The Gold Bug Variations Read online

  He wore a forgettable light suit, a narrow maroon tie not seen since the fifties, and an immaculate oxford button-down, carefully ironed but pilled to exhaustion around the collar. He emitted the aura—accurate, it turned out—that he found buying clothes too embarrassing. He was over the median age by twenty years. As I stared, wondering if this was an assault, the figure said, in a voice rattling like a cracked distributor, “Excuse me, Miss. There’s been a mistake.” I hadn’t a clue what he was talking about. Worse—the ultimate terror for my profession—I had no source to appeal to. Just his being here disturbed me; at that hour, in autumn, the library was the tacit domain of retirees and transients. A male of employable age, able-bodied albeit as emaciated as a Cranach Christ, upset the statistics. “There’s been a mistake. I’m afraid the date is off.”

  Influenced by earlier having identified the relative strengths of shipmast flags and Aldis lamps, I thought I’d been singled out to receive a cryptogram canceling some covert operation. All-points bulletin: Date off. His fastidiously soft-toned grammar, in best academic fashion, removed all trace of personal involvement: There’s been …, The date is … I gawked at him, mutely rolling my head to either side, Galileo’s pendulum experiments with my brain the deadweight. “I apologize for being so unnecessarily elliptical,” he added. A frail finger directed my attention to the Today in History. “This account, which I don’t for a minute doubt to be accurate in particulars, is, unfortunately, irrelevant.” He gave me an apologetic smile, an attempt to be amenable despite having just run over my pet dog. I still produced nothing but an uncomprehending stare. “I’m afraid those things did not take place today. In history.”

  My response surprised even me and jeopardized my standing in the ALA. I blurted out violently, giving in to that contempt the specialist stores up for the lay passerby, “And how would you know?”

  He paled and pulled his mouth into a grimace. “I don’t. That is, I wouldn’t be able to tell you when, if ever, that particular item took place.” He trailed off, considering it unnecessary to explain. Noticing my look change to clinical concern, he added, “To resort to an allusion that won’t be lost upon a person in your line: ‘You can look it up.’”

  I brayed out loud, astonished at the combination of scenic-route syntax and citation. I didn’t stoop to ask how he could possibly correct my events while admitting ignorance of when they’d happened. Instead, I adopted professional patience and hissed, “Let’s just do that.” I set off to the Reserves without looking to see if he followed. In seconds I was furiously buzzing over the historical almanacs, amazed at myself for losing equanimity. As the pristine derelict appeared at my side, I hit upon September 26 with a vengeance, confirming both Wilson and the Allied offensive. He passed a cupped hand across that stretch of forehead— God; his quintessential gesture!—and nodded. “I’m convinced, beyond question. Your skill with an index is impressive. Nevertheless …” He pointed politely to the massive wall calendar that, even from where we stood, broadcast today for all to see. I broke out for a branch-record second laugh in one morning. September 24.

  Just what empirical precision prevented him from asserting the obvious more obviously? His radical skepticism had required me to run the full, clumsy experiment of heading to the stacks in the outside event that the offensive had begun on the 24th and I’d committed the less likely error of date substitution. I sank into the nearest Breuer chair and exhaled. Thinking I was put out by the effort required to find a replacement, he said, “Might I make up for some of my incurred guilt in this matter by suggesting a substitute? Say, Eisenhower’s heart attack; 1955.” Making matters worse, he mumbled, “Should that be too obvious, you could take alternative refuge in 1789. Congress passes the Federal Judiciary Act. I’d rate that as fairly crucial, wouldn’t you? But perhaps you’ve used it?”

  I couldn’t decide if this was burlesque or the fellow’s genuine attempt to repair unmeant damage. I tried for knowing reserve. “Ike’s heart attack will do just fine.”

  He straightened like a teen coming clean from the confessional. “Terrific. We’re even, then.” He shifted weight from one leg to the other and tucked a stitch back into his coat seam. I reestimated his height: five-nine, with a full moon. He coughed and took a nervous step backwards. “I like Ike. How about yourself?”

