All Those Vanished Engines

by Paul Park

  A year later I had taken over the rest of Ben Burgis’s courses. I was reading Traci’s story, and if you were a certain type of persons—different from Nicola, for example—it might have been possible to detect the faltering, senescent hand of Providence in what had now occurred.

  Once, in bed with Traci’s heroine, Jason Hall had started talking about an English teacher at his college. He had gotten in close with her family, and was often at her house. She taught Dante, and Milton, and Expository Writing. She was also, Jason explained, delicate and vulnerable, with a husband who taught physics and often left her alone with her autistic child while he traveled the world. And despite her intellect and accomplishments, Jason Hall thought he could detect similarities between her and that same daughter, who had become in his eyes a figure of symbolic mystery, a ghost haunting the household, hovering in doorways, uttering from time to time a poignant, gnomic phrase.

  “What was the professor’s name?” I asked in one of our conferences. “You never say it in the text.”

  When she told me, I feigned disbelief. “Am I supposed to take this personally?”

  “Don’t flatter yourself,” she said. “This is nothing about you.”

  We had already established that the novel was based on events in Traci’s actual life. “People will think she is Korean,” I said. “Of course the description is filtered through Jason Hall—I’m hoping that’s a pseudonym, by the way. It’s interesting, what he chose to tell you. He was probably lying about her name.”

  “But—that’s what he called her. Besides, I looked her up.”

  “The actual facts hold no interest,” I said. “Sure. I understand you have a loyalty to the events as you remember them. It’s like you have a movie in your head and you want to be true to it. But we haven’t seen that movie. We don’t even care about it.”

  This was a lie. I cared only about the movie. So I combined the lie with something true: “That’s why it’s difficult to write about your own life. Any distortion feels like a betrayal. Was she an … author, by any chance?”

  I liked feeling the thin ice. “I’m sure that wasn’t her real name,” I said. “People hide the truth about these things. My own mother called me ‘Matthew’ in her books.”

  Irritated, uninterested, she shrugged, and I continued: “You give the impression they were … intimate. Him and the teacher.”

  We had met in a coffee shop on Charles Street. She was hunched over her seltzer, a worried expression on her face. “That’s what he told me. Actually, he was much more graphic than what I’m saying in the story. Talk about distortions. But he was such a liar. He thought every intimacy was a sexual one.”

  I sat back in my chair, touched the rim of my coffee cup. Anyone watching us, I thought, would imagine she wanted something from me, and by my body language they would think I was resisting. In reality, the opposite was true.

  “No,” she continued, “it’s obvious that these people were really important to him. Each one of them symbolized something, even the teenage boy, who was always kind of a loser—at least he sounded that way to me. Very self-absorbed. But the way Jason tried to connect with what he loved was always about sex.”

  “Do you believe him—I mean about the professor?”

  “I don’t know,” she said. “Is it important?”

  “I think it is. It speaks to the credibility of the scene. The heroine might be unsure. And the reader. But I don’t think the author should be.”

  “All right, I believe him,” she said bitterly. “That would make things more dramatic, anyway.”

  Because she was thin, she gave the first impression of a younger woman. Up close, after you were used to her, you could see her face was streaked and knotted with lines. In this way she was like my sister, Elly, who looked simultaneously middle-aged and fourteen.

  I myself didn’t believe him. As Traci said, he was a liar. Waiting for my father to wake up, I sat with my sister in the living room, where she was rocking in her chair. “Do you remember Jack Shoots?” I asked.

  Stupid question. “I remember,” she said, and smiled.

  “What do you remember?

  In the rocking chair she made a face, then pursed her lips together to whistle. The act of remembering provided a secret joy. I also pursed my lips, and she glanced up at my face and then away. “Once, in December, Jack Shoots was staying in my mother’s study when my mother wasn’t here. He wore a lemon-yellow shirt. Or a lime-yellow. He came downstairs to say he would make chicken fingers for supper. Or golden fingers.”

  She paused. “It was a night with one cloud and three doors. About eight-thirty. I was in the rocking chair, listening to my record called Sister Sledge. My friend Anna gave me that.”

