Richard Powers - Plowing the Dark

He'd failed to predict the obvious: a new return address that he was not privileged to know.

O'Reilly refolded the note and slid it back into the perfect slit. He slashed the last slug of carrot juice with one clean backhand into the sink. He could not sit. He found himself outside, in front of his apartment building, heading west — the American bearing. His pulse rate set the clip, and he fell in with it. The real brilliance of this country lay in its square blocks. You could circle at random and still be exactly where you were.

She ought to have come out. Just once, just for a four-day, no-obligations, sample tour. If she had taken even a single look at what they were putting together, she would have seen. This work would overhaul the terms of human existence. It was his chance to partake in the discovery of fire. How could she think that he had any choice in the matter? Accuse him of selfishness or neglect? Everything he worked on here, he did for her.

They might have made a life out here, built a common house from the ground up. They might have laughed like idiots together, from their aerial perch above this magnificent, navigable panorama. She ought to have come help him map the infinite mystery of the subjunctive. But she chose instead to serve him with this, the indicative's last word.

Odds were good that he'd live to see at least the rough outline of embodied thought, the first human passage into living, active graphics. By the end of the day, he might even be able to travel to any spot of the hypothetical panorama he cared to visit. Only now, there was no one left he cared to travel with.

On the fourth swing past his apartment steps, O'Reilly ascended. He reentered his cavernous flat, the one he'd picked expressly because it was large enough to absorb the ridiculous proliferation of pointless stuff that Maura so loved to accumulate. There he pulled from his collection of a thousand years of Western music the one disc that was to have been their recessional music after their run down to the justice of the peace, whose address they'd have found in the Yellow Pages on the morning when they knew they wanted at last to do the silly deed together, for all time.

Mr. Big, of course. Because they wanted the best available blessing, and Maura could always have put on her beloved pennywhistles afterward. Cantata number 197, one of the wedding ones. A bass aria, for nach der Trauung, rolling in innocence, sung by a bass whose perfect, amused intonation declared that he had never lived anywhere but here, his vocal cords squarely at home in the bungled, compromised, roundly resonant place nearest to hand.

Ronan lay back against the folding card-table chair — he'd have pitched it instantly on her arrival — and let the text wash over him.

O du angenehmes Paar! Dir wird eitel Heil begegnen, Gott wird dich aus Zion segnen Und dich leiten immerdar.

O you most delightful pair, he tried, padding out the words to preserve the meter. May you every blessing find; may the Lord shine forth His Mind. Not quite, but it scanned. May all happiness caress you, and the Lord from Zion bless you. Closer. May life all comforts bring you, and may God from Zion ping you. Wing you. Whatever.

In the rippling sequences, Ronan counted up all the partners he had ever had, every woman he'd ever slept with or sworn promises to, the ones he'd truly loved flush up against the ones he'd loved less. The ones he left without ever knowing. The ones who left him for a whole range of reasons, declared and undeclared. The ones who had cut him off from all wherewithal. The ones whom he drove stark frothing mad simply by being who he was.

He numbered them up in a dimensioned array. Then he counted Maura's. All the ghosts and goings-on she had ever told him about, and the ones he knew strictly through inference. The ones she replaced, and the ones she replaced them with. The lunatics and stalkers, the thugs he'd had to hustle out of the foyer, the dead little Michael Fureys he could never hope to compete with, the ones who stood under her memory's window in the dark rain, tossing pebbles at her pane.

Then he followed the list out to the second degree. All the partners that his ex-partners had partnered off with. And then Maura's, as far along as he knew them, inventing no one, leaving no one out. Couples split and divided and multiplied in front of him, pairing off and propagating in the well-lit room, a runaway chain reaction. He lost count, then took it up again.

He stopped at a hundred and forty-four, a heavily dividable number in anyone's book. Then he lined them all up, making a provisional seventy-two couples ol them, leaving room at the altar for all the unknown permutations — a melee of brides and grooms, brides and brides, grooms and grooms — and married them off in one mass, cull American wedding while the bass rolled on through those pure, practical Bach sequences:

Oh you sweet, delightful Pair, May this life its blessing send you, May the Lord always defend you And preserve you everywhere. O you sweet, delightful pair!

O'Reilly raised his ethereal stemware of now-imaginary ambrosia and toasted the pair in question, across a distance that no amount of technology would ever be able to close.

And full of sleep, Spiegel echoed. And nodding by the fire. That I've become a bloody-minded bitch? You know how I am about the truth, Ade.

She blessed the telephone for not broadcasting facial gestures. Stevie, tell me something. Whose life do you think you're writing, anyway? Oh, I'm not particular. Just so long as the story has a happy ending? Across the wires, there came only raw spacer. Stevie?

Ted's… not good. He's had a bad falling off. He called a few nights ago, from the nursing home. I thought it was a crank call. Even after I figured it was him, I thought he was putting me on. Not his voice. Not his sentences. It took him two minutes to get through six words. And you don't want to know which six.

She closed her eyes. Kept them closed while she said, Yes. I do.

On the far end, a harsh exhale. "Come out now. If you want."

Adie clutched the line's silence to her ear. Soon she would need to make a sound, just to keep whoever it was, out there, tied to the other end. Every available word was a small death.

Spiegel spoke first, his voice veering. I figured I'd make him, you know, a little piece? A little show, for light diversion? I don't even know if he'll be able to watch the fucking thing.

Stevie? Are you going out?

Go? Out there? His voice caught at each consonant. He'd never considered the possibility. To Ohio? Vaguer, less reachable than any invented dimension.

I could go with you. She matched him, daze for daze. I've been thinking. You're right. Whatever room we end up making here? It's going to need a score.

The plane out to Cincinnati was almost empty. Having rushed to make the flight, they waited in the airport, waited on the runway, then waited in midair. Adie stared down through her smoky Plexiglas portal onto the crumpled sheets of the Rockies below. Stevie watched her staring.

All back projection, he told her. You know. They put a few massive hydraulic jacks under the so-called plane, fake the dips and pressure changes, and treat us to the chroma-keyed Refreshing Landscapes tape out of the New Age catalogue. When the tape runs out, they fire up the fog machines.

Her eyes stayed fixed on the panorama. But Spiegel needed to chatter. People are way too mobile, he said. You know that? We run up the frequent-flyer tab like we're buying bagels. Look at us. Three thousand miles for a long weekend. On an impulse. My parents would be scandalized. They needed three weeks just to implement a two-hundred-mile bus trip.