Gold Bug Variations

XXIX

The Threshold Effect

In that museum in Rotterdam where my friend's broken-off research tour of the known world took him, a room away from Brueghel's great Tower (already crumbling in mid-construction around the base) hangs its twentieth-century counterpart, the contemporary reply to the scattering of languages: Magritte's Threshold of Liberty. The painting opens on a sealed room whose walls divide into panels. Each panel is itself a painted window, hinting at what lies on the other side, beyond the pane: sky, trees, fire, lace, more windows, or just a further wooden panel, the wall the painted imitation hangs upon.

In the center of the bare room stands a cannon, a paint cannon, but about to discharge itself all the same. The painting is an enigma, an absolute cipher. It is about enigma, the screen of knowing only through language, the threshold effect, the accumulation of small variations that transform a change of degree into a change of nature. Life stands on the threshold of some new twist it will never be able to name but must live through all the same. I will get no closer to liberty than thin explanation, this diminishing metaphor of panels porting images into the closed room. But it interests me to imagine Todd standing in front of that cannon just about to fire, shatter the painted chamber, flood the place with moonlight that until that moment had been only postulate. I stand next to him in the narrow gallery, looking, waiting.

My sabbatical is up. The last text I read says that the doubling time for genetic knowledge has dropped to less than a year. Twice the field it was the day I started studying. And I've nothing to put down by way of synopsis except this belated discovery that I don't much care to die apart from him.

A Child's Guide to Surgery

The mutations we set into the system began to take effect the next morning. MOL data enterers, sitting down at their terminals, coffee cups in hand, saw on their screens the message: "Would you mind if your major medical coverage were instantly dropped? (Enter Y or N to continue)." An "N" looped them back to the identical question. A "Y" cleared the tube and put up a string of phosphors reading, "Then please make some noise about your colleague James Steadman," before freeing the terminal and dropping the users into their ordinary dialogues.

Midmorning, when the firm's remote clients began requesting digital transmissions, the modems behaved flawlessly, the reports came over the wires, and the remote printers executed the ledgers without hitch, until the bottom line. Just where the balance should have been, the slavish dot-matrix printer pasted a boldface, near-letter-quality Q:

Q: Your company is financially linked to an insurance organization that does not honor the spirit of its contractual commitments. What can you do to keep it honest?

A: Drop a line to the CEO below.

Underneath, the dumb printer knocked out the appropriate address. Two lines beneath, like the denouement sports score doled out only after the public service announcement airs, appeared the accurate but upstaged bottom line.

Surprise blits began to infiltrate banking facilities in distant parts of the city. Tellers presenting transaction receipts to customers found that the innocuous little slips, universally distributed for the express purpose of being instantly thrown away, carried the announcement that today in history a certain stroke patient in a hospital in a neighborhood across town was about to be turned out onto the street. The slips were still thrown away, but not before a few of the bottle-messages reached civilization.

By afternoon back at the MOL offices, the day shift's crisis management, printing out the first batch of the day's mass statements, noticed, after several hundred had been printed, something wrong. Each otherwise faultless statement contained, in the bottom strip of the universal financial form usually reserved for such stuff as "We wish each one of you a warm and personal New Year," the emergency signal: "A stroke victim is about to be cut loose." Just below came a random selection from the "Yes" pile Dr. Ressler and I had made from my stack of quotes of the day:

In a few years we have learned virtually to ignore things that would have petrified the world….

Hark, the dominant's persistence till it must be answered to!

For who would lose, Though full of pain, this intellectual being….

I am sure that the power of vested interests is vastly exaggerated compared with the gradual encroachment of ideas.

Care is heavy, therefore keep you, You are care, and care must keep you.

Le vent qui éteint une lumière allume un brasier. For a rough translation, please call…

Verses-turned-viruses under the pressure of environment. Each message contained a contact where curiosity could be directed. Some quotes were canonical, others more transient. We'd clipped from Bartlett's, the daily newspaper, private stock, selecting on how well they made anonymous tragedy real. Others we picked for the roll of the words. Still others had nothing to do with Jimmy. We just liked them, favorite bits of recognition.

The first, astonished operator to notice this issue of literature all over the credit union forms may have tried to abort and restart the statement run. If so, he got exactly the same result, with whatever parameters he called up the print job. A glance at the tampered file, any attempt to list its logic, showed it scrambled beyond recognition. The daytime operations staff faced a few unacceptable choices. They could go over the thousand statements by hand with a black magic marker. This would take prohibitively long and would raise more curiosity than the snippets themselves; worse, it would not look professional. They could fail to send the batch out at all, which would result in stiff penalties for failing to meet the DP contract. Or they could send the infected financial stubs out as is and hope, as with the personal New Year's greetings, that no one paid any attention.

This they elected to do, notifying the targeted insurance executives whose numbers appeared, assuring them firm to firm that this sabotage was not the work of MOL but of some runaway individual from within. When Dr. Ressler and Todd showed up for work that evening, they were taken into police custody.

I sat home alone that night, expecting the phone to ring. I had no idea what was happening to them, although I suspected they had been rounded up. Every ten minutes I had to check myself from going over to the offices, now doubtless crawling with software experts trying to crack Dr. Ressler's Chinese box. I scoured the city news, waded through the schoolchildren slayings and neo-Nazi resurgences, but there was no mention of anomalous mass-mail hijacking. I could not see the statements going out or eavesdrop over the relay circuits. I had no way of finding out whether we'd succeeded in grazing the banking industry with our tetanus prick.

When my doorbell went off, I almost tore a ligament. I opened without even checking. It was the last visitor I expected: Annie. "You shouldn't be here," I shouted. But I wasn't about to let her leave, now that she was. Annie was pale with excitement. Acting publicly and illegally, taking legitimation from the cause itself, was so new to her that she shook to talk about it. She was discovering the thermodynamics of pressure politics and wanted, that very evening, to expand into it like nature filling its abhorred vacuum.

I gave her the apartment tour. She was as surprised at my assemblage of escapist Victoriana as her lover Todd had once been erotically charged by it. She kept snatching looks between me and all the embroidery, as if I were having her on. We sat in the living room pouring drinks, the radio news on low in the background, polling the air for waves from the pebble we'd chucked into it. Annie was transformed on activism: could we succeed in saving Jimmy? If insurance companies ran at a profit, wasn't that essentially exploitative? Weren't the central money centers the same ones who were fanning the fires in Central America and Africa? I told her I didn't know.

I didn't mind her talking. It filled the space. At one point she stopped and, complete non sequitur, announced, "You know. I've been thinking a lot about all the talks you and I used to have. You might be right about at least one thing. Species don't hold static. They don't keep still." The first awful concession: she wasn't admitting anything else. But she let me know, made me take responsibility for ruining her faith for good.

When she made to leave, I walked her to the door. There— having written down everything else from that year, I can hardly suppress this — we fell into a fumbling, confused moment, and all at once found ourselves kissing. I don't know who I was putting my mouth to. But Annie was definitely kissing me, attaching to me by her hands with the same excitement of discovery she'd had on arriving. We struggled and broke off. She looked at me, imploring, needing, hoping I might now ask her back in. I stood still and let her leave as if nothing had been transacted.

On day two of the information blitz, the mechanical messages were shuffled and sent out again a little differently. Dr. Ressler had inserted a clever routine that made sure, even though the idea-genes were distributed randomly, that no target received the same message twice. The enhanced statements went out to a new batch of recipients. Our doctored programs also began dispatching little-known facts: premium-to-payment ratios for major medical plans in the U.S.; number of days in a hospital bed required to wipe out average life savings.

I went to work but could concentrate on nothing. Ignorance of what was happening to Todd and Ressler together with my anxiety over Jimmy incapacitated me. I remember going to pieces over a trio of submissions left in the question submission box: Q: How old is the minicam? Q: How many rats are living under Brooklyn? Q: Should we go to Mars? That afternoon I was picked up for questioning.

Annie was interrogated separately, as well as a first-shift data entry clerk, completely innocent. Both were released in hours. I do not know what the others said. Aware that Dr. Ressler must certainly have been somewhere nearby, denying that anyone else had any involvement in the matter, I laid out exactly what I'd done and why. I said I had no idea at all how to stop the runaway software. That much was true.

For safety's sake, only Dr. Ressler knew. He had written the patches so that they would all unwrite themselves like the magician's self-vanishing knot the instant a certain word was typed at the command prompt on the system console. The word existed nowhere but in his memory. I don't know what Ressler told the authorities, but I know that he stopped short of dealing for Jimmy's reinstatement, a proffered swap that would have converted us all into felons.

