Prisoner's Dilemma

by Richard Powers

  Lily L.

  Mrs. Swallow,

  One more shot at this, my own obsessive handle testing, an exercise that will never go farther than this back room of my parents’ house, even should I myself ever again get it together to fly the coop, which each day seems less and less likely.

  My father is fond of saying that only habit can break habits. Only I’m not sure that habit is behind your self-protection racket. Habits cannot batter so hard as your behavior. Habits must have results to keep them from extinguishing. Yours is no habitual flinch. It comes from deeper in the nerves than learning.

  I know from experience what threat you test your door against. You claw, shove, dare the latch to give way, not from fear of strangers but from need. You could no more skip your door-check than you could stop breathing. You could not live without this routine. It orders your remaining days, lends them a motive they would be pointless without. You do not really fear a burglary. What could thieves do against you? Toast the break-in with coffee from crocheted tins? Violate your photo albums? No, the one you really fear is the officer of the law, making his preventative rounds. What if he checks your door for your own safety, only to discover to his bitter disappointment that you have let the neighborhood down, fallen slack on the one job expected of you: the job of living by common precaution? This officer, whose duty is your peace of mind, becomes your daily, if well-meaning warden. Meanwhile the true thief, never far from the scent of security, hearing your desperate door-shaking from her post in the window next door, thinks: “Such measures! Here at last is something worth stealing.”

  Your thief is here. The house next to yours threatens the whole neighborhood. Not fire or flood: nothing covered by the standard policies. The whole town is terrorized by my father’s loving either/ors. I steal the sounds of your predictable routine, your banging and clattering. Your door-test is the noise that keeps me moving. If I did not have you, my only sound would be the total silence that means he has come downstairs and collapsed on the front room floor.

  How do you still hold out? I see you as a child, stepping down the same stoop in seersucker, a century ago last May. Look through your diaries and imagined letters. Wasn’t there a day when the fullness of wonder slapped your hands, rebuked you for wanting too much? How did you survive the spring? You have cut and dried the old bouquets, wedged them away in your house. Your claws bang the door on the vanished garden behind it. You lock and bolt the warehouse of faded spices, preserving your remnant of May.

  I see you in your hair-bobbed youth, running with a crowd like the one I ran with, demanding new rules in the neighborhood. Your ears ache from the urgings of the popular press, the war to end all War. My crowd’s was a different jungle deadlock: “We had to destroy that village in order to save it.” What did you say at twenty, to the charm of paradox? Did you already give in to the madness of testing locks? I did not, not yet. I took up the challenge to sanity, the call for conviction. I can’t bring back that exact shade of those words now. Old formulas, embarrassing, dated, naive.

  I see you at the moment of choice: resist or be lost. My crowd, for our part, resisted. We made resistance into a game. I became a marvel of Magic Markers and posterboard. You had a different call to arms. While you kept the home fires burning, we lit up the town hall steps with draft cards. You see, we thought the future would be what enough people agreed it should be. And we were sure that belief was all the agreement we needed.

  Your movement, like mine, must have breathed for that much-awaited return to safety when extraordinary measures would no longer be needed. Our cause was the day when our cause could disappear. I hoped each protest march would succeed and be the last. How did your fight against so obviously evil an enemy turn into ours, born in the best of intentions, one sunny day deciding it had no power to stop the next escalation short of resorting to the virtuous letter bomb?

  Our movement splintered in two. Half said that it was better to play fair and get beat; to stay clean-handed, or destroy our own goal. The other said that dead and virtuous was still dead. I had to choose: go under with the ideal, or throw it away on pragmatics. Worse: what if we won? We could only free our hostages by jailing just as many jailors. The best we could hope for was a pointless exchange.

  And from that day forward, my resistance trickled away. My involvement vanished into a vague policy of personal prevention. Once, I had felt compelled to clean up the world; now it seemed enough for me merely not to litter. Only whoever touched the piece of trash last was responsible. Is that what you came to, too, Mrs. Swallow? Knowing that all you could do to quiet the howling is to keep silent?

