Gain

by Richard Powers

  She lets Don do everything now. Anything he wants. She lets him drive her to the hospital.

  “What happens now?” she asks Dr. Archer.

  “What?”

  “Now? What happens?”

  Now more tests. Now another CA-125 level check. Now she must down a chalk milkshake wider than her throat. Must swill barium until she is floating on it. Lie still for another CAT scan.

  “Rest up,” the doctors say. Rest up, and we’ll see where we are.

  She cannot read them. Their words don’t seem to follow. Then she realizes what they are saying. They have no more weapons to offer her. And still, in the face of this news that is no news, she wants to stay thankful and live.

  Clare came late to electricity. It had only just gotten onto gas, so vested was it in the goods that gas displaced. Peter thought electricity as unreliable as drunken immigrant labor. Douglas pushed for it: the most powerful creature yet to issue from the hand of man. Peter conceded the beast’s magnificence, while insisting that you don’t use a crazed rodeo bronco to pull a plow.

  When the Edison Company for Isolated Lighting electrified a block of New York, Douglas watched, enrapt. When Edison offered private power stations to all takers, Douglas wanted to sign. Peter predicted imminent disaster and asked for a moratorium.

  One by one, the firms went into the light. McCormick, Marshall Field, National Tube. If disaster awaited, it was far enough down the line so that no large firm could afford to consider it. At last, Peter surrendered to the inevitability that scientific progress had become. Less than a decade after Morgan threw the switch baptizing commercial light, Walpole blazed into its own, self-contained artificial day.

  Electricity took its place alongside soap in the health craze. People took current for relaxation. Large numbers shocked themselves religiously. The jolts charged recipients with scientific-spiritual energies.

  The health benefits of electricity did intrigue Peter. He had taken every other cure known to medicine, for half a dozen diseases that medicine never quite succeeded in identifying. The idea of a disembodied life force played upon him. Could Clare somehow combine electricity with soap into a single product, one that would unite the two great purifying agents of the day? Peter set Neeland upon the task. The idea was too far ahead of its time to be realized.

  But Neeland, inspired by electricity, leaped by analogy upon his last great contribution to the company. Somehow, he hit upon one of those uncanny inventions, the kind that anticipates another thing that does not yet exist. He toyed with a mix of tallow and rosin, satisfactory even in the hardest waters. He shaved and ground this soap, passed it through electric sparks, and gusted it in towers of hot air. After much experimentation, he hit upon a powdered soap that had no earthly use except to create new uses.

  For Neeland’s fast-dissolving granulated soap cleared the way for better mechanical washing machines. In their turn, the new machines made it possible for Clare to market whole new lines of powdered laundry soaps, soaps that beat back surges by Fels-Naphtha and other competitors whom electricity caught napping.

  Neeland died shortly after this last innovation, a death hastened by his habit of tasting his experimental samples. Within two decades, the washing machine had become a totally electric proposition. Peter’s dream of the union of electrons and lather came true, in a form he could never have imagined. But neither Peter nor Neeland lived to see their occult fantasy become an absolute necessity, the bedrock of modern existence, unless from their vantage point beyond the grave.

  IT IS NOT A

  MECHANICAL

  LUXURY BUT

  A HOUSE-

  HOLD

  NECESSITY

  •

  Blue Monday

  a thing of the

  past

  THE NEW

  IMPROVED

  WESTERN

  WASHER

  •

  Made by the

  Vandergrift Mfg

  Co., Jamestown

  New York

  SOLD ON ITS

  MERITS

  ANYONE

  CAN DO

  WASHING

  NOW

  •

  Sighs and

  Groans Turned

  into smiles

  Clare Soap and Chemical Company turned out in force for the fair of ’93. In that year, Chicago, the Republic’s wonder of the interior, hosted the World’s Columbian Exposition, the greatest single feat of engineering and the most spectacular trade show in the world.

