The Dream of Perpetual Motion

  After a sufficient pause in the conversation, during which Harold clandestinely grinds his teeth while clenching his fists beneath the table, he asks after Astrid’s welfare. She’s doing well: at twenty-four she’s regarded as a prodigy, and skipping college in favor of a two-year tenure in art school seems to have been the right decision for her, though her father went to war over it. Her larger, more expensive pieces are selling, and her dealer has begun treating her to the occasional dinner out to keep her mollified. There is talk that in a few months she may get one of the smaller rooms of one of the city’s museums to herself for a little while—most of the pieces will be on loan from other patrons, none of them for sale or “courtesy of the artist.” An ten-dollar art magazine just had a two-page spread that featured two of her recent sculptures, from a series of stainless-steel German shepherds sporting extravagantly erect penises welded together from springs and ball bearings. An article in the society section of the Xeroville Courier-Post (circulation six thousand) covering a fund-raising fete reported the presence of Astrid, the single given name in bold.

  She sighs, and the tenor of the sigh tells Harold that she’s about to start in on her personal life. “Okay,” she says. “Okay. So I’ve been fucking this guy, you know.” Like many of Astrid’s sentences, its breathless hasty blurt is meant to disguise its careful, long-premeditated composition—the word fucking intended to shock, though most of Harold’s college friends use such obscenities as standard punctuation; the you know to finish off the sentence while emphasizing the shockingly casual nature of the supposedly shocking fucking. “I’ve been fucking this guy,” says Astrid. “I’m still living with my ex-boyfriend, which hasn’t been easy but he’s having trouble finding a place and damned if I’m giving this one up, I don’t care whose name is on the lease, there’s fair and then there’s fair. It hasn’t been easy, because the reason we broke up is because he cheated on me and every time I see him I want to rip out his guts and make them into chitterlings and feed them back to him, but I cheated on him, too, so I guess it’s kind of even, but it’s still horrible. And sometimes I think the hate sex since we broke up is just about worth the breaking up, to be honest. But anyway. There’s this guy. And my jackass ex-boyfriend and I never thought to make any rules about whether we can have people over and when, since we haven’t been talking much, and when we do talk, we spend most of our time arguing about what we mean by what we say. So we never came up with any rules; we never set any boundaries. But this guy? He’s stuck in an apartment with his ex-girlfriend, except they do have rules. So that pretty much means he has to come over to my place if we want to get together. Right? Right. And he’s kind of loud. And I’m kind of loud.”

  La-la-la, shouts Harold’s mind in an attempt to drown out Astrid’s voice and do him a favor. La-la-la; la-la—

  “So we’re really loud in bed,” says Astrid, “and for some reason I’m louder with him than I am with my ex-boyfriend, maybe because my ex-boyfriend is an asshole. And so one night the asshole finds this girl and brings her over, I swear she was a whore because she looked like one, she looked like the queen mother of Whoreovia, and he knew my guy was going to be over because he’s over every Friday night and Saturday night, and I’m sitting on the couch with him listening to the radio shows and trying to have a quiet romantic moment and he and this whore go into his bedroom and slam the door and start going at it, screaming like a couple of crazy people. It sounded like five porn movies. And my guy just gets up and leaves without saying one word. I was so angry, Harold. I was so angry. I went in my room and smoked two bowls and I was still angry. Okay, so I’m loud. Fine. I get the point. But not that loud.”

  Harold says nothing.

  “I told him the next morning that if that’s the score, then he can either pay to get his bedroom soundproofed or he can get the hell out,” says Astrid. “Like it’ll do any good. But I had to say it. It was something that had to be said.”

  They sit there silently for a while, and Harold picks up a pen, takes an index card from a stack, and begins to doodle absently, drawing a series of five-pointed stars over some waves that look like the humps of abstract sea monsters. Then Astrid slaps the table with her palms. “It doesn’t get easy,” she says. “You’d think that as smart as people are, we could figure out a way to make simple problems like this go away. But we’ve got tin men and flying cars and it still hasn’t gotten any easier. And the tin men we’ve got can’t do the simplest things half the time like get someone from one place to another in a cab, so what good is any of it. What good is a flying car to me if I still have boyfriend trouble.”

