Richard Powers - Plowing the Dark

An architect, half German, at least by family tradition, a man for whom the human race was a perpetual source of stress, whose Moses complex led him through a lifelong quest for peace that started with biofeedback and wended its way through est, yoga, crystals, acupressure, acupuncture, shiatzu, Rolfing, Alexander technique, antioxi-dants, herbal extracts, homeopathic medicines, and finally Prozac, sat paralyzed, reeling in the real-time feed issuing from his workstation screen. Now and then, condemned to participate, the architect cried out to no one in particular, Oh God. This can't he happening. I can't process this. What in the hell is this all supposed to mean? What do these people think they're doing?

This man's disheveled cellmate, an American who'd made it through the last twenty years on force of habit alone, a man whose Cold War existence came down to little more than the private contrition of forward motion, at last had to answer: God only knows what they think they're doing. But they seem to be hitting that concrete wall with sledgehammers.

And the wall, for its part, seemed to break.

All inefficient border checks swept away. Both sides would enjoy a windfall peace dividend, not to mention the beauty of simplification.

In a sorry excuse for a neighborhood local, a Belfast emigrant raised half a glass to the television above the bar, where an ecstatic battalion of barbed-wire cutters danced an allemande on top of their taken objective. Best of luck to you, poor buggers. Reached the promised land, have you?

He mimed a virtual glass-clink and sipped, a good-sport attempt to join in history's graduation party. He toasted the end of the lifelong war, the end of status quo brinksmanship, the end of the market's last alternative, the end of mutually assured destruction, of gunpoint-guaranteed safety. He toasted the end of willed divisions. He toasted the New World Order, the beginning of nuclear proliferation, the steady slide into universal factionalism, the fragmentation past any ability of power politics to control… As he tipped his glass, the onscreen revelers waved their spilling magnums to toast the Irishman back.

An architect, half German, at least by family tradition, a man for whom the human race was a perpetual source of stress, whose Moses complex led him through a lifelong quest for peace that started with biofeedback and wended its way through est, yoga, crystals, acupressure, acupuncture, shiatzu, Rolfing, Alexander technique, antioxi-dants, herbal extracts, homeopathic medicines, and finally Prozac, sat paralyzed, reeling in the real-time feed issuing from his workstation screen. Now and then, condemned to participate, the architect cried out to no one in particular, Oh God. This can't he happening. I can't process this. What in the hell is this all supposed to mean? What do these people think they're doing?

This man's disheveled cellmate, an American who'd made it through the last twenty years on force of habit alone, a man whose Cold War existence came down to little more than the private contrition of forward motion, at last had to answer: God only knows what they think they're doing. But they seem to be hitting that concrete wall with sledgehammers.

And the wall, for its part, seemed to break.

The warm room is shelter against the surrounding cold.

Inside, you find a bed and a ready stock of blankets. Someone has seen to all needed provisions: sheets, candles, oil, towels. Cans in the pantry, wood in the cellar. Hooks and hangers, empty dresser drawers waiting to be filled by the stray refugee.

Outside, the wind hacks away with chill efficiency. Terminal winter settles in. Again, the world expels its baffled tenants. But the warm room takes all the roomless in.

The place seems almost to have known you were coming. Doors, stairs, windows all run exactly to your scale. The shelves carry all your best-loved books, and all those you have ever hoped to read. Your favorite nautical watercolors and cloud-teased landscapes line the front hall. All afternoon, each window's view outbids your eye's imagination. You've stumbled upon this hotel, this makeshift hospital, by more than chance. Linen waits stacked up in the cabinets, dishes in the chest. Behind the bathroom mirror, soaps, brushes, and blades stand at sacrificial attention. Dry provender renews itself with each use. All these things have long existed, but never before like this. They seem to gather in this holding pen strictly for you to delight in them.

The warm room has no other reason but yours. As the mass displacement grows, its answer turns inward, its cure simple. But grace may be harder to bear than its brutal opposite. For the warm room exists only by virtue of a single, chill twist. Touch the wooden cup left out for you, pick it up, and turn it over. Run your finger along its smooth length. Put your lips to its waiting lip, and empty it: your mouth will find nothing more solid than idea.

The shower does not wet you, nor do the towels dry. You can flip through the pages of these loving books, but you cannot hold them. The vibrant clothes slip onto your body, but they give no feel. It dawns on you only piecemeal where you are. How you have dropped down through your own, scribbled rabbit hole into this thought museum and now sit gaping at the shape of your evacuated life from the far side of the mental mirror.

Maybe you lost your given life, searching for this escape. Or maybe you did yourself in, bitter revenge on life for failing you. Or maybe the world would have cut you up anyway, and only luck led you to this emergency windbreak just before succumbing. Something in your refugee heart never felt at home anywhere, except in this room of maybes.

Down the hillside from this mountain cabin, grim realism rounds up its latest deportees. Global affairs pursue their footrace, for not everyone has been sentenced yet. You've made it to this sheltered Switzerland just before the police dogs close their jaws on your ankle. Or: you've fallen, out there in the dark, along the frozen border, and the last thought that crosses your expiring mind is this fire-lit chalet.

In the warm room, you are the goal of all these stocked provisions. All things await the theater of your needs, here freed at last to work its changes. In the warm room, you are the doer of all acts, the receiver of all action, the glow that lights these sanctuary walls, the warmth these eager trappings radiate, the fading coal, the lone heat source in a world gone zero and random.

"You need something?"

The Shiite Cronkite asks so gently, it's almost possible to imagine that today he means it. You can't catch his eye. But perhaps a blindfolded head swing in his direction can still haunt him with the parody of a human glance.

"Walter," you say. Slower now, with all the gravity of a dying animal: "Walter. What's your real name?"

You hear him shrug. Currents of compressed air roll off his undulating shoulders and form in your ears, as clear as words. You put your hands out in front of you, on your wasting thighs, palms up.

"Tell me," you beg. "I know Ali's. Walter. Listen. I can't hurt you."

You hear him, this peasant driven off the desiccated land, here at the front only for that expedited ticket to heaven given to anyone who dies for the cause. You hear him put his head down. Astonishing. Impossible. Yet still, your attenuated ears hear it.

when the Greeks were still in preschool. This, too, will pass, and leave behind nothing but the astonished record.

Because you could not come to it, Iran has come to you. It happily exports Islamic revolution into the vacuum of this fractured country. Your kinsmen bankroll Ali, Walter, the Angry Parent. Your unknown half-ancestor strides out to meet you halfway, in the valley between you.