Gold Bug Variations

XXII

Alla Breve

I can't take it in. Where has he been, and when? After the fact, the holes in my old version are obvious. But this new timetable, for all its superiority, is still shot full of anomalies. June? Half a year from door to door! Unthinkable, even for international mail. I cross off those weeks when, lost to this project, I'd stopped checking for mail: months still unaccounted for.

Assume that Todd, in character, obliviously attached so little postage that the packet went by surface freight. Adding all possible holdups — trouble reading his nineteenth-century hand, customs opening it — accounts for a couple of months at most. Todd's refusal to descend to anything so courante as zip code tacks on another punitive week here in New York. I conjure up a postal strike in the Low Countries — they happen in social welfare states. Stretched to breaking, the thread still doesn't span.

Perhaps he began the letter in mid-June, but sent it later. But that's impossible. Two weeks after he started it, he was back in Illinois, dispatching news of Dr. Ressler's death. The letter makes no mention of stateside hiatus. And the imitation Flemish card wedged between? I compare postage, look up the exchange rates from the middle of last year. No doubt the card came by surface. Slow boat. Posted before the death notice.

Todd couldn't have poured out a long chapter, had his life upended, returned to the continent with everything he wrote turned inside out, and then blithely sent the thing unemended, as if nothing had happened in the forgetting world in the interim.

Granted he never made sense to me. But even he could not have sent these bottle-messages in any order except card, lengthy letter, and obituary. Still, the gap: as if he set me up to misread chronology, invert it, hate his indifference for half a year. Now I must postdate everything, the way they adeptly postdated the console log when it most mattered. I can't set it right, can't remake myself to it.

How many times he left me kitchen-table notes, agonized trails of crotchety, contradicting explications replete with a course-of-battle map, arrows tracing out day's insomnia: "Don't worry; stepped out for a minute. Nope, upstairs; first line obsolete. Make that was obsolete; this rescinding is final. Two of the previous three updates are false." He lived in unaccounted gaps. Gone for weeks. Then waiting in the front room, smiling: You were saying…? In the dark, before falling asleep, he would suddenly ask after leftovers we had eaten a dozen days before. He confused the order of his discoveries about Herri with that man's chronology. I'd post the anniversary of the world's first news broadcast, February 1920, and he'd go about beaming as if it had just been sent all over again.

Once, over one of my modest casserole attempts, he asked, "How do you suppose that lobster could walk away like that with his rear half hacked off?" A day later, I remembered: that seafood dive, our business lunch that turned out to be a date after all. It unsettled me: if the first date was still so immediate in him, could the gap between now and the last be any larger?

I've seen him do the same to Dr. Ressler. We and an attendant Annie sat in the control room one night on the threshold of spring. The machines on the other side of the two-way mirror blindly carried out their procedures: if balance equals debit minus credit, then goto smoothsailing, else goto errorhandle. We were deep in listening. The theme for the evening was children's songs: Schumann, Bartók, Debussy. Without even a feint toward preparation, Todd asked his mentor, "So what about that magazine?" Annie and I exchanged glances: had we missed something? But Dr. Ressler broke into a reticent grin. He shook his head and squeezed the bridge of his nose. "Come on," Todd teased. "What did you tell those gentlemen?" I finally got it. He was jumping not just the weeks between that evening and the New Hampshire woods, when Ressler told us about his one run-in with notoriety. He was leaping over the entire twenty-five years since Ressler did the interview.

"I didn't tell them anything, as you and your woman collaborator determined." Ressler winked at me, homage for the bit of detective work I'd done three quarters of a year before. His wink rushed over me, a chemical injection. I was in love with the man. The worst, most unspeakable schoolgirl's crush.

Todd was relentless, for private reasons. "You must have told them something. Who supplied them with that Miescher quote? Should one ask anybody who is undertaking a major project in science, in the heat of the fight, what drives and pushes him so relentlessly, he will never think of an external goal; it is the passion of the hunter…." Todd had the quote intact.

"Guilty as charged. But I was just a child." A pointed rib for Todd's benefit: your age, boy.

"I thought you did. Hacks for the glossies seldom know the literature."

