RICHARD POWERS Read online

  You spend a lifetime, another afternoon, trying to recall what it meant, growing up, to say you were half Persian. Never much more than the usual North American party game of Mongrel's Papers. Quarter Irish. Three-fifths Lapp. Nothing more than your run-of-the-mill experiment in high-school chemistry dilution. But you always felt a little pride at being more than the prevailing flavor, an offbeat breed, at least in this stretch of the prairie. Your sound-bite biography always made for good show-and-tell. It tied you to a country where you'd never been, one that you didn't know from Eden.

  On into adulthood, you carried around this membership in a place forever closed to you. The year that you hoped finally to go visit, the door slammed permanently shut. The revolution would as soon jail the sons of the golden-haired Pahlevis as grant them visas. For months on the nightly broadcasts, you saw more of your homeland than you'd seen in the two preceding decades. Your mythic home-away-from-homeland turned, by an unholy alliance of mullahs and American television networks, into a demented parody, a nation of breast-beating crazies run by militant clerics with foot-long beards who captured innocent Americans and held them hostage.

  That's not how it really is, your mother told anyone who would listen. Above all, her boys. Believe me, the crushed-olive lips begged. But her eyes studied the assaulting broadcasts, flecked with doubt at the distance between what she remembered and this latest round of electronic proof. It's an old country, she insisted, her fleshy face frightened. Older than all this nonsense. Persians were masters of the world back when the Greeks were still in preschool. This, too, will pass, and leave behind nothing but the astonished record.

  Because you could not come to it, Iran has come to you. It happily exports Islamic revolution into the vacuum of this fractured country. Your kinsmen bankroll Ali, Walter, the Angry Parent. Your unknown half-ancestor strides out to meet you halfway, in the valley between you.

  All through the summer, words come back to you. At meals, or during your half-hour sprints along your oval track, or in the middle of the morning bathroom ritual, now trimmed back to a frenzied seven minutes. Forgotten vocabulary, sometimes in your mother's voice, sometimes in the voice of those grandparents, fictional to you except for two short childhood trips Stateside when the Brits still pumped the oil and the Shah still issued the travel visas. Words return. The names of foods. The primary colors. The numbers from one to ten.

  More than words: chunks of your mother's favorite stories, in translation. The one about the white-haired baby who grows up to be a mighty king. The one about a flock of birds who set out to find the fabulous Simurgh. They cross the seven valleys of Journey, Love, Knowing, Detachment, Unity, Bewilderment, and Annihilation, the thirty straggling survivors hanging on just long enough to discover, or rather to remember, that Simurgh means nothing more than "thirty birds."

  Your cell is a nave. A ship, a dinghy adrift on the currents of wrecked empire. You lie back in the stern, shackled to your radiator, this room's rudder. Open seas leach you. You drift on the longest day of the year, bobbing near madness, the black overtaking you, infinite time, unfillable, longer even than those childhood nights when your own prison bedroom ran with a dread so palpable that sleep seemed certain death and death far better than this standing terror.

  And then that frightened, fleshy face is there, next to yours, laughing in the dark.

  What in all the world does a child have to be scared of? The old Persians, your people, called their walls daeza. Pairi meant anything that surrounds. See? Pairi daeza. You have a wall running all the way around you. That, my little Tai-Jan, is the source of Paradise.

  29

  At last, deep in winter, the RL team stood and watched the thing that that year had been building toward. It was as if arrival had waited on the cold and dark. Consequence held out for the vesper service, when light ducked below the horizon and inevitability tucked itself in for the evening. The Cavern workers stood by and saw a country unmake itself in one searchlit midnight, teeming with people.

  Revelation carried the look of video. Late-night cameras combed the crowd, a mass milling to as many agendas as it had legs. Thick-coated people carried their hastily penned proclamations out into the night, along with their picks and flares and emergency champagne. A stamping winter herd steamed the air with raw breath. Deep in the Standing Now, lost between euphoria and panic, America watched Europe gather for its millennial bash, a decade too soon.

  Sooner or later, everyone alive saw this happen, if not live, then on delayed broadcast, if not on archival tape, then in garbled pantomime. Once more the builders of the next world gathered together in the Cavern to witness the end of the previous one. But everything that each of them saw, he saw alone.

  A woman who'd devoted her adult life to the religious avoidance of politics, who fled in revulsion from any system bigger than herself, stared in horror at the midnight party. She braced for the tanks again and could not look away. But this time, somehow, the tanks failed

  to come.

  A man who'd landed in California as an orphaned child, who saw through the sham of identity by the age of seven and thus never bothered to build himself one, looked on the crowd smashing to bits the very stage they danced upon, and thought: My country is next. All boundaries will come down. There will be one Korea, as there was in the beginning. They will find my family, scattered in that chaos. My parents will want me back. I'll return to a home where I've never been.

  By spontaneous signal across a medium thinner than air, two warring cities turned out on either half of their barricade. The happy violence gave off the feel of a sporting event—mass disaster tinged with religious awe. By instinct, they poured into the severed Platz, that forty-year-old scar on a continent's heart. A whole generation, raised to believe in this cement fiction, met at the Wall and passed right through it.

