Gold Bug Variations

XXIV

Canon at the Octave

He is within easy reach, unreachable. His last postmark, Dr. Ressler's forsaken Midwest grain oasis. Even there — only a thousand miles from me, on the same continent, identical landmass. Here. Now that I can't reach him, I want to. The letter I so long dragged my heels on, endlessly red-penned in my head, left lying for weeks on the bureau, and at last ambivalently sent off just before realizing my mistake has come back bearing an Indo-European grab bag of apologies saying that the addressee has vanished without forwarding address. The text of my sham indifference now sits urgent, priority mail, registered, express in my hands.

Not even the same letter, now that it's been returned. Even if I were to place it unrevised in another envelope, send it out again to his unresearchable new post node, it would not mean what it meant the afternoon I finally managed to put it together. The thing I thought to make him see then is gone. Aggregate chance has changed it — a memorandum lost in transit.

If I had his address (counterfactual) and if I could hit on the right words (hypothetical), I might send him some item from our assembled quote box—"I need to know someone"; "What is the origin of 'to make the catch'?"; "What's this I hear about you two cohabiting?"; "Oops, two bagels" — that might convey, if not the particulars of what I need to say now, at least the sense that if he were in the neighborhood (subjunctive), I'd like to see him. But even our favorite phrases, reprised over our allotted months on different occasions, repeated once more would now go enharmonic, altered, racing home even as they stay in place, changing because all other lines range freely around them.

1 cannot say the same thing twice. The first time through, invention; the second, allusion; a third promotes it to motif, then theme, keepsake, baggage, small consolation. Brought back after years, it evokes a lost twinge never harbored in the original. Perhaps, with everything between us changed beyond recognition, one more reprise might make it invention again.

When the chance was there, who needed to say anything? Now that I can't write, predicates take shape; polyps spread across my insides, bubbling into my throat, seeking the surgery of speech. What do I want so badly to tell him, now that the channel is down? I wanted to say it — the same thing, only different — that evening at that first seafood dive. (The front end of the lobster scuttled into the tank. Todd said, "You should see how they do beef." I kept mum.) 1 wanted to tell him, that summer night on the swings. (I came all over him, shuddering, but disguised the event, admitting nothing.) I wanted to say something achingly similar, that freezing night under the New England stars. (Todd and Dr. Ressler talked away, trying to save life from life. I worked a jigsaw.) I wanted to say the urgent thing, that Saturday afternoon when I leaned over him as he slept. (Annie said, still asleep, "I'm so hungry I could eat a house." I slipped verbless out the door, leaving no hostages.) I always thought it was Todd, ironic, dry, who constantly pleaded that quintessential department-store excuse "No thanks; just browsing." But it wasn't. Always, from the start, it was me.

What is it that I'd give the rest of my exhausted savings to say to him, now that I can't? I want to tell him what I've learned. Todd: I have taken on science, spent the year acquiring terms, doing a blitz Berlitz in the same grammar our friend was once after. The same, only with all particulars changed. And here is the sense, if not the specifics of what I've picked up.

"There is, in the Universe, a Stair." Small, too small for me to see the steps, even with the best current optics, too small to be floor-planned except through experimental analogy. But large beyond telling, a single epic verse five thousand volumes long, three billion years old. It is smooth, spiral, aperiodic, repeating. Within the regular frame is a sequence so varying that it leaps over the complexity barrier and freely adopts any of an inexhaustible array of possible meanings.

But meaning does not reside in the enormous molecule, the reservoir of naked data. The Stair Dr. Ressler was intent on climbing is not rolled up in the nucleus like a builder's blueprint. The plan does not map out the organism in so many words. Nowhere in DNA is there written the idea or dimensions of "tentacle," "flipper," "hand." Nowhere does it describe the shape or functioning of nerve or muscle. Tissue is not modeled to scale. Yet shape, structure, functioning, even the range of behavior: everything originates here, the repository where all significant difference is jotted down, held in place, passed along perfectly, but never twice the same.

I would tell Todd, spell it out in a five-thousand-volume letter. I would say how I have seen, close up, what Ressler wanted to crack through to. How I have felt it, sustained the chase in myself. How the urge to strip the noise from the cipher is always the desire to say what it means to be able to say anything, to read some part of what is written here, without resort to intermediaries. To get to the generating spark, to follow the score extracted from the split lark. I would tell him, at last, sparing nothing, just what in the impregnable sum of journal articles sent Ressler quietly away, appalled, stunted with wonder.

I would tell him everything I have found. I would lay my notebooks open to him. How the helix is not a description at all, but just the infolded germ of a scaffolding organism whose function is to promote and preserve the art treasure that erects it. How the four-base language is both more and less than plan. How it comprises secret writing in the fullest sense, possessing all the infinite, extendable, constricting possibilities lying hidden in the parts of speech. How there is always a go-between, a sign between signature and nature.

I would tell him of nucleic acid's nouns, its cistrons. I would show how stretches of the supercoiled chromosome are simple substitutions for polypeptide chains. Even Todd would see how breathtaking it must have been to be the first to connect metaphor to chemistry, to find the genes, those letter-crosses nesting like flocks in family trees. But I'd make the airtight case that nouns were not what Ressler was after.

I'd show him the speaking string's conjunctions, interrogatives, and prepositions — operator and promoter sites where proteins clamp, qualifying the noun, turning the cistron on or off in subordinate clauses and prepositional phrases. I would show him how Ressler lived at the moment when the ravishing, intensely cybernetic system, after millennia of theorizing, at last laid itself open. But Franklin would be the first to agree that prepositions alone would never have fed our friend.

