Richard Powers - Plowing the Dark

This is the heaven of last imagination. The paradise of detachment. The room of no consequence in the least. Of making no difference in the whole known world.

Yeki bood. Yeki nabood.

That is how the world's best storytellers always start: It was so. And it was not so. One of the few Persian phrases you can remember, from out of a whole childhood of your mother's Persian phrases that you never paid any attention to. They must be in there still, an attic of lost fables that wants only unlocking.

It's like this, and it's not like this. There was a time, and there was not a time. They are right to start that way. And they are not.

Like so: you find yourself in a small room. There is a mattress here. Before you is a radiator. On that radiator, a chain. The routine: crush-ingly familiar. Two and a half meals a day, ranging from the vaguely edible to the deeply disgusting. A ten-minute fire drill each morning in the Black Hole of Calcutta, where your stunned bowels must set land speed records if you wish to preserve what trappings of humanity your captors still allow.

And not like so: you are not here. Hope refuses even these temporary lodgings. You know the day only by running estimate. You know the hour only by the vague passage from dark to darker. A cell is nothing against this train of thought.

Your mind is clearer, now that clarity can do nothing for you. Freed from the state of emergency, you have some time to turn things over. To make sense of the senseless. They give their word that you will be out soon. But you now know to measure "soon" in more realistic units. You make the necessary conversions from Central Arab Time. But even your guards picture you out of here by New Year's, at the latest. And January 1, you insist. Not March 21.

You plan to spend New Year's Eve, 1987, in the middle of Daley Plaza, underneath the Picasso monstrosity, singing "The Star-Spangled Banner" at the top of your lungs.

Taken by surprise. Taken by accident. An insignificant foreign language teacher who never took sides in his life. Half Islamic, for God's sake. You mean nothing to your government. Nothing you can be swapped for. You're of no value to your captors whatsoever. In fact, you can only cost them, to imprison and feed you. Cost them in international prestige, to harm you in any way. All they can hope is to salvage some face-saving way to set you free.

With all the time in the world to think, it dawns on you. If they grabbed you by mistake, then the person they really want must still be out there, walking around at liberty. That CIA operative they jabbered on about during your first interrogation. If they can find him, you'll walk away from this nightmare with all your limbs intact.

You spend the whole of a waking day reconsidering everyone in the City of Wells you've ever met. Your life depends on finding the spy. On turning up the name that can save you. Only at nightfall does the full revulsion hit you. There is no such man. Yet you were ready to Kapo him off. Sell out a real life to the monsters of invention.

You wake up still horrified, unwilling to go near yourself. But by noon, you creep back again. You replay the mistake, reconsider the spy. It passes the time, at least. And time is more of an enemy than any other terrorist.

Deciding who turned you in is good for a brief twenty minutes every midafternoon. You still know the whole class roster from memory. The group must have harbored some closet Shiite, passing above his class, passing for a Sunni merchant learning the language of world trade. Or maybe one of the smiling Sunni elites sold you out, covering his tuition by making a few pounds on the side. Could have been any of them. All still washed in their first innocence.

These speculative minutes can last forever, without an outside tick to clock it. A single afternoon supplies all the endless time in the world to figure out who put you here. To figure out where you've put yourself. Just another slumming American, priding yourself on acing the interview, on marketing yourself with a bit of fast talk. How exhilarating it was, that sense that you'd gotten away with something. Now you see that the school would have taken anyone at all. Anyone who could speak English. Anyone not insane. And even that requirement, they went ahead and waived.

You've brought this all on yourself. Walked open-armed into a civil war. You've negotiated with it since childhood, this sick desire for event. You weigh every other explanation and come back to the only one possible. The happy, affable, well-adjusted guy with his whole life in front of him wanted to sample prison. But not even your old self-destruction could have imagined this.

Dinner saves you from more self-punishment. But your dinner guests turn out to be total duds. Conversation is sporadic and banal, and no one seems to have any sports scores fresher than three months old.

The smashed chickpeas do help to fortify. With something inside you, the crush lifts a little. So what if you were trying to kill yourself by coming here? Beating yourself up about it now won't help. Truth has less to recommend it at this point than survival. You must outlive whatever part of yourself that wants something else.

You double back on the healthier obsession of figuring out which innocent student turned you in. But that fondled theme fails to divert you all the way up to sleep. You graduate to trying to work out exactly which group you've been handed over to. Three million people. Sixteen officially recognized religions. You read once that twenty different militia groups can rule a single refugee camp. Two dozen autonomous armies have carved up this country, staked out their sovereign checkpoints. Two dozen independent nation-states, laws unto themselves, rove from the Bekaa to the coast, armed with anything that the Security Council countries will sell them, their assault rifle butts stenciled with everything from verses from the hadith to decals of the Virgin Mary. And you can name only five of these groups at most.

So much rides on figuring out who has taken you. And so much doesn't. The means for finding out are somewhat limited. You decide to ask them, point-blank. You've gotten pretty good with the blindfold. Putting it on, when anyone shows, so that a wide swatch of the world remains visible beneath. And your ears have attenuated, too, to the point where you can tell your guards apart by the way they rattle your cage.

There are at least three regulars. You assemble them from bits and pieces, in gauzy darkness. One of them, the Angry Parent, is short, with a belly potting if not already pot. He wears a khaki pseudo-uniform and must be in his fifties, although you'vee yet to make out his face.

The second you've gotten a hurried look at. He came into the room once without knocking, as you scrambled to fit the blindfold onto your head. The bare bulb of the hallway threw his outline into high relief. White hair, a medium build, alert but bemused features. The Shiite Walter Cronkite.

The third is the Crazy Child. The one who beat and threatened you with his gun. You keep your head bowed when he is in the room. You know him from his knees on down: pencil legs, always the same pair of blue jeans ending in, God help you, a spanking red-and-white pair of Adidas.

You sniff out each of their walks, easily telling them apart even before they open the door. But you want more chance to study their voices. The Shiite Cronkite brings you dinner one night. "Salaam alaykum" you try him.

After a pause, he replies with a polite "Alaykum as-salaam." The longest conversation with a real person that you Ve had for a week.

You try it out on the Crazy Child. "Salaam alaykum" you greet him, the next time he bangs on your door with his pistol butt.