RICHARD POWERS (24 page)

Your beard grows in. You play with the two bald spots on each side
of your mouth, the spots that have always stopped you from growing a beard in real life. For the first time ever, you have the luxury of growing facial hair without any social consequences. You twist the longest chin strands into twin points, untwist them, repeat. It's good for what feels like hours at a shot.

You peel off a wafer of plaster from behind the radiator large enough to balance over the opening of your urine bottle. You keep the makeshift cap in place at all times. It reduces the room's stench. You find a way of lying along the radiator so that you can do sit-ups and push-ups without the chain chafing. You jump in place, run two-meter laps in a shrunken oval.

Ali hears your morning workout. He bangs on the door to break it up. "Hey? What you doing in there?"

"I need exercise. If I don't exercise, I will grow sick and weak."

"You stupid shit," he explains.

But no one intervenes when you start up again, quieter.

Knowledge of who is holding you arrives by the worst of couriers. The Angry Parent shakes your door late one evening, the signal to submit and cover your eyes. He enters your cell and places something on the floor in front of you. Then he circles around behind your back.

"Take off your cloth, please." His English, though thick, is surprisingly fluid.

You remove your blindfold. The sight on the floor in front of you turns your eyes hot and viscid. A pencil and a sheet of blank paper, your first since captivity.

"You must write a letter." He sounds forceful, but not violent.

"Oh yes. Oh, bless you. Thank God.
al-Hamdallah.
"

His hand on your head prevents you from turning around in joy.

"No, no," he corrects, patient as a first-grade teacher. "I tell you what you must write."

You must write:
To the people of the United States.

I am alive and healthy. I am being kept by the soldiers of Sacred Conflict, a unit fighting for God's Partisans. They are not terrorists. They do this thing as the only way to win justice.

I am being treated and fed well. I will not be hurt in any way, as long as the United States and its leaders act honorably. I will be freed as soon as the demands of Gods Partisans and of Gods higher laws are met. If they are not, then the failure will be upon you. And the failure will be serious.

You spell several words wrong. The Angry Parent doesn't notice. This is your desperate code, the only word you can smuggle out to the outside, the lone assurance that you know the letter is nonsense. Your mother will tell them. The Chicago office, Gwen: anyone who knows you in the slightest. Nothing if not a perfect speller.

"Please sign the letter," the Angry Parent commands. "Now place your cloth back on your eyes." He gathers up the paper and pencil and walks to the door. "Thank you," he says, and closes you back in on nothing.

Worse than nothing. The sound of the clicking lock forces you under, into a despair like the closing of a metal crypt. It's Sacred Conflict. The group that brought down the American embassy like a stack of mah-jongg tiles. The ones who slammed a car bomb into a crowd of Lebanese scrambling to grab American visas. The group whose eager foot soldier, smiling as he ran his truck through an armed checkpoint, blew himself away with
2,000
pounds of TNT, taking
241
Marines along with him to the heaven of martyrs. The one group in this Babel of factions that you prayed it wouldn't be.

Sacred Conflict: their balance sheet is so huge, so mysterious, that you can't be anything higher than an expendable pawn. These men have the consortium of rational nations on the run, reeling from the power of their conviction. The terrorist group of the hour, just now enjoying their moment on the geopolitical stage, their suicidal, scene-stealing walk-on. Your letter gives them one more holy weapon to brandish at a cowering world.

The day after your exercise in dictation, you fall ill. Your body gives in to the infection it's been fighting since capture. A steel chill spreads from your extremities into your chest. You lie huddled on your mattress under the cheap acrylic blanket, shivering in the slip glaze of your own sweat. Sleep is a four-reel hallucination where radical factions take turns inscribing the details of your confession onto your abdomen with the point of an electric needle.

The next day's ten-minute sprint through the latrine does not last you through the morning. By the time the Shiite Cronkite brings you your pointless lunch, a demon
—hot, yellow, and liquid—splays its claws against the wall of your intestines.

