RICHARD POWERS Read online

  She showed him the river flowing through this figure. All the prone female flesh, up on one elbow, turned three-quarters to face the plane of paint. Those countless, recumbent, thinly veiled Renaissance mistresses, passed off as Venus. Titian's Urbino goddess, Madame Rйcamier, the naked Maja, ripe Olympia ... She showed him the long genealogical tree, art's ancient bloodline: this fetishizing, fawning, degrading, loving, lurid intimacy played out in front of centuries of voyeurs, these canvases like mirrors on the ceiling of the race's collective motel room, rented, as always, this evening, by the hour.

  As the spinning leaf programmed the light, so this strange almond algorithm programmed Spider Lim's body to take up some history too long to understand. The female nude wanted something from him, something commanded in a lost language, something Spider Lim hadn't the visual vocabulary to comprehend.

  He took to avoiding the Cavern while the jungle group worked there. But his cure produced the symptoms it worked against. His policy of containment only multiplied the woman's nighttime visits. Soon, she came to him as regularly as a cross-sound ferry, demanding that he examine her every surface, gaze on her where she lay wrapped in a long, self-extending pageant, a tableau vivant he'd never dreamed himself capable of seeing ...

  But those who toured it at open house felt its leap in technique, its advances in surface modeling.

  Seven or eight explorers pressed into the Cavern, taking turns wearing the master tracking glasses.

  My word, Jonathan Freese admired. It sure does feel robust.

  And responsive, O'Reilly added. Not a whole lot of depth effect yet. But at least a body can recognize what's in front of it.

  Sue Loque just nodded her all-natural fright wig, like a teen keeping the beat under a pair of headphones.

  Pretty flicker-free, Jackdaw said. Nice ray tracing. Not too much latency as you walk around.

  The moon soaked them all in silence, from up in the highest branches. A handful of jungle visitors stood loose in their own overrun seedbed.

  Steve Spiegel broke the spell. Explain something to me, Ade? What exactly is the dame on the sofa doing in the middle of all this malaria action?

  Ha. Does that trouble your little bourgie norms? Adie jabbed her college chum in the ribs, her first attack on his underbelly in a dozen years. The underbelly had grown softer in the interim. So had the jab.

  Sue jingled her tire-iron bracelets. She's listening to the music, obviously. To the spooky ebony guy in the Day-Glo skirt.

  No, no, Spider said. She lives there. She's some kind of jungle spirit. Like the other.

  Like him.

  Yeah, right. On a Louis Philippe divan?

  Uh, Rajan wavered. You white people do happen to notice that she's buck naked?

  No one heard Karl Ebesen enter the room, until he snarled. Idiots. The woman is not in the jungle. The jungle is in the woman's living room. It grows in through her window, while she dreams.

  10

  The Jungle Room feels strangely familiar.

  Your eye recognizes the place at once, although it has never been there. Or say your eye has been there, long ago. Back before childhood's childhood. Before your eye was even an eye. And say that you've toted this spurge around inside ever since, a keepsake of long-abandoned cover.

  Origins converge in the Jungle Room. Choose your myth of preference: the garden banishment, the wayward chromosome. Either way, this green is a return engagement. Nostalgia sprawls from the overgrown nooks. Life leverages every cranny. Moonlit creepers spread a welcome mat. The pennant of mangrove branches announces Old Home Week.

  Fronds appear with all the shocking clarity of fronds. Perhaps they began as metaphors. But now they grow into the species they once only represented. The Jungle Room creeps steadily toward arboretum: taxonomy without the formaldehyde, ripe fruit without the fall.

  Something yearns to return to first vegetation, only this time at a cool remove. The body wants back in its abandoned nest, but now free to come and go, like a shameless tourist, without the fatal danger of travel, free to name the lush sprawl of this place from the safe vantage of a divan.

  Here is the shape of reforestation, eons in germinating. Till this novel test patch, more flexible than the original starter bed. Speed the green revolution. Onto the teak's living trunk, graft a woody emblem. Fuse the fact of the branch to its depiction. Join stump and symbol into a single thing, a tree you can walk around, prune, replicate. The tree you came down from. The one you'd happily climb up again.

