Replication is simple enough to model with a drawing. The split strands separate, each becoming a template for duplication:
The two daughter strands are identical to the parent. One third of the great bridge: Mendel’s factors, embodied in a self-perpetuating molecule. That length of string—TAAGCTCGGA, plus hundreds more bases in strict sequence—encodes particular inheritable traits, say smooth seed or wrinkled. Molecular neo-Mendelism is consistent with the rules of gross segregation and assortment, requiring no metaphysical rules—just the constraints laid down by chemists: purine with pyrimidine, electrons in the lowest energetic state.
But that “just” is enormous. Genetic mechanism contains nothing transcendental. Cell growth, organism development conform to the principles of undergrad chemistry. The grammar does not change from generation to generation—only individual sentences do. A simple lookup table, one or more triplets of nucleotides to each amino acid, is universal for all life. Yet to get hold of this, to learn what it means, I must look into a creation story more miraculous than any human genesis myth.
I try to imagine a machine that, through a design stumbled upon by trial and error, has developed the ability to sniff out compounds that it then strips and welds to create another such machine. I cannot. Then I can: deer, euglena, snowy egrets, man. Self-replication is the easy part of the story, the simplest way that the purposive molecule arranges its environment. The sequence of bases in a gene is nothing in itself. Not phalanx, strut, tooth, claw, or eye color. Merely a mnemonic for building an enzyme. The enzyme does the work, steers the shape and function of the organism. The gene is just the word. I must follow it down, make it flesh.
I begin to understand how the real power of this self-duplicating machinery lies not in how perfectly it works but in how, incredibly rarely, it fails to work perfectly. If inviolable process allowed the magic crystal to seed itself in the first place, occasional fallibility permits life to crack open the sterile stable of inorganics and scream out. On the order of once every million replications, something goes wrong. Perhaps a base in a daughter string pairs with a base other than its required complement:
A mistaken daughter: CAAGCT …. Who knows what this new chain might mean? Slightly different from its parent, it may produce a different enzyme, an unexpected convolution in the unfolding ear. I draw the repercussions, repeat the replication process with the impostor cytosine going on to pair with its normal mate, guanine. One of the four granddaughters differs from all the other copies. Noise invades the system. One bad pairing alters the gene’s original message. Unlike the surnames of American daughters, the change need not be lost in generations. This aberrant offspring—with a new arsenal of enzymes—may be more successful at making further copies than her dutiful sisters, though the odds against this rival the odds against mutation in the first place.
Now I must link Darwin and his riot of proliferating solutions to that one-in-a-million molecular mistake. I must trace how chance static—a dropped, added, or altered letter in the delicate program—can possibly produce the mad, limitless variety of the natural history plates. That forethought and design could come of feedback-shaped mistake is as unlikely as the prospect of fixing a Swiss watch by whacking it with a hammer and hoping. The element I lack is the odd eon. I have eight months. The world has all the time in the world.
Whatever works is right, worth repeating: not much of a first principle. How can blind unplan produce a string thick with desire to reveal its own fundament? Where is the master program he was after? Somewhere in the self-proliferating print, the snowy egret, a keyboard that plays itself when you hit the right notes. The theme Ressler hoped bitterly to forget urges me on, whispering in enzymes to rebuild the buzz all around him.
THE QUESTION QOARD
Q:There is an enclosure with ten doors.
When one is open, nine are shut.
When nine are open, one is closed.
A:Once we held metaphor cupped in our hands. But it’s foreign to us now, the riddle, lost to our repertoire except in the short span of childhood and the handful of adult months when we recover a glimpse of where we’re going. We can predict, measure, repeat our results better than anything that has ever lived on earth. But we cannot answer this simplest of games.
Its beauty is verbal ingenuity: how well the hidden comparison fits. The sorrowful romance of three lines says more in hiding than it would by spelling out. But what good are riddles? Why bother with them? One might as well ask why bother with growing old. They are ways to begin to say what wonder means.
