The Gold Bug Variations

by Richard Powers

  “It’s generous of you to pretend to really want the spiel. This peculiar gadget seems to be garnering the most attention at this year’s show.” He picks up a sealed can outfitted with metal nozzle. “Believe it or not, we’ve injected this full of cheese that has, alas, been pasteurized until it has become virtually eternal. It is probably also flame-resistant and impervious to radiation.” Herbert bites a nail, but Ressler assures him with approving silence: The humiliation is all mine.

  “The nozzle is still a little rickety. But in twenty-five years, I hope someone can bring this prototype into production. The long-term goal is to shoot cheese out in a controlled spray.” He looks up from the device: I’m sorry; it’s what I do. Whatever work your hands can find to do, do now.

  “No,” Stuart objects. “Go on. Please. It looks as if it will be very … useful.” Herbert thanks him in silence. A look of complicity passes between them: Ah! But what’s the use of use?

  “Our main problem may not be the nozzle, however, but the plate presentation. As you see, the product at present bears an unfortunate resemblance to something you might scoop up after a Great Dane.” Chuckling forlornly. In a moment, both men are laughing at a puerile species that can never stop ludicrous ingenuity, can’t see what a fool it makes of itself in this world. Only invention’s source, the loneliness longer than life, prevents the evidence from condemning the lot of them.

  Ressler stops first. “Herbert, your wife is … wonderful.”

  Koss beams, proud without pride. “I envy you both, really.” Ressler’s head snaps back. “What do you mean?”

  “I would have liked to be a scientist.” He shrugs at the spin-offs all around him in the booth, the garden he wound up in.

  Ressler dismisses him with a wipe in the air. “No difference. You’ve heard that Congress is deciding whether actors in white coats have to identify themselves as simulations? If they do, we’ll all be undertitled.” They kick around that topic: Truth in Nomenclature. Herbert contributes his nemesis—a Western senator with a touch of religious mania and a mission to legislate the labels on synthetic foods. The law would prevent manufacturers from selling juice as “Juice” unless it contains a given percentage of real fruit sap. Others would require a suitable euphemism.

  “Our outlandish creation here would be forced to go forth into the world under the ignominious name of ‘Artificial Pasteurized Processed Cheeselike Food–Stick Drink–Spread Mix Spray.’ It simply isn’t fair to the entrepreneur.”

  Ressler laughs. He can’t help himself. He likes this man, as much as he’s liked any man since Tooney left. “Our legislators would be shocked to hear that evolution’s greatest successes deliberately misrepresent appearances. Nature has never abided by truth in advertising.” Your wife can attest to that.

  “Jeanette’s convinced me that your splinter group is on the right track.” Ressler smiles, wincing. “Jeannie brings the journals into bed with her, and reads them out loud. We share a great deal.” Herbert asks him his opinion of the possibility that cancer is gene-induced. The man may not have become a scientist, but no failure of curiosity, attention, or temperament prevented him. He is more current on this topic than Ressler, but Stuart takes a stab at the challenge. “A stretch of nucleic acid could code for a tumor-inducing enzyme, but a mutator gene is more likely, or a faulty feedback that causes other genes to run amok. All speculation, but I can at least conceive of an oncogene.”

  The comeback arrives from over his shoulder. “I had an Onco Gene, once.”

  Ressler sees her reflection in Herbert Koss’s face: the painter in the convex mirror behind the subjects. The creases in Herbert’s face swell like a succulent after flash flood. Even the cadence of his voice picks up conviction as he cracks back, “I remember him! Your Onco Gene and your Anti Body.”

  With a single-finger signal upon Ressler’s back, Jeanette springs to her husband and kisses him behind the ear. The married couple exchange a few tokens of their idioglossia, the most natural thing in the world. Ressler is stunned: the husband is hopelessly in love, and the wife accepts his ministrations with a marvelous insistence on the ordinary.

  “Wife, you must invite this fine fellow to have dinner with us.” Herbert touches her upper arm in a way suggesting, circumspectly, that he may have found a friend.