I would tutor him in the verbs, set in animation the enzymes, programmed molecules that act, cause, do, command things to fly upwards from equilibrium. I could touch upon the adverbs and adjectives, the modifying sea inside the cell wall singing "brightly," "langsam," "con brio." I could deliver an overview of how the five thousand volumes produce their own lexicon of translators for reading their own messengers (transcribed by enzymes of their own synthesis) at sites of their own devising. The complete predication, the weird collaboration of disparate parts of speech into whole utterances, is now within my working vocabulary.

If Todd could sit still for this explanation, if my translation of a translation meant anything to him, he would see that none of this was what the professor was after; despite the brute beauty of the system, none of these parts of speech would have had the power to cripple the man. Then I would say what I know: that an accident of private history left Ressler, for a single, prohibited, unrecoverable moment, hearing not what the grammar says but what it means.

I would tell you, straight out, what I've spent the year and my savings to verify, how language makes it impossible to receive the exact message sent. I would tell that anecdote Ressler told me, the day I went to say goodbye, in bitterness over you. That account of a boyhood experiment with a friend and a tin-can telephone: how he had yelled along the muffling string, "Calling Timmy, calling Timmy." Then, dispensing with the ingenious medium and calling out directly across the twenty feet of more expedient air: "Could you hear that?" Only here, there's no jumping outside the medium to verify transmission. Only the tinny tin.

I would make metaphors for you until I became almost clear. Words are fairy tale, not a court transcript. They are those PA announcements on public trans where all you can make out is the irrelevant filler. "Ladies and gentlemen, this is your captain speaking. We're experiencing severe sdklh dhfj hryu e ahj ajd astue for alarm." Words are those slides they constantly fed you in art history, the blurred, color-poor angels of annunciation meant to stand in for the trip to Bruges. But I have no other means to tell it to you.

Ressler, when all molecular inheritance took shape in outline before him, saw it: the closest he would ever get is simile, literature in translation, the thing by another name, and never what the tag stood for. The dream that base-pair sequences might talk about themselves in high-level grammar vanished in the synthesized organism. Science remains at best a marvelous mine, not a replacement for the shattered Tower. Even at his death, despite the unstoppable advances in the state of decoding art, the human genome defies interpretation.

And yet, a man's speech should exceed his lapse, else what's a meta for? The manufacture of these working terms, names and the rules for manipulating them, the accuracy of their fit as fired in îhe crucible of environment, gave him a way in that mere possession of the thing never would have allotted. Names let him toss arrangements around, examine the implications of the message from angles that did not exist in negotiable reality. There is, in this Universe, a Stair.

If I have read the texts correctly — and who knows how wide of the mark my grasp of the blurry words is — then the grand synthesis that ten years ago today pulled all biology into a single tenet is this: a living thing is a postulate about where it finds itself. But that living thing postulates, deep in its cells, in a language that is itself also just a rough guess, a running, revisable analogy. The intermediary of language alone makes it possible to run trials, load experiment. Only by splitting the name from the thing it stands for can tinkering take place. Language, however faulty a direct describer, can get to the place, even change it, by strange ability to simulate, to suppose, to say something else than what is.

A given stretch of the epic verse, the sequence AACGCTA, may start life as a part of speech, emblem noun or imperative verb; "add this, then a bond, then another." By fault in the sentence-making system, the original utterance becomes AACGCGTA. Not much, I hear you dismiss. So what? So everything; you must see it. The whole parade depends on seizing mistakes. The accidental change of a single base pair can ripple through the reading process, accounting, after eons of accretion, for every implicit structure never mentioned in the string: stems, leaves, hair, hands, and— most hypothetical — brain. Evolution, the first arrangement of living things that doesn't commit the post hoc fallacy, lays it out: invention mothers necessity.

The feasibility of each inherited variation — theme elaborated by mutation — breeds out until there is no more single epic but four million variant variorum editions, each matched to the shelf where it finds itself. Yet the code, the language life writes itself in, is universal for every living thing, taking hold once and spinning, telling in all places at all times an eerie, inconceivably implausible story of how in the beginning there was a little water, ammonia, and methane, all trapped by trivial rules, and at the end, this woman saying over and over to herself, I want to tell you, I want to tell.

The scrim lifted, this is what Dr. Ressler saw. The text of a living thing, the tender, delicate, unlikely apparatus for unfolding it, does not stand for or represent or disfigure the shape of the world; it is just a set of possible, implementable maybes about what one might do about it. Nature seems to favor the what-if. Once over the complexity barrier, the simple account promotes itself to simulation. That is the magic of language: every word waits to come true. Description gives way to postulate, is refined by experiment into singing celebration. The same opaque, heavy-handed system that kept him one step away from what those emblems stand for permits this. No saying how; I've been in molecular linguistics long enough to know that language, like economics and love, is wonderful in practice, but just won't work out in theory.

The notebooks I've been keeping for you, friend, if they go on long enough, might become something new, not the thing I wanted to get at, but a live thing all the same, a living thing's living offspring. Would you approve of them? Could all this stuff still move you? To think so has become my life, what all this science writing hopes for. Every sentence ever written down is sent into the world to be winnowed or thrive according to the same accountability principle as those cistrons and their experimental apparatus. Does a given combination of words push close? Do they resonate? Or are they more noise, divorcibles, permutations to dispense with? Does the line shout out, beat around the edges of something real? Do the words make sense? Do we find ourselves arriving back at them late one surprise night, after years of traveling, thinking them dead? Is this phrase worth the ink it expends? Is it what I mean, something I need? Unshakable bits of the original Question Board. Months after quitting, I'm still working on the thing. Still pasting together. I have something almost right, something to say for no one's but your ears, if I could only reach you.

