The Gold Bug Variations

by Richard Powers

  I worked quietly, wondering if I too would be fired. My colleagues, however, came to my unqualified support. Everyone I worked with was sufficiently acquainted with my character to know beyond doubt that I was not capable of being personally involved in such a passion play. I had simply let love temporarily turn my head, had fallen in with the wrong boyfriend. A healthy regimen of reference work would erase any blot still attached to me. Mr. Scott teased me about my public record for a few days, then dropped the matter.

  Some weeks after the event, I came home to discover that my apartment had been visited. On the table, wrapped in abandoned sketching paper, was a bottle of our going wine, a book, and a note reading, “To paraphrase the saint: ‘Nobody likes to burn.’”

  I could understand the wine—a late toast to our having brought the cause off. The note, too, was self-explanatory: I was to let him back in if I wanted. But the book. It was a tiny collection of two dozen color plates, details from Brueghel’s sprawling universe of children’s games. Each enlargement showed one of the games from the painted catalog and an en face text description. A nostalgic invitation to recover our earlier, museum-going days. But his choice of subject was so brutally insensitive that I felt my face go hot and all I could think of was how I had stupidly failed to get back the copy of my apartment key I had given him.

  I thought I would let any residual notoriety extinguish itself, then, after a month or two, try to contact Dr. Ressler. I’m not sure what I had in mind, what sort of friendship I imagined we two might still have, after all that had happened and failed to happen. He beat me to it. He called me at home, late one night, waking me from sleep. He, at least, was still on night-shift hours. He was halfway through his long, decorous apology for waking me before I realized who it was. “You!” I shouted stupidly, happily, into the receiver. It seemed physically impossible. Despite his ability to write self-vanishing code that would send Paradise Lost out over modems, Dr. Ressler had always been acutely uncomfortable with telephones. I’d never seen him use one voluntarily and never dreamed he would ever call me. “You! Are you all right?”

  He told me, in a few abstracting words, the details of his grilling and release. “The end of a promising career in the burgeoning field of information.”

  “I’ve missed you so much.” I was still asleep, saying things that would make me cringe the next morning and for a long time after. Not anymore. Now I wish I’d said worse.

  “You’ve missed your friend Todd,” he said. The words lay in that crevasse between assertion and educated guess. He did not wait for me to deny. “Have you been by to see James?”

  The silence on my end worsened by the second. The truth was, I had thought three times an hour for weeks about paying him a visit, but I could no longer stand seeing him that way. Dr. Ressler, mercifully as always, let me off. “He’s getting some light motor skill back. It’ll never be much, but he could not have been blessed with a better temperament to face the next thirty years. The slightest advance, and he’s triumphant. They’ve transferred him to a good muscle therapy clinic.” He gave me the address, which I wrote down eagerly but already hypocritically.

  “Can we see one another sometime?” I asked. Shier than a teenager. “Meet somewhere? I’m almost out of squash.”

  He let out a little puff of air. “I wish I could stick around long enough to keep you in tomatoes.” I didn’t dare say anything. “Jan, that’s why I’m calling. I wanted to tell you that I’m on my way back to the I-states tomorrow. I’ve signed on to a new research project, back with the … I can’t really say the alma mater, can I?” I could hear his lip pulling up ironically. Far away, the faint cross-talk of a bad connection.

  “You what?” The news was so extraordinary that all I could do was laugh with joy. “You what? Incredible!” Was science that forgiving? Yes, and why not? No field could expand so fast that return would be impossible, even after so long away. If the man was sharp enough, his learning curve steep, he might even have the relative advantage of the late starter. “I can’t believe it. What will you be working on?”

  Just as I asked the question, I finally woke. As he spelled it out, I anticipated him by a thin syllable. I was one of those contestants who knew all the answers, but only the instant that the cards are flipped over. “Jan, it’s a cancer study.”

  I hung on the edge of making it out—a phrase in foreign but ghostly cognates, the language I myself would still be speaking if the populations hadn’t drifted. The phrase book of runaway cells. I gripped the silence on the line, palpating it as if pressing the secret hard spot. The first thing I could think to say was, “Does Franklin know?”

  “He’s known for a while.”

  “Listen. I can dress in a minute. When do you leave? I can call a cab.”

  “I’d rather you didn’t. And I’ve never been much for writing letters, either, I’m afraid.”

  “I love you,” I said, without help, wide-awake.

  This time his words lay in a further crevasse, between assertion and command. “You love your friend.”

  Then, nothing between that phone call and Todd’s curt note. But no: Franker’s postcard and his long letter were first, written first, anyway. I did receive one other communication in that blank time, that year I spent doing nothing, working, trying to rehabilitate my own light motor skills. A handwritten card from Jimmy, delivered care of the library where he remembered I worked. Half printed, half cursive, the letters look like a first, helpless effort in penmanship written with the opposite hand. As best as I can transcribe it, it says:

  Dear Jan, I thank you and all of you. I mostly expect that there are many things still ahead. And hard. But yesterday was it possible for one whole book page to get through. As you see, I can drive this pen too, though clutch pops some. My words! I’m getting so that anyone can mostly make me out.

