by Mark Helprin
Walking through that place, he felt like Mohammed in Bismillah. Everything was shiny, sparkling, alert, and familiar. The machines seemed to greet him with the same ingenuous affection as a class of kindergarten children receiving the mayor. And as they puffed and revolved and did their mad angular dances, Peter Lake realized that he was a mechanic. In each section of the half-acre of machinery, years of knowledge charged out from the interior darkness and stood at attention like brigades and brigades of soldiers on parade. The realization was locked in place as if with strikes and bolts. At last, a victory.
They came to the double mutterer. The two mechanics leaned against a piece of long-inactive machinery and eyed Peter Lake with a powerful Irish skepticism that trembled and boiled and was as hot and smoky as a burning hearth. “Now. You, sir,” said one of them, cruelly, “will show us how to bring to life this—what you call a—double mutterer, or we, sir, will show you back to the Bowery.”
Peter Lake was aware that he was unshaven, badly sunburnt, filthy, and sapphire-eyed. “What’s a double mutterer?” he asked. “I thought maybe you two gentlemen would like to purchase a ticket to the garbage-man’s ball.”
The mechanics were confused—until Peter Lake fixed his mad gaze on the machine, and began to work.
“Now look here,” he said, after removing a large panel. “You see this oscillating slotted bar that’s rubbing up too close to the powl and ratchet of this here elliptic trammel? That, my friends, distorts the impact load on the second hobbing, up there, which is applied to that helical gear. But the trouble is, it isn’t. Without that little helical gear, the antiparallel linkage on the friction drive won’t disengage, and this wormwheeled pantograph can’t come into play. Clear so far?” They nodded.
“And it’s not only that, but you’ve got a jammed friction brake. See? It has to be lubricated with the finest spermacetti. And two cams on the periflex coupling are on backward.
“If one of you fellas will mill me a buttress-threaded lug nut with a fifty-five-degree flank angle, I’ll put the oscillating slotted bar back where it’s supposed to be. Meanwhile, we’ll rearrange the cams, and unfreeze the friction brake. Well? What are you waiting for?”
In less than half an hour the double mutterer was muttering like crazy, and the power train had begun to run as smoothly and quietly as an owl’s swoop, whereas, before, its belts had flapped about like the flesh of a sprinting fat man, making concussive leather slaps against the cast-iron flywheels that it struggled to embrace.
“These belts will now last for six months to a year,” Peter Lake informed his awed hosts. “And the horsepower drain will be much less, as the slack in the power train is moderated by the double mutterer. It’ll save you a lot of fuel. It’s like a trumpet.”
Though they didn’t understand the part about the trumpet, they didn’t care, and were eager to take Peter Lake on a tour of the many dormant machines that had puzzled them all their lives.
“What the hell is this?” they asked him of a bell-like dome that sat on top of a working steam engine. “We’ve been trying to figure it out since we were kids. Every once in a while, it rattles like crazy—as if there’s a loose bolt inside—but only now and then. We’ve tried to open it, but, no matter what we do, it doesn’t move. You wouldn’t happen to know what it’s all about, would you?”
“Of course I would,” Peter Lake replied, offended. “You take your average stray dog out in Canarsie, and he could tell you. In fact, it’s so simple that I think I’ll explain it in Filipino.”
“Oh no! Please don’t!” they begged. “You don’t understand what torture it’s been all these years. Suddenly it begins to jingle in the middle of the night, just like a baby calling for its ma, and we don’t know what it wants.”
“Right,” said the other. “And we try and try to take it apart, but it won’t budge. You can’t even make a dent in it. Look, I’ll put it in as honest a fashion as I can. If you don’t tell me what that goddamn thing is, I’m going to commit suicide by striking myself on the head with a clock mallet.”
“Me too,” offered his friend.
They were frozen with expectation.
“This,” Peter Lake said, patting the much abused bell-like piece of metal, “is a perfection tattle.”
Their mouths hung open. What in hell was a perfection tattle?
