The Gold Bug Variations

Richard Powers

• Publisher: William Morrow Paperbacks
• Year: 2021
• ISBN:
  9780063119420
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Literature General
• Index: Literature

National Bestseller

National Book Critics Circle Award Nominee

From the Pulitzer Prize–winning author of The Overstory and the forthcoming Bewilderment, a magnificent double love story of two young couples separated by a distance of twenty-five years.

"The most lavishly ambitious American novel since Gravity's Rainbow... An outright marvel." — Washington Post Stuart Ressler, a brilliant young molecular biologist, sets out in 1957 to crack the genetic code. His efforts are sidetracked by other, more intractable codes—social, moral, musical, spiritual—and he falls in love with a member of his research team.

Years later, another young man and woman team up to investigate a different scientific mystery: Why did the eminently promising Ressler suddenly disappear from the world of science? Strand by strand, these two love stories twist about each other in a double helix of desire.

The critically acclaimed third novel from Pulitzer Prize–winning author Richard Powers, The Gold Bug Variations is an intellectual tour-de-force that probes the meaning of love, science, music, and art.

XX

The Wife’s Message

Writing was bad enough. Posting the thing felt like killing a baby. The unreal address and Franker’s dreamy prose freed me to say things I’d never have written had I for a minute believed he might read them. He’ll be reading them in days.

The incurable Todd denial of time drips from his every sentence, worse than his long-distance admission of love. I loved his time-indifference once, believed in it. Now I see that he doesn’t even realize his infuriating, seductive residence in the eternal present. Nothing happens to anyone; no one changes or ages or dies. Everything exists, static; now is a standing wave. One just moves about inside the gallery, changing vantage, tilting an eyebrow, unbothered by closing hour.

Once, making fun of my three-by-five tone, he accused me of being thirty going on thirty centuries. But he was twenty-six going on twenty-six. When I first asked his age, he improvised: “I was born in St. Paul’s Maternity Hospital on June 18, 1957, and instantly fell into a deep sleep from which I have since awakened only fifteen hours a day.” Funny at the time.

When he was obsessed with transferring each day’s Times, baroquely illustrated, into his spiral books, I thought here was a fellow intent on knowing his narrow sliver instant. Just the opposite: he meant to freeze solid the world’s blood bank. Full compilation of everything that has happened would at last provide a place where nothing still did. Had he possessed the sticking power, his books would have swelled, not widthwise across the shelf but downwards, mine-shaft-style. In time—for one could always be sure of more time, somewhere in an eternally spacious future—he would have gone back to pick up the missing pieces from the vertical file: first UN disarmament conference, Reagan slips surviving marines out of Beirut, haircut ($9.50), breast of chicken again. February repeats; so does the 3rd: why not the year as well?

His letter plasters over unaccountable cracks in chronology. Days spent nosing about in collections no longer pass. His Hemelvaartsdag trip to the Middle Ages: Ascension, a good half year before he wrote. Yet he lays out the detail as if last week. He has grown so cavalier with the calendar that he postdated the letter; no other explanation for how it arrived so quickly. When he bothers mentioning Dr. Ressler at all, it’s a Ressler his own age, pre-disappearance, present tense.

If he came to my doorstep and petitioned in person, I would not be able to help myself, although the thing he cannot abide in me remains unchangeable. But this—this nostalgic declaration of attachment, a connection that continues in his mind just because he chanced recently to remember that it was ongoing once: impossible. Not now or ever.

Return Trip

We called our distress message back to the city. Jimmy groaned. “You two know you aren’t supposed to travel together.” A case of closing the disk file after the bytes escaped.

We borrowed a pound of oatmeal, a packet of coffee, and an ancient grain scoop from the contemptuous local whose phone we had hiked to. Sleepless, deliciously starved, we dug out. Late the next day, the plows sliced open the access road, clearing our umbilical. But before we were freed, we heard, in meticulous detail, how Dr. Ressler left microbiology. He narrated in open monotone, feeling the pull of those way stations again in proportion to their distance. Todd got his answer to how a person might descend into moratorium and never reemerge. And I learned that the man I’d researched was not who he was at all.

Not reticent, not demure, not this neutralized retreat behind grace and syntax. The effacing fifty-year-old was a detour, not Ressler by nature, not who he was slated to become. I began to see what had done it: circumstance and a certain turn of mind had conspired to give him violent proof that the individual organism was a lie. Thoughtful, precise, romantic, driven, needy: the à la carte traits were all phantom, paper bookkeeping. The self was wedged between two far more real antagonists—the genes it was designed to haul around and the running average of a population statistically indifferent, even hostile, to it.

What possible response was there, upon discovering that all responses were embarrassing, misrepresentative semaphores? Laughter was after something; even kindness had ulterior motives. Character was composed of processes intent on short-term results. The molecule, eternally rolling its repertoire against the monster-generating numbers, cared as little for a trait as for its polar opposite. Life was not the polite venture it seemed at eye level. One step up or down the hierarchy and the project grew sweeping, terrible, so indirect in means that it made him, the best part of his nature, seem a self-duping, shady junior partner in a fly-by-night mail-order scheme.

Even pure science—the most advanced display of living potential—was not approved by either gene or population, both indifferent to any but practical knowledge. The one was a stupid, sniffing truffle hound rooting out instant gain, the other a totalitarian juggler, insatiable for accuracy. As unsavory as that left things, the linkup between molecule and mob was still so brute-beautiful that Ressler might well have lived on curiosity alone, even manipulated, puppet curiosity, were it not for one implication in the unified theory. Life proceeded not by survival of the fittest, but by differential reproduction. It was enough simply to make more than you lost. There was no Jacob’s Ladder leading higher and higher. There was only breeding, faster, hungrier, until speed, appetite, and success did you in.

