RICHARD POWERS (47 page)

Not yours, you idiot. Mine.

Oh.
Ted's grin worked against the width of the disease.
Oh. In that case
... I
wonder if you could help me with ... the name of the cat woman?

Spiegel tucked his face under his arm. Adie smiled sweetly.
You asshole.

The ... cat woman. You two ... know the one I mean?

The three of them sat loosened by the breeze, looking over the accumulated wreckage of the past that still, somehow, seemed worth enumerating.

They didn't brave a restaurant again that evening. Instead, Adie ran out for candles and wine, a decent BV Napa cabernet that they drank out of paper cups. By dinner's end, there seemed nothing left to say.

Steve, as always, broke first under the silence.
Well. Shall we have a listen before we go?

A ...
listen?
Ted's face shrank in horror at the possible meanings.

To
the chamber symphony, man. What did you think I meant?

The chamber... ? How?

Steve pointed at the computer and whirled his finger around in space—the obscure sign language for whirring electrons.
Through the magic of semiconductors. How else?

Oh.
It flooded Ted's voice, a bitterness so great that only an immobilized soul could survive it.
Oh. I thought you meant a real listen.

But a fake listen would have to do, for the fake was all they had. Spiegel loaded the piece, set quarter note equal to sixty, clicked the cursor on the first measure, and released the synthetic music.

Notes spread over them in the dark, notes in a constellation that no one could have guessed came out of this man. The sound stunned Adie, even in the synthesized clarinets and trombones, even in the tinny approximation of inch-wide speakers. This music was not Ted, not any Ted either of them had ever known. It had no edge, no irony, no flamboyance, no demonstration of academic credentials. It was
tonal.
Standing waves of continuous, proscribed modulations outdid even
Dives
in luxurious archaism. Music meant nothing, except by convention. But this massive parallel data of pitches in time turned her viscera in a way unreachable by any paraphrase. There were things so complicated that only the ear could know them.

Sound snaked around itself, pointless and beautiful. The shaped sound counted for nothing. It demonstrated nothing. It proved nothing but its own raw need for a redemption that, finally, could only be denied. Something in this music had been lost in transcription. Some impediment to Zimmerman's conception brought about by the disease. Some inability to write what he meant, dictating through the ether while lying in bed.

But a look came across Ted's face as he listened. The music came as close to conception as the encumbered process was ever going to let him come. At last the piece trickled out, stumbling through the incomplete measure that Spiegel had transcribed that very evening. And when the chords decayed, the piece still abided in the night that scattered it.

Ted's eyes pleaded with the two of them. His mouth latched on to a sudden rush.
If I could just finish all four movements. It's music ... that people might love. That people might think about and... feel. Not like that alien stuff we all used to make ...

You'll finish,
Spiegel said.
And then you'll write something else. Because this one won't please you anymore. Yet,
Ted corrected.
Won't... please me yet. Give us a minute,
Adie ordered.

Spiegel's head jerked back.
I have been asked to evacuate,
he told Ted.
Goodbye. Farewell. Take care. Write if you get work.

He walked without looking, out to the front room, where a ballroom of white-tied aristocrats swirled to the strains of a Strauss lдndler. Near the door, a doubled-up woman, trembling against her rocker in time to the meter, hummed a des
cant to the ghost dance's tune.

Adie reappeared, pumice-faced.
OK. I'm done. Let's get out of here.

Nothing outside could touch either of them. The rental car was their cocoon, a safe capsule heading north in the dark.

Were you aware,
Stevie said to the Ohio night,
that a huge percentage of the population eventually gets sick and dies?

Adie stared at the ribboning road. Finally, in a voice the color of that hypnotic
pavement, she said,
Denise Girandel.

Denise Girandel?
Nothing. Then:
Denise Girandell How in the name of hell did you dig up that one?

She shrugged.
How many cat women are there in one persons life?

Why didn't you tell him?

I wasn't about to give the bastard the satisfaction.
A mile went by.
Besides. Trying to remember gives him something to do all day.

They pulled up at the motel. Spiegel sat still in the passenger seat, the motor dead. You
two should never have gotten divorced. You know that, don't you?

Whatever you say, Stevie.
Then, softer.
It's not that people shouldn't get divorced. It's that they can't.

Hours into the night, she came into his bed. Looking for something— an explanation, a barricade, another mammal's pelt.

I'm not going to hurt you,
she said. I
just need to lie here. I just need to hold someone.

Holding lasted no longer than holding ever does. But when it came to the things she needed, hurt and hurting were not least among them. She kneaded into him, as if the thing she had to release lay on the far side of a wall, just out of her reach. She ground against him, less in pleasure than in desperation, in search of some permanence she meant to work on his body. She forced into him, desperate to press all shale to slate. He tried to say her name, but she put her fingers into his mouth, gagging him with desire.

Whatever release she wheedled out of the contact had nothing to do with him. He was just the nearest body, the closest living thing that Would hold still. She fell off him finally, spent, holding him so that he could not turn to embrace her.

For the longest time she did nothing except to lie beside him on this single motel bed, returning to the unbearable baseline of sixty beats a minute. Then she reached over, her hand cupping around his face, a child playing guess who.

By the tips of her fingers, Stevie felt that his temples were wet.
Remind me,
he said.

She rustled up close to his ear.
Remind you what?

Once out of nature. To look for something better than this body.

She stroked his temples, counterclockwise. Each trace around the circle undid one spent year. Then she placed his words—the past, the poem that he was quoting. Her fingers clenched.
Go on,
she commanded. Desperate.
Say it. Say the rest.

He could not refuse her anything. He'd given her worse, more irreversible, already this night. His own voice rang strange to him, speaking into the black:

Once out of nature I shall never take My bodily form from any natural thing, But such a form as Grecian goldsmiths make Of hammered gold and gold enamelling ...

Her hand closed on the skin around his eyes. Her nails clenched, as she pressed back into him. He held still in pain, ready to be blinded.

That's it,
she whispered into the gaping motel room.
That's the room we're supposed to build.
And set upon a golden bough to sing.
The place we're after. Byzantium.

3
5

In time, whole days start to vanish. For a long while the orderly egg carton of the calendar has regulated your mind, kept it, if not productive, at least aligned. But now the carton starts to crumple, the eggs to break against one another in an angry omelet.

You carry on numbering the days, desperate for form, although the tally no longer correlates with anything. The week arrives when you can't make it from one Friday call to prayer to the next without disorientation. It pulls you up out of a night's sleep and runs you under the freezing fire hose—this drift into terror, into utter timelessness.

This room's day permits only the crudest clock. Sometimes it is dark; sometimes a little darker. The only reliable instrument here is
your English Qur'an, that earthbound perjury of heaven's uncreated original. Its pages solidify into a discipline, the rigorous training for a track meet you must get ready for. Reading is your daily regimen, each session coming to a forced stop after ten verses, wherever that leaves you. Whole
surahs
dangle right before the end, or break off bluntly after just starting. Only the count counts.

You may reread the day's passage as often as you like, but not a word more. When the hours expand beyond their usual cruelty, you pore over the opening
fatihah
until it induces oblivion. But you keep to the day's installment. For tomorrow, after the forced march through the latrine and the return to the chain, this system will return you to the previous outing's exact stopping place, to start you up again in the slot where today has dropped you.

This ritual hammers out a few still moments to stand in. It steadies the swirl of eternity, for as long as the verses last. This time you ration yourself, sustain the escape. The Cow, the Bee, the Table: just the mystery woven into these chapter names diverts you from hovering madness. However reconfigured this Jonah, this Joseph, this Abraham, they make their way against the backdrop, under the Thunder, out from the Cave, along the Night Journey.
Say,
the words of the Prophet always start.
Say: were the sea ink for the words of God, the sea would fail before the words did.

The verses themselves evade you. Their linked riddles will not crack. But the torrent of words, their sense-free cadences suffice to hold you, even in the absence of story. Their pageant of sounds drowns out your own incessant dunning. The throwaway phrase "and the water-bearer let down his bucket" expands in your eyes for hours, sounding in your ear for all the world like a soul-saving miracle, the most magnificent idea, the roundest image you have ever stumbled on.

But the secret side effect, the contraband payoff must never have occurred to your captors. They've already broken one divine prohibition in giving you this forbidden foreign translation in the first place. Surely they would confiscate the Scripture if they suspected the scope of its revelation. These measured-out passages keep you tethered in the flux of time. If you start at the
fatihah
and sum the verses you have
read, then divide the total by ten, the quotient yields, by the miraculous dictate of numbers, the total number of days that have passed since you received the word. This is your new perfected calendar, dating not to any fixed year but resetting all dates to your own private
hegira.

Most days, the balm of this word hoard outpaces the torment of its rationing. But sometimes balm and torment settle into a dead heat-starting and stopping, sentences and silence torturing one another to death. How have you been brought to this, staking yourself to the same book your mother once committed to memory without her understanding more than one in a dozen words? You reopen the wounds that that victim once inflicted on herself.
Did you think to enter paradise without suffering the violence of those who have come before you?

They tame the abyss, these verses, better than any parade of orderly notches in the wall plaster could. But they cannot repair your own damaged mainspring, or synchronize it. When you return to the well of text, passages that you recall from adjacent days now stand split by several pages, while those separated by weeks in your memory run flush against each other. This evidence hits you, like a freshly discovered lump in your abdomen. You and lucidity have been parting company without your knowing. Mind has been resorting to the quietest drift, a protective hallucination finally gentler than the alternative.

