Richard Powers - Gold Bug Variations

He'd set out to uncover the principle uniting all animate matter and discovered something simpler instead. Ear to the clicking telegraph key, to the message coming across the wire, the sequence he heard the answer to "What hath God wrought?" was "Who's asking?" Lost to science the moment he cannot put into words, into chromosome strings, why he loves this woman. Reductionism supplies no reason except her clothes, random, mismatched, pastel; her graceful gawkishness between the legs; the absolute lightness of her limbs moving against gravity in all directions at once; her globed cheeks; her wide, scared child-eyes; her visits, quick and brief as accident. No specific part but gives her an uncaring, lissome urgency, wholly beautiful because wholly ephemeral. He is condemned to loss, from that day forward, never quite able to return to the text he had been seeking, for no reason except that she has made him realize, at cell level, that the only message worth receiving will be intercepted, garbled, lost in translation.

He must have seen this before, this slipping off, recalled it from the histories, even as indifference came over him. I'm sure of it. He felt the slow unfolding, long before he showed any sign. He had all the motive in the world to keep from disappearing: the experimental method, all but resting in his hands, a trick for reading the banished original. All the magazines predicted results. Couldn't he have lasted another year?

But he knew the work would get done whatever happened to him. If he did nothing, shut down his tabulations, spoke not another word of his insights, any of countless, equally talented researchers would have his method in a year or two. His year produced a focus of scientific talent unparalleled since Herri's. An all-out marshaling of forces cutting across disciplines had already begun that grade-school recruiting process that would brush the two of us. Sputnik wasn't the catalyst, for my money. His 1957 was just the first of a stream of IGYs.

Before we said goodbye, the night we took our electronically permanent step, he reprised for me in a few, condensed measures his own bitter disappearance. Before we jimmied the packs, he thought it only fair to pass on to me details I might be able to use. "What we need," he told me, "is the code for the synthesis of the forgiveness enzyme. Self-forgiveness. Forgiveness for having wanted what we are born wanting."

Not that I can now hope to ask you for it, after everything, any more than Herri can ask me to forgive him for not being Van Eyck. He and I were born wanting the same thing, and neither of us will ever come close to it. We will never make an Arnolfini Wedding or a Hunters Homeward in Snow. Herri sees, through the stone casement, that he will be forgotten, demoted to shadowy myth, despite his sole biographer. And with his unrealized landscapes will go that compulsion to imitate, to name the crisis lingering over the indifferent town.

It has become night as I write. Soft chiarascuro transforms the casement view into interior: has any painter ever made such a composition? The graveyard shift in an airplane hangar full of infernal calculating machines and peripherals. The machines themselves are as serene as Titians. But underneath the skin seethes a public chaos of crowds, a roll call crammed with as many encapsulations of misery as were ever wedged into any last judgment. The foreground is still blue, merging into a sea-green midrange nativity. But the background now takes its tones from the red of ambulance lights. About suffering, they were never wrong, the Old Masters. Even the minor ones. Even met de Bles, or Blesse. With the blaze. Or wound. You see I am thrown in over my head, asked to judge this contest between observation and invention. All I can concentrate on long enough to write about is those overlookable almosts in his aborted landscapes. I wait by windows, half-maker of the range of creation I'm supposed to describe.

Creation is at present limited to exotic holidays. Not far back, I was sitting in a buitenlanders language class full of earnest young Germans when our teacher announced that there would be no school tomorrow. Incredibly, the most towheaded kid asked why. The teacher tactfully explained that the day commemorated her exemption from obligatory German. For Hemelvaartsdag I went to Brugge, an urban time capsule, where I took part in the Procession of the Holy Blood. In the town center, along a fossil gothic-walled circuit, with the great cloth hall and belfry as backdrop, comes this procession of thousands of townspeople in costume, acting out, along the length of their parade ribbon, the history of the world from the Garden to present-day politicos. Animated time flowed past me on the street, a ritual that has been going on, unchanged except for appended length, since 1150. As the procession ended, each block of crowd milled into the street, following the flow, becoming the last, contemporary, costumed participants.

Time, static stuff, is reified here. The granddaughter of collaboration can't marry the grandson of underground. I heard a German ask a price in a bordertown bric-a-brac shop. The proprietor— Common Market be damned — gave the standard reply — allusion to the million conscripted vehicles that aided the Wehrmacht in initial blitzkrieg and sped the surviving sixteen-year-olds reeling from advancing Americans: "Give me my bicycle back and I'll answer you."

Time is a place here, a tangible landscape. Last week I took a day trip to Münster. Disconcerting: still attached to the steeple of St. Lambert's, the iron cages where they displayed the bodies of the Anabaptists. The cathedral was softly disappointing. It had its great astronomical clock: Herri's contemporary universe as flywheel. But I'd expected something more articulated, nuanced. A clause and a half into a wall plaque on the south porch, I realized I was reading English. Stone from Coventry Cathedral, given to the people of Münster. Let us forgive one another as He forgives us. Caption in two languages, each translating the other.

Stupider than my towheaded classmate, I get no closer to this place's meaning than porting over. I will never fully "understand," because I can never fully "begrijp." The verbal myth of standing under a thing is as unrealizable as that of grasping it. I came to class last week to discover that my towheaded friend had suffered an auto accident. My distraught teacher, confusing my native tongue with the victim's, blurted out, "Rudy ist tot." That much I grasped, stood under. She passed out copies of the death notice, that final declension. We students spent the morning looking up, in our wordbooks, the names of grief in translation.

It did not stand in the dictionary, but these death notices make a local spreekwoord: "He lies like a remembrance card." For they are always filled with love, these after-the-fact summaries. Is what I feel for you at this moment the distortion of loss, waiting until separation to say it? I think of you, want nothing more than to see you and hear your voice.

Instead, I send you this botched dissertation draft. This letter may be the closest I ever come to writing it. You alone are easy to write to, perfect audience, someone who will see, in the weak paraphrase I here throw together, that I am building my apology— explaining why I could not become a sketcher in this world. Now is not the time for drawing. What limited skill we've developed to describe the place we long ago consigned to the laboratory. It may take generations before we remember how big the world is, how much room it has for all sorts of observation.

According to the professor, one single science stands between us and our address. Only we don't see the link; we grasp it only in bits — the pay telescope that magnifies but constricts, and that snaps shut on your quarter after a lousy two minutes. Let me paraphrase the vulnerable Bede: what I put my hands on is the sense, but not the order of the words as the man painted them. For travel scenes, however perfectly composed, can never be ported from one world to another without loss. Perhaps neither beauty nor exactness nor profundity nor meaning, but something will not go over the bridge intact.