  I wrote him back but failed to say anything. I never wrote Ressler. I never wrote Todd until after he’d left the address. I never said anything I wanted to say to anyone. I’ve misinterpreted the whole set from the start. That table of data in the nucleotides isn’t about reading at all. It’s about saying, out loud, everything there is, while it’s still sayable. The whole, impossibly complex goldberg invention of speech, wasted on someone who from the first listened only to that string of molecules governing cowardice. Obvious, out in the open: every measure, every vertical instant infused with that absurd little theme insisting “Live, live,” and me objecting, “But what if it should be real? What if it all means something? What if someone should hold me to my words?”

  I should have heard it, the night that amateur composer ordered me to. I listened to him disappear into dark fieldwork, this time as subject, on the other side of the instruments. He asked for nothing from me but a little music, a keyboard exercise from the next room over to ease him across his last insomnia. I knew the tune by ear, for years. I might have said something, might have made some noise.

  THE PERPETUAL CALENDAR

  June 6: 1520. Henry VIII hosts a Renaissance extravaganza for archrival Francois I in an attempt to secure an alliance. The feast fails to bring about any lasting political effect …

  1918. For the next nineteen days, the marine brigade of the American Second Division meet the Germans in the forested area of Belleau Wood, in the Aisne region of France. Expending more than half their men to gain …

  1944. Operation Overlord, involving the close coordination of 4,000 ships, 10,000 planes, 180,000 …

  2004. The planet Venus will make its next transit across the sun ….

  Political effects will be negligible. It feels as if I have done nothing but fiddle masochistically with the card set, waiting for the resulting pain to convince me that things have happened. A desperate, deluded attempt at triangulation: the old Laplacian engine applied to today in history. If one samples enough points, writes out all the differential equations governing the days’ independent paths, the resulting vector might be somehow solvable, the long consequence lying
patiently in the repetition might be revealed. The coward’s hope that if I go over the three-by-five events again, I might catch the bit I missed, the bit that renders inevitable exactly what it was (and always had been) that was supposed to happen today, just what part that I was meant to play in it. I can add nothing to the June 6 dossier but a classified ad:

  1986. Position Wanted. MLS. Years in the public service. Some programming experience. Hands-on knowledge of genetics. Good with data.

  There are no more events to go over, no more data to manipulate. The data stream will only widen, deepen, strengthen in current; I can get no closer to where I need to be than these particulars. I lived a year, I lost a year, I spent a third in the archives. It’s time to go back, to dust off the résumé.

  When I started on this tour, I was afraid that the place he inhabited might be bigger than I could safely live in. I have confirmed that hunch by direct measurement. It is immense beyond surviving, larger than the space between brilliance and brittle stars. Older than the oldest soft tissue in the fossil record. As densely populated as a drop of water. More complex than anything I can imagine, as complex as self-reproducing automata. As long as the entire text of history’s card file. As terrifying as the threshold of liberty. I have put it down here as a notch on a stick, afraid to name it any more closely than code.

  I have lost them all, lost those few days when, as inimitable Annie said, we got our feet dirty, lost them by saying nothing at the critical moment. But I have at least this. This field notebook. My after-the-fact year of mapping. But the map is still not the place. I am ready to follow him there, all the way into the locus itself, without benefit of intermediary, to live in it for a moment, everywhere and nowhere, the space between pine and everglade, between adjoining nucleotides, disappearing with the rain forest, glazed with acid rain, vanishing like habitat, like the magician’s knot, but carrying on, varying, learning by trick to subsist on poison, on heavy toxins if I can, living on just a little longer, shouting with all the invented parts of speech for a little assistance.

  But how to get there: how can I find it? All at once it is clear, clear as the first, aperiodic crystal. The double helix is a fractal curve. Ecology’s every part—regardless of the magnification, however large the assembled spin-off or small the enzymatic trigger—carries in it some terraced, infinitely dense ecosystem, an inherited hint of the whole. He said only what the texts say: the code is universal. Here, this city, me, the forest of infection on my hands, the sea of silver cells scraped from the inside of my mouth. Every word I have I knock out of its component letters. Every predication, every sculpted metaphor, sprung from the block. Let’s save what life cannot. Play me, he asked, all he ever asked: play me one of my variations. What could it hurt to carry that tune a little longer? Perhaps I might be up to it after all.

  XXX

  TODAY IN HISTORY

  6/23: Midsummer Eve. Everything and nothing happened: one day, one gene, one enzyme, one reaction, one island in the perpetual calendar. I feel, with reasonable professional confidence, that I could extract if not the sum of the day’s doctored console log at least a rough transcript. After a long while, one hits on the illuminating idea of building the room around the moonlight.

  Today caught up with me a week ago. Last Monday. I had closed the notebooks and started in on the job search. My main problem in putting myself on the block was how to account for my year off without seeming to host some secret pathology that might flare up again at any moment. I tried to pass it off on the résumé as a school year, but my inability to claim any accredited course of study seemed conspicuous, to say the least.

