Gold Bug Variations

XXV

Disaster

Information thrives on it, a larger part of the daily paper than anything except ads. Annuals feature it, the most prominent and dependable heading. Almanacs compile numbing numbers lists— freakish accounts aligned in fatal categories, Earth, Air, Fire, Water. The calendar is just a disaster register. March 27: strongest earthquake to hit North America, Anchorage, 1964. Worst aviation disaster in history, Canary Islands, 1977. Mount St. Helens, 1980. Next morning rounds out the elements: Kwangtung ferry capsizes, last year. Bolts from the blue, tears in the fabric. The word's etymology blames bad stars. But nothing is so mundane or ensured. All information, every signal and search, will collapse into noise, lost to sudden, shocking, disastrous commonplace.

Restricting myself to the seismic/volcanic category of Information Please, summing the conservative death estimates for the last hundred years, I get an average of thirty people a day dying from the locution of speech reserved for impossibility: the earth moving underneath them. Flood, drought, famine, hurricane, tornado, tidal wave, avalanche — tea visitors, daily mail. And the constructed catastrophes: hotel catwalks leaping free, tenement fires, airplanes dropping out of the sky. Motor-vehicle deaths in this country equal a large plane crashing daily. An accidental death every six minutes, accidental injury every four seconds. Only accidental birth accounts for anyone being left.

Outside accident accounts for less than 5 percent of American deaths. The rest are tiny slippages within the system, a valve shutdown, a tube burst or blocked, an instruction misread, production idle or fatally overrun. The body, too intricate to sustain, lives in what industry calls the "mean time between failures." Expected, ubiquitous friend of the family — bad stars.

The Morse name has an elegant symmetry: three triplets arranged in simple contrast that sounds panicked even in binary. No word is faster to transmit, clearer to receive than "An event again." Words — those rearguard actions — can't frame it, the infinitely unlikely disappearing into the terminally indifferent. Everywhere, this instant, unrepeatable combinations lost. Cathedrals bombed, cantatas used to wrap fish, years of space exploration going up like a Roman candle, an absurdly kind man who would choke on his phlegm rather than spit, wiped out by a fleck of loose plaque.

Disaster is modest, quiet as termites, low-key as a library dissolving in acid paper. The five-thousand-volume epic biography, life, loves — unique configuration of cells and switches—might be reassembled by trial and error, just as Keats's unwritten work lies hidden in the ad copy of magazines, out of order. Reconstituting Keats would be child's play in comparison.

Disaster is a junior page accidentally reshelving a one-of-a-kind manuscript by the wrong call number. Someone comes looking for the work, sure that it contains the explanatory key long overlooked. But the tome is not where the catalog assigns it. The manuscript, in any number of random places, is annihilated in improbability. How lost? Say the library is big, big beyond combing. Say it contains a few thousand books for every organism ever brought into unlikelihood. Say it contains a record of every geological tick that brought into existence, from out of bare rock and trace atmosphere, this implausibly kind man. No search will ever turn up that misshelved manuscript.

The "Disasters" sheaf in the vertical files professes to have the numbers in hand. It gives the erosion calmly, in columns of sandbagging statistics, the way good breeding compels a person to say, "Never mind; it's nothing," even when everything has now gone irretrievably wrong.

Uncle Jimmy

Franklin was worse than worthless over the phone. I'd never heard him like that. His voice was crumpled like an ancient wax cylinder recording. His sentences were incoherent beyond editing.

I had to steady him, lead him with Twenty Questions. Slowly now, back up: what's happened? I've killed him; I've killed the man. No one was even dead. But disaster, the 65.5 per 100,000 people per year chance, had settled in. Uncle Jimmy had had a stroke. Although alive, he had been severely hit.

Franklin's hysteric claim of responsibility possessed a distant logic. Jimmy's further inquiries about his premium error had at last awakened a sleepy corporate hierarchy. He had been requested to answer a couple of ad hoc actuaries. Their questions had raised the possibility, in insinuating office dialect, that Jimmy might know more about the source of the computer irregularity than he let on.

Jimmy, most oversensitive of men, already nursing accumulated anxiety over his inadvertent failure to meet a premium, was so bewildered by the probe — mere formalities, all part of good investigation — that he ruptured an aneurysm that had been hiding, an inherited deficiency, secret and soft in his cerebral arteries. He apoplexed on the examination carpet, proclaiming innocence while going into coma.

Not until his evening arrival did Franklin learn it. Dr. Ressler broke the news, alone in knowing how Todd tied in. Franklin harassed the hospital where Jimmy had been rushed until the answer-givers on the other end refused to speak to him. He forced Ressler to repeat over and over that the hemorrhage was not his fault, and each time he refused to believe it. Torturing himself into organic nightmare, he called the only person in the world who might further torture him.

I calmed him as best I could, offering to come right over. He screamed in agony, "No. Not me. Jimmy." I said I'd be at the hospital within the hour, and that alone comforted him a little. 1 rang off, threw some clothes on, and was gone. Not until I entered the hospital did I collect myself enough to realize: Jimmy. That courtly, clumsy truism-speaker, inept and universal flirt who every afternoon called his mother to say he was on his way home, too free of complication to understand, let alone repeat, the slurs that pass for human conversation.

I felt the queasy calm of worst-case scenarios. Cool, calm, and collected: the highest rung in Tuckwell's ad world, the one that will deliver us from harm. The building's smell — alcohols, ethers, gauze — made me feel I was picking Jimmy up from the dentist's rather than heading for Intensive Care. I asked for him at the reception desk, an antiseptic module as wide as a Canadian football field and as blond as Sweden. The linen nurse addressed me too gingerly. "Are you the wife?"

