“What does ease have to do with anything?” Ressler replied. The two of them had developed an elliptical way of talking to each other over long nights alone. Members only. I listened but was locked out in the static.
“Tell me he doesn’t deserve one,” Franklin said.
“He does. Unquestionably. After what we’ve put him through.” Ressler collected forms from the printer and collated them with amusement. “But he’s not on our payroll.”
“Of course not. Good data-processing procedures. Send your own checks to be cut out of house. Simple safety.” Ressler’s objection was so transparent that Frank didn’t even counter it: one can get to any machine from any machine, if one knows the sesames. And Ressler had taught us those. Franklin talked through the steps hypothetically. “We could penny-shave him. Take every salary we handle. Round the fractional cents down, pitch the remainder into Jimmy’s account. No one is out more than a partial cent, and Jimmy is …” He did a calculation in the air. “Lots richer.”
Ressler detached the day’s log, folded it carefully for the archives. “Penny shaving means a permanent program patch.”
“We could do it.”
“Again, possibility is not the point. The manipulation leaves a permanent print.”
“Snake the code around. Relative-address Jimmy’s record so that his name isn’t sitting in broad daylight. Make the siphon look like something else, an error trap.”
“If someone writes the program, another can always read it. Logic is easier to trace than to scramble.”
Franklin twaddled with his contrast knob. “What if we just went and injected a new figure directly into his salary field?”
“Exactly,” Ressler said. “Why get ingenious, when you can accomplish the same thing by simpler means?”
“But would it work? I mean, if we cleaned up after it? Balanced all the cross-sums?”
“Never underestimate the power of bureaucracy to believe what their electronic ledgers tell them.”
“So you’re in, then?”
“No.” Dissociating himself from the suggestion, Ressler thwacked his stack of forms in exasperation. “Good God! Pope was right on the money about knowledge. You can’t teach a kid anything these days.” With an affectionate shake of the head, he left us alone to our own devices.
“It could be done, you know,” Todd murmured defensively. He riffled idly across linked data lines as he’d watched Ressler do. He punched up a prohibited, distant file, flexing his apprentice prowess. “We give him a one-time bonus. Flat fee. We enter the change in a way that could be mistaken for a Mylar typo. If the tinkering should be traced back to us—assuming the unlikelihood of anyone noticing—we can always say it was a piece of driftwood from our recent flood.”
I watched him perform the surgery. He inserted a paper clip into the console print head to keep it from logging. Then, with a simple record edit, he turned the trick. Unreal. What was he changing? Just screens. Alphanumerics on the CRT. “There.” He lifted his fingers from the keys long enough to warm them. “How’s that for moral compromise?” He backed out to the system, signed on again locally, and returned to the familiar operations prompt. He rolled the printer platen back over the blank transcript and removed the paper clip. What could be simpler? “How’s that for victimless crime?”
THE ADAPTOR HYPOTHESIS
“What do we do now?”
She smiles, lids still beatifically closed. “Now, you love me.” Still lying indecorously on their corner of floor, she arches enough to allow him to lift her stockings, smooth the olive skirt, restore the organdy.
He places a guilty fingertip to the stain on her hem. “Do you need to rinse this?” he asks stupidly. “Before you go home?”
Her thigh moves beneath his hand. It already wants touching again. “Don’t worry.” She assures him with her eyes. He helps her outside to her car, escorting as if the assault has weakened her. He closes her car door, contrite, abandoning her to sneak home alone. He is ready to call Herbert, read his confession into the wiretap. Only it’s not just his confession any longer.
He walks home. The premature warmth of February air blankets him. He is lost in the calendar; he cannot, for a moment, say when in the year he is or which season follows, cannot even fix the ordinary sequence of warming and cooling. Helpless in the face of a mild breeze, his skin remarks on the glorious night this night has brought in. But the breeze, the false thaw, does not displace what he and Jeanette just transacted. It must keep happening now, transposed throughout the year.
