I yanked my card out in a daze. All the glands in my face opened and ran, without so much as polite consultation. I could still hear that music; it had never stopped. Something of divinity in it, beyond the ear. I stepped away from the machine, reaching a pitch of synthesis I will never recover. I took in the entire block in a single, vertical moment. The ring of bystanders in front of me blinked, grinning that ridiculous grin city people use in those few seconds when the danger of surviving lifts. A heavy man, medium height, thick glasses, indeterminate race, spoke for everyone. “What on earth was that?”
I was in the middle of such a convulsed colloid of sob and laugh that I could only get out the words by shouting. “I couldn’t begin to tell you.”
A WALKING TOUR OF THE KNOWN WORLD
I had to tell someone right away. But there was only one man I could possibly tell: the one I was supposed to take for all in all. Where was he in this world? How could I get there? Like an arctic tern on moving day, I swung uptown, toward that other information booth, the place where he had once told me, “Meet me here if we ever get separated.”
I cut through the Park. My walk took forever; it didn’t last long enough. The Park was just a simulation, a mere children’s zoo of the full system. But I had been away from the real thing for so long that even this thin intermediary stood in nicely. It had been a long time since I had felt any sort of real link to chitin and chlorophyll. I had thought that words, the distraction of language, enforced a separation, banished me to the nowhere of descriptions. Crossing the Park, I realized that no living piece of tissue could keep its head up above the Second Law without the power of speech. In shape, function, unfolding: they were all shouting, speaking, feasting on words like lichen on rocks. Everything was a grammar, and we might come back in if we wanted.
I reached the Met at last, made my contribution, and practically ran to the wheatfield. He wasn’t there. Of course not. But I had to go through the motion, for the time-lapse singing telegram Dr. Ressler had sent me was still an inch from my ear and I had to tell Todd while I could still hum. The painting, at least, was still around. I stood in front of it for a long time, thinking of the day we two had come to see it. It seemed a different object now, a completely changed composition. I had never seen it before. I looked at the harvesters, the gatherers, those just stopping for a meal, the man sprawled asleep under the tree, the two birds lifting up over the inlet of grain, the distant figures deep in the background, children at games again. Somewhere in my head, scattered by later atheism, a poem the nuns had once forced me to memorize tried to break the surface, an equation relating wheat and sleepers and time and reapers.
I wandered through the galleries, knowing I could not expect to find him there, having to content myself with the go-between of paint. I played with the idea, the inverse of the one that had struck me while cutting across the Park: everything ever painted—tree-catalogued landscapes, still lives with fish, flesh, and fowl served up with a sprig of sliced lemon, interiors, abstractions, all backwater genres—was an attempt to classify, backdrive the alluvial branching, locate the common term of natural history. Even the endless crucifixions seemed more about anatomy—the suffering capacity of the body, the way the thumbs curved in toward the palm when the tendons were severed—than they were about metaphysics.
After a while I stopped noticing the paintings altogether, so much more diverse was the international, drifting crowd trying to decipher them. This sampling of people, muddying the halls from Egyptian to Expressionist, had been specially selected for extremes of characteristic. The varieties of human face began to seem almost comical. This random assortment of particulars had nothing at all in common. Each one had a privacy that defied and redefined all the others. My texts had it right: we differ more from one another than man does from ape.
I left in late afternoon, not knowing where to go, with the bank machine’s message still in me, pressing to be ported. I stopped at another automated teller, but got nothing except the usual cash. I turned home, walking the whole way, miles, taking my life in my hands through the dangerous bouquet of neighborhoods, across that beautiful bridge, finding that slower, less accurate steps prolonged the afternoon message sprung on me.
But it was fading, unarrestable, going back to that place where wonder hides out from habituation. By the time I reached the Heights, late, after dark, it was just a sentence. Hello friend; here’s an easy one. Still a block away from the antique shop, I saw the light on in the second story. Living, just existing, presses probability to the threshold of unlikeliness. I looked up at a window shadow, a violation of physical law, a miracle of coincidence that could be neither reverse-engineered nor repeated. I almost apoplexed letting myself in; the shape could mark only one person, the person I was out hopelessly tracking down. The only other one with a key. He was sitting in his favorite stuffed chair, head back on the antimacassar, under a soft, shaded, fifty-watt pool of light, reading my notebooks. “You!” I shouted from the door. “How did you get here?”
As if he had no other way of answering except with a musical riddle, he began whistling “Take the A-Train.”