  Those who couldn't squeeze in to ground zero spilled out along the split. As one, on a silent word, they smashed at the graffitied stone. Chunks flew off, each fossil splinter turning to instant history, shoveled into plastic bags for the overnight souvenir market. The imaginary barricade breached, half the success-stunned sappers foraged east, snapping photographs of a world about to vanish, while the other half streamed west into commercial fairylands, shocked to a standstill by how far shopping's fantasia had advanced in their absence.

  The old, mass hallucination came apart at the seams. Cameras sallied out along the salients, soaking up this collective sabotage. A hundred happy souls labored in one residential neighborhood near the Versohnungskirche, undoing the surgical cut that politics had sliced through its narrow-laned heart. Celebration held its breath, terrified with joy. Then it swung into communal destruction, a raucous town barn raising run on rewind.

  Along one stretch, the razing snagged on a stuck slab. Worked from both sides, one fifteen-foot-tall block of concrete wobbled on its steel reinforcing rods, flipping lazily in the air like a sheet of damp cardboard. At the far end of a long chord through the Earth's crust, an Armenian mathematician raged against this amateur demolition squad's ham-handedness. He shouted at the video transcription, already hours obsolete. Achl Wunderbar. Brilliant. These are the planet's legendary engineers? The sons of Krupp and Porsche? Would anyone who grasps the basic concept of leverage please step to the front of the mob?

  A man half the mathematician's age, nominally Italian, but belonging to no particular nationality except the International Benevolent Order of Programmers, stood by, gawking, as the membrane went permeable. Boyle's law, it seemed to him: the thermocouple yanked to allow free equilibration across that barrier. The aging boy nursed a childhood dream of urban renewal. Blocked-up subway spurs would now be cleared. Traffic could flow rationally, as designed, with all inefficient border checks swept away. Both sides would enjoy a windfall peace dividend, not to mention the beauty of simplification.

  In a sorry excuse for a neighborhood local, a Belfast emigrant raised half a glass to the television above the bar, where an ecstatic battalio
n of barbed-wire cutters danced an allemande on top of their taken objective. Best of luck to you, poor buggers. Reached the promised land, have you?

  He mimed a virtual glass-clink and sipped, a good-sport attempt to join in history's graduation party. He toasted the end of the lifelong war, the end of status quo brinksmanship, the end of the market's last alternative, the end of mutually assured destruction, of gunpoint-guaranteed safety. He toasted the end of willed divisions. He toasted the New World Order, the beginning of nuclear proliferation, the steady slide into universal factionalism, the fragmentation past any ability of power politics to control... As he tipped his glass, the onscreen revelers waved their spilling magnums to toast the Irishman back.

  An architect, half German, at least by family tradition, a man for whom the human race was a perpetual source of stress, whose Moses complex led him through a lifelong quest for peace that started with biofeedback and wended its way through est, yoga, crystals, acupressure, acupuncture, shiatzu, Rolfing, Alexander technique, antioxi-dants, herbal extracts, homeopathic medicines, and finally Prozac, sat paralyzed, reeling in the real-time feed issuing from his workstation screen. Now and then, condemned to participate, the architect cried out to no one in particular, Oh God. This can't he happening. I can't process this. What in the hell is this all supposed to mean? What do these people think they're doing?

  This man's disheveled cellmate, an American who'd made it through the last twenty years on force of habit alone, a man whose Cold War existence came down to little more than the private contrition of forward motion, at last had to answer: God only knows what they think they're doing. But they seem to be hitting that concrete wall with sledgehammers.

  And the wall, for its part, seemed to break.

  30

  all inefficient border checks swept away. Both sides would enjoy a windfall peace dividend, not to mention the beauty of simplification.

  In a sorry excuse for a neighborhood local, a Belfast emigrant raised half a glass to the television above the bar, where an ecstatic battalion of barbed-wire cutters danced an allemande on top of their taken objective. Best of luck to you, poor buggers. Reached the promised land, have you?

  He mimed a virtual glass-clink and sipped, a good-sport attempt to join in history's graduation party. He toasted the end of the lifelong war, the end of status quo brinksmanship, the end of the market's last alternative, the end of mutually assured destruction, of gunpoint-guaranteed safety. He toasted the end of willed divisions. He toasted the New World Order, the beginning of nuclear proliferation, the steady slide into universal factionalism, the fragmentation past any ability of power politics to control... As he tipped his glass, the onscreen revelers waved their spilling magnums to toast the Irishman back.

  An architect, half German, at least by family tradition, a man for whom the human race was a perpetual source of stress, whose Moses complex led him through a lifelong quest for peace that started with biofeedback and wended its way through est, yoga, crystals, acupressure, acupuncture, shiatzu, Rolfing, Alexander technique, antioxi-dants, herbal extracts, homeopathic medicines, and finally Prozac, sat paralyzed, reeling in the real-time feed issuing from his workstation screen. Now and then, condemned to participate, the architect cried out to no one in particular, Oh God. This can't he happening. I can't process this. What in the hell is this all supposed to mean? What do these people think they're doing?