He wades in illicit, erotic revulsion: retained impression is no more than a command to repeat. The weighted average of every surviving drive compels him to another go-round with this woman. Arousing, irresistible, and like most enticing hybrids, sterile. Yet through that revulsion, this breeze insists that hope grow even in an empty place. The Base, overlaid with a contrary voice, whispers that the night feels good, nevertheless; something may yet happen; you’ve been surprised this far; more of the same is never just more of the same. He reaches the familiar barracks and lets himself in.
He concedes to an English muffin, then straight to music. He needs: what? To prostrate in front of plainsong from a cloister so empty that the echo relay is antiphonal? To join the high, pure head tones of boys in a Byrd Kyrie? To be knocked unconscious by a bit of dislodged opera-buffa stucco? To smile ironically at the Eroica, its canceled dedication? To sit quietly stewed outside the locked door of a rolling concerto cadenza just before the last, rescuing tutti? To admit the impossible poignancy of neoromance? To make a space for grief four last songs wide? To breathe the air of a new planet? To trace the permutations in the ILLIAC Quartet? To lie in caged silence?
He opts for the master blueprint: music with no past or future, existing in the perpetual now, a standing Schrödinger wave. He could kiss Olga, so paralyzed has she held her plastic arabesque. Once more he lowers the needle on the scratched disk, unleashing a keyboard exercise that wanders far off the face of the earth into a canonic minor modulation as full of pathos as the first creation. Chromatic beyond recognition, the Base slips inconceivably downstream from the peaceful thematic trickle of its source Brook, the most outrageous claimant in the most unprovable paternity suit ears have ever heard.
He and Jeanette have worked upon each other’s nakedness, done all they ever wanted to do. He has no inclination to go back to the lab, now or ever. He wants to resign, sign on to the obscurest work available—making pizzas, hawking Fighting Illini pennants, whatever unskilled labor the local economy will support. He is overwhelmed with the urge to trash his radio, cut the phone lines, and hole up in his bungalow alone with Olga, listening without dissection, assembling without violating the unforgiving weight of particular parts.
He wants her here, to see, speak with, listen to as she vocalizes those rhythmic, objecting stammers. She must call, now. But she doesn’t. Those moments when she will pity him, deign to drop by, are already too rare. Each minute out of contact is awash in variables—all the accidents that perhaps have already led her forever away. Research recovers nothing; knowledge doesn’t knit. He sits in the stream of sound, unable to avert a collapse of volition, not even wanting to.
Criminal scenarios edit themselves in his head. Cloak-and-dagger, skulking affairs where they press against one another for a quarter hour out of every forty-eight. Magnanimous Herbert lend-leasing her or throwing in the towel, acknowledging the omnipotent heart. Ressler appealing to Jeannie, begging for a noble, lifelong separation. His taking up surgery, returning her somehow to fertility.
Each permutation more inspired, more insipid than the last. They take him at once, gang-rape him. He sits wedged in the inseam between wall and floor, listening, thinking that he can hear distant song straining the contour of a variation beyond the variation. He’s lost it; accumulated stress pushes him into the realm of imaginary acoustics. But the trace is real, waving the air molecules however faintly. Then he figures it: the pianist singing, caught on rec
ord, humming his insufficient heart out. Transcribing the notes from printed page to keypress is not enough. Some ineffable ideal is trapped in the sequence, some further Platonic aria trial beyond the literal fingers to express. Sound that can only be approximated, petitioned by this compulsory, angelic, off-key, parallel attempt at running articulation, the thirty-third Goldberg.
CANON AT SEVENTH (II)
We began living together, I suppose. Not even what lawtalk would call a verbal contract. Todd had the key, and he checked in periodically. He even moved a few things over: a backpack of clothes, few but washed frequently enough to stretch forever. His precious notebooks, kept by the bed in case of emergencies that never emerged. His sketchpads, filled with closely observed nature and lacking only that last urgency to become truly remarkable. I was so pleased the day he brought them by that he felt compelled to squash any hope that he might start drawing in earnest: “Can’t leave these in my apartment for the burglars to find. I’d be drummed out of grad school if anyone saw them.”
