Richard Powers: Gold Bug Variations

The Perpetual Calendar

I.

What could be simpler? Four

scale-steps descend from Do.

Four such measures carry over

the course of four phrases, then home.

At first mere four-ale, the theme swells

to four seasons, four compass points, four winds,

forcing forth the four corners of a world

perfect for getting lost in

or for filling, by divide and multiply.

Four secret letters, tetragrammaton,

start to speak themselves, the tune

doubling down a net of no return.

What could be simpler? Not even music

yet, but only counting: Do, ti, la, sol.

Believing their own pulse, four tones

break into combinations, uncountable.

II.

From language to life is just four letters.

How can that awful fecundity come

from four semaphores, shorthand and dumb,

nothing in themselves but everything?

Gene-raining cascade, proliferating green

tints, varieties senseless except for their own

runaway joy in the explosion. Fresh phloem-

pipes, palisades, leaves ripe for insect-aping.

All patterns patented: gyro, chute, receiver,

fish that track ocean back to first stream

or steer pitch black by trapped bacterial beams.

Can egg-chaos really be all the blueprint needed

to father out this garden-riot from just seed?

No end to the program except a breaking out

in species-mad experiment, sense-shattered shout,

instruction-torrent: live, solve, copy This, repeat.

III.

Two men, two women, their requisite friends,

acquaintances, strangers and impediments,

two couples at arm's length of thirty years bend

in ascending spiral dance around each other.

All four have traveled far from home

and, in the hour when they need it most,

the grace of reference works won't come

to cure the persistent call of tonic.

"Picture those pay telescopes," he said,

"that sprout up at scenic views. Ten cents,

a minute's panorama, then it snaps dead.

Clicks shut. Cut off. And you with no more change."

All four must make a full tour of the curse,

and deep in variation, for a moment, lose

the four-note theme, sight of each other, worse,

Drowned by the pump and swell, the flood of dates.

IV.

The calendar's fresh beauty is how it runs

through perpetual days, calling us on

to the urgencies of life science, old names,

genus, species: May Thirds, March Twenty-ones.

Everything that ever summered forth starts

in identical springs, or four-note var-

iations on that repeated theme: four seasons,

four winds, four corners, four-chambered heart

in four desire-trapped bodies in the thick

of a species-swarmed world where green thrills

to countless change while the calendar holds still.

Winter works again, through autumn's politics,

its call to action, critical count of votes:

Look, speak, add to the variants (what could

be simpler?) now beyond control. How can we help

but hitch our all to these mere four notes?

The Care and Feeding of Foreigners

Word came today: four lines squeezed on a three-by-five. After months of bracing for the worst, I am to read it casually, jot down the closing date. The trial run is over, Dr. Ressler dead, his molecule broken up for parts, leaving no copies. I can neither destroy the note nor keep from rereading it. The news is a few days cold. I've had a year's advance warning. But I haven't time enough left in my own cells ever to figure it. The mechanical music box, his body, has had its last crack at the staff. Those four notes, four winds, four corners of a world perfect for getting lost in are lost in a sample mean.

Once, when he talked, I could almost follow in him the interior melody from the day of creation. For a few months, I'd had that tune by ear. Now nothing. Noise. I read the note all evening, waiting for the clause that will make sense of it. The only volunteer words are his: Dr. Ressler, leading the way through winter violence, the snowstorm that trapped the three of us in a vanished cabin, laying out all natural history with an ironic shrug: "What could be simpler?"

I had a hunch it would come now. For a week, unseasonably cool — brisk, blustery, more like summer's end than its beginning. Last night the cold peaked. I slept under a parfait of wool, the weight required to keep me under. Giving in to an irrational fear of courants d'air brought on by too much literature as a girl, I sealed the apartment. No one around any longer to object. Excited by night chill, the signal hidden in temperature, I fell asleep only by degrees. I lay in the metal-cold sheets aware of every pore, unable to keep from remembering. Something was about to happen. Hurried lingering, hope, as always, a function of weather.

I passed through that hybrid state just short of dream, back to that iridescent weekend in the woods. The familiar world overhauled, encased in silver sealant. We three waded again across the glacial surface: spectral trees glazed with lapidary. Bird and squirrel fossils marked the drifts. Snow obliterated paths, spun power lines into flax, confected hedgerows, dressed our cabin in gothic buttresses and finials. I walked through the transmuted place beside my two males, one in herringbone, the other in navy pea. Dr. Ressler walked between Franklin and me, pointing out astonishments in the altered world, his features as angular as the shepherd's wonder from my childhood creche. The seashell loops of his ears, his fleshless nose, reddened in the acute cold, while his lashes doilied with flakes that beaded across his mat of hair.

We pressed deeper into the snowscape, the bronchi-passages of a walk-in lung. Franklin and I placed our hands under each other's coats, pleading conservation of heat. In bed, my skin still recorded the year-ago cold of that boy's fingers against my ribs. Ressler saw everything: the bark swells of insect galls, the den entrance punched through hardened powder. He certainly saw how Franklin and I kept warm, and treated it as easily the most explicable of winter mysteries. At his finger-points, the arcade of frosted branches became vault ribbing. His each wave populated the landscape, pulling Chinese lanterns out of flat sheets. He crumpled to his knees in the snow, shook his head in incomprehension, and like the crystal world, seemed about to splinter. He must have solved again, with fierce looking, the ladder of inheritance, because his face turned and he swung his eyes on us expectantly.

Piled in blankets, I slowed the dream, kept him from speaking, prolonged the endangered moment that would shatter at the least formula. His throat tensed; his lips moved soundlessly like a remedial reader. He became that pump organ we had played six-hands, about to produce the one phrase sufficient to hymn this mass of brute specifics. The traces of creatures, all the elaborating trills and mordants of winter seemed a single score, one breathing instrument whose sole purpose was to beat the melodic line of its own instructions — four phrases, four seasons, every gene the theory of its own exposition. He was about to hum, in a few notes, the encoded thread of everything happening to us and everything that would fail to happen. But his lips — thin, boyish, blue, wasted in middle age — could not shake loose the first pitch.

As before, Franklin challenged him. "You're the life scientist. Tell us what's afoot here." Every detail of Ressler's face grew magnified: the interstate lines of folded neck, his frozen-brittle lobes, the spot on his chin thawed by breath. His viscera, the process even then growing more variegated, already knew the tumor. This time Dr. Ressler gave no reply. He had gone, slipped out from under the weight of white.