I would make metaphors for you until I became almost clear. Words are fairy tale, not a court transcript. They are those PA announcements on public trans where all you can make out is the irrelevant filler. “Ladies and gentlemen, this is your captain speaking. We’re experiencing severe sdklh dhfj hryu e ahj ajd astue for alarm.” Words are those slides they constantly fed you in art history, the blurred, color-poor angels of annunciation meant to stand in for the trip to Bruges. But I have no other means to tell it to you.
Ressler, when all molecular inheritance took shape in outline before him, saw it: the closest he would ever get is simile, literature in translation, the thing by another name, and never what the tag stood for. The dream that base-pair sequences might talk about themselves in high-level grammar vanished in the synthesized organism. Science remains at best a marvelous mine, not a replacement for the shattered Tower. Even at his death, despite the unstoppable advances in the state of decoding art, the human genome defies interpretation.
And yet, a man’s speech should exceed his lapse, else what’s a meta for? The manufacture of these working terms, names and the rules for manipulating them, the accuracy of their fit as fired in the crucible of environment, gave him a way in that mere possession of the thing never would have allotted. Names let him toss arrangements around, examine the implications of the message from angles that did not exist in negotiable reality. There is, in this Universe, a Stair.
If I have read the texts correctly—and who knows how wide of the mark my grasp of the blurry words is—then the grand synthesis that ten years ago today pulled all biology into a single tenet is this: a living thing is a postulate about where it finds itself. But that living thing postulates, deep in its cells, in a language that is itself also just a rough guess, a running, revisable analogy. The intermediary of language alone makes it possible to run trials, load experiment. Only by splitting the name from the thing it stands for can tinkering take place. Language, however faulty a direct describer, can get to the place, even change it, by strange ability to simulate, to suppose, to say something else than what is.
A given stretch of the epic verse, the sequence AACGCTA, may start life as a part of speech, emblem noun or imperative verb; “add this, then a bond, then another.” By fault in the sentence-making system, the original utterance becomes AACGCGTA. Not much, I hear you dismiss. So what? So everything; you must see it. The whole parade depends on seizing mistakes. The accidental change of a single base pair can ripple through the reading process, accounting, after eons of accretion, for every implicit structure never mentioned in the string: stems, leaves, hair, hands, and—most hypothetical—brain. Evolution, the first arrangement of living things that doesn’t commit the post hoc fallacy, lays it out: invention mothers necessity.
The feasibility of each inherited variation—theme elaborated by mutation—breeds out until there is no more single epic but four million variant variorum editions, each matched to the shelf where it finds itself. Yet the code, the language life writes itself in, is universal for every living thing, taking hold once and spinning, telling in all places at all times an eerie, inconceivably implausible story of how in the beginning there was a little water, ammonia, and methane, all trapped by trivial rules, and at the end, this woman saying over and over to herself, I want to tell you, I want to tell.
The scrim lifted, this is what Dr. Ressler saw. The text of a living thing, the tender, delicate, unlikely apparatus for unfolding it, does not stand for or represent or disfigure the shape of the world; it is just a set of possible, implementable maybes about what one might do about it. Nature seems to favor the what-if. Once over the complexity barrier, the simple account promotes itself to simulation. That is the magic of language: every word waits to come true. Description gives way to postulate, is refined by experiment into singing celebration. The same opaque, heavy-handed system that kept him one step away from what those emblems stand for permits this. No saying how; I’ve been in molecular linguistics long enough to know that language, like economics and love, is wonderful in practice, but just won’t work out in theory.
The notebooks I’ve been keeping for you, friend, if they go on long enough, might become something new, not the thing I wanted to get at, but a live thing all the same, a living thing’s living offspring. Would you approve of them? Could all this stuff still move you? To think so has become my life, what all this science writing hopes for. Every sentence ever written down is sent into the world to be winnowed or thrive according to the same accountability principle as those cistrons and their experimental apparatus. Does a given combination of words push close? Do they resonate? Or are they more noise, divorcibles, permutations to dispense with? Does the line shout out, beat around the edges of something real? Do the words make sense? Do we find ourselves arriving back at them late one surprise night, after years of traveling, thinking them dead? Is this phrase worth the ink it expends? Is it what I mean, something I need? Unshakable bits of the original Question Board. Months after quitting, I’m still working on the thing. Still pasting together. I have something almost right, something to say for no one’s but your ears, if I could only reach you.
