The Dream of Perpetual Motion

by Dexter Palmer

What is sad is that he half suspected a scam and that the whistle could not do what Gideon claimed, but even if there had been a ruse in the works, he would not have cared. He had had a rough day at the park, all things considered—the sharp-tongued sister and the shove in the face had been bad enough, but on top of that the park itself with all its noise had just been too much. The constant clamor of the booths and barkers served as an endless exhausting reminder that he had to choose a fate, and that no matter which fate he chose he could be certain that it would not be the best, that in other timelines rendered inaccessible with each spent coin, other versions of himself would be having more fun, or winning golden ribbons, or becoming taller. The thought was unbearable.

  But here, in the rusted whistle, lay the chance to have a man of no little means and reputed wisdom choose his fate for him. And for a boy too weak and cowardly to choose, what price could be placed on the freedom not to have to choose, the chance to blame someone else for the outcome of his life by proxy? If he lay alone in his bed at night and found the whistle useless, at least as he fell asleep he’d have the pleasure of telling himself that he’d been taken in, and that there was nothing to be done for it.

  Most important, what the whistle and the loss of nickels were buying him was the freedom not to have to listen. The camera obscura was soundproof, and the only noises within it came from the people and the machines that were inside; after he gave up his money to Gideon and descended once again to the park below, purified, his mind would be soundproof as well, for a little while. Instead of having to choose one or another of the barkers to pay heed to, he would be able to listen to none of them at all, because he had no choice. In the midst of chaos he would be at peace.

  Besides, he figured he could wheedle a last five cents from Astrid for the roller coaster—he wasn’t stupid. He’d blackmail her if worst came to worst—seriously, how bad could a midnight pinch or shingles be?

  So he wiped his eyes dry, swapped his bag of nickels for the rusty whistle, and called it fair and square. Only then did Martin beckon him to the other viewer, to see his sister.

  FOURTEEN

  She was with Clyde and Hortense and Frank and Julia and Jerry at the entrance to the Tunnel of Love; the six of them were stepping into one of the cars, which had three seats. Clyde and Hortense took the front seat; Julia and Frank sat in the rear; Astrid and Jerry slid in between them, in the middle.

  “I don’t like the way she’s being touched,” Martin said. “I don’t like it.” While Frank was nowhere near Julia’s personal space, and Clyde had his arm draped around Hortense’s shoulders with a casual ease connoting that they both believed it belonged there, Jerry’s manner with Astrid was alternatively furtive and possessive—he’d reach out and clamp her shoulder with his hand, then draw it away as if she were aflame or contagious. Then he’d do something weird like stick his nose in her ear and rub it all around. Their backs were to the view of the camera obscura, so Harold couldn’t see Astrid’s face, but he imagined that she couldn’t be enjoying what Jerry was doing—still, though, her body language was passive, with no sign of struggle or displeasure.

  The car jolted into motion, throwing its passengers backward, and it began to slip into the Tunnel’s open mouth. Clyde and Hortense vanished into the darkness first, the last sign of them a glint from a silver flask that Clyde held to his lips with his head tilted back.

  Just before Astrid disappeared behind them with Jerry, she turned to look behind her, as if she somehow knew that she was being watched. In that moment the image of her face on the canvas came into the sharpest focus. She stared right at Harold, and she looked, without a doubt, dead frightened.

  Then there was nothing but a circle of black.

  FIFTEEN

  Martin accompanied Harold on his trip back down the spiral staircase. The weather had drastically changed in the time that Harold had spent inside the camera obscura—the once-blue sky was now overcast with thick, heavy clouds, and lightning flashed in the distance behind the downtown buildings, the muted thunder from the strikes reaching Harold’s ears a half minute later. A wall of rain was coming toward them, and the ripples from the raindrops were already stippling the surface of the bay. The few pleasure boats that dotted the water were returning to their docks; the tin men in the racing pontoon rowed on with strong strokes despite the weather, oblivious and stainless.

