Plowing the Dark

31

"You need something?"

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

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

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

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

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

when the Greeks were still in preschool. This, too, will pass, and leave behind nothing but the astonished record.

Because you could not come to it, Iran has come to you. It happily exports Islamic revolution into the vacuum of this fractured country. Your kinsmen bankroll Ali, Walter, the Angry Parent. Your unknown half-ancestor strides out to meet you halfway, in the valley between you.

All through the summer, words come back to you. At meals, or during your half-hour sprints along your oval track, or in the middle of the morning bathroom ritual, now trimmed back to a frenzied seven minutes. Forgotten vocabulary, sometimes in your mother's voice, sometimes in the voice of those grandparents, fictional to you except for two short childhood trips Stateside when the Brits still pumped the oil and the Shah still issued the travel visas. Words return. The names of foods. The primary colors. The numbers from one to ten.

More than words: chunks of your mother's favorite stories, in translation. The one about the white-haired baby who grows up to be a mighty king. The one about a flock of birds who set out to find the fabulous Simurgh. They cross the seven valleys of Journey, Love, Knowing, Detachment, Unity, Bewilderment, and Annihilation, the thirty straggling survivors hanging on just long enough to discover, or rather to remember, that Simurgh means nothing more than "thirty birds."

Your cell is a nave. A ship, a dinghy adrift on the currents of wrecked empire. You lie back in the stern, shackled to your radiator, this room's rudder. Open seas leach you. You drift on the longest day of the year, bobbing near madness, the black overtaking you, infinite time, unfillable, longer even than those childhood nights when your own prison bedroom ran with a dread so palpable that sleep seemed certain death and death far better than this standing terror.

And then that frightened, fleshy face is there, next to yours, laughing in the dark.

What in all the world does a child have to be scared of? The old Persians, your people, called their walls daeza. Pairi meant anything that surrounds. See? Pairi daeza. You have a wall running all the way around you. That, my little Tai-Jan, is the source of Paradise.

perfects itself. You lie back against the wall, as far from the radiator as the links of chain allow. Bone-cold all winter, the machinery now comes alive, eager to add its joules to the summer inferno.

You close your eyes and will yourself into another climate. The volume materializes in your hands, the weight, the heft, the binding's resistance. You turn the treasure over and over, resolving the details down to the publisher's insignia on the spine. Through your eyelids, you inspect the cover illustration. Your read the blurbs on the back, the synopsis, the ISBN, all the precious trail marks you once squandered so profligately when they were yours to waste.

Each page of front matter passes one by one under your sentry fingers. Hours may dissolve, just playing with the stiffness of the paper, before you get to the actual first sentence. Lord Jim, the forty-four-point Garamond Bold announces to your hushed house of one. And again, in thirty-six-point type, on the next wondrously superfluous page. Or Great Expectations. Every menu name becomes a whole banquet where you might dine out eternally, for free.

You reach the opening sentence, the fresh start of all things possible. Modestly boundless, it enters bowing, halfway down that first right-hand page. You lie back against your paradise wall, your pillow. You make yourself a passive instrument, a seance medium for these voices from beyond the grave. Politics has taught you how to read, how to wait motionless, without hope. To wait for some spirit that is not yours to come fill you.

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

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

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

But no. That wasn't it, she sobbed. A book was not a personal gift. People gave books to colleagues, to acquaintances, not to their intimate partners. You might have given this to anyone. It didn't say you and me. It didn't say, You are the only person in the world 1 could have given this to.

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

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

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

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

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

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

What's your favorite book? you ask her, your brain pinging down a chain of associations, the night you do at last light up together. The melding that you'd hoped for comes off, at best, as a self-conscious swap of concessions.

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

Why do we always have to rank everything? Biggest? Best? Most? Boys: you'll really have to explain the concept to me one of these days.

You feel the flash of anger, the so familiar one, the rage that you can't voice without confirming her. Don't need you to rank them. Just want to know the name of one that moved you. One that you loved.

