Gold Bug Variations

XII

The Natural Kingdom

11/3: Arrived again in November. Just being alive this late in the year is not in itself proof of having hit on a solution worth preserving. Here, now, as professional cold sets in in earnest, all the anticipation of autumn comes to this: surviving in changed conditions. New strategy for a new climate. I have twenty-five weeks left, twenty-seven if I shower with cold water. What to show for the months already spent? Only the months themselves. I've dabbled in the hard sciences, picked up a hint of chemistry. But I'm no closer to recovering that tune I dreamed myself inside of the night I heard of Dr. Ressler's death. No closer to recording that score, the dance step that made me quit the working world.

I've learned that the one panel Todd has sent me since running away did come not from over the ocean but from up the coast. The definitive cross-reference proves he brought the landscape along with him, knowing in advance not to leave traces. QED: I am here alone. And that's best, when all is figured. Alone, flat out against myself. Close to the grain of the neighborhood, no motive except making it to the next calendar island. My days familiar, but flavored strange again. The closure of solitude, the only way of knowing I am here again in wet November, still imprinted with every shed skin.

I now know the problem Ressler was after. He wanted to determine how clusters of inert particles able only to roll down potential-energy hills could stack themselves into grammars, loaded configurations readable and enactable: blueprints for assembling and regulating other clusters themselves capable of erecting, dismantling, rearranging, and elaborating every strategy that has ever emerged on this sliver of rock. A modest problem for a by-product of those same, inert particles.

11/4: I've learned how the molecular archives are written in sinuous ribbons tightly packed into each cell nucleus. How these chromosomes are demarked into discrete sentences. My file proves I've actually relearned this:

Q: How many genes do I have?

L.N., 3/23/78

A: This number is not likely to be determined with precision anytime soon. The order of magnitude is 100,000. The complete genome of a human being is written on almost 7 feet of microscopic thread. Every human cell contains 3–6 billion nucleotide pairs.

J. O'D., 3/25/78

I've gotten a first sense of the tetragrammatonic golem recipe. I've won an analogic understanding of how seven feet of aperiodic crystal unzips, finds complements of each of its billion constituents, integrates them perfectly without tearing or entangling, then winds up again into a fraction of a millimeter, all in two minutes. I grasp, barely, that this process is taking place all over my body at this instant.

I see in rough outline the dogma Ressler was out to extend: one gene, one nucleotide sequence, one synthesized enzyme, one chemical reaction, one inherited quality. I accept that synthesis takes place at the speed of two amino acids per second, constantly, for countless enzymes in every cell. I can, in cartoon, conceive how this codex might be read, how merely speaking its words creates three-dimensional globules whose folds make each a miniature chemical computer. I grant that one enormous concatenated clause of A's, T's, C's, and G's is the plan for hemoglobin and another, every bit as inanimate, for insulin.

But I lack the critical keystone in the arch he was after: I cannot see how form emerges from the same mechanism. When to make bone, when pancreas, scale, hair, skin, or bowel? How large should the heart get? How to start it pumping? How indicate a heart at all? Take a broad, leafy, sun-spreading tuber factory, root, plumule, stolon: does the blueprint read, "Sprout a villus in the ileum; lace it up with veins"?

Pattern-juggling pattern actually makes life. From brittle and spiny to sleek and silver: an impossible spreading text for four letters. Even crisp illustrations, the bright primary pastels by the Herris of natural history, their unambiguous lines running from luxurious organ encampments to the affixing term—"cilia," "thorax," "vascular bundle" — cannot convince me. How much worse, a millionfold more incomprehensible, the passage from monocot to monogamy.

I find the evolution of eyesight remotely credible, but the production of perception from those same four letters baffles me. Behavior: the retreat of a sensitive plant from touch, phototaxis of plankton, nyctinasty in the morning glory, the butting of rams' horns, neo-Palladian mud-and-twig palaces, the engineering monuments of colonial insects, the clicks and whistles of distress, the motor rhythm of walrus sonar (irresistibly sexy to their opposites), speech, for God's sake? Are these enormous structures somehow in the invisible code? Can all this babel come from the same idiot idiolect?

11/5: And that catalog is a mere draft, no, the draft of a draft. Years ago I received a scrawled Question Board submission, unsigned: Q: How different can you get? Inside joke, private incoherence. As it was anonymous, I felt no obligation to answer. But ever the compulsive collector, I kept the card, a record of what elbow-nudging humanity, Brooklyn branch, wanted to know in the late twentieth century. Now, five months since I've set foot in my old haunt, I've read enough to propose molecular biology's stupefying solution.