  I see you at forty, discovering the bind, and from that day deciding that the best you could hope for was indefinite postponement. That it sufficed for you yourself not to make things go wrong. And that is as far as you have gotten. You pull your door behind you with historic obsession. Ten yards down the street, you double back, wondering, “Have I remembered, or was that yesterday?” And in following prevention to the letter, you exempt yourself from active guilt. “I took all precaution, and the world robbed me anyway.”

  I watch you for evidence of the last phase coming on. Soon, we will surrender even our small acts of prevention, reduced to feathering our own swallow-nests. At last, you will give up your routine, lie in bed, think that it is enough to pray your burglars away. But we will both be, at the end, criminally negligent, criminally apart. In stopping no crime, we will be guilty. From active to passive to self-protective: we are stuck, at the doorknob, between effective and correct, stepping into the trap in order to defuse it.

  That is why I write you unpostable letters late in the day, a day I should have spent looking for work, or an apartment, or at very least, a replacement husband. I, unlike yourself, was not born into widowhood, but had to earn it. I was married once upon a time. You may find that a little hard to swallow. I did it to a fellow named Wayne Leeds, for my own unnaming. No one pressured me into believing that good girls marry. I did it perversely, to set back the revolution.

  The whole thing lasted about ten months. Four months after we’d moved into our first home, still in the sunny honeymoon, Wayne-o took offense at something I did or failed to do. I’ve tried daily to remember the issue, but to this minute it eludes me. After my sin of omission, Wayne changed. He began a campaign to elicit from me the magic words that would clear things: an apology perhaps, or a retraction. I would have given it gladly, had I any idea what he was after. But he wouldn’t tell, and it was no good asking. I had to divine it myself or it wouldn’t be valid.

  He thought I refused to confess the magic words to spite him. But I swear this once I wasn’t being willful. I simply could not read the man or what he needed. Nothing I did would wash; yet, Wayne-o insisted that something I should do would help, if I only cared for him as much as I cared for myself. One day he took to breaking things. Monday, my guitar. Tuesday, my Rubaiyat. After several days of attrition I was down to subsistence, and I decided to break the contract.

  But leaving wasn’t the secret word Wayne was waiting for. Just the reverse. If he wasn’t over the edge before, my threatened departure pushed him over. He went through an outline of textbook reactions. First he feigned delight. Then he took to pleading. Then he went into the basement and came up with ten feet of rope. He set it on the coffee table, which I owned with some shame. When I couldn’t figure out his gesture, he erupted in rage. Before I could stop him he was out in the yard, tying the hank to a tree branch. It was raining heavily, very dark. I couldn’t make him out. I stood on the porch waving a six-volt light, not daring to come a step closer. Wayne positioned himself to give me the best view, but it was just too dark. All I could make out was a shadowy figure darting in and out of the globe of my six-volt. Then he stopped and after a moment of silence said, “You think I won’t do it, don’t you?” But I honestly didn’t know what he was threatening. “You think I won’t? I’ll do it. Just try me.”

  Then I understood, and every
scrap of admiration or mystery that the poor male had ever commanded in me dissolved, and I just didn’t care what path he took. He put me up there in the branches instead of him. Or I had beat him to it. I shut off the six-volt, went back into the house, and began looking up bus schedules out of town.

  For several minutes he stood in the dark rain, yelling, “You think I won’t? You just leave, and try me.” I’m surprised the neighbors never called the police. Families all up and down our block must have huddled in their living rooms, listening to the cries of this mad boy seep through their storm windows and insulation. In a few minutes Wayne stopped. He reappeared in the house, the rope coiled neatly around his arm. He went down in the basement and put the coil back where it belonged. When he returned, he was more than civil. He even helped me with my bags. And he’s stayed that way ever since—the annual Christmas cards, the occasional phone call, always so dignified.

