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 he 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 missynapsing. 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, stra
ining 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. T
he 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 Gold Bug Variations Page 34