Richard Powers - Gold Bug Variations

After Margaret goes to bed, the adults spend the remaining evening pleasantly. Suffering community with the Blakes is vastly superior to another evening of overloaded solitude. Since Dr. Koss's visit, he has lost his capacity for productive isolation. He finds himself driven to company, not sure what exactly he hopes to find there. They gravitate to the front lawn, stroll down the street toward the university. The air is brisk. Students have poured back to campus, in the erotic uncertainty of a new term. Eva relates her latest cerebral misadventures. She has just mastered the trick of delayed dictation. With her right hand, she jots down whatever someone is saying; with left, she writes the previous sentence in the past tense. "I'm not sure what practical advantages this has," she says, smiling fetchingly in streetlight.

Tooney puts his arm around his wife. "Do you know that we are walking in the presence of a woman who does crossword puzzles in pen?" Blake shakes his head. "When I first discovered that, I knew this was the sexiest woman I'd ever meet. I had to marry her."

The rhythm of the evening, the pitiful, arms-flung attempt to articulate the thrust, is drowned in cicada swarms. Ressler is shot through, unable to rid himself of the idea, the face, the scent of that woman who has attached herself to his brain like a water parasite. Why isn't she here? She is at this minute home, with her husband, while his thoughts are thick with her shape and spore. He grasps the slack truth: he is already lost, the one person alive who knows he isn't a native speaker. Ressler smiles as Tooney relates his own courtship. He watches this man and wife, such obvious mates, and suddenly decides to risk the infant friendship on an outside chance that can tell him nothing except how lost he already is. "Your wife is phenomenal," he blurts out. "I'm in love with her."

"Terrific!" Blake shouts, shaking his hand. "Hear that, wife?" Eva blushes. "See that? She thinks you're neat too."

"I mean it. I want to have an affair with her."

"Don't blame you in the least," Blake chuckles. "But I ain't gonna letcha, lecher." He cuffs Stuart's ears, rubs his hair with his knuckles, dangerously close to a hug. "You may kiss her good night, when the time comes. But no tongue!" Both cackle nervously, good-naturedly. The woman in question pretends outrage, but shoots Ressler a look that says, Well, we might have been an item, you and I, in other circumstances.

"Suppose it were, " he persists, but the experiment is ruined by descent into hypothetical. "Suppose it were Eva. Magnet, built in, like migration. That I had to come back to her, to that beach, even the first year, never having seen it. Suppose it were Eva. And everything depended on my making Margaret." Ressler rubs his neck, embarrassed. "You have an amazing child."

"That time of year, is it? G'wan. Get married. What're you waiting for? Can bachelor days last forever?"

"Does ripe fruit never fall?" Eva adds, her quota for the day. "Do, Stuart! Not even science compares with parenthood."

"Seems irreversible at first," Tooney says. "Terrifying. You look for the sign that she, out of every active genome in the species, is the one you're after. But the one you are after___"

Eva interrupts him with a nod toward Ressler. Tooney, noticing, clams up. Ressler announces quietly, "The one I'm after is already married."

"Stuart, I'm sorry." Eva takes his arm. "We're so stupid. We had no idea."

They walk another block, then circle back. The Blakes ask nothing, probe no further. How much has Tooney inferred? Ressler's been here but months, is a notorious hermit, knows no one except the crew. He can't believe how obvious he has been. He's just been waiting for the chance to commit this carelessness. They wind up back at K-53-C. Nobody is ready to break up the company, but the night is clearly over. "Can I still get that kiss good night?" Eva takes him in her arms, shoves her husband away.

"Deep and lasting osculation," Blake says, as his wife and this stranger kiss fully on the lips. "Nothing like it."

Ressler turns his back and lets himself into his apartment. Closing the door, he enters a vault, a time vacuum. He feels the first seed of what could easily become panic if he nudges it. He goes to the record player. But the flowering, formal perfection of the music is so close that he rips the playing arm off the motionless canon. The needle lurches hideously across the vinyl. He flings the record into the corner and with the same violent, emotionless wrist twist puts the banished Robeson on. But spirituals, smacking of theology, only intensify his shakes.

He digs in, steadying. Fear? Grief? The intrusion registering down his nerve sheaves, the radical dissection has its root somewhere before words: in the self-describing semaphore. The home nature museum. The work undone at the lab. The fallout shelter signs on stadium and stacks. That syntax-generating syntax. Jeanette's genome. The code bug. Now no matter, child, the name. Sorrow's springs are the same. It is the blight man was born for. It is Margaret he mourns for.

Program Notes

A handful of visits to Manhattan On-Line revealed that the night staff were not completely cut off from the rest of the firm they worked for. There really was a business behind them. If I came early enough in the evening, I caught the remnants of the swing shift who enjoyed hanging around after hours, avoiding rush commute or baiting the company recluses.

Jim Steadman was a regular, always late punching out. He had ostensible business: "Transfer of power, Ms. O'Deigh. Somebody's got to steer this pitiful ship." But Jimmy's nautical function was, if anything, ballast. Compensating for a lack of skill at the helm, he tried to run things by the manual. With those two on night watch, that was impossible. Jimmy was dear: he rarely transcended the accidents of his life and time, but was squarely in the camp of good men. Franklin had trained under him and took to calling him Uncle within days. Uncle Jimmy never objected to the sobriquet, although he was only a dozen years Franklin's senior. Avuncularity sat on his chest like a Good Conduct medal. The man would have made a great counselor, or one of those folksy district representatives, prematurely senile, whom the constituency returns term after term because he's a harmless institution.

Convinced that Chief of Operations included the duties of utility fielder, Jimmy patrolled the grounds, did minor maintenance, set rat traps in the attic, swept the stockroom, cleaned the corporate fridge, and managed to run the computer in only three or four times what it would take a teenager who stuck to the task. He would come in early, kill the morning, gossip with the keypunch girls. He would frequently still be there in the evening when Todd and Ressler arrived, modestly martyred by the OT, with horror stories about how he'd been checking the circuit breaker when he somehow brought the shop to a standstill just as the machine was closing out totals. The three of them would spend hours restarting the process from the top. Jimmy would stay on happily, around the clock. The computer room was his home, the staff, his family.

He flirted outrageously with all females, a snips-and-snails teasing. Jimmy had no wife or girlfriend. Shyness made him clownishly aggressive. He was sweetly overweight, suffered from an emotional skin condition, and nursed a "bum leg," a circulatory symptom telegraphing an advance notice nobody paid attention to. He lived at home with his widowed mother. He called her each evening just before leaving. Presumably, this mobilized supper or instructed her to call the police if he wasn't home within the hour.

He struck a wary symbiosis, a nonaggression pact, with the system. He did not trust the machine but treated it well and hoped for the best in return. He had no explicit grasp on what the computer did. It seemed to run itself, a part of the mundane miraculous. He liked to take me aside and inform me confidentially about the little men inside the CPU, at the consoles of their own little machines, which they, in turn, did not entirely understand, but which kept the whole she-bang going.