Prisoner's Dilemma

by Richard Powers

  3

  The local crisis passed, as Lily knew it would. As always, Hobson’s crisis was that there was no crisis, and so nothing the rest of them could do. Hearing of Dad’s instant return to health, Lily watched the others pump their lips like astonished aquarium fish, then dissolve a few minutes later, spread into the house’s corners to rule over independent, empty countries.

  Later, she sat by candlelight in her room, putting her hand to the draft where the window sash had long ago warped. Dad fixed the wood once, but it warped again. The flaw was now part of her room, like the sagging bookshelves and the cozily threadbare rug. The imperfections made things bearable. Lily put her hand against the cold, glass skin standing between herself and November. Her family did not suspect the expense their mute calls for help caused her. She alone saw the emergency afoot.

  She had always underwritten the negligence of others through private deficit spending, abiding her sister’s cute obtuseness, suffering Artie’s indignities in private, and putting Little Eddie’s ignorance on tab. She spoke the family code, cracked the required caustic jokes, but all the while watched out for them without their knowing. But tonight, Lily felt her outlay reach a debit ceiling.

  When her mother and sister had asked her along for Ladies’ Night, Lily had affected a mock shuffle and palsied palm. “You girls go dancing, and don’t worry about me.”

  Rachel had jumped all over her, saying, “Look, Sister. You’ve been nursing some serious old-maid qualities over the last couple of annums.”

  Lily had spit back, “Old maid? I’ve earned it. Come talk to me when you’ve been where I’ve been.”

  At the quarter-century mark, she’d been through the mill twice already. Her father was borderline certifiable, her mother a martyr. She herself was divorced, careerless, and without prospects in either. Worst, she had three siblings incapable of facing the coming disaster. Nor was she herself ready to go after the man. Not just yet.

  She lifted the stereo needle gingerly onto an old favorite LP, an early-seventies vocal group whose combination of African and Elizabethan harmonies always made her feel as if there were some possibility of new air that everyone had overlooked. The sound of the familiar tunes always made it seem that something was about to happen, something simple and wonderful. But after two tracks, the chordal formula sounded dated and precious. Without warning, she had to go for a walk, get out of the house’s residual static. She killed the phono, stubbed out what remained of a burned-down joss stick, went to the front-hall closet, got her winter coat, put it on, thought better of it, and replaced it with her lighter autumn one. Then she set off through the front door her mother had butted shut just two hours before. Three steps into the lawn, she concluded that Precinct 19 was right in their legal battle with her father: some Hobson had better do something about all those unraked leaves. So she lay down and rolled in them.

  When she at last stood up, she picked off leaves, leaving a few oranges in strategic points for perverse good measure. Then she followed the front walk out to the street. Turning to survey the family plot, she grew grateful for one thing: whatever indignities her family made her endure, they had never once graced their parade of exchanged houses with one of those horse-tether replicas topped by a miniature coach-and-four announcing “The Hobsons’,” or worse, “The Hobson’s.”

  For in reality, it never came down to the plural or the bastard plural possessive. It was always the Hobson. The man turned the We and They of their endless bridge scorecards into You and You and You and You. He’s upstairs working on Hobstown. Lily wandered away from One-Oh-Three toward town along Second Street’s unnecessarily rustic cobblestones. She reminded herself that there was, in fact, no such place as Hobstown: an Erewhon, an Emerald City of her father’s devising. The place she had to navigate was De Kalb, Illinois, a corn town sixty-five miles due west of Chicago, Birthplace of Barbed Wire.

  Pop always insisted that one’s only hope of salvation lay in finding out where history dropped you down. Yet the same man, trapped in phantoms, lived for Hobstown, a makeshift, escapist fantasy, as far as she could make out. She had her own, of course. She lived for names, and the names of places. The disaster of her own marriage lay in her having chosen Wayne Leeds not for any redeeming or damning qualities in the man himself but for the delicious alliteration that matrimony worked on her: Lily Leeds. It came off the tongue with poetic perfection, and who could help but honor such an offer?

