Gold Bug Variations

XXIII

Century of Progress

Q: Why not a test ban? If satellites can read license plates from outer space, couldn't they also detect your basic multimegaton blasts going off here or there?

P.N.

A: Official line is that a test ban would not be verifiable, and thus not desirable. But many in the scientific community say tremor detection has permitted verification for at least a decade. Nuclear detonations are required by the space weapons program now under development. Measurement is never separate from motive.

J. O'D.

Q: How many humans will there be by the beginning of next century? How many other living things?

R.P.

A: Eight billion humans, by conservative estimate. There will still be many animals. But far fewer kinds—

J. O'D.

Q: My parents used to sing a song together when I was a girl, before the First World War. It was called something like "A Hundred Years from Now." It was beautiful, but I've never been able to find it since. Do an old lady a favor?

L.S.

A: One Hundred Years Hence what a change will be made In politics, morals, religions, and trade;

In statesman who wrangle or ride on the fence, These things will be altered a hundred years hence.

Then woman, man's partner, man's equal will stand,

While beauty and harmony cover the land;

To think for oneself will be no offense,

The world will be thinking, a hundred years hence.

Oppression and war will be heard of no more,

Nor the blood of the slave leave its print on our shore;

Conventions will then be a useless expense,

For we'll all go free suffrage, One Hundred Years Hence.

J. O'D.

Change of Venue

He did not run for Europe; he came back. Ressler's death did not leave him cutting human ties, cleaning off, briskly efficient. Franklin was in the Low Countries already last spring, throwing his lot in with new words. Days after he wrote me, second week in June, he heard that Dr. Ressler was entering the last turn. He must have dropped everything and come back home.

Home to what? The death notice says nothing. "I have just heard__" Midwestern postmark; the town Ressler chose to die in. Did Franklin make it? Was he able to see the man? In my last word from Franklin, a trail a half year old, he'd just arrived stateside. No reason to believe he isn't still here. Somewhere. Today.

On the Threshold of Liberty

On March 11, the AEC concedes to angry scientists that seismic shock from last year's test in the Nevada desert registered in Alaska, 2,320 miles away, and was not limited to 250 miles, as first claimed. Ressler can't imagine how even government might think that figures will conform to decree. But he understands its temptation to dictate to measurement. Agencies sit on sheaves of results they can't ingest, a report of increasing mastery over material that grows faster than they can read it; each new breakthrough edges deeper into that place where everything is certain to happen — wider extremes of availability tahn the biome ever anticipated.

Foreign policy snaps precedent. Leaders are left hanging on to realpolitik, chanting the trusty, rusted formulae long obsolete. Nations haven't the first notion what to do about the eager weapons that will garble irreversibly the three-billion-year message inside the informational molecule. The lone trustee, the incompetent caretaker, is loose on the estate.

The public, even those still buying the myth of species permanence, has lately latched onto the most horrible fold in the new dogma. Life is no longer a priori appropriate. Creatures become sickeningly plastic, moldable, as mistakable as clay. Two-headed monsters, nightmarish collages of scales, fur, wings, and jagged things, hybrid ghouls of unbound imagination inhabit theaters nearest you. Godzillas, lagoon creatures, giant Gila monsters: nothing now prevents life from running amok in the shower of mutagenic material already unleashed. Lovering pins up a Yardley cartoon on the office bulletin board. "Radiation didn't hurt us a bit." The speaker is an amorphous blob with three eyes.

The specter is more terrifying than mass extinction. The annihilation of most of the globe seemed survivable so long as some fraction of the message remained intact. But if monstrous mean-inglessness propagates with the speed and exactitude of natural transmission, everything is over. The loss of a great library to fire is a tragedy. But the surreptitious introduction of thousands of untraceable errors into reliable books, errors picked up and distributed endlessly by tireless researchers, is nightmare beyond measure.

Ressler's read Neel and Schull on the effects of Hiroshima and Nagasaki on childbirth. He'd be the first to point out the impossibility of generalizing about the effects of radiation after one generation. New lethals float around in the pool, garblings that won't reveal their consequences for several lifetimes. If a bomb can be heard 2,300 miles away, then how unacceptably far might invisible, message-melting static seep out? Government, confronted with living nightmare among its own constituency, refits the facts, making human ingenuity seem somehow survivable, benign, commensurate with being alive. The project of procreation can't be allowed to scare itself sterile on its own imagination.

