Gold Bug Variations

XIII

A Young Person's Guide to the Orchestra

He reads the stack of journals until the type decomposes into runic scratchings. He half dozes, swims awake, is washed under again for a few minutes, for hours, in tidal semiawareness. He gives the technical data rein to assort into spontaneous visuals — unzipping ladders, blueprint-imbedding blueprints, complex wartime gear-machines, families of trapeze artists linked in aerial streamers. In his reverie, the edge of biological thought is a continuous showing of jerky one-reelers. Every so often, an image-analog jars him awake with recognition. Bold simplicity of design knocks him conscious. Lucid, he sees nothing in the models but comic, clumsy, cartoon inspirations. Each time he comes to, Ressler cracks the journal repository for something he's missed. He loses consciousness again two or three articles down the pike, returning in the middle of the fourth, blindly turning pages.

He keeps up this routine — reading, dozing, imagining — for days, paying no attention to the passage of daylight. He finishes the juice concentrate and peanuts left in his fridge from a shopping run ages before. When the last remaining milk spoils, he makes cold cereal with water. The phone rings, but its bell goes languid each time he fails to answer. At odd hours he saunters to Olga, his heart full of gratitude at her patient, permanent Fourth Position stance. He listens to the independent variations, the record of that unbirthday visit. The same record, but different in every particular, just as the woman herself is now unrelated to the one he met on first hitting town. Steeped in the music, he teaches himself a vocabulary to describe what he hears in the profusion of notes. He borrows those terms he is most familiar with. Canon and imitation, audible even without names, become transcription. Phrase and motif become gene. He hears polypeptides in a peal of parallel structure, differentiation in a burst of counterpoint.

Days into his journal binge, intent on latching onto the remaining piece in the synthesis, Ressler returns to the musical set to test a bizarre hypothesis. For weeks he has assumed that his lack of training would forever preclude his hearing how each single-minded permutation was a variation on anything. But recently he detects an unexpected pattern. The theme he begins to hear — the element drawing all filial generations into a family tree — is not a theme at all. It is a determining genotype. The existence of the Base is still a hypothesis. He will not swear to it until he hears it underwriting each of the aria's progeny. Testing the idea takes time. But listening is exactly the focused release he needs.

He began scientific life — natural history's home museum — a closet Laplacian: solving the real world required only a set of differential equations defining the movement of every independent piece in it. But a few days into his marathon session — never once leaving K-53-C, alternately sampling Bach and teasing protein synthesis — he scraps the engine. All measurement is not inherently valuable. Science is choked by unrestrained data as a pond is by too luxurious plant growth. Cyfer has attacked the coding problem by attending to every amino sequence ever unearthed. Given an English library and an identical, jumbled collection in Bulgarian, they've tried to write a bilingual dictionary by reading every book in both sets, tallying tables larger than the two libraries together, searching for spurts that correlate. Brute tabulature might work, if the underpinning translation were preordained, symmetrical. But there's no guarantee the runaway data enfold formulaic simplicity. In fact, just the reverse.

If nature is truly objective, as the entire scientific project must assume, then science can prove nothing except that we don't speak the same language as the outside world. Still, the double helix is a better map than the old homunculus or arcane pangene, which are both in turn miles beyond clay and spiritus dei for correspondence. Man may understand only artificial shorthand and nature speak only in innumerable instances; dim Berlitz phrases may never be the thing they describe, but they're the only visa available.

Three quarters of his reading aims not at throwing open the window but at stopping down his aperture. First, he discards the idea, plaguing the symposia since mid-decade, that specific enzymes are required to thread each amino onto each terminus of a growing bead string. Each of these joiner enzymes, themselves amino acid strings, would require sufficient enzyme-synthesizing enzymes to synthesize it, and so ad infinitum. Regress: he remembers the lullaby his mother used to sing, about how she would sing him a lullaby if he stopped crying.

Dispensing with enzyme-dispensing enzymes, he reviews the possibility of direct template synthesis. DNA might split, exposing a half-chain plaster cast where aminos line up into proteins. The idea is pleasing, but the chemistry is wrong; the bases don't have the right shape to distinguish among the twenty amino acids; a codon and an amino acid aren't even the same size. Yet just as clearly, some templating takes place. DNA doesn't leave the nucleus, and proteins are synthesized outside, in the immense cytoplasmic sea. Some intermediary must reproduce the DNA codon arrangement and carry it out of the nucleus. He goes to Olga, dips into a variation that confirms, in a burst of quavers, the only possible mechanism: transcription. RNA transcribes DNA, ports its message away for translation.

At intervals of a few hours, Ressler gets impatient with himself for belaboring the obvious. But cobwebs are only obvious after they're cleared. He smiles, recalling the Von Neumann anecdote, repeated endlessly after the man's death earlier this year. The cybernaut, considered by some the century's most intelligent man, while deriving a complex theorem on a chalkboard in front of a class, skipped a step, saying it followed obviously. A student said he didn't see how. Von Neumann scratched his head, stared at the board, set the chalk down, left the room, came back minutes later, and declared, "Yes, it is obvious," and carried on with the proof.

By forgetting common knowledge, by starting again with only the proved, Ressler begins to hear with new clarity the composition he is after. Transcription only shunts the problem of translation from DNA onto RNA. He must still make a rigid distinction between code text and code book. He goes to his door for a gulp of fresh air. Deep, metallic cold in the lungs might even be healthy. He stands on the threshold, sucking in vapor that condenses in each exhalation. He turns to go in, tripping over a basket on the stoop. Cold artichoke with hollandaise, two chicken piccata breasts, and a bottle of Médoc. He carries it inside, where he reads its attached note: "Inform us if the matter breaks. Remember the essential trace elements. We are all beginners in our own lives. Best, T.B."