  But Lily Leeds—perfect sound, perfect name—had led, after only ten months and ultimate violence, back here, imperfect place, imperfect town. In the end, she had nothing to show for the escapade but broken furniture, no remedy for the mistake except to come home to Hotel Hobson, a bed and board whose rates required putting up with a father’s black humor as he slowly did away with himself, erased himself for good from this place. Her father had lost his hold on Here. He could no longer calm her, as he had when she was young, with “Don’t be afraid. I’m Here, and so are you.”

  All she could do was embrace this flat, pragmatic state, layered north to south like a seasonal parfait, where three hundred miles along any road, roads that cut across county lines in compound scars, advanced or reversed by half a month the degree that next season’s temperature had homesteaded the area. Last week was still intact a short drive south of her, December some seven hundred miles north, rolling down on her at a fixed rate.

  And in spring, May rolled north from Cairo at the state’s southernmost tip. Then she watched farmers plant their thousand-acre maws, betting on when the best weather would break. Green systematically erased the state’s black cipher in a northward wave, spring’s parfait-fuse. De Kalb waited under snow blankets with a practiced patience until, in just weeks, the place denied it had ever been white once. Another month brought the double insult of 90 percent humidity and 100 degrees.

  Lily walked north, rushing December by several seconds, concluding that The Hobsons and one false Leeds were the only flesh west of the Fox River that did not make a living off the land. They were neither harvesters nor harvester-hybrid developers nor even, anymore, teachers of harvesters-to-be. They alone neither toiled nor spun, sowed, or reaped. They were stranded without practical skills, beached on the blessed black fields, impounded forever at Fifth and Main with no means of getting out.

  Though outwardly they showed no mark. They lived in a house identical to the dozens she now passed. De Kalb’s standard model: a white, wooden A-frame with pitched roof and screen porch added two years before the War for Democracy. Once her favorite joke was to tell anyone who gave her a lift home, “That’s my house. The white one with the pitched roof, up there on the right.” Can’t miss it. She thought it funny, like saying that Granddad’s grave in the photo of Flanders was the white stone cross with the dates on it. She rarely made the joke anymore.

  Their home, like all others, wore its garland of meters, meting out trickles of electricity, water, gas. The spin of dials marked the only evidence of change, the only proof that something inside the house had indeed altered from yesterday. Their door, like its neighbors’, already wore a winter wreath of Indian corn and gourds, products of the world’s richest earth. Mother, a genius of protective coloration, made their doorway blend in, hiding the fact that theirs marked the den of another species.

  From a hundred gourded doors in a few more hours, the air stinking of leaves and the sky taking on the color of a conch, interchangeable widows in slippers and gowns would put their hands to the cold stoop to retrieve the morning news. Her family would be waking, too. But safely back in bed, Lily would beg off breakfast, already having completed her effort for this day.

  She passed a Pentacostal barn whose sandwich board announced Sunday’s Special: BRICKS OF RELIGION. Across the way lay the town’s sole memorial, a garden-variety monument to the homegrown war dead. Twisted committee logic selected for the marker one of the agents of massacre: a tank of the Ardennes variety. She passed the town’s second-greatest claim to historical fa
me: the only place in North America where two state highways and a railroad track intersected. On the far side of the tracks, she loitered for the expected late freight, to hear the rich sixth chords it always issued. When the train tooled by on timetable, she identified the chord out loud: “Andrews Sisters.” Her father had formed her knowledge of music, as of so much else.

  The town looked more movie-proppish than ever at this late hour. The row of retail outlets one block deep along either side of the main drag held no interest for her. She hooked left, picking up her trail.

  Although she had not chosen the place, the family blamed her for their still being here. They lay the responsibility, under the guise of good humor, squarely on her: if Lily had not chosen to attend the local land-grant college just after the family’s arrival, De Kalb would have been just another four-year whistle-stop like all the others. This joke was especially cruel, as the choice wasn’t hers. Lily had intended to follow Artie’s lead in attending an Eastern public university, Dad’s school, the “family’s school,” as Pop ironically called it. “The university that the Hobsons have always attended.” Dad and Artie were the only two Hobsons who’d ever gone on to school.

