The Dream of Perpetual Motion, Page 3

  EIGHT

  Now I’m home.

  It’s the magic hour, and the setting sun’s rays shine through the yellow-green liquid in the drip glass. I hold the glass up to the window, carefully pouring a small measure of water into the receptacle in the top. The water begins to fall drop by drop into the absinthe in the bottom of the glass, making ripples and swirls, slowly changing its color from a translucent deep-water green to an opaque and opalescent white.

  NINE

  Nervously flicking his gaze into his rearview mirror again and again, the shrinkcabbie sits in the middle of dozens of gridlocked cars, stuck on the main drag out of the city. He’s edgy because he likes to be out of Xeroville when the sun sets.

  His glove compartment is stuffed to the point of bursting with hundred-dollar bills, each with a story stuck to it. The shrinkcabbie has not spoken a single meaningful word today: he has only listened. The years of diligent, rigorous training that shrinkcabbies get, that you hear about in the radio commercials: that’s a hoax. Shrinkcabbie training takes all of a week, a crash course in which they’re taught the fine art of paying attention: how to throw reassuring glances in the rearview mirror while driving, to catch the eyes of the fare; how to punctuate the fare’s discourse with encouraging phrases such as “Go on” and “Yes, of course,” and how to modulate the pitch of these occasional utterances so that one sounds engrossed, not bored. Nothing that anyone with a little common sense can’t pick up.

  In his soundproof cab, the shrinkcabbie is isolated from the cacophony of car horns and curses outside. In the automobile next to him he can see another driver beating his clenched fists against the steering wheel, grimacing, the muscles tight in his neck, the veins standing out in sharp relief. The angry driver looks through his window at the shrinkcabbie, sees him looking back, screams something he can’t make out, and makes an obscene gesture with his hand. The shrinkcabbie indulges himself in the pleasure of imagining the man’s jugular vein bursting, spraying the inside of the windshield glass with his blood, drenching the upholstery of the seats. Then he turns away.

  The job is starting to get to him. For ten hours today the shrinkcabbie has driven around the streets of the city, listening to stories from strangers who had tales to tell and no one to tell them to. Not one had a happy ending. Most didn’t have endings at all and couldn’t rightfully be called stories because they were just ramblings, results of futile attempts to make narratives out of a causeless, disconnected series of events that refused to be narrated. . . . Right now the shrinkcabbie would give one of his hundred-dollar bills to hear a simple story with a happy ending, concluding with an edifying moral in the form of a rhymed couplet. He wants to hear a story in which good things happen in threes to women who are poor but beautiful, who have the bodies of adults but the hearts of little girls.

  He glances into the rearview mirror again, looking into his own eyes and fingering the grips of the steering wheel. He looks good. Not great, but good; as well as can be expected. He can do again tomorrow what he’s done today. He will usher the city’s tarnished spirits into his chamber, romance them with attentive silence, be their magic mirror, and spit them back out on the streets with their souls washed snow white.

  It is reassuring to the shrinkcabbie to know that the troubles of his fares aren’t leaving marks on his face. The attrition rate for his profession is considerable. Seventy percent give it up after a year. There is always the threat that someday you might be alone in the car, escaping from the city at night, and that you’ll look into the rearview mirror and see a face that’s not your own. That it will have changed into someone else’s without even the courtesy of serving you notice. And that will be enough to break you.

  The gridlock is breaking now, and the cars around him are slowly starting to move. The cabbie tears his gaze away from the mirror and back to the road in front of him. The sun is descending behind the forest of towers that make up the city skyline. Night is falling.

  TEN

  I have a night-mask over my eyes now, and rubber plugs jammed in my ears to shut out the sounds of machines. I am shuddering in the reclining chair. The glass of absinthe has slipped out of my hand and fallen to the floor, where it has come to rest after rolling in a circle, describing an arc of liquid behind its rim. The sun has set.

  It is not until the room has rotated almost ninety degrees that I realize it is tipping over. By then I’m powerless to do anything about it, and I soundly bang my head as I fall out of the chair and collide with the ceiling. I rip off my mask and look around me, at the flickering lightbulb falling up on the end of its chain, swinging regularly back and forth like a metronome, and at the little boy, dressed in servant’s livery and sporting a satyrlike pair of hooves, casually walking on the ceiling as if it were a floor.

  A small cloud of gnats orbits the lightbulb. One alights on its shining surface and burns.

  I am lying supine on the ceiling, spread-eagled and afraid to move, and the satyr-child stands over me, sneering, showing stained and crooked teeth. “You oughta watch what you drink, friend,” he says. “That stuff’ll make you see all kinds of crazy shit.” He reaches into his vest and, with a flourish, pulls out a gilt-edged envelope with a wax seal and drops it on my stomach.

  “An invitation,” the satyr-child says, and chuckles. “To a dance with the virgin queen.”

  ELEVEN

  And nightfall has come to the greeting-card works.

  The building is nearly silent. Most of the machines are resting, with only an occasional, isolated whir or hum in the darkened corridors. Christmas tinsel rustles in the dark from stray drafts of ice-cold, air-conditioned wind. The building’s struts and columns contract with quiet creaks and pops in the coldness of night.

  And now the mechanical men concealed in hatches and secret doorways come out by the hundreds, creeping on cat feet like burglars or mischievous sprites, carrying huge burlap sacks on their backs. Quietly, they remove the red and green and silver and gold decorations from the walls and ceilings, stuffing them into their bags, replacing them with red cardboard hearts with arrows drawn on them, and long twisting billowing strands of pink crepe.

  And in a stuffy room in the basement of the greeting-card works, a dwarf standing in front of a half-length mirror removes his elf costume, squeezes into a bright red pair of tights, and straps a pair of cardboard cherub’s wings around his naked hairless chest with a belt. A quiver full of arrows completes the outfit. Christmas is over. Tomorrow is Valentine’s Day.

  INTERLUDE

  aboard the good ship chrysalis

  —and forever and forever and forever you and I, turning in circles in the midnight sky. Speak to me and we will trade stories, one for one. Don’t think I don’t know about your sweet little secret diary. Don’t you know it would be so much more meaningful to hand your thoughts over to me than to record them in some worthless book that no one will ever read besides yourself? Speak the first word to me and we’re married; speak a sentence and that marriage will be consummated, and in a short conversation about the weather you and I will grow old together, as we circle the earth in our little sealed-off world forever and forever and forever—

  But it cannot be forever, no matter what Miranda says, or how strongly she believes it, or how often she repeats it. Her father’s last and greatest experiment, the perpetual motion machine that keeps the zeppelin aloft, is a failure. The ship will crash. It must. It is only a matter of time.

  At the moment I have no proof of this. I did once. In the cockpit at the belly of the ship I once saw the altimeter’s counter spinning slowly backward, ticking off our descent foot by foot. But now the altimeter holds steady (even though I still believe that this ship is slowly descending as it circles the earth, falling a certain small distance with each successive circumnavigation), and my evidence is gone.

  I am writing this at a desk in the airship’s observation room made from a single obsidian slab, and through a plate-glass window that makes up most of the fro
nt wall, I can see clouds massed beneath the zeppelin, as if they are the turbulent surface of a dreamed sea. Against the rear wall of the room, standing upright, is the absolute-zero chamber where Prospero Taligent lies in state. I can see him through a pane of glass in the chamber’s door: frosty fingers have combed through his hair and bleached it from silver to white, dangled tiny icicles from his eyelashes like Christmas ornaments, and drawn a mischievous beard and mustache on his naked face to make him look like Old Man Winter. The internment in the cryogenic chamber was his last request. He spoke his last words and asked his last question with bubbles of blood sputtering from his lips, and then he gave up the ghost, as they say. It seemed the decent thing to do to fulfill his last request, since, after all, I murdered him.

  How did I come to be imprisoned aboard this ship, here with my warden’s frozen corpse?

  All in good time.

  —and forever and forever and forever and forever and sometimes . . . sometimes I think it might be good to be young again. Do you remember those timeless days we spent together in the playroom? And when I played the virgin queen for you, and when you and I tried to be we that one last time . . . no. No. I would not trade all the days from those to this to lose what I have now become. I have undergone a transformation. From caterpillar to beautiful brilliant butterfly. Even as I spat blasphemies in my father’s face, cursing him as he worked his magic on me, he said he forgave me, for I knew not what I did. Now I know. And now I believe in him.

  What I remember: looking into the glass-walled womb hanging beneath the gondola of the ship, a mechanical man at the controls, I saw the altimeter’s counter spinning backward to zero, seconds passing before the eye could register the movement, but still going back to zero, one digit at a time. Only a matter of time. The tin man saw me looking down into the pilot’s pit, saw me looking at the dial, and somehow, I don’t know how, it knew.

  The next time I peeked into the control chamber it had ripped open the display panel and was tearing out the nest of wires that lay behind it. Two hours later it had replaced the panel, and the altimeter’s dial held steady. I’m sure the tin man broke it, to eliminate the evidence. I don’t know how it knew, but it knew.

  What Miranda said to me afterward:

  My father built a perpetual motion machine, and it works, and he believed in its perfection. He designed the mechanical men that pilot this ship, and they believe in the perfection of the perpetual motion machine because he designed them to believe in it. And I believe in the perpetual motion machine because, for all my curses, in the end I must always be my father’s daughter. And you alone say that this little world of ours is destined to end, thinking that you have proof in something you call the “laws” of “physics.” And you have the rank temerity to believe that you, instead of I, have not gone mad?

  I have a recurring dream that goes something like this. There is a tower in the midst of a pastoral field of poppies, its smooth obsidian walls reaching to touch the underside of heaven. On the edge of the tower’s roof a woman dances, wearing a glittering crystalline crown. She is light on her feet and flirting with jumping.