  The rail hub by the lake, Clare’s western headquarters, had risen from the ashes of its fire and taken up the gauntlet of the future. Now it challenged itself with the task of receiving the civilized world. An army of conscripts and a fleet of construction engines turned seven hundred swampy acres near the immigrant-infested South Side into a glittering metropolis. And for the space of a few months, the White City gave visitors from all nations a glimpse of that Beaux Arts heaven that awaited the industrializing earth.

  During its brief run, the Exposition held almost thirty million visitors spellbound. A number close to half the population of the United States came out to gaze upon the fairyland and be transformed. The finger of endeavor reached down and animated the morasses, changing them into shimmering lagoons, bright terraces, and beauteous basins. At night, the glow of a hundred thousand electric bulbs bewitched the grounds.

  And on the artificial shores, monuments erupted in a panorama of exuberance. Louis Sullivan offered to turn the Exposition into a showcase for the next century. But his designs were slighted in favor of a more princely civic vision. Magnificently fake Paris Opéras, mocked up from wood and burlap, sported effulgent plaster façades more dazzling than the marble they imitated. The whole formed a vista of snow-driven white.

  “Not matter, but mind,” the fair’s slogan proclaimed. “Not things, but men.”

  A model of St. Peter’s, a monster peristyle, an “Electric Scenic Theater,” an ice railway, the halls of Electricity, Machinery, Agriculture, and Transportation, paint shops and log cabins, stables for private motor vehicles, a loggers’ camp, grain silos, sawmills, windmills, stills, mines, Izaak Walton’s house, the transplanted ruins of Yucatán—all came together in an ordered and stately frenzy, celebrating every ability known to collective man and predicting those countless skills yet to be learned.

  The buildings culminated in the great Hall of Manufactures and Liberal Arts, a tenth the size of the fair itself, the largest footprint of its kind ever built. Here Clare’s displays resided, among a boundless ocean of other exhibitors. The thousand displaying institutions included every famous name of the day. Diamond Match attended, and Merck, Van Houten, and Vanderbilt. Armour came over from just down the road, where it used every bit of its animals but the squeal and was even more efficient with its workers. All the Railroads and Oils showed up, as did Smith Coming, Cunard, Crane, Libbey Glass, Westinghouse, the Rolling Chair Company, the U.S. Wind Engine and Pipe Company, even the U.S. government, still a relatively small operation.

  Here, in Chicago, four hundred years after Columbus’s landfall, America could see itself for what it truly was: less a nation than a collective outfit for the capitalization and development of its endless hinterlands. The fair’s numerous and luminary speakers exhorted the Captains of Industry to use the power of manufacture for the uplift of all nations and the betterment of the human race.

  The attending partner companies did not neglect to erect a simulated “Workingman’s Home” for the thirty million visitors to examine close at hand. Labor’s cabin came across as nothing less than a capitalist pavilion in the bud.

  Sitting Bull’s camp, too, had been taken apart stick by stick and reassembled near the entrance to the Midway, on Fifty-ninth Street, alongside the Brazilian Music Hall and the Ostrich Farm. The fair found someone to play Sitting Bull, killed three years before while resisting arrest. Buffalo Bill’s Wild West Show, where Sitting Bull had until recently played himself, lay encampe
d to the south, between Sixty-second and the elevated railroad.

  Ziegfeld’s musical attractions opened for Frederick Turner’s lecture on the American frontier. Scott Joplin led a band and Frederick Douglass turned away from the White City in rage to write his last great speech, The Lesson of the Hour. Sandow the Strong Man presented his muscles for public palpation by members of both sexes. On the Midway Plaisance, Little Egypt gained world renown for a hootchy-kootchy that she never actually danced. The movable sidewalk down the pier was a mass, smash hit. The Norwegians sent a Viking ship, Krupp previewed its most impressive new guns, and the engineer George Washington Gale Ferris debuted his 250-foot power-driven wheel.

  The World’s Columbian Exposition assembled in one place all the inconceivable astonishment of the industrial age. It made visible the mighty conversion of matter worked by mechanization’s torrent, and rendered undeniable all the blessings unleashed by the ingenious genie over the space of three generations. It compiled an anthology of those inventions that had cracked open the globe’s buried wealth: steam, electricity, telegraph, telephone, chemistry, internal combustion, dynamo: and surpassing them all, the limited-liability corporation.

