Richard Powers - Gold Bug Variations

"So close you are almost past it," Woyty says.

"With long chains, we can label the bases in the sequence we feed the decoder. We can label the amino acids picked up in the synthesis. But it doesn't give us position. The best we can do is assign weight ratios — We're no closer to actual assignments."

"It's a pickle," Daniel concedes. A missed beat reveals that Woytowich is not really following him. He's playing with the baby. The gap between them wraps Ressler in loneliness more severe than that brought on by banging on the closed codon library door. Daniel says, "I wish I could help you, Stuart." Struck by a happy inspiration, he suggests, "Let's ask Ivy."

Weeks pass, the project advancing without real headway. One day, he cannot even name the month anymore, he comes home to the barracks to find Jeanette, in lovely familiarity, waiting for him as if they were silver anniversary candidates. Their time apart cannot even masquerade as moral restraint anymore. Simple cautious terror. But here she is again, in his front room, smiling richly, once more free from the delays and wastes of time that constitute their love. He returns her kiss, goes to the record player, puts the sound track on. She follows him eagerly with her eyes. Like me. Need me. "Hungry?" he asks. "I think I have something that might have been Major Grey Chutney once."

"No thanks. I never eat when I'm in love."

"You know this from experience?"

"Do now." Jeanette makes a little space for him to sit. No sooner does he than she changes her mind. "Stuart? I've a great idea. Let's go outside."

"Outside?"

"You remember." She crooks a finger toward the window. "Trees. Sky. Living things. Perfectly safe, in small doses."

"Well__" Suspicious. "It isn't the strontium 90 level I'm worried about, you understand."

"What, then?"

"It's just that, you are — how can I put this delicately?"

"Married?"

"Exactly. Walking in public, together__"

"Could be that Edward G. Robinson scenario all over again." Spring has made her reckless. "Come on," she laughs. "It's tougher to hit a moving target." She will go walking, and won't hear no. Nor, after another minute, does he want to refuse.

They roll onto the lawn, turn up the block, put Stadium Terrace behind them. He is struck by the department store of smells, after the stale monoscent of the barracks. "And," he adds, thinking out loud, "there are a lot more places to sit."

She stretches herself luxuriously. Relaxing, slack on the return stroke, she slips her arm into his. Here, in residential Champaign, in front of a gauntlet of plate glass — colleagues, friends, faint acquaintances — she makes an open, unambiguous declaration. He knows what it means. She is ready now, ready to leave her husband, that blameless man, to upend her life, to break it and build it again in this arbitrary spot, to recommence, uncertain, with him, only him. Here, now, in spring. Ressler's arms are paralyzed. He cannot move them a millimeter in any direction, either to encourage her or to withdraw and spoil the happy idiocy that has come across her face. He goes numb from neck down.

The abnormal warming trend has brought on, ahead of schedule, a rush of returning life up and down the ladder. She makes first mention of the event. Her voice is low, imparting, even-keyed: Here we are, outside, together, nothing hidden. "Flowers," she says. "How early! But it's been so long." He studies her skin. Just below the yellow, little-girl's surface, two blue-green blood tubes in her temples pulse as deep as a spanking new bruise, as the Aegean. She catches him looking, curls up shyly. "What are your favorites?"

"Favorite whats?"

She shoves him. "Haven't you been listening? Favorite flowers."

He is every bit as adrift as when he didn't know the antecedent.

"Hmm. Coleus, I suppose."

"Coleus? You suppose? Its flowers are this little."

"Sorry. I guess I meant crocus."

"Oh. Crocus is all right. First. Virginal. Paschal. Fresh schoolgirl." She pauses, putting things together. She grabs his arms, stopping him. "Wait a minute. You're an amateur, aren't you? And you call yourself a biologist!"

Ressler kicks a stone. "I've never called myself that."

Jeanette gapes, hurt by his willful ignorance toward blooms, but half excited at the thought that here, at last, is something she can be the first and only one to give him. "Wait. Look. See over there? Do you know what those are?"

He follows the line of her perfect extended finger. "Y-yes," he says, so tentatively it hurts. "I believe those are droopy, wrinkled, yellow vegetable genitalia."

"Fool. Listen to me. Those are called Narcissus. Even you can see why."

"Am I responsible for etymology as well?"

She kisses him, tongue, for the whole incorporated city to see. "Yes. You are. Now. How about these?"

"Those? Piece of cake. Those are, don't tell me— Nope. I'm afraid it's strike two."

She supplies a name, which he does not even hear, so taken up is he with the soft, effusive enthusiasm in her face. Bluebells, cockle shells: could be anything. He will ask her to repeat it, explain the name here in the privacy of the world. She takes his hand with the grip of a school crossing guard. From one plant to another: who would have thought the block contained so many? Revelation creeps over him. These bee-lures, bright landing pads, reproductive export docks for photofactories temporary beyond telling, self-promoting color that next month will annihilate: each is called something, distinct, keen, revealing. Every item has an exotic label that, while not the thing, is the only way of latching onto it in the course of a walk through the neighborhood.

A good deal of his undergraduate days were spent committing to memory vast tracts of binomial nomenclature. But the genus and species identifiers inhabiting his past, while occasionally colorful, were functional: ratios arranging in systematic manner what would otherwise be arbitrary varietal chaos. He knows of the raging taxonomic debate between splitters and lumpers, between those who see in each individual — never corresponding to the norm, always a little bit Other —the call for a new species, and those who want to restrict the chart to broad, manageable branches. His own discipline, the tabulation of mutations at the molecular level, might solve the matter, showing gaps between species to be both discrete and continuous. But whatever the local bias, inflected, logic-bound Latin taxonomy strives to squash ambiguity, to distinguish between surfaces.

Not so Gladiola, Jack-in-the-Pulpit, Mother of Thousands, Evanescence, False Solomon's Seal, Wake-Robin. The words Jeanette whispers to him, makes him repeat, ranging speculatively across the year, are not labels at all. They are intent on a different program altogether. Bidens frondosa, he learns, might go by Beggar-ticks, Ray-less Marigold, Sticktight, Devil's Bootjack, Pitchfork Weed. It might even be named the Nameless Wonder, for that matter, and still not strain the grain. According to this woman, a thousand different bi-zarrely descriptive modifiers specify the catch-all violet. The naming urge embodies the feminine miracle pouring it in his ears.

All desire comes down to naming. Yet no nomenclature will ever erase the fact: standing for is also obscuring. The real use of names must be something more serious than handle-efficiency. It must also be myth-making, resourceful approximation, soothing the scar between figure and ground, between the dead chemicals ATCG and the repeating uniqueness they have become. Dr. Koss, his Jeannie, moves him on, graduates him to bulbs that have not appeared yet, to stamens that never show themselves in this region. The game grows more incredible as it goes on. She says how the garden-variety pansy, one of the few lay identifiers he has taken for granted all these years, takes its name from pensée, French for thought. From thought to word to name to plant: the chain equating them, more fragile than the petals themselves, defies examination except through tools as fragile, of the same make. She feeds a tutoring hand inside his jacket, releasing a dam burst of labels. What, he wonders, could he call this blossomer?