Gold Bug Variations

VIII

After the Facts

The dead airplane passengers were still on the night table on September 23. Relations with Keith hadn't steadied in the interim. There were light moments — hours as free as any we'd had. We laid into the old conversational cadences, careful to avoid irritation. But chain jumped off sprocket at the least torque. Something caused one of us to miss the pickup, and we'd be off, attacking one another in the highly civilized diction of private symbols that had caused the hurt in the first place.

Tuckwell came to bed on the first night of autumn, excited by the growing cold. I could feel in the choreography of muscle contractions his hope for a reconciling predoze fondle. He maneuvered tentatively, afraid to ask outright for a touch I might deny him. How dare he protect himself from me, blame me for refusing? Slowly enough to be above reproach, I removed by millimeters to my side of the bed. Sheer perversity; how far away did I need to be before he asked me to return?

We lay in bed, outraged in every idiom short of English. Neither of us could break the escalation of accusal. Keith flicked on the reading light and directed the spot to his side. Even politeness was a threat — the effort he took not to disturb me. He reached out for his night reading but grabbed the question about Flight 007. He slammed the card down on the nightstand. "Can we get rid of this shit, please?" he whispered, so as not to wake anyone. "I'm sick of looking at it." He went to the kitchen to fish the day's newspapers from the trash. He returned, crumpled a couple sheets for my benefit, and read: "Reasonable prospect of Navy finding black box.

Russians are sweeping for it in force. Seen dragging something out of the waters. Widespread agreement that the 747 had been over Kamchatka for some time."

I grabbed the gap widening in my face and pinched it shut, pushed it into my pillow. I turned my face sideways, an efficient crawl-swimmer coming up for air. "All right, Keith. OK."

"OK what?" Nonnatives would have heard no rage.

"OK, I'll fabricate some sort of centrist smear for this person. Face the Nation. Whatever you want."

"What I want is not the point. Who said anything about smear? Why doesn't this person do her own work? What does she want you to do, paraphrase the same pap she can read herself? Cliff Note the mound of crap it's already buried in?" Typical Tuckwell: whenever he attacked me, he worked around until it seemed his one wish was to protect me from assault.

"Just the opposite," I addressed the ceiling. "She wants me to shovel her out." Covered in cotton and cliches, I molded myself into the shape of the offending shepherd's crook, facing the wall. As soon as he was out of my field of view, Keith seemed the most decent human being alive, susceptible to the best of excesses. I felt him get back into bed and switch off the light. After a moment, unasked-for, denying that the flare-up had happened, he molded his body along mine. We lay flush, curled, the two fastened alloys in a thermostat coil. I neither shook Tuckwell off nor returned his pressure. If I didn't move, I might be able to drift off despite myself. But not moving only aggravated the drag holding me against the bed.

We were both in absurd occupations; that was the problem. But pressed, I couldn't place the standard blame on the office for ruining my private life. I had only myself to fault. I repeated silently, like a Baltimore catechism—Q: Who made you? A: God made me. Q: Why did God make you? A- To know, love, and serve Him in this life and be happy with Him in the next—the one question in recent weeks I'd managed to answer definitively: "Q: How do you get moonlight into a chamber?"

The next day, behind the Reference Desk, I typed a long, inconclusive response to Flight 007. My mind was not on the victims or the absurd geopolitics, but on the man I was downing with my own absurdity. Every time I concluded that Tuckwell and I were genuinely ill-fitted — that we'd forced ourselves together for years because we were the age when more exploration is no longer cost-efficient — I recoiled, knew I was rationalizing my own new side romance.

I could no longer tell failed imagination from realism. The day I admitted that life with Tuckwell had lost itself to familiarity, I also felt an urge to run for the crosstown and gate-crash Tuckwell's familiar office just to see him. His most irritating habit, the asymmetry of his sternum, his stupidest mannerism, the white spots under his fingernails, had been fashioned exclusively for me, and I had failed to value them.

I came home that evening intent on redeeming myself. Like a literalist from a liturgy, or coed from a cathartic feature film: nothing more important, easier than being a little kinder. Keith must have felt something similar, for we collided at the door and kissed without a crackle of static. He let me fondle him, then slipped his arm around me. He brought me to the panorama plate glass running the length of the living room. We looked down on the same life-threatening street I had just threaded. The view from here had nothing to do with the one at eye level. "Q:," he said, shaking me affectionately.

"Shoot." We laughed off the bad word choice.

"Is the world getting any better? K.T., 9/23." Last night's fight was just passing madness, the end of a fiscal quarter.

"Every day in every way," I said, silently struck by how little the billion-dollar self-help industry had changed in the half century since Coué.

"The eradication of smallpox and polio," Tuckwell offered.

"Large-scale dismantling of the old colonial system," I added. "Fiberoptícs. Wide-body transport."

"The New York Mets. Frisbees." A sad joke, but our own. Keith dragged me to the kitchen in his wake. The place was a riot of dissolute Baggies and lidless jars. He was preparing my favorite of his private recipes, Neutron Chili. Beating me to the peace offering. We worked together; I spiced and stirred while he sliced and carried on a running burlesque. "I was a very ethnic child. Born into a mixed neighborhood. Democrats and Republicans—" We had both hit upon the same solution: all-out effort to save the endangered ordinary routine by doing nothing.