If scientific fact disappears in a sea of carefully tailored editing, then the protecting officials will have induced the corruption they meant to stave off. Fear of sinister garbling is just the first, obscure public realization of molecular genetics. The greatest revolution in thought ever, the one material theory of being that isn't an after-the-fact put-up, has an even more unpalatable ramification. The sanctity of one life, the primacy of the particular, has no place in the new science. Biology has united ecology, taxonomy, paleontology, and genetics in a single grand theory of encoded nucleotides, but in doing so, it lays bare terminal grimness. Gene, organism, and tribe operate by opposing means, are driven by inimical goals. The individual is a myth of scale.

Behind the radiation-horror is another so great that it requires agencies to interdict the facts. The life script's playwright is a die; even now the script is not fixed. Smudges change it from one reading to the next. The spectacular species-fan is spelled out in a table-bumped game of Scrabble. Who can go on breathing when mutagens are everywhere in the air? A severe birth defect, annihilating a sacred existence, is to the gene just another guess, to the population, just bean-curve indifference. Ten million mutations per U.S. generation. A half-dozen deleterious genes per person.

More unlivable still: the steady generation of noise — birth defects, the eternal perjury of even healthy bodies, infection beyond death — is life's motor. The text, self-trimming, self-writing, self-reading, is also self-garbling. Necessity's chance horror is the mother of variation. Time plays with deleterious mutations strewn through the common gene pool, extracting from them, every handful of millennia, new functionality. Useful difference comes about only through decanting tons of detritus, error, waste. Weed it and reap.

Individual interests are sacrificed to the interests of the species. A billion cripplings to produce one meliorism. Radiation becomes Pentecostal, the procurement of the overspecies that will rescue the speaking animal from the general botch of things, the disastrous night it has brought on itself. Mutation as evolution's arrow: further text depends on the garble, whether from UV or Nagasaki. The garble is the code talking about itself, a decision to go forth, be fruitful, and mutate.

Even the nausea of knowing where the message hails from cannot touch him today. Even knowing that the individual is permitted by gene and tribe only so long as it serves their ends cannot, this hour, alter how he feels. Despite knowledge, he is shamefully alive, weeks away from pushing through. Discovery, once-chaotic things clicking together into a tight matrix, is so unequaled a rush that it overwhelms even the ugliness of what it reveals.

Part of this ankle-dangling euphoria is more prosaic: the absurdly pleasant spring weather that's plagued Champaign-Urbana for days. Who can feel distressed for long in the face of this breeze? The core of brutal insistence thaws with the assurance that his love— recalcitrant, unique, individual — is reciprocated. Jeanette's minutes, he now knows, are as laden with him as his are with her. To be loved reciprocally promotes them to special-interest group. He no longer cares what codes for their shared obsession, what drives them deeper when they both know it can come to no issue. No behavior is so pointless but can be ratified by a second of the motion, mutual agreement, the binding site of love.

Love, like the mutation blade, both maims and surgically saves. He knows both incisions. Today it is good; a surge of surety putting anguish to bed. He savors the slight shift in his favor. Lovely sound rings K-53-C: car honks, someone getting married. The beep persists; he smiles at the summoned party's refusing to answer. At that moment, Jeannie's head appears at the window. "Ask not for whom the car honks."

He forgets himself, the careful propriety they've learned to coat themselves in. He rushes to the opening where she and the soft breeze pour in, holds her face, kisses it in adolescent profusion. Another instant and he is shod, wrapped in windbreaker, out the door. He tears around the corner of the shack, brakes just short of flying into the woman. He stretches out an arm and messes her hair. "Do you still love me? Are you all right? Nothing's happened since I saw you last?" All this delivered at the sprinting speed of one who's just discovered how little time he can afford anything except life.

He lifts her shoulders, pinches her waist, clasps each hand in rapid succession, pulls himself away, and glances at the windows that look out on where they stand. His puppyish eagerness to touch her already gives the ache hopelessly away. She laughs and strolls with him to the waiting car, not the familiar Koss futuristic spaceship. "What's this? What happened to the fins?"

She puts thumb to lip, hesitantly bites the nail. The gesture's endangered tenderness ravishes him. "I know this sounds terribly genre-ish, but I thought it less conspicuous to rent this for the day." She looks at him: the day. The whole day. To be squandered together over its entire length, as if it were really theirs without constraint to be disposed of. She stares at him. "Want a lift?"

How can he help but want? He is prepared to go wherever she designs to take them, today, ever. He throws himself into the camouflaged rental on the seat beside her, passenger, co-escapee, surrendered to travel. They wander out of town onto an unnumbered county road heading south, a lane unrolling as straight as the cut of a plow-scythe, the trailing arrow of a compass. The snow has melted, leaving the muted, moldy yellows of last fall's stalk residue, the blue-black of the soil, the clinical gray of a tree or windbreak hedge, the protestant white of a farmer's two-storied frame. He feels no inclination to ask where they're going. They are there already, here, in the same car with one another, released, untethered, unsponsored, on the thin crust of the earth.

