Gold Bug Variations

XIV

Desire per Square Mile

This time Todd waited for me at the top of the antique shaft. He leaped on me the moment I opened the accordion grate, my return promoting us to deep intimates. And I kissed back. Everything had changed between us; I lived in a new place. He greeted me after long absence with effusion, offering whatever salve was his to give. Even as I touched him, I thought of that advertising precept of Tuckwell's: nothing obligates more than unilateral kindness.

After a friendly feel, Franklin partly released me. Our hands remained in contact, threading aimlessly with each other's from that moment until the day he withdrew his. Where had I been? "Since when?" I asked. He laughed, kissed me again, and tugged me into the fluorescent computer room. My pupils dilated in the weird, familiar light of the old neighborhood.

"The Old Man will be delighted to see you," Todd said. "He's asked about you several times since your last visit."

"Don't mock."

"It's true. He seems to have developed a genuine fondness for you. Lord knows what the appeal is." I threatened the power switch on the nearest writing drive, ready to wipe out the evening's work. "Wait! Let me rephrase that."

Todd, I now see, wanted me only for my ability to tell if he too was destined to disappear in late twenties after a passionate start. I would always be subordinate to the research that had brought us together. Ressler had from the first been our matchmaker, awful confirmation of how many million more ways there are of being lost than of being found. Frank was overjoyed I was back, but the spark was the spark of salvage, the revived hope of explication.

He led me down the aisle of tape drives, past the line of printers under their sound hoods, a deafening collection that had multiplied since my last visit. As we approached the console where Dr. Ressler worked, my impression bore out Todd's account of a winter softening. Instead of delivering one of his restrained politenesses, Dr. Ressler broke into a warm smile of recognition, and welcomed me with, "Ah! A friend."

The three of us shared that unrepeatable evening as if I'd come back from years overseas. Todd ran out and secured our ritual provisions, pâté on saltines and grocery-store wine in paper cups. This would be our standard until Uncle Jimmy, discovering crumbs in the card reader, read us the house rules in his inept, egalitarian way: "You folks want to ruin everything? You realize that one smudge of mustard could wipe out ten thousand credit union members?"

That night was my homecoming. We went round the ring, toasting silliness, clinking paper rims. Todd proposed, "To the return of the native." I toasted Mylar, the stuff that allowed the two of them to make a living. Dr. Ressler thought a minute and supplied, "To Antarctica." We clinked, sipped, and demanded explanation. "The anniversary of a twelve-nation pact turning the last continent into a scientific preserve." In toasting the expanse of glacier and penguins he eulogized the decimated six other landmasses. But that night, the three of us set up base camp on the Ross Ice Shelf. The digitized warehouse became a sovereign, unreachable polar province, a fair chunk of the world set aside for responsible experiment.

God! What a few months. For the first time since sixteen, I unfolded into the available panel. Still regretting the mess I'd made of things with Tuckwell, I felt remorse scatter in instrumental brilliance, bravura trills, shakes, flourishes, demisemiquavers. We were a self-governing, city-free zone. What other way is there to survive the place? The last holdout habitat will be such a niche of charity. Life at the megapole required that I decide how many of the fifteen million adjacent catastrophes I could afford to feel. In those days — the brief bloom following a desert flash — I set my empathy at three. The calculus required consigning entire boroughs to misery beyond addressing, stepping gingerly over a baseball-batted body at the top of the subway stairs on the way to sharing whatever small delight one can save from mutilation. Those months, running at surplus, meant claiming the criminally privileged birthright of well-being. In fact, we all knew that a five-minute stroll from the converted warehouse proved the impossible mismatch of happiness.

Once, at late rush hour — his midmorning — Todd and I, prowling New York as if it were not so much death camp as theme park, rode to Chambers Street, the underground mall beneath two buildings that alone housed a midsized American city. We stood watching the nine-escalator bank that, for half an hour, spewed a shimmering waterfall of human foam. Frank's fascination with the ant farm was not Tuckwell's; New York was no thrilling Indy, adrenaline smorgasbord, buffet of ways to get killed. Franker sought the consolation of having one's worst suspicions confirmed. We stood at this lookout until the human platelets threatened to burst their capillaries and flood our high ground. Franklin turned from the scene with a gratified shudder and headed back to a night job where he made up half the known world.

Our happiness was pathetically outscaled: forty thousand homeless; three quarters of a million addicts. Four hundred radial miles of contiguous squalor, a deep brown demographic smear, a disappointment per square mile that left the three of us several digits to the right of significance. Still, exile to expendable stats freed us to do what little we could to rig the numbers game. The globe had never been closer to complete capitulation. The dozen regional and religious wars, delineated "shooting" to distinguish them from the ubiquitous conflict, the daily embrace of toxic spills, the gaping holes in international economics, irretrievable loss of a century's topsoil every ten months, continuous corruption trials, Esperanto chatter of terrorism: only the mildest symptoms of a world unaware of its watershed moment. But in our neck of the nature reserve, we three breathed the air of a new planet.

The secret, sustaining garden, my illicit fantasy having nothing to do with lucre or lust, was that by tweaking a few knobs, by having just these two friends, by clearing a space as wide as possible in my unstretched heart, the last living woman in Brooklyn Heights might contain multitudes, might grow to fill the dense bruise of killer buildings carefully designed to eat me. Might even (how could I have imagined?) pay back into the general healing fund. I made the dangerous assumption that goodwill was somehow enough.

I lived by myself — yellow glow from the second-story window over an antique clothing shop. I could do what I wanted with my free hours. I chose to spend them in Antarctica, picnicking by the punched-card hopper, getting my first lessons in programmable machines and the people who run them. I don't know what catalyzed the reaction, but we fed off one another. I was learning again, steeping myself in company. I rediscovered the strangest aspect of mystery: how much of it is temporarily knowable, how it chooses the off moment to come clean.

Who knows why Dr. Ressler chose late autumn of 1983 to thaw. I liked to think we brought him out. Perhaps Todd and I reminded him of discounted possibilities. We in turn, scared by his return just before the onset of winter, waded deeper into mutual care. Dr. Ressler was instrumental in these evenings. His approval was everything to Todd. Franklin brought the man articles, told him anecdotes, sang him little snippets of absurd radio songs. Every trick imaginable to engage an intellect that we'd seen only in concealed bursts.

