The Dream of Perpetual Motion Read online

  “Yes, you’re right! My stomach feels positively stuffed, just like—oh. Wait—the feeling is getting beyond stuffed now. Oh—oh God what have you done to me—”

  It doesn’t matter much whether you want to tell me what happened, Astrid. I believe you’d better, whether you want to or not.

  “And now from scientific advancements at the dinner table, we’re moving to advancements in the air. We’re going now live to Taligent Park, where none other than the man himself, the great Prospero Taligent—”

  Did you just talk back to me? Astrid. You come back here.

  “—hhsssfffsssnnn . . . nnfff . . . hnnnn . . . hnnnfff—excuse us we’re having a little trouble with the transmission—”

  What? I can’t hear you. Speak up.

  “—sssssssso then. Mr. Taligent, you’re going to test . . . what is this? A mass-transit flying machine.”

  “Yes: it’ll hold up to twenty passengers. Not quite capable of transoceanic flight yet, but we’re thinking that, once sizable production runs of this engine become viable and we can start building whole fleets of these ships, we’ll erect a kind of inflatable port at several strategic places at sea, where the crafts can land and refuel—”

  “An air-port.”

  “Yes. Yes exactly.”

  “Listeners, this sounds like yet another miracle from the Miracle Man, Prospero Taligent. Would you like to describe what we’re looking at, here, this truly magnificent machine?”

  “Well, the pyramidal shape of the craft is one that we’ve tested on miniature models in our laboratories. On the models we get really good lift, as opposed to other shapes we’ve tried in the past, such as spheres and cubes—”

  “I’m sure all that science is very interesting. Let me just say that everyone that’s anyone is here for this fantastic night launch of a mass-transit flying machine: the stars in this audience rival the stars in the sky. We’ve got the Mayor of Xeroville, arm in arm with the former Miss Xeroville 19—, who will both be present on the maiden voyage, and let’s try to catch a few words from the esteemed mayor on his way to board the craft. Hey! Hey Mister Mayor—”

  “—goddamned contraptions I am so sick of these maiden voyages damn contraptions breaking down—”

  “—hey there thanks Mister Mayor—”

  Astrid, I am having trouble believing what you just told me. Let me get this straight. You were approached by a man, a college boy, who offered you three trifling dollars if you would kiss his hideous virgin friend on the lips. And you are only fourteen years old: you are a fourteen-year-old girl. And you said yes to this.

  “—and now the air-craft is getting ready to ascend. The pilot—hey there!—the pilot is waving at us from a glass window in the side of the pyramid, and through the window we can also see the Mayor, and Miss Xeroville 19—! And Prospero Taligent is waving right back from the ground! Say there, Prospero, how’s young Miranda doing?”

  “Quite well, these days. She’s a beautiful young girl. Full of life. Her tenth birthday is next week. And I’m throwing a party for her—I’ve invited a hundred boys and girls from across the city. Most of the invitations have already gone out.”

  Because this man bet one of his other friends ten dollars that within two weeks he could find a woman who would kiss his unimaginably hideous virgin friend. And this is referred to as friendship. What kind of friendship is this?

  “There’ll be lots of cake, and ice cream of a thousand different flavors, and candies that come from all around the known world. And all the surprises that they can handle.”

  “That’s wonderful, Mr. Taligent. That’s absolutely wonderful. Isn’t Mr. Taligent wonderful, folks? Mr. Taligent is wonderful.”

  Astrid, you might have demeaned yourself a little less if you’d held out for half of the take. If I’ve failed to instill any sort of moral values in you, I’d have thought that at least you’d picked up some basic financial sense. But that doesn’t explain why Harold’s so upset.

  Go on: tell me the rest and then you can cry all you like. Soonest begun is soonest done.

  “The air-craft! Ladies and gentlemen the air-craft is actually lifting from the ground! It’s impossible to convey the beauty of this machine over the airwaves to you, listeners. The gigantic pyramid is rising into the sky, illuminated by dozens of panning spotlights, lifted by the hundreds of rotor blades all turning on their axles . . . five feet off the ground! Six feet . . . ten!”

