RICHARD POWERS Read online

  They determined to build a dazzling building. But forty-eight hours in a remote, three-room cabin failed to produce a viable candidate. They were still tossing around possibilities as they packed to return to

  civilization.

  Vulgamott tried to rally them. We should do Vierzehnheiligen. An amazing space. Mysterious, sensual, organic.

  Adie jerked back, as if slugged. Oh God. God, no. We'd all be insulin-dependent diabetics within a week. How about something clean, like ... Fallingwater?

  A total bear. I mean, it's a staggering building and all. But how in the hell would we ...?

  Too innovative, Ebesen agreed. Too singular. The tool set wouldn't be much of a help.

  Well, Karl? Adie clasped her hands together in front of her face.

  How about a time-lapse Troy?

  Vulgamott howled. Ebesen, you maniac. 1 divorce you, I divorce you,

  I divorce you.

  All right, all right. Nobody get excited. I vote for the Temple of Diana at Ephesus.

  Oh terrific, Michael said. Why bother doing an existing structure when we can do a building that has disappeared without a trace?

  Well, there is some basis for speculation ...

  How about the RL? Vulgamott proposed. The perfect compromise. We have all the data at our fingertips.

  Kill me first, Adie said. It's bad enough that we have to live in the place.

  Whatever we model, Ebesen insisted, has to be well made.

  It has to be beautiful, Adie said.

  Vulgamott let loose a bat-pitched scream. It has to be doable. You people. I can't believe this. What a colossal waste, this whole hug-a-tree idea. Two days up here and we haven't figured out anything that we couldn't have come up with in fifteen minutes back in the gerbil-run. A beautiful, well-made building. For this we needed to eat Stemo-soaked vegetable kabobs and encourage chiggers in the joys of symbiosis?

  Adie took her leave of the two men and headed back up into the woods for a last look, before returning to made existence. She followed the streambed awhile, to a narrowing that she figured had to exist. When she found the place, or a reasonable facsimile, she looked around, listening for any sounds larger than a muskrat. Hearing none, she stripped. She slipped into the water and sat in the eddy of her own naked body. She spun about in the numbing current, her length a lode-stone, until she faced upstream. Somewhere near this water's source lay the solution they needed.

  She knifed in the water, a rose-brushed trout. She kept under for as long as she could bear. The liquid ran colder and denser than she'd thought. It contracted her arteries and hammered her head. She felt her ideas go soft, giving in to the snow-fed current. She worked back to the shore. It took her two tries to lift herself up on a boulder. As the glaze of water on her evaporated, her core temperature plunged still deeper. She huddled on the rock, hands around her knees, convulsing.

  Adie? a voice twenty feet away called.

  She screamed and splayed, grabbing the rock as she lost her balance. She fought to reach her stack of clothes, and she fell. She cowered, clasping her T-shirt against her nakedness. Down the path, through the skirt of trees, his back to her, his hands folded in a cowl over his head, stood Karl Ebesen. She closed her eyes, breathed out hard, and slugged herself in the chest, to restart her heart.

  Ach, Ebesen moaned. Jesus. Sorry, sorry, sorry. Plaintive burlesque crept into his apology. She had to laugh. The most anguished she'd seen the man since meeting him.

  Hang on. Give me two minutes.

  Fright, at least, had killed the chill. Her clothes felt good going on, wicking the water off her skin.

  She stepped out from behind the rock. All hid.

  Ebesen lowered his hands and edged forward, shy caller in some overgrown game of tag. Forgive me. I figured it would be worse for you to hear me slinking away through the branches.

  Not a big deal. My fault, really. She reached out to reassure his elbow, which withdrew from her touch as soon as politeness permitted.

  That old spirit of noblouse oblige, he said. Susanna and the Elders. A genre subject that for some reason has fallen into neglect in the last few years.

  May I?

  She nodded. This man could do nothing she might object to. She looked into the metal surface while he pulled her hair back until it disappeared. He rested both hands against her jaw, as if feeling for swollen glands. He lifted slowly, with delicate pressure, like a potter at the wheel. Her whole lower face rose up into her cheekbones. He molded her skin, consulting no references. He needed none.

  Adie studied the result in the mirror. She turned and complied, holding the metal so she could look out on the wall of photos. And she became the cameo she was looking at. She shuddered, spun away from the photos, and dropped the mirror, freeing her face and hair.

  Ebesen stepped back and raised his hands. I'm sorry. Forgive me. Twice in one day.

  No, no. It was just... creepy, is all.

  That is the polite word for it.

  I'm not really ... I don't really look much like her, you know.

  No?

  I mean, Karl. Really. You have to push my face all around. If you maul a person's musculature, you can make anyone look like anyone.

  Really? Think we could do up Mr. Gates the Third as a good Baroque John the Baptist on a platter?

  She laughed, against her will.

  Ebesen sipped from his water. Do you know her?

  Adie turned back to the photos. Did she know her? The possibility had never crossed her mind. She combed the mosaic again for some spark of recognition. None.

  Should I?

  He looked at the gallery, as at a police lineup. Gail Frank?

  The name was common enough to sound familiar, but too common to place. One four-by-six exposure showed the woman in the middle of what looked like Washington Square, adjusting a mannequin into a fetal position on the pavement, surrounded by a few curious

  onlookers.

  She liked to work outdoors, Ebesen said. "Outstallations," she called them. Closed studio spaces made her claustrophobic.

  In the next shot, Ebesen's camera had caught Gail Frank in the act of binding the hands of the now-blindfolded mannequin behind its back. In adjacent Polaroids, she manipulated various other dolls, dummies, and human figures, stacking them up in shipping crates, loading them into mailers, packing them into constrained spaces in tight crystal lattices.

  Gail... Frank. A performance artist? Something nagged at her. Some buried, peripheral thing.

  Ebesen shook his head. Remember performance art? Remember the seventies? God, we sure do slash and burn our genres these days, don't we?

  Something in the way he said these words opened the sluice of her memory. Adie's hand flew up to her mouth. Gail Frank. Of course. The story that had the whole of artistic New York bound and entranced. At least for a season. The woman who ... Mark Nyborg's ... ?

  At the name of the fallen icon of minimalist sculpture, Ebesen's head jabbed forward.

  Adie chose her words. The woman he killed.

  Ebesen shrugged. Maybe.

  Karl. What do you mean, maybe? The man pushed her out of a thirteenth-story window.

  Fourteenth. But who's counting?

  Convicted by a jury. Put away. As far as I've heard, he's still doing time somewhere.

  Ebesen cleared a coating of papers off the stuffed chair and sat. He swirled his glass, then drained down to the white lees of plumbing scum. He stroked the empty tumbler like Beuys stroking his dead hare. Wouldn't that be incredible, for all of us? I mean, if we could actually "do" time?

  You knew her? Adie shrank from the anemic formulation. The man had an altar of pictures erected to the woman. His home's sole decoration, aside from the piles of rubbish. You were ... close?

  His mouth tightened into irony's thin mail slot. We were close. She ... upgraded me for him.

  Her every possible response became impossible.

  Strictly a matter of portfolio improvement. Gail needed to assoc
iate herself with heavy hitters. Reputation, standing, influence. That kind of thing. She was a creative vampire. Her own work fed off the attention that others were getting. After a couple of years, she outgrew whatever meager attention I was ever likely to receive in this life. And she grew into Mr. Nyborg, whose fame was expanding without limits.

  Not fame, Adie snapped. Notoriety. Surprised by the anger massing in her. A poseur. A salesman.

  Not without talent. She definitely traded up.

  Adie looked at this man with whom she'd worked for two years in the closest of quarters. Even objection seemed shut down.

  I can't say her departure left my life entirely impoverished. Gail was a ... complex personality. It took me some time to realize that even grief brought its own kind of relief.

