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, interwired 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 a
rm 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, remembering 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.
&
nbsp; 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.
The Gold Bug Variations Page 22