  Those who visited the fair had that one-time chance to walk around in the belly of a magical landscape. In one afternoon, they could witness, up close, all the elements of life that had passed away and those that would replace them. Here, in one concentrated spot, blazed forth all the wonders of consolidated wealth. The ivory Mecca’s blinding white skyline proclaimed the extent of the recent strong change, while announcing all the overhauls still in store.

  Henry Adams calculated that the fair’s inventions, on their current curve of progress, offered “infinite costless energy within a generation.” Adams came to Chicago looking to complete a lifetime’s education. There he found that

  the inconceivable scenic display consisted in its being there at all—more surprising, as it was, than anything else on the continent, Niagara Falls, the Yellowstone Geysers, and the whole railway system thrown in . . .

  Education ran riot at Chicago, at least for retarded minds which had never faced in concrete form so many matters of which they were ignorant. Men who knew nothing whatever—who had never run a steam-engine, the simplest of forces—who had never put their hands on a lever—had never touched an electric battery—never talked through a telephone, and had not the shadow of a notion what amount of force was meant by a watt or an ampère or an erg, or any other term of measurement introduced within a hundred years—had no choice but to sit down on the steps and brood as they had never brooded . . . [P]robably this was the first time since historians existed, that any of them had sat down helpless before a mechanical sequence . . .

  Chicago asked in 1893 for the first time the question whether the American people knew where they were driving . . .

  Once admitted that the machine must be efficient, society might dispute in what social interest it should be run, but in any case it must work concentration.

  All came to visit, for even those who did not travel to the fair were still its guests. One could see the festoons and garlands from one hundred and fifty miles downstate, in a little town whose principal growth industry had until recently been the retirement and death of farmers.

  In the few short years before the World’s Columbian Exposition, Lacewood had graduated from a tenuous camp on the land’s unforgiving crust to a permanent settlement. Just the tiniest edge of surplus, the smallest compounding of wealth made it possible to put a little something away, to hang prints on the walls, to listen to music at the end of the day, even to make music yourself.

  Clare’s fertilizer factory had changed the very nature of the town’s existence. Lacewood was now only two days from anywhere. Of course, two days had grown proportionately more valuable, not to be squandered, now that one’s time could earn something. But Chicago itself lay only a cheap day trip away.

  Lacewood came up to the Exposition, all of Lacewood. Damning the expenses, Clare plant workers spent their priceless day off looking upon what no worker had ever looked upon. They freighted their way through the rehabilitated prairies. They stepped off the platform at the specially built terminal that managed a continuous flow of tens of thousands. And they gazed out at the electric Columbian Fountains, where, in one blink, they saw their future.

  While strolling the esplanades, finding their way with their indexed Rand McNally courtesy map, naturally they stopped to visit the mother company. Clare’s Exposition theme, drawn up in an act of collective genius by Nagel’s creative office, had soap tying together the diverse and meliorating world. Soap lay at the heart of this dizzying advancement. Soap in all its incarnations—secret earth medicine, molten productivity, recaptured pureness, evolution’s highest testament—typified the best of what human effort had to offer.

  So obvious was this theme that it almost did not need to be sold. Soap’s theme was the theme of the Exposition itself. What was the White City but urban, collective man scrubbed clean and prepared for the coming banquet? Commerce itself crystallized around the very point. The virtues of cleanliness were the virtues of productivity. One did not arrive without the other. The world could unite in this insight. From the Javanese Settlement to the Indian School, from the Bedouin encampment to the Soda Pavilion, good business made good neighbors.

  This message, this moment, belonged to the children of Columbus. Such, too, was Clare’s implicit copy. Even mighty Pears, “a potent factor in brightening the dark corners of the earth as civilization advances,” whose cakes were “the first step towards lightening the White Man’s Burden,” laid down that burden at the White City and asked the U.S. soap syndicates to pick up the torch.

