The Gold Bug Variations

by Richard Powers

  Ressler pops the clutch for a moment before he can locate his deep sentence structures. He begins talking about Tooney and the tornadoes, the likely scenarios accounting for his absence. Paralleling in rough analogy the series turning electrical current into magnet pulse into paper motion into air wave into earbone disturbance into neural network into Brahms, his words of coded comfort drive Evie’s muscles into slack acceptance. When he runs out of explication, he goes on filling up empty space. He talks about how essential Blake’s sensibilities are to Cyfer, his lucid, first-rate spoiling of half-baked ideas. Tooney is the one person liked by everyone on the team. Eva acknowledges this praise with a muffled sigh. Ressler goes on, explaining how Cyfer has squared off against the coding problem, just what difficulties still lie between them and a map of the nucleotide grammar. As the details are lost on her and therefore safe, he lays out the theory of an in vitro solution just weeks away from gelling: submit the simplest imaginable message to the coding mechanism, and see what the enciphered text looks like. Crack the system by standing over the encoder’s shoulder.

  He stops, struck by the beauty of the thing he touches. His hands keep working, rubbing warmth into Eva in ways they would not dare with the other woman now. Eva has lost her agitation. He can stop the invented monologue. But for this perfect audience, asleep, unable to hear, he recites, “I’m in love with a colleague of your husband’s. She’s as married as you are. Nothing to do about it. No point.” He checks each mark off, brutally succinct, but he stops short of the worst: She is a locking template I cannot shake.

  He wakes up early to the sound of someone letting himself in. He watches fuzzily as Tooney Blake enters and sits opposite Ressler and still-sleeping Eva. “She was cold and just fell asleep here. Your daughter is in the next room.” Tooney fakes a suspicious look, speaking volumes, knowing that Ressler is already hopelessly compromised. Blake does not wake his wife, but only sits, staring disconcertedly through things rather than at them. Stuart asks if everything is all right.

  “Fine,” Blake answers, distracted tone contradicting him. The monosyllable rouses his wife, who in sleepy euphoria attaches herself to her mate. She rises up radiant, blinking, without a hint of question to her. The night’s anxiety needs no other payment: they’ve weathered the worst, already more than repaired. When the embrace settles, the space of reprieve gives place to the collective need for postmorteming. Something Blake needs to announce, a chance locution that threatens to change his life. He has this aura about him, difficult to miss. Blake grabs his wife by her shoulders, about to launch into There was a ship …. “Honey,” he says, “something’s happened.”

  At the moment that the Civil Defense horns began their Gabrieli, he was across town, in the stacks. “Somebody has the whole microbiology library out on loan,” he growls at Ressler, casting accusing glances about the periodical-strewn floor. “When the alarm went off, I figured I was already in as good a place as any other; no point going from one designated shelter to another. So I went down to Deck One, instinctively sought out the subterranean. I’d just gotten into a cozy study carrel when the power went out. Pitch-black, surrounded by that maze of shelves. I couldn’t move without banging up against the 120s. I kept thinking, ‘If this is the end, at least I’m surrounded by books.’

  “After a long time, with a lot to think about, I tried to work my way to a stairwell. I found one at last, and after some trouble adjusting to the steps, I hauled myself up to the deck at ground level. Light coming in from the street. Cars shuttling. Life as normal, except for a few vanished trees. I groped along the aisles, doing my Theseus bit, keeping my right hand on the wall. I found the entrance and yanked the door. It wouldn’t budge. Locked in. I heard the all clear go off downtown. I waited patiently in the dark, convinced that if I sat still long enough, something would happen. Sure enough, forty minutes later, the lights flooded on. When my eyes adjusted, I went to the emergency phone on Deck Five. The thing was as dead as a mayfly on day two. The lines must have come down in the storm.”

  Eva giggles, the low, jittery laugh of relief. “Oh Toon-ey! Locked in the stacks overnight! You must be a wreck.”

  “Strangely enough, I’ve never felt better in my life. They’d have to install vending machines before I’d agree to move back in on a long-term lease. But I’ve never spent a more important night.” A comical whimper from his wife forces him to append, “Honeymoon excepted, sweet.”