First, in a seven-year-old Scientific American—already fossil artifact — I learn that for an average human, almost every characteristic is homozygous. Only 6.7 percent of human genes are composed of different alleles. From that small fraction, all variability in legacy arises. How small is small? Taking 100,000 genes as a ballpark genome, 6,700 will be heterozygous. That gives 26700 ways of shuffling divergences — a number of more than two thousand digits — to pass on to a child. The growth of genetics has been the growth of realizing how huge the gap between individuals is.

By contrast: the human genome, considered as a whole, represents only the slightest divergence from the closest living trial. More than 98 percent of our DNA is identical to that of both chimp and gorilla. Less than 2 percent of that seven-foot text is proprietarily human. The incredible conclusion is that two children of the same parents differ more from one another than Homo sapiens as a whole differs from the apes. Superabundance of intraspecies diversity holds across the spectrum of all the few million species nature is currently testing. The ways of varying the original life molecule have multiplied beyond any ability to conceive of them. How much do species themselves differ? I have only to look. Eel on one hand, elm on the other: two recombinations on the same letter set. How many different yous can you have? How different can you get?

11/6: So different I can go no further on the coding problem until I narrow down my intended landing spot. If I'm to cross the bridge he was building, I've got to begin anew, with the question of what, if anything, all those coded strings are possibly after with their unbounded text scrambling. I accredit the ability of inanimate molecules to arrange themselves in configurations capable of coding. But I need to find why they go on coding for ever more elaborate configurations.

I must return to the macroscopic world, to Darwin's tautology. Survival of the fittest — Spencer's phrase — has a definite ring. But can it explain that superfluous explosion of self-generating programs? Is the famous, world-altering phrase really a "law"? Survival of those who survive. Disappearance of those who disappear. After-the-fact synopsis of species drift, missing the driving undercurrent, the molecular surge toward diversity as a way of staying around, producing more of the same.

On second look, I see I've misunderstood evolution as badly as my schoolgirl botch of Mendel. Education is wasted on those of school age. Now I find that evolution is not about competition or squeezing out, not a master plan of increasing efficiency. It is a deluge, a cascade of mistaken, tentative, branching, brocaded experiment, secrets seemingly dormant, shouted down from the past, wills and depositions hidden in the attic, how-to treasure maps reading "Tried this; it worked for a while; hang on to it," program-palimpsests reworked beyond recognition, churches renovated so often in a procession of styles that it's impossible to label them Romanesque, gothic, or baroque. It is about one instruction: "Make another similar something; insert this command; run; repeat." It is about the resultant runaway seed-spreading arabesques, unrelated except in all being variations on that theme.

"Struggle for survival," red in tooth and claw, is misleading; low-profile passivity is the strategy of choice in at least as many niches as aggression. "Struggle" carries too much individual emphasis. Selection deals in the economy of individuals, even individual traits. But evolution deals only in populations, demanding not that they struggle but just that they procreate faster than they perish. No upward march, no drive toward perfection. Evolution's move is lateral, spreading out, diversifying until every spot on the nearest-fit curve, every accidental juggle, has been auditioned against experience.

A day's reading makes plain that evolution is profoundly conservative. A species, on energetic grounds, stands to gain nothing by invention. Payoff lies in stable maintenance. Diversity, even more paradoxically, is born in preservation. "Natural selection," like the chemistry of self-replicating molecules, needs fleshing out, bridging. Evolution is circular, post hoc until I can underpin it, link it to the same coding problem I've circled around for months.

11/7: I read about barnacle geese. Beautiful creatures, larger than they should be, aerodynamically improbable, breathtaking in formation flight. Annually, their goslings pay the price of the safety of cliff nests. The flightless chicks throw themselves onto the rocks below, shielded by a centimeter of fluff. A few fledglings survive the massacre, perpetuate the behavior, build new nests next year in the fatal altitudes.

11/8: Exhausted, I watch a nature show shown late enough at night to ensure that only the already disenfranchised fringe will be disturbed by it. The film documents a slime mold so startling it needs seeing to be believed. A single-celled creature coats ponds in green scum. But when its food supply grows scarce, the particles transform. The cells congregate in huge colonies, differentiate, form the parts of a composite beast complete with head and body. The body grows spore cases that crack open and scatter single cells. The show cuts to a squid whose outer skin is an animated Kandinsky, awash in chromatophores that skitter across it in pigment ripples. The voiceover explains, in scientific baritone, that this fluctuating array is a map of the creature's brain activity: a visible neural analog.

Evolution becomes, on second look, an intricate switchboard, paths for passing signals back and forth: generation to generation, species to species, environment to creature, and back again. Life as exchange of mail. I think of the medieval bestiary, Frank's beloved illuminations, circulated in hand manuscripts — the journals of the day. That interpretive system seeing the spectrum of natural form as a mirror of God, eager to alert us to His nature through every living, loaded semaphore in creation-.

The leun slant on hille & he man hunten here. Alle hise fet steppes after him he filleth….

