Gold Bug Variations

III

We Are Climbing Jacob's Ladder

From the window of a wandering Greyhound, Stuart Ressler gets his first look at unmistakable I-state phenotype: unvarying horizon, Siberian grain-wastes, endless acres of bread in embryo. The most absent landscape imaginable, it calls to him like home. Schooled in the reductionist's golden rule, he sees in this Occam's razor-edge of emptiness a place at last vacant enough to provide the perfect control, a vast mat of maize and peas, Mendel's recovered Garden. Green at twenty-five, with new Ph.D., he leaves the lab to enter the literal field.

The tedious bus haul catches him up on the literature. The Journal of Molecular Biology takes him into Indiana, where he acquires a seatmate whose disease of choice, obesity, spills provinces over the armrest into Ressler's seat. Three articles into the National Academy Proceedings, Ressler must listen to the huge stranger's invective on the perils of reading. "My father could put away a Zane Grey in one afternoon, and it got him nowhere. Never touch the stuff. You'd be wise to go easy on it." Ressler nods and twists his lips. Not recognizing the dialect, his seatmate persists. "What do?"

Quick decoding eliminates Gesundbeit as appropriate. "I'm a geneticist."

"Oh, rich! You fix women trouble? What I wouldn't do to trade places with you. Oh brother. What I wouldn't do. Heaven on earth for you fellas, init?"

Ressler inspects his shoes. "Never touch the stuff." This too cracks up his fellow traveler. Fortune extracts the man at Indianapolis, and the plague of companionship passes over. Safely into Illinois, a half hour from his new life, organics lays a last ambush. A stream of tortoises possessed of mass migratory instinct crawl over the highway in the twilight. Bottlenecked cars take turns gunning, crunching over the shells. The tortoise-trickle does not even waver. Ressler stares out the rear window as long as he can stomach it. For a hundred yards, he can make out the horror. The insane persistence of the parade holds him in fascinated disgust.

Chelonia has nothing over primates re the processional urge. Ressler weighs the similar drive that brought him out here. Four years earlier, a fellow first-year grad stormed into his dorm room waving the legendary Watson-Crick article in Nature. A new threshold torn open for the leaping. The awesome, aperiodic double helix — with its seductive suggestion of encoded information assembling an entire organism — spread before him at twenty-one, wider than the American Wilderness. The next day, he dropped his four-year investment in physiology to rush the frontier.

To his astonished adviser, he pointed out how much solid prep he already had for the curriculum change, how much carried over into molecular. He'd concentrated on chemistry, so the scale change would be a snap. Besides: all significant breakthroughs were made by novices free from preconceptions or vested interests. In six months of ferocious precocity, he'd made believers of everyone. Research schools singled him out as a future player, recruiting him even as he put the last touches on his thesis. He accepted the post-doc at Urbana-Champaign, guided exclusively by heroic impatience. Illinois could get him started the fastest. From the stack of invitations he selected theirs, scribbled a ballpoint signature at the bottom, and dropped the reply in the nearest box. The game was afoot; a lab was a lab so long as it was antiseptic. Hunch, induction, and technique could put even an I-state on the map.

At twenty-five with no major contributions yet, he's under the gun. Miescher was twenty-five when he discovered DNA ninety years before. Watson was twenty-four. If the symptoms of breakthrough don't show by thirty, forget it: throw in the lab coat, get an industry job. Research — America in '57—is no country for old men. Sure, his dissertation was a minor tour de force, but just juggled ideas evident to anyone paying attention. Quickness and insight, both necessary, won't suffice to take him where he's headed. Now he must mint, in the crucible of his new lab, hard currency. He packs two changes of clothes and comes to this outpost Eden.

He acclimates instantly to the box houses, orthogonal blocks, and infinite corn in parallel plowcuts running clear to the horizon. Urbana, at twenty thousand, is just what he needs. Stagnant backwaters are the most fecund. He needs only a steady supply of pipettes and a place to spread his bed. Stepping off the bus into the greasy station, he parses the downtown, shoos off a soliciting cab, walks to campus. All significant discoveries are made on foot. The straightedge streets of his adopted town bear ingenious names: numbers, states, presidents, and the trees slaughtered to make way for them. They swell with whitewood houses, diners, five-and-dimes. A church pokes Pentecostal finger at the nimbus of clean linen laid over it, its promotional postboard announcing Sunday's sermon: "Can the Guests Morn When the Bridegroom Be with Them?" — the "u" deleted in point mutation. The rows lining each lane seem so many complementary, self-replicating pairs — the fifties' fastest-breaking metaphor. In minutes, Ressler forgets the seaboard, the flattened Eastern affect of his childhood. He settles into this emptiness, a symbiotic bacterium in the belly of his host.

On campus, he discovers there is no room at the inn. A superannuated department secretary, predating fruit flies, scrapes him up a place in the old army barracks reprieved from destruction until veterans stop pouring back to school on the G.I. Bill. Stuart, who missed the world crisis by enough years to think that G.I. bills come from internists for services rendered, also scabbed out of Korea on dissertation deferral. His thesis drafts him into another campaign, a magic bullet as explosive as any gunner's. Fitting then, military digs: vicarious enlistment. He takes possession of one end of a single-story tar-paper triplex in a shanty called Stadium Terrace. The row huts line the colonnaded shadow of Memorial Stadium, one of the country's largest collegiate football coliseums. He delights in discovering that his cell number, K-53-C, encodes his precise locus within the village.

