Prisoner's Dilemma

by Richard Powers

  18

  Suddenly, in the middle of the night, Artie awoke and shot bolt upright. He snapped awake on a thought, one that forced into his head even through sleep. He instantly saw, in the pitch-black room, a way to break Dad’s prisoner’s matrix. Only the way was terrible.

  He froze stock-still, as if the idea were in the room and would destroy him if he gave away his location. He checked the solution again in his mind, proving it was not one of those products of sleep that seem so brilliant until they dissolve in light and sanity. This one held firm all the way across the board. Artie had discovered the only and awful way back to We.

  He knew the idea was true, even at this impossible hour, because of its complete simplicity. If guarding one’s self-interests condemned both player and antagonist to the perpetual worst case, then self-interest was not in the self’s best interest. The only logic was the logic of the combined payoff. The only reasonable choice was not the choice of reason but the choice that kept both out of the hole.

  Artie felt his arms and legs under the blanket, paralyzed just inches from the thing that stalked it. Everything charged with danger: the bed linen, the outline of his hanging clothes, the promise of translucent windows against the far wall, the chill of the air. Afraid that he would never get out of the dark room to speak of it, Artie named his answer: Crackpot Realism.

  The only way out was to release the us-and-us that was trapped inside the you-versus-he. Lying very still, Artie saw that Dad had known the outcome from the beginning. Artie felt himself collapse under the man’s infected past, his symptoms, his insufferable evasion, his misguided and misunderstood themes. Crackpot Realism meant that he and his remaining fellow genes, if they hoped to survive the man’s disappearance, had to will, for everything they were worth, that he not disappear. They had to tie their hopes to Little Brother, who, even if he located Pop against all odds, alive and forsaken in the Great Western Basin, would never be able to bring the guy back home.

  They had to demand that Dad not go away, even though he was already gone. They had to love the man so fiercely and unconditionally that when he was at last lost, they would be lost too, wandering confused through the one thing the universe did better than any other. The only path out was to stray at random around their lamppost, with no hope of returning to him. That was what crackpot empathy freed them, forced them to do.

  Artie tried to swing his feet down onto the cold floorboards, but he could not. He could do nothing but lie still, the only thing awake in the drafty house, the only spark anywhere at this hour. He heard his own breathing, his own blood sloshing through the capillaries in his ears. As slowly and incalculably as a Devonian tree becoming mineral, Artie became his father: a minute, statistically insignificant coward who could not live if it meant losing things. How could people go on? Yet they went, even as headlines accumulated beyond all capacity to understand them. Artie lay frozen in an alarm of nerves set off by the unlivable crisis of beauty.

  But nerves, he gradually remembered, always settled—settled into the old, local routines of work and sleep, of dishes and laundry. Settled at the sound of someone in the next room breathing, whose presence, only moments before, had seemed too beautiful to bear. Nerves settled and died, and he had only a minute or two to use them.

  He could not hope to go back to sleep. But Artie was not ready to keep himself company during all the hours of darkness still ahead. Getting up in the middle of the night changed the rules beyond recognition, all the terror of a new game. Then it struck him, exactly where he might begin testing the idea that had awakened him. Artie forced his pink feet to the floor and instantly became free. He could do anything he wanted. The house was ready and was his. For a moment, as he felt the flannel of his winter robe, abundance again ran wild and became terrible. But moving around—crackpot moving—was the only choice he had. And he took it.

  The house was different, the layout strange. He could not remember, in the light of his insight, which rooms connected and led where. The strangest sensation came over him in the dark: life was like one of Pop’s costume dramas—Norma Shearer in Marie Antoinette—only without the costumes and without the drama. A sleeping house, a town that time forgot, a ridiculously narrow sliver on the time line.

  Artie climbed the stairs slowly, lifting his weight onto the bannister so as not to creak the eternally settling stair boards. He let the women in the house keep whatever light sleep they’d managed to win. He paced the front room for a few minutes, where his sister slept unsuspecting on the sofa bed. Then he camped out in the kitchen, working up the courage to go put his hands directly on the hard facts he was after. This very house hid period-piece evidence about where Dad had gone. And Artie knew where to get it. He had only to convince himself, in the greater costume drama, in the rush of possibility opened at this hour, that he really wanted to know.

