RICHARD POWERS Read online

  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.

  perfects itself. You lie back against the wall, as far from the radiator as the links of chain allow. Bone-cold all winter, the machinery now comes alive, eager to add its joules to the summer inferno.

  You close your eyes and will yourself into another climate. The volume materializes in your hands, the weight, the heft, the binding's resistance. You turn the treasure over and over, resolving the details down to the publisher's insignia on the spine. Through your eyelids, you inspect the cover illustration. Your read the blurbs on the back, the synopsis, the ISBN, all the precious trail marks you once squandered so profligately when they were yours to waste.

  Each page of front matter passes one by one under your sentry fingers. Hours may dissolve, just playing with the stiffness of the paper, before you get to the actual first sentence. Lord Jim, the forty-four-point Garamond Bold announces to your hushed house of one. And again, in thirty-six-point type, on the next wondrously superfluous page. Or Great Expectations. Every menu name becomes a whole banquet where you might dine out eternally, for free.

  You reach the opening sentence, the fresh start of all things possible. Modestly boundless, it enters bowing, halfway down that first right-hand page. You lie back against your paradise wall, your pillow. You make yourself a passive instrument, a seance medium for these voices from beyond the grave. Politics has taught you how to read, how to wait motionless, without hope. To wait for some spirit that is not yours to come fill you.

  My name being Phillip. No: my father's name being Pirrip, I called myself Pip. Something about a graveyard, five little stones as visible as the door of your cell, the markers of brothers who gave up on making a living exceedingly early in this universal struggle. Every turn, every further constriction in the plot—yours or the author's—makes it easier to keep to the general contour. Where you cannot recall a scene, you invent one.

  You recognize that underclass orphan making his way in an indifferent world. He was the first present you ever gave her. A fake heritage hardback edition that actually sold for $12.95 in the Cut-out Classics bin at both of the mall bookstore chains. Gave it to her for her birthday, half a year after you started going out. Back in that year when you were still trying to feed her all your favorites, to hand over to her all your secret treasures. Love me, love my childhood. Love my books. Maybe you meant an element of remedy in the gift. It had shocked you when she told you she'd never read it.

  She tore at the wrapping, excited. But she cried when she saw the contents. The price, you thought at first. Gwen knew prices, even of things she never bought. You must have come in a level or two below where she'd expected. Hurt, you bit back. Said that you'd make sure to get something more expensive next time.

  But no. That wasn't it, she sobbed. A book was not a personal gift. People gave books to colleagues, to acquaintances, not to their intimate partners. You might have given this to anyone. It didn't say you and me. It didn't say, You are the only person in the world 1 could have given this to.

  You tried to explain. It did say you. It did say me. This was a story that you'd read four times over the course of your life, one that had meant something different each time you'd read it. It did say you and me. It said you wanted her to know the things that you knew. You couldn't have given it to anyone else, you lied. She didn't need to know who else you'd once tried to give it to.

  Appeased a little, she flipped through, smiling bravely at the opening pages for your benefit. She patted the book. Said, Thank you so much. I'll let you know what I think. Slid it carefully into the appropriate place on her shelves, then came and dragged you off to her bed, where she ravished you, abdomen slapping against abdomen in such fury that you lost yourself in her punishing metronome, feeling in that impact the force of the correction she needed from you.

  Later you discovered, in Gwen's refrigerator, a fresh pot pipe carved out of a golden delicious apple lined with a little tinfoil. A little private birthday celebration, prior to your arrival, that she'd felt no need to tell you of. Her tears, forgiveness, ecstasy, and fury: all artificially enhanced, with you, as usual, the last person to dope things out.

  The book stayed on her shelf for the next six years. To all evidence, she never touched it again except when she dusted. Never tried to read another word, straight, high, or otherwise.

  The fruit bongs appeared and rotted, without fixed season, front-runners in a suite of little secrets, the extents of which you could only guess. She never much tried to hide them, but neither did she ever bother to announce their appearances. You offered to smoke with her, some weekend evening, when the two of you weren't doing anything the next day. Tai-Jan! Gwen said, in her favorite imitation of your mother, who exercised some fascination on her you never wholly understood. My little pragmatic moralist wants to get stoned with me?

  It seemed worth not letting her get to you. Worth waiting her out. Worth trying to be the safety net, the model, the pillar of trust that she'd never before received. But you felt something forbidden, too, more than a little prurient, in the notion of getting lit with this woman, of tumbling into a web of shared sensation, all gatekeepers gone. Getting inside that cloud of private lust you sometimes glimpsed through the frosted-glass window of her skin.

  What's your favorite book? you ask her, your brain pinging down a chain of associations, the night you do at last light up together. The melding that you'd hoped for comes off, at best, as a self-conscious swap of concessions.

  She stares at you too long for it to mean confusion. It takes you about three lifetimes to realize she's mocking you. Her barricades and burning-oil look: What planet did you say you're from? Favorite trick to knock you back on your heels. Jockeying, even now, while the two of you share this brief vacation from yourselves.

  Why do we always have to rank everything? Biggest? Best? Most? Boys: you'll really have to explain the concept to me one of these days.

