PLOWING THE DARK by Richard Powers
You pass through an invented Halloween. A functional Thanksgiving. A genuine simulation of Christmas. You lift a fake glass to a new approximate New Year's.
Your pupils habituate to permanent, low-grade twilight until the crushing vacuum of a single day begins to play like high opera. Even this plotless, characterless, sceneless script reveals its unities. Its beginnings, middles, and inexorable, minimalist ends afford you a panorama, the sweep of a story unlike anything you could have followed when you were free. Surprise in the absence of uncertainty. You will live here for the rest of your life, a Galileo under house arrest, with no telescope to stick through the skylight. You will die here. You'll watch your own deathbed scene, breathless, attuned to the smallest detail, awaiting the only possible outcome.
Attunement teaches you. It is possible to love one person, and only one person, more than you love your own existence, and still not know that one. She made you needy, controlling. You made her willful and perverse. All a life-sized misunderstanding, put to rest in this larger place of enforced listening.
You had no cause to be so brutal, that last call she made you, just before your capture. No cause, the years of preemptive second-guessing, certain that you already heard her objections before she made them. Now that you both must live within perpetual eyeshot of the thing you missed—two humans, too late, making a space for one another— you can see past fear to the place fear never let you reach.
And yet, in the fogged celluloid of this focused dream, the story repeats. The home you both set fire to, again and again. The constant border incursions, the mutual banishment. It's never enough for you. You're never satisfied. You want my fucking bone marrow.
She didn't know you when there was a now. How could she know you in absentia? And the need you felt for her—the love—must become a crippling thing, so filled with self-inflicted misery that even redemption now would ring worse than hollow.
Perhaps, your only reading matter says, perhaps God will place love between you and those that you are hostile toward. For God is powerful. And God is forgiving. And God is compassionate.
The mouse comes out to gnaw on the pages of the book. On those words, for those who can believe without seeing. You let it nibble. Let the creature take from you everything it needs.
As belated thanks for helping them with the video, the keepers return your necklace. Gwen's good-luck charm, the one they confiscated from you on the first day of imprisonment. You sit gripping it, unable to quit sobbing. You press the sharp point of the charm into your cheek, trying to get your thoughts to stop. Guards come and wrestle you, pin you to the ground, and confiscate the charm again.
"Please. I am sorry. Please give it back. I won't hurt myself anymore." A good deal later, after the gouge in your face has more or less healed, a hooded man comes in to snap your picture. Three days on, Ali brings you the print and tells you to sign your name across it.
It's some kind of bush-league trick. An amateur hoax you can't quite puzzle out. They force you to affix your signature to another man's picture, another Crusoe who only vaguely resembles you, gaunt and wasted from sockets to jowls, mizzled gray throughout the hair and beard, a fake-up that will fool no one. Ali harasses you into signing before you can figure out who exactly you're perjuring.
You had no cause to be so brutal, that last call she made you, just before your capture. No cause, the years of preemptive second-guessing, certain that you already heard her objections before she made them. Now that you both must live within perpetual eyeshot of the thing you missed—two humans, too late, making a space for one another— you can see past fear to the place fear never let you reach.
And yet, in the fogged celluloid of this focused dream, the story repeats. The home you both set fire to, again and again. The constant border incursions, the mutual banishment. It's never enough for you. You're never satisfied. You want my fucking bone marrow.
She didn't know you when there was a now. How could she know you in absentia? And the need you felt for her—the love—must become a crippling thing, so filled with self-inflicted misery that even redemption now would ring worse than hollow.
Perhaps, your only reading matter says, perhaps God will place love between you and those that you are hostile toward. For God is powerful. And God is forgiving. And God is compassionate.
The mouse comes out to gnaw on the pages of the book. On those words, for those who can believe without seeing. You let it nibble. Let the creature take from you everything it needs.
As belated thanks for helping them with the video, the keepers return your necklace. Gwen's good-luck charm, the one they confiscated from you on the first day of imprisonment. You sit gripping it, unable to quit sobbing. You press the sharp point of the charm into your cheek, trying to get your thoughts to stop. Guards come and wrestle you, pin you to the ground, and confiscate the charm again.
"Please. I am sorry. Please give it back. I won't hurt myself anymore." A good deal later, after the gouge in your face has more or less healed, a hooded man comes in to snap your picture. Three days on, Ali brings you the print and tells you to sign your name across it.
It's some kind of bush-league trick. An amateur hoax you can't quite puzzle out. They force you to affix your signature to another man's picture, another Crusoe who only vaguely resembles you, gaunt and wasted from sockets to jowls, mizzled gray throughout the hair and beard, a fake-up that will fool no one. Ali harasses you into signing before you can figure out who exactly you're perjuring.
Maybe another month goes by. You almost forget about having taken part in the bizarre ritual. Ali bursts into your cell one day, aflame.
"See who is famous today? See who is in today's newspaper? American film star! Mel Gibson!"
"Gibson is Australian," you say. "Not our fault."
