The Dream of Perpetual Motion Page 9

  “If it said it couldn’t think, then it’d be thinking,” says Harold, speaking through a mouthful of mashed potatoes. “Wouldn’t it.”

  “Yeah thanks for proving my point,” says Astrid lamely.

  “Astrid,” says Allan, “let’s not be silly. I won’t have you personifying that—”

  “Shut up Dad it’ll hear you,” Astrid says.

  The mechanical demon, of course, says nothing.

  TWENTY-FIVE

  “Prospero,” Allan says once during another dinner conversation, stretching out the syllables. “Prosssspero.”

  “Prospero Taligent,” says Harold, drumming out the waltz meter of the magnate’s name on the table with his fork and knife.

  “Do you think his mother named him that?” says Allan. “Think about it—Mrs. Taligent née McGillicuddy holds her newborn baby boy in her arms and looks into his eyes and says to herself, this one will grow up to be a maker of magic. He needs a name that suits him.”

  “Nah, he probably named himself that,” says Astrid. “Like he was probably a teenager looking through a book of Shakespeare plays or something, doing a homework assignment, and he pointed his finger at a page and said, there. That’s the name I want. And that’s the person I’m going to pretend to be. And then he ran away from his home in the sticks, and when he showed up in the big city he pretended to be that new person so well that he actually turned into him. But every night, the last thing he thinks about before he goes to sleep is what a fake he is.”

  “Shut up, Astrid,” says Harold.

  “His real name is probably Brad,” says Astrid. “Brad Jones.”

  “Shut up, Astrid!”

  “Fred Smith,” says Astrid, with one of her rare faint smiles.

  TWENTY-SIX

  In separate sessions during the week, Harold tells his father and Astrid the story of the whistle that summoned the demon. When he tells his father, he leaves out the part where Martin calls him a coward, because it’s embarrassing, and he leaves out the part where Clyde nearly knocks him down, because he senses that Astrid is in bad enough trouble as it is.

  His father is struck dumb for a little while, at first. Then he comes close to him and says: “Now Harry. Listen to me. When you go to this party, I want you to be on your best behavior. You are a very lucky boy, and Prospero Taligent is a very important man. If you gain his favor, he may make you privy to his secrets. So be on your best behavior. Remember everything you see. When you come back, write it down. I’ll buy you some pens and some clean new paper, and you can sit at my desk and write down everything you remember. You’ll want to have it written down to look back on later, when your mind sands all the sharp edges off your memory and makes it into a dream that it will have you believe is true.

  “You should try to gain the favor of the girl. I’ll give you this doll that I made, and if you get a chance, you can give it to her for a birthday present. If she decides that she likes you, you may be allowed to return. Perhaps—ha ha, perhaps the father will make a marriage match! Don’t make that face, son. I’m not advising golddigging, but perhaps you’ll be the heir to an empire. Then after he dies, you will take his place and ascend to the top of the obsidian tower and live with your beautiful wife among the clouds. And wouldn’t that be nice. Isn’t that the way that fairy stories end.

  “Be on your best behavior. Say please and thank you to Mr. Taligent; end your sentences in sir.”

  TWENTY-SEVEN

  When Astrid hears the same tale, minus Martin’s admonition to Harry to look after his sister and minus the look that Harold saw on Astrid’s face in the camera obscura, she says: “Okay. Okay listen. You are probably going to have to talk to the girl at some point. So don’t screw up. Don’t worry about airs and graces. Remember: she’s not a monster, and she’s not untouchable. No matter where she lives or who her daddy is or what expensive fabrics she’s been swaddled in she’s just a little girl, and her head is full of little-girl stuff like lollipops and lace—not the kind of stuff that runs around in circles in my head and it repeats and it repeats and it never shuts up. No matter what happens, when you see her, you just talk to her. You just say: hello, Miranda. Like that. No need to take a breath first; no need to get up your nerve. Easy-peasy. Got it?

  “Hello, Miranda. That’s it. That’s all you need to say to start.”

