Playground

by Richard Powers

Ta’aroa was an artist, so he played with what he had.

And on that island, the two of them married and raised a family as well as they could, away from the growing sadness of the real world.

The world with all its bright and surprising contents was created out of boredom and emptiness. Everything started by holding still and waiting. The perfect story to tell such a dark and anxious child.

Fifteen minutes after their brief service, Ina’s daughter was skipping down to the waves again, finding new jewels, as if death by plastic ingestion were just another inscrutable myth, as mysterious as a god huddled up in a spinning egg before the beginning of the world.

It was a kind of reciprocal autoerotic strangulation of the soul, and both parties were generous givers and grateful recipients.

It’s a simple, small thing, but I’ve never told anyone but you. When I was young, I could breathe underwater.

She loved that about him: he could love, fight his own terrors, and leave her alone to do the same.

Evanston was nothing. Chicago was nothing. Illinois and even the U.S. were a joke. There were insanely different ways of being alive, behaviors from another galaxy dreamed up by an alien God. The world was bigger, stranger, richer, and wilder than I had a right to ask for. The trauma of Keane Castle faded. Life on land couldn’t hurt me anymore.

MAKATEA’S FATE WAS SET in stone in 1896, a few years after France annexed the island and added it to its growing Pacific empire. That was the year when Sousa wrote “The Stars and Stripes Forever” for a country that had just committed to separate-but-equal. The year that Daimler built the first gas truck, Röntgen snapped the first X-ray, Puccini premiered La bohème, and the soon-to-be Nobel laureate Svante Arrhenius published a paper showing how rising carbon dioxide levels would soon cook the planet’s atmosphere.

The course of civilization is carved in ocean currents. Where sea layers mix, where rains travel or wastelands spread, where great upwellings bring deep, cold, nutrient-rich waters to the energy-bathed surface and fish go mad with fecundity, where soils turn fertile or anemic, where temperatures turn habitable or harsh, where trade routes flourish or fail: all this the global ocean engine determines. The fate of continents is written in water.

Makatea helped Homo sapiens subdue the Earth. But in the process, the island was consumed.

That made my father laugh and my mother tear up. I didn’t understand either reaction. People and their emotions puzzled me. They were stupidly complex, and there was no way to break them apart and see what was inside.

My father just tried to pick the colonizers who offered the best terms.”

Today, she had one last task to finish. She was on this island for a single reason: To compile another book before she died. To try one more time to make the land dwellers love the wild, unfathomable God of waters. To give the smallest hint of creatures so varied and inventive and otherworldly that they might compel humility and stop human progress in its tracks with awe.

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.

Reading left him untouchable on a raft in the middle of an ocean of bright words.

He just wanted to read until he discovered where all the pain of the world came from.

too moral to suspect what Evie had discovered: eager young girls required camouflage.

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.

But out of sight of land, human time vanished, and human geography with it. Evelyne loved that, beyond anything else she’d ever loved: the feeling that the globe was still mostly unknown, mostly unknowable. That she was in the middle of life, while still being nowhere at all.

But no one ever survived into old age who couldn’t open that vise and let much of their hard-gripped facts go free. Evelyne simply hoped that the girl might live long enough to grow as forgetful as she needed to be. As forgetful and reconciled to the horror of life as Evelyne herself had grown.

The Americans are landing, and they’re going to take everything! Understanding them at last, Evie wondered: What in God’s name is left to take?

The pages were yellowed and moldering, and they smelled of aldehydes, ketones, vanillin, and decomposing lignin—a mysterious, heady scent, almost narcotic.

Everyone here had some blood pact with fenua—the land—forever connected by mystical, umbilical pito to the place where their placenta was buried. And yet they came and went, migrating to new islands all the time. Countless more Makateans lived elsewhere than lived on Makatea. The diaspora that had colonized every habitable spot in the world’s greatest ocean was still under way.

International waters: That much, at least, sounded very American. The country’s endless desire to escape regulation had driven Ina Aroita to escape America.

MY DOCTOR TOLD ME about a thing that dementia patients do called “showtiming.” In denial, embarrassment, or terror, we perform ourselves in front of other people as if we have no symptoms at all. I’m a master at it. In meetings, interviews, even live behind a podium in front of several hundred people, I can showtime myself into competence for an hour or longer. Sometimes I even fool myself into thinking that I’m as powerful as

Add that to your table of definitions for what it means to be a human being. We make things that we hope will be bigger than us, and then we’re desolate when that’s what they become.

That was what was wrong with the French invaders in the first place. They had no home.

Her body went through things that should have silenced singing. But those years passed, the singing survived them, and she was left with sufficient skin and bone to get her all the way up to the plateau with enough mobility left over for a little stomp and hip-roll at the top. There was nowhere on the island she couldn’t reach if she gave herself ample time.

