Gold Bug Variations

II

Who's Who in the American Midsection

For all that we finally discovered about him, Dr. Ressler still came from and returned to nowhere. His life was a cipher, his needs one of those latent anthologies, safe deposit boxes filled with tickets to urgent, forgotten banquets. Our sustained misreading of the man was my fault. Todd put me on his trail, and I went after him as an abstraction, a chemistry unknown that, mixed with the right reagent, reveals itself by going rose or precipitating. I looked for a postulate, completely missing the empiricist's point. Now, when it no longer helps, I see the person he stood for is the one who is gone.

Our search for the reagent began two years ago. The branch again swelled to summer capacity with bored children and adults too ashamed for bathing suits. The alien figure from the previous autumn who'd known all about Ike's coronary but hadn't a sufficiently straightforward command of syntax to tell me I'd flubbed the day's date had not returned, and my recollection of the run-in followed the standard extinction path. Months on, after a numbing bean curve of requests, I looked up from the Reference Desk at a face so untroubled and trusting as to instantly trigger any thinking woman's suspicion. A man in mid-twenties lingering patiently like a parasitic vine for me to finish. His nose tilted friendlily when he at last got my attention. His eyebrows flashed greeting, sure I'd be as happy to see him as he was to see me. I returned the survivalist's stare I'd learned on hitting the city: stand where you like — here, there, under the traffic in Columbus Circle. His grin persisted as we slid onto business footing. If anything, he got a kick at my failing to respond as effusively as invited. Without a trace of agitation, he said, "I want to know someone."

I squelched the facetious comeback. Cutting cleverness, the chief weapon of my social life, was worthless at the branch. I kept mum until the clear-faced questioner corrected himself. He did so without the diffidence I expected from such ingenuous features. "I mean I'd like to identify someone. Find out who he is." I waited, but he was in no hurry. Apparently he felt that anyone who couldn't sift the evidence before it was spelled out would be unable to handle it after. "I'd like some information. Whatever you can find. I need an ID on this fellow." He slipped me a scrap torn from a drawing notebook. Florid acanthus letters formed a man's name. Aware that his writing was more cryptic than Linear A, he read out: "Stuart Ressler. Mean anything?"

I set the scrap down with exaggerated care. "Could you please be a little more vague?" I pride myself on working impartially, even for those whose sole purpose on earth is to propagate ravaging inanity. But this man was clearly too bright to be forgiven such a time waster. Bright enough to register facetiousness, in any case.

"Perhaps I ought to narrow the scale a mite. It's just that you're such a mind reader over the phone."

"Sir, we have several librarians on staff, and any one of them…" I tried to catch the eye of the security guard, just coming around the periodicals.

"Oh, no. We've spoken a couple times. The text of Luther's 95. Fast Fourier transforms. How much IBM to buy. Names of the flying reindeer."

I cleared my throat; we were not yet amused. But he had proved himself at least marginally safe, unlikely to tote handguns down into the subway. "All right. I'll help you, so long as you pay your taxes. This name: animal, vegetable…?"

"Funny you should ask." He turned his face away, hiding. When he looked back, his boyish clarity had changed barometrically. "I'm certain he did important work once."

The catch in his voice revealed that this wasn't a simple round of Botticelli. "All right. You believe he's in the records. I'll trust you. What was the man's line of work?"

My client grinned. "Don't know for sure." Sheepish, tickled. "Something hard. Something objective, I mean."

His odd adjective reminded me of a quote I'd once identified: Who seeks hard things, to him is the way hard. That one had fallen trivially at the push of a concordance. But this: qualitatively different. Why associate difficulty with objective disciplines? Certainly the subjective morass is harder. "We can eliminate professional sports?" He laughed in agreement. "You don't know the man's field, but you're sure he's well-known. What were his dates?"