But my lost friend, this one is easy! One needn’t be Solomon to solve it. When the umbilical is open, all other ports are still sealed. But cut the cord, and the stitch in time opens nine. You have one, proved by your effort to escape it. I have one, a full complement of symmetric parts; you knew it intimately once. Forgotten already?
There is an enclosure with ten doors. We are each locked up in one for life.
J. O’D., October ’85
X
A DAY WITHOUT THE EVER
Todd would choose mornings like this to show up downstairs, ring his private signal—a monotone but unmistakable rendition of “La donna e mobile”—and insist that I come out to play. “All systems go. The dissertation’s in hand. Ready for committee in six weeks,” he would say, tossing me a softball when I opened the door. “How’s about a little fungo?” Unflappable in the face of adulthood. This morning, I’d close his batting hand in the doorjamb. Just once, I’d leave him something he might feel for longer than the usual afternoon.
The date on his Greetings from Europe leaves him at most a few weeks to have stood still and grieved. He never had any trouble feeling deeply. Just broadly, for any length of time. Ressler’s lecture notes will never be made good. The ludicrous old stereo has been farmed out to Goodwill. The rooftop garden in Lower Manhattan that kept us in tomatoes all summer has run to seed. And Franklin’s moved on to the next feel.
Why waste my limited time narrowing Todd down to a specific atlas spot? He is unreliable, skittish, more changeable than the seasons. But he is the only other person who knew Ressler. The only person I know who, even now, I might speak to. If I find the museum that houses met de Bles’s panel, what will it tell me? Nothing guarantees that Todd stayed in the neighborhood more than an afternoon. But a start. Something to use my training on. Odd comfort, to know the exact town he was in on 7/6. An anchor spot. A day like any other.
I start with the obvious: the Low Countries. Aided by art catalogs, I search through northern Belgium, the Dutch Rim Cities. For a minute, I think I’ve pinned him down in Rotterdam. There, in the Boymans–van Beuningen, a picture that might have drawn him: one of Brueghel’s two great Towers of Babel. The painter and subject matter he really wanted to write about. But no Herris. I find a Bles panel—Paradise—in the Mauritshuis in The Hague, and another in a regional museum in the south of the country. I am dragging my heels, pursuing the unlikely. The stamp on his card was in francs, not guilders.
I cross the border, no douanes to trouble me over undeclared baggage. I find nothing in Antwerp but an afternoon of fabulous distraction. Ghent is a dead end; the altarpiece must have brought him there, but I have no proof. No clues when. I save my chief suspect for last. Brussels. French-speaking enclave in Flemish countryside. Musée des Beaux Arts. Voor Schone Kunsten. Brueghel’s Census at Bethlehem, his Fall of Icarus. Indifferent, irrelevant, overlooked, unbearably mundane suffering, depicted dead on. And for a moment: electric connection. Three bona fide panels by Bles. But the two landscapes do not match the view I’m after, and the subject of the third is all wrong. This painted apocalypse is of flood. The world I’m looking for must end in fire.
THE DATE, NO LONGER OFF
Todd was never sufficient motive for overhauling my life. I knew nothing of his private affairs, his prior commitments. No matter; I simply liked to be with him. Time was wide, broad enough for all manner of RSVPs. All his solicitous attention made me feel u
nique. The decorous handshakes and hugs—generations out of date—the barrage of personal questions, the liquid forest-animal eyes, the detailed monologues about his father’s Saturday ritual or Northern Renaissance painters made me feel that I brought about a reciprocal cold alertness in him, the suggestion of imminent ocean crossing.
Five minutes of seeing Todd, through the one-way glass, smother pretty bank teller Annie with the same courtier’s attention should have brought home that his flood could engulf anything that would hold still long enough to get wet. Sometimes in the early evening at MOL, the phone would ring with acquaintances eager for a share of his voice. Frank would greet every obscure claimant at the other end like a childhood blood brother lost for decades. A thousand people in greater New York considered him their best friend. Only he was on this island alone.
