Richard Powers - Plowing the Dark

This… man and I… have known each other… forever.

She held his eyes. And you and I, a few days longer.

The two males fell to remembering. The composer, his grasp on yesterday growing tenuous at best, reached back fifteen years and reconstructed all their old arias, note-perfect. Spiegel kept pace, as if this one-upsmanship of detail recovered from oblivion actually gave him pleasure.

Adie sat listening, eviscerated. When she couldn't make out Ted's words, she made them up rather than ask him to repeat a single vowel. The boys talked on, memories feeding on themselves, for in the end, there was nothing but reworking the one hope chest full of stories. For a while Adie walked around the room, groping every object she could reach. She looked over the small library of CDs, a medium invented since she and Ted had lived together. The tune that she searched for cowered there, among the others.

Do you listen much to your discs? A decade and a half of dodged questions, and this was the thing she chose to ask. She bit her tongue and hoped for a yes. At least some pit orchestra, to accompany the endless afternoons of sparrow-bickering.

Not…. as often as you might think. They're hard to get to. Hard… to load.

She knew what "hard" stood for. "Hard" was the last euphemism that dignity left him.

Lunch came. A tuna salad for the resident, and a cube of Jell-O for his guests to share. Steve and the nurse, with orchestration from Zimmerman, moved him from bed to chair. Adie watched. TeraSys robots moved with more mobility and coordination. The body that had warmed her once, that she had warmed, now flopped toward its target like hardened rubber.

The nurse hovered. You want some help with your food, Ted?

He waved her off, the arm a brutal flail. I will lunch alone with my friends. With whom I have not dined for some time.

His fork performed a bravura, involuntary loop-the-loop. Steve, suppressing a laugh, started to choke on a bite of tuna. Ted flailed at him, and his fork hit the rug. This second fling sent celery chunks flying in all directions. The boys were both hysterical. And then they weren't. That long, wheezing suck of air that each previous time had turned into a laugh veered into another place.

Adie stepped into the breach before she even knew there was one. She pulled her chair flush against Ted's and took up his jettisoned fork. As if she had done it forever, each day of her adult life, she stabbed a chunk of tuna and steered it into this lunging little chick's mouth. Ted opened, received, and swallowed, also knowing the drill. Her free arm went out and encircled him, steadying the bull's-eye.

So how about that Little League World Series? she asked him. Something else, huh?

The corners of his chewing mouth pulled up in an almost controlled rictus.

Lunch decimated, the composer confided in them about his new project, just under way. A last-minute sprint to the finish, something midway between setting Scottish folk tunes and heaving up an Opus 111. The work lay hiding inside his portable computer. Spiegel fired the box up for a look. The full score appeared on the screen.

Spiegel cleared his throat in shock. Chamber orchestra, Ted? Where are you going to find a chamber orchestra to play contemporary music these days? Or is this another soap-company commercial?

Zimmerman howled. Look at it. Read the notes, you Philist…

Adie came up behind Spiegel. The two of them inspected the score, trying to turn the armada of formal symbols into a symphony for the inner ear.

How are you entering this? she asked.

It seemed one of the nurses, an amateur pianist, occasionally came and took dictation. It took Ted almost a full minute to say as much. She s also… something of a… piece. It aids… the composition process … to have someone … to impress.

The visitors traded disbelief. The man was dead up to the waist, with the tide rising. But something in him still pursued the conquest, long after conquest could be of any use.

/'// take some dictation if you like, Steve offered.

Ted's eyes went round and terrified: Would you?

Just don't try to cop a feel while I'm at it.

Adie stood to go. I'm taking a walk. My bit to aid the creative process.

She came back an hour later. Stevie swung around at her entrance, utterly panicked. His look accused her: Where have you been? It's hopeless. Hopeless. She came over to the screen. They'd added no more than four measures.

We're going on an expedition, she announced. It's gorgeous out there. She crossed over to Ted and draped herself around him. You'd like that, wouldn't you?

His eyes fled back into their place of wonder. I… would… indeed.

They dollied his wheelchair down the linoleum hall and through the rec room. The circle of charmed TV viewers now sat in communion over an extinguished set. No one objected to the fact that the screen had gone blank. At the sight, Ted sucked air in through the sides of his mouth— eeegh… eeegh— and Adie accelerated him out the front door.

His spectral wail only crescendoed, once out in the open air. Everything in this scared, small town that could possibly stare at him did. All Lebanon gawked at the man in a wheelchair, bellowing at this chance gift of freedom.

Adie leaned down to Ted's ear. Sotto voce, through the side of her mouth, she giggled, Now, Grandpa, you fucking control yourself or we're taking you back to the can. This only made Stevie pick up and propagate the horse laugh.

First time, Ted tried to say. First time in six months. Not fifty yards down the asphalt, he cried out, My God!

Adie slammed the wheelchair to a stop, bracing for crisis.

Look.. at that… tree!

They turned toward the midsized maple that Ted's wavering arm stalk seemed to indicate. Steve and Adie looked up into the boughs, searching out a source large enough to rate the alarm. The branches drifted, a crowd of thousand-palmed arms waving callow-green, three-fingered salutes.

I've never… seen anything like it.

And then, looking, neither had any of them. Matte, shiny, then matte again as the wind flipped their surfaces, each leaf semaphored a single bit in a composite message too large to read. The trio stood until self-consciousness set in again, blinding them.

The cedars of Lebanon, Spiegel pronounced. Adie shoved him. Good Christ, there's another one!

They were, in fact, all over the place. Cheap and eager miracles, too common to look at twice. The wheelchair rolled slowly up the street, under that greening canopy.

It took some pushing to get to town. But town ended as soon as they entered it. Thirty-two places in the United States went by the same name, half of them having started existence as Utopias. Texas alone boasted three of them. This particular Lebanon now existed, to the extent that it could be said to exist, as a theme park version of itself. The Glendower Shaker Museum. The junk-turned-antiques shops, the fleabag hotels upgraded to bed-and-breakfasts for weekenders escaping Cinci or Columbus.

Main Street ran its eight blocks before giving up the ghost. The expedition came to rest at Main and Broadway, awaiting the rapture, which, when it finally came, would surely be at least this quiet. Zimmerman swung his arm in a resounding upbeat, Adie's cue to cut up to Pleasant, circle around, and start the whole loop over again.

J can't believe it. It's all still here.

They never let you out? Spiegel asked. Never take you for a spin?

How could they? Too… label-intensive.