The Dream of Perpetual Motion, Page 26

  It was quieter here, so Melinda (or Melissa) and I could talk without shoving our lips against each other’s ear. “What do you do?” she said to me.

  “I’m in publishing,” I said, leaving it at that. “What about you?”

  “What do I do?” she said. “I fail. I get red marks on report cards, letters of the alphabet you haven’t ever even seen—they only show up when you’re spelling the most obscene swear words. I can wither plants with a touch. I can’t follow the simplest directions even if they’re tattooed on the insides of my eyelids. Which is to say that I’m forever unemployed. I fail, is what I do, and then I spend my nights spinning on barstools and flirting with only the most handsome men.” She tilted her head again and flashed an impish grin.

  A waiter came by and asked us if we wanted drinks. “Gripe water,” M. said, “and he wants gripe water.”

  “I don’t—”

  “Oh for God’s sake take off your skirt,” she said. Then to the waiter, two fingers extended: “Trust me, if he doesn’t drink it, it’ll get drunk.”

  “Understood,” said the waiter, and drifted off.

  We performed the act of conversation, rather than conversing—neither of us was meant to be left altered by what we said to each other, since we were merely marking time. We mostly discussed the recent events of radio serials—like most modern people, we no longer bothered to make the distinction between events in real life and the dramas of fictional worlds, and so the cliff-hanger that inevitably, reliably ended the hour held just as much or more importance to us as the newspaper that usually went from doorstep to garbage bin unread, and we speculated about the future lives of the characters that populated decayed mansions or desert isles as if they weren’t inventions of other human minds. As M. chattered she slid her chair closer to me, and I held her small, short-fingered hand in mine, gently sliding my thumb back and forth across its back. The waiter brought our drinks and we downed them directly (“Good man,” she said, pounding me on the back, “getting rid of your skirt and your girly pink panties”), then we returned to the dance floor.

  Now my limbs were weightless; now my joints had turned to rubber; now my inhibition was gone. Parts of the floor were packed so tightly that dancing could only consist of little more than a constricted movement of the elbows. M. and I ground against each other as if we were ill-fitting jigsaw pieces determined to jam together, even though one showed sidewalk, the other sky.

  I was almost there. I was almost to the point where, for a few moments, I’d be able to forget the one failure of my life to which all the smaller failures of this other woman’s life could not compare. It was long past midnight, and time to cut deals. Soon we would strike a speechless bargain, with a long slow gaze copied from the third act of a romantic comedy, or a comically leering wink, or a hand slid surreptitiously beneath a shirt to caress the bones at the base of the spine. She would tacitly allow me to let her face and body stand in for those I saw in a recurring dream of someone else, and I would perhaps unwittingly do the same for her; I would wake the following morning and see, outlined beneath the sheets, the shape of an unfamiliar shoulder, and though I’d be revolted by it I’d remember that, for a few moments a few hours before, I’d almost been there.

  But that was when the music went wrong.

  We felt rather than heard it at first, an arrhythmia creeping into the beats that made the music increasingly difficult to dance to. One of the four sorority girls had fallen into the embrace of a middle-aged man with a mustache that’d been trimmed to a pencil line sitting atop his upper lip, and she yelped in surprise as he clumsily stepped on her open-toed shoe. A couple, drunk out of their minds and mock-rutting in a darkened corner, paused to gaze around them querulously, their eyes glazed. The pornographic film began to jitter in its projector, the nude woman’s image stretching and smearing into abstraction.

  M. paused, drew her arms from around my waist, and looked up at me. “Something’s not right,” she said. The music was even more offbeat now, and through it we could feel the trembling of malfunctioning machinery beneath us, of gears about to become unthreaded and belts about to snap.

  It was then that I looked over M.’s shoulder and saw another dancer scream as the panel of glass he stood on shattered. He tried to clutch at anyone within his reach as he fell, but a moment later he was caught in the conglomeration of machines that lay under us, seemingly unable to extricate himself no matter how much he twisted and writhed.

  As the nearby dancers cleared a space around him, I watched him sink deeper, hollering and fumbling as if mired in quicksand to the waist; then I looked down past my own feet. If it could be said that tin men have minds to go mad with, then the tin musicians beneath us were going mad. One with sledgehammers for hands had given up bell ringing in favor of bashing in his own misshapen skull; another was scrabbling at the glass above it, and I could see a crack appear in a nearby panel as a xylophone bar was hurled against it from below. The massive percussive machine beneath us was flying apart, arrhythmia racing through it now like a contagion, and I began to sense even through my drunkenness that all of us here in the club were in danger.

  But it was the harsh, blinding lights coming up in the club that made everyone start to panic. I could hear the voice of someone attempting to sound authoritative, telling us to stay calm and stand where we were, and that repairmen would be handling this directly, but at that moment another pane of glass exploded upward with the loud pop of an expiring light-bulb, scattering shards everywhere. A snare drum with a ruptured head flew out of the new hole in the floor, catching a young woman under the chin so hard that she bit down on her tongue and collapsed, her eyelids fluttering.

  “Stay calm,” the voice of authority pleaded, “will you all please stay calm,” and the pencil-mustached man bodychecked his dance partner, sending her sprawling as he ran toward the single exit, shoving people out of the way. That started the stampede. As the dance floor’s panels began to fracture more quickly, M. and I found ourselves swept up in a mob whose members had become bereft of their sense of honor and self. They shoved and swore and bit, their eyes all fixed on the single exit door. Slivers of glass rained down around us, catching and refracting the light; broken glass crunched beneath our feet.

  Suddenly I couldn’t move—M. had tightly gripped me around the waist, and just keeping my footing in the midst of the panicked herd of dancers was hard enough. She buried her face in my chest. “I can’t,” she said incoherently as I tried ineffectively to drag her along with me. “I can’t. Just—” I could see a series of cracks spiderwebbing through the pane beneath me as a malfunctioning mechanical man (with four arms welded onto its torso in addition to the standard two) pounded on its underside, its six steel fists banging out stuttering tattoos as sparks spilled out of its joints. Nearby a bawling girl lay prone on the floor, shielding her head with her arms and frantically kicking with her legs to save herself from being trampled.

  M. looked up at me, her lip quivering, her face tear-streaked. In the former darkness of the nightclub it had been impossible to determine her age—a best guess would make her one of those small, pixielike women who seem forever seventeen—but in the bright emergency lights I could tell that she was forty years old if a day. The creases at the corners of her eyes told of too many nights spent squinting them shut as she sobbed; the twin divots between her brows had been hewn there by the frustration of endless failure. And still there was something in her face that hadn’t yet been spoiled, something that reminded me of someone else, a pure girl I’d once known who’d grown over twenty years of reimagining into a pure woman I dreamed of every single night—falling from the tower; calling out to me.

  “Just—” she said. “I can’t—oh God—”

  A steel hand burst through the glass that held us up, latching onto her leg and starting to drag her down. I struggled with her for a moment as the rest of the pane we stood on began to fracture and fall away.

  But I was not good enough
. You should understand this about me—I am not a hero; not one to tap unknown reserves of courage; not one to rise to circumstance. I am the understudy who chokes on his lines when he is forced onto the stage. I am never, ever good enough.

  So I let her go. I jumped to the adjacent and still solid pane of glass, and even as I made the leap, the panel I’d been standing on disintegrated. M. was being drawn down into a roiling mass of broken musical instruments and machines gone haywire. The six-armed tin man gripped her legs with four of its hands, while its fifth and sixth banged on her back with a pair of drumsticks. She stretched out a hand to me—Save me—and even though I couldn’t (or didn’t care to) reach her and we both knew it, I did the same, thinking it good manners at the least to make the gesture.

  And then, not being good enough, not even good enough to spit out the halfhearted apology lodged in my throat, I turned and ran from the club like all the rest.

  “Howard!” she hollered as the machines pulled her under. “Howard!” At least she didn’t remember my name, either.

