Gold Bug Variations

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A Day Without the Ever

Todd would choose mornings like this to show up downstairs, ring his private signal — a monotone but unmistakable rendition of "La donna e mobile" — and insist that I come out to play. "All systems go. The dissertation's in hand. Ready for committee in six weeks," he would say, tossing me a softball when I opened the door. "How's about a little fungo?" Unflappable in the face of adulthood. This morning, I'd close his batting hand in the doorjamb. Just once, I'd leave him something he might feel for longer than the usual afternoon.

The date on his Greetings from Europe leaves him at most a few weeks to have stood still and grieved. He never had any trouble feeling deeply. Just broadly, for any length of time. Ressler's lecture notes will never be made good. The ludicrous old stereo has been farmed out to Goodwill. The rooftop garden in Lower Manhattan that kept us in tomatoes all summer has run to seed. And Franklin's moved on to the next feel.

Why waste my limited time narrowing Todd down to a specific atlas spot? He is unreliable, skittish, more changeable than the seasons. But he is the only other person who knew Ressler. The only person I know who, even now, I might speak to. If I find the museum that houses met de Bles's panel, what will it tell me? Nothing guarantees that Todd stayed in the neighborhood more than an afternoon. But a start. Something to use my training on. Odd comfort, to know the exact town he was in on 7/6. An anchor spot. A day like any other.

I start with the obvious: the Low Countries. Aided by art catalogs, I search through northern Belgium, the Dutch Rim Cities. For a minute, I think I've pinned him down in Rotterdam. There, in the Boymans — van Beuningen, a picture that might have drawn him: one of Brueghel's two great Towers of Babel. The painter and subject matter he really wanted to write about. But no Herris. I find a Bles panel—Paradise—in the Mauritshuis in The Hague, and another in a regional museum in the south of the country. I am dragging my heels, pursuing the unlikely. The stamp on his card was in francs, not guilders.

I cross the border, no douanes to trouble me over undeclared baggage. I find nothing in Antwerp but an afternoon of fabulous distraction. Ghent is a dead end; the altarpiece must have brought him there, but I have no proof. No clues when. I save my chief suspect for last. Brussels. French-speaking enclave in Flemish countryside. Musée des Beaux Arts. Voor Schone Kunsten. Brueghel's Census at Bethlehem, his Fall of Icarus. Indifferent, irrelevant, overlooked, unbearably mundane suffering, depicted dead on. And for a moment: electric connection. Three bona fide panels by Bles. But the two landscapes do not match the view I'm after, and the subject of the third is all wrong. This painted apocalypse is of flood. The world I'm looking for must end in fire.

The Date, No Longer Off

Todd was never sufficient motive for overhauling my life. I knew nothing of his private affairs, his prior commitments. No matter; I simply liked to be with him. Time was wide, broad enough for all manner of RSVPs. All his solicitous attention made me feel unique. The decorous handshakes and hugs — generations out of date — the barrage of personal questions, the liquid forest-animal eyes, the detailed monologues about his father's Saturday ritual or Northern Renaissance painters made me feel that I brought about a reciprocal cold alertness in him, the suggestion of imminent ocean crossing.

Five minutes of seeing Todd, through the one-way glass, smother pretty bank teller Annie with the same courtier's attention should have brought home that his flood could engulf anything that would hold still long enough to get wet. Sometimes in the early evening at MOL, the phone would ring with acquaintances eager for a share of his voice. Frank would greet every obscure claimant at the other end like a childhood blood brother lost for decades. A thousand people in greater New York considered him their best friend. Only he was on this island alone.

With only the slightest encouragement, I was prepared to jettison Keith, the apartment, our circle of mutual dinner friends— to slash and burn them all, rewriting the past with brutal efficiency. For a moment before consigning the old letters to the bin, I hesitated. Some nights I fell asleep swearing it would be tomorrow. But in the morning, the thought of splitting up the end tables we had bought as a set struck me not as clearing off deadwood but as torching the living tree. Tuckwell, sensing the lumpectomy might yet be avoided, played on my remorse. Fighting to keep me around, he put on a heroic show of lightness, as if that quality would awaken my fullest nostalgia for him. In October, the air took on unbearable, crisp clarity. It was waiting for me. The solid blue of the sky, the smell of dead leaves insisted that courage was a little thing. Slight. Easy, in that time of year when everything happened.

I was then on weekend rotation, two days off in midweek. Keith's willingness to market anything to anyone had landed him in court. An exporter and a manufacturer of an ultrasonic antipest device for whom Keith had done a brilliant multimedia campaign were suing one another for fraud. Each had led the other to believe that fortunes were to be made selling the killer sonic machine in Australia. Following bankruptcy, both held the other responsible for failing to determine that the top three Australian pests were deaf. On one of my free mornings, Keith suggested I join him in the civil courtroom where he was performing. "An especially interesting item in the docket today. An animal psychologist who specializes in vermin defense mechanisms. A must-see on anyone's judicial list."

"Keith, I'm not up to it just now. Besides…."

"Come on, woman. This is just what you need. Lose that long face. We're talking major Constitutional implications here. Democracy in action. The unmistakable element of human pathos." The couple that litigates together, mitigates together. Whenever the tertium quid settled down between us, he began to practice an ivy-league irony that made fun of everything he did for a living.

"I can't. I have to meet a friend at the Met."

"First I've heard about it." It would be the first Franker heard too. Todd had extended a standing invitation to look at paintings together any daytime I wanted. That afternoon, I wanted. But unable to move from one life to the next, I took to deception. To compound the ugliness, I blamed the need for deceit now on Keithy. But skulking had started all the way back with that first dinner date. I'd thought that for me to call Tuckwell and tell him "I'm meeting a man for dinner" would have been like the secretary of state announcing, in front of that bas-relief, briefing-room, world map proclaiming this country's perpetual escapade in high seriousness, that we have no immediate plans for amphibious invasion of this week's hot spot. Tuckwell and I had always danced warily around formally fixing the contract. We lived on a perpetual option to renew. My coming on with the threatened leverage of a stranger would seem to telegraph the conventional dictate "Marry or get off the pot." This I refused to do. So I withheld the facts, and withholding, week by week, grew progressively easier.

By that October morning, I was positively skilled at fabrication. Truth seemed so small a thing, against such overwhelming odds. Lying about plans for the Met had an aura of novelty, as exciting as hearing the mailman downstairs. As soon as I invented it for Keith, my faked afternoon date took on a sweepstakes feel. Bold and violent decision, the scent of spice islands.

