The Dream of Perpetual Motion, Page 24

  At the exact center of the chamber, where viewers of the piece tend to clump together, there is complete silence (this being the spot in the room where all of the sound waves coming from the phonographs meet their inversions and die). Looking up to the ceiling, one sees a cage hanging from a cable about nine feet off the ground, made from heavy-gauge wire and encompassing a space about six feet wide, eight feet long, and eighteen inches high. Enclosed in the cage is the corpse of the artist, Ms. Winslow. The corpse is cast in bronze. Its gleaming fingers clutch the wires of the cage in which it is interred, and its frozen face stares down on the viewers, contorted into a scream.

  In a final stroke of genius, the door by which one enters the exhibit has a time-release lock, set for ten minutes. Once you have entered the space and the door closes behind you, you have no choice but to endure the sculpture’s maddening beauty, at least until the ghost of the artist who haunts the planetarium grants you her begrudging permission to leave.

  FORTY-SIX

  All the noises of the world are in here with him; all the news of the world is in here and he cannot get away from it.

  The door to the outside world is barred; the only silent space in the hall is directly beneath the bronzed corpse of his sister, whose presence that close to him he cannot bear. He stumbles around the sculpture like a man possessed, and the twenty-four phonographs assault him with the spatter of rain against glass, the rustle of wind through pines, the crack of a lightning strike just overhead, the rumble of an earth tremor, the grinding of continental plates as they pass each other, a rottweiler’s howl, the plaintive roar of a lion with a thorn in its paw, the unholy keening of cicadas that return every seventeen years, the bray of a donkey, the crack of a cheetah’s leg breaking, the buzz of a wasp nest disturbed by a stick, the sunrise songs of sixty different birds, a gryphon’s squawk, a unicorn’s neigh, the caw of a phoenix, the crunch of a baby’s bones in the mouth of the thing beneath your bed, the sizzle of ichor dripping from the wound of a movie monster, the snap of a violin string as it breaks, the ringing shatter of a crystal glass broken by a soprano’s voice, the melody of a player piano performing a wedding march, the bleating honk of a tenor saxophone in the hands of a man with a poor embouchure, the cacophony of a child slamming his fists against a harpsichord’s keys, the gentle strum of a mandolin performing a lovesong, the ditty of a slot machine announcing a winning pull, a march drummed out on the bottom of an overturned garbage can, the song of the nine choirs of seraphim in the tenth crystal sphere, the fanfare announcing the entrance of a professional boxer into the ring, the scratch of a quill pen writing a poison-pen letter, the snick of the lock of a prison cell’s door, the explosion of a firecracker, the snap of a bullet sliding into the chamber of a revolver, the twang of a bowstring, the pop of a cork sliding out of a bottle of chardonnay, the tchank of a beer bottle as its top is popped off, the slice of a box cutter gliding through corrugated cardboard, the burble of hot chicken soup on the stove, the smack of a baseball bat impacting with a skull, the beep of an automobile’s horn, the ring of a telephone, the splintering of a door to a drug den as the cops come crashing through, the loop of a phonograph recording with a scratch, the drill of a jackhammer cracking asphalt, the tick of a grandfather clock, the rattle of a flying car’s malfunctioning engine, the trundle of a railway car, the creak of a first-generation tin man’s rusted joints, the tick of a bicycle’s gears, the whir of a film in its projector, the scream as a hammer comes down on a finger, the squall of a thirsty newborn babe, the nonsensical words of a toddler, the tentative stutter of a ten-year-old learning to swear, the giggle of a teenager looking at his first pornographic woodcuts, the smack of a fist as it breaks a man’s jaw, the pop of an eyeball punctured by a sharpened pencil, the gasp preceding a faked orgasm, the snore of a sleeping mother, the fart of a drunken bum, the death rattle of an invalid, the unanimous cheer of a stadium crowd, the unintelligible barks of a cheerleading squad, the sneeze of a cook who’s dropped the pepper pot, the cries of the crew of a tempest-wrecked ship, the dots and dashes of an SOS, the curse laid by a warlock on a wayward lover, the prayer of a supplicant to a god with stopped ears and closed eyes, an erotic poem written in a forgotten language, a declaration of war against a state that does not exist on maps, a five-year-old boy’s recitation of a nursery rhyme, the closing argument of a murder trial, the valedictorian’s speech for a technical school’s graduation, a funeral oration full of well-meant lies, and the unending monotony of a man listing all the names of all the sounds in the world, but among all the noises Harold never hears the instructions that he dearly needs to hear: how to feel and how to know you feel; how to love and how to honor love; how to grieve the death of one who shares your blood, but whom you barely knew.