I'm not sure which terrified the vested interests more: the suggestion that masses of sensitive data might be threatened — a notion that none of our messages even hinted at — or the acute embarrassment produced throughout the financial sector by this amateur theatrical showering of Milton and Robert Browning on the upper stories of the gleaming, inviolable World Trade buildings. In any case, no one had any use for me as soon as it became clear I could not help them stop the flow of messages. They sent me home over my own protests of guilt.

The press, a day late, caught wind of the event, and I was videotaped in conjunction with the story, walking down Vernon Boulevard. I felt strangely exhilarated, dosed with questions I had no intention of answering. That rush accounts for my looking so unlike myself in the pictures on file. Beautiful. At home the next morning, I watched myself on the breakfast sampler of area news. An hour after the spot aired, I got a call from Keith, enormously amused by the escapade. "I did my part, doll. Called the front desk of the villainous outfit for a full explanation the minute I saw your pretty mug interfering with our agency's morning spots." Suddenly scared, not at what would happen to me but aí what would never happen again, I begged Keithy to stay in touch. "Never fear. Every Christmas, a card. Like clockwork."

I don't know how many bewildered New Yorkers phoned in for a gloss on Beaumarchais or a verification on our claims figures. Perhaps a mildly curious couple dozen. Public rallying on the stroke victim's behalf amounted statistically to nil. Naturally. Ours was an equivocal case at best. Had the press not picked it up, it would have been less than insignificant, less than those people with the sandwich boards crammed with schizophrenically tiny writing who parade their imagined grievances in front of City Hall every day for twenty years. The city is full of suffering causes beyond affordability.

The press, for its part, barely mentioned Jimmy except as a side-thread to the paisley, surreal cloth. What they found locally sensational was that this mailing campaign had been a computer crime, then still a novelty. Reporters circled with weird fascination around the violated machine, its ephemeral files, the proximity of Dr. Ressler's virus to a network of sensitive information. When the hacks asked our targeted insurer for a comment, a self-assured executive, who'd had a full day to look over the paper trail on the matter and who thought that discretion was the better part of value, shrugged in front of the camera and said, "The man is covered. There was a clerical foul-up between ourselves and the hospital that we cleared up some time back. I don't understand any of it."

Neither did seven eighths of the sane world, let alone half of the breakfast television audience. We were a brief, bizarre human-interest trailer, one of those thirty-second spots that mitigate the impact of the day's real news. Our act of criminal conscience was newsworthy only until the mass of continuous diversion that passes for current event rendered it archaic trivia-game stuff. We would join the marginal list of those instantly forgotten local celebs that well-informed people, if they recall at all, suspect themselves of inventing. On day three, when the whole eccentricity was already dead, a city news reader closed the books on the story by reciting a canonical quote meant to parody our statement telegrams: "Across the wires, the electric message came/'He is no better, he is much the same.'"

At the same moment that the company spokesman denied any payment problem, Dr. Ressler surrendered the unscrambling word. They released him and Todd, a transaction that never would have happened had the two of them not been the only ones able to return the system to listable, patch-free status quo. Both were instantly fired, ironically losing, along with all other benefits, the coverage they had won back for Jimmy.

They might have fared a lot worse had it been easier to formulate a charge against them. They could not be prosecuted for vandalism. Only cosmetics had been touched, and returned unscratched. An employee in a position to do so had simply taken it on himself to redesign the corporate product. They could not be hit for electronic blackmail, as no one had ever leveled any threat. They might have been sentenced — and I with them — for malicious moralizing, capricious use of quotes. But wisely deciding that the best thing was to let the story die out as soon as possible, and perhaps afraid of vestigial viruses still in the system, neither MOL nor any node of the offended financial network spreading along the Eastern Seaboard leveled any case.

I worked quietly, wondering if I too would be fired. My colleagues, however, came to my unqualified support. Everyone I worked with was sufficiently acquainted with my character to know beyond doubt that I was not capable of being personally involved in such a passion play. I had simply let love temporarily turn my head, had fallen in with the wrong boyfriend. A healthy regimen of reference work would erase any blot still attached to me. Mr. Scott teased me about my public record for a few days, then dropped the matter.

