Richard Powers - Gold Bug Variations

Once inside the door, he dusts off the Goldberg disk and returns it to its absent place on the player. The music radiates again, with only a few additional scratch-induced mutations on the vinyl to record his fit of a few evenings before. The tune, suddenly exuberant this morning, confirms him that a method exists. An alternative, close to the beating heart of translation. In the precision of harmonic structure, he hears his own conviction that the coding problem rests on a simple look-up table — at ever lower levels, a mechanism to explain cell growth, viral piracy, symbiotic coalition government of organs, the origin of species, phone impulses broken off in panic, inexplicable behavior late in the year, fitful inspiration, the continuous cold modal rapture in chords, in vivo.

He wakes after two hours and walks to the library, Saturday morning, bucking the current of fifty thousand Memorial Stadium football fans. Deep into the season, he still has not acclimated; getting from Stadium Terrace to the stacks against the crowd takes twice as long as normal. Inside the informational Fort Knox, he pores over the periodicals in a spiral search back into time, not knowing what he is looking for but certain he will recognize it when he sees it. He is skimming the Journal of Biological Chemistry back to the early 1950s when he is suddenly frozen by a muted roar — a tsunami coming from some distance. The sound flashes through him, followed by instant realization: this is it. The magazine ads for fallout shelters with plush carpeting and Scrabble sets, the sad government films teaching kindergartners to survive an airburst by popping under their school desks: the age of information has caught up with itself.

But just as quickly, the collective howl collapses into silence. Ressler waits for another muffled announcement but hears nothing. Then the leap of inference: the home team threatening to score. All politics are local. Curious, he climbs to deck ten, looks out from this aerial outpost through the side of the stadium, between the banks of colonnades. There, a mass of fifty thousand particles forms a single, eukaryotic Football Fan. Waving, pink arms become the manifold cilia of a rotifer rippling across the membrane of this cooperative cell.

Ohio State takes the local boys through a clinic, as they will down the years fading into time imMemorial. Watching this remarkable exercise in collective stimulus and response, the fifty thousand organelles testing and responding to their environment, he resolves to differentiate himself. He will give in to the pressure of selection, employ the one weapon he has for obtaining the one thing of any consequence to him: Jeanette Koss — tasting, achieving her, pressing, infecting, taking, joining, learning what she is. He will overwhelm her by sheer display of lovely force, of preening genotype. He will bring her an incalculable prize, like those chocolate-box corpses certain spiders bring their loves, proofs of potential that also shield the suitor from serving as meal.

It relieves him to choose. Weeks he has held off, waiting for this impossible complication to become the first of simplicities. Now he will prove to her that he, of everyone she has ever met, most merits the selection of love. He will give her the most beautiful bouquet imaginable — objective, freezing, clear: the top rung of Jacob's ladder. Half blind to their contents, he checks out a dozen bound journals and carries them back to his den. On his way, the collective supercell, its function over, lyses. He stands helpless, feels the crowd sweep over him. The walls of the stadium explode, issuing fifty thousand viruses into the air. Epidemic this time of year.

Learning the Irregular Verbs

I stopped loving Tuckwell and started resenting him. No reason. The same reason I first loved him. I can't imagine how I ever thought my love might make a difference to him. Irrational arrival, irrational exit. I asked myself thirty times a day why I was trading him for an excellent shot at nothing. I wasn't even trading. Nothing mercantile about it. I was giving him away. Throwing.

In bad moments, I blamed advertising. It had always depressed me: form without substance, noise parading as sense. But in fairer intervals, I knew Keith only did what most of us do for a living: he sold things, only a little more honestly than most. He ridiculed his career himself: "The art form of the century. Concert, gallery, and holy writ in one convenient package. How to say 'Eat Multinational Carcinogen Patties' appealingly. How to convince the overcashed that all they need for happiness is leg weights. Mind-forged manacles."

For four years, he had shown me every ad campaign he did. Not for approval — to ward off boredom, keep us from drifting into different dialects. In the end, I chose one of his major accounts to throw a fit over. We were cooking dinner together, a familiar menu of acquired favorites. By tacit agreement, we did not talk about my plans to move — how far they'd gone, where I stood. We'd made that mistake twice since it became reality, and now cut the topic a wide berth. By dessert, Keith cracked his affectionate parody of my day at the office. "Question," he said, mugging for my benefit. "Is the Human Bean getting any smarter?" Nostalgic lost offering, reminder of everything we'd given each other. He put it forward resignedly, but with an element of outside shot. After all, the old joke had always worked before.

But not that evening. "Answer: If you have to ask…."

"Supporting documentation, please." Behind the burlesque, Kei-thy was trying to save us. But I didn't feel like playing. He spread a roll of paper towel and tried to amuse me by drawing a timeline of meliorism, marking pyramids, cathedrals, flotillas, railroads, and particle accelerators in little dots that broke out in a rash over the right side of the continuum. I ignored him, clearing dishes, putting up the leftovers.

"Einstein," he chuckled. "Lord Keynes. Pretty heavy hitters in recent generations. The semiconductor," he challenged, drawing one at the far right, in a halo of stars. "Quantum electrodynamics. Got you there!" He drew a triumphal arch for each one. He caricatured a baroque staircase leading from midcentury ever upwards off the map, bearing a little sign reading "This Way. Watch Your Step." He would have broken my heart had I let him.

"This is absurd," I said, level-voiced, ready for violence. "Love Canal. Ozone depletion. Tropical rain forest the size of Connecticut destroyed annually. A hundred thousand species extinct by the time we retire. How smart can you get?" Keithy diluted the silence by a low whistle. With a few deft sketches, he infested his staircase with cracks, broke it off in a shower of mortar and falling bodies. Mounted sideways on the resulting chasm, he hung a sign pointing downwards: "To Holiday Inn." He waited for a reaction I wouldn't give. "That reminds me," he said, leaving the room to fetch his portfolio as I used the timeline to wipe the table. He returned with the boards for a national campaign and ran them past me for approval.

I must have thought to make things easy for him by making myself ugly. I still loved him that much. But real connection between us died the moment I tried to protect him from what was happening. I flipped through his pictures, written in the world's only ubiquitous language, its syntax carrying the cozy, intimate delusion of tin-can telephones. I read his copy with the feeling that none of it made any sense. I understood the message. But his whole campaign didn't mean anything. "Keith, you say 'safer' here, but you never say safer than what."

"Hm. Fiendishly clever."

"And what do you mean, 'We make things right? What things? How right? Who's this 'we'? There are twenty-five hundred of these places across the country. Am I supposed to believe that all the wes do things one way and all the theys do it another? Grant me some discrimination."