Dedication
t h e p o w e r s
Epigraph
I am still puzzled as to how far the individual counts: a lot, I fancy, if he pushes the right way.
—T. E. Lawrence
I bet it’s a warrant for my arrest.
Isn’t it wonderful?
I’m going to jail.
—George Bailey, It’s a Wonderful Life
Contents
Cover
Title Page
Dedication
Epigraph
Riddles
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Hobstown: 1939
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
The Dominant Tense
Chapter 5
1940–41
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Spring. 1942
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Tit for Tat
Chapter 10
Fall. 1942
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
1943
Chapter 13
If You Can Fill the Unforgiving Minute
Chapter 14
1944
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
1945
Chapter 18
Breaking the Matrix
Chapter 19
V-J
Chapter 20
Chapter 21
Calamine
1979
P.S. Insights, Interviews & More . . .*
About the Author
Read On
Praise
Also by Richard Powers
Copyright
About the Publisher
Riddles
Somewhere, my father is teaching us the names of the constellations. We lie in the cold, out in the dark backyard, on our backs against the hard November ground. We children distribute ourselves over his enormous body like so many spare handkerchiefs. He does not feel our weight. My father points a dime-store six-volt flashlight beam at the holes in the enclosing black shell. We lie on the frozen earth while all in front of us spreads the illustrated textbook of winter sky. The six-volt beam creates the one weak warm spot in the entire world.
My father is doing what he does best, doing the only thing he knew how to do in this life. He is quizzing us, plaguing his kids with questions. Where is the belt of Orion? What is the English for Ursa Major? Who knows the story behind the Twins? How big is a magnitude?
He talks to us only in riddles. We climb out of the crib and learn to speak: he warns us about language with “When is a door not a door?” We grow, we discover the neighborhood. He is there, quizzing us on the points of the compass. We fall, we bruise ourselves. He makes the wound a lesson on the capillaries. Tonight we learn, in the great square of Pegasus, how far things are from one another. How alone.
He points his way with the flashlight, although the beam travels only a few feet before it is swallowed up in the general black. Still, my father waves the pointer around the sky map as if the light goes all the way out to the stars themselves. “There,” he says to us, to himself, to the empty night. “Up there.” We have to follow him, find the picture by telepathy. We are all already expert at second-guessing. The five of us are fluent, native speakers of the condensed sign language, the secret code of family.
We lie all together for once, learning to see Taurus and Leo as if our survival depends on it. “Here; this dim line. Imagine a serpent, a dragon: can you all see Draco?” My older sister says she can, but the rest of us suspect she is lying. I can see the Dipper, the big one, the obvious one. And I think I can make out the Milky Way. The rest is a blur, a rich, confusing picture book of too many possibilities.
But even if we can’t see the images of myth, all of us, even my little brother, can hear in my father’s quizzes the main reason for his taking us out under the winter lights: “If there’s one thing the universe excels at, it’s empty space.” We are out here alone, on a sliver of rock under the black vacuum, with nothing but his riddles for our thin atmosphere. He seems to tell us that the more we know, the less we can be hurt. But he leaves the all-important corollary, the how-to-get-there, up to us, the students, as an exercise.
Impressed with the truth he has just spoken, the one about the place’s one prejudice, he gives us a final glimpse of that closet romantic he will keep so perfectly hidden in later years: “For all must into Nothing fall,” he recites, the poetry lost on me until I see it in an anthology, decades later, “If it will persist in Being.” He recovers quickly, remembers the lesson at hand, and asks, “Why do you think people need to fill the sky with pictures?”
We have a few questions of our own to ask him in return. What are we running from? How do we get back? Why are you leaving us? What happens to students who fail? I have one urgent issue to pick with him before he flicks off the beam. But I have already learned, by example, to keep the real questions for later. I hold my retaliation until too late.
I feel cold, colder than the night’s temperature, a cold that carries easily across the following years. Only the sight of my mother in the close glow of kitchen window, the imagined smell of cocoa, blankets, and hot lemon dish soap, keeps me from going stiff and giving in. I pull closer to my father, but something is wrong. He has thought himself into another place. He has already left us. He is no longer warm.
We move, we uproot. We rebuild slowly in a strange place. We tear ourselves up and move again, for reasons only he understands. We strand ourselves, weave between Atlantic and Pacific, a moving target. Once, he tries to console us for the constant repotting by turning it into a geography lesson. “See? Here? Appalachia; that used to be in front of us. It’s behind us now. Give me your finger. There. We have shot the Cumberland Gap. Just like Crockett.” I care less for Crockett than for the map he’s printed on. My father is an arrow saying, “You are Here.” I need him to say, just once, clear out, where he is. Instead, he dodges with another riddle. “What’s the least number of shades it takes to fill the map so that no two bordering states are the same color?”