  This man's disheveled cellmate, an American who'd made it through the last twenty years on force of habit alone, a man whose Cold War existence came down to little more than the private contrition of forward motion, at last had to answer: God only knows what they think they're doing. But they seem to be hitting that concrete wall with sledgehammers.

  And the wall, for its part, seemed to break.

  The warm room is shelter against the surrounding cold.

  Inside, you find a bed and a ready stock of blankets. Someone has seen to all needed provisions: sheets, candles, oil, towels. Cans in the pantry, wood in the cellar. Hooks and hangers, empty dresser drawers waiting to be filled by the stray refugee.

  Outside, the wind hacks away with chill efficiency. Terminal winter settles in. Again, the world expels its baffled tenants. But the warm room takes all the roomless in.

  The place seems almost to have known you were coming. Doors, stairs, windows all run exactly to your scale. The shelves carry all your best-loved books, and all those you have ever hoped to read. Your favorite nautical watercolors and cloud-teased landscapes line the front hall. All afternoon, each window's view outbids your eye's imagination. You've stumbled upon this hotel, this makeshift hospital, by more than chance. Linen waits stacked up in the cabinets, dishes in the chest. Behind the bathroom mirror, soaps, brushes, and blades stand at sacrificial attention. Dry provender renews itself with each use. All these things have long existed, but never before like this. They seem to gather in this holding pen strictly for you to delight in them.

  The warm room has no other reason but yours. As the mass displacement grows, its answer turns inward, its cure simple. But grace may be harder to bear than its brutal opposite. For the warm room exists only by virtue of a single, chill twist. Touch the wooden cup left out for you, pick it up, and turn it over. Run your finger along its smooth length. Put your lips to its waiting lip, and empty it: your mouth will find nothing more solid than idea.

  The shower does not wet you, nor do the towels dry. You can flip through the pages of these loving books, but you cannot hold them. The vibrant clothes slip onto your body, but they give no feel. It dawns on you only piecemeal where you are. How you have dropped down through your own, scribbled rabbit hole into this thought museum and now sit gaping at the shape of your evacuated life from the far side of the mental mirror.

  Maybe you lost your given life, searching for this escape. Or maybe you did yourself in, bitter revenge on life for failing you. Or maybe the world would have cut you up anyway, and only luck led you to this emergency windbreak just before succumbing. Something in your refugee heart never felt at home anywhere, except in this room of maybes.

  Down the hillside from this mountain cabin, grim realism rounds up its latest deportees. Global affairs pursue their footrace, for not everyone has been sentenced yet. You've made it to this sheltered Switzerland just before the police dogs close their jaws on your ankle. Or: you've fallen, out there in the dark, along the frozen border, and the last thought that crosses your expiring mind is this fire-lit chalet.

  In the warm room, you are the goal of all these stocked provisions. All things await the theater of your needs, here freed at last to work its changes. In the warm room, you are the doer of all acts, the receiver of all action, the glow that lights these sanctuary walls, the warmth these eager trappings radiate, the fading coal, the lone heat source in a world gone zero and random.

  31

  "You need something?"

  The Shiite Cronkite asks so gently, it's almost possible to imagine that today he means it. You can't catch his eye. But perhaps a blindfolded head swing in his direction can still haunt him with the parody of a human glance.

  "Walter," you say. Slower now, with all the gravity of a dying animal: "Walter. What's your real name?"

  You hear him shrug. Currents of compressed air roll off his undulating shoulders and form in your ears, as clear as words. You put your hands out in front of you, on your wasting thighs, palms up.

  "Tell me," you beg. "I know Ali's. Walter. Listen. I can't hurt you."

  You hear him, this peasant driven off the desiccated land, here at the front only for that expedited ticket to heaven given to anyone who dies for the cause. You hear him put his head down. Astonishing. Impossible. Yet still, your attenuated ears hear it.

  when the Greeks were still in preschool. This, too, will pass, and leave behind nothing but the astonished record.

  Because you could not come to it, Iran has come to you. It happily exports Islamic revolution into the vacuum of this fractured country. Your
kinsmen bankroll Ali, Walter, the Angry Parent. Your unknown half-ancestor strides out to meet you halfway, in the valley between you.

  All through the summer, words come back to you. At meals, or during your half-hour sprints along your oval track, or in the middle of the morning bathroom ritual, now trimmed back to a frenzied seven minutes. Forgotten vocabulary, sometimes in your mother's voice, sometimes in the voice of those grandparents, fictional to you except for two short childhood trips Stateside when the Brits still pumped the oil and the Shah still issued the travel visas. Words return. The names of foods. The primary colors. The numbers from one to ten.

  More than words: chunks of your mother's favorite stories, in translation. The one about the white-haired baby who grows up to be a mighty king. The one about a flock of birds who set out to find the fabulous Simurgh. They cross the seven valleys of Journey, Love, Knowing, Detachment, Unity, Bewilderment, and Annihilation, the thirty straggling survivors hanging on just long enough to discover, or rather to remember, that Simurgh means nothing more than "thirty birds."