"Oh." My question flushed the amusement from his eyes. "He's still alive. And I didn't say well-known. I said I was sure he'd done something important. Some real work once." He spoke precisely if incoherently, sure that intelligibility would eventually, as with the current administration's promised economic prosperity, trickle down.

"I see." I hid my irritation by taking sparse notes. "Still living. Born…?" I finally prompted, "When?"

He thought long. Breaking through triumphantly, he said, "He is about twice as old as me. I know that for a fact. That means we can start in the early thirties, huh?"

I suggested he start a little higher, in the low forties, Fortieth to Forty-second, to be exact. "Sir. We're just a neighborhood branch. If this person is as obscure as you make him out, you'll have to go over to midtown."

He sensed my shame in referring him to a higher authority. "You kidding? They'd laugh me off Manhattan."

"Why shouldn't we do the same?"

"Heard you don't laugh as much here." At which, I did.

Even as I tried to palm him off, I knew I wouldn't let him go without first testing my skill. His softheaded question had a difficulty that hooked me. Solving it would be at least as valuable to the long-term survival of the race as determining Dorothy's shoe size or supplying a six-letter word for a vehicle ending in U. "All right. What great thing, broadly speaking of course, do you think he did? How did you hear of him?"

"I work with him."

It took no intuition to hear the warning buzzers. Those who want to get the drop on another — from term-papering schoolchildren to businessmen steeped in interoffice sabotage — outnumber all my other clients. I would not be party to spying on a coworker. But just about to hand back the paper scrap, I recalled how, at the moment when this man had joked about his acquaintance straddling animal and vegetable, he had hidden his hazel-and-bark face. Rather than return the name, I stiffened and held it, implicating myself for good.

Had I paid attention, I might have been quicker in drawing connections in the days ahead. But as in most informational work, content evaporates completely before the end of the shift. Specifics disappear, leaving just the trace of categories, methods. Archivists aren't wellsprings of fact; they are search algorithms. The unfolding subway, the byzantine network of accumulating particulars — our Pyramid, Great Wall, St. Peter's, the largest engineering feat of all time — daily runs a nip-and-tuck footrace between the facts worth saving and the technology for managing the explosion. A single day produces more print than centuries of antiquity. Magazines, newspapers, fliers, pamphlets, brochures: fifty thousand volumes annually in English alone, ten times what a person can read in a lifetime. Six new books every hour, each one the potential wave-tip that will put the whole retrieval system under. Dictionaries of dictionaries, encyclopedias of indices, compression tables into microfilm windows onto text bases. Even my sleepy branch has its desktop computer — a genus nonexistent ten years ago — that scans years of periodicals by subject, title, or author, in seconds returning a cartridge that plugs into a reader that zooms to the complete article in question, assuming the high schoolers haven't wedged Slurpee cups into the mechanism. In summer '83, I had every confidence in the power of my tools to crack the script. Two years of even more spectacular advances in retrieval, and I'm guttering in the dark.

One night not long ago Ressler, Todd, and I — contents, carrier, and cracker of that first ID — sat together in the hum of the computer room, its gigabytes of sensitive data in the sole care of these two vagrants, over stale bread, grocery-store Camembert, and Moselle. Expansive in the combination of tastes, Dr. Ressler remarked that people of last century could look at a musical score and hear the piece in their heads. "Name the work; they could hum the principal motifs. We've traded that for the ability to lay hands on a recording in five minutes, or your tax contribution back." Affectionate burlesque of my trade, the one that for a moment recovered him from the heap of lost scores.

In that professional capacity, I didn't for an instant doubt I'd be able to find the nub-penned name. Even without any contribution, Stuart Ressler was somewhere in the permanent files, many times, in immense Orwellian lists. Time, resources, and brute research could extract him. I needed only decide how much effort this other man, in his twenties, with the Bonnard coloration, was worth.

I try not to second-guess the social value of my daily assignments. From each according to his critical needs, to each according to my best retrieving abilities. I must believe that my clients are the best judge of what information they require. My colleague Mr. Scott, advanced degrees in anthro and philology as well as library science, hovering on the brink of eternally threatened retirement, pulling volumes to prove to this year's perpetual motioneer that the latest ingenious scheme once again violates the Second Law, likes to sing the couplet:

They all laughed at Christopher Columbus when he said the world was round,

They all laughed when Edison recorded sound.

Skepticism sweetens Mr. Scott's countertenor: all that sad, misdirected, highly trained skill, with only a once-an-epoch useful solution preventing his whole career from degenerating into a waste of shame. Scott, like everyone who looks things up for a living, prefers Gershwin to admitting that progress has destroyed our ability to tell which facts of the runaway file are worth recalling. Value is the one thing that can't be looked up. I myself am sometimes shamefully pragmatic, cutting losses on a goose-chase, bowing out on diminishing returns: the awful ethical calculus that forces politicians to cut a deal, surgeons to choose which of three dying people to repair My first impulse was to give this college boy a list of biographical dictionaries and ditch him until he'd run the legwork, by which point I would be safely over the informational border, joining Mr. Scott in retirement haven. Defensible, given the opacity of the question. But pride made me give it a preliminary nudge. However ill-defined, the ID was at least as diverting as rock stars' birthdays.

We started at the top, the Who's Whos. The boy annoyed me completely by trotting ahead, going down the spines saying, "Tried it, skipped it, tried it…." Months later, he explained he was being funny. By then, I'd discovered that Frank Todd was a competent researcher. The only thing standing between him and Ph.D., aside from sense of humor, was excessive thoroughness. He belonged to the class that can't get started writing, paralyzed by that last overlooked source. Franker perpetually budgeted another half year to mopping up; by the end of the period, the holdouts had proliferated. When I accused him of playing dumb at that first meeting, making me do the scutwork he could easily have done himself, he said, "Woman, have you ever seen yourself reach for the top shelves? Choice."

I ignored him and began the elimination sieve. As I thumbed, he stood by, irritating me further by humming. His hum sounded like the vibration of the library air conditioning, so soft and sustained were the intervals. When I looked up he was standing shoulders hunched and eyes closed, conducting himself with the closed forefinger of his right hand, wrist curled in front of his chest like a gothic icon. I just made out the tune, the slow accretion of a haunting chord. Flirting between major and minor, it brushed me with the sad suggestion that I'd heard it before, something forgotten and irretrievable. It sounded like a decision I'd made about myself long ago. But I could only work on one mystery at a time and so kept reading rather than add a descant.

We came up with nothing, which neither surprised nor disappointed him. We searched the indices and traced the biographies back a decade. The mystery man had, by all appearance, written nothing of note; we combed the combined abstracts as far back as credible and came up empty-handed. The undertaking took us both — for the solo conductor at last broke from enchanted humming to lend a hand — all afternoon. I assured him that failure still taught us a great deal, narrowed the scope considerably. "We know, at least, where the mark doesn't live." I didn't add that we'd greatly reduced the plausibility of the original hypothesis. My client stood dumbly by the card catalog, stuck his hands in his pockets, and waited for me to say what happened next.

I in turn waited for him to volunteer the reason why this search was so important. But his patience outlasted mine. In another moment, he might have gone back to humming. I gave in, ensuring another meeting. "I can run some electronic searches. But these are expensive if you don't know what you're looking for. Every vendor has a per-minute connect fee, and if you simply instruct them to grind away on an unspecified name…." He continued to smile; I wasn't sure he followed. "Then charges add up."

He spread his palms: Pay as you go? Don't I always? His voice dropped a notch. "All I have is yours."

I'm astonished to think how easily I slipped into flirtation. "Yes, but how much do you have?'

"Think Marx to Dumont on the ship's gangplank in Night at the Opera." Fifteen minutes after he left, I would produce the allusion.