Ressler smiles, breaks to eat, wonders how long he has been away, then returns to the publications, searching for evidence of an intermediary molecule, a translator that might align with the transcribed RNA codon and attach the correct amino acid into the growing polypeptide. At the back of his brain is an ironic hint about the most likely class of molecule for such a go-between, one capable of reading the subtle, raised-dot Braille of the nucleotide sites. Finding such an intermediary is prerequisite to his process, still only a matter of faith, for determining codon assignments. If he is to find it, it must be soon. The field is heating up. Insights are going public. He might pick the next journal off the stack and see the first islands of the transcription table drained of their opaque, deep-water enigma.

He bathes. The hot bath scalds his few fleshy parts a pale rose. Tub thermodynamics — heat loss, entropy, the chaff of the system — is hindered by a nineteenth-century slant: bath as steam engine, body as conditioned caldron of excess libido, cathexis cathartized. His bath cools like soup in a blown-upon spoon, the water's heat gone as random as recessing schoolchildren, too quickly for thermodynamics to explain. It cools only to him, would still surprise the outside touch. The analgesic property of hot water is a message, an instruction in warming. But the text evades him as he adjusts to reading it. The code is dimmed to the immersed, but will spring scalding to the unaccustomed hand. How to leave the water and still feel? The question is as still, as paradoxical as any aria. His skin burns with the fluid's prompting though the tub is already cold.

He sleeps a few anemic hours, a dreamless carpet of feral activity, a tapestry-forest that proves, on close examination, rioted with animal communities. Asleep, he thinks: nothing in the cell knows the code. Neither nucleotide nor transcription nor the hypothetical reading molecule nor the target enzyme contains anything resembling the codon table. No part of the code, not even the entire assembly, can say what it is. The triplet ACG could paint cysteine or arganine or any of the twenty, or even nonsense, and what difference would it make? What code are they after, after all? Where does it reside? In what level of that steep hierarchy of cells, the aggregate organism where every level depends on the one below, and all depend on the ineffable?

And should he be still — astonishingly — alive when the secret words are at last uncovered, should he of all searchers be blessed to find it, what will this self-generating, self-defining system — residing nowhere, unknown by any of its constituent parts — what will the assignment of CAG to glutamine lay open? What relation, what revealing rule? Will it be, after all, the first small link revealing how this flourishing, odds-prohibited architecture can come about, flower into militantly uncountable variety, build itself blindly into ever more complex communities of communication, all cooperating under the aegis of that never-itself-comprehended code, achieving more precarious orders of order, culminating in a construct that may just now be growing capable of a grammar able to articulate, to speak, to code a rough symbolic analogy, a name for the Code?

What name? Not nucleotide sequences; not the codon catalog; not any of the reading machinery; not the enzymes. Not even the cell is the code. It is just its working out. The code is — so near as he can figure — a figure. A metaphor. The code exists only as the coded organism. There is no lexicon or look-up book. Not in the molecules, nor the cell, nor anywhere else but in that place— unnameable except by comparison — that houses all translation, all motivation, all that self-propagating structure that only by rough analogy and always in archaic diction (but not yet in his own words) can only inescapably be called desire.

The Food Chain

A knock at the door awakens him. After a moment, he establishes the approximate time of day: late afternoon, deepening sun. He thinks first to ignore the sound, stay away from the windows until it goes. But the knocking persists; perhaps he is due the intrusion of humanity on work that for the last several hours has made no progress at all.

Ressler opens the front door and sees no one. He is almost ready to accept the knocking as hallucination when he looks down and notices a miniature human on the stoop. Little Margaret Blake, trekked over from K-53-A for unknown end to stand on Ressler's stoop, motionless and martyred, as if the world were already lost despite her pilgrim effort. Ressler is taken aback. "Hello there, little cowgirl," he opens tentatively.

"Will you let me in please? It's very cold out here."

"Your dad doesn't think it's cold yet."

"My dad is a pacifist."

Ressler bursts out laughing and lets the child in. Margaret investigates the place, awed by an apartment almost without furniture, decorations, the usual adult totems. "Wow! Amazing! What do people sit on?"

"Same place they always sit on," he says, making as if to spank her on that spot. Margaret collapses in a heap of giggles. When she sobers, Ressler asks, "So, little lady. What's up?"

"The sky." This time-honored comeback sends her into another paroxysm.

He feels the unforgettable first signs of a playground pit in his stomach. Terrible at taunts, he never understood the oppressed dialect of children, even as a child. He rejects Wrap your head in bubble gum and send it to the navy as an appropriate rejoinder for a Ph.D. "What's the matter?"

"With who?" Her giggle is nervous this time as she tests his face. She stops goofing and works herself into righteous indignation. "Bruce Bigelow."

The name signifies little to Ressler. It sounds vaguely familiar, so Bruce is either one of Stadium Terrace's preteen terrorists or the secretary of the interior. He's had a bad dose of Jesse James Clerk Maxwell Taylor Caldwell syndrome lately, all personalities, public and private, fusing into each other, indistinguishable flip sides of a common entity. "What about him?"

"He is Ass Hole."

Ressler snickers. "You've got to say, 'He is an asshole.' But don't say it, OK? You have to go through puberty before you're allowed to say that."