  By the time he finds his way out of the chamber and the planetarium, he has become me.

  FORTY-SEVEN

  “It’s a magnificent piece as it stands now; there’s no question about that. But it pales next to the experience of actually seeing Music for an Automatic Bronzing when it was in the final stage of execution—”

  “Excuse me, Miss—”

  “Charmaine Saint Claire. Ms.”

  “—you do realize that you’re being charged as an accomplice to murder?”

  “Murder? Who murdered? None of the twelve people who watched Astrid go down into the bath. Not the pizza boy: he didn’t know what he was doing. He just opened a door, as Astrid asked him to. You can say that either Astrid killed herself, or that the machines in the room killed her, but I’d like to see you prosecute either of them.

  “Besides, it’s not murder, so much as preservation. When you look at it in the correct way.”

  “Preservation.”

  “Yes. You have to understand that this is Astrid’s way of preserving herself as a piece of art, but in a much more elemental, meaningful way than a poet composing a hundred-sonnet cycle, for example. She’s cheating death by rendering it meaningless. She’s saying that humanity is the sum of its artistic endeavors. She’s laughing at the game and thereby winning the game by subverting it to her own ends. She’s thrusting the burning brand of the modern into the cyclopean eye of the mind-body problem. It’s all very complicated.”

  “Well, why don’t we go over it one more time, then. . . . There was a specially constructed machine, rigged to activate when the door to the planetarium opened.”

  “Yes. We prepared it a few hours before we ordered the pizza, to give the bronze statuettes in the bath enough time to melt. We locked Astrid into the cage and hoisted it off the ground. It was hanging from the ceiling by a pulley, you see. The cable attached to the cage looped over the pulley and back down to a motor, which was connected by a trip wire to the knob of the door to the planetarium.”

  “So . . . when the door opened, the motor would come on and lower the woman into the . . . bath.”

  “Right.”

  “And she was still alive then.”

  “Oh, yes, of course. She was alive right up until the end.”

  “So, after you hoisted the cage up—”

  “Then we pushed the tub under it, this gigantic tub filled with bronze statuettes, cheap stuff, madonnas and valkyries. And we lit the flames beneath the tub, and after a few hours, the statuettes melted into a beautiful pool of hot liquid bronze, with occasional bubbles coming to the surface and bursting.”

  “And she hung over this pool of bronze in her cage for . . . ?”

  “Five hours, probably. It couldn’t have been comfortable, but she never complained. No one spoke much while we were waiting. We stayed alone with our thoughts. It was a quiet time. And kind of religious, I imagine.”

  “So then there was a knock on the door—the pizza delivery boy.”

  “And Astrid said, ‘Open the door and come in!’ Then the delivery guy pulled the door open, and that started everything: the phonographs blaring—but they were quiet where we were standing, because of the destructive interference—and the cage descending
into the bath.

  “She looked so happy as she was going down. Her face had a cheery red glow that, frankly, I’d never seen in it before. And just before she disappeared beneath the surface of the bronze pool, she spoke her beautiful final words.”

  “Which were?”

  “Oh, they were so beautiful! And rather profound!”

  “It’s okay, Mizz Saint Claire, take your time, here’s a tissue, get yourself together.”

  “Yes. Yes. I’m sorry.”

  “Now then. Her last words.”

  “. . . Her last words were ‘Hot buttered spleen! Hot buttered spleen!’ With a positively beatific smile on her face. Rapturous.”

  “Excuse me?”

  “I wouldn’t expect you to understand.”

