The Gold Bug Variations

by Richard Powers

  He heard the sound—if not imbedded in the cell itself, there in the way the program runs—of an imperative variation stronger than “Copy this.” A countering command: the tick of miss, of not, the leak of things going wrong. The hiss accumulating in transcription, like that party game of Telephone, slowly mauling the message so badly it no longer meant anything. Death too was just the code’s last trick to promote divide and multiply. He listened to his cell incorporate disaster into its plan, synthesizing genes with no function but to make enzymes that smeared other genes, enhanced mutation, promoted runaway tumor.

  Disaster says to me, softer and softer, “Quit the typewriter. Too much has gone wrong. You’re not accurate enough ever to put it right.” I’d say my project was in crisis, if I thought the project still existed. How can I still mourn for a man who gave me a few months of guarded, way-station amenities? Why anxiety at Jimmy’s stroke, incapacitated by an acquaintance with whom I never graduated past tenderness? Throat-choking panic at the thought of a boy I kissed for four abortive months at sixteen. Anger at a devoted friend for skipping a Christmas card. Alarming dreams of parents dead for years. Annihilating ache for my old colleague Mr. Scott, who knew one joke about retiring. Everyone I’ve ever loved has killed me a little. Every concert I’ve ever attended, every tune I thrilled to and immediately forgot, every book, every reference, every patron that presented herself at my desk with every question saying, “Solve me; you have half an hour”: decimating strokes, a swipe of God’s hand.

  I’ll never solve any of it. Assembled into oppressive full score, it whispers to me, submits the unlivable knowledge that the world will be recombined, more fertile than ever after I disband. Worse, the mix will be renewed because I leave it. More than I can take: the stroke that erases me, the force corrupting my message engineers creation.

  But the piece won’t let me drop. The most chromatic catastrophe ever composed leaves me here, cashless, listening to meandering pattern stand in for plan. Accident hums the song it assembles, resigned beyond listening, intervals arcing like sparks damped in a vacuum inconceivably bigger than the code and wanting only one thing from it. The thing it makes me finish writing: how that celibate, as if only waiting for the disastrous chance, set to work living like there was no tomorrow.

  XXVI

  THE VERTICAL FILE

  Ressler alone was ready. The space of a single week showed that his slow return to engagement had been spring training for exactly this catastrophe. The bloom of the last few months, which I had nipped in the bud, sprang back fuller for my pruning. Todd was set to go to the insurance company with a signed confession and spend the next half of his life in prison if it meant getting Jimmy back on coverage. Dr. Ressler restrained him, pointing out that the grandstand clean breast would only transfer the unpayable liability from Jimmy to the fraudulent file manipulator.

  Ressler organized a trip to the hospital. Todd could not bring himself to go. His need for exoneration was so paralyzing he could not take a step toward it. The sight of Jimmy in that bed, in that condition, would have destroyed any chance Franklin had of ever living with what he had done. Dr. Ressler, Annie, and I met by the registration desk. When she saw me, Todd’s other mate pleaded with my eyes a moment. She came tentatively toward me and awkwardly stroked the hair of my forearm. She wanted to lay her head between my breasts like a little girl. Knocked down by the larger, unattainable forgiveness I then needed, I would have let her.

  But we gave no hostages to humiliation on that trip. The hospital halls, the bald children, the tubes jammed into bruised faces—the entire ordeal of shame seemed, in the company of Ressler, whom I had not seen out of the warehouse since New Hampshire, less to be endured than understood. In the elevator, he talked to a wheelchaired victim in the extremities of MS, not about the man’s disease or the work he would now never do, but about the best lines in Tennyson and which pieces of Dvořák most bore repeated listening. When we got out of the lift, Ressler turned and waved as the doors closed.

  CHALLENGE THE PATIENT

  Challenge the patient to respond

  to one narcotic or another,

  strap him to a quantifying screen

  that feeds back digits for his number,

  root out the latinate reason

  from the multivolume tome,

  circumvent the leak or seal it,

  magnificently postpone:

  he, insidious, will choose

  a time that signifies at least,

  chorus to a calculated close,

  spread south like the vee of geese.

