RICHARD POWERS Read online

  But how banal the bigger text, the pointless serial novel of power, how static and tedious the scenes, how shopworn real life's theme, how lacking in invention and delivery and interest and basic narrative device, compared with the smallest mundanity of love, the chance at private denouement. You devise this simple test of lasting literary merit: which tale promises the best net present pleasure? Which will see you through the end of this hour?

  All the Dickens that will ever return returns. Pip and his Estella go hand and hand out of their ruined place, and you are still here. Still here, after the story recedes, in the bombed-out rubble of your thoughts, a pile that you recognize only because it occupies the lot your house once did. Not even a blank, your mind. A nervous jitter. Twitching like some fourteen-year-old's desk-bound leg. You go for hours in the dark, not even knowing that you are shaking.

  Someone brings you food. The stench no longer gags you, after this time. But something in this picked-over rubbish, not fit for hamsters, breaks you. You bang your chain against the radiator, no longer caring about the consequences. There are no consequences. You will die of blows or you will die of malnutrition. You lay into the pipes like a fare alarm. Someone rushes into the cell, intent on silencing you. The Angry Parent. He cracks you in the chest, knocking you back on the

  mattress.

  It stuns you. He's always gotten one of the others to dole out the physical abuse. You sit back up, stalling to catch your breath, until your pulse lowers enough for you to speak. "Listen." You wait, curious, to see what you mean to say. "Listen. Tell me your name."

  You hear him breathing through his mouth. You've frightened him. But he says nothing.

  "Come on. We've known each other for a long time. Coming up on a year, before you know it. You've had me over. I've returned the invitation. We should know each other's name, don't you think?"

  Without seeing his face, you could easily take the sound he makes for a titter. Or he could be tensing to release another blow.

  "What difference does it make? 'Ali.' 'Sayid.' Who on earth would believe me? You're going to kill me anyway. Who are you afraid I'm going to tell? God?"

  You're ready. Ready for the one quick, merciful bullet through the temple. So of course, he denies you. You hear him shuffle a little in embarrassment.

  "Muhammad. Call me Muhammad." "Muhammad," you repeat. "You are a Shiite?" He coughs up a little fart of contempt in his throat. Not even contempt. Not even worth asking why you bother to ask.

  "Muhammad. I once read somewhere ... that Shiites believe food to be the holy gift of Allah. A mirror of the divine sustenance. Look at this." You grope about for the cold stench, put your hand in it as you hold it up toward him. "This is not sacred. This is not food."

  He takes the platter from you. Leaves without a word. Sometime later, another meal appears. More than sacred. Edible. You'd say delicious, but for fear of gilding the lily.

  The dish steams, a Lebanese knockoff of something your mother's exercise in capitalism once specialized in. A bademjan, the heart of the almond, the life of the heart.

  A halim bademjan, with some angelic substance floating around in the stew, electrifying, a taste once deeply familiar to you that you now strain to recognize. But the harder you chase after the ingredient, the more it recedes. You take a bite; the word floats there, on the tip of your tongue. The memory struggles to the surface and dissipates.

  You put down your spoon and wait. You try another mouthful. The familiarity fades with exposure. Every repetition reduces the miracle. You must name it in the last morsel or lose it forever. Then, before you get it to your mouth, restored by the bits you have already devoured, it comes to you. Meat. Chunks of sacrificial lamb.

  You walk a tightrope between sassing your guards and falling at their feet. When Muhammad next visits, you thread your way dead clown the middle.

  "Are you the Chief? Are you the one that Ali and Sayid call the Chief?"

  His silence settles out, indulgent. He sighs. It can only be a sigh. "Above every Chief, there is always one higher."

  "But you can do things. You have some power. You got me that... meat."

  "Allah is the doer. Allah alone is the getter of things. All power comes from Him and returns to Him."

  "Fair enough. Where did you learn to speak such good English?"

