Richard Powers - Gold Bug Variations

In the critical minute under the arc lights, Ressler decides that, Schrödinger notwithstanding, not talking about what he can't know doesn't in this instance preclude his talking about what he doesn't. He'll take a closer look at the article later that afternoon; if it should turn out that he's off base, he can give out his reconsidered opinion at the next session. Science is about reconsidering, revising one's position in the light of more light. He takes a breath. The description comes out easier than he thought. "I would say, tentatively, that we don't have to concern ourselves too much here with the Litner group's angle. It's ingenious in making the magic numbers fit; they get twenty out of four all right, but___ Well, I think they may be overlooking a few stereochemical constraints."

"For instance?" Ulrich looks up from scribbling, suddenly interested, choosing the worst possible moment to sit up and take notice. That's why Ulrich's in charge. Not because of the importance of his early work, but because of his intellectual aggression. Attentive, noisy, blunt: all dominant genes. The team leader hasn't shown half so much interest in Ressler's rate experiment as he shows in this almost irrelevant paper.

Ressler goes into a controlled stall. "I'd like another look at the piece before I commit, but—" The whole team's attention is now alerted by that most expressive musical device, the rest. "Well, for instance… the article seems to me to be sidetracked on a code that isn't even colinear."

"Really?" An unexpected vocal timbre chimes in. "That's not how I read the principal thrust at all." A voice as mellifluous as a mortician's. He turns from his lame chalkboard illustration to see who could be so intent on sautéing him in public. The ID is more confirmation than discovery.

"Of course, if Dr. Koss can translate Litner's prose back into English, she's a better man than I."

The room, at a cusp of embarrassment, finds outlet in that remnant of violence, laughter. Lovering, nervous as the day Ulrich threw Salk in his stigmata, leads the way, letting loose a full-blooded cackle. Toveh Botkin, on the other hand, purses the notch above her lip crease, grim but forgiving the entire catalog of human failings. The deep-set, brown amusement of Dr. Koss's eyes flashes explicit warning: forced the issue? Gotten what you want?

Despite narrow escape, the incident humiliates him. In a few sentences, he has fallen monumentally in his own sight, if not in peer estimation. He wants only to quit this place, escape everyone, go punish himself. Succumbed to ridiculous, avoidable boy's self-deception. It disgusts him to replay the incident. Shame is not acid enough to eradicate it. Work is ruined for the remainder of the day. He smells his own unmistakable animal odor. Yes, those most capable of making some noise in the world are precisely those with the greatest capacity for shrugging off sin, for distributing their felonies sympathetically across the whole hinged circumstance of shameful existence. But in the face of his own weakness, he cannot see how to do it. The shame of false witness mars his perfect record, debases his currency. Misrepresentation of the facts: no more forgivable for being mundane. An indelible blot on the transcript: a Fail, invalidating all good faith.

Even by evening, he cannot shake the afternoon libel. He probes the ugly truth compulsively, unable to keep from picking at the wound. Far from salved by knowing how little consequence his minor lie carries, he is doubly appalled by how little it took to make him lose his head. How little it would have taken to come clean, to ask for an absolution it would now shame him worse to go after.

Forgiveness requires not that he forget the crime but that he remember every other shame from his swelling past: the shoplifted library book, the violated confidence of a friend, the broken crockery deceptively reassembled and left to break again at the next, innocent touch. Seamy little mazes of shame, not even respectably bourgeois, more disgusting for their avoidable pettiness. He nurses the catalog, above all, this afternoon's grubby appendix. Contemptible desire to represent himself well. How much easier it would be to preempt the lie, come clean. And yet — the heart of the shame — he still could not, even now, if the whole scenario were his to correct, bring himself to reveal the real reason for his lack of preparation: I was digging up the goods on Mrs. Koss. Not even a matter of momentarily fouling the facts. He can't even bring himself to look at his motive in mucking about, much less confess it to others in good faith. He has shit on the truth.

An even more indicting memory reveals his betrayal. He recalls, with sick precision, that day almost twenty years ago: first landmark of childhood, his seventh birthday. He awoke that morning with excitement that doubled when his father explained that his present would arrive by parcel express. His parents' anxiety outstripped his own. Then, producing emotion difficult for a seven-year-old to grasp — awe, disappointment, alarm, thrill, and, even then, shame — the ruinously expensive set of encyclopedias arrived.

Stuart, with child's intuition, knew at once his parents' sacrifice in securing this gift. He understood the enormity the minute the delivery man arrived at the flat with four unliftable cases. He wanted to plead with them, "Oh, no, no thank you. You mustn't." Thirty inexhaustible volumes, a yearbook, and an index. His father calls to him in a voice that never rid itself of the scratch of factories, "Look here, the Ivory Coast. Isaac Newton. Phloem and Xylem. Everything worth knowing, in these pages. Alphabetical, too." Mother, father, and he sit together on the floor and unpack the treasure cases, poring over exotic entries the rest of the afternoon, the rest of remembered childhood.

An earlier edition had been heavily discounted, but Stuart's father had resolved on the most recent human understanding or none at all. His father never used the incurred debt, the years of resulting belt-tightening, against the boy. Stuart never gave him cause. The spines on every volume were broken within two years. The atlas of creases that formed along the binding — proof that the boy's precocity exceeded even his parents' guess — became his father's favorite feature of the set. He would run his fingers down the prematurely worn bindings on domestic evenings, saying, "It's all in there. Everything we've put together. Only a matter of learning how to get to it."

This is the ingenuous faith in accountability that Ressler has betrayed. For what? To keep himself from looking foolish in front of a woman for whom he cannot even plead the aberration of desire. Spirit-numbing memories follow one on another until he resurrects the summit agony. He was then twelve; the folks, years after purchase, still paying off the last encyclopedia installment. They had moved to Pittsburgh, "relocated," Dad explained, "for the War Effort." They were vacationing, camping in Maine, driving up the coast, when his father, at the wheel, in the middle of "Does Your Mother Know You're Out, Cecilia," slumped over in his seat. Stuart thought it a joke, laughed at the old man's slapstick.

But his father had suffered a massive myocardial infarction. Stuart's mother went instantly to pieces, as she could be counted on to do in the pinch of horror, the descent of real event. His father superhumanly managed to guide the car to the roadside. Stuart's mother could not have driven then even if she'd had a license. They were stranded in a remote stretch; hours might pass before they could flag a passerby. It fell to the twelve-year-old to drive them to hospital, while his mother flailed at her man's chest in a pointless effort to revive him.

From long afternoons browsing the encyclopedia paragraphs and plates, Stuart knew that the clutch was on the left and the accelerator on the right. Miraculously, from recall, he taught himself how to drive, covering the fifty miles to the hospital in two hours. Next to him on the front seat his mother huddled over the body, a perfect parody of the Michelangelo Pietà illustrating the article on Classical Sculpture. All the while, his father stupidly tried to get out last advice for the boy. Stuart repeatedly shouted at him to shut up, to save his strength.