  I led them to Jimmy’s room, issuing veiled sentences meant to warn them about what they would find. But when we got to the room, Ressler greeted his old acquaintance in the same voice he had greeted him in day after day at shift change for longer than I’d known either of them. “Hello, James. Visitors. Oh! This bed can’t possibly be comfortable.” Jimmy, seeing us, convulsed on his good side. Whether delight or resentment, the message was lost in the spastic independence his muscles had acquired. “Franklin has to man the fort,” Ressler said. “Your being away has thrown things up for grabs at work. He wants to come see you soon.” Not a lie. He wants; he wants with his capacity to come see you.

  Jimmy made an awful noise, not the one he had made for me. The contour was different, changed, more desperate, more out of control, less like words than the ones he had spoken to me alone. Annie shrank from the sound and left the room. Better to have stayed and cried in front of the man. Ressler leaned over Jimmy, put his ear close as I had done, if for no other reason than to ease the chest, lungs, diaphragm. “What was that?” As if he’d just been caught off guard, not paying attention. A thump in darkness, the trickle of syllables over teeth, fricatives ululating in rapids over the pebbles of a streambed. Cruel, given the smear of noise, to make him say it again. But against expectation, Dr. Ressler turned to me after the second burst and translated.

  “He says, ‘My father died.’”

  My hands flexed automatically to grab my neck, the escape of flushed birds. We had had no clue, until then, of the condition of Jimmy’s mind. Only his sagged face and vocal cords; he was trapped somewhere inside the hull. These first words Jimmy had gotten out since his vascular accident could not have been more grotesque. I didn’t know which would be worse: a real death, a second horror laid on his, or a detached, neural wandering. Dr. Ressler leaned back down to ask a question that never occurred to me. “When did your dad die, James?” He straightened and interpreted, “Nineteen-sixty.”

  Annie came back, sat in one of the chairs by the bed. When shifting, I caught Jimmy in certain angles—eyes alert, face at attention—where his expression seemed almost cogent. Was he decoupled, incoherent, ruined, or just rubbed raw, shot back into involuntary memory? “Mr. Steadman,” Ressler smiled, holding him affectionately by both hands, sitting down on the hospital bed that, while single, was large enough for both these men. “Jimmy. Can we get you anything?” Uncle Jimmy trumpeted again, more sedately, a breaking whitecap of pitch. But the professor was growing fluent enough to be able to understand the sentence without leaning up against him.

  “He’d like us to tell him a story. He says that if we give him one he’ll be good.” Perhaps inept irony was still intact. Or maybe he’d become a child. I searched Ressler for his opinion. I looked into the face of a biologist who thought Jimmy’s request totally understandable: anyone in the world might one day reasonably request such a thing. A story. And why not? “Either of you two any good at narrative?”

  But the line between simplicity and violence in Jimmy had been whittled narrower than a capacitor gap. When Dr. Ressler tried to tell Jimmy what had been happening at the office in his absence, the invalid flared out. His mouth hung open as inappropriately as a vault left swinging on its hinges. He practically howled a word that, in its vowel at least, was clearly “no.”

  Ressler appealed for help, but I could give none. I had no idea what Jimmy wanted. If it was really a t
ale with beginning, middle, and end, I was no good to him. My skill lay in retrieving, not telling. I could lead them to the encyclopedia, give them the Greek explanation for thunder or Native American rain. I knew that legenda was Medieval Latin, for things to be read at gatherings. But I could not invent one. Annie grabbed a newspaper from the stand where a visitor to Jimmy’s sickmate had left it. Thinking it was sound he needed, she pulled a headline off page two: “Sunni Splinter Group Shells Suspected Shi’ite Arsenal.” But Jimmy’s head snapped up. He gave her what must have been a sidelong glare and growled. That was no story; he was not going to be robbed of explanation by mere reportage.

