Prisoner's Dilemma

by Richard Powers

  Little Eddie, feeling how close they were to a full-scale blowout, fell into his patented strategy for undoing the tension he had inadvertently made. “I can’t believe you’re leaving.” He subscribed to the principle that if you said something often enough, you would eventually make the accidentally injured party laugh. “I can’t . . . I ca-ca . . . I just can’t believe . . . You can’t be . . .” All punches walk in a single line. It always worked for him, anyway.

  Artie knew what the kid was up to, and part of him thawed. After a dozen drunken Eddie-iterations of the offending phrase, the boys exchanged wry looks: no need for escalations here. Artie backed down from his docket. He ran looser, flicked with a little more flair. But just as Artie started to enjoy himself, the surprise prowess of his body, and the bite of the air, a sharp spiral bullet pass from Eddie caught him on the jaw and took a chunk out of his face. The pass came in so treacherously that Artie didn’t even have time to put up his hands. He crumpled to the grass, the freezing ground. Eddie ran over to him, streaming, “Sorry. Oh Jesus, I’m sorry, it was an accident, sorry, accident, acci . . .” At the same time, Artie objected furiously, “No, no. It’s nothing. My fault. I wasn’t paying . . . I was having too good a . . .”

  Eddie brought Big Brother inside and propped him up underneath an ice pack. Artie, peaceful now that he had earned his Purple Heart, chose the nursing moment to deliver up his belated birthday present to Eddie. Eddie Jr.’s eighteenth, the ostensible reason they had gathered here for the weekend, had been all but forgotten, upstaged by the Invalid’s latest and greatest return from remission.

  Artie went to the bottom of his bureau and brought forth the peace offering. Little Eddie recognized his brother’s gift at once, something he had for years coveted: a set of World War II photographs of enemy warplanes replete with performance statistics and markings, still packed in the army-issue box stamped “Secret” that Eddie Sr. had received in the service. Pop had passed the photos on to his firstborn, with solemn instructions to learn the silhouettes by heart. “The WEFT method: Wings, Engine, Fuselage, Tail. Every man must do his part,” the man had said, giving it the same intonation as he always gave to “There’s more to us than any of us suspects,” or “The Sea will provide.”

  “Oh, Artie. You don’t have to. Maybe you want to hold on to these, in case . . .”

  Artie overrode Eddie’s protests and objections of unworthiness. “Take them. You’ve wanted them for years. I’ve memorized them long ago. Just don’t tell Dad that I’m reneging on surveillance duty, okay?”

  He had enclosed a card, which Eddie now read: “Congrats on surviving Basic. Never thought you’d make it this far.” A brotherly allusion to “Chain of Command,” the game Dad had always used to get them to make their beds, take baths, practice musical instruments, do homework, and stay in line. Eddie was the Buck Private, Artie the Sergeant, and Pop the General, liable to make surprise spot inspections at any time. When the boys complained, asking when they would be able to get out of boot camp, Pop always responded, “You don’t get out of Basic until you’re eighteen.” This gift, Eddie Jr. understood, was his promotional papers, from Artie to the next in command.

  Before the visit broke up, Lily surprised everyone by dragging out the camera that had been hanging in the back of her closet, filmless, for the last few years. She documented Rachel and Artie’s departure, a photo opportunity unremarkable in the extreme. In this way, she maintained the longstanding Hobson family-snapshot tradition of feast or famine. Their photo album alternated between drought and glut. They would add no new pictures for years. Then someone would shoot a dozen exposures of five people hanging around the front door, giving a misleading significance to a moment whose importance, if any, was soon forgotten.

  Such was the present: four photographs of a confused group milling around the front door. “Well,” Ailene said, summing up everyone’s feelings. She could think of nothing more appropriate to say, and left it at that.

  “Welp,” agreed Rachel, smacking her lips and nodding. “Yer got that right. You . . . sure . . . got that right.” Eddie Jr. giggled. Provoked into hilarity, he reached out a hand as if to shake Arthur’s good-bye, but instead kept going and rammed him in the solar plexus. Suddenly, Lily couldn’t stand the false festivities another second. She put her hands to her ears and beat a retreat to her room. There she reshelved the camera and put a forgotten vocal group from the sixties on the grinder, blotting out the noises from the outside.

