RICHARD POWERS Read online

  She clamped. Don't want to play this game, Stevie. Don't even want to visit.

  But she came back easily those days, even from his most willful disruptions. She wore an aura now that nothing could dissipate. A woman who had found, again, the work she was meant to give herself to.

  Spiegel squinted, and called it love.

  The word spread, a winter contagion. Jackdaw came to them and announced his engagement. You're the first two people I've told. I haven't even told my parents yet.

  Jackie, Adie pouted. I thought you loved me.

  Something in his stuttering objections said that the two facts weren't incompatible.

  Spiegel clapped him on the back. Fantastic, man. Who's the happy shackle-to-be?

  She's called Fatima.

  Last name? Adie asked.

  Morgan.

  You make her change it, she threatened, and I'll kill you.

  Spiegel waved for the floor. Let me guess. Mother hails from Tunis and father from Piscataway.

  I... 1 don't really know.

  Humor, Jackie. Adie wrapped her arm around the boy.

  It's an analog thing, Spiegel said. You wouldn't understand.

  So what's she like?

  Oh, she's fantastic. All over the map. She's got something new going every ten minutes. And she doesn't take any shit from men, I'll tell you that much.

  Have you set a date yet?

  Date? Oh no. We're still working that one out. One of these years, anyway.

  Get it in writing, Spiegel stage-whispered.

  So when are you going to bring her around? We need to give her our stamp of approval.

  Meet you people? Before we're legally married? You think I'm crazy?

  Come on, Jackie. We have to see what you're getting into here.

  Jackdaw grinned beatifically. Use your imagination.

  What does she do? Adie heard herself, the parental interrogation she'd forsworn.

  She's a docs writer. Real verbal chick. The mouth on her? Man.

  You like that in a woman? Spiegel asked. Acquerelli nodded vigorously.

  What does she look like?

  Stevie! Adie punished his upper arm.

  Can't help it. I'm visually biased. She's dark. Dark, and... uh, nice? About Adie's height. Adie backpedaled. Documentation writer for... ? Motorola.

  Motorola? Steve dropped a beat. Which facility? Chicago.

  The penny dropped. Where exactly did you meet this woman? In ... in a Multi-User Dimension. On-line. A MUD? And you haven't really . .. seen her yet? Not. Really. Not yet.

  Steve looked away. Adie examined the back of her fingers. The stunted gestures of liberal tolerance.

  But of course we'll see each other, before we get... We're going to meet, FTF, pretty soon.

  Face-to-face, Steve told Adie. To spare her the humiliation of asking.

  They spoke about it alone, in bed, after lights-out. Spiegel spoke with real pain.

  The kid. Falling in love with a character in a MUD. Because she's a fast-typing put-down artist.

  Why not? Adie said. That's his world. Who else is he going to fall in love with? The whole thing is always an exercise in mutual projection, anyway, isn't it?

  Is it? Some projections at least have a chance of surviving the light of day.

  Then don't take it out into the light of day.

  What are we going to do?

  About what?

  About keeping Jackdaw safe?

  Adie put her hand out to feel this man's neck. Stevie. Stevie. Who ever told you that safe is an option?

  The packet-switched courtship grew as rich as any love match. Router by router, chat room by chat room, the new couple negotiated their future space.

  She hates TV as much as I do, Jackdaw told them. She loves 'zines. I think I'll eat better once she's around.

  He started to dress more carefully. He even shed a couple of pounds of hacker's corn-chip flab. Adie caught him working out in the Cavern, waving the wand like a racket, hitting a projectile back and forth with a distant, animated stick figure a dozen feet beyond the Cavern's front wall.

  Aiy. The age-old battle of man versus machine. It's not enough that they have to destroy us at chess? That they've started drawing better than we do? You have to teach them how to beat us at tennis, too?

  Jackdaw stopped to look and lost the serve. Oh. That's not a machine at the other end. That's Fatima.

  Fa—? Hang on. You mean there's another Cavern? In Chicago?

  He swung the electronic racket and cackled at her dread. No, no. She's sitting out there at a terminal, with a joystick. We converted the app interface and migrated it out to her client.

  Adie watched in horror: shadowy lives playing against living shadows. A sudden pupaphobia overtook her as she watched the boy volley, step out, recompile a few new lines of code, step back in and volley again. Like Buster Keaton's projectionist, slipping in and out of his own projection. She turned from the scene to bolt, but there was no way out of the frame.

  Jackdaw came to them in mid-November, high on adrenaline. She's traveling out here. Over Thanksgiving. For three days.

  Here? As in Seattle-here? That's great. Are we going to get to meet her?

  You're joking She's in town for three days. No way are we going to waste that on other people.

  He returned to work after the holiday, destroyed.

  Let me guess, Kaladjian said. She's twelve years old.

  No, Freese said. She's a hundred and twelve. But remarkably well preserved for her age.

  Rajan fell in with the cadence. Don't tell us. You didn't realize from the name that she was part foreign.

  Her name's not really Fatima?

  She's really a guy.

  She's really two guys.

  She's really a LISP routine.

  Jackdaw's nose flared and his mouth caved under. One tight globe of salt water pinched out of the corner of his right eye. He turned on his heel and left, over the cries of group protest that only too late realized the truth.

  Freese received a one-line e-mail the following day. Jack Acquerelli would not be returning to the project.

  Jackie's departure plunged them all into a cloud of bad faith.

  Not your fault, Steve told Adie. But she had long ago learned to discount forgiveness and work harder. And now there was more work for all of them, shorthanded, a man down with the match still in question.

  Did not need this, Lim said. Not with the finish line looming. The guy used to put in hundred-hour weeks.

  But eighty of them were just playing, Kaladjian said.

  You're saying there's a difference?

  Adie tried to absorb the bulk of those lost man-hours herself. Slu worked around the clock. She lived in Hagia Sophia now, and wher she couldn't get into the cathedral itself, she pitched tent in the trace; of its flat-screen shadow.

  That's where Stevie found her, with the next intruding news.

  What is it? she asked him. One look. What's wrong?

  Doris Singlegate?

  She shook her head, unable to place the name.

  The Mole-Woman?

  She snapped to attention, revelation already making its way up her neck hair. What's happened?

  They let her out. After something like two years underground. They brought her back up to the surface. She passed a physical. A few small, strange things wrong with her body clock, but nothing critical.

  Stevie. Just tell me. It's not like I know the woman.

  She seems to have taken her own life. Back in her own home. In her own bed.

  40

  Your whole body rejects the evidence. Not possible. You can't have been here that long. Time lived and time retrieved don't match up. Those afternoons that took a year to pass shrink, in treacherous memory, to seconds. A month of them wouldn't fill an hour. You can't account for more than a few dozen weeks, let alone two-and-fhree-quarters years.

  You clutch to that dead reckoning now, as if to life. Some desperately inventive internal
storyteller has won you survival through your thousand-and-one nights. And now, by the terms of the old agreement, the sentence must be lifted.

  But that, too, is only another fairy story: the thousand-and-second. It gives way to hundreds more, the fragmenting agonies of a world in the throes of universalizing, myths and fables that do not say why in the world they need you as protagonist…

  At least America remembers you; that much you could not have invented. Your picture in the Herald Tribune, even now, after so long you have almost forgotten yourself. They will want a full account, should you live to tell. They will want a book, a story, even though there is no story. There is nothing but a pointlessness the size of eternal time.

  Yet still, on days when the sun warps your corrugated tin cage like a cheap cookie sheet, in nights when the damp passes right through your one thin blanket and even thinner skin, seeping down into your bone, where it cracks your marrow, it calms you to write this book. Your head scribbles hundreds of pages at a go, and reads them all back to you, verbatim. For your memory has become prodigious, your story infinite ...

