Gold Bug Variations

XVII

Halcyon Days

Ressler's write-up is accepted by the Journal of Molecular Biology. He will appear as second author after Ulrich. Standard practice: the glass-washer takes second billing to team leader. Ulrich edits his summary liberally. Ressler initially concluded, "It has been demonstrated that hereditary information is arranged in unidirectional, nonoverlapping nucleotide triplets, each determining a single amino acid in protein synthesis. Code redundancy may favor an in vitro method of determining codon assignments over analyses of base and polypetide sequences." Ulrich softens this to "Our results further substantiate the hypothesis of a linear arrangement, perhaps with a triplet reading frame." He strikes the crucial second sentence altogether. When the red-penned draft comes back to Ressler, he springs up and walks the paper back down the hall to the old man's office, using the distance to suppress the spontaneous fight mechanism sprung in his body.

Ulrich shifts in his chair and drops into placid register. "The write-up is first-rate. But we don't want to overstate the results." Ressler volleys halfheartedly: his conclusion makes no assertion that isn't supported. "Perhaps," Ulrich holds firm. "But what counts is not what you claim for your results, but what they claim for themselves. You don't want to dictate how to run follow-ups. That would be…" The veteran breaks into a conspiratorial grin. "That would be leading trump."

Ressler leaves, rebuked but pleased. Ulrich's tacit advice to play things close to the chest unwittingly exonerates Stuart for not yet announcing his even more sweeping line of thought. In the premature evening of his office he follows a bibliographical trail, searching down another experiment from a pair of years ago. He dimly recalls a paper with similar elliptical conclusion that could vaporize the intractable barrier between him and the last lab step. His concentration for work is shaken by the hierarchy of ethics. Ulrich's edit can in no stretch of the term be called fraud, or even suppression. Yet aggregate reticence shades imperceptibly into misrepresentation.

He has not, under grant or tenure pressure, recreated results without resubmitting them to the experimental apparatus. No; his data are beyond reproach. He's not even on the hazier ground of corner-cutting in the name of efficiency. In school, he worked for a big-name researcher who occasionally whipped up extra runs, substantiating more careful trails but skimping on controls. The accusation's been made against Mendel himself: the smooth-versus-wrinkled ratio is too perfect. But that was something else altogether — the unconscious influence of conviction. Another, more troubling imputation against the monk asks why he studied only traits that all reside on independent chromosomes. Did he examine and fail to report inheritance patterns complicated by inexplicable linkage that would have thrown the infant theory in doubt?

Simplification, paring back the variables, far from invalidating results, is indeed required by the foundations of empirical design. The success of reductionism depends on measuring and reporting only that bit of the cloth that can be understood and tested piecemeal. Ulrich's advice partakes of the same reductionist pragmatism: let's establish the part beyond the slightest doubt, before we speculate on the whole's make and model.

Ressler releases this work — insignificant compared to the catch he now angles for — from safekeeping. But the question nags at him. The question of just what he is or isn't obliged to telegraph to the competing scientific community masks a deeper ethical issue, his secret competitive motive. Easier to tell all, free himself from the advantage of insight. He hoards the self-sabotage urge the way his fellow children of the Depression hoard tinfoil.

He lets Ulrich strike the summary and does not press his own extrapolation. Demurring is worlds away from the most defensible fraud. It doesn't begin to flirt with falsification. Even in the continuum between subjectivity and chicanery, no one would call it doctoring. But simple selective silence, cautious calculation itself, carries along, like an unsuspecting trouser cuff bearing the free-loading burr of a seedpod, some particle of self-servance. The nauseating calculus of survival flashes on him. Self-furthering stratagems color even that perfect, informational openness, the unedited wonder of the most ideal human pursuit: good science.

Cyfer has a greater threat to its survival than entrepreneurism. Circumstance strips the team of its clearest-headed member. The train is set in motion on December 19, when the world weather engine is traditionally in almanac respite. The day is too warm for near-winter. The unusual front that releases the balmy air in the same breath releases a burst of tornadoes across the belt of Missouri, Arkansas, and Illinois. They catch the states off-guard, well past the usual time of year.

Ressler has just returned from the retail strip, where he has bought himself an early Christmas present. He has taken his last two untouched checks and a list prepared by Toveh Botkin and made a run on the record store. He returns to barracks with two LPs for every periodical still strewn about his front room. He assembles a respectable, compact music library, from Palestrina's Missa Papae Marcelli to Penderecki's Threnody for the Victims of Hiroshima.

He listens, relaxed, alert, despite just coming off of a triple shift of journal scouring, article amending, and experimental speculation. Finding the music precise, the notes excruciatingly discrete, he decides that the need for sleep is vastly overrated. The intensity of music keeps him from hearing that the long, sonorous, extended pedal point arising from the continuo of a bit of until-then-banal Venetian Opera is, in fact, the Civil Defense horns crying disaster. Discovering that the piercing tone is not shook out of his phonograph's paper speakers, he wonders if he's skipped ahead to Tuesday, 10:00 a.m., the weekly CD drill. But days can't have passed: he's still in the seventeenth century.

At the air raid's insistence, he steps outside his shack to scope out the situation. Unforgettable: the sky has gone a sickening, Matthew Passion, faulty-Zenith green, right out of the Crayola box. Otherworldly: everyone in Stadium Terrace, from infant to eternal student, streams in column to the stadium, toting suitcases, pulling Rapid Flyers full of belongings. No simulation would bother to be this elaborate.

Tuning in the radio strikes him as superfluous. He stares at the sky creeping toward yellow, making a break for infrared. The long-expected airburst, most likely Chicago or old Midwestern rival, St. Louis. At 150–200 miles, a midsized device, as the papers like to call them, would kick up enough dust to discolor the atmosphere, give it this early, dramatic sunset. He goes heavy at the waist; his knees fold involuntarily. He crumbles onto his stoop, watching the refugee crowd fanning toward Memorial Stadium for an unscheduled game. Some amazing instinct has gotten it into these heads to try to save their possessions: scrapbooks, chairs, an antique doll, blendors, anything arms can drag or shove. He considers calling out to the lady hauling the home tanning lamp not to bother; she's getting a healthy dose of rays already.

For thirty seconds it hails, but cuts off abruptly. The violence of the wind, the backlash of pressure electrifies his skin, returns him to a child's awe at one-time forces. He watches the sky slip to a silver gray and calculates the airspeed by timing a scrap of paper tearing across the lawn. A ten-year-old boy breaks from beside his hysterical mother in the file and waves his arms like a crane, shouting: "Run from the funnel!" His clutching mother snatches him back, yelling at Ressler as if he were an abductor. So the cause is natural, not induced. It makes no difference: correction will eventually have its out. But spreading his fingers across the violet grass, he does feel something, the bulb of skin flaring after a failed immunity test: gratitude that he may have a chance to see Jeannie again.

