Richard Powers - Plowing the Dark

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.

One morning, on your bathroom run, you take off your blindfold in the common sty to find yourself staring at freedom. Square on the shelf above the septic squathole, atop the months of uncleaned scum, the smears of shit both terrorist and hostage, sits a shiny black machine.

You can't even guess at the make or model. You know only that you can put your index finger down its throat without touching metal. You pick up the evil and cradle it, the first time you've held one in your life. You wait for the rush of power, but feel only heavy pain. All expectation has died in you, months ago. You've fallen away from all faith in the future. The façade is down and civilization's carpenter ants have come crawling out of the woodwork. God or some self-destructive guard has set this thing in your lap to use with impunity, to go out blazing, the last breakout, with no hope of anything except to retaliate.

Your hand hovers, paralyzed by obsolete decorum. Pointless beliefs that you cannot shake. The habit of morality cows you, even in the face of morality's full collapse. You set the black device back down on the shelf. Your last chance of escape disappears forever.

You come from the bathroom without your blindfold. Nothing matters any longer. The face of Sayid returns your look, first with shock, then fear. He puts on anger and charges you. One casual wave of the palm stays him.

"You left your gun in the toilet."

He blanches whiter than almond. He freezes and bows his head, as if your magnanimity in not blasting your way out obliges him to you. Forever, you stand and face one another. Then he sidles off, dashes for the bathroom to get there before the angel of the Lord. You head back to your cell, lock yourself in, and don your blindfold.

From that moment, you wear your blindfold at all times. If for an hour, then forever. No one can ever again punish you for having it off. And blindness strengthens you against the world's trick.

From down the corridor, you can hear the sounds of the others being forced in and out of their cells. Once or twice, in the shared cesspool, you detect what must be secret, wordless messages left behind by these other lives — parings on the floor tile, or wadded-up bits of new stream of taps against your wall forces you back. Thrill and despair fight inside you for the upper hand. Life will not relent.

Against your will, your mind organizes the incoming flow of bits into words. The new occupant spontaneously reinvents the same code you once used with the short-lived Frenchman, Junot. One tap equals A. The underground alphabet of first resort.

The taps say they come from an American journalist, grabbed before you. When you tap him back your name, he cuts you off: We know. He claims that others share the room with him, and names them for you. The announcement floats somewhere between joke and hallucination. Your thoughts flit about you like bees. The thread of conversation grows impossible to hang on to. You lose count of letters or forget what word you were tapping out. The things the journalist types back don't make sense. He claims that the guards let him read an Arabic newspaper from time to time. He spins out bizarre, elaborate, journalist's delusions: the Berlin Wall has fallen. Apartheid has come to an end. The Soviet Union is holding free elections.

He tries to tell you that several Western hostages have already gone home. Clearly, his need to believe has led him over the edge. And you so badly need to believe these taps of your countryman that his hopeful madness threatens to take you with it. However cruel, you break off contact. You can't make him any better. But he has the power to make you much worse.

More time passes than you can comprehend. There is nowhere on earth it could have gone. You pull yourself inward and wait. Wait for nothing. Wait for the one possible release. Your soul smashes up its last human furnishing for firewood. When that is gone, the elements can take you.

You always thought that you loved your Gwen, that you might model a care that would wear down her suspicion, teach her the feel of gladness, that glimpse of how you might, together, steer your days to a harbored end. Only now you see it, in this bombed-out emptiness, how all along your love coerced her, manipulated, failed to credit her hurt, to legitimate her confusion, simply by demanding that she live the one scenario of shared happiness you were able to imagine…

Your love itself was the dictate she could not surrender to. All she had was sovereignty, her unilateral freedom to maneuver, to save herself from your demand for allegiance. You were her oppression, her tyranny, and whatever else she may have turned you into no longer matters. You always thought she pushed away, when, in fact, she only stood still against your pulling. All that your love could ever do for her was spare her.

So it is with your ruined life. All wars might end tomorrow and your capture would not. Kidnap is your keepers' only power, their lone proof that the future hasn't swallowed them alive. There is but one small difference: where love could not survive its cling, this hatred cannot let go and still live.

In the fall of 1990, your teeth begin to break off in your mouth. Something evil happens to them, some vast, advancing disintegration that chunks off bits of molar each time you chew anything harder than pita. You fight the throbbing, clamp down harder, grind the pain into a steady-state background of agony until, in one instant of delirium, you bite through an eighth-inch piece of the tip of your tongue.