Richard Powers - Gold Bug Variations

"I said," the chief enunciates, amusement and annoyance waiting for each other at a four-way stop, "you'd better get down to the lab. Some gentlemen from Life are here to see you."

Transposon

I have made a Bush League mistake. Idiot! Pulling his words out for the thirtieth time, for the stupid pleasure of hoping they might be different this time, I see it, as self-evident as just out of the envelope. I could smother myself. The boy's affectation has been staring me in the face, begging to be understood, obvious from the day of arrival.

Had I remembered the first thing about him, I would have worked this out weeks ago. He always said the trick to picking up a foreign language was to wear it. Affect its idiom. Act. Assume a virtue if you have it not. I should have known that his method would extend even to written dates. He posted me from Europe. There, people have the good sense to arrange their calendar units in ascending order. He wanted local fluency as fast as possible. So why revert to old habits, just to write a friend back home?

12/6: Not the sixth day of twelfth month. The twelfth of the sixth. I can hardly take it in. He wrote, not in early December, but in the middle of last June. Not X number of weeks ago. X months. Half a year before I thought he'd written. The opposite season. Every word I read of his was wrong, bungled, lost over the lines. The smallest tweak of context changes every sentence. Nagging anachronism, that weird sense of collapsed time disappears. Of course he had no grief. When Todd wrote me, Dr. Ressler was still alive. One stupid transposition and I hear what the man is saying for the first time. Only, after explanation, his message is more cryptic than ever.

Alla Breve

I can't take it in. Where has he been, and when? After the fact, the holes in my old version are obvious. But this new timetable, for all its superiority, is still shot full of anomalies. June? Half a year from door to door! Unthinkable, even for international mail. I cross off those weeks when, lost to this project, I'd stopped checking for mail: months still unaccounted for.

Assume that Todd, in character, obliviously attached so little postage that the packet went by surface freight. Adding all possible holdups — trouble reading his nineteenth-century hand, customs opening it — accounts for a couple of months at most. Todd's refusal to descend to anything so courante as zip code tacks on another punitive week here in New York. I conjure up a postal strike in the Low Countries — they happen in social welfare states. Stretched to breaking, the thread still doesn't span.

Perhaps he began the letter in mid-June, but sent it later. But that's impossible. Two weeks after he started it, he was back in Illinois, dispatching news of Dr. Ressler's death. The letter makes no mention of stateside hiatus. And the imitation Flemish card wedged between? I compare postage, look up the exchange rates from the middle of last year. No doubt the card came by surface. Slow boat. Posted before the death notice.

Todd couldn't have poured out a long chapter, had his life upended, returned to the continent with everything he wrote turned inside out, and then blithely sent the thing unemended, as if nothing had happened in the forgetting world in the interim.

Granted he never made sense to me. But even he could not have sent these bottle-messages in any order except card, lengthy letter, and obituary. Still, the gap: as if he set me up to misread chronology, invert it, hate his indifference for half a year. Now I must postdate everything, the way they adeptly postdated the console log when it most mattered. I can't set it right, can't remake myself to it.

How many times he left me kitchen-table notes, agonized trails of crotchety, contradicting explications replete with a course-of-battle map, arrows tracing out day's insomnia: "Don't worry; stepped out for a minute. Nope, upstairs; first line obsolete. Make that was obsolete; this rescinding is final. Two of the previous three updates are false." He lived in unaccounted gaps. Gone for weeks. Then waiting in the front room, smiling: You were saying…? In the dark, before falling asleep, he would suddenly ask after leftovers we had eaten a dozen days before. He confused the order of his discoveries about Herri with that man's chronology. I'd post the anniversary of the world's first news broadcast, February 1920, and he'd go about beaming as if it had just been sent all over again.

Once, over one of my modest casserole attempts, he asked, "How do you suppose that lobster could walk away like that with his rear half hacked off?" A day later, I remembered: that seafood dive, our business lunch that turned out to be a date after all. It unsettled me: if the first date was still so immediate in him, could the gap between now and the last be any larger?

I've seen him do the same to Dr. Ressler. We and an attendant Annie sat in the control room one night on the threshold of spring. The machines on the other side of the two-way mirror blindly carried out their procedures: if balance equals debit minus credit, then goto smoothsailing, else goto errorhandle. We were deep in listening. The theme for the evening was children's songs: Schumann, Bartók, Debussy. Without even a feint toward preparation, Todd asked his mentor, "So what about that magazine?" Annie and I exchanged glances: had we missed something? But Dr. Ressler broke into a reticent grin. He shook his head and squeezed the bridge of his nose. "Come on," Todd teased. "What did you tell those gentlemen?" I finally got it. He was jumping not just the weeks between that evening and the New Hampshire woods, when Ressler told us about his one run-in with notoriety. He was leaping over the entire twenty-five years since Ressler did the interview.

"I didn't tell them anything, as you and your woman collaborator determined." Ressler winked at me, homage for the bit of detective work I'd done three quarters of a year before. His wink rushed over me, a chemical injection. I was in love with the man. The worst, most unspeakable schoolgirl's crush.

Todd was relentless, for private reasons. "You must have told them something. Who supplied them with that Miescher quote? Should one ask anybody who is undertaking a major project in science, in the heat of the fight, what drives and pushes him so relentlessly, he will never think of an external goal; it is the passion of the hunter…." Todd had the quote intact.

"Guilty as charged. But I was just a child." A pointed rib for Todd's benefit: your age, boy.

"I thought you did. Hacks for the glossies seldom know the literature."

"It might have been any of the other poor souls they'd cornered for the portfolio. 'Faces to Watch for in '58,' or what-have-you." Todd supplied the actual title of the piece. This irritated Dr. Ressler. "Did you need to memorize it?" That hushed things, and we were back to songs for children. Todd had it coming. He should have known that missing spaces, for other people, remain real. But with the quick forgiveness of one who once studied inheritance for a living, Dr. Ressler gently berated Franklin. "I thought I'd told you everything that anyone could conceivably find interesting about my case." An edge in his tone insisted that of all ways there were of learning what it meant to be alive, biography was among the least helpful.

Todd, lip out, said, "I just wanted to know how they heard about you."

"Oh, they were doing the brave new world piece they're obliged to run every two years. Somebody at Cold Spring Harbor mentioned to the journalist compiling the piece that if they were looking for bankable horses, there was a bright, young, single, obscure young man out in the Midwest who had initiated an interesting bit of work and who, word had it, was not entirely unphotogenic." He looked at Annie and me sardonically: you see how cells take it upon themselves to fall apart. He couldn't have been more wrong.