Man Vs Machine

by Greenberg, Martin H.

  People in those earlier days didn’t have to contend with machines that killed and drove men like me mad with obsession. They lived in harmony with all of nature. I heard the burble of a stream, and I thought I might like to go wading when my task was done here.

  And I heard the low, musical moo of a cow, and then another.

  I’d broke down a farm fence about a mile away and managed to heard a half-dozen cows out onto the track, coaxing them to stay with bales of sweet hay to chew on. I saw the largest raise its head and look at me, and in that instant I felt sorry for what was to happen. In fact, I almost got up and went down to the track to pull them away.

  But then I heard John Bull coming, and I eased back and waited with dark anticipation. The train surged around the corner and struck the cows, a sickening, horrifying sound. It was dark down by the tracks, but there was just enough light from the moon so I could see the cows being ripped apart and pulled under the engine. Maybe I didn’t see it all, only imagined seeing the life go out of their large eyes and blood pool on the ground around the derailed John Bull and the tracks, blood looking like oil in the moonlight. The engineer climbed down, blood on his overalls and his hands, streaks of blood on the shirt of the man who stoked the boiler.

  I hadn’t intended to injure the people on the train, just the train itself, and I felt the bile rise into my mouth as the engine hissed and popped and more people piled off. Their conversations climbed up the rise like a cloud of buzzing insects, and I hurried away, not wanting to be seen and wanting to find the stream and wash away the malevolent memory.

  More than once after that I broke farm fences and lured cows out onto the tracks, each time stopping the Bull, but not ending its run.

  C & A retaliated by yet another improvement to the demon that continued to vex me. They attached a pilot, what some dubbed a ‘cow catcher’ to keep animals and other obstructions (I’d pushed old cars and rolled logs onto the tracks on several occasions) from going under the wheels and damaging the engine. Next came a headlamp that burned whale oil and let them operate more easily on the tracks at night—and let them see the obstacles I’d planted in time to stop. I’d heard they’d taken the lamp off a riverboat. A warning bell that could be rung from the engine was big and beautiful and loud, and thwarted another of my attempts to interfere with the Old John Bull.

  In my eighteenth year they added an earsplitting, shrill whistle that signaled the crew to problems with the track, a safety valve that kept the boiler from shutting down, and a cab that comfortably covered the engine crew and protected them from storms. All these “improvements” were due to my efforts to stop the damnable John Bull. I cursed myself that I was responsible for a better, stronger train, that I had given the demon I chased more power and fueled upgrades throughout the entire railway industry.

  But I vowed that I would not stop in my mission to see John Bull obliterated.

  I celebrated my nineteenth birthday in Illinois, trying to set fire to the damnable thing. I would have been successful, as there was a significant amount of oil in the engine . . . and I’d added to it. But C & A had hired security to ride along on the trip, and I barely escaped them. From a safe distance, I watched them put out the fire.

  Again the engineers reacted to my attempted sabotage, constructing a bonnet stack that had screens and baffles designed to catch sparks that might start a blaze. And they built a covered tender with eight wheels that would carry wood and water and that defied my attempts to cause further damage.

  I allowed myself no time for friends or family and only enjoyed the silky touch of a woman when I took my money to the poor side of a town. I had no opportunity to pursue any of the dreams about America I’d once entertained while riding from England in the belly of the Allegheny. The Bull did not afford me any chance of normalcy.

  It continued to consume me and bedevil me.

  Through the Civil War I pursued it, avoiding serving in the Army, as I did not exist on paper in the States, and I looked older than my years. Before that war was over, the Bull had been assigned simple switching duties at stations and occasional stationary boiler service. I’m certain all my tireless work had contributed to that.

  I’d finally crippled the Old John Bull.

  They retired it just after my forty-eighth birthday, the railway owners finally giving me some measure of peace.

  I made my way back to Bordertown, New Jersey, intending to watch the Bull’s demolition and allow my soul to have its pleasure. I’d seated myself in a booth at a diner, ordered a ginger ale in a blue glass bottle, and opened the newspaper. Its look had changed little since I’d delivered it more than three decades past. The sun had gone down an hour ago, and the shadows were swallowing the storefronts and spreading out onto the street. Lights were flickering on in second-and third-floor apartments, people home from work and settling in for the night.

  On the front page the reporter detailed what was to be America’s first act of historic railroad preservation—the Bull was to be placed in storage, not torn apart or melted down and sent to the hell it so rightly deserved. It was to be cherished and admired.

  A piece of American history put on display courtesy of England and my father.

  I had no appetite for the roast beef the doughy waitress sat in front of me. I pushed the plate away and read and reread the article, the color leaving my knuckles as I squeezed my hands tight. I scraped my meal into my napkin and fed a skinny dog in the alley. Then I climbed four flights of stairs to my rented room and stared in the bathroom mirror. All the intensity had leeched from my eyes, which looked like chunks of coal, hard and distant and unreadable. My face had an odd and serene cast.