  The clouds and doors referred to an obsolete system for classifying her mood. So: a happy evening. Zero clouds and four doors would have been better, but you can’t complain about the one cloud. A happy evening in this same room, this same chair. I looked up at the portrait above the mantelpiece, my mother’s Creole great-grandmother, painted in New Orleans in 1840. Later, she died of tuberculosis in prison, accused of spying for the Confederacy.

  Elly pursed her lips. “Because I like chicken fingers. Or golden fingers. Then he told me about the sexual intercourse and said he would make chicken fingers. He took my underpants off but he couldn’t have an erection. Because too drunk. Which makes it difficult. Then I got dressed and went downstairs. He made chicken fingers.”

  All’s well that ends well. “How were they?”

  “Umm—delicious.” Then she frowned. “A little spicy. I prefer it with olive oil and not that bacon grease.” Then she smiled: “Or golden fingers?”

  “Yes—or golden fingers.”

  “Because they are the same.” She paused, started again. “Because I don’t want to get pregnant.”

  “No.”

  “Or feel sick.”

  “No.”

  “Or a venereal disease. Or get up early.”

  “God, no,” I said. I thought of Traci’s description of lying next to Jason Hall, weeping after he had fallen asleep. And of Traci herself, weeping in my office when we discussed the scene. But Elly wasn’t unhappy, now or then. Autism had protected her. Nor could I bear the thought of saying anything that might spoil the pleasure of remembrance, or make her say, heartbroken, “Oh, oh, oh, it’s me again.”

  She smiled. “I remember in 1995 he sent me a letter asking for a house portrait, for his house, for his anniversary. And I made it, but he did not pay the bill! That’s what I asked him at the funeral.”

  As she spoke, I thought about Colonel Eustace Peevey. He also had a path he was following, old diagrams, cryptic letters, and unreliable interviews, which had led him far astray. Nor had he ever uncovered the Cetus, Grampus, or Leviathan, whose explosion had caused such havoc.

  “Would you like me to make golden fingers for supper?” I asked.

  “Or chicken fingers? Oooh, I would like that.” She pursed her lips, blew a little whistle. “Only with olive oil?”

  2. THE LIMIT OF HIS HEARING

  In the dining room, my father was alert. He had turned on the light and he was reading a book review. I made him a Bombay martini, and we chatted for a while, mostly about a recurring series of hallucinations in which figures from an earlier generation—his great-uncle Charlie, for example, or General Taufflieb, the French officer whom he suspected of having broken up his grandmother’s marriage—stamped and staggered as if drunk around the room’s perimeter. Sometimes celebrities such as Kurt Godel or Walt Whitman appeared, delivering fragments of advice. This, posthumously, from the bard of Camden: “In times like these, in modest fun our greatest safety lies. The wisest men are clods, nay, fools, who laughter do despise.”

  I remarked that death seemed to have eroded the poet’s skill. My father stared at me briefly. “Yes, well. One could have predicted that particular effect.”

  “Look on the bright side,” I told him. “At least he’s still wo
rking.”

  In his opinion, the hallucinations were the side effects of a drug called Mirapex, which he was taking for his restless leg. I wasn’t so sure. When supper was ready, I wheeled him to the table and served him a pile of chicken, rice, and green beans. Elly made a salad and sat down with us. At first he sat staring at his plate as if he didn’t know what to do next. After several minutes he skewered a piece of fried chicken on one of the outside tines of his fork and then nibbled it thoughtfully. The taste seemed to awaken a response, and soon he had slid down into a certain type of memory, which enabled him to eat nonstop for forty minutes, until long after my sister and I were done.

  Afterward I helped him up to bed and got him settled. I plumped up his pillows and adjusted the shade. “Listen,” I said, “do you believe in an afterlife? Worlds where people live?”

  I didn’t expect him to answer, and he didn’t. “When I was a boy,” he said, “I saw a speech in Cambridge by Percival Lowell, and a demonstration, with illustrations of the canals on Mars. You could look up at night and know you were seeing the remains of a great civilizations—all destroyed now, all gone. Just a few last irrigation projects in the red, drifting sand—Mr. Lowell had made sketches. He was very plausible, a very distinguished-looking man. In those days everybody still wore beards. It was a large improvement over now.”

