RICHARD POWERS Read online

  You rise and walk. It's like one of those avant-garde plays, where the lead goes to heaven and doesn't realize he's dead until the fourth act. You edge sideways to the shutters, shielding your eyes against the concentrated blast. When your pupils at last attenuate—peeling back a year and a half of shadow—they refuse the evidence. Outside your window is a farm.

  All morning, you trace tight, excited circles. You live here. You live here. Luck beyond rolling. At the first sound at the heavy oak door, you slip on your blindfold and wipe the stray canary feathers from the corners of your grin. But your guards arrive with drills, hammers, industrial staple guns.

  You huddle against a wall, weeping. It no longer matters who sees you. The room goes dark, to the sound of sheet metal riveted over the French windows. Then worse: the sound of a brace being set into the floor. When the redecorating party leaves, you lift your blindfold. Your chain is back, attached to an iron staple large enough to moor a ship. Next to it on the floor lies a thin mattress whose stains trace a map as familiar as that of Iowa.

  No prior breakdown can compare. No zero degree where the dead-drop bottoms out. The trench of depression rises up around you without limit. You grab hold of anything to slow the frictionless slip—the glimpse of silhouetted temple, the daylight farm. Drafts gust in through cracks in the wall. A brush of wind, the scent of grass, the rustle of a place that predates politics. But all of memory is not enough evidence to keep you here.

  Days pass when the thought of what lies behind your sheet tin—all that has been taken away from you—plunges you into a place not worth surviving. Worse, this torment pays for nothing. Your whole sacrificed life does not right a single wrong committed against your holders. Half the world, held hostage, would be too little to fix history. And that thought cuts you loose to drop still deeper.

  A clicking the size of a cricket keeps you from falling forever. It plays one day for the space of a few minutes. It sounds like the metronome a rat pianist might use when struggling to tame a rodent sonata. A tentative, regular ticking in the pipes of this rural chateau. The chirping of an artificial sparrow. A doll's clock. It dies out a measure and a half after it starts.

  Then, two days later, it comes back.

  Three shorts, three longs, three shorts. The international distress call of all ships at sea. It forces a whoop from you, then another, softer. A laugh, wet, spastic, soft enough to evade detection. Your east wall is another man's west. Just on the far side of those six inches, someone lives. Just as suddenly, the broadcast breaks off once more. The dispatch quits, unanswered. Fifteen hours will have to pass before you're off the chain, before you can reach the wall to send back a reply. You pull on the metal staple in panic. The sender has given up on you, on your empty cell. You'll never hear from him again.

  Then it occurs to you: this guy isn't going anywhere anytime soon.

  The hours until your next exercise creep like a slug in a headwind. As the moment nears, thoughts vanish in an ecstatic buzz. Unleashed, you run an agonizing couple of diversionary laps until the guard disappears. Then you fall down convulsed in front of the altar wall, thrilled

  into silence.

  It's as if the skies have finally cracked open with a message from beings a thousand light-years away. And now, after the thousand-year passage, Earth must send its one summary greeting that will take a millennium to return. Morse is not an option. Nor is any other compressed transmission. All you have is that ancient trick, the cumbersome, cuneiform stupidity: one tap equals A; two equals B ...

  You cannot waste time with anything so irrelevant as "hello." Just tapping M-A-R-T-I-N at a comprehensible pace with clear pauses between letters—making the inevitable fumbles and improvising a rapid-burst signal for "start over"—burns up a terrible fraction of your allotted thirty minutes off the chain.

  Every letter risks detection. You tap softly, checking as you cycle through the alphabet for any hint of movement behind your door. Detection here would mean death or worse.

  You come to the final N of your name and wait for a response. But the bottle-message drifts off into resounding silence. You repeat the whole word, although the act costs you more precious minutes. A second silence, even rounder than the first. Blackness comes on you at the inexplicable failure; the signal vanishes into the void.

