The Dream of Perpetual Motion

by Unknown

  I love you when I’m throwing up on roller-coaster rides

  I love you when I’m dancing on the brink of suicide.

  “See,” the manager said, sighing and handing the paper back to me, “see . . . the problem with this is, there’s a forced rhyme. Rides, suicide. It doesn’t work. Forced rhymes cause disquiet in the stomach of the potential purchaser. Let’s see . . . maybe we can fix it. You could perhaps pluralize suicide, but then you can’t really have one person killing himself over and over again, can you? That is unintelligible. But if you put ride in the singular then it makes it sound like caveman talk. No . . . no. This one won’t work. Tell you what . . . you’re off your game today. Why don’t you knock off a few minutes early. Try to have a merry Christmas.” He tentatively patted me on the shoulder, as if what I had were catching; then he walked away.

  NINE

  After work, I boarded the subway that went back to my apartment. It was half past noon by the time I entered the car, and its floor was covered with copies of Taligent’s proclamation. I imagined that a million of them must have been dumped onto the city by now, with still more raining between the skyscrapers and onto the streets.

  I still hadn’t made up my mind completely about the letter I received from Miranda. But before I left for home, I stopped off at a nearby liquor store and purchased a small flask of single-malt Scotch. I figured that if I decided not to rescue Miranda, I’d drink the whiskey myself the next day. It would be a Christmas present to myself.

  My train didn’t make it all the way to its intended stop, unfortunately—as we were pulling off from the station just before mine, the train jerked to a sudden halt as all its lights went dark. Its passengers sat there in silence for a few moments; then the car’s emergency lights came up, a few flickering red bulbs screwed into sockets in the ceiling.

  We looked at each other in the dim crimson light, our faces indistinct. Shadows made black holes of our eye sockets.

  “What happened?” said one person.

  “He cut the power,” said another. “I bet that crazy son of a bitch just cut the power to the whole city. I bet you.”

  “He can’t just cut the power, can he? I don’t understand how he can do that. Isn’t electricity something that’s everyone’s? Like, you know, water? Air?”

  “He can do anything he wants,” said a small boy.

  “Well somebody for damn sure needs to do something about that guy. The son of a bitch goes too far.”

  “Don’t swear,” said the small boy. “It’s Christmastime.”

  “Dinglepep!” chattered the automatic gramophone as it continued to patrol the aisle in darkness. “What puts pride in your stride and pep in your step? Dinglepep.”

  After we waited long enough to be certain that the car wouldn’t be moving anytime soon, and that official sorts of people in uniforms wouldn’t be coming along to save us, we made our way carefully to the rear car of the train, which was still adjacent to the platform. With a good deal of work four of us managed to jimmy its door open wide enough for all of us to work our way through it, one at a time. The only light we could make out was the daylight shining from a nearby stairway, which we moved toward. I was going to have to walk the rest of the way back to my apartment, a few blocks.

  When I emerged from the subway tunnel into the street above, I found that the ground was littered with more of Taligent’s flyers, in seven different colors. I could see phalanxes of his flying cars whizzing across the sky, dumping their messages, following a half second later by their own Dopplering buzz. The storefronts of the buildings on the opposite side of the street from the parking lot were all shattered, their contents looted. Looking down the street, I could see three curling plumes of ink-black smoke on the horizon, their sources obscured from view by skyscrapers.

  No traffic moved on the street itself. Along with the flyers from Taligent’s flying cars, the road was littered with the remnants of broken machines, many of them taken from the shop windows: radio dials; the limbs and skulls of tin men; wristwatches with missing hands and shattered faces; phonographs with their cabinets stove in; toaster ovens trying to hold in their guts. A totaled automobile was turned on its side in the middle of the narrow road, in a position such that it would have blocked traffic in both directions had there been any. A group of about fifty people was gathered around it, most of them young, most of them men. They were all looking up at the three mechanical men that were standing precariously atop the automobile, screaming.