  TWENTY-EIGHT

  In the week before the birthday party, every night for Harold is like a night before a Christmas morning, torturous and sleepless. As Saturday approaches Harold drifts drowsily through his days, and yet he spends his nights just as wide awake as if he’d eaten a giant-sized chocolate bar just before bedtime. He is waiting for the demon in the living room to do something, but he doesn’t know when it’ll make its move, or how. The few days left between his ordinary present and the future that Prospero Taligent has in store for him are like pages in a book that he’d like to skip but can’t. Seconds feel like minutes.

  There is one night, Thursday night, when he hears the noise of someone rustling around in the living room, and thinking that he will get his chance to see the demon move, doing whatever thing it does when it isn’t being watched, he untangles himself from the sheets in which he’s been tossing and turning for four hours, slips to the floor, pushes open his bedroom door slowly enough for the hinges not to squeak, and pads into the hallway that leads to the kitchen and the living room. He sidles along the hallway’s wall like a sneak thief until he can just see the demon standing in the middle of the floor. It isn’t moving. But Astrid is there in her dressing gown, speaking to it while pacing back and forth with her hands clasped behind her. Harold is concealed from her view for the moment, and so she continues talking as if he weren’t there at all.

  “And do you know what Father said?” says Astrid to the demon. “He said that the worst thing that a person can be is a liar, and that I was a liar because the kiss I gave that guy was a lie. But how can a kiss be a lie? A lie needs words to make it a lie, doesn’t it? Doesn’t a lie need sound? Don’t you need to speak a lie?

  “I guess you could say that a kiss means something, some one thing, and then if you kissed someone and it meant something else, then that’d be a lie. But that’s not even true, because it wouldn’t be the kiss that was the lie: it’d be the thing you said the kiss was that was the lie. The kiss would just be a lip touching another lip and that would be it. A kiss can’t mean anything just by itself unless you say what it means. It can’t be a lie, or truth, or anything at all but what it is.

  “It’s not like before I kissed that guy I looked at him and said, ‘This means I love you,’ or ‘This means that the sun is shining,’ or anything at all. I just kissed him, and that was it—well, that would have been it, except that inside the Tunnel of Love things got a little crazy. It doesn’t matter that I got three dollars at all.

  “And so what if you think a kiss does mean something? You can’t expect everybody to write a whole contract every time they kiss somebody—like this means A, and B, and sometimes C but never D. And everybody probably has an idea in their head about what it means when someone kisses you, and everybody probably has a different idea and no one has the same idea, and everybody thinks that their idea is the exact right one. So if it mattered that a kiss meant something in your head, and everybody had a different idea of what a kiss meant and no one had the same idea, then every time any two people kissed each other they’d be lying to each other. And it is hard to believe that people who have been, like, married to each other for sixty years or something have told lies to each other all that time. So a kiss must not mean anything at all. Right? Right. It would mean just as much if I kissed you as it would that I kissed Jerry, or someone I was in love with. Not that I’m ever going to be in love with anybody. The things that are running around in my head won’t let me be in love.

  “Can you hear anything I’m saying to you? When I say something to you, do gears turn around in your head to help you make sense of it, the way an adding machin
e makes four out of two and two? Dad thinks you can’t think, but I think you can. If you can think, are you going to say something?

  “I’ll tell you what—I like you, whether you can think or not.

  “I am going to kiss you, I think.”

  As Harold watches from his hiding place, Astrid drags a chair over from the kitchen and stands on it, so that her eyes are level with the demon’s. “I’ll tell you what,” she says. “Either you can’t think, or you can think and you’re just hiding it because you don’t want people to be onto your little game. But either way you’re getting a kiss. If you can think about what a kiss means, then this means that I like you. Not that I love you. I like you. I think you’re nice, and I appreciate your attention.

  “If you can’t think—well, it’ll be like kissing a rock, and it doesn’t matter, does it. But it’ll make me happy even if it doesn’t matter to you one way or the other. So it’s not so bad.”

  Then she leans forward, nearly losing her footing on the chair, and plants a firm smooch on the demon’s steel lips. It does nothing in response.