At times Dr. Ressler would slip back into his native condition. Feeling the man drift away, Todd would throw himself in after, like the boy in the news accounts who always happens along at the instant of the ice pond disaster. "Did you know," he would ask when comfortable silence slipped into the wrong meter, "that Brahms and George M. Cohan were contemporaries?" He would look to me for covert confirmation, ready to recant as a joke if the guess proved mistaken. Ressler invariably smiled, less at the invention than at its motive.

But sometimes, seamlessly, Ressler seeded us, hosting rambling round tables starting with the prospects for artificial intelligence, veering toward the impasse in Namibia, and winding up with the Pythagorean relations or plate tectonics and the Mid-Atlantic Ridge. With his quiet encouragement, we could talk all evening. He never let us equivocate or waffle. No matter how far afield we wandered, he would call us back with a rounded predicate. Franklin credited me, some obscure reattachment therapy I worked on the man. Dr. Ressler liked me, spoiled me with attention. He treated Jimmy and Annie Martens affectionately too. If he was a shade warmer with me, perhaps it was only that I stayed later into the night.

The elegant court Dr. Ressler paid me as our familiarity took hold thrilled Todd. He at last discovered in me the seed of the erotic. We kissed constantly, a running, surreptitious feeding fetish.

By the elevator shaft, in the foyer, through the main office, on desks where aides-de-camp of industry had drawn reports only hours before. A quick slip beneath the blouse in a dark utility closet. Hair, hands, neck, lip: one continuous tasting, sixteen without the giggle. How long could we prolong the extended adolescent feel? What came next? It didn't matter: after evenings of verbal invention, we needed something for our mouths to do when they paused to repair.

He kissed me through the accordion grate on my way home late one night — a last freight inventory after hours of polymath, polymorphous perversity. "Come tomorrow. Early, this time."

"All right," I said. "But I have to tell you something. Neither of us is twenty anymore."

"Remind me to teach you how to count in hexidecimal."

I cranked the lever to descend, but stopped at his shout. I set the dial to climb and came back level. "I have a great feeling about us these days, Janny." He gave it just enough time. "It's called lust."

If I missed two days in a row, Franklin would leave me notes in the question submissions box.

Lovely O'Deigh—

Come out and Play? Limber those lanky researcher's limbs? I will wait under the streetlamp at the library NE corner from now until you show. If you fail, I will be forced to stand all night and the following day and miss work and be fired and waste away, massive species die-off or worse. I have a thought for no one's but your ears. FTODD.

FTODD, his system login, doubled as personal signature. As if shorthand genus and species were necessary. As if anyone else in this spreading stain of fifteen million had used the word "lovely" since the Somme.

He came to my place, appraised my rooms. I had by then outfitted them with odds and ends from my antiquarian landlord, indulging myself, giving over to darkwood and damask. "This place is beautiful," he decided. "Did you dream all this up yourself? Amazing antimacassars. You're one player piano short of a New Orleans cathouse done up by the Rossettis." He loved coming over, sitting for hours in a rocker, being read to in embroidered darkness the reverse of the fluorescent flicker where he spent his waking life. But when he took to courting me in force, it had to be outside, in the open air, grabbing the last December light, the late heat of months holding on eerily long after the season. He wanted outside, every possible moment, as if only by being there at the instant the change arrived could he read the encyclopedia of the year in brief, the masterpiece of condensation, the backlit landscape, that gessoed, verdigris panorama.

Early December suggested that this would be the last chance either of us might have to remember what it was, in the blood, to be young. The day now went dark well before supper. It seemed an irritant to him, a command to hold more, soak it up until saturated, walk another block in the dark. Tomorrow would be too late. The smell of dry first flakes carried the weight of denouement, revelations to secure, sap to consolidate while the neighborhood got ready for night. Your rooms are beautiful; but friend, let's go out while we can.

Sometimes he would not even come up, but would shout from street level. Come play. Unlimber. Northeast corner. For some reason, I always came down. I had reached the age when I could no longer resist the fantastic, especially when carried off with authority. If his message was for no one's but my ears, what would become of it if I failed to listen? I would dress and undress several times, trying for an effect I couldn't satisfy, settling on not-quite: linen, a mid-calf wraparound, and shawl. He was always under the streetlight when I arrived. I could make him out blocks away— confident, calling from a distance, as if I might lose my way at the last moment. He dressed up too, after a fashion: straight-legged gray pants and a maroon pullover. He would talk without topic, give me the most forlorn fondle: he liked the small of my back, my fingers, my neck. We would find a spot in the park, abandoned now by even the most desperate adolescents, and place damp, guarded kisses in each other's mouth until we lost the easiness of virtual strangers.

He would walk me dutifully back to my rooms, making me promise to visit him at work, as if I were the undependable one. Once, when we reached the door of the shop that still surprised me to come home to, he said, "I'm glad you came out on such short notice. Ninety-five out of a hundred women would not have."

"Private poll?"

"Ha! That reminds me. Last night, Ressler defined the difference between pure and applied science: pure science was applied science the Pentagon won't pay for."

"Don't change the subject, creep."

"What? It's all the same subject. Data gathering." He looked in my eyes, deep and long, fields for future study. "Kiss me good night?" he asked, clinically.

"I suppose. Just this once." The next fifteen minutes lost to oral exploration. Ninety-five out of a hundred women in their right minds would have known better.

When I woke mornings, a sweet, forgivable embarrassment infused me, not a little secretly pleased at still being able, this late in the season, to do something that would be prohibited in another month or two. The way I was behaving was its own sponsor, insisting that my body had not changed all that much, that it still carried its old shape and solution. Every turn it had taken since twenty had been to some extent wrong. So how could I pass up his notes, his invitations to be wrong again?

