Richard Powers - Gold Bug Variations

"Look," Blake challenges. "Take our own field. Blown wide open lately. Which do you think will be more complex: a complete, functional description of human physiology, or a complete, functional description of the hereditary blueprint?"

Ressler considers the number, weight, and function of the purposive proteins in a working body — the countless, discriminating, if-then, shape-manipulating, process-controlling, feedback-sensitive, integrated programs composing the complete organism. As in the old Von Neumann joke, he sees at long last that the answer is obvious. "Physiology is vastly more complex."

"But the more complex is contained in the less complex, right? We believe in the simplicity of generating principles."

Some equivocation, some sleight of hand here. Can genetics really be said to contain all physiology in embryo? Yet Ressler concedes Blake's central point, Poe's point, in that volume buried in the 8OOs. Poe's cryptanalyst needed three things to turn the hopeless gold-bug noise back into readable knowledge: context, intention, and appropriate reference. A night of information science has forced Tooney to confront the full width of that triplet. "Wife," Blake says, grabbing his matched half. "Oh, Eva! I'm sorry. Something's happened to me." This all ought to be occurring elsewhere — anywhere but Ressler's living room. Eva's features are smothered in wonder. She touches her husband's head, coaxing him into relaxing the cords in his neck. "It's crazy," he repeats.

"No it's not," she says, combing him.

"Friend." Blake smiles helplessly at his wife. "I didn't plan this." Eva smiles broadly: nothing you could possibly do will upend our life. "I may," Blake says, laughing at her unconditional trust, swinging his head sideways in disbelief, "I may have to resign from the faculty."

Evie coddles him. In a very bad John Wayne, she says, "A man's gotta do___"

Ressler refuses to believe the exchange. "Quit the team? To do what? Where would you go?"

"Back to school," Eva says, almost hissing. Protecting her husband from this outsider when he is down.

It's impossible. "You can't. What about your child?"

"Who's a child?" Margaret demands.

Blake mistakes him. "My child? She's in school already."

"How will you live?"

"There's always the Civil Service," Eva volunteers.

"Tooney," Ressler says, "you've had a strange night."

Blake just laughs. "No doubt about that."

Anger fills Ressler at his friend's uncharacteristic leave from realism. "What will you study?"

Blake shrugs: the discipline hasn't been invented yet. "Look, Stuart. How can I pretend to do science, take apart the mechanism, inventory all the particulars, when I haven't even a rough feel for the sum? I haven't even dusted the spines of a fraction of the stuff they have shelved in there."

"And you never will."

"True. But I wouldn't mind a rough take on the big picture. A life of educated guesses, and I haven't even a clue what we're guessing at."

Thus the Blakes commit themselves, overnight, to hopeless gen-eralism. They depart, Tooney shaking Ressler's hand warmly, Evie kissing him, thanking him for keeping her alive last night. After they leave, Ressler replays the man's mad argument, but can find no hook to snag him. He circles back on Blake's point: the complex can be contained in the simple. Push past the deterring convolutions — too varied to describe — and get to their underpinnings. Grammar must be simpler than the uncatchable wealth of particular sentences. He wants to run over to K-53-A, throw himself around the man's neck. He has never been more in need of his teammate's skills. Never more in need of his neighbor himself— his solid, dispelling humor. But Tooney is gone already. Intractable.

Over the following days, as it becomes clear that Blake really means to depart, Ressler gambles everything. He lays out for Tooney the seminal germ he has stumbled on. The beauty of the green idea sparks Blake's scientific residue. His eyes light up at the walkthrough. He grabs his young colleague's upper arms, lifts him bodily into the air. "You can do it." But the next moment he returns to his new calm, encourages the kid more soberly, and again declines to stay.

Blake doesn't even wait for term's end. He leaves in midweek, departs from Stadium Terrace, forever jumps the tenure track. He asks Ressler to take over his classes; "Mostly a matter of administering finals." They leave him with a dozen pieces of furniture. "Another long-term loan." They give him a forwarding address — Seattle, Eva's mother's. Eva kisses him courageously goodbye, on the lips, wet with hypotheticals. Tooney shakes his shoulders. "After boning up, I might come back to the lab in good faith someday."

When it comes to saying goodbye to the child, Ressler can take it no longer. He may see her again in this life, but never again like this. Process will have gotten her. The pilgrim soul will be lost in adulthood. He tries to say, "Got any poems, for the road?" but cannot get it out. Margaret tugs at his shirt cuff, spins on one heel, and disappears, giggling. He will die without raising a child.

Script

Who knows how long his envelope has been there. I haven't checked the box since Thanksgiving. I'd given up looking, achieved a degree of self-sufficiency. My only bottle-messages lately are from the power company. Checking for mail was once my day's high-water mark. But recently I've taken to clearing out the box only often enough to keep the utilities running. Suddenly this: the message I'd written off. A simple letter wouldn't have been enough. It's a longhand manuscript. I knew instantly it was from him: his runic glyphs. The packet carried the same exotic monarch as his card, pasted all over with stickers pronouncing "Per Luchtpost." Why now, when I'd almost edited him?

I tore open the packet, knowing the weapon was loaded. I was a wreck from the first rambling paragraph. Even now, twice through the text, my organs scrape like tectonic plates. The sprawling poetics are unmistakable Todd. But someone else is in there too, someone I've never met. A dozen minutely, perfectly hand-lettered pages, both sides, and I still can't tell where he is. That landscape: the place he used to map out for me in whispers. But somewhere else too, a globe away. "Why have we had to keep apart this year?" "Not that I can hope to ask you—" Who is this? A male I once knew, stripping at a safe distance?

Plaintive Baedeker gossip, swapped cathedral stones, death notices. Frank on the ropes. Writer's block, foreign language, death of a classmate, the panels themselves after years of reproductions: tempera homesickness for the world. I make myself immune to his contents. But two paragraphs in and I hear him confessing something I never realized. He'd been on the ropes from the moment I met him. Easy, sociable, pelted with phone calls from friends who couldn't imagine why he gave them the slip, locked up on the night shift, satisfied with the company of a failed scientist and a failing librarian. This luchtpost packet confesses why he wanted Ressler's etiology, the dossier on that disease. A year's rupture; anonymity in Europe, oblique petition for help, lost in moratorium. Out of character at last: please write me back.

Something's out of joint. The cheery postcard — Flemish scene ported from Boston back to Flanders — is dated July 6, five months before this letter. He writes in the card that he's well along in Dutch. But the letter reports novice's difficulties, unlikely for someone of Todd's polyglot perversity. After a half a year, he still cannot mention Ressler's death, or give the man the dignity of past tense. Alone, unchecked, unseconded, writing me, dragging me through all his sweet, unreliable, poorly timed declarations of maybe love. God free me from this man.