Prisoner's Dilemma

by Richard Powers

  As long as he was listening in, he decided to go all the way. He tore upstairs to the other extension in the folks’ bedroom. But when he picked up the receiver the Hines man was wrapping things up, saying he was familiar with Mr. Hobson’s case but it wouldn’t be a good thing to discuss it until they knew what it was, which required getting the runaway back into the ward to complete the tests. The man rang off. Mother and son let receivers lapse back into respective cradles. When Eddie got back down to the kitchen, Sister Lily, still asleep, was propped up at the table in her nightgown, mumbling, “What . . . ? Who . . . ?”

  “I can’t stay any longer,” Ailene answered, lingering. “I’m going to be late for work if I don’t leave this minute.” Since she had never once been late for work in her entire professional life, she could not afford, at this late a date, to set a precedent. So she hurriedly drank an aspirin and coffee compote, making her usual, startled swallowing noises. Eddie grew irritated that she could not swallow silently just this once, given the emergency and his need to think. Ailene dictated a faked-calm series of noninstructions to her children that made absolutely no sense. Then, realizing that what she had just said was gibberish, she countermanded herself by saying, “Don’t either of you do anything until I call you from work.”

  She fluttered out, further alarming stunned offspring by kissing them both gravely. The December air, taking another sharp turn downward, gusted the door open at her touch. It took her ten minutes of idling time to get the Olds warmed up and drivable, minutes that Eddie might have spent outside, talking over options with her. But by the time that possibility occurred to him, she was finally hitting on all cylinders and disappearing down the driveway. A voice from the table called Eddie Jr. back from the land of failed concentration. “Will someone kindly fill me in? I haven’t the foggiest notion of what in the world is coming down.”

  “Your father,” Eddie began, but his voice would let him get no further. All they had to go through rose up and wedged in his throat, like a crowd plugging an escalator. And yet, he was surprised to find that what blocked his windpipe was not, as he first thought, a lump of vocal distress but the similar cord constriction of joy. He delighted in speaking the two words that prevented him from going on. The old man was still alive, unpredictable, capable of the liberating caper. There was more to him than anybody suspected. Eddie turned to face his sister, flushed with fullness. “I mean yer father. Yer father has—how shall I put this delicately?—jumped bail.”

  Lily groaned slowly and deliberately. She put the tip of her nose down on the table and made suffering sounds. The gesture—another of Big Sis’s contrivances—ordinarily offensive to Eddie, now was simply one of the things his sister had to do. Eddie accepted this collection of mannerisms as Lily’s way of making her way, as Lily. She would never reform. She was simply the person who could be counted on to put her nose on the table when crisis came. Lily without Lilyisms meant nothing. Nothing stood underneath her but her.

  “That’ll teach you to care what happens to the man,” he said, not needing to strain much to bring off an uncannily good Eddie Sr. impression. He had to turn toward the kitchen window to keep her from noticing the broad smile of rapprochement he could not keep off his face. Outside, the pretty next-door-neighbor girl, Gina Weatherby, two years younger than he, looked up from smoothing her clothes and balancing her school books, and noticed his grin. She thought his smile was for her and returned it, one ingenue to another, waving the innocent wave of one whom catastrophe cannot touch.

  He waved back as the school bus pulled up. Gina pointed a pretty digit in its direction and tilted her head, inquiring: You gonna deign . . . ? He pulled the skin around his lower lip into a disapproving fatness and shook his head: Wouldn’t catch me climbing onto that deathtrap. She shrugged, and waved once more as she boarded. Sixteen, with a wave that created its own white elbow gloves: Eddie’s heart filled with an odd, warm, protective affection for the clear-faced sandy-haired kid. He caught her eye again as the bus pulled away and smiled sadly back at her, a smile that indicated she would have to find someone else. He couldn’t possibly marry her: there was insanity in his family. Besides, he was already pledged to another. Then he grew conscious of his thoughts and yelled at himself for bogging down in the everyday while there was a disaster at hand.