  Now the lines that Harold draws across the card beneath the stars look like waves of water in a child’s diorama of the sea. He keeps his eyes cast down.

  “Like I’d like to just be able to sit next to someone and look at them and just know how they feel, you know?” says Astrid. “Isn’t that the way it’s supposed to work? And not some science-fiction bullshit like telepathy or mind control. Just to look at somebody’s face and understand what the face is trying to tell me for once, without wondering whether the person I’m looking at bought a five-cent pamphlet off a street salesman that told him what look he’s supposed to have on his face if he wants to pick up a girl, and what he’s supposed to say. You know?

  “You don’t know,” says Astrid to Harold. “You wouldn’t know.”

  Now the waves that Harold draws become more pronounced as he digs the tip of the pen into the index card, and the once-calm water beneath the stars becomes a sea disturbed by a tempest.

  “Not that you’d know anything about this kind of thing.” Astrid tries to strike a jocular, buddy-buddy tone, leaning conspiratorially toward him. “Have you—you know, are you inserting tab A into slot B? College days and all, you know—pussy, falling from the sky.”

  “Can we talk about something else?” says Harold, throwing down the pen.

  THREE

  In order to get off the subject of his personal life, or, more accurately, his startling lack of one, Harold goes into a droning monologue about his classes and how he’s doing in them. He gives Astrid the dutiful rundown that other college students might have given their mothers.

  Some classes are going better than others. He’s majoring in English and his grades are best in creative-writing courses, though he has a sneaking suspicion that the professors prefer to reward competence and mediocrity instead of innovation—the A’s he gets may well be backhanded compliments. He is doing the worst in Physics for Poets, the last science course he plans to take at the university if he can help it. Harold is learning to hate science. At first he liked it fine enough, and he pretty much aced the physics concepts that practically hailed from the dawn of time—levers and balls that roll down inclines and other things like that. But later sessions of the course dealt with more recent, abstract subjects—optics; sound waves; E and M—and, like many others who are destined not to make the cut, he lost his way, puzzling over equations that had too many letters and not enough numbers. The only girl in the class runs circles around them all and jeers at the boys when the problem sets are returned. But Harold cannot fathom how white light bends or separates; he wraps his fingers hitchhiker’s-style around imaginary wires, but can’t seem to get their electrons moving in correct directions.

  “The girl in the class says it helps to have an eye for art to get the problems right,” says Harold. “She’s always going on about elegant solutions and symmetry and things like that. And sometimes I see something like that, and I get it, but where I guess I’m supposed to feel some sort of universal awe at the order of things, instead I feel—I don’t know. Nervous. Terrified. Take—take destructive interference. Now here is one of the things I kind of get,” he says, feeling once again the pleasure of having got it. He takes a fresh index card from the stack on the table and draws a wave across it, nothing like a sine wave, but close enough to get the point across:

  “That’s the shape of a sound,” says Harold. �
��But every sound has an enemy. And to discover the shape of a sound’s enemy, you hold a mirror up to it.” Harold scribbles on the card some more, adding to the original drawing:

  “Now take this sound on the other side of the mirror and pull it into your own world:

  “And if you add these sounds together, this is what you get.” Flipping the card over and drawing a straight line across it from corner to corner:

  “Nothing.”

  “Well, what’s so god-awfully scary about that?” asks Astrid.

  “It’s scary because every day thousands of new sounds are born into the world: new machines with new rhythms; new words to name those new machines. Every day there are more sounds, and I’m afraid that, some day in the future, every sound that’s possible to make will be in the world at the same time. And since every sound has its opposite, they will cancel each other out, and at the end of the day there’ll be billions of machines with their percussive rhythms, and billions of words in a language that doesn’t work anymore, and billions of people trying to be heard, screaming their lungs out, hurling their impotent noises into a world so saturated with noise that it might as well be deaf, and dumb, and blind.”

