Gain

by Richard Powers

  Don, Ellen, and Tim stand around her new bed, forming a cordon with their bodies. The boy is shaken, now that the immediate danger has passed. “She was fine when we left this morning. The stupid nurse was supposed to be there at . . .”

  “Hush, sweetie,” Laura croaks. “You did everything right.” He must lean against her to hear.

  “It’s just as well,” Dr. Archer adds. “We can keep a closer eye on her, for a few days.”

  And so she comes back to this receptacle, the place she’d prayed never to enter again. Her room is a harsh coral. She shares the suite with an older woman who cannot talk and does not hear her. The two commune silently about where they are going.

  Whenever Don and the kids come, they pull the flimsy curtain around on its little runner. Privacy. It exhausts them to make out what little she can bring herself to say. Mostly they just sit quietly together, or the kids will read out loud to her their schoolwork.

  Reading is over, and she can’t hold a pen. She feels opaque, flattened by the morphine, now 50 mg over her waking hours. It should bother her. She can’t eat. She won’t, because the drug has constipated her.

  The nurses are kind. They come by at all hours to feed her pills, take her vitals, fiddle with her drip. They ask her how she is. She makes cheerful noises.

  She can still watch the news. She still has a little taste for it. Maybe even more than when she could understand it. She asks her blighted roommate if the TV bothers her. But the woman doesn’t reply.

  She watches the headline channel. She watches the local news, the state news, the national news, the international. Trawling. Something still out there, something she mustn’t miss. But the stories scatter before her, as senseless as her own. The Clare class action drags on. The lawyers for the plaintiffs aren’t happy with the settlement that the company lawyers offer. The two parties work the local news like hagglers in a street bazaar.

  Through the morphine, Laura dreams that her own daughter crashes the local news cameras. Strange fantasy, where kids from the local high school take to the streets. Then Ellen is there at bedside, thrilled, telling her it was real.

  “Then we set all our Clarity stuff on fire. Mom, everything. Hair gel, lip balms . . .”

  Laura finds herself, searches for Good girl, but pain annihilates even those syllables.

  Tim is there, too. She doesn’t see him at first. So small. She never noticed before how small he is. Why he lives on the Net. In cyberspace, no one knows you’re small.

  “I figured it out for them, Mom. Fifteen girls, and they needed me to figure it out. How to get it to catch on fire and stay lit. We had to juice it a little. Petrochemicals. But once we got it going? Man: clouds of black smoke. Perfect for the cameras.”

  She wants to ask: Are you in trouble? Will they punish you? Then she remembers: there is no trouble. No punishment bigger than living.

  “That stuff is really weird, Mom. Can’t believe I wore it every day. You should have seen what color it turned when it burned. And it doesn’t really taste like apricot, you know? Mom? Why would anybody want to have apricot lips, anyway?”

  A knot breaks in Laura’s throat. Her words gurgle up blood from her vocal cords. The tear widens, and muteness drives deeper through it. Her lips move, but Ellen can’t hear. Only air in smoothed-over drumlins.

  Ellen puts her ear on Laura’s mouth. There, up close, words are still rustling. Laura tries again. “People want everything. That’s their problem.” Speaking wears her out. She closes her eyes and dozes a little. When she wakes, everyone is gone.

  She dozes often. Constant catnaps, without her even knowing. So funny of the body, as if there’s still some point to these spot restorations. From her perch high above town, she can see Northlake Mall, the college, Clare, the Mercer Small Business Park, Millennium’s main office. Inside, in her coral chamber, all is chrome and pastel. The gear of survival. The landscape left her.

  Sometimes in the catnaps, she is a little girl. She helps her mother make her father’s birthday cake, tiny bars of Lever for the candles. She and her brother help carry canned goods down to the crawl space under the basement. Or her father explains gravely to her the ins and outs of the tax-sheltered plan that one day, very far off, will send her to college.

  All day long she lies in bed, these chapters in front of her. They are clearer now, more sharply focused than when they happened to her. As if she’s filed them away, put them up in the pantry for emergency. Now the emergency comes home, and she does not know how to use them.

