All Those Vanished Engines (9 page)

“Wait,” murmured the creature. “What is this? Wait just one minute, please.”

Now suddenly there was Lizzie up ahead, holding her own stick of dynamite in one hand, a burning branch in the other. “Go,” she said, “I'll follow you.” Then both fuses were alight, sparking and twisting as if alive.

The trees gave out. There below her she could see the metal sky-ship, bloated like a plumped-up sausage in the frozen meadow under the bright moon. Secure in their contemptuous superiority, the Martians had posted no watch. There at anchor, nosing upward in its net, hovered the alien balloon whose crew had captured Matthew in the dell, swarming down its ladder while, impotent, she had crouched in the darkness—no more. Tonight she would strike back.

As if in affirmation, she heard the crash behind her, the shudder of the explosion, and the high-pitched whining of the wolf. Lizzie had done her work—

“Wait, please,” hissed the creature as a concussion shook the laboratory. “Wait please, one minute…” I heard footsteps, and when I opened my eyes it had disappeared out of view. Wincing, I moved my head from side to side. No, it was gone.

“Elly,” I said.

She looked at me.

“Come here,” I said, and she did come. She put down her doll. Under my direction, she loosed the manacles, which fastened with a simple brass screw. Her hands were careful and adroit, as always. By contrast mine were stiff, yet I was able to pluck the wires from my scalp and even, tenderly, from the hole in the back of my head. It wasn't as large as I'd feared. I'd be able to hide it when I grew my hair.

“Are you coming home?” she said.

“Yes. Let's go.”

I followed her out of the room. Left by itself, the screen shone blank. There was no image on its shiny surface, nor was there any way for it to show the end of the story, how Paulina managed to climb onto the station platform just as the train was puffing in, managed to push her way through the crowd, some of whom recognized her from photographs. “Mother,” she said, just as the train doors opened.

Large and imposing, the empress turned to her. At the same time, the colonel stepped onto the platform, the girl beside him clutching her doll. When he saw Paulina, a spasm of indecision passed over his features. He pushed the girl forward and then yanked her back as Paulina ran toward them, arms outstretched. At the last moment Colonel Claiborne grabbed the doll out of Lizzie's hands. Perhaps he meant to deliver it himself. But he could see that he had given himself away; in an instant the empress was surrounded by her night-black guard. He turned down the platform and took to his heels, diving back into another compartment of the train as the muskets rattled and misfired.

5. T
HE
G
OLD
C
ARTOUCHE

Ever afterward, this is what she remembered: whey-faced and trembling, the creature stood in the center of the metal doorway, a stark figure in the moonlight with the dark gap behind. The curling fuse was at its end. She reared back and threw her dynamite through the open door just as the boy and his sister burst through. And through some kind of luck, or because there was some incendiary material built into the skin of the alien craft, the metal compartment erupted into flame, burst its seams, and the explosion threw them backward into the snow, while above them, untethered and unmanned, the balloon drifted up into the crystalline night sky.

“Wake up. Wake up now.”

It was a dream. She saw an electric lamp, the light muted, the bulb hidden behind a decorative fringe. The ormolu lampstand, with miniature lion feet, stood on a small table beside her bed. Beside it lay her diary, and on the marbleized cover, above where she had signed her name, perched the golden bracelet, which she had remembered so differently. Three of the inlaid oblong plates were intact, and the circular cartouche, the small circle of tiny letters. But the fourth plate was broken off, half the length of the others.

Her mother followed the direction of her eyes. “He wanted you to have it. He was still alive when we found him, and he said you used to like it when you were a little girl. He had a name for you. “Lump-cat.'”

Paulina's eyes filled up. “But it's so different.”

“We had to cut it from his wrist, and part of it was damaged. Oh, I can almost forgive him.”

How can we live, Paulina thought, when memory tells us one thing, reality another, and imagination a third? How can we travel through the world?

“I see you are affected. He was a brave man, though he was my enemy. We honor those who give their lives for what they think is right, however misguided. And I know at the end he was unable to hurt you, even at the cost of his enterprise.”