  He lapses again into amazed gazes at various objects about the room until Ressler clears his throat. Tooney wraps his wife tighter and continues, “Realizing I was stuck awhile, I began to see the place differently. The stacks had always been a purely functional means to an end. But now, I lived there. A long night ahead, and the third-biggest collection in the country to pass it in. It occurred to me just what the place contained. Millions of volumes. The figure, which has always struck me as impressive, now became staggeringly real. At first, I got a chuckle going around looking up everything I’ve ever published. Then I began to track down every published reference about me.

  “It slowly dawned on me that everything Ulrich, Botkin, or Woyty will leave behind is locked up in those shelves—their best insights, the record of how that trace spread or failed to catch hold. All the noise any of us has made in this world. I pulled our friend here’s dissertation. I independently confirmed that he graduated summa cum laude.” He gives Stuart a cuff. “After a while, the game of deciding which parts of each of us will live began to grow thin. It was after midnight, and I hadn’t even gotten off that deck, let alone scratched a fraction of it. I had ten levels to play on, without the slightest plan of attack.

  “You wouldn’t believe the substance of that collection. A book-length study tracing a century and a half of disease among a single tribe on Mozambique. A thirteen-volume log of an 1848 botanical survey in the South Pacific. Photo cavalcades to performing hand surgery. An experimental account of chimps addicted to painting, whose work declined as soon as they began getting rewards for it. And I hadn’t even gotten out of Biology yet.

  “The words spread in all directions, an endless, continuous thread. I could jump in anywhere. Goethe. Glosses on the Koran. How-to dog sledding. Crackpot theories about ancient supercontinents. Accounts of Marian Anderson singing the national anthem at the Lincoln Memorial, because the DAR wouldn’t let her sing it inside. Watercolors of Pemaquid Point by assorted artists. I lost twenty minutes to an article about whether or not Clara Bow had really slept with the entire UCLA offensive line.”

  Blake falls silent, preoccupied, sliding down the early slope of a syndrome that could drop off as suddenly as the continental shelf. Ressler tries for casual silliness. “We need to rush you to Info Detox, Tooney?”

  Blake laughs, but nominally. “It’s the world’s damn DNA in there. Not to trivialize tornadoes, but suppose yesterday had been something more … extreme. How many died?”

  “At last report, ten.”

  “Kick that figure up a few exponents. If worst-case scenario comes down to worst, there’s enough information in the stacks right now to rebuild everything we have, within a narrow tolerance, from scratch.”

  “Provided the survivors would want to do something so ill-considered,” Ressler counters.

  “I’m serious,” Blake insists.

  “I am too.”

  Blake stands and begins to pace. Margaret waddles out of bed from the next room, welcomes her father back from missing personhood with a nonchalant kiss, and curls up against her mom. Eva sits at attention, not quite knowing what’s going on. Nor do any of them. “How much of that information do I—any of us—actually have a handle on?” Blake pauses, the question more than hypothetical.

  To get the man to go on, Ressler answers, “Almost none.”

  “My God, we’re reaching the point where we’re stockpiling more information than we can manage.”

  “That’s what indices are for,” Ressler interrupts, this time to slow his friend down.

 
“But we’re racing to the day when even indices won’t help. We’re outstripping even the Index of Indices. New discovery daily, and we can’t even find the damn thing by this time next week. Go spend a night in the stacks. We’re committed to nothing less than a point-for-point transcript of everything there is. Only one problem: the concordance is harder to use than the book. We’ll live to see the day when retrieving from the catalog becomes more difficult than extracting it from the world that catalog condenses. Book and lab research will pass one another in the drifting continents of print.”

  “What are you suggesting?” Ressler asks. “It seems a bit late in the day to stop accumulating.”

  “No! We can’t afford to stop. We’ve got to keep on top of the stockpile. Here we are, digging in the dirt, turning up shards, millions of shards, more than anyone expected to find. But nobody knows what the shattered vase they all came from looks like. Whether it’s a single vase, or even a vase at all. What we need is not more shards. We need to accumulate something else altogether. Something much wider.”

