The Gold Bug Variations

by Richard Powers

  The room above the antique shop once again became my private reserve. There was nothing to do on evenings off except repair the place. When I could make no more improvements to its chenille stagecraft, I began finding reasons to stay late at the branch, without compensation except the slightly more comprehensive answer.

  Q:What is the largest geological feature on earth?

  A:The earth’s largest feature is also its youngest. The Mid-Atlantic Ridge, a ten-thousand-mile-long submarine mountain range rising to an average height of ten thousand feet and anywhere from three to six hundred miles wide, is split down its length by the breach of new rock welling up from the convection currents of the earth’s molten mantle.

  I lost several days to the QB. I thought I might be able to go on forever, working it into the perfect artifice, addressing every hidden need in the close-lipped questioner.

  Warm days went on increasing. I began walking again, more cautiously, not so far afield as when it had been the two of us. Brooklyn is a complex biome. Two and a half million people watching the neighborhood isobars of war and truce. Streets full of Russian, Italian, German, Korean, Yiddish, Spanish, Chinese—a fair slice of the varieties of talk. But the language map is devised to keep out crossovers. I stuck to the island allotted me—branch, apartment, subway opening.

  After a long afternoon at the branch rooting through Gov Pubs, I did not feel like going home. One evening, sitting in a convenient pizza parlor among surreal composite frescoes of Venetian and Florentine landmarks, I had time, for the first time since I’d left him, to see how I’d treated Tuckwell. While I’d been flush, I believed that the best thing we could do for old loves was be firm with them. I now saw the weak rationalization for what it was. I simply had had no stomach for messy responsibility. If it were too late to make good, maybe I could at least recant.

  Keithy shouted a surprised hello through the intercom and buzzed me in. I walked up to the apartment, disoriented by how familiar the stairs still were. He’d left the door open but did not meet me. He was lying in the recliner, watching TV with the sound off, but in full three-piece uniform as if just back from the office. “Marian,” he said, as if I too were just home from work. “What do you have to say for yourself?” I had lived here once, and all the place could say was I remember you; wait, don’t tell me … I sat next to him, ready for any sentence—hostility, abuse, sadistic wit, even affection, caresses, sex-with-the-ex, if that was the penalty he chose to extract. Any slap but casual indifference.

  “You’re just in time,” he said, without glancing over. “Watch.” He pressed a button on the remote; was it a new device, or the one we’d owned? The sound flooded on, cataclysmic Carmina Burana— the microphone everywhere in the orchestra at once. On the screen, a casserole apotheosis of meats, vegetables, noodles, and sauces flew through the air in an ultra-slow-motion parabola so charged and erotic that each of its subtle, glacially arcing parts seemed loaded with the symbolic curve of significance.

  I watched arrested in horror as epic food rained down upon an ivorycolored antique tablecloth. Every transcendent splash was Bolshoichoreographed. Succulent streamers of pasta twisted like living things against the sea bottom. Crosscut, pan, slow zoom: every visual stop pulled out to create a late-century masterpiece. The effect, pornographically immediate, more evocative than any Ingres or Master of Flemalle, scooped out my stomach more violently than the real event would have. Keithy killed the set just as the voice-over began to explain what the stain was selling. He leaned toward me in triumph. “No talking toilet bowls for me. When Keith Tuckwell dies, he’s going to leave something behind him in the minds of millions.”

  “That was yours?”

  “Essentially.”

  “Network TV? Prime time? My, Keith.”

  “Yes, woman. I’ve arrived.” No trace of the old self-mockery, no suggestion of see what you lost? He sat back in his chair, at peace with his times. I don’t know what I’d expected, what I’d hoped to say to him. In thirty seconds, I remembered how hard it was to say anything at all. I asked how he’d been. “Since when?” Had he been eating well? “Well, but not prettily.” Gotten out any? Been dating? “A veritable salad bar, a smorgasbord of women. Cold women who dress in red and black. Women with overbites—very frail. Women who know all there is to know about structural engineering. Black women who drift down sidewalks humming de Falla. Leggy blondes in pastel who have never known unhappiness. Women who keep great secrets. Auburn-haired beauties whose neuroses periodically flame out like …”

  I let him improvise, absorbing my due. But it was no punishment. He was too happy. An intercom call a minute later, playfully rhythmic, revealed the reason. He buzzed the caller in without asking identity, and opened the door on a heart-stoppingly glamorous girl who wore, with poised authority, incredibly expensive Italian-tailored rain-forest green and a rope of pearls. Keith introduced us without a ripple. I didn’t catch her name, but the way she shook my hand and said how much he’d told her of me laid out everything.

