by Unknown
Miranda’s body, already ensconced in layers of clothing, is swallowed up by the thronelike chair in which she sits at the head of the banquet table. All the girls are seated in a long line of fifty on Miranda’s left; the boys are facing them on her right. Prospero sits opposite Miranda at the far end of the long table, in silence. Keeping up his charm with the children has cost him a good deal of energy, so he quietly eats, serving himself from the bowls and platters of colorful vegetables, fresh breads, succulent meats, and decadent sweets that cover the table. As soon at the children sat down they started in on the food with abandon. No preliminary pauses for decorum, no saying grace, no toasts with goblets of seltzer water: they are too young yet to feel the need for rituals and politeness. No chemical solutions and essences for them: they know the pleasure of the texture of food on the tongue and the pain of an overfilled stomach.
Harold is so nervous that he doesn’t know if he can keep his food down. This close up, Miranda looks really weird. Her face is covered with a thick layer of powder, as white as the banquet table’s cloth. Her lips are painted bright red, and she stares in front of her, her bright blue eyes unblinking, mechanically placing forkfuls of food in her mouth. The girl’s manners are impeccable.
He feels uncomfortable. The boy sitting next to him, named William, is forgoing the use of utensils and shoveling food down his throat with both hands. He is larger than Harold, and he has curly, tousled black hair that hangs over his forehead in front of his eyes, and thick eyebrows that join above his nose. More hairs are scattered across his cheeks and chin, not enough to merit shaving, but enough to mark him as older than Harold, and old enough to have nothing to say to him. Miranda is weird, and he was half hoping that the girls who now look like Miranda’s handmaidens would at least try to talk to Miranda, leaving him to listen to girlish conversations in puzzlement or sink into a brown study. But the handmaidens are busy becoming the best of friends, entwining their arms together and placing spoonfuls of food into each other’s mouths, whispering into each other’s ears, swearing eternal fealty to each other in a secret language they’ve just now invented, that only the two of them speak. They laugh in a dozen different ways at private jokes: giggles; guffaws; snorts that make milk fly out their noses. Boys don’t make friends like this, Harold thinks—not so close, not so quickly. Girls don’t understand that friendships are a risk. Ill-chosen loyalties will earn you split lips during recess. Girls don’t do due diligence.
He has to talk to Miranda. What will his father and Astrid and the boys at school say when he tells them that he couldn’t talk to Miranda? First, though, he has to get her attention. “Hey,” he says. He means to speak in a normal voice, but the word comes out as a croak. A pit forms in his stomach. “Hey.”
Miranda says nothing; she doesn’t even look at him.
Carefully, then, as if risking electric shock, Harold reaches out and taps Miranda with one finger, on the large white ruff that surrounds her neck.
Miranda’s head swivels forty-five degrees on its neck to face Harold. She stretches her neck and swallows the food in her mouth like a bird. “Do not touch me,” she says. “Don’t.”
He snatches his hand back, as if from open flame. “Sorry?” he says. “Sorry!” This is all turning out wrong.
Miranda stares at Harold, pursing her lips. She holds her fork in midair. Her gaze is boring a hole through him.
Hello, Miranda. That’s it. That’s all you need to say to start.
But it isn’t that easy, is it?
“Huh,” says Harold. “Hey.”
Miranda blinks, once, slowly.
“Hey!” says Harold. “D—”
Miranda frowns.
“Hey?” says Harold.
Not even a blink this time.
“Hey,” says Harold. “Do you like stuff?”
Miranda blinks. Doing better.
Emboldened, Harold tries again. “Do you like to do stuff?”
Miranda blinks, twice.
“I like all kinds of stuff,” Harold says. “I like taking pictures of things with stereoscopic cameras, and listening to stories about captains of industry, and watching my father make dolls. What kinds of stuff do you like to do?”
Miranda opens her mouth and monotone words tumble out of it. “I like to sleep. I like all the different varieties of sleep: dozes, slumbers, stupors, comas . . . I like dreams, because they are stronger than memories. I have a recurring dream; in it, I am asleep, sleeping a sleep that is too deep for dreams. It is my favorite dream.” She closes her mouth. She blinks.
“You talk funny for a little girl,” Harold says.
“You will have to forgive me,” says Miranda. “I have not yet learned the ways in which words work. I have not yet comprehended their rhythms and rules: I do not know which words are best for secrets, and which for advertisements.”
“It’s advertisements,” Harold says, exasperated. “Not advertisements.”
There is a pause, during which Miranda continues to stare at Harold, blinking and occasionally cocking her head winsomely to one side, still holding her fork in the air above the plate, while the other guests, the ones not sitting at Miranda’s right hand, gnaw on jellied candies, and sticks of dark chocolate dusted with powdered sugar and dipped in caramel.
The doll! Maybe it’s time to show her the doll. “Do you want to see something my father made?” Harold sinks down into the seat so he can reach into the pocket of his pants.
Miranda looks distressed. “My father makes lots of things!” She drops the fork and it clangs against the plate. At the other end of the table Prospero looks up from his food, at his daughter.
