by Unknown
He slides his last few coins into the proper slot and takes the chicken sandwich. Through the empty window he can see the back room of the restaurant, where a single mechanical man stands at attention, surrounded by pallets holding stacks of little white boxes that tower to the ceiling. Harold supposes that in a few moments, once it’s worth its while, the tin man will go into action and refill the newly emptied windows with the proper, missing dishes. So this place is entirely automatic, then: there’s really not a soul in the building except for Miranda and himself. He carries the boxes of food back to the booth and places the piece of pie before Miranda. “Thank you,” she murmurs hoarsely, and she picks away the box’s seal and opens the lid. Inside there is a slender slice of pie with a dark brown glistening filling, with a single pecan-half placed on top of it for decoration. The package also contains a paper napkin, and a disposable fork made of tin that’ll last just long enough to finish off the pie before it’s too bent out of shape to be useful.
She places a bite of pie in her mouth. “It’s really really sweet,” she says.
The chicken sandwich turns out to be composed of two stale pieces of bread that hold together an overcooked slice of chicken breast and a pile of lettuce that has been shredded to the consistency of confetti. A nondescript yellowish white sauce is smeared over it all.
“It’s hard to be in the world,” Miranda says.
Harold says nothing and bites into his sandwich. The flavor of the sauce takes him by surprise; it’s rancid, and it turns his stomach. He still doesn’t know what to say. To him Miranda seems like a girl trapped in an adult’s body. The suit she’s wearing conceals her shape—the only visible sign that she might be female is her unkempt gold-red hair, which falls nearly to her waist. What must have it been like for her to grow into adulthood, never leaving the safety of her father’s Tower, spending away the days of her adolescence in that playroom made for little children, filled with fantasies custom-built from scratch? She can’t be normal, Harold thinks; she certainly can’t think like normal women who go through the laundry list of difficult things that women go through, growing up in the outside world. If you locked her in an empty room with Astrid, or with Charmaine Saint Claire, what would they have to talk about? Not much. Even though Harold and Miranda are the same age, Harold looks at Miranda and thinks to himself that she isn’t much more than a little girl, really.
Should he say to Miranda that he’s nearly certain that this whole incident was rigged by her father, possibly even including his own kidnapping, and it all went wrong in the end because Artegall decided to go off the script that had been provided to him by Prospero? If Artegall hadn’t gone off on his own, what would have happened? Or maybe this is what was supposed to happen—Harold and Miranda, sitting here in this deserted automatic restaurant, with Miranda feeling like a rescued damsel and Harold experiencing that incomparable rush of heroism, just as in the game they played together years ago? Is Prospero Taligent really that smart, to be able to pull that off?
Maybe when Artegall was saying to Talus that he wasn’t acting, he was still acting? Harold didn’t actually see what happened behind the door where they were, even though he could hear their voices. Perhaps they were faking it all, like actors in a radio play who know they won’t be seen.
What should Harold say to Miranda? He doesn’t know what to say.
Miranda puts down her fork, her pecan pie half-finished. Harold has his hand on the table, and she reaches out and grips two of his outstretched fingers in her fist, in the way a small child holds a parent’s hand.
They sit like that for several long minutes in silence in the empty restaurant, then Miranda takes a breath and gets herself together. “I’m going to tell you something now,” she says.
THIRTY-ONE
“When I got my first period I was twelve and a half years old, and I thought I was bleeding to death. It’s not like I knew what was happening to me, and Father had never sat me down to have the talk that I assume normal fathers have with their daughters about their bodies. He didn’t notice anything for two days, and I took the time to put my affairs in order: making a will out with a blue crayon, apologizing to Father for the times I’d thrown temper tantrums. He found out because of the sheets. This is kind of embarrassing. He told my maid only to put white sheets on my bed soon after my tenth birthday—soon after you got kicked out of the playroom for kissing me: remember that? He never explained it to me; he just said that it was a matter of trust after that little kissing incident, that he needed to regain my trust. And five or six times during any month he’d come wake me up himself, and he’d inspect the sheets while I got ready for the day, looking over every inch of them. Then he’d say something like ‘Clean as can be. She’s still pure. The girl is still pure. Good.’ But then he saw the blood that one morning, and he looked at me with what I still think today was an expression of absolute undiluted fright, his magnifying glass slipping out of his hand and shattering on the floor, and he screamed. He said, ‘You see what happens! When you kiss boys? One thing leads to another and now you’re ruined!’ And I broke and told him everything, in hysterical words that I’m sure didn’t make much sense.
