping
toward yellow, making a break for infrared.
The long-expected airburst, most likely
Chicago or old Midwestern rival, St. Louis. At
150-200 miles, a midsized device, as the
papers like to call them, would kick up
enough dust to discolor the atmosphere,
give it this early, dramatic sunset. He goes
heavy at the waist; his knees fold
involuntarily. He crumbles onto his stoop,
watching the refugee crowd fanning toward
Memorial Stadium for an unscheduled game.
Some amazing instinct has gotten it into
these heads to try to save their possessions:
scrapbooks, chairs, an antique doll,
blendors, anything arms can drag or shove.
He considers calling out to the lady hauling
the home tanning lamp not to bother; she's
getting a healthy dose of rays already.
   For thirty seconds it hails, but cuts off
abruptly. The violence of the wind, the
backlash of pressure electrifies his skin,
returns him to a child's awe at one-time
forces. He watches the sky slip to a silver
gray and calculates the airspeed by timing a
scrap of paper tearing across the lawn. A
ten-year-old boy breaks from beside his
hysterical mother in the file and waves his
arms like a crane, shouting: "Run from the
funnel!" His clutching mother snatches him
back, yelling at Ressler as if he were an
abductor. So the cause is natural, not
induced. It makes no difference: correction
will eventually have its out. But spreading
his fingers across the violet grass, he does
feel something, the bulb of skin flaring after
a failed immunity test: gratitude that he may
have a chance to see Jeannie again.
   The stream of evacuees drains to a trickle.
The wind whips to such craziness that he
cannot keep from laughing. In the cusp
moment, he sees the vertical cloud on the
horizon feeling its way, prehensile, across
the harvested fields. He calculates the
number of steps to the relative safety of the
stadium. Even if he'd dedicated his youth to
distance sprinting, the protection of
colonnades wouldn't warrant that
open-field gallop. It's all over except the
virtuosity. He spreads himself on the ground,
facedown, head to the side so he can view
this performance from the edge of the pit.
He sees the outlines of groundbound things
tossed about where they oughtn't be going.
On all sides of the cross hairs where he lies,
physical law defers to easy chaos.
   When it's safe to sit up, he does, slowly.
Stadium Terrace is overhauled with scrub,
branches, trash, furniture, pieces of wall—
no longer the center of the biggest plain in
the world, but a tidal zone of flotsam.
Astonishingly, his tarshack and most of K
block have escaped. He succumbs to childish
disappointment, the one he felt years ago on
seeing the picture of that domed structure
that obstinately survived Ground Zero. Can't
even violence accomplish something
unmitigated?
   He dusts off, grinning at how good his
clothes feel, how wonderful the wrinkles. He
takes himself back inside. He tunes in an
emergency report, running only minutes
behind the event itself. The twisters leave
ten dead across Illinois: a misleadingly small
toll, not indicating the power of the thing,
the lightest flick of Coriolis effect that chose,
this once, to pass over. The tornado failed to
take him by only the narrowest swirl of
turbulence. When the information repeats,
he shuts off the radio. He picks at random
from his new reference set a disk to return
to. Brahms's number comes up: the Second
Piano Concerto. The sound so transfixes him
that he rises to place the unprecedented
phone call: to Botkin, to verify her safety
after the storm. The gesture moves her out
of proportion to its facility. He hangs up,
hands fused momentarily to the phone. No:
he cannot call that other, whose safety
means more than meaning.
   He returns to a piercing, slow 'cello solo,
music too beautiful even to listen to in this
century with a clean conscience. But he
listens. The homecoming of the piano,
demure soloist, is punctuated by pounding
on the door. Outside, it is pitch-black; near
the solstice, that could mean any time after
4:00 p.m. Eva and Margaret Blake stand
shivering together under a quilt feathertick
in the dark. He quickly lets them in.
   "Is Tooney here? Have you heard from
him?" Evie asks, looking about, a timid meter
reader looking for the main. "It's late," she
adds, rebuking not her husband but puerile
nightfall. "He never came home." Ressler
settles her and gives Margaret a can of
orange juice concentrate and a spoon,
sufficient to delight her. He and Mrs. Blake
begin the systematic round of phone calls,
first to everyone on the team, all negative.
Then they try the lab, every office at the
Biology Building where someone might still
be around to pick up phones. No one does.
Only then do they resort to the finality of
police, who reassure them that the twin
cities have reported no fatalities. Last, the
hospitals, who cannot match any injured to
Tooney's description.
   Eva has worked herself into a state. She's
reluctant to return to K-53-A alone with the
child. He insists that they stay with him. Over
Eve's ennervated refusals, he makes up the
bed for them, apologizing for the brutality
of bachelorhood. Margaret is across the
mattress and asleep before he can turn out
the light. He returns to the front room and
his journal pile, prepared to sit up all night,
a trick that has become almost easy. He has
just hit upon an article in a 1955 Nature—one
that, for an instant, seems as catalytic as
Watson and Crick's piece two years
earlier—when Eva pads in, still wrapped in
the quilt. "Can I sit out here with you? I'll be
quiet."
   "You don't have to be quiet."
   "Good. Nature again, I see. You men are
all alike." She takes the volume from him,
thumbs through its thickness, and drops it
back into Ressler's hands. "OK. Ask me
anything."
   Before he can smile, she coils up and
follows the book into his lap. She collapses
like a cut tree, lets out a bleat of anguish,
and balls herself up against him. She is
uncannily cold; he wraps her in his forearms
to try to trap what little warmth is left in her.
"He must be somewhere," he offers.
   Evie stifles a vowel. "Keep talking." She
digs into his leg, a breeding sea turtle
scooping deeper into the beach.
   Ressler pops the clutch for a moment
before he can locate his deep sentence
structures. He begins talking about Tooney
and the tornadoes, the likely scenarios
accounting for his absence. Paralleling in
rough analogy the series turning electrical
current into magnet pulse into paper motion
into air wave into earbone disturbance into
neural network into Brahms, his words of
coded comfort drive Evie's muscles into slack
acceptance. When he runs out of
explication, he goes on filling up empty
space. He talks about how essential Blake's
sensibilities are to Cyfer, his lucid, first-rate
spoiling of half-baked ideas. Tooney is the
one person liked by everyone on the team.
Eva acknowledges this praise with a muffled
sigh. Ressler goes on, explaining how Cyfer
has squared off against the coding problem,
just what difficulties still lie between them
and a map of the nucleotide grammar. As the
details are lost on her and therefore safe, he
lays out the theory of an in vitro solution
just weeks away from gelling: submit the
simplest imaginable message to the coding
mechanism, and see what the enciphered
text looks like. Crack the system by standing
over the encoder's shoulder.
   He stops, struck by the beauty of the thing
he touches. His hands keep working,
rubbing warmth into Eva in ways they would
not dare with the other woman now. Eva has
lost her agitation. He can stop the invented
monologue. But for this perfect audience,
asleep, unable to hear, he recites, "I'm in
love with a colleague of your husband's.
She's as married as you are. Nothing to do
about it. No point." He checks each mark off,
brutally succinct, but he stops short of the
worst: She is a locking template I cannot
shake.
   He wakes up early to the sound of
someone letting himself in. He watches
fuzzily as Tooney Blake enters and sits
opposite Ressler and still-sleeping Eva. "She
was cold and just fell asleep here. Your
daughter is in the next room." Tooney fakes
a suspicious look, speaking volumes,
knowing that Ressler is already hopelessly
compromised. Blake does not wake his wife,
but only sits, staring disconcertedly through
things rather than at them. Stuart asks if
everything is all right.
   "Fine," Blake answers, distracted tone
contradicting him. The monosyllable rouses
his wife, who in sleepy euphoria attaches
herself to her mate. She rises up radiant,
blinking, without a hint of question to her.
The night's anxiety needs no other payment:
they've weathered the worst, already more
than repaired. When the embrace settles, the
space of reprieve gives place to the collective
need for postmorteming. Something Blake
needs to announce, a chance locution that
threatens to change his life. He has this aura
about him, difficult to miss. Blake grabs his
wife by her shoulders, about to launch into
There was a ship.... "Honey," he says,
"something's happened."
   At the moment that the Civil Defense
horns began their Gabrieli, he was across
town, in the stacks. "Somebody has the
whole microbiology library out on loan," he
growls at Ressler, casting accusing glances
about the periodical-strewn floor. "When
the alarm went off, I figured I was already in
as good a place as any other; no point going
from one designated shelter to another. So I
went down to Deck One, instinctively sought
out the subterranean. I'd just gotten into a
cozy study carrel when the power went out.
Pitch-black, surrounded by that maze of
shelves. I couldn't move without banging up
against the 120s. I kept thinking, 'If this is the
end, at least I'm surrounded by books.'
   "After a long time, with a lot to think
about, I tried to work my way to a stairwell. I
found one at last, and after some trouble
adjusting to the steps, I hauled myself up to
the deck at ground level. Light coming in
from the street. Cars shuttling. Life as
normal, except for a few vanished trees. I
groped along the aisles, doing my Theseus
bit, keeping my right hand on the wall. I
found the entrance and yanked the door. It
wouldn't budge. Locked in. I heard the all
clear go off downtown. I waited patiently in
the dark, convinced that if I sat still long
enough, something would happen. Sure
enough, forty minutes later, the lights
flooded on. When my eyes adjusted, I went
to the emergency phone on Deck Five. The
thing was as dead as a mayfly on day two.
The lines must have come down in the
storm."
   Eva giggles, the low, jittery laugh of relief.
"Oh Toon -ey! Locked in the stacks
overnight! You must be a wreck."
   "Strangely enough, I've never felt better in
my life. They'd have to install vending
machines before I'd agree to move back in
on a long-term lease. But I've never spent a
more important night." A comical whimper
from his wife forces him to append,
"Honeymoon excepted, sweet."
   He lapses again into amazed gazes at
various objects about the room until Ressler
clears his throat. Tooney wraps his wife
tighter and continues, "Realizing I was stuck
awhile, I began to see the place differently.
The stacks had always been a purely
functional means to an end. But now, I lived
there. A long night ahead, and the
third-biggest collection in the country to
pass it in. It occurred to me just what the
place contained. Millions of volumes. The
figure, which has always struck me as
impressive, now became staggeringly real. At
first, I got a chuckle going around looking
up everything I've ever published. Then I
began to track down every published
reference about me.
   "It slowly dawned on me that everything
Ulrich, Botkin, or Woyty will leave behind is
locked up in those shelves—their best
insights, the record of how that trace spread
or failed to catch hold. All the noise any of
us has made in this world. I pulled our friend
here's dissertation. I independently
confirmed that he graduated summa cum
laude." He gives Stuart a cuff. "After a while,
the game of deciding which parts of each of
us will live began to grow thin. It was after
midnight, and I hadn't even gotten off that
deck, let alone scratched a fraction of it. I
had ten levels to play on, without the
slightest plan of attack.
   "You wouldn't believe the substance of
that collection. A book-length study tracing
a century and a half of disease among a
single tribe on Mozambique. A
thirteen-volume log of an 1848 botanical
survey in the South Pacific. Photo cavalcades
to performing hand surgery. An
experimental account of chimps addicted to
painting, whose work declined as soon as
they began getting rewards for it. And I
hadn't even gotten out of Biology yet.
   "The words spread in all directions, an
endless, continuous thread. I could jump in
anywhere. Goethe. Glosses on the Koran.
How-to dog sledding. Crackpot theories
about ancient supercon-tinents. Accounts of
Marian Anderson singing the national
anthem at the Lincoln Memorial, because the
DAR wouldn't let her sing it inside.
Watercolors of Pemaquid Point by assorted
artists. I lost twenty minutes to an article
about whether or not Clara Bow had really
slept with the entire UCLA offensive line."
   Blake falls silent, preoccupied, sliding
down the early slope of a syndrome that
could drop off as suddenly as the
continental shelf. Ressler tries for casual
silliness. "We need to rush you to Info
Detox, Tooney?"
   Blake laughs, but nominally. "It's the
world's damn DNA in there. Not to trivialize
tornadoes, but suppose yesterday had been
something more... extreme. How many
died?"
   "At last report, ten."
   "Kick that figure up a few exponents. If
worst-case scenario comes down to worst,
there's enough information in the stacks
right now to rebuild everything we have,
within a narrow tolerance, from scratch."
   "Provided the survivors would want to do
something so ill-considered," Ressler
counters.
   "I'm serious," Blake insists.
   "I am too."
   Blake stands and begins to pace. Margaret
waddles out of bed from the next room,
welcomes her father back from missing
per-sonhood with a nonchalant kiss, and
curls up against her mom. Eva sits at
attention, not quite knowing what's going
on. Nor do any of them. "How much of that
information do I—any of us— actually have a
handle on?" Blake pauses, the question
more than hypothetical.
   To get the man to go on, Ressler answers,
"Almost none."
   "My God, we're reaching the point where
we're stockpiling more information than we
can manage."
   "That's what indices are for," Ressler
interrupts, this time to slow his friend down.
   "But we're racing to the day when even
indices won't help. We're outstripping even
the Index of Indices. New discovery daily,
and we can't even find the damn thing by
this time next week. Go spend a night in the
stacks. We're committed to nothing less than
a point-for-point transcript of everything
there is. Only one problem: the concordance
is harder to use than the book. We'll live to
see the day when retrieving from the catalog
becomes more difficult than extracting it
from the world that catalog condenses. Book
and lab research will pass one another in the
drifting continents of print."
   "What are you suggesting?" Ressler asks.
"It seems a bit late in the day to stop
accumulating."
   "No! We can't afford to stop. We've got to
keep on top of the stockpile. Here we are,
digging in the dirt, turning up shards,
millions of shards, more than anyone
expected to find. But nobody knows what
the shattered vase they all came from looks
like. Whether it's a single vase, or even a
vase at all. What we need is not more shards.
We need to accumulate something else
altogether. Something much wider."
   Ressler doesn't follow this last leap and
says as much.
   "Look," Blake challenges. "Take our own
field. Blown wide open lately. Which do you
think will be more complex: a complete,
functional description of human physiology,
or a complete, functional description of the
hereditary blueprint?"
   Ressler considers the number, weight, and
function of the purposive proteins in a
working body—the countless,
discriminating, if-then, shape-manipulating,
process-controlling, feedback-sensitive,
integrated programs composing the
complete organism. As in the old Von
Neumann joke, he sees at long last that the
answer is obvious. "Physiology is vastly more
complex."
   "But the more complex is contained in the
less complex, right? We believe in the
simplicity of generating principles."
   Some equivocation, some sleight of hand
here. Can genetics really be said to contain
all physiology in embryo? Yet Ressler
concedes Blake's central point, Poe's point,
in that volume buried in the 8OOs. Poe's
cryptanalyst needed three things to turn the
hopeless gold-bug noise back into readable
knowledge: context, intention, and
appropriate reference. A night of
information science has forced Tooney to
confront the full width of that triplet.
"Wife," Blake says, grabbing his matched
half. "Oh, Eva! I'm sorry. Something's
happened to me." This all ought to be
occurring elsewhere—anywhere but Ressler's
living room. Eva's features are smothered in
wonder. She touches her husband's head,
coaxing him into relaxing the cords in his
neck. "It's crazy," he repeats.
   "No it's not," she says, combing him.
   "Friend." Blake smiles helplessly at his
wife. "I didn't plan this." Eva smiles broadly:
nothing you could possibly do will upend
our life. "I may," Blake says, laughing at her
unconditional trust, swinging his head
sideways in disbelief, "I may have to resign
from the faculty."
   Evie coddles him. In a very bad John
Wayne, she says, "A man's gotta do..."
   Ressler refuses to believe the exchange.
"Quit the team? To do what? Where would
you go?"
   "Back to school," Eva says, almost hissing.
Protecting her husband from this outsider
when he is down.
   It's impossible. "You can't. What about
your child?"
   "Who's a child?" Margaret demands.
   Blake mistakes him. "My child? She's in
school already."
   "How will you live?"
   "There's always the Civil Service," Eva
volunteers.
   "Tooney," Ressler says, "you've had a
strange night."
   Blake just laughs. "No doubt about that."
   Anger fills Ressler at his friend's
uncharacteristic leave from realism. "What
will you study?"
   Blake shrugs: the discipline hasn't been
invented yet. "Look, Stuart. How can I
pretend to do science, take apart the
mechanism, inventory all the particulars,
when I haven't even a rough feel for the
sum? I haven't even dusted the spines of a
fraction of the stuff they have shelved in
there."
   "And you never will."
   "True. But I wouldn't mind a rough take
on the big picture. A life of educated
guesses, and I haven't even a clue what
we're guessing at."
   Thus the Blakes commit themselves,
overnight, to hopeless gen-eralism. They
depart, Tooney shaking Ressler's hand
warmly, Evie kissing him, thanking him for
keeping her alive last night. After they leave,
Ressler replays the man's mad argument, but
can find no hook to snag him. He circles
back on Blake's point: the complex can be
contained in the simple. Push past the
deterring convolutions—too varied to
describe—and get to their underpinnings.
Grammar must be simpler than the
uncatchable wealth of particular sentences.
He wants to run over to K-53-A, throw
himself around the man's neck. He has never
been more in need of his teammate's skills.
Never more in need of his neighbor
himself— his solid, dispelling humor. But
Tooney is gone already. Intractable.
   Over the following days, as it becomes
clear that Blake really means to depart,
Ressler gambles everything. He lays out for
Tooney the seminal germ he has stumbled
on. The beauty of the green idea sparks
Blake's scientific residue. His eyes light up at
the walkthrough. He grabs his young
colleague's upper arms, lifts him bodily into
the air. "You can do it." But the next
moment he returns to his new calm,
encourages the kid more soberly, and again
declines to stay.
   Blake doesn't even wait for term's end. He
leaves in midweek, departs from Stadium
Terrace, forever jumps the tenure track. He
asks Ressler to take over his classes; "Mostly
a matter of administering finals." They leave
him with a dozen pieces of furniture.
"Another long-term loan." They give him a
forwarding address—Seattle, Eva's mother's.
Eva kisses him courageously goodbye, on
the lips, wet with hypotheticals. Tooney
shakes his shoulders. "After boning up, I
might come back to the lab in good faith
someday."
   When it comes to saying goodbye to the
child, Ressler can take it no longer. He may
see her again in this life, but never again like
this. Process will have gotten her. The
pilgrim soul will be lost in adulthood. He
tries to say, "Got any poems, for the road?"
but cannot get it out. Margaret tugs at his
shirt cuff, spins on one heel, and disappears,
giggling. He will die without raising a child.

  Script

   Who knows how long his envelope has
been there. I haven't checked the box since
Thanksgiving. I'd given up looking, achieved
a degree of self-sufficiency. My only
bottle-messages lately are from the power
company. Checking for mail was once my
day's high-water mark. But recently I've
taken to clearing out the box only often
enough to keep the utilities running.
Suddenly this: the message I'd written off. A
simple letter wouldn't have been enough.
It's a longhand manuscript. I knew instantly
it was from him: his runic glyphs. The packet
carried the same exotic monarch as his card,
pasted all over with stickers pronouncing
"Per Luchtpost." Why now, when I'd almost
edited him?
   I tore open the packet, knowing the
weapon was loaded. I was a wreck from the
first rambling paragraph. Even now, twice
through the text, my organs scrape like
tectonic plates. The sprawling poetics are
unmistakable Todd. But someone else is in
there too, someone I've never met. A dozen
minutely, perfectly hand-lettered pages, both
sides, and I still can't tell where he is. That
landscape: the place he used to map out for
me in whispers. But somewhere else too, a
globe away. "Why have we had to keep
apart this year?" "Not that I can hope to ask
you—" Who is this? A male I once knew,
stripping at a safe distance?
   Plaintive Baedeker gossip, swapped
cathedral stones, death notices. Frank on the
ropes. Writer's block, foreign language,
death of a classmate, the panels themselves
after years of reproductions: tempera
homesickness for the world. I make myself
immune to his contents. But two paragraphs
in and I hear him confessing something I
never realized. He'd been on the ropes from
the moment I met him. Easy, sociable, pelted
with phone calls from friends who couldn't
imagine why he gave them the slip, locked
up on the night shift, satisfied with the
company of a failed scientist and a failing
librarian. This luchtpost packet confesses
why he wanted Ressler's etiology, the
dossier on that disease. A year's rupture;
anonymity in Europe, oblique petition for
help, lost in moratorium. Out of character at
last: please write me back.
   Something's out of joint. The cheery
postcard—Flemish scene ported from Boston
back to Flanders—is dated July 6, five
months before this letter. He writes in the
card that he's well along in Dutch. But the
letter reports novice's difficulties, unlikely for
someone of Todd's polyglot perversity. After
a half a year, he still cannot mention
Ressler's death, or give the man the dignity
of past tense. Alone, unchecked,
unseconded, writing me, dragging me
through all his sweet, unreliable, poorly
timed declarations of maybe love. God free
me from this man.
   Todd had a way of darting his eyes around
as if the earth were the last thing he
expected to see. I have forgotten that
astonished tone, forgotten everything about
him. He's back, wanted or not. But another
sender here too, one I wouldn't know from a
Dürer Adam. He is in trouble, needs me to
write. As if a letter, even now, might serve as
saving bedtime story.

  The Question Board

  Q: How often do questions appear here
that you can't solve?
  H.M., 8/11/81

   A: More often than we'd like. According to
a survey of American libraries, a third of
questions to reference departments go
unanswered. Ours weighs in a little under
the national average, although we have no
firm numbers.
   J. O'D., 8/11/81

   "What you need," Todd whispered into
my ear, gazing over my shoulder as I typed,
letting his hand loop dangerously over my
ribs toward my breast, "is to copy the post
office. A Dead Question Department." He
lifted my hair and moistened the back of my
neck. "Imagine: Question Purgatory. A smoky
room full of three-by-fives, each
unsolvable."

  Putting One's Hands Through the Pane

   Unbelievable: 1 can write him back at last.
What I've ached to do for months, poring
over atlases for clues, rehearsing the
wording I'd use when given a place to reach
him. Only now, I can't write the first clause.
My block is worse than his: I can't even get
off a salutation without seizing.
   Another two readings and I still can't tell
what's wrong. Indifference would feel
simpler, would have no shakes. I've never
written to him in my life. How can I start
now, after everything? How could I begin
telling him of my months reading a science I
haven't any grounding in, depleting my
savings, mourning the death he doesn't
mention? I can't begin to concentrate on
Dear Franklin until I've extricated myself from
Dear Dr. Ressler. All I can do with his letter is
add it to the evidence to be sifted. I can
write only the same piece I've been working
on for months. Why have we stayed apart all
this time? Enzymes, friend.
   I have only my work to answer him. The
content of the coding problem compels me,
twenty-five years after the facts. Discovery is
a dependence that addiction only imitates.
Engineered into my sequence, selected for
obvious survival value, is a craving to lift the
backdrop, to integrate the evidence, to
mimic the tune so closely I can at last get
through the notes. To force my hands
through, touch the habitat. Assemble it.
Ressler's was the desire behind all research:
the pull of something simpler and stranger
than imagined, lying within arm's length.
Curiosity must, like every built-in desire, be
written somewhere in the organism it wants
to discover. Ressler looked for the
fundamental lexicon in primitives. Only the
results of the lookup table itself can explain
why he was hooked on breaking it, on
getting to the name of experimental desire.
   Can anything as composite as curiosity be
revealed by a set of equivalences, a
molecular cipher wheel? Nothing in the
chemistry of nucleic acid gives the first hint
of the creature enclosing it. The sequence of
base pairs in the molecule, their disorderly
pattern, provides the edge needed to record
a message. But the sequences themselves are
not yet vernacular, but a shorthand. An
arbitrary string CGAGGACCGACG, without a
translator's dictionary, is gibberish. The
lookup table supplies that dictionary;
without semantic meaning itself, it lends the
first suggestion of sense to unreadable data.
   The translation Ressler worked on is a
one-for-one, simple substitution. My
arbitrary string, pressed through the table,
maps to a single protein:
arginine-glycine-proline-threonine...Translite
ration to aminos alone seems to move me no
nearer the evolution of heart, chest, hands,
eyes—those devices against the caprice of
environment. Slavish substitution appears
no more helpful in finishing my triple bridge
than those primitive DOD translators Ressler
once tapped us into. One night, taking us
on a tour through the vast MOL on-line
network, he tapped into a machine
translation program. He selected "French"
for target language and typed in the string
"I am left behind." We shouldn't have been
playing with the restricted program at all,
but that didn't keep Todd and me from
hanging on his every keystroke. The
algorithm churned away on a mighty effort
of pattern matching and produced "Je suis
gauche derrière." He hooked up two of
these software Berlitz's back to back,
feeding English-to-French back into its
reciprocal. "Out of sight, out of mind"
returned to source language as "blind
lunatic."
   All I've done with codon translation is
rename the elements I started with. ACG
becomes threonine; I've just swapped
chemical terms. And yet, the map is never
quite the place, nor the place as navigable as
its image. It has taken me months to see that
the coding problem is just the start of the
cryptography. If that were the extent of
inheritance, the lookup table would produce
only tautological definitions. The hundreds
of base pairs in a gene, broken into triplet
codons and fed through the decoder, would
produce the telegram "Please refer to
original dots and dashes."
   All these ciphers mean nothing until I find
the difference created in translation. The
table only softens the inscrutable script,
shapes the clay into executable words.
Cracking the code is just the tip of the
Goldberg. The lookup list of simple
equivalences requires me to learn how to
interpret, implement the text that comes out
of it. For data to grow, respond, rise up and
walk I must look at the secondary structures
locked in the life molecule. I want a deeper
definition from the string—its isomorphs of
hope, ache, posted desire.
   The bouillabaisse is richer than I've
guessed. The punched tape running along
the inner seam of the helix is much more
than a repository of enzyme stencils. It packs
itself with regulators, suppressors,
promoters, case-statements, if-thens. Genes
coding for messengers, readers, and
decoders of genes. Genes to copy and build
the genes' copiers and builders. Genes that
may speed, slow, or reverse their own
mutation. The automated factory imbeds a
blueprint for its own translation
machinery—a glimpse of real invention that
knocks me for a loop.
   How, from simple substitution, can this
absurd surplus emerge? A gene and its
enzyme, while code-equivalent, are worlds
apart in function. The decoded string
contains more than its original. My mistake
has been in thinking of enzymes as simple
ropes of twenty-colored beads. Even though
this model provides more necklaces than the
most scrupulous socialite could wear in an
eternity of nights out, my metaphor misses a
key point. Each color pattern corresponds to
a specific necklace twist. And shape, in
stereochemistry, is behavior by another
name.
   Protein necklaces are actually closer to
wildly tangled wool fuzz. They are strings,
but coiled as erratically as Norwegian hair
run through a home permanent. (Wool,
hair—two prime analogies.) Only, the twists
that the fiber balls up into are rigid, fixed by
the sequence of the aminos. I feel my first
spark: the growing poly-peptide—arginine,
glycine, proline—folds up in a manner
determined by the amino sequence coded
for in the synthesizing gene. The resulting
three-dimensional globule carries spatial
information; a landscape of grottos, peaks,
and plains gives the enzyme catalytic
ability—the power to bring about reactions
that otherwise might not have taken place.
   Even if the strand is stretched, it will
spontaneously reform to the coiled
arrangement unique to its linear sequence.
This complex but ordained shape turns the
enzyme into a cookie cutter, machine tool, a
shoehorn introducing big foot into
recalcitrant slipper. Smaller molecules align
with spots on the enzyme landscape where
they precisely fit. Held in place, they are
brought together to react with another
similar squatter. Each uniquely shaped
enzyme is expert at bringing about a
particular reaction. The human genome
codes for countless enzymes, each a chemical
command, a potential engine capable of
producing a specific chemical event.
   DNA carries just part of the instructions
for these purposive, molecular machines. The
actual welding—go straight a fraction of a
micron; make a hard turn, 137 degrees in
plane X, north-by-northwest—depends on
physics. The shape an enzyme takes, and
therefore its function, results from the laws
governing atoms in space. To manufacture
breathing, searching, speaking, rule-defying
life from out of constrained matter requires
no transcendence. Every level of the
hierarchy arises from the previous, without
any need to change the rules or call in
outside assistance. Yes, some sleight of
hand: a knit sock is just a series of knots, a
computer just switches, a haunting tune just
the intervals that walk it down the scale. But
what other way to grasp a thing except as
the emergent interplay of parts, themselves
emergent from combined performances at
lower levels?
   The emergence of function from codon
assignments is like that child's toy: two
intermeshed gears with an asymmetrically
affixed pen that produces unpredictable
designs. The surprise, recursive flowers the
toy makes aren't hinted at in any part of the
assembly— not gear, not pen, not the
cranking hand. Each of these parts does only
what is allowed. The flower lies latent in the
aggregate rules of geometry, which know
nothing about flowers. In the same way, my
most inexplicable high-order
ability—understanding things through
metaphor, applying the light of likeness to
probe the layers of the pyramid—already lies
infolded, hidden in the craggy terrain, the
hintless indifference of my crumpled-up
polypeptides.
   Solving the lookup table—itself
arbitrary—is prerequisite for my locating the
particle of purpose, the smallest
programmed machine in that regress of
programmable machines making up living
tissue. In grounding Mendel's invariant
inheritance squarely in molecules, Ressler
hoped to position science for a theory of
molecular evolution. Protein synthesis would
reveal how the destructive anarchy of
chance, capable only of wearing the rock
away, can carve Chartres. The production of
enzymes, each shaping an urge to bring
about reactions that would not occur
spontaneously, is the first rung up form's
ladder toward free will.
   The catalyzing shape of enzymes is the
seam between predetermined atomic
interactions and the self-ordering living
library. Enzymes are the machines DNA
creates and sends out into the cellular
factory. They are the factory. The coding
problem was, to Ressler's generation,
nothing less than a matter of locating the
fundamental message unit behind the
biosphere. Just as the innermost in a set of
nested Chinese dolls anticipates the shape
of the outermost, the way the array of living
things bends itself to the environment
depends on the ability of chains of amino
acids to fold into specific,
reaction-promoting molds. Or a step before
that: on the way nucleic acid hides the
enzyme shape in a helical archive.
   Addictive, naked hunger to reconstitute
the real: the freshly scrubbed Ph.D.'s
compulsion to locate the lookup table was,
by another name, a longing to unfrock
things as they are. Life that refused to push
all the way down to the evidence was just a
costume party. Only by demonstrating
beyond doubt how unaided atoms
accounted for craving, variety, the accident
of being alive could Ressler see what
compensation the truth of his own
contingency might hold.
    He and I both—desperate to disassemble
the table's mechanism, to show that the
cell's fundamental engines create living
purpose and not the other way around. To
demonstrate that blind atomic bumping can
lead to anything, even sight. Long before
love coiled him he felt desire, a catalyst
posted from the beginning of the genetic
record, bringing the parts of his substrate
inexorably together. However differently his
life might have unfolded, he could not have
long survived the need to refuse surfaces, to
come closer than flush. In the sum of their
catalyzed reactions, his choir of molecular
autonoma sang, Bloody your hands. Get past
it. What would it mean to leave this place,
really leave it? That is his coding problem.
The message I eavesdrop on, still vibrating
on the wires.
    The molecular engines—still not all named
by the week he died—begin to say who he
was at fifty, the work he had yet to do back
up the steps of the living hierarchy, here at
organism level. His traits, my own, Todd's, lie
tangled in the shape of proteins. But the
triumph of biological reductionism, the
grounding of living things on molecular
necessity, the establishment of chance as the
mainspring of change, each successive tier
rising seamlessly from the previous, still
leaves me something inexplicable at the top:
after curiosity, impulse, restlessness—his
ability to give it all up. My friend possessed
deep in the coils of his cell an urge to unite
the natural world in one internally consistent
model. He hid the compulsion for years. But
our showdown, forced on us, revived for a
moment his attempt to put hands through
the pane, a need always stronger than its
decoding. Years after he thought he'd come
home from the commute for good he
returned to the thick of the search. His last
days—and every day I knew him was one of
his last—shone with all the surprise of the
cybernetic enzyme. After a quarter century he
was back, pitting himself against the lookup
table. And this time, something more:
submitting to it a uniquely landscaped
command.

  I Have Become a Stranger to the World

   In our walking days, I talked to more
perfect strangers than I ever had before or
since. Todd was intent on single-handedly
reviving the custom of greeting people on
the street. In the city, this was tantamount to
taking one's own life. But we always got
away with it, and I was amazed at how many
people greeted back as if old friends. We
had long talks about election rigging with
news vendors, exchanges over dog
disobedience with retirees, leisurely debates
about Western history with men in
three-piece suits who must have had more
important places to be. Once, we were riding
the local next to a man whom Todd induced
into telling us all about his combat
experience in Asia. Giving us the
blow-by-blow of his tour of duty, the vet
asked Todd suspiciously, "What do you do?"
When Franker lied, "Art history," the man let
out his breath. "Good. Can't hurt me with
that." Todd talked to anyone, on any excuse.
Cabbies, police, Englishless immigrants, bank
officials, drunks—an endless dialogue with
people I'd never have spoken to alone.
   I was now free to see Franklin every hour I
wasn't working. He came by the library, late
afternoons before he started his shift. These
were my least productive hours of the day;
had I not had an excellent track record, I
would have been reprimanded. Sometimes,
to Save my job and to keep him from putting
his hands down my shirt where I sat at the
Reference Desk, I would send him into the
shelves with questions. I remember giving
him "Who was Leslie Lynch King, Jr.?" Frank
came back after an hour and a half,
successfully identifying him as the
thirty-eighth president of the U.S. "The
Public," he shook his head angrily, "is a
sadist."
   We met everywhere, and soon had
touched one another in as many places. The
MOL office was still our haunt of choice.
Following the disastrous system crash that
cost both men a sleepless week, the
machines returned to normal. Outside of
island visits by Uncle Jimmy, Annie Martens,
and the janitors, we reined in our
shamelessness only for Dr. Ressler.
   However genuinely the professor enjoyed
our round tables— free-wheeling
wine-and-cheese talk spiraling to absorb the
spread of international terrorism, the limits
to sports record-breaking, and the nuances
of surviving a certain late-night cashier at
the corner convenience store—he seemed as
genuinely relieved when conversation
ended. More often than not, he wound up,
saying, "You two must excuse me. I have to
supervise the workings of the North
American financial network." And he would
return to the gigabytes, leaving Franker and
me alone to escalating experiment.
   We pressed against each other, each day
more blatantly, feeling the short fuse
evaporate, postponing, restraining the way a
bud shimmies under time lapse before falling
into flower. Following an evening's wrestle,
he would kiss me goodbye, dipping into my
dress, saying he needed to fix my surface in
his memory until he could see me again. We
played deeply and dangerously. I found a
meridian on his shoulders, the mere press of
which made his muscles collapse and his
eyes roll up. He came by but never stayed
over; we were two passengers in a long-haul
airport, consulting the array of world capital
clocks, each still on his native time zone. My
night of romance was his midday.
   One night during lunch break he came to
my room carrying a package he'd acquired
downstairs just before my landlord's antique
shop closed. I unwrapped the box to find an
off-white eighty-year-old linen blouse that
must have set him back a month. Along its
dorsal edge ran cloth-covered hemisphere
buttons the size of lady-bugs, hundreds of
them. The high choker owed its origins to
Alexandra's tracheotomy. It rippled with
multiple traceries, ruffles under ruffles that,
as they could not actually be seen once the
blouse was on, could only have been, like
those exceptionally skilled adventures in
heavy counterpoint, for the express benefit
of those privileged to hold the score in front
of them.
   "Try it on," he commanded. I hesitated,
but just for pacing. I went to the bedroom,
stood in my closet, the mirrored door left
conspicuously open, and stripped to my
underclothes. Even these I changed for the
antique slips and skirts I had collected piece
by piece, on account with my landlord. In a
few minutes, I was clothed in a soft, lost
century. But the effect was not yet done. I sat
down at my vanity (another piece rescued
from downstairs), pulled my hair up in a
storybook pile, and made up lightly, with an
eye toward the period. It took some time and
extraordinary, wavering patience on both
our parts.
   When I stood and walked toward him, I
knew we were done for. He'd watched the
entire process, standing in the doorway,
waiting to undo it. The clothes I had
attended to so carefully shed themselves
everywhere. Some stayed on, displaced and
uncaring. Everything began to move slowly,
underwater. I felt him, felt myself all over,
both far away. Minutely mammalian, I
conformed to fill every space between myself
and this shape pressing against me. I could
see the peach inside of his legs and sweated
to match his breath condensing against the
back of my neck. Strenuously, straining, but
expansively, slowly, we worked, astonished
to be recovering pneumatics from a manual
we were born knowing. And something else
to our rocking: an attempt to recall a word
on the tips of our tongue. The word was
nihil. The word was nearly. I felt his skin
stretching, conductant, as smooth, hazel,
and aromatic as the taste of food I craved for
years but could never identify. My skin.
   I kept waiting for my body to pitch me
over those patent falls, the one I'd
discovered at thirteen but which, by thirty, I
still hadn't adjusted to. Instead, something
unprecedented: as I realized I was invading,
being invaded by, this man, that we'd
surrendered to the thing we had been
circling nervously for months, I was doused
by first serum-surge; rather than sharpen to
a cutting point, it spread, a thick, coffeed
narcotic, into parts of my body I never knew
existed. It vacillated, then intensified toward
white, wider than I thought possible, for
bottomless seconds before it faded into
capillaries. I could not tell if I'd gone over or
not. Stupid semantic. I was ionized.
   We made love—copulated—at my
apartment repeatedly over the nights that
followed. I never recaptured that total
diffusion, that month Of later. I did catch
brief bits and pieces before his body became
more almond-familiar. That sustained current
never reappeared, and I came in time to
wonder if it had been somatic after all. The
work we lavished on each other, hungry and
needy, received reinforcement, often and
diffuse and strange. More than enough to
keep us coming back. Todd came frequently
to my apartment, sometimes with more old
clothes.
   But it was some time before I ever set foot
in his place. True, he lived in Lower
Manhattan, while I lived in the
neighborhood where we both worked. At
last I invited myself. He was to cook for me,
on a weekend we both had off. He agreed to
the conditions, with whispered additional
terms.
   He lived in an attic—"loft" is the current
euphemism—on a street straight out of
"Bartleby." The corbled eccentricity of the
place made him give up nicer rooms uptown,
going from a relatively safe neighborhood
into the heart of the urban experience. He
greeted me at the street, walked me down
the hall, parodying bachelor brazenness as
soon as the apartment door closed. "Well.
Here we are. Just throw that dress
anywhere."
   He took me on the lightning tour. His
makeshift sitting room lay angled oddly
against the back corner's fire escape. He had
pitched a double bed in an old storage room
and turned a large walk-in closet into a
study. "Not much, but we call it home. All
right: abode. Let's not niggle over terms."
Museum-clutter suffused the place,
somewhere between a Sotheby's halfway
house and Turkish bazaar. A dumbwaiter,
now dysfunctional, toted a Howdy Doody in
pince-nez. Furnishings included a table
made from a lobster pot, chairs made from
conveyor belts, and a lilac-colored upright
piano. Here and there were scattered
convenience-store samplers of instant
coffee, lip balm, shoe-odor pads: CARE
packages dropped for a shipwreck who'd
forgotten how to use them.
   Art treasures—Brueghel's wheatfields and
Vermeer's Head of a Girl prominent among
them—covered every inch of his walls, and a
few Tiepolo-type trompe l'oeils even
encroached on the ceiling. That popular
seventeenth- and eighteenth-century genre,
the picture gallery: one canvas crammed
recursively with as many different miniature
art masterpieces as could fit in the space
allotted.
   Not only prints: incomplete sets of Conrad
and Scott, African kalimbas, a glass
harmonica assembled from kit, dancing bears
and Uncle Sams that swallowed dimes.
Among the larger bric-a-brac was a
seamstress's costume dummy from the 1920s,
adjustable along all major axes. "Meet Theda
Bara. I inherited her after the breakup of a
college experiment in idealistic living." She
had os-motically acquired a wardrobe:
flapper skirt, feather boa, worn-out
sneakers, a cocky hat fashioned from a
post-office mailer, a brightly painted
papier-mâché toucan nose, and a breastplate
of buttons reading, among other things.
"Liquid Courage, Not Liquid Paper." Against
a wall of raw brick lay a hundred-gallon
aquarium divided between soil and water.
The dry land was given over to mosses,
beetles, and skinks. Below lake line, turtles
and eels swam oblivious of captivity. "I tried
salt water once," he explained, "but it's
more difficult to balance than you think."
   I watched as he prepared a skillful
dinner—Indonesian chicken, so he said,
although it could easily have been ad lib. He
chattered the while, not even stopping to
answer the phone. "They'll call back. Do you
think I could pass for an eighties man? The
eighties man is sensitive. He wins women's
hearts by saying such things as 'I feel a deep
sadness welling up in me.' Do you think I'm
in any position to win women's hearts?" He
was nervous, profuse. I was happy, feeling
how little I knew him.
   We ate epically—two hours over dinner.
He made me try three cabernets blindfold.
We talked about his dissertation, long
delinquent, and about how I had ended up
in library science. When at last nothing
graced the table but scraped dishes, he
reached over, felt my belly, and nodded,
satisfied. "All right then," he said,
withdrawing his hand after only a modest
amount of further exploration. "We have to
talk about music now. You start." I could
think of nothing but his violent reaction, on
that first business dinner of ours so many
months before, when the piped tape of
Bach's little keyboard exercise had hurt his
face so spontaneously. I wondered if it
weren't music he wanted to talk about, but
that taboo neither of us had raised since he
first hired me to find Dr. Ressler in the
historical register.
   I shrugged. "I played the piano once. As
you know."
   Franklin smiled. "I played the accordion. I
could make 'Five Hundred Miles' sound as if
it had been transposed into kilometers. At
eighteen, I applied to music conservatory.
Chopin etudes on the squeeze box for my
audition. Went to art school."
   He looked at me, decided to get the worst
out of the way. "You know, the professor
came to music late in life. He says the whole
enterprise caught him by surprise. Other
noises, other tunes. Said he spent years
committing to memory the entire repertoire.
But somewhere along the way, he's pared
Western music down to just what he can
carry." His voice fell, forced-cheery. Todd
shook his head.
   But this time, we didn't stop at Dr.
Ressler's collapse into the microcosm of
those few dozen measures. He became
animated, demanding to know my favorite
pieces. I gave over a couple hostages. He
accused me of being hopelessly stuck on
mainstream war-horses. He challenged me
with a dozen composers, none of whom
were more than names to me. "These are the
folks who are writing music right now. Your
contemporaries. But who bothers listening?
We're reduced to the three-minute unison
synthesizer banks while an electronic drum
loop programmed to bash out every other
beat mercifully drowns out the
hermaphrodite wailing about how it feels
good to feel bad. It's a war zone out there.
Lose-lose situation. Another concert hall
rendition of Finlandia for folks with the
heavy jewelry on the one hand, and three
anemic teenagers called "The Styro Detritus'
on the other."
   In a minute, he recovered. "The trick to
listening," he said, lifting me by the hand,
"is to hear the pieces speaking to one
another. To treat each one as part of an
enormous anatomy still carrying the traces of
everything that ever worked, seemed
beautiful awhile, became too obvious, and
had to be replaced. Music can only mean
anything through other music. You have to
be able to hear in Stockhausen that homage
to the second Viennese school, in Schönberg
the rearrangement of sweet Uncle Claude.
And every new sleeper that Glass welds
together gives new breath to that rococo
clockmaker Haydn, as if only now, in 1980,
can we at last hear what pleasing the
Esterhazys is all about."
   He was performing for me. By then we
were in the bedroom, but for a wholly
different seduction than we'd explored at my
place. Franklin's dirty clothes were stacked
into prim piles, interleaved with notebooks.
He cleared away a state-of-the-art turntable,
expensive but not well cared for. He went to
the top shelf of his closet. There, stretching
from end to end where the sweaters usually
went, was a wall of records, arranged by
spine color in rainbow spectrum. He dug out
a disk, mumbling, "Have a seat. No. Take the
bed. Lie down and close your eyes."
   I did as instructed. Eyes closed, I heard
everything: Todd shuffling the record jacket,
the domestic argument in the flat
downstairs, the sound of breaking bottles,
someone being sick in the street below, Dr.
Resslcr putting up a disk pack on a spindle
across town, the first snow of the year falling
on my mother's Midwest grave. I heard the
hollow of high-fidelity speakers, the muffled
pop of needle touching, and the sandy
scuttling of crabs across the worn record
surface.
   A deep harp pulse, then a double reed,
followed by a muted horn choir: before I
realized that the piece had started, a door
opened beneath me, and I fell effortlessly
into another place. An orchestral work, but
deployed in a chamber, slower and more
melancholy than any music I've ever heard, a
sound written after the history of the human
race was only a faint memory.
   I didn't possess the sophistication to say
when it had been written. I didn't even
worry it. The notes took occupancy, a
horizon of tones stretching in all directions; I
was at the center of the sound. Someone
was singing, a contralto, although it took me
measures before I identified voice as that
new, ravishing instrument that had entered.
She sang in a language I didn't know but
understood perfectly. The song was so
agonizingly drawn-out—sustained loss
unfolding in the background of a peaceful
scene—that I couldn't make the pulse out.
One measure became eight; eight crystallized
into sixteen. I knew that sound: the last day
of the year.

           Ich bin der Welt abhanden
         gekommen Mit der ich sonst viele
         Zeit verdorben; Sic hat so lange
         nichts von mir vernommen, Sie mag
         wohl glauben, ich sei gestorben....

            Ich bin gestorben dem
         Weltgetümmel Und ruh' in einem
         stillen Gebiet. Ich leb' allein in
         meinem Himmel, In meinem Lieben,
         in meinem Lied.

   I couldn't say how long it lasted; I was
stunned to learn later that it took less than
ten minutes. Just as the tune seemed
reconciled to ending, its texture thinned to
nothing, the strings waited on the verge of
resolution, that reed hung on a suspension,
and the whole chord stood still in space,
frozen, refusing forever to give up the
moment of quick here now. Then the portal
closed; I came back to this man's room, all
the noises of his apartment and the street,
noises I had designed my life around not
hearing.
   He waited a suitable moment before
ruffling the silence. "Well? What was that all
about?" Didn't he know already? I snapped
my head up, opened my eyes, saw him again
in the corner of the room, sitting amid his
notebooks and clothes and rummage
treasures. He hadn't moved during the piece.
Had he meant to use the music to win me,
heart and frozen soul, he could not have
succeeded better with my assistance.
   "I don't know," I answered sharply. I
closed my eyes and let my head drop back to
the bed. "I don't speak German."
   He laughed at my hostility. "Not the text,
goof. The music. What does that tune
mean?"
   I was auditioning all over again. I was to
tell him what that frozen chordal unfolding
contained. Against my will, I wanted to
answer correctly. Wanted badly. But
anything I might say would be wrong. I kept
still and waited, knowing that the least
sound would give me away. I could think of
nothing to add to the notes. But my
interviewer waited just as patiently for the
thing he wanted from me. I would have
hummed that infinitely patient theme out
loud by way of explaining what it meant, if I
thought my voice could carry it. I said
nothing for as long as nothing was possible,
then came out with, "It's about leaving."
   Todd sat up. "I've been waiting forever for
someone to hear that." Unable to leave well
enough alone, he added, "The most
beautiful delaying gesture ever written."
   He identified the tune as one of the
Rückert Lieder by Mahler. He would play it
again for me later, under different
circumstances, when it would sound
completely changed. But this time, over the
sea in America, in 1983, in a cluttered,
unzoned apartment, between two people
who couldn't, despite themselves, have the
first idea of what was going on out there, in
the real house of cartels, conspiracies, and
national states, it sounded completely out of
place and time: a round, bitter, beautifully
inviting rearguard action against loss. But
we didn't understand, yet, just how much
there was to lose.
   "Ich bin der Welt abhanden gekommen,"
he said, coming over to where I waited. "I
have gotten lost in the world. Although der
Welt, feminine, seems to be in the dative:
maybe 'to the world.' Abhanden is definitely
not the tantalizing choice: abandoned. False
cognates. Faux amis, as the Germans would
say, if they were French."
   I hated him at that moment. His arrogance
ruined for me what sound I could still just
make out. Truth was, I was not a native
speaker. I had studied it once, but had
gotten nowhere. Had he played any other
piece, I would have heard little, maybe
nothing at all. I would have flunked the
audition if the piece he'd chosen hadn't
been so clearly a sound track for the only
thing on God's earth I have an ear for. I
wanted to be outside in the cold. I wanted
to be by myself, in the apartment I had left a
man to get. To die away from the world's
noises, to live alone in a quiet place. In that
song.
   Todd kept chattering amiably, as if I were
another of his news vendors or street
drunks. I wanted him to stop talking, but he
wouldn't. He jabbered on about the
composer, the exhaustion of romanticism,
the absolute distrust Americans have come
to feel toward European culture, toward
their own past. He prompted me to join in,
but I snubbed the invitation. He prodded me
again, but a look from me cut the game
dead. He stood, went to the window, and
stared at something farther than the
neighborhood. He squinted, looking for that
metaphor, the outside world with its
untraceable, newsprint, global urgencies
closed off to us, hermetically sealed. "But I
do love you," he said. I was the only person
within earshot.
   "Thank you. I mean, for..."I gestured at the
record player with a wrist. He turned to look
at me. I saw in his face the evidence he'd
been denying since the day he came by the
library to ask about a disappearing man. I
understood that all the people he spread
himself out over—the cashiers, the subway
vets, the three-piece-suiters, college friends
held at phone's distance, everyone who
elicited that uncalculated, soliciting,
contagious charm— were grapples, last-ditch
efforts to reverse the departure he was well
into. He had the Ressler gene, recessive,
latent, but irreversible.
   He returned the record to the closet shelf.
"I have become a stranger to this place," he
said, not daring to look at me. I realized later
that he was trying again to translate the
song text, quote of the day.



XVIII

  Canon at the Sixth

  "Does it have any side effects?" he asked
one night in my room, our habitual place for
love. We lay still straddled; 1 crouched
exhausted on top of him. Although subzero
outside, we were moist from exertion. Sex,
slack and slow, expansive, aesthetic, like
serious wine tastings where nothing gets
drunk but everything sampled, sometimes
turned fierce for no reason, vocal, frantic, a
muscle purge. The first such escalation
scared the daylights out of us. Neither had
initiated any change of pace, but all of a
sudden we were both running hard, testing
the edge of control. The more frightening it
became, the more wildly we went at each
other. Afterwards, still winded, I murmured
about not knowing he was a sprinter.
   "Sprinter? 'Hurdler' wouldn't half say it.
You get that from a book? Private
reference?" I made an embarrassed pun
about open circulation. After that, even our
most passive encounters—wide-eyed
stroking—had a whiff of danger, as if
anything could trigger fierce surprise.
   Following such an outbreak, we lay
motionless in my room, awkward in the
impossible non sequitur, the return to
nonchalance. The behavioral masterstroke,
more crucial to human evolution than the
opposable thumb: the ability to pretend that
nothing just happened, that there is no
seam. "Does it have any side effects?" he
asked in the dark, after geologic pressing
desperate enough to crystallize carbon. He
could make himself obscure in half a dozen
languages, including his mother tongue.
   "Hair on my palms, you mean?"
   "Can it do that?" he blinked.
   "Can what do that?" Even reaching the
conclusion that we didn't get each other was
endlessly difficult.
   He leaned toward me confidentially.
"Safeguarding." I stared, unable to crack the
euphemism. "Here we've been happily tilling
the fields for weeks, with nary a mention of
prevention. That leaves, to my knowledge,
only two possible methods by which you..."
   His speech ground to a halt. He locked
eyes and stuttered, "Uh-oh."
   I laughed a monosyllable. "Idiot."
   "I suppose I should have asked
beforehand, huh?" He was abashed only a
second. "Which is it then? I don't want you
using anything that's going to give you..."
   "Don't worry."
   "What do you mean, don't worry? I'm
worrying."
   "We don't have to worry about
pregnancy. Or any birth-control side effects."
We dressed slowly. I stood looking outside,
wishing for all the world that we could go
for a walk.
   After a respectable pause for a man, Todd
broke into Cockney constable. "What's all
this then?"
   I faced him, as self-possessed as a health
professional. "I had a ligation."
    "You what?" Dead silence. "You're not
even thirty."
    "Pretty soon," I said, suddenly too girlish.
    We lay back on the bed, fully clothed. He
put tentative fingers through my hair. "Mind
if I ask... ?" I waited placidly, relaxed, until he
put it in so many words. "What prompted
you... or did you need to?"
    "No. Tuckwell and I decided that, with our
lives, our careers, we would never do well
with babies."
    "But I didn't think...Did you expect... ? Did
you think you would live with him forever?"
    I snorted—a sharp exhalation that
expanded my lungs as it emptied them.
"Evidently I must have, on our good days."
    "Jesus. One of you must have been pretty
certain. I mean, 'permanent' means—"
    I discarded the argument that the
operation could conceivably be reversed.
The odds against that loophole made it
irrelevant. Permanent meant permanent. "He
had nothing to do with it, really." I was sorry
I'd mentioned Keith at all, ashamed to have
tried to palm off on him an interest in the
decision. "It was all me. The idea of passing
on accumulated adult knowledge to a
helpless infant—how to expectorate phlegm
and not swallow it, how to tell the difference
between 'quarter to' and 'quarter after,' how
to stay off the stove, how to tell when
people were trying to hurt them—was too
much. I couldn't see myself selecting all
those clothes and birthday presents year
after year, keeping them from inserting
screwdrivers in electrical outlets, nursing
them through the destruction of favorite
toys."
    "Jan. No. You're joking." Franklin was
pale, shaking. "Motherhood is tough, so you
tied your tubes!"
    I could have crushed him with one word. It
would never be his pregnancy. He wasn't
even responsible enough to have thought
of prevention. The male model of
parenthood: everything between ejaculation
and tossing the football with the
twelve-year-old is trivial. The matter didn't
concern him in the least. The fight had
begun, after all, with his wanting to avoid
contributing to any child of mine. I had made
an irreversible decision, a choice self-evident
at the time, one that would have been made
for me anyway in a few more years. I did not
care to reproduce, and although I was still
relatively young, removing that possibility
meant clearing the anxiety from my
remaining sexual life.
    "How hard would it have been to leave
the door open... ? Bad metaphor. Sorry."
Todd smiled queasily, about to be sick. "I
mean: as negative life insurance, the pill
would have been cheap at the price. Suffer
the less radical premiums for a couple years,
against the outside payoff if you change
your mind. Or partner," he added sadly,
touching me on a flank already changed to
terra-cotta.
   I shook my head. Having come this far, all I
could do was explain the variable that had
swung the calculation. I told him why it was
not a question of my mind or situation
changing. A few years before, I'd found on
the Question Board a request for the latest
scientific line on mongolism. My first
response was mild irritation; any modestly
educated adult ought to have been able to
find a satisfactory answer within minutes. I
started at the obvious place, followed the
well-marked trail through reliable sources,
and delivered the broadly established
explanation: Down's syndrome is the result
of trisomy—a third chromosome 21. Airtight,
complete, exact. I couldn't imagine
improving upon it.
   But the day after I posted this answer, the
board carried a follow-up: What causes
trisomy? I felt ashamed at not answering the
first question at all. I went back to the
sources, beginning to appreciate the issue,
how much subtlety the research in fact
required. The immediate mechanism was
undoubtedly genetic. But nature and
nurture were not entirely distinct. That extra
chromosome, research suggested, may in
turn be the result of an older ovary in which
chromosome 21 fails to separate in egg
formation. I attached a rider to the first
explanation: chromosomal nondisjunction,
while not entirely understood, increased in
frequency in proportion to the mother's age.
   Two days later, a third question: How old
is an at-risk mother? "I was exasperated," I
told Todd, crawling back under the weight
of his arms. "Someone was putting me
through the hoops. You know: like a child,
repeating 'why?' until the word
evaporates?" Todd shook his head, made me
continue.
   The day after the third question, before I
could form a definitive response, a woman
materialized at the Reference Desk asking if I
was J. O'D. She reached down into a stroller
and lifted an infant for me to inspect. The
child had the unmistakable spatulate
features of deformity. She said she was
twenty-three.
   "I could still see, for probably the last
week, a faint profile of normal boy already
being drowned out by the crosstalk of that
extra twenty-first chromosome. I finally knew
what she was asking. Was it her fault? I
asked what her doctors had told her. Her
answer destroyed me: 'They're less helpful
than you.' I spent the rest of the afternoon
with the two of them. I showed her how to
follow the citations, and we pushed them
hard. At the end, we discovered two distinct
etiologies. The first was sporadic, without
inheritance patterns, some slow, possibly
viral cause. The second, the minority of
cases, was a permanent chromosomal
attachment in the mother, a translocation
trisomy, a fluke of a fluke that struck mothers
of all ages equally.
   "After some hours, I apologized: the
library would have to be a lot more current
and specialized, I myself would have to have
a medical degree to move her any closer. But
by then she was almost grateful, having
learned along the way about cretinism,
microcephalia, PKU, anencephaly, spina
bifida. Oh, Jesus! The whole, grisly catalog."
   In the middle of the list I broke down,
scaring Todd witless. He sat by helplessly,
uncertain whether to comfort or cower in a
corner. I tried to compose myself,
aggravating the shakes. My voice was still
wild when I spoke again. "The girl thanked
me for the one promising bit anyone had
thrown her since her boy's birth.
   The books said that an extra twenty-first
often leaves mongols with the sweetest
dispositions."
   Todd did not need the rest spelled out.
The endless catalog of things that can go
wrong—so comforting to this woman,
whose punishment began to look like
commutation—had killed me. I felt a dread I
previously couldn't have imagined. Because
of a lucky statistical aberration, because I
and everyone close to me had been born
healthy, I had assumed that childbearing was
a perfected process with a few tragic
accidents impinging on the periphery. I now
saw that the error-free lived on a tiny,
blessed island of self-delusion. I could hear
my own mutations accumulating; it was
either hurry into a baby-making I was not
ready for, or wait, Russian roulette, for my
own blueprint to betray me.
   Lying in the dark, I felt the revulsion
return with full force. As at his apartment,
listening to that Viennese song, I heard how
we lived in a room of privileged music above
the screaming street. I closed out the
syllogism, wishing I'd stuck with the less
defensible line that I'd sterilized myself
because I hadn't the time or patience to bear
children. "I told Tuckwell I was going in for
the operation. He didn't argue. It never
occurred to me to consult anyone else."
Least of all one I hadn't met yet.
   I watched Franklin's face as he assembled
the facts. Something had been broken; but
the thing was done, and even he was smart
enough to see that he would only break
things worse by probing. "Well," he said at
length. "That answers my original question."
The time for theory was over. All that was
left was practice, and we fell back to working
over one another's bodies again, more
circumspectly this time. That night, at least,
there were no side effects.

  Friends of the Family

   She must still be a benign, lovely woman.
From the day I met her, Annie Martens struck
me as impossibly well-adjusted. She worked
as a remote teller for MOL's mother bank,
entering the financial world's dirty linen that
Todd and Ressler washed every night. She
seemed perfectly happy with that deadly-dull
career, preferring it to anything more
ambitious. She would have gladly accepted a
demotion for the good of the firm.
   She was suspiciously sunny for this city.
Her only claim to psy-chopathology involved
an early marriage, which had ended in
amicable divorce the year before. Uncle
Jimmy reported from the day shift that the
abandoning mate persisted in meeting
Annie every day for lunch. The
uncomplicated woman was happy to hold
hands and neck in the corridor with her ex
as if a newlywed.
   She was infinitely patient, cohabiting
comfortably with the incomprehensible, her
face wearing the perpetual surprise of Mary
ambushed at her prayers. She had a deep,
throaty laugh, like underground water. She
was intuitively musical; we often listened to
her wrap herself angelically around a guitar
and produce, in round pitches, old frontier
songs about wandering, gambling, or brutal
stabbings of love objects. Even I loved her
when she played. Her face radiated. She
closed her eyes when she sang, inhabiting a
garden far away.
   Annie had no faults except a propensity to
speak incoherently. She punctuated her
small talk with advertising slogans: "Betcha
can't eat just one," or "Even your friends
won't tell you." She was, Franker assured
me, impossible to take anywhere, because
she unconsciously read all wayside text out
loud until the patter became intolerable. This
habit explained how her husband could sue
for divorce without losing his affection for
the woman.
   There was something else that took me
months to put my finger on. She liked
aphorisms, annoying if forgivable in
themselves. But she could not reproduce
these cliches accurately. The errors were
easily missed. To recount amazement, she'd
exclaim, "I flipped my wing." She'd crack a
joke without apparent punchline, laugh
throat-ily, and conclude, "That went over
like a wet balloon." When Jimmy teased her,
she responded, "Watch it. You're walking on
thin eggshells."
   Once her problem became apparent,
listening to her filled me with embarrassment
at the whole race. She was not a stupid
woman; her problem was not imbecility in an
environment requiring alertness. Rather the
reverse. She was born in 1963, a year I'm old
enough to remember. The date itself
consigned her to another era. Todd, five
years older, slipped in under the wire, old
enough to know that the world is racing
toward the most crucial drop since Galileo.
Annie was too young to know what the
good fight was and certainly would never
have fought it without us.
    The paintings that made Franklin's life
palatable to him, that opened up a channel
to a resonant past, Annie knew instinclively
to be treacherous impostors. She was a
matter-of-fact woman, loving what was at
hand and not at all awed by what was not.
Sfumato mystery, the flame of the past
scumbled around her in a Washington
Heights pastiche of the Cluny cloisters. La
Gioconda munching on corn chips. Great
Expectations abridged to fit on
ninety-minute car cassette. Stains spreading
into underarms to Beethoven's Fifth.
Mozart's in the closet: let 'im out, let 'im out,
let 'im out.
    She was true to the culture she was born
into, truer than Todd, who has abandoned
it. She was endowed with a great capacity
for care. She could cry at pop tunes and
laugh at Yellow Pages ads. Her sloganeering,
her mangled proverbs, her utter
incomprehension of irony, her ability to
recite "Buckle up for safety" as if it were a
Pater Noster, marked in her genuine
humanism. Along with the clear forehead
and angelic chin came a propensity for what
her how-to manuals called "personal
engagement." The news account of a zoo
giraffe that had died in copulation almost
shattered her. She loved things. Anything.
Rain showers. Pretty stationery. Sandwich
wrappers. Her Doberman, ten pounds
heavier than she was. Anything nearby and
knowable Annie cared for indiscriminately
with all her heart.
    The need to distribute surplus care led her
to sacrifice personal preference to prescribed
taste. In another time or place, she might
have fixed as easily on Shaw as she did on
Burma-Shavian quatrain. Nothing mattered
except giving compassion in the available
dialect. I can't imagine what pleasure she
found in staying around after hours,
eavesdropping on the roundtable
rotogravure. She couldn't have had the first
idea of what those men were up to. When I
saw her with them, wading bravely into
cross-purpose conversation, I felt I was
witnessing one of those confrontations
beloved of science fiction: carbon-based life
meets living silicon. She would clip shirt ads
for Franker as a way of telling him his were
hopelessly worn out, and admonish a
startled Dr. Ressler about the dangers of
smoking. She confided in me that the two
fascinated her because they minced no
bones.
    She would have made herself a satellite of
whoever was at hand. Todd, in one of his
rare, Orphic ascents into the day shift, had
accosted this stranger just as he did so many
streetsweepers, cabbies, and commuting
power brokers, demanding a full working
account of her machine, her job, her
sensibilities, and her life. That, followed by
the requisite lunch, and Annie became a
devoted friend. Words so freely given were
to her a pact with him and all his friends. The
casual contact he was so good at made Todd
something real for her, not ever to be wholly
understood, but cared for.
    I often thought that Uncle Jimmy would
have been Annie's ideal mate. They were
both obliviously gentle people. They might
have offered one another some protection
against events. Even Todd suggested the
idea to him: "Take her out to a show. See
what happens."
    Jimmy laughed him off. "Are you mad? I'm
old enough to be the girl's father." The
difference in their years was not great. But
Annie was still a child and Jimmy already an
old lady. He did, in fact, carry a torch for her,
a crush that made him even more puppyish
than usual whenever she was in the room.
He flirted with her shyly, as he did with every
woman who came through the suite of
offices. "Have a boyfriend yet? Must be half
a dozen guys who would jump at a chance
to dance with the likes of you." Annie would
say that she was ready anytime, say that
evening. Jimmy would excuse himself,
insisting that his expert supervision was
required just then by the night shift. "Other
men get to play with the ladies. Me, I've got
to keep this ship running."
    In fact, he was a nuisance, and every hour
he stayed on into the shift cost Ressler and
Todd two on the other end, in the early a.m.
He liked to organize the stockroom and the
card deck library, to create new rotation
systems for the disk packs. Each scheme led
to complete confusion. He would call his
infirm mother. "These night-shift boys have
fouled things up again; don't look for me
until late."
    Jimmy caught me in possession of the
door password again, but this time resigned
himself to my coming and going. I had free
rein to let myself into the computer room as
if I were on salary. A few nights after my
confession to Todd, I arrived to find the
entire population missing. Someone, in
theory, was supposed to be laundering the
day's data at all times. I sat and waited,
thinking that the shift must have stepped
out to an all-night sandwich dive. A minute
later, all digital hell broke loose. Sys B began
making the distress ah-oo-gahs of a
wounded submarine. The spindles on Sys A
powered up and the console spit cathode
fireworks. Helpless, I ran to the screen,
thinking I might at least jot down error
codes. The screen erupted in animated
celebration:

            Our Dearest O'Deigh. Welcome
          to the median. The U.S. Bureau of
          On-Line Statistics assures us that 30
          splits the country in half. As usual,
          you're right on the fence. Get out
          of that frilly blur of an apartment
          and acquire a mortgage.
          Accumulate some debt. Numbers
          compel you to do something
          middling...

   The display was amazing: letters grew,
skidded across the screen, recombined into
new words, surged in normal distribution
curves, twisted into visual syntax, "fence"
forming one for "you" to sit on, "frilly blur"
dissolving into one, "debt" coming out
gothic, "middling" in Times Roman. The
letters exploded into life, accompanied by
bells and whistles on the terminal speaker:

             Happy B-day. We hope that 30 is
          your most profound variation yet.
          Never forget that you are living at
          life's critical instant. Your fellows in
          aging, SRESSLER & FTODD

  Then the screen went blank, came back
with its inscrutable system prompt politely
inquiring "Command?" I looked up from the
console and clenched a fist at the initiators,
doubtless observing behind the two-way
mirror. Todd came out, followed by a
sheepish Ressler. I cold-shouldered Todd,
addressed the professor. "How did you do
that?" He shrugged: all Boolean. A matter of
access.
  I wheeled on Todd. "How did you know it
was my birthday?"
  "You told me."
  "I only said it was coming. How did you
get the date?"
  He grinned, thick with significance. "We
looked it up."

