“What? Out? Why? Corn as high as an elephant’s eye. Big, hulking, behemoth state school, out in the middle of godforsaken nowhere.” He brightens, addresses Ressler as an old friend. “I’ve got a job offer, you know. As soon as Sandy finds someone, to replace her at her office, we’re outta this hole. Someplace new, fresh, different.”
“Terrific, Joe. Could be exactly what you’re looking for. Where are you going?”
“Ann Arbor.”
Late that evening he sees Lovering again, ducking into the department’s small-animal room. The lines of cages always have an edgy hysteria to them, as if the rodents know where their cage-mates disappear to. Ressler pokes his head into the room. He watches Lovering pick up a cage, shake it. Above the animal squeaks and pleas, Ressler hears Lovering doing a poor but obligatory Cagney: “You dirty rats.”
“Dr. L. Which way are you headed?”
Lovering sets the cage down quickly. “Nowhere. Why?”
Ressler makes the beer offer again, but Lovering smiles and shags him off, saying he isn’t ready to leave just yet. Ressler wishes him good night, and Joe replies in like manner. The next morning, Ressler notices an unnatural silence emanating from the cage room. He looks inside. The place is stripped clean. The animals are gone, cages and all. The answer stands just down the hall, where Woyty, Botkin, Koss, and Ulrich gather in a stunned lump. He walks into the circle, which opens to him with a look shared and obscene.
“You’ve heard?” Ulrich asks.
“Not a thing.”
“Apparently, Joe Lovering drove out of here last night in a rented truck loaded with the department lab animals.” The others, hearing the tale for the second time, seem unable to get past the beginning. “He drove the whole shipment back to his apartment …”
“Apartment? Didn’t he say …?”
Ulrich insists. “Apartment; there is, apparently, no new purchased home. He stacked all the stolen cages neatly around his garage. Albino rats together, all the cavia …”
Ressler nods hurriedly. Get on with it.
“His landlady heard the engine running about eleven o’clock last night. The garage door was locked and wadded with rags. She had to let herself in through his apartment.” Ulrich takes a breath, the same deep breath Joe’s landlady took before racing to the truck to shut off the engine. “It seems Joe’s decision to join the specimens was an impulse. There was a badly burned TV dinner in the oven, and a burned-out cigarette on the edge of a counter.” Ulrich clears his throat, debating whether to suppress the next detail. “A Sears catalog open to the lingerie pages in the bathroom. A pocket-size spiral notebook with grocery list. At the bottom, in the same handwriting slant, an afterthought, he’d written, ‘Send the checks to the Anti-Vivisectionist Society.’ He was in the front seat of the truck, lying gently on the wheel. He’d left the passenger door open. Presumably because it vented more closely onto the tailpipe.”
The stunned cluster of survivors turns toward Ressler, waiting. “How did you hear?” he asks Ulrich.
“Landlady called his mother. Mother called me early this morning.”
“Has anybody gotten in touch with his girlfriend? Sandy? She might know something …”
Ulrich snaps at his stupidity in the face of the obvious. “There is no girlfriend.” Sandy is a simulation.
Ressler spends two days pacing between office and lab, fiddling with beakers, doing nothing. Ulrich distributes the official notice through the department and announces a memorial service to be held at the First Church of Christ Scientist. The service is ecumenical, so much so that it carries almost no religious overtone at all. What’s left of Cyfer, their families, and the man’s mother comprise the entire congregation. Each team member makes a prepared speech. Ulrich talks about Joe’s sharp mind, how quickly he picked up the complexities of machine programming. Woyty, on dangerous ground, saved only by the difficulty he has controlling his voice, remembers Joey’s pathological fear of catching cold, hints at the irony that another virus, in the end, got him. Botkin reads from her beloved Rilke: Wir sind nicht einig. We do not agree. Sind nicht wie die Zugvögel verständigt. Do not correspond like the migratory bird. Blühn und verdorrn ist uns zugleich bewß. Bloom and withering come on together.