Out here in rural emptiness, road calculations are irrelevant. They are vulnerable to the slightest change of mind, the possibilities presented by the infinite numbered grid of county roads leading exactly everywhere. He can't imagine how anyone taking a trip could possibly plan his destination ahead of time. One can only get from Here to There by plotting the way simultaneously from both, and hoping against odds that the tendrils will meet in the middle.

He looks at the loveliness beside him. She too needs no more forethought than the game she plays with him every time they come to an intersection. She rolls up to the node, slightly reducing speed and asking languidly, while testing the wheel imperceptibly to left or right, "What do you think? Turn here?" Sometimes she turns, sometimes not. It comes to the same thing.

Something catches their eyes in the expanse of cumulused air. She tugs at his sleeve, disbelieving the remarkable phenomenon. Above a town that before this moment barely merited the name, a plane strews an aerial milt stream of confetti from its cargo bay. Jeanette steers toward this celebration — some local cause for wonder, a marriage perhaps, or a birth. As the dispersed load approaches the ground, Ressler makes out the artificial cloud: a flurry of rose petals, storm of leaf-lets showering the town. All these miles of A-frames and straight acreage, naked fields being readied for corn, bathed in a burst of pink petal-points. He would not be able to take in this March-shower surreality except that Jeannie is there at the wheel beside him, stone-still, just looking, for all she is worth.

How long has it been since he's gotten out? Out of town, out of range, out of the lab, out of touch, out of himself? He hasn't sampled this liberating emptiness since that day, negotiated lifetimes ago, when he Greyhounded into town through this same enchanted vacancy of may and might. The field returns, even as they pass, from black sand to the first, primitive hint of callow, new green. The challenge of this spilling emptiness cuts into him. He commits himself to feeling it, to riding aimlessly with her, to living this rented day. He stretches, feeling his feet against the floorboards, his back flexing against the car seat. He pushes out his arm, which falls experimentally across her welcoming shoulders, exercises its privilege to play with her rose neck hair. "Is this a kidnapping, by the way?"

Jeanette smiles, far away. "I sure hope not. Because you won't get any money out of my husband these days." Even mention of the man has no power over them. Herbert falls away, sinks into the road shoulder disappearing behind their wheels. When she looks over at him, lifting her eyes from the hazardless road, it is with all the dismay of care: we are abducting each other, throwing away everything in complicity.

How strange it all feels, how immediate. He has seen nothing at all except his adopted town since he hit it. And of that swaddling college village, nothing except the barracks, lab, stacks, and sycamore-shackled paths connecting this narrow net. How much finer the place he lives in, broader, more surprising than he thought. He stumbles upon it by accident for the first time. The farmers, worrying their lands' next attention, do not know their own acreage the way he knows it at this minute.

The fields call him palpably back to the moment of his arrival, the unsuspecting child he'd been. An urge comes over him to tell Jeannie of that forgotten bus ride into town, the way he has come, across the cold year, against all expectation. "When I first arrived— early summer! — Urbana seemed the perfect place for getting lost in. I sat on this endless bus, in the middle of the traveling poor, next to a man with a thyroid defect. He warned me against reading. Said he had an uncle who consumed all Zane Grey and never amounted to much."

His uncharacteristic monologue cracks her up. While Jeannie giggles, he adds, "We had been held up along the way by a flood of tortoises crossing the road. Several shells wide, with no end in sight. I could still hear them crunching under the bus wheels when we pulled into town. I saw this place and — the oddest thing. I was home, although I'd never even imagined its contour. I thought: A person could work here. Anonymous. Politely alone with nothing but investigation to get through this open cipher, all the right angles." He fondles the lithe vertebra protruding from her neck. "I had no idea you'd be here. I thought it — would be all code-breaking. 1 never predicted, until this morning, that it would be this." This! What, exactly? Name it. "That I would fall in love."

Jeanette arches against his hand, almost mews. She opens to him, speaks of how, at thirty, she wakes up some mornings not knowing where she is. "Sometimes I'm lost, without clue to recovery. This isn't where I live. This isn't what I do for a living. Illinois is lunar landscape to me. Even science sometimes seems some alien routine I've learned to go through without giving myself away. I think, 'What am I doing here?' And then I think on you, and it's like coming across a favorite child's book in an antique store with my name scrawled on the flyleaf. Like being dropped into the most tangled foreign bazaar and suddenly hearing English an inch away from my ear."

