Artie, yanked back to this place, remembered how difficult, how all but impossible, getting along with even the remaining few would always be. “Not because of the posting, Lil,” he said quietly, conviction disappearing. “Because he thought, wrongly, that he had been posted there alone.”
Rach burst out, “Ha! It had nothing to do with the posting. He’d have ended up there anyway.” And the moment she spoke, the other two knew she was right.
Artie tried to rally the idea that was fast getting away from him. He was shaking, and his voice came out in short halts. “Tell me, you two. Shit aside. Tell me just one thing. Do you love the man? Do you love being here?”
For the longest time, neither sister answered. Then Rach replied, giggling, “That’s two things, Artie.”
“Rachel. Lily.” Just saying their names out loud, so hard upon their loss, seemed a miracle. “Don’t you see? Pop’s deliberately left the door open.” It was true. For Hobstown, evolving as it had through endless new jails, had come full circle, back to that old imprisoner: do what you can while you can before you cannot. Having listened in, they were now each of them condemned to do something about the ending.
Artie looked over at his sisters and smiled. They could clearly make out his teeth in the first winter dusk. Slowly, deliberately, with the last reel still in position on the machine, in full and mutual knowledge of what they were about to do, Artie rewound the tape, reached forward, and hit record.
Somewhere, my father is teaching us the names of the constellations.
When he had spoken some, he passed the device to another, who did her turn and passed it to the other. Around they went, all in single file.
Calamine
It’s one of those unrepeatable days in mid-May, and all those who are still at home sit down to dinner. A house in a small, white wood town: De Kalb, Illinois. My mother knocks herself out to prepare a meal that each of us might find remarkable. My two sisters are upstairs, one with her child, bickering good-naturedly over how to redesign the master bedroom. We boys, all three of us, are in the front yard, playing an out-of-season round of pigskin. My older brother is just in town for the weekend, home from medical school. My younger asks us whether he should attend the local junior college.
Dad has just died, of cancer, the previous winter. No one is sure what caused the disease. Some of us blame his assignment at Alamogordo, thirty-three years before. Others think a more likely culprit to be the style of life he chose in response to a long and unrequited love affair with the world.
I, the middle son, going out into the flats on a long post, a deep pass, a bomb, stop short in mid-pattern. I have had an idea for how I might begin to make some sense of the loss. The plans for a place to hide out in long enough to learn how to come back. Call it Powers World.
1979
It’s one of those unrepeatable days in mid-May, and all those who are still at home sit down to dinner. Rach and Artie drive into town for the weekend. She has somehow nursed Mr. Nader through a severe midwestern winter, one that has left the machine unsafe at any speed. Eddie Jr. cools out in front of the tube; acceptance at a notorious, four-year, public, party university downstate means he can now nurse a senior slump of truly monumental proportions. Lily teaches him how to play the segue game with the remote control.
Artie can’t really afford the weekend away from law studies. He has more booking to do than he can hope to get through in the remaining time allotted. But rather than get to it, he stalls in the kitchen, offering to shuck corn, engaging Mom in trivial talk. She responds, wrestling over the range. “Art, why don’t we talk about this after dinner?”
To Rach falls the assignment of fixing the dining-room table. She tries to invent a napkin variation that has not been done, a place-setting possibility she has not exhausted, one that will delight her family into just this once thinking that surprises still hang about the island, untamed. But a table napkin will only fold into so many finite shapes. So she takes the entire stack of linen and piles it up into a Vesuvius cone in the middle of the red maple. That much will at least get a rise out of Mom.
The four food groups served up, they sit down at their understood places. The kids suffer Mom her little spate of benediction, two adding an amen, two abstaining. Artie tries to think up some amusing or edifying anecdote, some brain teaser that will go well with fish. “Has anybody here ever noticed how all families eat in single file?” Those mouths not full of food take a moment to flash him some teeth.
When everyone has had a genteel sufficiency, Ailene heads into the kitchen to retrieve a pie she has put together expressly for the occasion. But as she carries it back in, it slips from her hands to the floor. And good cause: there, through the front-porch window, peers a face she has seen somewhere before.
The apparition lets himself in. He stands in the foyer and inspects the domestic scene, breathing lightly, as if he has just returned from carrying the trash cans out to the street. “Deal the cards,” he says. When no one responds, no one dares move, he adds, “What? You haven’t set a place for your poor old father?”
“You! But you’re . . .” That’s all that Ailene can manage.
“What?” the specter demands. “What am I?” The trademark, sardonic, challenging smile. It occurs to them all that there is more to any of them than any of them suspects. But sometimes we need coaxing to act on our own accord. At last Artie masters the apparition. “Tell us how free we are, Pop,” he says, through the side of his mouth. Tell me how free I am.
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About the Author
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Meet Richard Powers
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More by Richard Powers
Excerpt from The Gold Bug Variations
About the Author
Meet Richard Powers
RICHARD POWERS is the author of thirteen novels. His most recent, The Overstory, won the Pulitzer Prize in Fiction. He is also the recipient of a MacArthur Fellowship and the National Book Award, and he has been a four-time National Book Critics Circle Award finalist. He lives in the foothills of the Great Smoky Mountains.