Some weeks after the event, I came home to discover that my apartment had been visited. On the table, wrapped in abandoned sketching paper, was a bottle of our going wine, a book, and a note reading, "To paraphrase the saint: 'Nobody likes to burn.'"

I could understand the wine — a late toast to our having brought the cause off. The note, too, was self-explanatory: I was to let him back in if I wanted. But the book. It was a tiny collection of two dozen color plates, details from Brueghel's sprawling universe of children's games. Each enlargement showed one of the games from the painted catalog and an en face text description. A nostalgic invitation to recover our earlier, museum-going days. But his choice of subject was so brutally insensitive that I felt my face go hot and all I could think of was how I had stupidly failed to get back the copy of my apartment key I had given him.

I thought I would let any residual notoriety extinguish itself, then, after a month or two, try to contact Dr. Ressler. I'm not sure what I had in mind, what sort of friendship I imagined we two might still have, after all that had happened and failed to happen. He beat me to it. He called me at home, late one night, waking me from sleep. He, at least, was still on night-shift hours. He was halfway through his long, decorous apology for waking me before I realized who it was. "You!" I shouted stupidly, happily, into the receiver. It seemed physically impossible. Despite his ability to write self-vanishing code that would send Paradise Lost out over modems, Dr. Ressler had always been acutely uncomfortable with telephones. I'd never seen him use one voluntarily and never dreamed he would ever call me. "You! Are you all right?"

He told me, in a few abstracting words, the details of his grilling and release. "The end of a promising career in the burgeoning field of information."

"I've missed you so much." I was still asleep, saying things that would make me cringe the next morning and for a long time after. Not anymore. Now I wish I'd said worse.

"You've missed your friend Todd," he said. The words lay in that crevasse between assertion and educated guess. He did not wait for me to deny. "Have you been by to see James?"

The silence on my end worsened by the second. The truth was, I had thought three times an hour for weeks about paying him a visit, but I could no longer stand seeing him that way. Dr. Ressler, mercifully as always, let me off. "He's getting some light motor skill back. It'll never be much, but he could not have been blessed with a better temperament to face the next thirty years. The slightest advance, and he's triumphant. They've transferred him to a good muscle therapy clinic." He gave me the address, which I wrote down eagerly but already hypocritically.

"Can we see one another sometime?" I asked. Shier than a teenager. "Meet somewhere? I'm almost out of squash."

He let out a little puff of air. "I wish I could stick around long enough to keep you in tomatoes." I didn't dare say anything. "Jan, that's why I'm calling. I wanted to tell you that I'm on my way back to the I-states tomorrow. I've signed on to a new research project, back with the… I can't really say the alma mater, can I?" I could hear his lip pulling up ironically. Far away, the faint crosstalk of a bad connection.

"You what?" The news was so extraordinary that all I could do was laugh with joy. "You what? Incredible!" Was science that forgiving? Yes, and why not? No field could expand so fast that return would be impossible, even after so long away. If the man was sharp enough, his learning curve steep, he might even have the relative advantage of the late starter. "I can't believe it. What will you be working on?"

Just as I asked the question, I finally woke. As he spelled it out, I anticipated him by a thin syllable. I was one of those contestants who knew all the answers, but only the instant that the cards are flipped over. "Jan, it's a cancer study."

I hung on the edge of making it out — a phrase in foreign but ghostly cognates, the language I myself would still be speaking if the populations hadn't drifted. The phrase book of runaway cells.

I gripped the silence on the line, palpating it as if pressing the secret hard spot. The first thing I could think to say was, "Does Franklin know?"

"He's known for a while."

"Listen. I can dress in a minute. When do you leave? I can call a cab."

"I'd rather you didn't. And I've never been much for writing letters, either, I'm afraid."

"I love you," I said, without help, wide-awake.

This time his words lay in a further crevasse, between assertion and command. "You love your friend."

Then, nothing between that phone call and Todd's curt note. But no: Franker's postcard and his long letter were first, written first, anyway. I did receive one other communication in that blank time, that year I spent doing nothing, working, trying to rehabilitate my own light motor skills. A handwritten card from Jimmy, delivered care of the library where he remembered I worked. Half printed, half cursive, the letters look like a first, helpless effort in penmanship written with the opposite hand. As best as I can transcribe it, it says:

Dear Jan, I thank you and all of you. I mostly expect that there are many things still ahead. And hard. But yesterday was it possible for one whole book page to get through. As you see, I can drive this pen too, though clutch pops some. My words! I'm getting so that anyone can mostly make me out.

