The Gold Bug Variations

by Richard Powers

  “Hm. Fiendishly clever.”

  “And what do you mean, ‘We make things right’? What things? How right? Who’s this ‘we’? There are twenty-five hundred of these places across the country. Am I supposed to believe that all the wes do things one way and all the theys do it another? Grant me some discrimination.”

  He began smiling the death smile. “Aren’t we being a little willful? It’s a time-honored, universal tradition. ‘Your Driver’—insert nameplate here—

  ‘Safe, Reliable, Courteous.’ Semiotics, woman. We’re not communicating anything. Folks don’t care about facts. They wouldn’t believe them anyway. They just want the promise of friendship slipped into the sale.”

  “And they believe that?”

  “Who’s gonna lie about friendship?”

  “‘We’ll love you. All twenty-five hundred of us.’”

  “It’s commercially viable.”

  “Is that right?” I asked quietly.

  “Yes. That’s right.” Still smiling, he knew we were lost, that I wanted it that way. I kept flipping through the boards, as if we weren’t in the middle of the last square-off. One thing I still admire about Keith: despite my encouragement, he never stooped to killing as a way to preserve things. He never pretended any degree of attachment less than he had. Just as I was on the verge of giving him further cause, the phone rang. Keith bounded out of the room to answer it. I heard him from the bedroom, just short of abusive, asking, “Who’s financing this? Who pays your salary? Who do I sue for breach of privacy?”

  He hung up and came back looking beautifully sheepish. “My poor relations in the phone solicitation racket. Turns out our name has been chosen at random to receive a book of coupons worth several thousands of dollars, free, at only twenty-nine ninety-five. Dante placed those people one circle below real estate brokers. Where’s that timeline? Gotta make some emendations.”

  I went to him and put my arms around him. After a long time, we separated, embarrassed. I mumbled something about going to bed. He didn’t move. I went into the bathroom and ran the water. I heard Tuckwell let himself out the door and lock it from the outside. He went down the stairs two at a time. I went to the dark window and watched until he came out on the street below. I saw him safely to the next block. He turned north, cutting a swath toward the bombed-out blocks. Everywhere, shops had battened down for the night, the day’s refuse and rinds rotting in the gutter. In the two and a half blocks I tracked him, amorphous outlines threatened from doorways, bumped against him, suggesting obscure exchanges. Keith kept up a clip that convinced the wasted, substance-dependent figures that he was in peak health and not to be messed with.

  His dependency was the city itself: male addiction to the unpredictable. Covert dangers of an evening walk through the neighborhood, sotto voce threats implied and periodically acted out, had led him from the lazy Methodist interior where he had been raised. The instant the umbilical snapped, he’d buzzed to the coast, first to a fine arts school in Rhode Island, a state whose motto, and not Colorado’s, he insisted, should have been “Nothing Without Providence.” Then Boston for a year. All staging ground for New York, shooting into Manhattan’s drag like an ion from a Tesla coil. He had habituated to life and needed a higher throttle. In North America, NY, NY was the most potent over-the-counter drug available. The city sucked him up as it did all insomniacs. But even here, familiarity tracked him down. After five years of Brooklyn, he talked about moving to the Lower East Side, the South Bronx. Calcutta perhaps. Someplace a body could feel.

  But I moved first. Ironic: I couldn’t think of the two miles’ sickening diversity between the South Docks and Prospect Park without admitting I didn’t belong here. One look at my clothes, one syllable of accent gave me away. And here I was, combing the neighborhoods for a place as if it were coupon-doubling day at the supermarket. For the past week, I’d had to keep myself from renting every slum I looked into, they all, overnight, seemed so full of promise. The hint of sea change was enough to make the familiar, forsaken rat warehouses show overlooked inlay of shining stone.

  I watched Tuckwell until he ducked down the subway—the same route that took him each morning to his International Style steel-and-glass vertical trailer park. I would never visit his office again. I pictured him boarding the car, the adored public transportation, his favorite contact sport. A subway car could always be counted on to provide the thrill of confrontation. The face-off he needed that night.

