RICHARD POWERS Read online

  "You know what my home is?" he says one night. "My home is Shatila." The massacred camp. Another night he claims, "You know Souq al Gharb? I live in Souq al Gharb. All Lebanese live in Souq al Gharb. Americans bomb shit from Souq al Gharb. Shit-scared, from a boat, out in the water! Because they know we will kill them dead if they come to us on the land."

  "Souq al Gharb is not my fault," you tell him, behind the blindfold. But softly. You do not want to be beaten. You love your limbs. You may even use them again, in another life.

  Ali unloads his story, in bits and pieces—embroidered, enlarged, but now and then, almost by accident, consistent.

  "When I was a little boy, I love the Palestinians. Everyone hurts them. They are my hero. Then the Palestinians burn my village. Why do they do this? No reason. Then I am thinking: The Israelis are coming. They are finding these people who kill my father and my father's sister and my mother's brothers, and they are going to kill them. But what do the Israelis do? What do they do?"

  He deals you a quick kick in the loins.

  "I don't know."

  "You don't know? They burn my village down again. Better than before. Why do they do that? Why?"

  You tense yourself. "No reason?"

  "Big reason!" he shrieks. Someone calls in Arabic outside the door. Ali reassures them.

  You hear him advance on you. "They are not good people," you blurt, ready to scramble.

  "They are bad people. Evil people." Agreement is as violent as argument. "Then the Syrian soldiers come in. I think, Now a real army will tell the Israelis a lesson. But he fails me, Syria. He stops before he reaches the south. He does nothing. He does shit."

  You wade through this brief primer of recent history, trying to remember what really happened. The real chronology lies infinitely far away, political science, a dull, distant abstraction. You can never hope to understand what has happened here. But you must understand Ali.

  "Then you Americans invade. You know something? It's OK. I am fine with America. Because maybe now someone is going to end things. Too many years of dying. Too many crazy people. But what does America do? Bomb shit from Souq al Gharb. From a boat, like a shit-scared girl."

  A long silence, and you wonder if lessons are over again for the evening. But your teacher simply shifts from history to philosophy.

  "No. No. The world wants us dead. Good; fine. The whole world is our Karbala. Too bad for the world. For every violence, we will give a violence. You kill, we kill. You play a trick on us, we bomb your embassy. You bomb our village, we kill your Marines. You think you are hurting us? You are doing good for us. You make us strong. You let Israel destroy Shatila? We kill you on that airplane. You bomb us at Tripoli? We kill three hostages just like you."

  He falls silent, the spilled secret flapping in the air between you. One slip kills, in an instant, all your willed ignorance. Your tenacious denial in the teeth of the evidence.

  Now you will pay for his error, his accidental confession. "Why me?" you rush out, to switch the game back to the abstract. Distract him with a new philosophical conundrum.

  "Look," he says, his voice cold with whatever he imagines to be compassion, "America is not your fault." You've taught him a new word. "But you are America's fault."

  You decide not to bring up the subject of more reading matter with Ali.

  But Muhammad: he is this local cadre's thinking man. The neighborhood Zuama, the Zaim, the reigning brains. The Chef.

  The request only annoys him. "We just gave you a book. You read too fast. You must make it last."

  "Muhammad. I'm dying by seconds here. By tenths of a second. Milliseconds. Nanoseconds. My mind ..."

  He exhales, a single stale laugh. "What is it that you need to read so badly?"

  You deliberately misinterpret. "Oh, a nice, fat novel would be fantastic. The fatter the better. Something meaty. Something nineteenth-century. Moby Dick. War and Peace. Bleak House. Whatever you can dig up. I'm not fussy. I'll read anything. Canterbury Tales. Pilgrim's—" "Do not play the fool."

  Something stiffens in you. Ready to go to war. You will not apologize for wrongs committed against you. This room is where your life will likely end. Safety means nothing anymore. You feel no need for a softer, later death.

