Richard Powers - Gold Bug Variations

Two days later, a third question: How old is an at-risk mother? "I was exasperated," I told Todd, crawling back under the weight of his arms. "Someone was putting me through the hoops. You know: like a child, repeating 'why?' until the word evaporates?" Todd shook his head, made me continue.

The day after the third question, before I could form a definitive response, a woman materialized at the Reference Desk asking if I was J. O'D. She reached down into a stroller and lifted an infant for me to inspect. The child had the unmistakable spatulate features of deformity. She said she was twenty-three.

"I could still see, for probably the last week, a faint profile of normal boy already being drowned out by the crosstalk of that extra twenty-first chromosome. I finally knew what she was asking. Was it her fault? I asked what her doctors had told her. Her answer destroyed me: 'They're less helpful than you.' I spent the rest of the afternoon with the two of them. I showed her how to follow the citations, and we pushed them hard. At the end, we discovered two distinct etiologies. The first was sporadic, without inheritance patterns, some slow, possibly viral cause. The second, the minority of cases, was a permanent chromosomal attachment in the mother, a translocation trisomy, a fluke of a fluke that struck mothers of all ages equally.

"After some hours, I apologized: the library would have to be a lot more current and specialized, I myself would have to have a medical degree to move her any closer. But by then she was almost grateful, having learned along the way about cretinism, microcephalia, PKU, anencephaly, spina bifida. Oh, Jesus! The whole, grisly catalog."

In the middle of the list I broke down, scaring Todd witless. He sat by helplessly, uncertain whether to comfort or cower in a corner. I tried to compose myself, aggravating the shakes. My voice was still wild when I spoke again. "The girl thanked me for the one promising bit anyone had thrown her since her boy's birth.

The books said that an extra twenty-first often leaves mongols with the sweetest dispositions."

Todd did not need the rest spelled out. The endless catalog of things that can go wrong — so comforting to this woman, whose punishment began to look like commutation — had killed me. I felt a dread I previously couldn't have imagined. Because of a lucky statistical aberration, because I and everyone close to me had been born healthy, I had assumed that childbearing was a perfected process with a few tragic accidents impinging on the periphery. I now saw that the error-free lived on a tiny, blessed island of self-delusion. I could hear my own mutations accumulating; it was either hurry into a baby-making I was not ready for, or wait, Russian roulette, for my own blueprint to betray me.

Lying in the dark, I felt the revulsion return with full force. As at his apartment, listening to that Viennese song, I heard how we lived in a room of privileged music above the screaming street. I closed out the syllogism, wishing I'd stuck with the less defensible line that I'd sterilized myself because I hadn't the time or patience to bear children. "I told Tuckwell I was going in for the operation. He didn't argue. It never occurred to me to consult anyone else." Least of all one I hadn't met yet.

I watched Franklin's face as he assembled the facts. Something had been broken; but the thing was done, and even he was smart enough to see that he would only break things worse by probing. "Well," he said at length. "That answers my original question." The time for theory was over. All that was left was practice, and we fell back to working over one another's bodies again, more circumspectly this time. That night, at least, there were no side effects.

Friends of the Family

She must still be a benign, lovely woman. From the day I met her, Annie Martens struck me as impossibly well-adjusted. She worked as a remote teller for MOL's mother bank, entering the financial world's dirty linen that Todd and Ressler washed every night. She seemed perfectly happy with that deadly-dull career, preferring it to anything more ambitious. She would have gladly accepted a demotion for the good of the firm.

She was suspiciously sunny for this city. Her only claim to psy-chopathology involved an early marriage, which had ended in amicable divorce the year before. Uncle Jimmy reported from the day shift that the abandoning mate persisted in meeting Annie every day for lunch. The uncomplicated woman was happy to hold hands and neck in the corridor with her ex as if a newlywed.

She was infinitely patient, cohabiting comfortably with the incomprehensible, her face wearing the perpetual surprise of Mary ambushed at her prayers. She had a deep, throaty laugh, like underground water. She was intuitively musical; we often listened to her wrap herself angelically around a guitar and produce, in round pitches, old frontier songs about wandering, gambling, or brutal stabbings of love objects. Even I loved her when she played. Her face radiated. She closed her eyes when she sang, inhabiting a garden far away.

Annie had no faults except a propensity to speak incoherently. She punctuated her small talk with advertising slogans: "Betcha can't eat just one," or "Even your friends won't tell you." She was, Franker assured me, impossible to take anywhere, because she unconsciously read all wayside text out loud until the patter became intolerable. This habit explained how her husband could sue for divorce without losing his affection for the woman.

There was something else that took me months to put my finger on. She liked aphorisms, annoying if forgivable in themselves. But she could not reproduce these cliches accurately. The errors were easily missed. To recount amazement, she'd exclaim, "I flipped my wing." She'd crack a joke without apparent punchline, laugh throat-ily, and conclude, "That went over like a wet balloon." When Jimmy teased her, she responded, "Watch it. You're walking on thin eggshells."

Once her problem became apparent, listening to her filled me with embarrassment at the whole race. She was not a stupid woman; her problem was not imbecility in an environment requiring alertness. Rather the reverse. She was born in 1963, a year I'm old enough to remember. The date itself consigned her to another era. Todd, five years older, slipped in under the wire, old enough to know that the world is racing toward the most crucial drop since Galileo. Annie was too young to know what the good fight was and certainly would never have fought it without us.

The paintings that made Franklin's life palatable to him, that opened up a channel to a resonant past, Annie knew instinclively to be treacherous impostors. She was a matter-of-fact woman, loving what was at hand and not at all awed by what was not. Sfumato mystery, the flame of the past scumbled around her in a Washington Heights pastiche of the Cluny cloisters. La Gioconda munching on corn chips. Great Expectations abridged to fit on ninety-minute car cassette. Stains spreading into underarms to Beethoven's Fifth. Mozart's in the closet: let 'im out, let 'im out, let 'im out.

She was true to the culture she was born into, truer than Todd, who has abandoned it. She was endowed with a great capacity for care. She could cry at pop tunes and laugh at Yellow Pages ads. Her sloganeering, her mangled proverbs, her utter incomprehension of irony, her ability to recite "Buckle up for safety" as if it were a Pater Noster, marked in her genuine humanism. Along with the clear forehead and angelic chin came a propensity for what her how-to manuals called "personal engagement." The news account of a zoo giraffe that had died in copulation almost shattered her. She loved things. Anything. Rain showers. Pretty stationery. Sandwich wrappers. Her Doberman, ten pounds heavier than she was. Anything nearby and knowable Annie cared for indiscriminately with all her heart.