  But Lily capitulated, giving up her choice at the last minute, the day before she was to fly back East. She was about to travel in two directions: forward into adulthood, and back to the place of her girlhood, the place she had loved before the Hobsons had started their long life of wagons west. For the first time, she savored that delicious smorgasbord of possibilities that life becomes when trimming down worldly possessions to two suitcases.

  When Ailene walked in on her during the bag-pack, Lily motioned to the wardrobe that had not made the final cut and asked giddily, “Oh, Mother! Who was it wore this chartreuse, and those floppy collars? Certainly I never had such taste.”

  Ailene sat down quietly, extinguishing her daughter’s excitement. Lily felt a wave of shame at delighting in something her mother had never done. But that was not the problem. Ailene, who had never dreamed of trying the same trick on Artie when it had been his turn to go, remarked offhandedly, “If only you weren’t starting off to school just now.”

  Lily instantly understood the tacit code: the man on the kapok, whose condition that summer had once again flared. Lily stopped in mid suitcase-stuff and knew that her careful, curatorial job of packing was irrelevant, that she would never leave. At that moment she glimpsed her adult role—always accommodating, seldom appreciated. Without protest, she changed her plans.

  The culprit responsible for the episodes timed them with the same heavy-handed burlesque behind the old joke about the family’s school, Hobson U. Her father lived in vignettes and thought in maxims. Lily recalled Dad’s favorite pedagogical aphorism, fired off when any of his charges committed a hasty conclusion: “All Indians walk in single file. At least the one I saw did.” A oneliner if ever there was one. No generalizations can be trusted. Least of all this one.

  The precise mix of meanings Dad injected into each of these gags contained so many unrelated and conflicting ingredients that Lily had long ago given up trying to pin him down. He kidded and ridiculed; he was deadly earnest. He got to the heart of the urgency, only to slide off into sarcasm. He threw away lines that distilled everything he knew. And when survival itself was at issue, Dad uncorked a cliché that meant nothing and everything all at once. His voice showed that he knew he couldn’t get away with it. Yet he always did. “We always let him,” Lily said out loud to the empty street. “At least the We I saw did.”

  So when her mother stopped her short with “just now,” Lily unpacked her bag and enrolled in the town’s normal college, one of those institutions that damns itself to mediocrity by adding a compass point to its name. She chose to study special education. But her undeclared major was campus radicalism, a field retreating from its high-water mark of the previous decade. Everyone had some alternative to things as they are, some escape from everyday limbo. Lily’s was to live in a year when raw history scraped open the surface of things and made it seem that something else could happen.

  This demure woman, who for twenty years had spent all her waking hours with a paint box, on her first Philosophy of Education take-home final declared that “making even one colored mark on a blank piece of newsprint should be an act of moral revolt.” More than a revolt: an appeal for grace. All human beings were due a full accounting, but they had to ask for it. Art was a way of asking. That, at least, was what she had had in mind when, totally in the dark at eighteen, she settled on special education with emphasis on fine arts. To teach the wordless another kind of speech, a way of articulating and demanding: that, she felt sure, was certainly worth studying. Eighteen, just Edski’s age. And now still no farther along than he.

  She did well her first year at school. But within a year she made the staggering discovery that “developmentally disabled” and “emotionally impaired” were simply euphemisms for what almost everybody, both within the profession and without, still thought of as retards. Certainly no one bought her belief that it was sufficient to get her charges to make colored marks on paper. “Well intentioned, but misguided” was the way one professor evaluated her classroom technique. Mainstreaming was the byword of the day. The borderline nonnormals were turned loose into public life, the moderates attended to, and the severes pharmaceutically maintained. But by the time Lily made this discovery, she was committed. Her father’s daughter, she could not stop halfway. All she could do was finish the degree and watercolor for her own sanity, between educational colloquia.

  The allure of collegiate unrest also proved disappointing. Things had grown so comparatively calm by the early seventies that one scarcely remembered the war was still going on. Her generation had waited for her to arrive to deny that anything needed protesting. More than one cafeteria debate she had incited ended with the enemy insisting that activists were only kidding themselves. The prevailing argument was that the present had achieved a permanent state of militarization, so why bitch about a magnesium brush fire?

