Richard Powers - Gold Bug Variations

"I'll be fine. Camping without the poisonous plants. I'll come by tomorrow to grab some things. Take what's left. It's yours. Sell it to that fence on Eastern Parkway."

"No way. I'm through with your liquid assets, lady." I walked him downstairs, waved as he left, then turned back inside where my new landlord, uninterested in my private fripperies, frittered in his shop. I bought a matched set of Hayes-era curtains and bedclothes for nothing down. He was delighted to start a tab. I feasted on crackers and fresh fruit from the greengrocers, which I ate slowly in invigorating silence. A bare apartment: my senses were never so awake. I took a scalding bath, soapless, squeezing the water from my skin, standing in the dark, fanning dry. I took care of my arousal in the solitary room. I had never before seen it: happiness required only that I rid myself of all distraction, I went to sleep against the antique sheets, feeling parts of my body I'd forgotten existed. I slept the best night I ever slept in my life.

I dressed in yesterday's clothes, finished the cracker box for breakfast, ran my fingers through my hair (a surprisingly reasonable comb), and walked, in the changing November, to work. The branch seemed a different building, my corning upon it from this direction. Delicious disorientation: I felt I'd changed jobs. I must have looked appalling. But of my colleagues, only Mr. Scott remarked on my appearance. "My dear, you look like you could do with a little retirement. Care to join me?" I told him I'd never been more sure: the Reference Desk was how I wanted to spend the rest of my life.

I moved my things gradually over several days, dragging my heels in a flare-up of empathy. Keith helped carry, by turns grateful and exasperated at my drawing the process out. Already gone, I had the luxury of loving that old life again at a safe range. I stayed over, slept once more with Tuckwell: a slow, sad night retracing, committing the cadence of one another to memory, realizing we had gotten it all wrong somehow, but that it was too late to go back and erase the maps, restore the white spaces.

I didn't contact my friends at MOL once during that period. My move had to be a moratorium, proof that I'd made the break, done the pointless violence for unimpeachable reasons. There had been no trade. Isolation was its own best reason. I worked at the branch, and in the remaining hours decorated the nest, wallpapered, trimmed. On days off, I learned the new neighborhood. I was determined to live as if the move were self-motivated. But I was sustained by undeniable expectation. Even the air had a scent of something imminent. Of course solitude was exciting — how couldn't it be? Crisis couldn't touch me. Loneliness, no loss, was something to covet. The erotic dress-up at the bottom of the cedar chest.

Strange place, Brooklyn. Not a place, a thesaurus of neighborhoods. I never belonged in any of them. Had things gone differently in local politics, we'd all be speaking Dutch. I'd be pinching my guilders. Todd would have had only to slip across New Amsterdam to the next colony in order to learn his latest irrelevant foreign language, English. Strange place, Breuckelen. Hudson sailed past fifty years after Bles's death. Two journeymen on the same enterprise: the pursuit of panels perfect for getting lost in. The elusive Passage, spice routes, epochal expansion, The world is too well mapped; quadrants capture it all. Alchemy's four elements, psychology's four humors. What can a body do in its quartet of seasons but set fire to the familiar, take off on the numinous half-moon?

I wanted Franklin, beyond a doubt. I could feel, in bands of tissue under my skin, the precise place that want had set for him. I wanted his field, his detached, unbearably patient art history. I wanted to see this place that I didn't belong in, its cross-sectional pigments, each assay suspended one on another, successive approximations. I wanted to recover that landscape, the place I'd forgotten as I got too good at describing it. I went two weeks without seeing him, two weeks at my new colony. One Friday I walked from my place to theirs. It seemed a miracle to be on foot. The blocks between did not seem so dangerous as strange, misunderstood. I buzzed, heard the voice thin, tinny, treble in the speaker, backed with a flack of electric static, but inimitable. He sang a ludicrous parody of a housewife's guarded "Who is it?" He knew full well who it was.

"It's me," I said, burying grammar. "I think it's time."

Perpetual Calendar (II)

The simplest of devices, a model of informational economy, it fits completely on a single page. You can take the magic square and palm it, hide the device in one hand. Even a small hand. The perpetual calender exists because the year has only fourteen possibilities. January 1 can fall on each day of the week, and once around again for leap years. The rest of the cycle — days when everything must happen — falls automatically, redundantly, according to compact pattern. 1983 starts on a Saturday. So do 1938, 1898, and 1842. The years of Sudetenland, of J ' accuse, of von Mayer's first thermodynamics paper duplicate the same dates as that year when a lost woman of thirty moves across town. How does it work? A lookup table lists the years, keying them to a long, repeating series of fourteen templates for the only possibilities going. The perfect reference tool: infinite sequence reduced to formula.

The cleverest child in every neighborhood, at fourteen, discovers this table secreted in the quartos of her parents' bookshelf. Appalled, unbelieving at first, she warms to the idea of a compressible eternity. Soon, she uses it to consolidate a shaman's control over the block's information-poor. Hiding the device behind cupped palms, she calls out her privileged, inside track to a spellbound audience in the back alley: "You, Pete, were born on a Wednesday. It will be Wednesday again in 19___Here's something:

ten years back, it was Sunday today." It will be years before she knows that these facts, in demand, clean and elucidating, mean nothing. For her clincher, she claims: "Today was exactly the same as it was one hundred and eighty years ago." Two years, twenty years ago, on this day, that child was me.

A Young Person's Guide to the Orchestra

He reads the stack of journals until the type decomposes into runic scratchings. He half dozes, swims awake, is washed under again for a few minutes, for hours, in tidal semiawareness. He gives the technical data rein to assort into spontaneous visuals — unzipping ladders, blueprint-imbedding blueprints, complex wartime gear-machines, families of trapeze artists linked in aerial streamers. In his reverie, the edge of biological thought is a continuous showing of jerky one-reelers. Every so often, an image-analog jars him awake with recognition. Bold simplicity of design knocks him conscious. Lucid, he sees nothing in the models but comic, clumsy, cartoon inspirations. Each time he comes to, Ressler cracks the journal repository for something he's missed. He loses consciousness again two or three articles down the pike, returning in the middle of the fourth, blindly turning pages.

He keeps up this routine — reading, dozing, imagining — for days, paying no attention to the passage of daylight. He finishes the juice concentrate and peanuts left in his fridge from a shopping run ages before. When the last remaining milk spoils, he makes cold cereal with water. The phone rings, but its bell goes languid each time he fails to answer. At odd hours he saunters to Olga, his heart full of gratitude at her patient, permanent Fourth Position stance. He listens to the independent variations, the record of that unbirthday visit. The same record, but different in every particular, just as the woman herself is now unrelated to the one he met on first hitting town. Steeped in the music, he teaches himself a vocabulary to describe what he hears in the profusion of notes. He borrows those terms he is most familiar with. Canon and imitation, audible even without names, become transcription. Phrase and motif become gene. He hears polypeptides in a peal of parallel structure, differentiation in a burst of counterpoint.