"It might have been any of the other poor souls they'd cornered for the portfolio. 'Faces to Watch for in '58,' or what-have-you." Todd supplied the actual title of the piece. This irritated Dr. Ressler. "Did you need to memorize it?" That hushed things, and we were back to songs for children. Todd had it coming. He should have known that missing spaces, for other people, remain real. But with the quick forgiveness of one who once studied inheritance for a living, Dr. Ressler gently berated Franklin. "I thought I'd told you everything that anyone could conceivably find interesting about my case." An edge in his tone insisted that of all ways there were of learning what it meant to be alive, biography was among the least helpful.

Todd, lip out, said, "I just wanted to know how they heard about you."

"Oh, they were doing the brave new world piece they're obliged to run every two years. Somebody at Cold Spring Harbor mentioned to the journalist compiling the piece that if they were looking for bankable horses, there was a bright, young, single, obscure young man out in the Midwest who had initiated an interesting bit of work and who, word had it, was not entirely unphotogenic." He looked at Annie and me sardonically: you see how cells take it upon themselves to fall apart. He couldn't have been more wrong.

"What did this fellow ask you?"

"Almost nothing about my work. He wouldn't have been able to follow even the Music for Millions version. He wanted the usual color: twists, eccentricities. Was I a child prodigy? Did I keep my lunch bag in the dissection freezer? Did knowing the chemical nature of humanity keep me from favoring certain eye color? Did I have any words of wisdom for the generation of molecular geneticists then cutting their teeth in school labs?" "Did you?"

"I told them to read from the bottom of the meniscus." Having bludgeoned my way through college chemistry with limited success despite the opposable thumb, I laughed. Annie, the picture of Sunday-school patience, blurted out, "Life magazine? You were famous once?"

Lovering snags him outside the interview, unable to wait until he gets back to the office. "So. Big Time. The coffee tables of America."

"Listen, Joey. I had nothing to do with this. I wouldn't even have talked to them, except they were already here. They just want a photo for the gallery. It could have been anybody. Could have been you."

"Thanks."

"That's not what I meant. I mean that the press hasn't the slightest notion of what we're working on."

"Do you?"

"Touché." Happy to give Lovering the hit if it will help put the ridiculous issue behind them.

"I heard Ulrich hasn't renewed your fellowship. Sounds like the prophet-without-honor syndrome."

The bombshell he's been expecting these last weeks. "Ah," he says, false-pitched. "I'm out of the running for next year?"

"So I've heard. Formal decision won't be posted for another few days. Department's eager to squirrel away cash for the big push." Meaning Lovering's hunt-and-peck methods on ILLIAC.

His year has been appraised and found lacking. Preferment denied, not because of the quality of his science but because Stuart has shown himself not to be a team player. The vicissitudes of funding cannot afford the solo worker. The population geneticists have had the right gauge all along. Ulrich has every right to apply his limited research funds to a post-doc who'll do better by Cyfer. But the calculation embitters Ressler, and he cannot suppress a smiling accusation. "You people are wrong, wrong, wrong."

Lovering, twitched by bad conscience, reassures him. "Oh, they want to keep you around. You're hot stuff. Ask any coffee table." The joke goes flatly aromatic. "But the freebie is over. You'll have to teach or something."

He can't teach — not yet, perhaps not ever. To stand up in front of students and make definitive statements is unthinkable. Every definitive statement is false. Whenever he addresses a room of eager notebooks, he begins to shuffle at the lectern, cloak himself in qualifications. It's useless to explain this to Lovering, one of those surehanded lecturers who forget that skepticism is at the bottom of scientific method. Ressler adopts an obsequious tone. "I don't imagine my classroom presentation is likely to be especially stellar."

"No, I wouldn't think so."

Ressler feels an urge to smash his colleague to the wall, watch his head loll against the brick. The forbidden appeal fills him: nothing to prevent it. He is more powerful in the upper chest than Lovering, although the comparison hasn't occurred to him until this moment. Violence forever in the serum. Jacob's Ladder does not ascend; it coils forever around the same four rungs. "Joseph, I've never said 'boo' to you. What's going on here? What do you have against me?"

"What do you have against Ulrich?"

"Against…? Nothing! I just want to do my work."

"You are a very unpleasant fellow, you know. I can't think of anyone in the department who's especially taken with you:"

The casual hallway conversation, at the flick of a switch, becomes puerile. He doesn't have a clue to what the switch is, let alone how to flick it off. "Listen, Joe. I don't know what to say. Is this over the interview? That's crazy. It's a puff piece. The magazine pulled my name out of a hat. They hadn't even seen my article, let alone…"

"Screw the magazine." Lovering's voice is steady. "Sandy and I don't even subscribe." His joke strews the path with shrapnel. "And screw your article, too. Sandy says you dangle too many participles, by the way."

