The Dream of Perpetual Motion, Page 33

  “There was this girl,” I say. “Her name was Alexa Graham. She was a cheerleader for the Xeroville High School Fighting Automata. And her nickname—though she didn’t know it as far as I knew—was Onion Butt. Because if you got one good clear look at that girl’s ass it would make you weep for joy. Now one evening my friend Greg throws a party while his parents are away on a trip. And he’s found the key to the liquor cabinet under the rug. And everybody’s there at the party! And let me tell you Mr. Taligent we were wasted, all right? And who comes up to me smiling and drunk off her tits but—”

  “Can you imagine me looking at a woman’s ass?” Prospero says.

  “Wha?”

  “Me, staring at a woman’s bottom. Can you imagine a journalist or the like saying, to give an example, ‘Prospero Taligent looked at the woman’s ass and nodded with tacit approval.’ Can you imagine reading such a thing?

  “Or how about this. Can you imagine me doing any of the things that you have told me that you did when you were young? Taking first steps? Holding a girl’s hand? Learning to read? Can you think of me having a first failed love affair that I still regret, or a broken marriage? Or of having brothers and sisters, or a mother and father?”

  “No,” I say. “I can’t.”

  “You’ve told me many secrets,” Prospero says, and smiles. “Now I will tell you one. It’s my darkest. Are you ready?

  “It is this.” He leans toward me and spreads his arms in mock surrender. “I have no past. You may think that I was once small and young and unwise as you once were, but I have always been as you see me before you. Always an old magician in exile.”

  “Some things always stay the same, sir,” I say.

  “Yes. It’s good, isn’t it. Some things never change.”

  He comes to his feet, places his hands in the small of his back, and bends backward. Three of the bones in his spine click in series. “Perhaps I will make up a past to confess to you one of these nights,” he says, leaving the gallery. “To keep you entertained.”

  On another of these sleepless evenings I tell him tales of transformation. This night we punish ourselves, making a bad thing worse by drinking coffee of a brand that Prospero imports from a tropical nation with a perpetually unstable government and a boundary that confounds cartographers. He bombards the beans with high-intensity Röntgen rays and brews them hot enough to scald the tongue. The result is a cup of coffee whose first sip will make you grind your teeth into a fine white powder. That’s the stuff.

  We are two old men, drunk on wakefulness, starting to look alike. Around us sit the sculptures of the transformation series. They are made from materials engineered by Prospero in his laboratory, invented substances with names made of nothing but rootless suffixes and prefixes, that designate long molecules that bite their own tails and wind around each other like the links of a chain. I have worked the death mask of Miranda and my memories of her body into other forms: a giant spider whose eight hairy legs each end in a delicate, neatly manicured human foot; a bird with a human head and Miranda’s sullen face, crowned in bright red feathers; a tree with porcelain-pale bark whose branches are made from hundreds of wrong-fingered hands.

  We are taking swigs of coffee from a single flask, of a peculiar construction invented by Prospero. He calls it a “vacuum flask.” (“Keeps hot foods hot, but,” he says, raising a teaching finger, “keeps cold foods cold!”) His coffee is burning a smoking hole in the lining of my stomach. “Transformations,” I say. “Arachne had the gall to weave a picture-perfect tapestry that documented the crimes of the gods in exacting detail. Io was so beautiful that she incited the lust of Jupiter, who later had to hide the maiden from his wife in plain sight. Jupiter raped Callisto by assuming the guise of Diana, but Callisto made the shame public by giving birth to a son. So Juno felt she had to take revenge. All of these women—Arachne, Io, Callisto—shifted their shapes, by choice or force.”

  “They were all turned into beasts.”

  “Many of them. Some were turned into trees, or plants.”

  “But they are always robbed of the power of speech,” Prospero says. “So when the gods choose to punish women, they make their tongues dumb.”

  “No, not exactly . . . In Ovid’s moral universe the gift of language is what makes us human, but it’s not always a curse to have your speech stolen. Take Daphne, for instance—she was Apollo’s first love, owing to the malicious shaft of one of Cupid’s arrows. But at the same time Daphne’s heart was pierced with an arrow of the opposite nature that caused her to reject all suitors, mortal and immortal. Apollo never gave up pursuing her because whenever he lay eyes on her the arrowhead worked its magic and he saw not what she was, but what he thought she had the potential to be—”

  “—the most beautiful woman in the world.”

  “—a woman so beautiful that it would not have been possible for her to exist. The two of them were an irresistible force and an immovable object, never to meet, and finally Daphne begged her father to rid her of her human shape and transform her into a tree. Better that, she thought, than to remain a woman and collapse under the weight of an infinite series of images and dreams, placed on her shoulders by men, too heavy for any mortal to bear.”

  “—wait. I forgot about someone. Echo.

  “It’s not always true that transformation causes the loss of a voice. Take Echo. She has a gift with language that sets her apart from all the other characters in the Metamorphoses. When her fellow nymphs scattered off to make love with Jupiter, Echo would divert Juno’s attention away with stories, long shaggy-dog tales with other tales nested within them, all of them withholding their resolutions, prolonging their climactic moments. . . . But the stories always ended, lasting just long enough for the nymphs to finish their business with Jupiter and flee.