I had no reason to feel so excited, considering what I'd spent to get here. Each morning's anticipation was thick with anxiety. I was the debutante on the evening of her coming out who, after three weeks of screaming adrenals, thinks it might be easier after all to stay home the night of the ball and stick to baking gingerbread for the rest of her life. That waking dream where one finds a dozen new rooms in the familiar house: it brought on dry heaves of expectation.

Sometimes during the day reaction set in. I spent my working hours answering questions as remote from my evenings as I had grown from the lost cause of politics:

Q: How long would I have to play continuous Ping-Pong to make it into the national record books?

Q: Could you please supply the words to the third verse from the theme song of Branded?

Q: Who's the most eligible bachelor in the developed world?

However numbing the day's list, I took pains with it, shaping my answers with the care of a potter to whom nothing mattered except creating the perfect vessel for today's flowers. I sculpted every response as if by outside chance it might signify. However ludicrous or heartbreaking the three-by-five, an accurate reply carried some small possibility of redemption. I did not imagine myself a pragmatic force, or even a moral one. I was simply an agent, assuming that what people wanted to know, they needed. If I kept my head down, maintained the path between inquiry and fact, human curiosity might rise to its subject matter.

Q: How does the government calculate poverty level?

Q: Are there places on earth that haven't been surveyed?

Q: What is the Lithuanian for "I need you"?

Q: I have heard of creatures that take energy directly from thermal vents on the seafloor. Nothing from sunlight at all? How could they have begun?

The instant I turned up one of these I felt recognition, a reminder of what I was doing. One of them redeemed a week of compost. Each betrayed the interrogative passion built into grammar, fueled by that thermal vent just under the crust. Each looked for an answer that would keep them from the absolute zero of blanketing vacuum. Yes, Ishmael again, in that rented bed in a coastal inn just before setting off, proving to himself, by feeling his nose freezing, that he is "the one warm spark in the heart of an arctic crystal."

The Amateur's Almanac

I learned then how shrewdly stable the forty-hour work week was. Any longer, and corporate time chokes the off-hours. Any shorter, and we might actually sustain a thought, satisfy ourselves. Either would be societally fatal. What allowed my friends to escape the net was how little MOL asked of their attention. Once a night Dr. Ressler would put up a File Repack: a massive process where all the Clients would be collated, reconditioned, squeezed, rein-dexed, and streamlined. The repack required so many spindles and so much processing time that the system was committed for the duration.

While File Repack ran, those two could do whatever they pleased — kick around the innovations that daily made a liar of Ecclesiastes. Recent sighting of the W particle. Stone Age tribe hitherto escaping detection. Pioneer 10, passing Neptune on its way to being the first artificial thing to quit the solar system. When the day held no particular revolutions, Dr. Ressler whipped us into silliness by making us sing ridiculously long three-part rounds in polytones until the last cat was gutted.

We saved no lives on the night shift. But then, we didn't take any either. It all seemed happy once. A nightly exercise in the quick improvisation that had brought us together in the first place. Ressler puttered with print ribbons and decollators. Todd sketched perpetually into ragpaper pads, pads that grew thinner as he filled them. Late at night, hours of work still ahead, my friends sent me home with a handful of curiosities to verify before the next evening, threads we never seemed to close out. A renaissance of contentment. I found myself in a place where words regained their campfire importance, explanatory, incorruptible, above suspicion. I talked myself into thinking that Todd and I helped repair this diverted man's considerable gift. Every curve of clavicle Todd caressed said it was all right to think so.

"Tell me everything I need to know about you," I asked Todd one night. He sat at his console, shuttling bits of magnetic flux on distant drive packs through the intermediary keyboard. Dr. Ressler was in the control room, soundproofed. The two of us were alone, discounting the obedient machines.

Franklin faked a theatrical shudder. "Brr. Jeesiz. At last it comes to this. I thought you were the reference. What do you want to know?"

I sat by the console table, legs up. I leaned over, took his arm, placed his fingers high up in my folded lap. We both felt the professor's presence on the clear side of the two-way mirror, but the obstacle itself was provocative. "Tell me, if you don't mind, how in the world you managed to get here."

"Well, my mother and father loved each other very much," he said, clandestinely stroking my thigh.

"Ass. Who are you? Where did you come from?"

"Dunno. 'Sconsin." I refused even to grimace. Franklin sighed. "I was wedged in the middle of a heap of kids. Must have been a half-dozen of us. Doubtless where all the trouble started. Family wanted me to be an oceanographer. Went on to college, did a couple years in physics. The universe as we knew it was too small. Ended up art history, ABD." He shot me his most opaque grin. "All but Dissertation."

He would answer my questions but only to the letter. "Come — on, Franker. That's not a curriculum vitae."

"What are you after? Chambers Bio? American Art Directory? I don't qualify."

"How did you get so damn alienated?" The closest we'd come to friction since our first meal. I felt a sickening urge to push until something broke.

"I'm not alienated. I am a United States citizen."

I couldn't help but laugh. We had such divergent senses of humor that he sometimes reduced me to giggles just by losing me in translation. He loved inadvertent slippage. I once found him chuckling alone in the coffee room at a flier announcing: "Power Saws Cut 10 Dollars." In time, I recognized a Todd ambiguity at first glance. For several weeks he enshrined on the side of system A's central processor the headline I'd brought him proclaiming, "Incest More Common Than Thought."

I kept after him. I wanted something that had nothing to do with personal data. "Where did you learn to sketch?"

"You presume I've learned. You haven't seen my work."

"Is that an offer?"

"In lectures," he said, choosing the lesser of two cooperations. "'New French Naturalism to the Present.' Irresistible: huge, scooped halls; faces from every aspect. I spent genre after genre just sketching. Problem was, the professors kept turning the lights out to show slides. Even now, I draw better in the dark."

He was telling the truth. I'd seen his hand skid across a tablet at high speed. He drew while talking, a nervous muscle-jitter while his mind was elsewhere. Hatches, shades, and crevasses sprung up from a hidden plane beneath the paper. He did not draw, he dusted: the flour spread over the smooth stones in a church floor that magically raises the pattern of gothic letters lying invisible across a worn-away tomb.