I smiled, despite the immediacy, to imagine Jimmy and me as life mates. I said the patient was single. The registrar nurse examined a huge, Dickensian ledger printed in dot matrix rather than quill. She flipped to Jimmy's lookup code: Steadman, James S. STEA3-J13-72-6. My correct answer apparently earned me admission, for she directed me to a waiting room. The sprawling complex consisted of an outer shell of functional, modernist passages laid out in star-shaped pods wrapped around an industrial kernel with low ceilings and forced steam heat that probably should have been trashed at the turn of the century. The two symbionts didn't quite align. Old floors ramped up to new; catwalks cut across obsolete passages. Colored stripes and system icons indexed each region of local suffering like a Byzantine underground parking lot.

Children in slippers and tunics, hair thinned to pointless patches, carried listless trucks under their arms, remembering everything about the ritual of toys except the reason. Mint-green semiconscious shapes with bloated bellies lay in half-obscured bedrooms in the care of LED banks, chins fighting for air, tubes rammed so deeply up their noses that it bruised their eyes. Some sat in pharmaceutical storms. Orderlies, acutely reassuring, wheeled people by on hydraulic flatbeds, cots that smelled of runny ulcers and fecal ooze, smells dusted over by musty astringent. Worse than Passchendaele, more hideous than Bosch: everything proceeded with supermarket calm.

In embarrassed hall-alcove clumps stood the healthy — by fault of intimacy, the go-betweens to this hideous lab. We avoided one another's eyes. An accidental exchange of glances and I found myself staring into the face of a scared woman who flashed me a conspirator's look: Don't tell anyone you saw me here. By the time I located the 1C waiting room, I knew the dirty secret. Individuals were woundable, sickly, inconvenient, contemptible, tragic in every way except numerically, smudges on endless fan-fold paper. Despite everything culture has ever insisted, hospitals were not shows. Even here, at the one moment my entire life should have trained me for — Intensive Care, 5W, North Tower, Green Wing — obscenely lacerated, lost: wanting, needing, but not knowing how to hear the makeshift, temporary metronome measuring out so obvious a rhythm, the meter of the faltering human platelet pump.

A months-old trade magazine in the waiting room declared that more Americans enter hospital every month than were alive at the Revolution. I stared awhile at the magazine's other unabsorbable facts, then matched wits against quiz TV. I sat on a wraparound petroleum-based sofa, kitty-corner to a volatile, overweight woman who had the lounge phone's receiver surgically incorporated into her double chin. She was not using the phone, just holding it, keeping the line open for a message she had long given up hope of receiving. My companion watched as I answered the one about the oldest city in the continental United States being St. Augustine and correctly gave "nano" as the prefix meaning one billionth in the metric system. The only question worth addressing at that instant was in the IC, stroked out. But I kept on answering these others, eye-calm.

The woman looked at me reverently. "You could make a lot of dough, honey." Having paid me the highest compliment, she could now let me into the intimacy of her being here. She said, "My little girl," tapping the receiver as if it were the child. She flashed me one of those in-your-own-best-interests grins. "She's down the hall, about to be cut open in several places." I apologized, not knowing what else to say. She waved me off. "I'm trying to find out who the anesthetician is. That's very important. A girlfriend's husband once died under the hands of a bad anesthetician."

Courtesy dictated my saying something about waiting to see what was left of a friend following his massive stroke. I didn't. After a pause during which she twice said "Hello" into the unresponsive phone, my partner turned again to me with the two-syllable, singsong question "Children?" She nodded reassuringly— Easy one. If you knew St. Augustine, this one's a gift. For some reason, I couldn't figure the question out. Did children exist? Which was the oldest? What was one billionth of one called? Up from the unfigurable field of memory came that old jump-rope rhyme: Franklin and Janny sitting in a tree, kay eye ess ess eye en gee. First comes love, then comes marriage, then comes Janny with a baby carriage.

I smiled and said I wasn't married. She made a just-as-well face, and all at once I felt Franker lean over my shoulder and whisper, "Holbein." Habit; with specialist's myopia, he would look at a tree deranged by autumn and, taking in the clash of colors, would come up for air saying, "Bonnard!" Nothing was what it was, but always a comparison to paint. When he came closest to genuinely loving me, he would freeze, beg me not to move, and exclaim in a half-rapture, " 'Girl with the Pearl Earring.'" He was a lost cause, wrecked on aesthetics. Seeing Rembrandt's ox-sides in the meat case at the supermarket marked him as unfit for life.

Aesthetics could not survive the waiting room. A bit of aesthetics on his part had led, however indirectly, step by step, to a burst vessel in Jimmy's brain. I looked at the woman again; yes, infinitely more Holbein miniature than contemporary Long Island mother. I was inspecting her in the Met, with Franklin at my side. It was suddenly enough to have had a look at her real face — pinched eyes, mole, spinsterly, approving mouth — to set her in a time she matched. Empathy came on me from nowhere, and I wished her daughter every chance that medical technology, God, and a good anesthetician could give her.

Years later, when they at last let me into his room, Jimmy was sitting in bed as if nothing had happened. I wondered, What on earth is he doing here? There's nothing wrong with him. In that first moment, he seemed the same person he had ever been. Unmistakable, vintage Uncle Jimmy. Then I saw just how wrong things were. His face had collapsed on one side, as if from a bad foundation. His mouth sagged down to the left, an eighty-year-old's mouth, unable to produce anything more than a few raw vowels. His lips drooped a deep, secretive smile all over his face, the smile of a man who had seen something remarkable. His eyes bore a matte glaze, not his. Jimmy's eyes were gone.