I refused to justify my day's plans. Keith repeated, "Come on. You'll love this. The technology, the untapped continent, and the men who dared rid it of its lower forms of life. The shattered dream, the falling out of friendship, and the judicial system that reconciled them. And it's free. Can the Met offer you even a fraction of that?"

For years, his ability to stoke up inspired silliness on demand had saved me from myself. But today, that was history. "Not very attractive, Keith."

"Pest eradication prosecution seldom is, dear one."

"Stop it!" I scared myself with the volume. "It's all a big burlesque, your life, isn't it? But you keep putting on the power suit every day, don't you? You jump through the same hoops as any other little zealot. Then you parody it all for your friends, so we'll all know you're only an observer."

Breaking loose, but in exactly the way I didn't want to. Keith closed his eyes and got infuriatingly calm. "OK. Easy, sweet. Let's do a little breakfast before we get too far into this. We don't want to start a catastrophe simply because we skipped today's E, hmm?"

After a healthy dose of vita-look-alike, I still declined to come watch the system in action, if more affectionate in my refusal. To fault Tuckwell for hypocrisy was even worse. Keith, private maniac, professional fair-haired boy of the senior partners, the perfect adaptation for steel and glass, was simply more honest about living the split than I was. The moment he walked out the door, still trying to seduce me with the ludicrous court battle, I was on the phone. By the third ring, I was about to hang up and disappear into telephonymity when he answered. "Museum?" I asked, aping his trick of plunging in in medias res.

Franklin answered, "Museum," enthusiastically on the downbeat, although sleep still coated his voice.

Hunger Moon

Even the Biology Building is lately promoted to Shelter Status. The need to imagine safe havens has become epidemic. Ressler's isolation in recent weeks — winding up his rate experiment, avoiding the distraction of his colleagues' company, exploring in the evenings that inscrutable musical code — has been so complete that he has not heard the world-changing news: the Russians have launched an artificial moon. For the first time since the first star maps, a new celestial body circles the sky. Everything at launch level is changed utterly. For a moment, the planet discovers itself on the edge of unforgiving space. Fear is electric: we've escaped the pull of the world.

Western alarm is worse, deafening. The Russian scientist's legendary backwardness is wiped out in one shocking headline. Stalinist science has produced its notorious monsters, notably the state-sponsored revival of Lamarckism. A body's ability to develop and pass on beneficial mutations was deemed ideologically appealing enough for the party to overrule the demonstrated direction of genetic translation. Forced by political dictum, Russian scientists wasted decades hunting the pangene, proof that somatic cells could alter the organism's gametes. When Uncle Joe died in '53, his Acquired Characteristics died with him.

But the West's own search for the genome might itself be biased toward a representational democracy. Ressler loves Haldane's quip about terriers growing tails despite generations of clipping: "Yes, there's a divinity that shapes our ends, rough hew them how we will." But on humbler days in the sophisticated West, he recalls that field evidence for the neo-Darwinian synthesis is itself equivocal. That some bump, not yet a functional eye, can be promoted for generations before it can see is at least as implausible as mo lecular-environmental feedback. Chance and necessity differ only by degree.

In labs across the country, the "What do you get when you cross Stalin with Lamarck" jokes are hushed furiously this week. A new respect for Soviet science emerges in 100-point type. They've made a satellite, while the brightest stars on our technological horizon are the exploding Vanguard and the Edsel. The blow to national pride is a mobilization call. In one night, science is promoted to unchallenged prominence. Shaman status, educational rage, patriotic and pragmatic. The once-revered business career slips to a distant second in immigrants' dreams for the perpetuation of their genes. Stuart's folks' vision is vindicated.

Where the public feels knee-jerk fright, Cyfer expresses hushed elation. Koss, usually caustic in groups, opens the first Blue Sky after the launch. "How does it feel to be alive at the first ground-break since Columbus?" We've left the planet. Now there's no stopping.

Joe Lovering, misreading her amazement, scoffs. He can explain the Soviets' beating us to space. "The same thing that got them our A-bomb so fast. And the Super, just one year after us. We let them capture too many Nazi profs."

The lurch into the Space Age will make that last jolt from Stone into Iron seem like a pothole in the road. The dazed, mismatched layman's response to the alien new place follows the second Soviet launch. Laika, first dog in space. The papers demand: Are the Communists just going to let the poor thing die out there? They forget that the ongoing experiment has already taken its every living victim, each step along the way.

Sputnik and the space race make less of an impression on Ressler than they might. He stands on the threshold of news that could rival the Russians'. After a bout of intensive lab work, sleeping little and eating less, he concludes the radioactive trials Ulrich assigned him as busywork. His results fail to support the phenomenon they were looking for. Yet — basic paradox — the unmitigated negative result reveals more than any qualified positive could. The nonre-sults tell Ressler something serendipitous, critical.

He can't quantify it yet, but certain phages remain partly functional even after mutation should have wiped out enzyme activity. This degree of mutation survival may confirm that the gene is read like a linear tape, that the gene has error tolerance built in, that the message is more flexible than anyone suspects. Suppose a codon in the base sequence mutates from GCT to GGT. If the enzyme synthesized by the new codon is still functional, then perhaps GGT and GCT code for the same amino. Those extra forty-four codons that have been troubling everyone could reduce the chance of error. Redundancy may itself be useful.

He deduces this much from his data on enzymatic persistence. But another unexpected result suggests more. As widely grasped, individual mutations — insertions, deletions, or substitutions of base pairs — garble the stretch of affected message by rearranging its letters. But as little as a single deletion near one end of the asymmetric gene can totally destroy the enzymatic function the gene codes for. Conversely, a deletion near the other end leaves the gene function largely intact. An enzyme produced by a gene with a single dropped letter at the tail end remains chemically similar to the one produced by the original gene.

Ressler infers something Cyfer until then only supposes: the code is read from head to tail. An error at the beginning of the tape throws off the remaining reading. But an error at the end is translated only after most of the enzyme has been built. The metaphor fits, substantiates the model that Ressler has been working on in mental privacy. More important, in the course of the experiment, he's come up with a technique that may help him assemble his Rosetta. He has learned to use acridine compounds in a way that lets him control more precisely just where he places the garble and what shape it takes. One of the first impediments into the codon substitution table vanishes overnight.

Three quarters of the methodology he needs must be out there in print somewhere, public knowledge. All he needs to do now is collect the leads from divergent disciplines and work them into a coherent whole. Nobody has yet assembled the pieces, although he feels the entire field teeter on the edge of the simplicity just beyond their mass conceptual block. His head spins with the immediacy of it: a simple, experimental means of inducing controlled mutations, the tool that will permit them to determine the codon/ amino assignments. Selective garbling can tell them everything. Inducing mutations, introducing bits of nonsense into the gene's message, can force the code to reveal itself in entirety.

