Richard Powers - Gold Bug Variations

"You mean, for a living?" She nods her head gravely. He thinks for a minute, helpless to remember exactly what he does do. "Same as your dad," he says.

"N-no," she says, curling her lip and shaking her head skeptically. "No. You don't do that!"

Ressler would laugh if it didn't sting, He can't imagine what Tooney has told his child he does. "Here," he says, getting an idea. "I'll show you." He goes to the side of the sink and takes the long-empty paper-towel tube off its holder. He tears it down its spiral seam from one end of the coil to the other. A three-dimensional helix, possessing all the magic geometry of the original. He shows the child the properties of the self-duplicating curve, all the while proving there is "always an intermediary analogy between us and substance, always a messenger between the mass we are after and the message it embodies.

"You study these things?" He nods, asks her if she knows what cells are. "Of course. Don't be dumb."

"You have a billion cells in your body, and each cell has masses of these."

She takes the dissected tube, spins it around, hands it back. "Scratch it. No deal. This thing? Billions? Me?"

"Yes, you."

"Can't be."

"Then who?"

Margaret jumps up, her eyes saucers. "You stole that! How did you know that?"

He doesn't have the heart to tell Margaret that every secret incantation she has ever recited has been around for generations. He looks at her and wonders: Why Brucie? Well, at least the kid loosened her tooth. Why Koss? He has no good data, knows nothing about her. She has never harmed him, to the best of his knowledge. She showed signs once of a bitter sense of humor, but even that surrogate sparring has quieted. She does not possess Toveh Botkin's strong moral sense, with its species-wide, if not individual, survival value. Her contributions to the Blue Sky sessions are impeccable but hardly adventuresome, barely cerebral ballet. She lacks too the older woman's indiscriminate kindness, a trait conveying no survival value, a liability in fact, unless, like the anti-malarial quality of sickle-cell anemia, it contains, for certain climates, some hidden side effect that outweighs benevolence's impediment. Of course, the whole comparison is moot, as the older woman has already committed the sin of aging. Whatever pleasure Ressler enjoys in her company will remain nothing more than irrelevant. Kindly.

But Jeanette: undeniably topical charms. Her shape, skin, coloration once upon a time had not been to his taste. Now her smallest arch obsesses him, even as he finds the full allure somehow repelling. How could he have let himself in for her when she remains unachievable — as pointless to fix his unappeasable, sharp, lost affection on as she is to covet, lust for, crave?

Little Margaret makes to punch him for stealing her secret verse — a slow-motion, platonic archetype of a punch. He intercepts its parabola and demands, "So how are you going to pay for this boxing lesson?"

The child smiles shyly, looks away. "I learned a new poem."

"Well? What are you waiting for?"

And little Margaret begins, disastrously, sing song:

"When you are old and grey nd full of sleep,

And nodding by the fire, take down this book,

And slowly read, and dream of the soft look

Your eyes had once…."

By the second line, Ressler sees it all: he has built her from scratch, in the lab of his own imagination. He has dressed her in clothes that she fits, fills out unforgettably. He has invested Jeanette Koss with every quality that might pin him hopelessly to her hem. And now she has them all, possesses them in flesh, cannot be divested. He has taught himself to see her, has named that recessive allele that manifests itself only once every hundred generations. Uncontainable mystery. He has frightened them both into noticing, and now they can't look away.

Margaret reaches the part about how one man loved the pilgrim soul in you. He cuffs her gently. "Enough, short stuff. You're terrific."

"And loved the sorrows of your changing face," she races to complete the rhyme. She struggles free and throws another slow punch to his midriff, stopping short at the skin to tickle him. "Shake him up. Knock him down."

"That's two 'shake him ups,'" Ressler says sternly. "Make sure to count." The advice sticks in his glottis, coming up. The ho-munculus giggles and is gone.

He toys with his paper-towel tube for some time. When night comes, he wonders if it might not be time to get back on diurnal schedule. He lies in bed, disembodied underneath the covers. The space in the room around him does not touch him. November; he smells the remote aroma of a disappearing fall in the accumulation of heating-degree days. He feels his hands because they are not his arms, his torso because it is not his legs where they rest under the sheets, his legs because they do not touch hers, and her, because she is not any of this, not his, does not touch any of these parts that can feel her imprint, so conspicuous is her solidity in its absence next to him.

Not this nor this nor this. But before he has power to say behold, lyrical awareness is lost to that sweet, sorry, one-word contradiction in terms. Nothing in his analogy for himself knows where tit. is. He can get no closer to the idea he is after except through contrast. Except through analogy. Except through already knowing. Sleep is as unreachable as the woman. He has not seen her for weeks. Not in flesh anyway; he sees her analogy everywhere. He cannot step out of his barracks bunk without imagining that some fall of a sheet or turn of a lathed chair leg holds the revelation he needs from her curve.

Has she thought of him in the last several days? A letter in his campus box, a casual inquiry at his office? Has she noticed his absence? That one look at the lab, the backwards glance they caught each other in convinces him that the awful hook is also barbed at the other end. One of those ignored phone calls could have been her. All of them. She must think of him.

He raises himself from bed. By feel, he retrieves his shirt and trousers from the back of the chair. Soundlessly in the dark, he dresses. He returns, by homing instinct, to the waiting stack of journals. The coding problem again possesses him. He smiles in mid-triplet-fiddling: I am only doing what any childless male is programmed to do. An alternative means of replication. Oblique, sublimated — pencil, paper the international chemical symbols. But he's definitely after a self-perpetuating, thriving, surviving genome with his name on it.

The search continues without sound. When the spell is broken, it's from the outside. He looks up, suddenly aware that extended sleep and food deprivation have put him in a state resembling those mind-alterers the DOD is perennially testing. The frame flickers, and he is startled to see Jeanette Koss letting herself in through his front door, a thief in the night.

He assumes — Occam's razor — that the vision is just neurons mis-synapsing. Extended fixation, never far below the surface of his work, relaying the millisecond message that the folds of his foyer lampshade are the coils of her hair. Then the apparition moves. "Are you all right? Where have you been?" He hears her exhale fright on coming close enough to see his face where he sits reading in the dark. "What have you done?"

Before he can put his hands up to defend, she reaches and touches his lip. He remembers now how badly it stings. She withdraws her hand, shows him the fresh blood. It has broken open without his noticing. "Oh that." He cannot keep from grinning, widening the cut. "Beaten up by a reciter of verse."

Today in History

She sponges the swollen split. He relaxes his face, neck, torso, dropping the journal at hand. If she chooses to kill him, he trusts she will at least use the swift skill of the professional vivisectionist. "This poet," Koss says skeptically, placing a hand under his neck and daubing, born to the motion. "Female?" He can't even smile without wincing. He closes his eyes, resting his head in the unknown quantity of her palm.