  THREE

  A light snow was falling as I found my way out of the club, melting as soon as it touched the concrete. A pair of fire trucks were parked at the club’s entrance, though there was no evidence of flame; they seemed to be there out of either caution or boredom, and most of the firemen were lazily smoking cigarettes and critiquing the outlandish appearances of some of the escaped clubgoers. A few flying police cars banked in slow figure eights above the crowd, pinning random revelers with their spotlights. A few men in crisp white jackets with bright red crosses on their backs climbed out of the back of an ambulance, pushing their way past the last of the escapees to see to whatever wounded remained inside.

  I didn’t stick around. The snow began to fall more heavily and stick to the sidewalk, so I headed to the nearest subway station, walking down the middle of the empty street. If I wasn’t going to take a woman home that evening, the next best thing would be a good night’s sleep. At first a police car left the formation above to follow along with me, illuminating me with its light from behind as if I were an actor striding onto a stage to deliver a play’s central soliloquy, but after I turned around and cheerfully waved up at it, it peeled away after flicking its headlights to rejoin the rest.

  The subway car on which I eventually found myself was nearly empty—a few ne’er-do-well late-night partygoers like myself, who’d try to squeeze in an hour or two of sleep before heading to their offices and impersonating responsible citizens, along with a couple of service types who had started their day an hour before, who would soon begin all the tasks that mechanical man were still too expensive or too ill-suited for, stoking the boilers and firing the ovens that made the city run.

  This is the time of night just before sunrise, the time that no one owns, and if you have found yourself awake and alone during this time, out in the city, outside the safety of the walls you call your own, then you know me, and you have felt what I have felt. This is the hour of the night it’s best to sleep through, for if it catches you awake then it will force you to face what is true. This is when you look into the half-dead eyes of those who are either wishing for sleep or shaking off its final remnants, and you see the signs of the twilight in which your own mind is suspended.

  At any other time it’s better. You can do the things you feel you should; you’re an expert at going through the motions. Your handshakes with strangers are firm and your gaze never wavers; you think of steel and diamonds when you stare. In a monotone you repeat the legendary words of long-dead lovers to those you claim to love; you take them into bed with you, and you mimic the rhythmic motions you’re read of in manuals. When protocol demands it you dutifully drop to your knees and pray to a god who no longer exists. But in this hour you must admit to yourself that this is not enough, that you are not good enough. And when you knock your fist against your chest you hear a hollow ringing echo, and all your thoughts are accompanied by the ticks of clockwork spinning behind your eyes, and everything you eat and drink has the aftertaste of rust.

  FOUR

  When I was still earthbound, in the days before I boarded the zeppelin, the most precious moments of my life were those fractions of seconds between the moment when I awoke each morning, and the moment when I realized that I was awake. In those halves of seconds the world was silent, and I was at rest. The patterns on my bedroom ceiling had not yet resolved into meaninglessness, and the incessant sounds of the world’s machines had not yet intruded upon my consciousness. But after no time at all, a second at the most if I was lucky, they’d come: the drone of the air conditioner humming harmonically through a rattling vent; the arrhythmic rapping of the headboard of my neighbor’s bed against the wall behind my head; the honks of hundreds of horns from automobiles ensnarled in gridlock on the street twenty floors below; the intermittent, high-pitched wheedling buzz of a flying car whizzing by my window. If you add up all the fragments of time when I was deaf to the noise of the world, these halves and three-fourths of seconds between sleeping and waking, over my life they might come to about ninety minutes. For an hour and a half of my life I have been allowed glimpses of the silent world that once was, before the machines came, when there were still miracles.

  On this particular morning, which would prove to be the last in which my feet touched earth, the sound that ruptured the bubble of my pastoral semiconsciousness was a sharp knocking, which at first seemed unfamiliar. Coming up out of the dark, still hungover from the night before, I tried to locate it in the catalog of ambient noises that make up the din of the world, but I couldn’t place it: three sharp irregular raps, then a pause, then four more. Then, wide-awake now, I had it: someone was knocking on the door, and the noise was magnified by the hollow metal door of my studio apartment.

  The knocking at the door grew louder, and the man on the other side was saying, “Sir! Harold Winslow! I got an urgent message! You gotta let me in! I got an urgent message, and also, I’m fuckin’ bleedin’ all over the place out here! I got an urgent message!” I stumbled out of bed and took a couple of moments to clear my head; then I shuffled over to the door of my apartment and opened it.

  On the other side, with a large cream-colored envelope in his right hand and a shallow gash running the length of his left forearm, stood a winged messenger.

  I had no idea what message anyone would have for me that would actually require a private, human courier. He stepped past me into the threshold, a wiry, pale, stubble-headed, sweat-covered man wearing a close-fitting cap with red cardboard wings affixed to either side with cellophane, a black short-sleeved shirt and short pants, and red leather boots with more cardboard wings glued to them, just above the ankles. “Fuck me,” he said, gesturing at the wound on his arm. “Jackass cut me. With a broken beer bottle. Comin’ at me all screamin’ aaaaah! In the street down below. It’s the fucking end of days, friend. You got anything I can put on this?”

  The only thing I had on hand to bind the wound was an old threadbare tie, which I retrieved from a drawer and began to clumsily wrap around his arm. He was seated on my unmade bed, still holding the large envelope. “That’s unusual,” I said to him. “This is generally a safe neighborhood.”

  “There ain’t no safe neighborhoods this morning, sir,” the courier said. “The whole city’s been a giant scream since sunup. I tell you when Taligent lowers the boom he lowers it but good. Oh, yeah,” he said as I finished bandaging him. “Here’s your message. Extra-urgent and paranoid-secret. Given to me by double blind. I don’t know what you did to rate that. And I don’t even know who it’s from, so don’t ask. And I’m supposed to instruct you not to open it until I’m off the premises, and that’s what I just did.”

  I took the envelope from him and asked, “What do you mean? About Taligent. Lowering the boom, you said. End of days?”

  The courier looked at me in confusion. “You don’t know? Oh, you just got up. You ain’t turned on the radio or been out of the house yet. The old man is stickin’
it to us and there ain’t nothing we can do.” Lying back on the bed, he ran his hand into the pocket of his pants and began to search for something. “Fleets of Taligent’s flying cars have been dropping these leaflets over the city, all in different colors. They’re stuck in all the gutters and caught in the updrafts. They got people pissing mad and shitting bricks. I never seen anything like it. I wanna try to get out of here.” He pulled out a wrinkled, soiled sheet of paper and began to unfold it. “We’ve been sleeping. Not paying attention to where the power was.”

  He handed me the piece of paper, and this is what it said:

  Citizens of Xeroville!

  Loyal Subjects!

  Happy Days for You!

  I, Prospero Taligent, am proud to announce at long last that the perpetual motion machine that has been in development at Taligent Industries for the past ten years is now complete. It is, and will be, the only one of its kind. The completion of the device signals the time for me to harvest the ripening fruits of my own boundless genius. As of tomorrow, I will assume the title that now belongs to me by right, of Ruler of the Known World.

  As you read this, the perpetual motion machine is being installed aboard a specially fitted zeppelin, the good ship Chrysalis, moored on the roof of the Taligent Tower. Once the installation is complete, my daughter, Miranda, and I will leave this earthly sphere and spend the rest of our days among the clouds. The airship contains a completely self-sufficient environment, with a self-perpetuating food and water supply large enough for two, so that our feet will never have to touch this filthy earth again. When we pass over the city at regular intervals, you will have the opportunity to offer your tributes to me in the form of poems, gold ingots, or self-abasement. I will also use the flying cars you see above you to distribute leaflets printed with written commands, which you will cheerfully obey in the interest of your own happiness and self-betterment. Occasionally, for my personal amusement, I will relieve hundreds of you of the tiresome burden of your lives at a single stroke, vaporizing you instantaneously with the batteries of death rays with which my zeppelin is liberally equipped.