Creation is at present limited to exotic holidays. Not far back, I was sitting in a buitenlanders language class full of earnest young Germans when our teacher announced that there would be no school tomorrow. Incredibly, the most towheaded kid asked why. The teacher tactfully explained that the day commemorated her exemption from obligatory German. For Hemelvaartsdag I went to Brugge, an urban time capsule, where I took part in the Procession of the Holy Blood. In the town center, along a fossil gothic-walled circuit, with the great cloth hall and belfry as backdrop, comes this procession of thousands of townspeople in costume, acting out, along the length of their parade ribbon, the history of the world from the Garden to present-day politicos. Animated time flowed past me on the street, a ritual that has been going on, unchanged except for appended length, since 1150. As the procession ended, each block of crowd milled into the street, following the flow, becoming the last, contemporary, costumed participants.
Time, static stuff, is reified here. The granddaughter of collaboration can’t marry the grandson of underground. I heard a German ask a price in a bordertown bric-a-brac shop. The proprietor—Common Market be damned—gave the standard reply—allusion to the million conscripted vehicles that aided the Wehrmacht in initial blitzkrieg and sped the surviving sixteen-year-olds reeling from advancing Americans: “Give me my bicycle back and I’ll answer you.”
Time is a place here, a tangible landscape. Last week I took a day trip to Münster. Disconcerting: still attached to the steeple of St. Lambert’s, the iron cages where they displayed the bodies of the Anabaptists. The cathedral was softly disappointing. It had its great astronomical clock: Herri’s contemporary universe as flywheel. But I’d expected something more articulated, nuanced. A clause and a half into a wall plaque on the south porch, I realized I was reading English. Stone from Coventry Cathedral, given to the people of Münster. Let us forgive one another as He forgives us. Caption in two languages, each translating the other.
Stupider than my towheaded classmate, I get no closer to this place’s meaning than porting over. I will never fully “understand,” because I can never fully “begrijp.” The verbal myth of standing under a thing is as unrealizable as that of grasping it. I came to class last week to discover that my towheaded friend had suffered an auto accident. My distraught teacher, confusing my native tongue with the victim’s, blurted out, “Rudy ist tot.” That much I grasped, stood under. She passed out copies of the death notice, that final declension. We students spent the morning looking up, in our wordbooks, the names of grief in translation.
It did not stand in the dictionary, but these death notices make a local spreekwoord: “He lies like a remembrance card.” For they are always filled with love, these after-the-fact summaries. Is what I feel for you at this moment the distortion of loss, waiting until separation to say it? I think of you, want nothing more than to see you and hear your voice.
Instead, I send you this botched dissertation draft. This letter may be the closest I ever come to writing it. You alone are easy to write to, perfect audience, someone who will see, in the weak paraphrase I here throw together, that I am building my apology—explaining why I could not become a sketcher in this world. Now is not the time for drawing. What limited skill we’ve developed to describe the place we long ago consigned to the laboratory. It may take generations before we remember how big the world is, how much room it has for all sorts of observation.
According to the professor, one single science stands between us and our address. Only we don’t see the link; we grasp it only in bits—the pay telescope that magnifies but constricts, and that snaps shut on your quarter after a lousy two minutes. Let me paraphrase the vulnerable Bede: what I put my hands on is the sense, but not the order of the words as the man painted them. For travel scenes, however perfectly composed, can never be ported from one world to another without loss. Perhaps neither beauty nor exactness nor profundity nor meaning, but something will not go over the bridge intact.
The words that might tell me who the fellow was are no longer the words of the original. A coat of metaphor between me and the life I want to write. Words are a treacherous sextant, a poor stand-in for the thing they lay out. But they’re all I have—memory, letters, this language institute. Translation would be impossible, self-contradicting at the etymological core: there would be no translation were it not for the fact that there is only translation. Nothing means what its shorthand pattern says it does. Everything ever uttered requires cracking. So I keep busy, travel, learn some words … “I will call the world a school instituted for the purpose of teaching little children how to read.” Full marks for identifying.