“My dad’s not an inventor, like your dad,” Harold says, clutching his hand around the little windup doll his father gave him. “He makes things with plans someone else gives him. But he made this.” Harold places the doll on the table, turns the windup key in its back, and lets it go. The tin Miranda lifts its arms and begins to totter across the table toward its namesake.
“It’s Miranda!” Harold says. “You can have it.”
Miranda, the real one, looks horrified. “Take it away!” she cries.
The doll trips on a fold in the tablecloth and falls on its face. Miranda puts her hand to her mouth and makes a noise somewhere between a yelp and a wail. Her eyes are stretched to the size of saucers.
“Okay, okay!” Harold picks up the doll, its metal legs still scissor-kicking, and puts it in his lap, out of sight.
“I do not like you!” Miranda says. “Don’t!”
Harold says nothing.
For a minute or two, Harold and Miranda both look down at their plates, pushing around stray bits of cold food. Harold reaches over to a silver tray full of chocolate sticks, takes one, and chews on it. It tastes bitter, not the way he feels that chocolate should. He wants to go home and listen to the radio. He wishes he’d never come here.
“I am not yet very good at conversations,” Miranda says.
“No kiddin’,” Harold says.
At the other end of the table, Prospero Taligent rises and gently taps the blade of his knife against his glass. It’s finest crystal, and one clear ring from it cuts through all the high-pitched chatter in the hall and brings all the boys and girls to silence.
FORTY-TWO
“Children,” Prospero says. “My guests. I’ve shown you wonders and stuffed your bellies, and now it is time for the giving of gifts. It is time, for a moment, for each of us to have the thing that we desire.
“You boys and girls are too young to understand this yet, but it’s endless unsatisfied desire that makes us human, that binds our spirits to flesh that it would rather do without. Even now, at this young age, you know the discontent of wanting something and not yet having it, and not even knowing the name of the thing that you want. This is why it’s good manners to give gifts in wrappers: so that, for a moment, that beast in all of us that makes us feel alive and keeps us from becoming angels can be satisfied. While a gift is in
its wrapper, it can be anything, even that one indescribable thing that will make us happy enough to die in peace.”
(The boys and girls look at each other in stunned confusion, crumbs in their laps and chocolate smeared across their faces. Now he’s talking about dying. This is such a weird birthday party.)
“If I were the kind of man who believed in God, I would tell you that Miranda, my adopted daughter, the only person in this world who I can truly claim to love, is that gift from God to me. And because I am so happy that you have all come to be guests in my Tower to celebrate her birthday, I want to give each of you a gift, as well as Miranda. You will not receive these gifts today. However, I and my many servants visible and invisible have been watching each and every one of you for the entire day. And we will continue to watch over you from shadows, all one hundred of you, after you leave this place; even after you’ve become adults, perhaps with little boys and girls of your own.
“Sometime, in the future, my gift to you will come. It may not be for several days; it may not be for many years; it may not be until I myself am long dead and you in your old age have long forgotten about me. Perhaps my gift to you will be something as simple as a single word, whispered into your ear by one of your servants as you lie on your deathbed, a word that solves a final mystery and makes it easy for you to slip quietly into the dark. But, in honor of this day, and in honor of Miranda, I promise you that each and every one of you will have your heart’s desires fulfilled.”
William, the boy sitting next to Harold, turns to him and sneers, “I wouldn’t get your hopes up. It’s just fairy stories for children, to keep us entertained. He doesn’t mean a thing he says.” William makes a nasty face and shows Harold a tongue laden with chewed mush. Miranda frowns in disgust.
“But now,” Prospero says, “it is my daughter’s turn.” He strides past the banquet table, to the large double doors at the opposite end of the hall. With a flourish, he throws open the huge doors simultaneously and steps back.
“Bring it in,” he says.
FORTY-THREE
A spiraling ivory horn emerges from the center of its skull, just beneath the forelock. The unicorn, its eyes the color of black coffee, trots slowly across the parquet of the banquet hall, past the children who are so oversaturated with the day’s wonders that they can do nothing but stare. Its coat is an unblemished white, and its mane streams white behind it; its hooves are shod in gleaming steel. It obediently follows the man who’s leading it by its gem-encrusted halter and stops in the center of the hall.
Miranda pushes back her little throne and rises. She turns in seeming slow motion and glides across the hall to the unicorn, close enough to touch it, then places her tiny ear to its broad chest, running her fingers along the gentle indentations of its ribs, caressing its croup and its flank.
“See,” Prospero says, joining her, placing his hand on her shoulder. “It’s real. It’s not a machine. You can feel its warmth and the beat of its heart. I didn’t lie to you, even though I looked in your eyes and saw that you didn’t believe me. It’s as real as you and me.”
“Father,” Miranda says, her ear pressed up against the horse’s side, her arms spread across it in an attempted embrace. A falling tear draws a narrow track in the powder that covers her face, revealing the fleshtone beneath. “You shouldn’t have. You shouldn’t.”