But it’s stupid, to write as if he could read this. How could he know what has happened, how far I have come, how I would share him now with anyone, under any conditions, so long as I had a fraction of him to converse with? He couldn’t, can’t, doesn’t, won’t: choose your modality. Last he heard, I crossed him off, cut the tin-can string. “It has been so long since he has heard from me that he might easily conclude that I too am dead.”
But I know something of him. He is here. Beached on the same island I am. I could walk to him overland if I had a map, an X to mark his spot, that Flemish, reflexive construction he once wrote me: “You Find Yourself Here.” Frank, there is no other way to you but this.
The man you wanted me to name for you: his metaphors, too, were from the start just genes, as “gene” is the most successful metaphor his science has yet made to name life’s notes toward a theory of experience. Dozens of words he scattered on us while alive still live. See? They keep me up at night, typing. This is what one woman might do with them. Todd, my mate, my husband, could I reach you, I would tell you how I have discovered what he was after—the secret subjunctive—and what discovery did to him. I would say how I have heard him, alone in this laboratory, his school, singing to himself. How I have made out, at last, what tune he wanted to pass on, the tune I want to sing you, the only notes worth moving mouth to mimic, and what the snippet means in our vocabulary. Franklin, just as you asked me: I have identified your friend.
NOMENCLATURE
By spring, Ressler’s trio has the kinks in cell-free synthesis ironed out. Uncanny: they can fractionate the inanimate building blocks, assemble them under controlled conditions, add a coded messenger, slip in the distilled adaptor, and—the nearest thing to golem-making to date— manufacture proteins, bring into being the plaintext product of the cell. It is not yet creating life. But their procedure is a close functional simulation.
They can take a chaotic soup of free aminos and arrange them, from out of a staggering number of linear permutations, into a sequence that gives them enzymatic sense. Granted, the information they introduce is not theirs, nor can they read it either before or after translation. They cannot compare the bit they submit and the batch output. The text is too complex, the print too fine.
They stand, all but there, confronting one last unskirtable hurdle. They can cause the code to be broken, eavesdrop on the process, but they can’t get close enough to read the code book. For weeks, neither Koss, Botkin, nor Ressler has been able to supply any fresh suggestions. Ressler concludes that they are in need of new blood. He tries out the problem on his office mate. Since assaulting Ressler that day outside Ulrich’s office, Lovering has been unreadably neutral. Enough time has passed to try reestablishing relations. This intellectual problem is Ressler’s peace offering. Lovering declines the proffered branch, polite
but indifferent, too busy to be bothered. To leave Lovering an honorable out, Ressler jokes, “Maybe your girlfriend would like to take a shot at the problem.” When Lovering jerks his head up from his desk, eyes burning, Ressler regrets the miscalculation.
He takes a slow walk to the Woytowichs’, a path he has lately reopened. They will never replace the Blakes, but they are nevertheless—what is the word?—contact. The prodigious Ivy has an undeniable fascination about her rapid development. This time Dan and Renée are between diaper changes. He and Dan trade project stumbling blocks. It gives Ressler no pleasure to hear that the ILLIAC project is just as seriously log-jammed.
“The kid’s program is fine,” Woyty admires. “It’s terrific what he can make that machine do, after only a few months. But after every run that closes in on an occurrence of the pattern we’re after, Joey changes his blessed instruction deck again. The program keeps expanding, like those radioactive tomatoes Botany is always growing. Exceptions to the latest exception-handling. The do-loops have grown do-loops on them several nests thick. Very Ptolemaic.”
