Prisoner's Dilemma

by Richard Powers

  “Who are we kidding?” he explained out loud. “Why bitch? Muzak; traffic cops. The fiendishly clever they invented them so that we don’t catch on to overpopulation, test-ban treaties, and poisoned water. Even if we could get to the real issue, acid rain or whatever, nobody really expects that even collectively, which is impossible, we can fix things. Here we are, whining about something of absolutely no significance. Our only common culture is complaint. Antisocial small talk. Complaint is the last tool society leaves us for feeling we belong.”

  “Yer whacked,” Rachel countered. “At least we bitch and moan. My friends don’t even mind the Muzak. They don’t even hear it. If they did, if we put ten million people on the White House steps, don’t you think they’d pass a law?”

  “Oh, Rach. Say it ain’t so. You, defending activism? You sound like your sister. Lily’s a perfect case in point. She’s just like the rest of us. Sure, she made the marches for a few years. But that was just her ticket to a happy despair. Her niche in the world.”

  “So how do you explain the kid?”

  Artie smiled. “Good question.” Eddie Jr. alone remained free of the antieverything infection. A generational difference lay hidden in the few years that separated the first three of them from the youngest. Artie remembered the scene of a few months back, when Lily had tried forcibly to restrain the then-still-minor from obeying the law and registering for the reinstated draft. Ironic turnaround from how things had been when he was a kid.

  “The way I see it, you, me, and Lil grew up postwar, in the mirage of prosperity. All the high expectations floating around must have wrecked us for any chance at real satisfaction. Now Edski, showing up after all the appliances arrived and the all the hope vanished: he’s got no reason to believe that anybody deserves anything better. So he’s genuinely happy, gripeless.”

  They both knew who was next in line for analysis. But neither brought him up, surrendering to late-century anesthesia rather than face, however briefly, the heart of Dad’s dilemma. And that, they half-saw, was Dad’s dilemma. Why was it so impossible, these days, to experience anything, to look out the window and feel? Because the question itself was already self-conscious. Because the basic four-chambered heart and the standard two-chambered brain were not designed to live in the kind of place they had made of the world. Because the only things left outside the window were unknowably huge and removed, in which the old animal legs of progress, long out of control, lopped off by the scythe, still kicked as if galvanized in the harvested, empty fields. Because to get downtown by nightfall, they had no choice but to take the prescribed anodynes and keep to the wheel.

  They reached emergency. Not knowing how else to back away, Artie turned on the radio and fiddled with it, getting one of the proliferate Chicago Ignore-Me stations. He lowered the volume appropriately, snapping his fingers and humming “Strangers in the Night,” although that was not the song playing. He looked over at Rachel, his face a perfect cipher, and asked, “What were you saying? I couldn’t hear you without background.” Rach, with nothing to lose but her new criminal record, rabbit-punched him while Artie kept her car on the road.

  “It’s yer dad’s fault, you know,” she sighed at last. “I mean, Discontent as an art form.”

  “Oh, unquestionably.” Artie no longer noticed their mutual habit, initially humorous, of democratizing blame by rendering the old man a “yer.” The gag made unwitting third parties think they were only half-siblings. Artie looked away from her. “And rightly so, don’t you think? You couldn’t respect the man if his great act of social protest took some banal form, say, alcoholism, or heart disease. No; he brought us up believing that the ordinary is our enemy, and we’ve got to fight it in style. Extraordinarily.”

  “Maybe. But nobody ever killed themselves with eccentricity.” The patented silliness slid from her face. She was, for the first time in a while, speaking from need, not just skipping stones. “Artie?” She sounded frightened. “Where do you go with ‘Westward Ho’ when you get West? You know, he could have stayed in Jersey, if he was just going to come out here and fall apart. Nothing wrong with Jersey, except that ‘The Garden State’ is a clear violation of truth in advertising. Or Pennsylvania? Philly? Philly’s perfect for falling apart in. Plenty of people fall apart in Philly. Or Ohio? Goddamned Birthplace of Presidents?”

  A scratch of phlegm tore off on the last word. If anyone else in the world had started to choke on Artie, he could have handled it. But for Rach to go to pieces: so impossible, so out of character, that Artie felt his neck flash cold. He could not manage this, not here, not Rachel. But the only thing he could think of to avert a collapse was limp, agreeing sympathy. “You’re right. There’s such a thing as carrying this fixation for elbowroom too far. I mean, look around . . .”