  Now it’s Astrid’s turn to say nothing.

  “All the noises of the world add up to silence,” says Harold. “This world will begin and end in silence.”

  “Can I make a suggestion?” says Astrid.

  “What?” says Harold, his voice cracking.

  “A toke or two would do you wonders. Also: tab A, slot B.”

  But as they’re finishing up their conversation her eye lingers on the diagram that Harold’s drawn, and as they’re settling the bill and leaving she casually lifts the card from the table and slides it into her purse.

  On the front steps of the bar there are triple air-kisses, and empty pleasantries, and assertions that all this must be done again soon. But he doesn’t see her again for the better part of a year.

  FOUR

  A restricted memorandum, written by Prospero Taligent and distributed to the directors and vice presidents of Taligent Industries, September 8, 19—:

  . . . Essentially, I have decided to restructure and reorganize the research divisions of Taligent Industries completely, consolidating them significantly. Most of the workers in these divisions can expect to keep their current positions at their current salaries; however, most can also expect to abandon their current projects indefinitely. From now on, the research divisions will devote themselves entirely to two projects. If our researchers continue to perform at their current rates of productivity, Taligent Industries will be able to deliver the fruits of their labors to the general public within ten to fifteen years.

  The two projects, listed in order of expected time of completion from least to greatest, are:

  1. Next-generation mechanical men, with significant technological advantages over current models.

  2. Perpetual motion.

  1. Next-generation mechanical men. Taligent Industries has made significant advancements in mechanical-man technology in the last ten years (e.g., miniaturization of components, aesthetic realism, and the increasingly convincing illusion of “intelligence”). Though proof-of-concept models have inhabited the playroom of my daughter Miranda for some time now, the company has not released mass-produced versions of these advanced mechanical men to the general public, for fear of a hostile response. Humans still prefer to believe in their own irreproducible uniqueness, and mechanical men with these technological advantages built into their construction could be considered a challenge to this uniqueness.

  The further miniaturization of individual components is of paramount importance. Many of the traits that separate mechanical from nonmechanical men (e.g., creativity, spontaneity, hypergraphia, the development of “hunches,” hyperreligiosity, etc.) are a by-product of untraceable random elements introduced into construction as a result of complexity. In other words, as the complexity of a design increases, unpreventable random elements appear in the construction of each individual device, which manifest themselves in unpredictable ways. (See Table 1: Comparisons of Certain Internal Systems of Homo sapiens, Various Extinct Hominids, and Grand Pianos.) It is expected that a sufficient decrease in the size of each individual component of a mechanical man will lead to a corresponding increase in the number of the possible components that can be contained within one mechanical man, which will in turn lead to an increase in complexity of construction that will (if the failure rate of parts is held constant) give spontaneous rise to the forms of behavior cited above in nonmechanical men. The next-generation mechanical men resulting from these developments will be indistinguishable from nonmechanical men to the naked eye. They will write epic poems in Spenserian stanzas, embrace each other on meeting, sing scat solos, pray, and have an understanding of their own impending obsolescence.

  2. Perpetual motion. As the details regarding the research path that will lead to the perpetual motion machine are nebulous at best, I have less to say about this topic at this time. I am fully aware, however, that a perpetual motion machine would violate the laws of thermodynamics as we presently understand them.

