Who made him? Chance made him. But that wasn’t the crucial issue. The second question in the catechism—why?—was, to Dr. Ressler, more important. In his short run at science, he had learned the trick of seeing every living creature as elaborate baggage for massive, miraculous, internal goings-on. Every itch, every craving, every store run, every spoken word arose in a switchboard of enzyme messages splaying out in an overflowing veil that made the sum of all water droplets tumbling over Niagara seem a simple, sophomore differential equation.
The knowledge left him mute, punctual, meticulous, polite, weakly good-humored, pained by human contact, a nibbler on food yet quietly omnivorous, good with words but only when pressed into them. Mostly, he took things in: listened. For some reason, a full understanding of enzymes left him still able to love me, to love Todd. Like all good Franciscans, he had this thing about affection for fellow creatures of chance’s kingdom.
The answer my Catholic training years ago had me memorize, if I carry through the blasphemous substitution, turns out to be exactly the answer Dr. Ressler’s work on the coding problem left him: Why did chance make him? To know, love, and serve it in this life. And be happy with it in the next. Only: Dr. Ressler knew—as now I do—that our chemicals, in the next life, will be stripped of their self-coding repertoire. There’ll be no chance to be happy with chance. It won’t be in the lexicon. No lexicon. Chance will resume its maiden name. I have only this afternoon, this moment, to decide whether to go on writing. Perhaps it’s letter-answering time after all. I pull out blank sheet number five, take a sip of suspect water, feel the waiting keys under my fingers, study the sunny January outside. I feel unaccountably, blessedly free.
XIX
WINTER STORM WALTZES
sea_change (odeigh,todd,ressler) if reawakened (ressler) or in_love(todd,odeigh) and not(scared(Anyone)) and journey (Anywhere).
Ressler knew we were sleeping together. Every indication suggested he approved. He toted in a sack full of squash and tomatoes. “For you.” Plural you, in ambiguous English.
“They’re beautiful,” I thanked him. Todd seconded. “Where did you find such nice ones this time of year?”
“My cold storage. I grew them.”
“In Manhattan?” we both asked, overlapping.
“I happen to live on the sunny side of the World Trade. Over several years, I’ve hauled three tons of soil up to my roof. My landlord puts up with it; she likes the beans. Organic gardening is the perfect supplement to a night position.” These were the first of a steady harvest—jar, juice, fresh—that kept us fed all winter.
He was lighter than I’d ever seen him. One day, a blue Icelandic sweater in place of the impeccable fifties suit and tie. He talked longer, exchanged brighter banter—often off-colored, anthropological double entendres about how it was up to us young to provide the heat needed to get the race through the winter. It was Ressler’s idea to do my computerized birthday card; he had pursued my birthday through the federal electronic statistics.
I hardly dared believe it: our happiness made him happy. A quiet, remarkable last process started up in him. He experimented successfully with a beard. Once when Annie treated us to guitar, he forced us all into descant, benevolently dictating which lines to take. “Do you know ‘Smoke Gets in Your Eyes’?” he asked. Annie shook her head, embarrassed for him. “How about ‘Soap Gets in Your Ears’?”
He brought in a pack of art postcards and quizzed Todd. He suckered us into outrageous debates: whether Vaughan’s “I saw Eternity the other night” might be treatable these days by a few milligrams of something from Hoffman–La Roche. Whether Marx’s class warfare might in the future be fought between information-rich and information-poor. He would dismiss Todd early. “Nothing left I can’t run through these rough beasts myself. Take this woman to live the life she deserves.” He would give me a gentlemanly cheek-brush of the lips, saying, “Your quote for tomorrow is Alain-Fournier,” supplying edition and page.
quote_of_day(alain-fournier,edition(Y,page(X1)),”I still say ‘our’ house though it is ours no longer”).
knows(jimmy,news) and curious(jimmy).
knows(annie,news) and unchanged(annie).
