The Dream of Perpetual Motion

by Unknown

  As you read this, the perpetual motion machine is being installed aboard a specially fitted zeppelin, the good ship Chrysalis, moored on the roof of the Taligent Tower. Once the installation is complete, my daughter, Miranda, and I will leave this earthly sphere and spend the rest of our days among the clouds. The airship contains a completely self-sufficient environment, with a self-perpetuating food and water supply large enough for two, so that our feet will never have to touch this filthy earth again. When we pass over the city at regular intervals, you will have the opportunity to offer your tributes to me in the form of poems, gold ingots, or self-abasement. I will also use the flying cars you see above you to distribute leaflets printed with written commands, which you will cheerfully obey in the interest of your own happiness and self-betterment. Occasionally, for my personal amusement, I will relieve hundreds of you of the tiresome burden of your lives at a single stroke, vaporizing you instantaneously with the batteries of death rays with which my zeppelin is liberally equipped.

  In conclusion: henceforth you may view me as your Ruler, though those few of you who choose to will still be permitted to attend your regular houses of worship. Good day to you!

  “You don’t really believe this, do you?” I said to the courier, handing the paper back to him. “That rumor of the perpetual motion machine has been going around for at least ten years. At least since I was in college. Everyone knows he’s crazy, right?”

  “Have you looked outside?” the messenger asked, on his way out the door with my tie knotted around his skinny arm, soaking up blood. “Maybe you don’t believe it, but everyone else believes he’s the real thing. So you can’t afford not to be careful—the rioting down there is fierce. Death rays. I swear. What the fuck.” He walked through the doorway and turned to face me.

  “Man,” he said, “fuck that noise,” and slammed the door shut.

  FIVE

  In accordance with the messenger’s instructions, I waited for a few minutes until I could be reasonably sure that he was gone from the building. Then I opened the envelope.

  Inside were two things: an entrance pass to the Taligent Tower with my name printed on it, and a single sheet of cream-colored, heavy-gauge paper. Holding the paper up to the light revealed a watermark, the logo of Taligent Industries, and the handwritten message said:

  Dear Harold,

  I don’t know if you’ve found out yet about Father’s plans to KIDNAP me and keep me prisoner FOREVER aboard his airship, the Chrysalis. He has terrible things in mind for me—that’s what he said. He’s gone completely crazy! Everything in here (the Tower) is total chaos. Father just runs around laughing all the time, like the mad scientists in movies. I don’t know what to do. I’m really scared. I’ve never been so scared, even that time when we first kissed (and I mightn’t’ve looked scared then, but let me tell you, I was nervous. I’d never kissed a guy before!). I was scared, too, a little, that other time, when we—you know.

  I need you to come save me! I put an entrance pass into the envelope so you can get into the Tower. That was all I could do—you’ll have to figure out the rest yourself. I know it sounds weird to ask a favor like this of someone you haven’t seen in about ten years, but I’m trapped here, and I can’t trust anyone and you’re my only hope, which is why you have to come save me yourself and don’t bring anyone with you. I know you’ll figure out a way to come rescue me! You were so good at it the last time when we were in that warehouse! There’s not much time left. Tonight he’s going to put me aboard the zeppelin, and after that it’ll lift off and then it’ll be all over. Right now I think I’m being kept somewhere on the 101st floor. You have to get there with the entrance pass. Then you can figure out how to get me out of here!

  This is a noisy, filthy place and I DON’T WANT TO BE WITH FATHER ANYMORE!!!

  I need you to come save me, Harold.

  Love, Miranda.

  SIX

  I took the subway to work that morning, as none of my various neuroses seemed demanding enough to required a shrinkcabbie that day, and I was low on money at any rate. Christmas was coming to the city, and despite what the courier had said about what was happening in the streets, I still looked forward to the holiday with some anticipation.

  One of the luxuries of my apartment building was a tunnel, connected to its basement parking garage, that let directly onto a subway platform. It meant that, if I wished, I could go straight to the greeting-card works without ever having to go outside (since a similar tunnel at the platform where I got off the subway led into the bowels of the enormous building). However, the elevator nearest my apartment stopped at the lobby without descending into the basement, so that I had to get out there and take a flight of stairs down. When I stepped out of the elevator, I briefly looked through the lobby’s plate-glass windows into the street. A pair of automobiles were overturned, one of them being quickly consumed by flames, the other already a charred and smoking shell; a gang of identically clothed thugs in jeans and black leather jackets were goose-stepping down the sidewalk in formation; a grizzled old man dressed in rags was staggering down the street’s yellow dividing line under the burden of a yard-tall stack of phonograph records, still in their paper wrappers. Some kind of a severed human limb flung itself against a lobby window and fell to the ground, leaving a wide red smear, but whether it was the arm of an adult or the leg of a child was hard to tell, as what had once been either its hand or foot had been removed.

