The Gold Bug Variations

by Richard Powers

  Ressler sits mum as a skewered saint, nauseated by this crowing cockdom. Even pretending to the ugliest mechanical bias, Joe lies to himself about what blood pressure is after. There is a gene, flexibly distributed throughout the pool. It codes for a protein … How to put this? If rutting truly drives each organism—and doubtless it does—not even vilest desire, aroused in violence, abuse, or smudgy photos, is free of that linked factor. How did awful tenderness take hold? What possible survival value has it? Lovering’s enlightened smuttiness is faked. Heat is by far the easier half of the linkage to admit. Lust does not exploit tenderness; tenderness manipulates lust.

  Lovering reaches the heights of confidential repulsiveness. “See, Stu, I have this …”. He beams, a boy bringing home a gold star. “I guess you’d have to call her a mistress.” The disclosure promotes him to King of France. “Her name … I shouldn’t be telling you this.”

  “You shouldn’t be telling me this, Joe.”

  “Her name is Sandy. A remarkable woman. You know Marie Curie?” Ressler doesn’t bite. “Well, she’s nothing like Marie Curie. But that’s Pierre’s loss. Not to say Sandy’s a dumb bunny. She knows Diffy Q. But let’s face it: if you could bed down the most brilliant female yet produced by evolution, or have your fly zipped for three seconds by Kim Novak, I mean, tell me …?” Ressler rustles his report, but Lovering perseveres. “That’s where Sandy comes in. One month ago, after much open and healthy athletic debate, I finally managed to persuade her to bestow upon me all the corporeal benefits of holy matrimony without the contractual obligations. A mere Miss Demeanor. I’d feel like a heel if it weren’t for one thing. She loves it. I can’t come through the door without her … she’s an altered personality. Crazed. She shivers, for God’s sake. She gets, like, surgically grafted … Let me tell you, the word ‘stamina’ has taken on entirely new threads to me. On top of that, she can turn stale shrimp into Lobster Newburg.”

  Almost to himself, Ressler asks, “If she’s got all that, Joey, why not marry her?’”

  “Where’s the crime in that?” This self-declared fling, the prescribed male bravura, renders Lovering so heartbreakingly pathetic that Ressler cannot abide the office another minute, even if leaving means abandoning Ulrich’s progress report. Lovering holds forth: “Come on! You’ve read Frazer! That’s science, too. Soft, maybe, but hey? Tilling the ol’ fields?”

  Ressler mumbles apology and retreats to the hall.

  He arrives without plan at Botkin’s office, knocks and enters. Toveh stops her patient exam grading to greet him. “Well! Here is a face absent for too long. Have we clarified some further coding mechanism?” Ressler glances at her, startled. But she’s simply making conversation. Alarm unnoticed, he takes his traditional place on the leather couch, psychoanalytic-style. Botkin smiles at the familiarity. “Well then. Today’s lesson?”

  Ressler raises only a weak, pained grimace. He folds his hands. “Tell me everything you know about music.”

  “So I’m in charge of the lecture, today. Student teaches teacher, is that it? Such a topic!” Concern crosses her Alpine face. She presses her eyes with the heels of her palms. Her accent spontaneously thickens. “One must learn a language at a very early age in order for it to stick.” Ressler, prone, does not move. No point in her asking the source of this sudden cultural interest. Without further objection, Botkin rises to the challenge of condensing the complete procession of Western music into an hour. Assisted by her archive of 78s, she conducts the tour in the hushed monotone of a cathedral guide who tries not to disturb the sanctuary: thorough, succinct, amazing herself by what she says, embarrassed by the desperate variety of ways of singing.

