The Universe in Miniature in Miniature

by Patrick Somerville

  Over the years, summer after summer, Nita never understood why she loved the island so much, but the feeling had overtaken her on the ferry that day and had stayed with her for the whole visit. Even afterwards. She was pregnant with Eliza, then, and only just married. She loved her husband, she did, but she was afraid, too, of her prospects in another country, of what she might become, over time. It’s not that she wasn’t fond of London. She loved London. This, though, the Isle of Man, was different—she felt here the remainder of something painfully, blissfully, tranquilly old. She wanted to be near it whenever she could.

  Eliza, in all honesty, has some money of her own, even though she’s always kept this very quiet, and has always been privately disgusted with her family’s affluence. Even had she inherited nothing from Herman, she could have lived, at her whim, a life of retirement and luxury. She knew, too, that this played a role in her decision to be a social worker, she could not pretend that her desire to work with the less fortunate had not grown, partly, from guilt of her good fortunes. No one at school ever knew. Certainly, no one at work knew, either. She concealed it well. She affected an accent, made sure her attitude on certain topics was just so. She’d begun to do all this even before her parents died.

  The house is three stories. There are many cars in the drive and there are many people here. Most are gathered in the drawing room on the first floor, quietly discussing what they might do next. They are all members of Pangea, in some way shape or form; they are bureaucrats, lawyers, artists, teachers, and weirdos. All people Eliza began to gather toward Pangea, or people who came to her once they realized what she aimed to do. They are, basically, the strangest people in the world. They are here to use their strange to save it. They are an army of odd.

  Eliza is in a third-floor bedroom, alone but for a doctor and a nurse, and at the moment, she isn’t conscious. Her face is wrapped tight in bandages; her hair is gone, burned away. What’s left of her lips are wrapped, too, but in a softer matrix of bandages, which the doctor has just now changed.

  Before, when she was conscious, she made the plans to come here.

  The doctor doesn’t want her here, nor does she like the task with which she’s been charged, as it runs counter to the central tenant of her profession. Eliza is not going to live. Eliza knows this. Eliza came here, to her old country house, to die.

  There are to be no more surgeries, only the lightest of treatments. Only fresh bandages, moisturizer, drugs to ease the pain. Eliza made it very clear to the doctor: only keep me alive for a day or two. Enough time to make plans for the money. If possible, to talk to Tom once more.

  Tom is in the car that even now is rolling slowly up the private road, so maybe she’ll get to.

  Eliza, of course, were she conscious, would remember almost nothing from the explosion. She would have no idea how the bomb first came into the offices. It seems the security budget was penciled in a little low, even for the early stages of their project, but how was she to have guessed? She had known there would perhaps be a few rough patches, but never had she guessed at the vitriol that lurked behind disbelief, behind shock—never had she imagined there could be such swift and focused hatred for the absurd. Never had she guessed at the systemic abhorrence, quick to pounce, snake-like, when someone as unusual as her came to power, unconstrained by the usual paths of power-grabbing. Grayspool—God bless Grayspool—had had an inclination all along. Grayspool had warned her, had tried to protect her, but she had none of it. Even when he’d said, quite accurately, that the amount of money she controlled was enough to kill her a thousand times over, reasons be damned. The fact that she’d started out by dumping 5% of it into the ocean had not helped.

  “Pardon me, Eliza,” Grayspool had said, upon first reading the memo. (She was proud of it: the first on Pangea letterhead.) “Why would you like to do this? Humor a confounded old man.”

  “To create jobs, of course,” she said.

  “Humor him more.”

  “The treasure hunters,” Eliza said. “They’ll need labor, won’t they? Deckhands, cooks, support crews? They’ll need new boats, they’ll need to buy all new scuba gear. Perhaps someone will even commission a submarine? Imagine the spike in labor then. Are you aware of the unemployment rates around the world today?”

  “And why not just hire people?”

  “To do what? No. People want to be looking for treasure, Cedric.”

  “I see.”

