RICHARD POWERS Read online

  A silence. Finally, she will be wide, will return, in kind, the surrender you want to give her. Finally she will leap free, meet you for that smallest mutual swap of sovereignty, the first exchange of trust you both so badly desire.

  Well. Of course it's worth ... But you make it sound like it's my—

  Just say. Just say you love me. Once. Without countering.

  Tai. What...? How ...?

  The rage courses through you again, as powerfully as when she spoke these words to you for real. Oh to hell with you. Why don't you just pack your fucking antiseptic overnight bag and... You swing your hand around to point at the window, or where the window would be, if it weren't sheet metal. This sealed aperture, twisted around in mental geography to align with your old southern exposure, the true-to-life direction of... go home.

  Oh God. She falls away from you, cowering, as from the silenced mortar. Her voice goes spectral. Spooky. On the edge of an ocean you don't want to imagine. You were going to hit me.

  All night long and into the following day, you redirect the scene. You adjust the mistaken angle of your backhand. You alter the words, change the pacing, fix the crooked gesture. Pay the penance of replay, summon up all the correction that editing can offer. Do everything in explanation's power to heal the misunderstanding. You reshoot everything for hours, trying to convince her, convince yourself, that the blow she ducked would never have been possible. That the anger you were feeling and the anger she saw were not the same.

  Someone knocks on your door. You rise to open it, amazed to find her standing in the dingy, unguarded corridor. She has come back, in tears, wanting some better last word. You rush out to meet her. But the speed of your advance scares her, and she turns to run.

  You rush after her, to prove that you can't hurt her. No guards stop you; it happens too quickly. She flees your attempted comfort, terrified. She stops, cowering, her arms above her head. You take her arms gently, to lower them from her face once and forever. She stiffens, and you pull harder.

  In the flash of an instant, the tug escalates into the full contest. Now you could truly hurt her, slap her hard, to stop her struggle, to carry her back into the room's safety before the larger insanity finds you out here. And in that moment of violence, you are everything she has feared in you, everything she always knew was knocking around inside you, awaiting only this awfulness to be born.

  She disappears. Throughout that dry season, she will not come back. But she leaves behind something more useful than remorse. For in that impulse chase, she has taught you how to spring from this prison down to the street below.

  You pace yourself. You draw out the exercise in stages. You work up the block of Lincoln Park immediately outside your building. The goal is largesse, weight, a map on the scale of an inch to an inch. You stand still until every contiguous brick and block of concrete reconvenes. No gaps: you refuse to step down the street until every fuzzed foot fills out with casements and moldings.

  Seventeen doors on your side of the street. Twelve, plus two shops and a parking garage on the other. Four stories of apartments, shoulder to shoulder, each one occupied with lives scavenging for scraps of love, scrambling to keep current, scrabbling to survive on the crust of the world's collapsing infrastructures. You move through this staggering set, a denser network than your eye ever made out when you actually lived there. Half a residential block lays out a universe so nauseatingly profuse that you need the safety of your cell even to consider it. Your Qur'an is right: the God of Creation is as close as your own jugular. And as far.

  Your cell sits inside a similar hive, the hive in its own warren, the warren in a neighborhood as dense as the one you reconstruct. You try to walk abroad here, too, but every attempt fails. You can no longer resolve the school, or the faces of your students. For all the weeks that you lived there, your Beirut compound now stands locked to you. You can't even say what floor you now inhabit, let alone the size of this building. From the sound of traffic, the street lies no more than two flights below you. You try to fall quietly to this pavement, but can't. You open the door and take the stairs, but the city waiting at the bottom of the stairwell is never this one.

  Lives swarm on all sides of you, through these walls, across the gully of street that the sun must surely warm and expand. Other lives live out their existences not a hundred feet from you: other Westerners, bargaining chips in a game the point of which even the principal players no longer remember. You hear their scrapings, their muffled back talk to the guards. You savor the evidence of their hurried ablutions as you rush through your own bathroom runs. But you can't see them, can't

  make them out.