"Perhaps I shouldn't reveal this to you," he said, thrashing in a cabinet above the stove, "seeing as how you're in a perfect position to abuse the information. But the key to really profound chili is this." He held aloft a nickel bag of cumin that had somehow evaded the Board of Health. He made for the stove, playfully chucking me out of the way.

"Keithy, stop. Wait a minute. Listen. I already put in two tablespoons of…."

"Geet otter here. What do you know from chili?" He blithely measured what he called a "guesstimate" into the stew.

"Tuckwell!" Shrill enough to draw him up short, but too far. I tripped a surprise rage in myself and could not back down. "Who do you think…? What right do you…?" I froze in his gaze: he had every right. I began again, unnerved. "Don't you think you ought to at least taste before you interfere?" Ludicrous; it was his recipe.

Still clutching the cumin, Tuckwell tried to salvage tne moment. "Two people who love each other," he began mock-pompously, who sincerely want to bridge the solitude surrounding each one of us ought to display an unwavering, unqualified trust for everything the other takes into mind to do. A woman, for instance, should be able to sacrifice a meal to her man's screwing about with the same abandon that Abraham exhibited in prepping the pot for Isaac, even in the knowledge that no ram will be waiting in the bushes when he hacks things up. You, for instance, should be able to watch me take this entire bag___" He started off comically, but quickly fatigued: if he joked me out of this, the next repair would be even more strained. I apologized, told him to do as he saw fit, and left. I looked back as I shut the front door to see Tuckwell spicing the meal for one.

Music Minus One

Jeanette Koss crosses the threshold. Ressler can neither prevent nor welcome her. Still she comes, eyes marking an astonished arc at the monkish sparsity, asceticism that registers in her eyes. Only when she leans against a wall in a girlish slump does he collect himself. "What in the world are you doing here?"

She takes the Ur-punchline, jutting one arm over her head and slithering a side step. "The samba." Slowly, sadly, she sings, "When you can't reproduce 'cause you've lost all your juice, It's Your Birthday," to the tune of "That's Amore," inflicting no apparent damage on the meaning of the chord progressions. She stops and examines Ressler, as if the burden of explanation rests squarely on him.

"But it's not my birthday. Not for a while." He feels his stupidity the instant he objects.

"It isn't? Damn! All the numerology worked out perfectly! Back to codon triplets for me. Here. I brought you a present anyway." She holds out a wrapped phonograph record tentatively, reluctant to give it up. Not knowing what else to do, Ressler unwraps the gift. It's a two-year-old recording of Bach's Goldberg Variations in a debut performance by a pianist who has the bad taste to be both as Canadian as Avery and a shade younger than Ressler. "I'm sorry if the surface is a little ground to death already. But I thought you deserved something better in life than bobby-soxers and Britten."

Ressler flinches at Koss's inside knowledge. Blake and Eva? Is that friendship, then, cozy nights made public? He wonders if this woman might also be privy to the fact that he's been afraid to put Robeson on in recent weeks. He stands paralyzed, unable to extricate himself. "I don't understand. What is this?"

"It's a record," she replies, a pouty, apologetic smile at having to do all the vaudeville. "You put it on that machine and music comes out." She lowers her arm, still thrust in pseudo-samba, and sits cross-legged on the floor in front of the loan sofa. She places her neck against the cushion, tilts her head, and lets her face go as slack as a sunbather's. She is perfectly at home in their mutual ignorance.

Ressler considers his options: deterrence has failed, and it is too late for a preemptive strike. His only chance to get his balance depends on giving Dr. Koss her own terms. He goes to the phono; for the first time since he bought her, Olga spins without a suggestion of complicity. He removes the record from its worn cardboard, experiencing difficulty finding side one. "Is your husband dropping by as well?" He tries for a neutral lilt.

"My husband doesn't care much for music. What Mr. Koss has no interest in could fill symposia." She faces him, equal parts coy, ashamed. His first good look at her. She is more juvenile, lighter than in profile. She gesticulates for him to hurry and get the music on: Why do you think I've come all the way here?

There is nothing to do except release side one, track one. He touches the needle down on the Goldberg aria. The first sound of the octave, the simplicity of unfolding triad initiates a process that will mutate his insides for life. The transparent tones, surprising his mind in precisely the right state of confusion and readiness, suggest a concealed message of immense importance. But he comes no closer to naming the finger-scrape across the keys. The pleasure of harmony — subtle, statistical sequence of expectation and release — he can as yet only dimly feel. But the first measure announces a plan of heartbreaking proportions. What he fails to learn from these notes tonight will lodge in his lungs until they stop pumping.

If the night is complete and the train of notes advances with certainty, even formal symmetry can grow as inevitably as a living thing. The fragmented melody, the decorated trickle coming from the speakers, the lights across the dark yard (so many ships' distress signals), the pile of slip-delineated journals swelling in the corner into an unassailable fairy-tale hill of glass, the foreign woman sitting cross-legged on the floor not three meters away: everything aims this moment, indistinguishable and arbitrary, at his heart. This fluke, beautiful assortment says they are here alone. Certainly a message: the sentient musical line makes that explicit. A messenger, undeniably, at the piano. But no sender. No sponsor. Only notes, vertically perfect, horizontally inevitable.