“Look at this engine,” he said, staring enthusiastically at the huge and graceful piece of machinery under the perfection tattle. “She’s gorgeous, isn’t she, like a young girl come back from a June day at Coney Island. This is called a comely engine. When she approaches a hundred percent efficiency, superheated steam turns inward, and becomes so volatile that it pushes apart two rather heavy tandy pieces (the kind with calabrian underglides) and rises through a secret flue into this chamber here, where it pushes around an eighteen-eighty-three silver dollar at near-musical speeds. I’m ashamed to say that I don’t know why it has to be an eighteen-eighty-three dollar, but that, as I recall, is the custom.”
The two mechanics were speechless. Peter Lake took it for disbelief.
“I’ll prove it if you’d like,” he said, guiding them into a far corner to a set of handles that seemed locked onto the floor.
“We’ve never known what these are, either,” they admitted.
“These? These are the tattle release notchets. Look,” he instructed, turning the handles. “You set the tapered ends at this angle. Oh, I see, it’s eighty-three degrees. That’s why the silver dollar is an eighteen eighty-three—it’s a memory device. And it frees the perfection tattles.”
“Tattles?”
“Sure, there are probably two dozen of them spread about, from the looks of the place. It’s like that with machinery of this sort. You always have to go across the room to find the release for the part you’re working on. When they designed it, they had more in mind than just power in and power out. The whole business is like a giant puzzle. It’s sort of an equation. The pieces are interrelated, as if they were the instruments of an orchestra. To be the conductor,” Peter Lake said with a grin, “you have to know every instrument. And you have to know the music.”
He took them back to the perfection tattle, which he lifted quite easily from its position atop the comely engine. A silver dollar fell out and rolled across the floor with a ringing sound. One of the mechanics ran after it and slammed it down with his foot. He picked it up, examined it, and stared at his friend, goggle-eyed. “Eighteen eighty-three,” he said.
ORDINARILY, IF The Sun had hired a new chief mechanic, he would have had dinner with Harry Penn either at home or at Petipas. That June, however, The Sun was in turmoil as it devoted most of its resources to the seemingly insoluble mystery of the great ship that had anchored in the Hudson and stayed in place ever since, unfathomed by either the general public or the press. Try as they might, none of The Sun’s people could find out anything. A large portion of the staff had been reassigned to this story—to wait at dockside twenty-four hours a day, to hammer at the mayor (who had gone in the middle of the night to visit the ship, and stepped back on the dock doing a little dance), to take aerial photographs, to make infrared profiles, and to attempt to break the stalemate with information from serendipitous sources all around the world. In their frustration at discovering so little, they neglected everyday matters at the paper itself, including the customary welcoming of new employees.
By the time an overworked and exhausted Praeger de Pinto quickly interviewed Peter Lake, Peter Lake had transformed himself into what a good mechanic was supposed to look like, which was very close, in fact, to his appearance in the days he could not quite remember when he divided his time between various oyster houses, workshops, and burglaries. He rehandlebarred his mustache, got a haircut, and took half a dozen showers and baths. Then he bought himself a new linen suit which had an old-fashioned cut that was both pleasing to him and not out of place at The Sun, where Harry Penn and a large number of other geezers dressed in styles with more than a hint of the nineteent
h century. When Peter Lake had been on the bum, the scars on his face had been covered with soot and grease. Now they emerged, although some of the finer lines were already beginning to disappear. If Praeger had looked deep into his eyes, he might have seen that Peter Lake’s soul was caught up in the storms of another place and time. But he didn’t, and Peter Lake’s face telegraphed only that he was a workingman who would always try to do his best. He looked neither like an intellectual, nor an artist, nor a lawyer, nor a banker. He looked, instead, like a man who lays down rails, builds buildings, and tends fires, forges, and machinery. He had strong arms, thick hands, a nonaquiline nose, and a deep voice. Praeger de Pinto liked him at first sight. He had no inkling of his complexity, didn’t recognize him as the apparition of Petipas (nor did Peter Lake remember Praeger), and quickly forgot about him, although he was happy that his mechanics had promised far fewer breakdowns and delays now that this expert had been taken on, at their urging, as their chief—even though he took only apprentice’s shares, because Trumbull, the former chief, was willing to follow Peter Lake but not willing to retire.
