RICHARD POWERS Read online

  Encouraged, you try a five-paragraph essay, the kind you used to make your students write. What brings you here? What are your plans following graduation? The essay grows into a magazine article that will go to the highest bidder upon your release.

  Retention's daily exercises release deep captives. I met a traveller from an antique land. Mr. Cotrell, ninth grade. Oh what is not a dream by day? Mrs. Hamin, seventh. Over the course of five days, you stitch together 90 percent of Frost's "Oven Bird," a poem whose very existence you could not have sworn to half a year ago.

  Shaken loose by storm, stray lines from triumphant roles in high-school plays flotsam up to the surface. Algy in Earnest Biff Loman. Fragments of a teenager who thought he might want to act for a living.

  Thou wall, О wall, you coax. О sweet and lovely wall. Show me thy chink. The plaster behind your head remains unmoved.

  You stockpile all the arsenal of salvation that you can get away with. You sing the choruses of rock anthems until the Angry Parent breaks up the act. You teach Ali fake street jive, getting him to swagger back and forth in the dingy hall outside your cell, proclaiming, "I one shanky hamsta mushu."

  You take to calling the Shiite Cronkite "Walter."

  "Why you say me this? What this name means?"

  "It means... Trustworthy Elder."

  He snorts. His pleasure betrays itself. "Sure. No problem."

  You call when you hear him scuffling outside the door, peering in through their observation crack. "Walter? Walter, is that you?"

  "What you want? You need something?"

  "Walter, I think Г11 go for a little stroll this afternoon. Outside. Just a short one? Twenty minutes. I come right back."

  Your two inverted fingers jog, yellow-pages-style. International sign language, for your surveillant's benefit. His silence kills the game. Brings you back to where no one is playing.

  The next day, you repeat the announcement: "Fm just heading out for a little morning constitutional. Ten, twelve minutes, max. Г11 be

  right out front."

  You vary the declaration every day for about a week. You have an appointment with a dentist. You must meet a pretty woman down at the corner cafe. It becomes a little liturgy of survival. The guards stop reacting when you call out to them.

  "Ali?" you call one morning. "Ali, is that you? I need to take the motorcycle in to get its cylinders cleaned."

  As in some alternate universe where the laws of physics are all backward, the door jiggles and opens. You scramble for your blindfold, laughing. It's worked. Inconceivable. Persistence has won.

  Ali advances on you, where you stumble to your feet. Your face swings blindly up into the downward arc of his pistol butt. Orange detonates across your field of vision. Something cracks, a jar filled with viscous sauce landing on the asphalt. He has broken your cheek. Can someone break a cheek? A fireball of radiant pain shuts down all thought.

  Far away, someone is screaming. That someone is you. "Shut your fucking mouth," Ali screams, over you. No need. This student of American idiom shuts it for you.

  Your head is split, but somehow there is no blood. You touch the second face growing from your face. It throbs like a creature trying to break loose. The swelling mashes shut your left eye. A trough cuts from your crushed upper lip to your temple. When your fascination wears off, the real pain sets in.

  The Angry Parent comes to inspect you. He clicks his tongue, displeased but not distraught. At least he has the basic sense not to touch the wound. Finger to your chin, he steers your cubist head around, to catch the meager light. When he leaves, you hear shouts in the corridor—violence on both sides, venom that for a moment threatens to spill over. You rise to your tensed thighs, hoping for wider confusion, some rain of retribution that fails to fall.

  The Parent calls a doctor. It opens your blindfolded eyes. This organization spreads deep enough to draw upon middle-class professionals. Sacred Conflict can rouse doctors in the night, bring them, blindfolded, to attend to their American captives, hidden under the nose of this ruptured city. The doctor spies in your mouth, up your nose, through your ear, every movement a blinding agony. Much Arabic scolding goes out in all directions. But he leaves no treatment, no medication, nothing to deaden the anguish.

  Cling to nothing, you tell yourself. And that is what you cling to.

