Oh Jesus, Spiegel laughed. Would you look at that.
Brute animal persistence. Adie followed the escape, incredulous. She gathered herself in. It should have died.
Spiegel broke off cackling and stared. He took his arm from her shoulder. I'm sorry? It should have what?
Better off dead than that. You saw how it flew off? More sky, as if nothing at all had changed.
Ade, it's a bird. A bird, for Christ's sake. A second ago, you were grieving for it.
She shook her head, insistent. There were worse things to be killed by than false distances. Worse things to die of than naïveté.
19
In imagination's room, all things work out.
This is the place's guiding rule. Nothing gets in that doesn't already fit. No twist of plot, except what is slated.
In this room, nothing bleeds. Nothing rots. Nothing breaks. There is pain here, but there is no suffering. Things do grow, but never past their prime. All local flesh has learned that lizard trick of regeneration. The cheetah takes no more than half the antelope's flank. Then the sacrifice grows back again.
Grizzlies stand in the rapids, swiping at stray salmon. But they fish more for sport than out of real need. Theirs is strictly a catch and release. The fish, too, understand the game, the pure run of it, there being no strong line between loss and win. They leap free, teasing, or go belly-up, surrender a pound like a tree sheds fruit, then drift back downstream to try their luck again tomorrow.
The politics of watering holes resolves itself through negotiation. Dogs still fight for their place in the pack's pyramid, but every Omega will have his day. Ant colonies still go to glorious war, although their fronts remain static. Soldiers give their lives to the cause, and the giving completes them.
Every accident has its repair. Nests crumble in the wind, just to gratify the oriole's need to rebuild. Unfledged chicks still blow to the ground, injured. But some benevolent biped ultimately returns them to their high, woven safety.
The people in this room grow up to become what they've always dreamed of being. The human economy teems with doctors and firemen. Oil bubbles up in the back yards of tar-paper shacks. Lost children find their parents again, after many harrowing adventures. Abused orphans wind up adopted by kind uncles and aunts.
Lovers quarrel, slam down the receiver, swear off each other, remember everything, and call each other back laughing in embarrassment. Widowers receive nightly visits from their mates' ghosts. Lonely souls, locked in their own timidity, finally write each other letters, three days before it would have been too late.
All countries move steadily toward democratic free markets. Poor nations catch spark, enjoying the advantages of the late starter. Growth is everywhere export-driven, yet all lands enjoy a favorable balance of trade. Disease yields new insights into how the body works. Someone invents the solar-powered car. Someone discovers how to extract energy from tepid water.
Zealots, on the road to some mass persecution, fall down blind and rise ecumenical. Hotbeds of factionalism succumb to improvements in communication.
Music here heads through the occasional passing dissonance. But always, by cadence, it finds its way back to Do. Revolutions in style still build upon the past. Art constantly refreshes itself, and the occasional harshness, after years of study, proves to be beauty by another name. Lost cantatas now and then come to light. The stolen panel of the Just Judges turns up in a Carthusian monastery.
Age-old mysteries at last get solved in court. Criminals come across life-changing novels in prison, bold-stroked tales that show what still lies ahead of them to accomplish. Each day ends in some illustrative sunset, shattering or subtle.
But this room can't brook any depth or width. Dimension is already too degraded to sustain. This room leaves no place to sit and absorb it. No spot where any outsider might just gaze. Even the weight of a solid glance would tip it, wreck this room's precarious equilibrium.
This is the room to which dying people retire. This is the room from which infants are taken to be born.
This is the soul's balanced window box, the domain of finished poems.
This is the heaven of last imagination. The paradise of detachment. The room of no consequence in the least. Of making no difference in the whole known world.
20
Yeki bood. Yeki nabood.
That is how the world's best storytellers always start: It was so. And it was not so. One of the few Persian phrases you can remember, from out of a whole childhood of your mother's Persian phrases that you never paid any attention to. They must be in there still, an attic of lost fables that wants only unlocking.
It's like this, and it's not like this. There was a time, and there was not a time. They are right to start that way. And they are not.
Like so: you find yourself in a small room. There is a mattress here. Before you is a radiator. On that radiator, a chain. The routine: crush-ingly familiar. Two and a half meals a day, ranging from the vaguely edible to the deeply disgusting. A ten-minute fire drill each morning in the Black Hole of Calcutta, where your stunned bowels must set land speed records if you wish to preserve what trappings of humanity your captors still allow.
And not like so: you are not here. Hope refuses even these temporary lodgings. You know the day only by running estimate. You know the hour only by the vague passage from dark to darker. A cell is nothing against this train of thought.
Your mind is clearer, now that clarity can do nothing for you. Freed from the state of emergency, you have some time to turn things over. To make sense of the senseless. They give their word that you will be out soon. But you now know to measure "soon" in more realistic units. You make the necessary conversions from Central Arab Time. But even your guards picture you out of here by New Year's, at the latest. And January 1, you insist. Not March 21.
You plan to spend New Year's Eve, 1987, in the middle of Daley Plaza, underneath the Picasso monstrosity, singing "The Star-Spangled Banner" at the top of your lungs.
Taken by surprise. Taken by accident. An insignificant foreign language teacher who never took sides in his life. Half Islamic, for God's sake. You mean nothing to your government. Nothing you can be swapped for. You're of no value to your captors whatsoever. In fact, you can only cost them, to imprison and feed you. Cost them in international prestige, to harm you in any way. All they can hope is to salvage some face-saving way to set you free.
With all the time in the world to think, it dawns on you. If they grabbed you by mistake, then the person they really want must still be out there, walking around at liberty. That CIA operative they jabbered on about during your first interrogation. If they can find him, you'll walk away from this nightmare with all your limbs intact.
You spend the whole of a waking day reconsidering everyone in the City of Wells you've ever met. Your life depends on finding the spy. On turning up the name that can save you. Only at nightfall does the full revulsion hit you. There is no such man. Yet you were ready to Kapo him off. Sell out a real life to the monsters of invention.
You wake up still horrified, unwilling to go near yourself. But by noon, you creep back again. You replay the mistake, reconsider the spy. It passes the time, at least. And time is more of an enemy than any other terrorist.
Deciding who turned you in is good for a brief twenty minutes every midafternoon. You still know the whole class roster from memory. The group must have harbored some closet Shiite, passing above his class, passing for a Sunni merchant learning the language of world trade. Or maybe one of the smiling Sunni elites sold you out, covering his tuition by making a few pounds on the side. Could have been any of them. All still washed in their first innocence.