You have cause to trust my truths less than my lies, but believe me. Your love has become, despite my best self-interest, as necessary, as desperate, as the little window of time that we’ve had. I seem to have reached a pitch of knowledge with you that I will never know again. But I’ll never be without it entirely, now. I see you teaching our little girls to sing rounds. I watch us selecting chemistry sets for them for birthdays, together, carefully. Oh God. It will break my heart to go on. I’ll never get through this. You’ve let me see what it might have been like to have a real home.
I am leaving to be with a man who, during the course of my hysterical year, looked the other way. Nothing, nothing in it for him. He knew what I was going through—my refusing the proof of sterility. He let me sneak, granted me the dignity of pretending not to know, and when pretense became impossible, arranged to leave. And still, he booked a place for me, should I want to leave with him. I’m leaving because I’d like for once to follow something other than the calculus of personal gain. I’m not trying to be worthy of him or to offer myself to sacrifice. You see, for whatever the sloppy term means, I love Herbert. I loved him for years before I fell for you. His is the only love I can carry through without invalidating the whole shooting match.
I’ve made some noises about being taken on at the university twenty miles from where we’re heading. It won’t be much, but perhaps Herbert will agree to follow me for the next move. We move a lot in this country, don’t we? So know I will still have our work, in some form at least, to compensate me for all I have lost in you. I will read about you in the lit, and the children Herbert and I adopt may well yet read about you in the texts. Stuart, I hope it. I know it. But you must agree that that can be all the contact we can allow.
It seems you’re going to force me to get all the way through this. But I will not leave without asking what I came here to ask. Friend, love me. Marry me, in some other, hypothetical life? Barring that (and I understand perfectly if you refuse), think of me sometimes, and of the time we had. It was a time. How much will still happen to you! Tell the woman you end up loving all about me. Never let her live a day for granted. And prove to the gold bug that it is ingenious enough to crack itself. You have cause, so have we all, for joy.
He flips the page, as if everything she has written might still be canceled out by one more amendment. But she has written nothing more except “Sorry to have spoiled a beautiful notebook.” The record has run out while he read. It was in the high twenties when he entered. If she’d put it on from the beginning, as fortification for her act of mercy killing, he must have just missed her. She is still in town, at the building perhaps, cleaning out her desk. He could intercept her, pretend not to have seen the note. Incite that change of mind she seems to half hope for in every paragraph. Or he could help her, just this once, to locate the sequence for love.
He stares blankly at the stacks of journals for several inaudible variations before he sees something else there. Another, out-of-place publication: a goodbye gift, a chaste kiss between yearning cousins, the pocket edition of A Field Guide to Flowering Plants. He searches the front pages for an inscription. She has indeed left a message there, the only possible one. In her irreproducible script she has written, “Flowers have names.” But neither book nor letter—nor any communication in his possession—bears Jeanette’s signature.
He flips through the book. It opens, at random, or perhaps to where she has creased the spine, to a picture of a flower—delicate, blue-purple petals piled up along a thinning stalk. He remembers having seen it before, in another, hypothetical life. The only clue to her whereabouts, her one return address. The caption gives both scientific and popular names. “Polemonium van-bruntiae. Jacob’s Ladder.”
XXVIII
THE PLACEBO EFFECT
Everything she writes is borne out. Ulrich circulates a note the next day, announcing Dr. Koss’s departure just before term’s end. With admirable dexterity, the head of the all but annulled Cyfer manages to praise the woman’s contribution to the team without once giving the reason for her leaving or mentioning her destination. For once, Ressler is left with more knowledge than information. The chief gives the note a day or two to sink in, then calls an emergency meeting. Ressler is the last to arrive. The other three are waiting for him.
“Right to it, then,” Ulrich begins with more force than conviction. “Is there any point in holding this thing together?”
Ressler looks at his boss, understands. The practice of science is less about sudden shifts of insight or repetitive hours of irreproachable lab practice than it is about funding. Always a subtle parasitism on patronage. Each year’s grants deadline hastens the day when the question of whether a piece of work gets done will rest exclusively with the impartial peer review.
Ulrich’s poll is clear: have we still a chance to go up against the massive labs, Big Biology? Or is this curse of defection fatal? Woytowich keeps his counsel; he’s ready to return to teaching, rating TV—the life of the embittered divorcer. The continuance of the project is to him a matter of immense indifference. Ressler is also tacit, ready to be dismissed. It takes Botkin’s eloquent intercession on his part to recall Stuart to unfinished business. She gives the group a rundown on the state of the cell-free system, including an abstract of the conceptual breakthrough she and Ressler hashed out just days before, at the precise instant when Jeanette sat in the barracks writing her Abschied.
She does a better job presenting than Ressler could have. At last, when it is too late, Ulrich’s eyes widen. He has been sitting on a resource beyond anything in the equipment catalogs. This generating idea, the means into the composition, puts them as close to the heart of the problem as anyone. “We have three vacant salary lines, and we can get more. I can book over eighty percent of the remaining supplies budget. We can get you both full release time, as far as the department is concerned. Just tell me what you need.”
