The Dream of Perpetual Motion

by Unknown

  In short, I was uncertain how this was all going to turn out. I wasn’t expecting anything nearly as dramatic as my own death—here alone on the roof with Prospero, Caliban, and a few mechanical men, my life didn’t seem to be at all in danger. I thought that the most likely outcome would be that I’d approach Prospero, and not remembering that I’d been his guest in this place twenty years before, he’d accuse me of being the crack-pot that I arguably was and have me forcibly escorted out after I’d said my piece.

  At any rate, I was sure that once the gang of vigilantes made its way to the roof, things would get more complicated, and it would be best to get this all over with before much longer. If I talked to Prospero and explained to him that his daughter had sent me what seemed like a rather desperate message summoning me here—well, that would have to be enough for me to be able to say to myself that I’d fulfilled my obligation to Miranda, even if nothing came of it.

  So I made my way across the roof, the high cold wind stinging my cheeks. During the occasional heavy gust, the whole sky would tilt slightly out of true as the entire building bent like a half-mile-high reed.

  Beneath the zeppelin, the mechanical men continued to ferry their supplies, taking no notice of me as they worked. As for Prospero, he was so distracted by whatever information he was receiving from the console’s display that he didn’t hear me approach, even though I made no attempt to disguise my footsteps. I actually had to tap him on the shoulder to get his attention.

  NINETEEN

  He turned away from the console and squinted up at me, shielding his eyes with his hand. He was immaculately dressed: a black pinstriped suit with a black silk shirt and tie; black wingtip shoes; a black woolen overcoat; a smart black fedora with a black silk hatband and a collection of snowflakes sitting on its brim. His narrow, deep brown eyes peered at me, cradled in a nest of wrinkles that spread across his entire face. He pursed his bloodless lips in confusion, then his thin, nearly nonexistent eyebrows lifted in sudden recognition.

  “Little Harry Winslow!” he said. “I was wondering if you were going to make it.” Then, oddly, he smiled and began to go through the pockets of his overcoat, as if he were checking to make sure that his wallet wasn’t lost.

  “It certainly took you long enough,” he said, inverting the lint-dotted lining of one pocket, then another. “Here’s a question: on your way into the Tower, did you happen to see a young little urchin child, running around and banging a pair of cymbals together?”

  “Yes,” I said. “He was banging them together and screaming. Yah, yah, yah. Like that.”

  “Good,” said Prospero. “Then everything’s going according to plan. Oh, here they are.” From one of the inside pockets of his suit jacket he removed a small stack of index cards.

  He took a pair of rimless spectacles from another pocket of his suit jacket, unfolded them, and placed them on the tip of his long, narrow nose. He peered at the cards, squinted up at me from beneath the brim of his hat, then looked at the cards again. Then he looked at me again.

  “At last we meet!” he crowed.

  Then he took the top index card and placed it on the bottom of the stack and read the next one.

  “If you want Miranda for yourself. Shaking finger. Then you’ll—oh, wait, I’ve stuffed it up.” He pointed his finger in my face and started to shake it vigorously. “If you want Miranda for yourself then you’ll have to kill me first!”

  Then he stood there, smiling up at me, as if he were waiting for me to do something.

  “Well, then?” he said, after a moment.

  By this point, I was somewhat confused.

  “I’d prefer that you shoot me in the stomach,” Prospero said. “It’s a long, slow death, but the damaged organs will be much easier to replace, I think. I suppose we can work with just about anything, as long as you don’t stave in my skull or anything like that.”

  I looked behind me at Caliban. He was hopping back and forth in the snow from one bare foot to another, holding the typewriter and the notebooks, a feral expression of glee on his face.

  I looked back at Prospero, whose gaze was now fixed on Caliban. “You let him out. I suppose that’s good. Poor Caliban. I only grafted the typewriter to his head to try to give him self-esteem.”

