Richard Powers - Gold Bug Variations

"I would like, very much," he begins, but breaks off in a flush of guilty well-being. He feels the warm air coming off the lawn, the light of his unfurnished army barrack at his back. How much he would like to fold himself in this woman. How beautiful she seems; how cut off, without consequence, they both are from the string of homes leading from this lot all the way to the black fields on the edge of town. He stands surrounded by danger, experience.

"I want…." He stops again, unable for the life of him to remember the name of the thing he wants so badly.

"I know," she giggles, collapsing again to the face and voice of a teenaged flirt, laughing off the game they have begun as misguided, simple eroticism. Before he can ask if the record is really his or if she wants it back, she waves him goodbye.

The Equinox

The day is easily recreated. Everything about September 23, 1983, is on microfiche or magnetic disk. Only ask one of the quarter million librarians in the country—85 percent women — for help in retrieving it. My log is even closer to hand. Too weak to cut himself off completely, Franklin left me a few of his beloved, unfinishable notebooks. He neither bequeathed them formally nor forbade me to look at them. Finding myself stalled after three months of memory and invention, I consult them freely, falling back on the unreliable perspective of another.

If I am addicted to Today in History, Franklin suffered from an equal and opposite addiction: History in Today. He was obsessed with proving that the atrocities of the last twenty-four hours led in a single aesthetic conga line back to the slaughter of Huguenots, the massacre of innocents, and beyond. The obsession vented itself in spurts of Schwitters-like collages, scraps Of newsprint, the day at its most palpably inexplicable. Like his other notebooks, from the studious to the sheer caprice, these lasted a few weeks before sputtering out. For the last week of September, he clipped events into cubism.

I picture him as he arrived for the night and settled to work. Franklin and Dr. Ressler had to punch in, the computer's log serving as time clock. Frank would greet his colleague in one of a few stock ways, say, "Those who are about to digitize, salute you." Then he would sit in the deserted staff lounge full of jettisoned lunch bags, spread a ratty copy of the Times over the Formica, and cut.

On the night of the 23rd, while Tuckwell and I lay in bed, irrationally furious with each other, Frank Todd, who as yet meant no more to me than a place where I could escape the city, attacked his news. He snipped at section one with a pair of lefty scissors, gluing the composed facts into a spiral notebook. Whether documentary or artistic, a handbook for future archaeologists or a Dadaist handbill, it's impossible to say. In a neater notebook, cross-indexed to the clippings by secret numerals and Mayan icons, Franklin penned a telegraphic commentary that is now my keepsake:

Marcos getting tough with the opposition. "Extreme measures" if antigovernment activities continue. Senate Intelligence Committee

(who names these things?) approves $19 million for Contras. House Foreign Affairs extends Lebanon deployment. Rooskies refuse our "appeal" to restrain Syria. French send 8 Super Etendards into Sofar. Retaliation for attacks against international peacekeepers. Who retaliation is aimed at escapes this reporter.

He worked into his clippings a map of Beirut, colored delicately by his gifted hand, embroidered with vegetation, serpents, spiders, deer, monkeys, savage men, and angels — facsimile of an illuminated Burgundian book of hours. Then, perhaps with a stroll around the lunchroom, a glance at the abandoned fashion magazines stinking of perfume samples and color ads of beautiful hermaphrodites stroking cars, he would join his shiftmate already at work down the hall. He would change the printer paper, mount a disk pack, check the card decks to be submitted, read the console, amend the evening's flowchart, then fire up a machine partition and leave it to multitask. He would return to the cafeteria, thaw himself an Entree for One in the microwave. Then back to his notes.

Things are heating up. 66 % of W. Germans opposed to deployment of new medium rangers if Geneva talks stall. Chief of Soviet Gen Staff threatens "responsive measures" if they go in; shares Marcos's diction coach. Senate votes 66 to 23 to cut UN contributions S5OO mil over next 4 years. "Taxpayers are sick and tired of playing host to our enemies…" says Symms, R-Idaho. What you get for bringing democracy to the provinces. In a related story… first outdoor field test of engineered bacteria allowing plants to manufacture their own fertilizer "tentatively endorsed" by NIH. Ask professor about wisdom of this. Lots of new books, movies, art, most of it blurry. Dow up 14. 'Recovery but No Boom.' Nobody died.

His script leaned to the right like a shortstop stabbing at a ball up the middle. He clipped and scrawled zealously into the journal, making love to this nonemployment. Amo, amas, amateur. Adieu sweet amaryllis.

I visited him later that week. For me, current events meant walking out on Tuckwell. I sat among the antiseptic business furnishings and related my news in knotted excitement. Todd clipped quietly, but bombarded me with his usual questions, that barrage that made me feel as if I might, after all, have a story to tell. Questions from succinct to silly. "Do you love the man? How much chili powder did you put in?"

But that night I didn't answer in the usual solitude. The last remnant of the first shift was working late. Jim Steadman, a pleasant, uncomplicated man in his mid-forties, Chief of Operations, ostensibly Todd's superior, although Franker insisted on addressing him as Uncle Jimmy. Jimmy paced pointedly past the lunchroom while I told Todd about my domestic fight. At last, hours after he should have gone home, he stuck his head in the doorway and threw on the lights. "You'll wind up blind, friend. Blind as the proverbial alley. Blind as a bat."

"Blind as the philosopher," said Todd.

"Blind as the eponymous Post Office Department," I contributed, feeling in my chest the thrill of forcing the moment.

Franklin wadded up the excised Times and banked it into the wastebasket. Jimmy growled, "You going to put in any hours at all this evening?"

Todd nodded. "In a minute. Almost underway, here."

"Still bothering over the news," Jimmy bitched to no one. "Counting editorials, you two'll be here around the horn again." He looked at me and added impishly, "Or should I say you three?" Affectionate, good-natured, as blind as the day shift was long. "Most men have productive hobbies, you know. Like stamp collecting, or toy trains." He crooked his thumb in the direction of the machine room. Todd smiled, sweetly obedient, but snipped on. The older man sighed and shuffled home, knowing that the late staff had long since slipped out of his jurisdiction.

Franklin glanced down the hall in the direction of his departing superior. "Long-suffering Jimmy, up solo against the technological age." This put him in mind of his shift partner, already at work, the man who remained the source of whatever pleasure Todd and I took in each other's company. Franker put his clipping away and punched in to the machine room to help the old man out. Earn his living for at least a little while.

I flip through the aborted notebooks and the days come back with precision. I turn the page to another entry:

CEASE-FIRE ACCORD GAINED IN LEBANON WITH SAUDIS' HELP

A "STEP," U.S. SAYS Role of Marines Unchanged

In his loop-perfect hand, the impressionable interpreter duplicated the secretary of state's prediction: "They'll be a little more comfortable in carrying that mission out because they won't be subject to the crossfire they have been in." At page bottom, he writes: "Interesting tidbit on computers and privacy says that Feds keep 15 files on each of us."