  They both did. Outside, the last, sourceless light scattered across vacancy, running unopposed all the way to the horizon. Another stunted sob came from Rach’s throat and she burst a laugh. She looked, eyes liquid, at her brother, unable to add to the unmitigated Illinois landscape with anything so small as words. They were surrounded by an endless, fenceless detention camp of openness where nothing—not rage, not native contrarity, not even their father’s final illness—could ruffle this Euclidean perfection. To stop the car, pull over, and protest to the fields that they were being cheated would be the absurd mismatch of scale of antimissile demonstrators attacking hardened silos with dime-store hatchets. Artie wondered for a minute if he would have to slap his sister’s face.

  Rach spoke deliberately, a flat matter-of-factness fighting for control of her voice. “What happens when Eddie goes off to school? Pop’s gonna drag Mom up to the Northwest Territories. Somewhere north of the Arctic Circle. I’m serious, Artie. He’s going to. And we’ll be reduced to one phone call from them a year, at Christmas, on a surplus field radiotelephone.”

  The image was so ludicrous that they both laughed nervously. Artie flicked off the drizzling radio. He knew that Rach knew that what Pop might do after Eddie went to school would probably never be of concern. He needed to keep her talking, but could not get back to the cutups in one swoop. So he stuck with what had soothed her a little: the truth. “I’m worried that Pop has only agreed to Hines in order to make a party out of the whole thing. It’s not real sickness to him yet. The most that he’s giving us is, you know—‘Let’s go see about My War Wound.’”

  “Old forgotten soldier?” Rach interpreted. “So goddamned what? Let him pretend he’s the sacrificial lamb, so long as he gets the tests done.”

  Trying to keep her intact, he embittered her instead. She misunderstood: Artie meant to fault Dad for his happy martyrdom, how the man tossed off the insult of daily life as if it were nothing more dangerous than a stale practical joke. Artie meant to condemn Pop for reading the newspaper accounts of contemporary madness out loud, shaking his head and saying, “Can you believe this place? Ya gotta love it.” He wanted to say that Pop’s show of high spirits and appetite—the flip quips, sardonic dismissals—hid a dark and secret bruise, something clearly and terribly wrong that Hines couldn’t treat. But Rach misread him because Artie had not said as much. And he had not said as much because that would have revealed that Artie knew as much from personal experience. He too sat in state at the breakfast table, reading aloud from The New York Times and The De Kalb Chronicle alike the latest installments of national and local insanities, smiling and shaking his head over toxic spills, government double-dealings, bank-underworld liaisons, the countless, felonious, five-finger exercises committed in the name of freedom and sovereignty. Artie himself had supplied Pop with details for Hobstown, that imaginary tumor that had grown out of the daily press for years now. Artie could not give the old, cheerful soldier any solution more tenable than Eddie Sr.’s own chuckling desolation. But Artie would never give such perversity, however much he himself resorted to it, his Good Housekeeping seal. That was what he had meant to tell Rachel. But she had misunderstood.

  However much he h
ad botched things so far, he had to keep talking. Something. Anything. Let Rach know he was just across the seat from her. He changed the topic, burying what he could not hope to tell her even in perfect circumstances. “Ever hear of a Dr. Wolff, of Cornell? Harold, I think the first name is. Harry, maybe?”

  “No.” Rachel sensed current underneath, and let it run. “Why?”

  Artie should have remembered sooner that nothing consoles better than a mystery. “It’s probably nothing,” he said. “A name Dad called after me on our way out. I’m supposed to be detective, see? Figure out what he has figured out about what nobody can figure out.”

