Shakespeare in Bantu, Indiana in Brooklyn, Dr. Ressler in verse, desire in biological terms: the world is only translation, nothing but. But paradoxically, inexpressibly, translation of no other place but here. All this conversion work—words into cantatas, landscapes into words—has as goal neither fidelity to the original (although valueless without fidelity) nor beauty in the target language (although without beauty, a waste). The point of every translation—the years spent in science, away from art history, wrapped in the library, trapped in this paragraph—is suddenly one and the same.
Translation, hunger for porting over, is not about bringing Shakespeare into Bantu. It is about bringing Bantu into Shakespeare. To show what else, other than homegrown sentences, a language might be able to say. The aim is not to extend the source but to widen the target, to embrace more than was possible before. After a successful decoding, after hitting upon the right solution—however temporary, tentative, replaceable, and local—the two extended, enhanced languages (Shakespeare changes forever too, analogies adapting to the African plains) form a triangulating sextant pointing back to the height of the ruined tower, steering limited idiom toward a place where knowledge goes without saying.
I have the likeness for the whole process in front of me. How could I have been so long in hearing it? Each alternate translation is an emblem of the generating tune. But variation grows rich in a new tongue. The tune in February. The tune as laborer. The tune in love. The tune in the Information Revolution. The tune intoned without hope or longing in the cloister of a solitary order. The tune in vitro. The tune swung round, wrenched into minor. The tune as a lost vee of geese. The tune triumphant. The tune as sudden stroke, erasing all personality. The tune as folk tune. How long you have been away from me. Come home, come home, come home. Change the signature, rhythm, harmonic underpinning, even the intervals. Where is the theme? Oh, still in there, in the new terms, the awful euphoria of more. It needs only a listener with the right key to find that unprecedented, surprising, radical bit that from the first, all along, it was saying.
Because he is not where I thought he is; because I had him badly figured; because I set out last June to identify Dr. Ressler at last; because Ressler died; because I thought Todd had run off to Europe; because he in fact came back for his friend’s death, leaving my letter sealed under some casement, waiting months for a benevolent stranger to post it; because I thought to learn genetics, hoping that way to work my way around to the man; because I loved with all the force of metaphor; because I loved those two as if they were the last similes left on earth; because I will never get the exact words and will be lucky to hint at the weakest equivocation; because I shut myself away for months for work (because I thought them both gone); because I find, tonight, in crossing over, that I was wrong on virtually every account worth being wrong on, I hear the old tune as if it were some absurdly singable new song. Sing it then. Friend, thou art translated.
XXIII
CENTURY OF PROGRESS
Q:Why not a test ban? If satellites can read license plates from outer space, couldn’t they also detect your basic multimegaton blasts going off here or there?
P.N.
A:Official line is that a test ban would not be verifiable, and thus not desirable. But many in the scientific community say tremor detection has permitted verification for at least a decade. Nuclear detonations are required by the space weapons program now under development. Measurement is never separate from motive.
J. O’D.
Q:How many humans will there be by the beginning of next century? How many other living things?
R.P.
A:Eight billion humans, by conservative estimate. There will still be many animals. But far fewer kinds …
J. O’D.
Q:My parents used to sing a song together when I was a girl, before the First World War. It was called something like “A Hundred Years from Now.” It was beautiful, but I’ve never been able to find it since. Do an old lady a favor?
L.S.
A:One Hundred Years Hence what a change will be made
In politics, morals, religions, and trade;
In statesman who wrangle or ride on the fence, These things will be altered a hundred years hence.
Then woman, man’s partner, man’s equal will stand,
While beauty and harmony cover the land;
To think for oneself will be no offense,
The world will be thinking, a hundred years hence.
Oppression and war will be heard of no more,
Nor the blood of the slave leave its print on our shore;
Conventions will then be a useless expense,
For we’ll all go free suffrage, One Hundred Years Hence.
J. O’D.
CHANGE OF VENUE
He did not run for Europe; he came back. Ressler’s death did not leave him cutting human ties, cleaning off, briskly efficient. Franklin was in the Low Countries already last spring, throwing his lot in with new words. Days after he wrote me, second week in June, he heard that Dr. Ressler was entering the last turn. He must have dropped everything and come back home.
Home to what? The death notice says nothing. “I have just heard …”. Midwestern postmark; the town Ressler chose to die in. Did Franklin make it? Was he able to see the man? In my last word from Franklin, a trail a half year old, he’d just arrived stateside. No reason to believe he isn’t still here. Somewhere. Today.
ON THE THRESHOLD OF LIBERTY
On March 11, the AEC concedes to angry scientists that seismic shock from last year’s test in the Nevada desert registered in Alaska, 2,320 miles away, and was not limited to 250 miles, as first claimed. Ressler can’t imagine how even government might think that figures will conform to decree. But he understands its temptation to dictate to measurement. Agencies sit on sheaves of results they can’t ingest, a report of increasing mastery over material that grows faster than they can read it; each new breakthrough edges deeper into that place where everything is certain to happen—wider extremes of availability than the biome ever anticipated.
