Gain

by Richard Powers

  Ellen greets her at home, one part contrite and two stubborn.

  “Honey. You picked on a girl because she’s poor?”

  “Camille Wexner is hardly poor, Mom. Her father’s some project manager with Clare. Probably makes twice what—”

  “You picked on her for her clothes?”

  “Oh my God. Mom. The girl is, like, constantly in my face. She’s a cretin.”

  Cretin? So many words have gone by Laura in her life. She wonders how she has learned any one of them.

  She makes an early New Year’s resolution. Look things up. She starts that night. The nausea sets in. She gets acquainted with her toilet bowl, up close. She learns the smell of the blue crystals she uses to erase the smell of her insides.

  She cannot eat. Sleeping is ludicrous. Work is out of the question. She wonders how she has ever done it, even when healthy. How she ever thought she could keep at it, through what’s to come.

  But she can look up things. Some fraction of those petty bafflements that have victimized her all these years. She can search for them on the computer, that reference CD she got for Tim, the one he refuses to touch.

  Taxol: not found. Cisplatin: not found. Cretin: A person suffering from congenital myxedema. An idiot. From the French word for Christian. Meant “poor soul” once, in another world.

  BREATHING EASY

  This year, Melissa blew out all her candles. In one breath. By herself. Last year, just humming along while the other kids sang Happy Birthday left her gasping for air. Until Respulin appeared among the rest of her life's presents, each new candle taxed her lungs to the breaking point. She could not run, sing, shout, or even jump a rope. She lived in constant fear. A spring day felt like being buried alive.

  Melissa turned nine today. Maybe she still can't spell oral leukotriene D4 receptor antagonist. But she does know how to spell Happiness.

  The Biological Materials Group

  CLARE MATERIAL SOLUTIONS

  The Red Man never worried about his skin. For that matter, the Red Man had very few modern anxieties. He lived in a state of noble simplicity and rapport with the world about him. His native insight penetrated into Nature’s deepest intricacies, giving him true knowledge, however unscientific.

  The Indian lived in harmony with the measureless tangles of life. Men of industry, crowded into their cities, celebrated the depths of his natural communion. Guided by Nature’s light, the Indian walked noiselessly upon the ground and, ear to that same earth, listened across unthinkable distances. He could pull fish from the streams with his hands. He could sense a bear before its appearance. He could stalk and snare the most skittish deer.

  Whites thrust into this wildness had survived as well. More than survived: they had subdued the earth to the extent of their reaches, as their Book instructed them. But white cultivation simplified much that otherwise eluded their subtlest study. In pruning back the forests of this immeasurable and wild place, white husbandry had lost some ancient insight, an older lore.

  All this Benjamin discussed with his brother Samuel. They quoted to each other the sage of Concord’s advice to the Young American. This land, too, was as old as the Flood. “Here stars, here woods, here hills, here animals.” But here, too, were vast tendencies concurring of a new order.

  Natural scientists, God’s spies, had changed the rules of life. The hand of industry was at last succeeding in turning stones into bread. In every quarter, labor and plan now outpaced easy, languorous culling. The simple parasitic relation of savvy native to Nature had been routed, force-marched into the Territories. The Red Man was no more.

  For all that the Indian knew, for as little as he worried, he had never once contemplated the collapse of his world in the face of his fellow humans, delivered from Nature’s chains. Never in a thousand years could he have comprehended the amalgamated age, the age that Emerson extolled:

  The locomotive and the steamboat, like enormous shuttles, shoot every day across the thousand various threads of national descent and employment, and bind them fast in one web, an hourly assimilation goes forward, and there is no danger that local peculiarities and hostilities should be preserved.

  Yet the White Man, in this all-promising age, now mourned the passing of the Indian’s Arcadia. The fiercest way forward produced the hardest look back. The cheaper the future, the dearer the past. One had only to consider the flurry of communal experiments within the Clares’ own Commonwealth. A rash of utopias bore witness not to final deliverance but to widespread disenchantment, stubborn refusal of man’s manufactured sorcery.

  The expansion of human affairs offered abundance on a scale never before imaginable. And yet, Benjamin submitted to Samuel, not everyone was ready for the cost of abundance. Merely imagining all this bounty did some hidden injury to the children of promise.

  Where the past commanded a firmer price than the future, the future looked backward for its newest markets. Contrition made for a booming business. The nation that footed the $30 million bill for Jesup and Taylor’s extermination of the Sac and Fox and Seminole now bought Catlin’s engravings at limited-edition prices.

  Samuel ran Ben’s idea past the more market-savvy Resolve. In the whiff of temporal homesickness hidden in Utilis clarea, even Resolve could smell opportunity. The scent called him back across time’s sea-lanes to the old family adage: profit equaled uncertainty times distance. The farther one hauled a thing, the more one could make from it. Out of the depths of the past, Clare might haul a new gravy run. The Red Man never worried about his skin. Why should we?

  In his mind, Resolve tested out the full beauty hidden in Ben’s offer. The age of steam produced certain unpre ce dented shocks to the skin unknown to earlier ways and races. Live as the natives once did,and those shocks might disappear. Unnatural skin needed a natural cure, a cure whose formulas machine progress had somehow mislaid.

  Resolve Clare found the idea truly majestic: they could solve the needs of progress by selling the very condition that the need remedied. Resolve pondered this twist while turning over his younger brother’s tuberous gift. The underpinning philosophy seemed sound. But finally, philosophy was nothing but the hound of business. Soon enough, someone would need to take the cur out for a brisk run.

  Samuel and Resolve studied Benjamin’s Utilis notebook. The two pored over the pages of careful observations describing the plant’s peculiarities. Together, all three brothers reproduced the series of chopping, burning, leaching, boiling, filtering, and drying that released from the plant a pungent powder midway between viridian and chartreuse. This form, unknown to its native island cultivators, proved, in Benjamin’s estimation, the herb’s most manageable concentrate.

  The extract tasted of burnt pine nut—pleasant on the tongue, with a distant after-hint of bitterness. Benjamin, having ingested minute quantities for years, reported some melioration of both gastritis and gout. The powder spumed when moist, like bicarbonate upon contact with acid. Plain water, however, did not easily wet it. The paste form was most definitely styptic. Applied powder preserved the freshness of butchered meat by as much as a day. A coating of dried froth cured a lesion on the back of Resolve’s hand in a little over half a week.

  Paste, powder, or recalcitrant solution, Utilis wore the hue of strong medicine. It looked restorative. It felt restorative. It smelled like the liniment that the angels applied in God’s own sickroom.

  The substance could have packed a delayed punch more poisonous than henbane. But no bureau, no business police existed to prevent the Clares from discovering that toxicity in vivo. They set to work retooling their soap works to make a product that would brook no substitutes. Once again, they scrapped perfectly good machinery while it was still profitable, to build new equipment on no more than hope.

  Ennis tried several abortive methods to get the substance to adhere to a finished product. The Utilis admixture remained insoluble during the boiling process, separating out with the spent lye. When Ennis at last got the extract to survive until s
trong change, the stuff failed to survive pitching and settling, coming out with the nigre. Cut directly into the finished neat, it clotted most unpleasantly.

  The milling process for the fancy Clare toilet soap supplied the answer. Ennis built a planing table where workmen whittled white soap into thin shavings. These shavings went into a rank of casks made from rum puncheons with their heads removed. Ennis fitted out these casks with galvanized iron pans luted to steampipes: the perfect second-cooking apparatus.

  Here the soap was carefully remelted and recondensed. Now the precise amounts of additive could be spooned in by a giant spatula, crutched continuously, and incorporated into a homogenous mixture.

  Cooled, cut, and trimmed into rounded oblongs, the cakes went into a drying room until cold, firm, and smooth to the touch. Last came the crucial step: one by one, feeders fed the raw oblongs into an ingenious, foot-powered mechanical stamper. All day long, pressers slammed down the pedals, snapping back the lever that sprang the soap free of its imprint. And all day long, from out of the jaws of the mold, fell glistening, aromatic cakes, each one perfectly incised with the profile of a noble Brave.