  She excused herself to take a powder, something I hadn’t realized women still did. “Keithy.” I said. “You can’t marry this woman.”

  He looked at me, lips cracking. “Why not?”

  “She’ll stay for long periods in the bathroom with the door closed. She’ll be two hours dressing, just to take the trash out. You’ll be miserable. This is just a rebound.”

  He waited an arch second. “Too late. Your invitation’s already in the mail.” His date returned. “We’re going out,” he said, his suit now giving an entirely different account of his emotional state of affairs. “No need to wait up.” They left, leaving me watching television in a stranger’s apartment, knowing the exact, private locking-up routine on my way out.

  Nights in my apartment I sat in the rocker, watching Todd’s goods disappear of their own volition. I reviewed the old photo gallery. I remembered how he arranged his notebooks near the bed, so he could reach them rapidly in the dark. How he bought milk so he could stare at the photos of Missing Children on the cartons. How, when he lost his patience with food, he could survive for days on charges of whipped cream straight out of the can. How his body sometimes lurched in an electrostatic jerk of total fear before falling off to sleep.

  I was at last militantly alone. I would probably have stayed in that condition, habituating to it until I no longer noticed, had not the phone rung one night, Todd on the other end, hoarsely whispering, “I’ve killed the man.”

  XXV

  DISASTER

  Information thrives on it, a larger part of the daily paper than anything except ads. Annuals feature it, the most prominent and dependable heading. Almanacs compile numbing numbers lists—freakish accounts aligned in fatal categories, Earth, Air, Fire, Water. The calendar is just a disaster register. March 27: strongest earthquake to hit North America, Anchorage, 1964. Worst aviation disaster in history, Canary Islands, 1977. Mount St. Helens, 1980. Next morning rounds out the elements: Kwangtung ferry capsizes, last year. Bolts from the blue, tears in the fabric. The word’s etymology blames bad stars. But nothing is so mundane or ensured. All information, every signal and search, will collapse into noise, lost to sudden, shocking, disastrous commonplace.

  Restricting myself to the seismic/volcanic category of Information Please, summing the conservative death estimates for the last hundred years, I get an average of thirty people a day dying from the locution of speech reserved for impossibility: the earth moving underneath them. Flood, drought, famine, hurricane, tornado, tidal wave, avalanche—tea visitors, daily mail. And the constructed catastrophes: hotel catwalks leaping free, tenement fires, airplanes dropping out of the sky. Motor-vehicle deaths in this country equal a large plane crashing daily. An accidental death every six minutes, accidental injury every four seconds. Only accidental birth accounts for anyone being left.

  Outside accident accounts for less than 5 percent of American deaths. The rest are tiny slippages within the system, a valve shutdown, a tube bu
rst or blocked, an instruction misread, production idle or fatally overrun. The body, too intricate to sustain, lives in what industry calls the “mean time between failures.” Expected, ubiquitous friend of the family—bad stars.

  The Morse name has an elegant symmetry: three triplets arranged in simple contrast that sounds panicked even in binary. No word is faster to transmit, clearer to receive than “An event again.” Words—those rearguard actions—can’t frame it, the infinitely unlikely disappearing into the terminally indifferent. Everywhere, this instant, unrepeatable combinations lost. Cathedrals bombed, cantatas used to wrap fish, years of space exploration going up like a Roman candle, an absurdly kind man who would choke on his phlegm rather than spit, wiped out by a fleck of loose plaque.

  Disaster is modest, quiet as termites, low-key as a library dissolving in acid paper. The five-thousand-volume epic biography, life, loves— unique configuration of cells and switches—might be reassembled by trial and error, just as Keats’s unwritten work lies hidden in the ad copy of magazines, out of order. Reconstituting Keats would be child’s play in comparison.

