The Dream of Perpetual Motion

by Unknown

  Having no other idea of what else to do, I approached the enormous granite block that had undergone only a few changes since the mechanical men had brought it into the studio. Then, lightly, I ran the end of the curved wire across the stone’s surface.

  The wire smoked and cut through the granite. But it didn’t just break the stone, or chip off small pebbles or shards of it. It peeled it, like a whittling knife cutting through pine. Little curled granite shavings began to collect on the floor.

  “I built this last night,” Prospero said. “Just spun it out of some parts lying around the shop.” He tapped his forehead. “I used my imagination.”

  I haven’t had a single good night’s sleep in the past year. And when I startled awake night after night to find that my bedsheets were wet and stinking with my sweat, or that I’d been biting down on my tongue in my sleep hard enough to make it bleed, I wondered if, had Prospero not spoken his next words, I would have come to do the terrible things I did to his daughter, Miranda.

  But he did. Looking down on the blue-hot line of light in my hand that threatened to burn me, he said, “Yesterday you said some unwise things to me, about the need to respect the shapes of things. But we are men, not animals, and our thoughts are stronger than whatever forces hold the molecules of stones in line. Because we are men, we do not submit to such forces. We take it as our challenge to overcome them, and we bend them to suit our wishes.

  “The girl is imprisoned within this stone, you say. But with the hammers that you have brought with you to set her free you are just as likely to split her head open. So use the new tools that I will bring you instead. This granite is not sacrosanct. You have the talent, and I have the machines: we’ll break its will together.”

  He invented more devices for me to work with, which I won’t describe to you, as you seem as if you’re in a hurry. But let it suffice to say that a work that I expected to take ten months was completed in five. It was a sculpture of Miranda Taligent, in a linen dress, one-to-one scale. I worked the surface of the dress last, for it took Prospero a month, working each night, to build the machine I requested for the task. Any machine I asked for, I got, whether it existed in reality or dream, and on that first sculpture of Miranda, made of granite, her simple dress was nearer to linen than I thought granite could ever possibly be: if you looked at it through a magnifying glass, you could see the dress’s individual fibers, and if you touched it blindfolded, the only thing that gave it away was that you couldn’t gather the impossibly cold fabric in your hand.

  It was my best work, and I wouldn’t have been able to accomplish it without Prospero’s help. In spite of my fears, he’d done what I wanted and nothing more: he just built the machines for me and left me alone.

  He was the first one to see the piece when it was completed. The two of us were in the studio alone, silent for several minutes as Prospero paced around the sculpture, looking at it up close and far away, frowning in thought, then smiling in that gentle way he sometimes used to, before he lost his mind.

  Finally, he said, “This is beautiful.”

  “Thank you, sir,” I said. “I couldn’t have done it without your help.”

  “And you’ll get your money.” His eyebrows knitted, and he pursed his lips, gazing at the statue.

  “Sir?”

  “I mean—what I am thinking is, that I asked for an exact representation of my daughter, and this isn’t it.”

  What does he want? I thought, restraining myself from screaming at him. Does he want it to get up and walk?

  “See,” he said, “this looks exactly like Miranda, when she was five years old.” He sighed and ran a long-fingered hand through his hair. “But now time has gone by. Now she’s five and a half. Now she’s nearly six.”

  He looked away from the statue to me and hesitantly smiled. “No two ways about it,” he said. “You’ll have to do another.”

  So that was how I got the job as the Taligent family’s permanent artist-in-residence, moving out of my one-room downtown studio and into a suite on the 125th floor of the Taligent Tower. The hundred-fifty sculptures I was to make over the next seventeen years were all to have the same subject, but I had no right to complain. She kept changing, her legs and arms and fingers stretching out, her breasts and hips appearing. Every time she sat before me she was someone new.

  There was another reason I couldn’t feel justified in bemoaning what might seem to others to be the monotony of my life: the job security. Frankly, I was having more and more trouble placing pieces in galleries, and the kind of art that was being shown and sold in those days was becoming increasingly distant from my own. A certain insincerity had crept into it. By the time I did the terrible thing to Miranda, the artists in the outside world who got the most notice, who received the write-ups in magazines with glossy pages and a cover price fifty times that of the local paper, were the ones who pulled stunts devoid of what I still thought as craft: submerging counterfeit holy relics in urine; ripping tossed-off paintings of pinup girls out of magazines and enshrining them in gilded frames; exhibiting lumps of flyblown human dung in sealed glass boxes. Sometime during the twentieth century the elite’s idea of beauty became tied to discomfort. Everything worth looking at for more than half a second had to turn your stomach, and if you found the simple things of the world beautiful, like sunrises and grins and starlight, well, then, there was something clearly wrong with you—you were common at best, moronic at worst. So remember this, that Prospero and I had the same ambition: we were both trying to bring back a dead kind of beauty, each in our own way. We were both after that lost idea of sincerity; we were both trying to breathe life back into the dead, sewed-together things of a damned, dead age. When you hear about what happened later, please remember that, and try to forgive me.

  Miranda wasn’t the only person who changed in the years she sat for me. Her father did, too: he got older, as I did, and he lost his mind, day by day, as the girl grew into a woman. It was in response to his begrudging request that I finally began to vary the materials I used to sculpt. He hated to say it: the idea of carving Miranda out of something besides the hardest of stones flew in the face of all his ideas about overcoming the natural forms of things. “But she keeps changing,” he said, sitting on my studio floor with his fists balled and his legs crossed while I worked (yes, he was in my presence while I sculpted; I came to like him there and missed him when he was gone). “Always different from day to day. Sometimes I watch her sleep and I feel like I can see it, the bones of her face stretching behind her skin. Maybe . . . maybe you should use something else. Something more pliable, that could keep up with her.”

  With the help of Prospero Taligent’s engineering I made about a hundred-fifty sculptures of Miranda between the ages of five and twenty-two, out of granite, and basalt, and marble, and clay, and wood, and ice, and wax. I’ll admit that many of them were hack work to keep my patron happy, a matter of quantity over quality. If I had ever embraced Prospero’s vaguely declared ideas of “exactness,” I soon threw them out the window, and he never said a word. Anyone could have seen that what he wanted was not portraits of the girl turning into a woman as she sat for me year after year, but images of the mask that his imagination laid over her face whenever he looked at her. And he wanted to believe that those were “exact,” that what he saw when he looked at her was what everyone else saw.

  My sculptures of Miranda became more unlike her the older she grew, as if the doppelgängers I made of her had some other path for their lives that veered off into fantasy. Except for her hair, a stunning shade of red mixed with gold in an almost equal measure, I found her to be somewhat unpretty in her adolescent years, with a crooked and somewhat bulbous nose and thin shrewish lips. These things I fixed. While my fifteen-year-old Miranda had skin of finest porcelain, the real one sat before me in my studio, digging with her chewed fingernails at splotches of angry red acne that had erupted across her face, and would soon riddle both her cheeks with pockmarks.

&nb
sp; This is never what showed up in the blurred photographs of the woman that you saw in the morning papers, her image smearing as its ink blackened your fingertips. This is what never appeared in the out-of-focus newsreels that you watched in the dark while you waited for the feature presentation. Because every time anyone makes an artistic image of anyone else, no matter what the medium, the subject is lent the mythic power of art, yes, but only at the price of making them so much less than what they truly are.

  I’m trying to make my case in advance here. So that when I tell you what happened eight months ago, you won’t think of it as a transgression upon someone’s rights, or as the commission of a crime, but as an act of atonement, an attempt at redemption for the sins of my graven images.

  I delayed the onset of puberty in my sculptures for as long as I reasonably could, over three years, but after a while it became ridiculous to pretend anymore. When the first Miranda with a woman’s body came out of the kiln, the representation I made of her to mark her sixteenth birthday, Prospero was there, and he stared at it for a few moments, frowning and biting his lip.