  I was asleep when he returned. For the next several days, we maneuvered around each other. We ate at different times, arranged our schedules to diverge. Only before sleep did we talk. We slept six centimeters from one another, sometimes in sleep closing even that gap, pressing against each other, licensed by the confusion of night. At week’s end, I told Keith that a library friend was marrying, looking for someone to adopt her place. The end of our postmortem existence.

  “Have you signed?”

  “I’ve arranged with her.”

  “You agreed to let me have a look before you did anything.”

  “Let’s go have a look, then. I can still back out.” But we both knew it was a done deal, that I had reneged on the one condition he’d set for our breakup.

  We walked to the new neighborhood. Keith inspected the street and nodded. “A little closer to the branch.”

  “It feels like home already,” I said, grateful for the sign of acceptance. He winced. Too late to apologize. After four years of conversation, we’d lost the phrase book. Every word now was in pathetic talkee-talkee, creole.

  “It’s on a corner,” Keith said apprehensively. I was forced to agree. “It’s over a dress shop,” he observed.

  “Antiques,” I equivocated. We got the key to the upstairs from the landlord, also the shop proprietor.

  “An efficiency,” Keith said, attempting to approve.

  “I wouldn’t call it that, exactly.” Semantic quibble.

  “Nice. Clean. Quiet. Rent-protected?” I mentioned the figure. Keith’s brow cowered and his cheek pulled, protecting the side of his face.

  “I can pay it.”

  “Not within the old quarter-salary rent rule.” I thought: Nobody on the Eastern Seaboard has followed that budget since 1940. He checked the fixtures, outlets, jambs: a pantomime we saw no way to avoid. The warrant of his solicitousness was not about to let me hurt myself for his sake. Now that I was absolving him from liability, he no longer had the luxury of letting me hurt myself. He sat on the bed and pounded the mattress. “Strong enough?” I said nothing. “When do we move your stuff? Not that I’m rushing, but …”. He drummed his fingers impatiently.

  I sat down next to him. I wanted so badly to ask him if he would come visit me here, once I’d put everything right. But I kept from sinking to contemptible. After a moment’s looking around the room, Tuckwell reached and pulled my elbow out from under me, controlling my roll and bringing my head down into his lap. He stroked my temples, his lower lip pushed slightly to the side in subfarction against his upper. Tell yourself whatever you need to, but don’t look for confirmation.

  I reached toward his face, thinking to grab his nose between first and second fingers, an old game meaning almost anything. But he moved unexpectedly and my motion carried my hand into a punch. In a flash, the whole hierarchy of second-guessing fed across Keith’s face. He squashed it, but not fast enough to escape mutual knowledge. He grabbed my hand, automatically restraining. Seamlessly returning to decorum he twisted my wrist and gingerly inspected my watch. “Yikes,” he said, slightly flattened affect. “Getting late. You’re coming home at least tonight, aren’t you?”

  I had no change of clothes, linen, toiletries, towel, toothbrush, or pillow to give my neck that civilized sleeping crook, no food nor anything to eat with, very little cash, and nothing to gain by staying. But his calling the other place home made it impossible to return to. I shook my head; Tuckwell, disgusted, didn’t even attempt the obvious argument. His shrug disowned me.

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nbsp; “I’ll be fine. Camping without the poisonous plants. I’ll come by tomorrow to grab some things. Take what’s left. It’s yours. Sell it to that fence on Eastern Parkway.”

  “No way. I’m through with your liquid assets, lady.” I walked him downstairs, waved as he left, then turned back inside where my new landlord, uninterested in my private fripperies, frittered in his shop. I bought a matched set of Hayes-era curtains and bedclothes for nothing down. He was delighted to start a tab. I feasted on crackers and fresh fruit from the greengrocers, which I ate slowly in invigorating silence. A bare apartment: my senses were never so awake. I took a scalding bath, soapless, squeezing the water from my skin, standing in the dark, fanning dry. I took care of my arousal in the solitary room. I had never before seen it: happiness required only that I rid myself of all distraction. I went to sleep against the antique sheets, feeling parts of my body I’d forgotten existed. I slept the best night I ever slept in my life.