Cursory inspection turns up ratty bunk, gas stove, half a black-and-white print of James Dean with head on steering wheel, several septic razor blades, and a box of cereal with both flakes and enclosed coupon devoured by red ants. He needs nothing more. He unpacks his worldly belongings — a tartan suitcase of second hand clothes and a tote bag crammed with journals. Social rounds, town exploration can wait. After a perfunctory trip to the convenience grocery, he holes up in the barracks. Days he toys with the coding problem and evenings he sits on a lawn chair staring at the pie-wedged fallout-shelter signs plastered over the stadium across the way. For dinner, tomato juice minus gin: alcohol is a trace mutagen and destroys brain cells. The department must wonder why he hasn't come by to introduce himself. That's all right; wonder is the trump of the twenty-three-pair chromosome set.

He remains horizontal for days, boning up, resisting the temptation to indulge in premature cracking. Feverish, unleashed vistas tempt him with fat feasibility. He must first consolidate, gather strength, quiet his mind, assemble the tools, await, without expecting, that rare, most skittish visit. Yet before insight can alight, the outside world flank-attacks him through the mail. A letter appears in his box, his first communique since hitting Illinois:

July 16, 1957 Dear Stu,

Heard you're in town and hope you're not waiting for official commencement of the fellowship to drop by the lab. We could use you in the Blue Sky sessions if nowhere else. No one's doing much biology at the moment, as you might imagine. Too much excitement in the air. Right now we're all thinking math and language. How are you at combinatorials? Oh for a spark of Aha! By the way, Charlene and I are having the team over for dinner and cards or something next Thursday. Do come. We'll even have the get-together in your honor, if that's what it takes.

Yours, Karl Ulrich

P.S. Review Adv Biol 4:23 if you haven't done so recently, and let me know Thursday if you think Gamow's right in discarding the diamond code. I never liked the layout: too pretty; too much the work of a physicist. But too convenient if the whole pattern just coiled up and blew away.

Ressler has met his new boss only through the professional journals. A prolific writer, the man is to trees what Bill Cody was to buffalo. Ulrich, at fifty-two (Ressler's age transposed), is Illinois's grand old molecular man, guiding spirit behind Cyfer, the team of microbiologists, chemists, and geneticists who induct Ressler as new recruit. Stuart ingests the assignment in place of lunch, tracking the article down to the university library. The stacks, third-läfgest in the country, are, like Memorial Stadium, decorated passim with orange-and-black Civil Defense pies. Ressler doubts the pragmatics of the motif. Four floors of masonry are not likely to survive an airburst. Brick and poured concrete do reduce rad passage, but story-height blown-out glass does not. And using the library as shelter until the renovated landscape returned to safe levels would require keeping survivors alive for weeks on cellulose alone.

Nevertheless, this homage to Dewey Decimal is the most impressive monument America's Breadbasket has yet shown him. Several million volumes colonize ten floors of catwalks and twisting alleys. Every deck contains, in its hectares, plumbing and facilities for long-term residents. If the stink of binding paste didn't offend, he'd go AWOL from the barracks and set up his two pieces of luggage here. A sadly vindicating tour reveals an 824 untouched since Henry James died. Humanities have clearly slid into the terminally curatorial, forsaking claim to knowledge. Ressler finds his niche-to-be, 575, by cytotropic sixth sense, tucked away in a grotto deep in the cavernous recesses, incandescence lending it appropriate spelunker's air. This rarefied branch of a specialized discipline, barely extant a decade back, now rates several shelves, swelling by the hour.

At any other time, he'd be hopelessly waylaid by 1930s unemployment lists, turn-of-the-century novels, hundred-season sets of symphony programs. A comprehensively dense map striving for perfect isomorphism with the outside world provokes his browser's awe. But commissioned, Stuart goes straight to the target periodical without cracking a spine. He's read Gamow's views on the code — one of the first formal attacks on how DNA might embed its protein-plans. But best review the physicist's retraction; its details are likely to be of more use at Dr. Ulrich's soiree than the latest Elvis or Fats Domino. Advanced Biology 4:23 comes off the shelf suspiciously easily, plops open to the piece in question, a penciled scrawl near the title:

JHB SZI HVA OLP GVX IKZ XHO DBN ZRU ALW WKH TVI HQQ BTI VSR EP

Disguised messages hook him by the brain stem. The cold lure of this adept's sport, text trapped in nonsense: a face-slap, tapping impulses fiercer than the urge to pile up cars or cure the forbidding loneliness of women. The sanctioned desires of twenty-five — Warm breasts and cold chrome — are mere substitutes, garbled misread-ings of the real pull. All longing converges on this mystery: revelation, unraveling secret spaces, the suggestion that the world's valence lies just behind a scrambled facade, where only the limits of ingenuity stand between him and sunken gardens. Cryptography alone slips beneath the cheat of surface. Yes, test adrenaline, the attempt to justify the teacher's faith, contributes to this nonsense string's siren song. But this puzzle — clearly planted for his benefit — this chase, this unscrambling, waiting, working, worrying the moment when simple, irrefutable plaintext explanation descends: this (the cadence of his thought straying dangerously close to Protestant hymnody) is the reason why awareness itself first evolved out of inert earth.

