The Dream of Perpetual Motion, Page 23

  THIRTY-NINE

  Before the incident that cost him his job and landed his image on the front page of every major paper in Xeroville, Jason Fenman, eighteen years old, was the best pizza delivery boy the Xeroville Famous Pizza Company had ever had in its four years of existence. His two shining virtues were especially strong calves (good for pedaling his bicycle up hills that would have sent lesser delivery boys sprawling to the ground ready to spit up a lung, their shipments spilled in the street and devoured by stray dogs) and a finely honed sense of balance that allowed him to carry his cargo by hand instead of stowing it in the rear rack of his bike, where it’d be tossed around inside its box until it was transformed into an unrecognizable mass of dough and tomato sauce and several varieties of cured meat. By holding the pizza in the air as he pedaled, balanced on a platform made from the splayed fingers of his open right hand, he could compensate for continually changing tilt and inertia with slight movements of his wrist, leaning the pizza a hair to the right when making a left turn, or tipping it a bit backward when flying down a steep slope. Jason Fenman could deliver a seven-topping, extralarge special from downtown to uptown and never have its crust touch the inside wall of its box once. He was a savant.

  Because of his unparalleled pizza-delivering capabilities, Jason Fenman is always given the Astrid Winslow order, whenever it comes through. She orders an extralarge three-topping pizza every other day (pepperoni, sausage, black olives), asking for it to be delivered to the Xeroville University Planetarium, which sits at the top of one of the steepest hills in the city. Jason doesn’t know much about Astrid, except that she’s not a vegetarian. He likes that about her. (Vegetarian pizza gives him the shivers: all the water from those toppings, green and red peppers and onions and broccoli and carrot slices and whatever the hell else those vegetarians eat—what is that stuff, tofu? The curd? Wouldn’t trust that stuff one bit, anything that looks like that has got to have some fish lips and worm ears mixed into it—all the water from those vegetables soaking through the crust, utterly ruining its crispy flaky flavor, unlike the grease from meat, which not only adds flavor but acts as a handy congealing agent.) When he comes to the planetarium’s double doors he knocks four times per instructions and Astrid comes, opening the doors just wide enough to take the box through them (and she doesn’t tilt the box at all when she takes it, notice that, she appreciates an undamaged pizza as much as Jason; they have a common bond, he thinks), giving Jason the price of the pizza plus a 30 percent tip, shutting the doors quickly before he can get out a word other than thank you. She looks beautiful, he thinks, if a bit older than she should, but perhaps that’s just because he’s only seen her for ten seconds at a time at the most. He could be filling in most of the details of her appearance from memories and fantasies. People often do that, he thinks.

  But on this particular evening, the evening that would ruin Jason Fenman’s life, when he made his way up the hill to the planetarium with his three-topping extralarge pizza in hand, got off his bike, and approached the planetarium’s entrance, a neatly lettered sign was taped to one of the double doors:

  It’s unlocked.

  Come on in.

  Astrid.

  Jason thought that was just a little weird at first, then changed his mind: maybe Astrid was finally going to let him see what she was up to in here. It wasn’t unheard of for a pizza delivery boy and his customer to form a casual friendship, or sometimes a relationship that was a bit more intimate. He recalled fragments of the stories of older, more experienced delivery boys, who claimed that sometimes lonely housewives picked up their pizzas topless or asked them to come up to their bedroom to repair a malfunctioning mechanical phallus, but Jason suspected that nothing like that would cross Astrid’s mind. Probably. He suspected that Astrid was some kind of artist, and artists think it’s okay to be naked in all kinds of strange places. You never know.

  So Jason broke the first and most important rule of pizza delivery—he crossed the threshold. He found himself in a short, dimly lit corridor, its walls sparsely decorated with building blueprints and curling yellowed posters depicting paintings of other planets. At the other end of the corridor was the door that let onto the planetarium’s central dome, where the shows would be held when the place was finished. The door was open just a crack, and a brightly flickering yellow light spilled from it, cutting a thin line across the corridor’s floor.

  Jason approached the door and rapped on it four times, sharply. He didn’t like this. The pizza was starting to get cold; he could feel its heat bleeding out of the box through his fingers. Cold pizza meant a stiff tip on the next delivery—bad. “Ms. Winslow?” he said. “Pizza: I got your pizza.”

  “It’s open,” hollered a woman from somewhere deep in the room, her voice distorted a bit by echo. “Just open the door and come on in!”

  Jason took the doorknob to his hand and pulled it to him. It resisted a bit at first, as if something was attached to it from the other side.

  He shifted his grip on the knob, yanked on the door, threw it wide open to a bright light and the sound of applause, and killed Astrid Winslow.

