Richard Powers - Gold Bug Variations

I could no longer tell failed imagination from realism. The day I admitted that life with Tuckwell had lost itself to familiarity, I also felt an urge to run for the crosstown and gate-crash Tuckwell's familiar office just to see him. His most irritating habit, the asymmetry of his sternum, his stupidest mannerism, the white spots under his fingernails, had been fashioned exclusively for me, and I had failed to value them.

I came home that evening intent on redeeming myself. Like a literalist from a liturgy, or coed from a cathartic feature film: nothing more important, easier than being a little kinder. Keith must have felt something similar, for we collided at the door and kissed without a crackle of static. He let me fondle him, then slipped his arm around me. He brought me to the panorama plate glass running the length of the living room. We looked down on the same life-threatening street I had just threaded. The view from here had nothing to do with the one at eye level. "Q:," he said, shaking me affectionately.

"Shoot." We laughed off the bad word choice.

"Is the world getting any better? K.T., 9/23." Last night's fight was just passing madness, the end of a fiscal quarter.

"Every day in every way," I said, silently struck by how little the billion-dollar self-help industry had changed in the half century since Coué.

"The eradication of smallpox and polio," Tuckwell offered.

"Large-scale dismantling of the old colonial system," I added. "Fiberoptícs. Wide-body transport."

"The New York Mets. Frisbees." A sad joke, but our own. Keith dragged me to the kitchen in his wake. The place was a riot of dissolute Baggies and lidless jars. He was preparing my favorite of his private recipes, Neutron Chili. Beating me to the peace offering. We worked together; I spiced and stirred while he sliced and carried on a running burlesque. "I was a very ethnic child. Born into a mixed neighborhood. Democrats and Republicans—" We had both hit upon the same solution: all-out effort to save the endangered ordinary routine by doing nothing.

"Perhaps I shouldn't reveal this to you," he said, thrashing in a cabinet above the stove, "seeing as how you're in a perfect position to abuse the information. But the key to really profound chili is this." He held aloft a nickel bag of cumin that had somehow evaded the Board of Health. He made for the stove, playfully chucking me out of the way.

"Keithy, stop. Wait a minute. Listen. I already put in two tablespoons of…."

"Geet otter here. What do you know from chili?" He blithely measured what he called a "guesstimate" into the stew.

"Tuckwell!" Shrill enough to draw him up short, but too far. I tripped a surprise rage in myself and could not back down. "Who do you think…? What right do you…?" I froze in his gaze: he had every right. I began again, unnerved. "Don't you think you ought to at least taste before you interfere?" Ludicrous; it was his recipe.

Still clutching the cumin, Tuckwell tried to salvage tne moment. "Two people who love each other," he began mock-pompously, who sincerely want to bridge the solitude surrounding each one of us ought to display an unwavering, unqualified trust for everything the other takes into mind to do. A woman, for instance, should be able to sacrifice a meal to her man's screwing about with the same abandon that Abraham exhibited in prepping the pot for Isaac, even in the knowledge that no ram will be waiting in the bushes when he hacks things up. You, for instance, should be able to watch me take this entire bag___" He started off comically, but quickly fatigued: if he joked me out of this, the next repair would be even more strained. I apologized, told him to do as he saw fit, and left. I looked back as I shut the front door to see Tuckwell spicing the meal for one.

Music Minus One

Jeanette Koss crosses the threshold. Ressler can neither prevent nor welcome her. Still she comes, eyes marking an astonished arc at the monkish sparsity, asceticism that registers in her eyes. Only when she leans against a wall in a girlish slump does he collect himself. "What in the world are you doing here?"

She takes the Ur-punchline, jutting one arm over her head and slithering a side step. "The samba." Slowly, sadly, she sings, "When you can't reproduce 'cause you've lost all your juice, It's Your Birthday," to the tune of "That's Amore," inflicting no apparent damage on the meaning of the chord progressions. She stops and examines Ressler, as if the burden of explanation rests squarely on him.

"But it's not my birthday. Not for a while." He feels his stupidity the instant he objects.

"It isn't? Damn! All the numerology worked out perfectly! Back to codon triplets for me. Here. I brought you a present anyway." She holds out a wrapped phonograph record tentatively, reluctant to give it up. Not knowing what else to do, Ressler unwraps the gift. It's a two-year-old recording of Bach's Goldberg Variations in a debut performance by a pianist who has the bad taste to be both as Canadian as Avery and a shade younger than Ressler. "I'm sorry if the surface is a little ground to death already. But I thought you deserved something better in life than bobby-soxers and Britten."

Ressler flinches at Koss's inside knowledge. Blake and Eva? Is that friendship, then, cozy nights made public? He wonders if this woman might also be privy to the fact that he's been afraid to put Robeson on in recent weeks. He stands paralyzed, unable to extricate himself. "I don't understand. What is this?"

"It's a record," she replies, a pouty, apologetic smile at having to do all the vaudeville. "You put it on that machine and music comes out." She lowers her arm, still thrust in pseudo-samba, and sits cross-legged on the floor in front of the loan sofa. She places her neck against the cushion, tilts her head, and lets her face go as slack as a sunbather's. She is perfectly at home in their mutual ignorance.

Ressler considers his options: deterrence has failed, and it is too late for a preemptive strike. His only chance to get his balance depends on giving Dr. Koss her own terms. He goes to the phono; for the first time since he bought her, Olga spins without a suggestion of complicity. He removes the record from its worn cardboard, experiencing difficulty finding side one. "Is your husband dropping by as well?" He tries for a neutral lilt.

"My husband doesn't care much for music. What Mr. Koss has no interest in could fill symposia." She faces him, equal parts coy, ashamed. His first good look at her. She is more juvenile, lighter than in profile. She gesticulates for him to hurry and get the music on: Why do you think I've come all the way here?

There is nothing to do except release side one, track one. He touches the needle down on the Goldberg aria. The first sound of the octave, the simplicity of unfolding triad initiates a process that will mutate his insides for life. The transparent tones, surprising his mind in precisely the right state of confusion and readiness, suggest a concealed message of immense importance. But he comes no closer to naming the finger-scrape across the keys. The pleasure of harmony — subtle, statistical sequence of expectation and release — he can as yet only dimly feel. But the first measure announces a plan of heartbreaking proportions. What he fails to learn from these notes tonight will lodge in his lungs until they stop pumping.

If the night is complete and the train of notes advances with certainty, even formal symmetry can grow as inevitably as a living thing. The fragmented melody, the decorated trickle coming from the speakers, the lights across the dark yard (so many ships' distress signals), the pile of slip-delineated journals swelling in the corner into an unassailable fairy-tale hill of glass, the foreign woman sitting cross-legged on the floor not three meters away: everything aims this moment, indistinguishable and arbitrary, at his heart. This fluke, beautiful assortment says they are here alone. Certainly a message: the sentient musical line makes that explicit. A messenger, undeniably, at the piano. But no sender. No sponsor. Only notes, vertically perfect, horizontally inevitable.