  Accident.

  Accident!

  “What’s—what’s wrong with it? The pyramid’s body is shaking. It’s shaking. Is it supposed to do that, Mr. Taligent?”

  “I—no—I don’t know—”

  Astrid, I ought to wring your neck! The nerve!

  Accident!

  “My God—my God—the craft is breaking apart—oh my God the great ship is bursting into flames—”

  You stay right there, Astrid, and don’t you move a muscle. I’m not through with you.

  “—oh God ladies and gentlemen the worst tragedy I’ve ever had the misfortune to see in all my years of reporting fireballs of flame ballooning to the sky bodies hitting the earth already charred to carbon Miss Xeroville 19—is a walking wailing column of flame oh God oh God oh God please strike me blind—”

  The boy is blinded by the light from the bedroom door, startled by his father’s bursting in. Allan runs toward him and takes him up in a clumsy embrace and begins to rock him back and forth: “You’re not an accident, son. You’re not. You’re not an accident. None of us are accidents, and don’t you dare believe you are. You’re not. You’re not an accident. You’re not.” The net effect of all this on Harold is fright rather than comfort—still bleary-eyed, he can’t figure out what all the commotion is about. Larynx-tearing screams are coming from the radio’s speaker as his father clasps him and repeats himself. What is this?

  Allan looks his son in the eye, and Harold sees a tear running down his cheek. What is this? First Astrid on the coaster getting all weepy-eyed, and now him, too! Crud!

  “You didn’t kill your mother,” Allan says, choking back a sob. “You’re not an accident, and you didn’t kill your mother. That’s a silly thing to think, son. Isn’t that silly.”

  “I didn’t?” This is all so confusing and uncomfortable, and Harold wishes that he could skip the next ten minutes of time.

  “Your mother was a miracle,” says Allan. “She was a miracle. But the thing is, we just don’t have miracles in the world anymore. All the miracles are gone.”

  TWENTY

  Later, at midnight, when the rest of the apartment is asleep, the arguments ended and the tears gone dry, Harold climbs out of his bed, rummages through the pockets of his trousers until he finds the whistle, goes to his open window, sticks his head out, and blows it for all he’s worth—exactly once, as Gideon instructed. It makes no sound that he can hear; when he shakes it afterward, he hears no pea rattling inside.

  He falls asleep believing he’s been robbed, not knowing that the summoning of demons is almost always unwitting.

  TWENTY-ONE

  And within the Taligent Tower, it is dreamtime.

  Miranda is a little girl, and her dreams are little-girl dreams, pure fantasies unfettered by the adult desire for symbols and secret meanings. There is an endless, tempestuous sea, blue as a perfect shining sapphire, and across this adult-sized sea moves a child-sized boat, its hull made from toothpicks and matchsticks, its riggings from twine. Little boys and little girls in tailored sailors’ outfits run frantically up and down the deck. Rain lashes across sails of stitched-together silken handkerchiefs. Spheres of ball lightning erupt in the sky, illuminating the children’s cherubic faces. They scream to each other in high-pitched squeals, hands cupped to their mouths: “Heigh, my hearts! Cheerly, cheerly, my hearts! yare, yare!” The ship rocks metronome-like in the storm. The apple-cheeked children pull industriously on the riggings, the skin of their tender hands rising in welts when the string runs uncontrolled through their fin
gers. “Take in the topsail!” “Tend to the master’s whistle!” “Blow till thou burst thy wind, if room enough!” The sea is still a perfect blue, despite the tempest. “Boatswain!” “Here, master, what cheer?” “Fall to’t, yarely, or we run ourselves aground!”

  TWENTY-TWO

  In Harold’s dream he is, at last, entering the Tunnel of Love, though it is not a tunnel, but a long, vast cavern so wide that darkness shrouds the walls on either side. Beneath him is not a track, but a river; the boat he is in holds six, and it glides along the river of its own volition, pilotless. A rhythmic booming sound emanates from somewhere up ahead, and the noise heralds troubled water.

