RICHARD POWERS Read online

She scowled, the look one reserved for the drunken party pest. I'm a good copyist, Karl. All God's creatures should do what they're best at. I know what you're best at I saw your show.

  Ah, yes! The latest Wild Kingdom. Mr. Rousseau, version 2.0. She held up a hand-drawn eel of an elephant rearing back to trumpet. She rocked the painted profile in the arc that animation planned for it. I didnt mean Rousseau 2.0.I meant Klarpol 1.0.

  N aw. You know the thing is a team effort. The guys wrote all the code. I plundered everybody, totally copycat. All I did was cut and paste Henri's Caesar salad onto lots of lollipop sticks. But wait until— I mean your one-woman show. Your solo opener. Her smile seized up, seeing the ambush. Gail's smile. Not in any curl or turn of the lip. Just its crumple of fear. Its carmine fight or flight. What was the name ofthat shop again? God, I used to know them all by heart. Not to mention how much commission each of them scraped off the top. Near Broadway and Spring Street. Francis Hinger Gallery. Francis Hinger, Adie echoed. The elephant stopped moving. She set it down.

  How long ago was that, exactly?

  Doesn't matter.

  No, wait. I'll tell you exactly when it was. August of... What year is it now? August of 1979.

  Opened in July, she said, through the side of her mouth. But who's counting?

  Adie Klarpol. Only you were going by Adia back then.

  My name.

  What were you, all of seventeen? Twenty-seven. Old enough to know better.

  Oh, nobody's ever that. A well-received show, as these things go. Some kind of awful literary name ...

  "Halations" What's so awful about that?

  What does it mean, anyway? It sounds like bad breath caused by asthma.

  It's a technical term. Describing what I did.

  Pastel penumbra halo stains. Lots of high-frequency colors. Not uninteresting. Inkblot tests on minor hallucinogens. Seemingly abstract, until you looked closely enough to make out the ghosted high realism. There was one called Infinite Coastline, if I remember right. Kind of a hand-drawn Mandelbrot, a couple of years before everybody in the industrialized nations dosed out on Mandelbrots.

  I cant believe you remember that. I cant believe you even saw the show. I didnt think anyone saw that show. Except my mother, and she only came because I paid her airfare.

  Come on. Nice little squib in artforum. They built you up. The next hot commodity. All set to unfurl.

  Karl. Please.

  Let me guess. You wanted to change the world. Right? Make a difference? Am I right?

  Well, whatever I wanted ... She laughed again. Her shoulders came down. She returned to her tablet. The ambush had passed. I didn't exactly produce the cure for cancer.

  Were you any good, do you think?

  Screw you, Karl. You saw the work. You're the voting public. You're supposed to tell me.

  Now. If you really mean to give the last word to the voting public, the only mystery is how you lasted until twenty-seven. Ebesen picked at his fraying sleeve, at some crib-sheet answer inked there. Beautiful was supposed to be back. Craft and exactitude and representation. That didnt even last the allotted fifteen minutes, now did it?

  She made herself a pillar of calm. Mary in the bower of roses, by Stefan Lochner. She returned to working at her creatures, under an impregnable halo. Know what's funny? The only people who are willing to pay you a steady salary to paint? Businesspeople? They still kind of like those things.

  So that's what did it for you? That's what prompted you to quit the downtown scene and go straight?

  Oh for heavens sake. It doesn't matter.

  I know it doesn't matter. The last person on earth to tell anyone that anything mattered. I'm just interested.

  Leave me alone, Karl. You should talk. She flinched at her own words.

  He stood still. All right. I had no idea it was still a live topic.

  It's not a live topic.

  I just wanted to know what made you ...

  She cocked forward on her stool, ready to spring. But some late-heard pressure on his "you" scattered the attack. She sat back and inhaled. Art is ... pretty sick now, isn't it?

  Life is sick. Art's just the recording nurse.

  Either way. It's not something I needed to live with all day long.

  He started to sing, in a tenor hinting at how it used to saunter, before the osteoporosis. "I got troubles of my own."

  Exactly. Exactly! The first through tears, the second through a wet, cracked giggle. What's it to ya, bub?

  She sat up, pulled her knees together, and folded her hands on them. Ebesen stood holding his greasy valise, ready to flee at anything that resembled intimacy.

  Shit, she said. She wiped her face with the butt of her hands. This is pathetic. She consolidated her body, pulling and tucking. OK. I'm OK. Here. Sit over there. She stood and installed him at a vacant workstation. At least make yourself useful, would you? Here's the palette and the set of brushes. Go on. Make the monkey jump.

  It was some proof for the God of the mathematicians that existence offered exactly as many penances as it afforded sins. The two artists worked away in silence. Her hands moved rapidly, like shorebirds, circling. His moved almost not at all, wavering as narrowly as a mantis's. He etched in short crosshatches, with brute, surgical fastidiousness. Each head bent down over its drawing, monks in a scriptorium furnishing a continent with gold leaf and cerulean.

  Ebesen painted, satisfied to be Klarpo's apprentice, for as long as it took to pay off her distress. But not a heartbeat longer. An internal timer somewhere between his riddled heart and savaged liver told him the precise moment when it was safe to badger her again.

  So what did it finally come down to? The bits of crockery glued to the canvas?

  No. I kinda liked those. Wasn't crazy about the price tags ...

  Was it the prohibition against affirmation? As I remember, your stuff ranked pretty low in the doom-and-detritus department. More of the— how shall we say?—Glad Game persuasion.

  She snorted at the caricature. Let's just say that my talents ... never really tended toward originality.

  Nu? That hasn't stopped half of the artforum pantheon. The trick out there is exactly the same as it is in here. You just have to find a way of being uniquely derivative.

  Don't like it out there. Like it in here. Singsong pugilistic. Safer in here.

  I don't get that at all. How can commercial art be safe, when it involves millions of viewers and trillions of dollars, and high art be dangerous when it sells for eight thousand bucks and sits in the foyer of some summer home in the Hamptons?

  High art's a bit of a joke, wouldn't you say? The go-go frenzy. The lives chewed up and spit out for the sake of novelty and glam. Reputations manufactured and deflated, fortunes thrown at trash. Then the transaction written up as if it's the stock market. All that fuss about something that's not even real.

  What is? Real, I mean.

  She shrugged. She waved her hand around her to indicate her captors. TeraSys. Exxon. GM. Things that make this world. Things people believe in. I'll tell you what's real. Microsoft is real. The gallery world is a wannabe dress-up game.

  Ebesen threw up his hands. For a moment he was the white-smocked firing-range victim in Goya's Third of May. Then why stay with art at all? Why not ditch picture making altogether and go into a legitimate line of work? Something really real, like sales and marketing? I understand there are a few openings.

  Because making the elephant trumpet is not exactly what I'd call art. But it sure beats working.

  Oh, I see. Pictures are fun, so long as they don't matter.

  In his outburst's aftershock, Ebesen looked up. Adie was cringing again, crooked over her animations.

  Don't ride me, Karl. I'm making a living, the same as you. You had more talent than I did. He grunted at his screen. Adie craned over, examining the work of his hands. The monkey lived. In three quickly executed slices, Rousseau's manic marmoset-macaque swung on his branch in a sweep that was pure simian.

/>   She looked up at the bagman, the sorry statesman of all RL eccentricities. Just how much talent did you have?

  Ebesen lifted his eyebrows and let them fall. He shuffled to his feet as if the bailiff had just proclaimed, "All rise." He scratched the dog Pinkham behind one ear and vanished from the room. But he came back again, helpless, the following evening.

  15

  This new room still has no place to relieve yourself. The fact seems hopeful, although hope is fast going relative. They can't keep you here for long without leaving you somewhere to pee. Solid plank floors; plaster walls. The chain on your leg would restrict urination to a six-foot radius of where you sit. Surely even these zealots don't expect you to foul your own bed.

  You wait. At least now you can wait in the half-light. Someone will come before the pressure to relieve yourself kills you. Come with food or word of your release. Or barring that, something to piss in.