But it's stupid, to write as if he could read this. How could he know what has happened, how far I have come, how I would share him now with anyone, under any conditions, so long as I had a fraction of him to converse with? He couldn't, can't, doesn't, won't: choose your modality. Last he heard, I crossed him off, cut the tin-can string. "It has been so long since he has heard from me that he might easily conclude that I too am dead."

But I know something of him. He is here. Beached on the same island I am. I could walk to him overland if I had a map, an X to mark his spot, that Flemish, reflexive construction he once wrote me: "You Find Yourself Here." Frank, there is no other way to you but this.

The man you wanted me to name for you: his metaphors, too, were from the start just genes, as "gene" is the most successful metaphor his science has yet made to name life's notes toward a theory of experience. Dozens of words he scattered on us while alive still live. See? They keep me up at night, typing. This is what one woman might do with them. Todd, my mate, my husband, could I reach you, I would tell you how I have discovered what he was after — the secret subjunctive — and what discovery did to him. I would say how I have heard him, alone in this laboratory, his school, singing to himself. How I have made out, at last, what tune he wanted to pass on, the tune I want to sing you, the only notes worth moving mouth to mimic, and what the snippet means in our vocabulary. Franklin, just as you asked me: I have identified your friend.

Nomenclature

By spring, Ressler's trio has the kinks in cell-free synthesis ironed out. Uncanny: they can fractionate the inanimate building blocks, assemble them under controlled conditions, add a coded messenger, slip in the distilled adaptor, and — the nearest thing to golem-making to date—manufacture proteins, bring into being the plaintext product of the cell. It is not yet creating life. But their procedure is a close functional simulation.

They can take a chaotic soup of free aminos and arrange them, from out of a staggering number of linear permutations, into a sequence that gives them enzymatic sense. Granted, the information they introduce is not theirs, nor can they read it either before or after translation. They cannot compare the bit they submit and the batch output. The text is too complex, the print too fine.

They stand, all but there, confronting one last unskirtable hurdle. They can cause the code to be broken, eavesdrop on the process, but they can't get close enough to read the code book. For weeks, neither Koss, Botkin, nor Ressler has been able to supply any fresh suggestions. Ressler concludes that they are in need of new blood. He tries out the problem on his office mate. Since assaulting Ressler that day outside Ulrich's office, Lovering has been unreadably neutral. Enough time has passed to try reestablishing relations. This intellectual problem is Ressler's peace offering. Lovering declines the proffered branch, polite but indifferent, too busy to be bothered. To leave Lovering an honorable out, Ressler jokes, "Maybe your girlfriend would like to take a shot at the problem." When Lovering jerks his head up from his desk, eyes burning, Ressler regrets the miscalculation.

He takes a slow walk to the Woytowichs', a path he has lately reopened. They will never replace the Blakes, but they are nevertheless — what is the word? — contact. The prodigious Ivy has an undeniable fascination about her rapid development. This time Dan and Renée are between diaper changes. He and Dan trade project stumbling blocks. It gives Ressler no pleasure to hear that the ILLIAC project is just as seriously log-jammed.

"The kid's program is fine," Woyty admires. "It's terrific what he can make that machine do, after only a few months. But after every run that closes in on an occurrence of the pattern we're after, Joey changes his blessed instruction deck again. The program keeps expanding, like those radioactive tomatoes Botany is always growing. Exceptions to the latest exception-handling. The do-loops have grown do-loops on them several nests thick. Very Ptolemaic."

Ressler suggests that they might be engineering their desired result. Dan nods gravely at the possibility. Then, as if hitting on a remedy, he says, "Hey. Come take a look at this." Ressler follows Dan into the infant's bedroom. There, father arranges Ivy on the rug and sets in front of her four brightly colored blocks — rose, powder blue, eucalyptus, lemon — boldly imprinted with oversized letters. "Find the A, Ivy. Come on, little girl." Singsong, he coaches, "A is for ap-ple, aard-vark, an-gi-o-sperm."

Ivy is off and crawling. Stretching out a system of muscles she can still but pitifully coordinate, she falls on the correct block. Ressler remains guarded. "One in four." Can she repeat?

Woyty laughs confidently. He returns the child to the starting point, shuffles the blocks, and says, "Can you show me the C, Ivy? Sure you can. C is for cat and cactus___"

"Cuneiform," Ressler suggests. "Codon." The baby, unperturbed, heaves herself against the correct letter in question. Ressler's eyes light, fueled from a source far away. Still in the crib, Ivy knows her alphabet. Is it real learning or just conditioning? The question, at this level, is meaningless. The scientists sit on the nursery floor. Daniel exercises his daughter's arms, strokes the hamhock smoothness of her back, stimulating the nerve connections to solidify into a network. Ressler relates the in vitro successes and describes the block they now knock up against. They can produce plaintext proteins from ciphertext nucleic acid. But analysis cannot yet tell them within acceptable margin of error how the sequences correspond.

"So close you are almost past it," Woyty says.

"With long chains, we can label the bases in the sequence we feed the decoder. We can label the amino acids picked up in the synthesis. But it doesn't give us position. The best we can do is assign weight ratios — We're no closer to actual assignments."

"It's a pickle," Daniel concedes. A missed beat reveals that Woytowich is not really following him. He's playing with the baby. The gap between them wraps Ressler in loneliness more severe than that brought on by banging on the closed codon library door. Daniel says, "I wish I could help you, Stuart." Struck by a happy inspiration, he suggests, "Let's ask Ivy."

Weeks pass, the project advancing without real headway. One day, he cannot even name the month anymore, he comes home to the barracks to find Jeanette, in lovely familiarity, waiting for him as if they were silver anniversary candidates. Their time apart cannot even masquerade as moral restraint anymore. Simple cautious terror. But here she is again, in his front room, smiling richly, once more free from the delays and wastes of time that constitute their love. He returns her kiss, goes to the record player, puts the sound track on. She follows him eagerly with her eyes. Like me. Need me. "Hungry?" he asks. "I think I have something that might have been Major Grey Chutney once."

"No thanks. I never eat when I'm in love."

"You know this from experience?"

"Do now." Jeanette makes a little space for him to sit. No sooner does he than she changes her mind. "Stuart? I've a great idea. Let's go outside."

"Outside?"

"You remember." She crooks a finger toward the window. "Trees. Sky. Living things. Perfectly safe, in small doses."

"Well__" Suspicious. "It isn't the strontium 90 level I'm worried about, you understand."

"What, then?"

"It's just that, you are — how can I put this delicately?"

"Married?"

"Exactly. Walking in public, together__"

"Could be that Edward G. Robinson scenario all over again." Spring has made her reckless. "Come on," she laughs. "It's tougher to hit a moving target." She will go walking, and won't hear no. Nor, after another minute, does he want to refuse.

They roll onto the lawn, turn up the block, put Stadium Terrace behind them. He is struck by the department store of smells, after the stale monoscent of the barracks. "And," he adds, thinking out loud, "there are a lot more places to sit."

She stretches herself luxuriously. Relaxing, slack on the return stroke, she slips her arm into his. Here, in residential Champaign, in front of a gauntlet of plate glass — colleagues, friends, faint acquaintances — she makes an open, unambiguous declaration. He knows what it means. She is ready now, ready to leave her husband, that blameless man, to upend her life, to break it and build it again in this arbitrary spot, to recommence, uncertain, with him, only him. Here, now, in spring. Ressler's arms are paralyzed. He cannot move them a millimeter in any direction, either to encourage her or to withdraw and spoil the happy idiocy that has come across her face. He goes numb from neck down.

The abnormal warming trend has brought on, ahead of schedule, a rush of returning life up and down the ladder. She makes first mention of the event. Her voice is low, imparting, even-keyed: Here we are, outside, together, nothing hidden. "Flowers," she says. "How early! But it's been so long." He studies her skin. Just below the yellow, little-girl's surface, two blue-green blood tubes in her temples pulse as deep as a spanking new bruise, as the Aegean. She catches him looking, curls up shyly. "What are your favorites?"

"Favorite whats?"

She shoves him. "Haven't you been listening? Favorite flowers."

He is every bit as adrift as when he didn't know the antecedent.

"Hmm. Coleus, I suppose."

"Coleus? You suppose? Its flowers are this little."

"Sorry. I guess I meant crocus."

"Oh. Crocus is all right. First. Virginal. Paschal. Fresh schoolgirl." She pauses, putting things together. She grabs his arms, stopping him. "Wait a minute. You're an amateur, aren't you? And you call yourself a biologist!"

Ressler kicks a stone. "I've never called myself that."

Jeanette gapes, hurt by his willful ignorance toward blooms, but half excited at the thought that here, at last, is something she can be the first and only one to give him. "Wait. Look. See over there? Do you know what those are?"

He follows the line of her perfect extended finger. "Y-yes," he says, so tentatively it hurts. "I believe those are droopy, wrinkled, yellow vegetable genitalia."

"Fool. Listen to me. Those are called Narcissus. Even you can see why."

"Am I responsible for etymology as well?"

She kisses him, tongue, for the whole incorporated city to see. "Yes. You are. Now. How about these?"

"Those? Piece of cake. Those are, don't tell me— Nope. I'm afraid it's strike two."

She supplies a name, which he does not even hear, so taken up is he with the soft, effusive enthusiasm in her face. Bluebells, cockle shells: could be anything. He will ask her to repeat it, explain the name here in the privacy of the world. She takes his hand with the grip of a school crossing guard. From one plant to another: who would have thought the block contained so many? Revelation creeps over him. These bee-lures, bright landing pads, reproductive export docks for photofactories temporary beyond telling, self-promoting color that next month will annihilate: each is called something, distinct, keen, revealing. Every item has an exotic label that, while not the thing, is the only way of latching onto it in the course of a walk through the neighborhood.

A good deal of his undergraduate days were spent committing to memory vast tracts of binomial nomenclature. But the genus and species identifiers inhabiting his past, while occasionally colorful, were functional: ratios arranging in systematic manner what would otherwise be arbitrary varietal chaos. He knows of the raging taxonomic debate between splitters and lumpers, between those who see in each individual — never corresponding to the norm, always a little bit Other—the call for a new species, and those who want to restrict the chart to broad, manageable branches. His own discipline, the tabulation of mutations at the molecular level, might solve the matter, showing gaps between species to be both discrete and continuous. But whatever the local bias, inflected, logic-bound Latin taxonomy strives to squash ambiguity, to distinguish between surfaces.