  But maybe he, too, can get free to tap only at certain intervals. The thought saves you long enough for another attempt. You struggle over what word should follow, the second most important disclosure after that meaningless first one. And raging against the inevitable choice, at the idiocy of having to say it, you tap A-M-E-R-I-C-A-N.

  You quit while still safe, a full day's work. When the guard comes to lock you back up after your run, you're more winded than usual.

  Some hours later comes a reply.

  Junot. French. The answer dashes your vague fantasy of free and unhindered romps through English with a native speaker. You'd dreamed of a shorthand version of those rambling letters your brother Kamran would send each month, trapped in a Peace Corps-ravaged Mali: "Yours in appropriate technology." You'd hoped for the desperate consolations of shared diction. You'll have, at best, a hurried pidgin.

  The next day, you telegraph him back: bien. A lie, by implication. The bulk of your French consists of your mother's Pahlevi-corrupted pas vraiss and merzis, all the cosmopolitan affectations of the Shah's courtier class. But a harmless enough lie, to which you attach another: courage. At least any French he responds with will be slowed to a crawl. And you'll have a day to decode it.

  Junot's next reply skirts the language issue altogether. Jihad, he tells you. Hezbollah.

  You can think of nothing, in fifteen hours, to answer with but oui. Shorter, by a few precious clicks in your shared language, than its English foster brother. You add: I know. You look for some semaphore to compress all that you know, all that you've learned in this private school. Eighteen months. You?

  You kick yourself for having said nothing. But on his next turn Junot picks up the English thread as if it signifies. Thirty-six weeks. I know, and as the words unfold in agonizing click-tedium, you wonder why he wastes such urgent time and risks such danger to say them. Then he adds your. Then he adds name.

  The word splits open and heaven air-drops manna. This man, this total stranger in the next cell, whose existence you were not even aware of until a few days ago, has heard of you. He recognizes the name you've told him. He has heard it, sometime in the year between your kidnap and his. The world has not lost track. You haven't disappeared. Your mother knows your fate. Your brother. Gwen.

  Now time, your old torturer, changes color. There aren't enough hours in the day to digest what the Frenchman tells you and to think up replies. You hurry through your words, stumbling, losing count of your clicks, starting all over. You spin in torment as he types, willing him to hurry, fearing that each breathless pause means discovery.

  You never dreamed that words took such numbing redundancy. You invent a code for "et cetera," faster and shorter than your original "do over," which Junot picks right up on. Improvements come piecemeal, improvised. You spend nights inventing whole new codes, drastically more efficient in their transmission. But their rules would take days to convey. And you can't stop saying things long enough to streamline their saying.

  Tick by tick, teaspoon by teaspoon, talk returns you to its appalling density. You communicate daily, but never more than a handful of words at one go. Completing a simple dialogue takes a week. Sometimes you go a night without hearing from him, awful interludes in which you toss on your bed like a cheated lover.

  Junot says that the English churchman sent to negotiate for the hostages' release has himself been taken, perhaps even killed. The news is at least half a year old, but it hits you with the force of a wire flash. He says the Syrians have occupied West Beirut, putting an end to the city's anarchy.

  But not, you reply, a bitter day later, to the war. You ache to cut through the waste of politics and ask him about the go
od stuff. What's new in music? Who won last year's Series? Any out-rageousness at the Oscars? He can't know, and you don't ask. Nor can you give him the diversion he must crave.

  You share all the insights of your protracted stay, the names of all the guards you have garnered, their assorted psychopathologies and soft spots. You learn of your awful luck.

  Junot has begged for reading matter but has not yet gotten a single scrap. You tap out short surahs from the Qur'an for him, like singing in the dark after bedtime, delighting in written syntax all over again. All the while you live in danger of detection.

  What you could not do for yourself you rise to do for him. Release can't be long in coming, you tell him. All the rational evidence is on your side. The two of you: each other's confidant, each other's clinical physician, each other's clown. You lie for hours at night, giggling at his ridiculous shaggy-dog jokes, the ones that take three days to get to their belated punch lines. The ones that open with the telegraphic formula: Three. Tourists. Chinese. Indian. American.