Prompted by the aria's first octave, he at once looks through an electron microscope at a moment he will never afterwards succeed in recreating. How can he say what he hears? He hears a melody (it can't quite be called that) ornamented, sighing in appoggiaturas (he has never heard the word), making its stately way into frilly irrelevance. He hears something else, something substantial underneath the period piece: a bass line as patterned as the orbit of seasons, fueled by the inexorable self-burning at the core of stars.

While right hand tentatively ascends and turns, left descends in nothing more ingenious than a major scale. What could be simpler? Four scale-steps descend from Do, answered by three rising tones before a temporary return home. The aria travels only eight measures, but Ressler has come far farther. He skids across epochs, shaking loose time. The ditty insinuates itself through the most unassuming thirty-two measures imaginable: a third group of four notes is answered by a fourth, these eight together meta-echoing the initial eight. This four-by-four megameasure is answered in turn by a further sixteen — a hierarchy where each internal rung is reflected at a higher level. A pulse, a row of tones, a magic square sprung from four letters: its Pythagorean perfection holds the hint of proliferation, celestial blowout of uncountable possibilities.

The scientist, until this moment incapable of hearing that every song on Summer Slumber Party derives from the same 1-4-5 progression as "Red River Valley," can hear in this spare, fourfold pattern potential beyond telling: answers and calls, inversions, oppositions, expansions, contractions, dissonances, resolutions. He hears all these hiding in a tune so simple it cannot in truth even be called a tune. And the variations themselves haven't even begun.

How can haphazard nubbiness of grooves pressed into synthetic polymer, read and converted into equivalent electric current, passed through an electromagnet that isomorphically excites speaker paper, sucking it back and forth in a pulsing wave that sets up a sympathetic vibration in thin, skin membrane tickling electrical nerve-bursts simulate not only all the instruments of the orchestra but this most cerebrally self-invested device, the hammer-struck, vibrating string? God only knows what those string vibrations themselves equate to. But the pattern means something: he's sure of that. And if he lets what these signal notes conceal fall back into the obscurity they have momentarily raised themselves from, a vast tract of unsuspected existence will disappear, vanish along with this woman when she stands up to leave.

Underneath the Goldberg aria's graceful surface is a skeleton, a stripped-down fragment, a moment not even a moment, a melody not yet the essential one. The real melody, the one that will pass with that trivial bass line through thirty wildly varying but constant mutations, is the accompaniment of desire and remorse in Ressler's listening. That bass is a mere crystal, periodic, irregular. Like all crystal instants, it seeps in both directions, back into imprecise memory of childhood and forward, in a rush of premonition, to the logical consequence of its opening phrases, an adulthood entirely unanticipated. It encroaches in all directions, a spiral architecture of sound. At the center of that musical stair, this moment leaves its fossil impression: a man and woman, unwitting particulars of a species frozen forever in the stillness before the historical calamity that will finish and preserve them, pressed in statigraphy, here against the Holocene floor.

Tone-deaf, he hears the tune breathing. He is inside it. In its final four bars, the bass detours back to origin. But at the moment when it must land on the octave, the delinquent line pulls one last shock. It hits and hangs on the note below, a suspended dissonance that threatens to spread indefinitely. He wonders if the chord will ever come home.

A change comes over Dr. Koss too at the music. No longer the nervous girl filled with skittish punchlines. Cross-legged, neck arched, head tilted, she sheds the sunbather and becomes a mater dolorosa. At aria's end, Ressler, scared by how much empty space has flooded into K-53-C, goes and sits next to her. His entree to music is exactly this: wanting, just this once, without compromise, to close the curve of this woman's body, the cell surface he has not been able to forget since the moment she took his head in her hands and toweled it dry.

He does not know her, what she is doing here, why she inflicts him with this tune. She has no personality but the one she adopts this instant. Dr. Koss remains, despite his research, no more than a sketch. He needs from her precisely this refusal to dissolve into specifics. Whatever he suspects about the motive for her visit disappears. All suspicion falls away somewhere in the thirty-two measures. They sit through the first fifteen variations, rooted to the bare floor a foot from one another. When side one ends, they listen to a few revolutions of dull scratching before either can move. Ressler gets up, flips the record. The fifteen feet of floorboard to the plastic phonograph elongate epically. He fumbles with the cartridge, overwhelmed by aboriginal wonder at the device. All devices.

When he comes back to his spot, Koss reaches without looking and puts her arm around his shoulders. She touches his bone blade without hope or threat or promise. A completely unencumbered, uncompromised, just-to-be-touching touch. His shoulders support her arm as if they have known each other since the start. As if they know each other now. As if anyone ever knows the first thing about another.

The piece proceeds, with the modesty of the monumental, to launch an investigation into everything the aria, by permutation, can conceivably become. After an immense journey whose contours he only darkly traces, the piece ends note for note as it began: da capo. Once more, from the head, the delicate filigree of sarabande, fleshed out upon those four unfolding scale-steps. When the music stops, they continue to touch immaterially. Olga arabesques on in silence, not knowing the difference. The sinusoidal pulse of the needle scratching the end of the track might be surf interrogating the continental coast. Ressler is not sure what he has heard. The little air and variations, its signal now dampened, message reconcealed, disperses into noise.

