I peeked inside the first-floor turret. I could see nothing through the smoky quartz and iron bars. In front of the main door, I scoured the buttons until I found the suitably corporate monogram MOL—Manhattan On-Line. “You can remember the name,” Todd had told me over the phone, “because we’re not in Manhattan and we’re not on-line.” I debated a last time and pressed the bell. After a second, a tinny transcription of Todd’s voice came over the intercom. “Friend or foe?”
“Do I have a choice?” I heard either static or his laugh, followed by the magic buzz. I grabbed the door at the tone’s order, and climbed the stairs in the half-dark. At the top of the first flight, following the quaintest layout imaginable, the stairs petered out and presented an accordion-grated service-elevator shaft, the only way higher. It violated all zoning ordinances. I pressed what passed for a summons button. Cables tensed like a surprised nest of bushmasters and a counterweight sluggishly unwound. Several seconds later, the elevator—little more than an open cage with forty-watt bulb strung through the ceiling—sallied down into sight.
The antiquated grate made a noise like an enraged myna. I took my life in my hands and entered. On the way up, I had to yank a cast-iron dial crank back and forth in its semicircle to keep the lurching car in ascent. Just as I was sure a cable was about to snap, a man’s voice echoed down the shaft telling me to stop at the next landing. I eased the throttle and cruised to a halt. I’d entered the car from the north. The box’s exit, however, lay to the east. To leave the deathtrap, I had to open a perpendicular grate, revealing a period-piece, dented, lead-alloy door with frosted chicken-wire glass—the non-windows once ubiquitous in office buildings. Todd’s silhouette on the other side called out, “Ya gotta kick it.” I did. The door swung open on a turn-of-the-century anthology of alcoves, now a functionless reception area, Manhattan On-Line being one of those businesses that never received. The dozen subdivided walls were of assorted glass, multicolored brick, and an afterthought of stucco.
“Ms. O’Deigh,” Todd greeted me with a formality that might have been mock. He shook my hand as if we were execs meeting over power brunch. Every time out with this fellow was starting from scratch. “Terrific you’ve come. I’ve got so much to show you.” Absolutely unreadable. He led us down the hall to a restraining door. He punched a code into the electronic lock, and we entered a blazing fluorescence reminiscent of fifties science fiction. Behind massive plate safety glass, several thousand square feet of room stood in the pallid postindustrial shimmer of night shift. The space, once tall, was now wedged between false floor and drop ceiling. The room shone as bright as daylight but with minute, maddening, near-imperceptible flickers.
Machines took hold in every niche of the place, devices in no way mechanical-looking. Beautiful expanses of metal and plastic, each enclosed in seductively homogeneous chitin of earth tones and ochers, formed a ring around the room as secret and monolithic as Stonehenge. Todd conducted a Grand Tour, mapping the layout. The world outside this nineteenth-century masonry held no sway here, so self-defining was this fluorescent, windowless aura. Todd took me to a console, where he issued a command to a keyboard, the rites of an inner circle closed to the uninitiated.
“Don’t be taken in by the bells and whistles. We’re engaged here in one of the most tediously repetitive routines known to man. The assembly line of the digital info set.” He punched a few more acronyms into his CRT and hit enter. Behind us, discharging pneumatic libido, a punched-card reader came to life. Todd removed a rubber band from a card deck and dropped the packet in the hopper. “Antique input method,” he apologized. The device sucked up the instructions, spat them out, and fell into cogitative silence.
I tried to study his face without staring. He was different on his own turf, but I couldn’t say how. His melodic voice showed no surprise at my being here. “I get in early every evening. Kick these beasts around until two, three a.m. An hour for lunch.” He smiled faintly. “Procedure for keeping the wheels grinding is absolutely axiomatic. Let me show you.” He tapped a pen-and-ink flowchart taped to the side of a nearby cabinet. “We go in this funnel here. We follow these arrows. Human intervention at the diamonds. We get pissed out here at the bottom. Then it’s time to go home.” He meditated on the flow of control. He pointed at a spot on the chart and said, “You are Here.”
