The Dream of Perpetual Motion Read online

  THE

  DREAM

  OF

  PERPETUAL

  MOTION

  THE

  DREAM

  OF

  PERPETUAL

  MOTION

  Dexter Palmer

  St. Martin’s Press New York

  This is a work of fiction. All of the characters, organizations, and events portrayed in this novel are either products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously.

  THE DREAM OF PERPETUAL MOTION. Copyright © 2010 by Dexter Palmer. All rights reserved. Printed in the United States of America. For information, address St. Martin’s Press, 175 Fifth Avenue, New York, N.Y. 10010.

  www.stmartins.com

  Book design by Rich Arnold

  ISBN 978-0-312-55815-4

  First Edition: March 2010

  10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

  CONTENTS

  PROLOGUE

  aboard the good ship chrysalis

  ONE

  nightfall in the greeting-card works

  INTERLUDE

  aboard the good ship chrysalis

  TWO

  lovesongs for a virgin queen

  INTERLUDE

  aboard the good ship chrysalis

  THREE

  music for an automatic bronzing

  INTERLUDE

  aboard the good ship chrysalis

  FOUR

  romance in a mechanical dancehall

  INTERLUDE

  aboard the good ship chrysalis

  FIVE

  the dream of perpetual motion

  EPILOGUE

  aboard the good ship chrysalis

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  PROSPERO. —Dost thou hear?

  MIRANDA.

  Your tale, sir, would cure deafness.

  —William Shakespeare,

  The Tempest

  Here opened another totally new education, which promised by far to be the most hazardous of all. The knife edge along which he must crawl, like Sir Lancelot in the twelfth century, divided two kingdoms of force which had nothing in common but attraction. They were as different as a magnet is from gravitation, supposing one knew what a magnet was, or gravitation, or love.

  —Henry Adams,

  The Education of Henry Adams

  THE

  DREAM

  OF

  PERPETUAL

  MOTION

  PROLOGUE

  aboard the good ship chrysalis

  sssss

  sp

  spiraling

  spiraling down

  Into. The. Sea?

  spiraling slowly down and crashing into the open sea?

  Morning, and the voice has already begun. It was speaking even before I awoke. It has never stopped.

  If my reckoning of time is still accurate, the day on which I begin to write this journal marks the one-year anniversary of my incarceration aboard the good ship Chrysalis, a high-altitude zeppelin designed by that most prodigious and talented of twentieth-century inventors, Prospero Taligent. It has also been a year since I last opened my mouth to speak. To anyone. Especially my captor. I refuse to speak to my captor precisely because it is the one thing that she desires, and my silence is the only form of protest that remains to me.

  Writing, however, is a different thing altogether from speaking. The written word has different properties, and different powers. If I learned anything in the world before my imprisonment here, it was certainly that.

  The only person aboard this ship besides myself is Prospero Taligent’s adopted daughter, Miranda. For this past year I have been unable to escape from the sound of Miranda’s voice. It follows me relentlessly through the corridors of this zeppelin’s immense gondola as I continue to seek out her hiding place, where I hope to confront her, face-to-face. Her voice never stops: even when I sleep, it is a shining silver thread running through most of my dreams and all my nightmares, whispering, beseeching, threatening: One word from you is all I want. Just speak one word, and we’ll begin. Name, rank, and serial number, perhaps the misquoted lyrics from a popular song: anything will do. From there we’ll move with slow cautious steps to gentle verbal sparring, twice-told tales, descriptions of the scarred and darkest places of our old and worn-out souls. I’ll love you back; I’ll tell you secrets—

  Miranda’s father was kind to me when he built the place that would become my prison. This craft is what one might call a miracle of engineering, fully staffed by a crew of mechanical men who wordlessly go about the hundreds of tasks necessary to keep the Chrysalis in the sky: tending to the small garden whose fruits keep me alive; interpreting the readouts of the dozens of instruments that continue to claim that this ship will never crash, despite my growing fears that they’re wrong; repairing each other, sometimes even harvesting their own limbs to replace the malfunctioning arms and legs of their metal colleagues. And somehow through Prospero’s craftsmanship the sounds of all the machines in the ship have been muffled to silence, a sharp contrast to the world beneath me where mechanical noises fill the air, day and night, never ceasing. So the only sounds that I have heard for the past year are the echoes of my footsteps as I drift down the gondola’s walkways, and the bell-clear voice of Miranda emanating from what may well be thousands of speakers scattered throughout the ship, inset in the floors, hidden behind paintings and secret panels, swinging on wires hanging from the ceilings, so that not one place here goes untouched by her endless lunatic stream of words: Soon our culture’s oldest dreams will be made real. Even the thought of sending a kind of flying craft to the moon is no longer nothing more than a child’s fantasy. At this moment in the cities below us, the first mechanical men are being constructed that will have the capability to pilot the ship on its maiden voyage. But no one has asked if this dream we’ve had for so long will lose its value once it is realized. What will happen when those mechanical men step out of their ship and onto the surface of this moon, which has served humanity for thousands of years as our principal icon of love and madness? When they touch their hands to the ground and perform their relentless analyses and find no measurable miracles, but a dead gray world of rocks and dust? When they discover that it was the strength of millions of boyhood daydreams that kept the moon aloft, and that without them that murdered world will fall, spiraling slowly down and crashing into the open sea?