A voice calls him back to the world's indifference; Jeanette Koss's, full of a timbre he has not heard until this moment. "Are you ill? You look febrile." Automatically, she places the back of her hand on his forehead. He at once burns for her to apply that ancient method, instinctive to women, of testing the fevered part with upper lip. His temperature would elude even this most heat-sensitive gauge — the burning hotel, plans lost in complexity, night, love's accident, long September, memory, fever beyond telling.

He does not look at her. In another moment, they rise by agreement and walk to the door. Their arms link a moment and unthread. At the open frame, they turn toward one another in an awkward eternity. A gulf of ignorance separates their two mutually unreadable faces. How implausible, dead-ended, and wrong any visit this woman might pay him at such an hour; he wants only to be rid of her without further calamity.

She reaches out, straightens his collar. "Whatever you think about me, try not to hate me." He cannot even ask what she is talking about. Deep in this woman, as deep in her mechanism as in his, stronger than fear of overstepping norms, than the urge to be loved or at least not forsaken, must be his own desire to stand in good faith, to do right by understanding. Do not hate me for being an experimentalist, and I will not hold theory against you. Which one of us knows the first thing about what we are after?

"I would like, very much," he begins, but breaks off in a flush of guilty well-being. He feels the warm air coming off the lawn, the light of his unfurnished army barrack at his back. How much he would like to fold himself in this woman. How beautiful she seems; how cut off, without consequence, they both are from the string of homes leading from this lot all the way to the black fields on the edge of town. He stands surrounded by danger, experience.

"I want…." He stops again, unable for the life of him to remember the name of the thing he wants so badly.

"I know," she giggles, collapsing again to the face and voice of a teenaged flirt, laughing off the game they have begun as misguided, simple eroticism. Before he can ask if the record is really his or if she wants it back, she waves him goodbye.

The Equinox

The day is easily recreated. Everything about September 23, 1983, is on microfiche or magnetic disk. Only ask one of the quarter million librarians in the country—85 percent women — for help in retrieving it. My log is even closer to hand. Too weak to cut himself off completely, Franklin left me a few of his beloved, unfinishable notebooks. He neither bequeathed them formally nor forbade me to look at them. Finding myself stalled after three months of memory and invention, I consult them freely, falling back on the unreliable perspective of another.

If I am addicted to Today in History, Franklin suffered from an equal and opposite addiction: History in Today. He was obsessed with proving that the atrocities of the last twenty-four hours led in a single aesthetic conga line back to the slaughter of Huguenots, the massacre of innocents, and beyond. The obsession vented itself in spurts of Schwitters-like collages, scraps Of newsprint, the day at its most palpably inexplicable. Like his other notebooks, from the studious to the sheer caprice, these lasted a few weeks before sputtering out. For the last week of September, he clipped events into cubism.

I picture him as he arrived for the night and settled to work. Franklin and Dr. Ressler had to punch in, the computer's log serving as time clock. Frank would greet his colleague in one of a few stock ways, say, "Those who are about to digitize, salute you." Then he would sit in the deserted staff lounge full of jettisoned lunch bags, spread a ratty copy of the Times over the Formica, and cut.

On the night of the 23rd, while Tuckwell and I lay in bed, irrationally furious with each other, Frank Todd, who as yet meant no more to me than a place where I could escape the city, attacked his news. He snipped at section one with a pair of lefty scissors, gluing the composed facts into a spiral notebook. Whether documentary or artistic, a handbook for future archaeologists or a Dadaist handbill, it's impossible to say. In a neater notebook, cross-indexed to the clippings by secret numerals and Mayan icons, Franklin penned a telegraphic commentary that is now my keepsake:

Marcos getting tough with the opposition. "Extreme measures" if antigovernment activities continue. Senate Intelligence Committee

(who names these things?) approves $19 million for Contras. House Foreign Affairs extends Lebanon deployment. Rooskies refuse our "appeal" to restrain Syria. French send 8 Super Etendards into Sofar. Retaliation for attacks against international peacekeepers. Who retaliation is aimed at escapes this reporter.

He worked into his clippings a map of Beirut, colored delicately by his gifted hand, embroidered with vegetation, serpents, spiders, deer, monkeys, savage men, and angels — facsimile of an illuminated Burgundian book of hours. Then, perhaps with a stroll around the lunchroom, a glance at the abandoned fashion magazines stinking of perfume samples and color ads of beautiful hermaphrodites stroking cars, he would join his shiftmate already at work down the hall. He would change the printer paper, mount a disk pack, check the card decks to be submitted, read the console, amend the evening's flowchart, then fire up a machine partition and leave it to multitask. He would return to the cafeteria, thaw himself an Entree for One in the microwave. Then back to his notes.

Things are heating up. 66 % of W. Germans opposed to deployment of new medium rangers if Geneva talks stall. Chief of Soviet Gen Staff threatens "responsive measures" if they go in; shares Marcos's diction coach. Senate votes 66 to 23 to cut UN contributions S5OO mil over next 4 years. "Taxpayers are sick and tired of playing host to our enemies…" says Symms, R-Idaho. What you get for bringing democracy to the provinces. In a related story… first outdoor field test of engineered bacteria allowing plants to manufacture their own fertilizer "tentatively endorsed" by NIH. Ask professor about wisdom of this. Lots of new books, movies, art, most of it blurry. Dow up 14. 'Recovery but No Boom.' Nobody died.