"I'd start each term in the first row on the far right aisle. Then I'd discover a perfect Pisanello in the upper middle, and I'd change seats. But there were only so many interesting faces in any given neighborhood. Had to go track me down that Memling. Seek out new blood."

He fell quiet; I'd accidentally sent him back. His hand played nervously over the function keys. All at once I received a tremendous jolt of who-cares courage. "I want my portrait done."

He looked around agitatedly, bluntly examined me up and down. Just as bluntly, I let him. He squinted, and after an awful hesitation, clapped his hands. "Why, you're the same woman who was here last night!" He took a soft pencil, the same pencil he used to mark off the Processing to Do List. He flipped over the nearest green-striped printout and unceremoniously began that oldest form of programming. When he came to do them, the hairs on the back of my neck moved at his pencil touch. I felt him locking in to the layout of my bone. The way he drew me, what he saw there, redefined my facial lexicon. Terror made me a good deal more striking then than I am. But he wasn't after symmetrical features. Not the pretty composite, but mystery. And the only way to keep that quantity intact was to transpose it to a distant, more mutable key.

Several minutes passed. We talked, as always, as he worked. As always, he didn't care if his subject moved. When he finished, he set the pencil down and said, "Missed it again."

"Don't I get to see it?" Faithful to the strict phoneme, he seemed genuinely surprised at that clause hanging on the end of the bargain. He handed the document over, a contractual captive. I took it, but couldn't assemble what I looked at. Both a recapitulation of the Vermeer Head of a Girl we'd stood in front of at the Met, and a dazed, physiognomically unmistakable thirty-year-old, 1983, who showed in her penciled eyes that she did not quite know what had happened, today in history.

"We do all styles," Franklin explained. "Giotto to Gleizes, inclusive." I could only stare at the image. "I told you. I picked it up in a lecture hall. Subliminal seduction. 'Learn Mandarin Chinese in Your Sleep.'"

"This is astonishing."

"Ha! Leonardo, Rafael, Agnolo, and me."

I demanded the portrait. It was already mine. Despite a stylistic anachronism that made it unacceptable to anyone except an historically indifferent critic, the sketch betrayed such incredible draftsmanship that I was furious at him for never cultivating it.

"I need it back. I have to submit the printout."

"You can't. You aren't going to turn over this report to some, some accountant in city government with my face all over the back of it?"

He took the page and shrugged. "Don't worry. Nobody ever listens to side B."

"Give me something from your tablet then. Compensation. Something of Dr. Ressler. Of both of us."

"I dispatch those suckers, soon as I make them. Can't stand to look at them after a day or two."

"You what?" Destroyed sketches of incredible draftsmanship: it was like news of burnt Alexandria, or jerky footage of the last marsupial wolf. I shouted, "Systematically trashing art!"

Franklin shook his head rapidly. "Don't ever confuse art with Draw the Pirate." Precise, vehement. "I have a steady hand, am a competent enough imitator. But no compositional sense. Incapable of making anything original."

"And you're a feeble liar to boot." I'd watched his hand. "Your sketches make themselves."

He twisted his lips. "My point exactly."

"Well, if you aren't ashamed of seducing public librarians, you should be ashamed of squandering a genuine talent."

He froze, turned to face me, and said the crudest thing I ever heard him say to anyone: "I thought you were supposed to be well-informed." He apologized by grabbing my knees and pressing them for forgiveness. I gave it to him, took his hands and pressed back, as I would now if they were in reach.

"You see the problem," he said. "You've followed the cult of originality since autographed toilets? The strait jacketing Neo-ist canvases full of original black paint? The original razor blade and follow-up hot bath?" I didn't catch his references, but he seemed to mean that we'd reached a moment in our visual lives when innovation was itself derivative. All that was left of the painted portal sat in galleries in Soho, intelligible only with the aid of program notes. "A fellow is left with few stylistic alternatives aside from 'Divest now.'"

I said nothing in defense — I hardly felt qualified. Had I words, I would never have stopped arguing that whatever a person did well, if it promoted possibility, was worth doing. Anything that added to the heft, texture, and density of the card catalog. I had no technical basis for debate except conviction, and so I only said, "But you are good."

I meant to say something else—"adept," or "gifted." Even those would have been less than I meant. Todd knew what I was after. But a look came across his eyes, and he refused to forgo the chance to savor another slippage. "I don't see what my moral conduct has to do with anything."

To find a person both fine and infuriating, and inside of minutes: I'll never feel that again. Such a spread, in one evening. It throws me even now, long after he has — hardly originally, but with excellent draftsmanship — divested.

Quick Sketch

Those few days before official winter were our walking tour of the known world. We walked everywhere, at any hour. I was free in the city in a way I'd never been before. When we cut our walking to a third our normal speed, the particulars of neighborhood took on specific mass. I tried the experiment again this evening: walked a block as slowly as I could without attracting the attention of unmarked cars. A slow walk — too slow to be going anywhere— changes the way everything around me holds itself.

I didn't care where we were going. We were there already, under the shed sumacs, standing a fraction of an inch closer to one another than ambiguous. The game developed unspoken rules: we couldn't say certain things at certain times. We dressed too lightly for the weather. We spent minutes looking up into the bone filigree of tree branches, whose lacework against the winter sky became brilliant as stained glass. Sometimes on those walks with Franklin, one-third Ideological speed, I stopped moving altogether, needing to fix this, to find an outlet for the clarity springing up in me.

Todd still reached out at odd moments, took my hand, and shook it in both of his. He grabbed my fingers for no reason, his equivalent hopeless search for that unreachable fixative. The most he could convey of that one-word contradiction in terms was affection. He liked me; at the handshake instant, he again discovered and meant to take credit for me in our hands' press, the slow walk still ahead of us.

We favored a playground three blocks from the warehouse. By the time Todd took his first nightly break, the terrain was a children's Pompeii. Sometimes we tried the slide, hopelessly slowed by an autumn of tree gum. We compared old recipes for greasing. His involved sliding on squares of waxed paper, and he was on the verge of routing us to a store eight blocks away to buy some when I talked him into sense. More typically, we drifted instinctively to the swings. Expansive or expectant, however quickening the night, swinging seemed the thing. I would rock on mine, hardly kicking, dragging my feet in the gravel beneath. Franklin, male, shot for escape trajectory.

