Richard Powers - Gold Bug Variations

I remember little of the clam shack Franker took me to. I do remember what he wore — creased, formal, button-down bemuse-ment. I remember the soulful look when he implored me to order the linguini with calamari, and the scolding brows leveled at me when I left it untouched. I remember seeing the chef hack off a living lobster's tail while the creature's front end bourréed blithely across the counter to plunk back into the tank, mix it up one last time with the ladies. "You should see him do beef," Todd said.

And I remember him quickly relieving me of my discoveries. My disclosure — the young man in the journals, teetering on the verge of significant contribution — confirming his pain. He demanded to hear, in as much detail as I could muster, about Ressler's early work and the predictions about him. Todd seemed to have suspected the worst, all that had been at stake. When I finished relating what little story I'd uncovered, I sat silent, gingerly prodding my unfinished plate like a bomb squad nudging a black satchel. When he finally spoke, it was only to repeat, incredulously, "Twenty-five! My age to the day, as it turns out." I mumbled a birthday toast, unsure how literal he was being.

I naively proceeded to hand over my entire list of primary sources without securing any return hostages. My dinner date then fell rudely indifferent. His interest in me had been entirely functional after all; despite the expertly mimicked courtship dance, he wanted no more than a research assistant. I felt abused, doubly stupid for not recognizing the trick. But watching him toy with a Parmesan shaker, I was astonished to see Frank Todd clearly grieving for a person who, given what he'd said about their working relationship, was as great a stranger to him as to me.

Sitting across from me at the hired table, morose with concern: at last, someone who I might matter to. I felt a twinge of guilt toward Keith, just then listening to my taped won't-be-home-till-late. In that one instant, Todd seemed about to fold up into himself, to drop out of sight for good. I wouldn't have prevented him. In that minute gone bad, we were an accent away from splitting the tab and quitting. We were both geared to be rid of one another when the only real coincidence of those days intervened. A fluke, outside chance yanked Frank Todd out of a reverie he would never have come back from on his own. The sawdust dive's piped music, until then an eclectic collection of Balkan reed choir, Tyrolean zither, and Memphis twang, turned abruptly and became solo piano. The boy bolted upright, listening, alarmed. He shook his head, amazement moving his lips: the inappropriate smile at hurt too diffuse to absorb. "Name that tune," he said bitterly, slamming the table. "Name it, and I'll introduce you to the bastard."

I recognized the music, having learned the first, trivial thirty-two measures as a young girl before giving up the piano in favor of pragmatics. I had even made first forays into the variations Bach had extracted from the thirty-two-note ditty. The distillation of the first few notes held all the chest-tightening surprise of unlikely visits. "I happen to know the piece," I said giddily. "But I'm off duty just now."

"Name it," he shouted. Conversation at other tables stopped. I mumbled the name of the work. By the effect on Todd, I'd just guessed the one-in-five-billion secret word. We listened. A few minutes in silence with a stranger lasts a lifetime. Only after two variations did he tell me that this piece—"this particular recording, in fact" — was the only music our mutual friend had listened to for the last year. Todd, reanimated, described how his lone shift partner sat every night in a sterile chamber of humming processing units, high-speed printers, floor-mount disk drives, and glowing consoles, doing routine work that any modestly endowed twenty-one-year-old could do, changing tapes, running the unvarying deck of punched cards through the hopper, while all the while this set of baroque irrelevances spun around on a cheap grinder perched on top of the digital check-sorter.

"All the way through, both sides, three times a night for the last few months." Todd, the insult of care cracking his voice, fell silent as the restaurant sound track reached the third permutation, a well-behaved melody beginning all over again against itself. Two pitch-for-pitch identical but staggered parts crossed each other, independently harmonized and harmonizing, no longer one identical source of notes but two. The study in imitative forward motion, the staggered, duplicate pair of voices stood motionless at the axis of the turning world. The unison canon, contradiction in terms, left Todd morose, ready to replay the older man's disappearance of years before. He came out of his trance long enough to say, "You won't have heard the thing properly until you see my friend in the flesh." The invitation I so badly wanted.

Later, after a stop at the futuristic supermarket that, like me, had recently gate-crashed this neighborhood, I found Keith alone in our apartment, still engrossed in a lucrative day's work, sprawled on the floor surrounded by tape splices, single-stepping through a video of his latest collaborative effort: the fifteen-second story of how a young woman and her breath spray find happiness together. "Dinner OK?" he asked, intent on the frame-by-frame.

"Yeah, dinner OK. Four-B's car alarm is howling again. Buzzing like a shorted bumblebee. Nobody paying any attention. Not even the beat police flinch anymore."

"Speaking of High Security, how's my Princess Grace?"

I'd lived with him long enough to follow every free association.

I was glad for glibness just then and retaliated in like currency. "American film actress. Born in Philadelphia, 1927? No,'28. Killed in Monaco car crash in September 1982. Almost a year already. God." I went to the window and held back the curtain. In the street below, late-evening pedestrians worked out the details of Brownian motion.

Tuckwell gave his representative laugh: a high-pitched, uncontrolled cackle. "Very good. Been earning your keep, I see. The Human Reference Shelf wouldn't care to say what day Mrs. Grimaldi died, would she?" I sat down next to him, looking for warmth that wouldn't aggravate the heat. He gave me a kiss on my exposed collarbone. I made no rejoinder, and he returned to work, adding, "See To Catch a Thief tot a demonstration of life imitating art."

The television was on, sound just loud enough to give voice to incestuous bad girls from Texas and tough but basically good inner-city cops. We witnessed the last five minutes of Five Minutes to Meltdown, where political extremists, natural disaster, and old-fashioned carelessness conspired to threaten the nuclear reactor on the community outskirts nearest you. Four young, lusty civil engineers narrowly thwarted the disaster. After, we caught the late news, fulfilling our social duty. Keith got his chance to make his favorite joke: "Twenty million face famine in Ethiopia. First, this." He made running commentary on all the spots, from headlines down to the perverse, trailing human interest. As usual, during commercials he cut the sound and ad-libbed. "Terrorism: the mini-series. Thursday, right here on—" Had he thrived in another decade, his manic energy might have made him an activist.

When one network in its allotted half hour said all there was to say about Tuesday, July 5, 1983, we switched to another. The coverage was identical, a half hour later. Keith carried on his inspired annotations, even after I stopped listening and disappeared into the bedroom. There I worked on loose ends, preparing for work the next day. I glanced at the librarian's trade journal, caught up on old correspondence, and, while I had the typewriter fired up, finished tomorrow's Today in History and the unanswered Question Board questions. I rolled a clean index card under the platen and typed "A: ". I remember pausing long enough to feel proud that what I was about to answer would have taken the median librarian, relying on Brewer's, Bartlett's, or the OED, considerable effort. Experience, private knowledge, could still stand one in better stead than mastery of the disjointed stockpile. I typed: