RICHARD POWERS Read online

  The room solidified as the year dissolved. Expectation shot through Spiegel every time, standing on the floorboards, riffling through the Dutchman's evacuated things. Adie's belief, too, reached critical mass. Technology wanted something from them. The play of emulated, Arlesean light teetered on the verge of some announcement.

  Whatever time passed outside the Cavern, the artist's bedroom hung in an eternal noon. The bedroom's blaze enveloped its makers, even as they worked at their midnight cubicles. The three of them settled into the silent routine of roommates, the new nuclear family sharing this close, sunny starter home. They worked alone, coming together at times to putter and refine. Perpetual nesting, permanent spring cleaning. The shared task of home improvement made talk unnecessary.

  Ade? Spiegel said one night, violating that pact of silence. Can I ask you something?

  The eyes said, "Do we need to?" The mouth said, Sure.

  The celibacy thing?

  Yes? She dragged out the initial letter in epic wariness. And what exactly would you like to know about the celibacy thing, Stevie?

  He thumbed his nose at her, some avuncular nineteenth-century gesture new to him, its origins a total mystery. Not celibacy per se. I've already assembled as much data about that particular subject as I care to, thank you. What I want to know is, don't you... don't you ever miss it?

  "It" being non-celibacy?

  "It" being a partner. Companionship. A warm body in the house on a damp night.

  Well, I have Pinkham, you know. She turned toward the creature, who lay curled up in his favorite spot on a rag rug inside a coil of coaxial cable at the Cavern mouth. She patted her thighs in invitation. Pinkham looked up, ascertained the absence of crisis, yawned, and curled down again. He refused to step near the simulated room. It bewildered him.

  Don't you miss ... surprising behavior? Something not reducible to axioms. A being as big and complicated as you are.

  Oh. Pinkham is all that. And then some. He's a lot more complicated than I am, in fact.

  All right. Call me anthropocentric. Don't you miss conversation? Talking in bed? A mind that isn't yours, to go over the day's mystery with. Someone to distract you, on those days when you feel like writing on the walls.

  I never really trusted words all that much, she said.

  Spiegel opened the shutters. Jackdaw's astonishing algorithm bathed the room in a crescendo of Provengal sun. Stevie fiddled with the casement, waving it back and forth without touching, like playing an etherophone. Sex, Ade. You don't need it? You can go totally without?

  That depends. She looked away from him, not at all coy. On what exactly you mean by "sex."

  He turned away too, hiding his blush. You ever wonder why we two never slept with each other? I mean, every other possible permutation in that house went to town, at least once. Didn't matter... He skipped a beat, but could not stop. Whether they even liked each other.

  You didn't miss anything, Stevie. Believe me. She seemed to wonder, for a moment, just which way she meant to head. Look. I don't know how it is for you. But as far as I'm concerned, solitude is not a hardship post. Being single is not some kind of jail sentence, Stevie. I like my aloneness. It's better than any other configuration I can imagine.

  Through the lab's partition walls came a group war whoop, the cheer of software engineers down the hall, delighting in some hard-won extension of their dominion deeper into the kingdom of comprehension.

  For that matter... She pointed toward the hidden celebration. None of us is anywhere near as alone as we ought to be.

  He caught her drift, without another word. Her worst fears about depiction were true. Evolution's most productive trick was to rig things so that the idea of need grew vastly more insatiable than the needs it represented. Feeling had nowhere near ample room in which to play itself out. Sex at best mocked what love wanted. The gut would explode before it could dent the smallest part of its bottomless hunger.

  Another night came, one night nearer to the end of history. Spiegel and Klarpol busied themselves with fixing a chair that, when picked up and moved, tended to shed and leave behind a phantom right front limb. You know what we need, Ade? Spiegel kept his eyes on a screen dump of the flawed data structure. He aired the idea as if he had just come up with it. Sound.

  It took her a moment to register. But when she did, she clapped her hands. And again, louder. For every tatter in the mortal idea.

  That's it. That's brilliant. Of course we need sound. It never occurred to me. This place is dead silent. That's why it seems like such a haunted house. Well. One of the reasons.

