PLOWING THE DARK

by Richard Powers

  They're arbitrary. The scale runs from zero to 255.

  Two hundred and fifty-five? You people are truly occult.

  It's a binary thing, babe. Give me this one on faith.

  Sue shook her fuchsia head and twitched her ruby-studded eyebrow, dragging the knobs through their paces. She called up sliders for contrast, saturation, and hue. The laurel wreath metamorphosed into supersaturated narcissi and hyacinths. It hardened to a turn-of-the-century black-and-white lithograph. It ignited in a lurid laundry soap commercial.

  We can tweak each color channel separately. Or we can nudge around points on a histogram or an active compensation curve.

  Adie looked on her colleague in awe. Loque's own aggressive Papagena plumage began to make sense. That's OK. I trust you.

  Big mistake. Here. Watch this. From out of a menu labeled "Transforms" came a choice called "Vortex." Sue blinked, and the laurel sprig descended into a Cartesian maelstrom. It wrung itself out like a topologisfs spent dishrag. And still it twirled in the mythic blackness.

  Wait. God. What have you done? You've wrecked it. It looks horrible.

  Easy, sweetie. Haven t you heard? What's done can always be undone.

  With a single click, Sue returned the spinning branch to mint condition. There you are. Unblemished. Untouched by human tinkering.

  The idea grazed Adie, like a pile of bricks falling off a scaffold and killing the pedestrian in front of her. She saw why the mind raced to convert to digital. Why it needed this place where ingenuity could always hit the Undo button.

  Sue Loque warped and bulged and folded the innocent sprig until it was no longer fit to grace a wilted salad. Laurel twisted into oak into maple. Each derangement offered its own custom parameters, permutations too numerous to investigate.

  Adie watched her expert pilot steer them into "Shadows and Edges." On the Cavern wall, the leaves fell away to a penciled outline. The mottled surface of a thousand greens vanished into mere contour flapping in the invented breeze. Surface reduced to a ghostly mold, a pipe-cleaner sculpture that Adie reached out and poked her fingers through.

  This isn't right. I cant cope ...

  Hang on. It gets worse.

  We're not meant to be able to do all this. It's not good for us.

  Loque turned her attention to the archaic creature. She fiddled with the chains dangling from her studded skirt. I don't get it. You've never used a computer in your work?

  Adie shot her head back, horrified.

  All those little pastel magic princess thingies of yours?

  Thanks, Sue. By hand. Every one. You remember the human hand, don't you?

  Do you? Sue asked, and reached out. Adie, despite herself, stepped back. Sue laughed, and snorted again at the color she brought to the artist woman's cheeks. You've never seen Monday Night Football? Saturday cartoons? This stuff is all over every prime-time fifteen-second commercial spot that—

  Another horrified head shake. I don't own a TV.

  Well. Aren't we precious? Wait until the baddies at TeraSys learn who they've hired.

  Adie regrouped. What they don't know can't hurt them.

  Oh, they know everything, finally. And nothing hurts them.

  Sue popped backward through the Undo catalogue, the history of their voyage here. She retrieved the original plant from its pipe-cleaner outline. The thousand greens returned from their brief banishment to transparency, now deepening, by contrast, their mimicry of the living.

  OK, doll. Pull up your virtual La-Z-Boy and kick back. Are you ready for this?

  I severely doubt it. You want a minute?

  I want a lifetime.

  Sue tsked. Chill out, girl scout. Here goes. Let's start with "Water-color."

  She blinked the word, and the fact followed. The result did not resemble a watercolor of a laurel sprig. It was one, down to the fibers in the moistened idea of rag paper. Down to the simulated color-bleeding, the dribbled imperfections of a gummed-up camel-hair brush, although the brush that painted it never existed outside this software library.

  Everything was perfect: the palette, the semitransparent matte, the fuzzy borders, the splotchy jade inks running into each other like broken yolks in a crooked skillet. All the kinks and cutaneous leaf landmarks still laced this revamped image. Only now they appeared as manhandled, hand-mangled parodies of the original. The leaf bobbed on its stalk in front of Adie, a copy of a copy, a debasement of the debasement of the Forms.

  Help me, Adie whimpered, appalled and euphoric at once. Гт drowning.

  No prob. Heading for dry land here, boss. What'll it be? Chalks? Colored pencil? Dry point? Conte? Here's something a little offbeat: stained glass. At a blink, the laurel fractured into the leaded lozenges of a free-floating lancet, hued in cool Chartres blue.

  They played like girls stumbling upon a rolltop desk in an attic, all the pigeonholes intact. Oil and Quilt; Paper Scrap and Tapestry; Putty Knife, Aluminum Foil, Fresco.

  Agitated Cave Painting? What in creation ...?

  As in Lascaux. I named that one. That's one of mine.

  Yours? Hang on a minute. You wrote ... ?

  Sure. What'd you think? You think Гт just some Turbo Pascal farm-team stringer?

  Math does all this, Adie chanted. All some kind of— The greatest paint-by-numbers kit in the universe.

  Princess, Гт ready to love you, and all that. But you gotta pull it together a little, or we'll never manage to drag you over the finish line.

  You mean there's more?

  Always. "More" is what we do. "More" is this outfit's end product.

  Always another level down, always another branch led off from the branch where they stood, until the spreading tree grew to fill all the available arbor. Submenu Art Effects. Submenu Filters. Submenu Artist Styles. Pointillism. Seurat. Their grafted leaves speckled into something from the Grande Jatte. The imitation was uncanny—an exact running average, stained on the mottled leaf, of every dot that the dead painter ever applied to canvas.

  Oh Jesus. I cant believe this. God help me.

  Sue dragged her stunned apprentice through a pantheon of styles. They tried on painters like teens trying on jeans at a factory outlet. Giotto bent the green into chalky sapphire chunks. The Caravaggio leaf darkened to tenebrismo. Van der Weyden glistened, hard-edged and luminous. Rothko bled a whole woodland of greens out of one monotone block. Artists who'd never dreamed of painting a leaf now did so in a perfect parody of their leafless life's work.

  Adie stood still in the Cavern, straddling rapture and despair.

  Who made all these things?

  What do you mean who made them? We just did. Didnt you just see us?

  No. I mean, who made the routines. Who made.. . Rothko? Caravaggio?

  Oh. Yeah. That was us too.

  Us?

  Us. Me, Acquerelli, Rajasundaran, Spiegel...

  Spiegel? My Spiegel? Does every one of you know more about painting than I know about computers?

  Watch this, Sue commanded. As if Adie could help but watch. Sue blinked onward, narrow and accurate. We can take a Rubens palette and put it on top ofPoussin shrubbery. Using Mary Cassatt's brushstrokes.

  Don't. Please. You realize that what makes these people great is ... ?

  That you cant reduce them to a statistical average? Yeah, yeah, we've looked into all that. But still, Sue wheedled. I bet you know who this is.

  Adie did, at a glance. And the one after that was even more obvious. A little aura began to glow, just behind the globe of her left eye. The harbinger of an out-of-this-world migraine that would prostrate her for the next ten hours.

  Gauguin, she called out. I need to see Gauguin.

  Why? Guilty favorite or something? Was he so hot with foliage?

  Adie didn't explain. Her need had nothing to do with the man's technique. She needed to see the colors behind that grimly named panorama, its name as long as the painting itself: Where Do We Come From? What Are We? Where Are We Going?

  They di
d Gauguin, blessedly not all that convincing. I've seen better Gauguin imitations on cruise-line brochures.

  Sue brayed. Tell me about it. We wrote this great filter. But we didnt know who in the hell it looked like.

  Marc, Adie declared. Franz Marc.

  You're the expert. Sue pulled up а С shell and jiggled the label of the offending menu. Gauguin became Marc, even more easily than he had in real life.

  You want to write a decent Gauguin? We can start with this one and monkey with the parameters.

  You mean to tell me I can be anyone? That every conceivable style ... ? That everyone's hand in the history of Western ... ?

  Princess. Chill. Whatever we can describe, we can reproduce.

  They played out the remainder of their reserved time slot, until Sybil Stance's climate modeling group came and kicked them out. By the time Klarpol and Loque left the Cavern, their laurel had become the spitting image of that bouquet just behind the sofa in Rousseau's Dream. A bouquet that never existed, until they plucked it and placed it there.

  7

  The staff at school exudes a nervous optimism that no one will jinx by speaking. They give you the guided tour prepared for all new hires. They leave the school driver to orient you, although all parties tastefully avoid that verb.

  "I take you anywhere, Mr. Martin. You tell me, I drive." He brings you down a newly broadened thoroughfare. On all sides of your closed car, life returns to trade. You pass the financial district and the open-air suqs, once more breathing with people. The anti-Ottoman statues in Martyrs' Square seem almost crater-free, from a distance. You hook around the Corniche along the Riviera, avoiding the checkpoints.

  Here and there, steel girders tear loose from the sides of blasted buildings, dragging along sprays of concrete veil. Balconies crumble off high-rises like so many dried wasp nests. Freshly scrubbed laundry hangs from those that remain, blinding white flags flapping in the Levant sun.

  Here is the Paris of the East, the once-chic orchid of the eastern Med. You speed along the shredded Rue des Banques to a palm-lined plaza, down by the turquoise bay. Fifteen minutes after setting out, the chauffeur spreads his hands in the air, palms up, disarmed. You see? Things are calming down. Returning to livable. "Where does that street lead? No, this one here." "Ha. Don't worry, Mr. Martin. Very boring. Very nothing." "Can we head down this way? I'd just like a quick peek." "Later, maybe. Inshallah." God willing. As if healing required hiding the wounds.

  No matter; you see it already. The thing your friends back home saw, even before you left. The thing you've half wished away, half sought out. Just behind the ivory facing, just beneath the glinting amethyst, this world is still shelling itself down to rubble.

  You can't help but hear it, rumbling off in the direction of the Metn foothills. A shell barrels overhead, close enough to break your guide's composure. This war is not over. This war will never end. Yet this rumble is no more than cartoon thunder. It growls like linen scraped over a plywood drum. The bursts come no closer to hurting you than score-board fireworks. They detonate impotently, softer than the explosions of your recent American bug-out.

  In fact, living on a powder keg has much to recommend it, providing one's driver knows a safe way back to the impregnable compound. A city's self-inflicted scars offer the prospect of unlimited further diversions.

  The following week treats you to your first real teeth-rattling blast. The panic passes, leaving you more alive than you've felt in months. An artillery plume rises on the horizon—an old movie's Indian smoke signals. Your life is not yet over, whatever the last two years have insisted. Thirty-three is still young. The future remains your dominant tense. You're alive, unhit. Anything can still happen.

  Simply being here proves that. You couldn't have scripted such a trip. Six years in Chicago, explaining your inexplicable country to Japanese businessmen, riding the emotional Tilt-a-Whirl with a miserable woman, keeping body and soul together on a largely ceremonial salary. Now living like a sultan, on hazard pay, in a place even more desperate than that woman.

  There is a harsh humor to it: nailing the job interview because of your Muslim mother. Because you don't currently drink, no matter the historical reason. Because they mistake you for one who understands the Faithful. Because tenacious Lebanese need the same English your Japanese businessmen did.

  You like them, these violence-inured twenty-year-olds raised along the Green Line's furrow. They possess an intensity you've never seen in any classroom. Pitching one's tent under the mortar's arc does wonders for a student's motivation.

  "Why do you want to improve your English?" you ask them, on the first day of your new tenure. The diagnostic icebreaker, cheap but to

  the point.

  It helps with trade, Phoenicia's descendants inform you. It's the world's second tongue, say the refugees of Sidon and Tyre.

  A smiling, bearded Nawaf in the front of the room summarizes. "America bosses the world around in English. We need English, just to tell America to go to hell."

  The whole class laughs. When learning another language, comprehension always outstrips production. It's true, the class agrees. Americans speak nothing and own everything. The world needs to learn English, just to talk back to its owner.

  Your very existence astonishes them. "How can an American have your first name?"

  "How can you let yourself be coming from such a place?"

  The ones you like best explain the delusions you've been living under. "Black people in your country are killed like sheep here for the end of Ramadan."

  "Americans pay forty million dollars to one man for putting a ball in a ring. Instead they could buy hamburgers for forty million starving people."

  They offer these earnest indictments of Sodom for your own good. But greater forces attract them to this evil. Their interest reveals itself in dribs and drabs over your first two weeks. "This Rocky, sir? You think he fights so good? He doesn't last five minutes against my cousin with mujahideen."

  "This Terminator? He's not so great. Take away the big gun ..."

  "The Terminator is Austrian," you tell them. "He's not our fault."

  "Mr. Martin? What means this? 'I am leaving the material world, and I am immaterial girl'?"

  "We'll work on that one next term," you promise.

  Ardent children of civil war still bathed in first innocence, they seem strangely unhardened, even by the odds against survival. They might sit basking in the afternoon, out by the marina under the St. George, if that neighborhood still existed. But they stay on, by choice or compulsion, after a million of their countrymen have thought better and bailed. Each of them is too long trained by collapse to continue hoping, yet too angry to give it up. All of them are hungry to learn the true size of the world beyond this city: a world of glossy fictions, stable, rich, progressing, theirs to glimpse only through the shadow boxes of bootlegged videotape.

  You are their model, their messenger from the outside world. Your job: to chat them up for hours at a shot, training them to survive the force of their imaginations. You work to hold them to the rules of polite conversation, in a city trying to believe again in the existence of rules. It is, by any measure, the perfect job description—the ticket you've been trying to write yourself for years. A golden existence. All that's missing is someone a little brave, someone just a little kind to share it with.

  "Tell me how you got here," you assign them, early on. The topic provides a high personal interest. Good practice with the tricky past tense. And it's easy to answer without straying too far outside core vocabulary.

  "How did you got here, Mr. Martin?" Nawaf baits you.

  The whole class becomes a sea of colluding head bobs. "Yes. Yes. We all want to know."

  "Nothing to tell," you tell them. "I came here to make sure that your subjects and verbs all agree with each other."

  "What job have you done before being our teacher?" Nawaf asks.

  "What did I do before coming here to teach?"

  "Yeah.
You said it."

  "A lot of things. Most recently, I trained Asian businessmen to survive Chicago."

  The sly bastard persists. "Why did you change your jobs?"

  "Now why in the world would that interest you?"

  "It's very interesting, Mr. Martin," the very interesting Zarai chips in.

  "Well, for a lot of reasons. But we're not going to get into that."

  "It's a secret?" Nawaf taunts.

  "That's right. Yes. It's a secret."

  "Top secret?" Zarai smiles at you from beneath her head wrapping.

  You smile back at her. "Tip-top secret."

  They say that you know more about this place on the day you first touch your foot to it than you will ever know about it again. And they're right. Each day that passes leaves you more confused about this stew, let alone the recipe that produced it. You understand Shiite versus Sunni, Maronite versus Orthodox, Druze, Palestinian, Phalangist, AMAL, the radical Party of God and their fanatical cell the Holy Warriors. But the fourteen other religions and splinter factions plunge you into the same despair that your students feel when confronting irregular English verbs.

  This al-Jumhuriyah al-Lubnaniyah: even the name is a maze. The country's politics, like some unmappable Grand Bazaar out of Ali Baba, cannot be survived except by chance. Here civilization's ground rules disperse into the mists of fantasy. Standing agreements, tenuous at best, collapse back into the law of armed camps, each local militia staking out a few shelled blocks. No one is allowed to cross from zone to zone, not even the Red Crescent. Your students scrape by in a decaying landscape, one of those postapocalypse teen movies that so intrigue them.

  But for all that, the streets still seem safer than Chicago's. Tomorrow feels more affirmed here, this city's pulse more surrendered to hope and devotion.

  You learn a few words: Na'am, shukran, merhadh, khubuz. Yes, no, thank you, bathroom, bread. You begin to fantasize about meeting a woman, perhaps even a woman in head covering. About taking a crash course in the rules of her grammar.