Richard Powers - Plowing the Dark

Here, in these galleries of hypothetical, your Qur'an turns its true face to you. You've failed to grasp it until now, the flash point of all faith, the law against depiction. The men who have taken you still adhere to the same ban that the West started out with — its second commandment, for God's sake. You stroll through the banned images, the forbidden fruit, heaven's stolen fire. This is the war that steals your life. Its front stretches out before you, farther than you can see. You've strayed into a factional flare-up, fluke regional politics. But even yours is just a tiny salient in the global sacred conflict, the millennia-long showdown between those who would fabricate God, forever sculpting and perfecting, and those who would suffer Him unseen.

Even being here indicts you. You're guilty, aligned. You are graven image's man, hostage for a reason. You can hope for no sentence less than the general bonfire. Imagination may be worse than the thing it would save you from. But what you will not abandon, you must live in. A place past hope. A place past place. A now indifferent to what happens next.

You press through the jumble of rooms, searching for that picture that you can't picture, the view that would make even death livable. On this upper floor, the two of you once stood looking. The simplest arrangement imaginable. Nothing: an open shutter, a few sticks of furniture. You turned to Gwen, to see what she saw. And she was weeping. Staring through wet lenses at that painted taunt, timeless and still, sadistically refusing her entry.

You should be able to summon it up in your sleep. But no; you must thread your way to where it hangs and look on it. No other way. Must have it there, in front of you, stroke for stroke.

The galleries are too many, the catalogue of old urgencies too wide. They maze you. The halls loop back inside their own folds. You have trouble steering your mental proxy. The puppet is willing but the strings are weak. Paint's apartments disappear down receding corridors, a nightmare rococo palace that lengthens with each step, its chambers filled with nativities, crucifixions, state-sanctioned agitprop, flattering bourgeois makeovers, pretty pastel picnics, nostalgic landscapes sprinkled with faked-up ruins.

Days unfurl when it feels as if you are closing in. All but there. A glow issues from down the hall, three archways away. You pick up the pace, forgetting, in your excitement, the original goal of killing time. She'll be standing, stilled and well, across this last threshold, waiting for you in the southern light, on the smooth-planked, scarred varnish floors.

Holy War always tears you back. For weeks it can leave you rotting, only to choose its moment of maximum intrusion. Ali, yearning for his school days in the States, bounds into your cell to chat about the Final Four. Some argument among your overseers, tuning their crippled TV to the latest Arabic-dubbed Dallas or Knots Landing, escalates to signs of innocence, but he ignores you. No sin you might commit can

penetrate him.

His twisted lips spit out Amal. Arabic for "hope." Impossible. This assault force laying siege to the nest of Western hostages: Amal? Hope and God's Partisans are on the same side. You'd have sworn your sanity on it, if not your life.

The advance of this commando raid unhinges the guard, routs him. He scrambles for a place to hide. You check his hands; he is weaponless. Wilder still, you look down at where you stand. The blast that tore your radiator out of the floor by its roots has also shed your chain. Freedom goes unnoticed in such concerted dying.

In a heartbeat, you weigh him. He stands a full foot shorter than you, and though he has fed better for the last year and a half, the match is no contest. Beyond him lies an emptied corridor, a stairwell, a street full of men scrambling for their lives. No risk; no need for caution. You are worse than dead already. You lock eyes, trade an eternity of mutual knowledge. He gazes into you, sees a man with nothing more to lose. You shake your head, grinning, stupid with the richness, the ancient history. He slides two steps backward out the door and bolts it behind him.

The squad that tries to ambush your guards pulls back or falls in the rubble. Over several confused hours, all the Partisan guards surface, intact. You stay docile and bowed, in the fury of regrouping. But still your punishment proves severe. It comes with the noise that you'd hoped never to hear again so long as you lived: the snick of packing tape tearing off the roll. The sound of live burial.

They tape you without mercy. You fight to keep a gap around your nose and mouth. They seem vague about your continued breathing. Tape revolves around you, passed from hand to hand, binding you in a cocoon smaller than your body. They smash you down the stairwell that only yesterday stood wide open.

They insert you into the old death truck's recessed well. Your muscles refuse the memory. It can't happen again. You won't survive that exhaust-filled coffin. Your whole body begins to buck, but the tape holds you immobile. You scream from the base of your lungs, but your mouth won't open. The sound goes up through your head and stops, trapped against the layers of insulation.

They put you into the well wrong, wedged. The fumes suffuse your brain even before the truck starts up. The truck's broken shocks send each stone in the road through your kinked body. You pray. Pray for quick death, a willed heart attack, suicide by self-made embolism. Anything but this creeping suffocation. Fifteen minutes in the fume-filled secret compartment and no imaginable future is worth holding out for. Deliverance comes as a drop into oblivion. A trapdoor in your coffin opens into an enormous gray staging area, empty and still. Then the warehouse gray refracts into all the colors of a furnished paradise. The room goes light, wondrous, spare, waiting for you. All here again: the shirt, the towel, the toiletries, those few crooked paintings on the wall. All human misery vanishes from the earth. You curl up under the moth-eaten red feather tick, intent on sleeping the sleep of the completed.

But someone's mouth tickles you awake. A set of lips on your lips, a pair of lungs pumping yours. Gwen's as you sleep, but a man's as you come to. A man's dark face, sobbing in a familiar foreign language. The shout of joy at your first movement just as quickly turns vicious. A circle of men take out their relief, kicking at your corpse, which, for a few moments longer, still evades feeling, immune to everything human. They slap your neck and punch your head. Every blow delivers you, and you grab at the rain of hands to kiss them.

Under your blindfold, you see night. Night out of doors, on the eastern Mediterranean, somewhere in Phoenicia, beneath the same stars that olive traders steered by, stencils of the world's first myths. They've moved you from the city, forestalling any new attempts to seize you, a living shell game inside the shell of a larger one, a coy three-card monte that will go on for as many millennia as empire continues to dream its dream of cleanness and faith continues to resist in its holdout pockets.

They prop you up and walk you through the bracing night. Who would have thought that life still had so much breeze in it? This same continuous wind once swept down out of the Caucasus, slipped over the Andoman, and scattered through the Great Rift Valley. You'd forgotten about wind.

They push you stumbling forward. This will be your last hundred yardsout in the open for years, maybe for forever. Your check muscles inch the blindfold up a hairline. You scramble to take some hostage of your own back with you, into whatever new hole awaits. Some glimpse to ground you in the floating nowhere that lies ahead.

The greasy cloth rides up the bridge of your nose. You tilt your head back, raising the slit as high as you dare. The sight on the horizon stops you dead. Off at a distance too shadowy to calculate, thrown into relief against the night sky, stand the ruined columns of the temple of Jupiter. Baalbek — already a thousand-year-old backwater by the time the Romans set up their imperial tax stations and linked the town into their network of command and control.