Her confession scares him: does he really soften the bare rock for her, give it a breathable atmosphere? "Were you happy as a child?"

"Growing up? Oh, happy enough, from what I remember. My folks were trauma-free, more than normally immersed in their generation's long-term goal of boredom. I loved school, always did well. Forever busy improving myself. Always had some project going. Continuous science fair."

"The Home Nature Museum."

They gaze at one another in recognition. "Where were you when I was sixteen?"

"Oh." The suggestion is pain. "Wouldn't that have been a scenario?" It mauls him to think what the years might have been like, what chances they might have lived.

"So much wasted time. I might have been watching you learn things, learning them with you. But look! We're here. We've found each other now. That's the main thing. Even if I__" Her voice drops, inaudible. "If I've married prematurely." She stares straight ahead, oversteering. Ressler feels her neck tense and removes his hand. Suddenly she shouts so violently from the lungs it makes him jump. "Stupid. Fool! Damn it to hell." She clutches him with a free claw, turns her face on him, eyes red, puffy, pleading. "Why?"

He gives no answer. She winces and looks away. She slams the steering wheel with the flat of her palms, and it flips off the column into her hands. Weaving, the rented car reams a big chuckhole in the county road, a washout from the spring melt. She reacts spontaneously, controls the vehicle by lifting her foot off the gas and braking judiciously. At the same time, fumbling with the worthless metal ring, she hands the wheel to Ressler, fake blase. "Here. You drive for a while."

Ressler laughs hysterically at her poise. Jeanette manages to beach the car without crashing. There's little to die against on infinite road shoulder. He finds the broken joining pin, jimmies a substitute, wedges the wheel back onto its column while Jeanette proclaims, "Damn rentals. Can't take them anywhere." Years later, when everything else, even bitterness, has dissolved into sepia, he will remember her, love her for that absurd reversion to wit in the face of near-disaster.

When they pull back onto the road, still alive, they grow as unqualified as the terrain moving through them. Their invention is subdued, the remorse lifts, the hypotheticals of where else they might have gone vanish. Jeanette accelerates, confidence creeping back, tearing along for tearing's sake, in overarching breakneck speed. The call in this confusing, rented, temporary tune is at last clear: all the two of them need do is hit the right notes at the right time, and the thing plays itself.

They know their intended destination the instant they wander into it. A pristine almost-village, a time hole lost in the previous century. They park the car, trying to make the vehicle inconspicuous. Difficult, as theirs is the only internal combustion engine in sight. The prevailing mode is horse-and-buggy: black, closed-box coaches, wood and leather, spoked wheels, draft animals in the stays. The extraordinary drivers are decked out in blue, black, and gray homespun. The women wear simple headcoverings, and the men sport foot-long beards.

Ressler can only look and look. How far have they come? No more than a few miles from that university town with its top engineering school, its transistor Nobel laureate, its state-of-the-art digital computer composers. They have fallen through time, Judge Craters, a footnote in those stranger-than-science compendia. It takes Jeannie's soft erudition in his ear to instruct him. "Are they House or Church Amish?" They have stumbled upon a self-isolated community of dissenters who have chosen to break off from the rest of the race, to hold still in the workable niche while life floods around them into new pools, speciates.

They walk by the roadside, in silence except for the creak of wheel rims and the clop of hooves. Jeannie takes to the community, ratifies its simplicity. She curtsies to a passing buggy and the driver acknowledges with a reserved nod. That one gesture gives Ressler the acute pleasure of locating the key to the chance variations of existence.

"I have lived in east-central Illinois for years," she whispers, "and I never knew such a place existed." Nor did Ressler; he barely believed in such groups when he read of them years ago in American History. "You brought me here," Jeannie insists, giving his hand a covert squeeze.

"No," he objects. "You." They pass a knot of families that gather in front of the general store. He hears accents of German. Although no one pays them any attention, he feels grossly conspicuous. He and Jeannie — glasses, wristwatches, awkwardly constraining clothes — are the grotesque, implausible by-product of a defective turn, representatives of all these people have saved themselves from.

In an unforgettably aromatic, unfinished wooden store, they buy a quilt, made by many hands over several weeks. They buy it for the haunting pattern neither of them can quite make out. It repeats yet is never twice the same, develops, yet stands in place, constantly spinning, unspun. Each time they look at it, it changes. They return reluctantly to the rental, the dead giveaway of their nonbelonging, their mark of Cain, their freedom. The anachronism vanishes in the rearview mirror, a lost place they will never find their way back to, even with detailed ordinance survey. They drive until they find a spot superlatively nowhere, even by prairie standards. There they pull the car off the road, spread the quilt, undress each other, and explore the solid sorrows of one another's bodies as if for the last time.