You may find it as hopeful as I did to discover that the Dutch for “weather” and “again” are the same. Let me say at least that I love you, and all other untranslatables.
FTODD
P.S. If I were you, I would write me back quickly and affectionately, an irrefusable letter from home. Something along the lines of “The age of Europe is past. That of America is ending. Get back fast before it’s all over.” In the meantime: Waarom hangt je was niet op de Siegfried Lijn? Roughly ported over: Why not hang your wash out on the Siegfried Line?
XVII
HALCYON DAYS
Ressler’s write-up is accepted by the Journal of Molecular Biology. He will appear as second author after Ulrich. Standard practice: the glass-washer takes second billing to team leader. Ulrich edits his summary liberally. Ressler initially concluded, “It has been demonstrated that hereditary information is arranged in unidirectional, nonoverlapping nucleotide triplets, each determining a single amino acid in protein synthesis. Code redundancy may favor an in vitro method of determining codon assignments over analyses of base and polypetide sequences.” Ulrich softens this to “Our results further substantiate the hypothesis of a linear arrangement, perhaps with a triplet reading frame.” He strikes the crucial second sentence altogether. When the red-penned draft comes back to Ressler, he springs up and walks the paper back down the hall to the old man’s office, using the distance to suppress the spontaneous fight mechanism sprung in his body.
Ulrich shifts in his chair and drops into placid register. “The write-up is first-rate. But we don’t want to overstate the results.” Ressler volleys halfheartedly: his conclusion makes no assertion that isn’t supported. “Perhaps,” Ulrich holds firm. “But what counts is not what you claim for your results, but what they claim for themselves. You don’t want to dictate how to run follow-ups. That would be …” The veteran breaks into a conspiratorial grin. “That would be leading trump.”
Ressler leaves, rebuked but pleased. Ulrich’s tacit advice to play things close to the chest unwittingly exonerates Stuart for not yet announcing his even more sweeping line of thought. In the premature evening of his office he follows a bibliographical trail, searching down another experiment from a pair of years ago. He dimly recalls a paper with similar elliptical conclusion that could vaporize the intractable barrier between him and the last lab step. His concentration for work is shaken by the hierarchy of ethics. Ulrich’s edit can in no stretch of the term be called fraud, or even suppression. Yet aggregate reticence shades imperceptibly into misrepresentation.
He has not, under grant or tenure pressure, recreated results without resubmitting them to the experimental apparatus. No; his data are beyond reproach. He’s not even on the hazier ground of corner-cutting in the name of efficiency. In school, he worked for a big-name researcher who occasionally whipped up extra runs, substantiating more careful trails but skimping on controls. The accusation’s been made against Mendel himself: the smooth-versus-wrinkled ratio is too perfect. But that was something else altogether—the unconscious influence of conviction. Another, more troubling imputation against the monk asks why he studied only traits that all reside on independent chromosomes. Did he examine and fail to report inheritance patterns complicated by inexplicable linkage that would have thrown the infant theory in doubt?
Simplification,
paring back the variables, far from invalidating results, is indeed required by the foundations of empirical design. The success of reductionism depends on measuring and reporting only that bit of the cloth that can be understood and tested piecemeal. Ulrich’s advice partakes of the same reductionist pragmatism: let’s establish the part beyond the slightest doubt, before we speculate on the whole’s make and model.
Ressler releases this work—insignificant compared to the catch he now angles for—from safekeeping. But the question nags at him. The question of just what he is or isn’t obliged to telegraph to the competing scientific community masks a deeper ethical issue, his secret competitive motive. Easier to tell all, free himself from the advantage of insight. He hoards the self-sabotage urge the way his fellow children of the Depression hoard tinfoil.
