Familiar forward motion, bandying between the two of us: the tone of our first social phone conversation stated that it was all right to feel all right, even in mid-July, even with a bad conscience. Bad conscience has no survival value. Todd's confidence cascade gave me a go-ahead to go ahead and do what I wanted to, to indulge in whatever worked. But a slight condition, an extra saddle, was tucked away in the injunction. I could not beat this conversation in one. To give in to the rush, the thrill of voices piling up against voices, colliding over the phone wires, I had to count the thing in three. In my mind, I already stood on a July evening outside their warehouse. Keith, at last coming in to bed, found his POSSLQ lying motionless but wide-awake. He asked if anything was wrong. I answered no, hearing the word leave me, too late to retrieve. The first time I ever lied to him.
V
The Quote Board
For all knowledge and wonder (which is the seed of knowledge) is an impression of pleasure in itself. — Francis Bacon
"I only ask for information." — Rosa Dartle, in David Copperfield
Transcription and Translation
In those weeks when we were happiest, and well into that nightmare period when he learned what was coming, Dr. Ressler's theme was always the same: the world was awash in messages, every living thing a unique signal. We were all cub interpreters at a babble-built UN, obligated to convert the covert metaphor, tweak the tuner, read the mechanism by actively attacking its surface. The catch to this elaborate Wissenschaft was the active obligation to extract cache from courier. I managed to avoid that imperative, ignore the mess in his message, until Frank left, Ressler died. Now time forces the issue. Time, as the Bacon entry says, just below the quote linking knowledge to pleasure, is the author of authors. Time to start my cub translation, to learn the place, as I'm likely to be here a little longer.
The whole day free, hours without end. How hard to make anything of unbudgeted time. In my remaining free days, I've decided to learn something, become expert, exchange fact for feeling, reverse what I've done with my life to date. A needy soul once asked me, through the anonymous three-by-five, what old film had an important state secret transported across Europe via musical code. Hitchcock's The Lady Vanishes, 1938: a banner year for secret European messages. I remembered the question this morning, listening to that other musical code whose message our circle carried through a similar plague year. I could whistle that melody in the dark, its pleasure returned permanently to school by grief. The tune of my new career.
My chief problem is what to study. Something empirical, something hard! My prospect of success depends on where in the hierarchy I attach myself. I start with top magnification, fix my lens on cosmology. If that level remains abstract, I could drop to the step below, stop down an order of magnitude, make due with astronomy. A working knowledge of galaxies must be of some use in naming the place where I'm left.
But the light-year is too long for me to get my bearing. I must reduce the magnification another exponent, start my study with the earth under my lens. A geologist I suppose, or oceanographer. But the explanations of this critical niche are still too large. I am after not earth science but its underwriting specific. Down another order. The search for a starting point begins to resemble that painful process of elimination from freshman year, spent in the university clinic, a knot across my abdomen from having to choose which million disciplines I would exclude myself from forever.
This time I narrow ruthlessly. I sharpen my focus to the raw component populations inhabiting this planet. Zoologist, anthropologist? Neither would yet clamp down on the why I'm after. I go a finer gauge, assuming that understanding can be best arrived at by isolating terms. That means downshifting again to the vocabulary of political science. The first limb of the hierarchy that speaks human dialect: what do we need, and how best to get it? The question is powerful, but as I zoom in on the increasingly precise concern, explanations recede, grow fuzzy and qualified. A faction of me secedes, insists that political science can be understood only in terms of constituent economics. But the study of goods, services, and distribution produces more problems than prescriptions.
Herds, it seems, are hundreds of individuals. Feeling no edge, I scale myself down into psychology. Here my lens reaches that cusp magnification: one-to-one. But a complete explanation of behavior requires somatic cause. Focal ratio flips, increases again, now in the microscopic direction. Psych shades over the bio threshold. The gradients, the gauges are continuous. Fields of study, like spectral bands, differ only in wavelength. No discrete moment when red ends and orange begins. Yet every constituent bent from white has its precise and particular name.
The final gloss hovers always one frame beneath. Physiology. Biophysics. Biochemistry. More light. Molecular biology, the transitional rung where Dr. Ressler hung. Downwards toward delineation, I consider studying chemistry. Unsatisfied, I pass another strangeness barrier, into quantum physics, beyond conceptual modeling. A push for terminal detail takes me into the statistics of perhaps. Here, in the domain of sub-subatomics, where I expect to butt up at last against fundamental phenomena, I find, instead, a field veering startlingly philosophicaclass="underline" eleven dimensions, su-perstrings, the eightfold way. Like a Klein bottle, insides twisting seamlessly onto out, small-scale physics drops off the edge of formal knowledge back into cosmology.
The whole hierarchical range up and down the slide rule of science shares one aim: to write the universe's User's Manual, to bring moonlight into a chamber. But what scale to choose? I'm thrown back on Lewis Carroll's information theory fable, the map paradox. A kingdom undertakes a marvelous cartographic project. They know that an inch to a thousand miles is too gross, giving only rough orientation of the largest places. The royal cartographers improve steadily over the years: at a hundred miles to the inch, true roads take shape. At ten per, the map navigates from village to village. At a mile to a map inch, individual structures become visible. The more exact the scale, the more useful the map. The kingdom's surveyors launch the supremely ambitious project of mapping the region at an inch to an inch — a map every bit as detailed as the represented terrain. The apotheosis of encapsulation, the supermap has only one drawback: the user can't unroll it without covering the landscape in question.
This is my problem in choosing a field to fill the ten months my savings leave me. The whole hierarchy spreads in front of me in imbedded frames. But each rung, cross-referenced, reads, "For more information, see below." Hinduism says the world rests on the back of a tortoise standing on the back of tortoise, etc. One of those terrapins must reach bottom. Where can I break in? What discipline will put me closest to knowing him? A year ago, when Dr. Ressler received the verdict of his cells (but not yet the sentence), the three of us met for a last evening before pulling the switch. Franklin asked if he felt any regrets about straying from his training, losing his career. "What would I be if I could start over?" Todd nodded furiously at his succinct rephrasing, so much more accurate than what he'd asked. Dr. Ressler thought in the white waterfall hum of the computer installation. At last he said, "There are really only two careers that might be of any help. One can either be a surgeon or a musician."
I set my magnification, choose my lens. Since surgery arrives too late, I'll be a musician. I'll spend what remains of my life savings studying music. First, I must tackle theory. And for a good grounding in tonal fundamentals, I must first learn everything I can about the genetic code.