Three Farmers on Their Way to a Dance

by Richard Powers

  —A pleasant evening, sir.

  The woman spoke in impeccable French, nodded once, and keeping to her pace, disappeared into another grove. Stimulated by this shock, Adolphe managed to fight off the remainder of the prolonged sentence. When the punishment ended, he resumed his duties in the service.

  Remarkably, the son of Adolphe and Alicia suffered few long-term scars from his eternity in the empty field. When the war ended, he took part in the Economic Miracle, becoming a prosperous businessman. His only two residual agonies were a fetish for collecting Limoges porcelain figures in petticoats and an unrestrainable need to chase after redheads in crowds.

  For his part in the forbidden operation, Peter Hubertus, on regaining consciousness, was stripped of his administrative duties with the camp and shipped by boxcar to a civilian jail for sentencing. The sutures behind his ear were left to fester and rot out as they would. Peter helped them out with a fingernail.

  He sat in solitary for an incalculable amount of time, fed irregularly, overlooked by the authorities. He no longer despaired of being absent at, unable to observe the cataclysm of the times. He developed a pastime to sustain him in his confinement, a game increasingly seductive with repeated playing. By enforced concentration, he devised an entire town, peopling and arranging it from his raw imagination.

  Twelve hours in the cell collapsed into one as he invented, laid out, and named roads, farms, businesses, family trees, intrigues, trysts, scandals, births, deaths, political maneuverings, dances, careers, estates, accidents, traditions, auctions, awards, wars—in short, all the records and events that made up a small society. In prison, he created lives and stories based on the figures and countryside in his mother’s triple photograph. He set this miniature world in the first decade of the century, peopling it with all he knew of the First War and its generation. He came to revere and be thankful for the isolation thrust on him. He would never have come to know his father and imagined uncles so intimately otherwise.

  When tired of building up his town’s history, he took to predicting its future. He laughed to see how different were the real events of his town from how they came to be recorded in the documents and annals of subsequent generations of villagers. In this way, he passed a year and a half awaiting trial.

  Following the Allied victories in the Ardennes, a flurry of desperate German bureaucratic activity turned up the forgotten prisoner, whose crime had gone unrecorded. The authorities summarily routed him to a death camp, where he was duly stenciled and prepared for execution. Thirty hours after his arrival, Hitler shot himself in his Berlin bunker and the press declared victory in Europe.

  What Peter Hubertus saw in those thirty hours confirmed that everything that mankind can do, it will. Whatever horrors the body makes possible will, given sufficient time, come about. Peter concluded that to survive, a body had to concentrate on the bearable permutations and forget the others. He did not consider this an evasion, but a sort of journalistic, practical categorical imperative. Soon, the same belief began cropping up among his uncles and other prominent figures that inhabited his imagined town.

  Returning to Holland, he received a half-day sentence for collaboration with the Nazis. The morning following this act of clemency, he read in the papers about the first explosion of a nuclear device on a civilian city. In trying to conceive of the detonation, he imagined it going off above the town he knew and cared for more than any other—the one he had invented in prison. He could not grasp it, it did not seem historically continuous, this device. It could not be fit into context. Soon, he forgot its existence. He took to wearing long-sleeved shirts to hide his serial number. He wrote again for the paper: the gardening column.

  His mother, Wies, had died during his incarceration, fusillé par les Allemands. She left him absolutely nothing in all the world but a greasy piece of paper with penciled surname, a letter from a celebrity, and the photograph that showed three fellows who had become more familiar to him than life, with explicit instructions to spare all three.

  His plump daughter married postwar Dutch money, and in the 1960s, managed to secure a green card for entry to the United States. The couple brought along the prematurely old fellow. They carted him up to the Catskills for ski vacations. There the waiters asked if he wanted the Beef au Jus or the Duck à l’Orange, but getting no answer, and perhaps noticing the serial number on his arm, removed themselves deferentially.

