Gold Bug Variations

XXVI

The Vertical File

Ressler alone was ready. The space of a single week showed that his slow return to engagement had been spring training for exactly this catastrophe. The bloom of the last few months, which 1 had nipped in the bud, sprang back fuller for my pruning. Todd was set to go to the insurance company with a signed confession and spend the next half of his life in prison if it meant getting Jimmy back on coverage. Dr. Ressler restrained him, pointing out that the grandstand clean breast would only transfer the unpayable liability from Jimmy to the fraudulent file manipulator.

Ressler organized a trip to the hospital. Todd could not bring himself to go. His need for exoneration was so paralyzing he could not take a step toward it. The sight of Jimmy in that bed, in that condition, would have destroyed any chance Franklin had of ever living with what he had done. Dr. Ressler, Annie, and I met by the registration desk. When she saw me, Todd's other mate pleaded with my eyes a moment. She came tentatively toward me and awkwardly stroked the hair of my forearm. She wanted to lay her head between my breasts like a little girl. Knocked down by the larger, unattainable forgiveness I then needed, I would have let her.

But we gave no hostages to humiliation on that trip. The hospital halls, the bald children, the tubes jammed into bruised faces — the entire ordeal of shame seemed, in the company of Ressler, whom 1 had not seen out of the warehouse since New Hampshire, less to be endured than understood. In the elevator, he talked to a wheelchaired victim in the extremities of MS, not about the man's disease or the work he would now never do, but about the best lines in Tennyson and which pieces of Dvorak most bore repeated listening. When we got out of the lift, Ressler turned and waved as the doors closed.

Challenge the Patient

Challenge the patient to respond to one narcotic or another, strap him to a quantifying screen that feeds back digits for his number, root out the latinate reason from the multivolume tome, circumvent the leak or seal it, magnificently postpone: he, insidious, will choose a time that signifies at least, chorus to a calculated close, spread south like the vee of geese.

I led them to Jimmy's room, issuing veiled sentences meant to warn them about what they would find. But when we got to the room, Ressler greeted his old acquaintance in the same voice he had greeted him in day after day at shift change for longer than I'd known either of them. "Hello, James. Visitors. Oh! This bed can't possibly be comfortable." Jimmy, seeing us, convulsed on his good side. Whether delight or resentment, the message was lost in the spastic independence his muscles had acquired. "Franklin has to man the fort," Ressler said. "Your being away has thrown things up for grabs at work. He wants to come see you soon." Not a lie. He wants; he wants with his capacity to come see you.

Jimmy made an awful noise, not the one he had made for me. The contour was different, changed, more desperate, more out of control, less like words than the ones he had spoken to me alone. Annie shrank from the sound and left the room. Better to have stayed and cried in front of the man. Ressler leaned over Jimmy, put his ear close as I had done, if for no other reason than to ease the chest, lungs, diaphragm. "What was that?" As if he'd just been caught off guard, not paying attention. A thump in darkness, the trickle of syllables over teeth, fricatives ululating in rapids over the pebbles of a streambed. Cruel, given the smear of noise, to make him say it again. But against expectation, Dr. Ressler turned to me after the second burst and translated.

"He says, 'My father died.'"

My hands flexed automatically to grab my neck, the escape of flushed birds. We had had no clue, until then, of the condition of Jimmy's mind. Only his sagged face and vocal cords; he was trapped somewhere inside the hull. These first words Jimmy had gotten out since his vascular accident could not have been more grotesque. I didn't know which would be worse: a real death, a second horror laid on his, or a detached, neural wandering. Dr. Ressler leaned back down to ask a question that never occurred to me. "When did your dad die, James?" He straightened and interpreted, "Nineteen-sixty."

Annie came back, sat in one of the chairs by the bed. When shifting, I caught Jimmy in certain angles — eyes alert, face at attention — where his expression seemed almost cogent. Was he decoupled, incoherent, ruined, or just rubbed raw, shot back into involuntary memory? "Mr. Steadman," Ressler smiled, holding him affectionately by both hands, sitting down on the hospital bed that, while single, was large enough for both these men. "Jimmy. Can we get you anything?" Uncle Jimmy trumpeted again, more sedately, a breaking whitecap of pitch. But the professor was growing fluent enough to be able to understand the sentence without leaning up against him.

"He'd like us to tell him a story. He says that if we give him one he'll be good." Perhaps inept irony was still intact. Or maybe he'd become a child. I searched Ressler for his opinion. I looked into the face of a biologist who thought Jimmy's request totally understandable: anyone in the world might one day reasonably request such a thing. A story. And why not? "Either of you two any good at narrative?"

