RICHARD POWERS (46 page)

They went on speaking, trading their widest words since their old, disowned ones. But east of the Mississippi, Adie fell sullen with memory. Soon they began their descent, the return to all hurt and hostility.

They made their way from the airport on total improvisation. Adie drove; Spiegel navigated.

He knows we're coming in today?
she asked, as they headed north along the state highway.

He did yesterday.

Rural Ohio rolled past the windows, lone farmhouses on their hillocks, each at the center of their few hundred acres. She fixed her eyes on the rushing cornstalks. Everyone's nerve cells were decomposing. Everyone alive. It was only a question of rate.

The nursing home stood a hundred yards from the site of the failed Shaker Utopian community. Every original building had vanished. No plank of that old, spare ecstasy remained behind. Adie and Spiegel parked and walked up to the single-story brick building. Nothing distinguished this particular purgatory from the identical geriatric holding tanks that every town over ten thousand inhabitants tucked away somewhere, behind an eight-foot hedge. A waiting room for the abandoned: the last place any infirm would want to land.

Just past the foyer, a group of shattered bodies formed an enchanted circle around a TV set. On the screen, the National Little League Championship played out in silence, the sound track muted without the audience noticing. Heads bowed forward over their walkers in a silent prayer ring, their cracked-vellum faces poised for some sign.

Why is it,
Adie asked, under her breath,
that the later in the day, the earlier a person falls asleep?
She blessed the enchanted circle as she and Spiegel pushed past.

They found their way down an ammonia-flavored corridor to the nurses' station. There they asked for Zimmerman. They found his room and knocked, but no invitation came from within. Stevie turned the handle and pushed. The door swung open upon their own invention. Bed to the right, bed stand to the left, unshuttered window in the middle. Only in this world, the artist was still at home.

Ted lay in bed, strapped to the raised headrest. His arms wavered in the air like dried seedpods on autumn's first breeze. The bewildered
bulge of his face took them in, mouth sagging, eyes fleeing back into their wells of bone. Age and incapacitation had added thirty pounds. He'd grown a mane, like Beethoven's.

Ste-ven Spie-gel.
The four syllables spread out over so long an astonishment that they lost themselves, like the word "Asia" on a good-sized globe. Then Ted saw Adie. And her name took so long to come out that it never did.

Their embraces glanced against a body that could not manage them. Ted's limbs thrashed in grief and gladness. At last they settled, like stormed water seeking its level in the ocean's permanent bowl. Words were past considering. Then there was nothing but words.

They spoke of the flight out and of their luck in finding the home.
We knew this had to be the place,
Spiegel said.
The Welcome Wagon of catatonics up front gave it away.

Zimmerman hauled back and sucked air. He seized up, a cracked

ignition failing to turn over at thirty below. It flashed through Adie to

call for a nurse. But Ted, in agonizing slow motion, was only laughing.

What... the hell. Am I doing ... somewhere ... like this? Can you ... imagine?

Adie could. Could imagine. She wanted to tell him not to exhaust himself. Not to try to talk. Ever again.

On the bed stand where the washbasin should have been sat a portable computer. A wheelchair faced the lone window, looking out upon a bird feeder. Three drab sparrows flicked about in the seed. A day in this room would turn their bickering into top-drawer Verdi.

Against the left wall where the towel should have hung stood a hands-free reading podium. A book lay under its acrylic plate, pinned open like a museum butterfly. An automatic page-turning device beneath the acrylic waited with infinite patience for the thrash that commanded it to advance the story. The book gaped open at a chapter reading "Meditation Four: What God Can Properly Give."

Spiegel's eyes fell upon the deus ex machina.
No. Tell me it isn't true. Don Giovanni gets religion?

Ted seized up again, the silent, sucking sound of freeze-frame mirth. He tried to grab Spiegel by the arm and address Adie at the same time. A little more myelin and he might have pulled it off.

This ... man and I... have known each other... forever.

She held his eyes. And you and I, a few days longer.

The two males fell to remembering. The composer, his grasp on yesterday growing tenuous at best, reached back fifteen years and reconstructed all their old arias, note-perfect. Spiegel kept pace, as if this one-upsmanship of detail recovered from oblivion actually gave him pleasure.

Adie sat listening, eviscerated. When she couldn't make out Ted's words, she made them up rather than ask him to repeat a single vowel. The boys talked on, memories feeding on themselves, for in the end, there was nothing but reworking the one hope chest full of stories. For a while Adie walked around the room, groping every object she could reach. She looked over the small library of CDs, a medium invented since she and Ted had lived together. The tune that she searched for cowered there, among the others.

Do you listen much to your discs?
A decade and a half of dodged questions, and this was the thing she chose to ask. She bit her tongue and hoped for a yes. At least some pit orchestra, to accompany the endless afternoons of sparrow-bickering.

Not…. as often as you might think. They're hard to get to. Hard... to load.

She knew what "hard" stood for. "Hard" was the last euphemism that dignity left him.

Lunch came. A tuna salad for the resident, and a cube of Jell-O for his guests to share. Steve and the nurse, with orchestration from Zimmerman, moved him from bed to chair. Adie watched. TeraSys robots moved with more mobility and coordination. The body that had warmed her once, that she had warmed, now flopped toward its target like hardened rubber.

The nurse hovered. You
want some help with your food, Ted?

He waved her off, the arm a brutal flail. I will lunch alone with my friends. With whom I have not dined for some time.

His fork performed a bravura, involuntary loop-the-loop. Steve, suppressing a laugh, started to choke on a bite of tuna. Ted flailed at him, and his fork hit the rug. This second fling sent celery chunks flying in
all directions. The boys were both hysterical. And then they weren't. That long, wheezing suck of air that each previous time had turned into a laugh veered into another place.

Adie stepped into the breach before she even knew there was one. She pulled her chair flush against Ted's and took up his jettisoned fork. As if she had done it forever, each day of her adult life, she stabbed a chunk of tuna and steered it into this lunging little chick's mouth. Ted opened, received, and swallowed, also knowing the drill. Her free arm went out and encircled him, steadying the bull's-eye.

So how about that Little League World Series?
she asked him.
Something else, huh?

The corners of his chewing mouth pulled up in an almost controlled rictus.

Lunch decimated, the composer confided in them about his new project, just under way. A last-minute sprint to the finish, something midway between setting Scottish folk tunes and heaving up an Opus 111. The work lay hiding inside his portable computer. Spiegel fired the box up for a look. The full score appeared on the screen.

Spiegel cleared his throat in shock.
Chamber orchestra, Ted? Where are you going to find a chamber orchestra to play contemporary music these days? Or is this another soap-company commercial?

Zimmerman howled.
Look at it. Read the notes, you Philist...

Adie came up behind Spiegel. The two of them inspected the score, trying to turn the armada of formal symbols into a symphony for the inner ear.

How are you entering this?
she asked.

It seemed one of the nurses, an amateur pianist, occasionally came and took dictation. It took Ted almost a full minute to say as much.
She
s
also ... something of a ... piece. It aids ... the composition process
... to
have someone
...
to
impress.

The visitors traded disbelief. The man was dead up to the waist, with the tide rising. But something in him still pursued the conquest, long after conquest could be of any use.

/'//
take some dictation if you like,
Steve offered.

Ted's eyes went round and terrified:
Would you?

Just don't try to cop a feel while I'm at it.

Adie stood to go.
I'm taking a walk. My bit to aid the creative process.

She came back an hour later. Stevie swung around at her entrance, utterly panicked. His look accused her: Where have you been? It's hopeless. Hopeless. She came over to the screen. They'd added no more than four measures.

We're going on an expedition,
she announced.
It's gorgeous out there.
She crossed over to Ted and draped herself around him.
You'd like that, wouldn't you?

His eyes fled back into their place of wonder.
I...
would. ... indeed.

They dollied his wheelchair down the linoleum hall and through the rec room. The circle of charmed TV viewers now sat in communion over an extinguished set. No one objected to the fact that the screen had gone blank. At the sight, Ted sucked air in through the sides of his mouth—
eeegh ... eeegh—
and Adie accelerated him out the front door.

His spectral wail only crescendoed, once out in the open air. Everything in this scared, small town that could possibly stare at him did. All Lebanon gawked at the man in a wheelchair, bellowing at this chance gift of freedom.

Adie leaned down to Ted's ear.
Sotto voce,
through the side of her mouth, she giggled,
Now, Grandpa, you fucking control yourself or we're taking you back to the can.
This only made Stevie pick up and propagate the horse laugh.

First time,
Ted tried to say.
First time in six months.
Not fifty yards down the asphalt, he cried out, My
God!

Adie slammed the wheelchair to a stop, bracing for crisis.

Look .. . at that... tree!

