RICHARD POWERS Read online

  "Is he close to finishing?" Something to say, however feeble.

  "Oh, any year now. Steve, it's unbelievable." Opposites mixed freely in her voice. "All the man wants to do anymore is compose."

  "Does he still...?" Spiegel began. But decency forced him to pull over before someone got hit.

  "No. Nothing. Just sits there and writes music."

  "Is any of it getting played?"

  "Stevie, Stevie. What planet are you living on? Our apartment was broken into five months ago? The thieves took everything that wasn't nailed down. Except for the man's classical music collection."

  "Is he at least...happy?"

  "What a quaint question. Nice to know that at least one of us hasn't changed since college."

  "You're still painting, aren't you?"

  "Guilty. But at least I'm holding down a real job. Official table busser to the art elite." She admitted to still putting together a portfolio, however much she declared her readiness to cave in to the world's terms.

  Her tone was too much for Spiegel. He wished he'd never called. "Let me know when you mount your show. And tell Thaddeus to give me a ring sometime."

  She never did let him know. But Zimmerman did call, years too late, after Spiegel had signed on to work with TeraSys, surrendering to the century's terminal art form. Ted did call, after Steve could no longer imagine how far the man's body had decayed. He called from Lebanon, a flyspeck in the wastelands of southwestern Ohio. An old Shaker town, site of one of Mother Ann's visionary communities, waiting celibately up on a bluff for the world's redemption and wrap-up. A town whose chief industry had once been utopianism but was now the nearby close-security prison.

  Ted was well. He was working. Oh: and he was also employed.

  He had a job in that same prison, part of a four-year private college's outreach program, granting bachelor's degrees to convicted rapists, arsonists, and murderers. He had gone out on the market for a few years' running and had come close to landing a post in Utah. But the Mormons had not bought his cultural analysis of Das Lied von der Erde. So he ended up in the ruins of millenarian Warren County, teaching Rudiments of Theory and World Culture 1 and 2 to the incarcerated underclass of Dayton, Columbus, and Cincinnati.

  What exactly was World Culture 1?

  He wasn't entirely sure, but if Spiegel had any suggestions, he was willing to try anything once. He rather enjoyed it when 300-pound men with diagonal keloids across their faces could identify the start of a secondary theme group. And get this: the recidivism rate for the prison as a whole was 48 percent. For those who completed a degree, it dropped to 12.

  Cause and effect?

  More likely, those who could stomach World Culture for a couple of semesters were already those who had steeled themselves to the idea of life on the outside.

  Job security?

  Twenty to life. No reduction for good behavior.

  How was he getting around?

  Slowly. In a wheelchair.

  Where was Adie?

  Zimmerman was not quite sure. Still in New York, he thought. She'd had a show, while they were still living together, at a reputable SoHo gallery. The work had been written up, talked about in all the appropriate circles. It looked as though the art mafia were going to let her play.

  Then she'd panicked. She took back the couple of works that had sold at the show, paying the gallery their commission plus a makeup fee to the buyers. She rejected the gallery's offer to think about a more casual, long-term relationship. Refused to keep the door open, even in the abstract. She held a bonfire. Ted wasn't sure how many works she burned, but the casualties were high and the ones that burned best were by far her most accomplished.

  She'd started to freelance. Junk, Ted called it. Commercial design. Coffee-shop walls. Health-club logos. Ad circulars for fake New England mail-order houses.

  At the time, Ted's own CV was coming back unopened from every academic job offering in the country. The MS was in remission, and he was pouring all temporary strength into a large-scale piece—a concerto for piano and orchestra. He was playing beat the clock, working away seven or eight hours a day on the concerto, and the hopeless effort was driving Adie up the wall. He should have been out doing something about his job odds, she said. When he asked her what that might entail, she grew even angrier.

  She came to him with an ultimatum. Either he start looking for real work or they were history. He told her he'd always enjoyed history. So she split, leaving him only a P.O. box for a forwarding address.

  Had he tried to contact her?

  Had not and would not. Not good for either of them. She needed to be free of him. He made her feel guilty.