He waves a scrap of newsprint under your blindfold. Eternity's long-sought armistice. Page 6 of the Herald Tribune, and there is the old man's photo, identified as you. Someone has been duped, either you or the world at large. And you don't care anymore, just who.
"Please," you beg. "Let me just... hold it. For sixty seconds." Not to read the article about you. Just for the look, the longitudinal proof of things happening. The feel of it in your hands: your old breakfast table news.
He won't let you hold it, if only because you want to. But before he snatches it away from you forever, you catch a glimpse of the date. You take the number to bed with you, vowing on your life never to lose count again. You shelter the secret figure in your heart, protecting it from all human invention. You perform vast calculations on it, sums and differences, expansions and extractions.
The math's stubborn result rocks you. Simple subtraction slams you up against a figure too mythic for you to believe. You go head-to-head, putting it through the calendar's mill so many times your brain begins to bleed. And still it persists, staring at you in its perfection.
If you were in fact taken on that November day of '86 that has stayed lodged in you, and if the scrap of paper they waved at you was in fact today's, then tonight is precisely your thousandth night. And tomorrow will be your thousandth night, plus one.
39
The thing accreted like any cathedral, one stone on the other. Each wall's blocks were but ghosts, floating in array through a million dynamically refreshed video addresses a second. And yet, to the ones who hewed and hick-pointed them, they passed for stones.
The designers fit their fly-through together in gross modules: first the ground floor, along with the narthex and exonarthex at the west entrance. Then, above the blending of aisle and apse, they placed the gallery. On top of that, they set spans of triforium arch to support the stunning trick of clerestory.
They worked for a month on the elevation alone. They studied the architectural analyses, the conjectures about what held the thing up. No two experts agreed, except in their astonishment. True to history, the group needed several tries to get the dome to stay in place. The window-ringed weight defied them. After the sec
That looming nave terrified Adie's dog. Pinkham had gotten used to the Arlesian Room, curling up in an empty corner, at most barking at the squeak of a floorboard. But those long, shrouded sight lines undid the creature. Something about the size of the undulating space, the smoke-colored arcades opening onto farther distances, spooked him. He would
not set paw in it.
Vulgamott played module librarian, putting his finger on each new part and tweaking the object's properties as needed. Ebesen fussed over every spandrel and inset. This man, who had not cleaned his mobile home since purchase, insisted that every filigree and tracing be perfect. Their modular objects lay wrapped inside a larger code, bits as opportunistic as those pagan Venus-temple columns incorporated into Notre
Dame.
Six weeks along, the mosaic team began to fuse. Their private differences got lost in the size of the undertaking. Lim and Jackdaw combined forces to solve the scale problem, getting the Cavern to house a grotto orders of magnitude larger than itself. Rajasundaran took on the challenge of that cavernous reverberation. Loque sculpted the shafts of changing light, those eerie threads spun out of the master source.
Adie took charge of the mosaic saints. Spiegel delighted daily in watching her assemble the stones. As she turned high-resolution photographic reproductions back into low-res squares of colored tile, the staircased edges of her own soul smeared and softened.
This must have been why you brought me out here, Stevie. Without even knowing it. I mean, I don't want to sound mystical or anything ...
Why not? Go wild. Christ Pantocrator will roll with it.
It's just that... I'd forgotten what it feels like to be part of something bigger than I am. To have some work that I'm ...
Destined to do? he asked. But the old irony hid itself under a bushel.
She shrugged. Every person has something she's supposed to do. I knew this when I was little, but I forgot. It comes back to you, though. That's the beauty: you think you're lost. You stumble around forever without knowing which way is forward. But you tum a comer one day and your work is right there, smack in front of you. Tracking you like the moon.
But you knew that, back when I met you. You already had your work.
She squeezed her eyes shut. Knew. Met. You knew me when I was an ecstatic novice. When I first went to SoHo, all I could talk about was line and energy and light. Before I knew it, I was chatting away about bankability and impact and positive portfolio exposure. It's horrible. You can't imagine what an industry, what a ...
Factory?
She snorted. You see? That's where we live.
But Rubens was a factory. Ingres was an industry.
The Master of Flйmalle wasn't.
Sure he was. The Church paid for those Annunciation panels by the metric ton.
Vermeer wasn't.
Lackey of the rising propertied class. Gimme a foot and a half of something in burnt umber that'll look good above the dining-room sideboard.
No, she said, almost violent. Not the same. Those people were ... looking. Pushing through appearance to the other side. You can see it in every mark they put down.
Well, they're industries now, anyway. Whatever they started out as.
This is fact. The Scream T-shirts. The Klimt coffee mugs. The hyped exhibitions where gallery guards move the customers through in cattle cars ...
So you liked it better when they turned away the great unwashed at the doors of the palazzo?
I liked it better when the human heart was more than a commodity. And when was that, exactly?
God only knows. Never, probably. That's why I bailed. Why I ended up so completely lost, for all those years.
