Plowing the Dark

26

They laid down the old floor over the newer one, wall to wall, an inch to the inch. The synthetic white composites reverted to knotty pine. Jackdaw, Adie, and Spiegel measured and cut each wood-grained symbol, planing the cured boards like the most careful of carpenters.

They tinkered and trued, pulling up the planks from the source room and shimming them into the target. It took some doing, for the original floor at Aries had traveled a good deal. The wood was old and warped, and often refused to behave at all. But plank by plank, the salvaged floorboards agreed to lie down in their new frame.

Adie insisted that they save the spotty varnish. She wanted the worn patches translated wholesale to their same coordinates in the rebuilt bedroom. That meant work, for origin and destination belonged to different ordinal realities.

Her goal was a floor that swam and sank just like the original, yet sat snugly on the joints of the Cavern floor it overlaid. She wanted an Aries you could walk on: a lumber bridge fitted across time and space, tongue in groove, the stains and nicks of its private history preserved intact.

Spiegel watched Adie walk across the translated boards. Where her feet trod on the illusion, Magritte-like, they occluded it. Jackdaw attended on her every hand-drawn desire. Spiegel put the postadoles-cent somewhere in his early twenties: two or three years older than Steve had been when he met the woman. Back at the beginning of creation, everyone was twenty.

Whatever made Adie choose the University of Wisconsin, Spiegel had long ago forgotten. He barely remembered his own reason for going to college in what Life magazine called "America's best place to live." What he remembered most about Madison was the cold. The town's average daily temperature hovered around 19 degrees. He'd followed a high-school sweetheart there, a woman whom he hoped to marry. They lost one another to multiple discoveries halfway through their first semester. So life always liked to run the little shill: the immortal cause vanishes, but the short-term effects last forever.

Stevie attended school on the Spiegel Memorial Scholarship, the family nest egg scraped together over two decades of middle-class scrimping. His parents meant the investment to give him a leg up in the practical world: fraternity membership, good connections, and a degree in civil engineering. Thirty credits into the process, little Stevie managed to sabotage all that, and more.

Madison was still reeling from its fatal bombing of the year before. The Army Math Research Center in Sterling Hall, "think tank of American militarism," had been gutted by campus radicals in the single most destructive act of sabotage in American history. The air on Lathrop Drive was still electric. A brilliant young low-temperature physicist lay dead, and a major national university stood teetering between revolution and revulsion, between We can do anything and What have we done?

Steve went back home to La Crosse that second Christmas, a semester's worth of dirty laundry in tow, and dropped his own bombshell on stunned parents. He'd found his real vocation. He couldn't, in good conscience, earn one more credit in engineering. He would study to become a poet. He stopped short of the phrase "true artificer," but it was in there, knocking around the back of his cerebellum.

This was the point in such stories when the father traditionally took the newly enlightened student prince out behind the woodshed and beat the living shit out of him. Maybe the Aged P was too incredulous to deliver the beating, as he should have. Maybe, in the wake of the Army Math bombing, his father's own sickened convictions had simply dissolved. Maybe Stevie's raw exuberance carried him through. Whatever the cause, both parents simply went ashen and wished him well, writing him off to a career as a greeter at some terminal superstore up on the periphery of north suburban Kotzebue.

Some residual shred of sanity prevented Steve from telling his parents the reason for his conversion. It had come in Introduction to English Literature, a Cakewalk survey course he took to satisfy his general education requirements. The teacher — in retrospect, probably only a hapless grad student caught up in the academic pyramiding scheme, awaiting his own superstore destiny — by way of lightening his class prep, had had each student recite and explicate a favorite poem.

And so in October of his twentieth year, Steve Spiegel sat in shock, listening to a shag-cut pug-faced girl across the room who had come to class tie-dyed on roller skates speak the words "Once out of nature I shall never take My bodily form from any natural thing."

The words, he supposed, were beautiful. The girl, he decided, was almost. But the way she said them: that was the warrant, the arrest, and the lifetime sentencing. Out of her mouth came a stream of discrete, miraculous gadgets — tiny but mobile creatures so intricately small that generations marveled and would go on marveling at how the inventor ever got the motors into them.

Once out of nature. The train of syllables struck the boy engineer as the most inconsolably bizarre thing that the universe had ever come up with. And this female mammal uttered the words as if they were so many fearsome, ornate Tinkertoys whose existence depended upon their having no discernible purpose under heaven. The words would not feed the speaker, nor clothe her, nor shelter her from the elements. They couldn't win her a mate, get her with child, defeat her enemies, or in any measurable way advance the cause of her survival here on earth. And yet they were among the most elaborate artifacts ever made. What was the point? How did evolution justify the colossal expenditure of energy? Once upon a time, rhythmic words might have cast some protecting spell. But that spell had broken long ago. And still the words issued from her mouth, mechanical birds mimicking living things. Sounds with meaning, but meaning to no end.

We'll put the door here, that girl's latest update said. Start it flush up against the back of the left-hand wall.

Spiegel and Jackdaw, her vaudeville apprentices, nodded in stereo.

We'II have to figure out what the floorboards actually look like, under the bed.

We can just reuse the piece we put in over there, Jackdaw said, all innocence.

No, no. That would be cheating. We have to follow the boards that he painted, and extend them. Work outward from the bits he could see.

Jackdaw groaned. But it's all going to be invisible in the finished product anyway.

Not to us, it isn't.

"But such a form as Grecian goldsmiths make." The girl's lips were a factory of ethereal phonemes. "Of hammered gold and gold enameling." Spiegel had never heard words pronounced that way — alloys of confusion and astonishment. Her mouth became the metal-worked machine its sounds described. Whole sentences of hammered gold tumbled out of it.

Stevie might have taken her for a drama student, except for the clotted paint under her nails. She finished reciting and launched into her explication, an associative ramble through the maze of images. She'd drawn a series of pen-and-watercolor sketches, visual aids to illustrate her points. Byzantium. A gyre. The mechanical bird, which looked to Stevie like an intricate, gold-leafed, cutaway, feathery Bulova.

This woman exuded a flavor he'd forgotten ever existed. She had the scent of immediacy, of planlessness. Existence was stranger than he'd ever realized. Every life held in its hands a bit of charcoal stick pressed from the ashes of the first campfire.

She must have felt his stare upon her as she gave her presentation. For when she brushed past him after the class let out, she asked, "That made absolutely no sense at all, did it?"

"You smell like something," he told her.

She laughed. "I'm sure you're right."

"No," he said. The breeze of association, the loose smell of free syllables played all around him. Pleasures too recently overlooked. Exercises out of the singing masters' book. "No. You smell like something my father used to keep in cans out in the garage. To clean paint brushes."

"That would be turpentine."

"Why are your fingers all green?"

She brought them up to her eyes. "It's not green. It's mostly chartreuse."

All he could do was nod.

"What do you do?" she quizzed him. Before any other data. Even before asking his name.