  A hundred meters farther out, two hundred, half a kilometer: your throw nets tear under the haul. Hundreds of thousands of Lebanese of all denominations live locked away in holes that bless yours by comparison, with no world superpower, however impotent, to demand accounting for their treatment. You put yourself in these streets, but they vanish beneath your feet. You've learned the ability to venture forth at will. Full-color, high-resolution. But always only Chicago. Always the near North Side, life before lifelessness found you out.

  Through long practice, applied urban renewal, you fill in every surface of your former block. There you reprise your old existence, an invisible tourist, threading through the mass pageant. Incubus again, among the lives that you depended on for every particular, people that you fed off without even bothering to learn their names. What you liked to call a private person, a solitary one, all the dress-up terms for parasite. Now that you'd knock on their doors, enter their living rooms give yourself wholeheartedly to your bit part in the improvised script you can't. Your neighbors pass right through you on the street. You an the phantom you worked so hard to be.

  They give you the keys to the city, abandon you to free excursion: deeper downtown. You make a left on Clark and head down past the Historical Society. Jog over to Dearborn or La Salle, depending upon barometric pressure. The weather is always spring. When you stop, a Gilded Age mansion or pretty brownstone faзade slides into focus. But you don't often stop, short of your destination.

  The approach to the Loop, always on Michigan, picks up definition. The Hancock, the Water Tower. On the bridge, the full panorama comes back. The newspaper buildings, Marina Towers. But bit by bit, even the throwaway filler solidifies, the tumbleweed concrete thrown up in the alleys and interstices. You start to remember buildings you can't ever have registered in all your years living in this town.

  But this is still not what you've come to see. You click off the last mile, down the superb stretch that the two of you took at most six times, in all your two and a half thousand opportunities to walk it together. The line of the lake opens. Buildings to the left of you fall away, leaving on your right a sheer cliff face of masonry and glass. When the explosions issue from the direction of Navy Pier, you hold them at bay. Nothing human can harm a single pane of this illusion.

  Twin carved lions enlarge in front of you, proving your forward motion. The sensation is uncanny, like sitting on a stationary train while another backs up on the next track. If you can mount the stone steps, get past the coat check, the bookstore, the ticket booth, if you can climb up the grand central staircase without some street detonation or strip assault by sadistic guard, you are home free.

  Once you reach that second floor, nothing can harm you. Time lies crumpled in a heap, back downstairs at the coat check. Always a footrace; you can't enter the museum except through that long walk in from the North Side. The slightest tracer can defeat you, any block along the way. But once you're here, the soul-pithing dullness of existence has no more say.

  The day still advances at its old rate, but you no longer feel it. Your heartbeat races or freezes, turns on a pin, floats on a seascape, jumps through a circus hoop, does whatever you tell it to do. It trawls in the afternoon light, downstream from an old mill. It ascends into heaven with the Virgin. It dawdles, designless, at a cafe full of boaters. It floats
in a porcelain footbath full of water.

  Hours may pass in your absence. Sometimes you come back, and the gaping wasteland between lunch and dinner has vanished. Sometimes the day has not budged since you set off, and all you have to show for your weekend away is swollen feet. But so long as you are here, you are safe from both hope and its opposite. There is no long, no short, no tedium, no delay. Only the dimension-free now.

  Time here is caught in the thinnest frozen section, sliced off and held to the light. At every inhabited moment, someone has needed to make these plays of line, these shorthands for elsewhere, for ever. You came here too rarely to fix in your mind more than a few dozen of these trapped eternities. But how many eternities does one person really need? Any one will fill all the space you give it.

  Surviving to find your way here, you're free to range at will. You lie back in a manicured green park on what seems a riverbank. You stand on a platform in a glass-roofed railroad station, filling up with steam. Who would have thought you'd have such a memory for color? You cannot remember the color of Gwen's eyes, but you can make out the girl at the half door's, down to their nearest wavelength.

