RICHARD POWERS Read online

  You'll finish, Spiegel said. And then you'll write something else. Because this one won't please you anymore. Yet, Ted corrected. Won't... please me yet. Give us a minute, Adie ordered.

  Spiegel's head jerked back. I have been asked to evacuate, he told Ted. Goodbye. Farewell. Take care. Write if you get work.

  He walked without looking, out to the front room, where a ballroom of white-tied aristocrats swirled to the strains of a Strauss lдndler. Near the door, a doubled-up woman, trembling against her rocker in time to the meter, hummed a descant to the ghost dance's tune.

  Adie reappeared, pumice-faced. OK. I'm done. Let's get out of here.

  Nothing outside could touch either of them. The rental car was their cocoon, a safe capsule heading north in the dark.

  Were you aware, Stevie said to the Ohio night, that a huge percentage of the population eventually gets sick and dies?

  Adie stared at the ribboning road. Finally, in a voice the color of that hypnotic pavement, she said, Denise Girandel.

  Denise Girandel? Nothing. Then: Denise Girandell How in the name of hell did you dig up that one?

  She shrugged. How many cat women are there in one persons life?

  Why didn't you tell him?

  I wasn't about to give the bastard the satisfaction. A mile went by. Besides. Trying to remember gives him something to do all day.

  They pulled up at the motel. Spiegel sat still in the passenger seat, the motor dead. You two should never have gotten divorced. You know that, don't you?

  Whatever you say, Stevie. Then, softer. It's not that people shouldn't get divorced. It's that they can't.

  Hours into the night, she came into his bed. Looking for something— an explanation, a barricade, another mammal's pelt.

  I'm not going to hurt you, she said. I just need to lie here. I just need to hold someone.

  Holding lasted no longer than holding ever does. But when it came to the things she needed, hurt and hurting were not least among them. She kneaded into him, as if the thing she had to release lay on the far side of a wall, just out of her reach. She ground against him, less in pleasure than in desperation, in search of some permanence she meant to work on his body. She forced into him, desperate to press all shale to slate. He tried to say her name, but she put her fingers into his mouth, gagging him with desire.

  Whatever release she wheedled out of the contact had nothing to do with him. He was just the nearest body, the closest living thing that Would hold still. She fell off him finally, spent, holding him so that he could not turn to embrace her.

  For the longest time she did nothing except to lie beside him on this single motel bed, returning to the unbearable baseline of sixty beats a minute. Then she reached over, her hand cupping around his face, a child playing guess who.

  By the tips of her fingers, Stevie felt that his temples were wet. Remind me, he said.

  She rustled up close to his ear. Remind you what?

  Once out of nature. To look for something better than this body.

  She stroked his temples, counterclockwise. Each trace around the circle undid one spent year. Then she placed his words—the past, the poem that he was quoting. Her fingers clenched. Go on, she commanded. Desperate. Say it. Say the rest.

  He could not refuse her anything. He'd given her worse, more irreversible, already this night. His own voice rang strange to him, speaking into the black:

  Once out of nature I shall never take My bodily form from any natural thing, But such a form as Grecian goldsmiths make Of hammered gold and gold enamelling ...

  Her hand closed on the skin around his eyes. Her nails clenched, as she pressed back into him. He held still in pain, ready to be blinded.

  That's it, she whispered into the gaping motel room. That's the room we're supposed to build. And set upon a golden bough to sing. The place we're after. Byzantium.

  35

  In time, whole days start to vanish. For a long while the orderly egg carton of the calendar has regulated your mind, kept it, if not productive, at least aligned. But now the carton starts to crumple, the eggs to break against one another in an angry omelet.

  You carry on numbering the days, desperate for form, although the tally no longer correlates with anything. The week arrives when you can't make it from one Friday call to prayer to the next without disorientation. It pulls you up out of a night's sleep and runs you under the freezing fire hose—this drift into terror, into utter timelessness.