Ressler says: “I need a week to think.”
He goes home and sits for days, projecting himself into the ideal scenario: he and Botkin set to work on the synthetic mapping, in charge of a small army of eager assistants. They scoop the world. They lay out the first, rudimentary lexicon of life’s language. They complete the table. They lay the capstone of the first material model of inheritance. Then he imagines himself the recipient, six months from now, through the mail, in an envelope with smudged return address, of one of those black-and-white hospital shots. A small, hairless, closed-eye cross between a planarian and Khrushchev, ID tag illegible. Like the words of organic nature hidden in the lookup table, this infant’s features grow more inscrutable upon closer identification. It has no one’s features, neither father nor mother. Like that complete, mechanical explanation, this complete, clean account of Jeanette’s departure explains nothing.
His thoughts during this brief sabbatical return to one image: that man, ready to disappear without issue, whether or not his choice of companion in this life chooses to accompany him in exile. Is even Herbert’s gesture part of the “pollen-trick”?
Then, into his third week of passive disengagement, Ressler wakes to a morning blazing in beautiful light. He showers, puts on clothes stiff with laundry soap, discovers: I am ravenous. He walks a brisk six blocks to the pancake house, ordering the full rancher’s, trucker’s, bricklayer’s, red-blood, high-starch, artery-clogging special, and adores every mouthful. The waitress flirts shyly with him over the check. He tells her she is lovely, then backs away, smiling affectionately, helpless in human contact.
He walks to the Biology Building, taking the longest detour that still leaves him inside the twin cities’ jurisdiction. He hears, for the first time since the days of the Home Nature Museum, how different the repeated calls of a single bird are. Are these tiny perturbations in the melody random, or do they mean something? He will make a study of this. The sound of automobile tires slopping the pavement suggests a review of physics, the equations for friction. He is struck by the shape of three ide
ntical poplars: might some mathematical expression guide the branching of trees?
By the time he gets to campus, it’s clear, as clear as anything will ever be in the rough translation allotted him. The self-serving, pointless duplication of giant molecules created him in its own image, set him down here with only one order: Do science. Postulate. Put together a working model. Yet the hunt for the single, substantiating thread running through all creation is just a start. It’s time for science to acknowledge the heft, bruise, and hopeless muddle of the world’s irreducible particulars. This field, this face, this day are not just the result of tweaking the variables, twisting the standard categories. Every alternative on the standing pattern is distinct, anomalous, a new thing requiring a separate take on what is and might yet be. And for that, theories must diverge and propagate as fast as the wonder of their subject matter.
He reaches Botkin’s office, enters without knocking. He surprises her in scowling over a popular magazine with a weekly circulation greater than the population of Austria in the year of her birth. Her grin of expectation at seeing him collapses into a demure, understanding “Oh.” He walks to her desk where she writes, removes the magazine. He takes her hand in his, stroking and examining it at the same time. Why should skin lose its elasticity with age? If he were to pinch hers, it would stay bunched like stiffest muslin. He holds her hand between his for a moment, and says, “I wish I’d taken more meals with you when I had the chance.”
She laughs sharply. “I wish I’d gotten more into you per meal.” He leans over her desk and kisses her still forehead. He glances over her desk, her dark, filled bookshelves: this room, the place of so many discoveries, bathed in the light of midday, affords him the closest thing to religious reconciliation that empiric sensibility allows.
Age does not deprive her of the responsibility of having to play the group’s advocate. “But what of your work?” she says. “It can’t be left undone.”
“Give it a year or two,” he answers, calling her bluff. The process of directed chance is inexorable. “Half a dozen people will hit on it all at once.”
“It’s always the numbers game with your generation. Have you ever considered taking up gambling?”
Ressler laughs; it was her generation that saddled them all with perpetual probability. “I wouldn’t know a blackjack if one hit me over the head.”
“Boychick. You can take this project anywhere, you know. Dr. Ulrich, myself: we can get you taken on anyplace you like. Cambridge. Cold Spring Harbor. The Institute. A real lab. Wherever is best equipped. Finish what you’ve started. Say the word. I will write letters, call in favors. You can name terms.”
He shakes his head: she, of all people, knows the nature of the work he must finish. “I don’t think another laboratory would be appropriate just now.” He listens to what he has just said, and adds, “Or needed, really.”
“You would make an astonishing teacher, given time.”
Teaching: yes, that might almost be close. But teaching is the most perilously slow way man has yet devised for conveying a message. “The student world won’t miss me.”
“But what about you?” Her eyes are a peculiar, fluid mixture of maternal distress and deep, secret satisfaction that this, her star pupil, has selected to set off into the dark. For abiding is nowhere. “You will be all right?”
“Without the prizes, you mean?”
“Yes. Without your Prize.”
He wonders how it would feel to be able to sit back, late in the afternoon, and bask in genuine contribution. “I’ll be fine.” Even as he speaks this, a door opens in front of him and he gets his first foretaste of just how long, how uncertain an existence in pursuit of an unverifiable idea must be. That slow, tooling nucleotide freight, that packet boat threading itself through his ribosomes, when named out loud, carries nothing more than a letter to Jeanette, to the Blakes, to Botkin, to the rest of his colleagues living and dead. Nothing more than a letter to the world, all along. But he must post it alone.