  “Fellow, you heard the man.” Jeanette, perfectly modulated, relishes the idea. Ressler barely manages to mumble a transparent excuse, blanching at the look of hurt confusion coming over Herbert’s face. The Know Your Enemy campaign retreats from the field in disarray, Ressler smiling but routed.

  For the next several days, he avoids her. He frequents the lab at night or when she is busy teaching. When they must be there together, he makes sure it’s in the company of others. She touches his upper arm as she passes—familial, furtive, questioning. But she knows the source of his silence, and neither of them cares to put it in words. She leaves him gentle and absurd gifts as apology—currants, offprints, lozenges at the first hint of a cough. She moves through the day visibly holding her breath. She sheds all trace of public sarcasm. Lovering continues to give her ample opportunity to deliver the quick cut, but the woman contritely declines the kill. One of those creatures with two-stage life cycles, having metamorphosed in front of his eyes from sylph back into cipher, she wants nothing but another chance to return to the pupa and reemerge with all the chestnut innocence she last week lost for him.

  He finds it impossible to concentrate on the empirical work. His desire to perfect the cell-free system stalls against Jeanette’s opacity, more cryptic than when she was a stranger to him. Curiosity has gone, leaving in its place a fatalistic homesickness opposed to investigation of any sort. He does not love her now. And yet, a keener coveting: she is more intensely beautiful for having so far declined to confirm him. Beauty, as Botkin once read to him during their joint listening sessions, Schubert’s Winter’s Journey, is just the beginning of a terror he might not be able to endure.

  He is taken by absurd urges to plead with her, to demand explanations. Of course, he cannot, even if the explanations were his to demand. He will lose her the moment his feigned self-possession admits to need. No begging. Self-preservation now depends on a deadly competition: can he escape faster than she? He slips into the lab late one afternoon, safe for the thirty seconds he needs. But immediately, tailed to this one injudicious half-minute, he is cornered by a lab-coated, dissimulating apparition.

  “May I come over and play?” She walks slowly toward him, then stops, hovering near where he stands, not daring to come flush to him. She wears her lab coat, a soft, brushed olive skirt, an organdy blouse sweetly fatigued. Dark stockings hold her legs heartstoppingly limber. She is less clinical than reckless, frightened, precariously still. She pushes back a loose forelock, then holds the nervous forearm in her other hand, to keep it from straying. She just looks, beseechingly, too uncertain to say anything. At last, she shakes her head, giving in: “You really are a beautiful boy.”

  Her simple, head-down, sole-scuffing benign capitulation betrays her. Passion now would be powerless against him, but soft, dependent admission of hurt calms him before he can run. She holds his gaze, opaline, opalescent. When she finally smiles, it is with relief, as if he has favored her already with his inevitable return. “Stuart. Friend. We have to talk.”

  He chills without missing a beat. Pith me mercifully, then. “Don’t worry,” he says, suppressing the trace betrayal. “We stay on the project together. In vitro is as much your province as mine. We’ll just have to find a way of working in close quarters without pulling the pin.”

  She stares at him, slapped down, laughing through choked throat at the frailty just revealed. She looks at him, shaking her head: Boyo, how could you think it? Don’t you realize: we can’t get out now, except together. “You said you loved me,” she says quietly, courage enough for both. “I’ve been thinking of nothing else since you admitted it.”

  “Nothing else?” One lie and we drown in
atmosphere.

  She gives him a bashful overbite that would disarm the coolest Geneva negotiator. “I won’t tell you what else has gone through my head since then. Not yet, anyway.” She steps toward him, a supplicant. Only believe. He does not step back. He fixes on her teeth: how can even her incisors incite him? They ought to seem more like tetanus hooks than pretty advertisements. She does not stop until they touch thighs, here in the open. She does not care who sees them.

  “How could you …? You’re so natural with him. You’re …”

  Her sweet undertones flatten into a quick cat’s hiss. “What were you doing tracking him down? Spying? Big buck showdown? Imagine how I felt, seeing you talking with him behind my back.”

  Her anger releases him. She might fake everything else, but not this surpassing flash of hatred. “Jeanette,” he says, loving her so acutely his chest feels the phantom pain of amputation. Names he never wished to be saddled with—the photo of a luminous child who died just after the lens opened. “Jeannie. Your husband is great. Kind, bright, funny.” He, in comparison: ambitious, hungry, vain. Even were he in the man’s league, any trade would invalidate everything.

  “Yes,” she admits harshly, the tear of the barbed gaff.

  He takes her at the waist, knowing even as he does it that it is the worst possible gesture. “You two love each other. I’ve seen it.”

  “He’s a good man. We get along. We know one another.”

  “But you’re not …?” He stops short of the ridiculous semantic distinction. Her nervous lock falls again, obscuring her lowered face. He reaches, brushes it back. “Something in your marriage is not working?” Temporarily reprieved by that indifference he could not rouse earlier, when he needed it.

  But his detachment lasts only until her next words. Her cheeks crumple horribly. Blood rushes into her soft tissue, and she chokes for air. “We can’t have children.” A day later, Ressler will not remember the precise next sequence. Jeannie falls into his shirt, dry-heaving, hyperventilating sobs. Water everywhere—eyes, nose, throat. Her vulnerability, her flood is at last her, one that he recognizes, recalls from internal phylogeny—cave life or earlier, arboreal, forest floor, or gilled, underwater. It pitches Ressler into the passion of animals. He begins to kiss her everywhere across the unrecognizable bruise her face has become. She kisses back. She bites, trying to break the skin. “Help me,” she says, as if he were the only one who could. “What’s wrong with me?”

  XXI

  CANON AT THE SEVENTH

  They rut. No other name for the humping that takes them. He kisses her blood-filled face, scattering the hits, surrendering to dizzy inertia. She sinks her teeth into his shoulder, sick desire clamping her to him. Her frightened, little-lamb’s-backsliding capitulation passes into his tissue and he can only clamp back. Sobbing, startled, she looks at him, realizing the place where they’ve arrived. They fall into the fabled clearing, forbidden and inevitable, the place they knew from the first caught glance they would one day inhabit. She loosens from him long enough to lead him to the back lab corner, beyond equipment shipment boxes: for form’s sake, out of the public thoroughfare.

  Den, hive, nest, nidus, eyrie, newlywed starter home: they build themselves a pallet on the floor. They pull each other down hungrily. He unfastens her organdy, exposing the final freshness of her breasts to the air. She stretches along the length of her flank, moans an admixture of pleasure and regret. Her exertion ripples like the paroxysms of a barometer giving up in the eye of the storm. We can’t. Don’t do this. Wrong, childish, wicked, degenerate. Please. Faster. Here. Home. They are to go through with it, in full cognizance, commit the self-seeking, indulgent act. It stops his breath.

  He lifts the crumpled olive skirt up around her waist. Jeannie gasps once, an angry aspirant. Her stockings and panties give way. She utters sharp, soft forest noises. The sound, the pungency of her vaginal quiff undo him. He rolls into her. Her legs lift, ready to receive. The space is his only. They fit. Her small-mammal whimpers condense in violence. He clasps his hand over her mouth, but even now does not really care if every living thing just down the hall hears. He is drawn up her by capillary action, deeper than anticipated, into an encircling center. Never did he imagine a woman could have so much room. The fluid folds of that infinite passage press up against the intruder, welcome it with all the ingenuity of design. She is crying now, from the lungs, where he feels her from the other side. “Stop. I don’t want,” and then, throatier, garbled: “I love you,” or “I love this.”

  Each races the other to unilateral surrender. Something more than sex: an excavation, mohole, metric and insufficient, each time farther down, nearer a remembered core. By turns, his whole body is a coition-charged conductance and something else—the effortless, mate-free budding of plants. There is no Herbert; whatever pain they cause the man is erased by his wife’s abandon. Ressler’s forward motion into her becomes a rocking apology: clandestine. Never again. He has her, as he needed from word go.

