RICHARD POWERS Read online

  Ted leaned across the toasted bagels and put one hand on each of Spiegel's shoulders. "You know the story about the woman who made Oscar Wilde listen to her daughter play a sonatina? 'How do you like the music, Mr. Wilde?' 'Oh, I don't like music. But I like that' "

  It stunned Spiegel: the success rate, the frequency and vigor, the beauty of the conquests, their utter willingness to disappear cleanly and completely afterward, when the mutual projections dissolved. Like nothing he'd ever thought possible. Stevie could not say what drove Ted's feats of appetite. Surely the man couldn't need any reassurance he didn't already possess. There seemed as little sport in the conquests as in the repetitive handball trouncings.

  "Know what I like best about twelve-tone music?" Ted told Steve, as they looked over the reams of pencil annotations for his infinitesimally advancing octet. Pure Zimmerman: the annotations swelled while the notes stood still. "The appreciative female audiences who are so intent on distracting you from it."

  Those appreciative audiences were sufficiently distracting to keep the music itself from ever materializing. Appetite against appetite, notes had little hope against skin tones. "Don't know about you and verse, buddy boy. But women are a great and mysterious motivator to me."

  Adie had been right. The man was a fun lover. And all his endless, absorbent energies were but instruments to that manic end.

  If it bothered Adie, she never showed it. If she retaliated with her own men, she did it so discreetly that Spiegel never knew. One night she came into Steve's room and lay on his bed, sketching into a tablet she held upon her knees while he sat in the bay window chair slogging through Derrida's Of Grammatology. He put the book down and moved to lie next to her. She draped her left hand on his head, still sketching with her right, a portrait that went futurist, once the subject abandoned it.

  "Doesn't it bother you?" he asked her.

  "Hmm?"

  "All of Ted's... ?"

  She sat up, tipping the sketchbook away. "All of Ted's colonial operations?" Still clear-faced. "It can't," she said.

  He waited for explanation. None came. "What do you mean, 'can't'?"

  She touched her thumb to the center of his forehead, stamping him forever. "It can't bother me. I can't let it. Life is long."

  It struck Spiegel, in that moment, that he would never have a life mate. Never a real one, for any length of time.

  By spring, Mahler Haus lay sacked and ruined. The winds of possibility blew utopia apart. The Madison bombing had spelled the end of world revolution. The Mahler Haus experiment in group living spelled, for each of them, the end of idealism. Each creator retreated to his private bedroom, and the Grand Ballroom closed its doors on group communion for good.

  "Things fall apart," Ted told him. "The center cannot hold." But the man seemed untouched by the centripetal wipeout.

  In Spiegel's memory, his parents' divorce the following year seemed a minor rehash by comparison. Now almost twice the boy poet's age, Spiegel couldn't recall the particulars of the smashup with any resolution. He felt only the shame of failed reciprocity, of free flights crashing

  back to ground level.

  Things got recriminatory, fast. All soirees ground to a stop. Potter David's beautiful celadon dishes disappeared from the kitchen. The housemates liquidated the group bank account and settled all remaining bills through bitter back-and-forth. Ugly altercations ensued, about who'd lost the key to the cellar. About who forgot to shut off the oven. About who left the hair in the sink. Even when he knew it was his damn hair, Spiegel denied it.

  Ted took the easy way out. Doors all over Madison opened up for him, the apartments of women who needed a new fix of Dives and Lazarus. "You son of a bitch," Spiegel laid into him, the night Ted came back to the house to move his belongings out. "You're going to abandon me in the ninth circle of hell, while you head off to fresh pastures."

  "Think of it as an adventure." Ted smirked. "Besides. You're not alone."

  "Who do you mean? Adie? What good is she? She's camped out over at her studio in the Education Building."

  "You think I don't know that? She's not who I mean." "Who, then? I'm left here to pick up the pieces. It makes me sick to my stomach, even to think about working. What the hell am I supposed to do?"