Experiment per se has never carried any special appeal; rare steak aside, Ressler has never enjoyed cutting into any genus higher than Anura. But the driving design___He forgets the article and sets to work on the pencil smudges. "EP," the closing, sole couplet: the initials of his antagonist, KU? He tries a few relations before hitting on a simple one. P to U is a jump of five letters; E to K, a jump of six. An incremental substitution cipher — a good, reversible garbling scheme. Seven to the final "R" yields "Y." Eight to the "S," going around the horn, arrives at "A." The last triplet comes out "day: " paydirt. The rest of the reconstruction is brute counting. Soon shell cracks and sense seeps through:

IFY OUC ANR EAD THI STH ENT HEP ART YIS REA LLY WED NES DAY

Back to native tongue. Grouping by threes is Ulrich's hat tip to the prevailing idea that the unit in the genetic code is a triplet of bases. Regrouping reveals all.

He passes the rite of hidden passages, wins his first glimpse of the new boss. The path from discovery to tinkering to inspiration to solution takes place outside time. Returning to deck entrance, he discovers that he has narrowly missed being locked in the stacks overnight. Only when he is safely back at the barracks, flat out on the bunk in K-53-C, sipping tomatoes and savoring his victory, does he realize that he's forgotten even to glance at the article Dr. Ulrich asked him to review.

Stuart arrives at the Ulrich doorstoop on the revealed Wednesday, groomed for the occasion. The chief ushers him into the party with only a "Good job." Ressler, the last guest to arrive, uncomfortable in newly purchased suit, presents host and hostess with a box of after-dinner chocolates filled with greenish fungi. Suit and gift are both wild miscalculations; soon he'll be unable to go out in public at all, so completely has he botched the social code in his haste to crack the genetic. He makes the rounds, meets his future labmates. Tooney Blake, dark, mid-height, a youthful forty, is at the piano doing a terrifyingly down-tempo version of "Let's Call the Whole Thing Off." Only he's missed the point of the song: "Potato, potato, tomato, tomato," all pronounced exactly the same. A gracious woman with an uncanny Eleanor Roosevelt impersonation, Dr. Toveh Botkin, stands by in great pain, waiting for the promised formal feeling to come. Her accent reveals her as one of those brilliant Central European scientists lured away from the Russians in '45 by democracy and cash. Musically illiterate, Ressler can nevertheless tell by Dr. Botkin's bearing that the soiree is soul-toughening purgatory for her. She says as much in her first sentence to him, declaring with convoluted tact that the machine responsible for the apotheosis of Beethoven's Diabelli, not to mention the transcendent Opus 109 set, had been a sacred instrument to her until a few moments before. He nods, without a clue to what she's talking about.

Joseph Lovering, five years Ressler's senior, sits on a sofa noisily denying that he is now or ever has been a member of this or any party. He and Jeanette Koss, also near thirty, heatedly discuss some political bomb that Ressler lost track of while in grad school. These two, the only folks close to Stuart in age, more or less ignore him after the obligatory hand-grab. Daniel Woytowich, the other senior Cyfer member after Ulrich and Botkin, is at work in the corner, head wrapped in Pyrex eyeglasses, watching the Ulrichs' rabbit-eared black-and-white set broadcast Garry Moore's I've Got a Secret. The show is interrupted by a flash announcement: scientists have succeeded in creating today's modern aspirin, the Ferrari of the gastrointestinal Le Mans. Faster, Stronger, and now Improved. "Last year's aspirin only killed the headache…" When Ressler introduces himself, Woytowich tells him the panelist's secret: by marrying the mother of his father's second wife, he's become his own grandpa.

The night's entertainment alarms and depresses him: how can so human a collection hope to penetrate its own blueprint? The code must certainly be more ingenious than this crew it created.

Ressler knows Cyfer's considerable collective intelligence from their published track record. He needs them; they represent specific expertise in cytology, biochemistry, ontogeny, fields wild to him. Yet they sing, watch prime time, talk politics. Incredible comedown, awful circularity: no one to reveal us to ourselves but us.

The welcome-aboard party — easily his most nightmarish evening out since prom — leaves Ressler in serious need of a purgative. He pays his first visit downtown since the bus pulled in. There he indulges uncharacteristically in buying something. Spending money is not a problem; he's never been one to form emotional bonds to crinkled bits of safety paper. The wrench for him is acquiring more stuff. Since late teens, he's never owned anything more than he could carry out of the country on short notice. Now, in less than a month, he's already saddled himself with dishes, a table, even a heap of chicken-wire sculpture that charitably passes for a chair.

He buys a record player that folds up into a box with handle, a pink that has been coaxed out of the spectrum by suspect means. He is sold by a matching pink polyethylene ballerina that snaps on the spindle and pirouettes slavishly at 78, 45, 33⅓, and— whatever happened to 16?—16. Never musical, he inherited what is physiologically referred to as a tin ear. His father carried the tone-deaf gene, forever going about the house delivering a spectral version of "Get Out and Get Under." Discomfort with harmony leaves Ressler not only ignorant of music but deeply distrustful. Pitch-writing obeys amorphous, ambiguous linguistics — a dialect just beyond paraphrase. Fast and loud is more exciting than slow and quiet. The rest is silence.

He needs, without knowing, those old, Renaissance formulas equating C-sharp minor with longing, sudden modulation to E major with a glimpse of heaven. How dare an obnoxious greaser four years younger than he turn the Civil War tune "Aura Lee" into the Hit Parade standard "Love Me Tender," without a wiggle of concern for the underpinning chordal message? Either this language has no content, or tonal tastes have festered, fixed for 100 years and more. Both options terrify him.

