Richard Powers - Gold Bug Variations

September at seven, the cyclic return: government-instituted torture of youth peculiar to Western Nations. Spelling bees, closed-circuit broadcasts of space shots, oral reports, experimental alphabets, new math. At sixteen: the sweet fumblings of first sex under the pines in the dark, on a mat of needles, discovery without texts, transgressing the papal demarcation of his parts and mine. Today, years later: too late to let the season linger any longer. By thirty, autumn urgency should have run its course. The time of year for setting out, as if all summer had been only a holding pattern. The thrill of Directory Assistance, adrenaline of a toll call.

The electrostatics of wool and cold fronts, the smell of earthworms across the sidewalk, the aroma of retreat in the rain, nervous shift in the permafrost — scent of late September sets me loose. I can smell it in the center of Times Square, at Chambers Street, Rockefeller Center, uptown, all the way over the Hudson and west into the prairies where I learned it. The smell of that private, quiet secret I always had: the neighborhood getting ready for night. Night that might bring anything. Crisp, almost here: can't be far off, can't be long.

Time to dig out of storage clothes stinking of cedar and naphthalene. Heinrich Schliemann Stumbles Across Grandmother's Trunk. Did I really wear this? As late as last year? Should have bought the replacement winter coat last spring, capitalized on old stock's mark-downs. Too late now; as with fresh vegetables and apartment rentals, it's a cellar's market.

It seemed this week that sixty-eight degrees would hold out as long as its constituency. But a seasonal swing of warmth's buffer, a few dry flakes, the hint of a pressure system setting sail, and the air is suddenly cold enough for the frames of my glasses to numb my temples. The radio playing in the apartment just below runs afoul of a flux in the ionosphere, bleeding the stations in and out across the dial. Partly sunny skies, breezy and somewhat colder. Dropping by this weekend, with the lows ranging into the deo gratias of medieval monks, or the cheerful idiocy of a helium-voiced talk radio host who argues with the home audience that things might not be half so bleak as they seem. That is, only twice as bleak as survivable.

Every year, preexistent in the almanac, each day already marked out on the perpetual calendar. Light length on the downward trend, caught for a moment at fulcrum. Hours are too small an increment to think in. Clocks go inconsequential. I need a wider instrument— the click of tree branches — to measure the only quality that has ever counted. Weather is the one tenuous connection between this year and two years ago. Then too, the season slid so deep in me it seemed to change direction. Ambiguous cusp of temperature; newly bare branches identical to those on the verge of budding. With only the lightest push, tonight's temperature could easily set off in me the same cell-programmed thaw. Cells can't tell that no one is around anymore. Spark of arousal — dumb fixation, stupid holdover — while paging the atlas for him. I haven't even pinned him down to a specific city. But he's there, somewhere among the burnt umbers.

In autumn, Herri, the Flemish landscaper whose rescue from obscurity will never be written, stood on a hill just outside a Renaissance village and painted the sweep of trees turning autumnal tones, harvest being hauled in, stooks standing in the vacated fields, departing vees of geese, soft rub of dusk on the contoured hills. And in the corner of the panel, almost overlooked — autumn bonfire. The only persuasive argument against living practically. The return of a familiar friend.

It suddenly occurs to me how I might fix him to a specific spot. I'm not restricted to the atlas. Perhaps that landscape — the one word he's sent since Dr. Ressler's death — never existed. But the panel itself exists somewhere, if not the panorama it imitates. The picture sits in a collection, and all collections have catalogs, compiled and archived. I've got a skill. Let me use it, however irrelevantly. However much my trying to locate him puts me on par with those birds whose apparatus does not stop them returning yearly to the unilaterally abandoned nest.

The shape of my day may already have been printed in the almanac. Sunrise at x. Sunset at y. H amount of daylight hours. The arc of prediction intercepting today. And yet: something about to give, about to happen, near at hand. Quick, close, behind the advertising, during the frozen dinner, over television, after the office politics, waiting its turn in the queue of current events. Something fundamental. Something real this time. The secret will come clean. I will not die in bed.

It's good to go to sleep with a project. Staves off winter for another week. But the day needs its quote, and one has just occurred to me. They still suggest themselves in the evenings— evolutionary holdovers tonsil or appendix. I juggle today's for a minute, so tired I can barely spell, before I get it intact and identified. De Tocqueville's Democracy in America. "They are all advancing every day towards a goal with which they are unacquainted." The only direction the calendar allows, forward toward that old friend, leaving. The goal of autumn.

Canon at the Third

Days later, Ressler still doesn't know the reason for Dr. Koss's visit. Neither seeking nor avoiding, he sees her everywhere — in the lab, in conference, in the creaking Georgian hallways of Biology. He studies her for flutter, but sees none. She is unaffectedly congenial. No secrets: so I was wrong about your birthday. He does his best to be congenial back. A week after the visit, coming out of the office he shares with Lovering, he practically knocks the woman over. Who knows how long she's been standing there. "You scared me," she says. All at once, the pound of blood pressure, hypertension bruits coming on like Mardi Gras. Excitement or fear? His or hers?

"Were you looking for me?" he asks stupidly.

Embarrassment clouds her face. She looks away shyly, confessing something for the first time since her visit. "No. Your office mate. Can you give him this?" She hands him a note and rushes off too quickly. Ressler battles with ethics for as long as it takes to peek. The message is unsealed and he kills no cats by looking. It's nothing; a reminder to Joe to get his paperwork in. The man has a mailbox for these things.

She's taken to dressing differently, but he can't say how. She seems airier, her walk a brisker cadence, her shoulders buoyant. She no longer fits the make he'd assigned her. She can't quite make the flamboyant smartmouth stick. He has no idea how to classify her, let alone interpret her late-night light arm around him the week before. Only her gift — those vinyl keyboard variations— proves irrefutably that she really dropped by. But that piece is the most ambiguous code wheel of all.

He needs real work to distract him from speculation. He throws himself into the rate trials, promoting them from the make-work they were made for. He visits Ulrich's office without appointment. Rousing the team leader from a pile of papers, he feels the force of his ludicrous mission. Low man on the totem, with no productive work to speak of, asking a man of thirty years his senior to humor a proposal he hasn't even formulated. He sits nervously. "Stuart?" the chief asks, affecting pleasure.

"Dr. Ulrich, I—" He seizes up, choosing just that moment to remember Koss's departure at his door, his trailing I want, which he now can too clearly name. "I think we ought to leave amino sequence analysis to the chemists."

Ulrich smiles at the boy's diplomatic choice of words. "How do you suggest we get to the translation without the ciphertext?"

Ressler knows Ulrich to be intellectually capable of grabbing the heart of things. "There must be a way to determine the codon-to-amino map without pacing over every inch of resulting print. The thing's too dense. We'll be forever."