Prisoner's Dilemma

by Richard Powers

  Already his crew has built a place, a little place, where little can trickle into big. They will man it with a mouse whom everyone recognizes and a boy whom everybody knows. Can it serve, for two hours, to improve upon the source? The answer to that ancient question, a reply from mid-century, will come to be called the Turing Test, after Alan Turing, the man who conceived and expressed it most succinctly. Turing’s conclusion, before the Wicked Witch disperses it completely and expediently, is that a perfect simulation of a thing serves very nicely for that thing. Big can grow out of sufficient, collected littles.

  The issue is moot. Whatever the prospect for success, Disney and company are already committed to the cash and carry. The nisei have no choice but to portray an ideal world and pray that the matinee crowd can chart their private route to it. They can only believe that belief is the only ticket out. They can only hope that the price of living can be paid by hope.

  Disney fiddles with his dictaphone, brought along from coast to coast for just this purpose. He starts the recording and says:

  My colleagues in Hollywood have an old saying: “If it looks like a duck, and sounds like a duck, and acts like a duck . . . then call it Donald.”

  He shuts off the machine and knocks out a telegram.

  TEASER IS BRILLIANT. LAUGHED AND CRIED. PLEASE ADD TO SETS SHOWN ONE INTERIOR DRUGSTORE ONE JERSEY LOWER MIDDLE HOME ONE SHOWBOAT RESTAURANT ONE AIR FORCE BASE EMPHASIS REPAIR. BAD NEWS BUD MIDDLETON MORT AU GUADALCANAL. GOOD NEWS HAVE FOUND PERFECT REPLACEMENT.

  He looks over what he has written and nods, convinced. He adds:

  KEEP UP FIRST CLASS WORK. BACK SOON. REMEMBER THIS IS AMERICA.

  He stops and reads the message. Something is missing but he does not know what. Finally, he supplies, with a perverse grin, the refrain from that old war-bond tune:

  THIS IS WORTH FIGHTING FOR.

  13

  Dad stood in the Loop, anchored at Clark and Randolph, two weekends before Christmas, on the busiest shopping day in the most populous year in Chicago’s history. More people than at any other moment in time wanted possession of the precise spot outside the bus station where Eddie Sr. now stood and were willing to be ugly, even violent, if need be, to achieve that holiday end.

  At that exact moment, the world’s population stood at four and a half billion, a fifth of a million being added a day. Eddie Sr. read those figures out loud from a magazine to wife, daughter, and son on the bus ride in. “A billion here, a billion there. Pretty soon we’ll be talking real people. It’s enough to make one suspect the sanity of the species.” He proceeded to repeat the figures to a pretty woman of procreative age in the seat in front of them, asking if she would forego having children for the sake of the human race. When the woman reeled around in alarm, Lily flashed her a desperate look: Please don’t make a scene. The man is not well. We just have to get him through today. To her infinite relief, the woman sassed back, saying that if the numbers he had just read out loud were true, she didn’t see why another half-dozen babies made any difference.

  And when the barbed-wire contingent disembarked in the terminal belonging to the line Rach affectionately branded “The Dog,” they struggled up to street level to find themselves smack in the middle of five of those millions, a crowd of cognizant packages wandering aimlessly between porno theaters, dingy retail outlets, and monolithic civic art. Wedged into these few square miles by the lake were more people than had been alive in the entire country at the beginning of the last century. They gathered like grunion by moonlight, buying gifts for one another. And at their still hub stood Dad, breaking up pedestrian traffic, panning over the abstract multitude of strangers as if just now becoming aware of the awful miracle of fecundity.

  Little Eddie, Ailene, and Lily stood on one corner of the Civic Center Plaza, trying to edge him on, anywhere, before his standing there doing nothing started a Christmas fistfight. But amid all the obstructing structures—the rows of Mies van der Rohe boxes blocking all views except the trough immediately in front of them—they could not answer that perennial Chicago question: which way to the lake? Mom and kids tried desperately to get their bearings, while Dad seemed perfectly content with staring at the immense Picasso sculpture on the plaza. He cornered Eddie Jr. Pointing at the famous ambiguity, he said, “My boy, I’ve finally figured out who this is.”

  Eddie Jr. did not want to hear his father’s conclusion. “Looks like a pimple with a parachute on, don’t it?” the kid diverted. Underneath his unexpected misanthropy, Eddie Jr. wanted only to avert the man until they could sign him over to the professionals. He could feel Pop flashing the seven warning signals. He could feel the man aching to try something as certainly as any mother can feel her five-year-old flexing to throw a good-night fit. But he could not head it off without provoking it. That was what belonging to a family meant.

  Dad brushed off his son’s aside and insisted, “No. Really. Look closely: think funny nose. Think big ears. Think bigger than life.”

  One or two seasoned Chicagoans stopped to look in the direction of the cubist commotion, which they had not glanced at for years. Finding no local celeb, no nut with submachine gun hiding in the rusting structure, they passed on. Little Eddie looked from Picasso to Pop and back again. Across the packed and desolate open place, a euphonium choir managed to make “Joy to the World” sound like “Smile Though Your Heart Is Breaking.”

  Unable to dislodge Pop from the spot, Little Eddie crossed a street at random and attempted to lose himself in front of a window-front elephant graveyard of consumer electronic goods bearing red fire-sale price tags. Let the man have his last wraps, he told himself. They were only downtown, after all, as a delaying action, simply to meet one of Pop’s preconditions—a last look at the State Street Christmas windows—before putting the man in the hands of the Veterans Administration.

  Not far away, Lily wandered over to the mundane protest rally that spread itself homogeneously across the plaza like a flock of birds under a winter feeder. She strained to read the bobbing pickets and placards. The issue seemed to be human rights in one of those subtropical countries where they extracted loyalty with cattle prods. Thirty people forming a fairy ring in Chicago to ward off a thing so distant and unstoppable so distressed her with its pathetic urgency that she returned quickly to the reconciled part of the world, that great majority to whom everything was all right so long as they were allowed to shop.

  She returned just in time to rescue Mom from a lunatic fringe religious zealot of indesignate denomination who had just given Ailene a copy of holy scripture for free and now angrily demanded payment. “How come I always have to be the one who does the rescue work?” Lily asked, grabbing her mother by the elbow. “If I had been looking the other way, you’d be a Hare Krishna by now.” She jabbed not so much at her mother as at Artie and Rach, conspicuous in their absence. Two weeks back they had promised, per Dad’s request, to show up for the holiday meal, but both, out of what Lily knew to be premeditated cowardice, had reneged. Instead, begging off Thanksgiving dinner, they had arranged to meet the family when they came downtown.

  Lily, persistent grassy-knollist that she was, considered their absence a mutually calculated conspiracy, and she held it against them. But all she could do now to retaliate was make sure that Hobson West kept its part of the appointment. Gathering Dad from the Picasso, Mom from the robed evangelist, and Little Brother from the seductive clutches of consumer electronics, she piloted her family through downtown disturbances toward their appointed meeting place.

  Rachel and Artie at that very instant emerged from the underground Grant Park parking garage. Artie accused Rachel, “I would have gone if I had gotten any sort of encouragement from you.”

  Without letting him finish, Rach answered over top, “Don’t blame me for making up your mind.”

  They paused for the obligatory book-gawking in front of Kroch’s on Wabash. Glimpsing himself reflected in the bookstore’s picture window, Artie sickened with a surge of self-revelati
on. Reflected there was the first telltale indication of what a genuine nebbish he had become: he’d managed to go the entire morning without realizing that his shirt was one button out of line.

  The giggles of a passing pack of teenage girls convinced him: his ineptitude had gone public. For a long time, his terror of ending up alone had driven him into semiseclusion, a you-can’t-fire-me, preemptive quitting. His deep need for conversation led him into increasing bouts of silence. But he had not until that moment suspected the broadcast signal clear enough for all except himself to hear. Hiding within the pristine button-down Oxford lay this declaration of secret slovenliness, a deliberate act of self-sabotage, a plea to the outside world for charity, like those plaintiff requests of “Wash Me!” written into the dust of neglected cars.

  Witnessing his distress, Rach laughed out loud. She had noticed her brother’s oversight an hour earlier when she picked him up. She had waited on edge the entire drive downtown, wondering how long the fastidious fellow would take to discover it. Savoring the slapstick inherent in his disaster, she squeezed his arm and wheedled, “Artie make a fox paw?”

  The misbuttoning at once became his sister’s fault. Artie filled with the urge to take retribution on her. He could hardly enjoy the instant justice of a lynching, even in the lawless Loop. So he contented himself with an unbelievably vile and colorful string of verbal abuse, a surge of potty-mouthing invective that stunned even himself the moment he put the finishing touches on it. He at once regretted having overreacted; his lack of restraint was, like his inability to dress himself, one more dead giveaway of his dissolution.

  Far from taking offense, Rach greeted his creative profanity with astonished delight. She caught her breath and gasped, “I’ll get you, my pretty, and your little dog too.” She leapt at him, chasing him through the holiday-shopping crowd. Artie took off, hooking west on Madison toward the designated rendezvous spot on State Street, that Great Street. He dug into the icy pavement for traction, dispersing a flock of pigeons—little more in his estimation than rats with wings—all the while repeating to himself, under his breath, “I’ve become a self-parody.”

  Rounding the corner onto State, Artie once more felt that shopping, more than any other activity, was now the only thing everyone had in common. It had become our entertainment, work, social life, and culture, the only thing that got people outside anymore. A study in Brownian motion, Artie bounced from parcel to parcel, keeping a pretty good clip until he saw the family loom up out of the nine-shopping-days-to-Christmas crowd.

  Swiss Family Hobson stood marooned outside Woolworth’s, the folks looking nonchalant, Eddie Jr. trying to look jive, and Lily managing to look a little like Joan of Arc after the stake-out. Only here, as the dense exercise in human-population dynamics split into countless Markov chains and eddied about his familiar domestic group, did Artie finally see: they were lost, truly lost, as lost as that world in Pop’s famous supposition. The Christmas crowd cut a circular bypass around them. They were clearly in quarantine, written off as injured, fair game to the herd’s trimming predators.

  Just as suddenly, the insight slid away from Artie as he noticed a side effect to Pop’s problem, a symptom less dramatic than the lesions and visions and passing out and bloody toothbrushes. But it was no less shocking for being relatively benign: Dad was clearly smaller than Artie remembered him. The man had begun to shrink prematurely.

  Artie, still eluding Rachel, easily could have checked his speed in time. Instead he slammed festively into the family group, grabbing hold of the big guy, intending to use him as an anchor to bring himself into orbit. But Dad’s new weight wasn’t up to the task. Lighter than of old, too, the man swung off-balance on Artie’s impact. Only Artie’s adept recovery kept them from crashing to the pavement.

  “Ya gotta protect me. Pop. Yer daughter’s after me and she’s gonna . . .”

  But Rachel was upon them already, adding her own momentum to the human pileup. Forgetting her original target at her first glance at Dad, she released her hold on Artie and grabbed the other man’s body. She wrapped her thumb and little finger around Pop’s wrist. Their tips joined easily. Her astonished face rose up, scolding, “Biafra!”

  Dad laughed. His hat—a farmer’s visor cap bearing De Kalb insignia, a winged, flying ear of corn for which he had frequently delivered Freudian interpretations—jarred loose in the collision. Rach reached up to right it, but Pop drew back and fixed it himself with a speed and severity that surprised the whole group. The little borrowed piece of pavement outside Woolworth’s filled with mutual knowledge: each knew what that hat failed to cover up. Rach and Artie saw their suspicions ratified in their mother’s eyes. All they could do was chalk up another symptom on the list. Somehow, overnight, the man had begun to lose his thick shock of black hair. Pop’s parts began to shed in a waterfall in front of them. Unable to dam the flow, each picked a spot on their gloves to inspect. At last, the man who had created the moment of shared shame broke it. “Proceed directly to Christmas windows. Do not pass Go, do not address outstanding business.”

  Artie heard the voice of reason insist: Good Christ, how can we be going through with this? But he had no confidence in the practical support he would get from the others if he objected. Besides: what could another hour hurt? So Dad got away again, for one last afternoon. As this was his baby—the Platonic ghost of a child’s remembered Christmas on Fifth Avenue a half-century ago—Eddie Sr. took charge, towing Ailene and the haplotypes along in his wake. They formed, against their separate wills, an All-Hobsons-in-Single-File parade through the indifferent, purchasing crowd.

  Eddie Jr. brought up the rear guard, whining, “Guys. Guys. It’s thirty degrees below, counting windchill. We gotta stop this Christmas noise and get indoors.” The mid-December temperature had taken a perverse turn downward toward bleak midwinter. But in Eddie’s begging was also that old romance of the dangerous cold. He beat his hands together and laughed, unable to feel his fingers. He gave in to giddiness, wondering if he would make it to the next shelter. He found himself agreeing with the bearish thermometer: something remarkable was about to happen.

  Artie dropped back into step next to his kid brother, wondering what to say to a guy like Little Eddie. “So, kid. How was T-Day?” Artie’s unsponsored memory offered: T-1, T-2, T-3. When did you hit the beach? On T plus 3. “Sorry I, uh, crapped out on you,” he added, taking up the slack.

  “Thanksgiving? S’allright. Hey! Remember that guy on . . . what the hell show was that? ‘All right?’ ‘S’allright.’”

  “What do you know about that? That show had been canned for years by the time you were conscious. I tell you: my generation might have its brains stuffed with half-hour scripts, but at least they’re the real thing and not reruns.”

  “Hey. Blow, all right?”

  “S’allright.”

  “Anyway, Thanksgiving was okay. White meat a little dry. Some calamity over Mom dropping a mincemeat pie on the kitchen floor. Can’t remember. Seems like such a long time ago.” Eddie let his voice trail off in Gothic parody.

  “Dig for it, buddy. It’s all there. You can tell me. You’re blocking.”

  “Well . . . your father had an interesting story or two, as you can imagine. Guy reads too much. Wouldn’t have half the problems he does if he’d just lay off the capital-L literature.” Eddie borrowed a nervous habit from his brother and pinched the bridge of his nose. He unconsciously tried to make whomever he was talking to more comfortable by copying one of their physical mannerisms. With Dad, he winced. “Everything was fine. The Cowboys won. The usual. And your mother’s bird stuffing . . .”

  “. . . makes up for a multitude of sins,” Artie supplied.

  “Yeah.” At a commanding glance from the ringleader, the two of them brought themselves back into the column. They exchanged a quick, quizzical, unseen, misunderstood look. The slight tightening about one another’s mouths triggered both boys to recall, in differing versions, that old favorite pedagogic
al chestnut of Pop’s: Sometimes we need coaxing to act on our own.

  Marshall Field’s, traditionally the most extravagant of the window dressers, was the family’s first stop. Field’s theme this year was “Christmas Through the Decades,” an elaborate, multiwindow display dug out of mothballs and restored to the splendor of all its elaborate moving parts. Each box of plate glass became a diorama devoted to its own ten-year period: Christmas from the 1880s to the present.

  “How convenient,” Rach commented. “They just pull it out every ten years, drop the oldest number, add a new one at the other end, and bingo. Ready-made nostalgia.”

  An unlikely assortment of decidedly contemporary people milled about history’s windows. One exhibit was mobbed by a local television-news crew documenting the antique display as viewed by the contemporary audience. The crowd formed that magic toadstool ring that invariably collects around any video camera and microphone, the mere presence of broadcast electronics turning the banal into news. The TV team roared with satisfaction as kids with bits of crap around their mouths stopped in front of the older decades, saying, “What’s with the funny hats?” or, “Why are all the streetlights on fire?”

  The windows followed chronological order, south to north. Artie suggested under his breath to his brother, “Notice the layout? Up from the slums toward the Gold Coast. Every day in every way, things are getting better and better.” His sardonic reading was in the next minute duplicated without the irony. A gang of materially blessed kids from Lincolnwood skipped from time portal to time portal, stopping to enumerate the milestones of progress each one marked: “Now they’ve got cars. Now they’re getting fun presents, with batteries.”