The Gold Bug Variations
Page 52
“Nobody likes death,” she says, hands cupped to receiver.
“Listen. I need to ask you something. When you brought me that record …”
“Record?”
No longer in control, he begins to sing, through shattered mouth, half of a twisting, two-manual arabesque. No, a third of a trio: a simple descending line that, in this instance, implies, in abstentia, a flowing semiquaver figure, transparent, effortless, advancing in all directions, nowhere.
“Oh, that record,” she laughs, despite his tuneless butchering of the Base. “De goole bug.”
“When you bought me that record …”
“Used,” she corrects.
“When you gave it to me, did you love me already?” Did you think: We’ll listen to this together, in some future life, you and I, free from all distraction, from the duplicitous waltz, innocent again, free to follow the tune, to go nowhere with it? “Why do I think of you when you aren’t here?” He does nothing to help her out of the bind. She must deceive her own way out, with her own sick skill with words.
“That’s a tough one. We could throw that one up for brainstorming, if you like.”
“I need you. God, I’m sorry I’m even saying this. Why am I saying this?”
“No doubt there’s a mechanism somewhere. But we shouldn’t be too hasty, hmm? Perhaps we can’t blame everything on ribosomal RNA?”
“Jesus Christ.”
“I beg your pardon?”
“Say that again.”
“I beg your …”
“Before that.”
“Aren’t we being a little hasty in blaming ribosomal …?”
“Dr. Koss!” An electric connection. She grasps it instantly. Whatever her weakness, her acting skill, her addiction to danger, her animal need, she too is driven by love of the pattern. “Oh, Stuart,” she says, hushed. “‘Jesus Christ’ is right!” Crescendoed in those four words almost to a yell, she lowers her voice back to business tones. “No, Herbert. Everything’s all right.” Giggling almost hysterically into the phone. “Isn’t everything all right, Dr. Ressler?”
It is. “How could we have been so stupid? Don’t answer that. The ribosome isn’t our message carrier. It’s not the software transcript. It’s just …”
“… the reading hardware,” Jeanette supplies, giving the word a delicious twist. “Our messenger boy is …”
“… someone else by the same name. The RNA we’re after disappears as soon as it’s read.” Of course: not the stuff that persists in the cell. Theirs is another transcript, ephemeral, one that can’t stick around to clog the works with old commands. No wonder vitro hasn’t produced yet; they’ve confused identities. When he speaks again, it’s to himself. “How beautiful! The thing assembles its own assembly plants. It sends out an isomorph of orders for the production run. It uses its own end product to keep the whole process running. Magnificent.” Its own hardware, software, storage, executor, writer, even client. What else? The code cannot be decoded except through by-products of the code. He might have known, he, another of the thing’s by-products. “I’ll call Botkin.”
“She’ll flip. You can’t be wrong about this,” she gushes carelessly. That slight oversight of tone recalls them from the intoxicating insight. She returns to the brisk voice of science, perfect in contrivance, disguised signaling. “Stuart. You’ve all but done it. I’ll be in the lab early tomorrow. The procedures for testing this ought to be trivial.”
“Goodbye, friend,” he exhales, weary.
She returns, “Good night,” imperceptible overtone catching in her throat, suggesting, Dream of me, as if that parameter were not already an errand boy, persisting, racing through his cell.
STORM WALTZ (DA CAPO)
writes(X,Y,Z) if knows(X,Y) ,alive(X) ,alive(Y) and
helps(heaven,X) and message(Z) and (curious(X) or
reawakened(X) or scared(X)) and in_love(X,Y).
message(Z) if quote_of_day(Anyone,Any_source,Z) or
question(Today, Z) or variation(Any_message,Z).
in_love(X,Y) if sea_change(X,Y,Anyone).
goal: writes(odeigh,todd,Z)?