He lets Ulrich strike the summary and does not press his own extrapolation. Demurring is worlds away from the most defensible fraud. It doesn’t begin to flirt with falsification. Even in the continuum between subjectivity and chicanery, no one would call it doctoring. But simple selective silence, cautious calculation itself, carries along, like an unsuspecting trouser cuff bearing the freeloading burr of a seedpod, some particle of self-servance. The nauseating calculus of survival flashes on him. Self-furthering stratagems color even that perfect, informational openness, the unedited wonder of the most ideal human pursuit: good science.
Cyfer has a greater threat to its survival than entrepreneurism. Circumstance strips the team of its clearest-headed member. The train is set in motion on December 19, when the world weather engine is traditionally in almanac respite. The day is too warm for near-winter. The unusual front that releases the balmy air in the same breath releases a burst of tornadoes across the belt of Missouri, Arkansas, and Illinois. They catch the states off-guard, well past the usual time of year.
Ressler has just returned from the retail strip, where he has bought himself an early Christmas present. He has taken his last two untouched checks and a list prepared by Toveh Botkin and made a run on the record store. He returns to barracks with two LPs for every periodical still strewn about his front room. He assembles a respectable, compact music library, from Palestrina’s Missa Papae Marcelli to Penderecki’s Threnody for the Victims of Hiroshima.
He listens, relaxed, alert, despite just coming off of a triple shift of journal scouring, article amending, and experimental speculation. Finding the music precise, the notes excruciatingly discrete, he decides that the need for sleep is vastly overrated. The intensity of music keeps him from hearing that the long, sonorous, extended pedal point arising from the continuo of a bit of until-then-banal Venetian Opera is, in fact, the Civil Defense horns crying disaster. Discovering that the piercing tone is not shook out of his phonograph’s paper speakers, he wonders if he’s skipped ahead to Tuesday, 10:00 a.m., the weekly CD drill. But days can’t have passed: he’s still in the seventeenth century.
At the air raid’s insistence, he steps outside his shack to scope out the situation. Unforgettable: the sky has gone a sickening, Matthew Passion, faulty-Zenith green, right out of the Crayola box. Otherworldly: everyone in Stadium Terrace, from infant to eternal student, streams in column to the stadium, toting suitcases, pulling Rapid Flyers full of belongings. No simulation would bother to be this elaborate.
Tuning in the radio strikes him as superfluous. He stares at the sky creeping toward yellow, making a break for infrared. The long-expected airburst, most likely Chicago or old Midwestern rival, St. Louis. At 150– 200 miles, a midsized device, as the papers like to call them, would kick up enough dust to discolor the atmosphere, give it this early, dramatic sunset. He goes heavy at the waist; his knees fold involuntarily. He crumbles onto his stoop, watching the refugee crowd fanning toward Memorial Stadium for an unscheduled game. Some amazing instinct has gotten it into these heads to try to save their possessions: scrapbooks, chairs, an antique doll, blendors, anything arms can drag or shove. He considers calling out to the lady hauling the home tanning lamp not to bother; she’s getting a healthy dose of rays already.
For thirty seconds it hails, but cuts off abruptly. The violence of the wind, the backlash of pressure electrifies his skin, returns him to a child’s awe at one-time forces. He watches the sky slip to a silver gray and calculates the airspeed by timing a scrap of paper tearing across the lawn. A ten-year-old boy breaks from beside his hysterical mother in the file and waves his arms like a crane, shouting: “Run from the funnel!” His clutching mother snatches him back, yelling at Ressler as if he were an abductor. So the cause is natural, not induced. It makes no difference: correction will eventually have its out. But spreading his fingers across the violet grass, he does feel something, the bulb of skin flaring after a failed immunity test: gratitude that he may have a chance to see Jeannie again.
