Enquire Within

upon Everything
R I C H AR D P OW E RS

Whether You Wish to Model a

Flower in Wax;
to Study the Rules of Etiquette;
to Serve a Relish for Breakfast or Supper;
to Plan a Dinner for a Large Party
or a Small One;
to Cure a Headache;
to Make a Will;
to Get Married;
to Bury a Relative;
Whatever You May Wish to Do, Make,
or to Enjoy,
Provided Your Desire has Relation to the
Necessities of Domestic Life,
I Hope You will not Fail to
‘Enquire Within.’
Editor’s introduction, Enquire Within upon
Everything (London: Houlston and Sons,
1856)

Say a boy is born in a northern middle class suburb of the large Midwestern
metropolis of C.
Say he is born in the year 1989.
This is the last of years. This is the first of years.
This is the year the walls come down and the webs come up.

307
 The boy learns to point and click right around the time he learns how to
talk.
From the earliest age, he is always able to cut, paste, or undo.
By eight, the boy will type with two thumbs much better than he can
write with either whole hand.
Card catalogs become obsolete by the time he reads his first book.
The first graphical web browser is outmoded before he starts second
grade.
By the age of eleven, the boy has difficulty doing fewer than four things
at once.
He never once needs to use a print reference, except as an exercise in
historical nostalgia.
His favorite childhood pet, a virtual Jack Russell terrier that he breeds and
trains and romps around with online, dies when the boy goes on a summer
vacation with his family and is away from the web for two weeks.
The boy builds an online mausoleum for the deceased digital dog, which
he forgets all about and never dismantles. The site ends up drawing condo-
lences, tearful empathy, and mocking abuse from all over the world, even after
the boy himself dies, nine decades later.
In junior high, the boy discovers music. He grows obsessed with acquir-
ing copies of the world’s fifty million musical titles. In time, he comes to carry
with him access to enough music that he could listen to a thousand pieces a
day for a century without repeating.
After puberty, the boy falls hard for information science. Between high
school and his graduation from college, the world’s information doubles. It
will double again several times before he dies, until just the indexes them-
selves outstrip the total data of his childhood.
In high school, the boy joins a club of everyone on earth who shares his
name and birthday. The club has hundreds of members and adds dozens
more a year. Soon, new members are located and added to the mailing list
immediately upon birth.
The boy doesn’t really remember his college years. But he does remember
vividly the details of those years that he spends the rest of his life retrieving
from various social networking sites.
While in college, the boy makes a nice income by adding helpful tags to
other people’s travel photos. His tags make it possible for anyone to spend
Sunny Afternoons/By Large Bodies of Water/With Friendly People/Cooking
Chicken/On the Grill for /People/Playing/Volleyball, anytime the desire strikes.

308 RICHARD POWERS

 After graduation, the boy makes a living teaching software how to tag
pictures automatically.
Later, the boy makes a living helping to create a system that can match
any person’s browsing history with exactly the product they don’t yet know
they need.
People who buy the things that the boy buys often buy the very next thing
that they are told that people like them often buy.
The boy receives an out of the blue e-mail from his wife-to-be explaining
that, while she may appear to be a perfect stranger, the data in fact prove their
lives have been following a weird synchrony that more or less dooms them to
marriage.
The boy checks the links that his wife-to-be sends. The data are indeed
incontrovertible.
Eight out of ten partner-matching sites declare the boy and his wife-to-be
to be “highly compatible.” Another site analyzes their backgrounds and reas-
sures them they can expect to remain married for at least seventeen and a
half years—almost twice the median.
The boy and his inevitable fiancée comb through thirteen million starter
homes by four hundred criteria and come up with three that fit them. They
can’t agree on which one to buy. They consult a site that generates random
numbers.
The boy has a boy of his own, whose life the proud father documents in a
variety of folksonomies. The boy’s folks and his folks’ folks and the state and
private sectors combine to index the boy’s boy’s life at the scale of about one
to five.
One day when he is thirty-eight, the boy passes on the street without
knowing it another boy who—all the data miners agree—he should have met
and become fast friends with. One century later, two biographers will inde-
pendently determine the fact of this near-meeting. Neither biographer will be
aware of the other’s existence.
In early middle age, the boy makes a fortune developing a program that
can determine the percentage of factual accuracy of any web page. Many such
programs already exist, but his is the first that graphs truth along the axis of
time.
Using this program, the boy discovers that the entire web is tending to-
ward an accuracy of about 55 percent. His estimate itself turns out to be about
70 percent correct.
The boy appears in the frame of tens of thousands of amateur videos on

ENQUIRE WITHIN UPON EVERYTHING 309

 the web, only the smallest fraction of which he’ll ever know about. The boy’s
family’s various pets will star in many dozens of web videos of their own. Most
of these will involve bathroom fixtures and treadmills.
When he no longer needs to work, the boy spends much of his time creat-
ing a three-dimensional panoramic immersion of the large Midwestern me-
tropolis of C., the city of his birth. He assembles the place as a mash-up out of
bits and pieces of mementos in the public domain.
In the model of his boyhood’s city, he can control the weather by sighing.
The boy’s own boy is bored by the model city, when the boy tries to take
his own boy there.
The boy hangs around a site that matches people up with other people
who they would have stayed in touch with from high school, had they gone to
high school together.
At his most popular, the boy has about three hundred thousand networked
friends and friends of networked friends. This is roughly a hundredth of the
lives that the boy’s personal information manager can handle, or roughly one
thousand times more people than the boy’s brain evolved to keep track of.
The boy communicates with many of these friends by automatic greeting
cards. His calendar-driven greetings will continue to be sent for years after his
death. A number of the friends who continue to receive these cards are them-
selves bots. These bot friends will nevertheless be deeply bewildered when
the cards finally stop.
Whenever he meets someone he likes, the boy sets a semantic crawler
loose to learn how many degrees of personal connection separate them. It’s
never more than two and a half, but for some reason, people keep talking
about six.
When the boy’s own boy turns twenty, he decides to drop off the face of
the grid. The boy spends much of the next two decades searching for his boy,
posting increasingly large rewards to all the appropriate virtual communities
for any useful leads.
The boy’s wife dies prematurely of accidental information poisoning.
The boy launches a massive genotyping-genealogy search, in an attempt
to contact his every living blood relative. He loses interest when no one can
tell him how far out “blood relative” actually goes.
A full scan of his genome tells him his alleles are nearly identical to a
man in Croatia sixteen years his junior. The boy flies to Zagreb to spend an
afternoon with his genetic semblance. The boy and the near-boy talk for hours

310 RICHARD POWERS

through a hand-held translator. Unfortunately, a software error generates a
misunderstanding resulting in fisticuffs.
The boy takes to finding all the pictures in creation with ochre or azure in
their pallet that involve four or more human figures in the act of Morris danc-
ing. When the boy finds them all, he beams them to a life-size frame in his
living room. The frame selects and displays the pictures in response the boy’s
own body movements. In this way, the boy dances with thousands of people,
95 percent of them long dead.
Sometime in his middle forties, the boy discovers by accident a mysteri-
ous site that has been tracking his every significant movement since child-
hood. Three years later, the boy tries to use the site to find where he left his
car keys. But he can no longer find the site.
Over the course of his lifetime, the boy is told 47 times by humans and
231 times by bots to read the stories of Borges, but somehow fails ever to do so
in the life he actually leads.
Something is missing in the boy’s life. He conducts various searches and
metasearches to find out what. The boy gets numerous answers, none of them
entirely satisfying.
When the boy turns fifty, he spends a year restoring the year 1989. He
does this through the more or less complete repository, Today in History. The
boy passes once more through the year of his birth, taking each day a day at
a time.
From March of that repeated year onwards, the boy watches the Web get
born, from out of the germ of an ingenious coding project called Enquire.
Using a primitive Trajectomizer, the boy traces Enquire all the way back to
its inspirational source: a handbook of universal Victorian knowledge called
Enquire Within upon Everything, a book whose 113th edition the inventor of the
Web once flipped through as a boy.
The boy mods up a camera that can see, analyze, and interpret nine-
teenth-century paintings better than can most twenty-first-century humans.
With the help of this machine, the boy achieves some renown in automated
art circles for his skilled, digitally assisted re-creations of Monet’s second
painting of the portal of Rouen Cathedral from 1893. The boy re-creates the
painting twice a year for two decades, preserving a remarkable document of
the subtly changing pigments of the original over that time.
With another group-modified, open-source program, the boy composes
reasonable probabilistic re-creations of all the symphonies that Mozart would

ENQUIRE WITHIN UPON EVERYTHING 311

 have composed, had Mozart lived to be the boy’s age. The boy performs these
symphonies with scores of acquaintances around the globe. None of these
players ever meet one another, and few of them can play a real musical
instrument.
The boy’s life itself, from about the age of sixty onward, will be tagged
and taxonomied by an automated program capable of trawling the boy’s every
recorded experience and determining its dominant narrative, from out of the
few hundred narratives that have been determined to exist. The story under-
writing the boy’s entire life will turn out to be: The hero goes on a journey . . .
When he reaches seventy, the boy becomes convinced that his entire life
is another person’s statistical speculation. But he’s never able to prove this
definitively.
The boy’s life can, in fact, be accidentally generated from the random
page hits produced when a real semantic ontology builder roughly the boy’s
age initiates a search while researching his own autobiography.
The boy’s life is, in fiction, just a series of data structures postulated for a
book of essays that will kick around in print for a few years before finally being
digitized on its way to the oblivion of immortality.
The sum of all the tags and metatags and subclasses of metatags used to
digitize the book that the boy’s life appears in will be seven percent greater
than the total word count of the book.
In older age, he likes to watch films spliced together out of favorite shots
from all the films he’s ever watched. The shots are selected on the fly based on
the boy’s current emotional state.
The boy is haunted his entire life by a book he read in childhood. But
nothing the boy remembers about the book will ever match anything pro-
duced by any search engine.
A year before his death, the boy is alerted by the archives that someone
140 years before him on the other side of the globe lived a life more or less
equivalent to his, albeit, of course, at a much more brutal level of technology.
The boy’s last hospital bed is fitted out with a visual browser that will al-
low him to travel anywhere, anytime, at any speed and resolution, in the guise
and temperament of anyone, with all the appropriate memories invoked and
re-experienced.
The boy dies at the age of ninety-eight, in a world of endless free creativ-
ity, insight, and gratification that has largely gotten away from him.
On his death, a handful of social networks will dynamically generate sev-

312 RICHARD POWERS

eral thousand obituaries for the boy, customized to fit the individual retriev-
ers. These obituaries will be, on average, about 55 percent accurate.
Some years later, another boy will run the boy’s entire life over again, in
silico, based on extrapolations from the semi-accurate data.
In this digitally restored life, the simulated boy will experience three scat-
tered moments when he feels the infinite odds against any existence at all.

ENQUIRE WITHIN UPON EVERYTHING 313

 To the Measures Fall
Rc a dP e
FROM The Ne Yo ke

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How much would ou have offered for the book had ou been
male?
***
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c bb P a , a W ee c ' Wha I Poe ?,
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f ca e ead ? B ba d f e e.
Choose which two books get dumped forever.

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proposed price, if necessar .
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Does the book go to Goodwill, the Salvation Arm , or the twent -
five-cent pile at our graduation lawn sale?

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Give the book a final grade:
Fail
Low Pass Pass
Pass with Honors
Highest Distinction

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Grade Elton Wentworth's public performance. Separate marks for
form, st le, and intent.

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Deal or no deal?

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ead f e e ea e Cong e ional Reco d. Y e a d
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P eCa d e ' a e. Y da e , a ed-e ed a d b d -
a c ed, c a "Read, M , ead," e e' ff Ne e a d a ead ,
e e bef e e f e b. A d , fa e We d , e ce a ed b eee a
ec e ce f a , ea Pe e a a f a db a d
d, e e de c e , "W a , a , e f e."
A fe ea a , a d da e ead f .Y ' e
e e e a , e f d ff : e e a c e f de a
ffe e e e b c f a de c ac . W e
a e d e a e ?D e e d ff e
ca ? Ma be, f e , e ec b Ed a d a a e
e fW - -W d e e a e d f e -Na a.
When should ou push Wentworth on Jane?
1. Never too earl .
2. Never too late.
 3. Never gonna happen.

Y c d e bec e e e e f e , e a a e
ec ab e e b d . T e e e a e e e e ae
e e e ee b d ec e e a c e , a
a e, e c a e c c E d.Y
ead f ea e: a d f .T e e e a ,b ,a e ,
ec e e e e e ab a e d ce e a e a .
Y ' e ca e e e be ee ead f ec a d ead f
e a e e .
M a ead a e e e . T fe ef d e a
ca eb a 'd e. A ea ca ead a e
a e ee e a ab fa ' e . A d, f e , a ab f
bea a d a a e .
T e e e acc a e fa e a ca f e . W a
ea eed a b a a f e b a a e. A
ea af e G e ada I a -c a e c , eba
a ea ' ac f ead e a ee e c e ,
c e ac e fac a To he Mea e Fall, f ,
be e ed a a a ed E e a L b a ed a fa e ea
e a a ce f We , , e e e a e , a bee a e -
ea dec e. T e e e e ca Mea e e " ce ce eb a ed,
f e B Magic Mo n ain." He c a a We ' a e
Mda d a ea c e ea a a f e a a ed e f
e ea . Ca a b c de Le , Leba , e P ab?
T e e ec e a ec a fee e e f e fe e-
ac e e e a a d a e f a ec e a dead. T e
e c e f e E e a L b a ed da ; a e We
e e e A ce Wa e . Y ' e e a c e a dece
e a be ee " c e e ed a a a e " a d " fa de a ed."
F e e e e, e e a e e e e a ab ea
e : a face, e f e. T e c ea
e e .
Who is Elton Wentworth, exactl ? Choose one.
1. The currentl most unjustl underrated author of his generation.
2. The formerl most justl overrated author of his generation.
3. The soon-to-be least unjustl rerated author of his generation.
Ne a a ed ed f d e a e.D e b a ? Y b ea
d a d a a a a e e e a d a e, e ea a ,
a c . C c ' a ed- e, , e f
e d ed d a S eb ' , a e e We e a a ce
. Y c be ed a C d ee fa e a ed H. H.
C ea eac . T e a a e ffe e b c ff fee.
T eb I f a P ce a a e a ff ce a
f f d d ea : a d acce ab ac f a ea ce a
ca e f d e ead. I be ee e ea c b ef , f
eb e We d e . T e eade - e e e e a e ,
e e d e a a e . T e e' a e da
a a a e a e f e- -e a , bef e e
dea f e-a de e .
A de a Ne Me c S a e e a To he Mea e Fall a
ea e a d 1928, e ed b We f decade , e
b ed, de e b ec , a f e dd ' a . A Ba a d
a cae f e a af e e a e f We '
e e . A ad a e de a I d a a e a e b
dd ed ca e . Sc a f a a We a
e d c f a a d fc c a b d e e a d E ce c
b a e.
Write a brief letter to no one, about what ou once thought the
book might mean.

T e Be Wa fa , a d e E E e fa . T e C d Wa e d ,
a df a e d e .Y ead a a e
a d.
Y d ' e ac e e be e e e . T e G f, f c e.
S e ab S a a a d Sa a e . S e e e e e. L f
c ed bb ed a d A e ca' ee . T e f ee da e
e f e a e ,b e e e a e .
T e 1993 fea e f ada a f To he Mea e Fall a Da e
Da -Le a d E a T . T e e' a e e ded a c a
e e ce de c e c da " a " a e S e (f ed
Sc a d), a ca a c ed a d e ce e e ea de
W - -W d (f ed a H d d d ). A e- a e bac
ed a ea , a e- c e fea e e
ead .
Rate the film:
1. Worth the price of a movie ticket.
2. Worth videotaping, when it comes on TV.
3. Worth denouncing at a dinner part .
4. Worth a class-action suit b readers ever where.

O f f -f f b da ea ea c e e a Sa a Bec
de f e ' b d a ef f eS D a e
a b . T e d ae , e ca ee ' a , e
ba d ff a a ba , a d ' e ead a a . B a e bac ,
e fa a e e. C b , c b , a e e e,
a e d , f e d'e , ee U b d a ,
ca c fa a a f Ka a a . B e e a e c e a d
b e: a a a - - e . Bac e -dead a f c a
ead . O a : a be a fe f b e be a e f e
f e f d. B 'd f e a a ea e d c d
a e a ab ea d , e b , e, a d a . T e e ,
e ea , ead e a a a e ec . Y fe
e be b e d ec e f e f dee a e. Y a e e
e e .Y ' e e f f e d .U e f
ab e ead. U e f a' a eac e b ee
da .
Y ead e, a c a e a , e ec e f ee .
T e , e b e a a a d, f e e e f
ne e hele e face f a f a : F a c Bec ' ef a be e e
a fe a fec e c a d ce a ,b e ce, a
e c; A ce W ' aa e , c e ca ' ac
de e a d de e;Te ' e ed a ed
a A ce, ead a c eff be d e a e.
T c b e be e f eb ac e a a e.
A e de a d e ee da bac . Acc a : ' a ,
' ce eb a , ' ea de , ' a a e, ' c d a d c a d
a c, ' ec ed b ede . Ho a e e ppo ed o ca e
abo he e cha ac e ? I j an ed hem all o ge a life.
 B a fe e e e d ' a e .O ef e d
a ed e f ff a e b a ed f f e af e e e d. T e ee
a e c e bac f W - -W d a ed b e
be de e a e e ce.
I' ac f e d ced b e ae a
e e b a e e ade. Y e a C+.
What percentage of our pleasure has gone out of the book forever?
Fractions permitted.

O e , e W d W de Web ea e a d .A e a
f , e a ab e, e fe , e e . I ' a c a ce
eca ee e ' ee e :c e ef e d, - f- a e,
a a ad a ed f e e . Y - e c ef
e e e, a d ' f TV e .Y e e da e
e c a e f ea - e eBa a c .V e f We ff a
e e ce, f ed d ab c e - e. Y e c e a fe ,
e f e d, eda , e e e.
I d c e a e ee a e a e e , ec d
We eade e d a e e ea e . Y
b c be a feed. S ae, ec a c a
a a ead be ee c e a da a aa e fa e .
Y ac eA a a f To he Mea e Fall d ead ,
f a f f a d a af a a e a be a f a
defec e dc e. T e d fc d ea e d We
a d a d f a ec e. Y c de a C f S e
ac e c , c ea a d f e ae ec e e b f
a e e ea f We eade , e e e e da e c e
f d .
How man aliases do ou create to rate the book?
1. Just enough to boost the book back to its rightful rating.
2. Sarah Beck would never create an alias.

T e e e ce . Te a d c -f bec e fe' d a e e.
Wa e e a.
T e a e a e ead a de c .
M e d e ed f e ea a ee b ed a e
.
 G ba a ea e f d c a ab ed b af a b
e e.
M f e a e ffe f d a ed a e .
Name the book that best captures life as now lived.

T bef e a e e, ea a a ea a e
a , e ed e e f , ee ca eac
.I' e e Sa a Bec ' , f 'e a c ec .
Y da e e eade b eb , ee c a a
a e- f- e-a ca ce ce e , bed e a d a
ab c a e fee ac a ce e c a d. Y ead a a . N
e eb , fc e c d ' b ead a ea .
B a a e a fe a e , ea c f a c ea e a ecede f
f a e.
T e, e b ab e f de f a ed eed,
e a ed a ace e a a . I ' ab a e
a a , a a b e de e C d e dc
, a b f fe a d e f ea f .
I ' ab a efa , ed f afa aa a a eb f a ef -
a d a e, a f e a e .
A f ea a e a ea . Y e bed, a f e
e d e, e de f e a a ec e ace e
e-c ac ed e, e a a e a ed c ed fe. F a e
a e c d, a d e a a .
Score the world on a scale from one to ten. Sa what ou'd like to
see happen, in the sequel.
 Mod la ion
Rc a dP e
DO

FROM EVERYTHING THAT TOSHI Yukawa could later determine, the original
file was uploaded to one of those illegal Brigadoon sites that appeared,
drew several thousand ecstatic hits from six continents, then disappeared
traceless, twelve hours later, compressing the whole arc of human history
into a single day: rough birth, fledgling colonies, prospering community,
land grabs and hoarding, shooting wars, imperial decay, and finally, much
gnashing of teeth after the inevitable collapse, which seemed to happen
faster each time through the cycle. The kind of site that spelled m ic t-u-n-
z.
Yukawa—or the artist formerly known as free4yu—was paid to spend
his days trawling such sites. When he was twenty-six, the Recording
Industry Association of America surrounded his apartment, coming after
him to the tune of $50,000 and four years in prison. He was now twenty-
eight, out on parole, and working for his old enemies. His job was to study
the latest escalations in the arms race that kept a motley army of hackers,
crackers, and slackers running roughshod over a multibillion-dollar
industry, and then to develop the next counteroffensive to try to reclaim
file-sharing no-man’s-land.
By Yukawa’s count, the average illegal file server could satisfy half a
million happy customers across the planet before being shut down. Most
looters rushed to grab this week’s tops of the pops. But even files with no
identifying description could rack up hundreds of downloads before the
well went dry. Much later, Yukawa guessed that the infected track might
have installed itself onto as few as fifty initial machines. But as his friends
in digital epidemiology were quick to point out, all it took to start a full-
fledged epidemic was a single Typhoid Mary surprise package slipping
through quarantine.

DI

A week before the music changed, Brazilian journalist Marta Mota was
grilling a strike brigade attached to the Second Infantry Division near
Baqubah in the explosive Iraqi province of Diyala. She was looking for a
story for the Folha de S. Pa lo, some new angle in the endless war that
hadn’t already been done to death. The stress the combatants had lived with
for years had broken her in three days. All she wanted was to get back to
her apartment in Tatuapé and write some harmless feature about local
rampant corruption.
On the day before she left Baqubah, she interviewed a young
American specialist who called himself Jukebox. He described, in more
detail than anyone needed, how part of his informal job description
involved rigging up one of the M1127 Stryker Reconnaissance vehicles
with powerful mounted speakers, in order to pound out morale-boosting
music for the unit during operations. “What does this music do?” Marta
asked the soldier, in her lightly accented English. The question bewildered
him, so she asked again. Jukebox cut her off, somewhere between
impatience and amusement. “What does it do! That depends on who’s
listening.” When she pressed for details, Jukebox just said, “You kno what
the hell it does.”
 At his words, Marta Mota snapped back in time to Panama, listening
as American Marines tried to flush Manuel Noriega out of his bunker with
massive waves of surround-sound Van Halen. That was two decades ago,
when she was still a fledgling journalist in her twenties, absolutely
convinced that the right story could change the conscience of the species.
Since then, in combat zones on three continents, she had written up far
more soul-crushing sounds.
She asked what music the Stryker vehicle pumped out, and Jukebox
gave a rapid-fire list: the soundtrack of the globe’s inescapable future. She
asked for a listen. He pulled out something that looked like those slender,
luxury matchboxes set out on the tables in her favorite Vila Madalena jazz
club. She inserted the ear buds and he fired up the player. She yanked the
buds out of her ear, howling in pain. Jukebox just laughed and adjusted her
volume. Even at almost mute, the music was ear-stabbing, brain-bleeding,
spine-crushing stuff.
“Can you copy some of these tracks onto my player?” she asked, and
fished her device out of her bag. She would write up the musical recon
operations later, in Frankfurt, while on her way back home.
The sight of her three-year-old player reduced Jukebox to tears of
mirth. He pretended to be unable to lift it. “What does this beast weigh, like
half a po nd!

RE

On the campus of a midwestern college dead center in one of the I-states, in

the middle of a cornfield that stretched three hundred miles in every
direction, a recently retired professor of ethnomusicology walks through a
dusting of snow across the quad to his office in the music building to begin
his permanent evacuation. Jan Steiner was supposed to have vacated back
in August, to surrender his coveted space to a newly hired junior faculty
member; it’s now mid-December, the semester over, and he’s still not
started culling.
Born in the late twenties to a German-speaking family in Prague,
Steiner came to the States just before half his extended family was rounded
up and sent east. He moved from a Czech enclave in Queens to Berkeley
and Princeton, and from there, he went on to change the way that academics
thought about concert music. He has taught at his privileged college for as
long as anyone alive, and he has occupied his office one semester longer
than the college allows.
He follows the stone path through a break in a hedge and comes
alongside the Doric temple to Harmony. For the first time in years, he
notices the names chiseled into the building’s limestone frieze: Palestrina,
Bach, Mozart, Beethoven, Schumann, Brahms, and—after decades, he still
can’t help smiling—Carl Maria von Weber. It could’ve been worse; there’s
a University of California music building that celebrates the immortality of
Rameau and Dittersdorf. His parents revered these names above any
humanitarian’s; beyond these names, they said, the rest was noise. Steiner’s
father went to his grave holding his son partly responsible for the twilight of
these gods.
Once, at the peak of the iconoclastic sixties, Jan Steiner suggested that
all these names be unceremoniously chiseled out of their limestone and
replaced by thousands of names from all places and times, names so
numerous and small they would be legible only to those willing to come up
close and look. Like all his writing from those heady days, his jest had been
deadly serious. The whole sleepy campus was outraged; he’d almost been
driven to finding work elsewhere. Now, a third of a century on, when the
college would probably leap at such a venture, Jan Steiner no longer has the
heart to propose it again.
Before Steiner and his like-minded colleagues set to work, scholars
wrote about music mostly as an aesthetic experience, masterpieces to be
celebrated in religious terms. After his generation’s flood of publications,
music took its place among all other ambiguous cultural work—a matter of
power relations, nationalism, market forces, class contestation, and identity
politics.
Jan Steiner gazes up at the Doric temple’s entablature, circa 1912, and
squints in pain. Could he still tell Palestrina from Allegri, in an aural police
lineup? When did he last listen to anything for pleasure? If this building
were to collapse tomorrow, what would he advocate, for the replacement
frieze? Just spelling out the solfege syllables of the chromatic scale
smacked of Eurocentrism.
He lets himself into the building’s side door and makes his way up to
the second story. Even on a snowy December Sunday, the practice rooms
are going full tilt. He walks past the eight cubicles of baby grands—
Pianosaurus Rex in full, eighty-eight-key sprint. The repertoire has certainly
expanded in his half a century on campus. The only fragment of sound in
the whole polychordal gauntlet he can name is the John Cage emanating
from the empty cubicle on the end.
Other voices, other rooms: he’s given his life to promote that, and the
battle is all but won. Scholarship has discovered the ninety-eight percent of
world music it hitherto suppressed. Elitism is dead; all ears are forever
opened wide. So why this pall he’s been unable to shake for these last
several months? Perhaps it’s the oppressiveness that Paul Hindemith once
attributed to Bach in his last years in Leipzig: the melancholy of
accomplishment.
 He unlocks his oaken office door and flicks on the light. The tomb is
overflowing. Every flat surface including the dark linoleum floor is piled
with precarious paper towers. Monographs bulge off the shelves. Folders
and collection boxes stack almost to the fluorescent lights. But he can still
put his finger on any desired item, in no more than a few minutes. The
problem is desire.
Now he must judge every scrap. There’s too much to save, but it would
stop his valve-repaired heart to throw any of it out. Five decades of
iconoclasm. The college library might sift through it and keep anything of
value. But who in the last five years has set foot in the college library?
He drops into his desk chair and stares again at the awful severance
gift from his retirement party. The department presented the mobile device
to him in a teary ceremony: a clock, calendar, appointment book, phone,
Web browser, and matter transporter, but mostly a bribe to get him to quit
quietly. The thing also, incidentally, plays music. Even the name sounds
like In a ion of he Bod Sna che . He should have known, half a century
ago, that music, like the most robust of weeds, would eventually come in
pod .
And this one came preloaded with every piece of music he has ever
written about, recorded, or championed. Turkish hymns and Chinese work-
camp songs, gamelan orchestras and Albanian wedding choirs, political
prisoners’ anthems and 1930s radio jingles: his entire life’s work arranged
for an instrument that everyone could learn to play without any effort. What
were his colleagues thinking, giving him his own back? What he needs is
music he hasn’t yet discovered, any sound at all that hasn’t disappeared into
the oversold, derivative, or market branded. He grabs the device, flips it on,
and blunders through the menu screens, looking for a song he might
somehow, by accident, have blessedly forgotten.
RI

On the night before the exploit launched, Mitchell Payne was on his way
from Los Angeles to the Sydney 8-Bit Chiptune Blowout. The first humans
to grow up from infancy on video games had stumbled inadvertently into
young adulthood, a condition that left them stricken with nostalgia for the
blips and bleeps of their Atari childhood. And where there was nostalgia,
there were always live concerts. The Sydney event was Mitchell’s third
such extravaganza. The chiptune phenomenon had hit North America ten
months ago, which meant it would soon erupt into mass consciousness and
be dead by this time next year. But until such demise, Mitchell Payne,
leading Futurepop composer and perhaps the greatest real-time Roland MC-
909 Groovebox performer of his generation, had found another way to help
pay off his Sarah Lawrence student loans.
The one-hundred-and-fifty-grand debt didn’t worry him so much.
What bothered him, as he hunkered down over Palmyra Atoll for the next
hour’s installment of in-flight entertainment from the Homeland Security
Channel, was the growing conviction that at twenty-three, he no longer had
his finger on the pulse. He had lost his lifelong ability to keep one measure
ahead of the next modulation. He’d recently scored only seventy-two
percent on an online musical genre test, making stupid mistakes such as
confusing acid groove, acid croft, acid techno, and acid lounge. He blamed
how busy he had been, trying to master the classic eight-bit repertoire. He
told himself that he had just overthought the test questions, but in reality,
there was no excuse. Truth was, he was slipping. Things were happening,
whole new genres crossbreeding, and he was going to be one of those
people who didn’t even hear it until the next big thing was already in its
grave and all over the cover of Rolling S one.
 But he had more pressing worries. In Sydney, he’d be up against some
classic composers, the true giants of the international chiptune movement.
Without some serious art on his part, they’d laugh him off the stage.
Fortunately, his material was beyond awesome. He pulled his laptop out of
his carry-on and fired up the emulator. He flipped through his sequences
again, checking tempi, fiddling with the voicing of chords. Then he peeked
again at the climax of his set, an inspiration he still couldn’t quite believe
he’d pulled off. He’d managed to contrapuntally combine the theme from
Nintendo’s Donke Kong with Commodore 64’s Ska e o Die, in retrograde
inversion. The sheer ecumenical beauty of the gesture once more brought
tears to his eyes.
When he looked up again, the in-flight entertainment had graduated to
that new reality show, Go fo he G een, where ten illegal alien families
compete against each other to keep from getting deported. He watched for a
few minutes, then returned to his hard drive’s 160 GB of tracks. But before
he could determine where he’d gone wrong in discriminating between epic
house, progressive house, filtered house, and French house, the stewardess
was on the sound system asking everyone to turn off and stow all portable
devices in preparation for landing in Sydney.

MI

Toshi Yukawa took too long to realize the danger of the virus. He’d seen the
chatter on the pirate music discussion boards, the reports of files that
downloaded just fine then disappeared from the receiving directory. Some
guy named Jarod would complain that his file count was broken after
syncing with his Nano. Some guy named Jason would report that the same
thing was true on his Shuffle. Another guy named Justin would confirm for
his Zen. Then another guy named Dustin would chime in, “Get a Touch,
you freaking noobs, it’s been out for weeks.”
Any file that hid itself was trouble. He ran some tests on the twelve
machines behind his router firewall: five subdirectories were compromised.
He could discover nothing else until he synchronized these machines with
portable devices. After syncing, three different handhelds—a music player,
a pocket PC, and even a cell phone—showed flaky file counts. Yukawa
realized that he was looking at something technologically impossible: the
very first backdoor infection of multiple music players.
The ingenuity of the code humbled Yukawa. The main file seemed to
figure out what kind of mobile device was attached to the host computer,
then loaded in the appropriate code. But the ingenuity got better, and worse.
On next check, Yukawa’s five suspicious desktop directories had multiplied
to twelve. The malicious payload was attaching itself to other files.
What kind of person would want to punish music traffickers? There
were the geek hacker athletes, virtuosi like Toshi had been, simply giving
their own kind of concert on their own astonishing instruments, regardless
of the effect on the audience. There were always the terrorists, of course.
Once you hated freedom, it was just a matter of time before you hated two-
part harmony. But when he saw how this new virus could spread, Toshi
Yukawa wondered if he wasn’t being set up. Maybe some of his colleagues
at the Recording Industry Association had developed the ultimate
counterstrike for a world where two hundred million songs a day were sold,
and even more were borrowed. And maybe his colleagues had simply
neglected to tell him about the new weapon.
Some days he wasn’t even sure why the RIAA had hired him. So much
music could be had by so many for so little that Toshi should have long ago
been driven into honest work, say eclectic format disc-jockeying for
Starbucks. There was pay what you want and genetic taste matching and
music by statistical referral. Customers who liked Radiohead also listened
to Slipknot. If you like Slipknot, you may also like the Bulgarian Women’s
Chorus. The vendors had your demographic, and would feed it to you in
unlimited ninety-nine-cent doses or even free squirts that vanished after
three listens. He owed his job to saltwater syndrome. Drinking made you
thirsty. Buffets bred hunger.
And some kind of strange musical hunger had bred this virus.
Whoever had made the payload had made something beautiful. Yukawa had
no other word for it, and the way the thing worked scared the hell out of
him. Three days into his hunt, he discovered that four other computers
behind his firewall were now infected. These boxes had gone nowhere near
an illegal download site. The virus had somehow uploaded itself back up to
shared music service software, and was spreading itself through automatic
synchronization onto innocent bystanders.
A sick and brilliant mind: that’s what Toshi Yukawa was fighting. He
felt a wave of disgust for anyone who couldn’t put such gifts to better use.
Then he remembered himself, just four years ago: a collector so obsessed
with liberating music that he’d all but stopped listening to it.

