Before the perverse thing closed for good, the professor wanted to find the first landfall of the full map, the rule that dictates his generative unfolding. To name, translate his own breathing, his own infolded instinct for love from out of the formal language of chemistry. He is the one I want to flesh out. Why did he let us so far into his life, only to hold us at arms' length? Nature's decoder, who thought that if he could just get to the generating tape, say what "A" meant, then "AT," then "ATG," he would sniff the source, the panel's panel, and could then let the window close peacefully over him. But at bottom, laid bare, solved, the tape read only, "Obsessed, reticent, demure, brilliant, intense, driven, asocial, truculent, lonely, vulnerable, abandoned." The old thesaurus.
Being in the same room as Ressler, just sitting with him in silence, was like filling my lungs with the air of galleries. The chamois cloth of his eye sockets, those pressed seersucker suits no one has worn for twenty years emitted unfinished labwork, interrupted notebooks, glimpses under the electron microscope rendering the familiar mechanics of life alien, less survivable, more unlikely than any oil. I know more about Bles than about the man we sat with.
Think what it must have felt like, to be in your twenties, to rip out of yourself in cerebral caesarean the formulation of an idea two thousand years old. A confirmation so simple, so unexpectedly whole that the only available response was militant, head-bowed humility. Then think the unthinkable. At the moment of confirmation, when the connection screams into proximity, you stumble onto another discovery, one that will disperse without trace the instant you formulate it: cracking the program does not mean exemption from having to follow it.
Because Ressler too erased himself from the guild records, I am free to elaborate. Even as he rushes the unavoidable outcome, he gives in to the trivial joy of being twenty-five, more soaringly ill-considered. He can do nothing but savor, as long as possible, that temporary, timid kindness of doomed courtship. What exactly, at this watershed, does she seem to him? She manages to look beatific without being ludicrous. She commits to precious little on the surface. She limps through labwork, by turns bright, sultry, competent, demure, vivacious, dumb. Joanne Woodward's contemporary Oscar performance as a multiple personality has nothing on this woman. Her body's message alters itself at its base: in her step, arrogantly light, she conveys, over the general noise of the lab, the campus, the apocalyptic meander of 1957, that all manner of things will be well, now and in the enzyme.
For his part, he sinks to a parody of reconciled Goodwill. The continued explosion of American Vanguards, the detonation of Soviet nuclear weapons in the Arctic — the whole market of current events fails to flap him. This vestigial, infant happiness is a chemical sluicegate flushing him with unbuffered ions; a thickness in the winter air, his youth triggered by irresistible stimulus — the mechanism he had hoped to overcome by translating.
Admission discounts nothing. The moment flushes him. He feels the rush, no matter what the equation. He thinks of her all day, wants nothing more reprehensible than to spread over her surface like a roosting flock. He willingly gives her every chance to waylay him, to wreck him for what he is after. If the worst should turn out true, the contemptible clarity of his love will redeem everything. The full force of luteinized want — his body conversing with its own attraction — leaves him more laughable perhaps, but no worse off than others, who must also dodge missiles, fend off conflagrations, name the crisis of knowledge. No worse off for his petty attempts at — call it care. Under the circumstances, isn't even care born in sexual aggression sufficient and worth savoring?
Remember the night when we confronted him point-blank with the dossier you'd assembled — every mention of him ever to appear in print? Confirm me: his shoulders slumped imperceptibly, he looked off and cleared his throat, willing to answer anything, but only this once. Remember how he shrugged, a stream of sympathy, invention without cleverness? The slight catch snagging his words wrung all our ingenuity out of me, the pride of authorship I'd felt in his friendship. The valence of the fellow we'd been trying to ascertain became real. Ressler's fingers gripped a card deck, some pointless data-processing task he was about to shove into the hopper. His knuckles turned transparent; his veins and cartilage were the color of an oil-slicked puddle. A thousand cells in that hand split and replicated in the time it took us to speak again.
He'd set out to uncover the principle uniting all animate matter and discovered something simpler instead. Ear to the clicking telegraph key, to the message coming across the wire, the sequence he heard the answer to "What hath God wrought?" was "Who's asking?" Lost to science the moment he cannot put into words, into chromosome strings, why he loves this woman. Reductionism supplies no reason except her clothes, random, mismatched, pastel; her graceful gawkishness between the legs; the absolute lightness of her limbs moving against gravity in all directions at once; her globed cheeks; her wide, scared child-eyes; her visits, quick and brief as accident. No specific part but gives her an uncaring, lissome urgency, wholly beautiful because wholly ephemeral. He is condemned to loss, from that day forward, never quite able to return to the text he had been seeking, for no reason except that she has made him realize, at cell level, that the only message worth receiving will be intercepted, garbled, lost in translation.
He must have seen this before, this slipping off, recalled it from the histories, even as indifference came over him. I'm sure of it. He felt the slow unfolding, long before he showed any sign. He had all the motive in the world to keep from disappearing: the experimental method, all but resting in his hands, a trick for reading the banished original. All the magazines predicted results. Couldn't he have lasted another year?
But he knew the work would get done whatever happened to him. If he did nothing, shut down his tabulations, spoke not another word of his insights, any of countless, equally talented researchers would have his method in a year or two. His year produced a focus of scientific talent unparalleled since Herri's. An all-out marshaling of forces cutting across disciplines had already begun that grade-school recruiting process that would brush the two of us. Sputnik wasn't the catalyst, for my money. His 1957 was just the first of a stream of IGYs.
Before we said goodbye, the night we took our electronically permanent step, he reprised for me in a few, condensed measures his own bitter disappearance. Before we jimmied the packs, he thought it only fair to pass on to me details I might be able to use. "What we need," he told me, "is the code for the synthesis of the forgiveness enzyme. Self-forgiveness. Forgiveness for having wanted what we are born wanting."
Not that I can now hope to ask you for it, after everything, any more than Herri can ask me to forgive him for not being Van Eyck. He and I were born wanting the same thing, and neither of us will ever come close to it. We will never make an Arnolfini Wedding or a Hunters Homeward in Snow. Herri sees, through the stone casement, that he will be forgotten, demoted to shadowy myth, despite his sole biographer. And with his unrealized landscapes will go that compulsion to imitate, to name the crisis lingering over the indifferent town.