The Gold Bug Variations

by Richard Powers

  We began to get out again, as the city again warmed. We took a trip up to the Bronx Zoo. Franklin was as excited as a child, and babbled like one. “Look! Kangaroos! Do you know that the mother can slow or speed up gestation, depending on food supply?”

  “The name means ‘I don’t know,’” I contributed. Standard trivia fare. “Aboriginal answer to white hunter’s question. ‘What do you call those fur-bags with the giant hind legs?’ ‘Haven’t the faintest idea what you’re talking about, hombre.’”

  “She licks down this passage in her fur, the way to the pouch, see? So that her newborn, a wriggly blob like a shelless snail, can slog out the journey …”

  “Have you actually seen this happen?” I asked suspiciously.

  “Do endless wildlife shows on public television count?” Oh, he was up that day; the cages were not cages, but regional sanctuary from unstoppable habitat destruction. I couldn’t help but think of the dismal visit to Central Park Tuckwell and I had made eight months before. Separate lifetimes.

  He was always ready for the impulse activity, for any jaunt at any hour, so long as it did not conflict with MOL, about which he grew unusually conscientious. Obscure museums, galleries, secret spaghetti dives, performing-arts warehouses, a walking tour of the colonial remnants of the city. For the first time since leaving Indiana, I went up against the variety of New York. Yet something in the way he moved feet first through the place tipped me off that he was just visiting.

  I never expected I would have him all there, every time he stayed over or we went out together. But his eternal pacing … He had a way of obsessively measuring out a room three times a minute, even when sitting still. I thought the restlessness came from his being twenty-six, at the height of his powers, with nothing of consequence to do. I put myself entirely at his disposal as research assistant for the dissertation. “I can find anything,” I swore to him. “Facts are my life.” I couldn’t have made a worse suggestion, even in jest. It made him pace in even tighter circles. He never dropped the boyish charm, the Midwestern politeness. He made it a point to be home more predictably, and even called on a couple occasions to tell me he would miss a standing meal. But his silence grew denser even as he pruned it.

  When he was gone, I thought he might be dead, distracted, religiously converted, injured, amnesiac, overcome by indifference. Each scenario was a toxin whose cold advanced up my arms and legs. Yet I would not put on the saving tourniquet, take the necessary measures. Leaden suspicion was scarily arousing. I discovered it only slowly. My fear for him when he was away became one of those secret fetishes discovered late in life—a region on my body that when struck by that taboo person reduced me to helpless perversity I never suspected lay in me.

  These were awful weeks. Every reckless afternoon proved that I had never known what I might be capable of. After making it last an hour, I would draw away with a sick thrill, find myself saying, in the extremity of affected calm, “We aren’t really one another’s type, you know. You need someone neurotic, taller, silkier, not so verbose.” On alternate days, I wanted to break laws for him, to take to terrorism rather than give up what little life with him I’d managed to win. I dwelt on the worst possible explanations for what was happening, the way someone who discovers a growth on a bone cannot help, several times an hour, feeling it to see if it has grown.

  Breathless, off-balance, by turns willfully wanting to confirm the incurable worst, I would use my key privileges to his place. An attempt to track him down, to find out how he lived when away from me. When I let myself into his apartment, I always masked my humiliation in high spirits. It never seemed to bother him. He could jump out of bed as if he’d been waiting impatiently for me for hours. “So what do you know about fixing refrigerators?” Or: “You must be the French Maid. Shall we wrinkle the sheets once before ironing them?” No matter what hour I surprised him there, we did not stay around his place for long. Twenty minutes of talk or milting or cleaning up and we’d be gone, to an exhibition, for a meal, back to my place, where he would once again stay a couple of days.

  I never appeared empty-handed, so that if he was not there, as he frequently wasn’t, I would have some excuse for dropping in while he was out, some reward to leave him for confirming my compulsive need to prove him not at home. I’d bring by a novel, claiming I’d just finished it and it was so beautiful I had to make the impulsive crosstown delivery. I would sit at his kitchen table, too cluttered with tapes, art repros, delinquent library books, lidless half-full peanut butter jars, and dire predictions torn from the Science Times to be used for actual meals, and compose scraps of occasional verse by way of saying that I’d been by and we had failed to connect.

