The Gold Bug Variations

by Richard Powers

  The welcome-aboard party—easily his most nightmarish evening out since prom—leaves Ressler in serious need of a purgative. He pays his first visit downtown since the bus pulled in. There he indulges uncharacteristically in buying something. Spending money is not a problem; he’s never been one to form emotional bonds to crinkled bits of safety paper. The wrench for him is acquiring more stuff. Since late teens, he’s never owned anything more than he could carry out of the country on short notice. Now, in less than a month, he’s already saddled himself with dishes, a table, even a heap of chicken-wire sculpture that charitably passes for a chair.

  He buys a record player that folds up into a box with handle, a pink that has been coaxed out of the spectrum by suspect means. He is sold by a matching pink polyethylene ballerina that snaps on the spindle and pirouettes slavishly at 78, 45, 33⅓, and—whatever happened to 16?—16. Never musical, he inherited what is physiologically referred to as a tin ear. His father carried the tone-deaf gene, forever going about the house delivering a spectral version of “Get Out and Get Under”. Discomfort with harmony leaves Ressler not only ignorant of music but deeply distrustful. Pitch-writing obeys amorphous, ambiguous linguistics—a dialect just beyond paraphrase. Fast and loud is more exciting than slow and quiet. The rest is silence.

  He needs, without knowing, those old, Renaissance formulas equating C-sharp minor with longing, sudden modulation to E major with a glimpse of heaven. How dare an obnoxious greaser four years younger than he turn the Civil War tune “Aura Lee” into the Hit Parade standard “Love Me Tender”, without a wiggle of concern for the underpinning chordal message? Either this language has no content, or tonal tastes have festered, fixed for 100 years and more. Both options terrify him.

  He has trouble selecting tunes to keep the ballerina dancing, and Olga herself remains noncommittal. At length, he settles on an anthology called Summer Slumber Party, the bobby-soxer, center cover behind the pillow, reminding him of a woman he dated in college. Straight brown hair and artesian eyes, she dumped him for never getting off his Bunsen. With the assistance of a sales clerk, he secures two other primers: Britten’s Young Person’s Guide to the Orchestra and Leitmotifs from Wagner’s “Ring”. The latter, still politically suspect, appeals to him from the liner description: a story told in a book-code of memorable riffs. One of these disks might contain his tonal Rosetta. To round out his disk library, in the spirit of Separate Can Never Be Equal, and knowing the tunes from his father, he buys an album of spirituals by Paul Robeson.

  A summer night, the last before his marriage to experiment, and Ressler spends the few, dark, warm hours soaking in the deep evangelical minister’s voice seeping in spirituals from K-53-C onto Stadium Terrace’s lawn. Robeson sings, “Sometimes it causes me to wonder. Ah, sometimes.” The sound ambushes Ressler, slack in his lawn chair. He watches the waves continue east at 1,134 feet per second, where they will arrive in D.C. later that evening. He hears the phrase knock at John Foster Dulles’s window as the secretary of state prepares for bed. Dulles curses, shouts for this blackfella to leave him be. He’s promised to return Ol’ Man River’s passport as soon as Robeson returns the ’52 International Stalin Peace Prize. Last year Dulles told a Life reporter that a man scared to go all the way to the brink is lost. “Brinksmanship” is now the going word. Dulles, hands full with the Suez and Syria, his troops in Lebanon within a year, shaken by the runaway slave’s son singing “Jordan river chilly and cold,” shouts out the window of the State Department at Ressler to turn the volume down and have a little respect, forgetting, under stress of the brink, that democracy is the privilege of not being able to escape the next man’s freedom of speakers.