  “You don’t,” she said. “But eventually.”

  Now. Here is Eliza: a clump of mummified white cotton on a bed.

  Someone blew her up.

  She’s unconscious. But she’s not dead yet.

  Tom is sort of uncomfortable when a good thirty people stop chatting and stop what they’re doing and all look up at him in the doorway of the house. He’s helping the driver with the steamer trunk, and at first, he doesn’t realize that he’s the center of attention.

  When he finally looks up, though, and looks around the room, he says, awkwardly bent forward, “Oh. Sorry. Hi everyone.”

  Grayspool says, “Everyone, here’s Tom. Tom, everyone.”

  “Hi. Everyone.”

  Embarrassing. You wouldn’t think it at a time like this, but it’s embarrassing. Tom gives a meek wave. Some servants hurry up and take over with the steamer—they quickly disappear up the stairs, hauling it and the rest of Tom’s things.

  Tom straightens up and looks at them. He does not know who these people are. They seem to know who he is. He remembers the day, long ago, when he stood in front of his mirror and mused on the idea of being special. Here it is, happening. Not quite what he had in mind.

  The room is very smoky.

  “No need to gawk, everyone,” Grayspool says, escorting Tom across the room. “It’s Tom, not Jesus. I assure you, he is both real and human.”

  Tom notices someone near the bar is dressed as a platypus.

  “Who exactly are these people, Grayspool?” Tom asks.

  “The beginnings of our staff,” he says, leading Tom to the foot of the stairs. “They’ve all come on their own accord. Freaks, really. Aren’t they? Eliza said it was all right.”

  “Is that Jonathan Rhys Davies?” asks Tom, looking over his shoulder.

  Grayspool compels him up the stairs, nodding absently. “Probably,” he says. “He’s been with us since the first week.”

  Tom slows and turns forward and looks warily at the staircase, knowing what’s at the top.

  “She really wants to see me?” he says.

  “Yes.”

  “She’s got Rhys Davies down here and she wants to talk to me? Have you seen him in Indiana Jones? Or as Gimley?”

  “Tom,” says Grayspool. “Please. She’s dying.”

  Tom sighs, looks at Grayspool.

  “It’s not a joke. It’s real.”

  Tom knows. He just doesn’t want to see her in this state. He doesn’t think he can take it.

  Eliza told Grayspool that she needed him to bring Tom to England during her only real coherent moment of consciousness. That was yesterday, not terribly long after the explosion, and since then, she’s only faded in and out. She’s not talked. Looking at her, Grayspool hopes that she somehow senses that she’s back here at the house, back in her old room. She has not woken up in hours.

  He and Tom stand silently at the foot of her bed.

  Grayspool is a master of concealing his emotions, always has been, but if he were not, he would certainly turn to Tom and tell him, through tears, how terribly hard he’s finding this, how it’s difficult to see her like this. True, it’s his job to look after her, but this cuts far deeper than a mere job. For Grayspool, the line between his work and his life has always been somewhat blurry, but he has known the girl, and been her silent ward, for years. He was the one to arrange a suitable foster home when her parents died; he was the one to shape the trust. He was the one to steer her toward the school, to set her on the path of her particular project. He saw her grow up, just as he�
��d seen his own children grow. She might as well be one of them.

  The doctor is irritated to have more visitors. It’s an impossible task as it is, just keeping her alive, not trying to aggressively keep her alive. And in these conditions! The last thing the doctor needs is two men lurking here like vultures, waiting for the poor girl to open her eyes. What do they expect? To kiss her on the lips and wake her? She doesn’t even have lips anymore. She has absorbed the blast of a bomb.

  The nurse just wishes she were back in Liverpool.

  “Is her face…” Tom says, but he doesn’t complete the thought.

  “It’s quite bad,” says Grayspool. “Yes.”

  “Were you with her?”

  “Not at the blast, no,” Grayspool says. “But I found her.”

  Tom tries to imagine what it might be like for Grayspool to have heard the blast, come running. To have come into the smoky room, felt the wind blowing through the opening. And there she was on the floor.

