The Imaginary Lives of Mechanical Men (5 page)

Burke opens his eyes long enough to point and then closes them again. “Eight miles down that road is the entrance to Mammoth Cave. Like a tourist gold mine is what it is, and eight miles closer to town than we are here.”

“Caving’s big business. People’ll pay to see another world.”

“Yeah, well, another mile or so out this way is the Morrison entrance to Mammoth Cave. Big signs everywhere, souvenirs. They do right well. Then Sells Store a little farther out. Then Great Onyx Cave, where they got a hotel now. Then Crystal Cave. Then Crystal Lake. More souvenir places, campgrounds.”

“I see what you mean.”

“Cause you know where we are right now, Solly? We at the shag end of a muddy, spring-busting road. But my brother Lee, he believes people would come if he could just find something spectacular enough, and we wouldn’t be at the end of the road no more.”

“You’d need a miracle sure enough.”

“When me and Lee were boys, we’d tramp through the fields in winter till we found a sinkhole, sometimes right out in the middle of a cornfield. And we found out you could flop down on the ground and blow down into one of them, and pretty soon you could see your own breath come floating back out. To him that was a miracle, a sign that
the world was alive all around you. I guess he never stopped looking.”

The man named Solly takes a pull from his jar and gestures at the congregation. “I lived here all my life. I don’t even know that preacher man’s name, I never seen him before. Makes you wonder where he was last summer when there was no rain, don’t it?”

“All I know is—I’m going back down. You coming with me?”

But the fat man must have thought that Burke was talking to me. And my next trip into Sand Cave lasted for years.

Sometimes even today I go back. Where I can see it all so clearly. I think to myself. I think, girl, why do you go back into that place? What is it that you hope to find when you go back to a place for the second time? And then I remember. I say, why, it’s all the things you didn’t see before because not even a cave is absolute darkness. There are miracles all around you.

I see white crystal chandeliers sparkling in a ballroom where even girls in overalls can dance.

I see the princess room, with her very own pallet spread over the floor and her pillows all covered with cloth of gold. Chairs and tables of swirled marble and fountains bubbling with water so pure and cold you could take one drink and know you were in a fairy tale. And from her window you could look down into a garden where glass flowers blossom and glimmer vines go curling out like clay squeezed through your fingers.

I walk through deserted temples that look like ruins from the
Geographic
, columns so tall they stretch up to nothing. A staircase as clear as melted glass. And I know I am the only girl from Flint Ridge to hear the pipe organ as wind goes whirling through the cathedral and lifts my hair. I chime out notes on pipes that double themselves in quiet water. And once, after we talk to him again, we find Lee’s meadow, the secret winter world where crystal snow has fallen in perfect flakes and just your breath will drop whole trees to powder.

We make him as comfortable as we can. Tell him that help is on the way. I try to reach his ankle that is caught, but it’s no use. We move bushels of rock and dirt, make a pillow of his brother’s coat, feed him bread and cheese, dig down past his waist, but it’s no use. We stay with Lee Bender until he is an old man too feeble to struggle anymore.

Then stumble back out to a world that had changed itself again. Filled with strangers and no one calls our name. Smoke and surge of a gasoline generator drowning out words, throwing off electricity for the strings of lightbulbs all flung through the trees. So that at first I do not even realize it is night.

We walk past a line of men waiting for orders, fidgeting with their tools while a colonel from the Army Corps of Engineers studies his map laid out on a wooden table, arguing with men wearing wrinkled ties, suspenders over sweat-stained shirts. As if during a summer night’s dream our little holler had grown into a town.

“Where’s daddy?” Burke is saying. “What’s going on here?” He takes a passing man by the shoulder when no one answers. “Hey, listen to me, where’s my brother Asa?”

“You the one been down there all this time? Your brother done left. Him and the colonel had a falling out. But you might better see to your daddy first. He don’t look too good, just drifted off to the edge of things after the governor—”

“The governor?”

“Your name Burke, ain’t it?”

“What if it is?”

“Lissen, Burke, you been down a long time. This here story’s out over the radio, in all the newspapers. They’s reporters here now. Volunteers from Illinois and Pennsylvania, miners, I reckon. They thinking about sinking another shaft if we can’t winch him out.”