The stream of evacuees drains to a trickle. The wind whips to such craziness that he cannot keep from laughing. In the cusp moment, he sees the vertical cloud on the horizon feeling its way, prehensile, across the harvested fields. He calculates the number of steps to the relative safety of the stadium. Even if he'd dedicated his youth to distance sprinting, the protection of colonnades wouldn't warrant that open-field gallop. It's all over except the virtuosity. He spreads himself on the ground, facedown, head to the side so he can view this performance from the edge of the pit. He sees the outlines of groundbound things tossed about where they oughtn't be going. On all sides of the cross hairs where he lies, physical law defers to easy chaos.

When it's safe to sit up, he does, slowly. Stadium Terrace is overhauled with scrub, branches, trash, furniture, pieces of wall— no longer the center of the biggest plain in the world, but a tidal zone of flotsam. Astonishingly, his tarshack and most of K block have escaped. He succumbs to childish disappointment, the one he felt years ago on seeing the picture of that domed structure that obstinately survived Ground Zero. Can't even violence accomplish something unmitigated?

He dusts off, grinning at how good his clothes feel, how wonderful the wrinkles. He takes himself back inside. He tunes in an emergency report, running only minutes behind the event itself. The twisters leave ten dead across Illinois: a misleadingly small toll, not indicating the power of the thing, the lightest flick of Coriolis effect that chose, this once, to pass over. The tornado failed to take him by only the narrowest swirl of turbulence. When the information repeats, he shuts off the radio. He picks at random from his new reference set a disk to return to. Brahms's number comes up: the Second Piano Concerto. The sound so transfixes him that he rises to place the unprecedented phone call: to Botkin, to verify her safety after the storm. The gesture moves her out of proportion to its facility. He hangs up, hands fused momentarily to the phone. No: he cannot call that other, whose safety means more than meaning.

He returns to a piercing, slow 'cello solo, music too beautiful even to listen to in this century with a clean conscience. But he listens. The homecoming of the piano, demure soloist, is punctuated by pounding on the door. Outside, it is pitch-black; near the solstice, that could mean any time after 4:00 p.m. Eva and Margaret Blake stand shivering together under a quilt feathertick in the dark. He quickly lets them in.

"Is Tooney here? Have you heard from him?" Evie asks, looking about, a timid meter reader looking for the main. "It's late," she adds, rebuking not her husband but puerile nightfall. "He never came home." Ressler settles her and gives Margaret a can of orange juice concentrate and a spoon, sufficient to delight her. He and Mrs. Blake begin the systematic round of phone calls, first to everyone on the team, all negative. Then they try the lab, every office at the Biology Building where someone might still be around to pick up phones. No one does. Only then do they resort to the finality of police, who reassure them that the twin cities have reported no fatalities. Last, the hospitals, who cannot match any injured to Tooney's description.

Eva has worked herself into a state. She's reluctant to return to K-53-A alone with the child. He insists that they stay with him. Over Eve's ennervated refusals, he makes up the bed for them, apologizing for the brutality of bachelorhood. Margaret is across the mattress and asleep before he can turn out the light. He returns to the front room and his journal pile, prepared to sit up all night, a trick that has become almost easy. He has just hit upon an article in a 1955 Nature—one that, for an instant, seems as catalytic as Watson and Crick's piece two years earlier — when Eva pads in, still wrapped in the quilt. "Can I sit out here with you? I'll be quiet."

"You don't have to be quiet."

"Good. Nature again, I see. You men are all alike." She takes the volume from him, thumbs through its thickness, and drops it back into Ressler's hands. "OK. Ask me anything."

Before he can smile, she coils up and follows the book into his lap. She collapses like a cut tree, lets out a bleat of anguish, and balls herself up against him. She is uncannily cold; he wraps her in his forearms to try to trap what little warmth is left in her. "He must be somewhere," he offers.

Evie stifles a vowel. "Keep talking." She digs into his leg, a breeding sea turtle scooping deeper into the beach.

Ressler pops the clutch for a moment before he can locate his deep sentence structures. He begins talking about Tooney and the tornadoes, the likely scenarios accounting for his absence. Paralleling in rough analogy the series turning electrical current into magnet pulse into paper motion into air wave into earbone disturbance into neural network into Brahms, his words of coded comfort drive Evie's muscles into slack acceptance. When he runs out of explication, he goes on filling up empty space. He talks about how essential Blake's sensibilities are to Cyfer, his lucid, first-rate spoiling of half-baked ideas. Tooney is the one person liked by everyone on the team. Eva acknowledges this praise with a muffled sigh. Ressler goes on, explaining how Cyfer has squared off against the coding problem, just what difficulties still lie between them and a map of the nucleotide grammar. As the details are lost on her and therefore safe, he lays out the theory of an in vitro solution just weeks away from gelling: submit the simplest imaginable message to the coding mechanism, and see what the enciphered text looks like. Crack the system by standing over the encoder's shoulder.

He stops, struck by the beauty of the thing he touches. His hands keep working, rubbing warmth into Eva in ways they would not dare with the other woman now. Eva has lost her agitation. He can stop the invented monologue. But for this perfect audience, asleep, unable to hear, he recites, "I'm in love with a colleague of your husband's. She's as married as you are. Nothing to do about it. No point." He checks each mark off, brutally succinct, but he stops short of the worst: She is a locking template I cannot shake.

He wakes up early to the sound of someone letting himself in. He watches fuzzily as Tooney Blake enters and sits opposite Ressler and still-sleeping Eva. "She was cold and just fell asleep here. Your daughter is in the next room." Tooney fakes a suspicious look, speaking volumes, knowing that Ressler is already hopelessly compromised. Blake does not wake his wife, but only sits, staring disconcertedly through things rather than at them. Stuart asks if everything is all right.

"Fine," Blake answers, distracted tone contradicting him. The monosyllable rouses his wife, who in sleepy euphoria attaches herself to her mate. She rises up radiant, blinking, without a hint of question to her. The night's anxiety needs no other payment: they've weathered the worst, already more than repaired. When the embrace settles, the space of reprieve gives place to the collective need for postmorteming. Something Blake needs to announce, a chance locution that threatens to change his life. He has this aura about him, difficult to miss. Blake grabs his wife by her shoulders, about to launch into There was a ship…. "Honey," he says, "something's happened."