  This is the aim of all bootstrapping: to lift the first curse and make dreams real. Here you can shed your wood skeleton and travel at will through groves of pure notion. Here you can gather up the pieces of something that shattered once, long ago, in childhood's childhood. Here you can reassemble all lost growth, and even back it up onto magnetic tape.

  Through the Jungle Room, birds wing at liberty. Define a feather when condemned to the wind. Say how the shaft tapers, straining to be weightless. Describe what the vanes do on the air, how they luff and ruffle and flute, how the barbs somersault on the downward curve of their resisting ride. Specify the flight in full, and you have those jungle fliers. Fix the thing's rules, and you slough off the tyrannical thing. Mere birdness alone yields birds on demand. Whole flocks pepper the canopy, from out of description.

  Ingenuity plays among these leaves. A snake slithers from the undergrowth, dappled by the moon that traces it. Mock ribs propel the python forward, muscles accurate down to a single strand. The pseudo-snakeskin glistens as you gaze, your sight renewed. But this time, the serpent takes no one in. You do not wholly buy this slithering bill of goods. This simulation cannot bruise your heel.

  Still the Jungle Room swells, as awful as its template. For there may be no return, no quarter, no resting place behind these renderings. These leaves hide nothing but the signs of hunger. Even the myth of elemental loss somehow misses the point. It may not be in you, ever, to believe in a home of your own devising. The tree may not grow that can trick both heart and limbs.

  11

  Now that you've explained the mistake, they'll let you go. It may take a few hours for permission to filter down whatever chain of crazed command these hoodlums follow.

  But you tell them: a schoolteacher. A teacher who used to have a decent job in industry before his private life fell apart.

  Teacher. No spy. Joke. Bad joke. Very sorry.

  You cost more to kidnap than they can hope to get for you. Not worth ten shekels a pound on the international terrorist spot market. Even these amateurs must see how ludicrous the whole mix-up is. What a story this will make, when it's all over. The greatest, most unbelievable letter back home ever.

  They take your watch, along with everything else. They wedge you into some kind of root cellar, where you can't tell day from night.

  Maybe two dozen hours have passed since they grabbed you. Surely not more than thirty. It might take a couple of days, even a week, to straighten everything out. You assume a courage you do not have, and settle in for however long you need.

  The crib where they've dumped you is too dark to see. Inch by inch, your fingertips cover its surface. Good for passing a couple of hours, if nothing else. You're on a dirt floor, in a more or less rectangular room, maybe ten feet by six. The floor is little more than the flight of five steps they shoved you down. It stinks of soot and vegetables. Three of the walls are wooden; one is stone. The crumbling plaster ceiling is too low to stand up under. Your heart begins to race, despite your forced calm. You will perish here. Suffocate. You will never see light again.

  Above the flight of steps lies a wooden trapdoor. You nudge at it. It doesn't move.

  After some time, the trap opens. Through the flood of light comes a crisis of arms and legs. Someone barks three Arabic syllables. The trap closes, and the room fills with a putrid odor. You grope your way to the steps. On the top one a tin plate sits covered with a steaming mass they can't possibly expect you to eat.

  It's some k
ind of evil game. See what the prisoner will put in his mouth, down there in the dark. The scent gags you. You remove your nose as far from the plate as the cramped quarters allow.

  After the rush of danger passes, fatigue slams you. Fear has run you a marathon. Only now do hormones give up pointlessly dousing your muscles. You need to sleep as you've never needed to sleep in your life. But you can't. The room is too small and hard to stretch out in. The pain of your first handling pounds you. The stink of the refuse they've tried to pass off as food keeps you from losing consciousness. Sleep would strip you of whatever feeble protection your mind now gives. Sheer stupidity: you want to be awake when they come to release you. Above all, you fear what dreams sleep might bring.