  Operation Santa Claus

   Blake's departure hits Cyfer hard. The lab
is poorer without the force of his arbitrating
humor, his even keel. The defection makes
the remaining members suspect they've been
kidding themselves; chemical inheritance will
evade them. To restore morale, Ulrich turns
the last Blue Sky session of 1957 into a
Christmas party. He invites other department
members, staff, favored graduate students:
anyone who might keep the remaining team
from staring at one another in stunned
silence.
   Christmas is an odd holiday to be
observing, intent as they are on substituting
a molecular model for the miraculous winter
birth.
   Nevertheless, they go through the
motions, set out a wassail bowl, paper cups
depicting Santa Claus in various postures of
levity, a herd of wax reindeer, and a
university record player on which Toveh
Botkin, music committee, keeps up a stream
of modal progressions insisting glad tidings
of great joy.
   Ressler wants to know how it has come to
pass, despite his friend's exit, the flicker of
the tired capacitance lights, Sputnik
standing in as Nativity Star, the daily radioed
word of low-level violence decimating the
unwatched flocks by night, that Christmas
still lodges itself so deeply under his skin. It
can't be the fugitive baby on the run from
the authorities, a story he saw through when
not much older than the infant in question.
Still, he finds himself steeped in the crusty
old four-parters Botkin churns out on the
turntable. Their modulations draw him
toward the pitiful speakers, exhalation of
synchronized air through the trachea
suggesting chords that might lift the edge of
the translation table for a quick look. These
medieval intervals, a fossil record of his
dazed arrival here in this room of reagents
and gauges, this change of venue, with no
quantitative test for discerning the way back.
A camaraderie he wishes he could admit: he
too, smothered in the stink of gingerbread
and pine needles, lapsing into Lydian under
forever unangeled skies, might be culpable,
guilty of trying to reach beyond his grasp, of
attempting to comprehend something he
can't hope to name, something that might
better be left to metaphor, myth, popular
fiction, the beautiful counterfeit.
   At the record player, he asks Botkin with
his eyes for an explanation. His old friend
raises her finger. At the end of the current
tune, she slaps on another sprightly chorale.
"Samuel Scheldt," she identifies. "From the
Köln Gesangbuch, early seventeenth
century." Ressler cocks an eyebrow at her,
uncomprehending. The piece has some
slight charm, aura of otherworldliness. But
as full of leftover Renaissance censer scent
as this tune is, it cannot minister. It has no
healing power, no explanation.
   Botkin notes his confusion. "Wait. Wait."
She musses about in the cardboard sleeves
and pulls out another disk. "O Jesulein
Suss." She drops the needle down on exactly
the same tune. Only everything different.
The thing now arches and breathes, soars
through agonizing suspensions, pours
across a new, unexpected support in the
bass, moves its four lines independently yet
in a coordinated harmonic terrace of beauty.
"Bach," she says, shrugging, the attribution
self-evident.
   The two works differ as a salt crystal and a
spider's web. Scheldt, competent craftsman,
labors on a carved doll that, however lifelike,
remains wooden, while the other joiner need
only apply the lightest imaginable touch to
transform the clunky melody, lift the crippled
thing to life. "A cradle song," Botkin
glosses. "Composers cut their eyeteeth on
chorales. No musical form is less
sophisticated. A year of theory and you
could churn them out blindfold. Bach
manufactured them by the hundreds. And
yet..." She points to the turntable, as if the
secret behind the miraculous transformation
searing Ressler lies there. On the vinyl. In the
vibrating diamond.
   Just as she is about to make the critical
point, to identify what turns beats into
beating, Toveh is interrupted by Dan
Woytowich. He grabs them both in a friendly
embrace, happier than Ressler has ever seen
him, happy enough to be another person.
The only happy soul in the room. Team
setback can't touch him. Wife Renée, after
losing two first-trimester fetuses, has finally
passed the danger point and is on her way
to making the couple a family. Woyty has
chosen the party to announce, sure that this
time the news will not turn out premature.
   "Christmas music: is that the topic here?
You two hear about the phantom of
Urbana? Yesterday's paper. Two undergrads
walking on the quad at night in the snow
hear this harpsichord tinkling. Nowhere in
the world it could come from. But they both
hear it, and track it down, with difficulty, to
one of those cast-iron grates in the sidewalk.
Turns out a fellow's been living down in the
steam tunnels for months. Persian rugs,
stuffed chair, harpsichord, candelabra,
bookshelves full of classics pinched from the
library."
   Ressler listens to the transformed Woyty.
After a bit more banter, he excuses himself.
The snippet of excruciating chorale, Toveh's
interrupted explication, confirms it: some
part of him has hem-orrhaged.
Companionship, connection to another is
now as locked off as that beautiful halo of
notes hanging above the winter cradle. He
turns from the music, from his friend Botkin,
from grinning Woytowich, turns into the
decorated lab. Clots of partygoers, the
forced gaiety of holiday streamers close the
matter. He wanders the lab, a priori lost; it's
not miraculous birth all these desperate
preparations are for, not birth at all. Each
face swinging to greet him is etched with the
same scrimshaw hysteria. The thought of
doing his bit for this outfit repulses him.
Behind the sickening melange of
aromas—the light Euglena petri mildew, the
smoky paraffin and dye of burning reindeer,
the sweet-greasy thermoplastic mistletoe, the
unguent perfumes, hair oil, deodorant, skin
lotion, the beakers of astringent and rinsing
acids, furtive fart vapor trails—is a smell so
stand-out that not even this richness can
smother it: the mammal-gland emission,
out-and-out animal bafflement at being left
here, spoorless, to toast in another New
Year.
   Then another scent, as neutral as air. Thin
aromatic hydrocarbon, one part per billion in
the room, catalyzes him. The smell fits; he
knows it. There, shining from a corner,
standing out against the sepia clumps of
conversation, a still spot in the sea of relayed
distress, a face as familiar to him as speech.
Clear as the cold, cloudless night, a lucid
journey of features framed in a shell of hair,
eyes that flash recognition, that have been
marking him all along, a mouth smiling
broadly at his rush of relief, a young head
shaking at him in wonder, in pure pleasure
from across the room, announcing one,
unambiguous certainty: be of good cheer.
   Jeanette. His Jeannie. He can no longer
keep away. Nor can he remember, so strong
is this welcome home, why he needed to. He
forces his way through the celebrants, drawn
to her north. She takes a few steps to him,
verifying: inevitable. In the blaring secrecy of
this public place, she places the flat of her
palm across his ribs. "I love you," he tells
her. He expects her to spring fawnlike at the
snap of a tree branch, the flush of this snare.
Instead, she melts against him, catches her
breath.
   "Don't say it," she answers. She looks up,
all forgiveness. She moves her hand minutely
against him. With that gesture, she assumes
all blame, confesses to a symmetrical wedge.
She lowers her eyes, awaiting further
sentence. Every program in his body, every
enzyme, every gemule collaborates on
synthesizing a single biophor: take this
woman and kiss her. He does, here in the
middle of danger, hard, moist, lasting. Empty
symbol, leading nowhere, appeasing only
the immediate edge of hunger, explodes in
his brain. A hand grasps his shoulder and he
steels himself to receive the blow. But it is
not the enemy, the legitimate complement to
this jean-home. It is Joe Lovering, pulling
Ressler out of the clinch.
   "OK, Buddy. Move over." Ressler, reeling,
looks up where Joe points: a dismal piece of
plastic mistletoe. The crowd around them
smiles indulgently. Jeanette straightens his
tie. He backs off, dizzy. Lovering steps into
his place, looking over his shoulder
confidentially as he takes his turn at
grabbing Jeanette. "Sandy doesn't need to
hear anything about this," he winks to
Stuart.
   After preliminary recon, Lovering launches
his frontal campaign.
   To Ressler's horror, Jeanette kisses the
cretin back, with a laugh of anonymous
pleasure in the license. Of course: she has to.
Protective coloration, or they are both
exposed. But her easy subterfuge makes him
crazy. Lovering at last breaks off,
pronouncing, "Hmm. In Sandy's league.
Could substitute in a pinch. But doesn't
quite ring the bell one hundred percent."
   "Thank you very much," Koss sniffs.
Lovering goes on to regale them with his
astonishment at actually being more fixated
on the polymorphous Sandy than when she
was still a veiled novelty, so many months
ago. Koss and Ressler ignore him.
Unflapped, Joe snags a cup of wassail.
"What is this stuff?" Lovering swills a
mouthful, cocks his head contemplatively,
and declares, "1889 Jolly Roger Green.
Cheeky bouquet. Sandy's a great wine
connoisseur. Me, all I know is 'Beer then
whiskey, pretty risky. Whiskey then beer,
never fear.'"
   Koss blinks, rests a sympathetic hand on
Lovering's shoulder. "Joey, it might be
furlough time." Lovering downs another
glass and goes on to perform combinatorial
studies on the gifts from "The Twelve Days
of Christmas."
   Ressler mingles, his gaze scrambling back
to the buoy of Jeanette's. She catches his
glance with one just as helpless: Where can
we go? We need to talk. He checks his
watch; how long can the bash last? He is
cornered by Ulrich and Woytowich, the
euphoric father-to-be. Anxious to follow up
the coup of the first paper, they are debating
the next step: might the table be based on a
super-symmetry of purines and pyrimidines?
Never angels and shepherds for very long.
   His earthbound colleagues exasperate
Ressler. "Why don't we go in and have a
look? Study the effect of positional havoc."
He tries to take the edge out of his voice.
"Induce point mutations along the length of
the message. Compare the synthesized
proteins. The words will fall like dominoes..."
   He doesn't labor the ramifications of Ike's
metaphor. The seniors smile in the thing's
glare. Ressler receives, for his pedagogical
pains, a clinical gaze. Woyty strokes his chin,
scanning the notion for flaws. "We'd have
to work out a few bugs, of course." Vogue
expression, derived from the moth that
crashed a complex program on one of the
first sequential logic machines. Sent the
coded instructions out into the electronic
ether.
   Ressler nods. He feels the blast of the
kiln: the method, a complete experimental
attack, all but here. He dies a slow death for
the chance to work it out with someone
who'll grasp it, help him past the last hurdle.
He bursts inside to diversify. Multiply,
subdue with fruition. But he is alone—no
ears to hear, no hands to understand. Except
perhaps hers.
   He slips out of the party, the mocked-up
festive lab. He stands in the darkened hall, a
hundred steps down, in a blind recess,
waiting. Five minutes turns into an agonized
ten. Surely she must have seen him leave. At
last, she hurries out furtively, looking over
her shoulder in fear, sheer erotic terror at
being caught. He steps from his shadow. She
stifles a shout and collapses into him,
clinging.
   "Listen," he orders. "Nature, 1955. Gale
and Folkes. Test-tube protein synthesis.
Incorporation. I told Tooney, before he left.
He thinks it'll work. We place the sequence
to study in glass. Out comes the offending
enzyme."
   "Shh," she says, convulsing rhythmically.
"I love you." The sound of singing, candle
scent from the far end of the hall. He holds
her to him, all along his length. Her tangled
hair, her face, her muscular shoulders, the
small of her back, her upper legs. "Make up
for lost time," she laughs, sniffling. She lets
out a short, soft, pained cry midway between
a howler monkey and a gothic angel's et
exultavit. He signals her, unnecessarily in the
dark: Don't even say it.

  Deus ex Machina

   Q: Who made me? Defensible evidence
only please.
   A molecule able to influence two others
that would not react otherwise: can my
miracle reside here? Does DNA, the map
unfolding the whole organism, do no more
than manufacture reagents, golem formulae,
tinctures where soul emerges if the secret
proportions are hit on? The code I am after
must embody not just stuff but substance:
process, decision, feedback. Not data alone;
behavior at molecular level.
   The lint-ball tangle of an enzyme—its
charged terrain of twists and turns,
vise-grips for welding chemical
substrate—makes it a three-dimensional,
supple machine. Here is the muse of fire I've
been needing. Certain of these enzyme
proteins become single-molecule transistors,
devices that test and respond to feedback,
creating a free repertoire from predictable
physics. The assembled amino string of an
allosteric enzyme can tangle into two
different shapes. With unique twists in each
shape, it thus possesses two separate sets of
binding sites. The molecule may be
enzymatically active in one shape and inert
in the other, like a shoehorn that sometimes
warps into worthlessness. A substance that
binds to a site in either the active or inert
shape will lock the enzyme into that
configuration:




   The inert shape of this enzyme has a
binding site that fits substance A. The active
shape has a site matching B as well as
materials C and D that it transforms into
product E. If A grabs the molecule first, it
locks it into inert shape, eliminating those
sites that accept the catalyzable materials.
The enzyme is switched off, C and D can't
bind, and manufacture of E stops. But if B
first binds to the enzyme in active form, it
locks the molecule into a shape with C and
D's sites intact. The faucet is held open; the
enzyme joins C and D into E so long as
supplies of C and D exist.
   Ressler's magic Boolean circuitry begins to
emerge. The presence of A inhibits the
manufacture of E; B promotes it. None of the
compounds reacts with the enzyme itself; the
machine remains unchanged except for
switching on or off, always capable of
switching back if the splint-substances
detach. Even wilder: the inhibitors,
promoters, and inputs, binding to
independent sites, need have nothing to do
with one another. A, B, C, D, and E can be
anything at all. In theory, any chemical can
be made to inhibit or promote the formation
or degradation of any other. The effect can
even be nonlinear; multiple binding sites on
an enzyme could cause small amounts of
compound to have enormous effects on the
synthesis of others.
   Here it is, my escape act from chemical
necessity. Microcircuitry I can't begin to map:
a single allosteric enzyme made up of a few
hundred amino acids, weighing less than a
million billionth of a gram, accepting
multiple, graded inputs and producing
nonlinear output, a free-floating if-then
program. It smacks of religion to me.
   But the conjuring act hasn't even begun.
Link the logical feeds of an allosteric circuit
together, and the molecule virtually lives. E,
the reaction product, can be the same as A,
the inhibitor. Every successful catalysis then
shuts off the switch. Or E, used up by the
body, might degrade into promoter B,
ensuring that new E is created whenever old
stock is expended.
   With self-regulating feedback, the enzyme
becomes its own economy, gauging supply
and demand in the chemical soup, even
acting to adjust these. I enter loops, linked
regulatory patterns more ingenious than
theistic design. One molecule's
manufactured product can inhibit or
promote another's. Two enzymes activate
each other in conjunction or opposition.
Metabolic pathways branch and conjoin, one
enzyme setting off two others, or two in
tandem combining to shut down a first.
These and, or, and not operations create a
complete prepositional calculus.
   Coordinated microprograms capable of
changing their own environment, able to
spring into production modes within an
instant of encountering a trigger, create a
cybernetic network powerful enough to
initiate the impossibly articulated behavior
of the composite cell. Q: Is the tracery of
microprogramming networks too complex to
have arisen through guided chance? Q: Is it
complex enough to account for the
autonomy that high-level enzyme
byproducts—Ressler, Todd, myself—all suffer
from?
   I've started four times today, on four
separate sheets—what? Nothing. Trivial
message strings going no farther than Dear
Franklin. Even the adjective is problematic.
After months, I have the man's address. I
have a world of things to tell him. Nothing
stops me. I want to write. But even
today—Caesar crosses Rubicon, 49 b.c.—I
can't. I won't. English doesn't have the
modality to say what's keeping me. Writing
him is fine, but words are out. A is too
functional, B too forgiving. C and D are
transparent excuses for E, which I will never
bring myself to say to him again.
   I own his mailbox, the lookup table to the
one spot where he can be reached. If I could
finish a fifth sheet, seal and mail it without
reading... I could; I want to. The first letter of
the first sentence, and I waver from one urge
to the other. I am truly stochastic, indecisive.
Do all inputs, computed, already drive me to
one course or the other, or can they still be
interfered with by some messy conglomerate
circuit, me?
   I try on Laplace's old dream—to solve the
world through giant inference engine.
Ressler, alert, talkative as I had never before
seen him, racing through the data stacks
looking for our place to cut, cracked a joke
about the final triumph of the reductionist
program. "NASA's eyes in the sky determine
the vectors on every molecule of
atmosphere. They feed all these numbers
into a Cray, and the animal pounds away,
megaflops, on a simulation that knows
everything about adiabatic cooling,
turbulence, vapor pressures, topography,
solar radiation. The machine assembles and
delivers a perfect prediction of tomorrow's
weather. Only it takes two days to run."
   The problem is irresistible. Do all my active
enzymes plus the running average of the
chemical soup they find themselves in, the
jungle of bioeconomy (vast, uncatalogued
tracts of electrochemical memory, mine and
earlier), all the stimuli bombarding me from
outside—the January sun's false springs out
my window, the glass of water at my elbow
(complete with Brooklyn reservoir heavy
impurities), the feel of the keys under my
fingers—do all these independent effectors
sum to one unique output: write him or not?
They couldn't sum to more than one
outcome. What would it even mean to say
the choice, the final cybernetic weighing
were left open? Open to what? Whom?
   I must be asking the question wrong. Any
outcome, once reached, must have been
decided by something. The sort of freedom I
am talking about—Dear Franklin, Where are
you? When can I see you? How long you
have been away! Come home—must be
constraint by another name. Constraint that
jumps some complexity threshold. The
molecules I look for need not be capable of
autonomous behavior; the word, when
pushed, probably has no meaning. But are
they enough, in themselves, to escape the
determinism of physical vectors? Do these
microprograms, once fired up, always run the
same way, water down an arroyo? Or can
they self-determine, self-modify, rewrite their
own program listings?
   They can. Allosteric enzymes are
themselves synthesized. The microtransistors
are drawn up, tailored, detached, and sent
into the fray by a macroprogram, the
nucleotide sequence—semantic bursts of
DNA thread. Worker bees, assembled by the
queen in her hive, these hatchetmen, day
laborers, have the critical ability to apply
their logical toolboxes back on the master
program. Allosteric proteins can bind to and
influence DNA, inhibiting or promoting the
synthesis of allosteric enzymes themselves. I
stare at purpose, at the molecular level. The
running program—DNA synthesizing
enzymes—creates and executes subroutines
that double back, influence the way the
master program executes, cascading into
new subroutines, run-time solutions.
   To the best of my metaphoric
understanding, it goes like this. Codons
along a stretch of DNA direct the sequencing
of amino acids in a protein. This sequence
constrains the lint-ball molecule to adopt
one of two or more possible shapes. Held in
one shape by an attached brace, its
personality—the lure of its binding sites— is
inert. But when that jamb is removed, the
protein recoils, takes on a new surface. Part
of that switched-on surface attaches to a
segment of DNA, switching oíf that
segment's instructions. The segment of code
temporarily patched out could even be the
one manufacturing the binding molecule
itself. The substance that switches the
protein's code-modifying abilities on and off
theoretically could be anything, even the
by-product of enzymes manufactured on
that or other DNA segments. The master
control and its agents combine to alter their
own combined behaviors.
   One allosteric enzyme, working by itself, is
already a formidable machine, reactively
linking unrelated substances. Thousands of
them, joined into branching, judging,
regulating feedback networks, can just
about account for the numbing inventories,
the shifting assembly lines that run the
corporate cell. With meta-programming—the
ability of the central network to reset even
its own switches—the last constraints of the
hardwired universe are shed. The field is
broken wide open. Anything can happen,
and does.
   But can chance alone create such
structures? Oh, yes. I have become
abandoned to the idea. Chance is necessity
by another name, thrown over the
complexity barrier. The building blocks for
self-replicating molecules can emerge from a
milky suspension of ammonia, methane,
water, and free hydrogen treated with an
electrical spark. All the other steps from
polypeptide to vanished near-Nobelists can
be derived.
   Solution can take shape—slowly, stupidly,
agonizingly inefficiently—on trial and error
alone. Error takes care of itself, in the
hardwired universe's unforgiving
compulsion to extinguish its dead ends. The
trial: that much emerges from quantum
perturbation—random mutation that infests
the duplicating life molecule with variation.
Molecular rules are not fixed, but statistical.
That mother lode of modern
anxiety—indeterminacy—lifts the whole
dance off the ground and holds out the
promise of sending it anywhere there might
be to go.
   Who made me? My answer, all but
demonstrated, ten days past New Year's,
1986, has none of the crisp, winter, nighttime
traveler's comfort offered by the old
Baltimore Catechism. The science I study
doesn't even frame the question the same
way. Each system answers only the question
it asks. The magic, memorized chants of my
girlhood dealt in revealed things—truths
that could be got at only by leap, flash,
obedience, and rejection of human
comprehension. They will never be
reconciled with a skepticism based on
repeatable test.
   Yet in both, the name is not the thing. The
one scientist I really knew came within a hair
shirt's breadth of being a divine. Ressler was
a Franciscan minus the cassock. He of
anyone I've ever met was free from use's
hammerlock, the blundering functionalism
that leaves us blind to the miracle of our
presence here. I can't begin to describe his
speech, his actions, his days—they were so
empty, selfless, contemplative. For a brief
moment, he achieved a synthesis between
scientist's certainty in underlying particulars
and the cleric's awe at the unmappable
whole.
   Who made him? Chance made him. But
that wasn't the crucial issue. The second
question in the catechism—why?—was, to
Dr. Ressler, more important. In his short run
at science, he had learned the trick of seeing
every living creature as elaborate baggage
for massive, miraculous, internal goings-on.
Every itch, every craving, every store run,
every spoken word arose in a switchboard of
enzyme messages splaying out in an
overflowing veil that made the sum of all
water droplets tumbling over Niagara seem a
simple, sophomore differential equation.
   The knowledge left him mute, punctual,
meticulous, polite, weakly good-humored,
pained by human contact, a nibbler on food
yet quietly omnivorous, good with words
but only when pressed into them. Mostly, he
took things in: listened. For some reason, a
full understanding of enzymes left him still
able to love me, to love Todd. Like all good
Franciscans, he had this thing about
affection for fellow creatures of chance's
kingdom.
   The answer my Catholic training years ago
had me memorize, if I carry through the
blasphemous substitution, turns out to be
exactly the answer Dr. Ressler's work on the
coding problem left him: Why did chance
make him? To know, love, and serve it in this
life. And be happy with it in the next. Only:
Dr. Ressler knew— as now I do—that our
chemicals, in the next life, will be stripped of
their self-coding repertoire. There'll be no
chance to be happy with chance. It won't be
in the lexicon. No lexicon. Chance will
resume its maiden name. I have only this
afternoon, this moment, to decide whether
to go on writing. Perhaps it's
letter-answering time after all. I pull out
blank sheet number five, take a sip of
suspect water, feel the waiting keys under
my fingers, study the sunny January outside.
I feel unaccountably, blessedly free.
XIX

  Winter Storm Waltzes

        sea.change(odeigh,todd,ressler) if
      reawakened(ressler) or
         in.love(todd,odeigh) and
      not(scared(Anyone)) and
         journey (Anywhere).

   Ressler knew we were sleeping together.
Every indication suggested he approved. He
toted in a sack full of squash and tomatoes.
"For you." Plural you, in ambiguous English.
   "They're beautiful," I thanked him. Todd
seconded. "Where did you find such nice
ones this time of year?"
   "My cold storage. I grew them."
   "In Manhattan?" we both asked,
overlapping.
   "I happen to live on the sunny side of the
World Trade. Over several years, I've hauled
three tons of soil up to my roof. My landlord
puts up with it; she likes the beans. Organic
gardening is the perfect supplement to a
night position." These were the first of a
steady harvest—jar, juice, fresh—that kept us
fed all winter.
   He was lighter than I'd ever seen him. One
day, a blue Icelandic sweater in place of the
impeccable fifties suit and tie. He talked
longer, exchanged brighter banter—often
off-colored, anthropological double
entendres about how it was up to us young
to provide the heat needed to get the race
through the winter. It was Ressler's idea to
do my computerized birthday card; he had
pursued my birthday through the federal
electronic statistics.
   I hardly dared believe it: our happiness
made him happy. A quiet, remarkable last
process started up in him. He experimented
successfully with a beard. Once when Annie
treated us to guitar, he forced us all into
descant, benevolently dictating which lines
to take. "Do you know 'Smoke Gets in Your
Eyes'?" he asked. Annie shook her head,
embarrassed for him. "How about 'Soap Gets
in Your Ears'?"
   He brought in a pack of art postcards and
quizzed Todd. He suckered us into
outrageous debates: whether Vaughan's "I
saw Eternity the other night" might be
treatable these days by a few milligrams of
something from Hoffman-La Roche. Whether
Marx's class warfare might in the future be
fought between information-rich and
information-poor. He would dismiss Todd
early. "Nothing left I can't run through these
rough beasts myself. Take this woman to live
the life she deserves." He would give me a
gentlemanly cheek-brush of the lips, saying,
"Your quote for tomorrow is
Alain-Fournier," supplying edition and page.

            quote.of.day(alain-fournier,editi
          on(Y,page(X1)),"I still say 'our'
          house though it is ours no
          longer").

            knows(jimmy,news) and
  curious(jimmy), knows(annie,news) and
  unchanged(annie).

   My new relation to Todd seemed to be
public knowledge. Even Uncle Jimmy asked
me confidentially, "What's this I hear about
you and my junior staff cohabiting?" Todd,
delighted, took up the euphemism as
buzzword of the hour: "Let's go cohabit the
cafeteria." "Care to cohabit a little after I get
off tonight?" Jimmy's trusting grin was
tinged around the edges with a droop
suggesting he would have preferred Todd
and me to altar the thing legitimately. Jimmy
was from another time. His mother, patiently
invalided at the other end of the phone,
probably understood the cohabiting world
better than he.
   Annie too began treating us as a couple.
"Look at you two, both in maroon. Cute as
two peas in a pie." She told us we ought to
wear more maroon; maroon was a largely
misunderstood color. Annie's
acknowledgment capped it: romance
discloses more than it knows. Everyone saw
what we were up to but us.

          reawakened(ressler) if

   Dr. Ressler paced the digital warehouse,
slipping deeper into human ways. During
machine lulls, over paper cups of wine, he
volunteered topics rather than just politely
annotating ours. He'd bring us colored bits
of the world's specificity: "Listen to this," he
said, sporting a shampoo label. " 'Lather,
rinse, repeat.' An infinite loop." He made us
try the Dial-an-Atheist number, laughing
broadly when we discovered it was
disconnected. He roped us into working
difficult British crosswords where puns,
imbeddings, weddings, retrograde
inversions, anagrams, counterpoints, and
subtle substitutions combined in fluid
wordplay that seemed beyond human
ingenuity to invent let alone solve.
   Imperceptibly he thawed. He told terrific
stories of scientists. An aged teacher who'd
spent seventeen years in Morgan's fruit fly
room. A colleague who left his research team
to surface, years later, as codeveloper of the
first artificially intelligent encyclopedia. The
famous Swiss botanist Nägeli, whose habit
of tasting bacterial cultures was a great
source of information but shortened his life.
So it would go until, at the end of an
evening, I would realize that we hadn't had
to draw the man out once.

         astonished(todd) or scared(todd).

   Frank was unable to believe the
turnaround. As Ressler grew daily more
voluminous, Franklin clammed up, afraid to
say anything that might dispel the fragile
moment. "Did you see the man?" he'd ask
later in bed. "Searching through his pockets
for clippings to give me? Like a third-base
coach giving signs!" The clipping-gifts were
superfluous; Todd's notebooks had closed.
He no longer needed them. The
companionship they'd substituted for had
sprung to life.
   Frank would play the fool out of sheer
terror. While the mainframes processed
end-of-day transactions, he'd bait his mentor
with silly challenges. "How high can you
count on your fingers?" He whispered in my
ear the proud target thirty-five, one hand
standing for digits and the other for groups
of six. Ressler paused a few polite minutes
before responding with 1,024—each digit a
single place in binary notation. Todd sulked.
"Yeah, well... anything higher?"
   "Always," confided Ressler. And they took
to the problem together, like competing
cousins at a family reunion, chucking the
softball, testing each other's arms.
   "It says here," Franker announced one
night, "that we have genetics to thank for
the killer bees heading north o' the border
from down Mexico way." He spoke the word
from Ressler's past, sidling up surreptitiously
to the conspicuously avoided issue.
   Dr. Ressler nodded, not at all reluctant to
take up the topic. "That's right. An attempt
to tame an aggressive African strain with a
docile South American one backfired. One of
hundreds of plagues we've initiated by
improving the ecosystem. Transplanted
gypsy moths; imported rat-catching cats that
destroy South Pacific islands; mongooses
overrunning the West Indies: cures worse
than the diseases. This one's especially
damning. We haven't just replaced one pest
with another. We've created a new one to
call our own." He huddled us around the
console, created a workspace, and whipped
up a Mendelian genetics lab, a field where
we could put our creations to the test. A
simple simulation, but complex enough to
prove his point. "There are a lot more ways
to fall off the tightrope than to inch
forward."
   Ressler, the author of every declaration
fed into the machine, was often surprised by
the executing program's outcome. Todd and
I, who had to have each line explained to us,
were floored to see self-modifying behavior
built from a few innocent assertions. I
learned not only the danger of intervening
in systems too complex to predict, but about
declarative programming, the thin line
between determined and emergent, the
ability to surprise. Looking down at Dr.
Ressler, newly bearded, Icelandic blue,
typing keys, leading us with infinite patience
through the nuances of his composition, I
knew the world had lost in him not just a
scientist of the first order, but something
more important: a gifted teacher.
   We ran the simulation many times, each
time failing to steer the model toward
anything but collapse. Todd threw up his
hands. "The discerning intellect of Man
bested by bees. I've a suggestion: we greet
the little buggers at the border. Instantly
upon their crossing the Rio Grande, we
lavish them with Walkmen, warm-up suits,
the whole nine yards. They'll shed their
asocial ways in a flick of the Zippo—get
ahead, secure the Mercedes, et cetera. Adieu
national panic."
   Still, the conclusion of the ecosimulation
distressed Todd's Renaissance belief in the
perfectability of the natural world. "You
aren't suggesting we stop cross-breeding?"
   "No," Ressler affirmed.
   "Or that we quit with all this inheritance
and population dynamics stuff?"
   "No again."
   "But we aren't yet ready to build a better
mouse?"
   "No."
   This last answer was ambiguous: No, we're
not ready? No, we never will be? No, that's
not what I mean? But Franklin was afraid to
pursue the point. I could hear him form and
reject delicate questions in his head. At last
he blurted out, "Bacteria engineered to
protect potatoes from freezing?"
   An art-history ABD specializing in obscure
450-year-old panelists, the spokesman for
technological progress, versus a Ph.D. in
molecular genetics, once the comer to keep
one's eye on, cautioning that the possible
and the desirable were not the same. Ressler
fielded Todd's question without flinching.
He ran his hand lightly over his head,
smoothing his hair. He seemed not a minute
over thirty. He was spoiling for
something—not for a fight. For the mystery
and heft and specificity of conversation. "If
we're to do recombinant DNA, you'll need
more background."

         journey(north-woods) if

   Todd jumped at the chance. He suggested
we three drive up the following Saturday to
a cabin in New Hampshire. "Belongs to a
college friend who will gladly lend it for a
weekend."
   Inviting the professor for a camping
weekend seemed just short of asking one's
priest if he'd care for a round of racquetball.
Had Todd run the idea by me first, I certainly
would have squashed it. But Dr. Ressler
broke into a boy's grin and said, "Do you
know how long it's been since I've gotten
out of this damn city?" Both men turned to
me, and I nodded with enthusiasm.
   "Should we ask anyone else?" I couldn't
think, aside from our day-shift friends and
the man at the sandwich shop, who Todd
had in mind.
   Ressler handled Todd's question with his
usual grace. "Having put our hand to this
three-personed plow, I suggest we stay with
it. This is a congenial enough group as it
stands."
   That was all it took. I arranged my hours at
the branch. Todd secured not only the cabin
but a beaten-up Plymouth to ferry us there. I
was in charge of food and Dr. Ressler of
kerosene and campfire reading. They picked
me up at three in the morning after their
Friday stint. Todd met me at the door of the
antique shop, shushing hysterically, as if this
were a teen-aged prank. I guess it was.
   The roads were clear, and after we jumped
the city, the night was crisp and quick. We
got free of the interstate, preferring
seat-of-the-pants navigation up through
empty New England towns. Todd drove, and
we passengers were assigned the task of
keeping him awake. For a stretch, Dr. Ressler
had us all rolling with a dry commentary
about how every road sign in
existence—"Slow children," "Cross traffic
does not stop"—contained unintentional
slipped meaning. Todd ruddered via Boston,
Saturday morning. We spent two hours in
the Fine Arts, studying the conflagration he
was after, and he bought a postcard of it.
Then he hauled us across the Fens to the
Gardner and that domestic chamber music in
amber by Vermeer.
   We arrived at the cabin late Saturday. I
felt, by contrast, how my life in New York
had become a spasm of hormone and acid
jolting my system into continuous
speculation on how I was going to get
killed. My key to surviving, or not dying too
quickly, had been to swim in stress without
feeling it. Adaptation to environment.
Suddenly this place: rag-quilted, smelling of
sap and kindling, spices hanging from
kitchen beams, squirrels marauding in the
walls. A foot-pumped parish church organ
stood against a wall with a Lutheran hymnal
on the music rack. A five-thousand-piece
picture puzzle that Franklin identified as an
Aelbert Cuyp lay spread over the
dining-room table. Salvation, in short. I
hadn't known I needed it until I was there.
   We unpacked, laughing, pitched up on
the beach of the New World. We put on
coats and fell into the bracing air. Snow was
falling thickly. A carpet gathered around the
cabin clearing and up the stony hillside. The
thought passed through us: head back now,
while still possible. But all w e spoke out
loud was, "Let's try this way."
   There were so many stars that the sky
seemed black gaps pasted over a silver
source. The same lights as hung over the
city, invisible. Todd looked up and quoted, "
'The stars get their brightness from the
surrounding dark.' Dante, but who's
keeping track?"
   We walked in silence, in one another's
footholes in the drifts. I felt, in the
constriction in my chest, the intractable
riddle facing the first species saddled with
language: why are some things alive and
others not? Snow, rock, star, lichen, rabbit
scat, pine. It was the easiest, most blanketing
protection in the world to imagine that
everything partook of the same animation.
   "Let's have it," Todd wheedled Ressler
after we'd walked half a mile in chill awe.
"You're the life scientist. Tell us what's
happening here."
   "I was never a life scientist, to my
misfortune." His breath came out in white,
frozen puffs against the snowy air. All our
patient field work was about to come to
fruition. "I was always, at best, a theorist.
But before I was a theorist, I was a child. And
every child knows... shh! Look. There. Just
past that birch."
   Ressler didn't even need to point. Against
the black of the woods, a pair of eyes,
reflecting dim analogy of starlight, observed
us from a distance, measuring our every
move, theorizing. We froze, matching it,
watching for watching, not even whispering
a guess as to what it was.

         alive(X) if grows(X) and
         reproduces(X,Y) and
         member(Y,class(X)) and not
         (equals(Y,X)) and

    A long, deliberate draw of observation,
and the eyes blinked off. The creature
vanished, freeing us to turn and retrace our
path through the drifted snow. I knew it
now: the world, even in the pitch of winter,
metabolizing all around us. Every ledge of it,
trampled by a permutation on the first
principle, each straining for a crack at the
Krebs cycle, a slice of the solar grant money.
"Hubert's Infinite Hotel," Ressler described
it. "Perpetually booked up, but always ready
for more occupants, even an infinity of
them." The place was penny-wedged,
crammed, charged with doppelgängers,
protean variants on the original: radial,
ruddy, furred, barked, scaled, segmented,
flecked, flat, lipped, stippled. Who knows
how? The place was beyond counting,
outside the sum of the inventory. And we, as
of this weekend, were but a particular part.
   As day broke, we returned to the cabin,
spread ourselves in the existing beds, and
slept. I had joined the night shift. I woke to
soft talking in the room downstairs. Dr.
Ressler was tutoring Todd, laying out the
rudiments of the new, biological alchemy. It
was afternoon, already dark. On the
windowpane, thick flakes had been
collecting for hours. I put my hand to the
cold glass, leaving a negative ghost when I
drew away. I hoped for the worst the
elements could do, hoped harder than I've
hoped since I was a girl.
   I came downstairs. The men had a
semblance of warm meal waiting. Flush with
eating and drinking, we piled close together
on the couch, in front of a fine fire. I
thought: This could last forever, long
evenings, passing around murder mysteries,
losing weeks without glancing at the papers.
A place where progress was obscene,
unwanted. Todd could putter perpetually at
his dissertation, I over some project in
Maritime wool, Ressler fiddling with the
smoky spruce logs.
   Franker roused us to attack the bellows
organ. He took the right pedal, Ressler the
left. They each took a line in the upper staff,
and I, on account of six years of piano
lessons as a child, was expected to handle
both tenor and bass while simultaneously
pulling stops. Conquering the skittish
entrances and squashing some unscored
tritones, we flew along well. We pumped
out Lobe den Herren and Nun danket alle
Gott. After a while, we even grew bold
enough to let the inner lines out and
improvise on the cantus firmus, Todd laying
on a counterpoint from "Mood Indigo." But
human, we grew tired of hymns. Todd was
the first to break off, pace back to the fire.
Warming himself, with his back to Ressler, he
asked, "How about it, then? Let's hear it for
those man-made bacteria."
   Ressler sighed with exasperated pleasure.
"Ice-minus Pseudomonas." He returned to
the couch, wrapping himself in a discarded
quilt. "Not man-made. Man-manipulated.
The process is neither so formidable nor so
erotic as you think."
   I wandered to the dining room. "Who's up
for a little jigsaw?" Neither man responded.
"How 'bout a big jigsaw?" Flat. "Think your
friend would mind if I worked on this
thing?"
   "Of course not," Todd smirked. "Just so
long as you take out any pieces you put in
before we leave." I pottered away at Mr.
Cuyp's cows, an ear posted to the
conversation I avoided.
   "How erotic is it?" Todd took the rocker
opposite Ressler.
   "The lab technician identifies, by a lot of
boring scutwork, that particular restriction
enzyme with the ability to clip out from the
bacterial DNA the sequence that directs the
synthesis of a given protein. In the case of
Pseudomonas, the deleted protein acts as a
seed for ice-crystal formation. No gene, no
protein. No protein, no crystal seed. No seed,
no ice at that temperature. We aren't
bestowing any new characteristics on the
microbe; we're depriving it of one."
   "Like clipping a Scotty's tail?"
   "Only this snip is inherited."
   "And this sort of deletion—can it happen
in nature?"
   "It is nature. Only infinitely quicker."
   "So where's the danger?"
   Ressler shrugged. "Where's the danger in
a mongoose?"
   "But a mongoose is a separate species.
Ice-minus bacteria are just a protein away."
   "And you are just proteins away from
either." It thrilled to hear the man, the edge
of alertness in his voice, discernible only in
outline until then. "Yes, the Frankenstein
fear is overblown. Transgenesis is not about
creating life from scratch. It's about juggling
existing genes—existing formulas for
protein manufacture. Deleting, adding,
moving the factory parts from one organism
to the other. You're right: the whole genetic
engineering revolution is only a quantitative
extension of the ancient art of livestock
breeding. Even interspecies gene transfer
has a viral precedent. Only human snipping
is a billion times faster, more facile."
   "Moving around existing traits? That's all
we're talking?"
   Ressler smiled. "All," he said ironically.
"For the time being."
   Todd was high-strung. He spoke rapidly.
"That just proves my point, then."
   "No." Ressler shook his head painfully.
"That proves my point. Genetic engineering
is not one single thing, but an assortment of
various techniques and projects, all with
different risks. By far the largest is ecological
imbalance. Unpredictable, irreversible
environmental mayhem that used to take
selective breeders a lifetime to produce can
now be knocked off in a dozen weeks."
   "Mayhem?" Todd sounded personally
wounded. "Are we that stupid? I'd think
that any science capable of reaching down
into the cell with a syringe a few molecules
thick, of doping out the genetic commands
and figuring out just where to cut and paste,
should be able to predict the effect a simple
rearrangement will have once it's in place.
The hard part's doing it. Figuring out what
you've done ought to be trivial."
   "One would think so. But remember our
simulation, back at the office. We wrote the
piece. We knew what every line of the code
did. We knew what effect a change to a
given parameter would have locally. But the
only way of determining the overall outcome
was to run the code." He learned forward
under his quilt. "It surprised us. And that
program was only a hundred instructions
long. The human genome, in twelve-point
Roman, is several thousand printed pages.
The linked biosphere..."
   "This strikes me as a strange argument for
an arch-empiricist to be taking."
   "Names will never hurt me," Dr. Ressler
laughed. "I could do without the 'arch,' I
suppose."
   "We can learn about things by breaking
them into parts?"
   "That's the only way I know of to learn
about things."
   "But it sounds as if you're describing some
impenetrable big picture. Some transcendent
sum that evades final analysis."
   "I wouldn't put it that way. Life is an
immense turbulent system. Small changes
produce large swings in outcome."
   "Are you saying that even a complete
understanding of the working parts can
never predict how they fit together?"
   "I'm saying we don't have anything close
to a working understanding of any of those
parts. A year and a half ago, two fellows at
large state schools, using one of those
miraculous syringes you mentioned, injected
the gene for rat growth hormone and a
promoter into a fertilized mouse cell. Their
mighty mouse made the cover of Nature.
Only: nobody knows how the mouse DNA
took up the injected gene. It's hard to
condone commercial applications of work
where the basic mechanism isn't
understood."
   "Unfair. How can we possibly go after a
breakdown of 'how' without first mapping
out 'what?'"
   Ressler was delighted that Todd, despite
his lack of formal training, felt equal to the
argument, even this deeply in. "Suppose the
fault is not in what technology can tell us,
but in what we are willing to hear from it?"
Hope: the life cycle's lethal enemy.
   I worked steadily on the jigsaw, a dozen
times aching to jump into the dialogue, but
knowing better than to risk involvement.
Franker argued from a position of urgent
altruism. He wanted to believe that by
eliminating the blind, backsliding,
short-interest, error-driven, groping element
from the spark—the code at last rendering
itself self-knowing, literate, able to grasp
and correct the insensate message it has for
eons posted forward to its later
by-products—life might reach the verge of a
new relation, cross the threshold of liberty.
Dr. Ressler, for private reasons, put Franker's
hope through the burner.
   "Check out Chargaff's piece in Nature.
Half-dozen years old. 'Have we the right to
counteract, irreversibly, the evolutionary
wisdom of millions of years... ? The world is
given to us on loan.
   We come and we go..' This, from the
fellow who first revealed the base ratios in
DNA."
   "Hey lady," Todd called me. "Verily this
man's citations."
   It felt good to be spoken to. "First tell me
where this tree branch with the two nubby
end things goes."
   The men came over to the table and began
worrying the puzzle with me. Frank looked
for spaces where particular pieces would fit,
Ressler for pieces that would fit particular
spaces. They were both infuriatingly good.
   "Do you have an ethical problem with it?"
Todd asked casually.
   "That depends, I suppose, on what part of
the 'it' we're concerned with. Perhaps some
genetic engineer somewhere is embarking
on eugenic nightmares, but that's another
matter. I guess I'd say that I have no more
moral qualms with ordinary gene transfer
than with hybrid corn."
   "Where in the world is the problem,
then?"
   Ressler shrugged. " 'Where in the world,'
indeed. The field is only a decade old. In a
little less than three years, the government
has granted a dozen patents on new forms
of life. Patents! There's even talk of
copyrighting segments of identified
genome."
   "OK, then. What part of recombinatory
research would you legislate against?"
   "That's just the problem. Legislation is too
late. Legislation is about commerce, rights,
equity. Once you need to pass laws about
science, you've taken a wrong turn."
   "Galileo muttering 'But it does move,'
under his breath, just after recanting?"
   "Exactly. Of course, the state is right to
prevent any process it thinks might harm the
public interest, just as it takes action against
phosphates in freshwater lakes,"
   "So what bothers you about genetic
engineering?"
   "It's not science. Science is not about
control. It is about cultivating a perpetual
condition of wonder in the face of
something that forever grows one step
richer and subtler than our latest theory
about it. It is about reverence, not mastery. It
might, from time to time, spin off an
occasional miracle cure of the kind you
dream about. The world we would know, the
living, interlocked world, is a lot more
complex than any market. The market is a
poor simulation of the ecosystem; market
models will never more than parody the
increasingly complex web of interdependent
nature. All these plates in the air, and we
want to flail at them. 'Genetic engineering' is
full of attempts to replace a dense,
diversified, het-erogenous assortment of
strains with one superior one. Something
about us is in love with whittling down: we
want the one solution that will drive out all
others. Take our miracle superstrains,
magnificent on the surface, but unlike the
messy populations of nature, deceptive, thin,
susceptible. One bug. One blight..No; the
human marketplace has about as much
chance of improving on the work of natural
selection as a per diem typist has of
improving Bartlett's Familiar Quotations."
   "But does recombination research
necessarily mean selling the field into the
market? We have this incredible leverage,
this light source, mind. The ability to work
consequences out in advance. Shed the
stone-and-chisel, save ourselves—"I could
make out his humanist's evolution: cell,
plant, animal, speaking animal, rational
animal, laboring animal, Homo fabor, and
ultimately: life as its own designer.
Something in Franker too, voting for
wonder. But wonder full of immanent
expectation.
   Ressler was not buying, not all the way.
"All we've done to date is uncover part of a
pattern. We can't mistake that for meaning.
Meaning can't be gotten at by
pattern-matching."
   "That's why work is more crucial than ever.
We're so close."
   "The experiment you want to extend is
three billion years old. It may indeed be close
to something unprecedented. All the more
reason why we need to step back a bit and
see how it runs."
   When we went to bed, Todd joined me in
mine. I was up early. It had stopped snowing
at last, but nearly three feet had obliterated
the contour of ground. Standing out against
the unbroken white, as conspicuous as the
pope without clothes, conifers went about
as if there was nothing more natural in the
world than converting sunlight into more
fondled slang thesaurus entries on the idea
of green. My eyes attenuated to movements,
birds, squirrels, the extension of that
trapped energy in the branches. I picked up
a cacophony of buzzes, whirs, and
whistles—an orchestra tuning up, about to
embark on big-time counterpoint. Imagining
the invisible sub-snow system—the larvae,
grubs, thimblefuls of soil a thousand species
wide—I suddenly understood Ressler's point
of the previous night: the transcendent,
delivering world Franker so badly ached for:
we were already there. Built into the middle
of it, tangled so tightly in the net that we
could not sense the balancing act always
falling into some other, some farther
configuration. The point of science was to
lose ourselves in the world's desire.
   Ressler came out, putting a biscuit in his
mouth as if dipping litmus into solution. He
greeted me happily. He gauged the snow
and rubbed a palm over his temple. "The
prospects of returning to the city in time to
do tonight's work have apparently slipped
to less than slim."
   Of course they had; we hadn't left
ourselves a margin to get back. We'd
counted, covertly, on this emergency, and
now we had it. We inspected the car, made
token efforts at clearing the wheels. I got in
and started the engine. Dr. Ressler wedged
himself against the fender and tried to rock
it down what was once the cabin path. But
we were not so much stuck as buried. The
back door of the cabin slammed and out ran
Todd. "Brought you some traction!"
Smirking like a schoolboy, he produced a salt
shaker.
   "Save it for the boids' tails," I shouted.
Giddy, euphoric.
   We rocked a while, stupidly, humanly,
going a dozen feet.
   "Shovel time," Todd suggested gaily.
   "You're mad," Ressler said. "It's three
hundred meters to the road."
   "Note the metric precision," Todd told me.
   "And the main road is itself under."
   "Just as well. We don't have a shovel
anyway."
   "We'd best call Jimmy," Dr. Ressler
suggested. "Not that he'll be able to do
much to pick up the pieces."
   "Oh God," Todd giggled, despite himself.
"Jesus. East Coast Fiscal Collapse."
   "Is there a problem?" Knowing what their
typical evening consisted of, I couldn't
conceive of their being anywhere near
indispensable to anyone.
   "We may not do anything. But those big
metal boxes do. Quite a bit."
   "Can't Jimmy run them?"
   "Around the clock? Without cohabitors?
Maybe for a day."
   "At half speed," Ressler clarified.
   "With the night operations procedures
manual at his side."
   "A book we haven't kept current for
months."
   "So who has a phone up here?" Todd
yodeled, listening for the echo.
   Ressler cocked his head in the direction of
the path we'd taken Saturday night. His eyes
flashed: it was not, perhaps, the shortest
route, but was by far the more beautiful. This
being North America, it had eventually to
lead to a phone. We took off happily up the
drifted hill. We made slow progress,
propping up one another. At the spot where
that pair of eyes had looked us over in the
dark, we stopped and searched but found
no tracks. The snow had long since rubbed
out all trace. We crested and saw, a few
hundred yards off, a house that looked lived
in. We threaded our way down the valley,
between the bare trees, hunters returning
home. Making the most of the last few
minutes before human contact, Todd asked,
as if nothing had intervened between their
conversation and now, "So is that why you
quit?"
   I was walking next to Ressler, and he took
my arm. "Not in so many words." And
because we weren't going anywhere that
night, or the night after, he suddenly had all
the time in the world to tell us what had
happened. And he did. In so many words,

  Storm Waltz II

       sea.change(ressler,koss,X) if
    in.Jove(ressler,koss) and
       not(knows(X)).

   Briefly humanity recalls, in a dream of
distant past, that use is no use. For a week,
it's again clear that the question is not ends
and applications, but shape, sound, angels
arriving on the raw doorstep, an ache, an
instant hint, singing the new year in, in a
bleak midwinter. Then back to grim progress.
In a dim hall just off the Christmas party, the
folio-wing afternoon in a public lecture,
passing in crowded corridors, seated
pointedly apart in team brain-storming, a
few excruciating minutes alone in the lab:
they fall deeper, more carelessly into
unwished desire. Her confession of love, at
the close of the old year, sweeps away his
last sense that this has all been self-torture.
He pays for that relief by losing all say in the
outcome. He has confessed to her, too.
   He feels in Jeanette a perverse urge for
danger. She is crazy reckless, slipping hand
between his thighs at a faculty meeting. In
their stolen clinches, she strains her head
around with fear at the least rattle or click,
only to relax her neck desperately again,
hating herself, her nerves, loving the
near-escape, moaning for more, moist fear.
Startled, silky, mottled, new to the place,
terrified, perpetually about to bolt.
   Away from her, he vows to break off, a
resolution already hobbled by attached
fatalist clauses. Hopeless. She demands to be
pressed, kneaded, her trembling animal lip
down registering the . punishment of
pleasure they cannot forego.
Creature-reversion, triggered simply by
touching certain spots on her—he can't stop
re-experimenting with it. The image comes
involuntarily just before he falls asleep, how
she closes her rolling eyes, shudders, lets her
focal "I" slip twenty centimeters down her
spinal column. He can feel it in her muscles,
in how she stands against him, indentured
to the flood response of her body, teaching
him how.
   He too is addicted by the sense, new to
him, of being victim to a thing he cannot
help. Debauched, depraved; the words give
him an erotic thrill proportionate to the pro
forma resistance he still manages. He knows
her public composure is the thinnest
wallpaper patch above a seething hive in the
board beneath. She wanders from the lab to
the supply closet nearby, looking for
something: tubing, glassware, him. He
follows her into the distant room. She stands
at the shelves, the picture of business. But
turning, she grabs him like a vegetative trap,
nudges closed the door, begins to mouth
him as if the verb were truly transitive.
   "If we get caught," he says, we'll be dead
on many levels."
   "I know." She kisses him, pushing away
and pulling at the same time. "Leave me
alone, why don't you?" She kisses again,
more circumspectly. "I must want to get in
trouble."
   He hears her struggle to keep from cooing
audibly. "This is as far as I go without a note
from your parents." He nearly says husband.
   "Me too," she replies dreamily, drugged,
aroused. "As far as I go." They catch one
another's eyes. The danger is real. They
sober, swing back to adulthood, agreeing
they must wean from this madness. "Little
boy," she says, restoring her glasses, "in
another life, I could take you around the
block a few times."
   The brave kindness, the funny, forlorn way
Dr. Koss delivers it pulls him back regretfully
to her face, where they lose another
moment. In this bittersweet heuristic, he is
not the experimenter. He is the subject of
these trial runs. That car will go around the
block itself if he doesn't brake.
   They share lucid moments, but only under
supervision. She visits him in his office, in
Lovering's gaze. "I've just read Gale and
Folkes," she says. Ressler looks across the
office. He can't very well ask her if she'd like
to talk outside, now that talk is really talk.
   "And?" he asks weakly. "What did you
think?"
   "Incredible. 'Incorporation reactions for
specific amino acids can be activated by
specific recombinations of nucleotides.'"
   "Spitting distance of an in vitro system
that will crack the game wide open."
   "You're right. You must be right." She
smiles, her back to Lovering, a double
entendre smile.
   "Two Cambridge scientists..." he doubts
out loud.
   "... who've missed a follow-up. You've
seen wrong turns before?"
    He's more than just seen one. "A
two-year-old article in one of the most
prestigious journals going..."
    "And no one's noticed it? No one picked
up Mendel for thirty years."
    "What's this over yonder?" Lovering
banters. "I distinctly hear dreaming."
    "Joey," Koss says, returning to the
thuggish quip-trader Ressler first took her
for, "call your wife, Sandy. I hear she's at
home taking a delivery from the furniture
man."
    "She's not my wife. Sandy doesn't believe
in the hypocrisy of the institution. We live in
sin. And believe me, sin's gotten an
undeserved bad name."
    "Have you told Ulrich about this?" Koss
readdresses Ressler.
    "I tried to," he claims.
    "How hard?" She grins.
    "You know the man's bias. You told me
yourself. Hung up on pushing the thing
through statistically. The last time I spoke
with him, he tried to interest me in doing
some machine coding."
    "Sounds interesting," Lovering throws
out.
    "Damn it, it's not." Ressler slams his hand
on his desk, surprising even himself. "He
thinks we can put together some kind of
grind-out generator of all sequenced
nucleotides, throw it up against some data
structure showing every known protein, and
let the thing iterate a couple hundred
hours..."
    "Couple hundred?" Jeanette almost falls
in his lap. "On the ILLIAC?" CU's
trimmed-down, transistor-overhauled,
performance-boosted, cutting-edge version
of the power-hungry rooms full of hardware,
brave new programmable switch boxes,
descendants of those devices originally built
in the forties to assist in cracking wartime
codes.
    "Sounds like it would work," Lovering
says.
    "I'm not saying it wouldn't."
    "What's the problem, then?"
    "It's overlaborious, superfluous drudgery,
that's the problem." Koss and Lovering both
laugh at his adjective production line. "I
can't believe it. Not after the success of the
first paper." Ressler's first work has already
caused ripples. The English and French, as
well as the Californians, have requested
reprints. But the more notorious the work
gets, the more cautiously Ulrich pursues it.
    Lovering shows his allegiance. "Come on.
How hard could the programming be?"
    "Oh, the algorithm is trivial. Little more
than a nested loop, with cases hooked on to
it. It would take a few weeks to throw
together, test it, get the bugs out. But it
would be a time-eating monster."
   Koss blurts out, "Joey! Friend. How much
programming have you done in your wee
lifetime?"
   "Zero. Null. Nil. Naught. Void."
   "Good. I'll teach you everything I know."
   "Everything?"
   "Everything that can be expressed politely
in FORTRAN. And Joey." She stares at him
and whispers. "We'll race you there."

         helps(heaven,X) if helps(X,X).

   Koss and Ressler get clearance from a
dubious Ulrich to try the incorporating
techniques suggested by Gale and Folkes,
under condition that they give Lovering a
hand in formulating an algorithm for the
matching program. They are to split their
time between in vitro synthesis and
computer tutorials. He gives them a
two-month probation, not enough time for
anything, yet more than Ressler expected. If
they have something tangible to show by
then, Ulrich will talk extension.
   Ressler tries to cop assistance from Woyty,
but the man is tied up reading Baby and
Child Care. Renée, pregnancy safe from
spontaneous abortion, is due in weeks.
Stuart visits Toveh Botkin in her
oriental-carpeted office. He surprises her,
slumped back in chair, in a Ringstrasse
Hapsburg reverie. "Where were you?" he
asks softly.
   "In the Café Centrale," she smiles.
   "Talking to Mahler?"
   She scoffs. "To Trotsky. In French. He was
trying to make me pick up his check." She
laughs at herself, a laugh that trails off into
a tsk. "Friend, it may be time to retire."
   "I've something that will change your
mind." He shows her the article, which she
devours in minutes. He tells her about the
release time he and Koss have won from
Ulrich.
   "Let me wash beakers. Pull periodicals.
Anything." Her eyes plead for one more shot
at the code before giving in to it.
   "We can pull our own damn periodicals.
From you, we need chemistry. And the
appropriate inspirational music."
   "Be not afeard," she says. "The isle is full
of noises."
   What noises? Down the quad, over in the
Music Building, Lejaren Hiller and Leonard
Isaacson put the finishing touches on their
composition, "ILLIAC Suite for String
Quartet," spawning a new genre. They use
the computer as a giant random-number
generator, an engine that produces, within
restrictions set by the
programmer-composers, sounds and suite
airs for four-pair hands to unvary. The
project reflects a dawning awareness that
the life score itself is assembled from
successive iterations of random mutation. It
is left to the unprepared audience's ears to
unalgorithm as best they can, to reverse the
random process, to hear in the blips and
bleeps of this new, startling conch shell the
steady surf of the first sea.

    theme(goldberg,list[g,f#,e,d,b,c,d,g,g,f#,
  e,a,f#,g,a,d,d,b,c,b,g,a,b,e,c,b,a,d,g,c,d,g]).
    variation(X,Y) if theme(Name,X) and
  equals(Y,mutation(X)).
    mutation(X) if

   "ILLIAC Suite" shares processing time with
Cyfer's attempts to secure the definition of
life. Compared to the tunes coming in over
the transistors at that moment, it comes from
a new planet. "Honeycomb" is the hit of the
season. Even Ressler, after laborious
attention now able to distinguish between
Haydn's London and Mozart's Prague,
dissects the disposable tune in two hearings.
For the week in question, he is forced to
listen to it twice an hour. The message is
inescapable—the measure of the minute. It
blasts from a thousand portable radios all
across town. For the invention of the
transistor, blame crosstown physics faculty
member John Bardeen. The 1956 Nobel
laureate, Bardeen has come to Urbana to
continue the work that will make him the
first repeat winner in the same field.
   The transistor itself is a flexible current
junction: small voltage differences at the
base produce large differences between
emitter and collector. With this simple
lexicon, the transistor can serve as
everything from current amplifier to logic
gate. In the ten years since its evolution, the
device has crept into circuits ranging from
ILLIAC to the portable radios giving white
kids of Anywhere, America, their first taste of
black sonority, racy innuendoed danger. R
and B currently mutates to R and R, a dialect
banned in several communities as
subversive, destructive, and unpatriotic. In
years, changed beyond recognition yet
virtually the same, the sound will go from
threat to ubiquitous backdrop: decorative
prop for everything from news broadcasts to
barber shops.
   William Shockley, Bardeen's collaborator
and corecipient of the '56 Nobel, has gone
from Bell Labs to California. There he begins
thinking taboo thoughts about the inherited
nature of intelligence. Might it be passed
along as discretely as wrinkled pods? He
becomes possessed by an idea in embryo—a
sperm bank for geniuses. Keep the genetic
pool from pollution. The racist tinge and
resultant outcry are picked up, reported, and
amplified in the general transistor noise.
   As for the text of "Honeycomb," it strikes
Ressler as a straightforward variation on the
time-honored metaphor of
Love-as-Edible-Food. Nuzzle, nibble, chew,
swallow your baby, your honey-pie, your
sweet. Until now, he always considered the
pap embarrassing, indulgent drooling. Now
he no longer holds it in contempt. Soft,
tuneful, pathetically appropriate. He'd like to
nuzzle, suck, sing to her, even. Jeanette's
form sears him with the instantly consumed
melancholic cheer of radio tunes.
Heartbreaking, vulnerable, in black-pleated
narrow waists, peach tapering bodices, she
is the core of girlishness, a fleeting goodbye
to summer, sailboats on the lake, the downy,
borrowed body about to be eaten and spit
out by the shape-hungry world. She hovers
at her last moment, soon to be expelled from
visitation. He must preserve, fix her at this
unarrestable peak of loveliness. He doesn't
know how. All he can do is attach himself to
her at the mouth.
   They preserve enough presence of mind to
work together on in vitro. With Botkin's
assistance, they advance on a clean
technique. Lab work is exciting again, not
solely on account of their proximity, hours
spent within touching distance, more secret
because more open. Back in the barracks,
doing a dish, he is struck by how much
repetitive maintenance it takes just to exist.
Existence is the cycle extraordinaire;
everything tangent, constantly spinning just
to stay in place. But the missing piece of the
coding problem offers entree to another
process—lines, deltas. They stand at the base
of Jacob's Ladder. Can they be on the
threshold of completing what until then had
been merely repetitive climb?
   For weeks Ressler has bankrolled a private
research venture, exploring to what extent a
toothache is imaginary. When the tooth
abscesses one morning, flash burning at the
stake makes him recant, tear to the dentist.
In the waiting room he blunts himself into
oblivion over back issues of Life. He reads
Dulles's brinksmanship quote, which he
missed the first time around. He scans the
magazine's breezy treatment turning
high-ranking Nazi von Braun into the Rock
Hudson of Rocketry. He has a premonition:
the final solution to the modern crisis will be
to turn the threat of news into light
entertainment.
   The world is at war, perpetual war, moving
at all tangent angles. All over the world, a
spreading collection of brushfires extends
the head-on conflagration by other means.
Wars come down to the control of
information. They purport to be about the
attainment of battlefields, defense of
property, renovation of antiquated systems
of ownership, liberation of oppressed
peoples, geopolitical dominance. But these
are just material proxies for pursuing
conflict's real end: the testing of new
technologies, the stockpiling of data.
   Information is ordered contrast; it can be
won only by building a differential between
sound and noise. The purpose of gathering
information is to increase predictability.
Information theory was born in the War,
when Norbert Wiener was asked to build a
gun-sight that could tell where an enemy
plane would be in the next few seconds.
He's read Wiener: wars are won by making
your enemies more ignorant than they can
make you. A state's ability to wage war is
measured only loosely in kilotonnage. A
better indicator is a country's ability to wage
randomness, to impose a signal-to-noise
problem on the enemy, render his
informational stockpile incoherent.
   Since Caesar, warring states have known
that the best way to protect information
from enemy corruption is to disguise it as
noise. A coded message already appears
random, protectively colored. But since the
Gauls, warring states have studied how to
break the noise barrier, reverse the garble.
The history of warfare is the story of
cryptology. In one of the paperback cipher
books he pored over when the coding
problem was forming, Ressler read that the
British alone during the recent outbreak
sported thirty thousand information troops.
The number has risen steeply since. The Cold
War marks that moment in organized
violence when the number of people
attached to various code books surpasses
the number toting rifles.
   No matter how well coded a message, how
ingeniously the treasure is reduced to
apparent gibberish, there is always a key that
reveals the underground sense under the
cloak of noise. This gives secret writing its
otherworldly quality. The cryptanalyst's
arcane ritual of incantations—MAGIC, as the
army/navy wartime decoding efforts were
named—transmutes seeming
meaningless-ness into firm predictions. The
one who renders the message readable
possesses all the import of the original.
   In Life's breezy treatments of Dulles and
von Braun—aided by the swatch his abscess
cuts across his brain—Ressler sees that even
the safe haven of academia, so far from the
industrial trenches, will not prevent his
being conscripted. The genetic code,
however selflessly and reverently, will be
co-opted in the broader code war. Life, use's
henchman, serves up as comestibles
everyone from assassins to scientists
("modern mandarins, modern
necromancers"). His act of pure research,
done with religious indifference to
consequences, delivers all organic creation,
codebroken and codespoken, into warring
hands.
   Just as his tooth sends up another flaming
wave, Ressler stumbles across a photo essay
of the twenty-odd-year-old pianist,
interpreter of the Goldberg recording that
Koss gave him. Given the ends of
photojournalism, Ressler is not surprised to
catch the gist: the boy is young, single,
romantically eccentric, a crank
hypochondriac, never seen without his
panoply of pills and jars of spring water. He
possesses the Lovering allele of cold virus
paranoia, wearing wool coats in the height
of summer. He sings out loud while
recording— ghostly, alternate vocalizings
the technicians can't muffle. He has a
carefully worked-out, outlandish theory
about recordings rendering the concert
obsolete. Yet the nut is a genius. He has
inherited a contrapuntal brain, and the Bach
decoding algorithm is congenitally
embedded into his ten-bit, digital circuitry.
   Suddenly the notes are in Ressler's ears,
conspiring voices, sounding of lost days, lost
names, affections, friends. Those variations,
fragments, flint-splinters of the original: how
long he has lived with them since his first,
dull attempts at theory. His slow,
purpose-free pursuit of the
four-by-four-by-four aria, the Sixty-four
Sarabande Dollar Question has become so
instilled, so somatic, that he has forgotten
the point of the experiment until this
moment.
   Jeanette! Why infect a stranger in the first
place? She hadn't a clue to his nature, yet
she came, brought this unprovoked birthday
encyclopedia of crystallized sounds—iced
trees clicking together after a storm; scrape
of metal runners coasting down a hill near
evening, sparking bare rock, reticent snow
brushing the blades; shouts in the city; the
clink of tipping scales; the slosh of
ankle-dangling euphoria; summer insect
swarms; plash of sun's rays lengthening over
the lawn; baroque silliness; French fluff;
political fervor; the chill call of last illness;
the swelling sound of always, of never. Did
she know already where they would arrive,
long before either dared to consider the first
touch? He forgives himself this once the
too-brief two-manual figure in the thick of
his chest, deciding that the only measure
that can crack these patterns is beauty.
   Ressler reads the profile three times but
finds no key to the Goldberg code. He is
called into the operating theater. As the
dentist administers the composite anesthetic,
preparing to yank out the offensive
handiwork of bacteria, Ressler calms himself,
grips the arms of the chair, and relaxes,
following the contour of the seductive
melody he has never really put aside since
that unbirthday party long ago. He recreates
tracts of the piece in his head. Preexistent
knowledge of the piece, recovered in a
hundred hours of close listening, allows him
perfect recall. But the music, the
note-for-note isomorph in his interior
concert hall, is not the piece she gave him.
One cannot step into the same theme twice.
   His dentist saws oíf the tooth's crown,
ferrets out the roots. His mouth is blown
apart. At that moment, when pain ought to
rack his body, the pain of violent mistake,
murderous razor-pain, Ressler is cast adrift,
at sea on sound. A Pentothal haze of
realization: every sound wave ever uttered
could be packed into a single generating
pattern a few measures long, the world's
pocket score. He barely flinches as the
chunks of infected, lodged bone are ripped
from his head.

            asks( ressler,koss,question(
         Today ,X )). question(2/l/58,"Why
         can't I tell you what I hear?").
         equals( question( Day ,X
         ),question( Day + 1 ,X )).

   At home, a bloody cotton wad in his
mouth, still under the protective residue of
anesthetic, he calls Koss. He gets the
husband. Pleasant acquaintance from faculty
parties, dignified man of standing, food
technologist of the first order, impediment,
innocent victim, human being who has never
shown Ressler anything but trust. "Hello,
Herbert. Ressler here. Wife home?" No mean
feat with a mouth of pebbles and blades.
   "I didn't recognize your voice. Drinking?"
   "Dentist."
   "Ha! Not the slurred speech of choice. The
wife's in the study, all bothered over this
new experiment of yours. Hold on."
   After gruesome pleasantry, Ressler doesn't
mind being left dead on the line. He stares at
where his hand has been tracing out
automatic writing on the phone pad:
phonenumber phonember phonembryo
phenomeber.
   A silence comes across the receiver, one
whose breathprint he has come to hear most
hours of waking and deep into sleep. Her
lungs, in and out, are a muffled Morse.
Those soft pulses of silence are the one
message they can transmit to one another
uncoded. At last she says, "Stuart!" Cheerily,
a little surprised for the benefit of her
husband, listening in the distant room. Yet
cloaked in a subtext intelligible only to him.
Quite a trick, making the word serve double
purpose for two parties. Her subsequent
lines are the same—masterly ambiguous
hermeneutic chestnuts. It scares him to hear
that actress's modulation, her flawless
delivery. She lies beautifully, as confidently
as Eva Blake doing cross-words in pen.
   But fright is also deeply silken, burgundy,
arousing. He hears her excitement across the
line, cadenced so that her husband cannot.
He relishes the awful irony: she lets the man
think we're discussing biochemistry. And we
are. "Jeannie," he grits out through numbed
mouth. "Jeannie, I'm sorry."
   "No need for that. Hold on a moment. Let
me get a pad. OK. Now: were you speaking
in the short or long term?"
   "I'm sorry for calling. I'm sorry for falling in
love with you. I've had a hundred
opportunities to stop. I wanted to. I'm sorry
for ruining your life."
   "Oh, I'm sure it's nothing we can't
salvage. What's the damage, in your
estimate?"
   "Jeanette," he says "Darling. Friend. We
have to quit."
   "We can't." Perfectly modulated. "Not
while we're ahead."
   "Jeanette. You're killing me. Every minute
is a terror that something's happened to
you." Without thinking, he blurts, "You
have to leave your husband."
   At the other end, excruciating, ambiguous
silence.
   "We have to have each other."
   "Well?" she giggles, eighteen, baiting,
ignoring the chaperon. April invitation.
"What's keeping you?"
   Where is Herbert? Has he stepped out?
Does she no longer care? Her invitation
burns like a fist of opium, warm, loose,
nothing to be done. He will go over this
minute, taste her, feed her, make her call out
to her husband in the next room that no,
she wasn't shouting. Nothing wrong. Ressler
looks down at his growing list: genenumber
genome genehome. "I'll die, otherwise."
   "Nobody likes death," she says, hands
cupped to receiver.
   "Listen. I need to ask you something.
When you brought me that record..."
   "Record?"
   No longer in control, he begins to sing,
through shattered mouth, half of a twisting,
two-manual arabesque. No, a third of a trio:
a simple descending line that, in this
instance, implies, in abstentia, a flowing
semiquaver figure, transparent, effortless,
advancing in all directions, nowhere.
   "Oh, that record," she laughs, despite his
tuneless butchering of the Base. "De goole
bug."
   "When you bought me that record..."
   "Used," she corrects.
   "When you gave it to me, did you love me
already?" Did you think: We'll listen to this
together, in some future life, you and I, free
from all distraction, from the duplicitous
waltz, innocent again, free to follow the
tune, to go nowhere with it? "Why do I
think of you when you aren't here?" He does
nothing to help her out of the bind. She
must deceive her own way out, with her own
sick skill with words.
   "That's a tough one. We could throw that
one up for brain-storming, if you like."
   "I need you. God, I'm sorry I'm even saying
this. Why am I saying this?"
   "No doubt there's a mechanism
somewhere. But we shouldn't be too hasty,
hmm? Perhaps we can't blame everything on
ribosomal RNA?"
   "Jesus Christ."
   "I beg your pardon?"
   "Say that again."
   "I beg your—"
   "Before that."
   "Aren't we being a little hasty in blaming
ribosomal... ?"
   "Dr. Koss!" An electric connection. She
grasps it instantly. Whatever her weakness,
her acting skill, her addiction to danger, her
animal need, she too is driven by love of the
pattern. "Oh, Stuart," she says, hushed.
'"Jesus Christ' is right!" Crescendoed in
those four words almost to a yell, she lowers
her voice back to business tones. "No,
Herbert. Everything's all right." Giggling
almost hysterically into the phone. "Isn't
everything all right, Dr. Ressler?"
   It is. "How could we have been so stupid?
Don't answer that. The ribosome isn't our
message carrier. It's not the software
transcript. It's just..."
   "... the reading hardware," Jeanette
supplies, giving the word a delicious twist.
"Our messenger boy is..."
   "... someone else by the same name. The
RNA we're after disappears as soon as it's
read." Of course: not the stuff that persists
in the cell. Theirs is another transcript,
ephemeral, one that can't stick around to
clog the works with old commands. No
wonder vitro hasn't produced yet; they've
confused identities. When he speaks again,
it's to himself. "How beautiful! The thing
assembles its own assembly plants. It sends
out an isomorph of orders for the
production run. It uses its own end product
to keep the whole process running.
Magnificent." Its own hardware, software,
storage, executor, writer, even client. What
else? The code cannot be decoded except
through by-products of the code. He might
have known, he, another of the thing's
by-products. "I'll call Botkin."
   "She'll flip. You can't be wrong about
this," she gushes carelessly. That slight
oversight of tone recalls them from the
intoxicating insight. She returns to the brisk
voice of science, perfect in contrivance,
disguised signaling. "Stuart. You've all but
done it. I'll be in the lab early tomorrow. The
procedures for testing this ought to be
trivial."
   "Goodbye, friend," he exhales, weary.
   She returns, "Good night," imperceptible
overtone catching in her throat, suggesting,
Dream of me, as if that parameter were not
already an errand boy, persisting, racing
through his cell.

