Each dance stands in utter emotional contrast to the previous canon. And each is followed by a two-manual tear that draws the ear up in a second reversal of decision upon appeal. This constant broadening of technical and emotional contrast must have taken Ressler years to train for: each variation is so arranged to throw off the spell of the previous, and before the ear has time enough to savor any crystallization of mood, a reaction at once pitches the listener into new tempi, meters, and melodic figures probing radically opposing kernels of feeling, pulling open the full complexity of the piece, the inexhaustible variety extracted from the modest four-by-four-by-four sarabande. Each variation asserts its own myth, its own melody, its lack of precedent. Yet underneath, shining through each arpeggiated outburst, the theme asserts itself as master gene.
My attending ear learns not to give over entirely to the sorrow or exuberance of the moment. The most stupendously brilliant piece in the set is also a premonition of the emotional devastation that must follow. The variations each announce the consequence each itself creates. Just after a variation harboring harmonies that will not surface again until this century comes the most rococo of diversions. Grief spills over into buffoonery. Every beauty has its bitter answer. Yet each reversal doesn’t dispel its sibling. They are all obedient, first-filial offspring of the same parent; while different phenotypes, they carry the same underwriting code. They exist side by side, superimposed in my unforgetting ear, apparent incommensurates, but one at the core.
And they are a unity in a way that becomes clear to me only as I discover an even higher order of order imbedded in the set. The aria, itself just another organism synthesized from the Base, is repeated—completely overhauled, although note for note the same—da capo at the end. So there are not thirty but thirty-two variations in the set, one for each measure in each variation, for each note in the generating Base. Any reductionist attempt to capture the work in its understandable particulars, dropping from the set down to the variation down to one measure, produces a germ that is not a part of anything but a microcosm of the infolded whole.
The theme is all thirty-two notes, the Goldbergs, all thirty-two variations. Each moment is a miniature globe, an encoding of everything above it. The Goldbergs are layered all the way from bottom to top and back down again, with every layer of ordering—from canonically entering canons to contrasting triplet groups, from note to measure to line to variation to entire work and back to note—contributing to, particularizing, and lost in the next rung of the hierarchy it generates.
But the severe mathematics of recursive architecture are lost in the first ornament of aria. By the time the potential of the original sequence emerges, no ear can trace any but the faintest line of that all-embracing ground plan. No; Ressler was not listening to inversions and midpoint symmetries and numerologies and the closing of the diatonic circle. He was following the death of his friends, listening to how love fled, anticipating the dissonance of Jimmy’s crippling, detecting and replaying his own departure from science: hearing, in the descent of four notes from Do, the script of life’s particulars, brute specifics that too often became too much, too full, too awful to bear, too unendurably, transiently beautiful.
The canons proceed beyond the octave, start all over again at the ninth, as if to suggest, “We could do this for eons.” The Goldbergs threaten to expand the modest four-note germ of the thirty-two note Base to the scale of infinite invention, a perpetual calendar. I hear Ressler talking to his love every night for thirty-two years, using no words other than those built on the allotted four letters, and never exhausting all he had to say to her. Once a grammar passes the complexity threshold, no algorithm can list all possible well-formed sentences. The diversity of language defies physical law, or rather, endless sentence-generation displays law in a new, unprecedented predication.
Sufficiently complex, the Goldbergs no longer know their own sarabande. They are no longer about permutation, manipulation, pattern. They are about the bliss of the sixth, the cut of the seventh, this drooping cadence, the suspension selecting for sorrow or serenity, a snowed-in weekend, late nights of conversation, anger, abandonment, disaster, the decision to act, to rejoin for a last moment the condition of human politics, a brute insistence modulating worlds from G before coming home. The Goldbergs reach the threshold where each variation denies that it is a variation. And at that point, they no longer are.