  The need to urinate grows unbearable. Banging on the trap and peeing in the corner seem equally humiliating, and you refuse to be humiliated. You try to ignore the swelling pressure on your bladder, to focus on making them open the trap. You'll make them break before you do.

  Enough time must now have passed for the school to notice your absence. You try to figure how many classes you've missed. Your docile flock will have told administration that their teacher has failed to show up. Surely, in such a city, in such a climate, someone will know to expect the worst. Someone will sound the alarm, raise a search party .. . Others have been taken before you. Others, with more powerful institutions lobbying for their release. Another thought to shove out of your mind. Still, your case is different. By now your kidnappers know they've made a mistake. You aren't what they thought you are. You're a schoolteacher. You have no secrets. None that would interest them, in any case. You'll be out in a matter of days, at the most.

  You pee in the corner. You try to break up the ground beforehand, with your fingernails. So the liquid can soak down.

  You fill the time by rehashing your abduction. You replay the car, the thugs, the questioning. You work up the details, make them more threatening or more comical in the recap. It's the most fantastic story that has ever happened, even without embroidering. But you'll wait awhile, after your release, before sending your mother even a sanitized account.

  Soon you'll need to defecate. If your bowels revolt before anyone comes, you'll be in deep shit. Another thing not to think about. Thoughts to avoid begin to crowd the already cramped quarters.

  Your mind mires and circles. Then a noise tears away the gauze. The ceiling above you explodes in banging. Someone shouts through the trap, "Cover you eyes. You no look. Cover eyes!"

  You fall to the floor, searching. Somewhere you've shed the oily rag they used to blindfold you. Discarded the scrap, thinking you'd never suffer it again. Now you scramble in the dark, to find it and cover your eyes before the hole opens.

  The rag slips on just in time for light to stream in under the folds. A voice you don't recognize commands you to climb up. "No talk," it adds. "No run."

  You crack your head on a rafter, searching for the lip of the steps. False light, the flash of the blow rips across your closed eyes. You bite down hard, to keep from shouting. As you ascend, you trip on the plate of food, scattering it.

  "Why you not eat?" the voice shouts. It holds a mania large enough to crush you.

  "Terrible," you say. "Bad food. No good."

  "No talk," he shouts, shoving you from behind.

  You come from your suffocating cocoon. The upstairs feels warm, light, clear. You're good for another few hours. You will endure whatever face-saving show these men need to enact. Then you'll ask to use the bathroom. To pull yourself together a little, clean up for your release.

  You flex, a gift from heaven. Behind you, you hear the puzzled crick of packing tape being ripped from its reel.

  "You don't move," the voice tells you. "We tape you. For your safety."

  You speak as softly as you can. You fall back on long practice, times trying to say two calming words to Gwen when just the sound of your voice lit her into frenzy.

  "I am a schoolteacher. My student... misunderstood a joke of mine. I came to this city because—"

  "Yes. We understand. Don't worry. We don't hurt you. We tape you. For safety. Short drive. Then you go home."

  They wrap you like a mummy. They wind around and around you for half an hour. They tape right over your clothes, your hair, your ratty cotton blindfold. They leave just the crown of your head and a too-small sliver for your nose. With chops and shoves, they force you to kneel. But bound so tightly in this tape tourniquet, your knees can't bend.

  They pummel you into a crate. The constriction bursts your arteries. You try to make some noise—the sound of refusal, of impossibility—through the tape. Nothing comes out but a muffled whimper. You can't fit in the box. You can't even tell them that you don't fit. Nothing but free fall into panic.

  They put you in the crate and cover you. Your annihilation, your live burial. Several men try to lift the crate. The weight of a typical American in a box dismays them. You wish now that you had eaten the food, just to add injury to insult.

  They trundle you down a flight of steps. Your skull caroms against the sides of the box. The foot of the crate crashes to the ground, splintering your ankles and knees. You hear the sounds of the street, snarling mopeds, vendors hawking and haggling. If you called out? A voice seeping out of a sealed coffin, gagged, muffled, a single smeared phoneme: the stunt would only seal your fate.

  A little patience, and you'll walk past this spot again, tomorrow, seeing, free.