They turned toward the midsized maple that Ted's wavering arm stalk seemed to indicate. Steve and Adie looked up into the boughs, searching out a source large enough to rate the alarm. The branches drifted, a crowd of thousand-palmed arms waving callow-green, three-fingered salutes.

I've never ... seen anything like it.

And then, looking, neither had any of them. Matte, shiny, then
matte again as the wind flipped their surfaces, each leaf semaphored a single bit in a composite message too large to read. The trio stood until self-consciousness set in again, blinding them.

The cedars of Lebanon,
Spiegel pronounced. Adie shoved him.
Good Christ, there's another one!

They were, in fact, all over the place. Cheap and eager miracles, too common to look at twice. The wheelchair rolled slowly up the street, under that greening canopy.

It took some pushing to get to town. But town ended as soon as they entered it. Thirty-two places in the United States went by the same name, half of them having started existence as Utopias. Texas alone boasted three of them. This particular Lebanon now existed, to the extent that it could be said to exist, as a theme park version of itself. The Glendower Shaker Museum. The junk-turned-antiques shops, the fleabag hotels upgraded to bed-and-breakfasts for weekenders escaping Cinci or Columbus.

Main Street ran its eight blocks before giving up the ghost. The expedition came to rest at Main and Broadway, awaiting the rapture, which, when it finally came, would surely be at least this quiet. Zimmerman swung his arm in a resounding upbeat, Adie's cue to cut up to Pleasant, circle around, and start the whole loop over again.

J
can't believe it. It's all still here.

They never let you out?
Spiegel asked.
Never take you for a spin?

How could they? Too ... label-intensive.

They ran the meager gauntlet of storefronts, Ted narrating the tour.
Good place to eat. Place I used to do my laundry. This ... guy still fixes shoes. Can you imagine?
A
hobbler!

Air spit out of Spiegel's pressed lips.
Cobbler, buddy.

Unless he's a bad one,
Adie offered.

Cobbler. That's what I said!
Followed by the rasping inhale, the
eegh
of uncontainable glee at this, the black comedy of his existence.

Adie weighed the size of the two ratios: New York to this prop town; this prop town to the nursing home. Which was the farther fall? She was not good at math. Her private calculator tape rarely gave the same subtotal twice. But the answer to this long division was obvious. The
second drop-off made the first seem level. The next drop would be no problem at all.

They rounded the loop again. On the third pass, revelation flagged. The thick, supernal gift past deserving now only fatigued them, at least the two doing the pushing. Spiegel broke first.
That so-called good place to eat. Want to give it a try?

I do, indeed. And I hope that... woman we saw is still... sitting out front.

Spiegel and Adie traded glances. There was something supremely cruel to evolution. Desire survived the purpose of its burn.

In that public place, Adie again rose to save them. She ordered for Ted, spoon-fed him, and wiped his face without a trace of patronage. She helped the waitress clean up the glass that Zimmerman's lunging backhand managed to swipe from the table. And she ate her own meal as well, all the while holding up her end of the conversation.

Ted asked about her work out West. She described the magic lantern show, in detail.

I've told you about all that stuff,
Steve kept interrupting.
Over the phone. You remember.

Clearly he didn't. Also clear that Ted could make nothing of the sketch Adie now drew for him. But she carried on gamely, the only strategy ever available.

We're supposed to demo for the general public next spring, and I haven't a clue as to what we should be building.

Spiegel laughed.
She says that like she's saying, "I don't have a thing to wear."

Ted just stared at his two lost friends, ecstatic with bafflement.

By the time they rolled back down the long hill to the home, darkness had settled in. The old folks were watching a video blooper out-take show, gales of hilarity pouring out of the set. The instant they got back to his room, Ted blurted,
Put me ... on the bed.

Neither healthy body knew what was happening. They worked the badly distributed sack, Steve under the shoulders and Adie at the knees. They floundered, slipped, and banged his deadened torso against the metal sides of the hospital bed, at last getting him more or less supine, face-up, and centered.

Pull down my pants.

Spiegel punched him.
Jesus, Zimmerman. Will you never change?

Hurry!

Thickened with emergency, Adie spent whole milliseconds wondering how they'd avoided this moment until now. She dove under the bed, the likely hiding spot, and surfaced with the bedpan.

Just put... just put me ...

Between the two of them, they figured out the logistics. While Ted mewled in agony, the cause lost, Adie and Steve lifted his naked middle and slipped the pan underneath him.

I'm sorry.
Humiliation bubbled up, broken, from Ted's throat.
You two. I'm so ... sorry.