  She wakes up one afternoon to see a pamphlet left for her on the rolling table arm. Putting In a Good Word for You. “Thank her,” she tries to tell her daughter. “Janine Grandy. Thanks.”

  “No,” Ellen cries. “I can’t get it. Can you speak louder?”

  The pain gets smarter. It scouts out the wall that her pills erect. It tests every brick and pushes on the loose ones. Soon it learns how to skirt the barrier all together. The hospital fights back. They open her vein to fit more painkiller in her.

  On the morphine drip, she is an angel. Untouchable; enormous; most of all, clean. Paul Loftus, the head of the Ag. Division, visits her. He sits on the edge of her bed and offers her an apology. Franklin Kennibar, the CEO, flies out from Boston. No one knew anything. They will clean everything up. They have to, of course. No company could stay in business if it caused people harm. The market wouldn’t let it.

  Clare comes to take her out for dinner and dancing. A male, in mid-life, handsome, charming, well built, well meaning. He comes with an armload of flowers, thoughtful gifts, even a poem. He comes again and again, always finding her at home. But always, the night of romantic dancing turns by evening’s end into desperate caresses, a brutal attack, date rape.

  Some days, she feels a little breeze, even through the sealed plate glass. Life is so big, so blameless, so unexpected. Existence lies past price, beyond scarcity. It breaks the law of supply and demand. All things that fail to work will vanish, and life remain. Lovely lichen will manufacture soil on the sunroofs of the World Trade.

  She can do this. It is not so hard. She feels the good that goods only hint at. At dusk, she hears the hollow bark of barnacle geese passing over her head, like the creak of a gate’s rusty hinge. Her eyes follow their shapes to infinity, their bodies bobbing like buoys in the sky. They ribbon off, streaming to a high place where nothing costs anything. One by one, each takes his turn at the difficult tip of the V.

  After twelve days, the billing and payments officer at Mercy approaches the family. Laura is reaching the end of the emergency hospitalization period. They will need to find some other solution. She can go into a nursing facility, and 50 percent of that cost will be paid. Or she can go back home, where 80 percent will be covered by hospice.

  They hold this conference on the second floor, miles below the room where Laura lies. But on that same day, she takes a sudden turn away from them, out of the theater of all decisions. Her lips still move, but without air. Her eyes move to take in her loves, but the muscles around them no longer register.

  Her body recedes just by being looked at. It shrinks as Ellen pushes on the bed to get next to her. The daughter is waving a letter, too small and faraway to see. “I got into college, Mom. I’m going.” Laura’s mouth, a rictus of puzzled medication, tightens a little at the edges. A smile, Ellen tells herself, for the rest of her life. Mother, glad for me.

  Tim sits silently at bedside, fidgeting at the floral curtain. For days, he has said nothing past yeah and no. His eyes retreat into the protective undergrowth of bangs and glasses. Now he stands and goes to her. Puts his hand on what remains of her shoulder.

  “It’s okay, Mom,” he tells her. “You don’t have to do this anymore.”

  She looks at him. Her face startled, relieved. I don’t? I really don’t? He shakes his head. No. We’ll do it for you.

  The kids slip down the hall, leaving Don alone with her for a minute. A little space, all the myth of the private that’s
left to anyone.

  “Lo,” he says. “La. I love you?”

  Who knows what she hears.

  It all starts in sun. The cardboard case, the instantly pitched packaging: a sunny upland stand of southern yellow pines. A thing that once lived for light.

  Somewhere on the coast of British Columbia, machines receive these trees. Pulper, bleacher, recovery plant, and mill synchronize a staggering ballet, juggling inventory from calcium hypochlorite to nitrogen tetroxide, substances ranging from Georgia clays to the South Pacific guano.

  Timber, scrap, and straw cook together in the maws of enormous chemical vats. Black liquors and white liquors—spent and new infusions of caustic soda and sodium sulfide—swirl the raw chips downward into the continuous digesters. Screened and washed of sodium brews, the pulp proceeds to beating. Micro-adjustable blades tease out the fibers. Into this smooth mash mix sizers and fillers and dyes. Calcium carbonate, aluminum sulfate, aluminum silicate, titanium dioxide, hydrated silica, hydrated alumina, talc, barium sulfate, calcium sulfate, zinc sulfide, zinc oxide, cationic starch, polyacrylamide resins, locust bean gum, guar gum, and asbestos combine to make any kind of paper the world wants made.

  As the creamed blend dries, subatomic van der Waals forces assert a new mat of tentative filaments. A Fourdrinier machine forms the wet stock, presses the draining sheets between felts, and carries them through a series of high-energy furnaces and dryers. Every pound of paper takes sixty pounds of heated air just to drive off the birthing fluid. The sandwich of myriad paperboard layers paste together to a thickness just under one millimeter.

  The outermost layer is manila-coated and impregnated, by thermoplastic extruder, with an invisible skin of polyethylene plastic. Molten resin flows through a heated cylinder under high pressure. A die heats the resin to a precise temperature and viscosity, squeezing it into a film of absurdly controlled thickness. Hot film slips onto the rolling stream of paper so perfectly that paper and plastic bond permanently into a weird, third thing that, within the last few years, has become another universal given.

  All this for the box, the throwaway. The product’s one-piece pup tent is also a self-contained sales-rack display. A series of machines cut, fold, and glue the cast around the finished camera. Powdered glue for sealing the carton arrives at an assembly plant in Guangzhou in whole railway cars, by the metric ton. The double crucifix of cardboard still bears the kerf of the complex jigsaw that cut this continuous contour. Parallel paper mold marks run down its inside surface, invisible except in slant light. A person could go to her grave not knowing that blank cardboard is so striated.

  The thing that Canada ships to Guangzhou for gluing is already an orchestral score. The chipboard must be perfect, to hold the vibrant stripes and bursts of look-at-me words that promise a life that will not fade prior to expiration date. The product calls itself after a youthful West Coast city. The trademark scrawls across package front in a childish rainbow of noisy graffiti. Variegated promises of well-behaved euphoria dance on a white background. The inks and resins smell musty and antiseptic, like an obstetrician’s waiting room.

  Dyes stain the front with a photographic transfer of the enclosed camera, itself ensleeved in a dye-transfer rainbow re-creating the design of the outside box. Down one side, text identifies each machine feature with an arrow. A golden star bursts above the scene, reading: “New: With Eye-Glare Elimination. Ultra-thin profile. Drop in your pocket!”

  Stamped onto the bottom, a disclaimer states:

  Liability for any product found to be defective in manufacture, packing, or shipping will be limited to replacement. As color dyes will change over time, this film bears no warranty for accuracy or fidelity, either implied or expressed. Not responsible for any damages consequent upon the use, misuse, failure to use, or inability to use this product.

  Next to these words stands a broken-toothed comb of bar codes, precise enough to be read by wands the world over. Next to that, the “Recycled” triangle and the words “Develop Before 12-99.” Ten more digits hide under a folded flap: GB72-020-001. The number means something to someone. At the bottom, in the smallest of fonts that will not smear, the manufacturer discloses its address: a town in a state where people assemble things made elsewhere.

  The high-tech paperboard encloses a vacuum-packed camera-in-a-bag. Hermetic foil pouching extends the thing’s shelf life, as if it were a slow-ripening fruit. The bag is part aluminum alloy, part plastic, part space-age oilskin. Inside, the camera itself: “Thinner than ’n inch.” On its inner cardboard wrap, the camera wears its own unlosable instructions. Explanatory icons lighten the labor of reading. All across the intricate machine, pointers identify the salient features: the electric flash, the ready light, the film counter window and ratcheted thumb wheel, the pressed lenses more exact than whole workshops of Dutch Golden Age scientists could hope to grind.

  The smooth, black plastic of the camera’s right side is impressed with a dimple the size and depth of the median human thumb: a composite grip averaged from several thousand hands by painstaking research. Another research team orchestrates the eyepiece, a third the flash. An army of chemical engineers, fresh from school, selects ingredients for the plastic casing. Perhaps management has a grasp of the general theory, a cartoon notion of what you’d need to rig up color film from scratch. But when the strained chains of infrastructure next crack, history will return to those long centuries after the Empire packed up, when a farmer’s scythe falling down a well meant permanent farewell to iron.