Jeannie is radiant, rubbed beautifully coral in the raw March air. She can stand the cold nakedness of this copse of trees only by huddling against him. Fierceness is gone. She does not use him this time to discharge her explosive, agitating thistle. No more gangster attempt to recover the androgyne. The two of them fit, couple to one other so wholly that friction is an unnecessary irritation.

Today she is downy, quilt-frightened, narcotically surprised by the unthinking pleasure she finds here. She makes love to him like a girl of sixteen. No, as if they had met at sixteen, and lost sixteen more intervening years, banished from each other by some wrong turn. They roll up in the quilt, so tightly wrapped that they cannot move except to fill each other's missing spaces, conform skin to skin, vapored breathing. They lie for a long, unmeasured time, until the light gives out. The spell failing to sustain, they dress, each helping the other, keeping the other warm until clothing can take over. For the last time they return to the car, enter, hug briefly on the seat, an afterthought, then ride home north in dark, in silence.

Jeannie breaks the quiet. "Tell me that story again."

"What story?"

"How you came to Champaign."

"Why?" He tickles her under the chin. She frowns.

"I like it."

"What's there to like about it?"

"I like how I'm waiting there, in town. How you don't have the first idea of how I'm there."

"You are, aren't you?" Daring, not daring to believe. "You really are, aren't you?"

"Love," she says, with heartbreaking alto. "Whatever you think about me when you are old, I want you to remember that I never lied to you." Never, an overtone in her voice gives away, about anything fundamental. It chills him, past the rapidly falling temperature. This once, despite everything he believes, he chooses not to decode.

They creep back into town, protected from notice by the anonymous car. She drives slowly, dropping almost to zero, delaying the end of their one stolen day of unmitigated intimacy. She continues to halve their speed, but Zeno does not keep Stadium Terrace away. They sit in the front seat looking at one another, hungry again, separate, needy. They would have each other, even here, if they thought for a minute that the magically patterned quilt could hide them. A noise jars them back to the realities of K-court. A couple across the street launching into the cruelty of familiars. Someone's failure to take out the garbage, wash a dish, or pick up a sock escalates into mutual hatred. Recrimination floats out upon the spring night, elides with a cry of disgust that tears free from the back of Jeannie's throat. "God. Listen. I hate people. I really do. The whole wretched lot of us make me ill."

His heart is so full with her, he sees through her without thinking. Her would-be misanthropy is misguided, jejune. He is strong enough now to take on human kindness. "I know. I used to hate people too."

"And?"

He kisses her, grazing her breasts gently into agreement. "Then I met a few." He shakes her, squeezes her shoulders until she giggles. The sound salvages them. She holds on a little tighter. But in her touch, the suggestion of inevitable mitosis. Her mouth stays pursed, expressively silent. She reaches a cold hand up under his shirt, connects the moles on his back with a grazing finger. Jeanette closes to him on the narrow car seat, as if just filling the space between them a few seconds longer will fix everything. Her eyes are wide, groping for words like a drugged woman. Sexual dizziness; she is thinking herself into climax, pushing herself out over the edge again. Jeannie, his Jeannie, comes, shudders, loses herself against him, just out of holding, refusing to stunt love.

Recovering as quickly as she took off, she raises her incredulous head. "Where did that come from? Did you do that to me?" Ressler just holds her, blood testing the weak points in his veins. He curls over her, makes the first motions of leaving. Her voice originates inside his ear. "Stuart, promise me something." All play gone.

"Name it," he says, straining for humor.

"Promise first."

"I promise. What?"

"You must never die."

The Paperwork Reduction Act

So Jimmy won the salary lottery and, thick with suspicion, accepted the windfall. The next time he stayed late, it was about another fluke, linked to the first, less benign. This man, whose most extravagant profanity was "chili con carne," who could not shout except apologetically, waited furiously in the computer room when Franklin and I arrived after an afternoon of playing house. "Problems, Uncle Jim?" Frank asked.

"That's one name for it. They've dropped me from the group insurance."

"They?" The word irritated Todd, with its overtones of conspiracy.

"Our loyal machines. This has to be the work of independent-minded computers. No human being would do such a thing without serving notice." Good faith, touchingly misguided.

"Beginning, please," Franklin said, hanging his jacket on the corner of the CPU.

"What do you mean, 'beginning? There is no beginning. This is the Information Revolution, son." Jimmy was shaken by being singled out to receive the random hit. "Look at this." He handed over the customer copy of a three-part micro-perforated form. The lines did not quite fit into their intended boxes — a bit of operator negligence I would never have noticed before my days of helping to load such paper. The piece was telegraphic: undernamed no longer carried on major medical group policy number XXX because of failure to pay premium during previous period.

