“How hard would it have been to leave the door open …? Bad metaphor. Sorry.” Todd smiled queasily, about to be sick. “I mean: as negative life insurance, the pill would have been cheap at the price. Suffer the less radical premiums for a couple years, against the outside payoff if you change your mind. Or partner,” he added sadly, touching me on a flank already changed to terra-cotta.
I shook my head. Having come this far, all I could do was explain the variable that had swung the calculation. I told him why it was not a question of my mind or situation changing. A few years before, I’d found on the Question Board a request for the latest scientific line on mongolism. My first response was mild irritation; any modestly educated adult ought to have been able to find a satisfactory answer within minutes. I started at the obvious place, followed the well-marked trail through reliable sources, and delivered the broadly established explanation: Down’s syndrome is the result of trisomy—a third chromosome 21. Airtight, complete, exact. I couldn’t imagine improving upon it.
But the day after I posted this answer, the board carried a follow-up: What causes trisomy? I felt ashamed at not answering the first question at all. I went back to the sources, beginning to appreciate the issue, how much subtlety the research in fact required. The immediate mechanism was undoubtedly genetic. But nature and nurture were not entirely distinct. That extra chromosome, research suggested, may in turn be the result of an older ovary in which chromosome 21 fails to separate in egg formation. I attached a rider to the first explanation: chromosomal non-disjunction, while not entirely understood, increased in frequency in proportion to the mother’s age.
Two days later, a third question: How old is an at-risk mother? “I was exasperated,” I told Todd, crawling back under the weight of his arms. “Someone was putting me through the hoops. You know: like a child, repeating ‘why?’ until the word evaporates?” Todd shook his head, made me continue.
The day after the third question, before I could form a definitive response, a woman materialized at the Reference Desk asking if I was J. O’D. She reached down into a stroller and lifted an infant for me to inspect. The child had the unmistakable spatulate features of deformity. She said she was twenty-three.
“I could still see, for probably the last week, a faint profile of normal boy already being drowned out by the crosstalk of that extra twenty-first chromosome. I finally knew what she was asking. Was it her fault? I asked what her doctors had told her. Her answer destroyed me: ‘They’re less helpful than you.’ I spent the rest of the afternoon with the two of them. I showed her how to follow the citations, and we pushed them hard. At the end, we discovered two distinct etiologies. The first was sporadic, without inheritance patterns, some slow, possibly viral cause. The second, the minority of cases, was a permanent chromosomal attachment in the mother, a translocation trisomy, a fluke of a fluke that struck mothers of all ages equally.
“After some hours, I apologized: the library would have to be a lot more current and specialized, I myself would have to have a medical degree to move her any closer. But by then she was almost grateful, having learned along the way about cretinism, microcephalia, PKU, anencephaly, spina bifida. Oh, Jesus! The whole, grisly catalog.”
In the middle of the list I broke down, scaring Todd witless. He sat by helplessly, uncertain whether to comfort or cower in a corner. I tried to compose myself, aggravating the shakes. My voice was still wild when I spoke again. “The girl thanked me for the one promising bit anyone had thrown her since her boy’s birth. The books said that an extra twenty-first often leaves mongols with the sweetest dispositions.”
Todd did not need the rest spelled out. The endless catalog of things that can go wrong—so comforting to this woman, whose punishment began to look like commutation—had killed me. I felt a dread I previously couldn’t have imagined. Because of a lucky statistical aberration, because I and everyone close to me had been born healthy, I had assumed that childbearing was a perfected process with a few tragic accidents impinging on the periphery. I now saw that the error-free lived on a tiny, blessed island of self-delusion. I could hear my own mutations accumulating; it was either hurry into a baby-making I was not ready for, or wait, Russian roulette, for my own blueprint to betray me.
Lying in the dark, I felt the revulsion return with full force. As at his apartment, listening to that Viennese song, I heard how we lived in a room of privileged music above the screaming street. I closed out the syllogism, wishing I’d stuck with the less defensible line that I’d sterilized myself because I hadn’t the time or patience to bear children. “I told Tuckwell I was going in for the operation. He didn’t argue. It never occurred to me to consult anyone else.” Least of all one I hadn’t met yet.