With only the slightest encouragement, I was prepared to jettison Keith, the apartment, our circle of mutual dinner friends—to slash and burn them all, rewriting the past with brutal efficiency. For a moment before consigning the old letters to the bin, I hesitated. Some nights I fell asleep swearing it would be tomorrow. But in the morning, the thought of splitting up the end tables we had bought as a set struck me not as clearing off deadwood but as torching the living tree. Tuckwell, sensing the lumpectomy might yet be avoided, played on my remorse. Fighting to keep me around, he put on a heroic show of lightness, as if that quality would awaken my fullest nostalgia for him. In October, the air took on unbearable, crisp clarity. It was waiting for me. The solid blue of the sky, the smell of dead leaves insisted that courage was a little thing. Slight. Easy, in that time of year when everything happened.
I was then on weekend rotation, two days off in midweek. Keith’s willingness to market anything to anyone had landed him in court. An exporter and a manufacturer of an ultrasonic antipest device for whom Keith had done a brilliant multimedia campaign were suing one another for fraud. Each had led the other to believe that fortunes were to be made selling the killer sonic machine in Australia. Following bankruptcy, both held the other responsible for failing to determine that the top three Australian pests were deaf. On one of my free mornings, Keith suggested I join him in the civil courtroom where he was performing. “An especially interesting item in the docket today. An animal psychologist who specializes in vermin defense mechanisms. A must-see on anyone’s judicial list.”
“Keith, I’m not up to it just now. Besides …”.
“Come on, woman. This is just what you need. Lose that long face. We’re talking major Constitutional implications here. Democracy in action. The unmistakable element of human pathos.” The couple that litigates together, mitigates together. Whenever the tertium quid settled down between us, he began to practice an ivy-league irony that made fun of everything he did for a living.
“I can’t. I have to meet a friend at the Met.”
“First I’ve heard about it.” It would be the first Franker heard too. Todd had extended a standing invitation to look at paintings together any daytime I wanted. That afternoon, I wanted. But unable to move from one life to the next, I took to deception. To compound the ugliness, I blamed the need for deceit now on Keithy. But skulking had started all the way back with that first dinner date. I’d thought that for me to call Tuckwell and tell him “I’m meeting a man for dinner” would have been like the secretary of state announcing, in front of that bas-relief, briefing-room, world map proclaiming this country’s perpetual escapade in high seriousness, that we have no immediate plans for amphibious invasion of this week’s hot spot. Tuckwell and I had always danced warily around formally fixing the contract. We lived on a perpetual option to renew. My coming on with the threatened leverage of a stranger would seem to telegraph the conventional dictate “Marry or get off the pot.” This I refused to do. So I withheld the facts, and withholding, week by week, grew progressively easier.
By that October morning, I was positively skilled at fabrication. Truth seemed so small a thing, against such overwhelming odds. Lying about plans for the Met had an aura of novelty, as exciting as hearing the mailman downstairs. As soon as I invented it for Keith, my faked afternoon date took on a sweepstakes feel. Bold and violent decision, the scent of spice islands.
I refused to justify my day’s plans. Keith repeated, “Come on. You’ll love this. The technology, the untapped continent, and the men who dared rid it of its lower forms of life. The shattered dream, the falling out of friendship, and the judicial system that reconciled them. And it’s free. Can the Met offer you even a fraction of that?”
For years, his ability to stoke up inspired silliness on demand had saved me from myself. But today, that was history. “Not very attractive, Keith.”
“Pest eradication prosecution seldom is, dear one.”
“Stop it!” I scared myself with the volume. “It’s all a big burlesque, your life, isn’t it? But you keep putting on the power suit every day, don’t you? You jump through the same hoops as any other little zealot. Then you parody it all for your friends, so we’ll all know you’re only an observer.”
