Richard Powers - Gold Bug Variations

There was the obvious explanation, of course. But an objective female jury would waffle between Todd and Tuckwell for raw desirability. Todd had the undeniable advantage of being new: his hair fell an unusual way across his temples, and I could watch for hours while his eyes modulated. Even level-headed women are programmed to spread themselves through every available backwater of the gene pool. At thirty, though, lust is no longer the giddy-maker it once was. Hormones will have the upper hand over me until their manufacture stops. But Todd's appeal — the reason I began to watch the library clock — was something else as well. From the moment I arrived at the MOL intercom to be buzzed in, he would pay steady flirtation. "What did we answer today? Wait, let me guess: the name for the plastic end-seals on shoe laces. No, no: how many wheelbarrows of Weimar marks it took to buy a loaf of bread." Tuckwell's manic humor made me laugh out loud. Todd's jokes, always sotto voce, made me ache with wanting.

He ran a continuous interrogation; I stood between him and the world. Frank's questions had nothing to do with empirical fact. His were amorphous, soft around the edges. We would sit in the corporate cafeteria while he, with a favorite skillet ported from his apartment, grilled an omelette with mace and cardamom for 9:00 p.m. early brunch. Out of the blue, he would ask, "Did you get along well with your parents?"

I'd do my best to look abashed, but he refused to let me off. Whether I answered in earnest or replied, "What's it to ya, Bud?" he would smile, ply me with requests for intimate details, and then reveal the hidden association. "These eggs, this aroma: my father's Saturday-morning ritual. Complex man, my father. Invested thirty-two hundred dollars — half his life's savings — when I was born, so there'd be something to send me to college on. When I came of age, through amazing business acumen, he had nursed the investment to a grand total of twenty-nine hundred dollars. Every Saturday of conscious existence, he woke us up with the aroma of omelette. All we need is a little Coleman Hawkins. Loved music, my father. Brought me up to play the accordion. 'You can always make a living with one of these.'" Then, quick key change: "Could you fall for a man who played the accordion in his youth?"

The hopeless second question was indistinguishable from the misplaced, expansive first. He did not ask whether / could fall for him. He asked me to savor a sad hypothetical, a current of circumstantial strangeness. He carried on like this — questions, stories, self-absorbed silences — nothing to lose and everything to gain; pushing past the normal politeness of terms. His constant word-wayfaring was all the more romantic because it never struck him as anything but ordinary. He read wildly, at random. Dostoyevsky one weekend and Little Women the next. "Have you read this? God, it's beautiful! Let me read you one passage." And one passage would inevitably grow into a chapter and more, Todd reading on expressively, obliviously, for forty minutes, stopping only to feed a punched-card deck into the hopper. I didn't mind; I could spend all evening watching the further hope and hurt that all manner of words registered in his reading face. I had forgotten how one could live on just words.

Manhattan On-Line was my enclave, safe haven in the middle of nowhere. I could walk into the warehouse, summon the rickety, trapezoidal elevator, ride to an upper room where all the windows were silvered over, showing nothing of the outside but a crystal diffraction pattern of night lights — the sparkle of Whistler's nocturne. To drop out of the inescapable city from a trapdoor in its middle was like discovering a geothermal jungle at the pole that had somehow evaded all the search algorithms of man, even the ridiculously detailed eye-in-the-sky satellite maps.

MOL took me temporarily through the forgotten gate to a platform outside, a fulcrum. Todd became an oasis of companionship, refuting and strange. His thought was profoundly different, but not so foreign that I required an interpreter. He was capable of endless inventive talk about any subject. "You know what Nietzsche says? He says, 'Oy, this headache!' No, really. He says: if two people are going to get married, they ought above all to be able to talk well to one another. Because everything else disappears."

But Tuckwell and I could talk too, before I killed our conversation. Keith was very bright, peripherally alert. If he had lost the ability to surprise me, he could still keep me honest. But his job, his view of people, his life in the city had cut a rift between us, a gulf of getting and spending. Tuckwell was an adman, I a librarian. Should never have happened In the first place. However implausibly long our contract had lasted, all I had left to give Tuckwell was my departure. But on ambivalent days, when I remembered the woo we two too had started with, even that idea seemed rationalization.

The man I lived with, well-adjusted ambassador of urban neu-roticism, used sardonic salesmanship to rouge the bruise of living here. Todd, Keith's maladjusted obverse, was sick at heart from believing that men could live in this grisly grid system as they once lived in Bruges. And yet that sad, protective urge — his coming to me to save a man already beyond repair — drew me out. I thought — incredible vanity! — I might keep him company.

"So what do all these boxes do?" I asked one night after we had solved the crossword together. We had been sitting for some time in the hum that passed for silence when I realized I still didn't know what all the equipment was.

Todd looked affectionately around the room. "My babies? Bookkeeping, mainly. Hey. Might that be the only word in English with three consecutive double letters?"

"How should I know? Stick to the point." But he was already on the phone to Dr. Ressler in the control room. Todd waved to his superior, although we could not see through the one-way glass whether the other waved back.

"The professor'll write a search routine for other triple doubles and run it on the dictionary file. Where were we?"

'Tour babies."

"I call them that? Perverse. In any case, we, if I can use first person plural for a group I've only seen assembled once in my life, are what are obnoxiously called Information Brokers. A fuzzy concept. Close as I can tell, it means we provide data and services to other folks — some permanent clients, some steady customers, and a few one-shot users. I'm forbidden by Scout's honor to tell you their names, but I could spell out initials. Alternately, you could infer them through Twenty Questions."

"That's OK. I get the idea. What data do you sell?"

"Who wants to know?" He looked around furtively. "Well, we have two general categories up for auction. First, the standard numbers racket. Big-time data processing. Receivables, Payables, Ledgers, and Payrolls for a dozen credit unions, even a state office." I gathered this was the daily, repetitive processing that made up the bulk of his evening. "Second, the piece sales. Our list-crunching spins off information that either these clients, or others by the same name, are willing to spend major world currencies for. Anything from mailing lists to—" He shrugged, suggesting that no enumeration could catch all the categories, cross-references, or calculations someone somewhere might find useful.

"The truth is, I'm not supposed to know myself who we render what services to. This whole outfit is run on distributed ignorance. A little like civics. Day and night shifts work in separate memory partitions. Analysts aren't allowed in programmers' area. Programmers are locked out of Operations. The hardware guys are not permitted in the listings library. The software guys can't touch the machines. As an Operator, I'm not even supposed to know how to program. Barefoot, preggers, and harmless. But the professor has taught me a little." His face reflected that truism about the danger of a little knowledge. "COBOL's a piece of cake. No conjugations, no cases, no inflections. Fortunately for me, I didn't mention language skills on my application."