  With a single, smooth motion, Zimmerman went to the shelves of the pillaged group library and found the red-spined paperback Collected Yeats that no one now wanted. He took down the book, slowly read, then scribbled something on the flyleaf. He chucked the volume at Spiegel, who caught it in mid-arc, as if they'd practiced the slant pattern for months. Zimmerman embraced his friend with the casual backslapping of joyous athletes. And left.

  From his second-story window, Spiegel watched the figure jaunt down the leaf-exploding street. Only then did he open the ratty paperback and read the inscription:

  We have fed the heart on fantasies,

  The heart's grown brutal from the fare;

  More Substance in our enmities

  Than in our love; О honey-bees,

  Come build in the empty house of the stare.

  The words came back now to fill this new emptied house, art's latest restored ruin. Adie squatted in front of the colored slab that would become the virtual Dutchman's bed. She held her hands out in front of her, in space, resting them on the pretend surface that would soon become blankets. Then she rested her head on those folded hands. What's that clichй? The one attributed to every famous sculptor who ever lived? We just have to free the bed hidden in this block. Chip away everything that isn't it.

  They did, throughout that September and October. They chipped away, until the blocks became objects. Spiegel helped her with the caning on the chairs, the glaze of the water pitcher, the soft red nub of the bedspread. This time, the game did not stop with surfaces. Each furnishing graduated from flat illusion into volume and shading. More was at stake this time than mere similarity.

  The bed stood out from the wall. It occupied its quarter of the room, so palpable that even Freese, on his first visit, gave in to the reflex impulse to smooth its covers. The room filled in. It materialized, up through the oils of half-finished underpainting, the penned cartoon here and there still showing through. On the Cavern's universal walls, they hung Arlesean wallpaper. One by one, the geometrical placeholders took on shape. And week by week, Jackdaw, the unlikeliest of Geppettos, labored away at the code that threatened to bring these woody constructs to life—to a life that life would accredit.

  Spiegel carved, too, at the larger block of wood lodged inside the smaller puppet casing. And every image he embellished cracked open to reveal its batting.

  After Mahler Haus self-destructed, Stevie had pressed on to get the worthless English degree, throwing good money after bad, unable to change courses or salvage the disaster. Of the whole circle of former idealists, the only ones he ever saw again were the two who had tricked him into utopia. The same couple who'd driven him out again.

  Spiegel called Adie the month before she graduated. He roped her into a lunch date, where she ate nothing and smiled her way around all substantive shoals. Steve asked her for a copy of the sketch she'd made of him, that night they'd spoken of Ted. "That? I've destroyed it."

  The words hit Spiegel with a force out of all proportion to the loss. He stood looking down into the hole that awaited all creative effort. "Destroyed? What do you mean, destroyed?" "Crumpled up. Thrown away. Most of what I draw I end up pitching."

  "You can't be serious. Why?" "Because most of it makes me ill."

  "God ...damn it." The rage returned to him, the rage he'd felt when they torched their dream of shared existence. "Why the hell bother to draw it in the first place?"

  "Good question." She thought for a long time. "I'd like to think that every mark gets stored. Somewhere."

  He and Zimmerman continued to meet for occasional handball and Stravinsky. Ted still gave Spiegel his monthly homework assignment, readings to prepare and deliver. The soirees shrank to the two of them sitting
in the corner of Gino's Pizzeria on State, the one where the New Year's Bomber had once worked. They'd hover over a large mushroom and pepper, struggling with scansion or polychords.

  One night Ted visited the hole in the wall on East Mifflin that Steve had moved into. He brought a 1958 Georges de Latour Private Reserve Napa Cabernet—a monster wine well beyond undergraduate means— and decent red wineglasses as well. Ted chatted even more maniacally than usual. But he would not say what the celebration was until they opened the bottle and imbibed.

  They talked modernism, the rind of archaism that had settled so rapidly on that radical aesthetic. "Have I made you read Joyce's Portrait yet?" Ted joked.

