Prisoner's Dilemma

by Richard Powers

  19

  Ailene, startled, stopped halfway to the coffeepot. The shortest path between bed and breakfast brewer, beaten out in so many houses over the family’s long exodus, a habit as certain as the measured course of daylight or the law of conservation of energy, vanished in the face of Artie’s extraordinary announcement. She went to the table and sat down, curlered and afraid. Artie addressed her with a quizzical look. Ailene returned one of nonplussed bewilderment, the expression she wore when playing Three No Trump and losing count. Artie was shocked to notice the first shafts of dead hair speckling her head. Ailene dropped her jaw to speak. She halted, overcome by how curious and unfortunate a thing being alive was.

  At last Artie delivered. “This is Dad’s second sweep through Amarillo, isn’t it?” Mom lowered her head and nodded, as if Artie had just detected her secret sin. But she volunteered nothing further. Art let her collect herself and then shouted at her. “Mom, Mom. Don’t leave me hanging. What else do you know about all this?”

  “What do you mean, what do I know? You’re the one who he’s always so keen on talking war with.” Winning back a little self-esteem, she reminded him, in a small voice, of what he had all along known but had chosen to forget until his night session with what remained of Dad’s tape library. She repeated those details of the past—Dad’s youthful swing through the American Theater, closing down the War—that they had all gotten in countless historical and illustrative exercises over the years.

  Artie groaned. “Oh, Mother. It’s worse than I thought. We have to go look at the papers.”

  Just then, Lily came into the room. She could barely mask her desire to rush out into the front room and see the Christmas tree, an old prohibition that still inhabited the Eddie-less house. She had dressed circumspectly, putting on a knit vest for the occasion, a dapperness that betrayed her. She never dressed up for the man when he was still around. She stole down the hallway from her room, hoping against hope that she was the first one up. When she saw Mother and Brother sitting at the table, she knew something had happened.

  She sat down defeated at the table, giving up on Christmas-tree renewal, resigning herself to the old burden of family. There was no way around them to a covert celebration of tinsel. Family, as much as she would do without it if she could, was the only celebration she would ever have. The others filled her in on the connection they had drawn. Then the detachment of three crept upstairs to the lockbox, keeping one another from turning around and backing down.

  The relevant sheaf of documents only confirmed what they had already received firsthand from the source himself, long ago. Separation papers, Camp Shelby, Mississippi. Honorable discharge. Mass-produced letter of thanks from Harry Truman and Henry “Hap” Arnold, Commanding General of the Army Air Forces, Pop’s name typed in on the receiving line. A diploma from Training Command, B-29 school, Amarillo.

  “Didn’t Uncle Art crash in Brownsville, Texas?” Lily asked, her finger on the named spot in the atlas. Mom nodded and tried to elaborate. But she could not get past the first words. The three sprawled across the folks’ bed, passing the records to one another, scouring them in turn for whatever clues they could extract. All of a sudden Ailene put her sheaf down carelessly, looked over at her daughter and son, and tried to hug both of them at once. Artie shouted out, embarrassed by the effusion, and fought free. At that moment he caught sight of the document they sought, one that drew him up vertically: a transfer order to a remote base in the wastelands of New Mexico.

  Ailene looked at the paper and nodded. Artie was almost white, as close to bloodless as he could come without stroking. “Alamogordo, Mom. He was really there.” Ailene made no answer, an opaque look about her sockets and cheekbones. “The A-bomb, Mom,” Artie said, with the exasperation of a high school history teacher giving away to his class that the answer was, after all that, just old, familiar B.

  “Did you think he was lying?” Mother spat, violently. Her son had neither thought nor said as much. But the place name and the device had never been more than an abstraction to him, despite his father’s frequent stories. Artie recalled Pop giving them the whole White Sands high drama over dinner, in his best Movietone/March of Time newsreel voice. As to Pop’s details, Artie could recall nothing specific except the man’s preserved amazement, after more than thirty years, at the night sky of the desert suddenly shooting up several times brighter than noon and staying that way for some time.