I thought there would be others there — friends, day shift, his mother. But I was alone, except for Jimmy and the patient behind the draw curtain. My calm collapsed beneath me like a pier gently washed out to sea. My eyes grew acid. I dug my fingernails into my upper arms, trying to reverse the process that had overtaken him, reverse everything.

He must have recognized me in some sense, because as I stepped to the bed, he rippled his ruined facial muscles. He looked roughly in my direction and erupted in a horrible, unformed call like the open modulation of an underwater whale. "Hello, Jimmy." My tone was no closer to natural. He made the awful blast again. This time it seemed to possess syllables. The sound was edgeless, blurred, terrible. I had to force myself not to run from the room and deny I ever knew him. I put my hand on his gown, and my touch made the word come out of him again. "Jimmy," I said, as brightly as I could without bursting. "Try it a little softer." I put my head close to him, my ear almost onto his mouth. The less air he had to push, the less muscle he needed to control, the more chance I had of making him out.

The sound came out again, softer but no more distinct. Jimmy fought to unmangle it. His whole body shook, a weight lifter at the instant when he must either jerk the bar overhead or be crushed under the plates. I thought I heard him, in shadow, pronounce "cohabit." The word he had teased me with for weeks when Todd and 1 moved in together. 1 must have projected it. I began to think he wasn't saying anything at all, just releasing animal bursts from a cortex now helpless to hold them in.

"Once more, Jimmy. Don't try so hard." But the noise was worse, vanishing. I looked at him, shook my head. "I'm sorry. 1 can't. I can't make it out." My own words were themselves smudged out, my voice lost in a choke, my head rocking. 1 could only stop myself by putting my face down onto him, where 1 kept it. 1 felt something brush my hair. His arm, its muscles contracted into a permanent claw, was trying to move, to put its weight over me in comfort. I lifted it — he could not do it alone — and put it around my neck, where it had been trying to go.

I hunted down a resident to ask about Jimmy's chances. Like most, I had so mastered necessity that when chance was at last the subject, I was lost. The physician was too professional to say what might be hoped. Hope was a function of structural impairment. But the implication was clear: Jimmy was setting out for an unknown place. Sitting in bed in the double-occupancy room, close up, flush against a place closed to every petition except disaster.

I went straight to the — warehouse. Todd wanted word immediately, over the intercom, but 1 waited until 1 went up. At the top of the freight elevator, I froze, afraid to go in. Jimmy was there. The office floor was still warm where he had fallen, a delicate, blue, broken vessel stroked out across the tiles. He was there, working late, ready to scold me for unofficial use of combinations, to tease me boyishly about cohabiting with men. It was all as I had left it, every night I ever spent in this forsaken place. But the old arrangement, the Second Shift Club, had changed color, reddened upon contact with air.

I gave my faithful transcript. I told them about his face, his mouth, his eyes, his clawed hand. I told them about the sound he had made, syllables beyond guessing. I told about the doctor's hedge. Dr. Ressler listened for physiological signs, Todd for any scrap that might spell forgiveness. Would it have happened without his mistake? Unanswerable, but we gave the rest of the night over to it. I couldn't think of sleep, and so sat up the remaining hours with them. In the morning I went directly to the branch, as I had before after long nights in circumstances that would never arise again.

I spent the day combing our modest collection, reading everything I could find on brain damage. I learned that a third of a million Americans suffer cerebral vascular accidents each year. I learned that the word derived from the stroke of God's hand. I learned that Jimmy's injury would unfold in its own way, a way research could not fix.

I found a text on the subject, reasonably up-to-date, although the pace of the field consigned all texts to the pyre every two years. The chapter on stroke recovery was a rationalist's nightmare: people who could see a sofa, walk around it, and give its name, but couldn't say how the thing was used. People who had no trouble explicating "Jack kissed Jill" but who were hopelessly gutted by "Jill was kissed by Jack." People whose right hemispheres didn't know what their lefts were doing. People in every other way intact, day after day unable to recognize their own spouses' faces.

Some accounts went beyond science fiction. I read of Phineas Gage, a Vermont railroad man who had a three-foot rod blasted through his head. He lived for twelve years, intelligence unimpaired, capable of speech, memory, and reason, but with no emotional control. I read of a woman whose one hand tried to strangle her unless fought off by her other. I read of people who could not recall anything from before their accident or who could not learn anything after. I read of a concert pianist who could play the most complex concerti from memory yet who could not point to middle C.

There was aphasia, loss of speech, alexia, loss of reading, agraphia, loss of writing, and agnosia, loss of recognition. Everything a person possessed could be taken away. I read of people who could grasp numerals but not numbers, who could define the word "pig" but couldn't recognize one, who could write complex ideas but couldn't make out what they'd written. There were patterns too bizarre to warrant names: the sixty-seven-year-old stricken into thirteen years of fastidious silence only to be awakened at age eighty by a train whistle's sixth-chord that launched him into a popular tune from the year of his wedding, a half century before. Minds reduced to a vacant stare worked their way back into replicas of their former state. Massive paralytics rose up and walked, showing no trace other than a shuffle or droop of one eyelid. Others, only grazed by God's swipe, lived for years masking incapacities they themselves failed to suspect. I grabbed at every slight ray of optimism. Children's brains could rewire, recover from blows that would wipe out mature adults. Jimmy's gentleness might indicate a saving persistence of child's wiring. Recovery was above normal in left-handed people, and higher still in lefties who had been forced into the right-hander's world. I'd seen Jimmy type, lift, carry, write, and wave hundreds of times, but I could not for life remember with which hand.

