ACA ACB BDC CDB CCB BDB ADB ADA ADC CDC
DDC ACA ADB BDB DDA CCA ACB CDB ADC BDB
Three words end with BDB, the most common remaining codon. Taking a tip from Poe, I bank on this one standing for “e.” The two-letter word affords another entrée. A list of common English digraphs and a little knowledge of combinational restrictions make the nonsense spurt sense: “or,” “code.” I push on, lost in a perverse pleasure. The flush of success makes me feel strong, attractive, erotic. Suddenly, it’s over.
BREAK THIS CODE OR GIVE BACK NOBEL PRIZE
Nothing compared to coaxing the truth out of Neurospora, yet the Nobel nominee needed help in the cryptanalysis. Beadle retaliated. He sent Delbrück a comeback code of his invention, which Delbrück also needed help in cracking. But Delbrück got in the last word. Beadle’s scientific address before the awards ceremony in Stockholm was interrupted by the confused delivery, in midspeech, of a package air-mailed Urgent. Beadle opened the crate to reveal a toothpick sculpture in the shape of a giant double helix. The tips of each toothpick were painted one of four colors. The pattern was irregular with hidden information. When Beadle’s lecture broke up, the roomful of premier life science brains pushed up to the podium, studying the color sequence, speculating, testing propositions. At last someone—or not someone, but that collective twentieth-century organism Big Science—hit on the solution: I AM THE RIDDLE OF LIFE. KNOW ME AND YOU WILL KNOW YOURSELF.
Both Delbrück codes are curiously self-referent. Break this code. I am the riddle; know me. What “me” could possibly proclaim itself the riddle? The cipher? The plaintext? The coding algorithm? The riddleness in the coder himself? What part of the DNA sculpture has the audacity to call itself “I”? The Delbrück code, the one inside the codemaker’s “I,” modified by no criterion except survival, grows miraculously capable of games. The I’s have it. Know me and you will know yourself. I spend the afternoon playing with messages, and on no proof but my pleasure, feel as if I’m closing in on my discovery, me.
THE CENSUS
At night, I put away the substitution ciphers and return to the painting index. I search for that particular oil-on-panel. But only Brueghel surrenders to me. Pieter the Elder: the man who was what Bles might have been, had the lesser possessed the passion of ordinary events. In The Census at Bethlehem, burghers in a wintry, sixteenth-century Brabantine town go about their business—men carting cargo, women slaughtering animals, children playing furiously on lake ice—without noticing the holy couple queuing up in the foreground to be numbered in obedience to Herod’s order, unaware of the coming slaughter.
Believing what we count, counting what we see:
A fistfight; gathered firewood; gutted pig-grease
caught in waiting pan. These things
are here at hand and present endlessly,
an endless repetition of infolded theme.
What was it that we hoped to settle on
by census, counting, inventory, roll?
While earth runs to frozen iron ball
we number Now as if already gone.
This time we say we’ll get it straight
sum the total, number all the fear
that snows the town in at the end of year,
the spur, the memory that drives men out
onto the frozen sea to map its edge
for clues to the mystery that was here
all along sends children out on sleds
with their own keen sense of the contested game:
Believing nothing lost that’s lived, counted, named.
Today the Pilgrimage of Grace occupies York, thirty years before Brueghel’s census. Religious sectarian revolt, same genus as the violence daily sweeping the Near East to my absolute bafflement. Today is the first newspaper to be printed regularly in New York City, 1725. The first of those loose-leaf folders filled with Brueghelian specific figurescapes whose holy historicity no one ever manages to feel. Today is a town square packed with people: Marie Antoinette guillotined, 1793; battle of Leipzig, 1813; first use of ether in surgery, 1846; Harpers Ferry raid, 1859; excavation of the Cardiff Giant, 1869; British halting the Germans at Ypres, 1914; 1,200 killed in Yangtze troopship explosion, 1926; Bengal struck by cyclone, 1942; China’s A-bomb, 1964. Anachronisms as persistent as the Flemish church in the background of a scene showing Mary and Joseph’s arrival in Bethlehem.