“You’re not in graduate school.”
“There’s still the dissertation. Any year now.”
He kept his own apartment and left most of his treasures there. He gave me a copy of his key, more out of moral parity than enthusiasm. I’d been back to his cult museum at the tip of the island a handful of times since our first listening session, but it never felt right. “Should we spend more time at your place?” I asked one weekend.
“I like it better here. The curtains. The rocker. The bedspread. Your touch.” It was his embroidered, endangered bastion, his last holdout in an overrun world: the amber oil lamp in the second-story corner above the antique shop, abiding in tragic coziness. There were more economical arrangements, but anything beyond this tentative fit—a nocturnal burrower braving danger to accept the handout—would be invasively unstable.
We ate evening meals together. He insisted on washing all dirty dishes. Sometimes he stocked the pantry. I took the phone off the hook when I left in the morning, to let him sleep. He came and went freely. I had no expectations. When he was around, we read out loud together, did anagrams, experimented on each other’s body, assembled a list of what hurt, what was indifferent, what felt good.
We worked together on our 1040s, finishing long before they were due. On this one ballot alone did he vote his conscience and go head to head with Western Civilization. At great fiscal sacrifice, Franklin buried most of his money in tax shelters, charitable deductions, and losses until the Amount You Owe was zero. Not stinginess on his part. Just the opposite: by the time he had it all legally diverted, he had nothing left to spend. The year I saw him file, he’d accumulated write-offs that would square him for two more years.
It wasn’t foresight; he never thought he’d make it to old age. “Part of me dearly wants to pay taxes. I love schools, sidewalks, museums, research funding, food relief. You simply cannot get a better return on investment. But I hate to pay for anything that can incinerate twenty million people at a pop. I know. At my infantile tax bracket, less all desirable governmental expenditures, my contribution wouldn’t even cover the decals on one of those things. It makes no measurable difference. But withholding is all I can do.”
Efficiency had Franker by the throat. He would urge bananas on me, broccoli—anything that might be in danger, in some future, of spoiling. “We’ve got to keep at that pilaf.” He was brutal when I took slices from the fresher loaf. Yet he refused the antidote that progress held out to people with his mania: the bacteria-resistant, stabilized foodstuff, BHA added to preserve freshness. “I try not to eat anything that’s newer to the food chain than I am.”
He liked the dark and the cold. Saved on utilities costs, but more than that. He aspired toward that life that would not use any of the earth’s resources. He deserved only what absolute efficiency could not eliminate. While he roomed with me, the compulsion got noticeably worse.
But when I pressured him to make use of the years already tied up in his obscure painter, efficiency became another matter. “I need more work. I just came across an early primary source that …”
“You already know more about him than anyone alive.”
“Me? I haven’t even seen all the panels.”
“Go see them, then.” I cringe to think of it: my suggestion. I even offered to pay, forgetting that he could write the flight off.
“Can’t. Got a job.”
“This thesis is your job. It’s important.”
He looked at me sardonically: right. Raging issue. But he did not speak the sarcasm. He seldom stooped to snideness. The words he used in his defense were so much smoke. He believed; he wanted. The project was lodged in him, staved off a worse drift. But he would never knock off a perfunctory proofwork. And putting a closely reasoned and deeply felt piece on the public auction block as a bid for self-promotion, packaging ongoing thought as a completed effort, was worse than immoral.
I frequented MOL as often as ever. I still assisted in dangling in front of Dr. Ressler the slow coax of companionship. Now that he was ready to emerge, I felt I had to make the place as ample as we’d advertised it. I couldn’t have been more wrong. Yes, he loved me, loved Todd, loved, for the first time in decades, talk for pure talking. And yes he was again researching. But not what I thought, or for my reasons. What had coaxed him out again, said go, recalled him to the roster, was something else: the one liberating whiff.