  Storm Waltz (Da Capo)

        writes(X,Y,Z) if knows(X,Y) ,alive(X)
     ,alive(Y) and helps(heaven,X) and
     message(Z) and (curious(X) or
     reawakened(X) or scared(X)) and
     ín.love(X,Y).
        message(Z) if
     quote.of.day(Anyone,Any.source,Z) or
     question(Today, Z) or
     variation(Any.message,Z).

       in.love(X,Y) if
     sea.change(X,Y,Anyone).
       goal: writes(odeigh,todd,Z)?
       1 Solution: Z =

     Dear Franklin,
       Your letter arrived just when I'd cured
     myself of waiting. I read it—I've lost
     count how often—and it still breaks my
     heart. What am I supposed to make of
     you? Not one mention of the fact that
     has driven me for months. Do you even
     realize? The man is dead.



XX

  The Wife's Message

   Writing was bad enough. Posting the
thing felt like killing a baby. The unreal
address and Franker's dreamy prose freed me
to say things I'd never have written had I for
a minute believed he might read them. He'll
be reading them in days.
   The incurable Todd denial of time drips
from his every sentence, worse than his
long-distance admission of love. I loved his
time-indifference once, believed in it. Now I
see that he doesn't even realize his
infuriating, seductive residence in the
eternal present. Nothing happens to anyone;
no one changes or ages or dies. Everything
exists, static; now is a standing wave. One
just moves about inside the gallery,
changing vantage, tilting an eyebrow,
unbothered by closing hour.
   Once, making fun of my three-by-five
tone, he accused me of being thirty going on
thirty centuries. But he was twenty-six going
on twenty-six. When I first asked his age, he
improvised: "I was born in St. Paul's
Maternity Hospital on June 18,1957, and
instantly fell into a deep sleep from which I
have since awakened only fifteen hours a
day." Funny at the time.
   When he was obsessed with transferring
each day's Times, baroquely illustrated, into
his spiral books, I thought here was a fellow
intent on knowing his narrow sliver instant.
Just the opposite: he meant to freeze solid
the world's blood bank. Full compilation of
everything that has happened would at last
provide a place where nothing still did. Had
he possessed the sticking power, his books
would have swelled, not widthwise across
the shelf but downwards, mine-shaft-style.
In time—for one could always be sure of
more time, somewhere in an eternally
spacious future— he would have gone back
to pick up the missing pieces from the
vertical file: first UN disarmament conference,
Reagan slips surviving marines out of Beirut,
haircut ( $9.50), breast of chicken again.
February repeats; so does the 3rd: why not
the year as well?
   His letter plasters over unaccountable
cracks in chronology. Days spent nosing
about in collections no longer pass. His
Hemelvaartsdag trip to the Middle Ages:
Ascension, a good half year before he wrote.
Yet he lays out the detail as if last week. He
has grown so cavalier with the calendar that
he postdated the letter; no other
explanation for how it arrived so quickly.
When he bothers mentioning Dr. Ressler at
all, it's a Ressler his own age,
pre-disappearance, present tense.
   If he came to my doorstep and petitioned
in person, I would not be able to help
myself, although the thing he cannot abide
in me remains unchangeable. But this—this
nostalgic declaration of attachment, a
connection that continues in his mind just
because he chanced recently to remember
that it was ongoing once: impossible. Not
now or ever.

  Return Trip

   We called our distress message back to the
city. Jimmy groaned. "You two know you
aren't supposed to travel together." A case
of closing the disk file after the bytes
escaped.
   We borrowed a pound of oatmeal, a
packet of coffee, and an ancient grain scoop
from the contemptuous local whose phone
we had hiked to. Sleepless, deliciously
starved, we dug out. Late the next day, the
plows sliced open the access road, clearing
our umbilical. But before we were freed, we
heard, in meticulous detail, how Dr. Ressler
left microbiology. He narrated in open
monotone, feeling the pull of those way
stations again in proportion to their
distance. Todd got his answer to how a
person might descend into moratorium and
never reemerge. And I learned that the man
I'd researched was not who he was at all.
   Not reticent, not demure, not this
neutralized retreat behind grace and syntax.
The effacing fifty-year-old was a detour, not
Ressler by nature, not who he was slated to
become. I began to see what had done it:
circumstance and a certain turn of mind had
conspired to give him violent proof that the
individual organism was a lie. Thoughtful,
precise, romantic, driven, needy: the a la
carte traits were all phantom, paper
bookkeeping. The self was wedged between
two far more real antagonists—the genes it
was designed to haul around and the
running average of a population statistically
indifferent, even hostile, to it.
   What possible response was there, upon
discovering that all responses were
embarrassing, misrepresentative
semaphores? Laughter was after something;
even kindness had ulterior motives.
Character was composed of processes intent
on short-term results. The molecule, eternally
rolling its repertoire against the
monster-generating numbers, cared as little
for a trait as for its polar opposite. Life was
not the polite venture it seemed at eye level.
One step up or down the hierarchy and the
project grew sweeping, terrible, so indirect
in means that it made him, the best part of
his nature, seem a self-duping, shady junior
partner in a fly-by-night mail-order scheme.
   Even pure science—the most advanced
display of living potential—was not
approved by either gene or population, both
indifferent to any but practical knowledge.
The one was a stupid, sniffing truffle hound
rooting out instant gain, the other a
totalitarian juggler, insatiable for accuracy.
As unsavory as that left things, the linkup
between molecule and mob was still so
brute-beautiful that Ressler might well have
lived on curiosity alone, even manipulated,
puppet curiosity, were it not for one
implication in the unified theory. Life
proceeded not by survival of the fittest, but
by differential reproduction. It was enough
simply to make more than you lost. There
was no Jacob's Ladder leading higher and
higher. There was only breeding, faster,
hungrier, until speed, appetite, and success
did you in.
   Yet life in theory (more beautiful because
more crystal-cold) didn't do him in; life as
lived did, the twist existence laid at his door.
He could not erase his traits without erasing
himself—a choice he stopped just short of.
But he could swear off the self-serving
bouquet of characteristics in abject humility.
Monasticism. The night shift.
   Snow-sprung, we headed south along the
fastest route. Todd drove; Ressler rode
shotgun. I studied this passenger in the
front seat who, for no good reason except
that we'd half guessed, had just told us his
life story. His eyes had become reanimated,
too hopeful, too alive to possibilities to bear
looking at.

  A 443

            A slight sharp in the middle
          brass, teeth-freezing, three beats
          fast: masked quickly, yet more
          conspicuous in being virtually
          home, but missed.

      Near-hit dissonance is a shout:
      someone whom love, in the
    darkening yard
      held at arm's length, kept almost.
      Always the choice: there or close,
      the sharp catch of near miss
      or the oblivion of concert pitch.

  Return Trip (continued)

   We reached MOL in the middle of the
night. The waiting chaos was worse than I'd
imagined. The computer room's fluorescent
composure had been shattered into a parody
of flyblown Jugendstil. Tables were stacked
with slopped printouts, riffled listings, and
unraveling tape bands. The rack-bound
operations manual that usually sat regal as
an OED was pulled apart into signatures,
spread all over the linoleum. Disk packs,
dangerously uncovered, were scattered
everywhere, piled in model babels on top of
spindles. The smooth metal chitin of the CPU
had been detached, revealing a mass of
printed circuit cards. Seated on the floor in
front of the bared cage, his back to the door
where we entered, a dazed Uncle Jimmy
stared listlessly at the diagnostic LEDs.
"James," Ressler greeted him, between
amusement and anguish.
   Jimmy turned around slowly, as if the
cavalry's arrival no longer made any
difference. "Don't even ask."
   From behind the aisle of drives came
Annie's excited treble. "Is it really them?"
She crept out, tape spools running up each
slender arm like Cleopatra's bracelets. Her
hair had fallen in a flaxen heap around her
neck. She was rumpled and white from lack
of sleep. "I've been helping tide things
over."
   Franker began frantically inspecting the
damage. "Don't tell me it's been just the two
of you here since..."
   "I Wish it had been," Jimmy said, hoisting
himself wearily off the floor. "They've been
parading in and out for the last forty-eight
hours. My people. Bank people. Hardware
repairmen. Outside advisers. Everyone
staying just long enough to screw up
another thing before heading home for the
wife and kids."
   "I have no wife and kids," Annie said.
   "You've been a brick, woman. A lifesaver.
Not that we've managed to salvage
anything."
   Ressler sat at the console, leaned forward
to read the screen full of error messages. He
managed a remarkably calming voice. "How
bad is it, Jimmy?"
   "I haven't been home to see my mother
since...Damn you both." Even the man's
anger was ludicrously devoid of hostility.
   Ressler scanned the console log and
asked, "What are you running at the
moment?"
   "Running? You jest. See those packs over
there? Those are tonight's work. Those in
the corner are from last night. Monday's
packs are still up on the spindles."
   Todd whistled. Jimmy nodded grimly. Dr.
Ressler took off his coat and glanced around
the room, looking for the best angle to
approach the catastrophe. Then the two of
them set into motion, like the mythic ants
called in to carry off the chaff. Todd sorted
reports, cumulating pages. He held out a
sheaf toward me, turning his head. "Take
these away. I'm not privy to them."
   "But I don't know the code to the listings
room."
   "Me neither," he said woodenly, then
whispered it in my ear.
   Ressler went over to the Operations
Manager, still paralyzed by the CPU. "Jim,
we're sorry. We owe you. Now get home to
bed. We'll see you on the day shift
tomorrow, when you get here. Go. You're no
good to us in your current condition."
   Jimmy nodded dumbly and gathered to
go. Annie, still pretty in raggedness, bleated
out heroically, "What can I do?"
   Ressler had already turned his back and
was busy swapping the board that had
failed. "You'd better go home too."
   Annie only smiled: whatever he said was
right. It hit me that she too adored the man,
in her fashion. "I'll pray for the three of
you."
   "She'll do what?" I whispered to Todd,
after they left.
   He was unrolling the console log on a
cleared swatch of floor, digging back into
the transcript of the last three days for clues
to reversing the disaster. His lips curled at my
incredulous tone. "You didn't know?"
   "Know what?" I began collating,
punching emergency job cards, doing what
little I could to help clean up.
   His answer shocked me. "She's a fighting
Fundy from Spiritus Mundi." Todd spoke
more to his pencil ticks on the log than to
me.
   "But that's impossible."
   "Why? Because she likes us?"
   "Because she works for a DP firm. Because
she graduated from a university."
   Todd snorted. "Lots of religious folks
graduated from university. Abelard. Luther.
Jonathan Edwards. Oral Roberts. Everybody
who ever graduated from Oral Roberts —"
   "Stupid. You know what I mean. Really
fundamentalist?"
   "Literal, noninterpretable truth of every
word in the Good Book. I'm not sure if that's
King James or Revised Standard."
   "And she's going to pray for us? Heaven
will expedite the data backlog you two have
unleashed?"
   "Don't be cynical. It's not becoming.
Besides: what Bible truths are you able to
refute beyond all doubt?"
   "Joshua commanding the sun to stand
still?"
   "This was before Newtonian mechanics."
   "Methuselah living to be nine hundred
and sixty-nine?"
   "They had more ozone layer back then."
He looked up suspiciously. "How, may I ask,
did you remember that number exactly? You
practice closet religion?"
   "Please. Don't talk to me about closets
and religion. I used to stay awake nights as a
girl, terrified that the Blessed Virgin was
going to pop out of mine. I used to pray not
to be granted a vision."
   "A Catholic!"
   "Very apostate, thank you."
   "Once a Catholic...Did you know that if
you summed the letters in all the popes'
names and divided by four thousand four
that you get six sixty-six?" He drew red
circles around telltale spots in the console
timeline. Annie's faith was burlesque
counterpoint, incidental to the real
metaphysical question of whether there was
life after the death of his firm. I continued to
help fetch things and enter keyboard codes.
But the idea that someone I was friendly
with believed that exactly 144,000 people
were going to be saved come the Rapture
wrecked me. I could not help harping on the
point. "Do you suppose God put all those
animal fossils deep in solid rock to test our
faith?"
   Todd laughed aggressively. "See all this?"
He swept his hands over the chaos of the
hermetic room. "God planted the seed for all
this in—" He paused to do the simple
product. "In one hundred and forty-four
hours."
   Across the room, from inside the crippled
CPU, Ressler said, "That's less time than it's
going to take us to clean it up."
   I stayed the night, gophering, watching as
they returned the machines to the state
they'd been in at derailment. By the time the
day shift filtered in, they had managed, by
superhuman effort and suspect shortcut, to
get the Monday processing underway. That
left two and a half days of backlog, with
Thursday's transactions about to come in. As
I left, Ressler shook his head in disbelief. He
smiled his old, demure smile—but with a hint
that the disguise wouldn't wash
anymore—kissed me on the cheek, thanked
me for the trip, and said that perhaps
praying was the proper algorithm in the
circumstances after all.
   I went straight from the warehouse to the
branch, looking as rumpled as my friend the
creationist had when she left to intercede
with the creator. Back at work, greeted by
Mr. Scott's sardonic eyebrow at my having at
last deigned to return from extended
vacation, I got down to addressing my own
backlog—the public sector's most urgent
questions.

  The Question Board

   How many dimples on a golf ball? My
neighbor refuses to turn his stereo down;
what legal recourse do I have? Is intelligence
inherited? Where did goose-stepping
originate? Can we afford to stand idly by? A
farmer has a fox, a chicken, and a bag of
feed; how... ? What is the highest form of
life that can be cloned? Why 'Big Apple'?
What happened to Amelia Earhart? What's
the most fundamental particle in nature?
Does acupuncture work? What causes
inflation? Who are the eleven thousand
Virgins and where can I meet one? What can
I do but move from sorrow to defeat? Why
sixty seconds in a minute? Why not 5,380?
Who made those statues in the South
Pacific? Which weighs more, a pound of
feathers or a pound of lead? What is the
name of the projecting blocks supporting a
roof beam? "Croatoan"? How many people
in this century have died for political
reasons? How many were going to St. Ives?
When did the Age of Enlightenment end?
Who calls so loud? Or se' tu quel Virgilio? Is
it possible to service domestic debt by
adjusting foreign exchange rates? Which is
better, Harvard or Yale? How many
secretaries of state has this country had?
What child is this who laid to rest on Mary's
lap is sleeping? Where is the oldest-known
surface on earth? Can one still join the
French Foreign Legion? What was the name
of that Eisenhower aide who got in trouble
over a coat? What kind of coat? What's the
difference between the United States and a
carton of yogurt? Kennst du das Land?
Kennst du es wohl? What is the common
name for the family Chrysomelidae? Will
machines ever think? Is my tap water
poison? What about radon? Acid rain? The
greenhouse effect? DES? Dioxins? The
ozone? What the hand dare seize the fire?
Did he smile his work to see? Is it true
blondes have more fun? What's your sign?
Will you still love me tomorrow? What
causes cancer? Who turned out the lights?
What is this world? What asketh man to
have? Who told you you were naked? When
will it suffice? What's a heaven for?

  The Coding Problem

   Todd woke me the next night. I rolled over
and answered the phone without coming
conscious. "Hello, Reference Desk."
   "Hello, Reference Desk. Frank here. Did
you see? We made the papers."
   "The what?" Swifter than smelling salts.
   "You know: today in history? All the News
That Fits? Well, we're on Section A, page
thirteen, column four, line number..."
   "What did we do?"
   "Nothing less than impede the March of
Progress. 'Digital But Ripples Through
System.' Special to the Times. 'A rash of
electronic funds transfer problems have
propagated through the banking networks
in the last several days, causing serious
delays throughout...'"
   "Good God."
   "Now, now. Let's not turn theistic under
pressure. That's the first signal. From there,
it's just a small step to frogs, hail, bread, and
fishes."
   "Shut up. Do they mention you by name?
Do they say MOL?"
   " 'Those most familiar with the
increasingly integrated computerized
transfer routes admit the difficulty in
identifying one specific node where delays
begin. "That's like trying to pull the culprit
from a fifty-car expressway pile up," says
systems analyst...'"
   "So you're not sure it's really your outfit?"
   "Our outfit, lady," he snickered; having
come along for the vacation, I couldn't
weasel out now. "I'm sure it's us. Ressler is
sure. The president of MOL is sure. But
nobody's suggesting as much to the Times
until we've doctored all the logs."
   "Don't be ridiculous. Your whole office
can't be larger than twenty thousand square
feet. Even the day shift only employs a
couple dozen people. How much weight can
you possibly swing?"
   "How big is a bit?" he replied. He went
on, against regulations, to list clients of the
firm—credit unions and financial outfits for
half a dozen Fortune 500 companies,
including two productless conglomerates
whose names perpetually pop up in defense
bidding.
   "By itself, all our screw-up did was mess
up these folks' books for a week, delay a few
checks, block the flow of transactions. Big
deal: they shell out excuses, we get slapped
with a fine, and everybody waits till the
status byte returns to quo. Problem is, no
CPU is an island. Listen: "The minor crisis,
which industry analysts hope is now over,
reveals the vulnerability of increasingly
interdependent fiscal networks. Particularly
sensitive are same-day overdrafts, when
institutions transfer massive amounts of
money they do not have, under the
assumption that they will receive similar
transfers to cover them in the immediate
future. Any interruption along the line...'"
   "Paraphrase, please."
   "What do you mean, paraphrase? The
thing already is a paraphrase. Every cell has
to be in place for the lung to pump properly.
Small inputs run up big outputs. A single
snowfall in New Hampshire ..."
   "... can bring the entire post-Bretton
Woods banking system to a standstill?"
   I meant the crack facetiously, but I heard
him doing the recursive algebra in his head
at the other end. "Yes," he said. "With a few
well-placed shoves from basic ineptitude."
   I went by the first chance I had. They were
still shoveling out; the place needed only the
stink of manure to be the Augean stables.
They had been on continuous surgical call
since I'd left. Todd was as punch-drunk as
he'd sounded over the phone. Dr. Ressler
looked unflustered, alert, well-rested. He'd
even managed to slip back into a pressed
suit, thinking to intimidate the crisis into
submission by proper dress. Taped to the
edge of a CRT was the clipping from the
Times. All other evidence was extinguished.
That evening they processed the previous
day's transactions, submitting alongside the
standard decks supplementary bug
inoculations. "Do you know what a 'fix' is?"
Todd asked.
   "I know you're in one."
   "Spoiled my punchline. A fix is when you
patch a tag to a program reading,
'Amendment 12: Amendment 11 hereafter
invalid.' "
   "What are you repealing, exactly?"
   "History. We have to settle the Master
File's nerves. Convince it the trauma it's just
been through never happened."
   "How do you do that?"
   "Much the way Stalin edited the textbooks
until Lamarck became viable," Ressler said.
   Todd chuckled. "All the data are backed
up. That's what these tape drives are for.
Transcriptions of every day for the last six
years. We went back to the last uncorrupt
day and fed in the duplicate transaction files
all over again, doctored to look as if they
were just coming in. The professor's
footwork, of course. It worked, except for a
few tumors, which we are now in the process
of postdating and zapping with
microlasers."
   "No four-day delay? No same-day
overdraft foul-ups?"
   "Never happened."
   Ressler explained, "Electronic records,
unlike organisms, aren't compelled to drag
around the trace of everything their
ancestors ever lived through. We can rewrite
them, assign them any past at any moment.
We, by contrast, are trapped in every
stopgap success our bases have ever come
up with, the running average of our every
then."
   "But how can a little flypaper dive like this
cause a quake in High Finance?"
   "You surprise me. I would have thought
that you, of all people your age, would have
picked up on the emerging, central fact of
modern existence."
   "Namely?"
   "The smaller the thread, the tighter the
weave."
   "Don't get him riled up," Todd cautioned
from across the room. "We still have two
evenings of work to finish tonight."
   But it was too late. Dr. Ressler sat me
down at the console.
   "What would you like to know? What
wing of this incredible house of cards would
you like to visit?" To hear him talk, the
keyboard was, in knowledgeable hands, an
index into all embraceable space—gazetteer,
thesaurus, almanac, anatomy, Britannica
annual all ready to respond to the least
finger nudge. "Let's start in our own
backyard," he said. Where all inquisitive
children begin exploration. He stroked the
keys, cross-hands, answering system prompts
faster than I could read them. A string of
coded digits snaked in front of us:

     53 6F 6D 65 74 69 6D 65 73 20 66 72 6F
  6D 20 68 65 72 20 65 79 65 73 20 49 20 64
  69 64 20 72 65 63 65 69 76 65 20 66 61 69 72
  20 73 70 65 65 63 68 6C 65 73 73 20 6D 65 73
  73 61 67 65 73 00 00

   "Here we are," he said. "A little fragment
of the master text. This could stand for
anything in creation. Bank account, tech
blueprint, love letter, combination of all
three. All we see is a systematic disorder."
   Todd sighed, "A systematic disorder in the
dress kindles in me a wantonness."
   "This says nothing in its present form, but
it clearly possesses the irregular regularity
needed to mean something more than it
says. So which do you think this scrap is," Dr.
Ressler quizzed, inclining his head. "Data or
instruction?"
   I hadn't the slightest idea. But on second
look, with encouraging nods from Todd, I
noticed two features that made the choice
obvious. "Data," I said quickly, once I'd
caught on.
   "Good woman." He knew I'd get it before
I did. He hit another key and the gibberish
turned into fair speechless messages.
   "Shakespeare," said Todd, leaning over
our shoulders. "What do I win? I recently
saw French literature defined as English
literature sans the Bard." Ressler did not
pause from file manipulation to reply. Todd
cleared his voice ironically, persisting. "Who
said, 'The French for London is Paris'? Think
he said it in French, originally."
   "Je ne sais pas," I said. "I'm off duty." To
my amazement, I found I was following
Ressler's walking tour through the system.
Just by long association with these two
exiles, I had picked up the rudiments of
programming.
   He showed us how to disassemble a
program, how the machine-readable switchs
can be turned—by means of another
program— back into the logical operators
that had generated them. He spoke of a
colored oil drop in a cylinder of water, spun
slowly until it dispersed, colorless,
throughout the fluid. Spinning the fluid
carefully in reverse can bring the oil drop
miraculously back out of nothing. "The
process is not entirely reversible. We can't
get from the driving bits all the way back up
to the high-level source language. But we
can begin to see the programmer's design."
   He demonstrated some structures. While
condition Y applies, do X. Do this if these
conditions are met, otherwise do that. For all
values in the list L, run routine R. Go here.
Test that. Change the other thing. When
done, return. He showed me how to build a
patch: save down all current values that
must remain the same. Change a byte or two
so that it branches to a space in the program
left blank for that purpose. Write your
appended routine there, and then pop back,
restoring all previously saved values.
   These generic commands, he explained,
were the meat and potatoes of procedural
languages. Procedural languages—those
that mapped out every route the machine
could take—were the lingua franca of
business computing. Business, Ressler
showed me, as he pulled up the skeleton
keys to the programs they used to process
their hundred thousand clients' health,
education, finance, and welfare, was nearing
its finest hour. "The logical conduits on
silicon have done to the ebb and flow of
capital what the Dutch waterworks did to
the Zuider Zee."
   "Speaking of the Dutch," Todd
interrupted, growing desperate, "I'd love to
get caught up tonight. Wooden Shoe?"
   Ressler sent him out for grocery-store
wine. By the time Todd came back, we were
navigating through the Federal Reserve via
MOL's linkup with a battalion of bank
mainframes. Under his ar-peggiating fingers,
portals opened, rabbit holes that we
disappeared down before they closed over
us. I could no longer keep track of imbedded
levels, just whose system prompts we were
responding to. We tunneled deep into the
web, far from home.
   "I had no idea," I said. "When you make
the link, it's just as if you were sitting in
front of the other machine in some other
office?"
   "With semiconductors, physical locations
become arbitrary. Half our work takes place
at remote sites. That's why this suite can be
so small."
   "These machines talk to one another?
Without chaperon?"
   He Smiled. "Under the supervision of
procedural languages."
   "Can you get anywhere from anywhere
else?"
   "Not yet. Think of the U.S. highway system
in the twenties. Lots of the local
infrastructure, but the expressways still
going in. Still, one can swing quite a
distance along existing vines." He got us
onto a system that allowed us entry to yet
another nested net; in no time we were
browsing machines in Washington, Oak
Ridge, San Francisco. The effect was
dizzying. For a man who'd stayed home for
twenty years, he got out a lot.
   For my benefit, he pulled up a sampler of
bibliographic services, retrieval banks now
creating the largest revolution in my
discipline since Alexandria burned. Our
branch had not yet entered the future, and I
had yet to play personally with the first
generation of living Reference Desks.
Christmas all over again. "Go ahead," he
said. "Ask it anything."
   I typed: "MACHINE; INTELLIGENCE," and
got back a bibliography as long as a
Mannerist Madonna's neck. I highlighted
one of the titles and got the full text. The
strangest sensation came over me—the
recovery of a lost domain, the bafflement of
childhood, a displaced hope older than
memory. What might we yet see, name, feel?
   "In the future, you'll be able to type,
'What happens to nuclein when it's boiled in
water for forty hours?' and the thing will
come back, 'According to a study by Albrecht
Hessel in 18...' The next step will be getting it
to print articles that haven't been written
yet."
   I couldn't tell how serious he was. "All of
this is assembled with only Ifs, Thens,
Gosubs, and Elses?"
   "No. These make ingenious use of tools
that a person can really love." And he
described, in tantalizing sketch, the new
declarative languages. He made them sound
like returns to the Ur-tongue. They relied not
on rules but on simple assertions about the
nature of things in the defined world. They
blurred the distinction between data and
instruction, set the machine free to serve as
inference engine.
   "Which is DNA, procedural or
declarative?"
   Dr. Ressler smiled soundlessly and looked
at his watch. "Short answer or long?"
   I felt what had been tearing at my heart
the last several weeks, why it hurt
progressively worse each time I saw him. He
had grown ready to teach, undertake again,
discover. Something in Todd's and my
blundering, slow courtship had tricked him
into thinking this time it could go right. I
sensed in the way his eyes grabbed at every
word thrown his way that he had recovered
a capacity for application. But there was
nothing for him to apply himself to. He had
awakened for nothing, for a wrong number.
A roof-gardener, harvest brought in for the
year, receiving unsolicited seed catalogs in
the depths of winter.
   "It's a grim irony," he said, waving toward
the screen, "that just as we are closing in on
the perfect taxonomy we've always been
after, we may already have spoiled the data
beyond recognition. And yet, our effort to
bring it on-line is beautiful. Beautiful in the
way that a child's first book, all folded and
crayoned over, is beautiful." He tilted his
head oddly, and I realized he had in mind
one particular child, whose conspicuous
absence at last informed him, here at the end
of the day, that he had never had a real
home.
   We were still at the bibliographic prompt
that for the last several minutes had kept me
as rapt as a toy chemistry set. Abstractedly,
he typed a woman's name—last name,
comma, first. After a pause just longer than
anguish, the system responded, "6
Match(es)." He turned away. When he could
speak again, his voice was controlled. "See
what one can find? And the first integrated
circuit was invented just twenty-five years
ago." The year I left the game, he didn't add.
He hit a few stop-key combinations, backing
us out of binary pontoons, dropping all
carriers until we returned to the dingy suite.
   When I left, sad beyond provocation, I
gave Todd a duplicate key to my place.
"Come tonight. Anytime. Move in if you
can."
   He woke me up when he came in. We had
a few unreal hours before I had to go to
work. Ice had paisleyed over the panes with
a second, opaque window. In hard February,
I paid the price for my place's
turn-of-the-century quaintness. Fuel ran a
hundred-meter hurdle up through the
Victorian insulation into the freezing night.
We held one another, wanting the relieving
friction but not daring to rub—like a
retriever trained to carry the shot bird back
in its jaws without salivating. "Do you
think... ?" I tried to ask, still glazed in sleep.
"Is it possible... he still loves this woman?"
For the first time since fullness had taken me,
I thought of Tuckwell, alone in our old place,
in front of that breathtaking view of skyline.
   Todd answered me with such an answer. I
never knew him. I never had the first idea of
what men were. "Love is a pyramiding
scheme," he said, and pressed my hands
together until they hurt. "He never loved her
more than tonight."

  Frailty and Other Fixed Constants

   The world churns out a tune Ressler just
now learns to hear. The U.S. at last lifts
Explorer I into orbit. It begins testing at
Eniwetok and rejects a Polish proposal to
make Central Europe nuclear-free. The Sixth
Fleet doubles its presence in the Middle East;
by summer's end, American troops will land
there. Emergency forces will be in the
Caribbean by spring. Veep Nixon's goodwill
tour in Latin America will provoke open
hostility. The army announces the STRAC, a
150,000-troop acronym committed to winning
limited war "anywhere in the world."
   One, frail fermata in that dissonant strain:
Van Cliburn wins the Tschaikovsky
competition, making him the most popular
Texan in Georgia. Vaughan Williams dies just
after the debut of his final symphony, a last
holdout against Boulez and Berio.
"Jailhouse Rock," "He's Got the Whole
World in His Hands," and "Purple People
Eater" (thinly disguised political allegory)
top the pops. To the casual listener, the
synthesized bass is lost in a ravishing circle
of chords, lovely terror, a broken horizontal
stream rushing toward greater complication.
Sheer counterpoint is loosed upon the
world.
   The quizz-show scandal breaks. Jack
Benny admits to being forty. A leading
manufacturer brings out a nontoxic floor
wax, to save infants that lick their way across
the kitchen. According to Time, eleven
thousand new "citizen-consumers" are born
every day in the U.S., adding a city the size of
Norfolk, Virginia, every thirty days. "A new
wave of opportunity coming."
   Science too can't help but join the
footrace. The accidental clarity that Ressler
and his love stumbled upon over the phone
remains solid, even in the unforgiving light
of following days. Botkin declares the
proposed angle as right as an inevitable
passacaglia. They sit in her office listening to
Fauré, Franck, drawing up the apparatus
needed to confirm his serendipitous insight.
   In barely controlled excitement, Ressler
does the week's summary for Cyfer. He
begins all the way back in the uncontestable:
the double helix. Not even Woytowich holds
out against the model any longer. He has
just become a father—an architectural marvel
named Ivy. The impossible reprieve leaves
him open to even the most outlandish
proposals about life's generating plan.
Taylor's radiographs, too, transcend
disagreement, proving that DNA replicates
by that classic postwar cure-all, political
partition. One message splits into two; two
halves each restore the one message. The
simplest form of molecular baby-making:
divide and regenerate.
   Adding a demonstration of Mendelian
inheritance for mutations, Ressler presses up
against the last unequivocal certainty. This
double-twined ribbon pastes up, from its
internal library, the army of proteins that
pump, breathe, inflame, hoist the whole
organism. The rest is tentative, beyond the
limits of current, territorial waters.
   "Our own work," Ressler casts a cold eye
at Ulrich, "elaborates the decoding
parameters: triplet, colinear nonoverlapping,
unpunctuated bases. We know that DNA
never leaves the nucleus. I submit that it
sends out a courier, a single-strand RNA
molecule templated on its surface, a
plaster-cast of the recipe. This messenger
strand carries its transcription of a base
sequence—call it a gene, for old times'
sake—to the ribosomes, where protein
synthesis takes place." He draws a freehand
philosopher's stone on the blackboard:



   "OK," says Ulrich. "Two separate
processes. One directly templated, one read
and assembled. Ribosomal RNA promoted to
translator, not message. Valuable," the chief
concedes. "But does it get us any closer to
reading the bugger?"
   Introducing a new, ephemeral, RNA
messenger—itself a single-ribboned series of
four bases, with uracil substituting for the
thy-mine in DNA—doesn't change the
informational nature of the problem. From a
cryptographic vantage, it makes no
difference whether the code word is the RNA
simulation or its DNA original. They still track
the old, elusive pattern. So despite the
opportunity staring him in the face, Ulrich
insists that codon assignment is more a
symbolic problem than a chemical one. He
fails to see that Ressler's clarification gives
them an experimental wedge, a way of
simulating nature's own mechanism, letting
the cell solve the problem for them. Instead,
Ulrich is preoccupied with his own
pronouncement: the discovery of a way of
juggling the letters to produce a pattern so
satisfying that it must be correct.
   Ulrich announces, in competition with
Stuart's unsubstantiated diagram, that he,
Lovering, and new conscript Woytowich may
be in a position to land the Big One. "The
closer we get, the better it looks. DNA splits
loose along the inside seam to present the
base sequence. Either edge might code for
the protein, so any codon and its
complement on the anti-gene would stand
for the same amino. The triplet AGU thus
codes for the same thing as its Chargaff
anticodon UCA on the other strand. Two
chains, two directions, so to the synonyms
AGU and UCA, we can add UGA and ACU.
Four words under the same thesaurus
heading."
   "Treatment by retrograde and inversion,"
Toveh Botkin mumbles, troubled. "Bach was
fond of putting fugue subjects through
both." So was this fellow Schoenberg, thinks
Ressler, who's done his homework on the
matter. But that proves nothing. He's
nonplussed and can do nothing but keep
still and follow the working-out.
   Ulrich lists the sixty-four-codon catalog
according to groups of shared degeneracy,
the plan growing increasingly obvious:




   "All sixty-four permutations. The set
contains twelve fourfold synonyms and eight
twofold synonyms." With a touch of
showman's pause, Ulrich says, "Twelve plus
eight equals our magic number." The pattern
is stunning in its own, horrific way. The
rationale for construction seems at least
reasonable, and the numerology is perfect.
That Ulrich has leapfrogged empirical
constraints to get there seems temporarily
defensible.
   "But it's all wrong," Ressler whispers,
glancing at Botkin for support. He's afraid to
appeal to Koss, afraid to look at her in public
for fear that her ephemeral face might make
the day's pragmatics too much to bear. But
it's Koss who comes to his aid. She objects,
grounded in the best literature, to the idea
that the complementary strands are being
read equivalently. For all her substantiated
accuracy, the facts wash up impotently
against perfect pattern.
   That Ulrich's subdivision of sixty-four
triplets uncannily produces a hidden number
equal to that of the essential amino acids
carries the surprise significance of arithmetic.
He is under the spell of physics, where the
pursuit of fundamentals pares back a mass
of data to simple, elegant expressions. It
seems safe to assume that cellular
mechanisms, carded back to their core, are
also driven by symmetry. But it's not safe;
safety and life science are incommensurate.
That one can derive twenty from sixty-four
with pretty, reciprocal twists may be nature's
sheer perversity.
   Botkin lowers herself into the line of fire.
"Grammars are not usually so clean." Her
cheeks contract bittersweetly: don't we
always mean more than we say? Why not the
we within us?
   But the objection of one senior member is
offset by another. Woytowich, revived by
infant Ivy, wanting to be worthy of her when
she is old enough to evaluate fathers,
throws his hopes in with Ulrich's dash for
the cymbal crash. "It's not evidence, of
course; but the fit's attractive enough to do
some stat analysis on those groups we think
might be equivalents."
   Lovering's vote is a foregone conclusion.
There's only one way Ulrich can run that sort
of analysis: through ILLIAC. And Lovering
has proved so skilled at programming that
he has replaced Stuart as Cyfer's fair-haired
boy. All Ulrich's hopes are now pinned to
numeric confirmation of his simple table.
Ressler tries again to interest them in in
vitro, but these three refuse to concede that
the codon catalog is arbitrary, devoid of
internal order. The debate comes down to
temperament, individual hobby horses. What
each feels ought to be true. The team splits
down the middle—gnostics versus
nominalists, formalists against functionalists.
They forget the first article of scientific
skepticism: meaning always reveals pattern,
but pattern does not necessarily imply
meaning.
   Ressler cannot fault Ulrich for leaping to
the beautiful conclusion. Would Stuart have
begun in science if he wasn't predisposed to
believing that what lay behind common
sense was more beautiful because more
objectively indifferent, dense, feverishly
specific? Ulrich sends them off with his
blessing: "Both parties' results to be
continuously exchanged, of course." Yet
Ressler knows he will be out a fellowship
come spring. He is resigned, for his own
sake, to losing everything, every professional
advantage, for a glimpse of the
demonstrable. Only now, he has dragged
Botkin and Koss into the breach with him.
Against their careers, he has only a vague
plan: learn the trick of the cell-free system.
   They now know the tube must include
synthesis-active RNA messenger chains as
well as ribosomes. They'll also need an
energy source, ATP, and the raw amino
building blocks. Their technique is still
crude: throw them together; see what you
get. On evidence, he is no less culpable than
Ulrich, perhaps even more stained by faith,
hope, and love—the old triumverate keeping
life perpetually on the trail of its own
suspected order.
   But he is not ready to tell Botkin or Koss
the wildest of his suspicions: the double
helix somehow codes not only for its own
messenger, but also for the elusive adaptor,
the ribosome assembly line, and all the
enzymes needed to recognize the adaptor,
affix the amino acids, promote the growing
chain, and trim the finished proteins.
Enzyme-trimming enzymes.
Ribosome-building ribosomes. Synthesis
must itself be synthesized. The machine is as
self-bootstrapping, as self -selfing as
consciousness itself. Why not?
Consciousness, the thirst for exchange and
research, is just the self-selfing chain writ
large, considering, synthesizing itself.
   Why so complex a path? Why so many
intermediaries? And how can everything
come from four simple bases? Ressler, even
now, closing in on tendering a first,
tentative model of the arrangement, is
blocked by his own unspeakable desire to
ambush the experiment, wreak the control
by introducing the irreducible variable of
personality. He hears it in the deep cell's
core, lapping at the heart of comprehension.
Despite the danger, he cannot help it. He
must make a little room in himself for
himself, for the same mistaken guide that
now leads half of Cyfer astray, for that
terrible Pauline triplet. And of those three,
most of all love.

  Self Help

  Each passing day has payoffs. Ressler,
Koss, and Botkin daily refine the
bottled-synthesis technique. He sees one
perhaps uncrossable barrier in front of them.
On that day when they can finally drop a
stretch of active RNA into the chemical mix
and have it produce its isomorphic protein,
the resulting sequence will still be beyond
direct chemical correlation with its source;
they might still require Ulrich's ILLIAC
bulldozing for any hope at analysis.
   Fat chance that Levering will be
forthcoming with his do-loops for the
competition's sake. Ressler learned
programming as a tyro undergrad—how to
octal-toggle machine code directly into Core
an instruction at a time. Worse than
annihilating on the nerves; not surprising
that the average software cowboy ran into a
breakpoint at thirty-two, sent home with
smoke steaming from the circuitry. Even
punching cumbersome codes into Hollerith
columns seemed small improvement. While it
did save wear on the neural nodes, coding
remained hell and debugging impossible.
   It was with the zeal of a convert that he
welcomed the work of Von Neumann and
others, who lumped common machine
instructions together and made them
available as macro commands.
Assemblers—programs that take macros and
generate machine-executable code—still
strike him as miraculous kludges, like the
first wind-catching membrane stealing upon
those lizards that had been hopping about
in trees. Released, the analogy spread like
disease. Full-fledged compilers were upon
him before he finished graduate school.
Compilers, of course, are themselves written
in assembly language, giving the whole
tower of Boolean babel more than a facade's
resemblance to the House That Jack Built.
Code-writing code. Program-designing
programs. Uncomfortably like the thing they
built this tool to help examine. Why stop
there? Why not assembler-assemblers?
Application-generating applications? Jacob's
Ladders off and runging, climbing
themselves; tools that turn the trick of
replication. Among the projects that the
Lovering-Ulrich-Woytowich
pattern-matching program time-shares
ILLIAC with is one to write a high-level
ALGOL language compiler. In ALGOL.
   Without further refinement of their
cell-free system, Ressler, Koss, and Botkin
will have to stay on good terms with Joe,
something that grows increasingly difficult
with the man's expanding personal
triumphs. Lovering, finding his vocation in
programming, is on the ascendant. His
well-being is consolidated by the devotion
of the much-touted Sandy. Ressler has still
not met the woman, but to hear Joe speak of
her, she is all sweet surprise and variety
personified.
   The accounts Lovering sprinkles liberally
over his office mate are ludicrously effusive.
The woman lisps in numbers. She's built like
a shit brickhouse, although Joe produces no
photos to substantiate. She plays Mozart
with the proper smidgen of rubato. And she
understands Lovering's own abstruse work,
without his yet conceding to bring her
around the lab. "I explained the gist of the
coding problem to her the other night.
Granted, she didn't take in all its particulars.
Who can? But in her own words—without
any formal training—she came up with this
beautifully intuitive formulation of framing."
   "How does she feel about code
degeneracy?" Ressler asks. The man's
adoration of the woman grates on him. He
wants to shake him violently until the
blathering stops. But for reasons Ressler's
reason more than comprehends, the most he
can level against the self-deceiving fellow is
gentle kidding.
   "Go on, laugh. She anticipated the proof
against overlap."
   "Jesus, Joe. You'd better go nuptial.
When's the date?"
   "Just after yours, Dr. Ressler." Miffed,
Lovering addresses his card-punch forms.
   "Seriously. With a woman like this falling
into your hands, you ought to cleave, be
fruitful, and multiply. If they let Dr. and Mrs.
Woytowich do it, surely..."
   "Who says we ain't cleaving?" Lovering
looks up slyly. "I told you, Sandy doesn't
believe in licensing love. We've talked it
over, and neither of us sees why we have to
pander to the boojwah by going through
with dress-ups. That's a socializing trick, all
that paper signing. The only party to profit
from marriage as it is currently defined in
middle-class America is the State. We've
drawn up our own contract."
   "Joey, I can't help thinking that you've
chosen the wrong moment in history to
make an experiment in alternative mores.
Just yesterday I read about this minister who
was defrocked for using the word 'sex' when
preaching the seventh commandment."
   "How can they hurt us? We've just put a
payment down on a house. We move this
weekend. It has a room for her piano, and a
garden plot, and..."
   Botkin knocks softly and enters. Hearing
the conversation she unwittingly walks into,
she sits by Ressler's desk like a frightened
undergraduate. Ressler says, "A house.
That's nice, Joe. But how are you going to
go about making babies?"
   "Stuart! And you claim to be a biologist.
Historically speaking, there have been some
very impressive genomes born out of
wedlock."
   "Who you calling a bastard?" Woyty calls
from the doorway. He enters, evening the
gnostics and nominalists in the room. He has
come hunting down Lovering with more
sequences to key in. But he capitalizes on
the opportunity to sentence the party to
baby pictures. Seven-pound Ivy Woytowich
looks to Ressler exactly the way every
newborn looks: a hive of tube worms
attacking a soft-boiled beet.
    "Sandy's already made it plain that I'm free
to sample other women, so long as all my
offspring are with her."
    " 'A miss for pleasure and a wife for
breed,'" Botkin supplies. "As far as I have
ever heard, we are the only species who seek
out nonprocreative liaisons. Who get
distressed when the surrogates accidentally
do the job they substitute for. Do you
suppose we succeed in tricking our genes
into irrelevant pleasure? Or do they still get
the surreptitious last laugh?"
    "What is this woman talking about?"
Lovering asks the other men. Ressler knows.
Botkin looks so sadly at him that she must
certainly have guessed everything there is to
guess about who is fooling whom.
    In the following days, the shame of that
look drives Ressler to force the equilibrium
of aroused danger he lives in. He will push
at the precarious spot, get to know his
enemy, the rightful husband. The man she
sleeps with every night in abject intimacy. He
cannot invite himself to their home, sit on
their settee, run a semantic differential on
Herbert Koss as she looks on. His trial must
be isolate, valid. Life, as always, supplies its
own contrivance: the Local Industries Trade
Show at the Champaign Holiday Inn. This
year's theme is "1983: How We Will Live a
Quarter Century On." Every east-central
Illinois entrepreneur in the book has banded
together to reassure the consuming public
that the future will continue to present no
end of new things to buy. The roster of
participants lists Herbert Koss as a principal.
Booth 112: "Better Food in a Fuller
Tomorrow." Ressler locates him on the
newsprint map amidst a forest of
voice-activated appliances, vibrating soap,
self-regulating lawn grass, and power-driven
exercise cycles.
    Ressler catches the food technologist
manning the booth alone. Herbert and his
outfit have taken a conservative stance
compared to the antigravity, space-station
approach of other vendors. His predictions
are modest. Hexagonal steaks for efficient
storage. Vegetable applique that cooks on
the stove top. Plastic wrap at once
spoil-retardant, clingy, and edible. Herbert's
brave new delivery systems attract a
continuous lull. Ressler wonders if he need
introduce himself; he has met the man only
casually, half a minute at a time. But Herbert
greets him at once, friendlily, his color
deepening to rose under the
convention-hall neon.
   "Dr. Ressler," he blusters. "Ha! You would
have to catch me in my finest hour." They
shake quickly. "My wife said you were
likable, but coming to say hello to a
neglected huckster is beyond the call of
duty." He spreads his hands over his display,
deeply embarrassed. "I assume you have no
genuine interest in how the future bodes for
edible goods."
   The man's no fool. Just an engineer
making a living. His self-deprecation fills
Ressler with shame for the daily
transgressions of thought, word, and
everything up to and all but including deed
against this man, whose carriage and speech
embody a quality promoting him beyond
contempt: good-natured humility. Ressler
has for weeks enjoyed the
self-congratulatory belief that disinterested
tinkering with nature was somehow more
virtuous than retail. Now he stands in front
of the man, quietly accepting indictment in
the lines of this fortyish, kind face. His failure
to pick up the conversational gambit only
makes Mr. Koss more graciously awkward.
   "It's generous of you to pretend to really
want the spiel. This peculiar gadget seems to
be garnering the most attention at this year's
show." He picks up a sealed can outfitted
with metal nozzle. "Believe it or not, we've
injected this full of cheese that has, alas,
been pasteurized until it has become
virtually eternal. It is probably also
flame-resistant and impervious to radiation."
Herbert bites a nail, but Ressler assures him
with approving silence: The humiliation is all
mine.
   "The nozzle is still a little rickety. But in
twenty-five years, I hope someone can bring
this prototype into production. The
long-term goal is to shoot cheese out in a
controlled spray." He looks up from the
device: I'm sorry; it's what I do. Whatever
work your hands can find to do, do now.
   "No," Stuart objects. "Go on. Please. It
looks as if it will be very ... useful." Herbert
thanks him in silence. A look of complicity
passes between them: Ah! But what's the
use of use?
   "Our main problem may not be the nozzle,
however, but the plate presentation. As you
see, the product at present bears an
unfortunate resemblance to something you
might scoop up after a Great Dane."
Chuckling forlornly. In a moment, both men
are laughing at a puerile species that can
never stop ludicrous ingenuity, can't see
what a fool it makes of itself in this world.
Only invention's source, the loneliness
longer than life, prevents the evidence from
condemning the lot of them.
   Ressler stops first. "Herbert, your wife is...
wonderful."
   Koss beams, proud without pride. "I envy
you both, really."
   Ressler's head snaps back. "What do you
mean?"
   "I would have liked to be a scientist." He
shrugs at the spin-offs all around him in the
booth, the garden he wound up in.
   Ressler dismisses him with a wipe in the
air. "No difference. You've heard that
Congress is deciding whether actors in white
coats have to identify themselves as
simulations? If they do, we'll all be
undertitled." They kick around that topic:
Truth in Nomenclature. Herbert contributes
his nemesis—a Western senator with a touch
of religious mania and a mission to legislate
the labels on synthetic foods. The law would
prevent manufacturers from selling juice as
"Juice" unless it contains a given percentage
of real fruit sap. Others would require a
suitable euphemism.
   "Our outlandish creation here would be
forced to go forth into the world under the
ignominious name of 'Artificial Pasteurized
Processed Cheeselike Food—Stick
Drink—Spread Mix Spray.' It simply isn't fair
to the entrepreneur."
   Ressler laughs. He can't help himself. He
likes this man, as much as he's liked any man
since Tooney left. "Our legislators would be
shocked to hear that evolution's greatest
successes deliberately misrepresent
appearances. Nature has never abided by
truth in advertising." Your wife can attest to
that.
   "Jeanette's convinced me that your
splinter group is on the right track." Ressler
smiles, wincing. "Jeannie brings the journals
into bed with her, and reads them out loud.
We share a great deal." Herbert asks him his
opinion of the possibility that cancer is
gene-induced. The man may not have
become a scientist, but no failure of
curiosity, attention, or temperament
prevented him. He is more current on this
topic than Ressler, but Stuart takes a stab at
the challenge. "A stretch of nucleic acid
could code for a tumor-inducing enzyme,
but a mutator gene is more likely, or a faulty
feedback that causes other genes to run
amok. All speculation, but I can at least
conceive of an oncogene."
   The comeback arrives from over his
shoulder. "I had an Onco Gene, once."
   Ressler sees her reflection in Herbert
Koss's face: the painter in the convex mirror
behind the subjects. The creases in Herbert's
face swell like a succulent after flash flood.
Even the cadence of his voice picks up
conviction as he cracks back, "I remember
him! Your Onco Gene and your Anti Body."
   With a single-finger signal upon Ressler's
back, Jeanette springs to her husband and
kisses him behind the ear. The married
couple exchange a few tokens of their
idioglossia, the most natural thing in the
world. Ressler is stunned: the husband is
hopelessly in love, and the wife accepts his
ministrations with a marvelous insistence on
the ordinary.
   "Wife, you must invite this fine fellow to
have dinner with us." Herbert touches her
upper arm in a way suggesting,
circumspectly, that he may have found a
friend.
   "Feüow, you heard the man." Jeanette,
perfectly modulated, relishes the idea.
Ressler barely manages to mumble a
transparent excuse, blanching at the look of
hurt confusion coming over Herbert's face.
The Know,Your Enemy campaign retreats
from the field in disarray, Ressler smiling but
routed.
   For the next several days, he avoids her.
He frequents the lab at night or when she is
busy teaching. When they must be there
together, he makes sure it's in the company
of others. She touches his upper arm as she
passes—familial, furtive, questioning. But
she knows the source of his silence, and
neither of them cares to put it in words. She
leaves him gentle and absurd gifts as
apology— currants, offprints, lozenges at
the first hint of a cough. She moves through
the day visibly holding her breath. She sheds
all trace of public sarcasm. Lovering
continues to give her ample opportunity to
deliver the quick cut, but the woman
contritely declines the kill. One of those
creatures with two-stage life cycles, having
metamorphosed in front of his eyes from
sylph back into cipher, she wants nothing
but another chance to return to the pupa
and re-emerge with all the chestnut
innocence she last week lost for him.
   He finds it impossible to concentrate on
the empirical work. His desire to perfect the
cell-free system stalls against Jeanette's
opacity, more cryptic than when she was a
stranger to him. Curiosity has gone, leaving
in its place a fatalistic homesickness opposed
to investigation of any sort. He does not
love her now. And yet, a keener coveting:
she is more intensely beautiful for having so
far declined to confirm him. Beauty, as
Botkin once read to him during their joint
listening sessions, Schubert's Winter's
Journey, is just the beginning of a terror he
might not be able to endure.
   He is taken by absurd urges to plead with
her, to demand explanations. Of course, he
cannot, even if the explanations were his to
demand. He will lose her the moment his
feigned self-possession admits to need. No
begging. Self-preservation now depends on
a deadly competition: can he escape faster
than she? He slips into the lab late one
afternoon, safe for the thirty seconds he
needs. But immediately, tailed to this one
injudicious half-minute, he is cornered by a
lab-coated, dissimulating apparition.
    "May I come over and play?" She walks
slowly toward him, then stops, hovering
near where he stands, not daring to come
flush to him. She wears her lab coat, a soft,
brushed olive skirt, an organdy blouse
sweetly fatigued. Dark stockings hold her
legs heartstop-pingly limber. She is less
clinical than reckless, frightened,
precariously still. She pushes back a loose
forelock, then holds the nervous forearm in
her other hand, to keep it from straying. She
just looks, beseechingly, too uncertain to say
anything. At last, she shakes her head,
giving in: "You really are a beautiful boy."
    Her simple, head-down, sole-scuffing
benign capitulation betrays her. Passion now
would be powerless against him, but soft,
dependent admission of hurt calms him
before he can run. She holds his gaze,
opaline, opalescent. When she finally smiles,
it is with relief, as if he has favored her
already with his inevitable return. "Stuart.
Friend. We have to talk."
    He chills without missing a beat. Pith me
mercifully, then. "Don't worry," he says,
suppressing the trace betrayal. "We stay on
the project together. In vitro is as much your
province as mine. We'll just have to find a
way of working in close quarters without
pulling the pin."
    She stares at him, slapped down, laughing
through choked throat at the frailty just
revealed. She looks at him, shaking her
head: Boy-o, how could you think it? Don't
you realize: we can't get out now, except
together. "You said you loved me," she says
quietly, courage enough for both. "I've been
thinking of nothing else since you admitted
it."
    "Nothing else?" One lie and we drown in
atmosphere.
    She gives him a bashful overbite that
would disarm the coolest Geneva negotiator.
"I won't tell you what else has gone through
my head since then. Not yet, anyway." She
steps toward him, a supplicant. Only believe.
He does not step back. He fixes on her teeth:
how can even her incisors incite him? They
ought to seem more like tetanus hooks than
pretty advertisements. She does not stop
until they touch thighs, here in the open.
She does not care who sees them.
    "How could you... ? You're so natural with
him. You're..."
    Her sweet undertones flatten into a quick
cat's hiss. "What were you doing tracking
him down? Spying? Big buck showdown?
Imagine how / felt, seeing you talking with
him behind my back."
    Her anger releases him. She might fake
everything else, but not this surpassing flash
of hatred. "Jeanette," he says, loving her so
acutely his chest feels the phantom pain of
amputation. Names he never wished to be
saddled with—the photo of a luminous child
who died just after the lens opened.
"Jeannie. Your husband is great. Kind,
bright, funny." He, in comparison: ambitious,
hungry, vain. Even were he in the man's
league, any trade would invalidate
everything.
   "Yes," she admits harshly, the tear of the
barbed gaff.
   He takes her at the waist, knowing even as
he does it that it is the worst possible
gesture. "You two love each other. I've seen
it."
   "He's a good man. We get along. We
know one another."
   "But you're not... ?" He stops short of the
ridiculous semantic distinction. Her nervous
lock falls again, obscuring her lowered face.
He reaches, brushes it back. "Something in
your marriage is not working?" Temporarily
reprieved by that indifference he could not
rouse earlier, when he needed it.
   But his detachment lasts only until her
next words. Her cheeks crumple horribly.
Blood rushes into her soft tissue, and she
chokes for air. "We can't have children." A
day later, Ressler will not remember the
precise next sequence. Jeannie falls into his
shirt, dry-heaving, hyperventilating sobs.
Water everywhere—eyes, nose, throat. Her
vulnerability, her flood is at last her, one that
he recognizes, recalls from internal
phylogeny—cave life or earlier, arboreal,
forest floor, or gilled, underwater. It pitches
Ressler into the passion of animals. He
begins to kiss her everywhere across the
unrecognizable bruise her face has become.
She kisses back. She bites, trying to break
the skin. "Help me," she says, as if he were
the only one who could. "What's wrong
with me?"



XXI

  Canon at the Seventh

   They rut. No other name for the humping
that takes them. He kisses her blood-filled
face, scattering the hits, surrendering to
dizzy inertia. She sinks her teeth into his
shoulder, sick desire clamping her to him.
Her frightened, little-lamb's-backsliding
capitulation passes into his tissue and he
can only clamp back. Sobbing, startled, she
looks at him, realizing the place where
they've arrived. They fall into the fabled
clearing, forbidden and inevitable, the place
they knew from the first caught glance they
would one day inhabit. She loosens from
him long enough to lead him to the back lab
corner, beyond equipment shipment boxes:
for form's sake, out of the public
thoroughfare.
   Den, hive, nest, nidus, eyrie, newlywed
starter home: they build themselves a pallet
on the floor. They pull each other down
hungrily. He unfastens her organdy,
exposing the final freshness of her breasts
to the air. She stretches along the length of
her flank, moans an admixture of pleasure
and regret. Her exertion ripples like the
paroxysms of a barometer giving up in the
eye of the storm. We can't. Don't do this.
Wrong, childish, wicked, degenerate. Please.
Faster. Here. Home. They are to go through
with it, in full cognizance, commit the
self-seeking, indulgent act. It stops his
breath.
   He lifts the crumpled olive skirt up around
her waist. Jeannie gasps once, an angry
aspirant. Her stockings and panties give way.
She utters sharp, soft forest noises. The
sound, the pungency of her vaginal quiff
undo him. He rolls into her. Her legs lift,
ready to receive. The space is his only. They
fit. Her small-mammal Whimpers condense in
violence. He clasps his hand over her mouth.
   but even now does not really care if every
living thing just down the hall hears. He is
drawn up her by capillary action, deeper
than anticipated, into an encircling center.
Never did he imagine a woman could have
so much room. The fluid folds of that infinite
passage press up against the intruder,
welcome it with all the ingenuity of design.
She is crying now, from the lungs, where he
feels her from the other side. "Stop. I don't
want," and then, throatier, garbled: "I love
you," or "I love this."
   Each races the other to unilateral
surrender. Something more than sex: an
excavation, mohole, metric and insufficient,
each time farther down, nearer a
remembered core. By turns, his whole body is
a coition-charged conductance and
something else—the effortless, mate-free
budding of plants. There is no Herbert;
whatever pain they cause the man is erased
by his wife's abandon. Ressler's forward
motion into her becomes a rocking apology:
clandestine. Never again. He has her, as he
needed from word go.
   He owes no one anything but compassion.
His lone accountability is solely to the code.
This woman was long ago inscribed in his
genotype. She is his working out, his text
made flesh, made enzyme. He will join
himself to her, however pointless that
deposit. He cannot do otherwise. She is
underneath, around him: he feels her
organic list. Her voiced breath dissolves into
syllables, self-defense shouts, bird's cooing.
He pins her, presses a spot in her back that
touches off further thrashing. Their sure
lives in this moment end. Even if they escape
this writhing, they can never again be safe.
She heaves again. The base of Ressler's brain
floods with chemical keys he will not, not
ever, neither viscerally nor in mind,
recapture.
   Jeanette's pumping leaves her spent.
Then, as suddenly, she is crazy again to
pump, elude pursuers. The force of her
desperation frightens him. What bloody
business has she come to transact? She rolls
against him, thighs first felinely soft, now
shoving with a drive that would be rid of
itself, of all its tensile load. Ressler cushions,
absorbs, protects her from her own tranced
rage, keeping this speaker-in-tongues from
crashing against the sharp corners of their
makeshift pew.
   She is only here, nowhere else but her
body, manning her cartilage factory. She
spasms, an enormous sustained cramp that
runs from the nape of her neck along her
whole length, at last pulling the arch of her
foot taut, from Romanesque to gothic. She is
only here, in frenzied pleasure, knowing she
will take it like this only once in life. Frenzy
enough for both of them: he is lost to the
dictates in the master program, locked onto
her, coupled, forever sacrificed, shutting out
last objections and letting the old sarabande
in.
   Her face, when the shock of the last
muscular lift comes on it, is surprised,
flushed out of the thicket in ancestral
wonder. All an "O" of astonishment—her
eyes, mouth, fingers circling his arms, her
labia concentrated around him, drawing him
over the edge into his own, rounded O.
Sustained effort, every minute of recent
months is here made real. Here, only here.
Then, the collapse back on confusion and
particulars.
   They glide at the end, after violent
discharge, released to familiars. His cells
swim into her, spend. But for a brief ever,
molecular memory of the deed persists in
muscle, fades through shoulders, torso,
limbs, limbic system like immense pipe-organ
fundamentals banging around in the
baroque dome an eternity before slipping
back to nave level, sinking through
flagstones into the crypt. He lies capitulate
on the floor next to Mrs. Koss, sharing the
last shred of companionship left them. They
are free of the chief anxiety in animal
delight: she can have no child. But facing a
worse eventuality.
   Jeanette Koss, still in the dream of
remembered recklessness, stiffens, comes
unstunned. She tries to sit, look at him. She
succeeds painfully, staring as if he has just
revealed himself. How can you do that to
me? She closes her eyes again, lies down,
and places a delicate, stray hand between
her legs, as if that will keep the somatic
impression of their animal abandon from
leaking out with his semen. This long,
undulating modesty, endless current of hair,
hand pressed innocently and curiously to the
pudenda. Residual image from the generic
feminine.
  She does not need to look at him to know
what he sees. She smiles through closed lids,
uses one finger to explore the passage he
has just inhabited, withdraws it with a globe
of milky, opaque fluid. She draws it to her
mouth, places the drop on the tip of her
tongue. Eyes still closed, she turns her lips
up and pronounces, "Millions of
stukaryotes." He kisses her and she passes
the taste perversely back. She hums, piano in
pleasure, already wanting more. She closes
her eyes, tasting, recalling.
  The memory, this woman passing one
unsolicited secret name to him now and for
good on the exposed lab floor, will be as
suddenly lost, taken from him. More than he
can endure. But Jeanette only drifts her hand
back under her stained olive dress, between
her absorbing thighs.

  Trace Mutagen

   "Let's give Uncle Jimmy a raise." I picture
him alert, playful in front of the console,
perched on the edge of a techno-chair, ready
to write his graffiti into the system at the first
nod from the professor. MOL was again in
the clear. Ressler and Todd had returned the
Master Fille to working order. The auditors
had come and gone, dragging their trails
behind them. They had given the restoration
a clean bill of health. The console log carried
no trace of catastrophe. We passed the
anniversary of the Maine, that explosion
half-made in the American press. Ours was
the opposite engineering feat: from out of
real burst, erasure. The sense of delivery
from disaster was still so strong that Todd's
manic suggestion seemed a simple
extension. "Who would know?" he asked.
"The easiest thing in the world."
   "What does ease have to do with
anything?" Ressler replied. The two of them
had developed an elliptical way of talking to
each other over long nights alone. Members
only. I listened but was locked out in the
static.
   "Tell me he doesn't deserve one," Franklin
said.
   "He does. Unquestionably. After what
we've put him through." Ressler collected
forms from the printer and collated them
with amusement. "But he's not on our
payroll."
   "Of course not. Good data-processing
procedures. Send your own checks to be cut
out of house. Simple safety." Ressler's
objection was so transparent that Frank
didn't even counter it: one can get to any
machine from any machine, if one knows the
sesames. And Ressler had taught us those.
Franklin talked through the steps
hypothetically. "We could penny-shave him.
Take every salary we handle. Round the
fractional cents down, pitch the remainder
into Jimmy's account. No one is out more
than a partial cent, and Jimmy is..." He did a
calculation in the air. "Lots richer."
   Ressler detached the day's log, folded it
carefully for the archives. "Penny shaving
means a permanent program patch."
   "We could do it."
   "Again, possibility is not the point. The
manipulation leaves a permanent print."
   "Snake the code around. Relative-address
Jimmy's record so that his name isn't sitting
in broad daylight. Make the siphon look like
something else, an error trap."
   "If someone writes the program, another
can always read it. Logic is easier to trace
than to scramble."
   Franklin twaddled with his contrast knob.
"What if we just went and injected a new
figure directly into his salary field?"
   "Exactly," Ressler said. "Why get
ingenious, when you can accomplish the
same thing by simpler means?"
   "But would it work? I mean, if we cleaned
up after it? Balanced all the cross-sums?"
   "Never underestimate the power of
bureaucracy to believe what their electronic
ledgers tell them."
   "So you're in, then?"
   "No." Dissociating himself from the
suggestion, Ressler thwacked his stack of
forms in exasperation. "Good God! Pope
was right on the money about knowledge.
You can't teach a kid anything these days."
With an affectionate shake of the head, he
left us alone to our own devices.
   "It could be done, you know," Todd
murmured defensively. He riffled idly across
linked data lines as he'd watched Ressler do.
He punched up a prohibited, distant file,
flexing his apprentice prowess. "We give
him a one-time bonus. Flat fee. We enter the
change in a way that could be mistaken for a
Mylar typo. If the tinkering should be traced
back to us—assuming the unlikelihood of
anyone noticing—we can always say it was a
piece of driftwood from our recent flood."
   I watched him perform the surgery. He
inserted a paper clip into the console print
head to keep it from logging. Then, with a
simple record edit, he turned the trick.
Unreal. What was he changing? Just screens.
Alphanumerics on the CRT. "There." He
lifted his fingers from the keys long enough
to warm them. "How's that for moral
compromise?" He backed out to the system,
signed on again locally, and returned to the
familiar operations prompt. He rolled the
printer platen back over the blank transcript
and removed the paper clip. What could be
simpler? "How's that for victimless crime?"

  The Adaptor Hypothesis

   "What do we do now?"
   She smiles, lids still beatifically closed.
"Now, you love me." Still lying indecorously
on their corner of floor, she arches enough
to allow him to lift her stockings, smooth the
olive skirt, restore the organdy.
   He places a guilty fingertip to the stain on
her hem. "Do you need to rinse this?" he
asks stupidly. "Before you go home?"
   Her thigh moves beneath his hand. It
already wants touching again. "Don't
worry." She assures him with her eyes. He
helps her outside to her car, escorting as if
the assault has weakened her. He closes her
car door, contrite, abandoning her to sneak
home alone. He is ready to call Herbert, read
his confession into the wiretap. Only it's not
just his confession any longer.
   He walks home. The premature warmth of
February air blankets him. He is lost in the
calendar; he cannot, for a moment, say when
in the year he is or which season follows,
cannot even fix the ordinary sequence of
warming and cooling. Helpless in the face of
a mild breeze, his skin remarks on the
glorious night this night has brought in. But
the breeze, the false thaw, does not displace
what he and Jeanette just transacted. It must
keep happening now, transposed
throughout the year.
   He wades in illicit, erotic revulsion:
retained impression is no more than a
command to repeat. The weighted average
of every surviving drive compels him to
another go-round with this woman.
Arousing, irresistible, and like most enticing
hybrids, sterile. Yet through that revulsion,
this breeze insists that hope grow even in an
empty place. The Base, overlaid with a
contrary voice, whispers that the night feels
good, nevertheless; something may yet
happen; you've been surprised this far; more
of the same is never just more of the same.
He reaches the familiar barracks and lets
himself in.
   He concedes to an English muffin, then
straight to music. He needs: what? To
prostrate in front of plainsong from a
cloister so empty that the echo relay is
antiphonal? To join the high, pure head
tones of boys in a Byrd Kyrie? To be knocked
unconscious by a bit of dislodged
opera-buffa stucco? To smile ironically at
the Eroica, its canceled dedication? To sit
quietly stewed outside the locked door of a
rolling concerto cadenza just before the last,
rescuing tutti? To admit the impossible
poignancy of neo-romance? To make a space
for grief four last songs wide? To breathe
the air of a new planet? To trace the
permutations in the ILLIAC Quartet? To lie in
caged silence?
    He opts for the master blueprint: music
with no past or future, existing in the
perpetual now, a standing Schrödinger
wave. He could kiss Olga, so paralyzed has
she held her plastic arabesque. Once more
he lowers the needle on the scratched disk,
unleashing a keyboard exercise that wanders
far off the face of the earth into a canonic
minor modulation as full of pathos as the
first creation. Chromatic beyond recognition,
the Base slips inconceivably downstream
from the peaceful thematic trickle of its
source Brook, the most outrageous claimant
in the most unprovable paternity suit ears
have ever heard.
    He and Jeanette have worked upon each
other's nakedness, done all they ever
wanted to do. He has no inclination to go
back to the lab, now or ever. He wants to
resign, sign on to the obscurest work
available—making pizzas, hawking Fighting
Illini pennants, whatever unskilled labor the
local economy will support. He is
overwhelmed with the urge to trash his
radio, cut the phone lines, and hole up in his
bungalow alone with Olga, listening
without dissection, assembling without
violating the unforgiving weight of
particular parts.
    He wants her here, to see, speak with,
listen to as she vocalizes those rhythmic,
objecting stammers. She must call, now. But
she doesn't. Those moments when she will
pity him, deign to drop by, are already too
rare. Each minute out of contact is awash in
variables—all the accidents that perhaps
have already led her forever away. Research
recovers nothing; knowledge doesn't knit.
He sits in the stream of sound, unable to
avert a collapse of volition, not even
wanting to.
    Criminal scenarios edit themselves in his
head. Cloak-and-dagger, skulking affairs
where they press against one another for a
quarter hour out of every forty-eight.
Magnanimous Herbert lend-leasing her or
throwing in the towel, acknowledging the
omnipotent heart. Ressler appealing to
Jeannie, begging for a noble, lifelong
separation. His taking up surgery, returning
her somehow to fertility.
    Each permutation more inspired, more
insipid than the last. They take him at once,
gang-rape him. He sits wedged in the inseam
between wall and floor, listening, thinking
that he can hear distant song straining the
contour of a variation beyond the variation.
He's lost it; accumulated stress pushes him
into the realm of imaginary acoustics. But the
trace is real, waving the air molecules
however faintly. Then he figures it: the
pianist singing, caught on record, humming
his insufficient heart out. Transcribing the
notes from printed page to keypress is not
enough. Some ineffable ideal is trapped in
the sequence, some further Platonic aria trial
beyond the literal fingers to express. Sound
that can only be approximated, petitioned by
this compulsory, angelic, off-key, parallel
attempt at running articulation, the
thirty-third Goldberg.

