We left the computer room, the alphabet-lock door swinging shut behind us. The sudden cutoff of noise reminded me of Midwest childhood, the abrupt end of a cicada-storm outside my window on a summer's night waking me from deep sleep with its roar of silence. The suite extended in the other direction. "This is the storeroom. These are the day-shift offices. Here's the software vault: Authorized Programmers Only." Indeed, a check-in desk blocked a door affixed with the same punch-code lock that had allowed us grudging access to the machine room. Hidden in this hierarchy of offices, the rift between information-rich and information-poor.
"Here's the lunchroom," he sighed at length. We entered a twilit cubicle containing sink, refrigerator, table with plastic chairs, and microwave. He pointed to a sign on this last device reading No Metal. "Obscure political protest, I guess." He made me coffee and yogurt without asking if I wanted it. "You see," he wound up. "Not exactly the glamour of high tech I used to dream about in art school. I could teach you to do what I do in two nights, so come back at your own risk. We are not so much this monster's brain as its arms and legs."
"Speaking of 'we'…." The first substantial thing I'd said since arriving. The sound of my voice surprised me.
"Of course! The man you came here to meet." I protested that meeting wasn't necessary. I just wanted to see the man the reference works hinted at but couldn't identify, the man that could elicit concern from these otherwise self-possessed features. Todd led us down a hall that doubled back behind the main computer room and dead-ended in a fire door. He gripped the knob, looked back at me over his shoulder, and asked, "Ready?" I wasn't in the slightest.
But there was no backing out. Forcing entry, we fell forward into a black cinematic cavern blazing with point lights. Cathode rays, a glowing halo of meters, and a tower of heavily cabled boxes twinkled a Christmas of continuous bit-streams being transmitted and received. Against the opposite wall was a pane of one-way glass that revealed the computer room with its gigabyte drums and its silk-smooth calculating cases. Todd and I had not done our surveying alone. I felt spied upon, violated, caught in the act of eavesdropping.
Above the hum, as the door swung shut, I heard another sound altogether. Todd had warned me, in the seafood-and-sawdust dive. And yet, each time I'd imagined these two lost boys serving their abandoned-warehouse night shift, I never once gave their isolation so ravishing a soundtrack. Aural obsession, in such astringent surroundings, was too fantastic. The music, ground from a cheap stereo that hid its low tech in a corner, was that same crotchety keyboard exploring that same eighteenth-century glaze, testing the keys' tentative possibilities. Imitative voices chased and cascaded over one another, interleaving, pausing at pivots, only to tag-team pratfall down the scale in close-interval clashes. In the dark, this finger-probing was the most perfect sound I had ever heard.
Like a shepherd's on breaking into a buried tomb, my eyes adjusted to local dark. I made out a figure, tipped forward in a tilt-and-swivel chair behind a desk littered with electronic instruments, liquid-crystal readouts, and a vast, rack-mounted technical manual that would have been the envy of Diderot and his Encyclopedic henchmen. I knew my man right away, although I'd seen him only once the year before and once in a magazine photo at twenty-five. We surprised him in the act of turning over pages in the massive manual, not so much looking up an error fix as reading though the entire yard-wide spine from cover to cover.
As we entered the confined space and stepped toward him, he stood and unfolded himself. He was thinner and shorter than I remembered; his features, not classic, by the glow of the machine diodes possessed a resignation that, like the ambient piano trickle, was consummately beautiful. In contrast to Todd's collegiate slovenliness, he dressed in coat and tie, as if some sentient presence in all this mass of integrated chips cared how he looked. Not just presentable; immaculate. Natty.
Before Todd could do formal introductions, Dr. Ressler, with a charming outdated gesture, offered me his hand. "You know who I am. But aside from the fact that you work for the public library, once considered becoming a professional dancer, and are called Jan, I know absolutely nothing about you." You've-been-in-Afghanistan-I-perceive. It came off hilariously. That slight, dry, upward curl of his thin lips convinced me that here was the last cultivated enclave in the forsaken world. I loved being in the man's presence from the first minute.
We left the control room and stepped back into the hall where we could see and hear one another. We might have been business associates who met frequently in London or Tokyo, acting together in silent consensus. On the far side of the fire door, Dr. Ressler paid me gallant attention: "You have exactly the sort of complexion required of the quintessential wronged heroine of Victorian pornographic fiction. I regret having to be the one to offer the observation, but Franklin's reading may not yet be broad enough to allow him to do likewise." This rolled out of him intact, with only the slightest ironic hint.
Todd rushed to assure me, "That's the nicest thing I've ever heard this old man say to anyone." But I wasn't at all embarrassed. And neither, it seemed, was the old man.
The instant we assembled in the hall, as if counting the seconds since his last, Dr. Ressler offered us cigarettes, which we both refused. "Am I the only one of this suspect group with an oral fixation?" He smoked, inhaling pensively and catching the ashes in a fastidiously cupped hand. It was by then the middle of the night. No one seemed in any hurry to ruin the rare visit with something so inexact as conversation. At last Dr. Ressler smiled at me. I can recreate that grin perfectly: laconic, amused, mixing its passive enjoyment with a particle of despair. The smile of a mathematician who cannot decide if his latest calculation presents him with a near-tautology of has plunged him into the heart of the enigma. "So how do you two come to know one another?"
I didn't dare look at Todd. Half a dozen near-truths passed through my head, but I missed the beat necessary to pull off a plausible lie. "He came to me and asked me to look you up."
Ressler's already high hairline moved higher as he smiled. "So the fellow said himself, although not nearly so forthrightly." He finished his smoke and motioned for us to wait while he discarded the remains in a nearby commode. As he returned, the shrunken figure was picking lint off of his suit coat. "I'm not sure what anyone could possibly find to be interested in. I've had no historical import." It seemed the wrong place to argue the point, yet something in my reading had convinced me that the world of scientific research was one continuous, shifting, interdependent event, an event still encompassing him.
I can't remember exactly how I phrased the question; I probably bungled it. I was unable to make a decent sentence in his company, so self-conscious did his parts of speech jumping through hoops make me. But hook or crook, standing in the deserted hall, the Goldbergs no longer audible through the control-room door, I asked what had happened to strand him here. He pulled at the skin around his eyes; maybe I'd miscalculated in believing the admiration for bluntness he professed. But when he answered, it was again with that look of bemused pleasure. "Science lost its calm." He extended an arm, palm up, in a gesture indicating the renovated warehouse, Brooklyn, the entire maze of current events the meek were condemned to inherit. "And as Poe long ago pointed out, cryptography begins at home."