This sets Margaret to crying, perhaps at the thought of one day having to deal with puberty on top of that asshole Bruce Bigelow. Ressler looks at her flushed cheeks, the hot springs leaching to the surface under her lower eyelid, and recalls the child's virtuosic sprung-verse performance. He frowns, chides, "Margaret? Are you? Grieving?" She smiles in mid-sob, gasps for air, coughs up a little sputum-laugh at her own ridiculousness. "What exactly did this Bruce so-called Bigelow do, woman?"

"He loosened this tooth. See?" She wiggles a canine whose time on this earth had come anyway.

"So what? Don't you get tooth-fairy payola for that? You ought to cut Brucie in for ten percent."

"You are Strangeness, know that? Strange Ness." The phrase I'm rubber and you're glue flashes through his mind, but he doesn't commit to it. Margaret, matter-of-fact, asks, "You know how to fight? You've gotta teach me."

"Oh I do, do I? Why me? Get your dad to teach you."

"My dad? Didn't you hear me? My dad believes in nonviolence." She sighs, a mix of incomprehension and pity.

Ressler laughs to recognize Tooney from this angle. "Ask him for a few lessons. Tell him they're hypothetical."

She doesn't even flinch at the word, but only shakes her head sadly. "He won't budge. He says, wait a few decades, and Bruce will die all by himself. You don't know how to box either, do you?"

"OK, kid. Them's fightin" words. Put up your dukes." Against his better judgment, he raises his palms and presents them to the little girl for target practice. Margaret jumps up in delight, claps her hands, rushes at him as if to kiss him in thanks, and takes a swing.

"Not too wild. You're leaving yourself open. Keep your guard up. Don't lead with your right all the time. Confuse him. Save your secret weapon. Left, left, left, then come in with the roundhouse. Shake 'im up, shake 'im up, then knock 'im down."

The phrase startles him. Perhaps his father taught him the cadence, but he has no memory of learning the words. They spring unsponsored from some antiquated chunk of neurons in the limbic, reptilian segment of his brain. He has always looked on all physical combativeness short of card games as evolutionary regression. He has never fought for anything in his life. That is, he has never applied overt violence to achieving his ends. Now the ancient formula of force, the somatic record of every successful bash that brought his forebears along their way upright presents arms, ready to address not only little Margaret's self-defense but his own akossting.

Over eons, undeniable advantage has conferred the Brute Force gene pretty ubiquitously throughout the population. But the last few millennia have produced a wrinkle — too soon to say if it's a true evolutionary variation or just a dress-up game. Capacity for violence — as unshakeable as any of the body's track record — has found a way of making itself even more propitious for survival by remaining latent. He can't take a poke at the chops of the editorial board of Nature in order to persuade them to accept the paper on the rates experiment he is writing up. Yet the paper is a way of going twelve rounds with Herbert Koss without ever once declaring himself in competition.

Werewolf, apeman, creature from the lagoon of lost souls: the killer instruction set still rattles loose in there. Locked in mock violence with this laughing little girl, her fists flaying at his palms as she picks up the trick of bodily injury, he sees that the unique achievement of this species, the thing that recursive consciousness ultimately permits, is the pretense that one does not actually manifest a trait even when taking maximum advantage of it. Everything the hominid branch has achieved — every treatise, tower, or diatonic tune — came about from surviving two out of three falls, prettying up the results after the fact. Jacob, after all, went all night against God's palooka, winning himself a name by avoiding the angel's pin. Shake him up, knock him down, do him in.

Man will never be anything better than a clever boxer. Maybe one that wins by footwork rather than punches, but still a creature always accountable to the win. The realization sickens him: advantage, self-interest, short-term gain are the only forces that carve a population. Every rung not higher, but shrewder, slier. The logical extreme is a species so clever it overruns its niche, bringing down the whole round robin. He quickly drops his target palms, timing it so that little Margaret's latest playful jab slams an uppercut to the kisser.

His lip breaks open. The child screams a terrified apology. Res-sler comforts her, assures her it was his fault. But he is as shocked as the little girl. He puts a dishrag to his mouth to stanch the blood. How did that slip in? How can natural selection make room, in this advanced a model, for such a pathetic, pointless, destructive little hit me of contrition? He clots the bleeding and calms Margaret by letting her eat cold cereal dry, right out of the box. Distracted by this novelty, she forgets the tragedy in minutes. "What do you do?" she asks him, munching happily.

"You mean, for a living?" She nods her head gravely. He thinks for a minute, helpless to remember exactly what he does do. "Same as your dad," he says.

"N-no," she says, curling her lip and shaking her head skeptically. "No. You don't do that!"

Ressler would laugh if it didn't sting, He can't imagine what Tooney has told his child he does. "Here," he says, getting an idea. "I'll show you." He goes to the side of the sink and takes the long-empty paper-towel tube off its holder. He tears it down its spiral seam from one end of the coil to the other. A three-dimensional helix, possessing all the magic geometry of the original. He shows the child the properties of the self-duplicating curve, all the while proving there is "always an intermediary analogy between us and substance, always a messenger between the mass we are after and the message it embodies.

"You study these things?" He nods, asks her if she knows what cells are. "Of course. Don't be dumb."

"You have a billion cells in your body, and each cell has masses of these."

She takes the dissected tube, spins it around, hands it back. "Scratch it. No deal. This thing? Billions? Me?"

"Yes, you."

"Can't be."

"Then who?"

Margaret jumps up, her eyes saucers. "You stole that! How did you know that?"