  You feel the flash of anger, the so familiar one, the rage that you can't voice without confirming her. Don't need you to rank them. Just want to know the name of one that moved you. One that you loved.

  You asked me to tell you my favorite. My absolute fave rave. The one that vanquishes all the other comers. No secrets, now. Come on, name names.

  Forget it. I'm sorry I brought it up.

  Oh. My little Tai-Jan's feelings are hurt. Bad girlfriend. Her right hand administers a slap to her left. Nasty, aggressive girlfriend. Does not work and play well with others.

  Yes, it so often crossed your mind to say. Yes. What you just said.

  You don't say that. You say something different. This time, as always. Look. It seemed legitimate to try to share in something that delighted you.

  Why can't you just let delight come up in its own good time? Why do you have to engineer everything all the time? Control the whole exchange?

  And in the next breath, in her hemp-induced fog, she suggests that she straddle you while you sit on the reclining chair in the front window, lights out—her favorite position, a secret vantage from which she can look out on all the cars and pedestrians, none of whom can imagine what takes place inside the darkened warren that they pass by.

  How desired and desolate she always made you feel — ever, ever— e
ach of those gifts wrapped in the other's predicate. She stands, in your mind, like some Hindu statuette, one set of hands crooked and beckoning, the other set, palms out in front of her in the international body language for Stop.

  The posture threw you off from the day you met her, in that florist on Highland, August of 78. You, ordering a dozen prosaic roses to throw into a stillborn cause, one already lost even as you tried to fix it with blooms. She, assembling a wild assortment of pastel exotics to send to someone she forever afterward refused to identify. The moment she looks up and sees you enter the shop, she smiles such a grin of vast recognition that you have to smile back, bluffing, wondering how you could possibly have forgotten so friendly and welcoming a face.

  You fall to talking almost without thought, hoping her name will come to you after a couple of clues. But the clues all prove that you don't know this woman from Eve. Four traded sentences and you want to. She makes you want to. Open, uncomplicated invitation—like a neighborhood buddy knocking on the door of a Saturday morning, with a baseball and two mitts.

  How do you like my creation? she coaxes, displaying it for you. It wants to be a bouquet when it grows up.

  You make the sound of appreciation, out of the depths of your throat's greater helplessness. What about my needs? Should I go with the red, the yellow, or the white?

  Depends. Is it a kiss-off or a suck-up?

  Good question. You do a fair imitation of total paralysis. I haven't figured that out yet.

  Definitely the ivory, then. Ivory is totally ambiguous. You can always claim misunderstanding later.

  You can, and do. There follows the obligatory couple of dead heats of answering-machine tag. Would you? Love to. Say when. You, then.

  The two of you cook a meal together, at her place. Vegetable lasagna, whose 3.5 grams of fat per serving would strike your mother as a disgrace to human dignity. You wash and slice and pulverize, feeling, despite yourself, as if you're preparing the buffet from which you'll sup the rest of your life. She looks on, smiling at your handiwork. The last time she ever lets you near the food prep.

  Her running gag: Who said you could go near sharp implements? Does your mother know you're trying to drive a standard transmission? Someone has cruelly and senselessly led you to believe that joke is funny? Uh, friend: about this so-called wardrobe of yours ... ? The feel of something invisible being forever contested in the flow of wit.

  You share five or six more outings, for form's sake, moseying up to the inevitable test of desire. Bird-watching, stargazing: each an adventure, but never the same adventure twice. You feel some pleasure in the agonizing postponement, but she is more patient than you. Always she meets you under the gun, the taxi meter running, half a dozen plates up in the air, Post-it notes stuck all over her jumpsuit, appointments with strangers written in Bic on her palms that she has to consult before she can tell you when she'll be available next.

  But always her eyes say soon. And when you part, with your ubiquitous and meaningless See ya, always she reins you in with a smiled "I believe you will."

  Her random reinforcement schedule keeps you massively addicted. Her trick is to pick the moment, that precise evening when the concession seems real and all the wait leading up to it no more than a fluke she is keen to repudiate. She chooses the time and place, a sweet surrender of sovereignty for which she is careful to palm the claim stub.

  There comes a moment in the night's right ascension when the lead-up tease, the slow, hinted rope tug disappears into the bin of all childish things. Then she spreads; then she solidifies. And all that night, your bodies exchange sightings, come within touching distance of a place that you will spend the next eight years trying to recover.

  At the moment that she fixes her limbs to you, her commitment is unthinking: as utter as that between any two speechless animals. But she is absent as well, somewhere far away, deep in a formulating image. Who knows whose? Off in a place that is anything but yours.

  Your two souths merge. You move your face to hers, sealing the ring. You will tell her that you love her, prematurely, helplessly, something she already knows, something she will snort dismissal at, glandular, cliched, but the only thing that might help a little against all that life still has in store for the two of you. You lower your length, fulcrumed along hers, a shadow curling toward the foot of its wall as the sun wanders over day, your mouth seeking out her ear. But she speaks first. You can do anything you want to me.