  Ali disappears for a few weeks, bundled off to some Siberia in the Anti-Lebanon mountains, on the other side of the Bekaa. A change comes over your remaining guards, a horrified respect, the best measure of how gruesome the Technicolor highlights of your new face must be. They serve as your ghostly shaving mirror, these men whose cause must now look upon its own lustrous effect.

  "What you want?" Walter asks. "You want something?"

  You suppress the urge to ask for a quick trip to the 7-Eleven. "I want forty minutes." You try to make the terms sound self-evident, agreed upon in advance. You'll stop the foolishness. In exchange, they must take you off the chain for forty minutes a day. Forty minutes. Surely they're clever enough to keep an atrophied, blindfolded, unarmed, shoeless, prison-garbed American locked up deep in the rat' s nest of a hostile city secure for forty minutes a day?

  They counter with a face-saving twenty. You shake on thirty minutes, an inconceivable figure. A treasure beyond the most bankrupt nation's debt. More than you bargained for in your maddest, most

  unguarded plans.

  Half an hour's freedom saves you. It expands your known world, the overnight appearance of an American continent. You pace about, astonished. From the once-mythical far side of this cube, you look back across the ocean of air. Seeing your corner like this, from a distance— your mattress, radiator, chain; the grubby country that swallowed you entire —it looks bounded, known, livable.

  Thirty minutes off the chain each day. Whole new universes open at your feet. As your head heals, your exploration picks up to a trot. The cell becomes an Olympic track, a loop of imaginary cinders that you circle around and around, training, whooping in your souped-up, pounding heart at this chance to move.

  You calculate the coiled-up equivalent of a mile. You jog one. Then

  one-and-a-half. Then two.

  You run for distance. Then for shorter sprints. Each footfall throbs in protest across your split face. But freedom makes the pain easy to run through. In fact, running is an analgesic, amphetamine, and tranquillizer by turns. You run through the hunger of this very exertion, the calorie deficit produced by these rationed, oval ecstasies.

  Sometimes they unlock you in the mornings. Sometimes freedom fails to come until much later, the thrill of release stoked by a whole day of waiting. Some days they cheat you, curtailing the exercise after ten minutes. You have no proof, nor any court of appeals. But on other days they forget you, and you run until you drop. There is a drama to this variance, an unendurable tension to not knowing, every day waiting to write its script until the moment it's read aloud.

  These runs are your slim exhilaration, their joy sharpened to a point by those annihilating days when something goes wrong and they fail to unchain you at all. On those days, you fall into the pit, a despair whose bottom you cannot feel. Your only weapon is to say nothing the next day, when the next day finally arrives. Give no hint of the power the enemy holds over your every feeling.

  But for all the spikes on the graph, the unchecked swings between gloom and elation, your mind admits only one baseline. No mood, no insight, no exercise is large enough to fill the crushing size of a day. Hostage has but one place to return to, one owner, one prevailing emotion. All it knows is a thinly delineated, horizon-wide boredom.

  Where the body is chained, the brain travels. In captivity, every inference is the freest flight. Nothing stops your associations or keeps them accountable. Your thoughts run through maniacal stunts, like radio-controlled drones at an air show. They blast through the countless embassies that offer limited asylum. Unchecked, your mind's maneuvers twist back on themselves in all directions, a nest of a million twigs
that knits its own fixed prison in the static air.

  You pass Gwen's birthday, the only other holiday capable of cutting through the morass of agitation and gloom. You wonder if it counts, your not sending her a card and all. Not quite the statement of indifference you'd planned—the long, pointed, unambiguous silence you had all mapped out as the answer to that last phone assault. Gwen's thirty-first: perhaps she finds it even more traumatic than her thirtieth. Once they were your allies, each extra year that thickened her. Accumulated age would remind her of the alternatives to a lasting truce. Once, you thought that all you needed was to sit back and let the years click off, until she chose you at last over permanent solitude.