I haven't had any complaints yet. I promised to tweak a few angles we hadn't explored that afternoon. He nodded and agreed to find out more at the source. Then he troubled his voice into greatness. "We won't give up so easily, will we? Not by a Lamb Chop." I refused to grin. He turned to leave, but just before quitting the reference area he swung to face me. In one of those unexpected shifts in tone I learned to predict, he asked, "Are you beautiful?" The question floored me less then than it does now. "Who wants to know?" I flipped back. The professional in me beat the provocateur, two out of three falls. Leaving that evening, I was still working on his parting shot. Was she beautiful? I said out loud, to no one, "Let's answer the hard one first."

Was She Beautiful?

I've never thought so. Perhaps he did. Dr. Ressler lent a gracious second, always chivalrous. The whole inquiry hardly seems relevant anymore. Dead issue. Why is that answer ever crucial? Those third-party testimonials—she's so trustworthy, loyal, helpful, friendly, courteous—are superfluous adjective catalogs without the key commodity—and so beautiful. Add that, and bored listeners beg for the chance to judge for themselves. The soberest article, mentioning good looks, sensationalizes mere journalism. She was beautiful. He was stunning. Porcelain, startling, deep, timeless, haunting: more than cosmetic. Political. Historical.

Custom downplays it, pretends that looks are a judgment call, denigrates the superficial. But the faintest suggestion of beauty and everyone's off, Todd in the lead. A glimpse, and he couldn't help myself: pretty form clamped his imagination, a credential for inner sense. Beautiful faces kept ineffable secrets he then needed to reveal. They knew something, something they might tell him if he could only get close enough, inhale, smother himself in their perfection. I've seen him stopped dead by the line of a woman coming carelessly out of a shop across the street. Perfect plumage chilled his heart. A classic face carried the imprint of another time, like those garbled message-dreams that distress the dreamer but reveal, to the skilled explicator, perpetual homesickness. For my friend, it was always the first question. Todd's every ache was desire to return. And beauty mapped the way back.

Franklin suffered from uncontrollable love for lovely women.

He nostalgically confused the lost domain with something more visceral: yellow hair, witch eyes, a pout to the lips, tight crepe black dresses stopping just south of the hip and running up the back in little ripples. Time and again he took the hook, went for the stamp, the visible spectrum, the package job, the fatal allure of surfaces. He could not resist the Vogue look. His Annie was much more the homecoming-queen shoo-in than I. I never possessed glamour or high features. Not even in the ballpark. Passable cheekbones, nose a bit too Sumerian. Body sound, but a step below aerobic. After years of living with me, Tuckwell said my face had the forbidding attractiveness that announced, "For office use only. Do not write below this line."

Hair between brown and blond is my best feature; but every schoolboy knows what hair is. Given Todd's desperation for Glossy, I don't know what he saw in me worth buzzing. If I have any surface, it is anachronistic. And yet anachronism has always had its fatal Franklin charm. "I know where I've seen you before," he said once, stroking my chin, studying it in candlelight. "The Cluny tapestries. Lady and Unicorn." He meant it as a compliment. High Medieval Flemish is his chosen field. But faint praise: he could see something in me the herd could not. I pushed my luck by asking, "Former or latter?"

I have it on authority that Franklin, confirmed Platonist from way back, seeing women who better approximated his rage for perfection, felt, above anything, distress. When led into Penn Station by a breathtaking madonna only to have her turn and reveal a mulish forehead or mousy nose, his utter relief was like a life sentence commuted to death at the last minute. A hopelessly plain face freed him of responsibility, while agonizingly perfect physiognomy attacked his cortex like an opiate, haunted his sleep for weeks, whispered to him of missed chances that might at last have lifted the confines of the mundane.