  "That's not important." Although, his tone admits, it would probably be of some interest to the U.S. State Department.

  "Muhammad. You must listen to me. I am afraid I am cracking up. Not just boredom. Boredom is what I feel on the good days. My brain. It's coming apart. I can feel it. Like a damn zoo animal about to go off its nut. I'm this far away from the abyss. I'm going to start screaming soon, at which point you're going to have to kill me, and then you'll have nothing. Nothing. You'll be out a year of room and board and the cost of cremation, and nobody's going to trade you anything for me."

  He makes some calculation, probably not mathematical. "What is it that you want?"

  With your last shred of strength, you force down the fury exploding in you.

  "I need books. I don't care what. Books in English. I'll take anything. I'll take the damn Lubbock, Texas, phone directory. I just. Need. Something to read."

  "We will see," he says, after troubled consideration. "We will do a fatwah to see if you can have a book."

  This sounds less than good.

  Lessons follow in performing a fatwah. It's the old Iowa Fighting Fundy from Spiritus Mundi trick of throwing open the Holy Scripture to a passage, then interpreting the words as if they were a scrap of cosmic fortune cookie. Judgment by roll of the evangelical die.

  You listen to them execute their oracular Three Stooges routine. You tilt your head back, stealthily, to catch the contour of your fate from under the lip of your blindfold. Ali flips the Qur'an open at random. Sayid flops his finger down. Muhammad, the intellectual, reads the selected Ouija utterance and interprets the augury. Decides what the chance passage means.

  "I am sorry," he tells you, sounding genuinely chagrined. "We have consulted the book, and it says no."

  You move toward them, trembling, to the full length of your chain. Your body starts to spasm so violently it scares even you.

  "Then, bloody Christ. Consult it again. I'm not fucking kidding you, man. We need a yes, here. Ayes, or there's going to be an incident."

  In the scuffle, someone knocks you down. You slam the back of your head against the radiator in your fall. The Three Fates evacuate. You float facedown in the pool of your concussion.

  You haven't even the will to remove your blindfold. You lie fetal, curled up in your own placenta. Survival is no longer a virtue, given where survival leaves you. On the far side of this nothingness lies more nothing, one continuous void extending to the ends of space, all the way to the vanishing point, where all lines fall into themselves.

  But life has still worse whiplash in store. Years later, maybe even the next day, human noise penetrates your coma. Sayid, across an unfathomable gulf, tosses something on the floor near you. "We do another fatwah. We ask again. Everything OK. No problem." Getting nothing, he withdraws.

  Another presence settles into your cell. The quaking in you starts up again in earnest. It takes you by your shoulders, determined to shake you back into sawdust. You cannot look for fear of reprisal. You saddle up near the new thing, crane back your neck, inspect it from under the safety of the blindfold. It's everything you fear it to be. Lying on the filthy planks, unswept since you came here, is that inconceivable device: a cunning, made world.

  You kneel and pick it up. You freeze down there on the floor, crying. Afraid to so much as touch it, your fingers clapper spastically against the covers. You bounce the book in your hands, testing its weight for any sign of counterfeit. The mass of it swells up close to your eyes, in the slit of your vision. You hold it up close, trading off depth of field for detail and resolution. The weave of fibers in the paperback binding thickens into a jungle tangle.

  Your s
ight scans up the book's length, seeking out the title that will sentence or deliver you. Terror is no less than desire with the chrome stripped away. In your atrophied eyes, the letters read like a line of alien hieroglyphs. Bizarre analphabetic randomness. English has no such series.

  Then your pulse shoots into your ears. Great. Your word. Your title. You've done it, summoned up this book by the sheer force of weeks-long concentration. By some intricate, unsolvable plan, through the interplay of forces devised by that Engineer whom Creation but grossly caricatures, you have been looked after. The words you love have made their way back to you for awful safekeeping. Imagination survives its own cruelty. You've been set down in this hell for something more than mapping your abandonment.

