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 base-ball-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 b
rown 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.
The Gold Bug Variations Page 35