All you can do is stay grappled to the book's planed planks, hoping that after each breaker, the timbers you've lashed to will bob back to the surface. The only recourse, when this morning slips loose, is to tie it to ten more verses. You listen in to the archangel Gabriel, dictating to the Prophet in his subterranean cave. This story extends itself only in hinted wisps, as if all readers already know the plot. But the more gloriously cryptic, the better. Each ten-verse maze holds you longer than the Sunday
Times
crossword ever did.

You search through the book, for a larger architecture, some forward motion that could pass for form. But the verses possess only the most astonishing organizing principle. The chapters proceed from longest to shortest, starting in prose and ending in prayer. Still, it swells, this staggering dialogue: God, His Prophet, and the cast of broken humanity, in
a three-way game of telephone where only endless repetition forces the words to correspond with what they figure.

You lie in the Prophet's slime-laden cave, taking the complete dictation all over again. Say:
I seek refuge in the Lord of the daybreak, from the evil of what He has created; and from the evil of the night when it cometh on; and from the evil of the blowers upon knots.
Say: I
seek refuge in the Lord of men, from the evil of the whisperer, from jinns and men.

You do. You say what it says to say. Out loud. You recite your
fatwahs
and divinations for a live audience of the word-starved. Chapter and verse. Forward and back. No one comes to tell you to break off.
Verily, man is in loss, save those who believe and do right, and bid each other be true, and bid each other be patient.

For a long time, talking to the book is conversation enough. Then the book runs out. You restart the careful system of mental tick marks from the top. But this time through, you already know what the
surahs
hold. And all those repeated commands to
Say, Say
at last force you to take the ideas live, into the realm of surprise, of real listeners.

You target the simplest, most religious of your keepers, the next time he lingers over a delivery. "Sayid, doesn't the Prophet say that you must never steal?"

"Yes." His only available answer. For lying, too, is forbidden.

"The man thief and the woman thief. Cut off the hands of both of them, as punishment, for they have done very wrong. An example from Allah, for Allah is mighty and wise."

You grope for the book, hold it out, open to the Table. He takes it from you, but of course hands the tainted, unreadable translation back to you at once.

"Yes, Mr. Taimur." As grave as the world at issue.

"But you have stolen me. You have stolen me from my life, and from my mother, and from my
...
family. This is the worst theft of all. How can you do what the Prophet has told you never to do?"

You hear the man crumble in silence. The surf of faith crashes against the rocks of duty. You curse yourself. But you are ready to do worse.

"Mr. Taimur, I cannot know. I ask Chef. Tomorrow.
Inshallah."

As if you've asked for another haircut. He comes through two days later, to let you off the chain for your run. He says nothing. You wait
until your half hour of exertion ends, and he replaces the iron ring on your ankle.

"Sayid, did you ask the Chief about
...
stealing?" You hold out your hands, the ones whose severing Allah specifies as punishment.

"Chef say not to talk to you. You think like a snake."

A snake and worse. A squid. A dung beetle. A human. A creature that would live at all costs.

"Sayid. Walter-jan. How much do your people pay you?"

He does not answer. However much he grasps the words, he does not understand you. You sense him fling his palms out, helpless.

"How much do you make? Twenty-five dollars a month? Thirty? You come work for me. I give you forty."

You cannot rouse him, even to anger. Getting him to kill you, for the moment, is past hope.

Deliverance almost comes, on the day you stop wishing for it. It begins one evening, during your thirty minutes of exertion off the chain. Gaunt legs work their oval until you find yourself logging a few hundred meters more than usual. You soak up a dozen bonus laps, exulting in this sudden increase in strength that leaves you able to shatter all previous speed records. But soon the laps so completely decimate your old personal best that something must be wrong.

You slow to a fast walk and take stock. Furtive reconnoitering near the door discloses nothing, no exceptional noises in the corridor beyond. The best explanation of this miracle is the most prosaic. Whoever was supposed to put you back on the leash tonight has forgotten his place in the rotation. The tick of the thirty-minute clock is finally silenced. Infinite freedom descends on you by accident, and leaves you no choice but to seize it.

You walk all night, a forced march through the checkpoints of crippling fatigue. You cannot squander this supreme windfall, not so long as life lays any claim to you. The epic trek leads off in the dark to parts foreign and unreachable. All those tucked-away peaks and archipelagos that you've never had the leisure to explore now stand naked. Liberty— a whole night in which to rub up against every degree of variegated plaster
in the full three-sixty—unfolds with such grace that all bitterness at it having to end gives in to a larger awe.