The Imaginary Lives of Mechanical Men (23 page)

“Yes, Your Honor.”

“Ms. McBryde, you’ve covered all this with them?”

“Yes, Your Honor.”

“Good. So ordered. Mrs. Anders, have you selected the photograph in accordance with our previous conversation?”

“Yes, Your Honor.”

“Would you bring it forward please.”

Amazing Stories
, November 1939, Volume 13, Number 11.
$47. Cover illustration by H. W. McCauley. Lead story “The Four-Sided Triangle” by William F. Temple. Other stories by Ralph Milne Farley, Robert Moore Williams, Frederic Arnold Kummer Jr., and Don Wilcox. Overall G to VG condition. Cover background now fading to violet with magenta undertones—originally a sharp medium blue (see other copies of
A.S.
from the 1930s). No splits or tears. All pages intact. Minor flaking and chipping where cover overlaps the pages beneath. Cash purchase at Second Foundation.

What drew me to this one was the color work. The individual letters of the words
Amazing Stories
are bright yellow, rising off the page like an old movie title. A thin russet outline gives the lettering dimension but also tricks the eye into seeing molten gold rather than crayon yellow. It is a startling effect to someone who has not been spoiled by Star Wars. McCauley’s illustration features a girl in a one-piece bathing suit, unconscious, reclining at about twenty-five degrees on a narrow
platform inside a transparent capsule. Next to her is another capsule inside of which is a portion of another girl. The second girl appears to be identical to the first, but only her face and breasts are complete; the rest of her is skeleton. She is either being duplicated from the first girl or else being deconstructed by a process not made clear in the illustration. At the bottom of the picture is a figure with his back to the viewer, intently studying the encapsulated girls, one hand on the lever of a glowing machine. The light being reflected from every surface in the painting varies from the pure yellow of
Amazing Stories
to the soft orange of the instrument dials to the lurid lime-gold glow streaming from the lid of each capsule. The shading is not subtle by current standards but is blended with a technical skill I have not seen on any other cover from the 1930s.

The girl in the painting, the complete girl, does not appear to be in pain. Her bathing suit is russet with yellow highlights at her breasts and pubis. It is of course a reversal of the title’s color and shading. Her skin is golden white. Her hair is golden red. The whole figure, I think, is a visual pun. Although I could not find the phrase “golden girl” in the dictionary, I believe it is a variant of “golden boy,” made familiar in 1937 as the title of a Clifford Odets play and then made famous as a 1939 movie starring William Holden and Barbara Stanwyck. Both of the girls on this cover are golden girls, although only one of them has flesh.

There are two machines at the bottom of the page framing the man and making him small. They are primitive and industrial by today’s standards but must have looked “scientific” to the artist McCauley. In the far background of the painting are the suggestions of other capsules and other girls, maybe rows of them, filling a huge gothic space. It is a hypnotic and horrifying moment, and I do not think this golden girl will ever escape alive.

This was my first one. I found it in a science fiction bookshop close to the campus where my parents were taking the tour. I said I would
wait for them right here because, secretly, I knew there would be no going away for me. So they took the tour. And I stayed as quiet and alert as a mouse. It is still my favorite one.

My body may have remembered things that my mind could not retrieve.
I think it must have remembered the impact, because at certain times during that first year it would jerk itself into rigid imitation of the russet girl with yellow highlights. Even today I can be walking around the corner of a building and be stunned by someone veering close to me. I can feel the force of our collision even though we never touch. My face being pressed against their glass. My arms, I know, will snap like toothpicks if I raise them. And I gasp, not because I am surprised, but because it is the body’s lust for air. People will think that I am terrified by small things, but I am not. It’s the body trying to protect itself. Back then it was still fighting to stay alive. It absorbed the impact so that my mind could continue on.

