The Gold Bug Variations

by Richard Powers

  Lovering’s assault seems more inexplicable after a week’s simmering. But one accusation stands out of the erratic mass as possessing a germ of truth. Distance is not respectfully neutral, as he has always meant it. Socializing, like push-ups, is a necessary, unpleasant surrogate for the real thing. He has not visited Woytowich and Renée since they gazed at the evening news together last summer. Almost too late, he feels a funny, irrelevant need to exonerate himself. He finds himself on their stoop on the first of March, holding an amateurishly wrapped, postage-stamp-sized baby jumper, he hopes female.

  Woyty opens the door, shouts “Stuart,” clutches at his chest, burlesqueing a heart attack. “My God, man! Who died?” He rushes Ressler in, treating him just a notch below long-lost brother. Lovering is right: Ressler has let the thread of mutual sentence almost snap. “Renée honey,” Daniel shouts. “You’ll never guess!”

  A thin voice from the distant room wafts back. “If it’s the Census Bureau, tell them we’re topping off at one.”

  “She’s kidding,” Daniel gushes. “She loves this motherhood racket. Come in, come in. We were just getting ready for the bassinet. Want to see?”

  “I’d prefer the home movie, Dr. W.” Ressler can’t deliver the line without smirking. Woyty’s elated regressing is infectious. He rushes Ressler upstairs. Renée fusses embarrassingly over the little jumper as if it were the coat of many colors. She retires it to the middle of a set of shelves that Dan has labeled “0 to 6,” “6 to 12,” and “12 to 24.”

  “We have to wash Ivy,” Woyty sings in a high, squeaky voice, rubbing his nose into the infant’s belly. “Don’t we have to wash Ivy?” Ivy smiles, or perhaps it is just gas. Ivy’s father undoes the enormous safety pin in her cotton diapers. “What did you do here? Did you make all this?” Daniel removes the soiled rags, showing Ressler the product, the miraculous residue left in a beaker after fractional distillation. The mocha clay—laid down in deposits—might fire in a kiln to silky porcelain.

  The wrapper gets thrown into an enormous collecting sack for the cleaning service. Father daubs the holdouts from between Ivy’s legs. The infant makes a confused gurgle, unsure whether to resist, screaming, or give in with pleasure. Ressler is hypnotized by the protozooic genitalia: a fatty eruption, almost tuberous, between the egg-roll thighs, a strange red rash disappearing into a discreet afterthought of a tuck, like the dimple that marks where the mold attaches.

  Ivy goes into the bassinet, water warmed to half-degree precision on Renée’s thermometer. She seems to enjoy returning to the drink, splashing about polywog-style with more muscular knowledge than she can muster on dry land. As he sops her clean, Daniel keeps up a constant stream of language games: “Where’s your foot? Here it is! No, we haven’t lost it. Where’s your tummy? That’s right. How did you know?”

  Father and daughter have an uncanny rapport, almost spooky for the handful of weeks under the bridge. Reading Ressler’s thoughts, Woyty concurs, “She’s a prodigy. Renée and I are both amazed. Already twice where the books say she’s supposed to be.” He gazes at his wife in astonishment and pride. Renée responds in kind. Daniel goes on laving, talking, half to Stuart, half to Ivy, letting his daughter in on an awful prediction. “This is going to be the brightest baby in the world. Isn’t she?” he asks, sponging the tiny creature’s back.

  “If Daddy has anything to do with it,” Renée chuckles. “He’s got the John Stuart Mill alphabet blocks strung up over her crib, and he spends an hour going through them with her every night.”

  “I swear she gets them already. I feel her catching on.”

  Ressler looks in the flat-focusing eyes of this baby to see if that can be possible. He remembers that other model of miraculous miniaturization, Margaret Blake. Ivy, no longer than Margaret’s arm, retraces phylogeny back to some intermediary generating form. Staring at Ivy, amphibious in her bath, he begins to think that parenting may be science as well. The gradual testing, forgoing, and refinement of postulates, the constant probes of methodology and interpretation. Ivy is the subject of every lesser investigation anyone has ever run.