  But that did not stop me exploiting my old employers for my own purposes. On Monday, early, I went downtown to 40th Street and began researching the registers. I was looking for a certain kind of outfit— conservation, public awareness. Places that worked to preserve those stakes now dissolving. It seemed the career change of choice, whether or not there was still time left for it. By midafternoon, I had a dozen addresses. It was slow going, culling them by hand. The next time I job-search, the whole world will be on-line.

  I broke for packed lunch and in the afternoon decided that I would need an interview suit to restore some of the credibility my résumé now lacked. I needed cash, and stopped at an automated teller that would take my bank card. I punched in my four-digit sequence and watched the screen flash “Incorrect code. Please try again.” Before I could reason with the machine, it cleared its screen and posted a new message: “Hello old friend. Here’s an easy one.” And out of that simple, vibrating speaker, designed to make no more than a few inarticulate flutes and beeps, came music. More than easy: I knew the piece before it even started. I knew the melody at once, both melodies as they entered, all three, four. A gathering of old friends, as easy to me, as familiar and close as my own name.

  THE QUODLIBET

  The Bach family, gathered at home, would begin with chorales and proceed to feats of extemporary combinatorics. One would start in with a popular tune, eighteenth-century radio music. Another would add, transposed, augmented, or diminuted to nestle down in perfect counterpoint, an older folk melody. A third would insert something racy, suggestive, even obscene, and a fourth might lay on top of all these a hymn. The words would fly in all directions, as would the piled-up melodic lines. But the whole would hang together, spontaneous, radiant, invented. Discovered harmony.

  This is how he ends the set. No canon at the tenth, as the variation’s position demands, although the snippets of trivial folk tune enter imitatively, in double counterpoint. No last flash of virtuosic brilliance. Just home: solid, radiant, warm, improvisation night with the family. Two of the folk strains—as recognizable as snatches of bus-stop melody heard this morning—have been identified from out of the thicket:

  Ich bin so lang nicht bei dir gewest. Ruck her, Ruck her, Ruck her I’ve been away from you for so long. Come here, come here, come here!

  Kraut und Rüben haben mich vertrieben …

  Cabbage and beets drove me away …

  This song’s second part also enters the contrapuntal fray:

  Hätt mein Mutter Fleisch gekocht, so wär ich länger blieben.

  Had my mother cooked meat, I would have hung around longer.

  High-spirited, but as steady as creation gets. The musicologist Mellers quotes the best explanation of the effect in words. Thomas Browne again, the Doctor’s religion:

  Even that vulgar and Tavern Music, which makes one man merry, another mad, strikes me into a deep fit of devotion, and a profound contemplation of the first Composer; there is something in it of Divinity more than the ear discovers. It is an hieroglyphical and shadowed lesson of the whole world …

  But there is another joke coded in the text, wrapped inside the tavern music. I’ve been away from you for so long. Cabbage and beets did it. Had my mother cooked up meat … The complainer is the sarabande Base, back at last, in unmistakable outline underneath the flurry of simultaneous quotes. I’ve been a great distance, a long time gone. Sometimes unrecognizable. But it’s not my fault; had my mother served up more than thin fare, all this circumlocution would never have been necessary. Bach’s apology for not being a better cook. Molecular evolution excusing itself: had I been a little more skilled, I might have spared the world all this terminal variety.

  Now no matter: the theme is back for good, in the left hand of the quodlibet, incarnate in the material of this last, apologetic child whose parent in no way could have foreseen it. The quodlibet changes all the previous variations after the fact. The irreducible is now less important than the irrecoverable. There comes a time in the search for the plaintext when even a chance rendezvous with the still encrypted cipher seems a glimpse, a real step in the hard passage on. The sense of all tune is to continue singing, in as many simultaneous melodies as possible. Come here, come here. I’m home. In the innermost hive, inside the cell’s thread, I never left. Was always there.

  QUOTE OF THE DAY

/>   I stood on the sidewalk, gathering a crowd, alerted bystanders in a jaded city closing an amazed ring on the pavement around me. He had said, once, that it’s infinitely curious that people are not infinitely more curious than they are. Here it was, his private lesson in inquisitiveness, remarkable enough to draw an audience, even in midtown.

  Monophonic speaker playing its own harmonies: he had explained to me a long time ago how that might be done, how Bach himself had done it in the solo partitas. Just hit the right notes at the right time. With a little programming, everything is possible. But I couldn’t in all of creation take in what was happening. Even while this bank-teller automaton spewed its music out into the city soot, I couldn’t see how he, a year dead, could be lodged inside this circuit, playing to me. I clutched at the keypad of the machine, as if I could reply to him there. I felt the tunes running out and was powerless to keep them from reaching the last measure. They cadenced together, joke, chorale, folk song, Base. In the return of silence, the screen displayed: “Machine adaptation by SR.” It cleared and wrote one more quote to compound the quodlibet: “He is a man. Take him for all in all.” Another thirty seconds later, it changed again to read, “Please enter your transaction.”