  Adie turned back to the picture anthology. The woman displayed every available facial expression from hostility to helplessness—the same unbridgeable spread that any life indulged in. Gail Frank's face exerted an eerie magnetism, the pull of the scared expression that knows you want to look at it. The beauty of narcissism. Her face looked nothing like Adie's. Adie looked nothing like the woman.

  She heard herself talking, from across an echoing hall. And you don't think that man murdered her?

  Well, you know, Mark went off to a double lifetime prison sentence swearing that Gail.... helped herself over the sill.

  Adie studied the woman, her public shows, her private nondisclosures. She shook her head. Wasn't there something about repeated abuse?

  Another thing that I'd fail to give her.

  And the neighbors in that building, testifying that they used to hear him, drugged, threatening at the top of his voice that he was going to kill her?

  Adie swung around to face Ebesen. He was studying her with a quizzical expression. You've retained a surprising number of details about the case.

  She shrugged. I was a young artist, living in New York City.

  Ebesen stood up. So were we all, once.

  He crossed the room without a word, walking away from her. The interview was over.

  Karl. Please. I'm sorry.

  He disappeared into his bedroom, behind the lacquer screen. She stood forever, wondering if she should let herself out.

  Hang on, he called at last. It's around here somewhere.

  When he returned, he was toting a cardstock portfolio like the one he carried around with him at the RL, only bigger and rattier. He laid it out on a plateau on top of the floor clutter. She came behind him as he flipped through the enclosed sheaves. With each riffled picture, she wanted to call out for him to stop and back up. But he was going somewhere, flipping so rapidly that every so often he tore one in his hurry. Every tear ripped into her.

  At first glance, she took them for color photographs. My God, she said, after a handful went by. What's the medium?

  These? They're just acrylics.

  Holy shit. Did you use projection?

  He dismissed her with a laugh. If I'd used projection, these things might have been fashionable. As it is, freehand, they're just curios.

  She needed him to stop flipping, to stop talking, to give her eye a chance to correct the impression of perfection, see the blemishes, figure out how it was done. But Ebesen forged on faster. When he finally came to rest on the thing he sought, she wished he'd kept going.

  The image jumped out at her, an obscene crime-journalism spread. Gail Frank lay clutching the sidewalk, with half the legs of a spider, but twice as disjointed. Karl turned the paper ninety degrees. Odd, no? This way, she looks like she's scaling the north face of a sheer rock drop.

  Adie could only stare. Stare at the ungodly, omnipotent technique. Stare at the obscene subject matter, painted here as if it were the heart of tranquil eternity. A woman lay sprawled on the pavement, her mechanism smashed. Pressed up against the floor of the world, clutching it, as if sleeping at the bottom of a deep well. All she lacked was a chalk outline around her now-obsolete body.

  You couldn't have seen this, Adie said. Adamant. Hoping.

  He nodded in contradiction. I did.

  In your imagination.

  Oh, my imagination isn't that good.

  She looked again, refusing the evidence. A hyper-real, lurid tabloid shot of the victim after impact. Adie's head tracked back and forth, a searchlight in denial. This is ... You must have painted this from a photograph?

  I painted everything from photographs. It's absurd, isn't it? I mean, what's the point? A photorealistic copy of a real photo. The camera can do everything the hand can do, a million times easier and more effectively. He picked up the sheet of paper, then let it fall. Except be the hand.

  Karl. It's horrible. How could you ...? Where did you get the photo?

  I took it.

  She recoiled from him. Her hands pressed up to receive her face, taking disgust's mold. When they came away, her face was still there.

  You don't understand, he said. She's not dead.

  Those three words came from a place she couldn't look at. Her colleague, the bagman, a victim of the quietest mental illness imaginable.

  I mean here. She's not dead yet, in the picture. In the photo I took of her.

  She wanted to take him and hold him in his delusion, a greedy pieta, however much his body dwarfed her own. She reached out and took his elbow, cradling what she could.

  He pulled away. No. It's not what you think. I made this about ten months before her death.