The lion stands on hill and hunts man here. Fills all his footsteps in after him, drags his tail over his tracks so he can't be found. When he sleeps he never closes his eyes. Why?

Welle heg is tat hil that is heven riche. Ure louerd is te leun the liveth ther abuven. Well high is that hill, that is heaven rich.

Our Lord is the lion that liveth there above. No devil can find him; he never sleeps.

The medieval natural kingdom was not indifferent object but pointed symbol. How else to explain the obvious interlocked design? Even its descendant science, stripping the world of every motive, reads like allegory. Even "nature," "evolution," still flirt with immanent purpose.

11/11: I begin to see science as a natural selection of species' postulates about the environment. Today, first U.S. patent for telescope, 1851. Tomorrow: Hooke appointed Royal Society Curator of Experiments, 1662. Empirical survivals for every port of call in the calendar. Survival of the fittest. Die-tosses developing goals; restless invention searching for application.

11/13: I spend the day among the ants, appalled by the Bulldog variety. They feed their sterile workers' eggs to larvae and queen. The queen mates for a day, storing the semen her whole life, from which she produces the entire colony. The Weaver, a near relation, is a bio-universe away. This strain uses its larvae as web spray guns, clasping the grubs in their jaws, coaxing them with antennae, pointing them to spots to sew up. Weavers raise Blue Butterfly caterpillars, nurse them to adulthood, protect them, sacrifice guardians as caterpillar feed, all for nectar emitted by the monster babies.

Flowers inscribed with ultraviolet runways, detectable only by particular bees. Wasps that live parasitically in bee bodies. The Bauhaus finesse of trapdoor spiders. Other spider strains that fish. Fish that shoot insects with water streams; fish that fish with electroluminescent bait. Two-pitch frog calls where males hear the low warning, females the high serenade. More bizarrerie than I feel the outrageousness of what Dr. Ressler was after: a simple generative axiom telling where all of this comes from. Macro-molecular feedback supplies the how without recourse to metaphysical why. Darwin gives the first internally plausible explanation not requiring a leap of faith. But gaps in the fossil record leave incomplete the account of how variety itself comes about. How can pruning produce the irreducible width of the world lab? That's where my friend came in. Ressler was after no less than ancient myth: a physical explanation of variety. How the creatures got their nature. How animate arose from inanimate. How different one can get.

11/14: Monod, Jacques: Chance and Necessity, page 48 of my dog-eared paperback: "[T]he prodigious diversity of macroscopic structures of living beings rests in fact on a profound and no less remarkable unity of microscopic makeup." Many from one. Complexity from the simple first principle. The living world as single event. Speciation is stranger than I've guessed: unstoppable, incoherent, continuous. All the parts of speech proliferated from the first verb. How can that be? Each copy grown precise in design, everything recorded within it geared toward undeniable ends driving every cell, each organelle. How can such clear, formal purpose arise without a purposive designer, no plan more steeped in necessity than chance?

11/16: Twenty-three weeks left; twenty-five with cold showers. Six months to discover how different you can get. To uncover the answer alone, in the seed-spreading core of the self-extending program. To validate that great tautology: survival of those who survive.

Canon at the Fourth

Ressler replaces the receiver even as she identifies him, picks his voiceprint out of a field of ambiguous noise. She guesses what he called to ask, and why he cannot. Koss. He grows frantic for communication. Woytowich's polling problem triggers an infant connection that he must run past someone. If he cannot find some safe other with whom he can coax it out, the link struggling to the surface will be lost. But he cannot call Koss back; the first phoneme of her voice already trickles with forgetting.

He rushes from his office to Toveh Botkin's Viennese study. Her door is unlocked, but Botkin is not there. Ressler scans the lavender, heavy furnishings and thinks: She will be dead soon. Her century of science will stop. She will disperse into ammonias, hydroxyls, aromatic hydrocarbons. Rilke and Furtwängler will scatter in auction. A regret passes through him that he cannot stop and predicate. No one at all in the building. He remembers: nighttime. The ordinary world goes home. Ressler runs out into the autumn air, following the route by heart. He reaches Stadium Terrace, K court, then 53, but at that gauge, his internal pointer veers toward A, the Blakes' end of the triplex. Ressler has not visited Tooney since the night he was shaken by child and wife. But he needs his neighbors now, needs to sound them out. Only words will get to the issue, however much he distrusts the medium. He rings the bell, stands on the stoop listening to the muffled sounds of surprise on the far side of the door. While the porch light floods on and the door lurches open, a shock of excitement stretches over his chest. The world is continuous, unlimited rearrangement: Jeanette knew his silence.

The Blakes greet him with great huzzah. Ressler, here on their turf, so late, uncoerced. Margaret cheers the reprieve from bedtime. "Hello," she greets him, wary with memory.

"Hello," Ressler grins. "Know any new poems?"