I watched Franklin’s face as he assembled the facts. Something had been broken; but the thing was done, and even he was smart enough to see that he would only break things worse by probing. “Well,” he said at length. “That answers my original question.” The time for theory was over. All that was left was practice, and we fell back to working over one another’s bodies again, more circumspectly this time. That night, at least, there were no side effects.
FRIENDS OF THE FAMILY
She must still be a benign, lovely woman. From the day I met her, Annie Martens struck me as impossibly well-adjusted. She worked as a remote teller for MOL’s mother bank, entering the financial world’s dirty linen that Todd and Ressler washed every night. She seemed perfectly happy with that deadly-dull career, preferring it to anything more ambitious. She would have gladly accepted a demotion for the good of the firm.
She was suspiciously sunny for this city. Her only claim to psychopathology involved an early marriage, which had ended in amicable divorce the year before. Uncle Jimmy reported from the day shift that the abandoning mate persisted in meeting Annie every day for lunch. The uncomplicated woman was happy to hold hands and neck in the corridor with her ex as if a newlywed.
She was infinitely patient, cohabiting comfortably with the incomprehensible, her face wearing the perpetual surprise of Mary ambushed at her prayers. She had a deep, throaty laugh, like underground water. She was intuitively musical; we often listened to her wrap herself angelically around a guitar and produce, in round pitches, old frontier songs about wandering, gambling, or brutal stabbings of love objects. Even I loved her when she played. Her face radiated. She closed her eyes when she sang, inhabiting a garden far away.
Annie had no faults except a propensity to speak incoherently. She punctuated her small talk with advertising slogans: “Betcha can’t eat just one,” or “Even your friends won’t tell you.” She was, Franker assured me, impossible to take anywhere, because she unconsciously read all wayside text out loud until the patter became intolerable. This habit explained how her husband could sue for divorce without losing his affection for the woman.
There was something else that took me months to put my finger on. She liked aphorisms, annoying if forgivable in themselves. But she could not reproduce these clichés accurately. The errors were easily missed. To recount amazement, she’d exclaim, “I flipped my wing.” She’d crack a joke without apparent punchline, laugh throatily, and conclude, “That went over like a wet balloon.” When Jimmy teased her, she responded, “Watch it. You’re walking on thin eggshells.”
Once her problem became apparent, listening to her filled me with embarrassment at the whole race. She was not a stupid woman; her problem was not imbecility in an environment requiring alertness. Rather the reverse. She was born in 1963, a year I’m old enough to remember. The date itself consigned her to another era. Todd, five years older, slipped in under the wire, old enough to know that the world is racing toward the most crucial drop since Galileo. Annie was too young to know what the good fight was and certainly would never have fought it without us.
The paintings that made Franklin’s life palatable to him, that opened up a channel to a resonant past, Annie knew instinctively to be treacherous impostors. She was a matter-
of-fact woman, loving what was at hand and not at all awed by what was not. Sfumato mystery, the flame of the past scumbled around her in a Washington Heights pastiche of the Cluny cloisters. La Gioconda munching on corn chips. Great Expectations abridged to fit on ninety-minute car cassette. Stains spreading into underarms to Beethoven’s Fifth. Mozart’s in the closet: let ’im out, let ’im out, let ’im out.
She was true to the culture she was born into, truer than Todd, who has abandoned it. She was endowed with a great capacity for care. She could cry at pop tunes and laugh at Yellow Pages ads. Her sloganeering, her mangled proverbs, her utter incomprehension of irony, her ability to recite “Buckle up for safety” as if it were a Pater Noster, marked in her genuine humanism. Along with the clear forehead and angelic chin came a propensity for what her how-to manuals called “personal engagement.” The news account of a zoo giraffe that had died in copulation almost shattered her. She loved things. Anything. Rain showers. Pretty stationery. Sandwich wrappers. Her Doberman, ten pounds heavier than she was. Anything nearby and knowable Annie cared for indiscriminately with all her heart.