  Spiegel sighed over the rim of his goblet. "Twice." "Can I tell you something?" Zimmerman said, a slight change in cadence. "I seem to have MS. Just found out this afternoon."

  It took Spiegel too long to decode, to figure out what the man had just announced. By the time he did, the moment for real comfort was lost.

  In his memory of the event, Spiegel said nothing. Utterly, stupidly nothing. Nothing of use or condolence or aid, for the rest of the night. Ted, at least in memory, left shortly after dropping his bomb, still vaguely buzzing. "Oh. Hey. I've also finished my octet."

  The topic sprung Spiegel from the spell that had fallen over him. "Really? That's fantastic. When do we get to hear it?"

  "You tell me. As soon as I find eight players who'll sit still long enough to learn something that jagged."

  That was his piece. That was the man's piece. Never performed, so far as Spiegel ever heard.

  Chance threw them all clear of the wreck. Adie made her way to New York, the Butter-and-Eggs district, where she worked in the MoMA cafeteria and painted. Ted made his way out the year after, up to Washington Heights, where he waited on tables on a restaurant boat moored in the Hudson and studied graduate composition with Davidovsky, at Columbia. Spiegel graduated with a degree in English and four poems that he liked. He moved to San Francisco, as far from New York as he could get and still have crappy weather.

  He floundered for a while, working dopey editing jobs, hanging around City Lights, more or less making a stock commedia dell'arte figure of himself. After about a year of shiftlessness, he got a card from the two of them. They'd hooked back up and were living together. Life was long. Three weeks later, Spiegel landed a bank teller's job and settled

  in for the duration.

  From teller, he jumped to data processing, a vacancy in Operations that opened up after a junior operator went berserk and locked himself in the tape storage room with a bulk magnetic eraser gun. Fortunately the eraser, like the machines that had driven the operator to the breaking point, malfunctioned.

  Spiegel discovered amazing digital aptitude. A surfeit of words and their ambiguity left him ready to love code's clean, definitive operands. Numbers were simple. They knew what they wanted. They rose and fell according to magnificent tabular design. The whir of the drive spindles, the chug of the card reader, the line printer's barrage all sounded a note of reason that, after the months of carping human clients—most of whom hadn't a clue what they wanted and conflated the Bay Savings Bank with their parents, tormentors, and lovers— struck Spiegel as heavenly.

  A little judicious stretching of fact on his resume landed him a software job with a financial planning outfit up the Valley. He claimed he programmed, when, in fact, he thought COBOL was a minor goblin and couldn't have picked Ada from Pascal out of a police lineup. Then he promptly taught himself the basics in the first three weeks of the job. There the mystery opened to him, the secret brotherhood between fact and its description.

  You have to imagine it, he tried to tell the woman who'd first set him upon the path of living algorithm. He laid it out for her over a digitally fabricated face towel, crumpled as if its owner had been taken unaware. My God! The Arabian Nights. The Arabian Nights. The full strangeness descended on him again, as it had in the year when he first looked on it. Wonder renewed itself in his replay, as the natural world renewed itself in imitating code.

  Think of it: you just spell out a few descriptions. OK: a lot of descriptions. But stilly you type some words, the inner name of the thing. You describe how you want it. You build a topical outline of its behavior. Then you run the description, and there the idea is. Actual, working, in all its functional glory. Coming to life, on the terminal in front of you.

  Adult Adie frowned at the thumbnail of the towel that they worked up on her screen.

  No, Steve said. You can't possibly understand. There are too many layers now, between you and the artifact. Assemblers, compilers, interpreters, code generators, reusable libraries, visual programming tools. It wasn't always like this. You have to imagine looking at this towel, this beautiful, woven, cotton towel, falling in natural folds, as good as cloth. Have to imagine looking at it and seeing the realization of your own words, your own perfect, workable essay about the way that cloth looks and feels and falls.

  Pygmalion?