He sits on a code mine. His mind races to the choices available should the method lead into the vein. He can keep the method in-house a little longer, surrender it to Ulrich, announce the results to the team. But as much as he'd like to, he can't keep mum for long. He must publish the results from this experiment, hastening the pace of the accelerating field. He can't refuse to testify, however much time it might buy. He feels a strange euphoria, an overwhelming sense of inevitability. The thing about to make its grand entrance surprises him by its uncanny familiarity.

Leaving the lab in late evening, he fails to recognize the outside, so deep are autumn's inroads. He heads to Stadium Terrace, extended concentration catching up with him in mild hallucinations. Passing the sewage facility, he transposes two letters in its sign: "Flirtation Plant." He hears his name in a distant car horn. The columns flanking Memorial Stadium, in inflamed peripheral vision, become a chorus line of Nike-Ajaxs in launch position. He knows what causes the phantoms; he even understands a little of the physiology involved. That doesn't make the tracers any less real.

He recalls his meeting weeks before, his fumbling attempts to convey the idea to Ulrich, who instantly intuited how little Ressler actually knew of his target. Weeks have slipped by, weeks of self-exile. He longs reluctantly for friendship with team members, conversation, any conversation, even shared silence. What is it that makes it so urgent to sacrifice the pleasures of inconsequential contact, to get to the insight, to be the first to announce a rearrangement of thought? He is more driven now than ever. The means are nearer than he imagined. He needs only another few months. Time to verify, hunt down obvious oversight. Flush out the variables. Add the imminent last links. But can he take that time in good faith, or is he merely drawing out, delaying?

At home, in the dark, he feels why he needs to race this thing, prove his own intellect, assign a portion of the unmapped world a fixed, unambiguous valence. He knows the cause, but he will not say it. At night, in the dark, he lies in his bunk and listens to a brilliant keyboard strain that will never again sound as it did. The piece flies along under his fingers, in his substrate. Even repeated exposure leaves him with no resistance to her code bug. He imagines the woman's face an inch from his. He reaches out, takes her head in his fingers, runs them over her meridian lines and ridges, around her ears, down to the slight flip at the base of her skull, back up to her crown. His innermost cells want to force up against hers, fuse, intermarry. He wants to fight for her, beat experience, propose himself as the best of all fits, the surviving solution. Yet part of him — the most recent addition to that composite surviving act — knows that knowledge this critical must do more than survive.

He is virtually there, on the threshold of a barrier-breaking as great as earth's first artificial moon. For the first time in the procession of biosphere, some part, some chance permutation threatens the technique, arrives at the place where it might reach down, feel its own material base, place its hands on its own mechanism, its own inheritance, grasp it as deeply as it can be grasped. His own contained code can synthesize the last span. But how can he begin to press his hands through if he cannot extract even the information in this breathtaking tune?

Night Music

A neat trick fires my imagination all afternoon. One lovely demonstration proves that the genetic tape is indeed written in triplet codons. I seem able to catch these things only in rough analogies. I imagine the string of letters:

YOUCANRUNFARBUTCANYOUFIXOURBADEAROLDMAN

In that form, the string conveys little. But if I know the cipher's word length is three, sense springs from the foliage:

YOU CAN RUN FAR BUT CAN YOU FIX OUR BAD EAR OLD MAN

The sense is still a bit cryptic, but I've shed enough noise for the emergence of message. Suppose something damaged this string as it was delivered. Parsing the letters into groups, I accidentally drop the first C:

YOU ANR UNF ARB UTC ANY OUF IXO URB…

Except for stray coincidence, the line now yields only nonsense. More gibberish results if I drop two letters near the beginning. But deleting three letters near the front produces:

YOC ANU NAR BUT CAN YOU FIX OUR BAD EAR OLD MAN

The message momentarily crumbles, only to rise again into sense. A single deletion near the beginning of a gene destroys the functionality of the synthesized protein. The same holds true for two deletions. But surprising modulation: three successive clipped bases partly restore the nature of the original protein, experimentally supporting a reading frame of three. This result, when combined with the sequential tape metaphor, provides a clue for solving the framing problem. If, in the catalog of sixty-four possible codons, one triplet stands for the start of the gene's message, such a marker would not only separate genes but would also establish the gene's word-frame.

My hunger for proofs grows as I consume them. I feel an unearned pleasure in tracing them, as if I were the first to haul them to the surface. As I catch the formal bug I begin to follow, in analogy, the cold joy, the distinction that had made Dr. Ressler seem so alien. The simplest, most childlike passion: he believed in readability — patterns connecting patterns — long after the age when the rest of us resign ourselves to adult confusion.

That triplet trick returns me to an evening Todd and I spent listening to the great tenth variation with him. Franklin should have been finishing his end-of-day processing. I should have been home, picking up the pieces of my domestic wreck. But neither of us could budge from the room, the formal spell Dr. Ressler had thrown over us. We'd been having an armchair discussion of current events accompanied by the standard background music for those parts. When the fughetta began its four bars of foreshadowing, Dr. Ressler broke off in midsentence. He announced, "Bass entry," and pointed to one corner of the room, as if the piano producing the line hid there. Thus instructed, I heard in the phrase an ornamented descendant of the first four notes of the sarabande. Not as they occurred in the original, but as sent out into the world, harmonically:

A second voice entered. "Tenor," Ressler commanded, pointing his other hand into the opposite corner. I heard the new voice chime in, duplicating the first, a fifth higher. Two more lines entered, question and answer, tonic and dominant, building up a complex clarity of texture. Ressler announced both in turn with near-shouts, "Soprano" and "Alto," cueing each voice, pointing a finger into the room's remaining corners.

At the edge of overflowing, the piece's motor rhythm stopped. The break lasted less than a breath. Immediately, a new harmonic variant on the four-bar subject made its way through the four-voice rotation again, this time rearranged, accompanied by a coun-terfigure. "Soprano," Dr. Ressler called out from the top, flipping toward the corner where he had first consigned that voice. "Alto," answered right hand with left. "Bass," he cued. I caught his eyes as he called out, "Tenor!" They were full, liquid with a throat-stopping delight.