  I had a list of minor tasks to complete on that Christmas Eve, and I went over them in my head as I sat in the subway car, trying my best, as always, to ignore all the noises: the trundling of the wheels against the track; the bansheelike screaming of the blood-spattered woman seated at the other end of the car; the rattling whirr of the fan struggling to recycle the air; the mechanical self-winding gramophones that crawled up and down the aisle on their eight slender spidery legs, tinnily trumpeting advertisements through their horns for absinthe and cleaning products and love-philters. First I had to put in a half day at work, but as it was Christmas Eve, I got the afternoon off. And I was going to have Christmas Day to myself. Christmas morning is the only time each year when the city is quiet. I suppose that those with families have a different perspective, sitting under their metal pine trees and reading each other the words I scripted for them six months ago, or simply tearing open the card to get at the bill or the check folded inside. Meanwhile, greedy children coming off a sleepless night rip open boxes and pull out clever little machines, automatons that dance and chirp gibberish.

  But all the threads that had once bound me to those who shared my blood had snapped. I wasn’t present years before when my father’s body was discovered in his apartment, so all I have remaining to me are memories of the dreams I had back then—of doctors and policemen donning deep-sea suits and diving down through layer after layer of newspapers, heading farther back in time the deeper they descended, until at the bottom of an ocean of information they found my father’s floating corpse, its mouth stuffed with wood pulp, its irisless eyes the color of spoiled cream, its hand clutching a faded piece of parchment chronicling the mundane events of ancient days.

  And those dreams were free of grief, or at least I believe they were; and the waking hours that followed those dreams were filled with that nameless feeling that must be a dozen times worse than all the other emotions to which we’ve given names. I dutifully stood alone one sunrise and tossed my father’s ashes to the wind that blew across the city’s bay, forcing all the facial expressions I could think of onto my face to find the one that would identify itself with grief and let the grieving start. But nothing worked, and nothing has since.

  And if I could have prayed to the God that ordered the world in which my father had come of age, I would have, hoping that He’d deign to descend from heaven and breathe life and heat back into the metal of which I was made. But He was long gone, like Father and like Astrid and like a mother who was little more than a fiction, left back in a past I’d alm
ost lost the capacity to even imagine.

  At any rate, I was free to walk the streets on Christmas morning. There is nothing so beautiful as the quiet mechanical city, with everyone inside their homes and everything gone still. There are messages scrawled across skyscrapers with letters five stories tall, and no one there to read them. You can stand still for minutes in places where you’d have been run over fifty times in ten seconds twelve hours before. Christmas morning is the best time to indulge in the luxury of loneliness.

  The letter from Miranda Taligent seemed as if it might change my plans, though. Memory is strange. I suppose that for most people, memories carry traces of the emotional colors associated with them from the time that past events occurred, so that the photograph of a particular woman or the mention of her name is enough to make one wince and clench one’s fists; at least, that is how the behavior of others often seems to me.

  For me, though, recalling an event that happened six months ago is like reading about it in a used paperback book. As I look back on my past, as I have tried to in this narrative, it seems as if I’ve shed the skins of a series of selves (or grew a series of shells; either metaphor is equally appropriate, I think). And, looking at the letter that Miranda sent, it seemed silly to me that she would write to the Harold Winslow that had kissed her in her playroom twenty years ago, or made love with her there ten years after that, and expect the person I was on this Christmas Eve to answer. As if I had to honor the obligations of my past selves that they had incurred by falling in love.

  Not to mention the impossibility of fulfilling the request of this damsel in distress. Whisking the girl out of the Tower under the noses of hundreds of guards: that was the stuff of serial short films. I didn’t think I was up to it.

  It never came to that, though. And it turned out that I had a little more courage than I thought. But not enough. If I’d had enough courage, I would have turned my back on the Chrysalis and never boarded her. And I wouldn’t be here, on the zeppelin, with Miranda.

  SEVEN

  I spent the morning working in my cubicle at the greeting-card works. It was almost completely devoid of decorations, the way I liked it. Most other workers had daguerreotypes of loved ones taped to the walls, or cynical cartoons about office life cut out of the morning paper, or little rhyming maxims about teamwork and success, or vain prayers to God: Dear Lord, give me the strength to accept the things I cannot change. Dear Lord, if you can’t make me thin, at least make everyone else fat! I didn’t know how they could stand it. Those little scraps of paper tacked all over the place with their edges curled, saying the same dumb puerile things to them each and every time they looked at them. Frozen girlsmiles and put-upon stick figures. Staying the same.

  I had a single sheet of paper attached to the wall of my cubicle, the same sheet of paper that everyone else had in every cubicle in the writing department, in one form or another. A series of rhymes were written on it. You need rhymes at hand to work quickly, and certain sets lend themselves to the genre: day/way; love/dove/above; breath/death; sunny/money; you/do/new/blue/true. Some workers chose to write blank verse, but they never wrote the top sellers. I knew better than that, though. People are more likely to assign emotional meaning to statements when they rhyme. Rhymes touch what the potential purchaser thinks of as his or her heart.

  I had my briefcase with me as well, which contained the envelope with Miranda’s letter and the entrance pass to the Tower. I still hadn’t made up my mind about what to do with them. The letter kept calling to me, and every half hour or so I would pull it out of my briefcase to read it over, as if it would say something different or new.