  This was, Lily knew, the Voting Fallacy that the Hobson had once given his kids as topic for a table debate. No matter which candidate I like, the fallacy goes, my vote itself will not alter the outcome. My scrap of litter is not the problem; it’s the mountain already made by the other three and a half billion. Or: one air-conditioner more or less will not rescue or deplete the doomed ozone layer. So why should I swelter for a virtuous but impotent ideal?

  Lily knew that the argument led to more air-conditioners, but it sounded so unimpeachable, she could not penetrate it and point out the error. Activism, when sufficient of her friends refused it credence, did seem irrelevant. It was only viable if everybody agreed it was. But doing nothing was complicity. She might have asked Dad to reveal the fallacy, the flaw in the logic. But during her first year, Dad was in no shape for dialectics. She would not have gone to him anyway; that would have involved admitting that she had missed the point of the lesson the first time around.

  Yet there were still enough of the dispossessed hanging around in Liberal Arts programs for Lily to take arms against the Voting Fallacy and pull off one final piece of resistance, one last act of articulation. In the spring of 1972, when talk of an impending peace pact was everywhere in the air, Lily and a commando gang of underclassmen prepared, under cover of the night, a reminder that the president, even at that threshold moment, was mining North Vietnamese harbors.

  With a hydrogen canister commandeered from Chemistry, some string and party balloons obtained over the counter, and a handful of stones dug out of an unwitting accomplice’s backyard, the covert band went about their protest. Just before sunrise, they set up the gas canister alongside the lagoon in the middle of campus and began inflating. Except for one lunatic who waved his cigarette around and made jokes about the Hindenburg, everything went smoothly. Filling each balloon with hydrogen and gluing it to a stone, the special-forces unit sank each sphere to the bottom of the pond. Asleep in the deep. By eigh
t o’clock that morning, early classgoers saw something remarkable: colored balls, one by one struggling up from the surface of the water and drifting up into the air, each with the word Haiphong written on it in a deliberate if not to say artistic hand.

  But all that activism now seemed so many years ago. Lily looked off to her left, where two of the college’s taller buildings shot up out of the vacancy of fields. The fields were harvested now, brought in like clean linen off the line. The campus had reverted to the days of an MBA for the boys and an MRS for the girls. Since the mock harbor-mining, she too had done her bit to build up equity in the status quo. She’d tried the tie that binds, and after its dissolution, moved back home. Those more assimilated of her classmates had simply figured it out before her: in the wider conflagration, what could one objection work? Not very much, she now suspected. Best bury your talent these days in the ground, where, if it failed to cumulate or compound, it was at least, in Minuteman lingo, a hard target.

  Yet the woman who had mined the Haiphong harbor that sat in the lagoon that lay on the campus that taught the town that barbed wire built still could not reconcile herself to the here in all this here. Ludicrous, that her family should end up where they were—the only ones for miles who couldn’t say what roguing and winter wheat were. She wished as she walked that what troubled her father had been as straightforward and unexotic as cerebral malaria or dissociative schizophrenia. If only he had chosen jaundice, a disease with clinical rationale. The only predictable pattern to Eddie Sr.’s illness was that after the initial, frenetic fit-period passed, usually in ten days, he would pull himself together, deny that anything out of the ordinary had happened, go back to work on his pet urban-development project, and then get the urge to take a lower paying, more obscure job farther west, deeper in the interior.

  Dad island-hopped from Jersey to Philly to Cinci to De Kalb, carting along wife and kids for no better reason than that anyplace else was one leg up on here. Lily had always believed her father’s job changes—clearly successive demotions in the eyes of the NEA if not in his—were separate from the rest of his sickness. His spells had cost him a job or two, but she had never before suspected cause and effect. Yet tonight, the wandering and the fits seemed cut from whole cloth, two aspects of the same trip, one from which, the unconsulted specialists were sure to concur, he was unlikely to return.