“I have this persistent fantasy,” Franklin told me, holding the cold bed linen to his neck as he spoke. “Met de Bles seeing that incredible panel, from the far side, a dozen years after his death. Knowing at once that his compatriot has spelled out in specific, radiant, complex, floating detail the nomenclature of human ecology that Herri himself had been born to describe, but died unable to articulate.”
NEAR WHERE THE WHEATFIELD LIES CUT DOWN
I met Todd on the steps of the Met, sitting in the middle of a Brueghelscape of tourists, pushers, impoverished art students, culture vultures, religious questers, Van Meegeren society frauds, footsore pedestrians sitting a minute, delinquent office workers taking a late lunch, and the occasional pilgrim of grace who simply liked looking at paintings. Frank stuck out of the assembly, even a block away, the one anomaly in the packed crowd. The first time I ever saw him in broad daylight.
Incredible weather, a June detour en route to November. I’d walked from two subway stops away, to discharge the jitters and give myself another chance to back out. Walking, I saw Manhattan as I hadn’t for a long time. I remembered why I’d come here—the epitome of epitomes, the most convoluted, aggressive, over-stimulating tabula rasa imaginable. The place was just bizarre enough, packed with sufficient diversity of neighborhoods, for me to make of it anything I wanted.
I saw him from a block off—outside the cave. He was exhilarated by the crowd. Here, in midday, he had lost nothing of the air I’d assigned him at our first meeting. He met me halfway down the steps, pumped my hand vigorously. “Great idea, this. Haven’t been here since late last week.” He rushed ahead and paid our admissions, over my protest. Then we fell into the quiet of the galleries.
We could head down any corridor of this maze, choose our century, school, bias, genre. We could buzz through, a masterpiece a minute, or stand all afternoon in front of one portrait. With every imaginable way of seeing to choose from, we made no choice. We wandered, letting each step determine the next. Franklin knew the galleries by heart. He could set in on a topic, wheel slowly around a corner, and land us in front of a picture that I’d realize had been the topic’s inspiration, even from the previous room.
Sometimes he was all formalism, tracing a lazy zigzag in the air in front of a Claude Lorrain, the rigid design of seemingly languid figures in landscape, a pattern glaringly obvious once pointed out. Sometimes he was all association and shameless indulgence. “Look at her gaze,” he whispered, nodding at Vermeer’s Head of a Girl. “A solitary locked gate, with no adjoining wall, in the middle of nowhere.”
Sometimes he told unrelated anecdotes. “When Renoir became too crippled to hold a brush, he painted with one strapped to his forearm.” His praise was all in his eyes, and his criticism was so gentle I sometimes didn’t realize what it was. “A skilled painting; blameless to a fault.” He was too funny to be pedantic. We stopped in front of a cryptic contemporary piece in the American wing. “Don’t look at me,” Todd mugged. “I got a B in Zen Buddhism.” Gazing at one of those baroque hyperrealist spreads where you can count the cherubs’ lashes, he smirked, “You know what this painting says to me? It says, ‘Press on.’
“Ain’t nothin’ here I haven’t been drilled on,” he drawled. “Would still be drilling today, if the alma mater hadn’t pitched me out on my severed ear. Seems they have a business to run; actually expected me to turn out some finished product.” He tsked at the academicians’ psychological naiveté.
We arrived, as if by chance, at an enormous gold resonance, a wheatfield being harvested. In the foreground, among the stacked sheaves, by a tree,
people sat eating. One exhausted figure lay sprawled asleep under the tree, breeches loose and abandoned. Todd would tell me nothing about this work, but the length of time he spent looking at it made me realize he’d been steering us to it all along. Brueghel’s Harvesters. One of a series of Months, depicting the run of the year. At last, Todd spoke, bitter with fullness, out of the corner of his mouth. “If by some accident we get separated,” he said, “meet me back here.”
Under the persuasion of my private guide, I realized that my own modest understanding of painting had gathered nothing of the unlimited vocabulary of sight. I had never seen paint before; I had never seen. Not that I saw any better then, but I began to feel that I might. Shape and form began to seem dialects of desire. The desire I started to see between Prussian blue and cyan owed much to the way he kept his voice low, came behind me, placed his head on my shoulder, moved just enough air to register in my ear: “See the line of that mountain, how he mirrors it in that tree limb?”
Slowly, deliberately, I let my focus slip from the paintings to his descriptions. I gave in to heat; I hurt, slack across the slope of my chest. I arched involuntarily from the small of my back. I could discriminate every hue, every brushstroke he mentioned. I had dressed up, made myself a visual lure, come down here expressly to let this stranger pick me up,
undress me with art lecture. I knew then that I would leave Tuckwell, that I would tell him that evening.
I tilted my face toward my private guide, pulled his ear to me. “Could we see?” I said, ashamed at the femininity of the request. “Could we see the costume collection?” We went downstairs together. There, amid a fabulous fetishistic compendium of Belle Epoque embroidered underclothes, he at last smelled the rearrangement going on in me. Having done nothing but brush hands since the day he first accosted me, he leaned down toward me, announced, “I think it’s time,” and kissed me. I knew it was coming, I had solicited it, but for some awful reason, my mouth ossified. We kissed like two planks being nailed together. Todd straightened up with a blameless smile and said, “I think it’s not time.” But it had been. Only, in the moment before our mouths grazed, I saw myself there, near where the wheatfield lay cut down, waiting for someone I’d become inexplicably separated from.
XI
I SIT STILL AND WAIT FOR CLOUDBURST
Q: And after the private gallery tour?
I went home and told Tuckwell. It was eerily easy. After months convincing myself I could never go through with it, molting, when the time came, was far less traumatic than the preparation. Avoidance is always a dry run. Keith, too, had prepped for the inevitable. He met my declaration as if he’d engineered it. When I entered our apartment fresh from the museum, Keith sensed something. He said in emcee’s voice, “If it isn’t the Jan o’ the Day.” He rushed at me, hunched over in playful wrestler’s crouch. I gave in to the squeeze. Then I calmly dropped my clinch-breaking clincher. A tiny, pro-tem stem of brain took over, and with a quiet final whack of the gavel, I announced I was withdrawing from the Five-Year Plan as soon as I could find a place.
Keith and I had met years ago on a downtown E that had stalled. For the dubious entertainment of the whole hostile car, this lunatic in three-piece suit began telling a story about a Beechcraft Bonanza amassing a lethal charge while passing through an electrical storm. The passengers and pilot had no idea of the potential they carried. When the plane touched down on a wet runway, they were all electrocuted. The train lumbered back to life and coughed us out at West 4th. Chance put me behind the stand-up act, and as he touched foot to the concrete platform, I goosed him in the ribs and shouted, “Fatal discharge!” He practically shot up through the sidewalk.
We had dinner together, discovering we’d been virtual neighbors before transplanting. I asked him how a good Midwestern boy triumphed over regional reticence to tap-dance for whole trains full of angry urbanites. He stuck by the story. “That’s how I’ll go. I know it. You’re looking at a man who has a standing date with electrocution.” Foreknowledge of what waited if he ever came to a full stop kept him on the continuous insulated ride. We left the restaurant, and he kept at it: everyone we passed was either a massive anode or cathode; one couldn’t tell, just by looking, which. “A pasty-faced World Trade exec and a punk, spike-haired bohunk might carry the same charge. The two of them can shake without fear of instant annihilation. But you and I might be dosed with opposite capacitance. Brush shoulders, and we’re a spent commodity. Null and void.” No more fitting an exit than to go up in a spurt of acrid smoke in the middle of pedestrian traffic on Avenue of the Americas. But that end, however much it might have appealed to him, didn’t arrive that first evening. Not until we stopped touching, grounded.
As he raced to embrace me, wanting forgiveness for the tiff that morning, I limply let him pin my limbs to my body in comic wrestling. Then I discharged. He dropped me, burned, and sat down with a look I’ll never forget. It crossed our minds at the same instant—that ancient silliness neither of us had thought about for years. I’d confirmed him at last. He put a hand to his head, shook it, smiling: I always knew it would be electrocution.
It was easy. I said, “Keithy, I have to look for a new place. You know I do.”
“Sure you haven’t found one already?” He looked away and said, “I’m sorry.” He fiddled with a piece of visual camp he’d found somewhere—a stiff cardboard print of the Virgin making a curtain call at Lourdes. He fanned himself with it. “Go on.”