His script leaned to the right like a shortstop stabbing at a ball up the middle. He clipped and scrawled zealously into the journal, making love to this nonemployment. Amo, amas, amateur. Adieu sweet amaryllis.

I visited him later that week. For me, current events meant walking out on Tuckwell. I sat among the antiseptic business furnishings and related my news in knotted excitement. Todd clipped quietly, but bombarded me with his usual questions, that barrage that made me feel as if I might, after all, have a story to tell. Questions from succinct to silly. "Do you love the man? How much chili powder did you put in?"

But that night I didn't answer in the usual solitude. The last remnant of the first shift was working late. Jim Steadman, a pleasant, uncomplicated man in his mid-forties, Chief of Operations, ostensibly Todd's superior, although Franker insisted on addressing him as Uncle Jimmy. Jimmy paced pointedly past the lunchroom while I told Todd about my domestic fight. At last, hours after he should have gone home, he stuck his head in the doorway and threw on the lights. "You'll wind up blind, friend. Blind as the proverbial alley. Blind as a bat."

"Blind as the philosopher," said Todd.

"Blind as the eponymous Post Office Department," I contributed, feeling in my chest the thrill of forcing the moment.

Franklin wadded up the excised Times and banked it into the wastebasket. Jimmy growled, "You going to put in any hours at all this evening?"

Todd nodded. "In a minute. Almost underway, here."

"Still bothering over the news," Jimmy bitched to no one. "Counting editorials, you two'll be here around the horn again." He looked at me and added impishly, "Or should I say you three?" Affectionate, good-natured, as blind as the day shift was long. "Most men have productive hobbies, you know. Like stamp collecting, or toy trains." He crooked his thumb in the direction of the machine room. Todd smiled, sweetly obedient, but snipped on. The older man sighed and shuffled home, knowing that the late staff had long since slipped out of his jurisdiction.

Franklin glanced down the hall in the direction of his departing superior. "Long-suffering Jimmy, up solo against the technological age." This put him in mind of his shift partner, already at work, the man who remained the source of whatever pleasure Todd and I took in each other's company. Franker put his clipping away and punched in to the machine room to help the old man out. Earn his living for at least a little while.

I flip through the aborted notebooks and the days come back with precision. I turn the page to another entry:

CEASE-FIRE ACCORD GAINED IN LEBANON WITH SAUDIS' HELP

A "STEP," U.S. SAYS Role of Marines Unchanged

In his loop-perfect hand, the impressionable interpreter duplicated the secretary of state's prediction: "They'll be a little more comfortable in carrying that mission out because they won't be subject to the crossfire they have been in." At page bottom, he writes: "Interesting tidbit on computers and privacy says that Feds keep 15 files on each of us."

I try to connect those fifteen per capita files with the libraries of magnetic disks in the room down the hall entrusted to his care. One and the same, they still don't jibe. I can no more connect government electronic omniscience with the antiseptic Mylar bits he twiddled for a living than Frank could assimilate global geopolitics into a life that consisted largely of schemes to delay, another year, his masterpiece on a minor Flemish landscapist. What was Haiphong to Herri or Herri to Haifa? Less than nothing. Yet Frank, for a few weeks, turned pages and copied, insisting, against all evidence, that he and what happened all around him shared, somehow, the same substance.

EPA scandal; Capitol Hill sets up killer watchdog, whacks it when it barks, and again for good measure when it fails to bite. "Almost 10 years after the public was alerted to the dangers of ethylene dibromide as a potent carcinogen, a Congressional subcommittee will inquire Monday into the reasons for Federal inaction on banning or restricting the substance, a widely used pesticide and gasoline additive…." Chemical "is invading food and underground drinking supplies… but the agency has yet to act." B11, for Jesus's sake. Big news was last night's Emmys.

I imagine him tending to his cut-and-paste, affecting a theatrical sigh. Every attempt to work himself into moral outrage failed to extinguish the sense of responsibility wadded up inside him. His notes filled with toxic poison, his night with the care and feeding of CPUs. But his thoughts were consumed by panel and patina, the incomprehensible landscape, the local confusion of nights when a stranger dropped by to keep him company, the chance to sketch the trivial sorrows of the nearest feminine face. Those weeks, that face was mine.

The Perpetual Calendar (I)

The breakthroughs in Dr. Ressler's science open as I explore them, like an unknown inlet that turns out to be a channel. As his post-doc went into its first autumn, partial overlap still seemed viable. If each triplet codon shared one base with its two neighbors, the string ACGAAGC would be parsed into discrete particles ACG GAA AGC. I make my own feasibility check the way he once must have. Given a codon ACG, the next partially overlapped codon must be Gxx. How many triplets possess that form? Four possible bases in the second position times four in the third gives a possible sixteen. But nothing in protein sequences places any such positional restriction. All twenty amino acids can occur freely, anywhere in a chain.