We would chatter or keep quiet — in those days they meant the same. One emblematic evening I watched Franklin pump to apogee and bail out, no doubt escaping one of those avuncular Flying Fortresses on a parachute that thighs sacrificed their stocking silks for. I calculated the parabola that had landed him between conflicts. We had a completely distorted historical view, he and I. By accident of timing, we thought this playground peace was the status quo.

Without Todd's weight for pendulum bob, his swing dampened to a stop. He got back on and called to me, "C'mere. Show you something." I hesitated, knowing the escalation. He motioned me into the sling, each leg over his, inside the chain. He helped my legs through, touching them with mute amazement. "For some reason shrouded in mystery," he explained, trying casually to pretend our thighs weren't touching, "this is called 'Swinging Double Dutch.'"

"You think you're teaching me something?" I challenged, pressing myself against him. "I was born knowing this." I relaxed and straddled him, looked deep into his face. Neither had done this before. Not since it started counting. And it hadn't counted until then, that moment of fragile pressure.

"Oh yeah? I learned how___" He fought to remain clear-headed, articulate, but even pretense took his breath. "I learned this… how to… before you even got your first inflatable slip."

"Right," I said, adjusting myself just enough to shatter his equanimity. He rolled his eyes at my little flick of friction. We synchronized our kicks, swinging in tandem, slowly at first, gradually gaining momentum. I could feel my vee riding a fraction of an inch above his. At the top of each arc we would press, pretending innocence, ignorance of contact. I kicked in rhythm, climbing a sapling on each upswing, and on each swing back, the sapling me.

At that moment, I would gladly have gone down onto the freezing grass and lost my last ten years all over again. I felt myself at my coat cuffs, against underwear, inside my silk collar come within seconds of anything. Cut loose, I was closer than ever to learning who this boy was. Rocking and straining, folding against him to our pulse, I had the chance to find out.

I felt it irresistibly unfold, but was surprised by the rapidity. At our arc's height, he kicked when he should have drawn in. A slight stiffening ran up his arms where I held them. Warm oscillation rippled across the gap to me — unforced, unconscious. A rush of conductance, animal-perfect rubato. Backwash erased all difference between us. No burst. Just sweet, spreading infusion, for one instant complete.

We went slack. Without kick-physics, the swing settled. Our pulse-pound, synchronized so briefly, fell into diffraction, dissipated in moire. I couldn't begin to guess what was in his heart at that moment, let alone my own. I climbed off without being asked. He said, "So they swung Double Dutch in your neighborhood, too?" He didn't dare look at me in the dark. Every second I spent with him was, even in the absence of hard fact, another slow assembling of artist's composite.

We turned back, the silent tactic. By the time we arrived at his machine warren, I was alone. He was attentive, arm around my shoulders. But back at the warehouse, when Dr. Ressler greeted us, a sign of collaborator's embarrassment passed from Todd to me: I had brought him over the edge with nothing but my body's graze through winter clothing, the rocking of a swing.

When I left, he rode the lift with me down to the street. The night ended like all its ancestors: a handshake, the only fingerprints he conceded. He was turning back to the office when I panicked. I grabbed and spun him by the elbows. He must have thought I was trying to embrace him, for he took me up, scolded me with a dismissive kiss. "So passionate as that?" He held me, resigning, admitting. His mouth near my ear, he spoke, incredulous. "Here again. At the mercy of strangers."

The Console Log

By then, I came and went as I pleased. Frank gave me a copy of the front key on long-term loan. Without incriminating anyone, I stole the sequence for the computer-room lock — the four letters M-O-L-E. I used the password freely until one evening, punching myself into the inner sanctum I was met by my sheepish friends and an angry Uncle Jimmy. Given his older cousin's crush on me, Jimmy would probably sooner have entrusted the company's safety to me than to Todd. But he was Operations Manager, and this was a clear-cut violation of, be it ever so ludicrous at this outpost, corporate security. He demanded to know how I knew the combination.

"I peeked over somebody's shoulder. Jimmy, it just seems silly to make them come punch me in."

Jim's bureaucratic bluster was undermined by recalcitrant kindness. "With the customers we have, if it had been anyone but me in here when anyone but you came in like that unescorted, he or she'd have put her or him in jail by now." I apologized, and Jimmy barked acceptance. He went through the apologetic motions of chewing out Dr. Ressler, the Night Manager, exacting a promise to change the combination right away.

When I showed up the following night, I buzzed for Franklin, smiling at the ridiculous return to pro forma propriety. Frank came to let me in, wearing that smirk beloved by mass murderers and the foreign service. Just as he was about to punch in the new code Dr. Ressler had set, he stepped aside. "Go ahead," he said. "I know you're dying to see how good you are."

I hadn't the first idea where to begin. Another four-letter word, reducing the possibilities to twenty-six to the fourth power: roughly half a million candidates. I had only two clues. Dr. Ressler was the designer. And Frank believed I could guess it or he would never have set up the riddle. It also helped to have him stand by humming the intervals that have run through Western music from Art of Fugue to Schönberg, with stops along the way at Beethoven, Mendelssohn, Liszt, and others. Down a minor second, up a major third, down a minor second. I cupped my hand over the keyplate, guarding my guess. I punched in the four letter tune, transcribed from German notation, and the lock sprang open. Todd emitted his high-pitched trademark laugh and cuffed me admiringly. He trooped me into the computer room and paraded me before Dr. Ressler. "She's broken security again," he reported. "She's unstoppable."

"You may find the punchline to this in your notes file," Ressler told Todd. Franklin cleared the nearest console. The screen returned with its eternally patient prompt:

Command?

Two-fingered, amateurish, Franklin typed NOTES and hit the Return key, that quintessential late-century punctuation.

NOTES RECVD: Read (y or n)? y

Note from jsteadman, @ 12/06/83, 16:14.

Take a break! This means you! Ask your woman friend out for dinner at the Rusty Scupper. That heap of bolts won't run any faster with you watching it! Uncle Jim.