  Ressler, a thousand miles west, listens to the blackfella go on to sing, in resonant bass, the great ascent up Jacob’s Ladder. Every rung—now the steps of the four nucleotides up the spiral DNA staircase—goes higher and higher. On the darkened, ex-army-barracks lawn, gathering strength for the work he owes the world, a physiological trick sweeps over Ressler. His peace turns to a sadness so overpowering that, before he can interpret it, tears seep out his eyes on underground springs. Avuncular defective lachrymal, until this moment happily masked, flushed by the deep voice, the simplicity of the tune, the hopeless hope of words in a world where the stadium colonnade declares itself a safe radiation haven, or just this absolute, still, summer night in a featureless town. Spontaneous twitch of gland for a race capable of grabbing the next rung while simultaneously leaping for the beloved brink. Or purely somatic epiphenomenon: Robeson hits a note, springs a chord sequence that triggers solute; everything else lies outside measure. Deeply enfolded, the tune attaches to the night’s lateness, and suddenly the song is real. Ah! sometimes it causes me to wonder. Sometimes.

  There on the lawn, the eve before uncovering the precise, testable tape that will change the way life conceives itself, he feels the first seduction of music, his own pitiful compulsion for forward motion, the insistence that we sing ourselves over into a further place. All the while the runaway slave’s son intones:

  We are climbing Jacob’s Ladder

  We are climbing Jacob’s Ladder

  We are climbing Jacob’s Ladder

  We’re soldiers of the Cross.

  As rearguard action, Ressler runs through the lexical combinations biology reserves for this five-letter combination: cross stain, hair cross, Ranvier’s cross, crossbreed, cross-firing, crossing over, cross matching, sensory crossway.

  Every rung goes higher and higher

  Every rung goes higher and higher

  Every rung goes higher and higher

  We’re soldiers of the Cross.

  To this cross list, he adds the crucial test cross, the only way to tell how he and the bass are related, to find the miscegenation harbored in their common ancestor, to trace the defective ducts. Then he hits on it, the mark, the label for the spiritual’s crucifix, the deep, reluctant cross Robeson soldiers: anatomical term. Crux of the heart.

  TODAY IN HISTORY

  Assisted by accident, I was out of the starting block. Given the locus—a year to peg him and a special field—I retrieved everything the limited print trail held about Dr. Ressler. Three days after coming across the magazine photo, I turned up two more citations: the Science Midwest abstracts for the same year, and the coauthored article in Journal of Molecular Biology that brought the young man his first attention. I even traced, through the dense, preserved, late-fifties paperwork, his department’s involvement in varied researches as molecular genetics unfolded. One colleague made important refinements in electron microscopy. Another developed a cheap way to measure cytoplasmic protein. A third cropped the copious shady old genealogical trees beloved of text-books.

  To have been a virgin post-doc then! I exhumed the Watson-Crick paper that had touched off the wholesale gold rush. The primary sources still exhale the atmosphere of intellectual dizziness, the articles thick with a sense that someone would soon crack the complete caper and seize the ne plus ultra of the research world, the riddle of life. I knew that every era since Anaximander and his vital moisture has tried to explain the ultimate contradiction: living matter. But even a hurried review of Ressler’s contemporaries brought home the shock: my lifetime has seen the breakthrough moment, the first physical theory of all life grounded at entry level.

  Each article, every retraction and revision recorded the heat of the exploding field. I pored over the background material—busman’s holidays at the main branch—coming to know Dr. Ressler weeks before I made his acquaintance, if only a Ressler decades younger than the one I was sent to discover. How must it have felt, at twenty-five, talented but untested, to live at the same hour, perhaps even arm’s length from the finishing touch, the final transcription—the first organism to explain its own axioms?

  Half of what I made out about the twenty-five-year-old scientist was pure projection. I began to feel I had not lived up to my own intellect, that I’d been born too late, had taken a wrong turn,
had lost my own chance to turn up the edge of the real, discover something, something hard. This child scientist, desperate with ability, somehow reduced to full-scale adult withdrawal, night shift labor, by something not explained in the literature: here was my own irreversible missed hour.

  The race for the genetic code must have been wonderful torture for one of Dr. Ressler’s abilities. By 1957, the search to describe all living tissue in molecular principles was halfway to unmitigated solution. The pace of revelations staggers even one habituated to permanent acceleration. Consensus that DNA was the genetic carrier had been reached only a few years before Ressler arrived in Illinois. Its structure had fallen only four years earlier. In 1957, speculation about how the giant molecule encoded heredity became open game for theoreticians. The field is littered with articles by physicists, chemists, and other inflamed amateurs. Generations of patient fly-counters had done the legwork. The mid-fifties were set for breakout, the rush of synthesizing postulates. He must have sensed that this anarchical phase would pass quickly, perhaps in months. The prize was bare, exposed for the plucking at the top of the nucleic stair.