I was so high-strung that I even found, hidden in the technical folds, rare benefits from a well-placed lesion. Violent personalities woke from apoplexy as loving as a newborn. Pasteur's massive stroke altered his work for the better. Dostoyevsky's visionary power followed from lifelong epileptic seizures. Research proved nothing except that no one could predict injury's outcome. No one knew much about the brain at all, let alone Jimmy's. The hierarchy had too many subsystems for the loss of any piece to be understood. My only question — would it still be Jimmy inside the destroyed case? — dissolved in qualified statistics. By evening I found myself guiltily hoping for the kinder, comprehensive solution.

I went back to MOL after work. Todd stood in the computer room, source of the catastrophe, scrutinizing my face as if, at panel edge, overlooked by everyone, he might find some hint of horror's miracle waiting to flame. Nothing I could report helped. My friends had news of their own, a wrinkle more pressing than Jimmy's prognosis. The hospital DP operatives — Todd's and Ressler's opposites at that immense institution — processing Jimmy's numbers, revealed that his coverage had not yet been reinstated.

"His mother called."

"How is she?"

Todd shrugged nervously; care had to be rationed, focused to a point. "She's either the emblem of strength or doesn't realize what's happened. She says the hospital needs proof of alternate ability to pay."

The man I'd seen the night before would need feeding, clothing, changing, constant surveillance, and a year of slow, expensive therapy that might come to nothing. An after-tremor could surface with the next clock tick. The hospital staff discovered the billing irregularity and served notice in under forty-eight hours: thus health science, the keepers of the human spark, in the Information Age.

Disaster (continued)

A part of Jimmy's brain had dissolved in the hemorrhage faster than a sugar cube in coffee. His was near one extreme of a spectrum of tissue failure. At the other, the best anyone gets away with is a steady evaporation beginning in late teens, racking up thousands of neurons a day, making every aspect of experience — cheerful revisionism notwithstanding — continuously harder to master and easier to miss.

Ten billion switches, by conservative estimate, are each wired to five thousand others, regulated by neurotransmitters and neuropeptides whose scores of enzyme dialects control a chaos of simultaneous translation conveying desire, fear, torture, pleasure. No sooner does the switchboard wire itself to survive the world of experience than it begins to dismantle. It flashes out in a violent short or disintegrates imperceptibly. All that varies is the tempo.

I have until now faulted words, blamed the messenger of mangled news for keeping me from my answer. I should instead be prostrate with gratitude that words can mean anything at all, given the nature of the receiver. The thing is jerry-rigged, carrying around in its own triple fossil a walkie-talkie wrapped around a shrew-screech encasing a lizard's intuition. Absurd paste-up: gothic chancel tacked onto Romanesque crypt fronted by rococo nave. The wonder lies in its comprehending anything, its ability to work its supreme invention, the shaky symbol set.

Word into synapse is even more approximate than substance into word. The brain, in the subtle dozen hours when it reaches its zenith, already wades through a dissipation that leaves it searching without success for those three syllables beginning with an "F" about which everything has been rubbed out except the certainty that they sat at the lower right corner of an even-numbered page. The word was "forfeiture." The word was "filigree." The word was "forgetting."

A hundred trillion synaptic bits, each capable of threshold effects, compressed into a kilo and a half, split into two lumps connected by 250 million cables. Twin-view parallax resolves the field into multiple dimensions. The most complex entity ever thrown together, an organ vastly more complex than the plan that assembled it, locally violates the Second Law. Every brain extends itself with a ten-thousand-item template, puts together continuous unprecedented messages for no other reason than to model in miniature everything that exists and half that doesn't. Five billion living brains, a hundred billion already dead, each sickeningly bound into a net surpassed only by the single thing they are bent on weaving.

Stockpiled deep in the magnificent kludge, buried in the cerebellum, hippocampus, corpus callosum, the device knows its own unwiring. Thought carries a little pattern of terror around inside it, the realization that it shouldn't even be around, that it will soon fall back into distributed static. "What a day," Jimmy sometimes greeted the second shift, throwing up his arms. "I should have been a chicken farmer. What else can go wrong?" He knew what else could and one day would, knew before anybody, and only his tired joke stood between him and nothing.

The map of circuits, like their mobile case, is shaped by evolution. Synapse routes that presage their own immanent shorting out must also have been selected for. What good can it possibly do to know, every paralyzing, conscious hour, that the prop holding me up to a smoky little aperture onto everything is already, even as I name the process, dissolving in a stroke or a gentle stream? Medullar terror at returning to randomness is behind every urge to pattern the world. Hardwired to fear is the breeding scream.

Desperate copulation evolved long before cerebral terror. Male dragonflies scrape a female clean of previous sperm before mating. Cheater fish slip between the throes of a thrashing couple and make their secret deposit. But the truly promiscuous, the ones who couple with everything that moves, who cannot stop propagating even to eat, who fill notebooks into the night: fear makes us father for our lives. Todd excavated me as if his organ were a fixing gauge. Learning that nothing could come of it, he left, scared off. Only wilder fear drove him temporarily back.

Natural selection edits with an eye only toward what the message says, not to what it means. It has no interest in the fittest solution, nor the most efficient. The fittest thing life could do would be to die immediately and join the overwhelming efficiency of inert space. Selection hinges on one thing alone: differential reproduction. Double faster than you die. Dissolve slower than you replicate. All organs are an attempt to leverage this edge, even this crazily immense, already unwiring circuit. I know; I can feel the pay telescope starting to flick off. By Jimmy's count, with luck, I might get six more years.

Losing the Signal

How much space might he clear away in himself for this brilliant, two-manual experiment in naming? He has no precedent, no Jeanette template, no chromosome locus synthesizing the next step. Dr. Koss is his only instructor. They test the limits of their freedom, walk openly through town, feeling the violation, not daring to believe what they do. Their walks are exercises in synchronization. Their legs cadence. They talk in overlap, complete one another's sentences, laugh at each other's jokes before they're made. A small miracle, for once in this life, not to have to explain.

She spends the night, an extended, sleepless night of semaphores. Jeanette stands peach-naked, stretches, touches her toes in morning's light, showing herself to him. "How do you like your eggs?"

He would ask: Are we wrong? Am I destroying something real and immediate in you? Are you denying your husband's sacrifice, losing the intimate, accumulated weight of your past? But her eyes are sparks, looking for affirmation of the rightness of this moment. He must not violate her joy, and says, "Ova easy."

The article appears, makes the rounds at Biology. It includes a photo of Ressler among Faces to Watch and gives a bastardized, erroneous thumbnail treatment of his mutagen investigations. It paints him as arcane, isolated — qualities that may have been requisite for serious creative effort in the past but at this hour are inimical to effective science. On pub date, log-jammed almost at solution, he wants nothing more than to be brought back into the fold, to work together with Ulrich toward some common persuasion.

The Life photo essay horrifies him: a sad, indelible feeling as he flips through the sickeningly permanent pages. Perpetual artifact, preserved in a thousand long-term vaults. A million copies faithfully reproduce his every imperfection. Too late to recant: his face, his thin nose, his words badly quoted and out of context, his arrogant self-assurance — Stuart Ressler, rising science star, split, flapped, and pinned out like a cat in undergraduate anatomy. Proliferated throughout the English-speaking world.

The fallout of bad-faith fame follows him into his first office visit following publication. Minor notoriety will not help patch matters between Ressler and his increasingly erratic office mate. Ressler braces on entering and shouts out something friendly. But Lovering just sits among the ruined piles of papers, his Baalbek of print, indifferent and still. Walking toward his desk, head down, hands in pocket, Ressler is shaken by Joe's voice, struggling to shake off catatonia. "Do you know the price we're all paying to improve the world?"

Ressler stops and faces Lovering. He chooses each word, multiplying the odds against the growing sentence a hundred thousand times per syllable. "I'm not sure what you mean, Joe."

"What I mean? The world. The world. Toot la moaned. The big picture. Come on. We're both adults. We don't have to get into semantics here." Ressler can't even respond. Scrambling through the repertoire, all inappropriate, he just bobs his head on its universal joint. "Unnatural prospect! All the way back, all the way back to fires in caves." Lovering drops into a movie monotone. "And I work for them!"

"Who do you work for, Joe?"

"Who the hell knows? Big state school. The money's been washed through so many agencies it's wetter'na Baptist, But it's the government at bottom, isn't it? All that dough."

The logic eludes Ressler. "Half the scientists in this country have worked for the government since the war."

"What do you mean, 'since'? Who told you they've stopped shooting?" Ressler backs toward his chair, out of the stumbled-upon line of fire. He can say nothing. "What does it cost to eradicate the Black Death? Ask GM. Ask Coke."

"Joe—"

"Shut up." Brutal, suppliant, drunken. "I'm talking." Ressler wants only to be out of the room, to allow the fit of latent humanity to work itself out in privacy. But Lovering won't release him. He stares at Ressler, pleading, the look of a spaniel, hindquarters smashed beneath the wheel of a car, asking why his years of service have been so rewarded. His smile changes to pity. "Education, learning, progress. You know what we're going to find out, we researchefs? We're going to finally get down to that old secret code in the cell, and the string is going to come out spelling D-U-M-B space S-H-I…"

"Joe. Would you like to go out for a beer?" Ressler's intonation is so soft it startles the man silent. The invitation sounds slightly frayed coming out of his mouth. He has forgotten how to ask the question right. But Lovering remains distracted.

"What? Out? Why? Corn as high as an elephant's eye. Big, hulking, behemoth state school, out in the middle of godforsaken nowhere." He brightens, addresses Ressler as an old friend. "I've got a job offer, you know. As soon as Sandy finds someone to replace her at her office, we're outta this hole. Someplace new, fresh, different."

"Terrific, Joe. Could be exactly what you're looking for. Where are you going?"

"Ann Arbor."

Late that evening he sees Lovering again, ducking into the department's small-animal room. The lines of cages always have an edgy hysteria to them, as if the rodents know where their cage-mates disappear to. Ressler pokes his head into the room. He watches Lovering pick up a cage, shake it. Above the animal squeaks and pleas, Ressler hears Lovering doing a poor but obligatory Cagney: "You dirty rats."

"Dr. L. Which way are you headed?"

Lovering sets the cage down quickly. "Nowhere. Why?"

Ressler makes the beer offer again, but Lovering smiles and shags him off, saying he isn't ready to leave just yet. Ressler wishes him good night, and Joe replies in like manner. The next morning, Ressler notices an unnatural silence emanating from the cage room. He looks inside. The place is stripped clean. The animals are gone, cages and all. The answer stands just down the hall, where Woyty, Botkin, Koss, and Ulrich gather in a stunned lump. He walks into the circle, which opens to him with a look shared and obscene.