During the first year I did not ride in any automobile except my parents’. I did not go to movies. I did not buy new clothes and did not wear those given to me as presents. I did not watch television, cut my hair, or talk on the phone. On weekends I did not come out of my room. And during the week I walked to school, held my eyes like this and my arms like this. Made A’s in everything. Lost twenty-two pounds in twenty-two weeks. Lost my house keys, crying with unstoppable joy at the relief of any minor tragedy. I wore dresses and cardigan sweaters in the winter, like a tourist from another country, and fell in love with the sweet oblivion of snow, sinking my hands into the powdered vapor until they burned.

During the second year, I graduated from high school, did not march across the stage, and realized the weight of the anchor holding me fast. I could have gone to any college, legally could have gone to the campus where my parents took the tour; but Gerry kept me home. In the picture he looks like my high school sweetheart, almost handsome, smiling, in the hammock, ankles crossed and hands behind his
head in a way that told you he never lounged between trees except in pictures, never wasted a moment by lying still. And I looked so long I could hear him laugh. His fiancé moved to Portland with a boy who played the kind of music Gerry loved. She couldn’t mourn forever. But Gerry has blue eyes and black hair that you can still see in Edinburgh, my mother said, come down from the hills and the homes where parents look suspiciously on city life. And his own mother’s nose and lips. He is wearing a chambray shirt with sleeves three-quarters rolled and jeans as faded as November. It is a picture with no cuts, creases, or folds. No crumbling at the edge or split along the spine. The background is as sharply focused as his face—grass and twigs and trunk. And the condition is very good to fine. Except for the pit of my stomach where something insistent calls to me, like a baby turned to stone.

In the third year we reconciled. I went to shopping malls, enrolled at the community college. I told myself that any kind of marriage could go sour and that I was getting ahead, making myself into an independent woman, maybe a business executive one day. I took accounting, figured taxes, and filed the forms for our neighbors, who said it to my parents over and over, “I wish we had one like that at home. You’re so lucky to have her in your golden years.” And then one spring enrolled in a creative writing course, where they gave a solid, unshakeable A for anything. Like when he asked the class for a quick list, off the top of our heads, of things that would determine our main character’s actions. And I wrote “Ten Reasons She Should Not Open Her Wallet.”

1. At some point it will fall open to the unexpected place.

2. Even when she cannot see him, he is there. She is pregnant with his weight, and it is more than one woman can bear.

3. She doesn’t have a right to be happy. No one does.

4. Her mother or her sister or her father will see it and start to cry. They will put their arms around her and only make it worse. One day her own child might see it, and then what?

5. She cannot wear blue because he is wearing blue.

6. In prison, the prison carries you.

7. If she keeps it closed, then he might be alive, living in a world she’s never seen. And she must look for him in newspapers and magazines.

8. Every time she opens it she must pay.

9. His mother chose it. Maybe it was the only one she had. Maybe she walked it to the bench as if she were carrying a wounded bird.

10. One day it will be the oldest photograph she owns, soiled and creased like a high school picture of her husband. And someone will say, “Oh Jess, who is this?” but that is not what she hears. What she will hear instead is, “Oh Jesus, who is this?”

Which is pretty good, pretty good, the instructor said. Except maybe give her a little more depth and, you know, variety in the story so it won’t sound like an obsession or one of those love poems written by a thirteen-year-old. You know what I mean?

Famous Fantastic Mysteries
, April 1947, Volume 8, Number 4.
$24. Cover illustration by unknown artist. Lead story “Allan and the Ice-Gods: A Journey into the Dawn of History” by H. Rider Haggard. Overall Fair to G condition. Cover background dark green to black. Spine split one inch from bottom. Slight tears and creasing at cover overhang. All pages intact, paper creamy white to light yellow. No tape or marks. Purchased through eBay.

This is another high-contrast cover with a bright yellow splash containing the title
Famous FANTASTIC Mysteries
in crimson. The illustration takes up two-thirds of the cover, and two-thirds of the illustration consists of an ice monolith inside of which is a frozen woman. She is reclining slightly, her eyes closed like Sleeping Beauty, and she is dressed in a long negligee or, more likely, a gown similar to those worn by Greek goddesses in the costume dramas of the 1940s and ’50s. She has platinum blonde hair, full lips that might be parted for a kiss,
and breasts that prefigure Jayne Mansfield. The monolith itself is multifaceted and tinged with a green glow, although the woman’s image is undistorted.

