Prisoner's Dilemma

by Richard Powers

  The double edge of the time line cut Artie until he could no longer stand it. Here they were, kept alive by the sight of their own past artificially preserved behind plate glass, waiting for the eternally improving future to bail them out of an obviously untenable present. For the first time since age twelve, he ran to his parents’ side, although their protective spell had long ago deserted them.

  At the sight of the moving parts—the butcher raising the killed goose by its neck, the man tipping his stovepipe hat to the pretty woman curtsying in cummerbund, the rocking horse, the sledders in stocking caps—Mom and Dad departed together into memory. “I remember my mother telling me about those kind of stoves. They were supposedly quite dangerous.”

  “The very first house I lived in, in Teaneck, had a fireplace exactly like that.” Artie, calmed by the catalog of inconsequences, dropped back to take the decades at his own pace.

  In front of 1900, an intimate interior of a living room with candle-trimmed tree as yet untouched by Ludlow, Lowell, Lawrence, or the Triangle Shirt Factory Fire, where a handlebar-mustachioed father read to several wide-eyed children decked out by the fire while mother sneaked about behind their backs, planting presents, Rach accosted Lily. “Admit it,” she said.

  “Admit what?” Lily demurred.

  “Don’t give me that. Just admit it.”

  “I don’t have the foggiest idea what you’re talking about. Admit what?”

  In answer, Young Sister simply pointed to the porcelain-modeled mother, toy-bedecked, coming from the pantry with its icebox, grinder, and spices hanging from the ceiling. “That’s you, isn’t it? Taking our time with this decade, aren’t we? Poor girl isn’t getting dreamy-eyed, is she?”

  Lily tried to brush her tormentor off, but refused to use her hands. Instead, she shoved her hips against her antagonist’s hips and slammed her shoulders against Rach’s, but kept her hands folded over in front of her, the chance of leprosy too great to risk pushing away persecution with bare skin. Rach persisted, “That’s you. Admit it,” while Lily, self-straight-jacketed, struggled against her, voicing vowels. A small altercation in the greater conflict all around them.

  Artie came to the rescue. “What seems to be the trouble here, ladies?” Lily came and snuggled against him, turning her back against Rachel, closing her sister out. She kept her arms crossed, but pressed her head and winter-coated torso against him. She reminded Artie of one of those Raggedy Ann dolls whose arms are permanently sewn together. Her posture—armadillo ball—irritated him, one of those affectations of posture that he hated most about his sister, that drove him away from her. But he suffered her body contact in silence, neither recoiling nor reciprocating.

  Her face still pressing her brother’s heavy coat, Lily asked, “Artie, how much do you know about the project?”

  “What project is that, Mrs. Leeds? The TVA?”

  “You know what I mean.” Her voiced flashed a sudden undercurrent of violence. “Pop’s project. Hobstown.” Artie nodded, but said nothing. “For some reason,” she continued unnecessarily, “I picture it like this.” She stretched her neck out toward Christmas in 1900, still in her protective posture-ball.

  Banned from the club, Rach hovered behind them. She leveled her own opinion of Hobstown. “It cain’t be anythin’ lahk this. That’s just wishful thinkin’, honey-chile.”

  Lily defended herself without turning around to acknowledge. “Not like this one. Like the whole series. All the windows at once. Taken as an entirety.” Neither sib said anything, and Lily added, “He is a history teacher, after all.”

  “Was,” corrected Artie, and instantly hated himself. Here, in the unforgiving minute, the woman put herself on the line and all he could do was play the discriminating prig. “Now he’s just another . . .” The attempted quick change to comedy didn’t come off, so he abandoned the predicate.

  Rach delighted in the wound her sister was widening. She thrust her head between the others, announcing, “I know exactly what Hobstown is.” This disclosure produced two alarmed looks of disbelief. She waited the full dramatic measure, then began to sing in an uncanny reproduction of the famous bass: “Stalag by Starlight.” Lily at last uncrossed her hands to hit her. All three laughed a little nervously.

  Artie thought there would be only one way to find out for certain about the project Pop had occupied himself with all these years: espionage. He pictured himself breaking into Dad’s archives and listening to the interminable monologues the man was always plotting. The very idea was as blasphemous as chewing on the Host. Just thinking of it made Artie look furtively toward his folks.