  “So what do we do now?” That most familiar of questions, coming from that unmistakably Hobsonian voice, called Little Eddie back to the things of this world. What do we do? If she had nothing else to recommend, Lily had a way of reducing the outstanding issues to their bare-boned essentials. Pop was on the loose; what could we do to reverse the situation? Eddie had no immediate answer, except to pace out to the front porch to verify that the big guy had not somehow slipped back to his traditional place on the kapok while everyone was looking the other way.

  When he paced back in, Lily pulled herself together, removing the cereal box from the shelf and stalking a milk gallon and a bowl. She grabbed a second bowl and tossed it to him without preparation. He caught it athletically and set to work on his second breakfast of the morning. The situation called for another 25 percent of the U.S. RDA of everything. Between mouthfuls, he managed, “We wait for Mom to call. Right? She said she would call when she got to work. So we wait. Am I right?” So this was what adulthood, achieving one’s majority, was all about. He far preferred your basic puerile irresponsibility. “She’s gonna call. We can’t do anything until then.”

  “What did the hospital say?”

  He spoke between spoonfuls. “Sick. Tests bad. More tests needed. Gone.”

  Lily pushed the cereal bits around in her bowl, studying their effects on the milk’s surface tension. “Did he just leave his stuff? His books and his change of clothes and all?” Eddie shrugged at the pointless question and kept shoveling. Lily moved from irrelevance to irrelevance, concerned with the logistics of the escape. “How can you get past the front desk of a hospital without anyone noticing?”

  “Easy. Make a noise like you’re healthy.” Lily cried out in pain. That was their last real transaction, aside from Eddie’s adding, every few spoonfuls, “So what do we do now?” If either formulated any plans for action, they both had the good sense to keep mum.

  When the refrigerator hum and the tick of the stove clock grew too much for her, Lily walked around the table and yanked Little Bro up by the arm socket. “I know how we can get her to call.” Above his protests, without explanations, she led him to the downstairs bathroom off her room. Before he could figure out what she was doing, Lil forced Eddie into the dry tub, fully clothed. Instantly, the phone rang. He looked up at her, startled. In the most matter-of-fact voice Eddie had ever heard her level, Lily explained, “She can’t tell there’s no water in it from across town,” and skipped to answer the ringing line.

  The call was brief. “Call Artie.”

  “Call Artie,” said Lily, disconnecting.

  “Of course. Call Artie,” echoed Eddie. “Why didn’t we think of that?”

  Artie didn’t know anything. He’d seen Pop a couple of days ago. “But we didn’t really talk about anything. Something about his roommate’s dream. Surgery. Oh, yeah. We talked silliness. Played Name That Poem.”

  “Jeezuz,” said Eddie. Verse was his least favorite thing in the world. “What poetry?”

  “Oh, Eliot, Yeats, Kipling. All the big guys. But it didn’t mean anything,” said Artie. “At least not to me. Also, he rejected one more solution to the prisoner problem. But he gave no hint that he was thinking of this.” Eddie rang off, making his older brother promise to call Rach at work and get back to them collect if she had any word.

  Lily was right at his elbow when Eddie hung up. “Tell, tell, tell.”

  Affectation again. Eddie forgot about these quirks being her, and before he could check himself he said, “Artie’s been in touch with Pop, who says he’ll come home as soon as you get a job.” Although she didn’t even flex a lip muscle, he at once came as close to hating himse
lf as his nature allowed. He blamed the outburst on Artie, whom he always tried to imitate immediately after talking to.

  Eddie called Mom back at work, and for once she didn’t reprimand him for doing so. They reassured one another that there was nothing to get alarmed about. Dad had simply taken a walk or something equally ludicrous. He was no doubt trying to prove a point about patients’ rights. He would show up by noon. After ringing off, Eddie conveyed this new party philosophy to Lil, who snorted, went back to her room, and shut the door. Eddie hitched the two miles to school, explaining to the detention-hall proctor that his mother had given him express permission to skip homeroom, seeing as how Christmas was just a few days away. He got four hours, with no appeal.

  Noon became evening, and still they had no word. Rach checked in after five, as did Artie, neither with any contributions. The hospital called back, needing to know if the family wanted them to alert the Cook County sheriff’s office. Outwardly optimistic, Ailene told them not to bother.

