Richard Powers - Gold Bug Variations

Until that moment comes, he can try to keep deep down, duck the breakers of adrenaline, stay stock-still and live whatever minutes of impossible visitation might be granted him. Her body, the blank subjunctive tense that he has conjugated in a thousand unsupported persons, has walked through his door tonight. For the first dozen variations — her tender strokings, their skittish explorations of mouth and neck and shoulder salient, surveys afraid of the data they are after — he finds relief from the relentless organic trap. Her simple being here, their simultaneous confession of the patently clear, is somehow blessedly enough.

He wants only her safety, her survival. He will do anything to ensure it. He would even now perjure himself, petition that tired, old anthropic metaphor — the bearded, wish-fulfilling bureaucrat in charge of the mesh of metacycles — to keep her from harm. But first he must learn what so badly needs saving in her. Her arrival, so long willed but never dared hoped for, at last presents the chance to discover.

"Your husband…?" He can go no further in naming the conspicuous Other. He's met Herbert several times, before the man meant anything to him. He has seen the other half of the Koss twisted pair slumped behind the wheel of a finny ballistic shape, waiting to ferry his wife to and from the laboratory, her real home. Jeanette looks down, hair red in the lamp halo. She kisses him on the clavicle, grabs the small of his back, moans a little. But except for the contortions, no answer. "Does he know you…?"

"Finish what you're___" Her posture goes insouciant. She removes her hands and looks so genuinely abashed that were his head not still in the nest of her thighs, he would think he has been wildly mistaken, that Dr. Koss's reason for dropping by was to discuss organic chemistry. She compounds the doubt by producing from her bag a copy of Biochemistry Society Symposium. "I came by to return this."

Back already to optative evasion? He feels her preparing to revoke, to claim that the confession was extracted under torture. He begins to jettison everything, everything. He is almost ready to dismiss their starved kiss as a miscalculation brought on by extended overwork, a psychosis she was too polite to rebuke. And yet, he clearly recalls her suckling fast to him. He stares at the journal she hands him. His eyes well up, stung. He loads his voice with the simulation of adulthood. "I'm sorry, but I don't remember ever having lent this to you."

"You didn't. But at two in the morning, I needed some rationalization." She laughs wildly, claps a hand to her face. She prods him under the chin, forces his eyes to gaze squarely into hers. She rebukes him with a look: Don't be stupid. We are lost, hopelessly lost, together in the thick. We don't even know each other, but in seconds, we have confirmed the predetermined fit. Irrefutable proof that we'll never be able to publish. As he shifts to restore blood to tourniqueted limbs, she adjusts accordingly, perfect ballet of self-communicating touch. They join again, flush, and the joint between them disappears. Organic chemistry indeed.

In the next rushed second, it is her, Jeanette in the flesh. She will never again be able to deny her signal. She shoves her face to his in breathing arrest, fixing to his lips as if to an oxygen mask, She pulls away at last for real air, her heart racing. "I knew you would never come to me."

"How could I?"

She unbuttons him to the waist, not going anywhere, just looking, marveling at the chest she uncovers, the person she reveals. She shakes herself, starting with her head and graduating hipwards. "I was waiting for you." Silence, carefully measured, in the half-articulate rhythms of distracted desire: silence at her first glimpse of his bare ribs. She puts her head to his torso, opens her mouth, takes in his breast. She nuzzles him, running her teeth lightly in his fur, eyes closed and head rolling softly from side to side as if his body were some obstacle. She gnaws, kisses, works his flesh. She has been waiting for him to come back from the mazed pursuit. Waiting all along for him to return to where he never should have left, to recognize the place at last, to return home, to rest, to her.

They overstep, accelerating into inexcusable touch. They could still stop, save the situation. To kiss a face, even unbridled, is still an adolescent sin — pretty, forgivable fantasy. To gnaw another's chest is another purpose. At this instant, they are still one another's innocence, a place in cut grass, an orchard under the rushing in of dusk. In a moment, if they do not stop the accelerando of friction, they will be one another's spent attempt, post-coupled, unrealized, unreachable.

He lifts her away, laughing desperately, limping across her face with little diffusing kisses; it takes the last of his internal monologue to remain even this much in control. "You're right," she says weakly, brushing hair from her mouth. "This isn't making matters any easier." She wraps herself into his arms quietly, content, as if she has had twenty easy years with him in which to grow aware of his every nuance of mood. "Change the subject," she orders him, eyes closed, smiling mischievously, as if his failure to do so will mean she will have to return to gnawing. "Tell me what you've been working on." Listening furiously to the last of the variations, he cannot, for a moment, choose between telling her about the in vitro idea or explaining his theory on how these musical condensations are all variations. The two proliferating patterns seem flip sides, hiding the same hermeneutic.

The vast, macroscopic architecture of the piece flashes into his head. The music, as familiar to him now as his body, reveals, in shadow, part of its design. The infolded Base presides over its independent progeny, rendering them congruent, concurrent, a family tree without clearly defined root or branch tip, a simultaneous as well as sequential ontogeny, profoundly felt, radial: each moment of the huge movement resembles the whole. The strangely beautiful, mathematical relation rings through its tonal changes. The Standing Now of the piece is more being than becoming. Its self-resembling perfection moves forward by a germinating process of periodic imitation he begins to detect but is still years away from naming.

"Listen." He glances down at Jeanette's face, searching for verification. The half-light molds her features into an empty flask. His mouth works up syllables, silently, struggling to hold that stationary morphogenesis he has at last found a name for. But he sees a different piece in her face. The form becomes a presage, information from a reliable source, a prediction of future news. The music remaining in the air after all sound is gone retains the first hint of sadness carried in the aria itself. Begun in too narrow terms, it must broaden into numinous sorrow, making the rounds of every village between here and the edge of dark.

He can no more hope to understand why she is here in his living room at night than to understand why he is. She waits on this platform, for this transfer. His head has lain gently between her legs. Whatever her motivation — unbalanced brilliance, crass calculation, random desire, love of intrigue, compassion, neurosis, retaliation, pity — this woman cradles him. And that lies as far beyond explaining as this whiff of modulation. Something sits hidden, still, in Jeanette Koss. She is more mysterious here beside him in the dark than on that day when she toweled him dry. He cannot reach her, put his hand on that mystery, the potential changes in her first four notes.

The notes are the song of children inhabiting the dark yard a minute more, inventing one last game even after being called to bed. They both hear, in the stillness, how the notes code the shared speechless intimacy of this instant, made complete by apprehension of its inevitable pain. It is, say, five o'clock in the morning by the sky. She's been here hours, hours that have evaporated in mutual nursing. Neither of them has said much of anything. But both have heard the functional poignancy harbored in the first, muted strains of sarabande. Half of the heart-pounding from the moment she slipped through his unlocked door was foresight of the payment they will, one way or another now, be forced to make.