RICHARD POWERS (50 page)

3
7

The room of holy wisdom spreads its tent beneath the dome of heaven.

Wood will not do, for its wooden parent burned. The building draws its stone from the farthest throws of empire. It cannibalizes for parts the world's great temples: columns from Ephesus and oracular Delphi, from Egyptian Heliopolis and Baalbek in the Levant.

It steals its palette of marble from the whole spectrum of imperial provinces: pink from Phrygia, Lydian gold, ivory Cappadocian, green from Thesselia, pure white quarries of sea-girt Proconnesus. Cut and dressed, the stone veins fan out to meet their mirror shapes at each facing's joint, picking up and echoing, like a stilled kaleidoscope, hints of heavenly device and earthly emblem, painted incantations, living creatures bolting through the symboled undergrowth.

The floor plan is a daring cross of conch and loggia. Basilica and hub—church architecture's two great streams—here flow together in a new confluence. And soaring above all, the dome rises to its awful altitude, climbing upward not to a point but cupped like the gentle firmament itself, a helmet resting on air, crowned in a crucifix, the world's

protector.

The dome bends over a gaping hole wider than its engineers should know how to span. Nor is the day's faith great enough to make up the shortfall. The emperor himself, at the building's christening, stumbles
dazed into the vast vacuum of the eastern apse, dispenses with the prepared
Deo Gratia,
and blurts out,
Solomon, I have outdone you!

Mosaic saints man the walls at strategic points. Deep-color tile squares of hammered gold leaf dusted over a layer of glass tesserae and finished with a layer of glass paste become the world's first bitmaps. Up close, their resolutions pixilate into discrete rectangles. But from down below, at the eye's prescribed distance, the folds of a gown hang full, and faces escape the waste of history into some stilled, further conviction.

Under the monstrous dome, empire draws itself tight into a hardened chrysalis. This room will fall first to Christian invaders, absorbing into its galleries the crypts of those crusaders who pillaged it. Later, from the conquering infidels, it will adopt calligraphic Arabic disks and minarets, and a subdued mihrab slipped into the east end, tilted slightly on the axis to Mecca. Another faith will command those mosaic saints to be destroyed, but fear and awe will leave them merely plastered over, protected for blasphemous mass viewing, centuries on, in the age of global tourism.

The world's ongoing project will fling itself upward, amassing public works so huge that this one will shrink to nothing in their wake. But something in the race yet chooses to build this one, here at the world's turning point, at obscene expense, to lay out a crippling percentage of the gross domestic product—greater than the sums it sinks into any other item in its governance — to raise this fixed navigation beacon for sailors breaking apart in the Hellespont, this vast, cupped dome huddling over the destitute, this
omphalos,
the Earth's navel, its cut umbilical cord.

Ringing the dome run these words, cut there by the supreme callig-raphers, this room's most recent owners:

God is the light

of Heaven and Earth.

His light is a niche in which there is a lamp,

the lamp enclosed in a globe of glass,

the globe of glass a shining star

lit from a blessed olive tree neither of the East nor the West
...

The room of holy wisdom is a ruin. The world's largest, as large as the ruinous world. And propped against the stripped arcades, amnesiac, disinherited, illiterate in the unreadable wreck, you pitch your home.

3
8

The
Q
ur'an runs out. No more need for it; no schedule left to preserve. You find yourself sitting blanked, your brain playing teatime host to the virus that consumes it. You look down in wonder at your arms and legs, where they tremble out of control. Hours mold. Your eyes fail to latch anywhere. From far off, in this perpetual dusk, you watch yourself stare at nothing. A translucent globe of light materializes in front of you, suspended on nothing, a spirit on air. Only as it covers your face in a silk thread does it occur to you: a spider.

You curl up fetal, your chin tucked between your hands. This close to your ear, your nail, rubbing up against your cheap cotton collar with every inhalation, sounds like the bobbing of boats against their ropes at anchor. There is a creaking like the creaking of rope on wood. There is a creaking that needs gulls, that says waves, insists sea.

Shapes spawn from the room's shadows, then dissolve in the startle they produce. But livid aftertaste lingers in the spots where these phantoms flicker. You turn back into that child of eight, pulled from a deep night's sleep, three hours past the reach of reason. A boy swimming to half-consciousness in a room not his own, its lumps of furniture a forest too tangled to navigate, without measure, without bearing, where north could be anywhere and the walls are as wide as dread.

All your life, you've awakened in this placeless place. Always the same, in its alien layout. Even as an adult, you felt it come to nuzzle, this other man's interior decoration. As late as three years ago you cried out loud, a groan forced up through sleep's thick opiates, scaring the wits out of the woman sleeping next to you. Your bed, your room, your Gwen, asking,
What is it, sweetie? What is it?

You couldn't tell her. You couldn't say. You did not yet know. Not the deep trace of infant trauma. A warning of the trauma that awaited you, a glimpse of your last, furnished efficiency, this northless one. One and the same: the room that forever troubled your sleep is this one that you finally wake up in.

The deed, the title to the place is yours now, and it's way past time to remodel. You go with a bookshelf in deep cherry, and next to it, a tawny leather sofa long enough to stretch out on. The sinister shadow that cowered for decades in the far right corner becomes a mission-style chair and footstool. A record player, neat on its cart, appears in what had once been fear's worst alcove. The swelling shelf of records crawls with your guilty favorites.

Nowhere can you find a phone. You don't seem to own one, or much miss it. Now and then there's a knock on the door. One that you can ignore or humor at your will. When it's not Ali or Sayid with your dinner, it's Gwen, come to see if you'd like to do anything.

It all feels a bit suspect, really. How nice she's being. She never had ten consecutive minutes for you, when minutes were real. Now she hangs around all the time, if only because her place is still a dump while you've done up yours to comfortable perfection.

You tell her yes, you wouldn't mind taking a walk. The two of you, outdoors, on this glorious day. And maybe you could talk, just a little, about what went wrong. Turns out your place is on the third floor. Turns out you're living in a decent neighborhood in Lincoln Park, eight blocks from the lake.

The light hurts your eyes. For a minute, you can see nothing. She understands your day blindness, and leads you by the hand. As if she has always loved you, and there is no fear between you. You walk west, along a street whose name you can't make out. Cars, bikes, and pedestrians swarm the thoroughfare. Every oak doorway, each bay window stupefies you.

She tells you about a new plan she has for making a living. She's decided to become practical. Live in the real world, like you. She's going to freelance, designing and creating business presentations. It will leave her more time. She won't be as stressed. She'll be happier, easier to get along with.

But in the same breath, she says that the stress was all your fault. You never accepted her. You never loved her as she was. She couldn't give you more than she was giving. You spooked the shit out of her. She could never satisfy you. You wanted out. You wanted to change her. You wanted an impossible synchrony. You wanted her bone marrow.

A shock rips through the afternoon air. The Howard El explodes into a blazing fireball. Then another blast, from the direction of Lake Shore Drive, the Corniche. Someone off beyond Grant Park is shelling the city. Gwen looks at you in animal panic. You grab her to you, and in an instant, you are back inside the apartment, huddled together

behind the leather sofa.

Something in the scent of violence—the war, the sound of things detonating, about to be revealed—excites her. The clutch of fear turns into its other. She grips you, cowering behind the thin plaster skin that one stray caprice of geopolitics could turn into your crypt. The city is coming down around you, grinding itself to rubble, and she wants her last minutes of body. She's inside your ear, wetting it, withdrawing her tongue only long enough to repeat, You
can do anything you want with me.

You debate the wisdom of bringing yourself off—in this, one of the rare opportlhities you have to do it, the guards distracted by the greater chaos outside. Comfort versus cost, the fleeting injection of well-being versus the expense of energy in a place where dinner's pita crust and stale chickpeas barely cover the calories involved in lying still.

You decide in favor, as quietly as you can. You focus on estranging her, resolving her, posing her in the multiple welcoming and inflaming postures, the dress-ups that she never knew you wanted from her, positions she would have begrudged you had you ever suggested them. You feel the terms that desire condemns you to, the male life sentence, the need to possess the thing that refuses to know you. You need to escape tonight, more than you've ever needed any pleasure—escape not into this stranger fantasy, but out from under it. But where can the heart run to, finally, except the known? Your lust seeks out those mourning features, all her furtive Kodak poses that have for years absorbed your eyes, instructing you in her perfect confusion, drilling you in its inflections, all the familiar terrors of the native speaker ...

At the moment that she joins her extremities to yours, her commitment is unthinking. Her grip is as utter, as unconscious as any between two needy animals. But vacant as well, absent, far away somewhere, deep in a formulating image. Who knows whose?

The mortar pounding falls off, its rounds expended. The two of you lie side by side, silent in the gulf that climax creates. Returned, you need to know. To ask her where she was just now, since she wasn't here with you.

