RICHARD POWERS Read online

  Some residual shred of sanity prevented Steve from telling his parents the reason for his conversion. It had come in Introduction to English Literature, a Cakewalk survey course he took to satisfy his general education requirements. The teacher—in retrospect, probably only a hapless grad student caught up in the academic pyramiding scheme, awaiting his own superstore destiny—by way of lightening his class prep, had had each student recite and explicate a favorite poem.

  And so in October of his twentieth year, Steve Spiegel sat in shock, listening to a shag-cut pug-faced girl across the room who had come to class tie-dyed on roller skates speak the words "Once out of nature I shall never take My bodily form from any natural thing."

  The words, he supposed, were beautiful. The girl, he decided, was almost. But the way she said them: that was the warrant, the arrest, and the lifetime sentencing. Out of her mouth came a stream of discrete, miraculous gadgets—tiny but mobile creatures so intricately small that generations marveled and would go on marveling at how the inventor ever got the motors into them.

  Once out of nature. The train of syllables struck the boy engineer as the most inconsolably bizarre thing that the universe had ever come up with. And this female mammal uttered the words as if they were so many fearsome, ornate Tinkertoys whose existence depended upon their having no discernible purpose under heaven. The words would not feed the speaker, nor clothe her, nor shelter her from the elements. They couldn't win her a mate, get her with child, defeat her enemies, or in any measurable way advance the cause of her survival here on earth. And yet they were among the most elaborate artifacts ever made. What was the point? How did evolution justify the colossal expenditure of energy? Once upon a time, rhythmic words might have cast some protecting spell. But that spell had broken long ago. And still the words issued from her mouth, mechanical birds mimicking living things. Sounds with meaning, but meaning to no end.

  We'll put the door here, that girl's latest update said. Start it flush up against the back of the left-hand wall.

  Spiegel and Jackdaw, her vaudeville apprentices, nodded in stereo.

  We'II have to figure out what the floorboards actually look like, under the bed.

  We can just reuse the piece we put in over there, Jackdaw said, all innocence.

  No, no. That would be cheating. We have to follow the boards that he painted, and extend them. Work outward from the bits he could see.

  Jackdaw groaned. But it's all going to be invisible in the finished product anyway.

  Not to us, it isn't.

  "But such a form as Grecian goldsmiths make." The girl's lips were a factory of ethereal phonemes. "Of hammered gold and gold enameling." Spiegel had never heard words pronounced that way—alloys of confusion and astonishment. Her mouth became the metal-worked machine its sounds described. Whole sentences of hammered gold tumbled out of it.

  Stevie might have taken her for a drama student, except for the clotted paint under her nails. She finished reciting and launched into her explication, an associative ramble through the maze of images. She'd drawn a series of pen-and-watercolor sketches, visual aids to illustrate her points. Byzantium. A gyre. The mechanical bird, which looked to Stevie like an intricate, gold-leafed, cutaway, feathery Bulova.

  This woman exuded a flavor he'd forgotten ever existed. She had the scent of immediacy, of planlessness. Existence was stranger than he'd ever realized. Every life held in its hands a bit of charcoal stick pressed from the ashes of the first campfire.

  She must have felt his stare upon her as she gave her presentation. For when she brushed past him after the class let out, she asked, "That made absolutely no sense at all, did it?"

  "You smell like something," he told her.

  She laughed. "I'm sure you're right."

  "No," he said. The breeze of association, the loose smell of free syllables played all around him. Pleasures too recently overlooked. Exercises out of the singing masters' book. "No. You smell like something my father used to keep in cans out in the garage. To clean paint brushes."

  "That would be turpentine."

  "Why are your fingers all green?"

  She brought them up to her eyes. "It's not green. It's mostly chartreuse."

  All he could do was nod.

  "What do you do?" she quizzed him. Before any other data. Even before asking his name.

  "Oh," he improvised, "I... write." He tipped his head to the side, toward the paperback Collected Yeats cradled in her chartreuse fingers. He tapped his own secondhand anthology, as if the volume were some hefty tab he'd run up at an all-night sidewalk cafe.