Not so Gladiola, Jack-in-the-Pulpit, Mother of Thousands, Evanescence, False Solomon's Seal, Wake-Robin. The words Jeanette whispers to him, makes him repeat, ranging speculatively across the year, are not labels at all. They are intent on a different program altogether. Bidens frondosa, he learns, might go by Beggar-ticks, Ray-less Marigold, Sticktight, Devil's Bootjack, Pitchfork Weed. It might even be named the Nameless Wonder, for that matter, and still not strain the grain. According to this woman, a thousand different bi-zarrely descriptive modifiers specify the catch-all violet. The naming urge embodies the feminine miracle pouring it in his ears.

All desire comes down to naming. Yet no nomenclature will ever erase the fact: standing for is also obscuring. The real use of names must be something more serious than handle-efficiency. It must also be myth-making, resourceful approximation, soothing the scar between figure and ground, between the dead chemicals ATCG and the repeating uniqueness they have become. Dr. Koss, his Jeannie, moves him on, graduates him to bulbs that have not appeared yet, to stamens that never show themselves in this region. The game grows more incredible as it goes on. She says how the garden-variety pansy, one of the few lay identifiers he has taken for granted all these years, takes its name from pensée, French for thought. From thought to word to name to plant: the chain equating them, more fragile than the petals themselves, defies examination except through tools as fragile, of the same make. She feeds a tutoring hand inside his jacket, releasing a dam burst of labels. What, he wonders, could he call this blossomer?

"You are brilliant," he says.

Jeanette drops her jaw. "Why? Because I like gardening?"

But the germ has taken hold in him. Flowers and their cipher-texts, smearing the one-for-one trip-wire correspondence that in vitro would isolate. Can the handle relating base patterns to proteins clear this up? Or could it be that in vitro is less precise than this hopeless, associative morass: Baby's Breath, Crowfoot, Lily of the Valley, Queen Anne's Lace?

"But can we call them anything we like?" His words elicit only a confused look. "I mean," he measures, "people call flowers what their grandmothers teach them to call them. But some grandmother assigned the tag once, way back, right?"

Jeannie chuckles at his earnestness. "Several grandmothers in several places at several different times." No conspiracy.

"Why is a given common name the plant's name? No one in a million years is ever likely to argue with 'Black-Eyed Susan.' What makes it right?" Dark and disturbing, a flare threatening the reductionist certainty that has guided his every step since the home nature museum. The task of the skeptic is to determine, for every appearance, if the label fits the thing. Every tag must be either apt or inapt. Was Charles the Bald? Louis the Fat? Richard the Lion-Hearted? By a slow tightening of terms, exclusion of middles, improvement of instrument, each sobriquet's appropriateness becomes discernible. But the assumption is shaken to the core by the introduction of Jeanette the Misnicknamed. If the name is apt, it's not; if it's not, it is.

She tightens against him. Her waist persuades, hands help, eyes ratify, arms work their armistice. "Well, I suppose a name is right if it sticks, if it becomes the name."

"I'd like something more than the tyranny of the vote."

She gives him the once-over. "All right, bub. You are above average in looks, so we're gonna give you one more shot. What exactly do you have in mind?"

"These," he says, leading her by the digits. "These tiny, bulbous ones."

"Oh!" She smiles widely. "Excellent choice; the name for these is inspired. Note how puffy, spacious. And how they hang upside down. You have thirty seconds."

When he makes no reply, she patters. "Ready for this? Dutchman's Breeches." He makes a puzzled, slight tightening of the mouth, flick of fingers. Faltering, she says, "See the trousers?" There are no trousers. For one, the flowers are less than an inch across. The blossoms flare out in a three-dimensional solid, more H than Y, an oriental kite. Upside down, opening underneath. But why Dutchman? At his failure to respond, Jeannie's features deepen, ready to run from the first hint of disaster. She is more beautiful in distress than at her sunniest. He needs this woman, her scattered stimuli of joy, intensity, and fright. He will end up on her doorstep in the dark rain, waiting for her to come out and utter even so little as one not unkind word.

He drops to his knees and examines, up close, this fragile palate opening diffidently to the air. The more Ressler looks, the more iridescent the bloom becomes until it goes purple around the lip. It smells of nothing — sinister, promising, forsworn, far away, as far away as Jeannie's hair. He moves it under his eye, careful to manipulate only the stem. Glass, it would shatter at a fingerprint. Even so, nature uses him: light rearrangement of examining is enough to dust pollen across his hand.

"But what if it weren't?" he says at last. "What if it were something else? Say, the Common Speak-a-portal."

Dr. Koss, who has followed him to knee level, struggles to her feet like a newborn wildebeest. She stares at him, slowly going radiant, finding in him what she has been after. He has broken the code. Ressler too tries to struggle to his feet, but her mouth blocks his way. "Mouth" is certainly misnamed: what he kisses is something lighter, wider, more enveloping. He is set for weeks, for as long as memory holds out.

How obvious, waiting to be discovered: the tracts of rectilinear Midwest that he once loved for their reserved refusal to interfere with fact in fact consist of an indivisible density of named things. Purple-green weeds sprouting ubiquitously throughout spring. Exploding pollen packets. Seeds parachuting on currents of wind. Waxy pitchers, dull matte, convoluted packed rosettes, bright, round, fierce day's eyes, each replicating and subduing the earth, attempting to demonstrate by success the aptness of their sobriquet.