Breaking loose, but in exactly the way I didn’t want to. Keith closed his eyes and got infuriatingly calm. “OK. Easy, sweet. Let’s do a little breakfast before we get too far into this. We don’t want to start a catastrophe simply because we skipped today’s E, hmm?”
After a healthy dose of vita-look-alike, I still declined to come watch the system in action, if more affectionate in my refusal. To fault Tuckwell for hypocrisy was even worse. Keith, private maniac, professional fair-haired boy of the senior partners, the perfect adaptation for steel and glass, was simply more honest about living the split than I was. The moment he walked out the door, still trying to seduce me with the ludicrous court battle, I was on the phone. By the third ring, I was about to hang up and disappear into telephonymity when he answered. “Museum?” I asked, aping his trick of plunging in in medias res.
Franklin answered, “Museum,” enthusiastically on the down-beat, although sleep still coated his voice.
HUNGER MOON
Even the Biology Building is lately promoted to Shelter Status. The need to imagine safe havens has become epidemic. Ressler’s isolation in recent weeks—winding up his rate experiment, avoiding the distraction of his colleagues’ company, exploring in the evenings that inscrutable musical code—has been so complete that he has not heard the world-changing news: the Russians have launched an artificial moon. For the first time since the first star maps, a new celestial body circles the sky. Everything at launch level is changed utterly. For a moment, the planet discovers itself on the edge of unforgiving space. Fear is electric: we’ve escaped the pull of the world.
Western alarm is worse, deafening. The Russian scientist’s legendary backwardness is wiped out in one shocking headline. Stalinist science has produced its notorious monsters, notably the state-sponsored revival of Lamarckism. A body’s ability to develop and pass on beneficial mutations was deemed ideologically appealing enough for the party to overrule the demonstrated direction of genetic translation. Forced by political dictum, Russian scientists wasted decades hunting the pangene, proof that somatic cells could alter the organism’s gametes. When Uncle Joe died in ’53, his Acquired Characteristics died with him.
But the West’s own search for the genome might itself be biased toward a representational democracy. Ressler loves Haldane’s quip about terriers growing tails despite generations of clipping: “Yes, there’s a divinity that shapes our ends, rough hew them how we will.” But on humbler days in the sophisticated West, he recalls that field evidence for the neo-Darwinian synthesis is itself equivocal. That some bump, not yet a functional eye, can be promoted for generations before it can see is at least as implausible as molecular-environmental feedback. Chance and necessity differ only by degree.
In labs across the country, the “What do you get when you cross Stalin with Lamarck” jokes are hushed furiously this week. A new respect for Soviet science emerges in 100-point type. They’ve
made a satellite, while the brightest stars on our technological horizon are the exploding Vanguard and the Edsel. The blow to national pride is a mobilization call. In one night, science is promoted to unchallenged prominence. Shaman status, educational rage, patriotic and pragmatic. The once-revered business career slips to a distant second in immigrants’ dreams for the perpetuation of their genes. Stuart’s folks’ vision is vindicated.
Where the public feels knee-jerk fright, Cyfer expresses hushed elation. Koss, usually caustic in groups, opens the first Blue Sky after the launch. “How does it feel to be alive at the first ground-break since Columbus?” We’ve left the planet. Now there’s no stopping.
Joe Lovering, misreading her amazement, scoffs. He can explain the Soviets’ beating us to space. “The same thing that got them our A-bomb so fast. And the Super, just one year after us. We let them capture too many Nazi profs.”
The lurch into the Space Age will make that last jolt from Stone into Iron seem like a pothole in the road. The dazed, mismatched layman’s response to the alien new place follows the second Soviet launch. Laika, first dog in space. The papers demand: Are the Communists just going to let the poor thing die out there? They forget that the ongoing experiment has already taken its every living victim, each step along the way.
The Gold Bug Variations Page 24
