The Gold Bug Variations

by Richard Powers

  All desire comes down to naming. Yet no nomenclature will ever erase the fact: standing for is also obscuring. The real use of names must be something more serious than handle-efficiency. It must also be myth-making, resourceful approximation, soothing the scar between figure and ground, between the dead chemicals ATCG and the repeating uniqueness they have become. Dr. Koss, his Jeannie, moves him on, graduates him to bulbs that have not appeared yet, to stamens that never show themselves in this region. The game grows more incredible as it goes on. She says how the garden-variety pansy, one of the few lay identifiers he has taken for granted all these years, takes its name from pensée, French for thought. From thought to word to name to plant: the chain equating them, more fragile than the petals themselves, defies examination except through tools as fragile, of the same make. She feeds a tutoring hand inside his jacket, releasing a dam burst of labels. What, he wonders, could he call this blossomer?

  “You are brilliant,” he says.

  Jeanette drops her jaw. “Why? Because I like gardening?”

  But the germ has taken hold in him. Flowers and their ciphertexts, smearing the one-for-one trip-wire correspondence that in vitro would isolate. Can the handle relating base patterns to proteins clear this up? Or could it be that in vitro is less precise than this hopeless, associative morass: Baby’s Breath, Crowfoot, Lily of the Valley, Queen Anne’s Lace?

  “But can we call them anything we like?” His words elicit only a confused look. “I mean,” he measures, “people call flowers what their grandmothers teach them to call them. But some grandmother assigned the tag once, way back, right?”

  Jeannie chuckles at his earnestness. “Several grandmothers in several places at several different times.” No conspiracy.

  “Why is a given common name the plant’s name? No one in a million years is ever likely to argue with ‘Black-Eyed Susan.’ What makes it right?” Dark and disturbing, a flare threatening the reductionist certainty that has guided his every step since the home nature museum. The task of the skeptic is to determine, for every appearance, if the label fits the thing. Every tag must be either apt or inapt. Was Charles the Bald? Louis the Fat? Richard the Lion-Hearted? By a slow tightening of terms, exclusion of middles, improvement of instrument, each sobriquet’s appropriateness becomes discernible. But the assumption is shaken to the core by the introduction of Jeanette the Misnicknamed. If the name is apt, it’s not; if it’s not, it is.

  She tightens against him. Her waist persuades, hands help, eyes ratify, arms work their armistice. “Well, I suppose a name is right if it sticks, if it becomes the name.”

  “I’d like something more than the tyranny of the vote.”

  She gives him the once-over. “All right, bub. You are above average in looks, so we’re gonna give you one more shot. What exactly do you have in mind?”

  “These,” he says, leading her by the digits. “These tiny, bulbous ones.”

  “Oh!” She smiles widely. “Excellent choice; the name for these is inspired. Note how puffy, spacious. And how they hang upside down. You have thirty seconds.”

  When he makes no reply, she patters. “Ready for this? Dutchman’s Breeches.” He makes a puzzled, slight tightening of the mouth, flick of fingers. Faltering, she says, “See the trousers?” There are no trousers. For one, the flowers are less than an inch across. The blossoms flare out in a three-dimensional solid, more H than Y, an oriental kite. Upside down, opening underneath. But why Dutchman? At his failure to respond, Jeannie’s features deepen, ready to run from the first hint of disaster. She is more beautiful in distress than at her sunniest. He needs this woman, her scattered stimuli of joy, intensity, and fright. He will end up on her doorstep in the dark rain, waiting for her to come out and utter even so little as one not unkind word.

  He drops to his knees and examines, up close, this fragile palate opening diffidently to the air. The more Ressler looks, the more iridescent the bloom becomes until it goes purple around the lip. It smells of nothing—sinister, promising, forsworn, far away, as far away as Jeannie’s hair. He moves it under his eye, careful to manipulate only the stem. Glass, it would shatter at a fingerprint. Even so, nature uses him: light rearrangement of examining is enough to dust pollen across his hand.

  “But what if it weren’t?” he says at last. “What if it were something else? Say, the Common Speak-a-portal.”