  Prospero sighed, then, in growing impatience. “I don’t think we have much time left. Besides, if we don’t get this over with soon, I’m going to lose my nerve. It’d be far easier for me to board the zeppelin myself, you know—

  “Wait a moment. You came all the way up here without a gun, didn’t you?”

  “I had a bottle of whiskey,” I said, “but now it’s gone.”

  “You have no respect for me,” Prospero said, flinging his hands in the air in frustration. “You’re a child come to his exam day without his pencil—that’s what you are. Well, I have a pencil for you.” Holding the stack of index cards in one hand, he began to go through the pockets of his coats again. This time he came out with a gleaming revolver with its barrel sawed off, which he presented to me, handle first.

  I took the pistol from him and held it in my open palm. “There we go,” said Prospero. “Now where were we?” He started to shuffle through his index cards again, but we were caught then in another heavy, sky-tilting gust of wind which blew the cards out of his hands. They scattered across the roof, turning end over end, caught in spinning vortices of air.

  Prospero cursed and tried to chase after the cards and gather them up, following after them with a strange waddling hunched walk that was not too dissimilar from Caliban’s gait, but that proved fruitless as some of the cards had already blown right off the roof and were on their way to the ground, a hundred-fifty floors below. He gave up that endeavor, then, and returned to face me.

  “Now everything’s stuffed up,” he said, and rubbed the tip of his nose with a hand clad in a black lambskin glove.

  “Mr. Taligent,” I said, “I have no idea what in the hell is going on here.”

  Prospero closed his eyes and placed the tips of his fingers to a throbbing temple. He breathed once, then again. “This is what comes of trying to make people happy.” Then he opened his eyes and looked up at me. “Listen. This is how things were supposed to turn out. This morning you received a message by private courier, addressed from Miranda Taligent, begging you to rescue her from my dastardly clutches, correct?”

  “Yes, but how did you—”

  “Of course I knew, because Miranda didn’t send that message. I did.”

  “What—”

  “Listen. Some way or other, I figured that that message would eventually bring you here, to the roof of this tower. Here, after various trials and tribulations, the archvillain—myself—awaits. We struggle; you get the upper hand; you murder me with the gun that any person who had taken the time to think ahead, anyone with any respect, would have thought to bring with him; as my last request as I’m dying ever so dramatically, I ask you to inter me in an absolute-zero chamber that I’ve installed aboard this zeppelin. That part was risky, because I would have to be dependent on your goodwill, or the probability that you’d be ridden with guilt after your impulsive act. But I think I know you. I think I know you well enough to be certain that you’d come here, and that you would have heroically charged aboard the Chrysalis with my body in your arms, thinking the worst was over with the archvillain dead, ready to rescue Miranda and carry her to safety. But what you wouldn’t have known is that the Chrysalis is designed to launch automatically once you’re aboard, so that roughly two minutes after you enter the gondola, the zeppelin, piloted by my most advanced mechanical men, will lift off with you trapped inside. And then, like all the other ninety-nine boys and girls at that birthday party twenty years ago, you will finally have your heart’s desire.”

  “My what?”

  “The zeppelin.” Prospero gestured with a wave of his arm at the fantastic flying machine that loomed above the two of us, straining against its bonds. “I’m giving it to you. It’s yours. Merr
y Christmas.”

  TWENTY

  While Prospero told me this, I saw, over his shoulder, Caliban sneaking aboard the zeppelin, carrying his stack of notebooks.

  “The zeppelin Chrysalis,” Prospero said. “It’s yours. I give it to you, the storyteller, the luckiest boy. And with it comes the best of all stories for you to tell—of you, and me, and most of all, my darling daughter, Miranda.

  “The zeppelin is not mounted with death rays, however. It really does have a perpetual motion machine, but I’m afraid the death rays are just a bunch of science-fiction folderol. They didn’t believe that, did they? The—what do you call them—the populace?”

  “They do,” I said.