"Oh," he improvised, "I… write." He tipped his head to the side, toward the paperback Collected Yeats cradled in her chartreuse fingers. He tapped his own secondhand anthology, as if the volume were some hefty tab he'd run up at an all-night sidewalk cafe.

The bed should run from just inside that corner to right about here. The late-day Adie impersonator, her fingers now pristine, stood on an invisible X marking a spot on the Cavern floor that corresponded to points deep beneath the grid. She stood straight, arms at her side, turning her body into a surveyor's siting stick. Jackdaw, at the console, got a bead on her. He typed some words, and a reddish rectangular block sprang up along the wall's length, up to this woman's still-callow waist.

A little higher, she called out. To figure in the blankets and headboards.

Nothing in this voice still hinted at its precursor, the voice that had long ago told Spiegel, "Well, if you write, you ought to come to our Tuesday nights. In fact, I'm surprised I haven't seen you there before now."

"I mostly keep to myself. I work in a style that isn't really… fashionable these days."

Her eyes widened, bestowing on him their full prize. "In that case, you have to come."

Anything worth devoting a lifetime to, young Stevie figured, might require as many as three days to master. Since the next Tuesday soiree was five days away, he was still in reasonable shape. He hadn't written verse since a hit-and-run sonnet accident in senior year of high school. But as with all other problem sets, he did his best work under the gun.

He showed up at the girl's apartment — a funky, carved-up Victorian boardinghouse near Lake Mendota — on Tuesday night, nerves shattered by caffeine, folding and unfolding a spayed scrap of mongrel doggerel that was probably prosecutable under even the most generous interpretation of the Intellectual Property Protection Act. His spot of manic plagiarism was all the more alarming for being at least as incoherent as it was shameless, a "Sailing to Byzantium" in leg-weighted waltz time. And he dragged this little ditty into a room draped in more black than a Greek Orthodox Good Friday service.

What is it about black? he asked the woman, seventeen years later, as they waited for Jackdaw to dummy up the place holder that stood where the bedside chair soon would. Black and the art scene? The fad that refuses to die. Why has every trendy crowd for the last two centuries embraced it?

She smiled at him, preoccupied. It's the perfect preemptive look, all-black. What you wear when you're not sure what the other guy is going to wear. Deeply conservative, passing as Rad. Why do you ask? she asked.

He'd sat there, at twenty, dying a million Oxford button-down deaths while reincarnated greasers and beatniks took turns presenting their "work" and laying themselves open to the flagellation of their peers. Poetry, prose, sculpture, music, pictures: he'd underestimated the spread of the contagion. He'd stepped into the middle of an old blood feud, warring family factions contesting the last will and testament of this dead, penniless patriarch, Art.

The terms of the fight were obscure, even to those who had been at it for years before Spiegel blundered on the scene. But the war seemed to come down to whether that liberating anagram, now just five days old inside him, should be indulged freely or called to answer for those same abuses of privilege and power that had trashed the rest of the world. It opened Spiegel's eyes. Art was embroiled in the same conflict that had claimed the Army Math.

Aside from wanting to avoid his own all-expenses-paid trip to Southeast Asia, Spiegel had no real political agenda. He'd hoped this aesthetics thing would be relatively simple. Now the night was forcing him to take sides, to declare his allegiances on issues he couldn't even decode. All he knew was that he'd sooner stick his head in a gas oven than read aloud in front of this tribunal.

Forty minutes into the street-fighting, during an especially ugly exchange over the political irresponsibility of a bleary chalk abstraction, a short, stocky guy swaggered into the room wearing a Bucky Badger sweatshirt and toting a dirty gym bag. Talk broke off, and all eyes fixed on the infidel. The fellow reached slowly into his sack and withdrew a damp jock strap.

"This is my piece," he announced. "It's a conceptual work." Protagonists of both stripes shouted the man down. He heckled back, creatively, in kind, and the session mercifully degenerated. Ted Zimmerman: the only name that stuck with Spiegel from that evening. The only person he cared to talk to afterward. A study in fearless delight. The man who saved Spiegel from having to read his first adult poem out loud in front of a room of hired aesthetic killers, there in war-torn Madison.

"My God, you vanquished them," Spiegel told Zimmerman, out on the chill front steps of the Victorian. "Three cheers." "Vanquished?" Zimmerman asked.

For one uncertain second, Spiegel thought he'd misread everything. He gestured inside. "The war between art and ethics."

"Oh." Ted's nod went sardonic. "Mutual coercion versus mutual communion. Whose side are you on?"

"I wish I knew. So what do you do?" Nothing if not a quick study. "I play handball. And I'm working on a damn octet on the side. Confessions of an apolitical man. You?"

"I do poetry." A lie he'd do penance for, by making it come true. Ted proceeded to grill Stevie about everyone he'd ever read. "Yeats is fine. But man cannot live by fruitcake alone. Have you read Rilke?

Have you read George?" Spiegel shook his head knowingly, trying to memorize the names.

They graduated to novels, plays, essays. Zimmerman held forth on Habermas and Musil. He quoted from Man and Superman, delivered a brief history of the Successionist movement, and glossed over chiti-nous Frankfurt School tracts. To Steve, half the people the man mentioned were total ciphers. Talk graduated to concert music, Ted's real passion. Spiegel caught the names Schoenberg, Webern, and Berg, whom he gathered were a kind of upscale Tinker to Evers to Chance. By the time they stood up from the cold steps, Spiegel had both a handball date and a considerable homework assignment.

"Time to go home," the composer announced. He breathed the night deeply into his lungs. "The two hours on either side of midnight. My favorite time in the day to nudge a piece forward." "Mine too," Spiegel decided.

"Thanks for the words," Ted said. "We live our lives in hope of the company of women. But barring that, an amusing man."

Spiegel ran up against the line again a year later, still plowing through his friend's reading list. It jumped out at him, underlined, from Zimmerman's beaten-up copy of Women in Love.

Inside the house, the black-clad crowd still hashed out the morality of depiction, just as their affiliated revolutionary cells did, by the tens of thousands, in accredited institutions across the face of the divided country. Things showed no sign of reaching consensus anytime before daybreak. Spiegel found his hostess and thanked her for the entree. The life-changing introduction. "Make a friend?" Adie asked.

Spiegel shook his head, dazed. "The man's a genius." Her eyebrows plunged. "Ted? Ted's a pleasure lover." The indictment sounded forgiving, as if the disease could infect even vigilant people. Spiegel felt himself deeply and beautifully at sea.

"You should give him a chance," he said. "Sit down and talk to him. It's amazing. Like trying to converse with a whole hive of social insects, crawling in all directions."

"Oh, Ted and I used to talk together pretty regularly." The girl held Spiegel in a wary stare. The look dismantled and reassembled him.

"Then what happened?"

"Then we started sleeping together."

