Richard Powers - Gold Bug Variations

Our happiness was pathetically outscaled: forty thousand homeless; three quarters of a million addicts. Four hundred radial miles of contiguous squalor, a deep brown demographic smear, a disappointment per square mile that left the three of us several digits to the right of significance. Still, exile to expendable stats freed us to do what little we could to rig the numbers game. The globe had never been closer to complete capitulation. The dozen regional and religious wars, delineated "shooting" to distinguish them from the ubiquitous conflict, the daily embrace of toxic spills, the gaping holes in international economics, irretrievable loss of a century's topsoil every ten months, continuous corruption trials, Esperanto chatter of terrorism: only the mildest symptoms of a world unaware of its watershed moment. But in our neck of the nature reserve, we three breathed the air of a new planet.

The secret, sustaining garden, my illicit fantasy having nothing to do with lucre or lust, was that by tweaking a few knobs, by having just these two friends, by clearing a space as wide as possible in my unstretched heart, the last living woman in Brooklyn Heights might contain multitudes, might grow to fill the dense bruise of killer buildings carefully designed to eat me. Might even (how could I have imagined?) pay back into the general healing fund. I made the dangerous assumption that goodwill was somehow enough.

I lived by myself — yellow glow from the second-story window over an antique clothing shop. I could do what I wanted with my free hours. I chose to spend them in Antarctica, picnicking by the punched-card hopper, getting my first lessons in programmable machines and the people who run them. I don't know what catalyzed the reaction, but we fed off one another. I was learning again, steeping myself in company. I rediscovered the strangest aspect of mystery: how much of it is temporarily knowable, how it chooses the off moment to come clean.

Who knows why Dr. Ressler chose late autumn of 1983 to thaw. I liked to think we brought him out. Perhaps Todd and I reminded him of discounted possibilities. We in turn, scared by his return just before the onset of winter, waded deeper into mutual care. Dr. Ressler was instrumental in these evenings. His approval was everything to Todd. Franklin brought the man articles, told him anecdotes, sang him little snippets of absurd radio songs. Every trick imaginable to engage an intellect that we'd seen only in concealed bursts.

At times Dr. Ressler would slip back into his native condition. Feeling the man drift away, Todd would throw himself in after, like the boy in the news accounts who always happens along at the instant of the ice pond disaster. "Did you know," he would ask when comfortable silence slipped into the wrong meter, "that Brahms and George M. Cohan were contemporaries?" He would look to me for covert confirmation, ready to recant as a joke if the guess proved mistaken. Ressler invariably smiled, less at the invention than at its motive.

But sometimes, seamlessly, Ressler seeded us, hosting rambling round tables starting with the prospects for artificial intelligence, veering toward the impasse in Namibia, and winding up with the Pythagorean relations or plate tectonics and the Mid-Atlantic Ridge. With his quiet encouragement, we could talk all evening. He never let us equivocate or waffle. No matter how far afield we wandered, he would call us back with a rounded predicate. Franklin credited me, some obscure reattachment therapy I worked on the man. Dr. Ressler liked me, spoiled me with attention. He treated Jimmy and Annie Martens affectionately too. If he was a shade warmer with me, perhaps it was only that I stayed later into the night.

The elegant court Dr. Ressler paid me as our familiarity took hold thrilled Todd. He at last discovered in me the seed of the erotic. We kissed constantly, a running, surreptitious feeding fetish.

By the elevator shaft, in the foyer, through the main office, on desks where aides-de-camp of industry had drawn reports only hours before. A quick slip beneath the blouse in a dark utility closet. Hair, hands, neck, lip: one continuous tasting, sixteen without the giggle. How long could we prolong the extended adolescent feel? What came next? It didn't matter: after evenings of verbal invention, we needed something for our mouths to do when they paused to repair.

He kissed me through the accordion grate on my way home late one night — a last freight inventory after hours of polymath, polymorphous perversity. "Come tomorrow. Early, this time."

"All right," I said. "But I have to tell you something. Neither of us is twenty anymore."

"Remind me to teach you how to count in hexidecimal."

I cranked the lever to descend, but stopped at his shout. I set the dial to climb and came back level. "I have a great feeling about us these days, Janny." He gave it just enough time. "It's called lust."

If I missed two days in a row, Franklin would leave me notes in the question submissions box.

Lovely O'Deigh—

Come out and Play? Limber those lanky researcher's limbs? I will wait under the streetlamp at the library NE corner from now until you show. If you fail, I will be forced to stand all night and the following day and miss work and be fired and waste away, massive species die-off or worse. I have a thought for no one's but your ears. FTODD.

FTODD, his system login, doubled as personal signature. As if shorthand genus and species were necessary. As if anyone else in this spreading stain of fifteen million had used the word "lovely" since the Somme.

He came to my place, appraised my rooms. I had by then outfitted them with odds and ends from my antiquarian landlord, indulging myself, giving over to darkwood and damask. "This place is beautiful," he decided. "Did you dream all this up yourself? Amazing antimacassars. You're one player piano short of a New Orleans cathouse done up by the Rossettis." He loved coming over, sitting for hours in a rocker, being read to in embroidered darkness the reverse of the fluorescent flicker where he spent his waking life. But when he took to courting me in force, it had to be outside, in the open air, grabbing the last December light, the late heat of months holding on eerily long after the season. He wanted outside, every possible moment, as if only by being there at the instant the change arrived could he read the encyclopedia of the year in brief, the masterpiece of condensation, the backlit landscape, that gessoed, verdigris panorama.

Early December suggested that this would be the last chance either of us might have to remember what it was, in the blood, to be young. The day now went dark well before supper. It seemed an irritant to him, a command to hold more, soak it up until saturated, walk another block in the dark. Tomorrow would be too late. The smell of dry first flakes carried the weight of denouement, revelations to secure, sap to consolidate while the neighborhood got ready for night. Your rooms are beautiful; but friend, let's go out while we can.

Sometimes he would not even come up, but would shout from street level. Come play. Unlimber. Northeast corner. For some reason, I always came down. I had reached the age when I could no longer resist the fantastic, especially when carried off with authority. If his message was for no one's but my ears, what would become of it if I failed to listen? I would dress and undress several times, trying for an effect I couldn't satisfy, settling on not-quite: linen, a mid-calf wraparound, and shawl. He was always under the streetlight when I arrived. I could make him out blocks away— confident, calling from a distance, as if I might lose my way at the last moment. He dressed up too, after a fashion: straight-legged gray pants and a maroon pullover. He would talk without topic, give me the most forlorn fondle: he liked the small of my back, my fingers, my neck. We would find a spot in the park, abandoned now by even the most desperate adolescents, and place damp, guarded kisses in each other's mouth until we lost the easiness of virtual strangers.