Richard Powers - Plowing the Dark

This room is never anything o'clock.

Minutes slip through it like a thief in gloves. Hours fail even to raise the dust. Outside, deadlines expire. Buzzers erupt. Deals build to their frenzied conclusions. But in this chamber, now and forever combine.

This room lingers on the perpetual pitch of here. Its low local twilight outlasts the day's politics. It hangs fixed, between discovery and invention. It floats in pure potential, a strongbox in the inviolate vault.

Time does not keep to these parts, nor do these parts keep time. Time is too straight a line, too limiting. The comic tumbling act of causality never reaches this far. This room spreads under the stilled clock. Only when you step back into the corridor does now revive. Only escaped, beneath the failing sky.

Out in the template world, flowers still spill from the bud. Fruit runs from ripe to rot. Faces still recognize each other in surprise over a fire sale. Marriages go on reconciling and cracking up. Addicts swear never again. Children succumb in their beds after a long fever. But on this island, in this room: the faint rumble, the standing hum of a place that passes all understanding.

Years later, when she surfaced again, Adie Klarpol couldn't say just how she'd pictured the place. Couldn't even begin to draw what she'd imagined. Some subterranean confection of dripped stone, swarming with blind cave newts. A spelunker's scale model Carlsbad. Summer dacha of the Mountain King.

The Cavern, Stevie had called it. Stevie Spiegel, phoning her up out of nowhere, in the middle of the night, after years of their thinking one another dead, when they thought of each other at all. The Cavern. A name that formed every shape in her mind except its own.

She had not placed him on the phone. It's Steve, he said. And still, she was anywhere.

Adie fumbled with the handset in the dark. She struggled backward, upstream, toward a year when an a capella Steve might have meant something. Steve. You know: the twelfth most common name for American males between the ages of twenty-four and thirty-eight?

Steve Spiegel, he repeated, hurt by her confusion. Madison? Your housemate and collaborator? Mahler Haus? Don’t tell me: you've torched your entire past.

A vision of herself at twenty-one congealed in front of her, like the Virgin come to taunt Slavic schoolchildren. Recollection swamped her carefully packed sandbags. Steve Spiegel. The three of them had planned to live the rest of their lives together, once. He, she, and the man who'd live long enough to become Adie's ex-husband.

Jesus! Stevie. Her voice skidded away from her, a gypsum imitation of pleasure's bronze. Stevie. What on earth have you been doing with yourself?

Doing…? Adie, my love. You still make life sound like a summer

camp craft project.

It isn't?

No, you decorative little dauber. It is not. Life is a double-blind, controlled placebo experiment. Has middle age taught you nothing?

Hah. I knew that at twenty. You were the one in denial.

Tag-team remembrance dissolved the years between them. OK, the gaps and rifts. OK, all the expended selves that would never again fit into the rag box of a single curriculum vitae.

Adie. Ade. You busy these days? I thought we might be able to hook up.

Outside her loft, the stink of singed oil and rotting vegetables settled. Car alarms clear down to the Battery sounded the predawn call to prayer. She cradled the phone under her chin, a fiddler between reels.

Steve, it's kind of late… She hoisted the guillotine window above her futon, its counterweights long ago lost at the bottom of the sash's well. She crawled out onto her fire hazard of a fire escape, adopting her favorite phone crouch, rocking on her haunches, her lumbar pressed to the rose brick.

Jesus Christ, he said. I am so sorry. Entirely forgot the time difference. What is it out there: like after one?

I mean, it's a little late for reunions, isn't it?

Missing the whole point, the sole purpose of reunions, their sad celebration of perpetual too-lateness, the basic one-step-behindhood of existence.

Oh, I don't want a reunion, Ade. I just want you. She laughed him off and they pressed on. They made the obligatory exchange of hostages, each giving over the short versions of their overland passage across the intervening decade.

Seattle, he told her. Can you believe it? Your doltish poet friend, the one who used to spout " Sunday Morning " until late Monday night. Supporting the computer industry's insidious plan for world domination.

Still lower Manhattan, she replied. Your washed-up watercolorist. Currently supporting the wall of my crumbling apartment building with the small of my back.

Surprised? he asked.

About…?

About where we've landed?

Nobody lands, she said. So how is the world of software?

It's the oddest thing, Ade. Ade: as if they still knew each other. You know, I lied to get into this business in the first place. Told them I knew C++ when I didn't know it from B-. But it turns out, I know this stuff in my sleep. Born to it. Code is everything I thought poetry was, back when we were in school. Clean, expressive, urgent, all-encompassing. Fourteen lines can open up to fill the available universe.

Different kind of sonnet, though, right? Different rhyme scheme?

I dont know. Sometimes you gotta wonder.

Wonder, in fact, was why he'd called. He'd come to rest in a moist den of pine on a twisty black macadam road looking out over Puget Sound. He was coding for a start-up called the Realization Lab, the latest tendril of that runaway high-tech success story TeraSys. But the RL was still experimental, more of a tax write-off than a source of any near-term revenue.

TeraSys? You mean you work for that little Boy Billionaire?

Indirectly, he laughed. And they're all boy billionaires out here.

What does your building look like?

What do you mean? My building, building? What does that have to do with anything?

I'm trying to visualize where you are. You’re calling from work, aren't you?

I… well, I guess I am.

William Butler Spiegel! The man who swore he'd never do anything more serious than wait on tables, so as not to compromise his muse. Still in his office in the middle of the night.

Middle…? Out here, we're usually just getting started around 10 p.m.