Richard Powers - Gold Bug Variations

"You live alone?" Todd asked him, back when we still drank contraband wine out of paper cups in the computer room. Ressler lifted that familiar lip edge that said everything and disclosed nothing. "What do you do with yourself?"

"1 work. 1 read what interests me. 1 garden. The seed companies send me their catalogs, a little earlier every year."

Todd was unrelenting that night. "If you don't mind my asking, what do you do for women?"

"What have women ever done for me?" He pressed the advantage of humor, slipped out with an account of a recent survey of the most desirable traits in an American mate: "Women choosing men selected intelligence, kindness, and money in increasing importance. Men ranked it face, breasts, and hips."

He deliberately chose to sit and wait for complete genetic dismantling. I never saw him, until that last chance, lift his hand to assert himself. He suppressed the choice to breed along with the other vanities. The life scientist, still in his twenties, turning over flagstones in the lab, looking for buried treasure, one day, by accident, squared up against what all the secret writing graffiti'd over every millimeter of the world's surface and miles deep was saying: double faster than you unravel.

Even that much would have been bearable. Even if only a simple-minded recursion—"Copy this" — the pattern had authored grammars so materially satisfying, living syntaxes of such heart-stopping choreography, that it would have been enough to affirm life even in abstaining. The law compelling electrons to arrange themselves in the lowest energy configuration, the law saying that hot had to flow irreversibly downhill into cold, had become so adept at local violations, amended and invented loopholes, that the resulting biological anarchy synthesized its own sponsor. But he had stumbled upon something that ruined him for procreation.

He heard the sound — if not imbedded in the cell itself, there in the way the program runs — of an imperative variation stronger than "Copy this." A countering command: the tick of miss, of not, the leak of things going wrong. The hiss accumulating in transcription, like that party game of Telephone, slowly mauling the message so badly it no longer meant anything. Death too was just the code's last trick to promote divide and multiply. He listened to his cell incorporate disaster into its plan, synthesizing genes with no function but to make enzymes that smeared other genes, enhanced mutation, promoted runaway tumor.

Disaster says to me, softer and softer, "Quit the typewriter. Too much has gone wrong. You're not accurate enough ever to put it right." I'd say my project was in crisis, if I thought the project still existed. How can I still mourn for a man who gave me a few months of guarded, way-station amenities? Why anxiety at Jimmy's stroke, incapacitated by an acquaintance with whom I never graduated past tenderness? Throat-choking panic at the thought of a boy I kissed for four abortive months at sixteen. Anger at a devoted friend for skipping a Christmas card. Alarming dreams of parents dead for years. Annihilating ache for my old colleague Mr. Scott, who knew one joke about retiring. Everyone I've ever loved has killed me a little. Every concert I've ever attended, every tune I thrilled to and immediately forgot, every book, every reference, every patron that presented herself at my desk with every question saying, "Solve me; you have half an hour": decimating strokes, a swipe of God's hand.

I'll never solve any of it. Assembled into oppressive full score, it whispers to me, submits the unlivable knowledge that the world will be recombined, more fertile than ever after I disband. Worse, the mix will be renewed because I leave it. More than I can take: the stroke that erases me, the force corrupting my message engineers creation.

But the piece won't let me drop. The most chromatic catastrophe ever composed leaves me here, cashless, listening to meandering pattern stand in for plan. Accident hums the song it assembles, resigned beyond listening, intervals arcing like sparks damped in a vacuum inconceivably bigger than the code and wanting only one thing from it. The thing it makes me finish writing: how that celibate, as if only waiting for the disastrous chance, set to work living like there was no tomorrow.

The Vertical File

Ressler alone was ready. The space of a single week showed that his slow return to engagement had been spring training for exactly this catastrophe. The bloom of the last few months, which 1 had nipped in the bud, sprang back fuller for my pruning. Todd was set to go to the insurance company with a signed confession and spend the next half of his life in prison if it meant getting Jimmy back on coverage. Dr. Ressler restrained him, pointing out that the grandstand clean breast would only transfer the unpayable liability from Jimmy to the fraudulent file manipulator.

Ressler organized a trip to the hospital. Todd could not bring himself to go. His need for exoneration was so paralyzing he could not take a step toward it. The sight of Jimmy in that bed, in that condition, would have destroyed any chance Franklin had of ever living with what he had done. Dr. Ressler, Annie, and I met by the registration desk. When she saw me, Todd's other mate pleaded with my eyes a moment. She came tentatively toward me and awkwardly stroked the hair of my forearm. She wanted to lay her head between my breasts like a little girl. Knocked down by the larger, unattainable forgiveness I then needed, I would have let her.

But we gave no hostages to humiliation on that trip. The hospital halls, the bald children, the tubes jammed into bruised faces — the entire ordeal of shame seemed, in the company of Ressler, whom 1 had not seen out of the warehouse since New Hampshire, less to be endured than understood. In the elevator, he talked to a wheelchaired victim in the extremities of MS, not about the man's disease or the work he would now never do, but about the best lines in Tennyson and which pieces of Dvorak most bore repeated listening. When we got out of the lift, Ressler turned and waved as the doors closed.

Challenge the Patient

Challenge the patient to respond to one narcotic or another, strap him to a quantifying screen that feeds back digits for his number, root out the latinate reason from the multivolume tome, circumvent the leak or seal it, magnificently postpone: he, insidious, will choose a time that signifies at least, chorus to a calculated close, spread south like the vee of geese.

I led them to Jimmy's room, issuing veiled sentences meant to warn them about what they would find. But when we got to the room, Ressler greeted his old acquaintance in the same voice he had greeted him in day after day at shift change for longer than I'd known either of them. "Hello, James. Visitors. Oh! This bed can't possibly be comfortable." Jimmy, seeing us, convulsed on his good side. Whether delight or resentment, the message was lost in the spastic independence his muscles had acquired. "Franklin has to man the fort," Ressler said. "Your being away has thrown things up for grabs at work. He wants to come see you soon." Not a lie. He wants; he wants with his capacity to come see you.

Jimmy made an awful noise, not the one he had made for me. The contour was different, changed, more desperate, more out of control, less like words than the ones he had spoken to me alone. Annie shrank from the sound and left the room. Better to have stayed and cried in front of the man. Ressler leaned over Jimmy, put his ear close as I had done, if for no other reason than to ease the chest, lungs, diaphragm. "What was that?" As if he'd just been caught off guard, not paying attention. A thump in darkness, the trickle of syllables over teeth, fricatives ululating in rapids over the pebbles of a streambed. Cruel, given the smear of noise, to make him say it again. But against expectation, Dr. Ressler turned to me after the second burst and translated.