Richard Powers - Gold Bug Variations

Remembering how furious Todd's italic name had made me, I needed so badly to see him, talk to him, tell him my irreversible step, that I did what I'd never done in all my years at the branch: I left early. I left Mr. Scott to field any residual Oscars, walked down to the warehouse, and buzzed my private signal. The door barked without a word, and I rode up in the accordioned freight hauler, blessing the winch-and-chicken-cage for still going through its paces. Jimmy Steadman greeted me at the top of the shaft, having just punched out. He shook his head sadly and said, "I sort of hoped you'd outgrown this place."

"Why, Uncle Jim?" I asked, touching him on the arm as we swapped spots. Everything made me happy — the elevator, the cartons of three-part paper, this prematurely old man.

"Because one of these days, these electronic brains are gonna launch Operation Rude Awakening." He pushed his glasses up the slope of his varicose nose. "You don't want to be around then. You won't want to admit knowing any of us." Jimmy waved good night and swung the iron lever around its semicircle. The grate swung shut, the car descended, and I was alone in a silence so great I could hear it coursing in my ears.

Franklin was in the cafeteria, taking his time before commencing his share of the GNP. Dropping to my knees like a recruit in basic training, I crawled unnoticed to where my consolation sat. Only when I lowed did Frank rock upright, surprised but not frightened by another sentience in the room. Seeing it was me and not a dazed seven-point elk wandering down from Canada, he laughed explosively, grabbed my head in his arms, drew it to him, and nuzzled my neck. This time, no crossed choreography. "I'll teach you to stay away so long," he growled, shaking me by the rib cage and sinking his teeth into my shoulder. The man was unreformable.

But from that moment, visa granted, our way of being with one another changed. From then on, we could not be in the same room without resorting to the etymology of touch.

I rabbit-punched my way out of his rib-grip and straightened. Fighting to keep the guilty triumph out of my voice, I said, "It's been an eventful two weeks. I'm making a move. Looking for my own apartment."

Todd brightened vicariously. "That's great!" he shouted, cuffing me again by the waist. Then, realizing, he whispered gingerly, "Isn't it?"

I looked at him and decided. "Yes," I said. "I think it will be."

Todd turned back to his notebook, and for a minute I thought he hadn't understood. When he spoke, I saw that he knew everything, even the part he played in my decision. "We must make sure both of you get through this all right." As if he were my agent, manager, charge d'affaires. He asked me a hundred of his patented questions that evening. Was I ready? What did I hope to get from it? Would I go on seeing Tuckwell? Did I have a bad conscience? Did it help to talk? This last, at least, I answered unequivocally. Despite the attention he lavished on me, our new intimacy, he looked at me the way he had stared at that Vermeer Head of a Girl: urgent, quizzical, separated by centuries. He listened to every detail of my last five years. And it all went into his new pet journal.

Q: What was he so intent on?

As we talked, Todd labored with colored pens, scissors, glue, and bits of postcard. The pages he made were so full of hue and texture I thought they must be visual studies. When I caught sight of reproductions of two paintings we had seen at the Met, I thought he'd at last begun the postponed apprentice piece he'd once described as the bane of a decent computer operator's existence. I imagined our private art tour had at last brought him to it. "I see I'm not the only one setting off," I said. Even as I clamped down, I couldn't hide my happiness. But Franklin looked up, confused.

"Oh, you mean this." He gestured defensively at his handiwork. "Scrap, actually. Stupid." He flipped a few pages, skeptically. "Here we are. Four weeks ago. Old enough for aesthetic distance, hmm? Well then. You explain this to me." He held the page open for examination. At the top, he'd emblazoned the date in parodic gothic. Below was no dissertation, no visual study. It was a base of news copy run into a Rauschenberg combine, one of those bric-a-brac assemblages that accumulate outside the grottos of Spanish saints. Prominent, en face, he had pasted two front-page columns, set in the same typeface: "Missile Issue: 2 Perceptions," and "America's Cup to Australia II as 132-Year U.S. Reign Ends." The two headlines were indistinguishable in emphasis, except that one had a secondary head claiming "Each Feels Other Holds the Advantage."

"Exactly how they appeared in the paper. All I've added is the paint job. We're to read them both as news, although only the boat race passes the novelty test. And look! This one was wedged in the middle, begging to be overlooked: 'Beirut Premier Offers to Resign in Truce Accord.'" He spoke in the same voice that had whispered the secrets of canvas in my ear. But the accents of incomprehension, which in front of the wheatfield had ached to take in, applied to Beirut — in light of subsequent events — registered only bitterness at being held forever in the dark. Event was clearly there only to carry the ads. He had worked other message-threads into the collage: "Slow Start for Weinberger in Peking," "Nicaraguan Rebels Fail in Effort to Seize Large Town in the North." But the text trim, now smoke screen, debased to diversion, was just the thin excuse for a profusion of visual quotes — Rembrandt, Caravaggio, his own inked labyrinth.

We sat, Todd cradling my upper arm, rubbing it gently to revive feeling. At length, he relaxed into my arms and kissed me where the collarbone turns to sternum. He came up without apology and asked, "What would it feel like to wake up to an evening edition finally announcing that something definitive had at last happened? Something real?"

No matter what my failings as a mate, woman, daughter, or friend, I've always held up my end of a conversation. I answered, "November first. Pompeii buried by Vesuvius. Lisbon destroyed by quake; sixty thousand die. First H-bomb explodes at Eniwetok. Jan O'Deigh walks out on lover, unprovoked."

"You've landed fortuitously in my lap. A woman who already knows what's happened today." He looked at the cafeteria clock. "And here we are, with two hours left." He took both my hands between his. "I've been very rude. I'm sorry. I know where you must be, just now."

He was obligated to complete something before the day shift returned. But before he set to work and I returned to what was no longer my apartment, Todd showed me one more page of that new journal, the destruction of his careful clippings under rococo stuccowork. He explained why he had given up on the text, buried it under a wedding cake of filigree. "Most people who pull apart the Times aren't looking for the millennium; they just want to explain the roundup in their corner of the panel. Everyone has his own port of entry: Business Day, Style, Science Times, the classifieds. Mine used to be page one. Quidnunc, ambulance chaser. But that was last month. You get tired of that. Look here."

He retrieved a story, buried alive under anatomical drawings so expert I was shocked to realize he had drawn them himself. This page of his belles heures carried as background "Youth Advises House on Computer Crime." Teen tells Committee on Science and Technology how he tapped into secret records stored on mainframes at Sloan-Kettering and Los Alamos. These ultrasensitive systems still used the passwords they were shipped with, unashamed log-ins like "system" and "test." I could not read the story, as it was lost in vineyard rows creeping up a craggy Rhineland cas-tlescape. Todd paraphrased, barely concealing his delight in the child's ingenuity, the celebration of American frontier. He recited half from memory, "When asked at what point he questioned the ethics of his actions, he answered, 'Once the FBI knocked on the door.'"