  My introduction to Stuart Ressler’s sense of humor. I could think of no answer in the world to give such a thing, so I returned to the almanac. Through the miracle of cross-referencing, I reverse-engineered Ike’s coronary and the Federal Judiciary Act. He must have arranged the stunt in advance. But I’d only posted the fact the instant before he jabbed my shoulder. He watched my bewilderment for a few seconds, hunched his back, waved apologetically, and walked away. He was almost gone when I called after him. “I give up,” I said, offering a respectful truce. “How’d you do that?”

  “Never complain, never explain.” He looked furtively around as if it could not have been him, violating this place of public research by talking in full voice.

  My propriety vanished. For the first time in years, I stood face to face with another who wanted to force his way into the indifference of data. I slid from hostility to good-natured self-effacement in under a second. “Piece of cake,” I baited him back. “Disraeli. I was born knowing that one.”

  “I’ll have to take your word for that. I’m afraid I’m worse than aphasic with quotes.” And he abandoned me. Too soon to be leaving. Never would have been too soon.

  The rest of that day was dense with its own transactions, but erased from the retrievable record. I half expected him to return a week later, drop in for another chat about retrieval. He didn’t. The whole encounter had been an elaborate setup. With no other way to explain it, I unprofessionally let the incident drop until this evening. Friend, why aren’t you here now? The date’s off again. I too have grown worse than aphasic with quotes. What was it you said to me once? What was it I said back? What had been so urgent for a while, so in need of saying?

  BUT WHAT DO YOU DO FOR A LIVING?

  From that clueless beginning dug up from corkboard clippings, to Today in History, 6/23/85: Stuart Ressler—who once put his hands cleanly through the molecular pane, subsequent second-shift recluse, late-in-the-day returnee to the world—dead. I met the man by fluke, the universal architect. I will not meet him ever again. The meeting place he opened for us imploded with him.

  Knowing the course of the disease, I thought I was prepared for Todd’s mercifully curt devastation. I saw it in the envelope before opening. But when I sat and read, the veins of my neck thickened with chemical fight or flight, as if death dated from the minute I heard of it. Two billion years, and my body is still stupidly literal. My neck-gorge refused to shrink, however hard I rubbed. No RSVP required; just return to work, an afternoon dispensing citations. But I couldn’t move from the chair. Something specific was required, some word I had to identify before I lost the few lucid moments grief ever allotted.

  I reached for the envelope, my first indication in a year where Franklin was. The name in the cancellation circle pushed me over the edge. My throat hemorrhaged; violent self-control broke into hatcheted crying. Franklin, Dr. Ressler’s only student, had posted the note from that Illinois university and farming town where the old man had wandered off the path of human sympathy. Of all the towns packed with all the impotent intensive-care facilities in the world, Ressler chose that one to return his metastasized cells to at the end, as they ran him back into randomness.

  I believed, until that minute, that business as usual was the only consolation life allowed. But now the idea of going back to work right away—ever—appalled me. I returned to the vegetables on the kitchen counter and heaped them into a semblance of salad. But eating anything was beyond me. I put the food on the sill for whatever not-yet-extinct birds still braved the Brooklyn biome. A sympathetic mass took over my chest. The block spread into my legs, threatened to stiffen them if I didn’t keep moving. So I did what I al
ways do in the face of unnameable grief. I began straightening things. I picked up the books dispersed over my study. I threw away the accumulated advertising fliers. Dusting the record collection, I suddenly knew what I had been delaying, the act I needed to send him off.

  There, in my front room, trembling the record from its dust jacket, I set on my ancient turntable the piece of music the newly cadenced man most loved. I sat limp and listened all the way through, the way he had listened once, motionless except to flip the record. Four notes, four measures, four phrases, pouring forth everything. The sound of my grief, my listening ritual, will be the closest the professor gets to a memorial service. Franklin, wherever he now is, must have resorted to the same. Two listeners to that simple G scale and all the impossible complexity spun from it. I heard, in that steady call to tonic, how Dr. Ressler had amortized bits of himself for decades. Now he was paid off. Back at Do.

