Richard Powers - Gold Bug Variations

"Officially, then, what do you do?"

"As little as possible, as you must have noticed." He took me on a second tour, one that made more sense to me now that I had visited the place a few times. "Think of us as pure functionaries. Wednesday's core routine never changes from week to week. We check the chart, any special jobs left by the day shift, drop the right card deck in the hopper, answer the questions on the screen___" He smiled empathetically. "At certain places during the run, we have to change the printer to multipart or forms. You know all those financial statements you get every day instead of letters from friends? Well, now you can think of them as personal communiques." I wanted all of a sudden to wrap him in my arms, but because we had not yet jumped that threshold, I contented myself with pinching his shoulder.

"Then, we have to swap out packs on the drive spindles." He let me have another look into the locked bakery of magnetic layer cakes. "Each of these contains a whole shelf full of your pitiful excuse for a library. A group of programs or a set of data files. 'The Clients.' A hundred thousand names, but it's easy to fall into the singular. 'Put that Client up on spindle three.' Almost as ridiculous as using 'Washington' or 'Moscow' to stand for a quarter billion."

Nor was metonymy his only professional figure of speech. He called up files, spoke to the console, shook hands with peripherals, woke or retired a system partition. Programs ran and processors crunched. Names were fields and fields made up records and records were data and data came in streams, packets, or blocks. An unassuming word like "overlay" served as noun, verb, adjective, adverb, and probably preposition on a good day. The whole sport made Shakespeare's functional shifts seem like small-time word processing. Up time and down time, hot, warm, and cold boots, and the apocalyptic-sounding full system crash.

"If the runner stumbles or falls… then the fun starts. We're just supposed to check the hardware and resubmit the aborted job. If it aborts again, and we're sure it's not a paper jam or the wrong pack or something equally imbecilic, we're supposed to dial the field service men — the Green Berets. Big salaries, twenty-four-hour beepers. But those guys are obnoxious, and in hexadecimal to boot. So Dr. Ressler and I have gone in for a little underground education in differential diagnosis.

"Every job we submit, every command we issue, is written into a console log. Fortunately, nobody reads them. They hang in the listings library, gathering digital dust. If anybody took half a look at some of the operations we've performed to keep things running at night, we'd be in a heap of hot floppies." He shrugged. "I work. I follow the list, the flowchart. The key to the entire process, from beginning to end, even the exception handling is specifiable by exact rules. One need only know the context. Not unlike choreography, I suppose. 'Two pas-de-bourrées, a ball-change.' But the bit of chenille fluff in the chorus never gets to see what all that spinning is all about. It'll be Robo City in here in another few years," he said, with serve-them-right enthusiasm at the prospect. "The only thing that's prevented their introduction until now is the superstition that humans are still the only thing capable of surviving the system crash. Also, the Doctor and I are still cheaper, for the time being."

We sat in front of the console and stared at the equipment, now completely changed. The phone rang, disturbing the empty hiss. I thought: Here is one of the few places where a phone call late at night doesn't automatically mean someone has died. Todd answered. "That was Dr. Ressler. 'Bookkeeper' is unique. And so, my friend, is your face." I smiled, already skilled at letting his moments of confrontatory zeal fall away without crisis. "What do I do for a living? I'm not sure the question has an answer anymore. Everyone, no matter what he does, is kept in the dark about the clients."

This was the moment of expansiveness that brought me compulsively to Manhattan On-Line to sit with this stranger after my own shift was over. "Do you know Ben Shahn's great answer to that question? I take a guilty pleasure in the man's paintings, knowing his whole pastel, representational aesthetic has been on the outs for a decade. But his essays need no excuse. He tells a story of an itinerant wanderer traveling over country roads in thirteenth-century France who comes across a man exhaustedly pushing a wheelbarrow full of rubble. He asks what the man is doing. 'God only knows. I push these damn stones around from sunup to sundown, and in return, they pay me barely enough to keep a roof over my head.'

"Farther down the road, the traveler meets another man, just as exhausted, pushing another filled barrow. In reply to the same question, the second man says, 'I was out of work for a long time. My wife and children were starving. Now I have this. It's killing, but I'm grateftil for it all the same.'

"Just before nightfall, the traveler meets a third exploited stone-hauler. When asked what he is doing, the fellow replies, 'I'm building Chartres Cathedral.""

Home Fires

We weren't involved. I simply wanted to spend my free minutes in Franklin's company. Sitting with him while he worked felt like repatriation. Franklin, remarkably, found nothing unusual in my overnight fixation with this place. He treated both my forwardness and reserve with the same easy touch. His intimacy could go on at arm's length forever.

I felt so awake, so ready to resurrect old steps and learn new ones I'd given up on. Remorse only came when I felt how blameless I was feeling. Guilt worked its way in, however. Romance at thirty is shot through with ambivalence. I was too old to think that my liberating happiness with Todd justified putting Keithy to the torch. The pleasure I felt in Frank's company was already compromised, and I could calculate no future payoff worth the surcharge needed to reach it. But bad conscience is one of those parasites that makes its host hungrier.

The evenings when I took the detour home produced a chunk of hours I had to account for. Tuckwell's and my relationship always pretended to place no bind on one another. But even Keith's cultivated obliviousness soon gave in to curiosity. For a while I got by on transparent excuses. The irregularity of my work covered somewhat, made Keith lose track of when I would ordinarily have come home.

Hard to confess anything when I had nothing yet to confess. I had no hope of explaining to Keith a fascination I didn't understand myself. Keeping quiet, on the other hand, was evasion, and I never could skulk for long. Crawling into bed one night after my embarrassingly late return, Keith and I outdoing the other in liberal tolerance, I resolved to come clean, although I still didn't know what that meant. Copying Todd's blunt trust in words, I stoked up to make a clean break. "I've made a few friends." I thought once I got going, I could imitate Frank's easy jig. But after those six quavers, I softened the contour of the line. "Eccentrics," I added, choosing the perfect word to render them harmless. It suddenly seemed self-indulgent to concern Tuckwell with exaggeration.

My time with Keith, if increasingly infringed on, remained unchanged in all respects but the important one. We still lazed together in the front room with the panoramic vista over the river. We still watched the nightly news together. We still needled one another with need. One early September evening, out of remorse and nostalgic love, I decided to stay home. Tuckwell lay spread across the floor with a portfolio, testing out jingles on me while I did my next day's homework. Keith was building a truly bizarre strategy for selling microwave gourmet meals, using an ad I had discovered in the September 18, 1939, issue of Time: "Hitler Threatens Europe — but Betty Havens's Husband's Boss Is Coming to Dinner and That's What Really Counts." I had shown it to him to make him laugh, something I'd done precious little of lately. But he'd latched onto it as the perfect piece of camp with which to run a retro sales pitch. "Sick sells," he lay on his back repeating. "Not a pretty fact. But then, persuasion is not a pretty business."