  Eddie Sr., however, was in rare form. Filling the silence created by Lily’s quick exit, he stood in the doorway and told, by way of a send-off, about a recent article he’d come across: a marvelous gorilla who had been taught to speak sign language. “Most attempts at animal communication,” Dad explained, “on examination, rely on cuing and conditioning. But what sets this guy apart is that he’s been filmed flipping through a picture book and signing to himself.” Artie, Rach, Ailene, and little Eddie, unable to connect Pop’s monologue with the situation yet certain of a link, however Byzantine, looked on in horrified fascination, not daring to stop him or anticipate what topic he would jump to next.

  Seeing he had garnered a modest success with the ape, Dad turned his attention to the angels. “You might also be interested to hear that engineers at Hughes Research Lab have succeeded in answering a timeless metaphysical question by microengraving one hundred thousand gold-deposit angels on the head of a pin. Unfortunately, the pin subsequently squirted out of the technician’s tweezers and is now lost forever in a crack in the laboratory floor.” And he began to free-associate completely, launching into a Robert Service travesty, “The Pin on the Laboratory Floor.”

  He would eventually have found a way around to Kipling’s “If,” had Rachel not blurted out, “Hey, hey, hey. Wait justa, will ya? Haven’t we forgotten something here? Nobody’s going anywhere until . . .” She dug the ever-present pitch pipe out of her coat pocket, tooted it, and began singing the crystalline soprano strain, “Lo, how a rose e’er blooming . . .”

  To hear the full four-part treatment was, after all, one of her chief incentives for coming home this weekend. Now she was determined to collect the pleasure, even in the closing minutes of the trip. The others didn’t make it in on the down beat, but three of four parts made the glorious hemiola at the end of the first strain. By the end of the second, even Lily had derailed her record player and crept shyly back out of her room to double her mother on alto. The boys, tenors true, doubled the other interior line, while Eddie Sr. supported the beefy bass part with so precise and clear an intonation that his kids once again felt he might have made a career out of singing-waiterdom, now atrophied. Pop’s musical ear left only the legendary Miller Tiller as its fossil record. Had he made a living making melodies instead of teaching, more than one of them now thought, everything might have turned out differently.

  Whatever the truth in that, by verse two Rach had her full chorale. The passing harmonies confirmed her belief that, if one avoided their attendant misery, no folks more deserved her love than these. This fact welled up in her ears as they glided into that deceptive modulation just before the last cadence without anyone either accidentally repeating the dominant or giving away the transcendence by telegraphing the surprise chord.

  All at once, the flash that each had tried so hard to evade was there, intact: a moment of tender visiting hovering over them as the tenors slid down that narrow half-step to the F sharp. They all felt it, momentarily. And each knew the others received a momentary hold on the instant, too. All six stood looking into a place before irony, before wit, before anxiety, before evasion. Surfaces dispersed, and in the still point underneath, they saw what was so terribly obvious to all of them, despite their long gainsaying: how hopelessly each cared what happened to the other. The care shouted out uninvited between them, like a candidate’s criminal record. They had no choice but to tune their chord to it. They stood startled, flushed into that snare, aware for once of the connection between them that
could reach down at leisure and destroy them. Caught in glorious chord, in facts gathered from each other’s faces, they all felt the fissure—fragile, dangerous, and beautiful—close up and leave them in the incurable call back to tonic. The rose I have in mind.

  The tune stopped, and so did the room. When the spell broke, they again exchanged counterpoint good-byes all around. Parents and children traded the pointed, pointless trivialities of leave-taking: “Drive carefully. Don’t kill yourself.” “Okay, Ma, we won’t.” Once more, fainter, briefer this time, a trace of the first visit came back: this is the last such time.

  All was indirection; they lapsed back into Hobsonspeak. Everything spoken stood for something else, with one exception. For when Dad grabbed Artie’s hand with his own insistent grip, he raised his eyebrows in a new intellectual challenge. Rather than echo anything so trivial as “Take care,” he said, “Dr. Harold Wolff, of Cornell.”