  Britain, from its lovely but modest pavilion by the North Pier, saluted its giant progeny across the Government Plaza, blessing it in this rite of passage. Clear to everyone, this spectacular assemblage of fake Beaux Arts buildings formed a great world capital calling out for an empire. America had her eye on economies of scale. Fruit, minerals, spices, tea, rubber, guano: a growing appetite for raw goods had left her chafing at her borders, snatching up those islands that the Wilkes expedition had charted for this very reason, a half century before. And even sooner than Imperial Chicago would have predicted, Illinois boys found themselves fighting Filipino guerrillas and opening China’s commercial door by force of arms.

  Clare’s Exposition booths seemed remarkably cozy, given the size to which the whole had grown. They shed the showman’s hoopla of Philadelphia and concentrated on more chemical and mechanical engineering than all but a few intrepid visitors could fathom. But in between the scale vats and dryers, they pasted up the noble “Measure of Civilization” series of placards. Each image marked off, in remarkably congruent yardstick ticks, the paired advances of sanitation and prosperity.

  Small black-and-white reproductions of these posters, with their careful admonition coupled with prophetic uplift, rapidly became collector’s items. Their appeal spread as deep as their reassurance: the promise of a modicum of well-being for anyone who stayed the material course and washed frequently.

  That sweeping Columbian guarantee convinced everyone but Nagel, the Clares, and the bulk of their company managers. For the enchantment of Chicago could not have come at a less auspicious hour. The Exposition played out in the middle of yet another desperate depression: the most desperate yet, to those caught in it. Twenty blocks to the west of the White City, the ring of smokestacks coughing up dense columns of coal sludge were once again blinking out.

  Even deeper troubles lapped at the pillars. The fair commemorated that moment when the industrial system seemed either about to transport the globe into a new Canaan or about to plunge all society over the brink. The gleam of capital, on alternate days, either hinted at marvels still to come or marked the high-water line of a spent flood.

  Underneath the encrusted plaster, Chicago’s celebrated promise of entrepreneurship bordered upon a bitter joke. No new start-up could
take root where a corporate tree already held sway, and corporations had long since cornered every essential tract of sunlit ground. The small businesses that remained already seemed curios of another age. Cash flowed like interstellar dust falling into gravitational masses. It streamed into ever-larger, more unappeasable monopolies, trusts, and syndicates. “The day of combination is here to stay,” Rockefeller proclaimed. “Individualism is gone, never to return.”

  For a long time, the nation’s hired hands had remained mostly willing to pay the price of combination. Whatever the penalty, the vast gains in economy and efficiency poured back their blessings in real weight. Wealth’s tapped wellsprings led many to expect that work conditions would steadily improve until the factory became a well-appointed health spa.

  But now those who hauled the yoke of incorporation began to feel the mechanical servitude that awaited humanity. The bargain no longer seemed acceptable, let alone winnable. Seven years before the fair, labor threatened to pull the whole house of cards down around its own ears. The year before, Homestead had run with blood: open war between the Pinkertons and anarchists. And discontent had only begun to spread.

  Armies of the industrial unemployed descended upon Washington to vote their boots. Strikes across the nation demanded an end to big business’s sanctioned system of theft. Pullman, once the idol of labor for his paternal and enlightened workers’ village, now charged his workers more for rent than he paid them. When the inevitable uprising came, only U.S. troops, sent to Chicago over the objection of the state governor, saved the Pullman company from the wrath of its incorporated parts.

  The fair’s brief moment of intoxication awoke in hangover. One by one, the soaring Classical façades crumbled, their plaster-cast cornices returning to chalk and burlap. Fire destroyed much of what remained. Of the entire mock cityscape, only one exhibit building survived to see the new century. During the Great Depression, the city rebuilt the Palace of Fine Arts in limestone to house the Museum of Science and Industry. The enormous temple of technology lay just two miles from Clare’s own futuristic Chicago processing plant, which finally moved offshore, to Indonesia, in 1987.