The Dream of Perpetual Motion, Page 31

  Nestled among all of these components was what looked like a turntable for a miniature gramophone, with a tiny record atop it and a needle poised above it. As I nudged the metal Miranda aside with my foot, the needle dropped onto the record, which began to spin. “Don’t touch me,” the legless false Miranda said, its voice crackling. “Don’t touch—” It flailed its arms around, pawing idiotically at its scalp; then it suddenly stopped dead.

  I stood there for a few moments to catch my breath; then, with what I hoped would pass for resolve, I pulled open the glass doors and, buffeted by a blast of cold air, I entered the chamber of frost.

  The interior of the chamber was lined with scored and dented plates of sheet metal, and long icicles dangled from its ceiling. Dozens of mesh-covered grates were embedded in the floor, and beneath them whirring fans blew bone-chilling drafts of air into the little cylindrical room. On the opposite side of the chamber stood the figure whose shadow I had seen from outside, and between us, in the center of the chamber, with a ceiling spotlight shining straight through it and lighting it up from the inside, was another statue of Miranda Taligent, larger than life and hewn from a single immense block of ice. In this rendering of her she wore the traveling suit with matching hat that I had seen her in when I rescued her from the abandoned warehouse, ten years ago. The statue was nine feet tall, and with the woman’s hands in her pockets, a slight slouch to her posture, narrowed eyes, pursed lips, and the brim of her fedora riding low on her forehead, there seemed to be some indefinable sense of masculinity in this representation of the woman that I could never recall seeing in the woman herself.

  And the statue was so detailed. How could you carve something with so much detail out of ice? Each individual button of Miranda’s suit was represented, and the threads that fastened the buttons to the fabric. The statue’s eyes had eyelashes. Hundreds of fine, transparent hairs were dusted across its lower arms. Why did whatever artist who made this thing have such an obsessive concern with realism? And what kind of tools could accomplish such feats with frozen water?

  The other man in the chamber watched me warily. He was old, with his face fallen and his hair gone white, its few remaining thin strands peeking from beneath the gray beret that sat stylishly askew on his head. He wore an artist’s smock smeared with stains of paint and handprints of clay, and in his hands he held a flamethrower, with a blue pilot light flickering nervously at its nozzle and its gas tanks strapped to his back.

  “Why have you come here?” he barked in a high voice. “Everyone’s leaving. I have to break everything, and then I’ll be gone myself.”

  “I’m looking for Miranda,” I said. “Do you—”

  “Miranda!” the man said, and the pilot light of his flamethrower erupted briefly, then went back to its jittering. “I especially appreciate the naïve manner in which you just say her name, and expect her to be summoned. As if a name can say what someone is. As if a few syllables can signify what that woman has become.

  “Forgive me. My manners. I should have introduced myself. You’ll have to excuse me if I don’t shake hands, but I don’t want this flamethrower to get away from me. I am Miranda Taligent’s official portraitmaker. And the works in this museum that I have shattered with hammers and put to the torch are my life’s work, the unceasing effort of twenty-five years. But now we have the perfect woman. So tonight all the rest must burn.”

  EIGHT

  “I’m looking for Miranda Taligent,” I said once again.

  “What is that supposed to mean?” the portraitmaker said. “Looking for Miranda. We were all looking for Miranda. I was, and so was her father, and so were the surgeons who wielded the knives. Even Miranda herself. There’s nothing new in that. Did you look outside at all of the women I broke? All that time I spent looking for her, and I never even got close, not once, until now. But now everything in this museum has to go.”

  “Why?”

  “Because it’s an affront,” the portraitmaker said. “After what we’ve finally achieved, it’s a sin to have those things in the world. My entire career is gone. But it’s worth it. It’s worth it; had damned well better be—”

  “So,” I said, backing away from him against the wall of the chamber, “you’ve done nothing for the past twenty-five years—”

  “—but make sculptures of Miranda: yes. But we have the one we want now. So there’s no point in all the others. They’re an insult—how can I make you understand? If only you were an artist, so that we could speak the same language—”

  “I write greeting cards,” I offered.

