RICHARD POWERS Read online

  Age-old mysteries at last get solved in court. Criminals come across life-changing novels in prison, bold-stroked tales that show what still lies ahead of them to accomplish. Each day ends in some illustrative sunset, shattering or subtle.

  But this room can't brook any depth or width. Dimension is already too degraded to sustain. This room leaves no place to sit and absorb it. No spot where any outsider might just gaze. Even the weight of a solid glance would tip it, wreck this room's precarious equilibrium.

  This is the room to which dying people retire. This is the room from which infants are taken to be born.

  This is the soul's balanced window box, the domain of finished poems.

  This is the heaven of last imagination. The paradise of detachment. The room of no consequence in the least. Of making no difference in the whole known world.

  20

  Yeki bood. Yeki nabood.

  That is how the world's best storytellers always start: It was so. And it was not so. One of the few Persian phrases you can remember, from out of a whole childhood of your mother's Persian phrases that you never paid any attention to. They must be in there still, an attic of lost fables that wants only unlocking.

  It's like this, and it's not like this. There was a time, and there was not a time. They are right to start that way. And they are not.

  Like so: you find yourself in a small room. There is a mattress here. Before you is a radiator. On that radiator, a chain. The routine: crush-ingly familiar. Two and a half meals a day, ranging from the vaguely edible to the deeply disgusting. A ten-minute fire drill each morning in the Black Hole of Calcutta, where your stunned bowels must set land speed records if you wish to preserve what trappings of humanity your captors still allow.

  And not like so: you are not here. Hope refuses even these temporary lodgings. You know the day only by running estimate. You know the hour only by the vague passage from dark to darker. A cell is nothing against this train of thought.

  Your mind is clearer, now that clarity can do nothing for you. Freed from the state of emergency, you have some time to turn things over. To make sense of the senseless. They give their word that you will be out soon. But you now know to measure "soon" in more realistic units. You make the necessary conversions from Central Arab Time. But even your guards picture you out of here by New Year's, at the latest. And January 1, you insist. Not March 21.

  You plan to spend New Year's Eve, 1987, in the middle of Daley Plaza, underneath the Picasso monstrosity, singing "The Star-Spangled Banner" at the top of your lungs.

  Taken by surprise. Taken by accident. An insignificant foreign language teacher who never took sides in his life. Half Islamic, for God's sake. You mean nothing to your government. Nothing you can be swapped for. You're of no value to your captors whatsoever. In fact, you can only cost them, to imprison and feed you. Cost them in international prestige, to harm you in any way. All they can hope is to salvage some face-saving way to set you free.

  With all the time in the world to think, it dawns on you. If they grabbed you by mistake, then the person they really want must still be out there, walking around at liberty. That CIA operative they jabbered on about during your first interrogation. If they can find him, you'll walk away from this nightmare with all your limbs intact.

  You spend the whole of a waking day reconsidering everyone in the City of Wells you've ever met. Your life depends on finding the spy. On turning up the name that can save you. Only at nightfall does the full revulsion hit you. There is no such man. Yet you were ready to Kapo him off. Sell out a real life to the monsters of invention.

  You wake up still horrified, unwilling to go near yourself. But by noon, you creep back again. You replay the mistake, reconsider the spy. It passes the time, at least. And time is more of an enemy than any other terrorist.

  Deciding who turned you in is good for a brief twenty minutes every midafternoon. You still know the whole class roster from memory. The group must have harbored some closet Shiite, passing above his class, passing for a Sunni merchant learning the language of world trade. Or maybe one of the smiling Sunni elites sold you out, covering his tuition by making a few pounds on the side. Could have been any of them. All still washed in their first innocence.

  These speculative minutes can last forever, without an outside tick to clock it. A single afternoon supplies all the endless time in the world to figure out who put you here. To figure out where you've put yourself. Just another slumming American, priding yourself on acing the interview, on marketing yourself with a bit of fast talk. How exhilarating it was, that sense that you'd gotten away with something. Now you see that the school would have taken anyone at all. Anyone who could speak English. Anyone not insane. And even that requirement, they went ahead and waived.

