The Chemistry of Tears

by Peter Carey

  It is 5:55 p.m. when I go to wash my hands, and only when I return does Eric divulge the news that Publicity aborted the mission half an hour ago.

  The canapés are very nice. One bottle of Veuve is already open so we have no choice but drink to our success.

  THE DAY DID COME. The studio was flooded with morning light which, being filtered through the blinds and reflected from the opposite wall, contained the very slightest wash of gold. Our object could not have looked more precious. We hid it beneath a muslin cloth, praying that the light would last.

  It was half past eight when the “loots and suits” began to arrive for the unveiling, and perhaps it was a tribute to the Conservative’s sense of business that everyone was assembled when the Minister of Arts, he of the boyish polished face, arrived at exactly 8:45 a.m.

  As was usual at the Swinburne, no one introduced anybody properly, so Amanda and I were left alone and unexplained. My assistant had gone Sloaney for the occasion but I did not, not even for a moment, see her as more tame.

  Eric was very jolly and extremely charming, sprinkling his learning about like holy water and shifting from individual conversation to his general address without missing a beat. He was rather like the swan himself, the way he paused to watch his prey. They became little girls in their communion dresses, these heartless men with polished Eton cheeks.

  Crofty gave me no public credit for my work, and I was disappointed but not at all surprised. When it came time for me to wind the mechanism, this lot would think I was some sort of quiz-show hostess.

  Then Crofty turned to the minister and I was rather taken aback to see him relieve the great man of his cup and saucer. Then, gesturing towards the swan he said, “I rather thought you might like to do the honours, Sir.”

  This was not his boon to grant. Only the conservator should touch or “work” the object.

  With the crank in his hand, the minister was left to look useless and confused. Meanwhile Eric, in a great flourish, removed the drop sheet and produced the hum of admiration we so desired.

  The swan was Zeus. The border of silver leaves was spectacular in that morning light.

  The minister approached with the crank.

  I thought, dear God, he does not know where to put it, and then I realized—I was dealing with Crofty and all this had been briefed and planned. The minister was not miffed. He was very pleased. To fit the crank he must give a sort of bob. “Your Highness,” he joked, and everybody laughed too much. To Crofty he said: “How many turns?”

  “Three,” Eric replied.

  It was a number that meant nothing. He made it up.

  As the boy from Eton wound the easy mechanism, I could smell the sweet light mineral oil. When he withdrew the crank the glass rods rotated, catching the reflected light. He smiled around the room but why would we look at him? The Brahms had begun, and the suits were all bewitched. Henry, your silver swan was beautiful and pitiless as it turned its head to the left, towards the minister, then to the right towards the man from the Guardian, and then it set to preen and clean its back. No one moved or spoke. Every eerie movement was smooth as a living thing, a snake, an eel, a swan of course. We stood in awe and, no matter how many hundred hours we had worked on it, this swan was never, not for a moment, familiar, but uncanny, sinuous, lithe, supple, winding, graceful. As it twisted to look into one’s eyes, its own stayed darkest ebony until, at that point when the sun caught the black wood, they blazed. It had no sense of touch. It had no brain. It was as glorious as God.

  The fish were “sporting.” The swan bent its snakelike neck, then darted, and every single human held its breath.

  Henry & Catherine

  PERCY, PERCY, THE FINAL page began.

  Percy, it is done, loaded on this cart, what we at home would call a dray. It is a rough and heavy platform. Bolted to it is a cubic structure without a lid, and inside the cube is the boat in which the creature is contained. The entire clockwork mechanism is inside its hull, all fitted neatly, ready for the crank handle, for the blue tiled cistern which, having tortured you so long, will now be your continual source of joy.

  But for now it is still in Germany, and all its mechanisms are in its boat and the boat is in its box and all around it is packed hard with soil and rocks and turf, and I would suppose there will be a poor German earthworm that will be accidentally exiled to Low Hall where it will get to know the English earthworms and probably do far better at it than your papa has done in this foreign land where I have been laughed at a good deal. The English worms, I am sure, will be ever so polite and charitable to the stranger.

