by Michael Helm
The shepherd-collie stopped in its tracks, as if it had been listening, and stood in profile twenty feet before us, staring into space until it forgot why, then put its nose down and trotted off. I seemed to be looking at Amanda’s knees where they appeared beneath her skirt, knowing this focus could be misinterpreted, that it was certainly no place to be looking in such a moment, and yet feeling trapped in a kind of precarious apprehension, unable to look back into the park. And now she was looking at me, I sensed, looking at her knees like a horny schoolboy. Through some intervention of grace, my face turned up to see hers, and it forgave me, without expecting of me anything like a verbal response.
“Marcus and I had different fathers, different last names. When I got close enough to Werling, and had had enough afternoons in the faculty lounge with him to ask about his time in Guatemala, he began to tell stories. At first he fell into a kind of pathetic attempt at intriguing evasion, as if he really knew too much to say anything, but when I pretended to let it drop he acquiesced to tell me he’d been contracted to ‘liaise’ between governments after the U.S. paid to set up surveillance systems abroad following 9/11. They wanted foreign governments to spy on their citizens for themselves and the U.S., exactly the story Marcus was working on. I spent the next few days making calls, connecting dots. At some point Werling must have gotten a phone call. He was in trouble. And he dropped me instantly, or rather, he had the department secretary drop him as my adviser. Another professor in the department guided me to Truth and Justice Studies and arranged for a prof over there to mentor me through a thesis. I transferred, different department, different building, and never saw Werling again. He took a leave in midterm and didn’t return until I’d graduated. I wasn’t going to get more from him, but I knew I’d looked in the right place.”
She took out a pack of cigarettes and offered me one. I declined.
“My Italian girlfriends have me smoking,” she said. “Here they come.”
The women smiled broadly. Their clothes—one wore linen pants, the other a skirt—weren’t especially stylish but looked better just for being Roman, on Romans. We stood and Amanda introduced them as Detta, who took off her sunglasses and smiled at me, and Cinzia, who left hers on and nodded. Detta said something in Italian and laughed.
“She wants to know if you speak Italian,” said Amanda.
“I learn more by pretending not to.” This was understood to be a sporting lie, and they laughed again, and Cinzia said something and now all three laughed. I should have been enjoying the moment but was still thinking of the revelation about Amanda and her brother.
“We only tease you,” said Detta. “Not polite. We didn’t know Amanda has a boyfriend.”
“Does she?” I turned to Amanda. “I’m disappointed. Will you tell me about him?”
Now I was in confederacy with the Italians.
“Will you come with us?” asked Cinzia. The temples of her shades disappeared perfectly into the blond streaks in her dark hair. I felt overmatched even by the tortoiseshell plastic.
“He has work to do,” said Amanda. She took from her woven bag an envelope. She said Durant had given it to her shortly after they came to Rome and she told him she was leaving the job. It was his thesis on Three Sheets and the Poet. “You should read it now. Let’s meet tomorrow night, after eight.”
“Why can’t I go to the zoo? Let me go to the zoo.”
“Don’t tell August I’ve given you this.” She placed the envelope into my hand.
“I won’t. And listen.” I leaned in and whispered to her while raising my eyebrows to the other women, asking them to forgive me, and I could see that they did. “This isn’t the place to say it but I’m very sorry about your brother.”
She administered another kiss, and for a very full measure of dappled time, I watched her and her friends walk away.
—
Maybe for the first time in my life I sat on grass beneath a tree. What I’d just learned about Amanda was strange, having met her friends in that moment was strange, the city, the park, the place I was, strange. What wasn’t strange was the shameful ranking of my concerns. I told myself I was just understandably lonely, and so my thoughts were fixed on my chances with Amanda when they should have been aligned with her feelings, her grief and anger at her brother’s death. But because in recent months my rankings were often a mess, I found something reassuringly familiar in my hateful self. Knowing you’re superficial doesn’t make you any deeper. Were my base motives—and they were base—simply money and desire? Or was my real motive hidden beneath poverty and loneliness? Whatever was going on, I had a very serious problem with the surround. As if to demonstrate, I took out my phone and checked my email. The only message was from a “D. Scirea.” “I just found your card. I was going to send music, yes? My father is an asshole. Yours, Davide.” I opened the link and a few seconds later was staring into my little phone screen at buskers on a daytime street somewhere, presumably Istanbul. Three musicians, two guitarists and a drummer with a single drum, all wearing porkpie hats. The one who looked something like Davide as I remembered him played guitar. The phonesound was small but I could make out the gypsy jazz, as he’d called it, the instruments in tight formation. People stood around them in a half circle. At one point the camera, or phone, more likely, wandered over the heads of the crowd and turned a full three-sixty, taking in a pedestrian street locked with hundreds or thousands of people, as if it were a stadium exit after a game, though the traffic was in all directions. Just before the camera came back around to the band, I saw a phalanx of men in white helmets, holding shields, standing by. Why were there riot police in the middle of all this? What was about to happen? The clip ended before the performance had. Another meaningless fragment of random capture, broken off and drifting.
With the tiny music still in my head, I took up Durant’s letter.