He has trouble selecting tunes to keep the ballerina dancing, and Olga herself remains noncommittal. At length, he settles on an anthology called Summer Slumber Party, the bobby-soxer, center cover behind the pillow, reminding him of a woman he dated in college. Straight brown hair and artesian eyes, she dumped him for never getting off his Bunsen. With the assistance of a sales clerk, he secures two other primers: Britten's Young Person's Guide to the Orchestra and Leitmotifs from Wagner's "Ring." The latter, still politically suspect, appeals to him from the liner description: a story told in a book-code of memorable riffs. One of these disks might contain his tonal Rosetta. To round out his disk library, in the spirit of Separate Can Never Be Equal, and knowing the tunes from his father, he buys an album of spirituals by Paul Robeson.

A summer night, the last before his marriage to experiment, and Ressler spends the few, dark, warm hours soaking in the deep evangelical minister's voice seeping in spirituals from K-53-C onto Stadium Terrace's lawn. Robeson sings, "Sometimes it causes me to wonder. Ah, sometimes." The sound ambushes Ressler, slack in his lawn chair. He watches the waves continue east at 1,134 feet per second, where they will arrive in D.C. later that evening. He hears the phrase knock at John Foster Dulles's window as the secretary of state prepares for bed. Dulles curses, shouts for this blackfella to leave him be. He's promised to return Ol' Man River's passport as soon as Robeson returns the '52 International Stalin Peace Prize. Last year Dulles told a Life reporter that a man scared to go all the way to the brink is lost. "Brinksmanship" is now the going word. Dulles, hands full with the Suez and Syria, his troops in Lebanon within a year, shaken by the runaway slave's son singing "Jordan river chilly and cold," shouts out the window of the State Department at Ressler to turn the volume down and have a little respect, forgetting, under stress of the brink, that democracy is the privilege of not being able to escape the next man's freedom of speakers.

Ressler, a thousand miles west, listens to the blackfella go on to sing, in resonant bass, the great ascent up Jacob's Ladder. Every rung — now the steps of the four nucleotides up the spiral DNA staircase — goes higher and higher. On the darkened, ex-army-barracks lawn, gathering strength for the work he owes the world, a physiological trick sweeps over Ressler. His peace turns to a sadness so overpowering that, before he can interpret it, tears seep out his eyes on underground springs. Avuncular defective lachrymal, until this moment happily masked, flushed by the deep voice, the simplicity of the tune, the hopeless hope of words in a world where the stadium colonnade declares itself a safe radiation haven, or just this absolute, still, summer night in a featureless town. Spontaneous twitch of gland for a race capable of grabbing the next rung while simultaneously leaping for the beloved brink. Or purely somatic epiphenomenon: Robeson hits a note, springs a chord sequence that triggers solute; everything else lies outside measure. Deeply enfolded, the tune attaches to the night's lateness, and suddenly the song is real. Ah! sometimes it causes me to wonder. Sometimes.

There on the lawn, the eve before uncovering the precise, testable tape that will change the way life conceives itself, he feels the first seduction of music, his own pitiful compulsion for forward motion, the insistence that we sing ourselves over into a further place. All the while the runaway slave's son intones:

We are climbing Jacob's Ladder We are climbing Jacob's Ladder We are climbing Jacob's Ladder We're soldiers of the Cross.

As rearguard action, Ressler runs through the lexical combinations biology reserves for this five-letter combination: cross stain, hair cross, Ranvier's cross, crossbreed, cross-firing, crossing over, cross matching, sensory crossway.

Every rung goes higher and higher Every rung goes higher and higher Every rung goes higher and higher We're soldiers of the Cross.

To this cross list, he adds the crucial test cross, the only way to tell how he and the bass are related, to find the miscegenation harbored in their common ancestor, to trace the defective ducts. Then he hits on it, the mark, the label for the spiritual's crucifix, the deep, reluctant cross Robeson soldiers: anatomical term. Crux of the heart.

Today in History

Assisted by accident, I was out of the starting block. Given the locus — a year to peg him and a special field — I retrieved everything the limited print trail held about Dr. Ressler. Three days after coming across the magazine photo, I turned up two more citations: the Science Midwest abstracts for the same year, and the coau-thored article in Journal of Molecular Biology that brought the young man his first attention. I even traced, through the dense, preserved, late-fifties paperwork, his department's involvement in varied researches as molecular genetics unfolded. One colleague made important refinements in electron microscopy. Another developed a cheap way to measure cytoplasmic protein. A third cropped the copious shady old genealogical trees beloved of textbooks.

To have been a virgin post-doc then! I exhumed the Watson-Crick paper that had touched off the wholesale gold rush. The primary sources still exhale the atmosphere of intellectual dizziness, the articles thick with a sense that someone would soon crack the complete caper and seize the ne plus ultra of the research world, the riddle of life. I knew that every era since Anaxi-mander and his vital moisture has tried to explain the ultimate contradiction: living matter. But even a hurried review of Ressler's contemporaries brought home the shock: my lifetime has seen the breakthrough moment, the first physical theory of all life grounded at entry level.

Each article, every retraction and revision recorded the heat of the exploding field. I pored over the background material — busman's holidays at the main branch — coming to know Dr. Ressler weeks before I made his acquaintance, if only a Ressler decades younger than the one I was sent to discover. How must it have felt, at twenty-five, talented but untested, to live at the same hour, perhaps even arm's length from the finishing touch, the final transcription — the first organism to explain its own axioms?

Half of what I made out about the twenty-five-year-old scientist was pure projection. I began to feel I had not lived up to my own intellect, that I'd been born too late, had taken a wrong turn, had lost my own chance to turn up the edge of the real, discover something, something hard. This child scientist, desperate with ability, somehow reduced to full-scale adult withdrawal, night shift labor, by something not explained in the literature: here was my own irreversible missed hour.

