Richard Powers - Plowing the Dark

The light hurts your eyes. For a minute, you can see nothing. She understands your day blindness, and leads you by the hand. As if she has always loved you, and there is no fear between you. You walk west, along a street whose name you can't make out. Cars, bikes, and pedestrians swarm the thoroughfare. Every oak doorway, each bay window stupefies you.

She tells you about a new plan she has for making a living. She's decided to become practical. Live in the real world, like you. She's going to freelance, designing and creating business presentations. It will leave her more time. She won't be as stressed. She'll be happier, easier to get along with.

But in the same breath, she says that the stress was all your fault. You never accepted her. You never loved her as she was. She couldn't give you more than she was giving. You spooked the shit out of her. She could never satisfy you. You wanted out. You wanted to change her. You wanted an impossible synchrony. You wanted her bone marrow.

A shock rips through the afternoon air. The Howard El explodes into a blazing fireball. Then another blast, from the direction of Lake Shore Drive, the Corniche. Someone off beyond Grant Park is shelling the city. Gwen looks at you in animal panic. You grab her to you, and in an instant, you are back inside the apartment, huddled together

behind the leather sofa.

Something in the scent of violence — the war, the sound of things detonating, about to be revealed — excites her. The clutch of fear turns into its other. She grips you, cowering behind the thin plaster skin that one stray caprice of geopolitics could turn into your crypt. The city is coming down around you, grinding itself to rubble, and she wants her last minutes of body. She's inside your ear, wetting it, withdrawing her tongue only long enough to repeat, You can do anything you want

with me.

You debate the wisdom of bringing yourself off — in this, one of the rare opportlhities you have to do it, the guards distracted by the greater chaos outside. Comfort versus cost, the fleeting injection of well-being versus the expense of energy in a place where dinner's pita crust and stale chickpeas barely cover the calories involved in lying still.

You decide in favor, as quietly as you can. You focus on estranging her, resolving her, posing her in the multiple welcoming and inflaming postures, the dress-ups that she never knew you wanted from her, positions she would have begrudged you had you ever suggested them. You feel the terms that desire condemns you to, the male life sentence, the need to possess the thing that refuses to know you. You need to escape tonight, more than you've ever needed any pleasure — escape not into this stranger fantasy, but out from under it. But where can the heart run to, finally, except the known? Your lust seeks out those mourning features, all her furtive Kodak poses that have for years absorbed your eyes, instructing you in her perfect confusion, drilling you in its inflections, all the familiar terrors of the native speaker…

At the moment that she joins her extremities to yours, her commitment is unthinking. Her grip is as utter, as unconscious as any between two needy animals. But vacant as well, absent, far away somewhere, deep in a formulating image. Who knows whose?

The mortar pounding falls off, its rounds expended. The two of you lie side by side, silent in the gulf that climax creates. Returned, you need to know. To ask her where she was just now, since she wasn't here with you.

Where was I? The question maddens her. She will not be bullied. East Moline, she tells you. How's that? I was in East Moline. With?

With fifteen dollars. Burning a hole in my pocket.

To see?

To see a man about a dog.

Even her kindness is arch, deflecting. Nothing like a little more nuzzling to shut a man up. You have no choice but to honor her offer. You slide her toward you, prelude to your coming together again. But just as suddenly, she stiffens.

You ask her what's wrong. What you've done this time.

/ don't like being moved. You're too much bigger than I am.

You throw your hands in the air. Affection is over for the evening. But your bodies stay close, flush, frayed, afraid to move away from each other into the wider chasm.

/ would love to see you happy, you tell her. I would do anything to see you at peace.

You hear the false note, even as you make it. Love, that placating condescension. Aren't we past that yet, so late in this distance run?

Look. Gwen. Trying for softness. Trying for balance, for some good-faith connection. I came into this relationship pretty easygoing. You wouldn't know it; I'm really very generous by nature. But you are slowly turning me into exactly the controlling, manipulative male that you're afraid I am.

I don't think you're controlling, she states. / don't think you're manipulative. She dares you to call it a concession.

The world is all militias, you want to tell her. All power, factions, and revenge. There is no place else but the one place we can make.

Everything bloody and dead, except the two of us. But even that much would be begging.

I don't think I should have to second-guess myself every time I need… something from you.

I don't think you should have to, either.

You hear it again, her arms curling up in a defensive clinch. The bitter readiness to stay at war forever.

Truce, sweetie? White hankies? Halfway out between the trenches?

She detonates. It's never enough for you, Tai. I am meeting you halfway. You don't want me halfway. You want me ten feet past you on the other side.

Look. Pointless syllable, buying time until you stop shaking. Look. Just tell me. Do you want to be with me? Make a life? Is it worth all this

endless…?

A silence. Finally, she will be wide, will return, in kind, the surrender you want to give her. Finally she will leap free, meet you for that smallest mutual swap of sovereignty, the first exchange of trust you both so badly desire.

Well. Of course it's worth… But you make it sound like it's my—

Just say. Just say you love me. Once. Without countering.

Tai. What…? How…?

The rage courses through you again, as powerfully as when she spoke these words to you for real. Oh to hell with you. Why don't you just pack your fucking antiseptic overnight bag and… You swing your hand around to point at the window, or where the window would be, if it weren't sheet metal. This sealed aperture, twisted around in mental geography to align with your old southern exposure, the true-to-life direction of… go home.

Oh God. She falls away from you, cowering, as from the silenced mortar. Her voice goes spectral. Spooky. On the edge of an ocean you don't want to imagine. You were going to hit me.

All night long and into the following day, you redirect the scene. You adjust the mistaken angle of your backhand. You alter the words, change the pacing, fix the crooked gesture. Pay the penance of replay, summon up all the correction that editing can offer. Do everything in explanation's power to heal the misunderstanding. You reshoot everything for hours, trying to convince her, convince yourself, that the blow she ducked would never have been possible. That the anger you were feeling and the anger she saw were not the same.

Someone knocks on your door. You rise to open it, amazed to find her standing in the dingy, unguarded corridor. She has come back, in tears, wanting some better last word. You rush out to meet her. But the speed of your advance scares her, and she turns to run.