  “Taken to crying Wolff, has he?” Rachel slid back into form. Her voice was once more Rach’s voice. Artie felt safety return, and for the next twenty miles, the two kicked around the enigma. The world became pitch dark. After the toll plaza at Oak Brook, they underwent the gradual escalation of nothing into vacancy, vacancy into sparsity, sparsity into FOR LEASE signs, lease signs into industrial parks, parks into complexes, complexes into conglomerates into skyscrapers and finally into the Sears Tower. Winding along the inbound Eisenhower into the Dan Ryan, “Damn Ryan” in Rachel’s private vocabulary, they picked up traffic until they were bumper to bumper. They began to breathe easier in the anonymity of overcrowding. Artie co-piloted Rach into Hyde Park and up to his old brownstone off Cottage Grove. She had taken him there scores of times and should have been able to locate the building herself, even in the dark. But she never could. Each time, he patiently marveled over how any townee, even an adopted one, familiar as she was with the Chicago grid system, could still lose herself amid all the indelible logic.

  “North Sider,” he razzed her. “Coming up?” Artie’s sudden invitation surprised them both. Normally, after a weekend of Hobson’s choices, he couldn’t wait to sequester himself with the law books. Maybe he’d habituated to companionship; maybe he was afraid to leave Rach alone so soon. Whatever the reason, he asked her, curtly, not to take off right away.

  Rach tipped her head at him, quizzically, the way a parakeet sometimes will. Only she kept tilting, through 180 degrees, until she sat completely twisted in the driver’s seat, craned all the way upside down, head to the cushion, looking at him as he dangled one foot on the curb. Vintage Rachel, returned fully from the tremor moment. “Say that again.”

  “Coming up?”

  “God. From this angle, it looks as if your mouth is in your forehead.”

  Losing his patience, he grabbed his rucksack, assembled his stuff, and closed the car door in disgust. He had done all that he could for her in the car, and now that she felt better, she fell back into sight gags. He completed the send-off brusquely and was halfway up the walk when Rachel rolled down the passenger window and called him back.

  “Artie.” He knew, because she used his real name and not some coinage, that he was in for a dressing down. He dragged back to the car, wronged but nevertheless cooperative. He thought, somehow, that she was about to speak directly to the issue, the thing that, in the drive back through the open fields, they had avoided touching on. He knew, by the tone of her voice, that the subject was friction, was fishing, or forgiveness; something fricative.

  She would call him out, he thought. Implore him to forgive the old man. Tell him not to hold it against the guy for both falling ill and then evading the differential diagnosis. But Artie wasn’t ready to forgive. He couldn’t do that yet, even for his favorite Rach of all Raches.

  But he had guessed entirely wrong about his sister’s scolding. He had guessed wrong about everything. He had guessed wrong in the car, in thinking that he had to hold her together. “Artie,” she said gently. “I’ll see you soon. Go easy on yourself, okay?”

  Fall. 1942

  By fall of 1942, the roundup of AJAns is historical fact. The press does not cover it, but letters slip out of the evacuation zone describing the great rumblings up and down the West Coast. The rumblings explode in molten silence and quickly cease, leaving no record but an extinct and hollow cone. Whole neighborhoods vanish. Prisoners write of flying the Stars and Stripes above their fish crates and orange bins, with no success. Others describe birth certificates and citizenship papers masking-taped to the picture window next to the hard-earned front-porch swing. Nothing turns the trick. Everyone of tainted descent is interned, “relocated” in the official idiom, brought to camps deep in the interior where they cannot harm tenuous national security. In a few weeks, information from the camps dries up. Letters come through cut to ribbons, jumping right from the Dear to the Sincerely. Getting no replies, many interned nisei give up writing.

  Years later, history books carry a famous photo with a Library of Congress credit showing “Wanto Co.,” that small fruits-and-vegetables market just across the street, a huge printed sign posted across it reading I AM AN AMERICAN. The shop is empty, the inside dark. The cause is already lost. A stunning image, the moment just after shame; the photo arrives too late for any remedy. For all its anguished power, the photo becomes a dated artifact, something that happened to the other fellow. More recent tragedies take us worlds farther into error.

  People are herded out of dance halls, football games, weddings. They’re allowed to collect things—a toothbrush, change of underwear, only what they can carry. Businessmen must sell off their assets for 5 percent of real value. Families are split up and loaded onto livestock trucks, driven to barbed-wire barracks where they spend the next four years. Some camps have unfinished, communal toilets, where a perpetual, overwhelming stench lingers on everything. People sleep in converted animal stalls. Children attend camp schools, where they study the founding fathers and recite the Preamble under the aegis of armed sentries.