"I don't understand this. I've never bad-mouthed you. I'm quiet in the office. I keep the glassware clean___"

Lovering wags his head, shedding these possibilities as beneath consideration. "If you haven't figured it out by now, I ain't gonna lay it out for you."

Ressler walks away, shaken. For days, he cannot put the weird run-in behind him. He cedes the office to Joe, abdicates out of shame and inability to look at the man. He doesn't go to Ulrich to confirm the loss of fellowship; he'll hear soon enough. He must assume good faith. Difference of opinion, even divorce, must all be in good faith.

On a late-February evening he passes the closed door of Toveh Botkin's office, from which issue the dampened strains of the gallows march from that old war-horse the Symphonic Fantastique. He freezes in the hall — dark, drafty, and full of the smothered scent of lacquer, hair oil, methane, generations of forgotten undergraduate odors — freezes at the tentative probes of this progression. He is thrown back to the previous year, to Summer Slumber Party, when he did not know flat from sharp, let alone Neapolitan sixth from French overture. He is nowhere close to breaking into the inner circle of repertoire, the mysteries of tone hidden even from program-note readers and devotees. But with the help of the woman on the other side of this door, he has gone from utter illiteracy to the point where he can name this tune without ever having heard it before. He recognizes the Berlioz exclusively from the physiognomic description given in the literature.

Standing in the hall, taut with eerie last-century intervals counterpointed by clattering steam pipes, he feels the quick slip of deliverance. No matter what happens — should he be barred from the intellectual cloister, never publish fresh research again — academic year '57—'58 will in any light remain the great watershed adventure of his life: the year he intuited the rough, sole appropriate method for cracking chemical inheritance, the year he fell irreversibly in love, and, most intangible, most intense of all, the year he learned to hear. He knocks, lets himself in, walking euphorically against the harmonic wind. He lies down in his old place on the leather couch. At the movement's end, he lifts his torso and greets his old friend. "Not two flutes, you scoundrels! Two piccolos!"

Botkin needs no gloss. Her eyes brim viscous at his visit. She shakes her head, tsking. "What a student we've turned out to be."

"Dr. Botkin, do you find me unpleasant?"

"Don't flirt with an old woman. There isn't one of us who couldn't rise to make a fool of ourselves under pressure."

He thanks her obliquely but gratefully by consulting her on the adaptor notion. "We have set everything up perfectly in our tube— plaintext message, scissors, paste, paper, pen — everything except the code book itself. If we slip that in, we ought to get synthesis such as no one has seen yet."

"What, in this extended metaphor, does 'code book' stand for?"

Ressler explains: a bilingual molecule, with specific amino acid at one locus and corresponding anticodon at another. Where the messenger reads ACG, the strip on the translator reads UGC. They fit; the amino is held in position, glued to the growing polypeptide chain. He glances up from the couch when he finishes. Botkin smiles at him, but queerly. "Is there something wrong?" he asks. "Have I committed the usual bona fide blunder?"

"My friend," Botkin laments, "you have been working too hard. You have been picking over too many back issues of periodicals and not enough front." She lifts, fresh from the place of honor on her desk, a reprint of a recent article, hands it to him. He accepts the piece, a paper Crick delivered last fall to the Society for Experimental Biology, with the amalgam of trepidation and excitement of asking a pretty wallflower for a dance. Crick is coherent, gorgeous. From beginning to end, he throws open the casements and floods the place with conceptual clarity. In a few pages, the man crystallizes everything Cyfer and Ressler have struggled so fitfully to consolidate. And before it is all over, Crick hints at the same construct, even employing the term "adaptor": an RNA strain shaped to encode both reading stencil and written amino.

It chills Ressler to lie there and read the piece, the chill of recognizing Berlioz without having heard him. He does not sink, beaten. Quite the reverse. The piece breaks his heart with poignancy. It is a beautiful late-twentieth-century pilgrim's narrative— exegesis pressing outwards, refusing to stay confined to the dark backyard. It makes the work his own era struggles to produce seem unmatched by any Renaissance: a time when anything might come to be anything at all.