  I am in a crowd of onlookers at the tower’s base, all of us jammed shoulder to shoulder. The crowd is made up of young boys, some dressed as girls, some with horses’ hooves and horns . . . they are beckoning the woman to jump. In fact, although I am not aware of it (and I am never aware of it, no matter how many times I have the dream) her suicide is a foregone conclusion. It is this way in dreams: when decisions are being made, they have already been made. One of the boys in the crowd is wearing a dingy, ragged white shirt with block letters painted on it: I SAW THE VIRGIN QUEEN DANCE WITH DEATH AND I SURVIVED.

  Now the wizard appears, a cartoon wizard with a long white beard, wearing a pointy, deep purple hat dusted with glitter and decorated with golden five-pointed stars and stylized comets, with a robe to match. In his hand he holds a wilting stalk of celery. “She’s going to die,” 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. You will have to watch as she hits the ground headfirst, and her skull splits open, and her brains and her blood spatter on the faces of the crowd, and the watching young boys lick their lips and taste the blood on their faces and run to the mangled corpse to dabble at the flesh with their fingers and tear at it with their teeth. She will die unless you speak the word that stops her. This is a magical stalk of celery,” he says, shoving it into my hand. “I have enchanted it so that it will amplify your words and carry them to her ears. Now it all depends on you.”

  So I look up to the sky where the virgin queen is giggling and twirling in pirouettes on the tower’s edge, and I hold the stalk of celery to my mouth and start to speak. The right word will make the miracle come. The woman is toying with the crowd, pulling up her skirts and stretching her bare left foot over the edge, then the right. The cheers of the crowd go louder with each of the queen’s taunts, and so when I speak to the enchanted celery, I can barely hear my own voice, and I am reduced to having faith in the wizard’s magic, hoping that my words are somehow being lifted to the virgin queen’s ears.

  I try hundreds of words, but nothing works. I try several of the words that we use on a regular basis in the greeting-card works, like heart and happiness and love. Especially love. Isn’t that the fabled magic word that fixes everything? Isn’t that the only word that can’t be worn out by its repetition on the covers on a billion greeting cards? In the distant past I remember believing something like that, but when I fill my lungs and shout the word into the head of the celery stalk it sounds so weak and overused and thin, as if I were opening my mouth and saying nothing at all, or reading a tax return or a train timetable. The woman is close to the edge and I am running out of time. First her left foot shoots out, then her right, as if she is testing the temperature of the water in a tranquil swimming pool. But there’s too much noise and all the children are screaming their heads off and nothing I say works. In desperation I start from the beginning: “Aardvark. Aardwolf. Aba. Abaca. Aback. Abacus.” But it’s too late, she gently hops off the edge and down she goes, tumbling end over end and I know what happens next, I’ve seen it before, even when I’d dreamed the dream the first time I’d seen it before, and everyone else in the dream has seen it, too, because they’re uncorking spewing bottles of champagne and pouring overflowing glasses and making toasts with the ease of familiar custom, and as the virgin queen falls from the sky she looks me in the eye and her gaze is full of blame and it says: “Why did you let me die? Why did you not speak the word I needed to hear to comfort me? And why, instead of speaking to me, when I needed you, when you knew I needed you, why in the hell were you talking to a stalk of celery?”

  Miranda. In her hysterically babbling voice I can no longer hear the quiet, gentle girl she once was, who sometimes seemed as if she might never learn to speak at all. She has changed so much since we were young, when I was Harry and she was Miri, before we stretched to fit the names our elders gave us. There was the playroom, and the birthday party, and the unicorn. There were hints and intimations of the shape of things to come.

  Now shapes appear in the fog. Now fragments piece themselves together.

  Now it’s time for a story of coming of age. Who can resist a tale of coming of age?

  Harry and Miri. Sitting in a tree. K. I. S. S. I. N. G.

  First comes love.

  Then comes—

  TWO

  lovesongs for a

  virgin queen

  ONE

  “Miranda.

  “Miranda. Miri. Darling.

  “Wake up, Miri.”

  “. . . mmmf. Hm. Father.”

  “There is a very important day coming soon. Do you know what it is?”

  The girl turned over on her back, rubbed her eyes, and snuggled beneath the quilts and silken sheets to shut out the cold. It is so c
old in the bowels of the Tower, even when Ferdinand, the master of the boiler room, works his crew the hardest. . . . “Soon. My birthday.”

  “Yes,” Prospero said, and stroked his adopted daughter’s forehead. “Soon you will be ten years old, and in recognition of this I will give you two things. A birthday party, with smiles and songs. And your heart’s desire.”

  TWO

  “When I was your age,” Harry Winslow’s father says, “miracles were commonplace. To me my childhood and adolescence seem as if they happened just a little time ago, just on the other side of the line dividing centuries. But you, who cannot remember a world that was not filled with machines, will never be able to imagine the drastic differences between your youth and mine. When I was a child people could fly without the need of jerry-rigged contraptions that were just as likely to explode as not. When I was young angels and demons walked the city streets. And they were fearless.”