Cavalry-like, Dr. Ressler arrived, carrying a bag of zucchini from his rooftop garden, a plot that must have had more soil than Battery Park. "I'm glad you're still here, James," he said, dividing the crop three ways. All anxiety ceased until he finished doling out his gifts. "Now. I can tell something's up. And today," he smiled at me as if I knew the reason, "I'm prepared to solve all problems."
Jimmy laid out the crisis, and Dr. Ressler's brows narrowed over the relevant documents. He did not look at Franklin, but the refusal to mete out the punishing glance was itself crushing. He studied the forms for hidden explanation. Jimmy said he'd called around, and all the relevant executives had apologized but assured him that his not intending to skip a payment did not change the fact.
"When will they reinstate you?" Ressler asked.
"The period after the period when I first pay again. Barring further electronic bolts from the blue, I should be back on coverage within eight weeks."
"Well, that's easy, then," Todd joked. "For two months, just look both ways before you cross the street."
Jimmy managed an anemic grin. Dr. Ressler asked, "James, may I hang on to these?"
"It's hopeless. I've talked to everyone. All I can do is pay up and wait. I wouldn't waste any more breath on it."
"I'd just like to think about this before notching up another round for the corporations." More than passing inconvenience: the individual in a mismatched battle. His asking for another look before conceding inevitable defeat reminded me that the actual quote, eternally misused, was "But for the grace of God there goes John Bradford" A name immortal in its oblivion, four hundred years ago swapped out for the generic I.
Jimmy grumbled his usual threat to enter chicken farming the next time the opportunity arose. The moment the man left, Todd began protesting. "I can't believe it. I don't know what I did. I must have tripped the preemie flag on the way out of the record." Frank was pitiful, scrambling to hide his ineptitude from his hero.
"Let me stake a hypothesis. You went in and requested a flat-fee bonus. Am I right?" Todd nodded. "You added your figure to his gross and put the total into the salary field."
Todd slapped his palm on his scalp. "Jesus. The program processed the whole check as a bonus."
"From which, of course, no premium is deducted."
"Christ. Who wrote that thing? What a kludge. Shouldn't it have known that the man can't get a bonus without a salary check in the same period?"
"Don't blame the code. I don't think the authors anticipated second-shift operators doing surgical intervention on their data structures."
Todd threw his hands up. "Well. Now we all know better."
Ressler took Jimmy's papers and sat at the console. Todd sat next to him at the keyboard. The two of them retraced Todd's escapade, which seemed more capricious with each keystroke. I tried to follow as they undertook flood control. I'd never noticed before how much Frank talked with his hands. He rubbed an eraser all over the screen, gesticulated at the keys, drew logic flows into his sketchpad, and sculpted in the air the solution he thought they might yet go after. Ressler sat motionless, a few words doing the work.
But there was little even he could do. The letter had been sent, the coverage canceled. They could not now uncancel the cancellation. Revealing all — the corrective measure of first choice — was out of the question. Todd would lose his job, perhaps be slapped with criminal charges, and Dr. Ressler would fall under suspicion. They could undo the event electronically, but the doctoring involved too many systems: their own, the firm that handled the check, the insurance company where the policy resided. The fix might muck up something else. "Too many humans tipped off already," Todd added. "Can't jerry-rig humans, unfortunately."
"Not yet," Ressler granted.
A few weeks after moving into my place, Franklin began to seep out again. He moved his treasured stereo into my room, a breakthrough in intimacy, and he even brought the violets, blues, and greens from his massive spectrum-arranged record collection. Every few days saw a trickle of disks, gradually edging into the higher wavelengths. He himself was there as often as ever. We continued to read together, to listen, to play, to share meals.
Sex remained dangerous, a revelation about how far I might go, how far I needed to keep going once brought out. I learned no end of things about myself. Franklin could be aggressive, slow, mercurial. He could stalk like a thief looting a house. He could repeat, wistfully after we spent ourselves, the Puritans' standard caption for a needlework primer's A: "In Adam's Fall, We Sinned All." He could lie still under the covers and tell, after a too-savage unloading, "Heard the one about the hellfire preacher berating his congregation? 'Is an hour of pleasure worth an eternity of regret?' Voice from the back of the church calls out, 'How do you make it last an hour?'"
We began to get out again, as the city again warmed. We took a trip up to the Bronx Zoo. Franklin was as excited as a child, and babbled like one. "Look! Kangaroos! Do you know that the mother can slow or speed up gestation, depending on food supply?"
"The name means 'I don't know,'" I contributed. Standard trivia fare. "Aboriginal answer to white hunter's question. 'What do you call those fur-bags with the giant hind legs?' 'Haven't the faintest idea what you're talking about, hombre.'"
"She licks down this passage in her fur, the way to the pouch, see? So that her newborn, a wriggly blob like a shelless snail, can slog out the journey__"
"Have you actually seen this happen?" I asked suspiciously.
"Do endless wildlife shows on public television count?" Oh, he was up that day; the cages were not cages, but regional sanctuary from unstoppable habitat destruction. I couldn't help but think of the dismal visit to Central Park Tuckwell and I had made eight months before. Separate lifetimes.
He was always ready for the impulse activity, for any jaunt at any hour, so long as it did not conflict with MOL, about which he grew unusually conscientious. Obscure museums, galleries, secret spaghetti dives, performing-arts warehouses, a walking tour of the colonial remnants of the city. For the first time since leaving Indiana, 1 went up against the variety of New York. Yet something in the way he moved feet first through the place tipped me off that he was just visiting.
I never expected I would have him all there, every time he stayed over or we went out together. But his eternal pacing__
He had a way of obsessively measuring out a room three times a minute, even when sitting still. I thought the restlessness came from his being twenty-six, at the height of his powers, with nothing of consequence to do. I put myself entirely at his disposal as research assistant for the dissertation. "I can find anything," 1 swore to him. "Facts are my life." I couldn't have made a worse suggestion, even in jest. It made him pace in even tighter circles. He never dropped the boyish charm, the Midwestern politeness. He made it a point to be home more predictably, and even called on a couple occasions to tell me he would miss a standing meal. But his silence grew denser even as he pruned it.
When he was gone, I thought he might be dead, distracted, religiously converted, injured, amnesiac, overcome by indifference. Each scenario was a toxin, whose cold advanced up my arms and legs. Yet I would not put on the saving tourniquet, take the necessary measures. Leaden suspicion was scarily arousing. I discovered it only slowly. My fear for him when he was away became one of those secret fetishes discovered late in life — a region on my body that when struck by that taboo person reduced me to helpless perversity I never suspected lay in me.