Richard Powers - Gold Bug Variations

"But what you have already! It feels so… inevitable."

She is of a piece with approaching winter, wanting and postponing, failing to render the world perfect, palatable, and so choosing to wrap it under an unbroken blanket of snow. In a moment, their time together comes to an end. She must leave. Jeanette's anxiety smoothes out into her former, familiar, steady-state equilibrium. The face put on for departures, the look he already knows, the not-her look of sterile good humor. He wraps her to him, arms full with her, but feeling her already halfway out the door.

He finds his voice and says, a little rusty in the cords, "What can I say?" Not what is there to say; what is permitted. "Just tell me one thing." But he cannot ask it, and so demands, "Are we dead yet? Does your husband…?"

Jeanette laughs bitterly. "It's as sordid as you think. Mr. Koss is where no word of his wife's meanderings can reach him. The Processed Foods Convention, Minneapolis — St Paul."

He holds her pityingly. The strength of their restraint, their intended decency, will never be known. "You know, I think you ought to stay here. Longer." She shakes her head against him. "More often, then." No again, without looking. "Once more." He stops short of pleading, of asking everything that pushes its way up to his still swollen lips. He understands something he has forgotten countless times since birth. All talk is in ciphers.

Dr. Koss mumbles from her hiked-up coat collar. "See you next year?"

"Tonight," he coaxes. She goes limp. "All right. 'Soon' is my final offer."

"Stuart." Shocking, the name come out of her like a violation of taboo. Her mouth, now fouled, goes straight to his, where it is wild to throw off its mistake. Her hands are all in his clothes, and his under hers, deploying such violence over each other that it takes the application of an equal and opposite intellectual violence to break them from mid-doorway debauch.

"Oh!" Ressler says, separating, understanding where they are left. "Heading toward serious trouble, here."

"Yes. Trouble. I'd like that very much." But Dr. Koss quickly changes cadences, urging Ressler to present at the next Blue Sky everything he has collected. It's beautiful, she assures him. Comprehensive, internally consistent. In line with the data, inviolably clean. The remaining block, with sustained effort, must soon fall.

He watches as she goes down the walk, thrilled to be present at the day of creation. She turns, walks backwards like a schoolgirl, waves to him, indifferent to whoever else might watch. He is irreversibly in love with her. She is not yet gone and he wants her back. They were insane not to force the issue, to throw everything else away for the thirty-second crest. The chance will never come again. The gene has failed of its own cleverness. It has believed its own trick: the ruse of care, doomed affection, decency, that desperate simulation.

Desire per Square Mile

This time Todd waited for me at the top of the antique shaft. He leaped on me the moment I opened the accordion grate, my return promoting us to deep intimates. And I kissed back. Everything had changed between us; I lived in a new place. He greeted me after long absence with effusion, offering whatever salve was his to give. Even as I touched him, I thought of that advertising precept of Tuckwell's: nothing obligates more than unilateral kindness.

After a friendly feel, Franklin partly released me. Our hands remained in contact, threading aimlessly with each other's from that moment until the day he withdrew his. Where had I been? "Since when?" I asked. He laughed, kissed me again, and tugged me into the fluorescent computer room. My pupils dilated in the weird, familiar light of the old neighborhood.

"The Old Man will be delighted to see you," Todd said. "He's asked about you several times since your last visit."

"Don't mock."

"It's true. He seems to have developed a genuine fondness for you. Lord knows what the appeal is." I threatened the power switch on the nearest writing drive, ready to wipe out the evening's work. "Wait! Let me rephrase that."

Todd, I now see, wanted me only for my ability to tell if he too was destined to disappear in late twenties after a passionate start. I would always be subordinate to the research that had brought us together. Ressler had from the first been our matchmaker, awful confirmation of how many million more ways there are of being lost than of being found. Frank was overjoyed I was back, but the spark was the spark of salvage, the revived hope of explication.

He led me down the aisle of tape drives, past the line of printers under their sound hoods, a deafening collection that had multiplied since my last visit. As we approached the console where Dr. Ressler worked, my impression bore out Todd's account of a winter softening. Instead of delivering one of his restrained politenesses, Dr. Ressler broke into a warm smile of recognition, and welcomed me with, "Ah! A friend."

The three of us shared that unrepeatable evening as if I'd come back from years overseas. Todd ran out and secured our ritual provisions, pâté on saltines and grocery-store wine in paper cups. This would be our standard until Uncle Jimmy, discovering crumbs in the card reader, read us the house rules in his inept, egalitarian way: "You folks want to ruin everything? You realize that one smudge of mustard could wipe out ten thousand credit union members?"

That night was my homecoming. We went round the ring, toasting silliness, clinking paper rims. Todd proposed, "To the return of the native." I toasted Mylar, the stuff that allowed the two of them to make a living. Dr. Ressler thought a minute and supplied, "To Antarctica." We clinked, sipped, and demanded explanation. "The anniversary of a twelve-nation pact turning the last continent into a scientific preserve." In toasting the expanse of glacier and penguins he eulogized the decimated six other landmasses. But that night, the three of us set up base camp on the Ross Ice Shelf. The digitized warehouse became a sovereign, unreachable polar province, a fair chunk of the world set aside for responsible experiment.

God! What a few months. For the first time since sixteen, I unfolded into the available panel. Still regretting the mess I'd made of things with Tuckwell, I felt remorse scatter in instrumental brilliance, bravura trills, shakes, flourishes, demisemiquavers. We were a self-governing, city-free zone. What other way is there to survive the place? The last holdout habitat will be such a niche of charity. Life at the megapole required that I decide how many of the fifteen million adjacent catastrophes I could afford to feel. In those days — the brief bloom following a desert flash — I set my empathy at three. The calculus required consigning entire boroughs to misery beyond addressing, stepping gingerly over a baseball-batted body at the top of the subway stairs on the way to sharing whatever small delight one can save from mutilation. Those months, running at surplus, meant claiming the criminally privileged birthright of well-being. In fact, we all knew that a five-minute stroll from the converted warehouse proved the impossible mismatch of happiness.

Once, at late rush hour — his midmorning — Todd and I, prowling New York as if it were not so much death camp as theme park, rode to Chambers Street, the underground mall beneath two buildings that alone housed a midsized American city. We stood watching the nine-escalator bank that, for half an hour, spewed a shimmering waterfall of human foam. Frank's fascination with the ant farm was not Tuckwell's; New York was no thrilling Indy, adrenaline smorgasbord, buffet of ways to get killed. Franker sought the consolation of having one's worst suspicions confirmed. We stood at this lookout until the human platelets threatened to burst their capillaries and flood our high ground. Franklin turned from the scene with a gratified shudder and headed back to a night job where he made up half the known world.