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. Ressler 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 antimalarial 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 and 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 homunculus 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.
The Gold Bug Variations Page 33