  By now, you're as good as dead to her. She's tucking into the birthday cake with someone simpler, someone less demanding. One of those men she always found under a rock with such surprise, so quickly, each time she fled your suffocation, so soon after deciding again that intimacy was beyond her. Some lost guy she smiled at, half a second too long, in the weight room at the gym.

  You try to visualize the festivities, but can't. Can't imagine a cake, can't resolve a birthday present, make out a restaurant, or read the label on a bottle of wine. Can't imagine Gwen smiling or making a wish. If she's read about you, if the letter that Sacred Conflict dictated has made it into the American papers, then surely you must cross her mind as she blows out the candles, if only in some involuntary, reflex jaywalk. God keep you from her thoughts and let her save herself.

  Winter slinks deep into Lebanon. The radiator does nothing, and the room temperature plummets. A damp cold: "dank" is the word that crawls up from the cellar of forgotten fiction. Moisture forms on the floor of the cell each night, drawn up through the capillaries in the mattress fiber to bathe you. Peat bog seeps through the cheap cotton clothes they give you. Your one thin blanket serves only to wrap your

  skin in moist acrylic.

  Nothing dries out by day. You strip and wring your clothes out each morning during the bathroom ritual. "Heat," you beg Walter, searching for something to bargain with.

  "I ask Chef," he says. "No problem. Bukrah." Needless to say, tomorrow never comes and heat is nowhere. Outside—no consolation—must be colder and wetter. A colony of roaches moves in to share the shelter. Not your discreet, retiring, bourgeois North American species: monster Middle Eastern militia-forming creatures two inches and longer. They wake you from dreams where feathery hands incessantly strip-search you. There's no keeping them out of the mattress, off your prostrate body. Fearing disease, you launch a border war. You pinch one's head off and leave the decapitated carcass along their major thoroughfare, a lesson to the rest. But they're slow learners, one and all. In fact, the corpse draws ants.

  You swat, smash, and sweep, first strategically, then more indiscriminately. But the cause starts to cost more than it repays. The great inter-species territorial war trickles out in an exhausted armistice, with victory going, as ever, to the bugs.

  In the barren expanses stretching out in front of you, surely you have time to teach even the insect brain a trick or two. Prison narratives march through your mind, a pass in review, tales of all the desperate symbiotic relations struck up between inmates and other species. As far as you can remember reading, no one has ever laid claim to this virgin territory. It's yours for the taking: the Cockroach Man of Beirut.

  Start modestly. Get them to walk in single file, keeping a rough group tempo. Parade them in simple formations—whatever twirling squares and stars you can remember from junior year playing clarinet in the Greater Des Moines Combined High Schools Marching Band. Then get them to form a few short words, strictly Anglo-Saxon monosyllables, lettered constellations of cockroach bodies, formations of synchronized scuttling, tricks for which they'll repay you with grateful companionship.

  You read something once about how these creatures make high-frequency pitches by rubbing their rear legs together. Like bows across violin strings, or maybe that was crickets. You might start them on Suzuki-method arrangements of "Ninety-nine Bottles of Beer on the Wall," working up to barbershop quartets and four-part chorales pitched too high for any but the captive ear to hear.

  You see yourself on your hands and knees, playing with your six-legged cellmates. Can you really need people that much? Each day widens your disbelief at the discovery. You wanted this solitary confinement. You made love to the idea. The whole reason you came to this country in the first place was to escape human connection. The endless birthday-present shopping. The interminable dinner parties. The relentless letters of recommendation. You came here hoping to reclaim your life, to sail over the edge of society into selfhood's new world.

  But isolation warps you into someone you don't recognize. You feel the thing in all its nakedness: a need so great that you'd stupidly tried to shed it. Your invitation to the human party—the constant obligation, the stack on your desk you could never clear. The drain on your resources. The perpetual static in your ears that kept you from your own, coherent thoughts. That petty, niggling burden. Your trueing, your delight, your sanity, your only health. Others.