Dr. Ressler refused to take part in my debates with the club creationist. Annie, even-tempered, devoid of suspicion, never knew these were anything but earnest exchanges of conviction.
Do you believe that the earth was made in 4004 B.C.?
Don’t be silly! That was some medieval bishop. The Bible doesn’t give the age. It’s very old, the beginning. But put together in no time flat.
Do you believe that species change?
No. They were made. Look around! Two creatures that need each other to survive: wouldn’t they have to be made together? One without the other would be like a ship without a carriage. They’d die if left to chance.
What of the fossil record? Small horses, huge lizards, cats with fangs?
I don’t know. Perhaps the Flood—
Trilobites? Fish covered with plate bone?
I don’t know.
I flush in shame. I didn’t want to destroy the woman’s faith, but it maddened me that I couldn’t. Ressler sometimes stopped to clear up facts, and Todd liked to push the argument back on track, like a kid righting a slot car. But Annie was unshakable; she would, after a day or two of quiet thought, match any forensics I sprang on her with an equal and opposite blow for verbatim truth.
I should have known that measurement and religion will always be two split continents bumping up for the first time, without interpreters. What drove me to distraction, made me ready to jump into the breach every time however ashamed I always came away, was the woman’s insistence that the spirit could address the mechanical world, but mechanics weren’t allowed to mess with the spirit. She accepted the age of the earth, dog breeding, inheritance of variant characteristics, organic chemistry, even the reality of genetic tampering. But not evolution.
“Try this,” she said, “it can’t hurt. A simple experiment, and who knows? It might mean a lot to you in the future.” She handed me a pocket Bible, which she carried at all times. “Open it randomly to a passage and read what’s written there.” I don’t know how I managed, but I kept sober as I read the passage chance had sent me. “Does it mean something to you?” I nodded gravely, and handed the passage to Todd. He had to leave the room to keep from bursting. Exodus 22, xviv: Whosoever copulateth with a beast shall be put to death. Contemptible just remembering it.
I was guilty of believing that evidence had progressed so far that a creature like Annie, endowed with native intelligence, would have to accept it. And it broke her heart to fail to convert me. Todd and Dr. Ressler were lost causes, to be loved more strongly on earth because they wouldn’t make the last cut c
ome the signs, seals, and trumpets, unless through benevolent intercession of the Maker. But me: for some reason, Annie thought she could win me for belief.
How did I ever presume to undermine her certainty? What did I have to replace joy with? Annie was surer of her right to happiness than I ever was of mine. Even the loss of her life savings did not ruffle her. She told us of the ugly event one night, still trembling, not in anger, but at the danger she had just come through.
Three days before, while looking over the books in those stalls at the southeast corner of the Park, she noticed something on the sidewalk near her feet. Just as she realized it was a purse, another book-browsing woman also noticed it, bent down, picked it up, and handed it to her. “Did you drop this?”
Annie said no. The two women looked around, finding only one other nearby browser. The third woman also said that the purse wasn’t hers. “Perhaps there’s an address,” Annie suggested. Still in possession, she opened it. No address. No credit cards. No ID. Only about fifteen thousand dollars in cash. The second woman yelped. They were holding the proverbial hot tuber. The three drew toward one another, herding instinct, and sat down on an empty bench. “This doesn’t look good,” Annie said. “Maybe we should notify the police.”
“The New York Police?” the others objected.
They sat in a scared knot, no one knowing what to suggest. At last the third mentioned, “My brother-in-law’s a lawyer.” Instant relief. The second woman was parked in a lot not far from Columbus Circle, and they drove to the brother-in-law’s on the Upper West Side.
The lawyer laughed at their nerves, asked facetiously if they were being tailed. “Relax. You’d be surprised at the amounts of cash some people carry on them.”
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