  You wait. The waiting becomes a game. Then the game becomes a contest. They mean to break your will. They find this cute. Some kind of victory for the world's downtrodden, to make mighty America wet its pants. So it turns into a State Department mission, to suppress your bladder until the enemy concedes respect.

  The pain goes crippling. A stone forms in your urethra. The denied moisture begins to trickle out of your eyes. You've lost, lost against your body, against time, against your captors. You place the blindfold over your head and call out, as contritely as the pain allows.

  Someone bangs once on your door and it opens. A voice from dark-ness's northeast calls out "Yes, please?"

  Not your previous visitor, the one who fondled your ear with his gun. This one sounds shorter, rounder, slower on the uptake.

  "I am sorry," you babble. "I need to pee very badly. Urinate. Toilet? You understand?"

  You've learned the Arabic word, but in the press of need, the language tapes fail you. You stand and resort to body language, hips forward, hand to groin, the little Belgian boy, writing your name in the snow of some dream Low Country, universes away.

  "Yes, please. OK. I know. You wait."

  You burst out in a sharp laugh that splits your gut. The man leaves, raising an alarm like the home team's during the First Crusade. You must be the first person this band has ever chained up. That Americans have bladders has never occurred to them.

  The little round voice scurries back. He holds something up to the vee of your pants. You peek under the lip of the blindfold, into the mouth of a sawn-off plastic bleach bottle. You unbutton yourself with your battered thumbs and roll down the waistband of your underwear. But it's hopeless. Desperation changes nothing. You never could piss in public.

  "Please. I hold. You leave."

  "OK." The man fumbles the container into your hands. "You take."

  "Thank you. You go now. Goodbye." He walks off a few feet. But no door closes. It will have to do. Under the blindfold, by force of will, you imagine the room empty. Your boarded-up hole, bare but for the mattress and radiator. The floodgates open; coarse yarn pulls out of your urethra at high speed.

  You collapse against the wall in relief. Your head falls back, slack against the plaster. "Merhadh." Toilet. "Merhadh" you sob, all fluids flowing out of you at once.

  "Yes, yes," your captor laughs. "Merhadh, merhadh. I understand."

  Not the word a native would have used. Pronunciation not even close. Failing to come until long after you needed it. Yet these two syllables, on his tongue, send him into delight.

  "Good, good. I leave bottle here. You use ... all the time. Make water only. No shit. Shit, mornings only. I come take you. Empty bottle. Good? Yes, please?"

  "Listen. Can you bring me something to drink? Water. Another bottle for water. I am very dry ..." You make obscure hand gestures meant to signify dehydration. Dust in the throat. "Not good. Not healthy. I must have water. A bottle to drink from." You will work on fluid for now. And put forward the concept of nourishment later.

  "OK. No problem. I bring for you. Soon. Inshallah"

  God willing. You pray the tag line is just a formula.

  The door closes upon silence. You lift your blindfold to the emptied room.

  "Listen. Can you bring me something to drink? Water. Another bottle for water. I am very dry ..." You make obscure hand gestures meant to signify dehydration. Dust in the throat. "Not good. Not healthy. I must have water. A bottle to drink from." You will work on fluid for now. And put forward the concept of nourishment later.

  "OK. No problem. I bring for you. Soon. Inshallah"

  God willing. You pray the tag line is just a formula.

  The door closes upon silence. You lift your blindfold to the emptied

  room.

  How long have they held you? You need some mileage markers. On the day of your capture, you refused to entertain any block of time longer than an hour. The crisis called for small steps, one in front of the other. Even figuring in days conceded defeat. To reckon in weeks already lay a week beyond survivable. Now survival depends upon the peace that only a calendar can give.

  Taken on Tuesday, the eleventh of November. Armistice Day, it now hits you. After that, a long questioning, long enough to induce hallucination. Then a stretch in the Hole, where total darkness cut off the passage of time. Interminable transfer by van followed by a stint of unconsciousness. Now, around the edges of the sheet-metaled French windows, you see the last declarations of daylight, brackish, disappearing into darknesses salt sea.

