If it were possible, I would tell them how, under a different binding, they live another, open book. Someone else’s narrowly rescued life story. Yours.
“Does it have a happy ending?” Linda asked. “I want a happy ending. Make someone donate their organs, at least.”
Someone donates their organs, all of them. You.
REMEMBERING SOME OLD pain, forestalled until now beyond all the odds, you wrap up this tale. “That’s enough for tonight. Go to bed.”
These words sound out loud, as if spoken to a child, sitting on the top landing in the dark.
The child is dazed. “Dad! You promised.”
You make no response, not even objection. Growing bolder, as oldest children do (this one even older than the man he pleads with), the boy pushes his luck. “Tell that spooky one again.” You know. You, Mom, those sick kids. Wandering at random.
He wants a scare that will dispel his worst fear.
The memory comes back, intact as original violence. It cuts into you, insurgent, deep as the first urge, the desire to strangle in the crib this thing that will destroy you if so little as one of its perfect cuticles is cut back.
You hate the boy for how he has forced you to love, to love him like, yes, like a child. The first, the most sickening: a love so awful that you must watch the creature go down, calling you, stunned that you do not step in with the effortless rescue. You know now how you will watch him fall, fall forever, a fall that will not stop with skinned knee or broken arm, a cast the school friends can sign in pastel. The end of all falls is impact without end.
You cuff him, ruffle the baseball cap, run your hands through the luxurious hair. “Tomorrow. Remind me.” With appropriate groans, he stomps up—always up—to his room at rooftop.
In the kitchen, you ask this woman—this other with whom you share this house, these offspring, this life—whether perhaps we have been assembled here in safekeeping, awaiting some return.
What do you mean? she asks, although she knows what you mean. It always comes down to this. Every night.
You tell her again of that spacecraft, launched back when you were both too young to know you were young. The one with the pictures and recordings, the message in all those languages. One day the rest will trace it back to us from where they have vanished, drop by, ask us to come out and play. But all they will know how to say will be the only words we’ve taught them: “Greetings from the children of Planet Earth . . .”
She laughs at the idea, and hurt, you defend. You follow her up to bed again, in the dark.
On the way, you find the blanketed shape huddling at the top of the stairs. The woman, your wife, handles it this time. The killing responsibility of care, split down the middle between you.
“What are you doing here?” she demands, in the playacted voice of authority. “Get back up. . . . You’re supposed to be asleep. Didn’t your father just tell you . . . ?”
But it’s the little one this time, the girl, and her eyes are burning, wet, incredulous, on fire. There is a look to them, such a look it scares you both.
It can be only one thing, one discovery painful enough to rate that gauge. Remember? Remember it? And yes, she blurts out, confesses, each word catching, tearing into her with the merciless beauty of the thing. “I finished it. That book you gave me? Your old favorite? I just finished it.”
P.S. Insights, Interviews & More . . .*
About the Author
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Excerpt from Three Farmers on Their Way to a Dance
About the Author
Meet Richard Powers
RICHARD POWERS is the author of thirteen novels. His most recent, The Overstory, won the Pulitzer Prize in Fiction. He is also the recipient of a MacArthur Fellowship and the National Book Award, and he has been a four-time National Book Critics Circle Award finalist. He lives in the foothills of the Great Smoky Mountains.
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THREE FARMERS ON THEIR WAY TO A DANCE
* * *
“Dazzling and audacious. . . . Nothing short of astounding.”
—Philadelphia Inquirer
In the spring of 1914, renowned photographer August Sander took a photograph of three young men on their way to a country dance. This haunting image, capturing the last moments of innocence on the brink of World War I, provides the central focus of Powers’s brilliant and compelling novel.
As the fate of the three farmers is chronicled, two contemporary stories unfold. The young narrator becomes obsessed with the photo, while Peter Mays, a computer writer in Boston, discovers he has a personal link with it. The three stories connect in a surprising way and offer the reader a glimpse into a mystery that spans a century of brutality and progress.