  And she made him feel ...?

  He'd never really stopped to consider.

  He was still writing music?

  This was the extraordinary compensation. Just as all hope was walking out the door, salvation blew in the window. Spiegel knew about computers? He made a living with them? Then he knew all about the first significant change in the production of music since Pan carved his

  pipes.

  Zimmerman had no clue how any of it worked. Some digital necromancer, probably Asian, had taken the sound of a real clarinet, sliced each second of the waveform into forty-four thousand pieces, and pushed each of those pieces down into silicon. From there, the reed could be recalled at any pitch, duration, or intensity.

  Not a perfect clarinet, mind you. Or rather, a tad too perfect. But Zimmerman wasn't about to quibble over sound quality. He had his Esterhazy in a box—every instrument of the orchestra at his beck and call, around the clock, each one capable of playing beyond the range of earthly instruments. He scored out music on the screen, just as he did on paper, and the miraculous music box performed every aural event he cared to specify.

  The possibilities outstripped not only his wildest expectations but also his wildest ability to expect. For the first time in his life, Ted could hear the contour of his thoughts as he thought them. The tireless box played a presto stream of hemi-demi-semiquavers all day long without hobbling a note or pausing to breathe.

  He set aside all concern for the possible and began to compose the music he most wanted to hear. The box realized anything that Zimmerman could describe to it. He wrote a piece for twelve piccolos in narrowest brilliant tessitura. He wrote a sonata for cello and piano that kept the piano in a perpetual pianissimo and never let the cello out of murderous thumb position. He wrote a frenetic solo for bass clarinet, thirty thousand high-speed notes leaping and crashing through all registers so jaggedly that no human could dream of bringing it off. He played the piece for Spiegel over the phone. Even through the tiny acoustical portal, the effect was dizzying.

  Once Spiegel opened the channel, the phone became Ted's favorite obbligato instrument. If the thing rang in Seattle any time before eight in the morning or after midnight, odds were good that the voice at the other end would kick things off with a cheery "Lebanon, here!" A call might last the better part of an hour, Ted ecstatic with computers? He made a living with them? Then he knew all about the first significant change in the production of music since Pan carved his

  pipes.

  Zimmerman had no clue how any of it worked. Some digital necromancer, probably Asian, had taken the sound of a real clarinet, sliced each second of the waveform into forty-four thousand pieces, and pushed each of those pieces down into silicon. From there, the reed could be recalled at any pitch, duration, or intensity.

  Not a perfect clarinet, mind you. Or rather, a tad too perfect. But Zimmerman wasn't about to quibble over sound quality. He had his Esterhazy in a box—every instrument of the orchestra at his beck and call, around the clock, each one capable of playing beyond the range of earthly instruments. He scored out music on the screen, just as he did on paper, and the miraculous music box performed every aural event he cared to specify.

  The possibilities outstripped not only his wildest expectations but also his wildest ability to expect. For the first time
in his life, Ted could hear the contour of his thoughts as he thought them. The tireless box played a presto stream of hemi-demi-semiquavers all day long without hobbling a note or pausing to breathe.

  He set aside all concern for the possible and began to compose the music he most wanted to hear. The box realized anything that Zimmerman could describe to it. He wrote a piece for twelve piccolos in narrowest brilliant tessitura. He wrote a sonata for cello and piano that kept the piano in a perpetual pianissimo and never let the cello out of murderous thumb position. He wrote a frenetic solo for bass clarinet, thirty thousand high-speed notes leaping and crashing through all registers so jaggedly that no human could dream of bringing it off. He played the piece for Spiegel over the phone. Even through the tiny acoustical portal, the effect was dizzying.

  Once Spiegel opened the channel, the phone became Ted's favorite obbligato instrument. If the thing rang in Seattle any time before eight in the morning or after midnight, odds were good that the voice at the other end would kick things off with a cheery "Lebanon, here!" A call might last the better part of an hour, Ted ecstatic with

  extended show-and-tell. "Wait," he'd say, his voice slurring in its great, decade-long rallentando. "Listen to that same passage played by a brass quintet." And he'd crash around making the changes, Spiegel hearing, in the struggle, just how bad things had become.