  He loves a woman, has entered one who so awakes the possibilities buried in his cytoplasm that the urge to get her as round, as loose-draped in the belly as a medieval Virgin is now stronger than any that has ever possessed him. The compulsion to run the one experiment that can’t be pared down to a manageable outcome. But every cell he will ever shoot into her will die there, in her tract, in confusion. He and Jeanette are barred forever from that trial run, not just by skirtable social proscription, but by final proclamation of the law of averages.

  “One, two, three, four, five,” Daniel intones, peeling back the child’s tiny, almond machine-shop parings. “Seis, siete, ocho, nueve, diez.” He frees his finger from her reflex grasp and winds up a music box. Its melodious running down sends the child into rapture. “Yes sir. This baby’s either going to be a genius or one overstimulated cookie.”

  Ressler barely hears Woytowich to nod acknowledgment. The music-box trickle recalls him to another music box, a distant one, one he first heard in Botkin’s office months ago, at the start of this annus mirabilis, before learning became more than he could bear. A music box, an automaton of stoic grief, faintly singing out in the fifth of five songs selected from a catalog of four hundred poems chronicling the death of a child from scarlet fever. Kindertodenlieder. A little light has gone out in my tent. Hail the eternal light of day.

  “Yes, Ivy and I are going to teach each other a lot. Aren’t we, dear? Aren’t we?” A fair trade; she gets to learn where her tummy is. You get to learn what it means to cheat death. Ressler hears, in the child’s music box, how the only life he will ever live beyond his own will be the life of that absurd photo and caption, trapping him in coffee tables everywhere.

  Annie’s alarm at Dr. Ressler’s one-time borderline notoriety was so genuine, her face so amazed, during the account that his irritation at the broach of the subject bubbled away. “Yes, greatness briefly thrust upon me, and only a quick side step and swing of the red cape saved me. I was cornered by the same journalistic band that cruelly led the beach-party beauties to believe that one of them might domesticate that twenty-someyear-old genius pianist, cure him of hypochondria and his awful singing over the instrumental tracks. Even as the magazine was busy promoting that fellow, he’d already begun to trade the international concert circuit for a life where even his closest friends could reach him only by phone. Life never caught on that his keyboard exercises were a refusal of natural selection, a means of surviving solitude.” He fell apologetically silent a minute. Speaking to Annie, as if Todd and I already understood, he said, “The three weeks when my mug inhabited the back pages of news-stands filled me with a revulsion that has not diminished.”

  That fame was a proving ground for another notoriety then just weeks away. One evening Uncle Jimmy stayed late, lying in wait for Todd. By Franker’s account, the Ops Manager hand-delivered their pay receipts for the period, reading over their shoulders as each examined his stub. Jimmy, jittery, wanted to know if their deposits checked out. He told them his pay had come through augmented by a lump sum, with no note on the stub or word from higher-ups. I imagine Todd relishing the lark, encouraging Jimmy to accept the Bank Error in Your Favor and go buy a new color TV for his mother. Of course, Jimmy, seconded by a terse-lipped Dr. Ressler, concluded that he would have to report the windfall glitch.

  “Do you think it could have something to do with that whole lotta shakin’ goin’ down here over the last few weeks?” Todd suggested lamely.

  “As you know,” Dr. Ressler intervened, to keep Todd from clever admission of guilt, “all our payroll records are kept insulated from our own machines.”

  “That’s right.” Jimmy frowned, trying hard to ignore his hunch. “All our checks are cut out of house. By a rival firm.”

  After Jimmy’s departure, Ressler gave Franklin the most severe dressing-down possible: he said nothing about the matter. They start
ed the end-of-day processing, Ressler letting Franker stick with his story. Trust devastated Todd more than any accusation could have. Franker’s whim turned real at last, on this side of the main-frame linkup.

  A few days later, when a baffled Uncle Jimmy returned to what his instincts told him was the scene of the crime, he shook his head and told my friends, “Nobody knows who authorized it, but the receipt matches a valid electronic request. ‘Somebody musta dunnit.’ Accounting even looked at me like I was crazy for bringing it to their attention.”

  “James,” Dr. Ressler assured him, “it sounds as if you’re forced to consider this the gift of an anonymous donor.”

  “Pennies from Heaven,” Todd suggested meekly. “The Color TVs for the Mothers of Excessively OT ’ed Middle Managers Fund.”