  His daughter and her husband had no children, and so the line ran out in the New World. Peter Hubertus did not like this end to the story, so in the Catskill evenings he devised another. He had brought his mother, wife, and young daughter to America just after the war—or better, just before. They escaped in time. They stood before the immigration officer at an Ellis Island of an earlier day, one he had read about in texts. The officer demanded his name. Hesitant, he spilled out:

  —Peter Hubertus Kinder Schreck Langerson van Maastricht.

  The immigration officer pressed his temples and responded curtly:

  —Peter Mays.

  AS FOR THE first Peter, the father in the photograph, he decided to stay in Paris illegally. There were other Great Personalities to interview. He would find the reality modulators, have them hide him from the authorities in their catacombs. They seemed the types to enjoy sheltering an illegal alien.

  He would approach them about an idea he’d had: an artwork, a documentary time capsule to be buried and opened somewhere toward the century’s end. Besides the usual records—photos, legal papers, schedules—would be a miraculously preserved, unaged human being.

  He would have to work out the details for the live burial. For the time being, he was once more excited about his own immediate future. He was beginning to feel, though less articulately, how the dead poet Rupert Brooke had felt in 1914, just two months after the May Day photo: “Well, if Armageddon’s on, I suppose one should be there.”

  Chapter Twenty-Four

  And We Have Come into Our Heritage

  The world image contains no observable magnitudes at all; all that it contains is symbols. . . .

  —Max Planck, The Philosophy of Physics

  Before Mr. Nichols called him into the inner office, Mays got an idea for what to do with the legacy money. He hadn’t given the matter much thought until arriving in Detroit on the Early Riser. When Alison asked him outright over the phone about his plans for the cash, he’d had no good answer. The quarter million was still an abstraction to him, the unlikely payoff for pursuing red hair seen from a window. It remained an emblem only. That he could spend it had not yet occurred to him. He lacked the connective thread that led him to the sum and could not realize that he was, by second-generation immigrants’ standards, rich.

  But standing in the offices of the Ford Motor Company, he at last comprehended the sum. Although not excessive by 1984 scales—it would not, for instance, buy him a house on Big Sur—the sum drew more interest per annum than Mays could comfortably spend. He could buy his mother those new rain gutters, send Alison through tech school, buy some Trans-Air to placate Bullock, and still not touch the principal. He had a real problem on his hands.

  Banking it, spending it, or giving it away seemed equally arbitrary and deplorable. Mays felt—trained by his father’s rise from penniless orphan to minor celebrity and his subsequent fall to an indesignate rung between the two—that what mattered was neither credits nor debits, production nor consumption, but a healthy fit between the two. Efficiency counted for more than expansion, and the idea of running at a surplus annoyed and obligated him.

  The question that concerned him as he browsed through the Ford archives while waiting for Nichols was what this fellow Henry did with his excess capital. Ford’s case was on a somewhat different scale than his, but Peter nevertheless found a certain similarity of concerns as he buzzed the photo museum in the foyer outside Nichols’s office. For the first time, Mays considered philanthropy on a larger plane than being kind to his cellmates at Micro.

  Clever
ly programmed into the human body, he reasoned, was the capacity to feel pain. After a debate with a hot plate as a small child, Mays gained a deep respect for the survival value inherent in the trick of physical trauma. Mays could think of no cleverer teaching device or mechanism for instrumentation and process control except that equally ingenious flip side, pleasure. He envied nature in coming up, by mere trial and error, with systems that he himself could never have come up with in a billion years.

  Grudgingly, he conceded that having developed cognition, an organism could find similar survival value in anxiety. The capability to suffer, too, had to be selected for evolutionarily. The trouble, in Mays’s unschooled view, was that evolution was entirely and eternally incapable of selecting between valuable and excessive ability to suffer, and could not select for mechanisms that felt the one and ignored the other. Between survival pain and the level where pain shut off at last lay a good deal of room for surplus anguish.

  Now if people suffered an epidemic or an earthquake, that upset Mays, but such pain seemed an unfortunate by-product of a necessary, selected-for capacity. Grief, too, served its purpose. But avoidable or inflicted suffering was another matter; sheer surplus anguish offended Mays’s sense of efficiency. Surplus production of pain—unusable and indistinguishable by natural selection—had to find a match in some surplus consumption, a surplus buying power somewhere.

  That, thought Mays, as he killed time over the photographic history of Ford in the foyer, was where philanthropy comes in. Meeting up with his pile that afternoon left him with two options: he could invest the surplus loot, nurture the sum, watch it grow—increasingly indebting society out of all proportion to his needs or worth—or he could blow the sum on buying up some surplus pain.

  This was what Ford had tried to do. Standing in front of an image of Ford and his buddy Edison on the dock among the Oscar II festivities, Mays read of how Henry had funded, out of his own pocket, the first-ever missile for peace. War, extracting payment for services denied, produced unusable suffering well beyond those debts. Ford, in a private parity program, tried to buy up that surplus and stabilize the market.

  The photo caption implied, however, that far from reducing the surplus, Ford’s privately funded floating nation actually increased the anguish, sadistically raising and then crushing the hopes of both combatants and observers. If the mighty Ford, one of the wealthiest men of his day, could not buy off any surplus pain, what hopes could Mays pin on a pile that couldn’t even buy him a beach house? He knew the answer to that one.

  Only one stockpile in all industry was capable of consuming enough pain to make a dent in the supply. That capital was, for whatever the word meant, humanity. Mays could define the word only circularly: humanity was a sop for surplus pain. And the answer to what the sop could or could not achieve, the best way to exercise it lay hidden, he now realized, in the remembered and documented past.

  A redhead in antique clothes limps upstream in a dispersing parade, one commemorating the survivors of an old bloodbath, ancient sacrifice. That was his search: to find, in the concurrent past, the lost context of surplus anguish and attempted action that informed the shapeless quantity called humanity. And his search had proved that the past could be recovered only by a deliberate reading-in on his part.

  For every bit of history he had tracked down, he had also been empowered, condemned to add to. To observe was already to change. The power to consume excess pain that Mays called, for want of a better term, humanity could do what evolution could not: go to the past, interpret, and select for qualities that would make people less susceptible to the unnecessary.

  Memory, thought Mays, was a reminder to change something in the future. And photos—the one of his great-great uncles on a muddy road; the ones he browsed through now; even the window-framed long shot of Kimberly Greene—were more or less recognized memories. Seeing the photo of the Peace Ship, he remembered, and that memory initiated his plans for philanthropy. It would be modest and of almost no consequence. But small was best, when all was figured. Nothing smaller than affection.

  He had an idea: the No Overheads Restaurant. He could subsidize subscribers from all over the state to mark their houses with a distinctive sign. Other subscribers, passing by while traveling, could then stop in and share a meal at cost. Mays seriously doubted such a scheme’s feasibility. Even if the tempo of contemporary life permitted the reintroduction of the open inn, it would never fly with the IRS. Still, he felt attracted to the idea, saw it as a move in the right direction.

  Here his thoughts on the matter, straying dangerously close to philosophy, began to break the emotional deadlock of his recent months, welling up as immanent feeling in his chest. The more he looked at the photo of the industrialist on the dock in front of his ludicrous Peace Ship, and the more he thought of those lost farmers walking along the muddy road toward disaster producing a descendant as ludicrous as he, the more his chest and throat informed him of how much more ludicrous, desirable, and necessary hope was than the press made out.

  The voice of Mr. Nichols called him back to the things of this world. Turning, Mays heard the man next to him, sounding several blocks off, welcoming him to his appointment. He added something Mays did not catch about things never turning out as planned. So much depends on an initial misunderstanding.