  She begins as far back as she can touch, in the incense-dosed anonymity of the Middle Ages. The world as deceptive epiphenomenon. She sings a few bars of plainchant in a rich contralto, unaware of the prohibition against public singing. The mournful intervals of Pope Gregory turn her Edwardian cubicle into a Romanesque-capitaled, monk-infested crypt. She adds two parallel parts to the plainsong and arrives at Organum. From the Notre Dame school, she glides across open terrain, resting momentarily at Conductus, Ars Nova, an excerpt from Machaut’s eerie, unrelenting mass. She flowers forth into the Renaissance, demonstrating the startling development of imitative polyphony with the assistance of her disks. She speaks of a new expressiveness, an emotional molding of discord. Music divides into cold North and sunbathed South, remote England and dazzling Italy, although the Venetian school is overrun by defecting Dutch contrapuntalists. Proper names begin to serve as post markers: Palestrina, Monteverdi, Gibbons, Byrd. Serious music strays out of the church. She plays him that party craze, the madrigal. April is in my mistress’s face. And July in her eyes hath place. Within her bosom is September. But in her heart: a cold December.

  The monodic revolution saddens Ressler, as does the advent of opera. Both, he feels intuitively, are wrong turns, apostasy. The sensuous music of France and the striving for new complexity in the Netherlands and Germany console him a little. Botkin maps the rise of the fugue through the Northern Baroque masters, all of whom were required to have names beginning with “Sch.” The late Mediterranean Baroque is lost on him, tinkled away in ornament. She talks about the emergence of a cryptic system called tonality—a set of rules, mathematical equivalences and prescriptions. Her language becomes laced with arithmetic relations. Reaching Bach and Handel, Botkin forgoes any hope of wrapping up the outline in an hour. Rather, lecturer and audience lose track of time. She stumbles, unable to sum up this first great watershed. She mumbles a few words about the High Baroque rage for unity.

  Mention of the Leipzig cantor throws him into nervous agitation. “More on Bach,” Ressler shouts from the sofa. “What do you know about this man?”

  “Bach?” Botkin remarks in surprise. Not the usual starting point for novices. “Of all the composers in the tradition, Bach is by far the most …” She looks for the appropriate hyperbole. Nothing transcendent enough. “Bach is the most likely to offer to help wash the dishes.”

  “More Bach,” Ressler insists. She plays him the most awful moment in auditory art: the Barabbas chord from the Matthew Passion. “More Bach.” She plays him the last movement of Berg’s Violin Concerto where out of the abject, serial mass of twentieth-century dissonance arises first the agonized tritone, then the whole Bach sotting of a resigned chorale. Es ist genug; Herr, wenn es dir gefällt, so spanne mich doch aus. It is enough; Lord, if it pleases you, simply unharness me.

  She pursues doggedly—the rococo, the classical homophonic reaction against the spent baroque. The issue is not progress or even advancement of technique, however tenuously that might be defined. Motion is not forward but concentric: restless rearrangement of styles oozing into every open cranny. She draws him the floor plan of sonata form, its tug between tonic and dominant, symmetry and surprise. Ressler wonders if composers are made to study algebra and architecture before being allowed to play with tunes. The joking grace of Haydn prepares the way for the aerial escape artist Mozart.

  She plays him the Jupiter. “Listen to him combine the old fugal with the new sonata form; as close to sublime as human engineering gets.” Ressler hears, but dimly: faraway sounds from the next town over. He feels the essential oddity of this moment—a young man, hungry for a vocabulary that can contain him, reaching in progressive restlessness back into time to revive an archaism, pouring a tour de force effortlessly out of the orchestra like water over stones in a brook, proving that no ear had ever really heard the idiom before, even when it was given up as exhausted. He needs to locate more notes. To detect with more precision the relations of time and pitch that evade him. His clay ear calls out for schooling. But can one learn to hear?

  Beethoven, Olympian peak, shakes his fist, cracks a punchline, storms heaven by force. Botkin does Opus 18 Number 1, Opus 59 Number 2, and Opus 133, the Grosse Fuge, three string quartet landmarks to give a blurry route description of that lonely launch into the unknown. She mentions
the famous intrastaff annotation—Must it be? “Either a rage against fate, a rejection of metaphysics, or a reference to his landlord on the doorstep again demanding the rent in cash.”

  In Botkin’s version, this flinging wide of sound’s expressive possibilities—contrasting keys, intensifying form, expanding tonal vocabulary—paradoxically spells the beginning of the end of concert music. As with a tumor that initially stimulates a patient into rosy vigor, self-destruction hides in the richest profusion of musical invention in history. Undaunted, she takes on the unmanageable rash of romanticism. She sings with Schubert, Mendelssohn, and Schumann, indulges the introspection of Chopin and bravura of Berlioz, puts up with Lisztian pyrotechnics, and arrives too quickly at Brahms, the most unbearably beautiful of all. “Then we have two towering operatics who might as well have lived on different planets. The first is Verdi. You know all his tunes already; you just don’t know they are his. The second, undeniably a genius, I’d rather not go into just now.”

  “All right,” Ressler guesses. “We skip him. Who’s next?”

  “Well, music gets mixed up in nationalism. Every land its spokesman: Norway, Grieg; Slovakia, Dvořák; Finland, Sibelius.”

  “I get the pattern.”

  “The names start shrinking and clumping in groups. The Five. Les Six.” She concedes a few more individuals: Tchaikovsky, Rachmaninoff, Debussy, Ravel, Bruckner, Mahler, Schönberg, Stravinsky. “More continuously than most realize, post-romanticism shades off into the eclectic anarchy of the twentieth century. And here we arrive at the far end, writing pieces of unhearable symmetry on one extreme, and on the other, picking notes out of a hat.” The thumbnail trip has lasted all afternoon. Outside, the first negative traces of dark. Botkin, hearing herself compress the whole story into a few hours, is bewildered at how a race with fixed needs could get from Machaut to Milhaud in so few breaths.

  Ressler feels her displacement, the little light that has gone out in her tent. But empathy makes him suddenly impatient. “What incredible sprawl. The stuff makes no sense. How can I be expected to remember all this?”

  Botkin turns to him pityingly. “How do you remember your stereochemistry?”

  “False analogy,” he snaps. “That’s a system.”

  “History is a system too.” She returns to the dry tone predating their friendship. “You might try taking a few decades to study it.”

  “Too cluttered. Too many names …”.

  Botkin snorts. “You want a short list, I suppose? Tops of the Pops in each critical period?”

  “Yes. That would be fine.”

  “You Americans are all the same.”

  “So: all those fellows in the Dark Ages and Renaissance …?”

  “Give that to Josquin, with Monteverdi the transition.”

  “Baroque?”

  “Bach. We want help with our dishes, do we not?”

  “Classical’s clearly Mozart. Beethoven his own class, I suppose.”

  “Has anyone ever told you that you are a quick study?”

  “Romantic? Brahms?” Botkin doesn’t answer. She is hearing a light in the night. “And beyond?”

  His tutor returns. “Post-romantic … Mahler, definitely. Twentieth century ….” She drifts into silence that lasts so long Ressler thinks she has forgotten the question. As he is about to suggest they quit for dinner, Botkin smiles. “Our century: Adrian Leverkühn.” He won’t get the quip for decades.

  “Maybe I’m not after stylistic history, per se. Not names themselves— not even the short list.” He smiles affectionately. “I need to locate the musical message. Do you know what I mean?” Botkin shakes her head. “Can you look at a score and tell … simply by the pattern of notes, whether the composer has uncovered something correct?”

  He has not said what he means; so not surprisingly, she misunderstands him. She tells of Mahler applying for a conducting job, lying about his knowing an opera he’d never heard. “He was hired, spent an afternoon with the full score, and conducted the piece that evening, from memory.”

  She tells the story with such passion that Ressler asks, “That man moves you?”

  Botkin laughs. “You have discovered my surreptitious character flaw. Have you any idea what it means to be in love with turn-of-thecentury suspensions in a world fixated on drums? Despite effort, I cannot assimilate to the North American ethos. Do you recall that supermarket where we ran into one another? They have, this week, at every checkout, a tabloid reading, ‘Millions Dead in Epidemic.’ I saw that yesterday and thought: ‘So we’ve brought on the end.’ It did not cheer me to discover that the article was about the Bubonic Plague.

  “Unquestionably, the music we’re talking about is dead. I will not inquire into the source of your sudden surge in interest. Perhaps you shouldn’t get started with it. Surely you realize the extent of the transistor age, and where it must lead. I can forgive the children; somehow, they understand the deliberate decision to permanently militarize the world. Even our old refuge science—older for some, granted—is conscripted. So: an eighteen-year-old needs music that can be listened to entirely in three minutes. Just in case.

