Richard Powers - Plowing the Dark

You come from your suffocating cocoon. The upstairs feels warm, light, clear. You're good for another few hours. You will endure whatever face-saving show these men need to enact. Then you'll ask to use the bathroom. To pull yourself together a little, clean up for your release.

You flex, a gift from heaven. Behind you, you hear the puzzled crick of packing tape being ripped from its reel.

"You don't move," the voice tells you. "We tape you. For your safety."

You speak as softly as you can. You fall back on long practice, times trying to say two calming words to Gwen when just the sound of your voice lit her into frenzy.

"I am a schoolteacher. My student… misunderstood a joke of mine. I came to this city because—"

"Yes. We understand. Don't worry. We don't hurt you. We tape you. For safety. Short drive. Then you go home."

They wrap you like a mummy. They wind around and around you for half an hour. They tape right over your clothes, your hair, your ratty cotton blindfold. They leave just the crown of your head and a too-small sliver for your nose. With chops and shoves, they force you to kneel. But bound so tightly in this tape tourniquet, your knees can't bend.

They pummel you into a crate. The constriction bursts your arteries. You try to make some noise — the sound of refusal, of impossibility — through the tape. Nothing comes out but a muffled whimper. You can't fit in the box. You can't even tell them that you don't fit. Nothing but free fall into panic.

They put you in the crate and cover you. Your annihilation, your live burial. Several men try to lift the crate. The weight of a typical American in a box dismays them. You wish now that you had eaten the food, just to add injury to insult.

They trundle you down a flight of steps. Your skull caroms against the sides of the box. The foot of the crate crashes to the ground, splintering your ankles and knees. You hear the sounds of the street, snarling mopeds, vendors hawking and haggling. If you called out? A voice seeping out of a sealed coffin, gagged, muffled, a single smeared phoneme: the stunt would only seal your fate.

A little patience, and you'll walk past this spot again, tomorrow, seeing, free.

From the sound and the smashing and what little light comes in through the cracks, you sense what is happening. They place you into a recessed well in the floor of a van. You must be hanging down in the undercarriage, given the sound of the engine.

The road is a single pothole from here to Kuala Lumpur. Every pit hammers your bound body. They've taped your face too tightly. Between the exhaust fumes, the closed crate, and the triangle of opening they leave your nose, you asphyxiate. First nausea and lightheaded-ness, your head and eyes, pressed through a grater. Then a black throb pushes forward against the inside of your face. Blind animal frenzy scrabbles at the base of your brain, a creature trapped under a sheet of resealing ice. If you pass out now, you'll never wake up.

You kick against the sides of your coffin, to make them pull over. But tape turns your kicks into a wad of socks tossed into a hamper. Every agitation now sends your lungs deeper into deficit. You try to slow your racing heart by force of will. Drop your pulse into a hibernation that will outlast this endless ride.

The crate heats up, from the engine, the sun, the dry sand whipped up from the road. You fight for air, for a slice of sanity. The engine slows. Covered voices trade a few words. You sense a barricade, a checkpoint. You shout. Death by gunfire would be a blessing. But the engine roars back to life before more than a dull moan can escape your mouth. You force your taped knees against the lid of the box. With what strength remains, you manage to crack the seam. A gush of fresh air knifes into you. You shove your nose into the stream. It tastes like God in your nostrils.

The holy sliver of air keeps you alive until the van stops. A chorused confusion hauls you from the well. They tip you on end, and the shift crushes your legs under you. They hoist you to horizontal and pop the lid. Rough hands pull at your packaging. The tape tears your skin and hair as it rips off.

You fall to the ground, gasping. You lie still, sucking salvation into your lungs.

"You… animal-fucking bastards…"

"Not talk! No make noise!" Someone smashes you across the face. Black collapses inward, and you are nowhere.

You come to in a white room. Even this feeblest of lights overwhelms you. When your eyes adjust, you make out where you are. Nothing to make out. A squalid plaster box. The room is maybe ten feet wide and twelve feet long. You could stand up fully, if you could stand up.

Here and there, the otherwise featureless walls bear greasy black fingerpainted smudges. Near the corner of one long wall, a five-foot slab of boiler plate barricades the lone doorway. Light dusts the room, seeping around the edges of a wall-sized sheet of corrugated steel nailed over the remnants of French windows.

The planked floor hasn't been swept anytime during your adulthood. The room is devoid of finishing except for a balding mattress and a metal radiator bolted to the filthy floor. Attached to the radiator, a short steel chain. Attached to the chain, your left ankle.

"Hey," you call. Your voice is dry, broken. "Hello?" Louder.

The door rumbles and jerks outward. A young man, no more than twenty-five, stands in the frame. He is tawny, thin, medium height, black-eyed, black-haired, sleek-bearded, hang-nosed, white-shirted, blue-jeaned, and glaring. You've seen whole armies of him, waving small arms, hanging out of car windows patrolling both sides of the Green Line. He's young enough to be one of your English students. He looks, in the second that you are given to scan him, lamentably like your internal clip-art stereotype of an Arab terrorist.

"What are you doing?" he screams. "Cover your eyes! Don't look!"

You scramble on the floor near the mattress, searching for the blindfold that has chosen the wrong moment to go AWOL. Screaming, the guard rushes you and yanks down the rag that has been riding, this whole while, on your numbed head.

You fix it so that you are blind.

The boy does not retreat. He hovers by your head. His breath condenses on your neck. He presses something hard and cold and metal up into your ear.

"You hear me, you cover your eyes. You understand?" You nod your head. Again. Harder. "You look, you die."

The moment he glimpsed America's pet project, Ronan O'Reilly was addicted. He'd come to Ecotopia determined to loathe its insular, insulating Gore-Tex righteousness, and he ended up marrying it and moving in. One look at the Cavern and he knew he'd never work on any other project ever again.

He toured it first on a junket to the Northwest, a whirlwind dog-and-pony show up the Pacific Coast, peddling a set of economic modeling tools to American statistical package resellers. No vendor in the U.K. — leave off the Republic or the Continent — could go to market against the kind of distribution that the Ecotopians were just then ramping up. He hoped to make a few quick quid by licensing his algorithms before North American brute force rendered the whole idea quaintly obsolete. He planned to return with whatever modest profit a sale might net and use the proceeds to rescue the Queen's University's School of Social Sciences from hardware decrepitude. With a new generation of decent iron, O'Reilly might hand-roll a new generation of future-modeling tools. Remind his countrymen that there still was a future.

Ronan landed in Washington armed with a solid prediction package and an accent that the tone-deaf locals mistook for some Public Television Edwardian English monstrosity. He ran a tight slide show, with enough reheated Bernard Shaw cracks to keep the audiences entertained. American venture capitalists seemed ready to throw money at anything that ran on silicon. And the Erse slant on visual econometrics was just different enough to frighten his American competitors into interest. Only after he entered the glass palace of TeraSys, the Solution Builders, did O'Reilly get his first significant offer — a bid outstripping his most reckless projections. TeraSys had little interest in the goods he peddled. They were after the peddler himself.