  “I wouldn’t have had the nerve,” said Martin as the two of them descended. “To admit that I was coward enough to want the whistle. That was what made you take it, right? Not bravery, nor a boy’s desire for adventure? It was cowardice, yes?”

  “I don’t know,” said Harold. But he knew. He reached into his pocket that had once hung heavy with coins and clutched the whistle, insubstantial by comparison.

  “I’m not criticizing you for cowardice,” said Martin. “I’m a coward, too. Whenever he waves the whistle under a little boy’s nose, I want to shove the boy out of the way and take it for myself. But I don’t have the nerve. And Gideon tries to lord it over everyone because he hands the whistles out, but if you could switch places, so that you were the man and he was the little boy, he’d want one, too. He’d want the sweet relief of having one—you bet.”

  They reached the turnstile at the bottom of the staircase. “Hey,” said Martin with a tentative touch to Harold’s forehead, a sort of benediction. “Look after your sister. She’s bigger and older than you, but still—look after her. And I don’t mean standing between her and men who are larger than the both of you put together—that’d be foolish. Just be present, when you’re needed.”

  Martin stepped back, turning to climb the staircase again. “Don’t worry about being a coward,” he said. “All of us are cowards.” Then he rose, and was gone.

  SIXTEEN

  When Harold made his way through the park back to the Tunnel of Love and found Astrid, she was waiting there, by herself. She wore her lemon-sucking face. Her eyes were red, and a small cut on her lower lip bled; as Harold approached, she reached up and rubbed it, looked at the red on the tips of her fingers, rubbed them together until it disappeared, and clasped her arms about herself, as if she were cold despite the sticky, humid weather.

  “Hey, Astrid,” said Harold, somewhat shyly.

  She said nothing; she merely rubbed her lip again, looking out across the park.

  “Perpetual motion,” hollered a shiller. “Perpetual motion. Witness this little wooden pyramid, handcrafted by the tribesmen of the darkest forests at the edge of the known world. Merely place it within ten feet of the engine of your choosing and watch that engine transform into a perpetual motion machine—that’s right: more energy going out than coming in. Is it magic, or science beyond our ken: who knows. Perpetual motion. Just five cents.”

  The adults whom Astrid had come here to meet were nowhere to be found, not even Jerry. Harold surmised that whatever devices lay inside the Tunnel of Love and riveted soul to soul had failed when they’d come up against Astrid’s intractability. Perhaps somewhere else in the park, Jerry had the same red eyes and the same bloodied lip.

  Harold had thought that after he returned to earth, he’d be at peace with the din around him, but this wasn’t the case—the noise of the park still pounded at him, and the absence of the bag of nickels weighing his pocket down was like an amputee’s memory of a phantom limb. Somehow it seemed important that in the midst of all this sound he should guess the proper thing to say to Astrid, that he ought to take that last admonition to heart that Martin had given him as he’d turned to climb the stairs. But his sister’s face was a sign that he saw but could not read, and in his ears above all, for just this moment, was the noise of the Tornado, of the screams of its passengers as they saw the world upside down for the first time.

  So forget the look on her face, then. Forget it.

  But he could not decide which tack to take with her, and so he blurted bits and pieces of excuses, all half-expressed: “Astrid I didn’t go on the Tornado and I wanted to go
on it. I wanted to wait until you were done with your friends so we could go together. Because it’s special. Because I’m scared. I don’t have any nickels. I spent them all and I was dumb. I was robbed. I thought you wouldn’t mind just five cents. If you don’t do it I’ll tell Dad. Come on let’s you and I go on the Tornado before we go back home. Come on let’s go.”

  “I want to get out of here,” said Astrid, hugging herself.

  “I’ll tell Dad,” Harold said. That seemed to be the thing to say that’d be most likely to work.

  When Astrid looked down at him, there was a new expression on her face that Harold could not interpret, because he’d never seen it there before: a certain squinting, cutting stare. Her lips were pinched in a thin line across her face, like the mouth on the dolls of Miranda Taligent that his father made.

  “You want to go on the Tornado?” she said.

  “Yeah!” said Harold.