Foreign policy snaps precedent. Leaders are left hanging on to realpolitik, chanting the trusty, rusted formulae long obsolete. Nations haven’t the first notion what to do about the eager weapons that will garble irreversibly the three-billion-year message inside the informational molecule. The lone trustee, the incompetent caretaker, is loose on the estate.
The public, even those still buying the myth of species permanence, has lately latched onto the most horrible fold in the new dogma. Life is no longer a priori appropriate. Creatures become sickeningly plastic, moldable, as mistakable as clay. Two-headed monsters, nightmarish collages of scales, fur, wings, and jagged things, hybrid ghouls of unbound imagination inhabit theaters nearest you. Godzillas, lagoon creatures, giant Gila monsters: nothing now prevents life from running amok in the shower of mutagenic material already unleashed. Lovering pins up a Yardley cartoon on the office bulletin board. “Radiation didn’t hurt us a bit.” The speaker is an amorphous blob with three eyes.
The specter is more terrifying than mass extinction. The annihilation of most of the globe seemed survivable so long as some fraction of the message remained intact. But if monstrous meaninglessness propagates with the speed and exactitude of natural transmission, everything is over. The loss of a great library to fire is a tragedy. But the surreptitious introduction of thousands of untraceable errors into reliable books, errors picked up and distributed endlessly by tireless researchers, is nightmare beyond measure.
Ressler’s read Neel and Schull on the effects of Hiroshima and Nagasaki on childbirth. He’d be the first to point out the impossibility of generalizing about the effects of radiation after one generation. New lethals float around in the pool, garblings that won’t reveal their consequences for several lifetimes. If a bomb can be heard 2,300 miles away, then how unacceptably far might invisible, message-melting static seep out? Government, confronted with living nightmare among its own constituen
cy, refits the facts, making human ingenuity seem somehow survivable, benign, commensurate with being alive. The project of procreation can’t be allowed to scare itself sterile on its own imagination.
If scientific fact disappears in a sea of carefully tailored editing, then the protecting officials will have induced the corruption they meant to stave off. Fear of sinister garbling is just the first, obscure public realization of molecular genetics. The greatest revolution in thought ever, the one material theory of being that isn’t an after-the-fact put-up, has an even more unpalatable ramification. The sanctity of one life, the primacy of the particular, has no place in the new science. Biology has united ecology, taxonomy, paleontology, and genetics in a single grand theory of encoded nucleotides, but in doing so, it lays bare terminal grimness. Gene, organism, and tribe operate by opposing means, are driven by inimical goals. The individual is a myth of scale.
Behind the radiation-horror is another so great that it requires agencies to interdict the facts. The life script’s playwright is a die; even now the script is not fixed. Smudges change it from one reading to the next. The spectacular species-fan is spelled out in a table-bumped game of Scrabble. Who can go on breathing when mutagens are everywhere in the air? A severe birth defect, annihilating a sacred existence, is to the gene just another guess, to the population, just bean-curve indifference. Ten million mutations per U.S. generation. A half-dozen deleterious genes per person.
More unlivable still: the steady generation of noise—birth defects, the eternal perjury of even healthy bodies, infection beyond death—is life’s motor. The text, self-trimming, self-writing, self-reading, is also self-garbling. Necessity’s chance horror is the mother of variation. Time plays with deleterious mutations strewn through the common gene pool, extracting from them, every handful of millennia, new functionality. Useful difference comes about only through decanting tons of detritus, error, waste. Weed it and reap.
Individual interests are sacrificed to the interests of the species. A billion cripplings to produce one meliorism. Radiation becomes Pentecostal, the procurement of the overspecies that will rescue the speaking animal from the general botch of things, the disastrous night it has brought on itself. Mutation as evolution’s arrow: further text depends on the garble, whether from UV or Nagasaki. The garble is the code talking about itself, a decision to go forth, be fruitful, and mutate.
Even the nausea of knowing where the message hails from cannot touch him today. Even knowing that the individual is permitted by gene and tribe only so long as it serves their ends cannot, this hour, alter how he feels. Despite knowledge, he is shamefully alive, weeks away from pushing through. Discovery, once-chaotic things clicking together into a tight matrix, is so unequaled a rush that it overwhelms even the ugliness of what it reveals.
Part of this ankle-dangling euphoria is more prosaic: the absurdly pleasant spring weather that’s plagued Champaign-Urbana for days. Who can feel distressed for long in the face of this breeze? The core of brutal insistence thaws with the assurance that his love—recalcitrant, unique, individual—is reciprocated. Jeanette’s minutes, he now knows, are as laden with him as his are with her. To be loved reciprocally promotes them to special-interest group. He no longer cares what codes for their shared obsession, what drives them deeper when they both know it can come to no issue. No behavior is so pointless but can be ratified by a second of the motion, mutual agreement, the binding site of love.
Love, like the mutation blade, both maims and surgically saves. He knows both incisions. Today it is good; a surge of surety putting anguish to bed. He savors the slight shift in his favor. Lovely sound rings K-53-C: car honks, someone getting married. The beep persists; he smiles at the summoned party’s refusing to answer. At that moment, Jeannie’s head appears at the window. “Ask not for whom the car honks.”