The race for the genetic code must have been wonderful torture for one of Dr. Ressler's abilities. By 1957, the search to describe all living tissue in molecular principles was halfway to unmitigated solution. The pace of revelations staggers even one habituated to permanent acceleration. Consensus that DNA was the genetic carrier had been reached only a few years before Ressler arrived in Illinois. Its structure had fallen only four years earlier. In 1957, speculation about how the giant molecule encoded heredity became open game for theoreticians. The field is littered with articles by physicists, chemists, and other inflamed amateurs. Generations of patient fly-counters had done the legwork. The mid-fifties were set for breakout, the rush of synthesizing postulates. He must have sensed that this anarchical phase would pass quickly, perhaps in months. The prize was bare, exposed for the plucking at the top of the nucleic stair.

But something else motivates the euphoric articles, something more than self-aggrandizement, more than the desire to cap the ancient monument and book passage to Stockholm, that freezing, pristine Valhalla. The compulsion to find the pattern of living translation — the way a simple, self-duplicating string of four letters inscribes an entire living being — is built into every infant who has ever learned a word, put a phrase together, discovered that phonemes might speak.

As the journal evidence accumulated, it sucked me into the craze of crosswords, pull of punch lines, addiction to anagrams, nudge of numerology, suspense of magic squares. I felt the fresh Ph.D.'s suspicion that beneath the congenital complexity of human affairs runs a generating formula so simple and elegant that redemption depended on uncovering it. Once lifting the veil and glimpsing the underlying plan, Ressler would never again surrender its attempted recovery. The desire surpassed that for food, sex, even bedtime stories, worth pursuing with convert's zeal, with the singleness of a monastic, a lost substance abuser, a true habitue: the siege of concealed meaning.

The Question Board

I put off telling Franklin Todd what my search had turned up. The trail of the sure-to-be-famous youth ended abruptly, dying out in the middle of 1958. Thumbnail biographies and professional references both dried up. A void lay between the boy of twenty-five, in the middle of the fastest-breaking biological revolution ever, and the man twice that age, an obscure computer functionary. I could do nothing but confirm the same enigma that had driven Todd to consult me in the first place. I returned to that hauntingly alien photo, "one of the new breed who will help uncover the formula—" The article bore an epigraph by Friedrich Miescher, the twenty-five-year-old who had discovered DNA in 1869:

Should one ask anybody who is undertaking a major project in science, in the heat of the fight, what drives and pushes him so relentlessly, he will never think of an external goal; it is the passion of the hunter and the soldier… the stimulus of the fight with its setbacks.

One passionate hunter had evidently been shot along the way. I would have gone on trying to determine how, even had Todd not returned. Some days after my break, I caught him hanging around the Question Board, scouring it as if nothing mattered except this discontinuous glut of fact stripped of context. As if, despite the biblical promise, the world would end in flood after all. Of information. If Todd lay in wait for me, he made no sign. "Truly amazing," he said, not even looking as I approached. "How'd you find all this stuff? You make it up?"

It distressed me to enjoy seeing him. I tried to pull my mouth out of its involuntary grin into disapproval. "Of course not. What do you take me for? This is human services. Not for profit. Bulk mail permit."

"This one, for instance." He pointed to the weeks-old question about where in the world people were best off. The outdated card was due to be removed; I took it down as Mr. Todd continued. "How did you know all that, about the two million tons of bird shit and disappearing roads and all?"

My M.L.S. cheekbones crumpled like a rear-ended economy car. "Nauru? Nauru is a reference librarian's mainstay. Smallest republic. Largest per capita income. Typical instance of List Mentality. You might as well ask any urban male over fourteen if the number three sixty-seven means anything to him." Cobb's average, which I verified every few months, meant nothing to Todd. He looked inquisitively at me, not yet daring to ask if I had results. I wasn't volunteering. I carried on with my work, pinning to the board the Q-and-A:

Q: Who is the head of the CIA and where can I reach him? This is an EXTREMELY confidential matter.

F.P. 7/3/83

A: William J. Casey, Central Intelligence Agency, Washington, DC 20505.

J. O'D., 7/5/83

Todd took two more cards from under my clasped arm, careful not to touch my side. He assisted, pinning the cards into place. It seemed we had worked together, easily and quietly, for years.

Q: What must we do to be saved?

C.R., 7/2/83

A: A tough one, but worth looking into. According to George Saville, Marquis of Halifax (1633–1695), in A Rough Draft of a New Model at Sea, "To the question, What shall we do to be saved in this World? there is no other answer but this, Look to your Moat."

J. O'D., 7/5/83

My new acquaintance examined our handiwork. He giggled at the first and took undisguised pleasure in the second. Then he looked at me, scrutinized my face, trying to determine exactly who worked this advice column for the fact-lorn public. "You've found something," he declared. "That much is clear."

I wanted to contradict him, but couldn't. "Like the Canadian Mounties…" I began, but caught myself before ending up in the double entendre.

"You'll have to tell me everything. Listen: turns out I'm the sole patron of a seafood dive very much ahead of its time." His burlesque was gentle, with no sadistic edge. "I'm particularly enthusiastic about their humane handling of shellfish. Want to do lunch?"

It felt good to be asked a question that didn't require a double-check. I laughed. "It's almost five o'clock."

"Almost time for night-shift breakfast. I thought lunch might be an acceptable compromise."

"You cannot have seafood for breakfast. I forbid it."

