The Gold Bug Variations

by Richard Powers

  Franklin wadded up the excised Times and banked it into the wastebasket. Jimmy growled, “You going to put in any hours at all this evening?”

  Todd nodded. “In a minute. Almost underway, here.”

  “Still bothering over the news,” Jimmy bitched to no one. “Counting editorials, you two’ll be here around the horn again.” He looked at me and added impishly, “Or should I say you three?” Affectionate, good-natured, as blind as the day shift was long. “Most men have productive hobbies, you know. Like stamp collecting, or toy trains.” He crooked his thumb in the direction of the machine room. Todd smiled, sweetly obedient, but snipped on. The older man sighed and shuffled home, knowing that the late staff had long since slipped out of his jurisdiction.

  Franklin glanced down the hall in the direction of his departing superior. “Long-suffering Jimmy, up solo against the technological age.” This put him in mind of his shift partner, already at work, the man who remained the source of whatever pleasure Todd and I took in each other’s company. Franker put his clipping away and punched in to the machine room to help the old man out. Earn his living for at least a little while.

  I flip through the aborted notebooks and the days come back with precision. I turn the page to another entry:

  CEASE-FIRE ACCORD GAINED IN LEBANON WITH SAUDIS’ HELP

  A “STEP,” U.S. SAYS

  Role of Marines Unchanged

  In his loop-perfect hand, the impressionable interpreter duplicated the secretary of state’s prediction: “They’ll be a little more comfortable in carrying that mission out because they won’t be subject to the crossfire they have been in.” At page bottom, he writes: “Interesting tidbit on computers and privacy says that Feds keep 15 files on each of us.”

  I try to connect those fifteen per capita files with the libraries of magnetic disks in the room down the hall entrusted to his care. One and the same, they still don’t jibe. I can no more connect government electronic omniscience with the antiseptic Mylar bits he twiddled for a living than Frank could assimilate global geopolitics into a life that consisted largely of schemes to delay, another year, his masterpiece on a minor Flemish landscapist. What was Haiphong to Herri or Herri to Haifa? Less than nothing. Yet Frank, for a few weeks, turned pages and copied, insisting, against all evidence, that he and what happened all around him shared, somehow, the same substance.

  EPA scandal; Capitol Hill sets up killer watchdog, whacks it when it barks, and again for good measure when it fails to bite. “Almost 10 years after the public was alerted to the dangers of ethylene dibromide as a potent carcinogen, a Congressional subcommittee will inquire Monday into the reasons for Federal inaction on banning or restricting the substance, a widely used pesticide and gasoline additive …”. Chemical “is invading food and underground drinking supplies … but the agency has yet to act.” B11, for Jesus’s sake. Big news was last night’s Emmys.

  I imagine him tending to his cut-and-paste, affecting a theatrical sigh. Every attempt to work himself into moral outrage failed to extinguish the sense of responsibility wadded up inside him. His notes filled with toxic poison, his night with the care and feeding of CPUs. But his thoughts were consumed by panel and patina, the incomprehensible landscape, the local confusion of nights when a stranger dropped by to keep him company, the chance to sketch the trivial sorrows of the nearest feminine face. Those weeks, that face was mine.

  THE PERPETUAL CALENDAR (I)

  The breakthroughs in Dr. Ressler’s science open as I explore them, like an unknown inlet that turns out to be a channel. As his post-doc went into its first autumn, partial overlap still seemed viable. If each triplet codon shared one base with its two neighbors, the string ACGAAGC would be parsed into discrete particles ACG GAA AGC. I make my own feasibility check the way he once must have. Given a codon ACG, the next partially overlapped codon must be Gxx. How many triplets possess that form? Four possible bases in the second position times four in the third gives a possible sixteen. But nothing in protein sequences places any such positional restriction. All twenty amino acids can occur freely, anywhere in a chain.

  Uncanny: my first scientific deduction before seeing the argument in print. Of course, I wasn’t first. Nor was I unassisted. But this surge of strange confidence: I have turned up a solution, attached my scent to the landmark. A cause for extraordinary muscle-flexing.

  Dr. Ressler came as close as anyone I’ve ever met to demonstrating that saving grace of Homo sapiens: the ability to step out of the food chain and, however momentarily, refuse to compete. That was the quality that drew Todd and me to him, forced our love, although we barely knew him. “Nature cares nothing about the calculus of individuals.” I saw him get angry once or twice. In the end, he even went after his goal with force. It wrecked him to admit that the gene is a self-promotion, a blueprint for building an armed mob to protect and distribute its plan throughout the inhabitable world.

  But selflessness too has survival value. To paraphrase Haldane again, one might lay down his life for two brothers or eight first cousins. Ressler knew the calculus and how far he was condemned to obey it. But at the crucial moment, he elected for pointless altruism. Self-denial: the weirdest by-product of a billion years of self-interest. But in nature’s hands, even altruism furthers selfish ends.

  So I come down from my overlap conquest, return to research. I taste, after making the kill, just between the salt and sour buds on my tongue, the incomparable protein soup driving me forward: not blood. Enzyme wine.

  I solve little by eliminating partial overlap. The insight, as advances do, only opens fresh cans of helical worms. I have backed into the framing problem. If a string of bases stores instructions without overlap, that long sequence still has to be framed into correct instructional bits. The gene segment ATCGGTACGGCCATG has three different reading frames:

  ATC GGT ACG GCC ATG

  xxA TCG GTA CGG CCA TGx

  xAT CGG TAC GGC CAT Gxx

  The string itself might carry some punctuation device, a chemical comma indicating how the codons should be read. The reading frame would then be unambiguous: ATC,GGT,ACG,GCC,ATG. But no chemical evidence for a such structure exists.

  I ask all the wrong questions, raise naive, misinformed objections that would cause even that most humane educator to smile. Might certain codons chemically fit their amino acid assignments? How literally should I take the tape analogy? Which half of the double helix is transcribed for reading? Can the tape play in both directions? I am a rookie, a greenhorn, a tenderfoot in this new country. But so is science.

  I begin to see one thing, at any rate. The chemical tumbling act is a mechanism beyond belief, a language more awesome than I suspected, perhaps more than I can suspect. To transpose the line of information-packed triplets into a meaningful burst of aminos is to begin to hear the structure of genes unfold over time—a virtuosic celebration of ideas trying themselves out, competing, announcing, developing, exploring contrapuntal possibilities.

  As my understanding increases and my naiveté shrinks, the mechanism strikes me as unnecessarily cumbersome, inefficient. How might I build it better, simpler? I read, with distress, that ours is not the only possible genetic code, nor even perhaps the best way to keep self-duplicating molecules in production. I remember the innumerate grief of Annie Martens—an in-law, like it or not—when she heard Dr. Ressler describe how base 12 would have been a superior counting system to base 10. The woman was profoundly saddened by this irreversible impediment.

  Another sadness, stronger than the code’s inefficiency: it hurts to discover how much my understanding relies on analogy, pale figurative speech. My tape recorders, playback heads, builders, blueprints, and messengers. Scientific method itself—from diagrams to symbolic formulae to phenomenal descriptions—relies on seeing things in reflected terms. The gene as self-replicating organism, the organism as pan-gene, the cell as factory, the protein as robot running a program so complex that, in Monod’s words, “to explain the presence of all th
at information in the protein you absolutely needed the code.”

  Will I ever get it? “Code” is itself a metaphor. “Cipher,” the etymological dictionary says, comes from that profound mystery, the zero. A term to house my bafflement at how living things can be made up of so many nonliving parts. And if I get to the code, in the months before my savings run out, will it translate, repair the tear in my chest opened the day Dr. Ressler’s instructions dispersed? One of the only sources of real company I’ve ever enjoyed—his gray brows, the taut, yellow smoothness of his face, the brutal, brave humor, the effortless flow of sentences—zeroed. “Dead” is too weak a metaphor. I push the barrow, sift the stone for a hint at how Chartres might come of rubble.