  “So you see it happening, too,” he said finally. The heat from the oven made shimmers in the air around the clay Miranda, and it stung our faces. “I was hoping, faintly, that you might never notice. Silly, isn’t it. Isn’t that silly.” He looked as if he wanted to cry. “I knew this would happen eventually, and you’d have to make her grow up all at once to catch up.”

  He sighed and shrugged his shoulders. “I suppose the secret’s out.”

  On peaceful days, when the work was not so fast that it consumed me, but not so slow that I felt at a loss every time I picked up a tool, I liked to take my lunch seated on the sill of a large window inside the Tower that looked out onto a large, high-ceilinged hall with its floor three floors below me. On those days I was the angel of typewriter girls.

  The hall beneath me was filled with row after row of heavy wooden desks, each of which held a cast-iron typewriter and two stacks of paper, one of clean white sheets, the other inked. At each desk sat a young woman, typing away, and a strange music filled the place as they made the information that kept the business running. The staccato striking of thousands of keys melded into a constant susurration, muffled by the glass of the window where I sat, punctuated by warning bells and the thuds of carriages slamming back to beginnings of lines.

  I would look down on the women from my high window, watching them make the music of moving information. They were all beautiful, to a one. In the morning, before I laid eyes on them, they tumbled out of bed all curves and lumps and disarray, but by the time they arrived at work, they had transformed their bodies into the purest possible expressions of the simplest, most perfect colors and forms. Their legs, clad in nylons and shaven smooth. Their blouses, with pads that set their shoulders off at perfect right angles. The brassieres that gave their breasts the shapes of cones. Their perfect, true-red fingernails flying over the typewriter keys, and their deep red lips that sounded out the words, and the faces made over their other faces, carved out of marble.

  Prospero Taligent is upset. “Damn,” he, who almost never curses, says. “Damn it.” It is the morning of Miranda’s birthday, and as on all the birthdays before this, I am in my studio, expecting her to show up for her annual portrait, the work that I always try to take some extra effort with. But Prospero is here instead, and he is trembling. “Do you know what she did?” he says. “Do you?”

  “No, sir.”

  “She ran away from home.”

  “Again?”

  “She’s never thought to do such a thing before. What was there in the world for her to want? What thing could there be that I didn’t give her myself?”

  “Mr. Taligent, sir. I think you’re confused. Miranda ran away from home three years ago. Remember: we cut her out of ice that year.”

  Prospero shakes his head as if he’s just been sucker punched, and curls his upper lip, staring at nothing. “Really? No—yes. That’s beside the point. Do you know what I found in her bedroom.”

  “No, sir, I don’t.”

  He has picked up one of my smaller ball-peen hammers and is nervously thwacking its head into the open palm of his hand. “I found a nightgown. There was a nightgown and do you know what was smeared all over it.” He flings the hammer away from him, sending it skittering in quick circles across the floor.

  “Sir, I don’t really think that it’s any of my—”

  “Coal dust. It was covered in coal dust.”

  He stands and waits for me to say something in reply, and I ask, quietly, “Mr. Taligent, will Miranda be coming to sit for me this morning?”

  “No. I don’t want you looking at her.” He spins and strides out of the room, yelling as he leaves the studio, “I don’t want any of you with your eyes on her.”

  The next morning he comes to me in the studio, all apologetic. He has something in his hand for me, an ovoid thing wrapped in newspaper. “I made this for you,” he says.

  I take the proffered package and unwrap it. It is a plaster cast of a woman’s face: Miranda’s. I can tell from the slightly uneven nose and the thin pursed lips.

  “I want you to keep working,” Prospero says. “I think it’s important that you keep working. So last night I took a cast of Miranda’s face. Now you’ll have something to work from, and you can sculpt all the Mirandas you want.”