He showed me the storage devices—waist-high spindles with removable packs resembling layer cakes under cover. “These boys will take an entire thirty-volume encyclopedia each. I hate to use the word ‘gigabyte’ in mixed company, but there seems no way around it.” He showed me the industrial printer, screaming under its sound hood. He opened the card cage of the CPU. “When this little electroluminescent display flashes ‘Help me, I’m melting’, you’re in for a long night.” He introduced me to a dozen other devices whose functions I instantly lost. Decollators; sequencers. Like one of those five-language bus travelogues through Rome—never quite sure where the guide’s English leaves off and his German begins.
When Todd at last fell quiet I noticed the hum of the metal, hard at work on calculations that never ruffled the silky surface. Constant, low-level drone permeated the room. Noticing, he dropped to his knees and spread supplicant-style across the floor. He put his ear to the acoustical tile and tugged on my pant leg for me to do the same. Amazed at myself, I crawled down with him and did the Native American trick of listening to the ground. Sound rushed into my ear, a rumbling chorus somewhere between Holst’s Planets and Aristophanes’ Frogs. He gestured me to lift my head. “Know what they’re humming? ‘Wake up, wake up, wake up you … Get up, get up, get up, get out of …’. Synthetically, of course.”
We left the computer room, the alphabet-lock door swinging shut behind us. The sudden cutoff of noise reminded me of Midwest childhood, the abrupt end of a cicada-storm outside my window on a summer’s night waking me from deep sleep with its roar of silence. The suite extended in the other direction. “This is the storeroom. These are the day-shift offices. Here’s the software vault: Authorized Programmers Only.” Indeed, a check-in desk blocked a door affixed with the same punch-code lock that had allowed us grudging access to the machine room. Hidden in this hierarchy of offices, the rift between information-rich and information-poor.
“Here’s the lunchroom,” he sighed at length. We entered a twilit cubicle containing sink, refrigerator, table with plastic chairs, and microwave. He pointed to a sign on this last device reading No Metal. “Obscure political protest, I guess.” He made me coffee and yogurt without asking if I wanted it. “You see,” he wound up. “Not exactly the glamour of high tech I used to dream about in art school. I could teach you to do what I do in two nights, so come back at your own risk. We are not so much this monster’s brain as its arms and legs.”
“Speaking of ‘we’ …”. The first substantial thing I’d said since arriving. The sound of my voice surprised me.
“Of course! The man you came here to meet.” I protested that meeting wasn’t necessary. I just wanted to see the man the reference works hinted at but couldn’t identify, the man that could elicit concern from these otherwise self-possessed features. Todd led us down a hall that doubled back behind the main computer room and dead-ended in a fire door. He gripped the knob, looked back at me over his shoulder, and asked, “Ready?” I wasn’t in the slightest.
But there was no backing out. Forcing entry, we fell forward into a black cinematic cavern blazing with point lights. Cathode rays, a glowing halo of meters, and a tower of heavily cabled boxes twinkled a christmas of continuous bit-streams being transmitted and received. Against the opposite wall was a pane of one-way glass that revealed the computer room with its gigabyte drums and its silk-smooth calculating cases. Todd and I had not done our surveying alone. I felt spied upon, violated, caught in the act of eavesdropping.
Above the hum, as the door swung shut, I heard another sound altogether. Todd had warned me, in the seafood-and-sawdust dive. And yet, each time I’d imagined these two lo
st boys serving their abandoned-warehouse night shift, I never once gave their isolation so ravishing a soundtrack. Aural obsession, in such astringent surroundings, was too fantastic. The music, ground from a cheap stereo that hid its low tech in a corner, was that same crotchety keyboard exploring that same eighteenth-century glaze, testing the keys’ tentative possibilities. Imitative voices chased and cascaded over one another, interleaving, pausing at pivots, only to tag-team pratfall down the scale in close-interval clashes. In the dark, this finger-probing was the most perfect sound I had ever heard.
Like a shepherd’s on breaking into a buried tomb, my eyes adjusted to local dark. I made out a figure, tipped forward in a tilt-and-swivel chair behind a desk littered with electronic instruments, liquid-crystal readouts, and a vast, rack-mounted technical manual that would have been the envy of Diderot and his Encyclopédie henchmen. I knew my man right away, although I’d seen him only once the year before and once in a magazine photo at twenty-five. We surprised him in the act of turning over pages in the massive manual, not so much looking up an error fix as reading though the entire yard-wide spine from cover to cover.
As we entered the confined space and stepped toward him, he stood and unfolded himself. He was thinner and shorter than I remembered; his features, not classic, by the glow of the machine diodes possessed a resignation that, like the ambient piano trickle, was consummately beautiful. In contrast to Todd’s collegiate slovenliness, he dressed in coat and tie, as if some sentient presence in all this mass of integrated chips cared how he looked. Not just presentable; immaculate. Natty.
Before Todd could do formal introductions, Dr. Ressler, with a charming outdated gesture, offered me his hand. “You know who I am. But aside from the fact that you work for the public library, once considered becoming a professional dancer, and are called Jan, I know absolutely nothing about you.” You’ve-been-in-Afghanistan-I-perceive. It came off hilariously. That slight, dry, up-ward curl of his thin lips convinced me that here was the last cultivated enclave in the forsaken world. I loved being in the man’s presence from the first minute.
We left the control room and stepped back into the hall where we could see and hear one another. We might have been business associates who met frequently in London or Tokyo, acting together in silent consensus. On the far side of the fire door, Dr. Ressler paid me gallant attention: “You have exactly the sort of complexion required of the quintessential wronged heroine of Victorian pornographic fiction. I regret having to be the one to offer the observation, but Franklin’s reading may not yet be broad enough to allow him to do likewise.” This rolled out of him intact, with only the slightest ironic hint.
Todd rushed to assure me, “That’s the nicest thing I’ve ever heard this old man say to anyone.” But I wasn’t at all embarrassed. And neither, it seemed, was the old man.
The instant we assembled in the hall, as if counting the seconds since his last, Dr. Ressler offered us cigarettes, which we both refused. “Am I the only one of this suspect group with an oral fixation?” He smoked, inhaling pensively and catching the ashes in a fastidiously cupped hand. It was by then the middle of the night. No one seemed in any hurry to ruin the rare visit with something so inexact as conversation. At last Dr. Ressler smiled at me. I can recreate that grin perfectly: laconic, amused, mixing its passive enjoyment with a particle of despair. The smile of a mathematician who cannot decide if his latest calculation presents him with a near-tautology or has plunged him into the heart of the enigma. “So how do you two come to know one another?”
I didn’t dare look at Todd. Half a dozen near-truths passed through my head, but I missed the beat necessary to pull off a plausible lie. “He came to me and asked me to look you up.”
Ressler’s already high hairline moved higher as he smiled. “So the fellow said himself, although not nearly so forthrightly.” He finished his smoke and motioned for us to wait while he discarded the remains in a nearby commode. As he returned, the shrunken figure was picking lint off of his suit coat. “I’m not sure what anyone could possibly find to be interested in. I’ve had no historical import.” It seemed the wrong place to argue the point, yet something in my reading had convinced me that the world of scientific research was one continuous, shifting, interdependent event, an event still encompassing him.
I can’t remember exactly how I phrased the question; I probably bungled it. I was unable to make a decent sentence in his company, so self-conscious did his parts of speech jumping through hoops make me. But hook or crook, standing in the deserted hall, the Goldbergs no longer audible through the control-room door, I asked what had happened to strand him here. He pulled at the skin around his eyes; maybe I’d miscalculated in believing the admiration for bluntness he professed. But when he answered, it was again with that look of bemused pleasure. “Science lost its calm.” He extended an arm, palm up, in a gesture indicating the renovated warehouse, Brooklyn, the entire maze of current events the meek were condemned to inherit. “And as Poe long ago pointed out, cryptography begins at home.”
With that, he excused himself; the machines were calling. He hoped I would drop by again. “He doesn’t deserve it, but give this young man the benefit of the doubt.” Ressler: if anything, more mysterious in person than in the elliptical accounts. The riddle the young scientist had once faced—how a four-letter chemical language could describe all life—was more opaque now than when it had sent him empty away. The only thing the visit told me was why Todd so urgently wanted to turn up this man.
By next morning I’d checked out Poe. I too wondered whether human ingenuity could construct an enigma that human ingenuity could not resolve. Yet the detective in me, a hardcover strain crossbred with hardy paperback perennial, was stumped by Ressler’s ingenuity in displaying himself to us without revealing a thing. I rephrased Poe’s dictum: It may well be doubted if genetic ingenuity can construct an enigma that genetic ingenuity may not resolve. His genetic code, the gradual accretion of living molecular language, had created itself out of free association. Everything derived from it, all successive mutations, recombinations, crossings over—fish in the ocean, eels in the sea, a thousand Darwinian finches, every researcher, Todd and I, Ressler himself, all natural history were elaborate permutations on an original four-base message. The young scientist left in this gaunt body was himself a product of the code he’d been after, the code that couldn’t keep itself hidden from itself.
I took his paradox apart from every direction. Against my policy of not repeating sources, I hit “The Gold Bug” twice over:
In the present case—indeed in all cases of secret writing—the first question regards the language of the cipher … In general, there is no alternative but experiment (directed by probabilities) of every tongue known to him who attempts the solution, until the true one can be obtained.
There lay the rub; the language of Ressler’s enigma was the genetic code, organic chemistry, well-understood forces. Ressler had known all that; the work of generations of whitecoats had identified the idiom the secret writing was written in. But there the man was, at the end of his working life, empty-handed, high and dry, alone at night in a dark room lit only by CRTs requiring as much attention as wetting infants.
The code he was after was not so much a message written in a language as all grammar itself. I felt that with my first good look at his wasted face, his intelligent eyes that resigned themselves to courteous elegance. The old vocabulary of research and exploration, the whole poetics of science still poured from the man’s mouth in rolling, perfect paragraphs.
At work, the routine that had taken me into adulthood came up short. I did not want my life. I wanted another thing, an analogy. I wanted to read Poe, all Poe. I wanted to read science, the history of science. I wanted to be back with those two men, listening to the language of isolation they spoke to one another. Half a dozen sentences, and I was fixed. Was any grammar sufficiently strong to translate the inner grammar of another? Did anything in the cell, in the code
itself, actually know the code? I needed to win this man’s confidence, to ask him as much. To ask him how he had guessed I’d wanted, once, to be a dancer.
Todd had said to call him anytime. I did, in the middle of the afternoon a few days later. “Oh God, I forgot. I woke you.”
“No, no,” he lied groggily. “There’s something I’ve been wanting to ask you forever.”
“We answer anything.”
“What is the origin of the phrase ‘Make the catch’?” Half-conscious silliness: repeating the question, reproducing the round he pretended to ask about. Clear dalliance, an open invitation to come again, that evening if I wanted. I had passed the audition. I needed no further lure. I could sit in that soundproof control room behind the one-way glass, savoring the banter of people who understood the scary unlikelihood of speech. I laughed something back at Franklin; hard to say which of us led the flirtation walk. A stepladder catch, second voice identical, only higher. He chases her until she catches him.
THE NIGHTLY NEWS
Ressler accepts Botkin’s standing invitation to eat with her. Food’s gone by the boards too long. Over venison or Duck à 1’Orange, they might even make headway on a coding angle. The elder woman’s mind is first-rate; if her science isn’t up to the minute, it’s the fault of the discipline’s runaway proliferation, not her ability to grasp essentials. He himself can’t understand more than three of five articles, even in those journals devoted to his narrow specialty. He becomes a regular at her table, benefiting more than just nutritionally. Botkin too seems fond of the chance for conversation. Odd thing: talk’s no good alone.
The Gold Bug Variations Page 13