  Canon at Seventh (II)

   We began living together, I suppose. Not
even what lawtalk would call a verbal
contract. Todd had the key, and he checked
in periodically. He even moved a few things
over: a backpack of clothes, few but washed
frequently enough to stretch forever. His
precious notebooks, kept by the bed in case
of emergencies that never emerged. His
sketchpads, filled with closely observed
nature and lacking only that last urgency to
become truly remarkable. I was so pleased
the day he brought them by that he felt
compelled to squash any hope that he might
start drawing in earnest: "Can't leave these
in my apartment for the burglars to find. I'd
be drummed out of grad school if anyone
saw them."
   "You're not in graduate school."
   "There's still the dissertation. Any year
now."
   He kept his own apartment and left most
of his treasures there. He gave me a copy of
his key, more out of moral parity than
enthusiasm. I'd been back to his cult
museum at the tip of the island a handful of
times since our first listening session, but it
never felt right. "Should we spend more time
at your place?" I asked one weekend.
   "I like it better here. The curtains. The
rocker. The bedspread. Your touch." It was
his embroidered, endangered bastion, his
last holdout in an overrun world: the amber
oil lamp in the second-story corner above
the antique shop, abiding in tragic coziness.
There were more economical arrangements,
but anything beyond this tentative fit—a
nocturnal burrower braving danger to
accept the handout—would be invasively
unstable.
   We ate evening meals together. He
insisted on washing all dirty dishes.
Sometimes he stocked the pantry. I took the
phone off the hook when I left in the
morning, to let him sleep. He came and went
freely. I had no expectations. When he was
around, we read out loud together, did
anagrams, experimented on each other's
body, assembled a list of what hurt, what
was indifferent, what felt good.
   We worked together on our 1040s,
finishing long before they were due. On this
one ballot alone did he vote his conscience
and go head to head with Western
Civilization. At great fiscal sacrifice, Franklin
buried most of his money in tax shelters,
charitable deductions, and losses until the
Amount You Owe was zero. Not stinginess
on his part. Just the opposite: by the time he
had it all legally diverted, he had nothing
left to spend. The year 1 saw him file, he'd
accumulated write-offs that would square
him for two more years.
   It wasn't foresight; he never thought he'd
make it to old age. "Part of me dearly wants
to pay taxes. I love schools, sidewalks,
museums, research funding, food relief. You
simply cannot get a better return on
investment. But I hate to pay for anything
that can incinerate twenty million people at a
pop. I know. At my infantile tax bracket, less
all desirable governmental expenditures, my
contribution wouldn't even cover the decals
on one of those things. It makes no
measurable difference. But withholding is all
I can do."
   Efficiency had Franker by the throat. He
would urge bananas on me,
broccoli—anything that might be in danger,
in some future, of spoiling. "We've got to
keep at that pilaf." He was brutal when I
took slices from the fresher loaf. Yet he
refused the antidote that progress held out
to people with his mania: the
bacteria-resistant, stabilized foodstuff, BHA
added to preserve freshness. "I try not to eat
anything that's newer to the food chain than
I am."
   He liked the dark and the cold. Saved on
utilities costs, but more than that. He aspired
toward that life that would not use any of
the earth's resources. He deserved only what
absolute efficiency could not eliminate.
While he roomed with me, the compulsion
got noticeably worse.
   But when I pressured him to make use of
the years already tied up in his obscure
painter, efficiency became another matter. "I
need more work. I just came across an early
primary source that..."
   "You already know more about him than
anyone alive."
   "Me? I haven't even seen all the panels."
   "Go see them, then." I cringe to think of it:
my suggestion. I even offered to pay,
forgetting that he could write the flight off.
   "Can't. Got a job."
   "This thesis is your job. It's important."
   He looked at me sardonically: right.
Raging issue. But he did not speak the
sarcasm. He seldom stooped to snideness.
The words he used in his defense were so
much smoke. He believed; he wanted. The
project was lodged in him, staved off a
worse drift. But he would never knock off a
perfunctory proofwork. And putting a
closely reasoned and deeply felt piece on the
public auction block as a bid for
self-promotion, packaging ongoing thought
as a completed effort, was worse than
immoral.
   I frequented MOL as often as ever. I still
assisted in dangling in front of Dr. Ressler
the slow coax of companionship. Now that
he was ready to emerge, I felt I had to make
the place as ample as we'd advertised it. I
couldn't have been more wrong. Yes, he
loved me, loved Todd, loved, for the first
time in decades, talk for pure talking. And
yes he was again researching. But not what I
thought, or for my reasons. What had
coaxed him out again, said go, recalled him
to the roster, was something else: the one
liberating whiff.
   Dr. Ressler refused to take part in my
debates with the club creationist. Annie,
even-tempered, devoid of suspicion, never
knew these were anything but earnest
exchanges of conviction.
   Do you believe that the earth was made in
4004 b.c.?
   Don't be silly! That was some medieval
bishop. The Bible doesn't give the age. It's
very old, the beginning. But put together in
no time flat.
   Do you believe that species change?
   No. They were made. Look around! Two
creatures that need each other to survive:
wouldn't they have to be made together?
One without the other would be like a ship
without a carriage. They'd die if left to
chance.
   What of the fossil record? Small horses,
huge lizards, cats with fangs?
   I don't know. Perhaps the Flood—
Trilobites? Fish covered with plate bone?
   I don't know.
   I flush in shame. I didn't want to destroy
the woman's faith, but it maddened me that I
couldn't. Ressler sometimes stopped to clear
up facts, and Todd liked to push the
argument back on track, like a kid righting a
slot car. But Annie was unshakable; she
would, after a day or two of quiet thought,
match any forensics I sprang on her with an
equal and opposite blow for verbatim truth.
   I should have known that measurement
and religion will always be two split
continents bumping up for the first time,
without interpreters. What drove me to
distraction, made me ready to jump into the
breach every time however ashamed I always
came away, was the woman's insistence that
the spirit could address the mechanical
world, but mechanics weren't allowed to
mess with the spirit. She accepted the age of
the earth, dog breeding, inheritance of
variant characteristics, organic chemistry,
even the reality of genetic tampering. But
not evolution.
   "Try this," she said, "it can't hurt. A simple
experiment, and who knows? It might mean
a lot to you in the future." She handed me a
pocket Bible, which she carried at all times.
"Open it randomly to a passage and read
what's written there." I don't know how I
managed, but I kept sober as I read the
passage chance had sent me. "Does it mean
something to you?" I nodded gravely, and
handed the passage to Todd. He had to
leave the room to keep from bursting.
Exodus 22, xviv: Whosoever copulateth with
a beast shall be put to death. Contemptible
just remembering it.
   I was guilty 1 of believing that evidence had
progressed so far that a creature like Annie,
endowed with native intelligence, would
have to accept it. And it broke her heart to
fail to convert me. Todd and Dr. Ressler were
lost causes, to be loved more strongly on
earth because they wouldn't make the last
cut come the signs, seals, and trumpets,
unless through benevolent intercession of
the Maker. But me: for some reason, Annie
thought she could win me for belief.
   How did I ever presume to undermine her
certainty? What did I have to replace joy
with? Annie was surer of her right to
happiness than I ever was of mine. Even the
loss of her life savings did not ruffle her. She
told us of the ugly event one night, still
trembling, not in anger, but at the danger
she had just come through.
   Three days before, while looking over the
books in those stalls at the southeast corner
of the Park, she noticed something on the
sidewalk near her feet. Just as she realized it
was a purse, another book-browsing woman
also noticed it, bent down, picked it up, and
handed it to her. "Did you drop this?"
   Annie said no. The two women looked
around, finding only one other nearby
browser. The third woman also said that the
purse wasn't hers. "Perhaps there's an
address," Annie suggested. Still in
possession, she opened it. No address. No
credit cards. No ID. Only about fifteen
thousand dollars in cash. The second woman
yelped. They were holding the proverbial hot
tuber. The three drew toward one another,
herding instinct, and sat down on an empty
bench. "This doesn't look good," Annie
said. "Maybe we should notify the police."
   "The New York Police?" the others
objected.
   They sat in a scared knot, no one knowing
what to suggest. At last the third mentioned,
"My brother-in-law's a lawyer." Instant relief.
The second woman was parked in a lot not
far from Columbus Circle, and they drove to
the brother-in-law's on the Upper West Side.
   The lawyer laughed at their nerves, asked
facetiously if they were being tailed. "Relax.
You'd be surprised at the amounts of cash
some people carry on them."
   "Only they usually notice if they've left it
lying on the street," the second woman said
acidly.
   The brother-in-law rummaged in his
red-spined library and found the passage he
was after. "If you three can put up a cash
retainer equal to a third of the amount, and
if we make a public declaration of the
find—a newspaper ad will do—and if no
legitimate claimants show after one week,
then it's all yours. Manna from heaven."
   They punched the numbers up on a
calculator. Adding a dash for the ads, they
each needed to put up sixteen hundred
dollars. They drove to their apartments, each
woman running in and securing the funds.
Annie and the second had to cash checks;
the third, embarrassed, admitted that she
kept her money under a rug. Annie's
collateral cleaned her out. They left the
earnest money with the brother-in-law, who
notarized receipts. They exchanged names
and numbers, and agreed on the restaurant
where they would eat out a week from then.
   "The next day, no ad. I called the first
woman, and got some poor man in the
Bronx. The second number gave me one of
those dee-dee-deeps." She sang the
no-longer-in-service triad. "I took the
subway to the lawyer's office, my stomach in
my throat. Cleaned out. For rent. I even tried
to go back to the buildings where the two
women got their money. Nobody by that
name. The police say the notarized receipt is
meaningless." Annie stopped, swallowed,
could not go on.
   She didn't need to, except to say that the
handle on the inside car door where they
had her sit was broken; her door had to be
opened from the outside. "These people
play for keeps." Ressler and Todd had their
heads down. Old, their faces said. Old,
treacherous, and transparent. It took a
genuine naif like Annie to get so blindly
stung. Yet I had never been tested against
so elaborate a setup. If the con thrived,
always with new wrinkles, now out of some
other uptown office or in another city, marks
must be in steady supply.
   In the wake of the story, Annie was the
first to revert to form. She said she'd
planned to give the windfall to an
ecumenical food drive for Africa. "Just
imagine, when I finally figured things out!
You could have knocked me over with a
truck."

  Adaptor Hypothesis (II)

  Cryptography lives in the seam between
sense and randomness. Its deforming rules
sow noise into a signal. But by reversing the
rules, the signal reforms, like Dr. Ressler's
undispersed oil drop. I can't quite put my
hands through this paradox: scattered
nonpattern and articulated message are
somehow—what can the word
mean?—equivalent.
   The entire Library of Congress, encoded
with a single notch on a stick, like those
colossi bestriding the narrow world under
whose legs we book researchers peep about,
keeping one foot on each of two
unspannable coasts. The straddle is its own
contradiction. The mark on the stick is trivial,
blank, without significance. And yet, it
inscribes everything in the archive. Even
more counterintuitively, the mark could fall
anywhere on the stick at all. An infinity of
transforming schemes: take the fraction
formed by the letter string, divide by its
cubed root, add .344... Any notch at all could
fold out into the Library of Congress,
including all books not yet catalogued.
   Such a notch would have to subdivide
quantum spaces. But not even that physical
catch clears things up. The rub remains: with
an infinity of available enciphering keys, a
meaningful string of letters can be translated
into any available gibberish. So any random
string of gibberish I choose already stands
for that original string, provided I can locate,
out of infinity, a transform that equates
them.
   This unsettling two-way mapping of any
sense onto any nonsense works because the
key—the enciphering rule—itself contains
information. Information (a science
unfolding just moments before Ressler hit
the scientific scene) is the degree of
restriction clamped onto the set of all
possible messages. Information is not
meaning, but can be used to reveal it. It has,
as Todd's favorite living novelist notes,
replaced cigarettes as the universal medium
of exchange.
   Knowledge might be extracted from
simple clues if given the right key: an idea as
old as consciousness, existing in precursor
form even in animals. Codes, ciphers,
impresas, enigmas, mots, emblems, all forms
of enfolded text propose not just their own
hidden significance but a secret system
where inscribed meaning built into the
half-obscuring, half-revealing world surface
is revealed.
   If any gibberish string can reveal not just
one but all possible patterns (given an
infinity of information-bearing keys), then
gnosticism—arcane manipulation until
pattern emerges—can't return me to source
meaning. The pattern such bit-fiddling
produces would say more about its own
manufacture than about the subcutaneous
nature I'm after. Information between cipher,
key, and source is conserved. If the key is
simple, then the cipher, however mysterious,
will carry much of the order of the original.
But if the codetext contains little
information—if it is random, full of
possibilities—then information must be
present in the clamped-down key. The
revealing key would then be as difficult to
arrive at by trial as the plaintext itself.
   The veil between signal and noise never
lifts as easily as it falls. Any teenager can take
a car apart, but few would be thrilled with a
complete parts inventory for their
coming-of-age gift. If signal is rich and noise
deafening, then the deforming garble is
practically irreversible without the formula. A
hard code is like a lump of peat for an
engagement stone, with the instructions:
Press firmly and long. From message to code
is trivial; but getting back to tonic, if the
clamp on possibilities lies in a complex
transposing scheme, is as entropically
prohibitive as the postman springing back
from the pool, the dog backing away, the
letters shedding their droplets and returning
to dryness.
   I may never come across the clause that
revokes his exile. The journey back, however
much it seems a birthright, a trip I ought to
be able to do blind, remains as unlikely as my
making it from alien Maple and Jefferson to
unknown Walnut and Monroe with nothing
but a world globe. Each cognate I stumble
across gives a shock of recognition: here is
the grammatical clue, something I can at last
make out. The nearness is uncanny. The
clues are all eall mast, al meist, allr mestr. But
run through the decipherer, they remain all
most. No ladders lead back up from where
I've been lowered. I must lie down where all
the ladders start.
   Science is hard, the notch intractable. It is
not secret knowledge, but nominalism. Not
facts; only a means of verifying the endless,
tentative list. Like Lear's look there; and
there. Information theory proves that for a
given purpose, an optimum code exists. But
it supplies no means for finding it. The
purpose of investigation seems to be to find
the optimal code for purpose. Nature freely
hands out isomorph variants of herself.
Signals jam the air—patterns not nature but
the shaped equivalents of her writing.
Sometimes information lies entirely in
particulars, and their uniting pattern lies
only a light tweak away. But if the key packs
a larger fraction of crucial information than
the signal, reading it remains as statistically
unlikely as launching at random and hitting
upon life.
   How is it possible, in those cases, to
recover anything? I have only the old,
empirical trump: set up a local peep-holed
world and watch; follow the effects, trace
the shadow of the key as it encodes.
Eavesdrop over the codebook. Then, with
the silhouette of the transforming rule
traced out, its transforms become trivial.
Briefly: the thing I want to hear more than
sound itself is the bliss beyond the fiddle.
But the fiddle itself remains my only
conveyance.
   The information of an organism is spread
out over its substance, processes,
organization. No one part embodies the life
semantic. Nowhere in my cells does it say,
"Woman, thirtyish, pretty to some, deserted,
unemployed, desperate to know." The code
is not the gene, nor the enzymes, nor the
lookup table, although these are the core of
what the code knows.
   All of these assembled leave a bit of
information still out: I lack a key. To make the
catch, I must grab the adaptor.
   What are my odds of succeeding in the
time remaining? By saving chance, the
school where I learn to read obeys the same
laws of probability constricting the codes
that life writes itself in. There is a limit on the
coding mechanism, on the information it
contains. Evolution sets such unlikelihoods
into existence that it seems, given time,
universally ingenious, eternally able to
one-up. In fact, it's a patch job, short-term
kludges barely breaking even, ducking down
blind alleys, working only with existing
parts. The map is full of places that one can't
get to from here. A fin might come in time to
grasp marvelously as if designed for it, and a
hand turn back into a fin. An air bladder,
used to solve the flotation problem, might
be tucked into a structure that can sustain a
crawl into naked air. But nothing is a priori.
Other solutions will never hit upon the
particular next trick, no matter how many
eons you let spin. Life on the planet could
have been entirely different: billions of years
of prokaryotes, unchanged since inception,
stretching on steadily until the sun dies.
   The "hopeful monster"—Goldschmidt's
variation—has been resurrected from the
scrap heap with the suggestion that
evolution need not always progress by
imperceptible gradualism. But despite the
haggle in step size, all jumps are essentially
local, for there are infinitely more ways of
jumping wrong than jumping right. Small
text changes ripple into huge phenotypic
differences. But the way the text is read and
processed will never change, short of the
complete annihilation and improbable
respark of all life. The code key is fixed,
clamped from the first fluke discovery of
self-propagation. The translator, the
adaptor, is information-rich, determined,
locked in. If we stumble on the place once, in
the dark, during a storm, after a quarrel that
has driven us wildly from home, we may
never find the way again. The accumulation
of accident along the way makes the journey
irreversible. Each step is sculpted, restricted,
feasible, frequently brilliant, on rare
occasions even optimal. But the sum of these
steps is unrepeatable. It will not happen
again, not in this way, perhaps not at all.
   I look for a go-between. Inside the
machine, deep in the cell, the molecule must
take the rich hieroglyphics of the DNA
string— randomly accumulated dots, crots,
and mots—and, its own structure housing
the missing key, translate the jiggles of the
varying sequence into the purposeful,
programmed, cybernetic, living enzymes.
Outside, in the warehouse of time, the
adaptor I look for must bridge the
paradoxical equivalence of message and
notch, caprice and complexity, theme and
variation.
   I wake to sleep and take my waking slow.
What falls away is always, and is near. Why
are three quarters of my analogies drawn
against lyric poetry? One would have to be a
lingering sap to still think, with Wordsworth,
that poetry is the impassioned expression
that is in the countenance of all science. I
don't deny the sentimentality charge, but
perhaps I keep reverting to anthologies—
the ones I have memorized over a life of
erratic reading—because they too are their
own evolutionary kludge, new vehicles
resurrected from modified parts, an historical
stratigraphy, packets announcing, "This
works, or worked once; use it, or lose it in
favor of something else." I learn by going
where I have to go.
   Four months from now, I'll have starved to
death or will be employed again,
somewhere. Either way, my education, these
notes, the extended aside of this last year,
will be over. Only two ways I might still get
moonlight into a chamber. I can sit and wait
for the calendar and capricious weather to
accommodate. Or, even at this time of the
night, I might find an intermediary. Get hold
of the adaptor. Dress up as the visiting
moon.

  The Transfer Molecule

  He can't explain it—maybe because from
here on nothing can work out as
hoped—but the morning after he makes love
to Jeanette Koss on the floor of the Cyfer
lab, he feels inappropriately alive. The
physiological component is undeniable:
yesterday's nerve-shattering release
produced a sleep deeper even than clean
conscience. He wakes, lies in the bunk,
arches, feels the muscles in the back of his
thighs, the full power of the intellectual
biped.
   He has had a dream: a world-renowned
gynecologist, looking suspiciously like Toveh
Botkin, told Jeanette Koss that her
conception problem lay in sperm getting lost
on their way through the egg. The doctor
implanted an ultramicroscopic device, a sort
of converter shaped to let the sperm enter at
one end, pass easily through the cell wall,
and sail through to the other end, snapped
snugly over the egg nucleus.
   Stretched on his back, he tenses at the
obvious message he has sent himself in
sleep. He knows why they haven't been able
to get the cell-free system to work. He,
Botkin, and Koss have assembled, in their
simulated broth, messenger RNA for the
instructions, ribosome material for the
factory, ATP for the energy, amino acids for
the contractors' materials, GTP to glue them
together, two types of enzymes as
cut-and-paste wage laborers, and a handful
of inorganic cations as a chemical hunch,
salts over the shoulder. They have left out
the key, the go-between, the bridge.
   Ressler, with the oceanic feeling of calm
that makes investigation the most
sustainable gratification available to living
things, conceives of what they are missing. A
molecule amorphous but vaguely familiar,
one of those UN simultaneous translators. At
one locus, the molecule has a spot, an
anticodon that matches a codon on the
message string. Another spot on this
bilinguist holds the amino acid called for in
the lookup table. No: the adaptor
molecules— for there must be a whole class,
each with different anticodon sites and
corresponding amino acids— are the lookup
table written into matter.
   The adaptor molecule is both sorter,
porter, and rivet-holder. The anticodon gives
it away: more nucleic acid, another RNA
chain itself transcribed from—where
else?—the parent DNA. Once they season
their preparation with this interlocutor, they
will be able to make nature break her own
code, as she does constantly in the maniacal
specific density of self-construction. But
before he has time to work out the details,
he hears the jiggle in the latch, the intrusion
of human sympathy. Company, carrying
something, muffled with care. Koss floats
into his bedroom, crimson with cold, hazel in
triumphant proximity. "Ah!" Ressler looks
up, helpless to waylay elation. "The Man
from Porlock." But she is so lovely, so here,
that he can't resent the desertion of insight,
its replacement by her.
   "I thought," she says, looking away a little
wickedly, a little shyly, "you might like a bite
of breakfast." She sits at his bedside and
unwraps her packages. Coffee, sweet rolls,
fruit. Ressler, slack, lets her insert torn-off
pieces into his mouth. He chews, eyes closed,
while her hands, losing their chill, colonize
the covers. Slowly, seamlessly, they are
forsaken again. She undresses, this time
showing him. Now they are infinitely patient,
exploratory, stripped of yesterday's violence.
Yesterday was public, awful, dangerous.
Today is soft, secluded, trembling, expectant,
admission of mutual rabbit-sin. Her throat
takes over again at the end. Anyone home at
this hour hears the decibels, knows what
blood ritual takes place. Exultant, shouting
for help, finding it.
   When she transfers control from ape back
to angel, that sound is the first thing she
mentions. "These barracks walls are pretty
thin. They could present a problem for us."
Never did he expect a single word could
trigger such instant, enzymatic rush. "How
are the troops supposed to do their women
without dispatching a communique?"
   "Enlisted men are not permitted to have
sexual relations."
   "And officers do it by semaphore?"
   Pretty Jeannie wrinkles her nose, kneels
over his body, exploring everything in that
inscribed universe. He rests a hand above
her breasts, protects her even at the cost of
this child-like moment. He tenses his
metacarpals. "This is crazy, you realize."
   Her change is astonishing. She collapses
against him like a sensitive plant. She bows
her head, hiding it. Muscles along her length
clasp him with a desperate rocking. "Don't
forsake me now, Stuart." The plea electrifies
him.
   The discharge is doubled by the phone
selecting that instant to ring. "That'll be the
HUAC," Ressler jokes weakly. He gets up,
throws a blanket around him, glad for the
excuse to retreat to the front room. He grabs
the receiver and mumbles hello.
   "Sleeping in this morning?" the other end
says. The voice chills Ressler to the quick.
Ulrich. His supervisor knows. "Not that sleep
hurts. Look at Poincaré, Kekulé. Major work
while unconscious."
   Jeanette creeps naked out of the
bedroom. She reattaches to him, curled, like
a small child, a gibbon on the ground, a
hermit crab displaced from its shell. Ressler
strokes her hair while she strokes the inside
of his legs. He cannot concentrate, makes
Ulrich repeat his message.
   "I said," the chief enunciates, amusement
and annoyance waiting for each other at a
four-way stop, "you'd better get down to
the lab. Some gentlemen from Life are here
to see you."

  Transposon

  I have made a Bush League mistake. Idiot!
Pulling his words out for the thirtieth time,
for the stupid pleasure of hoping they might
be different this time, I see it, as self-evident
as just out of the envelope. I could smother
myself. The boy's affectation has been
staring me in the face, begging to be
understood, obvious from the day of arrival.
   Had I remembered the first thing about
him, I would have worked this out weeks
ago. He always said the trick to picking up a
foreign language was to wear it. Affect its
idiom. Act. Assume a virtue if you have it
not. I should have known that his method
would extend even to written dates. He
posted me from Europe. There, people have
the good sense to arrange their calendar
units in ascending order. He wanted local
fluency as fast as possible. So why revert to
old habits, just to write a friend back home?
   12/6: Not the sixth day of twelfth month.
The twelfth of the sixth. I can hardly take it
in. He wrote, not in early December, but in
the middle of last June. Not X number of
weeks ago. X months. Half a year before I
thought he'd written. The opposite season.
Every word I read of his was wrong,
bungled, lost over the lines. The smallest
tweak of context changes every sentence.
Nagging anachronism, that weird sense of
collapsed time disappears. Of course he had
no grief. When Todd wrote me, Dr. Ressler
was still alive. One stupid transposition and I
hear what the man is saying for the first time.
Only, after explanation, his message is more
cryptic than ever.



XXII

  Alla Breve

    I can't take it in. Where has he been, and
when? After the fact, the holes in my old
version are obvious. But this new timetable,
for all its superiority, is still shot full of
anomalies. June? Half a year from door to
door! Unthinkable, even for international
mail. I cross off those weeks when, lost to
this project, I'd stopped checking for mail:
months still unaccounted for.
    Assume that Todd, in character,
obliviously attached so little postage that
the packet went by surface freight. Adding
all possible holdups—trouble reading his
nineteenth-century hand, customs opening
it—accounts for a couple of months at most.
Todd's refusal to descend to anything so
courante as zip code tacks on another
punitive week here in New York. I conjure up
a postal strike in the Low Countries—they
happen in social welfare states. Stretched to
breaking, the thread still doesn't span.
    Perhaps he began the letter in mid-June,
but sent it later. But that's impossible. Two
weeks after he started it, he was back in
Illinois, dispatching news of Dr. Ressler's
death. The letter makes no mention of
stateside hiatus. And the imitation Flemish
card wedged between? I compare postage,
look up the exchange rates from the middle
of last year. No doubt the card came by
surface. Slow boat. Posted before the death
notice.
    Todd couldn't have poured out a long
chapter, had his life upended, returned to
the continent with everything he wrote
turned inside out, and then blithely sent the
thing unemended, as if nothing had
happened in the forgetting world in the
interim.
    Granted he never made sense to me. But
even he could not have sent these
bottle-messages in any order except card,
lengthy letter, and obituary. Still, the gap: as
if he set me up to misread chronology, invert
it, hate his indifference for half a year. Now I
must postdate everything, the way they
adeptly postdated the console log when it
most mattered. I can't set it right, can't
remake myself to it.
    How many times he left me kitchen-table
notes, agonized trails of crotchety,
contradicting explications replete with a
course-of-battle map, arrows tracing out
day's insomnia: "Don't worry; stepped out
for a minute. Nope, upstairs; first line
obsolete. Make that was obsolete; this
rescinding is final. Two of the previous three
updates are false." He lived in unaccounted
gaps. Gone for weeks. Then waiting in the
front room, smiling: You were saying...? In
the dark, before falling asleep, he would
suddenly ask after leftovers we had eaten a
dozen days before. He confused the order of
his discoveries about Herri with that man's
chronology. I'd post the anniversary of the
world's first news broadcast, February 1920,
and he'd go about beaming as if it had just
been sent all over again.
    Once, over one of my modest casserole
attempts, he asked, "How do you suppose
that lobster could walk away like that with
his rear half hacked off?" A day later, I
remembered: that seafood dive, our business
lunch that turned out to be a date after all. It
unsettled me: if the first date was still so
immediate in him, could the gap between
now and the last be any larger?
    I've seen him do the same to Dr. Ressler.
We and an attendant Annie sat in the
control room one night on the threshold of
spring. The machines on the other side of
the two-way mirror blindly carried out their
procedures: if balance equals debit minus
credit, then goto smoothsailing, else goto
errorhandle. We were deep in listening. The
theme for the evening was children's songs:
Schumann, Bartók, Debussy. Without even a
feint toward preparation, Todd asked his
mentor, "So what about that magazine?"
Annie and I exchanged glances: had we
missed something? But Dr. Ressler broke
into a reticent grin. He shook his head and
squeezed the bridge of his nose. "Come
on," Todd teased. "What did you tell those
gentlemen?" I finally got it. He was jumping
not just the weeks between that evening
and the New Hampshire woods, when
Ressler told us about his one run-in with
notoriety. He was leaping over the entire
twenty-five years since Ressler did the
interview.
   "I didn't tell them anything, as you and
your woman collaborator determined."
Ressler winked at me, homage for the bit of
detective work I'd done three quarters of a
year before. His wink rushed over me, a
chemical injection. I was in love with the
man. The worst, most unspeakable
schoolgirl's crush.
   Todd was relentless, for private reasons.
"You must have told them something. Who
supplied them with that Miescher quote?
Should one ask anybody who is undertaking
a major project in science, in the heat of the
fight, what drives and pushes him so
relentlessly, he will never think of an external
goal; it is the passion of the hunter...." Todd
had the quote intact.
   "Guilty as charged. But I was just a child."
A pointed rib for Todd's benefit: your age,
boy.
   "I thought you did. Hacks for the glossies
seldom know the literature."
   "It might have been any of the other poor
souls they'd cornered for the portfolio.
'Faces to Watch for in '58,' or
what-have-you." Todd supplied the actual
title of the piece. This irritated Dr. Ressler.
"Did you need to memorize it?" That
hushed things, and we were back to songs
for children. Todd had it coming. He should
have known that missing spaces, for other
people, remain real. But with the quick
forgiveness of one who once studied
inheritance for a living, Dr. Ressler gently
berated Franklin. "I thought I'd told you
everything that anyone could conceivably
find interesting about my case." An edge in
his tone insisted that of all ways there were
of learning what it meant to be alive,
biography was among the least helpful.
   Todd, lip out, said, "I just wanted to know
how they heard about you."
   "Oh, they were doing the brave new
world piece they're obliged to run every two
years. Somebody at Cold Spring Harbor
mentioned to the journalist compiling the
piece that if they were looking for bankable
horses, there was a bright, young, single,
obscure young man out in the Midwest who
had initiated an interesting bit of work and
who, word had it, was not entirely
unphotogenic." He looked at Annie and me
sardonically: you see how cells take it upon
themselves to fall apart. He couldn't have
been more wrong.
   "What did this fellow ask you?"
   "Almost nothing about my work. He
wouldn't have been able to follow even the
Music for Millions version. He wanted the
usual color: twists, eccentricities. Was I a
child prodigy? Did I keep my lunch bag in
the dissection freezer? Did knowing the
chemical nature of humanity keep me from
favoring certain eye color? Did I have any
words of wisdom for the generation of
molecular geneticists then cutting their teeth
in school labs?" "Did you?"
   "I told them to read from the bottom of
the meniscus." Having bludgeoned my way
through college chemistry with limited
success despite the opposable thumb, I
laughed. Annie, the picture of
Sunday-school patience, blurted out, "Life
magazine? You were famous once?"
   Lovering snags him outside the interview,
unable to wait until he gets back to the
office. "So. Big Time. The coffee tables of
America."
   "Listen, Joey. I had nothing to do with
this. I wouldn't even have talked to them,
except they were already here. They just
want a photo for the gallery. It could have
been anybody. Could have been you."
   "Thanks."
   "That's not what I meant. I mean that the
press hasn't the slightest notion of what
we're working on."
   "Do you?"
   "Touché. " Happy to give Lovering the hit
if it will help put the ridiculous issue behind
them.
   "I heard Ulrich hasn't renewed your
fellowship. Sounds like the
prophet-without-honor syndrome."
   The bombshell he's been expecting these
last weeks. "Ah," he says, false-pitched. "I'm
out of the running for next year?"
   "So I've heard. Formal decision won't be
posted for another few days. Department's
eager to squirrel away cash for the big
push." Meaning Lovering's hunt-and-peck
methods on ILLIAC.
   His year has been appraised and found
lacking. Preferment denied, not because of
the quality of his science but because Stuart
has shown himself not to be a team player.
The vicissitudes of funding cannot afford
the solo worker. The population geneticists
have had the right gauge all along. Ulrich
has every right to apply his limited research
funds to a post-doc who'll do better by
Cyfer. But the calculation embitters Ressler,
and he cannot suppress a smiling
accusation. "You people are wrong, wrong,
wrong."
   Lovering, twitched by bad conscience,
reassures him. "Oh, they want to keep you
around. You're hot stuff. Ask any coffee
table." The joke goes flatly aromatic. "But
the freebie is over. You'll have to teach or
something."
   He can't teach—not yet, perhaps not ever.
To stand up in front of students and make
definitive statements is unthinkable. Every
definitive statement is false. Whenever he
addresses a room of eager notebooks, he
begins to shuffle at the lectern, cloak himself
in qualifications. It's useless to explain this
to Lovering, one of those surehanded
lecturers who forget that skepticism is at the
bottom of scientific method. Ressler adopts
an obsequious tone. "I don't imagine my
classroom presentation is likely to be
especially stellar."
   "No, I wouldn't think so."
   Ressler feels an urge to smash his
colleague to the wall, watch his head loll
against the brick. The forbidden appeal fills
him: nothing to prevent it. He is more
powerful in the upper chest than Lovering,
although the comparison hasn't occurred to
him until this moment. Violence forever in
the serum. Jacob's Ladder does not ascend;
it coils forever around the same four rungs.
"Joseph, I've never said 'boo' to you. What's
going on here? What do you have against
me?"
   "What do you have against Ulrich?"
   "Against... ? Nothing! I just want to do my
work."
   "You are a very unpleasant fellow, you
know. I can't think of anyone in the
department who's especially taken with
you:"
   The casual hallway conversation, at the
flick of a switch, becomes puerile. He doesn't
have a clue to what the switch is, let alone
how to flick it off. "Listen, Joe. I don't know
what to say. Is this over the interview? That's
crazy. It's a puff piece. The magazine pulled
my name out of a hat. They hadn't even seen
my article, let alone..."
   "Screw the magazine." Lovering's voice is
steady. "Sandy and I don't even subscribe."
His joke strews the path with shrapnel. "And
screw your article, too. Sandy says you
dangle too many participles, by the way."
   "I don't understand this. I've never
bad-mouthed you. I'm quiet in the office. I
keep the glassware clean..."
   Lovering wags his head, shedding these
possibilities as beneath consideration. "If
you haven't figured it out by now, I ain't
gonna lay it out for you."
   Ressler walks away, shaken. For days, he
cannot put the weird run-in behind him. He
cedes the office to Joe, abdicates out of
shame and inability to look at the man. He
doesn't go to Ulrich to confirm the loss of
fellowship; he'll hear soon enough. He must
assume good faith. Difference of opinion,
even divorce, must all be in good faith.
   On a late-February evening he passes the
closed door of Toveh Botkin's office, from
which issue the dampened strains of the
gallows march from that old war-horse the
Symphonic Fantastique. He freezes in the
hall—dark, drafty, and full of the smothered
scent of lacquer, hair oil, methane,
generations of forgotten undergraduate
odors—freezes at the tentative probes of
this progression. He is thrown back to the
previous year, to Summer Slumber Party,
when he did not know flat from sharp, let
alone Neapolitan sixth from French overture.
He is nowhere close to breaking into the
inner circle of repertoire, the mysteries of
tone hidden even from program-note
readers and devotees. But with the help of
the woman on the other side of this door, he
has gone from utter illiteracy to the point
where he can name this tune without ever
having heard it before. He recognizes the
Berlioz exclusively from the physiognomic
description given in the literature.
   Standing in the hall, taut with eerie
last-century intervals counterpointed by
clattering steam pipes, he feels the quick slip
of deliverance. No matter what
happens—should he be barred from the
intellectual cloister, never publish fresh
research again—academic year '57—'58 will
in any light remain the great watershed
adventure of his life: the year he intuited the
rough, sole appropriate method for cracking
chemical inheritance, the year he fell
irreversibly in love, and, most intangible,
most intense of all, the year he learned to
hear. He knocks, lets himself in, walking
euphorically against the harmonic wind. He
lies down in his old place on the leather
couch. At the movement's end, he lifts his
torso and greets his old friend. "Not two
flutes, you scoundrels! Two piccolos!"
   Botkin needs no gloss. Her eyes brim
viscous at his visit. She shakes her head,
tsking. "What a student we've turned out to
be."
   "Dr. Botkin, do you find me unpleasant?"
   "Don't flirt with an old woman. There isn't
one of us who couldn't rise to make a fool of
ourselves under pressure."
   He thanks her obliquely but gratefully by
consulting her on the adaptor notion. "We
have set everything up perfectly in our
tube— plaintext message, scissors, paste,
paper, pen—everything except the code
book itself. If we slip that in, we ought to
get synthesis such as no one has seen yet."
   "What, in this extended metaphor, does
'code book' stand for?"
   Ressler explains: a bilingual molecule, with
specific amino acid at one locus and
corresponding anticodon at another. Where
the messenger reads ACG, the strip on the
translator reads UGC. They fit; the amino is
held in position, glued to the growing
polypeptide chain. He glances up from the
couch when he finishes. Botkin smiles at
him, but queerly. "Is there something
wrong?" he asks. "Have I committed the
usual bona fide blunder?"
   "My friend," Botkin laments, "you have
been working too hard. You have been
picking over too many back issues of
periodicals and not enough front." She lifts,
fresh from the place of honor on her desk, a
reprint of a recent article, hands it to him. He
accepts the piece, a paper Crick delivered last
fall to the Society for Experimental Biology,
with the amalgam of trepidation and
excitement of asking a pretty wallflower for a
dance. Crick is coherent, gorgeous. From
beginning to end, he throws open the
casements and floods the place with
conceptual clarity. In a few pages, the man
crystallizes everything Cyfer and Ressler have
struggled so fitfully to consolidate. And
before it is all over, Crick hints at the same
construct, even employing the term
"adaptor": an RNA strain shaped to encode
both reading stencil and written amino.
   It chills Ressler to lie there and read the
piece, the chill of recognizing Berlioz
without having heard him. He does not sink,
beaten. Quite the reverse. The piece breaks
his heart with poignancy. It is a beautiful
late-twentieth-century pilgrim's narrative—
exegesis pressing outwards, refusing to stay
confined to the dark backyard. It makes the
work his own era struggles to produce seem
unmatched by any Renaissance: a time when
anything might come to be anything at all.
   The shining confirmation—the
correspondence between their own work
and this work going on across the
ocean—descends on him as relief. All sense
of racing to the gate dissolves. There is still
the weight of wanting to contribute
somewhere along the line. But Crick's
structure, so close to the one he has
independently imagined, reassures him that
contribution is never an endangered
individual. It will be made, whatever might
become of him, no matter how soon design's
undertow drags him down.
   Botkin mistakes the quiet that comes over
him while reading. When he finishes, she
consoles him. "He still seems confused
between ribosomal and messenger RNA.
And he has not yet picked up on Gale and
Folkes."
   "You think not?" He glances at the paper,
frightened. Then he understands his friend
is trying to motivate him to remain in the
chase. How can he tell her: I am in, for good,
forever, even if I drop out along the way?
We have no choice in these things; they
must be done for the greater glory of
whatever there'is. "Maybe not," he whispers,
grinning, conceding the responsibility still
wrapped inside relief. "Maybe we can add
something to this." He gazes at the creases
in Dr. Botkin's face, the manifestation, the
final working out of a textual puzzle written
nowhere in particular, everywhere in
general. He hands back the beautiful draft,
Crick's notes toward a score for the young
person's guide to the orchestra. "Let us go
after this adaptor molecule, then."
   "I think we have to."
   "You know what it is, of course."
   "More nucleic acid?"
   "Who else?" Is there any other matter so
skilled at grammar that it can write one, in its
own language? "Thank you for showing me
that," he says. "It's breathtaking." He spills
over with the wonder of it: the organism
guessing inspiredly at its own conveyance,
mechanisms themselves the frozen record of
inspired guesses about the environment.
The practical substitute of words for words
seems makeshift, courageous beyond
imagining. He can say nothing.
   Botkin lifts a hand to her darkwood
shelves, takes down a book, and slowly
reads to him. The source is in German, of
which Ressler has only technical reading
knowledge. But Botkin's native fluency
bridges this impediment. Her eyes read in
one language, her lips pronounce another,
without the halting searches of the
simultaneous interpreter.
   " 'At the suggestion of Doles, the Cantor
at the Leipzig Thomas-Schule, the choir
surprised Mozart by performing the
double-chorus motet Singet dem Herrn ein
neues Lied. The choir had produced but a
few measures when Mozart bolted upright,
shocked. After a few more measures, he
shouted out, "What is this?" His whole soul
appeared to rise up into his ears. The
singing ended; he cried out joyfully, "Here at
last is something one might learn from."' I
hope this holds up in translation."
   Even in the translation of a translation.
The image of Europe's prodigy, exiled in the
loneliness of his abilities, unexpectedly
discovering that he is not alone only
augments the strange understanding
welling in Ressler. "The name of that piece:
'Sing unto the Lord a new song'?"
   "On the mark." He does not even ask the
name of that surprise something, the
someone one might at last learn from. No
need to translate it into speech.
   Lovering's assault seems more inexplicable
after a week's simmering. But one accusation
stands out of the erratic mass as possessing
a germ of truth. Distance is not respectfully
neutral, as he has always meant it.
Socializing, like push-ups, is a necessary,
unpleasant surrogate for the real thing. He
has not visited Woytowich and Renée since
they gazed at the evening news together
last summer. Almost too late, he feels a
funny, irrelevant need to exonerate himself.
He finds himself on their stoop on the first
of March, holding an amateurishly wrapped,
postage-stamp-sized baby jumper, he hopes
female.
   Woyty opens the door, shouts "Stuart,"
clutches at his chest, burlesqueing a heart
attack. "My God, man! Who died?" He
rushes Ressler in, treating him just a notch
below long-lost brother. Lovering is right:
Ressler has let the thread of mutual sentence
almost snap. "Renée honey," Daniel shouts.
"You'll never guess!"
   A thin voice from the distant room wafts
back. "If it's the Census Bureau, tell them
we're topping off at one."
   "She's kidding," Daniel gushes. "She
loves this motherhood racket. Come in, come
in. We were just getting ready for the
bassinet. Want to see?"
   "I'd prefer the home movie, Dr. W."
Ressler can't deliver the line without
smirking. Woyty's elated regressing is
infectious. He rushes Ressler upstairs. Renée
fusses embarrassingly over the little jumper
as if it were the coat of many colors. She
retires it to the middle of a set of shelves
that Dan has labeled "0 to 6," "6 to 12," and
"12 to 24."
   "We have to wash Ivy," Woyty sings in a
high, squeaky voice, rubbing his nose into
the infant's belly. "Don't we have to wash
Ivy?" Ivy smiles, or perhaps it is just gas. Ivy's
father undoes the enormous safety pin in
her cotton diapers. "What did you do here?
Did you make all this?" Daniel removes the
soiled rags, showing Ressler the product, the
miraculous residue left in a beaker after
fractional distillation. The mocha clay—laid
down in deposits— might fire in a kiln to
silky porcelain.
   The wrapper gets thrown into an
enormous collecting sack for the cleaning
service. Father daubs the holdouts from
between Ivy's legs. The infant makes a
confused gurgle, unsure whether to resist,
screaming, or give in with pleasure. Ressler is
hypnotized by the protozooic genitalia: a
fatty eruption, almost tuberous, between the
egg-roll thighs, a strange red rash
disappearing into a discreet afterthought of
a tuck, like the dimple that marks where the
mold attaches.
   Ivy goes into the bassinet, water warmed
to half-degree precision on Renée's
thermometer. She seems to enjoy returning
to the drink, splashing about polywog-style
with more muscular knowledge than she can
muster on dry land. As he sops her clean,
Daniel keeps up a constant stream of
language games: "Where's your foot? Here it
is! No, we haven't lost it. Where's your
tummy? That's right. How did you know?"
   Father and daughter have an uncanny
rapport, almost spooky for the handful of
weeks under the bridge. Reading Ressler's
thoughts, Woyty concurs, "She's a prodigy.
Renée and I are both amazed. Already twice
where the books say she's supposed to be."
He gazes at his wife in astonishment and
pride. Renée responds in kind. Daniel goes
on laving, talking, half to Stuart, half to Ivy,
letting his daughter in on an awful
prediction. "This is going to be the brightest
baby in the world. Isn't she?" he asks,
sponging the tiny creature's back.
   "If Daddy has anything to do with it,"
Renée chuckles. "He's got the John Stuart
Mill alphabet blocks strung up over her crib,
and he spends an hour going through them
with her every night."
   "I swear she gets them already. I feel her
catching on."
   Ressler looks in the flat-focusing eyes of
this baby to see if that can be possible. He
remembers that other model of miraculous
miniaturization, Margaret Blake. Ivy, no
longer than Margaret's arm, retraces
phylogeny back to some intermediary
generating form. Staring at Ivy, amphibious
in her bath, he begins to think that
parenting may be science as well. The
gradual testing, forgoing, and refinement of
postulates, the constant probes of
methodology and interpretation. Ivy is the
subject of every lesser investigation anyone
has ever run.
   He loves a woman, has entered one who
so awakes the possibilities buried in his
cytoplasm that the urge to get her as round,
as loose-draped in the belly as a medieval
Virgin is now stronger than any that has ever
possessed him. The compulsion to run the
one experiment that can't be pared down to
a manageable outcome. But every cell he will
ever shoot into her will die there, in her
tract, in confusion. He and Jeanette are
barred forever from that trial run, not just by
skirtable social proscription, but by final
proclamation of the law of averages.
   "One, two, three, four, five," Daniel
intones, peeling back the child's tiny,
almond machine-shop parings. "Seis, siete,
ocho, nueve, diez." He frees his finger from
her reflex grasp and winds up a music box.
Its melodious running down sends the child
into rapture. "Yes sir. This baby's either
going to be a genius or one overstimulated
cookie."
   Ressler barely hears Woytowich to nod
acknowledgment. The music-box trickle
recalls him to another music box, a distant
one, one he first heard in Botkin's office
months ago, at the start of this annus
mirabilis, before learning became more than
he could bear. A music box, an automaton of
stoic grief, faintly singing out in the fifth of
five songs selected from a catalog of four
hundred poems chronicling the death of a
child from scarlet fever. Kindertodenlieder. A
little light has gone out in my tent. Hail the
eternal light of day.
    "Yes, Ivy and I are going to teach each
other a lot. Aren't we, dear? Aren't we?" A
fair trade; she gets to learn where her tummy
is. You get to learn what it means to cheat
death. Ressler hears, in the child's music box,
how the only life he will ever live beyond his
own will be the life of that absurd photo
and caption, trapping him in coffee tables
everywhere.
    Annie's alarm at Dr. Ressler's one-time
borderline notoriety was so genuine, her
face so amazed, during the account that his
irritation at the broach of the subject
bubbled away. "Yes, greatness briefly thrust
upon me, and only a quick side step and
swing of the red cape saved me. I was
cornered by the same journalistic band that
cruelly led the beach-party beauties to
believe that one of them might domesticate
that twenty-some-year-old genius pianist,
cure him of hypochondria and his awful
singing over the instrumental tracks. Even as
the magazine was busy promoting that
fellow, he'd already begun to trade the
international concert circuit for a life where
even his closest friends could reach him only
by phone. Life never caught on that his
keyboard exercises were a refusal of natural
selection, a means of surviving solitude." He
fell apologetically silent a minute. Speaking
to Annie, as if Todd and I already
understood, he said, "The three weeks when
my mug inhabited the back pages of
newstands filled me with a revulsion that
has not diminished."
    That fame was a proving ground for
another notoriety then just weeks away. One
evening Uncle Jimmy stayed late, lying in
wait for Todd. By Franker's account, the Ops
Manager hand-delivered their pay receipts
for the period, reading over their shoulders
as each examined his stub. Jimmy, jittery,
wanted to know if their deposits checked
out. He told them his pay had come through
augmented by a lump sum, with no note on
the stub or word from higher-ups. I imagine
Todd relishing the lark, encouraging Jimmy
to accept the Bank Error in Your Favor and
go buy a new color TV for his mother. Of
course, Jimmy, seconded by a terse-lipped Dr.
Ressler, concluded that he would have to
report the windfall glitch.
    "Do you think it could have something to
do with that whole lotta shakin' goin' down
here over the last few weeks?" Todd
suggested lamely.
   "As you know," Dr. Ressler intervened, to
keep Todd from clever admission of guilt,
"all our payroll records are kept insulated
from our own machines."
   "That's right." Jimmy frowned, trying hard
to ignore his hunch. "All our checks are cut
out of house. By a rival firm."
   After Jimmy's departure, Ressler gave
Franklin the most severe dressing-down
possible: he said nothing about the matter.
They started the end-of-day processing,
Ressler letting Franker stick with his story.
Trust devastated Todd more than any
accusation could have. Franker's whim
turned real at last, on this side of the
mainframe linkup.
   A few days later, when a baffled Uncle
Jimmy returned to what his instincts told him
was the scene of the crime, he shook his
head and told my friends, "Nobody knows
who authorized it, but the receipt matches a
valid electronic request. 'Somebody musta
dunnit.' Accounting even looked at me like I
was crazy for bringing it to their attention."
   "James," Dr. Ressler assured him, "it
sounds as if you're forced to consider this
the gift of an anonymous donor."
   "Pennies from Heaven," Todd suggested
meekly. "The Color TVs for the Mothers of
Excessively OT 'ed Middle Managers Fund."
   "If the two of you have nothing more
helpful to say than 'Roll with it,' I guess I'll
have to. But nobody can make me like it,"
Jimmy said.
   Or words to that effect. Unlike the
Evangelist, I was not there and did not see
these things. I received the revised version
only through Todd, and my memory of even
that is already years old. "This is the gist, but
not the exact run of words as he sang them
in his sleep, for even the most beautiful
song cannot be translated from one
language to the other without much loss of
loveliness and grace." No better fit for the
sad fact than Bede's famous bit— a bit no
one for more than a thousand years has
even been able to read in the way that a real
speaker of Bede's dead language was able
to. But what's a real speaker? Latin was no
one's mother tongue. Why should I use
quotes, if the English version of his despair
at the insufficiency of translation is itself
insufficient? "This is the gist" doesn't even
give the run of words as Bede sang them.
And yet these words are his gist. The same, if
undeniably different. My rough guess at
what Uncle Jimmy said stands in now for
Uncle Jimmy. It must. There is no other.
   These eight months spent trying to rig up
an exact recreation have never once gotten
closer than a rough gist, even of those
moments that I lived firsthand. A verbatim
transcript is, it goes without saying, a
contradiction in terms. Yet I could not have
sustained this almost-transcript this far
without believing that it approximates the
original, even with every original word out
of order or altered. No threshold effect turns
resemblance into facsimile. Yet
approximation is as close as any transcriber
gets. I know now how genetics relies on
ingenious but indirect measurements,
reflections and not direct knowledge. Genes
are mapped relatively by the frequency of
their breaking and recombining. No one has
witnessed a transfer-RNA molecule reading
the next triplet and attaching its amino acid
to the growing polypeptide. Yet the
inference is unimpeachable, because the
shadows this process casts on reflective
apparatus cannot be explained so well in
any other way.
   Even a literal recording—another
contradiction—even highest-fidelity
holographic videotape of what I and my
friends said and did at that precise moment
would still be a rough transcript requiring
interpretation. That pause between his
sentences: anger or exasperation? The pitch,
volume, and tempo of his words: do those
variables, integrated across context, indicate
half his impatience, uncertainty, wonder at
what is about to happen? Everything I might
say about this place involves decoding.
Things say in one language and mean in
another. No getting across that gap without
the ultimate transitive, to translate.
   Out of unshakable habit, I look up the
word. English occurrence dates from the
thirteenth century. Latin origin: to relocate,
carry across, port over. Among the dozen
definitions (including to bring to a state of
spiritual or emotional ecstasy), the now
familiar biochemical one: to transform the
information stored in messenger RNA into a
polypeptide structure by means of the
genetic code. An upstart translation of the
parent meaning: to move the substance of a
text from one language or dialect into
another. To translate Shakespeare into
Bantu, or the secretary of defense into
English.
   I follow the idea down to its core, where,
rather than reveal itself, it dissolves. I ask the
Ur-question of whether translations, unlike
Todd, can be both beautiful and faithful at
the same time. I nudge that old impasse
concerning whether to translate all
"Na-poleon"s into "Bismarck"s when
porting a limbered piece across the Rhine. I
live with the line about how all translations
are obsolete the moment they are made, how
the death of marines in Lebanon calls out for
a new draft on Thucydides. What I can't
decide is whether passing words from one
language to another is even possible.
   Pragmatically, I know it must be, for I do it
all day long. Like Dr. Johnson's friend Mrs.
Carter in reverse, I once could translate
Epictetus as well as make a pudding. Every
piece of impenetrable information I ever
ported to my eternally hungry clients was
born in interpretation and carried out under
the guidance of rough analogy. Even now,
working exclusively for myself, every genetic
concept I acquire is a stand-in isomorph for
an alien domain. Letters as bases. The
genome as five-thousand-volume library.
The ribosome as reading head, messenger
RNA as strip of recording tape. Enzyme as
if-then command. The presence of amino
sequences inferred through the pattern of
dark bands on paper. Traits located by
tracking genetic markers. The ages of the
earth as bands of sedimentary rock. The
forms of finches radiating outwards. Sperm
with heads and tails. Radiation garbling
messages, introducing noise. Mendel as the
Darwin of heredity. Darwin as left fielder,
batting third for the Science Hall of Fame.
Life as computer, steam engine, automation,
animate puppet, clay shape breathed full of
spiritus dei.

            For out of olde feldes, as men
         seith,
            Cometh al this newe corn fro yeer
         to yere;
            And out of olde bokes, in good
         feith,
            Cometh al this newe science that
         men lere.

   Translation inhabits every sentence ever
predicated. Nothing is what it is but by
contrast, cracking, porting over. Every part of
speech is already a figure of speech. Not
long before I stopped going back, I visited
Dr. Ressler, once more alone in the quiet of
the control room. He was compiling a
catalog, with nineteenth-century Linnaean
diligence, of examples of tone-painting (I
mistakenly heard "tome-painting") in Bach
vocal works. We listened to scores of
examples, figures as generic as joy,
hastening, or humility, as literal-minded as
flames, fire, sheep grazing, or the rich being
sent empty away. He played a jagged,
dissonant 'cello descent, buzz-saw violent.
"How do they put it in the King James? "The
veil of the temple was rended'?"
   "In current versions, it reads something
like 'And their public religious building was
damaged by plate slippage.' "
   Ressler smiled. "No wonder they burned
Tyndale. Of course, for Bach, it was 'Der
Vorhang im Tempel zerriss in zwei Stück von
oben an bis unten aus.' Which is another
story altogether."
   "I thought you said you didn't know any
foreign languages." Except I do no one any
harm by remaining here, in French.
   "Every scientist my age had to read a little
German."
   "And a little Latin?"
   He shrugged. "For nomenclature."
   "Greek?"
   "No farther than the letter names, believe
me."
   "Why should I? And tone-painting?"
   "Well that, yes. But is that a language?"
he slid away quickly. "Is it redundant,
specific, rigid, nonambiguous? Can we really
hear what it means?"
   "First tell me what "The veil of the temple
was rended' means."
   "Good point," he said. Or words to that
effect.
   But just because translation is everywhere
necessary, it doesn't follow that it's possible.
Even the perfect translations of mathematics
beg the question of what is being carried
over where. The length of this
two-dimensional extension expressed in
number. The value of that number expressed
as a numeral. If performing the same
operation on both sides of an equation does
not change the expression's validity, what
does it change? Why is the last line of a
proof surprising, if its truth is already hiding
tautologically in the lines above?
   The load is inseparable from the cart.
What I say depends on what ï say it with. The
most resourceful conversion cannot take the
simple phrase "Words are very rascals" and
transplant the sense, stripped of
conveyance, into Oriental pictographs where
adjectives are conjugated, sentences have
separate logical and grammatical subjects,
and verbs have no tense or mood but
context, cannot perform the exchange
without everything except simple-minded
correspondence being lost.
   Conversion's impossibility only increases
when the languages have recently diverged.
Mother, maman, madre, mutter come
nowhere near meaning the same thing. I
need only boot, fringe, or grid to prove that
we and the Brits are indeed two people
separated by the barrier of a common
language. "Ceci n'est pas une pipe" does not
mean "This is not a pipe," any more than
Magritte's famous symbol is smokable. All
four texts no longer mean what they
separably say: they are a packet, together
standing for the inability to extract thorns
from dialect briars.
   The decline of the world in my lifetime
precipitated by Vatican II and Webster III is
just the latest echo of the collapse of Babel.
Frank's favorite painter had to do this topic
twice, in porting it to another idiom.
Difficulty did not begin when God caused
everybody on the work crew to render "pass
the hammer" in his own unintelligible idiom.
It began with "hammer," a real thing in
itself, separate from that solid, cold,
workable weight strapped into the flat of
the hand. Every assertion is already a
comparison, wedding a thing to a thing, a
thing to an action, a thing to a quality,
temporarily joined at a given moment from a
given vantage. Shifts betray without ever
leaving the mother tongue. Stravinsky once
called Verdi the Puccini of Music. I know
exactly what he means, but could not say it
any other way.
   The coding problem begins with a single
word, shorthand simile. Simple naming is
already unstable. There is no other way to
say a thing except by its name, yet the name
never says it. Once, I knew what it felt like to
be the first to use a metaphor. To invent
metaphor itself. I loved someone who was
sunk in winter, someone who didn't watch
where he walked. Garden in his face. Nest in
hair. Pearls for eyes. Wall between us. Words
dispersed us like the cold points of stars. The
joints splay that should pull flush.
Dovetailed comparisons wear out, go
threadbare. But tonight, for no
reason—because of a transposition
converting two very different
dates—language coils, starts up again. I
apply my key, my adapting bit, until
something fits, shifts, carries over. The
conversion closing in on me will never aeain
be so clean as one eene. one enzyme.
   one metabolism. It never was that clean,
even at microscopic level.
   Shakespeare in Bantu, Indiana in
Brooklyn, Dr. Ressler in verse, desire in
biological terms: the world is only
translation, nothing but. But paradoxically,
inexpressibly, translation of no other place
but here. All this conversion work—words
into cantatas, landscapes into words—has as
goal neither fidelity to the original (although
valueless without fidelity) nor beauty in the
target language (although without beauty, a
waste). The point of every translation—the
years spent in science, away from art history,
wrapped in the library, trapped in this
paragraph—is suddenly one and the same.
   Translation, hunger for porting over, is
not about bringing Shakespeare into Bantu.
It is about bringing Bantu into Shakespeare.
To show what else, other than homegrown
sentences, a language might be able to say.
The aim is not to extend the source but to
widen the target, to embrace more than was
possible before. After a successful decoding,
after hitting upon the right
solution—however temporary, tentative,
replaceable, and local—the two extended,
enhanced languages (Shakespeare changes
forever too, analogies adapting to the
African plains) form a triangulating sextant
pointing back to the height of the ruined
tower, steering limited idiom toward a place
where knowledge goes without saying.
   I have the likeness for the whole process
in front of me. How could I have been so
long in hearing it? Each alternate translation
is an emblem of the generating tune. But
variation grows rich in a new tongue. The
tune in February. The tune as laborer. The
tune in love. The tune in the Information
Revolution. The tune intoned without hope
or longing in the cloister of a solitary order.
The tune in vitro. The tune swung round,
wrenched into minor. The tune as a lost vee
of geese. The tune triumphant. The tune as
sudden stroke, erasing all personality. The
tune as folk tune. How long you have been
away from me. Come home, come home,
come home. Change the signature, rhythm,
harmonic underpinning, even the intervals.
Where is the theme? Oh, still in there, in the
new terms, the awful euphoria of more. It
needs only a listener with the right key to
find that unprecedented, surprising, radical
bit that from the first, all along, it was
saying.
   Because he is not where I thought he is;
because I had him badly figured; because I
set out last June to identify Dr. Ressler at
last; because Ressler died; because I thought
Todd had run off to Europe; because he in
fact came back for his friend's death, leaving
my letter sealed under some casement,
waiting months for a benevolent stranger to
post it; because I thought to learn genetics,
hoping that way to work my way around to
the man; because I loved with all the force of
metaphor; because I loved those two as if
they were the last similes left on earth;
because I will never get the exact words and
will be lucky to hint at the weakest
equivocation; because I shut myself away for
months for work (because I thought them
both gone); because I find, tonight, in
crossing over, that I was wrong on virtually
every account worth being wrong on, I hear
the old tune as if it were some absurdly
singable new song. Sing it then. Friend,
thou art translated.


XXIII
  Century of Progress

  Q: Why not a test ban? If satellites can
read license plates from outer space,
couldn't they also detect your basic
multimegaton blasts going off here or there?
  P.N.

  A: Official line is that a test ban would not
be verifiable, and thus not desirable. But
many in the scientific community say tremor
detection has permitted verification for at
least a decade. Nuclear detonations are
required by the space weapons program
now under development. Measurement is
never separate from motive.
  J. O'D.

   Q: How many humans will there be by the
beginning of next century? How many other
living things?
   R.P.

  A: Eight billion humans, by conservative
estimate. There will still be many animals. But
far fewer kinds—
  J. O'D.

  Q: My parents used to sing a song
together when I was a girl, before the First
World War. It was called something like "A
Hundred Years from Now." It was beautiful,
but I've never been able to find it since. Do
an old lady a favor?
  L.S.

   A: One Hundred Years Hence what a
change will be made In politics, morals,
religions, and trade;

  In statesman who wrangle or ride on the
fence, These things will be altered a hundred
years hence.

  Then woman, man's partner, man's equal
will stand,
  While beauty and harmony cover the land;
  To think for oneself will be no offense,
  The world will be thinking, a hundred
years hence.

  Oppression and war will be heard of no
more,
  Nor the blood of the slave leave its print
on our shore;
  Conventions will then be a useless
expense,
  For we'll all go free suffrage, One
Hundred Years Hence.
  J. O'D.

  Change of Venue

   He did not run for Europe; he came back.
Ressler's death did not leave him cutting
human ties, cleaning off, briskly efficient.
Franklin was in the Low Countries already
last spring, throwing his lot in with new
words. Days after he wrote me, second week
in June, he heard that Dr. Ressler was
entering the last turn. He must have
dropped everything and come back home.
   Home to what? The death notice says
nothing. "I have just heard.." Midwestern
postmark; the town Ressler chose to die in.
Did Franklin make it? Was he able to see the
man? In my last word from Franklin, a trail a
half year old, he'd just arrived stateside. No
reason to believe he isn't still here.
Somewhere. Today.

