The Dream of Perpetual Motion

by Unknown

  With faith in God comes faith in language; if God made us, then it is language that makes us better things than animals. If those who lived in the age of miracles could not be Authors of the world in the manner that God was, then they must have believed that authorship in a lesser sense had a similar, if lesser, power—if we could not be makers of worlds, then we could at least be makers of words that described worlds, be they worlds in which we lived, or future worlds, or worlds that could never exist. And listeners must have had the same if lesser faith in speakers as they did in the unassailable truth of the words of God when they drifted down from heaven to earth.

  But in the absence of some sort of Godlike author or poet whose every word is clear and perfect, whose speech we’d measure our own against and always find it wanting, it is so much harder to have the faith in language that belief in God affords us—we are forced to see that words are not themselves ideas, but merely strings of ink marks; we see that sounds are nothing more than waves. In a modern age without an Author looking down on us from heaven, language is not a thing of definite certainty, but infinite possibility; without the comforting illusion of meaningful order we have no choice but to stare into the face of meaningless disorder; without the feeling that meaning can be certain, we find ourselves overwhelmed by all the things that words might mean.

  Whether God exists, or whether this certainty of meaning is fact or fantasy, is moot: without the feeling of such certainty we move from a common present into our own exclusive futures, none of which exist; our eyes see all things and are therefore blinded; our ears hear all things and make us deaf; our hearts are neither lead nor gold, but soundproof. They must be so, to keep us sane.

  Does grief bring up the bile in the throat? Does it twist the spine in the shape of an S? Tell me, future gentle reader, because it might be that if I simulate grief for long enough and make the proper motions, then I might be able to take a better stab at guessing what grief is like, and so this horrible feeling brought on by the endless absence of grief would come to an end.

  But if I cannot be certain of the words and motions that signal grief in others, then I cannot learn to recognize grief in myself. And without the recognition of grief, or any other emotion for that matter, it may as well not exist.

  This is the feeling, then: that without faith in language I am no better than or different from a tin man. Without certainty in meaning, nothing I say has any meaning, and the hundreds of pages’ worth of words I’ve written here are passionless nonsense: they’re little more than strings of obsessive decorations.

  This may not be the worst of things. In all honesty, the primary purpose of this tale is to help me while away the time, since I’m sure that it will never be read—this zeppelin is not supplied with machines to duplicate and distribute texts, and this copy of my memoirs is doomed to be the only one. Still, at my best I take the same pride in what I’m writing that a carpenter might take in a well-constructed table, with a level surface and four legs of a matching length.

  Such pride does afford a dim form of pleasure, though, the best available to me.

  My sister left me a message at the entrance to her tomb—my own drawing on an index card, returned to me. And perhaps you, gentle reader, read of the message and said to yourself, “I knew what she meant by that.” And you thought that her final statement to her brother was either profound or silly.

  Would you tell me what she meant, then? Because I can’t be certain. I don’t know. I feel that I should, and it kills me.

  At least I presume that the message was left for me. It may not have been.

  Too much writing for tonight. Tired; time for bed.

  More to this part later—description, and suspense.

  Now then.

  Though this story up to now has covered twenty years, the rest of it will be a tale of only twenty hours. I suppose that this interlude between decades past and the almost-present is as good a time as any to tell you, my imaginary reader, of my life aboard this zeppelin from day to day.

  Though my voice in these pages is the voice of a gentleman, I must confess that in the past year I have come to live like an animal. For the first month or so of my imprisonment I kept up the ingrained habits of civilization, maintaining my hygiene and wearing the only suit of clothes I had on hand (the same ones I wore when I boarded this ship, and which were stained in spots with Prospero Taligent’s blood). But after some time my clothes became too soiled to tolerate, and I didn’t see the point in wearing them anyway, so I began to wander the corridors naked. The only other person aboard this vessel is Miranda, and though I’m certain she can hear me, I’m equally certain she can’t see me, so there’s not much need for modesty. I bathe whenever my own odor becomes too much for me to bear, but that is probably less often than might satisfy the sensibilities of others, were they in my presence.