“He started crying, right there, and he gathered me into his arms and carried me down to the Tower’s infirmary. It was the closest I’d ever felt to my father: my arms around his neck, his broad hand splayed against my shaking back, my head tucked into the slope of his shoulder, my tears running down my face and making a damp spot on his shirt. And when he entered the infirmary, this room that was full of cleanness and bright light, a nurse looked up from her desk to see the two of us, and my father said, not in the voice he uses when he’s trying to humor me and shield me from some unknown terror, but a voice I’d never heard before, giving out that he himself was genuinely terrified, ‘You have to save my daughter. She’s bleeding to death.’ As if that was easier for him to believe than what I later found out from the nurse was the truth of the matter.
“Sometimes my father comes into my room when he thinks I’m sleeping, and he just stares at me. It makes me feel like he’s trying to will me back into the body I had ten years ago, when he used to talk to me and play little games while I sat on his desk in his office. I don’t understand why it is that we never want anything to get old. No, that’s not true: we think that bottles of wine are better the older they are, not like little girls. But in that case we’re just whetting our appetites, waiting for the right time to consume them.
“There’s something very wrong—wrong with my father, and wrong with me. I wake up every morning and I feel wrong, and when he looks at me it makes me want to run somewhere and hide. But it’s not just us . . . it’s you, too. I can look at you and be certain that you can’t tell me the thing I need to hear to save me, but it’s hard for me to hold it against you, because I can’t tell you the thing you need to hear, either. There’s no way for me to warn you about the terrible things that I know are going to happen.
“Every desire has a price; the price of being young is growing old; the price of knowledge is the loss of innocence. These are not new truths. But knowing this still doesn’t take the sting out of the fact that things were so different when we were young, in that place that we both believed was somehow full of magic, even though it was built with machines. Do you remember, we’d spend long minutes just sitting next to each other, your arm just touching mine, and neither of us speaking? Not worrying about whether we’d be able to say the thing we need to say; not trying to fill up the air with stupid noises to relieve us of the responsibility of dealing with what was going on in our heads? Do you think then that we were willing the world to stand still? Do you think we knew, even though we never could have said it aloud for fear of breaking the spell, that those last innocent moments of our youth were burning themselves up one at a time?”
“I have something to say to you,” says Harold when Miranda stops speaking. Then, again, hesitantly, clearing his throat first: “I have something to say?�
� The inside of his throat feels as if it’s lined with sand.
THIRTY-TWO
And that is all he can make himself say to her: that he has something to say. After he stammers that out, his voice trails off into silence and his gaze drops to the tabletop.
What he can’t bring himself to say to Miranda is:
“When I was a child, I used to look at adults half with confusion, half with envy, trying and failing to imagine the nature of the mysteries to which they’d been initiated, the pleasures they were keeping to themselves. Have you ever watched the swings of moods that toddlers go through, the way they act as if they’re attending their own funeral if the axle falls off a favored toy car, or the rapturous expressions that show up on their faces when they suck on sweet things? Though the memory’s fading, I can still remember feeling like that, and I thought that being an adult would be even more like that—that the emotions that make us human got more intense, the older you grew. Even at the age of ten, simple surprise gifts could be enough to make me feel like my heart and my brain were both about to burst. I couldn’t imagine how people even survived to the age of twenty when such pleasures were lying in wait, out in the world.
“But that hasn’t turned out to be what happened—instead, my own father tells me that he thinks I’m turning into tin. Something inside me is dying, and I don’t know what to do to save it; something inside me is slipping away, and somehow my memories of what you were as a child have come to stand in for all the things I want to keep alive inside myself and don’t know how. In dreams I see you as a queen, standing at the roof’s edge; again and again you beckon to me, and again and again I watch you fall, and with you fall all those things within me that make me best.