  Dr. Koss, who has followed him to knee level, struggles to her feet like a newborn wildebeest. She stares at him, slowly going radiant, finding in him what she has been after. He has broken the code. Ressler too tries to struggle to his feet, but her mouth blocks his way. “Mouth” is certainly misnamed: what he kisses is something lighter, wider, more enveloping. He is set for weeks, for as long as memory holds out.

  How obvious, waiting to be discovered: the tracts of rectilinear Midwest that he once loved for their reserved refusal to interfere with fact in fact consist of an indivisible density of named things. Purple-green weeds sprouting ubiquitously throughout spring. Exploding pollen packets. Seeds parachuting on currents of wind. Waxy pitchers, dull matte, convoluted packed rosettes, bright, round, fierce day’s eyes, each replicating and subduing the earth, attempting to demonstrate by success the aptness of their sobriquet.

  Jeanette, wetting his mouth with hers, breaks only long enough to pull him impatiently back toward the barracks. But before she can cover him in the prize she will bestow on him for his discovery, while he can still remember the wrinkle with sufficient agitation, Ressler grabs the spiral notebook that came out to Illinois with him. He has reserved it until this moment for lab notes, hypotheses, models, the verifiable jottings of procedure. The pages fill with a complete, handwritten history of the in vitro attempt. Now they seem the logical place to record the afternoon’s momentous insight. Jeannie clings lightly to his back, sinking her teeth into his shoulder. She looks on, reads as she murmurs, allowing him two minutes to say what he needs. Then she will take from him everything he has shown himself to be worth. But first, he arrests in print amber the skeleton that might one day release the world from its condition of standing cipherhood: “Flowers have names.”

  TODAY IN HISTORY

  March 21: First day of spring, vernal equinox, pedal point of Aries, the calendar’s octave. My file for the day is full of forgettable sports records, local legislation, small-time politics, standard international bickering. I can find only one thing of lasting consequence that happened on this date, one recombination that will stick, lodge itself in the permanent gene. For once, I break the self-imposed rule prohibiting birthdays: today is Bach’s.

  Ressler was celebrating that musical provincial’s 299th the night I walked into MOL to make my goodbyes. Todd, alone in the lunchroom, was cheery. “Thanks for breakfast,” he said, implying by a grin that they both had needed it. “Why didn’t you wake me?”

  The question, self-evident to him, knocked the words out of me. I sat down at the empty lunchtable. I had nothing left to say. I didn’t even want to be there. Impulse instructed me to run, get rid of him without pointless postmortems. I would have, except for the farewell I owed Dr. Ressler, the blessing I needed from him.

  “Why didn’t I wake you?” I could manage nothing more than a flat, journalistic survey. Todd nodded, but betrayed the pretense by fiddling with the knobs on the microwave. I was getting softer, fainter. I felt nothing. No resentment, no desperation. Zero. A cipher. I lifted my eyebrows: I release you; now will you let me out cleanly?

  “You didn’t want to wake our friend?” Todd’s voice tacked suddenly, came about. Its preemptive volume, front first, dropping the would-be innocence, jerked me by the neck.

  “I didn’t want to wake your friend,” I said, this time finding the exact, disdaining disengagement I was after. He tilted toward me and rubbed an eyebrow; every natural defense lay with him. I could not lie, could neither attack nor escape. Tolerance of animal stupidity, the only religion I believe in, kept me from choking him. He had broken no rules; we h
ad never laid down any. From the first, I could have him only without promise or propriety. But he had broken something, unforgivably cheated. He had not said. From the day he first showed at the Information Desk, all facts were to be on the table, public domain.

  “How long?” I asked him. I might have been conducting a phone poll, a product questionnaire.

  Todd closed his eyes, pressed thumb to the lids, and struggled to suppress an hysterical snicker. “How long what?”

  He wanted to hear me say it, unleash my rage. “How long,” I said, perfectly modulated, stewardess-clinical, “have you been packing your dick into that pretty little muff?” Hearing myself pronounce the obscenity—I still can’t believe this—brought me to the first stages of arousal.

  “How long have I been sleeping with Annie?” He waited brutally until I nodded at the paraphrase. He was a boy. A stupid, puerile, self-indulgent, arrested boy. His eyes looked up as if he were reading the answer there. “Since shortly after I began sleeping with you.”

  The moan came out of me before he finished the predicate. I covered my face in my hand, so that he would not have the pleasure of seeing the knife slice across it. Muscle convulsed under my palm, my skin burned, all over an exchange of words. Todd took a clumsy, involuntary step of compassion in my direction, but he did not dare close the gap. He could not bear to be responsible for a show of pain that compromised me. He let out a plaintive bleat, banged into a chair, and slammed the cabinet, by way of offering comfort. “You honestly didn’t know?”

  It helped, at least, to let my facial tics explode. “You said nothing. Total silence.” Amyclaean, golden, consenting. Alien and unnatural in my mouth. “You hid. How I was supposed to know?”

  He shook his head. “She’s always around. Devoted. Doting.” His tone was soft, pointed, regretful. “All the qualities I so patently lack.”

  “From that I was supposed to guess?” I went shrill, and—last symptom of losing control—didn’t care. “She treated us like a couple. So did you, for that matter.”

  “I still would. So would she.” If, he implied, you weren’t so archaic, perverse with monogamy. “The night I first went home with her, she told me she wouldn’t hurt you for all the tea in china shops. I obviously miscalculated in telling her you’d understand.”

  Having slighted everything else, he went after my understanding. I wanted to prove myself the most magnanimous, liberal creature on earth. At the same time, I wanted to snuff him out, arrogance and all, like a kitchen match. Hurt him beyond understanding. “You screwed with a creationist.” Monotone outrage. Sex with a religious zealot: the most unforgivable miscegenation. Todd could not stifle a horrible laugh. The pained chuckle came out hideous; he knew the escaping sound would divorce us for good.

  “We slept together regularly, yes.”

  “Slept together,” I said. “Regularly.” The act might have taken fifteen seconds against a wall, but the polite name promoted their every transaction to a mutual sedative between the politenesses of linen. “I don’t understand.” Bitter pleasantry. “How can she square this with the Six-Day God? Isn’t fucking without benefit of clergy one of the bargain fares to damnation?”

  Todd pinched his lip. “We’ve never discussed doctrine.”

  “What do you discuss?”

  “Not much, frankly. You and she have always talked more than she and I.”

  She’d wanted to save me. God did not allow for interpretation. Thou shalt not commit. Her folk-song simplicity had fooled me into assuming she did not share creation’s basic contradiction. I didn’t care anything about her or her motives. The only thing I cared about, flailed at as if it alone could keep self-esteem from dissolving, was the cause of Franklin’s infidelity. Irrelevant.

  Unaccountably calm, I suddenly knew that belonging, for Todd, was another ugly name for aging. He was losing the courage to face routine, and monogamy left him in the path of exhaustion. Woman-jumping, deep in him long before I arrived, publicly proclaimed that in the end he wouldn’t be around for anyone. He could never have survived, as half his life, a partner’s crises, the death of her parents, her illness, aging, change. He barely survived the spring overhaul of my wardrobe. The constant terror of event unfolding in daily familiarity could only be beaten by jumping ship, getting promiscuously free.

  He had ruined whatever chance the two of us ever had of looking to our joint moat. I would never forgive him that. But I needed to confirm a worse suspicion before breaking off. I spoke softly, not to repair but to cauterize. “Why, Franklin? You have to explain. Don’t leave me guessing.”

  “Janny.” A student pleading for a grade change. “I don’t want to leave you at all.” I retaliated now with all the secretly stockpiled silence I had stolen from him over the months. “Jan. You want me to make it worse?” I waited, my fingers jiggling like voltmeter needles. “You’re asking me to hit you.” Yes, I thought. Say it. It will never make any sense otherwise. I will never work it out alone. “You cannot,” he started. He shifted clauses. “She … Annie. You see, with her …”

  “She’s still fertile,” I supplied. His relief, the greatest I ever succeeded in giving him, broke all over his face. I felt, to answer it, only sick, self-confirming, disaster stoicism. Your house is on fire and your children have burnt. I knew what I needed to do, and would do it cleanly. “I’m sorry,” I said. “I had no idea. You two are trying to make babies?”