  Ailene, Lily, and Ed Jr. gathered for perfunctory dinner, a sorry affair all around. Despite the looming cataclysm, Mom saw to it that the four basic food groups were amply represented. She carefully rinsed an array of vegetables under the tap, exchanging insecticides for lead. The nuclear three had spent the previous few evenings alone, but this was their first night ever without a sponsor. For lack of a better way to grind up time after the meal, they dealt the cards. Three-handed pinochle.

  Aside from Lily solicitously fixing everybody drinks and Ailene bidding rather more ambitiously than usual, the cards fell out pretty much as expected. Occasionally, one of the three would go out on a limb and predict: “I have a hunch we’ll be hearing something in the next couple of minutes. Just a feeling.” But all forecasts came to nothing, except to make everyone lose track of trumps. Psychological warfare coupled with a roundhouse led Lily to win two consecutive matches. Eddie declined a third, saying he had to go lie down and toss around for a while.

  He left the women to their low conversation and headed upstairs. At the top of the flight, the phone rang. He dove the three yards into the folks’ bedroom, grabbing the upstairs extension with the grace of an on-base leadoff man performing his end of a hit-and-run. He cornered the receiver and for a moment forgot the standard invocation. Then he gathered himself and got out something close to “Hollow.” His “low” collided with a lo of another persuasion all together.

  From the other end came that unmistakable bass singing the foundation line of the old favorite chorale. How a Rose E’er Blooming, from tender stem hath sprung. Eddie Jr. stood transfixed, unable to cut in on the tune, noticing only how truly beautiful that voice was, how the throat alone on the man remained untouched by any outward destruction of disease. By all appearances, the old guy still had a good deal of singing waiter left in him, despite his unfortunate, long-standing mix-up with History.

  The kid’s hesitation proved fatal. The faint static of long-distance-relayed lines indicated anything from the sixty miles to Chicago all the way up to the ends of the earth. Dad would not quit singing, although the bass line, stripped of the family’s upper voices, seemed more like that sultry, minor, old favorite of his, “Don’t Get Around Much Anymore.” As he headed home toward that remarkable deceptive cadence in the next to the last strain, another voice, female, joined in on the crystalline melody: Amid the snows of winter, when half spent was the night. Eddie Jr. could not figure out what he was hearing. He couldn’t believe the evidence, or get the voices to cohere. Pop had run away with a woman; it was as simple and insane as that. Then the son realized that the soprano, sounding as far away as the bass, actually came from as close as downstairs.

  Pop pointed that out to him. “Thanks, girl. I might have been at that all night before certain unnamed parties would have condescended to lend a tenor.”

  Eddie Jr. took the cue. “’Lo, Pop. Listen, you’re a sick man. You gotta get back to the hospital.”

  “No credit for stating the obvious,” Dad said, his voice combating the static. “How’s your mother?”

  “How are you?” Lily inserted. Little Eddie hated three-way conversations. They were impossible to synchronize, even in the best of circumstances. He could not yell at his sister to shut up without violating the special delicacy of this connection. Besides, she seemed to be doing much better with the third wheel than he.

  “Not bad, hon. Want to know where I am?”

  “Where are you?” Eddie Jr. blurted out, instantly feeling more than routinely stupid.

  “Just a second, I’ll check.” The distant handset tumbled to the ground with a clunk. Eddie and Lil had only a few seconds to work out a strategy, and they wasted them. Before they could say anything to one another, Dad was back. “Man behind the cash register says this is Neosho. I believe him. Funny name. Probably an Indian thing. What do you think?”

  “What state, Dad?” asked Eddie, trying not to sound testy.

  “State? Why, I’m perfectly sober, I assure you.” The utter noncooperation of this predictable gag sent Eddie scrambling for the reference shelf that the man kept near his bedstead. Eddie cursed himself for his cultivated illiteracy, not knowing which of the thick books was the best prospect for locating the town. Reduced to repeating “Are you . . . ? Are you . . .” he scrounged for and eventually located an atlas.