  "Don't hurt yourself," Spiegel told him. "Send me a tape."

  Not the same. Ted wanted the thrill of a live performance. And he could still manage all the controls, given time.

  It worried Steve. "Are you OK out there by yourself? I mean, it sounds as if a lot of gear is hitting the floor with considerable frequency."

  "And I most frequently of all. Never fear. There's a woman who comes by..."

  Of course there was a woman. What had Spiegel been thinking? Two, in fact. A colleague who taught English at the prison. And Zimmerman's widowed landlady, who rented him three rooms in her antebellum house with its twenty-foot ceilings for $200 a month. From each according to her abilities.

  In some lingering need for an audience, Ted called more often. For a while, they were in better touch than they'd been since that spring of their mutual discovery. But however often they spoke, that spongy, deteriorating voice on the other end shocked Spiegel. Not a gradual descent: a fall headlong down the staircase. Ted called to lecture, to hold forth, to assign belated homework, but mostly to play the world premiere of another fifteen measures. Now and then he remembered to ask Spiegel how things were going on the other end.

  And then the bolt from the blue. The lottery: what anyone else but this crippled anachronism would have called his lifetime lucky break. An old virtuoso friend from Columbia days commissioned Zimmerman to write a piece for solo viola, for performance in the downtown New York avant-garde music demimonde.

  You never knew about it? Steve asked the adult Adie. Years failed to erase his surprise.

  Never.

  It was performed a few times. Once in a space in TriBeCa, in fact.

  The city's new music scene is pretty big, Stevie. Hundreds of concerts you never hear about, every day.

  He was sure you knew about it. That you deliberately stayed away. It crushed him that you never showed up.

  Crushed him? He said it crushed him?

  Well, not in so many words.

  The piece was as full of antinomian cheek as Zimmerman could manage. But for this audience bred on halting dissonance, he delivered lines as long and soaring as Dives and Lazarus. A theme and variations, no less, on the old fugueing tune "Idumea": beautiful, visceral, expansive, and, given the venue, hopelessly banal. The dedicatee almost refused to play the piece, so startlingly unshocking was it, so potentially damaging to an experimental reputation.

  He did it to provoke the provocateurs. Said it was his Abschied to the innovating world. You know: "It's not like I'm ever going to make it back to the city anyway."

  Idumea. I can't believe it. Idumea.

  He also said that you ...that you...

  ...used to walk around the apartment humming that tune.

  Naked.

  He told you that? How dare he?

  How dare anyone? "Idumea" drew as many silent sneers as he Sacre had once drawn catcalls. Shape-note Americana, second-rate WPA, half a century too late: the wry joke of a very select crowd, over the run of a very short season. But the gorgeous solo viola line lodged in the heart of at least one listener, a slumming double agent whose day job consisted of producing commercial musical scores. The fellow had been looking for someone who could do a thirty-second derivative Copland knockoff, and chance had led him to that someone.

  Zimmerman never hesitated. It shocked Spiegel, and saddened him. But working for TeraSys by then, Spiegel had little moral leverage to preach against selling out. Ted worked up the piece in a little under three weeks. It was "Simple Gifts," returned to sender. Thirty seconds of hosanna from the world's first, radiant hoedown. Heavenly counterpoint, put to the service of a multinational consumer-products conglomerate intent upon wrapping its insidious agricultural chemistry in the patina of Shaker innocence.

  He did that? That was Ted? Adie, incredulous, remembered the commercial spot. Remembered it in the back of her throat. The kind of manipulative, nostalgic sound track that you wept over in the solitary shame of your living room, with all the shades pulled down.

  The delighted corporate sponsors paid Zimmerman well. Ted made a hundred times more for those three weeks of work than he'd made for all the other music he had composed in his life. The lump sum helped to cover what the prison college's group insurance refused to pay, when Ted at last had to move into Warren County's second-best assisted-care facility.

