His uncharacteristic monologue cracks her up. While Jeannie giggles, he adds, “We had been held up along the way by a flood of tortoises crossing the road. Several shells wide, with no end in sight. I could still hear them crunching under the bus wheels when we pulled into town. I saw this place and—the oddest thing. I was home, although I’d never even imagined its contour. I thought: A person could work here. Anonymous. Politely alone with nothing but investigation to get through this open cipher, all the right angles.” He fondles the lithe vertebra protruding from her neck. “I had no idea you’d be here. I thought it would be all code-breaking. I never predicted, until this morning, that it would be this.” This? What, exactly? Name it. “That I would fall in love.”
Jeanette arches against his hand, almost mews. She opens to him, speaks of how, at thirty, she wakes up some mornings not knowing where she is. “Sometimes I’m lost, without clue to recovery. This isn’t where I live. This isn’t what I do for a living. Illinois is lunar landscape to me. Even science sometimes seems some alien routine I’ve learned to go through without giving myself away. I think, ‘What am I doing here?’ And then I think on you, and it’s like coming across a favorite child’s book in an antique store with my name scrawled on the flyleaf. Like being dropped into the most tangled foreign bazaar and suddenly hearing English an inch away from my ear.”
Her confession scares him: does he really soften the bare rock for her, give it a breathable atmosphere? “Were you happy as a child?”
“Growing up? Oh, happy enough, from what I remember. My folks were trauma-free, more than normally immersed in their generation’s long-term goal of boredom. I loved school, always did well. Forever busy improving myself. Always had some project going. Continuous science fair.”
“The Home Nature Museum.”
They gaze at one another in recognition. “Where were you when I was sixteen?”
“Oh.” The suggestion is pain. “Wouldn’t that have been a scenario?” It mauls him to think what the years might have been like, what chances they might have lived.
“So much wasted time. I might have been watching you learn things, learning them with you. But look! We’re here. We’ve found each other now. That’s the main thing. Even if I …”. Her voice drops, inaudible. “If I’ve married prematurely.” She stares straight ahead, oversteering. Ressler feels her neck tense and removes his hand. Suddenly she shouts so violently from the lungs it makes him jump. “Stupid. Fool! Damn it to hell.” She clutches him with a free claw, turns her face on him, eyes red, puffy, pleading. “Why?”
He gives no answer. She winces and looks away. She slams the steering wheel with the flat of her palms, and it flips off the column into her hands. Weaving, the rented car reams a big chuckhole in the county road, a washout from the spring melt. She reacts spontaneously, controls the vehicle by lifting her foot off the gas and braking judiciously. At the same time, fumbling with the worthless metal ring, she hands the wheel to Ressler, fake blasé. “Here. You drive for a while.”
Ressler laughs hysterically at her poise. Jeanette manages to beach the car without crashing. There’s little to die against on infinite road shoulder. He finds the broken joining pin, jimmies a substitute, wedges the wheel back onto its column while Jeanette proclaims, “Damn rentals. Can’t take them anywhere.” Years later, when everything else, even bitterness, has dissolved into sepia, he will remember her, love her for that absurd reversion to wit in the face of near-disaster.
When they pull back onto the road, still alive, they grow as unqualified as the terrain moving through them. Their invention is subdued, the remorse lifts, the hypotheticals of where else they might have gone vanish. Jeanette accelerates, confidence creeping back, tearing along for tearing’s sake, in overarching breakneck speed. The call in this confusing, rented, temporary tune is at last clear: all the two of them need do is hit the right notes at the right time, and the thing plays itself.
They know their intended destination the instant they wander into it. A pristine almost-village, a time hole lost in the previous century. They park the car, trying to make the vehicle inconspicuous. Difficult, as theirs is the only internal combustion engine in sight. The prevailing mode is horse-and-buggy: black, closed-box coaches, wood and leather, spoked wheels, draft animals in the stays. The extraordinary drivers are decked out in blue, black, and gray homespun. The women wear simple headcoverings, and the men sport foot-long beards.
Ressler can only look and look. How far have they come? No more than a few miles from that university town with its top engineering school, its transistor Nobel laureate, its state-of-the-art digital computer composers. They have fallen through time, Judge Craters, a footnote in those stranger-than-science compendia. It takes Jeannie’s soft erudition in his ear to instruct him. “Are they House or Church Amish?” They have stumbled upon a self-isolated community of dissenters who have chosen to break off from the rest of the race, to hold still in the workable niche while life floods around them into new pools, speciates.
They walk by the roadside, in silence except for the creak of wheel rims and the clop of hooves. Jeannie takes to the community, ratifies its simplicity. She curtsies to a passing buggy and the driver acknowledges with a reserved nod. That one gesture gives Ressler the acute pleasure of locating the key to the chance variations of existence.
“I have lived in east-central Illinois for years,” she whispers, “and I never knew such a place existed.” Nor did Ressler; he barely believed in such groups when he read of them years ago in American History. “You brought me here,” Jeannie insists, giving his hand a covert squeeze.
“No,” he objects. “You.” They pass a knot of families that gather in front of the general store. He hears accents of German. Although no one pays them any attention, he feels grossly conspicuous. He and Jeannie— glasses, wristwatches, awkwardly constraining clothes—are the grotesque, implausible by-product of a defective turn, representatives of all these people have saved themselves from.
In an unforgettably aromatic, unfinished wooden store, they buy a quilt, made by many hands over several weeks. They buy it for the haunting pattern neither of them can quite make out. It repeats yet is never twice the same, develops, yet stands in place, constantly spinning, unspun. Each time they look at it, it changes. They return reluctantly to the rental, the dead giveaway of their nonbelonging, their mark of Cain, their freedom. The anachronism vanishes in the rearview mirror, a lost place they will never find their way back to, even with detailed ordinance survey. They drive until they find a spot superlatively nowhere, even by prairie standards. There they pull the car off the road, spread the quilt, undress each other, and explore the solid sorrows of one another’s bodies as if for the last time.
Jeannie is radiant, rubbed beautifully coral in the raw March air. She can stand the cold nakedness of this copse of trees only by huddling against him. Fierceness is gone. She does not use him this time to discharge her explosive, agitating thistle. No more gangster attempt to recover the androgyne. The two of them fit, couple to one other so wholly that friction is an unnecessary irritation.
Today she is downy, quilt-frightened, narcotically surprised by the unthinking pleasure she finds here. She makes love to him like a girl of sixteen. No, as if they had met at sixteen, and lost sixteen more intervening years, banished from each other by some wrong turn. They roll up in the quilt, so tightly wrapped that they cannot move except to fill each other’s missing spaces, conform skin to skin, vapored breathing. They lie for a long, unmeasured time, until the light gives out. The spell failing to sustain, they dress, each helping the other, keeping the other warm until clothing can take over. For the last time they return to the car, enter, hug briefly on the seat, an afterthought, then ride home north in dark, in silence.
Jeannie breaks the quiet. “Tell me that story again.”
“What story?”
“How you came to Champaign.”
“Why?” He tickles her under the chin. She frowns
.
“I like it.”
“What’s there to like about it?”
“I like how I’m waiting there, in town. How you don’t have the first idea of how I’m there.”
“You are, aren’t you?” Daring, not daring to believe. “You really are, aren’t you?”
“Love,” she says, with heartbreaking alto. “Whatever you think about me when you are old, I want you to remember that I never lied to you.” Never, an overtone in her voice gives away, about anything fundamental. It chills him, past the rapidly falling temperature. This once, despite everything he believes, he chooses not to decode.