PRISONER’S DILEMMA
* * *
“Prisoner’s Dilemma is magnificent. Set it up there in the stratosphere with the American novels we study like pictures in the sky.”
—The Nation
Something is wrong with Eddie Hobson Sr., father of four, sometime history teacher, quiz master, black humorist, and virtuoso invalid. His recurring fainting spells have worsened, and knowing his ingrained aversion to doctors, his worried family tries to discover the nature of his sickness. Meanwhile, in private, Eddie puts the finishing touches on a secret project he calls Hobbstown, a place that he promises will save him, the world, and everything that’s in it.
A dazzling novel of compassion and imagination, Prisoner’s Dilemma is a story of the power of individual experience.
THE GOLD BUG VARIATIONS
* * *
National Book Critics Circle Award Finalist
“The most lavishly ambitious American novel since Gravity’s Rainbow. . . . An outright marvel.”
—Washington Post
Stuart Ressler, a brilliant young molecular biologist, sets out in 1957 to crack the genetic code. His efforts are sidetracked by other, more intractable codes—social, moral, musical, spiritual—and he falls in love with a member of his research team.
Years later, another young man and woman team up to investigate a different scientific mystery—why did the eminently promising Ressler suddenly disappear from the world of science? Strand by strand, these two love stories twist about each other in a double helix of desire.
Excerpt from Three Farmers on Their Way to a Dance
Chapter One
For a third of a century, I got by nicely without Detroit. First off, I don’t do well in cars and have never owned one. The smell of anything faintly resembling car seats gives me motion sickness. That alone had always ranked Motor City a solid third from bottom of American Cities I’d Like to See. I always rely on scenery to deaden the inconvenience of travel, and “Detroit scenery” seemed as self-contradictory as “movie actress,” “benign cancer,” “gentlemen of the press,” or “American Diplomacy.” For my entire conscious life I’d successfully ignored the city. But one day two years ago, Detroit ambushed me before I could get out of its way.
The Early Riser out of Chicago dropped me off alongside Grand Trunk Station, a magnificent building baptized in marble but now lying buried in plywood. I lugged my bag-and-a-half into the terminal, a public semidarkness stinking of urine and history. Subpoenaed relatives met their arriving parties under the glow of a loudspeaker that issued familiar, reassuring tunes.
One hundred years ago, the Grand Trunk must have quickened pulses. Pillars of American Municipal balanced a fifty-foot vault on elaborate Corinthian capitals: America copying England copying France copying Rome copying the Greeks. A copper dome with ceramic floral trim bore the obligatory inscriptions from Cicero and Bill Taft. Now the station’s opulence left it a mausoleum, empty except for the Early Riser executives who threaded the rotunda in single file.
I fell
automatically into line, sensing the station’s lavout. The soaring ceiling seemed out of proportion to the size of the hall. When my eyes adjusted to Detroit’s industrial-grade light, I received a shock, the same shock I had felt as a child when, at a public swimming pool, I saw an old vet unstrap and remove his leg before taking a dip. The antique terminal had been similarly amputated: the corridor I walked down was not the station’s length but only its width. The Grand Trunk had been sent packing: plywood sheets boarded off palatial wings and multiple gates, leaving only this reduced chicken run between a lone arrival platform and the main exit.
Transferring trains in Detroit was the cheapest if not the most expedient way of getting from Chicago to Boston. Drastically cut fares promoted a new route, the Technoliner, for the first month of its run. The line subsequently folded, the technolinees long ago forsaking Detroit for Houston and northern California, and even longer ago forsaking trains for planes. Another case of our railway being behind schedule. Nevertheless, I sank as low as Toledo to take advantage of the reduced fare.