He doesn't have the heart to tell Margaret that every secret incantation she has ever recited has been around for generations. He looks at her and wonders: Why Brucie? Well, at least the kid loosened her tooth. Why Koss? He has no good data, knows nothing about her. She has never harmed him, to the best of his knowledge. She showed signs once of a bitter sense of humor, but even that surrogate sparring has quieted. She does not possess Toveh Botkin's strong moral sense, with its species-wide, if not individual, survival value. Her contributions to the Blue Sky sessions are impeccable but hardly adventuresome, barely cerebral ballet. She lacks too the older woman's indiscriminate kindness, a trait conveying no survival value, a liability in fact, unless, like the anti-malarial quality of sickle-cell anemia, it contains, for certain climates, some hidden side effect that outweighs benevolence's impediment. Of course, the whole comparison is moot, as the older woman has already committed the sin of aging. Whatever pleasure Ressler enjoys in her company will remain nothing more than irrelevant. Kindly.

But Jeanette: undeniably topical charms. Her shape, skin, coloration once upon a time had not been to his taste. Now her smallest arch obsesses him, even as he finds the full allure somehow repelling. How could he have let himself in for her when she remains unachievable — as pointless to fix his unappeasable, sharp, lost affection on as she is to covet, lust for, crave?

Little Margaret makes to punch him for stealing her secret verse — a slow-motion, platonic archetype of a punch. He intercepts its parabola and demands, "So how are you going to pay for this boxing lesson?"

The child smiles shyly, looks away. "I learned a new poem."

"Well? What are you waiting for?"

And little Margaret begins, disastrously, sing song:

"When you are old and grey nd full of sleep,

And nodding by the fire, take down this book,

And slowly read, and dream of the soft look

Your eyes had once…."

By the second line, Ressler sees it all: he has built her from scratch, in the lab of his own imagination. He has dressed her in clothes that she fits, fills out unforgettably. He has invested Jeanette Koss with every quality that might pin him hopelessly to her hem. And now she has them all, possesses them in flesh, cannot be divested. He has taught himself to see her, has named that recessive allele that manifests itself only once every hundred generations. Uncontainable mystery. He has frightened them both into noticing, and now they can't look away.

Margaret reaches the part about how one man loved the pilgrim soul in you. He cuffs her gently. "Enough, short stuff. You're terrific."

"And loved the sorrows of your changing face," she races to complete the rhyme. She struggles free and throws another slow punch to his midriff, stopping short at the skin to tickle him. "Shake him up. Knock him down."

"That's two 'shake him ups,'" Ressler says sternly. "Make sure to count." The advice sticks in his glottis, coming up. The ho-munculus giggles and is gone.

He toys with his paper-towel tube for some time. When night comes, he wonders if it might not be time to get back on diurnal schedule. He lies in bed, disembodied underneath the covers. The space in the room around him does not touch him. November; he smells the remote aroma of a disappearing fall in the accumulation of heating-degree days. He feels his hands because they are not his arms, his torso because it is not his legs where they rest under the sheets, his legs because they do not touch hers, and her, because she is not any of this, not his, does not touch any of these parts that can feel her imprint, so conspicuous is her solidity in its absence next to him.

Not this nor this nor this. But before he has power to say behold, lyrical awareness is lost to that sweet, sorry, one-word contradiction in terms. Nothing in his analogy for himself knows where tit. is. He can get no closer to the idea he is after except through contrast. Except through analogy. Except through already knowing. Sleep is as unreachable as the woman. He has not seen her for weeks. Not in flesh anyway; he sees her analogy everywhere. He cannot step out of his barracks bunk without imagining that some fall of a sheet or turn of a lathed chair leg holds the revelation he needs from her curve.

Has she thought of him in the last several days? A letter in his campus box, a casual inquiry at his office? Has she noticed his absence? That one look at the lab, the backwards glance they caught each other in convinces him that the awful hook is also barbed at the other end. One of those ignored phone calls could have been her. All of them. She must think of him.

He raises himself from bed. By feel, he retrieves his shirt and trousers from the back of the chair. Soundlessly in the dark, he dresses. He returns, by homing instinct, to the waiting stack of journals. The coding problem again possesses him. He smiles in mid-triplet-fiddling: I am only doing what any childless male is programmed to do. An alternative means of replication. Oblique, sublimated — pencil, paper the international chemical symbols. But he's definitely after a self-perpetuating, thriving, surviving genome with his name on it.

The search continues without sound. When the spell is broken, it's from the outside. He looks up, suddenly aware that extended sleep and food deprivation have put him in a state resembling those mind-alterers the DOD is perennially testing. The frame flickers, and he is startled to see Jeanette Koss letting herself in through his front door, a thief in the night.

He assumes — Occam's razor — that the vision is just neurons mis-synapsing. Extended fixation, never far below the surface of his work, relaying the millisecond message that the folds of his foyer lampshade are the coils of her hair. Then the apparition moves. "Are you all right? Where have you been?" He hears her exhale fright on coming close enough to see his face where he sits reading in the dark. "What have you done?"

Before he can put his hands up to defend, she reaches and touches his lip. He remembers now how badly it stings. She withdraws her hand, shows him the fresh blood. It has broken open without his noticing. "Oh that." He cannot keep from grinning, widening the cut. "Beaten up by a reciter of verse."

Today in History

She sponges the swollen split. He relaxes his face, neck, torso, dropping the journal at hand. If she chooses to kill him, he trusts she will at least use the swift skill of the professional vivisectionist. "This poet," Koss says skeptically, placing a hand under his neck and daubing, born to the motion. "Female?" He can't even smile without wincing. He closes his eyes, resting his head in the unknown quantity of her palm.

Nurse's talk, vessel of calming distraction. Is this some skill on that fraction of chromosome his half of the race doesn't receive? Where has she learned to move with such certainty? He sees through closed lids her ironic delight at her unexplained presence here. She sponges in delicate spirals, and he forgets all else.