You asked me to tell you my favorite. My absolute fave rave. The one that vanquishes all the other comers. No secrets, now. Come on, name names.

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

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

Yes, it so often crossed your mind to say. Yes. What you just said.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Good question. You do a fair imitation of total paralysis. I haven't figured that out yet.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

She rises from intimacy to wash off the drops of your body. Clean again, she wraps herself in flannel pajamas — yes, even in this heat-before she'll come back to bed. She accepts you against the ladle of her back. She permits you to commit, smiles at the stories you spin out into her ear, but does not return or extend them.

She's up before you, doing her sit-ups to progressive radio rock when you finally drag yourself out of her long-suffering bed. Breakfast? you ask, over the throb of the synth bass.

Not for me.

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

Yes, she says, pausing in mid-step-aerobic long enough to kiss you goodbye. I believe you probably will.

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

You flip between following out this tale and fleeing from it. Ali's small sadisms — saying you will be released tomorrow; charging into the room at random intervals to catch you without blindfold; tossing a gorgeous orange just out of your reach — are nothing compared with recollection. You can deal with Ali, ignore his feeble invitations to believe. But against the torture of expectation, you have no defense.

Events seem blessedly bent on distracting you. This season produces some subtle shift in the front. One of the host of autonomous nations— the Druze, the Maronites, the Phalangists; the nomadic dreamers, daily harder to keep straight — some law unto itself is making a play to extend its jurisdiction. The tactics play out behind the gray screen of corrugated metal stapled across your window's gouged-out eye.

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

Sayid spells out just who is on the move. Afwaj al Muqawamah al Lubnanya. The Lebanese Resistance Battalions, whose name forms the acronym Amal, the Arabic word for hope.

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

In another life, on another infinite afternoon, when the shells abate enough to let you disappear again down the immaculate rabbit hole, she tells you. To your standing question, she answers simply, The French Lieutenant's Woman.

She looks up, vulnerable, appraising your reaction, a little frightened, a little shining. Relieved that you know it, glad for the pleasure she has afforded you, she asks back, How about yours? The easy reciprocity that you once thought could underscore all exchanges between people who cared for each other.

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

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

You've forgotten nothing. Whole scenes surface out of air. They pageant before you, responding to memory's every blush. And when they don't, you make them up again. From scratch, as the idiom goes. Week after week, and the complete architecture condenses under your aerial view. Why, here's a church. Why, here's Miss Skiffins. Let's have a wedding.

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

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

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

Someone brings you food. The stench no longer gags you, after this time. But something in this picked-over rubbish, not fit for hamsters, breaks you. You bang your chain against the radiator, no longer caring about the consequences. There are no consequences. You will die of blows or you will die of malnutrition. You lay into the pipes like a fare alarm. Someone rushes into the cell, intent on silencing you. The Angry Parent. He cracks you in the chest, knocking you back on the

mattress.

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

You hear him breathing through his mouth. You've frightened him. But he says nothing.

"Come on. We've known each other for a long time. Coming up on a year, before you know it. You've had me over. I've returned the invitation. We should know each other's name, don't you think?"

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

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

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

"Muhammad. Call me Muhammad." "Muhammad," you repeat. "You are a Shiite?" He coughs up a little fart of contempt in his throat. Not even contempt. Not even worth asking why you bother to ask.

"Muhammad. I once read somewhere… that Shiites believe food to be the holy gift of Allah. A mirror of the divine sustenance. Look at this." You grope about for the cold stench, put your hand in it as you hold it up toward him. "This is not sacred. This is not food."

He takes the platter from you. Leaves without a word. Sometime later, another meal appears. More than sacred. Edible. You'd say delicious, but for fear of gilding the lily.

The dish steams, a Lebanese knockoff of something your mother's exercise in capitalism once specialized in. A bademjan, the heart of the almond, the life of the heart.