  "If you're only going to dribble out one title every time I break down and grovel, at least give me something I can read again and again. Something with some real estate to it."

  "You do not know how most of the world lives." "Muhammad, a book costs nothing. I'll pay you back with interest, after you release me."

  He flashes at your taunt. "You want us to give you presents." "Look. Look around you. See my luxury suite. See the presents you have given me." It makes you giddy, this flirting with destruction. This parading in front of the beast that will kill you without the slightest accounting.

  His voice leans in to you, falling. "This is not your country. This is not a pretty hotel on the beach for rich, white foreigners. You are here for a reason."

  You feel your hands fly up toward the sound and snap its neck. The speed of this rage, its easy closeness, scares you worse than the worst they have done to you. It comes out of you. You tear it off like a crust of bread. Press your thumbs into his Adam's apple until it crumples: all over for you, the eternal boredom, the annihilation, the endless, empty lull of self-loathing.

  "I am here because I am a Westerner." A suicidal one, who thought the war could not touch him. Who walked into this massacre with open arms.

  His silence flows outward, marvelous. "How many Westerners do we keep?"

  "You tell me."

  "You may count them on your hands and feet. Twenty, twenty-five, maybe. Not all belong to our group. For any one Westerner, a hundred Lebanese are in prison. Two hundred. Sunni, Shiite, Druze, Christian. Thousands of Lebanese hostages. How many of these prisoners get the books they ask for, do you think?"

  "How are they held? Are they alone? Can they talk to each other? Can they tell each other stories?"

  More silence. It can have only one source. He is thinking. Thinking about what you say. Hands that wanted to crush his esophagus now want to embrace his shoulders. The first conversation. The first real talk you've had for more months than you can remember how to say.

  "What is it that you need from these books? What can you learn from them?"

  How can you tell him? On every urgent page, in every book born of human need, however flaccid, puerile, slight, or wrong, there is at least one sentence, one where the author is bigger than the writer, one that sheds the weight of its dead fixations and throws off the lead of its prose, one sentence that remembers the prisoner in his cell, locked away nowhere, victim of the world's shared failure, begging for something to read.

  "I... I can learn from them how not to be me. For an hour. For a day. You are crushing me, Muhammad. I need someplace to go. I need something to think about. Somebody else, somewhere else."

  "Go here," he commands you, touching your sternum. "Think about what is inside you."

  "I can only think about that... for so long."

  "We have a saying. Everything in life is imagination. But in fact it is reality. Whoever knows this will need nothing else."

  "I need ... someone to talk to. I need ... to hear someone else thinking."

  "Mr. Martin, do you believe in God?"

  The syllable is one of those auditory hallucinations manufactured from the faint puffs of artillery barrage in the air outside your crypt. A phantom, bizarre query, like the ones Gwen floats you sometimes, as you toss sleepless on your damp pallet.

  Can he really be asking this? You will tell him anything he wants to hear. Tell him about your mother's youth, her feats of religious memorization in a foreign language, beating the Qur'an against her chest in public processions, that believer's life she led before landing in the Hawkeye state.

  "That... that's not the shape that my ... astonishment takes."

  Silence stretches out between you. A small preparation, readying y
ou for the coming moment when silence will be total.

  The year makes its lurch toward spring. Your rear right molar begins to throb. The Chief, the big one, whoever he might be, ignores all requests for a dentist. There are no dentists. Dentists have ceased to exist. All dentists have fled this city, taken themselves off to the Anti-Lebanons, to airier altitudes—the mountains beyond the mountains.

  You take to killing your roaches and assorted vermin, shipping their corpses out with your dirty dinner dishes. A ceiling leak wets the corner above the radiator. Over the months, the steady waterfall cultures a green-algae streak running down the length of wall. The slime necklace threatens to continue down the nape of your neck.