  You're telling me we could get the floorboards to creak whenever someone takes a step on them? That's what I'm telling you.

  Unreal. The wood could thump when you touch it. The shutters could clack. Pinging glass. That's it. Every object will make its right noise. This will totally flip people out. Their ears will convince them of the thing they're touching.

  Know what we really need? Music.

  She cocked a head at the suggestion. Trying to figure out what he was after. Then she figured. You know what, Stevie? We really don't. Music is not what we really need. It's the last thing in the world, in fact.

  He looked at her, already hearing. As if the room were already dosed in superfluous sonatas.

  Realization took hold of her face. She fought back at the assault. Oh fuck. Fuck it. You brought me all the way out here, after all these years ... ? Just to get me to… just to try to fix me back up with …?

  She crumbled at the prospect of losing the greatest Etch-A-Sketch a girl had ever been given. She hid her face in her hands, up to her ears.

  No, his look said, too soft to hear. Not to fix you up. Not you per se. Zimmerman. To fix Ted. The one who really needed him. The one Spiegel loved, first of anyone.

  27

  The Therapy Room is a work in progress.

  Its idea is as old as ideas themselves: to break the terror of existence by depicting it. Heights brought down to ground level, dried floods, cardboard invaders: a story of hurtful things that cannot hurt you any more than any story can.

  Outside the Therapy Room, a white thirty-four-year-old neurasthenic female, Miss Muffet (not her real name), presents with acute, debilitating arachnophobia. After administering a history and physical, her doctors place Miss Muffet inside the palpable re-creation of a kitchen much like her own: a clean, well-lit Kenmore ensemble with lots of counter space. Just as M.M. grows comfortable in the surroundings, technicians bury her up to her midriff in spiders.

  The patient's vitals spike off the charts. She screams and runs out of the representation, as if from the real evil. For the next two hours M.M. is a panting wreck, unable to go anywhere near the imaginary kitchen. This is a good sign. In order for the Therapy Room to work, the patient must credit it enough to dread it. Miss Muffet's gullibility makes her the ideal subject. She knows the nightmare of spiders is a fabrication. And still she believes.

  As soon as the patient can calm down, they send her back in. This time, primed for the assault, telling herself that it's only an invention, she lasts a full thirty seconds. Miss Muffet laughs in cold terror after she reaches the exit. Her pulse returns to normal in half the time of her first exposure. She now knows she can escape the spiders anytime she wants. She can enter the kitchen, however horrible, and survive.

  Real exposure can't teach her this, for real fear overwhelms all second tries. But the Therapy Room works at the limits of seeming. Belief gives way to evidence, spiders to spiderlike objects. Twelve exposures later, Miss Muffet takes to batting at her nemeses, frying them with the click of a joystick, racking up the kills like so many toy targets.

  Out in the larger world, M.M. makes a miraculous parallel leap. For if the things she so lately took for threats turned out to be mere representations, how much more of a threat can the originals represent? Models reveal to her the model she has lived in. Symbols cure her of the fears those symbols stood for. Terror flattens into its empty
sign.

  The same cure promises help for all those disabled by the real. Burn victims will forget their pain, wrapped in a more vibrant light. Those paralyzed by fear of flying will make their connections. Post-traumatic stress sufferers, for whom no other therapy has worked, will skim the virtual canopies above firefights powerless to reach them.

  When next M.M. sees a living spider, she rubs it out happily with her bare hands. The case history writes her final happy chapter: Miss Muffet successfully desensitized.

  27

  Every ten-minute chunk of May makes an eternity. But once the weeks are finally dead, you feel the month pass in memory in half a heartbeat. Time uses you; it lays you out. It advances glacially, gouging by inches your scarred inner continents. Then it vanishes, leaving behind no single landmark but white.

  You kill the quarter-hours dune-ranging through the blankest Saharas, each kilometer of hard-won track wiped out by the wind as soon as you turn to look back. At huge intervals, oases punctuate the evacuated tracts. You head for whatever infrequent way stations you can scrape together.