When the fantastic construction dropped off into random silence, I looked over at Todd. He too, under the persuasion of Ressler's four spatially separate pianos, had heard something. He looked at Ressler imploringly, the way a child looks to a parent to explain the latest infecting crisis. But Ressler was off elsewhere, remembering, after three decades, his search for the underwriting metaphor. "Four-measure bass, four-base measure," he said, to no one in particular, as variation eleven already took the matter further. "Extraordinarily clever fellow, Bach. Ahead of his time."

Only tonight, my head full of mutation tricks, do I begin to name just what I heard, what connection Dr. Ressler mumbled about. Four voices, at four measures for each subject entry, the whole turn-taking undertaken twice, yielded thirty-two measures, a map of the thirty-two-note parent. Not a breath wasted. Nor did the three of us waste ours for catching it. With Dr. Ressler pointing them out, I heard the successive reentrant voices, layering one on top of another, musical analogs of those plastic anatomical overlays in biology books. Each transparent sheet contains its own, separate hierarchies — circulatory, skeletal, nervous. But each overlay, flipped on the stack, adds its system, compacts its parts into a surprising, indivisible composite.

Hearing that much, however modest, was a small triumph. I knew that fugues — while most not as compact as this one — did not necessarily require enormous musical gift to create or hear. Marvelous in my ear, and yet, every note just as it should be. But that much was just the surface of the form, one that went all the way down, as far as I chose to follow. Listening to the cyclical subject-passing entrances, I all at once heard something else. Something going on in the lines after they'd made their grand, identical entrances. In between the formal constraints of fugal entry, percolating up through the piling voices, was the outline of a musical idea I'd heard somewhere before.

My ear flipped back and forth between figure and ground, focus and periphery. What was the bass doing in the second four measures, when the tenor has the subject? Or the bass and tenor, in exultant dialogue, four measures along, while soprano took up the fugue? I heard it in a single stroke, endowed with new ears: the growing braid of free voices sang out nothing short of a mutation on the Base, the original, template theme.

The music ran beyond cleverness, outside admiration. According to my scholarly reference, it follows that fugues, because the same subject enters slavishly in each voice, however brilliantly carried forward, are more or less determined by the thrust of the subject itself, in this case, the fughetta's first four bars. But holding both vertical and horizontal at the same time, I heard that theoretical limit being shed, left behind like a spent chrysalis. Packed in the thirty-two measures of information was a harmonic structure informed by but also perpetually advancing the original aria from which it was merely descended.

The compositional triumph of the piece, both for Bach in the eighteenth century and the three of us lost in the twentieth, came eight bars from the end. The bass, taking its turn with the second fugue subject, extended the harmonic progression and completed the constraints of variation in the same four bars. Breath of air, genuine surprise although absolutely predictable. Rigidly perfect, but moldable to all the nuanced sworls of living ears.

The whole piece, as well as my brief understanding of it, lasted forty seconds. How Bach could meet both horizontal and vertical constraints with such efficiency of material, how he could add insight to inquiry without showing either seam or sweat left me in awe, even after my ability to hear it died away. During those forty seconds, I first felt the resonant, connecting joints holding together this experiment in reversing the randomness of inert matter. I heard the sound that caused Dr. Ressler's eyes to water, the sound that had once vibrated in the tones of scientific reduc-tionism. Pure analogy. No, I need a better name for being unable to tell where I left off and the piece began. I heard, for a moment, the explosion of shape, the diversity of living awareness, dovetail into one simple, accidental, but necessary and breathtaking generating form. For forty seconds, I understood that all evolution was accomplished by juggling only four voices. In the fughetta:

SATB. In us listeners, in the fughetta-writer himself: GATC.

The three of us stopped conversing long enough to follow the shadow of technical virtuosity at patient work, to listen to the fughetta map its own grateful ability to map at all. We eavesdropped, undetected for an instant, on a discussion supremely urgent and articulate but entirely without content. That sound took us, for forty seconds, beyond the point where experience commonly defers: beyond cleverness to joy, outside admiration into understanding, rubbing shoulders against wonder. I heard, in a word, my first few measures of music.

The Enigma Machine

A line runs down the office he shares with Lovering, straight as a surveyor's cut, an osmotic membrane separating the organization of Ressler's area from the entropic mayhem of his office mate. On Lovering's side, arboreal colonies of books, lush, vegetative pools of mimeograph, and ruminant herds of manila-enveloped crap creep up to the divide and abruptly drop off. On Ressler's side: the formal gardens of Versailles. He'd feel better if the barrier were physical — firebreaks, barbed wire — instead of nothing more explicit than mutual goodwill.

His office mate's filing system for the proliferating piles is astounding. Asked to retrieve any paper that has ever come into his possession, Lovering can pull it from the papyrus morass. Nevertheless, the watering hole gives Ressler the heebie-jeebies. He finds it hard to think, seated at his desk; he can feel tinea corporis in the damp air, jungle rot crawling behind him, tendrils sucking him into Lovering's data sprawl.

This afternoon, he can avoid the place no longer. Ulrich distributes progress-review forms to be completed by semester end. He must describe all lab activity in the last four months. His one experiment — with its blaring negative results — must be reported with great care. He heads to his office, breathes deeply, and enters. Lovering sits at the desk opposite, red-lining, dispersing professional confetti. "Stuart Ressler! You still on the payroll? Thought you'd skipped town."

"Afternoon, Dr. Lovering," Ressler replies, affable emphasis on the title. "I've been around. Lab work." He keeps his eyes diverted, lest they register the excitement of what he's stumbled upon. Head down, he cuts a path to open spaces.

"Work? You know what the good Dr. Freud says about work?"

"N-no." Ressler sits gingerly on the edge of his chair and eyes the border for any recent incursions. He spreads the form in front of him. "I can't honestly say I do."

"But you do know what Saint Paul says about marriage?" This delivered with sly, shit-eating grin.

Quietly, placidly, Ressler resigns himself to the reproaches of conversation. "What's that supposed to mean, Joe?"

"You know damn well!" Lovering rocks dangerously back in his chair, arms all over the place. Suit jacket and tie are suddenly belied by hayseed, goofy, boys'-locker-room intonation.

"What do I know damn well, Joe?"

"Poontang, my friend." Lovering shakes his head, laughs. "You dog! You animal!"

Ressler does some rapid cryptography. "Oh, no. No, Joe. Really. Believe me. It's nothing like that."

"It's something, then!" Lovering proclaims, as if verifying another organism's distress were cause for publication. "Now we're making headway. Come on, man. What else could it be? You found a little something? No, you haven't. That's the problem. No poon-tang!"

"Uh, Joe. Would you mind keeping it down? This is a university."

