Richard Powers - Gold Bug Variations

I wrapped up a few loose questions. I'd chosen, for tomorrow's event, the September 3 in that year when there was no September 3: in 1752, when Britain and colonies at last adopted the Gregorian calendar. By official decree, September 3 became September 14— correcting the eleven-day disparity that had accumulated between man-made time and the seasons. As had happened elsewhere in Europe as days disappeared into nothing, the reform was met by rioting. People's already too-short lives were cheated of yet another eleven days: vanished anniversaries, lost evenings at the pub, almost a dozen nights of potential pleasure. Paid by the hour but debited by the month, tenants paid thirty days of rent on nineteen.

The nightly news was over, the set turned off, but the evening's sound track — Bartok's Piano Music for Children —still hobbled over fourths and minor seconds, relating strange Hungarian folktales. I closed my eyes: the music was about a forest deep in Eastern Europe where night had fallen for several hundred years. I opened them again to find Tuckwell still sprawled across the throw rug, happily destroying the evening paper. I loved the man, stayed with him because, for a manic narcissist with a fierce death wish, Keith was relatively sedate and regular in habits.

Tuckwell stood, stretched, groaned like a compromised banshee, and went and pestered the human being nearest at hand. He came over to the makeshift typing table where I worked, lifted the hair off the nape of my neck, and bit the revealed skin. Choosing not to notice how wrong the moment had become, he asked, " "Sappening?"

I pulled the first card off of the unanswered pile. Not daring to look at him, I pitched my voice into soprano and inhaled. " 'Why did the Russians shoot down that airliner? Hundreds of innocent people killed. Will somebody please explain this to me?' Signed, 'A.N., 9/14.'" Facing the far wall, I monotoned, "What you got on Flight 007 today, Chet?"

"Not a whole hell of a goddamn lot, David," Tuckwell replied, but returned to the papers to see what he could dig up. I drafted answers in my head, one filled with accounts of warning shots and tape transcripts, one beginning "Discrepancies in what the interceptor saw and what the liner did persist," still another urging the questioner to read everything printed on the incident. Not one reply satisfied.

I was cut by a sharp grief, not for the 269 latest casualties in the perpetual war, but for A.N., who didn't have a chance in creation of getting a simple explanation for what was going on. It was a reasonable question, but as with the tacit prices on Upper East Side menus, if you had to ask, you couldn't afford the answer. The horrible full-color spreads, the antiseptic seal torn off of the usually restrained AP reports, the resulting global knee-jerk calling for a full accounting on the part of anonymous trigger-pullers everywhere: and then the veil of routine slamming back, once more condemning A.N. to the bewilderment of local life, while Here and Now squidded off in a cloud of ink until the next liner was downed.

Sadness doesn't capture it. I need a meatier, nineteenth-century word. Sorrow; the sorrow of press secretaries failing to explain away nations. When I looked at Tuckwell, news scrap over his lap, my sorrow grew. For the two of us — our last, ordinary evening at home. I whispered, "What in the hell am I supposed to tell this guy?" Alarming Keith more than I had in all our years of living together, I burst out in violent crying. I let Keith comfort me, talk me into giving up on answering, calling it a day. He led me into our bedroom, where he pried the typed card out of my hand and laid it to rest on the night table. It still sat there unanswered days later, on the equinox. The first day of autumn in anyone's calendar.

After the Facts

The dead airplane passengers were still on the night table on September 23. Relations with Keith hadn't steadied in the interim. There were light moments — hours as free as any we'd had. We laid into the old conversational cadences, careful to avoid irritation. But chain jumped off sprocket at the least torque. Something caused one of us to miss the pickup, and we'd be off, attacking one another in the highly civilized diction of private symbols that had caused the hurt in the first place.

Tuckwell came to bed on the first night of autumn, excited by the growing cold. I could feel in the choreography of muscle contractions his hope for a reconciling predoze fondle. He maneuvered tentatively, afraid to ask outright for a touch I might deny him. How dare he protect himself from me, blame me for refusing? Slowly enough to be above reproach, I removed by millimeters to my side of the bed. Sheer perversity; how far away did I need to be before he asked me to return?

We lay in bed, outraged in every idiom short of English. Neither of us could break the escalation of accusal. Keith flicked on the reading light and directed the spot to his side. Even politeness was a threat — the effort he took not to disturb me. He reached out for his night reading but grabbed the question about Flight 007. He slammed the card down on the nightstand. "Can we get rid of this shit, please?" he whispered, so as not to wake anyone. "I'm sick of looking at it." He went to the kitchen to fish the day's newspapers from the trash. He returned, crumpled a couple sheets for my benefit, and read: "Reasonable prospect of Navy finding black box.

Russians are sweeping for it in force. Seen dragging something out of the waters. Widespread agreement that the 747 had been over Kamchatka for some time."

I grabbed the gap widening in my face and pinched it shut, pushed it into my pillow. I turned my face sideways, an efficient crawl-swimmer coming up for air. "All right, Keith. OK."

"OK what?" Nonnatives would have heard no rage.

"OK, I'll fabricate some sort of centrist smear for this person. Face the Nation. Whatever you want."

"What I want is not the point. Who said anything about smear? Why doesn't this person do her own work? What does she want you to do, paraphrase the same pap she can read herself? Cliff Note the mound of crap it's already buried in?" Typical Tuckwell: whenever he attacked me, he worked around until it seemed his one wish was to protect me from assault.

"Just the opposite," I addressed the ceiling. "She wants me to shovel her out." Covered in cotton and cliches, I molded myself into the shape of the offending shepherd's crook, facing the wall. As soon as he was out of my field of view, Keith seemed the most decent human being alive, susceptible to the best of excesses. I felt him get back into bed and switch off the light. After a moment, unasked-for, denying that the flare-up had happened, he molded his body along mine. We lay flush, curled, the two fastened alloys in a thermostat coil. I neither shook Tuckwell off nor returned his pressure. If I didn't move, I might be able to drift off despite myself. But not moving only aggravated the drag holding me against the bed.

We were both in absurd occupations; that was the problem. But pressed, I couldn't place the standard blame on the office for ruining my private life. I had only myself to fault. I repeated silently, like a Baltimore catechism— Q: Who made you? A: God made me. Q: Why did God make you? A- To know, love, and serve Him in this life and be happy with Him in the next —the one question in recent weeks I'd managed to answer definitively: "Q: How do you get moonlight into a chamber?"

The next day, behind the Reference Desk, I typed a long, inconclusive response to Flight 007. My mind was not on the victims or the absurd geopolitics, but on the man I was downing with my own absurdity. Every time I concluded that Tuckwell and I were genuinely ill-fitted — that we'd forced ourselves together for years because we were the age when more exploration is no longer cost-efficient — I recoiled, knew I was rationalizing my own new side romance.