  “So Echo’s first punishment came at Juno’s hands. She took not the power of speech from her, but the power of storytelling. Juno was a busy woman with a continually philandering husband to keep an eye on, and no time to squander on stories. After her curse the best that Echo would do was to repeat random fragments of the speech of others, but she could not string together a narrative or express an original thought of her own.

  “Later, she fell in love with Narcissus, a near mirror image of Daphne: while Daphne loved no one, Narcissus loved only himself. It is possible that, had Echo still possessed her original unparalleled gifts, she could have woven a spell with language strong enough to tear him away from his endless contemplation of himself. But when she revealed herself to him at last after months of watching him, concealing herself behind trees and following in his footsteps, the only thing she could do was throw her arms around him and spit disconnected splinters of his own thoughts back at him. And of course he scorned her. And of course it broke her heart.

  “And now came Echo’s second punishment. Unable to express the inexpressible, she retreated to a cave, and while the world forgot about her, she starved herself. Time stripped all the flesh off her bones and turned them to stone, making her a sculpture of the living woman she used to be. Then the stone crumbled, and nothing was left of her but her voice.”

  “You have sculpted Miranda in the forms of all these transformed women,” Prospero said. “Daphne, and Io, and Callisto, and Arachne. But not Echo. Why?”

  “Because it can’t be done. It’s easy to make representations of spiders, or trees, or bears. And it’s easy enough to tell the story of Echo. But how do you sculpt the shape of a voice?”

  And now we come to the time when I did the terrible thing to Miranda.

  The thought of doing something awful to the woman hadn’t crossed my mind when I awoke on the morning that everything began in earnest. I pulled on my clothes, made myself presentable, left my rooms and took an elevator down seventy-seven floors to the company cafeteria where, as usual, I sat alone at a table in a corner with enough chairs for ten, listening to the jargon-riddled conversations of entry-level employees and making a breakfast out of a Danish
and a couple of cups of coffee. After that, it was back up to the 101st floor, where I had planned to spend a few hours frittering around the studio and cleaning things up, since I was between projects and stuck for ideas.

  But when I opened the door to the studio, I saw that everything was changed. It had been turned, overnight, into an operating theater.

  The walls were the first thing I noticed. They were completely covered, every square inch, with sheets of paper: pages ripped out of centuries-old anatomy texts, illustrated with woodcuts of flayed-open corpses with slender arrows pointing into their guts; more pages ripped out of cheap paperback copies of Shakespeare plays; blueprints for phonographs and automobiles and mechanical men; hundreds of cryptic drawings in pen and ink of men and women and animals and strange machines, some of which were topological impossibilities.

  In the center of the room was a gurney with a nude woman strapped to it, bound across the waist and at the wrists and ankles. All of the hair was shaved off her body. Her mouth hung open slackly and her eyes were wide-open, her pupils fully blown despite the surgical lamp that hung over her, shining right into her face. Without her eyebrows, her face seemed to be the most naked part of her.

  Two carts sat next to the gurney, one holding a variety of surgical instruments, the other my sculpting tools.

  There were a few doctors, dressed in red close-fitting skullcaps and facemasks and robes, and they stood to attention when I entered, lining up like soldiers on parade. Prospero Taligent was there too, in the same red robes, and he approached me when I entered, smiling.

  It wasn’t easy to take this all in, and I had trouble making sense of it. If the woman’s head hadn’t been shaved clean, I might have figured it out immediately. As she was, though, it took me a moment to place where I’d seen her thin lips and acne-scarred cheeks and slightly crooked nose.

  “Miranda,” I said, and the woman on the table said nothing in response, but all the same, I knew.

  “This is going to be a great day for both of us,” Prospero said. “We’ve finally figured it out. The thing we’ve wanted to do for all this time.”

  “I don’t understand this, sir,” I said, but even then I could feel myself lying to myself, because I did understand. And because Prospero knew that I understood beneath my false profession of doubt and my pretense of morality, the ensuing conversation had the language of an argument but the easy rhythms of a catechism, one that both of us had recited in our heads in silence for years, waiting for that special day when we would at last have the chance and the reason to speak it aloud.

  “You don’t understand,” Prospero said. “Then I’ll lead you to an explanation. Tell me your profession.”

  “I am your portraitmaker, and have been for more than twenty years.”

  “And what has been your single subject?”

  “The woman strapped to the table over there.”

  “No. Answer again.”

  “But for over twenty years I have made sculptures of Miranda Taligent.”

  “Yes. And what have been their materials?”

  “Stones: marble, basalt, granite, limestone. Wood. Wax. Ice. Clay. Then, toward the end, the substances you engineered for the transformation series, with names I can’t pronounce.”

  “Yes. All of those were your work, but can you see how you and I have been working together in concert from that first Miranda chiseled out of granite? Your talent and my invention?”

  “Yes. You brought me new substances, and new tools to carve them.”

  “And each sculpture you made was more beautiful than the one before. I never told you this, but it was true.”