  Mother's Day, never marked by more than a week of low-level anxiety capped by an emergency call to FTD, swells to an international conference of sacred distraction. All day, the woman's face struggles to take shape. You fight for detail, work to recover the first sight your eyes ever recognized, the most familiar, most assumed, most beatific, nauseating, neglected, adored, abused. Hours pass trying to fix her features, to see past their gross lines, to zoom in beyond your usual myopia down to the local intricacies of cartilage, her smallest fleshy finials.

  Her full-tipped nose swims into focus, your nose before its Anglo contamination. The pained laugh lines on the outskirts of her eyes deeping to plow cuts. Her chin's drumlins assume a detail that only enforced isolation could have given you. A haunted face, a hunted one. Framed in that copper coif of composure that it took you until the age of twelve to realize was not her natural color. Pahlevi copper. Before that, in pictures, Pahlevi blond. Westoxification at its finest. Hair color that would be hard to hide, even now, under the required head scarf. A face no longer welcome in the country of her birth, the same country that now bankrolls Sacred Conflict and their army of God's Partisans, the ones who have seized you, her baby, the flesh of her flesh.

  All day long her muscles materialize, cling to the noble cheekbones, a grimace of pleasure peeking through the interdicting fear. Every brave smile apprises you of its bewilderment, the wild route of its arrival here. You make out the tuft of peach fur on her upper lip, there already in '51, the year that old Tavakoli and his family migrated to England in the wake of Mussadegh's nationalization of Anglo-Iranian Oil.

  Three years later, in the returning Shah's wake, the freshly rechris-tened British Petroleum sought out her faithful father and reinstated him to his middle-management post. But by then your mother Shah-naz's lovely, peach-furred lip had captivated a handsome American serviceman loitering around London prior to his inevitable return to Iowa and a lifetime of agricultural extension lecturing. Veiled in white, in an incoherent Anglican ceremony where her whole displaced family did their best ferangi impersonations, your mother swore through that fleshy mouth to love, honor, and obey this American, to follow him into lifelong exile deep in a land that couldn't tell Iranian from Indonesian.

  These features, this face: what could the domesticated prairie have looked like, through eyes so black and baffled? Not a question you've ever entertained, before Mother's Day inflicts you with time enough to entertain all questions. Isfahan, your mother's singsong once sang to you, is half the world. Growing up in Basra, Kuwait, and Doha could not have left too much room in her remaining half a world for a town like Des Moines.

  And yet, the laughing, skittish voice tries again to tell you, I never felt at home until I came to the United States. The black eyes whose gaze you could never bear to meet dart away, caught in the compromise of something like truth. People in the Midwest are so friendly. So ready to take you in. By which she must have meant that Iowans, in their bounty, could not imagine how anyone would not want to be like them, given half a chance.

  But she did, your hair-dyed mother. Did want to become that local and featureless thing. Did take on a rolling, open, Midwestern look, that history of no history. Did adopt the life that her cosmopolitan father, the emissary of empire, unwittingly trained her for, through her childhood spent shuttling among Oil's tap points. Did learn to sing, We are from l-oway, I-oway! Never at home until here.

  The face that solidifies before you at morning grows old by nightfall. All those years, Shahnaz among the alien corn. Her ancient words, ways, and beliefs, hidden under a bushel. Her occasional Franco-Farsi, a mumbled merzi to checkout clerks or an accidental khoda hafez when leaving the rare party where she fully relaxed. Her annual covert Norooz celebrations, the third week of March, the flowers all hothouse imitations and the nougat candies all made with Jewel Tea Company bleached imperial equivalents.

  Except for these lapses, she steeped her life in protective coloration, her olive skin aging, growing pale, each year refining its successive approximation of hearty farm stock until, by Mother's Day midnight, you can mistake her for white, the white of your father, your state, your upbringing. The apparition gazes on you, neither scolding nor imploring. With a simple look, she works her daily vigilance. This May exercise recalls you to the basic fact of her existence. Her life needed no further justification, so long as you and your brother still needed her to survive the world in which chance set you down.

  Her two boys: all the light those eyes ever needed. Hers was the countenance of love, too circumspect for any photo to have captured. This is the mask of happy sacrifice. The face of the most maternal being that a child could conceive. Your icon for safety, for every comfort and care ever taken for granted. Your weight, your shame, your memory, your mother.