  Here, in these galleries of hypothetical, your Qur'an turns its true face to you. You've failed to grasp it until now, the flash point of all faith, the law against depiction. The men who have taken you still adhere to the same ban that the West started out with—its second commandment, for God's sake. You stroll through the banned images, the forbidden fruit, heaven's stolen fire. This is the war that steals your life. Its front stretches out before you, farther than you can see. You've strayed into a factional flare-up, fluke regional politics. But even yours is just a tiny salient in the global sacred conflict, the millennia-long showdown between those who would fabricate God, forever sculpting and perfecting, and those who would suffer Him unseen.

  Even being here indicts you. You're guilty, aligned. You are graven image's man, hostage for a reason. You can hope for no sentence less than the general bonfire. Imagination may be worse than the thing it would save you from. But what you will not abandon, you must live in. A place past hope. A place past place. A now indifferent to what happens next.

  You press through the jumble of rooms, searching for that picture that you can't picture, the view that would make even death livable. On this upper floor, the two of you once stood looking. The simplest arrangement imaginable. Nothing: an open shutter, a few sticks of furniture. You turned to Gwen, to see what she saw. And she was weeping. Staring through wet lenses at that painted taunt, timeless and still, sadistically refusing her entry.

  You should be able to summon it up in your sleep. But no; you must thread your way to where it hangs and look on it. No other way. Must have it there, in front of you, stroke for stroke.

  The galleries are too many, the catalogue of old urgencies too wide. They maze you. The halls loop back inside their own folds. You have trouble steering your mental proxy. The puppet is willing but the strings are weak. Paint's apartments disappear down receding corridors, a nightmare rococo palace that lengthens with each step, its chambers filled with nativities, crucifixions, state-sanctioned agitprop, flattering bourgeois makeovers, pretty pastel picnics, nostalgic landscapes sprinkled with faked-up ruins.

  Days unfurl when it feels as if you are closing in. All but there. A glow issues from down the hall, three archways away. You pick up the pace, forgetting, in your excitement, the original goal of killing time. She'll be standing, stilled and well, across this last threshold, waiting for you in the southern light, on the smooth-planked, scarred varnish floors.

  Holy War always tears you back. For weeks it can leave you rotting, only to choose its moment of maximum intrusion. Ali, yearning for his school days in the States, bounds into your cell to chat about the Final Four. Some argument among your overseers, tuning their crippled TV to the latest Arabic-dubbed Dallas or Knots Landing, escalates to signs of innocence, but he ignores you. No sin you might commit can

  penetrate him.

  His twisted lips spit out Amal. Arabic for "hope." Impossible. This assault force laying siege to the nest of Western hostages: Amal? Hope and God's Partisans are on the same side. You'd have sworn your sanity on it, if not your life.

  The advance of this commando raid unhinges the guard, routs him. He scrambles for a place to hide. You check his hands; he is weaponless. Wilder still, you look down at where you stand. The blast that tore your radiator out of the floor by its roots has also shed your chain. Freedom goes unnoticed in such concerted dying.

  In a heartbeat, you weigh him. He stands a full foot shorter than you, and though he has fed better for the last year and a half, the match is no contest. Beyond him lies an emptied corridor, a stairwell, a street full of men scrambling for their lives. No risk; no need for caution. You are worse than dead already. You lock eyes, trade an eternity of mutual knowledge. He gazes into you, sees a man with nothing more to lose. You shake your head, grinning, stupid with the richness, the ancient history. He slides two steps backward out the door and bolts it behind him.

  The squad that tries to ambush your guards pulls back or falls in the rubble. Over several confused hours, all the Partisan guards surface, intact. You stay docile and bowed, in the fury of regrouping. But still your punishment proves severe. It comes with the noise that you'd hoped never to hear again so long as you lived: the snick of packing tape tearing off the roll. The sound of live burial.