  “She had hoped to be able to speak with you,” says Grayspool. “But as she’s not awake, and there’s little time, I’ll have to speak in her place. I know her wishes.”

  “Just as long,” Tom says, “as you don’t role-play anything.”

  “Eliza has requested that you take over management of her institution.”

  Tom stares.

  “Me?”

  “She’s asked that you run it, yes. She said she thought you’d do a fine job.”

  “Me?” Tom asks again. “Pangea? I’d be awful.”

  “That’s not what she thought.”

  “I told her I’d buy yachts,” Tom says, looking back at her. “Big yachts. She has to remember that.”

  “I believe she does.”

  “I’m the one who thinks the whole thing is childish,” Tom says. “I think she should have just created a hedge fund. Or something. Something better than what she did.”

  “Yes, well. She thought you might use the helmet on her. Before she dies, that is. Just to get a sense of what she thinks, how she’s been approaching the job. Thoughts on Pangea. That way you might remember, you know… remember her as something of a guide. She can be your Virgil, Tom.”

  “That’s some dark shit, Grayspool,” Tom says.

  “Perhaps, yes. But practical. Isn’t that what you’re interested in? Practicality?”

  “Do you not understand what I’m saying here, though? I can’t run Pangea. I don’t give a fuck about anything, let alone a huge, silly—I mean maybe myself, maybe I give a small fuck about myself. But that’s it. The end of the world? Are you kidding me?”

  “All I can tell you is that she seemed to know you quite well,” Grayspool insists. “And that you’d be perfect for the job.”

  Tom thinks back to that night, how he watched her point the wand at him. The looks on her face, through the helmet’s glass. He could see. He hadn’t understood, then, had no idea what it might have been like for her to see him. Now that he knows how the helmet works, he can only shudder at the thought of what she saw in his heart. He has never quite had the nerve to point the thing at himself.

  “I’m sorry,” Tom says, “but I can’t. No.”

  “You can,” Grayspool insists. “At the very least, you can—”

  “I’m not doing it,” Tom says. “I’m sorry. And I’m not pointing that thing at her. I’m done with it, we should all just be done with it and let her die in peace. It’s already over.”

  To brush shoulders with death in that way, in passing, is like riding an elevator, for one floor, with the Grim Reaper. At your back, you feel his cold. Even her, even here—he can’t do it again. He can’t.

  “She was being idealistic,” Tom says. “She was being romantic and goo-goo eyed about people. About me. It’s stupid, Grayspool. And besides, you know as well as I do that Pangea is a waste of that fortune. That people have a right to be furious at how she plans to spend it.”

  Now it’s Grayspool’s turn to stand silent. Tom knows there’s something sensible in him, deep down.

  “He was crazy, wasn’t he?” Tom says. “Herman. He was mad as a hatter.”

  Still, silence.

  Tom looks once more at Eliza.

  “And he did this. To her.”

  With that, Tom says that he’s going to bed. He finds his room—it’s on the second floor. He looks up at the ceiling. When a servant goes by, Tom catches his attention. He tells the man to bring Scotch.

  What you have to understand is that Beatrice Lyons, seventy years in the past, never believed that the helmet would actually work. She never had the faintest clue as to how she’d made it work, either. Besides a few very complicated, somewhat arbitrary mathematical analyses, all she’d really done was distill, distill, distill. The Machine—once operational—scared the living daylights out of her, and she only once wore it herself. She trained the wand on a bat, actually, which ended up being a very uncomfortable experience.

  Tom, no longer quite the champion drinker he was a few short months ago, drinks himself to the edge of oblivion in a very short amount of time. Sitting in a plush chair, legs up on an ottoman, fire crackling beside him, he wonders, blurrily, if he loves Eliza. Not romantically, not really in that way—but still, there’s some connection, something more like family. Could it happen in just a few days? Two days? A trip to a cave? Or could you meet someone, and not even know it, but then remember—maybe years later—remember back and reconstruct the time and realize all the feelings that you’d missed, originally? It’s stupid—he knows how stupid it is. Something that a child might think. But he wonders. He does wonder.

