The Gold Bug Variations

by Richard Powers

  PUTTING ONE’S HANDS THROUGH THE PANE

  Unbelievable: I can write him back at last. What I’ve ached to do for months, poring over atlases for clues, rehearsing the wording I’d use when given a place to reach him. Only now, I can’t write the first clause. My block is worse than his: I can’t even get off a salutation without seizing.

  Another two readings and I still can’t tell what’s wrong. Indifference would feel simpler, would have no shakes. I’ve never written to him in my life. How can I start now, after everything? How could I begin telling him of my months reading a science I haven’t any grounding in, depleting my savings, mourning the death he doesn’t mention? I can’t begin to concentrate on Dear Franklin until I’ve extricated myself from Dear Dr. Ressler. All I can do with his letter is add it to the evidence to be sifted. I can write only the same piece I’ve been working on for months. Why have we stayed apart all this time? Enzymes, friend.

  I have only my work to answer him. The content of the coding problem compels me, twenty-five years after the facts. Discovery is a dependence that addiction only imitates. Engineered into my sequence, selected for obvious survival value, is a craving to lift the backdrop, to integrate the evidence, to mimic the tune so closely I can at last get through the notes. To force my hands through, touch the habitat. Assemble it. Ressler’s was the desire behind all research: the pull of something simpler and stranger than imagined, lying within arm’s length. Curiosity must, like every built-in desire, be written somewhere in the organism it wants to discover. Ressler looked for the fundamental lexicon in primitives. Only the results of the lookup table itself can explain why he was hooked on breaking it, on getting to the name of experimental desire.

  Can anything as composite as curiosity be revealed by a set of equivalences, a molecular cipher wheel? Nothing in the chemistry of nucleic acid gives the first hint of the creature enclosing it. The sequence of base pairs in the molecule, their disorderly pattern, provides the edge needed to record a message. But the sequences themselves are not yet vernacular, but a shorthand. An arbitrary string CGAGGACCGACG, without a translator’s dictionary, is gibberish. The lookup table supplies that dictionary; without semantic meaning itself, it lends the first suggestion of sense to unreadable data.

  The translation Ressler worked on is a one-for-one, simple substitution. My arbitrary string, pressed through the table, maps to a single protein: arginine-glycine-proline-threonine … Transliteration to aminos alone seems to move me no nearer the evolution of heart, chest, hands, eyes— those devices against the caprice of environment. Slavish substitution appears no more helpful in finishing my triple bridge than those primitive DOD translators Ressler once tapped us into. One night, taking us on a tour through the vast MOL on-line network, he tapped into a machine translation program. He selected “French” for target language and typed in the string “I am left behind.” We shouldn’t have been playing with the restricted program at all, but that didn’t keep Todd and me from hanging on his every keystroke. The algorithm churned away on a mighty effort of pattern matching and produced “Je suis gauche derrière.” He hooked up two of these software Berlitz’s back to back, feeding English-to-French back into its reciprocal. “Out of sight, out of mind” returned to source language as “blind lunatic.”

  All I’ve done with codon translation is rename the elements I started with. ACG becomes threonine; I’ve just swapped chemical terms. And yet, the map is never quite the place, nor the place as navigable as its image. It has taken me months to see that the coding problem is just the start of the cryptography. If that were the extent of inheritance, the lookup table would produce only tautological definitions. The hundreds of base pairs in a gene, broken into triplet codons and fed through the decoder, would produce the telegram “Please refer to original dots and dashes.”

  All these ciphers mean nothing until I find the difference created in translation. The table only softens the inscrutable script, shapes the clay into executable words. Cracking the code is just the tip of the Goldberg. The lookup list of simple equivalences requires me to learn how to interpret, implement the text that comes out of it. For data to grow, respond, rise up and walk I must look at the secondary structures locked in the life molecule. I want a deeper definition from the string—its isomorphs of hope, ache, posted desire.