  “And yet, if we’re to be saved, the prophase must do the saving. Youth. You’ve read von Baer, Haeckel, the developmental homologists?” Ressler shakes his head, says he knows “of” them. “My God!” Botkin cries. “Don’t tell me they’ve dropped ‘ontogeny recapitulates phylogeny’ from formal training. Perhaps they still read Rilke, in any case: ‘Glaubt nicht, Schicksal sei mehr als das Dichte der Kindheit.’ Don’t ever think that fate’s anything more than the condensation of childhood. Champaign-Urbana, with more engineering buildings than pizza parlors, is already a lost cause.”

  “But music,” Ressler reminds her.

  “Exactly. But music.” She plays him the first hundred bars of Mahler’s Ninth, that premonition of wholesale disintegration of the dream—the abandoned condensation of childhood. She tells of the composer’s anguished marginalia—the “Oh Alma!” penned into the score upon his discovering that his young wife was copulating with another man. She describes Mahler’s session with Freud, how the composer lay prostrate on a couch in Leiden in 1910 for four hours, as Ressler has lain all afternoon. “I picture Freud taking the score of this symphony, studying its figuration, seeing, as you suggest, even as an amateur, that the composer has revealed something terrible, real, and saying to his patient, ‘Don’t let me cure you of this.’ That, my friend, is your musical moment. But we’re wasting our time. Come. Let’s go have a meal. There is still eating, drinking, good talk.”

  They walk through the deserted corridor, leave the building, lock it behind them. Halfway across the quad, Botkin stops. She turns on Ressler fiercely. “You’ve worked in a lab, you’ve scribbled in enough notebooks to know better. I tell you, the world is not modulations and desire. It is stuff, pure and simple.”

  The attack floors Ressler. He can’t think why he deserves this dressing-down. A minute later, Botkin is pleasant again, discussing the choice of restaurants. Over ordering, she speculates, “Your ‘musical message.’ I’ve always been partial to text. I don’t mean opera; I’ve never liked flailing.

  But let me tell you two litanies, late mutations on the Viennese tradition. The first arises in Mahler’s Resurrection: ‘What you have loved and striven for is yours.’ I would love to believe that. The second, more realistic, is from a Webern cantata. You admire the compaction in a nucleotide sequence? This man’s Opus 21 is a perfect palindrome: a symphony that reads the same forward and backward, entirely generated from a densely threaded theme. Of course, the ear can’t hear that perfect order. As far as the listener is concerned, the piece might as well be random! But his text. His ‘message,’ as you so wonderfully and naively put it. I paraphrase the cantata: ‘Keep deep down, for the innermost life hums in the hive.’”

  THE ENIGMA VARIATIONS

  I find a footnote to the race for solution in his day, the story of Beadle’s 1958 Nobel Prize for the elegant expe
riment equating one gene with one synthesized enzyme. On winning the prize, Beadle received a cable from Max Delbrück, a later prizewinner, reading:

  ADBACBBDBADACDCBBABCBCDACDBBCABBA

  ADCACABDABDBBBAACAACBBBABDCCDB

  CCBBDBBBAADBADAADCCDCBBADDCACA

  ADBBDBDDABBACCAACBCDBADCBDBBBA

  The question could have sat unanswered on my board forever. I get out my decoder ring, put together everything I know about Beadle’s and Delbrück’s state of knowledge in 1958, and set to work cracking the telegram. I break the string into triplets. By ’58, even post-docs knew to begin there.

  ADB ACB BDB ADA CDC BBA BCB CDA

  CDB BCA BBA ADC ACA BDA BDB BBA

  ACA ACB BBA BDC CDB CCB BDB BBA

  ADB ADA ADC CDC BBA DDC ACA ADB

  BDB DDA BBA CCA ACB CDB ADC BDB BBA

  The message still means less than chance to me. But in the noise of these codons is a tip-off, an improbable distribution, something designed. The four independent letters appear freely in each position with one exception. The letter B occurs in the middle of only one codon: BBA. The unique nature of this most common trio suggests a special function, perhaps framing. I try a space; the message splits revealingly:

  ADB ACB BDB ADA CDC BCB CDA CDB BCA ADC ACA BDA BDB