Uncanny: my first scientific deduction before seeing the argument in print. Of course, I wasn't first. Nor was I unassisted. But this surge of strange confidence: I have turned up a solution, attached my scent to the landmark. A cause for extraordinary muscle-flexing.

Dr. Ressler came as close as anyone I've ever met to demonstrating that saving grace of Homo sapiens: the ability to step out of the food chain and, however momentarily, refuse to compete. That was the quality that drew Todd and me to him, forced our love, although we barely knew him. "Nature cares nothing about the calculus of individuals." I saw him get angry once or twice. In the end, he even went after his goal with force. It wrecked him to admit that the gene is a self-promotion, a blueprint for building an armed mob to protect and distribute its plan throughout the inhabitable world.

But selflessness too has survival value. To paraphrase Haldane again, one might lay down his life for two brothers or eight first cousins. Ressler knew the calculus and how far he was condemned to obey it. But at the crucial moment, he elected for pointless altruism. Self-denial: the weirdest by-product of a billion years of self-interest. But in nature's hands, even altruism furthers selfish ends.

So I come down from my overlap conquest, return to research. I taste, after making the kill, just between the salt and sour buds on my tongue, the incomparable protein soup driving me forward: not blood. Enzyme wine.

I solve little by eliminating partial overlap. The insight, as advances do, only opens fresh cans of helical worms. I have backed into the framing problem. If a string of bases stores instructions without overlap, that long sequence still has to be framed into correct instructional bits. The gene segment ATCGGT-ACGGCCATG has three different reading frames:

The string itself might carry some punctuation device, a chemical comma indicating how the codons should be read. The reading frame would then be unambiguous: ATC,GGT,ACG,GCC,ATG. But no chemical evidence for a such structure exists.

I ask all the wrong questions, raise naive, misinformed objections that would cause even that most humane educator to smile. Might certain codons chemically fit their amino acid assignments? How literally should I take the tape analogy? Which half of the double helix is transcribed for reading? Can the tape play in both directions? I am a rookie, a greenhorn, a tenderfoot in this new country. But so is science.

I begin to see one thing, at any rate. The chemical tumbling act is a mechanism beyond belief, a language more awesome than I suspected, perhaps more than I can suspect. To transpose the line of information-packed triplets into a meaningful burst of aminos is to begin to hear the structure of genes unfold over time — a virtuosic celebration of ideas trying themselves out, competing, announcing, developing, exploring contrapuntal possibilities.

As my understanding increases and my naivete shrinks, the mechanism strikes me as unnecessarily cumbersome, inefficient. How might I build it better, simpler? I read, with distress, that ours is not the only possible genetic code, nor even perhaps the best way to keep self-duplicating molecules in production. I remember the innumerate grief of Annie Martens — an in-law, like it or not— when she heard Dr. Ressler describe how base 12 would have been a superior counting system to base 10. The woman was profoundly saddened by this irreversible impediment.

Another sadness, stronger than the code's inefficiency: it hurts to discover how much my understanding relies on analogy, pale figurative speech. My tape recorders, playback heads, builders, blueprints, and messengers. Scientific method itself — from diagrams to symbolic formulae to phenomenal descriptions — relies on seeing things in reflected terms. The gene as self-replicating organism, the organism as pan-gene, the cell as factory, the protein as robot running a program so complex that, in Monod's words, "to explain the presence of all that information in the protein you absolutely needed the code."

Will I ever get it? "Code" is itself a metaphor. "Cipher," the etymological dictionary says, comes from that profound mystery, the zero. A term to house my bafflement at how living things can be made up of so many nonliving parts. And if I get to the code, in the months before my savings run out, will it translate, repair the tear in my chest opened the day Dr. Ressler's instructions dispersed? One of the only sources of real company I've ever enjoyed — his gray brows, the taut, yellow smoothness of his face, the brutal, brave humor, the effortless flow of sentences — zeroed. "Dead" is too weak a metaphor. I push the barrow, sift the stone for a hint at how Chartres might come of rubble.

The first time I had a private conversation with Dr. Ressler, when my repeated visits to MOL gradually put him at something resembling ease, we sat in the darkened control room watching through the two-way mirror as Todd fired up the end-of-week processing. Ressler volunteered nothing, but pleasantly answered everything I asked. Just to hear him talk, I asked about a bank of devices, red diode lights flickering rapidly but irregularly.

"Those are modems. They translate analog phone pulses to and from digital sequences. At the other end of a phone line — who knows where — some other machine sends across a datum each time one of those red lights flashes."

"What are they sending?" I asked, suddenly seeing the spasmodic red flashes as a text.

Ressler smiled. "It could be the collected works of Shakespeare. In a single stream, four hundred and eighty letters a second."

That is the genetic metaphor that begins to suit me. Something wilder than all the plays of Shakespeare written in something as simple as blinking lights. It fails in the representation. But then, so does putting Shakespearean moonlight into a twenty-six-letter chamber. The closest we ever come is dressing someone up, calling him the moon. Clay-derived thought, capstone of evolution: I count myself lucky to achieve even that weak analogy. Where can I go tonight for conversation? He alone made me feel clever, just in unraveling his metaphors.

