The Gold Bug Variations

by Richard Powers

  Still, in Herri’s brief flourishing, even an archaic skill provided vicarious thrill, a whiff of the spark that charged the old atmosphere. The printed word was suddenly everywhere, proliferate, vital, and at last affordable. Even art seemed sufficient, rich beyond imagining. New perspectives filtered up from Italy. Genres opened; vistas grew ambitious. Once over the threshold, it would never again be enough just to match the effect of the previous generation. All the attention once lavished on the past was now requisitioned by the unrealized future.

  But possibility is only born in a blaze. Dross must be burnt off. The doors at Wittenberg got the stigmata, and there was no turning back. Art, once healing, was enlisted in the longer war. Painting, if bolder than ever, was no longer an authority on the question it had posed since the first cave scratchings: How did I come to be trapped here on earth, at the mercy of strangers? For a long time, pigment had given the answers. Now panelists were as bewildered as anyone.

  Jan-o, if it weren’t for the collector’s thrill—the chance to sample the mythical auras of Ghent and Delft, cityscapes whose views I have wasted my life studying at second hand—I could not keep slogging pointlessly. Every day, between the novelty of new vocabulary and the art treasure map, I am consumed with the whole debacle, how badly I abused us. I miss you intensely, in my sleep. I miss the professor. I need to talk—one more late evening with the two of you. Why have we had to keep apart this year? Tell me exactly: what was it we tried to pull off? Oh, I know the motive, the virtue we made of necessity. I’ve kept the clippings, the accounts of how we walked away scot-free from the corporate mauling we had coming. But I’ve seemed to walk away with nothing except the unmistakable sound of missed calling.

  Me and my Antwerp master: no better response to looming contemporarity than to set up on a distant hill and catch the conflagration in oils. While his fellow guild members inhaled the whiff of combustion, broadening their palettes, taking on the awful, widening world, Herri staked out a modest line of sight, reworked the Wallonia horizon—the same three-star valleys I traveled yesterday—until it became a jagged, escapist kingdom, more seductive because of the lazy threat hanging perennially about it. Perhaps he was the first modern, after all.

  So it is with me: guiltless, evasive sightseeing. I take the cathedral tours, sketch in galleries until the guards chase me out, rediscover the tissue of simile that passes for linguistics, learn enough Flemish figures of speech to pore over obscure, outdated books: waste, in short, whatever gifts I might otherwise have staked against the ascendancy of nonsense. Oh, I’ve turned up my share of objective fact. I’ve even indulged in small doses of induction. But data spell out so blessedly little about the man that I am free to spend my days in speculation. The principal attraction in choosing Bles in the first place. His panels were manageable; I hoped to knock out a quick study, earn the degree in two years. At the time, it struck me as courageous, to turn my back on the present—to proclaim, in those faraway mellifluous blues of a milky, indifferent sky, an anodyne for current event, a technique, if not astonishing, at least caressing, resonant enough to salve without shame.

  I write you, seated at a desk by a medieval stone casement, breaking from a paragraph to stare out on an enclosing countryside that, in its essence, Herri himself once studied. The place I stay at tonight is a town like any other: a tuck-pointed, half-timbered, bacon-stripped, step-gabled Flemish village, circa 1500. It nestles over an expanse of hills like a case of cowpox. The view is succinct, following the familiar formula developed by Bles’s predecessors: foreground in brown, submerged sea-green middlescape, and background of serene mineral-and-linseed blue, wandering out of the available frame and off the edge of the visible spectrum. A lily pond of slate shingles and mansards, the ideal place to produce a minor student piece about a minor genre painter specializing in minor fires.

  Easy to imagine him looking out the same window, breaking the scene into constituent geometries. He still searches for the gnostic equivalence that will turn the tricks of the painter’s toolbox, the daub-formulas for producing a bird, tree, or frightened stag into a vessel able to unleash, from the dark cave of mind, the animate Original. Science is still in infancy— unweaned from vital essences—but already urging the skepticism of measurement onto the senses. Paint enjoys its last few years in the lost kingdom of parable before its exile. Years when the eye for the last time, alarmed by the discovery of what actually lies outside the window, still has half a retina full of the afterimage of preexistent places.

