Steampunk III: Steampunk Revolution

by Ann Vandermeer (ed)

  The real Wilde died in 1914, leaving Wykeham-Rackham alone and feeling, at 37, that his era was already passing away. Pater and Swinburne and Burne-Jones and the other aesthetes were long gone. The outbreak of World War I further deepened his pessimism about the future of modern civilization. Rich, bored and extravagantly melancholy, he enlisted in the 28th Battalion of the London Regiment, popularly known as the “Artists Rifles,” because, as he said, he “liked the uniform, and hated life.” One can only imagine his surprise when the Artists Rifles were retained as an active fighting force and sent on a tour of the war’s most viciously contested battlefields, including Ypres, the Somme and Passchendaele. All told the Artists Rifles would sustain more personnel killed in World War I than any other British battalion.

  But Wykeham-Rackham survived, and not only survived but flourished. He discovered within himself either an inner wellspring of bravery or a stylish indifference to his own fate—the line between them is a fine one—and over the course of three years of trench combat he was awarded a raft of medals, including the Military Cross for gallantry in the face of the enemy at Bapaume.

  His luck ran out in 1918, during the infamous 100-days assault on Germany’s Hindenburg Line. Wykeham-Rackham was attempting to negotiate a barbedwire barrier when a sharpshooter’s bullet clipped a white phosphorus grenade that he carried on his belt. White phosphorus, then the cutting edge of antipersonnel weaponry, offered one of the grimmest deaths available to a soldier in the Great War. In short order the chemical had burned away much of Wykeham-Rackham’s lower body, from the hips down. As he writhed in agony, the German sharpshooter, evidently not satisfied with his work, fired twice more, removing the bridge of Wykeham-Rackham’s nose, his left cheekbone and half his lower jaw.

  But not, strangely, ending his life. The former dandy’s soul clung tenaciously to his ruined body, even as it was trundled from aid station to field hospital to Paris and then across the channel to London. There he became the focus of one of the strangest collaborations to which the 20th century would bear witness.

  At that time the allied fields of prosthetics and cosmesis were being marched rapidly out of their infancy and into a painful adolescence in order to cope with the shocking wounds being inflicted on the human body by the new mechanized weaponry of World War I. Soldiers were returning from the battlefield with disfigurements of a severity undreamt of by earlier generations. When word of Wykeham-Rackham’s grievous injury reached his family, from whom he had long been estranged, rather than attend his bedside personally they opted to send a great deal of money. It was just as well.

  In short order Wykeham-Rackham’s feet, legs and hips had been rebuilt, in skeletal form, out of a new martensitic alloy known as stainless steel which had just been invented in nearby Sheffield. They were provided with rudimentary muscular power by a hydraulic network fashioned out of gutta-percha tubing. The whole contraption was then fused to the base of Wykeham-Rackham’s spine.

  It was a groundbreaking achievement, of course, but not without precedent. The field of robotics did not yet exist—the word “robot” would not be coined till 1920—but the history of prosthetic automata went back at least as far back as the 16th century and the legendary German mercenary Götz von Berlichingen, who lost his right arm in a freak accident when a stray cannonball caused it to be cut off with his own sword. The spring-loaded mechanical iron arm he had built as a replacement could grip a lance and write with a quill. (Wykeham-Rackham was fond of quoting from Goethe’s Goetz von Berlichingen, based on von Berlichingen’s life, in which the playwright coined a useful phrase: “Leck mich am Arsch,” or loosely, “kiss my ass.”)

  To replace Wykeham-Rackham’s shattered face, a wholly different approach was required. When he was sufficiently recovered from his first operation, Wykeham-Rackham was removed to Sidcup, a suburb of London, home to a special hospital dedicated to the care of those with grotesque facial injuries. It was an eerie place. Mirrors were forbidden. Throughout the town were placed special benches, painted blue, where it was understood that the townspeople should expect that anyone sitting there would present a gravely disturbing appearance.