  At least my first impression was that the men standing on the automobile were mechanical. But, as I approached the crowd gathered around it, I realized that they were, in fact, artificial tin men. The three of them were dressed almost exactly like those who’d kidnapped Miranda after she ran away from home ten years ago: their faces were painted silver, and they wore the same funnels atop their heads. In their hands they wielded double-bladed axes.

  The one in the center was speaking. I recognized his oversized, hypertrophied build, and his voice. I’d seen him twice before, in different guises. Martin. Artegall.

  “—ask you,” he said as I came close enough to hear him, “are we gonna allow ourselves to be ruled by Dynamos?”

  “No!” the crowd screamed.

  “Are we gonna allow this man to tell us what to do?”

  “No!”

  “I tell you—I let him tell me what to do for long enough. He used to look me in the eye and tell me what to do, and I’d do it. But I’ve had enough. Have you had enough? Tell me.”

  “We’ve had enough!” they responded.

  “Then we gotta act now! Not tomorrow—now! We’ve been sleeping for too long! Now we have to wake up! We have to storm Prospero Taligent’s citadel! We have to break down the doors of his Tower and search it floor by floor until we find him! Then we’ll throttle him with our bare hands!

  “He’s kept us under his thumb for too long! We have to take this city back!”

  (He said all we’re supposed to do is act this stuff out! Well we aren’t acting anymore!)

  The crowd let loose a collective yell, turned as one, and began to run down the deserted street toward the obsidian tower that dominated the eastern skyline, the false tin men leading them with their axes held high.

  (This is one hundred percent for real now.)

  TEN

  Given the commotion in front of the entrance to my apartment building (a man with an unkempt beard and a thousand-yard stare pressing a pamphlet describing the end-times into the hands of hurried passersby; a panicked doorman brandishing a rusty jackknife at a gang of jeering hooligans; a pile of defunct mechanical men in the middle of the empty street that a couple of cops in full riot gear were lighting up with flamethrowers), I thought it would be safest to enter the building through the parking garage beneath it.

  As I walked down one of the dimly lit aisles (for the power was out here, too, with only a few lights running off an emergency generator), an automobile prowling for a parking space kept pace with me, a shiny affair in black and chrome, polished to a mirror’s likeness, large and low to the ground. I couldn’t make out the driver’s face in the failing light; only that he wore a black fedora and a black trench coat with its collar turned up.

  We traveled down the aisle together for a short time, until someone vacated a parking space almost at the aisle’s head. The black automobile pulled ahead of me to swing into the spot, but before he could execute the turn, a hot-pink finned behemoth of a car came out of nowhere and whipped into the space, parking crookedly, nearly clipping off the black automobile’s front fender.

  As I approached the scene of the near accident, I could see the driver of the black automobile pounding his steering wheel repeatedly with his fists and quickly moving his lips with a grimace on his face. He’d barely managed to avoid a collision. The driver of the pink car opened her door and stepped out. She looked to be in her sixties, short, scrawny, wrinkled, and heavily made-up, with drawn-on eyebrows and twin spots of deep red r
ouge ground into her sagging cheeks. Her tight knee-length dress gave the clear impression that she’d just been inside a paint factory while it was imploding. In her jewelry-burdened hands she held a small, white, and unreasonably furry dog, its eyes obscured by its own hair.

  She let the dog drop to the ground and it began to run around frantically in tight circles, yapping hysterically. “Oh my gosh,” she said, approaching the black automobile as its driver shoved open its door. “Oh my gosh, I’m sorry? Oh I didn’t mean to cut you off like that—”

  “If you were really sorry about it, then you wouldn’t have done it,” the automobile driver whispered. He reached into a pocket of his trousers with his right hand and pulled out a keyring closed in his fist, tightly gripping one of the keys between his index and middle fingers.