But the line between simplicity and violence in Jimmy had been whittled narrower than a capacitor gap. When Dr. Ressler tried to tell Jimmy what had been happening at the office in his absence, the invalid flared out. His mouth hung open as inappropriately as a vault left swinging on its hinges. He practically howled a word that, in its vowel at least, was clearly "no."

Ressler appealed for help, but I could give none. I had no idea what Jimmy wanted. If it was really a tale with beginning, middle, and end, I was no good to him. My skill lay in retrieving, not telling. I could lead them to the encyclopedia, give them the Greek explanation for thunder or Native American rain. I knew that legenda was Medieval Latin, for things to be read at gatherings. But I could not invent one. Annie grabbed a newspaper from the stand where a visitor to Jimmy's sickmate had left it. Thinking it was sound he needed, she pulled a headline off page two: "Sunni Splinter Group Shells Suspected Shi'ite Arsenal." But Jimmy's head snapped up. He gave her what must have been a sidelong glare and growled. That was no story; he was not going to be robbed of explanation by mere reportage.

It seemed he would only be kept in check by a real barrier of narrative fable. He wanted an exegesis as precise, elegant, and exact as those old origins of thunder, evil, rainbows, suffering. But those museum pieces were rusted over beyond reviving. There was a man in the room who might make a stab at why the defective blood vessel had burst, leaving a mind flooded. But that wasn't the song Jimmy asked for. He needed a more potent bedside tale. Jimmy was pinned under wreckage, a cerebrovascular accident that had failed to throw him clear of the crash. He lay propped up in bed, sense of direction destroyed, one of those compassless whales trapped up an illusory inlet. For some reason, even after damage that could never be reversed, he still wanted the sum of his experience read back to him as an adventure.

Dr. Ressler looked at Annie and me, wondering why he'd bothered to bring us along. Jimmy was growing increasingly restive, rocking on the bed, attempting to build up the momentum needed to throw his feet to the floor. Ressler caught him up gently. "Jimmy. Listen. The hospital is making threatening noises about the bill. They've asked your mother for proof of ability to meet a prolonged stay." He hushed Jimmy's long, mewled objection. "Of course that's impossible. No one has told you because no one wanted to upset you."

Jimmy lay still while Ressler related the insurance company's refusal to retroactively reinstate him. He listened passively to the legal counsel's opinion: the letter of the law lay on the side of the insurers, a business that made no provision for individual charity. Ressler did not mention Todd's plan to save Jimmy by confessing the deed. But the professor did lay out something I heard for the first time. "Don't worry about this bill for now. Your job is to come back from this as quickly as you can. I believe we can get you reinstated. But don't mention this to anyone just yet."

The admonition made me snort in pain. But neither man paid me any notice. They were concentrating on each other. Ressler began spelling out a plan so developed that it seemed months in the making. Who knows how much Jimmy was taking in. Ressler leaned over his friend's crumpled side, speaking in low tones, as if admonishing, behave, then, and we'll give you what you ask for. Lie still and we'll give you that story.

The Cipher Wheel Days go by when he can think of nothing but what he might have done for Lovering had he been paying attention. He does not see Jeanette; neither can abide what they now know about the other. In that dead period, when Lovering's chaotic half of the office still sprawls up to the dividing line, Ressler learns, from out of the diminished Blue Sky, that Daniel is suing Renée Woytowich for divorce. Impossible: Ressler was at Woyty's the other day and father and mother were on the floor playing with the kid, beyond all dignity hopelessly in love with one another and their family. All incinerated in a matter of hours. He ought to leave it, run the other direction. But he must know.

He tracks Dan down to his office, late in the evening. Ressler knocks gingerly, hears nothing beyond the door but canned laughter. He goes in, circumspect and uninvited. Woyty sits in front of the hulking, luggable TV set that hasn't been on since Ivy's arrival. Woyty's long fast from watching, causing great concern at Stainer Central, is broken with a vengeance.

"Absolutely unavailable for chatting, Stuart. Got to assign a number to Life of Riley here."

Stuart sits down and watches Jackie Gleason play the big, bumbling, malapropian airplane factory worker whose tag line, "What a revoltin' development this is," has become a national catch-phrase. After a minute of ritual self-effacement, Dan says, "So much for the liberal humanist theory that what the world needs is more laughter. America doesn't need any more entertainment; it's entertained to the gills. I'm panning this sucker. Straight zeros. Send Life of Riley back to figurative speech where it belongs." He speaks as if there's something heroic in wandering out of the mode shelter in the middle of the bean curve. He fiddles with a Sputnik-sized wad of aluminum foil strung between the rabbit ears. "Reception's piss-poor here. Ghost so bad it makes Queen for a Day look like the Austro-Hungarian dual monarchy out for a weekend."