  Wykeham-Rackham’s old artist friends, those who were left, rallied around him. Facial reconstruction at that time was accomplished by means of masks. A plaster cast was made of the wounded man’s face, a process which brought the patient to within seconds of suffocation. The cast was then used to make a mask made of paper-thin galvanized copper. Prominent painters competed with one another to produce the most lifelike reproduction of Wykeham-Rackham’s vanished features, which were then reproduced in enamel that was bonded to the copper.

  In all, 12 such masks were produced, suitable for various occasions and displaying a range of facial expressions. On seeing them for the first time, Wykeham-Rackham held one up, like Hamlet holding up Yorick’s skull, and quoted from his old friend Wilde: “Man is least himself when he talks in his own person. Give him a mask, and he will tell you the truth.”

  Following the end of the war, Wykeham-Rackham enjoyed a second hey-day. His fantastical appearance made him the toast of the European avantgarde. A pioneer of kinetic sculpture, Marcel Duchamp was enraptured by Wykeham-Rackham, who agreed to be exhibited alongside Duchamp’s other “readymades”; he even allowed Duchamp to sign his steel calf with his distinctive “R. Mutt.” Man Ray photographed him. Cocteau filmed him. Stravinsky wrote a ballet based on his life, choreographed by Nijinsky.

  Picasso created a special mask for him, a Cubist nightmare that he never wore. (Wykeham-Rackham remarked that Picasso seemed to have missed the point, as the mask was more grotesque than what lay beneath it, not less.) Prosthetics became increasingly fashionable, and not a few deaths and grievous injuries among the fashionable set were explained as attempts to reproduce Wykeham-Rackham’s distinctive “look.”

  Meanwhile he was continuously undergoing mechanical upgrades and improvements as the available technology progressed. He regularly entertained whole salons of inventors and engineers who vied to try out their innovations on him. Nikolai Tesla submitted an elaborate, wildly visionary set of schematics for powering his movements electrically. They were, characteristically for Tesla, the subject of a defamation campaign by Edison, then a blizzard of law-suits by others who claimed credit for them, and then, finally and decisively, lost in a fire.

  But as time wore on Wykeham-Rackham became increasingly aware that while his metal parts were largely unscathed by the passage of time, his human parts were not. At a scandalous 50th birthday party thrown for him by the infamous Bright Young Things of London, Evelyn Waugh among them, Wykeham-Rackham was heard to remark that he was both picture and Dorian Gray in one man.

  It was not long afterwards, in 1932, that Wykeham-Rackham opted to have the remainder of his face removed. He was tired, he said, of having his mask touched up to look older, to match his surviving features. Why not become all mask, and look however he wished? It is not known with any certainty who performed this “voluntary disfigurement” operation, but it is strongly suspected that Lambshead’s steady if not overly fastidious hand held the scalpel, judging by the fact that Wykeham-Rackham took a sub rosa trip to Madagascar at around this time.

  Meanwhile stormclouds of international tension were once again massing.

  For a brief period Wykeham-Rackham’s lower limbs were declared a state secret, and he was required to wear specially designed pantaloons to conceal them. There were numerous attempts by Soviet emissaries to lure Wykeham-Rackham to Moscow—Stalin was said to have been obsessed with the idea of acquiring a literal “man of steel” to lead the glorious proletariat revolution.

  No one was wholly surprised when Wykeham-Rackham re-enlisted following Germany’s invasion of Poland in 1939. He had grown increasingly disenchanted with 20th-century urban life, with its buzzing electric lights, blaring radios and roaring automobiles, even though he himself existed as its living, walking avatar. (He had reluctantly submitted to the electrification of his n
ether regions in the mid-1920s, after a series of messy, embarrassing hydraulic failures at public functions.) He mourned the elegance of his vanished late-Victorian world.

  He was also lonely. His romantic life had stalled, in part because he lacked anything in the way of genitals. (It is rumored, although not confirmed, that attempts to add sexual functionality to Wykeham-Rackham’s steel groin had to be abandoned after a catastrophic injury to a test partner.) At one time he had hoped that the same procedure that made him what he was would be performed on others, who would share his strange predicament. But all attempts to repeat the experiment failed. It has been argued, most notably in Dominic Fibrous’ definitive Wykeham-Rackham: Awesome or Hokum?, that this is because Wykeham-Rackham’s condition was “medically impossible” and “made utterly no sense at all.”