Jeanette, wetting his mouth with hers, breaks only long enough to pull him impatiently back toward the barracks. But before she can cover him in the prize she will bestow on him for his discovery, while he can still remember the wrinkle with sufficient agitation, Ressler grabs the spiral notebook that came out to Illinois with him. He has reserved it until this moment for lab notes, hypotheses, models, the verifiable jottings of procedure. The pages fill with a complete, handwritten history of the in vitro attempt. Now they seem the logical place to record the afternoon's momentous insight. Jeannie clings lightly to his back, sinking her teeth into his shoulder. She looks on, reads as she murmurs, allowing him two minutes to say what he needs. Then she will take from him everything he has shown himself to be worth. But first, he arrests in print amber the skeleton that might one day release the world from its condition of standing cipherhood: "Flowers have names."

Today in History

March 21: First day of spring, vernal equinox, pedal point of Aries, the calendar's octave. My file for the day is full of forgettable sports records, local legislation, small-time politics, standard international bickering. I can find only one thing of lasting consequence that happened on this date, one recombination that will stick, lodge itself in the permanent gene. For once, I break the self-imposed rule prohibiting birthdays: today is Bach's.

Ressler was celebrating that musical provincial's 299th the night I walked into MOL to make my goodbyes. Todd, alone in the lunchroom, was cheery. "Thanks for breakfast," he said, implying by a grin that they both had needed it. "Why didn't you wake me?"

The question, self-evident to him, knocked the words out of me. I sat down at the empty lunchtable. I had nothing left to say. I didn't even want to be there. Impulse instructed me to run, get rid of him without pointless postmortems. I would have, except for the farewell I owed Dr. Ressler, the blessing I needed from him.

"Why didn't I wake you?" I could manage nothing more than a flat, journalistic survey. Todd nodded, but betrayed the pretense by fiddling with the knobs on the microwave. I was getting softer, fainter. I felt nothing. No resentment, no desperation. Zero. A cipher. I lifted my eyebrows: I release you; now will you let me out cleanly?

"You didn't want to wake our friend?" Todd's voice tacked suddenly, came about. Its preemptive volume, front first, dropping the would-be innocence, jerked me by the neck.

"I didn't want to wake your friend," I said, this time finding the exact, disdaining disengagement I was after. He tilted toward me and rubbed an eyebrow; every natural defense lay with him. I could not lie, could neither attack nor escape. Tolerance of animal stupidity, the only religion I believe in, kept me from choking him. He had broken no rules; we had never laid down any. From the first, I could have him only without promise or propriety. But he had broken something, unforgivably cheated. He had not said. From the day he first showed at the Information Desk, all facts were to be on the table, public domain.

I

"How long?" I asked him. I might have been conducting a phone poll, a product questionnaire.

Todd closed his eyes, pressed thumb to the lids, and struggled to suppress an hysterical snicker. "How long what?"

He wanted to hear me say it, unleash my rage. "How long," I said, perfectly modulated, stewardess-clinical, "have you been packing your dick into that pretty little muff?" Hearing myself pronounce the obscenity — I still can't believe this — brought me to the first stages of arousal.

"How long have I been sleeping with Annie?" He waited brutally until I nodded at the paraphrase. He was a boy. A stupid, puerile, self-indulgent, arrested boy. His eyes looked up as if he were reading the answer there. "Since shortly after I began sleeping with you."

The moan came out of me before he finished the predicate. I covered my face in my hand, so that he would not have the pleasure of seeing the knife slice across it. Muscle convulsed under my palm, my skin burned, all over an exchange of words. Todd took a clumsy, involuntary step of compassion in my direction, but he did not dare close the gap. He could not bear to be responsible for a show of pain that compromised me. He let out a plaintive bleat, banged into a chair, and slammed the cabinet, by way of offering comfort. "You honestly didn't know?"

It helped, at least, to let my facial tics explode. "You said nothing. Total silence." Amyclaean, golden, consenting. Alien and unnatural in my mouth. "You hid. How I was supposed to know?"

He shook his head. "She's always around. Devoted. Doting." His tone was soft, pointed, regretful. "All the qualities I so patently lack."

"From that I was supposed to guess?" I went shrill, and — last symptom of losing control — didn't care. "She treated us like a couple. So did you, for that matter."

"I still would. So would she." If, he implied, you weren't so archaic, perverse with monogamy. "The night I first went home with her, she told me she wouldn't hurt you for all the tea in china shops. I obviously miscalculated in telling her you'd understand."

Having slighted everything else, he went after my understanding. I wanted to prove myself the most magnanimous, liberal creature on earth. At the same time. I wanted to snuff him out, arrogance and all, like a kitchen match. Hurt him beyond understanding. "You screwed with a creationist." Monotone outrage. Sex with a religious zealot: the most unforgivable miscegenation. Todd could not stifle a horrible laugh. The pained chuckle came out hideous; he knew the escaping sound would divorce us for good.

"We slept together regularly, yes."

"Slept together," I said. "Regularly." The act might have taken fifteen seconds against a wall, but the polite name promoted their every transaction to a mutual sedative between the politenesses of linen. "I don't understand." Bitter pleasantry. "How can she square this with the Six-Day God? Isn't fucking without benefit of clergy one of the bargain fares to damnation?"

Todd pinched his lip. "We've never discussed doctrine."

"What do you discuss?"

"Not much, frankly. You and she have always talked more than she and I."

She'd wanted to save me. God did not allow for interpretation. Thou shalt not commit. Her folk-song simplicity had fooled me into assuming she did not share creation's basic contradiction. I didn't care anything about her or her motives. The only thing I cared about, flailed at as if it alone could keep self-esteem from dissolving, was the cause of Franklin's infidelity. Irrelevant.