The need to distribute surplus care led her to sacrifice personal preference to prescribed taste. In another time or place, she might have fixed as easily on Shaw as she did on Burma-Shavian quatrain. Nothing mattered except giving compassion in the available dialect. I can’t imagine what pleasure she found in staying around after hours, eavesdropping on the roundtable rotogravure. She couldn’t have had the first idea of what those men were up to. When I saw her with them, wading bravely into cross-purpose conversation, I felt I was witnessing one of those confrontations beloved of science fiction: carbon-based life meets living silicon. She would clip shirt ads for Franker as a way of telling him his were hopelessly worn out, and admonish a startled Dr. Ressler about the dangers of smoking. She confided in me that the two fascinated her because they minced no bones.
She would have made herself a satellite of whoever was at hand. Todd, in one of his rare, Orphic ascents into the day shift, had accosted this stranger just as he did so many streetsweepers, cabbies, and commuting power brokers, demanding a full working account of her machine, her job, her sensibilities, and her life. That, followed by the requisite lunch, and Annie became a devoted friend. Words so freely given were to her a pact with him and all his friends. The casual contact he was so good at made Todd something real for her, not ever to be wholly understood, but cared for.
I often thought that Uncle Jimmy would have been Annie’s ideal mate. They were both obliviously gentle people. They might have offered one another some protection against events. Even Todd suggested the idea to him: “Take her out to a show. See what happens.”
Jimmy laughed him off. “Are you mad? I’m old enough to be the girl’s father.” The difference in their years was not great. But Annie was still a child and Jimmy already an old lady. He did, in fact, carry a torch for her, a crush that made him even more puppyish than usual whenever she was in the room. He flirted with her shyly, as he did with every woman who came through the suite of offices. “Have a boyfriend yet? Must be half a dozen guys who would jump at a chance to dance with the likes of you.” Annie would say that she was ready anytime, say that evening. Jimmy would excuse himself, insisting that his expert supervision was required just then by the night shift. “Other men get to play with the ladies. Me, I’ve got to keep this ship running.”
In fact, he was a nuisance, and every hour he stayed on into the shift cost Ressler and Todd two on the other end, in the early a.m. He liked to organize the stockroom and the card deck library, to create new rotation systems for the disk packs. Each scheme led to complete confusion. He would call his infirm mother. “These night-shift boys have fouled things up again; don’t look for me until late.”
Jimmy caught me in possession of the door password again, but this time resigned himself to my coming and going. I had free rein to let myself into the computer room as if I were on salary. A few nights after my confession to Todd, I arrived to find the entire population missing. Someone, in theory, was supposed to be laundering the day’s data at all times. I sat and waited, thinking that the shift must have stepped out to an all-night sandwich dive. A minute later, all digital hell broke loose. Sys B began making the distress ah-oo-gahs of a wounded submarine. The spindles on Sys A powered up and the console spit cathode fireworks. Helpless, I ran to the screen, thinking I might at least jot down error codes. The screen erupted in animated celebration:
Our Dearest O’Deigh. Welcome to the median. The U.S. Bureau of On-Line Statistics assures us that 30 splits the country in half. As usual, you’re right on the fence. Get out of that frilly blur of an apartment and acquire a mortgage. Accumulate some debt. Numbers compel you to do something middling …
The display was amazing: letters grew, skidded across the screen, recombined into new words, surged in normal distribution curves, twisted into visual syntax, “fence” forming one for “you” to sit on, “frilly blur” dissolving into one, “debt” coming out gothic, “middling” in Times Roman. The letters exploded into life, accompanied by bells and whistles on the terminal speaker:
Happy B-day. We hope that 30 is your most profound variation yet. Never forget that you are living at life’s critical instant. Your fellows in aging, SRESSLER & FTODD.
Then the screen went blank, came back with its inscrutable system prompt politely inquiring “Command?” I looked up from the console and clenched a fist at the initiators, doubtless observing behind the two-way mirror. Todd came out, followed by a sheepish Ressler. I cold-shouldered Todd, addressed the professor. “How did you do that?” He shrugged: all Boolean. A matter of access.