Like proliferating species, the variants do not improve or advance. There is no question of progress here. Under the pressure of evolutionary restlessness, they simply spread out across the map of available biomes, unearth more of the embedded germ material, bring some as yet unrealized alternative—similar to all others, only different—into existence. The sarabande is never escaped, however much migration takes place. Its shape squarely inhabits mid-measure. It may wander freely across voices and beats, be for a few bars almost unhearable. But it is always there. The distance between any two incarnations is immense, as wide as the immigrant’s awe at native idiom. It is improvisation in here tonight. We listeners can do nothing but stand back and wing it as it wings. Where will the next dance step come from, the next flying arabesque, the wilder, more cunningly contrived canon?
More than enough room in this world for him to move around in, respond to, to laugh at, to feel the quick, sure flash of recognition. He could hear in it not just the faithful transcript of lost love, his early work on the coding problem, the years of obscurity, and the premonition of a few affectionate months with us, the first hint of what today in history would call him to. The sound was also an invitation to run this experiment of independent parts—crossing, racing, colliding, mimicking, moving in contrary motion, teasing each other into brighter, freer passages, informed by what has passed and what is still to come. The variations are the working out of that instruction, buried deep in the Base string, that commands itself to translate, to strain against the limits of its own synthesis, to test the living trick of Perhaps, to love.
It is, as the young pianist on Ressler’s thirty-year-old recording proclaims in the liner notes, music with no beginning and no end. Music of no particular style or period: its eighteenth-century decorum constantly upset by backward glances and embryonic predictions—by turns monkish cloister, Renaissance brass, skittish romantic soaring, and the jarring atonality of my own evening. Darwin might have found his elusive pangene, if he’d only looked in the right place: higher up, deeper down, outside the cell, in the codes the cell creates and sends out to probe and describe its inexhaustible world.
The variations take on the language of the time and place they require, obeying no formal principle except the continuance of their parent. Conflicting musical ideas tear across the page, from the page to the keys, and the keys to the ear—rising into free-fall, daring chromatics, turning triplet shorthand, leaping, crashing in exhilaration, creeping meekly across the keyboard, descending to earthy folk song, daring the dead stop of anguish. The Base on which the entire piece is built, while everywhere manifest, loses its original, independent identity. It is subsumed in the general fanfare, swallowed up in invention, changed in the accumulation of minute mutations. Its sequence becomes a sustained pedal point, a repeated, ultimately stationary strain that changes as all else changes around it.
And the immense set as a whole becomes a scalar expansion of the sarabande, each of the thirty-two notes enlarged into thirty-two variations that are themselves, apart and together, a macrocosm of a single idea. Nowhere in the patterned sequence is there the remotest suggestion of what might arise out of it. To try to locate, in the thematic germ, what Ressler spent a life listening to would be to search in those schematics— line drawings showing every subassembly of every carburetor part—for a semblance of the functioning car. The germ shares nothing with its inheriting variations except the investing metaphor at the heart of life.
Yet the only way over the threshold, down into the full sound he heard, lies along this line, parallel to the one connecting
organism to circulatory system to heart to chamber to valve to pumping muscle cell to nucleus to copy of the master theme. The line sought by the systematic researcher. The thing he hoped one day to uncover on the ancient, battered disk he toted around his entire adult life, the thing every beat of the piece encoded, the thing he was living, the set inside him: the infinitely pliable four-note theme.
Ultimately, the Goldbergs are about the paradox of variation, preserved divergence, the transition effect inherent in terraced unfolding, the change in nature attendant upon a change in degree. How necessity might arise out of chance. How difference might arise out of more of the same. By the time the delinquent parent aria returns to close out the set, the music is about how variation might ultimately free itself from the instruction that underwrites it, sets it in motion, but nowhere anticipates what might come from experience’s trial run.
