Richard Powers - Gold Bug Variations

In embarrassed hall-alcove clumps stood the healthy — by fault of intimacy, the go-betweens to this hideous lab. We avoided one another's eyes. An accidental exchange of glances and I found myself staring into the face of a scared woman who flashed me a conspirator's look: Don't tell anyone you saw me here. By the time I located the 1C waiting room, I knew the dirty secret. Individuals were woundable, sickly, inconvenient, contemptible, tragic in every way except numerically, smudges on endless fan-fold paper. Despite everything culture has ever insisted, hospitals were not shows. Even here, at the one moment my entire life should have trained me for — Intensive Care, 5W, North Tower, Green Wing — obscenely lacerated, lost: wanting, needing, but not knowing how to hear the makeshift, temporary metronome measuring out so obvious a rhythm, the meter of the faltering human platelet pump.

A months-old trade magazine in the waiting room declared that more Americans enter hospital every month than were alive at the Revolution. I stared awhile at the magazine's other unabsorbable facts, then matched wits against quiz TV. I sat on a wraparound petroleum-based sofa, kitty-corner to a volatile, overweight woman who had the lounge phone's receiver surgically incorporated into her double chin. She was not using the phone, just holding it, keeping the line open for a message she had long given up hope of receiving. My companion watched as I answered the one about the oldest city in the continental United States being St. Augustine and correctly gave "nano" as the prefix meaning one billionth in the metric system. The only question worth addressing at that instant was in the IC, stroked out. But I kept on answering these others, eye-calm.

The woman looked at me reverently. "You could make a lot of dough, honey." Having paid me the highest compliment, she could now let me into the intimacy of her being here. She said, "My little girl," tapping the receiver as if it were the child. She flashed me one of those in-your-own-best-interests grins. "She's down the hall, about to be cut open in several places." I apologized, not knowing what else to say. She waved me off. "I'm trying to find out who the anesthetician is. That's very important. A girlfriend's husband once died under the hands of a bad anesthetician."

Courtesy dictated my saying something about waiting to see what was left of a friend following his massive stroke. I didn't. After a pause during which she twice said "Hello" into the unresponsive phone, my partner turned again to me with the two-syllable, singsong question "Children?" She nodded reassuringly— Easy one. If you knew St. Augustine, this one's a gift. For some reason, I couldn't figure the question out. Did children exist? Which was the oldest? What was one billionth of one called? Up from the unfigurable field of memory came that old jump-rope rhyme: Franklin and Janny sitting in a tree, kay eye ess ess eye en gee. First comes love, then comes marriage, then comes Janny with a baby carriage.

I smiled and said I wasn't married. She made a just-as-well face, and all at once I felt Franker lean over my shoulder and whisper, "Holbein." Habit; with specialist's myopia, he would look at a tree deranged by autumn and, taking in the clash of colors, would come up for air saying, "Bonnard!" Nothing was what it was, but always a comparison to paint. When he came closest to genuinely loving me, he would freeze, beg me not to move, and exclaim in a half-rapture, " 'Girl with the Pearl Earring.'" He was a lost cause, wrecked on aesthetics. Seeing Rembrandt's ox-sides in the meat case at the supermarket marked him as unfit for life.

Aesthetics could not survive the waiting room. A bit of aesthetics on his part had led, however indirectly, step by step, to a burst vessel in Jimmy's brain. I looked at the woman again; yes, infinitely more Holbein miniature than contemporary Long Island mother. I was inspecting her in the Met, with Franklin at my side. It was suddenly enough to have had a look at her real face — pinched eyes, mole, spinsterly, approving mouth — to set her in a time she matched. Empathy came on me from nowhere, and I wished her daughter every chance that medical technology, God, and a good anesthetician could give her.

Years later, when they at last let me into his room, Jimmy was sitting in bed as if nothing had happened. I wondered, What on earth is he doing here? There's nothing wrong with him. In that first moment, he seemed the same person he had ever been. Unmistakable, vintage Uncle Jimmy. Then I saw just how wrong things were. His face had collapsed on one side, as if from a bad foundation. His mouth sagged down to the left, an eighty-year-old's mouth, unable to produce anything more than a few raw vowels. His lips drooped a deep, secretive smile all over his face, the smile of a man who had seen something remarkable. His eyes bore a matte glaze, not his. Jimmy's eyes were gone.

I thought there would be others there — friends, day shift, his mother. But I was alone, except for Jimmy and the patient behind the draw curtain. My calm collapsed beneath me like a pier gently washed out to sea. My eyes grew acid. I dug my fingernails into my upper arms, trying to reverse the process that had overtaken him, reverse everything.

He must have recognized me in some sense, because as I stepped to the bed, he rippled his ruined facial muscles. He looked roughly in my direction and erupted in a horrible, unformed call like the open modulation of an underwater whale. "Hello, Jimmy." My tone was no closer to natural. He made the awful blast again. This time it seemed to possess syllables. The sound was edgeless, blurred, terrible. I had to force myself not to run from the room and deny I ever knew him. I put my hand on his gown, and my touch made the word come out of him again. "Jimmy," I said, as brightly as I could without bursting. "Try it a little softer." I put my head close to him, my ear almost onto his mouth. The less air he had to push, the less muscle he needed to control, the more chance I had of making him out.

The sound came out again, softer but no more distinct. Jimmy fought to unmangle it. His whole body shook, a weight lifter at the instant when he must either jerk the bar overhead or be crushed under the plates. I thought I heard him, in shadow, pronounce "cohabit." The word he had teased me with for weeks when Todd and 1 moved in together. 1 must have projected it. I began to think he wasn't saying anything at all, just releasing animal bursts from a cortex now helpless to hold them in.

"Once more, Jimmy. Don't try so hard." But the noise was worse, vanishing. I looked at him, shook my head. "I'm sorry. 1 can't. I can't make it out." My own words were themselves smudged out, my voice lost in a choke, my head rocking. 1 could only stop myself by putting my face down onto him, where 1 kept it. 1 felt something brush my hair. His arm, its muscles contracted into a permanent claw, was trying to move, to put its weight over me in comfort. I lifted it — he could not do it alone — and put it around my neck, where it had been trying to go.

I hunted down a resident to ask about Jimmy's chances. Like most, I had so mastered necessity that when chance was at last the subject, I was lost. The physician was too professional to say what might be hoped. Hope was a function of structural impairment. But the implication was clear: Jimmy was setting out for an unknown place. Sitting in bed in the double-occupancy room, close up, flush against a place closed to every petition except disaster.

I went straight to the — warehouse. Todd wanted word immediately, over the intercom, but 1 waited until 1 went up. At the top of the freight elevator, I froze, afraid to go in. Jimmy was there. The office floor was still warm where he had fallen, a delicate, blue, broken vessel stroked out across the tiles. He was there, working late, ready to scold me for unofficial use of combinations, to tease me boyishly about cohabiting with men. It was all as I had left it, every night I ever spent in this forsaken place. But the old arrangement, the Second Shift Club, had changed color, reddened upon contact with air.