Ressler looks at him, neither admonishing nor accommodating. All at once, Woyty is volunteering all over the place. "You came to get the lowdown on my divorce, didn't you? Scavenger. Want to know why I'm filing? Want to know the grounds?" Ressler doesn't even nod. "Go ahead, guess." But Woytowich doesn't wait. "You got it. Infidelity."

"Good Christ!" Ressler slams the desk, shoots to his feet. "Don't be an idiot! One look at her and any divorce judge would laugh the case out of court."

"Saying she's not pretty enough? You wouldn't have her? Well, Stuart, I'm relieved to hear it's not you."

"I'm saying you're a fool. She worships you. She's just had a child." Ressler can't say how he knows Renée is blameless. He knows what women in affairs look like. Dan's wife is not one. "How could she possibly be running around? She doesn't have time. She hasn't been out of your sight for months."

"Oh," Woyty answers with a placid smile. "We're not talking about recent weeks. We're going back into the distant past. A year, year and a half."

"What are you talking about? Nonsense. Before Ivy?"

"Stuart. Leave me be. The kid's not mine."

"God. Don't tell me! Not learning fast enough. You've hit a wall in the instant-genius campaign, and the only explanation is that no child of yours.…" He breaks off in disgust.

Dan gives his evidence in monotone. "Five days ago, Ivy and I were playing with the letter blocks. It occurred to me that she might not be acquiring the alphabet at all, that I might be cuing her solely on block color. I thought it might be fun to set up a control, have her pick colored disks out of a ring. She couldn't do it very well. I tried it with some large letters and she selected them perfectly. That didn't make any sense. How could she learn letters and not colors? I tried the disks again, and she was erratic. She could do blue, black, white. But it became increasingly obvious that Ivy could not differentiate red from green disks without prompting."

"Your child is color-blind." An allele that might not have come to the surface for years had Woytowich not been so keen on bestowing super-stimulated intelligence on her.

"I've told you. She's not my child."

Ressler summons up the textbook treatments of the matter. He recalls the central irony of sight: good vision is recessive; myopia dominant. He skims past that irrelevance and concentrates on remembering what he can about red-green color-blindness. "Renée doesn't have it?"

Daniel clucks his tongue dryly against the roof of his mouth. "I thought you were supposed to be the boy wonder. Don't you remember anything from Mendel?"

Ressler suddenly sees why the question is stupidly irrelevant. Red-green color-blindness is the classic example of a sex-linked, X-linked recessive. Both Ivy's X chromosomes must have the allele for her to be color-blind. If Daniel isn't color-blind, his daughter can't be. "And you don't have it?" Ressler asks, again irrelevantly, of the first man in downstate Illinois to have bought a color set. "What about the autosomal varieties? At least two different assortments, as I remember."

Daniel snorts. "One in several tens of thousands. Which do you think is more likely? A fluke mutation or a woman getting herself plowed?" He turns away in pain, deaf to anything further Ressler has to say on the matter. "Too bad, too. I was looking forward to showing her the egg-in-the-bottle in a year or two." Science. "The potato and iodine."

"You're not going to ask for visitation?"

Woyty just spins lazily toward him. "How many times do I have to tell you? She's not mine."

The improbability of the event, the lateness of the hour leave Stuart helpless. "So what do you do now?" Woytowich flicks a wrist toward the corner, indicating a duffel bag and toilet kit. "Oh, no. Dan. You're not moving in here?"

"Just until I find a place."

"Turning your back on them? Just like that?"

"They'll get half the checks."

The next day Ressler visits Renée. The woman assaults him with dazed protests of innocence. "Stuart. There's never been anyone but Daniel. Not now, not two years ago. God. Not even before I met him." Clearly innocent: the way she rocks the baby between denials. She confesses to one sorry, fully clothed grope with her thesis instructor, momentarily aroused for the first time since his tenure when the two of them compared the relative merits of Volpone and As You Like It.

"You've told him as much?"

"He won't listen. He has that fucking proof."

"He told you about that?"

"Stuart," she says, ready to debase herself. Her vowels caramelize. "I don't care what inheritance says. Inheritance is wrong." He glances down at the bright child, tilting her head in curiosity all around the enormous room. All right, then. He's ready to accept the astronomical odds. But his willingness is not at issue. Ivy babbles, grabs Stuart's cuff, shakes it, waiting impatiently for the next letter game. The baby, however precocious, doesn't know what's hit her. But she is a fast study. She'll learn in no time.

