Richard Powers - Gold Bug Variations

You have cause to trust my truths less than my lies, but believe me. Your love has become, despite my best self-interest, as necessary, as desperate, as the little window of time that we've had. I seem to have reached a pitch of knowledge with you that I will never know again. But I'll never be without it entirely, now. I see you teaching our little girls to sing rounds. I watch us selecting chemistry sets for them for birthdays, together, carefully. Oh God. It will break my heart to go on. I'll never get through this. You've let me see what it might have been like to have a real home.

I am leaving to be with a man who, during the course of my hysterical year, looked the other way. Nothing, nothing in it for him. He knew what I was going through — my refusing the proof of sterility. He let me sneak, granted me the dignity of pretending not to know, and when pretense became impossible, arranged to leave. And still, he booked a place for me, should I want to leave with him. I'm leaving because I'd like for once to follow something other than the calculus of personal gain. I'm not trying to be worthy of him or to offer myself to sacrifice. You see, for whatever the sloppy term means, I love Herbert. I loved him for years before I fell for you. His is the only love I can carry through without invalidating the whole shooting match.

I've made some noises about being taken on at the university twenty miles from where we're heading. It won't be much, but perhaps Herbert will agree to follow me for the next move. We move a lot in this country, don't we? So know I will still have our work, in some form at least, to compensate me for all I have lost in you. I will read about you in the lit, and the children Herbert and I adopt may well yet read about you in the texts. Stuart, I hope it. I know it. But you must agree that that can be all the contact we can allow.

It seems you're going to force me to get all the way through this. But I will not leave without asking what I came here to ask. Friend, love me. Marry me, in some other, hypothetical life? Barring that (and I understand perfectly if you refuse), think of me sometimes, and of the time we had. It was a time. How much will still happen to you! Tell the woman you end up loving all about me. Never let her live a day for granted. And prove to the gold bug that it is ingenious enough to crack itself. You have cause, so have we all, for joy.

He flips the page, as if everything she has written might still be canceled out by one more amendment. But she has written nothing more except "Sorry to have spoiled a beautiful notebook." The record has run out while he read. It was in the high twenties when he entered. If she'd put it on from the beginning, as fortification for her act of mercy killing, he must have just missed her. She is still in town, at the building perhaps, cleaning out her desk. He could intercept her, pretend not to have seen the note. Incite that change of mind she seems to half hope for in every paragraph. Or he could help her, just this once, to locate the sequence for love.

He stares blankly at the stacks of journals for several inaudible variations before he sees something else there. Another, out-of-place publication: a goodbye gift, a chaste kiss between yearning cousins, the pocket edition of A Field Guide to Flowering Plants. He searches the front pages for an inscription. She has indeed left a message there, the only possible one. In her irreproducible script she has written, "Flowers have names." But neither book nor letter — nor any communication in his possession — bears Jeanette's signature.

He flips through the book. It opens, at random, or perhaps to where she has creased the spine, to a picture of a flower — delicate, blue-purple petals piled up along a thinning stalk. He remembers having seen it before, in another, hypothetical life. The only clue to her whereabouts, her one return address. The caption gives both scientific and popular names. "Polemonium vanbruntiae. Jacob's Ladder."

The Placebo Effect

Everything she writes is borne out. Ulrich circulates a note the next day, announcing Dr. Koss's departure just before term's end. With admirable dexterity, the head of the all but annulled Cyfer manages to praise the woman's contribution to the team without once giving the reason for her leaving or mentioning her destination. For once, Ressler is left with more knowledge than information. The chief gives the note a day or two to sink in, then calls an emergency meeting. Ressler is the last to arrive. The other three are waiting for him.

"Right to it, then," Ulrich begins with more force than conviction. "Is there any point in holding this thing together?"

Ressler looks at his boss, understands. The practice of science is less about sudden shifts of insight or repetitive hours of irreproachable lab practice than it is about funding. Always a subtle parasitism on patronage. Each year's grants deadline hastens the day when the question of whether a piece of work gets done will rest exclusively with the impartial peer review.

Ulrich's poll is clear: have we still a chance to go up against the massive labs, Big Biology? Or is this curse of defection fatal? Woytowich keeps his counsel; he's ready to return to teaching, rating TV — the life of the embittered divorcer. The continuance of the project is to him a matter of immense indifference. Ressler is also tacit, ready to be dismissed. It takes Botkin's eloquent intercession on his part to recall Stuart to unfinished business. She gives the group a rundown on the state of the cell-free system, including an abstract of the conceptual breakthrough she and Ressler hashed out just days before, at the precise instant when Jeanette sat in the barracks writing her Abschied.

She does a better job presenting than Ressler could have. At last, when it is too late, Ulrich's eyes widen. He has been sitting on a resource beyond anything in the equipment catalogs. This generating idea, the means into the composition, puts them as close to the heart of the problem as anyone. "We have three vacant salary lines, and we can get more. I can book over eighty percent of the remaining supplies budget. We can get you both full release time, as far as the department is concerned. Just tell me what you need."

Ressler says: "I need a week to think."

He goes home and sits for days, projecting himself into the ideal scenario: he and Botkin set to work on the synthetic mapping, in charge of a small army of eager assistants. They scoop the world. They lay out the first, rudimentary lexicon of life's language. They complete the table. They lay the capstone of the first material model of inheritance. Then he imagines himself the recipient, six months from now, through the mail, in an envelope with smudged return address, of one of those black-and-white hospital shots. A small, hairless, closed-eye cross between a planarian and Khrushchev, ID tag illegible. Like the words of organic nature hidden in the lookup table, this infant's features grow more inscrutable upon closer identification. It has no one's features, neither father nor mother. Like that complete, mechanical explanation, this complete, clean account of Jeanette's departure explains nothing.

His thoughts during this brief sabbatical return to one image: that man, ready to disappear without issue, whether or not his choice of companion in this life chooses to accompany him in exile. Is even Herbert's gesture part of the "pollen-trick"?

Then, into his third week of passive disengagement, Ressler wakes to a morning blazing in beautiful light. He showers, puts on clothes stiff with laundry soap, discovers: I am ravenous. He walks a brisk six blocks to the pancake house, ordering the full rancher's, trucker's, bricklayer's, red-blood, high-starch, artery-clogging special, and adores every mouthful. The waitress flirts shyly with him over the check. He tells her she is lovely, then backs away, smiling affectionately, helpless in human contact.