My new relation to Todd seemed to be public knowledge. Even Uncle Jimmy asked me confidentially, “What’s this I hear about you and my junior staff cohabiting?” Todd, delighted, took up the euphemism as buzzword of the hour: “Let’s go cohabit the cafeteria.” “Care to cohabit a little after I get off tonight?” Jimmy’s trusting grin was tinged around the edges with a droop suggesting he would have preferred Todd and me to altar the thing legitimately. Jimmy was from another time. His mother, patiently invalided at the other end of the phone, probably understood the cohabiting world better than he.
Annie too began treating us as a couple. “Look at you two, both in maroon. Cute as two peas in a pie.” She told us we ought to wear more maroon; maroon was a largely misunderstood color. Annie’s acknowledgment capped it: romance discloses more than it knows. Everyone saw what we were up to but us.
reawakened(ressler) if
Dr. Ressler paced the digital warehouse, slipping deeper into human ways. During machine lulls, over paper cups of wine, he volunteered topics rather than just politely annotating ours. He’d bring us colored bits of the world’s specificity: “Listen to this,” he said, sporting a shampoo label. “‘Lather, rinse, repeat.’ An infinite loop.” He made us try the Dial-an-Atheist number, laughing broadly when we discovered it was disconnected. He roped us into working difficult British crosswords where puns, imbeddings, weddings, retrograde inversions, anagrams, counterpoints, and subtle substitutions combined in fluid wordplay that seemed beyond human ingenuity to invent let alone solve.
Imperceptibly he thawed. He told terrific stories of scientists. An aged teacher who’d spent seventeen years in Morgan’s fruit fly room. A colleague who left his research team to surface, years later, as codeveloper of the first artificially intelligent encyclopedia. The famous Swiss botanist Nägeli, whose habit of tasting bacterial cultures was a great source of information but shortened his life. So it would go until, at the end of an evening, I would realize that we hadn’t had to draw the man out once.
astonished(todd) or scared(todd).
Frank was unable to believe the turnaround. As Ressler grew daily more voluminous, Franklin clammed up, afraid to say anything that might dispel the fragile moment. “Did you see the man?” he’d ask later in bed. “Searching through his pockets for clippings to give me? Like a third-base coach giving signs!” The clipping-gifts were superfluous; Todd’s notebooks had closed. He no longer needed them. The companionship they’d substituted for had sprung to life.
Frank would play the fool out of sheer terror. While the mainframes processed end-of-day transactions, he’d bait his mentor with silly challenges. “How high can you count on your fingers?” He whispered in my ear the proud target thirty-five, one hand standing for digits and the other for groups of six. Ressler paused a few polite minutes before responding with 1,024—each digit a single place in binary notation. Todd sulked. “Yeah, well … anything higher?”
“Always,” confided Ressler. And they took to the problem together, like competing cousins at a family reunion, chucking the softball, testing each other’s arms.
“It says here,” Franker announced one night, “that we have genetics to thank for the killer bees heading north o’ the border from down Mexico way.” He spoke the word from Ressler’s past, sidling up surreptitiously to the conspicuously avoided issue.
Dr. Ressler nodded, not at all reluctant to take up the topic. “That’s right. An attempt to tame an aggressive African strain with a docile South American one backfired. One of hundreds of plagues we’ve initiated by improving the ecosystem. Transplanted gypsy moths; imported rat-catching cats that destroy South Pacific islands; mongooses overrunning the West Indies: cures worse than the diseases. This one’s especially damning. We haven’t just replaced one pest with another. We’v
e created a new one to call our own.” He huddled us around the console, created a workspace, and whipped up a Mendelian genetics lab, a field where we could put our creations to the test. A simple simulation, but complex enough to prove his point. “There are a lot more ways to fall off the tightrope than to inch forward.”
Ressler, the author of every declaration fed into the machine, was often surprised by the executing program’s outcome. Todd and I, who had to have each line explained to us, were floored to see self-modifying behavior built from a few innocent assertions. I learned not only the danger of intervening in systems too complex to predict, but about declarative programming, the thin line between determined and emergent, the ability to surprise. Looking down at Dr. Ressler, newly bearded, Icelandic blue, typing keys, leading us with infinite patience through the nuances of his composition, I knew the world had lost in him not just a scientist of the first order, but something more important: a gifted teacher.