His stomach pitched. He was at sea with the obvious. Everything good, everything transforming about this evening would be lost. Already, he loved both these strangers too much to choose between them. And he was still too young to know that choice was never an option.

Weeks passed before he caught painter and composer alone together. Neither would talk to him about the other. Spiegel wondered whether Adie was one of those muses to creative men who did all the actual creation herself. But there was something more to that relationship, something each gave the other that Spiegel couldn't quite name. Their mutual, gravitational pull passed through crowded rooms, without a single signal passing between them. Their closeness sailed forth, silent, invisible, painstaking — like the intimacy both of them struck with the things they made.

Artist and musician were joined at the hip. Their pact with their newly adopted poet excluded Stevie even as they tutored him. Spiegel doubted whether two people ought to be that close. Yet he drew closer to them, ready to swap places with either or take up any kind of triple orbit they asked, however unstable.

Ted dismantled Stevie in several dozen consecutive games of handball before luck and desperate caginess gave Spiegel his first two-point win. By then, between games, they'd worked their way through Schoenberg's Pierrot and Second String Quartet together, and Spiegel had begun to feel the air of another planet.

Zimmerman demanded reciprocal gifts of allegiance, scouting reports from lands he hadn't yet reached. Stevie obliged with pleasure, with memorized parcels of Eliot and Stevens, stray trinkets for the two of them to analyze that shared no common thread except the thrill of discovery and the whiff of bewilderment. But always Yeats: Spiegel returned to the man with such persistence that Zimmerman finally gave up trying to break him of the obsession.

Adie rode them both. "Do you two aesthetes ever read anyone who hasn't been dead for decades?"

A decade and a half had passed. Now they were all dead. The joints that had limbered in that brief spring had all ossified. Klarpol and Spiegel, or their stiff adult puppets, straddled the amber planks of a Cavern that now resembled one of those rental storage sheds along the side of the interstate. No country for old men. Two adults, already fossil, stood with a youth completely unlike the one they'd both loved, a boy no more than the placeholder for a man whose life had peaked at

twenty-three.

The Cavern filled with colored boxes, transparent shipping containers stacked against its walls. Spiegel, Adie, and Jackdaw milled about among the marker blocks, passing right through the spectral surfaces as they surveyed them.

Adie cast a cold eye over the consolidating bedroom. The second chair looks too big. We need to scoot the washstand three inches to the

left.

The three of them hacked a path forward, advancing to the steady rhythm of prototype, tweak, prototype. Seattle and Aries differed so greatly that only the most desperate gaze could shoehorn the one into

the other.

Just such desperate looking had set Spiegel loose, back in that free-range spring. He'd never thought to indulge in it before that May. Now no more beautiful a town on earth existed than their little bandit's roost. Across the campus, trees broke out in absurd petaled profusion. Life returned to life, sporting a spin, strangeness, and charm that Spiegel had never suspected.

All things merited writing home about, now that he had his own address. All things turned worth describing. Writing became what he did. He wrote about what passed for landscape, there in the Midwest. He wrote about secondhand clothes in a thrift shop. He wrote about liquor store parking lots. He stood in front of Sterling Hall, so recently bombed out, and made poetry out of the forgetting renovation.

He set up his easel in front of the canonical masterpieces, scribbling pale imitations of everything from Blake to Auden to Wilbur. The ratio of borrowed to earned fell in steady amortization. He loved the saintly, cassocked presumption of the process, loved the sense that, so long as he juggled the feet of his centipede lines, he did nothing to compound the world's misery and perhaps even, in some insignificant way, lifted it a little.

The tapestries that issued from this Gobelin factory all bore the millefleur border of sex. The housemates paired off in all available arrangements. On a semester-long tour of the vineyards, they savored one another's tastes without swallowing. Soirees devolved into soft-core Satyricons, seven, ten, or a whole baker's dozen bodies lying around the Grand Ballroom in a ring, their various parts affectionately threaded. Throughout December, Lydia the pianist graced Spiegel's room, her chill extremities needing to be touched in four forbidden ways at once. By January, Lydia had drifted on to David, making way in Spiegel's bunk for a dancer named Diana, who wanted Hopkins in her ear as he held her corded thighs from behind, trying to fill her.

Sometimes at nights, when he sat working, Adie would come to his writing desk, sit on his lap, push back his hair, and appraise his face. But she never did more than laugh at his advances, plucking his hand from her breast like lint from a pullover.

Ted had women. Any number of them. Whenever new blood showed up at a house event, the composer had her feeling like Aphrodite's body double before the evening ended. He lived to prove that he could charm anything with two X chromosomes.

Zimmerman's perpetual act of seduction always resorted to the same time-honored weapons. He auditioned prospective partners on his best arsenal of quotes from Women in Love. "Let love be enough then. I'm bored with the rest." "There is a golden light inside you that I wish you would give me." And most-loved of all: "See what a flower I've found you." For those who still held out, he enlisted Dives and Lazarus. Women who resisted that tune were simply not worth further effort.

When that voluptuous folk melody trickled down from the Grand Ballroom, Ted's housemates knew to stay below. "I don't get it," Spiegel challenged him one morning, after the previous night's conquest had slunk off into daylight. "You slave over this jagged, atonal, mathematically rigorous stuff. How can you stand listening to that schmaltzy anachronism?"

Ted leaned across the toasted bagels and put one hand on each of Spiegel's shoulders. "You know the story about the woman who made Oscar Wilde listen to her daughter play a sonatina? 'How do you like the music, Mr. Wilde?' 'Oh, I don't like music. But I like that' "

It stunned Spiegel: the success rate, the frequency and vigor, the beauty of the conquests, their utter willingness to disappear cleanly and completely afterward, when the mutual projections dissolved. Like nothing he'd ever thought possible. Stevie could not say what drove Ted's feats of appetite. Surely the man couldn't need any reassurance he didn't already possess. There seemed as little sport in the conquests as in the repetitive handball trouncings.

"Know what I like best about twelve-tone music?" Ted told Steve, as they looked over the reams of pencil annotations for his infinitesimally advancing octet. Pure Zimmerman: the annotations swelled while the notes stood still. "The appreciative female audiences who are so intent on distracting you from it."

Those appreciative audiences were sufficiently distracting to keep the music itself from ever materializing. Appetite against appetite, notes had little hope against skin tones. "Don't know about you and verse, buddy boy. But women are a great and mysterious motivator to me."

Adie had been right. The man was a fun lover. And all his endless, absorbent energies were but instruments to that manic end.

If it bothered Adie, she never showed it. If she retaliated with her own men, she did it so discreetly that Spiegel never knew. One night she came into Steve's room and lay on his bed, sketching into a tablet she held upon her knees while he sat in the bay window chair slogging through Derrida's Of Grammatology. He put the book down and moved to lie next to her. She draped her left hand on his head, still sketching with her right, a portrait that went futurist, once the subject abandoned it.

"Doesn't it bother you?" he asked her.