  On the Threshold of Liberty

   On March 11, the AEC concedes to angry
scientists that seismic shock from last year's
test in the Nevada desert registered in
Alaska, 2,320 miles away, and was not limited
to 250 miles, as first claimed. Ressler can't
imagine how even government might think
that figures will conform to decree. But he
understands its temptation to dictate to
measurement. Agencies sit on sheaves of
results they can't ingest, a report of
increasing mastery over material that grows
faster than they can read it; each new
breakthrough edges deeper into that place
where everything is certain to
happen—wider extremes of availability tahn
the biome ever anticipated.
   Foreign policy snaps precedent. Leaders
are left hanging on to realpolitik, chanting
the trusty, rusted formulae long obsolete.
Nations haven't the first notion what to do
about the eager weapons that will garble
irreversibly the three-billion-year message
inside the informational molecule. The lone
trustee, the incompetent caretaker, is loose
on the estate.
   The public, even those still buying the
myth of species permanence, has lately
latched onto the most horrible fold in the
new dogma. Life is no longer a priori
appropriate. Creatures become sickeningly
plastic, moldable, as mistakable as clay.
Two-headed monsters, nightmarish collages
of scales, fur, wings, and jagged things,
hybrid ghouls of unbound imagination
inhabit theaters nearest you. Godzillas,
lagoon creatures, giant Gila monsters:
nothing now prevents life from running
amok in the shower of mutagenic material
already unleashed. Lovering pins up a
Yardley cartoon on the office bulletin board.
"Radiation didn't hurt us a bit." The speaker
is an amorphous blob with three eyes.
   The specter is more terrifying than mass
extinction. The annihilation of most of the
globe seemed survivable so long as some
fraction of the message remained intact. But
if monstrous mean-inglessness propagates
with the speed and exactitude of natural
transmission, everything is over. The loss of
a great library to fire is a tragedy. But the
surreptitious introduction of thousands of
untraceable errors into reliable books, errors
picked up and distributed endlessly by
tireless researchers, is nightmare beyond
measure.
   Ressler's read Neel and Schull on the
effects of Hiroshima and Nagasaki on
childbirth. He'd be the first to point out the
impossibility of generalizing about the
effects of radiation after one generation.
New lethals float around in the pool,
garblings that won't reveal their
consequences for several lifetimes. If a bomb
can be heard 2,300 miles away, then how
unacceptably far might invisible,
message-melting static seep out?
Government, confronted with living
nightmare among its own constituency, refits
the facts, making human ingenuity seem
somehow survivable, benign, commensurate
with being alive. The project of procreation
can't be allowed to scare itself sterile on its
own imagination.
   If scientific fact disappears in a sea of
carefully tailored editing, then the protecting
officials will have induced the corruption
they meant to stave off. Fear of sinister
garbling is just the first, obscure public
realization of molecular genetics. The
greatest revolution in thought ever, the one
material theory of being that isn't an
after-the-fact put-up, has an even more
unpalatable ramification. The sanctity of one
life, the primacy of the particular, has no
place in the new science. Biology has united
ecology, taxonomy, paleontology, and
genetics in a single grand theory of encoded
nucleotides, but in doing so, it lays bare
terminal grimness. Gene, organism, and tribe
operate by opposing means, are driven by
inimical goals. The individual is a myth of
scale.
   Behind the radiation-horror is another so
great that it requires agencies to interdict
the facts. The life script's playwright is a die;
even now the script is not fixed. Smudges
change it from one reading to the next. The
spectacular species-fan is spelled out in a
table-bumped game of Scrabble. Who can
go on breathing when mutagens are
everywhere in the air? A severe birth defect,
annihilating a sacred existence, is to the
gene just another guess, to the population,
just bean-curve indifference. Ten million
mutations per U.S. generation. A half-dozen
deleterious genes per person.
   More unlivable still: the steady generation
of noise—birth defects, the eternal perjury of
even healthy bodies, infection beyond
death—is life's motor. The text,
self-trimming, self-writing, self-reading, is
also self-garbling. Necessity's chance horror
is the mother of variation. Time plays with
deleterious mutations strewn through the
common gene pool, extracting from them,
every handful of millennia, new
functionality. Useful difference comes about
only through decanting tons of detritus,
error, waste. Weed it and reap.
   Individual interests are sacrificed to the
interests of the species. A billion cripplings
to produce one meliorism. Radiation
becomes Pentecostal, the procurement of the
overspecies that will rescue the speaking
animal from the general botch of things, the
disastrous night it has brought on itself.
Mutation as evolution's arrow: further text
depends on the garble, whether from UV or
Nagasaki. The garble is the code talking
about itself, a decision to go forth, be
fruitful, and mutate.
   Even the nausea of knowing where the
message hails from cannot touch him today.
Even knowing that the individual is
permitted by gene and tribe only so long as
it serves their ends cannot, this hour, alter
how he feels. Despite knowledge, he is
shamefully alive, weeks away from pushing
through. Discovery, once-chaotic things
clicking together into a tight matrix, is so
unequaled a rush that it overwhelms even
the ugliness of what it reveals.
   Part of this ankle-dangling euphoria is
more prosaic: the absurdly pleasant spring
weather that's plagued Champaign-Urbana
for days. Who can feel distressed for long in
the face of this breeze? The core of brutal
insistence thaws with the assurance that his
love— recalcitrant, unique, individual—is
reciprocated. Jeanette's minutes, he now
knows, are as laden with him as his are with
her. To be loved reciprocally promotes them
to special-interest group. He no longer cares
what codes for their shared obsession, what
drives them deeper when they both know it
can come to no issue. No behavior is so
pointless but can be ratified by a second of
the motion, mutual agreement, the binding
site of love.
   Love, like the mutation blade, both maims
and surgically saves. He knows both
incisions. Today it is good; a surge of surety
putting anguish to bed. He savors the slight
shift in his favor. Lovely sound rings K-53-C:
car honks, someone getting married. The
beep persists; he smiles at the summoned
party's refusing to answer. At that moment,
Jeannie's head appears at the window. "Ask
not for whom the car honks."
   He forgets himself, the careful propriety
they've learned to coat themselves in. He
rushes to the opening where she and the
soft breeze pour in, holds her face, kisses it
in adolescent profusion. Another instant
and he is shod, wrapped in windbreaker, out
the door. He tears around the corner of the
shack, brakes just short of flying into the
woman. He stretches out an arm and messes
her hair. "Do you still love me? Are you all
right? Nothing's happened since I saw you
last?" All this delivered at the sprinting
speed of one who's just discovered how
little time he can afford anything except life.
   He lifts her shoulders, pinches her waist,
clasps each hand in rapid succession, pulls
himself away, and glances at the windows
that look out on where they stand. His
puppyish eagerness to touch her already
gives the ache hopelessly away. She laughs
and strolls with him to the waiting car, not
the familiar Koss futuristic spaceship.
"What's this? What happened to the fins?"
   She puts thumb to lip, hesitantly bites the
nail. The gesture's endangered tenderness
ravishes him. "I know this sounds terribly
genre-ish, but I thought it less conspicuous
to rent this for the day." She looks at him:
the day. The whole day. To be squandered
together over its entire length, as if it were
really theirs without constraint to be
disposed of. She stares at him. "Want a lift?"
   How can he help but want? He is prepared
to go wherever she designs to take them,
today, ever. He throws himself into the
camouflaged rental on the seat beside her,
passenger, co-escapee, surrendered to
travel. They wander out of town onto an
unnumbered county road heading south, a
lane unrolling as straight as the cut of a
plow-scythe, the trailing arrow of a compass.
The snow has melted, leaving the muted,
moldy yellows of last fall's stalk residue, the
blue-black of the soil, the clinical gray of a
tree or windbreak hedge, the protestant
white of a farmer's two-storied frame. He
feels no inclination to ask where they're
going. They are there already, here, in the
same car with one another, released,
untethered, unsponsored, on the thin crust
of the earth.
   Out here in rural emptiness, road
calculations are irrelevant. They are
vulnerable to the slightest change of mind,
the possibilities presented by the infinite
numbered grid of county roads leading
exactly everywhere. He can't imagine how
anyone taking a trip could possibly plan his
destination ahead of time. One can only get
from Here to There by plotting the way
simultaneously from both, and hoping
against odds that the tendrils will meet in
the middle.
   He looks at the loveliness beside him. She
too needs no more forethought than the
game she plays with him every time they
come to an intersection. She rolls up to the
node, slightly reducing speed and asking
languidly, while testing the wheel
imperceptibly to left or right, "What do you
think? Turn here?" Sometimes she turns,
sometimes not. It comes to the same thing.
   Something catches their eyes in the
expanse of cumulused air. She tugs at his
sleeve, disbelieving the remarkable
phenomenon. Above a town that before this
moment barely merited the name, a plane
strews an aerial milt stream of confetti from
its cargo bay. Jeanette steers toward this
celebration—some local cause for wonder, a
marriage perhaps, or a birth. As the
dispersed load approaches the ground,
Ressler makes out the artificial cloud: a flurry
of rose petals, storm of leaf-lets showering
the town. All these miles of A-frames and
straight acreage, naked fields being readied
for corn, bathed in a burst of pink
petal-points. He would not be able to take in
this March-shower surreality except that
Jeannie is there at the wheel beside him,
stone-still, just looking, for all she is worth.
   How long has it been since he's gotten
out? Out of town, out of range, out of the
lab, out of touch, out of himself? He hasn't
sampled this liberating emptiness since that
day, negotiated lifetimes ago, when he
Greyhounded into town through this same
enchanted vacancy of may and might. The
field returns, even as they pass, from black
sand to the first, primitive hint of callow,
new green. The challenge of this spilling
emptiness cuts into him. He commits himself
to feeling it, to riding aimlessly with her, to
living this rented day. He stretches, feeling
his feet against the floorboards, his back
flexing against the car seat. He pushes out
his arm, which falls experimentally across her
welcoming shoulders, exercises its privilege
to play with her rose neck hair. "Is this a
kidnapping, by the way?"
   Jeanette smiles, far away. "I sure hope not.
Because you won't get any money out of my
husband these days." Even mention of the
man has no power over them. Herbert falls
away, sinks into the road shoulder
disappearing behind their wheels. When she
looks over at him, lifting her eyes from the
hazardless road, it is with all the dismay of
care: we are abducting each other, throwing
away everything in complicity.
   How strange it all feels, how immediate.
He has seen nothing at all except his
adopted town since he hit it. And of that
swaddling college village, nothing except
the barracks, lab, stacks, and
sycamore-shackled paths connecting this
narrow net. How much finer the place he
lives in, broader, more surprising than he
thought. He stumbles upon it by accident for
the first time. The farmers, worrying their
lands' next attention, do not know their
own acreage the way he knows it at this
minute.
   The fields call him palpably back to the
moment of his arrival, the unsuspecting child
he'd been. An urge comes over him to tell
Jeannie of that forgotten bus ride into town,
the way he has come, across the cold year,
against all expectation. "When I first
arrived— early summer!—Urbana seemed the
perfect place for getting lost in. I sat on this
endless bus, in the middle of the traveling
poor, next to a man with a thyroid defect. He
warned me against reading. Said he had an
uncle who consumed all Zane Grey and
never amounted to much."
   His uncharacteristic monologue cracks her
up. While Jeannie giggles, he adds, "We had
been held up along the way by a flood of
tortoises crossing the road. Several shells
wide, with no end in sight. I could still hear
them crunching under the bus wheels when
we pulled into town. I saw this place
and—the oddest thing. I was home,
although I'd never even imagined its
contour. I thought: A person could work
here. Anonymous. Politely alone with
nothing but investigation to get through
this open cipher, all the right angles." He
fondles the lithe vertebra protruding from
her neck. "I had no idea you'd be here. I
thought it -would be all code-breaking. 1
never predicted, until this morning, that it
would be this." This! What, exactly? Name it.
"That I would fall in love."
   Jeanette arches against his hand, almost
mews. She opens to him, speaks of how, at
thirty, she wakes up some mornings not
knowing where she is. "Sometimes I'm lost,
without clue to recovery. This isn't where I
live. This isn't what I do for a living. Illinois is
lunar landscape to me. Even science
sometimes seems some alien routine I've
learned to go through without giving myself
away. I think, 'What am I doing here?' And
then I think on you, and it's like coming
across a favorite child's book in an antique
store with my name scrawled on the flyleaf.
Like being dropped into the most tangled
foreign bazaar and suddenly hearing English
an inch away from my ear."
   Her confession scares him: does he really
soften the bare rock for her, give it a
breathable atmosphere? "Were you happy as
a child?"
   "Growing up? Oh, happy enough, from
what I remember. My folks were trauma-free,
more than normally immersed in their
generation's long-term goal of boredom. I
loved school, always did well. Forever busy
improving myself. Always had some project
going. Continuous science fair."
   "The Home Nature Museum."
   They gaze at one another in recognition.
"Where were you when I was sixteen?"
   "Oh." The suggestion is pain. "Wouldn't
that have been a scenario?" It mauls him to
think what the years might have been like,
what chances they might have lived.
   "So much wasted time. I might have been
watching you learn things, learning them
with you. But look! We're here. We've found
each other now. That's the main thing. Even
if I.." Her voice drops, inaudible. "If I've
married prematurely." She stares straight
ahead, oversteering. Ressler feels her neck
tense and removes his hand. Suddenly she
shouts so violently from the lungs it makes
him jump. "Stupid. Fool! Damn it to hell."
She clutches him with a free claw, turns her
face on him, eyes red, puffy, pleading.
"Why?"
   He gives no answer. She winces and looks
away. She slams the steering wheel with the
flat of her palms, and it flips off the column
into her hands. Weaving, the rented car
reams a big chuckhole in the county road, a
washout from the spring melt. She reacts
spontaneously, controls the vehicle by lifting
her foot off the gas and braking judiciously.
At the same time, fumbling with the
worthless metal ring, she hands the wheel to
Ressler, fake blase. "Here. You drive for a
while."
   Ressler laughs hysterically at her poise.
Jeanette manages to beach the car without
crashing. There's little to die against on
infinite road shoulder. He finds the broken
joining pin, jimmies a substitute, wedges the
wheel back onto its column while Jeanette
proclaims, "Damn rentals. Can't take them
anywhere." Years later, when everything
else, even bitterness, has dissolved into
sepia, he will remember her, love her for that
absurd reversion to wit in the face of
near-disaster.
   When they pull back onto the road, still
alive, they grow as unqualified as the terrain
moving through them. Their invention is
subdued, the remorse lifts, the hypotheticals
of where else they might have gone vanish.
Jeanette accelerates, confidence creeping
back, tearing along for tearing's sake, in
overarching breakneck speed. The call in this
confusing, rented, temporary tune is at last
clear: all the two of them need do is hit the
right notes at the right time, and the thing
plays itself.
   They know their intended destination the
instant they wander into it. A pristine
almost-village, a time hole lost in the
previous century. They park the car, trying to
make the vehicle inconspicuous. Difficult, as
theirs is the only internal combustion engine
in sight. The prevailing mode is
horse-and-buggy: black, closed-box coaches,
wood and leather, spoked wheels, draft
animals in the stays. The extraordinary
drivers are decked out in blue, black, and
gray homespun. The women wear simple
headcoverings, and the men sport foot-long
beards.
   Ressler can only look and look. How far
have they come? No more than a few miles
from that university town with its top
engineering school, its transistor Nobel
laureate, its state-of-the-art digital computer
composers. They have fallen through time,
Judge Craters, a footnote in those
stranger-than-science compendia. It takes
Jeannie's soft erudition in his ear to instruct
him. "Are they House or Church Amish?"
They have stumbled upon a self-isolated
community of dissenters who have chosen to
break off from the rest of the race, to hold
still in the workable niche while life floods
around them into new pools, speciates.
   They walk by the roadside, in silence
except for the creak of wheel rims and the
clop of hooves. Jeannie takes to the
community, ratifies its simplicity. She curtsies
to a passing buggy and the driver
acknowledges with a reserved nod. That one
gesture gives Ressler the acute pleasure of
locating the key to the chance variations of
existence.
   "I have lived in east-central Illinois for
years," she whispers, "and I never knew such
a place existed." Nor did Ressler; he barely
believed in such groups when he read of
them years ago in American History. "You
brought me here," Jeannie insists, giving his
hand a covert squeeze.
   "No," he objects. "You." They pass a knot
of families that gather in front of the general
store. He hears accents of German. Although
no one pays them any attention, he feels
grossly conspicuous. He and
Jeannie—glasses, wristwatches, awkwardly
constraining clothes—are the grotesque,
implausible by-product of a defective turn,
representatives of all these people have
saved themselves from.
   In an unforgettably aromatic, unfinished
wooden store, they buy a quilt, made by
many hands over several weeks. They buy it
for the haunting pattern neither of them can
quite make out. It repeats yet is never twice
the same, develops, yet stands in place,
constantly spinning, unspun. Each time they
look at it, it changes. They return reluctantly
to the rental, the dead giveaway of their
nonbelonging, their mark of Cain, their
freedom. The anachronism vanishes in the
rearview mirror, a lost place they will never
find their way back to, even with detailed
ordinance survey. They drive until they find a
spot superlatively nowhere, even by prairie
standards. There they pull the car off the
road, spread the quilt, undress each other,
and explore the solid sorrows of one
another's bodies as if for the last time.
   Jeannie is radiant, rubbed beautifully coral
in the raw March air. She can stand the cold
nakedness of this copse of trees only by
huddling against him. Fierceness is gone.
She does not use him this time to discharge
her explosive, agitating thistle. No more
gangster attempt to recover the androgyne.
The two of them fit, couple to one other so
wholly that friction is an unnecessary
irritation.
   Today she is downy, quilt-frightened,
narcotically surprised by the unthinking
pleasure she finds here. She makes love to
him like a girl of sixteen. No, as if they had
met at sixteen, and lost sixteen more
intervening years, banished from each other
by some wrong turn. They roll up in the
quilt, so tightly wrapped that they cannot
move except to fill each other's missing
spaces, conform skin to skin, vapored
breathing. They lie for a long, unmeasured
time, until the light gives out. The spell
failing to sustain, they dress, each helping
the other, keeping the other warm until
clothing can take over. For the last time they
return to the car, enter, hug briefly on the
seat, an afterthought, then ride home north
in dark, in silence.
   Jeannie breaks the quiet. "Tell me that
story again."
   "What story?"
   "How you came to Champaign."
   "Why?" He tickles her under the chin. She
frowns.
   "I like it."
   "What's there to like about it?"
   "I like how I'm waiting there, in town.
How you don't have the first idea of how I'm
there."
   "You are, aren't you?" Daring, not daring
to believe. "You really are, aren't you?"
   "Love," she says, with heartbreaking alto.
"Whatever you think about me when you are
old, I want you to remember that I never lied
to you." Never, an overtone in her voice
gives away, about anything fundamental. It
chills him, past the rapidly falling
temperature. This once, despite everything
he believes, he chooses not to decode.
   They creep back into town, protected from
notice by the anonymous car. She drives
slowly, dropping almost to zero, delaying
the end of their one stolen day of
unmitigated intimacy. She continues to halve
their speed, but Zeno does not keep Stadium
Terrace away. They sit in the front seat
looking at one another, hungry again,
separate, needy. They would have each
other, even here, if they thought for a
minute that the magically patterned quilt
could hide them. A noise jars them back to
the realities of K-court. A couple across the
street launching into the cruelty of familiars.
Someone's failure to take out the garbage,
wash a dish, or pick up a sock escalates into
mutual hatred. Recrimination floats out
upon the spring night, elides with a cry of
disgust that tears free from the back of
Jeannie's throat. "God. Listen. I hate people.
I really do. The whole wretched lot of us
make me ill."
   His heart is so full with her, he sees
through her without thinking. Her would-be
misanthropy is misguided, jejune. He is
strong enough now to take on human
kindness. "I know. I used to hate people
too."
   "And?"
   He kisses her, grazing her breasts gently
into agreement. "Then I met a few." He
shakes her, squeezes her shoulders until she
giggles. The sound salvages them. She holds
on a little tighter. But in her touch, the
suggestion of inevitable mitosis. Her mouth
stays pursed, expressively silent. She reaches
a cold hand up under his shirt, connects the
moles on his back with a grazing finger.
Jeanette closes to him on the narrow car
seat, as if just filling the space between them
a few seconds longer will fix everything. Her
eyes are wide, groping for words like a
drugged woman. Sexual dizziness; she is
thinking herself into climax, pushing herself
out over the edge again. Jeannie, his
Jeannie, comes, shudders, loses herself
against him, just out of holding, refusing to
stunt love.
   Recovering as quickly as she took off, she
raises her incredulous head. "Where did that
come from? Did you do that to me?" Ressler
just holds her, blood testing the weak points
in his veins. He curls over her, makes the first
motions of leaving. Her voice originates
inside his ear. "Stuart, promise me
something." All play gone.
   "Name it," he says, straining for humor.
   "Promise first."
   "I promise. What?"
   "You must never die."

  The Paperwork Reduction Act

  So Jimmy won the salary lottery and, thick
with suspicion, accepted the windfall. The
next time he stayed late, it was about
another fluke, linked to the first, less benign.
This man, whose most extravagant profanity
was "chili con carne," who could not shout
except apologetically, waited furiously in the
computer room when Franklin and I arrived
after an afternoon of playing house.
"Problems, Uncle Jim?" Frank asked.
  "That's one name for it. They've dropped
me from the group insurance."
  "They?" The word irritated Todd, with its
overtones of conspiracy.
  "Our loyal machines. This has to be the
work of independent-minded computers. No
human being would do such a thing without
serving notice." Good faith, touchingly
misguided.
  "Beginning, please," Franklin said,
hanging his jacket on the corner of the CPU.
  "What do you mean, 'beginning? There is
no beginning. This is the Information
Revolution, son." Jimmy was shaken by
being singled out to receive the random hit.
"Look at this." He handed over the customer
copy of a three-part micro-perforated form.
The lines did not quite fit into their intended
boxes—a bit of operator negligence I would
never have noticed before my days of
helping to load such paper. The piece was
telegraphic: undernamed no longer carried
on major medical group policy number XXX
because of failure to pay premium during
previous period.
   "Failure to pay!" Todd laughed, throwing
the form into the air. Jimmy scrambled to
catch it. Todd's voice shifted register at the
blanket stupidity. "What are they talking
about? How can you fail to pay? The
premium is deducted automatically from
every check."
   Jimmy groaned. "Supposed to be
deducted." He reached into a pocket and
withdrew the now heavily crumpled
statement stub that had recently thrown him
into moral convulsions. The one
announcing: You are the lucky winner. "In
all the excitement over that salary nonsense,
nobody even noticed." He smoothed the
ratty scrap and handed it over. Todd
reexamined the figures he'd secretly
produced. Jimmy didn't notice, but Frank's
face changed color. He shot me a look, but
in front of the victim, we could say nothing.
   Cavalry-like, Dr. Ressler arrived, carrying a
bag of zucchini from his rooftop garden, a
plot that must have had more soil than
Battery Park. "I'm glad you're still here,
James," he said, dividing the crop three
ways. All anxiety ceased until he finished
doling out his gifts. "Now. I can tell
something's up. And today," he smiled at me
as if I knew the reason, "I'm prepared to
solve all problems."
   Jimmy laid out the crisis, and Dr. Ressler's
brows narrowed over the relevant
documents. He did not look at Franklin, but
the refusal to mete out the punishing glance
was itself crushing. He studied the forms for
hidden explanation. Jimmy said he'd called
around, and all the relevant executives had
apologized but assured him that his not
intending to skip a payment did not change
the fact.
   "When will they reinstate you?" Ressler
asked.
   "The period after the period when I first
pay again. Barring further electronic bolts
from the blue, I should be back on coverage
within eight weeks."
   "Well, that's easy, then," Todd joked. "For
two months, just look both ways before you
cross the street."
   Jimmy managed an anemic grin. Dr. Ressler
asked, "James, may I hang on to these?"
   "It's hopeless. I've talked to everyone. All I
can do is pay up and wait. I wouldn't waste
any more breath on it."
   "I'd just like to think about this before
notching up another round for the
corporations." More than passing
inconvenience: the individual in a
mismatched battle. His asking for another
look before conceding inevitable defeat
reminded me that the actual quote, eternally
misused, was "But for the grace of God there
goes John Bradford" A name immortal in its
oblivion, four hundred years ago swapped
out for the generic I.
   Jimmy grumbled his usual threat to enter
chicken farming the next time the
opportunity arose. The moment the man left,
Todd began protesting. "I can't believe it. I
don't know what I did. I must have tripped
the preemie flag on the way out of the
record." Frank was pitiful, scrambling to hide
his ineptitude from his hero.
   "Let me stake a hypothesis. You went in
and requested a flat-fee bonus. Am I right?"
Todd nodded. "You added your figure to his
gross and put the total into the salary field."
   Todd slapped his palm on his scalp.
"Jesus. The program processed the whole
check as a bonus."
   "From which, of course, no premium is
deducted."
   "Christ. Who wrote that thing? What a
kludge. Shouldn't it have known that the
man can't get a bonus without a salary check
in the same period?"
   "Don't blame the code. I don't think the
authors anticipated second-shift operators
doing surgical intervention on their data
structures."
   Todd threw his hands up. "Well. Now we
all know better."
   Ressler took Jimmy's papers and sat at the
console. Todd sat next to him at the
keyboard. The two of them retraced Todd's
escapade, which seemed more capricious
with each keystroke. I tried to follow as they
undertook flood control. I'd never noticed
before how much Frank talked with his
hands. He rubbed an eraser all over the
screen, gesticulated at the keys, drew logic
flows into his sketchpad, and sculpted in the
air the solution he thought they might yet
go after. Ressler sat motionless, a few words
doing the work.
   But there was little even he could do. The
letter had been sent, the coverage canceled.
They could not now uncancel the
cancellation. Revealing all—the corrective
measure of first choice—was out of the
question. Todd would lose his job, perhaps
be slapped with criminal charges, and Dr.
Ressler would fall under suspicion. They
could undo the event electronically, but the
doctoring involved too many systems: their
own, the firm that handled the check, the
insurance company where the policy resided.
The fix might muck up something else. "Too
many humans tipped off already," Todd
added. "Can't jerry-rig humans,
unfortunately."
   "Not yet," Ressler granted.
   A few weeks after moving into my place,
Franklin began to seep out again. He moved
his treasured stereo into my room, a
breakthrough in intimacy, and he even
brought the violets, blues, and greens from
his massive spectrum-arranged record
collection. Every few days saw a trickle of
disks, gradually edging into the higher
wavelengths. He himself was there as often
as ever. We continued to read together, to
listen, to play, to share meals.
   Sex remained dangerous, a revelation
about how far I might go, how far I needed
to keep going once brought out. I learned
no end of things about myself. Franklin
could be aggressive, slow, mercurial. He
could stalk like a thief looting a house. He
could repeat, wistfully after we spent
ourselves, the Puritans' standard caption for
a needlework primer's A: "In Adam's Fall, We
Sinned All." He could lie still under the
covers and tell, after a too-savage
unloading, "Heard the one about the hellfire
preacher berating his congregation? 'Is an
hour of pleasure worth an eternity of
regret?' Voice from the back of the church
calls out, 'How do you make it last an
hour?'"
   We began to get out again, as the city
again warmed. We took a trip up to the
Bronx Zoo. Franklin was as excited as a child,
and babbled like one. "Look! Kangaroos! Do
you know that the mother can slow or speed
up gestation, depending on food supply?"
   "The name means 'I don't know,'" I
contributed. Standard trivia fare. "Aboriginal
answer to white hunter's question. 'What do
you call those fur-bags with the giant hind
legs?' 'Haven't the faintest idea what you're
talking about, hombre.'"
   "She licks down this passage in her fur,
the way to the pouch, see? So that her
newborn, a wriggly blob like a shelless snail,
can slog out the journey.."
   "Have you actually seen this happen?" I
asked suspiciously.
   "Do endless wildlife shows on public
television count?" Oh, he was up that day;
the cages were not cages, but regional
sanctuary from unstoppable habitat
destruction. I couldn't help but think of the
dismal visit to Central Park Tuckwell and I
had made eight months before. Separate
lifetimes.
   He was always ready for the impulse
activity, for any jaunt at any hour, so long as
it did not conflict with MOL, about which he
grew unusually conscientious. Obscure
museums, galleries, secret spaghetti dives,
performing-arts warehouses, a walking tour
of the colonial remnants of the city. For the
first time since leaving Indiana, 1 went up
against the variety of New York. Yet
something in the way he moved feet first
through the place tipped me off that he was
just visiting.
   I never expected I would have him all
there, every time he stayed over or we went
out together. But his eternal pacing..
   He had a way of obsessively measuring
out a room three times a minute, even when
sitting still. I thought the restlessness came
from his being twenty-six, at the height of
his powers, with nothing of consequence to
do. I put myself entirely at his disposal as
research assistant for the dissertation. "I can
find anything," 1 swore to him. "Facts are my
life." I couldn't have made a worse
suggestion, even in jest. It made him pace in
even tighter circles. He never dropped the
boyish charm, the Midwestern politeness. He
made it a point to be home more predictably,
and even called on a couple occasions to tell
me he would miss a standing meal. But his
silence grew denser even as he pruned it.
   When he was gone, I thought he might be
dead, distracted, religiously converted,
injured, amnesiac, overcome by indifference.
Each scenario was a toxin, whose cold
advanced up my arms and legs. Yet I would
not put on the saving tourniquet, take the
necessary measures. Leaden suspicion was
scarily arousing. I discovered it only slowly.
My fear for him when he was away became
one of those secret fetishes discovered late
in life—a region on my body that when
struck by that taboo person reduced me to
helpless perversity I never suspected lay in
me.
   These were awful weeks. Every reckless
afternoon proved that an hour, I would
draw away with a sick thrill, find myself
saying, in the extremity of affected calm, "We
aren't really one another's type, you know.
You need someone neurotic, taller, silkier,
not so verbose." On alternate days, I wanted
to break laws for him, to take to terrorism
rather than give up what little life with him
I'd managed to win. I dwelt on the worst
possible explanations for what was
happening, the way someone who discovers
a growth on a bone cannot help, several
times an hour, feeling it to see if it has
grown.
   Breathless, off-balance, by turns willfully
wanting to confirm the incurable worst, I
would use my key privileges to his place. An
attempt to track him down, to find out how
he lived when away from me. When I let
myself into his apartment, I always masked
my humiliation in high spirits. It never
seemed to bother him. He could jump out of
bed as if he'd been waiting impatiently for
me for hours. "So what do you know about
fixing refrigerators?" Or: "You must be the
French Maid. Shall we wrinkle the sheets
once before ironing them?" No matter what
hour I surprised him there, we did not stay
around his place for long. Twenty minutes of
talk or milting or cleaning up and we'd be
gone, to an exhibition, for a meal, back to
my place, where he would once again stay a
couple of days.
   I never appeared empty-handed, so that if
he was not there, as he frequently wasn't, I
would have some excuse for dropping in
while he was out, some reward to leave him
for confirming my compulsive need to prove
him not at home. I'd bring by a novel,
claiming I'd just finished it and it was so
beautiful I had to make the impulsive
crosstown delivery. I would sit at his kitchen
table, too cluttered with tapes, art repros,
delinquent library books, lid-less half-full
peanut butter jars, and dire predictions torn
from the Science Times to be used for actual
meals, and compose scraps of occasional
verse by way of saying that I'd been by and
we had failed to connect.
   These poems, more heartfelt than skilled,
were the only means I had of telling him
things without cloaking the sentiment in
requisite irony. In reverting to a form that
most lovers swear off of at eighteen, I
compounded the dangerous instability,
pushing myself where something would
soon have to happen.

            The first days of intimacy scare:
            exchange of histories too keen
         to mean
            anything yet but new threat of
         loss.
            Why thaw now? Why lay bare
            all that has held in a fine hide
         and stake
            it here against chance green?
            Because we haven't any choice.
            Just as two tunes catch in a
         chord
            care moves forward,
         fact-gathering.
            Our measured steps might
         improvise
            a way for winter to wind down,
             ice flushing crusted puddles,
         freeing spring.

  I would copy these pathetic fallacies onto
a notepad he'd made up for himself: From
the Couch of Franklin Todd. Then I would
shuffle them into the stack by the telephone,
among the ghostly phone transcripts and
the portraits made from memory of the
people on the other end of the line. He
never mentioned discovering them. But the
older ones were no longer there when I left
an addendum. He pressed them into
notebooks somewhere or threw them away.
  Life above the antique shop, nights when
he did not show, became unbearably acute.
The furnishings I had carefully selected, the
old crochets, the scents that had been so
evocative once, grew too much, the way
slight touch is acid to a skin oversensitive
with fever. Coming home from work, in days
that were struggling to lengthen and stay
bright until a reasonable hour, 1 would look
up at the intimate pool of light coming from
the room upstairs. I knew that the Edwardian
glow was turned on by a digital timer, just as
the choker collar—still capable of eliciting
response from him— wrapped the neck of a
woman who, that afternoon, had spent half
an hour procuring the feasibility of test
bans.
   Unable to sleep, I would call him at the
office at obscene hours of the night. Each
week was a new probe to see how depraved
I might, under the prose binding, really be.
"Do you mind if I touch myself while you
talk? Say something that might get me
bothered." Franklin loved these
experiments, thrilled to play along over the
phone. Sometimes he urged me to wait until
he got home. Others, he was as happy to
tease me, take care of me remotely via analog
transmission.
   1 had no clue where we were heading or
how long 1 would be able to last. I only
knew that every question I was asked all day
long seemed a nuisance variation on the one
I wanted answered. When I was away from
him, I was frantic with possibility. When I
was with him, it wasn't enough. I had
stumbled into a cadence, begun to believe
that love had to lead somewhere. He was
waiting for the same revelation, each of us
afraid to move lest we bring about the
expected QED.
   One early-spring Saturday I found myself,
around two in the afternoon, half a dozen
blocks from his apartment. He had not
shown the night before; Fridays, with their
end-of-week processing, frequently became
all-nighters. I had no idea where in all the
East Coast he had ended up, but his place
was as good a guess as any. I decided to
surprise him with afternoon breakfast. I
ducked into a deli and bought bagels, cream
cheese, coffee, oranges, and a horrible
sucrose-dripping thing that Todd, with his
sweet tooth, would doubtless devour
instantly. I walked up to his loft and let
myself in.
   He was still asleep. Evidence of
disorganized entry pointed to a rough night
with the machines. I stood in the foyer,
wondering whether to wake him. I took a
few steps toward the bedroom, then came
back to the hall. However good-naturedly he
awoke and greeted me, he could only be
irritated, and I'd only feel more desperate to
correct the impression of desperation. But
coming back into the foyer, I thought: So
what if I tip my hand? What doesn't he know
about me already? Affection, even overdone,
must be preferable to more empty space.
Back to the bedroom: but before I could
make it all the way there, I felt my eagerness
driving him away.
   I have never felt such indecision, certainly
not about anything so ludicrous as whether
to get a male up for breakfast. My inability to
take more than a step in either direction
suddenly seemed emblematic. From some
reserve of self-possession, I saw how pitiful
I'd become. I laughed out loud, but softly, so
as not to wake him. I went to the cluttered
table, composed some verses, crumpled them
up, and wrote instead, "Dearest Buddy. I
came by. Left you a bagel for breakfast."
   But just as I was quietly letting myself out,
I was again overcome by desire. This might,
after all, be the last time. Effusion was the
least of the two vices, everything considered.
I let myself back in, scolding and cheering
myself at once. I went straight into the
bedroom, relieved, leaned deeply over him,
and kissed him on the shaggy head. He
made a soft, pleased gurgle, which was
answered by another in a higher register. On
the pillow next to him, there moved a
second, soft, blond angelic head. An
incoherent female voice, lovely in
unconsciousness, said, "I'm so hungry I
could eat a house."
   All I could think about was getting out
before more groggy vocalizings brought
them conscious. I made it back to the front
room, went to the table, and with amazing
presence of mind, crossed out "a bagel" and
wrote, "Oops; two bagels," supplementing
the first from the now useless bag. Out on
the street, wandering at random through the
press of the Village, I understood; fidelity
was for stereos. Working his way through
love's alphabet, the man was stuck on the
A's. Annie was who he wanted.



XXIV

  Canon at the Octave

   He is within easy reach, unreachable. His
last postmark, Dr. Ressler's forsaken Midwest
grain oasis. Even there—only a thousand
miles from me, on the same continent,
identical landmass. Here. Now that I can't
reach him, I want to. The letter I so long
dragged my heels on, endlessly red-penned
in my head, left lying for weeks on the
bureau, and at last ambivalently sent off just
before realizing my mistake has come back
bearing an Indo-European grab bag of
apologies saying that the addressee has
vanished without forwarding address. The
text of my sham indifference now sits urgent,
priority mail, registered, express in my hands.
   Not even the same letter, now that it's
been returned. Even if I were to place it
unrevised in another envelope, send it out
again to his unresearchable new post node,
it would not mean what it meant the
afternoon I finally managed to put it
together. The thing I thought to make him
see then is gone. Aggregate chance has
changed it—a memorandum lost in transit.
   If I had his address (counterfactual) and if
I could hit on the right words (hypothetical),
I might send him some item from our
assembled quote box—"I need to know
someone"; "What is the origin of 'to make
the catch'?"; "What's this I hear about you
two cohabiting?"; "Oops, two bagels"—that
might convey, if not the particulars of what I
need to say now, at least the sense that if he
were in the neighborhood (subjunctive), I'd
like to see him. But even our favorite
phrases, reprised over our allotted months
on different occasions, repeated once more
would now go enharmonic, altered, racing
home even as they stay in place, changing
because all other lines range freely around
them.
   1 cannot say the same thing twice. The first
time through, invention; the second,
allusion; a third promotes it to motif, then
theme, keepsake, baggage, small
consolation. Brought back after years, it
evokes a lost twinge never harbored in the
original. Perhaps, with everything between
us changed beyond recognition, one more
reprise might make it invention again.
   When the chance was there, who needed
to say anything? Now that I can't write,
predicates take shape; polyps spread across
my insides, bubbling into my throat, seeking
the surgery of speech. What do I want so
badly to tell him, now that the channel is
down? I wanted to say it—the same thing,
only different—that evening at that first
seafood dive. (The front end of the lobster
scuttled into the tank. Todd said, "You
should see how they do beef." I kept mum.) 1
wanted to tell him, that summer night on the
swings. (I came all over him, shuddering, but
disguised the event, admitting nothing.) I
wanted to say something achingly similar,
that freezing night under the New England
stars. (Todd and Dr. Ressler talked away,
trying to save life from life. I worked a
jigsaw.) I wanted to say the urgent thing,
that Saturday afternoon when I leaned over
him as he slept. (Annie said, still asleep, "I'm
so hungry I could eat a house." I slipped
verbless out the door, leaving no hostages.)
I always thought it was Todd, ironic, dry,
who constantly pleaded that quintessential
department-store excuse "No thanks; just
browsing." But it wasn't. Always, from the
start, it was me.
   What is it that I'd give the rest of my
exhausted savings to say to him, now that I
can't? I want to tell him what I've learned.
Todd: I have taken on science, spent the year
acquiring terms, doing a blitz Berlitz in the
same grammar our friend was once after. The
same, only with all particulars changed. And
here is the sense, if not the specifics of what
I've picked up.
   "There is, in the Universe, a Stair." Small,
too small for me to see the steps, even with
the best current optics, too small to be
floor-planned except through experimental
analogy. But large beyond telling, a single
epic verse five thousand volumes long, three
billion years old. It is smooth, spiral,
aperiodic, repeating. Within the regular
frame is a sequence so varying that it leaps
over the complexity barrier and freely adopts
any of an inexhaustible array of possible
meanings.
   But meaning does not reside in the
enormous molecule, the reservoir of naked
data. The Stair Dr. Ressler was intent on
climbing is not rolled up in the nucleus like a
builder's blueprint. The plan does not map
out the organism in so many words.
Nowhere in DNA is there written the idea or
dimensions of "tentacle," "flipper," "hand."
Nowhere does it describe the shape or
functioning of nerve or muscle. Tissue is not
modeled to scale. Yet shape, structure,
functioning, even the range of behavior:
everything originates here, the repository
where all significant difference is jotted
down, held in place, passed along perfectly,
but never twice the same.
   I would tell Todd, spell it out in a
five-thousand-volume letter. I would say
how I have seen, close up, what Ressler
wanted to crack through to. How I have felt
it, sustained the chase in myself. How the
urge to strip the noise from the cipher is
always the desire to say what it means to be
able to say anything, to read some part of
what is written here, without resort to
intermediaries. To get to the generating
spark, to follow the score extracted from the
split lark. I would tell him, at last, sparing
nothing, just what in the impregnable sum
of journal articles sent Ressler quietly away,
appalled, stunted with wonder.
   I would tell him everything I have found. I
would lay my notebooks open to him. How
the helix is not a description at all, but just
the infolded germ of a scaffolding organism
whose function is to promote and preserve
the art treasure that erects it. How the
four-base language is both more and less
than plan. How it comprises secret writing in
the fullest sense, possessing all the infinite,
extendable, constricting possibilities lying
hidden in the parts of speech. How there is
always a go-between, a sign between
signature and nature.
   I would tell him of nucleic acid's nouns, its
cistrons. I would show how stretches of the
supercoiled chromosome are simple
substitutions for polypeptide chains. Even
Todd would see how breathtaking it must
have been to be the first to connect
metaphor to chemistry, to find the genes,
those letter-crosses nesting like flocks in
family trees. But I'd make the airtight case
that nouns were not what Ressler was after.
   I'd show him the speaking string's
conjunctions, interrogatives, and
prepositions—operator and promoter sites
where proteins clamp, qualifying the noun,
turning the cistron on or off in subordinate
clauses and prepositional phrases. I would
show him how Ressler lived at the moment
when the ravishing, intensely cybernetic
system, after millennia of theorizing, at last
laid itself open. But Franklin would be the
first to agree that prepositions alone would
never have fed our friend.
   I would tutor him in the verbs, set in
animation the enzymes, programmed
molecules that act, cause, do, command
things to fly upwards from equilibrium. I
could touch upon the adverbs and
adjectives, the modifying sea inside the cell
wall singing "brightly," "langsam," "con
brio." I could deliver an overview of how the
five thousand volumes produce their own
lexicon of translators for reading their own
messengers (transcribed by enzymes of their
own synthesis) at sites of their own devising.
The complete predication, the weird
collaboration of disparate parts of speech
into whole utterances, is now within my
working vocabulary.
   If Todd could sit still for this explanation,
if my translation of a translation meant
anything to him, he would see that none of
this was what the professor was after;
despite the brute beauty of the system, none
of these parts of speech would have had the
power to cripple the man. Then I would say
what I know: that an accident of private
history left Ressler, for a single, prohibited,
unrecoverable moment, hearing not what
the grammar says but what it means.
   I would tell you, straight out, what I've
spent the year and my savings to verify, how
language makes it impossible to receive the
exact message sent. I would tell that
anecdote Ressler told me, the day I went to
say goodbye, in bitterness over you. That
account of a boyhood experiment with a
friend and a tin-can telephone: how he had
yelled along the muffling string, "Calling
Timmy, calling Timmy." Then, dispensing
with the ingenious medium and calling out
directly across the twenty feet of more
expedient air: "Could you hear that?" Only
here, there's no jumping outside the medium
to verify transmission. Only the tinny tin.
   I would make metaphors for you until I
became almost clear. Words are fairy tale, not
a court transcript. They are those PA
announcements on public trans where all
you can make out is the irrelevant filler.
"Ladies and gentlemen, this is your captain
speaking. We're experiencing severe sdklh
dhfj hryu e ahj ajd astue for alarm." Words
are those slides they constantly fed you in art
history, the blurred, color-poor angels of
annunciation meant to stand in for the trip
to Bruges. But I have no other means to tell
it to you.
   Ressler, when all molecular inheritance
took shape in outline before him, saw it: the
closest he would ever get is simile, literature
in translation, the thing by another name,
and never what the tag stood for. The dream
that base-pair sequences might talk about
themselves in high-level grammar vanished
in the synthesized organism. Science remains
at best a marvelous mine, not a replacement
for the shattered Tower. Even at his death,
despite the unstoppable advances in the
state of decoding art, the human genome
defies interpretation.
   And yet, a man's speech should exceed his
lapse, else what's a meta for? The
manufacture of these working terms, names
and the rules for manipulating them, the
accuracy of their fit as fired in îhe crucible of
environment, gave him a way in that mere
possession of the thing never would have
allotted. Names let him toss arrangements
around, examine the implications of the
message from angles that did not exist in
negotiable reality. There is, in this Universe,
a Stair.
   If I have read the texts correctly—and who
knows how wide of the mark my grasp of the
blurry words is—then the grand synthesis
that ten years ago today pulled all biology
into a single tenet is this: a living thing is a
postulate about where it finds itself. But that
living thing postulates, deep in its cells, in a
language that is itself also just a rough
guess, a running, revisable analogy. The
intermediary of language alone makes it
possible to run trials, load experiment. Only
by splitting the name from the thing it
stands for can tinkering take place.
Language, however faulty a direct describer,
can get to the place, even change it, by
strange ability to simulate, to suppose, to say
something else than what is.
   A given stretch of the epic verse, the
sequence AACGCTA, may start life as a part
of speech, emblem noun or imperative verb;
"add this, then a bond, then another." By
fault in the sentence-making system, the
original utterance becomes AACGCGTA. Not
much, I hear you dismiss. So what? So
everything; you must see it. The whole
parade depends on seizing mistakes. The
accidental change of a single base pair can
ripple through the reading process,
accounting, after eons of accretion, for every
implicit structure never mentioned in the
string: stems, leaves, hair, hands, and— most
hypothetical—brain. Evolution, the first
arrangement of living things that doesn't
commit the post hoc fallacy, lays it out:
invention mothers necessity.
   The feasibility of each inherited
variation—theme elaborated by
mutation—breeds out until there is no more
single epic but four million variant variorum
editions, each matched to the shelf where it
finds itself. Yet the code, the language life
writes itself in, is universal for every living
thing, taking hold once and spinning, telling
in all places at all times an eerie,
inconceivably implausible story of how in the
beginning there was a little water, ammonia,
and methane, all trapped by trivial rules, and
at the end, this woman saying over and over
to herself, I want to tell you, I want to tell.
   The scrim lifted, this is what Dr. Ressler
saw. The text of a living thing, the tender,
delicate, unlikely apparatus for unfolding it,
does not stand for or represent or disfigure
the shape of the world; it is just a set of
possible, implementable maybes about what
one might do about it. Nature seems to favor
the what-if. Once over the complexity
barrier, the simple account promotes itself to
simulation. That is the magic of language:
every word waits to come true. Description
gives way to postulate, is refined by
experiment into singing celebration. The
same opaque, heavy-handed system that
kept him one step away from what those
emblems stand for permits this. No saying
how; I've been in molecular linguistics long
enough to know that language, like
economics and love, is wonderful in practice,
but just won't work out in theory.
   The notebooks I've been keeping for you,
friend, if they go on long enough, might
become something new, not the thing I
wanted to get at, but a live thing all the
same, a living thing's living offspring. Would
you approve of them? Could all this stuff still
move you? To think so has become my life,
what all this science writing hopes for. Every
sentence ever written down is sent into the
world to be winnowed or thrive according to
the same accountability principle as those
cistrons and their experimental apparatus.
Does a given combination of words push
close? Do they resonate? Or are they more
noise, divorcibles, permutations to dispense
with? Does the line shout out, beat around
the edges of something real? Do the words
make sense? Do we find ourselves arriving
back at them late one surprise night, after
years of traveling, thinking them dead? Is
this phrase worth the ink it expends? Is it
what I mean, something I need? Unshakable
bits of the original Question Board. Months
after quitting, I'm still working on the thing.
Still pasting together. I have something
almost right, something to say for no one's
but your ears, if I could only reach you.
   But it's stupid, to write as if he could read
this. How could he know what has
happened, how far I have come, how I
would share him now with anyone, under
any conditions, so long as I had a fraction of
him to converse with? He couldn't, can't,
doesn't, won't: choose your modality. Last
he heard, I crossed him off, cut the tin-can
string. "It has been so long since he has
heard from me that he might easily conclude
that I too am dead."
   But I know something of him. He is here.
Beached on the same island I am. I could
walk to him overland if I had a map, an X to
mark his spot, that Flemish, reflexive
construction he once wrote me: "You Find
Yourself Here." Frank, there is no other way
to you but this.
   The man you wanted me to name for you:
his metaphors, too, were from the start just
genes, as "gene" is the most successful
metaphor his science has yet made to name
life's notes toward a theory of experience.
Dozens of words he scattered on us while
alive still live. See? They keep me up at night,
typing. This is what one woman might do
with them. Todd, my mate, my husband,
could I reach you, I would tell you how I
have discovered what he was after—the
secret subjunctive—and what discovery did
to him. I would say how I have heard him,
alone in this laboratory, his school, singing
to himself. How I have made out, at last,
what tune he wanted to pass on, the tune I
want to sing you, the only notes worth
moving mouth to mimic, and what the
snippet means in our vocabulary. Franklin,
just as you asked me: I have identified your
friend.

  Nomenclature

   By spring, Ressler's trio has the kinks in
cell-free synthesis ironed out. Uncanny: they
can fractionate the inanimate building
blocks, assemble them under controlled
conditions, add a coded messenger, slip in
the distilled adaptor, and—the nearest thing
to golem-making to date— manufacture
proteins, bring into being the plaintext
product of the cell. It is not yet creating life.
But their procedure is a close functional
simulation.
   They can take a chaotic soup of free
aminos and arrange them, from out of a
staggering number of linear permutations,
into a sequence that gives them enzymatic
sense. Granted, the information they
introduce is not theirs, nor can they read it
either before or after translation. They
cannot compare the bit they submit and the
batch output. The text is too complex, the
print too fine.
   They stand, all but there, confronting one
last unskirtable hurdle. They can cause the
code to be broken, eavesdrop on the
process, but they can't get close enough to
read the code book. For weeks, neither Koss,
Botkin, nor Ressler has been able to supply
any fresh suggestions. Ressler concludes
that they are in need of new blood. He tries
out the problem on his office mate. Since
assaulting Ressler that day outside Ulrich's
office, Lovering has been unreadably
neutral. Enough time has passed to try
reestablishing relations. This intellectual
problem is Ressler's peace offering. Lovering
declines the proffered branch, polite but
indifferent, too busy to be bothered. To
leave Lovering an honorable out, Ressler
jokes, "Maybe your girlfriend would like to
take a shot at the problem." When Lovering
jerks his head up from his desk, eyes
burning, Ressler regrets the miscalculation.
   He takes a slow walk to the Woytowichs',
a path he has lately reopened. They will
never replace the Blakes, but they are
nevertheless—what is the word?—contact.
The prodigious Ivy has an undeniable
fascination about her rapid development.
This time Dan and Renée are between diaper
changes. He and Dan trade project
stumbling blocks. It gives Ressler no
pleasure to hear that the ILLIAC project is
just as seriously log-jammed.
   "The kid's program is fine," Woyty
admires. "It's terrific what he can make that
machine do, after only a few months. But
after every run that closes in on an
occurrence of the pattern we're after, Joey
changes his blessed instruction deck again.
The program keeps expanding, like those
radioactive tomatoes Botany is always
growing. Exceptions to the latest
exception-handling. The do-loops have
grown do-loops on them several nests thick.
Very Ptolemaic."
   Ressler suggests that they might be
engineering their desired result. Dan nods
gravely at the possibility. Then, as if hitting
on a remedy, he says, "Hey. Come take a look
at this." Ressler follows Dan into the infant's
bedroom. There, father arranges Ivy on the
rug and sets in front of her four brightly
colored blocks—rose, powder blue,
eucalyptus, lemon—boldly imprinted with
oversized letters. "Find the A, Ivy. Come on,
little girl." Singsong, he coaches, "A is for
ap-ple, aard-vark, an-gi-o-sperm."
   Ivy is off and crawling. Stretching out a
system of muscles she can still but pitifully
coordinate, she falls on the correct block.
Ressler remains guarded. "One in four." Can
she repeat?
   Woyty laughs confidently. He returns the
child to the starting point, shuffles the
blocks, and says, "Can you show me the C,
Ivy? Sure you can. C is for cat and cactus..."
   "Cuneiform," Ressler suggests. "Codon."
The baby, unperturbed, heaves herself
against the correct letter in question.
Ressler's eyes light, fueled from a source far
away. Still in the crib, Ivy knows her
alphabet. Is it real learning or just
conditioning? The question, at this level, is
meaningless. The scientists sit on the nursery
floor. Daniel exercises his daughter's arms,
strokes the hamhock smoothness of her
back, stimulating the nerve connections to
solidify into a network. Ressler relates the in
vitro successes and describes the block they
now knock up against. They can produce
plaintext proteins from ciphertext nucleic
acid. But analysis cannot yet tell them within
acceptable margin of error how the
sequences correspond.
   "So close you are almost past it," Woyty
says.
   "With long chains, we can label the bases
in the sequence we feed the decoder. We
can label the amino acids picked up in the
synthesis. But it doesn't give us position.
The best we can do is assign weight ratios
—We're no closer to actual assignments."
   "It's a pickle," Daniel concedes. A missed
beat reveals that Woytowich is not really
following him. He's playing with the baby.
The gap between them wraps Ressler in
loneliness more severe than that brought on
by banging on the closed codon library
door. Daniel says, "I wish I could help you,
Stuart." Struck by a happy inspiration, he
suggests, "Let's ask Ivy."
   Weeks pass, the project advancing
without real headway. One day, he cannot
even name the month anymore, he comes
home to the barracks to find Jeanette, in
lovely familiarity, waiting for him as if they
were silver anniversary candidates. Their time
apart cannot even masquerade as moral
restraint anymore. Simple cautious terror. But
here she is again, in his front room, smiling
richly, once more free from the delays and
wastes of time that constitute their love. He
returns her kiss, goes to the record player,
puts the sound track on. She follows him
eagerly with her eyes. Like me. Need me.
"Hungry?" he asks. "I think I have
something that might have been Major Grey
Chutney once."
   "No thanks. I never eat when I'm in love."
   "You know this from experience?"
   "Do now." Jeanette makes a little space
for him to sit. No sooner does he than she
changes her mind. "Stuart? I've a great idea.
Let's go outside."
   "Outside?"
   "You remember." She crooks a finger
toward the window. "Trees. Sky. Living
things. Perfectly safe, in small doses."
    "Well.." Suspicious. "It isn't the strontium
90 level I'm worried about, you understand."
    "What, then?"
    "It's just that, you are—how can I put this
delicately?"
    "Married?"
    "Exactly. Walking in public, together.."
    "Could be that Edward G. Robinson
scenario all over again." Spring has made
her reckless. "Come on," she laughs. "It's
tougher to hit a moving target." She will go
walking, and won't hear no. Nor, after
another minute, does he want to refuse.
    They roll onto the lawn, turn up the block,
put Stadium Terrace behind them. He is
struck by the department store of smells,
after the stale monoscent of the barracks.
"And," he adds, thinking out loud, "there
are a lot more places to sit."
    She stretches herself luxuriously. Relaxing,
slack on the return stroke, she slips her arm
into his. Here, in residential Champaign, in
front of a gauntlet of plate
glass—colleagues, friends, faint
acquaintances—she makes an open,
unambiguous declaration. He knows what it
means. She is ready now, ready to leave her
husband, that blameless man, to upend her
life, to break it and build it again in this
arbitrary spot, to recommence, uncertain,
with him, only him. Here, now, in spring.
Ressler's arms are paralyzed. He cannot move
them a millimeter in any direction, either to
encourage her or to withdraw and spoil the
happy idiocy that has come across her face.
He goes numb from neck down.
    The abnormal warming trend has brought
on, ahead of schedule, a rush of returning
life up and down the ladder. She makes first
mention of the event. Her voice is low,
imparting, even-keyed: Here we are, outside,
together, nothing hidden. "Flowers," she
says. "How early! But it's been so long." He
studies her skin. Just below the yellow,
little-girl's surface, two blue-green blood
tubes in her temples pulse as deep as a
spanking new bruise, as the Aegean. She
catches him looking, curls up shyly. "What
are your favorites?"
    "Favorite whats?"
    She shoves him. "Haven't you been
listening? Favorite flowers."
    He is every bit as adrift as when he didn't
know the antecedent.
    "Hmm. Coleus, I suppose."
    "Coleus? You suppose? Its flowers are this
little."
    "Sorry. I guess I meant crocus."
    "Oh. Crocus is all right. First. Virginal.
Paschal. Fresh schoolgirl." She pauses,
putting things together. She grabs his arms,
stopping him. "Wait a minute. You're an
amateur, aren't you? And you call yourself a
biologist!"
   Ressler kicks a stone. "I've never called
myself that."
   Jeanette gapes, hurt by his willful
ignorance toward blooms, but half excited at
the thought that here, at last, is something
she can be the first and only one to give him.
"Wait. Look. See over there? Do you know
what those are?"
   He follows the line of her perfect
extended finger. "Y-yes," he says, so
tentatively it hurts. "I believe those are
droopy, wrinkled, yellow vegetable
genitalia."
   "Fool. Listen to me. Those are called
Narcissus. Even you can see why."
   "Am I responsible for etymology as well?"
   She kisses him, tongue, for the whole
incorporated city to see. "Yes. You are. Now.
How about these?"
   "Those? Piece of cake. Those are, don't tell
me— Nope. I'm afraid it's strike two."
   She supplies a name, which he does not
even hear, so taken up is he with the soft,
effusive enthusiasm in her face. Bluebells,
cockle shells: could be anything. He will ask
her to repeat it, explain the name here in the
privacy of the world. She takes his hand with
the grip of a school crossing guard. From
one plant to another: who would have
thought the block contained so many?
Revelation creeps over him. These bee-lures,
bright landing pads, reproductive export
docks for photofactories temporary beyond
telling, self-promoting color that next month
will annihilate: each is called something,
distinct, keen, revealing. Every item has an
exotic label that, while not the thing, is the
only way of latching onto it in the course of
a walk through the neighborhood.
   A good deal of his undergraduate days
were spent committing to memory vast tracts
of binomial nomenclature. But the genus
and species identifiers inhabiting his past,
while occasionally colorful, were functional:
ratios arranging in systematic manner what
would otherwise be arbitrary varietal chaos.
He knows of the raging taxonomic debate
between splitters and lumpers, between
those who see in each individual—never
corresponding to the norm, always a little
bit Other—the call for a new species, and
those who want to restrict the chart to
broad, manageable branches. His own
discipline, the tabulation of mutations at the
molecular level, might solve the matter,
showing gaps between species to be both
discrete and continuous. But whatever the
local bias, inflected, logic-bound Latin
taxonomy strives to squash ambiguity, to
distinguish between surfaces.
   Not so Gladiola, Jack-in-the-Pulpit, Mother
of Thousands, Evanescence, False Solomon's
Seal, Wake-Robin. The words Jeanette
whispers to him, makes him repeat, ranging
speculatively across the year, are not labels
at all. They are intent on a different program
altogether. Bidens frondosa, he learns, might
go by Beggar-ticks, Ray-less Marigold,
Sticktight, Devil's Bootjack, Pitchfork Weed.
It might even be named the Nameless
Wonder, for that matter, and still not strain
the grain. According to this woman, a
thousand different bi-zarrely descriptive
modifiers specify the catch-all violet. The
naming urge embodies the feminine miracle
pouring it in his ears.
   All desire comes down to naming. Yet no
nomenclature will ever erase the fact:
standing for is also obscuring. The real use
of names must be something more serious
than handle-efficiency. It must also be
myth-making, resourceful approximation,
soothing the scar between figure and
ground, between the dead chemicals ATCG
and the repeating uniqueness they have
become. Dr. Koss, his Jeannie, moves him on,
graduates him to bulbs that have not
appeared yet, to stamens that never show
themselves in this region. The game grows
more incredible as it goes on. She says how
the garden-variety pansy, one of the few lay
identifiers he has taken for granted all these
years, takes its name from pensée, French for
thought. From thought to word to name to
plant: the chain equating them, more fragile
than the petals themselves, defies
examination except through tools as fragile,
of the same make. She feeds a tutoring hand
inside his jacket, releasing a dam burst of
labels. What, he wonders, could he call this
blossomer?
   "You are brilliant," he says.
   Jeanette drops her jaw. "Why? Because I
like gardening?"
   But the germ has taken hold in him.
Flowers and their cipher-texts, smearing the
one-for-one trip-wire correspondence that in
vitro would isolate. Can the handle relating
base patterns to proteins clear this up? Or
could it be that in vitro is less precise than
this hopeless, associative morass: Baby's
Breath, Crowfoot, Lily of the Valley, Queen
Anne's Lace?
   "But can we call them anything we like?"
His words elicit only a confused look. "I
mean," he measures, "people call flowers
what their grandmothers teach them to call
them. But some grandmother assigned the
tag once, way back, right?"
   Jeannie chuckles at his earnestness.
"Several grandmothers in several places at
several different times." No conspiracy.
   "Why is a given common name the plant's
name? No one in a million years is ever likely
to argue with 'Black-Eyed Susan.' What
makes it right?" Dark and disturbing, a flare
threatening the reductionist certainty that
has guided his every step since the home
nature museum. The task of the skeptic is to
determine, for every appearance, if the label
fits the thing. Every tag must be either apt or
inapt. Was Charles the Bald? Louis the Fat?
Richard the Lion-Hearted? By a slow
tightening of terms, exclusion of middles,
improvement of instrument, each sobriquet's
appropriateness becomes discernible. But
the assumption is shaken to the core by the
introduction of Jeanette the Misnicknamed.
If the name is apt, it's not; if it's not, it is.
   She tightens against him. Her waist
persuades, hands help, eyes ratify, arms work
their armistice. "Well, I suppose a name is
right if it sticks, if it becomes the name."
   "I'd like something more than the tyranny
of the vote."
   She gives him the once-over. "All right,
bub. You are above average in looks, so
we're gonna give you one more shot. What
exactly do you have in mind?"
   "These," he says, leading her by the digits.
"These tiny, bulbous ones."
   "Oh!" She smiles widely. "Excellent choice;
the name for these is inspired. Note how
puffy, spacious. And how they hang upside
down. You have thirty seconds."
   When he makes no reply, she patters.
"Ready for this? Dutchman's Breeches." He
makes a puzzled, slight tightening of the
mouth, flick of fingers. Faltering, she says,
"See the trousers?" There are no trousers.
For one, the flowers are less than an inch
across. The blossoms flare out in a
three-dimensional solid, more H than Y, an
oriental kite. Upside down, opening
underneath. But why Dutchman? At his
failure to respond, Jeannie's features
deepen, ready to run from the first hint of
disaster. She is more beautiful in distress
than at her sunniest. He needs this woman,
her scattered stimuli of joy, intensity, and
fright. He will end up on her doorstep in the
dark rain, waiting for her to come out and
utter even so little as one not unkind word.
   He drops to his knees and examines, up
close, this fragile palate opening diffidently
to the air. The more Ressler looks, the more
iridescent the bloom becomes until it goes
purple around the lip. It smells of
nothing—sinister, promising, forsworn, far
away, as far away as Jeannie's hair. He moves
it under his eye, careful to manipulate only
the stem. Glass, it would shatter at a
fingerprint. Even so, nature uses him: light
rearrangement of examining is enough to
dust pollen across his hand.
   "But what if it weren't?" he says at last.
"What if it were something else? Say, the
Common Speak-a-portal."
   Dr. Koss, who has followed him to knee
level, struggles to her feet like a newborn
wildebeest. She stares at him, slowly going
radiant, finding in him what she has been
after. He has broken the code. Ressler too
tries to struggle to his feet, but her mouth
blocks his way. "Mouth" is certainly
misnamed: what he kisses is something
lighter, wider, more enveloping. He is set for
weeks, for as long as memory holds out.
   How obvious, waiting to be discovered:
the tracts of rectilinear Midwest that he once
loved for their reserved refusal to interfere
with fact in fact consist of an indivisible
density of named things. Purple-green
weeds sprouting ubiquitously throughout
spring. Exploding pollen packets. Seeds
parachuting on currents of wind. Waxy
pitchers, dull matte, convoluted packed
rosettes, bright, round, fierce day's eyes,
each replicating and subduing the earth,
attempting to demonstrate by success the
aptness of their sobriquet.
   Jeanette, wetting his mouth with hers,
breaks only long enough to pull him
impatiently back toward the barracks. But
before she can cover him in the prize she will
bestow on him for his discovery, while he
can still remember the wrinkle with sufficient
agitation, Ressler grabs the spiral notebook
that came out to Illinois with him. He has
reserved it until this moment for lab notes,
hypotheses, models, the verifiable jottings of
procedure. The pages fill with a complete,
handwritten history of the in vitro attempt.
Now they seem the logical place to record
the afternoon's momentous insight. Jeannie
clings lightly to his back, sinking her teeth
into his shoulder. She looks on, reads as she
murmurs, allowing him two minutes to say
what he needs. Then she will take from him
everything he has shown himself to be
worth. But first, he arrests in print amber the
skeleton that might one day release the
world from its condition of standing
cipherhood: "Flowers have names."

  Today in History

   March 21: First day of spring, vernal
equinox, pedal point of Aries, the calendar's
octave. My file for the day is full of
forgettable sports records, local legislation,
small-time politics, standard international
bickering. I can find only one thing of lasting
consequence that happened on this date,
one recombination that will stick, lodge itself
in the permanent gene. For once, I break the
self-imposed rule prohibiting birthdays:
today is Bach's.
   Ressler was celebrating that musical
provincial's 299th the night I walked into
MOL to make my goodbyes. Todd, alone in
the lunchroom, was cheery. "Thanks for
breakfast," he said, implying by a grin that
they both had needed it. "Why didn't you
wake me?"
   The question, self-evident to him, knocked
the words out of me. I sat down at the empty
lunchtable. I had nothing left to say. I didn't
even want to be there. Impulse instructed me
to run, get rid of him without pointless
postmortems. I would have, except for the
farewell I owed Dr. Ressler, the blessing I
needed from him.
   "Why didn't I wake you?" I could manage
nothing more than a flat, journalistic survey.
Todd nodded, but betrayed the pretense by
fiddling with the knobs on the microwave. I
was getting softer, fainter. I felt nothing. No
resentment, no desperation. Zero. A cipher. I
lifted my eyebrows: I release you; now will
you let me out cleanly?
   "You didn't want to wake our friend?"
Todd's voice tacked suddenly, came about.
Its preemptive volume, front first, dropping
the would-be innocence, jerked me by the
neck.
   "I didn't want to wake your friend," I said,
this time finding the exact, disdaining
disengagement I was after. He tilted toward
me and rubbed an eyebrow; every natural
defense lay with him. I could not lie, could
neither attack nor escape. Tolerance of
animal stupidity, the only religion I believe
in, kept me from choking him. He had
broken no rules; we had never laid down
any. From the first, I could have him only
without promise or propriety. But he had
broken something, unforgivably cheated. He
had not said. From the day he first showed at
the Information Desk, all facts were to be on
the table, public domain.
   I
   "How long?" I asked him. I might have
been conducting a phone poll, a product
questionnaire.
   Todd closed his eyes, pressed thumb to
the lids, and struggled to suppress an
hysterical snicker. "How long what?"
   He wanted to hear me say it, unleash my
rage. "How long," I said, perfectly
modulated, stewardess-clinical, "have you
been packing your dick into that pretty little
muff?" Hearing myself pronounce the
obscenity—I still can't believe this—brought
me to the first stages of arousal.
   "How long have I been sleeping with
Annie?" He waited brutally until I nodded at
the paraphrase. He was a boy. A stupid,
puerile, self-indulgent, arrested boy. His eyes
looked up as if he were reading the answer
there. "Since shortly after I began sleeping
with you."
   The moan came out of me before he
finished the predicate. I covered my face in
my hand, so that he would not have the
pleasure of seeing the knife slice across it.
Muscle convulsed under my palm, my skin
burned, all over an exchange of words. Todd
took a clumsy, involuntary step of
compassion in my direction, but he did not
dare close the gap. He could not bear to be
responsible for a show of pain that
compromised me. He let out a plaintive bleat,
banged into a chair, and slammed the
cabinet, by way of offering comfort. "You
honestly didn't know?"
   It helped, at least, to let my facial tics
explode. "You said nothing. Total silence."
Amyclaean, golden, consenting. Alien and
unnatural in my mouth. "You hid. How I was
supposed to know?"
   He shook his head. "She's always around.
Devoted. Doting." His tone was soft,
pointed, regretful. "All the qualities I so
patently lack."
   "From that I was supposed to guess?" I
went shrill, and—last symptom of losing
control—didn't care. "She treated us like a
couple. So did you, for that matter."
   "I still would. So would she." If, he
implied, you weren't so archaic, perverse
with monogamy. "The night I first went
home with her, she told me she wouldn't
hurt you for all the tea in china shops. I
obviously miscalculated in telling her you'd
understand."
   Having slighted everything else, he went
after my understanding. I wanted to prove
myself the most magnanimous, liberal
creature on earth. At the same time. I wanted
to snuff him out, arrogance and all, like a
kitchen match. Hurt him beyond
understanding. "You screwed with a
creationist." Monotone outrage. Sex with a
religious zealot: the most unforgivable
miscegenation. Todd could not stifle a
horrible laugh. The pained chuckle came out
hideous; he knew the escaping sound would
divorce us for good.
   "We slept together regularly, yes."
   "Slept together," I said. "Regularly." The
act might have taken fifteen seconds against
a wall, but the polite name promoted their
every transaction to a mutual sedative
between the politenesses of linen. "I don't
understand." Bitter pleasantry. "How can
she square this with the Six-Day God? Isn't
fucking without benefit of clergy one of the
bargain fares to damnation?"
   Todd pinched his lip. "We've never
discussed doctrine."
   "What do you discuss?"
   "Not much, frankly. You and she have
always talked more than she and I."
   She'd wanted to save me. God did not
allow for interpretation. Thou shalt not
commit. Her folk-song simplicity had fooled
me into assuming she did not share
creation's basic contradiction. I didn't care
anything about her or her motives. The only
thing I cared about, flailed at as if it alone
could keep self-esteem from dissolving, was
the cause of Franklin's infidelity. Irrelevant.
   Unaccountably calm, I suddenly knew that
belonging, for Todd, was another ugly name
for aging. He was losing the courage to face
routine, and monogamy left him in the path
of exhaustion. Woman-jumping, deep in him
long before I arrived, publicly proclaimed
that in the end he wouldn't be around for
anyone. He could never have survived, as
half his life, a partner's crises, the death of
her parents, her illness, aging, change. He
barely survived the spring overhaul of my
wardrobe. The constant terror of event
unfolding in daily familiarity could only be
beaten by jumping ship, getting
promiscuously free.
   He had ruined whatever chance the two of
us ever had of looking to our joint moat. I
would never forgive him that. But I needed
to confirm a worse suspicion before
breaking off. I spoke softly, not to repair but
to cauterize. "Why, Franklin? You have to
explain. Don't leave me guessing."
   "Janny." A student pleading for a grade
change. "I don't want to leave you at all." I
retaliated now with all the secretly stockpiled
silence I had stolen from him over the
months. "Jan. You want me to make it
worse?" I waited, my fingers jiggling like
voltmeter needles. "You're asking me to hit
you." Yes, 1 thought. Say it. It will never
make any sense otherwise. I will never work
it out alone. "You cannot," he started. He
shifted clauses. "She... Annie. You see, with
her—"
   "She's still fertile," I supplied. His relief,
the greatest 1 ever succeeded in giving him,
broke all over his face. I felt, to answer it,
only sick, self-confirming, disaster stoicism.
Your house is on fire and your children have
burnt. I knew what I needed to do, and
would do it cleanly. "I'm sorry," I said. "I had
no idea. You two are trying to make
babies?"
   "Janny." Frank was beyond trying.
"Janny."
   But I was right: the saving maybe. Every
option exercised was a small murder.
Open-door policy, everything had to remain
possible. He couldn't write about his Flemish
landscapist without first acquiring botany,
geography, geology, optics, another foreign
language. He could not write a life with me
without a second edition being at least
conceivable. He had to remain an
able-semened body. My ligation robbed him
of potential. His every evasion of
commitment preserved the day when he
might exercise his birthright, cash in and
capitulate to fatherhood.
   I had my explanation, and I made to leave.
But stopping at the door, meaning to make a
concession to closure—a last goodwill drink
somewhere—I surprised myself by furiously
whispering, "I told you everything early on.
Why bother coming back, week after week?
Why trouble to move halfway in? Why string
out the thing, knowing I was useless?"
   A boy, arrogantly loose on his scavenger
hunt, stared at me in boyish bewilderment.
"What do you mean?" He held his head,
searched for the best possible word to
counter my willful misrepresentation. "I love
you."
   I left him and walked alone to the control
room, where I heard Dr. Ressler's birthday
musical offering. I knocked and entered
rapidly, before I could back out. The
professor sat behind the bank of monitors,
blissfully happy in the spray of dense
counterpoint from his turntable. "Ah! A
victim. Listen to this," he said, hungry for
companionship to a degree I had never seen
in him. He was now ready for anything that
circumstance might throw him. And I had
come to rub his readiness out.
   "The D minor partita for solo violin. 'Solo'
is a euphemism. Multipart polyphony from a
single instrument. Last movement: the
chaconne. Constantly repeated eight-bar
theme..." He stopped.
   I had my back to him, looking through the
two-way mirror into the computer room,
committing the place to long-term memory.
"No music lesson today?" he said gently,
without patronage. Unique among males in
my experience.
   "Your boy says he loves me," I said, trying
for lightness and missing by light-years.
   Dr. Ressler lifted the needle of the
phonograph and bombarded us with quiet.
"That much is obvious." My long silence
gave him a chance to allude to that old,
shared joke. "Well, yes. It is obvious."
   "But you see," I said, turning to him and
parodying a smile, "I am no longer
functional."
   He looked me full in the face, searching
for the missing pieces. In less time than it
would have taken a professional, he had the
thing figured. Against room rules, he lit a
cigarette brutally, in disgust. A flare-up I
didn't know could come from him. He had
taken a chance on us, tenderly maneuvered
us over our own flaws, poised us for a
reasonable chance at happiness; all we had
had to do was pay attention and try to be
relatively free of cruelty.
   He walked a few steps in every direction.
His eyes were intent on something farther
than the other side of the silvered glass. He
shook his head, racing through the
permutations, discarding things he might say
as pointless. He stubbed out the butt and
exploded. "The man is a fool." I felt a
forbidden rush: Dr. Ressler needed me. I
went over to him, stopped him from
stepping away, and pinned myself to him.
The only demonstration either of us would
ever give one another. I didn't let go;
instead, I pressed against him, insisting.
Slowly, against his will, he pressed back. We
did not caress, but held one another
hypothetically, softly letting skin guess at
what desire might have felt in another place,
another life, halves of a botched dissection,
an old whole.
   We separated without explanation. He
lifted my lowered chin until I had to look
squarely at him. "This is not the scenario of
choice for you two. You know that."
   I shrugged. "It's the scenario we're in." It
occurred to me: I could say: Talk to him;
shame him. And the thing would be
straightened. Ressler knew as much too, and
was waiting, weight on his toes, to
intercede. I didn't ask. I no longer wanted to
be fixed. It was a relief to escape the waiting,
the nights away—to break off without it
being my fault. To come away with all the
benefits of the injured party.
   I went home, there being no other place.
Over the next several days, most of Todd's
possessions politely disappeared of their
own accord, vanished under bacterial rot, in
stop-action film. The evacuation did leave its
slight, keloid blemish. Notebooks, a record
or two, a pair of socks left behind,
forgotten—the crippled child in Hamelin, or
props for a later, staged, happier goodbye.
   The room above the antique shop once
again became my private reserve. There was
nothing to do on evenings off except repair
the place. When I could make no more
improvements to its chenille stagecraft, I
began finding reasons to stay late at the
branch, without compensation except the
slightly more comprehensive answer.

  Q: What is the largest geological feature
on earth?

  A: The earth's largest feature is also its
youngest. The Mid-Atlantic Ridge, a
ten-thousand-mile-long submarine
mountain range rising to an average height
of ten thousand feet and anywhere from
three to six hundred miles wide, is split
down its length by the breach of new rock
welling up from the convection currents of
the earth's molten mantle.

   I lost several days to the QB. I thought I
might be able to go on forever, working it
into the perfect artifice, addressing every
hidden need in the close-lipped questioner.
   Warm days went on increasing. 1 began
walking again, more cautiously, not so far
afield as when it had been the two of us.
Brooklyn is a complex biome. Two and a half
million people watching the neighborhood
isobars of war and truce. Streets full of
Russian, Italian, German, Korean, Yiddish,
Spanish, Chinese—a fair slice of the varieties
of talk. But the language map is devised to
keep out crossovers. I stuck to the island
allotted me—branch, apartment, subway
opening.
    After a long afternoon at the branch
rooting through Gov Pubs, I did not feel like
going home. One evening, sitting in a
convenient pizza parlor among surreal
composite frescoes of Venetian and
Florentine landmarks, I had time, for the first
time since I'd left him, to see how I'd treated
Tuckwell. While I'd been flush, I believed
that the best thing we could do for old loves
was be firm with them. I now saw the weak
rationalization for what it was. I simply had
had no stomach for messy responsibility. If it
were too late to make good, maybe I could at
least recant.
    Keithy shouted a surprised hello through
the intercom and buzzed me in. I walked up
to the apartment, disoriented by how
familiar the stairs still were. He'd left the
door open but did not meet me. He was
lying in the recliner, watching TV with the
sound off, but in full three-piece uniform as
if just back from the office. "Marian," he
said, as if I too were just home from work.
"What do you have to say for yourself?" I
had lived here once, and all the place could
say was / remember you; wait, don't tell me.
... I sat next to him, ready for any
sentence—hostility, abuse, sadistic wit, even
affection, caresses, sex-with-the-ex, if that
was the penalty he chose to extract. Any slap
but casual indifference.
    "You're just in time," he said, without
glancing over. "Watch." He pressed a button
on the remote; was it a new device, or the
one we'd owned? The sound flooded on,
cataclysmic Carmina Burana —the
microphone everywhere in the orchestra at
once. On the screen, a casserole apotheosis
of meats, vegetables, noodles, and sauces
flew through the air in an ultra-slow-motion
parabola so charged and erotic that each of
its subtle, glacially arcing parts seemed
loaded with the symbolic curve of
significance.
    I watched arrested in horror as epic food
rained down upon an ivory-colored antique
tablecloth. Every transcendent splash was
Bolshoi-choreographed. Succulent streamers
of pasta twisted like living things against the
sea bottom. Crosscut, pan, slow zoom: every
visual stop pulled out to create a
late-century masterpiece. The effect,
pornographically immediate, more evocative
than any Ingres or Master of Flemalle,
scooped out my stomach more violently than
the real event would have. Keithy killed the
set just as the voice-over began to explain
what the stain was selling. He leaned toward
me in triumph. "No talking toilet bowls for
me. When Keith Tuckwell dies, he's going to
leave something behind him in the minds of
millions."
   "That was yours?"
   "Essentially."
   "Network TV? Prime time? My, Keith."
   "Yes, woman. I've arrived." No trace of the
old self-mockery, no suggestion of see what
you lost? He sat back in his chair, at peace
with his times. I don't know what I'd
expected, what I'd hoped to say to him. In
thirty seconds, I remembered how hard it
was to say anything at all. I asked how he'd
been. "Since when?" Had he been eating
well? "Well, but not prettily." Gotten out
any? Been dating? "A veritable salad bar, a
smorgasbord of women. Cold women who
dress in red and black. Women with
overbites—very frail. Women who know all
there is to know about structural
engineering. Black women who drift down
sidewalks humming de Falla. Leggy blondes
in pastel who have never known
unhappiness. Women who keep great
secrets. Auburn-haired beauties whose
neuroses periodically flame out like.."
   I let him improvise, absorbing my due. But
it was no punishment. He was too happy. An
intercom call a minute later, playfully
rhythmic, revealed the reason. He buzzed
the caller in without asking identity, and
opened the door on a heart-stoppingly
glamorous girl who wore, with poised
authority, incredibly expensive
Italian-tailored rain-forest green and a rope
of pearls. Keith introduced us without a
ripple. I didn't catch her name, but the way
she shook my hand and said how much he'd
told her of me laid out everything.
   She excused herself to take a powder,
something I hadn't realized women still did.
"Keithy." I said. "You can't marry this
woman."
   He looked at me, lips cracking. "Why
not?"
   "She'll stay for long periods in the
bathroom with the door closed. She'll be
two hours dressing, just to take the trash
out. You'll be miserable. This is just a
rebound."
   He waited an arch second. "Too late. Your
invitation's already in the mail." His date
returned. "We're going out," he said, his
suit now giving an entirely different account
of his emotional state of affairs. "No need to
wait up." They left, leaving me watching
television in a stranger's apartment,
knowing the exact, private locking-up
routine on my way out.
   Nights in my apartment I sat in the rocker,
watching Todd's goods disappear of their
own volition. I reviewed the old photo
gallery. I remembered how he arranged his
notebooks near the bed, so he could reach
them rapidly in the dark. How he bought
milk so he could stare at the photos of
Missing Children on the cartons. How, when
he lost his patience with food, he could
survive for days on charges of whipped
cream straight out of the can. How his body
sometimes lurched in an electrostatic jerk of
total fear before falling off to sleep.
   I was at last militantly alone. I would
probably have stayed in that condition,
habituating to it until I no longer noticed,
had not the phone rung one night, Todd on
the other end, hoarsely whispering, "I've
killed the man."



XXV

  Disaster

   Information thrives on it, a larger part of
the daily paper than anything except ads.
Annuals feature it, the most prominent and
dependable heading. Almanacs compile
numbing numbers lists— freakish accounts
aligned in fatal categories, Earth, Air, Fire,
Water. The calendar is just a disaster register.
March 27: strongest earthquake to hit North
America, Anchorage, 1964. Worst aviation
disaster in history, Canary Islands, 1977.
Mount St. Helens, 1980. Next morning
rounds out the elements: Kwangtung ferry
capsizes, last year. Bolts from the blue, tears
in the fabric. The word's etymology blames
bad stars. But nothing is so mundane or
ensured. All information, every signal and
search, will collapse into noise, lost to
sudden, shocking, disastrous commonplace.
   Restricting myself to the seismic/volcanic
category of Information Please, summing the
conservative death estimates for the last
hundred years, I get an average of thirty
people a day dying from the locution of
speech reserved for impossibility: the earth
moving underneath them. Flood, drought,
famine, hurricane, tornado, tidal wave,
avalanche—tea visitors, daily mail. And the
constructed catastrophes: hotel catwalks
leaping free, tenement fires, airplanes
dropping out of the sky. Motor-vehicle
deaths in this country equal a large plane
crashing daily. An accidental death every six
minutes, accidental injury every four
seconds. Only accidental birth accounts for
anyone being left.
   Outside accident accounts for less than 5
percent of American deaths. The rest are tiny
slippages within the system, a valve
shutdown, a tube burst or blocked, an
instruction misread, production idle or fatally
overrun. The body, too intricate to sustain,
lives in what industry calls the "mean time
between failures." Expected, ubiquitous
friend of the family—bad stars.
   The Morse name has an elegant symmetry:
three triplets arranged in simple contrast
that sounds panicked even in binary. No
word is faster to transmit, clearer to receive
than "An event again." Words—those
rearguard actions—can't frame it, the
infinitely unlikely disappearing into the
terminally indifferent. Everywhere, this
instant, unrepeatable combinations lost.
Cathedrals bombed, cantatas used to wrap
fish, years of space exploration going up like
a Roman candle, an absurdly kind man who
would choke on his phlegm rather than spit,
wiped out by a fleck of loose plaque.
   Disaster is modest, quiet as termites,
low-key as a library dissolving in acid paper.
The five-thousand-volume epic biography,
life, loves—unique configuration of cells and
switches— might be reassembled by trial and
error, just as Keats's unwritten work lies
hidden in the ad copy of magazines, out of
order. Reconstituting Keats would be child's
play in comparison.
   Disaster is a junior page accidentally
reshelving a one-of-a-kind manuscript by the
wrong call number. Someone comes looking
for the work, sure that it contains the
explanatory key long overlooked. But the
tome is not where the catalog assigns it. The
manuscript, in any number of random places,
is annihilated in improbability. How lost? Say
the library is big, big beyond combing. Say it
contains a few thousand books for every
organism ever brought into unlikelihood.
Say it contains a record of every geological
tick that brought into existence, from out of
bare rock and trace atmosphere, this
implausibly kind man. No search will ever
turn up that misshelved manuscript.
   The "Disasters" sheaf in the vertical files
professes to have the numbers in hand. It
gives the erosion calmly, in columns of
sandbagging statistics, the way good
breeding compels a person to say, "Never
mind; it's nothing," even when everything
has now gone irretrievably wrong.

  Uncle Jimmy

   Franklin was worse than worthless over
the phone. I'd never heard him like that. His
voice was crumpled like an ancient wax
cylinder recording. His sentences were
incoherent beyond editing.
   I had to steady him, lead him with Twenty
Questions. Slowly now, back up: what's
happened? I've killed him; I've killed the
man. No one was even dead. But disaster,
the 65.5 per 100,000 people per year chance,
had settled in. Uncle Jimmy had had a stroke.
Although alive, he had been severely hit.
   Franklin's hysteric claim of responsibility
possessed a distant logic. Jimmy's further
inquiries about his premium error had at last
awakened a sleepy corporate hierarchy. He
had been requested to answer a couple of
ad hoc actuaries. Their questions had raised
the possibility, in insinuating office dialect,
that Jimmy might know more about the
source of the computer irregularity than he
let on.
   Jimmy, most oversensitive of men, already
nursing accumulated anxiety over his
inadvertent failure to meet a premium, was
so bewildered by the probe—mere
formalities, all part of good
investigation—that he ruptured an aneurysm
that had been hiding, an inherited
deficiency, secret and soft in his cerebral
arteries. He apoplexed on the examination
carpet, proclaiming innocence while going
into coma.
   Not until his evening arrival did Franklin
learn it. Dr. Ressler broke the news, alone in
knowing how Todd tied in. Franklin
harassed the hospital where Jimmy had been
rushed until the answer-givers on the other
end refused to speak to him. He forced
Ressler to repeat over and over that the
hemorrhage was not his fault, and each time
he refused to believe it. Torturing himself
into organic nightmare, he called the only
person in the world who might further
torture him.
   I calmed him as best I could, offering to
come right over. He screamed in agony, "No.
Not me. Jimmy." I said I'd be at the hospital
within the hour, and that alone comforted
him a little. 1 rang off, threw some clothes
on, and was gone. Not until I entered the
hospital did I collect myself enough to
realize: Jimmy. That courtly, clumsy
truism-speaker, inept and universal flirt who
every afternoon called his mother to say he
was on his way home, too free of
complication to understand, let alone repeat,
the slurs that pass for human conversation.
   I felt the queasy calm of worst-case
scenarios. Cool, calm, and collected: the
highest rung in Tuckwell's ad world, the one
that will deliver us from harm. The building's
smell—alcohols, ethers, gauze—made me
feel I was picking Jimmy up from the dentist's
rather than heading for Intensive Care. I
asked for him at the reception desk, an
antiseptic module as wide as a Canadian
football field and as blond as Sweden. The
linen nurse addressed me too gingerly. "Are
you the wife?"
   I smiled, despite the immediacy, to imagine
Jimmy and me as life mates. I said the patient
was single. The registrar nurse examined a
huge, Dickensian ledger printed in dot
matrix rather than quill. She flipped to
Jimmy's lookup code: Steadman, James S.
STEA3-J13-72-6. My correct answer apparently
earned me admission, for she directed me to
a waiting room. The sprawling complex
consisted of an outer shell of functional,
modernist passages laid out in star-shaped
pods wrapped around an industrial kernel
with low ceilings and forced steam heat that
probably should have been trashed at the
turn of the century. The two symbionts
didn't quite align. Old floors ramped up to
new; catwalks cut across obsolete passages.
Colored stripes and system icons indexed
each region of local suffering like a
Byzantine underground parking lot.
   Children in slippers and tunics, hair
thinned to pointless patches, carried listless
trucks under their arms, remembering
everything about the ritual of toys except
the reason. Mint-green semiconscious
shapes with bloated bellies lay in
half-obscured bedrooms in the care of LED
banks, chins fighting for air, tubes rammed
so deeply up their noses that it bruised their
eyes. Some sat in pharmaceutical storms.
Orderlies, acutely reassuring, wheeled
people by on hydraulic flatbeds, cots that
smelled of runny ulcers and fecal ooze,
smells dusted over by musty astringent.
Worse than Passchendaele, more hideous
than Bosch: everything proceeded with
supermarket calm.
   In embarrassed hall-alcove clumps stood
the healthy—by fault of intimacy, the
go-betweens to this hideous lab. We
avoided one another's eyes. An accidental
exchange of glances and I found myself
staring into the face of a scared woman who
flashed me a conspirator's look: Don't tell
anyone you saw me here. By the time I
located the 1C waiting room, I knew the dirty
secret. Individuals were woundable, sickly,
inconvenient, contemptible, tragic in every
way except numerically, smudges on endless
fan-fold paper. Despite everything culture
has ever insisted, hospitals were not shows.
Even here, at the one moment my entire life
should have trained me for—Intensive Care,
5W, North Tower, Green Wing—obscenely
lacerated, lost: wanting, needing, but not
knowing how to hear the makeshift,
temporary metronome measuring out so
obvious a rhythm, the meter of the faltering
human platelet pump.
   A months-old trade magazine in the
waiting room declared that more Americans
enter hospital every month than were alive
at the Revolution. I stared awhile at the
magazine's other unabsorbable facts, then
matched wits against quiz TV. I sat on a
wraparound petroleum-based sofa,
kitty-corner to a volatile, overweight woman
who had the lounge phone's receiver
surgically incorporated into her double chin.
She was not using the phone, just holding
it, keeping the line open for a message she
had long given up hope of receiving. My
companion watched as I answered the one
about the oldest city in the continental
United States being St. Augustine and
correctly gave "nano" as the prefix meaning
one billionth in the metric system. The only
question worth addressing at that instant
was in the IC, stroked out. But I kept on
answering these others, eye-calm.
    The woman looked at me reverently. "You
could make a lot of dough, honey." Having
paid me the highest compliment, she could
now let me into the intimacy of her being
here. She said, "My little girl," tapping the
receiver as if it were the child. She flashed
me one of those in-your-own-best-interests
grins. "She's down the hall, about to be cut
open in several places." I apologized, not
knowing what else to say. She waved me off.
"I'm trying to find out who the anesthetician
is. That's very important. A girlfriend's
husband once died under the hands of a
bad anesthetician."
    Courtesy dictated my saying something
about waiting to see what was left of a
friend following his massive stroke. I didn't.
After a pause during which she twice said
"Hello" into the unresponsive phone, my
partner turned again to me with the
two-syllable, singsong question "Children?"
She nodded reassuringly— Easy one. If you
knew St. Augustine, this one's a gift. For
some reason, I couldn't figure the question
out. Did children exist? Which was the
oldest? What was one billionth of one
called? Up from the unfigurable field of
memory came that old jump-rope rhyme:
Franklin and Janny sitting in a tree, kay eye
ess ess eye en gee. First comes love, then
comes marriage, then comes Janny with a
baby carriage.
    I smiled and said I wasn't married. She
made a just-as-well face, and all at once I felt
Franker lean over my shoulder and whisper,
"Holbein." Habit; with specialist's myopia, he
would look at a tree deranged by autumn
and, taking in the clash of colors, would
come up for air saying, "Bonnard!" Nothing
was what it was, but always a comparison to
paint. When he came closest to genuinely
loving me, he would freeze, beg me not to
move, and exclaim in a half-rapture, " 'Girl
with the Pearl Earring.'" He was a lost cause,
wrecked on aesthetics. Seeing Rembrandt's
ox-sides in the meat case at the supermarket
marked him as unfit for life.
    Aesthetics could not survive the waiting
room. A bit of aesthetics on his part had led,
however indirectly, step by step, to a burst
vessel in Jimmy's brain. I looked at the
woman again; yes, infinitely more Holbein
miniature than contemporary Long Island
mother. I was inspecting her in the Met, with
Franklin at my side. It was suddenly enough
to have had a look at her real face—pinched
eyes, mole, spinsterly, approving mouth—to
set her in a time she matched. Empathy came
on me from nowhere, and I wished her
daughter every chance that medical
technology, God, and a good anesthetician
could give her.
   Years later, when they at last let me into
his room, Jimmy was sitting in bed as if
nothing had happened. I wondered, What
on earth is he doing here? There's nothing
wrong with him. In that first moment, he
seemed the same person he had ever been.
Unmistakable, vintage Uncle Jimmy. Then I
saw just how wrong things were. His face
had collapsed on one side, as if from a bad
foundation. His mouth sagged down to the
left, an eighty-year-old's mouth, unable to
produce anything more than a few raw
vowels. His lips drooped a deep, secretive
smile all over his face, the smile of a man
who had seen something remarkable. His
eyes bore a matte glaze, not his. Jimmy's eyes
were gone.
   I thought there would be others
there—friends, day shift, his mother. But I
was alone, except for Jimmy and the patient
behind the draw curtain. My calm collapsed
beneath me like a pier gently washed out to
sea. My eyes grew acid. I dug my fingernails
into my upper arms, trying to reverse the
process that had overtaken him, reverse
everything.
   He must have recognized me in some
sense, because as I stepped to the bed, he
rippled his ruined facial muscles. He looked
roughly in my direction and erupted in a
horrible, unformed call like the open
modulation of an underwater whale. "Hello,
Jimmy." My tone was no closer to natural. He
made the awful blast again. This time it
seemed to possess syllables. The sound was
edgeless, blurred, terrible. I had to force
myself not to run from the room and deny I
ever knew him. I put my hand on his gown,
and my touch made the word come out of
him again. "Jimmy," I said, as brightly as I
could without bursting. "Try it a little
softer." I put my head close to him, my ear
almost onto his mouth. The less air he had to
push, the less muscle he needed to control,
the more chance I had of making him out.
   The sound came out again, softer but no
more distinct. Jimmy fought to unmangle it.
His whole body shook, a weight lifter at the
instant when he must either jerk the bar
overhead or be crushed under the plates. I
thought I heard him, in shadow, pronounce
"cohabit." The word he had teased me with
for weeks when Todd and 1 moved in
together. 1 must have projected it. I began to
think he wasn't saying anything at all, just
releasing animal bursts from a cortex now
helpless to hold them in.
   "Once more, Jimmy. Don't try so hard." But
the noise was worse, vanishing. I looked at
him, shook my head. "I'm sorry. 1 can't. I can't
make it out." My own words were
themselves smudged out, my voice lost in a
choke, my head rocking. 1 could only stop
myself by putting my face down onto him,
where 1 kept it. 1 felt something brush my
hair. His arm, its muscles contracted into a
permanent claw, was trying to move, to put
its weight over me in comfort. I lifted it—he
could not do it alone—and put it around my
neck, where it had been trying to go.
   I hunted down a resident to ask about
Jimmy's chances. Like most, I had so
mastered necessity that when chance was at
last the subject, I was lost. The physician was
too professional to say what might be
hoped. Hope was a function of structural
impairment. But the implication was clear:
Jimmy was setting out for an unknown place.
Sitting in bed in the double-occupancy
room, close up, flush against a place closed
to every petition except disaster.
   I went straight to the -warehouse. Todd
wanted word immediately, over the intercom,
but 1 waited until 1 went up. At the top of
the freight elevator, I froze, afraid to go in.
Jimmy was there. The office floor was still
warm where he had fallen, a delicate, blue,
broken vessel stroked out across the tiles. He
was there, working late, ready to scold me
for unofficial use of combinations, to tease
me boyishly about cohabiting with men. It
was all as I had left it, every night I ever
spent in this forsaken place. But the old
arrangement, the Second Shift Club, had
changed color, reddened upon contact with
air.
   I gave my faithful transcript. I told them
about his face, his mouth, his eyes, his
clawed hand. I told them about the sound
he had made, syllables beyond guessing. I
told about the doctor's hedge. Dr. Ressler
listened for physiological signs, Todd for any
scrap that might spell forgiveness. Would it
have happened without his mistake?
Unanswerable, but we gave the rest of the
night over to it. I couldn't think of sleep, and
so sat up the remaining hours with them. In
the morning I went directly to the branch, as
I had before after long nights in
circumstances that would never arise again.
   I spent the day combing our modest
collection, reading everything I could find on
brain damage. I learned that a third of a
million Americans suffer cerebral vascular
accidents each year. I learned that the word
derived from the stroke of God's hand. I
learned that Jimmy's injury would unfold in
its own way, a way research could not fix.
   I found a text on the subject, reasonably
up-to-date, although the pace of the field
consigned all texts to the pyre every two
years. The chapter on stroke recovery was a
rationalist's nightmare: people who could
see a sofa, walk around it, and give its name,
but couldn't say how the thing was used.
People who had no trouble explicating "Jack
kissed Jill" but who were hopelessly gutted
by "Jill was kissed by Jack." People whose
right hemispheres didn't know what their
lefts were doing. People in every other way
intact, day after day unable to recognize
their own spouses' faces.
   Some accounts went beyond science
fiction. I read of Phineas Gage, a Vermont
railroad man who had a three-foot rod
blasted through his head. He lived for
twelve years, intelligence unimpaired,
capable of speech, memory, and reason, but
with no emotional control. I read of a
woman whose one hand tried to strangle
her unless fought off by her other. I read of
people who could not recall anything from
before their accident or who could not learn
anything after. I read of a concert pianist
who could play the most complex concerti
from memory yet who could not point to
middle C.
   There was aphasia, loss of speech, alexia,
loss of reading, agraphia, loss of writing,
and agnosia, loss of recognition. Everything
a person possessed could be taken away. I
read of people who could grasp numerals
but not numbers, who could define the
word "pig" but couldn't recognize one, who
could write complex ideas but couldn't make
out what they'd written. There were patterns
too bizarre to warrant names: the
sixty-seven-year-old stricken into thirteen
years of fastidious silence only to be
awakened at age eighty by a train whistle's
sixth-chord that launched him into a popular
tune from the year of his wedding, a half
century before. Minds reduced to a vacant
stare worked their way back into replicas of
their former state. Massive paralytics rose up
and walked, showing no trace other than a
shuffle or droop of one eyelid. Others, only
grazed by God's swipe, lived for years
masking incapacities they themselves failed
to suspect. I grabbed at every slight ray of
optimism. Children's brains could rewire,
recover from blows that would wipe out
mature adults. Jimmy's gentleness might
indicate a saving persistence of child's
wiring. Recovery was above normal in
left-handed people, and higher still in lefties
who had been forced into the right-hander's
world. I'd seen Jimmy type, lift, carry, write,
and wave hundreds of times, but I could not
for life remember with which hand.
   I was so high-strung that I even found,
hidden in the technical folds, rare benefits
from a well-placed lesion. Violent
personalities woke from apoplexy as loving
as a newborn. Pasteur's massive stroke
altered his work for the better. Dostoyevsky's
visionary power followed from lifelong
epileptic seizures. Research proved nothing
except that no one could predict injury's
outcome. No one knew much about the
brain at all, let alone Jimmy's. The hierarchy
had too many subsystems for the loss of any
piece to be understood. My only
question—would it still be Jimmy inside the
destroyed case?—dissolved in qualified
statistics. By evening I found myself guiltily
hoping for the kinder, comprehensive
solution.
   I went back to MOL after work. Todd
stood in the computer room, source of the
catastrophe, scrutinizing my face as if, at
panel edge, overlooked by everyone, he
might find some hint of horror's miracle
waiting to flame. Nothing I could report
helped. My friends had news of their own, a
wrinkle more pressing than Jimmy's
prognosis. The hospital DP
operatives—Todd's and Ressler's opposites
at that immense institution—processing
Jimmy's numbers, revealed that his coverage
had not yet been reinstated.
   "His mother called."
   "How is she?"
   Todd shrugged nervously; care had to be
rationed, focused to a point. "She's either
the emblem of strength or doesn't realize
what's happened. She says the hospital
needs proof of alternate ability to pay."
   The man I'd seen the night before would
need feeding, clothing, changing, constant
surveillance, and a year of slow, expensive
therapy that might come to nothing. An
after-tremor could surface with the next
clock tick. The hospital staff discovered the
billing irregularity and served notice in
under forty-eight hours: thus health science,
the keepers of the human spark, in the
Information Age.
   Disaster (continued)
   A part of Jimmy's brain had dissolved in
the hemorrhage faster than a sugar cube in
coffee. His was near one extreme of a
spectrum of tissue failure. At the other, the
best anyone gets away with is a steady
evaporation beginning in late teens, racking
up thousands of neurons a day, making
every aspect of experience—cheerful
revisionism notwithstanding—continuously
harder to master and easier to miss.
   Ten billion switches, by conservative
estimate, are each wired to five thousand
others, regulated by neurotransmitters and
neuropeptides whose scores of enzyme
dialects control a chaos of simultaneous
translation conveying desire, fear, torture,
pleasure. No sooner does the switchboard
wire itself to survive the world of experience
than it begins to dismantle. It flashes out in
a violent short or disintegrates
imperceptibly. All that varies is the tempo.
   I have until now faulted words, blamed
the messenger of mangled news for keeping
me from my answer. I should instead be
prostrate with gratitude that words can
mean anything at all, given the nature of the
receiver. The thing is jerry-rigged, carrying
around in its own triple fossil a walkie-talkie
wrapped around a shrew-screech encasing a
lizard's intuition. Absurd paste-up: gothic
chancel tacked onto Romanesque crypt
fronted by rococo nave. The wonder lies in
its comprehending anything, its ability to
work its supreme invention, the shaky
symbol set.
   Word into synapse is even more
approximate than substance into word. The
brain, in the subtle dozen hours when it
reaches its zenith, already wades through a
dissipation that leaves it searching without
success for those three syllables beginning
with an "F" about which everything has
been rubbed out except the certainty that
they sat at the lower right corner of an
even-numbered page. The word was
"forfeiture." The word was "filigree." The
word was "forgetting."
   A hundred trillion synaptic bits, each
capable of threshold effects, compressed
into a kilo and a half, split into two lumps
connected by 250 million cables. Twin-view
parallax resolves the field into multiple
dimensions. The most complex entity ever
thrown together, an organ vastly more
complex than the plan that assembled it,
locally violates the Second Law. Every brain
extends itself with a ten-thousand-item
template, puts together continuous
unprecedented messages for no other
reason than to model in miniature
everything that exists and half that doesn't.
Five billion living brains, a hundred billion
already dead, each sickeningly bound into a
net surpassed only by the single thing they
are bent on weaving.
   Stockpiled deep in the magnificent
kludge, buried in the cerebellum,
hippocampus, corpus callosum, the device
knows its own unwiring. Thought carries a
little pattern of terror around inside it, the
realization that it shouldn't even be around,
that it will soon fall back into distributed
static. "What a day," Jimmy sometimes
greeted the second shift, throwing up his
arms. "I should have been a chicken farmer.
What else can go wrong?" He knew what
else could and one day would, knew before
anybody, and only his tired joke stood
between him and nothing.
   The map of circuits, like their mobile case,
is shaped by evolution. Synapse routes that
presage their own immanent shorting out
must also have been selected for. What
good can it possibly do to know, every
paralyzing, conscious hour, that the prop
holding me up to a smoky little aperture
onto everything is already, even as I name
the process, dissolving in a stroke or a
gentle stream? Medullar terror at returning
to randomness is behind every urge to
pattern the world. Hardwired to fear is the
breeding scream.
    Desperate copulation evolved long before
cerebral terror. Male dragonflies scrape a
female clean of previous sperm before
mating. Cheater fish slip between the throes
of a thrashing couple and make their secret
deposit. But the truly promiscuous, the ones
who couple with everything that moves,
who cannot stop propagating even to eat,
who fill notebooks into the night: fear
makes us father for our lives. Todd
excavated me as if his organ were a fixing
gauge. Learning that nothing could come of
it, he left, scared off. Only wilder fear drove
him temporarily back.
    Natural selection edits with an eye only
toward what the message says, not to what
it means. It has no interest in the fittest
solution, nor the most efficient. The fittest
thing life could do would be to die
immediately and join the overwhelming
efficiency of inert space. Selection hinges on
one thing alone: differential reproduction.
Double faster than you die. Dissolve slower
than you replicate. All organs are an attempt
to leverage this edge, even this crazily
immense, already unwiring circuit. I know; I
can feel the pay telescope starting to flick
off. By Jimmy's count, with luck, I might get
six more years.

  Losing the Signal

   How much space might he clear away in
himself for this brilliant, two-manual
experiment in naming? He has no precedent,
no Jeanette template, no chromosome locus
synthesizing the next step. Dr. Koss is his
only instructor. They test the limits of their
freedom, walk openly through town, feeling
the violation, not daring to believe what
they do. Their walks are exercises in
synchronization. Their legs cadence. They
talk in overlap, complete one another's
sentences, laugh at each other's jokes before
they're made. A small miracle, for once in this
life, not to have to explain.
   She spends the night, an extended,
sleepless night of semaphores. Jeanette
stands peach-naked, stretches, touches her
toes in morning's light, showing herself to
him. "How do you like your eggs?"
   He would ask: Are we wrong? Am I
destroying something real and immediate in
you? Are you denying your husband's
sacrifice, losing the intimate, accumulated
weight of your past? But her eyes are sparks,
looking for affirmation of the rightness of
this moment. He must not violate her joy,
and says, "Ova easy."
   The article appears, makes the rounds at
Biology. It includes a photo of Ressler
among Faces to Watch and gives a
bastardized, erroneous thumbnail treatment
of his mutagen investigations. It paints him
as arcane, isolated—qualities that may have
been requisite for serious creative effort in
the past but at this hour are inimical to
effective science. On pub date, log-jammed
almost at solution, he wants nothing more
than to be brought back into the fold, to
work together with Ulrich toward some
common persuasion.
   The Life photo essay horrifies him: a sad,
indelible feeling as he flips through the
sickeningly permanent pages. Perpetual
artifact, preserved in a thousand long-term
vaults. A million copies faithfully reproduce
his every imperfection. Too late to recant: his
face, his thin nose, his words badly quoted
and out of context, his arrogant
self-assurance—Stuart Ressler, rising science
star, split, flapped, and pinned out like a cat
in undergraduate anatomy. Proliferated
throughout the English-speaking world.
   The fallout of bad-faith fame follows him
into his first office visit following
publication. Minor notoriety will not help
patch matters between Ressler and his
increasingly erratic office mate. Ressler
braces on entering and shouts out
something friendly. But Lovering just sits
among the ruined piles of papers, his
Baalbek of print, indifferent and still.
Walking toward his desk, head down, hands
in pocket, Ressler is shaken by Joe's voice,
struggling to shake off catatonia. "Do you
know the price we're all paying to improve
the world?"
   Ressler stops and faces Lovering. He
chooses each word, multiplying the odds
against the growing sentence a hundred
thousand times per syllable. "I'm not sure
what you mean, Joe."
   "What I mean? The world. The world. Toot
la moaned. The big picture. Come on. We're
both adults. We don't have to get into
semantics here." Ressler can't even respond.
Scrambling through the repertoire, all
inappropriate, he just bobs his head on its
universal joint. "Unnatural prospect! All the
way back, all the way back to fires in caves."
Lovering drops into a movie monotone.
"And I work for them!"
   "Who do you work for, Joe?"
   "Who the hell knows? Big state school.
The money's been washed through so many
agencies it's wetter'na Baptist, But it's the
government at bottom, isn't it? All that
dough."
   The logic eludes Ressler. "Half the
scientists in this country have worked for the
government since the war."
   "What do you mean, 'since'? Who told
you they've stopped shooting?" Ressler
backs toward his chair, out of the
stumbled-upon line of fire. He can say
nothing. "What does it cost to eradicate the
Black Death? Ask GM. Ask Coke."
   "Joe—"
   "Shut up." Brutal, suppliant, drunken.
"I'm talking." Ressler wants only to be out of
the room, to allow the fit of latent humanity
to work itself out in privacy. But Lovering
won't release him. He stares at Ressler,
pleading, the look of a spaniel, hindquarters
smashed beneath the wheel of a car, asking
why his years of service have been so
rewarded. His smile changes to pity.
"Education, learning, progress. You know
what we're going to find out, we
researchefs? We're going to finally get down
to that old secret code in the cell, and the
string is going to come out spelling D-U-M-B
space S-H-I..."
   "Joe. Would you like to go out for a
beer?" Ressler's intonation is so soft it
startles the man silent. The invitation sounds
slightly frayed coming out of his mouth. He
has forgotten how to ask the question right.
But Lovering remains distracted.
   "What? Out? Why? Corn as high as an
elephant's eye. Big, hulking, behemoth state
school, out in the middle of godforsaken
nowhere." He brightens, addresses Ressler
as an old friend. "I've got a job offer, you
know. As soon as Sandy finds someone to
replace her at her office, we're outta this
hole. Someplace new, fresh, different."
   "Terrific, Joe. Could be exactly what you're
looking for. Where are you going?"
   "Ann Arbor."
   Late that evening he sees Lovering again,
ducking into the department's small-animal
room. The lines of cages always have an
edgy hysteria to them, as if the rodents know
where their cage-mates disappear to. Ressler
pokes his head into the room. He watches
Lovering pick up a cage, shake it. Above the
animal squeaks and pleas, Ressler hears
Lovering doing a poor but obligatory
Cagney: "You dirty rats."
   "Dr. L. Which way are you headed?"
   Lovering sets the cage down quickly.
"Nowhere. Why?"
   Ressler makes the beer offer again, but
Lovering smiles and shags him off, saying he
isn't ready to leave just yet. Ressler wishes
him good night, and Joe replies in like
manner. The next morning, Ressler notices
an unnatural silence emanating from the
cage room. He looks inside. The place is
stripped clean. The animals are gone, cages
and all. The answer stands just down the
hall, where Woyty, Botkin, Koss, and Ulrich
gather in a stunned lump. He walks into the
circle, which opens to him with a look shared
and obscene.
    "You've heard?" Ulrich asks.
    "Not a thing."
    "Apparently, Joe Lovering drove out of
here last night in a rented truck loaded with
the department lab animals." The others,
hearing the tale for the second time, seem
unable to get past the beginning. "He drove
the whole shipment back to his apartment.."
    "Apartment? Didn't he say... ?"
    Ulrich insists. "Apartment; there is,
apparently, no new purchased home. He
stacked all the stolen cages neatly around
his garage. Albino rats together, all the
cavia..." Ressler nods hurriedly. Get on with
it.
    "His landlady heard the engine running
about eleven o'clock last night. The garage
door was locked and wadded with rags. She
had to let herself in through his apartment."
Ulrich takes a breath, the same deep breath
Joe's landlady took before racing to the
truck to shut off the engine. "It seems Joe's
decision to join the specimens was an
impulse. There was a badly burned TV dinner
in the oven, and a burned-out cigarette on
the edge of a counter." Ulrich clears his
throat, debating whether to suppress the
next detail. "A Sears catalog open to the
lingerie pages in the bathroom. A
pocket-size spiral notebook with grocery list.
At the bottom, in the same handwriting
slant, an afterthought, he'd written, 'Send
the checks to the Anti-Vivisectionist Society.'
He was in the front seat of the truck, lying
gently on the wheel. He'd left the passenger
door open. Presumably because it vented
more closely onto the tailpipe."
    The stunned cluster of survivors turns
toward Ressler, waiting. "How did you
hear?" he asks Ulrich.
    "Landlady called his mother. Mother called
me early this morning."
    "Has anybody gotten in touch with his
girlfriend? Sandy? She might know
something.."
    Ulrich snaps at his stupidity in the face of
the obvious. "There is no girlfriend." Sandy
is a simulation.
    Ressler spends two days pacing between
office and lab, fiddling with beakers, doing
nothing. Ulrich distributes the official notice
through the department and announces a
memorial service to be held at the First
Church of Christ Scientist. The service is
ecumenical, so much so that it carries almost
no religious overtone at all. What's left of
Cyfer, their families, and the man's mother
comprise the entire congregation. Each team
member makes a prepared speech. Ulrich
talks about Joe's sharp mind, how quickly he
picked up the complexities of machine
programming. Woyty, on dangerous ground,
saved only by the difficulty he has
controlling his voice, remembers Joey's
pathological fear of catching cold, hints at
the irony that another virus, in the end, got
him. Botkin reads from her beloved Rilke:
Wir sind nicht einig. We do not agree. Sind
nicht wie die Zugvögel verständigt. Do not
correspond like the migratory bird. Blühn
und verdorm ist uns zugleich bewß. Bloom
and withering come on together.
   Koss assumes the pulpit, mouths the
expected homilies. She turns to descend, but
stops, unable to sit down without really
speaking. Levering was a scientist, she
insists. A scientist going after the code. And
the end of all codebreaking is to get behind
the outward trappings of a thing to
meaning. Joey lost the signal. Read the
message wrong. The congregation makes a
scuffle of collective objection, propriety
offended. Ressler alone is quiet, loving her
more than he has ever loved her for
delivering this tract and no other. Who is the
graveside speech for, after all, if not the
survivors?
   He is last, deferred to for the postlude, for
some reason. For his act of speechmaking
Ressler digs way back, into the only other
text he received as inheritance from his
parents aside from chromosomes and the
Britannica. He has, in adulthood, achieved
agnosticism, despite efforts by both folks to
steep him in doses of received scripture. But
the syntax of the Book still rattles about in
him on days like this of vestigial need. So, it
comes about, here in the pulpit,
summarizing off to his long home a man he
didn't even know except through falsified
dispatches, that the only thing he can get
out is Ecclesiastes.

           Whatsoever thy hand findeth to
         do, do it with thy might; for there is
         no work, nor device, nor
         knowledge, nor wisdom in the
         grave whither thou goest.

   Work, for the night is coming. Inarguable,
if of no practical value to Lovering now.
Each human effort and each new word
speeds the acquisition of the next. The maps
get more exact with every effort, but the key
only points out the size of the workless,
wisdomless place. He might better have
dispensed with speeches altogether, left the
work of his colleague—the saving of a few
doomed test animals by carbon monoxide,
painless, reportedly lightly euphoric—as
Lovering's lasting eulogy.
   After the service, over the subdued
hand-shaking in the narthex, Lovering's
mother approaches Stuart and takes his
forearm in her hands. "Thank you. What you
read was beautiful."
   "I'm glad you think so."
   "Joseph spoke of you many times. He
thought the world of you. 'The best scientist
I've ever met.' He told me how much he
wanted to be more like you. I'm glad you two
were friends."
   'Tour son and I," he fits together,
searching, "had a great deal in common."
Vast stretches of A,T,G,C. She kisses him
without apology. He wants to grab the
woman, shake her until she tells: why start
that cigarette? Why not extinguish it before
himself? Joey had time, all the time of his
decision. In less time than it takes a cell to
split, Lovering turned ignition and
annihilated the three-billion-year-old system.
Two more minutes to hang around and
finish the butt: what couldn't he bring
himself to stub out?
   Lovering's senseless violence will never
heal, never close over in time with new
tissue. Ressler will be permanently scarred by
that last impertinence. A cigarette, a sorrow,
a chromatic love for the things of the world
unexcisable at the last minute. A garage full
of animals mercifully gassed: affirmation, a
yes to the same free polyphony he was
sending to death. A by-product of the first,
unresolvable confusion deep down at
rule-level, the inner confines of language
where sorrow and celebration, sender,
message, and receiver collapse into the same
unlikely pattern, a pattern that knows it is
alien, impossibly unlikely, exiled.
   How easily all decisions are reversed;
everything hand might find to do is tentative
at best. He, at least, is still alive, more alive
for Lovering's annihilation. Stuart walks
home from the service in the cold air, awake,
whole, pained for feeling so. He survives the
misguided man, a distant cousin, an atavistic
trial run, a hypothesis that could not stand
the test of experience, a failed variant.
Adjacent to survivor's exhilaration, a cold
capillary fluid closes on his heart. The man
was erratic, dissolving in pain: a glance
showed it. The best empiricist in all of his
acquaintance gave no help, ignored the
long distress call to friends.
   Four o'clock the following afternoon
brings Jeanette to him. He lets her in, unable
to read the enigma of the features he prided
himself on glossing the week before. After
he commits to some deplorable pleasantry he
sees that the message is anger: soft, silent,
crying, intractable. Her rage is all for
Lovering, although it is Koss she mourns for.
The best he can do in extremity is extend the
inadequate arm of care. He attempts to
comfort her in the only dialect he is fluent in.
He strokes her, but the touch feels like his
own obit. No comfort in contact at this
minute. If they could stop for half a measure,
separate, let silence come between them,
that paraphrase might teach them what
Lovering meant, and more. But he cannot
retreat from her for any reason now. He has
only the old, obscuring burden of touching
to save them.
   "Jeannie," he says, lifting her resisting
face. "Lovering made his own decision. We
might have seen, but we didn't. Who can say
what difference it would have made, even if
we had?" The argument his viscera have
already vetoed. Jeanette says nothing. He
never imagined she was capable of such
anguish, acute grief for someone she never
cared for. "Darling, listen. It isn't up to us to
figure out why he killed himself. You said it
yourself. Joe made a framing error. He
misread the..."
   Jeannie jerks away from him fiercely. Fully
capable of defrauding her husband, Ressler,
and even herself, she will not stand for
defrauding science. "What the hell do you
know about it? You, the arch-rationalist.
Tagged, antiseptic passions. The
double-blind study! Never known confusion
in your life. Nothing a control group can't
clarify. Where do you come off making sense
of him?"
   His mouth hangs loose on the words. Her
face purple, air-starved, bruised, her features
hideous, unrecognizable in the violence she
would do him. He sees how deeply he hates
her. Hates her as in the early days all over
again, when he could not admit to need,
when he was not even significant enough to
her to be singled out for rejection. Even in
hating, he takes his cue from her. The words
for what comes next originate with her at
every step, from the day this total stranger
toweled his head dry.
   Hatred bridges what pity was powerless
to. They are both instantly in the same place.
"Get out," he whispers. "Did I ask you here?
Did I ask to be led through grubby little
liaisons? The supply closet, for Christ's
sake." Each subdued syllable leaves her
slamming a fist into her temples and gasping
for breath. "Go on! Tell me all about myself.
Make it accurate. Then get out."
   With a weird, guttural shout, she springs
on him before he can hold her off. Her nails
sink into his back and her teeth dig for a
vein. Pinning her, he discovers: not
aggression. Desperate holding on. He knows
what consolation she has come for. A
minute's embrace and she would lead him
unsteadily off again, here, on another floor,
as if their bed were anywhere the world
might let them make it. She would have them
do the euphemism as if it still had a point. As
if the act of kind still signified, still stood
somehow for kindness or could close the
gap between them.
   But the closest they will ever come is
analogy, secret writing, codes—social,
behavioral, civil, moral, criminal—constantly
garbled in the thousand signal deformations
passed from her hemispheres to his. She
makes herself a glossary on his mouth, in his
ear, asking forgiveness, tolerance,
understanding, love. Or not for these weak
analogies, spent conventions, but the
intransigent, unmappable location she
would loose herself to.
   Her grief smashes against him, a
convulsion scarier than any Lovering elicits.
It forces his chest, cuts into it with the desire
to be past things, unchanged, indifferent to
how they reveal themselves here. Toward
that one goal, he can assist her for half an
hour. He undoes her blouse, turning it down
from the curve of her shoulders as she gives,
leans into the unsheathing. Then, shocked
by his fingers' static charge, she jumps to her
feet, pulling on the slipped clothing. She
holds her hair to her head, takes a few steps
in a circle. Ressler lets his breath out, saying,
at the end of the exhale, "He's dead."
   "That isn't," she says staccato, frantic.
"That isn't it. This isn't it.
   I can't... I never meant.." Dr. Koss shakes
her fevered head, comes to a decision. She
runs for the door. He calls her, but she
doesn't break meter. The latch closes behind
her, swift and succinct. Ressler goes slack,
stretched across his front room. He feels
nothing, no loss, only the lumpectomy scar.
From first prohibited kiss he has prepared
himself for the moment when the
impermissible toxin would purge itself. But
he has overlooked this
possibility—unexplained, unilateral
panic—as too awful and obvious. He lies on
the bare floor, waiting for no explanation.
He stands, goes to the record player, creates
his own.
   There is, in the innermost core of the
work, a variation that stands apart from the
others, bizarre, instantly detectable, alien. He
heard this outcast in the litter, picking it out
from the confusion of notes the night she
brought them by, even before he could
speak a single chord of tonal language. Five
sixths of the way through the Goldberg
set—variation twenty-five—is the most
profound resignation to existence ever
written.
   He has studied music for half a year,
listened each evening, learned notation,
sight-read scores for much of the basic
repertoire. Now, after a long time away, he
comes back to this little sequence coding for
the moment of dispersion. It is the one text
that can say how he and Jeanette, by lightest
degrees, arrived at dead confusion. How
could the unsuspecting initial sarabande
possibly code for what has taken her? He
follows in memory the way they have come.
Once, he could only see it on the page. Now
he can hear. The Base is intact, agonizingly
fleshed out with chromatic passing tones.
Above the encrypted notes a slow
unraveling, shattered beyond saying, an
ineffable, searing, lost line meanders into
intervals where language cannot follow.
Push the whole sequence down a tone, fill
out the phrase with accidentals, repeat
verbatim, but dropped into a key the
chilling, unreachable nether pole from tonic.
   The four-by-four-by-four Base, stretched
out of all proportion, out of all ability of its
limpid simplicity to carry, is still there, whole,
note-for-note intact, only unrecognizable.
His ear, schooled on recent events, detects
the ancestor, the parental name now lost in
daughters. The mathematical manipulation
pushes on, farther than the bars would
permit, grinding against dissonances more
grating even than those born in his own
generation. It wanders stunted through
bleak modulations—G minor, F minor, E-flat
minor, B-flat minor—keys incredibly distant,
bearing no relation to the place where they
began and must return. As testimony to the
heart that made it, this too is scored as a
dance. What cannot be survived, cannot be
listened to, must also be danced.
   Stuart lies at the close, back against the
impossibly thin crust of earth. The column of
air pressing his ribs is no thicker. Pinned
between these sheets, he hears in this scalar
mutation what called Lovering away, what
tortures Jeannie: a sorrow that did not exist
in its parent sarabande. No math encapsules
it; no signal, no word for Not. It never was
on this earth, until twisted out of insensate
elements.
   What are these modulations after, about,
just in front of the door? Something to the
tune of how mere saying, tracing,
researching, conveying will never make the
case for existence. Days do not carry the full
conjugation table for the verb To Live. Only,
at raw moments, the imperative.
   He knows she is gone, as gone as his
office mate, as lost as his steady,
programmed shedding of cells, the tune that
twenty-five comes unspeakably close to
speaking. Departure. He hears in brief the
only home his future can ever come back to,
whatever distant relations it explores on its
long, final, unimaginable spiral deep down
into the innermost life of the hive, beyond
grief, underneath encryption.

  Disaster (conclusion)

  I cannot find it in me to keep working. The
cause is longer than this morning. I've been
racing it from the first, and I see now that it
will beat me to the finish. I've made the
mistake of reading over what I've put down
here since last June. A little lay chemistry,
evolution in outline, amateur linguistics
padded out with kiss-and-tell. The whole
ream turns my stomach to look at. It was to
be my way of learning a little about music, a
year spent listening to the composition. Now
the pattern-search is snagged on a single
fact: the best potential father in the world,
the transmissible gift of kind intelligence,
chose to die a celibate.
   "You live alone?" Todd asked him, back
when we still drank contraband wine out of
paper cups in the computer room. Ressler
lifted that familiar lip edge that said
everything and disclosed nothing. "What do
you do with yourself?"
   "1 work. 1 read what interests me. 1
garden. The seed companies send me their
catalogs, a little earlier every year."
   Todd was unrelenting that night. "If you
don't mind my asking, what do you do for
women?"
   "What have women ever done for me?"
He pressed the advantage of humor, slipped
out with an account of a recent survey of the
most desirable traits in an American mate:
"Women choosing men selected intelligence,
kindness, and money in increasing
importance. Men ranked it face, breasts, and
hips."
   He deliberately chose to sit and wait for
complete genetic dismantling. I never saw
him, until that last chance, lift his hand to
assert himself. He suppressed the choice to
breed along with the other vanities. The life
scientist, still in his twenties, turning over
flagstones in the lab, looking for buried
treasure, one day, by accident, squared up
against what all the secret writing graffiti'd
over every millimeter of the world's surface
and miles deep was saying: double faster
than you unravel.
   Even that much would have been
bearable. Even if only a simple-minded
recursion—"Copy this"—the pattern had
authored grammars so materially satisfying,
living syntaxes of such heart-stopping
choreography, that it would have been
enough to affirm life even in abstaining. The
law compelling electrons to arrange
themselves in the lowest energy
configuration, the law saying that hot had to
flow irreversibly downhill into cold, had
become so adept at local violations,
amended and invented loopholes, that the
resulting biological anarchy synthesized its
own sponsor. But he had stumbled upon
something that ruined him for procreation.
   He heard the sound—if not imbedded in
the cell itself, there in the way the program
runs—of an imperative variation stronger
than "Copy this." A countering command:
the tick of miss, of not, the leak of things
going wrong. The hiss accumulating in
transcription, like that party game of
Telephone, slowly mauling the message so
badly it no longer meant anything. Death
too was just the code's last trick to promote
divide and multiply. He listened to his cell
incorporate disaster into its plan,
synthesizing genes with no function but to
make enzymes that smeared other genes,
enhanced mutation, promoted runaway
tumor.
   Disaster says to me, softer and softer,
"Quit the typewriter. Too much has gone
wrong. You're not accurate enough ever to
put it right." I'd say my project was in crisis, if
I thought the project still existed. How can I
still mourn for a man who gave me a few
months of guarded, way-station amenities?
Why anxiety at Jimmy's stroke, incapacitated
by an acquaintance with whom I never
graduated past tenderness? Throat-choking
panic at the thought of a boy I kissed for
four abortive months at sixteen. Anger at a
devoted friend for skipping a Christmas card.
Alarming dreams of parents dead for years.
Annihilating ache for my old colleague Mr.
Scott, who knew one joke about retiring.
Everyone I've ever loved has killed me a little.
Every concert I've ever attended, every tune I
thrilled to and immediately forgot, every
book, every reference, every patron that
presented herself at my desk with every
question saying, "Solve me; you have half an
hour": decimating strokes, a swipe of God's
hand.
   I'll never solve any of it. Assembled into
oppressive full score, it whispers to me,
submits the unlivable knowledge that the
world will be recombined, more fertile than
ever after I disband. Worse, the mix will be
renewed because I leave it. More than I can
take: the stroke that erases me, the force
corrupting my message engineers creation.
   But the piece won't let me drop. The most
chromatic catastrophe ever composed leaves
me here, cashless, listening to meandering
pattern stand in for plan. Accident hums the
song it assembles, resigned beyond
listening, intervals arcing like sparks damped
in a vacuum inconceivably bigger than the
code and wanting only one thing from it.
The thing it makes me finish writing: how
that celibate, as if only waiting for the
disastrous chance, set to work living like
there was no tomorrow.



XXVI

  The Vertical File

   Ressler alone was ready. The space of a
single week showed that his slow return to
engagement had been spring training for
exactly this catastrophe. The bloom of the
last few months, which 1 had nipped in the
bud, sprang back fuller for my pruning. Todd
was set to go to the insurance company with
a signed confession and spend the next half
of his life in prison if it meant getting Jimmy
back on coverage. Dr. Ressler restrained him,
pointing out that the grandstand clean
breast would only transfer the unpayable
liability from Jimmy to the fraudulent file
manipulator.
   Ressler organized a trip to the hospital.
Todd could not bring himself to go. His need
for exoneration was so paralyzing he could
not take a step toward it. The sight of Jimmy
in that bed, in that condition, would have
destroyed any chance Franklin had of ever
living with what he had done. Dr. Ressler,
Annie, and I met by the registration desk.
When she saw me, Todd's other mate
pleaded with my eyes a moment. She came
tentatively toward me and awkwardly
stroked the hair of my forearm. She wanted
to lay her head between my breasts like a
little girl. Knocked down by the larger,
unattainable forgiveness I then needed, I
would have let her.
   But we gave no hostages to humiliation
on that trip. The hospital halls, the bald
children, the tubes jammed into bruised
faces—the entire ordeal of shame seemed, in
the company of Ressler, whom 1 had not
seen out of the warehouse since New
Hampshire, less to be endured than
understood. In the elevator, he talked to a
wheelchaired victim in the extremities of MS,
not about the man's disease or the work he
would now never do, but about the best
lines in Tennyson and which pieces of
Dvorak most bore repeated listening. When
we got out of the lift, Ressler turned and
waved as the doors closed.

  Challenge the Patient

           Challenge the patient to respond
         to one narcotic or another, strap
         him to a quantifying screen that
         feeds back digits for his number,
         root out the latinate reason from
         the multivolume tome, circumvent
         the leak or seal it, magnificently
         postpone: he, insidious, will
         choose a time that signifies at least,
         chorus to a calculated close, spread
         south like the vee of geese.

   I led them to Jimmy's room, issuing veiled
sentences meant to warn them about what
they would find. But when we got to the
room, Ressler greeted his old acquaintance
in the same voice he had greeted him in day
after day at shift change for longer than I'd
known either of them. "Hello, James.
Visitors. Oh! This bed can't possibly be
comfortable." Jimmy, seeing us, convulsed
on his good side. Whether delight or
resentment, the message was lost in the
spastic independence his muscles had
acquired. "Franklin has to man the fort,"
Ressler said. "Your being away has thrown
things up for grabs at work. He wants to
come see you soon." Not a lie. He wants; he
wants with his capacity to come see you.
   Jimmy made an awful noise, not the one
he had made for me. The contour was
different, changed, more desperate, more
out of control, less like words than the ones
he had spoken to me alone. Annie shrank
from the sound and left the room. Better to
have stayed and cried in front of the man.
Ressler leaned over Jimmy, put his ear close
as I had done, if for no other reason than to
ease the chest, lungs, diaphragm. "What was
that?" As if he'd just been caught off guard,
not paying attention. A thump in darkness,
the trickle of syllables over teeth, fricatives
ululating in rapids over the pebbles of a
streambed. Cruel, given the smear of noise,
to make him say it again. But against
expectation, Dr. Ressler turned to me after
the second burst and translated.
   "He says, 'My father died.'"
   My hands flexed automatically to grab my
neck, the escape of flushed birds. We had
had no clue, until then, of the condition of
Jimmy's mind. Only his sagged face and vocal
cords; he was trapped somewhere inside the
hull. These first words Jimmy had gotten out
since his vascular accident could not have
been more grotesque. I didn't know which
would be worse: a real death, a second
horror laid on his, or a detached, neural
wandering. Dr. Ressler leaned back down to
ask a question that never occurred to me.
"When did your dad die, James?" He
straightened and interpreted,
"Nineteen-sixty."
   Annie came back, sat in one of the chairs
by the bed. When shifting, I caught Jimmy in
certain angles—eyes alert, face at
attention—where his expression seemed
almost cogent. Was he decoupled,
incoherent, ruined, or just rubbed raw, shot
back into involuntary memory? "Mr.
Steadman," Ressler smiled, holding him
affectionately by both hands, sitting down
on the hospital bed that, while single, was
large enough for both these men. "Jimmy.
Can we get you anything?" Uncle Jimmy
trumpeted again, more sedately, a breaking
whitecap of pitch. But the professor was
growing fluent enough to be able to
understand the sentence without leaning up
against him.
   "He'd like us to tell him a story. He says
that if we give him one he'll be good."
Perhaps inept irony was still intact. Or maybe
he'd become a child. I searched Ressler for
his opinion. I looked into the face of a
biologist who thought Jimmy's request
totally understandable: anyone in the world
might one day reasonably request such a
thing. A story. And why not? "Either of you
two any good at narrative?"
   But the line between simplicity and
violence in Jimmy had been whittled
narrower than a capacitor gap. When Dr.
Ressler tried to tell Jimmy what had been
happening at the office in his absence, the
invalid flared out. His mouth hung open as
inappropriately as a vault left swinging on
its hinges. He practically howled a word that,
in its vowel at least, was clearly "no."
   Ressler appealed for help, but I could give
none. I had no idea what Jimmy wanted. If it
was really a tale with beginning, middle, and
end, I was no good to him. My skill lay in
retrieving, not telling. I could lead them to
the encyclopedia, give them the Greek
explanation for thunder or Native American
rain. I knew that legenda was Medieval
Latin, for things to be read at gatherings.
But I could not invent one. Annie grabbed a
newspaper from the stand where a visitor to
Jimmy's sickmate had left it. Thinking it was
sound he needed, she pulled a headline off
page two: "Sunni Splinter Group Shells
Suspected Shi'ite Arsenal." But Jimmy's head
snapped up. He gave her what must have
been a sidelong glare and growled. That was
no story; he was not going to be robbed of
explanation by mere reportage.
   It seemed he would only be kept in check
by a real barrier of narrative fable. He
wanted an exegesis as precise, elegant, and
exact as those old origins of thunder, evil,
rainbows, suffering. But those museum
pieces were rusted over beyond reviving.
There was a man in the room who might
make a stab at why the defective blood
vessel had burst, leaving a mind flooded.
But that wasn't the song Jimmy asked for. He
needed a more potent bedside tale. Jimmy
was pinned under wreckage, a
cerebrovascular accident that had failed to
throw him clear of the crash. He lay propped
up in bed, sense of direction destroyed, one
of those compassless whales trapped up an
illusory inlet. For some reason, even after
damage that could never be reversed, he still
wanted the sum of his experience read back
to him as an adventure.
   Dr. Ressler looked at Annie and me,
wondering why he'd bothered to bring us
along. Jimmy was growing increasingly
restive, rocking on the bed, attempting to
build up the momentum needed to throw his
feet to the floor. Ressler caught him up
gently. "Jimmy. Listen. The hospital is making
threatening noises about the bill. They've
asked your mother for proof of ability to
meet a prolonged stay." He hushed Jimmy's
long, mewled objection. "Of course that's
impossible. No one has told you because no
one wanted to upset you."
   Jimmy lay still while Ressler related the
insurance company's refusal to retroactively
reinstate him. He listened passively to the
legal counsel's opinion: the letter of the law
lay on the side of the insurers, a business
that made no provision for individual
charity. Ressler did not mention Todd's plan
to save Jimmy by confessing the deed. But
the professor did lay out something I heard
for the first time. "Don't worry about this bill
for now. Your job is to come back from this
as quickly as you can. I believe we can get
you reinstated. But don't mention this to
anyone just yet."
   The admonition made me snort in pain.
But neither man paid me any notice. They
were concentrating on each other. Ressler
began spelling out a plan so developed that
it seemed months in the making. Who knows
how much Jimmy was taking in. Ressler
leaned over his friend's crumpled side,
speaking in low tones, as if admonishing,
behave, then, and we'll give you what you
ask for. Lie still and we'll give you that story.
   The Cipher Wheel Days go by when he can
think of nothing but what he might have
done for Lovering had he been paying
attention. He does not see Jeanette; neither
can abide what they now know about the
other. In that dead period, when Lovering's
chaotic half of the office still sprawls up to
the dividing line, Ressler learns, from out of
the diminished Blue Sky, that Daniel is suing
Renée Woytowich for divorce. Impossible:
Ressler was at Woyty's the other day and
father and mother were on the floor playing
with the kid, beyond all dignity hopelessly in
love with one another and their family. All
incinerated in a matter of hours. He ought to
leave it, run the other direction. But he must
know.
   He tracks Dan down to his office, late in
the evening. Ressler knocks gingerly, hears
nothing beyond the door but canned
laughter. He goes in, circumspect and
uninvited. Woyty sits in front of the hulking,
luggable TV set that hasn't been on since
Ivy's arrival. Woyty's long fast from watching,
causing great concern at Stainer Central, is
broken with a vengeance.
   "Absolutely unavailable for chatting,
Stuart. Got to assign a number to Life of
Riley here."
   Stuart sits down and watches Jackie
Gleason play the big, bumbling, malapropian
airplane factory worker whose tag line,
"What a revoltin' development this is," has
become a national catch-phrase. After a
minute of ritual self-effacement, Dan says,
"So much for the liberal humanist theory
that what the world needs is more laughter.
America doesn't need any more
entertainment; it's entertained to the gills.
I'm panning this sucker. Straight zeros. Send
Life of Riley back to figurative speech where
it belongs." He speaks as if there's
something heroic in wandering out of the
mode shelter in the middle of the bean
curve. He fiddles with a Sputnik-sized wad
of aluminum foil strung between the rabbit
ears. "Reception's piss-poor here. Ghost so
bad it makes Queen for a Day look like the
Austro-Hungarian dual monarchy out for a
weekend."
   Ressler looks at him, neither admonishing
nor accommodating. All at once, Woyty is
volunteering all over the place. "You came
to get the lowdown on my divorce, didn't
you? Scavenger. Want to know why I'm
filing? Want to know the grounds?" Ressler
doesn't even nod. "Go ahead, guess." But
Woytowich doesn't wait. "You got it.
Infidelity."
   "Good Christ!" Ressler slams the desk,
shoots to his feet. "Don't be an idiot! One
look at her and any divorce judge would
laugh the case out of court."
   "Saying she's not pretty enough? You
wouldn't have her? Well, Stuart, I'm relieved
to hear it's not you."
   "I'm saying you're a fool. She worships
you. She's just had a child." Ressler can't say
how he knows Renée is blameless. He knows
what women in affairs look like. Dan's wife is
not one. "How could she possibly be
running around? She doesn't have time. She
hasn't been out of your sight for months."
   "Oh," Woyty answers with a placid smile.
"We're not talking about recent weeks.
We're going back into the distant past. A
year, year and a half."
   "What are you talking about? Nonsense.
Before Ivy?"
   "Stuart. Leave me be. The kid's not mine."
   "God. Don't tell me! Not learning fast
enough. You've hit a wall in the
instant-genius campaign, and the only
explanation is that no child of yours. ..." He
breaks off in disgust.
   Dan gives his evidence in monotone. "Five
days ago, Ivy and I were playing with the
letter blocks. It occurred to me that she
might not be acquiring the alphabet at all,
that I might be cuing her solely on block
color. I thought it might be fun to set up a
control, have her pick colored disks out of a
ring. She couldn't do it very well. I tried it
with some large letters and she selected
them perfectly. That didn't make any sense.
How could she learn letters and not colors? I
tried the disks again, and she was erratic.
She could do blue, black, white. But it
became increasingly obvious that Ivy could
not differentiate red from green disks
without prompting."
   "Your child is color-blind." An allele that
might not have come to the surface for years
had Woytowich not been so keen on
bestowing super-stimulated intelligence on
her.
   "I've told you. She's not my child."
   Ressler summons up the textbook
treatments of the matter. He recalls the
central irony of sight: good vision is
recessive; myopia dominant. He skims past
that irrelevance and concentrates on
remembering what he can about red-green
color-blindness. "Renée doesn't have it?"
   Daniel clucks his tongue dryly against the
roof of his mouth. "I thought you were
supposed to be the boy wonder. Don't you
remember anything from Mendel?"
   Ressler suddenly sees why the question is
stupidly irrelevant. Red-green
color-blindness is the classic example of a
sex-linked, X-linked recessive. Both Ivy's X
chromosomes must have the allele for her to
be color-blind. If Daniel isn't color-blind, his
daughter can't be. "And you don't have it?"
Ressler asks, again irrelevantly, of the first
man in downstate Illinois to have bought a
color set. "What about the autosomal
varieties? At least two different assortments,
as I remember."
   Daniel snorts. "One in several tens of
thousands. Which do you think is more
likely? A fluke mutation or a woman getting
herself plowed?" He turns away in pain, deaf
to anything further Ressler has to say on the
matter. "Too bad, too. I was looking forward
to showing her the egg-in-the-bottle in a
year or two." Science. "The potato and
iodine."
   "You're not going to ask for visitation?"
   Woyty just spins lazily toward him. "How
many times do I have to tell you? She's not
mine."
   The improbability of the event, the
lateness of the hour leave Stuart helpless.
"So what do you do now?" Woytowich flicks
a wrist toward the corner, indicating a duffel
bag and toilet kit. "Oh, no. Dan. You're not
moving in here?"
   "Just until I find a place."
   "Turning your back on them? Just like
that?"
   "They'll get half the checks."
   The next day Ressler visits Renée. The
woman assaults him with dazed protests of
innocence. "Stuart. There's never been
anyone but Daniel. Not now, not two years
ago. God. Not even before I met him."
Clearly innocent: the way she rocks the baby
between denials. She confesses to one sorry,
fully clothed grope with her thesis instructor,
momentarily aroused for the first time since
his tenure when the two of them compared
the relative merits of Volpone and As You
Like It.
   "You've told him as much?"
   "He won't listen. He has that fucking
proof."
   "He told you about that?"
   "Stuart," she says, ready to debase herself.
Her vowels caramelize. "I don't care what
inheritance says. Inheritance is w rong." He
glances down at the bright child, tilting her
head in curiosity all around the enormous
room. All right, then. He's ready to accept
the astronomical odds. But his willingness is
not at issue. Ivy babbles, grabs Stuart's cuff,
shakes it, waiting impatiently for the next
letter game. The baby, however precocious,
doesn't know what's hit her. But she is a fast
study. She'll learn in no time.
   A week later, Ressler takes his first
outdoor tomato juice in months. In vitro is
still jammed, and he has nothing to fall back
on but the torture of relaxation. Propped in
the forgotten lawn chair, he realizes that
he'll soon have been in the I-states a whole
year. The landscape is unchanged, but his
1958 debut stretch on the lawn is
incomplete. No Tooney and Evie Blake will
materialize, step out from K-53-A, glasses in
hand, having waited all winter for this first
lawn party of the season. No one will set up
a chair at Stuart's side and kick in a
conversational bracer. No decimated Woyty,
now, and Jesus: no Levering. And Koss's
awful resolve to keep away, keep from
seeing him, will be no weaker, no less erratic,
than her original passion.
   His eye scans K court, the tar-paper
triplexes. He looks across the toy town street
toward A through J. He imagines all the
doors opening at once, pouring out their
contents, Tornado Day. He animates the
imagined occupants, marches them his way,
stands them out on his front lawn tapping
an imaginary but ample keg, trading the
character flaws that are the generating spark
of all beer bashes. A neighbor who studies
wish fulfillment in corporate execs, a woman
who conditions rabbits to do this trick with a
rosary, a fellow with a theory about rag
content in Spanish Renaissance manuscripts,
another who claims he's in grad school but
whose big trick is to sing the words to the
Gunsmoke theme so fast you can't tell what
language he's in: they are all there, behind
closed doors, lined up in these row houses.
Statistics and human variability guarantee it.
   He has only to tap on any window and
they will come out, eager to meet him.
Ressler has yet to commit himself to whether
dreams carry codified information or whether
they're just electrical residue. As he nods
deeper into this one, the difference becomes
insignificant. He snaps his head up each time
it droops onto his chest. Then, from
nowhere, he sees himself staring at clarity, at
the rarest, most paradisiacal species.
   In that moment of visitation—arriving
once in a life if lucky and requiring a further
lifetime to recover—it comes to him. He is
afraid to move; the least muscle tic will
frighten the creature off. He sets his empty
glass down on the grass, taking forever to
reach ground. He lifts himself slowly from
the chair, feeling his knees infinitesimally
unbend. He stands, turns, looks: it is still
there. Everything he is after, the last bit, the
complete, documented map home, squarely
in front of him. His.
   He stays up all night hitting it, but it will
not break. He tries to knock it out of
commission by reviewing the literature, but it
stands up to the articles. The means are so
clean, so self-evident, that the suspicion that
someone must already have it sits in the
crook of Ressler's gut like a
silver-dollar-sized, swallowed acid drop. He
is waiting for Botkin outside her office when
she shows up the next morning. She's
surprised enough to know not to ask
anything until she opens the door. Stuart
makes a beeline for the couch, where he lies
back and announces, "We are so bloody
stupid."
   "Instantiate that pronoun. You and me?
The research group? The department? The
human species?"
   "Whichever is largest."
   "This," she says, her pitch cupping
upwards with each word, "is Biology?"
   He grins in a way that confirms his
sweeping generalization. "We've done the
thing exactly ass-backwards. We've done
step two, the hard part. And we've been
stuck backing up to step one, the piece of
cake. Like someone building an entire
internal combustion engine and then
serendipitously saying, 'Hey! Why don't we
put gasoline in here?' Stupid. Dumb.
Pea-brained."
   "Dull. Dim-witted. Duncical," Botkin
agrees. "So tell me." She laughs, infected
with the visitation of science, which she has
felt once before. Laughs for this young man,
for the moment of insight that will not come
in this way again.
   "Unbelievable. I designed it toward this
end. I'd already realized it would have to be
something like this. That was the whole
point of Gale and Folkes. I'd laid it out,
everything but the method itself, months
ago. But I must have..." Marveling: how
could it be? "I must have forgotten."
   "And now you've recovered?"
   And more. Romped. Routed. "You see, it
was the fault of pattern. All those months of
numerology we put in. I've been as guilty as
Gamow, Crick, Ulrich, any of them."
   "Explain yourself. Two speeds slower,
please."
   "We all wanted to make the codon catalog
conform to some kind of internal necessity.
The problem is, math does provide a few
surprising, elegant, yet irrelevant ways of
producing the number twenty out of the
numbers sixty-four, three, and four. But you
see, Nature—well, it's not even perverse,
because it's not even a noun. Nature had no
idea what we had planned for it."
   "You're suggesting that we forget your
poet's advice about forcing Homer into
English—allow the result to be less than
rapid, plain, direct, noble?"
   Ressler nods his head impatiently.
"Because no experimental evidence for
internal commas exists, we assumed a
self-punctuating code, got hung up on
catalogs where no two successive codons
create valid overlaps. The notion of a
self-punctuating, error-correcting code was
never far from my mind. It happens that the
largest possible error-detecting, self-framing
catalog is exactly twenty codons. As a result
of this coincidence, I was predisposed
against even thinking of long monomer
chains like CCCCCC. Monotonous strings like
poly-C carry no internal information. Not
worth toying with, I thought. Couldn't be
more wrong." Ressler sits up, carried forward
by excitement. "The trivial chains are our
entree into this thing."
   A slow, broad grin of understanding-
breaks out over Botkin's face. She glimpses
it. Her pleasure confirms Ressler. She could
blurt it out, fill in the missing bit herself
now. But she sits back happily, waiting for
him.
   "We have built ourselves a working in
vitro interpreter, an Enigma Machine that
converts any nucleotide chain we feed it into
the protein polymer it stands for. Oh
Toveh!" His voice is a husky, amazed low
wavelength. "Child's play. Stupid, stupid,
stupid. It really is. We've built the flower,
then discovered sun." He's come too far not
to spell out the obvious. "Grunberg-Manago
and Ochoa had polyribonucleotide
synthesis three years ago. Accidentally, but
we'll take it." He nudges the smile in her
direction, stands, spins Euclidians in the
narrow office. "Khorana has
nucleotide-building down to a science. We
can say anything we want to our little
transcriber. So we synthesize our own RNA
message, only we make it the most
simple-minded, open-throated,
informationless whole-tone shout
imaginable." In the beginning was the
Word. "We make our own gene for reading,
only we make it all of one base. We take this
constructed, monotone string—poly-C,
poly-anything— and submit it to the
protein-synthesis process. I'll wager the
remainder of my fellowship that the resulting
protein will be a repeating polymer string of
a single amino acid. We will have the first
word of the code: the codon CCC codes for
whatever poly-amino makes up the resulting
string."
   "All right," says Botkin. "We get UUU,
AAA, GGG, and CCC. Four down leaves sixty
to go." That takes care of transmuting lead
into gold. What do you do for an encore?
   Ressler's face drops before he sees that
the woman's calm is affected, her euphoria
about to blow out every pore. "The rest of
the catalog is just sweat." It is not, in fact. He
begins to see how there's always call for one
more insight, one more piece of improvised
ingenuity. But labeling, controlled
mutagen-tailoring of the submitted message,
poly-dinucleotides, combinatorics, short
chains—time-consuming, meticulous, brute
lexical mop-up will get them through.
   "Simple," she concurs. "Dr. Johnson's
dictionary." But beneath the sardonic
restraint, they both know he has done the
hard part. He has listed the set of
imperatives for lifting the curtain. Her
excitement is unconcealable, and it spills out
of her in cautionary checks. "Anyone
wishing to make a little conversation with
the angels has to remember that jeder Engel
ist schrecklich." At his blank, startled look,
she laughs and glosses, "Every angel is
terrible. You've told Dr. Koss?"
   Something, a slight rise in the woman's
cheerful tone, warns Ressler that she knows
the half of what she is asking. He feels the
last step in an untraceable hierarchy of
chemical events flush his face, conveying the
source by suppressing it. Enzyme spray laces
his central nervous system. He will not go on
this way, pretending. He cannot bear it. And
now, he need not. Heart, lungs, viscera do a
Coney Island. He is diminished, augmented
all at once, hung out on the first intervals of
a melody that pronounce him infinitely
powerful and shatteringly afraid, a pairing
he needs no code wheel to read. Promise
first. You must never die.
   Now he can promise. He can go to her,
say, "See what a flower I have found you."
No more cause, no possible loss, no need for
this denial, the refusal they have fallen into,
the separation standing in for life. She must
get free. The two of them must marry, must
make, of the time still in front of them, the
everyday miracle time already hints at. He will
go to her, tell her he has sprung through to
the far side. He holds the answer in his
hands; hers if she wants it. He will ask her
help and offer her his, daily and for good.
What will it be like then, how impossible,
necessary, and real, to be able to look up
from anything he is thinking, working on,
just look up—nothing so simple as
that—and speak to her, hear her, be with
her?
   "I haven't told her yet," he says. "But she's
next."