  Bles’s era is the last to hope that even a journeyman drafter might assemble, from egg, oil, and slats of hardwood, a graphic equivalent of essence erupting in halftones. Painting, for the last time, is not a process of application but of stripping off, revealing underpainted layers that had been covered, steaming the glaze from between the eye and the form-doused world. Painting and science, for a brief moment before Bles’s last serene panel, are after the same key: that book—tucked away in the stacks of a secondhand vendor the way a master of the next generation will tuck a nativity in a hidden village corner—that will prove to be, under its binding, the forgotten alchemist’s almanac condensing, in one pass of the alphabet, the whole roll of landscape, the view from the lancet.

  I trace him, embroidering the sketchy sources, in his pursuit of this index to seeing. I see him, up before six for perfunctory matins, waiting the descent of journeyman’s grace. After a spartan breakfast, he sets to work in suggestive silence. There is no time like the early day for observation. He works alone, in the middle of this Brabant scene, out of reach of easy communication, so no man can say exactly what, if anything, he accomplishes.

  His day’s big meal comes on the stroke of eleven: fish and fowl, sauce, fruit, nuts, fresh bread to stave craving. After this heroic undertaking, he naps, to release dreams of the unity of all living things. He wakes, spends what remains of afternoon (marked out in the intervals of new mechanical clocks) in repetitive labor, waiting for the visual trick that might unlock the safebox. Lost to work until dinner, revising and undoing the morning’s base. Now, if ever, with a few scrapes of the palette knife, he might turn a competent genre piece into dangerous prediction, the living syllable that pierces opaque nature.

  Dinner is light, as light as breakfast—modest indulgences at day’s ends, falling away from the midday feast in a curve that science will formulate three centuries later. There follows the pursuit of women by night, alluring, unattainable shapes in stone passages, shadowy countenances rendering each shiveringly desirable. He enchants these midnight nuns with a thousand verbal inventions, seductions ranging from blunt frontals to coy flanking maneuvers. None works so well as the invitation to sit for a portrait, a misrepresentation as blatant as any, since he has long sworn off studies of the face, too important a subject for his own passing competence.

  Those nights when he fails to procure he is left alone, recalling that this is how he likes best to end days, in the tallow-glow of winter. Waking the next morning to the blessings of solitude, he throws himself again into the schedule of early production, midday gorging, afternoon nap. And further evenings in pursuit of that other whom he has never found, who exists only and precisely nowhere.

  He follows this invariant routine for a year or three. But at the instant when habit becomes inhibiting, he upends his carefully cultivated schedule, reneges on debts, chases off his few friends, sends them away berated. He liquidates stock, leaves his rent in arrears, and packs off to another town, another time, taking nothing but his private formulae and all the panels he can carry. He chooses a direction and begins walking. When he grows hungry, he stops and sets up shop. He puts his head down to work, eat, nap, describe this new landscape, find out its fires, rousing himself from routine only when awakened by a surprise ambush of forgotten fields from another century.

  He flourishes before an ornate gate unequaled in history. A few years after Gutenberg, a few before Shakespeare, unrepeatable era of giants: da Vinci, Erasmus, Michelange
lo, Rabelais. All a fellow condemned to marginalia can do to avoid the sink of afternoon is turn back to the morning’s unfinished panel, betray no barometer of hope except what eye can observe, hand mirror.

  This, the implicit advice of his paintings, is what I search for in his biography. But a paragraph into exegesis and I gaze again out of this stone casement in the medieval attic I have sublet. On second glance, the countryside is overhauled. All vestige of Brabantine gothic dissolves, and I am in another small town, just as sleepy. The window fills with a different formula for depicting houses, churches, the tucked-away, unobserved miracle. Bles becomes, say, Thomas Hart Benton. The era of infant exploration, its flirtation with parachutes, cadaver dissections, and the sextant gives way to the International Geophysical Year, scientific discovery in full flower, the year of my birth. The moment when that centuries-long investigation, begun on Bles’s doorstep, converges on a complete theory—the revelation that experiment has spent four centuries preparing for.