  She weathers the worst stretch of retching. Her energy comes back. She stops vomiting when there is no poison left to vomit. The Compazine begins to kick in, about the time the nausea would have gone away on its own. By the week before she has to go in again, Laura almost remembers how she felt before she went in the first time.

  The calendar shrinks to its barest rituals. She forces herself through the reflex routines, the searches and seizures so usual that she’s doing them already before she wakes. She checks the day’s tasks off mentally as she hits the forest-green shag. She felt-pens her stations to the washable whiteboard Super-Glued to the refrigerator. Nothing must change.

  Her life. Her life, Laura keeps telling herself. But the thing feels like nothing she’s ever visited. She’s back in some alien England, after years shipwrecked on a coral shoal that shows up on no one’s map.

  She’s perched on her own shoulder, watching her puppet body jerk through the checkpoints at her hours’ borders, squaring off against her pocket diary’s To Do list.

  Game, Goodies, Saturday’s entry taunts her. She stares at the words, clueless in the face of the cryptically familiar. Something obvious. It must be some weekly rendezvous, something she does unconsciously, by force of habit.

  She does not remember until Don calls her. “You need a lift?” That tone in his voice: Do not operate heavy machinery under the influence of Cancer.

  “You . . . uh . . . when . . . ?” she bluffs.

  “Laura. Tim’s indoor soccer team. The one I’ve been coaching for the last four Saturdays running?”

  Impossible. Impossible that it’s been four weeks. Impossible that she’s forgotten.

  Blame it on the chemo. One of her chemicals, messing with her memory. She’s studied the list of side effects. From ringing in the ears to renal failure. Neurotoxin: surely that can’t be good. And then there’s all the meds she’s taking to counter the original meds’ side effects.

  And she’s only just started. Only ingested the first little bit. True, she’s had other things on her mind than indoor soccer. But she’s never forgotten anything the kids do. Laura Bodey: the person who remembers for everyone.

  This is her week to bring the goodies for Tim’s team, and she forgot. Forgot to make anything. Forgot the team. She makes herself swing out to the Price Warehouse. Volume-packaged everything. Blackberry pie six-packs. Footlockers full of ravioli. She gets the pre-catered crudité platter with the multiple dip wells in the middle to placate the soccer parents. And for the boy players, she grabs the 144-count Candied Fruit Wedge Collection.

  She gets to the gym just after things have started. As soon as she unpacks the goods, she sees the extent of her mistake. She’s broken the unwritten rule. Bought, rather than whipped up from scratch. Worse: everyone knows why.

  Tori Gwain, mother of the relentless Gwain twins, consoles her. She dips a celery stick in a well, miming wide enjoyment. “Mm, mm. Good, Laura.” The exact sound as that old soup commercial.

  “Yeah, real good,” two or three others echo. “Real tasty.”

  They know exactly where she bought the stuff and how much she paid for it. They know it was a last-minute panic correction. They’re all careful not to berate her or make her feel bad in any way. She sits in the stands, under her knockoff Hermès scarf, surrounded by moms in jogging suits who appraise her headgear and say nothing.

  She fakes eating a carrot, but gags on the smell. The key is to not let anyone see. She settles in to watch her Timmy. For most of the first half, he chuffs downfield, alternately running and sulking. He stops often, first to tuck in his T-shirt, then to untuck it. He seems to be avoiding the ball. Staying out of trouble, away from the action. The ball sputters to him by accident. He passes it off quickly.

  And he so loved sports, once. Before he had to play them. Used to draw up those fantasy teams. The Rocky Mountain Marmosets. The Louisville Ring-tailed Lemurs. Whole leagues, not a Spartan, Trojan, Warrior, or Bomber to be seen. So gentle, for a boy. The bug-torturing didn’t start until later. After they started pushing him around at school. After she and Don hit the skids.

  He used to litter the house with drawings. Stacks of them, everywhere. He gave them away as presents—to her, to strangers, to the mailman. Maps of the ballparks, drawings of famous players, mascot portraits. Great stop-action moments from team history. Detailed uniforms. The Ring-tails: alternating white and black stacked bands, like a prison outfit gone jaunty.

  And those continual streams, half play-by-play, half silly kid’s stand-up comedy. “The Lemurs are really up a tree now. Time to show those opposable thumbs. Time to step up to the plate and defend the name of Primate.” Calling whole imaginary games, down to the last strike. But only if he thought no one could hear him. She’d have to slink off to the basement and stand with her ear to the laundry chute, eavesdropping shamelessly on the flesh of her flesh.

  The Lemurs are all gone. He’s left them to that universal trash bin of extinct species. Consigned to the Dead-Ball Era, that place where Don consigned the marriage, with his good-sport shrug, on the day their franchise quit town.

  Her Tim plays team sports now because his father makes him. Today’s match pits Caldwell Glass versus the Park Mall Medicine Tent. Every team has its own patron. Next Millennium supports one,too. Can’t cost much. A dozen jerseys, and a pizza party at the end of the season. Sponsor a future client: Lacewood’s next generation. Foster fond memories. Be a team player. Each boy a tax write-off for some local retailer. Keeps big government out of amateur sport. Cheap at the price. Especially if the team’s a winner.

  Caldwell Glass is not a winner. Not today. Not since Don and Tim have joined. Caldwell Glass has about as much chance of winning any of its games as Laura has of winning the Publishers Clearing House. Mr. Caldwell’s probably thinking about suing to retrieve his investment.

  It’s Don. He wants them to win so bad. The boys can smell the need to win oozing out of the man’s pores. It spooks them. They’re hearing footsteps for next week’s game even before this week’s is over. Don already berating them, lashing them with sarcasm two practices and an exhibition game into the season.

  She almost pities the man. On the one hand, he’s got all the other dads riding him to drive the team harder. On the other, he has the team totally freaked, each boy pointing fingers at every other. Even worse than the usual Little League lesson in community spirit.

  It wouldn’t be so awful, except for poor Tim getting caught in the middle of it. Forever bearing the brunt. All sides of indoor soccer target him: everybody’s enemy. The boys all hate him because he’s the coach’s son. And the father hates him for refusing to be Dad’s little henchman.

  Just watching him run around on the court for an hour is an exercise in torture. Just appearing in public, just flexing in front of the other boys is a humiliation Tim despairs of outl
iving.

  And he did so love running around, once. Kicking that yellow plastic ball in the backyard with Goldie chasing at his heels. Tossing the pigskin with Don, the horsehide, whatever. She’d have to shag both of them out of the house before they broke the last intact lamp. She thought they’d never grow up, either of them. Boys.

  Now both father and son detest the whole idea of sport. The hatred of a betrayed lover, obvious in every muscle flinch. But both go dutifully through the motions rather than shame each other in public. Don’s hoping to win by some fluke. Win the game, win over his boy, win the team’s love. Take them all out for celebratory root beer floats. Tim’s only desire in this world is to go home, get on the computer, and spend the next two days blasting the hell out of anything that moves.

  “Hey, Bodey,” Coach yells from the sidelines. Careful not to show any favoritism. Can’t call everyone by their last names except his own son. “Bodey! You deaf? Get the lead out. You call that running?” The other parents chime in. Don’s tongue-lash of his own boy winds them all up, like a reprimand by the boss to pick up production.

  Kay Huber calls to her son. “Kyle: come eat the rest of this Power-Bar. I don’t want you on that court on an empty stomach.” Stunted Kyle wavers. He wants to comply, but can’t quit in mid-drive. He hesitates toward the stands, a stutter step. Then he breaks downfield, trying to pretend he doesn’t hear her.

  Kay starts to shriek. “Kyle. Kyle!” Over the top, even by soccer-mom standards. The cut-short tone of medical emergency. At that decibel, not even Don countermands her. The poor little boy covers his crotch and comes to a full stop. He trots over, head bowed, a cow submitting to the stockyards.

  “I don’t want you running around out there depleted,” Kay scolds, betrayed. She makes him swill the banana-flavored bar down with Spor-teen, the choice of more multimillion-dollar contracts than any other leading teen sport electrolyte replenisher. Sends him back out, where his shorthanded team berates him for the goal scored in his absence.