"I knew it! How could you hope to keep anything like that from your close office mate?"

How indeed. "No, Joe. Really. It's not… loneliness. I've just been winding up—"

"We're not talking about loneliness, Stu. We're talking about the hot-to-trots. The savage scrotum. Your balls're backed up. Nothing to get embarrassed about. Wouldn't be surprised if the compulsion were programmed into the old transistors at a fairly deep level." Lovering, smirking, tapping a retort rapidly against an ashtray, enjoys himself immensely. Ressler wonders how a nervous distraction he has just identified himself can already be public knowledge. For a professional decipherer, he's shy on a few key secret-communication commodities. "Fortunately, there's a fairly specific treatment," Joe insists. "You just need to find a chick who'll sully herself with you. Barring that," Joe holds up his hand and wriggles his fingers, "there's always the lab assistant's assistant.

Blood pressure is entirely incapable of telling the difference."

Ressler sits mum as a skewered saint, nauseated by this crowing cockdom. Even pretending to the ugliest mechanical bias, Joe lies to himself about what blood pressure is after. There is a gene, flexibly distributed throughout the pool. It codes for a protein___

How to put this? If rutting truly drives each organism — and doubtless it does — not even vilest desire, aroused in violence, abuse, or smudgy photos, is free of that linked factor. How did awful tenderness take hold? What possible survival value has it? Lovering's enlightened smuttiness is faked. Heat is by far the easier half of the linkage to admit. Lust does not exploit tenderness; tenderness manipulates lust.

Lovering reaches the heights of confidential repulsiveness. "See, Stu, I have this…." He beams, a boy bringing home a gold star. "I guess you'd have to call her a mistress." The disclosure promotes him to King of France. "Her name… I shouldn't be telling you this."

"You shouldn't be telling me this, Joe."

"Her name is Sandy. A remarkable woman. You know Marie Curie?" Ressler doesn't bite. "Well, she's nothing like Marie Curie. But that's Pierre's loss. Not to say Sandy's a dumb bunny. She knows Diffy Q. But let's face it: if you could bed down the most brilliant female yet produced by evolution, or have your fly zipped for three seconds by Kim Novak, I mean, tell me…?" Ressler rustles his report, but Lovering perseveres. "That's where Sandy comes in. One month ago, after much open and healthy athletic debate, I finally managed to persuade her to bestow upon me all the corporeal benefits of holy matrimony without the contractual obligations. A mere Miss Demeanor. I'd feel like a heel if it weren't for one thing. She loves it. I can't come through the door without her… she's an altered personality. Crazed. She shivers, for God's sake. She gets, like, surgically grafted___Let me tell you, the word 'stamina' has taken on entirely new threads to me. On top of that, she can turn stale shrimp into Lobster Newburg."

Almost to himself, Ressler asks, "If she's got all that, Joey, why not marry her?'"

"Where's the crime in that?" This self-declared fling, the prescribed male bravura, renders Lovering so heartbreakingly pathetic that Ressler cannot abide the office another minute, even if leaving means abandoning Ulrich's progress report. Lovering holds forth:

"Come on! You've read Frazer! That's science, too. Soft, maybe, but hey? Tilling the ol' fields?"

Ressler mumbles apology and retreats to the hall.

He arrives without plan at Botkin's office, knocks and enters. Toveh stops her patient exam grading to greet him. "Well! Here is a face absent for too long. Have we clarified some further coding mechanism?" Ressler glances at her, startled. But she's simply making conversation. Alarm unnoticed, he takes his traditional place on the leather couch, psychoanalytic-style. Botkin smiles at the familiarity. "Well then. Today's lesson?"

Ressler raises only a weak, pained grimace. He folds his hands. "Tell me everything you know about music."

"So I'm in charge of the lecture, today. Student teaches teacher, is that it? Such a topic!" Concern crosses her Alpine face. She presses her eyes with the heels of her palms. Her accent spontaneously thickens. "One must learn a language at a very early age in order for it to stick." Ressler, prone, does not move. No point in her asking the source of this sudden cultural interest. Without further objection, Botkin rises to the challenge of condensing the complete procession of Western music into an hour. Assisted by her archive of 78s, she conducts the tour in the hushed monotone of a cathedral guide who tries not to disturb the sanctuary: thorough, succinct, amazing herself by what she says, embarrassed by the desperate variety of ways of singing.

She begins as far back as she can touch, in the incense-dosed anonymity of the Middle Ages. The world as deceptive epiphe-nomenon. She sings a few bars of plainchant in a rich contralto, unaware of the prohibition against public singing. The mournful intervals of Pope Gregory turn her Edwardian cubicle into a Romanesque-capitaled, monk-infested crypt. She adds two parallel parts to the plainsong and arrives at Organum. From the Notre Dame school, she glides across open terrain, resting momentarily at Conductus, Ars Nova, an excerpt from Machaut's eerie, unrelenting mass. She flowers forth into the Renaissance, demonstrating the startling development of imitative polyphony with the assistance of her disks. She speaks of a new expressiveness, an emotional molding of discord. Music divides into cold North and sunbathed South, remote England and dazzling Italy, although the Venetian school is overrun by defecting Dutch contrapuntalists. Proper names begin to serve as post markers: Palestrina, Monteverdi, Gibbons, Byrd. Serious music strays out of the church. She plays him that party craze, the madrigal. April is in my mistress's face. And July in her eyes hath place. Within her bosom is September. But in her heart: a cold December.

The monodic revolution saddens Ressler, as does the advent of opera. Both, he feels intuitively, are wrong turns, apostasy. The sensuous music of France and the striving for new complexity in the Netherlands and Germany console him a little. Botkin maps the rise of the fugue through the Northern Baroque masters, all of whom were required to have names beginning with "Sch." The late Mediterranean Baroque is lost on him, tinkled away in ornament. She talks about the emergence of a cryptic system called tonality — a set of rules, mathematical equivalences and prescriptions. Her language becomes laced with arithmetic relations. Reaching Bach and Handel, Botkin forgoes any hope of wrapping up the outline in an hour. Rather, lecturer and audience lose track of time. She stumbles, unable to sum up this first great watershed. She mumbles a few words about the High Baroque rage for unity.

Mention of the Leipzig cantor throws him into nervous agitation. 'More on Bach," Ressler shouts from the sofa. "What do you know about this man?"

"Bach?" Botkin remarks in surprise. Not the usual starting point for novices. "Of all the composers in the tradition, Bach is by far the most…" She looks for the appropriate hyperbole. Nothing transcendent enough. "Bach is the most likely to offer to help wash the dishes."