  “I didn’t mean to cut you off?” the woman continued. “It’s just that I’m in a hurry? I want to get safe and sound in my bed before this business with the death rays starts! And also it’s such a good parking space, you can’t blame—”

  “If you were really sorry about it, then you wouldn’t have done it!” the automobile driver screamed. “Why do you say you did not mean to do something when you know that you did mean to? ‘I do not mean to hurt you as I am hurting you’: What is this? How’s this?” He ran up to her car and ripped a long ragged gash into its pink paint with the key in his fist. “Oh, I’m sorry I ruined your paint job!” He then strode over to the woman and spat cleanly in her eye. “I didn’t mean to spit in your eye, either! And I’m sorry I killed your dog, too,” he said, reaching into the folds of his voluminous trench coat and removing a revolver, which he used to pump six bullets into the dog’s body, mowing it down. “And I didn’t mean to ruin your looks for life, either,” he said, holstering the revolver, reaching into his trench coat again, and pulling out a corked glass vial with a fluorescent green liquid inside; he deftly removed the cork with his thumb and, with an adept flick of the wrist, slung the contents of the tube into the woman’s face. “Acid?” she yelled. “Oh my God acid?” She put her hands to the smoking remains of her face and collapsed to the ground, weeping. “There, now!” said the man in the trench coat, stabbing a finger at the woman lying prone on the ground. “This will teach you to say what you mean in the future!”

  As the vitrioleur turned to look at me, I got a clear look at his face: round and ruddy, freckled, with a shock of curly carroty hair creeping from under the brim of his hat. He pointed a finger at me. “You remind me of someone I don’t think I like,” he said, “but I can’t remember who. But when I do, there’s going to be hell to pay—who are you. Tell me who you are.”

  “I’m Harold Winslow,” I stammered as he approached me, reaching into his trench coat again to pull out who knew what. “I don’t know you. I write greeting cards.”

  I was afraid for a moment that the man standing before me was a dissatisfied customer, seeking revenge. It wouldn’t have been the first time this kind of thing happened. For instance, the cards that I wrote for the company’s “I’d Like to Declare My Confused and Ambiguous Fondness for You” line were all notorious failures, some of which were blamed as the single direct cause of several nasty divorces, and some of their purchasers had actually taken the effort to discover the identity of their anonymous author, sending me hate mail, dead fish, and poorly wrapped, oil-stained packages emitting ticking noises.

  But the vitrioleur paused. “Wait a second. Harold Winslow.” He squinted. “Are you . . . this seems silly, but were you at a birthday party, about twenty years ago, for Miranda Taligent? You . . . you were the storyteller.”

  “Yes. Yes. That was me.”

  “So was I!” He pointed at himself. “I’m Sebastian! I sat next to you at the concert with the mechanical orchestra, remember?”

  That placed it for me. His face still looked the same.

  His hand came out of his trench coat, empty and offered in greeting. He shook my hand firmly, with a grip just short of being painful. The driver of the pink car was rolling back and forth on the ground and wailing. “Oh my God my face. Oh God my face.”

  “You know, I still think about that party,” Sebastian said. “Hey, you’ll like this! Remember when I said I wanted to be a vitrioleur when I grew up? And then Prospero Taligent said all that creepy stuff about how he’d watch all of us our whole lives and make our dreams come true?”

  I could hear the letter from Miranda in my briefcase, reading itself to me. “Yes,” I said.

  “Well, imagine my surprise when, on the day I graduated from high school, I received a letter in the mail saying that, in recognition of my stellar academic achievement, Taligent Industries was awarding me a full scholarship to the Xeroville College of Vitriol!”

  “There’s a school for that kind of thing?”

  “Why, sure! You don’t think you can just go around throwing acid in people’s faces without a degree, do you? Hundreds of hours of training are required before a man can don the black trench coat!”

  “Oh, really.”

  “Well, yes. It’s a two-year program. The first year is all chemistry, you know: mixing the acid, procedures for preservation and containment, things like that. A lot of people wash out in that first year. They like the image of the vitrioleur, the glamour, but not the work they have to put in, see? But if you can make it to that second year, that’s when the fun starts. That’s when you learn technique.”

  “Technique.”

  “Oh, yes. You try to sling acid without the proper technique, it could end up all over your hand; hell, it could end up in your own face for that matter!”