  The music—I can’t say what the music sounded like. Whole now, with none of its many endings the last word. That emotional anthology is so continuous that I could not tell whether my discovery dated from a year ago, under the dead man’s guidance, or this afternoon, at his private wake. Only Dr. Ressler’s perpetual running commentary was missing: the amateur’s gloss that always made the piece so difficult to listen to when he was in the same room now left it unbearable in his silence. “Here it comes. There. What a chord. Hear? The left hand, the interior dissonance …?” Every embedded line became painfully apparent with no one there to point it out.

  Only when the reprise, the last da capo bars resolved their suspension and fell back into generating inertness did I leave, lock the place, and climb the blocks back to the branch. Two hours late in returning. My colleagues, old maid Marians to a man, seeing me drag in late, stared as if I had just sprouted a full-fledged, handlebar-mustached mania. One of the eternally punctual, I had committed blatant inconsistency. Settling behind the Reference Desk as casually as possible, I resumed answering the public’s questions as if nothing had happened.

  But everything had. I worked like the worst of bush-leaguers. It took me twenty minutes to identify, for a polite woman not a day less than ninety, the river that had a funny name beginning with a vowel and probably lying in Africa or India. She and my atlas at last compromised on the Irrawaddy. I did almost as poorly naming the one-armed pro baseball player from the forties who puts in an appearance every five years and should have been child’s play. By four, badly in need of a break despite less than an hour’s work, already suspecting the break I needed, I attended to the Quote Board.

  Old institution, child of the fresh days of my M.L.S., when I still believed in the potential of democratically available facts: the Quote Board began as my experiment in free expression. An open corkboard with blank cards broadcast a standing invitation to “Add your favorite passage here.” We did well for a while, if not producing any transcendental insights. But the inevitable appearance of the limerick Ladies from Lunt and the Lonely Master Painters soon forced the notice “All quotes subject to final approval by Staff.” After-the-fact justification of censorship, first fatal realization that the body of literature had its obscene parts in need of covering.

  By the early eighties—just before I fell in with Todd and, through him, Ressler—the Quote Board was clearly fighting a losing cause against creeping nihilism. It filled with the work of junior Dadaists: random passages from sports magazines or cereal boxes, meaningless but too inoffensive to suppress in good faith. Disenfranchised blind mouths, wanting nothing better than to deface any suggestion of need. One morning the whole wall sprouted Day-Glo, spray-painted genitalia. After that, the project shrank from its first, ambitious conception to a square of plate glass around a single, daily quote selected by a librarian. As a sop to the old belief in public speech, I attached a locked submissions box with the condescending invitation, “If you have any suggestions for quote of the day …”. The project kept its old name through force of habit.

  Not that the public abandoned the Quote Board entirely. Over the years, it’s had the periodic inspired submission. Much of my original intention felt paid by one doubtlessly quarantined high school girl who, from an astonishingly broad reading, conscientiously culled the best of everything she came across. Last year she sent me an aerogramme from Eritrea reading:

  Even a proverb is no proverb to you till your life has illustrated it.

  Keats

  I let that one run two days. This girl and a few others have kept up a steady submissions trickle. A few hundred other contributors give once or twice, usually that private byword they’ve taken to heart: the St. Francis prayer or the Desiderata. Otherwise, the box bulges with teenage death or torch lyrics, proper names artlessly altered. Of tens of thousands who finance the branch, only a fraction of card-carriers make a point of reading the quote of the day, and fewer still ever go out on a limb and contribute. Still, the Quote Board provides its service. Recognition, learning a thing by heart: life will be nothing after these go.

