Richard Powers - Gold Bug Variations

Dr. Ressler pulled on his earlobes, a characteristic gesture he used whenever he caught himself being inexplicably human. "I thought: 'No wonder this Bach fella is so great a composer. He anticipates Watson and Crick by two hundred years.' Idiot! And I grew worse with the piece before it was all over. It didn't take me long to discover in the music all sorts of outrageous parallels. Nor was it all my fault. The piece has the same numerology as the systems we were working with. Do you know how the variations are built?"

I shook my head. Music had never been a formal thing to me. It had always been a run of expressive moments — urgencies that words only interfered with. But I watched in fascination as Dr. Ressler stood and walked to the turntable, curtly jerked the needle. He placed it back down on side one, track one, and to my astonishment, when the music started again, he began to sing. But not the melody, not the right-hand filigree I had concentrated on when learning to hack out the little aria. He sang, instead, the simple sequence spelled out in the bass. "This," he said, "is what the composer will vary through his gigantic construction. Not the melody; the harmonic sequence. The first great analysis of the piece, written at the moment of Mendel's triple rediscovery, set a precedent by calling this theme the Base. Handy English coincidence." He sang, batching the Base into four-note blocks:

He launched into numerology: triplet triads over each theme note. Superimposed over those first four triplet rungs, a diversionary tune that, with grace notes, contains twenty tones. Two halves of the aria, each sixteen bars, both scored to repeat, totaling sixty-four measures. He went to his earlobe again. "All the numbers we were after. The coincidence meant nothing, of course. But to a snot-nosed kid of twenty-five, the exercise was invigorating." To an old woman of thirty, too. It brought out the closet gnostic to hear him talk. Not for the correlations themselves, at best novelties, but for the look at a mind that years of night shift had not put to sleep. One that still drew connections between all things, if now only with embarrassment at its own profusion. A mind that looked for the pattern of patterns, the structure that mirrored mind itself, gave it something to recognize in the landscape around it.

This was my first introduction to musical experience I had not even suspected existed. As Dr. Ressler sang along with the record player, I began to see that he listened to these variations not as if they followed one after another, but as if they stacked up simultaneously, sounding all at once in an unbearable polyphonic chorus. He listened to the world, more attuned to its awful fullness than its expendable melody: a set of variations all based on one, simple, thirty-two-note ground bass; a giant passacaglia preserving the harmonic structure of the original, fleshing it out into every conceivable design.

My hush made Ressler self-conscious. He snorted. "As you can imagine, I fast approached the conviction that either everything in the universe fit into a regular pattern or that I was, at my tender age, perilously close to a weekend at what people in the late fifties were fond of calling the Funny Farm."

I looked away from his self-deflation, through the silvered glass at Todd, preparing a night's work in the other room. Although he could not see us through the mirror, Frank now and then looked up at the room where his delinquent shiftmate sat talking. Ressler, anxious to join him, wound up with that favorite expression of Bach: All things must be possible. A pedagogical goading-on to performances that lay just outside the fingers. What exactly did the phrase mean? "Everything that is, is possible" was possible, if redundant. "All things that might be, can be" rubbed up in my mind against unlikelihood. Yet an evolutionist might say the same. All permutations on an amino acid theme are possible; given sufficient time and the persistent tick of the mutation clock, everything might be tried, with varying success. Not every experiment will fly; but every conceivable message string is — whatever the word means — possible.

The mind, emerging from blind patterning in possession of catastrophic awareness, condensed the eon-work of random field trials into instants. Did Bach's baroque ditty harbor the political horrors of Ressler's own lifetime? Everything that humans can imagine will be implemented. Bergen-Belsen, Nagasaki, Soweto, Armenia, Bhopal: he had lived through all manner of atrocity. These mutations too were built on the little phrase, and then some. To listen to a theme and variations, he suggested, one had to be prepared for dissonance severe enough to destroy even the original theme.

"You see," Ressler at last broke our moratorium, "once the experiment gets underway, all possible outcomes are already implied." He spoke with a spittle of fear in his throat. "The impossibly delicate pineal folds of your ear, for instance. Just one of the infinite ways a child's ear might unfold." He winced, as if at the memory of a specific child. He ended our first lesson by returning to the phonograph and lifting the needle. "I listened to these miniatures for a year, pulled out of them the most marvelous genetic analogies. But at the end, the music refused to reduce, and it hurt worse than before. I was a good empiricist, and just as causality was forbidden me, so was prescription. All an empiricist is allowed to do about terrible possibility is describe it. All things being possible, description is everything."

He grew curt, perhaps ashamed at choosing this moment to break so long a silence. He asked forgiveness with his eyes— ridiculously inappropriate. Only with a woman twenty years younger, one he'd known just weeks, could he reveal his ambivalence toward human company, the host in the hermit. Quietly, his back turned as he punched a few console keys, he asked, "Do you think it would cost you a great effort to recover what you've lost?"

I couldn't for the life of me make out what he was talking about. Then it hit me: my piano skills, never more than modest. He wanted someone to play for him. "Do you two have a baby grand tucked away in all this electronics?"

"I'll get one tomorrow." He laughed, a sound that went straight into my chest.

Time passed before Dr. Ressler trusted us with the rest of the story; he'd dug a great deal more out of the sarabande than a handful of genetic metaphors. He had discovered, in the most painful way, why the aria and its wayward children made unspon-sored appearances in his mind's ears, keeping him awake in his barracks at night. It cost him considerably to find out. The music would remain unlistenable for decades. Love was long over, but what was lost to him he still loved so harshly that it prevented him from listening even to its trace.

I would never get from him, in so many words, why he chose the moment of Todd's arrival to return to the unlistenable piece. Why take it up again, just then, obsessively, once more finding in it more than he suspected? Perhaps it had something to do with the incurable Bach's other favorite quote. Asked how he made the keyboard perform miracles of interchanging voices when he possessed only the same finger-bound hands as the rest of mankind, he would say: It's simple. Just hit the right notes at the right time, and the thing virtually plays itself.

Double Check

Three months under the bridge; with frugality and luck, eight more in front of me before I have to hit the classifieds. Sickening to consider, so I won't. Human prerogative. Still: three months of reading, jotting, recalling. It feels as if I quit yesterday, that I'm on that most contrived of civilized symbolic stopgaps, a vacation.