"Heartbreaking," Franklin laughed. "The man apologizes for giving us a deserved dressing-down."

"I received a similar one," Dr. Ressler said.

Todd turned to me and howled. "And what do you do first thing upon returning? A shame, for women to speak in church!" He turned back to his dialogue with the CRT.

Note @ 12/06/83, 20:23 to: jsteadman

Jimmy, We're sorry too. Even the woman friend. Her only offense is pride in ingenuity. But I think we've caught her in time. Love from everyone, FTODD

Note sent. Command?

Todd looked up from his typing to the man whose opinion meant everything. "What do you suppose Uncle Jim would say if he knew you were in possession of every combination in this joint?"

Dr. Ressler shrugged painfully. "Passwords are trivial. How many words are there in English? How many in Indo-European, including all forms and proper names?"

Both men looked at me. A hopeless task, even to estimate the order of magnitude. I tried a rough, running total, falling back upon the technical reply, "Lots and lots." Ressler's eyes flashed; it was bliss to see him happy.

"And folks don't restrict themselves to meaningful combinations," Franklin objected.

"Nevertheless, passwords are trivial. One can employ the brute-force solution. Use one computer to generate all possible combinations of letters in words of given length. Then pipe the results to the computer demanding the password. Such a solution is not elegant but is as inexorable as death."

I thought out loud. "Every possible combination? Wouldn't writing the program be prohibitively difficult?"

Ressler smiled at my impeccable novitiate's thinking. He liked being reminded of the old place. He shook his head and said, "I could write that program in a dozen lines."

Todd clapped his hands. "Go to it." Ressler scribbled on a sheet of scratch paper, then showed us his handiwork:

For first letter from A to Z

For second letter from A to Z

For third letter from A to Z

…

Word = first letter + second letter 4- third letter… try word

…

Next third letter

Next second letter

Next first letter

I looked at his program, feeling the rush of forgotten terrain opening. He said, "The ellipses are for longer words. In the loop, one could start with blanks instead of A's, to include all words shorter than the number of imbedded cogs. You see__" And I did see; my first glimpse of the synthetic achievement of language. "You see that the nested loops produce words in simple combinatorial order: AAA, AAB, AAC, and so on."

"How long would it take such a program to run?" I asked, the cumbersome coordination of loops within loops dawning on me.

"Some time. Lots and lots."

"That's why God invented operators," Todd contributed.

"To speed the search, you could pipe likely lists — say our online file of the hundred and twenty thousand most common English words. That's a gamble, however. If the word is not on the list, you're left with no systematic way of picking up the pieces." At that moment, I saw in the exhausted face a look so unlikely I almost missed it. Gratitude at the chance of exchange, at stumbling across a listener after years of having no audience but himself. A look full of wonder that he was being thrown back, after everything, on the shifting ambiguity of first letter plus second letter plus third. He motioned toward the console, asking Franklin, "Do you have anything running at the moment?"

"Work, you mean? What a curious idea." Franklin turned to the keyboard. At the system prompt, he typed the command LOG.

20:36 Dumping console transactions to log. Mode brief. Begin when?

"What time did I show up tonight?" he asked Ressler, his eyes on the monitor.

"As I recall, you were here ten minutes before closing, camped over the terminal, waiting eagerly for the last remote teller to log off so that you could bring your machine down and begin the end-of-day processing." Todd winced at the portrait and typed a time. A thermal printer embedded in the tabletop began bruising a roll of paper, producing a printout that varied only in detail from the scraps that, hopeless pack rat, I scavenged for inclusion in the capsule.

Command? EOD

18:37 Begin end of day processing. Mount Sys Pack on Spindle 1, Master Client File on Spindle 2, Client Backup on Spindle 3, and scratch on Spindle 4. Oldest cycle date tape in tape drive. Hit any key when ready?

18:43 End of day underway; backing to tape…

18:58 Backup complete. Rewind tape and unthread.

19:01 Conditioning Master File…

19:20 Master File conditioned. Merging transactions…

19:42 Transactions merged. Ledgering new trans file. Running new-acct. Running purge. Running trial balance.

19:46 End of day complete. Command? PAY

19:46 Begin Tuesday pay cycle processing. Thread payroll tape, General Ledger pack on Spindle 3. Position checks in printer. Hit any key when ready?

The latest fable from Homo fabulus. Todd whistled at the history of his evening. "Do I really live this way?" "Check your partitions," Ressler said.

Command? TASKCHECK

20:38 Partition 1: Payroll check ok.

Partition 2: Report Generator check ok. No other partitions active.

"Steady as she goes. What do you have in mind?"

"Open a third partition. Give it a half a meg."

Todd gritted his teeth and shouted, papier-mâché-set style, "I don't know if the engines will stand it, Captain." He tapped a few keys. "Et voilà. Bute."

"Now. Do a part reset."

"Don't know how."

Ressler hit a key combination I missed, and the screen read:

Sys 1652 Exp Ver 4.2 partition reset login:

Ressler typed FTODD. The screen prompted for a password. "Turn around," Ressler said. Seconds later, he called, "Done."

password: xxxxxxx

System Date and Time: 12/06/83 20:40.45

User ftodd logged in.

"American Satan!" Todd shouted. "You couldn't possibly have learned that by brute force."

"No, sir."

"Selected list?" I suggested, and was rewarded by a warm no.

He let us savor the trick before confessing, "I have to admit to charlatanism here. I did not actually crack your password. I simply jumped to partition two, called up your record page, and blind-piped your password from the user profile to the unsuspecting partition."

Even his charlatanism was clever. Todd was greatly amused by the piracy. "What would Uncle Jim say if he knew you could kick this machine around?"

"Now that is more dangerous to corporate security than knowing a few passwords." He turned to me. "Your friend turns out to have an interesting password that you might be able to hit using the Short List." Just as I was about to pump him for data, Todd shouted from his place at the keyboard. Ressler gave a yelp and lunged to prevent Todd from punching any more keystrokes. But it was too late.

Command? EDIT

20:45 Entering editor in partition #3. Files belong to user ftodd:

pnotes eoderrors daybook herri

Enter name from list or new file to create: security

20:45 Opening new file: security File creation error.