FA

Marta Mota woke up in her economy hotel on the Schönstraße near the
Frankfurt Hauptbahnhof with a tune in her head. Not a tune, exactly: more
like a motif. She couldn’t altogether sing it, but she couldn’t shake it, either.
It lasted through her hot shower—a marvelous indulgence, after Iraq.
It persisted through the heavy black breads and sausages of German
breakfast. It was still there as she handled her e-mail and filed another story
with Folha on the Diyala campaign. She had contracted what the Germans
called an Uh m, what Brazilian Portuguese called chicle e de o ido: a
gum tune stuck in her relentlessly chewing brain.
As earworms went, this one wasn’t bad. She’d spent an hour yesterday
listening to the testosterone storms that the American soldier had copied for
her. She’d needed two hours of Django Reinhardt and Eliane Elias to drive
that throbbing from her mind. What she hummed now, she felt sure, was
nothing she’d heard in the last five days.
She Skyped her mate Andre at the appointed hour. He was consulting,
in Bahrain. The world was insane, and far too mobile for its own well-
being. She only thanked God for dispensing Voice Over Internet just in
time.
Andre asked about Iraq. There was nothing to say. Everyone knew
already, and no one could help. She told him about the earworm. Andre
laughed. “Oh yes. I had that for three months once. Kylie Minogue. I
thought I was going to have to check into a hospital. You see? The
Americans will get us all, one way or the other.”
She told him she thought Kylie Minogue was Australian.
“Alabama, Arizona, Australia: it’s all a World Bank thing, right?”
He asked how the tune went. She tried to describe it. Words were as
effective at holding music as smoke was at holding water.
“Sing it,” he commanded.
She swore colorfully. “Sing it! Here? In public?”
The man seemed to do nothing but laugh. Wasn’t there grimness
enough, out in Bahrain?
“The Internet is not public,” he told her. “Don’t you know that?
Everything you do on the Internet instantly disappears.”
She tried to sing a few notes, but it was hopeless. The earworm wasn’t
even a motif. It was more a harmony, a sequence of magical chords that
receded when she focused on them.
“Where do you think you heard it?”
She had no clue.
“I read an article about why this happens, but I can’t remember it.
Would you like the garbled version?”
She said yes. That was the beauty of free communication. They could
be as silly as if they were lying next to each other in bed. Andre recounted
his jumbled article, something about a cognitive itch, some combination of
simplicity and surprise, the auditory cortex singing to itself. He thought he
remembered something about the most common stuck tunes coming from
the first fifteen years of a person’s life.
“You need an eraser tune,” he told her. “A good eraser tune is as sticky
as the original, and they cancel each other out. Here’s the one that worked
for me.” And into his tinny laptop computer microphone in Bahrain, in a
frail but pretty baritone she hadn’t heard for way too long, he sang a few
notes that rematerialized in her Frankfurt hotel as the theme song from
Mi ion Impo ible.
It didn’t help, and she went to bed that night with the phantom chords
taunting her, just out of reach.

FI

Jan Steiner sits in his windowless office, listening to his life’s work. It isn’t
bad, as life’s work goes. But all these sounds have become so achingly
predictable. He can’t listen to anything for more than thirty seconds without
hearing political agendas. Somebody preserving their social privileges.
Somebody else subverting them. Groups of people bonding together with
branded tunes that assert their superiority over everyone with different
melodies.
 He has recorded hundreds of hours of what people now call “world
music,” and written about thousands more. He always paid the performers
out of his modest grant money and gave them any rare recording profits.
But he has never taken out a single copyright. Music belonged to everyone
alive, or to no one. Every year, in his Introduction to Music lecture, he told
his freshmen the story about how the Vatican tried to keep Allegri’s
Mi e e e a trade secret, refusing even to show the score, but insisting that,
for the full mystic aura of the piece, one had to come to Rome and pay top
dollar. And the protectionism worked until the fourteen-year-old Mozart, in
Rome for a concert, transcribed it perfectly from memory, freeing it for
performance everywhere. And every year, Jan Steiner got his freshmen
cheering the original bootlegger.
The idea was simple: put your song out in the world, free of all
motives, and see what other people do with it. When his scandalized
colleagues asked how musicians were supposed to make a living, he
pointed out that musicians in hundreds of countries had eked out a living for
millennia without benefit of copyright. He said that most music should be
amateur, or served up like weekly cantatas knocked out for the Glory of
God alone.
He sits on his green padded office chair, tipped back on the cracked
linoleum, under the humming fluorescent lights, listening. He listens to a
traditional Azerbaijani mourning song, as personal a lament as has ever
been put into tones. He found it gut-wrenching when he first recorded it,
two decades back. Now all he can hear is the globally released feature film
from a year ago that used the song as its novel theme music. The movie
seemed to be mostly about potential residuals and the volatile off-screen
escapades of its two stars. The soundtrack made more money in six months
than any Azerbaijani musician had made in a lifetime, and the performers
on his track—the one that had brought the haunted melody to North
America—had seen not a penny.
Just to further torture himself, he switches to his other great recent hit:
an ecstatic Ghanaian instrumental performed entirely on hubcaps and taxi
horns that only six months before had been turned into an exultant
commercial for global financial services. This one also made a mint as a
cell phone ring tone.
He has no one to blame for these abuses but himself. All music was
theft, he has maintained over a lifetime of scholarly writing, since long
before sampling even had a name. Europe used to call it cantus firmus.
Renaissance magpies used to dress up millennium-old Gregorian Psalmodic
chants in bright polyphony. Whole musical systems—Persian dastgāhs and
Indian ragas—knew nothing about ownership and consisted entirely of
brilliant improvisations on preexisting themes. The best songs, the ones that
God wanted, were the ones that someone else transposed and sang back to
you, from another country, in a distant key. But God hadn’t anticipated
global financial services jingles.
Back in the 1970s Steiner had predicted that the rise of computing
would save music from death by commodity. Armed with amazing new
ways to write, arrange, record, and perform, everyone alive would become a
composer and add to the world’s ongoing song. Well, his prediction had
come true. More music of more variety was being produced by more people
than any ethnomusicologist would ever be able to name again. His own
illiterate grandson was a professional digital musician, and Jan Steiner finds
the boy’s every measure unbearably predictable.
He works his way through the towering stacks of offprints, pitching
mercilessly. While he works, he leaves the player on shuffle, letting it select
his life’s tracks at random. By the time he leaves, hours later, he has thrown
out two large garbage bins, and it’s made no visible dent on the office. He
stashes the player in his coat pocket as he leaves the building and heads
back toward the snowy quad. Outside, it’s night, and silent, the only track
he can bear.
But as he rounds the corner of the Georgian psychology building, a
tune comes back to him. Come back isn’t quite right, since this one is
nothing he’s listened to this evening. He can’t quite say whether he’s ever
heard it before, or even what scale or mode or key it wants to be in. As far
as he can tell, this track—if it is a ack—has gotten away safely, innocent,
never repackaged, let alone heard by anyone.

SOL

In Sydney, Mitchell Payne felt a song coming on. It had banged around his
head since deplaning. This was dangerous: when melodies came to him out
of the blue, it usually meant he was ripping someone off. He wasn’t alone.
There were only so many notes—twelve, to be precise—and they could be
combined in only so many sensible ways. Someday soon, a garage band out
in Cos Cob was going to string together the last viable melody, and music
would be pure plagiarism and mash-ups, from then on.
The industry was already pretty much there anyway. Covers and
remakes, quotations and allusions, homage, sampling, and down and dirty
five-fingered discounts. A Korean kid covering a Taiwanese kid whose
arrangement imitated the video game P mp I Up whose soundtrack
mimicked an old Brian Eno performance uploads an electrifying guitar
video of Pachelbel’s Canon in D, already the most hacked-at piece of the
last three hundred years, and immediately, people from Panama to
Turkmenistan post hundreds of shot-perfect recreations, faithful down to
every detail of tempo and ornament .
 The melody nibbling at Mitchell’s brain as he set up his loopers,
shifters, sequencers, and MPCs on the stage of the small Haymarket theater
might have come from anywhere. It was at once oddly familiar and deeply
strange. He cursed the snippet, even as it haunted him. He couldn’t afford
Stuck Tune Syndrome just before performing. He had to settle into the
chiptune groove, that quantized trance that the children of Mario demanded.
But by the time he finished testing the gear, Mitchell was flipping. He
stood inside the circle of banked electronics, his Mission Control of
waveform generators, wanting to pull the plug on everything and crawl off
to a Buddhist monastery until the monster tune scratching at his brain either
came forward and said what it wanted from him or left him for dead.
While the house filled, Mitchell sat backstage in the green room
answering questions from an editor of New South Wales’s most prestigious
online chiptune zine. What was the most influential mix he’d ever listened
to? What would be the most important developments in the eight-bit scene
over the next few weeks? If he could put only one video game soundtrack
into an interplanetary spacecraft, which would it be? He could barely hear
the questions over the stunning harmonic tension in his head. The stage
manager had to call him twice before he heard.
Nerves almost doubled him over as he jogged out of the wings in front
of a restive crowd already clapping in frenzied, synchronized downbeats.
He had that sick flash of doubt: Wh do I p m elf h o gh hi ? I co ld
e i e o ome hing afe, i e a m ic blog o ome hing. But as soon as he
got the backing tracks looping, the MSX emulator bumping, and his Amiga
kicking out the MIDI jambs to the principal theme from the old blockbuster
game Al e na e Reali , he remembered just what Face-to-Face was all
about, and why nothing would ever replace live performance.

SI
By the time Toshi Yukawa realized he needed help from coders beyond
himself, it was too late. He’d taken too long to isolate the virus and even
longer to break-point and trace the logic, trying to determine exactly what
the multiple payloads meant to do to the hundreds of thousands, perhaps
even millions of music players already infected. The code was so
idiosyncratic and original that Toshi couldn’t understand it, even as it stared
him in the face. The weapon was cryptic, evanescent, awful, awesome,
protean, full of fearsome intelligence and unfathomable routines: a true
work of art. He isolated a subroutine devoted to hijacking the player and
beaming out music in subaudible frequencies. Yukawa didn’t get it: why
spend such incredible intellectual effort to take over millions of devices,
just to play a tune no one could hear? That had to be just a private
amusement, a warm-up act for the headline show. Yukawa dug deeper,
bracing for the real mayhem. A person who could write such code could
sow destruction on an operatic scale.
Then Toshi stumbled onto a portion of the initializer that made his
blood run cold. It checked the host’s time zone and adjusted another routine
that made continuous calls to the music player’s clock. A timed detonator:
the code was going to launch a synchronized event to go off at a single
moment across all the world’s time zones. But what event? The code was
inscrutable assembly language. Deleting songs at random? Scrambling the
firmware or flash memory?
Yukawa logged in to the best professional discussion board for
tracking the thousands of viruses, worms, Trojans, and assorted malicious
code in the wild. There it was: growing chatter about something already
code-named co n e poin . Yukawa posted his discoveries, and four hours
later, one of the big boys at Norton found the trigger date for Yukawa’s
detonator routine. A day obvious after the fact: co n e poin was set to
premiere on December 21, the winter solstice. The day after tomorrow.
Time had run out. In two days, many, many people were going to be
walking around earbudless, their billions of dollars’ worth of portable
media centers bricked. Personalized music would never be safe again.
People would be thrown back on singing to each other.
A South American journalist reporting on the eternal hackers’ arms
race had once asked Yukawa what would happen if the white hats lost. He’d
laughed her off, but here it was. Toshi sat back in his Aeron chair, gazed out
his window down the glens that hid the unsuspecting venture capitalists
along Sand Hill Road, and gave up. Then he did what any artist would,
faced with imminent destruction: he turned back to study the beauties of the
inscrutable score. He worked on without point, and all the while,
unconsciously, under his breath, in the key of hopeless and exhilarating
work, he hummed.

LA

São Paulo did not help Marta Mota. In fact, the relative safety of home only
worsened her earworm. It got so bad she had to take a few days’ leave from
Folha. Andre actually suggested she get help. Only the fact that several
friends were also suffering from a barely audible chicle e de o ido running
through their minds kept her from losing hers.
More confirmation awaited her online. She turned up hundreds of
posts, each one plagued by unsingable music. A reporter to the end, she
traced the blind leads. She found herself in ancient backwaters, Krishna’s
healing flute, Ling Lun’s discovery of the foundation tone, Orpheus raising
the dead and animating stones, the Pythagoreans with their vibrations the
length of a planetary orbit, the secret music that powered the building of the
Pyramids, the horns that felled Jericho, the drumming dance of Ame no
Uzume, the rain goddess, luring the sun goddess, Amaterasu Omikami,
from out of hiding in the rock cave of heaven. She read about African
maloya, outlawed because of its power to stir revolution. She found a
fantastic article by an old Czech-American musicologist tracing the myth of
sublime sound, from Ulysses, tied to the mast to hear the Sirens, through
Sufi mystics, Cædmon’s angel-dictated hymn, and on into songs on all
continents that yearned for the lost chord. God’s own court composer
seemed to be baiting her for a libretto.
On the solstice, Andre was consulting in Kamchatka. Marta worked
late, too wired to sleep. She drew a hot bath, trying to calm down. Her
player was docked in the living room, whispering soft, late Vinicius de
Moraes, one of the few human-made things capable of temporarily curing
her of the human-made world. Right at a key change, the music stopped,
plunging her into the night’s silence. Then another tune began, one that, in
four measures, lifted her bodily out of the water. She sprang from the tub
and dashed into the living room, nude and dripping. By the time she
reached the player, the harmonies were done.
She fiddled with the interface in a naked daze, but the tune had erased
its tracks. Whatever had visited was gone faster than it came. She shut her
eyes and tried to take down that sublime dictation before it faded, but could
make out only vague hope, vaguer reassurance. What was left of the tune
said, Keep deep do n; o ll hea me again omeda . She stood on the
soaking carpet, midway between bitter and elated. The song had ended. But
the melody lingered on.

LI
Mitchell Payne was deep into a smoking rendition of The La Ninja that
was burning down the house when the music died. The backing track piped
out by his 160 GB classic simply quit. The iPod brought down the master
sequencer, which in turn crashed the Roland, a chain reaction that pretty
much left Mitchell noodling away clueless on a couple of MIDI controllers
in the empty air. The silence lasted no longer than it takes to change a track,
an onstage eternity.
His first thought was that his old partner in crime, free4yu, had come
back to wreak electronic revenge on Mitchell for walking away scot-free
when their trading concession got rounded up by the federales. But before
Mitchell had the presence of mind to power anything down, the iPod started
up again.
The thumping audience fell silent and listened. The harmonies passed
through a series of changes, each a strangely familiar surprise. Afterward,
no two people described the sequence the same way. It was the weaving
antiphony of a dream, the tune your immigrant nanny made you laugh with,
the unsuspecting needle dropping onto a virgin Sg . Peppe , a call to desert
prayer, an archaic fauxbourdon, that tape you tried to make with your high
school garage band, the last four measures of something amazing on the
radio that you could never subsequently identify, highland temple bells, an
evening sing-along, the keys you pressed chasing after your grandmother’s
player piano, a garbled shortwave “Happy Birthday” from the other side of
the planet, a first slow dance, a hymn from back when you were just setting
out on the game of consciousness, all resonance, sphinxlike, aching with
possibility, a little incandescent phrase transporting all listeners back into
timeless time.
That’s how the world described it the next day, those who were lucky
enough not to rip their buds out of their ears or fiddle with their rebellious
players. The nations’ blogs resounded with endless variations on one simple
theme: OMG—did o hea ha ?
The world on that day had half a billion music-capable mobile devices.
If a tenth of those were infected and turned on when the tune got loose, then
more people heard the ghost tune at the same time than were alive when
music was first recorded into the Samaveda. And here it was again, after an
eternity away: a tune that sold nothing, that had no agenda, that required no
identity or allegiance, that was not disposable background product, that
came and went for no reason, brief as thunder on a summer night.
For his part, Mitchell heard the song he’d been hallucinating for the
last two days. And in that instant before the crowd broke out into stunned
applause, Mitchell Payne thought, Thi i i —a o all ne gen e. The first
person to transcribe the thing was going to make a fortune. Bo , o cke ,
bo !

TI

The quad is dark and empty, the snow gathering. Flakes pour out of the
woolen air. The sky above him is a lambent orange, scattering the lights of
the town. Jan Steiner takes the long diagonal path toward the neoclassical
English building. The phantom tune still nags at him. The harmonies take
an amazing turn, he calls out in surprise, his foot slips on the icy walk, and
he slams to the pavement. Hot current shoots through his brain. Pain such as
he has never felt tears up the fuse of his spine and he blacks out.
When he comes to, he feels nothing. Some part of him understands:
shock. He tries to stand but can’t. His right thigh comes through his hip in a
way that it shouldn’t. The front part of his pelvis is as powdered as the
snow.
 He lies on his back, paralyzed, looking up into the rust of night. He
calls out, but his voice doesn’t carry much beyond the globe of his body’s
warmth. He always was a feeble little tenor, even in the prime of life. Those
who can’t sing, teach.
He rolls his head to the left, the empty Colonial anthropology building.
He rolls to the right, the abandoned Brutalist auditorium. He can’t see past
his body to the music building, with the seven names on its confident
pediment. Winter’s first night. The college is closed, evacuated for the
holidays. He’ll lie here until morning, undiscovered. The temperature is
falling and the pain starts a vast, slow crescendo. He can’t imagine how the
piece will end.
He’s amazed that this fate has been lying in wait his entire life. He
looks up into snowy emptiness, recalling the words of the stunned Mozart,
when the natives in provincial Leipzig forced him to listen to their old
Capellmeister’s archaic motet they’d kept alive like some forgotten relic:
Wha i hi ? He e a la i ome hing one can lea n f om.
Then he remembers: invasion of the pod phone players. By a mighty
effort of will, he manages to crane his shattered right hand around into his
coat pocket. He shovels the device out onto the pavement in little Lego
pieces. No saving call. Not even a diverting tune while waiting to go numb.
He inserts the buds anyway, to keep the warmth from leaking out his
ears. World’s smallest earmuffs. Snow is falling on the wool of his coat and
his cotton cap. Snow falling on concrete, on frozen earth, freezing skin,
snow on snow. In the hush, his ears sharpen. Through the dead buds, he
hears the crushed device whisper a vast and silent fantasia: the wired world
recovering a theme it long ago misplaced.
He lies still in the ravishing dark, listening to a need as big as lust or
hunger, an urge with no reason on earth ever to have evolved. The only
f ndamen al h man pleas re i h no s r i al al e ha soe er: M sic .

A , cf a e
a ca e be e.

A fe meas res more, and he cold re rns him o Do.