  “If the two of you have nothing more helpful to say than ‘Roll with it,’ I guess I’ll have to. But nobody can make me like it,” Jimmy said.

  Or words to that effect. Unlike the Evangelist, I was not there and did not see these things. I received the revised version only through Todd, and my memory of even that is already years old. “This is the gist, but not the exact run of words as he sang them in his sleep, for even the most beautiful song cannot be translated from one language to the other without much loss of loveliness and grace.” No better fit for the sad fact than Bede’s famous bit—a bit no one for more than a thousand years has even been able to read in the way that a real speaker of Bede’s dead language was able to. But what’s a real speaker? Latin was no one’s mother tongue. Why should I use quotes, if the English version of his despair at the insufficiency of translation is itself insufficient? “This is the gist” doesn’t even give the run of words as Bede sang them. And yet these words are his gist. The same, if undeniably different. My rough guess at what Uncle Jimmy said stands in now for Uncle Jimmy. It must. There is no other.

  These eight months spent trying to rig up an exact recreation have never once gotten closer than a rough gist, even of those moments that I lived firsthand. A verbatim transcript is, it goes without saying, a contradiction in terms. Yet I could not have sustained this almost-transcript this far without believing that it approximates the original, even with every original word out of order or altered. No threshold effect turns resemblance into facsimile. Yet approximation is as close as any transcriber gets. I know now how genetics relies on ingenious but indirect measurements, reflections and not direct knowledge. Genes are mapped relatively by the frequency of their breaking and recombining. No one has witnessed a transfer-RNA molecule reading the next triplet and attaching its amino acid to the growing polypeptide. Yet the inference is unimpeachable, because the shadows this process casts on reflective apparatus cannot be explained so well in any other way.

  Even a literal recording—another contradiction—even highest-fidelity holographic videotape of what I and my friends said and did at that precise moment would still be a rough transcript requiring interpretation. That pause between his sentences: anger or exasperation? The pitch, volume, and tempo of his words: do those variables, integrated across context, indicate half his impatience, uncertainty, wonder at what is about to happen? Everything I might say about this place involves decoding. Things say in one language and mean in another. No getting across that gap without the ultimate transitive, to translate.

  Out of unshakable habit, I look up the word. English occurrence dates from the thirteenth century. Latin origin: to relocate, carry across, port over. Among the dozen definitions (including to bring to a state of spiritual or emotional ecstasy), the now familiar biochemical one: to transform the information stored in messenger RNA into a polypeptide structure by means of the genetic code. An upstart translation of the parent meaning: to move the substance of a text from one language or dialect into another. To translate Shakespeare into Bantu, or the secretary of defense into English.

  I follow the idea down to its core, where, rather than reveal itself, it dissolves. I ask the Ur-question of whether translations, unlike Todd, can be both beautiful and faithful at the same time. I nudge that old impasse concerning whether to translate all “Napoleon”s into “Bismarck”s when porting a limbered piece across the Rhine. I live with the line about how all translations are obsolete the moment they are made, how the death of marines in Lebanon calls out for a new draft on Thucydides. What I can’t decide is whether passing words from one language to another is even possible.

  Pragmatically, I know it must be, for I do it all day long. Like Dr. Johnson’s friend Mrs. Carter in reverse, I once could translate Epictetus as well as make a pudding. Every piece of impenetrable information I ever ported to my eternally hungry clients was born in interpretation and carried out under the guidance of rough analogy. Even now, working exclusively for myself, every genetic concept I acquire is a stand-in isomorph for an alien domain. Letters as bases. The genome as five-thousand-volume library. The ribosome as reading head, messenger RNA as strip of recording tape. Enzyme as if-then command. The presence of amino sequences inferred through the pattern of dark bands on paper. Traits located by tracking genetic markers. The ages of the earth as bands of sedimentary rock. The forms of finches radiating outwards. Sperm with heads and tails. Radiation garbling messages, introducing noise. Mendel as the Darwin of heredity. Darwin as left fielder, batting third for the Science Hall of Fame. Life as computer, steam engine, automation, animate puppet, clay shape breathed full of spiritus dei.

  For out of olde feldes, as men seith,

  Cometh al this newe corn fro yeer to yere;

  And out of olde bokes, in good feith,

  Cometh al this newe science that men lere.