  The C & A merged with the New Jersey Railroad three years later, establishing the United New Jersey Railroad and Canals Company, and garnering me more money than I ever thought possible. That stock that I’d purchased a while back . . . now seemed a very good time to cash it in.

  A few years after that, the United New Jersey Railroad was swallowed up by the Pennsylvania. John Bull was the Pennsylvania’s oldest asset, and in 1876 I watched them set the old engine out alongside the new shiny ones. Some company official thought my demon didn’t look antique enough, and so paid to remove the cab that once sheltered the engineer from storms and shave the tender from eight wheels down to four. Good money was spent replacing solid pilot wheels (which had been installed because of my clever and malicious work on the rails) with undersized spoked ones. Lastly, they peeled away the bonnet stack and instead put in its place something that probably came from a retired river steamer.

  It wasn’t the same demon anymore; it was a sickly shadow of what I’d once pursued.

  I was sixty-three and walking with a cane when I heard that the Bull was commanding center stage at the National Railway Appliance Exposition in Chicago. I went, and the year after, I followed it to the Smithsonian Institution in Washington, D.C.

  It was in 1893, shortly before my seventy-fifth birthday, that I took my last venture outside a room I rented behind a Bordentown bakery that made the best rye bread I’d ever tasted. The Pennsylvania Railroad somehow had talked the officials at the Smithsonian into lending out the Old John Bull. Under its own steam, my demon traveled to Chicago, where it gleamed dully black and gray at the Columbian Exposition.

  We were two old men, John Bull and I, staring each other down in that massive exhibit yard. Neither of us had weathered the decades all that well, but I knew my iron adversary would outlive me . . . unless I could finally, finally do something about that.

  I would do something about that.

  I was oblivious to the crowd and the noise, the buzz of conversations that swirled around me and my demon. I walked its length, climbing into a passenger car after purchasing a ticket, and easing myself down on a cracked leather seat. I don’t suppose the fairgoers were supposed to sit—look, not touch seemed to be the watchwords in the Exposition. But no one said anything to me.

  I’m not sure how long I spent ther
e, several minutes, maybe an hour, occasionally running my fingers along the window and the seat in front of me. In all these years I’d never ridden the train, though I’d been on it often enough in my efforts to destroy it. Some part of me wished I had taken such a trip, ridden in the belly of the demon. I closed my eyes and leaned back, finding the seat uncomfortable. When a mother and two children walked past me, chattering about what it must have been like to ride the Old John Bull, I got up and went out, then climbed into the engine—no mean feat taking those big steps with my aged legs.

  The controls were as I’d remembered them, but the big engineer’s seat was different . . . replaced after I’d sliced it up, and most certainly replaced again in the ensuing decades. I could almost feel John Bull move, standing there and looking out the front, almost feel it rocking on the tracks I’d laid in my youth.

  It was sad, in a way, that my quest to destroy it would end this night.

  I wondered if I would miss chasing my demon.

  I left the Exposition and returned to my hotel room, napping for a few hours before going down to the dining room for a late dinner and ordering a lobster tail and a bottle of their most expensive French wine. I’d finished my meal and was debating whether to order desert when the waiter brought a rumpled-looking young man to my table.

  “He insisted on seeing you, sir. Said he had business . . .”

  I waved the waiter away and reached into my suit pocket for a thick envelope.

  “It’s finished?”

  The rumpled man nodded and extended his hand. I placed the envelope in it.

  “Blew all to hell, that all engine is.” His voice was a conspiratorial whisper.

  I smiled sadly and shooed him away.

  Money did for me what my own skills and determination had not been able to accomplish during the past many decades. I’d used my stock gains to pay some of Chicago’s undesirables, the rumpled man their spokesman, to blow the Bull to pieces. Beautiful and ironic, I thought, that my gains from the C & A—from the Bull itself—paid for its demise.

  I chose the chocolate cake and requested cherries on the side.

  I would sleep well tonight on my full stomach.

  I’d finally put my demon to rest.

  Engines of Desire & Despair

  By Russell Davis

  Under a variety of names and in several different genres, Russell Davis has written and edited both novels and short stories. Some of his recent short fiction has appeared in the anthologies In The Shadow of Evil, Gateways and Army of the Fantastic . He lives in Nevada, where he’s hard at work on numerous projects, including keeping up with his kids. Visit his website at http://www.morningstormbooks.com or his irregularly updated blog at http://russelldavis.blogspot.com for more information about his work.

  —for Monica, last time pays for all

  I.

  “Men have become the tools of their tools.”

  —Henry David Thoreau

  The human body and brain is not like a machine. It is a machine.

  Some are well tuned, others less so, but the form and function of homo sapiens make them a machine nonetheless.

