Richard Powers - Gold Bug Variations

Then, this morning, just waiting for me to commit wrongly, summer chose its moment to break. The pressure system stalled above the city passed over, at last bringing the weather the calendar called for. Overbundled in the airless room, I woke up soaked in flannel. I sponged clean, washed my hair, ate an insignificant breakfast, and brushed my teeth without conviction. I sat in the dining nook, in the first, full heat of summer, trying to retrieve that snowscape. Awake, I let the man ask the question I'd earlier forestalled: what could be simpler? He remained a geneticist despite everything, partial to the purposive pattern, the generative thread. But his four-phrased, simple explanation was as unrecoverable from my breakfast table as that New Hampshire weekend, the whole aborted year.

Fragment, endorphin-induced, absolutely commonplace: easier to count the nights when I don't dream of those two than when I do. Still, this one torched my morning. I filled with the urge to make the call, but had no number. I came within a dot of dashing off the telegram composed since last spring, but knew no sending address. The way back, the suggestion forced open again overnight was sheer perversity. I sat at the breakfast table until the moment passed. Then I made my way to the archives.

I was first at work, always easiest. I unlocked the library and headed by rote to the Reference Desk, my half-dream still an embryo in me. The day would have been long in any event. The longest day of the year, even had I gotten eight good hours. By ten, I found myself seriously questioning the charter of a big-city branch library. Our catalogued, ecumenical clearinghouse of knowledge was running at about double average gate. Kitty-corner to me, a pack of pubescents prowled the genre racks, eyes on the signaling flesh at adjoining tables. A few bruised retirees, two years from terminal Medicare, pored over magazines, persisting in forcing the weekly news into a parody of sense. In the adjoining children's room, a pride of early readers, spirits not yet broken by summer camps, disguised the fact from their unwitting parents that books mystified them more than the real world. Behind the Reference Desk, on the peak day of our peak season, I fielded questions from this community of needs. First day of summer: briefly, everyone wanted to know something about nothing. I shook off Dr. Ressler's rhetorical question, agitating out of all proportion to the intervening silence, and busied myself with questions that were at least answerable.

This morning, I was glad for the diversion. By noon, I had solved a burning problem concerning obscure wording on W-4 forms, pointed out the Bridge and Dog Grooming books, and located, for an earnest navigator of sixteen, a side-by-side comparison of Mer-cator's, Mollweide's, and Goode's projections. I went home at noon. I've taken to it lately, despite losing most of the hour in the trip. I felt the urge to buy a car, not to drive, impossible in the city, but as prep for the increasingly likely evacuation. Home, I swept the mailbox by limp reflex. Franklin's note cowered in protective coloration amid bank statements and time-limited offers. I took it with the numbness of months. I can't remember the flight up or breaking through the deadbolts. I set Todd's calligraphic scrawl on the kitchen table and began pulling vegetables systematically from the bin. Hysterical affectation of indifference: make myself a bite to eat before settling down to death. The snowstorm came back, the hunch that sent me home for lunch, and I tried on the idea: I'd known. Then I remembered Ressler's definition of chance: the die is random, but we keep rolling until we hit necessity. Hunch long enough, and premonition will one afternoon be waiting for you at home. I left the vegetables salad-bar-style across the cutting board and sat down, worried open the seal. Stiff, white invitation card:

Our Dearest O'Deigh, It's all over with our mutual friend. I've just this instant heard. The attendant at the testing center assures me that all the instruments agree: Dr. Ressler went down admirably. No message, or, I should say, no new message. I wanted to inform you right away, naturally.

Naturally. Also naturally, no signature. He printed "FTODD" at the end, as if authorizing a change of date on a bank draft. But he could not help adding an afterthought at bottom: "Oh, Jan! I miss you right now. More than I would miss air."

I spread my hands on the table and divorced them. Through a tick in my eyelid, I pointlessly read the note again. All over with our friend, his four-letter tune. I knew the man for a year, one year ago. Before everything fell apart, he became one of the few who mattered to me in the world. Once, when he was young, he stood on the code's threshold, came as close as any human to cracking through to those four shorthand semaphores. Then, for years, he went under. Slowly, astonishingly, as Franklin and I watched, he awakened. Now, stripped of content, he was gone.

What did it mean, "went down admirably": resisting or acquiescing? And what possible difference could it make to me now? Dr. Ressler was dead. No shock, not technically. Given his disease, he wasted and died per timetable. But, backwater organism, I'm no good at abstraction. A lifetime of practice unmade in a minute. And I learn again, in my nerve endings, that information is never the same as knowledge.

Today in History

I met him in ignorance, a day into autumn of 1982. Another half year passed before I learned his name. I pinpoint the date through the Event Calendar, one of those well-meaning services I supervise daily for an indifferent audience. Research, edit, type, and list for the consumption of the dabbling public what, if anything, happened today in the past, ignoring the contradiction in terms. For five years I've posted the day's event, finding exactly the right bite-sized fact to feed the public library patron. Five years times fifty weeks times five days is 1,250 daily facts. The public librarian's knocking out of the weekly cantata. Something to do. Until today.

The race is constantly sneaking up to something: space shots, cathedrals, mill strikes, expeditions, inventions, air disasters, revolutions, epochally indecisive battles, world-shaking books, commercial upheavals, pogroms, putsches, treaties. A few sources provide enough grist for every day of the solar mill for years to come. If I'd ever run out, the human activity since I began hunting would have carried me through at least another year. I never fell back on birthdates of famous people, cheating in my book. I still have on file every Event I ever posted. After five years, my selections blend into a reference work in their own right. Years after my first run-in with the ex-scientist, putting together the stray pieces, I can look up the particular notice that caused the Franciscan of 4th Street to break down and — against character — address a perfect stranger. I arrived at the library early enough one September in '82 to pick, type, and post the item within fifteen minutes of the branch opening for business:

Today in History

September 26

In 1918, after four years of total war, the Allies launch an offensive along the Western Front that will break the Hindenburg Line. Two weeks later, World War I formally ends on the eleventh hour of the eleventh day of the eleventh month. The following year, touring the U.S. to drum up support for the new League of Nations, Wood-row Wilson collapses with his first incapacitating stroke. With him collapses any hope for the League.

I have the provoking entry here in front of me. As I pinned it to the board, a hand chopped me on the clavicle. I fell back at the capacitance, thinking that someone had stuck me with a knife. I now know that the man had gone so long without touching that his muscles had simply forgotten how light a tap need be to attract attention. I turned to see a figure shorter than average, small-framed, with a beautiful, skeletal face and skin resisting the sag of age. His forehead arced down into thin nose cartilage, and his lower lip shaded indistinctly into a long chin. Had he not been anemic, his crew cut might have made him an astronaut. His extraordinary moist eyes monitored me with the soft hurt of animals, encouraging me to say the worst. He seemed not to blink, like a camp refugee or feebleminded ward of state.