Richard Powers - Plowing the Dark

Conflicted for a reason. Conflicted for a reason, as the old televised talk-show public therapies liked to say. Pushing with the same hand that she used to pull you toward her.

Resenting any suggestion that you owed each other anything. But lashed together so tightly that even the vicious pulling away, even the cursing and eternal swearing off amounted to deepest intimacy.

In the days just after capture, your survival could spare no energy for any thought so trivial as love. Six months brought your radical education: happiness and desire were private distractions that allowed states to do their nightmare work unnoticed. A year embittered you to the fact that states had no more wherewithal than the most vicious of quarreling lovers. Eighteen months erased all human pretension past eating and sleeping, staying cool and dry, or calming your bowels until the next bathroom run.

Two years returns you to that first, unaffordable triviality.

More time passes. She comes almost right up to you. She'll take food out of your hand, if you hold it way out, palm open. She no longer turns and runs the second she's finished.

Late fall, the guards bring you a birthday cake. A single-layered, multicultural monstrosity of confectioner's sugar and identity politics, too freakish to assimilate. You don't want them to see you happy. To think that your stupid ecstasy has anything to do with this blundering

kindness.

Joy snubs out when they bring the present. A Minicam, sitting on some bag-headed mercenary's shoulder like a handheld rocket launcher. You are to eat and enjoy this cake — just another well-catered day in the Beirut Hilton — while they videotape you for the pleasure of the home audience.

You eat to keep them from seeing you destroyed. You eat left-handed, a subversive signal to any National Security Agency official inspecting the video for clues. You eat bare-faced, no evidence of ever having had to scramble with a blindfold. You look at this man filming you, stare at him. Even with the lights and blocking camera, even through the makeshift hood, his features will stay with you longer tharr the tape will remember yours.

Muhammad stands off camera, out of vision, saying, "Talk to your family. Say hello to your friends." Throw yourself off a high place. Change stones into bread. You eat slowly, savoring the cake, despite yourself. You make your face a blank, a mask onto which the world can project whatever dream it is struggling to realize.

Who do these clumsy directors think they're fooling? What message can they hope to send? And yet your family will see this. Your friends. Impossible. Communication from beyond the grave. You see them seeing you. You look just happy enough for your mother to imagine that

you're well.

They know your birthday. These martyrs know your birthday. And they can only have learned it from the American media. Someone at home has followed your story, this year or last, and wished you a televised happy birthday that your kidnappers intercept. Your birthday, somewhere within a week of where you sit. You'd forgotten you had one.

"Thank you," you tell the camera, in what comes out a mechanical drone. Who, on the many far ends of this transmission, will receive

these words? "Thank you. I'm alive." You wait, like you wait for the mouse, for your voice to come back. "I am being treated well." Lied to and lying, using and used. The eternal compromise seems, at least for this instant, to favor you by the narrowest sliver. "Although the decor here could use a little work."

You gesture stage right, and the cameraman, by instinct, tracks you with a pan, before he realizes.

"Finish your cake," Muhammad orders.

He's caught you trying to palm a piece no bigger than a finger. "I thought… I thought I might be able to save a little for… later?"

"Let them see you eat the whole thing."

You eat the piece that might have given your only joy a little pleasure.

This pact with your manipulators seals your fate. The State Department will wash its hands of you for aiding and comforting the enemy. But it keeps you alive, for many nights running. Somewhere abroad, out on the globe's trade routes, repeatedly rewound and replayed, your phantom image converses with those who know you, those who hear your words.

You pass through an invented Halloween. A functional Thanksgiving. A genuine simulation of Christmas. You lift a fake glass to a new approximate New Year's.

Your pupils habituate to permanent, low-grade twilight until the crushing vacuum of a single day begins to play like high opera. Even this plotless, characterless, sceneless script reveals its unities. Its beginnings, middles, and inexorable, minimalist ends afford you a panorama, the sweep of a story unlike anything you could have followed when you were free. Surprise in the absence of uncertainty. You will live here for the rest of your life, a Galileo under house arrest, with no telescope to stick through the skylight. You will die here. You'll watch your own deathbed scene, breathless, attuned to the smallest detail, awaiting the only possible outcome.

Attunement teaches you. It is possible to love one person, and only one person, more than you love your own existence, and still not know that one. She made you needy, controlling. You made her willful and perverse. All a life-sized misunderstanding, put to rest in this larger place of enforced listening.

You had no cause to be so brutal, that last call she made you, just before your capture. No cause, the years of preemptive second-guessing, certain that you already heard her objections before she made them. Now that you both must live within perpetual eyeshot of the thing you missed — two humans, too late, making a space for one another— you can see past fear to the place fear never let you reach.

And yet, in the fogged celluloid of this focused dream, the story repeats. The home you both set fire to, again and again. The constant border incursions, the mutual banishment. It's never enough for you. You're never satisfied. You want my fucking bone marrow.

She didn't know you when there was a now. How could she know you in absentia? And the need you felt for her — the love— must become a crippling thing, so filled with self-inflicted misery that even redemption now would ring worse than hollow.

Perhaps, your only reading matter says, perhaps God will place love between you and those that you are hostile toward. For God is powerful. And God is forgiving. And God is compassionate.

The mouse comes out to gnaw on the pages of the book. On those words, for those who can believe without seeing. You let it nibble. Let the creature take from you everything it needs.

As belated thanks for helping them with the video, the keepers return your necklace. Gwen's good-luck charm, the one they confiscated from you on the first day of imprisonment. You sit gripping it, unable to quit sobbing. You press the sharp point of the charm into your cheek, trying to get your thoughts to stop. Guards come and wrestle you, pin you to the ground, and confiscate the charm again.

"Please. I am sorry. Please give it back. I won't hurt myself anymore." A good deal later, after the gouge in your face has more or less healed, a hooded man comes in to snap your picture. Three days on, Ali brings you the print and tells you to sign your name across it.

It's some kind of bush-league trick. An amateur hoax you can't quite puzzle out. They force you to affix your signature to another man's picture, another Crusoe who only vaguely resembles you, gaunt and wasted from sockets to jowls, mizzled gray throughout the hair and beard, a fake-up that will fool no one. Ali harasses you into signing before you can figure out who exactly you're perjuring.

You had no cause to be so brutal, that last call she made you, just before your capture. No cause, the years of preemptive second-guessing, certain that you already heard her objections before she made them. Now that you both must live within perpetual eyeshot of the thing you missed — two humans, too late, making a space for one another— you can see past fear to the place fear never let you reach.