  Ressler doesn’t follow this last leap and says as much.

  “Look,” Blake challenges. “Take our own field. Blown wide open lately. Which do you think will be more complex: a complete, functional description of human physiology, or a complete, functional description of the hereditary blueprint?”

  Ressler considers the number, weight, and function of the purposive proteins in a working body—the countless, discriminating, if-then, shape-manipulating, process-controlling, feedback-sensitive, integrated programs composing the complete organism. As in the old Von Neumann joke, he sees at long last that the answer is obvious. “Physiology is vastly more complex.”

  “But the more complex is contained in the less complex, right? We believe in the simplicity of generating principles.”

  Some equivocation, some sleight of hand here. Can genetics really be said to contain all physiology in embryo? Yet Ressler concedes Blake’s central point, Poe’s point, in that volume buried in the 800s. Poe’s cryptanalyst needed three things to turn the hopeless gold-bug noise back into readable knowledge: context, intention, and appropriate reference. A night of information science has forced Tooney to confront the full width of that triplet. “Wife,” Blake says, grabbing his matched half. “Oh, Eva! I’m sorry. Something’s happened to me.” This all ought to be occurring elsewhere—anywhere but Ressler’s living room. Eva’s features are smothered in wonder. She touches her husband’s head, coaxing him into relaxing the cords in his neck. “It’s crazy,” he repeats.

  “No it’s not,” she says, combing him.

  “Friend.” Blake smiles helplessly at his wife. “I didn’t plan this.” Eva smiles broadly: nothing you could possibly do will upend our life. “I may,” Blake says, laughing at her unconditional trust, swinging his head sideways in disbelief, “I may have to resign from the faculty.”

  Evie coddles him. In a very bad John Wayne, she says, “A man’s gotta do …”

  Ressler refuses to believe the exchange. “Quit the team? To do what? Where would you go?”

  “Back to school,” Eva says, almost hissing. Protecting her husband from this outsider when he is down.

  It’s impossible. “You can’t. What about your child?”

  “Who’s a child?” Margaret demands.

  Blake mistakes him. “My child? She’s in school already.”

  “How will you live?”

  “There’s always the Civil Service,” Eva volunteers.

  “Tooney,” Ressler says, “you’ve had a strange night.”

  Blake just laughs. “No doubt about that.”

  Anger fills Ressler at his friend’s uncharacteristic leave from realism. “What will you study?”

  Blake shrugs: the discipline hasn’t been invented yet. “Look, Stuart. How can I pretend to do science, take apart the mechanism, inventory all the particulars, when I haven’t even a rough feel for the sum? I haven’t even dusted the spines of a fraction of the stuff they have shelved in there.”

  “And you never will.”

  “True. But I wouldn’t mind a rough take on the big picture. A life of educated guesses, and I haven’t even a clue what we’re guessing at.”

  Thus the Blakes commit themselves, overnight, to hopeless generalism. They depart, Tooney shaking Ressler’s hand warmly, Evie kissing him, thanking him for keeping her alive last night. After they leave, Ressler replays the man’s mad argument, but can find no hook to snag him. He circles back on Blake’s point: the complex can be contained in the simple. Push past the deterring convolutions—too varied to describe—and get to their underpinnings. Grammar must be simpler than the uncatchable wealth of particular sentences. He wants to run over to K-53-A, throw himself around the man’s neck. He has never been more in need of his teammate’s skills. Never more in need of his neighbor himself—his solid, dispelling humor. But Tooney is gone already. Intractable.

  Over the following days, as it becomes clear that Blake really means to depart, Ressler gambles everything. He lays out for Tooney the seminal germ he has stumbled on. The beauty of the green idea sparks Blake’s scientific residue. His eyes light up at the walkthrough. He grabs his young colleague’s upper arms, lifts him bodily into the air. “You can do it.” But the next moment he returns to his new calm, encourages the kid more soberly, and again declines to stay.

  Blake doesn’t even wait for term’s end. He leaves in midweek, departs from Stadium Terrace, forever jumps the tenure track. He asks Ressler to take over his classes; “Mostly a matter of administering finals.” They leave him with a dozen pieces of furniture. “Another long-term loan.” They give him a forwarding address—Seattle, Eva’s mother’s. Eva kisses him courageously goodbye, on the lips, wet with hypotheticals. Tooney shakes his shoulders. “After boning up, I might come back to the lab in good faith someday.”

  When it comes to saying goodbye to the child, Ressler can take it no longer. He may see her again in this life, but never again like this. Process will have gotten her. The pilgrim soul will be lost in adulthood. He tries to say, “Got any poems, for the road?” but cannot get it out. Margaret tugs at his shirt cuff, spins on one heel, and disappears, giggling. He will die without raising a child.

  SCRIPT

  Who knows how long his envelope has been there. I haven’t checked the box since Thanksgiving. I’d given up looking, achieved a degree of self-sufficiency. My only bottle-messages lately are from the power company. Checking for mail was once my day’s high-water mark. But recently I’ve taken to clearing out the box only often enough to keep the utilities running. Suddenly this: the message I’d written off. A simple letter wouldn’t have been enough. It’s a longhand manuscript. I knew instantly it was from him: his runic glyphs. The packet carried the same exotic monarch as his card, pasted all over with stickers pronouncing “Per Luchtpost.” Why now, when I’d almost edited him?

  I tore open the packet, knowing the weapon was loaded. I was a wreck from the first rambling paragraph. Even now, twice through the text, my organs scrape like tectonic plates. The sprawling poetics are unmistakable Todd. But someone else is in there too, someone I’ve never met. A dozen minutely, perfectly hand-lettered pages, both sides, and I still can’t tell where he is. That landscape: the place he used to map out for me in whispers. But somewhere else too, a globe away. “Why have we had to keep apart this year?” “Not that I can hope to ask you ….” Who is this? A male I once knew, stripping at a safe distance?

  Plaintive Baedeker gossip, swapped cathedral stones, death notices. Frank on the ropes. Writer’s block, foreign language, death of a classmate, the panels themselves after years of reproductions: tempera homesickness for the world. I make myself immune to his contents. But two paragraphs in and I hear him confessing something I never realized. He’d been on the ropes from the moment I met him. Easy, sociable, pelted with phone calls from friends who couldn’t imagine why he gave them the slip, locked up on the night shift, satisfied with the company of
a failed scientist and a failing librarian. This luchtpost packet confesses why he wanted Ressler’s etiology, the dossier on that disease. A year’s rupture; anonymity in Europe, oblique petition for help, lost in moratorium. Out of character at last: please write me back.

  Something’s out of joint. The cheery postcard—Flemish scene ported from Boston back to Flanders—is dated July 6, five months before this letter. He writes in the card that he’s well along in Dutch. But the letter reports novice’s difficulties, unlikely for someone of Todd’s polyglot perversity. After a half a year, he still cannot mention Ressler’s death, or give the man the dignity of past tense. Alone, unchecked, unseconded, writing me, dragging me through all his sweet, unreliable, poorly timed declarations of maybe love. God free me from this man.

  Todd had a way of darting his eyes around as if the earth were the last thing he expected to see. I have forgotten that astonished tone, forgotten everything about him. He’s back, wanted or not. But another sender here too, one I wouldn’t know from a Dürer Adam. He is in trouble, needs me to write. As if a letter, even now, might serve as saving bedtime story.

  THE QUESTION BOARD

  Q:How often do questions appear here that you can’t solve?

  H.M., 8/11/81

  A:More often than we’d like. According to a survey of American libraries, a third of questions to reference departments go unanswered. Ours weighs in a little under the national average, although we have no firm numbers.

  J. O’D., 8/11/81

  “What you need,” Todd whispered into my ear, gazing over my shoulder as I typed, letting his hand loop dangerously over my ribs toward my breast, “is to copy the post office. A Dead Question Department.” He lifted my hair and moistened the back of my neck. “Imagine: Question Purgatory. A smoky room full of three-by-fives, each unsolvable.”