Richard Powers - Gold Bug Variations

How strange it all feels, how immediate. He has seen nothing at all except his adopted town since he hit it. And of that swaddling college village, nothing except the barracks, lab, stacks, and sycamore-shackled paths connecting this narrow net. How much finer the place he lives in, broader, more surprising than he thought. He stumbles upon it by accident for the first time. The farmers, worrying their lands' next attention, do not know their own acreage the way he knows it at this minute.

The fields call him palpably back to the moment of his arrival, the unsuspecting child he'd been. An urge comes over him to tell Jeannie of that forgotten bus ride into town, the way he has come, across the cold year, against all expectation. "When I first arrived— early summer! — Urbana seemed the perfect place for getting lost in. I sat on this endless bus, in the middle of the traveling poor, next to a man with a thyroid defect. He warned me against reading. Said he had an uncle who consumed all Zane Grey and never amounted to much."

His uncharacteristic monologue cracks her up. While Jeannie giggles, he adds, "We had been held up along the way by a flood of tortoises crossing the road. Several shells wide, with no end in sight. I could still hear them crunching under the bus wheels when we pulled into town. I saw this place and — the oddest thing. I was home, although I'd never even imagined its contour. I thought: A person could work here. Anonymous. Politely alone with nothing but investigation to get through this open cipher, all the right angles." He fondles the lithe vertebra protruding from her neck. "I had no idea you'd be here. I thought it — would be all code-breaking. 1 never predicted, until this morning, that it would be this." This! What, exactly? Name it. "That I would fall in love."

Jeanette arches against his hand, almost mews. She opens to him, speaks of how, at thirty, she wakes up some mornings not knowing where she is. "Sometimes I'm lost, without clue to recovery. This isn't where I live. This isn't what I do for a living. Illinois is lunar landscape to me. Even science sometimes seems some alien routine I've learned to go through without giving myself away. I think, 'What am I doing here?' And then I think on you, and it's like coming across a favorite child's book in an antique store with my name scrawled on the flyleaf. Like being dropped into the most tangled foreign bazaar and suddenly hearing English an inch away from my ear."

Her confession scares him: does he really soften the bare rock for her, give it a breathable atmosphere? "Were you happy as a child?"

"Growing up? Oh, happy enough, from what I remember. My folks were trauma-free, more than normally immersed in their generation's long-term goal of boredom. I loved school, always did well. Forever busy improving myself. Always had some project going. Continuous science fair."

"The Home Nature Museum."

They gaze at one another in recognition. "Where were you when I was sixteen?"

"Oh." The suggestion is pain. "Wouldn't that have been a scenario?" It mauls him to think what the years might have been like, what chances they might have lived.

"So much wasted time. I might have been watching you learn things, learning them with you. But look! We're here. We've found each other now. That's the main thing. Even if I__" Her voice drops, inaudible. "If I've married prematurely." She stares straight ahead, oversteering. Ressler feels her neck tense and removes his hand. Suddenly she shouts so violently from the lungs it makes him jump. "Stupid. Fool! Damn it to hell." She clutches him with a free claw, turns her face on him, eyes red, puffy, pleading. "Why?"

He gives no answer. She winces and looks away. She slams the steering wheel with the flat of her palms, and it flips off the column into her hands. Weaving, the rented car reams a big chuckhole in the county road, a washout from the spring melt. She reacts spontaneously, controls the vehicle by lifting her foot off the gas and braking judiciously. At the same time, fumbling with the worthless metal ring, she hands the wheel to Ressler, fake blase. "Here. You drive for a while."

Ressler laughs hysterically at her poise. Jeanette manages to beach the car without crashing. There's little to die against on infinite road shoulder. He finds the broken joining pin, jimmies a substitute, wedges the wheel back onto its column while Jeanette proclaims, "Damn rentals. Can't take them anywhere." Years later, when everything else, even bitterness, has dissolved into sepia, he will remember her, love her for that absurd reversion to wit in the face of near-disaster.

When they pull back onto the road, still alive, they grow as unqualified as the terrain moving through them. Their invention is subdued, the remorse lifts, the hypotheticals of where else they might have gone vanish. Jeanette accelerates, confidence creeping back, tearing along for tearing's sake, in overarching breakneck speed. The call in this confusing, rented, temporary tune is at last clear: all the two of them need do is hit the right notes at the right time, and the thing plays itself.

They know their intended destination the instant they wander into it. A pristine almost-village, a time hole lost in the previous century. They park the car, trying to make the vehicle inconspicuous. Difficult, as theirs is the only internal combustion engine in sight. The prevailing mode is horse-and-buggy: black, closed-box coaches, wood and leather, spoked wheels, draft animals in the stays. The extraordinary drivers are decked out in blue, black, and gray homespun. The women wear simple headcoverings, and the men sport foot-long beards.

Ressler can only look and look. How far have they come? No more than a few miles from that university town with its top engineering school, its transistor Nobel laureate, its state-of-the-art digital computer composers. They have fallen through time, Judge Craters, a footnote in those stranger-than-science compendia. It takes Jeannie's soft erudition in his ear to instruct him. "Are they House or Church Amish?" They have stumbled upon a self-isolated community of dissenters who have chosen to break off from the rest of the race, to hold still in the workable niche while life floods around them into new pools, speciates.

They walk by the roadside, in silence except for the creak of wheel rims and the clop of hooves. Jeannie takes to the community, ratifies its simplicity. She curtsies to a passing buggy and the driver acknowledges with a reserved nod. That one gesture gives Ressler the acute pleasure of locating the key to the chance variations of existence.

"I have lived in east-central Illinois for years," she whispers, "and I never knew such a place existed." Nor did Ressler; he barely believed in such groups when he read of them years ago in American History. "You brought me here," Jeannie insists, giving his hand a covert squeeze.

"No," he objects. "You." They pass a knot of families that gather in front of the general store. He hears accents of German. Although no one pays them any attention, he feels grossly conspicuous. He and Jeannie — glasses, wristwatches, awkwardly constraining clothes — are the grotesque, implausible by-product of a defective turn, representatives of all these people have saved themselves from.

In an unforgettably aromatic, unfinished wooden store, they buy a quilt, made by many hands over several weeks. They buy it for the haunting pattern neither of them can quite make out. It repeats yet is never twice the same, develops, yet stands in place, constantly spinning, unspun. Each time they look at it, it changes. They return reluctantly to the rental, the dead giveaway of their nonbelonging, their mark of Cain, their freedom. The anachronism vanishes in the rearview mirror, a lost place they will never find their way back to, even with detailed ordinance survey. They drive until they find a spot superlatively nowhere, even by prairie standards. There they pull the car off the road, spread the quilt, undress each other, and explore the solid sorrows of one another's bodies as if for the last time.