  This room's day permits only the crudest clock. Sometimes it is dark; sometimes a little darker. The only reliable instrument here is your English Qur'an, that earthbound perjury of heaven's uncreated original. Its pages solidify into a discipline, the rigorous training for a track meet you must get ready for. Reading is your daily regimen, each session coming to a forced stop after ten verses, wherever that leaves you. Whole surahs dangle right before the end, or break off bluntly after just starting. Only the count counts.

  You may reread the day's passage as often as you like, but not a word more. When the hours expand beyond their usual cruelty, you pore over the opening fatihah until it induces oblivion. But you keep to the day's installment. For tomorrow, after the forced march through the latrine and the return to the chain, this system will return you to the previous outing's exact stopping place, to start you up again in the slot where today has dropped you.

  This ritual hammers out a few still moments to stand in. It steadies the swirl of eternity, for as long as the verses last. This time you ration yourself, sustain the escape. The Cow, the Bee, the Table: just the mystery woven into these chapter names diverts you from hovering madness. However reconfigured this Jonah, this Joseph, this Abraham, they make their way against the backdrop, under the Thunder, out from the Cave, along the Night Journey. Say, the words of the Prophet always start. Say: were the sea ink for the words of God, the sea would fail before the words did.

  The verses themselves evade you. Their linked riddles will not crack. But the torrent of words, their sense-free cadences suffice to hold you, even in the absence of story. Their pageant of sounds drowns out your own incessant dunning. The throwaway phrase "and the water-bearer let down his bucket" expands in your eyes for hours, sounding in your ear for all the world like a soul-saving miracle, the most magnificent idea, the roundest image you have ever stumbled on.

  But the secret side effect, the contraband payoff must never have occurred to your captors. They've already broken one divine prohibition in giving you this forbidden foreign translation in the first place. Surely they would confiscate the Scripture if they suspected the scope of its revelation. These measured-out passages keep you tethered in the flux of time. If you start at the fatihah and sum the verses you have read, then divide the total by ten, the quotient yields, by the miraculous dictate of numbers, the total number of days that have passed since you received the word. This is your new perfected calendar, dating not to any fixed year but resetting all dates to your own private hegira.

  Most days, the balm of this word hoard outpaces the torment of its rationing. But sometimes balm and torment settle into a dead heat-starting and stopping, sentences and silence torturing one another to death. How have you been brought to this, staking yourself to the same book your mother once committed to memory without her understanding more than one in a dozen words? You reopen the wounds that that victim once inflicted on herself. Did you think to enter paradise without suffering the violence of those who have come before you?

  They tame the abyss, these verses, better than any parade of orderly notches in the wall plaster could. But they cannot repair your own damaged mainspring, or synchronize it. When you return to the well of text, passages that you recall from adjacent days now stand split by several pages, while those separated by weeks in your memory run flush against each other. This evidence hits you, like a freshly discovered lump in your abdomen. You and lucidity have been parting company without your knowing. Mind has been resorting to the quietest drift, a protective hallucinat
ion finally gentler than the alternative.

  All you can do is stay grappled to the book's planed planks, hoping that after each breaker, the timbers you've lashed to will bob back to the surface. The only recourse, when this morning slips loose, is to tie it to ten more verses. You listen in to the archangel Gabriel, dictating to the Prophet in his subterranean cave. This story extends itself only in hinted wisps, as if all readers already know the plot. But the more gloriously cryptic, the better. Each ten-verse maze holds you longer than the Sunday Times crossword ever did.

  You search through the book, for a larger architecture, some forward motion that could pass for form. But the verses possess only the most astonishing organizing principle. The chapters proceed from longest to shortest, starting in prose and ending in prayer. Still, it swells, this staggering dialogue: God, His Prophet, and the cast of broken humanity, in a three-way game of telephone where only endless repetition forces the words to correspond with what they figure.

