RICHARD POWERS (28 page)

Well, maybe this painting was doing just that. Because as soon as I whipped my head around for a good look, nothing. Scared stiff.

That's what I figured. So I decided to lie in wait. Pretend I was busy noticing something else. I held my breath, as motionless as those pictures were pretending to be. And that's how I saw it again. I knew it was impossible, but I'd always suspected it. The frame around the Infanta shifted again.

Your ocean liner...

... listed toward port, and our gallery of visual instruction tipped with it. Don't you dare laugh. It really happened. And it scared me shitless.

I believe you. I'm not laughing. I... believe you.

Every slide of the pictures against the wall made the ocean swell beneath me. God. There's nothing more powerful than an eleven-year-old girl concentrating in the dark. Over several months,
I
trained myself to see the twitch, even when staring at the pictures dead on. First my body would yaw inside, then the frames would slip. After a while, I could rock the frames at will.
No
more than a few camel ham width. But visibly tilting, whenever I said so.

You're lucky you didn't drive yourself completely nuts,
he said. Then

caught himself.

Funny thing was, it felt like the most natural thing in the world. Something everyone should be able to do. I'm not saying it was effortless. It was exhausting. Sometimes it took hours. Clearing my mind of every thought except waiting. Concentrating on not concentrating. Waiting for the wave to hit my body. Wait without waiting.
She shuddered at the description, panicked all over again. I
had to nudge at the paintings without trying. Tug at their corners with the side of my eye. They were stuck in amber, all the thickened time that had settled on them since they were painted. I had to glance past this crust to rock the picture underneath. The moment the idea of pushing came into my mind, I had to start all over. I didn't move them; I let them move. Then one day,
I
graduated to the game's next secret level.
I
let myself into that lopsided bedroom. You
—you've really never seen it? Sorry. I've been busy.

Inside that painting there's another painted window, floating above the madman's bed. I could see it from my own crooked bunk, even with no light from my own window. The painted shutters are deeply wrong. They're way too big. Too much wood to close over the casement. There in the dark, I couldn't decide whether they floated in front of the window frame or behind it, folding into the bedroom or fanning outside. I had to find a way to close them, make them fit the frame. One night, without warning, I found I could wiggle them.

Time to wake the sister. Wake the sister. Please. Not at all. Time to oil their hinges. Each night that I exercised the shutters, they got a little easier to open. Pretty soon, Elise had barely fallen asleep before I was stealing off to the painter's bedroom. And as
soon as I got there, the breezes would start to blow. I loved it. My private little secret, which I had the good sense to hide from everyone. Making the wind blow. Making the ground move beneath my feet. All the things that pubescent girls eventually learn to do more prosaically.

Jackdaw turned away, hiding his rush of color.

I
got... too good. Too skilled at animation. Each of the objects in that painted room wanted its turn. I made gusts of southern wind twist the towel and slap the cyan shaving minor against the wall like a float slapping a dock. I got so I didn't even need breezes. I made the drawer in that crippled little bed table slide open unsponsored. I worried that the scraping would wake up Elise. But I couldn't stop. Couldn't keep from trying out new games
... A
night came when the room jumped, all by its lonesome. Started shaking before I gave it the mother-may-I. The chairs began to slide across the sloped floor. Horrible. I had to look away. But when I looked back, they'd start drifting all over again. Worse, the bed began creaking, from the weight of invisible bodies. It no longer had anything to do with gravity or wind or the
ocean rolling. I wanted off the boat. I tried to steer our bedroom back to dry dock. I repeated the proof, over and over: the Earth was solid. The paint was fixed.

She pointed one finger up into the air. St. John of the Cross.

Then it was
...
like you said. The thing I should have had the sense to be afraid of all along. I walked past the room the next morning, in daylight. And saw the clack of a loose shutter. At last I figured what was happening. Hereditary. I'd go insane. As raving as the painter, whose private things I was stupid enough to play with while he was away.

You weren't about to lop off any body parts?

Don't. Even. Joke. I asked Elise if the paintings ever seemed... strange. "Our gallery of Visual Instruction?" She was a dozen games behind me. "Oh, perhaps to others. Never to us! Don't forget: we had the wisdom to pay millions for them
..." I
could have wrung her neck. I was frantic with imagination. I went back into the room and copied it, trying to make it stop. I fixed each furnishing at its exact distance from all its neighbors with a number-two pencil on blue-ruled paper. Then, to keep the colors from drifting, I went at it with my own paints. Once I got the folds of the towel down, it would stop flapping. When I found the exact
lip of the shutters with my brush, they'd never move again.
Her chin muscles twitched: almost never. I
thought that if I could paint this room
...
thought that if I could get the colors right
...

She stopped long enough for Jackdaw to hear them
—the creakings downstairs, the middle-of-the-night shutter hangings, the armed father, family violences in some godforsaken Air Force barracks in yet another host country that did not want you there. When Adie resumed, her

voice was perfect again.

Just a hysteric child's voyage, I guess. It passed with puberty. But all through my teens, I couldn't look at a painting without repainting it. You know how childhood nightmare goes.
You
roll it back, demon by demon. Twenty years later, all that's left is a colorful story. That's how you learned to paint?

Adie smiled, the crisp Crosshatch of a technical pen.
That's how I learned to copy. I never could make my hand do anything interesting without an original nearby, threatening me.

But you're so good.
You
drew all those
...
things!
Her smile smeared outward into wet charcoal.
Lovely, reassuring trinkets that have sold everything from book jackets to fake Belgian chocolates. Never mind. Copying keeps fruit on the table. And it's landed me this job, on the bleeding edge of whatever we're on the edge of.
You
never told your sister? Elise? Sort of. Years later. When we were out of school and both bussing tables at
MoMA.
What did she say?

