Richard Powers - Gold Bug Variations

It was a night like any other. Outside, six blocks away, people were being murdered. At a middle distance, rain was falling upstate, over the border, rain that left pines as dead as if they had been stripped for sadistic pleasure. In the wide lens, we had at last opened up our long-sought hole in the atmosphere. According to best projections, extrapolations from that week's Facts on File, the world was moving into a terminal late afternoon. Ressler guessed Brahms's Fourth in four.

We sang and quizzed and stumped each other a few times. "No, no. Listen. This part's beautiful. Damn, I've lost the thread. You have to hear it with harmony; here, hold this D." In a few months, Todd and I would split, Jimmy would be crippled for life with a ruptured aneurysm, and the professor would succumb to galloping cancer. All of that lay hiding in those melodies we had by ear. We played name-that-hosanna, but the only quote that lasted past that night was the Dostoyevsky that wound up on the board: In life, sheer hosanna is not enough, for things must be tested in the crucible of doubt.

Above us, well into the solar system, a deep-space satellite drifted; in addition to pictures of the planet we had just finished poisoning (drawings and coded information theoretically understandable to any alien creature, whatever their language), it bore a record player and recording of a Brandenburg concerto. Colossal misrepresentation, exaggeration, lie, really, about who we were and what we might be able to accomplish. Homo musica.

But that was the language we spoke for a night, a grammar of one trick: tension and release. How likely is the next note, its pitch, its catch, its duration, its tonal envelope? Where does it need to go? What detours must it be put through? Delays, silences, that brief flash showing how close beauty was to the germ of hopelessness. The poignancy of a pattern lifted beyond identity, beyond the thing it was mimicking, past metaphor, into the first mystery: the bliss beyond the fiddle, but not, for a night, beyond fiddling.

Music was no use for anything. It would not protect us from the disaster about to happen, nor even predict it. It was the one pattern not rushing to accomplish or correct current event, not condemned to be about anything else. It was about itself, about singing and breaking off from song. Its every phrase continuously flirted with the urge to return to constituent pitch, to give up, go back to Do. We sat quizzing, guessing, comparing recognitions, trading affections for certain expositions with no idea of the development section already in store. Ressler was as happy as a widower who, through force of habit continuing to buy two season tickets years after his wife had gone, discovered that he might give one to the child on Symphony Hall steps who until then had had to be content with echo.

I can still hear them, softly at night, trickling through the open window from the next apartment over. Those tunes still hold, locked in their sequence like the foundations of older temples beneath the nave, not only the complete morphological steps for recreating each similar April night I have ever lived — the color, the wrap, the attitude, the inclination, the range of emotional casts: how I turned from a similar window in just such a light back to a sheet of sums that had to be completed before bed — but also the difference, the closed door, the knowledge that I am no longer in any night but this.

There is only one way for day to pass into dark; today has done so along a predictable sliding scale since the Precambrian. There are only a few barometric pressures, a narrow band of allowable temperatures. But however reducible to parts — degree, pound per square inch, lumen, hour by the clock, latitude, inclination and season — however simple and limited the rules for varying these, something in the particular combination of elements is, like twelve notes and ten durations compounded into a complex cortex-storm, unique, unrepeatable, infinitely unlikely. Today in History: Bach knocks out another cantata.

I hear him listening with a code-breaker's urge, taking noise and turning it to pattern, thinking to find with ear and voice a surrogate, an emblem for the melody of the self-composing gene. The absurd conclusion I cannot help but reach — that singing means something — is rooted in Ressler's choice: either be a physician, cropping the delinquent tissue, or a researcher, a musician, mapping anatomy, the way the tissue lies. Two choices that amount to one thing. To feel the pattern flash, summoning an account for the gut-twist in a deceptive cadence. In either case, conspire to produce and deliver that new song the obsolete Lord requires.

Listen and sing. That's all he wrote. And I can name that tune in one note.

Breaking and Entering

"So you see, Jimmy, we'll need access."

I listened as the professor sat on the hospital bed and explained. It became clear to me what he had in mind. It even became clear to Annie, who leaned over during Dr. Ressler's explanation and whispered, "So it's time to get our feet dirty."

How he could imagine that stroked and broken Jimmy, who had wanted pitifully to tell us of his father's death twenty years ago, was in any shape to assist was beyond me. Yet Ressler spoke to him without condescension, apologizing for spelling out the obvious. His words had a confidence in the ability of signals to survive the shattered receiver. I watched Ressler reach into his jacket pocket and momentarily thought he was about to pull out a handheld terminal and plug it into the wall jack in that hospital room.

Instead, he retrieved a lower-tech spiral notepad and flipped to a blank page. The pad was packed with illegible scrapings, although I had never once seen Ressler make a single mark into anything resembling it.

He printed methodically, in large block letters down six columns of six, the letters of the alphabet and the ten digits. "I'm sorry we have to resort to this, Jimmy. But I have to be sure we get it right." Jimmy made no sound. I thought: He might as well be talking to himself. "Let's start with the operating system lockout. You lie still. When I get to the first letter, let me know." He smiled reassuringly, betraying none of the hopelessness of this attempt, the only shot we had for getting Jimmy reinstated under the umbrella of an institution that, understandably, had no stake in private welfare. Dr. Ressler began at the top of the first column, pointing to each letter and pronouncing the corresponding name.

I stood and walked to the door. I could not stand to watch them get to the bottom of the last column, Ressler pointing and naming while Jimmy lay in confusion. Then, an agonizing twenty letters into the list, Jimmy made a noise. Not a howl or sigh. An indicative yes. Ressler's shoulders dropped in relief. He noted the letter and brought his pen back to the top.

It was a grueling process, and Jimmy had to rest twice. But after the first letter, we were home. Jimmy gave us dozens of crucial bits of information — passwords, memory locations, patch names— that until then had been the secret domain of the Operations Manager. Whatever else the flood of blood had wiped out — muscular control, speech, emotional perspective — it left Jimmy still able to remember the system words Ressler was asking him to spell. Nowhere in the dialogue was the message passed, "Betray your professional confidences, look the other way while we break the law, and we will do what we can to keep you from being killed." Ressler said only the letters of the alphabet; Jimmy made only grunts. But the transmission was there, intact, awful in its implied risk. Uncle Jimmy was the classic Picardian third: minor his whole life, promoted to major at the last chord.

The Goldberg Variations