I wrote him back but failed to say anything. I never wrote Ressler. I never wrote Todd until after he'd left the address. I never said anything I wanted to say to anyone. I've misinterpreted the whole set from the start. That table of data in the nucleotides isn't about reading at all. It's about saying, out loud, everything there is, while it's still sayable. The whole, impossibly complex goldberg invention of speech, wasted on someone who from the first listened only to that string of molecules governing cowardice. Obvious, out in the open: every measure, every vertical instant infused with that absurd little theme insisting "Live, live," and me objecting, "But what if it should be real? What if it all means something? What if someone should hold me to my words?"

I should have heard it, the night that amateur composer ordered me to. I listened to him disappear into dark fieldwork, this time as subject, on the other side of the instruments. He asked for nothing from me but a little music, a keyboard exercise from the next room over to ease him across his last insomnia. I knew the tune by ear, for years. I might have said something, might have made some noise.

The Perpetual Calendar

June 6: 1520. Henry VIII hosts a Renaissance extravaganza for archrival Francois I in an attempt to secure an alliance. The feast fails to bring about any lasting political effect….

1918. For the next nineteen days, the marine brigade of the American Second Division meet the Germans in the forested area of Belleau Wood, in the Aisne region of France. Expending more than half their men to gain…

1944. Operation Overlord, involving the close coordination of 4,000 ships, 10,000 planes, 180,000…

2004. The planet Venus will make its next transit across the sun—

Political effects will be negligible. It feels as if I have done nothing but fiddle masochistically with the card set, waiting for the resulting pain to convince me that things have happened. A desperate, deluded attempt at triangulation: the old Laplacian engine applied to today in history. If one samples enough points, writes out all the differential equations governing the days' independent paths, the resulting vector might be somehow solvable, the long consequence lying patiently in the repetition might be revealed. The coward's hope that if I go over the three-by-five events again, I might catch the bit I missed, the bit that renders inevitable exactly what it was (and always had been) that was supposed to happen today, just what part that I was meant to play in it. I can add nothing to the June 6 dossier but a classified ad:

1986. Position Wanted. MLS. Years in the public service. Some programming experience. Hands-on knowledge of genetics. Good with data.

There are no more events to go over, no more data to manipulate. The data stream will only widen, deepen, strengthen in current; I can get no closer to where I need to be than these particulars. I lived a year, I lost a year, I spent a third in the archives. It's time to go back, to dust off the resume.

When I started on this tour, I was afraid that the place he inhabited might be bigger than I could safely live in. I have confirmed that hunch by direct measurement. It is immense beyond surviving, larger than the space between brilliance and brittle stars. Older than the oldest soft tissue in the fossil record. As densely populated as a drop of water. More complex than anything I can imagine, as complex as self-reproducing automata. As long as the entire text of history's card file. As terrifying as the threshold of liberty. I have put it down here as a notch on a stick, afraid to name it any more closely than code.

I have lost them all, lost those few days when, as inimitable Annie said, we got our feet dirty, lost them by saying nothing at the critical moment. But I have at least this. This field notebook. My after-the-fact year of mapping. But the map is still not the place. I am ready to follow him there, all the way into the locus itself, without benefit of intermediary, to live in it for a moment, everywhere and nowhere, the space between pine and everglade, between adjoining nucleotides, disappearing with the rain forest, glazed with acid rain, vanishing like habitat, like the magician's knot, but carrying on, varying, learning by trick to subsist on poison, on heavy toxins if I can, living on just a little longer, shouting with all the invented parts of speech for a little assistance.

But how to get there: how can I find it? All at once it is clear, clear as the first, aperiodic crystal. The double helix is a fractal curve. Ecology's every part — regardless of the magnification, however large the assembled spin-off or small the enzymatic trigger— carries in it some terraced, infinitely dense ecosystem, an inherited hint of the whole. He said only what the texts say: the code is universal. Here, this city, me, the forest of infection on my hands, the sea of silver cells scraped from the inside of my mouth. Every word I have I knock out of its component letters. Every predication, every sculpted metaphor, sprung from the block. Let's save what life cannot. Play me, he asked, all he ever asked: play me one of my variations. What could it hurt to carry that tune a little longer? Perhaps I might be up to it after all.