Richard Powers - Plowing the Dark

Keep your motions clean and distinct. Mark the starts and stops. Use your whole body, all the degrees of freedom.

She started small. Commas with her fingertips. At first she tried to register what each motion produced. But the Pollock feedback came so thick and furious, so hard upon any plan her heels hatched, that she stopped thinking of her movements as causing the explosions ripping all around her. Her body was the sound and light.

Nods became auroras. Angry lightning bolts loosed themselves with a shake of the head. She composed with her posture and drew by drawing breath. The uterine lining of color swallowed her — the breakthrough sensation she'd heretofore only read about. She passed into the walls, coming out on the far side, encrusted in light, her skin hovering huge around her.

She forgot herself. Or she remembered. Dancing inside her dance, she could not say which. She embarked on a spiritual aerobics, the leap that sex never quite freed itself from self-consciousness to make. She decamped into pigment, molded, molding.

She came out from behind the glasses and shuddered. She shook her head at the boy author, not wanting to talk about it. Aiy. She shook herself off, like her dog Pinkham, after a dousing. That's like drugs. Like being out in a stormy night on a hit of Windowpane.

I wouldn't know.

But it only works for the operator. The onlooker has no idea. You have to be at the steering wheel, even to imagine—

He nodded a little sadly. One of its big problems. The other big one is that the graphics are… what do you call them? Abstract. Sooner or later, something recognizable needs to happen. That, his voice hoped, was where she came in. Then we'll have the start of a real, live-in adventure.

She sat safe, outside the theater, staring back at the walls where her circulatory system's sonata had just debuted. If this is just the primitive Marconi version… Television isn't even child's play. People are going to walk into these rooms, and they're never going to walk out again. Even her laugh came out bewildered. They'll starve in there. Like rats in those Skinner boxes, pressing their own pleasure buttons until they drop.

Jackdaw perked up, pleased.

You sure we really want to go down this road? she asked. Do we really want to hand something like this to an already addictive age? Aren't we in enough trouble the way things are?

He squinted, not getting her. When had trouble ever been the issue?

She thought for a long minute. I'm going to have to start all over again. From scratch.

Sure, he said. Start small. We've found that it's not how many plates you get in the air at the same time. It's how well the plates spin.

Start… small?

Pick one thing. Your favorite place in existence. Something you connect to. Something you can go inside of.

She closed her eyes and made the old pilgrimage. OK, she said, opening them. I have it.

So what are we talking about, then?

A bed. A bed by the shore of the Mediterranean.

This is the room life lends you to sleep in.

Bedroom. Slaapkamer. Chambre à coucher. Simple accommodation, with all the basic fittings. Bed, washstand, chair, window, mirror: everything that you need to live. But closing your eyes, sleeping here may prove impossible. For this room fills with a relentless blaze. Clear sun pours in from all directions.

A canted floor meets the wall in a mock horizon: the joint of earth and sky, of wheat and azure. The life that sleeps here has scuffed permanent patches in the floor's varnish. The room's real inhabitant has just stepped out. He leaves his shirts draped on the shirt rack. Their short-sleeve billow remembers his body. A straw hat, his shield from this southern sun, waits on a peg for his bared head to reclaim it. He leaves his bottles, his brush, his book on the bed stand. His towel, scudded with dirty handprints, hangs on the hook by the bathroom door.

In the painted bedroom, the man's own paintings hang on view. The scenes his eyes have lived in cling listing to the drunken walls. They serve as this apartment's additions: tiny remodeled day rooms, cobbled onto this room of broadest day.

The tenant has bent this apartment with his breathing. He proves, before the scientists, that space is curved. The chairs, the bed, the tilted table: each stick of furniture passes its own law of gravity. Each would-be solid lays down its own perspective, its various vanishing points scattered like buckshot in the hinted distance. No two of these pauper's objects belong to the same cubic space. The foot of the bed juts mysteriously through the doorframe. The floor swells like the loose sea. Walls and ceiling amble together by the art of compromise. The shutters give up on accommodating their casement, by turns closing inward and throwing themselves open to the Provençal breeze.

Is he happy, living here? Does the work of his hands please him? Do his eyes read this light's simplicity, grateful for a chance to handle it? Or do the cracks in this pitcher, the tears in the chairs' caning spell some unlivable agony?

You know this fellow by his things. The shaving mirror above the water bowl holds his look, as surely as a photograph. His impression nestles in the wonky bed. The lay of this rented hideout explains him. There is a rhyme to how this bedroom works. It remembers the life it hides. This man's ways suffuse through his attic dormer. Sun assembles a life from these surrounding solids.

But entering this painted life overhauls it. Your eyes change the bedclothes just by settling on them. Looking leaves its fingerprints on his glass. His towels take on your hand smudges. His shirts start to memorize the creases of your body.

This will be your kamer, your chambre, for who can say how long. A place to enter and inhabit at will. A box whose every plank of wood furnishes your story. This life, now yours. These paintings, too, now belong to you. The bed, the chairs, the azure, the wheat, the window: everything this sleeping room speaks of will be yours, except — in such merciless light — for sleep.

Tell me, Jackdaw asked her. Where? Arles, Adie answered. Where is that, exactly? In the South of France. You know France?

Don't abuse me. I may not get out very much. But I could find it on the Net.

Oh, sweetie, forgive me. I'm sure you could. It's an old Roman town, in Provence. When I was a girl, we used to play a game.

We?

My sister and I.

In the South of France?

No. In our bedroom. The running average of those nine bedrooms, swapped every two years, across the air bases of the Free World.

Did your sister have a name?

Elise. My mother's fault. She was looking to enliven a very banal life. Elise and I used to lie in bed, across from each other, after lights-out. Hold our eyes open with our fingers, until we could see in the dark. We'd chatter away, turning the cracks in the ceiling into the Shire, Moria, Mordor…

Been there. Made that map.

After a couple hours, Elise would fall asleep. Weak-fleshed girl, my sister. I'd lie underneath my covers, feeling abandoned. I became the last vigilant person on Earth. The whole, dark bedroom would tighten around me. Yd lie there like a stone effigy, feet to the east, toward Jerusalem. With enough time — and eleven-year-old insomniacs have forever — I could turn my coffin into a snug ship's cabin. A first-class berth on a transatlantic crossing.

Jackdaw nodded, replaying the trick in his own theater. After a while, just by squinting into the dark, 1 could make out the nighttime ocean through the starboard portal. I worked out this detailed saga — my sister and 1, recently orphaned, heading back to the Old World in the luxury befitting our recently recovered state. Back? Recovered?