The shining confirmation — the correspondence between their own work and this work going on across the ocean — descends on him as relief. All sense of racing to the gate dissolves. There is still the weight of wanting to contribute somewhere along the line. But Crick's structure, so close to the one he has independently imagined, reassures him that contribution is never an endangered individual. It will be made, whatever might become of him, no matter how soon design's undertow drags him down.

Botkin mistakes the quiet that comes over him while reading. When he finishes, she consoles him. "He still seems confused between ribosomal and messenger RNA. And he has not yet picked up on Gale and Folkes."

"You think not?" He glances at the paper, frightened. Then he understands his friend is trying to motivate him to remain in the chase. How can he tell her: I am in, for good, forever, even if I drop out along the way? We have no choice in these things; they must be done for the greater glory of whatever there'is. "Maybe not," he whispers, grinning, conceding the responsibility still wrapped inside relief. "Maybe we can add something to this." He gazes at the creases in Dr. Botkin's face, the manifestation, the final working out of a textual puzzle written nowhere in particular, everywhere in general. He hands back the beautiful draft, Crick's notes toward a score for the young person's guide to the orchestra. "Let us go after this adaptor molecule, then."

"I think we have to."

"You know what it is, of course."

"More nucleic acid?"

"Who else?" Is there any other matter so skilled at grammar that it can write one, in its own language? "Thank you for showing me that," he says. "It's breathtaking." He spills over with the wonder of it: the organism guessing inspiredly at its own conveyance, mechanisms themselves the frozen record of inspired guesses about the environment. The practical substitute of words for words seems makeshift, courageous beyond imagining. He can say nothing.

Botkin lifts a hand to her darkwood shelves, takes down a book, and slowly reads to him. The source is in German, of which Ressler has only technical reading knowledge. But Botkin's native fluency bridges this impediment. Her eyes read in one language, her lips pronounce another, without the halting searches of the simultaneous interpreter.

" 'At the suggestion of Doles, the Cantor at the Leipzig Thomas-Schule, the choir surprised Mozart by performing the double-chorus motet Singet dem Herrn ein neues Lied. The choir had produced but a few measures when Mozart bolted upright, shocked. After a few more measures, he shouted out, "What is this?" His whole soul appeared to rise up into his ears. The singing ended; he cried out joyfully, "Here at last is something one might learn from."' I hope this holds up in translation."

Even in the translation of a translation. The image of Europe's prodigy, exiled in the loneliness of his abilities, unexpectedly discovering that he is not alone only augments the strange understanding welling in Ressler. "The name of that piece: 'Sing unto the Lord a new song'?"

"On the mark." He does not even ask the name of that surprise something, the someone one might at last learn from. No need to translate it into speech.

Lovering's assault seems more inexplicable after a week's simmering. But one accusation stands out of the erratic mass as possessing a germ of truth. Distance is not respectfully neutral, as he has always meant it. Socializing, like push-ups, is a necessary, unpleasant surrogate for the real thing. He has not visited Woytowich and Renée since they gazed at the evening news together last summer. Almost too late, he feels a funny, irrelevant need to exonerate himself. He finds himself on their stoop on the first of March, holding an amateurishly wrapped, postage-stamp-sized baby jumper, he hopes female.

Woyty opens the door, shouts "Stuart," clutches at his chest, burlesqueing a heart attack. "My God, man! Who died?" He rushes Ressler in, treating him just a notch below long-lost brother. Lovering is right: Ressler has let the thread of mutual sentence almost snap. "Renée honey," Daniel shouts. "You'll never guess!"

A thin voice from the distant room wafts back. "If it's the Census Bureau, tell them we're topping off at one."

"She's kidding," Daniel gushes. "She loves this motherhood racket. Come in, come in. We were just getting ready for the bassinet. Want to see?"

"I'd prefer the home movie, Dr. W." Ressler can't deliver the line without smirking. Woyty's elated regressing is infectious. He rushes Ressler upstairs. Renée fusses embarrassingly over the little jumper as if it were the coat of many colors. She retires it to the middle of a set of shelves that Dan has labeled "0 to 6," "6 to 12," and "12 to 24."