  He's in there somewhere. Orpheus might be closer. I'm telling you, writing my first subroutine was...like causing huge chunks of unravished bride to rise up, just by singing to her. A good, polished program was everything I thought poetry was supposed to be.

  Stevie. You must have had a very peculiar idea of what poetry was supposed to be.

  No different than any person who ever wrote it. I was going to get inside of reality and extract its essence, write down on paper the magic metrical words that, read aloud, would do their open sesame.

  She looked at the screen, ready to deny everything. But she nodded. The vital formula. Sympathetic spells. Life's nail clippings. The impression of a body in bed.

  He raced on, not hearing her. There was this kid poet, and he wrote and wrote. He rubbed the magic lamp until the poetic self-abuse police threatened to come impound him. And still nothing happened. The incantation seemed to be defective. Then they put the kid in front of this terminal and initiated him into the secret syntax. A few simple rules, combined in a few elegant ways, and blamm-o. The thing works. It runs. The world does move. The rules chum. The descriptions step their way through their own internal logic. The lines of code set more switches, change more states. Commands produce results.

  The word made flesh.

  Spiegel flinched. Don't mock me.

  I'm not mocking.

  Because that's exactly what it is. It doesn't matter if you're only talking about a formula for compound interest plugged into a general ledger

  program. Change any variable and the executing universe alters. Move it to the left, increment it by a quarter percent, and the new result gets spit out whole. It gives one a tremendous feeling of—

  Tower?

  Perfectibility. Coding possessed a kind of reality check that sestinas never had. A program either worked or it didn't, and if it didn't work, it was wrong. Period. Something magnificent to that.

  1 made a lot of wrong paintings in my life. Believe me. And I didn't need any machine to tell me they were wrong.

  But you never knew, completely, when you made a right one.

  Adie wrapped her self-indicting silence around her like a shawl.

  It's…. funny, Spiegel went on. Art made all this happen, you know. The whole digital age. Music did it. Hollerith got his idea for the punched data card from the player piano. From the Jacquard tapestry loom.

  Not guilty, Adie pled. I've got an airtight alibi.

  That's what they all say. He nipped her chin between finger and thumb. You have to imagine. Programming blew my thinking loose. Absolutely liberating. It freed me up in a way I hadn't been sinc …

  Since Yeats?

  Since Yeats. The rules, the operators? They're completely open-ended. Extensible. Whatever you can imagine, they can build. Think of it: the universal behavior machine, able to build any gadget that crossed the human mind. Not a tool. The ultimate medium.

  They dirtied the digital towel, enlarged it, opened it to the light, hung it back upon the s
ketched-in schematic of its hook, protruding from the left-hand wall.

  You know, they say that a coder's whole concept of programming depends on his first language. Old FORTRAN dinosaurs are stuck in their own do-loops. COBOLers think the machine is only good for running accounts receivable. Kids raised on BASIC never break free of that GOTO. But you see, my first language...

  Adie smiled, remembering, despite herself. Was another code all together. You're telling me that you were fated to wind up programming golden mechanical birds?

  Well, we all end up working on whatever TeraSys lets us.

  Jackdaw? Adie called to the one who was still a child. What was your first programming language?

  The kid looked up from a screen filled with instructions. Somewhere in the sequenced lines, the tireless, interlinked description, a miraculous bedside drawer emerged, one that slid in and out of its wooden table. Wah? Eyebrows up, distracted. It took him a few processor cycles to parse the question. First language? Assembler.

  But first languages never knew their last sentences. On that day when Spiegel left Bay Savings, he called his friends in New York to give them the change of address, never mind the fact that they'd never used the old one. Ted was out. Spiegel spoke with Adie, the same Adie who wouldn't remember the call when the time came to remember everything.

  "He's starting to lose it," she reported. "Walking with a cane. He falls down a lot. Then he picks himself up as if nothing just happened."

  It occurred to Steve that he could now probably beat the man at handball. "They say it can go into remission."

  "Do they? What do they say about the chance of a doctor of music composition getting a job anywhere on the face of the planet?"