  “Wait . . . wait one moment. That doesn’t correlate with the information we have, not to mention common sense. It doesn’t make sense. Let me read you part of the deposition of the pizza delivery boy, Jason Fenman . . . here it is. ‘It all happened so fast and it was so weird I didn’t know what to do. I almost dropped the pizza, even. She was hanging over the tub, rattling the cage she was in and screaming her effing head off. “Stop the machine! Stop the machine!” And then she went under and then she burned.’ ”

  “He must have heard wrong. I can see how he might think he heard that, but remember: he was disoriented and had two phonographs playing at full volume on either side of him. But I was with Astrid when she died, in the silent space where all the sound dropped out. I think you can trust my recollection over his. And I knew Astrid personally—it wasn’t in her nature to finish off her life by saying something as mundane as you think. She was an artist.”

  “. . . So. Let’s say, for the sake of argument, that she did say ‘Hot buttered spleen’ instead of ‘Stop the machine.’ What do you suppose that means?”

  “Don’t ask stupid questions.”

  “I’ll ask whatever questions I like, stupid or no.”

  “Well, it’s all very complicated.”

  “Why don’t you try to give me an explanation that’s simple enough for my average intellect, then.”

  “Well, um . . . you see, Astrid was making a mock-comic request to the bronze bath to cook her, to preserve her by cooking her and cooking her well, to make her delicious. Especially her spleen . . . the spleen being, in her opinion, where the soul of an artist resides, instead of her heart. It’s a cryptic and provocative statement, you see . . . you see how she has her mouth as wide-open as it can go, in the final version of the piece? It’s because she wants her work to preserve her, inside and out, even if it scalds her throat and turns her lungs to ash. She looks so happy hanging there. She’s received her own art. It’s come inside her.”

  FORTY-EIGHT

  And now, at long last, Miranda Taligent, the shining light of her father’s life, has come back home.

  Sleep doesn’t come to her as easily as it used to. It seemed when she was young that she could actually summon sleep at will to put her under, no matter how long or how recently she’d slept before, or whether she’d gorged herself on so many sweets that the tips of her fingers tingled. Now, on this particular night, the best that she can manage is a fitful eyelid flickering, letting her unconscious dispiritedly rearrange the building blocks of her memories into mildly disquieting and mostly unimaginative dreams. This lasts for a few minutes, a quarter of an hour at the most; then she snaps awake again, staring wide-eyed into the total darkness of this room where she has slept since she first came to the Tower as an infant, the room in this place that is most, to her, like home.

  Naked beneath the sheets, she stretches both her arms out as far as she can; she can just touch both edges of the mattress with the tips of her fingers. When she was younger, the surface of the bed seemed immense, like a sea to be sailed across or an island to be explored. She remembers jumping up and down in a candy-fueled frenzy, nearly rupturing the box springs, yelling nonsense, trying to hit her head on the ceiling. But space shrinks when you get old, and things lose their wonder, and the wisest thing to do then is to try your best to sleep.

  Now a rectangle of white light appears and widens on the opposite side of the darkened room. Father is here. He closes the door and approaches the bed, his long robes rustling quietly against the floor. When he reaches the edge of the bed, he silently sinks to his knees.

  “Father,” Miranda says.

  “Miranda.”

  There is more silence for a time after this naming, and then Prospero breaks down into a full-throated sob. “I missed you,” he weeps, and coming to his feet, he leans over the bed to embrace his daughter. He feels her long slender arms come out and clasp him awkwardly around the waist, and he is careful to keep the bedsheet between them and covering her (because he can’t touch her, ever again. No matter what happens, he can never let her dirty skin touch his. She has been ruined. In one of his desk drawers he has saved something that he found when he was wandering alone through Miranda’s playroom, a condom wrapper ripped open and empty, illustrated with a silhouette of a couple in congress, the outlines of their pelvises mingled into a shadowy blur, but it’s best not to bring that up right now, he thinks. It’s probably best forgotten. But she is ruined).

  “Miranda,” he says. “My little girl’s all grown-up. . . . Do you know how hard this kind of thing is on a father? You’re not angry, are you? Tell me you’re not angry with me.”