Amanda,
Across the street below my window an artist has put out a tray of flattened paint tubes, a jar of turpentine, and a small painting of a woman. I walked by them earlier—the fresh smears of color on everything, the painting, the tray, the tubes themselves. Now a dog has stopped at them, sniffing at colors he doesn’t see, and yet knowing in his way things I cannot. What’s the difference in smell between two shades of blue? And here I am, no different, nose in art, thinking I see things as they are but intuiting other wonders all around, unavailable to my senses.
Even if it weren’t anyway so stale an expression, to say that the Poet’s work “speaks to me” is inadequate. It can’t describe those first moments in which I felt the poems knew me not anonymously but personally. The first line I came across led me to “The Art of Memory,” where I heard myself quoted, through my daughter. The sun blinks and we play blind. I was elated, I laughed, I recall talking out loud to myself, even a kind of singing. This went on through the evening and night until morning, by which time I’d read all the poems at Three Sheets, and as much as I could of the commentary at SHEPMETSOR and the other sites. I made pages of notes by hand. They were mostly questions. Who did she leave in the bar in Campo de’ Fiori and why? Who was the Poet? and so on. I started seeing connections in other poems, references to places she’d been in the past few years, even the general times she’d been there, and to other words and private jokes shared between us.
In “Relief” the Poet writes of a man meeting a woman, a stranger, in a café, and the disquiet he feels, the ghost of familial love there inside the romantic attraction. He’s sure they must be related and wonders who might be their common ancestor: “What coalescent event binds us?” Surely only a geneticist would have this way (“coalescent event”?) of expressing the idea. I’ve felt this precise strangeness myself. And I once explained to my daughter that the current we feel whenever we fall into attraction with someone is in fact genetic conditioning, the species trying to shuffle genes yet another way to find ever more advantageous mutations. The idea is so antiromantic that she ridiculed me about it in a running joke. I
remember she remarked on the word “coalescent,” meaning “bringing together,” and she objected to the fact that things proceed in variations on an original copy. In a sense she objected to nature.
Models of understanding are ways of seeing a thing, not the thing itself, and so in some instances can be applied, with modification, to new questions. The models that suggested themselves were those I know best: those describing patterns of codes and transferences.
Over many days I began to hunt for these codes. Imagining ciphers is the stuff of madness and popular novels. But if we geneticists hadn’t gone looking for codes we wouldn’t have discovered the underlying mysteries of life, which surely bring us as close to the Great Explanation as anything these past many decades within advancing human knowledge. Some geneticists are hubristic enough to imagine that they have stolen fire from the gods. The truth is we don’t even know how to conceive of gods, let alone their places and secrets. We’re some more clever than others, but we’re all dogs of a sort, sniffing at colors we can’t see. And yet among our senses, a few have been granted by nature, others won by our pursuit of them.
I chose the two poems called “Decor” for special attention. They stand out for their titles, of course, the repetition a kind of underscoring, a way of the Poet’s insisting upon a significance. In ways I hadn’t seen yet, I thought, they must be something of a like pair. It occurred to me to focus on the title itself. Without much effort I derived from “Decor” the anagram Coder and this seemed a confirmation that at least I might be on the right path (or maybe I’d been on the verge of seeing the word “code” all along, which is why I played my hunch). But who is the Coder? (Now there’s a question for the ages!) That was simply another way of putting the question I already had in hand. Then, an adjustment. What if the anagram was in fact not Coder but R Code? This made immediate sense. Given the hours of her girlhood I spent teaching my daughter about genetics, to us the term R Code means recombinant code.
I tested various models: gene conversion, transpositional recombination, and (this seemed promising, given that I was finding all these wonders at an internet site) site-specific recombination. But the model that fit best with my premise was the simple DNA crossover in homologous recombination. Have you ever studied meiosis, Amanda? In sister pairs of chromatids aligned side by side, at a point called the chiasma, the pairs become connected and exchange a segment of DNA. Just picture two trains, one bolded, side by side in a switching yard. Each train has ten cars. The bolded cars are numbered one through ten, the others, A through J.
Suppose that the back halves are exchanged. We end up with these trains (DNA segments):
This is (very roughly) the process of DNA crossover at the chiasma.
You might know that in poetry the term “chiasmus” refers to a reflecting rhetorical device, as if a mirror has been set down in the middle of a line or stanza. The primary early source is Scripture:
The ABBA structure can be made more complex, as in ABCDDCBA, or disguised through separation, so that each letter is on a different line or so the ABCD is in one line, and DCBA in another. If the poems contain any such principle, we must then look for chiasmic phrases—sequences of words, sounds, or meanings presented in one order, then its reverse. In recombination, the code would be the same at the chiasma, but it made sense to take guidance from the poetic sense of the word. Should I find matching word sequences, I’d then transpose the line endings following each to make new lines, with new meanings. Through this method, based on a natural phenomenon within creation itself, I might find the hidden code.