  The remark startled Artie, coming without context or gloss. He hadn’t a clue to what Dad meant. But Artie had cut his teeth on just such ellipses. With Dad, the out-of-context challenge was standard fare, meat and potatoes. “What field is he in?” Artie called back, thinking on his feet, as Rach dragged him out the door. But Dad just lifted his brows again, shrugged, and waved, already fading back into the well-wishing crowd.

  Artie and Rachel boarded Mr. Nader, a Ford Pinto complete with exploding gas tank, which she had chosen for perversely unactuarial reasons, and tooled down Second Street. Slowly, there descended on the severed family something like the dull thud following a failed simile. The homebound four reconnoitered at the door one full measure longer than required. Then the ranks broke into a rout.

  Late that night, Eddie Jr., looking for Dad in all the shamelessly optimistic places, saving the only likely one for last, found him racked out on the porch, stretched on the kapok, not sleeping yet but fortunately not tranced-out either. “Damn it, Pop. What the hell are you doing out here? It’s witch-titty cold out. Or didn’t you notice?”

  “Is that any way to talk to your father? Did I raise you to be a potty mouth? That’s witch-breasty cold, boy.”

  Eddie Jr. threw a blanket over his father and dropped into the side chair, filling in for the departed Artie. He thought, with only a little remorse, of what a relief it would be for Pop to kick off right now, die of something unexpected, say, exposure or pneumonia. Yet Little Eddie found himself admiring the guy for his obstinate jocularity under stress. Dad’s comic curiosity in the face of everything struck Eddie as the only form of dignity possible these days. But as the look of familiar whimsy shaded his dad’s face, it seemed, in the shadows, to tip toward vicious. Perhaps Artie was right: Dad’s good nature was not good-natured, his bluff not just bluff. Eddie looked again at Dad’s face, but could not longer see anything in the diminished streetlamp glow. He thought how he was now eighteen and would have to start being more discriminating.

  He picked up both of Dad’s discarded socks—the man was trying to get pneumonia—and juggled them along with a pewter ashtray, exercising the athletic grace that he alone of all Hobsons commanded. The three unbalanced objects stayed aloft best when he focused not on them but on the scar on his father’s exposed ankle, a wartime wound marking where part of a B-17 fuselage had pinned Dadimo to a dolly.

  “Fire with fire,” Eddie Jr. said suddenly, the juggled items not even wavering. “As ye give, so shall ye get. And verse-vica, you scratch my back, I’ll scratch yours.”

  He might have been falling benignly into randomness. But Dad needed no grace notes for explanation. He answered his son without missing a beat. “Interesting position. But it won’t get you out. You mean each prisoner should retaliate with what the other guy does the turn before? Is that right?”

  Eddie Jr., implementing the policy for himself, said nothing, juggling in the dark. Dad continued. “Tit for Tat. God knows it’s an honorable attempt at stabilizing. In fact, it’s the strategy of choice in the best textbooks. And it’s the option with the greatest chance of success with prisoners who are simple and good enough to assume the other guy is also simple and good.” Here Dad gave Eddie Jr. a look that could, in the dark, pass for heartbroken fondness. The quick, covert glance betrayed Dad’s secret favorite among his children, this simple foreigner whom the world would soon methodically dismantle. The look said: I care for you most because you don’t know what you’re up against. Eddie Jr., eyes on his orbits, did not notice. “But practically speaking,” Dad continued, “the policy collapses in at least two cases.”

  One sock circumnavigated the juggled loop, followed by the pewter, then the other sock. The smooth motion was Eddie Jr.’s nod to continue. “At first thought, cooperating with cooperation and betraying betrayal seems to stabilize the situation and stick it to old Senator Joe. But this strategy requires that the dilemma occur not just once, but repeatedly. It doesn’t help the one-shot event at all; you need retrials to make your policy known to the other guy. Retaliation won’t enforce anything if there’s no tomorrow. That’s breakdown number one.” Eddie Jr. bobbled the pewter, but kept on. So did Dad.