Command? EDIT

Command? WHAT GIVES?

20:46: Command string not recognized.

"Interesting," Todd said, giggling nervously.

"Indeed," Ressler concurred. "Promises to be a long night."

I had no idea what was going on. I looked from one to the other. "System crash," Todd explained curtly.

Ressler pulled on his earlobe. "Yes, we have once again done what the three-thousand-page user's manual insists is impossible." He led the three of us into the command room, where the twinkling LCDs had frozen solid. He looked at Todd, shook his head. "I'm mortified. Apparently, one can simulate a duplicate of oneself, but one can't actually be in two places at the same time."

"My fault for keying away blithely. What about the Report Gen?" They looked through the two-way mirror. The printers were drifting dead in the electrical current. "And Payroll?"

Dr. Ressler scratched his head. "Fairyland."

"The long chunk it had already finished?"

"I think, friend, that as things stand, we'll be lucky to rebuild the Master File without a cold reboot."

Franklin whistled. "Well! I'll take a good system crash over a crossword any day. That's why we're working for the military-industrial complex in the first place. Right?" The two fell into flowchart, Holmesian deduction, tapping panels, toggling switches, volleying terms, injecting patches, and cross-referencing their way through the massive metal-bound manual with masochistic relish. As I couldn't contribute, I was forgotten in the intellectual excitement of the fix. They were an unlikely pair, never more at ease with one another than at this crisis moment, with a hundred essential financial trails teetering on the brink of the ether. In the unreal solitude of their shift they were at peace, cut off from all others. Even I was at best a registered alien.

I went and sat in the lunchroom, glanced at the day's paper, which Franklin no longer shredded. I sat quietly in the dark, trying to recover that spark I'd felt on receiving my first introduction to programming. Within my lifetime, we'd built the first prototype animal capable of behaving like any other — the universal simulating machine. The complex behavior of Todd and Ressler's computers floated on a sea of self-organizing ands, ors, and nots: a circuit-medium of living language. Strange slippage: language itself was the computer; metal and silicon were just ways of marshaling the syntax. If the driving language were properly designed, it might provide a complete, enumerable description of everything there was. Not just a description, a semantic table that animated itself. I tried to formulate, without sufficient vocabulary, the odd, momentous identity at machine level of information and instruction. Every "Thus it came to pass" harbored a secret, equivalent, "Go ye, therefore." One of the great, isolate, alert moments of my life.

In a while, Franklin came to find me. "Uncle Jimmy was right; I should have asked the charming Ms. O'Deigh out to eat. Listen to one's elders; everything they tell you is right."

"I'm not going anywhere," I said.

"It's digital devastation in there. Don't look! Think the Bosch nightmare of your choosing. I might get out by nine a.m. If I'm lucky." He was in no more hurry to go home than he was to die. He never finished on time anyway. His second-shift vocation was innate, self-inflicted, a desire for perpetual distraction from real work, the thing calling out to be done. "A shame, too," he said softly, tilting my head back. "I'd thought I might be able to visit, tonight."

"Come by whenever you feel like," I said, deliberately misinterpreting. "I'll be awake."

He shrugged; the matter was digital, out of his hands. He let me out by way of the fire exit, disabling the alarm behind me. I felt him, his split, how much he would have given not to hold back. He restrained me at the door. "Got an exit visa?"

"Passwords are trivial," I said, kissing him good night. The kiss lingered, a simultaneous interpreter between visiting heads of state. It contained whole grammars, self-generating syntaxes. No longer just a description; it lived like a command.

Quote of the Day

In the expansion each day brought, I had little time for reparations. I visited Tuckwell one Sunday. Overdue, unable to put it off any longer, I returned to the old apartment for the first time since clearing out. I couldn't believe I'd lived here recently, come back every day to the settlement. I found Keith in the posture of eighty million other American males at that moment: crapped out in front of the football game. Apparently, nightly news no longer produced sufficient threat to satisfy his addiction to event. He was talking back to the set, also a national prerequisite. Only Keithy performed the pathetic act in a style all his own, turning the sound off and delivering his own play-by-play into the roarless apartment.

"Ol' Staubach ran for daylight as if an entire detachment of Mujahadin were on his ass. Secondary's fallen apart. The best lack all conviction. This is the moment when the entire offensive line must look over that brink at the inner bogeyman. Of course, none of this has any bearing on reality. All Ethiopia could live for a week on these teams' boiled shoulder pads. You think that troubles Roger? Nope. The old pro sacrifices his body, plunges ahead for no gain."

"Hi," I said. He studied the play. "I came to say hello. Roger Staubach retired four years ago after playing eleven seasons,"

Keith gave me a suspicious look. "How can you be sure?"

"Forgotten already? Forty percent of my livelihood is sports trivia."

We couldn't talk there; the place was too loaded. I hauled him out of the apartment, hanging on to keep him from breaking away. We ducked into the nearest greasy spoon. He was in bad shape, worse than I had thought. We ordered coffee. Tuckwell floated unopened sugar packs on the surface of his. He waited, made me ask him how he had been. At length, he gave me a manila folder he'd brought along. "Birthday present." he claimed passively; it wasn't my birthday. The folder housed a mounted ad: a grainy aerial photo that Franklin could have drawn freehand. Photorealism from his No. 2 pencil was child's play.

On second look, I recognized it as a vaguely familiar military document I'd seen reprinted. Tuckwell wouldn't identify; he wanted audience participation. Given the time I'd spent on Twenty Questions in my life, I had no patience for it then. But I'd long ago learned that when Keith got a bee up his ass, all I could do was let it cross-pollinate. I set the image on the table: a construction site, an empty lot a week before the circus comes to town. Muddy ground recently torn up, with man-made craters filled with water. A few pieces of blurry equipment, corrugated tin sheds. Superimposed on the photo was a system of arrows and Acronymese. I managed to ignore Tuckwell's pointed silence long enough to concentrate. Aerial view, construction site, strategic arrows: I did my quiz-show contestant stint. "U—2 shot of Cuba, twenty-one years ago."

