He is last, deferred to for the postlude, for some reason. For his act of speechmaking Ressler digs way back, into the only other text he received as inheritance from his parents aside from chromosomes and the Britannica. He has, in adulthood, achieved agnosticism, despite efforts by both folks to steep him in doses of received scripture. But the syntax of the Book still rattles about in him on days like this of vestigial need. So, it comes about, here in the pulpit, summarizing off to his long home a man he didn't even know except through falsified dispatches, that the only thing he can get out is Ecclesiastes.
Whatsoever thy hand findeth to do, do it with thy might; for there is no work, nor device, nor knowledge, nor wisdom in the grave whither thou goest.
Work, for the night is coming. Inarguable, if of no practical value to Lovering now. Each human effort and each new word speeds the acquisition of the next. The maps get more exact with every effort, but the key only points out the size of the workless, wisdomless place. He might better have dispensed with speeches altogether, left the work of his colleague — the saving of a few doomed test animals by carbon monoxide, painless, reportedly lightly euphoric — as Lovering's lasting eulogy.
After the service, over the subdued hand-shaking in the narthex, Lovering's mother approaches Stuart and takes his forearm in her hands. "Thank you. What you read was beautiful."
"I'm glad you think so."
"Joseph spoke of you many times. He thought the world of you. 'The best scientist I've ever met.' He told me how much he wanted to be more like you. I'm glad you two were friends."
'Tour son and I," he fits together, searching, "had a great deal in common." Vast stretches of A,T,G,C. She kisses him without apology. He wants to grab the woman, shake her until she tells: why start that cigarette? Why not extinguish it before himself? Joey had time, all the time of his decision. In less time than it takes a cell to split, Lovering turned ignition and annihilated the three-billion-year-old system. Two more minutes to hang around and finish the butt: what couldn't he bring himself to stub out?
Lovering's senseless violence will never heal, never close over in time with new tissue. Ressler will be permanently scarred by that last impertinence. A cigarette, a sorrow, a chromatic love for the things of the world unexcisable at the last minute. A garage full of animals mercifully gassed: affirmation, a yes to the same free polyphony he was sending to death. A by-product of the first, unresolvable confusion deep down at rule-level, the inner confines of language where sorrow and celebration, sender, message, and receiver collapse into the same unlikely pattern, a pattern that knows it is alien, impossibly unlikely, exiled.
How easily all decisions are reversed; everything hand might find to do is tentative at best. He, at least, is still alive, more alive for Lovering's annihilation. Stuart walks home from the service in the cold air, awake, whole, pained for feeling so. He survives the misguided man, a distant cousin, an atavistic trial run, a hypothesis that could not stand the test of experience, a failed variant. Adjacent to survivor's exhilaration, a cold capillary fluid closes on his heart. The man was erratic, dissolving in pain: a glance showed it. The best empiricist in all of his acquaintance gave no help, ignored the long distress call to friends.
Four o'clock the following afternoon brings Jeanette to him. He lets her in, unable to read the enigma of the features he prided himself on glossing the week before. After he commits to some deplorable pleasantry he sees that the message is anger: soft, silent, crying, intractable. Her rage is all for Lovering, although it is Koss she mourns for. The best he can do in extremity is extend the inadequate arm of care. He attempts to comfort her in the only dialect he is fluent in. He strokes her, but the touch feels like his own obit. No comfort in contact at this minute. If they could stop for half a measure, separate, let silence come between them, that paraphrase might teach them what Lovering meant, and more. But he cannot retreat from her for any reason now. He has only the old, obscuring burden of touching to save them.
"Jeannie," he says, lifting her resisting face. "Lovering made his own decision. We might have seen, but we didn't. Who can say what difference it would have made, even if we had?" The argument his viscera have already vetoed. Jeanette says nothing. He never imagined she was capable of such anguish, acute grief for someone she never cared for. "Darling, listen. It isn't up to us to figure out why he killed himself. You said it yourself. Joe made a framing error. He misread the…"
Jeannie jerks away from him fiercely. Fully capable of defrauding her husband, Ressler, and even herself, she will not stand for defrauding science. "What the hell do you know about it? You, the arch-rationalist. Tagged, antiseptic passions. The double-blind study! Never known confusion in your life. Nothing a control group can't clarify. Where do you come off making sense of him?"
His mouth hangs loose on the words. Her face purple, air-starved, bruised, her features hideous, unrecognizable in the violence she would do him. He sees how deeply he hates her. Hates her as in the early days all over again, when he could not admit to need, when he was not even significant enough to her to be singled out for rejection. Even in hating, he takes his cue from her. The words for what comes next originate with her at every step, from the day this total stranger toweled his head dry.
Hatred bridges what pity was powerless to. They are both instantly in the same place. "Get out," he whispers. "Did I ask you here? Did I ask to be led through grubby little liaisons? The supply closet, for Christ's sake." Each subdued syllable leaves her slamming a fist into her temples and gasping for breath. "Go on! Tell me all about myself. Make it accurate. Then get out."
With a weird, guttural shout, she springs on him before he can hold her off. Her nails sink into his back and her teeth dig for a vein. Pinning her, he discovers: not aggression. Desperate holding on. He knows what consolation she has come for. A minute's embrace and she would lead him unsteadily off again, here, on another floor, as if their bed were anywhere the world might let them make it. She would have them do the euphemism as if it still had a point. As if the act of kind still signified, still stood somehow for kindness or could close the gap between them.
But the closest they will ever come is analogy, secret writing, codes — social, behavioral, civil, moral, criminal — constantly garbled in the thousand signal deformations passed from her hemispheres to his. She makes herself a glossary on his mouth, in his ear, asking forgiveness, tolerance, understanding, love. Or not for these weak analogies, spent conventions, but the intransigent, unmappable location she would loose herself to.
Her grief smashes against him, a convulsion scarier than any Lovering elicits. It forces his chest, cuts into it with the desire to be past things, unchanged, indifferent to how they reveal themselves here. Toward that one goal, he can assist her for half an hour. He undoes her blouse, turning it down from the curve of her shoulders as she gives, leans into the unsheathing. Then, shocked by his fingers' static charge, she jumps to her feet, pulling on the slipped clothing. She holds her hair to her head, takes a few steps in a circle. Ressler lets his breath out, saying, at the end of the exhale, "He's dead."
"That isn't," she says staccato, frantic. "That isn't it. This isn't it.
I can't… I never meant__" Dr. Koss shakes her fevered head, comes to a decision. She runs for the door. He calls her, but she doesn't break meter. The latch closes behind her, swift and succinct. Ressler goes slack, stretched across his front room. He feels nothing, no loss, only the lumpectomy scar. From first prohibited kiss he has prepared himself for the moment when the impermissible toxin would purge itself. But he has overlooked this possibility — unexplained, unilateral panic — as too awful and obvious. He lies on the bare floor, waiting for no explanation. He stands, goes to the record player, creates his own.