  You've brought this all on yourself. Walked open-armed into a civil war. You've negotiated with it since childhood, this sick desire for event. You weigh every other explanation and come back to the only one possible. The happy, affable, well-adjusted guy with his whole life in front of him wanted to sample prison. But not even your old self-destruction could have imagined this.

  Dinner saves you from more self-punishment. But your dinner guests turn out to be total duds. Conversation is sporadic and banal, and no one seems to have any sports scores fresher than three months old.

  The smashed chickpeas do help to fortify. With something inside you, the crush lifts a little. So what if you were trying to kill yourself by coming here? Beating yourself up about it now won't help. Truth has less to recommend it at this point than survival. You must outlive whatever part of yourself that wants something else.

  You double back on the healthier obsession of figuring out which innocent student turned you in. But that fondled theme fails to divert you all the way up to sleep. You graduate to trying to work out exactly which group you've been handed over to. Three million people. Sixteen officially recognized religions. You read once that twenty different militia groups can rule a single refugee camp. Two dozen autonomous armies have carved up this country, staked out their sovereign checkpoints. Two dozen independent nation-states, laws unto themselves, rove from the Bekaa to the coast, armed with anything that the Security Council countries will sell them, their assault rifle butts stenciled with everything from verses from the hadith to decals of the Virgin Mary. And you can name only five of these groups at most.

  So much rides on figuring out who has taken you. And so much doesn't. The means for finding out are somewhat limited. You decide to ask them, point-blank. You've gotten pretty good with the blindfold. Putting it on, when anyone shows, so that a wide swatch of the world remains visible beneath. And your ears have attenuated, too, to the point where you can tell your guards apart by the way they rattle your cage.

  There are at least three regulars. You assemble them from bits and pieces, in gauzy darkness. One of them, the Angry Parent, is short, with a belly potting if not already pot. He wears a khaki pseudo-uniform and must be in his fifties, although you'vee yet to make out his face.

  The second you've gotten a hurried look at. He came into the room once without knocking, as you scrambled to fit the blindfold onto your head. The bare bulb of the hallway threw his outline into high relief. White hair, a medium build, alert but bemused features. The Shiite Walter Cronkite.

  The third is the Crazy Child. The one who beat and threatened you with his gun. You keep your head bowed when he is in the room. You know him from his knees on down: pencil legs, always the same pair of blue jeans ending in, God help you, a spanking red-and-white pair of Adidas.

  You sniff out each of their walks, easily telling them apart even before they open the door. But you want more chance to study their voices. The Shiite Cronkite brings you dinner one night. "Salaam alaykum" you try him.

  After a pause, he replies with a polite "Alaykum as-salaam." The longest conversation with a real person that you Ve had for a week.

  You try it out on the Crazy Child. "Salaam alaykum" you greet him,
the next time he bangs on your door with his pistol butt.

  "Heh? A! Salaam, salaam! How do you know? Where do you learn salaam, hey?" He giggles, a low, hick chuckle. "We talk my talk now?" He releases a high-speed stream of syllables that sounds like abuse in any lexicon.

  "Who are you?" you try, without a hope in hell that he'll tell you anything.

  "Who?" Another throaty giggle, but slower. Mountain kid in the big city. Trying to enjoy himself and make it back home without getting fleeced. "Me? I am Ali."

  It's your turn to giggle. You run the risk of pistol-whipping, or worse. But you cannot help yourself. "Hold on. Let me guess. Ali... Smith?"

  "Hnn?" You brace for the blow. "Ali Smith?" He laughs like a jackal. "Yes, good! I am Ali Smith."

  "Who are your people? What is this group that has taken me?"

  But Ali just clucks with his tongue: What do you take me for?

  Days later, the next time the Angry Parent hustles you to your morning sprint through the latrine, you try your greeting on him.

  "Salaam alaykum. Salaam alaykum"

  The Angry Parent makes no reply.

