The Dream of Perpetual Motion, Page 29

  Perhaps you know the kind of man I am, dear imaginary reader. I have never felt as if I have known anyone well. I have never had that sense of instinctive empathy that I am told comes to lovers, or brothers and sisters, or parents and children. I have never been able to finish a sentence that someone else starts. I have never been able to give a gift to someone that they have liked, one that surprises them even as they secretly expected it.

  Whenever I looked into faces and tried to discern the thoughts that lay behind them I had to make best guesses, and more often than not it seemed that my guesses were wrong. And one of my greatest fears in life has been that I might, sometime, receive the call of a damsel in distress, and not know it for what it is—that I might mistake it for an insult or the punch line of a poorly told joke. Or worse, that I would recognize it and fail, miserably, repeatedly, to respond.

  Why did I enter the Tower? (Prospero Taligent, on the roof of the Tower a few hours later, gave me his own reasons. But I’m getting ahead of myself.) It may have been as simple as that Miranda’s message to me was handwritten. The message in it was unique. It wasn’t written by a committee; it wasn’t one of ten million machine-made copies; it wasn’t blaring out the speaker of every radio in the city; it wasn’t printed on the inside of a greeting card in a script choking on its own flourishes and curlicues. It was composed by a single person, for the express purpose of communicating an original message to another, specific person. It was composed with that person, me, in mind. And so few messages like that were left in the world.

  In the middle of all the world’s incessant noise, her message was music, and music was a thing that I’d mostly lived my life without. In the ten years since I’d last seen Miranda she’d come to somehow stand in for all the things I didn’t have in life that were thought to make us human, all the absent music and touch and sympathy; in my mind she lived a separate life apart from her real one, and there she grew more pure and perfect with each passing day. Silly, perhaps, given what’s passed and what’s to come, but if you know the kind of man I am, then you cannot blame me for this, no more than I could blame my father for his addled daily rewrites of my mother’s life before he passed away. In my mind Miranda had become a miracle.

  And if she was a miracle, then for once in my life I could behave as if I still lived in a time of miracles. I could try for once to be the kind of hero that people used to read about in books, leaping chasms or running through flames, rescuing the woman from the tracks just before the train blew by. I’d done it once; I could do it again.

  Granted, I’d never touched a gun in my life, or even a knife outside a kitchen, and heaven knows I didn’t have a killer’s instinct. But I had language—that could be my weapon. I saw myself forcing my way through the Tower’s obsidian doors with a dirge for a sword and a sonnet for a shield. I’d hurl one-liners at Prospero’s guards that would cripple them with laughter, and once I reached the villain himself, I’d vanquish him with a spirited and rigorous philosophical debate that would last till sunrise, at which time he would willingly hand the girl over to me and commit an honorable suicide.

  Then I would take Miranda somewhere, I don’t know where, some place where there weren’t machines, and I would write lovesongs for her, a different one each day. Each one would have a new melody, and their rhymes would never be forced; every time I sang one to her, she would understand just what it meant; every morning I would wake before her and read her face as she slept, and I would know her thoughts and feelings with absolute certainty before she opened her eyes.

  And at my command the woman would assume the age that I wished her to be—thirty, or twenty, or ten. At thirty we’d talk of higher things and make each other wiser; at twenty we’d strip off our clothes and tangle together a half dozen times a day; and at ten she would take me in hand and resurrect those things in me that had been dead for so long that I’d even forgotten they existed—when we’d finished with each other, I’d use her eyes for mirrors and I’d see a boy’s wide eyes staring out of my own face. Her touch would give me the thrill of a child riding a roller coaster for the first time, and the meanings of the words she spoke to me would always be beyond doubt.

  Of course, it bears mentioning that by then I had finished off more than half of the bottle of Scotch, and I was good and drunk.

  INTERLUDE

  aboard the good ship chrysalis

  —we don’t have much time left, do we?

