Richard Powers - Gold Bug Variations

Separately, the three of us relearned that truth more times than I thought a body capable. If Dr. Ressler lamented the commercialization of science, he despaired even more over the science of commerce. He told us of legislation that had come before the 85th Congress in the wake of the Civil Rights Bill — the White Coat Ruling. In the few years that it took sponsors to bail out of radio's Official Detective in favor of TV's Name That Tune they'd developed a trick that threatened the public's ability to discriminate. Advertisers found they could dramatically boost sales of just about anything by having a man in glasses and white coat hold it up for view. Weed killer, rubber tires, lipstick: a few Erlenmeyer flasks in the background, and a sales pitch became news.

A well-meaning legislator decided that blind trust was, like Robeson and Oppenheimer, a national security risk. He introduced a measure that would require every televised commercial where someone held up anything that bubbled or doodled anything resembling trig on a chalkboard to bear the caption "A Simulation." The difficulty in the bill lay in the shadiness of implication in the first place. Commercials worked because actors never came out and said, "I'm a scientist." Credentials were left to the audience to infer. If the bill passed, opponents reasoned, any endorsers who donned a smock of any kind would have to prove they weren't simulating. "It's one thing to legislate on poultry, race relations, and atomic energy," Ressler said, with that tightening of mouth muscles that passed for irony. "But legislating inference is another matter. Simulation beats legislation nine falls out of ten."

He remembered the insignificant bill with the precision that locked his half century into his brain. As he tossed off thirty-year-old details with accuracy, I felt I'd gladly suffer aphasia at fifty for a few decades of that memory. "They passed an invitation around Illinois, asking for expert witnesses to fly to Washington. They wanted white coats to sell the bill to the legislators! None of us volunteered, of course. I imagine your generation is too sophisticated to realize what a betrayal of calling it would have been then to attempt to legislate thinking. The bill eventually passed, but did nothing to stop the human mind from reifying every conceivable sales pitch." All things must be possible. And all possible things are real.

It hurt, listening to him, to think he never wrote anything but that little sampler, that one article giving so little glimmer of who he could be in speech. Starting with a Resslerism, I would search for a simulation for my day's quote:

If we saw as much of the world as we do not see, we should be aware, in all probability, of a perpetual multiplication and variation of forms.

I used Montaigne to obliquely acknowledge that Ressler aphorism, from deep in a night's simulated conversation, too disturbing to post publicly as news, about how we differ more from ourselves than we do from one another.

Countercheck Quarrelsome

In weeks, he has struck an acquaintance with everyone on the team. Only Ulrich, like all effective leaders, remains aloof. Strange: Ressler actually enjoys the person he becomes in the company of his colleagues. He drops without thinking into a different personality with each — sardonic father to Lovering's brashness, clowning younger brother to Blake and Eva, sympathetic cousin to Woyty's low-grade paralysis, and child craftsman to Botkin's omnivorous intellect. With Cyfer's last member, Jeanette Koss, he somehow falls into awkward reserve. Not his ordinary, comfortable quiet, but incapacitating self-consciousness. Irritating to him and certainly confusing to the woman, who has gone out of her way to be pleasant.

It isn't her attractiveness that puts him off. Jeanette's features are not the sort that have ever threatened him. Her curves tend toward a topographical fullness he associates with varsity cheerleaders and nursing mothers. Those women who came closest to causing his own college coursework to suffer typically ran toward the homeless waif: You Can Save This Girl or You Can Turn the Page. The taste may be consanguine, but was certainly in place before his mother was reduced to terminal spindliness by her 6.6.

To date, he has chosen to turn the page rather than save, although nights in the bunk in Stadium Terrace, in half-sleep, he regrets not having run the proffered experiment with a meager waif or two. These private nostalgias of desire reassure him that the clumsy cadences he suffers in random lab encounters with Dr. Koss are neither ugly nor unnecessarily indicting. He can't be hot for her. Not in so many words.

Yet it burns him to know nothing, to be in the dark about her except for the public-domain data that she is married and a few years his senior. He spends the first weekend in September raking up something substantive on her. Pickings are slim. He begs the superannuated department secretary on invented pretext to let him browse the staff files, but she will release no information without triplicate request from God.

He runs into Dr. Koss in the staff lunchroom. She smiles awkwardly at him over her coffee cup. "Keeping the head dry?" To collect himself, he smiles back, pretends to be looking for someone, and leaves. Shortly after, at a colloquium where she delivers a lucid contribution on punctuation theory, he thinks to address her in the hall, ask for clarification. But he falls back instead on skepticism: she could reveal nothing that experiment wouldn't expose more fully. He collars Blake, the closest thing he has to a confidant in the Midwest. "Dr. Toon. What do you make of the Koss comma-free code?"

"First-rate," Blake answers, grinning quizzically. "You?"

Too obvious an audit trail. Ressler swears off direct questioning and takes to the stacks. By summer's end, he has gotten adept at caterwauling down the catwalks, and the stink of binding paste no longer distracts him. He digs up her dissertation: "Simple Non-pathogenic Autosomal Mutations." He settles in for an evening with her apprentice piece. The woman describes some interesting mutagen manipulation. But the paper, while professional, contains little further interest beyond her education (Wesleyan and Cornell) and date of birth, February 14, 1929—St. Valentine's Day massacre.

A thorough search of the journals turns up references to her as coauthor on those Illinois publications Ressler already read before hitting campus. He falls back on the biographical compilations in the Reference Room, but turns up only her sterile university profile. By chance, he finds a mention of her husband in the Local Interest area: a praise-laden entry on Koss, Herbert, in a chapbook, Who's Who Around and About C-U.

The fellow is a chemical engineer, a leader in local food technology. His chief contribution to the spiral of ingestibility: a superior method of getting the barbecue powder to stick to potato chips. The chapbook reports his guarded optimism on work toward a chip that will always come out of the bag intact. Their typical dinner conversation is too bizarre to consider. Battle Creek, the spoonful of frozen OJ, will never be the same.

Printed matter alone will not solve his Koss-word puzzle. As a result of killing a day and a half reading her thesis, he is unprepared to report on the article he's been assigned for the next Blue Sky. Ulrich calls on him to deliver. Ressler sputters; for the first time ever — as far back as first grade, when his teacher let him take over her abortive lesson on the language of bee dancing — he has come to class unprepared. He can admit to not having read the article, blowing his short-term credibility and profiting the team nothing. Or, knowing what he does about the authors' previously published research, the state of the art, and the article abstract, he can extrapolate a reasonable opinion. Not intellectual fraud, just the increasingly necessary short cut up the print mountain.