  “Let’s say we agree to exchange hostages at remote drop-off points every Monday night. It’s the same bind as the McCarthy model, only it happens regularly. Mutual cooperation is still better than mutual back-stabbing, but there’s still a premium paid for being the only one to rat. Now we can test your Tit for Tat. You both play fair for a few weeks. Then, the other guy tries the rewarding double cross. You pay him back the next week with a taste of his own medicine. If he cooperates, you reward him in spades. What we used to call the Old Testament law. As soon as the pattern reveals itself, it should be clear that nobody’s going to get away with anything much. The game has been greatly simplified. He knows you’ll seek retribution if he tries anything. And you’re both lulled into a false security.

  “False, because one Monday night, there’s an accident. He’s late with the delivery. You think he’s defected. You pay him back the following week, while he plays fair. Angry, he plays Tit for Tat in week three, and you fall into a game of perpetual revenge.” Outside, cars scythed up and down Second Street. Houses lined the cut, preparing private glows as an Arctic air mass rolled in from Canada. “Besides,” Dad added, “any week might be the last. So there’s always that additional incentive to take a chance, rat, and cash in.”

  Dad looked at the boy with real concern, wishing to keep him from harm. But he set his jaw and kept on, intent on disabusing him, hurting him, if need be, to keep him from greater injury. “There’s an even bigger problem. True. In a world of independent vested interests, you need some threat to prevent the other guy from threatening you. But please tell me what threat is big enough to check the force we are really up against? PREZ SEZ HE WILL NOT BLINK FIRST. How do you retaliate against something that size, little man?”

  One of Eddie Jr.’s air-bound socks caught on the tip of the pewter ashtray. The unstable amalgam flew out of orbit, and the kid was left pumping his hands in empty air. He put his hands in his lap. After a proprietary pause telling Dad that the diatribe had not gone undigested, he smiled and repeated, simply, “Fire with fire. With a little space for forgiveness.”

  Dad propped himself up on one arm, an action requiring visible sacrifice and agony. He leaned over to little Eddie, all pedagogy wiped from his face. A rippling irritation softened and broke over him from north of the diaphragm. He put his chin to his clavicle. Perhaps the convulsion was just gas spasms; perhaps it was part of the larger disease. Or perhaps Dad was the victim of a different, unmanageable concern, something the prisoner matrix, the threat of retaliation, kept him from saying outright. Perhaps Dad knew the feeling that had him by the throat but, for the boy’s sake, did not name it. The culprit could only have been love: he could not have helped but love anyone capable of such irrational kindness. He had to love anyone of his blood who was the equal of keeping to that shameless ideal. And what he felt for Little Eddie Dad admitted only indirectly, saying, “Good man
,” punctuating the confession with a nervous, under-the-breath swallow.

  But his implication was lost on the boy when a pair of headlights swung into the drive. The two Eddies froze in their separate tracks and turned toward the beam, caught criminals, or animals dazed in the pool of light. Mere interrogation turns innocent actions into complicity, thought Ed Jr., a mnemonic for something he had forgotten, probably from a quiz session in Artie’s law books. He recalled the one that went, “On Old Olympus’s Towering Top, a Fat-Assed German Viewed a Hawk,” a mnemonic for the eight cranial nerves. Artie taught him that one, too, and he was grateful. He’d completely forgotten the cranial nerves themselves, but he held on to the memory-jogging device as if it were itself the catechism. The same with Mere Interrogation, as the beam in the driveway caught father and son holding the bag.

  “Gotta head, Pop. That’s my ride.” Eddie Jr. stood, spun, and flipped a twenty-foot jumper with the remaining sock, which came down gently over the war wound on Dad’s shin. With one smooth motion Eddie lifted a coat off the rack near the door and fell into the front yard. He was almost to the waiting car full of friends when his father called him back once more. Eddie Jr., protesting, returned, compelled by something in the old bellow, the old “Sea will provide” chantey.

  “Where you off to, little man?”

  “Oh . . . just out. Friends from school. You know us kids, Pop. It’s always something. Hormones.”

  “Should I wait up?” asked Dad, tasting the irony, a pernicious smile at his lips.

  “I’ll be back by Thanksgiving at the latest. Don’t you worry about that. You’re not getting away with nothing.” Eddie turned again to the car, toward society and mutual support. But once more, perhaps for the last time, Pop called him back, this time with a whisper.