  For a long time, your eyes refuse the title's second word. Instead, they insist on the word that the word should be. But the surety of print survives your stare. You look again, and the title skids off into senselessness. You remove your blindfold and look dead on. Expectations somehow mutates into Escapes.

  You drop the book, electrocuted. If no one saw you pick it up, they can't punish you for touching it. It lies there, upside down, innocent. Impossible to take in. As the immediate madness subsides, you tick off the possible explanations. A trap. A mistake. A senseless accident. A joke whose cruelty makes mainstream sadism seem like the Marquis of Queensberry.

  It strikes you: maybe even Muhammad, with his clean syntax and accent, can't read. Maybe your guards' English extends no further than film and TV. They've bought this secondhand ream of paper scrap for pennies, down in the stalls of some bombed-out bazaar, left there by the last American with the good sense to get out of this suiciding country while the getting was good. Not one of these men knows what he puts into your hands.

  At this thought, something cracks in your throat. You can't place it at first, a shape so strange you can only wait in wonder for it to take the dulled depths of your confinement, the hive extends its growing hum.

  You vow to ration this opening chapter, to make it last at least through the end of summer. Great Escapes must be your daily introit and gradual. A single paragraph to serve as a matins service, another two sentences every other hour. The need to make astonishment last far exceeds your immediate urge to swallow it whole. The point is not to finish but to find yourself somewhere, forever starting.

  You panic at the rapid slip of pages across the binding from the right width to the left. You scramble for a way to read without making reading's hated forward progress. But the whole book evaporates into fact before you know how you got to the end.

  You close the back cover, sickened by what you've done. You seize up, you stand, you pace around on your chain. You close your eyes, guiltily savoring the cheap stories that you've just slammed down. You pick up the book and start again. It still holds some residual pleasure, but never again the launch into pure potential. Ten days from now, this dazed freedom still reverberating in you will have extinguished itself, starved out by repetition. Great Escapes is over. You will need another. But for a moment, for a thin, narrow, clouded, already closing moment: this. When you come to bed that evening, you turn to tell her, You'll never believe what I read today.

  The year that ended history came to its own end. The retaining Wall fell down, and all certainty came down with it. The Realization Lab's engineers entered 1990 adrift in a fluid landscape, stripped of

  all tether.

  O'Reilly asked Klarpol, How do you like living in a time without safe assumptions?

  Have you ever lived anywhere else? she answered.

  A world without assumptions should have been a world without surprises. But every day brought new shocks to the invented landscape, shocks requiring perpetual invention to smooth them over.

  32

  Wiring the Cavern for sound made more difference than Adie could have imagined. More than it should have. The Arlesean Room designers brought in Rajasundaran, who'd done a stint down at NASA/ Ames in Mountain View, to give the sunny South a tongue. Every event in Jackdaw's cabinet of interactions now came into its audible inheritance. Chairs learned to creak, floorboards to pop. The wind outside the window began to hiss a stereo mistral.

  The key is spatiality, Raj said. We creatures evolved to believe in space, and that's about all you can say for certain about belief. We're binaural. Binocular. These are evolution's tricks for getting us to think in 3-D, and we can't help falling for them every time. 3-D is a trick? Adie asked. She sounded hurt. Sure. What isn't, finally?

  They set to work voicing Aries, teaching the rented bed-sit to sing. To their arrays for texture and surface and dimension, they added sonority. The drawer coughed softly as it slid open. The pitcher pinged with the perfect pitch of porcelain. Off in the distance, past the edges of the casement, southward toward the invisible bay, gulls called.

  Even the earliest results unnerved them. Six channels run through five speakers implanted in each wall face sufficed to raise the neck hairs on the most sophisticated visitor. They put Spider Lim, the human litmus, alone in the room. They flew a sonic pigeon through the rafters. He tracked the arc of the flapping bird, a fuller, more physiological belief than had he actually seen one. They broke a pane of glass in the center of the left-hand window. Spider jumped, a full-scale startle. He slammed his fist against his chest.