Little Margaret turns her face into her shoulder. Ressler pecks Eva on the cheek shyly and pumps Tooney's hand, grateful that the man has survived to be here at this moment. "Drink?" his host offers. "Eat? Be merry?" Ressler shakes his head. Blake, nonplussed but delighted, leads him into the front room.

They barely sit down when Ressler bursts into things. "Tooney. What, in your opinion, have we been up to?"

"Don't know about you. I've been putting the kid to bed."

Ressler doesn't even break stride. "Cyfer. These months. Trying to solve the coding problem by equating specific base sequences with amino acid arrangements in protein polypeptides."

"Now you tell me." But Stuart's excitement is contagious.

"And how have we gone about it? Like bloody Poe. Studying all known enzymes. Looking for patterns. Letter frequencies. Clumps where we might wedge a lever of correspondence. But we're making one, glaring, freshman presupposition."

"I give up."

Ressler is too fired up to be disappointed. "We're combing amino sequences for some evidence of prior necessity. Why? There is no codemaker, Toon." Ressler speaks as if bluntly urging a child to shake off a scrape.

"All right," Blake says slowly. "Assume I follow. I'm afraid I don't see the ramifications, except___"

"Except that we've been attacking the problem ass-backwards." Talking to another is still superior to talking to himself, even if he must explain everything. "Listen, Tooney. I've got to talk dirty for a minute."

"Wife! Leave the room."

Eva, in the other room, hears her husband bellow and enters just in time to hear Ressler say "In vitro."

Eva laughs and says, "Et in terra pax." Ressler, Lutheran, looks blank. But he latches onto Evie, her unspecialized ears every bit as helpful as her scientist mate's. He explains the vitro/vivo dichotomy. To Eva, the difference between running an experiment outside rather than inside a living system seems functional. "I thought y'all did everything with test tubes," she drawls. "Don't you choose the most convenient method? Careful isolation under glass…."

"… can stand in for runs on the real thing?" Ressler informs her of the hitches. He feels renewed need to make the point hurriedly. "In vivo — testing with living things — is like Murrow's report from a street under fire. Firsthand information, but chaotic. In vitro gives a coherent but dangerously simplified recreation, from the calm of the studio. A whole new can of helical worms."

Blake whistles. "You want a cell-free system."

"Exactly," Ressler shouts, jumping up. A moan of resigned fear comes from the just-dozing child in the next room, and he lowers his voice. "I knew you would come through." Blake has supplied him with the thing he was after. A name.

"Stuart. I don't know. Even supposing that synthesis behaves no differently outside the cell than in. That a reaction's a reaction, that living things form no special domain." The whole point of the last hundred years. "Still___"

Stuart waits for the objection, the use of talk. Blake thinks in silence, knowing what's at stake and measuring ambiguities the best he can. After some seconds, he says, "In simulating the translation reactions outside the cell, reducing the case to manageable proportions, we might___"

"Yes?"

"I don't know. Violate the complexity threshold?"

"The what?"

"I know. It sounds mystical. But can we be sure that reduction to constituents won't strip out emergent phenomena?"

"Is there such an animal?"

"Jesus. Maybe I'm in the wrong line of work." Eva sits next to her husband, squeezes his feet. "In vitro," Blake works out tentatively, "might give us repeatable evidence. But would it ignore some cellular interdependence?"

The two pore over the new angle while the third party sits by, asks for occasional clarification, keeps them honest. They push on the problem into early morning, hitting a hard spot that won't budge. Tooney looks at his watch, laughs, and announces, "I have to drive to Chicago in five hours." Ressler apologizes, Blake waves him off, and they tap the matter another fifteen minutes. It's impossible to say, as the meeting breaks up and the Blakes lead Ressler to the door, how all three know that this talk, so highly charged, innocent, irrepeatable, will be the last of its kind. Blake walks Stuart across the lawn to K-53-C.

"No coat?" Ressler asks, solicitous in the crisp air.

"Don't you start now. You sound like Lovering. Have you seen that pup recently? The man is so convinced that cold germs are gunning for him that he won't even shake hands. It's one thing to rage against a wet-head. Another to run around in permanent parka. I saw the madman yesterday, wearing gloves, indoors. He refuses to take off his muffler even to talk. And here it's still practically summer."

"Tooney, it's getting cold. There is a flu virus going around. I can sympathize with Joe's desire to keep a distance. The idea of a packet of DNA attaching itself by landing gear on my cell wall, injecting me with alien nucleic acid, using my cell to reproduce itself by the hundreds, and then bio-wing it up in a grand exit is not especially savory."

"Tell me. But don't you see how he practically forces me to bike to the lab in bermudas? I'm fatalistic about disease. I mean, if a virus has your cell's name on it___I always say anyone can have Tea for Two, but it takes phage to make T4 tumor. Heard the one about the Cysteine Chapel? I gotta Millon ovum."