  He did. He climbed back upstairs, once more avoiding the sound mines. At the top landing, he hung a hard left and opened the cubbyhole crawl space that the folks used for long-term storage. He pulled the aged light string gingerly, craned to reach the highest shelf, and with both hands removed the quarry: two dozen reels of recording tape.

  He heard his mother groan slightly from her adjoining bedroom, and he redoubled his attempts at silence. He had no desire to add to her nightmare in progress. He grabbed the neatly penned, neatly arranged library of tapes. He swung his free hand back and forth along the distant back wall of the closet until he brushed against and grabbed the tape machine. He pulled the light string off with his teeth, pushed the door shut with his hip, and retreated to the front bedroom.

  In the safety of that closed place, Artie counted the tapes: a little over two dozen reels. The speculative and speculated-about Project spread all around him on a few hours of spools. He could absorb the whole thing in a couple of days of solid listening. His father had worked conscientiously for a quarter of a century, adding, revising, rethinking, editing out the gaps and blank pauses, to produce whatever story these reels contained.

  His father’s years-long work on this secret and alien project filled Artie with the horror hidden in the commonplace. The box of tape might have been anything—a house built by hand, a family album of children and children’s children, the idea for a better mousetrap, or the careful, perennial records of a well-tended garden. Artie looked at the box and understood that whatever it contained, it further proved that the attempt to speak the connection behind things was as unavoidable and as oppressive as breathing.

  Although the tapes were all neatly named and dated, Artie saw at once that the dates were not the dates they were made. He pulled out one bearing the earliest date, titled “The Cecilia Colony: 1890.” Without knowing what to expect, he threaded the first reel. He listened for a minute, and then another. Nothing. He fast-forwarded the story, becoming anxious. Still nothing. The tape had been erased. Artie removed the reel and replaced it with one called “The Peace Ship: 1915.” Whatever story Pop had told into the microphone he had once more carefully removed. Expecting the worst, Artie tried a third: “The Hollywood Ten: 1947.” Once more, the evidence had been destroyed, the trail of footprints smoothed. The man had deliberately headed to oblivion, removing all traces of his ever having been there.

  Defeated, Artie began to pack the machine back up. But wedged into the lid, apart from all the other tapes, unboxed and unnamed, was a loose reel. Rethreading the spool with shaking hands, Artie put on the tape that he knew to be Dad’s last, the one the man had been working on at the end, the one Artie was after. Slowly, incredulously, he heard the completely foreign, wholly familiar singing waiter’s bass fill up the empty room.

  Everything we are at that moment goes into the capsule: a camera, a wall switch, a safety pin. The task, a tough one, is to fit inside a ten-foot, streamlined missile a complete picture of us Americans, circa 1939.

  By accident or design, the tale had escaped erasure. Either Pop had taken off before he could kill it, or he found he could not kill i
t and therefore took off. Artie listened, with only partial comprehension, to the unfolding fable of incarceration and adaptation. He soon determined that the picture therein was not of “us Americans,” but of one American, the one Artie himself hoped to find.

  He stopped often, rewound, and reviewed selected spots in order to take the story in. Soon, Artie hit the pause button and crept back into his parents’ room, where he snared the massive single-volume encyclopedia Pop always kept close to the bed. He brought it back into the front room. To his surprise, he located a reference to the tape’s central event. The mass imprisoning of more than a hundred thousand American citizens had really happened. He stopped several times, going to his thick volume to verify the details or differentiate between fact and phantasm.

  The Disney in the reference books bore only slight relation to the one in the tapes. Disney had suffered and survived a labor strike at his outfit, in ’41, brought on by his dictatorial management practices. But the Disney on official record, an American not of Japanese ancestry, had been at liberty all during the war. While he had made the government propaganda cartoons Pop mentioned, the magnum opus seemed to be all Pop’s own.