  But when I see my ex-husband now, or hear from him, no matter how self-possessed, I see him in that moment when the trapdoor opened under both of us. He is not a person, but an infantile need. And he knows that I see him that way. Given a chance, I’d make another try to live with him in peace. But every boy carries a variation on hanging himself in the backyard branches, in the rain. At least the one I saw did. I love nobody. I feel I am on the verge of loving everybody. Then I step outside my room. And he is waiting there.

  Mrs. Swallow, pull the latch, bang it, twist it left and right, but never suspect that we lock our burglars inside. He is here, that boy, hiding where I have come to escape him, playing a more sophisticated version of the same rope trick. My father, blacking out, seeing things. He brushes his teeth and his gums bleed. “You think I won’t do it, don’t you?” He spends long hours late at night, inventing a protest, an alternative history, all the details tailored to suit him alone. My father lives in this place, his third spot between the effective and the right. But in the boy in him, written on his heart, is a trapdoor, a rope, a tree, out in the darkening backyard.

  If he had a stroke, who would I go to, my brothers and sister gone, and my mother in pieces? Who would come stop him if he set the house on fire, or took to breaking things? No one, no one at all, up and down this evacuated, silent and A-framed street except the neighbors. You, Mrs. Swallow. I am condemned to come to you. There is no one else. You must lend me your answer to being alive, the force that keeps you here in one piece long after you should have gone home. You must teach me that love for the trap that keeps you rattling the locks, refusing to quit resisting, to give up the senseless ritual as lost.

  You must tell me how to care for the man, instruct me in that stupid, repetitive checking. A care indifferent to the consequences. Compassion unconcerned with whether it is effective or correct, a routine, like laundry or trash. You must give me your trick, or I will steal it.

  As it is, I barely have the strength to evade another day of Classifieds. Someone is out in the dark backyard, swinging. Tonight, it is just my little brother and his newest charmer. Pop’s off in Hobstown, gum-bleeding, or passing out. Mother is abiding. Across the way, you read by kitchen light, browsing a hardware catalog for security supplements. You prepare for bed, slip under the covers, certain of today’s lesson. In another minute, you are in that place where there is no fight between right and efficacy.

  But you will only be there an instant before you bolt upright. You have forgotten to check. But it will be too late. Someone will see your oversight of locks. The long-feared burglar will have broken in. Running up to your bedroom in the dark, breaking your heirlooms all the way, she will burst in upon you, shouting fire, shouting help me, shouting save the man, shouting do not be afraid, it’s only your neighbor.

  1943

  In a suburban London movie theater in the spring of 1943, Alan Turing sees a matinee of Disney’s masterpiece, Snow White and the Seven Dwarves, the first feature-length animation. Turing, at the tender age of thirty-one, has already been as instrumental in saving England and the entire Allied war effort as any other single human. Without firing a shot, he keeps his green island afloat in the blood-dimmed tide of Nazi bombers and submarines. He gives civilization this second chance by tapping into the mind’s miraculous ability to model and simulate. In the apocalyptic game, where victory goes not to the side that can wage the most violence but to the one that second-guesses better, Turing has discovered a way to find out what the other side’s murderous millions are about to do.

  He steps from the darkened theater into the blinding light of midday. Still savoring the film, though this was not his first viewing of it, he lets his eyes adjust to the grainy light of the wartime street before heading back to his office, a nineteenth-century estate named Bletchley Park, fifty miles from London. From this headquarters, Turing and a cadre of mathematical brains provide the steady stream of hypotheses needed to crack the German Enigma Machine code. Out of the gibberish of infinite decipherings, Bletchley Park strains the sole meaningful reading. Thus able to put her ear to the channel and clearly hear the Enemy’s next step, Britain’s casualties plummet and her inflicted toll soars. We now know Them as well as they know themselves. So long as Turing and Company continue to corner Information, the world’s crucial commodity, their side will come out the victor.