"I assume it is pointless to ask for disinfectant in this part of the world." She searches the bathroom for an analog, returning empty-handed. "Your immune system is on its own for this one." She roots in her handbag for a kerchief, unused. Before he can object, she presses the fabric to him, lightly as leaves falling to earth. She holds the bandage to his broken surface, making no sound except breathing. Her fingers, fine instruments, test the damp cloth for clotting. All time's unraveling advance affixes to that square of linen, his lips on one side, her fingers on the other, his corpuscle stain sucked into the fiber capillaries like chromopartitioning. The blood that she dams by this tear pauses in the loop before its appalling haul back down to the pump.

Gauging the moment of drying, Dr. Koss lifts the linen away. She touches the congealed spot, brushes a few dry grains, shows her fingers to prove that the wound has healed. Then she leans in the most continuously smooth cycloid descent imaginable, draws herself flush to his body, and in one medicinal motion places her mouth — a mouth on the verge of saying, already forming the word — over his just-sealed scar. A sound escapes from her— threatened, mammalian. Ressler surrenders completely. He can do no other.

Jeanette changes: complete, fantastic reforging, and Ressler is inside the chrysalis with her. Unbroken, moldable expanse: moist, circulating tracts just inside her mouth attach to his awakened cell walls. The largest, most implausible living organ, the single membrane without edge, protective barrier, inescapable border, soft, semipermeable, resilient, impossibly strong for its thinness, her interface melanin prison, her — he dredges up the word: her skin. He feels himself dragged toward the cutoff of control. He looks over the drop in front of him but cannot measure it from cliff level. Then her mouth moves a certain way, spasms in a victimized twitch, and at once he no longer wants to measure. He can want nothing but to moisten her in return.

He tries to slow. A return kiss: nothing compounded. They've gone that ill-advisedly far anyway. Irreversible. They reach a place where he can level off for a moment without betraying further. Let this much be enough. More than he ever thought possible. Stop. Soon. At moment's end, seeing as they are already there.

Jeanette draws away first, changing partway back, retracting as much as possible from this melt. She stiffens her elbows and puts a hand to her head — frantic recollection, remorse past appropriate now. "I'm sorry," she whispers into the night room, the apology lost on air currents. "This doesn't help things any." She turns back toward him, touches his mouth, as if she meant the cut. "Not what the doctor ordered."

The cut has remained remarkably self-sutured. She tries to laugh, but the sound deflects in a flush of excitement and regret. Ressler makes a place for her among the piles of periodicals and she lies down next to him, holding him sadly, in mutual perjury. They say nothing, nor need to. He laces his fingers behind the base of her head, having known this shape always, how it fits in his hands, draped in this shock of hair. He holds her. The surf of his own circulation sluices inside him. He slips into that unforceable place free from the impulse to interpret. In that briefest space, nothing signals anything but itself. Dr. Koss answers silence with silence, the only explanation of her presence here. Her scent and bending is fact enough.

When it no longer is, they return to the nervous community of words. He extends the silence a little by reaching over to the record player, for days kept perpetually within reach. He chooses indifferently. He would fill the room with slumber party or young person's guide — anything except speech. But to do so without standing up, he is confined to the grooves already on the turntable, sound no more significant than the library of variations he has listened to continuously since the onset of his retreat. For lack of a gesture neither brutal nor clumsy, he lowers his head into her lap. She loosens her legs, makes a pallet for him in the softness of her thighs. She bends and kisses him, now briefer, drier, shallower, not so felonious. While she cannot claim that the first was an accident, it may have been an error in degree. A miscalculation, intended more so: quick, pertinent, almost acceptable among straight-ticket, Stevenson voters, virtually businesslike, therapeutic, preferable to the health hazard of complete repression.

But her recantation will not wash. She knows her transparency and smiles in shame. She reaches down, kisses him a third time: full again, but wary not to approach the extremity of the first. In the calculus of the permitted, everything less than what they have already committed cannot, they whisper, add to the sentence they will be slapped with. But they do worse with less. For at reduced volume, they admit to an eagerness more faultable than desire.

"I've created a monster," Jeanette says, breaking the embarrassed silence.

He disengages, reinstating the protective empty inch between, them. "Wolfman?" he says, straining for joke inflection. "Me?"

Dr. Koss shakes her head, laughs shyly, tentatively recloses the gap between them. "Not that! I mean___" She relaxes her focus to infinity, lifts her eyebrows on an abstraction, pattern, airy nothingness. On the music.

"Oh. I'm afraid I have gotten a little obsessed. They help me think. Or at least distract me productively."

"Were they that scratchy when I gave them to you? What do you play them on, a Mixmaster?" A flash of the old caustic. The biting, brittle, almost forgotten woman thrashing in the wake of frightened tenderness. Everything she has tried to be — cold, self-assured, professionally fond — all the blind come-ons, covert glances, suggestive sarcasms, concealed double crosses, casual, intermittent droppings-by, are not yet her sum.

"Oh, those," he says. "I hardly hear the scratches anymore. Surface mutations."

"An ACA triad in the original becomes ACG in the copy?" Ressler nods, inches away from her enormous eyes. The skin beneath is cream-tinted gold leaf, freckled, fetching, heartbreaking. His nod turns to a quick exam: how much has this woman assembled of translation? Can they help one another to the construct? He has sought the code in order to seduce her. Now, with the first taste of the prize wrapped gently around him, she seems the recruit to enlist in the wider campaign.

