Richard Powers - Gold Bug Variations

The Wife's Message

Writing was bad enough. Posting the thing felt like killing a baby. The unreal address and Franker's dreamy prose freed me to say things I'd never have written had I for a minute believed he might read them. He'll be reading them in days.

The incurable Todd denial of time drips from his every sentence, worse than his long-distance admission of love. I loved his time-indifference once, believed in it. Now I see that he doesn't even realize his infuriating, seductive residence in the eternal present. Nothing happens to anyone; no one changes or ages or dies. Everything exists, static; now is a standing wave. One just moves about inside the gallery, changing vantage, tilting an eyebrow, unbothered by closing hour.

Once, making fun of my three-by-five tone, he accused me of being thirty going on thirty centuries. But he was twenty-six going on twenty-six. When I first asked his age, he improvised: "I was born in St. Paul's Maternity Hospital on June 18,1957, and instantly fell into a deep sleep from which I have since awakened only fifteen hours a day." Funny at the time.

When he was obsessed with transferring each day's Times, baroquely illustrated, into his spiral books, I thought here was a fellow intent on knowing his narrow sliver instant. Just the opposite: he meant to freeze solid the world's blood bank. Full compilation of everything that has happened would at last provide a place where nothing still did. Had he possessed the sticking power, his books would have swelled, not widthwise across the shelf but downwards, mine-shaft-style. In time — for one could always be sure of more time, somewhere in an eternally spacious future— he would have gone back to pick up the missing pieces from the vertical file: first UN disarmament conference, Reagan slips surviving marines out of Beirut, haircut ($9.50), breast of chicken again. February repeats; so does the 3rd: why not the year as well?

His letter plasters over unaccountable cracks in chronology. Days spent nosing about in collections no longer pass. His Hemelvaartsdag trip to the Middle Ages: Ascension, a good half year before he wrote. Yet he lays out the detail as if last week. He has grown so cavalier with the calendar that he postdated the letter; no other explanation for how it arrived so quickly. When he bothers mentioning Dr. Ressler at all, it's a Ressler his own age, pre-disappearance, present tense.

If he came to my doorstep and petitioned in person, I would not be able to help myself, although the thing he cannot abide in me remains unchangeable. But this —this nostalgic declaration of attachment, a connection that continues in his mind just because he chanced recently to remember that it was ongoing once: impossible. Not now or ever.

Return Trip

We called our distress message back to the city. Jimmy groaned. "You two know you aren't supposed to travel together." A case of closing the disk file after the bytes escaped.

We borrowed a pound of oatmeal, a packet of coffee, and an ancient grain scoop from the contemptuous local whose phone we had hiked to. Sleepless, deliciously starved, we dug out. Late the next day, the plows sliced open the access road, clearing our umbilical. But before we were freed, we heard, in meticulous detail, how Dr. Ressler left microbiology. He narrated in open monotone, feeling the pull of those way stations again in proportion to their distance. Todd got his answer to how a person might descend into moratorium and never reemerge. And I learned that the man I'd researched was not who he was at all.

Not reticent, not demure, not this neutralized retreat behind grace and syntax. The effacing fifty-year-old was a detour, not Ressler by nature, not who he was slated to become. I began to see what had done it: circumstance and a certain turn of mind had conspired to give him violent proof that the individual organism was a lie. Thoughtful, precise, romantic, driven, needy: the a la carte traits were all phantom, paper bookkeeping. The self was wedged between two far more real antagonists — the genes it was designed to haul around and the running average of a population statistically indifferent, even hostile, to it.

What possible response was there, upon discovering that all responses were embarrassing, misrepresentative semaphores? Laughter was after something; even kindness had ulterior motives. Character was composed of processes intent on short-term results. The molecule, eternally rolling its repertoire against the monster-generating numbers, cared as little for a trait as for its polar opposite. Life was not the polite venture it seemed at eye level. One step up or down the hierarchy and the project grew sweeping, terrible, so indirect in means that it made him, the best part of his nature, seem a self-duping, shady junior partner in a fly-by-night mail-order scheme.

Even pure science — the most advanced display of living potential — was not approved by either gene or population, both indifferent to any but practical knowledge. The one was a stupid, sniffing truffle hound rooting out instant gain, the other a totalitarian juggler, insatiable for accuracy. As unsavory as that left things, the linkup between molecule and mob was still so brute-beautiful that Ressler might well have lived on curiosity alone, even manipulated, puppet curiosity, were it not for one implication in the unified theory. Life proceeded not by survival of the fittest, but by differential reproduction. It was enough simply to make more than you lost. There was no Jacob's Ladder leading higher and higher. There was only breeding, faster, hungrier, until speed, appetite, and success did you in.

Yet life in theory (more beautiful because more crystal-cold) didn't do him in; life as lived did, the twist existence laid at his door. He could not erase his traits without erasing himself — a choice he stopped just short of. But he could swear off the self-serving bouquet of characteristics in abject humility. Monasticism. The night shift.

Snow-sprung, we headed south along the fastest route. Todd drove; Ressler rode shotgun. I studied this passenger in the front seat who, for no good reason except that we'd half guessed, had just told us his life story. His eyes had become reanimated, too hopeful, too alive to possibilities to bear looking at.

A 443

A slight sharp in the middle brass, teeth-freezing, three beats fast: masked quickly, yet more conspicuous in being virtually home, but missed.

Near-hit dissonance is a shout:

someone whom love, in the darkening yard

held at arm's length, kept almost.

Always the choice: there or close,

the sharp catch of near miss

or the oblivion of concert pitch.

Return Trip (continued)

We reached MOL in the middle of the night. The waiting chaos was worse than I'd imagined. The computer room's fluorescent composure had been shattered into a parody of flyblown Jugendstil. Tables were stacked with slopped printouts, riffled listings, and unraveling tape bands. The rack-bound operations manual that usually sat regal as an OED was pulled apart into signatures, spread all over the linoleum. Disk packs, dangerously uncovered, were scattered everywhere, piled in model babels on top of spindles. The smooth metal chitin of the CPU had been detached, revealing a mass of printed circuit cards. Seated on the floor in front of the bared cage, his back to the door where we entered, a dazed Uncle Jimmy stared listlessly at the diagnostic LEDs. "James," Ressler greeted him, between amusement and anguish.

Jimmy turned around slowly, as if the cavalry's arrival no longer made any difference. "Don't even ask."

From behind the aisle of drives came Annie's excited treble. "Is it really them?" She crept out, tape spools running up each slender arm like Cleopatra's bracelets. Her hair had fallen in a flaxen heap around her neck. She was rumpled and white from lack of sleep. "I've been helping tide things over."