  I take what passes for my meals irregularly from the steel garden, which is maintained by the mechanical men. It is a small room near the bottom of the gondola that has an array of windows that afford the usual spectacular views of cloud formations and starlight to which I’ve become accustomed. Fruits and vegetables grow there on potted vines—tomatoes, eggplants, corn, grapes, melons. (There are also plots of hundreds of flowers with walkways weaving between them, but these are made of metal, with painted wires for stems and shining lacquered petals.) I pull the fruit off the vine and pound it on the floor until it splits or bite straight into it if its skin is thin enough. When I finish my meal, I place the leftover seeds in a receptacle that has thoughtfully been labeled by the makers of the ship. Other receptacles in various places are meant for my urine and feces, and I assume that the mechanical men are collecting it all, to purify and recycle.

  I am part of a machine that transfers energy from one place to another. It is not a perpetual motion machine, but it is still failing, slowly but surely. The plants in the steel garden soak up energy from the sunlight coming through its windows; I ingest the food from the plants and expend the energy contained in them in order to keep myself alive; the waste I expel is used along with the seeds and more sunlight to make more plants, and more food. But over the past year the tomatoes have been becoming less red, the melons less sweet, the harvest less plentiful. I’ve had to ration out the food to myself, and I’ve become used to a slight but constant hunger through most of the day, until the evening when I allow myself the indulgence of a full stomach. And I miss the taste of fresh meat—I have dreams of the $2.99 special advertised in a diner’s grimy flyspecked window, the slab of pan-broiled cow flesh slapped down on a cracked china plate, covered with black pepper and still bleeding.

  Recently I have taken up the habit of taking a pen and paper to the steel garden and composing there, instead of writing in the room with the obsidian desk where Prospero Taligent’s corpse is interred. Though he’s dead, and his eyes are closed, I just don’t like the feeling of him there. Part of the reason for the change is also that I’m getting closer in my story to the point where I murdered him.

  It’s become important to me now, for some reason, that the story of my life should sound pleasant to the ear when read aloud. I find myself going back and changing words in passages a hundred pages before, not because the new version of a given sentence has more sense, but because it sounds nicer for reasons I can’t put my finger on. And, as egotistical as it may seem, I like to hear the sound of my voice again, after a year of silence. Muscles in my throat and my chest that had gone soft are becoming strong again, and this feels good.

  When I read this manuscript back to myself, Miranda becomes quiet. I said that I wouldn’t speak to her, and I will not. But I have decided not to let this refusal force me to deny myself the freedom to speak. If Miranda chooses to comment on my work, as she often does, then I have the freedom of ignoring her, or even including her words in my manuscript whether or not she wants me to. I’ll do as I wish, whatever she says.

  I’ll say that I do like hearing your tale, Harold, but there’
s not enough of yourself in it, and this is ruining whatever attempts you might be making at total truth. You’re stitching things together from your own memories and the documents stored aboard the ship, and those cause enough problems in and of themselves. But where’s the “I” in this story? That’s what I’m expecting. I want you. Even when you don’t rely on those papers and choose to tell your story for yourself, it’s always “Harold” that does this or that: not you. As if the person you are can disassociate himself from the persons you were. That’s not the way it works at all, I’m afraid.

  I. I kissed Miranda Taligent. I lay half-asleep on a false beach and mourned the loss of my spent seed while Astrid dipped herself into the bronze bath. I killed Prospero Taligent. Each of those people was you. That’s what I want you to admit to me. That’s what I want to hear.

  There is not much left to tell now. The only part of the story that remains is the chronicle of the hours before I boarded the good ship Chrysalis.

  All of us have days in our lives, perhaps three or four at the most, when what we might call disparate events converge. These are the times when we sit down for an uncomfortable holiday dinner with our long-absent and best-forgotten past selves and dine on embarrassment and remorse until we are stuffed. Mostly, we deliberately make these messy moments for ourselves: the wedding to a wife whom your parents hate because she hails from an enemy nation; the high school reunion at which the guests immediately fall into the cliques that were the cause of your childhood torment.