  The bouillabaisse is richer than I’ve guessed. The punched tape running along the inner seam of the helix is much more than a repository of enzyme stencils. It packs itself with regulators, suppressors, promoters, case-statements, if-thens. Genes coding for messengers, readers, and decoders of genes. Genes to copy and build the genes’ copiers and builders. Genes that may speed, slow, or reverse their own mutation. The automated factory imbeds a blueprint for its own translation machinery—a glimpse of real invention that knocks me for a loop.

  How, from simple substitution, can this absurd surplus emerge? A gene and its enzyme, while code-equivalent, are worlds apart in function. The decoded string contains more than its original. My mistake has been in thinking of enzymes as simple ropes of twenty-colored beads. Even though this model provides more necklaces than the most scrupulous socialite could wear in an eternity of nights out, my metaphor misses a key point. Each color pattern corresponds to a specific necklace twist. And shape, in stereochemistry, is behavior by another name.

  Protein necklaces are actually closer to wildly tangled wool fuzz. They are strings, but coiled as erratically as Norwegian hair run through a home permanent. (Wool, hair—two prime analogies.) Only, the twists that the fiber balls up into are rigid, fixed by the sequence of the aminos. I feel my first spark: the growing polypeptide—arginine, glycine, proline—folds up in a manner determined by the amino sequence coded for in the synthesizing gene. The resulting three-dimensional globule carries spatial information; a landscape of grottos, peaks, and plains gives the enzyme catalytic ability—the power to bring about reactions that otherwise might not have taken place.

  Even if the strand is stretched, it will spontaneously reform to the coiled arrangement unique to its linear sequence. This complex but ordained shape turns the enzyme into a cookie cutter, machine tool, a shoehorn introducing big foot into recalcitrant slipper. Smaller molecules align with spots on the enzyme landscape where they precisely fit. Held in place, they are brought together to react with another similar squatter. Each uniquely shaped enzyme is expert at bringing about a particular reaction. The human genome codes for countless enzymes, each a chemical command, a potential engine capable of producing a specific chemical event.

  DNA carries just part of the instructions for these purposive, molecular machines. The actual welding—go straight a fraction of a micron; make a hard turn, 137 degrees in plane X, north-by-northwest—depends on physics. The shape an enzyme takes, and therefore its function, results from the laws governing atoms in space. To manufacture breathing, searching, speaking, rule-defying life from out of constrained matter requires no transcendence. Every level of the hierarchy arises from the previous, without any need to change the rules or call in outside assistance. Yes, some sleight of hand: a knit sock is just a series of knots, a computer just switches, a haunting tune just the intervals that walk it down the scale. But what other way to grasp a thing except as the emergent interplay of parts, themselves emergent from combined performances at lower levels?

  The emergence of function from codon assignments is like that child’s toy: two intermeshed gears with an asymmetrically affixed pen that produces unpredictable designs. The surprise, recursive flowers the toy makes aren’t hinted at in any part of the assembly—not gear, not pen, not the cranking hand. Each of these parts does only what is allowed. The flower lies latent in the aggregate rules of geometry, which know nothing about flowers. In the same way, my most inexplicable high-order ability— understanding things through metaphor, applying the light of likeness to probe the layers of the pyramid—already lies infolded, hidden in the craggy terrain, the hintless indifference of my crumpled-up polype
ptides.

  Solving the lookup table—itself arbitrary—is prerequisite for my locating the particle of purpose, the smallest programmed machine in that regress of programmable machines making up living tissue. In grounding Mendel’s invariant inheritance squarely in molecules, Ressler hoped to position science for a theory of molecular evolution. Protein synthesis would reveal how the destructive anarchy of chance, capable only of wearing the rock away, can carve Chartres. The production of enzymes, each shaping an urge to bring about reactions that would not occur spontaneously, is the first rung up form’s ladder toward free will.

  The catalyzing shape of enzymes is the seam between predetermined atomic interactions and the self-ordering living library. Enzymes are the machines DNA creates and sends out into the cellular factory. They are the factory. The coding problem was, to Ressler’s generation, nothing less than a matter of locating the fundamental message unit behind the biosphere. Just as the innermost in a set of nested Chinese dolls anticipates the shape of the outermost, the way the array of living things bends itself to the environment depends on the ability of chains of amino acids to fold into specific, reaction-promoting molds. Or a step before that: on the way nucleic acid hides the enzyme shape in a helical archive.

  Addictive, naked hunger to reconstitute the real: the freshly scrubbed Ph.D.’s compulsion to locate the lookup table was, by another name, a longing to unfrock things as they are. Life that refused to push all the way down to the evidence was just a costume party. Only by demonstrating beyond doubt how unaided atoms accounted for craving, variety, the accident of being alive could Ressler see what compensation the truth of his own contingency might hold.

  He and I both—desperate to disassemble the table’s mechanism, to show that the cell’s fundamental engines create living purpose and not the other way around. To demonstrate that blind atomic bumping can lead to anything, even sight. Long before love coiled him he felt desire, a catalyst posted from the beginning of the genetic record, bringing the parts of his substrate inexorably together. However differently his life might have unfolded, he could not have long survived the need to refuse surfaces, to come closer than flush. In the sum of their catalyzed reactions, his choir of molecular autonoma sang, Bloody your hands. Get past it. What would it mean to leave this place, really leave it? That is his coding problem. The message I eavesdrop on, still vibrating on the wires.

  The molecular engines—still not all named by the week he died— begin to say who he was at fifty, the work he had yet to do back up the steps of the living hierarchy, here at organism level. His traits, my own, Todd’s, lie tangled in the shape of proteins. But the triumph of biological reductionism, the grounding of living things on molecular necessity, the establishment of chance as the mainspring of change, each successive tier rising seamlessly from the previous, still leaves me something inexplicable at the top: after curiosity, impulse, restlessness—his ability to give it all up.

  My friend possessed deep in the coils of his cell an urge to unite the natural world in one internally consistent model. He hid the compulsion for years. But our showdown, forced on us, revived for a moment his attempt to put hands through the pane, a need always stronger than its decoding. Years after he thought he’d come home from the commute for good he returned to the thick of the search. His last days—and every day I knew him was one of his last—shone with all the surprise of the cybernetic enzyme. After a quarter century he was back, pitting himself against the lookup table. And this time, something more: submitting to it a uniquely landscaped command.

  I HAVE BECOME A STRANGER TO THE WORLD

  In our walking days, I talked to more perfect strangers than I ever had before or since. Todd was intent on single-handedly reviving the custom of greeting people on the street. In the city, this was tantamount to taking one’s own life. But we always got away with it, and I was amazed at how many people greeted back as if old friends. We had long talks about election rigging with news vendors, exchanges over dog disobedience with retirees, leisurely debates about Western history with men in three-piece suits who must have had more important places to be. Once, we were riding the local next to a man whom Todd induced into telling us all about his combat experience in Asia. Giving us the blow-by-blow of his tour of duty, the vet asked Todd suspiciously, “What do you do?” When Franker lied, “Art history,” the man let out his breath. “Good. Can’t hurt me with that.” Todd talked to anyone, on any excuse. Cabbies, police, Englishless immigrants, bank officials, drunks—an endless dialogue with people I’d never have spoken to alone.

  I was now free to see Franklin every hour I wasn’t working. He came by the library, late afternoons before he started his shift. These were my least productive hours of the day; had I not had an excellent track record, I would have been reprimanded. Sometimes, to save my job and to keep him from putting his hands down my shirt where I sat at the Reference Desk, I would send him into the shelves with questions. I remember giving him “Who was Leslie Lynch King, Jr.?” Frank came back after an hour and a half, successfully identifying him as the thirty-eighth president of the U.S. “The Public,” he shook his head angrily, “is a sadist.”

  We met everywhere, and soon had touched one another in as many places. The MOL office was still our haunt of choice. Following the disastrous system crash that cost both men a sleepless week, the machines returned to normal. Outside of island visits by Uncle Jimmy, Annie Martens, and the janitors, we reined in our shamelessness only for Dr. Ressler.