 For a retired
engineer on the
Voyager space program,
the past may be
more alive than the
present, but no one
can save him
from oblivion

By Richard Powers
77

Illustration by Gérard DuBois

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CREDITS: PHOTOGRAPHY BY: P. 5 AP/WIDE WORLD,
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LECTS/COURTESY OF EVERETT COLLECTION, THE
KOBAL COLLECTION; P. 75 COURTESY OF EVERETT
COLLECTION, LOCAL PRODUCTIONS/ONE DOLLAR PRO-
DUCTION/THE KOBAL COLLECTION; P. 80 AP/WIDE
WORLD (2); P. 81 AP/WIDE WORLD (4); P. 82 EVERETT
COLLECTION, HARLOW IN HOLLYWOOD BY DARRELL
ROONEY AND MARK A. VIEIRA, PUBLISHED BY ANGEL
CITY PRESS; P. 83 EVERETT COLLECTION; P. 84 CORBIS,
EVERETT COLLECTION, GETTY IMAGES, HARLOW IN
HOLLYWOOD BY DARRELL ROONEY AND MARK A.
VIEIRA, PUBLISHED BY ANGEL CITY PRESS (3); P. 86
FRANK BEZ, GHISLAIN DUSSART, EDWARD HESSER,
ARTHUR-JAMES, FRANK SCHALLWIG; P. 87 HAL ADAMS,
JEFF COHEN, SEPY DOBRONYI/© M. PALLAS, R. SEAVER,
1956, TOM KELLEY, PHOTOFEST; P. 88 FRANK BEZ,
PATRICK DEMARCHELIER, PHOTOFEST (2), POMPEO
POSAR; P. 89 EVERETT COLLECTION, JOHN DEREK,
RICHARD FEGLEY, ARNY FREYTAG, KEN MARCUS, PHO-
TOFEST; P. 90 MARIO CASILLI, DAVIS FACTOR, ROBERT
SCOTT HOOPER, PHOTOFEST, STEPHEN WAYDA (2); P.
91 JOHN DEREK, RICHARD FEGLEY, TERRY O’NEIL,
PHOTOFEST; P. 92 MARIO CASILLI, COLLECTION OF
ERWIN FLACKS, JOHN DEREK, RICHARD FEGLEY, JOE
HYAMS, PHOTOFEST; P. 93 DAVID BAILEY, WILLIAM
HAWKES, DWIGHT HOOKER, PHOTOFEST, ALEXAS
URBA, STEPHEN WAYDA; P. 96 AP/WIDE WORLD, COUR-
TESY OF ESTHER LIN/STRIKEFORCE, COURTESY OF
STRIKEFORCE; P. 97 GETTY IMAGES (6); P. 122 GETTY
IMAGES (3); P. 123 GETTY IMAGES (4); P. 131 COURTESY
OF PORSCHE; P. 133 MARKHAM STARR; P. 140 NBC; P.
185 COMEDY CENTRAL/VINCE BUCCI/PICTUREGROUP,
EMMA/JME PHOTO, JASON LAVERIS/FILMMAGIC.COM,
STEPHEN WAYDA; P. 186 COURTESY OF SARAH ELIZA-
BETH, COURTESY OF SPI ENTERTAINMENT (2), ARNY
FREYTAG (2), GETTY IMAGES, B. JOHNSON/O’NEILL’S,
STEPHEN WAYDA, GEORGE WEINSTEIN; P. 189 AP/WIDE
WORLD (2), GETTY IMAGES; P. 190 AP/WIDE WORLD,
CORBIS (2); P. 191 AP/WIDE WORLD; P. 194 AP/WIDE
WORLD, MATTHIAS CLAMER, © DERMOT CLEARY, DAVID
SHANKBONE, STEPHEN WAYDA. P. 124 HOW TO BUILD
A TIME MACHINE © 2011 BY BRIAN CLEGG; P. 136 FROM
THAT IS ALL BY JOHN HODGMAN. PUBLISHED BY AR-
RANGEMENT WITH DUTTON, A MEMBER OF PENGUIN
GROUP (USA), INC. COPYRIGHT © JOHN HODGMAN,
2011. P. 24 HAIR AND MAKEUP BY NICOLE CAP FOR
FORD ARTISTS; P. 25 HAIR AND MAKEUP BY NICOLE
CAP FOR FORD ARTISTS; PP. 100–109 HAIR AND MAKE-
UP BY SARA CRANHAM, PRODUCED BY STEPHANIE
MORRIS, SET DESIGN BY LIZ STEWART, WARDROBE
STYLING BY KATIE MACO AND LINDSEY STEEDE; P. 100
BOOTS BY CORRAL BOOTS, BOOTS BY JUSTIN BOOTS,
TOP BY GUESS (2); P. 101 BOOTS BY ZODIAC USA; P. 104
PANTIES BY IN BLOOM BY JONQUIL; PP. 112–115
GROOMING BY AMY KOMOROWSKI FOR AXE/CELESTINE
AGENCY.COM; PP. 116–118 HAIR BY JEN ATKIN FOR THE
WALL GROUP, MAKEUP BY JAMIE GREENBERG FOR
THE WALL GROUP, PROP STYLING BY JOHN GEARY
FOR CELESTINE AGENCY, WARDROBE STYLING BY
TARA SWENNEN FOR THE WALL GROUP; PP. 140–147
MAKEUP BY TAMARA OGDEN, PRODUCED BY PATTY
B E A U D E T - F R A N C È S , WA R D R O B E S T Y L I N G B Y
JOSHUA SETH FOR OPUS BEAUTY; P. 140 HAIR BY
FRANKIE PAYNE FOR OPUS BEAUTY; P. 141 HAIR BY
SEAN JAMES FOR OPUS BEAUTY; P. 142 HAIR BY
FRANKIE PAYNE FOR OPUS BEAUTY, HAIR BY SEAN
JAMES FOR OPUS BEAUTY; P. 143 HAIR BY FRANKIE
PAYNE FOR OPUS BEAUTY; PP. 144–147 HAIR BY
SEAN JAMES FOR OPUS BEAUTY. COVER: MODEL:
LEEANN TWEEDEN, PHOTOGRAPHER: ODETTE
SUGERMAN, HAIR: FRANKIE PAYNE FOR BUMBLE &
BUMBLE AT OPUS BEAUTY, MAKEUP: TAMARA OGDEN,
PRODUCER: PATTY BEAUDET-FRANCÈS, PROP
STYLIST: JOHN GEARY FOR CELESTINE, WARDROBE
STYLIST: JOSHUA SETH FOR OPUS BEAUTY.
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 ESQUIRE FICTION

ESCAPES
JULY 1, 1999 | RICHARD POWERS

"YOU NEED SOMETHING?"

The guard who looks like a Shiite Cronkite asks so gently, it's almost
possible to imagine that today he means it. You can't catch his eye. But
perhaps a blindfolded head-swing in his direction will still haunt him
with its husk of a human glance.

"Walter," you say. Slower now, with all the gravity of a dying animal:
"Walter. What's your real name?"

You hear him shrug. The currents of compressed air coming off his
undulating shoulders form in your ears, as clear as words. You put your
hands out in front of you, on your wasting thighs, palms up.

"Tell me," you beg. "I know Ali's. Walter. Listen. I can't hurt you."

You hear him, this peasant driven off the desiccated land, here at the
front only for that expedited ticket to heaven given to anyone who dies
for the cause. You hear him put his head down. Astonishing. Impossible.
Yet still, your attenuated ears hear it.

Softly, he confesses. Somewhere in your childhood's forgotten Koran, in

the watered-down hadith that you ingested with your mother's milk, you
recall a massive prohibition against lying. "Sayid," he says. Soft as his
shoulders' shrug. Ashamed.
You hug him across the infinite gap between you. "Sayid what? What is
your family name?"

"No, no," he says, on the edge of anger. Too much to ask. "Thank you. Do
not worry."

"Sayid. Sayid. I need you to help me. I need some books."

The air around you brightens. He breathes out a wave of relief. Books:
That's all. "Sure. I tell Chief. Tomorrow."

"Sayid. Listen to me. If I don't get books, I'll die. Do you understand?"

"Sure. I understand. You will die."

"Sayid. This is real. If I don't get books, I will go crazy."

"Sure. I know. No problem."

If you've learned nothing else in this nine-month gestation, you've

learned that No problem, in Sayidian Arabic, means Big problem.

No books appear the next day. Or the day after that. But this game is
long; each day longer than you've dared to imagine.

You ride him. "Sayid. Yesterday is gone. Today is gone. Tomorrow is

history. Still no books."

He snickers at your idiocy. "I understand. Chief say books coming."

"Tell Chief, Madness coming. I will die, Sayid. I will die, and your men
will have nothing to gain from me. All of this will be a total waste. Worse
than a waste. America will be very angry."
"Good." He snarls deep in his throat, the first step of spitting. The size of
your error becomes clear. "Good. We like America angry. America make
us angry."

America, of course, won't be even vaguely put out. America won't even
notice. America has done nothing for you for three quarters of a year:
nine months that you've ticked off in seven-minute intervals. Your death
would be one less distraction nagging at America's busy conscience. It
has taken a solitary locked room--without resources, stripped of any
touchstone but yourself--to commence your political education.

In the absence of books, you make your own. You resurrect your all-time
favorites. The details come in gross, gray, grainy chunks. The drill
perfects itself. You lie back against the wall, as far from the radiator as
the links of chain allow. Bone-cold all winter, the machinery has come
alive, now eager to add its joules to a summer inferno.

You close your eyes and will yourself into another climate. The volume
materializes in your hands--the weight, the heft, the binding's resistance.
You turn the treasure over and over, resolving the details down to the
publisher's insignia on the spine. You inspect the cover illustration,
without opening your eyes. You read the blurbs on the back, the
synopsis, the ISBN number, all the precious trail marks you once wasted
so profligately when they were yours to waste.

The pages of front matter pass one at a time under your sentry fingers.
Hours may dissolve, just playing with the stiffness of the paper, before
you get to the actual first sentence. ​Lord Jim,​ the forty-four-point
Garamond Bold announces to the hushed house of one. And again, in
thirty-six point, on the next wondrously wasted page. Or ​Great
Expectations.​ Every menu name becomes a whole banquet where you
might dine out eternally for free.
Then the opening sentences, the fresh start of all things possible.
Modestly boundless, it enters bowing, halfway down that first right-hand
page. You lie back against your paradise wall, your pillow. You make
yourself a passive instrument, a séance medium for these voices from
beyond the grave. Politics have taught you how to read, how to wait
motionless, without hope. To wait for some spirit that is not yours to
come fill you.

My name being Philip. No: My father's name being Pirrip. I called myself
Pip. Something about a graveyard, five little stones as visible as the door
of your cell, the markers of brothers who gave up on making a living
exceedingly early in that universal struggle. Every turn, every further
constriction in the plot--yours or the author's--makes it easier to keep to
the general contour. Where you cannot recall a scene, you invent one.

You know that underclass orphan, making his way in an indifferent

world. He was the first present you ever gave her. A fake heritage
hardback edition that actually sold for $12.95 in the cutout-classics bin at
both of the mall bookstore chains. Gave it to her for her birthday, half a
year after you started going out. Back in that year when you were still
trying to feed her all your favorites, to hand over all your secret treasures
to her, one by one. Love me, love my childhood. Love my books. Maybe
you meant an element of remedy in the gift. It shocked you when she told
you she'd never read it.

She tore at the wrapping, excited. But she cried when she saw the
contents. The price, you thought at first. Gwen knew prices, even of
things she never bought. You must have come in a level or two below
where she'd expected. Hurt, you bit back. Said that you'd make sure to
get something more expensive next time.

But no. That wasn't it, she sobbed. A book was not a personal gift. People
gave books to colleagues, to acquaintances, not to their intimate
partners. You might have given this to anyone. It didn't say ​you and me.
It didn't say, ​You are the only person in the world I could have given
this to.

You tried to explain. It did say ​you. I​ t did say ​me. ​This was a story that
you'd read four times over the course of your life, one that had meant
something different each time you'd read it. It did say ​you and me.​ It
said you wanted her to know the things that you knew. You couldn't have
given it to anyone else, you lied. She didn't need to know who else you
once tried to give that story to.

Appeased a little, she flipped through, smiling bravely at the opening

pages for your benefit. She patted the book. Said, ​Thank you so much. I'll
let you know what I think.​ Slid it carefully into the appropriate place on
her shelves, then came and dragged you off to her bed, where she
ravished you, abdomen slapping against abdomen in such fury that you
lost yourself in her punishing metronome, feeling in that impact the
force of the correction that she needed from you.

Later, you discovered in her refrigerator a fresh pot pipe carved out of a
Golden Delicious apple, lined with a little tinfoil. A little private birthday
celebration, prior to your arrival, that she'd felt no need to tell you of.
Her tears, forgiveness, ecstasy, and fury all artificially enhanced, with
you, as usual, the last person to dope things out.

The book stayed on her shelf for the next six years. To all evidence, she
never touched it again except when she dusted. Never tried to read
another word, straight, high, or otherwise.

The fruit bongs appeared and rotted without fixed season. Front-runner
in a suite of little secrets, the extent of which you could only guess. She
never much tried to hide them, but neither did she ever bother to
announce their appearances. You offered to smoke with her some
weekend evening, when the two of you weren't doing anything the next
day. ​Tai-Jan!​ Gwen said, in her favorite imitation of your mother, who
exercised some fascination on her you never wholly understood. ​My little
pragmatic moralist wants to get stoned with me?

It seemed worth not letting her get to you. Worth waiting her out. Worth
trying to be the safety net, the model, the pillar of trust that she'd never
before received. But there was something forbidden, too, more than a
little prurient, in the notion of getting lit with this woman, of tumbling
into a web of shared sensation, all gatekeepers down. Getting inside that
cloud of private lust you sometimes glimpsed through the frosted-glass
window of her skin.

WHAT'S YOUR FAVORITE BOOK?​you ask her, your brain pinging

down a chain of associations the night you do at last light up together.
The melding that you'd hoped for comes off, at best, as a self-conscious
swap of concessions.

She stares at you too long for it to mean confusion. It takes you about
three lifetimes to realize she's mocking you. Her barricades and
burning-oil look: What planet did you say you're from? Favorite trick to
knock you back on your heels. Jockeying, even now, while the two of you
share this brief vacation from yourselves.

Why do you always have to rank everything? Biggest? Best? Most?

Boys: You'll really have to explain the concept to me one of these days.

You feel the flash of anger, the so-familiar one, the anger that you can't
voice without confirming her. ​Don't need you to rank them. Just want to
know the name of one that moved you. One that you loved.
You asked me to tell you my favorite. My absolute fave rave. The one
that vanquishes all the other comers. No secrets, now. Come on, name
names.

Forget it. I'm sorry I brought it up.

Oh. My little Tai-Jan's feelings are hurt. Bad girlfriend.​ Her right hand
administers a slap to her left. ​Nasty, aggressive girlfriend. Does not
work and play well with others.

Yes, i​ t so often crossed your mind to say. ​Yes. What you just said.

You don't say that. You say something different. This time, as always.
Look. It seemed legitimate to try to share in something that delighted
you.

Why can't you just let delight come up in its own good time? Why do
you have to engineer everything all the time? Control the whole
exchange?

And in the next breath, in her hemp-induced fog, she suggests that she
straddle you while you sit on the reclining chair in the front window,
lights out, her favorite position, a secret vantage from which she can look
out on all the cars and pedestrians, none of whom imagine what takes
place inside the darkened warren that they pass by.

How desired and desolate she always made you feel--ever, ever--each of
those gifts wrapped in the other's inimical predicate. She stands, in your
mind, like some Hindu statuette, one set of hands crooked and
beckoning, the other set palms out in front of her, in the international
body language for ​stop.

The posture threw you off from the day you met her, in that florist on
Highland, August of '78. You, ordering a dozen prosaic roses to throw
into a stillborn cause, already lost, even as you tried to fix it with blooms.
She, assembling a wild assortment of spring exotics to send to someone
she forever afterward refused to identify. The moment she looks up and
sees you enter the shop, she smiles such a grin of vast recognition that
you have to smile back, bluffing, wondering how you could possibly have
forgotten so friendly, so welcoming a face.

You fall to talking almost without thought, hoping her name will come to
you after a couple of clues. But the clues all prove that you don't know
this woman from Eve. Four traded sentences and you want to. She makes
you want to. Open, uncomplicated invitation--like a neighborhood buddy
knocking on the door of a Saturday morning with a baseball and two
mitts.

How do you like my creation?​ she coaxes, displaying for you. ​It wants to
be a bouquet when it grows up.

You make the sound of appreciation, out of the depths of your throat's
greater helplessness. ​What about ​my ​needs? Should I go with the red,
the yellow, or the white?

Depends. Is it a kiss-off or a suck-up?

Good question.​ You do a fair imitation of total paralysis. ​I haven't

figured that out yet.

Definitely the ivory, then. Ivory is totally ambiguous. You can always
claim misunderstanding later.

You can, and do. There follows the obligatory couple of dead heats of
answering-machine tag. Would you? Love to. Say when. You, then.

The two of you cook a meal together at her place. Vegetable lasagna,
whose 3.5 grams of fat per serving would strike your mother as a disgrace
to human dignity. You wash and slice and pulverize, feeling, despite
yourself, as if you're preparing the buffet from which you'll sup the rest
of your life. She looks on, smiling at your handiwork. The last time she
ever lets you near the food prep.

Her running gag: Who said you could go near sharp implements? Does
your mother know you're trying to drive a standard transmission?
Someone has cruelly and senselessly led you to believe that joke is
funny? Uh, friend: about this so-called wardrobe of yours? The feel of
something invisible being forever contested in the flow of wit.

You share five or six more outings, for form's sake, moseying up to the
inevitable test of desire. Bird-watching, stargazing: each an adventure,
but never the same adventure twice. Pleasure in the agonizing
postponement, but she more patient than you. Always she meets you
under the gun, the taxi meter running, half a dozen plates up in the air,
Post-it notes stuck all over her jumpsuit, appointments with strangers
written in Bic on her palms that she has to consult before she can tell you
when she'll be available next.

