Playground

by Richard Powers

One continuous war game between the two of them dominated my entire childhood. Their tournament was driven as much by lust as by hatred, and each of them took their different superpowers into the fray. My father: the strength of mania. My mother: the cunning of the downtrodden. I was a precocious four-year-old when I realized that my parents were locked in a contest to inflict as much harm on each other as possible without crossing over the line into fatality—just enough pure pain to trigger the excitement that only rage could bring. It was a kind of reciprocal autoerotic strangulation of the soul, and both parties were generous givers and grateful recipients.

The ocean teemed with primordial life—monsters left behind from evolution’s oldest back alleys—ring-shaped, tube-shaped, shapeless, impossible plant-animal mash-ups with no right to exist, beasts so unlikely I wondered if my beloved author invented them.

Everyone needs to eat, but few people are aware of who sets the table.

A whole new grace came over her, confirming something she had long suspected. She had never felt at home up there, above the surface, with its noise and politics and relentless verticality. She had been made for water, gliding through a place edgeless and muffled, free of the blows that had always assaulted her in the world of air.

Water cradled her in its great, kind palm.

She lost herself in watching, the great pleasure of her life.

From underneath, looking up into the filtered sun, she found the Loner’s pale belly surprisingly hard to make out—a ghost as diffuse as his black dorsal silhouette would appear to anyone looking down on him through the darkening waves. Countershading—Thayer’s law: a trick that fish had used for the last hundred and fifty million years to make themselves disappear both into and against the light.

She had spent too many decades of close observation to be cowed any longer by the prohibition against anthropomorphism. What began, centuries ago, as a healthy safeguard against projection had become an insidious contributor to human exceptionalism, the belief that nothing else on Earth was like us in any way.

Play was evolution’s way of building brains, and any creature with a brain as developed as a giant oceanic manta sure used it. If you want to make something smarter, teach it to play.

While she was diving, all her senses were deranged. Distance, color, even shape: in the bent light beneath the waves, the simplest forms defied description.

Taciturnity was just desire that hadn’t yet blossomed.

She walked for hours across the sedge-fringed shore, transfixed by the thought of a world after humans. The beach sank from high briar-covered dunes, past pockets of tidal pools, down into a glorious foreshore riddled with burrowing invertebrates and scoured by more kinds of shorebirds than she could name. At the bottom of the long, shallow run, fine sand churned in the breakers. The salt air tickled her lungs, and the wide expanse of wild shore, mile after unbroken mile, felt like a summons from her designer.

Bliss was so simple. Just hold still and look.

They camped on the dunes in a gap in the thorny smilax. The sky cleared and spilled out stars. Every breath smelled of silica and iodine. Their fire on the beach was less than minuscule, and its curl of smoke rose into a night too enormous to say. A hunter’s moon pulled at the willing water, crashing it against the edge of the continent, and the pulse of that liquid piston was better than any song. There was so much to life, too much, more than Beaulieu could do justice to, more than any living thing could guess at or merit. She loved it all, even humans, for without the miracle of human consciousness, love for such a world would be just one more of a billion unnamed impulses.

The sea buoyed her, like warm silk on her bare arms and legs. She hung suspended in the middle of reefs that mounded up in pinnacles, domes, turrets, and terraces. She was a powerless angel hovering above a metropolis built by billions of architects almost too small to see.

I could die now. I have seen the relentless engine, the inscrutable master plan of Life, and it will never end.

Of all the things we humans excel at, moving the goalposts may be our best trick.

“Decisions are rarely made by reason but almost always by temperament, and that doesn’t change much as people get older.”

“Is a thing still garbage, once life starts using it?”

They’d seen an octopus who carried around a clear glass jar to make up for the shell it had lost to evolution.

A brass ship’s throttle, its handle stuck to a speed that failed to save it, lay like some wild Miró sculpture caked in starfish and worms.

Milky glassfish patrolled the wreck’s burst holes. Clouds of nacreous pearly dartfish and blue-green chromis damselfish schooled around her, running their own investigations.

The reds, burgundies, and oranges of marbled shrimp in all their stages clattered through the hidey-holes of the jumbled metal, looking like animated Christmas cards. Parrotfish, groupers, cardinalfish, gobies, two-tone darts, wrasses, blennies, scorpionfish, jellies and other cnidarians: she couldn’t begin to name all the colors.

“If two choices are impossible to choose between, it means they have equal merit. Either choice can have your belief. It doesn’t matter which you choose. You shed one chooser and grow into another.”

into the night’s moonless black.

The need to solve an intricate puzzle and the need to quiet your brain are twin sons of different mothers.

She described her descent in a three-person submersible, jammed against the tiny porthole, dropping miles down through a blackness blacker than outer space with no sense of direction into a kingdom so weird that it erased the line between nightmares and visions:

Everything Evie once learned through her own senses she now learned again, through the ears of her imagined readers.

Hope and truth could not be reconciled.

It came to her that this was why she had always shied away from human love. To give it was always to incur a growing obligation: someone else’s gratitude.

How hard it was, how painful, to be grateful for everything.

The terrorist commandos inside my brain were snipping off the connecting cables between cells and pulling out handfuls of who I am.

terror is just another painting hanging on the wall of a museum so huge, dark, and shot through with jumbled rooms that no single painting can hold my gaze or have much power over me for long.

“Fluctuating cognition, fluctuating cognition . . .” It was a way of reminding myself that I’d be back, eventually.

I wanted to doze off, but I was afraid to sleep—afraid of the flailing, kicking, choking battleground that sleep has become as I act out my nightmares in full mobility. Afraid that I might not be able to sleep. Afraid of the crippling fatigue that comes when I can’t. Afraid of what nightmares I might have when sleep stops and I’m awake again.

For centuries, the island has always hung flowers around the necks of its destroyers.

They cannot read his face; there’s no one left in charge of it.

For every island is a canoe, and all the Earth is an island, living by the grace of the immense and slowly turning blue creature.