The stream of evacuees drains to a trickle. The wind whips to such craziness that he cannot keep from laughing. In the cusp moment, he sees the vertical cloud on the horizon feeling its way, prehensile, across the harvested fields. He calculates the number of steps to the relative safety of the stadium. Even if he’d dedicated his youth to distance sprinting, the protection of colonnades wouldn’t warrant that open-field gallop. It’s all over except the virtuosity. He spreads himself on the ground, facedown, head to the side so he can view this performance from the edge of the pit. He sees the outlines of groundbound things tossed about where they oughtn’t be going. On all sides of the cross hairs where he lies, physical law defers to easy chaos.
When it’s safe to sit up, he does, slowly. Stadium Terrace is overhauled with scrub, branches, trash, furniture, pieces of wall—no longer the center of the biggest plain in the world, but a tidal zone of flotsam. Astonishingly, his tarshack and most of K block have escaped. He succumbs to childish disappointment, the one he felt years ago on seeing the picture of that domed structure that obstinately survived Ground Zero. Can’t even violence accomplish something unmitigated?
He dusts off, grinning at how good his clothes feel, how wonderful the wrinkles. He takes himself back inside. He tunes in an emergency report, running only minutes behind the event itself. The twisters leave ten dead across Illinois: a misleadingly small toll, not indicating the power of the thing, the lightest flick of Coriolis effect that chose, this once, to pass over. The tornado failed to take him by only the narrowest swirl of turbulence. When the information repeats, he shuts off the radio. He picks at random from his new reference set a disk to return to. Brahms’s number comes up: the Second Piano Concerto. The sound so transfixes him that he rises to place the unprecedented phone call: to Botkin, to verify her safety after the storm. The gesture moves her out of proportion to its facility. He hangs up, hands fused momentarily to the phone. No: he cannot call that other, whose safety means more than meaning.
He returns to a piercing, slow ’cello solo, music too beautiful even to listen to in this century with a clean conscience. But he listens. The homecoming of the piano, demure soloist, is punctuated by pounding on the door. Outside, it is pitch-black; near the solstice, that could mean any time after 4:00 p.m. Eva and Margaret Blake stand shivering together under a quilt feathertick in the dark. He quickly lets them in.
“Is Tooney here? Have you heard from him?” Evie asks, looking about, a timid meter reader looking for the main. “It’s late,” she adds, rebuking not her husband but puerile nightfall. “He never came home.” Ressler settles her and gives Margaret a can of orange juice concentrate and a spoon, sufficient to delight her. He and Mrs. Blake begin the systematic round of phone calls, first to everyone on the team, all negative. Then they try the lab, every office at the Biology Building where someone might still be around to pick up phones. No one does. Only then do they resort to the finality of police, who reassure them that the twin cities have reported no fatalities. Last, the hospitals, who cannot match any injured to Tooney’s description.
Eva has worked herself into a state. She’s reluctant to return to K-53-A alone with the child. He insi
sts that they stay with him. Over Eve’s ennervated refusals, he makes up the bed for them, apologizing for the brutality of bachelorhood. Margaret is across the mattress and asleep before he can turn out the light. He returns to the front room and his journal pile, prepared to sit up all night, a trick that has become almost easy. He has just hit upon an article in a 1955 Nature—one that, for an instant, seems as catalytic as Watson and Crick’s piece two years earlier—when Eva pads in, still wrapped in the quilt. “Can I sit out here with you? I’ll be quiet.”
“You don’t have to be quiet.”
“Good. Nature again, I see. You men are all alike.” She takes the volume from him, thumbs through its thickness, and drops it back into Ressler’s hands. “OK. Ask me anything.”
Before he can smile, she coils up and follows the book into his lap. She collapses like a cut tree, lets out a bleat of anguish, and balls herself up against him. She is uncannily cold; he wraps her in his forearms to try to trap what little warmth is left in her. “He must be somewhere,” he offers.
Evie stifles a vowel. “Keep talking.” She digs into his leg, a breeding sea turtle scooping deeper into the beach.
The Gold Bug Variations Page 43