"More Bach," Ressler insists. She plays him the most awful moment in auditory art: the Barabbas chord from the Matthew Passion. "More Bach." She plays him the last movement of Berg's Violin Concerto where out of the abject, serial mass of twentieth-century dissonance arises first the agonized tritone, then the whole Bach sotting of a resigned chorale. Es ist genug; Herr, wenn es dir gefällt, so spanne mich doch aus. It is enough; Lord, if it pleases you, simply unharness me.

She pursues doggedly — the rococo, the classical homophonic reaction against the Spent baroque. The issue is not progress or even advancement of technique, however tenuously that might be defined. Motion is not forward, but concentric: restless rearrangement of styles oozing into every open cranny. She draws him the floor plan of sonata form, its tug between tonic and dominant, symmetry and surprise. Resslef wonders if composers are made to study algebra and architecture before being allowed to play with tunes. The joking grace of Haydn prepares the way for the aerial escape artist Mozart.

She plays him the Jupiter. "Listen to him combine the old fugal with the new sonata form; as close to sublime as human engineering gets." Ressler hears, but dimly: faraway sounds from the next town over. He feels the essential oddity of this moment — a young man, hungry for a vocabulary that can contain him, reaching in progressive restlessness back into time to revive an archaism, pouring a tour deforce effortlessly out of the orchestra like water over stones in a brook, proving that no ear had ever really heard the idiom before, even when it was given up as exhausted. He needs to locate more notes. To detect with more precision the relations of time and pitch that evade him. His clay ear calls out for schooling. But can one learn to hear?

Beethoven, Olympian peak, shakes his fist, cracks a punchline, storms heaven by force. Botkin does Opus 18 Number 1, Opus 59 Number 2, and Opus 133, the Grosse Fuge, three string quartet landmarks to give a blurry route description of that lonely launch into the unknown. She mentions the famous intrastaff annotation— Must it be? "Either a rage against fate, a rejection of metaphysics, or a reference to his landlord on the doorstep again demanding the rent in cash."

In Botkin's version, this flinging wide of sound's expressive possibilities — contrasting keys, intensifying form, expanding tonal vocabulary — paradoxically spells the beginning of the end of concert music. As with a tumor that initially stimulates a patient into rosy vigor, self-destruction hides in the richest profusion of musical invention in history. Undaunted, she takes on the unmanageable rash of romanticism. She sings with Schubert, Mendelssohn, and Schumann, indulges the introspection of Chopin and bravura of Berlioz, puts up with Lisztian pyrotechnics, and arrives too quickly at Brahms, the most unbearably beautiful of all. "Then we have two towering operatics who might as well have lived on different planets. The first is Verdi. You know all his tunes already; you just don't know they are his. The second, undeniably a genius, I'd rather not go into just now."

"All right," Ressler guesses. "We skip him. Who's next?"

"Well, music gets mixed up in nationalism. Every land its spokesman: Norway, Grieg; Slovakia, Dvorak; Finland, Sibelius."

"I get the pattern."

"The names start shrinking and clumping in groups. The Five. Les Six." She concedes a few more individuals: Tchaikovsky, Rachmaninoff, Debussy, Ravel, Bruckner, Mahler, Schönberg, Stravinsky. "More continuously than most realize, post-romanticism shades off into the eclectic anarchy of the twentieth century. And here we arrive at the far end, writing pieces of unhearable symmetry on one extreme, and on the other, picking notes out of a hat." The thumbnail trip has lasted all afternoon. Outside, the first negative traces of dark. Botkin, hearing herself compress the whole story into a few hours, is bewildered at how a race with fixed needs could get from Machaut to Milhaud in so few breaths.

Ressler feels her displacement, the little light that has gone out in her tent. But empathy makes him suddenly impatient. "What incredible sprawl. The stuff makes no sense. How can I be expected to remember all this?"

Botkin turns to him pityingly. "How do you remember your stereochemistry?"

"False analogy," he snaps. "That's a system."

"History is a system too." She returns to the dry tone predating their friendship. "You might try taking a few decades to study it."

"Too cluttered. Too many names___"

Botkin snorts. "You want a short list, I suppose? Tops of the Pops in each critical period?"

"Yes. That would be fine."

"You Americans are all the same."

"So: all those fellows in the Dark Ages and Renaissance…?"

"Give that to Josquin, with Monteverdi the transition."

"Baroque?"

"Bach. We want help with our dishes, do we not?"

"Classical's clearly Mozart. Beethoven his own class, I suppose."

"Has anyone ever told you that you are a quick study?"

"Romantic? Brahms?" Botkin doesn't answer. She is hearing a light in the night. "And beyond?"

His tutor returns. "Post-romantic… Mahler, definitely. Twentieth century___" She drifts into silence that lasts so long Ressler thinks she has forgotten the question. As he is about to suggest they quit for dinner, Botkin smiles. "Our century: Adrian Leverkühn." He won't get the quip for decades.

"Maybe I'm not after stylistic history, per se. Not names themselves — not even the short list." He smiles affectionately. "I need to locate the musical message. Do you know what I mean?" Botkin shakes her head. "Can you look at a score and tell… simply by the pattern of notes, whether the composer has uncovered something correct?"

He has not said what he means; so not surprisingly, she misunderstands him. She tells of Mahler applying for a conducting job, lying about his knowing an opera he'd never heard. "He was hired, spent an afternoon with the full score, and conducted the piece that evening, from memory."

She tells the story with such passion that Ressler asks, "That man moves you?"

Botkin laughs. "You have discovered my surreptitious character flaw. Have you any idea what it means to be in love with turn-of-the-century suspensions in a world fixated on drums? Despite effort, I cannot assimilate to the North American ethos. Do you recall that supermarket where we ran into one another? They have, this week, at every checkout, a tabloid reading, 'Millions Dead in Epidemic.' I saw that yesterday and thought: 'So we've brought on the end.' It did not cheer me to discover that the article was about the Bubonic Plague.

"Unquestionably, the music we're talking about is dead. I will not inquire into the source of your sudden surge in interest. Perhaps you shouldn't get started with it. Surely you realize the extent of the transistor age, and where it must lead. I can forgive the children; somehow, they understand the deliberate decision to permanently militarize the world. Even our old refuge science— older for some, granted — is conscripted. So: an eighteen-year-old needs music that can be listened to entirely in three minutes. Just in case.