We ran the simulation many times, each time failing to steer the model toward anything but collapse. Todd threw up his hands. “The discerning intellect of Man bested by bees. I’ve a suggestion: we greet the little buggers at the border. Instantly upon their crossing the Rio Grande, we lavish them with Walkmen, warm-up suits, the whole nine yards. They’ll shed their asocial ways in a flick of the Zippo—get ahead, secure the Mercedes, et cetera. Adieu national panic.”
Still, the conclusion of the ecosimulation distressed Todd’s Renaissance belief in the perfectability of the natural world. “You aren’t suggesting we stop cross-breeding?”
“No,” Ressler affirmed.
“Or that we quit with all this inheritance and population dynamics stuff?”
“No again.”
“But we aren’t yet ready to build a better mouse?”
“No.”
This last answer was ambiguous: No, we’re not ready? No, we never will be? No, that’s not what I mean? But Franklin was afraid to pursue the point. I could hear him form and reject delicate questions in his head. At last he blurted out, “Bacteria engineered to protect potatoes from freezing?”
An art-history ABD specializing in obscure 450-year-old panelists, the spokesman for technological progress, versus a Ph.D. in molecular genetics, once the comer to keep one’s eye on, cautioning that the possible and the desirable were not the same. Ressler fielded Todd’s question without flinching. He ran his hand lightly over his head, smoothing his hair. He seemed not a minute over thirty. He was spoiling for something—not for a fight. For the mystery and heft and specificity of conversation. “If we’re to do recombinant DNA, you’ll need more background.”
journey(north-woods) if
Todd jumped at the chance. He suggested we three drive up the following Saturday to a cabin in New Hampshire. “Belongs to a college friend who will gladly lend it for a weekend.”
Inviting the professor for a camping weekend seemed just short of asking one’s priest if he’d care for a round of racquetball. Had Todd run the idea by me first, I certainly would have squashed it. But Dr. Ressler broke into a boy’s grin and said, “Do you know how long it’s been since I’ve gotten out of this damn city?” Both men turned to me, and I nodded with enthusiasm.
“Should we ask anyone else?” I couldn’t think, aside from our day-shift friends and the man at the sandwich shop, who Todd had in mind.
Ressler handled Todd’s question with his usual grace. “Having put our hand to this three-personed plow, I suggest we stay with it. This is a congenial enough group as it stands.”
That was all it took. I arranged my hours at the branch. Todd secured not only the cabin but a beaten-up Plymouth to ferry us there. I was in charge of food and Dr. Ressler of kerosene and campfire reading. They picked me up at three in the morning after their Friday stint. Todd met me at the door of the antique shop, shushing hysterically, as if this were a teen-aged prank. I guess it was.
The roads were clear, and after we jumped the city, the night was crisp and quick. We got free of the interstate, preferring seat-of-thepants navigation up through empty New England towns. Todd drove, and we passengers were assigned the task of keeping him awake. For a stretch, Dr. Ressler had us all rolling with a dry commentary about how every road sign in existence—“Slow children,” “Cross traffic does not stop”—contained unintentional slipped meaning. Todd ruddered via Boston, Saturday morning. We spent two hours in the Fine Arts, studying the conflagration he was after, and he bought a postcard of it. Then he hauled us across the Fens to the Gardner and that domestic chamber music in amber by Vermeer.
We arrived at the cabin late Saturday. I felt, by contrast, how my life in New York had become a spasm of hormone and acid jolting my system into continuous speculation on how I was going to get killed. My key to surviving, or not dying too quickly, had been to swim in stress without feeling it. Adaptation to environment. Suddenly this place: rag-quilted, smelling of sap and kindling, spices hanging from kitchen beams, squirrels marauding in the walls. A foot-pumped parish church organ stood against a wall with a Lutheran hymnal on the music rack. A five-thousand-piece picture puzzle that Franklin identified as an Aelbert Cuyp lay spread over the dining-room table. Salvation, in short. I hadn’t known I needed it until I was there.
We unpacked, laughing, pitched up on the beach of the New World. We put on coats and fell into the bracing air. Snow was falling thickly. A carpet gathered around the cabin clearing and up the stony hillside. The thought passed through us: head back now, while still possible. But all we spoke out loud was, “Let’s try this way.”
There were so many stars that the sky seemed black gaps pasted over a silver source. The same lights as hung over the city, invisible. Todd looked up and quoted, “‘The stars get their brightness from the surrounding dark.’ Dante, but who’s keeping track?”
We walked in silence, in one another’s footholes in the drifts. I felt, in the constriction in my chest, the intractable riddle facing the first species saddled with language: why are some things alive and others not? Snow, rock, star, lichen, rabbit scat, pine. It was the easiest, most blanketing protection in the world to imagine that everything partook of the same animation.
“Let’s have it,” Todd wheedled Ressler after we’d walked half a mile in chill awe. “You’re the life scientist. Tell us what’s happening here.”
“I was never a life scientist, to my misfortune.” His breath came out in white, frozen puffs against the snowy air. All our patient field work was about to come to fruition. “I was always, at best, a theorist. But before I was a theorist, I was a child. And every child knows … shh! Look. There. Just past that birch.”
Ressler didn’t even need to point. Against the black of the woods, a pair of eyes, reflecting dim analogy of starlight, observed us from a distance, measuring our every move, theorizing. We froze, matching it, watching for watching, not even whispering a guess as to what it was.
alive(X) if grows(X) and reproduces(X,Y) and
member(Y,class(X)) and not (equals(Y,X)) and
A long, deliberate draw of observation, and the eyes blinked off. The creature vanished, freeing us to turn and retrace our path through the drifted snow. I knew it now: the world, even in the pitch of winter, metabolizing all around us. Every ledge of it, trampled by a permutation on the first principle, each straining for a crack at the Krebs cycle, a slice of the solar grant money. “Hilbert’s Infinite Hotel,” Ressler described it. “Perpetually booked up, but always ready for more occupants, even an infinity of them.” The place was penny-wedged, crammed, charged with doppelgängers, protean variants on the original: radial, ruddy, furred, barked, scaled, segmented, flecked, flat, lipped, stippled. Who knows how? The place was beyond counting, outside the sum of the inventory. And we, as of this weekend, were but a particular part.
As day broke, we returned to the cabin, spread ourselves in the existing beds, and slept. I had joined the night shift. I woke to soft talking in the room downstairs. Dr. Ressler was tutoring Todd, laying o
ut the rudiments of the new, biological alchemy. It was afternoon, already dark. On the windowpane, thick flakes had been collecting for hours. I put my hand to the cold glass, leaving a negative ghost when I drew away. I hoped for the worst the elements could do, hoped harder than I’ve hoped since I was a girl.
I came downstairs. The men had a semblance of warm meal waiting. Flush with eating and drinking, we piled close together on the couch, in front of a fine fire. I thought: This could last forever, long evenings, passing around murder mysteries, losing weeks without glancing at the papers. A place where progress was obscene, unwanted. Todd could putter perpetually at his dissertation, I over some project in Maritime wool, Ressler fiddling with the smoky spruce logs.
Franker roused us to attack the bellows organ. He took the right pedal, Ressler the left. They each took a line in the upper staff, and I, on account of six years of piano lessons as a child, was expected to handle both tenor and bass while simultaneously pulling stops. Conquering the skittish entrances and squashing some unscored tritones, we flew along well. We pumped out Lobe den Herren and Nun danket alle Gott. After a while, we even grew bold enough to let the inner lines out and improvise on the cantus firmus, Todd laying on a counterpoint from “Mood Indigo.” But human, we grew tired of hymns. Todd was the first to break off, pace back to the fire. Warming himself, with his back to Ressler, he asked, “How about it, then? Let’s hear it for those man-made bacteria.”
The Gold Bug Variations Page 49