Yet life in theory (more beautiful because more crystal-cold) didn’t do him in; life as lived did, the twist existence laid at his door. He could not erase his traits without erasing himself—a choice he stopped just short of. But he could swear off the self-serving bouquet of characteristics in abject humility. Monasticism. The night shift.

Snow-sprung, we headed south along the fastest route. Todd drove; Ressler rode shotgun. I studied this passenger in the front seat who, for no good reason except that we’d half guessed, had just told us his life story. His eyes had become reanimated, too hopeful, too alive to possibilities to bear looking at.

A 443

A slight sharp in the middle brass,

teeth-freezing, three beats fast:

masked quickly, yet more conspicuous

in being virtually home, but missed.

Near-hit dissonance is a shout:

someone whom love, in the darkening yard

held at arm’s length, kept almost.

Always the choice: there or close,

the sharp catch of near miss

or the oblivion of concert pitch.

Return Trip (continued)

We reached MOL in the middle of the night. The waiting chaos was worse than I’d imagined. The computer room’s fluorescent composure had been shattered into a parody of flyblown Jugendstil. Tables were stacked with slopped printouts, riffled listings, and unraveling tape bands. The rack-bound operations manual that usually sat regal as an OED was pulled apart into signatures, spread all over the linoleum. Disk packs, dangerously uncovered, were scattered everywhere, piled in model babels on top of spindles. The smooth metal chitin of the CPU had been detached, revealing a mass of printed circuit cards. Seated on the floor in front of the bared cage, his back to the door where we entered, a dazed Uncle Jimmy stared listlessly at the diagnostic LEDs. “James,” Ressler greeted him, between amusement and anguish.

Jimmy turned around slowly, as if the cavalry’s arrival no longer made any difference. “Don’t even ask.”

From behind the aisle of drives came Annie’s excited treble. “Is it really them?” She crept out, tape spools running up each slender arm like Cleopatra’s bracelets. Her hair had fallen in a flaxen heap around her neck. She was rumpled and white from lack of sleep. “I’ve been helping tide things over.”

Franker began frantically inspecting the damage. “Don’t tell me it’s been just the two of you here since. . . .”

“I wish it had been,” Jimmy said, hoisting himself wearily off the floor. “They’ve been parading in and out for the last forty-eight hours. My people. Bank people. Hardware repairmen. Outside advisers. Everyone staying just long enough to screw up another thing before heading home for the wife and kids.”

“I have no wife and kids,” Annie said.

“You’ve been a brick, woman. A lifesaver. Not that we’ve managed to salvage anything.”

Ressler sat at the console, leaned forward to read the screen full of error messages. He managed a remarkably calming voice. “How bad is it, Jimmy?”

“I haven’t been home to see my mother since. . . . Damn you both.” Even the man’s anger was ludicrously devoid of hostility.

Ressler scanned the console log and asked, “What are you running at the moment?”

“Running? You jest. See those packs over there? Those are tonight’s work. Those in the corner are from last night. Monday’s packs are still up on the spindles.”

Todd whistled. Jimmy nodded grimly. Dr. Ressler took off his coat and glanced around the room, looking for the best angle to approach the catastrophe. Then the two of them set into motion, like the mythic ants called in to carry off the chaff. Todd sorted reports, cumulating pages. He held out a sheaf toward me, turning his head. “Take these away. I’m not privy to them.”

“But I don’t know the code to the listings room.”

“Me neither,” he said woodenly, then whispered it in my ear.

Ressler went over to the Operations Manager, still paralyzed by the CPU. “Jim, we’re sorry. We owe you. Now get home to bed. We’ll see you on the day shift tomorrow, when you get here. Go. You’re no good to us in your current condition.”

Jimmy nodded dumbly and gathered to go. Annie, still pretty in raggedness, bleated out heroically, “What can I do?”

Ressler had already turned his back and was busy swapping the board that had failed. “You’d better go home too.”

Annie only smiled: whatever he said was right. It hit me that she too adored the man, in her fashion. “I’ll pray for the three of you.”

“She’ll do what?” I whispered to Todd, after they left.

He was unrolling the console log on a cleared swatch of floor, digging back into the transcript of the last three days for clues to reversing the disaster. His lips curled at my incredulous tone. “You didn’t know?”

“Know what?” I began collating, punching emergency job cards, doing what little I could to help clean up.

His answer shocked me. “She’s a fighting Fundy from Spiritus Mundi.” To...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Dedication
• Contents
• Aria
• I. The Care and Feeding of Foreigners
• II. Who’s Who in the American Midsection
• III. We Are Climbing Jacob’s Ladder
• IV. Today in History
• V. The Quote Board
• VI. Cook’s Tour
• VII. Breakthroughs in Science
• VIII. After the Facts
• IX. Canon at the Third
• X. A Day Without the Ever
• XI. I Sit Still and Wait for Cloudburst
• XII. The Natural Kingdom
• XIII. A Young Person’s Guide to the Orchestra
• XIV. Desire per Square Mile
• XV. The Natural Kingdom (II)
• XVI. 12/6/85
• XVII. Halcyon Days
• XVIII. Canon at the Sixth
• XIX. Winter Storm Waltzes
• XX. The Wife’s Message
• XXI. Canon at the Seventh
• XXII. Alla Breve
• XXIII. Century of Progress
• XXIV. Canon at the Octave
• XXV. Disaster
• XXVI. The Vertical File
• XXVII. The Goldberg Variations
• XXVIII. The Placebo Effect
• XXIX. The Threshold Effect
• XXX. Today in History
• Aria
• P.S. Insights, Interviews & More . . .*
• Also by Richard Powers
• Copyright
• About the Publisher