He turns from that height of cheeks, focuses on the music, the surface blips. He understands, in panorama, the process of aging. Every cell division, each mitosis — how many going on each moment? — is subject to some small chance of mutation. Each of these mutations slightly degrades the command set. The more divisions, the more fouled with accidents the cell information. The piece decays, variation by variation, performer to performer, by ear and word of finger down the intervening years since composition; it loses its accuracy, laced through with mistakes. Age might be the gradual accumulation of noise in the signal. Static-rich, mistaken; old, gray, full of sleep.

He uncoils from his cradle and stares at this woman in self-defense. How will she age? Will he be allowed to see her? The cream will have crusted. The soft patina, the brown, feminine freckled edibility will be lost in slack pores. In time, the look will be obscured altogether, not even preserved in memory of this unforgettable evening, a guest register smudged beyond recall, lost to the accretion of mistakes.

Until that moment comes, he can try to keep deep down, duck the breakers of adrenaline, stay stock-still and live whatever minutes of impossible visitation might be granted him. Her body, the blank subjunctive tense that he has conjugated in a thousand unsupported persons, has walked through his door tonight. For the first dozen variations — her tender strokings, their skittish explorations of mouth and neck and shoulder salient, surveys afraid of the data they are after — he finds relief from the relentless organic trap. Her simple being here, their simultaneous confession of the patently clear, is somehow blessedly enough.

He wants only her safety, her survival. He will do anything to ensure it. He would even now perjure himself, petition that tired, old anthropic metaphor — the bearded, wish-fulfilling bureaucrat in charge of the mesh of metacycles — to keep her from harm. But first he must learn what so badly needs saving in her. Her arrival, so long willed but never dared hoped for, at last presents the chance to discover.

"Your husband…?" He can go no further in naming the conspicuous Other. He's met Herbert several times, before the man meant anything to him. He has seen the other half of the Koss twisted pair slumped behind the wheel of a finny ballistic shape, waiting to ferry his wife to and from the laboratory, her real home. Jeanette looks down, hair red in the lamp halo. She kisses him on the clavicle, grabs the small of his back, moans a little. But except for the contortions, no answer. "Does he know you…?"

"Finish what you're___" Her posture goes insouciant. She removes her hands and looks so genuinely abashed that were his head not still in the nest of her thighs, he would think he has been wildly mistaken, that Dr. Koss's reason for dropping by was to discuss organic chemistry. She compounds the doubt by producing from her bag a copy of Biochemistry Society Symposium. "I came by to return this."

Back already to optative evasion? He feels her preparing to revoke, to claim that the confession was extracted under torture. He begins to jettison everything, everything. He is almost ready to dismiss their starved kiss as a miscalculation brought on by extended overwork, a psychosis she was too polite to rebuke. And yet, he clearly recalls her suckling fast to him. He stares at the journal she hands him. His eyes well up, stung. He loads his voice with the simulation of adulthood. "I'm sorry, but I don't remember ever having lent this to you."

"You didn't. But at two in the morning, I needed some rationalization." She laughs wildly, claps a hand to her face. She prods him under the chin, forces his eyes to gaze squarely into hers. She rebukes him with a look: Don't be stupid. We are lost, hopelessly lost, together in the thick. We don't even know each other, but in seconds, we have confirmed the predetermined fit. Irrefutable proof that we'll never be able to publish. As he shifts to restore blood to tourniqueted limbs, she adjusts accordingly, perfect ballet of self-communicating touch. They join again, flush, and the joint between them disappears. Organic chemistry indeed.

In the next rushed second, it is her, Jeanette in the flesh. She will never again be able to deny her signal. She shoves her face to his in breathing arrest, fixing to his lips as if to an oxygen mask, She pulls away at last for real air, her heart racing. "I knew you would never come to me."

"How could I?"

She unbuttons him to the waist, not going anywhere, just looking, marveling at the chest she uncovers, the person she reveals. She shakes herself, starting with her head and graduating hipwards. "I was waiting for you." Silence, carefully measured, in the half-articulate rhythms of distracted desire: silence at her first glimpse of his bare ribs. She puts her head to his torso, opens her mouth, takes in his breast. She nuzzles him, running her teeth lightly in his fur, eyes closed and head rolling softly from side to side as if his body were some obstacle. She gnaws, kisses, works his flesh. She has been waiting for him to come back from the mazed pursuit. Waiting all along for him to return to where he never should have left, to recognize the place at last, to return home, to rest, to her.

They overstep, accelerating into inexcusable touch. They could still stop, save the situation. To kiss a face, even unbridled, is still an adolescent sin — pretty, forgivable fantasy. To gnaw another's chest is another purpose. At this instant, they are still one another's innocence, a place in cut grass, an orchard under the rushing in of dusk. In a moment, if they do not stop the accelerando of friction, they will be one another's spent attempt, post-coupled, unrealized, unreachable.

He lifts her away, laughing desperately, limping across her face with little diffusing kisses; it takes the last of his internal monologue to remain even this much in control. "You're right," she says weakly, brushing hair from her mouth. "This isn't making matters any easier." She wraps herself into his arms quietly, content, as if she has had twenty easy years with him in which to grow aware of his every nuance of mood. "Change the subject," she orders him, eyes closed, smiling mischievously, as if his failure to do so will mean she will have to return to gnawing. "Tell me what you've been working on." Listening furiously to the last of the variations, he cannot, for a moment, choose between telling her about the in vitro idea or explaining his theory on how these musical condensations are all variations. The two proliferating patterns seem flip sides, hiding the same hermeneutic.