  Many die along the way, die of shame in the four-year transit. Even to assimilated American descendants, shame is worse than death. Overnight, the program kills an entire way of life. Now we are all victims of precaution, prisoners of conscience, losing our tune in a world at battle pitch.

  In the middle of his legwork for the war effort, Disney stops in full stride. Months after the accomplished fact, he sees what has been going on around him. He cannot figure how the authorities yielded so readily to public frenzy over saboteurs and spies. He speculates on the role of protectionist interests, racism, and partisan politics in the mass arrests. He wonders whether any fight against might can ever be won without sacrifice of principle, or whether the forces of efficacy can only be beaten efficaciously. Nothing makes any sense to him except that two members of his brain trust have been imprisoned for nothing. The only thing he knows for sure is that his fellow countrymen wouldn’t be in jail without everybody else looking the other way.

  The morning before he flies out to sell his cinematic brainstorm to D.C., Disney sits at his drawing board and wrestles up a pen and ink cell of the Mouse. “What do you say to fighting fire with fire?” he mumbles to the image. With a few deft strokes, he blows a talk bubble above Mickey’s head reading, “That makes a big fire, Walt.” Disney puts his pens down and sighs. He knows the size of the blaze we are up against. He has heard Murrow’s London broadcasts. He has seen what the Imperial Navy accomplished in the Philippines. He knows about roundups far more hideously evil than the local one. Terminally evil. And other than retaliation he cannot think of a weapon large enough to put this fire out.

  He exhales, stands slowly, and slinks to his writing desk. Ashamed, he unwinds the speaker cone of his dictaphone and turns on the machine. After an appalling pause in which he can think of nothing, he speaks into the horn:

  Ariston hudor.

  Smiling to himself because he doesn’t know which side of this latest catastrophe the Greeks are on, but certain that he can’t afford to risk another house arrest, he translates:

  Water is best.

  This is the secret blueprint Disney brings out to Capitol Hill for his tête-à-tête with the Powers That Be. A government Douglas DC-3 wings him into Washington. Disney knows that not even his world-famous Mouse has sufficient lever
age to charge into Henry Stimson’s office and call the secretary of war onto the carpet. He cannot demand, point-blank, the release of his friends. Not with a war on, anyway. But he has another plan, more powerful than frontal assault.

  Stimson, the man who, blindfolded, stuck his hand into the vat of paper scraps to start the Selective Service, roundly considered one of the best public servants this country has produced, drummed out of his own party upon his appointment to FDR’s cabinet for speaking softly and grinding a big Axis, greets Disney from behind a mahogany cruiser, shuffling through four-color maps of the world. The secretary stands and delivers the obligatory accolades: he has seen and loved the first rushes of Victory Through Air Power. Walt thanks him graciously, giving him a Mickey watch and autographed cartoon photos.

  They get down to business. Disney, armed with sketches and storyboards, presents his idea for the feature-length, revolutionary motion picture You Are the War. More articulate and charming than ever, he sells the plan for all he’s worth. He claims this unprecedented wedding of cartoon fantasy with grim live action will provide the boost to home-front morale that will break the back of the Axis. The picture will show contemporary America its own front stoop, awaken it to the fact that it alone, and not High Commands and secret conferences, determines what is past, passing, and to come. “Think Fantasia,” Disney urges, “only set in Aunt Edith’s Victory Garden in Smith Center, Kansas.” Disney will show, using every fabulous technique in the book he himself has written, that no fairy tale ever told can match the here and now for sheer mystery, urgency, and power.

  Stimson is hooked from the start. He raises one halfhearted fear about the scope of the proposed scheme: timid members of Congress might object that the material would better serve our literal soldiers overseas. Disney reassures him. He urges Stimson to think imaginatively about the long-term benefits of such an epic ode to the national spirit, payoffs that will outlast wartime. He promises that he will school recalcitrant legislators on the necessity of thinking historically. He’s sure he can persuade any objectors by pointing out that we could not have won the first war without Chaplin, Mary Pickford, and Irving Berlin. If we don’t answer Triumph of the Will at once, theirs may. This is Democracy’s testing hour; he, Disney, the reigning, preeminent statesman of American values, must be allowed to pull all the stops for his cinematic slap in the face of totalitarianism.