Richard Powers - Plowing the Dark

Something yearns to return to first vegetation, only this time at a cool remove. The body wants back in its abandoned nest, but now free to come and go, like a shameless tourist, without the fatal danger of travel, free to name the lush sprawl of this place from the safe vantage of a divan.

Here is the shape of reforestation, eons in germinating. Till this novel test patch, more flexible than the original starter bed. Speed the green revolution. Onto the teak's living trunk, graft a woody emblem. Fuse the fact of the branch to its depiction. Join stump and symbol into a single thing, a tree you can walk around, prune, replicate. The tree you came down from. The one you'd happily climb up again.

This is the aim of all bootstrapping: to lift the first curse and make dreams real. Here you can shed your wood skeleton and travel at will through groves of pure notion. Here you can gather up the pieces of something that shattered once, long ago, in childhood's childhood. Here you can reassemble all lost growth, and even back it up onto magnetic tape.

Through the Jungle Room, birds wing at liberty. Define a feather when condemned to the wind. Say how the shaft tapers, straining to be weightless. Describe what the vanes do on the air, how they luff and ruffle and flute, how the barbs somersault on the downward curve of their resisting ride. Specify the flight in full, and you have those jungle fliers. Fix the thing's rules, and you slough off the tyrannical thing. Mere birdness alone yields birds on demand. Whole flocks pepper the canopy, from out of description.

Ingenuity plays among these leaves. A snake slithers from the undergrowth, dappled by the moon that traces it. Mock ribs propel the python forward, muscles accurate down to a single strand. The pseudo-snakeskin glistens as you gaze, your sight renewed. But this time, the serpent takes no one in. You do not wholly buy this slithering bill of goods. This simulation cannot bruise your heel.

Still the Jungle Room swells, as awful as its template. For there may be no return, no quarter, no resting place behind these renderings. These leaves hide nothing but the signs of hunger. Even the myth of elemental loss somehow misses the point. It may not be in you, ever, to believe in a home of your own devising. The tree may not grow that can trick both heart and limbs.

Now that you've explained the mistake, they'll let you go. It may take a few hours for permission to filter down whatever chain of crazed command these hoodlums follow.

But you tell them: a schoolteacher. A teacher who used to have a decent job in industry before his private life fell apart.

Teacher. No spy. Joke. Bad joke. Very sorry.

You cost more to kidnap than they can hope to get for you. Not worth ten shekels a pound on the international terrorist spot market. Even these amateurs must see how ludicrous the whole mix-up is. What a story this will make, when it's all over. The greatest, most unbelievable letter back home ever.

They take your watch, along with everything else. They wedge you into some kind of root cellar, where you can't tell day from night.

Maybe two dozen hours have passed since they grabbed you. Surely not more than thirty. It might take a couple of days, even a week, to straighten everything out. You assume a courage you do not have, and settle in for however long you need.

The crib where they've dumped you is too dark to see. Inch by inch, your fingertips cover its surface. Good for passing a couple of hours, if nothing else. You're on a dirt floor, in a more or less rectangular room, maybe ten feet by six. The floor is little more than the flight of five steps they shoved you down. It stinks of soot and vegetables. Three of the walls are wooden; one is stone. The crumbling plaster ceiling is too low to stand up under. Your heart begins to race, despite your forced calm. You will perish here. Suffocate. You will never see light again.

Above the flight of steps lies a wooden trapdoor. You nudge at it. It doesn't move.

After some time, the trap opens. Through the flood of light comes a crisis of arms and legs. Someone barks three Arabic syllables. The trap closes, and the room fills with a putrid odor. You grope your way to the steps. On the top one a tin plate sits covered with a steaming mass they can't possibly expect you to eat.

It's some kind of evil game. See what the prisoner will put in his mouth, down there in the dark. The scent gags you. You remove your nose as far from the plate as the cramped quarters allow.

After the rush of danger passes, fatigue slams you. Fear has run you a marathon. Only now do hormones give up pointlessly dousing your muscles. You need to sleep as you've never needed to sleep in your life. But you can't. The room is too small and hard to stretch out in. The pain of your first handling pounds you. The stink of the refuse they've tried to pass off as food keeps you from losing consciousness. Sleep would strip you of whatever feeble protection your mind now gives. Sheer stupidity: you want to be awake when they come to release you. Above all, you fear what dreams sleep might bring.

The need to urinate grows unbearable. Banging on the trap and peeing in the corner seem equally humiliating, and you refuse to be humiliated. You try to ignore the swelling pressure on your bladder, to focus on making them open the trap. You'll make them break before you do.

Enough time must now have passed for the school to notice your absence. You try to figure how many classes you've missed. Your docile flock will have told administration that their teacher has failed to show up. Surely, in such a city, in such a climate, someone will know to expect the worst. Someone will sound the alarm, raise a search party.. Others have been taken before you. Others, with more powerful institutions lobbying for their release. Another thought to shove out of your mind. Still, your case is different. By now your kidnappers know they've made a mistake. You aren't what they thought you are. You're a schoolteacher. You have no secrets. None that would interest them, in any case. You'll be out in a matter of days, at the most.

You pee in the corner. You try to break up the ground beforehand, with your fingernails. So the liquid can soak down.

You fill the time by rehashing your abduction. You replay the car, the thugs, the questioning. You work up the details, make them more threatening or more comical in the recap. It's the most fantastic story that has ever happened, even without embroidering. But you'll wait awhile, after your release, before sending your mother even a sanitized account.

Soon you'll need to defecate. If your bowels revolt before anyone comes, you'll be in deep shit. Another thing not to think about. Thoughts to avoid begin to crowd the already cramped quarters.

Your mind mires and circles. Then a noise tears away the gauze. The ceiling above you explodes in banging. Someone shouts through the trap, "Cover you eyes. You no look. Cover eyes!"

You fall to the floor, searching. Somewhere you've shed the oily rag they used to blindfold you. Discarded the scrap, thinking you'd never suffer it again. Now you scramble in the dark, to find it and cover your eyes before the hole opens.

The rag slips on just in time for light to stream in under the folds. A voice you don't recognize commands you to climb up. "No talk," it adds. "No run."

You crack your head on a rafter, searching for the lip of the steps. False light, the flash of the blow rips across your closed eyes. You bite down hard, to keep from shouting. As you ascend, you trip on the plate of food, scattering it.

"Why you not eat?" the voice shouts. It holds a mania large enough to crush you.

"Terrible," you say. "Bad food. No good."

"No talk," he shouts, shoving you from behind.