“I don’t know how to, quite.” I felt alert, autumn soaking my receptors. “We haven’t been … We haven’t really liked each other very much lately.”
“No.”
“What do you mean, no?” I shouted. When he laughed, I felt everything I’d ever loved about him return in one instant. It had been forever since I’d dared joke. Imperceptibly over time, we’d paralyzed one another. But he was willing to laugh when I most needed. That hurt. Tuckwell’s aggressive punchlines—his every affectation of mean spirit—sprang from love of human absurdity. I owed it to him to pack my bag and leave quickly.
It was automatic, once I gave it the first push. We hardly needed to hash out logistics. We agreed we were both too expert at rationalization to benefit from institutional attempts at patch-up. “It does seem somewhat presumptuous to show up at a marriage counselor without a license.” In truth, there was no therapy except quitting. We both knew that trial separations are rigged—self-fulfilling equation in two unknowns. All separations were final. Our mating simply had not lasted for life, per our inner instructions. I felt the residual mammal tract, the pair bond, torn from me. But it wasn’t my mate who was disappearing.
We worked out the particulars, adultly arranged the furniture deeding and cash transfers. We set a timetable of target dates. The more painful the depreciation, the more effortlessly I wrote it off. I looked for signs that Keith was relieved as well. But he remained subdued, neutral, if not unhelpful. We talked through the news hour, skipped dinner, at last called the day on account of darkness. But before we climbed into the now awkward bed, Keith revealed himself. He cut through my anesthetic, scraped the nerve he could not have gotten to deliberately. “Can I ask you one thing?” he said, lying on his back, examining the road maps in the plastering. “Let me look over any place you find before you sign anything. I don’t want you to get stung.”
I grabbed his shoulder, forced him to face me and accept my embrace. It had been months since my cells had felt so exhilarated. Then I saw his mouth pasted with the death smile, a sickening look of failed bravery, that amused lip-pinch of confusion when receiving news too appalling to put together. Your parents both died. Broad smirk. You have inoperable cancer. Warm grin. I’m leaving.
Q: To whom could a body turn?
We’d lived so professionally that our friends came mostly from our respective offices. Socializing with already incestuous work acquaintances is so widespread that it must be a capitalist trick to increase productivity. All jobs are surrogate families, c
omplete with oedipal urges, sibling rivalries, and the ugly rest. To occupation and family, add primary social contact and recreational outlet. In another fifty years, we’ll have returned to the medieval apprentice system, with parents selling their ten-year-olds into careers appointed by benevolent aptitude test.
Sure, Keith and I saw a few people regularly simply because we liked them. But those we saw most easily were those already in tune with who we were all day long. Keith felt no need to advertise for friends when he had friends in advertising. And I could imagine no periodic contact that would require me to cross the Wilson Line. As such, we each had to go on working inside our social circle after we separated. Neither half of our partisan friends was much help in the massacre.
I had two or three major moorings, each in her way having come, once, closer than words commonly allow. Had any of them asked, I would have hopped a jet out of La Guardia on a moment’s notice. But they never asked. In fact, they called only around holidays, never with a trace of desperation. That made it impossible to call them now. I also had my share of lighter long-term friends whom I might have called for steadying: college chums similar enough for some intimacy, a cast-off amour who had stayed in touch out of decorum. I’d made these friends when young enough to risk friendship casually. I lost that ability after twenty. By thirty, acquaintance-making had become a formality with diminishing return.
I called an old girlfriend in Indiana, just to tell someone I knew how I’d smashed domesticity into little bits. In the back of my mind I had the regressive idea of talking her into coming out and sharing an apartment. She upstaged my news: “How did you know to call? I just found out I was pregnant.”
Had it been death, I would have had dozens of names to contact. But no one had died, Tuckwell’s smile notwithstanding. I was just clearing out. Still, I needed to tell someone closer to hand. Not for emotional support; I just wanted to go public so I couldn’t back out. But who to announce to? My regular social contact consisted of checkout clerks, the muffled sadism from upstairs, and a host of cheerful, limited-time phone offers.
The Gold Bug Variations Page 27
