“The game she likes so much is called Panic Hand. Have you ever played?”
“No, I’ve never even heard of it.”
The girl tried explaining how it worked, but when none of it came out the right way, gave up and slumped in her seat. I knew she was about to cry. She’d tried but lost another game to her inner enemy: in living contrast to her gorgeous mother who had only to sit there and carry on her own boring, unending monologue.
But even mother was silent a while. The girl looked out through the window, flushed and tight-lipped, while Francesca smiled at me and smoked one cigarette after the other.
Suddenly Heidi looked at me and said, “Don’t you th-th-think cigarette s-s-s-smo—king is c-c-c-c-ool? I d-d-d-do.”
I shrugged. “Tried it when I was younger but never got the hang of it. I think it looks good in the movies.”
Hearing this mild rebuff, the girl cringed down into her seat as if I’d hit her. Was she that sensitive?
I was looking at her and trying to catch her eye and wink when her mother said, “I’d like to sleep with you. I’d like to sleep with you right now. Right here.”
“What did you say?” I looked at Francesca. She had her hand on her blouse and was unbuttoning it.
“I said I want to sleep with you. Here.”
“And what about your daughter?”
“She’ll go out in the corridor. We can pull the curtain.” Her hand continued to climb down the buttons.
“No.”
The blouse was open and a nice lilac frilly bra showed through against the stark white of her secret skin in there.
“Look, Francesca. Just wait, huh? Christ. Think about your daughter!”
The woman looked at the girl, then back at me. “You can sleep with her too. Would you rather that? I can leave!” She laughed high and fully, winked at Heidi, then began to button herself back up. “See, honey, sometimes you don’t need me. You just have to find a computer man.”
“Hey, just stop.” I finally had the presence of mind to stand up and start for the door.
“D-d-d-d-don’t go, please!” The girl grabbed my arm and held on hard. Her face was fear and shame. She got up out of her seat and put her arms around my neck. “Please don’t go, please! I’ll m-m-m-m-make her g-g-g-g-go aw-wa-wa-wa-wa-way!”
I hugged her back and, slowly easing her arms from around my neck, pushed her back into her seat at the same time. When I had her there, I turned to Francesca. Who wasn’t there. Who wasn’t anywhere. I was standing with my back to the door, so there was no way she could have gotten around me to get out.
Torn between a strong urge to get the hell out of there, and big curiosity to know what was going on, I more or less froze where I was and waited for something to decide the next move.
The train began to slow and the loudspeaker announced that we were pulling into Rosenheim, the last stop before Munich. I sat down. Heidi slid over next to me. Then she did something so erotic and wrong that I shiver to think of it, even now. Very gently, she took my hand and slid it under her skirt, between her legs. It was there a milli-second before I tried to pull it away. But couldn’t because she held it there and she was much, much stronger than I. That power, more than where my hand rested, was what scared me. What was she, eleven? Twelve? No twelve-year-old had that much strength.
When she spoke it was in a very normal, un-stuttering girl’s voice. “Didn’t you like her? Tell me what you like and I’ll make it for you. I promise. Whatever you want!”
“What are you doing, Heidi? What are you doing?”
Her hand tightened on my arm. It was so, so strong. “Didn’t you think she was cool? The colour of her hair and the way she smoked those Camels? That’s how I’ll do it. That’s what I want to be like when I’m old. That’s how I’m going to make myself.” Her eyes narrowed. “You don’t believe me? You don’t think she was cool? That’s what I’ll be like and every man will want me. They’ll all want to touch me and listen to me talk. I’ll have lots of stories and things. I’ll be able to say whatever I want.”
“Why can’t you say it now?”
She squeezed my hand till I cried out. “Because I stutter! You heard! You think I was kidding around? I can’t help it.”
Trying to prise her hand off mine, I gave up. “Why can you talk normally now?”
“Because your hand’s there. Men are going to want me all the time then because I’ll talk like her. I’ll be beautiful and I’ll talk beautifully.”
“You made her?”