Ressler draws up short. '"If a virus has your cell's name on it…'?" But the idea, too far ahead of its time, is lost to a failure of concentration. They stand outside Ressler's door, waiting for the vagaries of inspiration to visit once more in the pre-sunríse.

"You want to trace protein synthesis forward?" Blake asks, summarizing, although the point is long since solidified. Ressler nods. "In a cell-free system? But how, man?" Ressler shrugs. He feels the answer inching on him, as inevitable as infection.

Once inside the door, he dusts off the Goldberg disk and returns it to its absent place on the player. The music radiates again, with only a few additional scratch-induced mutations on the vinyl to record his fit of a few evenings before. The tune, suddenly exuberant this morning, confirms him that a method exists. An alternative, close to the beating heart of translation. In the precision of harmonic structure, he hears his own conviction that the coding problem rests on a simple look-up table — at ever lower levels, a mechanism to explain cell growth, viral piracy, symbiotic coalition government of organs, the origin of species, phone impulses broken off in panic, inexplicable behavior late in the year, fitful inspiration, the continuous cold modal rapture in chords, in vivo.

He wakes after two hours and walks to the library, Saturday morning, bucking the current of fifty thousand Memorial Stadium football fans. Deep into the season, he still has not acclimated; getting from Stadium Terrace to the stacks against the crowd takes twice as long as normal. Inside the informational Fort Knox, he pores over the periodicals in a spiral search back into time, not knowing what he is looking for but certain he will recognize it when he sees it. He is skimming the Journal of Biological Chemistry back to the early 1950s when he is suddenly frozen by a muted roar — a tsunami coming from some distance. The sound flashes through him, followed by instant realization: this is it. The magazine ads for fallout shelters with plush carpeting and Scrabble sets, the sad government films teaching kindergartners to survive an airburst by popping under their school desks: the age of information has caught up with itself.

But just as quickly, the collective howl collapses into silence. Ressler waits for another muffled announcement but hears nothing. Then the leap of inference: the home team threatening to score. All politics are local. Curious, he climbs to deck ten, looks out from this aerial outpost through the side of the stadium, between the banks of colonnades. There, a mass of fifty thousand particles forms a single, eukaryotic Football Fan. Waving, pink arms become the manifold cilia of a rotifer rippling across the membrane of this cooperative cell.

Ohio State takes the local boys through a clinic, as they will down the years fading into time imMemorial. Watching this remarkable exercise in collective stimulus and response, the fifty thousand organelles testing and responding to their environment, he resolves to differentiate himself. He will give in to the pressure of selection, employ the one weapon he has for obtaining the one thing of any consequence to him: Jeanette Koss — tasting, achieving her, pressing, infecting, taking, joining, learning what she is. He will overwhelm her by sheer display of lovely force, of preening genotype. He will bring her an incalculable prize, like those chocolate-box corpses certain spiders bring their loves, proofs of potential that also shield the suitor from serving as meal.

It relieves him to choose. Weeks he has held off, waiting for this impossible complication to become the first of simplicities. Now he will prove to her that he, of everyone she has ever met, most merits the selection of love. He will give her the most beautiful bouquet imaginable — objective, freezing, clear: the top rung of Jacob's ladder. Half blind to their contents, he checks out a dozen bound journals and carries them back to his den. On his way, the collective supercell, its function over, lyses. He stands helpless, feels the crowd sweep over him. The walls of the stadium explode, issuing fifty thousand viruses into the air. Epidemic this time of year.

Learning the Irregular Verbs

I stopped loving Tuckwell and started resenting him. No reason. The same reason I first loved him. I can't imagine how I ever thought my love might make a difference to him. Irrational arrival, irrational exit. I asked myself thirty times a day why I was trading him for an excellent shot at nothing. I wasn't even trading. Nothing mercantile about it. I was giving him away. Throwing.

In bad moments, I blamed advertising. It had always depressed me: form without substance, noise parading as sense. But in fairer intervals, I knew Keith only did what most of us do for a living: he sold things, only a little more honestly than most. He ridiculed his career himself: "The art form of the century. Concert, gallery, and holy writ in one convenient package. How to say 'Eat Multinational Carcinogen Patties' appealingly. How to convince the overcashed that all they need for happiness is leg weights. Mind-forged manacles."

For four years, he had shown me every ad campaign he did. Not for approval — to ward off boredom, keep us from drifting into different dialects. In the end, I chose one of his major accounts to throw a fit over. We were cooking dinner together, a familiar menu of acquired favorites. By tacit agreement, we did not talk about my plans to move — how far they'd gone, where I stood. We'd made that mistake twice since it became reality, and now cut the topic a wide berth. By dessert, Keith cracked his affectionate parody of my day at the office. "Question," he said, mugging for my benefit. "Is the Human Bean getting any smarter?" Nostalgic lost offering, reminder of everything we'd given each other. He put it forward resignedly, but with an element of outside shot. After all, the old joke had always worked before.

