Richard Powers - Gold Bug Variations

Todd smiled crookedly in the direction of his own mainframe. "The problem with living in the land of self-reliance is that a fellow has to do everything himself." I look at the artwork again tonight, yellowed by two years. Reportage transcribed to raw color, Franklin's latest attempt to bring newslight into the abandoned lunchroom. Shortly afterwards, this variant too broke off in favor of a new one. Operation Rude Awakening.

Todd grabbed his workbook from my hands, flipped violently through the pages. "Lots of fertile stuff here. Two hundred marines killed by truck bomb. Invasion of Caribbean nation. Big-time visual potential." Under his thumb, the illuminated calendar shot past like those children's animation tricks. "After a little time for aesthetic distance," he breathed. "Do you think," he turned casually, "there is something in the air?"

Q: Is there something in the air?

I asked him what he meant, but he took me to him again, half-tickling, half-measuring the flesh of my back. We had been on hugging terms forever; I'd never touched anyone before. He walked me to the elevator, waited, deposited me into the box, planted the softest, most fertile kiss cleanly on my lips, and pulled the grate shut as if tucking me into bed. But before I threw the lever to descend, he called out, "What day is today?"

Q: What day is today?

My answer was immediate. The day I at last left home. November first. Perpetual madness. I called out, halfway down the shaft, "All Saints'."

In the Archives

My father died when I was twelve. I remember nothing about him except my suspicion that he would have preferred that I'd been a boy. But I do remember how in every situation, he'd say that one needed "the right tools for the job." At the risk of having my old instructor in Research Methods revoke my degree ex post facto, I admit I haven't had the right tool for the job until today. I am looking for a town where he might be, a painting that might lead me to the hiding place. Until today, I've done this absurdly, museum by museum, from a handbook for art hunters making the Grand Tour. Trying to determine who lives at a certain address by using the phone book. I've willfully ignored the capstone of civilization — pointed arch, vault, flying buttress launching man's assault of the vertical — the cross-index. The higher the indexing level, the higher the civilization. From the recesses of my dusty reserve, I remember the cross-index for what I'm after. A two-volume, compact ordinance survey of the painted world.

With the right tool, the job is trivial. I look up met de Bles in the Painters volume. On demand, a complete list of everything the compilers know him to have painted: David and Bathsheba, Copper Mine, Adoration of Magi, Mountain Landscape, Village Landscape, Landscape with Iron Foundry, with Flight into Egypt, with Good Samaritan, with Banishing of Hagar — One of these landscapes must contain my conflagration. The titles give entry into the Names volume. There, amid the collections of Florence, Dresden, Belgium, I find a landscape matching my description. Even before my eyes confirm it, I know where the panel hangs. Museum of Fine Arts, Boston. As in Mass. USA. Idiot! I was there when he picked the postcard out. I stood looking at the scene with him for almost half an hour.

Todd sent me the scene to elicit a very specific association. In the depths of winter, in early 1984, he badgered Dr. Ressler and me to make a trip to New England. Pivotal visit. Franklin and I, in that woods cottage, reached a pitch of intimacy that could survive every climatic catastrophe. Dr. Ressler, coerced into the adventure, trapped with the two of us, at last told us the details of how he had fallen through the biographical safety net. Two timeless days together, isolated in the solitude only snow can bring on, tracking, talking, singing, solving mysteries late into the night. A community of three. For a moment it seemed we would never return to the city to need.

On the route up, we'd stopped in Boston, the Fine Arts, expressly so that Franker could see the panel. A research stop, he called it. He must have thought I would recognize it at once, a telegram of nostalgia held at arm's distance. Cursed with my visual illiteracy, I never connected the two images. He must have carried the artifact with him across the Atlantic and posted this emigrant Herri back from its native Flanders. It certainly came from the Low Countries; not even a draftsman of his skill could have forged that stamp and cancellation.

Now no cross-reference in the world will give me his coordinates or tell me what he's up to. I'm thrown back on that synthetic task of building the index. But how? In one of his few unguarded moments, Dr. Ressler confirmed my father on this one: one simply needs the right tool for the job.

"In the case of science," he told me, "the brief euphoria of slipping confusion's straitjacket reconciles you to a life spent washing beakers and sweeping up rat feces. Read the accounts," he urged, trying unsuccessfully to look grim. "Twelve milligrams of estradiol from one point five tons of mashed hog ovaries. Neurochemicals extracted from ten years' work on five hundred thousand cows' brains, at six cents per. Imagine. Someone carries each one of those lumps up three flights to the lab, enters them into the tedious ledger." In the end, that's why I loved him. Ressler knew how incalculably unlikely it was that a molecular duplication trick could hit upon a structure complex enough to probe its own improbability, willing to spend a life of profound tedium toward that end. To live the dull thrill of indexing.

I stayed in today, no leads on Todd's whereabouts, no tools for attacking the mound of scientific treatises that get harder and take me nowhere. I would give it up, were it not for the pain inside, remembering Ressler's dazed acceptance of long odds. "I have nothing now to give up, of course. But I would give everything for the chance to work a little longer."

The Polling Problem

She is a natural history, a sovereign kingdom, a theory about her environment, a virtuoso pedal-point performance. She follows a curve, a cadence, an animal locomotion he cannot help but lose himself to. Jeanette Koss is her own phylum. He admits it at last. No sense saving dignity in the face of onslaught. The moment the woman slips into the lab, everything Ressler is after — all careful simulation — is enveloped. He can attend to nothing, nor concentrate. She displaces with her texture, the frank affront of her skin, the arpeggiated toss of her hair. Dr. Koss walks across the lab to the dissection table, her legs inscribing a counterrhythm, the high arc of her collarbone floating in contrary motion. He is hypnotized by her approach, his pinch of chromatic pain enhanced to ecstasy at just being able to see her, look at her, taste without touching.

How can he remain impassive, give this woman no clue that she throws out his method, corrupts his buffer rates, soaks his equilibrium with a wash of chemical maydays? He has spent weeks ignoring her, but extended indifference only obsesses him further, ensilkens her smooth fur, enriches her odor. He probes, fascinated, cannot help but palpate the pain, the ulcered place. Oh, the blot is there, and not at all deep: the animal inkstain.

She gives no sign that she has guessed. But how could she not? The bend of her limbs, her least motion, her mere presence is paralyzing. All he can do as she enters the room is look away, keep busy, breathe quietly. Press his informant hands against the Formica. He examines her secretly, minutely along her entire length, to see if he might not have made some mistake, some enhancement of memory belied by empirical fact. But searching for repulsive detail and finding none fixates him further. He watches her gingerly pour the chloroform, pick up the stainless recurve blade as if puzzled by how knowledge always requires this preliminary killing.