Koss assumes the pulpit, mouths the expected homilies. She turns to descend, but stops, unable to sit down without really speaking. Lovering was a scientist, she insists. A scientist going after the code. And the end of all codebreaking is to get behind the outward trappings of a thing to meaning. Joey lost the signal. Read the message wrong. The congregation makes a scuffle of collective objection, propriety offended. Ressler alone is quiet, loving her more than he has ever loved her for delivering this tract and no other. Who is the graveside speech for, after all, if not the survivors?
He is last, deferred to for the postlude, for some reason. For his act of speechmaking Ressler digs way back, into the only other text he received as inheritance from his parents aside from chromosomes and the Britannica. He has, in adulthood, achieved agnosticism, despite efforts by both folks to steep him in doses of received scripture. But the syntax of the Book still rattles about in him on days like this of vestigial need. So, it comes about, here in the pulpit, summarizing off to his long home a man he didn’t even know except through falsified dispatches, that the only thing he can get out is Ecclesiastes.
Whatsoever thy hand findeth to do, do it with thy might; for there is no work, nor device, nor knowledge, nor wisdom in the grave whither thou goest.
Work, for the night is coming. Inarguable, if of no practical value to Lovering now. Each human effort and each new word speeds the acquisition of the next. The maps get more exact with every effort, but the key only points out the size of the workless, wisdomless place. He might better have dispensed with speeches altogether, left the work of his colleague—the saving of a few doomed test animals by carbon monoxide, painless, reportedly lightly euphoric—as Lovering’s lasting eulogy.
After the service, over the subdued hand-shaking in the narthex, Lovering’s mother approaches Stuart and takes his forearm in her hands. “Thank you. What you read was beautiful.”
“I’m glad you think so.”
“Joseph spoke of you many times. He thought the world of you. ‘The best scientist I’ve ever met.’ He told me how much he wanted to be more like you. I’m glad you two were friends.”
“Your son and I,” he fits together, searching, “had a great deal in common.” Vast stretches of A,T,G,C. She kisses him without apology. He wants to grab the woman, shake her until she tells: why start that cigarette? Why not extinguish it before himself? Joey had time, all the time of his decision. In less time than it takes a cell to split, Lovering turned ignition and annihilated the three-billion-year-old system. Two more minutes to hang around and finish the butt: what couldn’t he bring himself to stub out?
Lovering’s senseless violence will never heal, never close over in time with new tissue. Ressler will be permanently scarred by that last impertinence. A cigarette, a sorrow, a chromatic love for the things of the world unexcisable at the last minute. A garage full of animals mercifully gassed: affirmation, a yes to the same free polyphony he was sending to death. A by-product of the first, unresolvable confusion deep down at rule-level, the inner confines of language where sorrow and celebration, sender, message, and receiver collapse into the same unlikely pattern, a pattern that knows it is alien, impossibly unlikely, exiled.
How easily all decisions are reversed; everything hand might find to do is tentative at best. He, at least, is still alive, more alive for Lovering’s annihilation. Stuart walks home from the service in the cold air, awake, whole, pained for feeling so. He survives the misguided man, a distant cousin, an atavistic trial run, a hypothesis that could not stand the test of experience, a failed variant. Adjacent to survivor’s exhilaration, a cold capillary fluid closes on his heart. The man was erratic, dissolving in pain: a glance showed it. The best empiricist in all of his acquaintance gave
no help, ignored the long distress call to friends.
Four o’clock the following afternoon brings Jeanette to him. He lets her in, unable to read the enigma of the features he prided himself on glossing the week before. After he commits to some deplorable pleasantry he sees that the message is anger: soft, silent, crying, intractable. Her rage is all for Lovering, although it is Koss she mourns for. The best he can do in extremity is extend the inadequate arm of care. He attempts to comfort her in the only dialect he is fluent in. He strokes her, but the touch feels like his own obit. No comfort in contact at this minute. If they could stop for half a measure, separate, let silence come between them, that paraphrase might teach them what Lovering meant, and more. But he cannot retreat from her for any reason now. He has only the old, obscuring burden of touching to save them.
