Richard Powers - Plowing the Dark

Once out of nature I shall never take My bodily form from any natural thing, But such a form as Grecian goldsmiths make Of hammered gold and gold enamelling…

Her hand closed on the skin around his eyes. Her nails clenched, as she pressed back into him. He held still in pain, ready to be blinded.

That's it, she whispered into the gaping motel room. That's the room we're supposed to build. And set upon a golden bough to sing. The place we're after. Byzantium.

In time, whole days start to vanish. For a long while the orderly egg carton of the calendar has regulated your mind, kept it, if not productive, at least aligned. But now the carton starts to crumple, the eggs to break against one another in an angry omelet.

You carry on numbering the days, desperate for form, although the tally no longer correlates with anything. The week arrives when you can't make it from one Friday call to prayer to the next without disorientation. It pulls you up out of a night's sleep and runs you under the freezing fire hose — this drift into terror, into utter timelessness.

This room's day permits only the crudest clock. Sometimes it is dark; sometimes a little darker. The only reliable instrument here is your English Qur'an, that earthbound perjury of heaven's uncreated original. Its pages solidify into a discipline, the rigorous training for a track meet you must get ready for. Reading is your daily regimen, each session coming to a forced stop after ten verses, wherever that leaves you. Whole surahs dangle right before the end, or break off bluntly after just starting. Only the count counts.

You may reread the day's passage as often as you like, but not a word more. When the hours expand beyond their usual cruelty, you pore over the opening fatihah until it induces oblivion. But you keep to the day's installment. For tomorrow, after the forced march through the latrine and the return to the chain, this system will return you to the previous outing's exact stopping place, to start you up again in the slot where today has dropped you.

This ritual hammers out a few still moments to stand in. It steadies the swirl of eternity, for as long as the verses last. This time you ration yourself, sustain the escape. The Cow, the Bee, the Table: just the mystery woven into these chapter names diverts you from hovering madness. However reconfigured this Jonah, this Joseph, this Abraham, they make their way against the backdrop, under the Thunder, out from the Cave, along the Night Journey. Say, the words of the Prophet always start. Say: were the sea ink for the words of God, the sea would fail before the words did.

The verses themselves evade you. Their linked riddles will not crack. But the torrent of words, their sense-free cadences suffice to hold you, even in the absence of story. Their pageant of sounds drowns out your own incessant dunning. The throwaway phrase "and the water-bearer let down his bucket" expands in your eyes for hours, sounding in your ear for all the world like a soul-saving miracle, the most magnificent idea, the roundest image you have ever stumbled on.

But the secret side effect, the contraband payoff must never have occurred to your captors. They've already broken one divine prohibition in giving you this forbidden foreign translation in the first place. Surely they would confiscate the Scripture if they suspected the scope of its revelation. These measured-out passages keep you tethered in the flux of time. If you start at the fatihah and sum the verses you have read, then divide the total by ten, the quotient yields, by the miraculous dictate of numbers, the total number of days that have passed since you received the word. This is your new perfected calendar, dating not to any fixed year but resetting all dates to your own private hegira.

Most days, the balm of this word hoard outpaces the torment of its rationing. But sometimes balm and torment settle into a dead heat-starting and stopping, sentences and silence torturing one another to death. How have you been brought to this, staking yourself to the same book your mother once committed to memory without her understanding more than one in a dozen words? You reopen the wounds that that victim once inflicted on herself. Did you think to enter paradise without suffering the violence of those who have come before you?

They tame the abyss, these verses, better than any parade of orderly notches in the wall plaster could. But they cannot repair your own damaged mainspring, or synchronize it. When you return to the well of text, passages that you recall from adjacent days now stand split by several pages, while those separated by weeks in your memory run flush against each other. This evidence hits you, like a freshly discovered lump in your abdomen. You and lucidity have been parting company without your knowing. Mind has been resorting to the quietest drift, a protective hallucination finally gentler than the alternative.

All you can do is stay grappled to the book's planed planks, hoping that after each breaker, the timbers you've lashed to will bob back to the surface. The only recourse, when this morning slips loose, is to tie it to ten more verses. You listen in to the archangel Gabriel, dictating to the Prophet in his subterranean cave. This story extends itself only in hinted wisps, as if all readers already know the plot. But the more gloriously cryptic, the better. Each ten-verse maze holds you longer than the Sunday Times crossword ever did.

You search through the book, for a larger architecture, some forward motion that could pass for form. But the verses possess only the most astonishing organizing principle. The chapters proceed from longest to shortest, starting in prose and ending in prayer. Still, it swells, this staggering dialogue: God, His Prophet, and the cast of broken humanity, in a three-way game of telephone where only endless repetition forces the words to correspond with what they figure.

You lie in the Prophet's slime-laden cave, taking the complete dictation all over again. Say: I seek refuge in the Lord of the daybreak, from the evil of what He has created; and from the evil of the night when it cometh on; and from the evil of the blowers upon knots. Say: I seek refuge in the Lord of men, from the evil of the whisperer, from jinns and men.

You do. You say what it says to say. Out loud. You recite your fatwahs and divinations for a live audience of the word-starved. Chapter and verse. Forward and back. No one comes to tell you to break off. Verily, man is in loss, save those who believe and do right, and bid each other be true, and bid each other be patient.

For a long time, talking to the book is conversation enough. Then the book runs out. You restart the careful system of mental tick marks from the top. But this time through, you already know what the surahs hold. And all those repeated commands to Say, Say at last force you to take the ideas live, into the realm of surprise, of real listeners.

You target the simplest, most religious of your keepers, the next time he lingers over a delivery. "Sayid, doesn't the Prophet say that you must never steal?"

"Yes." His only available answer. For lying, too, is forbidden.

"The man thief and the woman thief. Cut off the hands of both of them, as punishment, for they have done very wrong. An example from Allah, for Allah is mighty and wise."

You grope for the book, hold it out, open to the Table. He takes it from you, but of course hands the tainted, unreadable translation back to you at once.

"Yes, Mr. Taimur." As grave as the world at issue.

"But you have stolen me. You have stolen me from my life, and from my mother, and from my… family. This is the worst theft of all. How can you do what the Prophet has told you never to do?"