Free RICHARD POWERS by Unknown Page B

screen that revolved within themselves, cosmic elaborations of light, visual excursions deep and dimensionless, color-chord progressions that admitted no beginning or end. But within two months, the miracles naturalized, and Adie habituated to them as she once had to her first set of colored pencils.
    Spiegel taught her how to assemble a few shoots into massed, cir-cumnavigable corsages. A single plant, by itself, was still just an image. But two plants next to each other in space, linked by data's rhizome, became the semblance of a live-in bower. From her workstation screen, Adie's hand-painted bouquets went out to an object script packager for transplanting to the virtual garden beds. All she lacked was dirt under her fingernails.
    Vulgamott came by just to fuss, New Yorker to New Yorker. Make sure you re leaving enough space between those plants. It's not the foliage that makes this painting so brilliant. It's all the space he somehow manages to cram in between.
    Dont worry, Michael. Гт good with air. Air is easy. There ' ll be plenty of air in the finished weed patch.
    Once, she could have scrutinized the original Dream, whenever she wished. That canvas hung in her own personal attic, at MoMA, one flight up from the cafeteria where she had bussed tables and peddled coffee. Once she had lived almost close enough to hear the spillover from that flute player's tune. Now she had to scour around a little toy town of a port city for the best reproductions of the image she could lay her hands on, testing the defects of each against the print that still hung in her mind's clearing.
    Most nights between ten-thirty and quarter to eleven, Karl Ebesen checked in to say good night. Or so Adie assumed, for on these visits, the senior visual designer mostly said nothing at all. He'd show up in a streaked trench coat, a prop out of some Mitchum film noir, his ratty portfolio of the day's digitizing under one arm. He'd heave himself into the corner across from Adie's workstation, capitulating to the gravity he'd fended off for five decades, wheezing through his mouth and scowling.
    She'd ask him about the architectural fly-through that he and Vulgamott were assembling. Ebesen would answer snidely or just wave her off. Over the course of several evenings, Adie settled into returning the man's morose silences with the mirror of her own. The idiom had for Adie a comforting familiarity. The silent conversation of her childhood. The absence she was raised in.
    Ebesen would sit mute for anywhere from five minutes to an hour, then shuffle off like one of those benign street people down by the ferry docks who accept all offered change without once asking for any. She came to think of Ebesen as her guardian bagman. Any sign of human drama caused him to slink off to whatever Presbyterian soup kitchen had coughed him up. When Karl was around, she could talk out loud without worrying about anyone answering. Drawing into a digital graphics tablet seemed less displacing, in the shadow of this odder interface.
    Then one night, the derelict talked back. She was chattering, just making noise while her hand moved around the bits on her electronic palette, a little verbal dribbling, spinning through sentences the way some people spin through radio stations on the car dial, with no real intention of landing anywhere.
    All these creatures, she said. All these animal eyes. What are they all looking at? An elephant, a snake, two birds, two lions, two monkeys ...
    How many monkeys? Ebesen sneered. A barking seal after the emergency tracheotomy.
    Adie whipped around from her workstation. She stared at the man in the corner, the one she'd stopped looking up at half a dozen visits ago. He had his head down, circling ads in an old travel magazine with a red felt pen. She looked back at the twenty prints of the painting taped over every free corner of her cubicle. And saw the third monkey.
     
    Bit by bit, bouquet by bouquet, she reconstructed the painted Dream.