  But which day? You can't say, and it crazes you. You've lost count, by as much as two full days. Lost your link to the world that they've stolen you away from. Market day, school day, wash day, holiday, birthday: you fall into limbo. You can't live, without a date to live in.

  You run the sum of hours every possible way, landing on different calendar squares each time. You walk in chained arcs around the radiator, trying to force up the real date as if it were a forgotten phone number. Here, in this empty cube, you choke like a child lost on a packed midnight train platform in some mass deportation. You'll call out. Yell for your captors. Trade a beating for today's date.

  Then, through the muffling wall, a signal reaches you. The background hum of traffic modulates. The air erupts in a spectral cry, then its echo. The sound reverberates, a civil defense drill. Electronic muezzins pass the fugue, back and forth, like shoeless street kids passing around a soccer ball. The size of this call to prayer decides you. A smile floats up your throat to take dominion of your face. Friday. Holy day. Friday the fourteenth of November. 1986. You close your fingers around the prize and cling to it for sweet life.

  Days go by. With each, so does the prospect of a quick release. You consider scratching each one into the soft wall plaster with your fingernails, stick men herded and tied diagonally into docile groups of seven, down the chute of time's slaughterhouse. But the gesture seems too cheaply cinematic, too much of a surrender. Instead, vague light and dark, a cycle of repugnant meals, the morning blindfold trip to that cesspool opposite your cell all keep time for you, sure and metronomic.

  The days cross off more easily than the hours. You look inward for some diversion, a fidgety Iowa kid in the backseat of a Yellowstone-bound Rambler who exhausts the possibilities of license-plate bingo long before washing up on the lee shore of Nebraska. Your head is a gray-green, tidal emptiness. Your mind rebels against the smallest admission of your fate. Thought becomes a blur. Nothing there. No more than a reflection of the formless pit where they've pitched you.

  Surely you knew something once, learned things, stored up diversions that might help pass the brutal infinity of an afternoon, the wall of minutes so monumental that your pulse can't even measure them? But your brain, ever vigilant, refuses to be caught exploring any other prospect than immediate release.

  You talk to yourself, as to a stranger on a transatlantic flight. You study your resume from above, hoping to remind yourself of some topic that interests you. Favorite sport. Musical instrument. No thread lasts for more than ten minutes
. And you must slog through a hundred ten-minute intervals between any two bouts of blessed unconsciousness.

  You sleep on the soggy mattress, a life-sized grease stain seeping along its length. The stench so gags you that, even lying on your back, you're afraid to slip off into unconsciousness. But with each new night, you habituate to the toxic fumes. You learn to doze intermittently, suppressing the reflex to retch.

  Mornings they unchain you and march you through the latrine. You fix your blindfold to let you look down your cheekbones to your shuffling feet. You fake a blind stumble, so the guards don't catch on. Then, for ten precious minutes, time returns, its sudden fast-forward mocking the previous twenty-four fossilized hours. You jump like a galvanized corpse, rinsing out your urine bottle and filling your canteen, fighting the giant roaches for a corner of the sink, shitting at the speed of sound, using any remaining seconds to scoop cold water over your head, armpits, and groin, a surreptitious shower that gets you no cleaner and costs you hours of mildewing chill. Yet it seems a guerrilla blow for decency, the smallest symbol of order keeping you alive.

  Meals come capriciously, two or three times a day. They vary in quality, from inedible on downward. Breakfast usually consists of stewed okra scraps rimed with smashed chickpea. Lunch tends toward the chewed-over soup bone, what you pray are pickled tomatoes, and half a circle of khobez. Dinner arrives, at best some self-deluding parody of baba ghanouj.

  Hostage: each passing day adds another letter to the hangman's word. It grows hourly harder to deny that you've become the next victim in a serial crime that you thought had exhausted itself in pointless-ness. Just one more naive Westerner picked off the streets for nothing, an uncashable token held to impress an enemy who doesn't grasp the first thing about the rules of exchange.

  Independence Day passes on the twenty-second. At least it's the twenty-second by your private count. The street below your cell signals