FORTY-FOUR
To Harold’s relief, he’s returned to his apartment from the Taligent Tower by a garden-variety taxicab instead of a perilous flying mechanical contraption. He runs upstairs and through the door. Allan has the pen and paper waiting for him as he promised—he’s cleared off the desk where he makes his dolls, and a stack of fifty sheets of paper is there, next to a bottle of ink in which sits a pen with a newly sharpened nib.
But when Harold starts to write down a recount of the events of the day, they start to slip through his fingers. His mind feels like a sieve through which his experience is draining out, too quick for him to stop it. He captures a few fine details, here and there—its metal legs still scissor-kicking; there was a virgin queen; uncover my mechanical orchestra—but no matter how he tries he can’t make the ink marks on the page represent the things he’s seen with enough fidelity to be certain that someone else might read the words and be certain of the things he saw. Even worse than this is that he can feel his mind actively making up events from whole cloth to fill the blank spaces of his story that lie between those few things he does remember, and that as soon as it does this, he can’t distinguish between the truths of his memory and the fictions of his necessary fantasies. After seven double-sided pages covered with his cramped script, he slams the pen down in frustration, spattering drops of ink across the desk.
“You can’t get it down fast enough?” his father says.
“I can’t,” says Harold, rubbing his eyes. “It’s all gone. Or it might not be. I don’t even know. It was all so strange.”
“It doesn’t matter, really,” says his father. “I no longer know whether my memory of the past is something I made up to please myself, or something that actually happened. I sometimes think on my childhood and how wonderful it was, and how mundane the time in which I now live seems by comparison. I seem to remember mornings playing games alone at the edge of a forest, and one of these mornings during which my noisy boy’s antics startled a flock of angels to break from the cover of the nearby trees, and that as they rose to fly away one of them shed a single feather that fell right into my open hand, and that as I placed the feather in my mouth as village custom dictated: the taste, dear God, as it melted like a spun-sugar confection there was this indescribable, never-to-be-replicated taste—
“Did that really happen? Or do I merely believe that it happened? If the thought of this thing that I think is a memory consoles me at night when I lie in darkness, and the empty space and coldness of the bed reminds me of the vanished miracle of the woman I once loved, does it matter, one way or the other?
“Son: write down what you think happened, or what you believe happened, or something like what might have happened. All of these are better in the end than writing down nothing at all; all are true, in their own way.”
FORTY-FIVE
When Astrid finishes reading Harold’s fourteen handwritten pages, she looks at him and frowns. She is lying on her bed, surrounded by scattered colored pencils and the strange drawings on store-bought parchment paper with which she’s been spending an increasing amount of her time in recent months. They are distant cousins of the drawings that Harold remembers himself making with crayons when he was much younger, of flying cars and mechanical men that he’d imagined before others had done the hard work to bring them into existence, but these pictures are much more obsessively detailed and disturbing—an old man whose left eye has been replaced with a telescopic camera lens, the wound of the apparently recent surgery still suppurating ichor; another grimacing man looking upward with the muscles of his neck stretched taut, who is nude and has a third mechanical leg joined to the space between his two real legs; a disgustingly corpulent woman with gimlet eyes who has a V-shaped flap cut into her stomach, pulled back to reveal a baby made of metal, nestled in a cocoon of its mother’s fatty yellow flesh. The pictures don’t make sense to Harold, and he tries his best not to look at them, though it’s clear that gruesomeness aside, she has talent that exceeds her age. Maybe Astrid’s drawing the things she says are inside her head, that she mentions sometimes. Their father explains them away by claiming that she’s merely “going through a phase.”
“Are you telling me this happened?” says Astrid, throwing the pages down.
“Yeah,” says Harold. He doesn’t tell her about the conversation that he just had with his father, nor that he feels he may have reason to doubt his own memory, at least a little. He read it back just after he finished writing it, and what was set down seemed true, or true enough.
“This doesn’t seem like something that would happen to anybody,” Astrid says. “The whole th
ing seems made-up.”
“But you saw the demon,” Harold says. “You saw it.” You talked to it and kissed it, he doesn’t say.
“Well I know, I know,” says Astrid. “And I guess that must have been true, and if that was true, then the rest of it could be also. But what I’m saying—what I’m saying is this story here sounds like something that happens in a kid’s book. Not something that happens to real people.”
“Well, why?”
“It’s like . . . it’s like you left out all the meanness and the nastiness that’s inside and under everything. If this had been something that really happened, then when something like this unicorn showed up here at the end, there would have been something mean and twisted behind it. Nothing’s ever all-the-time happy or beautiful like this. It just isn’t. Either you didn’t understand what you were looking at today, or you just want to remember it all happily like this because it makes you feel better.”
Harold protests, “But it was—”
“Get out of here and do some homework or go to sleep or something!” barks Astrid suddenly, giving Harold’s writing back to him. She looks a little irritated now. “Get out of here—I’m drawing!” He obediently leaves and closes her bedroom door behind him.