  “Sir,” I say, “if I may—”

  “Oh don’t you worry, she’s not dead or anything,” he says, clasping his hands together, working the muscles in them. “I’ve just hidden her away for a while. She needs to not be seen for a time. That will make her better for all of us.

  “I want you to work in a new way,” he continues. “You should take more time with the new ones. I want you to solve the problem of making Miranda, even though she keeps changing. When you first started working for me, I asked for an exact copy of Miranda, and you somewhat understood what I was talking about, and many of the things you made were pretty, even though you seemed to be in a rush. But now I want something smarter, something you will make with care. Now you need to make sculptures of a higher order of exactitude.”

  “I don’t understand what you mean,” I say, more than a little put out by his dismissal of over a decade’s work as “pretty.”

  “See,” Prospero says, “the girl keeps changing. But I want you to make a sculpture that will always be exactly like Miranda, no matter how much she changes. Not what she was yesterday or will be tomorrow, but the thing she always is.”

  I am still confused. “Do you want something with moving parts, or—”

  “No no! You are thinking: He is the crass bastard that builds the tin men; he thinks engines can solve everything. I just want a sculpture that—” (he sighs forcefully and places the palm of his hand to his head) “—that means change. Pretend she’s a function and take the integral. That’s what I want.

  “Listen. The girl who sat before you years ago has become a woman who has learned the arts of deception and coquetry. She keeps fooling you into thinking that what you see of her is what she really is, and every time you finish a new work it’s further from the mark. And she laughs at you for this, and she laughs at me. Not to my face, but a father knows his daughter—I know she shuts her door at night and laughs at me. Because the way we think of her has not been of a high enough order.

  “So I don’t want you to see her anymore. The perfect and correct Miranda isn’t sitting behind the eyes of the girl that I’ve hidden away from you for your own good. She resides in our minds now—partly in yours, partly in mine. We only have to chisel her out of our minds, just as you released that first little girl from the block of granite that imprisoned her.

  “We don’t need the girl here to make her: she’ll only trick us again. Tomorrow you will use the mask of her face and go to work.

  “I think we are close now. We are very close.”

  It is late at night, and the clock’s hands are in awkward places. F
our years have passed since I received Prospero’s permission to start on what I came to call the transformation series, and although he thought we were very close then, it soon became clear, at least to him, that we weren’t close at all. I never leave the Tower anymore, and I have developed a strange internal clock: I sleep and work when I like, with little or no regard for whether the sun is above or beneath me.

  But this building becomes more quiet when all the workers leave, so I have some idea that, when I visit the gallery of Mirandas with my eyelids pinned back by insomnia, I ought to be sleeping. But Prospero is here, too, wandering among the sculptures, as if he expects me.

  This has been happening more and more often: the two of us come upon each other by accident in the early hours of the morning and take solace in each others’ company, weathering out the peril of being awake at this time of night, when thoughts that are neatly ordered or justly murdered during the day come loose from their moorings and out of their graves, to tie themselves to each other in new and dangerous ways. Mostly I tell Prospero stories, and he listens, despite the fact that after all these years he must have heard them several times. They are from the time before I came to work here, when the events of my life gave rise to genuine narratives, tales with beginnings and endings. Since I have come to the Tower, every day has been more or less the same to me, and except for the accumulation of false Mirandas in her gallery while the real one goes unseen, the only means I have to remind myself that clocks have moving hands and calendars shed their pages is the telling of stories.

  We have a special kind of friendship now, the rare kind that happens when the necessary, continual talker meets the impossibly patient listener. He understands that I need this shriving at this time of night, and he never asks the same of me. So I tell him stories I’d never consider telling anyone else, not even you, to whom I am telling the last tale I ever will. I tell him of all the little events that duplicate themselves in all our lives that we nonetheless think are singularly important, that we think would make excellent material for novels but aren’t really worth a damn to anyone but yourself in the end. I tell him of my hesitant first kiss, and the fumbling loss of my virginity. I play puppeteer with the skeletons that stuff my family’s closet. I list the names of people I’d once considered killing.