  I have a recurring dream: it goes something like this. I am standing at the base of an obsidian tower that rises out of a field of newly mown grass stretching to the horizon in all directions, crosshatched patterns of light and dark green making it into an infinitely large chessboard. Unlike this dream’s other variations, no crowd is waiting to watch the woman fall. There is only me, looking up at the queen dancing drunkenly along the edge of the roof in a bloodred gown.

  Now the wizard appears, standing behind me, whispering in my ear. “She’s going to fall,” he says. “And even though you have seen this death in uncounted previous dreams, it will still be the most horrific thing you have ever witnessed in your life, and it will be the stuff of nightmares for years to come. Let me give you a mathematical demonstration.”

  The wizard waves his hands and mumbles something in the back of his throat, and a chalkboard in a weathered wooden frame materializes in front of me, accompanied by a burst of sparks and the quickly disappearing sound of a harp. The wizard, who wears a pointy purple hat and a robe decorated with golden stars and moons and comets, scurries over to the chalkboard, trailing his improbably long white beard behind him, and draws a rough diagram of the tower, and a long curved arrow going from the roof of the tower to the ground, depicting the trajectory of the queen’s body once she commits to suicide. The queen is a faceless stick figure atop the tower, with a sawtooth crown and a hollow triangle standing in for her hips and thighs. “First she has to fall half the distance between the tower’s roof and the ground,” he says. “Then she has to fall half the distance that’s left. And then half again. And so on. She has to fall past an infinite series of halfway marks, you see, stretching in front of her like all of unspent time. So although you’d be inclined to think that she’d dash her brains out on the ground a few seconds after she jumped, in truth, she will perpetually fall, but she will never reach the ground. And you will have to stand here and watch her fall (tee-hee) forever!” The wizard seems to think that this is all very funny. On the roof of the tower the queen briefly loses her footing and almost slips off, but after frantically windmilling her arms she goes back to precariously traipsing along the edge. “You can save her,” the wizard says. “All you have to do is erase the drawing of the queen on the chalkboard and draw yourself in her place.”

  He hands me a piece of chalk, and with my open hand I rub out the woman’s image, turning it into a smear of white, and draw a male stick figure in its place. There is a flash of light as I finish the final stroke, and more sparks, and the harp, and maybe a choir of girls performing a little ditty. And I am standing on the roof, where the woman was. But instead of my own clothes, I am wearing the queen’s red gown, and no matter how hard I try to will myself back to safety, I cannot stop myself from stepping over the edge.

  The wizard is striking the same deal with the queen now, who stands where I once stood, wearing the suit and hat that I once wore, her long reddish gold hair spilling out from beneath the fedora’s brim. It occurs to me that this could go on forever, this switching of names and identities, each of us perpetually rescuing the other. There is not much time left for me; my feet are carrying me too close to the edge. “But if he falls forever, and never hits the ground, then that means he’ll never die,” the queen says. “So the best way for me to show my love for him is to let him fall, and grant him immortality.”

  Then I step off the roof. I always wake up just before I hit the ground.

  FIVE

  the dream

  of perpetual

  motion
/>   ONE

  Girls are angels of goodness and light. Boys are demons with malice and spite. And little girls get marriage plots and tales of spiteful stepsisters to fuel their fantasies of adulthood. But the stories that men tell their sons are stories of men with weapons, standing alone in places where men do not belong. And so, with his dagger clenched between his teeth, he swam into the mouth of the giant whale. And brandishing the great sword he charged into the cavern, where the dragon lay sleeping atop his pile of gold. And he lived for five years among the merfolk that whiled away their days in a city of ivory beneath the waves, and he took one of their women for his wife.

