The Dream of Perpetual Motion

by Dexter Palmer

  “Get moving!” said Astrid, yanking at Harold’s hand, bringing him out of his daze. “I gotta get to the Tunnel of Love. I am meeting adults there at eleven o’clock.” She pulled at his arm again and they stumbled forward through the crowd.

  SEVEN

  They had to wait at the entrance of the Tunnel of Love for a whole half hour before Astrid’s friends showed up, and Harold spent the time watching passersby and nursing a caramel custard that he’d convinced Astrid to let him pick up on the way there, eating each spoonful as slowly as he could (for with each bite he tasted not just the irresistible sweetness of the dessert, but the deliciously agonizing negative flavor of all the imagined foodstuffs that he could have bought with that nickel instead—a turkey leg the size of his forearm, or a milkshake with a pair of deep red strawberries floating on its surface. The single relinquished nickel sat in the custard seller’s till, its gold transmuted back to lead). He watched people entering and leaving the Tunnel of Love—a man and a woman would present the attendant with a pair of nickels and slide into a car that would then jerk into motion and roll into the tunnel’s entrance, which was decorated like the enormous gaping mouth of a clown with twice as many teeth as a normal human’s. Above the tunnel’s entrance the clown’s nostrils flared and its black eyes stretched wide, as if it were suffering digestive difficulties from spending its day swallowing lovers. No matter how the men and women behaved toward each other when they entered the clown’s mouth, even if they sat apart from each other with arms folded in silence or were in the middle of an argument, when they came out of the other end of the Tunnel and alighted from the car, they were always holding hands and wearing sly smiles, reluctant to let each other go. It looked to Harold like some kind of assembly line, though he could not imagine what fantastic machines might be laboring away in the tunnel’s darkness, repeatedly welding part to part or sliding tabs into slots.

  “Are you going into the Tunnel of Love?” said Harold.

  “Shut up,” said Astrid.

  “Tell me what’s in there if you go in,” said Harold.

  “Shut up I said,” said Astrid.

  “I’ll guess your weight,” a nearby huckster shouted. “I’ll guess your weight; I’ll guess your age. Bring your sweeties to me, men; I guarantee I won’t offend. I’ll guess your weight; I’ll guess your age.”

  Eventually the adults whom Astrid was waiting for showed up—college kids, three men and two women. The women were each arm in arm with an escort, a matched pair of long-legged gazelles in swishy pleated skirts, daintily biting at paper sticks supporting pink clouds of cotton candy and being careful not to get stray fibers stuck to their faces. Their boyfriends were a barrel-chested twosome with square heads set atop thick necks and sweaters decorated with large bold letter X’s, orange against a field of black; they must have been from the university.

  The third man, the one by himself, completely lacked the rugged if incompetently hewn looks of his companions—despite his pear-shaped fatness, his face was sunken and sallow, and an excess of pomade did nothing to tame the spikes of hair springing from his head in all directions. All about his face was crookedness—a nose that seemed as if it had been broken and improperly reset; a mouth whose corner rode up in a permanent involuntary smirk; skewed eyes that jittered behind eyeglass lenses with the thickness of the bottoms of pop bottles, seeming to speak of the crookedness of the mind that lay behind them. This was the man who approached Astrid, took her hand, dipped awkwardly, and pecked at it with pale, fleshy lips.

  “Oh, no, Jerry,” said one of the women, “tell me this isn’t the—”

  “Hush, hon,” said the grinning man on whose arm she hung.

  “But she’s not a day over—”

  “Hush, hon,” her boyfriend said to her, and then to his seeming twin, “See? I said this was gonna be good.”

  “Hey, Astrid,” said Jerry, rising. “Hey. It’s. It’s nice to meet you finally.” He smiled, and to Harold it seemed as if his mouth had too many teeth, like the clown at the entrance to the Tunnel of Love. “Hey. I want you to meet these friends of mine. These are my friends. This is Hortense, and this is Clyde,” he said, gesturing at the woman who’d spoken just a moment before and her boyfriend, “and this is Frank. And this is Julia. But you already know Clyde. I forgot that. You already met Clyde.”