  “But every one was a failure. I never got the one you wanted.”

  “And I failed, because I could never describe it to you. The exact perfect Miranda, the one that was always like her, no matter how this child changed that’s now strapped to the table. But now I know what to do. I’ve known for some time, but now the time has come to put thought into action.

  “Listen,” he said. “You and I are going to make one last sculpture of Miranda. Once we finish this one, you won’t have to make another, because I am certain that this one will be perfect. We are going to use a new material, one we haven’t tried before, and one that I would never have been able to engineer myself.”

  Then he gestured at the woman tied to the table, who continued to stare at the ceiling wide-eyed and emotionless.

  “It wasn’t age that ruined the girl, but noise,” said Prospero. “She would have stayed perfect if she’d come of age in silence.

  “Do you understand that I’ve loved Miranda ever since I first laid eyes on her? And that because of this I wanted her to spend her life being everything that I’m not? I have no past, portraitmaker. I can never remember being a child. I look back on all my long years and I can never remember a time when my head has not been full of noises and filth. But if I had managed to keep the girl in silence then she would have stayed pure.

  “Because a subtle shift in the balance of the hormones that saturated your brain was necessary but not sufficient to change you into an adult. It was the noise that the world shoveled into your head that finally made you into a man, wasn’t it? Isn’t it the sounds out of people’s mouths that make us feel we’ve aged months in minutes? Her tits look great: you hear that for the first time and it ages you. The cancer has spread to the lung: you hear that and it ages you. I think you should sit down for this: you hear that and it ages you. The rattle of the tax collector’s clearing throat ages you. The curse of the climaxing woman pinned beneath you ages you. The snap of the chicken’s neck as it’s prepared for the cooking pot ages you. It is not the bending of your bones but the noises of the world that make you grow old, and turn your heart to a block of granite in your chest, and make everyone’s head like mine is. Filled with noise and filth.

  “So I tried to keep the girl in a soundproof place, to make her perfect. Because if I could control the sounds she heard then I could control how she aged, and ensure that she would stay beautiful and not turn ugly like all the rest of us. But I couldn’t stop her from hearing things. . . . ”

  Prospero went on rambling like this for several minutes, coming in and out of coherence, clearly more than half-mad, returning time and again to the same profound perversities—that children were somehow better creatures than adults; that ignorance was a worthy price to pay for innocence; that adults were inherently corrupt, and that given the chance they would speak the words of dark magic that would corrupt all those who were not already like themselves. And it slowly became apparent to me what he believed—that the perfect little girl that he’d adopted as a baby, the one who had never existed anywhere but in his own head when he looked at Miranda, was locked up inside the body of the woman strapped to the table in front of us. And that if we could somehow use our tools and our imaginations to somehow chisel that little girl out of the woman’s body and set her free, just as I’d chiseled that first sculpture of Miranda Taligent out of a block of granite nearly twenty-five years ago, then everything would be set right again. Then everything would be perfect.

  At this point in my tale, I wish I could take the liberties of a fiction-maker. Because then I’d have the ability to manufacture some compelling cause that forced me to act against my will, in spite of my essentially honest heart. Suddenly a cadre of soldiers poured into the studio and held great big bayonets with gleaming blades to our heads and Prospero said menacingly, “Perform the operation or die.” Or: Prospero reached behind his back and produced a heavy suitcase stuffed to bursting with thousand-dollar bills and said, “I know about your gambling debts. How your wife and seven daughters are starving in a garret, living off thin gruel and week-old bread. Perform the operation and you get this suitcase, and four more just like it.”

  But if this is to be a confessional, then it must be free of lies and conjecture, and the facts are these: I was an old man, and I had given most of my life to making Miranda and come up short time after tim
e. And when Prospero held out the possibility of making the Miranda of our minds a real physical thing, no matter how impossible that might seem to you, I jumped on it. Because I was just a little bit mad myself by then. I might have been salivating when I accepted his offer. I wanted to cut the woman until she was perfect.

  This is what you have to understand about Miranda: you might think of her as a damsel in distress, in dire need of rescue, but she was strong—strong enough to inspire you to dream of her, but weak enough to allow you to map that perfect dream of her onto her living face. I did the terrible things I did because I was in love with Miranda: not the one you might think of as real, but the one that her father and I had dreamed of together, who was Miranda in a way that the real one would never be without our help. I ask you: how could I responsibly pass up the opportunity to bring such a beautiful being into the world?

  The surgical operations that we executed upon Miranda Taligent took almost eight months, working seven days a week, fourteen hours a day. You’ll have to forgive me if I don’t go into the details of the whole thing. I don’t really understand much of the technical aspects of what we did, despite the fact that I was one of the directors of the project. I made vague suggestions, and the surgeons ran with them. The most I can really say is that over the course of the surgery, I developed a studied indifference to Miranda’s body. I lost my sense of its sanctity, its sacredness as a repository for the soul that all of us but doctors believe in. The doctors are forced to see the flesh for what it is, and for all their talk of miracles, they know, even if they deny it to themselves and cover up their sentiments with noble talk, that they are dealing with machines.