  Your beard grows in. You play with the two bald spots on each side of your mouth, the spots that have always stopped you from growing a beard in real life. For the first time ever, you have the luxury of growing facial hair without any social consequences. You twist the longest chin strands into twin points, untwist them, repeat. It's good for what feels like hours at a shot.

  You peel off a wafer of plaster from behind the radiator large enough to balance over the opening of your urine bottle. You keep the makeshift cap in place at all times. It reduces the room's stench. You find a way of lying along the radiator so that you can do sit-ups and push-ups without the chain chafing. You jump in place, run two-meter laps in a shrunken oval.

  Ali hears your morning workout. He bangs on the door to break it up. "Hey? What you doing in there?"

  "I need exercise. If I don't exercise, I will grow sick and weak."

  "You stupid shit," he explains.

  But no one intervenes when you start up again, quieter.

  Knowledge of who is holding you arrives by the worst of couriers. The Angry Parent shakes your door late one evening, the signal to submit and cover your eyes. He enters your cell and places something on the floor in front of you. Then he circles around behind your back.

  "Take off your cloth, please." His English, though thick, is surprisingly fluid.

  You remove your blindfold. The sight on the floor in front of you turns your eyes hot and viscid. A pencil and a sheet of blank paper, your first since captivity.

  "You must write a letter." He sounds forceful, but not violent.

  "Oh yes. Oh, bless you. Thank God. al-Hamdallah."

  His hand on your head prevents you from turning around in joy.

  "No, no," he corrects, patient as a first-grade teacher. "I tell you what you must write."

  You must write: To the people of the United States.

  I am alive and healthy. I am being kept by the soldiers of Sacred Conflict, a unit fighting for God's Partisans. They are not terrorists. They do this thing as the only way to win justice.

  I am being treated and fed well. I will not be hurt in any way, as long as the United States and its leaders act honorably. I will be freed as soon as the demands of Gods Partisans and of Gods higher laws are met. If they are not, then the failure will be upon you. And the failure will be serious.

  You spell several words wrong. The Angry Parent doesn't notice. This is your desperate code, the only word you can smuggle out to the outside, the lone assurance that you know the letter is nonsense. Your mother will tell them. The Chicago office, Gwen: anyone who knows you in the slightest. Nothing if not a perfect speller.

  "Please sign the letter," the Angry Parent commands. "Now place your cloth back on your eyes." He gathers up the paper and pencil and walks to the door. "Thank you," he says, and closes you back in on nothing.

  Worse than nothing. The sound of the clicking lock forces you under, into a despair like the closing of a metal crypt. It's Sacred Conflict. The group that brought down the American embassy like a stack of mah-jongg tiles. The ones who slammed a car bomb into a crowd of Lebanese scrambling to grab American visas. The group whose eager foot soldier, smiling as he ran his truck through an armed checkpoint, blew himself away with 2,000 pounds of TNT, taking 241 Marines along with him to the heaven of martyrs. The one group in this Babel of factions that you prayed it wouldn't be.

  Sacred Conflict: their balance sheet is so huge, so mysterious, that you can't be anything higher than an expendable pawn. These men have the consortium of rational nations on the run, reeling from the power of their conviction. The terrorist group of the hour, just now enjoying their moment on the geopolitical stage, their suicidal, scene-stealing walk-on. Your letter gives them one more holy weapon to brandish at a cowering world.

  The day after your exercise in dictation, you fall ill. Your body gives in to the infection it's been fighting since capture. A steel chill spreads from your extremities into your chest. You lie huddled on your mattress under the cheap acrylic blanket, shivering in the slip glaze of your own sweat. Sleep is a four-reel hallucination where radical factions take turns inscribing the details of your confession onto your abdomen with the point of an electric needle.

  The next day's ten-minute sprint through the latrine does not last you through the morning. By the time the Shiite Cronkite brings you your pointless lunch, a demon—hot, yellow, and liquid—splays its claws against the wall of your intestines.

