Richard Powers - Gold Bug Variations

I was about to give the same, daily nonresponse I gave Tuckwell when, stopped by a sardonic crook to his face, I caught on. I returned the look, saying, "Spanish Civil War on the brink of breaking out, 1936. Goldwater wins GOP nomination, 1964. Apollo/ Soyuz, 1975."

He beamed. "You're so predictable."

I shook my hair loose and sat down. "You know, I haven't even met you properly and already I don't like you."

"The pleasure's mutual, I'm sure." His face broke out in all the muted possibilities of the opening game. "You are extraordinary." He gave the long word an extra syllable, intoning it with the same converted skepticism he had given his measurement of my beauty. "But you suffer from this terrible twentieth-century bias."

"It's not a bias. Most of what has happened happened in the last hundred years. Any newsworthy July day is probably recent."

"I see. Current events, like traffic, increasingly clogged until one day soon some old guy's going to pull out of his garage in Iowa and poof: universal gridlock." He ordered for both of us, issuing instructions throughout the meal: "Squeeze the lemon like this. Let the taste sit on the back of your tongue while you think of Mardi Gras." The imperatives carried the inbred, dictatorial drive of males — the hand in the small of the back they always use to steer the weaker vessel. But something else in his voice too: inappropriate enthusiasm for experience that needed sharing. Franklin in no way passed for a gourmet. He sniffed the Tabasco cap and made me do likewise. "Most expedient sinus recipe known to man." He did not preach good taste so much as enjoyment. "Cut this end off. Swirl it first before dunking." Expertise acquired over long trial and error, offered up now to save me the bother of the learning curve. It amused me, his assuming I'd never eaten food before. He had the ingenuous pleasure of a novice who sees in everyone a new initiate.

We paid and left. Coming out to the street, turning into the Sidewalk tide, he took my hand and shook it enthusiastically, as if I'd been a far more entertaining guest than I had been. I was supposed to remember only this round, erase the unpleasant undertone of the first. I asked where he was headed. "My night off. Back home to the Butter and Eggs."

"You live in Manhattan? What were you doing at our branch?"

"Research."

"/ was doing the research. You were humming to yourself, as I remember."

"There's a difference?" He smiled and left.

Another week went by before Franklin turned up again. I was cleaning out the Question Submission Box. To the query "I want to buy a microwave oven. Are they safe?" I knew both the desired answer and informed opinion. I'd been asked the question often, and I easily delivered the unimpeachable stats, adding at the bottom of my response, "Most reports concerning cooked human kidneys are urban legend." Number two was "What is the formula for figuring compound interest?" or something as trivial. "Trivial," I knew, derived from trivium, any junction of three Roman roads, where your basic whores hung out. I gave the formula with no editorial comment.

But the third note had been left for no one's but my eyes. It was in the same anonymous typewriting as the one about making the catch. Todd had never had any intention of disappearing. He meant to water me with a steady stream of far-ranging, restless demands for answers for every imaginable issue, however far from hand.

Q: My friend and I (neither a crackpot in the ordinary sense) are in the middle of an ongoing argument that we'd like you to clear up. What is the possibility that we will someday communicate with life on other planets?

F.T., 7/19

I laughed out loud to read it. I spent the remaining afternoon answering as if this were itself an anonymous hello from deep space. Not that it took that long to compose my answer. I lingered, let myself down the luxury of unrelated alleys, the side paths research always opens up when one pays attention. The encyclopedia's country lanes.

A: Serious scientific estimates about the possibility of contacting life on other planets are based on the Drake or Green Bank formula:

N = R fg * nchz * f1 * f1 * f1 * L

where N = number of technical civilizations, R = rate of star formation, fg = fraction of stars with planets, nch2 = number of planets that are habitable, f, = fraction of these developing life, f1 = fraction of these developing intelligent life, f, = fraction of these with communications technology, and L = length of attempted communication. Of course, the equation says nothing about the values of the terms. Guesses for these are hotly debated, resulting in estimates for the number of intelligent civilizations in our galaxy ranging as high as 100,000 and as low as zero. After a quarter century of listening for messages from unknown galactic neighbors, all scientists have yet heard is a very imposing silence. Finding an intelligent signal would immediately present the enormous problem of how to respond. A two-line dialogue between sentient planets could take centuries; our great-great-great-grandchildren would have to remember what we said in order to make sense of the reply, assuming they could make human sense of nonhuman words. It is hard to say which would be more sobering: to hear someone answer our "Are you there?" with "Yes," or to learn that the whole experiment lies entirely in our hands.

Of course, the real question was not whether intelligent life existed elsewhere in the universe but whether there was intelligent life on Earth. Still, I delighted in my answer, knowing who was asking. He meant to let me know that I could hear from deep space if I wanted to. The two of them would enter and reenter my life, persistent, transposed, inverted, retrograde, spread through different voicings, announcing themselves in all contexts for every reason, sounding the capricious, cantabile motive as often as I let them.

Three answers in one day was a good haul by any standard; most people don't arrive at three definitive answers in a lifetime. And I had accomplished all three in the interstices, between the other duties demanded by one of the NYPL's sixty Brooklyn franchises. True, I had also fielded the routine phone calls: armchair investors too lazy to get off their A-ratings and read their own Value Lines, high school kids asking for a definition of S-O-D-O-M-Y (tape machine audible in the background), the bewildered citizens who'd crawled out of their paneled dens to request the names of senators. Those, plus the archiving, inventorying, and maintenance work, the box-piling tasks that monopolize existence.

But three for the fait accompli file: in that I took considerable fisherman's pride.

Back home, I found my POSSLQ — Person of Opposite Sex Sharing Living Quarters — hard at work on a campaign alerting the public to a major dental development that would, like the Great Wall of China, provide the long-sought security of Tartar Control. As I fell into the front room, Keithy asked cheerily, "So what'd she do all day?" For the first time all day, I was stumped. Coming at the end of the stack, this seemed less question than request for intimacy. And intimacy was no longer mine to give. I flopped on the couch, undid some buttons, and capitulated. The candy dish stood in for dinner. I listened to Keithy insult mankind for my amusement. "Looky here. You hate this photo? How about this text? Totally humiliating? Good. I think we've got a wiener, here."

Lying slack, I thought of something my mother said, the first and only time she ever came out from Indiana to visit me. "This is not a city," she sneered in utter distaste for the place I'd chosen as home. "This is a country. A world." I was new here myself then, and thought she was right. Precisely the reason I had come here to live. A country, a world, large enough to lose oneself in. Now I roused myself enough to look out of the front picture window onto the East River, a stunning view that cost Keith and me half our income. On the far side, the fanfare of lights, the community that was slowly killing us. From where I lay I could see my mother's error. Nothing stood between me and the insane compression of midtown. No moat, no ad-campaign misanthropy could shut out the runaway numbers, the gang rape of the place.