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Literal music, music flying along under the fingers, the same music I had listened to earlier this afternoon, only radically changed. I was at last hearing, picking out pattern with my ears, knowing what sound meant, without translation: that tune—four notes by four—Dr. Ressler's life theme, the pattern-matching analog he had always been after. That syncopated dance back to the Reference Desk—elaborate, contrary motion—called on me to make a deliberate, irrevocable sashay. Music, his music, melodic balls tossed freely back and forth between the hands, begged me to discover how wide an arpeggio might emerge from single notes.

He remained a geneticist despite everything, partial to the purposive pattern, the generative thread. But his four-phrased, simple explanation was as unrecoverable from my breakfast table as that New Hampshire weekend, the whole aborted year. Fragment, endorphin-induced, absolutely commonplace: easier to count the nights when I don't dream of those two than when I do. Still, this one torched my morning. I filled with the urge to make the call, but had no number. I came within a dot of dashing off the telegram composed since last spring, but knew no sending address.

But everything had. I worked like the worst of bush-leaguers. It took me twenty minutes to identify, for a polite woman not a day less than ninety, the river that had a funny name beginning with a vowel and probably lying in Africa or India. She and my atlas at last compromised on the Irrawaddy. I did almost as poorly naming the one-armed pro baseball player from the forties who puts in an appearance every five years and should have been child's play. By four, badly in need of a break despite less than an hour's work, already suspecting the break I needed, I attended to the Quote Board.