  I dressed in yesterday’s clothes, finished the cracker box for breakfast, ran my fingers through my hair (a surprisingly reasonable comb), and walked, in the changing November, to work. The branch seemed a different building, my coming upon it from this direction. Delicious disorientation: I felt I’d changed jobs. I must have looked appalling. But of my colleagues, only Mr. Scott remarked on my appearance. “My dear, you look like you could do with a little retirement. Care to join me?” I told him I’d never been more sure: the Reference Desk was how I wanted to spend the rest of my life.

  I moved my things gradually over several days, dragging my heels in a flare-up of empathy. Keith helped carry, by turns grateful and exasperated at my drawing the process out. Already gone, I had the luxury of loving that old life again at a safe range. I stayed over, slept once more with Tuckwell: a slow, sad night retracing, committing the cadence of one another to memory, realizing we had gotten it all wrong somehow, but that it was too late to go back and erase the maps, restore the white spaces.

  I didn’t contact my friends at MOL once during that period. My move had to be a moratorium, proof that I’d made the break, done the pointless violence for unimpeachable reasons. There had been no trade. Isolation was its own best reason. I worked at the branch, and in the remaining hours decorated the nest, wallpapered, trimmed. On days off, I learned the new neighborhood. I was determined to live as if the move were self-motivated. But I was sustained by undeniable expectation. Even the air had a scent of something imminent. Of course solitude was exciting— how couldn’t it be? Crisis couldn’t touch me. Loneliness, no loss, was something to covet. The erotic dress-up at the bottom of the cedar chest.

  Strange place, Brooklyn. Not a place, a thesaurus of neighborhoods. I never belonged in any of them. Had things gone differently in local politics, we’d all be speaking Dutch. I’d be pinching my guilders. Todd would have had only to slip across New Amsterdam to the next colony in order to learn his latest irrelevant foreign language, English. Strange place, Breuckelen. Hudson sailed past fifty years after Bles’s death. Two journeymen on the same enterprise: the pursuit of panels perfect for getting lost in. The elusive Passage, spice routes, epochal expansion. The world is too well mapped; quadrants capture it all. Alchemy’s four elements, psychology’s four humors. What can a body do in its quartet of seasons but set fire to the familiar, take off on the numinous half-moon?

  I wanted Franklin, beyond a doubt. I could feel, in bands of tissue under my skin, the precise place that want had set for him. I wanted his field, his detached, unbearably patient art history. I wanted to see this place that I didn’t belong in, its cross-sectional pigments, each assay suspended one on another, successive approximations. I wanted to recover that landscape, the place I’d forgotten as I got too good at describing it. I went two weeks without seeing him, two weeks at my new colony. One Friday I walked from my place to theirs. It seemed a miracle to be on foot. The blocks between did not seem so dangerous as strange, misunderstood. I buzzed, heard the voice thin, tinny, treble in the speaker, backed with a flack of electric static, but inimitable. He sang a ludicrous parody of a housewife’s guarded “Who is it?” He knew full well who it was.

  “It’s me,” I said, burying grammar. “I think it’s time.”

  PERPETUAL CALENDAR (II)

  The simplest of devices, a model of informational economy, it fits completely on a single page. You can take the magic square and palm it, hide the device in one hand. Even a small hand. The perpetual calender exists because the year has only fourteen possibilities. January 1 can fall on each day of the week, and once around again for leap years. The rest of the cycle—days when everything must happen—falls automatically, redundantly, according to compact pattern. 1983 starts on a Saturday. So do 1938, 1898, and 1842. The years of Sudetenland, of J’accuse, of von Mayer’s first thermodynamics paper duplicate the same dates as that year when a lost woman of thirty moves across town. How does it work? A lookup table lists the years, keying them to a long, repeating series of fourteen templates for the only possibilities going. The perfect reference tool: infinite sequence reduced to formula.

