Rainbows End

The Ezra Pound Incident

There was a dark side to Robert's morning insights. Sometimes he would wake not to a grand solution but to the horrid realization that some problem was real, immediate, and apparently unsolvable. This wasn't worrywart obsessiveness, it was a form of defensive creativity. Sometimes the threat was a total surprise; more often it was a known inconvenience, now recognized as deadly serious. The panic attacks normally led to real solutions, as when he had withdrawn his earliest long poem from a small press, hiding its naive shallowness from public view.

And very rarely, the new problem was truly unsolvable and he could but flail and rail against the impending disaster.

Last night, coming away from his presentation at Fairmont High, he'd been feeling pretty good. The groundlings had been impressed, and so had the likes of Winston Blount — who was a more sophisticated kind of fool. Things are getting better. I'm coming back . Robert had drifted through dinner, pretty much ignoring Miri's pestering about all the things she could help him with. Bob was still absent. Robert had halfheartedly badgered Alice with questions about Lena's last days. Had Lena asked for him at the end? Who had come to her funeral? Alice was more patient than usual but still not a great source of information.

Those were the questions he'd gone to sleep with.

He woke with a plan for finding answers. When Bob returned, they would have a heart-to-heart talk about Lena. Bob would know some of the answers. And for the rest… in Search and Analysis, Chumlig had been talking about the Friends of Privacy. There were methods of seeing through their lies. Robert was getting better and better at S&A. One way or another, he would recover his lost times with Lena.

That was the good news. The bad news floated up as he lay there drowsing through his scheme for turning technology into a searchlight on Lena — — –The bad news was an absolute, gut certainty that replaced the vague uneasiness of earlier days. Yesterday, my poetry impressed the groundlings . That was no reason for joy, and he'd been a fool to be warmed by it for even an instant. Any blush of pleasure should have vanished when little Juan Whosits had announced that Robert was as brilliant as an advertising copywriter. Lord !

But Winston Blount had applauded Robert's little effort. Winston Blount was certainly competent to judge such verse. And here Robert's morning insight came up with the memory of Winnie applauding, the measured beat of Blount's hands, the smile on his face. That had not been the look of an enemy bested and awed. Never in the old days would Robert have confused it for that. No, Winnie had been mocking him. Winston Blount was telling him what he should have known all along. His out-doorsy poem was shit, good only for an audience accustomed to eating shit. Robert lay still for a long moment, a groan trapped in his throat, remembering the banal words of his little poem.

That was the genius insight of this dark morning, the conclusion he had evaded every day since he was brought back from the dead: I've lost the music in the words .

Every day he was awash with ideas for new poetry, but not the smallest piece of concrete verse. He had told himself that his genius was coming back with his other faculties, that it was coming back slowly, in his little poems. All that was a mirage. And now he knew it for a mirage. He was dead inside, his gifts turned into vaporous nothingness and random mechanical curiosity.

You can't know that ! He rolled out of bed and went into the bathroom. The air was cool and still. He stared out the half-open bathroom window at the little gardens and twisted conifers, the empty street. Bob and Alice had given him an upstairs room. It had been fun to be able to run up and down stairs again.

In truth nothing had changed about his problems. He had no new evidence that he was permanently maimed. It was just that suddenly — with the full authority of a Morning Insight — he was certain of it. But hell. For once this could be just panic without substance ! Maybe obsessing on Lena's death was spilling over, making him see death in all directions.

Yes. No problem. There was no problem.

He spent the morning in a panicked rage, trying to prove to himself that he could still write. But the only paper was the foolscap, and when he wrote on it, his scrawling penmanship was re-formed into neat, fontified lines. That had been an irritation in days past, but never enough to force him to dig up real paper. Today, now… he could see that his soul was sucked out of the words before he could make them sing! It was the ultimate victory of automation over creative thought. Everything was beyond the direct touch of his hand. That was what was keeping him from finally connecting with his talents! And in the entire house there were no real paper-and-ink books.