"Hmm?"

"All of Ted's…?"

She sat up, tipping the sketchbook away. "All of Ted's colonial operations?" Still clear-faced. "It can't," she said.

He waited for explanation. None came. "What do you mean, 'can't'?"

She touched her thumb to the center of his forehead, stamping him forever. "It can't bother me. I can't let it. Life is long."

It struck Spiegel, in that moment, that he would never have a life mate. Never a real one, for any length of time.

By spring, Mahler Haus lay sacked and ruined. The winds of possibility blew utopia apart. The Madison bombing had spelled the end of world revolution. The Mahler Haus experiment in group living spelled, for each of them, the end of idealism. Each creator retreated to his private bedroom, and the Grand Ballroom closed its doors on group communion for good.

"Things fall apart," Ted told him. "The center cannot hold." But the man seemed untouched by the centripetal wipeout.

In Spiegel's memory, his parents' divorce the following year seemed a minor rehash by comparison. Now almost twice the boy poet's age, Spiegel couldn't recall the particulars of the smashup with any resolution. He felt only the shame of failed reciprocity, of free flights crashing

back to ground level.

Things got recriminatory, fast. All soirees ground to a stop. Potter David's beautiful celadon dishes disappeared from the kitchen. The housemates liquidated the group bank account and settled all remaining bills through bitter back-and-forth. Ugly altercations ensued, about who'd lost the key to the cellar. About who forgot to shut off the oven. About who left the hair in the sink. Even when he knew it was his damn hair, Spiegel denied it.

Ted took the easy way out. Doors all over Madison opened up for him, the apartments of women who needed a new fix of Dives and Lazarus. "You son of a bitch," Spiegel laid into him, the night Ted came back to the house to move his belongings out. "You're going to abandon me in the ninth circle of hell, while you head off to fresh pastures."

"Think of it as an adventure." Ted smirked. "Besides. You're not alone."

"Who do you mean? Adie? What good is she? She's camped out over at her studio in the Education Building."

"You think I don't know that? She's not who I mean." "Who, then? I'm left here to pick up the pieces. It makes me sick to my stomach, even to think about working. What the hell am I supposed to do?"

With a single, smooth motion, Zimmerman went to the shelves of the pillaged group library and found the red-spined paperback Collected Yeats that no one now wanted. He took down the book, slowly read, then scribbled something on the flyleaf. He chucked the volume at Spiegel, who caught it in mid-arc, as if they'd practiced the slant pattern for months. Zimmerman embraced his friend with the casual backslapping of joyous athletes. And left.

From his second-story window, Spiegel watched the figure jaunt down the leaf-exploding street. Only then did he open the ratty paperback and read the inscription:

We have fed the heart on fantasies,

The heart's grown brutal from the fare;

More Substance in our enmities

Than in our love; Î honey-bees,

Come build in the empty house of the stare.

The words came back now to fill this new emptied house, art's latest restored ruin. Adie squatted in front of the colored slab that would become the virtual Dutchman's bed. She held her hands out in front of her, in space, resting them on the pretend surface that would soon become blankets. Then she rested her head on those folded hands. What's that cliché? The one attributed to every famous sculptor who ever lived? We just have to free the bed hidden in this block. Chip away everything that isn't it.

They did, throughout that September and October. They chipped away, until the blocks became objects. Spiegel helped her with the caning on the chairs, the glaze of the water pitcher, the soft red nub of the bedspread. This time, the game did not stop with surfaces. Each furnishing graduated from flat illusion into volume and shading. More was at stake this time than mere similarity.

The bed stood out from the wall. It occupied its quarter of the room, so palpable that even Freese, on his first visit, gave in to the reflex impulse to smooth its covers. The room filled in. It materialized, up through the oils of half-finished underpainting, the penned cartoon here and there still showing through. On the Cavern's universal walls, they hung Arlesean wallpaper. One by one, the geometrical placeholders took on shape. And week by week, Jackdaw, the unlikeliest of Geppettos, labored away at the code that threatened to bring these woody constructs to life — to a life that life would accredit.

Spiegel carved, too, at the larger block of wood lodged inside the smaller puppet casing. And every image he embellished cracked open to reveal its batting.

After Mahler Haus self-destructed, Stevie had pressed on to get the worthless English degree, throwing good money after bad, unable to change courses or salvage the disaster. Of the whole circle of former idealists, the only ones he ever saw again were the two who had tricked him into utopia. The same couple who'd driven him out again.

Spiegel called Adie the month before she graduated. He roped her into a lunch date, where she ate nothing and smiled her way around all substantive shoals. Steve asked her for a copy of the sketch she'd made of him, that night they'd spoken of Ted. "That? I've destroyed it."

The words hit Spiegel with a force out of all proportion to the loss. He stood looking down into the hole that awaited all creative effort. "Destroyed? What do you mean, destroyed?" "Crumpled up. Thrown away. Most of what I draw I end up pitching."

"You can't be serious. Why?" "Because most of it makes me ill."

"God…damn it." The rage returned to him, the rage he'd felt when they torched their dream of shared existence. "Why the hell bother to draw it in the first place?"

"Good question." She thought for a long time. "I'd like to think that every mark gets stored. Somewhere."

He and Zimmerman continued to meet for occasional handball and Stravinsky. Ted still gave Spiegel his monthly homework assignment, readings to prepare and deliver. The soirees shrank to the two of them sitting in the corner of Gino's Pizzeria on State, the one where the New Year's Bomber had once worked. They'd hover over a large mushroom and pepper, struggling with scansion or polychords.

One night Ted visited the hole in the wall on East Mifflin that Steve had moved into. He brought a 1958 Georges de Latour Private Reserve Napa Cabernet — a monster wine well beyond undergraduate means— and decent red wineglasses as well. Ted chatted even more maniacally than usual. But he would not say what the celebration was until they opened the bottle and imbibed.

They talked modernism, the rind of archaism that had settled so rapidly on that radical aesthetic. "Have I made you read Joyce's Portrait yet?" Ted joked.

Spiegel sighed over the rim of his goblet. "Twice." "Can I tell you something?" Zimmerman said, a slight change in cadence. "I seem to have MS. Just found out this afternoon."

It took Spiegel too long to decode, to figure out what the man had just announced. By the time he did, the moment for real comfort was lost.

In his memory of the event, Spiegel said nothing. Utterly, stupidly nothing. Nothing of use or condolence or aid, for the rest of the night. Ted, at least in memory, left shortly after dropping his bomb, still vaguely buzzing. "Oh. Hey. I've also finished my octet."

The topic sprung Spiegel from the spell that had fallen over him. "Really? That's fantastic. When do we get to hear it?"

"You tell me. As soon as I find eight players who'll sit still long enough to learn something that jagged."

That was his piece. That was the man's piece. Never performed, so far as Spiegel ever heard.