  You've spent your whole life dining out, while bad-mouthing the meal. No better than a thief who helps himself to the movable goods, then slanders his victims' taste. Solitude proves how little of you is yours. Everything that you've ever thought, everything you've ever felt, you owe to that company you could never abide.

  Somehow, you must boost the odds of surviving this suicide you've arranged. April is your month to start taking stock. Bare waiting has killed one hundred and fifty days, days of nothing, days you will never get back. You're through calculating how much longer they'll hold you. However long it takes, that will be your length. You'll walk out of here knowing what you did not know on walking in. You vow to study that dependent self you never looked at, to converse with it every day from dinner until bed.

  You start by replaying every detail of your life you can remember. The years you've lost to evasion you must reclaim now, second by second. Surely some core must exist inside you, some essence that you haven't simply sponged from a world of others. Some green oasis of wherewithal that won't return to desert, now that its feeder springs are sealed off.

  Some tune that Jihad unwittingly hums you. A hymn to the forgotten Source. A convalescent's song.

  25

  August gave birth to a human chain, large enough to be seen from outer space. It solidified in several hundred hamlets across a landscape of scrub and failing farmland, accreting like some fearsome, foretold northern serpent. It ran for five hundred kilometers across three national frontiers, from the coasts of the Gulf of Finland down beyond the shores of the Kaunas Sea. Link by link, it snaked across the Cartesian plane, person by person, hooking up digits.

  Nothing, it seemed, had died under June's tread. Disaster in Asia, the resolve of power, had slowed the worldwide movement, but could not stop it. The largest empire ever assembled began to evaporate into fiction. Transcaucasia spun out of orbit. A handful of freed prisoners took control of Poland. And across the wastes of three nominal republics, a spontaneous human rope played Crack the Whip while the cable-ready world looked on, whiplashed.

  Even impromptu, a chain the length of three nations needed wartime logistics. A division of vegetable trucks stood in for half tracks, bussing villagers to gaps in the line. All was ad hoc. A leviathan longer than any camera's ability to document arose from thousands of local committees messaging one another, as fluid and pointless as song.

  Ari Kaladjian floated above the spectacle on a sky hook, watching the transcendental function roiling from out of a scattered set of points. Don't any of these people have to work for a living?

  Jaysus, man! O'Reilly said, without taking his eyes off the screen. Do you hear what you're saying?

  I'm saying that if these people had put this much effort into being economically competitive, they wouldn't be in this hole that they now have to climb out of so theatrically.

  For love of the bleeding Mary.
You're a traitor to your race.

  What does my race have to do with the price of tea in Tallinn?

  Where the hell do you come from? Don't you think Armenia is next up on this carousel?

  Armenia, Georgia, Ukraine, Azerbaijan.

  Didn't your family come to this country as refugees?

  Not the same thing, Kaladjian snapped. We're here because various powers have enjoyed killing us by the hundreds of thousands over the course of the century.

  And the Baltics ...?

  The Baltics! My friend, what's happening there is not political. This is not about oppression. You're an economist. You of all people ought to know that.

  Not political!

  This is not about forms of government or appropriations of power or anything of the sort. This is about the globalization of markets, the apotheosis of consumerism. Your... human chain — Kaladjian spat both words—is nothing more than a glorified product-promotional placement.

  Well I'm not going to stand around discussing the fall of Eastern Europe with this crypto-fascist.

  Absolutely astonishing, Dale Bergen said, to no one. If seems to be self-assembling.

  Michael Vulgamott snorted. You mean the human chain, or the global socialist meltdown?

  I'm just a biologist, Bergen answered. I couldn't tell you about the thing's politics. But from this distance, it looks an awful lot like a long polypeptide growing itself out of side chains.

  Adie broke in on the speculating circle. This isn't happening, she said. Again? Didn't this dream die two months ago? I cant take any more developments. I'm overloading.