Such queer things, elegies.All shapes have a beginning,Turing supposed: morphogenesis. It is this initialspinning that describes us, our original moan,developed from spiral and signal—notionof a physical soul.Popcorn strung on a string. We are heroic machines,pushed out from DNA center, designedto pull back curtains from their windows,to make trains go, to sing.Wars hold strange words in their teeth,in the submarine's deep.For every eye, a lid. For every war,a shiny new machine.Seagulls dipped behind governmentbuildings like blips on radar screens. Slow, unsteady.He first met Murray outside the Regal Cinema.Murray just out of Monkey Business,starring Cary Grant, Ginger Rogers,Marilyn Monroe. Turing saw The Snows of Kilimanjaro,and in fact, it did snow. It snowed and snowed.They had afternoon tea the next day,leaves left drifting into their knots, water into shadow.Before there were Homosexualsthere were Contrary Sensations.The underlying streets awaitedtheir soldiers, saviors.A genius of solution, he imagineda test for whether man or man-thing.Genius, for all its solitude,means a fathering force,attendant spirit.He was at work on mathematical biologyto ascertain origin's shapewhen he fell for a hustler named Murray.Loved him, maybe.Or, if not love, perhapsthey exchanged some other code.Nothing made should be lost,one can hear him explain.Gross indecency. Section II.Convicted in March,a month of caws and echoes.Bad jokes can kill, he must have laughedfrom his cell. Robed men in wigs offered judgment:selection. He chose chemical castrationover prison. A floodthrough narrow cracks.The pressure of walls inside veins.Injections of stilboestrol,a hormone treatment designedto produce impotence. The giveof the skin on the arm as the needleslid in: No doubt I will returna different man, he said.The treatments causedhis breasts to grow. All thingschange: another law to weaponize.He loved Snow White, lovedthe novelty of animation, dream-hazecome to life. A woman lifts her arm to singing branches,pure song: what integration, what connection.He was in awe of novelty, whereit might go. His eyes wideas a queen dipped her applein its brutal brew. In the mirror,he saw all the world could beone remarkable machine.Those wind-swept government halls,the appeal of uniforms, corridors,secrets tucked into pockets with pensand keys. Small words, like launch,slender as their fingers over the keys.Turing broke every code,unexploded a thousand ships.Then, guilty of beingdecrypted. Faulted for lying on a couchafter afternoon tea. For plucking somethingfrom the string and holding it in his mouthfor an hour after tea. The exhaustive brevityof opinion. Their eyes squintedin disgust, unassailable decision.He understood the limitsof what they could perceive.His housekeeper found himstiff from cyanide, waiting for nothing.He was a man of habit. Evenings,he would have an applebefore sleep. One bite and all your dreams...It was not unusual for it to be found at his bedside,half-eaten, his housekeeper said. See?Teeth mark windows to the core:the dark wink of what could only be a seed.