“There has to be a spell to speak to save you, and myself. But for the life of me I can’t come up with the words.”
THIRTY-THREE
Harold says none of that, though: he just sits there. Then, after a while, Miranda speaks.
“Harold,” Miranda says. “Harry. I want to go back.”
“Back to the Tower?”
“Back to my playroom, whose door is likely rusted shut. Back to our magic island.”
THIRTY-FOUR
Harold had the idea that getting back into the Taligent Tower with Miranda would involve some kind of exciting covert operation, like knocking out a pair of guards and taking their uniforms, or scaling the Tower’s obsidian walls with rubber suction cups attached to their hands and feet. It turned out, though, that they showed up at the Tower’s gates in the early morning when the workers were arriving, marching into the Tower in their habitual neat rows and columns, wearing identical overalls and singing one of those proletarian songs in three-part harmony while they swung their gleaming lunch buckets in synchrony. They joined the crowd, and Miranda flashed her identification to the gate guard, taking in Harold as her personal guest (“Hey there, Miranda!” the gate guard said, and beamed a smile at her. “It’s very nice to see you again!”). Then Miranda let the two of them into the Tower through one of its side entrances, to which she had a long silver key hanging around her neck on a chain.
But.
This is what Harold expected to happen when he and Miranda reached the playroom and Miranda swung open its door:
A miasmatic decay blasted them in the face as soon as the door opened. Everything in the playroom was dead, dead: vines and leaves of plants gone brown; a small and formerly iris-blue lake turned foul with a thick layer of deep green pond scum covering its surface; mechanical corpses sprawled on the ground in unnatural positions with spots of rust blooming on them; the skeleton of a horse with its bones picked clean and a neat little hole drilled into its skull. “O!” said Miranda. “O, how could I ever have expected to reclaim the innocent pastoral world of my long-vanished youth?? O, we have learned a most important lesson, Harold: that the innocence and beauty of our younger years can never be valued enough, for it is lost too soon, O, all too soon. Now I shall sit here in the dead grass and weep until I can weep no more, mourning the loss of all my illusions. Boo-hoo-hoo!” wept Miranda. “Boo-hoo-hoooo!!”
But that is not what happened.
THIRTY-FIVE
This is what really happened, which was worse.
“Everything is exactly like I left it,” Miranda said. “I haven’t come into this place in years, but he kept everything exactly the same for me. In case I ever wanted to come back.”
They stood together on the seashore, hand in hand, in a child’s place. Waves from an ice-blue sea beat gently against a beach with sand the color of newly made paper, waiting to be written on. A brace of palm trees with perfectly parabolic trunks and bright green leaves stood behind them, waving gently in a light cold wind that carried the sharp smell of salt. A light-bulb sun, deep red turning to yellow, rose on the island’s false horizon.
“No footprints here but our own,” Miranda said. “It’s our own little paradise.” She looked up at Harold and drew a smile across her face.
Something is wrong here, Harold thought. He’d felt disoriented like this the first time he’d entered the playroom ten years ago; back then Miranda said that it had something to do with this place being “more real” than the places he was used to being in. It always hurts like this the first time, she’d said. But now something else was wrong in an altogether different way. Something to do with the way time was moving here, or that this place seemed less real to him now than anywhere he’d ever been, even in dreams.
“Do you remember all of those troublesome tin men that Father put on the island, to give us lessons?” Miranda said. “To constantly remind us that the world wasn’t perfect, and that outside the special secluded places that some of us can manage to make for ourselves there’s nothing but suffering? All those tin men are gone now. We don’t need lessons anymore, because we’ve grown up. Now we can come to this place in peace, because we were smart enough to find it. Most people stop believing in things like paradise once they grow up, and their hearts encase themselves in ice and armor. But paradise never goes away. You just have to be able to find your way back to it.”
“There’s something wrong,” Harold said.
“There’s nothing wrong!” Miranda spat back at him. “Nothing, except that I neglected this place for all this time because I thought I was too grown up for it, and now that time is wasted. There’s no evil here, except for that we bring with us. And we didn’t bring any evil with us, did we?” She glared at Harold, her hand on her hip, speaking with the tone of a chiding mother. “Did we?”
“No,” said Harold. “We didn’t.”
“Then lie down with me in the sand,” Miranda said, “and put your arms around me.”
And this is what he did, the sun already high in the sky, shortening the island’s shadows to nothing.
THIRTY-SIX
“There’s something wrong with time here,” Harold said a minute later as the afternoon sun began its downward arc. “It’s moving faster than it should.”
“It’s all the time that’s built up in this place unspent, burning itself away,” Miranda said quietly, her arms around him. “Hurry. We still have a chance to be young.”
“I’m tired,” said Harold. “I don’t know why.”
“Sleep, then,” said Miranda.
Hurry; sleep, thought Harold. It doesn’t make sense.
He slept.
THIRTY-SEVEN
When he awoke again five minutes later, Miranda was naked and lying on top of him. Evening had come, and some of the golden tone had gone out of her hair in the light from the full moon over the sea, leaving it the color of newly forged copper. Her white suit lay shed like a second skin in a pile farther down the shore, just out of reach of the tide.
“I wanted to be naked with you,” Miranda said.
Harold looked at her and squinted drowsily. He felt drunk.
“Harry,” Miranda whispered, straddling him now and cupping his chin in her hands, silhouetted in moonlight, “there is something very
important that I have to tell you, but I cannot say it with words. But I think that it will be the most important thing I will ever say. Before I can tell you, I need to have your body inside mine.
“Did I say that right?” she said, bending over him, her lips brushing against his ear, her hands at the top button of his shirt, slipping it open.
“Did I sound silly when I said that?
“It’s hard to talk about this kind of thing without sounding silly.
“Did I . . .
“Can I—”
THIRTY-EIGHT
And so Harold Winslow and Miranda Taligent made love, on the shore of that pastoral place where they’d played their childhood games so long ago. First there was the problem with the condom. When Harold finally fumbled his way out of his clothes, removed the condom from his wallet (where it had spent the last year and a half), opened its wrapper with a great deal of difficulty (he finally had to use his teeth), and sheathed himself with it, it split right down the shaft, shrinking in a flash to a little ring of rubber. Fortunately, he had a second, but Miranda, noting that it was the same brand as the first and, moreover, a brand she’d never heard of, became gunshy. “But I thought you had something to tell me,” said Harold, all hot and bothered—virgin, virgin, virgin. “Well, yeah,” said Miranda, “I like you fine enough, and I have something that it’d be very nice to tell you, but it’s not worth me getting pregnant because of a crap condom made by the—what? The . . . the Happy Family Toy Company? They make rubbers?” But after a few minutes of coaxing and explaining that maybe he tore that first condom with his teeth trying to get the package open, she reluctantly acquiesced. Then they argued for a good half hour about which position to use, as each carried certain symbolic overtones of dominance and submission with which one or the other was uncomfortable. By the time they settled on a position (missionary, if you’re interested, because it allows the deepest possible penetration and contact between the male pubic bone and clitoris, according to a radio program that Harold had heard one afternoon on the subject), Miranda had lost any trace of sexual arousal, and so Harold had to go through this elaborate business of foreplay (which he was already finding he hated) in order to get her “turned on” (to coin a phrase) again. So. When he finally entered her, Miranda was just realizing that she might have to fake it (having already judged Harold against the standard set by her other lovers and found him sorely wanting, especially next to that Ferdinand fellow, a muscle-bound dullard who worked in the Tower’s boiler room, shirtless chest begrimed with soot and slick shining sweat . . . mmmmyes Ferdinand. There are many men that shovel coal in this boiler room. But I am their master.) when Harold saved her the trouble by climaxing, having thrust against her for approximately forty seconds: gasp, grunt, done. “It was because I passed my peak,” he said by way of vague apology, citing the above-mentioned time-consuming foreplay. And as he stripped off the rubber and threw it down the shore to be taken away by the morning tide, Harold turned on his side away from Miranda, frustrated and exhausted, wondering if this was the secret thing that Miranda had been trying to tell him all along, even though she hadn’t known it: that everything in the twentieth century was dead, and we’d built shields between all of us, and that there was nothing really worth saying that one person could say to another anymore, nothing, nothing further, nothing more.