A halim bademjan, with some angelic substance floating around in the stew, electrifying, a taste once deeply familiar to you that you now strain to recognize. But the harder you chase after the ingredient, the more it recedes. You take a bite; the word floats there, on the tip of your tongue. The memory struggles to the surface and dissipates.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

"That's not important." Although, his tone admits, it would probably be of some interest to the U.S. State Department.

"Muhammad. You must listen to me. I am afraid I am cracking up. Not just boredom. Boredom is what I feel on the good days. My brain. It's coming apart. I can feel it. Like a damn zoo animal about to go off its nut. I'm this far away from the abyss. I'm going to start screaming soon, at which point you're going to have to kill me, and then you'll have nothing. Nothing. You'll be out a year of room and board and the cost of cremation, and nobody's going to trade you anything for me."

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

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

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

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

This sounds less than good.

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

You listen to them execute their oracular Three Stooges routine. You tilt your head back, stealthily, to catch the contour of your fate from under the lip of your blindfold. Ali flips the Qur'an open at random. Sayid flops his finger down. Muhammad, the intellectual, reads the selected Ouija utterance and interprets the augury. Decides what the chance passage means.

"I am sorry," he tells you, sounding genuinely chagrined. "We have consulted the book, and it says no."

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

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

In the scuffle, someone knocks you down. You slam the back of your head against the radiator in your fall. The Three Fates evacuate. You float facedown in the pool of your concussion.

You haven't even the will to remove your blindfold. You lie fetal, curled up in your own placenta. Survival is no longer a virtue, given where survival leaves you. On the far side of this nothingness lies more nothing, one continuous void extending to the ends of space, all the way to the vanishing point, where all lines fall into themselves.

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

Another presence settles into your cell. The quaking in you starts up again in earnest. It takes you by your shoulders, determined to shake you back into sawdust. You cannot look for fear of reprisal. You saddle up near the new thing, crane back your neck, inspect it from under the safety of the blindfold. It's everything you fear it to be. Lying on the filthy planks, unswept since you came here, is that inconceivable device: a cunning, made world.

You kneel and pick it up. You freeze down there on the floor, crying. Afraid to so much as touch it, your fingers clapper spastically against the covers. You bounce the book in your hands, testing its weight for any sign of counterfeit. The mass of it swells up close to your eyes, in the slit of your vision. You hold it up close, trading off depth of field for detail and resolution. The weave of fibers in the paperback binding thickens into a jungle tangle.

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

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

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

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

It strikes you: maybe even Muhammad, with his clean syntax and accent, can't read. Maybe your guards' English extends no further than film and TV. They've bought this secondhand ream of paper scrap for pennies, down in the stalls of some bombed-out bazaar, left there by the last American with the good sense to get out of this suiciding country while the getting was good. Not one of these men knows what he puts into your hands.

At this thought, something cracks in your throat. You can't place it at first, a shape so strange you can only wait in wonder for it to take the dulled depths of your confinement, the hive extends its growing hum.

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

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

You close the back cover, sickened by what you've done. You seize up, you stand, you pace around on your chain. You close your eyes, guiltily savoring the cheap stories that you've just slammed down. You pick up the book and start again. It still holds some residual pleasure, but never again the launch into pure potential. Ten days from now, this dazed freedom still reverberating in you will have extinguished itself, starved out by repetition. Great Escapes is over. You will need another. But for a moment, for a thin, narrow, clouded, already closing moment: this. When you come to bed that evening, you turn to tell her, You'll never believe what I read today.

The year that ended history came to its own end. The retaining Wall fell down, and all certainty came down with it. The Realization Lab's engineers entered 1990 adrift in a fluid landscape, stripped of

all tether.

O'Reilly asked Klarpol, How do you like living in a time without safe

assumptions?

Have you ever lived anywhere else? she answered.

A world without assumptions should have been a world without surprises. But every day brought new shocks to the invented landscape, shocks requiring perpetual invention to smooth them over.