RICHARD POWERS (21 page)

Adie's new pleasure drew Spider back with greater frequency. He checked up on the Jungle Room's smallest alterations, like a log house owner watching a neighbor put in a barbecue pit too close to the property line.

Go on, she encouraged him.
Just head down that way a little. That opening to the left of the divan. Nah. I kind of like it out here.

Even after a dozen solo trips, he refused to leave the comfortable foyer of Rousseau for the expanses of the greater mansion.
She
...
reminds you of someone? Who?
he bluffed.

Adie smiled at him. Pointed at the pointing woman, recumbent on her berth. Spider made no sign.
Someone from around here?

He turned to look at her. Through their two sets of 3-D glasses, she couldn't see his eyes. He looked away.
Depends on what you mean by "here." Where were you born?
she asked. He shrugged.
You dont want to say?

He swung around, hard.
Not a question of wanting. How old were you when
...
you came over?
He turned away again.
Young.
She waited a decent interval.
Adopted?

You know the odd thing?
He spoke to the woman on the sofa.
They say I have an older brother. Somewhere.

She came and put her arm around him, where he stood in the foliage. He took off his glasses, but would not look at Adie. I
really wish you'd paint some clothes on her.

Ebesen paid a visit one day, when Adie had the Cavern. For the first time since their near-conversation, he reappeared, ready to talk. He checked up on her progress. She walked him through the moving animals, including the monkey he'd animated.

Were you aware that your innocent customs official-turned-naive painter once did time in La Sante prison?
Ebesen spoke as though the crime were hers.

No! Impossible.

Yes indeed. Aiding and abetting a forgery and embezzlement scheme.

I cant believe it. Did he know what he was doing?

Probably not. You folks rarely do.

You folks? Me folks?

A surfeit of wide-eyed artistic trust. At least that's what the authorities concluded. They let him out after a month.

She took Ebesen down the paths into the scanned anthology. They passed by the Botticelli without comment. They skirted the Poussin. Ebesen showed nothing more than a twitch of recognition around the lips. He took the controls, steering them down the jungle track as if in an ATV. Soon he refused even to slow down at the passing wayside attractions.

They reached the far end of the simulation, where the unbordered world dropped off into white. Ebesen removed his glasses and nodded.
Interesting.

That's it? That's all the critique I get?

Well, unless I missed it down a hidden fork somewhere, you've left out something obvious. Something essential.

No Dr. Tulp,
she said. No Gross
Clinic. I refuse to do anything where anyone's veins are outside their body.

Hands. Red handprints. Elk. Bison. Magic arrows.

Oh! Yes, of course!
A glow infused her eyes, the idea of perfection.
Cant have a Cavern exhibition without a little cave painting.

Ebesen didn't register. The bagman was lost in disputation with himself. When he spoke again, it wasn't to her.
Huh. That's it. That's how you need to do this.

He walked out of the Cavern. She watched him leave. The seat of his sagging khaki pants had worn through in two moth-eyed spots on
either side of the inseam. It stabbed at her. The battle for existence shrunk to a decent pair of trousers
—one meager gift that she'd never be able to give the man without humiliating him.

Against all indication, Ebesen came back. He dragged with him a massive quarto volume, its spine long ago broken, its loose pages in various degrees of prison break. A venerable book with the smell of mold and water damage to authenticate it. A text that had hectored generations of students when Janson's unfocused eyes still baffled themselves on that print
of The Peaceable Kingdom
pasted above his crib.

Here,
Ebesen said, cracking open the tome. All the plates were black-and-white. Or had been black-and-white once. They'd since all mildewed to ashen and ivory. He held out his specimen for Adie's inspection: a wildly shadowed flamenco dancer. Adie kinked her brows and looked at him for explanation.

You don't know it?
She shook her head.
You don't know it. I'm disappointed in you.
El Jaleo?
By Sargent? You do know Sargent, don't you?

Karl. Be nice.

I am being nice. You haven't seen mean yet. Here. Look here.
He pressed his thumb to where she was supposed to look, further smudging her chances of making out the data.

She stared, feeling her old loupes kick in. She scoured the wall behind the dancer, the play of macabre shadow, obscured in a cheap print, rubbed out through years of shameless use by hands that probably
prayed more often than they washed. Seeing anything there was a hopeless prospect, except for his insistence that she see it.

And then she saw. Painted on the painting's painted plaster wall: a replica of the first-made images.

He's quoting Altamira,
Karl said.
Just discovered by Sautuola and his little daughter. Written up the year before Sargent does the painting. A Spanish cave, you see. The painting's not really about the dancer. It's about the first-ever proof that we have to paint. Paint like we clap our hands. Took four more decades for the experts to accept the idea of Stone Age art. Nobody wanted to believe that these bison were the real thing. Except for painters, of course.

She looked at him, taken apart by what she saw.

Scan Sargent and stick him in your nature walk,
he said.
You'll get Altamira for free.
He stared back at the image inside the image, shaking his head a little sadly.
Think of it. All these centuries of greater realisms, more light, deeper psychological penetration, and the golem still never came alive. Paint: disowned by technology, discredited, until technology needed it again. And now,
he said, shrugging at the Cavern walls,
the water and the mud and the spark are finally coming together. Now we're at last threatening to pull it off...

Karl. Karl.
Who was this man?
Why aren't you an art history professor?

His face flushed, as if her words had slapped him. A hard, red hand slap. Flamenco.

Fuck you, too, doll.

Ebesen bundled up his yellowing gift and removed it from the negotiating table. He turned his threadbare trousers on her
—pallid mandrill on its deathbed—and made for the exit.

Karl. Stop. Stop right now! I meant that as a compliment.

