by Unknown
“I hope I’ve made myself clear, that I don’t appreciate this vigilante business,” the cop said, tapping the tin man on the shoulder with his nightstick. Then he walked away.
“Well,” the false tin man said to me with a sigh as the elevator doors opened, “I’ve got a hundred and fifty flights to climb. I may as well get started.” He still seemed to be in his unusual good humor. I stepped into the car and pressed the button marked 101, and as I looked at the silver-faced man he lifted his hand, as if in benediction.
“Good luck, my friend,” he said as the doors slid shut. “Thanks for the whiskey. Three hours. I’ll see you on the roof.”
FOUR
A few minutes later, the elevator glided to a stop, and its doors slid quietly open. I looked out onto the 101st floor of the Taligent Tower.
Years of experience with reading signs on doors had taught me that a door’s sign was usually indicative of what lay on its other side. But the signs on the closely spaced doors that lined both sides of the labyrinthine hallways that branched crazily before me at all angles could mean nothing, unless Prospero had somehow developed the ability to bottle dreams and wishes: AWKWARD read one, all in capital letters. NORTH read another. TUESDAY. NOT. IMPAIR. VERSIONS. MIRACLE. HEAT. EARLY. THE. CANDLELIGHT. I stepped cautiously out of the elevator, and it shut and went whizzing down to the bottom floor. Then it was dead quiet.
I didn’t know what to do. Which one of the doors concealed the woman? Was there a door here that read DAMSEL? If so, how would I find it? If the rooms weren’t in alphabetical order, what order were they in? I had never before felt so lost in my life as I did then. MELTED. SIN. EAST. SOUNDPROOF. ESSENCE. DUNE. AN. It was as if the building had gone mad along with its owner.
The feedback whine erupted out of the ceiling again, and I jumped as I felt my heart dump adrenaline into my body. “—odeon of alternate pasts. People think they want to see the future. But do they not truly desire to see a past that never existed when they speak of this future? Do they in their old age not want to return to some misremembered pastoral childhood, full of daisies and innocence, censored of its beatings and suffering? The nickelodeon of alternate pasts will show films custom-made for each viewer, films of what might have been: had you taken a left instead of a right at a certain crosswalk; had you not walked in on your parents in the midst of sexual congress at the age of eight; had you introduced yourself to the plain Jane at the wedding reception instead of the temptress with the startling décolletage. Each film will end identically: the customer enters the nickelodeon and sits rapt at the viewer, watching himself watching himself watching himself dine on regret, unable to leave—”
Quiet again. After a few more moments, I decided that the only course of action available was to try a door at random. I turned to a door next to me; it wouldn’t open when I tried the knob, but embedded in the door’s frame was a device with a blinking light and a small slot. I slipped the identification card into it. It swallowed the card and spat it back out; the light stopped blinking and glowed cleanly; the door swung open, revealing darkness on the other side. It was labeled with the single word HEAT.
FIVE
When the door shut behind me, it took a few moments for my eyes to adjust to the light. In pitch darkness I felt my way down a narrow corridor until it opened out into what seemed like a spacious room with a high ceiling; the only light came from an odd reddish orange rectangle at the far end, which flickered like a fire and was occasionally obscured. As my pupils widened I began to take in more details: a glinting line of light on a wide metal pipe descending from the ceiling; piles of something, rocks perhaps, five times as high as I was tall; a large metallic egglike structure mounted against a wall, twice as tall as myself, with a dark rectangular hole cut into it like a gaping mouth.
It was a furnace, with the fire inside it gone out. And the piles of rocks in front of me were piles of coal. This was one of the Tower’s boiler rooms.
The dead furnace I saw was one of many, perhaps a hundred, scattered irregularly throughout the boiler room like forgotten totems. Pipes led out of them to twist like nests of metal pythons and disappear into the ceiling and floor. The dancing light at the chamber’s end came from the only burning furnace in the entire room, and as I slowly approached it, clumsily making my way past pipes and clambering around mountains of coal, I saw a stockily built man standing in front of the furnace, frantically slinging shovelfuls of coal down its throat.
I got close enough to shout a greeting to him, and he spun to face me. He was shirtless and muscular, and covered in coal dust. With an enormous upper body, thick stout legs, and no neck or waist to speak of, he looked like a child’s drawing of a strongman.
He took a step toward me, holding his shovel in a pose suggesting that he could use it either as a tool or a weapon. A grin dawned on his coal-smudged face.
“You came for the heat,” he said.
I stumbled backward, nearly slipping on a nugget of coal lying beneath my foot. “I’m looking for a damsel in distress,” I managed to spit out. “Her name is Miranda.”
He stood there for a moment, backlit by furnace glow. “Miranda?” he said, and his grin widened. “I screwed her.”
He turned away from me then, picked up a shovelful of coal from a nearby mound, and threw it into the furnace, which spoke with a deep whoomph from its gullet as the coal ignited. “I’m Ferdinand,” he said, continuing to feed the furnace. “I’m the master of this boiler room. You picked the wrong time to come if you came for the heat. Usually there’s a hundred men here. All of us shoveling. Keeping things hot. Tin men can’t work here. They can’t take the heat. It’s constant. Their insides gum up. They freeze. They choke on coal dust.
“One hundred men. Shoveling coal and singing bawdy songs to keep the beat and pass the time. Sweating to make your heat and your light. But ninety-nine men were cowards tonight. They ran away because they were afraid.” He stopped shoveling for a moment to look at me and pound his chest with a meaty fist. “Not me. Not Ferdinand. I’m staying until the end. Because men have to take responsibility.”
“I’m looking for Miranda,” I said, and it sounded crazy as soon as it came out of my mouth. “If you know, please tell me where I can find her.”
“When I touched her,” Ferdinand said, “I would leave a handprint in coal dust on her perfect porcelain flesh.” He went back to shoveling as he spoke, punctuating his words with the swings of the shovel and the sound of the coal’s ignition. “I found her wandering among the furnaces.” Whoomph. “Through the mountains of coal.” Whoomph. “The girl wore a thin nightgown.” Whoomph. “She huddled on the slope of a coal mountain. She held a lump of coal in her hand. She was chewing on it. Her other arm was drawn around her. Hiding her breasts from me. She shook. Two heat spots of red on her cheeks.
“I said that’s not how you get the heat out of it. Not by eating it. You have to heat it up. It takes heat to make more heat. That’s science. She said I’m cold. I said come here then. She climbed down from the coal pile. I could see through her nightgown. Her nipples were hard and the color of wine. She put her arms around me. She laid her cheek against my chest. She shivered. My cock sprang up like a dowsing rod. She said I’m so cold. I’m very cold. All around me I could hear the slicing sound of shovel blades sliding into piles of coal. Like swords sliding into sheaths. We were hidden from the other men. In the mountains of coal. They sang as they worked. Love Meg Moll Marian and Margery. But none of us cared for Kate. For she had a tongue with a tang. I said are you maid or no. She said haven’t you heard the news. I’m a little virgin queen. She said I’m unmade. She said I want you to make me.
“I tasted the coal on her tongue then. I took her up to the top of one of the coal mountains. The lumps skittered beneath our feet as we crawled upward. I had her there lying on my back. My hands gripping her waist. Impaling her on me.
“After that she came to me again and again. For five years. Sometimes not for months at a time.
Sometimes every day. We would screw in the coal mountains. The other men found out about her soon enough. But none of them tried to take her. Because the girl was mine by right. There are many men that shovel coal in this boiler room. But I am their master. They would raise their voices in song to drown out our screams.