  One day, the line goes dead. It seems at first a minor annoyance. You've suffered interruptions before. Some guard has almost caught him, and he must lie low for a cooling period. Or he is on some protracted punishment, restricted to his chain.

  For a while you tap on into the darkness, hoping he can still hear you. But long silence wears away the sense of anything at all on the far side of the barrier. This Frenchman has let you down, has raised your hopes, then hung you out to dry. Your daily dispatches get shorter, more perfunctory. You want to save the good stuff for his return, when you can hear his live reaction.

  The day comes when you admit Junot will not be back. You say freedom. You say release, although there are more frugal explanations. This abandonment makes last spring's hopelessness seem like a mercy killing. You hate the man, for reviving desire and all its gruesome reminders. For telling you that you persist in the world's memory.

  His words are no better than those pieces of fruit that Ali sadistically tosses, just out of reach.

  In your dreams these nights, you lean out through a bright, open window. But the window sash falls like a blade on the back of your neck, as crisp as that old French political expedient. Joy looks out on all that it is not, your book says. But bitterness sees only itself.

  Sayid brings you your supper late one evening, some day in what must be late August. The air wears that oppressive stillness, but here it is not so stultifying as the city was, this time last year. Your country estate, the subtle shifts of its noise and breezes, has blessed you in a million ways, all powerless to make any difference. Sayid comes to bring you your usual plate of gristle, and you hear him weeping. It stuns your ear to learn of a grief that isn't yours. In its strange depths, his pool of sadness at once dissolves yours.

  What in all the world can this bewildered, accepting soul have to weep about? His suffering twists the air around him. You cannot help yourself; some dead root in you, left over from years ago, twitches in this rain. You want to know what happened. So long as you live, it will hook you, the hint of word. You hear him set down the plate and back out to go. He, too, will leave you without disclosing the source of his bitterness. Then a discovery larger than your life: you can just ask him.

  "Sayid." The movement stops, but not the muffled sorrow. "Sayid. What is it? What has happened to you?"

  He searches for a way through his loss. "Hussein." Unsure how to go on. "Hussein is dead."

  Some family member or close friend. Another victim of this eternal

  civil suicide.

  "I'm ... so sorry. When? When did it happen?"

  The question baffles him. "When? At Karbala!" A thousand and a third years ago.

  Pity, astonishment, and disgust—the whole grab bag given the human animal—pass through you in quick succession. But the flood of feeling recedes with Sayid, leaving behind only a single, sharp thrill. You know what day it is.

  For the first time in months, you can locate yourself in time. Today is Ashura, the anniversary of the ancient sacrifice. The tenth day of Muharram, the month of mourning. Some quick thought and the application of your mother's formula produce the year: 1409.

  But when is 10 Muharram? You spend the rest of the month—both months—worrying the problem. Like trying to derive the quadratic formula too many years after high-school algebra. The moon and the sun deny each other's cycles. By the time you conclude that mental conversion is impossible, you've lost count again, in any calendar.

  You wake from a deep sleep, a creature gnawing at your face. You scream and spasm, sending some kind of beaked mammal flying across the floor. The guards ignore you, used to your nighttime apparitions.

  But this beast is real. It glares at you from the corner where you've whacked it. You make it out: a mouse, feral and sniffing, no longer than your thumb, although a little fatter. Ounce for ounce, it looks at least as needy as a human. But infinitely more harmless.

  The scared gray thing gives you a project to absorb another winter. It takes weeks to overcome your bad first impression and win her trust. You surrender the best scraps of each meal, always more than you can afford. In your moments off the chain, you leave stockpiles as far from human contamination as possible. When she comes out to examine the stash, helpless in the tug of its aroma, the human giant is there, lying still, just looking on, passive and given.

