Richard Powers - Gold Bug Variations

But it was fading, unarrestable, going back to that place where wonder hides out from habituation. By the time I reached the Heights, late, after dark, it was just a sentence. Hello friend; here's an easy one. Still a block away from the antique shop, I saw the light on in the second story. Living, just existing, presses probability to the threshold of unlikeliness. I looked up at a window shadow, a violation of physical law, a miracle of coincidence that could be neither reverse-engineered nor repeated. I almost apo-plexed letting myself in; the shape could mark only one person, the person I was out hopelessly tracking down. The only other one with a key. He was sitting in his favorite stuffed chair, head back on the antimacassar, under a soft, shaded, fifty-watt pool of light, reading my notebooks. "You!" I shouted from the door. "How did you get here?"

As if he had no other way of answering except with a musical riddle, he began whistling "Take the A-Train."

I dropped everything and threw myself violently on him, grabbed hold, as if grip could arrest and fix this. It startled him, seeing me bare, begging to be spared. "What'd I do?" he laughed, protecting himself from the attack of my hands. "Tell me what I did."

We dispensed with talking for a record three minutes. Then, all I could find to repeat was, "This is impossible. I can't believe this."

The Question Board

"What's impossible?"

I told him. I skipped everything of importance — the year of enforced waste, the year of science. My quitting my job. The genetics texts. My anxiety over not hearing from him, then hearing, then not. I skipped everything, and started in with the bank machine playing the last Goldberg. "The quodlibet. He was in there, Franklin; I swear to you. Do you know what he told me?" I waited, put my hand to his chin, the same line of bone, and made him shake his head. "He told me you were a man. That I was to take you for all in all."

"He said that?" Franklin reacted in a show of disappointment. "Damn it. I had expressly asked for 'One man loved the pilgrim soul in you.'"

I reeled from the implication. "He's alive?"

Todd buckled his shoulders at my stupidity, my untreatable addiction to hope. "Janny, don't you see? I primed the pump myself, last week. He told me, when I went to see him in Illinois at the end, that he'd left a little virus on-line for you. He gave me the number that would bring it to life. Said I might use it if I ever needed to soften you up."

I took my hands from him, moved to a spot on the floor. No coincidence. Todd had cosigned on the telegram. "You never needed," I said, half to myself. "Never needed to soften."

"I've been punching into the damn tellers every afternoon, to see if you'd tripped it yet. Paranoid that someone was gonna pick me up for breaking and entering, recognize me as a monkeyer from way back. Don't you ever withdraw, woman? You above cash? Much relief this afternoon when you finally got around to it."

Matter-of-fact affectation, tough humor against the odds, as if the separation might as easily have been two days or twenty years. I dismissed the sixty-four thousand closest questions and asked, "How long have you been back?" As if the tourist's itinerary would tell me anything.

He looked at his watch. "Ten months or so. Jersey City, actually. A shade cheaper."

"Ten months! Franklin. Oh God. Jesus. Why on earth did you wait?" Even as I asked it, I knew the question was out of line. Wait for what? To come see a person who had told him that visiting hours were over?

"I could not drop by earlier," he said, parodying Euclid, "because I didn't want to show up here empty-handed." He reached into a rucksack that had been lying innocuously by the side of the chair. He had arrived packed. He extracted a sheaf from his overnight bag and handed it to me. A stack of beautifully typed watermark bond. "I figured that you wouldn't even say 'boo' to me unless and until I wrapped up the dissertation."

My hand caught, afraid to turn over the cover sheet. "Todd. Don't start this again." I felt myself laughing, stricken, beginning to believe.

"Done. Portrait of the Artist. I'm out from under it."

I turned the cover page and began to read. I knew what it was with the first paragraph, the first sentence's description of a young post-doc's Greyhound bus arrival at a laboratory deep in the interior. He too had served his sentences. The story of one life; the math of the central nervous system. I could not read on. I began straightening the sheaf of papers, throat, hands, eyes, all in wild counterpoint.

"Who'da thought it?" Todd said, filling the silence. "Years of art history, and I wind up in biography after all."

You should talk, friend: all I ever wanted to be was a researcher, and here I am, plunged into information science. To keep myself from complete regression, I asked, "What have you been living on all this while?"

Todd shot back, speaking through the corner of his mouth, "Patrimony. The old man's life policy. What's it to ya, doll?"

I began to cry, quietly. He came and sat beside me on the floor. He began to tell me about his last visit to the professor. "The man pretended to be furious at me for leaving Europe just to come see him like that, a skeleton. We managed to sneak in a car tour, out to the woods, before he got too weak. I plied him for buried biographical details. I asked what it felt like, slowly dissolving into bad instructions. I asked him for his odds on humanity. I asked him if he was happy with the way he'd spent his time. He told me: 'It seems my answers to all the important questions are doomed to remain qualified.'

"No bursts of false hope, no journal entries celebrating I kept my meals down today. Let's hope tomorrow is still better. Nothing left behind, no bequest to first filial but the ongoing experiment. Janny, his hair had turned white. White. As white as a fresh sheet of paper. I asked him if the cancer study he'd hooked up with had reached any conclusions. 7 have, in any case. It hurts.'"

So did the punchline. So did having to laugh. The muscles around my rib cage contracted all together, against the blueprint, more like a swimmer's cramp than laughter. Todd made another feeble, black crack, for my sake: something about the absurdity of a language that made oncology and ontology differ by a single mutation. A little while later, I thought I might try breathing again.

"He told me a story: 1982. The year before you meet him. He's passed fifty, gratefully out from under the immediate jurisdiction of endocrinology. Through decades of training, he now thinks of Dr. Koss only three times a day. He's living in a world where clipped, rewritten supercoiled strands of nucleotides can be sent from anywhere to anywhere. Where everybody's got his own ILLIAC. Three golf balls on the moon.

"He's working steadily on the night shift, the month before I get myself hired. On a whim, he turns the radio on, fiddles with the dial, and freezes it on an old friend. It's the Canadian kid, beyond a doubt. The inimitable playing style, that muffled humming in the background tracks trying for a Platonic, thirty-third variation just beyond the printed score. Playing the piece that woman gave him. Ressler is amazed to find how vividly the structure of the past is still encoded in him. Stadium Terrace, Cyfer. That reverse-telescope dilation, where distant is closer than near. He discovers he still loves Jeannie as intensely as the day he first stumbled upon the evidence.

"But in an instant's listening, he's shocked to hear that it's not the same piece, not the same performance. It's a radical rethinking from beginning to end, worlds slower, more variegated, richer in execution. A lot of the variations enter attacca, without pause, the last notes of one spilling into the first notes of the next, anxious to hear how they might sound all at once, on top of one another.