Not even the same letter, now that it's been returned. Even if I were to place it unrevised in another envelope, send it out again to his unresearchable new post node, it would not mean what it meant the afternoon I finally managed to put it together. The thing I thought to make him see then is gone. Aggregate chance has changed it — a memorandum lost in transit.
If I had his address (counterfactual) and if I could hit on the right words (hypothetical), I might send him some item from our assembled quote box—"I need to know someone"; "What is the origin of 'to make the catch'?"; "What's this I hear about you two cohabiting?"; "Oops, two bagels" — that might convey, if not the particulars of what I need to say now, at least the sense that if he were in the neighborhood (subjunctive), I'd like to see him. But even our favorite phrases, reprised over our allotted months on different occasions, repeated once more would now go enharmonic, altered, racing home even as they stay in place, changing because all other lines range freely around them.
1 cannot say the same thing twice. The first time through, invention; the second, allusion; a third promotes it to motif, then theme, keepsake, baggage, small consolation. Brought back after years, it evokes a lost twinge never harbored in the original. Perhaps, with everything between us changed beyond recognition, one more reprise might make it invention again.
When the chance was there, who needed to say anything? Now that I can't write, predicates take shape; polyps spread across my insides, bubbling into my throat, seeking the surgery of speech. What do I want so badly to tell him, now that the channel is down? I wanted to say it — the same thing, only different — that evening at that first seafood dive. (The front end of the lobster scuttled into the tank. Todd said, "You should see how they do beef." I kept mum.) 1 wanted to tell him, that summer night on the swings. (I came all over him, shuddering, but disguised the event, admitting nothing.) I wanted to say something achingly similar, that freezing night under the New England stars. (Todd and Dr. Ressler talked away, trying to save life from life. I worked a jigsaw.) I wanted to say the urgent thing, that Saturday afternoon when I leaned over him as he slept. (Annie said, still asleep, "I'm so hungry I could eat a house." I slipped verbless out the door, leaving no hostages.) I always thought it was Todd, ironic, dry, who constantly pleaded that quintessential department-store excuse "No thanks; just browsing." But it wasn't. Always, from the start, it was me.
What is it that I'd give the rest of my exhausted savings to say to him, now that I can't? I want to tell him what I've learned. Todd: I have taken on science, spent the year acquiring terms, doing a blitz Berlitz in the same grammar our friend was once after. The same, only with all particulars changed. And here is the sense, if not the specifics of what I've picked up.
"There is, in the Universe, a Stair." Small, too small for me to see the steps, even with the best current optics, too small to be floor-planned except through experimental analogy. But large beyond telling, a single epic verse five thousand volumes long, three billion years old. It is smooth, spiral, aperiodic, repeating. Within the regular frame is a sequence so varying that it leaps over the complexity barrier and freely adopts any of an inexhaustible array of possible meanings.
But meaning does not reside in the enormous molecule, the reservoir of naked data. The Stair Dr. Ressler was intent on climbing is not rolled up in the nucleus like a builder's blueprint. The plan does not map out the organism in so many words. Nowhere in DNA is there written the idea or dimensions of "tentacle," "flipper," "hand." Nowhere does it describe the shape or functioning of nerve or muscle. Tissue is not modeled to scale. Yet shape, structure, functioning, even the range of behavior: everything originates here, the repository where all significant difference is jotted down, held in place, passed along perfectly, but never twice the same.
I would tell Todd, spell it out in a five-thousand-volume letter. I would say how I have seen, close up, what Ressler wanted to crack through to. How I have felt it, sustained the chase in myself. How the urge to strip the noise from the cipher is always the desire to say what it means to be able to say anything, to read some part of what is written here, without resort to intermediaries. To get to the generating spark, to follow the score extracted from the split lark. I would tell him, at last, sparing nothing, just what in the impregnable sum of journal articles sent Ressler quietly away, appalled, stunted with wonder.
I would tell him everything I have found. I would lay my notebooks open to him. How the helix is not a description at all, but just the infolded germ of a scaffolding organism whose function is to promote and preserve the art treasure that erects it. How the four-base language is both more and less than plan. How it comprises secret writing in the fullest sense, possessing all the infinite, extendable, constricting possibilities lying hidden in the parts of speech. How there is always a go-between, a sign between signature and nature.
I would tell him of nucleic acid's nouns, its cistrons. I would show how stretches of the supercoiled chromosome are simple substitutions for polypeptide chains. Even Todd would see how breathtaking it must have been to be the first to connect metaphor to chemistry, to find the genes, those letter-crosses nesting like flocks in family trees. But I'd make the airtight case that nouns were not what Ressler was after.
I'd show him the speaking string's conjunctions, interrogatives, and prepositions — operator and promoter sites where proteins clamp, qualifying the noun, turning the cistron on or off in subordinate clauses and prepositional phrases. I would show him how Ressler lived at the moment when the ravishing, intensely cybernetic system, after millennia of theorizing, at last laid itself open. But Franklin would be the first to agree that prepositions alone would never have fed our friend.
I would tutor him in the verbs, set in animation the enzymes, programmed molecules that act, cause, do, command things to fly upwards from equilibrium. I could touch upon the adverbs and adjectives, the modifying sea inside the cell wall singing "brightly," "langsam," "con brio." I could deliver an overview of how the five thousand volumes produce their own lexicon of translators for reading their own messengers (transcribed by enzymes of their own synthesis) at sites of their own devising. The complete predication, the weird collaboration of disparate parts of speech into whole utterances, is now within my working vocabulary.
If Todd could sit still for this explanation, if my translation of a translation meant anything to him, he would see that none of this was what the professor was after; despite the brute beauty of the system, none of these parts of speech would have had the power to cripple the man. Then I would say what I know: that an accident of private history left Ressler, for a single, prohibited, unrecoverable moment, hearing not what the grammar says but what it means.
I would tell you, straight out, what I've spent the year and my savings to verify, how language makes it impossible to receive the exact message sent. I would tell that anecdote Ressler told me, the day I went to say goodbye, in bitterness over you. That account of a boyhood experiment with a friend and a tin-can telephone: how he had yelled along the muffling string, "Calling Timmy, calling Timmy." Then, dispensing with the ingenious medium and calling out directly across the twenty feet of more expedient air: "Could you hear that?" Only here, there's no jumping outside the medium to verify transmission. Only the tinny tin.