  Lily cut in again, with a question he could not quite make out. Distracted, he could hear Mom in the background downstairs, demanding the phone. He blessed his sister silently for not transferring the call. He found the unlikely name in the atlas index, followed by an inscrutable look-up code of numbers. Flipping to the designated map, he heard Dad reply, “By hitchhiking, of course.” Eddie gathered enough presence of mind to warn his parent about the dangers of that means of travel, hypocritically making no mention of his jaunt to school that morning. Dad ignored him, instead giving a condensed travelogue of his last eighteen hours. “I really made pretty good time. Lost a little edge around St. Louis, though.”

  Good time to where? And at that moment, he put his finger on the spot. Neosho was an entirely overlookable rat’s eyelash just south of Joplin, Missouri. It fell right on the crossover of two highways, but that was about it. His eyes scanned the immediate environs for an appeal to motive but found nothing even remotely interesting anywhere in the area. Eddie’s eyes flicked down as Dad jabbered on about nothing. A familiar name jumped out due south of Neosho: De Kalb. De Kalb, Texas.

  For a minute, the strangest, half-formed possibilities presented themselves. The man had gotten confused. Turned around. Alternate universe, like in the comics, where everything is the same, only different, or like that church logic where alpha and omega constantly turn up as one another. Dad was finding his way back to a place he had never been. Eddie cleared his head enough to ask, “Where you headed, Pop?”

  But the blunt route also got nowhere, except to launch the old man into “Goin’ home, goin’ home, I’ma goin’ home.” Dad quit after the chorus, adding, “Those folk-song writers have a lot of nerve, ripping off Dvořák like that.”

  Eddie could feel Dad winding up the conversation. He felt like screaming, singing, whispering, begging, pleading, reciting the Gettysburg Address at high speed—anything to delay the inevitable severance. He was more alarmed, more in the dark, than he had been that morning upon hearing of the prison break. Eddie Jr. had always known that his fundamental inability to get a straight answer out of his namesake, no matter how forthright he played it, would eventually spell trouble. And right now was fast becoming eventually. Trying to think like the fellow in question, he employed one more tactic, one he hated to stoop to: allusion. He cut in on Lily, who was saying something inane about how the hospital needed him back for tests. “Hey, Dad-o. Lemme ask you something.”

  “Yes, Eddie?” Pure high-school-teacher intonation.

  “Do those two guys in the bind ever get it together?”

  For a brief silence, it seemed as if Pop might suddenly come across, surrende
r something of substance. At last he answered. “Do they ever break out of the matrix? Do they stop murdering themselves over the long haul? Too many maybes. First, they have to get a second chance. Second, they have to ignore the fact that evolution favors the nasty and brutish, that success is always at the other guy’s expense. Third, even if the game stabilizes with two players, it’s certainly hopeless at four billion.”

  Pop was back in the saddle, in the land of allegory and evasive metaphor. Eddie Jr. ran out of countering resources. He was about ready to tell Lily to put Mom on when Big Sis fell back, way back, to a level of questioning he’d totally overlooked. “You must have been on the road most of last night,” she said, making it sound as if the trip were your basic, planned-out summer vacation. “How long have you been awake?”

  Dad, jovial again, answered, “Oh, about thirty years or so.” Then, over both children’s accelerating, crescendoed, and panicked protests, he told them he’d call again soon and ordered them to wish the rest of the family well. “Keep them honest for me, will you?”

  16

  In her dream, Lily rose in the cold, green water, emptying her lungs as she shot upward. But at the surface, a sheet of ice blocked her way. Airless, she hammered at the crust, but her blows had no force. She felt her way along the seamless and solid sheet for miles, about to black out for good. At last she found a crumbled edge and, scrambling for life, she widened the passage and surfaced. Instantly, a hand crashed through the blowhole and forced her back into the cold water. She woke in total terror, tried to sit up and scream, but the same hand held her against her pillow. Someone was in the room with her. Lily let out a deep, sleep-drugged wail, pitchless and spectral in her vocal cords. Then she woke enough to recognize her mother. Ailene had come into her room to sit on the edge of her bed and pet her hair. And that pathetic, secret gesture created Lily’s nightmare.