When I’m in money, I can leave half-eaten meals in restaurants along with the best. I’ve worked hard at overcoming a natural stinginess. But when I’m out of money—a cyclical occurrence paralleling America’s boom/bust economy of the last century—I easily fall back on old habits. This trip found me once again short, having just spent a year in the Illinois backwoods on a small business project that did not pan out. “Pan out” comes, I assume, from the prospectors’ days. Flash in the pan. I spent my early thirties in isolation, chasing flashes in the pan.
With my technical background, I knew that I could find work in Boston providing I could put down a security deposit on an efficiency and still have enough cash left over to dry-clean my interview suit. My money margin, marginalia in this case, did not worry me so much as the immediate problem of how to spend the six hours between the Early Riser and the Technoliner in a city I had, until then, celebrated by avoiding. It was me against motion sickness in the city autos built.
But as sometimes happens when killing time, I would come across something in my brief Detroit layover that would kill not just six hours but the next year and more before I came to terms with it. Sifting the downtown for novelties that might deaden ten minutes, I did not imagine that the next ten months would find me obsessed with everything I could learn about Motor City and the fifth-grade farmer who put it on the map.
When I made my stopover, Detroit had already been undergoing a manufactured and heavily publicized rebirth for some time. The emblem of this new era, the Renaissance Center, may be the single most ambitious building project of recent times. Its five black towers outscale the rest of the city the way Chartres Cathedral dwarfs its surrounding town. Four cylinders flank a central, massive pillar, each hanging black glass over girders in disguised International Style.
But if the city were not already dead, would it need a rebirth? The name “Renaissance Center” resembles an ad campaign declaring Sudso “All the cleaner you’ll ever need,” or a restaurant assuring, “What we serve is really a meal.” And just as when telling an old widower that he looks well we mean he ought not to push his luck, the leading citizens of Detroit, in naming the Renaissance Center, implied that they would be pleased if the city could, at this point, break even.
The size and opulence of the center meant to attract tourists and conventioneers into double-A, self-contained luxury. The palace executed its purpose too well. It drew people (read money) up and away from the surrounding businesses, and because the towers were so self-sufficient a village, the people never came back out. The area surrounding the Renaissance Center showed the signs of a hasty evacuation and rout. Gravitating toward the towers, I passed row on row of brick, triple-decked residences standing vacant, their windows and doors broken open to reveal nothing inside.
I figured that the Renaissance Center (dubbed the Ren Cen by those who make a living truncating all words into monosyllables) would be good for a half hour. The inside was a contemporary version of the Grand Trunk—the multileveled, involuted architecture that had delighted me as a boy of six, when I still believed in Tom Swift and urban renewal. I ordered a meal, reading the menu right to left, in a disk-shaped restaurant floating on a moat in the central tower, spinning, gradually but perceptibly, driven no doubt by a thousand Asian coolies chained to a mill-track on a hidden lower level.
My training in physics made the huge spinning plate seem an unintentional homage to the last, great empirical experiment of the nineteenth century. In 1887, the physicists Michelson and Morley set out to measure the absolute velocity of the earth through the ether field. The two scientists floated a gigantic slab on a sea of mercury, on the same scale and setup as the slab I now rode. They shone a beam of light through a prism in the center and back to mirrors on the perimeter, reasoning that light flowing in the direction of the ether stream would travel faster than light flowing upriver. But Michelson and Morley found no difference in light speeds, regardless of orientation. An international calamity followed in 1905, when Einstein, a Bern patent clerk with no reputation to lose, suggested preserving the velocity of light at the expense of the concept of absolute measure. The century was off to a quick jump out of the gate.
I came across an account of this experiment again much later, after pursuing the Henry Ford hoax through the infant century. But at the time, I drew the comparison casually. I waited until the disk completed one full rotation before disembarking. Since I don’t smoke or drink and swear unconvincingly, symmetry is my only vice. Escaping from the Ren Cen, I walked counterclockwise for a few blocks to reverse my dizziness. I sat down on the nearest set of steps. A bum approached from across the piazza and requested a quarter for some suntan oil. I explained that I needed it to dry-clean my interview suit and he left me in peace.
