Richard Powers - Gold Bug Variations

The waitress's hovering maddened him. On the woman's third return he said, "You want us out of here? Why not put a taxi meter in these booths? Or I can leave a bunch of quarters on the edge of the plexi here, and you can come by every ten minutes and pick one up." He was pacing in place, poking the slots on the napkin holder, squeezing the mustard pump, spindling the straws. I took his hands and held them steady, more wrestler's pin than old flame's cradle. He turned on me, gave me the most menacing smile I've ever seen: "You still don't know the secret word here, do you? You think the issue is apocalypse? The missiles are nothing, dear heart. No-thing." He looked at the photo as if he'd forgotten what the issue was. "How you supposed to take arms against something like this?" His laugh was desperate, falsetto. "Picket?" His voice popped, like a teenager learning to drive a standard transmission. "The product is electronic mail. The advertisement is a finalist for a national award."

I knew that such things existed. But I'd never taken them seriously. "How? It hasn't even run yet."

"Novelty is all. These folks are on top of things. I have to fly to LA next month, because___" He looked at me with caustic pride.

"Because the awards are being televised."

"Who's the sponsor?" I risked. Keith cackled.

"Brought to you by the folks who left you sponsorless." He breathed, clearing an aisle down the minefield between us. "Thing is, I could use a stunning, statuesque, killer beauty in black elbow gloves to drape over my arm." He waited until I could no longer accept gracefully. "Care to help me find one?"

I took him home, where he began communing with the remote control before I was out of the room. At last I asked him what I had come to ask, a question no answer could satisfy. "Keithy, will you be all right?"

He shut the sound off and stared. "Why did you move?"

I manufactured something about room, adulthood, self-reliance, the need for perpetual experiment. I didn't try to explain that I was after the one thing I already knew would not be left me at the end: what it felt like to be alive.

Books

I went through my library this morning, searching for books I might be able to peddle secondhand A bit histrionic, perhaps. Premature. 1 still have cash left, if none coming in. Haven't yet been knocked back onto necessity. But for a minute this morning, I got obsessed with the idea of efficiency, the political economy of plants: capture the energy I need to build just those structures that will let me capture all the energy I need. I forgot for a moment how inept and archaic nature really is. Grotesque encumbrance of peacock tails, koalas' dependence on a single leaf, inexplicable energy cost of narwhal horn: efficiency belongs only to ingenious naturalists.

This morning around ten, I ran out of sentences. It became impossible to type another verb. So I attacked my library, thinking to pare it down. I didn't need both the Times Atlas and my schoolgirl Hammond; I could part with the older almanacs; my Spotter's Sailboats, acquired who knows where, had stood me in all the stead it ever would; I could ditch either Bartlett's or the Oxford Quotes.

But in choosing between these last I rediscovered just how differently two identical purposes could be met and also, indirectly, the source of the note that first persuaded me to come out and meet Todd by streetlight. Running my finger down the entry "Ears,"

hath e. to hear

high crest, short e.

I have e. in vain

in e. and eyes to match me

'Jug Jug' to dirty e.

leathern e. of stock-jobbers

I was struck by the ears that were missing. If not here, then I would need to check one of those great compendia the rearguard guerrilla actions against the scattering of world's word where he cribbed all his love notes. I found them in "Adam's Curse," by Yeats.

I had a thought for no one's but your ears:

That you were beautiful, and that I strove

To love you in the old high way of love;

That it had all seemed happy, and yet we'd grown

As weary-hearted as that hollow moon.

The lines turned up in a superfluous anthology I'd ear-marked for sale. The note that had stolen the verses returned to me intact, and with the note, Todd — more real, less efficient than I've yet made him out. And with him, I had what I was after, and my sentences came back all afternoon. And I vowed not to sell so much as a single, redundant letter.

The Natural Kingdom (II)

Q: How big is the biosphere? How high? How wide?

R.G., 5/12/81

Q: What is Life?

E. Schrödinger, 1944, J.B.S. Haldane, 1947

Q: Is not the life more than meat, and the body than raiment?

Matthew (?), ca. 80 (?)

A. Classification

Books may be a substantial world, but the world of substance, the blue, species-mad world at year's end outstrips every card catalog I can make for it. If I'm to locate Ressler's code, I must step back and see what the nucleotides are after at beast level. But every system for listing life that I come across is a map at least as unwieldy as the place itself.

In the first nomenclature, what Adam called a creature was what it was —an exact lookup table for the living library. But that perfect equivalence between name and thing was scattered in ten thousand languages, punishment for an overly ambitious engineering project. Schemes to recapture the Ur-order go as far back as I can track. Theophrastus classified plants by human use, not an auspicious second start to naming, but a popular one in the centuries following him. Color, shape, feature, habitat, behavior: successive methods cast makeshift classification nets over a school that will not stay still long enough to be drafted.

I'd thought the gross macrodivision, at least, was secure, until I read of unicellulars neither animal nor plant. A nineteenth-century patch job, Protista is a category so diverse it hardly helps. I watch a fourth kingdom secede: Monera, cells without nuclei. But subdividing still doesn't suffice; later treaties draw up five or six domains. And all this splintering takes place while I'm still at the top of the classifying pyramid.

Descending into phylum, class, and order, I'm swamped in ever more controversial flowcharts. Strata shade off into suborders and superfamilies, overrunning the borders. Seed-bearing plants alone number 200,000 species. At the third rung, a single class, Insecta, exceeds three-quarters of a million species, with thousands more added every year. Tracking these figures for no one's but my ears, I realize that I'd stopped asking, for years now, that first question: how many ways are there of being alive? What is this place? How can I say it?

Bat to banyan, bavarian gentian to baleen whale: I was expelled from childhood the day that living strategies began embarrassing me with their ludicrous profusion. Too immodest, teeming: I could memorize a hundred species a day and die not yet scratching the collection's surface. Species laugh off the most rigorous hierarchy. My Baedekers to the biosphere, government offices packed to exploding with print, strain under the weight of this wild violation of the paperwork reduction act.

A year too late, a life since I last bothered to ask the only thing worth asking, I feel strong enough to take on natural history again. Girlish-strong, discovering that the catalog can never be complete. Made strong by desperation at what's come over the list. However impaired my vocabulary, however late my start, I must have a quick look while there's time. Something's happened, yesterday, this morning, something threatening the whole unclassifiable project, changing the rules of the runaway gamble forever. Something all my reading leads to.