Richard Powers - Gold Bug Variations

Nurse's talk, vessel of calming distraction. Is this some skill on that fraction of chromosome his half of the race doesn't receive? Where has she learned to move with such certainty? He sees through closed lids her ironic delight at her unexplained presence here. She sponges in delicate spirals, and he forgets all else.

"I assume it is pointless to ask for disinfectant in this part of the world." She searches the bathroom for an analog, returning empty-handed. "Your immune system is on its own for this one." She roots in her handbag for a kerchief, unused. Before he can object, she presses the fabric to him, lightly as leaves falling to earth. She holds the bandage to his broken surface, making no sound except breathing. Her fingers, fine instruments, test the damp cloth for clotting. All time's unraveling advance affixes to that square of linen, his lips on one side, her fingers on the other, his corpuscle stain sucked into the fiber capillaries like chromopartitioning. The blood that she dams by this tear pauses in the loop before its appalling haul back down to the pump.

Gauging the moment of drying, Dr. Koss lifts the linen away. She touches the congealed spot, brushes a few dry grains, shows her fingers to prove that the wound has healed. Then she leans in the most continuously smooth cycloid descent imaginable, draws herself flush to his body, and in one medicinal motion places her mouth — a mouth on the verge of saying, already forming the word — over his just-sealed scar. A sound escapes from her— threatened, mammalian. Ressler surrenders completely. He can do no other.

Jeanette changes: complete, fantastic reforging, and Ressler is inside the chrysalis with her. Unbroken, moldable expanse: moist, circulating tracts just inside her mouth attach to his awakened cell walls. The largest, most implausible living organ, the single membrane without edge, protective barrier, inescapable border, soft, semipermeable, resilient, impossibly strong for its thinness, her interface melanin prison, her — he dredges up the word: her skin. He feels himself dragged toward the cutoff of control. He looks over the drop in front of him but cannot measure it from cliff level. Then her mouth moves a certain way, spasms in a victimized twitch, and at once he no longer wants to measure. He can want nothing but to moisten her in return.

He tries to slow. A return kiss: nothing compounded. They've gone that ill-advisedly far anyway. Irreversible. They reach a place where he can level off for a moment without betraying further. Let this much be enough. More than he ever thought possible. Stop. Soon. At moment's end, seeing as they are already there.

Jeanette draws away first, changing partway back, retracting as much as possible from this melt. She stiffens her elbows and puts a hand to her head — frantic recollection, remorse past appropriate now. "I'm sorry," she whispers into the night room, the apology lost on air currents. "This doesn't help things any." She turns back toward him, touches his mouth, as if she meant the cut. "Not what the doctor ordered."

The cut has remained remarkably self-sutured. She tries to laugh, but the sound deflects in a flush of excitement and regret. Ressler makes a place for her among the piles of periodicals and she lies down next to him, holding him sadly, in mutual perjury. They say nothing, nor need to. He laces his fingers behind the base of her head, having known this shape always, how it fits in his hands, draped in this shock of hair. He holds her. The surf of his own circulation sluices inside him. He slips into that unforceable place free from the impulse to interpret. In that briefest space, nothing signals anything but itself. Dr. Koss answers silence with silence, the only explanation of her presence here. Her scent and bending is fact enough.

When it no longer is, they return to the nervous community of words. He extends the silence a little by reaching over to the record player, for days kept perpetually within reach. He chooses indifferently. He would fill the room with slumber party or young person's guide — anything except speech. But to do so without standing up, he is confined to the grooves already on the turntable, sound no more significant than the library of variations he has listened to continuously since the onset of his retreat. For lack of a gesture neither brutal nor clumsy, he lowers his head into her lap. She loosens her legs, makes a pallet for him in the softness of her thighs. She bends and kisses him, now briefer, drier, shallower, not so felonious. While she cannot claim that the first was an accident, it may have been an error in degree. A miscalculation, intended more so: quick, pertinent, almost acceptable among straight-ticket, Stevenson voters, virtually businesslike, therapeutic, preferable to the health hazard of complete repression.

But her recantation will not wash. She knows her transparency and smiles in shame. She reaches down, kisses him a third time: full again, but wary not to approach the extremity of the first. In the calculus of the permitted, everything less than what they have already committed cannot, they whisper, add to the sentence they will be slapped with. But they do worse with less. For at reduced volume, they admit to an eagerness more faultable than desire.

"I've created a monster," Jeanette says, breaking the embarrassed silence.

He disengages, reinstating the protective empty inch between, them. "Wolfman?" he says, straining for joke inflection. "Me?"

Dr. Koss shakes her head, laughs shyly, tentatively recloses the gap between them. "Not that! I mean___" She relaxes her focus to infinity, lifts her eyebrows on an abstraction, pattern, airy nothingness. On the music.

"Oh. I'm afraid I have gotten a little obsessed. They help me think. Or at least distract me productively."

"Were they that scratchy when I gave them to you? What do you play them on, a Mixmaster?" A flash of the old caustic. The biting, brittle, almost forgotten woman thrashing in the wake of frightened tenderness. Everything she has tried to be — cold, self-assured, professionally fond — all the blind come-ons, covert glances, suggestive sarcasms, concealed double crosses, casual, intermittent droppings-by, are not yet her sum.

"Oh, those," he says. "I hardly hear the scratches anymore. Surface mutations."

"An ACA triad in the original becomes ACG in the copy?" Ressler nods, inches away from her enormous eyes. The skin beneath is cream-tinted gold leaf, freckled, fetching, heartbreaking. His nod turns to a quick exam: how much has this woman assembled of translation? Can they help one another to the construct? He has sought the code in order to seduce her. Now, with the first taste of the prize wrapped gently around him, she seems the recruit to enlist in the wider campaign.

He turns from that height of cheeks, focuses on the music, the surface blips. He understands, in panorama, the process of aging. Every cell division, each mitosis — how many going on each moment? — is subject to some small chance of mutation. Each of these mutations slightly degrades the command set. The more divisions, the more fouled with accidents the cell information. The piece decays, variation by variation, performer to performer, by ear and word of finger down the intervening years since composition; it loses its accuracy, laced through with mistakes. Age might be the gradual accumulation of noise in the signal. Static-rich, mistaken; old, gray, full of sleep.

He uncoils from his cradle and stares at this woman in self-defense. How will she age? Will he be allowed to see her? The cream will have crusted. The soft patina, the brown, feminine freckled edibility will be lost in slack pores. In time, the look will be obscured altogether, not even preserved in memory of this unforgettable evening, a guest register smudged beyond recall, lost to the accretion of mistakes.