I yanked my card out in a daze. All the glands in my face opened and ran, without so much as polite consultation. I could still hear that music; it had never stopped. Something of divinity in it, beyond the ear. I stepped away from the machine, reaching a pitch of synthesis I will never recover. I took in the entire block in a single, vertical moment. The ring of bystanders in front of me blinked, grinning that ridiculous grin city people use in those few seconds when the danger of surviving lifts. A heavy man, medium height, thick glasses, indeterminate race, spoke for everyone. "What on earth was that?"
I was in the middle of such a convulsed colloid of sob and laugh that I could only get out the words by shouting. "I couldn't begin to tell you."
A Walking Tour of the Known World
I had to tell someone right away. But there was only one man I could possibly telclass="underline" the one I was supposed to take for all in all. Where was he in this world? How could I get there? Like an arctic tern on moving day, I swung uptown, toward that other information booth, the place where he had once told me, "Meet me here if we ever get separated."
I cut through the Park. My walk took forever; it didn't last long enough. The Park was just a simulation, a mere children's zoo of the full system. But I had been away from the real thing for so long that even this thin intermediary stood in nicely. It had been a long time since I had felt any sort of real link to chitin and chlorophyll. I had thought that words, the distraction of language, enforced a separation, banished me to the nowhere of descriptions. Crossing the Park, I realized that no living piece of tissue could keep its head up above the Second Law without the power of speech. In shape, function, unfolding: they were all shouting, speaking, feasting on words like lichen on rocks. Everything was a grammar, and we might come back in if we wanted.
I reached the Met at last, made my contribution, and practically ran to the wheatfield. He wasn't there. Of course not. But I had to go through the motion, for the time-lapse singing telegram Dr. Ressler had sent me was still an inch from my ear and I had to tell Todd while I could still hum. The painting, at least, was still around. I stood in front of it for a long time, thinking of the day we two had come to see it. It seemed a different object now, a completely changed composition. I had never seen it before. I looked at the harvesters, the gatherers, those just stopping for a meal, the man sprawled asleep under the tree, the two birds lifting up over the inlet of grain, the distant figures deep in the background, children at games again. Somewhere in my head, scattered by later atheism, a poem the nuns had once forced me to memorize tried to break the surface, an equation relating wheat and sleepers and time and reapers.
I wandered through the galleries, knowing I could not expect to find him there, having to content myself with the go-between of paint. I played with the idea, the inverse of the one that had struck me while cutting across the Park: everything ever painted— tree-catalogued landscapes, still lives with fish, flesh, and fowl served up with a sprig of sliced lemon, interiors, abstractions, all backwater genres — was an attempt to classify, backdrive the alluvial branching, locate the common term of natural history. Even the endless crucifixions seemed more about anatomy — the suffering capacity of the body, the way the thumbs curved in toward the palm when the tendons were severed — than they were about metaphysics.
After a while I stopped noticing the paintings altogether, so much more diverse was the international, drifting crowd trying to decipher them. This sampling of people, muddying the halls from Egyptian to Expressionist, had been specially selected for extremes of characteristic. The varieties of human face began to seem almost comical. This random assortment of particulars had nothing at all in common. Each one had a privacy that defied and redefined all the others. My texts had it right: we differ more from one another than man does from ape.
I left in late afternoon, not knowing where to go, with the bank machine's message still in me, pressing to be ported. I stopped at another automated teller, but got nothing except the usual cash. I turned home, walking the whole way, miles, taking my life in my hands through the dangerous bouquet of neighborhoods, across that beautiful bridge, finding that slower, less accurate steps prolonged the afternoon message sprung on me.
But it was fading, unarrestable, going back to that place where wonder hides out from habituation. By the time I reached the Heights, late, after dark, it was just a sentence. Hello friend; here's an easy one. Still a block away from the antique shop, I saw the light on in the second story. Living, just existing, presses probability to the threshold of unlikeliness. I looked up at a window shadow, a violation of physical law, a miracle of coincidence that could be neither reverse-engineered nor repeated. I almost apo-plexed letting myself in; the shape could mark only one person, the person I was out hopelessly tracking down. The only other one with a key. He was sitting in his favorite stuffed chair, head back on the antimacassar, under a soft, shaded, fifty-watt pool of light, reading my notebooks. "You!" I shouted from the door. "How did you get here?"
As if he had no other way of answering except with a musical riddle, he began whistling "Take the A-Train."
I dropped everything and threw myself violently on him, grabbed hold, as if grip could arrest and fix this. It startled him, seeing me bare, begging to be spared. "What'd I do?" he laughed, protecting himself from the attack of my hands. "Tell me what I did."
We dispensed with talking for a record three minutes. Then, all I could find to repeat was, "This is impossible. I can't believe this."
The Question Board
"What's impossible?"
I told him. I skipped everything of importance — the year of enforced waste, the year of science. My quitting my job. The genetics texts. My anxiety over not hearing from him, then hearing, then not. I skipped everything, and started in with the bank machine playing the last Goldberg. "The quodlibet. He was in there, Franklin; I swear to you. Do you know what he told me?" I waited, put my hand to his chin, the same line of bone, and made him shake his head. "He told me you were a man. That I was to take you for all in all."
"He said that?" Franklin reacted in a show of disappointment. "Damn it. I had expressly asked for 'One man loved the pilgrim soul in you.'"
I reeled from the implication. "He's alive?"
Todd buckled his shoulders at my stupidity, my untreatable addiction to hope. "Janny, don't you see? I primed the pump myself, last week. He told me, when I went to see him in Illinois at the end, that he'd left a little virus on-line for you. He gave me the number that would bring it to life. Said I might use it if I ever needed to soften you up."
I took my hands from him, moved to a spot on the floor. No coincidence. Todd had cosigned on the telegram. "You never needed," I said, half to myself. "Never needed to soften."
"I've been punching into the damn tellers every afternoon, to see if you'd tripped it yet. Paranoid that someone was gonna pick me up for breaking and entering, recognize me as a monkeyer from way back. Don't you ever withdraw, woman? You above cash? Much relief this afternoon when you finally got around to it."
Matter-of-fact affectation, tough humor against the odds, as if the separation might as easily have been two days or twenty years. I dismissed the sixty-four thousand closest questions and asked, "How long have you been back?" As if the tourist's itinerary would tell me anything.