1 Solution: Z =
Dear Franklin,
Your letter arrived just when I’d cured myself of waiting. I read it—I’ve lost count how often—and it still breaks my heart. What am I supposed to make of you? Not one mention of the fact that has driven me for months. Do you even realize? The man is dead.
XX
THE WIFE’S MESSAGE
Writing was bad enough. Posting the thing felt like killing a baby. The unreal address and Franker’s dreamy prose freed me to say things I’d never have written had I for a minute believed he might read them. He’ll be reading them in days.
The incurable Todd denial of time drips from his every sentence, worse than his long-distance admission of love. I loved his time-indifference once, believed in it. Now I see that he doesn’t even realize his infuriating, seductive residence in the eternal present. Nothing happens to anyone; no one changes or ages or dies. Everything exists, static; now is a standing wave. One just moves about inside the gallery, changing vantage, tilting an eyebrow, unbothered by closing hour.
Once, making fun of my three-by-five tone, he accused me of being thirty going on thirty centuries. But he was twenty-six going on twenty-six. When I first asked his age, he improvised: “I was born in St. Paul’s Maternity Hospital on June 18, 1957, and instantly fell into a deep sleep from which I have since awakened only fifteen hours a day.” Funny at the time.
When he was obsessed with transferring each day’s Times, baroquely illustrated, into his spiral books, I thought here was a fellow intent on knowing his narrow sliver instant. Just the opposite: he meant to freeze solid the world’s blood bank. Full compilation of everything that has happened would at last provide a place where nothing still did. Had he possessed the sticking power, his books would have swelled, not widthwise across the shelf but downwards, mine-shaft-style. In time—for one could always be sure of more time, somewhere in an eternally spacious future— he would have gone back to pick up the missing pieces from the vertical file: first UN disarmament conference, Reagan slips surviving marines out of Beirut, haircut ($9.50), breast of chicken again. February repeats; so does the 3rd: why not the year as well?
His letter plasters over unaccountable cracks in chronology. Days spent nosing about in collections no longer pass. His Hemelvaartsdag trip to the Middle Ages: Ascension, a good half year before he wrote. Yet he lays out the detail as if last week. He has grown so cavalier with the calendar that he postdated the letter; no other explanation for how it arrived so quickly. When he bothers mentioning Dr. Ressler at all, it’s a Ressler his own age, predisappearance, present tense.
If he came to my doorstep and petitioned in person, I would not be able to help myself, although the thing he cannot abide in me remains unchangeable. But this—this nostalgic declaration of attachment, a connection that continues in his mind just because he chanced recently to remember that it was ongoing once: impossible. Not now or ever.
RETURN TRIP
We called our distress message back to the city. Jimmy groaned. “You two know you aren’t supposed to travel together.” A case of closing the disk file after the bytes escaped.
We borrowed a pound of oatmeal, a packet of coffee, and an ancient grain scoop from the contemptuous local whose phone we had hiked to. Sleepless, deliciously starved, we dug out. Late the next day, the plows sliced open the access road, clearing our umbilical. But before we were freed, we heard, in meticulous detail, how Dr. Ressler left microbiology. He narrated in open monotone, feeling the pull of those way stations again in proportion to their distance. Todd got his answer to how a person might descend into moratorium and never reemerge. And I learned that the man I’d researched was not who he was at all.
Not reticent, not demure, not this neutralized retreat behind grace and syntax. The effacing fifty-year-old was a detour, not Ressler by nature, not who he was slat
ed to become. I began to see what had done it: circumstance and a certain turn of mind had conspired to give him violent proof that the individual organism was a lie. Thoughtful, precise, romantic, driven, needy: the à la carte traits were all phantom, paper bookkeeping. The self was wedged between two far more real antagonists—the genes it was designed to haul around and the running average of a population statistically indifferent, even hostile, to it.