"I've done worse. Can we take that no as a yes?" He went on, with wondrous, unassisted certainty, to set the time and place, not to mention what I would be eating. He rubbed his hands and made a curious snapping flick with thumb and middle finger. I later learned how many different things that nervous gesture stood for. "All right then. Meet you there. I assume you are dependable, Ms.

O'Deigh?" My paranoia flared as I heard my name in his mouth. "You'll be there?" Urgent but decorous library subdecibel. "Ach, she'll be thare, laddie. Stop with yare wurryin'."

All that I know of animal courtship dances comes from Van Nostrand's. But this clearly was one; too much bravado and flutter to be anything else. No man had done me so elaborate a two-step in several seasons, and I let it go on, despite myself. Pure, amateur male theatrics: nothing to take seriously. While ambivalent about meeting the man outside the jurisdiction of the shelf list, I saw little danger in it. Capitulation was easier than trying to outtalk him. My own curiosity about the collapse of the precocious empiricist would have been enough to take Todd on. I wanted everything his colleague might tell me.

But Franklin Todd's soft-shoe polish also smelled of something else: aromatic locales I hadn't yet visited, the scent of travel. The man was genuinely strange. Two people, no longer young, knowing nothing about one another, their pasts sharing no word in common, meet on a day in early summer to compare notes on a third party. The scenario had all the charm of travelers' phrases, a crash course at Berlitz. Sardonic, innocent, Todd backpedaled from the Question Board. He stopped abruptly and retraced his steps. He looked me over a last time and said, "But you are." Contradicting all advance reports, yet firm in the face of the evidence.

"Am what? What am I?"

"You are looking after your moat, aren't you?" He'd meant something else, an answer to his own question of a week before, deciding that I was, after all, possessed of surfaces. And the decision surprised us both. Still pruning the board after he left, I found an impeccable imitation of one of my own typed cards hiding amid the others, one of those marvelous walking sticks or owl-imitating moths. The impostor-card asked, "Q: What is the origin of the phrase 'Make the catch'?" It had not been there before Mr. Todd's visit.

Persistence of Vision

At the time, I was not in the market for dance steps, however novel. Already involved, as contemporary idiom puts it, tied to a man in a mutually professional windbreak stable enough to deflect this new sea breeze. Stavine toeether for four vears Droved our complementarity. Keith — slick, quick to anger, addicted to excitement, at times insane — countered my own reverse extremes. Together, we passed in our class and era, subtly matched opposites in a country full of couples as incongruous as Tuckwell-O'Deigh.

Keithy always made me laugh. The problem, by summer of '83, was that I'd begun laughing at his running routine despite myself. My mate's particular brand of joke had lost the redeeming secret: the trick of making disparate reality show a hopeless, bearable seam. Like everyone I know in New York, Tuckwell was a prairie refugee. Every damn person I get close to in this city — all transplanted Hoosiers or huskers. It would have been cheaper to stay home. Keith's dress, speech, and manner were compensatory— Coastier Than Thou. He could speak convincingly about everything on the island from P/E ratios to performance art. "Appraising, dear heart, doesn't necessarily require the inconvenience of knowing."

He knew the city like a cabbie. The stress of midtown at 5:00 p.m. rolled off his downy obliviousness. Keith would have sickened and died if he'd had to live anywhere else but this epitome. For years he protected me, underwrote my survival in this toxic place. Keith had dabbled in academics but soon strayed into advertising, "Needs Manufacturing," as he liked to describe it. Tuckwell was outstanding at what he did. He made pots of money without shame. But he pumped a wellspring of sardonic commentary, the progressive's estrangement from his own pursuits. "Ads," he once defended himself at a dinner full of less forthright friends, "are our supreme art, polar exploration, and depth psychology rolled into one. And the shit that keeps the GNP blooming, to boot."

We liked each other well enough. But the spit holding us together was the power of mutual facetiae to legitimize affection. Against my reference-desk reserve, he cultivated crude anarchy. He was far more comfortable in the flash of Lower Manhattan haute Kultur, but he had to come to me for help in navigating the boroughs, even our own neighborhood. I kept him out of debt and he kept me from starving myself. We divided the household chores contractually. I did mine in the evenings and days off; he hired outside help. Tuckwell was convinced he would die by electric shock. I milked the opposite fear of wasting away for decades in a nursing home. Our phobias and philias canceled out one another, We arrived at an equilibrium that could go on, like those fleas on backs of fleas, forever ad infinitum.

We conversed well, when we saw one another. Keith overheated at times, but he knew the language. People who still love words have to be forgiven everything. In what the last century referred to as mechanical transport, we were scarily compatible, even after four years. He taught me abandon. The rule was: recklessness could always be repented at leisure. With ad designer's ingenuity, he steadily introduced wrinkles into our sex life, always managing to suggest that R and D had future, new-and-improved packages around the corner.

His total shamelessness even made the awful minute afterwards almost comic. As I postcoitally recoiled, Keith, still savoring the instinctual release just served up, would lie alongside me and wail, in a perfectly timed, plaintive voice directed at the ceiling, "What is the Law?" He'd answer himself in animal sadness, "Not to eat meat; not to go on all fours—" I always laughed — the dovetail joint between need and embarrassment.

Our attraction, unplanned and mismatched, was the physics of charged particles, ions pulled toward their neutralizing not. He was one of the few who prance through the world with self-esteem. His absolute views on everything were manna after a day in the perpetually uncertain, qualified reference wilderness. Keith liked himself, a fire worth hovering near, trying to steal.