  His one, platonic, romance seems to have been with a young mathematician and computer scientist named Alan Turing. Their dalliance led to the latter’s formulation of his famous Wykeham-Rackham Test, which raised the question of whether it would be possible to devise a robot so lifelike that it would be impossible to tell it apart from a human being while making love to it.

  Now in his 60s, Wykeham-Rackham was far too old for active service, but the physical stamina resulting from his unusual physical make-up, and his value to the troops as a source of morale, made him indispensable. For public relations purposes he joined the invasion of Normandy on D-Day, and the famous photograph of him striding from the surf onto Omaha Beach, his steel pelvis dripping seafoam, a bullet pinging off his enamel face, remains one of the iconic images of the Second World War. The American GIs cheered him on and called him “Tin Man.”

  But Wykeham-Rackham’s excessive bravery was again his downfall. Emboldened by this taste of his former glory, he refused the offer of transport back to England and stayed with the Allied forces pressing forward through the Norman hedgerows. A close-range encounter with the infamous German Flammenwerfer seared his arms and torso almost to the bone. Once again he made the perilous journey back across the Channel to the hospitals of London. This time it was necessary to replace almost his entire upper body, leaving only his head and major organs in place.

  Astoundingly, he lived on.

  Indeed, some began to speculate that out of the crucible of the world wars, humanity’s first immortal being had emerged. Wykeham-Rackham showed no obvious signs of aging, apart from his mane of white hair, which he took to dyeing to match its original lustrous black.

  But inside, his soul was wasting away. A dark time began for Wykeham-Rackham. Owing to the precipitous decline in sales of wainscoting and wainscoting accessories since the Victorian period, his family fortune had dwindled almost to nothing. He was able to survive only on his military pension, and whatever he received making promotional appearances for the British Armed Forces. Twice he was caught stealing lubricants for his joints and convicted of petty larceny. He became silent and morose. He sold off eleven of his masks, and the Picasso, leaving only the one entitled “Melancholia.” It was, he said, the only one he needed.

  Wykeham-Rackham’s last moment in the spotlight came in the 1960s, when he became one of the oddities and grotesques taken up by Andy Warhol and the Factory scene in New York. He appeared in several of Warhol’s movies, to the lasting detriment of his dignity, and was of course the subject of Warhol’s seminal silkscreen Wykeham-Rackham Triptych. It was at Warhol’s suggestion that Wykeham-Rackham commissioned the final surgery that turned him into an entirely synthetic being: the replacement of his skull with a steel casing, and his brain with a large lightbulb.

  Conventional wisdom would argue that this was the end of Wykeham-Rackham’s existence as a sentient being, but in truth it was difficult to tell. As the 1960s wound down he had spoken and moved less and less. One Warhol hanger-on remarked, in a display of sub-Wildean wit, that after the operation his conversation was “more brilliant than ever.”

  But Warhol cast Wykeham-Rackham off as lightly as he took him up, and he passed the 1970s and 1980s in obscurity. It’s difficult to track his movements during this lost period, but curatorial notes found in Lambshead’s basement suggest that some of Warhol’s junkie friends eventually sold him to a traveling carnival, where he was put to use as a fortune-telling machine.

  Even there he was exiled to a gloomy corner of the midway. The proprietors despaired of ever making money off him, because, they said, no matter how they fiddled with his settings, he only ever predicted the imminent and painful demise of whoever consulted him.

  His glorious past had been entirely forgotten but for a single trace. On the sign above his booth was painted, in swirly circus calligraphy, a quotation from Oscar Wilde:

  “A mask tells us more than a face.”

  This is a fact: The muscles of the hand and arm cramp and spasm while becoming acclimated to a regular repetitive motion, especially one that must be repeated sixty to eighty times a minute. More if there is any cause for excitement.

  At the Hôpital du Salut, the strangest sights are not the men and women with metal instead of flesh, not the children with gas flames in place of eyes, not the veterans who race down the hallway to see if they’re spry enough on the wheels that replace their legs to join the police corps. The strangest sights are the docteurs and nurses, all of whom are completely flesh.