Her hand loosened a little. She looked at me, wanting a reaction. “Yes. You don’t like her? All men like her. They always want her. Whenever she asks, they say yes. And if they want her then they’ll want me too. ’Cause that’s what I’ll be like.”
I had two choices—to play along and pretend or tell the truth and hope …
‘She talks too much.’ Heidi stopped squeezing my hand but kept it where it was.
“What do you mean?”
“She talks too much. She’s boring.”
“B-B-B-oring?”
“Yes. She talks about herself too much and a lot of it isn’t interesting. I stopped listening to her. I was paying more attention to you.”
“Why? You didn’t think she was pretty?”
“Pretty but dull.”
“The other men didn’t think that! They always wanted her! They always took her!”
“Not all men are the same. I like a woman to be interesting.”
“More than pretty?” It was as if she were asking me things from a questionnaire. I had little choice but to answer her.
In fact, the rest of the way to Munich she questioned me about ‘Francesca.’ How did I like her voice? What about her body? What was wrong with her stories? Would I have wanted to sleep with her if she’d been alone?
I never found out who the woman … ‘was.’ I did not want to make the girl angrier or more upset than she was, for obvious reasons. I answered her questions as best I could and, believe me, there were a great many. I answered her right into the Munich train station where she stood up as the train was slowing and told me she had to go. Nothing more, nothing else. Sliding the glass door open, she gave me one last small smile and was gone.
* * *
What do I think happened? I think too many things. That she had an idea for the perfect woman she wanted to be and created her out of her unhappiness to take her place until she could grow into her adult skin. But she was young and made mistakes. What the young think is cool or sexy we grown-ups often smile at. That’s one thought. Or she was a witch playing her own version of ‘Panic Hand,’ a game I naturally looked for but never found. Or … I don’t know. It sounds completely dumb and helpless, but I don’t know. I’m sorry if you’re unsatisfied.
I saw her one last time. When I got off the train I saw her running down the platform and into the arms of a nice-looking couple who were delighted to see her. The man wouldn’t put her down and the woman kept giving her kisses. She never turned around once. I kept my distance.
But I walked far behind them and was glad she didn’t see me. Then there was Celine. And look who came with her so late at night! Fiona. The wonderful Fiona—Celine’s daughter.
MORIYA
Dean Paschal
He’s VERY mechanically minded.
Oh?
Yes. It’s scary at times. How so?
There is a darkness to mechanical objects that he is a bit too quick to appreciate and understand.
(The elderly lady turned ahead of them down a long hall and the mother and the boy followed. The three of them turned again, passing a shelf covered with whiskey bottles and a mahogany cabinet which the boy noticed was full of wine and single-malt scotch.)
In that case (the elderly lady said) I have something—something mechanical—that he might like to see. The girl next door wanted to see it this morning, so it’s already wound.
The boy to whom the two grown women are impolite enough to be indirectly referri
ng is fourteen years old and is following them through a Victorian-looking house on his first day in New Orleans. He is to take six weeks of intensive French lessons in a special summer program for adolescents in a school on Jackson Avenue. The elderly woman is a moderately distant friend of his mother’s who is going to put him up and who is leading both of them now into a parlor tinkling with prisms and light.
Indeed, the idea of “something mechanical” immediately had this boy’s interest. Just as immediately, he saw it and was disappointed. Enough so, that it was difficult to fully conceal his disappointment. The mechanical thing was a clock. It was a glass clock in the center of a marble table. It was ticking steadily. The clock had an exposed mechanism, a pendulum weighted with dual glass tubes full of mercury, but otherwise was of a rather familiar style and unremarkable. There were some other antiquated objects in the room, some family pictures in ornate, somewhat brassy-looking shadow-box frames, a spinet-style piano, two medallion sofas facing one another beneath a third medallion on the ceiling. Indeed, there was something of a medallion “theme” to the entire center of the parlor. It is unlikely that the boy would have known or noticed this. He was, after all, mechanically, not architecturally, minded. On the left-hand sofa, however, there was something he did notice, couldn’t help but, a doll, a virtually life-sized doll, not a “‘baby” doll either but a doll representing an adolescent girl, a girl in her mid-adolescence, perhaps. Had she been standing up she might have been over four feet high, perhaps well over. She was wearing a nineteenth-century, European, many-buttoned, fin-de-siècle dress, a maroon velvet jacket, and some high-topped black shoes. She had been positioned so that she was looking somewhat wistfully out of a long French window, one elbow on the arm of the sofa.