But always her eyes say ​soon. ​And when you part, with your ubiquitous
and meaningless ​see ya,​ always she reins you in with a smiled ​I believe
you will.

Her random reinforcement schedule keeps you massively addicted. Her

trick is to pick the moment, that precise evening when the concession
seems real and all the wait leading up to it no more than a fluke she is
keen to repudiate. She chooses the time and place, a sweet surrender of
sovereignty for which she is careful to palm the claim stub.

There comes a moment in the night's right ascension when the lead-up
tease, the slow, hinted rope tug, disappears into the bin of all childish
things. Then she spreads; then she solidifies. And all that night, your
bodies exchange sightings, come within touching distance of a place that
you will spend the next eight years trying to recover.

At the moment that she fixes her limbs to you, her commitment is
unthinking: as utter as that between any two speechless animals. But
absent as well, somewhere far away, deep in a formulating image. Who
knows whose? Off in a place that is anything but yours.

Your two souths merge. You move your face to hers, sealing the ring. You
will tell her that you love her, prematurely, helplessly, something she
already knows, something she will snort dismissal at, glandular, clichéd,
but the only thing that might help a little against all that life still has in
store for the two of you. You lower your length fulcrumed along hers, a
shadow curling toward the foot of its wall as the sun wanders over day,
your mouth seeking out her ear. But she speaks first.

You can do anything you want to me.

This is what you hear. Or, at the most generous, the most rehabilitated,
factoring in all faults of sound and audition, the tricks of the brain when
showered in chemical joy for the land it has succeeded in reaching: ​You
can do anything you want with me.

For years, she will not remember. She will deny having said anything of
the kind.

She rises from intimacy to wash off the drops of your body. Clean again,
she wraps herself in flannel pajamas--yes, even in this heat--before she
comes back to bed. She accepts you against the ladle of her back. She
permits you to commit, smiles at the stories you spin out into her ear,
but does not return or extend them.
She's up before you, doing her sit-ups to progressive-radio rock, when
you finally drag your lame ass out of her long-suffering bed. ​Breakfast?
you ask over the throb of the synth bass.

Not for me.

You commandeer a banana and wait for the routine to abate. It doesn't.
Finally, you must get on with your life. The crucial skill here seems to be
to ask for nothing, to wait with no expectations, to see what might settle
on your sill of its own free accord. ​See you soon?​ you say, hoping that the
hope in your voice feels in no way coercive.

Yes, s​ he says, pausing in mid--step aerobics long enough to kiss you

goodbye. ​I believe you probably will.

NOW YOU HAVE ONLY ​your own workout, your own daily routine,
to blunt the brutal memory working your gut. Your thirty minutes off the
chain to tranquilize, to bring your eager grief low. Back on the leash, you
match her sit-up for sit-up, exercise serving some awful, unshakable end,
the stupid insistence on surviving. You fight against the steady atrophy of
your muscles, work to crush the furtive hope that, should you by some
accident ever be freed and in the uproar of freedom come by chance
across her, you will not look repulsive. You wonder how she likes beards,
this wiry pelt that cups, petlike, into your hands. Groundless desire: the
last thing we outlive, outlove.

You flip between following out this tale and fleeing from it. Ali's small
sadisms--saying you will be released tomorrow; charging into the room
at random intervals to catch you without your blindfold; tossing a
gorgeous orange just out of your reach--are nothing compared with
recollection. You can deal with Ali, ignore his feeble invitations to
believe. But against the torture of expectation, you have no defense.
Events seem blessedly bent on distracting you. This season produces
some subtle shift in the front. One of the host of autonomous
nations--the Druze, the Maronites, the Falangists; the nomadic
dreamers, daily harder to keep straight--some law unto itself is making a
play to extend its jurisdiction. The tactics play out behind the blank gray
screen of corrugated metal stapled across your window's gouged-out eye.

But you don't need to see the hidden developments to map their tactics.
For days, rifled artillery pieces lob their lazy cargoes in. You hear the
distant puff of firing, count the intervening quarter seconds, and feel the
annihilating crush when it slams back to earth. Your brain does the
ungodly calculus, the complex trig that locates in space the arc of each
explosion. You mark the ebb and flow, the advance and retreat in your
shaking abdomen, telling from the sound of impact the difference
between a souk taken out, a playground, a parking lot, and the sheared
face of an apartment high-rise.

Sayid spells out just who is on the move. ​Afwaj al Muqawamah al

Lubnaniyah.​ The Lebanese Resistance Battalions, whose name forms the
acronym Amal, the Arabic word for hope.

Hope is not the innocent you once mistook it for. It does not circulate.
Yours cannot mean what another takes it to be. Even between you and
the woman you loved, you failed to hold the thing in common. You went
into the relationship generous and likable and easygoing and came out
shaken, the person she most feared, a pathological controller and
manipulator. You could not speak to her without spinning out whole
chapters of dialogue in your head--countering, wheedling, needing to
destroy her belief that you were desperately needy.

In another life, on another infinite afternoon, when the shells abate

enough to let you disappear again down the immaculate rabbit hole, she
tells you. To your standing question, she answers simply, ​The French
Lieutenant's Woman​.

She looks up, vulnerable, appraising your reaction, a little frightened, a

little shining. Relieved that you know it, glad for the pleasure she has
afforded you, she asks back, ​How about yours?​ The easy reciprocity that
you once thought could underscore all exchanges between people who
cared for each other.

And you tell her all about ​Great Expectations.​ A simple, trusting swap of
hostages. Surrender everything. We cannot hurt each other as much as
life will. You tell her the whole sustaining story, from graveyard to cradle.
What larks! you tell her. What larks.

Time in its endlessness brings you to a complete recitation. It takes two

full afternoons with your eyes pinched closed to come up with the name
"Miss Skiffins." But you have all the afternoons in the world. World,
time, and focus, and you start to perform super-human feats of synthetic
memory. Desperate feats, deranged, like the reflex acts of mothers lifting
two-ton beams off their pinned infants.

You've forgotten nothing. Whole scenes surface out of nothing. They

pageant before you, responding to memory's every blush. And when they
don't, you make them up again. ​From scratch,​ as you think the idiom
goes. Week after week, and the complete architecture condenses under
your aerial view. Why, here's a church. Why, here's Miss Skiffins. Let's
have a wedding.

You take it then, this month's contraband reading, the blessed banality of
your old existence, all the engaging, pointless complications that she
smuggles in to you under the nose of your captors, your lost Miss
Skiffins, so unlike her real-life model, the one who lived in terror of being
held accountable for ever having given anyone anything. How ludicrous
the potboiler seems, how absurd and anemic, against the daylong
barrages that make up your day's only dispatches now.

But how banal the bigger text, the pointless serial novel of power, how
static and tedious the scenes, how shopworn real life's theme, how
lacking in invention and delivery and interest and basic narrative device
compared with the smallest mundanity of love, the chance at private
denouement. You devise this simple test of lasting literary merit: Which
tale promises the best net present pleasure? Which will see you through
the end of this hour?

All the Dickens that will ever return returns. Pip and his Estella go hand
and hand out of their ruined place, and you are still here. Still here, after
the story recedes, in the bombed-out rubble of your thoughts, a pile that
you recognize only because it occupies the lot your house once did. Not
even a blank, your mind. A nervous jitter. Twitching like some
fourteen-year-old's deskbound leg. You go for hours in the dark not even
knowing that you are shaking.

Someone brings you food, rubbish so disgusting that not even necessity
can drive you past the stench. You bang your chain against the radiator,
no longer caring about the consequences. Someone rushes in to silence
you. The Angry Parent. He cracks you in the chest, knocking you back on
the mattress.

It stuns you. He's always gotten one of the others to dole out the physical
abuse. You sit back up, stalling to catch your breath, until your pulse
lowers enough for you to speak. "Listen." You wait, curious, to see what
you mean to say. "Listen. Tell me your name."

You hear him breathing through his mouth. You've frightened him. But
he says nothing.
"Come on. We've known each other for a long time. Coming up on a year,
before you know it. You've had me over. I've returned the invitation. We
should know each other's names, don't you think?"

Without seeing his face, you could easily take the sound he makes as a
titter. Or he could be tensing to release another blow.

"What difference does it make? 'Ali.' 'Sayid.' Who on earth would believe
me? You're going to kill me anyway. Who are you afraid I'm going to tell?
God?"

You're ready. Ready for the one quick, merciful bullet through the
temple. So of course, he denies you. You hear him shuffle a little in
embarrassment.

"Muhammed. Call me Muhammed."

"Muhammed," you repeat. "You are a Shiite?"

He coughs up a little fart of contempt in his throat. Not even contempt.

Not even worth asking why you bother to ask.

"Muhammed. I once read somewhere that Shiites believe food to be the

holy gift of Allah. A mirror of the divine sustenance. Look at this." You
grope about for the cold stench, put your hand in it as you hold it up
toward him. "This is not sacred. This is not food."

He takes the platter from you. Leaves without a word. Some time later,
another meal appears. More than sacred. Edible. You'd say delicious but
for fear of gilding the lily. The dish steams, a Lebanese knockoff of
something your mother's exercise in capitalism once specialized in. A
bademjan, t​ he heart of the almond, the life of the heart.
Ahalim bademjan,​ with some angelic substance floating around in the
stew, electrifying, a taste once deeply familiar to you that you now strain
to recognize. But the harder you chase after the ingredient, the more it
recedes. You take a bite; the word beats there, on the tip of your tongue.
The memory struggles to the surface and dissipates.

You put down your spoon and wait. You try another mouthful. The
familiarity fades with exposure. Every repetition reduces the miracle.
You must name it in the last morsel or lose it forever. Then, before you
get it to your mouth, restored by the bits you have already devoured, it
comes to you. Meat. Chunks of sacrificial lamb.

You walk a tightrope between sassing your guards and falling at their
feet. When Muhammed next visits, you thread your way dead down the
middle.

"Are you the Chief? Are you the one that Ali and Sayid call the Chief?"

His silence settles out, indulgent. He sighs. It can only be a sigh. "Above
every Chief, there is always one higher."

"But you can do things. You have some power. You got me that meat."

"Allah is the doer. Allah alone is the getter of things. All power comes
from Him and returns to Him."

"Fair enough. Where did you learn to speak such good English?"

"That's not important." Although, his tone admits, it would probably be

of some interest to the U. S. State Department.

"Muhammed. You must listen to me. I am afraid I am cracking up. Not

just boredom. Boredom is what I feel on the good days. My brain. It's
coming apart. I can feel it. Like a damn zoo animal about to go off its nut.
I'm this far away from the abyss. I'm going to start screaming soon, and
then you're going to have to kill me, and then you'll have nothing.
Nothing. You'll be out a year of room and board and the cost of
cremation, and nobody's going to trade you anything for me."

He makes some calculation, probably not mathematical. "What is it that

you want?"

With your last ounce of strength, you force down the fury exploding in
you.

"I need books. I don't care what. Books in English. I'll take anything. I'll
take the damn Lubbock, Texas, phone directory. I just. Need. Something
to read."

"We will see," he says, after troubled consideration. "We will do a fatwa
to see if you can have a book."

This sounds less than good.

Lessons follow in performing a fatwa. It's the old Iowa Fighting Fundy
from Spiritus Mundi trick of throwing open the Holy Scripture to a
passage, then interpreting the words as if they were a scrap of cosmic
fortune cookie. Judgment by roll of the evangelical die.

You listen to them execute their oracular Three Stooges routine. You tilt
your head back, stealthily, to catch the contour of your fate from under
the lip of your blindfold. Ali flips the Koran open at random. Sayid flops
his finger down. Muhammed, the intellectual, reads the selected Ouija
utterance and interprets the augury. Decides what the chance passage
means.
"I am sorry," he tells you, sounding genuinely chagrined. "We have
consulted the book, and it says no."

You move toward them, trembling, to the full length of your chain. Your
body starts to spasm with such violence it scares even you.

"Then bloody Christ. Consult it again. I'm not fucking kidding you, man.
We need a yes, here. A yes, or there's going to be an incident."

In the chaotic scuffle, someone knocks you down. You slam the back of
your head against the radiator in your fall. The Three Fates evacuate. You
float facedown in the pool of your concussion.You haven't even the will to
remove your blindfold. You lie fetal, curled up in your own placenta.

Survival is no long-er a virtue, given where survival leaves you. On the

far side of this nothingness lies more nothing, extending to the ends of
space, one continuous void all the way to the vanishing point, where all
lines fall into themselves.

But life has still worse whiplash in store. Years later, maybe even the next
day, human noise penetrates your dissolution. Sayid, across an
unfathomable gulf, tosses something on the floor near you. "We do
another fatwa. We ask again. Everything okay. No problem." Getting
nothing, he withdraws.

Another presence settles into your cell. The quaking in you starts up
again in earnest. It takes you by your shoulders, determined to shake you
back into sawdust. You cannot look, for fear of reprisal. You saddle up
near the new thing, crane back your neck, inspect it from under the
safety of the blindfold. It's everything you fear it to be. Lying on the filthy
planks, unswept since you came here, is that inconceivable device: a
cunning, made world.
You kneel and pick it up. You freeze down there on the floor, crying.
Frightened to so much as touch it, your fingers clap spastically against
the covers. You bounce the book in your hands, testing its weight for any
sign of counterfeit. The mass of it swells up close to your eyes, into your
slit of vision. You hold it up close, trading off depth of field for detail and
resolution. The weave of fibers in the paperback binding grows into the
densest forest.

Slowly, your sight scans up the book's length, seeking out the title that
will sentence or deliver you. Terror is no less than desire with the chrome
stripped away. In your atrophied eyes, the letters read like a line of alien
hieroglyphs. Bizarre analphabetic randomness. English has no such
series.

​ our word. Your title.

Then your pulse shoots into your ears. ​Great. Y
You've done it, summoned up this book by the sheer force of weeks-long
concentration. By some intricate and unsolvable plan, through the
interplay of forces devised by that engineer whose creation can but
grossly caricature, you have been looked after. The words you love have
made their way back to you for awful safekeeping. Imagination survives
its own cruelty. You've been set down in this hell for something more
than merely mapping your abandonment.

For a long time, your eyes refuse the title's second word. Instead, you
insist on the word that the word should be. But the surety of print
survives your stare. You look again, and the title skids off into
senselessness. You remove your blindfold and look dead on.
Expectations s​ omehow mutates into ​Escapes.

You drop the book, electrocuted. If no one saw you pick it up, they can't
punish you for touching it. It lies there, upside down, innocent.
Impossible to take in. As the immediate madness subsides, you tick off
the possible explanations. A trap. A mistake. A senseless accident. A joke
whose cruelty makes mainstream sadism seem like the Marquis of
Queensberry.

It strikes you: Maybe even Muhammed, with his clean syntax and accent,
can't read. Maybe your guards' English extends no further than film and
TV. They've bought this secondhand ream of scrap paper for nothing
down in the stalls of some bombed-out bazaar, left there by the last
American with the good sense to get out of this suiciding country while
the getting was good. Not one of these men knows what he put into your
hands.

At this thought, something breaks in your throat. You can't place it at

first, a shape so strange you can only wait in wonder for it to take shape.
When at last you recognize the quick, dry convulsions, you can't stop
them. Impossible to say how long you laugh, forcing the sniggers down,
silent, secret from anyone beyond your walls.

The book they give you has been read many times. And recently, by all
indications. You're not the first prisoner to have begged a fatwa, to have
forced scripture to deliver. Of course, there are others, other Western
bargaining chips, maybe even housed with you in this very building.
They are the muffled noises you hear at all hours down this hall, half a
dozen feet away, just on the other side of your own plaster. The
movements to and from the latrine. The covered altercations. Others that
you've read about, taken before your cap-ture, or poor souls even
stupider than you, snatched up since your own destruction.

You touch the cover that other escapees must have touched. Your hands
turn the trembling pages so recently turned by others. Title page. Other
books by the author. Library of Congress information.
Acknowledgments. Dedication. After each new leaf, you set the book
down and look away. You wait for as many minutes as discipline permits.
You try to pace yourself, to hang on, to savor this pained heightening, the
point of long deprivation.

You open to the first true page, the holder of possibility, the keeper of all
things. It slinks halfway down the right-hand side. Gorgeous human
thoughts detonate in space all around you, extending their subordinate
clauses, fling-ing their nouns around like burgeoning tracts of starter
homes airlifted into arid wastes.

Grant all permits. Fill the available world with frantic marks. Cram the
answers to the living exam into every legible cranny. Have each new
version tear down the last, each manic utterance give way to further
revision. Let people chatter forever. It doesn't even matter what we think
we're really after. For there is no solace here, no win, no other end than
this stream of urgent invention.

In real life, this book wouldn't hold your attention for five minutes. Now
it bears the key to continued existence. You cannot even say what ​Great
Escapes​ is about. It may not be about anything. Every verb phrase puts
on the full freedom of human movement. The slightest clichés, the worst
throwaway inanities pitch you into whole preserves of wilderness, whose
existence you've forgotten. Even here: Even into the dulled depths of
your confinement, the hive extends its growing hum.

You vow to ration this opening chapter, to make it last at least through
the end of summer. ​Great Escapes​ must be your daily introit and
gradual. A single paragraph to serve as a matins service, another two
sentences every other hour. The need to make astonishment last far
exceeds your immediate urge to swallow it whole. The point is not to
finish but to find yourself somewhere, forever starting.

You panic at the rapid slip of pages across the binding from the right
width to the left. You scramble for a way to read without making
reading's hated forward progress. But the whole book evaporates into
fact before you know how you got to the end.