  You lie in the Prophet's slime-laden cave, taking the complete dictation all over again. Say: I seek refuge in the Lord of the daybreak, from the evil of what He has created; and from the evil of the night when it cometh on; and from the evil of the blowers upon knots. Say: I seek refuge in the Lord of men, from the evil of the whisperer, from jinns and men.

  You do. You say what it says to say. Out loud. You recite your fatwahs and divinations for a live audience of the word-starved. Chapter and verse. Forward and back. No one comes to tell you to break off. Verily, man is in loss, save those who believe and do right, and bid each other be true, and bid each other be patient.

  For a long time, talking to the book is conversation enough. Then the book runs out. You restart the careful system of mental tick marks from the top. But this time through, you already know what the surahs hold. And all those repeated commands to Say, Say at last force you to take the ideas live, into the realm of surprise, of real listeners.

  You target the simplest, most religious of your keepers, the next time he lingers over a delivery. "Sayid, doesn't the Prophet say that you must never steal?"

  "Yes." His only available answer. For lying, too, is forbidden.

  "The man thief and the woman thief. Cut off the hands of both of them, as punishment, for they have done very wrong. An example from Allah, for Allah is mighty and wise."

  You grope for the book, hold it out, open to the Table. He takes it from you, but of course hands the tainted, unreadable translation back to you at once.

  "Yes, Mr. Taimur." As grave as the world at issue.

  "But you have stolen me. You have stolen me from my life, and from my mother, and from my ... family. This is the worst theft of all. How can you do what the Prophet has told you never to do?"

  You hear the man crumble in silence. The surf of faith crashes against the rocks of duty. You curse yourself. But you are ready to do worse.

  "Mr. Taimur, I cannot know. I ask Chef. Tomorrow. Inshallah."

  As if you've asked for another haircut. He comes through two days later, to let you off the chain for your run. He says nothing. You wait until your half hour of exertion ends, and he replaces the iron ring on your ankle.

  "Sayid, did you ask the Chief about... stealing?" You hold out your hands, the ones whose severing Allah specifies as punishment.

  "Chef say not to talk to you. You think like a snake."

  A snake and worse. A squid. A dung beetle. A human. A creature that would live at all costs.

  "Sayid. Walter-jan. How much do your people pay you?"

  He does not answer. However much he grasps the words, he does not understand you. You sense him fling his palms out, helpless.

  "How much do you make? Twenty-five dollars a month? Thirty? You come work for me. I give you forty."

  You cannot rouse him, even to anger. Getting him to kill you, for the moment, is past hope.

  Deliverance almost comes, on the day you stop wishing for it. It begins one evening, during your thirty minutes of exertion off the chain. Gaunt legs work their oval until you find yourself logging a few hundred meters more than usual. You soak up a dozen bonus laps, exulting in this sudden increase in strength that leaves you able to shatter all previous speed records. But soon the laps so completely decimate your old personal best that something must be wrong.

  You slow to a fast walk and take stock. Furtive reconnoitering near the door discloses nothing, no exceptional noises in the corridor beyond. The best explanation of this miracle is the most prosaic. Whoever was supposed to put you back on the leash tonight has forgotten his place in the rotation. The tick of the thirty-minute clock is finally silenced. Infinite freedom descends on you by accident, and leaves you no choice but to seize it.

  You walk all night, a forced march through the checkpoints of crippling fatigue. You cannot squander this supreme windfall, not so long as life lays any claim to you. The epic trek leads off in the dark to parts foreign and unreachable. All those tucked-away peaks and archipelagos that you've never had the leisure to explore now stand naked. Liberty— a whole night in which to rub up against every degree of variegated plaster in the full three-sixty—unfolds with such grace that all bitterness at it having to end gives in to a larger awe.

  All night long, wonder refuses to vanish. Unrestricted mobility. Crouching, cantering, contrapposto, tiptoe: all postures enter the available repertoire. North and South return, and East and West with them, dragging along every skew axis. Amazement, here in the pitch-black passages, is a tactile thing, feeling its way along the smooth-bore corridors into open defiles of feeling that you haven't allowed yourself since the earliest days of captivity.