"We have to wash Ivy," Woyty sings in a high, squeaky voice, rubbing his nose into the infant's belly. "Don't we have to wash Ivy?" Ivy smiles, or perhaps it is just gas. Ivy's father undoes the enormous safety pin in her cotton diapers. "What did you do here? Did you make all this?" Daniel removes the soiled rags, showing Ressler the product, the miraculous residue left in a beaker after fractional distillation. The mocha clay — laid down in deposits— might fire in a kiln to silky porcelain.

The wrapper gets thrown into an enormous collecting sack for the cleaning service. Father daubs the holdouts from between Ivy's legs. The infant makes a confused gurgle, unsure whether to resist, screaming, or give in with pleasure. Ressler is hypnotized by the protozooic genitalia: a fatty eruption, almost tuberous, between the egg-roll thighs, a strange red rash disappearing into a discreet afterthought of a tuck, like the dimple that marks where the mold attaches.

Ivy goes into the bassinet, water warmed to half-degree precision on Renée's thermometer. She seems to enjoy returning to the drink, splashing about polywog-style with more muscular knowledge than she can muster on dry land. As he sops her clean, Daniel keeps up a constant stream of language games: "Where's your foot? Here it is! No, we haven't lost it. Where's your tummy? That's right. How did you know?"

Father and daughter have an uncanny rapport, almost spooky for the handful of weeks under the bridge. Reading Ressler's thoughts, Woyty concurs, "She's a prodigy. Renée and I are both amazed. Already twice where the books say she's supposed to be." He gazes at his wife in astonishment and pride. Renée responds in kind. Daniel goes on laving, talking, half to Stuart, half to Ivy, letting his daughter in on an awful prediction. "This is going to be the brightest baby in the world. Isn't she?" he asks, sponging the tiny creature's back.

"If Daddy has anything to do with it," Renée chuckles. "He's got the John Stuart Mill alphabet blocks strung up over her crib, and he spends an hour going through them with her every night."

"I swear she gets them already. I feel her catching on."

Ressler looks in the flat-focusing eyes of this baby to see if that can be possible. He remembers that other model of miraculous miniaturization, Margaret Blake. Ivy, no longer than Margaret's arm, retraces phylogeny back to some intermediary generating form. Staring at Ivy, amphibious in her bath, he begins to think that parenting may be science as well. The gradual testing, forgoing, and refinement of postulates, the constant probes of methodology and interpretation. Ivy is the subject of every lesser investigation anyone has ever run.

He loves a woman, has entered one who so awakes the possibilities buried in his cytoplasm that the urge to get her as round, as loose-draped in the belly as a medieval Virgin is now stronger than any that has ever possessed him. The compulsion to run the one experiment that can't be pared down to a manageable outcome. But every cell he will ever shoot into her will die there, in her tract, in confusion. He and Jeanette are barred forever from that trial run, not just by skirtable social proscription, but by final proclamation of the law of averages.

"One, two, three, four, five," Daniel intones, peeling back the child's tiny, almond machine-shop parings. "Seis, siete, ocho, nueve, diez." He frees his finger from her reflex grasp and winds up a music box. Its melodious running down sends the child into rapture. "Yes sir. This baby's either going to be a genius or one overstimulated cookie."

Ressler barely hears Woytowich to nod acknowledgment. The music-box trickle recalls him to another music box, a distant one, one he first heard in Botkin's office months ago, at the start of this annus mirabilis, before learning became more than he could bear. A music box, an automaton of stoic grief, faintly singing out in the fifth of five songs selected from a catalog of four hundred poems chronicling the death of a child from scarlet fever. Kindertodenlieder. A little light has gone out in my tent. Hail the eternal light of day.

"Yes, Ivy and I are going to teach each other a lot. Aren't we, dear? Aren't we?" A fair trade; she gets to learn where her tummy is. You get to learn what it means to cheat death. Ressler hears, in the child's music box, how the only life he will ever live beyond his own will be the life of that absurd photo and caption, trapping him in coffee tables everywhere.

Annie's alarm at Dr. Ressler's one-time borderline notoriety was so genuine, her face so amazed, during the account that his irritation at the broach of the subject bubbled away. "Yes, greatness briefly thrust upon me, and only a quick side step and swing of the red cape saved me. I was cornered by the same journalistic band that cruelly led the beach-party beauties to believe that one of them might domesticate that twenty-some-year-old genius pianist, cure him of hypochondria and his awful singing over the instrumental tracks. Even as the magazine was busy promoting that fellow, he'd already begun to trade the international concert circuit for a life where even his closest friends could reach him only by phone. Life never caught on that his keyboard exercises were a refusal of natural selection, a means of surviving solitude." He fell apologetically silent a minute. Speaking to Annie, as if Todd and I already understood, he said, "The three weeks when my mug inhabited the back pages of newstands filled me with a revulsion that has not diminished."