  She stares into its eyes for a few moments, looking for a reaction that will probably never come, sighs, and climbs down off the chair.

  By the time Astrid replaces the chair in the kitchen and enters the hallway on the way to her own bedroom, Harold is gone—he’s scooted back to his bed and ensconced himself under the sheets, covered from head to toe. For some reason that he will never quite understand, even years afterward as he sits aboard the zeppelin writing this story down, he is shaking, literally shaking, with rage.

  TWENTY-NINE

  Finally Friday night turns to Saturday morning, and at before dawn, Harold’s father rousts him out of bed. “It’s doing something,” says Allan, once the cobwebs have cleared from Harold’s head. “I think you’d better get ready to go.”

  Harold turns on a lamp and puts on the outfit that Allan purchased for him for the party—a crisply ironed button-down white shirt, short pants, black dress shoes and matching black socks, a muted blue tie, and a sharp new hat, dark gray with a blue sash tied around it to match the tie, which will promptly fall from his head within the next ten minutes and which he will never recover. He grabs the windup Miranda that his father has left on his nightstand and puts it in his pocket.

  When he comes into the living room, the demon seems to have partly awoken from some kind of trance—twin tendrils of steam are drifting lazily from its ears, and it blinks occasionally. Its arms are outstretched, as if it desires a comforting embrace.

  Astrid comes into the living room, rubbing her eyes. “What’s it doing?”

  “I don’t know,” says Harold. He is trying not to be scared, but he is.

  The demon’s arms suddenly jerk up and down, as if it’s attempting and failing to dance.

  “I think we have to figure this out rather quickly,” says Allan.

  “It wants a hug,” says Astrid. “Harry. Put your arms around it.”

  “Astrid,” says Allan, “don’t be—”

  “But it’s obvious,” says Astrid. “Go on. Give it a hug.”

  And so, as he’d seen Astrid do, Harold gets a chair from the kitchen, places it in front of the demon, and stands on it. He can feel heat coming off the demon, as if it has a pile of hot coals lying in its stomach.

  He slips his arms around the demon’s torso as tightly as he can—he can only manage to get them a little more than halfway around it. He looks up at the demon, which is still staring straight ahead, blinking every few seconds. He says to Astrid, “I don’t think this is—”

  As if Harold has tripped a snare, the demon’s arms spring shut, pinning Harold against its chest. “Agh!” he cries in surprise—its embrace is also slightly painful, and try as he might, he can’t do more than move his arms or wiggle his feet. He’s stuck.

  Two jets of steam shoot horizontally with a hiss out the demon’s ears, and it turns toward the apartment’s front door.

  “Open the door before it breaks it down,” shouts Allan, and as the demon marches toward it, Astrid gets there just ahead of it and throws it open.

  The demon lurches through the hallway, and Allan and Astrid stand at the door, saying their good-byes. Harold can’t say much in response for fear of biting his tongue—his head is bouncing around on his neck due to the demon’s jarring, loping gait as it descends the stairs, and this evening when Harold returns, he’ll be feeling aches and pains from head to toe. He screams again as the demon bashes straight through the front door of the apartment building, leaving splinters behind.

  Now that the demon is outside, it begins to run straight down the empty street, the wings on its back twitching as if they are about to spread. Here and there, squinting, frowning tenants in bathrobes and gowns are poking their heads out of the windows of the apartments that overlook the street, wondering what the commotion is.

  The demon begins to run faster and faster, and Harold is starting to wonder if the demon is planning on running all the way to the Taligent Tower—even at this rate, it would take hours to get there, and Harold would be jostled to pieces in the process. For that matter, he’d never thought to ask how the demon got to his apartment in the first place.

  This is when the demon’s black wings spring out to their full span, and as Harold bawls and his brand-new hat falls off, it leans forward so far as it’s running that it seems it’s about to trip and fall, and it takes to the sky.