  He passes out.

  The house falls into silence as the night moves on.

  The many gathered downstairs find nooks and couches and chairs while the few staff on hand do their best to clean around them.

  Cedric Grayspool, restless, struggling to maintain a suitable demeanor, walks the paths outside, wondering if perhaps Tom might not be right after all.

  And Eliza still doesn’t wake up. She’s lost in something below a dream and different than sleep.

  Pain of that degree will follow someone anywhere—it will only turn back at the gates of the underworld.

  Eliza is dying.

  The island is still.

  Manannan isn’t here.

  There are not many houses nearby, and most people live east, in Douglas. Douglas sleeps.

  Hours go.

  The sun, then, coming up over the sea.

  Tom, surprisingly, is awake to see it.

  He’s outside. Metabolizing again? He’s not sure. But as dawn comes and the orange light begins to creep along the rocks and grass outside the house, Tom is there, sitting on a bench, freezing, watching the arrival of the light.

  Tom’s reconsidering.

  Tom thinks:We’re it.

  And we’re at best a maybe.

  What he couldn’t have conceived of months ago—hours ago—seems strangely obvious to him now, sitting here, watching the sunrise. He thinks of the press release: well, obviously. It makes little difference what he thinks of Pangea, or even what he thinks of Herman, of the helmet. There’s something far clearer and far simpler afoot.

  Life.

  It took some hours for it to settle over him, but he knew, even then, arguing with Grayspool. Probably why he argued in the first place. Something more in harmony with mornings than with nights. How is it that he’s sober? He isn’t sure.

  It’s Christmas Eve.

  It’s Christmas Eve, 2010.

  Tom goes into the house, finds the kitchen, and asks the servant for a chisel and a hammer.

  Upstairs, kneeling in front of the helmet, Tom pauses, concerned that the noise might wake everyone. If it does, someone—Grayspool, probably—might try to stop him. He closes his door, leans a chair up against the knob.

  He starts by tearing off all the attachments, all the wiry arms and orbs and lenses. They come free with distinct, satisfying snaps, and as he plucks them off, Tom realizes that
a part of him has grown to hate this helmet.

  Hate it.

  He goes after the main contraption with the chisel, wedging it down into a welded seam and pounding with the hammer. At first, the pounding does little more than create noise, but Tom continues, hammering with more and more fury. Because what right had she had, so long ago, to make such a thing at all? Really? As though it would have stopped the war, a war of real death, of real pain? Thousands of years of death and dismemberment, man at the hand of man—as though such a thing could stop inertia like that. It is what we are. As though it would have closed down concentration camps, reunited families, made bombs fly back upward, sucked the flames back into ordinance? Fuck that. It was a disgrace to those who’d died. And what right had Herman had? To spy on them, to orchestrate their lives, to toy with them as though they were marionettes. Fuck that. People, Tom knows, are not marionettes.

  Show some courage, he thinks. Show yourself, Herman.

  There is another loud crackle.

  Tom starts hammering with more passion. The seam has split. There is knocking on the door—he can hear it alongside his pounding. The top of the helmet has cracked open.

  After a few more strikes, Tom takes hold of the two split pieces of metal and begins to pull with all his strength. There is louder pounding at the door—Tom hears Grayspool’s voice. He’s concerned. Tom’s almost there. Just a little more and…

  Crrraaaaaccckkkkle.

  There. Finally.

  Another seam gives, this time at the side.

  The helmet cracks open like an egg.

  Tom, hands aching, leans back onto his knees, surveying what’s before him. The innards of the machine are twisting tubes and wires. There are a few small lights glowing softly. More lenses, too, dirtier, stacked horizontally. The wires and tubes all wind around a central space, a kind of heart at the helmet’s center.

  And resting there, the centerpiece of everything, is a single glass vial with a cork.