  The first time I had a private conversation with Dr. Ressler, when my repeated visits to MOL gradually put him at something resembling ease, we sat in the darkened control room watching through the two-way mirror as Todd fired up the end-of-week processing. Ressler volunteered nothing, but pleasantly answered everything I asked. Just to hear him talk, I asked about a bank of devices, red diode lights flickering rapidly but irregularly.

  “Those are modems. They translate analog phone pulses to and from digital sequences. At the other end of a phone line—who knows where— some other machine sends across a datum each time one of those red lights flashes.”

  “What are they sending?” I asked, suddenly seeing the spasmodic red flashes as a text.

  Ressler smiled. “It could be the collected works of Shakespeare. In a single stream, four hundred and eighty letters a second.”

  That is the genetic metaphor that begins to suit me. Something wilder than all the plays of Shakespeare written in something as simple as blinking lights. It fails in the representation. But then, so does putting Shakespearean moonlight into a twenty-six-letter chamber. The closest we ever come is dressing someone up, calling him the moon. Clay-derived thought, capstone of evolution: I count myself lucky to achieve even that weak analogy. Where can I go tonight for conversation? He alone made me feel clever, just in unraveling his metaphors.

  When I at last got out of the house today, stepped outside into the open air after ages, I bussed around Flatbush, Fulton, discovering to my senses’ shock how thick autumn was in me already. Season of mists and mellow fruitfulness, to blame it on Keats. Sap consolidates; the days have begun going dark before supper. Even here, in the middle of fifteen million, colors come on, acquire reputations: umber, burnt sienna, ocher, iodine, scarlet, rare earths hued to the first order. With the right formula of dry cold, for no practical reason, demure trees slip from lime to lemon, go down with all the garishness of an historical atlas. And bless with fruit the vines that round the thatch-eaves run.

  Well, perhaps no fruit vines in my neighborhood. But isolated branches telegraph the first symptoms of epidemic. Trees shed brittled skin and strip down to cartilage fighting weight. Twigs scrape against phase-changed glass, followed in a week or two by tentative ice traceries, fibrous, hexagonal, the solid geometry of crystal water molecules. First day of autumn, the equinox: New Year’s of Phoenicians and Egyptians, wielding symbolic power as late as 1939, when we chose the day to bury our technological message to future species.

  Q:Who decided that the first day of autumn should fall on September 23? Why not the 21st, or better yet, October 1, which makes more sense? Probably invented by committee. Why doesn’t the day move around, like Thanksgiving and Easter?

  A:This one is trickier than it looks. In fact, the reconciliation of the solar year was the first technical bottleneck facing civilization … The balance points, equal-nights, do move around—five hours, forty-eight minutes, and forty-six seconds each year. They do fall at odd times as the result of that committee, historical accident. Rotation divides only reticently into revolution. But then, if the repetitive calendar had come easily, we might never have developed astronomers, mathematicians, scientists, librarians.

  Everything that ever happened happens at equinox. Wars start, armistices all arrive between early October and the end of the year. Symphonies begin and break off on autumn leave-taking. Governments change; the only logical time for elections (however pro forma), for mothers of four to head dutifully to precinct polls in station wagons despite a driving rain, to hide themselves behind curtains and pull the lever of choice.

  Three compressed months of change write the year in brief. Plants pull back; landscape retreats into a miniature of muted colors. Tonight, where I grew up, the cicadas have their last seasonal blowout, choral storms outside my childhood window, now serving some other child in the formation of memories. Even from this distance their simmer is audible, a sex-soaked group pulse, a twitch in the dry air swelling to buzz-saw bandwidth. Wind pitches their group shout in a mechanical wave sounding for all the world like a million miniature pieces of shook sheet tin. Reaching decibel denouement the noise cuts off at the chaos instant, fizzling to a few holdouts. The signal from one swarm sets off another, a hundred yards off, flaring in pitch before it too hushes. All down the county line, the overlapping antiphony of bug choirs.

  Frost stencils the hoods of cars, reveals internal cross-struts as clearly as an X-ray. Delinquent husbands return after thirty years, begging for absolution. The cheerful, hermetic next-door neighbor, receiving in his mail the most blunt prognosis medical technology can muster, turns back to his house, thinking: Just time enough to get those problem patches under the shingles. On every corner, lambent glow of streetlamps on maple limbs, an inverted carpet of rust. The moon goes gibbous, the night stars a drunken dream. Where I grew up, “Milky” is the only conceivable adjective for the spread of pebbled, intertidal autumn sky.

