Richard Powers - Gold Bug Variations

"You presume I've learned. You haven't seen my work."

"Is that an offer?"

"In lectures," he said, choosing the lesser of two cooperations. "'New French Naturalism to the Present.' Irresistible: huge, scooped halls; faces from every aspect. I spent genre after genre just sketching. Problem was, the professors kept turning the lights out to show slides. Even now, I draw better in the dark."

He was telling the truth. I'd seen his hand skid across a tablet at high speed. He drew while talking, a nervous muscle-jitter while his mind was elsewhere. Hatches, shades, and crevasses sprung up from a hidden plane beneath the paper. He did not draw, he dusted: the flour spread over the smooth stones in a church floor that magically raises the pattern of gothic letters lying invisible across a worn-away tomb.

"I'd start each term in the first row on the far right aisle. Then I'd discover a perfect Pisanello in the upper middle, and I'd change seats. But there were only so many interesting faces in any given neighborhood. Had to go track me down that Memling. Seek out new blood."

He fell quiet; I'd accidentally sent him back. His hand played nervously over the function keys. All at once I received a tremendous jolt of who-cares courage. "I want my portrait done."

He looked around agitatedly, bluntly examined me up and down. Just as bluntly, I let him. He squinted, and after an awful hesitation, clapped his hands. "Why, you're the same woman who was here last night!" He took a soft pencil, the same pencil he used to mark off the Processing to Do List. He flipped over the nearest green-striped printout and unceremoniously began that oldest form of programming. When he came to do them, the hairs on the back of my neck moved at his pencil touch. I felt him locking in to the layout of my bone. The way he drew me, what he saw there, redefined my facial lexicon. Terror made me a good deal more striking then than I am. But he wasn't after symmetrical features. Not the pretty composite, but mystery. And the only way to keep that quantity intact was to transpose it to a distant, more mutable key.

Several minutes passed. We talked, as always, as he worked. As always, he didn't care if his subject moved. When he finished, he set the pencil down and said, "Missed it again."

"Don't I get to see it?" Faithful to the strict phoneme, he seemed genuinely surprised at that clause hanging on the end of the bargain. He handed the document over, a contractual captive. I took it, but couldn't assemble what I looked at. Both a recapitulation of the Vermeer Head of a Girl we'd stood in front of at the Met, and a dazed, physiognomically unmistakable thirty-year-old, 1983, who showed in her penciled eyes that she did not quite know what had happened, today in history.

"We do all styles," Franklin explained. "Giotto to Gleizes, inclusive." I could only stare at the image. "I told you. I picked it up in a lecture hall. Subliminal seduction. 'Learn Mandarin Chinese in Your Sleep.'"

"This is astonishing."

"Ha! Leonardo, Rafael, Agnolo, and me."

I demanded the portrait. It was already mine. Despite a stylistic anachronism that made it unacceptable to anyone except an historically indifferent critic, the sketch betrayed such incredible draftsmanship that I was furious at him for never cultivating it.

"I need it back. I have to submit the printout."

"You can't. You aren't going to turn over this report to some, some accountant in city government with my face all over the back of it?"

He took the page and shrugged. "Don't worry. Nobody ever listens to side B."

"Give me something from your tablet then. Compensation. Something of Dr. Ressler. Of both of us."

"I dispatch those suckers, soon as I make them. Can't stand to look at them after a day or two."

"You what?" Destroyed sketches of incredible draftsmanship: it was like news of burnt Alexandria, or jerky footage of the last marsupial wolf. I shouted, "Systematically trashing art!"

Franklin shook his head rapidly. "Don't ever confuse art with Draw the Pirate." Precise, vehement. "I have a steady hand, am a competent enough imitator. But no compositional sense. Incapable of making anything original."

"And you're a feeble liar to boot." I'd watched his hand. "Your sketches make themselves."

He twisted his lips. "My point exactly."

"Well, if you aren't ashamed of seducing public librarians, you should be ashamed of squandering a genuine talent."

He froze, turned to face me, and said the crudest thing I ever heard him say to anyone: "I thought you were supposed to be well-informed." He apologized by grabbing my knees and pressing them for forgiveness. I gave it to him, took his hands and pressed back, as I would now if they were in reach.

"You see the problem," he said. "You've followed the cult of originality since autographed toilets? The strait jacketing Neo-ist canvases full of original black paint? The original razor blade and follow-up hot bath?" I didn't catch his references, but he seemed to mean that we'd reached a moment in our visual lives when innovation was itself derivative. All that was left of the painted portal sat in galleries in Soho, intelligible only with the aid of program notes. "A fellow is left with few stylistic alternatives aside from 'Divest now.'"

I said nothing in defense — I hardly felt qualified. Had I words, I would never have stopped arguing that whatever a person did well, if it promoted possibility, was worth doing. Anything that added to the heft, texture, and density of the card catalog. I had no technical basis for debate except conviction, and so I only said, "But you are good."

I meant to say something else—"adept," or "gifted." Even those would have been less than I meant. Todd knew what I was after. But a look came across his eyes, and he refused to forgo the chance to savor another slippage. "I don't see what my moral conduct has to do with anything."

To find a person both fine and infuriating, and inside of minutes: I'll never feel that again. Such a spread, in one evening. It throws me even now, long after he has — hardly originally, but with excellent draftsmanship — divested.

Quick Sketch

Those few days before official winter were our walking tour of the known world. We walked everywhere, at any hour. I was free in the city in a way I'd never been before. When we cut our walking to a third our normal speed, the particulars of neighborhood took on specific mass. I tried the experiment again this evening: walked a block as slowly as I could without attracting the attention of unmarked cars. A slow walk — too slow to be going anywhere— changes the way everything around me holds itself.

I didn't care where we were going. We were there already, under the shed sumacs, standing a fraction of an inch closer to one another than ambiguous. The game developed unspoken rules: we couldn't say certain things at certain times. We dressed too lightly for the weather. We spent minutes looking up into the bone filigree of tree branches, whose lacework against the winter sky became brilliant as stained glass. Sometimes on those walks with Franklin, one-third Ideological speed, I stopped moving altogether, needing to fix this, to find an outlet for the clarity springing up in me.

Todd still reached out at odd moments, took my hand, and shook it in both of his. He grabbed my fingers for no reason, his equivalent hopeless search for that unreachable fixative. The most he could convey of that one-word contradiction in terms was affection. He liked me; at the handshake instant, he again discovered and meant to take credit for me in our hands' press, the slow walk still ahead of us.

We favored a playground three blocks from the warehouse. By the time Todd took his first nightly break, the terrain was a children's Pompeii. Sometimes we tried the slide, hopelessly slowed by an autumn of tree gum. We compared old recipes for greasing. His involved sliding on squares of waxed paper, and he was on the verge of routing us to a store eight blocks away to buy some when I talked him into sense. More typically, we drifted instinctively to the swings. Expansive or expectant, however quickening the night, swinging seemed the thing. I would rock on mine, hardly kicking, dragging my feet in the gravel beneath. Franklin, male, shot for escape trajectory.