The Live-Forever Machine

by Kenneth Oppel

  “ ‘Our life is short, and our days run / As fast away as does the sun …’ “

  Eric heard a cough, and at that moment, Alexander came into view around the corner, once again dressed in blue coveralls, a tool satchel slung over his shoulder and bouncing against his hip. He stopped when he saw Eric, but only the mildest look of surprise crossed his face. His eyes flashed over Eric intently, as if studying every feature.

  “Have you lost your way?” Alexander asked in his peculiar, hoarse voice.

  About sixty or so, Eric guessed. And he hadn’t noticed the first time how thin Alexander was, the straps of his coveralls stretched over razor-edged shoulders, his pant legs baggy. His hands were long and slender, his fingers almost skeletal, his wrists pinched and knobby. The veins of his narrow forearms stood out prominently against his skin, like elastic cord binding him tightly together. He’s skinnier than me, Eric thought gratefully.

  He tried to moisten his parched mouth.

  “I—” he began, but faltered. He could feel the tiny weight of the locket in his pants pocket. And he suddenly realized that he didn’t want to give it back. He couldn’t bring himself to draw it out of his pocket and surrender it to this stranger.

  “Yeah, I kind of got lost,” he said quickly.

  “I see,” said Alexander, his eyes still locked on Eric’s.

  There was something about the twist of Alexander’s mouth and his intonation that made Eric think Alexander knew he was lying. Sweat prickled at the back of his neck. Was it possible Alexander knew about the locket? There was no way he could. Still, the look in the man’s eyes made Eric feel that he was being peeled like an onion, layer by layer.

  “That’s exceedingly unfortunate,” Alexander was saying. There it was again, Eric thought, that slight edge of mocking disbelief in his voice. “Shall I escort you back to the galleries, then?” He gestured to one of the passages.

  “Thanks,” Eric said. Neither moved, as if they both knew the truth of the matter, but were choosing to play this game.

  “Your face is a familiar one,” Alexander said. “I’m certain I’ve seen you before.”

  “I come here a lot,” Eric responded, a spark of uneasiness flickering in his mind, the feeling he’d had earlier of being watched. “Especially since it’s been so hot.”

  “Ah, yes, that’s right,” Alexander said, as if he’d only been vaguely aware of the heatwave outside. “And of course, that is why I remember you. But I’ve seen you here on numerous occasions, even earlier. With your father I believe.”

  “Yeah, well, we live just across the road.”

  “In one of those glittering towers of Babel?”

  Eric was puzzled for a moment. “Oh,” he said with a nervous chuckle. “You mean the highrises. No, we live in the old house—” And then he stopped. He couldn’t believe he was telling these things to a complete stranger.

  “The old farm house between the two towers,” Alexander said pleasantly.

  “Yeah, that’s the one.” Eric tried without success to hold back a shiver. But then again, he told himself, there was only one old house across the road—theirs.

  “I am continually surprised at its longevity in this city,” Alexander commented. “It is an extremely rare find.”

  “Dad won’t sell it.” He was doing it again, just letting things slip out.

  “Oh? Why is that?” Alexander’s creased face showed interest, but Eric thought there was something insincere-sounding about the question, as if the man already knew the answer.

  “He likes old things,” Eric said curtly. But it was more because of Mom, he thought. Because he lived there with her and now he can’t bring himself to sell it.

  “Ah,” Alexander said. “And you must take after your father.”

  “What do you mean?” Eric asked sharply. Comparisons with his father always made him uncomfortable—and coming from a stranger, they made him wary, too.

  “The simple fact that you spend so much time here would seem to indicate that you like old things as well.”

  “Oh. Yeah.” Eric looked away. Alexander’s eyes seemed to tear through him. He knew about the locket. Why didn’t he say anything? Eric forced himself to calm down. Alexander couldn’t know anything about the locket. He was making himself paranoid over nothing. Just cool it.

  “Visitors are not usually permitted past the galleries,” Alexander was saying. “But if you would like, I could show you through the workshops. I only offer because I think you might find them interesting.”