  The cleverest child in every neighborhood, at fourteen, discovers this table secreted in the quartos of her parents’ bookshelf. Appalled, unbelieving at first, she warms to the idea of a compressible eternity. Soon, she uses it to consolidate a shaman’s control over the block’s information-poor. Hiding the device behind cupped palms, she calls out her privileged, inside track to a spell-bound audience in the back alley: “You, Pete, were born on a Wednesday. It will be Wednesday again in 19 … Here’s something: ten years back, it was Sunday today.” It will be years before she knows that these facts, in demand, clean and elucidating, mean nothing. For her clincher, she claims: “Today was exactly the same as it was one hundred and eighty years ago.” Two years, twenty years ago, on this day, that child was me.

  XIII

  A YOUNG PERSON’S GUIDE TO THE ORCHESTRA

  He reads the stack of journals until the type decomposes into runic scratchings. He half dozes, swims awake, is washed under again for a few minutes, for hours, in tidal semiawareness. He gives the technical data rein to assort into spontaneous visuals—unzipping ladders, blueprintimbedding blueprints, complex wartime gear-machines, families of trapeze artists linked in aerial streamers. In his reverie, the edge of biological thought is a continuous showing of jerky one-reelers. Every so often, an image-analog jars him awake with recognition. Bold simplicity of design knocks him conscious. Lucid, he sees nothing in the models but comic, clumsy, cartoon inspirations. Each time he comes to, Ressler cracks the journal repository for something he’s missed. He loses consciousness again two or three articles down the pike, returning in the middle of the fourth, blindly turning pages.

  He keeps up this routine—reading, dozing, imagining—for days, paying no attention to the passage of daylight. He finishes the juice concentrate and peanuts left in his fridge from a shopping run ages before. When the last remaining milk spoils, he makes cold cereal with water. The phone rings, but its bell goes languid each time he fails to answer. At odd hours he saunters to Olga, his heart full of gratitude at her patient, permanent Fourth Position stance. He listens to the independent variations, the record of that unbirthday visit. The same record, but different in every particular, just as the woman herself is now unrelated to the one he met on first hitting town. Steeped in the music, he teaches himself a vocabulary to describe what he hears in the profusion of notes. He borrows those terms he is most familiar with. Canon and imitation, audible even without names, become transcription. Phrase and motif become gene. He hears polypeptides in a peal of parallel structure, differentiation in a burst of counterpoint.

  Days into his journal binge, intent on latching onto the remaining piece in the synthesis, Ressler returns to the musical set to test a bizarre hypothesis. For weeks he has assumed that his lack of training would forever preclude his hearing how each single-minded permutation was a variation on anything. But recently he detects an unexpected pattern.
The theme he begins to hear—the element drawing all filial generations into a family tree—is not a theme at all. It is a determining genotype. The existence of the Base is still a hypothesis. He will not swear to it until he hears it underwriting each of the aria’s progeny. Testing the idea takes time. But listening is exactly the focused release he needs.

  He began scientific life—natural history’s home museum—a closet Laplacian: solving the real world required only a set of differential equations defining the movement of every independent piece in it. But a few days into his marathon session—never once leaving K-53-C, alternately sampling Bach and teasing protein synthesis—he scraps the engine. All measurement is not inherently valuable. Science is choked by unrestrained data as a pond is by too luxurious plant growth. Cyfer has attacked the coding problem by attending to every amino sequence ever unearthed. Given an English library and an identical, jumbled collection in Bulgarian, they’ve tried to write a bilingual dictionary by reading every book in both sets, tallying tables larger than the two libraries together, searching for spurts that correlate. Brute tabulature might work, if the underpinning translation were preordained, symmetrical. But there’s no guarantee the runaway data enfold formulaic simplicity. In fact, just the reverse.

  If nature is truly objective, as the entire scientific project must assume, then science can prove nothing except that we don’t speak the same language as the outside world. Still, the double helix is a better map than the old homunculus or arcane pangene, which are both in turn miles beyond clay and spiritus dei for correspondence. Man may understand only artificial shorthand and nature speak only in innumerable instances; dim Berlitz phrases may never be the thing they describe, but they’re the only visa available.