RICHARD POWERS (27 page)

She came out from behind the glasses and shuddered. She shook her head at the boy author, not wanting to talk about it.
Aiy.
She shook herself off, like her dog Pinkham, after a dousing.
That's like drugs. Like being out in a stormy night on a hit of
Windowpane.

I wouldn't know.

But it only works for the operator. The onlooker has no idea. You have to be at the steering wheel, even to imagine
—

He nodded a little sadly.
One of its big problems. The other big one is that the graphics are ... what do you call them? Abstract. Sooner or later, something recognizable needs to happen.
That, his voice hoped, was where she came in.
Then we'll have the start of a real, live-in adventure.

She sat safe, outside the theater, staring back at the walls where her circulatory system's sonata had just debuted.
If this is just the primitive Marconi version
...
Television isn't even child's play. People are going to walk into these rooms, and they're never going to walk out again.
Even her laugh came out bewildered.
They'll starve in there. Like rats in those Skinner boxes, pressing their own pleasure buttons until they drop.

Jackdaw perked up, pleased.

You sure we really want to go down this road?
she asked. Do
we really want to hand something like this to an already addictive age? Aren't we in enough trouble the way things are?

He squinted, not getting her. When had trouble ever been the issue?

She thought for a long minute.
I'm going to have to start all over again. From scratch.

Sure,
he said.
Start small. We've found that it's not how many plates you get in the air at the same time. It's how well the plates spin.

Start... small?

Pick one thing. Your favorite place in existence. Something you connect to. Something you can go inside of.

She closed her eyes and made the old pilgrimage. OK, she said, opening them. I
have it.

So what are we talking about, then?

A bed. A bed by the shore of the Mediterranean.

22

This is the room life lends you to sleep in.

Bedroom.
Slaapkamer.
Chambre
а coucher.
Simple accommodation, with all the basic fittings. Bed, washstand, chair, window, mirror: everything that you need to live. But closing your eyes, sleeping here may prove impossible. For this room fills with a relentless blaze. Clear sun pours in from all directions.

A canted floor meets the wall in a mock horizon: the joint of earth and sky, of wheat and azure. The life that sleeps here has scuffed permanent patches in the floor's varnish. The room's real inhabitant has just stepped out. He leaves his shirts draped on the shirt rack. Their short-sleeve billow remembers his body. A straw hat, his shield from this southern sun, waits on a peg for his bared head to reclaim it. He leaves his bottles, his brush, his book on the bed stand. His towel, scudded with dirty handprints, hangs on the hook by the bathroom door.

In the painted bedroom, the man's own paintings hang on view. The scenes his eyes have lived in cling listing to the drunken walls. They serve as this apartment's additions: tiny remodeled day rooms, cobbled onto this room of broadest day.

The tenant has bent this apartment with his breathing. He proves, before the scientists, that space is curved. The chairs, the bed, the tilted table: each stick of furniture passes its own law of gravity. Each would-be solid lays down its own perspective, its various vanishing points scattered like buckshot in the hinted distance. No two of these pauper's objects belong to the same cubic space. The foot of the bed juts mysteriously through the doorframe. The floor swells like the loose sea. Walls and ceiling amble together by the art of compromise. The shutters give up on accommodating their casement, by turns closing inward and throwing themselves open to the
Proven
зal
breeze.

Is he happy, living here? Does the work of his hands please him? Do his eyes read this light's simplicity, grateful for a chance to handle it? Or do the cracks in this pitcher, the tears in the chairs' caning spell some unlivable agony?

You know this fellow by his things. The shaving mirror above the
water bowl holds his look, as surely as a photograph. His impression nestles in the wonky bed. The lay of this rented hideout explains him. There is a rhyme to how this bedroom works. It remembers the life it hides. This man's ways suffuse through his attic dormer. Sun assembles a life from these surrounding solids.