But not that evening. "Answer: If you have to ask…."

"Supporting documentation, please." Behind the burlesque, Kei-thy was trying to save us. But I didn't feel like playing. He spread a roll of paper towel and tried to amuse me by drawing a timeline of meliorism, marking pyramids, cathedrals, flotillas, railroads, and particle accelerators in little dots that broke out in a rash over the right side of the continuum. I ignored him, clearing dishes, putting up the leftovers.

"Einstein," he chuckled. "Lord Keynes. Pretty heavy hitters in recent generations. The semiconductor," he challenged, drawing one at the far right, in a halo of stars. "Quantum electrodynamics. Got you there!" He drew a triumphal arch for each one. He caricatured a baroque staircase leading from midcentury ever upwards off the map, bearing a little sign reading "This Way. Watch Your Step." He would have broken my heart had I let him.

"This is absurd," I said, level-voiced, ready for violence. "Love Canal. Ozone depletion. Tropical rain forest the size of Connecticut destroyed annually. A hundred thousand species extinct by the time we retire. How smart can you get?" Keithy diluted the silence by a low whistle. With a few deft sketches, he infested his staircase with cracks, broke it off in a shower of mortar and falling bodies. Mounted sideways on the resulting chasm, he hung a sign pointing downwards: "To Holiday Inn." He waited for a reaction I wouldn't give. "That reminds me," he said, leaving the room to fetch his portfolio as I used the timeline to wipe the table. He returned with the boards for a national campaign and ran them past me for approval.

I must have thought to make things easy for him by making myself ugly. I still loved him that much. But real connection between us died the moment I tried to protect him from what was happening. I flipped through his pictures, written in the world's only ubiquitous language, its syntax carrying the cozy, intimate delusion of tin-can telephones. I read his copy with the feeling that none of it made any sense. I understood the message. But his whole campaign didn't mean anything. "Keith, you say 'safer' here, but you never say safer than what."

"Hm. Fiendishly clever."

"And what do you mean, 'We make things right? What things? How right? Who's this 'we'? There are twenty-five hundred of these places across the country. Am I supposed to believe that all the wes do things one way and all the theys do it another? Grant me some discrimination."

He began smiling the death smile. "Aren't we being a little willful? It's a time-honored, universal tradition. 'Your Driver'— insert nameplate here—'Safe, Reliable, Courteous.' Semiotics, woman. We're not communicating anything. Folks don't care about facts. They wouldn't believe them anyway. They just want the promise of friendship slipped into the sale."

"And they believe that?"

"Who's gonna lie about friendship?"

" 'We'll love you. All twenty-five hundred of us.'"

"It's commercially viable."

"Is that right?" I asked quietly.

"Yes. That's right." Still smiling, he knew we were lost, that I wanted it that way. I kept flipping through the boards, as if we weren't in the middle of the last square-off. One thing I still admire about Keith: despite my encouragement, he never stooped to killing as a way to preserve things. He never pretended any degree of attachment less than he had. Just as I was on the verge of giving him further cause, the phone rang. Keith bounded out of the room to answer it. I heard him from the bedroom, just short of abusive, asking, "Who's financing this? Who pays your salary? Who do I sue for breach of privacy?"

He hung up and came back looking beautifully sheepish. "My poor relations in the phone solicitation racket. Turns out our name has been chosen at random to receive a book of coupons worth several thousands of dollars, free, at only twenty-nine ninety-five. Dante placed those people one circle below real estate brokers. Where's that timeline? Gotta make some emendations."

I went to him and put my arms around him. After a long time, we separated, embarrassed. I mumbled something about going to bed. He didn't move. I went into the bathroom and ran the water. I heard Tuckwell let himself out the door and lock it from the outside. He went down the stairs two at a time. I went to the dark window and watched until he came out on the street below. I saw him safely to the next block. He turned north, cutting a swath toward the bombed-out blocks. Everywhere, shops had battened down for the night, the day's refuse and rinds rotting in the gutter. In the two and a half blocks I tracked him, amorphous outlines threatened from doorways, bumped against him, suggesting obscure exchanges. Keith kept up a clip that convinced the wasted, substance-dependent figures that he was in peak health and not to be messed with.

His dependency was the city itself: male addiction to the unpredictable. Covert dangers of an evening walk through the neighborhood, sotto voce threats implied and periodically acted out, had led him from the lazy Methodist interior where he had been raised. The instant the umbilical snapped, he'd buzzed to the coast, first to a fine arts school in Rhode Island, a state whose motto, and not Colorado's, he insisted, should have been "Nothing Without Providence." Then Boston for a year. All staging ground for New York, shooting into Manhattan's drag like an ion from a Tesla coil. He had habituated to life and needed a higher throttle. In North America, NY, NY was the most potent over-the-counter drug available. The city sucked him up as it did all insomniacs. But even here, familiarity tracked him down. After five years of Brooklyn, he talked about moving to the Lower East Side, the South Bronx. Calcutta perhaps. Someplace a body could feel.