I dropped everything and threw myself violently on him, grabbed hold, as if grip could arrest and fix this. It startled him, seeing me bare, begging to be spared. “What’d I do?” he laughed, protecting himself from the attack of my hands. “Tell me what I did.”
We dispensed with talking for a record three minutes. Then, all I could find to repeat was, “This is impossible. I can’t believe this.”
THE QUESTION BOARD
“What’s impossible?”
I told him. I skipped everything of importance—the year of enforced waste, the year of science. My quitting my job. The genetics texts. My anxiety over not hearing from him, then hearing, then not. I skipped everything, and started in with the bank machine playing the last Goldberg. “The quodlibet. He was in there, Franklin; I swear to you. Do you know what he told me?” I waited, put my hand to his chin, the same line of bone, and made him shake his head. “He told me you were a man. That I was to take you for all in all.”
“He said that?” Franklin reacted in a show of disappointment. “Damn it. I had expressly asked for ‘One man loved the pilgrim soul in you.’”
I reeled from the implication. “He’s alive?”
Todd buckled his shoulders at my stupidity, my untreatable addiction to hope. “Janny, don’t you see? I primed the pump myself, last week. He told me, when I went to see him in Illinois at the end, that he’d left a little virus on-line for you. He gave me the number that would bring it to life. Said I might use it if I ever needed to soften you up.”
I took my hands from him, moved to a spot on the floor. No coincidence. Todd had cosigned on the telegram. “You never needed,” I said, half to myself. “Never needed to soften.”
“I’ve been punching into the damn tellers every afternoon, to see if you’d tripped it yet. Paranoid that someone was gonna pick me up for breaking and entering, recognize me as a monkeyer from way back. Don’t you ever withdraw, woman? You above cash? Much relief this afternoon when you finally got around to it.”
Matter-of-fact affectation, tough humor against the odds, as if the separation might as easily have been two days or twenty years. I dismissed the sixty-four thousand closest questions and asked, “How long have you been back?” As if the tourist’s itinerary would tell me anything.
He looked at his watch. “Ten months or so. Jersey City, actually. A shade cheaper.”
“Ten months! Franklin. Oh God. Jesus. Why on earth did you wait?” Even as I asked it, I knew the question was out of line. Wait for what? To come see a person who had told him that visiting hours were over?
“I could not drop by earlier,” he said, parodying Euclid, “because I didn’t want to show up here empty-handed.” He reached into a rucksack that had been lying innocuously by the side of the chair. He had arrived packed. He extracted a sheaf from his overnight bag and handed it to me. A stack of
beautifully typed watermark bond. “I figured that you wouldn’t even say ‘boo’ to me unless and until I wrapped up the dissertation.”
My hand caught, afraid to turn over the cover sheet. “Todd. Don’t start this again.” I felt myself laughing, stricken, beginning to believe.
“Done. Portrait of the Artist. I’m out from under it.”
I turned the cover page and began to read. I knew what it was with the first paragraph, the first sentence’s description of a young post-doc’s Greyhound bus arrival at a laboratory deep in the interior. He too had served his sentences. The story of one life; the math of the central nervous system. I could not read on. I began straightening the sheaf of papers, throat, hands, eyes, all in wild counterpoint.
“Who’da thought it?” Todd said, filling the silence. “Years of art history, and I wind up in biography after all.”
You should talk, friend: all I ever wanted to be was a researcher, and here I am, plunged into information science. To keep myself from complete regression, I asked, “What have you been living on all this while?”
Todd shot back, speaking through the corner of his mouth, “Patrimony. The old man’s life policy. What’s it to ya, doll?”
I began to cry, quietly. He came and sat beside me on the floor. He began to tell me about his last visit to the professor. “The man pretended to be furious at me for leaving Europe just to come see him like that, a skeleton. We managed to sneak in a car tour, out to the woods, before he got too weak. I plied him for buried biographical details. I asked what it felt like, slowly dissolving into bad instructions. I asked him for his odds on humanity. I asked him if he was happy with the way he’d spent his time. He told me: ‘It seems my answers to all the important questions are doomed to remain qualified.’
“No bursts of false hope, no journal entries celebrating I kept my meals down today. Let’s hope tomorrow is still better. Nothing left behind, no bequest to first filial but the ongoing experiment. Janny, his hair had turned white. White. As white as a fresh sheet of paper. I asked him if the cancer study he’d hooked up with had reached any conclusions. ‘I have, in any case. It hurts’.”
So did the punchline. So did having to laugh. The muscles around my rib cage contracted all together, against the blueprint, more like a swimmer’s cramp than laughter. Todd made another feeble, black crack, for my sake: something about the absurdity of a language that made oncology and ontology differ by a single mutation. A little while later, I thought I might try breathing again.