  “Janny.” Frank was beyond trying. “Janny.”

  But I was right: the saving maybe. Every option exercised was a small murder. Open-door policy: everything had to remain possible. He couldn’t write about his Flemish landscapist without first acquiring botany, geography, geology, optics, another foreign language. He could not write a life with me without a second edition being at least conceivable. He had to remain an able-semened body. My ligation robbed him of potential. His every evasion of commitment preserved the day when he might exercise his birthright, cash in and capitulate to fatherhood.

  I had my explanation, and I made to leave. But stopping at the door, meaning to make a concession to closure—a last goodwill drink somewhere—I surprised myself by furiously whispering, “I told you everything early on. Why bother coming back, week after week? Why trouble to move halfway in? Why string out the thing, knowing I was useless?”

  A boy, arrogantly loose on his scavenger hunt, stared at me in boyish bewilderment. “What do you mean?” He held his head, searched for the best possible word to counter my willful misrepresentation. “I love you.”

  I left him and walked alone to the control room, where I heard Dr. Ressler’s birthday musical offering. I knocked and entered rapidly, before I could back out. The professor sat behind the bank of monitors, blissfully happy in the spray of dense counterpoint from his turntable. “Ah! A victim. Listen to this,” he said, hungry for companionship to a degree I had never seen in him. He was now ready for anything that circumstance might throw him. And I had come to rub his readiness out.

  “The D minor partita for solo violin. ‘Solo’ is a euphemism. Multipart polyphony from a single instrument. Last movement: the chaconne. Constantly repeated eight-bar theme …” He stopped. I had my back to him, looking through the two-way mirror into the computer room, committing the place to long-term memory. “No music lesson today?” he said gently, without patronage. Unique among males in my experience.

  “Your boy says he loves me,” I said, trying for lightness and missing by light-years.

  Dr. Ressler lifted the needle of the phonograph and bombarded us with quiet. “That much is obvious.” My long silence gave him a chance to allude to that old, shared joke. “Well, yes. It is obvious.”

  “But you see,” I said, turning to him and parodying a smile, “I am no longer functional.”

  He looked me full in the face, searching for the missing pieces. In less time than it would have taken a professional, he had the thing figured. Against room rules, he lit a cigarette brutally, in disgust. A flare-up I didn’t know
could come from him. He had taken a chance on us, tenderly maneuvered us over our own flaws, poised us for a reasonable chance at happiness; all we had had to do was pay attention and try to be relatively free of cruelty.

  He walked a few steps in every direction. His eyes were intent on something farther than the other side of the silvered glass. He shook his head, racing through the permutations, discarding things he might say as pointless. He stubbed out the butt and exploded. “The man is a fool.” I felt a forbidden rush: Dr. Ressler needed me. I went over to him, stopped him from stepping away, and pinned myself to him. The only demonstration either of us would ever give one another. I didn’t let go; instead, I pressed against him, insisting. Slowly, against his will, he pressed back. We did not caress, but held one another hypothetically, softly letting skin guess at what desire might have felt in another place, another life, halves of a botched dissection, an old whole.

  We separated without explanation. He lifted my lowered chin until I had to look squarely at him. “This is not the scenario of choice for you two. You know that.”

  I shrugged. “It’s the scenario we’re in.” It occurred to me: I could say: Talk to him; shame him. And the thing would be straightened. Ressler knew as much too, and was waiting, weight on his toes, to intercede. I didn’t ask. I no longer wanted to be fixed. It was a relief to escape the waiting, the nights away—to break off without it being my fault. To come away with all the benefits of the injured party.

  I went home, there being no other place. Over the next several days, most of Todd’s possessions politely disappeared of their own accord, vanished under bacterial rot, in stop-action film. The evacuation did leave its slight, keloid blemish. Notebooks, a record or two, a pair of socks left behind, forgotten—the crippled child in Hamelin, or props for a later, staged, happier goodbye.