Unaccountably calm, I suddenly knew that belonging, for Todd, was another ugly name for aging. He was losing the courage to face routine, and monogamy left him in the path of exhaustion. Woman-jumping, deep in him long before I arrived, publicly proclaimed that in the end he wouldn't be around for anyone. He could never have survived, as half his life, a partner's crises, the death of her parents, her illness, aging, change. He barely survived the spring overhaul of my wardrobe. The constant terror of event unfolding in daily familiarity could only be beaten by jumping ship, getting promiscuously free.

He had ruined whatever chance the two of us ever had of looking to our joint moat. I would never forgive him that. But I needed to confirm a worse suspicion before breaking off. I spoke softly, not to repair but to cauterize. "Why, Franklin? You have to explain. Don't leave me guessing."

"Janny." A student pleading for a grade change. "I don't want to leave you at all." I retaliated now with all the secretly stockpiled silence I had stolen from him over the months. "Jan. You want me to make it worse?" I waited, my fingers jiggling like voltmeter needles. "You're asking me to hit you." Yes, 1 thought. Say it. It will never make any sense otherwise. I will never work it out alone. "You cannot," he started. He shifted clauses. "She… Annie. You see, with her—"

"She's still fertile," I supplied. His relief, the greatest 1 ever succeeded in giving him, broke all over his face. I felt, to answer it, only sick, self-confirming, disaster stoicism. Your house is on fire and your children have burnt. I knew what I needed to do, and would do it cleanly. "I'm sorry," I said. "I had no idea. You two are trying to make babies?"

"Janny." Frank was beyond trying. "Janny."

But I was right: the saving maybe. Every option exercised was a small murder. Open-door policy, everything had to remain possible. He couldn't write about his Flemish landscapist without first acquiring botany, geography, geology, optics, another foreign language. He could not write a life with me without a second edition being at least conceivable. He had to remain an able-semened body. My ligation robbed him of potential. His every evasion of commitment preserved the day when he might exercise his birthright, cash in and capitulate to fatherhood.

I had my explanation, and I made to leave. But stopping at the door, meaning to make a concession to closure — a last goodwill drink somewhere — I surprised myself by furiously whispering, "I told you everything early on. Why bother coming back, week after week? Why trouble to move halfway in? Why string out the thing, knowing I was useless?"

A boy, arrogantly loose on his scavenger hunt, stared at me in boyish bewilderment. "What do you mean?" He held his head, searched for the best possible word to counter my willful misrepresentation. "I love you."

I left him and walked alone to the control room, where I heard Dr. Ressler's birthday musical offering. I knocked and entered rapidly, before I could back out. The professor sat behind the bank of monitors, blissfully happy in the spray of dense counterpoint from his turntable. "Ah! A victim. Listen to this," he said, hungry for companionship to a degree I had never seen in him. He was now ready for anything that circumstance might throw him. And I had come to rub his readiness out.

"The D minor partita for solo violin. 'Solo' is a euphemism. Multipart polyphony from a single instrument. Last movement: the chaconne. Constantly repeated eight-bar theme___" He stopped.

I had my back to him, looking through the two-way mirror into the computer room, committing the place to long-term memory. "No music lesson today?" he said gently, without patronage. Unique among males in my experience.

"Your boy says he loves me," I said, trying for lightness and missing by light-years.

Dr. Ressler lifted the needle of the phonograph and bombarded us with quiet. "That much is obvious." My long silence gave him a chance to allude to that old, shared joke. "Well, yes. It is obvious."

"But you see," I said, turning to him and parodying a smile, "I am no longer functional."

He looked me full in the face, searching for the missing pieces. In less time than it would have taken a professional, he had the thing figured. Against room rules, he lit a cigarette brutally, in disgust. A flare-up I didn't know could come from him. He had taken a chance on us, tenderly maneuvered us over our own flaws, poised us for a reasonable chance at happiness; all we had had to do was pay attention and try to be relatively free of cruelty.

He walked a few steps in every direction. His eyes were intent on something farther than the other side of the silvered glass. He shook his head, racing through the permutations, discarding things he might say as pointless. He stubbed out the butt and exploded. "The man is a fool." I felt a forbidden rush: Dr. Ressler needed me. I went over to him, stopped him from stepping away, and pinned myself to him. The only demonstration either of us would ever give one another. I didn't let go; instead, I pressed against him, insisting. Slowly, against his will, he pressed back. We did not caress, but held one another hypothetically, softly letting skin guess at what desire might have felt in another place, another life, halves of a botched dissection, an old whole.

We separated without explanation. He lifted my lowered chin until I had to look squarely at him. "This is not the scenario of choice for you two. You know that."

I shrugged. "It's the scenario we're in." It occurred to me: I could say: Talk to him; shame him. And the thing would be straightened. Ressler knew as much too, and was waiting, weight on his toes, to intercede. I didn't ask. I no longer wanted to be fixed. It was a relief to escape the waiting, the nights away — to break off without it being my fault. To come away with all the benefits of the injured party.

I went home, there being no other place. Over the next several days, most of Todd's possessions politely disappeared of their own accord, vanished under bacterial rot, in stop-action film. The evacuation did leave its slight, keloid blemish. Notebooks, a record or two, a pair of socks left behind, forgotten — the crippled child in Hamelin, or props for a later, staged, happier goodbye.

The room above the antique shop once again became my private reserve. There was nothing to do on evenings off except repair the place. When I could make no more improvements to its chenille stagecraft, I began finding reasons to stay late at the branch, without compensation except the slightly more comprehensive answer.