"And yet, if we're to be saved, the prophase must do the saving. Youth. You've read von Baer, Haeckel, the developmental ho-mologists?" Ressler shakes his head, says he knows "of" them. "My God!" Botkin cries. "Don't tell me they've dropped 'ontogeny recapitulates phytogeny' from formal training. Perhaps they still read Rilke, in any case: 'Glaubt nicht, Schicksal sei mehr als das Dichte der Kindheit.' Don't ever think that fate's anything more than the condensation of childhood. Champaign-Urbana, with more engineering buildings than pizza parlors, is already a lost cause."

"But music," Ressler reminds her.

"Exactly. But music." She plays him the first hundred bars of Mahler's Ninth, that premonition of wholesale disintegration of the dream — the abandoned condensation of childhood. She tells of the composer's anguished marginalia — the "Oh Alma!" penned into the score upon his discovering that his young wife was copulating with another man. She describes Mahler's session with Freud, how the composer lay prostrate on a couch in Leiden in 1910 for four hours, as Ressler has lain all afternoon. "I picture Freud taking the score of this symphony, studying its figuration, seeing, as you suggest, even as an amateur, that the composer has revealed something terrible, real, and saying to his patient, 'Don't let me cure you of this.' That, my friend, is your musical moment. But we're wasting our time. Come. Let's go have a meal. There is still eating, drinking, good talk."

They walk through the deserted corridor, leave the building, lock it behind them. Halfway across the quad, Botkin stops. She turns on Ressler fiercely. "You've worked in a lab, you've scribbled in enough notebooks to know better. I tell you, the world is not modulations and desire. It is stuff, pure and simple."

The attack floors Ressler. He can't think why he deserves this dressing-down. A minute later, Botkin is pleasant again, discussing the choice of restaurants. Over ordering, she speculates, "Your 'musical message.' I've always been partial to text. I don't mean opera; I've never liked flailing. But let me tell you two litanies, late mutations on the Viennese tradition. The first arises in Mahler's Resurrection: 'What you have loved and striven for is yours.' I would love to believe that. The second, more realistic, is from a Webern cantata. You admire the compaction in a nucleotide sequence? This man's Opus 21 is a perfect palindrome: a symphony that reads the same forward and backward, entirely generated from a densely threaded theme. Of course, the ear can't hear that perfect order. As far as the listener is concerned, the piece might as well be random! But his text. His 'message,' as you so wonderfully and naively put it. I paraphrase the cantata: 'Keep deep down, for the innermost life hums in the hive.'"

The Enigma Variations

I find a footnote to the race for solution in his day, the story of Beadle's 1958 Nobel Prize for the elegant experiment equating one gene with one synthesized enzyme. On winning the prize, Beadle received a cable from Max Delbrück, a later prizewinner, reading:

ADBACBBDBADACDCBBABCBCDACDBBCABBA ADCACABDABDBBBAACAACBBBABDCCDB

CCBBDBBBAADBADAADCCDCBBADDCACA ADBBDBDDABBACCAACBCDBADCBDBBBA

The question could have sat unanswered on my board forever. I get out my decoder ring, put together everything I know about Beadle's and Delbrück's state of knowledge in 1958, and set to work cracking the telegram. I break the string into triplets. By '58, even post-docs knew to begin there.

ADB ACB BDB ADA CDC BBA BCB CDA CDB BCA BBA ADC ACA

BDA BDB BBA ACA ACB BBA BDC CDB CCB BDB BBA ADB ADA

ADC CDC BBA DDC ACA ADB BDB DDA BBA CCA ACB CDB

ADC BDB BBA

The message still means less than chance to me. But in the noise of these codons is a tip-off, an improbable distribution, something designed. The four independent letters appear freely in each position with one exception. The letter B occurs in the middle of only one codon: BBA. The unique nature of this most common trio suggests a special function, perhaps framing. I try a space; the message splits revealingly:

ADB ACB BDB ADA CDC BCB CDA CDB BCA ADC ACA BDA BDB ACA ACB BDC CDB CCB BDB ADB ADA ADC CDC DDC ACA ADB BDB DDA CCA ACB CDB ADC BDB

Three words end with BDB, the most common remaining codon. Taking a tip from Poe, I bank on this one standing for "e." The two-letter word affords another entree. A list of common English digraphs and a little knowledge of combinational restrictions make the nonsense spurt sense: "or," "code." I push on, lost in a perverse pleasure. The flush of success makes me feel strong, attractive, erotic. Suddenly, it's over.

BREAK THIS CODE OR GIVE BACK NOBEL PRIZE

Nothing compared to coaxing the truth out of Neurospora, yet the Nobel nominee needed help in the cryptanalysis. Beadle retaliated. He sent Delbrück a comeback code of his invention, which Delbrück also needed help in cracking. But Delbrück got in the last word. Beadle's scientific address before the awards ceremony in Stockholm was interrupted by the confused delivery, in mid-speech, of a package air-mailed Urgent. Beadle opened the crate to reveal a toothpick sculpture in the shape of a giant double helix. The tips of each toothpick were painted one of four colors. The pattern was irregular with hidden information. When Beadle's lecture broke up, the roomful of premier life science brains pushed up to the podium, studying the color sequence, speculating, testing propositions. At last someone — or not someone, but that collective twentieth-century organism Big Science — hit on the solution:

I AM THE RIDDLE OF LIFE. KNOW ME AND YOU WILL KNOW YOURSELF.

Both Delbrück codes are curiously self-referent. Break this code. I am the riddle; know me. What "me" could possibly proclaim itself the riddle? The cipher? The plaintext? The coding algorithm? The riddleness in the coder himself? What part of the DNA sculpture has the audacity to call itself "I"? The Delbrück code, the one inside the codemaker's "I," modified by no criterion except survival, grows miraculously capable of games. The I's have it. Know me and you will know yourself. I spend the afternoon playing with messages, and on no proof but my pleasure, feel as if I'm closing in on my discovery, me.

The Census

At night, I put away the substitution ciphers and return to the painting index. I search for that particular oil-on-panel. But only Brueghel surrenders to me. Pieter the Elder: the man who was what Bles might have been, had the lesser possessed the passion of ordinary events. In The Census at Bethlehem, burghers in a wintry, sixteenth-century Brabantine town go about their business — men carting cargo, women slaughtering animals, children playing furiously on lake ice — without noticing the holy couple queuing up in the foreground to be numbered in obedience to Herod's order, unaware of the coming slaughter.

Believing what we count, counting what we see:

A fistfight; gathered firewood; gutted pig-

grease caught in waiting pan.

These things are here at hand and present endlessly,

an endless repetition of infolded theme.

What was it that we hoped to settle

on by census, counting, inventory, roll?