  Translation inhabits every sentence ever predicated. Nothing is what it is but by contrast, cracking, porting over. Every part of speech is already a figure of speech. Not long before I stopped going back, I visited Dr. Ressler, once more alone in the quiet of the control room. He was compiling a catalog, with nineteenth-century Linnaean diligence, of examples of tone-painting (I mistakenly heard “tome-painting”) in Bach vocal works. We listened to scores of examples, figures as generic as joy, hastening, or humility, as literal-minded as flames, fire, sheep grazing, or the rich being sent empty away. He played a jagged, dissonant ’cello descent, buzz-saw violent. “How do they put it in the King James? ‘The veil of the temple was rended’?”

  “In current versions, it reads something like ‘And their public religious building was damaged by plate slippage.’”

  Ressler smiled. “No wonder they burned Tyndale. Of course, for Bach, it was ‘Der Vorhang im Tempel zerriss in zwei Stück von oben an his unten aus.’ Which is another story altogether.”

  “I thought you said you didn’t know any foreign languages.” Except I do no one any harm by remaining here, in French.

  “Every scientist my age had to read a little German.”

  “And a little Latin?”

  He shrugged. “For nomenclature.”

  “Greek?”

  “No farther than the letter names, believe me.”

  “Why should I? And tone-painting?”

  “Well that, yes. But is that a language?” he slid away quickly. “Is it redundant, specific, rigid, nonambiguous? Can we really hear what it means?”

  “First tell me what ‘The veil of the temple was rended’ means.”

  “Good point,” he said. Or words to that effect.

  But just because translation is everywhere necessary, it doesn’t follow that it’s possible. Even the perfect translations of mathematics beg the question of what is being carried over where. The length of this two-dimensional extension expressed in number. The value of that number expressed as a numeral. If performing the same operation on both sides of an equation does not change the expression’s validity, what does it change? Why is the last line of a proof surprising, if its truth is already hiding tautologically in the lines above?

  The load is inseparable from the cart. What I say depends on what I say it with. The most resourceful convers
ion cannot take the simple phrase “Words are very rascals” and transplant the sense, stripped of conveyance, into Oriental pictographs where adjectives are conjugated, sentences have separate logical and grammatical subjects, and verbs have no tense or mood but context, cannot perform the exchange without everything except simple-minded correspondence being lost.

  Conversion’s impossibility only increases when the languages have recently diverged. Mother, maman, madre, mutter come nowhere near meaning the same thing. I need only boot, fringe, or grid to prove that we and the Brits are indeed two people separated by the barrier of a common language. “Ceci n’est pas une pipe” does not mean “This is not a pipe,” any more than Magritte’s famous symbol is smokable. All four texts no longer mean what they separably say: they are a packet, together standing for the inability to extract thorns from dialect briars.

  The decline of the world in my lifetime precipitated by Vatican II and Webster III is just the latest echo of the collapse of Babel. Frank’s favorite painter had to do this topic twice, in porting it to another idiom. Difficulty did not begin when God caused everybody on the work crew to render “pass the hammer” in his own unintelligible idiom. It began with “hammer,” a real thing in itself, separate from that solid, cold, workable weight strapped into the flat of the hand. Every assertion is already a comparison, wedding a thing to a thing, a thing to an action, a thing to a quality, temporarily joined at a given moment from a given vantage. Shifts betray without ever leaving the mother tongue. Stravinsky once called Verdi the Puccini of Music. I know exactly what he means, but could not say it any other way.

  The coding problem begins with a single word, shorthand simile. Simple naming is already unstable. There is no other way to say a thing except by its name, yet the name never says it. Once, I knew what it felt like to be the first to use a metaphor. To invent metaphor itself. I loved someone who was sunk in winter, someone who didn’t watch where he walked. Garden in his face. Nest in hair. Pearls for eyes. Wall between us. Words dispersed us like the cold points of stars. The joints splay that should pull flush. Dovetailed comparisons wear out, go threadbare. But tonight, for no reason—because of a transposition converting two very different dates—language coils, starts up again. I apply my key, my adapting bit, until something fits, shifts, carries over. The conversion closing in on me will never again be so clean as one gene, one enzyme, one metabolism. It never was that clean, even at microscopic level.