  You point it out to the latest phantom on the far side of the blindfold who comes to feed you. "You see that green stain?" Hoping, behind your blindfold, that you point more or less in the general direction. "You must get rid of it. A man cannot live this way. It's unclean."

  But this guard doesn't even bother to return the traditional bukrah, the annihilating inshallah. The rage of countless months courses up through the veins in your neck and spills over.

  "OK. That's it. I've had it. I'm not paying you people a sou more in rent until you make a few improvements around here."

  There is a silence as wide, as violent as history. You brace for the coming punishment. Then the voice of Muhammad says, "We are taking it out of your salary."

  They come one day to make you submit to a haircut and shave. For the better part of a year, you have not looked on your own image. You don't need to. For the first time in your life, you can see your own hair and beard without benefit of a mirror. The effect must be something like a bad painting of Christ on velvet, only a little more Middle Eastern than he's usually depicted. It has been one of your lone comforts, to twist a five-inch hank around an idle fist for hours at a shot.

  "No thank you," you tell them. The hair has become a source of strength, extruding daily out of your follicles. Your Samson fantasy: power proportionate to its untended length. The plaster behind the radiator has gone soft with heat and damp, and one well-timed, concentrated shove will one day push the soggy Philistine temple down on all of you. Your hermit hair, your curling strands of beard have become your private project, the sole vestiges of growth in a growthless place. Your visible badge of defiance, your rosary of focus. The measure of your captivity.

  "Not to worry. I don't need a haircut just now."

  They advance in a group, at least four of them. One of the voices you have never heard before. The others speak an Arabic in front of this stranger that denies even knowing you.

  "Honest, gentlemen." You giggle. "I would prefer not to. I would prefer not to."

  They unlock you and prod you to your feet. Their touch incenses you. They will not; they have no right. You push out blindly, shoving the hands off you. The knot of them falls back, startled by this madness. Then the zeal of retaliation, of method released. A knee jacks into your back, shattering your kidney and sending your spine into your stomach. One of them goes for the head, batting with the butt of a piece of metal that, even as you fall and ball up, you realize must be the electric-shears.

  It is over quickly. They drag you out in the hall, under a lamp. Crippled all the way down into your rearranged gut, you stop resisting. Three of them hold you pinned, while the fourth tears into you with the croaking shears. They prune your secret strength back to your skull, your scalp clipped repeatedly in the electric blades. Your face follows, beard more ripped off than severed.

  They deposit you back on your mattress, continuing to vent their rite of group rage as they shackle you back up. Sobbing will not stop, nor your body quit convulsing. No food comes that night, or all the next day. No one comes to let you off the chain for exercise. When you reach up to feel your head, you feel only raw hide, patchy and diseased.

  You lie dead for two days. You cannot open your left eye. Something in your abdomen has ruptured. Pain immobilizes you. Your pelvis has been smashed under a boulder. Even making a quarter-turn on the mattress ruptures you. Holding still is a duller agony, but lasts much longer.

  You try to talk to Gwen, but you cannot raise her. Her image can't seem to hear you or tell that you're there. But then she can. She is crying. It seems to be for you. And then it isn't.

  She is crying, because she is thirty-two and her life means nothing.

  I'm a worthless, divorced waitress who's ten thousand dollars in debt. How can you stand being around me? You know what I should do? I should do something with my photography. I'm thinking about going back to school in the fall. Art school. You know what I've always wanted to get good at? Acting. You know: I can write pretty well. I've been thinking about doing some reviewing for The Reader. You know, they run these ads? Training to be a dominatrix? Men who just want to be disciplined a little? It's completely safe, they say. And it pays incredibly well. And it won't cost me a dime, except for the photo portfolio.

  Look, Gwen. I live in the real world. What you always told her, every time around. Horrified, you can't keep from repeating it. I live. In the real world.

  She looks at you: This is the love that is supposed to improve my existence? You want me to believe what? You want me to live where?

  She's right. This is no place to be caught out in.

