The Dream of Perpetual Motion

  “Speaking at someone is when you’re standing in front of someone, but you talk to them like you’re broadcasting on the radio and they’re listening. My father speaks at me most of the time. He says, ‘I am your father.’ And he says, ‘Come here, darling daughter.’ And he says, ‘I believe that this article of clothing will allow you to properly bind your breasts.’ Maybe the next time he speaks at me I’ll just say ‘Harmahrrmahhamah!’ and I wonder what he will think then. Good night.”

  THIRTEEN

  “These paintings are bullshit,” Marlon says. “She just took stuff that somebody said in a bar one night after a couple of beers, painted it on a canvas, and hung it on a wall. Now people are lining up to pay eight hundred dollars a pop for these things just because she’s an ar-teest—”

  “Shush,” Harold says. “Here she comes.”

  Astrid sashays over to Harold with two hangers-on, wineglass in her hand, slightly tipsy, and slips her arm into his. “I want you all to meet my brother,” she trills. “Harold,” Astrid says, motioning to her companions one at a time, “this is Charmaine Saint Claire, and she’s a brilliant graduate student that is positively going to be one of the leaders in her field. I just read this brilliant paper she just published that was on—what was that?”

  “Bodies, and commodities,” Charmaine Saint Claire says. “And the uncanny.”

  “And this,” Astrid says, gesturing at a wiry gentleman wearing eyeglasses and a houndstooth suit in need of pressing, standing a little distance away from the rest of the group, looking slightly uncomfortable, “is Dexter Palmer, and he’s a—what?”

  “I,” says Dexter Palmer. “Um.”

  “He’s a novelist,” Astrid brays, and Harold looks at Dexter, at his right arm rubbing his threadbare left elbow. Harold sees the oaken trunk in the corner of Dexter’s filthy downtown loft with an enormous padlock on it, sees the tens of thousands of pages of handwritten manuscript that fill it. He sees the stub of the tallow candle on Dexter’s rickety wooden desk, purchased for a dollar-fifty at a rummage sale. He sees the short leg of the desk propped up with a seven-hundred-page study of phrenology, printed during the age of miracles. He sees Dexter’s eyes going bad by candlelight, a whole diopter lost with each late night. “Zounds, I am working on my masterpiece,” Dexter Palmer yells hoarsely, disturbing the neighbors. He slings a cup half-full of tepid chamomile tea at the wall, where it shatters.

  “Dexter’s writing a novel,” Astrid says brightly.

  After a few minutes of introductory cross-talk, the group of five splits into separate conversations: Harold talks with his sister and Charmaine, while Marlon ends up with Dexter. To Harold, Marlon looks cornered—Harold can’t hear what Dexter’s saying, but whatever he’s talking about, he’s clearly going on about it at length and in fine detail. Maybe Marlon is getting to hear all about the novel. Every once in a while Marlon will look at Harold and theatrically roll his eyes and sigh, but Dexter, who’s frantically gesticulating, wrapped up in whatever he’s chattering about, doesn’t notice.

  “It’s positively stunning, what you’ve done here, Astrid,” Charmaine says yet again. She turns to Harold. “What Astrid’s doing here is liberating language from the patriarchy.” Is this how critics talk? Harold’s idea of an art critic is someone who wanders through a gallery and waves his arm in the general direction of a painting while saying, “Notice the diagonal.” “Astrid,” Charmaine says to Harold, “realizes that we live in a world in which an enduring patriarchal hegemony has transformed the woman’s voice into a commodity. By re-presenting her own language and giving it a body, as Astrid has done here, she embraces that patriarchal desire to commodify, while subversively reaping the benefits of that commodification. You saw the men here this evening with their wads of money, wallowing in anality—not only were they reading bodies, in that they themselves were bodies that were reading Astrid’s work, but they were also reading bodies, in that they were interpreting and reifying Astrid’s literal and figurative body of work, and in turn attempting to possess and circumscribe her own desirable body. And when they bought the paintings, not realizing that the price tags were themselves part of the work—”

  “They were?” says Astrid. “Yes. Yes, they were.”