“Jeannie,” he says, lifting her resisting face. “Lovering made his own decision. We might have seen, but we didn’t. Who can say what difference it would have made, even if we had?” The argument his viscera have already vetoed. Jeanette says nothing. He never imagined she was capable of such anguish, acute grief for someone she never cared for. “Darling, listen. It isn’t up to us to figure out why he killed himself. You said it yourself. Joe made a framing error. He misread the …”
Jeannie jerks away from him fiercely. Fully capable of defrauding her husband, Ressler, and even herself, she will not stand for defrauding science. “What the hell do you know about it? You, the arch-rationalist. Tagged, antiseptic passions. The double-blind study! Never known confusion in your life. Nothing a control group can’t clarify. Where do you come off making sense of him?”
His mouth hangs loose on the words. Her face purple, airstarved, bruised, her features hideous, unrecognizable in the violence she would do him. He sees how deeply he hates her. Hates her as in the early days all over again, when he could not admit to need, when he was not even significant enough to her to be singled out for rejection. Even in hating, he takes his cue from her. The words for what comes next originate with her at every step, from the day this total stranger toweled his head dry.
Hatred bridges what pity was powerless to. They are both instantly in the same place. “Get out,” he whispers. “Did I ask you here? Did I ask to be led through grubby little liaisons? The supply closet, for Christ’s sake.” Each subdued syllable leaves her slamming a fist into her temples and gasping for breath. “Go on! Tell me all about myself. Make it accurate. Then get out.”
With a weird, guttural shout, she springs on him before he can hold her off. Her nails sink into his back and her teeth dig for a vein. Pinning her, he discovers: not aggression. Desperate holding on. He knows what consolation she has come for. A minute’s embrace and she would lead him unsteadily off again, here, on another floor, as if their bed were anywhere the world might let them make it. She would have them do the euphemism as if it still had a point. As if the act of kind still signified, still stood somehow for kindness or could close the gap between them.
But the closest they will ever come is analogy, secret writing, codes— social, behavioral, civil, moral, criminal—constantly garbled in the thousand signal deformations passed from her hemispheres to his. She makes herself a glossary on his mouth, in his ear, asking forgiveness, tolerance, understanding, love. Or not for these weak analogies, spent conventions, but the intransigent, unmappable location she would loose herself to.
Her grief smashes against him, a convulsion scarier than any Lovering elicits. It forces his chest, cuts into it with the desire to be past things, unchanged, indifferent to how they reveal themselves here. Toward that one goal, he can assist her for half an hour. He undoes her blouse, turning it down from the curve of her shoulders as she gives, leans into the unsheathing. Then, shocked by his fingers’ static charge, she jumps to her feet, pulling on the slipped clothing. She holds her hair to her head, takes a few steps in a circle. Ressler lets his breath out, saying, at the end of the exhale, “He’s dead.”
“That isn’t,” she says staccato, frantic. “That isn’t it. This isn’t it. I can’t … I never meant …” Dr. Koss shakes her fevered head, comes to a decision. She runs for the door. He calls her, but she doesn’t break meter. The latch closes behind her, swift and succinct. Ressler goes slack, stretched across his front room. He feels nothing, no loss, only the lumpectomy scar. From first prohibited kiss he has prepared himself for the moment when the impermissible toxin would purge itself. But he has overlooked this possibility—unexplained, unilateral panic—as too awful and obvious. He lies on the bare floor, waiting for no explanation. He stands, goes to the record player, creates his own.
There is, in the innermost core of the work, a variation that stands apart from the others, bizarre, instantly detectable, alien. He heard this outcast in the litter, picking it out from the confusion of notes the night she brought them by, even before he could speak a single chord of tonal language. Five sixths of the way through the Goldberg set—variation twenty-five—is the most profound resignation to existence ever written.