  “Hey, Astrid,” said Julia, curtsying and cutting her gaze back to Hortense.

  “Hey—hey Astrid!” yelped Hortense, and then she inexplicably turned her back to the girl, her hand placed to her mouth and her shoulders quivering.

  “This is messed up,” said Frank to Clyde, laughing. “Don’t get me wrong: I came here expecting something messed up. But this is messed up.”

  “Hush,” said Clyde. “I got a sawbuck riding on this so you just shut your mouth. And you know what the deal was. Fair is fair.” To Harold the conversations of adults seemed so cryptic sometimes, as if they only bothered to say a third of the words they needed to.

  The cotton candy fell out of Hortense’s hand to the ground.

  “Now Jerry,” Clyde said. “Now Jerry I got to explain something, and I am sure that Hortense will agree with me from personal experience—sometimes, see, when the ladies come they come with an unannounced little man in tow, who gets it in his little head to throw a monkey wrench in your well-laid plans. Now I gotta show you what to do to little men, when they try to step up to bat.

  “When little men step up to bat, Jerry,” Clyde said, standing over Harold and looking down at him, “what you gotta do is—”

  Clyde’s hand shot out and clamped itself around Harold’s face, so large that his little finger and thumb stretched from one ear to the other.

  “—you gotta take ’em—”

  Harold looked through the cage of Clyde’s fingers at Jerry, who just looked confused and a little dim, and at Astrid in her loosely fitting boy’s trousers and button-down chambray shirt, stepping backward from Julia in her skirt and heels, who towered over her by a full six inches.

  She isn’t doing anything. Astrid isn’t doing anything—

  “—and you gotta make ’em shove off,” Clyde said, pushing Harold backward. He took two, three steps; he stumbled and nearly fell; he kept his footing, barely.

  “Hey?” said Jerry. “Stop it?” His voice was barely a whisper.

  “Caricatures, caricatures,” yelled a carny, dressed in a flattop straw hat and a white suit with red stripes that made him look like a walking candy cane. “Caricatures, caricatures. Sit before our mechanical portraitmaker if. You. Dare. With its magic-camera eye and lightning-quick hands it will sketch your face in comic style in sixty seconds flat. Reveal your shameful secret self; see the ones you love made ugly. Caricatures, caricatures.”

  “Come on,” Clyde said, and Frank began to whisper in Jerry’s ear while glancing now and again at Astrid. “We’ve got to go. We’ve got to make hay while the sun shines. I got to get my sawbuck.”

  As Harold recovered himself, Astrid bent over and placed her arm around his shoulders as a gesture that must have been intended to reassure. “Now you have to get scarce,” she said. “I will meet you back here in two hours. You can go on the Tornado over and over again. And you had better not breathe a word of any of this to Dad. If you do, you will get pinched, and you will get diseases. You will get shingles and lumbago.”

  “Good-bye, Astrid,” said Harold.

  They left him there. As the six of them walked away down the boardwalk, Clyde turned to shout behind him, “She’s got to go on a date, little man! She is going into the Tunnel of Looooove! She is going into the mouth!”

  EIGHT

  Did young Harold consciously sense that his sister might be in some sort of danger? Unlikely: he was only ten years old, and did not have an adult’s instinctive facility for reading the menace that could lie beneath words seemingly spoken in jest, or the way in which hands and glances might communicate intentions thought too vulgar to speak aloud. He didn’t like tha
t Clyde guy, he knew that much—he seemed a bit too large to engage in schoolyard horseplay. Or Jerry, either—to be blunt about it, Jerry seemed to have more in common than one would like with the gibbering wild men and tattooed pinheads depicted on the posters just outside the Nickel Empire’s freak shows. But Harold had no real reason to believe that Clyde would treat Astrid the way he’d treated him—she was bigger, after all, and being a girl, certain codes of honor applied. Harold could not guess what things went on inside the Tunnel of Love; he did not think to wonder where his sister had met these older, stranger people.