That fame was a proving ground for another notoriety then just weeks away. One evening Uncle Jimmy stayed late, lying in wait for Todd. By Franker's account, the Ops Manager hand-delivered their pay receipts for the period, reading over their shoulders as each examined his stub. Jimmy, jittery, wanted to know if their deposits checked out. He told them his pay had come through augmented by a lump sum, with no note on the stub or word from higher-ups. I imagine Todd relishing the lark, encouraging Jimmy to accept the Bank Error in Your Favor and go buy a new color TV for his mother. Of course, Jimmy, seconded by a terse-lipped Dr. Ressler, concluded that he would have to report the windfall glitch.

"Do you think it could have something to do with that whole lotta shakin' goin' down here over the last few weeks?" Todd suggested lamely.

"As you know," Dr. Ressler intervened, to keep Todd from clever admission of guilt, "all our payroll records are kept insulated from our own machines."

"That's right." Jimmy frowned, trying hard to ignore his hunch. "All our checks are cut out of house. By a rival firm."

After Jimmy's departure, Ressler gave Franklin the most severe dressing-down possible: he said nothing about the matter. They started the end-of-day processing, Ressler letting Franker stick with his story. Trust devastated Todd more than any accusation could have. Franker's whim turned real at last, on this side of the mainframe linkup.

A few days later, when a baffled Uncle Jimmy returned to what his instincts told him was the scene of the crime, he shook his head and told my friends, "Nobody knows who authorized it, but the receipt matches a valid electronic request. 'Somebody musta dunnit.' Accounting even looked at me like I was crazy for bringing it to their attention."

"James," Dr. Ressler assured him, "it sounds as if you're forced to consider this the gift of an anonymous donor."

"Pennies from Heaven," Todd suggested meekly. "The Color TVs for the Mothers of Excessively OT 'ed Middle Managers Fund."

"If the two of you have nothing more helpful to say than 'Roll with it,' I guess I'll have to. But nobody can make me like it," Jimmy said.

Or words to that effect. Unlike the Evangelist, I was not there and did not see these things. I received the revised version only through Todd, and my memory of even that is already years old. "This is the gist, but not the exact run of words as he sang them in his sleep, for even the most beautiful song cannot be translated from one language to the other without much loss of loveliness and grace." No better fit for the sad fact than Bede's famous bit— a bit no one for more than a thousand years has even been able to read in the way that a real speaker of Bede's dead language was able to. But what's a real speaker? Latin was no one's mother tongue. Why should I use quotes, if the English version of his despair at the insufficiency of translation is itself insufficient? "This is the gist" doesn't even give the run of words as Bede sang them. And yet these words are his gist. The same, if undeniably different. My rough guess at what Uncle Jimmy said stands in now for Uncle Jimmy. It must. There is no other.

These eight months spent trying to rig up an exact recreation have never once gotten closer than a rough gist, even of those moments that I lived firsthand. A verbatim transcript is, it goes without saying, a contradiction in terms. Yet I could not have sustained this almost-transcript this far without believing that it approximates the original, even with every original word out of order or altered. No threshold effect turns resemblance into facsimile. Yet approximation is as close as any transcriber gets. I know now how genetics relies on ingenious but indirect measurements, reflections and not direct knowledge. Genes are mapped relatively by the frequency of their breaking and recombining. No one has witnessed a transfer-RNA molecule reading the next triplet and attaching its amino acid to the growing polypeptide. Yet the inference is unimpeachable, because the shadows this process casts on reflective apparatus cannot be explained so well in any other way.

Even a literal recording — another contradiction — even highest-fidelity holographic videotape of what I and my friends said and did at that precise moment would still be a rough transcript requiring interpretation. That pause between his sentences: anger or exasperation? The pitch, volume, and tempo of his words: do those variables, integrated across context, indicate half his impatience, uncertainty, wonder at what is about to happen? Everything I might say about this place involves decoding. Things say in one language and mean in another. No getting across that gap without the ultimate transitive, to translate.