  She shook her head. No: no.

  It's from a favorite performance piece of hers. She used to find a nice stretch of public sidewalk down in the Financial District, get a demonstration permit, and then lie out on it for as long as she could get away with it. Used to scare the shit out of the Wall Street crowd.

  Oh Jesus. Oh God. She watched the picture dissolve under her eyes, every detail changing to some identical other. You're saying her death was a ... piece?

  He looked again at the subpoenaed exhibit. That s what her boyfriend told the jury.

  And you? What did you tell the jury?

  I think it must have been a collaboration. A workshop effort. Ebesen shut the portfolio with brutal finality. Mark, Gail, and me.

  You? Oh, Karl. How can you blame yourself for something that... She trickled off, losing her way out of the idea.

  I shouldn't have been tempting fate. A person should never represent anything that they aren't willing to have come true.

  Wait. No. That picture ... had nothing to do with her death. You weren't even painting. You were just documenting the woman's ... How were you supposed to know?

  We know what we paint. And everything we paint comes into the world somehow. That's why God put the kibosh on graven images, you know. He didn't want the minor leagues fooling around with something they couldn't control.

  She crossed the gap between them. She put her arms around him, to silence him. He made no move either to conform or to quit the sentence. Like embracing a six-foot burlap sack of rice. She pulled away, blunted, holding on to his flank.

  Karl, you can't carry this around with you. Your picture had no bearing on ... You're not responsible. You didn't do this.

  Oh, but I did. Everyone does what they do, finally.

  She let go of him. She stepped back, staring. He would not look at her. It fit together now, what the man was doing here, what he wasn't doing. All the things he'd never do again.

  And you? he said, reading her thoughts. How about you? What's your excuse?

  She shook her head. I have no excuse.

  Why did you give it up?

  She held her hair back with one hand and reddened raw. Because. Because it was a racket. Because we might as well be in an honest business. Because art does nothing.

  He took her water glass from out of her fingers and vanished into the kitchen, leaving her the dignity of isolation.

  You still love her? she called to him, for no reason. So there wouldn't be silence.

  He called back, invisible, from the ell. Still...
? What makes you say that?

  What makes you. She figured the reasons. Counted them up, syllo-gistically aloof. The pictures. Like some Central American grotto of gra-cias to the Virgin.

  Oh, he called back. That. Step back.

  It took her a moment to process. She stepped back. Yes?

  Nothing? Step back again. Keep going.

  She stepped back as far as she could, all the way to the opposite wall. She looked up again at memory's pastiche. Suddenly each individual picture —each discrete pattern of light and dark—diffused into the dithered dots of a newspaper halftone. Where there had been hundreds of images, there now was just one: a single, gaping composite of a female face. But exactly whose face, the composite lacked the resolution to disclose.

  Something moved to the left of the illusion. She looked away. Karl had come back into room, watching her discovery. When he spoke, it was as if all life's ballots were already counted.

  I had a box of photos lying around. Most of them were of her. And I had this idea. I don't get that many of them these days. It was just an experiment.

  Art made nothing happen. Nothing but what had to.

  By the way, he added, she loved your show.

  33

  I need more to read," you tell Sayid.

  He can't grasp the request. They've already brought you a book. What have you done with it? What is this more?

  "I've read this one. Finished. Many, many times. I know every word in it No surprises left."

  He takes the book away. No new volumes come to replace it.

  You must work on Muhammad. He is the only possibility, among the guards. Sayid has a soul capable of sympathy. But he is a simple man, a Bekaa peasant from a poor cotton-farming family, ending up with the Partisans more for the twenty-five dollars a month than out of any strong conviction. In his world, books are not even a luxury. They are an obscene irrelevance.

  Ali is even less use. He has gotten bad again, these last two months. He'll come sit in your cell in the evenings, unrolling long campfire tales of who he is and where he came from. Practicing his English, like one of your innocent students. An eager, swaggering boy weaving a valiant epic out of his life.