Ressler suggests that they might be engineering their desired result. Dan nods gravely at the possibility. Then, as if hitting on a remedy, he says, “Hey. Come take a look at this.” Ressler follows Dan into the infant’s bedroom. There, father arranges Ivy on the rug and sets in front of her four brightly colored blocks—rose, powder blue, eucalyptus, lemon—boldly imprinted with oversized letters. “Find the A, Ivy. Come on, little girl.” Singsong, he coaches, “A is for ap-ple, aard-vark, an-gi-o-sperm.”
Ivy is off and crawling. Stretching out a system of muscles she can still but pitifully coordinate, she falls on the correct block. Ressler remains guarded. “One in four.” Can she repeat?
Woyty laughs confidently. He returns the child to the starting point, shuffles the blocks, and says, “Can you show me the C, Ivy? Sure you can. C is for cat and cactus …”
“Cuneiform,” Ressler suggests. “Codon.” The baby, unperturbed, heaves herself against the correct letter in question. Ressler’s eyes light, fueled from a source far away. Still in the crib, Ivy knows her alphabet. Is it real learning or just conditioning? The question, at this level, is meaningless. The scientists sit on the nursery floor. Daniel exercises his daughter’s arms, strokes the ham-hock smoothness of her back, stimulating the nerve connections to solidify into a network. Ressler relates the in vitro successes and describes the block they now knock up against. They can produce plaintext proteins from ciphertext nucleic acid. But analysis cannot yet tell them within acceptable margin of error how the sequences correspond.
“So close you are almost past it,” Woyty says.
“With long chains, we can label the bases in the sequence we feed the decoder. We can label the amino acids picked up in the synthesis. But it doesn’t give us position. The best we can do is assign weight ratios …. We’re no closer to actual assignments.”
“It’s a pickle,” Daniel concedes. A missed beat reveals that Woytowich is not really following him. He’s playing with the baby. The gap between them wraps Ressler in loneliness more severe than that brought on by banging on the closed codon library door. Daniel says, “I wish I could help you, Stuart.” Struck by a happy inspiration, he suggests, “Let’s ask Ivy.”
Weeks pass, the project advancing without real headway. One day, he cannot even name the month anymore, he comes home to the barracks to find Jeanette, in lovely familiarity, waiting for him as if they were silver anniversary candidates. Their time apart cannot even masquerade as moral restraint anymore. Simple cautious terror. But here she is again, in his front room, smiling richly, once more free from the delays and wastes of time that constitute their love. He returns her kiss, goes to the record player, puts the sound track on. She follows him eagerly with her eyes. Like me. Need me. “Hungry?” he asks. “I think I have something that might have been Major Grey Chutney once.”
“No thanks. I never eat when I’m in love.”
“You know this from experience?”
“Do now.” Jeanette makes a little space for him to sit. No sooner does he than she changes her mind. “Stuart? I’ve a great idea. Let’s go outside.”
“Outside?”
“You remember.” She crooks a finger toward the window. “Trees. Sky. Living things. Perfectly safe, in small doses.”
“Well …” Suspicious. “It isn’t the strontium 90 level I’m worried about, you understand.”
“What, then?”
“It’s just that, you are—how can I put this delicately?”
“Married?”
“Exactly. Walking in public, together …”
“Could be that Edward G. Robinson scenario all over again.” Spring has made her reckless. “Come on,” she laughs. “It’s tougher to hit a moving target.” She will go walking, and won’t hear no. Nor, after another minute, does he want to refuse.
They roll onto the lawn, turn up the block, put Stadium Terrace behind them. He is struck by the department store of smells, after the stale monoscent of the barracks. “And,” he adds, thinking out loud, “there are a lot more places to sit.”
She stretches herself luxuriously. Relaxing, slack on the return stroke, she slips her arm into his. Here, in residential Champaign, in front of a gauntlet of plate glass—colleagues, friends, faint acquaintances—she makes an open, unambiguous declaration. He knows what it means. She is ready now, ready to leave her husband, that blameless man, to upend her life, to break it and build it again in this arbitrary spot, to recommence, uncertain, with him, only him. Here, now, in spring. Ressler’s arms are paralyzed. He cannot move them a millimeter in any direction, either to encourage her or to withdraw and spoil the happy idiocy that has come across her face. He goes numb from neck down.