A week later, Ressler takes his first outdoor tomato juice in months. In vitro is still jammed, and he has nothing to fall back on but the torture of relaxation. Propped in the forgotten lawn chair, he realizes that he'll soon have been in the I-states a whole year. The landscape is unchanged, but his 1958 debut stretch on the lawn is incomplete. No Tooney and Evie Blake will materialize, step out from K-53-A, glasses in hand, having waited all winter for this first lawn party of the season. No one will set up a chair at Stuart's side and kick in a conversational bracer. No decimated Woyty, now, and Jesus: no Levering. And Koss's awful resolve to keep away, keep from seeing him, will be no weaker, no less erratic, than her original passion.

His eye scans K court, the tar-paper triplexes. He looks across the toy town street toward A through J. He imagines all the doors opening at once, pouring out their contents, Tornado Day. He animates the imagined occupants, marches them his way, stands them out on his front lawn tapping an imaginary but ample keg, trading the character flaws that are the generating spark of all beer bashes. A neighbor who studies wish fulfillment in corporate execs, a woman who conditions rabbits to do this trick with a rosary, a fellow with a theory about rag content in Spanish Renaissance manuscripts, another who claims he's in grad school but whose big trick is to sing the words to the Gunsmoke theme so fast you can't tell what language he's in: they are all there, behind closed doors, lined up in these row houses. Statistics and human variability guarantee it.

He has only to tap on any window and they will come out, eager to meet him. Ressler has yet to commit himself to whether dreams carry codified information or whether they're just electrical residue. As he nods deeper into this one, the difference becomes insignificant. He snaps his head up each time it droops onto his chest. Then, from nowhere, he sees himself staring at clarity, at the rarest, most paradisiacal species.

In that moment of visitation — arriving once in a life if lucky and requiring a further lifetime to recover — it comes to him. He is afraid to move; the least muscle tic will frighten the creature off. He sets his empty glass down on the grass, taking forever to reach ground. He lifts himself slowly from the chair, feeling his knees infinitesimally unbend. He stands, turns, looks: it is still there. Everything he is after, the last bit, the complete, documented map home, squarely in front of him. His.

He stays up all night hitting it, but it will not break. He tries to knock it out of commission by reviewing the literature, but it stands up to the articles. The means are so clean, so self-evident, that the suspicion that someone must already have it sits in the crook of Ressler's gut like a silver-dollar-sized, swallowed acid drop. He is waiting for Botkin outside her office when she shows up the next morning. She's surprised enough to know not to ask anything until she opens the door. Stuart makes a beeline for the couch, where he lies back and announces, "We are so bloody stupid."

"Instantiate that pronoun. You and me? The research group? The department? The human species?"

"Whichever is largest."

"This," she says, her pitch cupping upwards with each word, "is Biology?"

He grins in a way that confirms his sweeping generalization. "We've done the thing exactly ass-backwards. We've done step two, the hard part. And we've been stuck backing up to step one, the piece of cake. Like someone building an entire internal combustion engine and then serendipitously saying, 'Hey! Why don't we put gasoline in here?' Stupid. Dumb. Pea-brained."

"Dull. Dim-witted. Duncical," Botkin agrees. "So tell me." She laughs, infected with the visitation of science, which she has felt once before. Laughs for this young man, for the moment of insight that will not come in this way again.

"Unbelievable. I designed it toward this end. I'd already realized it would have to be something like this. That was the whole point of Gale and Folkes. I'd laid it out, everything but the method itself, months ago. But I must have___" Marveling: how could it be? "I must have forgotten."

"And now you've recovered?"

And more. Romped. Routed. "You see, it was the fault of pattern. All those months of numerology we put in. I've been as guilty as Gamow, Crick, Ulrich, any of them."

"Explain yourself. Two speeds slower, please."

"We all wanted to make the codon catalog conform to some kind of internal necessity. The problem is, math does provide a few surprising, elegant, yet irrelevant ways of producing the number twenty out of the numbers sixty-four, three, and four. But you see, Nature — well, it's not even perverse, because it's not even a noun. Nature had no idea what we had planned for it."

"You're suggesting that we forget your poet's advice about forcing Homer into English — allow the result to be less than rapid, plain, direct, noble?"