  The portraitmaker sighed, then said, “Fine. We’ll pretend that those count as art. Now suppose, through some miracle, you were able to write the perfect greeting card. One that would be suitable for absolutely any occasion. Guaranteed to completely convey and magnify the spirit in which it was given.”

  “What does it say?”

  “Who knows what it says. But listen: this greeting card. You can give it to a new widower, and he will break into tears and find the consolation that eluded him. You can give this same card to a strange woman you see on the street that you’re sweet on and she’ll propose to marry you, on the spot. You can give it to your sick sister, get well soon, and the next day her consumption will vanish and her cancer will go into remission. The card will cure junkies of their addictions. If you give it to a madman he will read it and become sane. This card does everything you could ever want a greeting card to do. Now, if you wrote that greeting card, and you finished setting down the final rhyme and you read it and knew it for the miracle it was, wouldn’t you look back on all the other cards you’d written, all those stupid little verses, and realize that there was no need for them in the world anymore? That they no longer served a purpose? That their existence was a sacrilege against the purity of your art?”

  “I don’t understand,” I said.

  “Look,” said the portraitmaker, tracing figure eights in the air with the nozzle of his flamethrower. “Can I tell you a special story? Imagine it set off with a centered heading in capital letters, three points smaller than the principal text. In a display font. This is the portraitmaker’s tale.

  “I’ll tell you this story, the last I’ll ever tell, and you’ll listen. Then at the end you’ll know where the woman is, and you can try your hand at whatever heroics you have in mind, if you think they’ll do any good.

  “That’s the deal, my friend.

  “Now then—”

  NINE

  THE PORTRAITMAKER’S TALE.

  —My first Miranda [the portraitmaker began] was hewn out of a block of granite, studded with tiny crystals of quartz. I was thirty-five years old when Prospero Taligent commissioned it. It was an unusual request of me: he should have known from my portfolio that I didn’t habitually work with stone that hard. I’d usually stuck to marble, using limestone on the rarest occasions, because you could make more precise, finer movements with the tools. When you hack into something like granite you never know half the time what’s going to happen—it might break lucky, it might not. Granite doesn’t want to change what it is.

  But granite was what Prospero requested, and he said, moreover, that he wanted the sculpture to look exactly like his daughter. Not “something like,” he took care to say. Exactly. Back then my work was all about abstraction and essence, female forms with just the suggestions of a bust or a face: you were meant, when you looked at them, not to think of whatever women I had in my mind when I was at work, but to be reminded of women whom you yourself once knew, but whom I myself had never seen. But the promise of a ridiculously high payment for the work, many times my going rate, plus the added opportunity to work with a large, heavy block of stone without having to go out to a quarry to carve it—he said he would supply the stone himself and have it brought to the Tower—was enough to induce me into trying to change my materials and style.

  You might wonder, as I did, what Prospero meant by the word exact; after all, his daughter was made from f
lesh and blood, not stone, and granite as a medium has its limitations. And art deals in impressions, not exactitude. But exact is the word that he used again when he ushered me into the room on the 101st floor of the Taligent Tower that was to serve as my studio. There were six mechanical men laboring to shove an eight-foot-tall block of stone into place in the center of the room, narrow jets of steam shooting out of the joints in their knees and elbows.

  I tried, unsuccessfully, to explain the fundamental nature of art to my newfound patron. He had Miranda with him, and he sat in the studio’s only chair, bouncing the nightgown-clad little girl up and down on his knee. “Igneous,” he was saying, tickling Miranda under his chin with his index finger, then pointing at the block of pink granite. “Can you say igneous? It’s perfect for you. It’s not even the least bit metamorphic—not one tiny bit.” “Listen,” I said. “Exactness as I think you’re thinking of it is not within the capabilities of art. Not even so-called realist art. Not even stereographs, whose status as legitimate art is still contested. Yes, they have the illusion of three dimensions, but is Miranda the size of a postcard, colored entirely in shades of gray? When we look at a piece of art and say that it is exactly like the thing it resembles, we mean that it gives us a strong impression that reminds us of that thing, be it an apple or a woman or an emotion or whatever—not that we are fooled into responding to it as if it’s the thing it pretends to be. I fear that’s what you want, and with granite, or with any other stone in fact, I can’t give it to you.”