"Very good. Natural-born uncoverer. And what do you remember about said incident?"

"Keithy, I was just nine years old. I swear I had nothing to do with it."

"Don't be a Hoosier." We sat and looked at the icon, knowing that another word would spell disaster. To self-conscious effect, he took out of his rucksack an acetate overlay. He handed it to me, saying, "Forgot something." I spread the overlay over the photo, and the scene was transformed. It now read, in fancy, living color, 40-point type: "DO YOU KNOW WHAT THE OTHER GUY IS UP TO?"

Keith was wired by now. A wrong guess was worse than none, so I set the composite image down and folded my hands. He explained that his outfit had been hired to free-lance this ad; it would hit the stands in three big-circulation glossies next month. His eyes gleamed. "The bastard will sell," he chuckled. "Apotheosis of vending by fear. Paranoia — our supreme erotic desire. Everyone secretly adores having his worst nightmares orchestrated."

"I thought we bought things we liked."

"Wake up, lady."

"Who's the client?" I asked. "What's the product?"

"God damn it, O'Deigh. Who in hell cares? Haven't you figured this game out yet? Nobody sells products. They sell slogans."

He was right: I thought of all the times patrons had asked me to identify forgotten commodities by dimly remembered sales pitches. The best display in adland, the ne plus ultra of mottodom, was; "The Best Motto Money Can Buy."

We stared at the reconnaissance, pretending to sip at our tepid, distracting narcotic. I could stand it no longer. "A beautiful lettering job. The layout's nice. What would you like me to say?" I had come to try to be kind, but was not prepared to find kindness so messy. I could think of nothing to say that would extricate us.

But I had misread Keith — flunked the economics of compassion. Before I knew what was happening, he was hissing at me, "You want me to quit my job? Make some difference? Go chain myself to the fence at Lawrence Livermore?" He began racing along a mental tangent angle I could not intercept. "You think I don't know what's at stake? You're the one; you don't have the slightest sense of what we're up against. You, with all the facts. You won't sum them up. Look at this." He smacked the photo with a violent backhand. " 'Twenty-one years back.' You still haven't the slightest idea what we're looking at."

I knew I was looking at a triumph of late-day, calculated despair. I knew the sort of product the photo promoted, the market distraction we have inserted between every desire and its itch: the ultimate bottled water, a salt elixir that creates more thirst than it gratifies. I'd heard him deliver the same speech when we lived together, but never so distraughtly, never with such solid supporting evidence.

The waitress's hovering maddened him. On the woman's third return he said, "You want us out of here? Why not put a taxi meter in these booths? Or I can leave a bunch of quarters on the edge of the plexi here, and you can come by every ten minutes and pick one up." He was pacing in place, poking the slots on the napkin holder, squeezing the mustard pump, spindling the straws. I took his hands and held them steady, more wrestler's pin than old flame's cradle. He turned on me, gave me the most menacing smile I've ever seen: "You still don't know the secret word here, do you? You think the issue is apocalypse? The missiles are nothing, dear heart. No-thing." He looked at the photo as if he'd forgotten what the issue was. "How you supposed to take arms against something like this?" His laugh was desperate, falsetto. "Picket?" His voice popped, like a teenager learning to drive a standard transmission. "The product is electronic mail. The advertisement is a finalist for a national award."

I knew that such things existed. But I'd never taken them seriously. "How? It hasn't even run yet."

"Novelty is all. These folks are on top of things. I have to fly to LA next month, because___" He looked at me with caustic pride.

"Because the awards are being televised."

"Who's the sponsor?" I risked. Keith cackled.

"Brought to you by the folks who left you sponsorless." He breathed, clearing an aisle down the minefield between us. "Thing is, I could use a stunning, statuesque, killer beauty in black elbow gloves to drape over my arm." He waited until I could no longer accept gracefully. "Care to help me find one?"

I took him home, where he began communing with the remote control before I was out of the room. At last I asked him what I had come to ask, a question no answer could satisfy. "Keithy, will you be all right?"

He shut the sound off and stared. "Why did you move?"

I manufactured something about room, adulthood, self-reliance, the need for perpetual experiment. I didn't try to explain that I was after the one thing I already knew would not be left me at the end: what it felt like to be alive.

Books

I went through my library this morning, searching for books I might be able to peddle secondhand A bit histrionic, perhaps. Premature. 1 still have cash left, if none coming in. Haven't yet been knocked back onto necessity. But for a minute this morning, I got obsessed with the idea of efficiency, the political economy of plants: capture the energy I need to build just those structures that will let me capture all the energy I need. I forgot for a moment how inept and archaic nature really is. Grotesque encumbrance of peacock tails, koalas' dependence on a single leaf, inexplicable energy cost of narwhal horn: efficiency belongs only to ingenious naturalists.

This morning around ten, I ran out of sentences. It became impossible to type another verb. So I attacked my library, thinking to pare it down. I didn't need both the Times Atlas and my schoolgirl Hammond; I could part with the older almanacs; my Spotter's Sailboats, acquired who knows where, had stood me in all the stead it ever would; I could ditch either Bartlett's or the Oxford Quotes.

But in choosing between these last I rediscovered just how differently two identical purposes could be met and also, indirectly, the source of the note that first persuaded me to come out and meet Todd by streetlight. Running my finger down the entry "Ears,"

hath e. to hear

high crest, short e.

I have e. in vain

in e. and eyes to match me

'Jug Jug' to dirty e.

leathern e. of stock-jobbers

I was struck by the ears that were missing. If not here, then I would need to check one of those great compendia the rearguard guerrilla actions against the scattering of world's word where he cribbed all his love notes. I found them in "Adam's Curse," by Yeats.

I had a thought for no one's but your ears:

That you were beautiful, and that I strove

To love you in the old high way of love;

That it had all seemed happy, and yet we'd grown

As weary-hearted as that hollow moon.

The lines turned up in a superfluous anthology I'd ear-marked for sale. The note that had stolen the verses returned to me intact, and with the note, Todd — more real, less efficient than I've yet made him out. And with him, I had what I was after, and my sentences came back all afternoon. And I vowed not to sell so much as a single, redundant letter.