From a later year: my father reads to me from one of those thick single-volume encyclopedias that form the backbone of his library. I am older, sixteen, the age of overt rebellion. Now we fight about religion, politics, clothes, hair—everything except the real issue. I finally find the courage to ask him outright why he always hides behind questions. And he answers me by looking up the entry “Riddles,” which he thinks I might find informative: “At a critical time, when even a slight thing may decide the issue, solving a riddle correctly may, by a sort of sympathetic magic, help to solve the big problem, may turn the scales the right way.” My father, the last generalist, who has always instructed me that one should attempt, hopelessly, to know everything, never once tells me, point blank, why trying to know left him so fiercely alone and lost.
The summer before I go away to school, he takes me out for private counsel. We have never gone out before, the two of us by ourselves. Awkward in the door of the restaurant, he tries, against rules, to seat himself. I am suddenly struck by how odd it is to see my father out in public, with anyone else, at a waiter’s mercy. We fumble with menus, and I order something in the middle of the price range. My father claims that nothing looks good and asks for a shot of house dressing in a glass. The waiter withdraws, and my dad, hiding behind the old, sardonic humor, reveals what it is we have come here for him to say. “Don’t worry about your major. Don’t worry about grades. A gentleman passes with C’s. Just try to figure out where history has set you down.”
Somewhere my father takes us out in the dark yard. Somewhere he teaches us the names of the stars. “They are not really near each oth
er, you understand. The points in Cetus, the Great Whale, lie hundreds of light years away from one another. They come together into these designs through optical accident.” On our backs against the already frozen ground, huddled against his heavy winter coat, we try to make out the words behind his words. We listen for the missing points, for what he fails to say.
The light goes out. We transplant, we tear up again. My father leaves us to ourselves. My mother and sisters rearrange the emptied house. We boys play a last game of catch in the early evening, in spring, in the now-thawing yard. My brother passes; the football parabolas toward me. I reach for it, full extension, and at once understand what the man’s real question had been all along. Inside each of us is a script of the greater epic writ little, an atlas of politics so abundant it threatens to fill us full to breaking. My father asks how we might find our way through all of that to a treaty.
My father has fallen away. He is fallen into nothing. For a fossil record he leaves only a few fragmentary tapes, the record of his voice straying over and exploring his one idea, a notion that cut him adrift in the world for a while and failed to show him the way back home. He leaves little else: A favorite chair that holds his impression. A closet of shirts that still wrinkle where he hunched. A few photos. Some freehand lecture notes. And the five of us, of course. The sum total of his lessons.
All of a sudden, as I reach for my brother’s pass, I know what the man was all along asking. And I will ask what remains of my family how a person could move through life repeating, every year, the old perennials, the same chestnut riddles, the adored ore, the when-is-a-door-not-a-door? Then I will tell them, straight out, the answer, the treaty: when his mind is an evasive urgency. And ajar.
1
The first indication that Pop had been seeing something more than heebie-jeebies for all those years came a few weeks before the end, when the old guy leaned over to Artie on the front porch of an autumn evening and said, distinctly, “Calamine.” Father and son had come out after dinner to sit together on this side of the screens and see November along. They enjoyed, in silence, one of those nights that hung in the high fifties but could easily go ten degrees either way within the hour. Artie staked out the rocker while his father, as usual, exercised eminent domain over the kapok bed long ago banished to the porch because chez Hobson—a twenty-year repository of everything the family had ever owned—could not take one more cubic foot of crap without spewing it all through every doorway and window.
Silence had gotten them this far, and there seemed to Artie no reason to improve on it. He tried to chalk up his father’s mumbled word to an involuntary spasm in the man’s cerebral cortex, a first burst of verb salad accompanying the return of autumn. He hoped, for a moment, to hide from it, let the word fall to the ground and add to the November earthworm-stink and humus. But Artie had no place to hide from Pop that the old man himself hadn’t shown him. So he put his knuckles to the bridge of his nose, braced his face for what was coming, and asked, “Say what, Dad?”
“You heard me. Calamine. I say what I mean and I mean what I say. I plan my work and work my plan. When the tough get going, the . . .”
“Got you, Pop.” Artie preempted quickly, for once Edward Hobson, Sr., was let out of the verbal paddock, he could go all night without denting his capacity for free association. After a quarter century, Artie knew the symptoms. In the man’s present condition, it was pointless to ask him straight out just what he meant by the word. Artie tried reconstructing: Calamine, zinc oxide, iodine—nothing in that direction. Dad’s invocation was certainly not a medical request. Dad abhorred all medications. His sickness was nothing so trivial or topical as dermatitis, except that in crowds, for the express purpose of publicly shaming any other Hobson with him, he had been known to sing, “It’s no sin to shake off your skin and go dancing in your bones.”
Artie leaned back in the rocker, farther than safe. He cocked his hands behind his head and again tried to reverse engineer the train of thought behind his father’s teaser. Calamine, Gal o’ Mine, Our Gal Sal. Possibly. Probably. Who could say? In part to forestall the old man from clouding the air with additional clues, Artie announced, “Technicians are working on the problem.”
He looked away to the far side of the screens. Under the rustic, ineffectual globes of small-town streetlamps, men of the 19th Precinct, scions of Second Street, used the unseasonably late warm weather to apply a last-minute manicure of preventions to their houses and lawns before the assault of winter. One or two broke from the routines of ownership to throw listless waves in the direction of One-Oh-Three, without expecting any return gesture. Neither father nor son disappointed them.
