Richard Powers - Plowing the Dark

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.