  Prospero smiled, then laughed. “They do think the world is some kind of science-fiction novel, then. Do you realize how fervently most people will believe in the promises of technology, even when those promises fly in the face of common sense? Take Caliban, for instance—”

  “He’s boarded the zeppelin, by the way,” I said.

  “Oh, he’s just stowing away his precious notebooks. His only reason left for living is to see me dead. Once you kill me, he will probably dispense with himself as well. He thinks that the contents of his notebooks will somehow serve to make him immortal. But living one’s life out as a bunch of marks on a page isn’t very exciting, if you ask me.” Prospero winked, and an array of spidery wrinkles bloomed across his face and vanished. “But I have a plan worth two of his. Which I’ll explain in a moment.”

  Prospero sat down on a nearby wooden crate and patted the space next to him with his hand. I sat down there, and he looked up at me and smiled again. “When you’re writing all this down, you should make it clear that this, what I’m saying now, is the archvillain’s last supremely villainous monologue, before he’s eliminated. Just like the way things go in the cinema serials. Even though I’m not making much of a villain so far—losing my script full of appropriately menacing lines, handing out lavish gifts, things like that. Not doing too well, so far.

  “So then. I assume that Caliban told you a tale, about the misery of his life, and something about a name with seventy-two letters, and how he knows himself to the depths of his soul and all that.”

  “Something like that,” I said.

  “Well, parts of that story are true. It’s true, for example, that I assembled Caliban’s body from parts of cadavers. In some instances I harvested parts from people who were, if you wanted to put a fine point on it, still technically alive. It was something I did early on in my career as a researcher. I do regret it, if it makes you feel any better, and somehow an apology doesn’t seem to suffice—I don’t know who to apologize to, at any rate, to make things right. All I can say is that no scientist with the kind of renown that I have gets to where he is in the world without engaging in just a little bit of vivisection, sometime in his early days.

  “Anyway. When I finished putting Caliban together, I saw how hideous he was, in spite of what I’d envisioned, and I knew two things: that I could never reveal him to the world or I’d be tarred and feathered and ridden out of town on a rail, and that if I wanted him to have any hope of happiness in the solitude to which he was doomed, he had to somehow believe that he was the most beautiful, wonderful human being that ever existed. That he was not too ugly, but too beautiful for the eyes of lesser men.

  “So I found a broken typewriter, and I rubbed out all the letters of the keys and drew appropriately cryptic symbols in their places. Then I attached it by a cable to the back of his head. I shocked him to life and taught him language; then, when I thought he was ready, I told him what was basically a cock-and-bull story about how he was the culmination of my research, mapping the human mind.

  “Harry, make no mistake: I’ve cut up a few brains here and there, but I haven’t mapped the mind. I look at it and see a complete mystery locked up in flesh. Caliban’s typewriter is perfectly ordinary—its typebars still have their original English letters. But he believes in it, and so for him its technology is so advanced that it may as well be magic. I could never have guessed that the fiction I’d constructed for him would have made him so unhappy. But telling him the truth after all of this would have made things worse.

  “I stuffed it all up in the end, Harry. It’s no wonder that he wants to see me dead.”

  Now Caliban was coming out of the zeppelin’s gondola, carrying just his typewriter in his arms. He walked away from the ship and stood a fair distance off from us, staring as us seated on the supply crate, and he waited.

  “Did he tell you all about his magical powers and such?” said Prospero. “He goes on about them sometimes. I never disabused him: if it makes him feel better to believe it, then fine. The monster has magical powers.”

  “He told me that the contents of his notebooks are works of incomparable genius,” I said.

  “Well, some of them are admittedly fairly interesting,” Prospero said, “in the way that the writings of insane people sometimes seem singularly profound. There’s a lot of self-important ranting and raving. But what he calls the ‘heart of his argument’ is really nothing but a series of randomly chosen words, strung together and punctuated, with no meaning to be found in them.