  But soon Artie gave up on checking his dad’s world against the official tally. Pop’s land, it became increasingly clear, however rooted in fact, branched into a web of bewildering invention designed for its curative power alone. The story of Hobstown, so far as Artie could make it out from the Byzantine and baffling shifts of events, traced out Dad’s favorite hobby horse of all: how we are invariably trapped by immediate concerns into missing the long run, the big picture. By now it had the ring of an old and familiar friend, and as Artie listened, he could hear Pop stopping the motor, rewinding, reviewing, rerecording his tale countless times, until the results satisfied the famous perfectionist. The famous prisoner.

  The man was fighting for his life: that much was obvious. And more than his life. Somehow, Dad had fixed on the crazy notion that he was caretaker for the entire tribe, assuming personal responsibility and guilt for all the imprisoning of innocents the group continually commits. His story was the attempt to answer the question, unbearable, of how he could go on living while another suffered even the smallest indignity of distrust. Dad was trying, in the tape, to cure the permanent condition of mistrust the world fast embraced by creating a domain where escalating suspicion had no place. Hobstown. World World. And each time he released the pause button, Artie felt more certain that such a place could never survive the light of day.

  Artie never got to the end, to Pop’s end. For as the fable went on, it slowly changed from being about the disease of history to being the story of his father, sick with that disease. All at once, he knew where the story would double back on: Dad’s brief rub with the cataclysmic. Artie swore out loud at himself for not seeing the destination all along. So obvious: he had heard the account a hundred times, from the man himself. Figure it out, Pop had told him. I should have made this trip long ago. Now the tape had taken Artie there too.

  With a few minutes of the story still remaining, he reached out and hit the stop button. Leaving his father’s life work scattered across his bedroom floor, he went back downstairs. This time he let the wood creak all it could. He paced in the kitchen until he lost track of time. He was sitting calmly at the table when his mother came down that morning. “Merry Christmas,” he said quietly. “I know where Pop has gone.”

  Breaking the Matrix

  Late on a slow Sunday evening in mid-July 1945, my father and his bunkmates gather around the fold-out barracks table for their week-ending session of cards. A string of closed-down bases in his wake, Dad finds himself in what must be the most desolate spot in this hemisphere: an immense, blasted plain the original Spanish explorers named the Jornada del Muerto—the Journey of Death. His base lies about 250 miles southwest of his old B-29 school in Amarillo. Pop isn’t sure why he has been transferred here. For that matter, he isn’t sure what an army air field is doing out in the middle of so much emptiness. On the day he arrived, in answer to his unspoken questions, Dad’s new bunkmates told him that the only things certain out here in the Jornada were that work was slow and it never rained.

  They are right on the first account. But since the previous Friday, it has showered continuously, raining like there will be no tomorrow. Dad, after three days of soaking, concludes that rain in the desert is a strange thing. Gorged, purple blood vessels of clouds anvil up within minutes, as in time-lapse photography. The thunderheads rip open, dousing everything in a mix of water and whipped-up dust. He tastes ionized slate in his cheeks and feels it in the linings of his nostrils. The rain doesn’t dampen anything, although the scattered succulents swell visibly and show a spot of waxy pink here and there. The ground swallows the flood instantly, channels it away in walls of running water that fill the chiseled arroyos, feet deep. After each violent baptism the Jornada returns within minutes to zero humidity. The sun returns to full, skin-parching power.

  Rules at the isolated base have relaxed since the capitulation of the Germans. Fewer planes come in for servicing; fewer need to return to service. Sooner or later, everyone knows, the Japs too will have to throw in the towel. As a result, discipline in the rank and file is not what it had been back in ’43. The card-table quorum know they can get away with a couple of extra hours after lights-out. And so the hands keep coming.

  By my father’s standards, his companions play neither subtly nor well. They play a bastard hybrid of Acey Deucey, a game that, even in the original, demands nowhere near the concentration or skill of bridge or even pinochle. For their part, his companions have no reason to tolerate the newcomer or take him into their table. But a three-pound can of peanuts—a gift from my mother back in Jersey—provides a plentiful and perfect table stake, earning my father all the hands he wants.