The vast, macroscopic architecture of the piece flashes into his head. The music, as familiar to him now as his body, reveals, in shadow, part of its design. The infolded Base presides over its independent progeny, rendering them congruent, concurrent, a family tree without clearly defined root or branch tip, a simultaneous as well as sequential ontogeny, profoundly felt, radial: each moment of the huge movement resembles the whole. The strangely beautiful, mathematical relation rings through its tonal changes. The Standing Now of the piece is more being than becoming. Its self-resembling perfection moves forward by a germinating process of periodic imitation he begins to detect but is still years away from naming.

"Listen." He glances down at Jeanette's face, searching for verification. The half-light molds her features into an empty flask. His mouth works up syllables, silently, struggling to hold that stationary morphogenesis he has at last found a name for. But he sees a different piece in her face. The form becomes a presage, information from a reliable source, a prediction of future news. The music remaining in the air after all sound is gone retains the first hint of sadness carried in the aria itself. Begun in too narrow terms, it must broaden into numinous sorrow, making the rounds of every village between here and the edge of dark.

He can no more hope to understand why she is here in his living room at night than to understand why he is. She waits on this platform, for this transfer. His head has lain gently between her legs. Whatever her motivation — unbalanced brilliance, crass calculation, random desire, love of intrigue, compassion, neurosis, retaliation, pity — this woman cradles him. And that lies as far beyond explaining as this whiff of modulation. Something sits hidden, still, in Jeanette Koss. She is more mysterious here beside him in the dark than on that day when she toweled him dry. He cannot reach her, put his hand on that mystery, the potential changes in her first four notes.

The notes are the song of children inhabiting the dark yard a minute more, inventing one last game even after being called to bed. They both hear, in the stillness, how the notes code the shared speechless intimacy of this instant, made complete by apprehension of its inevitable pain. It is, say, five o'clock in the morning by the sky. She's been here hours, hours that have evaporated in mutual nursing. Neither of them has said much of anything. But both have heard the functional poignancy harbored in the first, muted strains of sarabande. Half of the heart-pounding from the moment she slipped through his unlocked door was foresight of the payment they will, one way or another now, be forced to make.

Their silence is not the shyness of setting out but the stunned assemblage of memory after a decade of separation. They have known one another longer than either guesses. They parted bitterly, years ago, in mitotic anger, broke off all communication. Now, they have rejoined, discovering their utter failure of imagination then, recovering it in silence and waiting. She strokes his bare back. The touch opens a strange, two-way mirror between her fingers and his spine. Her skin signals to his what it's like to feel itself from the far surface. His back reaches and returns her fingertips' touch. The double-stroking goes on, difficult to say how long, as the only delineations of time are the irregular strokes themselves. In this quiet way, the two bring themselves dangerously close to believing that a discovery of the other's axiom might indeed be possible. A matter of working out the transfer in vivo.

She breaks off stroking. She wraps herself around him as if already for the last time. "Forgive me. I had to know."

He rolls over, catches her ribs. How could you not have? He ruptures his lips, grinning helplessly. "You know." It will soon be daylight. Neither has closed an eye, except to concentrate more fully on the feel of the other. In all but the colloquial sense, Jeanette Koss has spent the night. And yet, as she has just said, it was all heuristic, hypothetical. She simply needed to verify the suspicion. Every pleasure of contact has known it can go no farther. Nothing can come of it. Nothing. The thought makes him rise up and begin to undress her.

She sinks and yields a moment, proof she would in a different world. Proof she wants where he is going, but cannot. She places a hand on his, bends it to a more innocent place of hayloft and pine, a quick foray of unrealizable possibility, all that can obtain, here, just yards from the inhabited picnic ground. She is right. He catches himself, slows. But each restraint revives something more dangerous, the sense of all that the other deprives herself of. He holds her cheeks between his hands and places the smallest, seismic probe on her closed lids. "Well," he breathes. "What are we supposed to do now?"

She looks at him, apologizing, self-castigating. She touches the flare of his nose in wide-eyed wonder. They have already had more than either thought possible. A half-dozen hours flush against one another. She shakes herself all over, and tickles him. "Breakfast!"

Ressler groans. "It would have to be that. I'm cleaned out. We can't very well go to the Pancake House together. Imagine getting caught without having committed the felony."

She nuzzles against him and sighs. "Mm. You know, maybe you're right." He laughs in agony. They get to their feet, unkink. She falls into his chest, stretches her every cord, then goes limp. He has never felt anyone relax so totally. "You're the man," she says dreamily. She nudges him. "Go bring home the bacon. Haven't you ever played house before?"

If she has meant, by spending the night without cost, to work some crazy blackmail, she now has the goods. If she means to hurt her husband, retaliate for past infidelity, she has accomplished that, too. If she planned by feigning heat to reduce him to an emotional appendage, exercise her female rights over the drone half of the species, she has handled that much handily. He doesn't care about her motive anymore. The lie is enough. Jeanette herself, these unexpected minutes suffice. He dresses slowly, lingering over his winter layers at the door. She comes up beside him, crawls in under his coat before he closes it. He grabs her shoulders, holds her at arm's length. "Promise me."

She raises her right hand. "I'll stay put until you get back." They laugh, and he falls outdoors. He has forgotten how weird the world is, the man-violated world. He wanders the few blocks to stores that might be open at this hour, collecting random provisions— coffee, fresh fruit, obscenely glazed doughnuts she might find funny. Giddy, he asks the grocer what women eat for breakfast. He gets a look: why do nuts always shop at the crack of dawn? He sees a newspaper on a stand. He picks it up, unable to believe this wonderful, forgotten artifact. It opens like Tut's Tomb to everything that happened yesterday. "Can I buy one of these?" He overpays, folds it like a precious magna carta.