  Each feeding station that she accepts gives way to another, imperceptibly closer to the giant's base camp. Desensitization takes forever, but it's precisely forever that you have on your hands. You've forgotten what it means to work steadily toward some goal. By the time she'll come within ten feet of you, she already forms your unwitting solace, your joy, your day's significance.

  But she remains skittish as the day is long. Something about the disparity in your sizes. Something about being smacked across the room before formal introductions. There comes a day when she'll nibble just outside arm's distance. You're too ashamed to admit the name you've already given her, even to yourself, even at night when she wriggles her nose, inquiring, at your motionless body.

  Conflicted for a reason. Conflicted for a reason, as the old televised talk-show public therapies liked to say. Pushing with the same hand that she used to pull you toward her.

  Resenting any suggestion that you owed each other anything. But lashed together so tightly that even the vicious pulling away, even the cursing and eternal swearing off amounted to deepest intimacy.

  In the days just after capture, your survival could spare no energy for any thought so trivial as love. Six months brought your radical education: happiness and desire were private distractions that allowed states to do their nightmare work unnoticed. A year embittered you to the fact that states had no more wherewithal than the most vicious of quarreling lovers. Eighteen months erased all human pretension past eating and sleeping, staying cool and dry, or calming your bowels until the next bathroom run.

  Two years returns you to that first, unaffordable triviality.

  More time passes. She comes almost right up to you. She'll take food out of your hand, if you hold it way out, palm open. She no longer turns and runs the second she's finished.

  Late fall, the guards bring you a birthday cake. A single-layered, multicultural monstrosity of confectioner's sugar and identity politics, too freakish to assimilate. You don't want them to see you happy. To think that your stupid ecstasy has anything to do with this blundering

  kindness.

  Joy snubs out when they bring the present. A Minicam, sitting on some bag-headed mercenary's shoulder like a handheld rocket launcher. You are to eat and enjoy this cake —just another well-catered day in the Beirut Hilton—while they videotape you for the pleasure of the home audience.

  You eat to keep them from seeing you destroyed. You eat left-handed, a subversive signal to any National Security Agency official inspecting the video for clues. You eat bare-faced, no evidence of ever having had to scramble with a blindfold. You look at this man filming you, st
are at him. Even with the lights and blocking camera, even through the makeshift hood, his features will stay with you longer tharr the tape will remember yours.

  Muhammad stands off camera, out of vision, saying, "Talk to your family. Say hello to your friends." Throw yourself off a high place. Change stones into bread. You eat slowly, savoring the cake, despite yourself. You make your face a blank, a mask onto which the world can project whatever dream it is struggling to realize.

  Who do these clumsy directors think they're fooling? What message can they hope to send? And yet your family will see this. Your friends. Impossible. Communication from beyond the grave. You see them seeing you. You look just happy enough for your mother to imagine that

  you're well.

  They know your birthday. These martyrs know your birthday. And they can only have learned it from the American media. Someone at home has followed your story, this year or last, and wished you a televised happy birthday that your kidnappers intercept. Your birthday, somewhere within a week of where you sit. You'd forgotten you had one.

  "Thank you," you tell the camera, in what comes out a mechanical drone. Who, on the many far ends of this transmission, will receive

  these words? "Thank you. I'm alive." You wait, like you wait for the mouse, for your voice to come back. "I am being treated well." Lied to and lying, using and used. The eternal compromise seems, at least for this instant, to favor you by the narrowest sliver. "Although the decor here could use a little work."

  You gesture stage right, and the cameraman, by instinct, tracks you with a pan, before he realizes.

  "Finish your cake," Muhammad orders.

  He's caught you trying to palm a piece no bigger than a finger. "I thought... I thought I might be able to save a little for ... later?"

  "Let them see you eat the whole thing."

  You eat the piece that might have given your only joy a little pleasure.

  This pact with your manipulators seals your fate. The State Department will wash its hands of you for aiding and comforting the enemy. But it keeps you alive, for many nights running. Somewhere abroad, out on the globe's trade routes, repeatedly rewound and replayed, your phantom image converses with those who know you, those who hear your words.