All that prevented me from glazing over—scientific or technical language tends to leather my brain—were the irritatingly bolded words, the text version of Durant’s full-voiced pronouncements, and the building evidence that he’d made himself open to a kind of lunacy that brought false traces of his daughter. His need to argue for the traces was desperate and sad, and I wondered if his social manner, warm but challenging, was more than just a way to keep his workers on task. In testing me, he kept us both distracted from the possibility that he was irreparably heartbroken.
Upon a stray thought I wondered if Amanda sensed as I did that we might make a beautiful advantageous mutation together.
A breeze reached me but failed to stir the pages in my hand.
Both “Decor”s are nine stanzas of nine lines (they’re terrible, pointless poems, I think you’ll agree), which makes the fifth line of the fifth stanza the middle line of the poem. And in the middle of this line, in each poem, we find the key.
After weeks in open country I hit town with its yowling corners and hotel room phone looking as do
the plastic key fob and newspaper at the door like a movie prop. I’m one city nearer you but a call is unlikely to
save me, father of nothing now, no one I haven’t already here lost within sight of home. Lost too amid too many markers.
Everything moves toward one of two conditions. The name said or not. There’s forgetting, yes, but there is no
place without thought of itself in a wind. One of two conditions. With
And, from the second “Decor”:
How to say I met a casting director without getting your hopes up.
The traffic here is a kind of weather. How to say, Mother, he took an interest.
The part of the footman’s mute girl in prison. With no text per se my
audition was stunning and two weeks ago, okay, but still they are unlikely to
forget me, Father. Already I’ve known the one absence I’m imprisoned within is how he put it. To have trouble finding the words makes sense for a casting director and so we are alike, he and the mute. There are no true clichés in this business, he said rotely. Other parts often come open. Auditions are best done on-site. The weather here gets tied up in arteries.
Each middle line is long, eighteen syllables. Extracting the middle word sequences we arrive at
and
Now we do the train move, switching the cars at the point of chiasma and sectioning out the mirroring material to construct the new lines. After extraction and transposition they read:
save me, father. I’m imprisoned
and
forget me, Father. here lost
Was I to enter a whole new order of despair? Or were these accidents of language, products of over-reading? Because I couldn’t bear the one possibility—that my daughter was “imprisoned” or “lost”—I chose for weeks to think that I’d imposed the patterns and connections. I know that fragments of language travel on invisible vectors and reproduce as if through binary fission at incalculable rates. There are rational explanations for what would otherwise seem inexplicable coincidences of this sort within language and outside it. In fact I was researching them on the day that “August” appeared on Three Sheets and cast me into the dark certainty I’ve lived in since. Somehow, though there’d been a “June” and “July,” I hadn’t anticipated a poem whose title was my own name. I quote here only the first stanza.
You let his name slip. I made you describe him. You said a bend in a road, a single blue tie, walls covered with images of gas clouds spooling two hundred light-years high tacked up by this man who long ago walked out of the straw upon his schooling.
Coincidence does not extend this far, Amanda. Her favorite view was at the bend in the road at the crest of a hill that looked over our acreage to the sea. The blue tie was the only one I owned as she was growing up, and she laughed at me whenever I wore it. Deep space photos that I’d tacked up covered the walls of her bedroom. And it’s true, a scholarship allowed me to leave the small Nebraska farming town where I grew up.
Imagine my horror at seeing myself. But you can imagine, can’t you? I sense the poems reach you, too. I think that you feel something of my loss for seeing what I see. Your distress—it’s obvious to me—is a bitter comfort to me, I confess. If a mystery grows large enough, if there comes a point after which there’s no hope of explanation, then our troubles are vaulted
to the realm of…not the metaphysical, a dated category I have never accepted…but the omniphysical, what the anthropologist Lévi-Strauss called “the one lasting presence” that might be there at the end of all inquiry, a presence not that surpasseth understanding but that surpasses current understanding and, I admit, even given the exponentially increased pace of intellectual gain, likely always will.
The disappearance of my daughter as a causal event could be brought to hand with enough evidence, but the everlasting condition of her absence will never make sense, not to me. And so, on the good days, the poems at Three Sheets can seem to understand me. Even as they wound, they can seem to be my friend.
Can you see them that way? I ask that you don’t let go, don’t abandon them out of fear for me. We can encourage each other. We have been made to matter to one another in ways no one else could comprehend.
I’m sorry that the poems have caused you the pain of empathy, but I must tell you that I’ve come to treasure our like-mindedness. There is no name for this state as it has evolved in me in recent weeks. To me, the closest name is “Amanda.”
And so the letter ended where it began, upon Amanda. Durant was like someone out of Nabokov, afflicted with a referential mania. He’d offered a plea for mercy in the guise of a pattern analysis, with circumstantial evidence, weak and incoherent. Was his daughter a character in the poems, the “you” being addressed, or was she in fact the voice of them, telling him in code that she was “imprisoned” or “lost” (and which was it?)? Maybe the details in “August” could be fitted to his past, but blue ties and deep space posters aren’t uncommon, and the other poems, objectively read, supported none of his imaginings. He had read cleverly and wrongly. It seemed obvious now that he’d wanted Amanda and me in Rome not just the better to guide our work but out of sheer lonely despair.