by Unknown
This is what you have to understand about Miranda: you might think of her as a damsel in distress, in dire need of rescue, but she was strong—strong enough to inspire you to dream of her, but weak enough to allow you to map that perfect dream of her onto her living face. I did the terrible things I did because I was in love with Miranda: not the one you might think of as real, but the one that her father and I had dreamed of together, who was Miranda in a way that the real one would never be without our help. I ask you: how could I responsibly pass up the opportunity to bring such a beautiful being into the world?
The surgical operations that we executed upon Miranda Taligent took almost eight months, working seven days a week, fourteen hours a day. You’ll have to forgive me if I don’t go into the details of the whole thing. I don’t really understand much of the technical aspects of what we did, despite the fact that I was one of the directors of the project. I made vague suggestions, and the surgeons ran with them. The most I can really say is that over the course of the surgery, I developed a studied indifference to Miranda’s body. I lost my sense of its sanctity, its sacredness as a repository for the soul that all of us but doctors believe in. The doctors are forced to see the flesh for what it is, and for all their talk of miracles, they know, even if they deny it to themselves and cover up their sentiments with noble talk, that they are dealing with machines.
Of course, on the first day of surgery I had to run from the room to vomit. The surgeons all got a laugh out of that one. After I returned to the studio, my mouth still tasting of bile, one of the doctors pounded me heartily on the back with his open hand and said, “Listen. My third year of medical school we were taking a class on musculoskeletal systems. And one day the subject of discussion is an actual hand and lower arm, hacked off a cadaver at the elbow. First the prof holds it up, you know, so we can see it; then we have to pass it around from person to person like show-and-tell at grammar school while he mutters and makes notes on the board. We were skittish at first, scared shitless, but after a while we got a little cold about it all, you know? Because we were becoming initiates to secrets. And by the end of the class we’re actually throwing the hand around the room, like we’re practicing for some kind of sports event, and the prof is letting this happen, because he knows that this is something we have to go through, that this process of becoming cold is one of many initiations. And we are laughing. Now you think of all the things that hand might’ve done, and maybe you think it’s sacred. Maybe it slid a wedding band onto some other hand; maybe it jerked off; maybe it clutched the rail of a swaying steamship; maybe it spanked a son’s bare bottom; maybe it played the viola part of a symphony with no surviving copies. Then you think: screw it. It’s just meat. So buck up, little camper!”
When we could, we worked in shifts. I led the team that worked in the morning up until the late afternoon; after a short break, Prospero’s team came in and worked on Miranda until as late as midnight. For all Prospero’s talk about the two of us sharing a single image of the perfect Miranda, we were oftentimes at cross-purposes, and we would spend days repeatedly undoing each other’s procedures in the service of our own creative visions. This antagonism went unaddressed and lasted between us for the entire duration of the operation. At times he would lock me out of my own studio, and I’d stand quietly outside the door and listen to him bawl out his team of surgeons until he lost his voice: “If you’re so damned concerned about the few pounds of flesh that holds the information matrix—what! You come to me now with talk of ethics? A little late for that, I think. Now you’ll do what I say. You cut her there, and you cut her to the bone, and you cut her in C-sharp, with a blueness.”
When we were almost done with that last magnificent sculpture, one or maybe several of the wonder drugs we shot Miranda up with to keep her pacified gave rise to a tumor in her stomach that grew at an astonishing rate, so that within a week the woman looked ten months pregnant. We decided that we had no choice but to remove the tumor if we wanted the woman to survive.
What the doctors lifted out of her when they split her stomach open was the size of a Christmas turkey and weighed twenty-six pounds. It was a mass of featureless, shining gray flesh, threaded through with a network of thousands of hair-thin, purple veins. The doctors huddled over it at a table and went at it with gleaming carving knives, expecting it to yield up some profound medical secret, and what they found embedded in it when they cut it open were the dead parts of all of us, their growth gone haywire: long, curling fingernails; single, small pointed teeth; knotted clumps of red-gold hair.
Then they put the tumor in a glass box on a countertop, all cut up, and left it there while they went back to work on the woman. Later, after everyone had finished the day’s work and cleared out of the studio, I took the box with me and carried it down to the museum of false Mirandas and placed it on a pedestal with the rest of the sculptures. It stayed there, in a place of honor, until it had to be disposed of. It was, after all, Miranda’s self-portrait.
TEN
“And suddenly one day we were done,” the portraitmaker said. “We didn’t even know the day before that the next day, Miranda would be perfect. But on the evening of that last day, Prospero called me into my studio, and the two of us stood there alone and looked down on the woman sleeping, and we knew. The two of us knew that we’d somehow performed a miracle, even as we’d worked against each other, even though what we did was shameful. And we also knew that, if that miracle was to persist in the world, it could not be looked upon by eyes other than our own.
“Because do you know what someone like yourself would do if you were to lay eyes on her? You’d be speechless for a few moments, yes, but then you’d do the thing that I myself am wise enough not to do—you’d start to string together killing words to describe her. You will say what she is, and each word will chip a little bit of that miracle away. Then, when you’ve assembled enough words, she’ll become commonplace and understandable, and she’ll die. In order to keep her alive and perfect, she must reside in the sky. In the realm of the imaginary.