  These poems, more heartfelt than skilled, were the only means I had of telling him things without cloaking the sentiment in requisite irony. In reverting to a form that most lovers swear off of at eighteen, I compounded the dangerous instability, pushing myself where something would soon have to happen.

  The first days of intimacy scare:

  exchange of histories too keen to mean

  anything yet but new threat of loss.

  Why thaw now? Why lay bare

  all that has held in a fine hide

  and stake it here against chance green?

  Because we haven’t any choice.

  Just as two tunes catch in a chord

  care moves forward, fact-gathering.

  Our measured steps might improvise

  a way for winter to wind down,

  ice flushing crusted puddles, freeing spring.

  I would copy these pathetic fallacies onto a notepad he’d made up for himself: From the Couch of Franklin Todd. Then I would shuffle them into the stack by the telephone, among the ghostly phone transcripts and the portraits made from memory of the people on the other end of the line. He never mentioned discovering them. But the older ones were no longer there when I left an addendum. He pressed them into notebooks somewhere or threw them away.

  Life above the antique shop, nights when he did not show, became unbearably acute. The furnishings I had carefully selected, the old crochets, the scents that had been so evocative once, grew too much, the way slight touch is acid to a skin oversensitive with fever. Coming home from work, in days that were struggling to lengthen and stay bright until a reasonable hour, I would look up at the intimate pool of light coming from the room upstairs. I knew that the Edwardian glow was turned on by a digital timer, just as the choker collar—still capable of eliciting response from him—wrapped the neck of a woman who, that afternoon, had spent half an hour procuring the feasibility of test bans.

  Unable to sleep, I would call him at the office at obscene hours of the night. Each week was a new probe to see how depraved I might, under the prose binding, really be. “Do you mind if I touch myself while you talk? Say something that might get me bothered.” Franklin loved these experiments, thrilled to play along over the phone. Sometimes he urged me to wait until he got home. Others, he was as happy to tease me, take care of me remotely via analog transmission.

  I had no clue where we were heading or how long I would be able to last. I only knew that every question I was asked all day long seemed a nuisance variation on the one I wanted answered. When I was away from him, I was frantic with possibility. When I was with him, it wasn’t enough. I had stumbled into a cadence, begun to believe that love had to lead somewhere. He was waiting for the same revelation, each of us afraid to move lest we bring about the expected QED.

  One early-spring Saturday I found myself, around two in the afternoon, half a dozen blocks from his apartment. He had not shown the night before; Fridays, with their end-of-week processing, frequently became all-nighters. I had no idea where in all the East Coast he had ended up, but his place was as good a guess as any. I decided to surprise him with afternoon breakfast. I ducked into a deli and bought bagels, cream cheese, coffee, oranges, and a horrible sucrose-dripping thing that Todd, with his sweet tooth, would doubtless devour instantly. I wa
lked up to his loft and let myself in.

  He was still asleep. Evidence of disorganized entry pointed to a rough night with the machines. I stood in the foyer, wondering whether to wake him. I took a few steps toward the bedroom, then came back to the hall. However good-naturedly he awoke and greeted me, he could only be irritated, and I’d only feel more desperate to correct the impression of desperation. But coming back into the foyer, I thought: So what if I tip my hand? What doesn’t he know about me already? Affection, even overdone, must be preferable to more empty space. Back to the bedroom: but before I could make it all the way there, I felt my eagerness driving him away.

  I have never felt such indecision, certainly not about anything so ludicrous as whether to get a male up for breakfast. My inability to take more than a step in either direction suddenly seemed emblematic. From some reserve of self-possession, I saw how pitiful I’d become. I laughed out loud, but softly, so as not to wake him. I went to the cluttered table, composed some verses, crumpled them up, and wrote instead, “Dearest Buddy. I came by. Left you a bagel for breakfast.”