  “Trust me. No one knows better than me how hard it is to tell the difference between madness and genius, between profoundly difficult truths and pure nonsense. There are no miracles to be found in Caliban’s books. There is nothing at all between their covers but words.”

  TWENTY-ONE

  Another heavy gust of wind blew, and Prospero pulled the lapels of his overcoat more tightly around himself. The sky tilted ever so slightly, and tilted back.

  “You can’t see the building bending from the ground, or in the lobby, or even if you’re inside a room in one of the upper floors, looking through a window,” he said. “It’s a fraction of a degree, and the architects of this Tower planned for it to bend just a little bit, so that it would be able to take the stress from high winds without sustaining structural damage. But up here, at the outer part of the arc, that infinitesimal bending sometimes makes it seem as if you are aboard a ship at sea, with a tempest on the way.”

  Prospero shivered, and his voice began to sometimes falter. “Have you ever been happy? You are too young to have the lines on your face that you do, and they tell a tale of an unhappy man. But there was one moment—and I know what it was, so don’t you lie to me. Tell me the happiest moment of your life.

  “No—I can’t wait. I’ll tell you what it was. It wasn’t when you slept with Miranda, or when you kissed her ten years before. It was when you rescued her. When you chased after the windup beasts that menaced her in her playroom, waving around your little tin sword, that was just a dress rehearsal, but in that moment when you were with her in the abandoned warehouse, just after you reached out to put your hand over her mouth to stop her from screaming, but just before you touched her: that was the happiest moment of your life. Because it had possibilities. In that moment, the future, the moment just after the one in which your hand was outstretched over her sleeping and vulnerable form—it could have been anything. That woman could have been perfect, and she could have fallen into your arms, and you could have slung mud at her and she still would have shone like new. But once you touched her all those infinite futures collapsed into one, and all of those possibilities vanished. And then she was just the thing that she was; just a woman.

  “But wouldn’t it have been wonderful if you could have taken that moment, and photographed it, and found some way to live in that photograph forever? Because an imperfect grace is never what we seek when we fantasize about our futures, when we dream of a long life with someone we claim to love or we build the machines that we read about in science fiction. We want all possible things made actual, the perpetual possibility of perfection, the best of all futures all at once. But whatever we accomplish in the end never measures up. We always fail. We always fall short. Because when we see the perfect thing before us we feel we have to tou
ch it. And then it vanishes or bruises or turns to show its hidden flaws or turns to dust.

  “But once you board the zeppelin, you’ll have your heart’s desire. The happiest second of your life will be frozen there, stretched out forever. You’ll hear Miranda and you’ll know she’s there, but you won’t be able to find her or touch her. You will always be about to rescue the damsel in distress, but you will never succeed. And as long as that moment exists, your world will be full of nothing but possibilities.”

  “But that’s not what I want,” I said. “I came all the way here to save Miranda. I’m certain.”

  “Oh, I promised you your heart’s desire all those years ago,” Prospero said. “I didn’t say I’d give you what you wanted.”

  TWENTY-TWO

  “How did you know?” I asked.

  “Know what?”

  “In the warehouse. I put my hand over her mouth to stop her from screaming when she woke up. How did you know?”

  “I staged it all,” Prospero said. “The two men—they chose to call themselves Talus and Artegall—they were actors. Their real names were Gideon and Martin—they’d been in my employ for years. They were making noises behind a door when you rescued her, screaming and banging pipes against shelves. But the door had a peephole in it that Gideon could see through.

  “I had Gideon tell that story over and over to me until he wore it out. Do you know what he said? He said that when you were bent over her while she slept, you hesitated. Not for a few seconds, but for fully five minutes. Stretching that perfect second out until you couldn’t anymore. You didn’t even notice that both Gideon and Martin had gone quiet while they watched you watch the girl in silence. When he told me this I knew that my certainty about you was correct. And that out of all the hundred boys and girls that came to Miranda’s birthday party I had to save your gift for last. And that it would be the best.”