“And so, though it breaks his heart to leave this world, in a matter of minutes Prospero Taligent will join his daughter aboard a specially constructed high-altitude zeppelin, the largest ever made. It will circle the earth forever, never touching the ground. And everyone will look to the sky when the ship passes overhead, and they will imagine the woman inside. They’ll know that their dreams have been given shape, even if they cannot remember their dreams upon waking and cannot conceive of their shape. She’ll exist in all the minds of men set free from language. Which is how she should be.
“The rest of the story you know. We’ve made the perfect woman, and I was left behind to burn all the rest.”
The coldness of the frosted chamber had crept into my knees and elbows, and they briefly flared with pain as I rose to my feet. I was running out of time, I thought—the policeman that I’d run across in the Tower’s lobby had indicated that the zeppelin was due to lift off in three hours, and though I wasn’t wearing a wristwatch, it seemed to me that Ferdinand’s tale had taken at about a half hour of that time, and the portraitmaker’s had eaten at least a whole hour. What if each of the labeled doors on the 101st floor of the Tower had a storyteller lying in wait behind it, ready to demand my attention, leading me on with the promise of a hint that would lead me to the woman? Not only would I never find Miranda before the ship lifted off, but I might end up wandering these halls until doomsday.
“For the moment, let’s put aside the fact that it seems as if you’ve taken advantage of my patience and wasted my time,” I said to the portraitmaker. “This doesn’t make sense to me. You sound as if you believe you’ve done something wonderful for Miranda, but the reason I’m here is because she sent me a note this morning, by private courier, asking me to save her.”
“Oh, I’m reasonably certain that she’s not happy, not a whit. And what do I care for her happiness? It was my duty not to care for her happiness. I’m not happy t
o have to destroy the contents of this museum, either. But some things have to be done in the service of the greater good. What do the rights or the goodwill of a single woman matter in such a situation? They don’t.”
“But I’m here, and as long as I feel that I can save her, I’m going to try—”
“Another thing about which I’m reasonably certain,” the portraitmaker spat at me, “is that she’s no longer in need of saving.” He began to fiddle with his flamethrower, and I got the impression that he was itching to get back to his business. What a waste of time this little man had been. I turned to leave the chamber without saying another word, but as I placed my hand on the door’s handle, he stopped me with a word: “Wait.”
I waited, not turning back to look at him.
“If you’re going back into the halls, there are many, many doors with cryptic words on them. But doors with signs you do not understand are not for you.”
I closed my eyes for a moment and attempted to contain my frustration. Then, when it seemed as if he weren’t going to say anything further, I pushed the chamber’s door open and moved into the darkness of the museum.
“Wait,” the portraitmaker called again.
I waited.
He paused in silence, as if he couldn’t make up his mind whether to go on. Then he said, “But there’s one door here, with no sign on it at all. It’s where I think he keeps his most secret projects. I don’t know how you’ll get in—my keys won’t let me in there. But if she is anywhere in this building, she’s there.”
When he finished speaking I bolted from the gallery, but as I dodged between the pedestals and jumped over the broken bodies, I heard the portraitmaker call behind me once more: “Wait!”
I turned to face him this time, still walking backward. He had opened the ice chamber’s door just wide enough to poke his head out.
“I wish you the best of luck, if you think you need to do this. But I really do believe that, should you find her in the end, you’ll discover she’s not in need of rescue.”
Then he turned away from me and shut the chamber’s door behind him. A moment later the chamber lit up like a lantern, full of yellow flame. I imagined the icewoman’s face melting, twisting out of shape.
ELEVEN
It took another half hour of running through hallways before I found the nameless door that the portraitmaker thought might have Miranda behind it, near the end of a corridor and between two doors that were labeled NICKNAME and PRODIGY. I felt through my pockets for the identification card, fished it out, and jammed it into the slot next to the unmarked door, wondering if the key would work at all: not only had it been damaged by the last door I’d entered, but by its nature this door seemed as if it would require more security clearance than the others on this floor.
The slot took the card, holding it while the light beneath it blinked on and off; then the receptacle emitted a high-pitched whine and spat the card out, shredded into pieces that fluttered to the floor.
The whine grew louder, then a thin tendril of smoke drifted out of the card slot as I caught a whiff of ozone in the air. The door suddenly sprang open six inches, just wide enough for me to quickly get a foot and hand in the crack and wedge the rest of my body in after them, tearing a button off my jacket in the process. The door shut and locked itself behind me the instant I got through it.
TWELVE
Later, aboard the zeppelin Chrysalis, I’d have ample opportunity to reflect on the frantic hours I spent searching the 101st floor of the Taligent Tower, looking for the woman but only finding men. The first two men I met, the master of the boiler room and the portraitmaker, had both lost their minds, each in his own peculiar way, but I wouldn’t have gone so far as to call either of them monsters. But the third man I met on the 101st floor was a beast. From the brief time I spent with him I got the clear impression that he was one of the most intelligent human beings that I had ever met in my life, possibly more so than the genius Prospero Taligent himself. But he was all the more a beast for that.