  This was part of Prospero Taligent’s most elaborate final gift to me, the one that he promised all us birthday-party children twenty years ago, the fulfillment of our heart’s desires: he gave me one of those days, when my former selves pursued me like hounds running a fox to ground. I ended up boarding this ship to escape from those ghosts of myself that he summoned. But they were already aboard when the Chrysalis lifted off, waiting for me to reckon with them.

  I’ll make the storyteller the luckiest boy, so he’ll have a story to tell the other boys at school. That is what he promised me twenty years ago, and that is what he did, whether I wanted it or not. That son of a bitch is the Author of my life.

  Miranda is partially right about one thing, I think. I cannot escape what I am and what I have done. My earlier mistakes I can disown by ascribing them to youth, but before I boarded this ship I killed Miranda’s father. It is the people I once was that made me what I am. I must admit to that.

  Not yet, though. I have to record the events of that Christmas Eve, the day before the good ship Chrysalis was launched on its first and only voyage. This was the day when the whole world began to fall apart.

  FOUR

  romance in a

  mechanical

  dancehall

  ONE

  What was her name—Minerva? Melinda, maybe. I was never sure—the noise of the dancehall drowned out the music of her name as she said it, and with just the movement of her mouth to go on, I could only make out the pursed lips of her M and the tentative accompanying smile of the final a as she spoke it. It didn’t matter, though—in retrospect there was a sweet naïveté in the way she gave her name to me unasked, as though we were in a place where the names of people mattered.

  The two of us were wedged together, shoulder to shoulder, in the midst of a milling throng of sweating, panting people who were trying either to work their way to a bar to order drinks whose value was best measured in days of pay, or to return to the dance floor without spilling their glasses or taking inadvertent elbows to the chest. The women in the crowd kept their eyes to the floor, inching forward on clunky high-heeled shoes and clutching impractically tiny purses slung just beneath their armpits; the men’s gazes roved and darted and crawled, dazzled by tricks of makeup that made cheeks seem redder and eyes seem larger, by clothes that changed the shapes of bodies from pears to hourglasses. The music that echoed from the dance floor was all rhythm and no melody, an endlessly transforming, looping, layered series of drumbeats that numbed the ears and made jittering ripples in the surfaces of gingerly held martinis.

  When we made our way to the bar at last we exhaled with relief. The bartender was clearly going to take a while to get to us—he was in the middle of mixing four doses of a drink that seemed to involve more craft than alcohol, pouring one neon-bright liqueur after another into a row of Erlenmeyer flasks while a group of giggling sorority sisters watched, enraptured. “Always the little girls that hold things up, isn’t it!” the woman said in my ear, standing on tiptoe. “Always the girls with their girly drinks!”

  I gave her a wide smile and the slightest of winks—Marlon Giddings would have been proud. That was when she offered her hand and gave her name—Melinda, maybe. Or Melissa. I clasped her cold fingers briefly, then drew away—I didn’t yet have enough liquor in me that evening not to find the touch of other humans revolting.

  Her smile faltered slightly, then returned, flashing two hundred watts’ worth of white teeth. She seemed pretty, though in the ever-shifting lighting of the club it was hard to determine the details of faces with certainty. Her close-cropped hair was dyed fire-engine red and dusted with the tiniest of metallic specks, and her freckled face had a pallor that suggested that she spent high summer days shielded by an umbrella. She was simply but stylishly dressed—well-worn jeans and a shirt featuring what seemed to be a hand-painted portrait of a bygone film starlet I didn’t recognize.

  The bartender poured a final shot of some imported drink into each of the four flasks that turned their contents from a pale blue to a seemingly pulsing neon green, then finished off the drinks by dropping a small pebble of dry ice into each. The faces of the girls lit up as white smoke bloomed out of the necks of the flasks, drifted down their sides, and began to pool on the surface of the bar. “Four Mad Scientists,” the bartender said, and after conferring with each other and fiddling with the contents of their purses, the girls handed him a small pile of crumpled bills. They collected their beakers, took prim sips from them, and began to burrow back through the crowd, chattering to each other and trailing four thin dissipating tendrils of smoke behind them.