  She begs me to speak, but I won’t. We live in our own little universe, she and I, and she is mad, and I am sane. This is the one thing that I know for sure. Prospero Taligent drove her mad: thirty years of being his daughter broke her mind, but I won’t let the same thing happen to me. She is mad, and I am sane. To speak to her, even the first word, would be an acknowledgment and an acceptance of her madness, and from there I would have no choice but to follow her down the hole until both of us would be here alone in this ship among the clouds, endlessly circling the earth, our needs carefully ministered to by mechanical men, howling ourselves hoarse and counting off the ticks of the clock before the moon falls out of the sky.

  I am going to try to tell a story now, and though I’ve made a life out of writing words, this is the first time I have told a story. There are no new stories in the world anymore, and no more storytellers. There is nothing left but the fragments of phrases that signaled their telling: once upon a time; why; and then; the end. But these phrases have lost their meanings through endless repetition, like everything else in this modern, mechanical age. And this machine age has no room for stories. These days we seek our pleasures out in single moments cast in amber, as if we have no desire to connect the future to the past. Stories? We have no time for them; we have no patience.

  Sometimes I have a little trouble holding things together. It see
ms strange and inaccurate, when writing of what oneself once was, to speak of oneself as “I,” especially when I find it difficult to own up to some of the actions performed by the people I once was: the ten-year-old boy who played innocent games on Miranda’s magic island; the twenty-year-old who returned to that island when he had no business there; the thirty-year-old who committed the crime for which I have been imprisoned aboard this ship, with the madwoman. In this last year I’ve spent time with all of my past incarnations (oh, yes, they have their voices, too, they have just as much to say to me as Miranda), and we have decided that the only way to make sense of our existences is to set the stories of our lives down on paper, to try to make one tale that shows how the twentieth century turned Harold Winslow into Harold Winslow into Harold Winslow into me.

  Any story told in this machine age must be a story of fragments, for fragments are all the world has left: interrupted threads of talk at crowded cocktail parties; snatches of poems heard as a radio dial spins through its arc; incomplete commandments reclaimed from shattered stones.

  Every story needs a voice to tell it though, or it goes unheard. So I have to try. I still have enough faith left in language to believe that if I place enough words next to each other on the page, they will start to speak with sounds of their own.

  ONE

  nightfall in the

  greeting-card

  works

  ONE

  Hello? Hello.

  Hello. My name is Harold Winslow. Yes. I need help.

  Yes, I’ve used your services before.

  Don’t tell me everything’s going to be fine. It’s not. You can guess I know better than that.

  I need help. This is one of my bad mornings. Some of the dreams I have are worse than others. This one isn’t the worst, but it’s bad enough for me to need your services.

  I need to be taken to the Xeroville Greeting-card Works. I have to get to work.

  No—no I still don’t have insurance. I’ll pay cash.

  No—no I don’t have a voice of my own.

  But if you need a voice I can give one to you. It’s the thing that I do best.

  TWO

  Some of the dreams I have are worse than others, and though the one I had last night wasn’t one of those especially vivid ones that keep me riveted to the bed and soaked in sweat for a half hour after I’ve woken from it, it was bad enough to warrant placing the call for a shrinkcab. It is there waiting for me by the time I hang up the phone, dress for work, and descend to the lobby of my apartment building—except for the light on its roof, white instead of the usual yellow, it is indistinguishable from the hundreds of other cabs that clog the city’s downtown streets each rush hour. The drivers of shrinkcabs usually make a gesture toward dressing a bit better than the usual cabbie, and as I slide into the backseat, I see that this one is wearing a starched shirt with silver cuff links—unfortunately, the intended effect is spoiled by a sleeve sporting scattered stains of ketchup and scrambled egg, the remnants of a breakfast sandwich whose foil wrapper lies discarded in the passenger seat.

  Without a word the shrinkcabbie starts the meter and pulls off. Then, unconscionably, he turns on the radio, as if he intends to listen to me with one ear and the news of the world with the other. This is not the grade of service I expect. Periodic static interrupts a parade of voices as he twiddles the dial.

  —fffffsssssfffff—

  “—after fifteen years of marriage you can see her disgust whenever she looks at you. You know her heart’s a block of ice.”

  —fffffsssssfffff—

  “—full fadom five thy father lies, of his bones are coral made—”

  —fffffsssssfffff—

  “Hello out there! I just want you to know that I’m just like you, and, just like you, sometimes I have a little trouble holding things together.”

  —fffffsssssfffff—

  “—but then you give her the greeting card. And she opens it, and she reads it, and the color comes back into her cheeks. And the smile spreads across her face that you haven’t seen since both of you were young. And she bakes the casserole that you like. And she enters your bedroom and kneels before you.

