At times Dr. Ressler would slip back into his native condition. Feeling the man drift away, Todd would throw himself in after, like the boy in the news accounts who always happens along at the instant of the ice pond disaster. “Did you know,” he would ask when comfortable silence slipped into the wrong meter, “that Brahms and George M. Cohan were contemporaries?” He would look to me for covert confirmation, ready to recant as a joke if the guess proved mistaken. Ressler invariably smiled, less at the invention than at its motive.
But sometimes, seamlessly, Ressler seeded us, hosting rambling round tables starting with the prospects for artificial intelligence, veering toward the impasse in Namibia, and winding up with the Pythagorean relations or plate tectonics and the Mid-Atlantic Ridge. With his quiet encouragement, we could talk all evening. He never let us equivocate or waffle. No matter how far afield we wandered, he would call us back with a rounded predicate. Franklin credited me, some obscure reattachment therapy I worked on the man. Dr. Ressler liked me, spoiled me with attention. He treated Jimmy and Annie Martens affectionately too. If he was a shade warmer with me, perhaps it was only that I stayed later into the night.
The elegant court Dr. Ressler paid me as our familiarity took hold thrilled Todd. He at last discovered in me the seed of the erotic. We kissed constantly, a running, surreptitious feeding fetish. By the elevator shaft, in the foyer, through the main office, on desks where aides-decamp of industry had drawn reports only hours before. A quick slip beneath the blouse in a dark utility closet. Hair, hands, neck, lip: one continuous tasting, sixteen without the giggle. How long could we prolong the extended adolescent feel? What came next? It didn’t matter: after evenings of verbal invention, we needed something for our mouths to do when they paused to repair.
He kissed me through the accordion grate on my way home late one night—a last freight inventory after hours of polymath, polymorphous perversity. “Come tomorrow. Early, this time.”
“All right,” I said. “But I have to tell you something. Neither of us is twenty anymore.”
“Remind me to teach you how to count in hexidecimal.”
I cranked the lever to descend, but stopped at his shout. I set the dial to climb and came back level. “I have a great feeling about us these days, Janny.” He gave it just enough time. “It’s called lust.”
If I missed two days in a row, Franklin would leave me notes in the question submissions box.
Lovely O’Deigh—
Come out and Play? Limber those lanky researcher’s limbs?
I will wait under the streetlamp at the library NE corner
from now until you show. If you fail, I will be forced to
stand all night and the following day and miss work and
be fired and waste away, massive species die-off or worse.
I have a thought for no one’s but your ears. FTODD.
FTODD, his system login, doubled as personal signature. As if shorthand genus and species were necessary. As if anyone else in this spreading stain of fifteen million had used the word “lovely” since the Somme.
He came to my place, appraised my rooms. I had by then outfitted them with odds and ends from my antiquarian landlord, indulging myself, giving over to darkwood and damask. “This place is beautiful,” he decided. “Did you dream all this up yourself? Amazing antimacassars. You’re one player piano short of a New Orleans cathouse done up by the Rossettis.” He loved coming over, sitting for hours in a rocker, being read to in embroidered darkness the reverse of the fluorescent flicker where he spent his waking life. But when he took to courting me in force, it had to be outside, in the open air, grabbing the last December light, the late heat of months holding on eerily long after the season. He wanted outside, every possible moment, as if only by being there at the instant the change arrived could he read the encyclopedia of the year in brief, the masterpiece of condensation, the backlit landscape, that gessoed, verdigris panorama.
Early December suggested that this would be the last chance either of us might have to remember what it was, in the blood, to be young. The day now went dark well before supper. It seemed an irritant to him, a command to hold more, soak it up until saturated, walk another block in the dark. Tomorrow would be too late. The smell of dry first flakes carried the weight of denouement, revelations to secure, sap to consolidate while the neighborhood got ready for night. Your rooms are beautiful; but friend, let’s go out while we can.
