Richard Powers - Plowing the Dark

He took to shaving more often, so as not to spook her. He hung his trousers over the bathroom door when he showered, to steam out the worst of the wrinkles. He worked dish soap on a worn toothbrush against the stains of his shirt collars, watching himself, wondering how far he might sink in the name of revived feeling.

Months after her arrival, the spell broke. Sight did nothing to disperse it. His eye was worthless, in the end. Three stray words delivered him: speech, the medium that Ebesen distrusted above all others. Of all the absurdities, something she said.

She was chattering. Something Ms. Klarpol did whenever he visited. Talking out loud, to anyone, to herself, to her chocolate Lab, the faithful Pinkham, who loved to accompany her to work. Chattering about the absurdly beautiful place she found herself living in.

An island cottage, Karl. Right out of a poem. Circling gulls wake me up in the morning. In New York, it was always sirens.

"New York" and "siren" fused, and Gail stood before him. Each plane of her face materialized, a frantic hologram. He looked up at this Adie, still amusing herself with a running account of her windfall. He stared at her, no longer caring if she caught him looking. The living woman resolved into her own parts, lost to all likeness. Nothing remained of the ghost story but his need to be near it.

He tried to stop visiting her. He started coming by again. She greeted him happily on his return, asking for no explanation. He contented himself with serving as her mascot of bitterness. He dispensed with any threat of recovered respectability. But as he carved mortise-and-tenon furnishings for Vulgamott's architectural fly-through or designed anvil thunderheads for Stance and Kaladjian's Weather Room, he felt the flinch of recollection, the awful willingness of arousal that he thought he'd put to death.

He taught her how to animate. You only need to paint a few eels. Say, one at each two-second interval. Rajasundaran has written morph-ing software that will fill in all the midpoints.

Then he sat back and watched her bring motion to the jungle's fixed planes. Already, bushes rustled and the moon strayed across the child sky. Soon her frozen birds would thaw into a flutter, the snake slink, the monkeys scamper, the flutist weave, and the lions crouch in the perfect impression of stalking.

He watched her paint dozens of frames, creatures in various postures. She painted each cross-sectioned creature as lovingly as the first, assembling them into time-lapse fragments that moved more surely than he did. The Dream awakened, channeling the dead painter's spirit through the hand of this living woman medium.

He heard her, when things got buggy, pleading with the terminal. Please, nice Mr. Machine. Don't be mean to me. I haven t done anything wrong, aside from belonging to the organic life-forms. Karl, the little chips are acting up again. What should I do?

Accept adversity, Ebesen said. It's soul-strengthening.

It's not my soul that needs work, she told him.

He watched her scratch at the drawing tablet. He stood behind her workstation screen while she willed her graphics pen through glad arcs. The lightness of her aping dazzled him. Her fingers played at the existing shapes, exhilarated by their constraint to copying. Something in that virtuosity did not want to be free.

You're good.

Thank you.

Watch out, he razzed her. Not too original, now. They could get loose otherwise, your animals.

She looked up at him. Doubtless she saw a stubble-faced fifty-five-year-old man with soap smears around his collar. She turned back to her cookie-cut time sequences and cooed at them.

That's right, my little beasties. You're getting loose someday, aren't you? That's exactly what you're going to do.

Something in her pet-coddling voice alerted her Labrador, until then curled up, on best behavior, in the corner. The dog padded over to his owner and nuzzled her.

Oh, you too, Pinkham. You too. Gonna cut loose someday? That your plan? Oh yes, you are, my sweetie.

Placated, Pinkham returned to his post and settled back in. Ebesen, too, wandered back to his post. Have you ever thought about work that didn't involve some violation of visual copyright?

She scowled, the look one reserved for the drunken party pest. I'm a good copyist, Karl. All God's creatures should do what they're best at. I know what you're best at I saw your show.

Ah, yes! The latest Wild Kingdom. Mr. Rousseau, version 2.0. She held up a hand-drawn eel of an elephant rearing back to trumpet. She rocked the painted profile in the arc that animation planned for it. I didnt mean Rousseau 2.0. I meant Klarpol 1.0.

N aw. You know the thing is a team effort. The guys wrote all the code. I plundered everybody, totally copycat. All I did was cut and paste Henri's Caesar salad onto lots of lollipop sticks. But wait until— I mean your one-woman show. Your solo opener. Her smile seized up, seeing the ambush. Gail's smile. Not in any curl or turn of the lip. Just its crumple of fear. Its carmine fight or flight. What was the name ofthat shop again? God, I used to know them all by heart. Not to mention how much commission each of them scraped off the top. Near Broadway and Spring Street. Francis Hinger Gallery. Francis Hinger, Adie echoed. The elephant stopped moving. She set it down.

How long ago was that, exactly?

Doesn't matter.

No, wait. I'll tell you exactly when it was. August of… What year is it now? August of 1979.

Opened in July, she said, through the side of her mouth. But who's counting?

Adie Klarpol. Only you were going by Adia back then.

My name.

What were you, all of seventeen? Twenty-seven. Old enough to know better.

Oh, nobody's ever that. A well-received show, as these things go. Some kind of awful literary name…

"Halations" What's so awful about that?

What does it mean, anyway? It sounds like bad breath caused by asthma.

It's a technical term. Describing what I did.

Pastel penumbra halo stains. Lots of high-frequency colors. Not uninteresting. Inkblot tests on minor hallucinogens. Seemingly abstract, until you looked closely enough to make out the ghosted high realism. There was one called Infinite Coastline, if I remember right. Kind of a hand-drawn Mandelbrot, a couple of years before everybody in the industrialized nations dosed out on Mandelbrots.

I cant believe you remember that. I cant believe you even saw the show. I didnt think anyone saw that show. Except my mother, and she only came because I paid her airfare.

Come on. Nice little squib in ARTFORUM. They built you up. The next hot commodity. All set to unfurl.

Karl. Please.

Let me guess. You wanted to change the world. Right? Make a difference? Am I right?

Well, whatever I wanted… She laughed again. Her shoulders came down. She returned to her tablet. The ambush had passed. I didn't exactly produce the cure for cancer.

Were you any good, do you think?

Screw you, Karl. You saw the work. You're the voting public. You're supposed to tell me.

Now. If you really mean to give the last word to the voting public, the only mystery is how you lasted until twenty-seven. Ebesen picked at his fraying sleeve, at some crib-sheet answer inked there. Beautiful was supposed to be back. Craft and exactitude and representation. That didnt even last the allotted fifteen minutes, now did it?