Richard Powers - Gold Bug Variations

"You know my lovely wife Eva." Ressler wobbles his neck. "You've met," Blake insists. "Ulrich's. Stuart, you'll never believe this. We just discovered it ourselves, in fact. We live under the same damn roof."

Ressler is lost in the vistas of figurative speech. Eva explains, "You know, K-53-A? The other end of the triplex?"

Blake takes up the slack. "Luck of the draw, huh? So Evie and I found this here bottle___" He holds it up, as if the label might persuade the fellow to let them in.

Stuart pulls himself together. "I'm afraid I haven't bought a welcome mat yet, so you'll have to take my word for it." This the Blakes do, with easy style.

Within minutes, Tooney has the Summer Slumber Party on the player, watching in fascination as Eva does a wonderful one-step imitation of Olga, the plastic spindle ballerina. In no time, the two of them have done Stuart's week of dirty dishes, singing descant to those teenage death songs the whole while, even getting the boy to kick in on the choruses. They graduate to the Wagner excerpts. "Ah, the hero's motif," Tooney says. "Just the tune to welcome young geniuses to town." Ressler reads the text on his tennis shoes. Inspired by the musical Siegfried line, the Blakes crack open the Riesling. Tooney proposes a toast: "May your stay here be filled with significant insights."

Noticing the empty space in the living room where a sofa should be, Eva protests. "You poor boy. Have you been sitting on the floor all this time? We've an extra one, don't we, Toon?" Shamefaced at being caught with more sofas than her share. "Don't say anything! It's yours on permanent loan."

Pointless for him to protest. Something in Eva's extreme generosity toward a total stranger — pointless, pathetically trusting— moves him to accept. Before he knows what's happening, the three of them dash down the barrack row and begin moving furniture in the Blakes' parlor. "Shhh," they giggle. "Don't wake the kid." They spring the spare sofa, trundle it across the lawns of K-53 in the middle of the night, laughing hilariously and daring all Stadium Terrace to mistake them for sofa burglars.

As they lever the beast through his door, Ressler realizes he will be twenty-six in a few days, too old for discoveries of consequence. He has done nothing to advance the project, to locate the approach that will systematically decipher nucleic acid. The three of them, gasping for breath, position the sofa to fill up as much empty space as possible and then plunk themselves down on it, exhausted. A failure, he is forced back on the compromise of companionship.

They find a deck of cards hiding in the crack between the back and cushions. "Little Margaret's been playing hide-the-folks'-stuff again." Tooney and Eva teach him to play pinochle, a game whose payoff matrices would soon addict him but for one shortcoming: the play of the cards contains no progression, no development. Each hand, no matter the outcome, leaves the play of the next unchanged.

Eva, giddy with wine and aces around, waxes astonished over the playing cards. "These things are amazing. Glossy, washable, every one different. There's a miracle for you. What are these made out of? Not paper, surely. Soybeans? You scientists are always making things out of soybeans."

Ressler cannot resist these two. He talks with Tooney, the only other human capable of conversing about RNA templates while the Valkyries skip their way up the slopes of Valhalla. Eva fascinates Ressler as well. Undeniably attractive, Eva possesses skills that can only be called freakish. The three of them sit outside in Ressler's favorite spot; the Blakes instantly adapt to the lawn-chair routine. The couple drink their wine and Ressler his tomato juice, with just a smidgin — make that two-thirds of a dollop — of wine at Eva's insistence. On the lawn, Blake pressures his wife to roll out her mental arsenal.

He asks Ressler to supply two pieces of paper and two pens. "Now, talk to her about anything you want, and I'll do the same." Ressler describes an article on partial overlap he has just read. At the same time, Blake babbles in her other ear about the weather, Wagner, how fine a neighbor they've discovered. Eva, a pen per hand, takes simultaneous dictation on separate sheets, without garbling a word. Right-ear stream with left hand and vice versa.

Knocked out already, Ressler learns there is more. "Give her a sentence," Blake urges. "Nice and long." Ressler reaches back, performs a mental feat of his own, and pulls up from God knows where a favorite quote. Flaubert, from days when he could still afford belles lettres: "Some fatal attraction draws me into the abyss of thought, down into those innermost recesses which never cease to fascinate the strong."

Without a pause, Eva responds, "Strong the fascinate to cease never which recesses innermost…." It takes him a moment to figure out what is going on. The whole stream, backwards.

Unbelievable. A living palindromist. "We could use you in codon transcription." For all they know, the gene might be read in either direction, both at once, for that matter. Who knows what golden patterns this woman could mine?

Eva laughs, fetchingly shy again after her bravura feat. "I've already got a job."

"Who could possibly make proper use of you?"

Tooney breaks out laughing. Eva joins him, managing to explain, "I work for the Civil Service. Processing job applications. You two think you have a coding problem on your hands. You ought to see ours."

"Let 'er rip," Blake chuckles. "What's the code for 'Changed Jobs'?"

"Let's see….Applicant Changed Jobs — five point seven E."

"How about 'Retired'?"

"Easy one. That'd be five point eight I."

"Now then. How about illness?"

"Terminal?"

"Heck, why not. Live it up."

"Name your disease."

"Try cancer."

"More specific, please."

"Leukemia."

"We give that a six point six Q."

"Q? How in hell do they get Q from 'leukemia'?"

"My dear husband. There is no wherefore to the Service."

"Radiation sickness?"

"Still in committee. We lump that into seven point oh, your basic 'Deceased.'" The Blakes break off their vaudeville, noticing the unintended effect on the audience. Ressler has gone silent, the glow of the corner streetlight unmistakably glinting off his ambushed cheeks. He feels, for the first time, his mother's status, something in the 6.6 range. She died three years back, while he was in grad school. The details of the woman's decline are intact in memory; only the nightmare of not being able to name what was happening remained lost until this evening, the evening the U.S. fires its first rocket-powered atomic warhead due west of this improvised lawn party, in the empty sands of Nevada.

Only five months between diagnosis and death. He took a leave from studies to go home and sit with her through a pain that she preferred to the alternative bouts of annihilating fatigue. His role was to sit and assure her of the great strides medicine was making at that moment. He would tell her, day after day, as her hips wasted to grotesque ripples, that the most important thing was to fight the malignancy and live for the outside shot. Mind as medicine: no other course. Deny the numbers. Cancer lives for the onset of common sense. Reconcile yourself to it, and it wins.

A nursing more for his sake than the dying woman's, obsessed, all the way up to the final metastasis, with proving that mental function did not altogether dissipate, was not dispersed by illness and treatment. That she was preserved inside somewhere. "Read anything today, Mom?" he would lead. "Well, yes I have," she would answer, with a weak smile hinting at the miracle of deception. He never asked for specifics.

He does not hear the Blakes stop their routine. He is elsewhere, thinking how he used to sit with her on the front porch, just like this, late in the evening, not daring to hold her hand, while she said unexplainable things about the effects of her illness on perception. "Who would believe what this place sounds like? I had no idea nature made so much noise."