  Combines scythe circumference swatches, close their noose around holdout corn. At the last pass, a thousand acres of trapped rats, snakes, and pheasant break from the drawn net, most mauled by indifferent machines. Sundays, as winds whip through moribund barns, harvesters meet in narthex and nave to sing how all is safely gathered in, as if they had the principal hand in bringing it off. Autumn is the note before the last melisma, the third stanza, the congregation fumbling in hymnals to read both words and music. A plenitude of pies, pride of drop-in guests, brace of hams, corsage of table settings, parliament of mashed potatoes, supplication of network sports, clatch of conversation, covey of vacation days, school of parades, volume of preserves, brood of read-alouds, keepsake of snapshots: everything running at glut, at glorious surplus.

  “Healthy Midwestern girl,” Todd used to tease me. “Healthy Midwestern influences.” They have not helped me healthily over him. All day today, it felt as if this were the last chance I would have to remember what it felt like, in the blood, once, to be young. That synonym list of anticipation, before the business of thinning out.

  Everything that ever happened to me happened in autumn. I moved away from home. I first fell in love. I got my first job. In autumn, at twelve, I thought I was hemorrhaging to death. Autumn is sea-storm warnings a thousand miles inland, everyday affairs going entirely incomprehensible, changed by the chance disaster, the autumn occurrence, the fall phenomenon.

  Once I spent the wet first days of fall blowing on tea, doing a picture puzzle of Constable’s Hay Wain, the soggy, rocking card table badly in need of a shim. Racing my mother for the obvious pieces, the wheel spokes, the stream, and leaving the uniform sky for when it wouldn’t be so hard. Working alongside the woman who pieced me together, who has since put aside both picture puzzles and procreation for good.

  I bought my first book in autumn, a story about three girls who swear a perpetual pact of friendship and set out to do something slightly forbidden but ultimately laudable one Saturday in September. Annually, like celestial clockwork, I acquire more volumes, seek out the great multistory secondhand dealers. Through plaster caverns damp with the aroma of disintegrating bindings, I select on size, color, the marginalia of former owners—subjects as obscure as Guide to Fencing, or Tungsten Mining Commission Proceedings, 1934. I hedge them up against winter, an
d toss them all out the following spring.

  In the fourth grade, two weeks after Labor Day, I brought home my first instrument, a three-quarter-sized ’cello bigger than I was. I took it upstairs to my father’s study, methodically ground the endpin into the lacquered floor, and touched the bow to the catgut C. A bass swell filled the house, penetrating to the root cellar—the only successful sound I ever made on the thing. All subsequent attacks on the instrument were failed attempts to recreate that first resonance. I turned the box in the following Labor Day, after a frustrating summer stuck in first position. Next autumn I took up piano. Czerny exercises (Chopin without sex, Brahms with a bad conscience) every October from then on.

  September at seven, the cyclic return: government-instituted torture of youth peculiar to. Western Nations. Spelling bees, closed-circuit broadcasts of space shots, oral reports, experimental alphabets, new math. At sixteen: the sweet fumblings of first sex under the pines in the dark, on a mat of needles, discovery without texts, transgressing the papal demarcation of his parts and mine. Today, years later: too late to let the season linger any longer. By thirty, autumn urgency should have run its course. The time of year for setting out, as if all summer had been only a holding pattern. The thrill of Directory Assistance, adrenaline of a toll call.

  The electrostatics of wool and cold fronts, the smell of earthworms across the sidewalk, the aroma of retreat in the rain, nervous shift in the permafrost—scent of late September sets me loose. I can smell it in the center of Times Square, at Chambers Street, Rockefeller Center, uptown, all the way over the Hudson and west into the prairies where I learned it. The smell of that private, quiet secret I always had: the neighborhood getting ready for night. Night that might bring anything. Crisp, almost here: can’t be far off, can’t be long.