Love Among the Particles

by Norman Lock

  “How her subconscious must storm! The upheaval and unreason! A lava of thought—hot and unpent. Raw—I would like, Gordon, to be, for once, raw.”

  “How old are you now?”

  “Fifty.”

  “And a proper grammarian—yes?”

  “I hope I am.”

  “You do not, Norman, have it in you to be raw.”

  “Still, I should like to know this girl’s mind.”

  “Take the doctor’s serum.”

  “I’m afraid.”

  “You want to know her dreams. You came here to acquire new images. You want to be raw. Take the serum! Griffin calls it ‘dream-walking’ by the way. It will do you good to walk out into another’s dream.”

  “And yet …”

  “What?”

  “This is all a game.”

  “And is it not all of it, Norman, a game?”

  “One-hundred, ninety-nine, ninety-eight, ninety-seven, ninety-six, ninety-five, ninety-four, ninety-three, ninety-two, ninety-one, ninety, eighty-nine, eight-seven, ninety, eighty-nine, eighty-eight, eighty—”

  After injecting me with serum, Dr. Griffin had instructed me to count backward from one hundred. Catherine was asleep in the bed next to mine. The room was dark except for the sickly light of the instruments. I closed my eyes and listened to myself counting in the dark. The fluorescent tubes hummed. An instrument pinged like the sonar in every submarine movie I have ever seen—that climactic moment when the crew holds its breath on the sea bottom, hoping to evade the destroyer and its depth charges. Griffin and his assistant whispered together.

  I counted: “Eighty-eight, eighty, seventy-nine, seventy-seven, seventy-seven …”

  Ping Ping Ping.

  Catherine opened her eyes and left the room. I followed—past Griffin and his assistant, who continued to whisper together in the greenish light. The door to the hallway closed silently behind us. We moved through the murky channel of the corridor toward the recreation room.

  Ping Pong Ping Pong Ping.

  Mr. Stanislaw showed me his heart shaped like a Ping-Pong paddle. I could see the damage death had done it.

  “I’m sorry, Stosh,” I said. “I cannot play with you.”

  He bowed his head and wept.

  Catherine was far away now, on the river that was salt with Mr. Stanislaw’s tears.

  “Catherine!” I called, but my voice was drowned in the first explosion.

  A dog barked.

  I started to run. My feet sank a little into the sand, lifting clouds of silt.

  “Catherine!”

  The river entered the sea; and in the pinging of the sonar, I forgot Catherine. The Destroyer covered me with his shadow; his depth charges rained down on me. Inside the submarine, Griffin made love to Myra, who slept—her white dress torn and spotted with blood. A depth charge exploded, and greenish water flooded the room. I floated grotesquely above the sleeping girl, my mouth clamped to her breast, watched by Griffin through a wire-mesh window.

  It’s been in the oven too long!

  Pulling at her restraints, Catherine was screaming in terror under me.

  “She would have bitten through her wrists to wake and have me off of her!”

  I shivered with cold. My clothes were wet.

  “You slept the sleep of reason,” said Gordon, just returned from Terre Haute. “Perhaps, Norman, you are not equal to the game.”

  I wished now that it were finished.

  “It can end only in death,” said Gordon, reading my mind. “Ask Stosh. By the way, did the submarine have a name?”

  “Monte Cristo.”

  “I don’t understand,” Myra tells me.

  “I was telling you a story.”

  “Not a word.”

  Her look is reproachful—perhaps because of my fascination with Lulu. (I cannot admit even to myself a desire for Catherine!) Myra goes to the dresser. She looks in the mirror. I stand behind her, put my arms around her, and fondle her breasts.

  “Stop it; it hurts!”

  She opens her blouse and shows me the teeth marks.

  I look at them in the mirror. I look and look.

  Myra falls asleep.

  Love in the Steam Age

  For Lee Chapman

  1.