While earth runs to frozen iron ball we number

Now as if already gone.

This time we say we'll get it straight

sum the total, number all the fear

that snows the town in at the end of year,

the spur, the memory that drives men out

onto the frozen sea to map its edge

for clues to the mystery that was here

all along sends children out on sleds

with their own keen sense of the contested game:

Believing nothing lost that's lived, counted, named.

Today the Pilgrimage of Grace occupies York, thirty years before Brueghel's census. Religious sectarian revolt, same genus as the violence daily sweeping the Near East to my absolute bafflement. Today is the first newspaper to be printed regularly in New York City, 1725. The first of those loose-leaf folders filled with Bruegh-elian specific figurescapes whose holy historicity no one ever manages to feel. Today is a town square packed with people: Marie Antoinette guillotined, 1793; battle of Leipzig, 1813; first use of ether in surgery, 1846; Harpers Ferry raid, 1859; excavation of the Cardiff Giant, 1869; British halting the Germans at Ypres, 1914; 1,200 killed in Yangtze troopship explosion, 1926; Bengal struck by cyclone, 1942; China's A-bomb, 1964. Anachronisms as persistent as the Flemish church in the background of a scene showing Mary and Joseph's arrival in Bethlehem.

"I have this persistent fantasy," Franklin told me, holding the cold bed linen to his neck as he spoke. "Met de Bles seeing that incredible panel, from the far side, a dozen years after his death. Knowing at once that his compatriot has spelled out in specific, radiant, complex, floating detail the nomenclature of human ecology that Herri himself had been born to describe, but died unable to articulate."

Near Where the Wheatfield Lies Cut Down

I met Todd on the steps of the Met, sitting in the middle of a Brueghelscape of tourists, pushers, impoverished art students, culture vultures, religious questers, Van Meegeren society frauds, footsore pedestrians sitting a minute, delinquent office workers taking a late lunch, and the occasional pilgrim of grace who simply liked looking at paintings. Frank stuck out of the assembly, even a block away, the one anomaly in the packed crowd. The first time I ever saw him in broad daylight.

Incredible weather, a June detour en route to November. I'd walked from two subway stops away, to discharge the jitters and give myself another chance to back out. Walking, I saw Manhattan as I hadn't for a long time. I remembered why I'd come here— the epitome of epitomes, the most convoluted, aggressive, over-stimulating tabula rasa imaginable. The place was just bizarre enough, packed with sufficient diversity of neighborhoods, for me to make of it anything I wanted.

I saw him from a block off — outside the cave. He was exhilarated by the crowd. Here, in midday, he had lost nothing of the air I'd assigned him at our first meeting. He met me halfway down the steps, pumped my hand vigorously. "Great idea, this. Haven't been here since late last week." He rushed ahead and paid our admissions, over my protest. Then we fell into the quiet of the galleries.

We could head down any corridor of this maze, choose our century, school, bias, genre. We could buzz through, a masterpiece a minute, or stand all afternoon in front of one portrait. With every imaginable way of seeing to choose from, we made no choice. We wandered, letting each step determine the next. Franklin knew the galleries by heart. He could set in on a topic, wheel slowly around a corner, and land us in front of a picture that I'd realize had been the topic's inspiration, even from the previous room.

Sometimes he was all formalism, tracing a lazy zigzag in the air in front of a Claude Lorrain, the rigid design of seemingly languid figures in landscape, a pattern glaringly obvious once pointed out. Sometimes he was all association and shameless indulgence. "Look at her gaze," he whispered, nodding at Vermeer's Head of a Girl. "A solitary locked gate, with no adjoining wall, in the middle of nowhere."

Sometimes he told unrelated anecdotes. "When Renoir became too crippled to hold a brush, he painted with one strapped to his forearm." His praise was all in his eyes, and his criticism was so gentle I sometimes didn't realize what it was. "A skilled painting; blameless to a fault." He was too funny to be pedantic. We stopped in front of a cryptic contemporary piece in the American wing. "Don't look at me," Todd mugged. "I got a B in Zen Buddhism." Gazing at one of those baroque hyperrealist spreads where you can count the cherubs' lashes, he smirked, "You know what this painting says to me? It says, 'Press on.'

"Ain't nothin' here I haven't been drilled on," he drawled. "Would still be drilling today, if the alma mater hadn't pitched me out on my severed ear. Seems they have a business to run; actually expected me to turn out some finished product." He tsked at the academicians' psychological naivete.

We arrived, as if by chance, at an enormous gold resonance, a wheatfield being harvested. In the foreground, among the stacked sheaves, by a tree, people sat eating. One exhausted figure lay sprawled asleep under the tree, breeches loose and abandoned. Todd would tell me nothing about this work, but the length of time he spent looking at it made me realize he'd been steering us to it all along. Brueghel's Harvesters. One of a series of Months, depicting the run of the year. At last, Todd spoke, bitter with fullness, out of the corner of his mouth. "If by some accident we get separated," he said, "meet me back here."

Under the persuasion of my private guide, I realized that my own modest understanding of painting had gathered nothing of the unlimited vocabulary of sight. I had never seen paint before; I had never seen. Not that I saw any better then, but I began to feel that I might. Shape and form began to seem dialects of desire. The desire I started to see between Prussian blue and cyan owed much to the way he kept his voice low, came behind me, placed his head on my shoulder, moved just enough air to register in my ear: "See the line of that mountain, how he mirrors it in that tree limb?"

Slowly, deliberately, I let my focus slip from the paintings to his descriptions. I gave in to heat; I hurt, slack across the slope of my chest. I arched involuntarily from the small of my back. I could discriminate every hue, every brushstroke he mentioned. I had dressed up, made myself a visual lure, come down here expressly to let this stranger pick me up, undress me with art lecture. I knew then that I would leave Tuckwell, that I would tell him that evening.

I tilted my face toward my private guide, pulled his ear to me. "Could we see?" I said, ashamed at the femininity of the request. "Could we see the costume collection?" We went downstairs together. There, amid a fabulous fetishistic compendium of Belle Epoque embroidered underclothes, he at last smelled the rearrangement going on in me. Having done nothing but brush hands since the day he first accosted me, he leaned down toward me, announced, "I think it's time," and kissed me. I knew it was coming, I had solicited it, but for some awful reason, my mouth ossified. We kissed like two planks being nailed together. Todd straightened up with a blameless smile and said, "I think it's not time." But it had been. Only, in the moment before our mouths grazed, I saw myself there, near where the wheatfield lay cut down, waiting for someone I'd become inexplicably separated from.