At the moment that the Civil Defense horns began their Gabrieli, he was across town, in the stacks. "Somebody has the whole microbiology library out on loan," he growls at Ressler, casting accusing glances about the periodical-strewn floor. "When the alarm went off, I figured I was already in as good a place as any other; no point going from one designated shelter to another. So I went down to Deck One, instinctively sought out the subterranean. I'd just gotten into a cozy study carrel when the power went out. Pitch-black, surrounded by that maze of shelves. I couldn't move without banging up against the 120s. I kept thinking, 'If this is the end, at least I'm surrounded by books.'

"After a long time, with a lot to think about, I tried to work my way to a stairwell. I found one at last, and after some trouble adjusting to the steps, I hauled myself up to the deck at ground level. Light coming in from the street. Cars shuttling. Life as normal, except for a few vanished trees. I groped along the aisles, doing my Theseus bit, keeping my right hand on the wall. I found the entrance and yanked the door. It wouldn't budge. Locked in. I heard the all clear go off downtown. I waited patiently in the dark, convinced that if I sat still long enough, something would happen. Sure enough, forty minutes later, the lights flooded on. When my eyes adjusted, I went to the emergency phone on Deck Five. The thing was as dead as a mayfly on day two. The lines must have come down in the storm."

Eva giggles, the low, jittery laugh of relief. "Oh Toon-ey! Locked in the stacks overnight! You must be a wreck."

"Strangely enough, I've never felt better in my life. They'd have to install vending machines before I'd agree to move back in on a long-term lease. But I've never spent a more important night." A comical whimper from his wife forces him to append, "Honeymoon excepted, sweet."

He lapses again into amazed gazes at various objects about the room until Ressler clears his throat. Tooney wraps his wife tighter and continues, "Realizing I was stuck awhile, I began to see the place differently. The stacks had always been a purely functional means to an end. But now, I lived there. A long night ahead, and the third-biggest collection in the country to pass it in. It occurred to me just what the place contained. Millions of volumes. The figure, which has always struck me as impressive, now became staggeringly real. At first, I got a chuckle going around looking up everything I've ever published. Then I began to track down every published reference about me.

"It slowly dawned on me that everything Ulrich, Botkin, or Woyty will leave behind is locked up in those shelves — their best insights, the record of how that trace spread or failed to catch hold. All the noise any of us has made in this world. I pulled our friend here's dissertation. I independently confirmed that he graduated summa cum laude." He gives Stuart a cuff. "After a while, the game of deciding which parts of each of us will live began to grow thin. It was after midnight, and I hadn't even gotten off that deck, let alone scratched a fraction of it. I had ten levels to play on, without the slightest plan of attack.

"You wouldn't believe the substance of that collection. A book-length study tracing a century and a half of disease among a single tribe on Mozambique. A thirteen-volume log of an 1848 botanical survey in the South Pacific. Photo cavalcades to performing hand surgery. An experimental account of chimps addicted to painting, whose work declined as soon as they began getting rewards for it. And I hadn't even gotten out of Biology yet.

"The words spread in all directions, an endless, continuous thread. I could jump in anywhere. Goethe. Glosses on the Koran. How-to dog sledding. Crackpot theories about ancient supercon-tinents. Accounts of Marian Anderson singing the national anthem at the Lincoln Memorial, because the DAR wouldn't let her sing it inside. Watercolors of Pemaquid Point by assorted artists. I lost twenty minutes to an article about whether or not Clara Bow had really slept with the entire UCLA offensive line."

Blake falls silent, preoccupied, sliding down the early slope of a syndrome that could drop off as suddenly as the continental shelf. Ressler tries for casual silliness. "We need to rush you to Info Detox, Tooney?"

Blake laughs, but nominally. "It's the world's damn DNA in there. Not to trivialize tornadoes, but suppose yesterday had been something more… extreme. How many died?"

"At last report, ten."

"Kick that figure up a few exponents. If worst-case scenario comes down to worst, there's enough information in the stacks right now to rebuild everything we have, within a narrow tolerance, from scratch."

"Provided the survivors would want to do something so ill-considered," Ressler counters.

"I'm serious," Blake insists.

"I am too."

Blake stands and begins to pace. Margaret waddles out of bed from the next room, welcomes her father back from missing per-sonhood with a nonchalant kiss, and curls up against her mom. Eva sits at attention, not quite knowing what's going on. Nor do any of them. "How much of that information do I — any of us— actually have a handle on?" Blake pauses, the question more than hypothetical.

To get the man to go on, Ressler answers, "Almost none."

"My God, we're reaching the point where we're stockpiling more information than we can manage."

"That's what indices are for," Ressler interrupts, this time to slow his friend down.

"But we're racing to the day when even indices won't help. We're outstripping even the Index of Indices. New discovery daily, and we can't even find the damn thing by this time next week. Go spend a night in the stacks. We're committed to nothing less than a point-for-point transcript of everything there is. Only one problem: the concordance is harder to use than the book. We'll live to see the day when retrieving from the catalog becomes more difficult than extracting it from the world that catalog condenses. Book and lab research will pass one another in the drifting continents of print."

"What are you suggesting?" Ressler asks. "It seems a bit late in the day to stop accumulating."

"No! We can't afford to stop. We've got to keep on top of the stockpile. Here we are, digging in the dirt, turning up shards, millions of shards, more than anyone expected to find. But nobody knows what the shattered vase they all came from looks like. Whether it's a single vase, or even a vase at all. What we need is not more shards. We need to accumulate something else altogether. Something much wider."

Ressler doesn't follow this last leap and says as much.

"Look," Blake challenges. "Take our own field. Blown wide open lately. Which do you think will be more complex: a complete, functional description of human physiology, or a complete, functional description of the hereditary blueprint?"

Ressler considers the number, weight, and function of the purposive proteins in a working body — the countless, discriminating, if-then, shape-manipulating, process-controlling, feedback-sensitive, integrated programs composing the complete organism. As in the old Von Neumann joke, he sees at long last that the answer is obvious. "Physiology is vastly more complex."

"But the more complex is contained in the less complex, right? We believe in the simplicity of generating principles."

Some equivocation, some sleight of hand here. Can genetics really be said to contain all physiology in embryo? Yet Ressler concedes Blake's central point, Poe's point, in that volume buried in the 8OOs. Poe's cryptanalyst needed three things to turn the hopeless gold-bug noise back into readable knowledge: context, intention, and appropriate reference. A night of information science has forced Tooney to confront the full width of that triplet. "Wife," Blake says, grabbing his matched half. "Oh, Eva! I'm sorry. Something's happened to me." This all ought to be occurring elsewhere — anywhere but Ressler's living room. Eva's features are smothered in wonder. She touches her husband's head, coaxing him into relaxing the cords in his neck. "It's crazy," he repeats.

"No it's not," she says, combing him.