  Don't ever do that to me again.

  Sound is better than visual, Steve decided. It's more immediate. More virtual to begin with. It hangs in space, getting sharper in memory.

  Adie ignored his invitation. She spoke to him now only when work required.

  Raj sailed through the subaudible battlefield, unaware. Every modality that you can add will square the level of believability. Every new affordance, every connection we can lay down between out here and in there increases the sense of immersion geometrically.

  Spiegel paced in place. We need some haptic device. Some kind of force-feedback jumpsuit that'll resist when you try to walk into things. Pressure-hammers that'll bruise your legs when you scrape against the bed.

  Not necessary, Lim said. And showed them his shins.

  Raj grinned. At bottom, you know? At bottom, the mind wants to be taken in.

  Poor Jackdaw went back and affixed a new element to every data array, a variable pointer that would hold the clicks and pocks that Adie wanted to add to every plunkable object in the room. But he worked gladly. Rajasundaran's audio—the lowing and keening of it—had something of the innermost eerieness, something a visitor assimilated into her tissue before even noticing.

  It knocked Adie out. The sounds are so present! Better than the real thing. It's as if the noises are going off inside my brain.

  Oh, they are, Raj said. They are! We do our real-time signal processing right inside those flaps of twisted cartilage of yours. He wiggled his own flaps in question. We put a microphone in a subject's ear canal, capture the chaos, and reverse-engineer the sampling. Waves crashing into waves, nodes and antinodes wiping themselves out all over the place. Sounds like the Lower East Side, Adie said. You ought to try Jaffna. That's where you lived? Oh no no. Jaffna came to me.

  Her hands dry-pointed the air in front of her, talking before her words could catch up. They scuttled, flustered, like the hands of library patrons at the five-minute warning, gathering together their materials and carrying their quarry up to the charge desk before it shut down for

  the night. Explain.

  What is there to explain, really? Raj spoke in the subcontinental, singsong inflection of Imperial English, whose practitioners outnumbered all of England several times over. My family and I were living our lives in Colombo. The Tigers made some high-profile power plays up in the peninsula. Our Sinhalese aunties and uncles decided that the Jaffna deaths required some symmetrical mischief to put them right. They voted to set fire to the hundred nearest Tamil houses, no matter that these belonged to their dear friends and neighbors. We beat a hasty retreat to Vancouver. A lovely city, by the way.

  What do your parents do
for a living?

  You mean before our move or after?

  Both ... Both.

  A familiar story. You don't really want to know.

  How... how did you end up living here?

  Here? He cast a gaze back at the Cavern, where windows broke, floorboards popped, and pigeons flew about the eaves. You mean Seattle? The idea amused him. I don't really live here. I'm just renting.

  Raj wanted to develop a high-level audio programming language to match the visual one that Jackdaw and Loque were assembling. He wanted fast filter transforms that would change a frog to a choirboy with a few typed commands. He wanted to spin the aural sources in space, make them wheel about with each turn of the head.

  But as with images, acoustic precision exacted its price in responsiveness. Milliseconds loomed huge. Latency killed the sense of presence. Only the tightest virtuoso chorus of sounds would flush the ear into belief. Spatializing the noisy universe and synchronizing it with sight involved a bit of higher mathematical modeling called the Head-Related Transfer Function.

  We should get the Armenian in on this, Rajan said. Adie balked. Is that really necessary? Nothing is really necessary. Not really.

  He's so incredibly unpleasant. The man has raised ugliness to the level of haute art. He's ugliness's high priest.

  They brought in Kaladjian. He started out on his best behavior, which consisted of not saying anything at all. He walked into the Van Gogh bedroom and shrugged. He tapped the shutters and rapped the porcelain with a hand-gripped Polhemus sensor, unhappy with the delayed pocks and pings. He stepped out of the room and removed the stereo glasses.