"Failure to pay!" Todd laughed, throwing the form into the air. Jimmy scrambled to catch it. Todd's voice shifted register at the blanket stupidity. "What are they talking about? How can you fail to pay? The premium is deducted automatically from every check."

Jimmy groaned. "Supposed to be deducted." He reached into a pocket and withdrew the now heavily crumpled statement stub that had recently thrown him into moral convulsions. The one announcing: You are the lucky winner. "In all the excitement over that salary nonsense, nobody even noticed." He smoothed the ratty scrap and handed it over. Todd reexamined the figures he'd secretly produced. Jimmy didn't notice, but Frank's face changed color. He shot me a look, but in front of the victim, we could say nothing.

Cavalry-like, Dr. Ressler arrived, carrying a bag of zucchini from his rooftop garden, a plot that must have had more soil than Battery Park. "I'm glad you're still here, James," he said, dividing the crop three ways. All anxiety ceased until he finished doling out his gifts. "Now. I can tell something's up. And today," he smiled at me as if I knew the reason, "I'm prepared to solve all problems."

Jimmy laid out the crisis, and Dr. Ressler's brows narrowed over the relevant documents. He did not look at Franklin, but the refusal to mete out the punishing glance was itself crushing. He studied the forms for hidden explanation. Jimmy said he'd called around, and all the relevant executives had apologized but assured him that his not intending to skip a payment did not change the fact.

"When will they reinstate you?" Ressler asked.

"The period after the period when I first pay again. Barring further electronic bolts from the blue, I should be back on coverage within eight weeks."

"Well, that's easy, then," Todd joked. "For two months, just look both ways before you cross the street."

Jimmy managed an anemic grin. Dr. Ressler asked, "James, may I hang on to these?"

"It's hopeless. I've talked to everyone. All I can do is pay up and wait. I wouldn't waste any more breath on it."

"I'd just like to think about this before notching up another round for the corporations." More than passing inconvenience: the individual in a mismatched battle. His asking for another look before conceding inevitable defeat reminded me that the actual quote, eternally misused, was "But for the grace of God there goes John Bradford" A name immortal in its oblivion, four hundred years ago swapped out for the generic I.

Jimmy grumbled his usual threat to enter chicken farming the next time the opportunity arose. The moment the man left, Todd began protesting. "I can't believe it. I don't know what I did. I must have tripped the preemie flag on the way out of the record." Frank was pitiful, scrambling to hide his ineptitude from his hero.

"Let me stake a hypothesis. You went in and requested a flat-fee bonus. Am I right?" Todd nodded. "You added your figure to his gross and put the total into the salary field."

Todd slapped his palm on his scalp. "Jesus. The program processed the whole check as a bonus."

"From which, of course, no premium is deducted."

"Christ. Who wrote that thing? What a kludge. Shouldn't it have known that the man can't get a bonus without a salary check in the same period?"

"Don't blame the code. I don't think the authors anticipated second-shift operators doing surgical intervention on their data structures."

Todd threw his hands up. "Well. Now we all know better."

Ressler took Jimmy's papers and sat at the console. Todd sat next to him at the keyboard. The two of them retraced Todd's escapade, which seemed more capricious with each keystroke. I tried to follow as they undertook flood control. I'd never noticed before how much Frank talked with his hands. He rubbed an eraser all over the screen, gesticulated at the keys, drew logic flows into his sketchpad, and sculpted in the air the solution he thought they might yet go after. Ressler sat motionless, a few words doing the work.

But there was little even he could do. The letter had been sent, the coverage canceled. They could not now uncancel the cancellation. Revealing all — the corrective measure of first choice — was out of the question. Todd would lose his job, perhaps be slapped with criminal charges, and Dr. Ressler would fall under suspicion. They could undo the event electronically, but the doctoring involved too many systems: their own, the firm that handled the check, the insurance company where the policy resided. The fix might muck up something else. "Too many humans tipped off already," Todd added. "Can't jerry-rig humans, unfortunately."

"Not yet," Ressler granted.

A few weeks after moving into my place, Franklin began to seep out again. He moved his treasured stereo into my room, a breakthrough in intimacy, and he even brought the violets, blues, and greens from his massive spectrum-arranged record collection. Every few days saw a trickle of disks, gradually edging into the higher wavelengths. He himself was there as often as ever. We continued to read together, to listen, to play, to share meals.

