There is, in the innermost core of the work, a variation that stands apart from the others, bizarre, instantly detectable, alien. He heard this outcast in the litter, picking it out from the confusion of notes the night she brought them by, even before he could speak a single chord of tonal language. Five sixths of the way through the Goldberg set — variation twenty-five — is the most profound resignation to existence ever written.
He has studied music for half a year, listened each evening, learned notation, sight-read scores for much of the basic repertoire. Now, after a long time away, he comes back to this little sequence coding for the moment of dispersion. It is the one text that can say how he and Jeanette, by lightest degrees, arrived at dead confusion. How could the unsuspecting initial sarabande possibly code for what has taken her? He follows in memory the way they have come. Once, he could only see it on the page. Now he can hear. The Base is intact, agonizingly fleshed out with chromatic passing tones. Above the encrypted notes a slow unraveling, shattered beyond saying, an ineffable, searing, lost line meanders into intervals where language cannot follow. Push the whole sequence down a tone, fill out the phrase with accidentals, repeat verbatim, but dropped into a key the chilling, unreachable nether pole from tonic.
The four-by-four-by-four Base, stretched out of all proportion, out of all ability of its limpid simplicity to carry, is still there, whole, note-for-note intact, only unrecognizable. His ear, schooled on recent events, detects the ancestor, the parental name now lost in daughters. The mathematical manipulation pushes on, farther than the bars would permit, grinding against dissonances more grating even than those born in his own generation. It wanders stunted through bleak modulations — G minor, F minor, E-flat minor, B-flat minor — keys incredibly distant, bearing no relation to the place where they began and must return. As testimony to the heart that made it, this too is scored as a dance. What cannot be survived, cannot be listened to, must also be danced.
Stuart lies at the close, back against the impossibly thin crust of earth. The column of air pressing his ribs is no thicker. Pinned between these sheets, he hears in this scalar mutation what called Lovering away, what tortures Jeannie: a sorrow that did not exist in its parent sarabande. No math encapsules it; no signal, no word for Not. It never was on this earth, until twisted out of insensate elements.
What are these modulations after, about, just in front of the door? Something to the tune of how mere saying, tracing, researching, conveying will never make the case for existence. Days do not carry the full conjugation table for the verb To Live. Only, at raw moments, the imperative.
He knows she is gone, as gone as his office mate, as lost as his steady, programmed shedding of cells, the tune that twenty-five comes unspeakably close to speaking. Departure. He hears in brief the only home his future can ever come back to, whatever distant relations it explores on its long, final, unimaginable spiral deep down into the innermost life of the hive, beyond grief, underneath encryption.
Disaster (conclusion)
I cannot find it in me to keep working. The cause is longer than this morning. I've been racing it from the first, and I see now that it will beat me to the finish. I've made the mistake of reading over what I've put down here since last June. A little lay chemistry, evolution in outline, amateur linguistics padded out with kiss-and-tell. The whole ream turns my stomach to look at. It was to be my way of learning a little about music, a year spent listening to the composition. Now the pattern-search is snagged on a single fact: the best potential father in the world, the transmissible gift of kind intelligence, chose to die a celibate.
"You live alone?" Todd asked him, back when we still drank contraband wine out of paper cups in the computer room. Ressler lifted that familiar lip edge that said everything and disclosed nothing. "What do you do with yourself?"
"1 work. 1 read what interests me. 1 garden. The seed companies send me their catalogs, a little earlier every year."
Todd was unrelenting that night. "If you don't mind my asking, what do you do for women?"
"What have women ever done for me?" He pressed the advantage of humor, slipped out with an account of a recent survey of the most desirable traits in an American mate: "Women choosing men selected intelligence, kindness, and money in increasing importance. Men ranked it face, breasts, and hips."
He deliberately chose to sit and wait for complete genetic dismantling. I never saw him, until that last chance, lift his hand to assert himself. He suppressed the choice to breed along with the other vanities. The life scientist, still in his twenties, turning over flagstones in the lab, looking for buried treasure, one day, by accident, squared up against what all the secret writing graffiti'd over every millimeter of the world's surface and miles deep was saying: double faster than you unravel.
Even that much would have been bearable. Even if only a simple-minded recursion—"Copy this" — the pattern had authored grammars so materially satisfying, living syntaxes of such heart-stopping choreography, that it would have been enough to affirm life even in abstaining. The law compelling electrons to arrange themselves in the lowest energy configuration, the law saying that hot had to flow irreversibly downhill into cold, had become so adept at local violations, amended and invented loopholes, that the resulting biological anarchy synthesized its own sponsor. But he had stumbled upon something that ruined him for procreation.
He heard the sound — if not imbedded in the cell itself, there in the way the program runs — of an imperative variation stronger than "Copy this." A countering command: the tick of miss, of not, the leak of things going wrong. The hiss accumulating in transcription, like that party game of Telephone, slowly mauling the message so badly it no longer meant anything. Death too was just the code's last trick to promote divide and multiply. He listened to his cell incorporate disaster into its plan, synthesizing genes with no function but to make enzymes that smeared other genes, enhanced mutation, promoted runaway tumor.
Disaster says to me, softer and softer, "Quit the typewriter. Too much has gone wrong. You're not accurate enough ever to put it right." I'd say my project was in crisis, if I thought the project still existed. How can I still mourn for a man who gave me a few months of guarded, way-station amenities? Why anxiety at Jimmy's stroke, incapacitated by an acquaintance with whom I never graduated past tenderness? Throat-choking panic at the thought of a boy I kissed for four abortive months at sixteen. Anger at a devoted friend for skipping a Christmas card. Alarming dreams of parents dead for years. Annihilating ache for my old colleague Mr. Scott, who knew one joke about retiring. Everyone I've ever loved has killed me a little. Every concert I've ever attended, every tune I thrilled to and immediately forgot, every book, every reference, every patron that presented herself at my desk with every question saying, "Solve me; you have half an hour": decimating strokes, a swipe of God's hand.
I'll never solve any of it. Assembled into oppressive full score, it whispers to me, submits the unlivable knowledge that the world will be recombined, more fertile than ever after I disband. Worse, the mix will be renewed because I leave it. More than I can take: the stroke that erases me, the force corrupting my message engineers creation.