Chance threw them all clear of the wreck. Adie made her way to New York, the Butter-and-Eggs district, where she worked in the MoMA cafeteria and painted. Ted made his way out the year after, up to Washington Heights, where he waited on tables on a restaurant boat moored in the Hudson and studied graduate composition with Davidovsky, at Columbia. Spiegel graduated with a degree in English and four poems that he liked. He moved to San Francisco, as far from New York as he could get and still have crappy weather.

He floundered for a while, working dopey editing jobs, hanging around City Lights, more or less making a stock commedia dell'arte figure of himself. After about a year of shiftlessness, he got a card from the two of them. They'd hooked back up and were living together. Life was long. Three weeks later, Spiegel landed a bank teller's job and settled

in for the duration.

From teller, he jumped to data processing, a vacancy in Operations that opened up after a junior operator went berserk and locked himself in the tape storage room with a bulk magnetic eraser gun. Fortunately the eraser, like the machines that had driven the operator to the breaking point, malfunctioned.

Spiegel discovered amazing digital aptitude. A surfeit of words and their ambiguity left him ready to love code's clean, definitive operands. Numbers were simple. They knew what they wanted. They rose and fell according to magnificent tabular design. The whir of the drive spindles, the chug of the card reader, the line printer's barrage all sounded a note of reason that, after the months of carping human clients — most of whom hadn't a clue what they wanted and conflated the Bay Savings Bank with their parents, tormentors, and lovers— struck Spiegel as heavenly.

A little judicious stretching of fact on his resume landed him a software job with a financial planning outfit up the Valley. He claimed he programmed, when, in fact, he thought COBOL was a minor goblin and couldn't have picked Ada from Pascal out of a police lineup. Then he promptly taught himself the basics in the first three weeks of the job. There the mystery opened to him, the secret brotherhood between fact and its description.

You have to imagine it, he tried to tell the woman who'd first set him upon the path of living algorithm. He laid it out for her over a digitally fabricated face towel, crumpled as if its owner had been taken unaware. My God! The Arabian Nights. The Arabian Nights. The full strangeness descended on him again, as it had in the year when he first looked on it. Wonder renewed itself in his replay, as the natural world renewed itself in imitating code.

Think of it: you just spell out a few descriptions. OK: a lot of descriptions. But stilly you type some words, the inner name of the thing. You describe how you want it. You build a topical outline of its behavior. Then you run the description, and there the idea is. Actual, working, in all its functional glory. Coming to life, on the terminal in front of you.

Adult Adie frowned at the thumbnail of the towel that they worked up on her screen.

No, Steve said. You can't possibly understand. There are too many layers now, between you and the artifact. Assemblers, compilers, interpreters, code generators, reusable libraries, visual programming tools. It wasn't always like this. You have to imagine looking at this towel, this beautiful, woven, cotton towel, falling in natural folds, as good as cloth. Have to imagine looking at it and seeing the realization of your own words, your own perfect, workable essay about the way that cloth looks and feels and falls.

Pygmalion?

He's in there somewhere. Orpheus might be closer. I'm telling you, writing my first subroutine was…like causing huge chunks of unravished bride to rise up, just by singing to her. A good, polished program was everything I thought poetry was supposed to be.

Stevie. You must have had a very peculiar idea of what poetry was supposed to be.

No different than any person who ever wrote it. I was going to get inside of reality and extract its essence, write down on paper the magic metrical words that, read aloud, would do their open sesame.

She looked at the screen, ready to deny everything. But she nodded. The vital formula. Sympathetic spells. Life's nail clippings. The impression of a body in bed.

He raced on, not hearing her. There was this kid poet, and he wrote and wrote. He rubbed the magic lamp until the poetic self-abuse police threatened to come impound him. And still nothing happened. The incantation seemed to be defective. Then they put the kid in front of this terminal and initiated him into the secret syntax. A few simple rules, combined in a few elegant ways, and blamm-o. The thing works. It runs. The world does move. The rules chum. The descriptions step their way through their own internal logic. The lines of code set more switches, change more states. Commands produce results.

The word made flesh.

Spiegel flinched. Don't mock me.

I'm not mocking.

Because that's exactly what it is. It doesn't matter if you're only talking about a formula for compound interest plugged into a general ledger

program. Change any variable and the executing universe alters. Move it to the left, increment it by a quarter percent, and the new result gets spit out whole. It gives one a tremendous feeling of—

Tower?

Perfectibility. Coding possessed a kind of reality check that sestinas never had. A program either worked or it didn't, and if it didn't work, it was wrong. Period. Something magnificent to that.

1 made a lot of wrong paintings in my life. Believe me. And I didn't need any machine to tell me they were wrong.

But you never knew, completely, when you made a right one.

Adie wrapped her self-indicting silence around her like a shawl.

It's…. funny, Spiegel went on. Art made all this happen, you know. The whole digital age. Music did it. Hollerith got his idea for the punched data card from the player piano. From the Jacquard tapestry loom.

Not guilty, Adie pled. I've got an airtight alibi.

That's what they all say. He nipped her chin between finger and thumb. You have to imagine. Programming blew my thinking loose. Absolutely liberating. It freed me up in a way I hadn't been sinc …

Since Yeats?

Since Yeats. The rules, the operators? They're completely open-ended. Extensible. Whatever you can imagine, they can build. Think of it: the universal behavior machine, able to build any gadget that crossed the human mind. Not a tool. The ultimate medium.

They dirtied the digital towel, enlarged it, opened it to the light, hung it back upon the sketched-in schematic of its hook, protruding from the left-hand wall.

You know, they say that a coder's whole concept of programming depends on his first language. Old FORTRAN dinosaurs are stuck in their own do-loops. COBOLers think the machine is only good for running accounts receivable. Kids raised on BASIC never break free of that GOTO. But you see, my first language…

Adie smiled, remembering, despite herself. Was another code all together. You're telling me that you were fated to wind up programming golden mechanical birds?

Well, we all end up working on whatever TeraSys lets us.

Jackdaw? Adie called to the one who was still a child. What was your first programming language?

The kid looked up from a screen filled with instructions. Somewhere in the sequenced lines, the tireless, interlinked description, a miraculous bedside drawer emerged, one that slid in and out of its wooden table. Wah? Eyebrows up, distracted. It took him a few processor cycles to parse the question. First language? Assembler.

But first languages never knew their last sentences. On that day when Spiegel left Bay Savings, he called his friends in New York to give them the change of address, never mind the fact that they'd never used the old one. Ted was out. Spiegel spoke with Adie, the same Adie who wouldn't remember the call when the time came to remember everything.

"He's starting to lose it," she reported. "Walking with a cane. He falls down a lot. Then he picks himself up as if nothing just happened."

It occurred to Steve that he could now probably beat the man at handball. "They say it can go into remission."

"Do they? What do they say about the chance of a doctor of music composition getting a job anywhere on the face of the planet?"

"Is he close to finishing?" Something to say, however feeble.

