Richard Powers - Gold Bug Variations

Todd kept chattering amiably, as if I were another of his news vendors or street drunks. I wanted him to stop talking, but he wouldn't. He jabbered on about the composer, the exhaustion of romanticism, the absolute distrust Americans have come to feel toward European culture, toward their own past. He prompted me to join in, but I snubbed the invitation. He prodded me again, but a look from me cut the game dead. He stood, went to the window, and stared at something farther than the neighborhood. He squinted, looking for that metaphor, the outside world with its untraceable, newsprint, global urgencies closed off to us, hermetically sealed. "But I do love you," he said. I was the only person within earshot.

"Thank you. I mean, for___"I gestured at the record player with a wrist. He turned to look at me. I saw in his face the evidence he'd been denying since the day he came by the library to ask about a disappearing man. I understood that all the people he spread himself out over — the cashiers, the subway vets, the three-piece-suiters, college friends held at phone's distance, everyone who elicited that uncalculated, soliciting, contagious charm— were grapples, last-ditch efforts to reverse the departure he was well into. He had the Ressler gene, recessive, latent, but irreversible.

He returned the record to the closet shelf. "I have become a stranger to this place," he said, not daring to look at me. I realized later that he was trying again to translate the song text, quote of the day.

Canon at the Sixth

"Does it have any side effects?" he asked one night in my room, our habitual place for love. We lay still straddled; 1 crouched exhausted on top of him. Although subzero outside, we were moist from exertion. Sex, slack and slow, expansive, aesthetic, like serious wine tastings where nothing gets drunk but everything sampled, sometimes turned fierce for no reason, vocal, frantic, a muscle purge. The first such escalation scared the daylights out of us. Neither had initiated any change of pace, but all of a sudden we were both running hard, testing the edge of control. The more frightening it became, the more wildly we went at each other. Afterwards, still winded, I murmured about not knowing he was a sprinter.

"Sprinter? 'Hurdler' wouldn't half say it. You get that from a book? Private reference?" I made an embarrassed pun about open circulation. After that, even our most passive encounters — wide-eyed stroking — had a whiff of danger, as if anything could trigger fierce surprise.

Following such an outbreak, we lay motionless in my room, awkward in the impossible non sequitur, the return to nonchalance. The behavioral masterstroke, more crucial to human evolution than the opposable thumb: the ability to pretend that nothing just happened, that there is no seam. "Does it have any side effects?" he asked in the dark, after geologic pressing desperate enough to crystallize carbon. He could make himself obscure in half a dozen languages, including his mother tongue.

"Hair on my palms, you mean?"

"Can it do that?" he blinked.

"Can what do that?" Even reaching the conclusion that we didn't get each other was endlessly difficult.

He leaned toward me confidentially. "Safeguarding." I stared, unable to crack the euphemism. "Here we've been happily tilling the fields for weeks, with nary a mention of prevention. That leaves, to my knowledge, only two possible methods by which you___"

His speech ground to a halt. He locked eyes and stuttered, "Uh-oh."

I laughed a monosyllable. "Idiot."

"I suppose I should have asked beforehand, huh?" He was abashed only a second. "Which is it then? I don't want you using anything that's going to give you___"

"Don't worry."

"What do you mean, don't worry? I'm worrying."

"We don't have to worry about pregnancy. Or any birth-control side effects." We dressed slowly. I stood looking outside, wishing for all the world that we could go for a walk.

After a respectable pause for a man, Todd broke into Cockney constable. "What's all this then?"

I faced him, as self-possessed as a health professional. "I had a ligation."

"You what?" Dead silence. "You're not even thirty."

"Pretty soon," I said, suddenly too girlish.

We lay back on the bed, fully clothed. He put tentative fingers through my hair. "Mind if I ask…?" I waited placidly, relaxed, until he put it in so many words. "What prompted you… or did you need to?"

"No. Tuckwell and I decided that, with our lives, our careers, we would never do well with babies."

"But I didn't think___Did you expect…? Did you think you would live with him forever?"

I snorted — a sharp exhalation that expanded my lungs as it emptied them. "Evidently I must have, on our good days."

"Jesus. One of you must have been pretty certain. I mean, 'permanent' means—"

I discarded the argument that the operation could conceivably be reversed. The odds against that loophole made it irrelevant. Permanent meant permanent. "He had nothing to do with it, really." I was sorry I'd mentioned Keith at all, ashamed to have tried to palm off on him an interest in the decision. "It was all me. The idea of passing on accumulated adult knowledge to a helpless infant — how to expectorate phlegm and not swallow it, how to tell the difference between 'quarter to' and 'quarter after,' how to stay off the stove, how to tell when people were trying to hurt them — was too much. I couldn't see myself selecting all those clothes and birthday presents year after year, keeping them from inserting screwdrivers in electrical outlets, nursing them through the destruction of favorite toys."

"Jan. No. You're joking." Franklin was pale, shaking. "Motherhood is tough, so you tied your tubes!"

I could have crushed him with one word. It would never be his pregnancy. He wasn't even responsible enough to have thought of prevention. The male model of parenthood: everything between ejaculation and tossing the football with the twelve-year-old is trivial. The matter didn't concern him in the least. The fight had begun, after all, with his wanting to avoid contributing to any child of mine. I had made an irreversible decision, a choice self-evident at the time, one that would have been made for me anyway in a few more years. I did not care to reproduce, and although I was still relatively young, removing that possibility meant clearing the anxiety from my remaining sexual life.

"How hard would it have been to leave the door open…? Bad metaphor. Sorry." Todd smiled queasily, about to be sick. "I mean: as negative life insurance, the pill would have been cheap at the price. Suffer the less radical premiums for a couple years, against the outside payoff if you change your mind. Or partner," he added sadly, touching me on a flank already changed to terra-cotta.

I shook my head. Having come this far, all I could do was explain the variable that had swung the calculation. I told him why it was not a question of my mind or situation changing. A few years before, I'd found on the Question Board a request for the latest scientific line on mongolism. My first response was mild irritation; any modestly educated adult ought to have been able to find a satisfactory answer within minutes. I started at the obvious place, followed the well-marked trail through reliable sources, and delivered the broadly established explanation: Down's syndrome is the result of trisomy — a third chromosome 21. Airtight, complete, exact. I couldn't imagine improving upon it.

But the day after I posted this answer, the board carried a follow-up: What causes trisomy? I felt ashamed at not answering the first question at all. I went back to the sources, beginning to appreciate the issue, how much subtlety the research in fact required. The immediate mechanism was undoubtedly genetic. But nature and nurture were not entirely distinct. That extra chromosome, research suggested, may in turn be the result of an older ovary in which chromosome 21 fails to separate in egg formation. I attached a rider to the first explanation: chromosomal nondisjunction, while not entirely understood, increased in frequency in proportion to the mother's age.