  Behind his desk, a sheet of numbers in front of him, Turing replays, in mental images, the scene from Snow White that terrifies him far more than any petty attempt by Aryans to set fire to his city: the Wicked Witch, preparing the lethal apple intended for Snow, invoking, “Dip the apple in the brew, let the sleeping death seep through.” The imaginary image appalls the young man. He knows, firsthand, the power of animation over live action. For the skill that has given him the upper hand over the minions of evil is his ability to create a similar alternate world, to play a similar game of mathematical What If, to forge a crucible of numeric Maybe where real life can be smelted out and purified. The world must first be saved or lost on paper. That’s why the Witch threatens more than Hitler.

  In his code-cracker’s office after the matinee, Turing senses the real terror lurking behind the billboard. Far from springing the forces of good from this lime-tree bower their prison, the success of Bletchley Park in cracking the Enigma code lands the Allies in a greater dilemma. Turing supplies High Command with advance warning on all manner of dangers: he foretells the bombing of Coventry, with its consummate cathedral. He announces the threat to flights carrying Churchill and Leslie Howard. High Command must choose: save the cathedral and tip off German Intelligence that their code is broken, or do nothing and preserve their Informational edge. Seated over his tabular data, Turing sees the double cut of that edge. It is our only hope for survival, yet we cannot play it for fear of losing it. Every loss we foresee but do not prevent is partly on our own hands.

  Eleven years later, in 1954, publicly humiliated, Alan Turing will kill himself by eating a cyanide-painted apple just like the Wicked Witch prepared for Snow White. The act will be Turing’s terminal testimony to the frailty of the line dividing mental imagery and life as lived. Disney will read the account of his handiwork in the trade press. The next year, the father of animation will commemorate the father of simulation by building a fantastic kingdom for the consumer of fantasy, a live-in monument to our ability to cross over from the unlivable emptiness of Here into a smaller world.

  On the same day that Turing returns from Snow White to the business of saving the Free World, on the other side of the Atlantic, safe inside an enclave of barbed wire, Disney’s paroled planning committee finishes the final edit of a humorous short subject documenting the completion of the studio and set for You Are the War. The teaser runs only twelve minutes and is intended for Disney’s private amusement, to show him what the community now has in hand for the still unscripted project.

  The sole existing print catches up with Disney in New York, where he has flown in search of the ingenuous time traveler, Bud Middleton, whose ability to portray the quintessential American boy is the mak
e-or-break element in Disney’s grand plan. Walt receives the single spool with excitement. He closes himself off in a private projection room and threads it up. He is much amused by the hand-lettered title on the opening frames: The Furious Phase. Next come the credits: “By Grumpy, Dopey, Happy, Snisei, Doc, Doc, and Doc. And introducing . . .” A great pullback shot of the entire crew wipes into white, newsreel-style headlines: “. . . a Cast of Thousands!” The last shot of the credits, although meant to be funny, closes up Disney’s throat with a sorrow beyond telling. It is an intercut of the old footage of Snow, making her surprising discovery: “Why, you’re little men!”

  An overdub of the theme music from Bambi trills while the camera pans across the enormous, living ordinance survey map of unsuspecting, frozen midwestern cornfields. A voice-over, perfect parody of a forties documentary narrator, quavers about how a band of home-front soldiers, at the insistence of their country, have lucked upon the ideal geography for establishing a model nation, for starting over from scratch, for beginning again. “From out of this absolute absence of features,” the voice resonates, “this flat, empty tabula rasa, this blank slate of nothingness, can come anything at all, anything that a majority of folks agrees to put here.”

  There follows a comical, mugging, home-movie sequence of three men in gas masks, helmets, fatigues, rubber-sealed gloves, and, for some inscrutable reason, frogman flippers, wheeling on-camera a cylindrical lead canister. They prop the tube upright and motion to it with Chaplinesque jabs. Then one of the frogmen does a double take, realizing that the explanatory gestures mean nothing because the tube is turned around. The three reverse the cylinder with self-defeating efforts, revealing an amateurishly lettered sign reading FAIRY DUST.