Richard Powers - Gold Bug Variations

As I left that evening, I thought how the italic-penned challenge also partook of the species-wide inability to tell need from not. All the way home, walking through the enfeebling city heat, I wondered why I'd agreed to help find what could better be learned by asking the man in question. I came up with no better answer than the asker's beauty. Reaching the relative safety of my neighborhood, I heard my father — no more tolerant than my mother in answering my endless girlhood questions — whisper his old litany, "Stranger, Danger," in my interrogative ear.

Face Value

I worked for a humiliating week and a half without turning up a shred of evidence that Stuart Ressler had ever existed, let alone done anything hard. I spent more time on the job than I should have, rigor proportionate to my anger at the thing's idiocy. Half a dozen times a day, on a new inspiration, I'd labor a page or phone midtown. I was on the verge of running a bogus credit check to get his date, place of birth, and social security. Ethics and pride prevented me, but only just. The sponsor called once during that period, more out of obligation than hope. He'd weaseled some specifics from the source that he thought might help. The man was born in 1932, putting him just over a half-century. He had been brought up in the East but joked about time as a young man "in the interior." He spoke little and read perpetually, everything from throwaway fiction to abstruse journals. He was by all appearances celibate. He lived at work. "You probably can't use this," my accomplice added, "but the only time I've ever seen him show emotion was last year, when that famous pianist stroked out dead."

I brought up the matter of occupations. "I know we're after the distant past here, but it might help to know what line of work the two of you are currently in."

Mr. Todd chuckled hollowly at the other end. "We run the country, the two of us. Nights. Paper collating. Buck ten over the minimum." They were the mainframe operations graveyard shift for a data-processing firm. "Info vendors. You and me are practically kissing cousins." He stopped short of suggesting we improve relations. As worthless as the stray facts were, I learned one helpful bit before disconnecting: Todd's name. He also gave me a number where I could reach him, "any hour of the night or night."

I hit the payoff only by coincidence, after another week of ingenious, impotent search. Serendipitous discovery, beloved of science historians. The trick to blundering onto a gold mine lies in long preparation. I undertook no project without testing it for relevance. But the solution chose to arrive with such accidental grace that it appalls me. A wide-eyed schoolboy had come to the Reference Desk with a whitewashed first draft of a term paper on civil rights. Attempting to bring the movement back from gelded interpretation, I led him to primary sources, contemporary reports of 1957 Little Rock — the Arkansas National Guard confronting the U.S. Army. We flipped through a popular Year in Pictures, the ingénu discovering that this foregone event had in fact required a second civil war just before his own birth, and was not yet decided.

As I'd done habitually with every book I touched for the last two weeks, I scanned the index. Nothing. Then the next year's cumulative, reduced to hunt-and-peck. This time, beyond all hope, an entry. Refusing to believe, I pulled the citation. A gallery of black-and-white portraits accompanying an article on this annus mirabilis in molecular genetics carried a minor caption that read, "Dr. Stuart Ressler: one of the new breed who will help uncover the formula for human life."

That was just the first shock. I had seen the accompanying face before. The eruption of coincidence made me put off calling Franklin Todd. I woke that night from a sleep of secret cabals to make the connection: Ike's coronary specialist, the man in the pilled oxford. He was a smooth twenty-six in the photo, and over fifty when I'd met him the previous fall. But despite the intervening years, his face was unmistakable. The cell paths responsible for aging had failed to erase his particulars. Lying in bed, unable to go back to sleep, I did the long division. The NYPL has over eighty branches serving more than ten million people. The odds against a man paying my insignificant branch a visit followed months later by another who wanted to identify him were incalculable. I jumped to conspiracy: the two were colluding to test my research skills for some reason I was compelled to figure out. In the dark of my room, beside a sleeping male whose breath did not change cadence as I shot awake, it felt as if Dewey had broken down: on the shelf, spine to spine beside the Biography Index where I had begun the search, came cheap intrigue.

Suspicion didn't leave me until the day Frank Todd took me to his office, that converted warehouse he shared with the still obscure Dr. Ressler. Only then did the statistical improbability work out. I laughed at my mathematical paranoia, at how I had missed the crucial, obvious splint: their office, the night watch where they nursed the machines, was four streets down from mine. I had swapped cause with effect. The two lost men were simply both patrons of the nearest public bookshelf.

Rule of Three

I've logged tonight much the same story as the one I started a few nights ago. Identical, with changes: the dead man's one theme. A life in the laboratory made Dr. Ressler see everything that happened on earth — everything that ever can happen — all speciation as a set of variations whose differences declare their variegated similarity. Yet in the end, the work he left behind, the bit he added to the runaway fossil record, proves that the occasional, infinitesimal difference, astronomically rare, is the force that drives similarity into unexpected places. Tonight I put the scratched record on the machine again, playing it out loud when my memory becomes too spotty to call up the melody. The same tune this evening, same simple scale as the one that a few days ago prompted me to end my professional life. But not a note of Dr. Ressler's piece is in place.

Last week, the dance seemed a duet, subtle play between a right hand too close and courant to hear and a left I left so long ago I didn't at first recognize it. But tonight: I definitely hear trio. Love triangle. Dr. Ressler's story is nothing if not a threesome. He loved a woman; and he loved something else, inimical. Research didn't teach me this; firsthand contamination did. I've been to the place, picked up the spore.

Coy cat-and-mouse, familiar Q-and-A game around since the dawn of Chordata. The man I loved was of a low opinion of love's predictability. I can hear him — in the same voice that wandered up that stacked, homeless chord while he conducted himself— singing, "Birds do it, Bees do it; even shiftless ABDs do it…." I loved Franklin, and it all seemed a duet once. But every late-night visit I ever had from him, every visit I ever paid, took place in the shadow of an unnamed corespondent. A third party. Every couple an isosceles.

I am no calmer tonight. For all that I've already written, Dr. Ressler's death still comes on me at odd hours. Worse, more real. I hit a sentence requiring a fact I can't bring back intact: Ask Stuart; he'll remember. But his memory, the finest I've ever seen, is scattered, lost in small changes. What I have in mind is no clearer now than on the day I gave notice. Half my two weeks is over, and I've still not explained to incredulous coworkers what's going on. I promise to, the moment I figure it. Tomorrow, I start my last week of work, with no plan for after. Every book I touched this afternoon seemed strange. I must have been crazy to quit. Overreacted in a moment's grief. I've thrown away what little prospect I had of making it through these days intact. And yet: hurt demanded that I lose my job. For a week, I know I must square off against quiet, coming catastrophe alone.