  “Then I’ll take you on the damned Tornado,” said Astrid.

  SEVENTEEN

  By what seemed like good fortune at the time, Harold and Astrid ended up in the front seat of what would be the final car to ascend the Tornado’s ramp that day. The rainstorm was only a few minutes away, and it would effectively shut the Nickel Empire down when it arrived—already, a fine cold mist hung in the air. Before Harold, the tracks of the Tornado’s coaster converged to a vanishing point in the sky; beside him, across the bay, skyscrapers grew forward and upward out of a slanted earth. Beneath him the barkers ceased their endless entreaties and shut down their speakers; the windup keys in the backs of the tin men spun down, the springs that coiled around their spines going slack; shutters descended to cover the fronts of booths; customers began to leave the park or look for cover.

  “Damn it,” said Astrid. “Oh damn it all damn it.” She rubbed her lip; she rubbed her fingers together. “If Dad hadn’t made me take you along this would have turned out all different. But you came along and look what happened. You look what happened.” She rubbed her lip; she rubbed her fingers together.

  The wheels of the car trundled as it rose. In the seat behind Harold and Astrid, a woman let loose with a single high-pitched barking guffaw, like whistling in the dark.

  “Stupid,” said Astrid. “Stupid me, and I have to go home now to stupid Dad, and I don’t have any stupid friends, and the worst of it all is that I have to sit at the dinner table across from stupid you. Stupid.”

  Harold’s eyes were on the track in front of him, and his heart was full of anticipation of what was coming. And so he did not think to look at Astrid’s face when next she spoke. Had he done so, he might have seen that same cutting squint there that he’d never seen before today; he might have been smart enough this time to take it as a warning sign; he might have covered his ears or steeled himself before it was too late.

  “Hey, I have something to tell you,” said Astrid, her voice suddenly melodious and chatty. “Do you ever wonder why it is that there are only three people at our dinner table in the evenings, and not four? I mean, it ought to be that there’s me and you and a dad and a mom, right? But there isn’t a mom. Did you ever think about that?”

  Harold said nothing, but he clutched the safety bar in front of him a little tighter. The coaster’s car neared the top of the ramp.

  “Because normally,” Astrid said in that same bouncy conversational tone, “when a mom and dad decide to have a kid they plan it out in advance—beforehand, they think about it, and they talk about it, and they fill out forms and do things with slide rules. That’s how people end up getting born most of the time. That’s how I was born.

  “But that’s not how you were born.”

  The car began to slow and level out. Behind Harold, a squeal slipped from between someone’s lips.

  “I’m sorry to tell this to you,” Astrid said, “but you weren’t planned out like I was. You were a child of passion, is what it’s called. You were an accident. Mom just woke up one day after being passionate and she was pregnant, and it scared her so much, because not only did she not want another baby because one was already enough, but when a kid is an accident you never know how it’s going to turn out. When a kid is born because of a plan, like me, then she turns out okay. But kids who are accidents might need glasses, or they might have four legs and no arms, or their insides might be where their outsides are supposed to be, and they have to walk around carrying their stomachs in their hands.”

  The car stopped, locked at the summit of the ramp. Before them lay the dip, the turn, the spin, the loop. The storm was here. Fat raindrops spattered against the boy’s face.

  “So when Mom went to the hospital to have you she was so scared: I can’t even tell you how scared she was. And when you were finally born, and the doctor said here is your new baby boy, Mrs. Winslow, I’m so sorry, and you were all ugly and crying like an ugly damn monkey, waaah, wahhhh, I’m an accident, hey watch I’m gonna pee all over myself, how do you like that, then Mom got so sick that she died right then and there. Yeah, that’s right. First she died. Then she melted. Then she exploded. And now I have to take you to the amusement park and have things ruined by you, and now we have to live with stupid you,” Astrid shrieked. “Because you were an accident, accident, acci—”

  The rest was a blur—the ground before him, the sky behind him, his sister bawling herself hoarse in the seat beside him, her cries a ragged counterpoint to the giddy screams of the other passengers; the threat of vomit rising in his throat as his organs tossed themselves around inside him; pellets of rain stinging as they smacked against his face; the whistle pressing against his thigh through his pocket. And in the distance, finally, the Taligent Tower, pointing downward like the dark finger of a God indicating those whom He wishes to torment. And inside it, perhaps, the girl, waiting.