She said that I should get counseling. That Mom and Dad had fucked us over good, between the two of them. That going to a shrink was the best thing she'd ever done for herself. This was just before Elise moved uptown in the wake of the art bubble. Ah. Our millions!

Did you ... ever
...
?

Go to a shrink?
No. I
went downtown and tried to become a painter. It didn't work. But neither did Elise's therapy, in the long run. And hers was more expensive.

Did your mother ever... ?

Died,
Adie interrupted. At
Langley Air Force Base, Virginia. A very unromantic death.

Did your... father ever see ... anything that you made?

That depends.
She looked away, on a mythic place where gifts really reached their recipients. Nothing she'd ever made
—offering, bribe, buyoff, retaliation—had ever come close to hitting its mark.
That depends on what you mean by "see."

Jackdaw heard the current in her. He searched out the lab for a place to flee. But the chance for flight was over.
This painting. This bedroom of yours? You sure you want to . .. animate that one?

No. I'm not sure. I've never been sure of anything in my life. Except that that place is beautiful.

Jackdaw nodded, ready to go there.

24

There was a song. A piece of music. A beautiful thing, you used to say, back when the word meant nothing. Back when existence let you listen. In another life, you loved that piece. Now every note is gone.

You lie in the constant dusk of this sealed carton, willing the tune to come back to you. You try all the possible opening intervals, checking off the permutations, like trying to remember someone's name by ticking off the letters of the alphabet. Chasing does nothing. A song like this returns only of its own volition. It will descend, or not, only by grace. All you can do is keep still and wait.

You lie waiting, without expectation. But the song does not come. Not one phrase. Only a shifting stumble of tones. You lie forever in the dark, inviting the melody. You spend days making yourself available, ready for any arrival. But all that comes to you is the piece's name: a convalescent's song of thanks to the Godhead.

You've heard the piece maybe all of three times in your life. Not really your music of choice. Not the stuff you ordinarily put on the player, except in those rare moments when something made you imagine that you understood it. Something like sudden sickness, sudden health. The music of a vanished past that you always thought you'd someday have time to learn.

Now there is time, more time than learning could hope to fill. But now there is no music. Now there is only a pitchless waiting.

Once, you tried to play the ancient thing for Gwen, a chant as much beyond you as listening was beyond her. A haunted few minutes that you needed to share with another living being. She failed to sit all the way through it. Could not, although you asked her. Could not, because you asked her. The ensuing three days of mutual escalation ended at the eternal, retaliatory impasse.
Why do you begrudge me ten minutes of shared pleasure with you?
To which:
Why do you have to control my life?
Now your cell turns that anger laughable, horrible, murderous. How could you ever have felt anything but guilty amazement when you were still free? Felt anything but crazed, convalescent gratitude at being able to listen to any song at all?

Thanksgiving has long since passed, without observance. Couldn't bear celebrating a holiday that should have marked your release. Christmas, too, comes and goes, some time during your extended illness. If there was any sound of it, you didn't hear. If any celebrants marched
oud
and
doumbec
through the dusty streets
—streets so near to Bethlehem, that source of the old intractable crisis, streets through which Christ himself dragged his own sorry and ultimately incarcerated ass, healing and wheedling—they did not pass beneath your barricaded shutters.

If believers walked out that night, taking their singing out under the angel-scattered skies
...
But no: Sacred Conflict would hardly be sheltering you anywhere near the Maronite districts, those neighborhoods across the impassable Green Line that even now, for Christmas, send and receive their selfless gifts of artillery, bright portents of comet tail rising stubbornly in the east, those daily repaying lobs whose parabola arcs remain blindly indifferent to the lives they offer up for sacrifice this

holiday season.

New Year's Eve you do manage to celebrate, the only way possible. No way of saying for sure that you have the day right. The hour is pure speculation. No man will know it, as it says somewhere in what little you remember of Scripture. You declare the minute that Ali brings your dinner to be 8 p.m., and work forward from there.

Figuring your pulse at sixty beats a minute, your basic moderato, you map out the continent often minutes. You do two dozen of those, and on the last, you start your countdown. Across your ceiling, you tune in the mob in Times Square. The ball begins its stately descent. Only, nestled at the bottom of the globe's fall, absorbing the blow like the strength-testing lever at a vanished county fair, is not January 1, 1987, but January 1, 1988. And you are watching the mad cheer from ground zero on a television set, from a warm, womblike, walnut-appointed hotel room who knows where, holding on baby-possum-style to the amber underside of a woman whose comforts do not extend to a face that will resolve into features.

January will not defeat you: this is your New Year's resolution. All strength must go into preserving your strength. You chew your food until the puree passes osmotically through the membranes of your cheeks. You increase the reps of your sit-ups and push-ups, closing in on that asymptote that your meager diet can sustain. You resort to yoga. You meditate.

From the shards that you found when you arrived here, you reassemble your shattered concentration. Mental calisthenics tone up your mind's shapeless misery. You string together a few sentences of comfort to your mother. You store the letter in your head, grateful to find the whole composition intact and growing, every morning when you come looking for it.

Encouraged, you try a five-paragraph essay, the kind you used to make your students write. What brings you here? What are your plans following graduation? The essay grows into a magazine article that will go to the highest bidder upon your release.

Retention's daily exercises release deep captives. I
met a traveller from an antique land.
Mr. Cotrell, ninth grade.
Oh what is not a dream by day?
Mrs. Hamin, seventh. Over the course of five days, you stitch together 90 percent of Frost's "Oven Bird," a poem whose very existence you could not have sworn to half a year ago.

Shaken loose by storm, stray lines from triumphant roles in high-school plays flotsam up to the surface. Algy in
Earnest
Biff Loman. Fragments of a teenager who thought he might want to act for a living.