The Dream of Perpetual Motion

by Unknown

  The Hall of Dynamos was designed to be the last stop on the tour, after you’d gone through all the exhibits in the city hall. You’d go out the city hall’s back door and get in a line to enter an enormous barn that had originally been built to house hundreds of head of cattle, and a young girl would hand you a pair of earplugs made out of beeswax. As you got closer to the barn’s entrance, you’d see people stumbling past you in the opposite direction, having already seen the things that lay in wait inside. All the color would be drained from their faces, and if you asked them to describe what they’d seen, they’d either refuse or, worse, they’d try and be unable and break down into stammers and sniffling sobs.

  When you finally reached the barn door, another attendant would caution you to insert the beeswax plugs in your ears. Then you’d step through the door, and you’d see engines. Dozens upon dozens of engines crammed into every available space, even lining the walls all the way up to the roof, some smaller than your fist, some big as houses. Intermeshed gears and fans with blades as long as I was tall turned so quickly that they were blurs to the eye. Electric arcs traveled back and forth across the barn’s ceiling, excess power burning itself off in bright blue light. It took ten men shoveling coal into an enormous furnace at top speed to keep it all running.

  The roar of the whirring and grinding was unbelievable, and deafening even through the beeswax; as an unwise child I thought that the noise of all those engines must have been what the true voice of God sounded like, the one He only used when speaking to His seraphim. As my father held my hand and stood there quivering, wanting to run from the place but not wanting to show cowardice in front of his son, I watched one man piss his pants, and another dare to remove a beeswax plug to hear the sounds of engines undiluted: a few drops of blood spurted out of his ear as its drum ruptured. I saw him scream as he clutched the side of his head and collapsed to his knees in supplication, but I couldn’t hear him.

  Engines, you’re thinking, modern man that you are, and you roll your eyes with boredom and make snide remarks about my age. I’ve seen engines: nothing to be afraid of. But those of us who entered the Hall of Dynamos saw those engines with eyes that you can never have, and we learned something that you’ll never truly know, even if I tell it to you now as clearly and directly as I can: that what we were afraid of wasn’t the mechanical power of the engines, and their seeming ability to make anything happen that you could imagine, even before you’d finished fully imagining it. It was instantly clear to all of us, standing there in the Hall of Dynamos, that we were in the presence of an unstoppable moral force, and that this force would not rest until it did us in, all of us, even if it didn’t mean to.

  TWENTY-SIX

  —Two moral forces shaped how we think and live in this shining twentieth century: the Virgin, and the Dynamo. The Dynamo represents the desire to know; the Virgin represents the freedom not to know.

  What’s the Virgin made of? Things that we think are silly, mostly. The peculiar logic of dreams, or the inexplicable stirring we feel when we look on someone that’s beautiful not in a way that we all agree is beautiful, but the unique way in which a single person is. The Virgin is faith and mysticism; miracle and instinct; art and randomness.

  On the other hand, you have the Dynamo: the unstoppable engine. It finds the logic behind a seeming miracle and explains that miracle away; it finds the order in randomness to which we’re blind; it takes a caliper to a young woman’s head and quantifies her beauty in terms of pleasing mathematical ratios; it accounts for the secret stirring you felt by discoursing at length on the nervous systems of animals.

  These forces aren’t diametrically opposed, and it’s not correct to say that one’s good and the other’s evil, despite the prejudices we might have toward one or the other. When we’re at our best, both the Virgin and the Dynamo govern what we think and what we do. But the fear that we felt standing in the Hall of Dynamos stemmed from the certainty that the Virgin was in trouble, and that we needed her, just as much as we needed and even wanted the Dynamo. What the Dynamo threatened to do was to murder the Virgin by explaining her to us, because it was its nature to explain. To us common men it wasn’t worth the pleasure of looking at a woman and knowing that we found her beautiful because of the distance between the tip of her nose and her top lip and the size of her eyes, if it meant losing the equally wonderful pleasure of looking at that same woman and finding her beautiful without knowing why.

  Imagine a damsel in distress, tied to a train track and screaming. Her impending death would be unfortunate, but would you call the engine that drives the oncoming train evil? You have to ask: how did the damsel get there? Where’s the black-cowled dastard in the top hat and the handlebar mustache who did the tying? He is one who forces us to view the damsel and the engine as moral opposites when, in fact, they’re nothing of the kind. He is a person who believes that all of our human problems can be solved by the all-knowing Dynamo. And if the Dynamo has to run over a Virgin or two as it barrels unerringly toward its final destination: no great loss, really, in the end.

  TWENTY-SEVEN

  “Instead of seeing these two kingdoms of force as diametric opposites, always in conflict, as this industrial age has taught us,” Talus says, “we have to find a way to allow them to coexist. We have to find a way to marry the Virgin to the Dynamo.”

  “And Miranda will help you do this?” Harold says.

  “The daughter of the inventor of the mechanical man is going to be our Queen,” Talus says. “It’s just me and Artegall right now, and a couple of others. But once we have a Queen the movement will grow.

  “Unless you manage to rescue her, of course. That’s what young heroes do, after all. Hey—is the adrenaline running yet? You’ll need it to pull off your hairbreadth escape.”

  Suddenly Talus rises and looks around to see if anyone else is listening. But Miranda is still sleeping, and Artegall is presumably in the back room. Then he leans over and whispers to Harold, “All jokes aside, you have to do something soon. I don’t know how long I can keep Artegall off of her.”

  TWENTY-EIGHT

  Meanwhile, how is Astrid doing? Not so well. No one has seen her for days now except the delivery boys from fast-food restaurants who pedal to the planetarium door on their bicycles, knock sharply four times per instructions, quickly trade their package (a greasy paper bag or a cardboard box) for purchase price plus a generous tip, then pedal away to the next delivery site, no questions asked. Astrid is at work, and she does not want to be disturbed.

  The planetarium under construction on the Xeroville University campus is the ideal exhibition space for Astrid’s sculpture: a building whose interior space is a nearly perfect hemisphere. Moreover, with its thick concrete walls and almost no mechanical equipment yet installed, it is completely soundproof, making it a wonderful acoustic space. She managed to talk the university trustees into delaying the opening of the planetarium for a few months while she built the sculpture and exhibited it, giving them a slightly modified version of her plans for the thing (but leaving out what police investigators would later consider to be a rather important detail), and so, opening in this space in less than two weeks will be Astrid Winslow’s greatest work, Music for an Automatic Bronzing.

  Strewn across the planetarium floor are a cot, where Astrid gets five hours of sleep out of every twenty-four; the remains of dozens of fast-food orders that have been her breakfast, lunch, and dinner since she started work on the sculpture in earnest, moving out of her apartment away from the ex-boyfriend du jour and into the exhibition space; expired marijuana roaches and cigarette butts; scraps of paper featuring sketches of the final product; huge coils of wire, along with a welder and cutting tool that Astrid is using to construct some kind of cage; an enormous metal bathtub, big enough to comfortably bathe four, with six feet in the shape of a gryphon’s claws; an electrical generator; burners to provide gas flames beneath the bathtub; crates filled with hundreds of defective bronze figurines bought who
lesale, screaming cherubs and madonnas with twisted faces; more wires and cables and all the other gears and things necessary to make machines in the twentieth century; the guts and cabinets of two dozen top-of-the-line phonographs; and a recording rig that Astrid is using right now to engrave the discs that will be played on the phonographs when the sculpture is completed. The recording rig works like this: A microphone is connected to the arm of a phonograph, whose needle sits on a disc that spins as long as the phonograph’s crank is properly wound, so that any vibrations from the microphone are scratched onto the disc, to be replayed later. The phonograph’s arm is also connected by a wire to a small black box with a motor inside it and a lever sticking out of it. The lever has a pencil fastened to it; the point of the pencil is in contact with a long rolling sheet of paper would around two dowels, powered by small motors. So the vibrations from the phonograph arm are translated through the black box into waveforms drawn by the pencil as the lever to which it is attached swivels back and forth. In addition to being attached to the lever, the pencil is connected to a second lever, which is attached to a second pencil; this second lever pivots on a pin, on an axis halfway between the two pencils to which the lever is attached. The second half of the recording rig is a mirror image of the first: the pencil etching waveforms on paper; the black box; the wire leading to the arm of a second recording phonograph. However, because of the pivoting lever arm that connects the two halves of the recording rig, the waves drawn on the second rolling spool of paper are the inverse of the waves drawn on the first spool. The result, then, is that the sounds recorded on the second phonograph are the inverse of the sounds of the words that Astrid, this malnourished and bedraggled young woman living on a steady diet of carbonated water, salt, and starches, speaks into the microphone over and over, holding her cracked lips close: “This world will begin and end in silence. This world will begin and end in silence.”

  TWENTY-NINE

  Harold awakes again to find himself starving, his stomach stabbing itself with knives. He flexes his stiff wrists and finds that his arms have been untied: the ropes lie coiled about the chair’s feet. Strange. Why?

  He hears Talus and Artegall arguing heatedly through the door of the room that’s behind him. Talus’s high-pitched words alternate with Artegall’s abrasive bellow: they are quarreling, apparently, about Miranda. “You ain’t got what it takes to get with that high-class girl!” Artegall says. “You ain’t got it! You ain’t goin’ to do nothing but sit and talk to her! You and her sitting there drinking tea in the gazebo with your pinky fingers sticking out, you going on all genteel about important events of the day when all the girl wants is for you to shut your mouth and get to laying pipe. You ain’t—”

  “The boss said that it’s me that talks to her, and you that stays away—”

  “I told you that the boss isn’t shit to us now! He said all we’re supposed to do is act this stuff out! Well we aren’t acting anymore! We aren’t pretending that we want us a Queen! This is one hundred percent for real now. We’ve got the girl, and I’ve got what this situation requires, and I can damn well tell you this: I am going to shuck that girl out of that seersucker suit so fast it’ll take her back to her senior prom—”

  On the other side of the warehouse, Miranda is curled on the blankets, sleeping, her body trembling. It’s time to move, Harold realizes, and he leaves the chair and moves across the warehouse to her as quickly as he can, without making any noise. You have to do something soon. I don’t know how long I can keep Artegall off of her.

  “I don’t understand what you’re about,” Harold hears Artegall say to Talus. “Because, seriously, I don’t see how you could look at that woman and not want to jump her ASAP. I wouldn’t care if she was writing me a traffic ticket or giving me communion.”

  Bent over Miranda, Harold reaches out a hand to shake her into wakefulness, but then thinks better of it. He hesitates for a long moment with his hand in the air above her, thinking of what he should do (and ten years from now, when Harold Winslow is about to murder Miranda’s father, Prospero Taligent will tell him that this moment of hesitation, which in retrospect seemed not too different to Harold than any other, was the happiest of Harold’s life). He hates to scare her like this, but instead of touching her shoulder, he takes his hand and firmly clamps it over her mouth. This much he’s learned from movies.

  The girl’s eyes snap open.

  Artegall’s voice comes clearly to them through the metal door: “I have doubts about you.”

  Harold keeps Miranda pinned down as she screams and kicks and flails her arms for a moment; then she stops as she realizes who Harold is. Her eyes are stretched wide and unblinking in pure terror, her gaze darting back and forth. “Miranda,” Harold hisses. “It’s me. We have to get out of here.”

  “Artegall,” Talus says behind the door, “have you lost your mind? What are you doing?”

  “You see this?” Artegall says. “You see this magnificence? This is what I got waiting for the girl. Some of this, and some of this. You want to see some of this? You want—oh no you don’t. You get back here. I’m going to show you some of this. I’m going to give you some of this.”

  Miranda looks over to the door on the opposite side of the warehouse. Harold takes his hand away from her mouth and she whispers, “What’s happening?”

  “We don’t have time to worry about them. Leave them to it. We have to go.” Harold gestures toward the crumpled white fedora on the floor: “Don’t forget your hat.”

  Behind the door, there’s the dull painful smack of something solid and metallic colliding with soft flesh. “Agh,” Talus says.

  Miranda rises, brushes off her clothes, straightens her suit and tie, and places her hat on her head; then the two of them run over to one of the wide garage doors and try to lift it. To Miranda’s surprise (but not Harold’s, not really) it’s not even locked, and rises easily.

  “Do you like that?” growls Artegall. “That’s what you like. This is what you like, isn’t it. You know you like the pipe! Everybody likes the pipe!” He’s hysterical. There is another soft thud, and another, then the ringing clang of some hollow things falling off shelves.

  Talus screams. “Help me.” Harold hears his hands scrabbling against the inside of the closed door.

  It’s a pity when one has to turn one’s back on another in distress, but this time it has to be done. Together, Miranda and Harold lift the door of the warehouse just high enough for the two of them to scurry under it and lower it behind them. In another moment they are running down the street, out into the night of the city’s industrial district, leaving the two living tin men to their ministrations.

  THIRTY

  Two hours later, it’s three o’clock in the morning and Harold finds himself in a twenty-four-hour automatic restaurant, sitting in a booth across a table from Miranda. He is only now beginning to think clearly, after their escape. At first all he could think of was that they needed to get away from people, and that he was nearly faint from hunger, so he hailed a passing cab and had it drop them here, sixty blocks north of the warehouse and far enough away so that Talus and Artegall won’t be able to find them.

  Miranda is a nervous wreck, crying her eyes out, her hands shaking too much to hold her coffee cup to her lips without spilling it on her already stained white suit. Harold doesn’t know how to deal with Miranda just yet. He feels that he’s not quite performing as well as he might in this situation. But given that he’s managed to extract them both from the custody of kidnappers, he thinks that on balance he’s doing okay, even if there wasn’t much to the escape attempt in the end but walking straight out of the place—no fisticuffs; no outfoxing.

  He looks at everything else he can in the automatic restaurant except Miranda: if she catches his eye, then he feels that his clear inability to say something sufficiently comforting will make things even worse for her. He puts a good deal of effort into trying to figure out how the device works that operates his “bottomless c
up of coffee.” The cup, it appears, is perfectly ordinary, but its saucer is bolted to the table—whenever he sets his empty cup down on the saucer, a nozzle shoots out of a hatch on the wall, squirts a few ounces of lukewarm brown sludge into the cup, and goes back whence it came. Maybe the saucer is attached to a plate that measures the weight of the cup sitting on it, and the plate’s calibrated so that it activates the nozzle once the cup is sufficiently light. Then why doesn’t the nozzle appear whenever there’s no cup on the saucer at all, and spray coffee all over the table? Like much modern technology, it’s a mystery to him.

  Maybe he should get Miranda some food? Yes. Maybe he should place some food in front of her, as a gesture of care. He has a few coins in his pocket, enough to get them both something to eat. Miranda is still vacillating between looking around her surroundings all wild-eyed and bursting into tears, so asking her what she wants probably isn’t the best idea. He’ll pick it himself, he decides.

  “I’ll be right back with some food,” he says quietly, touching the woman’s hand, and Miranda nods her head feverishly and rubs her bloodshot eyes, her chest hitching with sobs. Some communication is better than none at all: she’s settling down. He gets out of the booth and approaches the back wall of the restaurant, which is made up of an array of hundreds of tiny glass windows, each one with some sort of foodstuff behind it. All of the dishes are concealed within identical white cardboard boxes, each printed with its name. All of the names of the dishes end with exclamation points, as if to convey some halfhearted sense of exuberance that’s meant to be felt when consuming twentieth-century mass-produced convenience food. Harold drops a few coins into a slot next to a window displaying a SLICE OF PECAN PIE!, lifts the window, and takes the box; that’ll be for Miranda. He wants something a little more substantial for himself, though. The PORK SANDWICH! seems a little questionable: he can already see spots of pink-tinged grease blooming through its box. The CHICKEN SANDWICH! looks safe enough, though.