They find a deck of cards hiding in the crack between the back and cushions. "Little Margaret's been playing hide-the-folks'-stuff again." Tooney and Eva teach him to play pinochle, a game whose payoff matrices would soon addict him but for one shortcoming: the play of the cards contains no progression, no development. Each hand, no matter the outcome, leaves the play of the next unchanged.
Eva, giddy with wine and aces around, waxes astonished over the playing cards. "These things are amazing. Glossy, washable, every one different. There's a miracle for you. What are these made out of? Not paper, surely. Soybeans? You scientists are always making things out of soybeans."
Ressler cannot resist these two. He talks with Tooney, the only other human capable of conversing about RNA templates while the Valkyries skip their way up the slopes of Valhalla. Eva fascinates Ressler as well. Undeniably attractive, Eva possesses skills that can only be called freakish. The three of them sit outside in Ressler's favorite spot; the Blakes instantly adapt to the lawn-chair routine. The couple drink their wine and Ressler his tomato juice, with just a smidgin — make that two-thirds of a dollop — of wine at Eva's insistence. On the lawn, Blake pressures his wife to roll out her mental arsenal.
He asks Ressler to supply two pieces of paper and two pens. "Now, talk to her about anything you want, and I'll do the same." Ressler describes an article on partial overlap he has just read. At the same time, Blake babbles in her other ear about the weather, Wagner, how fine a neighbor they've discovered. Eva, a pen per hand, takes simultaneous dictation on separate sheets, without garbling a word. Right-ear stream with left hand and vice versa.
Knocked out already, Ressler learns there is more. "Give her a sentence," Blake urges. "Nice and long." Ressler reaches back, performs a mental feat of his own, and pulls up from God knows where a favorite quote. Flaubert, from days when he could still afford belles lettres: "Some fatal attraction draws me into the abyss of thought, down into those innermost recesses which never cease to fascinate the strong."
Without a pause, Eva responds, "Strong the fascinate to cease never which recesses innermost…." It takes him a moment to figure out what is going on. The whole stream, backwards.
Unbelievable. A living palindromist. "We could use you in codon transcription." For all they know, the gene might be read in either direction, both at once, for that matter. Who knows what golden patterns this woman could mine?
Eva laughs, fetchingly shy again after her bravura feat. "I've already got a job."
"Who could possibly make proper use of you?"
Tooney breaks out laughing. Eva joins him, managing to explain, "I work for the Civil Service. Processing job applications. You two think you have a coding problem on your hands. You ought to see ours."
"Let 'er rip," Blake chuckles. "What's the code for 'Changed Jobs'?"
"Let's see….Applicant Changed Jobs — five point seven E."
"How about 'Retired'?"
"Easy one. That'd be five point eight I."
"Now then. How about illness?"
"Terminal?"
"Heck, why not. Live it up."
"Name your disease."
"Try cancer."
"More specific, please."
"Leukemia."
"We give that a six point six Q."
"Q? How in hell do they get Q from 'leukemia'?"
"My dear husband. There is no wherefore to the Service."
"Radiation sickness?"
"Still in committee. We lump that into seven point oh, your basic 'Deceased.'" The Blakes break off their vaudeville, noticing the unintended effect on the audience. Ressler has gone silent, the glow of the corner streetlight unmistakably glinting off his ambushed cheeks. He feels, for the first time, his mother's status, something in the 6.6 range. She died three years back, while he was in grad school. The details of the woman's decline are intact in memory; only the nightmare of not being able to name what was happening remained lost until this evening, the evening the U.S. fires its first rocket-powered atomic warhead due west of this improvised lawn party, in the empty sands of Nevada.
Only five months between diagnosis and death. He took a leave from studies to go home and sit with her through a pain that she preferred to the alternative bouts of annihilating fatigue. His role was to sit and assure her of the great strides medicine was making at that moment. He would tell her, day after day, as her hips wasted to grotesque ripples, that the most important thing was to fight the malignancy and live for the outside shot. Mind as medicine: no other course. Deny the numbers. Cancer lives for the onset of common sense. Reconcile yourself to it, and it wins.
A nursing more for his sake than the dying woman's, obsessed, all the way up to the final metastasis, with proving that mental function did not altogether dissipate, was not dispersed by illness and treatment. That she was preserved inside somewhere. "Read anything today, Mom?" he would lead. "Well, yes I have," she would answer, with a weak smile hinting at the miracle of deception. He never asked for specifics.
He does not hear the Blakes stop their routine. He is elsewhere, thinking how he used to sit with her on the front porch, just like this, late in the evening, not daring to hold her hand, while she said unexplainable things about the effects of her illness on perception. "Who would believe what this place sounds like? I had no idea nature made so much noise."
She talked for the first time about her father, the third child from the right in front of the shaft entrance in a famous photo of child mine workers. Now Ressler has never harbored closet Lamarckism; social traumas experienced by the forefathers are not visited upon the sons. But his grandfather's life underground left its imprint — the dream of meliorism that child laborers impart rose up from his mother's lungs on the warm tufts of her disease. Suffering, her last looks said to him, must be the precursor to greater things. Every rung goes higher and higher.
She died ten days after his return to school. In a misguided final tribute to her son, she left her body to medical science," meaning, Stuart knew, that third-year premeds lopped her organs off in anatomy lab. Because he never saw her body again, she did not die until this evening, when Evie Blake assigns her a number. He always knew the world would one day be like this: a night of no temperature, sitting outside with no one there any longer to call him in. Free to sit forever in the company of strangers, in the belly of a cold, formless waiting.
The Blakes, seeing they have accidentally sent their host off alone, call it a night and take their leave back to K-53-A. But they read him wrong. Ressler comes back to the lawn party, wanting them to resume the careless evening, extend it, stretch out the mixed blessing of companionship until morning. But searching, he cannot find the pointer to the words "Don't go yet." The Blakes disappear, waving, across the lawn. He cannot even find those two syllables for a departing greeting. Minutes later he remembers it: "Good night." Come back. Good night.
Landscape with Conflagration
I've reached a sticking point in my homework, the background reading that must take me inside the man. Not a barrier to comprehension: I remember, flexing my intellect again this season, that given time, I have the capacity to tackle anything, however formidable. And I have more than enough time — time spreading from sunny sahara mornings alone over onion bagels and oranges to arctic nights, postponing sleep as long as possible, armed with only thick books and a headboard lamp. I've hit a barrier not to comprehension but to credulity. How can an assortment of invisible threads inside one germ cell record and pass along the construction plans of the whole organism, let alone the cell housing the threads themselves? I've grasped the common metaphor: the blueprint gene somehow encodes a syntactic message, an entire encyclopedia of chemical engineering projects. I feel the thrill of attaching abstract gene to physical chromosome. But it remains analogy, lost in intermediary words.