Addictive, naked hunger to reconstitute the reaclass="underline" the freshly scrubbed Ph.D.'s compulsion to locate the lookup table was, by another name, a longing to unfrock things as they are. Life that refused to push all the way down to the evidence was just a costume party. Only by demonstrating beyond doubt how unaided atoms accounted for craving, variety, the accident of being alive could Ressler see what compensation the truth of his own contingency might hold.
He and I both — desperate to disassemble the table's mechanism, to show that the cell's fundamental engines create living purpose and not the other way around. To demonstrate that blind atomic bumping can lead to anything, even sight. Long before love coiled him he felt desire, a catalyst posted from the beginning of the genetic record, bringing the parts of his substrate inexorably together. However differently his life might have unfolded, he could not have long survived the need to refuse surfaces, to come closer than flush. In the sum of their catalyzed reactions, his choir of molecular autonoma sang, Bloody your hands. Get past it. What would it mean to leave this place, really leave it? That is his coding problem. The message I eavesdrop on, still vibrating on the wires.
The molecular engines — still not all named by the week he died — begin to say who he was at fifty, the work he had yet to do back up the steps of the living hierarchy, here at organism level. His traits, my own, Todd's, lie tangled in the shape of proteins. But the triumph of biological reductionism, the grounding of living things on molecular necessity, the establishment of chance as the mainspring of change, each successive tier rising seamlessly from the previous, still leaves me something inexplicable at the top: after curiosity, impulse, restlessness — his ability to give it all up. My friend possessed deep in the coils of his cell an urge to unite the natural world in one internally consistent model. He hid the compulsion for years. But our showdown, forced on us, revived for a moment his attempt to put hands through the pane, a need always stronger than its decoding. Years after he thought he'd come home from the commute for good he returned to the thick of the search. His last days — and every day I knew him was one of his last — shone with all the surprise of the cybernetic enzyme. After a quarter century he was back, pitting himself against the lookup table. And this time, something more: submitting to it a uniquely landscaped command.
I Have Become a Stranger to the World
In our walking days, I talked to more perfect strangers than I ever had before or since. Todd was intent on single-handedly reviving the custom of greeting people on the street. In the city, this was tantamount to taking one's own life. But we always got away with it, and I was amazed at how many people greeted back as if old friends. We had long talks about election rigging with news vendors, exchanges over dog disobedience with retirees, leisurely debates about Western history with men in three-piece suits who must have had more important places to be. Once, we were riding the local next to a man whom Todd induced into telling us all about his combat experience in Asia. Giving us the blow-by-blow of his tour of duty, the vet asked Todd suspiciously, "What do you do?" When Franker lied, "Art history," the man let out his breath. "Good. Can't hurt me with that." Todd talked to anyone, on any excuse. Cabbies, police, Englishless immigrants, bank officials, drunks — an endless dialogue with people I'd never have spoken to alone.
I was now free to see Franklin every hour I wasn't working. He came by the library, late afternoons before he started his shift. These were my least productive hours of the day; had I not had an excellent track record, I would have been reprimanded. Sometimes, to Save my job and to keep him from putting his hands down my shirt where I sat at the Reference Desk, I would send him into the shelves with questions. I remember giving him "Who was Leslie Lynch King, Jr.?" Frank came back after an hour and a half, successfully identifying him as the thirty-eighth president of the U.S. "The Public," he shook his head angrily, "is a sadist."
We met everywhere, and soon had touched one another in as many places. The MOL office was still our haunt of choice. Following the disastrous system crash that cost both men a sleepless week, the machines returned to normal. Outside of island visits by Uncle Jimmy, Annie Martens, and the janitors, we reined in our shamelessness only for Dr. Ressler.
However genuinely the professor enjoyed our round tables— free-wheeling wine-and-cheese talk spiraling to absorb the spread of international terrorism, the limits to sports record-breaking, and the nuances of surviving a certain late-night cashier at the corner convenience store — he seemed as genuinely relieved when conversation ended. More often than not, he wound up, saying, "You two must excuse me. I have to supervise the workings of the North American financial network." And he would return to the gigabytes, leaving Franker and me alone to escalating experiment.
We pressed against each other, each day more blatantly, feeling the short fuse evaporate, postponing, restraining the way a bud shimmies under time lapse before falling into flower. Following an evening's wrestle, he would kiss me goodbye, dipping into my dress, saying he needed to fix my surface in his memory until he could see me again. We played deeply and dangerously. I found a meridian on his shoulders, the mere press of which made his muscles collapse and his eyes roll up. He came by but never stayed over; we were two passengers in a long-haul airport, consulting the array of world capital clocks, each still on his native time zone. My night of romance was his midday.
One night during lunch break he came to my room carrying a package he'd acquired downstairs just before my landlord's antique shop closed. I unwrapped the box to find an off-white eighty-year-old linen blouse that must have set him back a month. Along its dorsal edge ran cloth-covered hemisphere buttons the size of lady-bugs, hundreds of them. The high choker owed its origins to Alexandra's tracheotomy. It rippled with multiple traceries, ruffles under ruffles that, as they could not actually be seen once the blouse was on, could only have been, like those exceptionally skilled adventures in heavy counterpoint, for the express benefit of those privileged to hold the score in front of them.
"Try it on," he commanded. I hesitated, but just for pacing. I went to the bedroom, stood in my closet, the mirrored door left conspicuously open, and stripped to my underclothes. Even these I changed for the antique slips and skirts I had collected piece by piece, on account with my landlord. In a few minutes, I was clothed in a soft, lost century. But the effect was not yet done. I sat down at my vanity (another piece rescued from downstairs), pulled my hair up in a storybook pile, and made up lightly, with an eye toward the period. It took some time and extraordinary, wavering patience on both our parts.
When I stood and walked toward him, I knew we were done for. He'd watched the entire process, standing in the doorway, waiting to undo it. The clothes I had attended to so carefully shed themselves everywhere. Some stayed on, displaced and uncaring. Everything began to move slowly, underwater. I felt him, felt myself all over, both far away. Minutely mammalian, I conformed to fill every space between myself and this shape pressing against me. I could see the peach inside of his legs and sweated to match his breath condensing against the back of my neck. Strenuously, straining, but expansively, slowly, we worked, astonished to be recovering pneumatics from a manual we were born knowing. And something else to our rocking: an attempt to recall a word on the tips of our tongue. The word was nihil. The word was nearly. I felt his skin stretching, conductant, as smooth, hazel, and aromatic as the taste of food I craved for years but could never identify. My skin.
I kept waiting for my body to pitch me over those patent falls, the one I'd discovered at thirteen but which, by thirty, I still hadn't adjusted to. Instead, something unprecedented: as I realized I was invading, being invaded by, this man, that we'd surrendered to the thing we had been circling nervously for months, I was doused by first serum-surge; rather than sharpen to a cutting point, it spread, a thick, coffeed narcotic, into parts of my body I never knew existed. It vacillated, then intensified toward white, wider than I thought possible, for bottomless seconds before it faded into capillaries. I could not tell if I'd gone over or not. Stupid semantic. I was ionized.