  He is holding hands with Astrid, and this seems good, but also incorrect. Her palm is hot and has the raspy feel of sandpaper. In the seat in front of him are that Clyde fellow with what seems like a woman wearing a large, lacy Sunday bonnet, but when the woman lifts her head off Clyde’s shoulder and turns to look at Harold, Harold sees that she is, in fact, Jerry. Jerry is not wearing his pop-bottle glasses, and he has the eyes of a Kewpie doll—they take up half his face, and they have thick, inch-long black lashes and pupils that look like a pair of black pies with a slice removed from each.

  “You gotta make ’em shove off,” Jerry says to Harold in a thin falsetto. He puts the tips of his fingers to his lipstick-smeared mouth and titters as he flutters his lashes. Then he goes back to cuddling with Clyde.

  Boom, boom, boom goes the noise up ahead, and a few moments later the boat rocks slightly.

  Behind Harold and Astrid is seated Prospero Taligent—he is not with his daughter, but with a phony mechanical replica of Miranda, one of Allan Winslow’s windup dolls enlarged to life size. The tin Miranda stares straight ahead with its painted eyes, and though Astrid seems herself and human, she also looks ahead of the boat with the same unblinking, glass-eyed expression.

  When Prospero opens his mouth he speaks in Martin’s voice. “Look after your sister,” he says. “Just be present, when you’re needed.”

  Boom, boom, boom: the boat shakes.

  “We’re all cowards,” Prospero says. “Now here it comes—”

  And suddenly Harold is in the air and rising—a pair of mechanical hands have plucked him into the air by his shirt collar. Up here at the roof of the tunnel there are dozens, no, hundreds of mechanical hands and arms, all tangled together and interlocked and writhing, communicating to each other in sign-language gestures that Harold can’t interpret. Twenty kid-gloved tin palms support the boy and stop him from falling into the river, and twenty more strip off his clothes, tearing them to scraps that flutter down to the water. The hands carry him over to Astrid, who is hanging up here as well—he can see that she is naked, too, but her body from the neck down is a blur, as if he’s viewing a censored film.

  It is then that he sees how people are joined to each other inside the Tunnel of Love: the process is so simple that it’s a wonder that he didn’t think of it himself. But that doesn’t mean that it isn’t painful, and as one mechanical hand approaches him and Astrid with a hammer, along with another that’s holding several twenty-penny nails, he screams and screams until he wakes himself up and the only thing left of the dream is the boom, boom, boom of whatever undefined but surely terrifying thing it was that lay at the tunnel’s end.

  Wait—that isn’t part of the dream. That noise is real. It’s muffled now, but it’s shaking his bedroom door.

  He rolls out of bed and stumbles out of his bedroom and down the hall, to see Astrid still in her dressing gown, standing in the middle of the living-room floor, staring wide-eyed at the door to the apartment: it’s shaking on its hinges as whatever’s on the other side bangs against it. Whatever it is must have a fist the size of a canned ham. Bam. Bam. Bam.

  Now Allan shuffles out of his bedroom and stands next to Astrid and Harold, the three of them staring at the door. From the floor below they hear the curses of neighbors, muffled to unintelligibility. It’s still not yet dawn—the noise is inexcusable.

  “I blew the whistle,” Harold says.

  “What on earth are you talking about?” says Astrid.

  “I blew the whistle!” Harold cries gaily, and before his father can stop him, he runs to the front door, stands on his tiptoes, shoots its bolt, and yanks it open.

  On the other side of the door stands a mechanical demon, eight feet tall, its skin a red burnished metal, with shoulder blades that extend into large, delicate, batlike wings. A pair of curled horns jut from either side of its skull. Its eyes glow and roll madly in its head. Streams of steam jet forth from its flaring nostrils.

  In its oversized, clawed right hand, it holds an envelope.

  The demon lurches into the room on its hinged legs, its insides making all manner of noises, twangs and clicks and snaps and boings. A delicately filigreed windup key slowly rotates in the center of its back. When the demon reaches the center of the room, it halts (and all the noise inside it ceases, except for the quiet grinding of the key) and it raises its right hand straight out, proffering the elegantly decorated envelope to empty air.