  When the bartender approached Melissa (or Minerva) he seemed to recognize her on sight; at least he gave her the hearty greeting that bartenders tend to reserve for regulars who tip well and don’t cause any trouble. “Gripe water!” she ordered, and I moved in (most likely as expected) and offered to pick up the tab for her drink, tacking on an order for a gin and tonic for myself. “Gripe water” turned out to be what looked like five or six shots of vodka poured into a tumbler that was better suited for orange juice than hard liquor, with a single mint leaf tossed on top to give the enterprise the appearance of legitimacy. “Well, thank you,” she said, tilting her head and smiling winsomely as she hoisted her glass. “Now what do you say we get these in us and dance?”

  TWO

  The dance floor of the nightclub was made up of an enormous array of hexagonal panels of clear glass; just beneath the glass we could see the sprawling conglomeration of machines that drove the dancers, an amalgamation of percussive instruments tangled together with decades-old mechanical men whose bodies had been endlessly deformed by the aftermarket modifications of talented amateurs. Beneath us a tin man with three legs performed a lazy leper’s shuffle, clicking castanets in its hands as it limped around in slow ellipses. Another mechanical man had had its hands severed from its arms and replaced with the heads of sledgehammers, with which it rang changes on an arrangement of giant brass bells. A tin man whose hands fanned out into two dozen slender, mallet-tipped fingers tickled the bars of three xylophones; a tin man whose rust-covered torso was riddled with jagged holes mindlessly banged together two concussion stones to make the sound of thunder. A tin creature formed more like a spider than a human skittered over the surface of a kettledrum; another tin man with extraordinarily long arms twirled calabashes so fast that they seemed like blurs. Ten more tin men surrounded a medicine drum, beaing out ten different shifting rhythms w
ith their iron fists.

  The mechanical contraption beneath us sounded so different from the automatic orchestra that I’d heard in the Taligent Tower as a child, with young Miranda nestled within a cocoon of violins and pianos and harps, laboring away at the single crank that ran it all. The orchestra had had noise beneath its music, but in the dancehall noise and rhythm were everything. We listened with our instinct and our sex instead of our hearts and our minds; we responded not with polite applause after a moment of considered silence, but with the increasingly frenetic movements of our bodies in time to the beats.

  The gin and tonic that I’d downed had gotten to me, loosening up my muscles and deadening the disgust that I often felt on contact with the flesh of others. Melissa (or Minerva) was coming closer to me, gracing me here and there with occasional touches that neither of us thought were accidental, though they were meant to seem so. Every once in a while some slick shyster would try to cut in on me, but I’d long ago mastered the kind of unblinking stare that made other men shove off.

  With flirts and come-ons the woman drew me farther into the middle of the floor, where the beats were stronger and deeper and the crowd was packed closer together, and I began to lose myself a little, the hamster wheels of my most persistent thoughts spinning down to rest. Certain parts of me became a little bit forgotten, a little bit numb, a little bit dead, and it was nice to have some dead places in me for a little while, to lose a little bit of my broken mind.

  After a while Minerva (or Melinda) waved her open palm fanlike in front of her face—phew!—gently took my hand in hers—mine.—and led me over to the edge of the dance floor, where a dais held a few bar tables. From here we could see the crowd of dancers, though not the machinery beneath them that made them move. On a canvas hanging on the opposite wall I could see a projected image, a heavily scratched print of vintage pornography from the early days of the century that was playing at the wrong speed: a plump nude brunette with a pageboy haircut and a rictus pasted on her face performed an odd jackknifing dance, while a group of cigar-smoking dandies in white suits looked on from the edge of the frame, grinning salaciously and nudging each other in the ribs. Near the edge of the dance floor were the four sorority girls, huddled together in a tight circle with their purses piled in the middle; they were surrounded by twice as many men, all of whom were trying awkward strategies intended to separate one of them from the rest of the flock and draw her off alone.