Sometimes he would not even come up, but would shout from street level. Come play. Unlimber. Northeast corner. For some reason, I always came down. I had reached the age when I could no longer resist the fantastic, especially when carried off with authority. If his message was for no one’s but my ears, what would become of it if I failed to listen? I would dress and undress several times, trying for an effect I couldn’t satisfy, settling on not-quite: linen, a mid-calf wraparound, and shawl. He was always under the streetlight when I arrived. I could make him out blocks away—confident, calling from a distance, as if I might lose my way at the last moment. He dressed up too, after a fashion: straight-legged gray pants and a maroon pullover. He would talk without topic, give me the most forlorn fondle: he liked the small of my back, my fingers, my neck. We would find a spot in the park, abandoned now by even the most desperate adolescents, and place damp, guarded kisses in each other’s mouth until we lost the easiness of virtual strangers.
He would walk me dutifully back to my rooms, making me promise to visit him at work, as if I were the undependable one. Once, when we reached the door of the shop that still surprised me to come home to, he said, “I’m glad you came out on such short notice. Ninety-five out of a hundred women would not have.”
“Private poll?”
“Ha! That reminds me. Last night, Ressler defined the difference between pure and applied science: pure science was applied science the Pentagon won’t pay for.”
“Don’t change the subject, creep.”
“What? It’s all the same subject. Data gathering.” He looked in my eyes, deep and long, fields for future study. “Kiss me good night?” he asked, clinically.
“I suppose. Just this once.” The next fifteen minutes lost to oral exploration. Ninety-five out of a hundred women in their right minds would have known better.
When I woke mornings, a sweet, forgivable embarrassment infused me, not a little secretly pleased at still being able, this late in the season, to do something that would be prohibited in another month or two. The way I was behaving was its own sponsor, insisting that my body had not changed all that much, that it still carried its old shape and solution. Every turn it had taken since twenty had been to some extent wrong. So how could I pass up his notes, his invitations to be wrong again?
I had no reason to feel so excited, considering what I’d spent to get here. Each morning’s anticipation was thick with anxiety. I was the debutante on the evening of her coming out who, after three weeks of screaming adrenals, thinks it might be easier after all to stay home the night of the ball and stick to baking gingerbread for the rest of her life. That waking dream where one finds a dozen new rooms in the familiar house: it brought on dry heaves of expectation.
Sometimes during the day reaction set in. I spent my working hours answering questions as remote from my evenings as I had grown from the lost cause of politics:
Q:How long would I have to play continuous Ping-Pong to make it into the national record books?
Q:Could you please supply the words to the third verse from the theme song of Branded?
Q:Who’s the most eligible bachelor in the developed world?
However numbing the day’s list, I took pains with it, shaping my answers with the care of a potter to whom nothing mattered except creating the perfect vessel for today’s flowers. I sculpted every response as if by outside chance it might signify. However ludicrous or heartbreaking the three-by-five, an accurate reply carried some small possibility of redemption. I did not imagine myself a pragmatic force, or even a mor
al one. I was simply an agent, assuming that what people wanted to know, they needed. If I kept my head down, maintained the path between inquiry and fact, human curiosity might rise to its subject matter.
Q:How does the government calculate poverty level?
Q:Are there places on earth that haven’t been surveyed?
Q:What is the Lithuanian for “I need you”?
Q:I have heard of creatures that take energy directly from thermal vents on the seafloor. Nothing from sunlight at all? How could they have begun?
The instant I turned up one of these I felt recognition, a reminder of what I was doing. One of them redeemed a week of compost. Each betrayed the interrogative passion built into grammar, fueled by that thermal vent just under the crust. Each looked for an answer that would keep them from the absolute zero of blanketing vacuum. Yes, Ishmael again, in that rented bed in a coastal inn just before setting off, proving to himself, by feeling his nose freezing, that he is “the one warm spark in the heart of an arctic crystal.”