Ressler nods his head impatiently. "Because no experimental evidence for internal commas exists, we assumed a self-punctuating code, got hung up on catalogs where no two successive codons create valid overlaps. The notion of a self-punctuating, error-correcting code was never far from my mind. It happens that the largest possible error-detecting, self-framing catalog is exactly twenty codons. As a result of this coincidence, I was predisposed against even thinking of long monomer chains like CCCCCC. Monotonous strings like poly-C carry no internal information. Not worth toying with, I thought. Couldn't be more wrong." Ressler sits up, carried forward by excitement. "The trivial chains are our entree into this thing."

A slow, broad grin of understanding- breaks out over Botkin's face. She glimpses it. Her pleasure confirms Ressler. She could blurt it out, fill in the missing bit herself now. But she sits back happily, waiting for him.

"We have built ourselves a working in vitro interpreter, an Enigma Machine that converts any nucleotide chain we feed it into the protein polymer it stands for. Oh Toveh!" His voice is a husky, amazed low wavelength. "Child's play. Stupid, stupid, stupid. It really is. We've built the flower, then discovered sun." He's come too far not to spell out the obvious. "Grunberg-Manago and Ochoa had polyribonucleotide synthesis three years ago. Accidentally, but we'll take it." He nudges the smile in her direction, stands, spins Euclidians in the narrow office. "Khorana has nucleotide-building down to a science. We can say anything we want to our little transcriber. So we synthesize our own RNA message, only we make it the most simple-minded, open-throated, informationless whole-tone shout imaginable." In the beginning was the Word. "We make our own gene for reading, only we make it all of one base. We take this constructed, monotone string — poly-C, poly-anything— and submit it to the protein-synthesis process. I'll wager the remainder of my fellowship that the resulting protein will be a repeating polymer string of a single amino acid. We will have the first word of the code: the codon CCC codes for whatever poly-amino makes up the resulting string."

"All right," says Botkin. "We get UUU, AAA, GGG, and CCC. Four down leaves sixty to go." That takes care of transmuting lead into gold. What do you do for an encore?

Ressler's face drops before he sees that the woman's calm is affected, her euphoria about to blow out every pore. "The rest of the catalog is just sweat." It is not, in fact. He begins to see how there's always call for one more insight, one more piece of improvised ingenuity. But labeling, controlled mutagen-tailoring of the submitted message, poly-dinucleotides, combinatorics, short chains — time-consuming, meticulous, brute lexical mop-up will get them through.

"Simple," she concurs. "Dr. Johnson's dictionary." But beneath the sardonic restraint, they both know he has done the hard part. He has listed the set of imperatives for lifting the curtain. Her excitement is unconcealable, and it spills out of her in cautionary checks. "Anyone wishing to make a little conversation with the angels has to remember that jeder Engel ist schrecklich." At his blank, startled look, she laughs and glosses, "Every angel is terrible. You've told Dr. Koss?"

Something, a slight rise in the woman's cheerful tone, warns Ressler that she knows the half of what she is asking. He feels the last step in an untraceable hierarchy of chemical events flush his face, conveying the source by suppressing it. Enzyme spray laces his central nervous system. He will not go on this way, pretending. He cannot bear it. And now, he need not. Heart, lungs, viscera do a Coney Island. He is diminished, augmented all at once, hung out on the first intervals of a melody that pronounce him infinitely powerful and shatteringly afraid, a pairing he needs no code wheel to read. Promise first. You must never die.

Now he can promise. He can go to her, say, "See what a flower I have found you." No more cause, no possible loss, no need for this denial, the refusal they have fallen into, the separation standing in for life. She must get free. The two of them must marry, must make, of the time still in front of them, the everyday miracle time already hints at. He will go to her, tell her he has sprung through to the far side. He holds the answer in his hands; hers if she wants it. He will ask her help and offer her his, daily and for good. What will it be like then, how impossible, necessary, and real, to be able to look up from anything he is thinking, working on, just look up — nothing so simple as that — and speak to her, hear her, be with her?

"I haven't told her yet," he says. "But she's next."

Theory and Composition

Sometimes we played a game, essentially Name that Tune. Our friend would challenge us: "A sequence please, some clues, But make it something from the repertoire I've had some chance in this amateur's life of having heard."

The point was not mastery of the catalog, but the pleasure in quotation: Were we familiar with those few measures, a certain interval, a favorite leap; that abiding high G in the 'cello, surprise rising fifths, agitation in the reeds?

He thought themes between us might make an intimacy, could be almost like singing. We didn't get it: "How long should the phrase be?" "How long do I need? Give it to me a tone at a time. One after the other; I'll stop you when I'm home."

We tried him on our most obscure: Stamitz, Machaut, Cui. Then graduated to guilty loves. At last, it grew fun to see if Gilbert and Sullivan, slowed to a stop and in minor, might slip him. Or "Satisfaction." "Watchman, Tell Us of the Night."

I thought: so this is melody.

Leased office, dull mechanical hum, irritating flicker of fluorescence, and a few friends, stretching their vocal cords. A little patter, a little mix of the dozen available intervals. And out of this weight on the chest, our desolation, came a sudden sweep, a quick-closing glimpse of that place beyond the incurable, where hope might Still germinate.

We resorted to the concert war-horses. The point was to see how far they might be sliced down, pared back to their essentials, and still be recognizable. Ressler was uncanny. Even with my feeble approximations, he could get most of what I knew by heart in a few pitches. Half by reading my mind, half by the shape of the phrase, he got Brahms's Fourth, first movement, in four.

The suggestion of predictability in the masters outraged Todd. "Now how in hell, out of all possible choices—"

"That's just the point. Each note reduces the choices that are left. What pitch could possibly come after such a setup? And if you already know the next pitch, then you know the piece."

Todd persisted, confused. "Tell me: could you conceivably Name That Tune in three?"

"Not if the notes formed an ascending triad. The whole question is, within acceptable tonal syntax, how likely the sequence of intervals becomes. Where do they point? Is the next pitch already telegraphed? Some sequences are so free, so without redundancy, that they might lead anywhere. Others are more constrained. Every melody heaps up improbability until, by the cadence, it can only be the one thing it is. If your three pitches were improbable enough, they might suffice to prove the private domain of, say, Shostakovich. Or Dragnet"

"And two notes, then? Still possible?"

"Don't push your luck."

"One?"

"Pure potential! No edge; no message. One note could be the start of any tune at all."

It took a trained reductionist, someone who arrived at effusion relatively late in life, to see the shape of songs governed by information theory. Perhaps he did so simply to lead Frank on, force him to toughen his own indulgence toward washes of sound. Whatever the case, Ressler tested the first, tentative equation relating music to constituent melody and melody to strings of frequencies, simple sequence.

Q: I'm just your middle-distance listener. Forgive me asking: if it's really language, a matter of tending toward tonic, being driven back, how can fragments of phrase, motives, voices stacked into chords, moments that strain toward greater departure or return, how can these explain, begin to account for, the terrace of light, mottled rays guttering back to dark, joy, loss, the scent of my own ending in this syllable-free tune? Layman's answer please.

J. O'D.

Sound, he pronounced, always means more than it says. The parts only start to explain the thing waiting to spring out of them. So it is in every organized hive. Because we live on the seam between formula and mystery, because I can recognize in the harmonic vicissitudes the hummable tune is put through some similar, metaphorical bend, music marks out the way all messages go. Its contours deliver themselves, bent from the chance of experience. They live for a minute in ephemeral pattern, then collapse back to a uniform void that says nothing, carries no knowledge, far less information. The silence they fall back into, the nothing that they contrast with, is what notes make, for a measure, audible.

What else is there in a melodic phrase? However much it wrenches me on the promise of sound, signals from a place lost beyond recovering, a musical line has nothing in it but notes. A choice of twelve possible pitch-equivalents, durations scored out by a simple-minded system of ten or so lengths based on powers of two. What else is there in an allegro but phrase, phrase, and development of phrase? What is there in the Jupiter but allegro, andante, minuet, plus allegro? At bottom, only notes.

But notes passed through a transforming key: nothing is what it is except in where, when, and how it goes about unfolding. Push that pencil box of notes, pitch it faster, prolong it, pinch it, prod it upwards, follow its fall, attach it to a line, stack voices on top of it, slacken, shift it off into unlikely relation, let it breathe, grow, summon, augment, enhance, startle everything around it, and suddenly, out of those ridiculously constrained initial building blocks, those neutral frequencies meaningless in themselves, with only the most elementary grammar or enzymes to shape them:

I am (at first modulation) coming home late, pressed under the hot but changeable air, studying the warnings, the bruise-blue striations of a storm-sky. Someone — my mother? — runs before me, entering, crashing through the house, slamming shut windows, spreading towels across the soaked sills. A cascade of flats, sudden appassionato, about-face at the double bar, and I am elsewhere: watching frigate birds dip in a graceful circle into fresh pools, an enchanted oasis of animals studied through a slight break in the vegetation.

And yet: that's still not it, exactly. It's no more an excuse to free-associate than it is equations. Besides, those associations— house, storm, birds, pool — are all too literal. Everything Ressler ever said to us was an exercise in how words might fit to music. But music into words? Don't push your luck. It will run from any description like floaters skidding across the cornea when and only when you look directly at them.