On the day I accepted dinner, I was not dissatisfied. I'd never been a big fan of unnecessary drama. Mr. Todd's invitation was flattering, but not enough to account for my accepting it, even under guise of business. Tuckwell and I were, in the rules of coming and going, hopelessly liberal. His work was continuous and mine too variable for us to set up the schedule that ordinarily substitutes for home life. I tried to call him that July evening to tell him I'd be late. But already half sabotaging, I didn't try his office. I rang up the apartment and listened to Tuckwell's latest tape: "Your mission, should you decide—"I then announced to the machine that I was eating with a stranger.

I remember little of the clam shack Franker took me to. I do remember what he wore — creased, formal, button-down bemuse-ment. I remember the soulful look when he implored me to order the linguini with calamari, and the scolding brows leveled at me when I left it untouched. I remember seeing the chef hack off a living lobster's tail while the creature's front end bourréed blithely across the counter to plunk back into the tank, mix it up one last time with the ladies. "You should see him do beef," Todd said.

And I remember him quickly relieving me of my discoveries. My disclosure — the young man in the journals, teetering on the verge of significant contribution — confirming his pain. He demanded to hear, in as much detail as I could muster, about Ressler's early work and the predictions about him. Todd seemed to have suspected the worst, all that had been at stake. When I finished relating what little story I'd uncovered, I sat silent, gingerly prodding my unfinished plate like a bomb squad nudging a black satchel. When he finally spoke, it was only to repeat, incredulously, "Twenty-five! My age to the day, as it turns out." I mumbled a birthday toast, unsure how literal he was being.

I naively proceeded to hand over my entire list of primary sources without securing any return hostages. My dinner date then fell rudely indifferent. His interest in me had been entirely functional after all; despite the expertly mimicked courtship dance, he wanted no more than a research assistant. I felt abused, doubly stupid for not recognizing the trick. But watching him toy with a Parmesan shaker, I was astonished to see Frank Todd clearly grieving for a person who, given what he'd said about their working relationship, was as great a stranger to him as to me.

Sitting across from me at the hired table, morose with concern: at last, someone who I might matter to. I felt a twinge of guilt toward Keith, just then listening to my taped won't-be-home-till-late. In that one instant, Todd seemed about to fold up into himself, to drop out of sight for good. I wouldn't have prevented him. In that minute gone bad, we were an accent away from splitting the tab and quitting. We were both geared to be rid of one another when the only real coincidence of those days intervened. A fluke, outside chance yanked Frank Todd out of a reverie he would never have come back from on his own. The sawdust dive's piped music, until then an eclectic collection of Balkan reed choir, Tyrolean zither, and Memphis twang, turned abruptly and became solo piano. The boy bolted upright, listening, alarmed. He shook his head, amazement moving his lips: the inappropriate smile at hurt too diffuse to absorb. "Name that tune," he said bitterly, slamming the table. "Name it, and I'll introduce you to the bastard."

I recognized the music, having learned the first, trivial thirty-two measures as a young girl before giving up the piano in favor of pragmatics. I had even made first forays into the variations Bach had extracted from the thirty-two-note ditty. The distillation of the first few notes held all the chest-tightening surprise of unlikely visits. "I happen to know the piece," I said giddily. "But I'm off duty just now."

"Name it," he shouted. Conversation at other tables stopped. I mumbled the name of the work. By the effect on Todd, I'd just guessed the one-in-five-billion secret word. We listened. A few minutes in silence with a stranger lasts a lifetime. Only after two variations did he tell me that this piece—"this particular recording, in fact" — was the only music our mutual friend had listened to for the last year. Todd, reanimated, described how his lone shift partner sat every night in a sterile chamber of humming processing units, high-speed printers, floor-mount disk drives, and glowing consoles, doing routine work that any modestly endowed twenty-one-year-old could do, changing tapes, running the unvarying deck of punched cards through the hopper, while all the while this set of baroque irrelevances spun around on a cheap grinder perched on top of the digital check-sorter.

"All the way through, both sides, three times a night for the last few months." Todd, the insult of care cracking his voice, fell silent as the restaurant sound track reached the third permutation, a well-behaved melody beginning all over again against itself. Two pitch-for-pitch identical but staggered parts crossed each other, independently harmonized and harmonizing, no longer one identical source of notes but two. The study in imitative forward motion, the staggered, duplicate pair of voices stood motionless at the axis of the turning world. The unison canon, contradiction in terms, left Todd morose, ready to replay the older man's disappearance of years before. He came out of his trance long enough to say, "You won't have heard the thing properly until you see my friend in the flesh." The invitation I so badly wanted.

Later, after a stop at the futuristic supermarket that, like me, had recently gate-crashed this neighborhood, I found Keith alone in our apartment, still engrossed in a lucrative day's work, sprawled on the floor surrounded by tape splices, single-stepping through a video of his latest collaborative effort: the fifteen-second story of how a young woman and her breath spray find happiness together. "Dinner OK?" he asked, intent on the frame-by-frame.

"Yeah, dinner OK. Four-B's car alarm is howling again. Buzzing like a shorted bumblebee. Nobody paying any attention. Not even the beat police flinch anymore."

"Speaking of High Security, how's my Princess Grace?"

I'd lived with him long enough to follow every free association.

I was glad for glibness just then and retaliated in like currency. "American film actress. Born in Philadelphia, 1927? No,'28. Killed in Monaco car crash in September 1982. Almost a year already. God." I went to the window and held back the curtain. In the street below, late-evening pedestrians worked out the details of Brownian motion.