The abnormal warming trend has brought on, ahead of schedule, a rush of returning life up and down the ladder. She makes first mention of the event. Her voice is low, imparting, even-keyed: Here we are, outside, together, nothing hidden. “Flowers,” she says. “How early! But it’s been so long.” He studies her skin. Just below the yellow, little-girl’s surface, two blue-green blood tubes in her temples pulse as deep as a spanking new bruise, as the Aegean. She catches him looking, curls up shyly. “What are your favorites?”
“Favorite whats?”
She shoves him. “Haven’t you been listening? Favorite flowers.”
He is every bit as adrift as when he didn’t know the antecedent. “Hmm. Coleus, I suppose.”
“Coleus? You suppose? Its flowers are this little.”
“Sorry. I guess I meant crocus.”
“Oh. Crocus is all right. First. Virginal. Paschal. Fresh schoolgirl.” She pauses, putting things together. She grabs his arms, stopping him. “Wait a minute. You’re an amateur, aren’t you? And you call yourself a biologist!”
Ressler kicks a stone. “I’ve never called myself that.”
Jeanette gapes, hurt by his willful ignorance toward blooms, but half excited at the thought that here, at last, is something she can be the first and only one to give him. “Wait. Look. See over there? Do you know what those are?”
He follows the line of her perfect extended finger. “Y-yes,” he says, so tentatively it hurts. “I believe those are droopy, wrinkled, yellow vegetable genitalia.”
“Fool. Listen to me. Those are called Narcissus. Even you can see why.”
“Am I responsible for etymology as well?”
She kisses him, tongue, for the whole incorporated city to see. “Yes. You are. Now. How about these?”
“Those? Piece of cake. Those are, don’t tell me … Nope. I’m afraid it’s strike two.”
She supplies a name, which he does not even hear, so taken up is he with the soft, effusive enthusiasm in her face. Bluebells, cockle shells: could be anything. He will ask her to repeat it, explain the name here in the privacy of the world. She takes his hand with the grip of a school crossing guard. From one plant to another: who would have thought the block containe
d so many? Revelation creeps over him. These bee-lures, bright landing pads, reproductive export docks for photofactories temporary beyond telling, self-promoting color that next month will annihilate: each is called something, distinct, keen, revealing. Every item has an exotic label that, while not the thing, is the only way of latching onto it in the course of a walk through the neighborhood.
A good deal of his undergraduate days were spent committing to memory vast tracts of binomial nomenclature. But the genus and species identifiers inhabiting his past, while occasionally colorful, were functional: ratios arranging in systematic manner what would otherwise be arbitrary varietal chaos. He knows of the raging taxonomic debate between splitters and lumpers, between those who see in each individual—never corresponding to the norm, always a little bit other—the call for a new species, and those who want to restrict the chart to broad, manageable branches. His own discipline, the tabulation of mutations at the molecular level, might solve the matter, showing gaps between species to be both discrete and continuous. But whatever the local bias, inflected, logic-bound Latin taxonomy strives to squash ambiguity, to distinguish between surfaces.
Not so Gladiola, Jack-in-the-Pulpit, Mother of Thousands, Evanescence, False Solomon’s Seal, Wake-Robin. The words Jeanette whispers to him, makes him repeat, ranging speculatively across the year, are not labels at all. They are intent on a different program altogether. Bidens frondosa, he learns, might go by Beggarticks, Rayless Marigold, Sticktight, Devil’s Bootjack, Pitchfork Weed. It might even be named the Nameless Wonder, for that matter, and still not strain the grain. According to this woman, a thousand different bizarrely descriptive modifiers specify the catch-all violet. The naming urge embodies the feminine miracle pouring it in his ears.
The Gold Bug Variations Page 63