Most of the time, Peter Lake stayed with the machinery, for there he was genuinely happy. He spent his free hours in a little rented room that looked upon an endless valley of empty roofs and wooden water tanks, and he quickly became like so many people in New York; that is, comfortable, forgotten, and alone.
Though at the beginning of that summer the perfect June weather always reasserted itself, it was shattered many times by dramatic thunderstorms that swept in from the west. Gray clouds that did not know if they were mountains or snake nests of lightning would suddenly appear and ride over the city on a cushion of rain, wind, and hail. Lightning that coiled and tangled in plum-colored clouds loved to aim for Manhattan’s high spires, loved to strike them with precision, and loved the magnification of the thunder as it rolled down the avenues from Washington Heights to the Battery. Its flashes and booms made every living being into a tenpin, and propelled otherwise imperturbable crowds into doorways and arcades to wait out the storm, necks bent and hearts stopping now and then when a big stroke decided to punish something nearby.
Peter Lake always stopped whatever he was doing to watch a thunderstorm. Sometimes he looked up through the glass plates over The Sun’s machinery hall and watched the rain drumming and the lightning cracking the sky, and sometimes he witnessed the artillery strike from his room, as the wooden tanks in the water tower valley thundered in sympathy. He always felt like a fifth columnist for the wind and rain, hoping that they would be strong enough to flatten the structure of time and make him free. Everyone, he supposed, had his own particular view of the lightning.
Stalking about their suddenly darkened apartment thirty floors above the East River, Martin and Abby weathered one of these storms in primal fright. This was the first time either had seen such a performance and been old enough to appreciate it. Martin remembered a few small thunderstorms, but there is all the difference in the world between a storm ten miles away and one right overhead. Hardesty and Virginia were at work, and Mrs. Solemnis was taking a typically unshakable nap. When the two children couldn’t wake her, they thought that she had been killed by the storm, and they went into the kitchen to peep out the window toward Hell Gate.
After Martin told her that he was sure their parents were dead, Abby cried. In fact, now that Mrs. Solemnis was dead, they might be the only people left in the world. Though they were heartened when they saw a towboat charging through Hell Gate, it then disappeared, and the thunder grew so intense that it nearly broke the windows. “Don’t worry, Abby. I’ll take care of you,” Martin told her as she began to whimper. He then went over in his mind the various steps in cooking eggs. He had just been taught how to light the stove and make breakfast, and that, he reasoned, was a great stroke of luck now that he would have to feed himself and Abby. He was beginning to wrestle with the problem of what to do with Mrs. Solemnis’ body (throw it off the terrace? put it in the refrigerator?) when the storm vanished, the sun came out, and Virginia called to ask how they were.
Time for them was much as it was for Peter Lake. He and they were not as sure of its workings as were those who had been deceived by clocks. Though people readily understood that a line was imaginary, and a point, too, they were true believers in seconds. Abby and Martin rested easily in the lateral infinities of timelessness, and lived in the Marrattas’ apartment high over Yorkville like two young birds in an aerie.
Their capabilities were frequently surprising. For example, Hardesty and Virginia were delighted that their children apparently had a rich fantasy life. They had hundreds of invisible friends with names like “Fat Woman and Baldy,” “The Dog People,” “Lonely Dorian,” “Snake Lady,” “Underwear Man,” “The High Plant People,” “The Low Plant People,” “The Smoke People,” “Alfonse and Hoola,” “Screecher and Tiptoes,” “Crazy Ellen,” “The Boxer,” “Romeo,” “The Garlic Boys,” etc. The list was long, leading their parents to worry that (despite the fact that neither child had ever seen a television) their imaginations were overly fragmented, until, one night at dinner they overheard a peculiar conversation:
“Catwoman from the moon was crying today,” Martin told Abby, matter-of-factly. “The cat Bonomo was turning backward somersaults. I think it doesn’t feel well.”
