Richard Powers - Gold Bug Variations

He began smiling the death smile. "Aren't we being a little willful? It's a time-honored, universal tradition. 'Your Driver'— insert nameplate here—'Safe, Reliable, Courteous.' Semiotics, woman. We're not communicating anything. Folks don't care about facts. They wouldn't believe them anyway. They just want the promise of friendship slipped into the sale."

"And they believe that?"

"Who's gonna lie about friendship?"

" 'We'll love you. All twenty-five hundred of us.'"

"It's commercially viable."

"Is that right?" I asked quietly.

"Yes. That's right." Still smiling, he knew we were lost, that I wanted it that way. I kept flipping through the boards, as if we weren't in the middle of the last square-off. One thing I still admire about Keith: despite my encouragement, he never stooped to killing as a way to preserve things. He never pretended any degree of attachment less than he had. Just as I was on the verge of giving him further cause, the phone rang. Keith bounded out of the room to answer it. I heard him from the bedroom, just short of abusive, asking, "Who's financing this? Who pays your salary? Who do I sue for breach of privacy?"

He hung up and came back looking beautifully sheepish. "My poor relations in the phone solicitation racket. Turns out our name has been chosen at random to receive a book of coupons worth several thousands of dollars, free, at only twenty-nine ninety-five. Dante placed those people one circle below real estate brokers. Where's that timeline? Gotta make some emendations."

I went to him and put my arms around him. After a long time, we separated, embarrassed. I mumbled something about going to bed. He didn't move. I went into the bathroom and ran the water. I heard Tuckwell let himself out the door and lock it from the outside. He went down the stairs two at a time. I went to the dark window and watched until he came out on the street below. I saw him safely to the next block. He turned north, cutting a swath toward the bombed-out blocks. Everywhere, shops had battened down for the night, the day's refuse and rinds rotting in the gutter. In the two and a half blocks I tracked him, amorphous outlines threatened from doorways, bumped against him, suggesting obscure exchanges. Keith kept up a clip that convinced the wasted, substance-dependent figures that he was in peak health and not to be messed with.

His dependency was the city itself: male addiction to the unpredictable. Covert dangers of an evening walk through the neighborhood, sotto voce threats implied and periodically acted out, had led him from the lazy Methodist interior where he had been raised. The instant the umbilical snapped, he'd buzzed to the coast, first to a fine arts school in Rhode Island, a state whose motto, and not Colorado's, he insisted, should have been "Nothing Without Providence." Then Boston for a year. All staging ground for New York, shooting into Manhattan's drag like an ion from a Tesla coil. He had habituated to life and needed a higher throttle. In North America, NY, NY was the most potent over-the-counter drug available. The city sucked him up as it did all insomniacs. But even here, familiarity tracked him down. After five years of Brooklyn, he talked about moving to the Lower East Side, the South Bronx. Calcutta perhaps. Someplace a body could feel.

But I moved first. Ironic: I couldn't think of the two miles' sickening diversity between the South Docks and Prospect Park without admitting I didn't belong here. One look at my clothes, one syllable of accent gave me away. And here I was, combing the neighborhoods for a place as if it were coupon-doubling day at the supermarket. For the past week, I'd had to keep myself from renting every slum I looked into, they all, overnight, seemed so full of promise. The hint of sea change was enough to make the familiar, forsaken rat warehouses show overlooked inlay of shining stone.

I watched Tuckwell until he ducked down the subway — the same route that took him each morning to his International Style steel-and-glass vertical trailer park. I would never visit his office again. I pictured him boarding the car, the adored public transportation, his favorite contact sport. A subway car could always be counted on to provide the thrill of confrontation. The face-off he needed that night.

I was asleep when he returned. For the next several days, we maneuvered around each other. We ate at different times, arranged our schedules to diverge. Only before sleep did we talk. We slept six centimeters from one another, sometimes in sleep closing even that gap, pressing against each other, licensed by the confusion of night. At week's end, I told Keith that a library friend was marrying, looking for someone to adopt her place. The end of our postmortem existence.

"Have you signed?"

"I've arranged with her."

"You agreed to let me have a look before you did anything."

"Let's go have a look, then. I can still back out." But we both knew it was a done deal, that I had reneged on the one condition he'd set for our breakup.

We walked to the new neighborhood. Keith inspected the street and nodded. "A little closer to the branch."

"It feels like home already," I said, grateful for the sign of acceptance. He winced. Too late to apologize. After four years of conversation, we'd lost the phrase book. Every word now was in pathetic talkee-talkee, Creole.

"It's on a corner," Keith said apprehensively. I was forced to agree. "It's over a dress shop," he observed.

"Antiques," I equivocated. We got the key to the upstairs from the landlord, also the shop proprietor.

"An efficiency," Keith said, attempting to approve.

"I wouldn't call it that, exactly." Semantic quibble.

"Nice. Clean. Quiet. Rent-protected?" I mentioned the figure. Keith's brow cowered and his cheek pulled, protecting the side of his face.

"I can pay it."

"Not within the old quarter-salary rent rule." I thought: Nobody on the Eastern Seaboard has followed that budget since 1940. He checked the fixtures, outlets, jambs: a pantomime we saw no way to avoid. The warrant of his solicitousness was not about to let me hurt myself for his sake. Now that I was absolving him from liability, he no longer had the luxury of letting me hurt myself.

He sat on the bed and pounded the mattress. "Strong enough?" I said nothing. "When do we move your stuff? Not that I'm rushing, but___" He drummed his fingers impatiently.

I sat down next to him. I wanted so badly to ask him if he would come visit me here, once I'd put everything right. But I kept from sinking to contemptible. After a moment's looking around the room, Tuckwell reached and pulled my elbow out from under me, controlling my roll and bringing my head down into his lap. He stroked my temples, his lower lip pushed slightly to the side in subfarction against his upper. Tell yourself whatever you need to, but don't look for confirmation.

I reached toward his face, thinking to grab his nose between first and second fingers, an old game meaning almost anything. But he moved unexpectedly and my motion carried my hand into a punch. In a flash, the whole hierarchy of second-guessing fed across Keith's face. He squashed it, but not fast enough to escape mutual knowledge. He grabbed my hand, automatically restraining. Seamlessly returning to decorum he twisted my wrist and gingerly inspected my watch. "Yikes," he said, slightly flattened affect. "Getting late. You're coming home at least tonight, aren't you?"

I had no change of clothes, linen, toiletries, towel, toothbrush, or pillow to give my neck that civilized sleeping crook, no food nor anything to eat with, very little cash, and nothing to gain by staying. But his calling the other place home made it impossible to return to. I shook my head; Tuckwell, disgusted, didn't even attempt the obvious argument. His shrug disowned me.