  Eric looked up at him. “I’d like that,” he said carefully.

  “Very well. These are the service corridors,” Alexander explained, indicating the passages that led off from the junction. “They twine like serpents through the back of the museum, behind most of the displays. Why don’t we go this way?”

  He fell into a long-striding gait. Walking quickly beside him, Eric was aware of his strong odour; not unpleasant exactly, it was the same musty smell his father’s sweaters had when they were first taken out of the trunk at the beginning of winter—a thick smell of wool and mothballs.

  “Are you a repairman here?” Eric asked.

  Alexander nodded. “I tend to the exhibits, perform minor repairs and so on. Now, the central workshops are what you would find most engaging, I think. Am I walking too quickly for you? I hardly think so. You’re keeping up nicely. One should always make the most of one’s time. ‘But at my back I always hear / Time’s wingèd chariot hurrying near …’ You know the rest, of course.”

  The strange thing was that he did. It must have been his father—something his father used to read. The next two lines rose to the surface of his mind.

  “ ‘And yonder all before us lie / Deserts of vast eternity,’ “ he found himself saying.

  “That’s it!” exclaimed Alexander. “Marvellous stuff.” His voice had clouded over and he coughed violently for a few seconds. “Excuse me,” he said, choking out the words. “A small pestilence—a cold, rather.”

  Eric glanced up. Such an old-fashioned way of talking. Would a repairman really talk like that, and recite old poetry, too? Snobbery, he chided himself. His father the subway conductor would not approve.

  Eric watched Alexander walking slightly ahead of him, jackknife legs, thin arms lost in the folds of his coverall sleeves. Eric thought of the fight in the armoury, and couldn’t believe Alexander had been able to hold his own against the man in black. He should have been snapped like a dry twig. Still, there was a kind of strength to the man, as if he’d been whittled down to the hard, bare essentials.

  They’d come to a dead end. Alexander went up to the wall and, with a flourish of his hand, pressed a button.

  “Freight elevator,” Eric said, and Alexander turned and winked.

  A deep groan rose from the depths of the shaft and swiftly grew louder. There was a jarring thud, a brief silence, and then the whole wall seemed to split horizontally as the massive doors opened.

  Alexander pushed aside the metal gate and ushered Eric inside. The elevator was almost as large as Eric’s room at home. Alexander pressed a button and the elevator gave a mighty lurch. Eric could see the rough stone walls of the shaft slide by. He counted four floors before they came to a shuddering halt.

  Stretched out before him was a colossal workshop, throbbing with machinery. Light slanted in broad beams through the high, arched windows—the same ones, Eric realized, that faced onto Astrologer’s Walk. Thousands of specks of dust danced and glowed in the air.

  Two workers brushed past Eric, carrying wooden planks. Ahead, he saw a line of men pushing wheelbarrows full of stone blocks across the crowded floor. Another group carried huge plates of glass, balanced precariously against their shoulders. Workers were hunched intently over machines, shouting out orders. A tide of noise washed over him: the pounding of hammers, the sharp serrated sound of saws, the growl of motors powering huge drills, the sudden snap of arc welders. His nostrils twitched with the scent of dust and wood, oil
and heated metal.

  “It’s a glorious sight, isn’t it?” Alexander said with a continental sweep of his arm. “Does it not make your heart quicken? This is the machine works. Orders are delivered here from every department in the museum—glass for display cases, chicken-wire for a papier-mâché backdrop, hinges for doors, steel to reinforce a dinosaur’s tail, timber to replace a broken plank on the Spanish galleon. An endless stream of requests! This way.”

  Eric followed Alexander across the vast room, past the rows of throbbing machinery, benches and tables, towards a spiral staircase that corkscrewed up against the far wall. They climbed the clanging steel steps to a high catwalk.

  Eric gazed out over the workshop. He could see it all now, a shifting collage of machine parts and bodies, metal levers and arms, wheels and human heads, all moving in rhythmic unison. He felt drunk with the swirling noise and activity below.