How can we make sense of it? As she spoke them, the words felt thick and out of shape: “I thought it was a figure eight, and you just slipped your hand through. I don't remember these hinges, these little landscapes. I thought it was made of elephant hair and braided wire. All I remember is the gold cartouche.”

“My darling—don't cry. The mind plays tricks.”

She looked up. Her mother sat beside her in a tasseled armchair. She had a mole on the bridge of her nose. For an empress, she wore simple clothes. She reached out for Paulina's hand, and then pulled back, leaving her own hand poised in the air.

“There was a letter we found on his body, a letter addressed to you.”

Now she noticed the envelope, addressed in her cousin's well-remembered script. Often in the forgotten past, he had written her messages of commiseration, on Christmas and the Confederate holidays. Pushing herself up on her pillows, she reached for it and opened it, searching for the final signature: Colonel Adolphus Claiborne, CSA.

PART TWO

Three Visits to a Nursing Home

1. R
IGHT
N
OW

This is how the second part begins, the first five pages or so, single-spaced:

He said, “It's hard to get the noises out of my ears. It's hard not to wake up with them or listen when I fall asleep. I hear a rattle, or a clatter, or the ringing of a phone. I hear the banging of a ladle on the lip of a tureen. I listen for the rhythms and don't try to understand. Sounds loom out of nowhere. There's no background and no foreground; I hear sounds in my memory and not just now. The past is clearer and clearer, the present less and less distinct. Now people say the same things to me over and over. They bend down over me and say the same things over and over. You're doing it now.”

He was right. On the other hand, he also was liable to repeat himself. He'd talk ten minutes and forget who we were. He'd say, “You hear the sound of a bell, or a bong, or a ringing in the night. Sometimes it's real, and sometimes it's a noise from the inside out. Sometimes I'll be dreaming about work, dreaming about the hiss of the steam, the cough of the cutoff valves, the whine of the generators. You'd step outside for a smoke in the middle of the night. Sometimes you could hear the sound of the radio, and the water underneath the bridge. You'd stand out there on a summer evening and listen to the scrape of the locomotives as they made the turn after the long descent, the sound of the whistle and the crash as they let off steam. I remember the first diesels coming through. I knew then I'd miss the old sounds. I miss the new ones now.”

His wheelchair was equipped with a small tray, and his spotted hand lay on it, grasping at nothing. The corded veins. He stared up at us, his blue eyes rimmed with red and sightless, of course, because of the accident. He had a white scar across his forehead, half-hidden in his stiff white hair, tinged with yellow like a nicotine stain. He had a jutting blade of a nose. He stared at us with his mouth open, and then reached up with his hooked forefinger into the roof of his mouth. He was pulling out his bridgework, false teeth attached to a pink plastic palate—he laid it on the tray. And then for five minutes he treated us to a variety of sounds, which he made by cupping his hands together in front of his mouth and blowing into the cavity, fluttering his fingers to produce a tremolo. In this way he created a small concert until he was out of breath, all the sounds of those vanished engines. For emphasis he would click his tongue against the roof of his mouth. He made rhythmic knocks and snaps, loud and resonant because most of his teeth were gone.

When he was finished, he'd forgotten who we were. We reminded him of how we wanted to learn about a project from his years at Sprague Electric during the war, about a secret that lay hidden in the ordinary function of the plant, which produced heat for that entire complex of buildings. Elsewhere there were engineers working on a War Department subcontract for the Manhattan Project. This venture was more secret still, because the science was even more uncertain, and the possibilities for success or failure even more extraordinary.

We said, “Why is it that the actual furnaces have been removed? Those three sets of condensing tubes, who has ever seen a system like that? And that enormous coal bin, as big as the hull of a ship, suspended overhead, fed by that long conveyer belt from the railroad siding—surely it's impossible to imagine how such a structure could be supported in that way, by a network of such flimsy beams, if it were full of coal? We have studied the diagrams from the mill, as well as the original blueprints of the renovation. But many of those machines appear on neither set of plans.”