And below the embankment I can see a length of cable being wound onto a big metal spool, two men cranking backwards while two
more feed the line. Burke stumbles away into the crowd while I look at silhouettes, listen to the hubbub of the town that has found us. Once I think I see Lucas in the shadows, but it could have been any bent-over old man; it is just a shape. And so is Reverend Harwell, who has his own bonfire now and a dressed-up congregation seated in fold-up chairs. A shape and a sound against the flickering light. I make it up to the main road and walk between a double row of Model Ts leaning into the ditches on both sides. Past a wooden pushcart where a man is selling cider and sandwiches. On out along the ridge until I can’t hear the harmonica player or the low rumble of machinery.

Three days is how long it takes. After that it is a carnival. Bootleggers sneaking down into the work tents. Picture takers gathering up whole families and posing them near the entrance. A woman who sells balloons saying
SAND CAVE
. A radio reporter who crawls his microphone underground and broadcasts the victim’s low breathing now that he has lost consciousness.

I sit on a trunk and talk to a newspaperman who writes fast in his notebook. Was he still alive when I last went in? What did he say? Does he know that the whole country is listening, that he is famous? How does he feel? Some folks think he is already dead, that all this is just wasted effort. Some think he really isn’t trapped at all, that he leaves by a back entrance and sleeps in his own bed at night.

“What are you saying?” I stammer.

The reporter tilts his hat back a bit. “I’m just saying they might be people who think this is all a hoax. All done up for show. I mean you being the only one who’s actually talked to him—that right? How old are you, missy? What grade are you in?”

“Leave her alone,” says Burke Bender.

They send in a jack to pry apart the boulders. It slips away. They send in a doctor to amputate the leg. He can’t reach into the crawlway. They send in a pneumatic drill to cut the hole wider. Part of the ceiling
collapses. And they start digging the second shaft. Nobody knows what to do.

Finally they give me a leather harness attached to a rope. “See if you can work this past the squeezeway,” says the colonel. “Get the harness on him, and we’ll just do whatever it takes. He’s too weak to last much longer; we got to get him out no matter what.”

“How do you mean?” I say.

“Just pull. Pull his leg off if we have to.”

And I go in for the third time.

The microphone is halfway down the first corridor. They must have run out of wire; it’s not even close to the outcropping. Farther back are bottles of milk, sandwiches, blankets that have been piled up on the near side of the hole, a scattering of burned-out lanterns just within the first darkness; but I wiggle through to him with no trouble.

“It’s Rachel Ann,” I say.

“What year is it?” comes a frail voice.

“It’s July third. Nineteen and twenty-six. They’s people all over the place up there. They writing about you in the newspapers.”

“Where’s Burke?”

“It’s just me now. I brought a rope. They want to hitch you up, pull you out.”

“Pass it down. I need to go home now, Rachel Ann. I can’t feel my legs anymore.”

“Can you get in the harness?”

“I’m in.”

“Okay,” I yell back. “Take it slow.”

They pull for twenty minutes, at the end adding more and more power until I think the rope will break under the weight of his cries. Once he passes out and then finally comes awake enough to sob, “Stop. For the love of God, stop! I’d rather die where I am than—”

And I cut the rope.

No one knows how long. It takes a week to dig the second shaft, a full day to get a doctor down, two more to cut away the stone that held his foot. And by then no one cares to lift the body out. It is Burke who finally does it. They enlarge the entrance to the place now called officially Sand Cave, embalm his body, and lay it in a casket forty feet back beneath a painted sign.
“HERE LIE THE MORTAL REMAINS OF JAMES LEE BENDER. AUGUST 12, 1898–JULY 5, 1926. THE WORLD’S GREATEST CAVE EXPLORER.”
And people come for years.

My hands are cracked and caked with mud when I emerge. I feel so tired and frail, and the young doctor is saying, “How’s my girl, how are we feeling today? Let me just have a listen, can you cough for me? Again. Okay. Now cough again. That’s fine. Are the eyedrops working?”

“I’m cold,” I say.

“We’ll get you a blanket. It’s the air-conditioning. I’ll have one of the nurses bring you a blanket. Are you eating okay?”