"You've heard?" Ulrich asks.

"Not a thing."

"Apparently, Joe Lovering drove out of here last night in a rented truck loaded with the department lab animals." The others, hearing the tale for the second time, seem unable to get past the beginning. "He drove the whole shipment back to his apartment__"

"Apartment? Didn't he say…?"

Ulrich insists. "Apartment; there is, apparently, no new purchased home. He stacked all the stolen cages neatly around his garage. Albino rats together, all the cavia…" Ressler nods hurriedly. Get on with it.

"His landlady heard the engine running about eleven o'clock last night. The garage door was locked and wadded with rags. She had to let herself in through his apartment." Ulrich takes a breath, the same deep breath Joe's landlady took before racing to the truck to shut off the engine. "It seems Joe's decision to join the specimens was an impulse. There was a badly burned TV dinner in the oven, and a burned-out cigarette on the edge of a counter." Ulrich clears his throat, debating whether to suppress the next detail. "A Sears catalog open to the lingerie pages in the bathroom. A pocket-size spiral notebook with grocery list. At the bottom, in the same handwriting slant, an afterthought, he'd written, 'Send the checks to the Anti-Vivisectionist Society.' He was in the front seat of the truck, lying gently on the wheel. He'd left the passenger door open. Presumably because it vented more closely onto the tailpipe."

The stunned cluster of survivors turns toward Ressler, waiting. "How did you hear?" he asks Ulrich.

"Landlady called his mother. Mother called me early this morning."

"Has anybody gotten in touch with his girlfriend? Sandy? She might know something__"

Ulrich snaps at his stupidity in the face of the obvious. "There is no girlfriend." Sandy is a simulation.

Ressler spends two days pacing between office and lab, fiddling with beakers, doing nothing. Ulrich distributes the official notice through the department and announces a memorial service to be held at the First Church of Christ Scientist. The service is ecumenical, so much so that it carries almost no religious overtone at all. What's left of Cyfer, their families, and the man's mother comprise the entire congregation. Each team member makes a prepared speech. Ulrich talks about Joe's sharp mind, how quickly he picked up the complexities of machine programming. Woyty, on dangerous ground, saved only by the difficulty he has controlling his voice, remembers Joey's pathological fear of catching cold, hints at the irony that another virus, in the end, got him. Botkin reads from her beloved Rilke: Wir sind nicht einig. We do not agree. Sind nicht wie die Zugvögel verständigt. Do not correspond like the migratory bird. Blühn und verdorm ist uns zugleich bewß. Bloom and withering come on together.

Koss assumes the pulpit, mouths the expected homilies. She turns to descend, but stops, unable to sit down without really speaking. Levering was a scientist, she insists. A scientist going after the code. And the end of all codebreaking is to get behind the outward trappings of a thing to meaning. Joey lost the signal. Read the message wrong. The congregation makes a scuffle of collective objection, propriety offended. Ressler alone is quiet, loving her more than he has ever loved her for delivering this tract and no other. Who is the graveside speech for, after all, if not the survivors?

He is last, deferred to for the postlude, for some reason. For his act of speechmaking Ressler digs way back, into the only other text he received as inheritance from his parents aside from chromosomes and the Britannica. He has, in adulthood, achieved agnosticism, despite efforts by both folks to steep him in doses of received scripture. But the syntax of the Book still rattles about in him on days like this of vestigial need. So, it comes about, here in the pulpit, summarizing off to his long home a man he didn't even know except through falsified dispatches, that the only thing he can get out is Ecclesiastes.

Whatsoever thy hand findeth to do, do it with thy might; for there is no work, nor device, nor knowledge, nor wisdom in the grave whither thou goest.

Work, for the night is coming. Inarguable, if of no practical value to Lovering now. Each human effort and each new word speeds the acquisition of the next. The maps get more exact with every effort, but the key only points out the size of the workless, wisdomless place. He might better have dispensed with speeches altogether, left the work of his colleague — the saving of a few doomed test animals by carbon monoxide, painless, reportedly lightly euphoric — as Lovering's lasting eulogy.

After the service, over the subdued hand-shaking in the narthex, Lovering's mother approaches Stuart and takes his forearm in her hands. "Thank you. What you read was beautiful."

"I'm glad you think so."

"Joseph spoke of you many times. He thought the world of you. 'The best scientist I've ever met.' He told me how much he wanted to be more like you. I'm glad you two were friends."

'Tour son and I," he fits together, searching, "had a great deal in common." Vast stretches of A,T,G,C. She kisses him without apology. He wants to grab the woman, shake her until she tells: why start that cigarette? Why not extinguish it before himself? Joey had time, all the time of his decision. In less time than it takes a cell to split, Lovering turned ignition and annihilated the three-billion-year-old system. Two more minutes to hang around and finish the butt: what couldn't he bring himself to stub out?

Lovering's senseless violence will never heal, never close over in time with new tissue. Ressler will be permanently scarred by that last impertinence. A cigarette, a sorrow, a chromatic love for the things of the world unexcisable at the last minute. A garage full of animals mercifully gassed: affirmation, a yes to the same free polyphony he was sending to death. A by-product of the first, unresolvable confusion deep down at rule-level, the inner confines of language where sorrow and celebration, sender, message, and receiver collapse into the same unlikely pattern, a pattern that knows it is alien, impossibly unlikely, exiled.

