Richard Powers - Gold Bug Variations

The joke incriminates him. Hypocrite: how did he fail to see in himself the same persuasion, the old blessed are those who have not seen?

Cook's Tour

On August 20 I committed myself to leaving, putting together a portfolio of the day's restlessness. I began my travelogue in 1597: Dutch East India Company ships return to Europe with word of a remarkable voyage. Germ cell of the modern world, its commerce craze, engine of expansion. I added Bering's arrival in Alaska in 1741, precisely the moment — bizarre anachronism — when Bach unravels his Goldbergs. Another 173 years later, the Panama Canal's first week of business opens a short cut between worlds. The day of exploration seemed a cornucopia expressly for my use.

In fact, the date was nothing special. On any calendar page, exploration rolls out anniversaries on demand: take every location on the globe that produced a recorded first encounter and divide by 365. Each day approximates what it means to need to be forever someplace other than here. Faces pressed to the glass of cabs, a summer freight's lapsed, transfigured blast, autumn attic-rattling, the furious slam of screens in back-door disappearance. Departure was easy, commonplace, everyday.

I'd signed on for the full ride. August 20, after my shift was done and the foreign legion was just punching in, I showed up on the doorstep of the converted warehouse and buzzed to be let in. I'd discovered no more about Dr. Ressler in the interim. Harder to prove a thing's absence than its existence. But in the run of time, the evidence adds up. His work had clearly come to nothing. He had produced nothing of consequence that had entered the permanent record, at least the record I wasted weeks sifting.

His non-work began to infect mine. Life science made raids on events of the day, colored my choice of quotes. He and self-appointed sidekick Todd used my Question Board to settle running disputes — everything from that calculation about the degree of our isolation in deep space to "How far did Goebbels get with Katherine Anne Porter when they dated in the thirties?" They used the forum to communicate with each other, with me, and with a public that never wrote them, put it to work for everything from Todd's private joke about making the catch to Ressler's request for the name, lost to one of the rare failings of his memory, of the tendency of languages to become simpler — to drop inflectional cases and consolidate. I proudly produced, without revealing my footwork: A: Syncretism. The board became their private tin-can telephone, although I never saw Ressler inside the branch. He must have been by regularly, but either he calculated his visits to avoid my shift or he perfected invisibility in public.

As I learned his story, I continued to steal his quotes for my own use. Even as we set in motion our own small act of code-breaking, I posted extracts from that Poe story, the one that marked for him the bewildering human propensity for metaphor. "Circumstances and a certain bias of mind," says the cryptographer of "The Gold Bug," a coded persona of his inventor, "have led me to take interest in such riddles, and it may well be doubted whether human ingenuity can construct an enigma of the kind that human ingenuity may not, by proper application, resolve." I posted this on August 21, the day after meeting Dr. Ressler for real. Although we had exchanged only a few paragraphs, my head still spun on his long, periodic sentences, the sense underneath.

I told Tuckwell I was going out that evening with a couple of friends who were in town. The old rot about half-truth being better than whole lies. Keith was so relieved at not having to throw our apartment open to a night of reminiscence that he didn't even ask who the friends were. He gave me a blank check for the evening. I had the warehouse address and a standing invitation. I needed only walk a few streets from the branch and satisfy my curiosity, answer my questions for once. The nondescript reddish-brown building was flanked by two sooty, brick, cliff walls, gullies where sunlight would not shine again until all buildings fell. It was fronted on the alley side by loading docks. On the street, story-length stone-trimmed windows filled with uncooperative darkness. From the outside, it was one of those mildewed, permanently For Let places, countless late-nineteenth-century brick rectangles that I no longer noticed after my second day in the city. I thought: They've lost the deed to this place. No one owns it. A forgotten tract squeezed between forgotten tracts, stuffed floor to ceiling with wooden files from a hundred years ago, papers slowly ammoniat-ing. Nothing could have been further from the truth. In bland buildings with concrete cornices, everything is decided.

I peeked inside the first-floor turret. I could see nothing through the smoky quartz and iron bars. In front of the main door, I scoured the buttons until I found the suitably corporate monogram MOL— Manhattan On-Line. "You can remember the name," Todd had told me over the phone, "because we're not in Manhattan and we're not on-line." I debated a last time and pressed the bell. After a second, a tinny transcription of Todd's voice came over the intercom. "Friend or foe?"

"Do I have a choice?" I heard either static or his laugh, followed by the magic buzz. I grabbed the door at the tone's order, and climbed the stairs in the half-dark. At the top of the first flight, following the quaintest layout imaginable, the stairs petered out and presented an accordion-grated service-elevator shaft, the only way higher. It violated all zoning ordinances. I pressed what passed for a summons button. Cables tensed like a surprised nest of bush-masters and a counterweight sluggishly unwound. Several seconds later, the elevator — little more than an open cage with forty-watt bulb strung through the ceiling — sallied down into sight.

The antiquated grate made a noise like an enraged myna. I took my life in my hands and entered. On the way up, I had to yank a cast-iron dial crank back and forth in its semicircle to keep the lurching car in ascent. Just as I was sure a cable was about to snap, a man's voice echoed down the shaft telling me to stop at the next landing. I eased the throttle and cruised to a halt. I'd entered the car from the north. The box's exit, however, lay to the east. To leave the deathtrap, I had to open a perpendicular grate, revealing a period-piece, dented, lead-alloy door with frosted chicken-wire glass — the non-windows once ubiquitous in office buildings. Todd's silhouette on the other side called out, "Ya gotta kick it." I did. The door swung open on a turn-of-the-century anthology of alcoves, now a functionless reception area, Manhattan On-Line being one of those businesses that never received. The dozen subdivided walls were of assorted glass, multicolored brick, and an afterthought of stucco.

"Ms. O'Deigh," Todd greeted me with a formality that might have been mock. He shook my hand as if we were execs meeting over power brunch. Every time out with this fellow was starting from scratch. "Terrific you've come. I've got so much to show you." Absolutely unreadable. He led us down the hall to a restraining door. He punched a code into the electronic lock, and we entered a blazing fluorescence reminiscent of fifties science fiction. Behind massive plate safety glass, several thousand square feet of room stood in the pallid postindustrial shimmer of night shift. The space, once tall, was now wedged between false floor and drop ceiling. The room shone as bright as daylight but with minute, maddening, near-imperceptible flickers.

Machines took hold in every niche of the place, devices in no way mechanical-looking. Beautiful expanses of metal and plastic, each enclosed in seductively homogeneous chitin of earth tones and ochers, formed a ring around the room as secret and monolithic as Stonehenge. Todd conducted a Grand Tour, mapping the layout. The world outside this nineteenth-century masonry held no sway here, so self-defining was this fluorescent, windowless aura. Todd took me to a console, where he issued a command to a keyboard, the rites of an inner circle closed to the uninitiated.