  But still, there was a pit in his stomach, entirely distinct from the anticipation of the gleeful terror of the Tornado’s loop-de-loop, or the nervousness of being left to his own devices in such a place as this. His desires yanked him in different directions—he wanted to run off toward the latticed wooden ramp in the distance with a train of cars laboriously climbing it; he wanted to return to the security of home to stand before his father’s desk and watch him make his windup dolls; he wanted, somehow, to be near Astrid, if not quite to watch over her (for it was she who ought to do the watching, you would think); he wanted not to be pinched at night, or not to contract lumbago, which sounded like something that riddled one’s face and body with purplish buboes and oozing sores and turned your mind to porridge.

  Most of all he wanted to get away from the endless, ever-shifting noise of the park, which was starting to get to him. All the myriad repeating pitches of the carnies, and the mindless looping melodies of the tin men banging on pianos, and the cheers of the audiences who sat on bleachers beneath tents, watching amateur actors perform classic scenes from Shakespeare’s romances or cheering along prizefighters as they shuffled through their forty-seventh round—all of these things brought back to him that acutely uncomfortable and yet irresistibly exquisite sense of indecision that he’d felt ever since he’d entered the gates of the Nickel Empire.

  In short, the boy’s guts were tangled in knots. Even more than wanting to ride the Tornado, he just wanted somewhere that he could sit in silence for a while, somewhere that he could think for a few moments.

  It was then that he saw a sign in the midst of all the others, advertising a most peculiar attraction. While all the others had their dedicated pitchmen shouting into microphones, this one had just the single sign to advertise itself; that and the unusual nature of the building in which the attraction was housed. The sign sat next to a spiral staircase made out of metal and mesh, its entrance protected by an automatic turnstile; the staircase turned and turned around a metal pole that rose to the sky, until it reached the base of an odd, cylindrical hut that sat atop it, like a man-made nest designed for the gigantic, predatory birds of creature features.

  The sign next to the staircase read:

  SEE THE TALIGENT INDUSTRIES CAMERA OBSCURA

  A DEVICE INVENTED BY PROSPERO TALIGENT HIMSELF

  HIS WONDROUS ARRANGEMENTS OF OPTICS WILL ALLOW

  YOU TO SEE THE ENTIRE CITY IN ASTONISHING DETAIL

  EXTRAORDINARY

  MIRACULOUS

  SOUNDPROOF.

  NINE

  There was no one standing at the turnstile, no one ascending the staircase, no one coming down—without a carnival barker to pitch the attraction, the ears of the throng were drawn elsewhere. Harold extracted another precious nickel from his drawstring bag and dropped it into the slot cut into a box next to the turnstile. He heard a click from inside the box, and he pushed through and began to climb the staircase.

  As he rose and became not part of the crowd but one who looked down on it from above, his perception of the park changed—from here it seemed not so relentlessly oppressive, not quite so hard to tolerate. The unending mumble of the thousands of people in the park and the incessant advertisements of the barkers were not so loud and insistent up here (though even from here he could tell that one of the barkers was, yes, actually barking into his microphone like a dog, as if he’d come to realize that what mattered was not what he had to sell or how he chose to describe it, but merely the act of selling, in and of itself). And since Harold had committed to a course of action, however temporarily, the charms of all the pitchmen were lost on him, at least until he entered the hut perched atop the pole around which the staircase turned and saw whatever inevitably disappointing wonder lay inside.

  The sky above him was still clear, though it was beginning to darken in the east. Looking in that direction he could see the Nickel Empire’s boardwalk with families and couples strolling up and down it; beyond that lay the bay that separated Xeroville’s middle- and lower-class residential areas from the business districts of its downtown. A few boats dotted the bay’s surface: a couple of smallish yachts drifting slowly on the calm water, and a racing pontoon driven by a crew of four mechanical men, their arms bending back and forth in an inhuman double-jointed fashion as they worked the oars in perfect synchrony, propelling the blade of the boat’s prow through the water. Beyond the bay rose the city’s skyscrapers; in the midst of them, taller than the rest, was the obsidian pinnacle of the Taligent Tower, its upper floors shrouded in a wreath of fog.

  The spiral staircase terminated in a tiny platform with a protective railing, hundreds of feet above the ground. From here a ladder rose up the pole to a hatch set into the floor of the hut. Harold saw that affixed to one of the rungs of the ladder, just at his eye level, was a small metal plate inset with a red button and inscribed with two words in gold: RING BELL.

  Beneath Harold, a child released a bundle of helium-filled multicolored balloons, which rose to the sky and separated, carried away by the wind blowing from over the bay. The rain would be here in a couple of hours at most.

  He stretched out a finger and rang the bell, and immediately the door above the hatch swung downward, as if whoever was on the other side had been lying there in wait. The man who poked his head through the hatch was gaunt and sported an asymmetrically receding hairline and a beak for a nose, his gigantic pale green eyes set in a long, oddly elfin face. He looked at Harold, laughed, and called to someone else outside Harold’s view: “I think we found one.”

  “Bollocks,” a gruff voice bellowed from the hut’s interior. “You always say we found one, we found one, and he never is one, and he never has the nerve to take the whistle when it’s offered to him. Get back here, Gideon. Leave him there.”

  “No, I can look at his face and tell that we’ve found one,” the elfin man said, lowering his arm through the hatch and beckoning Harold to climb the ladder. “We have found one of the saddest, loneliest boys.”

  TEN

  With Gideon’s assistance, Harold climbed the ladder, poked his head through the hatch, and clambered into the interior of the camera obscura.

  Here, at last, was something that was like nothing he’d ever seen. The interior of the hut was occupied by a complex array of brightly polished mirrors and lenses attached to slender brass rods that dangled from its ceiling or sprouted from its floor, that could swing on fulcrums or spin in place or glide along rails, reflecting and refracting light in innumerable carefully controlled directions. Harold had the distinct impression that he was looking at a device that was more complicated than it needed to be, needlessly baroque just for show.

  A narrow passageway cut through the tangle of machinery, with enough clearance above it for Harold to stand without bumping his head against the lenses suspended above him, though Gideon had to stoop slightly. The passageway ran from one side of the cylindrical hut to the other, with the entrance hatch at its middle. At either end of the passageway was a console studded with dozens of levers and switches and dials, which Harold assumed controlled the orientations and positions of the optics; over each console hung a large canvas, with an image projected on it. One of the images showed the base of the staircase that Harold had just ascended; the other showed the view across the bay that Harold had seen as he climbed the staircase.

  Each console had a chair in front of it; the one in front of the con
sole whose image showed a view of the downtown district across the bay was empty. The other chair held a man who was as stocky and muscular as Gideon was wiry and thin; his neck was even wider than his brick-shaped head. He squinted at Harold with small, dark eyes and said, “Mistaken, Gideon. You have made another mistake. This is not one of the saddest, loneliest boys. Look at his face, for one thing. I had half a dozen frown lines by his age. Between my eyebrows. Running from my nose to my mouth.”

  “I think you’re wrong. I think that when we make him the offer, that he’ll take the offer,” Gideon said. “That’s Martin who’s being so pessimistic, by the way. Martin, and Gideon. That’s us. Welcome to the Camera Obscura—

  “Listen to that,” said Gideon, cutting himself off. “Listen.”

  Harold heard nothing. “What am I—”

  “No talking—did I say talk? No. Listen!”

  “I don’t hear anything,” Harold said.

  “That’s right,” said Gideon. “Nothing is exactly what you hear: this place is soundproof, and once its hatch is shut, all the noise from the park below falls dead against this building’s walls. Up here we are deaf to all those endless salesmen’s pitches. We sit here in peace and quiet. We sit and we think on wonderful things—”