"Toilet," you croak.
"Merhadh."

"I ask Chef"

"No ask Chef. Tell Chef."

He disappears. You wait an eternity
—150 seconds or more. Then you must defecate or die. No time even to scream for a can. You run as far from the bed as you can get, tear down your pants, and aim for the mouth of your urine bottle. Amazingly, almost half of the silty stream finds the bottle. You leave the putrefying rest and crawl back into bed, fetid, sticky, lower than an insect, a dung beetle. You fall into a raging fever.

You wake up, someone kicking you in the back, thumping you with an Adidas cross-trainer toe. AH is shouting, "Hey. Hey! Why you shit all fucking over the floor?"

Your blindfold is on. He must have replaced it before commencing to kick you. You roll over and place your face in the path of his blows. He stops. You feel your power over him, power that comes from your total indifference.

"Sacred Conflict," you say. "Holy War."

"Hey," he bleats. "You gotta eat your food." The
gotta
learned dutifully from some Top 40 song.

Eating is death. Anything you eat now will pass right through the frictionless tube you have become. All you can do is squat it out, hope the virus dies of dehydration before you do.

"No eat," you say. "Hunger strike."

Your refusal enrages him. He shrieks deep in his throat. "Eat!" He kicks you again, in your mercifully emptied gut. He crouches down and inserts the cold tip of his pistol in your nostril. "Eat."

His growl sounds like a bad James Coburn. Even this wasted, you must laugh. He screams again, his rage ever more impotent. "What you want? What the hell you want?" "Medicine. I need medicine."

"Bukrah,"
he says, shaken. "Tomorrow." Neither word means anything to you.

In your dream, Gwen reaches into your throat, deep in, deeper than you ever suspected a hand could go. She pulls up half-digested forms, eroded Cracker Jack prizes covered in decomposing clay, the hair and slime that accumulates in sink pipe traps. She holds out a handful, and the two of you lean in for a closer look. The crowns of your heads touch, the first kind touch you've suffered in months. You bend over the slime, examining. It crawls with tiny amphibians, pink cave newts no bigger than termites.

The medicine arrives by special delivery. Whether it is tomorrow or not, you cannot say. The room is anyway pitch-black. The medicine is a grayish powder. Ali, by flashlight, jabs a fistful into your hands, telling you to take it with water. The drink tastes like mine tailings. It gags you. But by now, so does the neutral air on your opened mouth.

"Is this poison? Are you trying to kill me?"

"We are not killing you," Ali counters. "America is killing you."

You sleep again. You wake as light seeps in under the cracks of the corrugated iron stapled over your French windows. You are hungry. At first you don't recognize the gnawing, so archaic is it, so unlikely. Even after several deep breaths, nothing hurts. You feel
—well—
well.
You feel the reacquaintance that comes only after illness. Exhilarated, in spite of all cause.

You rise up on your stumps and walk, as far as the chain allows.

"Hello? Hey. Someone?"

Someone is there, opening the door. From the gentleness, you guess it to be the Shiite Walter.

"What you want?"

Blindfolded like justice, you point toward the smear of fecal accident in the corner. "Something to clean that up with." You pantomime rag, pantomime bucket.

"Yes. OK."

"Also
...
an orange juice, an Indonesian highland arabica, and a double order of eggs Benedict. Easy on the hollandaise." Silence from your captor. Mute, threatening, ambiguous. "Food, please." "Yes. Sure. No problem."

21

The world machine bore on, in the face of the unbearable. Its overburdened angel engine failed to overheat. Not right away, in any event. Not all at once. It survived the latest massacre of hunger-striking students. It absorbed the intimate documentation, the grainy aerials and close-ups, the midrange establishing shots that saturated video's every free market. Knowledge returned, civilization's bad penny, even this late in the scheme of things. It played and replayed the rote vignette: armies firing on unarmed crowds. Only the scale, the mechanical efficiency, the presence of cameras made this round seem in any way unique.