Where was I?
The question maddens her. She will not be bullied.
East Moline,
she tells you.
How's that? I was in East Moline.
With?

With fifteen dollars. Burning a hole in my pocket.

To see?

To see a man about a dog.

Even her kindness is arch, deflecting. Nothing like a little more nuzzling to shut a man up. You have no choice but to honor her offer. You slide her toward you, prelude to your coming together again. But just as suddenly, she stiffens.

You ask her what's wrong. What you've done this time.

/
don't like being moved. You're too much bigger than I am.

You throw your hands in the air. Affection is over for the evening. But your bodies stay close, flush, frayed, afraid to move away from each other into the wider chasm.

/
would love to see you happy,
you tell her.
I would do anything to see you at peace.

You hear the false note, even as you make it. Love, that placating condescension. Aren't we past that yet, so late in this distance run?

Look. Gwen.
Trying for softness. Trying for balance, for some good-faith connection.
I came into this relationship pretty easygoing. You wouldn't know it; I'm really very generous by nature. But you are slowly turning me into exactly the controlling, manipulative male that you're afraid I am.

I don't think you're controlling,
she states. /
don't think you're manipulative.
She dares you to call it a concession.

The world is all militias, you want to tell her. All power, factions, and revenge.
There is no place else but the one place we can make.

Everything bloody and dead, except the two of us. But even that much would be begging.

I
don't think I should have to second-guess myself every time I need
...
something from you.

I don't think you should have to, either.

You hear it again, her arms curling up in a defensive clinch. The bitter readiness to stay at war forever.

Truce, sweetie? White hankies? Halfway out between the trenches?

She detonates.
It's never enough for you, Tai. I am meeting you halfway. You don't want me halfway. You want me ten feet past you on the other side.

Look.
Pointless syllable, buying time until you stop shaking.
Look. Just tell me. Do you want to be with me? Make a life? Is it worth all this endless
...
?

A silence. Finally, she will be wide, will return, in kind, the surrender you want to give her. Finally she will leap free, meet you for that smallest mutual swap of sovereignty, the first exchange of trust you both so badly desire.

Well. Of course it's worth
...
But you make it sound like it's my—

Just say. Just say you love me. Once. Without countering.

Tai. What...? How ...?

The rage courses through you again, as powerfully as when she spoke these words to you for real.
Oh to hell with you. Why don't you just pack your fucking antiseptic overnight bag and...
You swing your hand around to point at the window, or where the window would be, if it weren't sheet metal. This sealed aperture, twisted around in mental geography to align with your old southern exposure, the true-to-life direction of...
go home.

Oh God.
She falls away from you, cowering, as from the silenced mortar. Her voice goes spectral. Spooky. On the edge of an ocean you don't want to imagine.
You were going to hit me.

All night long and into the following day, you redirect the scene. You adjust the mistaken angle of your backhand. You alter the words, change the pacing, fix the crooked gesture. Pay the penance of replay, summon up all the correction that editing can offer. Do everything in explanation's power to heal the misunderstanding. You reshoot everything for hours, trying to convince her, convince yourself, that the blow she ducked would never have been possible. That the anger you were feeling and the anger she saw were not the same.

Someone knocks on your door. You rise to open it, amazed to find her standing in the dingy, unguarded corridor. She has come back, in tears, wanting some better last word. You rush out to meet her. But the speed of your advance scares her, and she turns to run.

You rush after her, to prove that you can't hurt her. No guards stop you; it happens too quickly. She flees your attempted comfort, terrified. She stops, cowering, her arms above her head. You take her arms gently, to lower them from her face once and forever. She stiffens, and you pull harder.

In the flash of an instant, the tug escalates into the full contest. Now you could truly hurt her, slap her hard, to stop her struggle, to carry her back into the room's safety before the larger insanity finds you out here. And in that moment of violence, you are everything she has feared in you, everything she always knew was knocking around inside you, awaiting only this awfulness to be born.

She disappears. Throughout that dry season, she will not come back. But she leaves behind something more useful than remorse. For in that impulse chase, she has taught you how to spring from this prison down to the street below.

You pace yourself. You draw out the exercise in stages. You work up the block of Lincoln Park immediately outside your building. The goal is largesse, weight, a map on the scale of an inch to an inch. You stand still until every contiguous brick and block of concrete reconvenes. No gaps: you refuse to step down the street until every fuzzed foot fills out with casements and moldings.