They creep back into town, protected from notice by the anonymous car. She drives slowly, dropping almost to zero, delaying the end of their one stolen day of unmitigated intimacy. She continues to halve their speed, but Zeno does not keep Stadium Terrace away. They sit in the front seat looking at one another, hungry again, separate, needy. They would have each other, even here, if they thought for a minute that the magically patterned quilt could hide them. A noise jars them back to the realities of K-court. A couple across the street launching into the cruelty of familiars. Someone’s failure to take out the garbage, wash a dish, or pick up a sock escalates into mutual hatred. Recrimination floats out upon the spring night, elides with a cry of disgust that tears free from the back of Jeannie’s throat. “God. Listen. I hate people. I really do. The whole wretched lot of us make me ill.”
His heart is so full with her, he sees through her without thinking. Her would-be misanthropy is misguided, jejune. He is strong enough now to take on human kindness. “I know. I used to hate people too.”
“And?”
He kisses her, grazing her breasts gently into agreement. “Then I met a few.” He shakes her, squeezes her shoulders until she giggles. The sound salvages them. She holds on a little tighter. But in her touch, the suggestion of inevitable mitosis. Her mouth stays pursed, expressively silent. She reaches a cold hand up under his shirt, connects the moles on his back with a grazing finger. Jeanette closes to him on the narrow car seat, as if just filling the space between them a few seconds longer will fix everything. Her eyes are wide, groping for words like a drugged woman. Sexual dizziness; she is thinking herself into climax, pushing herself out over the edge again. Jeannie, his Jeannie, comes, shudders, loses herself against him, just out of holding, refusing to stunt love.
Recovering as quickly as she took off, she raises her incredulous head. “Where did that come from? Did you do that to me?” Ressler just holds her, blood testing the weak points in his veins. He curls over her, makes the first motions of leaving. Her voice originates inside his ear. “Stuart, promise me something.” All play gone.
“Name it,” he says, straining for humor.
“Promise first.”
“I promise. What?”
“You must never die.”
THE PAPERWORK REDUCTION ACT
So Jimmy won the salary lottery and, thick with suspicion, accepted the windfall. The next time he stayed late, it was about another fluke, linked to the first, less benign. This man, whose most extravagant profanity was “chili con carne,” who could not shout except apologetically, waited furiously in the computer room when Franklin and I arrived after an afternoon of playing house. “Problems, Uncle Jim?” Frank asked.
“That’s one name for it. They’ve dropped me from the group insurance.”
“They?” The word irritated Todd, with its overtones of conspiracy.
“Our loyal machines. This has to be the work of independent-minded computers. No human being would do such a thing without serving notice.” Good faith, touchingly misguided.
“Beginning, please,” Franklin said, hanging his jacket on the corner of the CPU.
“What do you mean, ‘beginning’? There is no beginning. This is the Information Revolution, son.” Jimmy was shaken by being singled out to receive the random hit. “Look at this.” He handed over the customer copy of a three-part micro-perforated form. The lines did not quite fit into their intended boxes—a bit of operator negligence I would never have noticed before my days of helping to load such paper. The piece was telegraphic: undernamed no longer carried on major medical group policy number XXX because of failure to pay premium during previous period.
“Failure to pay!” Todd laughed, throwing the form into the air. Jimmy scrambled to catch it. Todd’s voice shifted register at the blanket stupidity. “What are they talking about? How can you fail to pay? The premium is deducted automatically from every check.”
Jimmy groaned. “Supposed to be deducted.” He reached into a pocket and withdrew the now heavily crumpled statement stub that had recently thrown him into moral convulsions. The one announcing: You are the lucky winner. “In all the excitement over that salary nonsense, nobody even noticed.” He smoothed the ratty scrap and handed it over. Todd reexamined the figures he’d secretly produced. Jimmy didn’t notice, but Frank’s face changed color. He shot me a look, but in front of the victim, we could say nothing.
Cavalry-like, Dr. Ressler arrived, carrying a bag of zucchini from his rooftop garden, a plot that must have had more soil than Battery Park. “I’m glad you’re still here, James,” he said, dividing the crop three ways. All anxiety ceased until he finished doling out his gifts. “Now. I can tell something’s up. And today,” he smiled at me as if I knew the reason, “I’m prepared to solve all problems.”