  FORTY

  When Harold opens his eyes, he cannot make the time told by the wall clock square with the lines of light on the wall, shining through the window blinds. Either the clock has stopped, or the earth shifted its orbit while he slept, or he is misremembering the season, or he is still in Miranda’s playroom, burning through time like a fire through tissue paper.

  But he is in his dormitory room, the yellowed posters advertising jazz concerts and movie serials tacked to its dingy walls, his dirty clothes from a week before scattered across the floor, and now he is remembering his escape from the Taligent Tower, his journey back to the university, his disoriented crawl into bed. It’s not four a.m., but four p.m.: he’s slept the clock round. And kidnapped before that. How long has he been gone? Was he even missed? Some sort of manhunt under way, begun when the morning shift came in and saw the damaged press and headless tin men? The whole affair couldn’t have taken more than a day or two.

  Those two men with the silver faces. So familiar. Seen them before—the answer is lodged in his throat and won’t come out. Where? Some time ago—the Tower?

  That’s it. Ten years ago. The camera obscura. And the day he was cradled in the tin demon’s arms.

  One of them thin and scrawny, the other one fat. Like a vaudeville team.

  Talus? Artegall? No.

  Martin. Gideon.

  Taligent’s men.

  FORTY-ONE

  He expects, having lost his virginity the night before, to feel somehow profoundly different; he used to look around at passengers on buses, or at the queues in front of movie theaters, and think that all of those people had knowledge to which he was uninitiated, that all of them but him had done a wonderful thing that animals do. He imagined that the double entendres that peppered romantic comedies and frat-boy boasts were like words in a foreign language that couldn’t directly be translated into his own—he might get the gist of them and know what was being spoken of, but without recourse to the memories that he assumed everyone else in the theater had, they were like describing color to the blind from birth, or music to the deaf.

  But he feels exactly the same as he did the day before, and the day before that. There is a distinct lack of romanticized specialness to his memory of last night’s encounter with Miranda. As he stands naked before the bathroom mirror his body still looks the same; no film of sin sticks to his skin, refusing to be scrubbed off in the shower. His heart is neither light nor heavy. He has not become enlightened.

  When he returns to his room and starts to dress, he notices that the answering device attached to his telephone has recorded a message. The wax cylinder lying in the device’s tray is engraved with grooves from end to end—not just someone saying hey, call me, but a long message. A salesman at best, prattling on about matchmaking services or opportunities for low-interest loans; likely something more inconvenien
t. Or his roommate, Marlon, a drunken ramble letting him know that he’s staying the night with some girl.

  Harold places the cylinder on the playback dowel, drops the needle onto it, and starts to turn the crank. It’s hard to get the speed properly matched, and even then there’s a crackle that obscures a third of the words, due partly to recording technology that seems as if it’s not going to get its kinks worked out until the end of time, and partly to what must have been a bad telephone connection. But it isn’t a salesman who placed the call—it’s a policeman. “Hello. This is Officer—” What is that name? Scythe? Smythe. “Smythe. You may want to—” Unintelligible. “—we think your sister may have—” Unintelligible. “—automatic bronzing. Please call—” Unintelligible. “—no note. We’ve kept everyone out so you—” Unintelligible. “—send someone out to bring you to the planetarium if you need it—” Unintelligible. “—as soon as possible. Thank—”

  The needle slides off the end of the cylinder, and the reedy voice of the cop goes silent.

  It makes sense for the police to call his apartment, he thinks—he’s reassured that someone cares about his disappearance. And maybe it’s Astrid who’s been looking for him and alerted the cops, though it’s hard for him to imagine her being that concerned about his welfare. But fragments of the message don’t quite fit that hypothesis: automatic bronzing; no note; bring you to the planetarium. Strange.

  As he picks up the phone to call the police department, he still can’t make sense of it.

  FORTY-TWO

  But he’s disappointed to find that the police don’t seem to care much about his kidnapping, which is one of the most unusual events to have happened to him in some time—it seems to him that everyone else should be at least as excited about it as he is. In fact, after he’s relayed from person to person upon calling the department, he ends up talking to this same Officer Smythe, who fails to be forthcoming with much of anything at all—though he presumably wears a badge, he speaks in riddles, like a pulp-fiction master criminal. Over the telephone line his voice sounds less tinny—it doesn’t grate against the ear like it does when it’s carved into wax. But there’s still something strange about the way he speaks, as if he’s composing his sentences from beginning to end in close consultation with an editor and a lawyer, and reciting them into the handset fully formed.

  “I am to ask you,” says Officer Smythe, “if you’re well.”

  “I’m fine,” says Harold. “As well as can be expected, considering that I just got back from—”

  “I am to ask you,” interrupts Officer Smythe, “if you made them shove off.”

  “I don’t understand—”

  “I am to ask if you made them shove off,” Officer Smythe repeats, sounding like a hostage reading his own ransom note.

  “Yeah. Yeah—sure I did. You bet. They shoved off. You betcha.”

  “It’s going to be a difficult time for you soon,” says Officer Smythe, his voice becoming slightly more relaxed. “If it could have been managed another way, be assured that it would have been. The timing of this could not be worse.”

  “Officer, I don’t know what—”

  “Where are you right now?”

  “In my dormitory room at the university. Hey, Officer! Hey did I mention that I just got back from being kid—”

  “We’re going to send an officer over immediately to escort you to the university’s planetarium.”

  “What for?” Planetarium? Sure, there’s that project that Astrid’s been working on there, but—

  Smythe pauses, then says in a measured voice: “There’s a crime scene.”

  “A what?” Hey what—

  A pause; a sigh.

  “We need you to identify a body,” says Officer Smythe.

  FORTY-THREE

  There are four police cars near the entrance to the planetarium when Harold and the police officer with him ascend the hill; they are parked at various careless angles, the lights on their roofs flashing blue. Most of the cops in the area are just milling around the place, writing things on notepads and engaging in idle conversation; two of them are brandishing nightsticks, holding back a small gang of hipsters that look as if they’re trying to get inside the planetarium, whose entrance is cordoned off with rope. Harold recognizes one of the people in the crowd—it’s Charmaine Saint Claire, the graduate student he met at Astrid’s exhibition. She is screaming bloody murder at the policeman standing before her. “The visual is essentially pornographic,” she yells, and the cop flinches as her spittle flies into his face. “And how ironic that you with your fetishized uniform are attempting to repress Astrid’s reification—indeed, her potentiation—of the pornographic impulse. But her subversive embodiment of the scriptible will not be stopped.” With her index finger she points at her own eye. “I think the visual,” she shouts. “History sharpens the female gaze; it brings it into being—”

  The policeman with Harold escorts him past Charmaine and her accompanying rabble-rousers and over to the planetarium’s entrance. They both duck under the rope, and another officer approaches Harold, introducing himself as Officer Smythe.

  Smythe nods at the cop next to Harold, and he leaves the two of them alone.

  “I’m really sorry about this,” Smythe says in a low voice. “We haven’t let anyone in since we got the place cleared out.”

  “Thanks,” says Harold, not knowing if that’s the right thing to say.

  “Would you like to go in alone?”

  Does he? “Yes,” says Harold. “I’d like that. I think that might be best.”

  FORTY-FOUR

  He enters the double doors and walks down the silent corridor. The door at the other end is closed tight shut, and an engraved bronze plaque is affixed to it, a polished square four inches on a side:

  ASTRID WINSLOW.

  MUSIC FOR AN AUTOMATIC BRONZING.

  MIXED MEDIA.

  19—.

  Beneath this plaque, a second:

  ARTIST’S STATEMENT.

  Under that, taped to the door by its top, is a spindled, smudged index card with a series of crude waves drawn across it in ink. Harold lifts it to look at its back side: a straight line is drawn from corner to corner. He’d drawn it himself a year ago in the bar in Picturetown, when he wanted to illustrate his limited understanding of destructive interference.

  He lets the card drop and takes a breath, then pulls the door open and enters the exhibition space.

  The door shuts behind him; the lights come up; the sound nearly knocks him down.

  FORTY-FIVE

  An excerpt from an article appearing on the first page of the Arts, Leisure, and Society section of the Xeroville Times, November 2, 19—, entitled, “Astrid Winslow’s Final Work Premieres at Xeroville Planetarium”:

  A cacophony of sound assaults the viewer of the piece when she enters the soundproof, hemispherical dome and shuts the door. Arranged around the inner wall of the dome at precisely measured intervals are twenty-four phonographs with their doors thrown wide, each of them playing a different recording. Each of the phonographs has an apparatus attached to it, a disembodied mechanical arm and four-fingered hand projecting from a black box. The mechanical hands continuously reset the recordings when they finish playing and wind the phonograph cranks to keep them running, and these apparatuses are all powered by an electric generator that sits in a recessed pit near the circular wall. The mechanical hands are synchronized together to make identical movements simultaneously, and the overall visual effect is beautiful and balletic.

  The twenty-four phonographs are all pointed toward the center of the room and are oriented to take advantage of the principle of destructive interference (see sidebar), which Ms. Winslow has used to miraculous effect. Because of this principle of sound, when one stands in certain geometrically defined spots of the floor of the dome, elements of the noise initially encountered upon entry suddenly resolve themselves, the inverted sound waves canceling each other out. It is a most unusual sigh
t to see other viewers of the piece drifting through the exhibition space with their eyes closed, letting their feet direct them to the spaces in the chamber where the volume suddenly dips, revealing a simple repetitive melody played on a wind instrument, or a looping series of whispered phrases in a dead language.