As we spoke, we could not fail to notice the ugliness of our words, not just in their aggressive and accusatory nature, but in their sounds and cadences, especially in contrast to the soft, whispered cooing that still flowed from between the old man's hands. We had taken him to a gazebo in the courtyard of the nursing home, toward sunset of a summer day. Flies knocked against the screens. Somewhere, the sound of a whippoorwill. Snatches of music from the parking lot. Abruptly, a car horn.

“Did you see the garden?” he said.

We had seen photographs. Even now outside the boiler house between the stone wall and the oil tank, there are remains of the triangular raised beds, the circular vents suggesting a subterranean laboratory or storage facility, now filled in.

“Oh, it was beautiful,” he breathed. “Snapdragons as big as a man's fist. Ladies' slippers. Puff balls full of germs. Blossoms that used to pop when they opened.” He made a popping noise with his tongue. “Made you feel like a midget at the beginning of the world.”

We had no idea what that would feel like. We were more interested in the machines. “The flowers were so big,” he said, “they couldn't be pollinated by ordinary insects.” He paused. “One night I saw a moth with a ten-inch wingspan.”

We asked him why, what happened. We had tried to find out in other ways, but the information was still classified. He said, “You must be talking to me now because the rest are dead. Lacombe, Carusi, Niemeyer…” He listed some of the engineers.

“Yes,” we said, although it wasn't true. Some had died, but some we'd been unable to track down. “Where did you get the raw material?” we asked.

Blind, he looked up at us, his eyes full of a moisture that was thicker than tears. In the gazebo, we listened to the buzzing of the flies, and the sound of someone shouting in the distance. We couldn't quite make out the words.

He lowered his head, as if to examine the bridgework in his hands, the assortment of false teeth, the grasping crablike wires that attached them to the stumps still in his mouth. “Brazil,” he mumbled finally, as if confessing to a crime that was a secret source of pride. “Rio de la Plata. Shiploads first, until one of them was attacked by a German submarine. The cargo didn't allow the ship to sink, even though the hull was shattered by the torpedoes. At least until the … material, as you call it … dissolved in the salt water—you could hear the noise from miles away, like bubbles breaking. After that they brought it up on boxcars from Montevideo. All the way, all through the war. That's how big this was. We had priority all down the line.”

We asked where they'd stored this secret cargo and he chuckled, a sound like someone crumpling a newspaper. But then it turned wet and ugly, a liquid, hacking cough. “You'll forgive me,” he said when he could speak. “Fibrosis,” he explained. “It's done for most of us.”

He wiped his mouth with a handkerchief, and then laboriously replaced his bridge, pressing it up into the roof of his mouth. “You'll forgive me,” he repeated when he was finished, his words immediately easier to understand.

He leaned back in his chair, and we wondered if he had the strength to continue. But now suddenly he seemed eager to speak. Maybe he was still amused by the trick they'd managed to pull: “We acted like it was coal,” he explained, “even though the generators had already switched to oil—you've seen the tank. But the new deliveries, we pretended it was coal since it was mined like coal. We off-loaded it at the same siding in the middle of the night, and sent it up the same conveyor belt and into the same bin at the top of the building, which we refitted like you saw. None of it needed to be so heavy now. Mostly we had to keep the stuff tethered down. At least until we mixed it into slurry, it wanted to float away. But we'd pump in the additives, which we'd manufactured on-site—you've seen the machines. The industrial noise was the easiest, of course, by-products of the whole procedure, which we regathered and combined. All those clanks and scrapes. All those rattles, clunks, and hissing.

“The animal sounds were the hardest. But I worked on the big systems. You've seen those ducts that led down to the furnaces? You think that was for coal? That whole divided sequence of gigantic cubes—why do you think they had to be so big? That was me. The echoes and reverberations. We could increase the potency many times, even before it went into the fire. Then we had to rebuild the distillation cylinders, and did you see the tubes? Gosh, that was a beautiful system. It was like the pipes of an organ once the pressure came up.”