  But something else motivates the euphoric articles, something more than self-aggrandizement, more than the desire to cap the ancient monument and book passage to Stockholm, that freezing, pristine Valhalla. The compulsion to find the pattern of living translation—the way a simple, self-duplicating string of four letters inscribes an entire living being—is built into every infant who has ever learned a word, put a phrase together, discovered that phonemes might speak.

  As the journal evidence accumulated, it sucked me into the craze of crosswords, pull of punch lines, addiction to anagrams, nudge of numerology, suspense of magic squares. I felt the fresh Ph.D.’s suspicion that beneath the congenital complexity of human affairs runs a generating formula so simple and elegant that redemption depended on uncovering it. Once lifting the veil and glimpsing the underlying plan, Ressler would never again surrender its attempted recovery. The desire surpassed that for food, sex, even bedtime stories, worth pursuing with convert’s zeal, with the singleness of a monastic, a lost substance abuser, a true habitué: the siege of concealed meaning.

  THE QUESTION BOARD

  I put off telling Franklin Todd what my search had turned up. The trail of the sure-to-be-famous youth ended abruptly, dying out in the middle of 1958. Thumbnail biographies and professional references both dried up. A void lay between the boy of twenty-five, in the middle of the fastest-breaking biological revolution ever, and the man twice that age, an obscure computer functionary. I could do nothing but confirm the same enigma that had driven Todd to consult me in the first place. I returned to that hauntingly alien photo, “one of the new breed who will help uncover the formula …”. The article bore an epigraph by Friedrich Miescher, the twenty-five-year-old who had discovered DNA in 1869:

  Should one ask anybody who is undertaking a major project in science, in the heat of the fight, what drives and pushes him so relentlessly, he will never think of an external goal; it is the passion of the hunter and the soldier … the stimulus of the fight with its setbacks.

  One passionate hunter had evidently been shot along the way. I would have gone on trying to determine how, even had Todd not returned. Some days after my break, I caught him hanging around the Question Board, scouring it as if nothing mattered except this discontinuous glut of fact stripped of context. As if, despite the biblical promise, the world would end in flood after all. Of information. If Todd lay in wait for me, he made no sign. “Truly amazing,” he said, not even looking as I approached. “How’d you find all this stuff? You make it up?”

  It distressed me to enjoy seeing him. I tried to pull my mouth out of its involuntary grin into disapproval. “Of course not. What do you take me for? This is human services. Not for profit. Bulk mail permit.”

  “This one, for instance.” He pointed to the weeks-old question about where in the world people were best off. The outdated card was due to be removed; I took it down as Mr. Todd continued. “How did you know all that, about the two million tons of bird shit and disappearing roads and all?”

  My M.L.S. cheekbones crumpled like a rear-ended economy car. “Nauru? Nauru is a reference librarian’s mainstay. Smallest republic. Largest per capita income. Typical instance of List Mentality. You might as well ask any urban male over fourteen if the number three sixty-seven means anything to him.” Cobb’s average, which I verified every few months, meant nothing to Todd. He looked inquisitively at me, not yet daring to ask if I had results. I wasn’t volunteering. I carried on with my work, pinning to the board the Q-and-A:

  Q:Who is the head of the CIA and where can I reach him? This is an EXTREMELY confidential matter.

  F.P. 7/3/83

  A:William J. Casey, Central Intelligence Agency, Washington, DC 20505.

  J. O’D., 7/5/83

  Todd took two more cards from under my clasped arm, careful not to touch my side. He assisted, pinning the cards into place. It seemed we had worked together, easily and quietly, for years.

  Q:What must we do to be saved?

  C.R., 7/2/83

  A:A tough one, but worth looking into. According to George Saville, Marquis of Halifax (1633–1695), in A Rough Draft of a New Model at Sea, “To the question, What shall we do to be saved in this World? there is no other answer but this, Look to your Moat.”