She feels him waver, and not for the last time. But it is the last time she’ll be around to be of any help. “Mönchlein, Mönchlein. Du gehst einen schweren Gang. Can I help you in any way? Can I do anything?” she asks, regressing to an accent so impenetrable he has to infer her words from her face.
“Yes,” he says. “Yes you can.” He slides over to the dark leather Viennese couch and lies down one last time. He slips his hands behind his head, crosses his legs at the ankles. Now. How does one get started in this enigmatic trade? “You can play me something.”
THE LOOKUP TABLE
I brought Dr. Ressler the names and addresses he asked me to find. He took them with a last, chivalrous compliment of my reference skills and entered them grimly into the hit routine that now hovered invisibly over the MOL data bases the way Bles’s fire quietly waits to run loose through imaginary Flanders. “I’ve made you an accessory,” he said, half to me, half to the console where he typed.
“No, I did.” From the day I had signed on. I had also taken the initiative to retrieve a different set of addresses from the archives, and when Dr. Ressler reached a pause in his work, I produced my scrap of hurriedly copied chart
The genetic code for mRNA as determined in vitro, considered universal across all living creation. “That’s the ticket,” he said, his eyes on the paper, studying it for some revealing nuance that he and everyone else had so far overlooked. Without meaning to, I’d reduced him to embarrassment. He continued at that vanishing decibel. “Doesn’t look like much, does it?” I told him I’d spent half an hour in the library learning how to read the thing before figuring out that it was a simple substitution in three variables. Two years would pass before I had even a rough, reflected image of what the table described.
“No question. It’s an interesting time to be alive,” Ressler said, tapping the sheet of paper as his documentary proof. “We have attained ancient wishes, the plan to dig all the way down, to the bottom, like little children in the backyard shooting for China. In twenty years, we’ve put together a comprehensive, physical explanation of life. Only, at every way station on the way down, the destination slips one landing deeper. Heredity is not only chromosomes. Then, not only genes, not only nucleotides. My generation found it was not only chemistry, not only physics. Seems life might not be only anything.” He traced three rays with his fingers, verifying that UCG coded for serine. “No question. An intellectual achievement: those of us understandably prejudiced toward seeing life from chicken level, realizing that chickens are just the egg’s way of perpetuating the egg.”
Todd joined us in the control room, dusting his hands in a parody of manual labor well done. He came from the computer room, where he had been erasing the packs containing the old versions of the programs and data files. We had crossed the backout point. The only existing copies of the disks containing the complete financial histories of tens of thousands of people now carried the changes that Dr. Ressler and Todd had engineered into them.
Todd and I had spoken little in the handful of days since my return. The catalyst that brought me back was too pressing, Jimmy’s hospitalization too real for us to waste time on private reconciliation. He offered no apologies, tried out no resolutions. We were both there to assist Dr. Ressler in getting Jimmy back under coverage. There was nothing to explain, to remedy. One night, seeing Jimmy for the first time since the stroke, returning to the offices to try to lose himself in an intransigent bit of machine code, Todd had weakened. “Would it be impossible for me to come home with you? One Day Only?”
I felt myself waver at his exhausted attempt at humor. “I don’t think that would be a good idea.”
“You do know that the lovely Ms. Martens and I are—”
“It’s no business of mine.” I did not want any news on the matter. Were what? Married? Divorced? History? It no longer concerned me. Annie too had tried to mumble something about intentions and ignorances and getting past misunderstandings. After the second blanket forgi
veness I gave her, she stopped trying to approach me about anything but technical matters. In fact, none of us had much occasion to talk about anything except the specifics of our data terrorism. For the first time since I started visiting, actions ran ahead of words.
But that evening, as Dr. Ressler inserted the executive address list into place and Todd joined us in the control room, dusting his hands after putting the original, unedited disk packs to sleep, we were at last forced to sit down with each other as we used to, thrown back on the old, limited compensation of talk. Todd took my scribbled sheet of hieroglyphs from Dr. Ressler. As he looked it over, trying to catch up with the conversation, the professor slipped in his last bit of pedagogy for his only graduating class. “The spookiest thing about the code is its contingency. Some order in it, the symmetries of significance. But matter very well might have missed hitting upon even this configuration, no matter how large the reservoir of time it had to move around in. It might never have arrived at even this bootstrap translation had initial conditions been even a hundredth of a percent different. Or even exactly the same,” he said, with a wicked glance at me, setting in motion the chain of idea-links that would eventually make me lose a year to the study of variation.
“But we got the sucker now,” Todd said, facetious emphasis on the plural pronoun; nothing could be further from his field of expertise than this cryptic chart.
“Yes, we have it now,” Ressler said, interpreting the phrase a little differently. “Perhaps other codes arose at the same moment, but this is the one that won out. It will never happen again; too much inertia now. Places we can’t get to from here. Unlike what they teach in schools, the master builder can only proceed by patching onto existing patches.”
The Gold Bug Variations Page 73