  “No, Father,” Miranda replies. “Of course not.”

  “If I could somehow stop time and keep you from moving into the future . . .” He holds her tightly for a stretch of seconds, then, slowly, lets her go. “I . . . I didn’t mean to hurt you. I’ll never hurt you, ever again. Just . . . just stay. Be the company of a loving father in his old age.” He is backing away from her as he speaks, toward the door. Making distance.

  Sleep is coming on for Miranda at last, welcome and long sought. “I’ll stay,” she says, starting to go under. Ludicrous, to leave home to search for what you want, when all you want is sleep and peace. No place like home.

  Now the rectangle of light is back and Prospero stands silhouetted in it, shoulders slumped, looking down at the floor. “Miranda?” he says, his voice cracking and just above a whisper.

  “Father,” the woman in the bed replies. She’s almost gone now.

  “I’m going to do terrible things to you,” Prospero says, and quietly shuts the door.

  INTERLUDE

  aboard the good ship chrysalis

  My failure to grieve my sister’s death is harder to bear than grief itself. Or at least that’s what I believe I’d say, were it the case that I knew something of grief that would assist me in making the comparison.

  Gentle reader: if I am allowed the liberty of imagining your existence in some far future, perhaps you might grant me the further liberty of imagining that you’ve found some way to record your voice and send it back through time to me. In that case, tell me this: grief. What is it like; what does it do to you? Does it change your heart from gold to lead? Does it pin the corners of your mouth back past your ears? Does it stiffen your prick, or line your stomach with acid? Does it send you stumbling against your will down an alley lined with bars and brothels? What?

  I truly do not know, and that unnameable feeling that comes with not knowing: it must be worse than grief. It must.

  Not just grief, but ecstasies as well—there have been times that should have taken me as high as grief should have brought me low, and those have been just as unremarkable. The twelve hours during which I lost my virginity to Miranda and discovered Astrid’s suicide should have been a roller coaster for me, but the roller coaster that I rode with Astrid in the Nickel Empire was much more terrifying; I’m sad to say that it’s likely to be the most terrifying moment that I will experience in these pages.

  Never fear, though: even though such thrills are forbidden me, you, my imaginary gentle reader, will get your vicarious excitement. There will be a last grand adventure before this comes to an
end—you’ll get your love, and your murder.

  My father used to talk about a God Who was an Author of the universe, who lent order to it by the simple fact of His existence. Looking back on what he said, it seems as if he felt that it did not really matter whether that Author-God truly did exist, so long as people believed that He did: as long as they believed, then they would believe that the world had order, even if they could not perceive that order for themselves.

  The existence of such a God must have lent a certain surety to language that’s now unknown to us. I imagine that the entries of the dictionary that lies on the desk in God’s study must have one-to-one correspondences between words and their definitions, so that when God sends directives to his angels, they are completely free from ambiguity. Each sentence that He speaks or writes must be perfect, and therefore a miracle.

  With faith in God comes faith in language; if God made us, then it is language that makes us better things than animals. If those who lived in the age of miracles could not be Authors of the world in the manner that God was, then they must have believed that authorship in a lesser sense had a similar, if lesser, power—if we could not be makers of worlds, then we could at least be makers of words that described worlds, be they worlds in which we lived, or future worlds, or worlds that could never exist. And listeners must have had the same if lesser faith in speakers as they did in the unassailable truth of the words of God when they drifted down from heaven to earth.

  But in the absence of some sort of Godlike author or poet whose every word is clear and perfect, whose speech we’d measure our own against and always find it wanting, it is so much harder to have the faith in language that belief in God affords us—we are forced to see that words are not themselves ideas, but merely strings of ink marks; we see that sounds are nothing more than waves. In a modern age without an Author looking down on us from heaven, language is not a thing of definite certainty, but infinite possibility; without the comforting illusion of meaningful order we have no choice but to stare into the face of meaningless disorder; without the feeling that meaning can be certain, we find ourselves overwhelmed by all the things that words might mean.