But entering this painted life overhauls it. Your eyes change the bedclothes just by settling on them. Looking leaves its fingerprints on his glass. His towels take on your hand smudges. His shirts start to memorize the creases of your body.

This will be your
kamer,
your
chambre,
for who can say how long. A place to enter and inhabit at will. A box whose every plank of wood furnishes your story. This life, now yours. These paintings, too, now belong to you. The bed, the chairs, the azure, the wheat, the window: everything this sleeping room speaks of will be yours, except
—in such merciless light—for sleep.

23

Tell me,
Jackdaw asked her.
Where? Arles,
Adie answered.
Where is that, exactly? In the South of France. You know France?

Don
'
t abuse me. I may not get out very much. But I could find it on the Net.

Oh, sweetie, forgive me. I'm sure you could. It's an old Roman town, in Provence. When I was a girl, we used to play a game.

We?

My sister and I.

In the South of France?

No. In our bedroom.
The running average of those nine bedrooms, swapped every two years, across the air bases of the Free World.

Did your sister have a name?

Elise. My mother's fault. She was looking to enliven a very banal life. Elise and I used to lie in bed, across from each other, after lights-out. Hold our eyes open with our fingers, until we could see in the dark. We'd chatter away, turning the cracks in the ceiling into the Shire, Moria, Mordor...

Been there. Made that map.

After a couple hours, Elise would fall asleep. Weak-fleshed girl, my sister.
I'd lie underneath my covers, feeling abandoned. I became the last vigilant person on Earth. The whole, dark bedroom would tighten around me. Yd lie there like a stone effigy, feet to the east, toward Jerusalem. With enough time
—and eleven-year-old insomniacs have forever—I could turn my coffin into a snug ship's cabin. A first-class berth on a transatlantic crossing.

Jackdaw nodded, replaying the trick in his own theater.
After a while, just by squinting into the dark, 1 could make out the nighttime ocean through the starboard portal. I worked out this detailed saga
—my sister and 1, recently orphaned, heading back to the Old World in the luxury befitting our recently recovered state. Back? Recovered?

I'
ve no idea where
I
got all that crap. One troubled little cookie,
I
guess. Yd lived in Germany, Turkey, Japan. But my fantasies always left me orphaned in New York. Anyway, in the dark, whatever Air Force barracks we were holed up in passed for a great stateroom. Walnut and brass. Tooled leather chairs. And
I
and my recently widowed sister
—

Widowed?
I
thought you said orphaned?

Widowed, orphaned: depended on the night. You boys just don
'
t get
it, do you?

Go on.
You
and your widowed sister
...

Me and my widowed thirteen-year-old sister furnished our cabin with a suite of priceless paintings that anyone who belonged to our same elevated station would instantly recognize.

Know that elevated station. I
lived underneath it as a kid.

Oh, don
'
t poor-mouth me, Acquerelli. You're as middle-class as they come. What was your father, a university professor?

Electrical engineer. Berg and Nordstrom.

There. So let a little girl indulge her harmless false consciousness, will you?

Go on. Your priceless painted masterpieces.

"Our art treasures," Elise always called them. Hold it. I thought she was asleep?

I got her up now and then. Eventually, I taught her how to play in the day.

You could see them by daylight? The pictures? Oh, the pictures were real. You had priceless art on the walls of your bedroom? Fake real. Not imaginary, 1 mean. Ouch. My brain. Someone hit the Reset.

My mother used to buy us prints of famous paintings for our walls. Our Gallery of Visual Instruction. Cheap reproductions to remind the two of us of just how much our mother sacrificed to bring us into the world.

Sacrificed?

Her father sold insurance. Reasonably well-off. He warned her not to marry Air Force. She thought she was in love. She thought it'd be romantic, raising kids on air bases around the world. It wasn't. Raphael was supposed to compensate. The Hudson River School She was indiscriminate, so long as the thing said "culture." She told you all this?