A snatch of Thanksgiving tune, “All is safely gathered in,” flashed through Artie’s head, so he sang the line out loud, buying time. Singing made him feel incredibly foolish. He knew a glance at the bed would show his father grinning victory. So he did the only thing possible given the situation. He sang, louder, the next line: “E’er the winter’s storms begin.”
Artie thought that, with as little as De Kalb, Illinois, had to offer—absolutely nothing except the claim of being the place where barbed wire was invented—there was nevertheless a stretch of fourteen days in fall when no better place on earth existed. Even given the immediate circumstances, he was somehow glad to be here. He paled at the prospect of scrapping his whole semester for nothing—increasingly likely with each new day he spent away from the law-school books. He could not really afford this unplanned trip back home. He had hoped to put the visit off until Thanksgiving, swing out for a few days, share some hormone-injected turkey with the rest of the gene pool, maybe watch a football game with the sibs: engage, for once, in the simple holiday fare the pilgrims intended. But the old refrain had again surfaced, drawing him unwillingly back into the crisis of family: “Your father is not well.”
Artie tried to imagine his mother saying, for once, “Your father is sick,” or even, “Your father is ill.” But he could not hear her voicing either. The woman had long ago caught from her husband the contagious part of his disease, the part Artie himself had inherited: the hope that everything would still come clean if you only sit still, understate everything, and make yourself as small a target as possible.
“Ah, Ailene,” Artie mouthed, almost audibly. He wondered if Mom ever gave up waiting for the miracle cure. He probed her words the way one might test a newly twisted ankle. Not well. But Artie did not dwell on his mother’s stoic refrain. He had a more immediate test at hand. His father, perpetual high school history teacher, unrepentant grand games master, had issued a challenge: Identify the following. And Artie swore not to budge until he proved more capable of making sense out of fragments than his father was of fragmenting sense.
He stole a look kapok-way, but Dad was waiting for him. Artie never had a very smooth motion to first, and his Dad was the greatest balk detector of all time. “Son?” Pop inquired, fleshing out the word with a sadistic, smart-ass grin. Artie filled with filial hatred, a familiar and quiet disgust at knowing that Pop always had been and would be able to see through the least of the thousand pretensions Artie needed for self-esteem. He’d lived with him too long. Pop had gotten hold of his rhythm. Worse than that: his rhythm was Pop’s, handed down. And here Artie was, trying to drive past the man who’d taught him how to dribble. Spin, fake, or weave, he would be there keeping pace, predictable to himself, smirking, Who taught you that move?
“Dad?” Artie mimicked, returning a poor version of his father’s grin. There on the kapok, head propped up off the pillow in a crooked arm, stick limbs dangling, a gut that dumped its cargo across the bed, torso decked in ratty corduroys and vintage fifties crew neck: the man was a living denial of social decorum. His face, flushed with challenge, met Artie’s in impudent amusement and dare.
“Calamine. Couldn’t be simpler. Can we conclude that the much-touted Mr. Memory is stumped?” Dad stumbled on the first syllable, but as soon as he came up to thirty-three and a third, he
was almost fine.
Artie forced a laugh and put his thumbnail squarely in the chip of his right incisor. “Don’t rush the neurotransmitters,” he whistled. His recall tested out in the upper stanines, but that was with objective stuff. With Dad, one could never be sure that the investigation dealt with verifiable fact. Phantom tracers had to be followed down as well. Odds were the word was some allusion to family history. Art considered calling in Eddie Jr. to pinch hit for him; his younger brother coped with nostalgia much better than Artie, although he had lived through less family trivia than anyone. The kid could identify the reference. But Dad hadn’t given the problem to little brother. It was all Arthur’s, and he’d sit with it until Christmas, if need be.
The trick to bringing something back was to look at something else altogether. So Artie let his attention wander from the emaciated, fat man in the crew neck to the maple leaves piling up on the front lawn. The men of the 19th had long been after the elder Eddie about criminally negligent raking, but Pop stood them off, exercising civil disobedience, the only exercise he got anymore. He refused to ruffle the leafstuff until someone in civil power once again legalized burning. The right to burn leaves, Hobson claimed, was in the Constitution. The Hobsons, he told the precinct, had been burning leaves ever since they came over. He neglected to tell the 19th that the Hobsons came over only seventy years ago, but what the community didn’t know about the local opposition couldn’t hurt them as much as what they already did.
Artie focused on the leaves, on how each shed piece of maple, in ridiculous tints of flint, cantaloupe, and rose, falling in front of a lamp globe, captured a corona, flapped once to keep aloft longer, preened down the debutante runway, and made that superfluous but all-important coming-out spin. Hair by Austere. Gown by Chlorophyll. Artie concentrated on not concentrating on Pop’s secret word as if curing his father, or at least being temporarily rid of him, depended on identifying the allusion.
Prisoner's Dilemma Page 1