There was a black ribbon with a medallion on it around her neck.
(The boy went dutifully to the clock.)
We think a Swiss clockmaker made it, the woman continued. It’s from 1892, over a hundred years old at this point.
The boy looked at the beveled glass, the spattering of color on the marble tabletop, the mercury-filled tubes, and stood there waiting for the woman to say something more about it. Actually, though, he knew the theory of the tubes himself. Heat causes metal to expand, and the pendulum, being metal, will lengthen, lowering the center of gravity and therefore slowing the clock—not much, of course, infinitesimally, as a matter of fact, but when one is counting seconds over months or years the differences become significant, then profound. The mercury in the tubes is confined so that it can only expand upward, raising the center of gravity so the effects cancel.
(Well, he thought, standing patiently, politely, at the table, at least he could show off his knowledge.)
Is this the original key? he said.
What?
It was only then that the boy realized that the woman was looking at neither him nor the clock.
Oh, that, she said. Not that. I know nothing about that. That’s new, for us anyway. That was at an estate sale last year. Sit down.
Ma’am?
Sit down. Here. The woman patted the sofa beside her, rubbed the red velvet flirtatiously, made room between herself and the boy’s mother.
This woman, with her well-applied makeup and at least one facelift, was elegant in the slightly decadent manner of the best-preserved of sixty-year-old females. She was the sort of woman who can successfully squeeze the last remnants of sensuality out of age, possessing still the power of crossed legs in cocktail dresses, knowing well the uses of black chiffon, gold jewelry, French perfume, and alcohol. In fact, bringing a fourteen-year-old into a parlor tinkling with such temptations might have given many a mother pause. But this particular woman had a husband she was still moderately crazy about, a handsome lawyer with an alcoholic nose who was a member of one of the old-line Mardi Gras krewes and a fixture at Galatoire’s on Friday. (In fact, the husband was there now, this being a Friday.) So that particular story is possibly over before it starts.
Wait, the woman said, facing the other sofa now.
The doll continued looking out the window. The clock continued ticking on its table.
The boy sat down, began waiting, leaned forward slightly.
It may take a while. Would you like a Coca-Cola?
The boy was equally puzzled by both sentences.
He was still facing the sofa. He had already noticed that the two sofas were not quite identical. The one the doll was on was slightly longer and had darker, somewhat different-looking woodwork. He was beginning to make other comparisons. But at that moment the doll began to turn. She began to turn toward him, slowly, as he watched, though not so slowly as to be unlifelike. It was as though she had been interrupted in the midst of a daydream. Her brilliant hazel eyes were not fixed, not what they call “doll-like”; they moved independently of her head and slightly in advance of it, giving an effect the realism of which was uncanny. Her hazel-colored eyes were crystalline, maybe literally. There was no movement of her mouth, which, like her face, was ceramic, or ivory, or alabaster, and was doll-like, though the lips were full and there was a feeling and even a glimpse of natural teeth. She moved her elbow and left hand from the armrest and crossed both hands (politely?) in her lap. She was wearing long white gloves which, had her jacket been removed, would have proved to extend past her elbows. She moved her right hand and tugged on the fabric of her left glove as though to straighten it or exorcise some ghost of disorder.
Then she looked at the boy again, directly at him, through him. There could have been no more steadfast stare. The most saucy and impudent thirteen-year-old that has ever taken the perilous step of trying the effects of lipstick on a stepfather could not have had such a gaze. The doll had a breathtaking face, not innocent, but breathtaking: high cheekbones, shadowy eyes, dark hair that seemed real. His own gaze flinched down somewhat to the black-and-white medallion around her neck. Her breasts were so well formed, her blouse so tucked in as to give a sense of suspended breathing.
