Richard Powers - Gold Bug Variations

They might have fared a lot worse had it been easier to formulate a charge against them. They could not be prosecuted for vandalism. Only cosmetics had been touched, and returned unscratched. An employee in a position to do so had simply taken it on himself to redesign the corporate product. They could not be hit for electronic blackmail, as no one had ever leveled any threat. They might have been sentenced — and I with them — for malicious moralizing, capricious use of quotes. But wisely deciding that the best thing was to let the story die out as soon as possible, and perhaps afraid of vestigial viruses still in the system, neither MOL nor any node of the offended financial network spreading along the Eastern Seaboard leveled any case.

I worked quietly, wondering if I too would be fired. My colleagues, however, came to my unqualified support. Everyone I worked with was sufficiently acquainted with my character to know beyond doubt that I was not capable of being personally involved in such a passion play. I had simply let love temporarily turn my head, had fallen in with the wrong boyfriend. A healthy regimen of reference work would erase any blot still attached to me. Mr. Scott teased me about my public record for a few days, then dropped the matter.

Some weeks after the event, I came home to discover that my apartment had been visited. On the table, wrapped in abandoned sketching paper, was a bottle of our going wine, a book, and a note reading, "To paraphrase the saint: 'Nobody likes to burn.'"

I could understand the wine — a late toast to our having brought the cause off. The note, too, was self-explanatory: I was to let him back in if I wanted. But the book. It was a tiny collection of two dozen color plates, details from Brueghel's sprawling universe of children's games. Each enlargement showed one of the games from the painted catalog and an en face text description. A nostalgic invitation to recover our earlier, museum-going days. But his choice of subject was so brutally insensitive that I felt my face go hot and all I could think of was how I had stupidly failed to get back the copy of my apartment key I had given him.

I thought I would let any residual notoriety extinguish itself, then, after a month or two, try to contact Dr. Ressler. I'm not sure what I had in mind, what sort of friendship I imagined we two might still have, after all that had happened and failed to happen. He beat me to it. He called me at home, late one night, waking me from sleep. He, at least, was still on night-shift hours. He was halfway through his long, decorous apology for waking me before I realized who it was. "You!" I shouted stupidly, happily, into the receiver. It seemed physically impossible. Despite his ability to write self-vanishing code that would send Paradise Lost out over modems, Dr. Ressler had always been acutely uncomfortable with telephones. I'd never seen him use one voluntarily and never dreamed he would ever call me. "You! Are you all right?"

He told me, in a few abstracting words, the details of his grilling and release. "The end of a promising career in the burgeoning field of information."

"I've missed you so much." I was still asleep, saying things that would make me cringe the next morning and for a long time after. Not anymore. Now I wish I'd said worse.

"You've missed your friend Todd," he said. The words lay in that crevasse between assertion and educated guess. He did not wait for me to deny. "Have you been by to see James?"

The silence on my end worsened by the second. The truth was, I had thought three times an hour for weeks about paying him a visit, but I could no longer stand seeing him that way. Dr. Ressler, mercifully as always, let me off. "He's getting some light motor skill back. It'll never be much, but he could not have been blessed with a better temperament to face the next thirty years. The slightest advance, and he's triumphant. They've transferred him to a good muscle therapy clinic." He gave me the address, which I wrote down eagerly but already hypocritically.

"Can we see one another sometime?" I asked. Shier than a teenager. "Meet somewhere? I'm almost out of squash."

He let out a little puff of air. "I wish I could stick around long enough to keep you in tomatoes." I didn't dare say anything. "Jan, that's why I'm calling. I wanted to tell you that I'm on my way back to the I-states tomorrow. I've signed on to a new research project, back with the… I can't really say the alma mater, can I?" I could hear his lip pulling up ironically. Far away, the faint crosstalk of a bad connection.

"You what?" The news was so extraordinary that all I could do was laugh with joy. "You what? Incredible!" Was science that forgiving? Yes, and why not? No field could expand so fast that return would be impossible, even after so long away. If the man was sharp enough, his learning curve steep, he might even have the relative advantage of the late starter. "I can't believe it. What will you be working on?"

Just as I asked the question, I finally woke. As he spelled it out, I anticipated him by a thin syllable. I was one of those contestants who knew all the answers, but only the instant that the cards are flipped over. "Jan, it's a cancer study."

I hung on the edge of making it out — a phrase in foreign but ghostly cognates, the language I myself would still be speaking if the populations hadn't drifted. The phrase book of runaway cells.

I gripped the silence on the line, palpating it as if pressing the secret hard spot. The first thing I could think to say was, "Does Franklin know?"

"He's known for a while."

"Listen. I can dress in a minute. When do you leave? I can call a cab."

"I'd rather you didn't. And I've never been much for writing letters, either, I'm afraid."

"I love you," I said, without help, wide-awake.

This time his words lay in a further crevasse, between assertion and command. "You love your friend."

Then, nothing between that phone call and Todd's curt note. But no: Franker's postcard and his long letter were first, written first, anyway. I did receive one other communication in that blank time, that year I spent doing nothing, working, trying to rehabilitate my own light motor skills. A handwritten card from Jimmy, delivered care of the library where he remembered I worked. Half printed, half cursive, the letters look like a first, helpless effort in penmanship written with the opposite hand. As best as I can transcribe it, it says:

Dear Jan, I thank you and all of you. I mostly expect that there are many things still ahead. And hard. But yesterday was it possible for one whole book page to get through. As you see, I can drive this pen too, though clutch pops some. My words! I'm getting so that anyone can mostly make me out.

I wrote him back but failed to say anything. I never wrote Ressler. I never wrote Todd until after he'd left the address. I never said anything I wanted to say to anyone. I've misinterpreted the whole set from the start. That table of data in the nucleotides isn't about reading at all. It's about saying, out loud, everything there is, while it's still sayable. The whole, impossibly complex goldberg invention of speech, wasted on someone who from the first listened only to that string of molecules governing cowardice. Obvious, out in the open: every measure, every vertical instant infused with that absurd little theme insisting "Live, live," and me objecting, "But what if it should be real? What if it all means something? What if someone should hold me to my words?"

I should have heard it, the night that amateur composer ordered me to. I listened to him disappear into dark fieldwork, this time as subject, on the other side of the instruments. He asked for nothing from me but a little music, a keyboard exercise from the next room over to ease him across his last insomnia. I knew the tune by ear, for years. I might have said something, might have made some noise.