Jimmy laid out the crisis, and Dr. Ressler’s brows narrowed over the relevant documents. He did not look at Franklin, but the refusal to mete out the punishing glance was itself crushing. He studied the forms for hidden explanation. Jimmy said he’d called around, and all the relevant executives had apologized but assured him that his not intending to skip a payment did not change the fact.
“When will they reinstate you?” Ressler asked.
“The period after the period when I first pay again. Barring further electronic bolts from the blue, I should be back on coverage within eight weeks.”
“Well, that’s easy, then,” Todd joked. “For two months, just look both ways before you cross the street.”
Jimmy managed an anemic grin. Dr. Ressler asked, “James, may I hang on to these?”
“It’s hopeless. I’ve talked to everyone. All I can do is pay up and wait. I wouldn’t waste any more breath on it.”
“I’d just like to think about this before notching up another round for the corporations.” More than passing inconvenience: the individual in a mismatched battle. His asking for another look before conceding inevitable defeat reminded me that the actual quote, eternally misused, was “But for the grace of God there goes John Bradford.” A name immortal in its oblivion, four hundred years ago swapped out for the generic I.
Jimmy grumbled his usual threat to enter chicken farming the next time the opportunity arose. The moment the man left, Todd began protesting. “I can’t believe it. I don’t know what I did. I must have tripped the preemie flag on the way out of the record.” Frank was pitiful, scrambling to hide his ineptitude from his hero.
“Let me stake a hypothesis. You went in and requested a flat-fee bonus. Am I right?” Todd nodded. “You added your figure to his gross and put the total into the salary field.”
Todd slapped his palm on his scalp. “Jesus. The program processed the whole check as a bonus.”
“From which, of course, no premium is deducted.”
“Christ. Who wrote that thing? What a kludge. Shouldn’t it have known that the man can’t get a bonus without a salary check in the same period?”
“Don’t blame the code. I don’t think the authors anticipated second-shift operators doing surgical intervention on their data structures.”
Todd threw his hands up. “Well. Now we all know better.”
Ressler took Jimmy’s papers and sat at the console. Todd sat next to him at the keyboard. The two of them retraced Todd’s escapade, which seemed more capricious with each keystroke. I tried to follow as they undertook flood co
ntrol. I’d never noticed before how much Frank talked with his hands. He rubbed an eraser all over the screen, gesticulated at the keys, drew logic flows into his sketchpad, and sculpted in the air the solution he thought they might yet go after. Ressler sat motionless, a few words doing the work.
But there was little even he could do. The letter had been sent, the coverage canceled. They could not now uncancel the cancellation. Revealing all—the corrective measure of first choice—was out of the question. Todd would lose his job, perhaps be slapped with criminal charges, and Dr. Ressler would fall under suspicion. They could undo the event electronically, but the doctoring involved too many systems: their own, the firm that handled the check, the insurance company where the policy resided. The fix might muck up something else. “Too many humans tipped off already,” Todd added. “Can’t jerry-rig humans, unfortunately.”
“Not yet,” Ressler granted.
A few weeks after moving into my place, Franklin began to seep out again. He moved his treasured stereo into my room, a breakthrough in intimacy, and he even brought the violets, blues, and greens from his massive spectrum-arranged record collection. Every few days saw a trickle of disks, gradually edging into the higher wavelengths. He himself was there as often as ever. We continued to read together, to listen, to play, to share meals.
Sex remained dangerous, a revelation about how far I might go, how far I needed to keep going once brought out. I learned no end of things about myself. Franklin could be aggressive, slow, mercurial. He could stalk like a thief looting a house. He could repeat, wistfully after we spent ourselves, the Puritans’ standard caption for a needlework primer’s A: “In Adam’s Fall, We Sinned All.” He could lie still under the covers and tell, after a too-savage unloading, “Heard the one about the hellfire preacher berating his congregation? ‘Is an hour of pleasure worth an eternity of regret?’ Voice from the back of the church calls out, ‘How do you make it last an hour?’”
The Gold Bug Variations Page 61