  Around eight I returned to my mother’s study and sat down at her desk to do my “smiting,” as I referred to my daily work on The Rose of Sarifal, the book I was writing for Wizards of the Coast, under the pseudonym Paulina Claiborne, who had been someone from my mother’s family in Virginia, though from a couple of generations before. Apparently she’d been a science-fiction writer—so my mother said. She had written stories set in the future, none of which survived.

  How could anyone forget a whole realm? I thought. To waste time, I googled Percival Lowell, and learned, as I suspected, that he had died before my father was born.

  Here is part of the episode I wrote that night, about fourteen hundred words:

  The sun was halfway down the horizon. The shadow of the statue protruded almost to Lukas’s feet. As he watched, arrow on string, the shadow faded, though there wasn’t a cloud in the blue sky. Instead, the sunlight itself had changed and weakened as the sky turned color, tending toward a deeper, colder purple, or as if dusk had suddenly come. At the same time, as if to compensate, the empty iron cressets along the balustrade came flickering to life, first tendrils of black smoke, and then a gentle radiance.

  In a moment the crew had their weapons out, had assumed their postures of defense. Only Lord Roseholm stayed where he was, winking vaguely at the sky.

  But all was still. Above them, the light had lost its force, and it grew cold. In the center of the square, the fountain overflowed. Lukas could hear a light, sweet laughter. As he turned, he almost expected to see the ghost who always followed him, his father’s mother, dead before he was even born, her face pale and bloodless, her gray hair wild and tangled. Most recently he’d seen her on the ship from Alaron, stalking the deck in her long, shapeless cloak, or perching footless in the rigging like a bird, whether to haunt him or watch over him, who could say?

  It was not she. Or if it were, she had taken a new shape. From the west side of the square, someone stepped out of the shadows of the long colonnade, a single eladrin, empty hands upraised, her long black hair braided down her back, dressed in a fawn-colored bodice and diaphanous burgundy sleeves, a gown of red and yellow that moved around her when she moved. She wore a necklace of gold strands and citrine drops, and there were gold rings in her ears. In the square the water and the fire followed her, flowing from the goddess’s stone hands and rising up from the broken cressets, until the rest of the city and the world beyond the stone balustrade lost substance, faded into shadow in the middle of the afternoon.

  She turned in a half circle, then took a few staggering steps. “You must forgive me. I had something to drink while I was waiting. And I’ve brought something for you. You must be hungry after ten days of biscuits and dried sausages.”

  Behind her in the palace of the moon, a new light shone among the columns of the portico and from the stone window frames, a row of empty arches save for the greenish glow. None of the crew had for a moment relaxed their vigilance, unless you could count Lord Roseholm, besotted by the beauty of the girl in front of him; he wiped his lips, wagged his big head back and forth on his long neck. “Yes,” he said, making a motion to the others. “You may stand down.”

  They didn’t move until Lukas gave the signal, stepping forward as he replaced the arrow in his quiver. They found themselves moving, he imagined, through a trap made of spider-silk rather than steel, and it was not with steel that they could free themselves.

  Lord Roseholm, though, was already caught. As the lady stumbled from feigned drunkenness he took her by the elbow. She thanked him with her smile and drew him forward into the portico. The place had been an inn in the old days, and a blistered painted board still hung from iron rings—The Red Herring. Inside, Lukas could see a table had been spread—there was one silver plate, one knife and fork, one silver goblet, one chair. It occurred to him that she knew only Lord Roseholm was so stupid as to eat or drink.

  Lukas raised his hand. The lady favored him with a complicit smile as she drew Roseholm to the carved chair and sat him down and poured a cup of wine for him. She had her own cup of wine, but she didn’t drink. Only she made a gesture with her finger, and Lukas could hear, as if at the limit of his ears, a sound that was like music.