  I go to the train shed as often as I can find the time. With women whose ardor for modern industrial processes is—I hope—the equal of my own. A woman’s frank enjoyment of them is the criterion by which I judge her—the “glass slipper” ensuring our compatibility. And nowhere are industrial processes better displayed than here. The train shed is the quintessence of the age and its sublime expression. I adore the sinuous iron columns, the iron tracery of its vault. I am moved almost to tears by the sooty cloud of accumulated arrivals and departures, nuzzling the mullioned windows high above the platform. I take the undeviating parallelism of its shining tracks as an example, an exhortation, and a moral imperative.

  Ernestine and I ought to have gotten on like a pair of locomotives and would have if she had not, in exasperation, railed against the train shed: how bored she was by our daily visits there.

  “I’m bored with the train shed!” she whined as I dabbed at her cheek with my handkerchief to rid it of a smudge.

  I stopped in mid-dab, horrified by her apostasy.

  “It is the cathedral and citadel of civilization!” I cried.

  “Wilma’s friend takes her to the Botanical Garden.”

  “The Botanical Garden!” I sputtered in harmony with a departing express. “People go to the Botanical Garden in order to worship unchecked exuberance,” I explained. “They are unsound. They hang landscapes of Provence on their parlor walls and dream of hayricks and threshing parties.”

  Natural forms are tolerable in iron and plaster—not in nature, where they wither irresistibly toward death.

  “Wilma gets kissed among the delphinium,” Ernestine replied stubbornly, “and eats ice cream.” I cannot swear to you that it was Ernestine, who preferred tenderness and ice cream in the Botanical Garden to civilization’s cathedral and citadel; it may have been Caroline, or even Rebecca. I recall Rebecca as a young woman with a tendency to anachronism and friends among the Pre-Raphaelites.

  I had broken off at once with Ernestine-Caroline-Rebecca. I had broken off, as well, with Pauline and Sarah and any number of other desirable women who seemed, at first, to be in sympathy with steam and its pent-up ambition to transform the world but, in the end, proved frivolous.

  Helen, however, filled me with equal parts of desire and optimism.

  “Don’t you love the steam-carrousel!” she said as I helped her down from a handsomely gilded horse. “It is tireless in its pursuit of pleasure—a pleasure, I might add, which is all the more piquant for its circularity.”

  “Would you care to examine the train shed with me tomorrow?” I asked.

  “Delighted!” she replied, detaining my hand in hers a moment longer than was necessary.

  2.

  While I could not offer Helen an ice cream because of the particles of soot, which were general under the great vault, I might kiss her, discreetly, during an escape of steam from a locomotive. I might even, should I have the audacity, press my hand against her bosom.

  “Girls appreciate a bit of amour,” Willard had said when I mentioned my high hopes for Helen. Willard was experienced in matters of the heart, having spent a year in Paris at an impressionable age. “They want fondling—lets them know they have the power to inflame a man. The face to launch a thousand ships—hey? That was a Helen, too, though one of the ancient world.”

  A thousand steamships! I thought.

  “Do you feel as I do?” I ask Helen, having entered the present, where I shall remain. “I mean now, at this moment in time, standing at what is—for me—the epicenter of our age?”

  I have brought her to the center of the train shed—the heroic bronze Prometheus making man a gift of steam—where innumerable vectors of purpose, excitement, and energy converge
. Passengers bustle toward their embarkation, their expressions commingling solemnity and exultation; the newly arrived stride toward one of the four magnificent entrances leading to the city beyond; stalwart men in smocks, carrying toolboxes, thread their way through the crowd; and the nobility of the age—the engineers and trainmen, whose authority is unchallenged throughout the empire of tracks and right-of-ways—pass, indifferent to our admiration. I would have fallen down in a faint if I had not taken hold of Helen’s arm. She interpreted my having done so as an access of affection and smiled up at me. (She is a head shorter than I, who am not tall; neither am I short. I am a man of medium height, build, and intelligence—neither a nullity nor a paragon; but one who accommodates at all points the optimum dimensions of his time.)

  She smiles up at me and says, “Yes, it is wonderful.”

  I want her to expand on the wonder that she feels, but refrain from importuning her for more. I recall Willard’s admonition: “Your enthusiasm for steam is too great, perhaps, for most women. Temper it.”