  After sunset, her features dim. She disappears into the black of your enclosure. Nothing remains of her dislocated solicitude but that brow's accommodation, her motherly wiliness, the will to improvise. You cannot conjure her back. She morphs into the woman you never witnessed, the one who came into her own after you fled her faultless nest.

  Your desertion must have changed those features, for eyes always betray the thing they look for. With you up in Chicago, teaching the global economy's privileged elites how to maximize their verbal throw weight, Kamran off building Peace Corps housing in Mali, and her hapless husband shrinking to nothing with each successive day of retirement, spinning down the tube into prime-time dramas of Texan millionaires, what could the daughter of Anglo-Iranian wandering, the born mother, still find, in the corn-rowed wastes of I-oway, to nurture? For whom could she go on living? What could absorb her surplus care?

  She found a replacement, so fast it made you jealous. Force of habit, maternal instinct's inertia left her continuing to cook, cranking out sustenance as if there were still fledglings to eat it. Great, heaped mountain ranges of her family's favorites began to pile up in a home that no longer housed enough mouths to consume it all. At last a woman friend, a fellow volunteer at the 4-H, suggested a joint catering service, Shahnaz on the stove and native Rosemary handling the front office.

  For two years, the women's experiment in grassroots capitalism coasted along on word of mouth. They served pork chops and mashed potatoes to confirmation parties and fried chicken and apple dumplings to golden anniversary reunions. All the while, your mother hid in her heart of hearts the conviction that people wouldn't really cat that way except out of ignorance. Once she'd secured a loyal clientele, the woman launched her calculated gamble. She introduced her offerings sparingly, slipping in a little mast o esfinaj or khiar alongside the glazed hams, and no one was any the wiser.

  Emboldened, she graduated to saffron-flecked rice with bottom-of-the-pot and zereshk pulow at one party, an eggplant "Mullah-has-fainted" at another. Piecemeal, she deployed the full menu of raptures and revelations: kabab koobideh, fesenjan, qormeh sabzi. To the
se Persian mainstays she added a panoply of recipes reverse-engineered from a youth spent bouncing around all the capitals of the Middle East.

  In that corn-fed desert, she built an oasis. Native xenophobia counted for nothing against a good rosewater rice pudding. Once the Iowans supped from her font, even lifelong steak-and-potato men came back for more. Culture had impaired no palate so severely that it could not recover on a few tastes of heaven.

  Rosemary, the managing partner, drew up an exotic, Orientalized business card and christened the reborn business Iranian Delights. Des Moines never knew their likes. Nothing matched them for miles. They were a hit, producing a demand that they could not satisfy. They delivered the full, unknown flavor that life forever promised, for the same price as pork and beans.

  After November 1979 they changed the name again, to Persian Delights, just as Anglo-Iranian had once changed discreetly into British Petroleum. But the greater Des Moines area still sounded the call to arms, patriotically renouncing all things spicy and suspect. Culinary multiculturalism surrendered its tenuous beachhead in the tall corn, beaten by geopolitics. Iowa renounced its ideal convert citizen, returned her to immigrant status in her adopted homeland.

  Reconstructing her story is good for burning an hour, when you most need it. But the pain of imagining her is worse than the agony of time. Her details do you in. You'd call them vicious irony, if you still believed in so benign a thing. How she marched in the streets as a teen, beating her breasts, reciting slices of a Qur'an that she'd memorized in inscrutable Arabic, to the horror of her Westernized parents. How she sealed the lifelong pact with her American serviceman, whose greatest wartime experience had consisted of helping to move Patton's fictitious landing army around England, the thousands of cardboard and balloon tanks replete with recorded mechanical sounds meant to fool the Nazis into imagining that the Allies would land at Calais. How your parents embarked on eternal matrimony in an Anglican church, in a country that belonged to neither, yet held them both by the colonial lapels. How, Westernized, apostate, she all but lost her native Farsi. And now, from the street below, how the Arabic texts she once committed to memory percolate up nightly to serenade her monolingual son's window.