Q: What is the largest geological feature on earth?

A: The earth's largest feature is also its youngest. The Mid-Atlantic Ridge, a ten-thousand-mile-long submarine mountain range rising to an average height of ten thousand feet and anywhere from three to six hundred miles wide, is split down its length by the breach of new rock welling up from the convection currents of the earth's molten mantle.

I lost several days to the QB. I thought I might be able to go on forever, working it into the perfect artifice, addressing every hidden need in the close-lipped questioner.

Warm days went on increasing. 1 began walking again, more cautiously, not so far afield as when it had been the two of us. Brooklyn is a complex biome. Two and a half million people watching the neighborhood isobars of war and truce. Streets full of Russian, Italian, German, Korean, Yiddish, Spanish, Chinese — a fair slice of the varieties of talk. But the language map is devised to keep out crossovers. I stuck to the island allotted me — branch, apartment, subway opening.

After a long afternoon at the branch rooting through Gov Pubs, I did not feel like going home. One evening, sitting in a convenient pizza parlor among surreal composite frescoes of Venetian and Florentine landmarks, I had time, for the first time since I'd left him, to see how I'd treated Tuckwell. While I'd been flush, I believed that the best thing we could do for old loves was be firm with them. I now saw the weak rationalization for what it was. I simply had had no stomach for messy responsibility. If it were too late to make good, maybe I could at least recant.

Keithy shouted a surprised hello through the intercom and buzzed me in. I walked up to the apartment, disoriented by how familiar the stairs still were. He'd left the door open but did not meet me. He was lying in the recliner, watching TV with the sound off, but in full three-piece uniform as if just back from the office. "Marian," he said, as if I too were just home from work. "What do you have to say for yourself?" I had lived here once, and all the place could say was / remember you; wait, don't tell me.… I sat next to him, ready for any sentence — hostility, abuse, sadistic wit, even affection, caresses, sex-with-the-ex, if that was the penalty he chose to extract. Any slap but casual indifference.

"You're just in time," he said, without glancing over. "Watch." He pressed a button on the remote; was it a new device, or the one we'd owned? The sound flooded on, cataclysmic Carmina Burana—the microphone everywhere in the orchestra at once. On the screen, a casserole apotheosis of meats, vegetables, noodles, and sauces flew through the air in an ultra-slow-motion parabola so charged and erotic that each of its subtle, glacially arcing parts seemed loaded with the symbolic curve of significance.

I watched arrested in horror as epic food rained down upon an ivory-colored antique tablecloth. Every transcendent splash was Bolshoi-choreographed. Succulent streamers of pasta twisted like living things against the sea bottom. Crosscut, pan, slow zoom: every visual stop pulled out to create a late-century masterpiece. The effect, pornographically immediate, more evocative than any Ingres or Master of Flemalle, scooped out my stomach more violently than the real event would have. Keithy killed the set just as the voice-over began to explain what the stain was selling. He leaned toward me in triumph. "No talking toilet bowls for me. When Keith Tuckwell dies, he's going to leave something behind him in the minds of millions."

"That was yours?"

"Essentially."

"Network TV? Prime time? My, Keith."

"Yes, woman. I've arrived." No trace of the old self-mockery, no suggestion of see what you lost? He sat back in his chair, at peace with his times. I don't know what I'd expected, what I'd hoped to say to him. In thirty seconds, I remembered how hard it was to say anything at all. I asked how he'd been. "Since when?" Had he been eating well? "Well, but not prettily." Gotten out any? Been dating? "A veritable salad bar, a smorgasbord of women. Cold women who dress in red and black. Women with overbites — very frail. Women who know all there is to know about structural engineering. Black women who drift down sidewalks humming de Falla. Leggy blondes in pastel who have never known unhappiness. Women who keep great secrets. Auburn-haired beauties whose neuroses periodically flame out like__"

I let him improvise, absorbing my due. But it was no punishment. He was too happy. An intercom call a minute later, playfully rhythmic, revealed the reason. He buzzed the caller in without asking identity, and opened the door on a heart-stoppingly glamorous girl who wore, with poised authority, incredibly expensive Italian-tailored rain-forest green and a rope of pearls. Keith introduced us without a ripple. I didn't catch her name, but the way she shook my hand and said how much he'd told her of me laid out everything.

She excused herself to take a powder, something I hadn't realized women still did. "Keithy." I said. "You can't marry this woman."

He looked at me, lips cracking. "Why not?"

"She'll stay for long periods in the bathroom with the door closed. She'll be two hours dressing, just to take the trash out. You'll be miserable. This is just a rebound."

He waited an arch second. "Too late. Your invitation's already in the mail." His date returned. "We're going out," he said, his suit now giving an entirely different account of his emotional state of affairs. "No need to wait up." They left, leaving me watching television in a stranger's apartment, knowing the exact, private locking-up routine on my way out.

Nights in my apartment I sat in the rocker, watching Todd's goods disappear of their own volition. I reviewed the old photo gallery. I remembered how he arranged his notebooks near the bed, so he could reach them rapidly in the dark. How he bought milk so he could stare at the photos of Missing Children on the cartons. How, when he lost his patience with food, he could survive for days on charges of whipped cream straight out of the can. How his body sometimes lurched in an electrostatic jerk of total fear before falling off to sleep.

I was at last militantly alone. I would probably have stayed in that condition, habituating to it until I no longer noticed, had not the phone rung one night, Todd on the other end, hoarsely whispering, "I've killed the man."