Out of unshakable habit, I look up the word. English occurrence dates from the thirteenth century. Latin origin: to relocate, carry across, port over. Among the dozen definitions (including to bring to a state of spiritual or emotional ecstasy), the now familiar biochemical one: to transform the information stored in messenger RNA into a polypeptide structure by means of the genetic code. An upstart translation of the parent meaning: to move the substance of a text from one language or dialect into another. To translate Shakespeare into Bantu, or the secretary of defense into English.

I follow the idea down to its core, where, rather than reveal itself, it dissolves. I ask the Ur-question of whether translations, unlike Todd, can be both beautiful and faithful at the same time. I nudge that old impasse concerning whether to translate all "Na-poleon" s into "Bismarck" s when porting a limbered piece across the Rhine. I live with the line about how all translations are obsolete the moment they are made, how the death of marines in Lebanon calls out for a new draft on Thucydides. What I can't decide is whether passing words from one language to another is even possible.

Pragmatically, I know it must be, for I do it all day long. Like Dr. Johnson's friend Mrs. Carter in reverse, I once could translate Epictetus as well as make a pudding. Every piece of impenetrable information I ever ported to my eternally hungry clients was born in interpretation and carried out under the guidance of rough analogy. Even now, working exclusively for myself, every genetic concept I acquire is a stand-in isomorph for an alien domain. Letters as bases. The genome as five-thousand-volume library. The ribosome as reading head, messenger RNA as strip of recording tape. Enzyme as if-then command. The presence of amino sequences inferred through the pattern of dark bands on paper. Traits located by tracking genetic markers. The ages of the earth as bands of sedimentary rock. The forms of finches radiating outwards. Sperm with heads and tails. Radiation garbling messages, introducing noise. Mendel as the Darwin of heredity. Darwin as left fielder, batting third for the Science Hall of Fame. Life as computer, steam engine, automation, animate puppet, clay shape breathed full of spiritus dei.

For out of olde feldes, as men seith,

Cometh al this newe corn fro yeer to yere;

And out of olde bokes, in good feith,

Cometh al this newe science that men lere.

Translation inhabits every sentence ever predicated. Nothing is what it is but by contrast, cracking, porting over. Every part of speech is already a figure of speech. Not long before I stopped going back, I visited Dr. Ressler, once more alone in the quiet of the control room. He was compiling a catalog, with nineteenth-century Linnaean diligence, of examples of tone-painting (I mistakenly heard "tome-painting") in Bach vocal works. We listened to scores of examples, figures as generic as joy, hastening, or humility, as literal-minded as flames, fire, sheep grazing, or the rich being sent empty away. He played a jagged, dissonant 'cello descent, buzz-saw violent. "How do they put it in the King James? "The veil of the temple was rended'?"

"In current versions, it reads something like 'And their public religious building was damaged by plate slippage.' "

Ressler smiled. "No wonder they burned Tyndale. Of course, for Bach, it was 'Der Vorhang im Tempel zerriss in zwei Stück von oben an bis unten aus.' Which is another story altogether."

"I thought you said you didn't know any foreign languages." Except I do no one any harm by remaining here, in French.

"Every scientist my age had to read a little German."

"And a little Latin?"

He shrugged. "For nomenclature."

"Greek?"

"No farther than the letter names, believe me."

"Why should I? And tone-painting?"

"Well that, yes. But is that a language?" he slid away quickly. "Is it redundant, specific, rigid, nonambiguous? Can we really hear what it means?"

"First tell me what "The veil of the temple was rended' means."

"Good point," he said. Or words to that effect.

But just because translation is everywhere necessary, it doesn't follow that it's possible. Even the perfect translations of mathematics beg the question of what is being carried over where. The length of this two-dimensional extension expressed in number. The value of that number expressed as a numeral. If performing the same operation on both sides of an equation does not change the expression's validity, what does it change? Why is the last line of a proof surprising, if its truth is already hiding tautologically in the lines above?

The load is inseparable from the cart. What I say depends on what ï say it with. The most resourceful conversion cannot take the simple phrase "Words are very rascals" and transplant the sense, stripped of conveyance, into Oriental pictographs where adjectives are conjugated, sentences have separate logical and grammatical subjects, and verbs have no tense or mood but context, cannot perform the exchange without everything except simple-minded correspondence being lost.