You close the back cover, sickened by what you've done. You seize up,
you stand, you pace around on your chain. You close your eyes, guiltily
savoring the cheap stories that you've just slammed down. You pick up
the book and start again. It still holds some residual pleasure, but never
again the launch into pure potential. Ten days from now, this dazed
freedom reverberating in you will have extinguished itself, starved out by
repetition. ​Great Escapes​ is over. You will need another.

But for a moment, for a thin, narrow, clouded, already closing moment:
this. When you come to bed that evening, you turn to tell her, You'll
never believe what I read today.
 RICHARD POWERS
b. r957
In his second novel, Prisoner's Dilernma ( 1988), Richard Powers presents a theory of
order his characters experience as the "Butterfly Effect, that model of random motion
describing how a butterfly flapping its wings in Peking propagates an unpredictable
chain reaction of air currents, ultimately altering tomorrow's weather in Duluth." The
human capacity to imagine and understand the real world (poetry) and the human
ability to construct technologies capable of measuring it (science) combine in the
sense of scientific wonder that $pifies his fifth and most popular novel, Gal^atea 2,2.
How people and the forces that influence their lives keep pace with each other is the
substance of Powers's work.
Powers is one of several contemporaries (including Kathryn Kramer, William T. Voll-
mann, and David Foster Wallace) who write as the generational successors to Thomas
Pynchon, whose novels, particularly V (1963) aid Gravity's Rainbout (1973), chal-
lenged readers to comprehend worlds that were virtually encyclopediac in range yet
containable-barely-within the limits of printed novels, As the critic Tom Leclair
has noted, Powers and his cohort, the ideal youthful readers of Pynchon, have adapted
that author's intellectual overkill and applied it to conditions more rypical of late-
twentieth-century and early-twenty-first-century America. What was in Pynchon's
1960s a paranoia about government secrecy and terroristic subversion had become,
by the millennium's end, literal facts of life, creating an even larger challenge to the
novelistic intelligence that would contain them all. To balance the increase of tech-
nological capability with the limits of the mind to comprehend things, Powers favors
double plots that reflect microcosmic versions of the same theme. In his first novel,
Three Fanners onTheirway to a Dance (1985), world war I and its global reorderings
are related to the three young Dutchmen of the title, Prisoner's Di.lemma tells the story
of the world's emergence into the atomic age with ongoing references to the fate oi
one small family involuntarily caught in the process. This strategy of intersecting plots
continues through an eighth novel, Tke Time of Our Singing (2003), which pairs a
brilliant, mixed-race vocalist's struggle to sing the music of his choice with his parents'
earlier struggle to raise their three children in a world free from history's racial con-
straints. A ninth novel, The Echo Maker (2006), a winner of the National BookAward,
explores memory the homing instinct, and other brain function as they relate to one
family member's caring for another.
Powers was born in Evanston, Illinois, and raised on the far north side of Chicago,
in the suburb of Lincolnwood, where his father was a school principal. when Powers
was eleven his father accepted an appointment as principal of a school in Bangkok,
and the family moved to Thailand for a five-year stint, not returning to the United
states until 197 4, Nter earning bachelor's and master's degrees (with initial concen-
trations on physics and mathematics and ending in English) at the University of llli-
nois he worked as a computer-code writer in Boston. The publication of his first norel
led to his being awarded a MacArthur fellowship, after which for several years he lir-ed
in the Netherlands. In 1992he returned to the Universitv of lllinois as an artist-in-
 3220 / RrcHanp Powrns

residence; since I 996 he has held the swanlund

chair as a professor of
-- English. arrc
he is formally affiliated with units in the science. ---Dl
fi.r" ,.tr.
Powers's story "The seventh Event" shows
the ".rd
intersections that characterize
::Lr+
work: the scientific with the artistic, the historical with
the fictive. of all the *nr*::s
and works cired in the story (including powers and
rwo .r r,i. n=_
mann,her illness, her books, and a re-r.ie* of them are "r*rJ,
invented, ""riui"
yet her status *u i
created character makes the entire work fictive,
as the author _""H h;;; ;;.
The text is from Granta No. 90 (2005), with a revision
by the author,

The Seventh Event

Six

Theworld shallperkhnotforlackof wondcrs, butfor

Lack of uonilen

When Mia Erdmann passed,away last May, ecocriticism

lost a singuim
voice and all of us who were changed and then
changed her r*ro
books lost rhe chance,t: "*.ir-U"
#Eld";;itst
-rghip.,J
,s"e,I"h:re"sh.
lished her first book' Hitched " or,*
to Everything,Tircrature andthe [Jnseemw,rni,&
in 1989 at the age of thirry-two. I can stirr recail
"[.r"." a,r,.*
n.r, -y
accusing opening words:
To our embarrassment' we critics have belatedry
in how we talk about literature, and
begun to see a basic ,*i
a corresponding lack in how a gom
deal of literature talks about the world . . .

scholars often cite Erdmannt book as the sharpest cry

in the call to arm*
that took shape at the end of the l9g0s. Her words gave
the growing ecocr![
movement its most succinct.voice. I,iterary arralyJs,
explores the links between written worlds
,t" iiri.t"a] .igh*
the worlds trr"v r"pr".".rt. g*
it wrongly stop-s' when making those links "ni
at the gauge
"rril i-r,i*"".belatec
ing her, I still feel her combinld amazement undrep-,rgrra;;;;;i;
Reao
discovery. Personal relationships, family, society,
even globar economics rmilr
politics: Erdmann saw these ai nothing more riran ti"f
ro".i ;;;;;'i"
work so-large it should have made the f,rrman vanish "*-
in embarrassment." -{nu.
yet the human insisted that alr of life hung upon
humanirv. app"il"a u,.
hopeles_s parochialism, E_rdmann revived
i;ril
S;i;;j "*#ffi;J";
'I have heard of a man who had a mind r"..fi f,i, f,";;;,;Jr#i;;;
ried a piece of brick in his pocket, which he shewed
;;;;;;ri^".,.o*-
age purchasers.'3 As Erdmann saw it, literary
creation ",
and interpretation hac
increasingly lost itself at the scare of the brick,
large thar few had yet stepped back far
-hir. ;";J;;iin'"ior, - u
!9use_ 1o
thing Iike a real architecturai sketch. we courd not";;;h'l;;ffi
;;;"
seeiow bd ,-il;nr";;; "r,_
are. lVe rvere like those first-rime concert goers
who
tra stops tuning, thinking it the symphony. "pph;; "fi;;il";r:;;

l. John Burdon Haldane {1892-1964t, English tere

Drologrst and MiteL published under the pseudom
^by^Swift.arguing againsr Irish acceptaut
2. Irish satirisr
and poet (1667-1745). ori';t,ll^],jlR,9r
UU.U00 in
3. From "The Drapier's Letters,,(17j4), four let_ new copper coins minted in Er.
Srand under corrupt circumstances.
 THs Srvewrn EvsNr / 3221

Her book had its famous defenders and detractors. As for me, after read-
ing her, I never wrote the same way again. In an act of private homage, I stole
and recycled her Swift quote in my third novel, a story of molecular biology
and ecolog/ which appeared two years after Erdmann's landmark book. IIv
every subsequent attempt at fiction scrambled to rise to her challenge to
describe the wider net beyond humanity's few square knots. Anr.thing less
now seemed like failure. As Erdmann put it in that same remarkable first
polemic in Hitched to Ewrything:
Living things, faced with the pressure of changing habitat, must adapt or
move. The only third choice is death. If the literary mode wants to sur-
vive the catastrophic climate change we ourselves have engineered, it
must now do the same.
Erdmann scared me out of the fiction of the self. But I feel a little fraudu-
lent ignoring that self, a little fictitious calling her Erdmann like the rest of
her public admirers. For in real life I never called her anything but Mimi. The
author of two of the most provocative ecocritical works of the last fifteen
years was, to me, the girl in my junior high class in International School
Bangkok,s who, thirty years ago, at the height of the Vietnam war, performed
abizarre talent show send-up of 'Getting to KnowYou', singing it just like one
of Deborah Kerr's happy charges,5 while dressed in what everyone but the
teachers and administrators recognized as Vietcong garb.
We were not exactly friends, in school. It wouldn't have been possible, at
fourteen, for a six-foot-four-inch son of an American school principal to be
friends with a four-foot-and-a-fraction daughter of a Canadian petrochemi-
cal company executive. But we did sniff each other out, two precocious and
doubtlessly obnoxious kids, conscious, a little before most, that they might
make a little noise in the world, if they chose. She was far more sophisticated
and worldly than I was. But I was a quick study and not above stealing from
her stance at a distance. I don't recall her showing any particular interest in
nature or life science in school, although I do remember our freshman biol-
ogy teacher, Khun Porani, declaring Mimi's frog pithing and dissection 'an
aesthetic masterpiece'. When I reminded Mimi of this, in her hospital room
last spring, four weeks before the end, she claimed I'd made up the whole
story. 'Remember what KunderaT says,'she warned, 'Memory is not the oppo-
site of forgetting; it is a kind of forgetting. Or something to that effect.'
I left Bangkok in 1973 at the age of sixteen. By a coincidence that seemed
stranger to me then than it does now, Mimi and I met again two years later,
as freshmen at the University of lllinois, one of those massive educational
factories whose strengths in the sciences made it a logical place for me to
study physics and for her to study bioengineering. I was stunned to see her
again, on the other side of the globe. The unlikelihood didn't seem to surprise
her at all. I asked her how she had settled on her major, a choice I found
bewildering. She replied, 'Are you kidding me) My entire life, I've dreamed
about making a living thing.'

4. Powers's novelTheGoldBugVariatiore(1991). of themusicalT}le Kngandl(1951),bytheAmer-

5. Oldest such school in Thailand, offering the ican composer Richard=Rodgers (19O2-1979\ nd
International Baccalaureate and the American K- the American lwicist Oscar Hammerstein ( 189 i-
12 curriculum. 1960).
6. Kerr (b. l92l), a Scottish-bornAmerican sinqer 7. Milan Kundera (b. 1929). Czech norclisr-
and actress. plays a governess in the movie version
3222 I RrcuaRo Powsns

we took freshman chemistry together, along with a couple thousand oth,er

le'r
students. we arranged to be placed in the same lab section. we became
Dartners, if I ie*"-ber our being assigned to determine the
awkwarld ones.
'-.f.."f". weight of one particular unknown sample' % l"{ a-long flom
chart of measurements urr"y, to perform. Mimi just laughed. 'Forget thm
"ni
noise. Look at it. Feel it. smell it. It's mashed up mothballs. Naphthalene.
\\fu
know the molecular weight of naphthalene. Save ourselves some work" fu:-
ence, she declared, had to know when and how to cheat if it hoped
to accom-'
plish anything.
' It disconc"lt.d ,n", being thrown back together on the other side of ti'*.
I tor*
world, the long descent from Bangkok, Thailand to Nowhere, Illinois.
the colnciderr"ce to be fate, a ki"d of obligation. I think we were briefr"
irrrroirr"a, or something that passed for involvement. Mimi teased
me reler:,:-
lessly about the episo-<le later in life. She even told an interviewer that rire
V."rig "r""fist-to-Le helped her to come to terms with her own preference fiw
women.
Nlint''
Near the end of our undergraduate days, I drifted into literature and
sank deeper into bioengin""ittg. Mostly orrt of embarrassment' we lost tracl
I no idea where she was headeo
oi o'ther. By the time I left school, had
"""h
., -t rl she planned to do. I took off for Boston without hunting her do$'' ro
say goodbye. Memory is a form of forgetting, not its opposite'

Fitte

Et ery luxwry must be paid for, and ercrything is a luxury starting'with

the wotld'
-Paveses
I canne
I was living in the Netherlands and had written two novels by the time
Mia Erdmann again, almost ten years later. When a fellom
across thJname
mentioned the critical stutry Hitched to Eaerytking, and' its call for a
writer
literature that tried to recover thl obscene majority of existence tyPicaltrlr
b*rh"d aside by the novel of character revelation, I couldn't believe that mc
old schoolfri".,i arrd this book's author might be one and the same
persoD,

But the name was unusual enough that it couldn't be anyone else. I hunted
down a copy. An academic boo=k, it carried no author photograph' Th*
noie identified her as an assistant professor ofliterary studies at the
""ttrort
University of California, Santa Cruz'
-
ih" in life paths boggled me. But from the book's first sentence
"#rrg"
the prose ,til" bo." the stamp of that unmistakable mind. The writing
rre*
saving itself somervork. Crit-
ilig i"a bold, remarkably limber, and not above
i"i"r", tfr" ciaimed, hai treated American literature's centuries-long obses-
jaded contempt-as
sion with wildness-from early shock and awe to late
,i-pf" ""r."sions of the themes of self-fashioning, self-reliance, and seffi-
she
transformation. It was time, Mia said, to put away such childish things'
demonstrated, in damning shorthand, how all of the then leading schools
rf
literary criticism-Muoir-, Deconstruction, even the emerging Posr-

8. Cesare Pavese (1908-19501. ltalian novelist, poet' and translaton

 Tnr SrvsNrn Evpnr I 3223

Colonial studiese-were, to some extent, self-exempting, performing much

the same kind of cultural work that they themselves were intent on exposing,
For even as cultural studies exposed hidden social agendas, it participated in
crimes against the non-human worse than anything humanity had eser com-
mitted against itself. And fiction, for its part, had for two centuries rvallos'ed
in a bottomless vanity that promoted the individual self to be the measure of
all things: 'We have let our shot at awareness be bought off with a bauble,'
this Mia Erdmann put it.
An infant is the soul of absolute narcissism, identifuing only with itself.
Growth should be the steadybreaking down and enlargement of its iden-
tity. But judging by our literature, the true scale of the world may be too
terrifying for even the largest acts of identification to grasp.
The prose, as many have commented, alternated between diatribe and epic
poem. It bore no relationship to the kind of prose required for academic
Nor did the author bother much with close arguments. It's
"drr".r""-"ttt.darnn it. We know the rnolecular weight of naphthalene. But I
naphtkalene,
knew, within five pages, that this book would stand the conversation on its
ear. My old friend would make a name for herself. And it seemed I had always
known this, as far back as junior high. The author had the force of moral cer-
tainty behind her, of incontestable urgency. And after my stabs of jealousy
orr", ih" sheer force of her words, all I could feel in them was the pleasure of
recovery.
Some have aligned Erdmann's prose and her position in this first book with
the more l1.r'ical voices of ecofeminism. Cheryll Glotfelty,' in her review in
lnterdisciplinary Stud.ies in Literatwre qnd Em'vironmen'L2 calls Erdmann 'a
diabolical Annie Dillard'.3 These comparisons slight what is most distinctive
in Mimi's writing. A great deal of ecstatic, first-wave ecological criticism con-
cerns itself with almost mystical communion with other living things. Such
a possibility, in Erdmann, is at best problematic and at worst impossible. Even
when her descriptions work the hardest to invoke something close to awe at
the living world, her gaze is unflinching, less Protestant h)rmn than house
music rave. 'Life,'she declares,
is botched self-replication.It stems from a single command: copy this,
again and again and again. Crucially' that copying is not wholly accurate'
Otherwise, we would have stopped at pretty crystals. Think of mitosisa as
trillions of slightly near-sighted, plagiarizing students-speculation on
the loose. The crazed self-copier, DNA,5 is runaway and indifferent,
erecting endless botched, diverging organisms as delivery systems' Each

9. Respectively. the school of socialism promul-
gated b\ the Cerman social philosopher Karl Man
ft A r S-i ee:t predicat ing the histoiical inevitabil-
it\ ofa communist society: a stlle oflilerary analy-
sis nromulgated br French and {.merican theorists
in t'he I c6ds and i 970s predicated on the rigorous
intenogation of previouily unquestioned assump-
tions underllng texts; a style of literary and social
analysis examining cultures of former colonies
from an independent viewpoint.
1 . Professor of literature and the environnent (b.
c. 1963) at the University of Nevada, Reno who
helped create the field of ecocriticism.
-Official
2. journal of the fusociation for the Study
of Literatuie and Environment' headquartered at
the Universitv of Nevada, Reno.
3. American writer (b. 1945), famous for her
responses to the environment in lytic prose.
,1. Nuclear division of a cell, resulting in two iden-
tical cells with the same number of chromosomes
as the original cell.
5. Deoxwibonucleic acid, the major constituent of
chromosomes; it stores the genetic code that is the
basis of heredity.
3224 / RrcHaRo Powtns

one of its current twelve and a half million species serves as a postuiimd'
about its environment. Most of them are viral or opportunistic. .\ll anrt
shaped for exploitation, dependent on the whole . . . We large ani-mrorh
are hopelessly macroscopicentric. In fact, any life form bigger tha: a
thimble is a flulcy, precarious, exceptional, composite kludge job. Thoc
are more cells in a baby's finger than people in the world, and eachr d
these cells is itself an ecosystem, already a colony of assimilated sla,,t
species. A single Amazon6 tree top harbours three dozen species of a'm"
What does it mean to be alive? The real, bedrock deal is vegetative. fun'"
gal, invisible: superbugs, extremophiles,T bacteria that thrive on acid aldl
salt, that never see the sun, that live in suspended animation 320 degrcsr
below zero Fahrenheit, or mass in a spoon of soil in concentrariomr
beyond anyone's ability to number. What would a literature that kneu nIl
this look like?

But for all her attempts to terrify the reader with the violent profligacr d
nature, Erdmann's world is exhilarating once your eyes attenuate to it. Tiro
book's conclusion still holds, in my mind, even after her youthful field's maurn
revisions and revolutions:

If we could stop using nature as a metaphor for reflecting the human

condition, we might begin to see how the human condition tsfls61s 56.*
small fraction of nature's relentless urge to speculate.