  From the sound and the smashing and what little light comes in through the cracks, you sense what is happening. They place you into a recessed well in the floor of a van. You must be hanging down in the undercarriage, given the sound of the engine.

  The road is a single pothole from here to Kuala Lumpur. Every pit hammers your bound body. They've taped your face too tightly. Between the exhaust fumes, the closed crate, and the triangle of opening they leave your nose, you asphyxiate. First nausea and lightheaded-ness, your head and eyes, pressed through a grater. Then a black throb pushes forward against the inside of your face. Blind animal frenzy scrabbles at the base of your brain, a creature trapped under a sheet of resealing ice. If you pass out now, you'll never wake up.

  You kick against the sides of your coffin, to make them pull over. But tape turns your kicks into a wad of socks tossed into a hamper. Every agitation now sends your lungs deeper into deficit. You try to slow your racing heart by force of will. Drop your pulse into a hibernation that will outlast this endless ride.

  The crate heats up, from the engine, the sun, the dry sand whipped up from the road. You fight for air, for a slice of sanity. The engine slows. Covered voices trade a few words. You sense a barricade, a checkpoint. You shout. Death by gunfire would be a blessing. But the engine roars back to life before more than a dull moan can escape your mouth. You force your taped knees against the lid of the box. With what strength remains, you manage to crack the seam. A gush of fresh air knifes into you. You shove your nose into the stream. It tastes like God in your nostrils.

  The holy sliver of air keeps you alive until the van stops. A chorused confusion hauls you from the well. They tip you on end, and the shift crushes your legs under you. They hoist you to horizontal and pop the lid. Rough hands pull at your packaging. The tape tears your skin and hair as it rips off.

  You fall to the ground, gasping. You lie still, sucking salvation into your lungs.

  "You ... animal-fucking bastards ..."

  "Not talk! No make noise!" Someone smashes you across the face. Black collapses inward, and you are nowhere.

  You come to in a white room. Even this feeblest of lights overwhelms you. When your eyes adjust, you make out where you are. Nothing to make out. A squalid plaster box. The room is maybe ten feet wide and twelve feet long. You could stand up fully, if you could stand up.

  Here and there, the otherwise featureless walls bear greasy black fingerpainted smudges. Near the corner of one long wall, a five-foot slab of boiler plate barricades the lone doorway. Light dusts the ro
om, seeping around the edges of a wall-sized sheet of corrugated steel nailed over the remnants of French windows.

  The planked floor hasn't been swept anytime during your adulthood. The room is devoid of finishing except for a balding mattress and a metal radiator bolted to the filthy floor. Attached to the radiator, a short steel chain. Attached to the chain, your left ankle.

  "Hey," you call. Your voice is dry, broken. "Hello?" Louder.

  The door rumbles and jerks outward. A young man, no more than twenty-five, stands in the frame. He is tawny, thin, medium height, black-eyed, black-haired, sleek-bearded, hang-nosed, white-shirted, blue-jeaned, and glaring. You've seen whole armies of him, waving small arms, hanging out of car windows patrolling both sides of the Green Line. He's young enough to be one of your English students. He looks, in the second that you are given to scan him, lamentably like your internal clip-art stereotype of an Arab terrorist.

  "What are you doing?" he screams. "Cover your eyes! Don't look!"

  You scramble on the floor near the mattress, searching for the blindfold that has chosen the wrong moment to go AWOL. Screaming, the guard rushes you and yanks down the rag that has been riding, this whole while, on your numbed head.

  You fix it so that you are blind.

  The boy does not retreat. He hovers by your head. His breath condenses on your neck. He presses something hard and cold and metal up into your ear.

  "You hear me, you cover your eyes. You understand?" You nod your head. Again. Harder. "You look, you die."

  12

  The moment he glimpsed America's pet project, Ronan O'Reilly was addicted. He'd come to Ecotopia determined to loathe its insular, insulating Gore-Tex righteousness, and he ended up marrying it and moving in. One look at the Cavern and he knew he'd never work on any other project ever again.