When I at last got out of the house today, steppea outside into the open air after ages, I bussed around Flatbush, Fulton, discovering to my senses' shock how thick autumn was in me already. Season of mists and mellow fruitfulness, to blame it on Keats. Sap consolidates; the days have begun going dark before supper. Even here, in the middle of fifteen million, colors come on, acquire reputations: umber, burnt sienna, ocher, iodine, scarlet, rare earths hued to the first order. With the right formula of dry cold, for no practical reason, demure trees slip from lime to lemon, go down with all the garishness of an historical atlas. And bless with fruit the vines that round the thatch-eaves run.

Well, perhaps no fruit vines in my neighborhood. But isolated branches telegraph the first symptoms of epidemic. Trees shed brittled skin and strip down to cartilage fighting weight. Twigs scrape against phase-changed glass, followed in a week or two by tentative ice traceries, fibrous, hexagonal, the solid geometry of crystal water molecules. First day of autumn, the equinox: New Year's of Phoenicians and Egyptians, wielding symbolic power as late as 1939, when we chose the day to bury our technological message to future species.

Q: Who decided that the first day of autumn should fall on September 23? Why not the 21st, or better yet, October 1, which makes more sense? Probably invented by committee. Why doesn't the day move around, like Thanksgiving and Easter?

A: This one is trickier than it looks. In fact, the reconciliation of the solar year was the first technical bottleneck facing civilization….The balance points, equal-nights, do move around — five hours, forty-eight minutes, and forty-six seconds each year. They do fall at odd times as the result of that committee, historical accident. Rotation divides only reticently into revolution. But then, if the repetitive calendar had come easily, we might never have developed astronomers, mathematicians, scientists, librarians.

Everything that ever happened happens at equinox. Wars start, armistices all arrive between early October and the end of the year. Symphonies begin and break off on autumn leave-taking. Governments change; the only logical time for elections (however pro forma), for mothers of four to head dutifully to precinct polls in station wagons despite a driving rain, to hide themselves behind curtains and pull the lever of choice.

Three compressed months of change write the year in brief. Plants pull back; landscape retreats into a miniature of muted colors. Tonight, where I grew up, the cicadas have their last seasonal blowout, choral storms outside my childhood window, now serving some Other Child in the formation of memories. Even from this distance their simmer is audible, a sex-soaked group pulse, a twitch in the dry air swelling to buzz-saw bandwidth. Wind pitches their group shout in a mechanical wave sounding for all the world like a million miniature pieces of shook sheet tin. Reaching decibel denouement the noise cuts off at the chaos instant, fizzling to a few holdouts. The signal from one swarm sets off another, a hundred yards off, flaring in pitch before it too hushes. All down the county line, the overlapping antiphony of bug choirs.

Frost stencils the hoods of cars, reveals internal cross-struts as clearly as an X-ray. Delinquent husbands return after thirty years, begging for absolution. The cheerful, hermetic next-door neighbor, receiving in his mail the most blunt prognosis medical technology can muster, turns back to his house, thinking: Just time enough to get those problem patches under the shingles. On every corner, lambent glow of streetlamps on maple limbs, an inverted carpet of rust. The moon goes gibbous, the night stars a drunken dream. Where I grew up, "Milky" is the only conceivable adjective for the spread of pebbled, intertidal autumn sky.

Combines scythe circumference swatches, close their noose around holdout corn. At the last pass, a thousand acres of trapped rats, snakes, and pheasant break from the drawn net, most mauled by indifferent machines. Sundays, as winds whip through moribund barns, harvesters meet in narthex and nave to sing how all is safely gathered in, as if they had the principal hand in bringing it off. Autumn is the note before the last melisma, the third stanza, the congregation fumbling in hymnals to read both words and music. A plenitude of pies, pride of drop-in guests, brace of hams, corsage of table settings, parliament of mashed potatoes, supplication of network sports, clatch of conversation, covey of vacation days, school of parades, volume of preserves, brood of read-alouds, keepsake of snapshots: everything running at glut, at glorious surplus.

"Healthy Midwestern girl," Todd used to tease me. "Healthy Midwestern influences." They have not helped me healthily over him. All day today, it felt as if this were the last chance I would have to remember what it felt like, in the blood, once, to be young. That synonym list of anticipation, before the business of thinning out.

Everything that ever happened to me happened in autumn. I moved away from home. I first fell in love. I got my first job. In autumn, at twelve, I thought I was hemorrhaging to death. Autumn is sea-storm warnings a thousand miles inland, everyday affairs going entirely incomprehensible, changed by the chance disaster, the autumn occurrence, the fall phenomenon.

Once I spent the wet first days of fall blowing on tea, doing a picture puzzle of Constable's Hay Wain, the soggy, rocking card table badly in need of a shim. Racing my mother for the obvious pieces, the wheel spokes, the stream, and leaving the uniform sky for when it wouldn't be so hard. Working alongside the woman who pieced me together, who has since put aside both picture puzzles and procreation for good.

I bought my first book in autumn, a story about three girls who swear a perpetual pact of friendship and set out to do something slightly forbidden but ultimately laudable one Saturday in September. Annually, like celestial clockwork, I acquire more volumes, seek out the great multistory secondhand dealers. Through plaster caverns damp with the aroma of disintegrating bindings, I select on size, color, the marginalia of former owners — subjects as obscure as Guide to Fencing, or Tungsten Mining Commission Proceedings, 1934. I hedge them up against winter, and toss them all out the following spring.