The room behind the unmarked door had another, smaller room contained within it, with a heavy steel door that contained a single window. The door was padlocked shut with a lock that was almost the size of my fist. A key that seemed to match the padlock hung by a loop of twine on a hook next to the door.
As I looked through the door’s window, I saw that inside this smaller room was a cage of stout iron bars, suspended from the ceiling by a chain. The inside wall of this smaller room was lined with neat arrays of rubber tubes, each with a tag on its end. Though the tubes were neatly gathered into bundles on the inside of the wall, they became tangled into rat’s nests as they punched through the wall of the inner room to cover the floor of the larger room in which I stood, leading into what looked to me like thousands of randomly arranged holes in the floor and the walls and the ceiling.
From my vantage point just inside the larger room, I couldn’t see what was inside the cage (and what seemed to require such extreme security methods to keep it restrained). As I moved closer to the steel door, brushing aside some of the rubber tubes that snaked into the ceiling, I heard from within the cage the sharp snapping sound of a typewriter’s typebar striking its platen—after all the years I’d spent writing in one form or another, there was no mistaking it.
“Hello?” I said loudly, coming closer to the small room, almost at the steel door. “Can you hear me? I’m looking for a woman. Her name is Miranda Taligent.”
Then I reached the steel door and looked through the window, and saw the monster.
THIRTEEN
He had skin like a patchwork quilt, all different colors sewn together with keloidal scars. It was as if all the parts of his body were borrowed from other men: an arm from one person, a foot from another, a nose from another, a cheek from another, an eye from another. One of his lips was thick; the other was thin. One of his eyes was brown; the other was blue.
He was naked, and his body was featureless in strange ways that weren’t immediately apparent. Then I realized that he had no hair—he was not only bald, but he had no eyebrows and no pubic hair. He had no nipples, and no genitalia. He seemed as if he had been poorly fed: each rib of his torso was clearly delineated beneath the surface of his patched-together, multicolored skin.
He looked as if he would be five feet tall if standing. He sat in a corner of the cage with his spindly legs folded beneath him, and in his lap he cradled a heavy, cast-iron typewriter. The typewriter had a small, metal box welded to the back of it, and out of this box led a cable as thick as my wrist. The cable looped over the monster’s shoulder and plugged directly into the back of his skull, where it was surrounded by a circular metal plate studded with rivets.
I might have screamed when I saw him and I could make sense of what I saw, but I don’t remember. I do remember him staring at me through the window, not even blinking, cradling his typewriter, tilting his head and smirking with his odd little mouth. Then he extended a patchwork hand and curled his mismatched index finger toward himself: Come closer. Come inside.
FOURTEEN
I took the key off its hook and unlocked the padlock that held the door shut, figuring that the monster was still locked in a cage within the smaller room itself, and that even if he managed to escape from the cage through guile and attack me, then his typewriter would prove too unwieldy for him. For some reason I didn’t dare to enter the room completely, preferring instead to stand within the arch of its steel door. I saw that a padlock similar to the one that held the steel door shut was attached to the door of the cage, and guessed that the key I held in my hand would open that lock as well. I didn’t believe that this creature had left its cage for years, though—his muscles had atrophied so much that it was a wonder that he was capable of standing.
The monster clambered across the floor of the cage toward me in an odd sort of shuffle, pushing the typewriter ahead of him, sending the cage swinging gently back and forth on the chain from which it was suspended. When he reached
the other side of the cage, he sat down again with his legs folded beneath him, holding the typewriter in his lap. From here I could see that the typewriter’s keys were decorated not with letters, but symbols: a stylized sun, with eight rays pointing away from a circle; a bell; a clock’s unnumbered dial; a rictus; a half-lidded eye.
The monster poised his fingers above the keys and poked at one, then another. Then he spoke, in a raspy, scratchy bass too large for his small body, a voice that made him seem as if he smoked four packs of cigarettes a day. “My name is Caliban,” he said. “I’m Miranda’s brother. And I know you,” he continued, tapping on the keys as he spoke. “You’re the greeting-card writer. That we’ve all heard so much about.”
“Miranda never told me that she had a brother,” I said.
Tap-ta-tap-tap-ta went Caliban’s fingers on the keys of his typewriter, and then: “They never tell you about the other men in their lives, do they?”
He sniffed the air theatrically with a nose far too large to suit his face, then pressed a few more keys on the typewriter. “I smell whiskey on you. On your clothes. Pathetic. Did you bring any?”
“I drank it all,” I said, feeling sheepish about it.
Tap-ta-ta-tap-ta. “You shouldn’t have dulled your senses on an evening like this. I’ve been following your progress through the Tower from this listening post.” Caliban gestured at the arrays of tubes that lined the walls of the room in which he was caged. Then: tap-tap-ta-tappeta-tap. “You’re doing well, but not well enough. Not a hero; not even a normal person who finds he has some kind of capacity for heroism that’s been left untried until a crucial moment. Father is going through a good deal of effort to walk you through all of this.”
“Prospero Taligent is your father?”