How easily all decisions are reversed; everything hand might find to do is tentative at best. He, at least, is still alive, more alive for Lovering's annihilation. Stuart walks home from the service in the cold air, awake, whole, pained for feeling so. He survives the misguided man, a distant cousin, an atavistic trial run, a hypothesis that could not stand the test of experience, a failed variant. Adjacent to survivor's exhilaration, a cold capillary fluid closes on his heart. The man was erratic, dissolving in pain: a glance showed it. The best empiricist in all of his acquaintance gave no help, ignored the long distress call to friends.

Four o'clock the following afternoon brings Jeanette to him. He lets her in, unable to read the enigma of the features he prided himself on glossing the week before. After he commits to some deplorable pleasantry he sees that the message is anger: soft, silent, crying, intractable. Her rage is all for Lovering, although it is Koss she mourns for. The best he can do in extremity is extend the inadequate arm of care. He attempts to comfort her in the only dialect he is fluent in. He strokes her, but the touch feels like his own obit. No comfort in contact at this minute. If they could stop for half a measure, separate, let silence come between them, that paraphrase might teach them what Lovering meant, and more. But he cannot retreat from her for any reason now. He has only the old, obscuring burden of touching to save them.

"Jeannie," he says, lifting her resisting face. "Lovering made his own decision. We might have seen, but we didn't. Who can say what difference it would have made, even if we had?" The argument his viscera have already vetoed. Jeanette says nothing. He never imagined she was capable of such anguish, acute grief for someone she never cared for. "Darling, listen. It isn't up to us to figure out why he killed himself. You said it yourself. Joe made a framing error. He misread the…"

Jeannie jerks away from him fiercely. Fully capable of defrauding her husband, Ressler, and even herself, she will not stand for defrauding science. "What the hell do you know about it? You, the arch-rationalist. Tagged, antiseptic passions. The double-blind study! Never known confusion in your life. Nothing a control group can't clarify. Where do you come off making sense of him?"

His mouth hangs loose on the words. Her face purple, air-starved, bruised, her features hideous, unrecognizable in the violence she would do him. He sees how deeply he hates her. Hates her as in the early days all over again, when he could not admit to need, when he was not even significant enough to her to be singled out for rejection. Even in hating, he takes his cue from her. The words for what comes next originate with her at every step, from the day this total stranger toweled his head dry.

Hatred bridges what pity was powerless to. They are both instantly in the same place. "Get out," he whispers. "Did I ask you here? Did I ask to be led through grubby little liaisons? The supply closet, for Christ's sake." Each subdued syllable leaves her slamming a fist into her temples and gasping for breath. "Go on! Tell me all about myself. Make it accurate. Then get out."

With a weird, guttural shout, she springs on him before he can hold her off. Her nails sink into his back and her teeth dig for a vein. Pinning her, he discovers: not aggression. Desperate holding on. He knows what consolation she has come for. A minute's embrace and she would lead him unsteadily off again, here, on another floor, as if their bed were anywhere the world might let them make it. She would have them do the euphemism as if it still had a point. As if the act of kind still signified, still stood somehow for kindness or could close the gap between them.

But the closest they will ever come is analogy, secret writing, codes — social, behavioral, civil, moral, criminal — constantly garbled in the thousand signal deformations passed from her hemispheres to his. She makes herself a glossary on his mouth, in his ear, asking forgiveness, tolerance, understanding, love. Or not for these weak analogies, spent conventions, but the intransigent, unmappable location she would loose herself to.

Her grief smashes against him, a convulsion scarier than any Lovering elicits. It forces his chest, cuts into it with the desire to be past things, unchanged, indifferent to how they reveal themselves here. Toward that one goal, he can assist her for half an hour. He undoes her blouse, turning it down from the curve of her shoulders as she gives, leans into the unsheathing. Then, shocked by his fingers' static charge, she jumps to her feet, pulling on the slipped clothing. She holds her hair to her head, takes a few steps in a circle. Ressler lets his breath out, saying, at the end of the exhale, "He's dead."

"That isn't," she says staccato, frantic. "That isn't it. This isn't it.

I can't… I never meant__" Dr. Koss shakes her fevered head, comes to a decision. She runs for the door. He calls her, but she doesn't break meter. The latch closes behind her, swift and succinct. Ressler goes slack, stretched across his front room. He feels nothing, no loss, only the lumpectomy scar. From first prohibited kiss he has prepared himself for the moment when the impermissible toxin would purge itself. But he has overlooked this possibility — unexplained, unilateral panic — as too awful and obvious. He lies on the bare floor, waiting for no explanation. He stands, goes to the record player, creates his own.

There is, in the innermost core of the work, a variation that stands apart from the others, bizarre, instantly detectable, alien. He heard this outcast in the litter, picking it out from the confusion of notes the night she brought them by, even before he could speak a single chord of tonal language. Five sixths of the way through the Goldberg set — variation twenty-five — is the most profound resignation to existence ever written.

He has studied music for half a year, listened each evening, learned notation, sight-read scores for much of the basic repertoire. Now, after a long time away, he comes back to this little sequence coding for the moment of dispersion. It is the one text that can say how he and Jeanette, by lightest degrees, arrived at dead confusion. How could the unsuspecting initial sarabande possibly code for what has taken her? He follows in memory the way they have come. Once, he could only see it on the page. Now he can hear. The Base is intact, agonizingly fleshed out with chromatic passing tones. Above the encrypted notes a slow unraveling, shattered beyond saying, an ineffable, searing, lost line meanders into intervals where language cannot follow. Push the whole sequence down a tone, fill out the phrase with accidentals, repeat verbatim, but dropped into a key the chilling, unreachable nether pole from tonic.

