Richard Powers - Gold Bug Variations

These poems, more heartfelt than skilled, were the only means I had of telling him things without cloaking the sentiment in requisite irony. In reverting to a form that most lovers swear off of at eighteen, I compounded the dangerous instability, pushing myself where something would soon have to happen.

The first days of intimacy scare:

exchange of histories too keen to mean

anything yet but new threat of loss.

Why thaw now? Why lay bare

all that has held in a fine hide and stake

it here against chance green?

Because we haven't any choice.

Just as two tunes catch in a chord

care moves forward, fact-gathering.

Our measured steps might improvise

a way for winter to wind down,

ice flushing crusted puddles, freeing spring.

I would copy these pathetic fallacies onto a notepad he'd made up for himself: From the Couch of Franklin Todd. Then I would shuffle them into the stack by the telephone, among the ghostly phone transcripts and the portraits made from memory of the people on the other end of the line. He never mentioned discovering them. But the older ones were no longer there when I left an addendum. He pressed them into notebooks somewhere or threw them away.

Life above the antique shop, nights when he did not show, became unbearably acute. The furnishings I had carefully selected, the old crochets, the scents that had been so evocative once, grew too much, the way slight touch is acid to a skin oversensitive with fever. Coming home from work, in days that were struggling to lengthen and stay bright until a reasonable hour, 1 would look up at the intimate pool of light coming from the room upstairs. I knew that the Edwardian glow was turned on by a digital timer, just as the choker collar — still capable of eliciting response from him— wrapped the neck of a woman who, that afternoon, had spent half an hour procuring the feasibility of test bans.

Unable to sleep, I would call him at the office at obscene hours of the night. Each week was a new probe to see how depraved I might, under the prose binding, really be. "Do you mind if I touch myself while you talk? Say something that might get me bothered." Franklin loved these experiments, thrilled to play along over the phone. Sometimes he urged me to wait until he got home. Others, he was as happy to tease me, take care of me remotely via analog transmission.

1 had no clue where we were heading or how long 1 would be able to last. I only knew that every question I was asked all day long seemed a nuisance variation on the one I wanted answered. When I was away from him, I was frantic with possibility. When I was with him, it wasn't enough. I had stumbled into a cadence, begun to believe that love had to lead somewhere. He was waiting for the same revelation, each of us afraid to move lest we bring about the expected QED.

One early-spring Saturday I found myself, around two in the afternoon, half a dozen blocks from his apartment. He had not shown the night before; Fridays, with their end-of-week processing, frequently became all-nighters. I had no idea where in all the East Coast he had ended up, but his place was as good a guess as any. I decided to surprise him with afternoon breakfast. I ducked into a deli and bought bagels, cream cheese, coffee, oranges, and a horrible sucrose-dripping thing that Todd, with his sweet tooth, would doubtless devour instantly. I walked up to his loft and let myself in.

He was still asleep. Evidence of disorganized entry pointed to a rough night with the machines. I stood in the foyer, wondering whether to wake him. I took a few steps toward the bedroom, then came back to the hall. However good-naturedly he awoke and greeted me, he could only be irritated, and I'd only feel more desperate to correct the impression of desperation. But coming back into the foyer, I thought: So what if I tip my hand? What doesn't he know about me already? Affection, even overdone, must be preferable to more empty space. Back to the bedroom: but before I could make it all the way there, I felt my eagerness driving him away.

I have never felt such indecision, certainly not about anything so ludicrous as whether to get a male up for breakfast. My inability to take more than a step in either direction suddenly seemed emblematic. From some reserve of self-possession, I saw how pitiful I'd become. I laughed out loud, but softly, so as not to wake him. I went to the cluttered table, composed some verses, crumpled them up, and wrote instead, "Dearest Buddy. I came by. Left you a bagel for breakfast."

But just as I was quietly letting myself out, I was again overcome by desire. This might, after all, be the last time. Effusion was the least of the two vices, everything considered. I let myself back in, scolding and cheering myself at once. I went straight into the bedroom, relieved, leaned deeply over him, and kissed him on the shaggy head. He made a soft, pleased gurgle, which was answered by another in a higher register. On the pillow next to him, there moved a second, soft, blond angelic head. An incoherent female voice, lovely in unconsciousness, said, "I'm so hungry I could eat a house."

All I could think about was getting out before more groggy vocalizings brought them conscious. I made it back to the front room, went to the table, and with amazing presence of mind, crossed out "a bagel" and wrote, "Oops; two bagels," supplementing the first from the now useless bag. Out on the street, wandering at random through the press of the Village, I understood; fidelity was for stereos. Working his way through love's alphabet, the man was stuck on the A's. Annie was who he wanted.

Canon at the Octave

He is within easy reach, unreachable. His last postmark, Dr. Ressler's forsaken Midwest grain oasis. Even there — only a thousand miles from me, on the same continent, identical landmass. Here. Now that I can't reach him, I want to. The letter I so long dragged my heels on, endlessly red-penned in my head, left lying for weeks on the bureau, and at last ambivalently sent off just before realizing my mistake has come back bearing an Indo-European grab bag of apologies saying that the addressee has vanished without forwarding address. The text of my sham indifference now sits urgent, priority mail, registered, express in my hands.

Not even the same letter, now that it's been returned. Even if I were to place it unrevised in another envelope, send it out again to his unresearchable new post node, it would not mean what it meant the afternoon I finally managed to put it together. The thing I thought to make him see then is gone. Aggregate chance has changed it — a memorandum lost in transit.

If I had his address (counterfactual) and if I could hit on the right words (hypothetical), I might send him some item from our assembled quote box—"I need to know someone"; "What is the origin of 'to make the catch'?"; "What's this I hear about you two cohabiting?"; "Oops, two bagels" — that might convey, if not the particulars of what I need to say now, at least the sense that if he were in the neighborhood (subjunctive), I'd like to see him. But even our favorite phrases, reprised over our allotted months on different occasions, repeated once more would now go enharmonic, altered, racing home even as they stay in place, changing because all other lines range freely around them.

1 cannot say the same thing twice. The first time through, invention; the second, allusion; a third promotes it to motif, then theme, keepsake, baggage, small consolation. Brought back after years, it evokes a lost twinge never harbored in the original. Perhaps, with everything between us changed beyond recognition, one more reprise might make it invention again.

When the chance was there, who needed to say anything? Now that I can't write, predicates take shape; polyps spread across my insides, bubbling into my throat, seeking the surgery of speech. What do I want so badly to tell him, now that the channel is down? I wanted to say it — the same thing, only different — that evening at that first seafood dive. (The front end of the lobster scuttled into the tank. Todd said, "You should see how they do beef." I kept mum.) 1 wanted to tell him, that summer night on the swings. (I came all over him, shuddering, but disguised the event, admitting nothing.) I wanted to say something achingly similar, that freezing night under the New England stars. (Todd and Dr. Ressler talked away, trying to save life from life. I worked a jigsaw.) I wanted to say the urgent thing, that Saturday afternoon when I leaned over him as he slept. (Annie said, still asleep, "I'm so hungry I could eat a house." I slipped verbless out the door, leaving no hostages.) I always thought it was Todd, ironic, dry, who constantly pleaded that quintessential department-store excuse "No thanks; just browsing." But it wasn't. Always, from the start, it was me.