  You try passages out on the mouse. Practice oral recitations, triweekly checkups to test your trembling mind. On the day you left Chicago, you could not keep a new phone number in your head for fifteen minutes. Now you are a concert pianist of the verbal arts, performing huge narrative rhapsodies by heart. Who cares if the brilliant solos may be, in fact, the wildest crashing dissonance?

  Deep in those prodigious mnemonic galleries, stores of letters to everyone you have ever cared for pile up in teetering stacks, awaiting postage. The gardens of memory grow so ornately, radioactively rococo that their topiary spills over in all directions and all paths return to lushest underbrush.

  Things come down out of the attic that you couldn't possibly have left there. The more you retrieve, the faster the stockpiles of bric-a-brac heap up, fire hazards. The forms inside you beat for an outward shape. A way to tear free and be born.

  Muhammad must understand the curse of literacy. "I need paper and pencil," you harass him, every chance you get. "Anything to scratch on. Anything, or the jinns are going to get me. Who is going to read it? What possible danger can it be? I'll hand it all over the day you let me leave."

  He will not listen to reason. He treats you as if you are already mad.

  "Look: you are Lebanese. The Lebanese invented the damn alphabet." The worst, culprit technology. The rod that dislodged the murderous boulder. "You practically created writing. Does that mean nothing to you?"

  It does. Mean nothing.

  The stories keep coming, flooding their banks, reverting. Your brain is a used bookstore that buys more than it sells. Its shelves will not hold. All things happen even to the shortest life. We all live forever. That simple discovery will break you.

  You need to tell someone. You need someone to tell. You tell the rodent, until she, too, disappears. Even a mouse's life span makes more sense than yours.

  She comes back, the phantom who will take the weight of these gifts from you. You sit on the foot of her bed, stroking her leg, starting in on the boundless backlog. "You'll never believe. I was walking down the street. Some men seemed to be struggling with a flat tire. I slowed down to see if I could help and they told me to get in."

  But she is asleep already, before you even hint at the tales where that tale leads. How you always loved to look at her when she slept. Sleeping she did perfectly. Sleeping, she was unified. Out of her nighttime window, clouds roll past a bone moon, stratus stained the color of coral, scudded like sand in time's streambed.

  She asks you to sleep in the other room, because your night movements wake her up. But this much she will abide—your holding her foot. And tonight, from this distance, you sum all the years invested, all the cost in equanimity and esteem, the flare-ups of self-righteousness, the scraps that you hoped for in return for holding back. The years that you waited, thinking that you'd be able to tell her about your day, one day, at day's end.

  And this is the most she can give you, short of death and surrender: her foot, as she sleeps ... And still, you would take it again, at the same expense. There is a whirring inside you that falls quiet only so long as you can touch some part of her.

  You tell her anyway, as she sleeps. And half the stories that you tell her are just these: these moments of stolen peace, the rough fragments of your life together, coughed up on a shipwreck's beach, snapped beams worthless for sailing now, but still your only source of wood.

  Sleeping, she seems an angel, although you know she will wake again. When she does, she rises up disconsolate. She presses her fists into her hips, to make sure she can still feel bone. She inspects her face morosely in the mirror. She asks you, Do you like my nose?

  You love her nose. Every part of her: devastating, ephemeral.

  Other men want me. Other men find me beautiful. Why don't you?

  You scowl a little at her, a helpless spasm on your lips. You study her features in this light, light over which she has no control. I want you. I find you beautiful. Don't be stupid. The world cannot abide too many more games.

  She asks you, Do you think I should have it taken in? Just the tip. Just a touch. Maybe you'd find me more attractive if I had a nicer nose.

  You cannot find her any more attractive than you do at this moment. You tell her so.

  Impatience crumples the flesh in question: You're not being very supportive.

  You say you will support her in this and all things that she decides to do. That you find her heartrending as she is, and will love all changes that age adds to her. But if she feels the need to make some alterations, you'll find those beautiful, too.