The four-by-four-by-four Base, stretched out of all proportion, out of all ability of its limpid simplicity to carry, is still there, whole, note-for-note intact, only unrecognizable. His ear, schooled on recent events, detects the ancestor, the parental name now lost in daughters. The mathematical manipulation pushes on, farther than the bars would permit, grinding against dissonances more grating even than those born in his own generation. It wanders stunted through bleak modulations — G minor, F minor, E-flat minor, B-flat minor — keys incredibly distant, bearing no relation to the place where they began and must return. As testimony to the heart that made it, this too is scored as a dance. What cannot be survived, cannot be listened to, must also be danced.

Stuart lies at the close, back against the impossibly thin crust of earth. The column of air pressing his ribs is no thicker. Pinned between these sheets, he hears in this scalar mutation what called Lovering away, what tortures Jeannie: a sorrow that did not exist in its parent sarabande. No math encapsules it; no signal, no word for Not. It never was on this earth, until twisted out of insensate elements.

What are these modulations after, about, just in front of the door? Something to the tune of how mere saying, tracing, researching, conveying will never make the case for existence. Days do not carry the full conjugation table for the verb To Live. Only, at raw moments, the imperative.

He knows she is gone, as gone as his office mate, as lost as his steady, programmed shedding of cells, the tune that twenty-five comes unspeakably close to speaking. Departure. He hears in brief the only home his future can ever come back to, whatever distant relations it explores on its long, final, unimaginable spiral deep down into the innermost life of the hive, beyond grief, underneath encryption.

Disaster (conclusion)

I cannot find it in me to keep working. The cause is longer than this morning. I've been racing it from the first, and I see now that it will beat me to the finish. I've made the mistake of reading over what I've put down here since last June. A little lay chemistry, evolution in outline, amateur linguistics padded out with kiss-and-tell. The whole ream turns my stomach to look at. It was to be my way of learning a little about music, a year spent listening to the composition. Now the pattern-search is snagged on a single fact: the best potential father in the world, the transmissible gift of kind intelligence, chose to die a celibate.

"You live alone?" Todd asked him, back when we still drank contraband wine out of paper cups in the computer room. Ressler lifted that familiar lip edge that said everything and disclosed nothing. "What do you do with yourself?"

"1 work. 1 read what interests me. 1 garden. The seed companies send me their catalogs, a little earlier every year."

Todd was unrelenting that night. "If you don't mind my asking, what do you do for women?"

"What have women ever done for me?" He pressed the advantage of humor, slipped out with an account of a recent survey of the most desirable traits in an American mate: "Women choosing men selected intelligence, kindness, and money in increasing importance. Men ranked it face, breasts, and hips."

He deliberately chose to sit and wait for complete genetic dismantling. I never saw him, until that last chance, lift his hand to assert himself. He suppressed the choice to breed along with the other vanities. The life scientist, still in his twenties, turning over flagstones in the lab, looking for buried treasure, one day, by accident, squared up against what all the secret writing graffiti'd over every millimeter of the world's surface and miles deep was saying: double faster than you unravel.

Even that much would have been bearable. Even if only a simple-minded recursion—"Copy this" — the pattern had authored grammars so materially satisfying, living syntaxes of such heart-stopping choreography, that it would have been enough to affirm life even in abstaining. The law compelling electrons to arrange themselves in the lowest energy configuration, the law saying that hot had to flow irreversibly downhill into cold, had become so adept at local violations, amended and invented loopholes, that the resulting biological anarchy synthesized its own sponsor. But he had stumbled upon something that ruined him for procreation.

He heard the sound — if not imbedded in the cell itself, there in the way the program runs — of an imperative variation stronger than "Copy this." A countering command: the tick of miss, of not, the leak of things going wrong. The hiss accumulating in transcription, like that party game of Telephone, slowly mauling the message so badly it no longer meant anything. Death too was just the code's last trick to promote divide and multiply. He listened to his cell incorporate disaster into its plan, synthesizing genes with no function but to make enzymes that smeared other genes, enhanced mutation, promoted runaway tumor.

Disaster says to me, softer and softer, "Quit the typewriter. Too much has gone wrong. You're not accurate enough ever to put it right." I'd say my project was in crisis, if I thought the project still existed. How can I still mourn for a man who gave me a few months of guarded, way-station amenities? Why anxiety at Jimmy's stroke, incapacitated by an acquaintance with whom I never graduated past tenderness? Throat-choking panic at the thought of a boy I kissed for four abortive months at sixteen. Anger at a devoted friend for skipping a Christmas card. Alarming dreams of parents dead for years. Annihilating ache for my old colleague Mr. Scott, who knew one joke about retiring. Everyone I've ever loved has killed me a little. Every concert I've ever attended, every tune I thrilled to and immediately forgot, every book, every reference, every patron that presented herself at my desk with every question saying, "Solve me; you have half an hour": decimating strokes, a swipe of God's hand.

I'll never solve any of it. Assembled into oppressive full score, it whispers to me, submits the unlivable knowledge that the world will be recombined, more fertile than ever after I disband. Worse, the mix will be renewed because I leave it. More than I can take: the stroke that erases me, the force corrupting my message engineers creation.

But the piece won't let me drop. The most chromatic catastrophe ever composed leaves me here, cashless, listening to meandering pattern stand in for plan. Accident hums the song it assembles, resigned beyond listening, intervals arcing like sparks damped in a vacuum inconceivably bigger than the code and wanting only one thing from it. The thing it makes me finish writing: how that celibate, as if only waiting for the disastrous chance, set to work living like there was no tomorrow.