THE AMATEUR’S ALMANAC
I learned then how shrewdly stable the forty-hour work week was. Any longer, and corporate time chokes the off-hours. Any shorter, and we might actually sustain a thought, satisfy ourselves. Either would be societally fatal. What allowed my friends to escape the net was how little MOL asked of their attention. Once a night Dr. Ressler would put up a File Repack: a massive process where all the Clients would be collated, reconditioned, squeezed, reindexed, and streamlined. The repack required so many spindles and so much processing time that the system was committed for the duration.
While File Repack ran, those two could do whatever they pleased— kick around the innovations that daily made a liar of Ecclesiastes. Recent sighting of the W particle. Stone Age tribe hitherto escaping detection. Pioneer 10, passing Neptune on its way to being the first artificial thing to quit the solar system. When the day held no particular revolutions, Dr. Ressler whipped us into silliness by making us sing ridiculously long three-part rounds in polytones until the last cat was gutted.
We saved no lives on the night shift. But then, we didn’t take any either. It all seemed happy once. A nightly exercise in the quick improvisation that had brought us together in the first place. Ressler puttered with print ribbons and decollators. Todd sketched perpetually into ragpaper pads, pads that grew thinner as he filled them. Late at night, hours of work still ahead, my friends sent me home with a handful of curiosities to verify before the next evening, threads we never seemed to close out. A renaissance of contentment. I found myself in a place where words regained their campfire importance, explanatory, incorruptible, above suspicion. I talked myself into thinking that Todd and I helped repair this diverted man’s considerable gift. Every curve of clavicle Todd caressed said it was all right to think so.
“Tell me everything I need to know about you,” I asked Todd one night. He sat at his console, shuttling bits of magnetic flux on distant drive packs through the intermediary keyboard. Dr. Ressler was in the control room, soundproofed. The two of us were alone, discounting the obedient machines.
Franklin faked a theatrical shudder. “Brr. Jeesiz. At last it comes to this. I thought you were the reference. What do you want to know?”
I sat by the console table, legs up. I leaned over, took his arm, placed his fingers high up in my folded lap. We both felt the professor’s presence on the clear side of the two-way mirror, but the obstacle itself was provocative. “Tell me, if you don’t mind, how in the world you managed to get here.”
“Well, my mother and father loved each other very much,” he said, clandestinely stroking my thigh.
“Ass. Who are you? Where did you come from?”
“Dunno. ’Sconsin.” I refused even to grimace. Franklin sighed. “I was wedged in the middle of a heap of kids. Must have been a half-dozen of us. Doubtless where all the trouble started. Family wanted me to be an oceanographer. Went on to college, did a couple years in physics. The universe as we knew it was too small. Ended up art history, ABD.” He shot me his most opaque grin. “All but Dissertation.”
He would answer my questions but only to the letter. “Come on, Franker. That’s not a curriculum vitae.”
“What are you after? Chambers Bio? American Art Directory? I don’t qualify.”
“How did you get so damn alienated?” The closest we’d come to friction since our first meal. I felt a sickening urge to push until something broke.
“I’m not alienated. I am a United States citizen.”
I couldn’t help but laugh. We had such divergent senses of humor that he sometimes reduced me to giggles just by losing me in translation. He loved inadvertent slippage. I once found him chuckling alone in the coffee room at a flier announcing: “Power Saws Cut 10 Dollars.” In time, I recognized a Todd ambiguity at first glance. For several weeks he enshrined on the side of system A’s central processor the headline I’d brought him proclaiming, “Incest More Common Than Thought.”
I kept after him. I wanted something that had nothing to do with personal data. “Where did you learn to sketch?”
“You presume I’ve learned. You haven’t seen my work.”
“Is that an offer?”
“In lectures,” he said, choosing the lesser of two cooperations. “‘New French Naturalism to the Present.’ Irresistible: huge, scooped halls; faces from every aspect. I spent genre after genre just sketching. Problem was, the professors kept turning the lights out to show slides. Even now, I draw better in the dark.”