You ran to commerce to get away from commercialism? In a funny way, yes. That's exactly what happened. Adie, my Ade ...
You have no idea how horrible it is. To give your life to a thing you think represents the best that humanity can do, only to discover that it's not about beauty at all. It's about coercion and manipulation and power politics and market share and the maintenance of class relations.
Then what... ? He teetered on the edge of making the obvious point. Maybe the obvious point was never worth making. What's... different about what we're doing?
She pieced her tiles together, in silence. Blue, rose, gold: sages standing in God's holy fire.
As a product? Maybe nothing. But as a process? It feels as if there's something we have to make. As if we're closing in on something that the world somehow ... needs.
He laughed in astonishment. I never thought I'd live to see you become the spokesperson for high technology.
Not the technology. She grew shy, diffident. She did not say it. The
sanctuary.
You see what you're making, don't you? His chin pointed at the paint-by-numbers coming to life on her screen. Human portraiture. The thing you'd sworn off of.
She blushed, a schoolgirl caught slipping a secret valentine into a mailbox. Maybe so. But they're not my originals! And they're not especially realistic.
When you work your way down to the damaged bits—the parts the Crusaders and the Turks destroyed? Are you going to finish them?
I haven't thought about it. You can't think too much about this thing. The one that tracks you like the moon. I'll see when I get there.
All the lab's orioles brought them scraps of colored rag to weave into the deepening nest. Nineteenth-century Orientalist engravings of the immense interior. Photographs shot from atop Sophia's descendant: Sinan's Sultanahmet, the Blue Mosque. Translations of the dazzling, calligraphic, verse maze that lined the inside of that stone firmament.
The whole felt fresh, like something from the days when making things was still young and not yet overcome by terminal success.
Freese suggested a treadmill, to speed the visitor through the enormous distances.
Adie vetoed. No machines inside. It's a sacred space.
They settled on a simpler propulsion. Lean in the direction of travel, and that compass point would drift toward you. Lean harder to run.
Why is the math so hard? she asked Kaladjian.
Which math?
Perspective. Proportion. Depth.
Perspective? Perspective is easy. Just the visual cone turned inside out. Once the Italians got wind of Arab optics, the whole globe was up for grabs.
Not that perspective, she said, harsh enough to surprise him. But he was alongside her in a flash. The most difficult man she knew was also among the smartest.
Oh. Perspective. Knowing where you are?
She nodded. He scribbled with a number-two pencil on a pad of blank canary legal paper. He drew her diagrams, space's irrefutable proof. If being alive were a single problem in long division—how to divide infinity by threescore and ten—we'd have a reasonable chance of solving existence. But the solution for seventy years misses catastrophically for thirty, because the numerator is infinite. And those solutions, in turn, look nothing like the quotient for this year, this fiscal quarter, or today, let alone the next thirty minutes.
We live between our next heartbeat and forever. The mathematician shot her a look: How much do you know? That's it. We are supposed to solve all the conflicting quotients at once. That is what makes ... the math so hard.
He lifted his eyebrows at her, as if he did not mind being of use, if only this once.
Revived by work, Adie returned to the play of her body. Limbered, she and Stevie tussled at each other, like fast-learning pups. Pinkham barked at the sounds of happy scuffling, and he would scrape his nails at the other side of the closed bedroom door to be let in.
Sex in middle age felt illicit, blunted, sad, curdled by knowledge, each of them aware how little a role the loved object actually played in the perpetuation of happiness. But neither of them could shrug off the forms of happiness. Joy grasped and dismissed them by turns, t
Adie opened. She tried on a whole wardrobe of abandoned clothes for Spiegel that she had never worn in front of anyone, even for the solitary mirror. She sported looks that weren't her, outfits that quickened her to inhabit.
She talked to Stevie widely, as she once had to her sister, in childhood. She talked to him of Ted, now without guilt or recrimination. She spoke of the things that had gone wrong. The ways in which their paired equations failed to balance.
She narrated the horrors of New York. The molestations in the subway. Rats the size of a healthy baby. The fashion of nihilism and runaway hipness. The serenade of all-night car alarms under her apartment window.
He smirked at her. You miss it, don't you? Admit it.
In your dreams.
She made him get out more. The trips stunned him. Our ancestors spoke of this thing, the sun.
She made him sit, dank and chilled, with a book in his lap, in her harvested garden. She took him to that hideout in the Cascades, her secret swimming hole. The water was too cold now to swim. They postponed full immersion until they got home.
There she lay waste to him, with a hunger that grew with each feeding. It surprised Stevie sometimes, the ferocity of it. Her sniffing him, tasting, holding him up to the light, inspecting. Searching his every part for some sensory testament she could never quite find.
You're not bad at this, she told him. His reward. For an old guy.
Yep. That's me. The Loin in Winter.
But each encounter fed the question in him, the one that would undo them, whether he asked it or held it under.
When you make love to me ... ?
Yy-yess? she teased, touching him in a place, in a way to derail all words.