Richard Powers - Gold Bug Variations

I believed, until that minute, that business as usual was the only consolation life allowed. But now the idea of going back to work right away — ever — appalled me. I returned to the vegetables on the kitchen counter and heaped them into a semblance of salad. But eating anything was beyond me. I put the food on the sill for whatever not-yet-extinct birds still braved the Brooklyn biome. A sympathetic mass took over my chest. The block spread into my legs, threatened to stiffen them if I didn't keep moving. So I did what I always do in the face of unnameable grief. I began straightening things. I picked up the books dispersed over my study. I threw away the accumulated advertising fliers. Dusting the record collection, I suddenly knew what I had been delaying, the act I needed to send him off.

There, in my front room, trembling the record from its dust jacket, I set on my ancient turntable the piece of music the newly cadenced man most loved. I sat limp and listened all the way through, the way he had listened once, motionless except to flip the record. Four notes, four measures, four phrases, pouring forth everything. The sound of my grief, my listening ritual, will be the closest the professor gets to a memorial service. Franklin, wherever he now is, must have resorted to the same. Two listeners to that simple G scale and all the impossible complexity spun from it. I heard, in that steady call to tonic, how Dr. Ressler had amortized bits of himself for decades. Now he was paid off. Back at Do.

The music — I can't say what the music sounded like. Whole now, with none of its many endings the last word. That emotional anthology is so continuous that I could not tell whether my discovery dated from a year ago, under the dead man's guidance, or this afternoon, at his private wake. Only Dr. Ressler's perpetual running commentary was missing: the amateur's gloss that always made the piece so difficult to listen to when he was in the same room now left it unbearable in his silence. "Here it comes. There What a chord. Hear? The left hand, the interior dissonance…?" Every embedded line became painfully apparent with no one there to point it out.

Only when the reprise, the last da capo bars resolved their suspension and fell back into generating inertness did I leave, lock the place, and climb the blocks back to the branch. Two hours late in returning. My colleagues, old maid Marians to a man, seeing me drag in late, stared as if I had just sprouted a full-fledged, handlebar-mustached mania. One of the eternally punctual, I had committed blatant inconsistency. Settling behind the Reference Desk as casually as possible, I resumed answering the public's questions as if nothing had happened.

But everything had. I worked like the worst of bush-leaguers. It took me twenty minutes to identify, for a polite woman not a day less than ninety, the river that had a funny name beginning with a vowel and probably lying in Africa or India. She and my atlas at last compromised on the Irrawaddy. I did almost as poorly naming the one-armed pro baseball player from the forties who puts in an appearance every five years and should have been child's play. By four, badly in need of a break despite less than an hour's work, already suspecting the break I needed, I attended to the Quote Board.

Old institution, child of the fresh days of my M.L.S., when I still believed in the potential of democratically available facts: the Quote Board began as my experiment in free expression. An open corkboard with blank cards broadcast a standing invitation to "Add your favorite passage here." We did well for a while, if not producing any transcendental insights. But the inevitable appearance of the limerick Ladies from Lunt and the Lonely Master Painters soon forced the notice "All quotes subject to final approval by Staff." After-the-fact justification of censorship, first fatal realization that the body of literature had its obscene parts in need of covering.

By the early eighties — just before I fell in with Todd and, through him, Ressler — the Quote Board was clearly fighting a losing cause against creeping nihilism. It filled with the work of junior Dadaists: random passages from sports magazines or cereal boxes, meaningless but too inoffensive to suppress in good faith. Disenfranchised blind mouths, wanting nothing better than to deface any suggestion of need. One morning the whole wall sprouted Day-Glo, spray-painted genitalia. After that, the project shrank from its first, ambitious conception to a square of plate glass around a single, daily quote selected by a librarian. As a sop to the old belief in public speech, I attached a locked submissions box with the condescending invitation, "If you have any suggestions for quote of the day…." The project kept its old name through force of habit.

Not that the public abandoned the Quote Board entirely. Over the years, it's had the periodic inspired submission. Much of my original intention felt paid by one doubtlessly quarantined high school girl who, from an astonishingly broad reading, conscientiously culled the best of everything she came across. Last year she sent me an aerogramme from Eritrea reading:

Even a proverb is no proverb to you till your life has illustrated it. Keats

I let that one run two days. This girl and a few others have kept up a steady submissions trickle. A few hundred other contributors give once or twice, usually that private byword they've taken to heart: the St. Francis prayer or the Desiderata. Otherwise, the box bulges with teenage death or torch lyrics, proper names artlessly altered. Of tens of thousands who finance the branch, only a fraction of card-carriers make a point of reading the quote of the day, and fewer still ever go out on a limb and contribute. Still, the Quote Board provides its service. Recognition, learning a thing by heart: life will be nothing after these go.

This afternoon the box was empty. Cupboard bare, I fingered my skirt pocket where Franklin's note had somehow accompanied me back to the library, a coconut floating to populate a virgin, volcanic island. Franker once promised to keep me in permanent quotes: "You'll never have to stuff the ballot box again." For a long time he did. But today, as so often before he began to frequent me, I again had to come up with a fresh saying, never before used. One that might mean something, anything, to that fractional percent of my clients who hang on the choice of words.

I felt an urge to use "Two loves have I, of comfort and despair…." But remembering the public in public library and feeling little better than the prolific submitters of plaintive lyrics, I didn't. Despite my small stockpile of emergency reserves, I could find no quote that satisfied. I couldn't shake the features of the dead man's face, the constriction of my gut. I took my neck by the hand and my fingers went all the way in. I tried to lose myself in the search, to turn up the quote that had absolutely nothing to do with grief. I stood in front of the Quote Board for some time before admitting that what I required in today's quote was a private, particular eulogy.

As I pretended to think, the passage I was after presented itself. I went straight to the stacks and found the source, a posthumous work by Dr. Arendt on the dangerously detachable, oddly convincing life of the mind. I remembered the words practically verbatim. I knocked out the excerpt on one of the antique staff manuals and posted it. Stuart Ressler had probably never come across the passage in his life. But it stood for him, summed up his permutation as well or better than any other:

The God of the scientists, one is tempted to suggest, created man in his own image and put him into the world with only one commandment: Now try to figure out by yourself how all this was done and how it works.

Tacking up this charm, locking the glass cover that would keep it safe from an uncomprehending audience until I replaced it, I headed back to the Reference Desk. But on the upbeat of my return footstep, I felt the first of Dr. Ressler's astonishing variations visit. Music. Unasked-for, self-generating attacca singing. Unable to help myself, forcing my heels into professional clicks, I succumbed to syncopated desire, the skip hidden in the sound of sole against tile. The most powerful intellect, the most remarkable temperament I ever met was dead of a slow horror. And all I could feel was this urge to dance. Grotesquely inappropriate— what could be simpler? — I felt the need to move in as many directions as possible, to assume all the virtue of virtuosity. I knew what measures I would be forced to take.