Richard Powers - Gold Bug Variations

Todd rushed to assure me, "That's the nicest thing I've ever heard this old man say to anyone." But I wasn't at all embarrassed. And neither, it seemed, was the old man.

The instant we assembled in the hall, as if counting the seconds since his last, Dr. Ressler offered us cigarettes, which we both refused. "Am I the only one of this suspect group with an oral fixation?" He smoked, inhaling pensively and catching the ashes in a fastidiously cupped hand. It was by then the middle of the night. No one seemed in any hurry to ruin the rare visit with something so inexact as conversation. At last Dr. Ressler smiled at me. I can recreate that grin perfectly: laconic, amused, mixing its passive enjoyment with a particle of despair. The smile of a mathematician who cannot decide if his latest calculation presents him with a near-tautology of has plunged him into the heart of the enigma. "So how do you two come to know one another?"

I didn't dare look at Todd. Half a dozen near-truths passed through my head, but I missed the beat necessary to pull off a plausible lie. "He came to me and asked me to look you up."

Ressler's already high hairline moved higher as he smiled. "So the fellow said himself, although not nearly so forthrightly." He finished his smoke and motioned for us to wait while he discarded the remains in a nearby commode. As he returned, the shrunken figure was picking lint off of his suit coat. "I'm not sure what anyone could possibly find to be interested in. I've had no historical import." It seemed the wrong place to argue the point, yet something in my reading had convinced me that the world of scientific research was one continuous, shifting, interdependent event, an event still encompassing him.

I can't remember exactly how I phrased the question; I probably bungled it. I was unable to make a decent sentence in his company, so self-conscious did his parts of speech jumping through hoops make me. But hook or crook, standing in the deserted hall, the Goldbergs no longer audible through the control-room door, I asked what had happened to strand him here. He pulled at the skin around his eyes; maybe I'd miscalculated in believing the admiration for bluntness he professed. But when he answered, it was again with that look of bemused pleasure. "Science lost its calm." He extended an arm, palm up, in a gesture indicating the renovated warehouse, Brooklyn, the entire maze of current events the meek were condemned to inherit. "And as Poe long ago pointed out, cryptography begins at home."

With that, he excused himself; the machines were calling. He hoped I would drop by again. "He doesn't deserve it, but give this young man the benefit of the doubt." Ressler: if anything, more mysterious in person than in the elliptical accounts. The riddle the young scientist had once faced — how a four-letter chemical language could describe all life — was more opaque now than when it had sent him empty away. The only thing the visit told me was why Todd so urgently wanted to turn up this man.

By next morning I'd checked out Poe. I too wondered whether human ingenuity could construct an enigma that human ingenuity could not resolve. Yet the detective in me, a hardcover strain crossbred with hardy paperback perennial, was stumped by Ressler's ingenuity in displaying himself to us without revealing a thing. I rephrased Poe'S dictum: It may well be doubted if genetic ingenuity can construct an enigma that genetic ingenuity may not resolve. His genetic code, the gradual accretion of living molecular language, had created itself out of free association. Everything derived from it, all successive mutations, recombinations, crossings over— fish in the ocean, eels in the sea, a thousand Darwinian finches, every researcher, Todd and I, Ressler himself, all natural history were elaborate permutations on an original four-base message. The young scientist left in this gaunt body was himself a product of the code he'd been after, the code that couldn't keep itself hidden from itself.

I took his paradox apart from every direction. Against my policy of not repeating sources, I hit "The Gold Bug" twice over:

In the present case — indeed in all cases of secret writing — the first question regards the language of the cipher…. In general, there is no alternative but experiment (directed by probabilities) of every tongue known to him who attempts the solution, until the true one can be obtained.

There lay the rub; the language of Ressler's enigma was the genetic code, organic chemistry, well-understood forces. Ressler had known all that; the work of generations of whitecoats had identified the idiom the secret writing was written in. But there the man was, at the end of his working life, empty-handed, high and dry, alone at night in a dark room lit only by CRTs requiring as much attention as wetting infants.

The code he was after was not so much a message written in a language as all grammar itself. I felt that with my first good look at his wasted face, his intelligent eyes that resigned themselves to courteous elegance. The old vocabulary of research and exploration, the whole poetics of science still poured from the man's mouth in rolling, perfect paragraphs.

At work, the routine that had taken me into adulthood came up short. I did not want my life. I wanted another thing, an analogy. I wanted to read Poe, all Poe. I wanted to read science, the history of science. I wanted to be back with those two men, listening to the language of isolation they spoke to one another. Half a dozen sentences, and I was fixed. Was any grammar sufficiently strong to translate the inner grammar of another? Did anything in the cell, in the code itself, actually know the code? I needed to win this man's confidence, to ask him as much. To ask him how he had guessed I'd wanted, once, to be a dancer.

Todd had said to call him anytime. I did, in the middle of the afternoon a few days later. "Oh God, I forgot. I woke you."

"No, no," he lied groggily. "There's something I've been wanting to ask you forever."

"We answer anything."

"What is the origin of the phrase 'Make the catch'?" Half-conscious silliness: repeating the question, reproducing the round he pretended to ask about. Clear dalliance, an open invitation to come again, that evening if I wanted. I had passed the audition. I needed no further lure. I could sit in that soundproof control room behind the one-way glass, savoring the banter of people who understood the scary unlikelihood of speech. I laughed something back at Franklin; hard to say which of us led the flirtation walk. A step-ladder catch, second voice identical, only higher. He chases her until she catches him.

The Nightly News

Ressler accepts Botkin's standing invitation to eat with her. Food's gone by the boards too long. Over venison or Duck a l'Orange, they might even make headway on a coding angle. The elder woman's mind is first-rate; if her science isn't up to the minute, it's the fault of the discipline's runaway proliferation, not her ability to grasp essentials. He himself can't understand more than three of five articles, even in those journals devoted to his narrow specialty. He becomes a regular at her table, benefiting more than just nutritionally. Botkin too seems fond of the chance for conversation. Odd thing: talk's no good alone.

By day he frequents her office, the single place on campus providing that balance between attention and escape necessary to concentrate. Over decades, Botkin has perfected her digs. A heavy oak panel obscures the pea-green steam pipes, and lace curtains, white embroidery on white, meliorate the industrial frosted glass. University-issue khaki bookcases against one wall house journal indexes, meticulously aligned, going back into forties antiquity. Across from these shelves stands another case, a varnished turn-of-the-century hardwood masterpiece. It holds editions of Werfel, Mann, Musil, essays by Benjamin and Adorno, and other suspect tomes from the soft sciences. The spines alone qualify some as minor triumphs of decorative art. Ressler likes to heft these, examine the marbled paper. He is entranced, too, by other items on the shelf: molding Furtwängler platters older than he is, pressed, to his delight, on one side only. "So did this man collaborate?"