Aha . He rushed to the basement, pulled down one of the moldering cartons that Bob had brought from Palo Alto. Inside, there were real books. When he was a kid, he had practically camped out on the living-room sofa the whole summer. They had no television, but every day he'd bring home a new pile of books from the library. Those summers, lying on the sofa, he had read his way through frivolous trash and deep wisdom — and learned more about truth than in an entire school year. Maybe that was where he had learned to make words sing.

These books were mostly junk. There were school catalogs from before Stanford went all online. There were handouts that his TAs had painfully Xeroxed for the students.

But, yes, there were a few books of poetry. Pitifully few, and read only by silverfish these last ten years. Robert stood up and stared at the boxes farther back in the basement dimness. Surely there were more books there, even if selected by brute chance, whatever was left after Bob auctioned off the Palo Alto place. He looked down at the book in his hand. Kipling. Damned jingoistic elevator music. But it's a start . Unlike the libraries that floated in cyberspace, this was something he could hold in his hands. He sat down on the boxes and began to read, all the while pushing his mind ahead of the words, trying to remember — trying to create — what should rightly be the rest of the poem.

An hour passed. Two. He was vaguely aware that Alice came down to announce lunch, and that he waved her off impatiently. This was so much more important. He opened more boxes. Some contained Bob and Alice's own junk, even more vacuous than what they had retrieved from Palo Alto. But he found a dozen more books of poetry. Some of them were… good stuff.

The afternoon passed. He could still enjoy the poetry, but the enjoyment was also pain. I can't write a jot of the good stuff, except where I happen to remember it . And his panic grew. Finally, he stood and threw Ezra Pound into the basement wall. The spine of the old book split and it sprawled on the floor, a broken paper butterfly. Robert stared for a moment. He had never harmed a book before, not even if it bore the ugliest writing in the world. He walked across the room and knelt by the ruin.

Miri chose that moment to come bouncing down the stairs. "Robert! Alice says I can call an air taxi! Where would you like to go?"

The words were noise, scraping on his despair. He picked up the book and shook his head. "No." Go away .

"I don't understand. Why are you digging around here? There are easier ways to get what you want."

Robert stood, his fingers trying to put Ezra Pound back together again. His eyes found Miri. Now she had his attention. She was smiling, so sure of herself, in maximum bossiness mode. And for the moment she didn't understand the light in his eyes. "And how is that, Miri?"

"The problem is that you can't access what's all around us. That's why you're down here reading these old books, right? In a way you're like a little kid — but that's good, that's good ! Grown-ups like Alice and Bob have all sorts of bad habits that hold them back. But you're starting almost fresh. It'll be easy for you to learn the new things. But not from dumbhead vocational classes. See? Let me teach you how to wear." It was the same wearisome nag as always, but she thought she'd found a clever new angle.

This time, he would not let it pass. Robert took a step toward her. "So you've been watching me down here?" he said mildly, building up to what he intended.

"um, just in a general way. I — "

Robert took another step toward her and shoved the mutilated book toward her face. "Have you ever heard of this poet?"

Miri squinted at the broken spine." 'E,' Y — oh, 'Ezra Pound'? Well… yes, I've got all her stuff. Let me show you, Robert!" She hesitated, then saw the foolscap lying atop a box. She picked it up and it came to life. Titles streamed down the page, the cantos, the essays — even, God help us, later criticism from the mindless depths of the twenty-first century. "But seeing it on this page is like looking through a keyhole, Robert. I can show you how to see it all around you, with — "

"Enough!" said Robert. He slid his voice down till it was quiet, cutting, overtly reasonable. "You simpleton. You know nothing and yet you presume to run my life, just as you run the lives of your little friends."

Miri had backed up a step. There was shock on her face, but that had apparently not yet connected with her mouth. "Yes, that's what Alice says, that I'm too bossy — "

Robert took another step, and Miri was against the stairs. "You've spent your whole life playing video games, convincing yourself and your friends that you're worth something, that you're some kind of beautiful thing. I'll bet your parents are even foolish enough to tell you how clever you are. But it's not a pretty thing to be bossy when you're a fat, brainless brat."