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More by Richard Powers
THREE FARMERS ON THEIR WAY TO A DANCE
* * *
“Dazzling and audacious. . . . Nothing short of astounding.”
—Philadelphia Inquirer
In the spring of 1914, renowned photographer August Sander took a photograph of three young men on their way to a country dance. This haunting image, capturing the last moments of innocence on the brink of World War I, provides the central focus of Powers’s brilliant and compelling novel.
As the fate of the three farmers is chronicled, two contemporary stories unfold. The young narrator becomes obsessed with the photo, while Peter Mays, a computer writer in Boston, discovers he has a personal link with it. The three stories connect in a surprising way and offer the reader a glimpse into a mystery that spans a century of brutality and progress.
THE GOLD BUG VARIATIONS
* * *
National Book Critics Circle Award Nominee
“The most lavishly ambitious American novel since Gravity’s Rainbow. . . . An outright marvel.” —Washington Post
Stuart Ressler, a brilliant young molecular biologist, sets out in 1957 to crack the genetic code. His efforts are sidetracked by other, more intractable codes—social, moral, musical, spiritual—and he falls in love with a member of his research team.
Years later, another young man and woman team up to investigate a different scientific mystery—why did the eminently promising Ressler suddenly disappear from the world of science? Strand by strand, these two love stories twist about each other in a double helix of desire.
OPERATION WANDERING SOUL
* * *
National Book Award Finalist—Fiction
In the pediatrics ward of a public h
ospital in the heart of Los Angeles, a group of sick children is gathering. Surrogate parents to this band of stray kids, resident Richard Kraft and therapist Linda Espera are charged with keeping the group alive on make-believe alone. Determined to give hope where there is none, the adults spin a desperate anthology of stories that promise restoration and escape. But the inevitable is foreshadowed in the faces they’ve grown to love, and ultimately Richard and Linda must return to forgotten chapters in their own lives in order to make sense of the conclusion drawing near.
Excerpt from The Gold Bug Variations
I
The Care and Feeding of Foreigners
Word came today: four lines squeezed on a three-by-five. After months of bracing for the worst, I am to read it casually, jot down the closing date. The trial run is over, Dr. Ressler dead, his molecule broken up for parts, leaving no copies. I can neither destroy the note nor keep from rereading it. The news is a few days cold. I’ve had a year’s advance warning. But I haven’t time enough left in my own cells ever to figure it. The mechanical music box, his body, has had its last crack at the staff. Those four notes, four winds, four corners of a world perfect for getting lost in are lost in a sample mean.
Once, when he talked, I could almost follow in him the interior melody from the day of creation. For a few months, I’d had that tune by ear. Now nothing. Noise. I read the note all evening, waiting for the clause that will make sense of it. The only volunteer words are his: Dr. Ressler, leading the way through winter violence, the snowstorm that trapped the three of us in a vanished cabin, laying out all natural history with an ironic shrug: “What could be simpler?”
I had a hunch it would come now. For a week, unseasonably cool—brisk, blustery, more like summer’s end than its beginning. Last night the cold peaked. I slept under a parfait of wool, the weight required to keep me under. Giving in to an irrational fear of courants d’air brought on by too much literature as a girl, I sealed the apartment. No one around any longer to object. Excited by night chill, the signal hidden in temperature, I fell asleep only by degrees. I lay in the metal-cold sheets aware of every pore, unable to keep from remembering. Something was about to happen. Hurried lingering, hope, as always, a function of weather.
I passed through that hybrid state just short of dream, back to that iridescent weekend in the woods. The familiar world overhauled, encased in silver sealant. We three waded again across the glacial surface: spectral trees glazed with lapidary. Bird and squirrel fossils marked the drifts. Snow obliterated paths, spun power lines into flax, confected hedgerows, dressed our cabin in gothic buttresses and finials. I walked through the transmuted place beside my two males, one in herringbone, the other in navy pea. Dr. Ressler walked between Franklin and me, pointing out astonishments in the altered world, his features as angular as the shepherd’s wonder from my childhood crèche. The seashell loops of his ears, his fleshless nose, reddened in the acute cold, while his lashes doilied with flakes that beaded across his mat of hair.
We pressed deeper into the snowscape, the bronchi-passages of a walk-in lung. Franklin and I placed our hands under each other’s coats, pleading conservation of heat. In bed, my skin still recorded the year-ago cold of that boy’s fingers against my ribs. Ressler saw everything: the bark swells of insect galls, the den entrance punched through hardened powder. He certainly saw how Franklin and I kept warm, and treated it as easily the most explicable of winter mysteries. At his finger-points, the arcade of frosted branches became vault ribbing. His each wave populated the landscape, pulling Chinese lanterns out of flat sheets. He crumpled to his knees in the snow, shook his head in incomprehension, and like the crystal world, seemed about to splinter. He must have solved again, with fierce looking, the ladder of inheritance, because his face turned and he swung his eyes on us expectantly.