  "Toilet," you croak. "Merhadh."

  "I ask Chef"

  "No ask Chef. Tell Chef."

  He disappears. You wait an eternity—150 seconds or more. Then you must defecate or die. No time even to scream for a can. You run as far from the bed as you can get, tear down your pants, and aim for the mouth of your urine bottle. Amazingly, almost half of the silty stream finds the bottle. You leave the putrefying rest and crawl back into bed, fetid, sticky, lower than an insect, a dung beetle. You fall into a raging fever.

  You wake up, someone kicking you in the back, thumping you with an Adidas cross-trainer toe. AH is shouting, "Hey. Hey! Why you shit all fucking over the floor?"

  Your blindfold is on. He must have replaced it before commencing to kick you. You roll over and place your face in the path of his blows. He stops. You feel your power over him, power that comes from your total indifference.

  "Sacred Conflict," you say. "Holy War."

  "Hey," he bleats. "You gotta eat your food." The gotta learned dutifully from some Top 40 song.

  Eating is death. Anything you eat now will pass right through the frictionless tube you have become. All you can do is squat it out, hope the virus dies of dehydration before you do.

  "No eat," you say. "Hunger strike."

  Your refusal enrages him. He shrieks deep in his throat. "Eat!" He kicks you again, in your mercifully emptied gut. He crouches down and inserts the cold tip of his pistol in your nostril. "Eat."

  His growl sounds like a bad James Coburn. Even this wasted, you must laugh. He screams again, his rage ever more impotent. "What you want? What the hell you want?" "Medicine. I need medicine."

  "Bukrah," he says, shaken. "Tomorrow." Neither word means anything to you.

  In your dream, Gwen reaches into your throat, deep in, deeper than you ever suspected a hand could go. She pulls up half-digested forms, eroded Cracker Jack prizes covered in decomposing clay, the hair and slime that accumulates in sink pipe traps. She holds out a handful, and the two of you lean in for a closer look. The crowns of your heads touch, the first kind touch you've suffered in months. You bend over the slime, examining. It crawls with tiny amphibians, pink cave newts no bigger than termites.

  The medicine arrives by special delivery. Whether it is tomorrow or not, you cannot say. The room is anyway pitch-black. The medicine is a grayish powder. Ali, by flashlight, jabs a fistful into your hands, telling you to
take it with water. The drink tastes like mine tailings. It gags you. But by now, so does the neutral air on your opened mouth.

  "Is this poison? Are you trying to kill me?"

  "We are not killing you," Ali counters. "America is killing you."

  You sleep again. You wake as light seeps in under the cracks of the corrugated iron stapled over your French windows. You are hungry. At first you don't recognize the gnawing, so archaic is it, so unlikely. Even after several deep breaths, nothing hurts. You feel—well—well. You feel the reacquaintance that comes only after illness. Exhilarated, in spite of all cause.

  You rise up on your stumps and walk, as far as the chain allows.

  "Hello? Hey. Someone?"

  Someone is there, opening the door. From the gentleness, you guess it to be the Shiite Walter.

  "What you want?"

  Blindfolded like justice, you point toward the smear of fecal accident in the corner. "Something to clean that up with." You pantomime rag, pantomime bucket.

  "Yes. OK."

  "Also ... an orange juice, an Indonesian highland arabica, and a double order of eggs Benedict. Easy on the hollandaise." Silence from your captor. Mute, threatening, ambiguous. "Food, please." "Yes. Sure. No problem."

  21

  The world machine bore on, in the face of the unbearable. Its overburdened angel engine failed to overheat. Not right away, in any event. Not all at once. It survived the latest massacre of hunger-striking students. It absorbed the intimate documentation, the grainy aerials and close-ups, the midrange establishing shots that saturated video's every free market. Knowledge returned, civilization's bad penny, even this late in the scheme of things. It played and replayed the rote vignette: armies firing on unarmed crowds. Only the scale, the mechanical efficiency, the presence of cameras made this round seem in any way unique.