System Date and Time: 05/15/84 06:35.45
User sressler logged in.
Last user logout was 00/00/00 at 00:00.00
Command?
Uncanny. We had created a new species, registering its own day one. No previous user. Ressler had even added the humorous touch of patching in a new version number for our new animal. But when he answered the command prompt with the standard request to bring up the start of the day's on-line processing tasks, up came what cosmetically resembled in every respect the old operating system. And yet it was only a simulation.
We breathed again. At least it ran. If the wrinkles we had introduced behaved in context the way they tested out in isolation, we were in business. Ressler grinned, as if Opus One had never caused him the least stress. "Looks good on this end." He produced, from behind the CPU where he had stashed it who knows how long before, a bottle of our old favorite drugstore vintage and the requisite paper cups. "To our friend's physical therapy," he proposed. And we clinked wax rims.
"To musicians and physicians," Todd added, and we sipped again.
Two sips to the wind, it was my turn. "To the language of the central nervous system."
At the Cadence
What would I add to the list of things we did that night? How would I interpret the account, two years and a handful of evenings after the fact? We thought to engage in a very old-fashioned gesture, or one so modern as to still be, like music, in its infancy. We acted according to a new complex mathematics, one dependent on the tiniest initial tweaks. The attempt was an absurd mismatch of scale — the notion that the entire community was accountable to the infinitesimal principle of a single life.
I would say: at the same moment that we tried to bring our premise into being, we were also testing its validity, objectively, if not without passion. We worked on the same problem that had occupied Dr. Ressler from earliest adulthood. Now that he had half-unraveled it, he concluded that the bulk of the text down at ATCG level was still in the infinitive: to look, to want, to stand amazed. We simply read those verbs out loud, extending the synonym list. To try. To investigate.
On the day I heard about Dr. Ressler's death, I posted a quote, one of my last, about the God of the scientists making men in his own image and setting them here with the single command to go and figure out how everything worked. Tonight, I would sneak fugitively into the library and add a complementary quote by the same author: "Trouble throughout the modern age has as a rule started with the natural sciences__" Or better: "Everything has become perishable except perhaps the human heart."
I learned that night, as we put our last touches on the on-line replacement, that science, the chief, most miraculous project of the modern world, the source of all the trouble, was itself a self-reproducing automaton. Empirical wonder did not stop short of those forbidden infinitives, to protect, to hope, to assist. They too were embedded deep in the coding problem. In order to say "Copy me," the string had first to say "Read me." Naturally such a command would result in time in the need to do science. What else could it become?
Doing science was simply a question of getting up the courage of curiosity. But the courage that made Dr. Ressler automatically interfere on Jimmy's behalf would have paralyzed Todd and me had we recognized its source. I can't pretend I had no idea. He hinted at it — his personal immunity, his already being spoken for. It's there, obvious, in his toss-off about being remembered by posterity. But that evening, while we finished our entry for the science fair, these were just words I couldn't afford to make sense of.
Tonight, the project that enlisted me is all but ready for print. I have finished my book lookup; the self-assigned homework is done. I have retrieved from the stacks the gist, at least, of what his science thought to retrieve from the world. I can now hear, in the set of variations, the shattering process he spent a life listening to. Like the best of reductionists, I can pull it apart into base molecules that, through a circus tumbling act governed by physical law, learn how to fill every conceivable niche of sound. All this, and it hasn't even come down to the wire; by the time-honored creative method of not eating, I have enough reserves left to start the job search or finance a full-scale retreat to the blood relations in Elkhart.
In my time away, I have managed a layman's guide to nucleo-tides, a miniature map of the man who so badly wanted in. I've come to the verge of declaring that the code codes only for the desire to break it. I've managed to name everything except the one thing, that evening, that Dr. Ressler knew. The Ur-text, the certain certainty that by itself motivated him, the in vivo foster parent of empiricism.
I'd seen the glow for months, but had chalked up his gradual return to solid things, to Todd's and my company. I should have known, by how quickly Dr. Ressler threw himself into Jimmy's cause, that he followed a fuller preparation, long in motion. He felt the mass packed in his abdomen. The composer knew, weeks before any physician, that the oncogene had been triggered. Information was going back under, was about to disappear again into silence. His long apprenticeship to science was soon to be rewarded with a Name Chair in oblivion. The pattern behind the pattern, the mutation shaped into something significant, the mystery, the only muse, the built-in desire for discovery, was coming home. He knew. There was a fire loose in the landscape, in the library.
XXIX
The Threshold Effect
In that museum in Rotterdam where my friend's broken-off research tour of the known world took him, a room away from Brueghel's great Tower (already crumbling in mid-construction around the base) hangs its twentieth-century counterpart, the contemporary reply to the scattering of languages: Magritte's Threshold of Liberty. The painting opens on a sealed room whose walls divide into panels. Each panel is itself a painted window, hinting at what lies on the other side, beyond the pane: sky, trees, fire, lace, more windows, or just a further wooden panel, the wall the painted imitation hangs upon.
In the center of the bare room stands a cannon, a paint cannon, but about to discharge itself all the same. The painting is an enigma, an absolute cipher. It is about enigma, the screen of knowing only through language, the threshold effect, the accumulation of small variations that transform a change of degree into a change of nature. Life stands on the threshold of some new twist it will never be able to name but must live through all the same. I will get no closer to liberty than thin explanation, this diminishing metaphor of panels porting images into the closed room. But it interests me to imagine Todd standing in front of that cannon just about to fire, shatter the painted chamber, flood the place with moonlight that until that moment had been only postulate. I stand next to him in the narrow gallery, looking, waiting.
My sabbatical is up. The last text I read says that the doubling time for genetic knowledge has dropped to less than a year. Twice the field it was the day I started studying. And I've nothing to put down by way of synopsis except this belated discovery that I don't much care to die apart from him.
A Child's Guide to Surgery