Thus the Blakes commit themselves, overnight, to hopeless gen-eralism. They depart, Tooney shaking Ressler's hand warmly, Evie kissing him, thanking him for keeping her alive last night. After they leave, Ressler replays the man's mad argument, but can find no hook to snag him. He circles back on Blake's point: the complex can be contained in the simple. Push past the deterring convolutions — too varied to describe — and get to their underpinnings. Grammar must be simpler than the uncatchable wealth of particular sentences. He wants to run over to K-53-A, throw himself around the man's neck. He has never been more in need of his teammate's skills. Never more in need of his neighbor himself— his solid, dispelling humor. But Tooney is gone already. Intractable.
Over the following days, as it becomes clear that Blake really means to depart, Ressler gambles everything. He lays out for Tooney the seminal germ he has stumbled on. The beauty of the green idea sparks Blake's scientific residue. His eyes light up at the walkthrough. He grabs his young colleague's upper arms, lifts him bodily into the air. "You can do it." But the next moment he returns to his new calm, encourages the kid more soberly, and again declines to stay.
Blake doesn't even wait for term's end. He leaves in midweek, departs from Stadium Terrace, forever jumps the tenure track. He asks Ressler to take over his classes; "Mostly a matter of administering finals." They leave him with a dozen pieces of furniture. "Another long-term loan." They give him a forwarding address — Seattle, Eva's mother's. Eva kisses him courageously goodbye, on the lips, wet with hypotheticals. Tooney shakes his shoulders. "After boning up, I might come back to the lab in good faith someday."
When it comes to saying goodbye to the child, Ressler can take it no longer. He may see her again in this life, but never again like this. Process will have gotten her. The pilgrim soul will be lost in adulthood. He tries to say, "Got any poems, for the road?" but cannot get it out. Margaret tugs at his shirt cuff, spins on one heel, and disappears, giggling. He will die without raising a child.
Script
Who knows how long his envelope has been there. I haven't checked the box since Thanksgiving. I'd given up looking, achieved a degree of self-sufficiency. My only bottle-messages lately are from the power company. Checking for mail was once my day's high-water mark. But recently I've taken to clearing out the box only often enough to keep the utilities running. Suddenly this: the message I'd written off. A simple letter wouldn't have been enough. It's a longhand manuscript. I knew instantly it was from him: his runic glyphs. The packet carried the same exotic monarch as his card, pasted all over with stickers pronouncing "Per Luchtpost." Why now, when I'd almost edited him?
I tore open the packet, knowing the weapon was loaded. I was a wreck from the first rambling paragraph. Even now, twice through the text, my organs scrape like tectonic plates. The sprawling poetics are unmistakable Todd. But someone else is in there too, someone I've never met. A dozen minutely, perfectly hand-lettered pages, both sides, and I still can't tell where he is. That landscape: the place he used to map out for me in whispers. But somewhere else too, a globe away. "Why have we had to keep apart this year?" "Not that I can hope to ask you—" Who is this? A male I once knew, stripping at a safe distance?
Plaintive Baedeker gossip, swapped cathedral stones, death notices. Frank on the ropes. Writer's block, foreign language, death of a classmate, the panels themselves after years of reproductions: tempera homesickness for the world. I make myself immune to his contents. But two paragraphs in and I hear him confessing something I never realized. He'd been on the ropes from the moment I met him. Easy, sociable, pelted with phone calls from friends who couldn't imagine why he gave them the slip, locked up on the night shift, satisfied with the company of a failed scientist and a failing librarian. This luchtpost packet confesses why he wanted Ressler's etiology, the dossier on that disease. A year's rupture; anonymity in Europe, oblique petition for help, lost in moratorium. Out of character at last: please write me back.
Something's out of joint. The cheery postcard — Flemish scene ported from Boston back to Flanders — is dated July 6, five months before this letter. He writes in the card that he's well along in Dutch. But the letter reports novice's difficulties, unlikely for someone of Todd's polyglot perversity. After a half a year, he still cannot mention Ressler's death, or give the man the dignity of past tense. Alone, unchecked, unseconded, writing me, dragging me through all his sweet, unreliable, poorly timed declarations of maybe love. God free me from this man.
Todd had a way of darting his eyes around as if the earth were the last thing he expected to see. I have forgotten that astonished tone, forgotten everything about him. He's back, wanted or not. But another sender here too, one I wouldn't know from a Dürer Adam. He is in trouble, needs me to write. As if a letter, even now, might serve as saving bedtime story.
The Question Board
Q: How often do questions appear here that you can't solve?
H.M., 8/11/81
A: More often than we'd like. According to a survey of American libraries, a third of questions to reference departments go unanswered. Ours weighs in a little under the national average, although we have no firm numbers.
J. O'D., 8/11/81
"What you need," Todd whispered into my ear, gazing over my shoulder as I typed, letting his hand loop dangerously over my ribs toward my breast, "is to copy the post office. A Dead Question Department." He lifted my hair and moistened the back of my neck. "Imagine: Question Purgatory. A smoky room full of three-by-fives, each unsolvable."
Putting One's Hands Through the Pane
Unbelievable: 1 can write him back at last. What I've ached to do for months, poring over atlases for clues, rehearsing the wording I'd use when given a place to reach him. Only now, I can't write the first clause. My block is worse than his: I can't even get off a salutation without seizing.
Another two readings and I still can't tell what's wrong. Indifference would feel simpler, would have no shakes. I've never written to him in my life. How can I start now, after everything? How could I begin telling him of my months reading a science I haven't any grounding in, depleting my savings, mourning the death he doesn't mention? I can't begin to concentrate on Dear Franklin until I've extricated myself from Dear Dr. Ressler. All I can do with his letter is add it to the evidence to be sifted. I can write only the same piece I've been working on for months. Why have we stayed apart all this time? Enzymes, friend.
I have only my work to answer him. The content of the coding problem compels me, twenty-five years after the facts. Discovery is a dependence that addiction only imitates. Engineered into my sequence, selected for obvious survival value, is a craving to lift the backdrop, to integrate the evidence, to mimic the tune so closely I can at last get through the notes. To force my hands through, touch the habitat. Assemble it. Ressler's was the desire behind all research: the pull of something simpler and stranger than imagined, lying within arm's length. Curiosity must, like every built-in desire, be written somewhere in the organism it wants to discover. Ressler looked for the fundamental lexicon in primitives. Only the results of the lookup table itself can explain why he was hooked on breaking it, on getting to the name of experimental desire.
Can anything as composite as curiosity be revealed by a set of equivalences, a molecular cipher wheel? Nothing in the chemistry of nucleic acid gives the first hint of the creature enclosing it. The sequence of base pairs in the molecule, their disorderly pattern, provides the edge needed to record a message. But the sequences themselves are not yet vernacular, but a shorthand. An arbitrary string CGAGGACCGACG, without a translator's dictionary, is gibberish. The lookup table supplies that dictionary; without semantic meaning itself, it lends the first suggestion of sense to unreadable data.