  The children stop and point at me, too. I’m a straddler; I don’t belong in the world of the Hôpital anymore than I do in the world outside. I’m not fully flesh, but my metal workings are carefully kept hidden under the long lace at the ends of my sleeves. Only five others in the world know of my metal plates: my parents, my sister, Docteur Suvi, and his nurse. The nurse stays in the room from the moment I step behind the screen to undo my blouse to the moment the docteur escorts me back out into the world. It’s childish, certainly, but she provides a security that not even my parents can give me. My sister Eva could, if she chose. But she doesn’t.

  Today my fingers are numb with cold, even after warming them in front of the fire in the waiting room, so it’s hard to undo each of the tiny buttons that line my spine, then to pull the tight sleeve off my left arm, the hand ever pumping, then to shake the sleeve off my right arm. It feels whorish to leave my blouse dangling from the waist of my skirt so I pull it off completely, meeting the docteur in only my corset and combination above my long skirt. He’s never embarrassed; all he cares about is the metal.

  “Looking good despite the rain,” he mutters as he forces his fingers into my palm in the few seconds that my fingers relax. He removes his chef d’oeuvre from my grip carefully, squeezing the metal heart for the few moments it takes to slip it into the huge steam-powered pump where he tests the endurance of each new heart. My hand hovers above my captive heart, unable to stop clenching and unclenching. I have to stay within inches of the hot metal and steam; my metal vessels won’t let me stray any further from my heart. “We could try putting it back between your ribs and your bicep,” the docteur says, examining my heart for wear. The nurse takes quick notes from the desk, never looking at her paper. “Then you’d have both hands again.”

  “No.” It was bad enough having a metal plate instead of the ribs that shattered under the force required to pump my heart. I could live one-handed.

  He shrugs. “How is your arm?” he asks, checking the flexible metal tubes just under the skin of my left hand. They enter on the underside of my wrist, connecting to the large blood vessels there. At the time of the operation, the docteur told my parents, Eva, and I that the metal might get corroded. That I would die if it did.

  “Fine.” I swallow. “Docteur, did you see that Monsieur Edison is coming for the Exposition? I’ve been following his experiments with electricity.... I think he may be interested in creating an electric heart.”

  Dr. Suvi snorts. “First you refuse to be shown as my crowning achievement, and now you speak of electric hearts? You’re a silly girl, mademoiselle.” He steps away, wiping his hands on his white coat as if he’s been sul
lied by hearing my question. “I’ll see you in a week.”

  And with that I’m back behind the screen. I’m better at buttoning up than I am unbuttoning. Before I step out to rejoin the docteur and his nurse, I shake my sleeves so that the long lace covers both hands equally.

  This is a fact: An adult human heart has the same mass as two clenched fists. A child’s heart has the same mass as one clenched fist. It took years of innovation for Dr. Suvi to develop a metal heart that fit in one hand.

  If Eva had gone to the hospital, our parents would have sent Marie to accompany her. I go on my own. I prefer it this way; Marie is not a stifling governess, but I’ve seen enough of her in my nineteen years. She was hired to take care of Eva, and me by extension once I was born six years later.

  Rather than taking the stairs up to the zeppelin station like most people of gentle birth, I walk to the corner to hail the horse-driven omnibus. I tell Eva that I prefer being on the ground, but in reality I’d rather be in the air. I get too excited by heights for my hand to keep up with my brain’s need for oxygen. The city view from our family’s flat is the most beautiful thing I know, and the excitement of seeing all of Paris spread below me like a toy begging to be played with is too much. Since the operation, I faint every time I take a zeppelin, causing sensations. I’d rather not have well-dressed bourgeois ladies poke at my metal heart with their silk fans while their husbands debate over who will have to carry me off. I know they do this; I woke in the middle of the debate once. They probably all thought I was dead, despite the spasms in my left hand that kept my blood moving. My hand resembles a heart more than a hand now; it wouldn’t stop clenching and unclenching if I told it to, even when I sleep. It took months of practice and conditioning before the operation, but nothing can stop it now. Just like a true heart, it never tires.