  “What is all this sophistry you are going on with? Why are you quibbling with the meanings of words so much—to wriggle out of your contract? I don’t know much about art—why, your little essay just flew right over my head,” Prospero said, his lips smiling, but his gaze giving them the lie. “Exact is what I want, and exact is what you’ll give me. You know what I mean.”

  The little girl on his knee looked at me then, and giggled.

  Before I began the sculpture in earnest, I took a few photographs of Miranda to have some images to work from. Normally I would have just done some sketches, but I thought that letting my patron see me as I photographed the girl would give him some reassurance that I was considering his idea of “exactness,” whatever that was.

  Miranda Taligent was a terrible model. She fretted and squirmed on her little stool; she crawled under it and placed it on her head as if it were a hat; she would spontaneously burst into tears that would disappear inside of a minute, like the rain from a lone storm cloud blown past by a high wind. Sometimes she would point at me with her chubby finger and laugh, for no reason I could see.

  I am not good with children. I tried every little hack photographer’s trick I could think of to try to make her sit still: throwing my voice to a hand puppet with the head of a unicorn; singing silly jingles in a squeaky falsetto; promising sweets to her if she won the “be-a-statue” game. But nothing could induce her to remain still for the sixty seconds that my plates took to expose. Looking back, I think that she might have somehow understood the nature of the camera, for I think that she made some of her motions, like imperceptible movements of her hand over the course of a minute, to deliberately confound my attempt to capture her image. So in the photographs I had pinned to the walls of my studio, all of the images of Miranda sported aberrations, like multiple heads or arms, or translucent eyelids, or halos, or angel’s wings made by flapping arms, or nimbuses of light that surrounded her entire body.

  Prospero was there on the morning when I began to knock the corners off the block of granite that he’d provided for me. I don’t like being observed when I work, and the prospect of my patron dropping in unannounced at all stages of the process over the following months was extremely unsettling to me. While I paced around the block, trying to see the possible sculpture of the little girl buried within it, Prospero examined the flawed photographs of the girl that I had tacked to the walls, turning his head this way and that, making little noises under his breath. Then he turned his attention to the tools that I’d laid out on a metal cart, the chisels of varying shapes and the hammers.

  He picked up one of the heaviest hammers and turned it over, hefting its weight. “Is this what you’re going to use to render my darling daughter?” he asked. He seemed shocked, even a little horrified, as if he thought I was going to take the hammer to Miranda’s head instead of to the stone.

  “Yes,” I replied, trying not to sound too patronizing. “That, and the other tools.”

  He snorted. “Tools are what you call these?” He placed the hammer on the cart. “I clearly don’t understand these. Explain them to me.”

  I suppose I should have been flattered that my employer took an interest in my work beyond its monetary value, no matter how unschooled he seemed to me. But at the time I was more annoyed than appreciative, and more in the mood to sculpt than teach. “Look,” I said. “Sculpting isn’t like some other forms of art, like writing a novel, where you spin the whole thing out of nothing. For me, it’s just the opposite—I usually begin with the assumption that the product I desire is buried within the rock, so to speak, and that my task is just to remove the packing material.”

  “So my little girl is trapped inside that block of stone, then.”

  “I hope. Now, what I’ll do, more or less, is carve a series of increasingly accurate approximations, until we get—”

  “—the perfect one.”