In the fourth grade, two weeks after Labor Day, I brought home my first instrument, a three-quarter-sized 'cello bigger than I was. I took it upstairs to my father's study, methodically ground the endpin into the lacquered floor, and touched the bow to the catgut C. A bass swell filled the house, penetrating to the root cellar— the only successful sound I ever made on the thing. All subsequent attacks on the instrument were failed attempts to recreate that first resonance. I turned the box in the following Labor Day, after a frustrating summer stuck in first position. Next autumn I took up piano. Czerny exercises (Chopin without sex, Brahms with a bad conscience) every October from then on.

September at seven, the cyclic return: government-instituted torture of youth peculiar to Western Nations. Spelling bees, closed-circuit broadcasts of space shots, oral reports, experimental alphabets, new math. At sixteen: the sweet fumblings of first sex under the pines in the dark, on a mat of needles, discovery without texts, transgressing the papal demarcation of his parts and mine. Today, years later: too late to let the season linger any longer. By thirty, autumn urgency should have run its course. The time of year for setting out, as if all summer had been only a holding pattern. The thrill of Directory Assistance, adrenaline of a toll call.

The electrostatics of wool and cold fronts, the smell of earthworms across the sidewalk, the aroma of retreat in the rain, nervous shift in the permafrost — scent of late September sets me loose. I can smell it in the center of Times Square, at Chambers Street, Rockefeller Center, uptown, all the way over the Hudson and west into the prairies where I learned it. The smell of that private, quiet secret I always had: the neighborhood getting ready for night. Night that might bring anything. Crisp, almost here: can't be far off, can't be long.

Time to dig out of storage clothes stinking of cedar and naphthalene. Heinrich Schliemann Stumbles Across Grandmother's Trunk. Did I really wear this? As late as last year? Should have bought the replacement winter coat last spring, capitalized on old stock's mark-downs. Too late now; as with fresh vegetables and apartment rentals, it's a cellar's market.

It seemed this week that sixty-eight degrees would hold out as long as its constituency. But a seasonal swing of warmth's buffer, a few dry flakes, the hint of a pressure system setting sail, and the air is suddenly cold enough for the frames of my glasses to numb my temples. The radio playing in the apartment just below runs afoul of a flux in the ionosphere, bleeding the stations in and out across the dial. Partly sunny skies, breezy and somewhat colder. Dropping by this weekend, with the lows ranging into the deo gratias of medieval monks, or the cheerful idiocy of a helium-voiced talk radio host who argues with the home audience that things might not be half so bleak as they seem. That is, only twice as bleak as survivable.

Every year, preexistent in the almanac, each day already marked out on the perpetual calendar. Light length on the downward trend, caught for a moment at fulcrum. Hours are too small an increment to think in. Clocks go inconsequential. I need a wider instrument— the click of tree branches — to measure the only quality that has ever counted. Weather is the one tenuous connection between this year and two years ago. Then too, the season slid so deep in me it seemed to change direction. Ambiguous cusp of temperature; newly bare branches identical to those on the verge of budding. With only the lightest push, tonight's temperature could easily set off in me the same cell-programmed thaw. Cells can't tell that no one is around anymore. Spark of arousal — dumb fixation, stupid holdover — while paging the atlas for him. I haven't even pinned him down to a specific city. But he's there, somewhere among the burnt umbers.

In autumn, Herri, the Flemish landscaper whose rescue from obscurity will never be written, stood on a hill just outside a Renaissance village and painted the sweep of trees turning autumnal tones, harvest being hauled in, stooks standing in the vacated fields, departing vees of geese, soft rub of dusk on the contoured hills. And in the corner of the panel, almost overlooked — autumn bonfire. The only persuasive argument against living practically. The return of a familiar friend.

It suddenly occurs to me how I might fix him to a specific spot. I'm not restricted to the atlas. Perhaps that landscape — the one word he's sent since Dr. Ressler's death — never existed. But the panel itself exists somewhere, if not the panorama it imitates. The picture sits in a collection, and all collections have catalogs, compiled and archived. I've got a skill. Let me use it, however irrelevantly. However much my trying to locate him puts me on par with those birds whose apparatus does not stop them returning yearly to the unilaterally abandoned nest.

The shape of my day may already have been printed in the almanac. Sunrise at x. Sunset at y. H amount of daylight hours. The arc of prediction intercepting today. And yet: something about to give, about to happen, near at hand. Quick, close, behind the advertising, during the frozen dinner, over television, after the office politics, waiting its turn in the queue of current events. Something fundamental. Something real this time. The secret will come clean. I will not die in bed.

It's good to go to sleep with a project. Staves off winter for another week. But the day needs its quote, and one has just occurred to me. They still suggest themselves in the evenings— evolutionary holdovers tonsil or appendix. I juggle today's for a minute, so tired I can barely spell, before I get it intact and identified. De Tocqueville's Democracy in America. "They are all advancing every day towards a goal with which they are unacquainted." The only direction the calendar allows, forward toward that old friend, leaving. The goal of autumn.