  Theory and Composition

     Sometimes we played a game, essentially
  Name that Tune. Our friend would
  challenge us: "A sequence please, some
  clues, But make it something from the
  repertoire I've had some chance in this
  amateur's life of having heard."

     The point was not mastery of the
  catalog, but the pleasure in quotation:
  Were we familiar with those few measures,
  a certain interval, a favorite leap; that
  abiding high G in the 'cello, surprise rising
  fifths, agitation in the reeds?

     He thought themes between us might
  make an intimacy, could be almost like
  singing. We didn't get it: "How long
  should the phrase be?" "How long do I
  need? Give it to me a tone at a time. One
  after the other; I'll stop you when I'm
  home."

     We tried him on our most obscure:
  Stamitz, Machaut, Cui. Then graduated to
  guilty loves. At last, it grew fun to see if
  Gilbert and Sullivan, slowed to a stop and
  in minor, might slip him. Or "Satisfaction."
  "Watchman, Tell Us of the Night."

   I thought: so this is melody.
   Leased office, dull mechanical hum,
irritating flicker of fluorescence, and a few
friends, stretching their vocal cords. A little
patter, a little mix of the dozen available
intervals. And out of this weight on the
chest, our desolation, came a sudden sweep,
a quick-closing glimpse of that place beyond
the incurable, where hope might Still
germinate.
   We resorted to the concert war-horses.
The point was to see how far they might be
sliced down, pared back to their essentials,
and still be recognizable. Ressler was
uncanny. Even with my feeble
approximations, he could get most of what I
knew by heart in a few pitches. Half by
reading my mind, half by the shape of the
phrase, he got Brahms's Fourth, first
movement, in four.
   The suggestion of predictability in the
masters outraged Todd. "Now how in hell,
out of all possible choices—"
   "That's just the point. Each note reduces
the choices that are left. What pitch could
possibly come after such a setup? And if you
already know the next pitch, then you know
the piece."
   Todd persisted, confused. "Tell me: could
you conceivably Name That Tune in three?"
   "Not if the notes formed an ascending
triad. The whole question is, within
acceptable tonal syntax, how likely the
sequence of intervals becomes. Where do
they point? Is the next pitch already
telegraphed? Some sequences are so free, so
without redundancy, that they might lead
anywhere. Others are more constrained.
Every melody heaps up improbability until,
by the cadence, it can only be the one thing
it is. If your three pitches were improbable
enough, they might suffice to prove the
private domain of, say, Shostakovich. Or
Dragnet"
    "And two notes, then? Still possible?"
    "Don't push your luck."
    "One?"
    "Pure potential! No edge; no message.
One note could be the start of any tune at
all."
    It took a trained reductionist, someone
who arrived at effusion relatively late in life,
to see the shape of songs governed by
information theory. Perhaps he did so simply
to lead Frank on, force him to toughen his
own indulgence toward washes of sound.
Whatever the case, Ressler tested the first,
tentative equation relating music to
constituent melody and melody to strings of
frequencies, simple sequence.

   Q: I'm just your middle-distance listener.
Forgive me asking: if it's really language, a
matter of tending toward tonic, being driven
back, how can fragments of phrase, motives,
voices stacked into chords, moments that
strain toward greater departure or return,
how can these explain, begin to account for,
the terrace of light, mottled rays guttering
back to dark, joy, loss, the scent of my own
ending in this syllable-free tune? Layman's
answer please.
   J. O'D.

   Sound, he pronounced, always means
more than it says. The parts only start to
explain the thing waiting to spring out of
them. So it is in every organized hive.
Because we live on the seam between
formula and mystery, because I can recognize
in the harmonic vicissitudes the hummable
tune is put through some similar,
metaphorical bend, music marks out the way
all messages go. Its contours deliver
themselves, bent from the chance of
experience. They live for a minute in
ephemeral pattern, then collapse back to a
uniform void that says nothing, carries no
knowledge, far less information. The silence
they fall back into, the nothing that they
contrast with, is what notes make, for a
measure, audible.
   What else is there in a melodic phrase?
However much it wrenches me on the
promise of sound, signals from a place lost
beyond recovering, a musical line has
nothing in it but notes. A choice of twelve
possible pitch-equivalents, durations scored
out by a simple-minded system of ten or so
lengths based on powers of two. What else
is there in an allegro but phrase, phrase, and
development of phrase? What is there in the
Jupiter but allegro, andante, minuet, plus
allegro? At bottom, only notes.
   But notes passed through a transforming
key: nothing is what it is except in where,
when, and how it goes about unfolding.
Push that pencil box of notes, pitch it faster,
prolong it, pinch it, prod it upwards, follow
its fall, attach it to a line, stack voices on top
of it, slacken, shift it off into unlikely
relation, let it breathe, grow, summon,
augment, enhance, startle everything around
it, and suddenly, out of those ridiculously
constrained initial building blocks, those
neutral frequencies meaningless in
themselves, with only the most elementary
grammar or enzymes to shape them:
   I am (at first modulation) coming home
late, pressed under the hot but changeable
air, studying the warnings, the bruise-blue
striations of a storm-sky. Someone—my
mother?—runs before me, entering, crashing
through the house, slamming shut windows,
spreading towels across the soaked sills. A
cascade of flats, sudden appassionato,
about-face at the double bar, and I am
elsewhere: watching frigate birds dip in a
graceful circle into fresh pools, an enchanted
oasis of animals studied through a slight
break in the vegetation.
   And yet: that's still not it, exactly. It's no
more an excuse to free-associate than it is
equations. Besides, those associations—
house, storm, birds, pool—are all too literal.
Everything Ressler ever said to us was an
exercise in how words might fit to music. But
music into words? Don't push your luck. It
will run from any description like floaters
skidding across the cornea when and only
when you look directly at them.
   Yet it is, beyond doubt, language. It may
be closer to the architectural plan for that
ruined Tower than any other available
approximation. I once read, when combing
the literature to save Jimmy from his
hemorrhage, of the way CAT scans reveal
sonatas ravishing the cerebral cortex. A
single tone shows up as stagnant Sargasso.
Scales create regular ripples of red, yellow,
blue. But tune it, trip it into a sequence,
three-three-four-five-five-four-three-two,
clothe it in vertical harmony, and it storms,
splashes across a mass of uncontrollably
firing neurons, exploding into the rose
window at Chartres.
   We know all the rules of air, but we will
never predict the weather. Something
happens on the rungs of order above the
chromatic scale; something happens
between the four first pitches and Four Last
Songs. According to the scan, even the
simplest compositional rules are enough to
awaken primitive wonder, release the brain
from the conventions of verisimilitude, free it
from its constant dictionary of
representation. But the scan shows
something even more surprising. Composers,
skilled in theory, hear music differently. CAT
profiles of their listening brains show more
verbal hemisphere activity, as if they don't
just let the associative sensations of timbre
and rhythm swell through them, but
somehow eavesdrop on a point being
argued on thought's original instruments.
Can the effect be any less beautiful for being
better articulated?
   What message could anyone hear there,
what terrible conversation except the same,
out-of-place, inexecutable instruction carried
in the Linear B script deep in the nucleus:
feel this, grow, do more with what is scored
here? Harmonize it every time you open your
throat, but know you will never come close
to saying, naming what it is.
   Even those who can look at a score, a
graph of the raw wavelengths in annotated
two dimensions, who can see an ingenious
inversion or stretto and feel there in the
soundless study a cold stab up the spinal
column, who can leap from the single cut
stone to the completed dome: even they are
not replying just to the notes on that
particular page. They are hearing in the sigh
of the appoggiatura the covert, coded, Latin
joy at the approach of the Spanish Armada
transcribed in Byrd's motet. They are
remembering Lully putting the time-beating
stick through his foot and dying of infection.
They are repenting to Mendelssohn, unable
to premier Schubert's Ninth in London
because the players wouldn't take the work
seriously. They are reliving late Beethoven's
obsession with variation form. They are
reading, where they still lie open, extant, the
notebooks in which an unbearable humanity
addressed the deaf man. They are scribbling
addenda in those notebooks, adding
unanswered questions there.
   Our game was only Name That Tune. "I
can name that tune in five notes, in four,
three." The pieces whose names Ressler
supplied had nothing to do with these
snippet clues. The real works were interplays
of huge motions, movements that stormed
inexorably toward arrival or were forcibly
restrained, parts progressing in the collision
and collusion of themes, themes that
constantly built toward breaking down,
recombining from their phrases, lines that
urged certain stabilities, expectations,
setbacks, the tendencies of chords in their
given instant, five or four or three of those
delinquent, namable, and straying intervals
sounded at once. Notes that gave nothing at
all away about the ineffable message
urgently taking shape so many levels above
them, in the weather, in the storm.
   It was a night like any other. Outside, six
blocks away, people were being murdered.
At a middle distance, rain was falling
upstate, over the border, rain that left pines
as dead as if they had been stripped for
sadistic pleasure. In the wide lens, we had at
last opened up our long-sought hole in the
atmosphere. According to best projections,
extrapolations from that week's Facts on
File, the world was moving into a terminal
late afternoon. Ressler guessed Brahms's
Fourth in four.
   We sang and quizzed and stumped each
other a few times. "No, no. Listen. This part's
beautiful. Damn, I've lost the thread. You
have to hear it with harmony; here, hold this
D." In a few months, Todd and I would split,
Jimmy would be crippled for life with a
ruptured aneurysm, and the professor would
succumb to galloping cancer. All of that lay
hiding in those melodies we had by ear. We
played name-that-hosanna, but the only
quote that lasted past that night was the
Dostoyevsky that wound up on the board: In
life, sheer hosanna is not enough, for things
must be tested in the crucible of doubt.
   Above us, well into the solar system, a
deep-space satellite drifted; in addition to
pictures of the planet we had just finished
poisoning (drawings and coded information
theoretically understandable to any alien
creature, whatever their language), it bore a
record player and recording of a
Brandenburg concerto. Colossal
misrepresentation, exaggeration, lie, really,
about who we were and what we might be
able to accomplish. Homo musica.
   But that was the language we spoke for a
night, a grammar of one trick: tension and
release. How likely is the next note, its pitch,
its catch, its duration, its tonal envelope?
Where does it need to go? What detours
must it be put through? Delays, silences, that
brief flash showing how close beauty was to
the germ of hopelessness. The poignancy of
a pattern lifted beyond identity, beyond the
thing it was mimicking, past metaphor, into
the first mystery: the bliss beyond the fiddle,
but not, for a night, beyond fiddling.
   Music was no use for anything. It would
not protect us from the disaster about to
happen, nor even predict it. It was the one
pattern not rushing to accomplish or correct
current event, not condemned to be about
anything else. It was about itself, about
singing and breaking off from song. Its every
phrase continuously flirted with the urge to
return to constituent pitch, to give up, go
back to Do. We sat quizzing, guessing,
comparing recognitions, trading affections
for certain expositions with no idea of the
development section already in store. Ressler
was as happy as a widower who, through
force of habit continuing to buy two season
tickets years after his wife had gone,
discovered that he might give one to the
child on Symphony Hall steps who until then
had had to be content with echo.
   I can still hear them, softly at night,
trickling through the open window from the
next apartment over. Those tunes still hold,
locked in their sequence like the
foundations of older temples beneath the
nave, not only the complete morphological
steps for recreating each similar April night I
have ever lived—the color, the wrap, the
attitude, the inclination, the range of
emotional casts: how I turned from a similar
window in just such a light back to a sheet
of sums that had to be completed before
bed—but also the difference, the closed
door, the knowledge that I am no longer in
any night but this.
   There is only one way for day to pass into
dark; today has done so along a predictable
sliding scale since the Precambrian. There are
only a few barometric pressures, a narrow
band of allowable temperatures. But
however reducible to parts—degree, pound
per square inch, lumen, hour by the clock,
latitude, inclination and season—however
simple and limited the rules for varying
these, something in the particular
combination of elements is, like twelve notes
and ten durations compounded into a
complex cortex-storm, unique, unrepeatable,
infinitely unlikely. Today in History: Bach
knocks out another cantata.

            I hear him listening with a
         code-breaker's urge, taking noise
         and turning it to pattern, thinking
         to find with ear and voice a
         surrogate, an emblem for the
         melody of the self-composing gene.
         The absurd conclusion I cannot
         help but reach—that singing means
         something—is rooted in Ressler's
         choice: either be a physician,
         cropping the delinquent tissue, or
         a researcher, a musician, mapping
         anatomy, the way the tissue lies.
         Two choices that amount to one
         thing. To feel the pattern flash,
         summoning an account for the
         gut-twist in a deceptive cadence. In
         either case, conspire to produce
         and deliver that new song the
         obsolete Lord requires.

  Listen and sing. That's all he wrote. And I
can name that tune in one note.
  Breaking and Entering

   "So you see, Jimmy, we'll need access."
   I listened as the professor sat on the
hospital bed and explained. It became clear
to me what he had in mind. It even became
clear to Annie, who leaned over during Dr.
Ressler's explanation and whispered, "So it's
time to get our feet dirty."
   How he could imagine that stroked and
broken Jimmy, who had wanted pitifully to
tell us of his father's death twenty years ago,
was in any shape to assist was beyond me.
Yet Ressler spoke to him without
condescension, apologizing for spelling out
the obvious. His words had a confidence in
the ability of signals to survive the shattered
receiver. I watched Ressler reach into his
jacket pocket and momentarily thought he
was about to pull out a handheld terminal
and plug it into the wall jack in that hospital
room.
   Instead, he retrieved a lower-tech spiral
notepad and flipped to a blank page. The
pad was packed with illegible scrapings,
although I had never once seen Ressler make
a single mark into anything resembling it.
   He printed methodically, in large block
letters down six columns of six, the letters of
the alphabet and the ten digits. "I'm sorry
we have to resort to this, Jimmy. But I have
to be sure we get it right." Jimmy made no
sound. I thought: He might as well be
talking to himself. "Let's start with the
operating system lockout. You lie still. When
I get to the first letter, let me know." He
smiled reassuringly, betraying none of the
hopelessness of this attempt, the only shot
we had for getting Jimmy reinstated under
the umbrella of an institution that,
understandably, had no stake in private
welfare. Dr. Ressler began at the top of the
first column, pointing to each letter and
pronouncing the corresponding name.
   I stood and walked to the door. I could
not stand to watch them get to the bottom
of the last column, Ressler pointing and
naming while Jimmy lay in confusion. Then,
an agonizing twenty letters into the list,
Jimmy made a noise. Not a howl or sigh. An
indicative yes. Ressler's shoulders dropped
in relief. He noted the letter and brought his
pen back to the top.
   It was a grueling process, and Jimmy had
to rest twice. But after the first letter, we
were home. Jimmy gave us dozens of crucial
bits of information—passwords, memory
locations, patch names— that until then had
been the secret domain of the Operations
Manager. Whatever else the flood of blood
had wiped out—muscular control, speech,
emotional perspective—it left Jimmy still able
to remember the system words Ressler was
asking him to spell. Nowhere in the dialogue
was the message passed, "Betray your
professional confidences, look the other way
while we break the law, and we will do what
we can to keep you from being killed."
Ressler said only the letters of the alphabet;
Jimmy made only grunts. But the
transmission was there, intact, awful in its
implied risk. Uncle Jimmy was the classic
Picardian third: minor his whole life,
promoted to major at the last chord.



XXVII

  The Goldberg Variations

   Its published name is wildly unassuming:
"Keyboard Practice, Part IV. Composed for
music lovers to refresh their spirits." One of
only a handful of his thousand compositions
to be published in his lifetime, in a form he
never cared for, although perfected here.
   Bach's first biographer tells the story,
already thirdhand, of how Count Kaiserling,
former Russian ambassador to Saxony,
employed a young harpsichordist named
Goldberg, one of Bach's star pupils.
Goldberg's duties included making soft
music in an adjoining room on those
frequent nights when the Count had trouble
sleeping. The Count commissioned Bach to
compose for Goldberg something "of a soft
and somewhat lively character," to assist
against this periodic insomnia. A musical
calmative, a treatment that now consists of
two tablets and the low drone of talk radio.
   Theme and variations, a form limited to
"the sameness of the fundamental harmony"
throughout, was just the ticket: sedative,
soporific permutations jumping like counted
sheep over a stile. From beginning to end,
the Goldbergs were conceived, if not as an
attempt to sing the listener to sleep, as a
catalog that would at least keep the
sleepless sufferer company, to hold at
theme's length the nightmare of
wakefulness. The best one can be is either
doctor or musician. Both, if possible.
   For this work, legend has it, Bach was
rewarded with a goblet of one hundred gold
louis, more than he was paid for scores of
other works combined. The ambassador got
off cheaply, taking possession of one of the
supreme works in music history. Throughout
the rest of his life, he referred to the piece as
if it were his own composition. "Dear
Goldberg, do play me one of my variations."
   So much for the reading tale. The stuff any
librarian can turn up. As for the architecture:
the Goldbergs are twice as long as any
previous variation collection. They form the
most virtuosic and demanding piece for solo
keyboard in any form until middle
Beethoven. The set is built around a scheme
of infinitely supple, proliferating relations.
Each of the thirty is a complete ontogeny,
unfolding until it denies that it differs at
conception from all siblings by only the
smallest mutation. Together they achieve a
technical inventiveness and profundity
unsurpassed in the rest of music, a catalog
hinting at every aspect of tonal experience.
   And the whole archive is hatched from an
insipidly simple theme. One musicologist
tried to convince a fellow scholar that the
germ aria, a heavily ornamented period
piece, was not even Bach's own. The
eminent colleague disappeared into his
study, emerging some time later (like Von
Neumann affirming the obvious) shaking his
head. "You're right. It's a piece of French
fluff."
   Bach's first act out of the block is to strip
down this aria bacterium to its even simpler
bass. For the longest time, until Ressler
pointed it out, I couldn't hear how the
wayward offspring had anything to do with
parent. That's because the variations aren't
descended from the aria per se. Rather, the
aria itself is just another variation, built
upon the all-generating, sarabande Base:




   The Goldbergs are not even variations in
the modern sense, but an imperceptibly vast
chaconne, an evolutionary passacaglia built
on the repetition and recycling of this Base.
Music that goes nowhere, that simply is,
hovering around the fixed center of diatonic
time.
   A line of pitches can be heard as a melodic
sequence or as a series of harmonies. Bach's
Base is both, at times even hybridizing
horizontal and vertical. As with 90 percent of
standard tonality, it is no more than an
exploration of the possibilities hidden in the
scale. The sequence is symmetrical to an
extreme: two paired, complementary halves
of sixteen notes each. Each half comprises
four similar-shaped paired phrases—tension,
release, tension, release—four notes long.
Each pair of four-note phrases creates an
eight-note harmonic section, four in all,
tracing the fundamental journey from tonic
to dominant to relative and back to tonic.
Sixteen twos, eight fours, four eights, and
two sixteens: with repeats, the trip from
home and back takes sixty-four notes.
   Dr. Ressler—already fighting gnostic
tendencies—must have loved discovering in
Bach two paired strands, four
phrase-building blocks, a sixty-four-codon
catalog. Bach had a habit of imbedding
mystic numbers in his compositions; these
ones happen to correspond to the
number-game nature imbeds in its own. But
this coincidence was the least of the
qualities that made this music Ressler's best
metaphor for the living gene.
   I begin to hear, too late, how the Base's
symmetry ripples through the piece,
unfolding ever-higher structures, levels of
pattern, fractal self-resemblances. Having
made my layman's survey of the synthesis his
science was after, I begin to hear in this
encyclopedia of transcription, translation,
and self-replication something of the catalog
he carried around inside of himself for a
quarter century.
   Like the master molecule and its living
scaffolding, the Goldberg schema is a
self-spun hierarchy. First: the transcription of
the Base into each variation, even those
transposed to relative minor, is faithful,
either note for note or harmony for harmony.
Oh, it strays from its source, sometimes
implying the sarabande while straining to
leave it, sometimes filling out the step with
jarring accidentals. At times it too becomes a
new thing, a new theme, overhauled for all
its treading water. But the basic sarabande
bass, its thirty-two-note journey, completely
informs each child, in turn thirty-two
bar-equivalents long. The code is universal
throughout creation.
   The variations unfold a second level of
emerging pattern. Every third variation is a
canon, a strict imitation of staggered voices.
"Row Row Row Your Boat" self-replication
taken to terminal degree. In the first canon,
the duplicating voice begins on the same
pitch a measure later. In the second canon,
the interval between voices is a second: the
replication begins one tone higher than the
original. The third canon is a canon at the
third, and so on through every interval of
the major scale plus one—the same scale the
theme is built upon. Two canons occur in
inversion: whatever happens in the first
voice is mirrored upside down in the second.
A rising interval is answered by equivalent
fall. But in all the canons the situation is the
same; the melody harmonizes not with
another tune but with itself, a replica of its
immediate past and future.
   The second voice in every canon is
determined: the template first voice
right-shifted, transcribed into new scalar
position. Two copies twist about each other
with helical precision, at ever-increasing
steps, coding for their own continuation.
Some of the canons are content to be
canonical: the template is still audible when
the replication arrives. Others push the
form's limits, holding a note away from
falling into a single voice or mapping out
intervals so dissonant that each constrained
part seems to insist on its own, discrete
decisions—strict, deterministic
contrapuntalism forcing freedom.
   In each canon but one, strict imitation
takes place over a third, persistent, unifying
voice across the widening intervals. The
second level of order enfolds the first:
underneath each canon, the original Base
matrix continues to churn. Canons at every
scalar interval arch across the work like a
giant backbone. But at each vertebra, the
canonic lines are tied into position by the
spinal cord of a theme that released them,
the last to anticipate what spreading
skeletons swirl around it. In the final
canon—the replication at the ninth, the
interval beyond the octave—the imitative
voices draw up into their tag the contour of
the Base itself.
   That much, already a tour de force of both
conception and execution, would have easily
engaged Ressler the scientist and
pattern-seeker. But the primary structure of
informing theme and the secondary
emergence of canons at increasing intervals
does not yet account for his lifelong
devotion to the piece. A third level of
structure, emerging after a week of my
nonstop listening, hints at the successive
layers of fascination peeling from the piece,
bringing the man constantly back to listen,
to make his next discovery.
   I have just come to hear how the
variations group locally, how they arrive in
threes, triplet codons together spelling out a
fundamental word of human experience. The
third of each set is a canon, as the second
level of ordering dictates. But after the first
triplet set, a regular rotation also generates
the form, color, and scope of the other two
members of the triplet. The first of each
codon is a dance, strikingly rhythmic or in a
unique musical form. These moments of
clarity are followed by brilliant duets,
outbursts of virtuosic display, two-manual
arabesques tearing across the keys. Dance,
arabesque, canon: the variations produce a
triangulation of feeling, sensing, and
thinking that could only have arisen from a
three-chambered arrangement of body, soul,
and mind in perfect coordination. Harmony
consists of propositions about harmony.
   The dance variations explore a variety of
musical genres: a complete, compact fugue
without episodes. An outrageous French
overture, that most stylized of Baroque puff
pieces, opening with a vertical flourish in the
jungle of surrounding counterpoint and
proceeding with eighteenth-century
aristocratic optimism. A vigorous,
syncopated alia breve. A four-voice
stretto-fit of well-being over before you can
say hallelujah. Two transcendent adagios,
one in poignant, resigned major, the other a
heart-stabbing minor where every pitch in
the chromatic scale puts in an appearance,
the two together an unendurable duet of
deliverance wedded to dissonance, promise
unwinding in pain.
   Each of these formal dances is built upon
clear renditions of the Base. The difficulty of
satisfying the constraints of variation within
the bravura of overture or the rigor of fugue
is considerable. But more disconcerting than
the technical accomplishment is the plan.
Take the variation number and divide by
three. If the remainder is 1/3, the piece is a
formal genre or dance; 2/3, and it's a toccata.
No remainder, and the piece is a canon built
on the interval given by the quotient.
   Each dance stands in utter emotional
contrast to the previous canon. And each is
followed by a two-manual tear that draws
the ear up in a second reversal of decision
upon appeal. This constant broadening of
technical and emotional contrast must have
taken Ressler years to train for: each
variation is so arranged to throw off the
spell of the previous, and before the ear has
time enough to savor any crystallization of
mood, a reaction at once pitches the listener
into new tempi, meters, and melodic figures
probing radically opposing kernels of
feeling, pulling open the full complexity of
the piece, the inexhaustible variety extracted
from the modest four-by-four-by-four
sarabande. Each variation asserts its own
myth, its own melody, its lack of precedent.
Yet underneath, shining through each
arpeggiated outburst, the theme asserts
itself as master gene.
   My attending ear learns not to give over
entirely to the sorrow or exuberance of the
moment. The most stupendously brilliant
piece in the set is also a premonition of the
emotional devastation that must follow. The
variations each announce the consequence
each itself creates. Just after a variation
harboring harmonies that will not surface
again until this century comes the most
rococo of diversions. Grief spills over into
buffoonery. Every beauty has its bitter
answer. Yet each reversal doesn't dispel its
sibling. They are all obedient, first-filial
offspring of the same parent; while different
phenotypes, they carry the same
underwriting code. They exist side by side,
superimposed in my unforgetting ear,
apparent incommensurates, but one at the
core.
   And they are a unity in a way that becomes
clear to me only as I discover an even higher
order of order imbedded in the set. The aria,
itself just another organism synthesized from
the Base, is repeated—completely
overhauled, although note for note the
same—da capo at the end. So there are not
thirty but thirty-two variations in the set, one
for each measure in each variation, for each
note in the generating Base. Any
reductionist attempt to capture the work in
its understandable particulars, dropping
from the set down to the variation down to
one measure, produces a germ that is not a
part of anything but a microcosm of the
infolded whole.




   The theme is all thirty-two notes, the
Goldbergs, all thirty-two variations. Each
moment is a miniature globe, an encoding of
everything above it., The Goldbergs are
layered all the way from bottom to top and
back down again, with every layer of
ordering—from canonically entering canons
to contrasting triplet groups, from note to
measure to line to variation to entire work
and back to note—contributing to,
particularizing, and lost in the next rung of
the hierarchy it generates.
   But the severe mathematics of recursive
architecture are lost in the first ornament of
aria. By the time the potential of the original
sequence emerges, no ear can trace any but
the faintest line of that all-embracing
ground plan. No; Ressler was not listening
to inversions and midpoint symmetries and
numerologies and the closing of the diatonic
circle. He was following the death of his
friends, listening to how love fled,
anticipating the dissonance of Jimmy's
crippling, detecting and replaying his own
departure from science: hearing, in the
descent of four notes from Do, the script of
life's particulars, brute specifics that too
often became too much, too full, too awful
to bear, too unendurably, transiently
beautiful.
   The canons proceed beyond the octave,
start all over again at the ninth, as if to
suggest, "We could do this for eons." The
Goldbergs threaten to expand the modest
four-note germ of the thirty-two note Base
to the scale of infinite invention, a perpetual
calendar. I hear Ressler talking to his love
every night for thirty-two years, using no
words other than those built on the alloted
four letters, and never exhausting all he had
to say to her. Once a grammar passes the
complexity threshold, no algorithm can list
all possible well-formed sentences. The
diversity of language defies physical law, or
rather, endless sentence-generation displays
law in a new, unprecedented predication.
   Sufficiently complex, the Goldbergs no
longer know their own sarabande. They are
no longer about permutation, manipulation,
pattern. They are about the bliss of the sixth,
the cut of the seventh, this drooping
cadence, the suspension selecting for sorrow
or serenity, a snowed-in weekend, late
nights of conversation, anger,
abandonment, disaster, the decision to act,
to rejoin for a last moment the condition of
human politics, a brute insistence
modulating worlds from G before coming
home. The Goldbergs reach the threshold
where each variation denies that it is a
variation. And at that point, they no longer
are.
   Like proliferating species, the variants do
not improve or advance. There is no
question of progress here. Under the
pressure of evolutionary restlessness, they
simply spread out across the map of
available biomes, unearth more of the
embedded germ material, bring some as yet
unrealized alternative—similar to all others,
only different—into existence. The
sarabande is never escaped, however much
migration takes place. Its shape squarely
inhabits mid-measure. It may wander freely
across voices and beats, be for a few bars
almost unbearable. But it is always there. The
distance between any two incarnations is
immense, as wide as the immigrant's awe at
native idiom. It is improvisation in here
tonight. We listeners can do nothing but
stand back and wing it as it wings. Where
will the next dance step come from, the next
flying arabesque, the wilder, more cunningly
contrived canon?
   More than enough room in this world for
him to move around in, respond to, to laugh
at, to feel the quick, sure flash of
recognition. He could hear in it not just the
faithful transcript of lost love, his early work
on the coding problem, the years of
obscurity, and the premonition of a few
affectionate months with us, the first . hint
of what today in history would call him to.
The sound was also an invitation to run this
experiment of independent parts— crossing,
racing, colliding, mimicking, moving in
contrary motion, teasing each other into
brighter, freer passages, informed by what
has passed and what is still to come. The
variations are the working out of that
instruction, buried deep in the Base string,
that commands itself to translate, to strain
against the limits of its own synthesis, to test
the living trick of Perhaps, to love.
   It is, as the young pianist on Ressler's
thirty-year-old recording proclaims in the
liner notes, music with no beginning and no
end. Music of no particular style or period:
its eighteenth-century decorum constantly
upset by backward glances and embryonic
predictions—by turns monkish cloister,
Renaissance brass, skittish romantic soaring,
and the jarring atonality of my own evening.
Darwin might have found his elusive
pangene, if he'd only looked in the right
place: higher up, deeper down, outside the
cell, in the codes the cell creates and sends
out to probe and describe its inexhaustible
world.
   The variations take on the language of the
time and place they require, obeying no
formal principle except the continuance of
their parent. Conflicting musical ideas tear
across the page, from the page to the keys,
and the keys to the ear—rising into free-fall,
daring chromatics, turning triolet shorthand,
leaning, crashing in exhilaration, creeping
meekly across the keyboard, descending to
earthy folk song, daring the dead stop of
anguish. The Base on which the entire piece
is built, while everywhere manifest, loses its
original, independent identity. It is
subsumed in the general fanfare, swallowed
up in invention, changed in the
accumulation of minute mutations. Its
sequence becomes a sustained pedal point,
a repeated, ultimately stationary strain that
changes as all else changes around it.
   And the immense set as a whole becomes
a scalar expansion of the sarabande, each of
the thirty-two notes enlarged into thirty-two
variations that are themselves, apart and
together, a macrocosm of a single idea.
Nowhere in the patterned sequence is there
the remotest suggestion of what might arise
out of it. To try to locate, in the thematic
germ, what Ressler spent a life listening to
would be to search in those schematics—line
drawings showing every subassembly of
every carburetor part—for a semblance of
the functioning car. The germ shares
nothing with its inheriting variations except
the investing metaphor at the heart of life.
   Yet the only way over the threshold, down
into the full sound he heard, lies along this
line, parallel to the one connecting organism
to circulatory system to heart to chamber to
valve to pumping muscle cell to nucleus to
copy of the master theme. The line sought by
the systematic researcher. The thing he
hoped one day to uncover on the ancient,
battered disk he toted around his entire
adult life, the thing every beat of the piece
encoded, the thing he was living, the set
inside him: the infinitely pliable four-note
theme.
   Ultimately, the Goldbergs are about the
paradox of variation, preserved divergence,
the transition effect inherent in terraced
unfolding, the change in nature attendant
upon a change in degree. How necessity
might arise out of chance. How difference
might arise out of more of the same. By the
time the delinquent parent aria returns to
close out the set, the music is about how
variation might ultimately free itself from the
instruction that underwrites it, sets it in
motion, but nowhere anticipates what might
come from experience's trial run.
   The relentlessly repeating thirty-two-note
Base traces out that same unintentional
contradiction in terms that Dr. Ressler read
to us from the operations manual on the
night we sat down to commit our crime.
"These two procedures are exactly similar."
"Exactly similar" elicited a laugh. But
shouldn't "the same" get the same? "A is
the same as B." Impossible. What Ressler
listened to in that tightly bound,
symmetry-laced catalog of unity was how
nothing was the same as anything else. Each
living thing defied taxonomy. Everything
was its own, unique, irreducible
classification.
   The Goldbergs were his closest metaphor
to the coding problem he gave his life to
studying. Exactly similar, with one exception.
Bach liked to inscribe his compositions with
the triplet SDG, Soli Dei Gloria. To God alone
the glory. Even this secularly commissioned
soporific possesses the religious wonder at
being joyously articulate, alive to extend the
pattern. But in Ressler's hierarchy of
transitional rungs, the thing beyond the
composer, on the other side of the threshold
from articulate breath, was only dumb
designless matter, arising from and led only
by the shape of experience. The world's
pattern was not assembled for the mind's
comprehension; rather the other way
around. And that made the metaphor more
miraculous.
   To play the piece—to buzz the length of
the keyboard for an hour, to barrage, to
cross over, careen dangerously—requires
only a feat of digital dexterity. Just hit the
right notes at the right time, and the thing
virtually plays itself. To compose it, Bach
insisted, required only that one work as hard
as he did. To hear in the organizing software
the unique, unspecifiable odds against any
metaphor ever arising on this earth out of
nothing, out of mere notes, requires
something more. It needs the conviction, in a
third favorite phrase of the provincial
choirmaster, that all things must be possible,
sayable, particular, real.

  A Terrorist's Primer

   When we returned to MOL from visiting
Jimmy, Dr. Ressler set to work on the
second-to-the-last experiment he would ever
be involved in. He laid out the contour of his
plan. "What we're looking for is a program
exactly similar to this operating system." The
work required over the next several days
steadied Todd, gave his hands something to
eradicate. We all resolved to do anything
needed to keep from abandoning Jimmy to
the world.
   The office was in a shambles since Jimmy's
stroke. The daily processing was getting out,
but only just. The day shift ran on automatic,
and the least irregularity would have
chucked the whole operation into chaos.
While Jimmy's crippling was still novel
enough to play on imaginations, the staff to
a person worked until the work got done,
without compensation. But gradually
imagination failed, folks tired of reality, and
self-interest set in. Management appointed
an "interim" replacement, more eager than
competent. And under this blanket of
confusion, Todd and Ressler, never very
supervised to begin with, had free rein to
implant our seed into the on-line processing.
   MOL had been suspicious enough of the
original irregularity to begin inquiries,
inquiries quickly and discreetly canceled in
light of their role in Jimmy's stroke. The
insurers had dodged a million-dollar bullet;
the chronology of Jimmy's skipped premium
and high-profile disaster was drilled into
them. All surreptitious attempts to backdate
reinstatement, to sneak Jimmy in the
electronic side door, were out of the
question.
   Frank, getting the gist of Ressler's plan,
wanted to dispose of it in favor of the less
subtle, more expeditious, full-frontal
approach. "The easiest thing in the world:
we buy a bulk tape eraser from the hobby
electronics store, change the combinations,
barricade ourselves in, take a few Master File
packs hostage, and give them forty-eight
hours to cover the man's indefinite hospital
stay."
   Dr. Ressler's eyes measured the extent of
Frank's desperation. For a moment, he
seemed about to attack. Instead, he relaxed
and lit a cigarette. "Ah! The postwar
solution. No, we're too close to terrorism as
it stands. We can do this thing more
effectively without violence or property
damage." He shrugged, having said
everything needed about the superiority of
legitimate retaliation. And Todd acquiesced.
   Combining the words supplied by Jimmy's
horrifying dictation with their own batch of
gradually acquired contraband knowledge,
Dr. Ressler and his graduate assistant went
to work on a last recombination. They raided
the program listings room and before the
new manager could reinstate punch-lock
security, they copied all the sections of the
system software they needed, stashing the
copies each night in the bottom of
stockroom supply boxes.
   For all they had taught themselves about
how the system worked, how to make it
jump through hoops, they now had to figure
out why it did what it did, to trace its
internal logic at machine level. For four
nights running, program listings littering the
computer room, they dissected the routines
and procedures. They raced the clock.
Jimmy's mother had seen a lawyer, who had
convinced the increasingly nervous hospital
to restrain itself and keep the man stabilized
under care while his mother looked into
every conceivable financial strategy for
meeting the unmeetable bill. We had no idea
of how much time we had for the delicate
surgery we meant to pull off.
   I was there every night. I hunched over the
listings alongside them, threw in my guesses
as to what fit where, ran back and forth to
the massive, meter-long documentation
manual. They accepted my help, but when
they talked, they clearly talked to each other.
They were men, in the end, and had begun,
in challenge, to discover just what the other
might be capable of. When their eyes locked
on a piece of particularly tangled code, I
could sense that they threw themselves into
the untangling not just for Jimmy but to earn
and keep the love of the other.
   In addition to helping speed things up, I
wanted to leave my fingerprints in the affair,
to stand implicated alongside them. Dr.
Ressler allowed me that chance, giving me a
list of two dozen credit unions and financial
institutions, all clients of MOL. I was to check
Who Owns Whom, and establish which if
any had parent-child connections to the
insurance company in question. He wanted
to make his bullet as precise, discriminating,
and manageable as possible. "Oh," he
added, as I left to do the assignment. "We'll
also need your entire index card collection
from the last five years." I laughed.
   The financial audit was trivial but
surprising. A few hours of legwork in the
stacks confirmed the classic postindustrial
para-noiac's fantasy: four of the two dozen
names on the list belonged to the same tier
of the same sprawling hierarchy of
ownership as our insurance company target.
"I thought we might snag a couple," Dr.
Ressler said mildly, when I gave him the
results that evening. "Contracts and
kickbacks tying together one big happy
family."
   "I personally think the Trilateral
Commission is behind us all," Todd said, not
lifting his head from the listing where he
traced calling routines with colored pencils.
   Dr. Ressler chuckled. "Maybe. The world
certainly is more connected than anyone
supposes. Perhaps in another few years,
we'll all be owned by one little old lady in
Kansas City." He thanked me for the work.
Looking over the list of linked businesses,
he grew apprehensive. "Can you get names?
Addresses?"
   "Child's play," I assured him. What could
be simpler?
   "And the quote cards? Your collection of
'Today in History'?"
   "You really want those? I thought you
were joking."
   "Not at all. They're instrumental."
   I brought in my massive card box the
following evening, years of trivia typed up
on three-by-fives. He sat down with me and
in fifteen minutes taught me the criterion by
which I could divide the stack into two piles,
Yes and No. In the samples we sorted
together, one by Swift caught his eye. Dr.
Ressler instantly taped it to the front of the
CPU. It inspired him throughout the most
difficult parts of subsequent decoding:

            I have heard of a man who had a
         mind to sell his house, and
         therefore carried a piece of brick in
         his pocket, which he shewed as a
         pattern to encourage purchasers.

   After they had deciphered the system
logic, Dr. Ressler duplicated the relevant
programs and data files. Then came the task
of building the mutation, the exactly similar,
only different system. Ressler carefully
selected locations where they might place
the needed patches—electronic detours and
amendments. The point was to make their
baby look, feel, and behave exactly the same
as the template, the original operating
system. But be the serpent underneath.
   It seemed to take weeks. Every night I
arrived expecting to hear that Jimmy had
been turned out, that the hospital was suing
his mother for immediate payment, or that
our project to avert that scenario had been
uncovered. In reality, the insertion of
program patches went quickly, and the bulk
of the replacement code actually got written
in the few days between the founding of the
Library of Congress on April 24 and the
combined Lusitania sinking/Nazi surrender
on May 7—8.
   Live testing of the
modifications—bringing them on-line on
scores of remote terminals—was the most
difficult and dangerous part. An
insignificantly small alteration, whose logic is
impeccable in isolation, can have unforeseen
consequences that multiply out of control
when dropped in the middle of a complex
system. It came down either to testing a
number of changes in one batch, which
increased the chance of untraceable bugs, or
to tracing the effects of single differences,
which took far more time and showed little
about the combined behavior. And each
on-line test increased the odds of our being
discovered.
   For live testing, Annie was indispensable.
As a remote terminal user herself, she could
report to Dr. Ressler the effects of the
modifications at a typical station. She could
also enter keystrokes remotely, sequences
that triggered a routine, set in motion as if
by accident. This made it possible to invoke
and trace changes during a normal day
without irregularities back in the computer
room. Annie did this in full knowledge of
the risks, aware that her complicity violated
the state criminal code if none of God's own
minor statutes. We each loved Jimmy after
our own fashion.
   The operation involved some degree of
what white-collar espionage calls
backstopping: dummying up the record after
the fact. Todd, the artist, enjoyed this part:
creating on the text editor bogus console
logs that looked exactly like real ones.
Faking labels and directory histories for the
packs they experimented on. Going into the
low-level driver software and altering the
dates on modified files. "Do you remember
that Holmes story where the bad guys create
the complete, simulated, subterranean bank
vault one story above the real one? That's
what we're up to. Hijacking an entire office."
   I hadn't seen him in such spirits since
Jimmy's stroke; no, before—since we began
living together. As they closed in on
debugging the last subtle change they
meant to introduce into the machine, I saw
how much the two of them enjoyed the
work, enjoyed one another, the exertion. It
was an elaborate game, an intellectual
challenge, momentarily divorced from
real-world consequences, the emergency
motive. They got carried up in the charge of
making it work, making it ingenious. The
life-or-death matter became play, lab for
lab's sake: what would happen if we put the
patch here? Wouldn't it be prettier if we
rebuilt the allocation table? Why not read
the records directly from the cross-index?
   They were both vital for a few days. Strong
and inventive with effort. Alive. Franklin
earned momentary respite from feeling that
he'd personally crippled Jimmy. And Dr.
Ressler had, here at the end, finally found an
outlet, a call to put to use that superlative
skill in pattern-searching and manipulation
that had always been his second nature. The
young post-doc would never, in a lifetime,
have imagined this experiment. But after a
long detour, it was his belated return to
biology. To Life Science.

  Canon at the Ninth

   He leaves the Biology Building, walking
slowly, too slowly to get anywhere, strolling
into the middle of the place he's been trying
to reach from the start, from before
childhood. The last click of in vitro
reverberates in his head with the clang of a
meter-thick cell door being thrown wide
open. Sprung in the open air, he explores its
layout, feels its foliage, wholly foreign yet
still familiar. The landscape he has lucked
into is wider, more surprising than he ever
imagined. A difficult passage in arriving,
blind alleys and doublings back that he
could never retrace, reroute, so obvious is
this place in retrospect.
   Ressler feeds into pedestrian turbulence,
the passing hour between classes. People
scowl at him for failing to get out of their
way, or smile tolerantly at his distraction. He
cannot quite take in his breakthrough,
cannot believe that his own mental
construct— string-and-cardboard mock-up,
manipulation of the available tools—has led
him to this threshold. Research, that
inefficient recombination of insufficiencies,
has rewarded him with the one prize every
researcher lives for but never expects: a
chance to locate part of the palpable world's
terrain, to summarize some fraction of the
solidity that cares nothing for theory, to say
something definitive about their real home,
to speak some word about the grammar
carried around in every oblivious mote,
down there, inside.
   His idea is simplicity itself: they must feed
the in vitro decoder a stripped-down signal
of their own devising that will yield a
message beyond ambiguity. The peal of the
carillon just now breaking out of the
university bell tower rings a change in him,
slows his walk further. The waves of enabled
air circle him, bang up against one another,
create in him a standing crest of
astonishment and gratitude. He cannot
accept his good fortune, the odds against it.
For a moment, he has been appointed
caretaker of the entire, immensely delicate
experiment, trustee of the living possibility.
Whatever happens from here, he will be glad
to have—well, just this once—to have made
a joyful noise.
   The decoding can be done. He glimpses
the necessary process and knows it will
work. What's more, this afternoon, walking
aimlessly across the quad in May air, Ressler
understands that this work, the lookup
table—that rung of the hierarchy linking the
life principle with slavish molecular
mechanics—will, the minute it is published,
be turned to further work, extrapolated,
taken farther afield than he can now guess.
Ideas are as self-exploiting as tissue.
Everyone ever pressed into service—Mendel,
Avery, Crick, Cyfer—is but a primitive
precursor. The problem each has worked on,
the postulate passing through their hands,
mutates with every generation. It must, to
remain viable. The concerns of those
working on the codon table will soon
appear as blunt and unsubtle as those old
biological models of animism and
spontaneous generation.
   The future of his science sweeps across
Ressler with physical certainty: in a very few
years, the Sunday-school work of
cryptography will go public, enter
commercial politics. Too much need always
hinges on knowledge for it ever to remain
uncorrupt, objective, a source of meditative
awe. After wonder always comes the
scramble, the applications for patents.
Perhaps, he thinks, unable to keep from
grinning at the oblivious undergrads who
pass him under the sycamores, it won't be
patents at all. Perhaps it will be copyrights,
like books and magazines: genes written,
amended, and edited like any other text.
Only alive. Cold goose flesh runs up his back
at the word that profit requires and biology
refuses to mention: improvement.
Everything life has ever been, this
magnificent accident of doubling, error, and
feedback, changes forever in this minute,
makes an incalculable macro-step of fatal
evolution here, now, as he walks across the
quad.
   Yes, the message has changed before,
momentously. The marshaling of the
organelles, the development of the
eukaryotic membrane, energy by ingestion,
colonies, differentiation, the notochord, the
brain, the first croak of distress, courtship,
self-expression: the word has always been
permanently restless, wanting only to repeat
imperfectly, recast what it has been until
then. Life can't be protected against a fate
it's coveted from the beginning. But this
break is something else again. Angelic,
catastrophic, unprecedented except in the
origin. Life is passing the second threshold,
emending the contract. The next generation
will wrap their opposable thumbs around
processes he can't even begin to conceive.
What can be filled in of the map will be filled
in.
   Worse: everything that can be done to the
process will be done. The thing the adaptor
molecule has for billions of years tried to
articulate will, in the last click of the second
hand, be channeled into massive habitat
clearance, would-be property improvements,
trillion-dollar toxicity, terminal annihilation.
A million species lost irretrievably by the time
he dies, an acceleration of slaughter that can
only be ignored by an effort of will. One
species a day, soon one an hour, one a
minute. Not research's fault per se, but tied
to the same destructive desire to grow, be
more. And in return—he can't grasp the
grotesque trade-off—a few new species that,
for the first time in creation, can be signed
by the artist.
   The realized ability to masquerade as the
creator—not achieved this week yet, but
certainly next—this slim, second shot at the
garden calls out for nothing less than a
complete, instant maturation. Anything short
of the creator's wisdom will chuck us into
chaos. Ressler skims his eye across the open
space of this campus: a quaint building for
math, another brick Georgian for music, a
curious, classical colonnade for English
literature. Clearly, we lag behind ourselves,
knowledge always hopelessly outstripped by
available information.
   At one end of the trimmed rectangle, in
front of the auditorium, a boy and girl, both
sweet-and-twenty, stand propping their
bikes, one's thighs brushing the other's.
Each pretends they are talking. Neither
admits the real issue, both crazy with spring,
aroused to inchoate blur by sap-distraction.
These two children will be first-time lovers
tonight, find a way to violate the segregated
dorms. Neither realizes the historical moment
they inhabit—the sad potential, the willful
waste of it. They may never know the place
the way he does in this minute, wider,
stranger, more calamitous than he
suspected, the place research from the first
has been desperate to reach. They will feel
rushing finality in everything they do
without ever being able to name the utter
change in life's program that researchers at
their own school have set inexorably in
motion.
   He weighs the odds against the day being
saved by the arrival, in the nick of time, of
that judicious, adult nature that must
accompany this discovery. No chance. They
are on their own, lost, lost to this obscene
place, a place larger than anyone can safely
care for, the place his carefully isolated
adaptor molecules locate and leave him to.
Left to whistle in the dark the tune described
in information-bearing strands that life itself
will now be able to compose, perform with
the chemical philharmonic he and his friends
now conduct. Even now the piece must be
further improvised, built up from the given
ground, played on that piano roll he will
pass through test-tube ribosomes. The
cell-free spinet must take up the tune,
singing as it goes, the way the record his
love gave him sings under the reading
needle.
    But his experiment, a first solution to the
coding problem, will put him no step closer
to solving the code-breaking urge, a place
unlocatable in either the lookup table or any
aggregate survey of it. Investigation is an
ache, a permanent displacement, an
accidental by-product of necessity written
into the program itself. He sees it briefly, the
random outline thrown up for an instant in
an electrical storm: he will spend what
remains of his life guessing at a pattern that
is itself nothing more than exactly similar.
Those codons all in a row: just successive
approximations about the possibilities of
pattern in this world. The gene is an
experiment in its own decoding. It too, like
the commands it shapes, remains a beginner
in its own life. An educated guess. A
blundering amateur.
    How can the one place where that fragile
experiment thrives, how can it be protected,
kept from being trampled? Investigation
cannot and ought not be stopped. The
command to decipher was present at the
start, driving the first clunky, unshelled,
self-duping, primitive amino-assembler. But
if research, life, is to protect itself from itself
here at the eleventh hour, the moment of its
second revolution, curiosity must be
amended, matured. He cannot bring that
new thing to life by himself. But there is one
he might ask about this idea forming in his
mind, a friend who might already be halfway
toward founding that new science required
to save creation from the creative urge.
    A nervous coed approaches him as he
drifts by the library. Are you the one from the
picture magazine? She thrusts out a scrap of
cash-register receipt and asks him to sign his
name. "Oh, no," Ressler objects. "Thank you,
but this is premature. I haven't done
anything yet. Ask me next year, perhaps." He
grins to smooth her apology and backs
away. He runs for the barracks. Sprinting,
gulping air, he knows it is high time—yes,
even this late in life—to tie himself forever to
his companion. There is something they must
find, develop together as helpmates. They
will only be able to reach it in combination,
each contributing a half-proposal to the
corrective that pure research calls out for. It
is not too late to fabricate, between them, an
answer to the riot of silence awaiting life on
the far side of the patent. They will put the
finishing touches on the in vitro catalog.
Then they will use the international
reputation the work will lay at their doorstep
to convince the world that it is not too late
for the getting of wisdom.
   This something else: he hasn't gotten it
yet, he does not know its precise shape. But
they can arrive at it together—the one
descendant he and Jeanette can leave to this
teetering place. Herbert can, of course, visit
anytime he wants. Even live with them if he
likes. That will not be the last concession to
the law of human averages they will need to
make in the decades in front of them.
   They must perfect the only way home, the
one trick of natural pattern forever
unpatentable. They must learn quickly, this
afternoon, to care for living existence with
the tender survey of parental love. It's time
for him to become a husband. A father.
   He sprints the distance to Stadium Terrace,
arriving on the stoop gasping for breath. He
is about to stumble inside when something
stops him. Through the thin wooden door,
he hears a strain of music as familiar to him
as breathing. She has anticipated him. She is
inside, playing this disk hinting of the new
science they must originate. He stands for a
moment, simply listening, hearing a certain
play of counterpoint for the first time. He
pushes the door open, shouting her name
on the air.
   The record is indeed playing, Olga indeed
centrifuging dutifully above it. But Jeanette
is, like the decoding urge, nowhere. He
thinks: The bedroom, enters shyly,
wondering what tender, depraved
rendezvous she has arranged for him. But
the room is empty, the linen unmussed. He
calls once, softly, pointlessly, to her
attending ghost.
   His answer waits in the front room, both
sides of a full sheet in his laboratory
notebook, left lying on top of the stack of
delinquent periodicals that has become his
de facto reference library. Every relationship
he enters into on this earth comes down to a
carefully printed message. Her hand, that
spidery, runic script—as much as her voice,
her scent, the curve of her forehead where
his fits— begins carefully, perfectly across
the horizontal.

    I didn't want you to hear from Ulrich
  tomorrow, secondhand, about what
  concerns you at first. I worked up the
  courage to tell you face to face, but as you
  know, courage has always been at best a
  periodic phenomenon with me. A few
  minutes of sitting, waiting for you to catch
  me here, and I rush into the cowardice of
  print. I keep thinking I can hear your step
coming up to the door. I keep rushing up,
shutting this thing with guilty relief.
Impossible hope that you might somehow
still free me from having to say all this.
You always could revise even my firmest
rules. Why don't you come home?
   Here is what has happened. Herbert, my
husband, foreseeing every eventuality,
knowing I might take it in mind really to
fall in love with you long before I did, put
in for a transfer some months back. The
arrangements have at last come through.
He has been assigned to—no matter
where. The world is flattening out to
uniformity anyway. The next choice is
mine: Wife, are you coming or staying?
Coming.
   You will walk in now before I can finish
this clause. You'll look over my shoulder,
read this, laugh. You will turn and walk
out, leave me, unable to understand. How
could you? I told you once that I have
never lied to you. It's true, Stuart. But all
along, from the opening note I passed
you, I've let you draw your own
conclusions. The line between that and
lying now seems more equivocal than it
did before I turned thirty. What good is it
to claim that I never misrepresented myself
to you, if I never presented, either?
   Oh, love. If all I had to do now was
admit, make out that we two stole your
baby. If I could say: my husband, all along,
was the barren one. That we two, in
sickness and health, in love so deep that it
reached bottom, colluded to dupe you.
That he told me: go find someone,
someone brilliant, soft, crystal in
temperament, kind. That I found the most
intelligent, gorgeous seed imaginable to
use. (Beautiful isn't enough: I see your
tightening lids, the flush of your cheeks as
you tense under me. Brilliant doesn't
suffice: your leaps are like nothing I will
see again.)
   If only we had stung you for a little
fertility. I could have lived with that on my
conscience. Isn't that love, when it comes
down to it? The old pollen trick? Mutually
profitable trade, exploitation. I give you
pleasure to match your inbred fantasy, and
take, in return, a painless biopsy, a little
tissue you will never miss. I could forgive
myself for having tried to steal your genes.
   But that isn't how it went. That wasn't
how I came to you. It's exactly as I told you
long ago: Herbert is fine. I'm the one with
something wrong. He could leave me
cleanly by anyone's rules of fairness. Give
me the severance payoff, go land a
twenty-five-year-old with all her parts
working as advertised, and even now start
a family. That's what all the tests showed.
But, good radical skeptic, I didn't believe
  the tests. I had to run my own. All I
  needed to disprove them was the perfect
  man.
     I told you I never lied to you. I wanted
  you, wanted to give myself to you from the
  moment I toweled dry your angelic hair.
  But from the start, want was couched in
  hysterical denial. I thought we might
  remake physiology, you and I, if we were
  fierce enough. All selfless and abject, but
  everything I ever gave you I handed over
  with an eye toward the impossible return
  on investment, your saving me. You see,
  I've never wanted anything in my life as I
  want to be a mother. Think of the deepest
  desire you have ever felt. Then let it last
  unanswered every day for ever.

   He looks up from the page, up where the
walls meet the ceiling. She means discovery.
Science. An urge greater than what I am
after: in vivo. And she will never have it.
      All this makes what I did even worse. I
   loved you, I love you this minute. Stuart,
   believe none of this but that. I would
   retract, qualify beyond recognition, to be
   able to promise you again all the mutual
   evers we have ever given each other.
   That's really why I came by. Not to tell you
   about my going: to stare you in the face,
   get you to swear that you will never leave
   me.
      The most selfless love I ever felt was
   self-serving. The deepest altruism I am
   capable of feeling is still after something,
   the thing I was after in you. You were
   going to rewrite the rules for me, or at
   least explain, at cell level, why I'd been
   singled out, left with a desire beyond
   solving. But you couldn't do that for me.
   You could do nothing for me but love me.
      You have cause to trust my truths less
   than my lies, but believe me. Your love has
   become, despite my best self-interest, as
   necessary, as desperate, as the little
   window of time that we've had. I seem to
   have reached a pitch of knowledge with
   you that I will never know again. But I'll
   never be without it entirely, now. I see you
   teaching our little girls to sing rounds. I
   watch us selecting chemistry sets for them
   for birthdays, together, carefully. Oh God.
   It will break my heart to go on. I'll never
   get through this. You've let me see what it
   might have been like to have a real home.
      I am leaving to be with a man who,
   during the course of my hysterical year,
   looked the other way. Nothing, nothing in
   it for him. He knew what I was going
   through—my refusing the proof of
   sterility. He let me sneak, granted me the
   dignity of pretending not to know, and
   when pretense became impossible,
   arranged to leave. And still, he booked a
  place for me, should I want to leave with
  him. I'm leaving because I'd like for once
  to follow something other than the
  calculus of personal gain. I'm not trying to
  be worthy of him or to offer myself to
  sacrifice. You see, for whatever the sloppy
  term means, I love Herbert. I loved him for
  years before I fell for you. His is the only
  love I can carry through without
  invalidating the whole shooting match.
     I've made some noises about being
  taken on at the university twenty miles
  from where we're heading. It won't be
  much, but perhaps Herbert will agree to
  follow me for the next move. We move a
  lot in this country, don't we? So know I
  will still have our work, in some form at
  least, to compensate me for all I have lost
  in you. I will read about you in the lit, and
  the children Herbert and I adopt may well
  yet read about you in the texts. Stuart, I
  hope it. I know it. But you must agree that
  that can be all the contact we can allow.
     It seems you're going to force me to get
  all the way through this. But I will not
  leave without asking what I came here to
  ask. Friend, love me. Marry me, in some
  other, hypothetical life? Barring that (and I
  understand perfectly if you refuse), think
  of me sometimes, and of the time we had.
  It was a time. How much will still happen
  to you! Tell the woman you end up loving
  all about me. Never let her live a day for
  granted. And prove to the gold bug that it
  is ingenious enough to crack itself. You
  have cause, so have we all, for joy.

   He flips the page, as if everything she has
written might still be canceled out by one
more amendment. But she has written
nothing more except "Sorry to have spoiled
a beautiful notebook." The record has run
out while he read. It was in the high
twenties when he entered. If she'd put it on
from the beginning, as fortification for her
act of mercy killing, he must have just missed
her. She is still in town, at the building
perhaps, cleaning out her desk. He could
intercept her, pretend not to have seen the
note. Incite that change of mind she seems
to half hope for in every paragraph. Or he
could help her, just this once, to locate the
sequence for love.
   He stares blankly at the stacks of journals
for several inaudible variations before he
sees something else there. Another,
out-of-place publication: a goodbye gift, a
chaste kiss between yearning cousins, the
pocket edition of A Field Guide to Flowering
Plants. He searches the front pages for an
inscription. She has indeed left a message
there, the only possible one. In her
irreproducible script she has written,
"Flowers have names." But neither book nor
letter—nor any communication in his
possession—bears Jeanette's signature.
   He flips through the book. It opens, at
random, or perhaps to where she has
creased the spine, to a picture of a
flower—delicate, blue-purple petals piled up
along a thinning stalk. He remembers having
seen it before, in another, hypothetical life.
The only clue to her whereabouts, her one
return address. The caption gives both
scientific and popular names. "Polemonium
vanbruntiae. Jacob's Ladder."