What possible response was there, upon discovering that all responses were embarrassing, misrepresentative semaphores? Laughter was after something; even kindness had ulterior motives. Character was composed of processes intent on short-term results. The molecule, eternally rolling its repertoire against the monster-generating numbers, cared as little for a trait as for its polar opposite. Life was not the polite venture it seemed at eye level. One step up or down the hierarchy and the project grew sweeping, terrible, so indirect in means that it made him, the best part of his nature, seem a self-duping, shady junior partner in a fly-by-night mail-order scheme.
Even pure science—the most advanced display of living potential— was not approved by either gene or population, both indifferent to any but practical knowledge. The one was a stupid, sniffing truffle hound rooting out instant gain, the other a totalitarian juggler, insatiable for accuracy. As unsavory as that left things, the linkup between molecule and mob was still so brute-beautiful that Ressler might well have lived on curiosity alone, even manipulated, puppet curiosity, were it not for one implication in the unified theory. Life proceeded not by survival of the fittest, but by differential reproduction. It was enough simply to make more than you lost. There was no Jacob’s Ladder leading higher and higher. There was only breeding, faster, hungrier, until speed, appetite, and success did you in.
Yet life in theory (more beautiful because more crystal-cold) didn’t do him in; life as lived did, the twist existence laid at his door. He could not erase his traits without erasing himself—a choice he stopped just short of. But he could swear off the self-serving bouquet of characteristics in abject humility. Monasticism. The night shift.
Snow-sprung, we headed south along the fastest route. Todd drove; Ressler rode shotgun. I studied this passenger in the front seat who, for no good reason except that we’d half guessed, had just told us his life story. His eyes had become reanimated, too hopeful, too alive to possibilities to bear looking at.
A 443
A slight sharp in the middle brass,
teeth-freezing, three beats fast:
masked quickly, yet more conspicuous
in being virtually home, but missed.
Near-hit dissonance is a shout:
someone whom love, in the darkening yard
held at arm’s length, kept almost.
Always the choice: there or close,
the sharp catch of near miss
or the oblivion of concert pitch.
RETURN TRIP (CONTINUED)
We reached MOL in the middle of the night. The waiting chaos was worse than I’d imagined. The computer room’s fluorescent composure had been shattered into a parody of flyblown Jugendstil. Tables were stacked with slopped printouts, riffled listings, and unraveling tape bands. The rack-bound operations manual that usually sat regal as an OED was pulled apart into signatures, spread all over the linoleum. Disk packs, dangerously uncovered, were scattered everywhere, piled in model babels on top of spindles. The smooth metal chitin of the CPU had been detached, revealing a mass of printed circuit cards. Seated on the floor in front of the bared cage, his back to the door where we entered, a dazed Uncle Jimmy stared listlessly at the diagnostic LEDs. “James,” Ressler greeted him, between amusement and anguish.
Jimmy turned around slowly, as if the cavalry’s arrival no longer made any difference. “Don’t even ask.”
From behind the aisle of drives came Annie’s excited treble. “Is it really them?” She crept out, tape spools running up each slender arm like Cleopatra’s bracelets. Her hair had fallen in a flaxen heap around her neck. She was rumpled and white from lack of sleep. “I’ve been helping tide things over.”
Franker began frantically inspecting the damage. “Don’t tell me it’s been just the two of you here since …”
“I wish it had been,” Jimmy said, hoisting himself wearily off the floor. “They’ve been parading in and out for the last forty-eight hours. My people. Bank people. Hardware repairmen. Outside advisers. Everyone staying just long enough to screw up another thing before heading home for the wife and kids.”
“I have no wife and kids,” Annie said.
“You’ve been a brick, woman. A lifesaver. Not that we’ve managed to salvage anything.”
Ressler sat at the console, leaned forward to read the screen full of error messages. He managed a remarkably calming voice. “How bad is it, Jimmy?”
“I haven’t been home to see my mother since … Damn you both.” Even the man’s anger was ludicrously devoid of hostility.
Ressler scanned the console log and asked, “What are you running at the moment?”