  Dropped into this alien landscape of block apartments swept by overhead satellites, my journeyman is forced to abandon painting. He takes up the vocation of the times—cashes in palette for vernier gauge. He has no choice but to go on working at the same scene, his eye still after the underlying mechanism that infuses life with its surprising form. Work remains a question of catching, in one sweep, the quiet neighborhood crisis that knowledge always circumscribes. The world by mid-twentieth century has expanded unprecedentedly toward that watershed moment when it will comprise nothing except measure. Met de Bles, symbol depictor, takes up a profession still obsessed with eavesdropping on the world’s interior monologue, but wildly enlarged in power of material manipulation, closing in on the symbol table itself.

  You see, I start with every intention of cranking out a chapter of Bles’s bio, but after a few subordinate clauses, find myself deep in Ressler’s. Obsessed, reticent, demure, brilliant, intense, driven, asocial, truculent, lonely, vulnerable, abandoned: the professor, for all we got from him, remains a thesaurus of contradictions. Ressler, at my age, lived for one thing only. To unravel the complexities of personality at its source. Being alive is a one-shot affair: a window, small, blurred, but miraculously permitting a cramped, flattened, two-dimensional, distorted view of the terrain.

  Before the perverse thing closed for good, the professor wanted to find the first landfall of the full map, the rule that dictates his generative unfolding. To name, translate his own breathing, his own infolded instinct for love from out of the formal language of chemistry. He is the one I want to flesh out. Why did he let us so far into his life, only to hold us at arms’ length? Nature’s decoder, who thought that if he could just get to the generating tape, say what “A” meant, then “AT,” then “ATG,” he would sniff the source, the panel’s panel, and could then let the window close peacefully over him. But at bottom, laid bare, solved, the tape read only, “Obsessed, reticent, demure, brilliant, intense, driven, asocial, truculent, lonely, vulnerable, abandoned.” The old thesaurus.

  Being in the same room as Ressler, just sitting with him in silence, was like filling my lungs with the air of galleries. The chamois cloth of his eye sockets, those pressed seersucker suits no one has worn for twenty years emitted unfinished labwork, interrupted notebooks, glimpses under the electron microscope rendering the familiar mechanics of life alien, less survivable, more unlikely than any oil. I know more about Bles than about the man we sat with.

  Think what it must have felt like, to be in your twenties, to rip out of yourself in cerebral caesarean the formulation of an idea two thousand years old. A confirmation so simple, so unexpectedly whole that the only available response was militant, head-bowed humility. Then think the unthinkable. At the moment of confirmation, when the connection screams into proximity, you stumble onto another discovery, one that will disperse without trace the instant you formulate it: cracking the program does not mean exemption from having to follow it.

  Because Ressler too erased himself from the guild records, I am free to elaborate. Even as he rushes the unavoidable outcome, he gives in to the trivial joy of being twenty-five, more soaringly ill-considered. He can do nothing but savor, as long as possible, that temporary, timid kindness of doomed courtship. What exactly, at this watershed, does she seem to him? She manages to look beatific without being ludicrous. She commits to precious little on the surface. She limps through labwork, by turns bright, sultry, competent, demure, vivacious, dumb. Joanne Woodward’s contemporary Oscar performance as a multiple personality has nothing on this woman. Her body’s message alters itself at its base: in her step, arrogantly light, she conveys, over the general noise of the lab, the campus, the apocalyptic meander of 1957, that all manner of things will be well, now and in the enzyme.

  For his part, he sinks to a parody of reconciled Goodwill. The continued explosion of American Vanguards, the detonation of Soviet nuclear weapons in the Arctic—the whole market of current events fails to flap him. This vestigial, infant happiness is a chemical sluicegate flushing him with unbuffered ions; a thickness in the winter air, his youth triggered by irresistible stimulus—the mechanism he had hoped to overcome by translating.

  Admission discounts nothing. The moment flushes him. He feels the rush, no matter what the equation. He thinks of her all day, wants nothing more reprehensible than to spread over her surface like a roosting flock. He willingly gives her every chance to waylay him, to wreck him for what he is after. If the worst should turn out true, the contemptible clarity of his love will redeem everything. The full force of luteinized want—his body conversing with its own attraction—leaves him more laughable perhaps, but no worse off than others, who must also dodge missiles, fend off conflagrations, name the crisis of knowledge. No worse off for his petty attempts at—call it care. Under the circumstances, isn’t even care born in sexual aggression sufficient and worth savoring?