But I moved first. Ironic: I couldn't think of the two miles' sickening diversity between the South Docks and Prospect Park without admitting I didn't belong here. One look at my clothes, one syllable of accent gave me away. And here I was, combing the neighborhoods for a place as if it were coupon-doubling day at the supermarket. For the past week, I'd had to keep myself from renting every slum I looked into, they all, overnight, seemed so full of promise. The hint of sea change was enough to make the familiar, forsaken rat warehouses show overlooked inlay of shining stone.

I watched Tuckwell until he ducked down the subway — the same route that took him each morning to his International Style steel-and-glass vertical trailer park. I would never visit his office again. I pictured him boarding the car, the adored public transportation, his favorite contact sport. A subway car could always be counted on to provide the thrill of confrontation. The face-off he needed that night.

I was asleep when he returned. For the next several days, we maneuvered around each other. We ate at different times, arranged our schedules to diverge. Only before sleep did we talk. We slept six centimeters from one another, sometimes in sleep closing even that gap, pressing against each other, licensed by the confusion of night. At week's end, I told Keith that a library friend was marrying, looking for someone to adopt her place. The end of our postmortem existence.

"Have you signed?"

"I've arranged with her."

"You agreed to let me have a look before you did anything."

"Let's go have a look, then. I can still back out." But we both knew it was a done deal, that I had reneged on the one condition he'd set for our breakup.

We walked to the new neighborhood. Keith inspected the street and nodded. "A little closer to the branch."

"It feels like home already," I said, grateful for the sign of acceptance. He winced. Too late to apologize. After four years of conversation, we'd lost the phrase book. Every word now was in pathetic talkee-talkee, Creole.

"It's on a corner," Keith said apprehensively. I was forced to agree. "It's over a dress shop," he observed.

"Antiques," I equivocated. We got the key to the upstairs from the landlord, also the shop proprietor.

"An efficiency," Keith said, attempting to approve.

"I wouldn't call it that, exactly." Semantic quibble.

"Nice. Clean. Quiet. Rent-protected?" I mentioned the figure. Keith's brow cowered and his cheek pulled, protecting the side of his face.

"I can pay it."

"Not within the old quarter-salary rent rule." I thought: Nobody on the Eastern Seaboard has followed that budget since 1940. He checked the fixtures, outlets, jambs: a pantomime we saw no way to avoid. The warrant of his solicitousness was not about to let me hurt myself for his sake. Now that I was absolving him from liability, he no longer had the luxury of letting me hurt myself.

He sat on the bed and pounded the mattress. "Strong enough?" I said nothing. "When do we move your stuff? Not that I'm rushing, but___" He drummed his fingers impatiently.

I sat down next to him. I wanted so badly to ask him if he would come visit me here, once I'd put everything right. But I kept from sinking to contemptible. After a moment's looking around the room, Tuckwell reached and pulled my elbow out from under me, controlling my roll and bringing my head down into his lap. He stroked my temples, his lower lip pushed slightly to the side in subfarction against his upper. Tell yourself whatever you need to, but don't look for confirmation.

I reached toward his face, thinking to grab his nose between first and second fingers, an old game meaning almost anything. But he moved unexpectedly and my motion carried my hand into a punch. In a flash, the whole hierarchy of second-guessing fed across Keith's face. He squashed it, but not fast enough to escape mutual knowledge. He grabbed my hand, automatically restraining. Seamlessly returning to decorum he twisted my wrist and gingerly inspected my watch. "Yikes," he said, slightly flattened affect. "Getting late. You're coming home at least tonight, aren't you?"

I had no change of clothes, linen, toiletries, towel, toothbrush, or pillow to give my neck that civilized sleeping crook, no food nor anything to eat with, very little cash, and nothing to gain by staying. But his calling the other place home made it impossible to return to. I shook my head; Tuckwell, disgusted, didn't even attempt the obvious argument. His shrug disowned me.

"I'll be fine. Camping without the poisonous plants. I'll come by tomorrow to grab some things. Take what's left. It's yours. Sell it to that fence on Eastern Parkway."

"No way. I'm through with your liquid assets, lady." I walked him downstairs, waved as he left, then turned back inside where my new landlord, uninterested in my private fripperies, frittered in his shop. I bought a matched set of Hayes-era curtains and bedclothes for nothing down. He was delighted to start a tab. I feasted on crackers and fresh fruit from the greengrocers, which I ate slowly in invigorating silence. A bare apartment: my senses were never so awake. I took a scalding bath, soapless, squeezing the water from my skin, standing in the dark, fanning dry. I took care of my arousal in the solitary room. I had never before seen it: happiness required only that I rid myself of all distraction, I went to sleep against the antique sheets, feeling parts of my body I'd forgotten existed. I slept the best night I ever slept in my life.