  “So this is your job, then.” I started to edge away from Sebastian, but he kept following me, his twitching hand nervously sliding into his trench coat and coming out empty, then going back in.

  “Yes, it’s great, isn’t it? I get hired by rich old men, mostly: revenge on squirrelly second wives that run off with a suitcase full of money and the plumber. It’s got a real sense of drama, more so than the usual stuff with guns and knives. First I track the victim for a few days, to figure out the pattern of their lives; then I come up to them when they’re stepping out of their apartment in their bathrobe to pick up the newspaper in the morning, or when they’re waiting for a cab in the afternoon, and then I spring it on them! And just so they understand who’s doing them in, I’ll say something just beforehand like ‘This bile comes to you from the tongue of Jeremiah Smith!’ Like this!” And quicker than my eyes could follow, his hand snaked into his trench coat, came out with a vial, uncorked it, and threw its contents into my face.

  I yelped and staggered backward, putting my hands to my face, but noticed that I felt none of the intense stinging that one normally associates with caustic liquids in contact with the skin. I dropped my hands and looked at Sebastian, confused. “Ho ho!” he laughed. “That was merely colored water! That is a little trick I like to play on new friends! You see the drama of it now? Some of the newer vitrioleurs like to fake their way through that part of it. They have these rigged-out vials that have a mechanical delivery system inside, so that the acid just shoots out through a tiny hole in the cork. But where’s the glory in that? If you’re going to do that then you might as well get a little toy squirt gun, is what I say.”

  He looked behind him at the woman, still lying on the ground, moaning incoherently. “Miss Priss is no longer the cat’s meow when her face is made ugly,” he said between clenched teeth. He turned back to me, and an honest-to-God tear glistened in the corner of his eye. “Prospero Taligent made my dream come true,” he said. “He really did.”

  ELEVEN

  After climbing twenty flights of stairs in darkness, I let myself into my apartment and shut the door, double-bolting it. Then I opened my briefcase, removed the bottle of Scotch, uncorked it, and took a swig straight from the bottle. From the street below I could hear screams, the cracks of firing rifles and revolvers, and the shattering of window glass.

  I sat in silence as the afternoon
passed and the light dimmed, sipping from the bottle of Scotch, reading the letter from Miranda again, thinking, reading the letter again, thinking, sipping from the bottle of Scotch. Soon enough night began to come on, heralded by the early, man-made, gloomy sunset that descends on a city full of skyscrapers, made of sharply defined mile-long swaths of light and shadow. The city was refusing to sleep as it should have on the night of Christmas Eve, with the last presents wrapped in foil and placed in the closet to be trotted out at three o’clock in the morning, and the last of the greeting cards I’d written in midsummer snatched hurriedly off drugstore racks unread. It seemed that Xeroville was heading for a full-scale riot.

  With the power gone out in the building it was strangely quiet, with all its machines shut down. That was good—the quiet was rare, and it let me mull things over.

  The thing is—I’d just gone about my business today. The winged messenger; the letter from a lost love; the proclamation of the madman; the riots in the streets—and I’d just gone about my business, trying to ignore it all as if it were just so much noise. And everyone else in the city who could carry it off was probably trying to do the same. Nothing less than acid thrown straight in our faces would turn us from our predetermined paths, or our quibbles over quality parking spaces.

  Outside my window I could see the nearly full moon rising in deepening twilight over the Xeroville skyline. The stars were coming out, and as they shone above the dark city they looked the way they must have looked in the age of miracles that my father used to speak of—thousands of twinkling pinpricks in the sky, the distant indicators of forbidden planets. Hundreds of flying cars were circling aimlessly around the upper floors of skyscrapers like clouds of insects, their headlamps painting circles of white light that slowly floated across the rows of plate-glass windows.

  The only building in the city that still had lights in its windows was the tallest: the Taligent Tower. Moored atop it I could see what appeared to be an enormous white cigar-shaped bladder, moving almost imperceptibly back and forth as if it were being tossed by a strong wind. That must have been the zeppelin Chrysalis.