  The bed should run from just inside that corner to right about here. The late-day Adie impersonator, her fingers now pristine, stood on an invisible X marking a spot on the Cavern floor that corresponded to points deep beneath the grid. She stood straight, arms at her side, turning her body into a surveyor's siting stick. Jackdaw, at the console, got a bead on her. He typed some words, and a reddish rectangular block sprang up along the wall's length, up to this woman's still-callow waist.

  A little higher, she called out. To figure in the blankets and headboards.

  Nothing in this voice still hinted at its precursor, the voice that had long ago told Spiegel, "Well, if you write, you ought to come to our Tuesday nights. In fact, I'm surprised I haven't seen you there before now."

  "I mostly keep to myself. I work in a style that isn't really ... fashionable these days."

  Her eyes widened, bestowing on him their full prize. "In that case, you have to come."

  Anything worth devoting a lifetime to, young Stevie figured, might require as many as three days to master. Since the next Tuesday soiree was five days away, he was still in reasonable shape. He hadn't written verse since a hit-and-run sonnet accident in senior year of high school. But as with all other problem sets, he did his best work under the gun.

  He showed up at the girl's apartment—a funky, carved-up Victorian boardinghouse near Lake Mendota—on Tuesday night, nerves shattered by caffeine, folding and unfolding a spayed scrap of mongrel doggerel that was probably prosecutable under even the most generous interpretation of the Intellectual Property Protection Act. His spot of manic plagiarism was all the more alarming for being at least as incoherent as it was shameless, a "Sailing to Byzantium" in leg-weighted waltz time. And he dragged this little ditty into a room draped in more black than a Greek Orthodox Good Friday service.

  What is it about black? he asked the woman, seventeen years later, as they waited for Jackdaw to dummy up the place holder that stood where the bedside chair soon would. Black and the art scene? The fad that refuses to die. Why has every trendy crowd for the last two centuries embraced it?

  She smiled at him, preoccupied. It's the perfect preemptive look, all-black. What you wear when you're not sure what the other guy is going to wear. Deeply conservative, passing as Rad. Why do you ask? she asked.

  He'd sat there, at twenty, dying a million Oxford button-down deaths while reincarnated greasers and beatniks took turns presenting their "work" and laying themselves open to the flagellation of their peers. Poetry, prose, sculpture, music, pictures: he'd underestimated the spread of the contagion. He'd stepped into the middle of an old blood feud, warring family factions contesting the last will and testament of this dead, penniless patriarch, Art.

  The terms of the fight were obscure, even to those who had been at it for years before Spiegel blundered on the scene. But the war seemed to come down to whether that liberating anagram, now just five days old inside him, should be indulged freely or called to answer for those same abuses of privilege and power that had trashed the rest of the world. It opened Spiegel's eyes. Art was embroiled in the same conflict that had claimed the Army Math.

  Aside from wanting to avoid his own all-expenses-paid trip to Southeast Asia, Spiegel had no real political agenda. He'd hoped this aesthetics thing would be relatively simple. Now the night was forcing him to take sides, to declare his allegiances on issues he couldn't even decode.
All he knew was that he'd sooner stick his head in a gas oven than read aloud in front of this tribunal.

  Forty minutes into the street-fighting, during an especially ugly exchange over the political irresponsibility of a bleary chalk abstraction, a short, stocky guy swaggered into the room wearing a Bucky Badger sweatshirt and toting a dirty gym bag. Talk broke off, and all eyes fixed on the infidel. The fellow reached slowly into his sack and withdrew a damp jock strap.

  "This is my piece," he announced. "It's a conceptual work." Protagonists of both stripes shouted the man down. He heckled back, creatively, in kind, and the session mercifully degenerated. Ted Zimmerman: the only name that stuck with Spiegel from that evening. The only person he cared to talk to afterward. A study in fearless delight. The man who saved Spiegel from having to read his first adult poem out loud in front of a room of hired aesthetic killers, there in war-torn Madison.

  "My God, you vanquished them," Spiegel told Zimmerman, out on the chill front steps of the Victorian. "Three cheers." "Vanquished?" Zimmerman asked.

  For one uncertain second, Spiegel thought he'd misread everything. He gestured inside. "The war between art and ethics."

  "Oh." Ted's nod went sardonic. "Mutual coercion versus mutual communion. Whose side are you on?"

  "I wish I knew. So what do you do?" Nothing if not a quick study. "I play handball. And I'm working on a damn octet on the side. Confessions of an apolitical man. You?"

  "I do poetry." A lie he'd do penance for, by making it come true. Ted proceeded to grill Stevie about everyone he'd ever read. "Yeats is fine. But man cannot live by fruitcake alone. Have you read Rilke?

  Have you read George?" Spiegel shook his head knowingly, trying to memorize the names.

  They graduated to novels, plays, essays. Zimmerman held forth on Habermas and Musil. He quoted from Man and Superman, delivered a brief history of the Successionist movement, and glossed over chiti-nous Frankfurt School tracts. To Steve, half the people the man mentioned were total ciphers. Talk graduated to concert music, Ted's real passion. Spiegel caught the names Schoenberg, Webern, and Berg, whom he gathered were a kind of upscale Tinker to Evers to Chance. By the time they stood up from the cold steps, Spiegel had both a handball date and a considerable homework assignment.

  "Time to go home," the composer announced. He breathed the night deeply into his lungs. "The two hours on either side of midnight. My favorite time in the day to nudge a piece forward." "Mine too," Spiegel decided.

  "Thanks for the words," Ted said. "We live our lives in hope of the company of women. But barring that, an amusing man."

  Spiegel ran up against the line again a year later, still plowing through his friend's reading list. It jumped out at him, underlined, from Zimmerman's beaten-up copy of Women in Love.

  Inside the house, the black-clad crowd still hashed out the morality of depiction, just as their affiliated revolutionary cells did, by the tens of thousands, in accredited institutions across the face of the divided country. Things showed no sign of reaching consensus anytime before daybreak. Spiegel found his hostess and thanked her for the entree. The life-changing introduction. "Make a friend?" Adie asked.

  Spiegel shook his head, dazed. "The man's a genius." Her eyebrows plunged. "Ted? Ted's a pleasure lover." The indictment sounded forgiving, as if the disease could infect even vigilant people. Spiegel felt himself deeply and beautifully at sea.

  "You should give him a chance," he said. "Sit down and talk to him. It's amazing. Like trying to converse with a whole hive of social insects, crawling in all directions."

  "Oh, Ted and I used to talk together pretty regularly." The girl held Spiegel in a wary stare. The look dismantled and reassembled him.

  "Then what happened?"

  "Then we started sleeping together."

  His stomach pitched. He was at sea with the obvious. Everything good, everything transforming about this evening would be lost. Already, he loved both these strangers too much to choose between them. And he was still too young to know that choice was never an option.

  Weeks passed before he caught painter and composer alone together. Neither would talk to him about the other. Spiegel wondered whether Adie was one of those muses to creative men who did all the actual creation herself. But there was something more to that relationship, something each gave the other that Spiegel couldn't quite name. Their mutual, gravitational pull passed through crowded rooms, without a single signal passing between them. Their closeness sailed forth, silent, invisible, painstaking—like the intimacy both of them struck with the things they made.

  Artist and musician were joined at the hip. Their pact with their newly adopted poet excluded Stevie even as they tutored him. Spiegel doubted whether two people ought to be that close. Yet he drew closer to them, ready to swap places with either or take up any kind of triple orbit they asked, however unstable.

  Ted dismantled Stevie in several dozen consecutive games of handball before luck and desperate caginess gave Spiegel his first two-point win. By then, between games, they'd worked their way through Schoenberg's Pierrot and Second String Quartet together, and Spiegel had begun to feel the air of another planet.