  The others were several decades north, Eddie Jr. with a parent under either arm. Ailene was saying, “Isn’t it clever how they’ve done the music? A bouquet of Christmas tunes. Each window has a carol from its own slice of time. Listen!” The three of them drew up to the 1940s, a snowy street at night, just outside a well-lit and now obviously suburban home. A young man in dress uniform stood poised on the snowy steps, his hands reaching for the knocker. About to make his presence known, the figure looked into the window of the protecting home, seeing an older couple poised anxiously around an ancient walnut-cabinet radio. The tune accompanying this window was “I’ll Be Home for Christmas.” If only in my dreams.

  Eddie Jr. looked at his dad. As though the diorama glass were a funhouse mirror, the boy became a copy of those anxious parents, waiting for his child-father soldier to come home. For some reason, he expected his old man to respond horribly to the scene. Pop did nothing. Instead, old Eddie looked over at Ailene, who returned his look of complicity with another. They turned choreographically toward each other, took one another’s waist, and, each submitting to the other, walked from the window into the below-freezing, mid-December, State Street traffic stream.

  Dad started to sing, “I saw a man who danced with his wife in Chicago, Chicago,” Sinatra style, and tried to waltz his woman. Mom resisted, laughing, self-conscious in the anonymous crowd. Eddie Jr. marveled. He had never before thought of his parents as a couple, bound together contractually and emotionally for all time. The unashamed little dance, now attracting grins from strangers, struck the boy as a miracle of defiance in the face of all that had happened and would continue to happen.

  Only then, at that minute, did Dad start to go down. Eddie Jr., still tagging close by, grabbed his father by both elbows and held him up. “Easy, big guy. I’ve got you.” He pretended calm.

  The other kids, near enough to see what had happened, ran to lend their assistance. Ailene braced herself for the worst, turning her body into a contact block against the human current. Brittle distress pressed in on her. All she could think was: Whistle. Where is the whistle to call the swimmers in, retrieve them from the surf and undertow?

  But just as Artie closed ranks and drew up to Dad’s other side, ready to fight off five million to keep this one alive, big Eddie surfaced again. He pulled himself up, turned on them, and said brightly, “Berghoff’s for lunch. Beat you there.” He set off toward the restaurant, bouncing, leaving the others frozen in the lurch.

  His five appendages stood riveted in place, shocked by Dad’s sudden recovery from major incident. They had traveled the length of the decade dioramas, the quaint Christmas scenes, only to find themselves catapulted back into 1978. They stood paralyzed by the man’s abrupt return to the present. Their brief nostalgic look backward dissolved, and they crashed back into now, the year that 4 prominent Soviet human-rights activists were sent to the gulag, the year that 917 religious cultists practiced mass ritual suicide in South America, the year that Pop disappeared from under them as State Street spread its simulated good cheer in all directions.

  At last Rachel broke the stunned silence. “Berghoff’s?” she asked incredulously. “Did he say Berghoff’s? Mr. Antidisestablishedeatinghouse, Mr. Never-a-Sit-Down-Meal himself? Must be he wants to take us out for something other than pizza at least once before he kicks off.” The joke’s incredible bad taste straighte
ned the group with a second shock wave. Mother and children stared at the felon, who made no attempt to defend her gag. Ailene had raised her offspring never to call long-lost friends out of fear of hearing of the loved ones who had died in the meantime. The very word itself was taboo, as if it could cause what it stood for. Now one of their own had spoken it. Lent had reared its ugly head, here in Advent.

  But in the next minute, Artie laughed. Eddie Jr. followed him, quickly infected. With the horror of the immediate moment shattered, even Lily and Ailene saw the obvious, and the edges of their mouths curled up against their will. Something other than pizza before he kicks: only one other person in the world could have made that joke. And this was Rach’s eulogy for him.

