by Unknown
She gave you a plant, once. Not your mother: the other one. A droopy, seductive, tropical thing. A peace offering she biked over and left on your stoop, after a bloody, five-day, knockdown standoff where neither of you would concede the other's terror. It thrived under your care for a good three months. After another patented spin-out, it began to wither. Its leaves burned back from their tips, as if torched by a butane lighter. Nothing you did helped. It limped along on critical. By chance it rallied, just before she started tentatively coming around again.
A couple more synchronized dips and recoveries convinced you: this plant marked the health of the relationship. A magic gift, a talisman out of a Persian book, it flourished so long as your love flourished, and would die, definitively, when love died. You and Gwen staggered to your battered finish, and the plant's leaves fell off completely, leaving just a few bald spikes to trim the afterthought of stem. You put the husk out in the garage and left it, refusing to recycle the soil or the pot. A year later, closing up shop before your move, you discovered it. It sat in its banishment behind a scrap of chain-link fence, putting out new growth in the dark. You went inside and called her. She sounded glad to hear from you. There followed the best three weeks of your life together, unscathed because faked, sheltered by your certain departure.
Even this fiction ended viciously, in mutual recrimination, with your quick exit. As you left, you transplanted the hothouse vine to that strip of dirt that passed for a garden on the north side of your apartment. The thing could not have made it past that next Chicago Columbus Day.
Here in this dark room, in the one unrepentant slit of light your sheet tin permits, that plant proliferates. Its jungle rises up around you. How has it grown so profuse, with so little care? How could it have reached such a canopy without your tending it?
The world goes simple, finally. Air, water, light, heat. Recalling or forgetting. Liking or not liking. Finishing the evening's meal or leaving it. You have not been beaten much. Not suffered pliers or electric prod, burns or mutilations, and so, vastly better off than most of the world's full storehouse of politicals. Your mind, for a few more weeks, is still a model time machine—kingdoms, wars, harems—running at any speed, forward and back.
You've gotten out and seen the world, had a glimpse of the place that Chicago would forever have hidden from you. There are worse things than death by solitude. The silence of this infinite library hones you down to a single razor point. People, like those great sourdough pretzels that you'd personally martyr any number of the faithful to taste again, are individually twisted. The insight carries no horror, no bitterness, no recrimination. It is, finally, simple.
"The war is over," Muhammad tells you, on the twenty-third of October, 1989. Monday. In Christian countries, you remember from some long-forgotten text, the day after the baseball game.
He does not say how the war has ended, or who won. He seems neither pleased nor particularly stricken. He says only that you will be going home soon. For certain this time. That you must make yourself ready.
This does not involve all that many steps. They cut your hair and shave you, not as before, but with some attention and care. The prep still feels fake until the moment they bring you your old clothes, the things you were wearing on the day they grabbed you, cleaned and pressed, as if you'd only left them at the local laundromat, your claim ticket lost. They take your cheap cotton rags back, to pass on to the next tenant or sell on the international terrorist-supplies spot market.
And then you wait. For four days, then five. Waiting is what you're best at in the world, what you've had the most practice in. But this short sprint at the finish threatens to kill you. You sit a week with your prison-cell possessions in a neat bundle in your lap, ready to ship out at a
moment's notice.
Muhammad arrives, a spark of rule-breaking excitement in him. He unlocks you. "Mr. Taimur. Come with us. We have a wonderful surprise for you."
You stand and flee in all directions at once.
"Leave your things. Just come."
You reach the stairwell, where they shove you not down but up. In the rush of novelty, this error does not trouble you. They take you up until there is no more up left. You feel yourself step outside, onto the roof of your prison. A guard at each elbow, you walk to the imagined edge. Only now does the fact grip you. Your whole life has been one misguided leap of trust, with no alternative.
"Sit down," Muhammad orders. His voice is pleasant, expansive. The command, completely insane. Those who climb up here with you line up behind you. To shoot you in the back. To torture you at last, after all these years. To push you off.
"Take off your blindfold." You do. "Do not turn around." You couldn't, even if everything in you tried.
You look up, into a huge black wall awash with stars. The night is silent and still. Larger than any night you can remember ever looking up into. You've forgotten how a night sky plays. It strikes you dumb, the frozen depth of it, the continuity. So many vertices, unnumbered connect-a-dots, the outlines of every picture imaginable. This world is not a story. This world is not an invention. Or there never could be so many of them, spread up there, circling.
You look up, and the night is clear. The mounted beacon moon pulls at this tide inside you. There is an awe, too large for the one we're engineered for. You look down, and the lights even of this maimed city match the ones that nature hangs out against its vacuum.
Why have you been allowed to see this? Your heart swells to receive the unanswerable gift of your captors.
Such a spectacle should have been enough. But up from below, a quick flare rises to rival the moon. A violet new light, the sole moving thing in this panorama, brighter, more beautiful than these mere fixed points, it fails to stay aloft. It falls on a mirror arc back to earth, shattering the point at the far end of its parabola.