Tuckwell gave his representative laugh: a high-pitched, uncontrolled cackle. "Very good. Been earning your keep, I see. The Human Reference Shelf wouldn't care to say what day Mrs. Grimaldi died, would she?" I sat down next to him, looking for warmth that wouldn't aggravate the heat. He gave me a kiss on my exposed collarbone. I made no rejoinder, and he returned to work, adding, "See To Catch a Thief tot a demonstration of life imitating art."

The television was on, sound just loud enough to give voice to incestuous bad girls from Texas and tough but basically good inner-city cops. We witnessed the last five minutes of Five Minutes to Meltdown, where political extremists, natural disaster, and old-fashioned carelessness conspired to threaten the nuclear reactor on the community outskirts nearest you. Four young, lusty civil engineers narrowly thwarted the disaster. After, we caught the late news, fulfilling our social duty. Keith got his chance to make his favorite joke: "Twenty million face famine in Ethiopia. First, this." He made running commentary on all the spots, from headlines down to the perverse, trailing human interest. As usual, during commercials he cut the sound and ad-libbed. "Terrorism: the mini-series. Thursday, right here on—" Had he thrived in another decade, his manic energy might have made him an activist.

When one network in its allotted half hour said all there was to say about Tuesday, July 5, 1983, we switched to another. The coverage was identical, a half hour later. Keith carried on his inspired annotations, even after I stopped listening and disappeared into the bedroom. There I worked on loose ends, preparing for work the next day. I glanced at the librarian's trade journal, caught up on old correspondence, and, while I had the typewriter fired up, finished tomorrow's Today in History and the unanswered Question Board questions. I rolled a clean index card under the platen and typed "A: ". I remember pausing long enough to feel proud that what I was about to answer would have taken the median librarian, relying on Brewer's, Bartlett's, or the OED, considerable effort. Experience, private knowledge, could still stand one in better stead than mastery of the disjointed stockpile. I typed:

A: A "catch" is a form of musical round where identical voices enter at different times. The catch to a catch is that it is printed on one solo line. In the past, as a party game, singers would sight-read from catch collections, each group responsible for figuring out when to "make the catch," when to come in at the proper moment. Making the catch reached its peak of popularity under England's Charles II. The phrase may have originated earlier. Rounds in general are at least as old as the thirteenth-century tune "Summer Is Icumen In."

I stopped, realizing I was straying from the point, that summer was already two weeks gone. As the submitter had not deigned to sign the question, I left my answer similarly anonymous. The pair are both still on file that way. As I held the cards next to one another, checking my work, I knew I would not, contrary to all I'd ever assumed, remain a librarian forever.

Canon at Unison

My old associates threw me a going-away party today. It was, as going-away parties go, a bad mix of parting embarrassment and exhilaration. For want of a more plausible story, I spread the word around the branch that I am going back to school. Loosely interpreted, never a lie. The celebration was a sorry affair. Several colleagues brought homemade cookies, which nobody's diet permitted. We broke the rules and served Chablis in paper cups; everyone partook dutifully, in professional moderation. Separation — life's major emotion — is being slowly written out of our repertoire. A few friends will genuinely miss me, and I them. My buddy Mr. Scott, he of the eternal retirement threat, came up to me late in the afternoon, making no effort to disguise his eyes. "You beat me to it," he said, shaking his head. "I can't believe you beat me."

"I'm afraid I'm abandoning you, friend. Fight the good fight." Before I could get all the way through the sentence, he swept me up in an embrace, which we held for a long time by contemporary standards. Close to his ear, before pulling away from it for good, I whispered, "Work forever."

We all made the standard plans to stay in touch, plans we knew, even as we made them, would atrophy for no reason. As a gag gift, the collected staff presented me with a wrapped Facts on File binder stuffed with miscellaneous soap-opera synopses, gov pubs, library memos, and those You-Are-Next fliers collected from the prophets of apocalypse who hang around Grand Central. Then they presented me with my own copy of the Times Atlas. The combination of my long-expressed girlish delight in the book, the misplaced earnestness of the staff, and the hopeless ambition of the atlas itself — the simple description of how to get anywhere in the world — caught inside me. Seeing the effect the atlas had on me, my friends broke up the party.

As ironic token of affection, the staff let me have a last go at the Quote Board and Event Calendar. "Made me" might be more accurate. The work was more than I wanted to take on today, but I appreciated the gesture. For tomorrow's Today, I chose the Homestead Strike: the fifth day's clash between five thousand steel-workers and Prick's three hundred Pinkertons. I avoided my habit of extending the fact into exposition or mouthing my usual guarded meliorism. I wish I hadn't chosen that particular event; I'd hate to suggest that I've left on a labor dispute. But done is done. For my last ever selection for quote of the day, I posted vintage W.C. Fields:

It's a funny little world. A man's lucky if he gets out of it alive.

My final official act at the branch was to sort the unbound issues of Congressional Quarterly, which some malicious cit had mixed up beyond recognition. Alexandria arranged its scrolls by size— an order useless except to the initiated. The race's chief discovery may well be the idea that even a perfect stranger could retrieve things from parchments, given the sequence. Filing was a bit below my skills, but it was basically what I did for a living, until today. And in truth, returning the CQs to useful order gave me the thrill of send-off. I was packing my bags, feeling my freedom. I took a last look around my stacks. The collection suddenly seemed wonderful beyond naming. I had for a time lived here. Then I snapped the binders shut and was gone.