RICHARD POWERS (55 page)

40

Your whole body rejects the evidence. Not possible. You can't have been here that long. Time lived and time retrieved don't match up. Those afternoons that took a year to pass shrink, in treacherous memory, to seconds. A month of them wouldn't fill an hour. You can't account for more than a few dozen weeks, let alone two-and-fhree-quarters years.

You clutch to that dead reckoning now, as if to life. Some desperately inventive internal storyteller has won you survival through your thousand-and-one nights. And now, by the terms of the old agreement, the sentence must be lifted.

But that,
too,
is only another fairy story: the thousand-and-second. It gives way to hundreds more, the fragmenting agonies of a world in the
throes of universalizing, myths and
fables that do not say why in the world they need you as protagonist…

At least America remembers you; that much you could not have invented. Your picture in the
Herald Tribune,
even now, after so long you have almost forgotten yourself. They will want a full account, should you live to tell. They will want a book, a story, even though there is no story. There is nothing but a pointlessness the size of eternal time.

Yet still, on days when the sun warps your corrugated tin cage like a cheap cookie sheet, in nights when the damp passes right through your one thin blanket and even thinner skin, seeping down into your bone, where it cracks your marrow, it calms you to write this book. Your head scribbles hundreds of pages at a go, and reads them all back to you, verbatim. For your memory has become prodigious, your story infinite ...

You try passages out on the mouse. Practice oral recitations, triweekly checkups to test your trembling mind. On the day you left Chicago, you could not keep a new phone number in your head for fifteen minutes. Now you are a concert pianist of the verbal arts, performing huge narrative rhapsodies by heart. Who cares if the brilliant solos may be, in fact, the wildest crashing dissonance?

Deep in those prodigious mnemonic galleries, stores of letters to everyone you have ever cared for pile up in teetering stacks, awaiting postage. The gardens of memory grow so ornately, radioactively rococo that their topiary spills over in all directions and all paths return to lushest underbrush.

Things come down out of the attic that you couldn't possibly have left there. The more you retrieve, the faster the stockpiles of bric-a-brac heap up, fire hazards. The forms inside you beat for an outward shape. A way to tear free and be born.

Muhammad must understand the curse of literacy. "I need paper and pencil," you harass him, every chance you get. "Anything to scratch on. Anything, or the jinns are going to get me. Who is going to read it? What possible danger can it be? I'll hand it all over the day you let me leave."

He will not listen to reason. He treats you as if you are already mad.

"Look: you are Lebanese. The Lebanese
invented
the damn alphabet." The worst, culprit technology. The rod that dislodged the murderous boulder. "You practically created writing. Does that mean nothing to you?"

It does. Mean nothing.

The stories keep coming, flooding their banks, reverting. Your brain is a used bookstore that buys more than it sells. Its shelves will not hold. All things happen even to the shortest life. We all live forever. That simple discovery will break you.

You need to tell someone. You need someone to tell. You tell the rodent, until she, too, disappears. Even a mouse's life span makes more sense than yours.

She comes back, the phantom who will take the weight of these gifts from you. You sit on the foot of her bed, stroking her leg, starting in on the boundless backlog. "You'll never believe. I was walking down the street. Some men seemed to be struggling with a flat tire. I slowed down to see if I could help and they told me to get in."

But she is asleep already, before you even hint at the tales where that tale leads. How you always loved to look at her when she slept. Sleeping she did perfectly. Sleeping, she was unified. Out of her nighttime window, clouds roll past a bone moon, stratus stained the color of coral, scudded like sand in time's streambed.

She asks you to sleep in the other room, because your night movements wake her up. But this much she will abide—your holding her foot. And tonight, from this distance, you sum all the years invested, all the cost in equanimity and esteem, the flare-ups of self-righteousness, the scraps that you hoped for in return for holding back. The years that you waited, thinking that you'd be able to tell her about your day, one day, at day's end.

And this is the most she can give you, short of death and surrender: her foot, as she sleeps
...
And still, you would take it again, at the same expense. There is a whirring inside you that falls quiet only so long as you can touch some part of her.

You tell her anyway, as she sleeps. And half the stories that you tell her are just these: these moments of stolen peace, the rough fragments of your life together, coughed up on a shipwreck's beach, snapped beams worthless for sailing now, but still your only source of wood.

Sleeping, she seems an angel, although you know she will wake again. When she does, she rises up disconsolate. She presses her fists
into her hips, to make sure she can still feel bone. She inspects her face morosely in the mirror. She asks you, Do
you like my nose?

You love her nose. Every part of her: devastating, ephemeral.

Other men want me. Other men find me beautiful. Why don't you?

You scowl a little at her, a helpless spasm on your lips. You study her features in this light, light over which she has no control. I want you. I find you beautiful. Don't be stupid. The world cannot abide too many more games.

She asks you,
Do you think I should have it taken in? Just the tip. Just a touch. Maybe you'd find me more attractive if I had a nicer nose.

You cannot find her any more attractive than you do at this moment. You tell her so.

Impatience crumples the flesh in question:
You're not being very supportive.

You say you will support her in this and all things that she decides to do. That you find her heartrending as she is, and will love all changes that age adds to her. But if she feels the need to make some alterations, you'll find those beautiful, too.

You sit at the foot of another bed. She rises from post-op, mutilated. Both her eyes blackened, her cheeks a yellow bruise, a bandage across the swollen midline, she looks for all the world like a beating victim. Straight up from the ocean of anesthetic, she fixes you with the full accusation: I
hope you're happy now.

You are not happy. Your misery has no bottom.

Misery, too, you might give to her. You might make a story of it, of your shared idiocies, one for her to laugh at from the safety of her next bed. Might remind her of all the follies that you two thought so urgent once, as best as you can remember them: your worst horrors, dissolved in worse sequels. All the desperate self-inflictions of an attempted life together, the little indulgences of privilege, called in by the wider war.

What did she say when she woke up next? That is the thread of plot from which you hang. Telling it becomes your last subversive act. The illicit pleasure of recounting, your one revenge on the things that really happened.

Then it is your mother's turn to tell, holding your childish foot and reminding you of things that haven't even happened in this life. You hear her ritual Arabian Nights read-alouds, spread for you and Kamran, well past the year when you should have been weaned from them. Her reading voice, flecked with what you knew even then to be a foreign accent, the keystone to the arched enigma of those days, smooths the total bafflement of childhood. How you used to slog through twelve harsh hours of brute-force realism, just to earn those thirty minutes of enchanted shadow, lying there bed-bound in oblivion's foyer, listening to her read.

Your mother the confirmed pragmatist, rigorous cooker and cleaner, the woman who once made the firemen wipe their muddy boots at the back door before letting them in to douse the burning basement, takes you for a spin in her fabulous Persian machine. She sets the levers, and out leap whole kingdoms, tangled harems, terrible wars. She turns the dials, and the three of you tear off, touring in every direction, past the speed of light.

She reads to you again from out of a book whose title, for all the years of your childhood, you thought was written in Arabic. But now, in photographic recall, you see it clearly enough to read off the stylized, flowing script: Saadi.

It was so; it was not so: there once was a slave who tried to alter his fate by running away from his master. But fate recaptured the runaway and sentenced him to a life of backbreaking work, building the master's mansion.

Many years later, a penitent appeared in the court of this master, knelt down, and pleaded. I
am that slave who ran away from you, all that time ago.

The master listened to the news in horror.
If you are my escaped slave, then who is the man whom I have sentenced to a lifetime of hard labor?

He sent for the innocent convict, a philosopher named Lukman.
How can you ever forgive me? I have stolen your whole life.

But Lukman told the unhappy man, Do
not apologize. For
you have
your new mansion, and I have learned
the only lesson worth learning
about life, one that I would never have learned had
you not imprisoned me.

That is the message your mother sends you, from out of her bound volume, a quarter century ago. A fable she picked as preparation for the life that would one day take you hostage.

She tells you her favorite again, the story she always had to give you from memory, out of her best Farsi children's book, lost in the violence of repeated exiles. She improvises, embroiders by word of mouth, a deeper archaeology, the far-off lands even more suggestive in their state of ruin.

There was and there was not a great nature painter who painted a landscape so perfect it destroyed him. Each person who looked at the scene saw something different. But all saw envy, and all wanted what they saw. And those who wanted the painting most decided to kill the maker and steal the thing he made.

Each time she tells you, the story ends differently. Some trick of memory, either yours or hers. In one, the man's painted creatures warn him of the danger and foil the plot. In another, the painter's murder returns the beautiful landscape to overgrown weeds. In the ending that two small, stunned boys loved most, the painter evades his killers, who arrive at his house only to find the abandoned painting, now with a figure running through its farthest, faintest hills.

Death is not death, nor invention invention. Your single life replays all existence, the way your fetus quoted the fish it came from. All innocence, all mistakes, from your first frightened grunts to your late-night adult confusion, are yours again. All your moments condemn you to line them up and relive them, one by one. Your Enlightenment, your Dark Age, your puddled afternoons of Hundred Years' War. All times collapse into now, in the mind forced to a standstill.

She gave you a plant, once. Not your mother: the other one. A droopy, seductive, tropical thing. A peace offering she biked over and left on your stoop, after a bloody, five-day, knockdown standoff where neither of you would concede the other's terror. It thrived under your care for a good three months. After another patented spin-out, it began to wither. Its leaves burned back from their tips, as if torched by a butane lighter. Nothing you did helped. It limped along on critical. By chance it rallied, just before she started tentatively coming around again.

A couple more synchronized dips and recoveries convinced you: this plant marked the health of the relationship. A magic gift, a talisman out of a Persian book, it flourished so long as your love flourished, and would die, definitively, when love died. You and Gwen staggered to your battered finish, and the plant's leaves fell off completely, leaving just a few bald spikes to trim the afterthought of stem. You put the husk out in the garage and left it, refusing to recycle the soil or the pot. A year later, closing up shop before your move, you discovered it. It sat in its banishment behind a scrap of chain-link fence, putting out new growth in the dark. You went inside and called her. She sounded glad to hear from you. There followed the best three weeks of your life together, unscathed because faked, sheltered by your certain departure.

Even this fiction ended viciously, in mutual recrimination, with your quick exit. As you left, you transplanted the hothouse vine to that strip of dirt that passed for a garden on the north side of your apartment. The thing could not have made it past that next Chicago Columbus Day.

Here in this dark room, in the one unrepentant slit of light your sheet tin permits, that plant proliferates. Its jungle rises up around you. How has it grown so profuse, with so little care? How could it have reached such a canopy without your tending it?

The world goes simple, finally. Air, water, light, heat. Recalling or forgetting. Liking or not liking. Finishing the evening's meal or leaving it. You have not been beaten much. Not suffered pliers or electric prod, burns or mutilations, and so, vastly better off than most of the world's full storehouse of politicals. Your mind, for a few more weeks, is still a model time machine—kingdoms, wars, harems—running at any speed, forward and back.

You've gotten out and seen the world, had a glimpse of the place that Chicago would forever have hidden from you. There are worse things than death by solitude. The silence of this infinite library hones you down to a single razor point. People, like those great sourdough pretzels that you'd personally martyr any number of the faithful to taste again, are individually twisted. The insight carries no horror, no bitterness, no recrimination. It is, finally, simple.

"The war is over," Muhammad tells you, on the twenty-third of October, 1989. Monday.
In Christian countries,
you remember from some long-forgotten text,
the day after the baseball game.

He does not say how the war has ended, or who won. He seems neither pleased nor particularly stricken. He says only that you will be going home soon. For certain this time. That you must make yourself ready.

This does not involve all that many steps. They cut your hair and shave you, not as before, but with some attention and care. The prep still feels fake until the moment they bring you your old clothes, the things you were wearing on the day they grabbed you, cleaned and pressed, as if you'd only left them at the local laundromat, your claim ticket lost. They take your cheap cotton rags back, to pass on to the next tenant or sell on the international terrorist-supplies spot market.

And then you wait. For four days, then five. Waiting is what you're best at in the world, what you've had the most practice in. But this short sprint at the finish threatens to kill you. You sit a week with your prison-cell possessions in a neat bundle in your lap, ready to ship out at a

moment's notice.

Muhammad arrives, a spark of rule-breaking excitement in him. He unlocks you. "Mr. Taimur. Come with us. We have a wonderful surprise for you."

You stand and flee in all directions at once.

"Leave your things. Just come."

You reach the stairwell, where they shove you not down but up. In the rush of novelty, this error does not trouble you. They take you up until there is no more up left. You feel yourself step outside, onto the roof of your prison. A guard at each elbow, you walk to the imagined edge. Only now does the fact grip you. Your whole life has been one misguided leap of trust, with no alternative.

"Sit down," Muhammad orders. His voice is pleasant, expansive. The command, completely insane. Those who climb up here with you line up behind you. To shoot you in the back. To torture you at last, after all these years. To push you off.

"Take off your blindfold." You do. "Do not turn around." You couldn't, even if everything in you tried.

You look up, into a huge black wall awash with stars. The night is silent and still. Larger than any night you can remember ever looking up into. You've forgotten how a night sky plays. It strikes you dumb, the frozen depth of it, the continuity. So many vertices, unnumbered connect-a-dots, the outlines of every picture imaginable. This world is not a story. This world is not an invention. Or there never could be so many of them, spread up there, circling.

You look up, and the night is clear. The mounted beacon moon pulls at this tide inside you. There is an awe, too large for the one we're engineered for. You look down, and the lights even of this maimed city match the ones that nature hangs out against its vacuum.

Why have you been allowed to see this? Your heart swells to receive the unanswerable gift of your captors.

Such a spectacle should have been enough. But up from below, a quick flare rises to rival the moon. A violet new light, the sole moving thing in this panorama, brighter, more beautiful than these mere fixed points, it fails to stay aloft. It falls on a mirror arc back to earth, shattering the point at the far end of its parabola.

If this war is truly over, then the next one has just started. Your guides have failed to anticipate this bonus light show. They bundle you back up and return you to the cell, before human ingenuity announces any new developments. You return to sitting, for days, awaiting further clarification, your real marching orders. After another week, you take your bundle off your lap and scatter it.

This time, you don't even stanch the bitterness. Too late in history. Too much already sacrificed. You ask each guard who comes to bother you. Was the whole sham just another setup, to pick off the last little bits of you they haven't yet managed to annihilate? Not one bothers to answer. Whiplash sets in, its trough proportionate to the peak you let yourself feel. You pass into a blackness as narrow as that night sky was wide. Food becomes an intrusion. Exercise. The daily defecation. Each time you move your bowels now, you smell yourself rotting. Your scat has become your father's. It gives off the pungency that filled your childhood, the stink of the disease that ate out the man's insides, the smell still haunting the family bathroom years after his death.