The relentlessly repeating thirty-two-note Base traces out that same unintentional contradiction in terms that Dr. Ressler read to us from the operations manual on the night we sat down to commit our crime. “These two procedures are exactly similar.” “Exactly similar” elicited a laugh. But shouldn’t “the same” get the same? “A is the same as B.” Impossible. What Ressler listened to in that tightly bound, symmetry-laced catalog of unity was how nothing was the same as anything else. Each living thing defied taxonomy. Everything was its own, unique, irreducible classification.
The Goldbergs were his closest metaphor to the coding problem he gave his life to studying. Exactly similar, with one exception. Bach liked to inscribe his compositions with the triplet SDG, Soli Dei Gloria. To God alone the glory. Even this secularly commissioned soporific possesses the religious wonder at being joyously articulate, alive to extend the pattern. But in Ressler’s hierarchy of transitional rungs, the thing beyond the composer, on the other side of the threshold from articulate breath, was only dumb designless matter, arising from and led only by the shape of experience. The world’s pattern was not assembled for the mind’s comprehension; rather the other way around. And that made the metaphor more miraculous.
To play the piece—to buzz the length of the keyboard for an hour, to barrage, to cross over, careen dangerously—requires only a feat of digital dexterity. Just hit the right notes at the right time, and the thing virtually plays itself. To compose it, Bach insisted, required only that one work as hard as he did. To hear in the organizing software the unique, unspecifiable odds against any metaphor ever arising on this earth out of nothing, out of mere notes, requires something more. It needs the conviction, in a third favorite phrase of the provincial choirmaster, that all things must be possible, sayable, particular, real.
A TERRORIST’S PRIMER
When we returned to MOL from visiting Jimmy, Dr. Ressler set to work on the second-to-the-last experiment he would ever be involved in. He laid out the contour of his plan. “What we’re looking for is a program exactly similar to this operating system.” The work required over the next several days steadied Todd, gave his hands something to eradicate. We all resolved to do anything needed to keep from abandoning Jimmy to the world.
The office was in a shambles since Jimmy’s stroke. The daily processing was getting out, but only just. The day shift ran on automatic, and the least irregularity would have chucked the whole operation into chaos. While Jimmy’s crippling was still novel enough to play on imaginations, the staff to a person worked until the work got done, without compensation. But gradually imagination failed, folks tired of reality, and self-interest set in. Management appointed an “interim” replacement, more eager than competent. And under this blanket of confusion, Todd and Ressler, never very supervised to begin with, had free rein to implant our seed into the on-line processing.
MOL had been suspicious enough of the original irregularity to begin inquiries, inquiries quickly and discreetly canceled in light of their role in Jimmy’s stroke. The insurers had dodged a million-dollar bullet; the chronology of Jimmy’s skipped premium and high-profile disaster was drilled into them. All surreptitious attempts to backdate reinstatement, to sneak Jimmy in the electronic side door, were out of the question.
Frank, getting the gist of Ressler’s plan, wanted to dispose of it in favor of the less subtle, more expeditious, full-frontal approach. “The easiest thing in the world: we buy a bulk tape eraser from the hobby electronics store, change the combinations, barricade ourselves in, take a few Master File packs hostage, and give them forty-eight hours to cover the man’s indefinite hospital stay.”
Dr. Ressler’s eyes measured the extent of Frank’s desperation. For a moment, he seemed about to attack. Instead, he relaxed and lit a cigarette. “Ah! The postwar solution. No, we’re too close to terrorism as it stands. We can do this thing more effectively without violence or property damage.” He shrugged, having said everything needed about the superiority of legitimate retaliation. And Todd acquiesced.
Combining the words supplied by Jimmy’s horrifying dictation with their own batch of gradually acquired contraband knowledge, Dr. Ressler and his graduate assistant went to work on a last recombination. They raided the program listings room and before the new manager could reinstate punch-lock security, they copied all the sections of the system software they needed, stashing the copies each night in the bottom of stockroom supply boxes.