About what?
Adie rubbed his shoulder, looking away from his worthless, bared groin.
We got you.

I'm in?
His eyes retreated deep into their stunned corners.
I made it... ?

She nodded.

Oh.
His voice relaxed in a wave of wonder.
Oh! What a ... good... day.

How does he pay for the single room?
she asked Spiegel, on the way to their own motel that night.

Steve had fallen away sharply from jovial to grim, the minute they left the home.
He made a fortune on those sell-out TV ads. The beatific Shaker rip-off. His thirty seconds of tonal recidivism.

She closed her eyes, hearing the beautiful tune against her will.
That cash can't possibly last much longer.

Neither can he,
Steve said.

At the motel check-in, she surprised him.
One room,
she told the desk clerk.
With two single beds.
She turned to Steve.
Hope that's all r
ight
with you? I'm not sleeping in a strange room by myself tonight. Not after that.

Nothing separated them but a bedside light. My
God,
Spiegel whispered into the dark.
The man can't go to the bathroom by himself. And he's still... he's still...

Don't say it,
she said.

Each faced the other's wall, silent for a while.
You know?
he said at last.
No lesson in life cripples me worse than "life goes on."
And he fell asleep.

She followed, mere hours later.

Adie dawdled the next morning, first in the shower and later over the complimentary continental breakfast. It crossed Spiegel's mind as well, just how many eternities they could knock off the tally simply by showing up a few minutes later.

When they arrived, Ted was waiting for them, agitated. I
woke up with this weird... idea. That you said something yesterday. About building a cave?

Adie embraced him where he lay. A
Cavern.

Technically speaking,
Spiegel added.

Why would anyone ...
?

Haven't you watched the tape I sent you?

Ted flailed in the direction of the TV room. I
don't go out there much.

I spent weeks slaving over a hot workstation cooking that up for you, and this is the thanks I get?

Spiegel found the video on Ted's shelf. Grateful for the diversion, Adie collaborated in dragging Ted out and commandeering the set. And so the nodding, enchanted geriatric ring looked on at their first working demo of virtual reality, a new galaxy beyond their combined ken.

Steve appeared on the videotape, making a few off-color comments that no one, Ted included, seemed to decipher. Then he stepped into the Cavern and fired it up. He took a spin through the Crayon World, then the Weather Room, then the Jungle.

What is this?
a blue-skinned, beaked woman asked. A
travel show or something?

I seen one of them,
explained a man attached to a tube of oxygen.
It's got to do with special effects.

On the tape, Spiegel set the controls for Aries.

I
did that,
Adie said, holding Ted's flapping hand.

I... thought it was ... Van Gogh.

Then the taped version of Steve booted up the invisible organ. His hands played upon air, and a deeper air issued from them. Ted sat forward, transfixed. Here at last was something one could learn from. They'd forgotten to attach his belt restraint. Adie had to reach over to keep him in the chair.

I need... one of those. But one .. . that doesn't need hands.
Ted wanted to see the instrument again. He asked for a third look, but the rest of the audience shouted him down. He rocked his head all the way back to his room.
That's... the thing I'm going to be playing.
Any month now.

Somehow that day passed faster than the last. Time's aperture stopped down to match the stunted bandwidth. Steve took more dictation.
F... sharp. No. Make that a G ... flat.
Even the simplest whole-note triads required endless revision.

Adie watched. Through the window, at the contested feeder, the sparrow industry worked out its continued survival, eating and excreting, twitching and chattering, inventing each minute from scratch.

They rolled Ted out to the terrace, hoping to store up the outdoors in the cells of his body. He asked for a windbreaker, despite the warmth. He seemed happy just to sit and look, without any walls to jam his focal length.

Spiegel, workless now for longer than he had been since college, paced in place. Already he wanted the airport waiting lounge and the flight back to Seattle.
So what do you do all day? How do you fill the damn vacuum?

Ted's eyes opened wide.
For the last few weeks ... I've been trying to remember... the name of every woman I've ever... enjoyed.

Spiegel all but spit his teeth across the terrace.
How many of those that you enjoyed did you actually ... enjoy?

Not... many.
Ted avoided looking at either of them.
I'm just trying
... to
put my story together. Where I was ... when. I don't know.
Half a minute passed.
And why.

Done,
Adie laughed.
And it's taken me less than forty seconds.

Ted stared at her, that look of myelin-stripped panic.
You knew ... all of them?