Richard Powers - Gold Bug Variations

Jimmy grumbled his usual threat to enter chicken farming the next time the opportunity arose. The moment the man left, Todd began protesting. "I can't believe it. I don't know what I did. I must have tripped the preemie flag on the way out of the record." Frank was pitiful, scrambling to hide his ineptitude from his hero.

"Let me stake a hypothesis. You went in and requested a flat-fee bonus. Am I right?" Todd nodded. "You added your figure to his gross and put the total into the salary field."

Todd slapped his palm on his scalp. "Jesus. The program processed the whole check as a bonus."

"From which, of course, no premium is deducted."

"Christ. Who wrote that thing? What a kludge. Shouldn't it have known that the man can't get a bonus without a salary check in the same period?"

"Don't blame the code. I don't think the authors anticipated second-shift operators doing surgical intervention on their data structures."

Todd threw his hands up. "Well. Now we all know better."

Ressler took Jimmy's papers and sat at the console. Todd sat next to him at the keyboard. The two of them retraced Todd's escapade, which seemed more capricious with each keystroke. I tried to follow as they undertook flood control. I'd never noticed before how much Frank talked with his hands. He rubbed an eraser all over the screen, gesticulated at the keys, drew logic flows into his sketchpad, and sculpted in the air the solution he thought they might yet go after. Ressler sat motionless, a few words doing the work.

But there was little even he could do. The letter had been sent, the coverage canceled. They could not now uncancel the cancellation. Revealing all — the corrective measure of first choice — was out of the question. Todd would lose his job, perhaps be slapped with criminal charges, and Dr. Ressler would fall under suspicion. They could undo the event electronically, but the doctoring involved too many systems: their own, the firm that handled the check, the insurance company where the policy resided. The fix might muck up something else. "Too many humans tipped off already," Todd added. "Can't jerry-rig humans, unfortunately."

"Not yet," Ressler granted.

A few weeks after moving into my place, Franklin began to seep out again. He moved his treasured stereo into my room, a breakthrough in intimacy, and he even brought the violets, blues, and greens from his massive spectrum-arranged record collection. Every few days saw a trickle of disks, gradually edging into the higher wavelengths. He himself was there as often as ever. We continued to read together, to listen, to play, to share meals.

Sex remained dangerous, a revelation about how far I might go, how far I needed to keep going once brought out. I learned no end of things about myself. Franklin could be aggressive, slow, mercurial. He could stalk like a thief looting a house. He could repeat, wistfully after we spent ourselves, the Puritans' standard caption for a needlework primer's A: "In Adam's Fall, We Sinned All." He could lie still under the covers and tell, after a too-savage unloading, "Heard the one about the hellfire preacher berating his congregation? 'Is an hour of pleasure worth an eternity of regret?' Voice from the back of the church calls out, 'How do you make it last an hour?'"

We began to get out again, as the city again warmed. We took a trip up to the Bronx Zoo. Franklin was as excited as a child, and babbled like one. "Look! Kangaroos! Do you know that the mother can slow or speed up gestation, depending on food supply?"

"The name means 'I don't know,'" I contributed. Standard trivia fare. "Aboriginal answer to white hunter's question. 'What do you call those fur-bags with the giant hind legs?' 'Haven't the faintest idea what you're talking about, hombre.'"

"She licks down this passage in her fur, the way to the pouch, see? So that her newborn, a wriggly blob like a shelless snail, can slog out the journey__"

"Have you actually seen this happen?" I asked suspiciously.

"Do endless wildlife shows on public television count?" Oh, he was up that day; the cages were not cages, but regional sanctuary from unstoppable habitat destruction. I couldn't help but think of the dismal visit to Central Park Tuckwell and I had made eight months before. Separate lifetimes.

He was always ready for the impulse activity, for any jaunt at any hour, so long as it did not conflict with MOL, about which he grew unusually conscientious. Obscure museums, galleries, secret spaghetti dives, performing-arts warehouses, a walking tour of the colonial remnants of the city. For the first time since leaving Indiana, 1 went up against the variety of New York. Yet something in the way he moved feet first through the place tipped me off that he was just visiting.

I never expected I would have him all there, every time he stayed over or we went out together. But his eternal pacing__

He had a way of obsessively measuring out a room three times a minute, even when sitting still. I thought the restlessness came from his being twenty-six, at the height of his powers, with nothing of consequence to do. I put myself entirely at his disposal as research assistant for the dissertation. "I can find anything," 1 swore to him. "Facts are my life." I couldn't have made a worse suggestion, even in jest. It made him pace in even tighter circles. He never dropped the boyish charm, the Midwestern politeness. He made it a point to be home more predictably, and even called on a couple occasions to tell me he would miss a standing meal. But his silence grew denser even as he pruned it.

When he was gone, I thought he might be dead, distracted, religiously converted, injured, amnesiac, overcome by indifference. Each scenario was a toxin, whose cold advanced up my arms and legs. Yet I would not put on the saving tourniquet, take the necessary measures. Leaden suspicion was scarily arousing. I discovered it only slowly. My fear for him when he was away became one of those secret fetishes discovered late in life — a region on my body that when struck by that taboo person reduced me to helpless perversity I never suspected lay in me.

These were awful weeks. Every reckless afternoon proved that an hour, I would draw away with a sick thrill, find myself saying, in the extremity of affected calm, "We aren't really one another's type, you know. You need someone neurotic, taller, silkier, not so verbose." On alternate days, I wanted to break laws for him, to take to terrorism rather than give up what little life with him I'd managed to win. I dwelt on the worst possible explanations for what was happening, the way someone who discovers a growth on a bone cannot help, several times an hour, feeling it to see if it has grown.

Breathless, off-balance, by turns willfully wanting to confirm the incurable worst, I would use my key privileges to his place. An attempt to track him down, to find out how he lived when away from me. When I let myself into his apartment, I always masked my humiliation in high spirits. It never seemed to bother him. He could jump out of bed as if he'd been waiting impatiently for me for hours. "So what do you know about fixing refrigerators?" Or: "You must be the French Maid. Shall we wrinkle the sheets once before ironing them?" No matter what hour I surprised him there, we did not stay around his place for long. Twenty minutes of talk or milting or cleaning up and we'd be gone, to an exhibition, for a meal, back to my place, where he would once again stay a couple of days.

I never appeared empty-handed, so that if he was not there, as he frequently wasn't, I would have some excuse for dropping in while he was out, some reward to leave him for confirming my compulsive need to prove him not at home. I'd bring by a novel, claiming I'd just finished it and it was so beautiful I had to make the impulsive crosstown delivery. I would sit at his kitchen table, too cluttered with tapes, art repros, delinquent library books, lid-less half-full peanut butter jars, and dire predictions torn from the Science Times to be used for actual meals, and compose scraps of occasional verse by way of saying that I'd been by and we had failed to connect.