  “The Xeroville Greeting-card Works. When you need a reliable immediate intense targeted emotional response—”

  —fffffsssssfffff—

  “—those are pearls that were his eyes: nothing of him that doth fade—”

  —fffffsssssfffff—

  “—and I’m just like you. And between a seventy-hour workweek and a romance that’s crumbling before my eyes, who can spare an hour to go to a therapist to get the help we all desperately need, every once in a while, to help us hold things together? To stave off the oncoming specter of insanity? Not me, I tell you! Not me. That’s why, every once in a while, only when I need it, I pick up the phone and call a Shrinkcab. Shrinkcab’s fleet of drivers are all rigorously trained in clinical psychiatry and licensed to dispense prescriptions, and will happily help you combine your necessary psychological therapy with your morning or evening commute for the maximum in twentieth-century convenience. Our cabs are handsomely upholstered in soothing colors and completely soundproofed for the ultimate in comfort. You just sit back, open up your head, and—”

  —fffffsssssfffff—

  “—our proprietary emotional-provocation technologies. Xeroville Greeting-card Works. The key to the human heart. The best in the business.”

  —fffffsssssfffff—

  “—sea nymphs hourly ring his knell. Hark: now I hear them. Ding-dong bell.”

  —fffffsssssfffff—

  “—relax. We’ll help you hold things together.”

  I lean forward and tell him to turn off the radio in a tone meant to be peremptory, but the intended note of command in my voice has too much squeak and quiver. Nonetheless, after looking at me for a moment in his rearview mirror, he reluctantly shuts off the radio, leaving us in soundproof silence.

  Then I begin.

  THREE

  This is costing me a lot, isn’t it. By the time we make it into downtown Xeroville I will have spent two days’ pay in cab fare. So I guess I’d better start talking, and get my money’s worth.

  My name is Harold Winslow. I’m in the sentiment-development division of the Xeroville Greeting-card Works. Right now we’re working on Christmas cards. That’s right—even though it’s the middle of July, we’re working on the Christmas cards for next season. Time is always out of joint in the greeting-card works. Outside the works heat-shimmers rise from concrete; inside the works it’s ice-cold, that special kind of ozone-flavored cold that machines make, and we’ve got Styrofoam snow strewn across the floors and red and green tinsel hanging from the walls. For inspiration. You’d be surprised: it’s hard to summon the Christmas spirit in the middle of July. We hired a group of dwarves to dress up in elf outfits and run up and down the hallways, carrying lovingly handcrafted wooden toys and singing high-pitched, cloying songs of holiday cheer.

  I’ve become disillusioned with my job: that’s part of my problem, I think. I am a failed writer. I went to a university, hoping to become a successful writer, but I failed. Miranda, back then, tried to tell me that terrible things were in store for me, for all of us. But even though she was wise beyond her years, she was still young, and so was I, and all of our words were drowned out by the noise of our beating hearts, screaming at us that we were, after all, creatures of flesh and blood. So instead of taking our only chance of escape, we went back to her magic island when we had no business there. In a life full of failures, that was yet another.

  I’m a failed writer with no voice of my own. What I do at the greeting-card works is this: I try to guess what kind of voice a voiceless person would choose if he could have any voice he wanted, and then I try to speak with that voice. I speak the words of love and affection that people would speak for themselves if they could. If they weren’t paralyzed. If their lips didn’t lock every time they even thought of expressing their own love for themsel
ves. You have seen them, drifting up and down drugstore aisles like ghosts, their hands shaking, their teeth grinding, their jaws locked as they try to find the words that say the thing they mean to say. They are blind and dumb. I don’t know what they’d do if they were confronted with greeting cards that were blank on the inside. Paralyzed. Blind and dumb.

  My special talent is greeting cards that are designed to be given by boys between the ages of nine and sixteen, when they are too old for naïve sentiments that tumble clumsily off the tongue, and too young for cookie-cutter blank verses about love that perseveres through ravaging Time. My masterpiece is a greeting card I wrote for the Father’s Day season three years ago, a large two-dollar affair that opened out into three panels, illuminated on both sides in brilliant pastels. As far as greeting cards go, it was an epic. The text was in iambic pentameter. The son, the implied speaker and the person presenting the card, details a fantasy in which his father is a monster, and the son is a smaller version of his father, a monster as well. And the father and son do monstrous things together, like throwing around automobiles and knocking down buildings and breathing fire and biting the heads off innocent bystanders. Then on the climactic final panel, the son thanks his father for being a “monster of a dad!” and for making him a “monster of a son!” It was a big seller. It went into several printings.

  I know what little boys like. Little boys like monsters.

  I have a recurring dream that goes something like this. I am lying naked on my back in the midst of an endless field of poppies, staring up at a blue sky. It is dead quiet, the way it is never quiet in the world anymore, now that machines are everywhere. Even when you think a room is quiet, there’s always some damned machine in it, making some kind of noise: plumbing; an air conditioner; a fluorescent lamp. But in this endless field of poppies it’s dead quiet, as it must have been when the world was still young.