  But just as I was quietly letting myself out, I was again overcome by desire. This might, after all, be the last time. Effusion was the least of the two vices, everything considered. I let myself back in, scolding and cheering myself at once. I went straight into the bedroom, relieved, leaned deeply over him, and kissed him on the shaggy head. He made a soft, pleased gurgle, which was answered by another in a higher register. On the pillow next to him, there moved a second, soft, blond angelic head. An incoherent female voice, lovely in unconsciousness, said, “I’m so hungry I could eat a house.”

  All I could think about was getting out before more groggy vocalizings brought them conscious. I made it back to the front room, went to the table, and with amazing presence of mind, crossed out “a bagel” and wrote, “Oops; two bagels,” supplementing the first from the now useless bag. Out on the street, wandering at random through the press of the Village, I understood; fidelity was for stereos. Working his way through love’s alphabet, the man was stuck on the A’s. Annie was who he wanted.

  XXIV

  CANON AT THE OCTAVE

  He is within easy reach, unreachable. His last postmark, Dr. Ressler’s forsaken Midwest grain oasis. Even there—only a thousand miles from me, on the same continent, identical landmass. Here. Now that I can’t reach him, I want to. The letter I so long dragged my heels on, endlessly red-penned in my head, left lying for weeks on the bureau, and at last ambivalently sent off just before realizing my mistake has come back bearing an Indo-European grab bag of apologies saying that the addressee has vanished without forwarding address. The text of my sham indifference now sits urgent, priority mail, registered, express in my hands.

  Not even the same letter, now that it’s been returned. Even if I were to place it unrevised in another envelope, send it out again to his unresearchable new post node, it would not mean what it meant the afternoon I finally managed to put it together. The thing I thought to make him see then is gone. Aggregate chance has changed it—a memorandum lost in transit.

  If I had his address (counterfactual) and if I could hit on the right words (hypothetical), I might send him some item from our assembled quote box—“I need to know someone”; “What is the origin of ‘to make the catch’?”; “What’s this I hear about you two cohabiting?”; “Oops, two bagels”—that might convey, if not the particulars of what I need to say now, at least the sense that if he were in the neighborhood (subjunctive), I’d like to see him. But even our favorite phrases, reprised over our allotted months on different occasions, repeated once more would now go enharmonic, altered, racing home even as they stay in place, changing because all other lines range freely around them.

  I cannot say the same thing twice. The first time through, invention; the second, allusion; a third promotes it to motif, then theme, keepsake, baggage, small consolation. Brought back after years, it evokes a lost twinge never harbored in the original. Perhaps, with everything between us changed beyond recognition, one more reprise might make it invention again.

  When the chance was there, who needed to say anything? Now that I can’t write, predicates take shape; polyps spread across my insides, bubbling into my throat, seeking the surgery of speech. What do I want so badly to tell him, now that the channel is down? I wanted to say it—the same thing, only different—that evening at that first seafood dive. (The front end of the lobster scuttled into the tank. Todd said, “You should see how they do beef.” I kept mum.) I wanted to tell him, that summer night on the swings. (I came all over him, shuddering, but disguised the event, admitting nothing.) I wanted to say something achingly similar, that freezing night under the New England stars. (Todd and Dr. Ressler talked away, trying to save life from life. I worked a jigsaw.) I wanted to say the urgent thing, that Saturday afternoon when I leaned over him as he slept. (Annie said, still asleep, “I’m so hungry I could eat a house.” I slipped verbless out the door, leaving no hostages.) I always thought it was Todd, ironic, dry, who constantly pleaded that quintessential department-store excuse “No thanks; just browsing.” But it wasn’t. Always, from the start, it was me.

  What is it that I’d give the rest of my exhausted savings to say to him, now that I can’t? I want to tell him what I’ve learned. Todd: I have taken on science, spent the year acquiring terms, doing a blitz Berlitz in the same grammar our friend was once after. The same, only with all particulars changed. And here is the sense, if not the specifics of what I’ve picked up.