“Afterward we would lie at the top of the mountain of coal. Sweat drying to a thin film of salt on our bodies. I would try to tell her I loved her. But I have trouble with making words do the things I want. I said things to her that I found in books. Love better than wine. Name like ointment poured forth. Doves’ eyes in your locks. Hair like a flock of goats. She’d place a hand over my mouth. She said don’t speak. Every time you speak you sound like a barking animal. Bark bark bark. I don’t come to you to hear words. I don’t want words from you. I’m sick of hearing words to tell me what I am. She started crying. I tried to say something. She said shut up shut up. She called me nasty names. She said every time I spoke it was like a hammer driving a nail home.
“Days turned to years. She got older. Once she went away and didn’t come back for months. Then she came. And we did what we always did. The men were happy when she came back. Because it gave them a reason to sing loud. But I could smell another man on her.
“Afterward she said Father—. I said I—. She said I told you to be quiet. Be quiet and listen now. She said, ‘Father has terrible things in mind for me. I don’t know what they are. At first I thought he was just going to punish me for running away from home, but now I think he has something worse in store. It’s going to be something that hurts me—I can tell from the way he looks at me. The worst thing is that, when he finally does it, this awful thing, he’ll know it’s hurting me, but he won’t be able to stop himself. Because he loves me so very, very much. His face is chiseled into a permanent scowl. But he is drowning in his own love.’
“Once afterward she said, ‘There is something I do that isn’t permitted, when I am alone and I know Father won’t find out. And while I’m doing it I think of straddling you, holding a needle and thread, sewing your lips tight shut. Sometimes I think of you with no mouth at all—just a blank stretch of skin beneath your nose that’s as unmarked as the top of your foot or your buttock. Sometimes I think of you without a face, and I imagine that I have a lump of coal in my hand and I’m drawing on your blank skull with it. And I can draw any face on you that I want. The face of an architect or a demolition man, or a strongman or an invalid, or an angel or a devil, or a rocket scientist or a court fool. That’s how I wish you were. That’s how you should be.’
“Once afterward she said, ‘Stay with me, atop this mountain of coal, and let your furnace go out. I wish there were one of me for every man that shovels coal in this Tower’s boiler rooms, so that they could learn the thing that you have learned. Then they would climb atop their own coal beds with me, and drop their shovels and hold me in their arms, and spend themselves and drowse in silence. Then all of the fires in all of the furnaces would die. And the Tower would freeze. Films of frost covering the walls and windows; frost coating the metal keys of the secretaries’ typewriters. Frost killing all the colorful plants in my playroom. Everything would freeze. The machines and the mechanical men would freeze. The secretaries would look down at their typewriters and see that there were no more letters anymore, and they would freeze, and frost would coat the lenses of their spectacles. And Father would freeze with his cup of morning coffee halfway to his lips. And everything would get quiet. Then all the Mirandas could leave this place and go out into the world. One Miranda by herself is always a girl in danger, and has to come back to this place. But a hundred of me would be safe.’
“I said I have to go back to the furnace. I said a man has responsibilities. I climbed down from the coal mountain. I left her there.
“I didn’t see her anymore after that.
“I don’t want to talk anymore.”
Ferdinand continued to sling coal into the furnace in silence; then, after a few moments, he spun around and said, “Are you just going to stand there staring? Or are you going to help me shovel? A man’s got responsibility! We’ve got to keep things hot!”
“I’m looking for Miranda,” I said, because it was all I knew to say. “She told me that I have to save her. But there are too many doors outside, and they all have signs I don’t know how to read.”
Ferdinand raised his shovel over his head and then threw it clattering to the ground. He stepped toward me and grabbed me by the shoulders with his huge, slablike hands. I thought he was going to crush me. Spit flew from his coal-smeared mouth into my face as he screamed: “Doors with signs you do not understand are not for you!” He released me with a shove, and I stumbled backward and nearly fell to the floor. “Did you look for a door that said MIRANDA?” he sneered, picking up his shovel again, turning back to his work. “Dumbass.”
SIX
When I reentered the labyrinth of twisting corridors and oddly labeled doors, I decided that I needed a much better plan than wandering around randomly if I was to locate Miranda before she was taken from the 101st floor to the airship (if, in fact, she wasn’t already on board). I sat down with my back against a door (with a sign that read QUIXOTIC) for a few moments, to get the coal dust out of my lungs and throat, and to think.