  It seemed he would only be kept in check by a real barrier of narrative fable. He wanted an exegesis as precise, elegant, and exact as those old origins of thunder, evil, rainbows, suffering. But those museum pieces were rusted over beyond reviving. There was a man in the room who might make a stab at why the defective blood vessel had burst, leaving a mind flooded. But that wasn’t the song Jimmy asked for. He needed a more potent bedside tale. Jimmy was pinned under wreckage, a cerebrovascular accident that had failed to throw him clear of the crash. He lay propped up in bed, sense of direction destroyed, one of those compassless whales trapped up an illusory inlet. For some reason, even after damage that could never be reversed, he still wanted the sum of his experience read back to him as an adventure.

  Dr. Ressler looked at Annie and me, wondering why he’d bothered to bring us along. Jimmy was growing increasingly restive, rocking on the bed, attempting to build up the momentum needed to throw his feet to the floor. Ressler caught him up gently. “Jimmy. Listen. The hospital is making threatening noises about the bill. They’ve asked your mother for proof of ability to meet a prolonged stay.” He hushed Jimmy’s long, mewled objection. “Of course that’s impossible. No one has told you because no one wanted to upset you.”

  Jimmy lay still while Ressler related the insurance company’s refusal to retroactively reinstate him. He listened passively to the legal counsel’s opinion: the letter of the law lay on the side of the insurers, a business that made no provision for individual charity. Ressler did not mention Todd’s plan to save Jimmy by confessing the deed. But the professor did lay out something I heard for the first time. “Don’t worry about this bill for now. Your job is to come back from this as quickly as you can. I believe we can get you reinstated. But don’t mention this to anyone just yet.”

  The admonition made me snort in pain. But neither man paid me any notice. They were concentrating on each other. Ressler began spelling out a plan so developed that it seemed months in the making. Who knows how much Jimmy was taking in. Ressler leaned over his friend’s crumpled side, speaking in low tones, as if admonishing, behave, then, and we’ll give you what you ask for. Lie still and we’ll give you that story.

  THE CIPHER WHEEL

  Days go by when he can think of nothing but what he might have done for Lovering had he been paying attention. He does not see Jeanette; neither can abide what they now know about the other. In that dead period, when Lovering’s chaotic half of the office still sprawls up to the dividing line, Ressler learns, from out of the diminished Blue Sky, that Daniel is suing Renée Woytowich for divorce. Impossible: Ressler was at Woyty’s the other day and father and mother were on the floor playing with the kid, beyond all dignity hopelessly in love with one another and their family. All incinerated in a matter of hours. He ought to leave it, run the other direction. But he must know.

  He tracks Dan down to his office, late in the evening. Ressler knocks gingerly, hears nothing beyond the door but canned laughter. He goes in, circumspect and uninvited. Woyty sits in front of the hulking, luggable TV set that hasn’t been on since Ivy’s arrival. Woyty’s long fast from watching, causing great concern at Stainer Central, is broken with a vengeance.

  “Absolutely unavailable for chatting, Stuart. Got to assign a number to Life of Riley here.”

  Stuart sits down and watches Jackie Gleason play the big, bumbling, malapropian airplane factory worker whose tag line, “What a revoltin’ development this is,” has become a national catchphrase. After a minute of ritual self-effacement, Dan says, “So much for the liberal humanist theory that what the world needs is more laughter. America doesn’t need any more entertainment; it’s entertained to the gills. I’m panning this sucker. Straight zeros. Send Life of Riley back to figurative speech where it belongs.” He speaks as if there’s something heroic in wandering out of the mode shelter in the middle of the bean curve. He fiddles with a Sputnik-sized wad of aluminum foil strung between the rabbit ears. “Reception’s piss-poor here. Ghost so bad it makes Queen for a Day look like the Austro-Hungarian dual monarchy out for a weekend.”

  Ressler looks at him, neither admonishing nor accommodating. All at once, Woyty is volunteering all over the place. “You came to get the lowdown on my divorce, didn’t you? Scavenger. Want to know why I’m filing? Want to know the grounds?” Ressler doesn’t even nod. “Go ahead, guess.” But Woytowich doesn’t wait. “You got it. Infidelity.”

  “Good Christ!” Ressler slams the desk, shoots to his feet. “Don’t be an idiot! One look at her and any divorce judge would laugh the case out of court.”

  “Saying she’s not pretty enough? You wouldn’t have her? Well, Stuart, I’m relieved to hear it’s not you.”