  Your hemorrhaging organs refuse to kill you. Nothing will put you out of your nausea. There is no misery strong enough to save you from consciousness. The world you live in demands that you eat again, that you recover, that your patchy, bloody fuzz grow back in.

  The guards seal you off, except for your morning trip to the latrine. Even there, they rush you, cutting your allotment to six minutes, then five. They shove your meals through the cracked door in boats made of newsprint. No one bothers to come collect the leftover gristle.

  Then, three weeks after your beating, when you can walk again and even do some light stretching, a present arrives. A forbidden transcript, dropped into your lap. Apology, chastisement, correction, discipline: you don't care what it means. Its thickness suffices, its mass, its heft, its length. A volume to be read no end of times. Words that can take you out of yourself. A book for those who believe in the unseen. The world-changer. The Reading. The holy Qur'an.

  34

  Loque sat entertaining Klarpol, in the safe haven of morning. You know that our director used to fly military aircraft?

  Adie did not know. She knew nothing of importance.

  Never in combat, as far as I know. He picked up the whole virtual environment bug from his exposure to it in the Air Force. One of the first generation of pilots to test out the Head's-Up gear. You know: where they project the instrument display as a graphic, right onto your visor? Man, I'd kill for a gig like that. The chrome, the leather...

  The Air Force? The United States Air Force? They're into this stuff?

  Loque cawed at her. What planet core are you living in? The Air Force was building simulators a decade before you were born. Before digital. Whole film-wrapped rooms that pitched and yawed as you swung the stick around.

  The Air Force wants make-believe?

  Everybody wants make-believe. It's the most powerful leverage over non-make-believe that you can get. By now, the Air Force must have toys that would blow our little Brownie box camera out of the skies.

  But why on earth ... ?

  Come on. Use your circuits, girlie. It's a whole lot more cost-effective to let the little gunner boys kill themselves a few times in synthetic space than to have them all baptized under real fire. Hardware is cheap; wet-ware is what runs you.

  Good God. Something issued from Adie that couldn't be called a laugh. I'm working for Dr. Strangelove. Again. She closed her eyes and shook her head. One palm flew up to supplicate, then gave up and fell back to her lap. My dad was Air Force.

  Did he abuse you?

  Ab—? No. No. Not... in so many words. Why do you ask?

  You ought to try abuse sometime. I mean, on the receiving end.

>   Adie looked at Loque, the eyebrow studs, the chains and bangles, the new tattoo of barbed wire that had recently sprouted around her pale biceps. Your father?

  Loque flicked back her grenadine hair. It's what they do.

  No. Mine was too ... too absent for anything like that. He got the dagger in in other ways. I went into art just to spite him.

  Sue's head rocked back and forth. Can't spite those guys. Can't fight the Air Force. Dad holds the patents on anything we might want to throw at him.

  How did he end up in industry?

  Fearless Leader, you mean? Freese? You get too old to zap things, they turn you out to pasture.

  God help us. Retired Air Force. What does he want from me?

  Nothing much. Just wants you to design a world that will wow the press corps and excite the greater purchasing public at the same time.

  I'm dead meat. Nothing we might possibly design can hope to... Compared to what the public already imagines, anything we make is going to seem like an inflatable jerk-off doll.

  Hmm. Sounds like a killer app. Lot of folks are looking for just that.

  Help me, Sue. You're my only hope.

  Content's your department, babe. I'm just a tool guy, myself.

  Oy, oy. Adie gripped her head in the vise of her two hands. You're telling me that the boss was a fighter pilot, before he became himself?

  Sue nodded with vigor, her nose rings flapping happily.

  Do you know about Karl Ebesen? Adie asked.

  What about him?

  About who he was, in his former life?

  Sue shrugged. We all want something from the machine.

  It messes us up, Adie decided. It really screws us over, representation. You know that?

  Of course it does. Whatever hasn't been totally fucked up already.