I decided that the best thing to do would be to walk down the left side of the hallway, sticking to the left wall as if I were a blind man trapped in a labyrinth. I would mark each door with the lump of coal as I passed it; in that way, I wasn’t guaranteed to pass all of the doors on the 101st floor, but any system of elimination was better than none. When I found a door that spoke to me and told me to open it, then I would. Simple enough.
IT. FINGER. BARTER. SUBURB. The doors passed by me with X’s marked in coal. I soon realized that I could save time by cutting the two strokes of an X down to one, so later doors were marked with simple, messy smears. NEEDFUL. VISIONARY. PUNCTUATE. OF. GET.
MIRANDA.
I stood before the door with her name on it. I hadn’t actually believed that finding her would be as easy as this, but seeing Miranda’s name emblazoned there made me happy that I hadn’t listened to Ferdinand’s message for nothing.
I pulled out my identification card and slid it into the receptacle next to the door. It swallowed the card, but held it for several seconds while it made grinding noises and its light blinked irregularly, as if it were deciding whether to shred the card and vomit it up in pieces. Finally, though, the card ejected, a bit bent and chewed up on the edges, and the door marked MIRANDA swung quietly open.
SEVEN
I stepped through the door and found myself in what appeared to be a museum of some kind, a large room lit by electric lamps that were affixed to the ceiling and arranged to shine spotlights at various angles onto hundreds of pedestals of different heights, scattered throughout the hall. Some of the pedestals had sculptures atop them, but most were barren.
I took a few steps forward into the room and heard a crunching sound beneath my feet, as if I were walking over gravel. I looked down at the floor then, and saw that it was strewn with the remnants of broken women’s bodies, arms and legs and feet and breasts and slender hands and halves of heads, of women made from wax and bronze and marble. I knelt and picked up a split wax head and turned it over in my hands. When I saw its single ice-blue eye staring at me, and the locks of fake red-gold hair that clung to its skull, I understood. All of the sculptures in this museum were portraits of Miranda Taligent, or had been. Someone else was in here, destroying them.
My heart skipped. I called Miranda’s name, as if one of the sculptures on the pedestals would uncurl itself from its frozen pose and come running to me with its arms outstretched. But none of them moved.
I noticed then that in the center of the room was a small, cylindrical chamber, with two large glass doors framed in silver. The doors appeared to be coated on the inside with a layer of frost, and through it I thought I could discern the silhouette of a man, pacing
back and forth. I started to make my way there, stepping gingerly over the broken statue fragments.
The sculptures that remained on their pedestals were all unique, and made of completely different, more exotic materials than the broken ones whose remains covered the museum floor, as if the vandal working his way through this room had decided to save these works for last, to let them live just a bit longer. There was a tiny carving out of balsa wood of Miranda as a little girl astride her unicorn; it sat on a pedestal at eye level, and couldn’t have been more than four inches high. There was a Miranda made out of papier-mâché applied to a wire frame bent to the shape of a young woman’s body; covered in newsprint, she had a downcast expression on her face as she held her lips to the microphone in her hand. One of the pedestals held what looked like a child’s toy; it was a housing that held a vertically oriented wheel with a crank connected to it. The wheel had dozens of photographs attached to it, and as I turned the crank I saw an animated image of the young Miranda asleep in her bed; then, silently, with only the riffling sound of the photographs flipping past to accompany her, she awoke, rolled over, sat on the bed’s edge, yawned, and stretched her arms. . . . Then the photographs looped, and quicker than a finger snap she was back in bed, her eyes tight shut. There was a hollow sculpture of Miranda in the brilliant gown she wore when she operated the mechanical orchestra at that birthday party twenty years ago; the sculpture was made from nine different colors of stained glass, and each of the hairs on its head was made from an individually spun golden red glass fiber. Its face was clear and completely transparent, and an electric lamp shone warmly in its heart.