“Running? You jest. See those packs over there? Those are tonight’s work. Those in the corner are from last night. Monday’s packs are still up on the spindles.”
Todd whistled. Jimmy nodded grimly. Dr. Ressler took off his coat and glanced around the room, looking for the best angle to approach the catastrophe. Then the two of them set into motion, like the mythic ants called in to carry off the chaff. Todd sorted reports, cumulating pages. He held out a sheaf toward me, turning his head. “Take these away. I’m not privy to them.”
“But I don’t know the code to the listings room.”
“Me neither,” he said woodenly, then whispered it in my ear.
Ressler went over to the Operations Manager, still paralyzed by the CPU. “Jim, we’re sorry. We owe you. Now get home to bed. We’ll see you on the day shift tomorrow, when you get here. Go. You’re no good to us in your current condition.”
Jimmy nodded dumbly and gathered to go. Annie, still pretty in raggedness, bleated out heroically, “What can I do?”
Ressler had already turned his back and was busy swapping the board that had failed. “You’d better go home too.”
Annie only smiled: whatever he said was right. It hit me that she too adored the man, in her fashion. “I’ll pray for the three of you.”
“She’ll do what?” I whispered to Todd, after they left.
He was unrolling the console log on a cleared swatch of floor, digging back into the transcript of the last three days for clues to reversing the disaster. His lips curled at my incredulous tone. “You didn’t know?”
“Know what?” I began collating, punching emergency job cards, doing what little I could to help clean up.
His answer shocked me. “She’s a fighting Fundy from Spiritus Mundi.” Todd spoke more to his pencil ticks on the log than to me.
“But that’s impossible.”
“Why? Because she likes us?”
“Because she works for a DP firm. Because she graduated from a university.”
Todd snorted. “Lots of religious folks graduated from university. Abelard. Luther. Jonathan Edwards. Oral Roberts. Everybody who ever graduated from Oral Roberts …”
“Stupid. You know what I mean. Really fundamentalist?”
“Literal, noninterpretable truth of every word in the Good Book. I’m not sure if that’s King James or Revised Standard.”
“And she’s going to pray for us? Heaven will expedite the data backlog you two have unleashed?”
“Don’t be cynical. It’s not becoming. Besides: what Bible truths are you able to refute beyond all doubt?”
“Joshua commanding the sun to stand still?”
“This was before Newtonian mechanics.”
“Methuselah living to be nine hundred and sixty-nine?”
“They had more ozone layer back then.” He looked up suspiciously. “How, may I ask, did you remember that number exactly? You practice closet religion?”
“A Catholic!”
“Very apostate, thank you.”
“Once a Catholic … Did you know that if you summed the letters in all the popes’ names and divided by four thousand four that you get six sixty-six?” He drew red circles around telltale spots in the console timeline. Annie’s faith was burlesque counterpoint, incidental to the real metaphysical question of whether there was life after the death of his firm. I continued to help fetch things and enter keyboard codes. But the idea that someone I was friendly with believed that exactly 144,000 people were going to be saved come the Rapture wrecked me. I could not help harping on the point. “Do you suppose God put all those animal fossils deep in solid rock to test our faith?”
Todd laughed aggressively. “See all this?” He swept his hands over the chaos of the hermetic room. “God planted the seed for all this in …” He paused to do the simple product. “In one hundred and forty-four hours.”
Across the room, from inside the crippled CPU, Ressler said, “That’s less time than it’s going to take us to clean it up.”
I stayed the night, gophering, watching as they returned the machines to the state they’d been in at derailment. By the time the day shift filtered in, they had managed, by superhuman effort and suspect shortcut, to get the Monday processing underway. That left two and a half days of backlog, with Thursday’s transactions about to come in. As I left, Ressler shook his head in disbelief. He smiled his old, demure smile—but with a hint that the disguise wouldn’t wash anymore—kissed me on the cheek, thanked me for the trip, and said that perhaps praying was the proper algorithm in the circumstances after all.