"Oh, any year now. Steve, it's unbelievable." Opposites mixed freely in her voice. "All the man wants to do anymore is compose."

"Does he still…?" Spiegel began. But decency forced him to pull over before someone got hit.

"No. Nothing. Just sits there and writes music."

"Is any of it getting played?"

"Stevie, Stevie. What planet are you living on? Our apartment was broken into five months ago? The thieves took everything that wasn't nailed down. Except for the man's classical music collection."

"Is he at least…happy?"

"What a quaint question. Nice to know that at least one of us hasn't changed since college."

"You're still painting, aren't you?"

"Guilty. But at least I'm holding down a real job. Official table busser to the art elite." She admitted to still putting together a portfolio, however much she declared her readiness to cave in to the world's terms.

Her tone was too much for Spiegel. He wished he'd never called. "Let me know when you mount your show. And tell Thaddeus to give me a ring sometime."

She never did let him know. But Zimmerman did call, years too late, after Spiegel had signed on to work with TeraSys, surrendering to the century's terminal art form. Ted did call, after Steve could no longer imagine how far the man's body had decayed. He called from Lebanon, a flyspeck in the wastelands of southwestern Ohio. An old Shaker town, site of one of Mother Ann's visionary communities, waiting celibately up on a bluff for the world's redemption and wrap-up. A town whose chief industry had once been utopianism but was now the nearby close-security prison.

Ted was well. He was working. Oh: and he was also employed.

He had a job in that same prison, part of a four-year private college's outreach program, granting bachelor's degrees to convicted rapists, arsonists, and murderers. He had gone out on the market for a few years' running and had come close to landing a post in Utah. But the Mormons had not bought his cultural analysis of Das Lied von der Erde. So he ended up in the ruins of millenarian Warren County, teaching Rudiments of Theory and World Culture 1 and 2 to the incarcerated underclass of Dayton, Columbus, and Cincinnati.

What exactly was World Culture 1?

He wasn't entirely sure, but if Spiegel had any suggestions, he was willing to try anything once. He rather enjoyed it when 300-pound men with diagonal keloids across their faces could identify the start of a secondary theme group. And get this: the recidivism rate for the prison as a whole was 48 percent. For those who completed a degree, it dropped to 12.

Cause and effect?

More likely, those who could stomach World Culture for a couple of semesters were already those who had steeled themselves to the idea of life on the outside.

Job security?

Twenty to life. No reduction for good behavior.

How was he getting around?

Slowly. In a wheelchair.

Where was Adie?

Zimmerman was not quite sure. Still in New York, he thought. She'd had a show, while they were still living together, at a reputable SoHo gallery. The work had been written up, talked about in all the appropriate circles. It looked as though the art mafia were going to let her play.

Then she'd panicked. She took back the couple of works that had sold at the show, paying the gallery their commission plus a makeup fee to the buyers. She rejected the gallery's offer to think about a more casual, long-term relationship. Refused to keep the door open, even in the abstract. She held a bonfire. Ted wasn't sure how many works she burned, but the casualties were high and the ones that burned best were by far her most accomplished.

She'd started to freelance. Junk, Ted called it. Commercial design. Coffee-shop walls. Health-club logos. Ad circulars for fake New England mail-order houses.

At the time, Ted's own CV was coming back unopened from every academic job offering in the country. The MS was in remission, and he was pouring all temporary strength into a large-scale piece — a concerto for piano and orchestra. He was playing beat the clock, working away seven or eight hours a day on the concerto, and the hopeless effort was driving Adie up the wall. He should have been out doing something about his job odds, she said. When he asked her what that might entail, she grew even angrier.

She came to him with an ultimatum. Either he start looking for real work or they were history. He told her he'd always enjoyed history. So she split, leaving him only a P.O. box for a forwarding address.

Had he tried to contact her?

Had not and would not. Not good for either of them. She needed to be free of him. He made her feel guilty.

And she made him feel…?

He'd never really stopped to consider.

He was still writing music?

This was the extraordinary compensation. Just as all hope was walking out the door, salvation blew in the window. Spiegel knew about computers? He made a living with them? Then he knew all about the first significant change in the production of music since Pan carved his

pipes.

Zimmerman had no clue how any of it worked. Some digital necromancer, probably Asian, had taken the sound of a real clarinet, sliced each second of the waveform into forty-four thousand pieces, and pushed each of those pieces down into silicon. From there, the reed could be recalled at any pitch, duration, or intensity.

Not a perfect clarinet, mind you. Or rather, a tad too perfect. But Zimmerman wasn't about to quibble over sound quality. He had his Esterhazy in a box — every instrument of the orchestra at his beck and call, around the clock, each one capable of playing beyond the range of earthly instruments. He scored out music on the screen, just as he did on paper, and the miraculous music box performed every aural event he cared to specify.

The possibilities outstripped not only his wildest expectations but also his wildest ability to expect. For the first time in his life, Ted could hear the contour of his thoughts as he thought them. The tireless box played a presto stream of hemi-demi-semiquavers all day long without hobbling a note or pausing to breathe.

He set aside all concern for the possible and began to compose the music he most wanted to hear. The box realized anything that Zimmerman could describe to it. He wrote a piece for twelve piccolos in narrowest brilliant tessitura. He wrote a sonata for cello and piano that kept the piano in a perpetual pianissimo and never let the cello out of murderous thumb position. He wrote a frenetic solo for bass clarinet, thirty thousand high-speed notes leaping and crashing through all registers so jaggedly that no human could dream of bringing it off. He played the piece for Spiegel over the phone. Even through the tiny acoustical portal, the effect was dizzying.

Once Spiegel opened the channel, the phone became Ted's favorite obbligato instrument. If the thing rang in Seattle any time before eight in the morning or after midnight, odds were good that the voice at the other end would kick things off with a cheery "Lebanon, here!" A call might last the better part of an hour, Ted ecstatic with computers? He made a living with them? Then he knew all about the first significant change in the production of music since Pan carved his

pipes.

Zimmerman had no clue how any of it worked. Some digital necromancer, probably Asian, had taken the sound of a real clarinet, sliced each second of the waveform into forty-four thousand pieces, and pushed each of those pieces down into silicon. From there, the reed could be recalled at any pitch, duration, or intensity.

Not a perfect clarinet, mind you. Or rather, a tad too perfect. But Zimmerman wasn't about to quibble over sound quality. He had his Esterhazy in a box — every instrument of the orchestra at his beck and call, around the clock, each one capable of playing beyond the range of earthly instruments. He scored out music on the screen, just as he did on paper, and the miraculous music box performed every aural event he cared to specify.

The possibilities outstripped not only his wildest expectations but also his wildest ability to expect. For the first time in his life, Ted could hear the contour of his thoughts as he thought them. The tireless box played a presto stream of hemi-demi-semiquavers all day long without hobbling a note or pausing to breathe.

