Richard Powers - Gold Bug Variations

"Jeannie," he says, lifting her resisting face. "Lovering made his own decision. We might have seen, but we didn't. Who can say what difference it would have made, even if we had?" The argument his viscera have already vetoed. Jeanette says nothing. He never imagined she was capable of such anguish, acute grief for someone she never cared for. "Darling, listen. It isn't up to us to figure out why he killed himself. You said it yourself. Joe made a framing error. He misread the…"

Jeannie jerks away from him fiercely. Fully capable of defrauding her husband, Ressler, and even herself, she will not stand for defrauding science. "What the hell do you know about it? You, the arch-rationalist. Tagged, antiseptic passions. The double-blind study! Never known confusion in your life. Nothing a control group can't clarify. Where do you come off making sense of him?"

His mouth hangs loose on the words. Her face purple, air-starved, bruised, her features hideous, unrecognizable in the violence she would do him. He sees how deeply he hates her. Hates her as in the early days all over again, when he could not admit to need, when he was not even significant enough to her to be singled out for rejection. Even in hating, he takes his cue from her. The words for what comes next originate with her at every step, from the day this total stranger toweled his head dry.

Hatred bridges what pity was powerless to. They are both instantly in the same place. "Get out," he whispers. "Did I ask you here? Did I ask to be led through grubby little liaisons? The supply closet, for Christ's sake." Each subdued syllable leaves her slamming a fist into her temples and gasping for breath. "Go on! Tell me all about myself. Make it accurate. Then get out."

With a weird, guttural shout, she springs on him before he can hold her off. Her nails sink into his back and her teeth dig for a vein. Pinning her, he discovers: not aggression. Desperate holding on. He knows what consolation she has come for. A minute's embrace and she would lead him unsteadily off again, here, on another floor, as if their bed were anywhere the world might let them make it. She would have them do the euphemism as if it still had a point. As if the act of kind still signified, still stood somehow for kindness or could close the gap between them.

But the closest they will ever come is analogy, secret writing, codes — social, behavioral, civil, moral, criminal — constantly garbled in the thousand signal deformations passed from her hemispheres to his. She makes herself a glossary on his mouth, in his ear, asking forgiveness, tolerance, understanding, love. Or not for these weak analogies, spent conventions, but the intransigent, unmappable location she would loose herself to.

Her grief smashes against him, a convulsion scarier than any Lovering elicits. It forces his chest, cuts into it with the desire to be past things, unchanged, indifferent to how they reveal themselves here. Toward that one goal, he can assist her for half an hour. He undoes her blouse, turning it down from the curve of her shoulders as she gives, leans into the unsheathing. Then, shocked by his fingers' static charge, she jumps to her feet, pulling on the slipped clothing. She holds her hair to her head, takes a few steps in a circle. Ressler lets his breath out, saying, at the end of the exhale, "He's dead."

"That isn't," she says staccato, frantic. "That isn't it. This isn't it.

I can't… I never meant__" Dr. Koss shakes her fevered head, comes to a decision. She runs for the door. He calls her, but she doesn't break meter. The latch closes behind her, swift and succinct. Ressler goes slack, stretched across his front room. He feels nothing, no loss, only the lumpectomy scar. From first prohibited kiss he has prepared himself for the moment when the impermissible toxin would purge itself. But he has overlooked this possibility — unexplained, unilateral panic — as too awful and obvious. He lies on the bare floor, waiting for no explanation. He stands, goes to the record player, creates his own.

There is, in the innermost core of the work, a variation that stands apart from the others, bizarre, instantly detectable, alien. He heard this outcast in the litter, picking it out from the confusion of notes the night she brought them by, even before he could speak a single chord of tonal language. Five sixths of the way through the Goldberg set — variation twenty-five — is the most profound resignation to existence ever written.

He has studied music for half a year, listened each evening, learned notation, sight-read scores for much of the basic repertoire. Now, after a long time away, he comes back to this little sequence coding for the moment of dispersion. It is the one text that can say how he and Jeanette, by lightest degrees, arrived at dead confusion. How could the unsuspecting initial sarabande possibly code for what has taken her? He follows in memory the way they have come. Once, he could only see it on the page. Now he can hear. The Base is intact, agonizingly fleshed out with chromatic passing tones. Above the encrypted notes a slow unraveling, shattered beyond saying, an ineffable, searing, lost line meanders into intervals where language cannot follow. Push the whole sequence down a tone, fill out the phrase with accidentals, repeat verbatim, but dropped into a key the chilling, unreachable nether pole from tonic.

The four-by-four-by-four Base, stretched out of all proportion, out of all ability of its limpid simplicity to carry, is still there, whole, note-for-note intact, only unrecognizable. His ear, schooled on recent events, detects the ancestor, the parental name now lost in daughters. The mathematical manipulation pushes on, farther than the bars would permit, grinding against dissonances more grating even than those born in his own generation. It wanders stunted through bleak modulations — G minor, F minor, E-flat minor, B-flat minor — keys incredibly distant, bearing no relation to the place where they began and must return. As testimony to the heart that made it, this too is scored as a dance. What cannot be survived, cannot be listened to, must also be danced.

Stuart lies at the close, back against the impossibly thin crust of earth. The column of air pressing his ribs is no thicker. Pinned between these sheets, he hears in this scalar mutation what called Lovering away, what tortures Jeannie: a sorrow that did not exist in its parent sarabande. No math encapsules it; no signal, no word for Not. It never was on this earth, until twisted out of insensate elements.

What are these modulations after, about, just in front of the door? Something to the tune of how mere saying, tracing, researching, conveying will never make the case for existence. Days do not carry the full conjugation table for the verb To Live. Only, at raw moments, the imperative.

He knows she is gone, as gone as his office mate, as lost as his steady, programmed shedding of cells, the tune that twenty-five comes unspeakably close to speaking. Departure. He hears in brief the only home his future can ever come back to, whatever distant relations it explores on its long, final, unimaginable spiral deep down into the innermost life of the hive, beyond grief, underneath encryption.

Disaster (conclusion)

I cannot find it in me to keep working. The cause is longer than this morning. I've been racing it from the first, and I see now that it will beat me to the finish. I've made the mistake of reading over what I've put down here since last June. A little lay chemistry, evolution in outline, amateur linguistics padded out with kiss-and-tell. The whole ream turns my stomach to look at. It was to be my way of learning a little about music, a year spent listening to the composition. Now the pattern-search is snagged on a single fact: the best potential father in the world, the transmissible gift of kind intelligence, chose to die a celibate.