Richard Powers - Plowing the Dark

You've heard the piece maybe all of three times in your life. Not really your music of choice. Not the stuff you ordinarily put on the player, except in those rare moments when something made you imagine that you understood it. Something like sudden sickness, sudden health. The music of a vanished past that you always thought you'd someday have time to learn.

Now there is time, more time than learning could hope to fill. But now there is no music. Now there is only a pitchless waiting.

Once, you tried to play the ancient thing for Gwen, a chant as much beyond you as listening was beyond her. A haunted few minutes that you needed to share with another living being. She failed to sit all the way through it. Could not, although you asked her. Could not, because you asked her. The ensuing three days of mutual escalation ended at the eternal, retaliatory impasse. Why do you begrudge me ten minutes of shared pleasure with you? To which: Why do you have to control my life? Now your cell turns that anger laughable, horrible, murderous. How could you ever have felt anything but guilty amazement when you were still free? Felt anything but crazed, convalescent gratitude at being able to listen to any song at all?

Thanksgiving has long since passed, without observance. Couldn't bear celebrating a holiday that should have marked your release. Christmas, too, comes and goes, some time during your extended illness. If there was any sound of it, you didn't hear. If any celebrants marched oud and doumbec through the dusty streets — streets so near to Bethlehem, that source of the old intractable crisis, streets through which Christ himself dragged his own sorry and ultimately incarcerated ass, healing and wheedling — they did not pass beneath your barricaded shutters.

If believers walked out that night, taking their singing out under the angel-scattered skies… But no: Sacred Conflict would hardly be sheltering you anywhere near the Maronite districts, those neighborhoods across the impassable Green Line that even now, for Christmas, send and receive their selfless gifts of artillery, bright portents of comet tail rising stubbornly in the east, those daily repaying lobs whose parabola arcs remain blindly indifferent to the lives they offer up for sacrifice this

holiday season.

New Year's Eve you do manage to celebrate, the only way possible. No way of saying for sure that you have the day right. The hour is pure speculation. No man will know it, as it says somewhere in what little you remember of Scripture. You declare the minute that Ali brings your dinner to be 8 p.m., and work forward from there.

Figuring your pulse at sixty beats a minute, your basic moderato, you map out the continent often minutes. You do two dozen of those, and on the last, you start your countdown. Across your ceiling, you tune in the mob in Times Square. The ball begins its stately descent. Only, nestled at the bottom of the globe's fall, absorbing the blow like the strength-testing lever at a vanished county fair, is not January 1, 1987, but January 1, 1988. And you are watching the mad cheer from ground zero on a television set, from a warm, womblike, walnut-appointed hotel room who knows where, holding on baby-possum-style to the amber underside of a woman whose comforts do not extend to a face that will resolve into features.

January will not defeat you: this is your New Year's resolution. All strength must go into preserving your strength. You chew your food until the puree passes osmotically through the membranes of your cheeks. You increase the reps of your sit-ups and push-ups, closing in on that asymptote that your meager diet can sustain. You resort to yoga. You meditate.

From the shards that you found when you arrived here, you reassemble your shattered concentration. Mental calisthenics tone up your mind's shapeless misery. You string together a few sentences of comfort to your mother. You store the letter in your head, grateful to find the whole composition intact and growing, every morning when you come looking for it.

Encouraged, you try a five-paragraph essay, the kind you used to make your students write. What brings you here? What are your plans following graduation? The essay grows into a magazine article that will go to the highest bidder upon your release.

Retention's daily exercises release deep captives. I met a traveller from an antique land. Mr. Cotrell, ninth grade. Oh what is not a dream by day? Mrs. Hamin, seventh. Over the course of five days, you stitch together 90 percent of Frost's "Oven Bird," a poem whose very existence you could not have sworn to half a year ago.

Shaken loose by storm, stray lines from triumphant roles in high-school plays flotsam up to the surface. Algy in Earnest Biff Loman. Fragments of a teenager who thought he might want to act for a living.

Thou wall, Î wall, you coax. Î sweet and lovely wall. Show me thy chink. The plaster behind your head remains unmoved.

You stockpile all the arsenal of salvation that you can get away with. You sing the choruses of rock anthems until the Angry Parent breaks up the act. You teach Ali fake street jive, getting him to swagger back and forth in the dingy hall outside your cell, proclaiming, "I one shanky hamsta mushu."

You take to calling the Shiite Cronkite "Walter."

"Why you say me this? What this name means?"

"It means… Trustworthy Elder."

He snorts. His pleasure betrays itself. "Sure. No problem."

You call when you hear him scuffling outside the door, peering in through their observation crack. "Walter? Walter, is that you?"

"What you want? You need something?"

"Walter, I think Ã11 go for a little stroll this afternoon. Outside. Just a short one? Twenty minutes. I come right back."

Your two inverted fingers jog, yellow-pages-style. International sign language, for your surveillant's benefit. His silence kills the game. Brings you back to where no one is playing.

The next day, you repeat the announcement: "Fm just heading out for a little morning constitutional. Ten, twelve minutes, max. Ã11 be

right out front."

You vary the declaration every day for about a week. You have an appointment with a dentist. You must meet a pretty woman down at the corner cafe. It becomes a little liturgy of survival. The guards stop reacting when you call out to them.

"Ali?" you call one morning. "Ali, is that you? I need to take the motorcycle in to get its cylinders cleaned."

As in some alternate universe where the laws of physics are all backward, the door jiggles and opens. You scramble for your blindfold, laughing. It's worked. Inconceivable. Persistence has won.

Ali advances on you, where you stumble to your feet. Your face swings blindly up into the downward arc of his pistol butt. Orange detonates across your field of vision. Something cracks, a jar filled with viscous sauce landing on the asphalt. He has broken your cheek. Can someone break a cheek? A fireball of radiant pain shuts down all thought.

Far away, someone is screaming. That someone is you. "Shut your fucking mouth," Ali screams, over you. No need. This student of American idiom shuts it for you.

Your head is split, but somehow there is no blood. You touch the second face growing from your face. It throbs like a creature trying to break loose. The swelling mashes shut your left eye. A trough cuts from your crushed upper lip to your temple. When your fascination wears off, the real pain sets in.

The Angry Parent comes to inspect you. He clicks his tongue, displeased but not distraught. At least he has the basic sense not to touch the wound. Finger to your chin, he steers your cubist head around, to catch the meager light. When he leaves, you hear shouts in the corridor — violence on both sides, venom that for a moment threatens to spill over. You rise to your tensed thighs, hoping for wider confusion, some rain of retribution that fails to fall.