“I tend to think that the world is my fault. Maybe that’s ego or something. But getting accepted into Ignatius was not my fault. Being smart is not my fault. Not wanting to die in a Housing Authority apartment at the bottom of a flight of broken stairs is not my fault.”

Separate, these two small sovereign nations astonished Evelyne, and together they blew her mind. Their emotions pulsed like the skin colors of a flamboyant squid. She had no idea that land-based creatures could be so interesting.

But they had taken the next step in the unfolding adventures of humankind. The thought gave her power. With each new press conference, she grew bolder in preaching the gospel of the oceans. Becoming a part of them would give the troubled race of men something to aspire toward. Once people witnessed the abundance of underwater life, once they lived there, they would ache to take care of the place like it was their home.

But he stopped rising to my bait. He stared ahead vacantly, down the chilly streets of that desolate cow town of learning. “You know why I love games? For the same reason I love literature. In a game . . . in a good poem or story? Death is the mother of beauty.” He stopped and twisted to face me. “Know what I’m sayin’?”

All the time we saved we plowed back into booking for our exams, which, of course, were games by another name.

Remarkably, turning his passion into work did not destroy it. He lost himself in poetry. He read all the wild stuff that the Jesuits had hid from us. He typed up the ones that made him feel like a comet had just screamed across the sky, and he taped those up to the front lip of his bookshelves as if they were WANTED posters.

Fine! Let them forget us. Let everyone leave us be, so that we can live here in this healing place together and enjoy each other all our days.”

Neither Rafi nor I saw what was happening. No one did. That computers would take over our lives: Sure. But the way that they would turn us into different beings? The full flavor of our translated hearts and minds? Not even my most enlightened fellow programmers at CRIK foresaw that with any resolution.

Sure, they predicted personal, portable Encyclopedia Britannicas and group real-time teleconferencing and personal assistants that could teach you how to write better. But Facebook and WhatsApp and TikTok and Bitcoin and QAnon and Alexa and Google Maps and smart tracking ads based on keywords stolen from your emails and checking your likes while at a urinal and shopping while naked and insanely stupid but addictive farming games that wrecked people’s careers and all the other neural parasites that now make it impossible for me to remember what thinking and feeling and being were really like, back then? Not even close.

“As the waters keep rising, we’ll be the last island to go under.”

Rafi knew better than to ask how she recognized perfect. He didn’t need to know. Never again in life would he let perfect be the enemy of good. He had lived that way once, and it almost cost him everything. Combing the rocks now, he stashed away each bit of trash he came across, even the soft, crinkly, pathetic little half-serving water bottle no bigger than his fist. He’d found her again, here, after having lost her forever, found that pair of magic small beings he could see down the shore in front of him. He would never want or need anything more perfect than this.

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

“Oh, Rafi. I don’t know. People are like sculptures. You can mold them a little when they start out, but not much. A body wants to be what a body wants to be. I’ve known who these two souls are since we first laid eyes on them.”

“What does it mean to be a ‘Pacific Islander’? I haven’t a clue. I dress and think and behave like an outsider. I speak the languages of the Western invaders. The planet that I came from is gone forever. And I don’t belong in the one where I’ve landed. The only way I can find out about where I came from—who my people were—is to read about it in books.

“Our first god made the world from eggshells and tears and bone. Then our artists made the other gods out of shells and coral and sand and the fiber from palm fronds. All those gods are dead, now. What am I supposed to do? What am I supposed to make?”

He edited them as patiently as he’d edited himself.

Maybe if she was devious; maybe if she could sneak and hide. Maybe if she loved one single woman, and not a mix of several. But even then, she would not have known how to leap from her solid and rewarding existence into the terrifying unknown. She loved women. But there were all kinds of things she loved and could not have. Best to have the things that already overwhelmed her with their amplitude, the things she already could never exhaust. She had the ocean. And the ocean absorbed all her hope and excitement, all her panic and pain and love, into a place far larger than anything human.

When Evelyne told him that she was leaving again, a cold current passed through Limpet’s own circulatory system. The old, familiar hurt had come to feel almost proprietary, even exciting. Through his work, Limpet had learned to see all the hurt they caused each other as part of an enormous system of fluctuating currents that worked on scales too large to grasp. In their recirculating pain, he and Evelyne were united again. Even saying goodbye to her, again and again, was thick with meaning.

my friend was not exactly a public person. The idea of giving human beings yet more ways to get together and be argumentative horrified him.

He knew of her obsession with the old gods. Was this going to be a gigantic plastic Ta’aroa, shaking out his feathers like the ones that fell to Earth and rose again as the first trees? He tried to recall what other old myths this shape might represent, but his memories were crowded out by Mary and Joseph and the ox and the ass and the manger and the shepherds and the three kings.

“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.”