Richard Powers - Gold Bug Variations

He loves a woman, has entered one who so awakes the possibilities buried in his cytoplasm that the urge to get her as round, as loose-draped in the belly as a medieval Virgin is now stronger than any that has ever possessed him. The compulsion to run the one experiment that can't be pared down to a manageable outcome. But every cell he will ever shoot into her will die there, in her tract, in confusion. He and Jeanette are barred forever from that trial run, not just by skirtable social proscription, but by final proclamation of the law of averages.

"One, two, three, four, five," Daniel intones, peeling back the child's tiny, almond machine-shop parings. "Seis, siete, ocho, nueve, diez." He frees his finger from her reflex grasp and winds up a music box. Its melodious running down sends the child into rapture. "Yes sir. This baby's either going to be a genius or one overstimulated cookie."

Ressler barely hears Woytowich to nod acknowledgment. The music-box trickle recalls him to another music box, a distant one, one he first heard in Botkin's office months ago, at the start of this annus mirabilis, before learning became more than he could bear. A music box, an automaton of stoic grief, faintly singing out in the fifth of five songs selected from a catalog of four hundred poems chronicling the death of a child from scarlet fever. Kindertodenlieder. A little light has gone out in my tent. Hail the eternal light of day.

"Yes, Ivy and I are going to teach each other a lot. Aren't we, dear? Aren't we?" A fair trade; she gets to learn where her tummy is. You get to learn what it means to cheat death. Ressler hears, in the child's music box, how the only life he will ever live beyond his own will be the life of that absurd photo and caption, trapping him in coffee tables everywhere.

Annie's alarm at Dr. Ressler's one-time borderline notoriety was so genuine, her face so amazed, during the account that his irritation at the broach of the subject bubbled away. "Yes, greatness briefly thrust upon me, and only a quick side step and swing of the red cape saved me. I was cornered by the same journalistic band that cruelly led the beach-party beauties to believe that one of them might domesticate that twenty-some-year-old genius pianist, cure him of hypochondria and his awful singing over the instrumental tracks. Even as the magazine was busy promoting that fellow, he'd already begun to trade the international concert circuit for a life where even his closest friends could reach him only by phone. Life never caught on that his keyboard exercises were a refusal of natural selection, a means of surviving solitude." He fell apologetically silent a minute. Speaking to Annie, as if Todd and I already understood, he said, "The three weeks when my mug inhabited the back pages of newstands filled me with a revulsion that has not diminished."

That fame was a proving ground for another notoriety then just weeks away. One evening Uncle Jimmy stayed late, lying in wait for Todd. By Franker's account, the Ops Manager hand-delivered their pay receipts for the period, reading over their shoulders as each examined his stub. Jimmy, jittery, wanted to know if their deposits checked out. He told them his pay had come through augmented by a lump sum, with no note on the stub or word from higher-ups. I imagine Todd relishing the lark, encouraging Jimmy to accept the Bank Error in Your Favor and go buy a new color TV for his mother. Of course, Jimmy, seconded by a terse-lipped Dr. Ressler, concluded that he would have to report the windfall glitch.

"Do you think it could have something to do with that whole lotta shakin' goin' down here over the last few weeks?" Todd suggested lamely.

"As you know," Dr. Ressler intervened, to keep Todd from clever admission of guilt, "all our payroll records are kept insulated from our own machines."

"That's right." Jimmy frowned, trying hard to ignore his hunch. "All our checks are cut out of house. By a rival firm."

After Jimmy's departure, Ressler gave Franklin the most severe dressing-down possible: he said nothing about the matter. They started the end-of-day processing, Ressler letting Franker stick with his story. Trust devastated Todd more than any accusation could have. Franker's whim turned real at last, on this side of the mainframe linkup.

A few days later, when a baffled Uncle Jimmy returned to what his instincts told him was the scene of the crime, he shook his head and told my friends, "Nobody knows who authorized it, but the receipt matches a valid electronic request. 'Somebody musta dunnit.' Accounting even looked at me like I was crazy for bringing it to their attention."

"James," Dr. Ressler assured him, "it sounds as if you're forced to consider this the gift of an anonymous donor."

"Pennies from Heaven," Todd suggested meekly. "The Color TVs for the Mothers of Excessively OT 'ed Middle Managers Fund."

"If the two of you have nothing more helpful to say than 'Roll with it,' I guess I'll have to. But nobody can make me like it," Jimmy said.

Or words to that effect. Unlike the Evangelist, I was not there and did not see these things. I received the revised version only through Todd, and my memory of even that is already years old. "This is the gist, but not the exact run of words as he sang them in his sleep, for even the most beautiful song cannot be translated from one language to the other without much loss of loveliness and grace." No better fit for the sad fact than Bede's famous bit— a bit no one for more than a thousand years has even been able to read in the way that a real speaker of Bede's dead language was able to. But what's a real speaker? Latin was no one's mother tongue. Why should I use quotes, if the English version of his despair at the insufficiency of translation is itself insufficient? "This is the gist" doesn't even give the run of words as Bede sang them. And yet these words are his gist. The same, if undeniably different. My rough guess at what Uncle Jimmy said stands in now for Uncle Jimmy. It must. There is no other.

These eight months spent trying to rig up an exact recreation have never once gotten closer than a rough gist, even of those moments that I lived firsthand. A verbatim transcript is, it goes without saying, a contradiction in terms. Yet I could not have sustained this almost-transcript this far without believing that it approximates the original, even with every original word out of order or altered. No threshold effect turns resemblance into facsimile. Yet approximation is as close as any transcriber gets. I know now how genetics relies on ingenious but indirect measurements, reflections and not direct knowledge. Genes are mapped relatively by the frequency of their breaking and recombining. No one has witnessed a transfer-RNA molecule reading the next triplet and attaching its amino acid to the growing polypeptide. Yet the inference is unimpeachable, because the shadows this process casts on reflective apparatus cannot be explained so well in any other way.

Even a literal recording — another contradiction — even highest-fidelity holographic videotape of what I and my friends said and did at that precise moment would still be a rough transcript requiring interpretation. That pause between his sentences: anger or exasperation? The pitch, volume, and tempo of his words: do those variables, integrated across context, indicate half his impatience, uncertainty, wonder at what is about to happen? Everything I might say about this place involves decoding. Things say in one language and mean in another. No getting across that gap without the ultimate transitive, to translate.

Out of unshakable habit, I look up the word. English occurrence dates from the thirteenth century. Latin origin: to relocate, carry across, port over. Among the dozen definitions (including to bring to a state of spiritual or emotional ecstasy), the now familiar biochemical one: to transform the information stored in messenger RNA into a polypeptide structure by means of the genetic code. An upstart translation of the parent meaning: to move the substance of a text from one language or dialect into another. To translate Shakespeare into Bantu, or the secretary of defense into English.