  J. O’D., 7/5/83

  My new acquaintance examined our handiwork. He giggled at the first and took undisguised pleasure in the second. Then he looked at me, scrutinized my face, trying to determine exactly who worked this advice column for the fact-lorn public. “You’ve found something,” he declared. “That much is clear.”

  I wanted to contradict him, but couldn’t. “Like the Canadian Mounties …” I began, but caught myself before ending up in the double entendre.

  “You’ll have to tell me everything. Listen: turns out I’m the sole patron of a seafood dive very much ahead of its time.” His burlesque was gentle, with no sadistic edge. “I’m particularly enthusiastic about their humane handling of shellfish. Want to do lunch?”

  It felt good to be asked a question that didn’t require a double-check. I laughed. “It’s almost five o’clock.”

  “Almost time for night-shift breakfast. I thought lunch might be an acceptable compromise.”

  “You cannot have seafood for breakfast. I forbid it.”

  “I’ve done worse. Can we take that no as a yes?” He went on, with wondrous, unassisted certainty, to set the time and place, not to mention what I would be eating. He rubbed his hands and made a curious snapping flick with thumb and middle finger. I later learned how many different things that nervous gesture stood for. “All right then. Meet you there. I assume you are dependable, Ms. O’Deigh?” My paranoia flared as I heard my name in his mouth. “You’ll be there?” Urgent but decorous library subdecibel. “Ach, she’ll be thare, laddie. Stop with yare wurryin’.”

  All that I know of animal courtship dances comes from Van Nostrand’s. But this clearly was one; too much bravado and flutter to be anything else. No man had done me so elaborate a two-step in several seasons, and I let it go on, despite myself. Pure, amateur male theatrics: nothing to take seriously. While ambivalent about meeting the man outside the jurisdiction of the shelf list, I saw little danger in it. Capitulation was easier than trying to outtalk him. My own curiosity about the collapse of the precocious empiricist would have been enough to take Todd on. I wanted everything his colleague might tell me.

  But Franklin Todd’s soft-shoe polish also smelled of something else: aromatic locales I hadn’t yet visited, the scent of travel. The man was genuinely strange. Two people, no longer young, knowing nothing about one another, their pasts sharing no word in common, meet on a day in early summer to compare notes on a third party. The scenario had all the charm of travelers’ phrases, a crash course at Berlitz. Sardonic, innocent, Todd backpedaled from the Question Board. He stopped abruptly and retraced his s
teps. He looked me over a last time and said, “But you are.” Contradicting all advance reports, yet firm in the face of the evidence.

  “Am what? What am I?”

  “You are looking after your moat, aren’t you?” He’d meant something else, an answer to his own question of a week before, deciding that I was, after all, possessed of surfaces. And the decision surprised us both. Still pruning the board after he left, I found an impeccable imitation of one of my own typed cards hiding amid the others, one of those marvelous walking sticks or owl-imitating moths. The impostor-card asked, “Q: What is the origin of the phrase ‘Make the catch’?” It had not been there before Mr. Todd’s visit.

  PERSISTENCE OF VISION

  At the time, I was not in the market for dance steps, however novel. Already involved, as contemporary idiom puts it, tied to a man in a mutually professional windbreak stable enough to deflect this new sea breeze. Staying together for four years proved our complementarity. Keith—slick, quick to anger, addicted to excitement, at times insane— countered my own reverse extremes. Together, we passed in our class and era, subtly matched opposites in a country full of couples as incongruous as Tuckwell-O’Deigh.

  Keithy always made me laugh. The problem, by summer of ’83, was that I’d begun laughing at his running routine despite myself. My mate’s particular brand of joke had lost the redeeming secret: the trick of making disparate reality show a hopeless, bearable seam. Like everyone I know in New York, Tuckwell was a prairie refugee. Every damn person I get close to in this city—all transplanted Hoosiers or huskers. It would have been cheaper to stay home. Keith’s dress, speech, and manner were compensatory—Coastier Than Thou. He could speak convincingly about everything on the island from P/E ratios to performance art. “Appraising, dear heart, doesn’t necessarily require the inconvenience of knowing.”