The Dream of Perpetual Motion

  Still, I cannot help but feel a twinge of pity when, walking insomniac through the corridors of my Tower, I come silently across her, face and hands pressed to the glass of a high window, staring at the grids of light and movement in the city below. Darling daughter. Too dumb to know that nothing in this world really matters to me but her.

  SEVEN

  “Students, believe me when I tell you this: everything in the twentieth century is dead. Everything has already been said. Every color of paint has been ground and every canvas covered. Every sculpture has been sculpted and fired. Every combination of notes on every possible musical instrument has been generated and performed. There is nothing new left for you to say. All we have left to us are possible permutations of the building blocks of fossilized ideas and dead sentences.”

  At the front of the classroom sits the newest teaching tool of the Creative Writing department of Xeroville University, the Taligent Industries Critic-O-Matic. Its principal component is a single-occupant sensory-deprivation chamber, a seven-foot-tall glass cylinder with a swiveling steel lid, filled to the top with water. In the cylinder floats a blindfolded undergraduate girl in a one-piece bathing suit with a pleated skirt, who is volunteering for this job to work off a chunk of her university tuition. Electrical nodes are attached to various places on her forehead and body, with insulated wires leading out of the chamber in a bundle through an airtight hole in the lid. The wires terminate in a large machine sitting against the wall, a rectangular metal box featuring several meters with quivering needles, along with the requisite bank of frantically blinking lamps. Rubber tubes jammed into the girl’s nostrils also lead out of the chamber to an oxygen tank. The steel lid has a microphone fastened to it by a cable, so that the machine’s operator can stand in front of the chamber, holding the mike, and speak to the girl floating weightless and limp inside. So, when a student’s composition is read into the microphone, the mass of circuits in the bank attached to the chamber measures the physiological responses of the girl inside; the machine then uses this data to evaluate the text for style and marketability and recommends a grade, thereby saving the class’s teacher from the unverifiability and the inaccuracy of subjective judgment.

  Each of the twelve students in the classroom has on his or her desk a twenty-cent paperbound copy of The Tempest, a bottle of glue, and a pair of scissors. Their assignment is to dismantle and reconstruct: that is, they are to cut words out of the pages of the book with scissors, then, as if they are writing ransom notes, they must rearrange the words into another work that is to “reflect the spirit of the twentieth century,” according to the professor standing at the front of the classroom. He continues to lecture, pacing back and forth as the students busily cut and paste. In the sensory-deprivation chamber, the girl’s long black hair has come loose and swirls about her head, Medusa-like. Her fingertips are shriveling. “Just as every single word has been spoken, so has every single life been lived. In the twentieth century we have no choice but to walk in the footsteps of the dead. What better example have we for this phenomenon than the great Prospero Taligent, who has used this very play you take apart as the source material for the story of his life, just as Shakespeare himself takes his inspiration, or plagiarizes, if you will, from a folktale of a magician and his daughter that is now lost to us? We can see that Taligent has consciously modeled his life after his fictional namesake: naming his adopted daughter Miranda, secluding himself from society, wearing embroidered robes decorated with cryptic symbols in his increasingly infrequent public appearances. . . . What motivation might we hazard for such behavior? I suggest that, like all of us, Prospero Taligent wishes to make a piece of art from his own life, to give a random series of events the comforting shape of narrative and destiny, creating evidence of pattern and predestination in a modern, godless world. An impulse born out of a need to believe in miracles, even though miracles in this world are no more—”

  At a desk in the back of the room Harold’s hands move deftly, ripping pages out of the binding, folding and cutting, scattering random words across his desk: ridiculous thee Sycorax weak i’ Stephano mouth Ferdinand neither a Caliban. He cuts, and he pastes, and he slips into daydream.

  EIGHT

  —Tonight I’m the devil again. Why do they need a human devil when a tin man will do just as well for the job? Still, it pays part of my tuition, so I guess I shouldn’t complain. That day I tripped with the tray of type and all those inverted letters scattered across the floor, under all the desks and machines, the mechanical men slipping and falling on them . . . the boss was mad enough to spit. Hours needed to get them sorted again. Why I’m on the graveyard shift now. Not too much to screw up there. Watch the tin men cast and set the type and cut and bind and stack. All I have to make do is make sure that one doesn’t (gasp) run amok! I don’t know what I’m supposed to do since I’m there alone. Imagine that: tin man clutching me by the throat with its superstrong grip, cramming slugs and backward letters into my mouth with its metal fingers until I choke to death. Like the nightmares that Dad says he has sometimes. I should visit him. So much pain in him now. Everything went to hell after I left. Eighteen. Time to move out: bildungsroman. No, son. Stay. Please. Sit next to me here and we can both stay warm.

  A piece of art of his own life. Prospero. I’ve seen the man in the flesh. But childhood seems like something out of a book now. Miranda. Simple like this kiss. But it isn’t that simple, is it. There’s one thing Astrid was right about, wrong as she often is, deaf as she is to the meanings of things. Nearly done with college and I’m still a virgin, virgin, virgin. My roommate takes a drag from the lip of a drugstore vodka bottle and claims that he hopes to do something with a woman that he’ll later come to regret, but I can’t square his grin and the leering look in his eye with what little I know of regret—partly because those things at which men leer only seem to disgust me, partly because I’ve managed to do so little in life that has any more than a negligible chance of invoking this regret, so dearly sought. I am a virgin, virgin, virgin. The blind-eyed true love that arose between couples that met during their first semester and stayed together ever since passed me by; the drunken fumbling of fingers at bra straps in a darkened corner of a fraternity house continues to elude me. A bleary-eyed pixie holding a glass of swill concocted in a frat boy’s bathtub struts up to me as I stand against a wall; she slurs a flirty greeting; and I fail to say whatever thing in response that would be interpreted in her alcohol-pickled brain as the password. She squints at me in puzzlement, idly lifting her arm to reveal a black patch of stubble in its pit where she’s let her shaving go for a second day, and I am revolted. She sees my grimace and she leaves me alone. I see the callousness with which the big man on campus walks up to a woman whom he’s never met and places his hand on her shoulder as he introduces himself; she giggles because she doesn’t seem to know what else to do, and it makes my gorge rise. And yet if I could speak this secret language of drug-mangled speech and insincere touch. And yet if I did not pray to be spared the knowledge of the shapes and smells of other bodies. And yet if shyness did not rivet my tongue to my palate those few times when I see an unattended woman at whom I can stand to look. I would not be a virgin, virgin, virgin—

  NINE

  “—Winslow.”

  “Mmmmnah. Uh. Wha.”

  “Are you finished? It looks like you have something finished here.”

  “Well, I guess, but . . . it’s not something I really want the rest of the class to hear, I mean, I’ve just been pushing words around, thinking about something else entirely, haven’t been keeping my mind on my work, daydreaming, letting the words arrange themselves—”

  Snatching the sheet of paper up before Harold can grab it. Words are stuck crookedly all over it, along with superfluous crusty blotches of dried glue. “This shyness is something you’ll have to get over, Winslow.” Walking up to the front of the room where the Critic-O-Matic waits. “How do you expect to improve your work without constructive
criticism?” He takes the microphone and, looking at the paper in his hand and turning it this way and that, begins to read. The girl in the chamber stirs:

  —As I hope

  For quiet days, fair issue, and long life

  Which such love as ’tis now, the murkiest den

  The most opportune place, the strong’st suggestion

  Our worser genius can, shall never melt

  Mine honour into lust, to take away

  The edge of that day’s celebration

  When I shall think or Phœbus’s steeds are founder’d

  Or Night kept chain’d below.

  When the professor finishes, the bank of circuits attached to the chamber wakes up. Lights flicker on and off in mysterious patterns. The needles on the meters wiggle crazily back and forth. Buzzes sound in different pitches. Finally, a high-pitched bell rings and a slot in the side of the machine spits out a printed piece of paper, like a fortune cookie’s fortune:

  BRILLIANT! ABSOLUTELY BRILLIANT. A+.

  “Well, Mr. Winslow,” the professor says, peering over the lenses of his spectacles at the little slip of paper, “it seems your work is improving. There’s hope for you yet.”

  TEN

  A mechanical man can compose type at a rate slightly less than that of a veteran typesetter. However, a tin man doesn’t need smoke breaks, doesn’t care about monotony, and doesn’t mind working through the worst hours of the night. This is why typesetting is an ideal task to assign to mechanical men on a press’s graveyard shift, for they can perform it with almost no human supervision (although many other important chores that keep a press running are beyond them). Although human typesetters are in no danger of being entirely replaced by their mechanical counterparts, it is admittedly a great convenience to be able to place a sheaf of typewritten pages in front of a mechanical man when the human pressmen are knocking off for the day (the pages must be typewritten, for mechanical men can’t decipher even a child’s clean block letters; nor can they set type involving musical notations or mathematical equations). Open up shop in the morning, and the type is composed and justified, in the forms and nearly ready to go. A human compositor then looks over the forms for errors, corrects them, and takes them to the press.

  In addition to thirty workers, the Xeroville University Press employs four mechanical men, leased from Taligent Industries. Only two are working under Harold’s supervision tonight; the other two stand in shadows against a back wall as if at attention, the lights in their eyes gone dark. One is setting type, the pinpoint light from its gaze moving slowly from left to right across the page on the desk in front of it, then dropping down to the next line and scanning right to left. A composing stick is in its left hand, and its right, fitted with specially elongated fingers, darts among the irregularly arranged trays of type at its side, placing mirrored letters into the stick.

  When Harold is paying attention to anything at all, he is watching the other tin man, whose job tonight is to melt down some type and recast it into another font. Its hands move back and forth over an array of devices surrounding a bath of molten metal, glowing golden red. Tiny lead blocks with inverted letters carved on them in relief are dropped into the bath one at a time, and the letters twist out of shape and disappear amidst bubbles that slowly rise to the surface and explode, each one releasing the whiff of a lost word.

  The room has a large radio that Harold turns on during his shift, its shape and speaker grille reminiscent of the interior of a cathedral ruin. It is the closest thing to company that he has while he is at work: these low-end models of tin men are not capable of speech, and would not indulge in small talk if they were.

  He sits in a chair with his arms folded, looking at the inert presses with their huge cylinders, at the tin men going quietly about their labors. The radio plays some instrumental pop music, mutters a goodnight and signoff, performs the Xeroville city anthem, and, without taking a breath first, whispers static.

  Harold’s legs splay and stretch out, and his head drops onto his chest. He snores. A string of drool begins to creep out of the corner of his mouth.

  The reversed letters melt into hot nothing, one after another.

  The quiet snickety-snick of slugs dropped in the composing stick.

  “. . . ssssfffello. Hello.” Harold snaps awake whatwhowhat nearly falling out of the little wooden chair. “Hello. Is anyone listening?” A voice. Strangely familiar. Where coming from. Radio. “Anyone. Is there anybody out there. This is Miranda Taligent.

  “Hello. This is Miranda Taligent. I’m a twenty-one-year-old girl . . . woman. I live in the Taligent Tower. I . . . I know that there’s no way for you to talk back to me, but . . . even if there isn’t, I just need to feel like there’s someone out there. Listening.”

  ELEVEN

  The gallery where Astrid’s newest exhibition is premiering is a single room of a dealer’s home, in one of the tonier Xeroville suburbs. The four walls are shining white and completely barren, except for Astrid’s eight paintings, two of which hang on each wall. About thirty people are here to look at the works: some are here to buy; some are here to envy Astrid for obtaining this particular dealer; some (such as Harold) are here who feel obligated to come; and some (like Harold’s college roommate, Marlon Giddings) are here to hit on women. “Women who buy black hair dye off the shelf,” Marlon says, “and dye every single strand of hair the same black color. Women who wear eyeglasses with wire frames in perfect circles. And the glasses slide down to the tips of their noses, and they reach up with a manicured index finger to push them back up. That’s what I’m here for, Harry.” Marlon stuffs an hors d’oeuvre into his mouth without looking at it, and Harold thinks that someone in a kitchen spent time giving that bit of food a singular flavor and shape, perhaps hoping against hope that whoever came across it would be so bedeviled by its intricate appearance that they’d take it home and place it on a mantel instead of eating it. “Hey, Harry,” Marlon says as crumbs fly out of his mouth onto Harold’s lapel, “your sister’s paintings are crap, and you know it and I know it and damned if she doesn’t know it too. I do believe that she is running some kind of clever shyster’s racket.”

  Each of the eight paintings is on a white square canvas, eighteen inches on a side. In the center of each canvas, a phrase is lettered in black paint, so carefully that the words appear to have been printed by machines. They all have the same font, a lowercase lettering without serifs, formed out of simple geometric shapes.

  One of the paintings looks like this:

  destructive interference

  Another looks like this:

  the shape of a sound’s enemy

  A third looks like this:

  new machines with new rhythms

  “Oh my god, with a lowercase g, Astrid,” a young woman wearing a tight-fitting black turtleneck sweater, black slacks, and wire-framed glasses with perfectly circular lenses is saying to Astrid, who is standing about ten feet away from Harold and Marlon, in the middle of a small crowd. “This is just—this is just—oh my god. Among these works I feel as if I am in the presence of the uncanny.” This is Charmaine Saint Claire, one of Astrid’s graduate-student friends. “So young and yet so talented. You have the aura of election about you, Astrid.”

  “You have the aura of election about you,” Marlon mimics, flourishing with his hand while he says it. “Harry, I just found my next pickup line.”

  TWELVE

  “Listen. This is Miranda Taligent. Listen. What am I going to talk about? I know what I want to talk about tonight. I’m going to talk about speaking. I’m going to talk about what the difference is between speaking with someone, and speaking to someone, and speaking at someone.

  “Sometimes when I wander through this Tower, I have conversations with the people that work here, or live here, or work here so much that they seem as if they live here. I say something like ‘Hello’ to them, and then they say, ‘Hello, Miranda,’ and then I say something to them that causes much surprise and the
n their faces light up and then we converse, because there is one of them, and of the other person, and we take turns. But now I’m in a room full of machines, and I speak into a microphone and then my voice has ten thousand mouths. This is an ability that only angels should have, or queens. So if I say ‘Hello’ in my mechanical queen’s voice, you could all say ‘Hello, Miranda,’ at the same time, and here in the Tower I’d be able to understand it, because it would be as if the city has the voice of a giant and the giant is saying my name. But if I say something to you that causes surprise, or even say, ‘What is your name?’ then you’d all say something different because you all have different names and different ways of being surprised and I guess then the city’s giant voice would sound something like ‘Harmahrrmahhamah!’ So I’m not speaking with you, I’m speaking to you because you can’t always speak back, and I have to remember to think about this when I talk, that you all hear the same thing but you are all thinking different things.