He turned in the doorway. His face twisted up, as if he were a non-native speaker, trying to remember "compliment," the shifty homonym, the false friend.

Help me with this,
she said, waving to include all that was now invisible.
It's the greatest game in the world. But it would be even more fun with someone who understood all the jokes.

His face came forward a nanometer.
Jokes?

Ah. Sorry. I mean "allusions"

Ebesen suppressed a lip twitch. He studied the Cavern walls, empty now, their projections shut down. Bled of all electrons, they looked as blank and white as heavyweight bond.
You
'//
help us out with the architectural fly-through, in return?

Sure, sure. Although I warn you, I cant tell a corbel from a cornice.

And you'll let me litter your little theme park with my personal favorites?

Of course. That's the whole point. Only
...
?

Go
ahead. Say what you were going to say. Only?

She winced.
Only
...
we might want to work from some more recent prints.

Ebesen held the grubby book to his chest for an awful moment.
You want me, you get my anthology.

I'm sure we can find an out-of-the-way bush to stick you both under.

So Design's senior derelict led Adie down the overgrown path of Western art. Ebesen muttered to himself while he worked, reciting stray facts and vesper-captions that kept him to the task at hand. She listened as inconspicuously as she could, from across the cubicle, reacquainting herself with all his old, exhausted favorites from scratch. From another's eye.

The man pattered on everything from Paleolithic fertility figures to late-day silk-screened sex sirens.
On New Britain,
he told her,
people believed that humans came to life when the gods dribbled blood on drawings of them.

Or:
Picasso thought he'd invented camouflage.
And by free association:
You know how the Dutch kept the
Night Watch
out of the hands of the Nazis? They hid it underground, in the Limburg marl grottos.

He'd hold two prints up for her, side by side. Comic in their contrast: Watteau and El Greco.
Art has only two obsessions. Denial of death and preoccupation with it. Real achievement depends on either utter indifference or utter terror.

Genuflecting in front of the Ghent Altarpiece, he'd say,
Do you know why Mary's hand towel is dirty? The angel took her by surprise, at her prayers. No time to tidy up for the guests. Know why the Annunciation script is upside down? God's dictating, from above
...

Karl, Karl. Where on earth do you come up with these things?

She asked his opinion about the eighties international superstars, the market where art now lived. Ebesen just shrugged. His knowledge ended abruptly in the year that Adie's SoHo show had opened.

It passed for friendship in the low fluorescent light, Ebesen's halting glosses, his overture of closeness. And Adie kept her end of the bargain. She cleared herself a workspace in the room that Ebesen shared with Michael Vulgamott. The bagman and the architect had already used their Cavern tool kit to simulate a skeletal bungalow. The viewer could wand through this interior, not just along predetermined paths, but in any direction she cared to explore. Their simulated rooms occupied real volume. Although little more than hasty polygon fills with a dash of surface texture, their interiors held together from any angle. Walls blocked access and doors allowed it. Light streamed through windows from a consistent source. Stairs led up and down. Opposite views supplied each other's complements.

Proof of concept,
Vulgamott said.
Enough to show how the Cavern can bust open spatial visualization. But just a five-finger exercise. A mock-up for the real tool.

Their idea was to assemble a chest of architectural primitives: three-dimensional icons, universal building blocks for creating countless further rooms. They imagined a visual catalogue of prefab parts, designed once, reused forever
—the full Vitruvian library of any building component that imagination might require. Each solid piece had to be deformable along any axis. When Adie joined them, Ebesen had already been working on the Ionic capital for weeks.

We figured we'd start with your more high-demand items,
he

explained.

Doric was done. Abacus and echinus each bore resizable handles that one could click and drag to shrink or swell the capital. The moldings below adjusted accordingly, while the necking and flutes stretched to fit snugly onto any column underneath them. The Ionic model improved upon this basic unit, upping the number of flutes, changing the echinus to egg and dart, and adding adjustable volutes.

Ebesen worked the stone meticulously, testing on a flat-screen monitor. He carved, examined, jimmied, and carved again. The tedious scut work fell as far below design as design fell below the skills of the man who, Adie suspected, could freehand any object in creation.

Vulgamott fussed at a nearby screen, perfecting his own pier and shaft.
Nobody here is exactly looking forward to Corinthian. Adjustable acanthus leaves. It's going to be a bloody nightmare.

The tool-kit language took ordinary architectural descriptions and parsed them into tiny aesthetic machines. Someday
—with luck, before the hour that TeraSys set for a final Cavern rollout—a goggled archi
tect would be able to stand inside this wraparound drafting table and, by clicking, cutting, and pasting in the empty air, produce a ghostly scale-model Parthenon, on the fly. The designer, immersed in a virtual design environment: Vulgamott christened the idea V-CAD. It had a certain recursive beauty, using a chamber of the Cavern itself to build more stately chambers
...

So
use me already,
she told them.
Tell me what to work on.

How would you like to be the greatest expert on triglyphs and metopes north of the Bay Area?
Michael Vulgamott asked. No
experience necessary.

He spoke with a perpetual mope, that burlesque of depression that could only be depression-induced. Even expressions of appreciation sounded like a dental complaint. She slaved over bits of frieze and pediment that she felt sure would please the man. But when he came and stood over her shoulder to monitor her monitor, he could manage no more than a whimper. He'd start to object, and then
—objecting to his own objections—trip himself up before he could get back to his sentence's line of scrimmage.

What?
she said.
Tell me. What'd I do wrong?

It isnt you, doll.
He'd turn his back and throw one operatic hand up in the air.
It's humanity at large. A persistent source of stress to me.

Michael, Michael, Michael. It's like being back in the Union Square subway station, talking to you. Where d you grow up, anyway?

Hattiesburg, Mississippi. Who wants to know?