But can chance alone create such structures? Oh, yes. I have become abandoned to the idea. Chance is necessity by another name, thrown over the complexity barrier. The building blocks for self-replicating molecules can emerge from a milky suspension of ammonia, methane, water, and free hydrogen treated with an electrical spark. All the other steps from polypeptide to vanished near-Nobelists can be derived.
Solution can take shape — slowly, stupidly, agonizingly inefficiently — on trial and error alone. Error takes care of itself, in the hardwired universe's unforgiving compulsion to extinguish its dead ends. The triaclass="underline" that much emerges from quantum perturbation — random mutation that infests the duplicating life molecule with variation. Molecular rules are not fixed, but statistical. That mother lode of modern anxiety — indeterminacy — lifts the whole dance off the ground and holds out the promise of sending it anywhere there might be to go.
Who made me? My answer, all but demonstrated, ten days past New Year's, 1986, has none of the crisp, winter, nighttime traveler's comfort offered by the old Baltimore Catechism. The science I study doesn't even frame the question the same way. Each system answers only the question it asks. The magic, memorized chants of my girlhood dealt in revealed things — truths that could be got at only by leap, flash, obedience, and rejection of human comprehension. They will never be reconciled with a skepticism based on repeatable test.
Yet in both, the name is not the thing. The one scientist I really knew came within a hair shirt's breadth of being a divine. Ressler was a Franciscan minus the cassock. He of anyone I've ever met was free from use's hammerlock, the blundering functionalism that leaves us blind to the miracle of our presence here. I can't begin to describe his speech, his actions, his days — they were so empty, selfless, contemplative. For a brief moment, he achieved a synthesis between scientist's certainty in underlying particulars and the cleric's awe at the unmappable whole.
Who made him? Chance made him. But that wasn't the crucial issue. The second question in the catechism — why? — was, to Dr. Ressler, more important. In his short run at science, he had learned the trick of seeing every living creature as elaborate baggage for massive, miraculous, internal goings-on. Every itch, every craving, every store run, every spoken word arose in a switchboard of enzyme messages splaying out in an overflowing veil that made the sum of all water droplets tumbling over Niagara seem a simple, sophomore differential equation.
The knowledge left him mute, punctual, meticulous, polite, weakly good-humored, pained by human contact, a nibbler on food yet quietly omnivorous, good with words but only when pressed into them. Mostly, he took things in: listened. For some reason, a full understanding of enzymes left him still able to love me, to love Todd. Like all good Franciscans, he had this thing about affection for fellow creatures of chance's kingdom.
The answer my Catholic training years ago had me memorize, if I carry through the blasphemous substitution, turns out to be exactly the answer Dr. Ressler's work on the coding problem left him: Why did chance make him? To know, love, and serve it in this life. And be happy with it in the next. Only: Dr. Ressler knew— as now I do — that our chemicals, in the next life, will be stripped of their self-coding repertoire. There'll be no chance to be happy with chance. It won't be in the lexicon. No lexicon. Chance will resume its maiden name. I have only this afternoon, this moment, to decide whether to go on writing. Perhaps it's letter-answering time after all. I pull out blank sheet number five, take a sip of suspect water, feel the waiting keys under my fingers, study the sunny January outside. I feel unaccountably, blessedly free.
XIX
Winter Storm Waltzes
sea_change(odeigh,todd,ressler) if reawakened(ressler) or
in_love(todd,odeigh) and not(scared(Anyone)) and
journey (Anywhere).
Ressler knew we were sleeping together. Every indication suggested he approved. He toted in a sack full of squash and tomatoes. "For you." Plural you, in ambiguous English.
"They're beautiful," I thanked him. Todd seconded. "Where did you find such nice ones this time of year?"
"My cold storage. I grew them."
"In Manhattan?" we both asked, overlapping.
"I happen to live on the sunny side of the World Trade. Over several years, I've hauled three tons of soil up to my roof. My landlord puts up with it; she likes the beans. Organic gardening is the perfect supplement to a night position." These were the first of a steady harvest — jar, juice, fresh — that kept us fed all winter.
He was lighter than I'd ever seen him. One day, a blue Icelandic sweater in place of the impeccable fifties suit and tie. He talked longer, exchanged brighter banter — often off-colored, anthropological double entendres about how it was up to us young to provide the heat needed to get the race through the winter. It was Ressler's idea to do my computerized birthday card; he had pursued my birthday through the federal electronic statistics.
I hardly dared believe it: our happiness made him happy. A quiet, remarkable last process started up in him. He experimented successfully with a beard. Once when Annie treated us to guitar, he forced us all into descant, benevolently dictating which lines to take. "Do you know 'Smoke Gets in Your Eyes'?" he asked. Annie shook her head, embarrassed for him. "How about 'Soap Gets in Your Ears'?"
He brought in a pack of art postcards and quizzed Todd. He suckered us into outrageous debates: whether Vaughan's "I saw Eternity the other night" might be treatable these days by a few milligrams of something from Hoffman-La Roche. Whether Marx's class warfare might in the future be fought between information-rich and information-poor. He would dismiss Todd early. "Nothing left I can't run through these rough beasts myself. Take this woman to live the life she deserves." He would give me a gentlemanly cheek-brush of the lips, saying, "Your quote for tomorrow is Alain-Fournier," supplying edition and page.
quote_of_day(alain-fournier,edition(Y,page(X1)),"I still say 'our' house though it is ours no longer").
knows(jimmy,news) and curious(jimmy), knows(annie,news) and unchanged(annie).
My new relation to Todd seemed to be public knowledge. Even Uncle Jimmy asked me confidentially, "What's this I hear about you and my junior staff cohabiting?" Todd, delighted, took up the euphemism as buzzword of the hour: "Let's go cohabit the cafeteria." "Care to cohabit a little after I get off tonight?" Jimmy's trusting grin was tinged around the edges with a droop suggesting he would have preferred Todd and me to altar the thing legitimately. Jimmy was from another time. His mother, patiently invalided at the other end of the phone, probably understood the cohabiting world better than he.
Annie too began treating us as a couple. "Look at you two, both in maroon. Cute as two peas in a pie." She told us we ought to wear more maroon; maroon was a largely misunderstood color. Annie's acknowledgment capped it: romance discloses more than it knows. Everyone saw what we were up to but us.
reawakened(ressler) if
Dr. Ressler paced the digital warehouse, slipping deeper into human ways. During machine lulls, over paper cups of wine, he volunteered topics rather than just politely annotating ours. He'd bring us colored bits of the world's specificity: "Listen to this," he said, sporting a shampoo label. " 'Lather, rinse, repeat.' An infinite loop." He made us try the Dial-an-Atheist number, laughing broadly when we discovered it was disconnected. He roped us into working difficult British crosswords where puns, imbeddings, weddings, retrograde inversions, anagrams, counterpoints, and subtle substitutions combined in fluid wordplay that seemed beyond human ingenuity to invent let alone solve.