Richard Powers - Gold Bug Variations

Prompted by the aria's first octave, he at once looks through an electron microscope at a moment he will never afterwards succeed in recreating. How can he say what he hears? He hears a melody (it can't quite be called that) ornamented, sighing in appoggiaturas (he has never heard the word), making its stately way into frilly irrelevance. He hears something else, something substantial underneath the period piece: a bass line as patterned as the orbit of seasons, fueled by the inexorable self-burning at the core of stars.

While right hand tentatively ascends and turns, left descends in nothing more ingenious than a major scale. What could be simpler? Four scale-steps descend from Do, answered by three rising tones before a temporary return home. The aria travels only eight measures, but Ressler has come far farther. He skids across epochs, shaking loose time. The ditty insinuates itself through the most unassuming thirty-two measures imaginable: a third group of four notes is answered by a fourth, these eight together meta-echoing the initial eight. This four-by-four megameasure is answered in turn by a further sixteen — a hierarchy where each internal rung is reflected at a higher level. A pulse, a row of tones, a magic square sprung from four letters: its Pythagorean perfection holds the hint of proliferation, celestial blowout of uncountable possibilities.

The scientist, until this moment incapable of hearing that every song on Summer Slumber Party derives from the same 1-4-5 progression as "Red River Valley," can hear in this spare, fourfold pattern potential beyond telling: answers and calls, inversions, oppositions, expansions, contractions, dissonances, resolutions. He hears all these hiding in a tune so simple it cannot in truth even be called a tune. And the variations themselves haven't even begun.

How can haphazard nubbiness of grooves pressed into synthetic polymer, read and converted into equivalent electric current, passed through an electromagnet that isomorphically excites speaker paper, sucking it back and forth in a pulsing wave that sets up a sympathetic vibration in thin, skin membrane tickling electrical nerve-bursts simulate not only all the instruments of the orchestra but this most cerebrally self-invested device, the hammer-struck, vibrating string? God only knows what those string vibrations themselves equate to. But the pattern means something: he's sure of that. And if he lets what these signal notes conceal fall back into the obscurity they have momentarily raised themselves from, a vast tract of unsuspected existence will disappear, vanish along with this woman when she stands up to leave.

Underneath the Goldberg aria's graceful surface is a skeleton, a stripped-down fragment, a moment not even a moment, a melody not yet the essential one. The real melody, the one that will pass with that trivial bass line through thirty wildly varying but constant mutations, is the accompaniment of desire and remorse in Ressler's listening. That bass is a mere crystal, periodic, irregular. Like all crystal instants, it seeps in both directions, back into imprecise memory of childhood and forward, in a rush of premonition, to the logical consequence of its opening phrases, an adulthood entirely unanticipated. It encroaches in all directions, a spiral architecture of sound. At the center of that musical stair, this moment leaves its fossil impression: a man and woman, unwitting particulars of a species frozen forever in the stillness before the historical calamity that will finish and preserve them, pressed in statigraphy, here against the Holocene floor.

Tone-deaf, he hears the tune breathing. He is inside it. In its final four bars, the bass detours back to origin. But at the moment when it must land on the octave, the delinquent line pulls one last shock. It hits and hangs on the note below, a suspended dissonance that threatens to spread indefinitely. He wonders if the chord will ever come home.

A change comes over Dr. Koss too at the music. No longer the nervous girl filled with skittish punchlines. Cross-legged, neck arched, head tilted, she sheds the sunbather and becomes a mater dolorosa. At aria's end, Ressler, scared by how much empty space has flooded into K-53-C, goes and sits next to her. His entree to music is exactly this: wanting, just this once, without compromise, to close the curve of this woman's body, the cell surface he has not been able to forget since the moment she took his head in her hands and toweled it dry.

He does not know her, what she is doing here, why she inflicts him with this tune. She has no personality but the one she adopts this instant. Dr. Koss remains, despite his research, no more than a sketch. He needs from her precisely this refusal to dissolve into specifics. Whatever he suspects about the motive for her visit disappears. All suspicion falls away somewhere in the thirty-two measures. They sit through the first fifteen variations, rooted to the bare floor a foot from one another. When side one ends, they listen to a few revolutions of dull scratching before either can move. Ressler gets up, flips the record. The fifteen feet of floorboard to the plastic phonograph elongate epically. He fumbles with the cartridge, overwhelmed by aboriginal wonder at the device. All devices.

When he comes back to his spot, Koss reaches without looking and puts her arm around his shoulders. She touches his bone blade without hope or threat or promise. A completely unencumbered, uncompromised, just-to-be-touching touch. His shoulders support her arm as if they have known each other since the start. As if they know each other now. As if anyone ever knows the first thing about another.

The piece proceeds, with the modesty of the monumental, to launch an investigation into everything the aria, by permutation, can conceivably become. After an immense journey whose contours he only darkly traces, the piece ends note for note as it began: da capo. Once more, from the head, the delicate filigree of sarabande, fleshed out upon those four unfolding scale-steps. When the music stops, they continue to touch immaterially. Olga arabesques on in silence, not knowing the difference. The sinusoidal pulse of the needle scratching the end of the track might be surf interrogating the continental coast. Ressler is not sure what he has heard. The little air and variations, its signal now dampened, message reconcealed, disperses into noise.

A voice calls him back to the world's indifference; Jeanette Koss's, full of a timbre he has not heard until this moment. "Are you ill? You look febrile." Automatically, she places the back of her hand on his forehead. He at once burns for her to apply that ancient method, instinctive to women, of testing the fevered part with upper lip. His temperature would elude even this most heat-sensitive gauge — the burning hotel, plans lost in complexity, night, love's accident, long September, memory, fever beyond telling.

He does not look at her. In another moment, they rise by agreement and walk to the door. Their arms link a moment and unthread. At the open frame, they turn toward one another in an awkward eternity. A gulf of ignorance separates their two mutually unreadable faces. How implausible, dead-ended, and wrong any visit this woman might pay him at such an hour; he wants only to be rid of her without further calamity.

She reaches out, straightens his collar. "Whatever you think about me, try not to hate me." He cannot even ask what she is talking about. Deep in this woman, as deep in her mechanism as in his, stronger than fear of overstepping norms, than the urge to be loved or at least not forsaken, must be his own desire to stand in good faith, to do right by understanding. Do not hate me for being an experimentalist, and I will not hold theory against you. Which one of us knows the first thing about what we are after?