Richard Powers - Gold Bug Variations

The Adaptor Hypothesis

"What do we do now?"

She smiles, lids still beatifically closed. "Now, you love me." Still lying indecorously on their corner of floor, she arches enough to allow him to lift her stockings, smooth the olive skirt, restore the organdy.

He places a guilty fingertip to the stain on her hem. "Do you need to rinse this?" he asks stupidly. "Before you go home?"

Her thigh moves beneath his hand. It already wants touching again. "Don't worry." She assures him with her eyes. He helps her outside to her car, escorting as if the assault has weakened her. He closes her car door, contrite, abandoning her to sneak home alone. He is ready to call Herbert, read his confession into the wiretap. Only it's not just his confession any longer.

He walks home. The premature warmth of February air blankets him. He is lost in the calendar; he cannot, for a moment, say when in the year he is or which season follows, cannot even fix the ordinary sequence of warming and cooling. Helpless in the face of a mild breeze, his skin remarks on the glorious night this night has brought in. But the breeze, the false thaw, does not displace what he and Jeanette just transacted. It must keep happening now, transposed throughout the year.

He wades in illicit, erotic revulsion: retained impression is no more than a command to repeat. The weighted average of every surviving drive compels him to another go-round with this woman. Arousing, irresistible, and like most enticing hybrids, sterile. Yet through that revulsion, this breeze insists that hope grow even in an empty place. The Base, overlaid with a contrary voice, whispers that the night feels good, nevertheless; something may yet happen; you've been surprised this far; more of the same is never just more of the same. He reaches the familiar barracks and lets himself in.

He concedes to an English muffin, then straight to music. He needs: what? To prostrate in front of plainsong from a cloister so empty that the echo relay is antiphonal? To join the high, pure head tones of boys in a Byrd Kyrie? To be knocked unconscious by a bit of dislodged opera-buffa stucco? To smile ironically at the Eroica, its canceled dedication? To sit quietly stewed outside the locked door of a rolling concerto cadenza just before the last, rescuing tutti? To admit the impossible poignancy of neo-romance? To make a space for grief four last songs wide? To breathe the air of a new planet? To trace the permutations in the ILLIAC Quartet? To lie in caged silence?

He opts for the master blueprint: music with no past or future, existing in the perpetual now, a standing Schrödinger wave. He could kiss Olga, so paralyzed has she held her plastic arabesque. Once more he lowers the needle on the scratched disk, unleashing a keyboard exercise that wanders far off the face of the earth into a canonic minor modulation as full of pathos as the first creation. Chromatic beyond recognition, the Base slips inconceivably downstream from the peaceful thematic trickle of its source Brook, the most outrageous claimant in the most unprovable paternity suit ears have ever heard.

He and Jeanette have worked upon each other's nakedness, done all they ever wanted to do. He has no inclination to go back to the lab, now or ever. He wants to resign, sign on to the obscurest work available — making pizzas, hawking Fighting Illini pennants, whatever unskilled labor the local economy will support. He is overwhelmed with the urge to trash his radio, cut the phone lines, and hole up in his bungalow alone with Olga, listening without dissection, assembling without violating the unforgiving weight of particular parts.

He wants her here, to see, speak with, listen to as she vocalizes those rhythmic, objecting stammers. She must call, now. But she doesn't. Those moments when she will pity him, deign to drop by, are already too rare. Each minute out of contact is awash in variables — all the accidents that perhaps have already led her forever away. Research recovers nothing; knowledge doesn't knit. He sits in the stream of sound, unable to avert a collapse of volition, not even wanting to.

Criminal scenarios edit themselves in his head. Cloak-and-dagger, skulking affairs where they press against one another for a quarter hour out of every forty-eight. Magnanimous Herbert lend-leasing her or throwing in the towel, acknowledging the omnipotent heart. Ressler appealing to Jeannie, begging for a noble, lifelong separation. His taking up surgery, returning her somehow to fertility.

Each permutation more inspired, more insipid than the last. They take him at once, gang-rape him. He sits wedged in the inseam between wall and floor, listening, thinking that he can hear distant song straining the contour of a variation beyond the variation. He's lost it; accumulated stress pushes him into the realm of imaginary acoustics. But the trace is real, waving the air molecules however faintly. Then he figures it: the pianist singing, caught on record, humming his insufficient heart out. Transcribing the notes from printed page to keypress is not enough. Some ineffable ideal is trapped in the sequence, some further Platonic aria trial beyond the literal fingers to express. Sound that can only be approximated, petitioned by this compulsory, angelic, off-key, parallel attempt at running articulation, the thirty-third Goldberg.

Canon at Seventh (II)

We began living together, I suppose. Not even what lawtalk would call a verbal contract. Todd had the key, and he checked in periodically. He even moved a few things over: a backpack of clothes, few but washed frequently enough to stretch forever. His precious notebooks, kept by the bed in case of emergencies that never emerged. His sketchpads, filled with closely observed nature and lacking only that last urgency to become truly remarkable. I was so pleased the day he brought them by that he felt compelled to squash any hope that he might start drawing in earnest: "Can't leave these in my apartment for the burglars to find. I'd be drummed out of grad school if anyone saw them."

"You're not in graduate school."

"There's still the dissertation. Any year now."

He kept his own apartment and left most of his treasures there. He gave me a copy of his key, more out of moral parity than enthusiasm. I'd been back to his cult museum at the tip of the island a handful of times since our first listening session, but it never felt right. "Should we spend more time at your place?" I asked one weekend.

"I like it better here. The curtains. The rocker. The bedspread. Your touch." It was his embroidered, endangered bastion, his last holdout in an overrun world: the amber oil lamp in the second-story corner above the antique shop, abiding in tragic coziness. There were more economical arrangements, but anything beyond this tentative fit — a nocturnal burrower braving danger to accept the handout — would be invasively unstable.

We ate evening meals together. He insisted on washing all dirty dishes. Sometimes he stocked the pantry. I took the phone off the hook when I left in the morning, to let him sleep. He came and went freely. I had no expectations. When he was around, we read out loud together, did anagrams, experimented on each other's body, assembled a list of what hurt, what was indifferent, what felt good.

We worked together on our 1040s, finishing long before they were due. On this one ballot alone did he vote his conscience and go head to head with Western Civilization. At great fiscal sacrifice, Franklin buried most of his money in tax shelters, charitable deductions, and losses until the Amount You Owe was zero. Not stinginess on his part. Just the opposite: by the time he had it all legally diverted, he had nothing left to spend. The year 1 saw him file, he'd accumulated write-offs that would square him for two more years.