He told me, in a few abstracting words, the details of his grilling and release. "The end of a promising career in the burgeoning field of information."
"I've missed you so much." I was still asleep, saying things that would make me cringe the next morning and for a long time after. Not anymore. Now I wish I'd said worse.
"You've missed your friend Todd," he said. The words lay in that crevasse between assertion and educated guess. He did not wait for me to deny. "Have you been by to see James?"
The silence on my end worsened by the second. The truth was, I had thought three times an hour for weeks about paying him a visit, but I could no longer stand seeing him that way. Dr. Ressler, mercifully as always, let me off. "He's getting some light motor skill back. It'll never be much, but he could not have been blessed with a better temperament to face the next thirty years. The slightest advance, and he's triumphant. They've transferred him to a good muscle therapy clinic." He gave me the address, which I wrote down eagerly but already hypocritically.
"Can we see one another sometime?" I asked. Shier than a teenager. "Meet somewhere? I'm almost out of squash."
He let out a little puff of air. "I wish I could stick around long enough to keep you in tomatoes." I didn't dare say anything. "Jan, that's why I'm calling. I wanted to tell you that I'm on my way back to the I-states tomorrow. I've signed on to a new research project, back with the… I can't really say the alma mater, can I?" I could hear his lip pulling up ironically. Far away, the faint crosstalk of a bad connection.
"You what?" The news was so extraordinary that all I could do was laugh with joy. "You what? Incredible!" Was science that forgiving? Yes, and why not? No field could expand so fast that return would be impossible, even after so long away. If the man was sharp enough, his learning curve steep, he might even have the relative advantage of the late starter. "I can't believe it. What will you be working on?"
Just as I asked the question, I finally woke. As he spelled it out, I anticipated him by a thin syllable. I was one of those contestants who knew all the answers, but only the instant that the cards are flipped over. "Jan, it's a cancer study."
I hung on the edge of making it out — a phrase in foreign but ghostly cognates, the language I myself would still be speaking if the populations hadn't drifted. The phrase book of runaway cells.
I gripped the silence on the line, palpating it as if pressing the secret hard spot. The first thing I could think to say was, "Does Franklin know?"
"He's known for a while."
"Listen. I can dress in a minute. When do you leave? I can call a cab."
"I'd rather you didn't. And I've never been much for writing letters, either, I'm afraid."
"I love you," I said, without help, wide-awake.
This time his words lay in a further crevasse, between assertion and command. "You love your friend."
Then, nothing between that phone call and Todd's curt note. But no: Franker's postcard and his long letter were first, written first, anyway. I did receive one other communication in that blank time, that year I spent doing nothing, working, trying to rehabilitate my own light motor skills. A handwritten card from Jimmy, delivered care of the library where he remembered I worked. Half printed, half cursive, the letters look like a first, helpless effort in penmanship written with the opposite hand. As best as I can transcribe it, it says:
Dear Jan, I thank you and all of you. I mostly expect that there are many things still ahead. And hard. But yesterday was it possible for one whole book page to get through. As you see, I can drive this pen too, though clutch pops some. My words! I'm getting so that anyone can mostly make me out.
I wrote him back but failed to say anything. I never wrote Ressler. I never wrote Todd until after he'd left the address. I never said anything I wanted to say to anyone. I've misinterpreted the whole set from the start. That table of data in the nucleotides isn't about reading at all. It's about saying, out loud, everything there is, while it's still sayable. The whole, impossibly complex goldberg invention of speech, wasted on someone who from the first listened only to that string of molecules governing cowardice. Obvious, out in the open: every measure, every vertical instant infused with that absurd little theme insisting "Live, live," and me objecting, "But what if it should be real? What if it all means something? What if someone should hold me to my words?"
I should have heard it, the night that amateur composer ordered me to. I listened to him disappear into dark fieldwork, this time as subject, on the other side of the instruments. He asked for nothing from me but a little music, a keyboard exercise from the next room over to ease him across his last insomnia. I knew the tune by ear, for years. I might have said something, might have made some noise.
The Perpetual Calendar
June 6: 1520. Henry VIII hosts a Renaissance extravaganza for archrival Francois I in an attempt to secure an alliance. The feast fails to bring about any lasting political effect….
1918. For the next nineteen days, the marine brigade of the American Second Division meet the Germans in the forested area of Belleau Wood, in the Aisne region of France. Expending more than half their men to gain…
1944. Operation Overlord, involving the close coordination of 4,000 ships, 10,000 planes, 180,000…
2004. The planet Venus will make its next transit across the sun—
Political effects will be negligible. It feels as if I have done nothing but fiddle masochistically with the card set, waiting for the resulting pain to convince me that things have happened. A desperate, deluded attempt at triangulation: the old Laplacian engine applied to today in history. If one samples enough points, writes out all the differential equations governing the days' independent paths, the resulting vector might be somehow solvable, the long consequence lying patiently in the repetition might be revealed. The coward's hope that if I go over the three-by-five events again, I might catch the bit I missed, the bit that renders inevitable exactly what it was (and always had been) that was supposed to happen today, just what part that I was meant to play in it. I can add nothing to the June 6 dossier but a classified ad:
1986. Position Wanted. MLS. Years in the public service. Some programming experience. Hands-on knowledge of genetics. Good with data.
There are no more events to go over, no more data to manipulate. The data stream will only widen, deepen, strengthen in current; I can get no closer to where I need to be than these particulars. I lived a year, I lost a year, I spent a third in the archives. It's time to go back, to dust off the resume.
When I started on this tour, I was afraid that the place he inhabited might be bigger than I could safely live in. I have confirmed that hunch by direct measurement. It is immense beyond surviving, larger than the space between brilliance and brittle stars. Older than the oldest soft tissue in the fossil record. As densely populated as a drop of water. More complex than anything I can imagine, as complex as self-reproducing automata. As long as the entire text of history's card file. As terrifying as the threshold of liberty. I have put it down here as a notch on a stick, afraid to name it any more closely than code.
I have lost them all, lost those few days when, as inimitable Annie said, we got our feet dirty, lost them by saying nothing at the critical moment. But I have at least this. This field notebook. My after-the-fact year of mapping. But the map is still not the place. I am ready to follow him there, all the way into the locus itself, without benefit of intermediary, to live in it for a moment, everywhere and nowhere, the space between pine and everglade, between adjoining nucleotides, disappearing with the rain forest, glazed with acid rain, vanishing like habitat, like the magician's knot, but carrying on, varying, learning by trick to subsist on poison, on heavy toxins if I can, living on just a little longer, shouting with all the invented parts of speech for a little assistance.