RICHARD POWERS (35 page)

He was sure you knew about it. That you deliberately stayed away. It crushed him that you never showed up.

Crushed him? He said it crushed him?

Well, not in so many words.

The piece was as full of antinomian cheek as Zimmerman could manage. But for this audience bred on halting dissonance, he delivered lines as long and soaring as
Dives and Lazarus.
A theme and variations, no less, on the old fugueing tune "Idumea": beautiful, visceral, expansive, and, given the venue, hopelessly banal. The dedicatee almost refused to play the piece, so startlingly unshocking was it, so potentially damaging to an experimental reputation.

He did it to provoke the provocateurs. Said it was his
Abschied
to the innovating world. You know: "It's not like I'm ever going to make it back to the city anyway."

Idumea. I can't believe it. Idumea.

He also said that you
...
that you
...

...
used to walk around the apartment humming that tune.

Naked.

He told you that? How dare he?

How dare anyone? "Idumea" drew as many silent sneers as
he Sacre
had once drawn catcalls. Shape-note Americana, second-rate WPA, half a century too late: the wry joke of a very select crowd, over the run of a very short season. But the gorgeous solo viola line lodged in the heart of at least one listener, a slumming double agent whose day job consisted of producing commercial musical scores. The fellow had been looking for someone who could do a thirty-second derivative Copland knockoff, and chance had led him to that someone.

Zimmerman never hesitated. It shocked Spiegel, and saddened him. But working for TeraSys by then, Spiegel had little moral leverage to preach against selling out. Ted worked up the piece in a little under three weeks. It was "Simple Gifts," returned to sender. Thirty seconds of hosanna from the world's first, radiant hoedown. Heavenly counterpoint, put to the service of a multinational consumer-products conglomerate intent upon wrapping its insidious agricultural chemistry in the patina of Shaker innocence.

He did that? That was Ted?
Adie, incredulous, remembered the commercial spot. Remembered it in the back of her throat. The kind of manipulative, nostalgic sound track that you wept over in the solitary shame of your living room, with all the shades pulled down.

The delighted corporate sponsors paid Zimmerman well. Ted made a hundred times more for those three weeks of work than he'd made for all the other music he had composed in his life. The lump sum helped to cover what the prison college's group insurance refused to pay, when Ted at last had to move into Warren County's second-best assisted-care facility.

Life was truly long. Ted spent his days strapped in a bed in a nursing home in the Buckeye state, a forty-year-old avant-garde composer surrounded by the perfect audience: deaf nonagenarians. At least he had a private room—a cinder-block single compartment, the same dimensions as the one his old friends now redecorated.

Ted and Steve had spoken only twice since Adie's arrival out West. Spiegel stopped calling him. Ted could no longer hold the receiver. Even after one of Ted's nightingales bought him a speakerphone, Spiegel quit returning Ted's calls. It was not just cowardice. Ted's voice had gotten so faint and slurred that Steve had to ask him to repeat everything three times and still couldn't make out the half of each message. The brain was still intact, but it had begun to waver into places where Spiegel was not yet allowed. Silence seemed the more merciful ordeal. Spiegel had not visited, nor had he seen pictures. And yet here was the place where the man now lived. Where else but this prototypical layout? Planks standing in for linoleum; cambered casements for molded plastic. The bed pressed up against the back right corner of the narrow box. No doubt the real bed was a tubular steel hospital apparatus wrapped in acrylic blankets. But in the invalid's mind, surely it resembled this rich red wood piled high in an eidolon of eiderdown. And next to the bed, the rickety table: the perfect stand for Ted's MIDI sequencer, executing its archaic scores on a whole orchestral
palette
of digitally sampled instruments, playing them out through a pair of tinny speakers where Van Gogh's water pitcher stood. Perhaps a nurse came in and worked the mouse for him. Perhaps the machine,
unlike Spiegel, still understood Ted's voice well enough to take dictation. Perhaps the picture frames on the walls above his bed held snippets of laser-printed score, keepsakes of Ted's long, aural adventure.

This was the room that Spiegel helped to furnish, no matter what chamber from the sunny South Adie thought she outfitted. The two of them collaborated, carving down the cubes into the objects each hid. Thousands of polygons hung suspended in space on the intersecting beams of five projectors. The shaving mirror alone ran into the millions of bits, dozens just to fix the location and color of each hung pixel. Behind its flinty blue reflection, voltage differences snaked through an array of registers in a conga line so long that all that the human eye ever saw was this massive epiphenomenon, this simple looking glass that bore no earthly relatio
nship to the worlds of oscillat
ing semiconductance surging beneath its surface.

Over the weeks that Spiegel and Klarpol refinished their storeroom of old furniture, Jackdaw assembled a library of interactive definitions— reusable ball bearings that animated all the room's moving parts. Through the staked pains of software's sieve—check lower bound X; check lower bound
Y;
check lower bound Z; check upper..., set StepRate..., fix ShadeOffset…; for Rotltem from -180 to 180, step StepRate, if ShadeOffset

It no longer sufficed for each of the room's austere furnishings, their continent-wide sheets of bits sliding along the moraines of video memory, merely to mimic solidity. Deeply nested C routines now invested the smallest collection of boxels with real-world behaviors. The same host electronics that sculpted these statues of colored air could also sense and respond to the room's angelic visitors.

The visitors' solid hands still passed through everything they tried to feel. But now a thumb and forefinger, pinched around the phantom drawer knob, could pull it open. Even the designers felt the uncanny effect, moving the wood-grained logic of an object they could not even touch. However incorporeal, the towel ruffled when brushed. The windows cluttered shut at the first mime of force against them. And when the transient user, suckered by half a billion years of evolution into
believing the visible, reached out by reflex to pat the bedcovers, those sheets miraculously turned their corners down as if waiting for the idea of a sleeper to curl up and inhabit them.

Water wanted to pour. Shirts wanted wearing; picture frames, straightening. An eerie hideout rose up around its makers. The ghostly placeholders began to stand in for their leaden referents. For finally, the brain conversed less with stuff than with appropriate response. It operated upon the working symbol, and for that, the less carrying weight, the better. Dimension, color, surface, motion—the full play of functional parts—implied a tenant who seemed eternally to have just stepped out for a moment. The visitor moved through a furnished efficiency where all the comforts and amenities performed as they should, with only the apartment's occupant eternally not at home.

The room solidified as the year dissolved. Expectation shot through Spiegel every time, standing on the floorboards, riffling through the Dutchman's evacuated things. Adie's belief, too, reached critical mass. Technology wanted something from them. The play of emulated, Arlesean light teetered on the verge of some announcement.

Whatever time passed outside the Cavern, the artist's bedroom hung in an eternal noon. The bedroom's blaze enveloped its makers, even as they worked at their midnight cubicles. The three of them settled into the silent routine of roommates, the new nuclear family sharing this close, sunny starter home. They worked alone, coming together at times to putter and refine. Perpetual nesting, permanent spring cleaning. The shared task of home improvement made talk unnecessary.

Ade?
Spiegel said one night, violating that pact of silence.
Can I ask
you something?

The eyes said, "Do we need to?" The mouth said,
Sure.

The celibacy thing?

Yes?
She dragged out the initial letter in epic wariness.
And what exactly would you like to know about the celibacy thing, Stevie?

He thumbed his nose at her, some avuncular nineteenth-century gesture new to him, its origins a total mystery.
Not celibacy per se. I've already assembled as much data about that particular subject as I care to, thank you. What I want to know is, don't you... don't you ever miss it?

"It" being
non-
celibacy?

"It" being a partner. Companionship. A warm body in the house on a damp night.

Well, I have Pinkham, you know.
She turned toward the creature, who lay curled up in his favorite spot on
a rag rug inside a coil of coax
ial cable at the Cavern mouth. She patted her thighs in invitation. Pinkham looked up, ascertained the absence of crisis, yawned, and curled down again. He refused to step near the simulated room. It bewildered him.

Don't you miss
...
surprising behavior? Something not reducible to axioms. A being as big and complicated as you are.

Oh. Pinkham is all that. And then some. He's a lot more complicated than I am, in fact.

All right. Call me anthropocentric. Don't you miss conversation? Talking in bed? A mind that isn't yours, to go over the day's mystery with. Someone to distract you, on those days when you feel like writing on the walls.

I never really trusted words all that much,
she said.

Spiegel opened the shutters. Jackdaw's astonishing algorithm bathed the room in a crescendo of Provengal sun. Stevie fiddled with the casement, waving it back and forth without touching, like playing an etherophone.
Sex, Ade. You don't need it? You can go totally without?

That depends.
She looked away from him, not at all coy.
On what exactly you mean by "sex."

He turned away too, hiding his blush. You
ever wonder why we two never slept with each other? I mean, every other possible permutation in that house went to town, at least once. Didn't matter
...
He skipped a beat, but could not stop.
Whether they even liked each other.

You didn't miss anything, Stevie. Believe me.
She seemed to wonder, for a moment, just which way she meant to head.
Look. I don't know how it is for you. But as far as I'm concerned, solitude is not a hardship post. Being single is not some kind of jail sentence, Stevie. I like my aloneness. It's better than any other configuration I can imagine.

Through the lab's partition walls came a group war whoop, the cheer of software engineers down the hall, delighting in some hard-won extension of their dominion deeper into the kingdom of comprehension.

For that matter
...
She pointed toward the hidden celebration.
None of us is anywhere near as alone as we ought to be.

He caught her drift, without another word. Her worst fears about depiction were true. Evolution's most productive trick was to rig things so that the idea of need grew vastly more insatiable than the needs it represented. Feeling had nowhere near ample room in which to play itself out. Sex at best mocked what love wanted. The gut would explode before it could dent the smallest part of its bottomless hunger.

Another night came, one night nearer to the end of history. Spiegel and Klarpol busied themselves with fixing a chair that, when picked up and moved, tended to shed and leave behind a phantom right front limb.
You know what we need, Ade?
Spiegel kept his eyes on a screen dump of the flawed data structure. He aired the idea as if he had just come up with it.
Sound.

It took her a moment to register. But when she did, she clapped her hands. And again, louder. For every tatter in the mortal idea.

That's it. That's brilliant. Of course we need sound. It never occurred to me. This place is dead silent. That's why it seems like such a haunted house. Well. One of the reasons.

You're telling me we could get the floorboards to creak whenever someone takes a step on them? That's what I'm telling you.

Unreal. The wood could thump when you touch it. The shutters could clack. Pinging glass. That's it. Every object will make its right noise. This will totally flip people out. Their ears will convince them of the thing they're touching.

Know what we really need? Music.

She cocked a head at the suggestion. Trying to figure out what he was after. Then she figured.
You know what, Stevie? We really don't. Music is not what we really need. It's the last thing in the world, in fact.

He looked at her, already hearing. As if the room were already dosed in superfluous sonatas.

Realization took hold of her face. She fought back at the assault.
Oh
fuck
. Fuck it. You brought me
a
ll the way out here, after all these
years
.
..
? Just to get me to
…
ju
st
to
try
to
fix me back up with …?