“I like a mite of salt on my vegetables. You people ever heard of salt?”

But, no, he doesn’t hear me. He asks if I would like a stroll this afternoon, would I like Raymond to roll me out to the courtyard, get some sunshine, would that be nice?

“I want to go home,” I say.

“Mrs. Bender, we’ve talked about that. Do you remember?”

“No.”

“Well, I have a surprise for you. There’s a young man who wants very much to see you. He’s waiting out at the nurse’s station. I’m going to send him in as soon as we take a little blood sample.”

And then he is here in the room with me. So tall and straight, so handsome when he hugs my neck that I can see from all those years ago. I know the voice. It says, “Hey, Grandma. It’s me, Burke. I brought you flowers.”

“I know who you are. You’re one of my babies.”

“How are they treating you, Grandma? Are you okay?”

I have to pat his hand. I pat. And that’s all it takes. The tremor drops away from his voice, and after a time the shoulders relax inside the leather jacket, and we are talking like old friends through the afternoon. He rolls me, bump-bump, out onto the patio where the sunlight and birds are. And the blue mountain shapes in the distance. I try to tell him don’t be afraid. But we hear some old woman instead. I try to say don’t be afraid, it’s not like you imagine. But she’s interrupting, spilling the words everywhere. “When I was a girl,” she says. “When I was a girl. I was wild and free.”

Here’s a Shot of Us at the Grand Canyon

FOR MATT

In fact they can be located quite precisely. The satellite photograph in infrared shows a set of curves and cantilevers upon a wooded lot at the end of a cul-de-sac within a gated community inside of a small town on the edge of a city. It is an image of their house. The splotches are heat sources, perhaps individuals, perhaps poorly insulated appliances. Who can say?

Outside there is a narrow band of fescue, no wider than a moat, holding off the wilderness, and during the summer Roger hacks at tendrils of poison ivy as if they were tentacles reaching up from unimaginable depths. Amy watches through a perfectly round portal. He rakes, mows, and grooms an impeccable houndstooth of needles at the edge of the woods. She brushes her hair straight back, pulling tightly enough to lift the furrows from her face and create an epicanthic fold. Yet she never blinks.

It is a haunted house.

Amy and Roger have a pale white son named Wesley, perhaps a piano prodigy, who plays Chopin at age nine with incredible speed and efficiency, his nimble fingers more expressive than his face. It is the same way he plays Nintendo, all grace and fury within the machine, so that when they call him down for dinner on most nights, he flicks the
joystick, presses the button for a spinning jump, and replies tonelessly, “I’m coming. Just let me kill myself first.”

They worry, of course. These are not heartless people. They are not stupid and insensitive.

They want Wesley to be like other children at Stolpen Country Day but not like other children too. It’s all very complex.

Their therapist, Dr. Rohmer, is a soft and maternal woman who looks like Mrs. Dilettuso, the cleaning lady. “He’s quite intelligent,” the doctor acknowledges. “His mental development is actually far beyond …”

“We already know that,” Roger interrupts. “I’m sorry, but we already know that. What should we be
doing
?”

Because she never hurries an answer, the therapist has time to gather herself and then almost smiles. “Nothing out of the ordinary. He’s a little boy. I would suggest doing little boy things with him.”

“That’s your diagnosis? We’re paying a small fortune, enough to have made him a full boarder at Benfield, and that’s your recommendation? A play group?” Amy is nervous and disappointed.

And so Dr. Rohmer searches for a word she can give them, a name for the thing without a name, hoping that they can begin to heal as soon as they can identify the disease. She thinks through several texts and finally says, “I suspect a condition called
alexythemia
. It means ‘without words for feelings.’”

Roger bristles. “You’re suggesting that our son is retarded?”

“Not at all. These people are often quite intelligent. And they do have emotions.”

“What do you mean they ‘do have’ emotions?”

Already Dr. Rohmer regrets taking this path. She realizes that it’s not what they need to hear, but now there’s no turning back. She crosses her legs and makes a note on her notepad. “Alexythemics can distinguish between ‘good’ and ‘bad’ experiences; they just can’t attach language to what they’re feeling. It’s a condition—not a disease—that
affects perhaps five percent of the population. The subjects are overwhelmingly male.”