  Life was truly long. Ted spent his days strapped in a bed in a nursing home in the Buckeye state, a forty-year-old avant-garde composer surrounded by the perfect audience: deaf nonagenarians. At least he had a private room—a cinder-block single compartment, the same dimensions as the one his old friends now redecorated.

  Ted and Steve had spoken only twice since Adie's arrival out West. Spiegel stopped calling him. Ted could no longer hold the receiver. Even after one of Ted's nightingales bought him a speakerphone, Spiegel quit returning Ted's calls. It was not just cowardice. Ted's voice had gotten so faint and slurred that Steve had to ask him to repeat everything three times and still couldn't make out the half of each message. The brain was still intact, but it had begun to waver into places where Spiegel was not yet allowed. Silence seemed the more merciful ordeal. Spiegel had not visited, nor had he seen pictures. And yet here was the place where the man now lived. Where else but this prototypical layout? Planks standing in for linoleum; cambered casements for molded plastic. The bed pressed up against the back right corner of the narrow box. No doubt the real bed was a tubular steel hospital apparatus wrapped in acrylic blankets. But in the invalid's mind, surely it resembled this rich red wood piled high in an eidolon of eiderdown. And next to the bed, the rickety table: the perfect stand for Ted's MIDI sequencer, executing its archaic scores on a whole orchestral palette of digitally sampled instruments, playing them out through a pair of tinny speakers where Van Gogh's water pitcher stood. Perhaps a nurse came in and worked the mouse for him. Perhaps the machine, unlike Spiegel, still understood Ted's voice well enough to take dictation. Perhaps the picture frames on the walls above his bed held snippets of laser-printed score, keepsakes of Ted's long, aural adventure.

  This was the room that Spiegel helped to furnish, no matter what chamber from the sunny South Adie thought she outfitted. The two of them collaborated, carving down the cubes into the objects each hid. Thousands of polygons hung suspended in space on the intersecting beams of five projectors. The shaving mirror alone ran into the millions of bits, dozens just to fix the location and color of each hung pixel. Behind its flinty blue reflection, voltage differences snaked through an array of registers in a conga line so long that all that the human eye ever saw was this massive epiphenomenon, this simple looki
ng glass that bore no earthly relationship to the worlds of oscillating semiconductance surging beneath its surface.

  Over the weeks that Spiegel and Klarpol refinished their storeroom of old furniture, Jackdaw assembled a library of interactive definitions— reusable ball bearings that animated all the room's moving parts. Through the staked pains of software's sieve—check lower bound X; check lower bound Y; check lower bound Z; check upper..., set StepRate..., fix ShadeOffset…; for Rotltem from -180 to 180, step StepRate, if ShadeOffset
  It no longer sufficed for each of the room's austere furnishings, their continent-wide sheets of bits sliding along the moraines of video memory, merely to mimic solidity. Deeply nested C routines now invested the smallest collection of boxels with real-world behaviors. The same host electronics that sculpted these statues of colored air could also sense and respond to the room's angelic visitors.

  The visitors' solid hands still passed through everything they tried to feel. But now a thumb and forefinger, pinched around the phantom drawer knob, could pull it open. Even the designers felt the uncanny effect, moving the wood-grained logic of an object they could not even touch. However incorporeal, the towel ruffled when brushed. The windows cluttered shut at the first mime of force against them. And when the transient user, suckered by half a billion years of evolution into believing the visible, reached out by reflex to pat the bedcovers, those sheets miraculously turned their corners down as if waiting for the idea of a sleeper to curl up and inhabit them.

  Water wanted to pour. Shirts wanted wearing; picture frames, straightening. An eerie hideout rose up around its makers. The ghostly placeholders began to stand in for their leaden referents. For finally, the brain conversed less with stuff than with appropriate response. It operated upon the working symbol, and for that, the less carrying weight, the better. Dimension, color, surface, motion—the full play of functional parts—implied a tenant who seemed eternally to have just stepped out for a moment. The visitor moved through a furnished efficiency where all the comforts and amenities performed as they should, with only the apartment's occupant eternally not at home.