Piled in blankets, I slowed the dream, kept him from speaking, prolonged the endangered moment that would shatter at the least formula. His throat tensed; his lips moved soundlessly like a remedial reader. He became that pump organ we had played six-hands, about to produce the one phrase sufficient to hymn this mass of brute specifics. The traces of creatures, all the elaborating trills and mordants of winter seemed a single score, one breathing instrument whose sole purpose was to beat the melodic line of its own instructions—four phrases, four seasons, every gene the theory of its own exposition. He was about to hum, in a few notes, the encoded thread of everything happening to us and everything that would fail to happen. But his lips—thin, boyish, blue, wasted in middle age—could not shake loose the first pitch.
As before, Franklin challenged him. “You’re the life scientist. Tell us what’s afoot here.” Every detail of Ressler’s face grew magnified: the interstate lines of folded neck, his frozen-brittle lobes, the spot on his chin thawed by breath. His viscera, the process even then growing more variegated, already knew the tumor. This time Dr. Ressler gave no reply. He had gone, slipped out from under the weight of white.
Then, this morning, just waiting for me to commit wrongly, summer chose its moment to break. The pressure system stalled above the city passed over, at last bringing the weather the calendar called for. Overbundled in the airless room, I woke up soaked in flannel. I sponged clean, washed my hair, ate an insignificant breakfast, and brushed my teeth without conviction. I sat in the dining nook, in the first, full heat of summer, trying to retrieve that snowscape. Awake, I let the man ask the question I’d earlier forestalled: what could be simpler? 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. The way back, the suggestion forced open again overnight was sheer perversity. I sat at the breakfast table until the moment passed. Then I made my way to the archives.
I was first at work, always easiest. I unlocked the library and headed by rote to the Reference Desk, my half-dream still an embryo in me. The day would have been long in any event. The longest day of the year, even had I gotten eight good hours. By ten, I found myself seriously questioning the charter of a big-city branch library. Our catalogued, ecumenical clearinghouse of knowledge was running at about double average gate. Kitty-corner to me, a pack of pubescents prowled the genre racks, eyes on the signaling flesh at adjoining tables. A few bruised retirees, two years from terminal Medicare, pored over magazines, persisting in forcing the weekly news into a parody of sense. In the adjoining children’s room, a pride of early readers, spirits not yet broken by summer camps, disguised the fact from their unwitting parents that books mystified them more than the real world. Behind the Reference Desk, on the peak day of our peak season, I fielded questions from this community of needs. First day of summer: briefly, everyone wanted to know something about nothing. I shook off Dr. Ressler’s rhetorical question, agitating out of all proportion to the intervening silence, and busied myself with questions that were at least answerable.
This morning, I was glad for the diversion. By noon, I had solved a burning problem concerning obscure wording on W-4 forms, pointed out the Bridge and Dog Grooming books, and located, for an earnest navigator of sixteen, a side-by-side comparison of Mercator’s, Mollweide’s, and Goode’s projections. I went home at noon. I’ve taken to it lately, despite losing most of the hour in the trip. I felt the urge to buy a car, not to drive, impossible in the city, but as prep for the increasingly likely evacuation. Home, I swept the mailbox by limp reflex. Franklin’s note cowered in protective coloration amid bank statements and time-limited offers. I took it with the numbness of months. I can’t remember the flight up or breaking through the deadbolts. I set To
dd’s calligraphic scrawl on the kitchen table and began pulling vegetables systematically from the bin. Hysterical affectation of indifference: make myself a bite to eat before settling down to death. The snowstorm came back, the hunch that sent me home for lunch, and I tried on the idea: I’d known. Then I remembered Ressler’s definition of chance: the die is random, but we keep rolling until we hit necessity. Hunch long enough, and premonition will one afternoon be waiting for you at home. I left the vegetables salad-bar-style across the cutting board and sat down, worried open the seal. Stiff, white invitation card:
Our Dearest O’Deigh,
It’s all over with our mutual friend. I’ve just this instant heard. The attendant at the testing center assures me that all the instruments agree: Dr. Ressler went down admirably. No message, or, I should say, no new message. I wanted to inform you right away, naturally.
Naturally. Also naturally, no signature. He printed “FTODD” at the end, as if authorizing a change of date on a bank draft. But he could not help adding an afterthought at bottom: “Oh, Jan! I miss you right now. More than I would miss air.”
I spread my hands on the table and divorced them. Through a tick in my eyelid, I pointlessly read the note again. All over with our friend, his four-letter tune. I knew the man for a year, one year ago. Before everything fell apart, he became one of the few who mattered to me in the world. Once, when he was young, he stood on the code’s threshold, came as close as any human to cracking through to those four shorthand semaphores. Then, for years, he went under. Slowly, astonishingly, as Franklin and I watched, he awakened. Now, stripped of content, he was gone.
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