He returns home with his treasures. She has waited. She is sitting on the floor, surrounded by his periodicals, reading the notes he has scribbled into several canary-yellow legal tablets. She looks up in alarm as he slips in, an exact inversion of their positions hours ago. Her eyes hold a new admiration, a new fear. "You never told me you were this close."

Ressler comes over to her, combs his hand into one full lock of that swirling rose hair. He holds the hank as if it were the leash of a seeing-eye dog. For the first time since it became light enough to see, he looks into her face. Her features, malleable enough to disguise their beauty, are now smashed into the code for unmitigated anxiety. He has his first real look at her. She is a scientist.

Her eyes drink and live and address the code — the latest twist of the tumbler puzzle. Close, he wants to say, is not yet there. There is no more dissonant an interval than a semitone. We can be closer, he wants to tell her. Work with me. Let me spread the plan in front of you, for your appraisal. But all he can manage to get out is, "See what I've brought you. Coffee. Fruit. A paper!"

She takes the provisions from this helpless boy's hands. She looks at him oddly again as she moves to the kitchen to prepare their meal. "Have you a knife? Thanks. Now tell me everything you know."

He does, willingly, with growing relief that someone else is now in part responsible. His entire stockpile of insight is remarkably compact. "There must be a messenger molecule, to get the message from the nucleus into the cytoplasm where translation takes place. The messenger must have stereochemical properties analogous to the master library. Thus, RNA."

Jeanette stops slicing fruit, grabs her elbow, bracing for a fall. "What is it?" he asks. In all his dictating to the cell what it must do, has he overlooked what it does? She tells him to look in the journal she brought as a visiting excuse. Prominently featured, a beautiful article by Crick lays out the same inescapable conclusion. He scans it, knowing what it will say, and sets it aside. "That's all right. We're still OK, here. The idea's in the air. I've traced it back a decade, in fact, and nobody has gotten any farther. It's welcome confirmation to hear Crick behind it." He pauses and giggles nervously. "I think.

"Combine Ingram and Neel. A change in the gene is a change in the enzyme. It's all sequence; we know that. There may be an intermediary, a mechanism that reads or decodes or assembles the protein globule. But it's informationally inert. The information we're after has nothing to do with anything except translating one linear sequence into another. That's where we must start. Look. Siekevitz, 1952. 'Uptake of Radioactive Alanine in Vitro into the Proteins of Rat Liver Fractions___'"

"Please. I'm making breakfast." But Dr. Koss sets the knife down and turns, comprehension spreading on her face. "Do you mean we might be able to synthesize proteins in a tube, without any cell, from raw homogenate? Get the mapping that way?"

He looks directly into her, eyes sunk in eyes. He walks toward her. She turns, putting up a weakly protesting arm. He moves against her backside, puts his hands on the muscle just above her breast, saying, "You are not only beautiful___"

"Mm." She rocks imperceptibly up and down on her heels, her curve against him. "If you don't stop right now, neither of us will live to regret it."

They sit to eat. She plies him hungrily for the next step. "Sorry," he says. "That's the missing bit."

"But what you have already! It feels so… inevitable."

She is of a piece with approaching winter, wanting and postponing, failing to render the world perfect, palatable, and so choosing to wrap it under an unbroken blanket of snow. In a moment, their time together comes to an end. She must leave. Jeanette's anxiety smoothes out into her former, familiar, steady-state equilibrium. The face put on for departures, the look he already knows, the not-her look of sterile good humor. He wraps her to him, arms full with her, but feeling her already halfway out the door.

He finds his voice and says, a little rusty in the cords, "What can I say?" Not what is there to say; what is permitted. "Just tell me one thing." But he cannot ask it, and so demands, "Are we dead yet? Does your husband…?"

Jeanette laughs bitterly. "It's as sordid as you think. Mr. Koss is where no word of his wife's meanderings can reach him. The Processed Foods Convention, Minneapolis — St Paul."

He holds her pityingly. The strength of their restraint, their intended decency, will never be known. "You know, I think you ought to stay here. Longer." She shakes her head against him. "More often, then." No again, without looking. "Once more." He stops short of pleading, of asking everything that pushes its way up to his still swollen lips. He understands something he has forgotten countless times since birth. All talk is in ciphers.

Dr. Koss mumbles from her hiked-up coat collar. "See you next year?"

"Tonight," he coaxes. She goes limp. "All right. 'Soon' is my final offer."

"Stuart." Shocking, the name come out of her like a violation of taboo. Her mouth, now fouled, goes straight to his, where it is wild to throw off its mistake. Her hands are all in his clothes, and his under hers, deploying such violence over each other that it takes the application of an equal and opposite intellectual violence to break them from mid-doorway debauch.

"Oh!" Ressler says, separating, understanding where they are left. "Heading toward serious trouble, here."

"Yes. Trouble. I'd like that very much." But Dr. Koss quickly changes cadences, urging Ressler to present at the next Blue Sky everything he has collected. It's beautiful, she assures him. Comprehensive, internally consistent. In line with the data, inviolably clean. The remaining block, with sustained effort, must soon fall.

He watches as she goes down the walk, thrilled to be present at the day of creation. She turns, walks backwards like a schoolgirl, waves to him, indifferent to whoever else might watch. He is irreversibly in love with her. She is not yet gone and he wants her back. They were insane not to force the issue, to throw everything else away for the thirty-second crest. The chance will never come again. The gene has failed of its own cleverness. It has believed its own trick: the ruse of care, doomed affection, decency, that desperate simulation.