"I — " Miri's hand rose to her mouth and her eyes grew wide. She took an awkward step backwards, up the steps. His words were connecting now. He could see the veneer of self-confidence and bright cheeriness collapsing.

And Robert pursued: "'I,' 'I' — yes, that's probably what your self-centered little mind thinks about most. It would be hard to bear your worthlessness otherwise. But think about that before you come again trying to run my life."

Tears welled in the girl's eyes. She turned and sprinted up the stairs, her footsteps not a pounding of childish force, but soft — almost as if she didn't want anything about herself to be sensed.

Robert stood for a moment, looking up the empty stairway. It was like standing at the bottom of a well, with a patch of daylight across the top.

He remembered. There had been a time, when he was fifteen and his sister Cara was about ten… when Cara became independent, bothersome. At the time Robert had had his own problems — totally trivial from the altitude of seventy-five years, but they'd seemed significant at the time. Getting past his sister's newfound ego, making her realize how little she counted in the general scheme of things, that had given him such a rush of pleasure.

Robert stared up into the patch of daylight and waited for the rush.

Bob Gu got out of debrief late on Saturday. He had been delinquent about tracking events at home; the Paraguay operation had been all-absorbing. Okay, that was an excuse. But it was also the truth. There had been hot launchers under that hostage orphanage. There in Asuncion, he had seen the abyss.

So it wasn't until he arrived home that he got the local bad news…

His daughter was too big and grown-up to sit on his lap, but she sat close on the sofa and let him take her hands in his. Alice sat on the other side; she looked calm, but he knew she was totally freaked. Training jitters plus this problem at home were almost too much for her. So it was past time to face up to family responsibilities:

"It's nothing you did, Miri."

Miri shook her head. There were dark rings around her eyes; Alice said she had stopped crying only an hour ago. "I was trying to help him and…" The sentence dribbled off. Her voice held none of the confidence that had grown in it over the last two or three years. Damn . In the corner of his eye, Bob could see that his father was still ensconced in his room upstairs, silently sticking it to them all. Visiting Dad was next on the agenda. The old man was going to have a surprise.

For now, there was something more important to set right. "I know you were, Miri. And I think you have helped Grandpa a lot since he came to live with us." The old man would still be trying to find his shoes if she hadn't. "You remember, we talked about this when Grandpa came? He is not necessarily a nice fellow" — except when he wants a favor, or he's setting you up for a fall; then he can charm almost any human ever horn .

"Y-Yes. I remember."

"What he says when he's trying to hurt you doesn't have any connection with whether you've been good or bad, clever or stupid."

"B-But maybe I was too pushy. You didn't see him this morning, Bob. He was so sad. He thinks I don't notice, but I do. His pulse was way up. He's so afraid that he can't write anymore. And he misses Grandma, I mean Lena. I miss Lena! But I — "

"It's not your responsibility to solve this problem, Miri." He glanced over Miri's head at Alice. "It's mine, and till now I've messed up. Your job, well, that's at Fairmont Junior High."

"Actually, we call it Fairmont High."

"Okay. Look. Before Grandpa came, school was just about all you thought about. That and your friends and your projects. Didn't you tell me you're going to transform the place this Halloween?"

Some shred of her past enthusiasm lit Miri's face. "Yeah. We've got the backstory on all the SpielbergRowling stuff. Annette's going to — "

"Then that and your regular schoolwork is what you should concentrate on. That's your mission, kiddo."

"But what about Robert?"

Robert can go to hell . "I'll talk to him. I think you're right that he's got a problem. But, you know sometimes, well… there's something you have to learn as you grow up. Some people make their own problems. And they never stop hurting themselves and messing up the people around them. When that's the case, then you shouldn't keep hurting yourself for them."

Miri's head bowed and she looked very sad. And then she looked back at him. Her jaw came up in that familiar, stubborn way. "Maybe that's true about other people… but this is my grandfather."

08