  It is late at night, but the whole village is awake, rattling bells and cracking whips. The fairytale collector told me it was a festival called Fasching. Then he said it was something completely different. The truth is that the clockmaker has offended the villagers by his lack of faith in Jesus Christ. I cannot blame the Christians. We at home would also be offended, although never quite so much, I hope, as to burn effigies and set the forest trees on fire.

  There is a Baron, I am told, but in all the uproar I have seen no evidence that he insists on the orderly behaviour of his people. I will not be sorry to leave here, and if it must be tonight, then it will not be too soon. Imagine your papa riding high beside our splendid creature, galloping down the forest road with flares blazing in the darkness, all the taunts and beastliness behind, all your splendid health ahead.

  They burn the witch. I saw them too. She was only straw but it was a frightful sight.

  Soon in Low Hall you will see this wonder—and your hair will rise and your blood will race. Hail Cygnus. Salt tears and burnished silver. Oh Lord, you will watch the Great Creature as he takes a silver fish and holds up his head and goes through that complex swannish dance of swallowing.

  There, I have confessed. It is a swan.

  Dear Percy, I did not really want a swan. In spite of what I said, I did not even wish to leave your side. I never wanted more, darling boy, than to make you well.

  Dear God, may he still be there and waiting for me. Dear Lord I pray, let him be saved. May I deserve admittance, in your sight.

  Catherine

  PUBLICITY AND DEVELOPMENT WERE very happy. The magnificent swan had its place by the grand front doors of Lowndes Square. It was on the BBC and CNN and television sets and servers and podcasts around the world. Eric took me to dinner at the Ivy where I had never been before. The maître d’ made a fuss of Eric and we had a fabulous flinty Chablis and oysters and of course we talked about Matthew, and I cried.

  Eric handled all this rather well. He told me that tears produced by emotions are chemically different from those we need for lubrication. So my shameful little tissues, he said, now contained a hormone involved in the feeling of sexual gratification, another hormone that reduced stress; and finally a very powerful natural painkiller.

  “What is that one called?” I asked.

  “Leucine enkephalin.” He smiled. I wrote it down.

  The leucine enkephalin did its job and I laughed to hear how Eric took my darling to his club to learn to swim.

  We did not talk about Amanda’s “enthusiasm” and I did not ask if her grandfather had been amongst the loots and suits at the viewing of the swan. I spoke only about the sense of awe that a wind-up machine had induced in men you might have thought beyond all human feeling.

  I told my anthropological stories about growing up in Clerkenwell and then being dumped in the not quite posh school in High Wycombe. I said my sorries. He was kind and funny and when we had tottered out onto West Street he got me a cab and kissed me very sweetly, very chastely, on the cheek.

  I came over Waterloo Bridge and did not cry too much.

  I gave the cabbie a ridiculous tip, and as the taxi departed I noticed that awful old car backed down in the neighbours’ parking space again. This time, seeing the front of the old ruin I realized it was an Armstrong Siddeley, a grand English dinosaur from 1950. The paints of the period were all toxic toluene n
ightmares, polluting the air even as they began their life. In 2010 its skin was cracked and chalky, more like dead fish than a dinosaur, a skate, dead shark skin amongst the sand and seaweed.

  I was at my door when the hand touched my shoulder. My scream must have echoed all the way to Waterloo.

  It was Angus, frail and ghostly.

  “All right down there?”

  That was the neighbour two doors up. “Sorry,” I said.

  He slammed his window down and Angus flinched. Then a young woman in dark grey overalls emerged from the shadow. Of course it was Amanda, her hair stretched back off her face, and looking excited enough to give one pause.

  We never think something unusual is happening, even when it is. When they were side by side on my Nelson day bed, I offered them a cup of tea.

  “We’re good,” said Angus, leaning forward and gazing at me intently. “How are you?”