  Dad took them to the restaurant via Carson’s windows. This year, Field’s major competitor had gone with the sugar plum, gingerbread, toy soldiers, and giant rats of The Nutcracker. The family caught up with Dad underneath the Louis Sullivan grillwork. He was teaching the descant of “God Rest Ye Merry, Gentlemen” to a street drunk, promising the man a dollar in change if they could get through two verses and a chorus. “Here come the inner lines now,” Pop said, seeing them. Rach threw herself into the counterpoint with the necessary glee. Eddie Jr. and Artie harmonized more grudgingly. Lily wanted to run and hide behind the giant two-hundred-dollar box of Frango mints in Field’s. Ailene tugged at her husband’s arm, hissing, “Ed, Ed,” as if at any minute the police might round them up for teasing indigents in G minor, without a permit.

  They dispersed just before the local camera crew could break from prearranged script and pick up on their ad lib. In this, too, the family tagged along behind Pop’s aesthetic: always stay one step ahead of written-out plans. They arrived in troupe at the promised restaurant, but Dad did not turn in. Rather, he carried on to a far shabbier place a half-block away.

  “I knew it,” Rach wailed bitterly. “A trick. He never really meant Berghoff’s. We’ve been had.” As they filed into the alternate selection, the reason for the change became clear. The Miller Tiller had led Dad here. Over the loudspeaker system, just loud enough to be danceable, a bank of brass did their Big Band bit. “Moonlight Serenade.”

  Resisting the urge to give funny answers to the hostess when she asked them how many they were, the Hobsons settled in and ordered. Dad echoed that Depression-era Eleventh Commandment, “Take all that you want, but eat all that you take.” They ate leisurely, aware that it might be their last meal all assembled for a while. They talked of current events, Christmas plans, spectator sports. For a few astonishing minutes, the Hobsons actually found themselves enjoying each other in public. As the meal wound down, Dad challenged Rachel to put her wallet on the table in sight of everyone.

  “Forget it, buddy. If you’re too cheap to take us to Berghoff’s, then I’m not going to bail you out of this dive.”

  “No, no. New game. Here. Here’s my wallet. Put yours out too. Come on. Now. Neither of us knows how much is in the other’s, right? Whoever has less money in theirs gets the whole pot. Is it a good bet?”

  Rach put her magic actuarial powers to use before responding. “Well, the most I can lose is what’s in my wallet. But if I win, it will be a sum greater than twice what I have. And it’s even odds, right? So if I have a one-in-two chance of more than doubling my money, the situation favors me.”

  “I reason the same way,” said Dad, simply.

  In silence, the paradox grew to full flower. Lily groaned. She put a paper napkin over her head. “Why do you do this to us?” Under her question was a more serious one, unasked: Is this how you want us to remember you?

  Eddie Jr. tried to back them out of the wallet game by saying that the contest was no contest, since Dad had had plenty of time to empty his billfold in advance. He knew it had nothing to do with the point in question, but it kept the last moments relatively seamless.

  Pulling his fork from out of a playground of cold mashed potatoes, Artie was next to recover. “My turn. I’ve got another one. Not a paradox, exactly. Not logic. More along the lines of experiment. But pretty interesting, all the same.” He paused, giving an emcee’s look around the table. The audience was his, providing he did not try to hold it too long.

  “I know you guys think all I read is law, law, law.” He paused again, distracted by an aural association: “Jaw, Jaw is better than War, War.” He tried to place the quote; it had to be some Brit, probably Churchill, in order to make the rhyme work out. Artie suddenly realized something about himself, who he was. He himself had been formed by that 1940s window at Field’s that had given Dad so much trouble. But the revelation would have to wait for its full working out until the crisis ran its course. For now, he had to deliver his magic act.

  “Just the other day, I was in the U. of C. library and I happened across something apropos. Seems there’s this fellow, a Doctor Wolff, at some Ivy League place. Cornell . . .” He shot a glance at Eddie Sr. to catch the reaction take. Dad registered only a slightly pleased look: You found it. I knew you would. Good researcher. “Brain man,” Artie continued. “I mean, he studies neurology. Anyway, he hypnotized several experimental subjects and, while they were under, told them he was going to brand them with a red-hot iron. Then he touched them with a pencil. That’s science for you, huh?” His audience only motioned impatiently for him to get on with the story. “When the subjects came out of the trance, most of them developed a red, tender area where the pencil had touched them. A few developed badly seared blisters.” As usual, Artie left the last link unspoken.