  They tape you without mercy. You fight to keep a gap around your nose and mouth. They seem vague about your continued breathing. Tape revolves around you, passed from hand to hand, binding you in a cocoon smaller than your body. They smash you down the stairwell that only yesterday stood wide open.

  They insert you into the old death truck's recessed well. Your muscles refuse the memory. It can't happen again. You won't survive that exhaust-filled coffin. Your whole body begins to buck, but the tape holds you immobile. You scream from the base of your lungs, but your mouth won't open. The sound goes up through your head and stops, trapped against the layers of insulation.

  They put you into the well wrong, wedged. The fumes suffuse your brain even before the truck starts up. The truck's broken shocks send each stone in the road through your kinked body. You pray. Pray for quick death, a willed heart attack, suicide by self-made embolism. Anything but this creeping suffocation. Fifteen minutes in the fume-filled secret compartment and no imaginable future is worth holding out for. Deliverance comes as a drop into oblivion. A trapdoor in your coffin opens into an enormous gray staging area, empty and still. Then the warehouse gray refracts into all the colors of a furnished paradise. The room goes light, wondrous, spare, waiting for you. All here again: the shirt, the towel, the toiletries, those few crooked paintings on the wall. All human misery vanishes from the earth. You curl up under the moth-eaten red feather tick, intent on sleeping the sleep of the completed.

  But someone's mouth tickles you awake. A set of lips on your lips, a pair of lungs pumping yours. Gwen's as you sleep, but a man's as you come to. A man's dark face, sobbing in a familiar foreign language. The shout of joy at your first movement just as quickly turns vicious. A circle of men take out their relief, kicking at your corpse, which, for a few moments longer, still evades feeling, immune to everything human. They slap your neck and punch your head. Every blow delivers you, and you grab at the rain of hands to kiss them.

  Under your blindfold, you see night. Night out of doors, on the eastern Mediterranean, somewhere in Phoenicia, beneath the same stars that olive traders steered by, stencils of the world's first myths. They've moved you from the city, forestalling any new attempts to seize you, a living shell game inside the shell of a larger one, a coy three-card monte that will go on for as many millennia as empire continues to dream its dream of cleanness and faith continues to resist in its holdout pockets.

  They prop you up and walk you through the bracing night. Who would have thought that life still had so much breeze in it? This same continuous wind once swe
pt down out of the Caucasus, slipped over the Andoman, and scattered through the Great Rift Valley. You'd forgotten about wind.

  They push you stumbling forward. This will be your last hundred yardsout in the open for years, maybe for forever. Your check muscles inch the blindfold up a hairline. You scramble to take some hostage of your own back with you, into whatever new hole awaits. Some glimpse to ground you in the floating nowhere that lies ahead.

  The greasy cloth rides up the bridge of your nose. You tilt your head back, raising the slit as high as you dare. The sight on the horizon stops you dead. Off at a distance too shadowy to calculate, thrown into relief against the night sky, stand the ruined columns of the temple of Jupiter. Baalbek—already a thousand-year-old backwater by the time the Romans set up their imperial tax stations and linked the town into their network of command and control.

  You hoped to play tourist here once, long ago, in a world past reconstructing. Now you do, checking off the night-etched silhouette against the one filed away in your mental Baedecker. Six eerie Corinthian capitals, six stray verticals—all that's left of the belief they stood for. Jihad could not have built a more surreal set for your safekeeping. This glimpse of awful otherworldliness trips you up. You stumble, and someone cracks you across the crown of your skull. Then looking is over for

  this lifetime.

  When the blindfold comes off, your new home opens onto blackness. But in the morning, real light streams through a million louvered slats. It pins you, blinded, to the bright, clean floor. What should have been another slime-covered cave is instead the opulent country villa of some wealthy sympathizer.

  The room is a bare but blazing white. The floors are a handsome hardwood, and the ceiling's scalloped medallion surrounds a hollow socket that once fed a chandelier. French shutters stand clasped together. Most glorious of all, there is no radiator. No place at all to attach a leg chain.