He was telling the truth. I’d seen his hand skid across a tablet at high speed. He drew while talking, a nervous muscle-jitter while his mind was elsewhere. Hatches, shades, and crevasses sprung up from a hidden plane beneath the paper. He did not draw, he dusted: the flour spread over the smooth stones in a church floor that magically raises the pattern of gothic letters lying invisible across a worn-away tomb.
“I’d start each term in the first row on the far right aisle. Then I’d discover a perfect Pisanello in the upper middle, and I’d change seats. But there were only so many interesting faces in any given neighborhood. Had to go track me down that Memling. Seek out new blood.”
He fell quiet; I’d accidentally sent him back. His hand played nervously over the function keys. All at once I received a tremendous jolt of who-cares courage. “I want my portrait done.”
He looked around agitatedly, bluntly examined me up and down. Just as bluntly, I let him. He squinted, and after an awful hesitation, clapped his hands. “Why, you’re the same woman who was here last night!” He took a soft pencil, the same pencil he used to mark off the Processing to Do List. He flipped over the nearest green-striped printout and unceremoniously began that oldest form of programming. When he came to do them, the hairs on the back of my neck moved at his pencil touch. I felt him locking in to the layout of my bone. The way he drew me, what he saw there, redefined my facial lexicon. Terror made me a good deal more striking then than I am. But he wasn’t after symmetrical features. Not the pretty composite, but mystery. And the only way to keep that quantity intact was to transpose it to a distant, more mutable key.
Several minutes passed. We talked, as always, as he worked. As always, he didn’t care if his subject moved. When he finished, he set the pencil down and said, “Missed it again.”
“Don’t I get to see it?” Faithful to the strict phoneme, he seemed genuinely surprised at that clause hanging on the end of the bargain. He handed the document over, a contractual captive. I took it, but couldn’t assemble what I looked at. Both a recapitulation of the Vermeer Head of a Girl we’d stood in front of at the Met, and a dazed, physiognomically unmistakable thirty-year-old, 1983, who showed in her penciled eyes that she did not quite know what had happened, today in history.
“We do all styles,” Franklin explained. “Giotto to Gleizes, inclusive.” I could only stare at the image. “I told you. I picked it up in a lecture hall. Subliminal seduction. ‘Learn Mandarin Chinese in Your Sleep.’”
“This is astonishing.”
“Ha! Leonardo, Rafael, Agnolo, and me.”
I demanded the portrait. It was already mine. Despite a stylistic anachronism that made it unacceptable to anyone except an historically indifferent critic, the sketch betrayed such incredible draftsmanship that I was furious at him for never cultivating it.
“I need it back. I have to submit the printout.”
“You can’t. You aren’t going to turn over this report to some, some accountant in city government with my face all over the back of it?”
He took the page and shrugged. “Don’t worry. Nobody ever listens to side B.”
“Give me something from your tablet then. Compensation. Something of Dr. Ressler. Of both of us.”
“I dispatch those suckers, soon as I make them. Can’t stand to look at them after a day or two.”
“You what?” Destroyed sketches of incredible draftsmanship: it was like news of burnt Alexandria, or jerky footage of the last marsupial wolf. I shouted, “Systematically trashing art!”
Franklin shook his head rapidly. “Don’t ever confuse art with Draw the Pirate.” Precise, vehement. “I have a steady hand, am a competent enough imitator. But no compositional sense. Incapable of making anything original.”
“And you’re a feeble liar to boot.” I’d watched his hand. “Your sketches make themselves.”
He twisted his lips. “My point exactly.”
“Well, if you aren’t ashamed of seducing public librarians, you should be ashamed of squandering a genuine talent.”
He froze, turned to face me, and said the cruelest thing I ever heard him say to anyone: “I thought you were supposed to be well-informed.” He apologized by grabbing my knees and pressing them for forgiveness. I gave it to him, took his hands and pressed back, as I would now if they were in reach.
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