I wheeled on Todd. “How did you know it was my birthday?”
“You told me.”
“I only said it was coming. How did you get the date?”
He grinned, thick with significance. “We looked it up.”
OPERATION SANTA CLAUS
Blake’s departure hits Cyfer hard. The lab is poorer without the force of his arbitrating humor, his even keel. The defection makes the remaining members suspect they’ve been kidding themselves; chemical inheritance will evade them. To restore morale, Ulrich turns the last Blue Sky session of 1957 into a Christmas party. He invites other department members, staff, favored graduate students: anyone who might keep the remaining team from staring at one another in stunned silence.
Christmas is an odd holiday to be observing, intent as they are on substituting a molecular model for the miraculous winter birth. Nevertheless, they go through the motions, set out a wassail bowl, paper cups depicting Santa Claus in various postures of levity, a herd of wax reindeer, and a university record player on which Toveh Botkin, music committee, keeps up a stream of modal progressions insisting glad tidings of great joy.
Ressler wants to know how it has come to pass, despite his friend’s exit, the flicker of the tired capacitance lights, Sputnik standing in as Nativity Star, the daily radioed word of low-level violence decimating the unwatched flocks by night, that Christmas still lodges itself so deeply under his skin. It can’t be the fugitive baby on the run from the authorities, a story he saw through when not much older than the infant in question. Still, he finds himself steeped in the crusty old four-parters Botkin churns out on the turntable. Their modulations draw him toward the pitiful speakers, exhalation of synchronized air through the trachea suggesting chords that might lift the edge of the translation table for a quick look. These medieval intervals, a fossil record of his dazed arrival here in this room of reagents and gauges, this change of venue, with no quantitative test for discerning the way back. A camaraderie he wishes he could admit: he too, smothered in the stink of gingerbread and pine needles, lapsing into Lydian under forever unangeled skies, might be culpable, guilty of trying to reach beyond his grasp, of attempting to comprehend something he can’t hope to name, something that might better be left to metaphor, myth, popular fiction, the beautiful counterfeit.
At the
record player, he asks Botkin with his eyes for an explanation. His old friend raises her finger. At the end of the current tune, she slaps on another sprightly chorale. “Samuel Scheidt,” she identifies. “From the Köln Gesangbuch, early seventeenth century.” Ressler cocks an eyebrow at her, uncomprehending. The piece has some slight charm, aura of otherworldliness. But as full of leftover Renaissance censer scent as this tune is, it cannot minister. It has no healing power, no explanation.
Botkin notes his confusion. “Wait. Wait.” She musses about in the cardboard sleeves and pulls out another disk. “O Jesulein Süss.” She drops the needle down on exactly the same tune. Only everything different. The thing now arches and breathes, soars through agonizing suspensions, pours across a new, unexpected support in the bass, moves its four lines independently yet in a coordinated harmonic terrace of beauty. “Bach,” she says, shrugging, the attribution self-evident.
The two works differ as a salt crystal and a spider’s web. Scheidt, competent craftsman, labors on a carved doll that, however lifelike, remains wooden, while the other joiner need only apply the lightest imaginable touch to transform the clunky melody, lift the crippled thing to life. “A cradle song,” Botkin glosses. “Composers cut their eyeteeth on chorales. No musical form is less sophisticated. A year of theory and you could churn them out blindfold. Bach manufactured them by the hundreds. And yet …”. She points to the turntable, as if the secret behind the miraculous transformation searing Ressler lies there. On the vinyl. In the vibrating diamond.
Just as she is about to make the critical point, to identify what turns beats into beating, Toveh is interrupted by Dan Woytowich. He grabs them both in a friendly embrace, happier than Ressler has ever seen him, happy enough to be another person. The only happy soul in the room. Team setback can’t touch him. Wife Renée, after losing two first-trimester fetuses, has finally passed the danger point and is on her way to making the couple a family. Woyty has chosen the party to announce, sure that this time the news will not turn out premature.
The Gold Bug Variations Page 47