“He told me a story: 1982. The year before you meet him. He’s passed fifty, gratefully out from under the immediate jurisdiction of endocrinology. Through decades of training, he now thinks of Dr. Koss only three times a day. He’s living in a world where clipped, rewritten supercoiled strands of nucleotides can be sent from anywhere to anywhere. Where everybody’s got his own ILLIAC. Three golf balls on the moon.
“He’s working steadily on the night shift, the month before I get myself hired. On a whim, he turns the radio on, fiddles with the dial, and freezes it on an old friend. It’s the Canadian kid, beyond a doubt. The inimitable playing style, that muffled humming in the background tracks trying for a Platonic, thirty-third variation just beyond the printed score. Playing the piece that woman gave him. Ressler is amazed to find how vividly the structure of the past is still encoded in him. Stadium Terrace, Cyfer. That reverse-telescope dilation, where distant is closer than near. He discovers he still loves Jeannie as intensely as the day he first stumbled upon the evidence.
“But in an instant’s listening, he’s shocked to hear that it’s not the same piece, not the same performance. It’s a radical rethinking from beginning to end, worlds slower, more variegated, richer in execution. A lot of the variations enter attacca, without pause, the last notes of one spilling into the first notes of the next, anxious to hear how they might sound all at once, on top of one another.
“He can’t believe his good luck at getting a new recording. But the party dissipates at the end, after the return of the ossified aria, when the announcer reports that the pianist has suffered a massive cerebral hemorrhage just after releasing this take two. He leaves the radio on all night, and the next, as if letting it air out. When the piece plays again two days later, he knows why. He sits and listens the piece through in its entirety, weeping like a child for the death of someone he didn’t even know.”
I saw then why Todd came back to pass all this on to me. I raised my head, knowing I looked hideous, thinking that if he could see me this way and not run away, it might begin to signify some chance. When he saw my face like that, Todd laughed, reached out a finger, and smeared a little saline pool around in the bogs under my eyes.
“He sent you back to me,” I said.
“My suggestion. He supplied the dowry. A trunk packed with handwritten full scores. He thought we might like to try to decipher them together.” Todd reached his hands around my waist from behind, closed them around mine, then moved both sets in a pantomime of that old pump-organ enterprise we had once indulged in, up in the woods. This time the keyboard was only four-hands.
I freed myself from his arms. The thought of Dr. Ressler’s compositions pinned me against the stakes of being alive. The readiness that the singing bank machine had released in me vanished. Everything I had learned in my year off, every stunted enzyme for courage that I had managed in isolation to nurse alive, was about to seize up and go dysfunctional again, knowing all that now rode on it. I tried to steady myself; if I could tell Todd everything I’d done, from the beginning, I might begin to retrieve myself. “I’ve been toying with a little biography too, I’m afraid.”
“So I see,” he said, picking up the notebook I had caught him reading. “Pretty strong stuff here, Missy. Sex, love, espionage, the works. You’re sitting on a gold mine, you know.”
“Don’t be absurd.”
“No. I’m serious. I have this great idea.”
All of a piece, I knew what it was. “Out of the question. Don’t even think of it.”
“Come on. A few edits, a little cut-and-paste …”
He made me laugh. I couldn’t help myself. “I believe ‘splicing’ is the bioengineer’s term of choice.”
He made a great show of collating, a little courtship-dance of paper-shuffling to win me again, for good. “Come on. Let’s do it. Let’s make a baby.”
I shook my head. “No,” I said, dead sober. “It wouldn’t be enough. A man like you will always want the real thing someday. Or at least the chance. It would never last.”
“My dear Ms. Reference.” He edged over to me, taking me up against him. “Why do you think the Good Lord invented sperm bank donations?” He placed his hands over my face, exploring the burning landscape there. “And let me ask you another thing.” One for the perpetual Question Board. His eyes were full beyond measure. His whole throat shook like a beginner’s in wonder at the words he was about to discover. “Who said anything about lasting?”
Aria
DA CAPO E FINE
What could be simpler? In rough translation: Once more with feeling.
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Copyright © Richard Powers 1991
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First published in Vintage in 2019
First published in Great Britain by Little, Brown and Company (UK) in 1992
First published in the United States by William Morrow and Company, Inc. in 1991
This novel is entirely a work of fiction. The names, characters and incidents portrayed in it are the work of the author’s imagination. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events or localities is entirely coincidental.
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The Gold Bug Variations Page 77