The woman was talking to his mother now.
It’s the only one like it we’ve ever seen. It’s Swiss, we think. It stayed in the attic for decades in a cedar-lined box. It was in my husband Eric’s family. Eric’s grandfather would have had to know something about it, since this was his house and furniture. Eric himself says he had never seen it before. His grandfather never mentioned the thing, had forgotten about it, perhaps, or perhaps kept it a secret deliberately, since he had three daughters in addition to his son. Maybe he wanted to avoid a fight. We didn’t find it till a few months ago. The year 1892 was stamped on—actually burned into—the wood of the box. It was in an alcove under an unbelievable number of blankets.
(The women, of course, are talking around the boy again.)
The crank is in that case, the woman said, pointing to a narrow leather box. There are a number of movements it goes through randomly, sometimes randomly, sometimes not. I’m not sure that we’ve seen them all as yet. It seems, at times, that where you touch it very much affects the internal program. You may touch it, if you like.
The boy came closer but could hear no sound of clockwork. The doll’s eyes had not moved, her head had not moved, still she seemed to be following him. He grasped the tips of her gloved fingers, tremulously, as though shaking hands, as though saying hello.
After a moment, the doll turned slightly and looked up at him. Her eyes, once again, slightly leading the movement. It was impossible to believe it was coincidental.
It will run for days, the woman said. The spring must be enormous. It feels enormous when you wind it.
What’s her name?
My God! You’re the second person who has asked that today! Actually, we haven’t named her. Or maybe we have. My husband and I have begun calling her “the doll.” You can name her if you like.
(The boy was still waiting, still holding the doll’s hand.)
Can you stop her? he said. Her motion, I mean. Is it possible to shut her off?
(Outside the house, he
heard the shriek of a young girl’s voice next door.)
Yes, there’s a little wheel in the back of her neck, just under the ribbon.
The boy went behind her, behind the sofa, and rested both his hands on the doll’s shoulders. Her eyelashes were almost assuredly real, her hair too, human, straight, long and luxurious. It seemed he could smell a trace of perfume. He looked down at the fabric of her dress, felt the little wheel beneath the ribbon.
Interesting, the woman said. See what I mean? (The woman was talking to the boy’s mother now.) I’ve never seen her do that before.
The doll was turning around to look at the boy. She succeeded, too, to a surprising degree, finishing by staring up at him, her neck arched slightly.
* * *
During the first week, the boy attempted to make a complete catalog of the doll’s movements. She seldom moved as much as she had the first day. Sometimes she would go a full hour or two without any motion of any kind. He would come into the parlor in the afternoon or evening and watch her and wait. Her activity was completely unpredictable: five minutes, thirty minutes, forty-seven and a half minutes between movements. Then she might do a lot, an entire series of things, as though bored by the long inactivity—straighten a glove, adjust her knees, slap at an invisible fly. The most elaborate thing she could do was the following: put both hands down, curl her knuckles slightly, and lift her entire body a fraction of an inch to the right. But before that motion was ever repeated, she would move to the left again, so that there was no overall change in position. Often she would fold her hands together, waiting; and from that position move her eyes, alone, so as to look slowly around the room. (Literally, she seemed very much to look at something for a while, then at something else.) Occasionally she would look down at the floor for quite a period of time, so that one would be very tempted to say, “This little doll once had a little dog.”
Her eyes themselves, the boy noticed, seemed as though they should be able to close, the lids seemed to be hinged, or potentially hinged, but they never did, or he never saw them do it. They never blinked, even. He could hear her ticking only by holding his ear directly on her body, but anyplace on it would work—her back, for instance, or one of her shoulders. There was quite a presence in the sound, not a slow tick … tick … tick … tick … like a clock, but something faster, shorter, more breathless and passionate: a tic-tic-tic-tic-tic-tic-tic-tic-tic, full in its own way, of the quality of construction, of the click of micrometers, of the precise cut of lathes, of the tempering of steel for shafts and mainsprings.
The Uncanny Reader Page 33