  I temper it, contenting myself with an assertion impossible to prove: “What seems to us here anarchic, amid the moving crowd, is not so when seen from there.” I point to the smutted windows transecting the sky above us—through them to a coign of vantage occupied by the Architect of All Things. (Yes, I admit to a strain of belief. Although I am sound—a man of scientific bent—there is, I believe, a ghost in the machine impervious to analysis.) “From there, the thousand trajectories inscribed in this perfect space are as intelligible as the grand concourse of the stars.” Having her here, I am quite carried away.

  “I think so, too,” Helen replies charmingly.

  Suddenly, a stilled locomotive succumbs to an internal pressure in its boiler, sighs operatically, and emits a white vapor that engulfs us. I seize the moment and, with unaccustomed ardor, press Helen to me. She does not protest.

  “Shall we have an espresso?” I ask, picking up my hat, which fell during the embrace.

  “Oh, yes—let’s!” she replies, straightening hers, which, in its design, alludes to modern industrial forms rather than avian ones.

  Arm in arm, we are walking toward the shed’s western entrance (decorated with copper repossé panels depicting the Stations of the Railway in heroic tableaux) when we are arrested by a tremendous shout, resonant in the shed’s parabolic vault. Unless you are a contemporary, you cannot know the esteem in which the director of railroads is held. For it is no other than he, who has stepped from a private car onto the platform, to be surrounded instantly by an adoring mob.

  “Look!” I shout to Helen. “The director!”

  He walks beneath a triumphal arch of red long-stemmed oilers (more fitting than roses!) produced by the mechanics.

  “Standing at attention, with right arms upraised, they seem to form the letter W,” she says.

  The director’s bearing is magisterial; his self-possession, perfect. He is neither humble nor haughty; neither aristocratic nor common. He bears our homage as priests do, understanding that it is not to them the faithful sing hosannas, but to their God.

  For a second time, I might have fainted.

  “I shall never forget this day!” I tell Helen.

  She presses my hand frankly to her bosom. I take her hand and kiss it—the dainty gloved fingers one by one.

  With his retinue of Great Men (though none so great as he!), the director sweeps across the marbled floor, draws to a stop beside the bronze Prometheus, and, stiffening, permits himself to be immortalized in tintype. His image taken, he accepts a key to the city, slices with a gold-plated trowel a track of cake, and doffs his silk hat to the disciples of steam. The ceremony at an end, the director boards his private train in a blizzard of tickets, timetables, and—sown by the mechanics—rubber gaskets. He departs for a city farther up the line—there, to inaugurate yet another epic project in this, the Age of Steam.

  I look at Helen—at her eyes—and note with satisfaction that, like mine, they are brimming with tears.

  3.

  “I’m in love with Helen,” I say, setting down my spoon, “and she—I believe—with me.”

  “You tempered your enthusiasm, then,” Willard remarks.

  “There was no need,” I reply. “Hers, too, verges on intemperance.”

  “The Queen of Steam.”

  I solemnly nod.

  “A fit consort for the age’s most fervent adherent,” he states with inoffensive irony as a waiter removes my plate.

  Willard unhooks his wire rims, which have steamed over during his attack upon a plate of mussels, and polishes them on the tablecloth’s hem. “Will you prosecute the relationship to its ultimate?”

  “You mean will I marry her?”

  “I mean, my honorable friend, will you sleep with her?”

  “I dream of it!”

  “For an age of unrelenting actualization, we spend entirely too much time in dreaming. It is the reason so many men go abroad, I think. Or mad.”

  I sigh; for I, too, have done both on occasion.

  “If I were you, I’d sleep with Helen at the earliest opportunity,” Willard concludes. “If you insist on discretion, my apartment is at your disposal. I am leaving for Peru in the morning to paint Machu Picchu.”

  As if to punctuate the news of his departure, a distant blast of dynamite rattles the restaurant’s window and causes the silverware on the table to chime.

  “What do they hope to accomplish!” I cry.

  Willard presses his napkin to his lips and does not answer, his attention riveted by a pair of black wings—or so the empty mussel shell appears to me, who am not, as a rule, artistic.

  4.