Sex remained dangerous, a revelation about how far I might go, how far I needed to keep going once brought out. I learned no end of things about myself. Franklin could be aggressive, slow, mercurial. He could stalk like a thief looting a house. He could repeat, wistfully after we spent ourselves, the Puritans' standard caption for a needlework primer's A: "In Adam's Fall, We Sinned All." He could lie still under the covers and tell, after a too-savage unloading, "Heard the one about the hellfire preacher berating his congregation? 'Is an hour of pleasure worth an eternity of regret?' Voice from the back of the church calls out, 'How do you make it last an hour?'"

We began to get out again, as the city again warmed. We took a trip up to the Bronx Zoo. Franklin was as excited as a child, and babbled like one. "Look! Kangaroos! Do you know that the mother can slow or speed up gestation, depending on food supply?"

"The name means 'I don't know,'" I contributed. Standard trivia fare. "Aboriginal answer to white hunter's question. 'What do you call those fur-bags with the giant hind legs?' 'Haven't the faintest idea what you're talking about, hombre.'"

"She licks down this passage in her fur, the way to the pouch, see? So that her newborn, a wriggly blob like a shelless snail, can slog out the journey__"

"Have you actually seen this happen?" I asked suspiciously.

"Do endless wildlife shows on public television count?" Oh, he was up that day; the cages were not cages, but regional sanctuary from unstoppable habitat destruction. I couldn't help but think of the dismal visit to Central Park Tuckwell and I had made eight months before. Separate lifetimes.

He was always ready for the impulse activity, for any jaunt at any hour, so long as it did not conflict with MOL, about which he grew unusually conscientious. Obscure museums, galleries, secret spaghetti dives, performing-arts warehouses, a walking tour of the colonial remnants of the city. For the first time since leaving Indiana, 1 went up against the variety of New York. Yet something in the way he moved feet first through the place tipped me off that he was just visiting.

I never expected I would have him all there, every time he stayed over or we went out together. But his eternal pacing__

He had a way of obsessively measuring out a room three times a minute, even when sitting still. I thought the restlessness came from his being twenty-six, at the height of his powers, with nothing of consequence to do. I put myself entirely at his disposal as research assistant for the dissertation. "I can find anything," 1 swore to him. "Facts are my life." I couldn't have made a worse suggestion, even in jest. It made him pace in even tighter circles. He never dropped the boyish charm, the Midwestern politeness. He made it a point to be home more predictably, and even called on a couple occasions to tell me he would miss a standing meal. But his silence grew denser even as he pruned it.

When he was gone, I thought he might be dead, distracted, religiously converted, injured, amnesiac, overcome by indifference. Each scenario was a toxin, whose cold advanced up my arms and legs. Yet I would not put on the saving tourniquet, take the necessary measures. Leaden suspicion was scarily arousing. I discovered it only slowly. My fear for him when he was away became one of those secret fetishes discovered late in life — a region on my body that when struck by that taboo person reduced me to helpless perversity I never suspected lay in me.

These were awful weeks. Every reckless afternoon proved that an hour, I would draw away with a sick thrill, find myself saying, in the extremity of affected calm, "We aren't really one another's type, you know. You need someone neurotic, taller, silkier, not so verbose." On alternate days, I wanted to break laws for him, to take to terrorism rather than give up what little life with him I'd managed to win. I dwelt on the worst possible explanations for what was happening, the way someone who discovers a growth on a bone cannot help, several times an hour, feeling it to see if it has grown.

Breathless, off-balance, by turns willfully wanting to confirm the incurable worst, I would use my key privileges to his place. An attempt to track him down, to find out how he lived when away from me. When I let myself into his apartment, I always masked my humiliation in high spirits. It never seemed to bother him. He could jump out of bed as if he'd been waiting impatiently for me for hours. "So what do you know about fixing refrigerators?" Or: "You must be the French Maid. Shall we wrinkle the sheets once before ironing them?" No matter what hour I surprised him there, we did not stay around his place for long. Twenty minutes of talk or milting or cleaning up and we'd be gone, to an exhibition, for a meal, back to my place, where he would once again stay a couple of days.

I never appeared empty-handed, so that if he was not there, as he frequently wasn't, I would have some excuse for dropping in while he was out, some reward to leave him for confirming my compulsive need to prove him not at home. I'd bring by a novel, claiming I'd just finished it and it was so beautiful I had to make the impulsive crosstown delivery. I would sit at his kitchen table, too cluttered with tapes, art repros, delinquent library books, lid-less half-full peanut butter jars, and dire predictions torn from the Science Times to be used for actual meals, and compose scraps of occasional verse by way of saying that I'd been by and we had failed to connect.