  But suddenly the huge ceiling lamps flickered, the machinery stuttered. Eric stiffened. Again, and this time the lights went out completely, and the roar of the machines gradually faded to a quiet whirring, then silence.

  Eric quickly looked over. Alexander was standing very tall and still, watching the workroom. He didn’t seem even to be breathing. Only a few seconds passed before the lights blinked on again and the machinery kicked in, sounding like airplane turbines warming up.

  “Happens at our house all the time,” Eric said. “It’s the heatwave.”

  “Yes,” said Alexander after a few moments. He looked back at Eric. “Now then, shall we continue? The department workshops continue on either side of us, and above us, as well. That’s where the real creation takes place.”

  “I’d like to see them all,” Eric said.

  “Yes. I knew you would!” Alexander exclaimed. “Mesopotamian, Egyptian, Greek and Roman, West Asian, European, Oriental, American, African, Paleontology, Ornithology, Earth Sciences …” His list was cut short by another coughing fit, more violent than the first. “The dust!” he proclaimed. “The dust is the cause. It is of no consequence. This way. Let me show you.”

  Eric felt another quick stab of suspicion. It was almost as if Alexander had expected him. Was it chance that they had met in those tunnels? When you thought about how big the building was …. And Alexander seemed to know quite a lot about him. He hadn’t even asked Eric his name—hadn’t offered his own either, as if he assumed Eric already knew. Which Eric in fact did.

  He followed Alexander along the catwalk and through a doorway into the next room, as large as the first. Below, surrounded by a network of scaffolding, a dinosaur was under construction. Workers clung to the metal latticework like spiders, painting the creature’s head, welding together pieces of its long tail in little bursts of light and smoke. A woman was varnishing the dinosaur’s toenails. The room was cluttered with workbenches, their surfaces hidden under reference books, blueprints and tools. Tall shelves and cupboards lined the walls, filled with giant dinosaur bones.

  Eric felt a wave of nostalgia—all those visits to the dinosaur gallery together—and now he and his father couldn’t even talk. Dad would be too preoccupied, not paying attention.

  “You have fond memories of the dinosaur gallery, no doubt,” Alexander said.

  “It used to be one of our favourite parts, me and my father,” Eric told him.

  “And now?”

  “We don’t come together as much anymore. He’s been pretty busy lately.”

  He knew he shouldn’t be talking like this, but it seemed so easy. The tall, stooped man was watching him closely, nodding.

  “Is he a very busy man, your father?”

  “He’s a subway conductor, and he writes a lot in his spare time.”

  Alexander nodded again. “Shall we go on? There are several other workshops you’ll find of interest.”

  He led Eric to the window of a workroom where a scholar poured over a misshapen tablet of stone, its surface covered in hieroglyphics. Through another window Eric saw a team of men and women polishing a suit of armour. Further on, a man sat in a small library, books spread out all around him, his head bowed in concentration.

  “I once worked in a library,” Alexander was saying into his ear. “A vast library, with the finest collection of literature in the world. We had some half a million volumes, which was a breathtaking number in those days.”

  “Here in the city?” Eric asked.

  “Oh no, not here—and it’s gone now. It burned down many years ago. Everything was lost. It was a great tragedy. Those were things that will never be recovered.”

  Eric glanced at Alexander. It was uncanny how much he had sounded like Dad.

  “And there have recently been fires here as well, did you know?” Alexander went on in a conversational tone. “One at the rare-book library, another at the antiquarian’s. Perhaps you’ve seen the news reports. People have always craved a good fire.”

  “My father says that people would rather watch the fires on TV than read a book.”

  “Or go to the museum. People place little value on such things now.”

  Like the man in black, Eric almost said. The man who had knocked over the soldier. Who was that guy? he wondered. But he knew he couldn’t ask, not without giving away the fact that he’d been hiding in the display during the fight.

  “Shall we continue?” Alexander said.