  Mr. Nichols led him into an office mocked up as a captain’s quarters. A framed degree from Annapolis diagnosed the dementia. Round windows, bulkheads, stuffed seagulls, navigational maps, cork nets, and obligatory sloops in bottles conveyed the general ambience. Nichols ushered Mays to a desk chair. Only through a mighty effort of will did Peter resist the temptation to shiver his timbers.

  Nichols spoke so appealingly and cordially that Mays at once put up his guard. The PR man held up the letter from Ford to Theo Langerson gingerly, reverently, treating it as a cult object, grinning in disbelief.

  —We’ve checked the letter over thoroughly, and it’s on all accounts the genuine article. This is an authentic early correspondence signed by the first Mr. Ford. Stick close to it; it’s valuable.

  What was a hundred bucks against a quarter million? Mays felt seasick; he wanted to tell this guy to stop flashing his bridgework and batten down the hatches before the cabin pitched over entirely. Mays realized that the two of them were now reenacting the age-old ritual of hack versus flack, PR man versus trade-press journalist, two out of three falls. The flack began round two with a weak side gambit.

  —Of course, your family’s changes of names, the difficulty of getting solid documentary records from Immigration, and your virtually untraceable great-grandfather does make your claim of descent tough to verify.

  Mays, ambushed, felt his blood rising to the fight. He had not expected this; Nichols had been sent out to skirmish with the claimant, bar him on a technicality. Nichols, and the Ford brass behind him, belonged to that perennial class Bullock liked to call “the big boys.” Lenny’s other aphorism, “The big boys play hardball for keeps,” so impenetrable to Mays in the past, took on a material freshness and clarity as Mays stared at the wool, three-piece perfection of Mr. Nichols.

  —Compared to some of the digs our research department has to make, this one is recent history. But a curious thing about research: the further back in the past an issue recedes, the clearer it becomes. Everybody agrees about the Greeks. But get five experts together to analyze yesterday’s speech by the President, you’ll have a fistfight.

  The more pleasant the guy became, the more Mays ached to do a little plastic surgery. Peter had arrived in Detroit indifferent to the cash, thinking the legacy an unsatisfactory resolution to the mystery still buried in the past, in the perimeter of the Great War. Now the mere thought of this Brooks Brothers baboon rendered Mays, whose second-grade teacher once sent a note to his mother suggesting that there might be a somatic reason for his sluggishness, seething for litigation. He’d calculate the interest on the five hundred dollars to four places and sue to the fraction.

&
nbsp; —Mr. Nichols, I don’t know why I rate this long lead-in. The only reason I can figure for the executive velvet glove is that you are preparing to hop down the nearest loophole.

  The flack’s face twisted to keep its grin.

  —I beg your pardon. I thought you might be interested in some of the details of this case.

  —I’ve done without details for some time. Now I’m more interested in your paying up.

  —It’s a little more interesting than that.

  As it always is. Simplification was the age’s mortal sin. The situation with Nichols reminded him nostalgically of a ghoulish scenario back in the days of his beat. He was interviewing a vice-president of a leading New England computer firm while another vice-president in the adjoining office was being fired. The firm, conscious of every amenity, had hired a professional extricator to “facilitate the transition.” The executive came to work to find a man sitting in his office speaking soothingly about his demise, using every psychological trick in the grab bag to calm him. The pro would say, “It’s my job to help you do this as smoothly as possible.” “Don’t baby me; I know how to behave.” “You don’t think so at the moment, but you can jeopardize your future job search by inappropriate behavior now.” Mays’s interviewee tried to carry on the talk as if nothing was happening. Mays left the office with a new appreciation of just how rational, inarguable, and inexorable social cooperation had become.

  Now he sat face to face across the walnut from a spokesman of that corporate principle, and all he could do was think of names to call him. He hadn’t expected Ford to weasel out, yet he was not surprised. Bullock had done backflips to get Mays to put eight thousand dollars in Trans-Air paper. Ford, with thirty times the outlay at stake, would do thirty times the acrobatics. And Nichols was the preliminary screen.