“Who?” asked Abby, frazzled after a nap that had gone on too long and taken her further than usual into the land of Morpheus and Belinda—any Marratta arising from a nap was truly wicked.
“Catwoman from the moon,” said Martin, annoyed that he had to repeat himself.
“Who?”
“Catwoman from the moon! Catwoman from the moon!” Martin screamed in five-year-old arrogance, freezing Hardesty’s fork between plate and mouth. “You know, fourteen down and seven over.”
Only then did Hardesty and Virginia realize that the invisible companions were real, the inhabitants of a huge high-rise visible from the children’s room, whom they had named according to observed idiosyncrasies and possessions. They had pegged almost a thousand people and animals, and were familiar with them on almost a day-to-day basis. Virginia was not surprised, for she had learned, early on, ten or twenty thousand of Mrs. Gamely’s more common words so that she might know what was happening if Mrs. Gamely were to say, for example: “Marry! Le Blonde and his men are here, asking the village to divvy its piscaries among diglots holus-bolus.” Virginia had been able to read the clouds so as to predict the weather days in advance, like a farmer, having grown up with land and sky her constant companions. In Yorkville there were just as many signs to read, though they seemed far less graceful than the raw and unspoiled nature of the Coheeries.
But her children’s skills were as real as hers had been. And her children were daring, too. She remembered with a chill how close she had come on many occasions to a horrible death—taunting an enraged timber rattler; or feeding an itinerant black bear that was ten times her weight, putting berries in its mouth as if it were a raccoon, scolding it, and leading it around like a dog for half an hour or more in a meadow where, Mrs. Gamely had assumed, nothing could hurt her; climbing to the summit of the ice blocks in the icehouse; and playing with the shotgun while her mother was out delivering pies. Her children were safe from such things. Or so she thought, until one day when Abby appeared on the balcony wall, walking in time to a waltz that was playing on the phonograph, unmoved by the three-hundred-foot drop.
Many mothers might have screamed and dashed out to snatch the child from the railing, but Virginia remained cool. The first thing that occurred to her was that living where they did her children were like cliff dwellers, and having known no other life, they were probably gifted, in much the same way as squirrels or mountain goats, with abilities unhindered by fear. She determined to suppress her own fear in favor of Abby’s fearlessness, to put her arms around her gently, and to waltz her off the wall. She did, and she remained forever an admirer of her daughter’s instinctual grace.
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nbsp; Walking on the balcony rails was an exceptional episode in the children’s otherwise tranquil lives. Their powerlessness, innocence, and imagination fused to enable them to turn time inside out, travel on the wind, and enter the souls of animals. That they thought the city was the whole of the universe and its center, put them, in compensatory fashion, close to the borders of the infinite and the unexplained, since whatever was beyond the known realms of existence was therefore no farther than Fort Lee, New Jersey, or Yonkers. They had a better grasp of cosmology than the fast-talking physicists, because the physicists and their predecessors had been forced to see the universe with the tools at hand, and so devise models that were like thimbles tasked to hold the open sky, whereas the children had skipped over the obstructions of doubt and fear, and gone directly to the heart of the matter. They were still close enough to having been born to remember in their deep dreams the perfect stillness of all things. They did not doubt that, by believing, they could rise and travel through the air, leaving at their feet a blurry trail of light like a long white gown.
They accepted from Virginia, as she had accepted from Mrs. Gamely long before, an explanation of the white curtain that sometimes walled in the city.
“It is nothing and everything,” she had said to them during one of the storms, as they lay in their beds listening to it howl. “There is no time in it, but only islands of time. It moves within itself in currents and contradictions, and if you get too close, it will take you, like a huge wave that sweeps someone off a rock. It swirls around the city in uneven cusps, sometimes dropping down like a tornado to spirit people away or deposit them here, sometimes opening white roads from the city, and sometimes resting out at sea while connections are made with other places. It is a benevolent storm, a place of refuge, the neutral flow in which we float. We wonder if there is anything beyond it, and we think that perhaps there is.”
“Why?” Martin asked from within the covers.