  When I was a child and I listened to my father as he sat behind his desk and made his little dolls, before everything happened with the Taligents and before my sister’s suicide, the stories he told me of the past age of miracles made it seem as if every single boy who grew up in those days was a hero at some point in his life. I never knew whether any or all of the things my father said were true or false, but he had me half-believing that schools of giant fish would swim up to the shores of seacoast towns back then, beaching themselves and opening their mouths wide in invitations for exploration, as if they were patients at the dentist’s office. Looking back on it, I’m sure that he looked at me and felt that, in this age of machines and skyscrapers, I never had a chance to be young, in the way that he did. Even in Miranda’s playroom I never had that child’s thrill of feeling myself in mortal peril: any monstrous fish we might have found there would have obligingly kept its jaws agape until we’d gotten bored with dancing jigs on its tongue and prodding at its molars.

  But when I made my way through the mob that crowded the city streets and finally set foot in the rapidly emptying obsidian Taligent Tower, in its cavernous central lobby filled with the descending pitches of thousands of machines winding down, I felt as if I’d stepped into one of those stories of supermen conquering forbidden fictional spaces, and even through the haze of my drunkenness, even running off four hours of sleep in the past twenty-four, I felt young. It is nice enough to be a child, but it is far rarer, and much more precious, to no longer be young, and to truly feel young again.

  TWO

  And so the young hero charged into the tower, to save the woman and the world with her. And on his last journey to vanquish the dastardly villain he heard the tales of three storytellers who lay in wait, all of whom had been touched by the woman he believed he loved: the master of the boiler room; the portraitmaker; and the beast.

  Listen.

  THREE

  The lobby was filled with hundreds of people running in dozens of different directions: panicked employees attempting to escape from the building with sheaves of documents clutched in either hand; young secretaries in high heels and ripped stockings struggling with boxes of filched office supplies; a gang of silver-faced men dressed like Artegall, pushing through the crowd with fire axes at the ready, looking for something to break; people who had stumbled into the Tower from nearby streets just to observe the rioting and get a secondhand adrenaline rush. The building’s security guards were present in the crowd, but there were not nearly enough to keep order; whenever I was accosted by one, I’d show the security pass that had been in the courier envelope I’d received that morning, and the guard would glance at it for half a second, send me on my way with a nod, and hassle someone else. Nightstick-wielding policemen in sharp, deep blue uniforms were already starting to trickle into the lobby, though there weren’t yet enough of them to lock the building down. I figured that it would be prudent to make my way up to the 101st floor of the Tower, rescue the girl in some suitably valiant fashion, and somehow bring her out of the building before there were too many authorities to stop me. I felt young. I felt like I could do this.

  I made my way toward the bank of elevator cars at the rear of the lobby, taking a swig of whiskey and trying not to let all the sounds in the place get to me. There was the noise of all the building’s dying machines; of the mob at the Tower’s doors, pushing their way inside behind me; of the throng of employees inside the hall; of an engineer who cradled in his arm a large folder stamped SECRET in bloodred ink, screaming technical data at the top of his lungs; of a shirtless toothless urchin in overalls, weaving quickly between the legs of all the adults, barking nonsense and banging a pair of cymbals together as if he were a windup tin monkey.

  When I reached the elevator door, one of the false tin men was standing there as well, resting the handle of his axe on his shoulder like some kind of lumberjack, waiting for the elevator to reach the lobby and the door to open. “Hey there!” he said to me as I stood next to him to wait, his white teeth glimmering in a shining silver face.

  “Hello,” I said.

  “Nice night, isn’t it?” He motioned at the mayhem going on around him, at the lobby full of noise. “The new forebrain components will be composed of a nickel-platinum alloy!” yelled the engineer. “Capable of withstanding a Beaumont pressure of two hundred pounds squared per square inch squared!” “Yah yah yah!” screamed the urchin, banging his cymbals for all he was worth. “Yah yah yah yah!” Then a deep voice came out of the ceiling, heralded by the earsplitting whine of speaker feedback, lent an echo by the hall’s acoustics: “—ughter. Darling daughter. My daughter was raped by a god. Transformed into a brute.” His voice trembled with madness. “I thought I’d lost her. I couldn’t recognize her. When she opened her mouth to speak all that would come out of her was the dumb sound of a beast. She had to draw letters in the dust with her newfound hoof to tell me the tale of her altered shape—” The voice suddenly shut off.

  “What brings you here?” said the imitation tin man.

  “I’m here to rescue a damsel in distress,” I said.

  “That’s a nice way to spend an evening like this,” said the tin man. “Noble of you. Me, I’m just here to cause trouble. Hey—I can’t help but notice that you positively reek of alcohol. Got any on you?”

  I took the flask of Scotch out of my coat pocket, and since it only had a couple of gulps left in it, I handed it over. “Keep it.”

  “That’s nice of you,” the tin man said. “You have the Christmas spirit.” He placed the bottle to his lips and tilted his whole head back theatrically, swallowing until it was empty. “In times like this, we have to stick together. Small favors, and all.” He pitched the empty bottle away with an underhand throw, and it went sliding across the floor. “Hey, after you finish doing whatever you’re doing,” he said, “you ought to meet us on the roof of the Tower. A bunch of us guys are making our way up there, one way or another. Splitting up so the cops can’t catch us all. That’s where it’s all going to go down, I think. He’s gotta be up there, I think—the old man, getting his ship ready. I don’t have any intention of letting that happen, you know? You just heard what he said? The man is clearly stone-cold crazy.” The tin man slung the fire axe off his shoulder and thwacked its handle in his open palm. “I think this will have something to say about the matter first. If you’re feeling the way we do about this, maybe you can help us out—what do you say?”

  A policeman barged out of a crowd of people and came toward us, waving his nightstick in the air. “Hey. Hey, you two.” We turned, and while I protectively showed him the entrance pass to the Tower, the tin man merely smiled, not even dropping his axe.

  “You,” the cop said, pointing his nightstick at me, “you got ID: you’re okay. You,” he said to the tin man, “look here. We can’t have you guys running around in here like this. How would that look, if the cops just started letting vigilantes run around in the place willy-nilly, huh? Even if maybe some of these cops, or maybe even just about all of them, wouldn’t mind if some of these vigilantes happened to make their way to the roof of the building, where some rich crazy evil genius is almost ready to take off in what from all appearances is some kind of death-dealing zeppelin, and said vigilantes happened to sink a couple of axe-heads into this guy’s skull. After this is over there’s going to be
an investigation, the whole works. You know? People are going to get subpoenaed; people are going to ask questions. The force will be under the microscope.”

  “Sure,” the tin man said. “I get you.”

  “All I’m saying,” the cop said, “is that if I were a vigilante, running around this place, and not that I approve of such behavior, personally, I think it’s despicable, I think somebody ought to arrest you guys—I wouldn’t take the elevator up to the roof, like this guy. I’d take the fire stairs, over there, which seem to have somehow been left unattended by a couple of security guards, who I may or may not have had conversations with about the evening’s exciting events, and who may or may not exactly mind if their employer, who is the crazy genius I just mentioned, befell some kind of mishap. Okay? See the guys headed over that way, dressed like you? They know that by taking the stairs, which no one’s watching, they’re unlikely to run into hassle, since they don’t exactly have passes like this guy, right? Maybe it’ll take a long time to climb those flights, but I’m hearing, from the same security guards who would never cut it on the force because they are carelessly letting crucial information slip, that this guy’s scheduled time to take off is in three hours. So you’ve got time. Not that I approve of you going up to the roof of the building just as fast as you can make it and kicking every bit of ass that you can find to kick, especially if it is the ass of a crazy genius. You guys oughta go home and wipe that stupid paint off your faces and let the law take care of this.

  “I hope I’ve made myself clear, that I don’t appreciate this vigilante business,” the cop said, tapping the tin man on the shoulder with his nightstick. Then he walked away.

  “Well,” the false tin man said to me with a sigh as the elevator doors opened, “I’ve got a hundred and fifty flights to climb. I may as well get started.” He still seemed to be in his unusual good humor. I stepped into the car and pressed the button marked 101, and as I looked at the silver-faced man he lifted his hand, as if in benediction.