He forgets himself, the careful propriety they’ve learned to coat themselves in. He rushes to the opening where she and the soft breeze pour in, holds her face, kisses it in adolescent profusion. Another instant and he is shod, wrapped in windbreaker, out the door. He tears around the corner of the shack, brakes just short of flying into the woman. He stretches out an arm and messes her hair. “Do you still love me? Are you all right? Nothing’s happened since I saw you last?” All this delivered at the sprinting speed of one who’s just discovered how little time he can afford anything except life.
He lifts her shoulders, pinches her waist, clasps each hand in rapid succession, pulls himself away, and glances at the windows that look out on where they stand. His puppyish eagerness to touch her already gives the ache hopelessly away. She laughs and strolls with him to the waiting car, not the familiar Koss futuristic spaceship. “What’s this? What happened to the fins?”
She puts thumb to lip, hesitantly bites the nail. The gesture’s endangered tenderness ravishes him. “I know this sounds terribly genreish, but I thought it less conspicuous to rent this for the day.” She looks at him: the day. The whole day. To be squandered together over its entire length, as if it were really theirs without constraint to be disposed of. She stares at him. “Want a lift?”
How can he help but want? He is prepared to go wherever she designs to take them, today, ever. He throws himself into the camouflaged rental on the seat beside her, passenger, co-escapee, surrendered to travel. They wander out of town onto an unnumbered county road heading south, a lane unrolling as straight as the cut of a plow-scythe, the trailing arrow of a compass. The snow has melted, leaving the muted, moldy yellows of last fall’s stalk residue, the blue-black of the soil, the clinical gray of a tree or windbreak hedge, the protestant white of a farmer’s two-storied frame. He feels no inclination to ask where they’re going. They are there already, here, in the same car with one another, released, untethered, unsponsored, on the thin crust of the earth.
Out here in rural emptiness, road calculations are irrelevant. They are vulnerable to the slightest change of mind, the possibilities presented by the infinite numbered grid of county roads leading exactly everywhere. He can’t imagine how anyone taking a trip could possibly plan his destination ahead of time. One can only get from Here to There by plotting the way simultaneously from both, and hoping against odds that the tendrils will meet in the middle.
He looks at the loveliness beside him. She too needs no more forethought than the game she plays with him every time they come to an intersection. She rolls up to the node, slightly reducing speed and asking languidly, while testing the wheel imperceptibly to left or right, “What do you think? Turn here?” Sometimes she turns, sometimes not. It comes to the same thing.
Something catches their eyes in the expanse of cumulused air. She tugs at his sleeve, disbelieving the remarkable phenomenon. Above a town that before this moment barely merited the name, a plane strews an aerial milt stream of confetti from its cargo bay. Jeanette steers toward this celebration—some local cause for wonder, a marriage perhaps, or a birth. As the dispersed load approaches the ground, Ressler makes out the artificial cloud: a flurry of rose petals, storm of leaf-lets showering the town. All these miles of A-frames and straight acreage, naked fields being readied for corn, bathed in a burst of pink petal-points. He would not be able to take in this March-shower surreality except that Jeannie is there at the wheel beside him, stone-still, just looking, for all she is worth.
How long has it been since he’s gotten out? Out of town, out of range, out of the lab, out of touch, out of himself? He hasn’t sampled this liberating emptiness since that day, negotiated lifetimes ago, when he Greyhounded into town through this same enchanted vacancy of may and might. The field returns, even as they pass, from black sand to the first, primitive hint of callow, new green. The challenge of this spilling emptiness cuts into him. He commits himself to feeling it, to riding aimlessly with her, to living this rented day. He stretches, feeling his feet against the floorboards, his back flexing against the car seat. He pushes out his arm, which falls experimentally across her welcoming shoulders, exer
cises its privilege to play with her rose neck hair. “Is this a kidnapping, by the way?”
Jeanette smiles, far away. “I sure hope not. Because you won’t get any money out of my husband these days.” Even mention of the man has no power over them. Herbert falls away, sinks into the road shoulder disappearing behind their wheels. When she looks over at him, lifting her eyes from the hazardless road, it is with all the dismay of care: we are abducting each other, throwing away everything in complicity.
How strange it all feels, how immediate. He has seen nothing at all except his adopted town since he hit it. And of that swaddling college village, nothing except the barracks, lab, stacks, and sycamore-shackled paths connecting this narrow net. How much finer the place he lives in, broader, more surprising than he thought. He stumbles upon it by accident for the first time. The farmers, worrying their lands’ next attention, do not know their own acreage the way he knows it at this minute.
The fields call him palpably back to the moment of his arrival, the unsuspecting child he’d been. An urge comes over him to tell Jeannie of that forgotten bus ride into town, the way he has come, across the cold year, against all expectation. “When I first arrived—early summer!— Urbana seemed the perfect place for getting lost in. I sat on this endless bus, in the middle of the traveling poor, next to a man with a thyroid defect. He warned me against reading. Said he had an uncle who consumed all Zane Grey and never amounted to much.”
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