Richard Powers - Gold Bug Variations

"Well, you wouldn't spend so much of your life knocking up against those difficulties if they weren't."

He laughed, rewarding me for nursing the flame of logic in dark times. He saw me as a faithful Chartres peasant, preserving the cathedral rose in pieces strewn through a thousand wartime cellars. "Sorry to disappoint, Miss. He's average. Very. Passable panels, in a relatively narrow range. A handful of awkward biblical allegories. Impatient with human figures, dashes them off to justify the scenery. Some compositional interest, slight technical skill, but spiritually mediocre." He felt silent, the silence of ancient oracles. Finally, speaking to himself under his breath: "But landscape ! You ought to see them." As if every contradiction could be reconciled by jagged, fantastic rose madder.

"If the fellow is as average as you say, why not do somebody more important? Someone you love. Difficult, I have no problem with. But difficult, obscure, and trivial? No wonder you can't get through with it."

"Believe me, sweet lady," Franklin shot back, affecting troubadour. "I'd kill for Brueghel or Vermeer. I'd write on the Mystic Lamb, pour out a book on the singing angels panel alone, if it were still possible. You know how much wood pulp has been sacrificed on the Ghent Altar already? You want the sheepskin, you gotta do Herri met de Bles."

"Henri," I corrected. He laughed a compensation, restoring us to other, more pressing theses in need of writing.

I flipped this morning's postcard over and read the tag on back: Landschap met grote brand. Knowing just enough cognates and etymology to be dangerous, I translated the title without the humiliation of showing my face at the branch within a month of quitting. Landscape with large fire. Only on second look did I notice, true to billing, near the right edge of the pastoral oblivion, something burning. The most delicate umbers and ambers twisted into plumes, shaded to grays, and slipped off into the cloudscape. Fires were, Franker told me, a minor specialty of his apocryphal painter. This one went completely overlooked, even by threatened villagers.

Todd gave no address, natuurlijk. I admired his poise, blowing clear of the wreck, slipping off to Europe the minute his mentor was cremated. The Grand Tour at last, as he always threatened. And making the catch, reaching the far side of the Atlantic, he caps the escapade with a postcard home. No tourist's trinket vista: that would have been forgivable. The typical Technicolor snap of donjon or belfry might have helped me imagine where he'd run to. But the fool sends a transcription, a reproduction of a painting of an idea of a place, if that.

Nothing would make me happier, even now, than to think that Franklin has at last gotten down to unfinished business, tying up the eternal loose end, spurred by Ressler's death into at last putting down the ideas he a hundred times explained so lucidly to me in private, in streetlit rooms. But the postcard makes no such claim, no word of the professor or the uses of death. The card says only that he has jumped continent and bought a phrase book. As sympathetic as I am to the scholar's need to speak in tongues, as much as I share his delight in word acquisition, Flemish would not be the first language Frank has distracted himself with. He invested years in French and German and can at least read Italian, if his pronunciation tends to scumble into sfumato.

He's told me enough of the scattering of Bles's panels to suggest that Flanders would only be stop one. To do the job right, he'll need Vienna, Dresden, Copenhagen, Budapest: excuses to stop and learn Danish and Hungarian. He doesn't need to read, see, think, or hear another word in any language. He's memorized all the sources already. He has the damn paper complete in his head, an inch away from written. He's practically recited it to me. He just has to work up the nerve to declare, "/ put my name to all this. Sue me if I'm wrong." It's not even conscientiousness that keeps him from the final draft. The real impediment — one as one-folded as seeing — is Franklin's inability to convince himself that the project has any worth. A year ago, our little band breaking up, I said to him, "At least this is goodbye to distractions. Now you'll have the time to get back to Herri." His parting shot: "Why bother?"

He meant to slight more than his panel painter's technique. He meant the whole, colossal impertinence of studying Art History— the delicate, gessoed, tempera conflagration — in a world setting itself on fire. Franker, in the year I knew him, carried inside, wound up in his love for anachronistic art, a contempt for aesthetics that only the aesthete can feel. Every so many weeks he tried, despite his temperament, to turn himself into a moralist whose ethical code bore one criterion: use. Frontpage news — the bleakest of which he clipped obsessively for months — would not allow him to indulge the pointless pleasure he needed. Headlines confirmed his worst suspicion; current events shamed panel and oil. Like an unfaithful lover, he repeatedly swore off sin and allure. But repeated infidelity made the betrayed more beautiful.

What use could new light on a sixteenth-century landscapist be to a sick, self-afflicted present? Dr. Ressler's terminal nightmare may have decided Franker on that account. His card is cheery enough; he sounds worlds limberer than in the closing weeks of love. But has he really gone to Dinant to write? Could he sincerely believe long-postponed looking might now be of some moral use? New language, any new language — at best, homage to a lost linguist he loved. He'll never put his new adjectives to the use he wants. Acts of care are never fundamentally useful.

At least he's made the pretense of getting down to work. I, on the other hand, entering unemployment's third week, have done nothing for days but add up my liquid assets and divide them by my spending rate, determining how much time I have before I run my life savings into the ground. Depending on the weight I assign the variables, I'm left with between forty and sixty weeks. Less than nothing and more time than I know how to fill. Weirdly exhilarating prospect: I give this week a number and begin the countdown. Week zero, getting closer every seven days, ought to put an edge on my style. Make me more supple than I've been in a while. But supple for what? Having nothing better to do, finding guilty delight in the pure, useless exercise of powers, I spent two hours this afternoon placing the allusion in Franker's card. The accents and alliterations gave me a broad hint where to begin. I worked in the sunny pleasure of my own room, combing the volumes that have grown over the years, reproducing themselves into a private reference collection. I worked — the oddest of feelings — for myself alone. No one to solve the citation for but me.

The line showed up in an Anglo-Saxon poem, one of the earliest in the language that mutated into English. A fragment in the Exeter Book called the Husband's Message. He closed with it as friendly challenge, for old times' sake: from a vanished friend to one left behind. Invigorating, to learn a language. Aside from that citation hunting, nothing. Dinner, extravagantly, at a sit-down place near Prospect Park, savoring spice and irony, paying for both with two days' worth of remaining time. The passage of time with nothing specific to accomplish makes me feel a little more blessedly, acutely free. I eat, I walk fearless in the summer air back home. I sit alone in my room, among the home reference. I now have all a lady is allowed had I only an answer. Had I only him.

Imitation of the Dance

If the forties' great debate raged over which macromolecule carried hereditary material, and if the early fifties fought over nucleic acid structure, Ressler walks smack into the contention of 1957 on his first day in the lab. Conscientious hygiene resulting from a working relationship with microorganisms made him bathe this morning before leaving barracks. A regular dawn dunking also gives him time for undirected reflection. Like Luther, his best insights arrive in proximity to porcelain. But drying his hair before setting off is time lost to superfluity. The omission puts him into the scientific cross hairs.