If this war is truly over, then the next one has just started. Your guides have failed to anticipate this bonus light show. They bundle you back up and return you to the cell, before human ingenuity announces any new developments. You return to sitting, for days, awaiting further clarification, your real marching orders. After another week, you take your bundle off your lap and scatter it.
This time, you don't even stanch the bitterness. Too late in history. Too much already sacrificed. You ask each guard who comes to bother you. Was the whole sham just another setup, to pick off the last little bits of you they haven't yet managed to annihilate? Not one bothers to answer. Whiplash sets in, its trough proportionate to the peak you let yourself feel. You pass into a blackness as narrow as that night sky was wide. Food becomes an intrusion. Exercise. The daily defecation. Each time you move your bowels now, you smell yourself rotting. Your scat has become your father's. It gives off the pungency that filled your childhood, the stink of the disease that ate out the man's insides, the smell still haunting the family bathroom years after his death.
One morning, on your bathroom run, you take off your blindfold in the common sty to find yourself staring at freedom. Square on the shelf above the septic squathole, atop the months of uncleaned scum, the smears of shit both terrorist and hostage, sits a shiny black machine.
You can't even guess at the make or model. You know only that you can put your index finger down its throat without touching metal. You pick up the evil and cradle it, the first time you've held one in your life. You wait for the rush of power, but feel only heavy pain. All expectation has died in you, months ago. You've fallen away from all faith in the future. The faзade is down and civilization's carpenter ants have come crawling out of the woodwork. God or some self-destructive guard has set this thing in your lap to use with impunity, to go out blazing, the last breakout, with no hope of anything except to retaliate.
Your hand hovers, paralyzed by obsolete decorum. Pointless beliefs that you cannot shake. The habit of morality cows you, even in the face of morality's full collapse. You set the black device back down on the shelf. Your last chance of escape disappear
s forever.
You come from the bathroom without your blindfold. Nothing matters any longer. The face of Sayid returns your look, first with shock, then fear. He puts on anger and charges you. One casual wave of the palm stays him.
"You left your gun in the toilet."
He blanches whiter than almond. He freezes and bows his head, as if your magnanimity in not blasting your way out obliges him to you. Forever, you stand and face one another. Then he sidles off, dashes for the bathroom to get there before the angel of the Lord. You head back to your cell, lock yourself in, and don your blindfold.
From that moment, you wear your blindfold at all times. If for an hour, then forever. No one can ever again punish you for having it off. And blindness strengthens you against the world's trick.
From down the corridor, you can hear the sounds of the others being forced in and out of their cells. Once or twice, in the shared cesspool, you detect what must be secret, wordless messages left behind by these other lives—parings on the floor tile, or wadded-up bits of new stream of taps against your wall forces you back. Thrill and despair fight inside you for the upper hand. Life will not relent.
Against your will, your mind organizes the incoming flow of bits into words. The new occupant spontaneously reinvents the same code you once used with the short-lived Frenchman, Junot. One tap equals A. The underground alphabet of first resort.
The taps say they come from an American journalist, grabbed before you. When you tap him back your name, he cuts you off: We know. He claims that others share the room with him, and names them for you. The announcement floats somewhere between joke and hallucination. Your thoughts flit about you like bees. The thread of conversation grows impossible to hang on to. You lose count of letters or forget what word you were tapping out. The things the journalist types back don't make sense. He claims that the guards let him read an Arabic newspaper from time to time. He spins out bizarre, elaborate, journalist's delusions: the Berlin Wall has fallen. Apartheid has come to an end. The Soviet Union is holding free elections.
He tries to tell you that several Western hostages have already gone home. Clearly, his need to believe has led him over the edge. And you so badly need to believe these taps of your countryman that his hopeful madness threatens to take you with it. However cruel, you break off contact. You can't make him any better. But he has the power to make you much worse.
More time passes than you can comprehend. There is nowhere on earth it could have gone. You pull yourself inward and wait. Wait for nothing. Wait for the one possible release. Your soul smashes up its last human furnishing for firewood. When that is gone, the elements can take you.
You always thought that you loved your Gwen, that you might model a care that would wear down her suspicion, teach her the feel of gladness, that glimpse of how you might, together, steer your days to a harbored end. Only now you see it, in this bombed-out emptiness, how all along your love coerced her, manipulated, failed to credit her hurt, to legitimate her confusion, simply by demanding that she live the one scenario of shared happiness you were able to imagine ...
Your love itself was the dictate she could not surrender to. All she had was sovereignty, her unilateral freedom to maneuver, to save herself from your demand for allegiance. You were her oppression, her tyranny, and whatever else she may have turned you into no longer matters. You always thought she pushed away, when, in fact, she only stood still against your pulling. All that your love could ever do for her was spare her.
So it is with your ruined life. All wars might end tomorrow and your capture would not. Kidnap is your keepers' only power, their lone proof that the future hasn't swallowed them alive. There is but one small difference: where love could not survive its cling, this hatred cannot let go and still live.