"Friend." Blake smiles helplessly at his wife. "I didn't plan this." Eva smiles broadly: nothing you could possibly do will upend our life. "I may," Blake says, laughing at her unconditional trust, swinging his head sideways in disbelief, "I may have to resign from the faculty."

Evie coddles him. In a very bad John Wayne, she says, "A man's gotta do___"

Ressler refuses to believe the exchange. "Quit the team? To do what? Where would you go?"

"Back to school," Eva says, almost hissing. Protecting her husband from this outsider when he is down.

It's impossible. "You can't. What about your child?"

"Who's a child?" Margaret demands.

Blake mistakes him. "My child? She's in school already."

"How will you live?"

"There's always the Civil Service," Eva volunteers.

"Tooney," Ressler says, "you've had a strange night."

Blake just laughs. "No doubt about that."

Anger fills Ressler at his friend's uncharacteristic leave from realism. "What will you study?"

Blake shrugs: the discipline hasn't been invented yet. "Look, Stuart. How can I pretend to do science, take apart the mechanism, inventory all the particulars, when I haven't even a rough feel for the sum? I haven't even dusted the spines of a fraction of the stuff they have shelved in there."

"And you never will."

"True. But I wouldn't mind a rough take on the big picture. A life of educated guesses, and I haven't even a clue what we're guessing at."

Thus the Blakes commit themselves, overnight, to hopeless gen-eralism. They depart, Tooney shaking Ressler's hand warmly, Evie kissing him, thanking him for keeping her alive last night. After they leave, Ressler replays the man's mad argument, but can find no hook to snag him. He circles back on Blake's point: the complex can be contained in the simple. Push past the deterring convolutions — too varied to describe — and get to their underpinnings. Grammar must be simpler than the uncatchable wealth of particular sentences. He wants to run over to K-53-A, throw himself around the man's neck. He has never been more in need of his teammate's skills. Never more in need of his neighbor himself— his solid, dispelling humor. But Tooney is gone already. Intractable.

Over the following days, as it becomes clear that Blake really means to depart, Ressler gambles everything. He lays out for Tooney the seminal germ he has stumbled on. The beauty of the green idea sparks Blake's scientific residue. His eyes light up at the walkthrough. He grabs his young colleague's upper arms, lifts him bodily into the air. "You can do it." But the next moment he returns to his new calm, encourages the kid more soberly, and again declines to stay.

Blake doesn't even wait for term's end. He leaves in midweek, departs from Stadium Terrace, forever jumps the tenure track. He asks Ressler to take over his classes; "Mostly a matter of administering finals." They leave him with a dozen pieces of furniture. "Another long-term loan." They give him a forwarding address — Seattle, Eva's mother's. Eva kisses him courageously goodbye, on the lips, wet with hypotheticals. Tooney shakes his shoulders. "After boning up, I might come back to the lab in good faith someday."

When it comes to saying goodbye to the child, Ressler can take it no longer. He may see her again in this life, but never again like this. Process will have gotten her. The pilgrim soul will be lost in adulthood. He tries to say, "Got any poems, for the road?" but cannot get it out. Margaret tugs at his shirt cuff, spins on one heel, and disappears, giggling. He will die without raising a child.

Script

Who knows how long his envelope has been there. I haven't checked the box since Thanksgiving. I'd given up looking, achieved a degree of self-sufficiency. My only bottle-messages lately are from the power company. Checking for mail was once my day's high-water mark. But recently I've taken to clearing out the box only often enough to keep the utilities running. Suddenly this: the message I'd written off. A simple letter wouldn't have been enough. It's a longhand manuscript. I knew instantly it was from him: his runic glyphs. The packet carried the same exotic monarch as his card, pasted all over with stickers pronouncing "Per Luchtpost." Why now, when I'd almost edited him?

I tore open the packet, knowing the weapon was loaded. I was a wreck from the first rambling paragraph. Even now, twice through the text, my organs scrape like tectonic plates. The sprawling poetics are unmistakable Todd. But someone else is in there too, someone I've never met. A dozen minutely, perfectly hand-lettered pages, both sides, and I still can't tell where he is. That landscape: the place he used to map out for me in whispers. But somewhere else too, a globe away. "Why have we had to keep apart this year?" "Not that I can hope to ask you—" Who is this? A male I once knew, stripping at a safe distance?

Plaintive Baedeker gossip, swapped cathedral stones, death notices. Frank on the ropes. Writer's block, foreign language, death of a classmate, the panels themselves after years of reproductions: tempera homesickness for the world. I make myself immune to his contents. But two paragraphs in and I hear him confessing something I never realized. He'd been on the ropes from the moment I met him. Easy, sociable, pelted with phone calls from friends who couldn't imagine why he gave them the slip, locked up on the night shift, satisfied with the company of a failed scientist and a failing librarian. This luchtpost packet confesses why he wanted Ressler's etiology, the dossier on that disease. A year's rupture; anonymity in Europe, oblique petition for help, lost in moratorium. Out of character at last: please write me back.

Something's out of joint. The cheery postcard — Flemish scene ported from Boston back to Flanders — is dated July 6, five months before this letter. He writes in the card that he's well along in Dutch. But the letter reports novice's difficulties, unlikely for someone of Todd's polyglot perversity. After a half a year, he still cannot mention Ressler's death, or give the man the dignity of past tense. Alone, unchecked, unseconded, writing me, dragging me through all his sweet, unreliable, poorly timed declarations of maybe love. God free me from this man.

Todd had a way of darting his eyes around as if the earth were the last thing he expected to see. I have forgotten that astonished tone, forgotten everything about him. He's back, wanted or not. But another sender here too, one I wouldn't know from a Dürer Adam. He is in trouble, needs me to write. As if a letter, even now, might serve as saving bedtime story.

The Question Board

Q: How often do questions appear here that you can't solve?

H.M., 8/11/81

A: More often than we'd like. According to a survey of American libraries, a third of questions to reference departments go unanswered. Ours weighs in a little under the national average, although we have no firm numbers.

J. O'D., 8/11/81

"What you need," Todd whispered into my ear, gazing over my shoulder as I typed, letting his hand loop dangerously over my ribs toward my breast, "is to copy the post office. A Dead Question Department." He lifted my hair and moistened the back of my neck. "Imagine: Question Purgatory. A smoky room full of three-by-fives, each unsolvable."

Putting One's Hands Through the Pane

Unbelievable: 1 can write him back at last. What I've ached to do for months, poring over atlases for clues, rehearsing the wording I'd use when given a place to reach him. Only now, I can't write the first clause. My block is worse than his: I can't even get off a salutation without seizing.

Another two readings and I still can't tell what's wrong. Indifference would feel simpler, would have no shakes. I've never written to him in my life. How can I start now, after everything? How could I begin telling him of my months reading a science I haven't any grounding in, depleting my savings, mourning the death he doesn't mention? I can't begin to concentrate on Dear Franklin until I've extricated myself from Dear Dr. Ressler. All I can do with his letter is add it to the evidence to be sifted. I can write only the same piece I've been working on for months. Why have we stayed apart all this time? Enzymes, friend.

I have only my work to answer him. The content of the coding problem compels me, twenty-five years after the facts. Discovery is a dependence that addiction only imitates. Engineered into my sequence, selected for obvious survival value, is a craving to lift the backdrop, to integrate the evidence, to mimic the tune so closely I can at last get through the notes. To force my hands through, touch the habitat. Assemble it. Ressler's was the desire behind all research: the pull of something simpler and stranger than imagined, lying within arm's length. Curiosity must, like every built-in desire, be written somewhere in the organism it wants to discover. Ressler looked for the fundamental lexicon in primitives. Only the results of the lookup table itself can explain why he was hooked on breaking it, on getting to the name of experimental desire.

Can anything as composite as curiosity be revealed by a set of equivalences, a molecular cipher wheel? Nothing in the chemistry of nucleic acid gives the first hint of the creature enclosing it. The sequence of base pairs in the molecule, their disorderly pattern, provides the edge needed to record a message. But the sequences themselves are not yet vernacular, but a shorthand. An arbitrary string CGAGGACCGACG, without a translator's dictionary, is gibberish. The lookup table supplies that dictionary; without semantic meaning itself, it lends the first suggestion of sense to unreadable data.

The translation Ressler worked on is a one-for-one, simple substitution. My arbitrary string, pressed through the table, maps to a single protein: arginine-glycine-proline-threonine___Transliteration to aminos alone seems to move me no nearer the evolution of heart, chest, hands, eyes — those devices against the caprice of environment. Slavish substitution appears no more helpful in finishing my triple bridge than those primitive DOD translators Ressler once tapped us into. One night, taking us on a tour through the vast MOL on-line network, he tapped into a machine translation program. He selected "French" for target language and typed in the string "I am left behind." We shouldn't have been playing with the restricted program at all, but that didn't keep Todd and me from hanging on his every keystroke. The algorithm churned away on a mighty effort of pattern matching and produced "Je suis gauche derrière." He hooked up two of these software Berlitz's back to back, feeding English-to-French back into its reciprocal. "Out of sight, out of mind" returned to source language as "blind lunatic."

All I've done with codon translation is rename the elements I started with. ACG becomes threonine; I've just swapped chemical terms. And yet, the map is never quite the place, nor the place as navigable as its image. It has taken me months to see that the coding problem is just the start of the cryptography. If that were the extent of inheritance, the lookup table would produce only tautological definitions. The hundreds of base pairs in a gene, broken into triplet codons and fed through the decoder, would produce the telegram "Please refer to original dots and dashes."

All these ciphers mean nothing until I find the difference created in translation. The table only softens the inscrutable script, shapes the clay into executable words. Cracking the code is just the tip of the Goldberg. The lookup list of simple equivalences requires me to learn how to interpret, implement the text that comes out of it. For data to grow, respond, rise up and walk I must look at the secondary structures locked in the life molecule. I want a deeper definition from the string — its isomorphs of hope, ache, posted desire.

The bouillabaisse is richer than I've guessed. The punched tape running along the inner seam of the helix is much more than a repository of enzyme stencils. It packs itself with regulators, suppressors, promoters, case-statements, if-thens. Genes coding for messengers, readers, and decoders of genes. Genes to copy and build the genes' copiers and builders. Genes that may speed, slow, or reverse their own mutation. The automated factory imbeds a blueprint for its own translation machinery — a glimpse of real invention that knocks me for a loop.

How, from simple substitution, can this absurd surplus emerge? A gene and its enzyme, while code-equivalent, are worlds apart in function. The decoded string contains more than its original. My mistake has been in thinking of enzymes as simple ropes of twenty-colored beads. Even though this model provides more necklaces than the most scrupulous socialite could wear in an eternity of nights out, my metaphor misses a key point. Each color pattern corresponds to a specific necklace twist. And shape, in stereochemistry, is behavior by another name.

Protein necklaces are actually closer to wildly tangled wool fuzz. They are strings, but coiled as erratically as Norwegian hair run through a home permanent. (Wool, hair — two prime analogies.) Only, the twists that the fiber balls up into are rigid, fixed by the sequence of the aminos. I feel my first spark: the growing poly-peptide — arginine, glycine, proline — folds up in a manner determined by the amino sequence coded for in the synthesizing gene. The resulting three-dimensional globule carries spatial information; a landscape of grottos, peaks, and plains gives the enzyme catalytic ability — the power to bring about reactions that otherwise might not have taken place.

Even if the strand is stretched, it will spontaneously reform to the coiled arrangement unique to its linear sequence. This complex but ordained shape turns the enzyme into a cookie cutter, machine tool, a shoehorn introducing big foot into recalcitrant slipper. Smaller molecules align with spots on the enzyme landscape where they precisely fit. Held in place, they are brought together to react with another similar squatter. Each uniquely shaped enzyme is expert at bringing about a particular reaction. The human genome codes for countless enzymes, each a chemical command, a potential engine capable of producing a specific chemical event.

DNA carries just part of the instructions for these purposive, molecular machines. The actual welding — go straight a fraction of a micron; make a hard turn, 137 degrees in plane X, north-by-northwest — depends on physics. The shape an enzyme takes, and therefore its function, results from the laws governing atoms in space. To manufacture breathing, searching, speaking, rule-defying life from out of constrained matter requires no transcendence. Every level of the hierarchy arises from the previous, without any need to change the rules or call in outside assistance. Yes, some sleight of hand: a knit sock is just a series of knots, a computer just switches, a haunting tune just the intervals that walk it down the scale. But what other way to grasp a thing except as the emergent interplay of parts, themselves emergent from combined performances at lower levels?

The emergence of function from codon assignments is like that child's toy: two intermeshed gears with an asymmetrically affixed pen that produces unpredictable designs. The surprise, recursive flowers the toy makes aren't hinted at in any part of the assembly— not gear, not pen, not the cranking hand. Each of these parts does only what is allowed. The flower lies latent in the aggregate rules of geometry, which know nothing about flowers. In the same way, my most inexplicable high-order ability — understanding things through metaphor, applying the light of likeness to probe the layers of the pyramid — already lies infolded, hidden in the craggy terrain, the hintless indifference of my crumpled-up polypeptides.