Nearby, a vintage ’50s statue depicted a green, cupreous titan hefting a petite, state-of-the-art, Waspish couple in one hand and either a globe or an automobile—I can’t remember which—in the other: Spirit of Detroit. Two lawyers fist-fought over a parking space. A woman sold clods of earth out of a shoe box. A man with a ventriloquist’s dummy explained to an indifferent crowd that the present secretary of state was the Antichrist. A prominent clock harped on the fact that I was doing a rotten job marking time. If I was going to make it to the Technoliner intact, I’d need better diversion.
I bused to the Detroit Institute of Arts. Now the finest of this century’s paintings will never make up for our concurrent botch of everything else. Art can only hope to be an anaesthetic, a placebo. The best artists know that patients always fake their symptoms and must be tricked into diagnosis before treatment can take place. The last thing I expected to find at the Institute was a mystery, a work of art demanding to be tracked down, a trail unfolding indefinitely, approximately, the way memory tries “recoil,” or “recommend,” or “record,” coming as close as “recoup,” but never alighting on its real object, “recover.”
The foyer of the Detroit museum opens onto yet another Grand Hall, a high-vaulted, Euro-sick, stone rectangle entirely unfit for displaying works of art. Rococo satyrs and curlicues alternate with heat-duct grills in a confused architectural legacy. In 1931, in the depths of the Depression, the Institute’s Arts Commission, backed by Edsel Ford, asked the Mexican muralist Diego Rivera to use the room for a fresco commemorating the greatness of Detroit.
It was an odd marriage: Edsel Ford, whose father was the first among capitalists, in cahoots with Rivera, the notorious revolutionary who secured Trotsky’s political asylum in Mexico. Rivera, the Third World champion, praising the city whose chief icon is an enormous electric sign tallying new autos as they come off the assembly ramp. Diego, who once incorporated a wall fuse box into a mural, working in a room the gaudy copy of Bourbon splendor. But Detroit and Diego shared something critical: both were in love with machines.
The Institute put up ten thousand dollars of Edsel’s cash, embarrassed to offer “the only man now living wh
o adequately represents the world we live in—wars, tumult, struggling peoples” such a meager sum. They suggested he limit his work to fifty square yards on each of the two larger walls, one hundred dollars per square yard, by some esoteric formula, considered fair for a man of Diego’s stature. Thus the Fords, standing in for Michelangelo’s papal patrons, might have suggested the fellow not do the whole ceiling, but just a little bit above the altar. Rivera grew increasingly ambitious in guilty compensation for the gringos’ liberality. Edsel, finding out that Diego meant to cover all four walls, upped the ante to twenty-five thousand.
The Institute told Diego that they “would be pleased if [he] could possibly find something out of the history of Detroit, or some motive suggesting the development of industry in this town.” They did not suspect that the huge man would cart his bulk through all the factories of Detroit, holing up for over three months at Ford’s, Chrysler’s, and Edison’s plants, sketching thousands of preliminaries. Rather than appease the room’s rococo anachronisms, he blitzed them with a vision swept up off the factory floor. And in the final work, the curlicues and satyrs go unnoticed, lost in Diego’s mechanical vision.
Rivera worked behind a screen for two years, an hourly laborer painting sometimes sixteen hours a day, in a room whose glass roof created greenhouse temperatures of over 100 degrees. Journalists, glimpsing the work in progress, declared that the murals, far from praising the city, would “knock Detroit’s head off.” The unveiling provided plenty for all those who secretly love a thunderstorm. The crowd stood baffled by the revealed work, seeing no historical allusions or civic allegories, no lineup of leading Detroit power brokers. The public flocked all the way out to the museum to see what they were forced to see every other day of the week: ordinary, characterless people chained to endless, sensual machines.
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