In the fall of 1990, your teeth begin to break off in your mouth. Something evil happens to them, some vast, advancing disintegration that chunks off bits of molar each time you chew anything harder than pita. You fight the throbbing, clamp down harder, grind the pain into a steady-state background of agony until, in one instant of delirium, you bite through an eighth-inch piece of the tip of your tongue.
You stand in blinding anguish. Grope your way to the length of your chain. You arch your back slowly, then spring forward, slamming your forehead into the wall.
Your head bounces off the concrete. Something issues from the impact. Your back arches and slams forward again, building your leverage. The drinking toy duck. Again and again. Your forehead slips against the viscous wet spot building up on the stone.
"Make it stop," you hear yourself scream. "Make it stop. Make it—"
And then it does.
For years, you've hung by your nails over this drop. Now your fingers straighten, their strength gone. All life has been a fight against this slide into chaos, and here at the end, you feel the slide win. You look down into the abyss, give up your grip, and drop.
41
This room is dark, and without dimension.
It has no door. Or any window where you might have entered.
42
Something doesn't want us doing this.
Antecedent? Spiegel asked his mate. If not his mate, then at least the woman who slept beside him. What is this "this" of which you speak?
Images. Look. A thousand years of mosaics. Every few hundred years they'd fill the place, floor to dome. And every couple of centuries they'd cover them over or rip them out again.
Persistent little suckers, them they. And more than a little conflicted. Conflicted is not the half of it. Waves of iconoclasm. Waves of repainting. It's never-ending. Worse than the abortion debate. An all-out war for our eternal souls.
So who wins finally? I've a vested interest in knowing. Depends on where you stop the clock. Check in one century, and the walls of the church are completely gutted. Check the next, and it's your worst billboard nightmare.
Wait. You're telling me that this figure you're working on was done in the thirteenth century and this other one in the ninth? There's no difference. Exactly the same style.
That's what the Byzantines would like you to believe. But it's the Byzantines doing the ripping?
The Byzantines. The Roman Catholics. The Ottoman Turks. The modern secularists. Name your idol basher. And it's not just images. People die over this. Lots of people.
I don't see ... I mean, what... what possible difference ... ? Spiegel's lover looked up from her expensive study plates, betrayed. He should know. He shouldn't have to ask. Form mangled the truth it housed. Every fixed image crucified the divinity it tried to copy.
Adie's tone grew chill. Well. After all. God told us not to. Burlesque skidded up against its own electric fences. The second rule He ever gave us. Uh, right. And remind me. What was the first one again? We're playing with the ultimate fire here. The one true prohibition. It's like God knew that if we ever got started drawing ... She trailed off, conscience-stricken, in the face of the hi-res evidence.
That?
That we'd keep at it until the picture was done.
Something in him wanted her off the topic. Away. So where does that leave us? I mean, we have a millennium and a half of possible interiors, ranging from figure-clogged to buck naked. Which moment are we supposed to re-create?
She held her mouse up to her chest, a numbed virgin holding up her child victim for target practice again. That's the only question.
The container unfolded, as light bent in air. The eye, wandering through at ground level, slipped into so many slant archways, secret niches, and aisle forests, so many hints at further space that it could not make out the exact floor plan. All the action flew up—up into paradise's central dome and its flanking hemispheres.
Spiegel worked on the code that would move the pilgrim through so much sculpted emptiness. He turned the visiting body into its own joystick, accelerating down any arrow of the compass it leaned into. And he added a crowning stroke, so right it seemed a given. One raised index finger swept the visitor
off the floor up into the soaring vaults.
No matter how often he tested the routine, Spiegel succumbed to the euphoria of flight. Here was the levitation all children dream of, the easy uplift of birds that the soul feels entitled to, brought weight-lessly to life. He pointed his digit skyward. The ground fell away. The upper arcades drew close. He hovered in place, twenty meters above the church floor, drafting on the currentless air like one of those miraculous medieval monks who repeat the Ascension on faith alone.
The RL lined up to try. Even hardened hackers could not get enough of flying. Hagia Sophia was fast becoming the biggest thing since bull jumping. Neither Ebesen nor Vulgamott would take part. Lim did, and paid for his ride with a gushing nosebleed.
Adie insisted on including every flourish: the Theotokos, hovering in the eastern apse; the Deesis, harsh in its second-story south gallery. A single overarching volume arose from her anthology of parts. But her flight toward sanctuary played out as the most secular of footraces: her push for transcendent detail versus spring's public demo deadline.
She labored for longer than she could afford over each tile in the southwest narthex tympanum: Justinian and Constantine presenting the church and city to the seated Christ. Each mosaic emperor held up his gift of a scale mosaic model: tiny domed cosmos inside the tiny domed cosmos they decorated.
Stevie watched her work, excited by the stillness that consumed her. So this is the dream of VR? he asked. Be of the world ... ?
She smiled and nodded. But not in it.
You know what we need?
Tell me what we need, Stevie.
Code that will crumble at the same rate mortar does. Stone that compresses. Joints that break. Bits of rubble that accumulate around the piers after the simulation has been running for a few hundred years. Rubble that no one actually programmed...