  However genuinely the professor enjoyed our round tables— freewheeling wine-and-cheese talk spiraling to absorb the spread of international terrorism, the limits to sports record-breaking, and the nuances of surviving a certain late-night cashier at the corner convenience store—he seemed as genuinely relieved when conversation ended. More often than not, he wound up, saying, “You two must excuse me. I have to supervise the workings of the North American financial network.” And he would return to the gigabytes, leaving Franker and me alone to escalating experiment.

  We pressed against each other, each day more blatantly, feeling the short fuse evaporate, postponing, restraining the way a bud shimmies under time lapse before falling into flower. Following an evening’s wrestle, he would kiss me goodbye, dipping into my dress, saying he needed to fix my surface in his memory until he could see me again. We played deeply and dangerously. I found a meridian on his shoulders, the mere press of which made his muscles collapse and his eyes roll up. He came by but never stayed over; we were two passengers in a long-haul airport, consulting the array of world capital clocks, each still on his native time zone. My night of romance was his midday.

  One night during lunch break he came to my room carrying a package he’d acquired downstairs just before my landlord’s antique shop closed. I unwrapped the box to find an off-white eighty-year-old linen blouse that must have set him back a month. Along its dorsal edge ran cloth-covered hemisphere buttons the size of lady-bugs, hundreds of them. The high choker owed its origins to Alexandra’s tracheotomy. It rippled with multiple traceries, ruffles under ruffles that, as they could not actually be seen once the blouse was on, could only have been, like those exceptionally skilled adventures in heavy counterpoint, for the express benefit of those privileged to hold the score in front of them.

  “Try it on,” he commanded. I hesitated, but just for pacing. I went to the bedroom, stood in my closet, the mirrored door left conspicuously open, and stripped to my underclothes. Even these I changed for the antique slips and skirts I had collected piece by piece, on account with my landlord. In a few minutes, I was clothed in a soft, lost century. But the effect was not yet done. I sat down at my vanity (another piece rescued from downstairs), pulled my hair up in a storybook pile, and made up lightly, with an eye toward the period. It took some time and extraordinary, wavering patience on both our parts.

  When I stood and walked toward him, I knew we were done for. He’d watched the entire process, standing in the doorway, waiting to undo it
. The clothes I had attended to so carefully shed themselves everywhere. Some stayed on, displaced and uncaring. Everything began to move slowly, underwater. I felt him, felt myself all over, both far away. Minutely mammalian, I conformed to fill every space between myself and this shape pressing against me. I could see the peach inside of his legs and sweated to match his breath condensing against the back of my neck. Strenuously, straining, but expansively, slowly, we worked, astonished to be recovering pneumatics from a manual we were born knowing. And something else to our rocking: an attempt to recall a word on the tips of our tongue. The word was nihil. The word was nearly. I felt his skin stretching, conductant, as smooth, hazel, and aromatic as the taste of food I craved for years but could never identify. My skin.

  I kept waiting for my body to pitch me over those patent falls, the one I’d discovered at thirteen but which, by thirty, I still hadn’t adjusted to. Instead, something unprecedented: as I realized I was invading, being invaded by, this man, that we’d surrendered to the thing we had been circling nervously for months, I was doused by first serum-surge; rather than sharpen to a cutting point, it spread, a thick, coffeed narcotic, into parts of my body I never knew existed. It vacillated, then intensified toward white, wider than I thought possible, for bottomless seconds before it faded into capillaries. I could not tell if I’d gone over or not. Stupid semantic. I was ionized.

  We made love—copulated—at my apartment repeatedly over the nights that followed. I never recaptured that total diffusion, that month or later. I did catch brief bits and pieces before his body became more almond-familiar. That sustained current never reappeared, and I came in time to wonder if it had been somatic after all. The work we lavished on each other, hungry and needy, received reinforcement, often and diffuse and strange. More than enough to keep us coming back. Todd came frequently to my apartment, sometimes with more old clothes.