  Amanda was also studying me. She had her sketchbook on her lap and I thought—in the middle of all this—that we must get those drawings back from her because they, the ones she had done at work, were the property of the museum and would be needed for the glossy catalogue. It would be something, really something, and it seemed that we would now really get the money to produce it. Crofty had won his bet. The silver swan had pleased the patron of the British Arts. It would be a “profit centre.”

  It seemed that Angus wished to tell me something, but had lost his nerve.

  “Go on,” Amanda told him. I saw little to remind me of the young woman who had actually held my hand at the unveiling.

  “What is it, Angus?” I touched the back of his big rough hands, my Matthew’s little child.

  “Ask her, will she X-ray the swan? Will you?”

  “Amanda, you must not continue with this.”

  “Please sit down, Miss Gehrig. I am not going to do anything, but what would you be frightened of discovering? What if I was Leeuwenhoek? Would you refuse to look into my microscope? The world would look different to anything you knew.”

  “Mandy, there isn’t anything inside it,” Angus said. “You just want there to be.” He touched her shoulder but she shook him violently away.

  “OK. What if there are ghosts?” she demanded of me.

  “But there aren’t.”

  “You’d call it mumbo jumbo but what if it was consistent with modern physics, or string theory? You would be like those people who insisted the sun went round the earth.”

  “Very well. I stand with them.”

  By then she was opening her notebook and I somehow knew she had a “proof” or cosmology of some sort. I was not exactly anxious, but wary, and very careful. I followed her into the kitchen where she began frantically pulling out loose leaves and laying them down on the table like a hand of patience, careless of the spilled jam and butter which polluted those exquisite lines which crossed the borders between one waxed sheet and the next, continuous, as in a map. I immediately appreciated that the assembled whole was exceptionally beautiful, but I was slow to recognize that what lay on my kitchen table was a close reading of Henry Brandling’s notebooks which she had presumably conducted in this kitchen and in Annie Heller’s lair. It was, like all close readings, very personal, but the combination of her mature talent and her relentless abstract logic had a quality I shrank from.

  What if there are ghosts? I thought.

  Amanda could not have been more than twenty-three years old but she had produced a detailed and graceful architecture all driven by her strong desire to find “deep order” amidst chaos.

  It took some minutes to grasp that its visual hub was a plan of the city of Karlsruhe as Sumper had presented it to Henry Brandling—the city of the wheel, but also, as she noted boldly: “Home of Karl Benz.” She had sketched or traced a formal portrait of Karl Benz, ghostly in grey graphite, and beneath it she had written in a facsimile of Henry’s script: “Karl Benz looks back at the home of his childhood: blue mountains, a valley he wandered through, a valley well familiar to him with green mountains and foaming creeks, fir trees clinging to the cliffs and up above the small Black Forest village.”

  She had made little Carl into Karl Benz. “Born 1844,” she wrote. Good God, I thought—can that be right?

  This same earnest girl who had tried to prove the blue cube was a Christian cross had decided that the hull was a kind of wooden horse whose double skin had been produced to smuggle, not only a blue cube, but the “secrets” of an internal combustion engine, and these “secrets” she had rendered with such skill and care that it was almost impossible to believe they were not “true.” I know enough about engines to recognize the cam shaft and the valves and tappets, but there were also devices, and variations on these devices, rendered just as “truthfully” that resembled manufactured objects with functions one could not imagine.

  I thought, she is stark raving mad. I also thought: am I too stupid to see this is a critique of the industrial revolution?

  “Amanda, please.” I wished to gather up the pages, to take them straight to Eric.

  “No!” She slapped my hand.

  “Amanda, these are the parts of an internal combustion engine.”

  “Duh.”

  “And they are inside a hull constructed in 1854.”

  “And do you have a good memory for what you have read, Miss Gehrig?”

  “Pretty good.”

  “I have an excellent memory,” she said, and took my hand and held it. I resisted the urge to pull away. “ ‘You are in the same state as a fly whose microscopic eye has been changed to one similar to a man’s. YOU ARE WHOLLY UNABLE TO ASSOCIATE WHAT YOU ARE SEEING WITH WHAT YOUR LIFE HAS TAUGHT YOU.’ ”

  I began to speak. She cut me off. “ ‘You have no idea of where you are. You have no idea of what will happen here. In this very room, I promise, you will witness wonders such as have been never known.’ Do you know what that meant?”