  Lord Roseholm took a sip. “Oh, that was too easy,” smiled the lady. She turned her head toward Lukas and the rest, where they had gathered on the portico. “Cousins, and you, sir,” she said to Lukas, “let me thank you for not resisting me. Death comes so soon, but not today. Because I have need of you—strong soldiers! Brave warriors. And loyal too! Loyal until death—no, I am teasing. This fellow, how much was he paying you?”

  Just at the limit of his ears, a sound that was like music, a violin, perhaps, and then a pipe. Almost Lukas could hear it better when he wasn’t listening. “You knew we were coming,” he said.

  The lady laughed. “Do you think so? Captain, you have a suspicious nature. But let me ask you this. If you don’t manage to defend him, despite your best effort, will you forfeit your money? Or were you prudent enough to take your payment in advance? No matter—whatever money was promised, I will double it.”

  Now she stood behind the lord’s chair, her long hand caressing his cheek as he goggled and drooled, his freckled face empty of understanding, his big head wagging back and forth.

  She ran her thumbnail down the length of his throat. A thread of blood followed it down. “There, it is done,” she said. All together, they watched Lord Roseholm’s throat swallow and convulse, swallow and convulse, swallow and convulse. Then it was still.

  “A sad thing,” she said, reaching for a napkin from the table. She wiped her hands, then threw down her napkin, turned, and stalked out through the portico. Outside it was bright day, the last of the afternoon. The torches were dark, the fountain dry, the shadows long. “Leave him,” she said, and they followed her to the long stairs.

  “Come,” she said to Lukas, who hurried to her side. “You see you were meant to die here with Lord Roseholm. Three hundred gold pieces—the high procurator of Alaron could have promised you six hundred, or a thousand. He never meant to pay. But I have work for you.”

  In the light she was impossibly lovely, her straight, dark hair and pearly skin. But now that Lukas knew that she was old, hundreds, perhaps thousands of years old, he could see behind her eyes a hooded shadow. She climbed rapidly downstairs, and then turned into the cobblestoned streets of the old town. The doors gaped open in the empty houses, stone and brick, and dark passageways smelling of bat dung. Flights of birds rose from the courtyards, and rats scurried among piles of fallen masonry.

  She turned under a high gate into the block of an old prison, its window
s covered with a mesh of corroded iron bars. In the courtyard Lukas stopped her. “We aren’t following you here.”

  His crew moved into position, a ragged semicircle behind him. He raised his hand. Weapons were useless. His own bow was upon his back.

  The lady turned around, then came back toward him until she stood uncomfortably close, her eyes almost level with his own. Even at that distance, her body and her clothes gave off no scent. “Captain,” she said, “do you know who I am?”

  “I have an idea.”

  “Tell me,” she said. Her teeth were small and very white. He watched the tip of her tongue move between them. It was dark, and a peculiar shade of lavender.

  “I believe you are High Lady Constance of Sarifal, queen of this land.”

  A hiss escaped her lips, and Lukas could feel her cool breath. “Is that what you believe?” she asked, her long eyes mocking him. “Then you must also believe I have the power to destroy you where you stand.”

  He shrugged.

  “But I mean you no harm! On the contrary, I mean to reward you. Three hundred gold pieces from the procurator—you won’t see that money, I’m afraid. You wouldn’t even see it if you dragged Lord Roseholm’s worthless carcass back to Alaron. But I will make you rich men.”

  She blinked, and a tear formed in her long lashes at the corner of her eye. She raised her hand to touch it, pull it away, roll it between her fingers, a jewel now, or something close to it, a sapphire or a piece of crystal. She laughed, flicked it away.

  I took a break, thought for a moment about what I was doing. As usual, I was dissatisfied with the character of my protagonist, Captain Lukas. I was not happy with his reactions. It seemed to me that he was never involved in enough fighting, which was what these novels were supposed to be about. Was he a coward? He had the weaponry, the skill. And yet most scenes devolved into versions of this current one; Lukas, handed a carefully crafted opportunity for mayhem, would find instead a peaceable solution that always seemed to involve at least the possibility of social and financial improvement. Though in theory he combined a proud spirit with the irrationality of a berserker, in practice he was cautious and sensible, and unfailingly courteous toward women, even or especially when they didn’t deserve it.