These poems, more heartfelt than skilled, were the only means I had of telling him things without cloaking the sentiment in requisite irony. In reverting to a form that most lovers swear off of at eighteen, I compounded the dangerous instability, pushing myself where something would soon have to happen.

The first days of intimacy scare:

exchange of histories too keen to mean

anything yet but new threat of loss.

Why thaw now? Why lay bare

all that has held in a fine hide and stake

it here against chance green?

Because we haven't any choice.

Just as two tunes catch in a chord

care moves forward, fact-gathering.

Our measured steps might improvise

a way for winter to wind down,

ice flushing crusted puddles, freeing spring.

I would copy these pathetic fallacies onto a notepad he'd made up for himself: From the Couch of Franklin Todd. Then I would shuffle them into the stack by the telephone, among the ghostly phone transcripts and the portraits made from memory of the people on the other end of the line. He never mentioned discovering them. But the older ones were no longer there when I left an addendum. He pressed them into notebooks somewhere or threw them away.

Life above the antique shop, nights when he did not show, became unbearably acute. The furnishings I had carefully selected, the old crochets, the scents that had been so evocative once, grew too much, the way slight touch is acid to a skin oversensitive with fever. Coming home from work, in days that were struggling to lengthen and stay bright until a reasonable hour, 1 would look up at the intimate pool of light coming from the room upstairs. I knew that the Edwardian glow was turned on by a digital timer, just as the choker collar — still capable of eliciting response from him— wrapped the neck of a woman who, that afternoon, had spent half an hour procuring the feasibility of test bans.

Unable to sleep, I would call him at the office at obscene hours of the night. Each week was a new probe to see how depraved I might, under the prose binding, really be. "Do you mind if I touch myself while you talk? Say something that might get me bothered." Franklin loved these experiments, thrilled to play along over the phone. Sometimes he urged me to wait until he got home. Others, he was as happy to tease me, take care of me remotely via analog transmission.

1 had no clue where we were heading or how long 1 would be able to last. I only knew that every question I was asked all day long seemed a nuisance variation on the one I wanted answered. When I was away from him, I was frantic with possibility. When I was with him, it wasn't enough. I had stumbled into a cadence, begun to believe that love had to lead somewhere. He was waiting for the same revelation, each of us afraid to move lest we bring about the expected QED.

One early-spring Saturday I found myself, around two in the afternoon, half a dozen blocks from his apartment. He had not shown the night before; Fridays, with their end-of-week processing, frequently became all-nighters. I had no idea where in all the East Coast he had ended up, but his place was as good a guess as any. I decided to surprise him with afternoon breakfast. I ducked into a deli and bought bagels, cream cheese, coffee, oranges, and a horrible sucrose-dripping thing that Todd, with his sweet tooth, would doubtless devour instantly. I walked up to his loft and let myself in.

He was still asleep. Evidence of disorganized entry pointed to a rough night with the machines. I stood in the foyer, wondering whether to wake him. I took a few steps toward the bedroom, then came back to the hall. However good-naturedly he awoke and greeted me, he could only be irritated, and I'd only feel more desperate to correct the impression of desperation. But coming back into the foyer, I thought: So what if I tip my hand? What doesn't he know about me already? Affection, even overdone, must be preferable to more empty space. Back to the bedroom: but before I could make it all the way there, I felt my eagerness driving him away.

I have never felt such indecision, certainly not about anything so ludicrous as whether to get a male up for breakfast. My inability to take more than a step in either direction suddenly seemed emblematic. From some reserve of self-possession, I saw how pitiful I'd become. I laughed out loud, but softly, so as not to wake him. I went to the cluttered table, composed some verses, crumpled them up, and wrote instead, "Dearest Buddy. I came by. Left you a bagel for breakfast."

But just as I was quietly letting myself out, I was again overcome by desire. This might, after all, be the last time. Effusion was the least of the two vices, everything considered. I let myself back in, scolding and cheering myself at once. I went straight into the bedroom, relieved, leaned deeply over him, and kissed him on the shaggy head. He made a soft, pleased gurgle, which was answered by another in a higher register. On the pillow next to him, there moved a second, soft, blond angelic head. An incoherent female voice, lovely in unconsciousness, said, "I'm so hungry I could eat a house."

All I could think about was getting out before more groggy vocalizings brought them conscious. I made it back to the front room, went to the table, and with amazing presence of mind, crossed out "a bagel" and wrote, "Oops; two bagels," supplementing the first from the now useless bag. Out on the street, wandering at random through the press of the Village, I understood; fidelity was for stereos. Working his way through love's alphabet, the man was stuck on the A's. Annie was who he wanted.