Richard Powers - Gold Bug Variations

He would walk me dutifully back to my rooms, making me promise to visit him at work, as if I were the undependable one. Once, when we reached the door of the shop that still surprised me to come home to, he said, "I'm glad you came out on such short notice. Ninety-five out of a hundred women would not have."

"Private poll?"

"Ha! That reminds me. Last night, Ressler defined the difference between pure and applied science: pure science was applied science the Pentagon won't pay for."

"Don't change the subject, creep."

"What? It's all the same subject. Data gathering." He looked in my eyes, deep and long, fields for future study. "Kiss me good night?" he asked, clinically.

"I suppose. Just this once." The next fifteen minutes lost to oral exploration. Ninety-five out of a hundred women in their right minds would have known better.

When I woke mornings, a sweet, forgivable embarrassment infused me, not a little secretly pleased at still being able, this late in the season, to do something that would be prohibited in another month or two. The way I was behaving was its own sponsor, insisting that my body had not changed all that much, that it still carried its old shape and solution. Every turn it had taken since twenty had been to some extent wrong. So how could I pass up his notes, his invitations to be wrong again?

I had no reason to feel so excited, considering what I'd spent to get here. Each morning's anticipation was thick with anxiety. I was the debutante on the evening of her coming out who, after three weeks of screaming adrenals, thinks it might be easier after all to stay home the night of the ball and stick to baking gingerbread for the rest of her life. That waking dream where one finds a dozen new rooms in the familiar house: it brought on dry heaves of expectation.

Sometimes during the day reaction set in. I spent my working hours answering questions as remote from my evenings as I had grown from the lost cause of politics:

Q: How long would I have to play continuous Ping-Pong to make it into the national record books?

Q: Could you please supply the words to the third verse from the theme song of Branded?

Q: Who's the most eligible bachelor in the developed world?

However numbing the day's list, I took pains with it, shaping my answers with the care of a potter to whom nothing mattered except creating the perfect vessel for today's flowers. I sculpted every response as if by outside chance it might signify. However ludicrous or heartbreaking the three-by-five, an accurate reply carried some small possibility of redemption. I did not imagine myself a pragmatic force, or even a moral one. I was simply an agent, assuming that what people wanted to know, they needed. If I kept my head down, maintained the path between inquiry and fact, human curiosity might rise to its subject matter.

Q: How does the government calculate poverty level?

Q: Are there places on earth that haven't been surveyed?

Q: What is the Lithuanian for "I need you"?

Q: I have heard of creatures that take energy directly from thermal vents on the seafloor. Nothing from sunlight at all? How could they have begun?

The instant I turned up one of these I felt recognition, a reminder of what I was doing. One of them redeemed a week of compost. Each betrayed the interrogative passion built into grammar, fueled by that thermal vent just under the crust. Each looked for an answer that would keep them from the absolute zero of blanketing vacuum. Yes, Ishmael again, in that rented bed in a coastal inn just before setting off, proving to himself, by feeling his nose freezing, that he is "the one warm spark in the heart of an arctic crystal."

The Amateur's Almanac

I learned then how shrewdly stable the forty-hour work week was. Any longer, and corporate time chokes the off-hours. Any shorter, and we might actually sustain a thought, satisfy ourselves. Either would be societally fatal. What allowed my friends to escape the net was how little MOL asked of their attention. Once a night Dr. Ressler would put up a File Repack: a massive process where all the Clients would be collated, reconditioned, squeezed, rein-dexed, and streamlined. The repack required so many spindles and so much processing time that the system was committed for the duration.

While File Repack ran, those two could do whatever they pleased — kick around the innovations that daily made a liar of Ecclesiastes. Recent sighting of the W particle. Stone Age tribe hitherto escaping detection. Pioneer 10, passing Neptune on its way to being the first artificial thing to quit the solar system. When the day held no particular revolutions, Dr. Ressler whipped us into silliness by making us sing ridiculously long three-part rounds in polytones until the last cat was gutted.

We saved no lives on the night shift. But then, we didn't take any either. It all seemed happy once. A nightly exercise in the quick improvisation that had brought us together in the first place. Ressler puttered with print ribbons and decollators. Todd sketched perpetually into ragpaper pads, pads that grew thinner as he filled them. Late at night, hours of work still ahead, my friends sent me home with a handful of curiosities to verify before the next evening, threads we never seemed to close out. A renaissance of contentment. I found myself in a place where words regained their campfire importance, explanatory, incorruptible, above suspicion. I talked myself into thinking that Todd and I helped repair this diverted man's considerable gift. Every curve of clavicle Todd caressed said it was all right to think so.

"Tell me everything I need to know about you," I asked Todd one night. He sat at his console, shuttling bits of magnetic flux on distant drive packs through the intermediary keyboard. Dr. Ressler was in the control room, soundproofed. The two of us were alone, discounting the obedient machines.

Franklin faked a theatrical shudder. "Brr. Jeesiz. At last it comes to this. I thought you were the reference. What do you want to know?"

I sat by the console table, legs up. I leaned over, took his arm, placed his fingers high up in my folded lap. We both felt the professor's presence on the clear side of the two-way mirror, but the obstacle itself was provocative. "Tell me, if you don't mind, how in the world you managed to get here."

"Well, my mother and father loved each other very much," he said, clandestinely stroking my thigh.

"Ass. Who are you? Where did you come from?"

"Dunno. 'Sconsin." I refused even to grimace. Franklin sighed. "I was wedged in the middle of a heap of kids. Must have been a half-dozen of us. Doubtless where all the trouble started. Family wanted me to be an oceanographer. Went on to college, did a couple years in physics. The universe as we knew it was too small. Ended up art history, ABD." He shot me his most opaque grin. "All but Dissertation."

He would answer my questions but only to the letter. "Come — on, Franker. That's not a curriculum vitae."

"What are you after? Chambers Bio? American Art Directory? I don't qualify."

"How did you get so damn alienated?" The closest we'd come to friction since our first meal. I felt a sickening urge to push until something broke.

"I'm not alienated. I am a United States citizen."

I couldn't help but laugh. We had such divergent senses of humor that he sometimes reduced me to giggles just by losing me in translation. He loved inadvertent slippage. I once found him chuckling alone in the coffee room at a flier announcing: "Power Saws Cut 10 Dollars." In time, I recognized a Todd ambiguity at first glance. For several weeks he enshrined on the side of system A's central processor the headline I'd brought him proclaiming, "Incest More Common Than Thought."

I kept after him. I wanted something that had nothing to do with personal data. "Where did you learn to sketch?"