  Disaster is a junior page accidentally reshelving a one-of-a-kind manuscript by the wrong call number. Someone comes looking for the work, sure that it contains the explanatory key long overlooked. But the tome is not where the catalog assigns it. The manuscript, in any number of random places, is annihilated in improbability. How lost? Say the library is big, big beyond combing. Say it contains a few thousand books for every organism ever brought into unlikelihood. Say it contains a record of every geological tick that brought into existence, from out of bare rock and trace atmosphere, this implausibly kind man. No search will ever turn up that misshelved manuscript.

  The “Disasters” sheaf in the vertical files professes to have the numbers in hand. It gives the erosion calmly, in columns of sandbagging statistics, the way good breeding compels a person to say, “Never mind; it’s nothing,” even when everything has now gone irretrievably wrong.

  UNCLE JIMMY

  Franklin was worse than worthless over the phone. I’d never heard him like that. His voice was crumpled like an ancient wax cylinder recording. His sentences were incoherent beyond editing. I had to steady him, lead him with Twenty Questions. Slowly now, back up: what’s happened? I’ve killed him; I’ve killed the man. No one was even dead. But disaster, the 65.5 per 100,000 people per year chance, had settled in. Uncle Jimmy had had a stroke. Although alive, he had been severely hit.

  Franklin’s hysteric claim of responsibility possessed a distant logic. Jimmy’s further inquiries about his premium error had at last awakened a sleepy corporate hierarchy. He had been requested to answer a couple of ad hoc actuaries. Their questions had raised the possibility, in insinuating office dialect, that Jimmy might know more about the source of the computer irregularity than he let on.

  Jimmy, most oversensitive of men, already nursing accumulated anxiety over his inadvertent failure to meet a premium, was so bewildered by the probe—mere formalities, all part of good investigation—that he ruptured an aneurysm that had been hiding, an inherited deficiency, secret and soft in his cerebral arteries. He apoplexed on the examination carpet, proclaiming innocence while going into coma.

  Not until his evening arrival did Franklin learn it. Dr. Ressler broke the news, alone in knowing how Todd tied in. Franklin harassed the hospital where Jimmy had been rushed until the answer-givers on the other end refused to speak to him. He forced Ressler to repeat over and over that the hemorrhage was not his fault, and each time he refused to believe it. Torturing himself into organic nightmare, he called the only person in the world who might further torture him.

  I calmed him as best I could, offering to come right over. He screamed in agony, “No. Not me. Jimmy.” I said I’d be at the hospital within the hour, and that alone comforted him a little. I rang off, threw some clothes on, and was gone. Not until I entered the hospital did I collect myself enough to realize: Jimmy. That courtly, clumsy truism-speaker, inept and universal flirt who every afternoon called his mother to say he was on his way home, too free of complication to understand, let alone repeat, the slurs that pass for human conversation.

  I felt the queasy calm of worst-case scenarios. Cool, calm, and collected: the highest rung in Tuckwell’s ad world, the one that will deliver us from harm. The building’s smell—alcohols, ethers, gauze—made me feel I was picking Jimmy up from the dentist’s rather than heading for Intensive Care. I asked for him at the reception desk, an antiseptic module as wide as a Canadian football field and as blond as Sweden. The linen nurse addressed me too gingerly. “Are you the wife?”

  I smiled, despite the immediacy, to imagine Jimmy and me as life mates. I said the patient was single. The registrar nurse examined a huge, Dickensian ledger printed in dot matrix rather than quill. She flipped to Jimmy’s lookup code: Steadman, James S. STEA3-J13-72-6. My correct answer apparently earned me admission, for she directed me to a waiting room. The sprawling complex consisted of an outer shell of functional, modernist passages laid out in star-shaped pods wrapped around an industrial kernel with low ceilings and forced steam heat that probably should have been trashed at the turn of the century. The two symbionts didn’t quite align. Old floors ramped up to new; catwalks cut across obsolete passages. Colored stripes and system icons indexed each region of local suffering like a Byzantine underground parking lot.