  Though Allan and Astrid are completely baffled, Harold knows what this is, and now that he knows it’s really going to happen, he doesn’t know if he should be ecstatic or scared to death.

  Cautiously, Allan approaches the demon, reaching up and taking the envelope from its hand. The demon remains there, absolutely still, its arm outstretched.

  Allan looks at the envelope, runs his finger over the gilded edges, turns it over, squints at it, picks with his finger at a wax seal embossed with the logo of Taligent Industries, turns it over again.

  “Harry,” he says, “I don’t know why, but—”

  “It’s for me,” Harold says, because he knows. He takes the envelope from him. “It’s mine because I blew the whistle.”

  With his father watching intently, Harold Winslow carefully removes the wax seal from the envelope with his index finger and opens it, revealing a card inside. He slowly extracts the card, opens it, and reads the message printed neatly within:

  Girls are angels of goodness and light.

  Boys are demons with malice and spite.

  Come to my party and you will see

  What fun fun fun a party can be!

  Saturday morning, at the Taligent Tower, at sunrise.

  This demon will conduct you there.

  It will have to stay in your home until the day of the party.

  I hope that you do not mind.

  Please take good care of it and wind it twice a day.

  Your new friend,

  Miranda Taligent

  The mechanical demon stands statue-still in the center of the room, tendrils of smoke drifting from its ears, its arm outstretched, beckoning.

  TWENTY-THREE

  Dawn is coming, and the dreamship floating across the sea of Miranda’s mind is taking on water and splitting apart. Little girls, caught by surprise in their petticoats, clamber to the deck as the ship begins to tilt. In their arms the girls cradle cunningly wrought porcelain dolls, with real human hair shorn from the heads of virgin princesses, that can roll their painted glass eyes, belch, defecate, and stretch out their arms to beg for a bottle or a desperate embrace. . . . The little boys are below, doing their futile best to bail out the ship, saying their last high-pitched hysteric good-byes to the earthly world: “Farewell, wife and children! Farewell, brother!”

  “We split,” the child captain says, standing on the bridge in his little captain’s uniform with its smart cut and shiny golden buttons. He stares up at the sky, resolute as the ship goes down beneath him, the matchsticks of its hull scattering across the ice-blue sea. The sky clears to reveal a packed and twinkling starfield. A single bright clear child’s tear courses down the captain’s face. “We split,” he says, and hangs his head in sorrow. “We split.”

  TWENTY-FOUR

  The tin demon stands in the middle of the living-room floor of the Winslows’ apartment for a solid week, its head near
ly touching the ceiling. As if he is taking care of a pet, Harold is careful to wind it twice a day, as Miranda’s invitation instructed. He does this once in the morning before he goes to school and once again when he gets back, after he shakes off the effects of the teaching machine and he can think clearly without involuntarily reciting villanelle or bursting into tears.

  As far as Harold can see, the demon never moves, though Allan claims it does when Harold is away at school—when the sun hits the living-room window around one o’clock, the demon’s eyes light up as it swings its arms and rotates its head on its neck like an athlete preparing for a strenuous round of calisthenics. Then it clomps over to the window to sun itself, and a few hours later it clanks back to its original place on the floor to stand at attention, stone still. Since he spends his day making windup dolls, Allan feels that he’s somewhat mechanically inclined, but he can’t sort out how the kinetic energy supplied by a single windup key that a child can turn can power a device that seems devilishly complicated and must weigh at least a quarter ton. “Perhaps the sunlight has something to do with it,” he hypothesizes one evening, during dinner. “Perhaps it can somehow take advantage of the same energy that makes plants grow, in a limited way.”

  “Maybe it just likes the sun,” Astrid says. “Maybe, you know, it’s thinking, if I didn’t have to stand here all the time waiting for whatever, I’d be outside, picking daisies and such.”

  “It’s mechanical,” Allan says. “It doesn’t think. It doesn’t prefer overcast skies to clear ones, or thunderstorms to droughts. Or daisies to nasturtiums, for that matter.”

  “You don’t know it doesn’t think,” says Astrid. “It’s not like it’s said it doesn’t think.”