Richard Powers - Plowing the Dark

No, she said, almost violent. Not the same. Those people were… looking. Pushing through appearance to the other side. You can see it in every mark they put down.

Well, they're industries now, anyway. Whatever they started out as.

This is fact. The Scream T-shirts. The Klimt coffee mugs. The hyped exhibitions where gallery guards move the customers through in cattle cars…

So you liked it better when they turned away the great unwashed at the doors of the palazzo?

I liked it better when the human heart was more than a commodity. And when was that, exactly?

God only knows. Never, probably. That's why I bailed. Why I ended up so completely lost, for all those years.

You ran to commerce to get away from commercialism? In a funny way, yes. That's exactly what happened. Adie, my Ade…

You have no idea how horrible it is. To give your life to a thing you think represents the best that humanity can do, only to discover that it's not about beauty at all. It's about coercion and manipulation and power politics and market share and the maintenance of class relations.

Then what…? He teetered on the edge of making the obvious point. Maybe the obvious point was never worth making. What's… different about what we're doing?

She pieced her tiles together, in silence. Blue, rose, gold: sages standing in God's holy fire.

As a product? Maybe nothing. But as a process? It feels as if there's something we have to make. As if we're closing in on something that the world somehow… needs.

He laughed in astonishment. I never thought I'd live to see you become the spokesperson for high technology.

Not the technology. She grew shy, diffident. She did not say it. The

sanctuary.

You see what you're making, don't you? His chin pointed at the paint-by-numbers coming to life on her screen. Human portraiture. The thing you'd sworn off of.

She blushed, a schoolgirl caught slipping a secret valentine into a mailbox. Maybe so. But they're not my originals! And they're not especially realistic.

When you work your way down to the damaged bits — the parts the Crusaders and the Turks destroyed? Are you going to finish them?

I haven't thought about it. You can't think too much about this thing. The one that tracks you like the moon. I'll see when I get there.

All the lab's orioles brought them scraps of colored rag to weave into the deepening nest. Nineteenth-century Orientalist engravings of the immense interior. Photographs shot from atop Sophia's descendant: Sinan's Sultanahmet, the Blue Mosque. Translations of the dazzling, calligraphic, verse maze that lined the inside of that stone firmament.

The whole felt fresh, like something from the days when making things was still young and not yet overcome by terminal success.

Freese suggested a treadmill, to speed the visitor through the enormous distances.

Adie vetoed. No machines inside. It's a sacred space.

They settled on a simpler propulsion. Lean in the direction of travel, and that compass point would drift toward you. Lean harder to run.

Why is the math so hard? she asked Kaladjian.

Which math?

Perspective. Proportion. Depth.

Perspective? Perspective is easy. Just the visual cone turned inside out. Once the Italians got wind of Arab optics, the whole globe was up for grabs.

Not that perspective, she said, harsh enough to surprise him. But he was alongside her in a flash. The most difficult man she knew was also among the smartest.

Oh. Perspective. Knowing where you are?

She nodded. He scribbled with a number-two pencil on a pad of blank canary legal paper. He drew her diagrams, space's irrefutable proof. If being alive were a single problem in long division — how to divide infinity by threescore and ten — we'd have a reasonable chance of solving existence. But the solution for seventy years misses catastrophically for thirty, because the numerator is infinite. And those solutions, in turn, look nothing like the quotient for this year, this fiscal quarter, or today, let alone the next thirty minutes.

We live between our next heartbeat and forever. The mathematician shot her a look: How much do you know? That's it. We are supposed to solve all the conflicting quotients at once. That is what makes… the math so hard.

He lifted his eyebrows at her, as if he did not mind being of use, if only this once.

Revived by work, Adie returned to the play of her body. Limbered, she and Stevie tussled at each other, like fast-learning pups. Pinkham barked at the sounds of happy scuffling, and he would scrape his nails at the other side of the closed bedroom door to be let in.

Sex in middle age felt illicit, blunted, sad, curdled by knowledge, each of them aware how little a role the loved object actually played in the perpetuation of happiness. But neither of them could shrug off the forms of happiness. Joy grasped and dismissed them by turns, the only solace against its own affliction.

Adie opened. She tried on a whole wardrobe of abandoned clothes for Spiegel that she had never worn in front of anyone, even for the solitary mirror. She sported looks that weren't her, outfits that quickened her to inhabit.

She talked to Stevie widely, as she once had to her sister, in childhood. She talked to him of Ted, now without guilt or recrimination. She spoke of the things that had gone wrong. The ways in which their paired equations failed to balance.

She narrated the horrors of New York. The molestations in the subway. Rats the size of a healthy baby. The fashion of nihilism and runaway hipness. The serenade of all-night car alarms under her apartment window.

He smirked at her. You miss it, don't you? Admit it.

In your dreams.

She made him get out more. The trips stunned him. Our ancestors spoke of this thing, the sun.

She made him sit, dank and chilled, with a book in his lap, in her harvested garden. She took him to that hideout in the Cascades, her secret swimming hole. The water was too cold now to swim. They postponed full immersion until they got home.

There she lay waste to him, with a hunger that grew with each feeding. It surprised Stevie sometimes, the ferocity of it. Her sniffing him, tasting, holding him up to the light, inspecting. Searching his every part for some sensory testament she could never quite find.

You're not bad at this, she told him. His reward. For an old guy.

Yep. That's me. The Loin in Winter.

But each encounter fed the question in him, the one that would undo them, whether he asked it or held it under.

When you make love to me…?

Yy-yess? she teased, touching him in a place, in a way to derail all words.

He took away her hand. When you make love to me… who are you touching?

She clamped. Don't want to play this game, Stevie. Don't even want to visit.

But she came back easily those days, even from his most willful disruptions. She wore an aura now that nothing could dissipate. A woman who had found, again, the work she was meant to give herself to.

Spiegel squinted, and called it love.

The word spread, a winter contagion. Jackdaw came to them and announced his engagement. You're the first two people I've told. I haven't even told my parents yet.

Jackie, Adie pouted. I thought you loved me.

Something in his stuttering objections said that the two facts weren't incompatible.

Spiegel clapped him on the back. Fantastic, man. Who's the happy shackle-to-be?