Solving the lookup table — itself arbitrary — is prerequisite for my locating the particle of purpose, the smallest programmed machine in that regress of programmable machines making up living tissue. In grounding Mendel's invariant inheritance squarely in molecules, Ressler hoped to position science for a theory of molecular evolution. Protein synthesis would reveal how the destructive anarchy of chance, capable only of wearing the rock away, can carve Chartres. The production of enzymes, each shaping an urge to bring about reactions that would not occur spontaneously, is the first rung up form's ladder toward free will.

The catalyzing shape of enzymes is the seam between predetermined atomic interactions and the self-ordering living library. Enzymes are the machines DNA creates and sends out into the cellular factory. They are the factory. The coding problem was, to Ressler's generation, nothing less than a matter of locating the fundamental message unit behind the biosphere. Just as the innermost in a set of nested Chinese dolls anticipates the shape of the outermost, the way the array of living things bends itself to the environment depends on the ability of chains of amino acids to fold into specific, reaction-promoting molds. Or a step before that: on the way nucleic acid hides the enzyme shape in a helical archive.

Addictive, naked hunger to reconstitute the real: the freshly scrubbed Ph.D.'s compulsion to locate the lookup table was, by another name, a longing to unfrock things as they are. Life that refused to push all the way down to the evidence was just a costume party. Only by demonstrating beyond doubt how unaided atoms accounted for craving, variety, the accident of being alive could Ressler see what compensation the truth of his own contingency might hold.

He and I both — desperate to disassemble the table's mechanism, to show that the cell's fundamental engines create living purpose and not the other way around. To demonstrate that blind atomic bumping can lead to anything, even sight. Long before love coiled him he felt desire, a catalyst posted from the beginning of the genetic record, bringing the parts of his substrate inexorably together. However differently his life might have unfolded, he could not have long survived the need to refuse surfaces, to come closer than flush. In the sum of their catalyzed reactions, his choir of molecular autonoma sang, Bloody your hands. Get past it. What would it mean to leave this place, really leave it? That is his coding problem. The message I eavesdrop on, still vibrating on the wires.

The molecular engines — still not all named by the week he died — begin to say who he was at fifty, the work he had yet to do back up the steps of the living hierarchy, here at organism level. His traits, my own, Todd's, lie tangled in the shape of proteins. But the triumph of biological reductionism, the grounding of living things on molecular necessity, the establishment of chance as the mainspring of change, each successive tier rising seamlessly from the previous, still leaves me something inexplicable at the top: after curiosity, impulse, restlessness — his ability to give it all up. My friend possessed deep in the coils of his cell an urge to unite the natural world in one internally consistent model. He hid the compulsion for years. But our showdown, forced on us, revived for a moment his attempt to put hands through the pane, a need always stronger than its decoding. Years after he thought he'd come home from the commute for good he returned to the thick of the search. His last days — and every day I knew him was one of his last — shone with all the surprise of the cybernetic enzyme. After a quarter century he was back, pitting himself against the lookup table. And this time, something more: submitting to it a uniquely landscaped command.

I Have Become a Stranger to the World

In our walking days, I talked to more perfect strangers than I ever had before or since. Todd was intent on single-handedly reviving the custom of greeting people on the street. In the city, this was tantamount to taking one's own life. But we always got away with it, and I was amazed at how many people greeted back as if old friends. We had long talks about election rigging with news vendors, exchanges over dog disobedience with retirees, leisurely debates about Western history with men in three-piece suits who must have had more important places to be. Once, we were riding the local next to a man whom Todd induced into telling us all about his combat experience in Asia. Giving us the blow-by-blow of his tour of duty, the vet asked Todd suspiciously, "What do you do?" When Franker lied, "Art history," the man let out his breath. "Good. Can't hurt me with that." Todd talked to anyone, on any excuse. Cabbies, police, Englishless immigrants, bank officials, drunks — an endless dialogue with people I'd never have spoken to alone.

I was now free to see Franklin every hour I wasn't working. He came by the library, late afternoons before he started his shift. These were my least productive hours of the day; had I not had an excellent track record, I would have been reprimanded. Sometimes, to Save my job and to keep him from putting his hands down my shirt where I sat at the Reference Desk, I would send him into the shelves with questions. I remember giving him "Who was Leslie Lynch King, Jr.?" Frank came back after an hour and a half, successfully identifying him as the thirty-eighth president of the U.S. "The Public," he shook his head angrily, "is a sadist."

We met everywhere, and soon had touched one another in as many places. The MOL office was still our haunt of choice. Following the disastrous system crash that cost both men a sleepless week, the machines returned to normal. Outside of island visits by Uncle Jimmy, Annie Martens, and the janitors, we reined in our shamelessness only for Dr. Ressler.

However genuinely the professor enjoyed our round tables— free-wheeling wine-and-cheese talk spiraling to absorb the spread of international terrorism, the limits to sports record-breaking, and the nuances of surviving a certain late-night cashier at the corner convenience store — he seemed as genuinely relieved when conversation ended. More often than not, he wound up, saying, "You two must excuse me. I have to supervise the workings of the North American financial network." And he would return to the gigabytes, leaving Franker and me alone to escalating experiment.

We pressed against each other, each day more blatantly, feeling the short fuse evaporate, postponing, restraining the way a bud shimmies under time lapse before falling into flower. Following an evening's wrestle, he would kiss me goodbye, dipping into my dress, saying he needed to fix my surface in his memory until he could see me again. We played deeply and dangerously. I found a meridian on his shoulders, the mere press of which made his muscles collapse and his eyes roll up. He came by but never stayed over; we were two passengers in a long-haul airport, consulting the array of world capital clocks, each still on his native time zone. My night of romance was his midday.

One night during lunch break he came to my room carrying a package he'd acquired downstairs just before my landlord's antique shop closed. I unwrapped the box to find an off-white eighty-year-old linen blouse that must have set him back a month. Along its dorsal edge ran cloth-covered hemisphere buttons the size of lady-bugs, hundreds of them. The high choker owed its origins to Alexandra's tracheotomy. It rippled with multiple traceries, ruffles under ruffles that, as they could not actually be seen once the blouse was on, could only have been, like those exceptionally skilled adventures in heavy counterpoint, for the express benefit of those privileged to hold the score in front of them.

"Try it on," he commanded. I hesitated, but just for pacing. I went to the bedroom, stood in my closet, the mirrored door left conspicuously open, and stripped to my underclothes. Even these I changed for the antique slips and skirts I had collected piece by piece, on account with my landlord. In a few minutes, I was clothed in a soft, lost century. But the effect was not yet done. I sat down at my vanity (another piece rescued from downstairs), pulled my hair up in a storybook pile, and made up lightly, with an eye toward the period. It took some time and extraordinary, wavering patience on both our parts.

When I stood and walked toward him, I knew we were done for. He'd watched the entire process, standing in the doorway, waiting to undo it. The clothes I had attended to so carefully shed themselves everywhere. Some stayed on, displaced and uncaring. Everything began to move slowly, underwater. I felt him, felt myself all over, both far away. Minutely mammalian, I conformed to fill every space between myself and this shape pressing against me. I could see the peach inside of his legs and sweated to match his breath condensing against the back of my neck. Strenuously, straining, but expansively, slowly, we worked, astonished to be recovering pneumatics from a manual we were born knowing. And something else to our rocking: an attempt to recall a word on the tips of our tongue. The word was nihil. The word was nearly. I felt his skin stretching, conductant, as smooth, hazel, and aromatic as the taste of food I craved for years but could never identify. My skin.

I kept waiting for my body to pitch me over those patent falls, the one I'd discovered at thirteen but which, by thirty, I still hadn't adjusted to. Instead, something unprecedented: as I realized I was invading, being invaded by, this man, that we'd surrendered to the thing we had been circling nervously for months, I was doused by first serum-surge; rather than sharpen to a cutting point, it spread, a thick, coffeed narcotic, into parts of my body I never knew existed. It vacillated, then intensified toward white, wider than I thought possible, for bottomless seconds before it faded into capillaries. I could not tell if I'd gone over or not. Stupid semantic. I was ionized.

We made love — copulated — at my apartment repeatedly over the nights that followed. I never recaptured that total diffusion, that month Of later. I did catch brief bits and pieces before his body became more almond-familiar. That sustained current never reappeared, and I came in time to wonder if it had been somatic after all. The work we lavished on each other, hungry and needy, received reinforcement, often and diffuse and strange. More than enough to keep us coming back. Todd came frequently to my apartment, sometimes with more old clothes.

But it was some time before I ever set foot in his place. True, he lived in Lower Manhattan, while I lived in the neighborhood where we both worked. At last I invited myself. He was to cook for me, on a weekend we both had off. He agreed to the conditions, with whispered additional terms.

He lived in an attic—"loft" is the current euphemism — on a street straight out of "Bartleby." The corbled eccentricity of the place made him give up nicer rooms uptown, going from a relatively safe neighborhood into the heart of the urban experience. He greeted me at the street, walked me down the hall, parodying bachelor brazenness as soon as the apartment door closed. "Well. Here we are. Just throw that dress anywhere."

He took me on the lightning tour. His makeshift sitting room lay angled oddly against the back corner's fire escape. He had pitched a double bed in an old storage room and turned a large walk-in closet into a study. "Not much, but we call it home. All right: abode. Let's not niggle over terms." Museum-clutter suffused the place, somewhere between a Sotheby's halfway house and Turkish bazaar. A dumbwaiter, now dysfunctional, toted a Howdy Doody in pince-nez. Furnishings included a table made from a lobster pot, chairs made from conveyor belts, and a lilac-colored upright piano. Here and there were scattered convenience-store samplers of instant coffee, lip balm, shoe-odor pads: CARE packages dropped for a shipwreck who'd forgotten how to use them.

Art treasures — Brueghel's wheatfields and Vermeer's Head of a Girl prominent among them — covered every inch of his walls, and a few Tiepolo-type trompe l'oeils even encroached on the ceiling. That popular seventeenth- and eighteenth-century genre, the picture gallery: one canvas crammed recursively with as many different miniature art masterpieces as could fit in the space allotted.

Not only prints: incomplete sets of Conrad and Scott, African kalimbas, a glass harmonica assembled from kit, dancing bears and Uncle Sams that swallowed dimes. Among the larger bric-a-brac was a seamstress's costume dummy from the 1920s, adjustable along all major axes. "Meet Theda Bara. I inherited her after the breakup of a college experiment in idealistic living." She had os-motically acquired a wardrobe: flapper skirt, feather boa, worn-out sneakers, a cocky hat fashioned from a post-office mailer, a brightly painted papier-mâché toucan nose, and a breastplate of buttons reading, among other things. "Liquid Courage, Not Liquid Paper." Against a wall of raw brick lay a hundred-gallon aquarium divided between soil and water. The dry land was given over to mosses, beetles, and skinks. Below lake line, turtles and eels swam oblivious of captivity. "I tried salt water once," he explained, "but it's more difficult to balance than you think."

I watched as he prepared a skillful dinner — Indonesian chicken, so he said, although it could easily have been ad lib. He chattered the while, not even stopping to answer the phone. "They'll call back. Do you think I could pass for an eighties man? The eighties man is sensitive. He wins women's hearts by saying such things as 'I feel a deep sadness welling up in me.' Do you think I'm in any position to win women's hearts?" He was nervous, profuse. I was happy, feeling how little I knew him.

We ate epically — two hours over dinner. He made me try three cabernets blindfold. We talked about his dissertation, long delinquent, and about how I had ended up in library science. When at last nothing graced the table but scraped dishes, he reached over, felt my belly, and nodded, satisfied. "All right then," he said, withdrawing his hand after only a modest amount of further exploration. "We have to talk about music now. You start." I could think of nothing but his violent reaction, on that first business dinner of ours so many months before, when the piped tape of Bach's little keyboard exercise had hurt his face so spontaneously. I wondered if it weren't music he wanted to talk about, but that taboo neither of us had raised since he first hired me to find Dr. Ressler in the historical register.

I shrugged. "I played the piano once. As you know."

Franklin smiled. "I played the accordion. I could make 'Five Hundred Miles' sound as if it had been transposed into kilometers. At eighteen, I applied to music conservatory. Chopin etudes on the squeeze box for my audition. Went to art school."

He looked at me, decided to get the worst out of the way. "You know, the professor came to music late in life. He says the whole enterprise caught him by surprise. Other noises, other tunes. Said he spent years committing to memory the entire repertoire. But somewhere along the way, he's pared Western music down to just what he can carry." His voice fell, forced-cheery. Todd shook his head.

But this time, we didn't stop at Dr. Ressler's collapse into the microcosm of those few dozen measures. He became animated, demanding to know my favorite pieces. I gave over a couple hostages. He accused me of being hopelessly stuck on mainstream war-horses. He challenged me with a dozen composers, none of whom were more than names to me. "These are the folks who are writing music right now. Your contemporaries. But who bothers listening? We're reduced to the three-minute unison synthesizer banks while an electronic drum loop programmed to bash out every other beat mercifully drowns out the hermaphrodite wailing about how it feels good to feel bad. It's a war zone out there. Lose-lose situation. Another concert hall rendition of Finlandia for folks with the heavy jewelry on the one hand, and three anemic teenagers called "The Styro Detritus' on the other."