In every way but words. It worked, I guess. We girls both bought in. Sometimes, in daylight, Elise and I would parade in front of the prints, saying, "Oh yes, we had to have them. Even though they cost us our millions."

Another planet. One of us is from another planet. Would you be so kind as to tell me to whom you are referring? Well, it sure the piss ain't me, sister.

Her laugh went up the wrong pipe. Choking on her spittle made her laugh all the harder. She flapped her arms. He would have patted her on the back, except that it involved touching.

She caught her breath.
Yd lie there in the dark, in that luxury stateroom, nursing this story in my head about bringing our millions back from exile in the form of the world's best bullion. The only truly priceless commodity: human genius. Things there would never be more than one of.
Something harsh took over her face. Jackdaw looked harder away.

First there was that spoiled little blond Infanta, always bursting into our private stateroom as if she owned the joint. And then that sly, pretty girl at the half door. Our mother went to her grave insisting she was a Rembrandt, even after the Rembrandt scholars ruined her forever. For a long time, we had the world's most ethereal newlyweds, with their fantastic scrub brush of a dog. Their alcove seemed to open off our own cabin.

Show me,
he told her.

Oh, I put them all in the jungle. Every painting that hung in any of the bedrooms I've ever lived in. You've seen little parodies of all of them. Except one.

That one being ... ?

The Bedroom at Aries.
The bed by the shores of the Mediterranean. She spoke in a trance, her eyes resting ten meters past the front wall of the Cavern, her voice addressing a thing long out of earshot.
The devastating one. All tilted and wrong. The bedroom of a man our mother made the mistake of telling us had gone mad.

She looked at him: you know the man I mean? Jackdaw nodded. But he didn't know.

That room was my father's. My father was the madman. God, we saw so little of him, growing up. So absent, so enraged. Captain Klarpol, the silent warrior, gone for months at a stretch, flying those horrible machines ten times bigger than any house we lived in, dropping God knows what on God knows whom. And when he did come home, we three always paid for the latest round of missions. He
... we ...
I thought: If I could just give him something. Find out what he needed
...

A quiet room somewhere, by the other Mediterranean. The far shore, where they never got posted. A fictive, all-restoring summer home.

I'd peek out at this room, from under my down comforter. I'd gaze into that periscope, looking back into a miniature, blazing version of our room. Bed, chairs, washstand, shaving mirror, floor, shuttered window. Even the madman's own paintings, leaning out at crazy angles from the painted wall
...

You could see all this? In the night. From across a dark room.

Well, see, that was the thing. I never could decide whether I actually saw them, or whether I just supplied all the brushstrokes from daylight viewings. And that got me thinking. Got me started playing the game.

Wait. I thought that was the game.

No, no. The real game. The game of free the shutters. Ocean crossings are never smooth, you know. You always hit some longitude, two nights out of wherever it is
—Le Havre—when the sea rises up and bites you. The prevailing winds, the North Atlantic currents. Or maybe the captain just passes out on the ship's wheel at 3 a.m., after a bout with the aquavit.

She stared off at a bitter old friend. Images rose up around her
— detailed, familiar still lifes she'd kept in deep storage for twenty years or longer, now back in vengeful retrospective.

I'm really sorry,
he said.
But I have no idea what you're talking about.

No, of course you don't, do you?
The snarl surprised her. She recovered fast, waving off her lapse.
Ocean liners pitch. It's what you pay them to do. It's how you know they're ocean liners. And it was up to me, in my first-class berth, to preserve the laws of physics aboard ship by making the paintings shift when the cabin did. I'm not sure I want to hear about this.

Now, Jackie. You're the big advocate of interactivity. The first time it happened, it was an accident. I was looking without really seeing, and the bottom left of the Infanta frame, well, fluttered. I saw a ripple, something wrong in the comer of my eye. Like the shift in a branch that turns out to be a walking stick.

Trying to avoid the big mammal's notice.