  THIRTY

  Dear imaginary reader: unless you are from a future so far distanced from my present that I cannot guess at the fantastic nature of its engines, and you have some means of travel that lies beyond my comprehension, the idea of machine-powered flight must be commonplace for you. Even for the young Harold Winslow flight was not unheard of, though the drawing boards of Prospero Taligent’s engineers had yet to produce reliable mass-transit airborne devices that wouldn’t tip over and fall to the ground in flames. There were flying cars, for instance, though not the fleets of them that choked the skyways of some cities in my final days on earth. You might have gone weeks without sighting one, but they were there.

  So when I say that there was nothing to which young Harold’s flight to the Tower compared, and that there are few events in my life for which I could say this, then you may be reluctant to take me at my word. But believe me—when Harold was hundreds of feet in the air over the bay that lay between his family’s apartment and the city’s downtown, the wind rushing by him and filling his ears, his only support the demon whose arms gripped him so tightly that he would later find two bands of dark purple bruises across his back—well, the only thing he could think was that life must have been something like this during the age of miracles that his father sometimes talked about. Not exactly like this, but something like this, something close.

  This feeling doesn’t last for him for long, though. For one thing, he’s somewhat uncomfortable; also, because of the position in which he’s pinned, he can’t see as much as he’d like—he can look over the demon’s shoulder to see the sky above him, and when the demon banks for one of its occasional swooping turns, he can look out the corner of his eye to see the water of the bay beneath him. Eventually he gets used to this awkward situation, and he nods off in the demon’s arms for a little while, in the way that young children can fall asleep in the most unlikely of places—he hasn’t been sleeping well this past week, and something about being up this high in the air makes him light-headed, forcing him to drowse against his better judgment.

  When he wakes again he sees an angel just above him, flying on the same course as the demon that holds him. The rising sun gleams off its face, which is an expressionless mask of silver with full lips and a nose with wide, flared nostrils; its eyes are blank and have no pupils. A yellow neon halo is fastened above its head, and it blinks on and off at regular intervals like a sign hanging in front of a diner. Its wingspan is wider than that of the demon that carries Harold, and each feather of its wings is long, white, and distinctl
y detailed—Harold thinks that the feathers might even be real, plucked from birds of a species with which he’s not familiar. In the angel’s arms is a girl in a sleeveless white dress who looks down at Harold. Her dark curling tresses toss in the wind and obscure her face from him.

  “Crazy!” the girl screams at Harold, as best she can. “Crazy!” She yells some more things to him that are unintelligible, and Harold says nothing, not knowing how to respond.

  The angel suddenly rises upward, pulling the girl away from him, and Harold can see that it is one of a triangle-shaped phalanx of ten that’s flying in formation, each one holding a little girl that is smiling, or weeping, or passed out from terror. He turns his head as much as he can and figures out that the demon carrying him has joined a similar configuration, and that the other nine demons nearby are ferrying little boys like himself. One of them is letting forth loud, exuberant yells: “Yaaaaaahoo. Yeeeeeehah.”

  The demon carrying Harold banks sharply, and after recovering from the sudden jolt he can see that he is above Xeroville’s downtown, with the people on the streets below reduced to the size of ants; in fact, he and all the other mechanical angels and demons who hold their party guests have formed a single line and are now circling the Taligent Tower, climbing higher and higher in a spiral that has the Tower in its center. He can see inside the windows of the Tower as he flies by, though he doesn’t get more than a couple of seconds to look through each—he sees secretaries seated at long rows of desks, banging away at typewriters; he sees men in wire-rimmed spectacles and lab coats, operating devices with mysterious purposes that seem unimaginably complex; he sees a man sitting at a grand piano and playing it while a researcher has his head poked beneath its propped-up lid, carefully observing the movements of its hammers and strings.

  The demon that holds Harold reaches the roof of the Tower and flies through a wide, high loop above it, bringing back discomforting memories for Harold of the Nickel Empire’s Tornado. It orients itself so that its feet are pointing downward and lands on the roof of the Tower, breaking into a rapid run once again as soon as it makes contact. It manages to bring itself to a stop before running off the roof’s edge and its arms fly open, unceremoniously dropping Harold on his bottom without warning as he scratches up the palms of his hands in an attempt to break his fall.