  Children in slippers and tunics, hair thinned to pointless patches, carried listless trucks under their arms, remembering everything about the ritual of toys except the reason. Mint-green semiconscious shapes with bloated bellies lay in half-obscured bedrooms in the care of LED banks, chins fighting for air, tubes rammed so deeply up their noses that it bruised their eyes. Some sat in pharmaceutical storms. Orderlies, acutely reassuring, wheeled people by on hydraulic flatbeds, cots that smelled of runny ulcers and fecal ooze, smells dusted over by musty astringent. Worse than Passchendaele, more hideous than Bosch: everything proceeded with supermarket calm.

  In embarrassed hall-alcove clumps stood the healthy—by fault of intimacy, the go-betweens to this hideous lab. We avoided one another’s eyes. An accidental exchange of glances and I found myself staring into the face of a scared woman who flashed me a conspirator’s look: Don’t tell anyone you saw me here. By the time I located the IC waiting room, I knew the dirty secret. Individuals were woundable, sickly, inconvenient, contemptible, tragic in every way except numerically, smudges on endless fanfold paper. Despite everything culture has ever insisted, hospitals were not shows. Even here, at the one moment my entire life should have trained me for—Intensive Care, 5W, North Tower, Green Wing— obscenely lacerated, lost: wanting, needing, but not knowing how to hear the makeshift, temporary metronome measuring out so obvious a rhythm, the meter of the faltering human platelet pump.

  A months-old trade magazine in the waiting room declared that more Americans enter hospital every month than were alive at the Revolution. I stared awhile at the magazine’s other unabsorbable facts, then matched wits against quiz TV. I sat on a wraparound petroleum-based sofa, kitty-corner to a volatile, overweight woman who had the lounge phone’s receiver surgically incorporated into her double chin. She was not using the phone, just holding it, keeping the line open for a message she had long given up hope of receiving. My companion watched as I answered the one about the oldest city in the continental United States being St. Augustine and correctly gave “nano” as the prefix meaning one billionth in the metric system. The only question worth addressing at that instant was in the IC, stroked out. But I kept on answering these others, eye-calm.

  The woman looked at me reverently. “You could make a lot of dough, honey.” Having paid me the highest compliment, she could now let me into the intimacy of her being here. She said, “My little girl,” tapping the receiver as if it were the child. She flashed me one of those in-your-ownbest-interests grins. “She’s down the hall, about to be cut open in several places.” I apologized, not knowing what
else to say. She waved me off. “I’m trying to find out who the anesthetician is. That’s very important. A girlfriend’s husband once died under the hands of a bad anesthetician.”

  Courtesy dictated my saying something about waiting to see what was left of a friend following his massive stroke. I didn’t. After a pause during which she twice said “Hello” into the unresponsive phone, my partner turned again to me with the two-syllable, singsong question “Children?” She nodded reassuringly—Easy one. If you knew St. Augustine, this one’s a gift. For some reason, I couldn’t figure the question out. Did children exist? Which was the oldest? What was one billionth of one called? Up from the unfigurable field of memory came that old jump-rope rhyme: Franklin and Janny sitting in a tree, kay eye ess ess eye en gee. First comes love, then comes marriage, then comes Janny with a baby carriage.

  I smiled and said I wasn’t married. She made a just-as-well face, and all at once I felt Franker lean over my shoulder and whisper, “Holbein.” Habit; with specialist’s myopia, he would look at a tree deranged by autumn and, taking in the clash of colors, would come up for air saying, “Bonnard!” Nothing was what it was, but always a comparison to paint. When he came closest to genuinely loving me, he would freeze, beg me not to move, and exclaim in a half-rapture, “‘Girl with the Pearl Earring.’” He was a lost cause, wrecked on aesthetics. Seeing Rembrandt’s ox-sides in the meat case at the supermarket marked him as unfit for life.

  Aesthetics could not survive the waiting room. A bit of aesthetics on his part had led, however indirectly, step by step, to a burst vessel in Jimmy’s brain. I looked at the woman again; yes, infinitely more Holbein miniature than contemporary Long Island mother. I was inspecting her in the Met, with Franklin at my side. It was suddenly enough to have had a look at her real face—pinched eyes, mole, spinsterly, approving mouth—to set her in a time she matched. Empathy came on me from nowhere, and I wished her daughter every chance that medical technology, God, and a good anesthetician could give her.