In a minute, he recovered. "The trick to listening," he said, lifting me by the hand, "is to hear the pieces speaking to one another. To treat each one as part of an enormous anatomy still carrying the traces of everything that ever worked, seemed beautiful awhile, became too obvious, and had to be replaced. Music can only mean anything through other music. You have to be able to hear in Stockhausen that homage to the second Viennese school, in Schönberg the rearrangement of sweet Uncle Claude. And every new sleeper that Glass welds together gives new breath to that rococo clockmaker Haydn, as if only now, in 1980, can we at last hear what pleasing the Esterhazys is all about."

He was performing for me. By then we were in the bedroom, but for a wholly different seduction than we'd explored at my place. Franklin's dirty clothes were stacked into prim piles, interleaved with notebooks. He cleared away a state-of-the-art turntable, expensive but not well cared for. He went to the top shelf of his closet. There, stretching from end to end where the sweaters usually went, was a wall of records, arranged by spine color in rainbow spectrum. He dug out a disk, mumbling, "Have a seat. No. Take the bed. Lie down and close your eyes."

I did as instructed. Eyes closed, I heard everything: Todd shuffling the record jacket, the domestic argument in the flat downstairs, the sound of breaking bottles, someone being sick in the street below, Dr. Resslcr putting up a disk pack on a spindle across town, the first snow of the year falling on my mother's Midwest grave. I heard the hollow of high-fidelity speakers, the muffled pop of needle touching, and the sandy scuttling of crabs across the worn record surface.

A deep harp pulse, then a double reed, followed by a muted horn choir: before I realized that the piece had started, a door opened beneath me, and I fell effortlessly into another place. An orchestral work, but deployed in a chamber, slower and more melancholy than any music I've ever heard, a sound written after the history of the human race was only a faint memory.

I didn't possess the sophistication to say when it had been written. I didn't even worry it. The notes took occupancy, a horizon of tones stretching in all directions; I was at the center of the sound. Someone was singing, a contralto, although it took me measures before I identified voice as that new, ravishing instrument that had entered. She sang in a language I didn't know but understood perfectly. The song was so agonizingly drawn-out — sustained loss unfolding in the background of a peaceful scene — that I couldn't make the pulse out. One measure became eight; eight crystallized into sixteen. I knew that sound: the last day of the year.

Ich bin der Welt abhanden gekommen Mit der ich sonst viele Zeit verdorben; Sic hat so lange nichts von mir vernommen, Sie mag wohl glauben, ich sei gestorben….

Ich bin gestorben dem Weltgetümmel Und ruh' in einem stillen Gebiet. Ich leb' allein in meinem Himmel, In meinem Lieben, in meinem Lied.

I couldn't say how long it lasted; I was stunned to learn later that it took less than ten minutes. Just as the tune seemed reconciled to ending, its texture thinned to nothing, the strings waited on the verge of resolution, that reed hung on a suspension, and the whole chord stood still in space, frozen, refusing forever to give up the moment of quick here now. Then the portal closed; I came back to this man's room, all the noises of his apartment and the street, noises I had designed my life around not hearing.

He waited a suitable moment before ruffling the silence. "Well? What was that all about?" Didn't he know already? I snapped my head up, opened my eyes, saw him again in the corner of the room, sitting amid his notebooks and clothes and rummage treasures. He hadn't moved during the piece. Had he meant to use the music to win me, heart and frozen soul, he could not have succeeded better with my assistance.

"I don't know," I answered sharply. I closed my eyes and let my head drop back to the bed. "I don't speak German."

He laughed at my hostility. "Not the text, goof. The music. What does that tune mean?"

I was auditioning all over again. I was to tell him what that frozen chordal unfolding contained. Against my will, I wanted to answer correctly. Wanted badly. But anything I might say would be wrong. I kept still and waited, knowing that the least sound would give me away. I could think of nothing to add to the notes. But my interviewer waited just as patiently for the thing he wanted from me. I would have hummed that infinitely patient theme out loud by way of explaining what it meant, if I thought my voice could carry it. I said nothing for as long as nothing was possible, then came out with, "It's about leaving."

Todd sat up. "I've been waiting forever for someone to hear that." Unable to leave well enough alone, he added, "The most beautiful delaying gesture ever written."

He identified the tune as one of the Rückert Lieder by Mahler. He would play it again for me later, under different circumstances, when it would sound completely changed. But this time, over the sea in America, in 1983, in a cluttered, unzoned apartment, between two people who couldn't, despite themselves, have the first idea of what was going on out there, in the real house of cartels, conspiracies, and national states, it sounded completely out of place and time: a round, bitter, beautifully inviting rearguard action against loss. But we didn't understand, yet, just how much there was to lose.

"Ich bin der Welt abhanden gekommen," he said, coming over to where I waited. "I have gotten lost in the world. Although der Welt, feminine, seems to be in the dative: maybe 'to the world.' Abhanden is definitely not the tantalizing choice: abandoned. False cognates. Faux amis, as the Germans would say, if they were French."

I hated him at that moment. His arrogance ruined for me what sound I could still just make out. Truth was, I was not a native speaker. I had studied it once, but had gotten nowhere. Had he played any other piece, I would have heard little, maybe nothing at all. I would have flunked the audition if the piece he'd chosen hadn't been so clearly a sound track for the only thing on God's earth I have an ear for. I wanted to be outside in the cold. I wanted to be by myself, in the apartment I had left a man to get. To die away from the world's noises, to live alone in a quiet place. In that song.

Todd kept chattering amiably, as if I were another of his news vendors or street drunks. I wanted him to stop talking, but he wouldn't. He jabbered on about the composer, the exhaustion of romanticism, the absolute distrust Americans have come to feel toward European culture, toward their own past. He prompted me to join in, but I snubbed the invitation. He prodded me again, but a look from me cut the game dead. He stood, went to the window, and stared at something farther than the neighborhood. He squinted, looking for that metaphor, the outside world with its untraceable, newsprint, global urgencies closed off to us, hermetically sealed. "But I do love you," he said. I was the only person within earshot.

"Thank you. I mean, for___"I gestured at the record player with a wrist. He turned to look at me. I saw in his face the evidence he'd been denying since the day he came by the library to ask about a disappearing man. I understood that all the people he spread himself out over — the cashiers, the subway vets, the three-piece-suiters, college friends held at phone's distance, everyone who elicited that uncalculated, soliciting, contagious charm— were grapples, last-ditch efforts to reverse the departure he was well into. He had the Ressler gene, recessive, latent, but irreversible.

He returned the record to the closet shelf. "I have become a stranger to this place," he said, not daring to look at me. I realized later that he was trying again to translate the song text, quote of the day.