Richard Powers - Gold Bug Variations

Ressler makes the beer offer again, but Lovering smiles and shags him off, saying he isn't ready to leave just yet. Ressler wishes him good night, and Joe replies in like manner. The next morning, Ressler notices an unnatural silence emanating from the cage room. He looks inside. The place is stripped clean. The animals are gone, cages and all. The answer stands just down the hall, where Woyty, Botkin, Koss, and Ulrich gather in a stunned lump. He walks into the circle, which opens to him with a look shared and obscene.

"You've heard?" Ulrich asks.

"Not a thing."

"Apparently, Joe Lovering drove out of here last night in a rented truck loaded with the department lab animals." The others, hearing the tale for the second time, seem unable to get past the beginning. "He drove the whole shipment back to his apartment__"

"Apartment? Didn't he say…?"

Ulrich insists. "Apartment; there is, apparently, no new purchased home. He stacked all the stolen cages neatly around his garage. Albino rats together, all the cavia…" Ressler nods hurriedly. Get on with it.

"His landlady heard the engine running about eleven o'clock last night. The garage door was locked and wadded with rags. She had to let herself in through his apartment." Ulrich takes a breath, the same deep breath Joe's landlady took before racing to the truck to shut off the engine. "It seems Joe's decision to join the specimens was an impulse. There was a badly burned TV dinner in the oven, and a burned-out cigarette on the edge of a counter." Ulrich clears his throat, debating whether to suppress the next detail. "A Sears catalog open to the lingerie pages in the bathroom. A pocket-size spiral notebook with grocery list. At the bottom, in the same handwriting slant, an afterthought, he'd written, 'Send the checks to the Anti-Vivisectionist Society.' He was in the front seat of the truck, lying gently on the wheel. He'd left the passenger door open. Presumably because it vented more closely onto the tailpipe."

The stunned cluster of survivors turns toward Ressler, waiting. "How did you hear?" he asks Ulrich.

"Landlady called his mother. Mother called me early this morning."

"Has anybody gotten in touch with his girlfriend? Sandy? She might know something__"

Ulrich snaps at his stupidity in the face of the obvious. "There is no girlfriend." Sandy is a simulation.

Ressler spends two days pacing between office and lab, fiddling with beakers, doing nothing. Ulrich distributes the official notice through the department and announces a memorial service to be held at the First Church of Christ Scientist. The service is ecumenical, so much so that it carries almost no religious overtone at all. What's left of Cyfer, their families, and the man's mother comprise the entire congregation. Each team member makes a prepared speech. Ulrich talks about Joe's sharp mind, how quickly he picked up the complexities of machine programming. Woyty, on dangerous ground, saved only by the difficulty he has controlling his voice, remembers Joey's pathological fear of catching cold, hints at the irony that another virus, in the end, got him. Botkin reads from her beloved Rilke: Wir sind nicht einig. We do not agree. Sind nicht wie die Zugvögel verständigt. Do not correspond like the migratory bird. Blühn und verdorm ist uns zugleich bewß. Bloom and withering come on together.

Koss assumes the pulpit, mouths the expected homilies. She turns to descend, but stops, unable to sit down without really speaking. Levering was a scientist, she insists. A scientist going after the code. And the end of all codebreaking is to get behind the outward trappings of a thing to meaning. Joey lost the signal. Read the message wrong. The congregation makes a scuffle of collective objection, propriety offended. Ressler alone is quiet, loving her more than he has ever loved her for delivering this tract and no other. Who is the graveside speech for, after all, if not the survivors?

He is last, deferred to for the postlude, for some reason. For his act of speechmaking Ressler digs way back, into the only other text he received as inheritance from his parents aside from chromosomes and the Britannica. He has, in adulthood, achieved agnosticism, despite efforts by both folks to steep him in doses of received scripture. But the syntax of the Book still rattles about in him on days like this of vestigial need. So, it comes about, here in the pulpit, summarizing off to his long home a man he didn't even know except through falsified dispatches, that the only thing he can get out is Ecclesiastes.

Whatsoever thy hand findeth to do, do it with thy might; for there is no work, nor device, nor knowledge, nor wisdom in the grave whither thou goest.

Work, for the night is coming. Inarguable, if of no practical value to Lovering now. Each human effort and each new word speeds the acquisition of the next. The maps get more exact with every effort, but the key only points out the size of the workless, wisdomless place. He might better have dispensed with speeches altogether, left the work of his colleague — the saving of a few doomed test animals by carbon monoxide, painless, reportedly lightly euphoric — as Lovering's lasting eulogy.

After the service, over the subdued hand-shaking in the narthex, Lovering's mother approaches Stuart and takes his forearm in her hands. "Thank you. What you read was beautiful."

"I'm glad you think so."

"Joseph spoke of you many times. He thought the world of you. 'The best scientist I've ever met.' He told me how much he wanted to be more like you. I'm glad you two were friends."

'Tour son and I," he fits together, searching, "had a great deal in common." Vast stretches of A,T,G,C. She kisses him without apology. He wants to grab the woman, shake her until she tells: why start that cigarette? Why not extinguish it before himself? Joey had time, all the time of his decision. In less time than it takes a cell to split, Lovering turned ignition and annihilated the three-billion-year-old system. Two more minutes to hang around and finish the butt: what couldn't he bring himself to stub out?

Lovering's senseless violence will never heal, never close over in time with new tissue. Ressler will be permanently scarred by that last impertinence. A cigarette, a sorrow, a chromatic love for the things of the world unexcisable at the last minute. A garage full of animals mercifully gassed: affirmation, a yes to the same free polyphony he was sending to death. A by-product of the first, unresolvable confusion deep down at rule-level, the inner confines of language where sorrow and celebration, sender, message, and receiver collapse into the same unlikely pattern, a pattern that knows it is alien, impossibly unlikely, exiled.

How easily all decisions are reversed; everything hand might find to do is tentative at best. He, at least, is still alive, more alive for Lovering's annihilation. Stuart walks home from the service in the cold air, awake, whole, pained for feeling so. He survives the misguided man, a distant cousin, an atavistic trial run, a hypothesis that could not stand the test of experience, a failed variant. Adjacent to survivor's exhilaration, a cold capillary fluid closes on his heart. The man was erratic, dissolving in pain: a glance showed it. The best empiricist in all of his acquaintance gave no help, ignored the long distress call to friends.

Four o'clock the following afternoon brings Jeanette to him. He lets her in, unable to read the enigma of the features he prided himself on glossing the week before. After he commits to some deplorable pleasantry he sees that the message is anger: soft, silent, crying, intractable. Her rage is all for Lovering, although it is Koss she mourns for. The best he can do in extremity is extend the inadequate arm of care. He attempts to comfort her in the only dialect he is fluent in. He strokes her, but the touch feels like his own obit. No comfort in contact at this minute. If they could stop for half a measure, separate, let silence come between them, that paraphrase might teach them what Lovering meant, and more. But he cannot retreat from her for any reason now. He has only the old, obscuring burden of touching to save them.