Yet it is, beyond doubt, language. It may be closer to the architectural plan for that ruined Tower than any other available approximation. I once read, when combing the literature to save Jimmy from his hemorrhage, of the way CAT scans reveal sonatas ravishing the cerebral cortex. A single tone shows up as stagnant Sargasso. Scales create regular ripples of red, yellow, blue. But tune it, trip it into a sequence, three-three-four-five-five-four-three-two, clothe it in vertical harmony, and it storms, splashes across a mass of uncontrollably firing neurons, exploding into the rose window at Chartres.

We know all the rules of air, but we will never predict the weather. Something happens on the rungs of order above the chromatic scale; something happens between the four first pitches and Four Last Songs. According to the scan, even the simplest compositional rules are enough to awaken primitive wonder, release the brain from the conventions of verisimilitude, free it from its constant dictionary of representation. But the scan shows something even more surprising. Composers, skilled in theory, hear music differently. CAT profiles of their listening brains show more verbal hemisphere activity, as if they don't just let the associative sensations of timbre and rhythm swell through them, but somehow eavesdrop on a point being argued on thought's original instruments. Can the effect be any less beautiful for being better articulated?

What message could anyone hear there, what terrible conversation except the same, out-of-place, inexecutable instruction carried in the Linear B script deep in the nucleus: feel this, grow, do more with what is scored here? Harmonize it every time you open your throat, but know you will never come close to saying, naming what it is.

Even those who can look at a score, a graph of the raw wavelengths in annotated two dimensions, who can see an ingenious inversion or stretto and feel there in the soundless study a cold stab up the spinal column, who can leap from the single cut stone to the completed dome: even they are not replying just to the notes on that particular page. They are hearing in the sigh of the appoggiatura the covert, coded, Latin joy at the approach of the Spanish Armada transcribed in Byrd's motet. They are remembering Lully putting the time-beating stick through his foot and dying of infection. They are repenting to Mendelssohn, unable to premier Schubert's Ninth in London because the players wouldn't take the work seriously. They are reliving late Beethoven's obsession with variation form. They are reading, where they still lie open, extant, the notebooks in which an unbearable humanity addressed the deaf man. They are scribbling addenda in those notebooks, adding unanswered questions there.

Our game was only Name That Tune. "I can name that tune in five notes, in four, three." The pieces whose names Ressler supplied had nothing to do with these snippet clues. The real works were interplays of huge motions, movements that stormed inexorably toward arrival or were forcibly restrained, parts progressing in the collision and collusion of themes, themes that constantly built toward breaking down, recombining from their phrases, lines that urged certain stabilities, expectations, setbacks, the tendencies of chords in their given instant, five or four or three of those delinquent, namable, and straying intervals sounded at once. Notes that gave nothing at all away about the ineffable message urgently taking shape so many levels above them, in the weather, in the storm.

It was a night like any other. Outside, six blocks away, people were being murdered. At a middle distance, rain was falling upstate, over the border, rain that left pines as dead as if they had been stripped for sadistic pleasure. In the wide lens, we had at last opened up our long-sought hole in the atmosphere. According to best projections, extrapolations from that week's Facts on File, the world was moving into a terminal late afternoon. Ressler guessed Brahms's Fourth in four.

We sang and quizzed and stumped each other a few times. "No, no. Listen. This part's beautiful. Damn, I've lost the thread. You have to hear it with harmony; here, hold this D." In a few months, Todd and I would split, Jimmy would be crippled for life with a ruptured aneurysm, and the professor would succumb to galloping cancer. All of that lay hiding in those melodies we had by ear. We played name-that-hosanna, but the only quote that lasted past that night was the Dostoyevsky that wound up on the board: In life, sheer hosanna is not enough, for things must be tested in the crucible of doubt.

Above us, well into the solar system, a deep-space satellite drifted; in addition to pictures of the planet we had just finished poisoning (drawings and coded information theoretically understandable to any alien creature, whatever their language), it bore a record player and recording of a Brandenburg concerto. Colossal misrepresentation, exaggeration, lie, really, about who we were and what we might be able to accomplish. Homo musica.

But that was the language we spoke for a night, a grammar of one trick: tension and release. How likely is the next note, its pitch, its catch, its duration, its tonal envelope? Where does it need to go? What detours must it be put through? Delays, silences, that brief flash showing how close beauty was to the germ of hopelessness. The poignancy of a pattern lifted beyond identity, beyond the thing it was mimicking, past metaphor, into the first mystery: the bliss beyond the fiddle, but not, for a night, beyond fiddling.