And the hook is this: a man is kneeling at her side. He is dressed in a leopard skin and is perhaps one-tenth the size of the woman. His head is bowed in despair and his arms reach out to touch the surface of the ice in a gesture of love and hopeless longing. You can tell that the man is one-tenth the size of the woman because he is kneeling in the palm of a giant skeletal hand, also frozen in ice. It is unclear whether the man has been lifted to the height of the woman’s breasts or whether he climbed up the body of the giant skeleton.

This is the illustration that prompted me to make it a collection, the covers I mean. I realized I had seen this one before, or one very much like it, on another pulp magazine. It took me a long time to find the original, an August 1937 cover for
Horror Stories
(volume 5, number 4) done in pastels by John Newton Howett, where the woman is being frozen in a transparent vat of water. She is nude, her hands pressing against the lid of the vat as the water rises. The thermometer is below zero. A man is leaning over her looking down as he turns the dial of a machine. In the background are three other women who have already been frozen.

The same story, I think, is being told on the cover of
Astonishing Stories
, November 1941: the frozen woman is being guarded by a dragon. The same in
Planet Stories
, Summer 1948: a man and an alien are fighting in the background. The same in
Marvel Science Stories
, April 1939: other women are looking on as the woman is being frozen. One of them is a nurse.

I collected them, all of them that I could find over the next months. I called it the Frozen Beauty cover because the girl isn’t just sleeping and the spell cannot be broken by a kiss. Before I graduated from high school I had collected over a hundred of the old pulps, rotting like corpses in dim rooms of my parents’ house. At yard sales or estate clearances, I sometimes had to buy entire boxes of pulps in order to
get the one I needed. That’s how it grew, became more than a collection, I suppose. One day I heard my mother fretting to the man she married, and he, like the clueless king, said, “Oh well, at least it keeps her off the street.”

Time means nothing in stories like these.
One day, I don’t know exactly when, he simply walked into the shop as I was arranging a window display. Perhaps it was in the eleventh year, perhaps the twelfth, and at first I thought he was looking for books. He worked the maze of shelves so slowly that he seemed to be lingering over every title in the “Americana” section, then fingering the spines in “Law” as if reading them in Braille. He went through “Nature” and “Photography” just as slowly but finally returned to me after wandering through “Religion.” He wore a dark wool overcoat glistening with rain droplets along the shoulders and sleeves. And in one hand he carried a gray fedora that had gone out of style in the forties. He was taller than I remembered and thin enough to make me think of my own father just before he had died.

At the pulp counter he stopped—they all do—and studied the covers, looking, I suppose, for some particular author or remembering the way the future was. “My God,” he said, “I didn’t know these still existed. When I was a boy, I read nearly …”

“I’m sorry, those aren’t for sale,” I said.

“Ah. Well. Do you mind if I sit down in one of these? My old knees seem to creak a bit on days when the weather …”

“There’s coffee on the stove. Muffins next to the microwave. Please let me know if I can find something for you.”

“Thank you. Yes, thank you, it’s miserable out there, miserable even for this time of year, and you’ve made this such a lovely sanctuary, I do believe it’s more inviting than the public library. Run by committees, you know. They’re awful things, all of them. This must have been someone’s home before you …”

“It was.
Is
there something I can find for you?”

He laid his hat on the coffee table I keep among the chairs and then pressed his palms together in a thoughtful moment. So I waited, the two of us together again in the front bedroom of my parents’ house, a cash register and display case where the bed had stood. “I hardly know how to answer that, Miss Meyer. I don’t suppose you have any recollection at all of whom I might be.”

“Your name,” I said, “is Burrelle. Judge Saxby Burrelle. If I remember correctly.”