  “—you saw their faces, saw that they believed that Astrid was selling her language, saw that they believed her to be a prostitute, a woman who whores out her speech, not realizing the subversively uncanny nature of her work, not realizing that when they placed these embodied words in their homes, they would begin to striate their previously smooth patriarchal spaces.”

  “What does that mean?” Harold says. “I don’t know what the hell that means.”

  FOURTEEN

  “Listen. This is Miranda Taligent. Tonight I’m going to talk about the pet unicorn that I used to have. Have any of you ever had a unicorn? I got one as a gift for my tenth birthday, but now I’m older, and now it’s dead. One day I went looking for him in my playroom so I could go for a ride on him, but when I found him he was lying on his side with a dozen flies dancing on his flank. When I saw him I cried like a little girl. Then I asked my father to take it away, but he was in one of his moods and he wouldn’t do anything about it. He just left it there, and it made my playroom stink. He made me watch it decay day after day until it stopped smelling bad and turned into a skeleton with an ivory horn sticking out of its skull. He said, ‘This is all your fault. You could have had a mechanical unicorn that would have lived forever. But you wanted flesh and blood. You got it: now you sit there and watch it fester and go to dust. And this will teach you not to turn your nose up at immortality when it’s offered to you.’ I hate my father. Good night.”

  FIFTEEN

  “I must say, Astrid,” says Charmaine Saint Claire, “that this is lovely, lovely work. And it pleases me to see women succeed in the arts, much as it pains me beyond words to see women who shamefully take up the patriarchal weapons of Science. This is the subject of my forthcoming article—you see, it is obvious that we have been trained by the patriarchal hegemony to conflate that which is masculine with that which is objective, and since Science itself bears the standard of objectivity, it is also our primary cause of patriarchal oppression. You must have observed the inherent sexist bias in the study of physics, which deals ever so well with rigid masculine solids, but breaks down when it is accosted with the paradox of the feminine fluid, which can shift its shape and become sometimes a solid, sometimes a liquid, and sometimes a gas. You must have also observed the masculine bias in the English language itself, in which women—literally, ‘not-men’—are daily confronted with the terror, unknowable to men, of concepts which they can imagine, but which an inherently patriarchal language does not allow them to express. These women who engage in the practice of Science, and choose to give their lives over to this most supposedly objective and most masculine of languages, do so because they wish to escape that uniquely feminine terror that gives them their identity, instead of grappling with it and mastering it, as you and I have, Astrid. These not-men scientists are held up as models of feminist progression by the untutored, but they are slaves to the capitalist pig-dog patriarchy as surely as if they were incessant baby-breeders and bakers of pies, with strands of pearls about their necks like chains—”

  “Holy shit!” says Harold, looking at his watch. “I do believe I must be going!” He says a hurried good-bye to Astrid, smiles politely at Charmaine Saint Claire, drags Marlon away from Dexter Palmer (who’s been going on and on for an hour now), and hightails it out of there.

  “Christ, I thought that was never going to end,” Marlon says later, in the cab that’s taking them downtown, back to the university. He smells like wine. “This crowd you run with—completely full of hot air. Blabbering on and on about this and that, and half of it doesn’t make any sense, and the rest has nothing to do with the real world anyway. What do you and Astrid talk about, anyway? I mean, I know you’re brother and sister, but you guys are so different you mu
st barely even talk.”

  “We don’t see each other much,” Harold says. “We talk now and again, about her, mostly. The pieces she’s working on, things like that. Thoughts that she has. Every once in a while she mentions this big thing she’s working on these days, some kind of installation in a building that’s eventually supposed to house a planetarium, but somehow when she describes it, I can’t visualize it—I think it’s something you have to see for yourself. She’s been working on it for months now—it’s apparently this ridiculous thing that needs, I think she said, a soundproof room, and two dozen phonographs, and a bunch of other stuff . . . . This showing was supposed to raise the money she needed to finish that thing, but I don’t know how many of those paintings she sold this evening, or what.

  “I’ll admit it—her head’s a little in the clouds sometimes, but she’s not so bad when I don’t spend that much time around her. That friend of hers has got to go, though. You’re lucky you got stuck with that Dexter guy instead of her.”

  “Yeah, but that Dexter couldn’t shut his piehole either,” Marlon says. “I mean, Christ. Artists and writers—let them kill each other off in cage matches; let God sort ’em out.” Then he fell, with a almost audible clunk, into an alcohol-induced sleep.

  SIXTEEN

  From the diary of Prospero Taligent, cylinder #343:

  —A number of terrible things about falling in love make it not worth the time and the effort. But the worst of these is that we can never truly fall in love with a person, but only what we think that person is—more precisely, we fall in love with an image of a person that we create in our minds based on a few inconsequential traits: hair color; bloodline; timbre of voice; preference in music or literature. We are so quick to make a judgment on first sight, and it is so easy for us to decide that the object of our love is unquestionably perfect. And while people can only be human at best, these same fallible humans are more than capable of imagining each other to be infallible gods.

  Any relationship we have with another human being is an ongoing process of error correction, altering this image that we see in our mind’s eye whenever we lay love-blinded eyes on our beloved. It changes bit by bit until it matches the beloved herself, who is invariably less than perfect, often unworthy of love, and often incapable of giving love. This is why any extended interpersonal relationship other than the most superficial, be it a friendship, a romance, or a tie between father and daughter, must by necessity involve disappointment and pain. When the woman you worship behaves as a human being eventually will, she does not merely disappoint: she commits sacrilege, as if the God we worship were to somehow damn Himself.

  The realization that Miranda has deceived me as to her true nature for all these years is the most painful of my life. Of course I know about the radio transmissions: Caliban has told me everything (and I suspect that she knows that I know as well, but for some reason, perhaps to keep up appearances, it’s important for both of us to pretend innocence). Of course it hurts to hear her say these things about me. But to know that this spiteful, ungrateful woman was looking out at me from behind the eyes of my beloved virgin queen, in her coronation gown for her tenth birthday party—this is unbearable. Caliban has never disappointed me in this way. He has always been what he pretended to be—if anyone has been deceptive about his true identity, it’s me, not him. Unlike Miranda, he has never been shy about expressing his desire to murder me; he has told me to my face, and I have seen his notebooks. We both know that he is cordial to me only because he is in a cage and I am his warden, and that he lives at my pleasure. But at least I can say in truth that he has never tried to deceive me.

  Caliban also tells me that he has heard rumors that Miranda is planning to run away from home. Part of me wants to lock her in chains and keep her here for her own good, until she learns to love this place and me; part of me wants to throw her to the wolves and see her come back to me wounded by the world, on her knees to beg for shelter. She never believes me when I tell her how terrible the world is.

  If she wants to leave, then she can go. I’ll have to resign myself to keeping an eye on her from afar, as best I can. And when she comes back to the Tower covered with scars, I will gather her in my arms, as a good father should. And I will read the hieroglyphics in those scars, and use the words written there as the evidence that I may someday need against her.

  SEVENTEEN

  “Listen. This is Miranda Taligent. This will be my last broadcast. I’m leaving.

  “Maybe you’ll see me, on a sidewalk, or in the back rows of a cinema, or purchasing a sundae in an ice-cream parlor. There are other people in the world who look the way that I look sometimes in pictures, but they won’t be me.

  “What do I look like? So that you can say ‘Hello’ to me when you see me.

  “I look just like what you think I look like. I look just like the sound of my voice, which does not lie.

  “I’m leaving now.

  “Good night.”

  EIGHTEEN

  On the increasingly rare occasions when Harold visits his father, who lives alone in the same apartment that the Winslow family occupied when Harold was a boy, the first reminder to him that his father’s life has changed over these past years are the newspapers. Allan Winslow used to fastidiously throw his daily paper away once he’d finished reading it, disposing of it section by section. But now, as Harold opens the front door, piles of out-of-date and yellowed news have to be kicked aside so he can make his way inside: the mess covers the floor, a half inch deep. And not just issues from a single subscription: the pile of refuse includes legitimate Papers of Record, set in small austere fonts, their articles illustrated with stippled pointillistic portraits of men with high collars and grimly pursed lips; and half-sized tabloids, their headlines large, bold, vulgar, and shamelessly speculative, selling an imagined future to gullible readers as if it’s the present day (“INTERSTELLAR TRAVEL BY 1985?” “CITY COUNCIL TESTS NEW DEATH RAY! WE HAVE RESULTS!” “THE TALIGENT PERPETUAL MOTION ENGINE: FACT OR FICTION?”). Earlier issues from several years back are folded neatly, stacked in bundles, and bound in twine, and they sit against a wall. After Allan Winslow’s sight started to go, though, he couldn’t sort them so diligently anymore. Now he opens the paper, squints at the words, gets frustrated, and throws it to the floor.

  “I’m getting worse,” Allan says. Now Harold and Allan sit in the living room amid the sea of old news, facing each other. Allan is in his habitual rocking chair with his feet propped up on an ottoman, its cushion leaking stuffing; Harold sits precariously perched on a small three-legged stool, his fedora clutched in his hands and his knees halfway up to his chest. Harold knows that Allan is looking at him because Allan’s gaze is pointed over Harold’s shoulder, at the stacks of old papers against the wall behind him. “I can only see the edges and corners of things,” Allan says. “Whenever I try to look right at something, it’s like an imp is holding something in front of my face to stop me from seeing it. But if I look at things out the corner of my eye, I can sometimes just make them out. I have to fight my curiosity, though. I can’t look right at you, to see you as clearly as I’d like. Are you growing a little beard?”

  “No, Dad,” says Harold, whose new goatee is in an awkward phase, poorly trimmed and manifesting itself in patches.

  “Good. You’ve always looked good clean-shaven. Beards are for pretentious students. ‘Look at me—I want you to know that I’m a student.’ That’s what a beard says.”

  “Of course, Dad.”

  “And boys with weak chins who want you to think they’re men—they wear beards,” Allan says.

  There’s some awkward silence for a time. Allan’s gaze turns to face Harold, signaling that he’s looking into the distance, in some sort of reverie. Harold thinks about blindness, and wonders how his father’s began. Perhaps just a pinprick in his field of vision, not always there, and easy enough to blink away. But it keeps coming back, becoming larger, growing from a flea-sized dot to a penny-
sized disc. Too large to ignore then, but it keeps getting bigger, the rods and cones in the backs of his eyes burning out one at a time.

  I should stay here with him, Harold thinks. But he doesn’t.

  “The thing I miss the most,” Allan says, looking over Harold’s shoulder again, “is the sound of the voice in my head that used to read the news back to me, when I’d sit silently in the afternoons with the paper, in this rocking chair. You know—that voice that’s always in the back of your mind and loudest just before sleep, the one that replays fragments of old conversations or sings verses of popular songs over and over. When I opened the paper and that voice read the news back to me, I knew that I could trust it, that it would always find the meanings of words that were the most true. When the radio would tell me the news of the world, or when someone else reads the paper aloud—those are different things. As if the way you pause between words or change your pitch to say certain things gives the words a meaning they weren’t meant to have. I know you can’t help it—you have to read things some way. But I can’t bring myself to trust your voice in the way that I trusted my own.

  “Did I tell you that a tube burned out in the radio some time ago? Don’t bother with it—I don’t want to get it fixed. I used to leave it on, just to have sounds in the place. But once it stopped working I learned to prefer silence.

  “All the same, I suppose you can read something to me.” Allan gestures toward the floor. “Just anything will do—all the news is the same to me now, no matter when it’s happened. What’s lying on the top should all be fairly recent.”

  As Harold leans over and roots around through the pile, looking for something interesting, Allan’s mind begins to drift, and he starts to ramble. This happens more often these days—the recurring themes of his monologues are events of the past that he has coated with a nostalgic patina, and his long-gone wife, the mother of Harold and Astrid. He almost never talked about her when Harold was a child, so one would think that Allan’s newfound loquacity on the subject would be an endless source of crucial revelations. One would expect that after each conversation with his father, the son would return home to see in his mirror a little bit more of the ghost of the woman before him, hovering behind his own face as if they are the subjects of a twice-exposed photograph.