But did I have a face that compelled that connoisseur to desire? Eyes, nose, expanse of skin to alert that stranger-stalker? His repeated insistence contradicted itself. Mine is a middle-percentile dazzle, smack in the fat of the normal curve, the not-bottom-of-a-truck woman who sits next to you on the bus, attractive but unrecognized at class reunions. What Franklin saw on second take would never have sold cigarettes or survived pastel. But in the time and place he saw me — Flanders or Artois, 1500—he insisted I had the stuff that earth's waters and wild animals wept at in envy.

Did he have looks enough to justify that gangbuster, self-conducting solo-humming? Oh, he's beautiful. Undeniably, breath-takingly, in all prosaic senses, the classic regularity of features. He claimed to be a little short, a little overweight, a little caulky. He was none of these when I last saw him, and he knew it. He hid behind a face that shone like no other.

The vertical files now contain us: clippings, grainy pictures of all four faces. They show me as a woman somewhat startled. Only the initiated would call me attractive. The Wire photo of Frank shows a young man whose face is a prism. Bent from its white light is the spectrum of every autumn day that ever hurt him. For standard beauty, he had a decided head start. And yet, all of us would grow infinitely more attractive. Even I would shoot open, turn heads like the rarest hothouse flower. Events conspired to make us all, for a moment, beautiful. His parting question, insouciant and impertinent, seemed to create the very pull it asked about. Somewhere I heard rules breaking, water trickling through limestone. Here was a man possessed of boundary-free confidence, asking not if I was beautiful but if I was ready to become it.

He's right: beauty does correspond to a profound secret. But there's a catch. Not the emblem of inner power, but its by-product: the last, faint track of a slowly unfolding generative order, numb-ingly miraculous, even in end results — mouth, eyes, hair. The epi-phenomenon of desperate cells, every face forms the record of shattering, species-wide experiment. The perfect face, the one we ache inside to stand near, is just the median case. The Artist's composite criminal, one that destroys us to leave. And we always leave, once we learn its creases.

He left me that day with two unknowns for the price of one: I didn't even get his name. But he left a trace, another scrap of nub script discovered that evening before I left. When I went to update the quote of the day, making my perfunctory, usually pointless search of the submissions, I found a piece of drawing paper torn from the same notebook:

Natura nihil agit frustra (Nature makes no grotesques)

Signed Sir Thomas Browne, although he misspelled the name. I used the quote, paying the price. Few selections have produced such public bafflement. But I'd choose confusion even now, over the usual indifference of days.

The Question Board

Mother always insisted I got what I had coming. From birth, I was addicted to questions. When the delivering nurse slapped my rump, instead of howling, I blinked inquisitively. As a child I pushed the why" cycle to break point. At six, I demanded to know why people cried. Mother launched into the authorized version of the uses of sorrow. At the end of her extended explanation, it came out that I really wanted the hydromechanics of tear ducts. By her account, I worsened with each year's new vocabulary. She finally took refuge in a multivolume children's encyclopedia, parking me by it whenever I began to get asky. I can still see the color plates: Archers at Agincourt; Instruments of the Orchestra; two-page rainbow Evolutionary Tree. But her scheme backfired. I could now ask about things that hadn't even existed before. Whys multiplied, poking into the places color plates opened but failed to enter.

So it righted a cosmic imbalance in her eyes that I ended up answering others' questions for a living. She hoped to see me sit behind the Reference Desk until I'd answered as many unanswerables as I had plagued her with all those years. To hasten that payoff, I invented a way to address interrogatives around the clock. The Question Board, with Quotes and Events, completes the trinity I used to break up the routine of human contact. Librarian is a service occupation, gas station attendant of the mind. In an earlier age, I might have made things. Now I only make things available. Another blit in the bulge of the late-capitalist job curve. Service accounts for two thirds of the GNP, with the figure expected to rise well into next century. By the millennium, half of all service professionals will specialize in processing data. My Question Board, then, is both living fossil and meta-mammal.