  I have eyes to see and ears to hear. My eyes are blue, and I can see the distant specks of birds flying hundreds of feet in the air and the way the light plays on the leaves of the trees in Utop Park. My ears, which were tested at my most recent physical exam, can hear an amazing variety of sounds and tones without any problem whatsoever. I have lungs to breathe, and I do so easily and without thought except on the coldest days of winter, when the air is sharp and cold like a knife touched by accident in the dark. They work, expanding and contracting, bringing in the oxygen and pushing out the carbon dioxide. I have ten fingers that function as they are supposed to, allowing me to write a story or play the piano or wave to a friend. Or make an obscene gesture to a foe. I have ten toes attached to my feet and I can walk a long distance without complaint. And I have a heart.

  A heart that beats sixty-four times every minute when I am resting and pumps blood throughout my body.

  A heart that works, or so I was told during that same checkup and by the same doctor, very well, with no signs of abnormalities at all.

  A heart that is utterly broken, and I can feel the pain in my chest, and all of this is how I know that the human body and brain can be viewed as a machine, but they cannot be fixed like one.

  There is no doctor that is a true mechanic of the human heart.

  There is nothing that can be done for me. The machine that is my body continues on, an engine unaware that there is no fuel left in the tank and the oil has all been burned away. Like all engines, all machines, it will eventually recognize the problem, and when no human hand reaches forth to repair it—for it cannot repair itself—it will falter, stutter and fail. I am sure of this.

  Ahhh, I stretch my metaphors too far sometimes, but the truth—which has nothing to do with fact—is that we are machines, engines of desire and despair, but what fuels us and makes us run is love and passion. What we feel for each other is our fuel. Without those, we are machines, but we are machines clattering away toward death.

  And I cannot feel a thing.

  II.

  “The simple lack of her is more to me than others’ presence.”

  —Edward Thomas

  I have watched her sleeping, when the shadows from the trees outside our window danced intricate patterns on her face. I have watched her laughing, holding the hands of our children, eating, talking, singing, making love, reading, learning, living, birthing, and once—when she was terribly ill—I saw a glimpse of the failing machine. So I have even seen her dying. It was my will, my passion and love, that brought her back, repaired the machine of her soul even as the doctors repaired the machine of her body. I believe this to be true.

  The history of any married couple is rife with challenges and pain. It is so much easier to look back and see the darkness than it is to see the light. I understand that now. Is that what she saw, looking back on our years together? Did she see only those moments when the shadows were long and not the moments when our children laughed with us or we made love after eating cookies in bed or rode horses to the top of a mountain and saw spring wildflowers? Hindsight is so very clear, but only when you want to see clearly.

  How can I explain to you that dread emptiness of her absence? What it is like to not hear her, see her, touch her, to know she is there in the house and feel her presence as though it was a living thing? The absence of her is a wound, unstitched and unbound. I am always bleeding inside, always swallowing down the bile.

  I look above at what I just wrote. “And I cannot feel a thing.” This is not true. I lied for the sake of hyperbole. I can feel hurt and anger and frustration and despair. If I reach deep, I can feel thankful that our children are grown and will not be subjected to the direct destruction of their family.

  What I cannot feel is love. I cannot feel passion. The positive emotions that once fueled me, those are gone, like thin streamers of incense smoke in a high wind.

  Have you ever seen a sheet on a clothesline, white and crisp and smelling of fabric softener? Have you ever seen it as the storm blows in, lifting and snapping, curling up and whipping down? Listen carefully, and you’ll hear the faint snap! of the clothespins letting go before it tears itself free and flies into the sky, a casualty of wind. That’s me. I’m blown away, shrieking into the sky and the storm, knowing that when I come down, I’ll be mud-covered, wrinkled . . . ruined.

  That is what her absence means to me. Ruin.

  And perhaps, in the end, that is better.

  Someone once said to me that the universe is karmic in nature. What comes around goes around. It made sense at the time, but now I see that this sentiment does not cleave to the bone in the way that real truth does.

  Everyone gets, I think, exactly what they deserve.

  I don’t feel as though I deserved this, but still . . . maybe I did. Maybe I do.

  Maybe the sunlit moments I s
ee looking back are only the desperate illusions of a man who still loves, of someone who carried shadows in his pocket, but never in his heart.

  III.

  “When he spoke, what tender words he used! So softly, that like flakes of feathered snow, they melted as they fell.”

  —John Dryden

  Life, our lives, the universe, everything is a machine. The sun rises and sets, the earth moves around the sun, the stars and the planets turn in their courses . . . all of it an intricate dance not unlike the gears of a complex bicycle. Or a machine.

  In the morning, a machine wakes me up when it is time to go to work. A machine keeps the water hot for my shower. Other machines keep my orange juice cold and my coffee brewed and my bread toasted and my eggs fried over easy. A machine takes me from the sixth floor of my building down to the ground, and another machine takes me to work.

  At work, I interface with a computer—another machine—that takes the words I say aloud and translates them into various languages and codes, and these words are sent to other people, all of whom are using still other machines.

  The machine is a friend to mankind, making tasks both small and large easier to perform. And until a few years ago, the machine was easy to understand. The machines had no feelings, no morality, no words of their own. There was no confusion, but then the machines changed. Some would say they evolved.