  Remember the night when we confronted him point-blank with the dossier you’d assembled—every mention of him ever to appear in print? Confirm me: his shoulders slumped imperceptibly, he looked off and cleared his throat, willing to answer anything, but only this once. Remember how he shrugged, a stream of sympathy, invention without cleverness? The slight catch snagging his words wrung all our ingenuity out of me, the pride of authorship I’d felt in his friendship. The valence of the fellow we’d been trying to ascertain became real. Ressler’s fingers gripped a card deck, some pointless data-processing task he was about to shove into the hopper. His knuckles turned transparent; his veins and cartilage were the color of an oil-slicked puddle. A thousand cells in that hand split and replicated in the time it took us to speak again.

  He’d set out to uncover the principle uniting all animate matter and discovered something simpler instead. Ear to the clicking telegraph key, to the message coming across the wire, the sequence he heard the answer to “What hath God wrought?” was “Who’s asking?” Lost to science the moment he cannot put into words, into chromosome strings, why he loves this woman. Reductionism supplies no reason except her clothes, random, mismatched, pastel; her graceful gawkishness between the legs; the absolute lightness of her limbs moving against gravity in all directions at once; her globed cheeks; her wide, scared child-eyes; her visits, quick and brief as accident. No specific part but gives her an uncaring, lissome urgency, wholly beautiful because wholly ephemeral. He is condemned to loss, from that day forward, never quite able to return to the text he had been seeking, for no reason except that she has made him realize, at cell level, that the only message worth receiving will be intercepted, garbled, lost in translation.

  He must have seen this before, this slipping off, recalled it from the histories, even as indifference came over him. I’m sure of it. He felt the slow unfolding, long before he showed any sign. He had all the motive in the world to keep from disappearing: the experimental method, all but resting in his hands, a trick for reading the banished original. All the magazines predicted results. Couldn’t he have lasted anot
her year?

  But he knew the work would get done whatever happened to him. If he did nothing, shut down his tabulations, spoke not another word of his insights, any of countless, equally talented researchers would have his method in a year or two. His year produced a focus of scientific talent unparalleled since Herri’s. An all-out marshaling of forces cutting across disciplines had already begun that grade-school recruiting process that would brush the two of us. Sputnik wasn’t the catalyst, for my money. His 1957 was just the first of a stream of IGYs.

  Before we said goodbye, the night we took our electronically permanent step, he reprised for me in a few, condensed measures his own bitter disappearance. Before we jimmied the packs, he thought it only fair to pass on to me details I might be able to use. “What we need,” he told me, “is the code for the synthesis of the forgiveness enzyme. Self-forgiveness. Forgiveness for having wanted what we are born wanting.”

  Not that I can now hope to ask you for it, after everything, any more than Herri can ask me to forgive him for not being Van Eyck. He and I were born wanting the same thing, and neither of us will ever come close to it. We will never make an Arnolfini Wedding or a Hunters Homeward in Snow. Herri sees, through the stone casement, that he will be forgotten, demoted to shadowy myth, despite his sole biographer. And with his unrealized landscapes will go that compulsion to imitate, to name the crisis lingering over the indifferent town.

  It has become night as I write. Soft chiarascuro transforms the casement view into interior: has any painter ever made such a composition? The graveyard shift in an airplane hangar full of infernal calculating machines and peripherals. The machines themselves are as serene as Titians. But underneath the skin seethes a public chaos of crowds, a roll call crammed with as many encapsulations of misery as were ever wedged into any last judgment. The foreground is still blue, merging into a sea-green midrange nativity. But the background now takes its tones from the red of ambulance lights. About suffering, they were never wrong, the Old Masters. Even the minor ones. Even met de Bles, or Blesse. With the blaze. Or wound. You see I am thrown in over my head, asked to judge this contest between observation and invention. All I can concentrate on long enough to write about is those overlookable almosts in his aborted landscapes. I wait by windows, half-maker of the range of creation I’m supposed to describe.