A portion of board duty is always custodial: disposing of "Why can't Jigs talk English?" and "How 'bout the phone number of the girl who does that shower commercial?" Eight of ten remaining requests are fish in barrels, solutions floating off the pages of major almanacs or last week's periodicals. One in ten demand tougher track-downs, sometimes lasting days before breaking. The final 10 percent, not always demanding, aren't technically answerable. Formally undecidable, to bastardize math jargon: heartbreaking, ludicrous insights into the inquiring spirit, requiring special delicacy. "Q: Is there any meaning to it all?" "A: According to Facts on File…"

Over years I've squirreled away a mass of three-by-five Q-and-A's, perpetually preparing for nebulous further reference. Backtracing, I dig up the cards displayed on the day I met Franklin. If, as all facts at my fingertips insist, I truly live at the crucial moment of this experiment, if creation itself is now at stake, it's tough to tweeze from the whole cloth the significant, saving thread.

Q: I need (desperately) to know the source of the line: "How do you get moonlight into a chamber?" Please find this. My life's at stake.

A.H., 6/20/83

A: Quince: Well, it shall be so. But there is two hard things: that is, to bring the moonlight into a chamber; for you know, Pyramus and Thisby meet by moonlight.

Snout: Doth the moon shine that night we play our play?

Bottom: A calendar, a calendar! Look in the almanac. Find out moonshine, find out moonshine.

Quince: Yes, it doth shine that night.

Bottom: Why, then may you leave a casement of the great chamber window, where we play, open, and the moon may shine in at the casement.

Quince: Ay. Or else one must come in with a bush of thorns and a lantern, and say he comes to disfigure, or to present, the person of Moonshine.

Midsummer Night's Dream, III, i. If we can save your life again, by all means let us know.

J. O'D., 6/23/83

Q: Got an anagram for "ranted"? "Roast mules"?

R.S., 6/04/83

A: This one took time. Unfortunately, anagrams can't be solved by dipping into Reader's Guide. The first is trivial: "ardent." The second took our concerted staff two weeks, although the answer is so simple any child can do it: "somersault," We hope you appreciate the tax dollars that went into these. If your efforts produce any cash prize, we trust you'll split it with your favorite library.

J. O'D., 6/23/83

Q: Where can I go live where the people are really well off, money-wise? I don't care what type of government, because I don't vote anyway.

K.G., 6/22/83

A: For sheer income there's always Nauru, a Pacific island whose eight thousand inhabitants are far wealthier per capita than the U.S. population. They make their money on one product, phosphates, which run the industries of Australia, New Zealand, and Japan. The Nauruans extract the chemicals from huge deposit of seafowl guano laid down over thousands of years. Such affluence has a price. The island is itself largely a giant guano deposit, and the more than two million tons of phosphates exported each year eat it away rapidly. While everyone on Nauru drives expensive cars, there are fewer miles of road to drive on every year. You might as well stay home and vote.

J. O'D, 6/23/83

Q: Has a woman ever given birth to the child of a goat? What was this creature called?

B.R.G., 6/23/83

A: No. But such an offspring would be a satyr — Greek mythological hybrids, man above the waist, goat below.

J. O'D, 6/23/83

This last one attracted special attention. I've marked the card for admittance into my circumspect list of all-time classics. During my Question Board tenure, I've been asked everything at least once. Which is worse, cancer or heart attack? If Chicago time gives more hours than New York time, why don't we go on it too? I'm doing a family tree of Jesus and need to know Mary's last name; was it also Christ? Three weeks in the reference section of the local public would convince even Saint Paul that caritas is, if anything, beside the point. Love doesn't even scratch the surface of what the species needs. Goat-people arise more frequently than anyone except reference librarians knows. I long ago stopped being astonished at the number of people unable to distinguish between whim and brick wall, who choose their newspapers on whether they are readable on the subway.

As I left that evening, I thought how the italic-penned challenge also partook of the species-wide inability to tell need from not. All the way home, walking through the enfeebling city heat, I wondered why I'd agreed to help find what could better be learned by asking the man in question. I came up with no better answer than the asker's beauty. Reaching the relative safety of my neighborhood, I heard my father — no more tolerant than my mother in answering my endless girlhood questions — whisper his old litany, "Stranger, Danger," in my interrogative ear.

Face Value

I worked for a humiliating week and a half without turning up a shred of evidence that Stuart Ressler had ever existed, let alone done anything hard. I spent more time on the job than I should have, rigor proportionate to my anger at the thing's idiocy. Half a dozen times a day, on a new inspiration, I'd labor a page or phone midtown. I was on the verge of running a bogus credit check to get his date, place of birth, and social security. Ethics and pride prevented me, but only just. The sponsor called once during that period, more out of obligation than hope. He'd weaseled some specifics from the source that he thought might help. The man was born in 1932, putting him just over a half-century. He had been brought up in the East but joked about time as a young man "in the interior." He spoke little and read perpetually, everything from throwaway fiction to abstruse journals. He was by all appearances celibate. He lived at work. "You probably can't use this," my accomplice added, "but the only time I've ever seen him show emotion was last year, when that famous pianist stroked out dead."

I brought up the matter of occupations. "I know we're after the distant past here, but it might help to know what line of work the two of you are currently in."

Mr. Todd chuckled hollowly at the other end. "We run the country, the two of us. Nights. Paper collating. Buck ten over the minimum." They were the mainframe operations graveyard shift for a data-processing firm. "Info vendors. You and me are practically kissing cousins." He stopped short of suggesting we improve relations. As worthless as the stray facts were, I learned one helpful bit before disconnecting: Todd's name. He also gave me a number where I could reach him, "any hour of the night or night."

I hit the payoff only by coincidence, after another week of ingenious, impotent search. Serendipitous discovery, beloved of science historians. The trick to blundering onto a gold mine lies in long preparation. I undertook no project without testing it for relevance. But the solution chose to arrive with such accidental grace that it appalls me. A wide-eyed schoolboy had come to the Reference Desk with a whitewashed first draft of a term paper on civil rights. Attempting to bring the movement back from gelded interpretation, I led him to primary sources, contemporary reports of 1957 Little Rock — the Arkansas National Guard confronting the U.S. Army. We flipped through a popular Year in Pictures, the ingénu discovering that this foregone event had in fact required a second civil war just before his own birth, and was not yet decided.

As I'd done habitually with every book I touched for the last two weeks, I scanned the index. Nothing. Then the next year's cumulative, reduced to hunt-and-peck. This time, beyond all hope, an entry. Refusing to believe, I pulled the citation. A gallery of black-and-white portraits accompanying an article on this annus mirabilis in molecular genetics carried a minor caption that read, "Dr. Stuart Ressler: one of the new breed who will help uncover the formula for human life."

That was just the first shock. I had seen the accompanying face before. The eruption of coincidence made me put off calling Franklin Todd. I woke that night from a sleep of secret cabals to make the connection: Ike's coronary specialist, the man in the pilled oxford. He was a smooth twenty-six in the photo, and over fifty when I'd met him the previous fall. But despite the intervening years, his face was unmistakable. The cell paths responsible for aging had failed to erase his particulars. Lying in bed, unable to go back to sleep, I did the long division. The NYPL has over eighty branches serving more than ten million people. The odds against a man paying my insignificant branch a visit followed months later by another who wanted to identify him were incalculable. I jumped to conspiracy: the two were colluding to test my research skills for some reason I was compelled to figure out. In the dark of my room, beside a sleeping male whose breath did not change cadence as I shot awake, it felt as if Dewey had broken down: on the shelf, spine to spine beside the Biography Index where I had begun the search, came cheap intrigue.