He set aside all concern for the possible and began to compose the music he most wanted to hear. The box realized anything that Zimmerman could describe to it. He wrote a piece for twelve piccolos in narrowest brilliant tessitura. He wrote a sonata for cello and piano that kept the piano in a perpetual pianissimo and never let the cello out of murderous thumb position. He wrote a frenetic solo for bass clarinet, thirty thousand high-speed notes leaping and crashing through all registers so jaggedly that no human could dream of bringing it off. He played the piece for Spiegel over the phone. Even through the tiny acoustical portal, the effect was dizzying.

Once Spiegel opened the channel, the phone became Ted's favorite obbligato instrument. If the thing rang in Seattle any time before eight in the morning or after midnight, odds were good that the voice at the other end would kick things off with a cheery "Lebanon, here!" A call might last the better part of an hour, Ted ecstatic with

extended show-and-tell. "Wait," he'd say, his voice slurring in its great, decade-long rallentando. "Listen to that same passage played by a brass quintet." And he'd crash around making the changes, Spiegel hearing, in the struggle, just how bad things had become.

"Don't hurt yourself," Spiegel told him. "Send me a tape."

Not the same. Ted wanted the thrill of a live performance. And he could still manage all the controls, given time.

It worried Steve. "Are you OK out there by yourself? I mean, it sounds as if a lot of gear is hitting the floor with considerable frequency."

"And I most frequently of all. Never fear. There's a woman who comes by…"

Of course there was a woman. What had Spiegel been thinking? Two, in fact. A colleague who taught English at the prison. And Zimmerman's widowed landlady, who rented him three rooms in her antebellum house with its twenty-foot ceilings for $200 a month. From each according to her abilities.

In some lingering need for an audience, Ted called more often. For a while, they were in better touch than they'd been since that spring of their mutual discovery. But however often they spoke, that spongy, deteriorating voice on the other end shocked Spiegel. Not a gradual descent: a fall headlong down the staircase. Ted called to lecture, to hold forth, to assign belated homework, but mostly to play the world premiere of another fifteen measures. Now and then he remembered to ask Spiegel how things were going on the other end.

And then the bolt from the blue. The lottery: what anyone else but this crippled anachronism would have called his lifetime lucky break. An old virtuoso friend from Columbia days commissioned Zimmerman to write a piece for solo viola, for performance in the downtown New York avant-garde music demimonde.

You never knew about it? Steve asked the adult Adie. Years failed to erase his surprise.

Never.

It was performed a few times. Once in a space in TriBeCa, in fact.

The city's new music scene is pretty big, Stevie. Hundreds of concerts you never hear about, every day.

He was sure you knew about it. That you deliberately stayed away. It crushed him that you never showed up.

Crushed him? He said it crushed him?

Well, not in so many words.

The piece was as full of antinomian cheek as Zimmerman could manage. But for this audience bred on halting dissonance, he delivered lines as long and soaring as Dives and Lazarus. A theme and variations, no less, on the old fugueing tune "Idumea": beautiful, visceral, expansive, and, given the venue, hopelessly banal. The dedicatee almost refused to play the piece, so startlingly unshocking was it, so potentially damaging to an experimental reputation.

He did it to provoke the provocateurs. Said it was his Abschied to the innovating world. You know: "It's not like I'm ever going to make it back to the city anyway."

Idumea. I can't believe it. Idumea.

He also said that you…that you…

…used to walk around the apartment humming that tune.

Naked.

He told you that? How dare he?

How dare anyone? "Idumea" drew as many silent sneers as he Sacre had once drawn catcalls. Shape-note Americana, second-rate WPA, half a century too late: the wry joke of a very select crowd, over the run of a very short season. But the gorgeous solo viola line lodged in the heart of at least one listener, a slumming double agent whose day job consisted of producing commercial musical scores. The fellow had been looking for someone who could do a thirty-second derivative Copland knockoff, and chance had led him to that someone.

Zimmerman never hesitated. It shocked Spiegel, and saddened him. But working for TeraSys by then, Spiegel had little moral leverage to preach against selling out. Ted worked up the piece in a little under three weeks. It was "Simple Gifts," returned to sender. Thirty seconds of hosanna from the world's first, radiant hoedown. Heavenly counterpoint, put to the service of a multinational consumer-products conglomerate intent upon wrapping its insidious agricultural chemistry in the patina of Shaker innocence.

He did that? That was Ted? Adie, incredulous, remembered the commercial spot. Remembered it in the back of her throat. The kind of manipulative, nostalgic sound track that you wept over in the solitary shame of your living room, with all the shades pulled down.

The delighted corporate sponsors paid Zimmerman well. Ted made a hundred times more for those three weeks of work than he'd made for all the other music he had composed in his life. The lump sum helped to cover what the prison college's group insurance refused to pay, when Ted at last had to move into Warren County's second-best assisted-care facility.

Life was truly long. Ted spent his days strapped in a bed in a nursing home in the Buckeye state, a forty-year-old avant-garde composer surrounded by the perfect audience: deaf nonagenarians. At least he had a private room — a cinder-block single compartment, the same dimensions as the one his old friends now redecorated.

Ted and Steve had spoken only twice since Adie's arrival out West. Spiegel stopped calling him. Ted could no longer hold the receiver. Even after one of Ted's nightingales bought him a speakerphone, Spiegel quit returning Ted's calls. It was not just cowardice. Ted's voice had gotten so faint and slurred that Steve had to ask him to repeat everything three times and still couldn't make out the half of each message. The brain was still intact, but it had begun to waver into places where Spiegel was not yet allowed. Silence seemed the more merciful ordeal. Spiegel had not visited, nor had he seen pictures. And yet here was the place where the man now lived. Where else but this prototypical layout? Planks standing in for linoleum; cambered casements for molded plastic. The bed pressed up against the back right corner of the narrow box. No doubt the real bed was a tubular steel hospital apparatus wrapped in acrylic blankets. But in the invalid's mind, surely it resembled this rich red wood piled high in an eidolon of eiderdown. And next to the bed, the rickety table: the perfect stand for Ted's MIDI sequencer, executing its archaic scores on a whole orchestral palette of digitally sampled instruments, playing them out through a pair of tinny speakers where Van Gogh's water pitcher stood. Perhaps a nurse came in and worked the mouse for him. Perhaps the machine, unlike Spiegel, still understood Ted's voice well enough to take dictation. Perhaps the picture frames on the walls above his bed held snippets of laser-printed score, keepsakes of Ted's long, aural adventure.

This was the room that Spiegel helped to furnish, no matter what chamber from the sunny South Adie thought she outfitted. The two of them collaborated, carving down the cubes into the objects each hid. Thousands of polygons hung suspended in space on the intersecting beams of five projectors. The shaving mirror alone ran into the millions of bits, dozens just to fix the location and color of each hung pixel. Behind its flinty blue reflection, voltage differences snaked through an array of registers in a conga line so long that all that the human eye ever saw was this massive epiphenomenon, this simple looking glass that bore no earthly relationship to the worlds of oscillating semiconductance surging beneath its surface.