  I send Helen a pneumatiqué inviting her to accompany me to the Museum of Steam. It will be a supreme test of her affection, I tell myself as I ride the moving pavement north to that part of the city where the dynamos are in perpetual motion. The Museum of Steam is seldom visited even by aficionados. Admittedly, the entertainment to be found there is not the liveliest, especially as the steam on display is dead.

  Helen is waiting on the steps outside the museum as I dismount. I tip my hat. She lifts her veil and gives me her cheek to kiss. I kiss it and, taking her arm, lead her through an iron door ornamented by rivets.

  The door shuts behind us, and a folding fan of light leaves the floor in darkness. The floor, like the vestibule’s walls and ceiling, is clad in iron. Our shoes ring upon it as we walk to the counter. I ring a bell; and after a moment, a man appears from out the shadows of an adjoining room. He sketches a gesture of welcome in our vicinity and indicates that we should sign the register. We do, and I note that ours are the solitary names inscribed on its yellowing page. Stooped and shuffling, he precedes us into the next room, kept by chance or design in a kind of twilight altogether agreeable to my amorous mood.

  He looks to be an old man, though his age may be an illusion created by the dusky light and the vapidity of the displays. Certainly, the skin of his masklike face is minutely lined. His head is hairless—even the eyebrows gone, sacrificed, perhaps, to steam in a livelier form than that captive in the museum he tends. His voice is dry, seeming to issue from an aridity that, like sand, draws all moisture into itself. The dry voice cracks during its recitation as he guides us among the exhibits with the slow and unerring movements of a somnambulist:

  “Steam trapped during an eruption of Krakatau.

  “Steam abducted from a bathhouse in Istanbul during the Young Turks’ uprising of 1908.

  “Steam that escaped a rooming house on Cliveden Street, subsequently mangling passersby until it was captured by a resourceful tobacconist in a half-empty jar of Troost Special Cavendish.

  “Steam reputed to have heated the private apartments of Gordon Lishkowitz while he composed his ‘Ode on Penury.’

  “Steam that rose, unbidden, through a heat register, with indecent intent with regard to a young woman’s knickers.

  “Steam that collected on the bathroom mirror of the notorio
us Mr. Craig, moments before his dispatching of his mistress with a cutthroat razor.

  “Steam arrested, ‘in open defiance,’ during a railroad workers’ strike in Aberdeen.

  “Steam seized in a shipment of noodles during the British embargo of Nanking.

  “Steam, whose condensation on the lid of a tureen containing a fatal dose of belladonna survived a husband’s expiration and his wife’s inaugural moments as a widow. Her widowhood was cut short by the blade of the guillotine.”

  I am, as always, fascinated by the exhibits and press a bill into the cicerone’s dry hand in gratitude for his discipleship to civilization’s motive power. The museum is not, as Ernestine remarked after having been put to the test, “dull as paint.” She and all those others whom I have squired up and down its aisles missed the point: The excitement does not lie in the object (ostensibly an empty bell jar with legend penned in an antique hand), but in the anecdote.

  The attendant gives me back the bill, saying that he cannot accept gratuities. I am surprised to see that it is a Peruvian soles de oro. How, I wonder, did it happen to come into my possession? I think of Willard; but despite his being in Peru, there is no way to account for a soles de oro having come to me—even if pocketed, inadvertently, while I was in his apartment. To my knowledge, Willard has never before been in Peru, nor has he yet returned from there.

  My train of thought is derailed by an explosion muffled by the museum walls. Helen and I hurry outside in time to see a mounted policeman charge by. “They’ve blown up the steam factory!” he shouts.

  Helen trembles—in fear, or excitement.

  The museum door opens behind us. Our guide stands framed in darkness, his spectacles flaring with late-afternoon sun. Appalled, I seem to see in their twin fires the catastrophe to come. He rubs his hands together and dances—a schottische without partners, round a cast-iron column.

  “How very light on his feet he is!” Helen says admiringly.

  5.

  Helen surprises me with tickets for a performance of the Empire Steam Calliope. Can you guess at my elation when the cab stops beneath the porte cochere of the Hall of Science? Perhaps not. Only one who, like me, has fallen in love in the Age of Steam and who is about to hear an epithalamium on that love, produced by one of the age’s foremost musical interpreters, can guess at my joy.