  This is what you hear. Or at the most generous, the most rehabilitated, factoring in all faults of sound and audition, the tricks of the brain when showered in chemical joy at sight of the land it has succeeded in reaching. You can do anything you want with me.

  For years, she will not remember. She will deny having said anything of the kind.

  She rises from intimacy to wash off the drops of your body. Clean again, she wraps herself in flannel pajamas—yes, even in this heat-before she'll come back to bed. She accepts you against the ladle of her back. She permits you to commit, smiles at the stories you spin out into her ear, but does not return or extend them.

  She's up before you, doing her sit-ups to progressive radio rock when you finally drag yourself out of her long-suffering bed. Breakfast? you ask, over the throb of the synth bass.

  Not for me.

  You commandeer a banana and wait for the routine to abate. It doesn't. Finally, you must get on with your life. The crucial skill here seems to be to ask for nothing, to wait with no expectations, to see what might settle on your sill of its own free accord. See you soon? you say, hoping that the hope in your voice feels in no way coercive.

  Yes, she says, pausing in mid-step-aerobic long enough to kiss you goodbye. I believe you probably will.

  Now you have only your own workout, your own daily routine to blunt the brutal memory working your gut. Only your daily thirty minutes off the chain, to tranquillize, to bring your eager grief low. Back on the leash, you match her sit-up for sit-up, exercise serving some awful, unshakable end, the stupid insistence on surviving. You fight against the steady atrophy of your muscles, work to crush the furtive hope that, should you by some accident ever be freed, and in the uproar of freedom come by chance across her, you will not look repulsive. You wonder how she likes beards, this wiry pelt that cups, petlike, into your hands. Groundless desire: the last thing we outlive, outlove.

  You flip between following out this tale and fleeing from it. Ali's small sadisms—saying you will be released tomorrow; charging into the room at random intervals to catch you without blindfold; tossing a gorgeous orange just out of your reach—are nothing compared with recollection. You can deal with Ali, ignore his feeble invitations to believe. But against the torture of expectation, you have no defense.

  Events seem blessedly bent on distracting you. This season produces some subtle shift in the front. One of the host of autonomous nations— the Druze, the Maronites, the Phalangists; the nomadic dreamers, daily harder to keep straight—some law unto itself is making a play to extend its jurisdiction. The tactics play out behind the gray screen of corrugated metal stapled across your window's gouged-out eye.

  But you don't need to see these hidden developments to map their tactics. For days, rifled artillery lob their lazy cargoes in. You hear the distant puff of firing, count the intervening quarter-seconds, and feel the annihilating crush when it slams back to earth. Your brain does the ungodly calculus, the complex trig that locates in space the arc of each explosion. You mark the ebb and flow, the advance and retreat in your shaking abdomen, telling from the sound of impact the difference between a suq taken out, a playground, a parking lot, or the sheered face of an apartment high-rise.

  Sayid spells out just who is on the move. Afwaj al Muqawamah al Lubnanya. The Lebanese Resistance Battalions, whose name forms the acronym Amal, the Arabic word for hope.

  Hope is not the innocent you once mistook it for. It does not circulate. Yours cannot mean what another takes it to be. Even between you and the woman yo
u loved, you failed to hold the thing in common. You went into the relationship generous and likable and easygoing, and came out shaken, the person she most feared, a pathological controller and manipulator. You could not speak to her without spinning out whole chapters of dialogue in your head—countering, wheedling, needing to destroy her belief that you were desperately needy.

  In another life, on another infinite afternoon, when the shells abate enough to let you disappear again down the immaculate rabbit hole, she tells you. To your standing question, she answers simply, The French Lieutenant's Woman.

  She looks up, vulnerable, appraising your reaction, a little frightened, a little shining. Relieved that you know it, glad for the pleasure she has afforded you, she asks back, How about yours? The easy reciprocity that you once thought could underscore all exchanges between people who cared for each other.

  And you tell her all about Great Expectations. A simple, trusting swap of hostages. Surrender everything. We cannot hurt each other as much as life will. You tell her the whole sustaining story, from graveyard to cradle. What larks! you tell her. What larks.

  Time in its endlessness brings you to a complete recitation. It takes two full afternoons with your eyes pinched closed to come up with the name "Miss Skiffins." But you have all the afternoons in the world. World, time, and focus, and you start to perform superhuman feats of synthetic memory. Desperate feats, deranged, like the reflex acts of mothers lifting two-ton beams off their pinned infants.

  You've forgotten nothing. Whole scenes surface out of air. They pageant before you, responding to memory's every blush. And when they don't, you make them up again. From scratch, as the idiom goes. Week after week, and the complete architecture condenses under your aerial view. Why, here's a church. Why, here's Miss Skiffins. Let's have a wedding.

  You take it then, this month's contraband reading, the blessed banality of your old existence, all the engaging, pointless complications that she smuggles in to you under the nose of your captors, your lost Miss Skiffins, so unlike her real-life model, the one who lived in terror of being held accountable for ever having given anyone anything. How ludicrous the potboiler seems, how absurd and anemic, against the weeklong barrages that make up your day's only dispatches now.