  “—the best possible one. Now this,” I said, warming a little now, “is what we call the pitcher. You drive it in with this heavy hammer, and it doesn’t cut the stone so much as break huge chunks of it off altogether. After you knock off the angles, you move to this—the heavy point—then to this—the fine point—and by then you’ll be close to the final surface of the thing. Then you use all kinds of special tools for the detail work—”

  “Are these the inventions of monkeys?” Prospero said, frowning. “Chipping and breaking, instead of doing what you want. I don’t see”—he ran his fingers over the surface of the immense piece of granite—“why you don’t just treat the thing as if it’s wooden. As if it’s soft. Why don’t you carve it and shape it. Treat the stone like the writer treats a blank page, not the other way around.”

  What he said seemed asinine to me at the time, but I was later to learn under Prospero’s tutelage that it wasn’t. Later I found that Prospero had, shall we say, novel ideas concerning form and function.

  Nonetheless, I tried to humor him. “You can’t treat stone as if it’s wood, because it has a different molecular structure,” I said. “You must respect the nature of the material when you work. What you’re talking about is seventeenth-century stuff, when master artisans tried to pass themselves off as makers of miracles, making flames out of stones and three dimensions out of two. But twentieth-century art’s a different animal, no longer Michelangelesque. We have learned to take things for what they are. We cherish canvas for its flatness and stone for its density—”

  “I want you to take the rest of the day off,” Prospero said, cutting me off. “I don’t believe you’re thinking about this properly.” He pulled out his wallet, extracted a few bills from it, and pressed them into my hand. “Go somewhere and have dinner, and sleep, and come back fresh tomorrow. Today you are making me angry.”

  Utterly confused, I replaced the chisel that I’d been gesturing with as I spoke back on its cart and prepared to storm dramatically out of the studio, as is an artist’s prerogative, but then Prospero laid a hand gently on my shoulder.

  “Don’t let your ignorance frustrate you,” he said. “Ignorance gets the best of all of us sometimes, even me. Rest, and return tomorrow. Tonight I will invent something to fulfill your secret heart’s desire.”

  It might have made me angry, but with his money in my pocket, I did what he told me. When I showed up at the Tower the next morning, Prospero was already in my workshop waiting for me, wearing a gleeful smile. In his hand he held some kind of jerry-rigged electrical device that looked unsafe to to
uch.

  I had barely gotten through the door before he pressed the thing into my hand. “Try it on the granite,” he said, nodding his head. “Try it!”

  The thing he handed to me consisted of a heavy handle, wrapped in rough leather, with a single thick, gently curved wire leading out of it that looked as if it were clipped out of a coat hanger. The handle of the device was unexpectedly heavy, and had an electric switch embedded in it, set to OFF (Prospero had labeled the switch by hand, with tiny letters that seemed as if they were printed by a little girl).

  “Turn it on,” Prospero said.

  I flicked the switch with my thumb, and as the tart smell of ozone filled the air, the wire sticking out of the handle began to glow: first yellow, then red, then white, then blue. The handle became warm in my hand, then hot.

  “I haven’t yet fixed the heatsink problem,” Prospero said. “Try it. Before it gets too hot to hold. Cut the granite with it.”

  Having no other idea of what else to do, I approached the enormous granite block that had undergone only a few changes since the mechanical men had brought it into the studio. Then, lightly, I ran the end of the curved wire across the stone’s surface.

  The wire smoked and cut through the granite. But it didn’t just break the stone, or chip off small pebbles or shards of it. It peeled it, like a whittling knife cutting through pine. Little curled granite shavings began to collect on the floor.

  “I built this last night,” Prospero said. “Just spun it out of some parts lying around the shop.” He tapped his forehead. “I used my imagination.”

  I haven’t had a single good night’s sleep in the past year. And when I startled awake night after night to find that my bedsheets were wet and stinking with my sweat, or that I’d been biting down on my tongue in my sleep hard enough to make it bleed, I wondered if, had Prospero not spoken his next words, I would have come to do the terrible things I did to his daughter, Miranda.