I dressed in yesterday's clothes, finished the cracker box for breakfast, ran my fingers through my hair (a surprisingly reasonable comb), and walked, in the changing November, to work. The branch seemed a different building, my corning upon it from this direction. Delicious disorientation: I felt I'd changed jobs. I must have looked appalling. But of my colleagues, only Mr. Scott remarked on my appearance. "My dear, you look like you could do with a little retirement. Care to join me?" I told him I'd never been more sure: the Reference Desk was how I wanted to spend the rest of my life.

I moved my things gradually over several days, dragging my heels in a flare-up of empathy. Keith helped carry, by turns grateful and exasperated at my drawing the process out. Already gone, I had the luxury of loving that old life again at a safe range. I stayed over, slept once more with Tuckwell: a slow, sad night retracing, committing the cadence of one another to memory, realizing we had gotten it all wrong somehow, but that it was too late to go back and erase the maps, restore the white spaces.

I didn't contact my friends at MOL once during that period. My move had to be a moratorium, proof that I'd made the break, done the pointless violence for unimpeachable reasons. There had been no trade. Isolation was its own best reason. I worked at the branch, and in the remaining hours decorated the nest, wallpapered, trimmed. On days off, I learned the new neighborhood. I was determined to live as if the move were self-motivated. But I was sustained by undeniable expectation. Even the air had a scent of something imminent. Of course solitude was exciting — how couldn't it be? Crisis couldn't touch me. Loneliness, no loss, was something to covet. The erotic dress-up at the bottom of the cedar chest.

Strange place, Brooklyn. Not a place, a thesaurus of neighborhoods. I never belonged in any of them. Had things gone differently in local politics, we'd all be speaking Dutch. I'd be pinching my guilders. Todd would have had only to slip across New Amsterdam to the next colony in order to learn his latest irrelevant foreign language, English. Strange place, Breuckelen. Hudson sailed past fifty years after Bles's death. Two journeymen on the same enterprise: the pursuit of panels perfect for getting lost in. The elusive Passage, spice routes, epochal expansion, The world is too well mapped; quadrants capture it all. Alchemy's four elements, psychology's four humors. What can a body do in its quartet of seasons but set fire to the familiar, take off on the numinous half-moon?

I wanted Franklin, beyond a doubt. I could feel, in bands of tissue under my skin, the precise place that want had set for him. I wanted his field, his detached, unbearably patient art history. I wanted to see this place that I didn't belong in, its cross-sectional pigments, each assay suspended one on another, successive approximations. I wanted to recover that landscape, the place I'd forgotten as I got too good at describing it. I went two weeks without seeing him, two weeks at my new colony. One Friday I walked from my place to theirs. It seemed a miracle to be on foot. The blocks between did not seem so dangerous as strange, misunderstood. I buzzed, heard the voice thin, tinny, treble in the speaker, backed with a flack of electric static, but inimitable. He sang a ludicrous parody of a housewife's guarded "Who is it?" He knew full well who it was.

"It's me," I said, burying grammar. "I think it's time."

Perpetual Calendar (II)

The simplest of devices, a model of informational economy, it fits completely on a single page. You can take the magic square and palm it, hide the device in one hand. Even a small hand. The perpetual calender exists because the year has only fourteen possibilities. January 1 can fall on each day of the week, and once around again for leap years. The rest of the cycle — days when everything must happen — falls automatically, redundantly, according to compact pattern. 1983 starts on a Saturday. So do 1938, 1898, and 1842. The years of Sudetenland, of J'accuse, of von Mayer's first thermodynamics paper duplicate the same dates as that year when a lost woman of thirty moves across town. How does it work? A lookup table lists the years, keying them to a long, repeating series of fourteen templates for the only possibilities going. The perfect reference tool: infinite sequence reduced to formula.

The cleverest child in every neighborhood, at fourteen, discovers this table secreted in the quartos of her parents' bookshelf. Appalled, unbelieving at first, she warms to the idea of a compressible eternity. Soon, she uses it to consolidate a shaman's control over the block's information-poor. Hiding the device behind cupped palms, she calls out her privileged, inside track to a spellbound audience in the back alley: "You, Pete, were born on a Wednesday. It will be Wednesday again in 19___Here's something:

ten years back, it was Sunday today." It will be years before she knows that these facts, in demand, clean and elucidating, mean nothing. For her clincher, she claims: "Today was exactly the same as it was one hundred and eighty years ago." Two years, twenty years ago, on this day, that child was me.