History and its victims kept their hands to the plow, broken, exhausted, like an old married couple trapped for life in love's death lock, unable to break through to that sunlit upland. The future, under construction, leveraged to the hilt, could only press forward, hooked on its own possibility. Hope not only persisted; it made a schoolgirl spectacle of itself, skirt in the air, all shame on view.

Fall was well into its return engagement. The rains signaled an early and long winter. Adie Klarpol grieved for current events until she could no longer feel them. Then another shame gripped her, more private and local. She'd lived here for the better part of a year and had not yet learned the first thing about this town. It was as if she'd had room in her for only one exploration at a go. Now the days began to lose their length and weight, heading to winter. She vowed to get out a little, while there was still time.

She laid out a box around the downtown, one of those numbered grids that archaeologists use to inventory a virgin field. She rode to the top of the Space Needle, fixing a shorthand map of the streets' layout. From that bird's-eye view, she picked out sights to acquire over the next half-dozen Saturdays. She turned over every inch of the City Center. She got the Woodland Park Zoo out of the way early, racing past the various forms of captivity. She paid her overdue pilgrimage to the Asian Art Museum and the Frye, blasting through them with the same guilty squeamishness.

Jefferson, James, Cherry, Columbia, Marion, Madison, Spring, Seneca ... She clicked the streets off, climbing and diving with the strangest sensation, feeling as if she were wanding through them. As she walked, the high-resolution, water-lapped horizon swelled and filled, without pixilating or dropping frames. She swung her head side to side, and life tracked her pan seamlessly. The piers, Alki Point, Pike Place Market: all appeared to her astonishingly solid, with fantastic color depth, and no trade-off between realism and responsiveness. When the sun chiseled its way through a chink in the stratocumulus and, for fifteen seconds, blazed the cityscape into highest contrast, Adie discovered the real use of binary. The greatest value of the clumsy, inexorable, accreting digitization of creation lay in showing, for the first time, how infinitely beyond formulation the analog would always run.

She prowled, one blustery Saturday, up and down the four floors of the Mindful Binding, that fantastic, expanding, used-book universe perfect for getting lost in. She headed first for Architecture, searching for scannable plans that might be of interest to Ebesen and Vulgamott, peace offerings for having abandoned them. Then
—old bad habit— Art. The oversized color coffee-table books just sat there on the shelves, past hurting anyone. And there was no one at all to catch her looking.

She moved on to Travel, Victoriana, and Local History. Then, decorously delayed, she paid the obligatory visit to her first love, Juvenile Fiction. And there in that most unlikely place, she ran into Stevie Spiegel. The last person alive she would have figured on meeting under that heading.

He saw her, and his eyes darted quickly away to check if he might slip off unseen. But they were both caught.
Adia Klarpol! What brings you out into the light?

She laughed.
Not a full-blooded vampire yet. Still just a novitiate, remember? Don't we get to venture abroad for short intervals during the first year?

Sure, sure. Whatever gets you through the night.

Besides, I could ask you the same thing.

Me? I like the light. I make it a point to get out in it. Once every other month or so, whether I need to or not.

She gestured to the motley-colored bindings.
Kids' books, Stevie? You're not responsible for any illegitimate little charges that I don't know about, are you?

He blushed.
Hope not. It's
...
He wrestled with expediency.
It's just that I've been looking for this one story
...

Since you were nine?

Well, seven, if you must know.

Called?

Oh. Now. If I knew what the damn thing was called, I wouldn't still be looking for it after all this time, would I?

Author? Subject?

Gone. All gone. My daughter, my ducats.

Hang on a minute. You've been trying to locate a book for thirty years, and you can't remember what it's about?

Oh, it was a fabulous story, if that's what you mean. This boy has the ability to make the things he imagines come into existence, just by
—and here I'm a little shaky on the exact mechanism—

Stevie. You're hopeless. Was this an older book? American? English? Translated?