He has studied music for half a year, listened each evening, learned notation, sight-read scores for much of the basic repertoire. Now, after a long time away, he comes back to this little sequence coding for the moment of dispersion. It is the one text that can say how he and Jeanette, by lightest degrees, arrived at dead confusion. How could the unsuspecting initial sarabande possibly code for what has taken her? He follows in memory the way they have come. Once, he could only see it on the page. Now he can hear. The Base is intact, agonizingly fleshed out with chromatic passing tones. Above the encrypted notes a slow unraveling, shattered beyond saying, an ineffable, searing, lost line meanders into intervals where language cannot follow. Push the whole sequence down a tone, fill out the phrase with accidentals, repeat verbatim, but dropped into a key the chilling, unreachable nether pole from tonic.
The four-by-four-by-four Base, stretched out of all proportion, out of all ability of its limpid simplicity to carry, is still there, whole, note-for-note intact, only unrecognizable. His ear, schooled on recent events, detects the ancestor, the parental name now lost in daughters. The mathematical manipulation pushes on, farther than the bars would permit, grinding against dissonances more grating even than those born in his own generation. It wanders stunted through bleak modulations—G minor, F minor, E-flat minor, B-flat minor—keys incredibly distant, bearing no relation to the place where they began and must return. As testimony to the heart that made it, this too is scored as a dance. What cannot be survived, cannot be listened to, must also be danced.
Stuart lies at the close, back against the impossibly thin crust of earth. The column of air pressing his ribs is no thicker. Pinned between these sheets, he hears in this scalar mutation what called Lovering away, what tortures Jeannie: a sorrow that did not exist in its parent sarabande. No math encapsules it; no signal, no word for Not. It never was on this earth, until twisted out of insensate elements.
What are these modulations after, about, just in front of the door? Something to the tune of how mere saying, tracing, researching, conveying will never make the case for existence. Days do not carry the full conjugation table for the verb To Live. Only, at raw moments, the imperative.
He knows she is gone, as gone as his office mate, as lost as his steady, programmed shedding of cells, the tune that twenty-five comes unspeakably close to speaking. Departure. He hears in brief the only home his future can ever come back to, whatever distant relations it explores on its long, final, unimaginable spiral deep down into the innermost life of the hive, beyond grief, underneath encryption.
DISASTER (CONCLUSION)
I cannot find it in me to keep working. The cause is longer than this morning. I’ve been racing it from the first, and I see now that it will beat me to the finish. I’ve made the mistake of reading over what I’ve put down here since last June. A little lay chemistry, evolution in outline, amateur linguistics padded out with kiss-and-tell. The whole ream turns my stomach to look at.
It was to be my way of learning a little about music, a year spent listening to the composition. Now the pattern-search is snagged on a single fact: the best potential father in the world, the transmissible gift of kind intelligence, chose to die a celibate.
“You live alone?” Todd asked him, back when we still drank contraband wine out of paper cups in the computer room. Ressler lifted that familiar lip edge that said everything and disclosed nothing. “What do you do with yourself?”
“I work. I read what interests me. I garden. The seed companies send me their catalogs, a little earlier every year.”
Todd was unrelenting that night. “If you don’t mind my asking, what do you do for women?”
“What have women ever done for me?” He pressed the advantage of humor, slipped out with an account of a recent survey of the most desirable traits in an American mate: “Women choosing men selected intelligence, kindness, and money in increasing importance. Men ranked it face, breasts, and hips.”
He deliberately chose to sit and wait for complete genetic dismantling. I never saw him, until that last chance, lift his hand to assert himself. He suppressed the choice to breed along with the other vanities. The life scientist, still in his twenties, turning over flagstones in the lab, looking for buried treasure, one day, by accident, squared up against what all the secret writing graffiti’d over every millimeter of the world’s surface and miles deep was saying: double faster than you unravel.
Even that much would have been bearable. Even if only a simpleminded recursion—“Copy this”—the pattern had authored grammars so materially satisfying, living syntaxes of such heart-stopping choreography, that it would have been enough to affirm life even in abstaining. The law compelling electrons to arrange themselves in the lowest energy configuration, the law saying that hot had to flow irreversibly downhill into cold, had become so adept at local violations, amended and invented loopholes, that the resulting biological anarchy synthesized its own sponsor. But he had stumbled upon something that ruined him for procreation.
The Gold Bug Variations Page 67