  With movement comes memory. A string of shuffle-ball-changes carries you back through a packed cocktail party of tongue-tied Japanese businessmen. Four hundred incredulous stutter-steps take you to the muddy crocus beds that your industrious girlfriend once caused to stud your lawn.

  You lie down flat in the middle of this Grand Ballroom. You pry at the lip of your wall of sheet tin, searching for stretches that haven't been stapled down. You drop to the ground in front of the sliver under the door. Up close, through the slit of this science fair experiment, you can see the whole universe. The feet of your captors take turns on the watch, standing sentry over a suite of cells, cells that hold the lives of those taken along with you.

  Hour by hour, the gift expands. You take possession of more room than you know what to do with. Free, at leisure, you pace back and forth across the gaping eight feet. You take up residence in the corner farthest from the radiator, pressing yourself against the far walls, sniffing their surface. Then disbelief shoves you on again, to more discovery. A strangeness spreads over you, one awful enough to seem the reason you were taken. Never again will you gainsay anything, or chafe against your allowed radius, or take a square inch for granted ...

  Daybreak's first covered strands are the cue to slip back to base camp. You lie waiting, acquiescent, on your bed of straw when breakfast arrives. They will see, in this harmless creature, how little need they have for the redundant lockdown.

  But the sight of your freedom drives your guards insane. Bodies fly shouting through your room, enraged. Shadow puppets, through your blindfold, rush around in clumps, testing the lock, searching your clothes, slashing at your mattress with knives. How far do they think you could have gotten in your overnight excursion?

  Voices lash at one another, spitting through their teeth like cornered rats. A feral, crazed face pulls yours up to it, its breath chamoising your cheeks. "How you do this? How you get out?"

  "Please. I did nothing. The guard never came to lock me up again last night."

  They haul you to your feet and slam you down again. A knee swings up, smashing your genitals against the back of your pelvis. One spongy testicle smears against this vise of bone. The wave of red shoots up through your spinal column and comes out through the seams of your skull.

  Even unconsciousness cannot protect you. Each time you wake, the pain sucks you ba
ck under. You come to at last, your face in a pool of vomit, the half-digested dinner from your evening of liberation. The Qur'an can't tell you how long ago that was. Scores of verses pass before you can straighten up and stand.

  By the book's count, they leave you on the chain for a full month. The day they take you off again, your atrophied flesh collapses after four slow drags around the oval. Two more weeks pass before you can lift your knees without puking.

  Then, late one evening run, your laps closing in on their old target, it happens all over again. The half-hour trot widens into three-quarters. Once more, you feel the awful accident of freedom. The day's meals have all arrived. No one else is coming. Six mobile hours could easily build back half the muscle you've lost.

  But there's something too casual this time, too obviously cat and mouse. A test of last term's lesson. A blatant taunt. A cheap trick to justify another beating. Anyone might barge in, at 2 a.m., to catch you in flagrante, flaunting your freedom. They are huddled, even now, over a hidden peephole in these walls, to catch you in the very instant of joy. Sick and beaten, worse than an animal, you return to the padlock and submit. You close the loop tight around your own ankle. The metal clicks; your eyes swell with humiliation. The hate you bear yourself exceeds any that you can feel for your captors. They have their cause; you have nothing. All self, all dignity, sold. All night long, the pathetic dose of freedom that you deny yourself snickers at you from the darkness. Debasement complete, you bare all your openings to the rape.

  36

  They flew back to a Sound rearranged in their absence. Adie forced Spiegel to come home with her the night they landed. To her island cottage, her safe haven. Once might have passed itself off as an accident. Twice had to mean something. But still, she wouldn't tell him what. And he wouldn't ask, afraid she might tell him. Willful ignorance could still pass itself off as anything.