I wrote to the author, care of UC Santa Cruz. This was still back in the agr
of letters, when you had to put the recipient's name at the top of the messagt
and yours at the bottom. I told her how shamed and rearranged I had beem
by wrestling with her book. And I asked her all the predictable and necessa:'r
questions about how her life had gone in the intervening decade. What had
happened to her after leaving lllinois? How did she end up in California? \\-as
she with someone? Was she happy?
Her reply answered none of my personal questions. None of her letters eru
did. She found personal details fulsome, indulgent and boring. The only ome
of my biographical questions she thought even vaguely worth addressing rsa5
how she had gotten from a bachelor's degree in bioengineering to a PhD ir
American literature. 'I got impatient. I wanted to make a living thing frorr.
scratch. Those guys weren't quite as far along as they were promising. So I
took a short cut.'I asked why, in that case, she hadn't become a fiction writer
She replied, 'You had too big of a head start.'
I hadn't realized we were competing. But then, I'd never taken as hard a
look at life as Mimi had. In Hitched to Euerything, the living world was noc
some stable, benign equilibrium that humans needed to rejoin after a lone
self-exemption. In Mimi's view of nature, the two slowest-growing neigh-
bouring sequoias were locked in a freeze-frame battle of life and deatlu
stretching out over centuries,

6. River in South America that drains the Amazon 7. Organisms that thrive in extreme conditioru
Rain Forest. "supeibugs": antibiotic-resistant bacteda.
 Tnr SsveNrn EvrNr / 3225

Four

ln the long ,"", ." *4.#:!;

Even in the bloom of youth, she had been spindly and blotchy, one of the
homeliest people I've ever met. She took great pride in this. She claimed
selective advantage in being able to startle other creatures. I've mentioned
that Mimi was short. She topped out at about four feet four. She was forever
making a point of this, in her writing and in person. 'Small creatures tend to
be scavengers,'she wtote, in the acknowledgements of her second book.

The world looks different in the undergrowth than it does in the canopy.
Small creatures hate to be beholden to large ones, but all of my friends'
alas, seem to be giants. I have stolen from each of them.

She claimed to have 'stolen'the title of her second book,Tke Monte Cailo
Game, from a citation in my third. But how that counts as theft from me,
when I had stolen it already from Jacques Monod,e only a mind as scrupu-
lously property aware as Mimi's could say. The full quote from Monod reads:
'The universe was not pregnant with life, nor the biosphere with man. Our
number came up in the Monte Carlo game.'l
I don't intend to rehash the controversy surrounding Erdmann's second
book, controversy already too familiar to be useful again. Seven years had
passed since Mimi's first study. She was not yet forty. The environmental move-
ment had embraced her early work, to the point of suffocating it, and she was
fleeing that embrace, even as she fled literature for a less compromised life sci-
ence. Poetry made nothing happen, and to save herself from her admirers, she
had to repudiate what she now thought of as the more sentimental aspects of
her own first position. I knew before it existed that the second book would
raise havoc. She wrote me often during its composition, sometimes with indis-
creet, even brutal put-downs of what she called the 'owl worshippers':

They think that advocating on behalf of some gigantic, fluffy species exon-
erates them. If they knew for one instant the pressure their own mere exis-
tence puts on the rest of the cracking web, they would take their own lives.

Her writing in the book is only a shade more judicious. The central idea of
The Monte Csilo Game grows out of the conclusion of her first book, but
turns far darker. We invented nature. Everything that we mean by invoking
the word natural must be understood as merely a social symbol with a long
and changing history. She writes:

When our stories yearn for a vanished world, green and pleasant, they do
so out of sheer terror, however suppressed, at the real look of the energy
bazaar that truly surrounds and encloses us.

And elsewhere, she clarifies:

8. From Monetary Refurm Q92a), by the English 9. French bioloeist (1910-1976).
economist John Maynard Keynes (1883-1946). l. From Chanci and. Necessity (197 O),
 3226 / RrcnaRo PowEns

Any writer who invokes the environment or the non-human living *,oric
as a transcendental moral category does so out of very tr-""
motives . . . Any system that separates the natural from the human is
already thinking anri-ecologically.

The book came out at the worst possible moment, just before the electio-
of a congress that proved to be the most anti-environmental and or.'
business legislative body in history. Decades of hard-fought enda.rge.ei
species and environmental protection legislation were bling destror.*
overnight. The environmentalists were on the run, and they wJre quick r:
identiSr Mia Erdmann as a traitor to the cause. She defended herself in prini
in a series of articles perhaps too subtle and combative.
Nature is not our zoo. we must get away from golly-green wide-eyed *-or-
der. wonder is too easy a dodge, u
-urri.." distraciion from the -.r.. p..-
saic question ofjust what toxins we are sending downstream.

Maybe her critics are right, and Mimi suffered from a fatal perverse con-
trarianism. But that quality made her a useful writer. 'Life will survive all our
theories of ecology,'she wrote in the May issue of Harper's in 1995. 'we car-
not damage it. we will press it to the wall, and in its own time, it will come
roaring back in spectacular speciation, like a forest after a fire.'That arricl*
made her scores of enemies for life. But it also forced many to think abo,ur
just what they meant by ecological thinking. with the passage of years. l-o,*
Monte Caflo Gance has been attacked and defended in as many wuv, ."u*
ers have needs. Ultimately, most ecocritics have conceded thai Erd'ma.r.r ", roro
once again early in cautioning against mistaking the interdependence of c
living things for a sentimental, universal affirmation.
Nature has no philosophy. It makes no judgements and writes no bool-s
only we do that. we cannot look to nature foia moral foundation, for narrm
will try every,thing at least once, not least of all perpetual cheating anr
exploitation. The web of life does not mourn extinction. It rzses extinctior.

Her short pieces increasingly suggested that being green was not about sat-
ing the spotted owl but about saving Homo sapiemi. sh" g."* fond of quc,i-
ing John Maymard Keynes's 1930 article, 'Economic possibilities for o-.::
Grandchildren': 'with psalms and sweet music the heavens'l be ringing,, B:,r
I shall have nothing to do with the singing.'
Mimi and I didn't write each other often, and with the advent of email. m,e
wrote even less. Something in the new medium felt too close for comfort. \{,nr
two liked each other better in the abstract, at the level of ornate sentences. thaun
we didupclose, at the scale of grittypunctuation. when we did write, we arguerc
a lot, challenged each other, and basically indulged various craclpot ideas abn,rr
literature's relationship to ecology that were not yet ready for the flee ma*e.
I wasn't sure I understood the direction that her thinking was taking hel
sometimes she sounded almost spencerian, like some horrific sterile hvbrid :r
E. o. wilson and Richard Dawkins, or like a molecular-biorogieal A1n Rand- -

2. Russian-bornAmerican novelist and social the- knowledge- on the _basis of a single pm.o*
orist (1905,-1982), chanpim,of personar free- Edwarddsbornewir"r"tu. iqzsi,;;"ricars'
doms. Herbert Spmcer. (1820-1903). English mologist and biologist. Richard Daw[ns rb. . :_
phrtosopher nored lor his artempr to uni! all English zoologist.
 Tnr SsvrNrn Evenr I 3227

with the indomitable Human Will replaced by nucleotides, a story where

everything that life cobbles up or stumbles upon is Right, I tried dravving her
out; citing thernost predatory of her critics and asking her what kind of retal-
iation she was working on.
She claimed that she had graduated from retaliation, that she was nos'e,rplor-
ing the possibilities of commensalism, or even mutualism. I asked if that meant
she might be working on a book on s)rynbiosis-say, about literature and net-
worked cooperation. 'I'm not working on anlthing,'she wrote. 'I'm just listening.'

Tkree

We are relnodelling tke Alhawbra utith a steam-shovel, and. tve are

proud of our yardage.
_Leopold3

Over the next few years, she wrote almost nothing about literature, When her
name appeared anywhere, it was on nothing longer than reviews, thorny strug-
gles with bools on the ecology movement that themselves had no patience for
narrative fiction. Her earlier attempts to understand theAmerican Eden and the
American Frontier-her great acts of slnthesis running from Jonathan Edwards
to Jonathan Franzena-died away, replaced by terse social critiques and brute
science. In these pieces, she moves away from the theoretical high ground of The
Monte Carlo Game towards a simpler, statistical desperation. The evidence pops
up in quotes scattered here and there through subtler arguments:

The six hottest years in recorded history have occurred since 1991 . . .
The fossil-based phase of civilization is ending. The race has perhaps fif-
teen years to prepare for what happens next. Already, we consume twenty
per cent more natural resources than the earth can produce, and the fig-
ure is rising steeply . . . Humans are quick at all things, and we are driv-
ing the seventh mass extinction three orders of magnitude faster than the
natural background extinction rate. Ifpresent trends continue, one half
of all species of life on earth will be gone in one hundred years . . .

I learned of Mimi's illness from the Literature and Life Science LISTSERV5
How anyone on the LISTSERV found out, I don't know. She'd been ill for over
a year without a mention anlnvhere. Contrary to popular knowledge, she did not
have ALS, but a related motor neuron disease called Sandon's disease.6 Like
ALS, Sandon's is a rapidly progressing degenerative neurological disease that
attacks the nerve cells responsible for controlling voluntary muscles. Like ALS,
it is invariably fatal, usually running its course in three to five years. The
National Institute of Health fact sheet says: 'The cause(s) of most MNDsT are
not known, but environmental, toxic, viral, or genetic factors may be implicated.'

3. From A Sand Cwnty Almmc (1949), by the
American environmental witer Aldo Leopold
(1887-1948).'Alhambra":palaceofMoorishkings
near Granada in Spain, built in the l3th century
4. Respectively, the Anerican theological witer
(1703-1758) and theAmerican novelist (b. 1959).
5. Electronic mailinglist.
6. No such disease is listed in The Merck Manual
of Medical lnfomation, The Merck Manual of
Diagrcsis and Therapy, The Mayo Clinic Famill'
Heahhbooh", or The American Medical Associatim
Family Guide. "ALS": Amyorophic lateral sclero-
sis, also knorm as Lou Gehrig's Disease for the
American baseball player (1901-1941) who died
from it, a degenerative muscular disease.
7. Motor neuron diseases. "National Institute of
Health": U.S. government institute responsible for
medical research.
 3228 / RrcnaRo PowrRs

I called her the afternoon I found out. Mimi was furious..'You go twentr
years without telephoning, only to call because I have some disease?'She
accused me of ambulance chasing. 'What is it about people? What's so damn
exciting about talking to a sick person?'After a while, she calmed down, fas-
cinated by how different my voice sounded, after all that time. 'Are you sure
it's really you?'As proof, I reminded her of the International School Bangkok
talent show, her chirpy rendition of 'Getting to KnowYou', delivered in blacli
Vietcong pyjamas.
'Sadistic and flctitious,'she declared. 'It must be you.'
Before too long we were talking again, as if we had just come out of fresh-
men chemistry lab. She was remarkably animated. 'I wanted to askyour opin-
ion on something. A question I've been turning over a lot, lately. Why is it thar
ecosystems produce rich networks, while markets-including literary mar-
kets-tend to produce monocultures?'I had no answer, but she talked to me
anyway. Over the next several months, as she lost control of her fingers, ue
used the phone more often. She went into a nursing home. 'It's like tirne
travel,'she told me. Jumping into your own future. How often do you get to
gaze upon your eighties, while you're still in your forties? Useful, realls
Senescence is wasted on the old.'
She got so she couldn't handle a phone, and she refused to wear a hands-
free headset on principle. I went on writing her letters, but I don't know whar
she made of them.

Ttno

We are not unifud.

I used a book tour with readings in San Francisco and Berkeley as an excusd
to visit her. I don't know what I was expecting, but I failed to hide my shocl
when I walked into her nursing-home room. Something like a capuchin mon.
key was sitting up in the private bed, just waiting for the organ grinder uu
strike up a tune. For her part, Mimi didn't seem to recognize me at all. It tooL
me a moment to realize that she was suffering from the Sandon's 'mask'-*rc
inability to move her facial muscles in anything like an expression.
Bizarre pitched sounds came out of her, and it took me two phrases to rec-
ognize the song: Getting to hnow you. Getting to know all about you.
I sat down at her bedside. Flustered, I said the only thing I could thinh of
'How are you going?'
'Going,' she responded, in a thick, deliberate voice. 'A fair amount of dread
on this end, I keep telling myself that it's just the serotonine levels, but nnn
Self keeps insisting, "No, girlie, it's dread.' " She didn't want to talk about he5
illness. 'Tedious,'she dismissed. 'It's not in the chest walls yet. Lungs and
oesophagus still work. That's all that matters.'
I spent the day with her. An eternity; an eye-blink. She wanted to rnlliL.
about anything in the world, so long as it wasn't about anything concrete. 'It:$
all we're good for anyway, isn't it?'she claimed. 'Tiading abstractions. Talk and

8. Rainer Maria Rilke (1875-1926), Geman 9. Chemical found in the gastrointestinal ea$,
poet. blood platelets. and brain.
 Tue Srvnrvrn Evrrur / 3229

more talk.'She spent most of the afternoon taking issue with evervone. Peter
Ward'sr belief that humans were immune to extinction struck her as quaint
and beside the point. 'Do you know that ninety-nine per cent of erery species
that ever existed is extinct?'2
I said that seemed almost hopeful.
'Annihilates every possible position,' Mimi said.
To David Abram's3 assertion that political and economic institutions not
aligned with earthly realities are not likely to last, she countered, '\A,'hat do
you suppose he means by "last"? That's the final question, isn't it? \\lat
should we care for? On what time frame? Who's "us"? How much, atlast, can
we hope to connect with?'
Her voice was faint and uninflected. I couldn't always understand or fol-
low her. But then, that was nothing new. She was out ahead of me again,
ahead of everyone, lying frozen in her bed, looking out on a future of super-
bugs and extremophiles, bacteria that wouldn't even be starting over again,
after big life was gone, but just continuing.
'I'm struggling with consciousness,'she said, then laughed at the slippage,
the treachery of words. 'Well, not vnth consciousrless, but with the idea of it.
I just don't see the survival value. It seems to me revenue-negative. As far as
I can see, what Einsteina called the 'optical delusion of consciousness'is
exactly what has pulled this whole game apart. Slows you down and leaves
you permanently exiled. The so-called integrated self is exactly the thing that
made us torch the place. If only we could grokt what the neuroscientists are
telling us.'She banged her skull hard against the hospital bed headboard. 'A
billion years of inherited apparatus, all those earlier species, still inside, still
up there. A whole reef of neural modules, all updating each other, changed
by everything we look at, and little bits of self scraping off on everything we
brush up against. And we want to simpli$' all tkis into character? Personal-
ity? Self-realization?'
She let me feed her, and she laughed at how pathetic I was. 'Not much
practice at this, huh?'After lunch, she said, 'Want to go for a walk?'I practi-
cally had my coat on before I remembered. She laughed at me again, although
not without s)rynpathy. 'I mean the other kind of walk.
You know what I want to write? A book made up entirely of quotes. Or, you
know: quotes inexactly copied.'
'Botched replication?' I suggested.
Yeah, what 7oz said. Actually,l arnv,rnting something. Have been, for a few
months now.'She saw my reflex glance at her stiff body. 'In my head, dimwit.'
I offered to find her someone to take dictation, but she didn't seem to hear.
'The hardest part is getting away from uonder, damn it. Not easy, in my
present condition. At the same time, I hate the idea of being thrown back on
activism. It seems so belated and lame, at the end of the day. But if I could
get just one more volume out? I think it would have to be down and dirtv

I . Professor of geological sciences and zoology (b.
1949) and curator ofpaleontolog;r at the University
of Washinston in Seattle.
2. Accordlng to Ward's Future of Etolution
(2001).
3. American ecologist, anthropologist, and philoso-
pher (b. 1957) whose work emphasizes magic and
the connection between human ercerience in the
environment" and modes of perception.
4. Albert Einstein (1879-1955), German-bom
American physicist.
5. Science fiction slang for empathize, from t}e
novel Stranger in a Strange Land. (1961\, b.v tk
American science fiction witer RobertA. Heinkin
( 1907-1988).
3230 / RrcneRo Powsns

Environmental Justice Movement5 stuff. No literature; just law. Who shouk

get sued for poisoning whom. No theory no threatened biosphere. nc
microbes; just the downwind people versus the upwind people. It would dc
nothing to slow the real catastrophe, of course. But we'd be able to disappean
with a clean conscience about something.'
I asked her why not keep to the bigger story if it's about to erase all others
She sighed, a little disgusted. 'Because humans can't follow a bigger ston
They don't want to read anything larger than autobiography. At least Enri-
ronmental Justice squeezes the story down into a shape some people migh
recognize. I know, I know: it's tedious and formulaic. Hardly art.'
All art was a formula, I said. I told her I was sure she could make jusricr
interesting. She studied me, gauging whether I was ready for the truth. \\&
were thirteen, all over again. 'I'm not sure you know what irateresting is, That +
the problem with you, as a novelist. Man, you are sitting with your ass in tlr
tropical rainforest ofprofessions. Everything there is, and look at everythinc
that you haven't done with it. You should be writing deranged stuff, com-
pletely decoupled stuff. Anti-human. Non-bipedal. Fiction that could sa\€ u$
all from rationality. Fiction that knows what real life looks like. Yours is the
one line of work where a person gets to create species from scratch. Make t,
up, damn it. Anything! Want to know the best thing you ever wrote? Thac
ghost story in book five."
I knew at once which ghost story she meant. Two men, llng in an old ho*-
pital, a heart patient and a quadriplegic. The heart patient, through seniorr-
ity, has the bed by the windoq while the quadriplegic lies out of the line d
sight. But the heart patient entertains the quadriplegic all day long with tale$
of life outside the window. Incredible stuff, a constant circus of activig. T.m-
drils, trees, and vines in full flower. The teardrop pendant mosques of orio,le
nests. Gravity-deffingwebbed mammals. Colonies ofJune bugs so thickther
flowed like lava. Mass migrations blacking out the sky. The quadripleglu
grows so envious of the view that, one night, when the heart patient su$es;
an attack and reaches for the medicine on the bedside table between them"
the quadriplegic, through an impossible effort of will, rises up and knocks thr
vial to the floor. When they remove the dead heart patient the next da1'amfr
promote the quadriplegic to the window bed, he can barely contain his excir*.
ment as he turns to see the view for himself for the first time. But when hc
sees the window, the view that greets him there is a solid, grey wall.
'I love that one,'she said. 'Now that'sliterature,'
'But that one wasn't mine,'I objected. 'I got it from some 1930s storr
omnibus that belonged to my father.'
Would you listen to this guy? He wants it to be made up, and originall Od
course it wasn't yours. A botched quote, stolen since Gilgamesh.s That's rrfi,m
makes it great.'
She insisted on watching the evening news. I'm not sure what was still m
it for her, but she made me turn on the set, high on the opposite wall. \fo,*
stopped talking and watched the night's installment-insurgency and occu--
pation, suicide bombers and nuclear material proliferating thrqugh the spcm

6. A holistic effort to analwe and overcome the 7. Of Powers'snovelGalateaz.2(1995\.

powerstructuresthathave'traditionallyinhibited 8. LegendaryBabylonianking,herooftheeprcdi
environmental refom, active since the early the same name (c. 200 n.c.e.).
1980s.
 THB SrvENrn Evsr,rr / 3231

black market. I couldn't tell what the images were doing to her. All I could
see was the Sandon's mask.
Pictures came onr from Mars. The two rovers, Spirit and Opportunitv. Sur-
real'landscapes, red and spectacular and void. A sound came from her bed:
more words. 'Maybe that's why life needed consciousness. To make it to Nlars
and see how the place was covered in water once. Now just pretty rock.'
It was getting late. I fed her again, dinner. Then I had to go. I didn't lnorr
how to say goodbye. 'See you in the lab?'
She looked at me with that stiff face. 'Make me up?' she begged. 'Some
demented story? One where I get to make something come alive?'
I promised her I would.