  “There is, in the Universe, a Stair.” Small, too small for me to see the steps, even with the best current optics, too small to be floor-planned except through experimental analogy. But large beyond telling, a single epic verse five thousand volumes long, three billion years old. It is smooth, spiral, aperiodic, repeating. Within the regular frame is a sequence so varying that it leaps over the complexity barrier and freely adopts any of an inexhaustible array of possible meanings.

  But meaning does not reside in the enormous molecule, the reservoir of naked data. The Stair Dr. Ressler was intent on climbing is not rolled up in the nucleus like a builder’s blueprint. The plan does not map out the organism in so many words. Nowhere in DNA is there written the idea or dimensions of “tentacle,” “flipper,” “hand.” Nowhere does it describe the shape or functioning of nerve or muscle. Tissue is not modeled to scale. Yet shape, structure, functioning, even the range of behavior: everything originates here, the repository where all significant difference is jotted down, held in place, passed along perfectly, but never twice the same.

  I would tell Todd, spell it out in a five-thousand-volume letter. I would say how I have seen, close up, what Ressler wanted to crack through to. How I have felt it, sustained the chase in myself. How the urge to strip the noise from the cipher is always the desire to say what it means to be able to say anything, to read some part of what is written here, without resort to intermediaries. To get to the generating spark, to follow the score extracted from the split lark. I would tell him, at last, sparing nothing, just what in the impregnable sum of journal articles sent Ressler quietly away, appalled, stunted with wonder.

  I would tell him everything I have found. I would lay my notebooks open to him. How the helix is not a description at all, but just the infolded germ of a scaffolding organism whose function is to promote and preserve the art treasure that erects it. How the four-base language is both more and less than plan. How it comprises secret writing in the fullest sense, possessing all the infinite, extendable, constricting possibilities lying hidden in the parts of speech. How there is always a go-between, a sign between signature and nature.

  I would tell him of nucleic acid’s nouns, its cistrons. I would show how stretches of the supercoiled chromosome are simple substitutions for polypeptide chains. Even Todd would see how breathtaking it must have been to be the first to connect metaphor to chemistry, to find the genes, those letter-crosses nesting like flocks in family trees. But I’d mak
e the airtight case that nouns were not what Ressler was after.

  I’d show him the speaking string’s conjunctions, interrogatives, and prepositions—operator and promoter sites where proteins clamp, qualifying the noun, turning the cistron on or off in subordinate clauses and prepositional phrases. I would show him how Ressler lived at the moment when the ravishing, intensely cybernetic system, after millennia of theorizing, at last laid itself open. But Franklin would be the first to agree that prepositions alone would never have fed our friend.

  I would tutor him in the verbs, set in animation the enzymes, programmed molecules that act, cause, do, command things to fly upwards from equilibrium. I could touch upon the adverbs and adjectives, the modifying sea inside the cell wall singing “brightly,” “langsam,” “con brio.” I could deliver an overview of how the five thousand volumes produce their own lexicon of translators for reading their own messengers (transcribed by enzymes of their own synthesis) at sites of their own devising. The complete predication, the weird collaboration of disparate parts of speech into whole utterances, is now within my working vocabulary.

  If Todd could sit still for this explanation, if my translation of a translation meant anything to him, he would see that none of this was what the professor was after; despite the brute beauty of the system, none of these parts of speech would have had the power to cripple the man. Then I would say what I know: that an accident of private history left Ressler, for a single, prohibited, unrecoverable moment, hearing not what the grammar says but what it means.

  I would tell you, straight out, what I’ve spent the year and my savings to verify: how language makes it impossible to receive the exact message sent. I would tell that anecdote Ressler told me, the day I went to say goodbye, in bitterness over you. That account of a boyhood experiment with a friend and a tin-can telephone: how he had yelled along the muffling string, “Calling Timmy, calling Timmy.” Then, dispensing with the ingenious medium and calling out directly across the twenty feet of more expedient air: “Could you hear that?” Only here, there’s no jumping outside the medium to verify transmission. Only the tinny tin.