Over the weeks that Spiegel and Klarpol refinished their storeroom of old furniture, Jackdaw assembled a library of interactive definitions— reusable ball bearings that animated all the room's moving parts. Through the staked pains of software's sieve — check lower bound X; check lower bound Y; check lower bound Z; check upper…, set StepRate…, fix ShadeOffset…; for Rotltem from -180 to 180, step StepRate, if ShadeOffset

It no longer sufficed for each of the room's austere furnishings, their continent-wide sheets of bits sliding along the moraines of video memory, merely to mimic solidity. Deeply nested C routines now invested the smallest collection of boxels with real-world behaviors. The same host electronics that sculpted these statues of colored air could also sense and respond to the room's angelic visitors.

The visitors' solid hands still passed through everything they tried to feel. But now a thumb and forefinger, pinched around the phantom drawer knob, could pull it open. Even the designers felt the uncanny effect, moving the wood-grained logic of an object they could not even touch. However incorporeal, the towel ruffled when brushed. The windows cluttered shut at the first mime of force against them. And when the transient user, suckered by half a billion years of evolution into believing the visible, reached out by reflex to pat the bedcovers, those sheets miraculously turned their corners down as if waiting for the idea of a sleeper to curl up and inhabit them.

Water wanted to pour. Shirts wanted wearing; picture frames, straightening. An eerie hideout rose up around its makers. The ghostly placeholders began to stand in for their leaden referents. For finally, the brain conversed less with stuff than with appropriate response. It operated upon the working symbol, and for that, the less carrying weight, the better. Dimension, color, surface, motion — the full play of functional parts — implied a tenant who seemed eternally to have just stepped out for a moment. The visitor moved through a furnished efficiency where all the comforts and amenities performed as they should, with only the apartment's occupant eternally not at home.

The room solidified as the year dissolved. Expectation shot through Spiegel every time, standing on the floorboards, riffling through the Dutchman's evacuated things. Adie's belief, too, reached critical mass. Technology wanted something from them. The play of emulated, Arlesean light teetered on the verge of some announcement.

Whatever time passed outside the Cavern, the artist's bedroom hung in an eternal noon. The bedroom's blaze enveloped its makers, even as they worked at their midnight cubicles. The three of them settled into the silent routine of roommates, the new nuclear family sharing this close, sunny starter home. They worked alone, coming together at times to putter and refine. Perpetual nesting, permanent spring cleaning. The shared task of home improvement made talk unnecessary.

Ade? Spiegel said one night, violating that pact of silence. Can I ask you something?

The eyes said, "Do we need to?" The mouth said, Sure.

The celibacy thing?

Yes? She dragged out the initial letter in epic wariness. And what exactly would you like to know about the celibacy thing, Stevie?

He thumbed his nose at her, some avuncular nineteenth-century gesture new to him, its origins a total mystery. Not celibacy per se. I've already assembled as much data about that particular subject as I care to, thank you. What I want to know is, don't you… don't you ever miss it?

"It" being non-celibacy?

"It" being a partner. Companionship. A warm body in the house on a damp night.

Well, I have Pinkham, you know. She turned toward the creature, who lay curled up in his favorite spot on a rag rug inside a coil of coaxial cable at the Cavern mouth. She patted her thighs in invitation. Pinkham looked up, ascertained the absence of crisis, yawned, and curled down again. He refused to step near the simulated room. It bewildered him.

Don't you miss… surprising behavior? Something not reducible to axioms. A being as big and complicated as you are.

Oh. Pinkham is all that. And then some. He's a lot more complicated than I am, in fact.

All right. Call me anthropocentric. Don't you miss conversation? Talking in bed? A mind that isn't yours, to go over the day's mystery with. Someone to distract you, on those days when you feel like writing on the walls.

I never really trusted words all that much, she said.

Spiegel opened the shutters. Jackdaw's astonishing algorithm bathed the room in a crescendo of Provengal sun. Stevie fiddled with the casement, waving it back and forth without touching, like playing an etherophone. Sex, Ade. You don't need it? You can go totally without?

That depends. She looked away from him, not at all coy. On what exactly you mean by "sex."

He turned away too, hiding his blush. You ever wonder why we two never slept with each other? I mean, every other possible permutation in that house went to town, at least once. Didn't matter… He skipped a beat, but could not stop. Whether they even liked each other.

You didn't miss anything, Stevie. Believe me. She seemed to wonder, for a moment, just which way she meant to head. Look. I don't know how it is for you. But as far as I'm concerned, solitude is not a hardship post. Being single is not some kind of jail sentence, Stevie. I like my aloneness. It's better than any other configuration I can imagine.

Through the lab's partition walls came a group war whoop, the cheer of software engineers down the hall, delighting in some hard-won extension of their dominion deeper into the kingdom of comprehension.

For that matter… She pointed toward the hidden celebration. None of us is anywhere near as alone as we ought to be.

He caught her drift, without another word. Her worst fears about depiction were true. Evolution's most productive trick was to rig things so that the idea of need grew vastly more insatiable than the needs it represented. Feeling had nowhere near ample room in which to play itself out. Sex at best mocked what love wanted. The gut would explode before it could dent the smallest part of its bottomless hunger.

Another night came, one night nearer to the end of history. Spiegel and Klarpol busied themselves with fixing a chair that, when picked up and moved, tended to shed and leave behind a phantom right front limb. You know what we need, Ade? Spiegel kept his eyes on a screen dump of the flawed data structure. He aired the idea as if he had just come up with it. Sound.

It took her a moment to register. But when she did, she clapped her hands. And again, louder. For every tatter in the mortal idea.

That's it. That's brilliant. Of course we need sound. It never occurred to me. This place is dead silent. That's why it seems like such a haunted house. Well. One of the reasons.

You're telling me we could get the floorboards to creak whenever someone takes a step on them? That's what I'm telling you.

Unreal. The wood could thump when you touch it. The shutters could clack. Pinging glass. That's it. Every object will make its right noise. This will totally flip people out. Their ears will convince them of the thing they're touching.

Know what we really need? Music.

She cocked a head at the suggestion. Trying to figure out what he was after. Then she figured. You know what, Stevie? We really don't. Music is not what we really need. It's the last thing in the world, in fact.

He looked at her, already hearing. As if the room were already dosed in superfluous sonatas.

Realization took hold of her face. She fought back at the assault. Oh fuck. Fuck it. You brought me all the way out here, after all these years…? Just to get me to… just to try to fix me back up with …?

She crumbled at the prospect of losing the greatest Etch-A-Sketch a girl had ever been given. She hid her face in her hands, up to her ears.

No, his look said, too soft to hear. Not to fix you up. Not you per se. Zimmerman. To fix Ted. The one who really needed him. The one Spiegel loved, first of anyone.