  They passed like ghosts through the tangle of corridors. Mounting a twisting set of stairs, they came to another room, where Oriental carpets and tapestries were being sprayed for bugs. At the next workshop, his face pressed close against the window, Eric looked on as shards of pottery were glued back together to form ancient vases.

  He devoured everything. He felt as if history were being resurrected before his eyes.

  “There is a great deal more to show you,” Alexander said, “but I haven’t much more time.”

  “What’s below us, on the lower floors?” The buttons on the freight elevator had continued much farther down than the one Alexander had pressed.

  “Those are the storage rooms, the treasure houses of Kubla Khan! There is space in the galleries, you see, to display only a minuscule portion of the museum’s collection, so the remainder is packed carefully away.”

  “How far down do they go?”

  “To the very pit of hell!” Alexander proclaimed with a dramatic flourish. “Ah, forgive me. A jest—a joke, rather. Let me see … twenty floors, I believe.” He looked thoughtful for a moment. “No, perhaps only eighteen. The two lowest levels have been barricaded for many years now. They sealed them up during the renovations because there was a problem with water leakage from the storm drains.”

  Deep as the city, Eric thought, and the clanging of machinery in the darkness rang through his head.

  “Is there anything down there still?” he asked. He could still see Jonah bent over the storm drain grate, bellowing about fire and brimstone.

  “Not a thing,” Alexander replied. “They are empty as tombs, home only to rats.” He tried to stifle a cough but couldn’t.

  “Are you all right?” Eric looked at him with concern. “Isn’t there something you could take for that?”

  “A passing fit.” His breathing calmed and his eyes settled on Eric. “How much did you see and hear in the armoury?”

  Eric’s body tightened and, for a moment, he felt sick. He had been watched without his knowing. Even though he’d hidden in the shadows of the display, Alexander had known he was there.

  “Alexander’s not your real name,” he shot back to cover up his alarm. “I called the museum.”

  “I see.” The tall, stooped man appeared amused, a small spark dancing in each pupil. “I applaud your resourcefulness. But it is my real name—my middle name, in fact. It is simply that no one calls me by it.”

  “Only the man you fought with?”

  “Yes. Your ears are very sharp. You heard everything, saw everything?” His gaze was piercing.

  Eric couldn’t stand it any longer.
r />   “Here,” he said, reaching into his pocket. “I found it on the floor afterwards.” He unfolded the washcloth and held out the locket. “You dropped it, right? That’s why I came. To give it back.”

  Alexander’s bony hand darted out and closed around the wooden oblong.

  “I’ve been searching for this,” he said.

  A chill ran through Eric. His instincts told him that Alexander was lying: he’d known all along where it was. Alexander had dropped it on purpose, left it like a lure. Everything seemed to click into place: the feeling of being watched, the door at the rear of the display left slightly ajar, the meeting in the service corridor. Had it really all been planned out, every step? But why?

  For a split second he wanted to get as far away as possible. But he stood riveted, watching the rapt expression on Alexander’s face as he gazed at the locket.

  “There she is,” he said softly. “A wonderful likeness, though it fails to capture her fully—or so I am told. But even Leonardo fell short with his Mona Lisa. Yes, truly one of the great beauties. ‘Love, that doth reign and live within my thought, / And built his seat within my captive breast.’ “

  The smile faded from Alexander’s lips, and he looked up at Eric.

  “Why didn’t you give it back immediately?” he demanded.

  There was no anger in his voice, only a fierce urgency.

  “Well—” Eric faltered. “I—”

  “Tell me!”

  “I wanted to keep it,” Eric heard himself saying. “I didn’t want to give it back.”

  “Yes, yes,” Alexander said softly, urging him on. “And why?”

  “Because it was old and beautiful.” He scarcely recognized his own voice. “Because of her. There was something about her.” How could he explain the mesmerizing effect she had? “I wanted to know about her, more than just her name and date. I wanted it, her, for myself—to keep her safe. I didn’t want anyone else to have it.”

  “That’s right, yes,” said Alexander quietly, his eyes ablaze. How strange they were, Eric noticed for the first time: a swirling ocean green, infinitely deep.