  He owes no one anything but compassion. His lone accountability is solely to the code. This woman was long ago inscribed in his genotype. She is his working out, his text made flesh, made enzyme. He will join himself to her, however pointless that deposit. He cannot do otherwise. She is underneath, around him: he feels her organic list. Her voiced breath dissolves into syllables, self-defense shouts, bird’s cooing. He pins her, presses a spot in her back that touches off further thrashing. Their sure lives in this moment end. Even if they escape this writhing, they can never again be safe. She heaves again. The base of Ressler’s brain floods with chemical keys he will not, not ever, neither viscerally nor in mind, recapture.

  Jeanette’s pumping leaves her spent. Then, as suddenly, she is crazy again to pump, elude pursuers. The force of her desperation frightens him. What bloody business has she come to transact? She rolls against him, thighs first felinely soft, now shoving with a drive that would be rid of itself, of all its tensile load. Ressler cushions, absorbs, protects her from her own tranced rage, keeping this speaker-in-tongues from crashing against the sharp corners of their makeshift pew.

  She is only here, nowhere else but her body, manning her cartilage factory. She spasms, an enormous sustained cramp that runs from the nape of her neck along her whole length, at last pulling the arch of her foot taut, from Romanesque to gothic. She is only here, in frenzied pleasure, knowing she will take it like this only once in life. Frenzy enough for both of them: he is lost to the dictates in the master program, locked onto her, coupled, forever sacrificed, shutting out last objections and letting the old sarabande in.

  Her face, when the shock of the last muscular lift comes on it, is surprised, flushed out of the thicket in ancestral wonder. All an “O” of astonishment—her eyes, mouth, fingers circling his arms, her labia concentrated around him, drawing him over the edge into his own, rounded O. Sustained effort, every minute of recent months is here made real. Here, only here. Then, the collapse back on confusion and particulars.

  They glide at the end, after violent discharge, released to familiars. His cells swim into her, spend. But for a brief ever, molecular memory of the deed persists in muscle, fades through shoulders, torso, limbs, limbic system like immense pipe-organ fundamentals banging around in the baroque dome an eternity before slipping back to nave level, sinking through flagstones into the crypt. He lies capitulate on the floor next to Mrs. Koss, sharing the last shred of companionship left them. They are free of the chief anxiety in animal delight: she can have no child. But facing a worse eventuality.

  Jeanette Koss, still in the dream of remembered recklessness, stiffens, comes unstunned. She tries to sit, look at him. She succeeds painfully, staring as if he has just revealed himself. How can you do that to me? She closes her eyes again, lies down, and places a delicate, stray hand between her legs, as if that will keep the somatic impression of their animal abandon from leaking out with his semen. This long, undulating modesty, endless current of hair, hand pressed innocently
and curiously to the pudenda. Residual image from the generic feminine.

  She does not need to look at him to know what he sees. She smiles through closed lids, uses one finger to explore the passage he has just inhabited, withdraws it with a globe of milky, opaque fluid. She draws it to her mouth, places the drop on the tip of her tongue. Eyes still closed, she turns her lips up and pronounces, “Millions of stu-karyotes.” He kisses her and she passes the taste perversely back. She hums, piano in pleasure, already wanting more. She closes her eyes, tasting, recalling.

  The memory, this woman passing one unsolicited secret name to him now and for good on the exposed lab floor, will be as suddenly lost, taken from him. More than he can endure. But Jeanette only drifts her hand back under her stained olive dress, between her absorbing thighs.

  TRACE MUTAGEN

  “Let’s give Uncle Jimmy a raise.” I picture him alert, playful in front of the console, perched on the edge of a techno-chair, ready to write his graffiti into the system at the first nod from the professor. MOL was again in the clear. Ressler and Todd had returned the Master File to working order. The auditors had come and gone, dragging their trails behind them. They had given the restoration a clean bill of health. The console log carried no trace of catastrophe. We passed the anniversary of the Maine, that explosion half-made in the American press. Ours was the opposite engineering feat: from out of real burst, erasure. The sense of delivery from disaster was still so strong that Todd’s manic suggestion seemed a simple extension. “Who would know?” he asked. “The easiest thing in the world.”