  “Amanda.”

  “It meant that they will kill us all. That is what the machine is for. It is not the work of humans.”

  With this fierce announcement she opened her sketchbook where I was confronted with those familiar sentences that begin on one end of the line and end with their toes on the edge of the abyss.

  “This is Henry Brandling?” I asked.

  “Of course.”

  So clearly she had written it herself. She now carried her forgery to the sitting room where she knelt on the carpet beside me.

  “Please,” she said, and held my hand again. I thought, the skin is the largest sensory organ of the body. It contains more than four million receptors. It is our skin that lets us feel the gentle blowing of air, our lover caressing our body. Our skin experiences our reading too, or at least it did in my case: covering me in goose-bumps as I read that eerie facsimile of Henry’s hand:

  “And the filth shall spew forth from the depths, like black bile, like gall, and the ocean shall be as a mother giving wormwood from her breasts. The truth will be like a razor no tongue dare touch. A multitude of idiots shall flee back and forth on rivers of tar, an awful honking like generations of geese.” (Angus sat heavily. I thought, this is the first time he has really seen beyond her beauty.) “The cruel famines, the droughts—all will be enigma and injustice. And any who sees the truth will be called mad. Is it you, unlucky woman? Then you will be stoned and thrown into a moat.

  “Mysterium Tremendum. There were ghosts, fabulous beings, but they were our enemies and we died, not knowing what had happened, all and every one.”

  Amanda closed the book and clasped it to her breasts.

  “Of course,” she said quietly, “none of this can possibly be true.”

  I felt her despair and confusion like sunspots in my brain. Perhaps I was a blow fly. Perhaps this gorgeous creature was a genius. I will X-ray the damn thing, I thought, why not? Why wouldn’t I? No one will dare stop me.

  Angus was curled up beside me. Amanda put her head on my lap and her filthy hands around my legs. “I am so tired,”
she said.

  And then the three of us are standing, crouching, united and I am not certain of very much at all, only that our essence is enveloped by the largest sensory organ, a universe itself, our human skin.

  I hold Amanda’s hand as I once touched Matthew’s skin as I now touch his son’s wet cheek. Machines cannot feel, it is commonly believed. Souls have no chemistry, and time cannot end. Our skin contains four million receptors. That is all I know. I love you. I hold you. I miss you forever. Mysterium Tremendum. I kiss your toes.

  Acknowledgements

  The author wishes to thank Frances Coady, Sonny Mehta, Diana Coglianese, Ben Ball, Angus Cargill, Lee Brackstone, Hans Jürgen Balmes, Kate Ward, Eleanor Rees, Meredith Rose, Jenny Uglow, Marion Kite, Matthew Read, Jane Whittaker, Howard Coutts, Edna McCown, Susan Lyons, Paul Kane, David Smith, Robert Smith, Jefferson Mays, Thomas Mogford, David Thompson, Jon Kessler, Richard Powers, Patrick McGrath, Maria Aitken, Jack Gaiser, Garry Craig Powell, Quinn Slobodian, Stewart Waltzer, Elizabeth Estabrook and, of course, Charles Babbage.

  A NOTE ABOUT THE AUTHOR

  Peter Carey received the Booker Prize for Oscar and Lucinda and again for True History of the Kelly Gang. His other honors include the Commonwealth Writers’ Prize and the Miles Franklin Literary Award. Born in Australia, he has lived in New York City for twenty years, where he is now the executive director of the Hunter College MFA program in creative writing.

  ALSO BY PETER CAREY

  Parrot and Olivier in America

  His Illegal Self

  Theft

  Wrong About Japan

  My Life as a Fake

  True History of the Kelly Gang

  Jack Maggs

  The Unusual Life of Tristan Smith

  The Big Bazoohley