For all they had taught themselves about how the system worked, how to make it jump through hoops, they now had to figure out why it did what it did, to trace its internal logic at machine level. For four nights running, program listings littering the computer room, they dissected the routines and procedures. They raced the clock. Jimmy’s mother had seen a lawyer, who had convinced the increasingly nervous hospital to restrain itself and keep the man stabilized under care while his mother looked into every conceivable financial strategy for meeting the unmeetable bill. We had no idea of how much time we had for the delicate surgery we meant to pull off.
I was there every night. I hunched over the listings alongside them, threw in my guesses as to what fit where, ran back and forth to the massive, meter-long documentation manual. They accepted my help, but when they talked, they clearly talked to each other. They were men, in the end, and had begun, in challenge, to discover just what the other might be capable of. When their eyes locked on a piece of particularly tangled code, I could sense that they threw themselves into the untangling not just for Jimmy but to earn and keep the love of the other.
In addition to helping speed things up, I wanted to leave my fingerprints in the affair, to stand implicated alongside them. Dr. Ressler allowed me that chance, giving me a list of two dozen credit unions and financial institutions, all clients of MOL. I was to check Who Owns Whom, and establish which if any had parent-child connections to the insurance company in question. He wanted to make his bullet as precise, discriminating, and manageable as possible. “Oh,” he added, as I left to do the assignment. “We’ll also need your entire index card collection from the last five years.” I laughed.
The financial audit was trivial but surprising. A few hours of legwork in the stacks confirmed the classic postindustrial paranoiac’s fantasy: four of the two dozen names on the list belonged to the same tier of the same sprawling hierarchy of ownership as our insurance company target. “I thought we might snag a couple,” Dr. Ressler said mildly, when I gave him the results that evening. “Contracts and kickbacks tying together one big happy family.”
“I personally think the Trilateral Commission is behind us all,” Todd said, not lifting his head from the listing where he traced calling routines with colored pencils.
Dr. Ressler chuckled. “Maybe. The world certainly is more connected than anyone supposes. Perhaps in another few years, we’ll all be owned by one little old lady in Kansas City.” He thanked me for the work. Looking over the list of linked businesses, he grew apprehensive. “Can you get names? Addresses?”
“Child’s play,” I assured him. What could be simpler?
“And the quote cards? You
r collection of ‘Today in History’?”
“You really want those? I thought you were joking.”
“Not at all. They’re instrumental.”
I brought in my massive card box the following evening, years of trivia typed up on three-by-fives. He sat down with me and in fifteen minutes taught me the criterion by which I could divide the stack into two piles, Yes and No. In the samples we sorted together, one by Swift caught his eye. Dr. Ressler instantly taped it to the front of the CPU. It inspired him throughout the most difficult parts of subsequent decoding:
I have heard of a man who had a mind to sell his house, and therefore carried a piece of brick in his pocket, which he shewed as a pattern to encourage purchasers.
After they had deciphered the system logic, Dr. Ressler duplicated the relevant programs and data files. Then came the task of building the mutation, the exactly similar, only different system. Ressler carefully selected locations where they might place the needed patches—electronic detours and amendments. The point was to make their baby look, feel, and behave exactly the same as the template, the original operating system. But be the serpent underneath.
It seemed to take weeks. Every night I arrived expecting to hear that Jimmy had been turned out, that the hospital was suing his mother for immediate payment, or that our project to avert that scenario had been uncovered. In reality, the insertion of program patches went quickly, and the bulk of the replacement code actually got written in the few days between the founding of the Library of Congress on April 24 and the combined Lusitania sinking/Nazi surrender on May 7–8.
Live testing of the modifications—bringing them on-line on scores of remote terminals—was the most difficult and dangerous part. An insignificantly small alteration, whose logic is impeccable in isolation, can have unforeseen consequences that multiply out of control when dropped in the middle of a complex system. It came down either to testing a number of changes in one batch, which increased the chance of untraceable bugs, or to tracing the effects of single differences, which took far more time and showed little about the combined behavior. And each on-line test increased the odds of our being discovered.
The Gold Bug Variations Page 71