Suspicion didn't leave me until the day Frank Todd took me to his office, that converted warehouse he shared with the still obscure Dr. Ressler. Only then did the statistical improbability work out. I laughed at my mathematical paranoia, at how I had missed the crucial, obvious splint: their office, the night watch where they nursed the machines, was four streets down from mine. I had swapped cause with effect. The two lost men were simply both patrons of the nearest public bookshelf.

Rule of Three

I've logged tonight much the same story as the one I started a few nights ago. Identical, with changes: the dead man's one theme. A life in the laboratory made Dr. Ressler see everything that happened on earth — everything that ever can happen — all speciation as a set of variations whose differences declare their variegated similarity. Yet in the end, the work he left behind, the bit he added to the runaway fossil record, proves that the occasional, infinitesimal difference, astronomically rare, is the force that drives similarity into unexpected places. Tonight I put the scratched record on the machine again, playing it out loud when my memory becomes too spotty to call up the melody. The same tune this evening, same simple scale as the one that a few days ago prompted me to end my professional life. But not a note of Dr. Ressler's piece is in place.

Last week, the dance seemed a duet, subtle play between a right hand too close and courant to hear and a left I left so long ago I didn't at first recognize it. But tonight: I definitely hear trio. Love triangle. Dr. Ressler's story is nothing if not a threesome. He loved a woman; and he loved something else, inimical. Research didn't teach me this; firsthand contamination did. I've been to the place, picked up the spore.

Coy cat-and-mouse, familiar Q-and-A game around since the dawn of Chordata. The man I loved was of a low opinion of love's predictability. I can hear him — in the same voice that wandered up that stacked, homeless chord while he conducted himself— singing, "Birds do it, Bees do it; even shiftless ABDs do it…." I loved Franklin, and it all seemed a duet once. But every late-night visit I ever had from him, every visit I ever paid, took place in the shadow of an unnamed corespondent. A third party. Every couple an isosceles.

I am no calmer tonight. For all that I've already written, Dr. Ressler's death still comes on me at odd hours. Worse, more real. I hit a sentence requiring a fact I can't bring back intact: Ask Stuart; he'll remember. But his memory, the finest I've ever seen, is scattered, lost in small changes. What I have in mind is no clearer now than on the day I gave notice. Half my two weeks is over, and I've still not explained to incredulous coworkers what's going on. I promise to, the moment I figure it. Tomorrow, I start my last week of work, with no plan for after. Every book I touched this afternoon seemed strange. I must have been crazy to quit. Overreacted in a moment's grief. I've thrown away what little prospect I had of making it through these days intact. And yet: hurt demanded that I lose my job. For a week, I know I must square off against quiet, coming catastrophe alone.

Tonight, at the old sticking point, I hear another voice in the bass, below the love duet. However entwined the upper lines, another figure informs them, insists on singing along. All two-part voice separation harbors a secret trio in dense fretwork. Three in nature is always a crowd. A chord. A code. If science was that man's perpetual third party, the scientist himself was mine.

Today in History

Inappropriately exhilarating to be in the stacks today, now that I'm a short-term impostor. Still, work continues until the last check. This morning, as if nothing has happened to routine, I posted for the Event Calendar:

June 28

Half a year before the United States' entry into World War II, Roosevelt establishes the Office of Scientific Research and Development. Vannevar Bush, designer of one of the earliest computers, becomes director. The OSRD coordinates U.S. scientific work with military concerns. It presides over the development of radar and sonar, mass-produced sulfa drugs and penicillin, mechanical computing, and the atomic bomb. The contributions of science to the war effort are widely appreciated. But the effects war has had on subsequent scientific research are more difficult to state.

Posting, I'd already made my break with the branch. My thoughts were no longer on work, but on that other today, twenty-five years ago, when Stuart Ressler, newly minted Doctor of Biological Science, nine years old when the OSRD was born, arrived in the Midwest to commence adult life and make his crucial if subsequently forgotten contribution to progress. His bid for the Who's Who.