  You sit at the foot of another bed. She rises from post-op, mutilated. Both her eyes blackened, her cheeks a yellow bruise, a bandage across the swollen midline, she looks for all the world like a beating victim. Straight up from the ocean of anesthetic, she fixes you with the full accusation: I hope you're happy now.

  You are not happy. Your misery has no bottom.

  Misery, too, you might give to her. You might make a story of it, of your shared idiocies, one for her to laugh at from the safety of her next bed. Might remind her of all the follies that you two thought so urgent once, as best as you can remember them: your worst horrors, dissolved in worse sequels. All the desperate self-inflictions of an attempted life together, the little indulgences of privilege, called in by the wider war.

  What did she say when she woke up next? That is the thread of plot from which you hang. Telling it becomes your last subversive act. The illicit pleasure of recounting, your one revenge on the things that really happened.

  Then it is your mother's turn to tell, holding your childish foot and reminding you of things that haven't even happened in this life. You hear her ritual Arabian Nights read-alouds, spread for you and Kamran, well past the year when you should have been weaned from them. Her reading voice, flecked with what you knew even then to be a foreign accent, the keystone to the arched enigma of those days, smooths the total bafflement of childhood. How you used to slog through twelve harsh hours of brute-force realism, just to earn those thirty minutes of enchanted shadow, lying there bed-bound in oblivion's foyer, listening to her read.

  Your mother the confirmed pragmatist, rigorous cooker and cleaner, the woman who once made the firemen wipe their muddy boots at the back door before letting them in to douse the burning basement, takes you for a spin in her fabulous Persian machine. She sets the levers, and out leap whole kingdoms, tangled harems, terrible wars. She turns the dials, and the three of you tear off, touring in every direction, past the speed of light.

  She reads to you again from out of a book whose title, for all the years of your childhood, you thought was written in Arabic. But now, in photographic recall, you see it clearly enough to read off the stylized, flowing script: Saadi.

  It was so; it was not so: there once was a slave who tried to alter his fate by running away from his master. But fate recaptured the ru
naway and sentenced him to a life of backbreaking work, building the master's mansion.

  Many years later, a penitent appeared in the court of this master, knelt down, and pleaded. I am that slave who ran away from you, all that time ago.

  The master listened to the news in horror. If you are my escaped slave, then who is the man whom I have sentenced to a lifetime of hard labor?

  He sent for the innocent convict, a philosopher named Lukman. How can you ever forgive me? I have stolen your whole life.

  But Lukman told the unhappy man, Do not apologize. For you have your new mansion, and I have learned the only lesson worth learning about life, one that I would never have learned had you not imprisoned me.

  That is the message your mother sends you, from out of her bound volume, a quarter century ago. A fable she picked as preparation for the life that would one day take you hostage.

  She tells you her favorite again, the story she always had to give you from memory, out of her best Farsi children's book, lost in the violence of repeated exiles. She improvises, embroiders by word of mouth, a deeper archaeology, the far-off lands even more suggestive in their state of ruin.

  There was and there was not a great nature painter who painted a landscape so perfect it destroyed him. Each person who looked at the scene saw something different. But all saw envy, and all wanted what they saw. And those who wanted the painting most decided to kill the maker and steal the thing he made.

  Each time she tells you, the story ends differently. Some trick of memory, either yours or hers. In one, the man's painted creatures warn him of the danger and foil the plot. In another, the painter's murder returns the beautiful landscape to overgrown weeds. In the ending that two small, stunned boys loved most, the painter evades his killers, who arrive at his house only to find the abandoned painting, now with a figure running through its farthest, faintest hills.

  Death is not death, nor invention invention. Your single life replays all existence, the way your fetus quoted the fish it came from. All innocence, all mistakes, from your first frightened grunts to your late-night adult confusion, are yours again. All your moments condemn you to line them up and relive them, one by one. Your Enlightenment, your Dark Age, your puddled afternoons of Hundred Years' War. All times collapse into now, in the mind forced to a standstill.