  This afternoon the box was empty. Cupboard bare, I fingered my skirt pocket where Franklin’s note had somehow accompanied me back to the library, a coconut floating to populate a virgin, volcanic island. Franker once promised to keep me in permanent quotes: “You’ll never have to stuff the ballot box again.” For a long time he did. But today, as so often before he began to frequent me, I again had to come up with a fresh saying, never before used. One that might mean something, anything, to that fractional percent of my clients who hang on the choice of words.

  I felt an urge to use “Two loves have I, of comfort and despair …”. But remembering the public in public library and feeling little better than the prolific submitters of plaintive lyrics, I didn’t. Despite my small stockpile of emergency reserves, I could find no quote that satisfied. I couldn’t shake the features of the dead man’s face, the constriction of my gut. I took my neck by the hand and my fingers went all the way in. I tried to lose myself in the search, to turn up the quote that had absolutely nothing to do with grief. I stood in front of the Quote Board for some time before admitting that what I required in today’s quote was a private, particular eulogy.

  As I pretended to think, the passage I was after presented itself. I went straight to the stacks and found the source, a posthumous work by Dr. Arendt on the dangerously detachable, oddly convincing life of the mind. I remembered the words practically verbatim. I knocked out the excerpt on one of the antique staff manuals and posted it. Stuart Ressler had probably never come across the passage in his life. But it stood for him, summed up his permutation as well or better than any other:

  The God of the scientists, one is tempted to suggest, created man in his own image and put him into the world with only one commandment: Now try to figure out by yourself how all this was done and how it works.

  Tacking up this charm, locking the glass cover that would keep it safe from an uncomprehending audience until I replaced it, I headed back to the Reference Desk. But on the upbeat of my return footstep, I felt the first of Dr. Ressler’s astonishing variations visit. Music. Unasked-for, self-generating attacca singing. Unable to help myself, forcing my heels into professional clicks, I succumbed to syncopated desire, the skip hidden in the sound of sole against tile. The most powerful intellect, the most remarkable temperament I ever met was dead of a slow horror. And all I could feel was this urge to dance. Grotesquely inappropriate—what could be simpler?—I felt the need to move in as many directions as possible, to assume all the virtue of virtuosity. I knew what measures I would be forced to take.

  The mood annihilated the incapacitating silence of lunch hour. In the time it took me to walk the hundred meters back, the syncopation clamping itself deeper into my walk, I caught sight of the scientist, the god of the scientist. Frozen like a deer in car headlights, the thing he’d figured out: how all this works. Dr. Ressler, hearing the world burst its reservoir. The empty separation of the last year dissolved in one upbeat; the first hint of a two-step, and every
thing changed. The constant anticipation of a handful of months before came flooding back. I saw the three of us, the small circle drawn into our orbit, as we all had been. I heard the words we wasted late into the night, stabbing at something beyond saying. I felt, with a mix of hot shame and pleasure, what a talker I’d overnight become. Months of verbal drunkenness, when once or twice I’d even known what I was talking about. I saw the sharp lines of the design that obsessed him as if I’d drawn them myself.

  In that instant my afternoon’s routine, my surviving professional life, wholly unconnected to that other run, sounded the subtlest exercise in multifoliate counterpoint: a short-short-long in the right hand completing a simultaneous long-short-short in the left. Those two out-of-step tunes, in their off-beat separateness, not only seemed deliberately thrown together, they also harbored, hidden and distant, other voices peeling off in parallel structure, coming apart at the seams. No other way to describe what came over me: I began to hear music. Literal music, music flying along under the fingers, the same music I had listened to earlier this afternoon, only radically changed. I was at last hearing, picking out pattern with my ears, knowing what sound meant, without translation: that tune—four notes by four—Dr. Ressler’s life theme, the pattern-matching analog he had always been after.

  That syncopated dance back to the Reference Desk—elaborate, contrary motion—called on me to make a deliberate, irrevocable sashay. Music, his music, melodic balls tossed freely back and forth between the hands, begged me to discover how wide an arpeggio might emerge from single notes. He led me to the center of the ballroom with those thin, cancerous hands, took my body in his timid, skinless arms and commanded, “Ready? On one.”