  Get scarce. Get moving. Shut up. Shove off. Little man. Coward.

  Look after your sister.

  Damn it all damn it.

  Accident. Accident. Accident.

  EIGHTEEN

  Sitting at the dinner table, Allan knows none of this. Astrid and Harold both finish their meal, saying nothing, and Allan eventually guesses from observing Astrid’s petulance and Harold’s attempt at a firmly set jaw that one of them has committed some unimaginable and merciless cruelty on the other, the sort that could only arise out of mutual unconditional love between brother and sister. It is, perhaps, within his power to smooth things over, but one of them will have to crack first. He decides to work on Astrid—she seems shaken, so she’ll be the easier of the two to break. He guesses that she’s the offender, and her brother the offended—it’s probably more complicated than that, but isn’t it always.

  Harold chokes down his stew first and asks to listen to his radio in his bedroom—unusual, since he prefers the vacuum-tube-driven radio in the living room to the smaller crystal radio that’s by his bed, with its finicky tuning, its sounds fading in and out of the ether, its songs and poems overlaid with static. But Allan wants to be alone with Astrid anyway for a little while this evening, so that’s fine. The newspaper that Allan had planned on spending time with tonight will probably have to go unread—already he senses the information within it aging like quickly spoiling meat.

  “Radio till nine o’clock,” he says. “Then noises off, and lights out. I want you wide awake tomorrow, for those teachers to cram those books of theirs into your head.”

  It is the usual joke that father and son make on Sunday evenings during the school year, and Harold dutifully delivers the proper response, covering both his ears and rolling his eyes back in his head to make fun of the teaching machine that he hates. Tonight his performance seems halfhearted, though—when he’s at his most amusing he usually makes a little line of drool fall from his lip. There’s definitely something on his mind.

  NINETEEN

  When alone in his bedroom, he prefers to listen to the radio in darkness. His father built it for him as a birthday present three years ago, and after Harold dons its headphones an
d slides the tuner across the coil of copper to pick up the channel he wants, he shuts out the lights and slides under the covers. But though he knows he must stay awake until midnight tonight, his fatigue outweighs his resolve, and in minutes he falls into a twilight sleep. In his semiconsciousness, the words of the radio announcers who cry out the news of the world and the conversations that he hears through his bedroom door merge together into a single dialogue, so that he cannot identify which is which—sometimes the world’s news seems as if it’s being screamed from the living room; sometimes it’s relayed through the radio in his father’s voice, grown uncharacteristically nasty and harsh.

  Astrid. Tell me something.

  “—and our team of meal-replacement engineers have concocted some of the absolute best distillation formulas you’ll find in the city.”

  A female voice in a sultry contralto: “All of the pleasure of eating with none of the effort, right?”

  “That’s right—you can enter our restaurant confident that you’ll still fit into your little black dress when you leave for the theater. Here—try this one.”

  “He’s . . . okay. He’s handing me a vial, a test tube full of a clear, deep red liquid. It looks like blood. Is this blood?”

  “No-ho-ho! This isn’t blood at all.”

  “Do I sip it, or just drink the whole thing? Just toss it back?”

  “Just drink it! All at once!”

  Astrid. What happened at the Nickel Empire today? I can’t help but notice your silence during dinner. Are you hiding something?

  “Okay, here goes . . . I’m a little nervous about this . . . here we go . . . it tastes . . . oh my goodness. It tastes . . . wait . . . it tastes exactly like steak! A nice, juicy strip steak: oh, steak and potatoes and bourbon—”

  “That’s right! And it is strip steak! In fact, it’s better—it’s essence of strip steak! That vial had all the vitamins and nutrients that you’d get in a complete meal, and—”