  Plastic happens; that is all we need to know on earth. History heads steadily for a place where things need not be grasped to be used. At a shutter click, a bite-sized battery dispatches a blast through a quartz tube filled with halogens. Excited electrons, falling back down the staircase of available energy states, flash for a second, to dissipate the boost that lifted them briefly into rarefied orbitals. This waste energy bounces off the lines of a grieving face and back down the hole of the aperture, momentarily opened. Inside, reflected light ruffles the waiting film emulsion like a child’s hand impressing a birthday cake. Years from now, metal from the flash battery will leach into runoff and gather in the fat of fish, then the bigger fish that eat them.

  The camera jacket says: “Made In China With Film From Italy Or Germany.” The film itself accretes from more places on the map than emulsion can cover. Silver halide, metal salts, dye couplers, bleach fixatives, ingredients gathered from Rus sia, Arizona, Brazil, and underwater seabeds, before being decanted in the former DDR. Camera in a pouch, the true multinational: trees from the Pacific Northwest and the southeastern coastal plain. Straw and recovered wood scrap from Canada. Synthetic adhesive from Korea. Bauxite from Australia, Jamaica, Guinea. Oil from the Gulf of Mexico or North Sea Brent Blend, turned to plastic in the Republic of China before being shipped to its mortal enemies on the Mainland for molding. Cinnabar from Spain. Nickel and titanium from South Africa. Flash elements stamped in Malaysia, electronics in Singapore. Design and color transfers drawn up in New York. Assembled and shipped from that address in California by a merchant fleet beyond description, completing the most heavily choreographed conference in existence.

  On the label, the manufacturer warns: “To avoid possible shock, do not open or disassemble.” And still they will be sued, by someone, somewhere. These words hide a feat of master engineering under the hood too complex for any user to follow. What makes the sale is transparency. Set to go, right out of the package, and ready to disappear when used. No anything required.

  The instant camera lies forgotten in a drawer by the side of a hospital bed. Its pictures, too, began in sun: day’s finger painting, where every product starts. A girl sowing a garden. The Million Dollar Movers Club, dropping by with chocolate and flowers. A woman blowing out the candles on a cake, the IV just visible beneath the sleeve of her robe.

  A nurse’s aide throws it out, prior to the next occupant. For the entire engineering magnificence was designed to be pitched. Labor
, materials, assembly, shipping, sales markups and overheads, insurance, international tariffs—the whole prodigious creation costs less than ten dollars. The world sells to us at a loss, until we learn to afford it.

  Such a wonder has to be cheap enough to jettison. You cannot have a single-use camera except at a repeatable price. Buy it; shoot it; toss it. As mundane as any breakthrough that seemed our whole salvation once. A disposable miracle, no less than the least of us.

  From up in his glass-skinned executive aerie, Franklin Kennibar, Sr., gazes down twenty-five stories upon Fort Point Channel and the replica of the Tea Party ship, and contemplates a world without Clare. He locates the microscopic India Wharf, where Jephthah’s Rough Bed put in with its seed cargo of stoneware plates. From the other side of the sumptuous suite, he can just pick out the public dock where the pauper Irishman landed, the dock where the Irishman’s wife died.

  That minute of his wandering nostalgia costs the firm twenty-seven dollars. Nor can he really afford the time himself. For this afternoon he will be interviewed by Public Television for its survey of American business. And two days from now, at the monthly meeting of the board, he will set forward a repurchase and reorganization plan that will put the entire company into play.

  We speak of bitter, he thinks. We speak of sweet. We speak of bounce, we speak of body. Of hold and shine and nonstick and pine scent and quick-acting. In reality, there is no bitter, no sweet, no bounce or body. There is nothing but a series of chemicals, each distinctly shaped, stretching on forever into the Void.

  None of this is his choice. Neither the interview, nor the board meeting, nor the plan that will rock the future of these two centuries of business. It has always amused him, drawing the salary he does, how little say a CEO has about anything. The corporation’s point man, the passive agent of collective bidding.

  We speak of profit, we speak of loss. We speak of cost, we speak of revenue. Of debits and credits and downsizing and expansion and layoff and stock split and reorganization. In reality, there is nothing but a series of little Clares, each with its own purpose, spreading down the fiscal quarters without end.