  You will permit me to describe to you an exceptionally lucid dream that I had on the night of August 31 that began with me flying through the air high above this city, propelling myself by spreading my robes wide and quickly waving my arms up and down as if they were wings. After what seemed to be an impossibly long and impossibly high flight, I landed in a giant nest, made from the branches of redwoods and perched on the edge of a cliff whose base was shrouded by clouds. In the nest were several baby origami cranes, who immediately mistook me for their mother and swarmed around me, chirping and begging for food. At this point I removed the top of my skull and pulled from my head a fistful of long squirming worms, which I tossed to them. These they hungrily devoured. One of the baby cranes made from bright blue paper then approached me and unfolded himself at my feet. He was made from a blueprint, for a perpetual motion machine. He allowed me to examine him for several seconds before I awoke. On waking I was not able to duplicate the blueprint in its entirety; however, I have made sketches that bear what I believe is a faint resemblance, and I will assemble a team of engineers, hypnotists, psychologists, sculptors, and psychics in the coming weeks to assist me personally in pursuing this line of research.

  I will soon schedule a meeting of all vice presidents and directors to discuss the far-reaching implications of these admittedly ambitious plans. . . .

  FIVE

  From an article printed above the fold on the front page of the Business section of the Xeroville Free Press, September 30, 19—:

  TALIGENT INDUSTRIES STOCK DIVES AFTER

  SECRET MEMORANDUM LEAKED TO PUBLIC

  Rumors Surface That CEO Has “Gone Insane”

  XEROVILLE—Taligent Industries stock dropped eleven points yesterday as leaked copies of a lengthy secret memorandum, unintended for public viewing, made the rounds of the business district. The memo, confirmed to the Free Press by several anonymous sources as authored by CEO Prospero Taligent, details his plans for the company’s future, which, in all apparent seriousness, include the development of “perpetual motion.”

  SIX

  A transcription from the diary of Prospero Taligent, cylinder #338:

  —History is replete with tales of men who were considered mad in life, their genius only appreciated by the public long after their death. I realize that more often than not genius and madness are indissolubly linked, and indistinguishable from one another to the untutored; still, though, I cannot help but be distressed and saddened by the allegations of my insanity appearing in the newspapers in these past days, for they come earlier than I expected, and with far less provocation. Clearly, someone in the upper echelons of the corporate structure of Taligent Industries cannot be trusted, and house will have to be cleaned.

  Even though I have been granted the dubious gift of a clearer foresight than my contemporaries, the drastic cha
nges in Miranda are still beyond my understanding. She is quiet, moody, and sullen. She has a certain walk, and a new smell that I do not like. Moreover, Caliban tells me that he has overheard men in my employ make certain remarks about her that are too indecent to record here. While I cannot say that her developments over the past few years are entirely unforeseen, I must say that I find them frustrating, and disheartening.

  Recently, for example, she has developed an inexplicable desire to leave the Tower. I myself have not left this place in five years, making my necessary communications with the outside world through press releases and radio interviews. When a man has as much power over his environment as I do, he has to need to leave it; not only can he shape it to resemble anything that exists outside it, but he can alter it to bring to life his fantasies as well. In Miranda’s playroom I can simulate any place in Xeroville or beyond, real or fictional, and fill it with mechanical representations of any living being, past, present, or future. So why should she want to leave?

  But she does. She complains to me that this hundred-fifty-story tower is “cramped,” and that she wants some “fresh air.” She is an adult and not a prisoner here, of course. But if she does finally manage to leave this place, I cannot let her do so without, somehow, watching over her.

  The world sullies, and by keeping parts of it from her, I have tried my best to make Miranda into the best, most beautiful person a human being can be. I am on my way to concluding that, as an experiment, she is a failure. I had high hopes for her as a child, with her delicate mix of innocence and precocity, but in her waning adolescence such a combination of personality traits seems unstable. I made my own mistakes in bringing her up (for example, it was foolish of me to allow prolonged and repeated contact with the child Harold Winslow, despite her need for friendship and the company of a human male of her own age; I should have known that such contact would inevitably lead to an instance of osculation). However, such incidents, no matter their number, cannot account fully for the radical change in Miranda’s behavior and appearance in these past few years. I fear I must conclude that, as a result of several irredeemable flaws in their makeup, it is impossible for even the most beautiful children to retain their inborn, “God-given” beauty into adulthood.