  A bunkmate from the Bronx with an idiot savant’s way with electrical devices hooks up an illicit FM radio link, providing the card table with Big Band music as they bid each other up into peanut heaven. Since the card session is not studious, the table swarms with kibitzing. Everybody has something to say about everything: how long the Japs can hold out; how many men Operation Olympic will cost us; what the world will be like after the war; what the army is cooking up on the other side of the mountains; whose wife is doing what dirty deeds with what members of trade occupations.

  The new PFC pitches in with the best of them. But every few hands he devotes his forensic skills to trying to talk the others into a decent game of Hearts, or even Rummy. Getting nowhere, he concentrates on the radio, Hoagy Carmichael stuff—the man behind “I’m a Cranky Old Yank in a Clanky Old Tank on the Streets of Yokohama with My Honolulu Mama Singin’ Those Beat-o, Beat-o, Flat on My Seat-o Hirohito Blues.” Dad listens to some Big Band play a show tune from Thanks for the Memory or Every Day’s a Holiday. I can’t remember which. He plays the most intelligent game of high-low possible, given the house rules.

  The boys keep on playing into the wee hours of Monday morning. Nobody shows any signs of slackening. They keep right on gambling at that idiot Acey Deucey game, literally for goobers, finding some intrinsic fascination to the payoff. A little after five A.M., Pop gives up in disgust. The others won’t let him quit if it means his taking the peanut can away, so he leaves it with the table, reminding himself to write his wife to send peanut butter next time.

  He goes to the barracks screen door, lights up a Lucky, and thinks up new phrases for the L.S./M.F.T. acronym. Still a half hour or so before sunrise, the desert is dark, repentantly cool, clicking with the activity of unseen nocturnals. A brace of quail, attracted to the camp’s water supply, grieves as it comes awake.

  This is the sole half hour of the day when my father finds the desert livable. With the terrain charged with peace, he thinks out his next letter to his yet unknown wife, a letter filled with precious little news. Precious little happens to him these days, under the fuselage. His tour will be over just after the war, and he still has no real sen
se of how the two of them might best proceed when he gets his walking papers.

  Dad thinks about hitting the sack but knows that the card party won’t accommodate. That skinny Sinatra kid is on the FM link; Pop can’t see what the girls go crazy over as far as that guy is concerned. His back to the bunks, smoke trickling out the screen, he listens to the song—sinners kissing angels—as it mingles with the card-game arguments. For a second, it dawns on him—the draw, the appeal of a game like Acey Deucey. Whatever its failings as an exercise in strategy, it gives a bunch of pent-up, confused, shiftless grease monkeys working a thankless job for the State a chance to bicker harmlessly, even socially. He listens to the early-morning dark—that sweet, social sound of Acey—takes a last pull on the butt, and flicks it into the air.

  At the instant the Lucky hits the sand, the sun comes up. Too fast, too sharply, too bright, it grows into a light more luminous than noon. The desert blooms. For a fraction of a second, Dad chalks up the glare to sleeplessness, fatigue. But when the first tracers fail to fade, he knows that this sunrise will not yield easily to theory.

  Years later, he frequently read that what he had seen had not lasted more than half a dozen seconds. But Dad forever maintained otherwise. The light, three times brighter than midday, simply persists. At the moment that Oppenheimer, a few miles west, speaks to himself those often-quoted words from the Bhagavad Gita, “I am become Death, the destroyer of worlds,” my father hears, at his back, the unchanged chatter of card players, Sinatra’s sinners still smooching angels, in an early and unexplainable sun-shower.

  The light effuses a bright, warm matrix of desire. Dad decides he might as well call this premature sunrise the actual one, that he might as well turn back into the barracks, wash, go to work, get a jump on the now longer-than-usual day. Everything has changed except my father’s power to make any difference. This fireball just hangs in the air, a glow, a desert heat against his face. For my father, the brightness hangs on like this forever. For my dad, it stays bright for good.