Music was no use for anything. It would not protect us from the disaster about to happen, nor even predict it. It was the one pattern not rushing to accomplish or correct current event, not condemned to be about anything else. It was about itself, about singing and breaking off from song. Its every phrase continuously flirted with the urge to return to constituent pitch, to give up, go back to Do. We sat quizzing, guessing, comparing recognitions, trading affections for certain expositions with no idea of the development section already in store. Ressler was as happy as a widower who, through force of habit continuing to buy two season tickets years after his wife had gone, discovered that he might give one to the child on Symphony Hall steps who until then had had to be content with echo.

I can still hear them, softly at night, trickling through the open window from the next apartment over. Those tunes still hold, locked in their sequence like the foundations of older temples beneath the nave, not only the complete morphological steps for recreating each similar April night I have ever lived — the color, the wrap, the attitude, the inclination, the range of emotional casts: how I turned from a similar window in just such a light back to a sheet of sums that had to be completed before bed — but also the difference, the closed door, the knowledge that I am no longer in any night but this.

There is only one way for day to pass into dark; today has done so along a predictable sliding scale since the Precambrian. There are only a few barometric pressures, a narrow band of allowable temperatures. But however reducible to parts — degree, pound per square inch, lumen, hour by the clock, latitude, inclination and season — however simple and limited the rules for varying these, something in the particular combination of elements is, like twelve notes and ten durations compounded into a complex cortex-storm, unique, unrepeatable, infinitely unlikely. Today in History: Bach knocks out another cantata.

I hear him listening with a code-breaker's urge, taking noise and turning it to pattern, thinking to find with ear and voice a surrogate, an emblem for the melody of the self-composing gene. The absurd conclusion I cannot help but reach — that singing means something — is rooted in Ressler's choice: either be a physician, cropping the delinquent tissue, or a researcher, a musician, mapping anatomy, the way the tissue lies. Two choices that amount to one thing. To feel the pattern flash, summoning an account for the gut-twist in a deceptive cadence. In either case, conspire to produce and deliver that new song the obsolete Lord requires.

Listen and sing. That's all he wrote. And I can name that tune in one note.

Breaking and Entering

"So you see, Jimmy, we'll need access."

I listened as the professor sat on the hospital bed and explained. It became clear to me what he had in mind. It even became clear to Annie, who leaned over during Dr. Ressler's explanation and whispered, "So it's time to get our feet dirty."

How he could imagine that stroked and broken Jimmy, who had wanted pitifully to tell us of his father's death twenty years ago, was in any shape to assist was beyond me. Yet Ressler spoke to him without condescension, apologizing for spelling out the obvious. His words had a confidence in the ability of signals to survive the shattered receiver. I watched Ressler reach into his jacket pocket and momentarily thought he was about to pull out a handheld terminal and plug it into the wall jack in that hospital room.

Instead, he retrieved a lower-tech spiral notepad and flipped to a blank page. The pad was packed with illegible scrapings, although I had never once seen Ressler make a single mark into anything resembling it.

He printed methodically, in large block letters down six columns of six, the letters of the alphabet and the ten digits. "I'm sorry we have to resort to this, Jimmy. But I have to be sure we get it right." Jimmy made no sound. I thought: He might as well be talking to himself. "Let's start with the operating system lockout. You lie still. When I get to the first letter, let me know." He smiled reassuringly, betraying none of the hopelessness of this attempt, the only shot we had for getting Jimmy reinstated under the umbrella of an institution that, understandably, had no stake in private welfare. Dr. Ressler began at the top of the first column, pointing to each letter and pronouncing the corresponding name.

I stood and walked to the door. I could not stand to watch them get to the bottom of the last column, Ressler pointing and naming while Jimmy lay in confusion. Then, an agonizing twenty letters into the list, Jimmy made a noise. Not a howl or sigh. An indicative yes. Ressler's shoulders dropped in relief. He noted the letter and brought his pen back to the top.

It was a grueling process, and Jimmy had to rest twice. But after the first letter, we were home. Jimmy gave us dozens of crucial bits of information — passwords, memory locations, patch names— that until then had been the secret domain of the Operations Manager. Whatever else the flood of blood had wiped out — muscular control, speech, emotional perspective — it left Jimmy still able to remember the system words Ressler was asking him to spell. Nowhere in the dialogue was the message passed, "Betray your professional confidences, look the other way while we break the law, and we will do what we can to keep you from being killed." Ressler said only the letters of the alphabet; Jimmy made only grunts. But the transmission was there, intact, awful in its implied risk. Uncle Jimmy was the classic Picardian third: minor his whole life, promoted to major at the last chord.