  Until that instant, the invention had seemed to all of them no more tangent to their own experience than the numeric payoff game Pop forced on them. Lily shook her head and said, “All that happened thirty years ago. Of course, we wouldn’t remember. To our generation, that’s prehistory.”

  It came to all of them at once that Dad’s sickness, from day one, came from his being the last man in the Northern Hemisphere who refused to think of the past as over. He had never followed the universal, self-protecting practice of flattening out the past, abstracting it, rendering it neuter and quaint. He had spent twenty years of dinners trying to point out that the whole program of civilization had not arrived ex nihilo, out of nothing. Dad’s problem was simply that he saw the destination.

  Ailene said, “One never wants to make matters worse by assuming the worst. But here we are.”

  Pop was bound for Alamogordo. All the facts bore that out. Eddie Jr.’s colored map pins led to it. The path Dad had taken and the time he spent in each place fit the curve. It obeyed Pop’s trademark sense of historical irony. Most important, the destination explained the course and nature of Dad’s disease itself. Under pressure of the self-evident, Artie pointed out something everybody had frequently noticed since Pop began relapsing: just before the man went down for the count, he would screw up his eyes and wince, as if fending off a very bright light.

  Rach was in the kitchen when they came back down. She was setting another capricious table for holiday breakfast. Little Sister made linen angels and archangels out of Mother’s starched napkins, standing them at attention to adorn each setting. For halos, she used the ubiquitous multivitamin. On hearing them enter, she rolled her eyes, shook her jowls, and said, in tremulous bass, “Let’s . . . open . . . the . . . presents!” giving a game-show host’s pregnant pause between each word, doing her unsuccessful best to deliver Dad’s annual taunt. When no one replied, she turned to them to say “Bah, Humbug,” when she saw that something was very wrong. The one-woman kitchen patrol came to a standstill.

  Artie looked at her and said, “White Sands.” Then he slumped into a chair, picked up one of the folded napkins, and said, “I like these. Angels, are they?”

  That morning, Eddie Jr. called collect. Rachel answered. Eddie said, “Tell me everything that’s happening over there. Slowly. Don’t race. It’s holiday rates. Discount.” Momentarily confused over which Eddie she was speaking to, Rachel asked him where he was and how he felt. “Seems to have been Missouri at one time,” he said. “And I’m just fine, thanks. I was highway-hallucinating for a while there a few miles back, but I pulled up in a rest area and did forty.”

  For once, the family’s joker refused to trade him banter for banter. “Ever hear of a place called Alamogordo?” The kid, despite his having no sense of history aside from which came first, the Chicken McNugget or the Egg McMuffin, caught on quickly. The two of them worked out a new itinerary on and around the spot.

  When Rachel rang off, Artie placed a call of his own. He reached Hines Hospital, and after suffering considerable bureaucratic shuffle, he got through to the resident who had worked up Dad’s charts and now spent his Christmas on call, keeping watch over flocks by night. Artie did not mince preliminaries. He identified himself and the case in question and said, simply, “Radiation poisoning.”

  “Astonishing you should mention that,” said the resident. “Many of the symptoms put me in mind of it.” The physician went on to demand to know why exposure to radiation wasn’t mentioned at all during the history and physical.

  “If he
ever took a real dose of any size, which is debatable, it was over thirty years ago.” The doctor assured Artie that the disease could not possibly drag on malignant that way, so long after exposure. Even if some of the symptoms matched, the etiology was all wrong. Artie assured the physician, “I’m sure you’re right. Unfortunately, I’m not the one that needs convincing.”

  He had done everything he could possibly do. Emptied, Artie climbed slowly back to his bedroom. He found the tape player where he had left it, interrupted near the end, a few minutes left on the reel. He had come up to hear the rest of the tale but now found he could not summon the courage to start the machine in motion. He sat staring out the iced-over window, wondering what he was supposed to learn from this last and most emphatic of Dad’s riddles, his resignation from all games. He thought of his family’s complete inability to see where Pop had been heading all these years. Artie wanted to know how they all could have messed up so badly.

  None of them, despite personalities as varied as an unplanned garden, saw what was coming until it had already passed. Despite Pop’s daily admonitions over breakfast eggs or dishwashing, they had all let the immediate past become history, that most abstract, detached, impersonal, and curatorial of disciplines. Artie lost track of how many minutes had passed when a soft knock came at his door.

  Lil entered the room quietly. “So you have it. I was about to steal it myself.” Artie looked up at her, his eyes for the first time in years asking for her help. Lily sat down next to him on the floor. “Look what else I found. The last thing he was reading.” She showed him a beaten-up, old paperback copy of The Decameron. Artie smiled to see the old standard. One of Pop’s favorites: a handful of people escape the Black Death and keep themselves alive and entertained in their exile by telling one another fantastic stories. Pop pulled it out and read it, sometimes out loud to one or more of the family, every five years or so.

  They sat together, touching lightly, saying nothing. In another few minutes, Rach came in and settled down without a sound. The sisters said nothing to each other, but in time fell silently to braiding each other’s hair, the way they had always done when they were girls. Rachel spoke first. “Now we’re all guilty, huh, guys? We might as well listen from the top.”

  They did. Artie rewound the tape, and let them in from the beginning. As the story unfolded, each felt how their lives had been written out by 1946, years before their birth. But they hadn’t any real experience of the time or place with which to apprehend it. Their parents were their jailers, building their fate and their children’s fate. Somewhere in the layers of sedimented ground the releasing key, the cathartic, firsthand knowledge of where they came from, lay buried.

  They listened to Dad’s last riddle in silence, with nothing to protect themselves from its conclusion except one another. They reached the point in the story where Artie had broken off. Artie thought: He has one last chance to get us out. The master of escapism must pull off a political miracle. But what weapon could save them from his return to the self-opposing world? What could a cartoon biopic work, or whistling on stars?

  This time, he let the tape run all the way to its magnetic end.

  V-J

  When the miniature, simulated sun at last dies out, Eddie Hobson walks off of the vacant sound stage into a World World he does not recognize. The sets are still there, still the same. The blank midwestern fields still play host to the most remarkable geographical variety ever concentrated into so small a space. But the industrious cast of thousands has disappeared.

  “They have been freed,” Disney explains, “by the magic, iridescent powder.” Eddie discovers the man sitting on the stoop of World World’s world headquarters in De Kalb’s Elwood Mansion. The director grips an old newspaper, The Chicago Daily News, whose headlines scream, ROOSEVELT DEAD—DIES AT 63 OF HEMORRHAGE IN GEORGIA. But Disney is not mourning the death of the man who signed the nisei into prison. His attention is held by a sidebar from the same front page reading, REDS OPEN DRIVE ON BERLIN. Near page bottom, almost an afterthought, next to the box that gives the pages for Bridge, Comics, and Crossword, adjacent to a human-interest teaser titled “What Shall We Do with Japan?” a reporter announces casually that

  Two Russian armies were closing in on the last two districts of burning Vienna still in German hands. The Leopoldstadt commercial district, including the 2,000-acre Prater Amusement Park, was cleared yesterday by troops that forced the Danube River canal.

  The Reds have the Prater. Disney explains to the bewildered boy that the place is the most famous amusement park in what was the most beautiful capital city in what was once the West. And one can bet that they will attempt to hold on to the prize, no matter how much talk goes on after the war. He interprets the sidebar for Eddie. “The only country that will make it through this conflagration with enough raw entertainment resources to rival our own has a two-thousand-acre leg up on us.

  “The time for movie dreams has passed,” Disney concludes. “We need something more substantial if we are to survive. We need to go beyond animation. It’s no longer enough to breathe spirit back into an exhausted world.” The Communists have the Big One. There’s only one thing to do. Tit for Tat. Park Warfare. Build a place that’s twenty-five hundred.

  Disney retreats to his office and locks himself in, dictating plans for his new undertaking into his machine. Eddie is left to wander the deserted set of the abandoned masterpiece You Are the War. He is stranded here in the forsaken fields, alone. The next morning, by the time-honored technique of time compression, the Daily News appears again on their stoop, as if by magic. Its headline reads, ATOM RUIN STUNS JAPS. “What Just One Bomb Did.” Page one contains three graphics. The first explains, “How an uranium atom splits.” The second shows two craters, one being the largest previously produced by any explosive, and this new one, an order of magnitude larger. The third shows a map of Japan with five black circles and a finned silhouette reading, “5,000 Atomic Bombs.” Its caption reads: “What Might Happen—Map shows how atomic bombs, 1,000 dropped in each circle, might destroy everything on the home islands of Japan.”

  Disney comes out of his room and addresses his last recruit, his lost child lead. He says that the war is effectively over, that Eddie is free to go. Condemned to go. Go ye therefore and do whatever work your hands can find to do. Disney shakes the boy’s hand and is gone. He buys up a huge tract of land in Anaheim and paces out the boundaries for a magic kingdom, documentary cameras rolling all the while. His paces are those of a zoo animal released into the wild, still running the loop defined by its old cage. On the far side of the apocalypse the man continues to suffer the Stockholm Syndrome, in love with the jailers of this new landscape, this small world.

  C-47’s buzz the deserted camp. They release from the sky ten thousand letters, each bearing the national seal and the White House return address. Eddie stands in the falling snow of paper and rips one open to find a page headed by a star-entrapped e pluribus eagle. Underneath, the sheet bears the name of one of the vanished dwarves, followed by the message:

  To you who answered the call of your country and served in its Armed Forces to bring about the total defeat of the enemy, I extend the heartfelt thanks of a grateful Nation. As one of the Nation’s finest, you undertook the most severe task one can be called upon to perform. Because you demonstrated the fortitude, resourcefulness and calm judgment necessary to carry out that task, we now look to you for leadership and example in further exalting our country in peace.

  The epistle is signed, “Harry Truman, the White House.”

  The captured nisei are no longer prisoners of war, no longer dangerous foreign nationals, because their foreign nation no longer exists. Eddie invents fates for the seven founders. Tom Ishi is free to go to Korea six years later and donate his life to foreign affairs. Billy Sasaki is free to return to Santa Monica and prove his patriotism by acquiring a bigger mortgage, an uglier house, a more demeaning job, and more assimilated children than any of his Scandinavia
n neighbors. Basho Mitsushi is free to repatriate to Japan and spend the rest of his days in a Shinto monastery while the country around him devotes itself to producing cars, consumer electronics, and baseball. Paul Okira is free to resume his law practice and suffer for years under a vague sense of wrong, until one day in the late seventies he joins a San Diego committee for redress and reparations for those citizens imprisoned illegally in World War II. Steve Ushima turns his incredible engineering skills over to the government, on the Oak Ridge–Hanford, Washington–Los Alamos circuit. Dr. Tamagami Simms retires a venerable academic, and late in life, his mind slipping, becomes one of those 11 percent of Americans who respond to a survey that America has never used a nuclear weapon in anger. Sato, of course, is safe where all safety’s lost, safest of all.

  In short, they are all free to struggle with the same, entrapping question of what, if anything, one private citizen can do to make the shared scenario less horrible. Eddie walks into the white wood A-frame that Disney lived in when the project was in its heyday. He goes to the dusty upright piano still standing in the corner and strokes a few ivories—Gershwin, or Charles Ives. He goes upstairs to the man’s office and searches around until he finds what he is after. From the back closet of a long-forgotten room, he pulls out an antique dictaphone, replete with black metal bullhorn.

  He sets the machine up in the middle of the room and begins to play the tape still threaded on it, at the ready position. The unmistakable sound of Disney, the man who himself dubbed in the voice of the world’s most famous rodent, comes out of the machine and fills the room.

  You must often have heard, as I have, that to make a sensible use of one’s reason harms nobody. It is natural for everybody to aid, preserve and defend his life as far as possible. And this is so far admitted that to save their own lives men often kill others who have done no harm. If this is permitted by the laws which are concerned with the general good, it must certainly be lawful for us to take any reasonable means for the preservation of our lives. . . .