  Zimmerman demanded reciprocal gifts of allegiance, scouting reports from lands he hadn't yet reached. Stevie obliged with pleasure, with memorized parcels of Eliot and Stevens, stray trinkets for the two of them to analyze that shared no common thread except the thrill of discovery and the whiff of bewilderment. But always Yeats: Spiegel returned to the man with such persistence that Zimmerman finally gave up trying to break him of the obsession.

  Adie rode them both. "Do you two aesthetes ever read anyone who hasn't been dead for decades?"

  A decade and a half had passed. Now they were all dead. The joints that had limbered in that brief spring had all ossified. Klarpol and Spiegel, or their stiff adult puppets, straddled the amber planks of a Cavern that now resembled one of those rental storage sheds along the side of the interstate. No country for old men. Two adults, already fossil, stood with a youth completely unlike the one they'd both loved, a boy no more than the placeholder for a man whose life had peaked at

  twenty-three.

  The Cavern filled with colored boxes, transparent shipping containers stacked against its walls. Spiegel, Adie, and Jackdaw milled about among the marker blocks, passing right through the spectral surfaces as they surveyed them.

  Adie cast a cold eye over the consolidating bedroom. The second chair looks too big. We need to scoot the washstand three inches to the left.

  The three of them hacked a path forward, advancing to the steady rhythm of prototype, tweak, prototype. Seattle and Aries differed so greatly that only the most desperate gaze could shoehorn the one into

  the other.

  Just such desperate looking had set Spiegel loose, back in that free-range spring. He'd never thought to indulge in it before that May. Now no more beautiful a town on earth existed than their little bandit's roost. Across the campus, trees broke out in absurd petaled profusion. Life returned to life, sporting a spin, strangeness, and charm that Spiegel had never suspected.

  All things merited writing home about, now that he had his own address. All things turned worth describing. Writing became what he did. He wrote about what passed for landscape, there in the Midwest. He wrote about secondhand clothes in a thrift shop. He wrote about liquor store parking lots. He stood in front of Sterling Hall, so recently bombed out, and made poetry out of the forgetting renovation.

  He set up his easel in front of the canonical masterpieces, scribbling pale imitations of everything from Blake to Auden to Wilbur. The ratio of borrowed to earned fell in steady amortization. He loved the saintly, cassocked presumption of the process, loved the sense that, so long as he juggled the feet of his centipede lines, he did nothing to compound the world's misery and perhaps even, in some insignificant way, lifted it a little.

  The tapestries that issued from this Gobelin factory all bore the millefleur border of sex. The housemates pa
ired off in all available arrangements. On a semester-long tour of the vineyards, they savored one another's tastes without swallowing. Soirees devolved into soft-core Satyricons, seven, ten, or a whole baker's dozen bodies lying around the Grand Ballroom in a ring, their various parts affectionately threaded. Throughout December, Lydia the pianist graced Spiegel's room, her chill extremities needing to be touched in four forbidden ways at once. By January, Lydia had drifted on to David, making way in Spiegel's bunk for a dancer named Diana, who wanted Hopkins in her ear as he held her corded thighs from behind, trying to fill her.

  Sometimes at nights, when he sat working, Adie would come to his writing desk, sit on his lap, push back his hair, and appraise his face. But she never did more than laugh at his advances, plucking his hand from her breast like lint from a pullover.

  Ted had women. Any number of them. Whenever new blood showed up at a house event, the composer had her feeling like Aphrodite's body double before the evening ended. He lived to prove that he could charm anything with two X chromosomes.

  Zimmerman's perpetual act of seduction always resorted to the same time-honored weapons. He auditioned prospective partners on his best arsenal of quotes from Women in Love. "Let love be enough then. I'm bored with the rest." "There is a golden light inside you that I wish you would give me." And most-loved of all: "See what a flower I've found you." For those who still held out, he enlisted Dives and Lazarus. Women who resisted that tune were simply not worth further effort.

  When that voluptuous folk melody trickled down from the Grand Ballroom, Ted's housemates knew to stay below. "I don't get it," Spiegel challenged him one morning, after the previous night's conquest had slunk off into daylight. "You slave over this jagged, atonal, mathematically rigorous stuff. How can you stand listening to that schmaltzy anachronism?"