  “I’m saying you’re a fool. She worships you. She’s just had a child.” Ressler can’t say how he knows Renée is blameless. He knows what women in affairs look like. Dan’s wife is not one. “How could she possibly be running around? She doesn’t have time. She hasn’t been out of your sight for months.”

  “Oh,” Woyty answers with a placid smile. “We’re not talking about recent weeks. We’re going back into the distant past. A year, year and a half.”

  “What are you talking about? Nonsense. Before Ivy?”

  “Stuart. Leave me be. The kid’s not mine.”

  “God. Don’t tell me! Not learning fast enough. You’ve hit a wall in the instant-genius campaign, and the only explanation is that no child of yours …”. He breaks off in disgust.

  Dan gives his evidence in monotone. “Five days ago, Ivy and I were playing with the letter blocks. It occurred to me that she might not be acquiring the alphabet at all, that I might be cuing her solely on block color. I thought it might be fun to set up a control, have her pick colored disks out of a ring. She couldn’t do it very well. I tried it with some large letters and she selected them perfectly. That didn’t make any sense. How could she learn letters and not colors? I tried the disks again, and she was erratic. She could do blue, black, white. But it became increasingly obvious that Ivy could not differentiate red from green disks without prompting.”

  “Your child is color-blind.” An allele that might not have come to the surface for years had Woytowich not been so keen on bestowing super-stimulated intelligence on her.

  “I’ve told you. She’s not my child.”

  Ressler summons up the textbook treatments of the matter. He recalls the central irony of sight: good vision is recessive; myopia dominant. He skims past that irrelevance and concentrates on remembering what he can about red-green color-blindness. “Renée doesn’t have it?”

  Daniel clucks his tongue dryly against the roof of his mouth. “I thought you were supposed to be the boy wonder. Don’t you remember anything from Mendel?”

  Ressler suddenly sees why the question is stupidly irrelevant. Red-green color-blindness is the classic example of a sex-linked, X-linked recessive. Both Ivy’s X chromosomes must have the allele for her to be color-blind. If Daniel isn’t color-blind, his daughter can’t be. “And you don’t have it?” Ressler asks, again irrelevantly, of the first man in downstate Illinois to have bought a color set. “What about the autosomal varieties? At least two different assortments, as I remember.”

  Daniel snorts. “One in several tens of thousands. Which do you think is more likely? A fluke mutation or a woman getting herself plowed?” He turns
away in pain, deaf to anything further Ressler has to say on the matter. “Too bad, too. I was looking forward to showing her the egg-inthe-bottle in a year or two.” Science. “The potato and iodine.”

  “You’re not going to ask for visitation?”

  Woyty just spins lazily toward him. “How many times do I have to tell you? She’s not mine.”

  The improbability of the event, the lateness of the hour leave Stuart helpless. “So what do you do now?” Woytowich flicks a wrist toward the corner, indicating a duffel bag and toilet kit. “Oh, no. Dan. You’re not moving in here?”

  “Just until I find a place.”

  “Turning your back on them? Just like that?”

  “They’ll get half the checks.”

  The next day Ressler visits Renée. The woman assaults him with dazed protests of innocence. “Stuart. There’s never been anyone but Daniel. Not now, not two years ago. God. Not even before I met him.” Clearly innocent: the way she rocks the baby between denials. She confesses to one sorry, fully clothed grope with her thesis instructor, momentarily aroused for the first time since his tenure when the two of them compared the relative merits of Volpone and As You Like It.

  “You’ve told him as much?”

  “He won’t listen. He has that fucking proof.”

  “He told you about that?”

  “Stuart,” she says, ready to debase herself. Her vowels caramelize.

  “I don’t care what inheritance says. Inheritance is wrong.” He glances down at the bright child, tilting her head in curiosity all around the enormous room. All right, then. He’s ready to accept the astronomical odds. But his willingness is not at issue. Ivy babbles, grabs Stuart’s cuff, shakes it, waiting impatiently for the next letter game. The baby, however precocious, doesn’t know what’s hit her. But she is a fast study. She’ll learn in no time.