Richard Powers - Gold Bug Variations

"Those are modems. They translate analog phone pulses to and from digital sequences. At the other end of a phone line — who knows where — some other machine sends across a datum each time one of those red lights flashes."

"What are they sending?" I asked, suddenly seeing the spasmodic red flashes as a text.

Ressler smiled. "It could be the collected works of Shakespeare. In a single stream, four hundred and eighty letters a second."

That is the genetic metaphor that begins to suit me. Something wilder than all the plays of Shakespeare written in something as simple as blinking lights. It fails in the representation. But then, so does putting Shakespearean moonlight into a twenty-six-letter chamber. The closest we ever come is dressing someone up, calling him the moon. Clay-derived thought, capstone of evolution: I count myself lucky to achieve even that weak analogy. Where can I go tonight for conversation? He alone made me feel clever, just in unraveling his metaphors.

When I at last got out of the house today, steppea outside into the open air after ages, I bussed around Flatbush, Fulton, discovering to my senses' shock how thick autumn was in me already. Season of mists and mellow fruitfulness, to blame it on Keats. Sap consolidates; the days have begun going dark before supper. Even here, in the middle of fifteen million, colors come on, acquire reputations: umber, burnt sienna, ocher, iodine, scarlet, rare earths hued to the first order. With the right formula of dry cold, for no practical reason, demure trees slip from lime to lemon, go down with all the garishness of an historical atlas. And bless with fruit the vines that round the thatch-eaves run.

Well, perhaps no fruit vines in my neighborhood. But isolated branches telegraph the first symptoms of epidemic. Trees shed brittled skin and strip down to cartilage fighting weight. Twigs scrape against phase-changed glass, followed in a week or two by tentative ice traceries, fibrous, hexagonal, the solid geometry of crystal water molecules. First day of autumn, the equinox: New Year's of Phoenicians and Egyptians, wielding symbolic power as late as 1939, when we chose the day to bury our technological message to future species.

Q: Who decided that the first day of autumn should fall on September 23? Why not the 21st, or better yet, October 1, which makes more sense? Probably invented by committee. Why doesn't the day move around, like Thanksgiving and Easter?

A: This one is trickier than it looks. In fact, the reconciliation of the solar year was the first technical bottleneck facing civilization….The balance points, equal-nights, do move around — five hours, forty-eight minutes, and forty-six seconds each year. They do fall at odd times as the result of that committee, historical accident. Rotation divides only reticently into revolution. But then, if the repetitive calendar had come easily, we might never have developed astronomers, mathematicians, scientists, librarians.

Everything that ever happened happens at equinox. Wars start, armistices all arrive between early October and the end of the year. Symphonies begin and break off on autumn leave-taking. Governments change; the only logical time for elections (however pro forma), for mothers of four to head dutifully to precinct polls in station wagons despite a driving rain, to hide themselves behind curtains and pull the lever of choice.

Three compressed months of change write the year in brief. Plants pull back; landscape retreats into a miniature of muted colors. Tonight, where I grew up, the cicadas have their last seasonal blowout, choral storms outside my childhood window, now serving some Other Child in the formation of memories. Even from this distance their simmer is audible, a sex-soaked group pulse, a twitch in the dry air swelling to buzz-saw bandwidth. Wind pitches their group shout in a mechanical wave sounding for all the world like a million miniature pieces of shook sheet tin. Reaching decibel denouement the noise cuts off at the chaos instant, fizzling to a few holdouts. The signal from one swarm sets off another, a hundred yards off, flaring in pitch before it too hushes. All down the county line, the overlapping antiphony of bug choirs.

Frost stencils the hoods of cars, reveals internal cross-struts as clearly as an X-ray. Delinquent husbands return after thirty years, begging for absolution. The cheerful, hermetic next-door neighbor, receiving in his mail the most blunt prognosis medical technology can muster, turns back to his house, thinking: Just time enough to get those problem patches under the shingles. On every corner, lambent glow of streetlamps on maple limbs, an inverted carpet of rust. The moon goes gibbous, the night stars a drunken dream. Where I grew up, "Milky" is the only conceivable adjective for the spread of pebbled, intertidal autumn sky.

Combines scythe circumference swatches, close their noose around holdout corn. At the last pass, a thousand acres of trapped rats, snakes, and pheasant break from the drawn net, most mauled by indifferent machines. Sundays, as winds whip through moribund barns, harvesters meet in narthex and nave to sing how all is safely gathered in, as if they had the principal hand in bringing it off. Autumn is the note before the last melisma, the third stanza, the congregation fumbling in hymnals to read both words and music. A plenitude of pies, pride of drop-in guests, brace of hams, corsage of table settings, parliament of mashed potatoes, supplication of network sports, clatch of conversation, covey of vacation days, school of parades, volume of preserves, brood of read-alouds, keepsake of snapshots: everything running at glut, at glorious surplus.

"Healthy Midwestern girl," Todd used to tease me. "Healthy Midwestern influences." They have not helped me healthily over him. All day today, it felt as if this were the last chance I would have to remember what it felt like, in the blood, once, to be young. That synonym list of anticipation, before the business of thinning out.

Everything that ever happened to me happened in autumn. I moved away from home. I first fell in love. I got my first job. In autumn, at twelve, I thought I was hemorrhaging to death. Autumn is sea-storm warnings a thousand miles inland, everyday affairs going entirely incomprehensible, changed by the chance disaster, the autumn occurrence, the fall phenomenon.

Once I spent the wet first days of fall blowing on tea, doing a picture puzzle of Constable's Hay Wain, the soggy, rocking card table badly in need of a shim. Racing my mother for the obvious pieces, the wheel spokes, the stream, and leaving the uniform sky for when it wouldn't be so hard. Working alongside the woman who pieced me together, who has since put aside both picture puzzles and procreation for good.

I bought my first book in autumn, a story about three girls who swear a perpetual pact of friendship and set out to do something slightly forbidden but ultimately laudable one Saturday in September. Annually, like celestial clockwork, I acquire more volumes, seek out the great multistory secondhand dealers. Through plaster caverns damp with the aroma of disintegrating bindings, I select on size, color, the marginalia of former owners — subjects as obscure as Guide to Fencing, or Tungsten Mining Commission Proceedings, 1934. I hedge them up against winter, and toss them all out the following spring.

In the fourth grade, two weeks after Labor Day, I brought home my first instrument, a three-quarter-sized 'cello bigger than I was. I took it upstairs to my father's study, methodically ground the endpin into the lacquered floor, and touched the bow to the catgut C. A bass swell filled the house, penetrating to the root cellar— the only successful sound I ever made on the thing. All subsequent attacks on the instrument were failed attempts to recreate that first resonance. I turned the box in the following Labor Day, after a frustrating summer stuck in first position. Next autumn I took up piano. Czerny exercises (Chopin without sex, Brahms with a bad conscience) every October from then on.