  So we wrote, I and Ophelia Flavin in the cubicle on my right, and Marlon Giddings in the cubicle on my left, and a host of other writers in their separate cubicles in a large, windowless, poorly lit room, with walls painted in various shades of gray. We scribbled our little ditties, and our supervisors came by our cubicles regularly, looked over our work, and harvested what they liked. The supervisors sent our scribbles to the marketing division; there they were matched up with an artist that would draw a suitable series of accompanying images: seascapes, or still lifes, or cartoonish, goggle-eyed beasts with pastel skins that behave as humans do. Then the finished cards were delivered into the bowels of the greeting-card works, where the presses deafened their caretakers with their noise and stained their faces black with ink, churning out apologies and condolences and lovesongs by the tens of thousands, minting simulations of the motions of the heart.

  Time was out of joint. Outside the temperature was below freezing, with the threat of snow and a brutal, skyscraper-accelerated wind whipping down streets, strong enough to tear through overcoats and chill the flesh. Inside the greeting-card works it was June, and stifling hot. Because of the six-month production time for greeting cards, during the winter months there is no particular holiday to write for that demands all of our attention, like Christmas or Valentine’s Day. So we used those months to fill out the demand for cards that celebrate personal holidays, like birthdays and anniversaries, as well as those nondescript declarations of love that one sees in drugstore aisles, filed under labels like FOR A NEW FRIEND and I LOVE YOU!

  We were all burning up. Marlon and I had removed our coats and loosened our ties. Beneath the roar of the rows of ceiling fans balancing out the effects of the building’s heaters, I could hear an occasional strangled scream from the street below, or the firing of a weapon.

  The word had come down from marketing that we were short of multiple-purpose couplets on the generic subject of love, so those were what Marlon and Ophelia and I were writing. The lines of all the couplets needed to be iambic, with seven feet each; this way, couplets from different writers could easily be mixed and matched.

  I hadn’t come up with much of anything after two hours; Ophelia, on the other hand, was just plugging away. She’d written more than thirty couplets since she’d clocked in. She’d sit at her desk for about five minutes, humming arpeggios to herself with the tip of her index finger between her lips; then she’d rip one out. Then she’d look over the shared wall of our two cubicles, dripping with sweat, and show it to me.

  “Look!” she said, handing a piece of paper over the cubicle wall for the thirty-fourth time. “I got another one.”

  I took the paper from her and read it:

  I loved you so darned muchly when our love was fresh and new.

  But a love that’s even better is a love that’s tried and true!

  “This one would be good for endings,” Ophelia said. “To end something with.”

  Ophelia Flavin was six and a half feet tall, and beautiful. But she was a horrible writer. “That’s good,” I said to Ophelia, giving the paper back. “You’re really cranking them out today.”

  “Yeah,” Ophelia replied. “You seem to be stuck today. You ought to try writing down the things you see in dreams. That’s how I’m inspired.”

  “You got that from a dream,” I said. “What kind of dreams do you usually have?”

  “Nothing fraught with meaning,” said Ophelia. “Nothing complicated. People embracing, with faces that I can’t make out; certain shades of pink invisible to the eye. Dreams where I don’t grow old. You have to believe in your dreams if you want to practice this art. This is a special thing that we do, that everyone takes for granted: people need us to say the things for them that they wish they could say themselves, because wishes aren’t enough to make words out of desires. We need to be there when those important times come, when the woman looks her lover in his eye, and her hands shake and her lips lock. This is when we step in, to save her. We can be there for her, if we just believe in our dreams—”

  “For God’s sake,” Marlon broke in from the cubicle on my left, “will somebody please deliver me from this creeping bullshit?” He stood up to look over the cubicle walls at Ophelia. “Believe. Do you actually believe the bullshit that just came out of your mouth. Do you. Do you know what I’ve gotten in exchange fo
r true love, and knights in shining armor, and damsels locked in stone penthouses waiting for escape? Shit. And you’re dining out on dreams and wishes. I’ve gotten shit, and hangovers, and kicks in the balls and cigarette smoke mixed with the stink of seven different brands of stale perfume. And you’re flinging a bunch of shit at me about the truth of rhyming couplets! Pieced together like jigsaw puzzles! You believe. For God’s sake. Have you looked outside. Have you looked at what’s going on outside. On the way to work this morning I saw a woman wandering down the middle of the street in a ripped wedding gown and both her ring fingers sliced down to stumps. Smile and believe that shit. You believe. You’re dumb enough to believe that people actually read greeting cards. You think they get interpreted. They’re just placeholders for thoughts that people didn’t have the balls to think for themselves. Their eyes just slide over the words, and maybe if the words make a nice shape on the page then they say something about that. Then they throw the thing on the floor and go to dinner in their skimpy little dresses with their tits falling out or go to their silly little musicals with the flashing lights at the end or blow out the candles or screw their tin men or whatever it is that people do. The things we write here are disposable.

  “You believe. Well if you believe then for Christ’s sake don’t tell anyone. I’d be ashamed to be so goddamn stupid if I were you. Shit. I’ve gotten shit.” And he sat down.

  EIGHT

  My manager came by my cubicle fifteen minutes before I was supposed to leave work. I only had one couplet to show him. He read, squinting at the sheet of paper in his hand: