Richard Powers - Gold Bug Variations

Those nights when he fails to procure he is left alone, recalling that this is how he likes best to end days, in the tallow-glow of winter. Waking the next morning to the blessings of solitude, he throws himself again into the schedule of early production, midday gorging, afternoon nap. And further evenings in pursuit of that other whom he has never found, who exists only and precisely nowhere.

He follows this invariant routine for a year or three. But at the instant when habit becomes inhibiting, he upends his carefully cultivated schedule, reneges on debts, chases off his few friends, sends them away berated. He liquidates stock, leaves his rent in arrears, and packs off to another town, another time, taking nothing but his private formulae and all the panels he can carry. He chooses a direction and begins walking. When he grows hungry, he stops and sets up shop. He puts his head down to work, eat, nap, describe this new landscape, find out its fires, rousing himself from routine only when awakened by a surprise ambush of forgotten fields from another century.

He flourishes before an ornate gate unequaled in history. A few years after Gutenberg, a few before Shakespeare, unrepeatable era of giants: da Vinci, Erasmus, Michelangelo, Rabelais. All a fellow condemned to marginalia can do to avoid the sink of afternoon is turn back to the morning's unfinished panel, betray no barometer of hope except what eye can observe, hand mirror.

This, the implicit advice of his paintings, is what I search for in his biography. But a paragraph into exegesis and I gaze again out of this stone casement in the medieval attic I have sublet. On second glance, the countryside is overhauled. All vestige of Brabantine gothic dissolves, and I am in another small town, just as sleepy. The window fills with a different formula for depicting houses, churches, the tucked-away, unobserved miracle. Bles becomes, say, Thomas Hart Benton. The era of infant exploration, its flirtation with parachutes, cadaver dissections, and the sextant gives way to the International Geophysical Year, scientific discovery in full flower, the year of my birth. The moment when that centuries-long investigation, begun on Bles's doorstep, converges on a complete theory — the revelation that experiment has spent four centuries preparing for.

Dropped into this alien landscape of block apartments swept by overhead satellites, my journeyman is forced to abandon painting. He takes up the vocation of the times — cashes in palette for vernier gauge. He has no choice but to go on working at the same scene, his eye still after the underlying mechanism that infuses life with its surprising form. Work remains a question of catching, in one sweep, the quiet neighborhood crisis that knowledge always circumscribes. The world by mid-twentieth century has expanded unprecedentedly toward that watershed moment when it will comprise nothing except measure. Met de Bles, symbol depictor, takes up a profession still obsessed with eavesdropping on the world's interior monologue, but wildly enlarged in power of material manipulation, closing in on the symbol table itself.

You see, I start with every intention of cranking out a chapter of Bles's bio, but after a few subordinate clauses, find myself deep in Ressler's. Obsessed, reticent, demure, brilliant, intense, driven, asocial, truculent, lonely, vulnerable, abandoned: the professor, for all we got from him, remains a thesaurus of contradictions. Ressler, at my age, lived for one thing only. To unravel the complexities of personality at its source. Being alive is a one-shot affair: a window, small, blurred, but miraculously permitting a cramped, flattened, two-dimensional, distorted view of the terrain.

Before the perverse thing closed for good, the professor wanted to find the first landfall of the full map, the rule that dictates his generative unfolding. To name, translate his own breathing, his own infolded instinct for love from out of the formal language of chemistry. He is the one I want to flesh out. Why did he let us so far into his life, only to hold us at arms' length? Nature's decoder, who thought that if he could just get to the generating tape, say what "A" meant, then "AT," then "ATG," he would sniff the source, the panel's panel, and could then let the window close peacefully over him. But at bottom, laid bare, solved, the tape read only, "Obsessed, reticent, demure, brilliant, intense, driven, asocial, truculent, lonely, vulnerable, abandoned." The old thesaurus.

Being in the same room as Ressler, just sitting with him in silence, was like filling my lungs with the air of galleries. The chamois cloth of his eye sockets, those pressed seersucker suits no one has worn for twenty years emitted unfinished labwork, interrupted notebooks, glimpses under the electron microscope rendering the familiar mechanics of life alien, less survivable, more unlikely than any oil. I know more about Bles than about the man we sat with.

Think what it must have felt like, to be in your twenties, to rip out of yourself in cerebral caesarean the formulation of an idea two thousand years old. A confirmation so simple, so unexpectedly whole that the only available response was militant, head-bowed humility. Then think the unthinkable. At the moment of confirmation, when the connection screams into proximity, you stumble onto another discovery, one that will disperse without trace the instant you formulate it: cracking the program does not mean exemption from having to follow it.

Because Ressler too erased himself from the guild records, I am free to elaborate. Even as he rushes the unavoidable outcome, he gives in to the trivial joy of being twenty-five, more soaringly ill-considered. He can do nothing but savor, as long as possible, that temporary, timid kindness of doomed courtship. What exactly, at this watershed, does she seem to him? She manages to look beatific without being ludicrous. She commits to precious little on the surface. She limps through labwork, by turns bright, sultry, competent, demure, vivacious, dumb. Joanne Woodward's contemporary Oscar performance as a multiple personality has nothing on this woman. Her body's message alters itself at its base: in her step, arrogantly light, she conveys, over the general noise of the lab, the campus, the apocalyptic meander of 1957, that all manner of things will be well, now and in the enzyme.

For his part, he sinks to a parody of reconciled Goodwill. The continued explosion of American Vanguards, the detonation of Soviet nuclear weapons in the Arctic — the whole market of current events fails to flap him. This vestigial, infant happiness is a chemical sluicegate flushing him with unbuffered ions; a thickness in the winter air, his youth triggered by irresistible stimulus — the mechanism he had hoped to overcome by translating.

Admission discounts nothing. The moment flushes him. He feels the rush, no matter what the equation. He thinks of her all day, wants nothing more reprehensible than to spread over her surface like a roosting flock. He willingly gives her every chance to waylay him, to wreck him for what he is after. If the worst should turn out true, the contemptible clarity of his love will redeem everything. The full force of luteinized want — his body conversing with its own attraction — leaves him more laughable perhaps, but no worse off than others, who must also dodge missiles, fend off conflagrations, name the crisis of knowledge. No worse off for his petty attempts at — call it care. Under the circumstances, isn't even care born in sexual aggression sufficient and worth savoring?

Remember the night when we confronted him point-blank with the dossier you'd assembled — every mention of him ever to appear in print? Confirm me: his shoulders slumped imperceptibly, he looked off and cleared his throat, willing to answer anything, but only this once. Remember how he shrugged, a stream of sympathy, invention without cleverness? The slight catch snagging his words wrung all our ingenuity out of me, the pride of authorship I'd felt in his friendship. The valence of the fellow we'd been trying to ascertain became real. Ressler's fingers gripped a card deck, some pointless data-processing task he was about to shove into the hopper. His knuckles turned transparent; his veins and cartilage were the color of an oil-slicked puddle. A thousand cells in that hand split and replicated in the time it took us to speak again.