  But the import was clear. Everyone understood, but nobody seemed too anxious to follow up on the implication. Ailene straightened her dirty dishes; Lil excused herself and went to the WC. Pop, however, looked around animatedly and asked, “So what are you saying?”

  “Isn’t it obvious? This physical reaction of cells, these pencil burns: well, the brain did it. The subjects believed themselves into a burn. Suggestion burned them.”

  “Wild,” said old Eddie. “So what can and can’t it do, then? The brain, I mean.”

  “How do I know? The point is, certain inarguably physical responses needing, so we think, physical causes, can be created, if you will, by sufficiently powerful imagination.” Dad pulled his lower lip in and nodded. He looked for all the world like one of those little plastic dogs with spring necks that one puts in the rear windows of cars. Artie followed up his point, unnecessarily. “In the familiar phrase of a man who will remain nameless, ‘Wishing might make it so.’”

  By the look on his face, Pop might have been feeling anything: hurt, angered, pleased, indifferent. Rach and Eddie Jr. sank into the booth vinyl, stunned that Artie had dared stray so close to the real issue. Finally, Ailene spat at him, sharply: “Have a little respect.”

  Artie, confused, looked from one parent to the other. “Respect? Respect? You’ve got to be kidding. What are you talking about?” He pointed an accusing finger at Pop. “He’s the one who put me on to the man.”

  Nothing more was said about suggestion, or any other matter. When lunch broke up, they brought Dad out to Maywood and committed him to the Old Soldiers’ Home.

  If You Can Fill the Unforgiving Minute

  I have in front of me a folder of documents, all that remains of my father. Photos, letters, government forms: the stuff that carries our weight through the fact-demanding world. Most of it is the printed matter we must constantly show to prove our existence. Incredible to me, in some my father is my age or even younger.

  I cannot adjust to this switch, even in the teeth of the evidence. My father always seemed to have stepped out of the infants’ ward fully blown. For a long time, the best I can do is paste the fifty-two-year-old soul onto the twenty-year-old wrestler’s body. The man stubbornly remains who he was when I waved good-bye to him. I tear apart the folder all afternoon. But my father changes more slowly than glaciers.

  I rearrange the sheaf of papers. I squint at the pictures, trying to forget what I know. Still no good. I spread them
around me in an orchestra. He remains Dad, black-humored, baroque, evasive Dad, with a different waist, different skin tone, different circumstances, but destined to disappear all the same. As I am about to put them away, a single, hand-written, blue-lined sheet of school notebook paper separates itself from the others. In the top right, in the scrawl of a boy forced to write in unnatural cursive, he has written the teacher’s name, his own name, and the date: September 1, 1939.

  My Favorite Poem

  My favorite poem is Rudyard Kipling’s “If.” In particular, the lines “If you can fill the unforgiving minute/ with sixty seconds’ worth of distance run.” This paper is about what those lines mean, and how to fill those sixty seconds.

  All at once he is no longer the quizmaster, the great doublethinker, the distanced ironist who had me second-guessed and checked at every step of the game. He is no longer the man imprisoned by all the wrong answers at the end of his interrupted life. All at once my father is a child, as uncertain, terrified, and abandoned to the terrible abundance of being alive as I am. He is no longer the man who, reciting the poem at high speed, used to deny that the old colonialist’s idealism could still save him. He is defenseless, thirteen, struggling with a composition, holding on to the lines for all he is worth, as I hold on to his.

  What could that grade-school teacher possibly have been thinking, giving out the hackneyed assignment on the day that the whole globe set itself in flames? I wonder what possessed Dad’s mother to keep this page, what possessed him, and finally my mother in turn. What is it doing here, with the birth certificate and insurance forms? No reason on earth why it should have been saved.

  I read the lines again. It strikes me for the first time that wherever we find ourselves in the unforgiving minute, we had somehow to get there. Dad’s manila folder proves it: he is no more than a work in progress. He takes the first tentative step out of his racing block, running headlong into a world bursting apart in cataclysm, a world that has nothing to do with him, one that will tear him apart if he ever stops. And it is at once clear to me that the very thing he hoped would keep the violent beauty outside the classroom from killing him instead sent him out alone into the hopeless contest: this schoolboy’s belief that he had some say in the distance run.