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-yearold 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 fairytale 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 sunbathe
r 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 entrée 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 hand-bill, 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 Entrée 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 $500 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.
The Gold Bug Variations Page 19