One

When we try n pick out anythinglry itself, we find it hitched to erery-

thing else in the Universe.
_Muire

When the Sandon's disease reached Mia Erdmann's chest wall, she went on
a respirator. And when she'd had all the thoughts she cared to have, she weht
off.
Awareness-narrative imagination-is just the latest reckless experiment
set loose by faulty transcription. Who knows what survival benefits it has?
Natural selection may snuff it out tomorrow. The flaw of narrative imagina-
tion, in its current form, is that we can only feel the big in terms of the little.
We have written the end of our current story but we cannot read it yet. I can-
not begin to grasp the end of big animals, or even the mere extinction of
humans. But I could invent Mia Erdmann, and make her up, and so almost
grasp her end.r
Her estate executors sent me two pages. I don't know when she composed
them. She must have dictated them to someone. The first page read: 'The new
book or six things I think I think.'It consisted of a simple list.
l. Muir: When we try to pick out anything by itself, we find it hitched
to every'thing else in the Universe.
2. Rilke: We are not unified.
3. Leopold: We are remodelling the Alhambra with a steam-shovel,
and we are proud of our yardage.
4. Keynes: In the long run, we are all dead.
5. Pavese: Every luxury must be paid for, and eve4'thing is a luxury
starting with the world.
6. Haldane: The world shall perish not for lack of wonders, but for
lack of wonder.
The second page was a letter, with no signature. It read:
Hey, Powers. I have a new story for you. Okay, it's not new. Just a little
botched self-replication, variation on a theme. Thanks for taking me out
9.. From My Firt Sumer in the Siena (19 | l) , by asked that this line be changed to its present fm
the Scottish-bom American naturalist witer and from that originally published, whici s.6 -Bm I
erplorer John Muir ( I 838-1914). could make Mij Erdman, and alnost gnsp he
l. For reprinting in this anthology, the author end." "[
for a spin. Don't say I never paid you back. Ready? There are three prco-
ple in the room: the heart patient, the quadriplegic, and a stroke vic^tirn.
And when the quadriplegic gets promoted to ihu
-i.tduw bed, and turnc
to see that solid grey wall, and the truth of what he's done crushes hin-
he stops, composes himself, swallows his murder, and teils the stroke ric-
timl 'You won't believe what's out there. you simply won't believe what I
can see,'

2005
 LODESTAR   265

Lodestar
Choice on an epic scale disoriented Firpo, and once inside the mega-
store’s maze of glittering electronics, he had to ask a salesman for help.
Could the young man recommend the best automobile navigation system
for a first-time user? The boy chewed on his mirth and eyed Firpo as if to
say, You, Sir, are totally clueless, aren’t you? Firpo could neither confirm
nor deny.
“They all lease the same databases,” the clerk told him, pinching and
zooming the air. “They do exactly the same thing.” It seemed a simple
matter of picking the packaging you liked most.
Firpo liked the box that showed the streets of a sprawling city with a
route in red floating above them like the optimal solution to some Platonic
traveling salesman problem. He liked, too, that the device, a tiny screen
called Lodestar, promised everything the better-advertised brands did, for
half the price: nine million points of interest and complete knowledge of
every road in the country, right down to the turning lanes. It surprised
Firpo to realize the country had nine million points of interest.
Even before the sale discount, the thing was a steal. He clutched a
Lodestar to his chest and found his way to the cash registers at the front
of the store, getting turned around only once.
It did make Firpo a little nervous that he had to give the machine
his credit card, just to qualify for the free lifetime updates. The software
needed a number on file to offer additional data modules for inline pur-
chase. Firpo couldn’t imagine what other data a person might need, once
he owned nine million points of interest and every road ever built. But a
lifetime of free data was good value, even for a man of 65. In the span of
four short months, Firpo had become first retired, then divorced. All he
wanted to do anymore was get away. If the Lodestar took it on itself to
run up his card balance and bleed his bank account, Firpo would adjust.
He set the Lodestar on the dash of the Fiat and pecked in the address
of the public library across town. These days he could drive to the library
by smell. He went five times a week to pore over guide books and maps.
Firpo’s sons laughed at him for staying with print. But print was still the
best way to find things by chance.
There was an accident on Clarke, and two squad cars blocked the road.
“In two blocks, turn left,” the Lodestar said, and before Firpo could
object, insisted, “Turn left now.”
 266  
R. POWERS

Fig. 12.1  Lodestar. Image by Richard Powers

 LODESTAR   267

Horrified by his blatant rudeness and sure the machine would never
speak to him again, he drove straight through the intersection, almost
doubling the accident.
“Recalculating,” the Lodestar said. And soon enough, it had a backup
plan, one that would never have occurred to Firpo. Something in Firpo
went bold, liberated by the sheer brilliance of the machine. He tried to
thwart it, perversely zigging where the Lodestar told him to zag. With no
trace of anger or distress, as if thankful for this new Sudoku, the Lodestar
readdressed the problem, a happy Sisyphus. And with a wonder he hadn’t
felt since seeing his car in his driveway through the lens of a camera in
earth’s orbit, Firpo realized that he’d never be lost again.
He pecked the word Yellowstone into the tiny screen, and three days
later, after a 600-mile detour through the world’s largest prairie dog town
in Oakley, Kansas, he arrived at the park he hadn’t seen since his honey-
moon, 40 years before. And as he sat watching Old Faithful blow repeat-
edly, he thought back on a lifetime of road trips with his wife and sons,
the epic shouting matches and the icy silences, and it occurred to Firpo
that he and his spouse might still be together, had they had a navigator
like Lodestar.
On the long way home, Firpo stayed at two reasonably priced motels
that Lodestar thought highly of, and when he asked for the very best steak
house in Davison County, Lodestar knew just the place. Every detour was
a bagatelle. Lodestar knew every gas station, ATM, supermarket, restau-
rant, hotel, cafe, bar, museum, grocery and convenience store, specialty
shop, business, professional office, entertainment palace, salon, spa, scenic
vista, church, mosque, synagogue, school, public building, car park, rest
area, automotive service, sports facility, tourist attraction, and historical
marker along the way. The world was Firpo’s oyster.
But an hour south on I-29, the honeymoon soured. Lodestar took him
smack into a ridiculous construction snarl that Firpo had entirely forgot-
ten to avoid. An hour later, he’d moved a dozen car lengths. A message
popped up on Lodestar’s screen: “Real-time road conditions and traf-
fic modules available. Press here to unlock.” And it named a price that
seemed almost comically cheap, given the data involved.
The upgraded Lodestar knew a great deal. It knew about congestion
and population density. It knew about hazards and work zones and rough
surfaces and road closures, sometimes—it seemed to Firpo—moments
before the road was actually closed. It even knew about speed traps and
speed cameras and cameras policing lonely desert stop signs, and for the
268   R. POWERS

first time in his life, protected by a virtuoso knowledge that made his life-
long safe-betting habits seem superstitious, Firpo let out the throttle and
learned what the Fiat could do.
It is your responsibility, the startup screen warned him on every trip, to
disregard any unsafe, hazardous, or illegal route suggestions. But Lodestar
held all the cards, and Firpo had no idea how he might even tell when one
of its suggestions might be hazardous.
He went and bought the safety module too, along with the danger-
ous curves and intersections packet. Now, Lodestar knew about road
slopes and gradients; proximity of emergency and medical facilities; bridge
height and weight limits; safety histories, pavement class, and something
the database referred to vaguely as “neighborhood quality.” Firpo recalled
that moment in his childhood when his father sat him down with a map of
the city, warning him which streets any person named Firpo should never
walk down.
Fed by so many information streams, Lodestar’s instructions sometimes
wandered into the arcane. It issued routes that seemed almost capricious.
One time, it made Firpo go clear around the city just to return from the
mall, a 20-minute rerouting of a trip that should have taken five. Firpo
never did learn the reason for the detour. But another time, Lodestar’s
combined databases kept Firpo from being caught in a parking lot shoot-­
out that sent three innocent motorists to the emergency room. Perhaps it
was a coincidence; perhaps the emergent machine now possessed a fore-
sight that bordered on the inspired.
Firpo stopped questioning all but the oddest of commands that the
instrument issued. Ask not the logic: Lodestar, he began to see, had a
higher purpose for him, one he did not yet know enough to grasp.
The minute he bought the voice module, Firpo wondered how he’d
gotten along without it. He could now talk to the machine hands-free, in
natural dialogues—so much safer than pecking words into a tiny keyboard
while piloting one and a half tons of metal at a mile a minute. But speech
also opened up whole new possibilities. Firpo loved how he could say,
“Take me to my mother’s,” and Lodestar determined from the tone of his
voice whether to take him by the shortest route, the fastest route, the most
picturesque route, or the one that involved the highest chance of getting
in an accident.
He bought maps for Montenegro and Madagascar, Senegal and
Sumatra. He bought maps for places he knew he’d never get to in this life.
Sometimes he studied the roads of some distant capital, checked out its
 LODESTAR   269

must-see monuments, and located its currency exchanges. Sometimes, he

squirreled away the maps and never thought of them again. It comforted
and excited him, just to possess the information. He collected the world,
like the best of connoisseurs, hungry for completion.
Lodestar told Firpo about the personal history module. By combing
through all Firpo’s driving records that the servers had collected, com-
bined with all his credit card purchases and browser histories and bank
transactions and phone logs and library borrowings that Lodestar could
gather, and by factoring in the likes of all other GPS users whose driv-
ing and purchasing habits most closely resembled Firpo’s, Lodestar could
calculate which of its tens of millions of pleasures would mean the most
to Firpo.
Firpo was horrified. The machines were spying on him, laying his
insides bare. It was as if the Devil himself had led him up a high spire and
made him look out, saying, “All this can be yours.” He shook himself free
from the year-long bender he’d been on. He took the tiny screen off of its
dashboard mount, brought it into the garage, set it on the concrete floor,
and grabbed the largest hammer he owned. But as he lifted the blunt
weapon in the air above the insidious device, he realized Lodestar was
blameless. The hydra-like data were already everywhere, simply a matter
of gathering. All that Firpo could ever hope to smash was this obliging,
cheerful tool, offering to help him with what his own life had forever
struggled to discover: the shape and nature and means of fulfilling his
innermost desires.
Firpo bought the personal history module. In a way, he was simply
buying back the rights to what already belonged to him. To make it up to
Lodestar, he let his guide take him on another long, scenic, meandering
tour out West. And this time, every stop that Lodestar found for them,
every diversion and facility and service was exactly the one that Firpo
himself would have sought out, had he had the wherewithal to find it on
his own.
They crossed the Rockies, at a spot Lodestar had found that seemed to
come straight out of Firpo’s imagination. “Beautiful mountains,” Firpo said.
“No problem,” Lodestar answered. “One moment. Recalculating.”
“No,” Firpo blurted. “I mean these are beautiful mountains. Here,
already. Don’t you think?”
Lodestar kept its counsel. After a moment, it said, “There is music that
many people like you think might be perfect for scenery like this. Would
you like to try the music module?” And no sooner did Firpo answer yes
270   R. POWERS

than that cab of the car was flooded by the sounds of Songs of a Wayfarer,
the perfect mountain music that Firpo never knew existed but seemed to
have been written for right here, right now, him.
He told Lodestar that he wanted to go back to Omaha. The long way.
Around the world.
“Sure,” Lodestar chirped and began to calculate. It knew every dirt
track, every ferry boat, every auto train in the world. It could avoid
every unstable banana republic and evade every impoverished stretch
of ratland out there. It knew the kinds of things that Firpo always liked,
and it had on file every pleasure along every road into every Shangri-La
around the globe. It took some minutes, but soon enough, it proposed
a route.
“In three blocks, turn right on Main Street,” it told Firpo. Then off to
Alaska, the Bering Straits, Siberia, China.
“Ooh,” Firpo said. “China. The Great Wall?”
“No problem,” Lodestar answered.
They traveled for weeks, then months, and never once were they close
to being lost. That made Firpo a little sad. He seemed unable to wind up
anywhere except where he thought he wanted to be.
“Bangkok,” Firpo demanded. “Chennai. Karachi.”
Lodestar served them up, with endless delightful points of interest
along the way. They saw religious processions and great souks, and cities
nestled under stunning, snow-capped ranges and perched on the banks of
ancient rivers. They had sights and sounds and smells, alien experiences
that Firpo could never have dreamed of on his own, yet every one hand-
picked just for him, for what he’d be surest to find beautiful.
The density of the world amazed him, and every chaotic town and
tangled trade route he saw changed him forever. Yet it was all somehow
smaller and more manageable than he’d imagined.
“Tehran,” Firpo said. “Istanbul.”
It was, Lodestar told him, no problem at all. Just a question of cash and
time; the itinerary, per se, was handled in a heartbeat.
Firpo bought more modules—cultural, historical, ecological, educa-
tional, economic. He was hungry for a place he didn’t even know how to
ask for. He could find no trace of it in Greece, the Balkans, or the Alps.
“Venice,” Firpo ordered.
Lodestar balked. “No cars allowed.”
“I’ll park nearby. I’ll walk.”
“You might get lost,” the machine cautioned.
“Thank God,” Firpo said.
 LODESTAR   271

But La Serenissima Repubblica was too small to get too lost in for long.
Firpo wandered at random, in back alleys along the crumbling canal pal-
aces, until the illusion of escaping the satellites’ omniscience wore off. He
found the car and Lodestar again in the Piazzale Roma, as unshakable as
a recurring dream.
“Paris,” Firpo murmured, determined to see the City of Light.
Something in his voice warned Lodestar off of suggesting any scenic
detours.
At a darkened exit on the Périphérique, Lodestar requested a surprise
detour. The device took Firpo through a crowded banlieue that the safety
module should never have allowed. “Turn left,” it said, “now right, now
left again,” leading Firpo deeper into a narrowing concrete maze. “Pull
over,” Lodestar commanded.
Firpo did. He sat in the idling car, awaiting further instructions.
“Look left,” Lodestar said. “Paris.” Gray block towers spread like some
vast prison, as far as the eye could see.
Firpo didn’t understand. “This is in your points of interest? Why are
you showing me this?”
“Look right,” Lodestar said.
There, on a placard on a concrete barrier, someone had scrawled, “Le
jour du jugement est proche.” Some other wag had inserted, before the
word “jugement,” three red letters: NON. The day of non-reckoning is
near.
The maps had gone mad, the databases demented. Or perhaps all the
modules had begun to draw conclusions on their own.
“Get me back,” Firpo ordered, “New York. Chicago. Omaha.”
“Sure,” Lodestar said. It knew of several transports departing soon from
nearby ports, carrying cars across the ocean by the millions. “Shortest
route?” it asked. “Easiest? Most picturesque?”
Firpo asked for the fastest. Lodestar found a carrier leaving from
Normandy, through the middle of the 500-kilometer-wide garbage patch
in the center of the North Atlantic Gyre.
Firpo blanched. “Five hundred?”
“Give or take,” Lodestar answered. “The Pacific patch is bigger.”
“Jesus,” Firpo said. “Get me out of here.”
Lodestar mentioned an Epidemics, Toxic Sites, and War Zones suite
available for one-click purchase.
Firpo gripped the wheel and whispered, “Never mind. Take me home.”
“Home?” Lodestar echoed. “Sure thing.” And the screen flashed with
the word, Recalculating, recalculating, recalculating.