Conversion's impossibility only increases when the languages have recently diverged. Mother, maman, madre, mutter come nowhere near meaning the same thing. I need only boot, fringe, or grid to prove that we and the Brits are indeed two people separated by the barrier of a common language. "Ceci n'est pas une pipe" does not mean "This is not a pipe," any more than Magritte's famous symbol is smokable. All four texts no longer mean what they separably say: they are a packet, together standing for the inability to extract thorns from dialect briars.

The decline of the world in my lifetime precipitated by Vatican II and Webster III is just the latest echo of the collapse of Babel. Frank's favorite painter had to do this topic twice, in porting it to another idiom. Difficulty did not begin when God caused everybody on the work crew to render "pass the hammer" in his own unintelligible idiom. It began with "hammer," a real thing in itself, separate from that solid, cold, workable weight strapped into the flat of the hand. Every assertion is already a comparison, wedding a thing to a thing, a thing to an action, a thing to a quality, temporarily joined at a given moment from a given vantage. Shifts betray without ever leaving the mother tongue. Stravinsky once called Verdi the Puccini of Music. I know exactly what he means, but could not say it any other way.

The coding problem begins with a single word, shorthand simile. Simple naming is already unstable. There is no other way to say a thing except by its name, yet the name never says it. Once, I knew what it felt like to be the first to use a metaphor. To invent metaphor itself. I loved someone who was sunk in winter, someone who didn't watch where he walked. Garden in his face. Nest in hair. Pearls for eyes. Wall between us. Words dispersed us like the cold points of stars. The joints splay that should pull flush. Dovetailed comparisons wear out, go threadbare. But tonight, for no reason — because of a transposition converting two very different dates — language coils, starts up again. I apply my key, my adapting bit, until something fits, shifts, carries over. The conversion closing in on me will never aeain be so clean as one eene. one enzyme.

one metabolism. It never was that clean, even at microscopic level.

Shakespeare in Bantu, Indiana in Brooklyn, Dr. Ressler in verse, desire in biological terms: the world is only translation, nothing but. But paradoxically, inexpressibly, translation of no other place but here. All this conversion work — words into cantatas, landscapes into words — has as goal neither fidelity to the original (although valueless without fidelity) nor beauty in the target language (although without beauty, a waste). The point of every translation — the years spent in science, away from art history, wrapped in the library, trapped in this paragraph — is suddenly one and the same.

Translation, hunger for porting over, is not about bringing Shakespeare into Bantu. It is about bringing Bantu into Shakespeare. To show what else, other than homegrown sentences, a language might be able to say. The aim is not to extend the source but to widen the target, to embrace more than was possible before. After a successful decoding, after hitting upon the right solution — however temporary, tentative, replaceable, and local — the two extended, enhanced languages (Shakespeare changes forever too, analogies adapting to the African plains) form a triangulating sextant pointing back to the height of the ruined tower, steering limited idiom toward a place where knowledge goes without saying.

I have the likeness for the whole process in front of me. How could I have been so long in hearing it? Each alternate translation is an emblem of the generating tune. But variation grows rich in a new tongue. The tune in February. The tune as laborer. The tune in love. The tune in the Information Revolution. The tune intoned without hope or longing in the cloister of a solitary order. The tune in vitro. The tune swung round, wrenched into minor. The tune as a lost vee of geese. The tune triumphant. The tune as sudden stroke, erasing all personality. The tune as folk tune. How long you have been away from me. Come home, come home, come home. Change the signature, rhythm, harmonic underpinning, even the intervals. Where is the theme? Oh, still in there, in the new terms, the awful euphoria of more. It needs only a listener with the right key to find that unprecedented, surprising, radical bit that from the first, all along, it was saying.

Because he is not where I thought he is; because I had him badly figured; because I set out last June to identify Dr. Ressler at last; because Ressler died; because I thought Todd had run off to Europe; because he in fact came back for his friend's death, leaving my letter sealed under some casement, waiting months for a benevolent stranger to post it; because I thought to learn genetics, hoping that way to work my way around to the man; because I loved with all the force of metaphor; because I loved those two as if they were the last similes left on earth; because I will never get the exact words and will be lucky to hint at the weakest equivocation; because I shut myself away for months for work (because I thought them both gone); because I find, tonight, in crossing over, that I was wrong on virtually every account worth being wrong on, I hear the old tune as if it were some absurdly singable new song. Sing it then. Friend, thou art translated.