XXVIII

  The Placebo Effect

   Everything she writes is borne out. Ulrich
circulates a note the next day, announcing
Dr. Koss's departure just before term's end.
With admirable dexterity, the head of the all
but annulled Cyfer manages to praise the
woman's contribution to the team without
once giving the reason for her leaving or
mentioning her destination. For once,
Ressler is left with more knowledge than
information. The chief gives the note a day
or two to sink in, then calls an emergency
meeting. Ressler is the last to arrive. The
other three are waiting for him.
   "Right to it, then," Ulrich begins with
more force than conviction. "Is there any
point in holding this thing together?"
   Ressler looks at his boss, understands. The
practice of science is less about sudden
shifts of insight or repetitive hours of
irreproachable lab practice than it is about
funding. Always a subtle parasitism on
patronage. Each year's grants deadline
hastens the day when the question of
whether a piece of work gets done will rest
exclusively with the impartial peer review.
   Ulrich's poll is clear: have we still a chance
to go up against the massive labs, Big
Biology? Or is this curse of defection fatal?
Woytowich keeps his counsel; he's ready to
return to teaching, rating TV—the life of the
embittered divorcer. The continuance of the
project is to him a matter of immense
indifference. Ressler is also tacit, ready to be
dismissed. It takes Botkin's eloquent
intercession on his part to recall Stuart to
unfinished business. She gives the group a
rundown on the state of the cell-free system,
including an abstract of the conceptual
breakthrough she and Ressler hashed out
just days before, at the precise instant when
Jeanette sat in the barracks writing her
Abschied.
   She does a better job presenting than
Ressler could have. At last, when it is too
late, Ulrich's eyes widen. He has been sitting
on a resource beyond anything in the
equipment catalogs. This generating idea,
the means into the composition, puts them
as close to the heart of the problem as
anyone. "We have three vacant salary lines,
and we can get more. I can book over eighty
percent of the remaining supplies budget.
We can get you both full release time, as far
as the department is concerned. Just tell me
what you need."
   Ressler says: "I need a week to think."
   He goes home and sits for days, projecting
himself into the ideal scenario: he and
Botkin set to work on the synthetic mapping,
in charge of a small army of eager assistants.
They scoop the world. They lay out the first,
rudimentary lexicon of life's language. They
complete the table. They lay the capstone of
the first material model of inheritance. Then
he imagines himself the recipient, six months
from now, through the mail, in an envelope
with smudged return address, of one of
those black-and-white hospital shots. A
small, hairless, closed-eye cross between a
planarian and Khrushchev, ID tag illegible.
Like the words of organic nature hidden in
the lookup table, this infant's features grow
more inscrutable upon closer identification.
It has no one's features, neither father nor
mother. Like that complete, mechanical
explanation, this complete, clean account of
Jeanette's departure explains nothing.
   His thoughts during this brief sabbatical
return to one image: that man, ready to
disappear without issue, whether or not his
choice of companion in this life chooses to
accompany him in exile. Is even Herbert's
gesture part of the "pollen-trick"?
   Then, into his third week of passive
disengagement, Ressler wakes to a morning
blazing in beautiful light. He showers, puts
on clothes stiff with laundry soap, discovers:
I am ravenous. He walks a brisk six blocks to
the pancake house, ordering the full
rancher's, trucker's, bricklayer's, red-blood,
high-starch, artery-clogging special, and
adores every mouthful. The waitress flirts
shyly with him over the check. He tells her
she is lovely, then backs away, smiling
affectionately, helpless in human contact.
   He walks to the Biology Building, taking
the longest detour that still leaves him inside
the twin cities' jurisdiction. He hears, for the
first time since the days of the Home Nature
Museum, how different the repeated calls of
a single bird are. Are these tiny
perturbations in the melody random, or do
they mean something? He will make a study
of this. The sound of automobile tires
slopping the pavement suggests a review of
physics, the equations for friction. He is
struck by the shape of three identical
poplars: might some mathematical
expression guide the branching of trees?
   By the time he gets to campus, it's clear, as
clear as anything will ever be in the rough
translation allotted him. The self-serving,
pointless duplication of giant molecules
created him in its own image, set him down
here with only one order: Do science.
Postulate. Put together a working model. Yet
the hunt for the single, substantiating
thread running through all creation is just a
start. It's time for science to acknowledge the
heft, bruise, and hopeless muddle of the
world's irreducible particulars. This field, this
face, this day are not just the result of
tweaking the variables, twisting the
standard categories. Every alternative on the
standing pattern is distinct, anomalous, a
new thing requiring a separate take on what
is and might yet be. And for that, theories
must diverge and propagate as fast as the
wonder of their subject matter.
   He reaches Botkin's office, enters without
knocking. He surprises her in scowling over
a popular magazine with a weekly circulation
greater than the population of Austria in the
year of her birth. Her grin of expectation at
seeing him collapses into a demure,
understanding "Oh." He walks to her desk
where she writes, removes the magazine. He
takes her hand in his, stroking and
examining it at the same time. Why should
skin lose its elasticity with age? If he were to
pinch hers, it would stay bunched like
stiffest muslin. He holds her hand between
his for a moment, and says, "I wish I'd taken
more meals with you when I had the
chance."
   She laughs sharply. "I wish I'd gotten
more into you per meal." He leans over her
desk and kisses her still forehead. He glances
over her desk, her dark, filled bookshelves:
this room, the place of so many discoveries,
bathed in the light of midday, affords him
the closest thing to religious reconciliation
that empiric sensibility allows.
   Age does not deprive her of the
responsibility of having to play the group's
advocate. "But what of your work?" she
says. "It can't be left undone."
   "Give it a year or two," he answers, calling
her bluff. The process of directed chance is
inexorable. "Half a dozen people will hit on
it all at once."
   "It's always the numbers game with your
generation. Have you ever considered taking
up gambling?"
   Ressler laughs; it was her generation that
saddled them all with perpetual probability.
"I wouldn't know a blackjack if one hit me
over the head."
   "Boychick. You can take this project
anywhere, you know. Dr. Ulrich, myself: we
can get you taken on anyplace you like.
Cambridge. Cold Spring Harbor. The
Institute. A real lab. Wherever is best
equipped. Finish what you've started. Say
the word. I will write letters, call in favors.
You can name terms."
   He shakes his head: she, of all people,
knows the nature of the work he must finish.
"I don't think another laboratory would be
appropriate just now." He listens to what he
has just said, and adds, "Or needed, really."
   "You would make an astonishing teacher,
given time."
   Teaching: yes, that might almost be close.
But teaching is the most perilously slow way
man has yet devised for conveying a
message. "The student world won't miss
me."
   "But what about you?" Her eyes are a
peculiar, fluid mixture of maternal distress
and deep, secret satisfaction that this, her
star pupil, has selected to set off into the
dark. For abiding is nowhere. "You will be all
right?"
   "Without the prizes, you mean?"
   "Yes. Without your Prize."
   He wonders how it would feel to be able
to sit back, late in the afternoon, and bask in
genuine contribution. "I'll be fine." Even as
he speaks this, a door opens in front of him
and he gets his first foretaste of just how
long, how uncertain an existence in pursuit
of an unverifiable idea must be. That slow,
tooling nucleotide freight, that packet boat
threading itself through his ribosomes,
when named out loud, carries nothing more
than a letter to Jeanette, to the Blakes, to
Botkin, to the rest of his colleagues living
and dead. Nothing more than a letter to the
world, all along. But he must post it alone.
   She feels him waver, and not for the last
time. But it is the last time she'll be around
to be of any help. "Mönchlein, Mönchlein.
Du gehst einen schweren Gang. Can I help
you in any way? Can I do anything?" she
asks, regressing to an accent so
impenetrable he has to infer her words from
her face.
   "Yes," he says. "Yes you can." He slides
over to the dark leather Viennese couch and
lies down one last time. He slips his hands
behind his head, crosses his legs at the
ankles. Now. How does one get started in
this enigmatic trade? "You can play me
something."

  The Lookup Table

   I brought Dr. Ressler the names and
addresses he asked me to find. He took them
with a last, chivalrous compliment of my
reference skills and entered them grimly into
the hit routine that now hovered invisibly
over the MOL data bases the way Bles's fire
quietly waits to run loose through imaginary
Flanders. "I've made you an accessory," he
said, half to me, half to the console where he
typed.
   "No, I did." From the day I had signed on.
I had also taken the initiative to retrieve a
different set of addresses from the archives,
and when Dr. Ressler reached a pause in his
work, I produced my scrap of hurriedly
copied chart:




   The genetic code for mRNA as determined
in vitro, considered universal across all living
creation. "That's the ticket," he said, his eyes
on the paper, studying it for some revealing
nuance that he and everyone else had so far
overlooked. Without meaning to, I'd
reduced him to embarrassment. He
continued at that vanishing decibel.
"Doesn't look like much, does it?" I told him
I'd spent half an hour in the library learning
how to read the thing before figuring out
that it was a simple substitution in three
variables. Two years would pass before I had
even a rough, reflected image of what the
table described.
   "No question. It's an interesting time to be
alive," Ressler said, tapping the sheet of
paper as his documentary proof. "We have
attained ancient wishes, the plan to dig all
the way down, to the bottom, like little
children in the backyard shooting for China.
In twenty years, we've put together a
comprehensive, physical explanation of life.
Only, at every way station on the way down,
the destination slips one landing deeper.
Heredity is not only chromosomes. Then, not
only genes, not only nucleotides. My
generation found it was not only chemistry,
not only physics. Seems life might not be
only anything." He traced three rays with his
fingers, verifying that UCG coded for serine.
"No question. An intellectual achievement:
those of us understandably prejudiced
toward seeing life from chicken level,
realizing that chickens are just the egg's way
of perpetuating the egg."
   Todd joined us in the control room,
dusting his hands in a parody of manual
labor well done. He came from the computer
room, where he had been erasing the packs
containing the old versions of the programs
and data files. We had crossed the backout
point. The only existing copies of the disks
containing the complete financial histories
of tens of thousands of people now carried
the changes that Dr. Ressler and Todd had
engineered into them.
   Todd and I had spoken little in the
handful of days since my return. The catalyst
that brought me back was too pressing,
Jimmy's hospitalization too real for us to
waste time on private reconciliation. He
offered no apologies, tried out no
resolutions. We were both there to assist Dr.
Ressler in getting Jimmy back under
coverage. There was nothing to explain, to
remedy. One night, seeing Jimmy for the first
time since the stroke, returning to the offices
to try to lose himself in an intransigent bit of
machine code, Todd had weakened. "Would
it be impossible for me to come home with
you? One Day Only?"
   I felt myself waver at his exhausted
attempt at humor. "I don't think that would
be a good idea."
   "You do know that the lovely Ms. Martens
and I are—"
   "It's no business of mine." I did not want
any news on the matter. Were what?
Married? Divorced? History? It no longer
concerned me. Annie too had tried to
mumble something about intentions and
ignorances and getting past
misunderstandings. After the second blanket
forgiveness I gave her, she stopped trying to
approach me about anything but technical
matters. In fact, none of us had much
occasion to talk about anything except the
specifics of our data terrorism. For the first
time since I started visiting, actions ran
ahead of words.
   But that evening, as Dr. Ressler inserted
the executive address list into place and
Todd joined us in the control room, dusting
his hands after putting the original,
unedited disk packs to sleep, we were at last
forced to sit down with each other as we
used to, thrown back on the old, limited
compensation of talk. Todd took my
scribbled sheet of hieroglyphs from Dr.
Ressler. As he looked it over, trying to catch
up with the conversation, the professor
slipped in his last bit of pedagogy for his
only graduating class. "The spookiest thing
about the code is its contingency. Some
order in it, the symmetries of significance.
But matter very well might have missed
hitting upon even this configuration, no
matter how large the reservoir of time it had
to move around in. It might never have
arrived at even this bootstrap translation
had initial conditions been even a
hundredth of a percent different. Or even
exactly the same," he said, with a wicked
glance at me, setting in motion the chain of
idea-links that would eventually make me
lose a year to the study of variation.
   "But we got the sucker now," Todd said,
facetious emphasis on the plural pronoun;
nothing could be further from his field of
expertise than this cryptic chart.
   "Yes, we have it now," Ressler said,
interpreting the phrase a little differently.
"Perhaps other codes arose at the same
moment, but this is the one that won out. It
will never happen again; too much inertia
now. Places we can't get to from here. Unlike
what they teach in schools, the master
builder can only proceed by patching onto
existing patches."
   "Having recently authored some pretty
ugly kludges myself, I am glad to hear that."
   Ressler extended the idea. "Efficiency and
accuracy are not the same thing. Like it or
not, life can only revise itself like a library
saving or pitching books strictly on the basis
of how frequently they've been checked
out." He spoke obliquely to me, tailoring his
metaphors to an end I could not then see.
"We like to think of nature as unerring. In
reality, everything it does is an approximate
mistake. Its every calculation is short-term, a
quick fix. 'Kludge' is right, Franklin." Under
the shadow of what we were about to
launch, the rules of decorum were changing.
   "Take our species: the apex of
engineering. We've all but completed our
systematic destruction of the whole,
buffered web. The evidence is there, for
anyone paying attention. Even if we stopped
this evening... And yet, something in the joy
of building—something in my inherited,
egoistic firmware—still insists that we also
possess the first, flawed, rough prototype
that might, in time, take nature beyond the
knee-jerk, blind short-term. You see, we can
project, unlike any other postulate in nature,
unlike nature itself. Model. Foresee. Think.
But we have no one to help us make our
projections wise."
   He stubbed out a butt and checked his
watch. "There is talk in the genetics
community about the Human Genome
Project. Sequencing, base by base, the entire
five-thousand-volume DNA string. But
whose string? Yours? This fine woman's
here? What of the volumes for gray whales,
horned toads, diatoms, four million species
in all, lost by the thousands while we talk
about them? Even the complete library,
unattainable, will never begin to hint at the
books, the stories the string might have
produced."
   Todd, my Todd, stood up, realizing what
was at stake all around him. Life was
suddenly too real to get out of alive. "Christ.
What do we ask for, then?" Frantic, he asked
the man he loved blindly, the woman he
cared for a little, the general night—anyone
who might answer. The question tore him
like a marathoner's cramp, his rib trying to
free itself from imprisonment in its side. I
never loved him more than at that moment.
   "What do you mean?" Ressler asked,
elsewhere, years away.
   "I mean: we have this office sewn up; the
records are in our power. A Defense
Department contractor, a major financial
institution, a dozen municipal outfits. Five
years of transactions. Half a billion dollars
would vanish into a giant Mylar null if we
say so. We could take a day of data, scramble
it beyond all recognition. 'What's a day, one
day, worth to you?' What do we ask for? A
new Clean Air Act? Save the Whatever-it-is
Seal?" Ressler chose his moment to say
nothing. Todd looked at me, his voice
wobbling into the shimmies. He assumed, all
at once, the entire, terminal, toxic clot the
race had laid over the place. The anguished
understanding that he might, possessing
these files, cut a deal, force a rescue on one
bit of the botched job, was like alcohol in an
incision. Todd was in real pain, drowning in
causes. "An industry-free zone in the
Antarctic? Ban the personal AK-47 from
over-the-counter sale? Free food for the
starving? Russians out of Afghanistan?"
   "U.S. out of North America?" I suggested.
It helped briefly to undo the urgency, to thin
the tangible sickness calling on all sides for
instant cure.
   Ressler took my handmade chart back from
Todd and gave it one more glance before
answering. "Yes, the only question worth
asking, now that we've all turned activist."
This is the sense if not the sound of his
words as he sang them: we have it now,
have extracted knowledge from information,
and it's not enough. We need to ask
ourselves what we want to be when we
grow up. We need that thing, that arithmetic
of ecology that should have preceded
knowledge, too easy, too obvious to bear
repeating, too embarrassing and indicting to
mention by name. The lookup code for care.
"I suggest, seeing as how everything is
already at stake, that we ask for the one
essential in the triumvirate that life is too
large and crucial to care about."
   Todd looked at him without
comprehension. "Meaning?"
   The baggage of the gene, the curse of
populations. "Keep to the original plan. Ask
for Jimmy."
   We sat in silence, reluctant to take the
machine on-line, to bring up the doctored
version of programs whose results, both
digital and analog, we had no way of
forecasting. Todd retrieved a sketchbook
and began doing portraits, lightning
contour studies as controlled as anything I'd
ever seen him do. Dr. Ressler surprised us
both by asking to keep two. We dragged our
heels, postponing the launch for a few
seconds, and we all three knew it. I
half-jokingly suggested that we wait a few
more days, until the anniversary of Morse's
first public telegraphic message on the line
between Washington and Baltimore. The
notion tickled Dr. Ressler, but by that point
he could only laugh gamely and say, "I dearly
wish we could."
   Delay was no longer just a question of
losing time, of being outraced by the
hospital collection bureaucracy. We had
systematically destroyed all chance of
returning to the old program. The files were
gone. We could allow the vested interests
no other program to fall back upon, or our
changes would be quickly suppressed before
they could produce their desired effect. We
could run the new version or nothing at all.
And running nothing at all, as Todd pointed
out, would be the equivalent of performing
a lobotomy on a chunk of the city's working
interests large enough to create a seizure
throughout the rest of the interdependent
network.
   "That first remote message," Dr. Ressler
asked, stubbing out another butt and
starting anew. "Was it really 'What hath God
wrought?'"
   "That's how the books report it."
   Todd snorted. "Probably backstopped.
Jimmied up after the fact." His inadvertent
verb stopped the conversation. He fiddled
with a CRT contrast button. "Sorry. The
fellow must be on my mind."
   We rehearsed for the last time how we
would put our claim once our variant system
software was in operation. Dr. Ressler said,
"We haven't talked about it yet, but we
ought to try to minimize prosecution, once
the project has had its run."
   "Ha!" Franklin discounted. "Information
Age criminals never get prosecuted. They get
hired on as consultants to the DOD."
   Dr. Ressler smiled; that was the precedent.
"All the same, I'll link your immunity to the
other conditions. Should push come to
blow, you two and Annie haven't the first
idea of how this bug slipped into the works.
As far as you are concerned, you don't know
your ASCII from your ALGOL."
    "What about you?" I said, indignant at
the suggestion that we scatter and leave him
alone, answerable to everything.
    He smiled and exhaled. "They can't do
anything to me," he answered. "I'm already
spoken for."
    Willfully or just ordinarily oblivious, we
went on to other matters. "Well, as long as I
still know you for another day yet," Franklin
cackled, "can I ask you one thing?"
    "Name it." His voice acknowledged that
he still owed us an explanation. He knew
what this last petition to the Question Board
would be: the same question that had
started us here, before love, before
knowledge, before disaster.
    Todd began gingerly enough, accelerating
only slowly into a semblance of courage. "I
understand... I can see how one might not
be able to trap certain feelings off in a side
panel. I mean, I can see how, if the
attraction, if the need were large enough..."
    He shot me an involuntary glance. "That a
person might choose to go on caring, as
if..."
    "As if it still counted?" Dr. Ressler
assisted.
    Something broke in Todd, and his urgent
attachment to the man, his innate need to
prove that neither of their disappearances
was inevitable, flooded the room. "I can
understand the torch-bearing. Celibacy.
Self-denial. But son of a mother.... It seems
to me that the worst thing, the worst hurt
anyone could possibly have inflicted on you,
shouldn't have been enough to..." He trailed
off, afraid at the end to ask.
    But he had as much as asked already. Dr.
Ressler had only to coax him to put it into
words. "Enough to do what?"
    "To make you give up science." Todd's
eyes swam with confusion. Shouldn't you
have thrown yourself into it with redoubled
effort? How could you desert the one place
that might have given you some comfort?
    It was Dr. Ressler's turn to be surprised.
This was not the phrasing, not the question,
he expected. "Oh," he said, alerted into
softness. "But I never quit science."
    Franklin and I exchanged astonishments.
Todd dismissed him bitterly. "I mean
something more than keeping up with the
journals."
    "So do I." The professor returned a
self-conscious grin. "Look. Analysis depends
on breaking down complex hierarchies into
understandable parts. That's indispensable
to good science, and I did it for years. Even
got a paper out of it, as you junior sleuths
insist on reminding me. But analysis is just
part of the method. When you catch a
glimpse of your smallest, discrete
components, and even these don't explain
the pattern you are after, sometimes the
situation calls out for another motion, a
synthetic cycle.
   "Remember John Von Neumann?" he
asked. " 'Yes, it is obvious'? The sharpest
systematic intellect of the century. Games
theory, contributions to quantum mechanics,
father of digital computer software." He
gestured through the two-way mirror into
the computer room, suggesting that
something of those old language
generations still floated around in the
newest machines. "Codeveloper of the
hydrogen bomb and advocate of the
preemptive strike. Once told Life, 'If you say
why not bomb them tomorrow, I say why not
today? If you say today at five o'clock, I say
why not one o'clock?' Claimed to have
invented a whole mathematical discipline
while riding in a taxi cab. Wrote a pivotal
book, published posthumously by my old
I-state research university, called Theory of
Self-Reproducing Automata, in which he
proves that machines can be made complex
enough to copy themselves.
   "Von Neumann, the cleverest product
evolution has yet offered, thought that the
language of the functioning brain was not
the language of logic and mathematics. The
only way we would ever be able to see the
way the switches all assembled the messages
they sent among themselves would be to
create an analog to the language of the
central nervous system." He fell silent,
perhaps wondering whether sheer
cleverness is ever enough. "The firmware
language of the brain. That's what I have
spent the last twenty-five years pursuing."
   The revelation stunned us. Todd rubbed
his temples. "I don't get it. No institution?
No grant? No laboratory? What are you
doing here?"
   Ressler laughed. "It's not a particularly
popular or accredited line of research these
days." He held up a finger, holding the floor.
He went to his attache case, brought it back
to the table, and unzipped it. It poured
forth, like a flushed warren, long, stiff,
manila-colored, heavily penciled-over scores.
Musical scores. "This one is a woodwind
octet," he announced self-consciously.
"Look here. I stole this bit from Berg. But he
stole a similar bit from Bach, so I'm safe from
lawsuit."
   Todd flipped through the penciled staves,
looking for some explanatory key. I collected
myself first. "You're a composer," I said, a
thrill coursing at the forbidden word.
   "Yes, I guess I am." He sounded as startled
by the revelation as we were. "I even went
back to school awhile, although the pieces
have remained hopelessly amateur."
   "And?" I asked. I could not help myself,
took his hand between mine. Nothing he
could say or do would ever surprise me
again. "Research results? Anything to write
the journals about?" Could there really be
another language, cleaner than math, closer
to our insides than words?
   He answered me figure for figure.
"Precious few conclusions, so far. Soft, slow
passages more effective when contrasted
with loud, fast ones. Nothing much more
definitive. But bear in mind, the field is still
in its infancy."
   Todd, recovering his wits at last, plied him
with enthusiastic questions. What had he
written, and how much? Lieder, chamber
works, symphonic? Problems of
instrumentation and registration, color,
timbre. The trade-off of genre. Tonal? Serial?
Aleatoric? I tried to follow this tech shoptalk
but found myself hearing something else,
absolutely silent: a monk, late twentieth
century, working in total isolation, locked in
a cell for longer than I could imagine, a
lifetime, just composing, trying to emulate,
recreate, variegate, state, consecrate the
sound he had once heard while standing on
his front porch on a spring morning, about
to enter, thinking his love waited for him
inside. I thought of all the experimental,
heuristic, and botched compositions that
kept him company over long years, and how,
whatever the orchestration, form, choice of
language, all pieces amounted to love
songs, not just to a lost woman, but to a
world whose pattern he could not help
wanting to save.
   What he had done, how he had chosen to
spend his energies, really was science. A way
of looking, reverencing. And the purpose of
all science, like living, which amounts to the
same thing, was not the accumulation of
gnostic power, fixing of formulas for the
names of God, stockpiling brutal efficiency,
accomplishing the sadistic myth of progress.
The purpose of science was to revive and
cultivate a perpetual state of wonder. For
nothing deserved wonder so much as our
capacity to feel it.
   I did not know the letter names yet, but I
gathered that this biologist had discovered
that A, T, G, and C spelled out endless
variations on the old Socratic imperative in
the cells. To say that the variants came from
the same command was not to say they came
to the same thing. Each still had to be
identified in its particular texture. For that,
one could only remain alert, stay flexible,
keep deep down, work. All human effort
now hung on the verge of revealing
something unexpected, from the simplest of
beginnings. The system ran undeniably
toward randomness, but along the way, a
steady stream of new nuances accumulated,
each complete in its complexity, each
incorporating the issuing theme. Dear
Goldberg, play me one of my variations.
   And at that moment, losing the thread of
the conversation, I blurted out that colossal
contemporary irrelevance: "Have you had
any pieces performed?"
   Dr. Ressler looked as nervously delighted
as a little boy about to do his talent show
number. "Opus One debuts tomorrow," he
declared. "The sole work by which I hope to
be remembered."
   He punched up the system time on the
screen, and we were struck by the work still
left to do before the arrival of the day shift.
"Oh Jesus," Todd let out.
   The geneticist-turned-musical-recombiner
threw his portfolio back together. "Sorry. My
fault. That's what happens when you begin
to solve the globe's problems. Before you
know it, it's a quarter to six in the morning."
   We fell to the cleanup tasks. I shredded
the printouts of our last-minute test runs.
Todd dummied up a console log, leaving no
clues about the nature of the program that
would soon be executing. And Dr. Ressler
performed his coup de grace. He selected, at
random, a string of zeroes and ones deep in
the system firmware. Using it as a
cryptographic key, he ran the sequence
against the program code of the impostor
routines, storing down the scrambled
product. Then he manually single-stepped
into the loading procedure a pointer back to
that random sequence, so that the scrambled
programs would be deciphered into
intelligible code when and only when they
fed into the machine at run-time. When the
corporate programmers went into the packs
the next day to list the files and see where
the unexpected behavior came from, they
would find only gibberish. The trick was not
uncrackable, but would slow the reversing
process down.
   The self-enciphering spread across acres
of digital storage. "All right," he said, when
the task came up complete. He took a deep
breath and lifted a significant eyebrow.
"Time to collect the songbooks." Our bit of
genetic engineering was done. For better or
worse, Franklin brought down the last
remnant of old firmware. We held our
breaths like rocket scientists as he attempted
to boot the complete, new system. The status
indications flashed one by one across the
console without producing any unexpected
warnings. Up came what seemed to be the
old, original cold-start screen.
   Ressler, ensuring that his name would be
the only one traceable to this new boot,
used two fingers to type it in. The screen
prompted "password:" and echoed its
demure x's as he entered his. It waited an
ungodly whole minute, long enough for us
to realize that a crash now would leave us
with Jimmy on the street, his mother without
a mortgage, and the three of us plus Annie
in prison. Then, having put the fear of God
in us, the system at last decided to flash:

    System Date and Time: 05/15/84
  06:35.45
    User sressler logged in.
    Last user logout was 00/00/00 at
  00:00.00

    Command?

   Uncanny. We had created a new species,
registering its own day one. No previous
user. Ressler had even added the humorous
touch of patching in a new version number
for our new animal. But when he answered
the command prompt with the standard
request to bring up the start of the day's
on-line processing tasks, up came what
cosmetically resembled in every respect the
old operating system. And yet it was only a
simulation.
   We breathed again. At least it ran. If the
wrinkles we had introduced behaved in
context the way they tested out in isolation,
we were in business. Ressler grinned, as if
Opus One had never caused him the least
stress. "Looks good on this end." He
produced, from behind the CPU where he
had stashed it who knows how long before,
a bottle of our old favorite drugstore
vintage and the requisite paper cups. "To
our friend's physical therapy," he proposed.
And we clinked wax rims.
   "To musicians and physicians," Todd
added, and we sipped again.
   Two sips to the wind, it was my turn. "To
the language of the central nervous system."

  At the Cadence

   What would I add to the list of things we
did that night? How would I interpret the
account, two years and a handful of
evenings after the fact? We thought to
engage in a very old-fashioned gesture, or
one so modern as to still be, like music, in its
infancy. We acted according to a new
complex mathematics, one dependent on the
tiniest initial tweaks. The attempt was an
absurd mismatch of scale—the notion that
the entire community was accountable to the
infinitesimal principle of a single life.
   I would say: at the same moment that we
tried to bring our premise into being, we
were also testing its validity, objectively, if
not without passion. We worked on the
same problem that had occupied Dr. Ressler
from earliest adulthood. Now that he had
half-unraveled it, he concluded that the bulk
of the text down at ATCG level was still in
the infinitive: to look, to want, to stand
amazed. We simply read those verbs out
loud, extending the synonym list. To try. To
investigate.
   On the day I heard about Dr. Ressler's
death, I posted a quote, one of my last,
about the God of the scientists making men
in his own image and setting them here with
the single command to go and figure out
how everything worked. Tonight, I would
sneak fugitively into the library and add a
complementary quote by the same author:
"Trouble throughout the modern age has as
a rule started with the natural sciences.." Or
better: "Everything has become perishable
except perhaps the human heart."
   I learned that night, as we put our last
touches on the on-line replacement, that
science, the chief, most miraculous project of
the modern world, the source of all the
trouble, was itself a self-reproducing
automaton. Empirical wonder did not stop
short of those forbidden infinitives, to
protect, to hope, to assist. They too were
embedded deep in the coding problem. In
order to say "Copy me," the string had first
to say "Read me." Naturally such a command
would result in time in the need to do
science. What else could it become?
   Doing science was simply a question of
getting up the courage of curiosity. But the
courage that made Dr. Ressler automatically
interfere on Jimmy's behalf would have
paralyzed Todd and me had we recognized
its source. I can't pretend I had no idea. He
hinted at it—his personal immunity, his
already being spoken for. It's there, obvious,
in his toss-off about being remembered by
posterity. But that evening, while we
finished our entry for the science fair, these
were just words I couldn't afford to make
sense of.
   Tonight, the project that enlisted me is all
but ready for print. I have finished my book
lookup; the self-assigned homework is done.
I have retrieved from the stacks the gist, at
least, of what his science thought to retrieve
from the world. I can now hear, in the set of
variations, the shattering process he spent a
life listening to. Like the best of
reductionists, I can pull it apart into base
molecules that, through a circus tumbling act
governed by physical law, learn how to fill
every conceivable niche of sound. All this,
and it hasn't even come down to the wire; by
the time-honored creative method of not
eating, I have enough reserves left to start
the job search or finance a full-scale retreat
to the blood relations in Elkhart.
   In my time away, I have managed a
layman's guide to nucleo-tides, a miniature
map of the man who so badly wanted in. I've
come to the verge of declaring that the code
codes only for the desire to break it. I've
managed to name everything except the one
thing, that evening, that Dr. Ressler knew.
The Ur-text, the certain certainty that by itself
motivated him, the in vivo foster parent of
empiricism.
   I'd seen the glow for months, but had
chalked up his gradual return to solid
things, to Todd's and my company. I should
have known, by how quickly Dr. Ressler
threw himself into Jimmy's cause, that he
followed a fuller preparation, long in
motion. He felt the mass packed in his
abdomen. The composer knew, weeks before
any physician, that the oncogene had been
triggered. Information was going back
under, was about to disappear again into
silence. His long apprenticeship to science
was soon to be rewarded with a Name Chair
in oblivion. The pattern behind the pattern,
the mutation shaped into something
significant, the mystery, the only muse, the
built-in desire for discovery, was coming
home. He knew. There was a fire loose in the
landscape, in the library.



XXIX

  The Threshold Effect

   In that museum in Rotterdam where my
friend's broken-off research tour of the
known world took him, a room away from
Brueghel's great Tower (already crumbling in
mid-construction around the base) hangs its
twentieth-century counterpart, the
contemporary reply to the scattering of
languages: Magritte's Threshold of Liberty.
The painting opens on a sealed room whose
walls divide into panels. Each panel is itself a
painted window, hinting at what lies on the
other side, beyond the pane: sky, trees, fire,
lace, more windows, or just a further
wooden panel, the wall the painted
imitation hangs upon.
   In the center of the bare room stands a
cannon, a paint cannon, but about to
discharge itself all the same. The painting is
an enigma, an absolute cipher. It is about
enigma, the screen of knowing only through
language, the threshold effect, the
accumulation of small variations that
transform a change of degree into a change
of nature. Life stands on the threshold of
some new twist it will never be able to name
but must live through all the same. I will get
no closer to liberty than thin explanation,
this diminishing metaphor of panels porting
images into the closed room. But it interests
me to imagine Todd standing in front of that
cannon just about to fire, shatter the
painted chamber, flood the place with
moonlight that until that moment had been
only postulate. I stand next to him in the
narrow gallery, looking, waiting.
  My sabbatical is up. The last text I read
says that the doubling time for genetic
knowledge has dropped to less than a year.
Twice the field it was the day I started
studying. And I've nothing to put down by
way of synopsis except this belated discovery
that I don't much care to die apart from him.

  A Child's Guide to Surgery

   The mutations we set into the system
began to take effect the next morning. MOL
data enterers, sitting down at their terminals,
coffee cups in hand, saw on their screens the
message: "Would you mind if your major
medical coverage were instantly dropped?
(Enter Y or N to continue)." An "N" looped
them back to the identical question. A "Y"
cleared the tube and put up a string of
phosphors reading, "Then please make some
noise about your colleague James
Steadman," before freeing the terminal and
dropping the users into their ordinary
dialogues.
   Midmorning, when the firm's remote
clients began requesting digital
transmissions, the modems behaved
flawlessly, the reports came over the wires,
and the remote printers executed the ledgers
without hitch, until the bottom line. Just
where the balance should have been, the
slavish dot-matrix printer pasted a boldface,
near-letter-quality Q:

    Q: Your company is financially linked to
  an insurance organization that does not
  honor the spirit of its contractual
  commitments. What can you do to keep it
  honest?

     A: Drop a line to the CEO below.

   Underneath, the dumb printer knocked
out the appropriate address. Two lines
beneath, like the denouement sports score
doled out only after the public service
announcement airs, appeared the accurate
but upstaged bottom line.
   Surprise blits began to infiltrate banking
facilities in distant parts of the city. Tellers
presenting transaction receipts to customers
found that the innocuous little slips,
universally distributed for the express
purpose of being instantly thrown away,
carried the announcement that today in
history a certain stroke patient in a hospital
in a neighborhood across town was about
to be turned out onto the street. The slips
were still thrown away, but not before a few
of the bottle-messages reached civilization.
   By afternoon back at the MOL offices, the
day shift's crisis management, printing out
the first batch of the day's mass statements,
noticed, after several hundred had been
printed, something wrong. Each otherwise
faultless statement contained, in the bottom
strip of the universal financial form usually
reserved for such stuff as "We wish each one
of you a warm and personal New Year," the
emergency signal: "A stroke victim is about
to be cut loose." Just below came a random
selection from the "Yes" pile Dr. Ressler and
I had made from my stack of quotes of the
day:

    In a few years we have learned virtually
  to ignore things that would have petrified
  the world....

   Hark, the dominant's persistence till it
  must be answered to!

    For who would lose, Though full of
  pain, this intellectual being....

     I am sure that the power of vested
  interests is vastly exaggerated compared
  with the gradual encroachment of ideas.

    Care is heavy, therefore keep you, You
  are care, and care must keep you.

     Le vent qui éteint une lumière allume
  un brasier. For a rough translation, please
  call...

   Verses-turned-viruses under the pressure
of environment. Each message contained a
contact where curiosity could be directed.
Some quotes were canonical, others more
transient. We'd clipped from Bartlett's, the
daily newspaper, private stock, selecting on
how well they made anonymous tragedy real.
Others we picked for the roll of the words.
Still others had nothing to do with Jimmy.
We just liked them, favorite bits of
recognition.
   The first, astonished operator to notice
this issue of literature all over the credit
union forms may have tried to abort and
restart the statement run. If so, he got
exactly the same result, with whatever
parameters he called up the print job. A
glance at the tampered file, any attempt to
list its logic, showed it scrambled beyond
recognition. The daytime operations staff
faced a few unacceptable choices. They
could go over the thousand statements by
hand with a black magic marker. This would
take prohibitively long and would raise more
curiosity than the snippets themselves;
worse, it would not look professional. They
could fail to send the batch out at all, which
would result in stiff penalties for failing to
meet the DP contract. Or they could send the
infected financial stubs out as is and hope,
as with the personal New Year's greetings,
that no one paid any attention.
   This they elected to do, notifying the
targeted insurance executives whose
numbers appeared, assuring them firm to
firm that this sabotage was not the work of
MOL but of some runaway individual from
within. When Dr. Ressler and Todd showed
up for work that evening, they were taken
into police custody.
   I sat home alone that night, expecting the
phone to ring. I had no idea what was
happening to them, although I suspected
they had been rounded up. Every ten
minutes I had to check myself from going
over to the offices, now doubtless crawling
with software experts trying to crack Dr.
Ressler's Chinese box. I scoured the city
news, waded through the schoolchildren
slayings and neo-Nazi resurgences, but there
was no mention of anomalous mass-mail
hijacking. I could not see the statements
going out or eavesdrop over the relay
circuits. I had no way of finding out whether
we'd succeeded in grazing the banking
industry with our tetanus prick.
   When my doorbell went off, I almost tore a
ligament. I opened without even checking. It
was the last visitor I expected: Annie. "You
shouldn't be here," I shouted. But I wasn't
about to let her leave, now that she was.
Annie was pale with excitement. Acting
publicly and illegally, taking legitimation
from the cause itself, was so new to her that
she shook to talk about it. She was
discovering the thermodynamics of pressure
politics and wanted, that very evening, to
expand into it like nature filling its abhorred
vacuum.
   I gave her the apartment tour. She was as
surprised at my assemblage of escapist
Victoriana as her lover Todd had once been
erotically charged by it. She kept snatching
looks between me and all the embroidery, as
if I were having her on. We sat in the living
room pouring drinks, the radio news on low
in the background, polling the air for waves
from the pebble we'd chucked into it. Annie
was transformed on activism: could we
succeed in saving Jimmy? If insurance
companies ran at a profit, wasn't that
essentially exploitative? Weren't the central
money centers the same ones who were
fanning the fires in Central America and
Africa? I told her I didn't know.
   I didn't mind her talking. It filled the
space. At one point she stopped and,
complete non sequitur, announced, "You
know. I've been thinking a lot about all the
talks you and I used to have. You might be
right about at least one thing. Species don't
hold static. They don't keep still." The first
awful concession: she wasn't admitting
anything else. But she let me know, made me
take responsibility for ruining her faith for
good.
   When she made to leave, I walked her to
the door. There— having written down
everything else from that year, I can hardly
suppress this—we fell into a fumbling,
confused moment, and all at once found
ourselves kissing. I don't know who I was
putting my mouth to. But Annie was
definitely kissing me, attaching to me by her
hands with the same excitement of discovery
she'd had on arriving. We struggled and
broke off. She looked at me, imploring,
needing, hoping I might now ask her back
in. I stood still and let her leave as if nothing
had been transacted.
   On day two of the information blitz, the
mechanical messages were shuffled and sent
out again a little differently. Dr. Ressler had
inserted a clever routine that made sure,
even though the idea-genes were
distributed randomly, that no target received
the same message twice. The enhanced
statements went out to a new batch of
recipients. Our doctored programs also
began dispatching little-known facts:
premium-to-payment ratios for major medical
plans in the U.S.; number of days in a
hospital bed required to wipe out average
life savings.
   I went to work but could concentrate on
nothing. Ignorance of what was happening
to Todd and Ressler together with my
anxiety over Jimmy incapacitated me. I
remember going to pieces over a trio of
submissions left in the question submission
box: Q: How old is the minicam? Q: How
many rats are living under Brooklyn? Q:
Should we go to Mars? That afternoon I was
picked up for questioning.
   Annie was interrogated separately, as well
as a first-shift data entry clerk, completely
innocent. Both were released in hours. I do
not know what the others said. Aware that
Dr. Ressler must certainly have been
somewhere nearby, denying that anyone else
had any involvement in the matter, I laid out
exactly what I'd done and why. I said I had
no idea at all how to stop the runaway
software. That much was true.
   For safety's sake, only Dr. Ressler knew. He
had written the patches so that they would
all unwrite themselves like the magician's
self-vanishing knot the instant a certain
word was typed at the command prompt on
the system console. The word existed
nowhere but in his memory. I don't know
what Ressler told the authorities, but I know
that he stopped short of dealing for Jimmy's
reinstatement, a proffered swap that would
have converted us all into felons.
   I'm not sure which terrified the vested
interests more: the suggestion that masses
of sensitive data might be threatened—a
notion that none of our messages even
hinted at—or the acute embarrassment
produced throughout the financial sector by
this amateur theatrical showering of Milton
and Robert Browning on the upper stories
of the gleaming, inviolable World Trade
buildings. In any case, no one had any use
for me as soon as it became clear I could not
help them stop the flow of messages. They
sent me home over my own protests of guilt.
   The press, a day late, caught wind of the
event, and I was videotaped in conjunction
with the story, walking down Vernon
Boulevard. I felt strangely exhilarated, dosed
with questions I had no intention of
answering. That rush accounts for my
looking so unlike myself in the pictures on
file. Beautiful. At home the next morning, I
watched myself on the breakfast sampler of
area news. An hour after the spot aired, I got
a call from Keith, enormously amused by the
escapade. "I did my part, doll. Called the
front desk of the villainous outfit for a full
explanation the minute I saw your pretty
mug interfering with our agency's morning
spots." Suddenly scared, not at what would
happen to me but aí what would never
happen again, I begged Keithy to stay in
touch. "Never fear. Every Christmas, a card.
Like clockwork."
   I don't know how many bewildered New
Yorkers phoned in for a gloss on
Beaumarchais or a verification on our claims
figures. Perhaps a mildly curious couple
dozen. Public rallying on the stroke victim's
behalf amounted statistically to nil. Naturally.
Ours was an equivocal case at best. Had the
press not picked it up, it would have been
less than insignificant, less than those
people with the sandwich boards crammed
with schizophrenically tiny writing who
parade their imagined grievances in front of
City Hall every day for twenty years. The city
is full of suffering causes beyond
affordability.
   The press, for its part, barely mentioned
Jimmy except as a side-thread to the paisley,
surreal cloth. What they found locally
sensational was that this mailing campaign
had been a computer crime, then still a
novelty. Reporters circled with weird
fascination around the violated machine, its
ephemeral files, the proximity of Dr. Ressler's
virus to a network of sensitive information.
When the hacks asked our targeted insurer
for a comment, a self-assured executive,
who'd had a full day to look over the paper
trail on the matter and who thought that
discretion was the better part of value,
shrugged in front of the camera and said,
"The man is covered. There was a clerical
foul-up between ourselves and the hospital
that we cleared up some time back. I don't
understand any of it."
   Neither did seven eighths of the sane
world, let alone half of the breakfast
television audience. We were a brief, bizarre
human-interest trailer, one of those
thirty-second spots that mitigate the impact
of the day's real news. Our act of criminal
conscience was newsworthy only until the
mass of continuous diversion that passes for
current event rendered it archaic trivia-game
stuff. We would join the marginal list of
those instantly forgotten local celebs that
well-informed people, if they recall at all,
suspect themselves of inventing. On day
three, when the whole eccentricity was
already dead, a city news reader closed the
books on the story by reciting a canonical
quote meant to parody our statement
telegrams: "Across the wires, the electric
message came/'He is no better, he is much
the same.'"
   At the same moment that the company
spokesman denied any payment problem, Dr.
Ressler surrendered the unscrambling word.
They released him and Todd, a transaction
that never would have happened had the
two of them not been the only ones able to
return the system to listable, patch-free
status quo. Both were instantly fired,
ironically losing, along with all other
benefits, the coverage they had won back
for Jimmy.
   They might have fared a lot worse had it
been easier to formulate a charge against
them. They could not be prosecuted for
vandalism. Only cosmetics had been
touched, and returned unscratched. An
employee in a position to do so had simply
taken it on himself to redesign the corporate
product. They could not be hit for electronic
blackmail, as no one had ever leveled any
threat. They might have been
sentenced—and I with them—for malicious
moralizing, capricious use of quotes. But
wisely deciding that the best thing was to let
the story die out as soon as possible, and
perhaps afraid of vestigial viruses still in the
system, neither MOL nor any node of the
offended financial network spreading along
the Eastern Seaboard leveled any case.
   I worked quietly, wondering if I too would
be fired. My colleagues, however, came to my
unqualified support. Everyone I worked with
was sufficiently acquainted with my character
to know beyond doubt that I was not
capable of being personally involved in such
a passion play. I had simply let love
temporarily turn my head, had fallen in with
the wrong boyfriend. A healthy regimen of
reference work would erase any blot still
attached to me. Mr. Scott teased me about
my public record for a few days, then
dropped the matter.
   Some weeks after the event, I came home
to discover that my apartment had been
visited. On the table, wrapped in abandoned
sketching paper, was a bottle of our going
wine, a book, and a note reading, "To
paraphrase the saint: 'Nobody likes to
burn.'"
   I could understand the wine—a late toast
to our having brought the cause off. The
note, too, was self-explanatory: I was to let
him back in if I wanted. But the book. It was
a tiny collection of two dozen color plates,
details from Brueghel's sprawling universe
of children's games. Each enlargement
showed one of the games from the painted
catalog and an en face text description. A
nostalgic invitation to recover our earlier,
museum-going days. But his choice of
subject was so brutally insensitive that I felt
my face go hot and all I could think of was
how I had stupidly failed to get back the
copy of my apartment key I had given him.
   I thought I would let any residual
notoriety extinguish itself, then, after a
month or two, try to contact Dr. Ressler. I'm
not sure what I had in mind, what sort of
friendship I imagined we two might still
have, after all that had happened and failed
to happen. He beat me to it. He called me at
home, late one night, waking me from sleep.
He, at least, was still on night-shift hours. He
was halfway through his long, decorous
apology for waking me before I realized who
it was. "You!" I shouted stupidly, happily,
into the receiver. It seemed physically
impossible. Despite his ability to write
self-vanishing code that would send
Paradise Lost out over modems, Dr. Ressler
had always been acutely uncomfortable with
telephones. I'd never seen him use one
voluntarily and never dreamed he would
ever call me. "You! Are you all right?"
   He told me, in a few abstracting words,
the details of his grilling and release. "The
end of a promising career in the burgeoning
field of information."
   "I've missed you so much." I was still
asleep, saying things that would make me
cringe the next morning and for a long time
after. Not anymore. Now I wish I'd said
worse.
   "You've missed your friend Todd," he
said. The words lay in that crevasse between
assertion and educated guess. He did not
wait for me to deny. "Have you been by to
see James?"
   The silence on my end worsened by the
second. The truth was, I had thought three
times an hour for weeks about paying him a
visit, but I could no longer stand seeing him
that way. Dr. Ressler, mercifully as always, let
me off. "He's getting some light motor skill
back. It'll never be much, but he could not
have been blessed with a better
temperament to face the next thirty years.
The slightest advance, and he's triumphant.
They've transferred him to a good muscle
therapy clinic." He gave me the address,
which I wrote down eagerly but already
hypocritically.
   "Can we see one another sometime?" I
asked. Shier than a teenager. "Meet
somewhere? I'm almost out of squash."
   He let out a little puff of air. "I wish I could
stick around long enough to keep you in
tomatoes." I didn't dare say anything. "Jan,
that's why I'm calling. I wanted to tell you
that I'm on my way back to the I-states
tomorrow. I've signed on to a new research
project, back with the... I can't really say the
alma mater, can I?" I could hear his lip
pulling up ironically. Far away, the faint
crosstalk of a bad connection.
   "You what?" The news was so
extraordinary that all I could do was laugh
with joy. "You what? Incredible!" Was
science that forgiving? Yes, and why not?
No field could expand so fast that return
would be impossible, even after so long
away. If the man was sharp enough, his
learning curve steep, he might even have the
relative advantage of the late starter. "I can't
believe it. What will you be working on?"
   Just as I asked the question, I finally woke.
As he spelled it out, I anticipated him by a
thin syllable. I was one of those contestants
who knew all the answers, but only the
instant that the cards are flipped over. "Jan,
it's a cancer study."
   I hung on the edge of making it out—a
phrase in foreign but ghostly cognates, the
language I myself would still be speaking if
the populations hadn't drifted. The phrase
book of runaway cells.
   I gripped the silence on the line, palpating
it as if pressing the secret hard spot. The first
thing I could think to say was, "Does
Franklin know?"
   "He's known for a while."
   "Listen. I can dress in a minute. When do
you leave? I can call a cab."
   "I'd rather you didn't. And I've never been
much for writing letters, either, I'm afraid."
   "I love you," I said, without help,
wide-awake.
   This time his words lay in a further
crevasse, between assertion and command.
"You love your friend."
   Then, nothing between that phone call
and Todd's curt note. But no: Franker's
postcard and his long letter were first,
written first, anyway. I did receive one other
communication in that blank time, that year I
spent doing nothing, working, trying to
rehabilitate my own light motor skills. A
handwritten card from Jimmy, delivered care
of the library where he remembered I
worked. Half printed, half cursive, the letters
look like a first, helpless effort in
penmanship written with the opposite hand.
As best as I can transcribe it, it says:
     Dear Jan, I thank you and all of you. I
  mostly expect that there are many things
  still ahead. And hard. But yesterday was it
  possible for one whole book page to get
  through. As you see, I can drive this pen
  too, though clutch pops some. My words!
  I'm getting so that anyone can mostly
  make me out.

   I wrote him back but failed to say
anything. I never wrote Ressler. I never wrote
Todd until after he'd left the address. I never
said anything I wanted to say to anyone. I've
misinterpreted the whole set from the start.
That table of data in the nucleotides isn't
about reading at all. It's about saying, out
loud, everything there is, while it's still
sayable. The whole, impossibly complex
goldberg invention of speech, wasted on
someone who from the first listened only to
that string of molecules governing
cowardice. Obvious, out in the open: every
measure, every vertical instant infused with
that absurd little theme insisting "Live, live,"
and me objecting, "But what if it should be
real? What if it all means something? What if
someone should hold me to my words?"
   I should have heard it, the night that
amateur composer ordered me to. I listened
to him disappear into dark fieldwork, this
time as subject, on the other side of the
instruments. He asked for nothing from me
but a little music, a keyboard exercise from
the next room over to ease him across his
last insomnia. I knew the tune by ear, for
years. I might have said something, might
have made some noise.

  The Perpetual Calendar

     June 6: 1520. Henry VIII hosts a
  Renaissance extravaganza for archrival
  Francois I in an attempt to secure an
  alliance. The feast fails to bring about any
  lasting political effect....

    1918. For the next nineteen days, the
  marine brigade of the American Second
  Division meet the Germans in the forested
  area of Belleau Wood, in the Aisne region
  of France. Expending more than half their
  men to gain...

     1944. Operation Overlord, involving the
  close coordination of 4,000 ships, 10,000
  planes, 180,000...

    2004. The planet Venus will make its
  next transit across the sun—

   Political effects will be negligible. It feels
as if I have done nothing but fiddle
masochistically with the card set, waiting for
the resulting pain to convince me that things
have happened. A desperate, deluded
attempt at triangulation: the old Laplacian
engine applied to today in history. If one
samples enough points, writes out all the
differential equations governing the days'
independent paths, the resulting vector
might be somehow solvable, the long
consequence lying patiently in the repetition
might be revealed. The coward's hope that if
I go over the three-by-five events again, I
might catch the bit I missed, the bit that
renders inevitable exactly what it was (and
always had been) that was supposed to
happen today, just what part that I was
meant to play in it. I can add nothing to the
June 6 dossier but a classified ad:

    1986. Position Wanted. MLS. Years in
  the public service. Some programming
  experience. Hands-on knowledge of
  genetics. Good with data.

   There are no more events to go over, no
more data to manipulate. The data stream
will only widen, deepen, strengthen in
current; I can get no closer to where I need
to be than these particulars. I lived a year, I
lost a year, I spent a third in the archives. It's
time to go back, to dust off the resume.
   When I started on this tour, I was afraid
that the place he inhabited might be bigger
than I could safely live in. I have confirmed
that hunch by direct measurement. It is
immense beyond surviving, larger than the
space between brilliance and brittle stars.
Older than the oldest soft tissue in the fossil
record. As densely populated as a drop of
water. More complex than anything I can
imagine, as complex as self-reproducing
automata. As long as the entire text of
history's card file. As terrifying as the
threshold of liberty. I have put it down here
as a notch on a stick, afraid to name it any
more closely than code.
   I have lost them all, lost those few days
when, as inimitable Annie said, we got our
feet dirty, lost them by saying nothing at the
critical moment. But I have at least this. This
field notebook. My after-the-fact year of
mapping. But the map is still not the place. I
am ready to follow him there, all the way into
the locus itself, without benefit of
intermediary, to live in it for a moment,
everywhere and nowhere, the space
between pine and everglade, between
adjoining nucleotides, disappearing with the
rain forest, glazed with acid rain, vanishing
like habitat, like the magician's knot, but
carrying on, varying, learning by trick to
subsist on poison, on heavy toxins if I can,
living on just a little longer, shouting with
all the invented parts of speech for a little
assistance.
   But how to get there: how can I find it? All
at once it is clear, clear as the first, aperiodic
crystal. The double helix is a fractal curve.
Ecology's every part—regardless of the
magnification, however large the assembled
spin-off or small the enzymatic trigger—
carries in it some terraced, infinitely dense
ecosystem, an inherited hint of the whole.
He said only what the texts say: the code is
universal. Here, this city, me, the forest of
infection on my hands, the sea of silver cells
scraped from the inside of my mouth. Every
word I have I knock out of its component
letters. Every predication, every sculpted
metaphor, sprung from the block. Let's save
what life cannot. Play me, he asked, all he
ever asked: play me one of my variations.
What could it hurt to carry that tune a little
longer? Perhaps I might be up to it after all.



XXX

  Today in History

   6/23: Midsummer Eve. Everything and
nothing happened: one day, one gene, one
enzyme, one reaction, one island in the
perpetual calendar. I feel, with reasonable
professional confidence, that I could extract
if not the sum of the day's doctored console
log at least a rough transcript. After a long
while, one hits on the illuminating idea of
building the room around the moonlight.
   Today caught up with me a week ago. Last
Monday. I had closed the notebooks and
started in on the job search. My main
problem in putting myself on the block was
how to account for my year off without
seeming to host some secret pathology that
might flare up again at any moment. I tried
to pass it off on the resume as a school year,
but my inability to claim any accredited
course of study seemed conspicuous, to say
the least.
   But that did not stop me exploiting my old
employers for my own purposes. On
Monday, early, I went downtown to 40th
Street and began researching the registers. I
was looking for a certain kind of
outfit—conservation, public awareness.
Places that worked to preserve those stakes
now dissolving. It seemed the career change
of choice, whether or not there was still time
left for it. By midafternoon, I had a dozen
addresses. It was slow going, culling them by
hand. The next time I job-search, the whole
world will be on-line.
   I broke for packed lunch and in the
afternoon decided that I would need an
interview suit to restore some of the
credibility my resume now lacked. I needed
cash, and stopped at an automated teller
that would take my bank card. I punched in
my four-digit sequence and watched the
screen flash "Incorrect code.
   Please try again." Before I could reason
with the machine, it cleared its screen and
posted a new message: "Hello old friend.
Here's an easy one." And out of that simple,
vibrating speaker, designed to make no
more than a few inarticulate flutes and
beeps, came music. More than easy: I knew
the piece before it even started. I knew the
melody at once, both melodies as they
entered, all three, four. A gathering of old
friends, as easy to me, as familiar and close
as my own name.

  The Quodlibet

   The Bach family, gathered at home, would
begin with chorales and proceed to feats of
extemporary combinatorics. One would start
in with a popular tune, eighteenth-century
radio music. Another would add,
transposed, augmented, or diminuted to
nestle down in perfect counterpoint, an
older folk melody. A third would insert
something racy, suggestive, even obscene,
and a fourth might lay on top of all these a
hymn. The words would fly in all directions,
as would the piled-up melodic lines. But the
whole would hang together, spontaneous,
radiant, invented. Discovered harmony.
   This is how he ends the set. No canon at
the tenth, as the variation's position
demands, although the snippets of trivial
folk tune enter imitatively, in double
counterpoint. No last flash of virtuosic
brilliance. Just home: solid, radiant, warm,
improvisation night with the family. Two of
the folk strains—as recognizable as snatches
of bus-stop melody heard this
morning—have been identified from out of
the thicket:




    Ich bin so lang nicht bei dir gewest.
  Ruck her, Ruck her, Ruck her I've been
  away from you for so long. Come here,
  come here, come here!




    Kraut und Rüben haben mich
  vertrieben. ... Cabbage and beets drove
  me away..
    This song's second part also enters the
  contrapuntal fray:




    Hätt mein Mutter Fleisch gekocht, so
  wär ich länger blieben. Had my mother
  cooked meat, I would have hung around
  longer.
  High-spirited, but as steady as creation
gets. The musicologist Mellers quotes the
best explanation of the effect in words.
Thomas Browne again, the Doctor's religion:

     Even that vulgar and Tavern Music,
  which makes one man merry, another mad,
  strikes me into a deep fit of devotion, and
  a profound contemplation of the first
  Composer; there is something in it of
  Divinity more than the ear discovers. It is
  an hieroglyphical and shadowed lesson of
  the whole world....

   But there is another joke coded in the
text, wrapped inside the tavern music. I've
been away from you for so long. Cabbage
and beets did it. Had my mother cooked up
meat.... The complainer is the sarabande
Base, back at last, in unmistakable outline
underneath the flurry of simultaneous
quotes. I've been a great distance, a long
time gone. Sometimes unrecognizable. But
it's not my fault; had my mother served up
more than thin fare, all this circumlocution
would never have been necessary. Bach's
apology for not being a better cook.
Molecular evolution excusing itself: had I
been a little more skilled, I might have
spared the world all this terminal variety.
   Now no matter: the theme is back for
good, in the left hand of the quodlibet,
incarnate in the material of this last,
apologetic child whose parent in no way
could have foreseen it. The quodlibet
changes all the previous variations after the
fact. The irreducible is now less important
than the irrecoverable. There comes a time in
the search for the plaintext when even a
chance rendezvous with the still encrypted
cipher seems a glimpse, a real step in the
hard passage on. The sense of all tune is to
continue singing, in as many simultaneous
melodies as possible. Come here, come here.
   I'm home. .In the innermost hive, inside
the cell's thread, I never left. Was always
there.

  Quote of the Day

   I stood on the sidewalk, gathering a
crowd, alerted bystanders in a jaded city
closing an amazed ring on the pavement
around me. He had said, once, that it's
infinitely curious that people are not
infinitely more curious than they are. Here it
was, his private lesson in inquisitiveness,
remarkable enough to draw an audience,
even in midtown.
   Monophonic speaker playing its own
harmonies: he had explained to me a long
time ago how that might be done, how Bach
himself had done it in the solo partitas. Just
hit the right notes at the right time. With a
little programming, everything is possible.
But I couldn't in all of creation take in what
was happening. Even while this bankteller
automaton spewed its music out into the city
soot, I couldn't see how he, a year dead,
could be lodged inside this circuit, playing to
me. I clutched at the keypad of the machine,
as if I could reply to him there. I felt the
tunes running out and was powerless to
keep them from reaching the last measure.
They cadenced together, joke, chorale, folk
song, Base. In the return of silence, the
screen displayed: "Machine adaptation by
SR." It cleared and wrote one more quote to
compound the quodlibet: "He is a man. Take
him for all in all." Another thirty seconds
later, it changed again to read, "Please enter
your transaction."
   I yanked my card out in a daze. All the
glands in my face opened and ran, without
so much as polite consultation. I could still
hear that music; it had never stopped.
Something of divinity in it, beyond the ear. I
stepped away from the machine, reaching a
pitch of synthesis I will never recover. I took
in the entire block in a single, vertical
moment. The ring of bystanders in front of
me blinked, grinning that ridiculous grin city
people use in those few seconds when the
danger of surviving lifts. A heavy man,
medium height, thick glasses, indeterminate
race, spoke for everyone. "What on earth
was that?"
   I was in the middle of such a convulsed
colloid of sob and laugh that I could only
get out the words by shouting. "I couldn't
begin to tell you."

  A Walking Tour of the Known World

   I had to tell someone right away. But there
was only one man I could possibly tell: the
one I was supposed to take for all in all.
Where was he in this world? How could I get
there? Like an arctic tern on moving day, I
swung uptown, toward that other
information booth, the place where he had
once told me, "Meet me here if we ever get
separated."
   I cut through the Park. My walk took
forever; it didn't last long enough. The Park
was just a simulation, a mere children's zoo
of the full system. But I had been away from
the real thing for so long that even this thin
intermediary stood in nicely. It had been a
long time since I had felt any sort of real link
to chitin and chlorophyll. I had thought that
words, the distraction of language, enforced
a separation, banished me to the nowhere of
descriptions. Crossing the Park, I realized
that no living piece of tissue could keep its
head up above the Second Law without the
power of speech. In shape, function,
unfolding: they were all shouting, speaking,
feasting on words like lichen on rocks.
Everything was a grammar, and we might
come back in if we wanted.
   I reached the Met at last, made my
contribution, and practically ran to the
wheatfield. He wasn't there. Of course not.
But I had to go through the motion, for the
time-lapse singing telegram Dr. Ressler had
sent me was still an inch from my ear and I
had to tell Todd while I could still hum. The
painting, at least, was still around. I stood in
front of it for a long time, thinking of the
day we two had come to see it. It seemed a
different object now, a completely changed
composition. I had never seen it before. I
looked at the harvesters, the gatherers,
those just stopping for a meal, the man
sprawled asleep under the tree, the two
birds lifting up over the inlet of grain, the
distant figures deep in the background,
children at games again. Somewhere in my
head, scattered by later atheism, a poem the
nuns had once forced me to memorize tried
to break the surface, an equation relating
wheat and sleepers and time and reapers.
   I wandered through the galleries,
knowing I could not expect to find him
there, having to content myself with the
go-between of paint. I played with the idea,
the inverse of the one that had struck me
while cutting across the Park: everything
ever painted— tree-catalogued landscapes,
still lives with fish, flesh, and fowl served up
with a sprig of sliced lemon, interiors,
abstractions, all backwater genres—was an
attempt to classify, backdrive the alluvial
branching, locate the common term of
natural history. Even the endless crucifixions
seemed more about anatomy—the suffering
capacity of the body, the way the thumbs
curved in toward the palm when the
tendons were severed—than they were
about metaphysics.
   After a while I stopped noticing the
paintings altogether, so much more diverse
was the international, drifting crowd trying
to decipher them. This sampling of people,
muddying the halls from Egyptian to
Expressionist, had been specially selected for
extremes of characteristic. The varieties of
human face began to seem almost comical.
This random assortment of particulars had
nothing at all in common. Each one had a
privacy that defied and redefined all the
others. My texts had it right: we differ more
from one another than man does from ape.
   I left in late afternoon, not knowing where
to go, with the bank machine's message still
in me, pressing to be ported. I stopped at
another automated teller, but got nothing
except the usual cash. I turned home,
walking the whole way, miles, taking my life
in my hands through the dangerous
bouquet of neighborhoods, across that
beautiful bridge, finding that slower, less
accurate steps prolonged the afternoon
message sprung on me.
   But it was fading, unarrestable, going
back to that place where wonder hides out
from habituation. By the time I reached the
Heights, late, after dark, it was just a
sentence. Hello friend; here's an easy one.
Still a block away from the antique shop, I
saw the light on in the second story. Living,
just existing, presses probability to the
threshold of unlikeliness. I looked up at a
window shadow, a violation of physical law,
a miracle of coincidence that could be
neither reverse-engineered nor repeated. I
almost apo-plexed letting myself in; the
shape could mark only one person, the
person I was out hopelessly tracking down.
The only other one with a key. He was sitting
in his favorite stuffed chair, head back on
the antimacassar, under a soft, shaded,
fifty-watt pool of light, reading my
notebooks. "You!" I shouted from the door.
"How did you get here?"
   As if he had no other way of answering
except with a musical riddle, he began
whistling "Take the A-Train."
   I dropped everything and threw myself
violently on him, grabbed hold, as if grip
could arrest and fix this. It startled him,
seeing me bare, begging to be spared.
"What'd I do?" he laughed, protecting
himself from the attack of my hands. "Tell me
what I did."
   We dispensed with talking for a record
three minutes. Then, all I could find to repeat
was, "This is impossible. I can't believe this."

  The Question Board

   "What's impossible?"
   I told him. I skipped everything of
importance—the year of enforced waste, the
year of science. My quitting my job. The
genetics texts. My anxiety over not hearing
from him, then hearing, then not. I skipped
everything, and started in with the bank
machine playing the last Goldberg. "The
quodlibet. He was in there, Franklin; I swear
to you. Do you know what he told me?" I
waited, put my hand to his chin, the same
line of bone, and made him shake his head.
"He told me you were a man. That I was to
take you for all in all."
   "He said that?" Franklin reacted in a show
of disappointment. "Damn it. I had expressly
asked for 'One man loved the pilgrim soul in
you.'"
   I reeled from the implication. "He's alive?"
   Todd buckled his shoulders at my
stupidity, my untreatable addiction to hope.
"Janny, don't you see? I primed the pump
myself, last week. He told me, when I went to
see him in Illinois at the end, that he'd left a
little virus on-line for you. He gave me the
number that would bring it to life. Said I
might use it if I ever needed to soften you
up."
    I took my hands from him, moved to a spot
on the floor. No coincidence. Todd had
cosigned on the telegram. "You never
needed," I said, half to myself. "Never
needed to soften."
    "I've been punching into the damn tellers
every afternoon, to see if you'd tripped it yet.
Paranoid that someone was gonna pick me
up for breaking and entering, recognize me
as a monkeyer from way back. Don't you ever
withdraw, woman? You above cash? Much
relief this afternoon when you finally got
around to it."
    Matter-of-fact affectation, tough humor
against the odds, as if the separation might
as easily have been two days or twenty years.
I dismissed the sixty-four thousand closest
questions and asked, "How long have you
been back?" As if the tourist's itinerary
would tell me anything.
    He looked at his watch. "Ten months or
so. Jersey City, actually. A shade cheaper."
    "Ten months! Franklin. Oh God. Jesus.
Why on earth did you wait?" Even as I asked
it, I knew the question was out of line. Wait
for what? To come see a person who had
told him that visiting hours were over?
    "I could not drop by earlier," he said,
parodying Euclid, "because I didn't want to
show up here empty-handed." He reached
into a rucksack that had been lying
innocuously by the side of the chair. He had
arrived packed. He extracted a sheaf from his
overnight bag and handed it to me. A stack
of beautifully typed watermark bond. "I
figured that you wouldn't even say 'boo' to
me unless and until I wrapped up the
dissertation."
    My hand caught, afraid to turn over the
cover sheet. "Todd. Don't start this again." I
felt myself laughing, stricken, beginning to
believe.
    "Done. Portrait of the Artist. I'm out from
under it."
    I turned the cover page and began to
read. I knew what it was with the first
paragraph, the first sentence's description of
a young post-doc's Greyhound bus arrival at
a laboratory deep in the interior. He too had
served his sentences. The story of one life;
the math of the central nervous system. I
could not read on. I began straightening the
sheaf of papers, throat, hands, eyes, all in
wild counterpoint.
    "Who'da thought it?" Todd said, filling
the silence. "Years of art history, and I wind
up in biography after all."
    You should talk, friend: all I ever wanted
to be was a researcher, and here I am,
plunged into information science. To keep
myself from complete regression, I asked,
"What have you been living on all this
while?"
   Todd shot back, speaking through the
corner of his mouth, "Patrimony. The old
man's life policy. What's it to ya, doll?"
   I began to cry, quietly. He came and sat
beside me on the floor. He began to tell me
about his last visit to the professor. "The
man pretended to be furious at me for
leaving Europe just to come see him like
that, a skeleton. We managed to sneak in a
car tour, out to the woods, before he got
too weak. I plied him for buried biographical
details. I asked what it felt like, slowly
dissolving into bad instructions. I asked him
for his odds on humanity. I asked him if he
was happy with the way he'd spent his time.
He told me: 'It seems my answers to all the
important questions are doomed to remain
qualified.'
   "No bursts of false hope, no journal
entries celebrating I kept my meals down
today. Let's hope tomorrow is still better.
Nothing left behind, no bequest to first filial
but the ongoing experiment. Janny, his hair
had turned white. White. As white as a fresh
sheet of paper. I asked him if the cancer
study he'd hooked up with had reached any
conclusions. 7 have, in any case. It hurts.'"
   So did the punchline. So did having to
laugh. The muscles around my rib cage
contracted all together, against the
blueprint, more like a swimmer's cramp than
laughter. Todd made another feeble, black
crack, for my sake: something about the
absurdity of a language that made oncology
and ontology differ by a single mutation. A
little while later, I thought I might try
breathing again.
   "He told me a story: 1982. The year before
you meet him. He's passed fifty, gratefully
out from under the immediate jurisdiction of
endocrinology. Through decades of training,
he now thinks of Dr. Koss only three times a
day. He's living in a world where clipped,
rewritten supercoiled strands of nucleotides
can be sent from anywhere to anywhere.
Where everybody's got his own ILLIAC.
Three golf balls on the moon.
   "He's working steadily on the night shift,
the month before I get myself hired. On a
whim, he turns the radio on, fiddles with the
dial, and freezes it on an old friend. It's the
Canadian kid, beyond a doubt. The
inimitable playing style, that muffled
humming in the background tracks trying for
a Platonic, thirty-third variation just beyond
the printed score. Playing the piece that
woman gave him. Ressler is amazed to find
how vividly the structure of the past is still
encoded in him. Stadium Terrace, Cyfer. That
reverse-telescope dilation, where distant is
closer than near. He discovers he still loves
Jeannie as intensely as the day he first
stumbled upon the evidence.
   "But in an instant's listening, he's shocked
to hear that it's not the same piece, not the
same performance. It's a radical rethinking
from beginning to end, worlds slower, more
variegated, richer in execution. A lot of the
variations enter attacca, without pause, the
last notes of one spilling into the first notes
of the next, anxious to hear how they might
sound all at once, on top of one another.
   "He can't believe his good luck at getting
a new recording. But
   the party dissipates at the end, after the
return of the ossified aria, when the
announcer reports that the pianist has
suffered a massive cerebral hemorrhage just
after releasing this take two. He leaves the
radio on all night, and the next, as if letting
it air out. When the piece plays again two
days later, he knows why. He sits and listens
the piece through in its entirety, weeping
like a child for the death of someone he
didn't even know."
   I saw then why Todd came back to pass all
this on to me. I raised my head, knowing I
looked hideous, thinking that if he could see
me this way and not run away, it might begin
to signify some chance. When he saw my
face like that, Todd laughed, reached out a
finger, and smeared a little saline pool
around in the bogs under my eyes.
   "He sent you back to me," I said.
   "My suggestion. He supplied the dowry. A
trunk packed with handwritten full scores.
He thought we might like to try to decipher
them together." Todd reached his hands
around my waist from behind, closed them
around mine, then moved both sets in a
pantomime of that old pump-organ
enterprise we had once indulged in, up in
the woods. This time the keyboard was only
four-hands.
   I freed myself from his arms. The thought
of Dr. Ressler's compositions pinned me
against the stakes of being alive. The
readiness that the singing bank machine had
released in me vanished. Everything I had
learned in my year off, every stunted enzyme
for courage that I had managed in isolation
to nurse alive, was about to seize up and go
dysfunctional again, knowing all that now
rode on it. I tried to steady myself; if I could
tell Todd everything I'd done, from the
beginning, I might begin to retrieve myself.
"I've been toying with a little biography too,
I'm afraid."
   "So I see," he said, picking up the
notebook I had caught him reading. "Pretty
strong stuff here, Missy. Sex, love,
espionage, the works. You're sitting on a
gold mine, you know."
   "Don't be absurd."
   "No. I'm serious. I have this great idea."
   All of a piece, I knew what it was. "Out of
the question. Don't even think of it."
   "Come on. A few edits, a little
cut-and-paste..."
   He made me laugh. I couldn't help myself.
"I believe 'splicing' is the bioengineer's term
of choice."
   He made a great show of collating, a little
courtship-dance of paper-shuffling to win
me again, for good. "Come'on. Let's do it.
Let's make a baby."
   I shook my head. "No," I said, dead sober.
"It wouldn't be enough. A man like you will
always want the real thing someday. Or at
least the chance. It would never last."
   "My dear Ms. Reference." He edged over
to me, taking me up against him. "Why do
you think the Good Lord invented sperm
bank donations?" He placed his hands over
my face, exploring the burning landscape
there. "And let me ask you another thing."
One for the perpetual Question Board. His
eyes were full beyond measure. His whole
throat shook like a beginner's in wonder at
the words he was about to discover. "Who
said anything about lasting?"
   ARIA

  Da Capo e Fine

          What could be simpler? In rough
translation: Once more with feeling.