Richard Powers - Plowing the Dark

Spiegel, workless now for longer than he had been since college, paced in place. Already he wanted the airport waiting lounge and the flight back to Seattle. So what do you do all day? How do you fill the damn vacuum?

Ted's eyes opened wide. For the last few weeks… I've been trying to remember… the name of every woman I've ever… enjoyed.

Spiegel all but spit his teeth across the terrace. How many of those that you enjoyed did you actually… enjoy?

Not… many. Ted avoided looking at either of them. I'm just trying … to put my story together. Where I was… when. I don't know. Half a minute passed. And why.

Done, Adie laughed. And it's taken me less than forty seconds.

Ted stared at her, that look of myelin-stripped panic. You knew… all of them?

Not yours, you idiot. Mine.

Oh. Ted's grin worked against the width of the disease. Oh. In that case … I wonder if you could help me with… the name of the cat woman?

Spiegel tucked his face under his arm. Adie smiled sweetly. You asshole.

The… cat woman. You two… know the one I mean?

The three of them sat loosened by the breeze, looking over the accumulated wreckage of the past that still, somehow, seemed worth enumerating.

They didn't brave a restaurant again that evening. Instead, Adie ran out for candles and wine, a decent BV Napa cabernet that they drank out of paper cups. By dinner's end, there seemed nothing left to say.

Steve, as always, broke first under the silence. Well. Shall we have a listen before we go?

A… listen? Ted's face shrank in horror at the possible meanings.

To the chamber symphony, man. What did you think I meant?

The chamber…? How?

Steve pointed at the computer and whirled his finger around in space — the obscure sign language for whirring electrons. Through the magic of semiconductors. How else?

Oh. It flooded Ted's voice, a bitterness so great that only an immobilized soul could survive it. Oh. I thought you meant a real listen.

But a fake listen would have to do, for the fake was all they had. Spiegel loaded the piece, set quarter note equal to sixty, clicked the cursor on the first measure, and released the synthetic music.

Notes spread over them in the dark, notes in a constellation that no one could have guessed came out of this man. The sound stunned Adie, even in the synthesized clarinets and trombones, even in the tinny approximation of inch-wide speakers. This music was not Ted, not any Ted either of them had ever known. It had no edge, no irony, no flamboyance, no demonstration of academic credentials. It was tonal. Standing waves of continuous, proscribed modulations outdid even Dives in luxurious archaism. Music meant nothing, except by convention. But this massive parallel data of pitches in time turned her viscera in a way unreachable by any paraphrase. There were things so complicated that only the ear could know them.

Sound snaked around itself, pointless and beautiful. The shaped sound counted for nothing. It demonstrated nothing. It proved nothing but its own raw need for a redemption that, finally, could only be denied. Something in this music had been lost in transcription. Some impediment to Zimmerman's conception brought about by the disease. Some inability to write what he meant, dictating through the ether while lying in bed.

But a look came across Ted's face as he listened. The music came as close to conception as the encumbered process was ever going to let him come. At last the piece trickled out, stumbling through the incomplete measure that Spiegel had transcribed that very evening. And when the chords decayed, the piece still abided in the night that scattered it.

Ted's eyes pleaded with the two of them. His mouth latched on to a sudden rush. If I could just finish all four movements. It's music… that people might love. That people might think about and… feel. Not like that alien stuff we all used to make…

You'll finish, Spiegel said. And then you'll write something else. Because this one won't please you anymore. Yet, Ted corrected. Won't… please me yet. Give us a minute, Adie ordered.

Spiegel's head jerked back. I have been asked to evacuate, he told Ted. Goodbye. Farewell. Take care. Write if you get work.

He walked without looking, out to the front room, where a ballroom of white-tied aristocrats swirled to the strains of a Strauss ländler. Near the door, a doubled-up woman, trembling against her rocker in time to the meter, hummed a descant to the ghost dance's tune.

Adie reappeared, pumice-faced. OK. I'm done. Let's get out of here.

Nothing outside could touch either of them. The rental car was their cocoon, a safe capsule heading north in the dark.

Were you aware, Stevie said to the Ohio night, that a huge percentage of the population eventually gets sick and dies?

Adie stared at the ribboning road. Finally, in a voice the color of that hypnotic pavement, she said, Denise Girandel.

Denise Girandel? Nothing. Then: Denise Girandell How in the name of hell did you dig up that one?

She shrugged. How many cat women are there in one persons life?

Why didn't you tell him?

I wasn't about to give the bastard the satisfaction. A mile went by. Besides. Trying to remember gives him something to do all day.

They pulled up at the motel. Spiegel sat still in the passenger seat, the motor dead. You two should never have gotten divorced. You know that, don't you?

Whatever you say, Stevie. Then, softer. It's not that people shouldn't get divorced. It's that they can't.

Hours into the night, she came into his bed. Looking for something— an explanation, a barricade, another mammal's pelt.

I'm not going to hurt you, she said. I just need to lie here. I just need to hold someone.

Holding lasted no longer than holding ever does. But when it came to the things she needed, hurt and hurting were not least among them. She kneaded into him, as if the thing she had to release lay on the far side of a wall, just out of her reach. She ground against him, less in pleasure than in desperation, in search of some permanence she meant to work on his body. She forced into him, desperate to press all shale to slate. He tried to say her name, but she put her fingers into his mouth, gagging him with desire.

Whatever release she wheedled out of the contact had nothing to do with him. He was just the nearest body, the closest living thing that Would hold still. She fell off him finally, spent, holding him so that he could not turn to embrace her.

For the longest time she did nothing except to lie beside him on this single motel bed, returning to the unbearable baseline of sixty beats a minute. Then she reached over, her hand cupping around his face, a child playing guess who.

By the tips of her fingers, Stevie felt that his temples were wet. Remind me, he said.

She rustled up close to his ear. Remind you what?

Once out of nature. To look for something better than this body.

She stroked his temples, counterclockwise. Each trace around the circle undid one spent year. Then she placed his words — the past, the poem that he was quoting. Her fingers clenched. Go on, she commanded. Desperate. Say it. Say the rest.

He could not refuse her anything. He'd given her worse, more irreversible, already this night. His own voice rang strange to him, speaking into the black: