Love Among the Particles

by Norman Lock

  “How did you manage it?” I ask as we take our seats. “The performance has been sold out for months!”

  She smiles at me, a smile both charming and inscrutable. I am disquieted, my elation eclipsed, as if a pool’s unexpected depths were revealed suddenly by a cloud flying over the face of the sun.

  “I hear the machine is quite marvelous!” she says; and I am once again restored to myself and to my desire for her.

  “Yes!” I say. “I was disappointed when I could not get tickets.”

  The lights are lowered, and the evening passes as in a dream. M. Laval achieves on the calliope, whose operation he flawlessly supervises, an ebullition I would not believe possible. The anxiety incited in me by the anarchists and by Helen’s ambiguous smile vanishes.

  Rapt, I take her hand; insinuating my fingers into the glove, I touch her palm with its significations and mysteries. While the allegretto bubbles and whistles like an exultant teakettle, I am seized by a perfection of form in which my inner life and all that is external to it compose a kind of crystal in the darkness—a darkness whose only relief is the glinting of the calliope’s chromium pipes—and all the richer because of it. The music burbles, chirps, and hisses, accompanied by the clanging of cast-iron radiators. The machine gallops to a mad climax, its whirring gears a blur, then, suddenly, ceases. The last mechanical warble wobbles and falls silent. M. Laval’s arm drops in exhaustion. The concert ends. And before its recessional’s decay among the wavering flames of returning gaslight, Helen and I are rushing in a cab pell-mell for Willard’s apartment, beneath the city’s myriad of steam pipes and the black, luxurious night.

  6.

  We undress behind the drawn shade of Willard’s bedroom window—our clothing seeming to melt from each other in the heat of our gaze. Naked, we sit in Willard’s companionable steam cabinets until our bodies are bathed in desire’s rich liqueur, as flammable and intoxicating as brandy. “Blood on the boil,” we unyoke our necks from the cabinet lids and fall into each other’s arms. Feeling like a live steam pipe about to burst, I pull her onto the bed. She slips from my embrace, landing on the floor. I grapple her up in my two hands and, body pent with steam from the cabinet, allow my piston to range to its maximum ambit, eliciting from her shuddering frame terrific screams. We are both of us soon spent. We lie wordlessly, looking at the ceiling, on which trapezes of dust swing in the warm convection currents engendered by the radiator, intimate altar of the age.

  I rise to find a cigarette and trip over a large spool of wire, which has rolled out from under the bed.

  “What’s this?” I say, surprised, sending with my foot the spool across the floor.

  “Wire,” says Helen.

  “I wonder what Willard wants with wire?”

  Helen shrugs and, in shrugging, lets slip the sheet that has demurely hidden her breasts. I look at them and feel again the complicated pneumatic apparatus start up in me. She smiles, and I care not at all that it is ambiguous. I rush at her.

  Restored once more to reason and our clothes, we discover one of Willard’s inartistic daubs.

  “He paints beautifully!” Helen says, turning from it to a mirror in order to arrange her hair.

  “It’s incomprehensible!” The sight of one of Willard’s painted hodgepodges never fails to infuriate me.

  “It is absolutely new!” she exclaims, attending now to her hat.

  “I don’t see anything in it!” I grumble.

  “You must learn to see beneath seeming.”

  “I am no disciple of Swedenborg,” I say, answering coldly what seems a rebuke.

  She laughs gaily and pushes a last long pin through her hat.

  “Shall we go visit the train shed, then?” she asks, taking my arm with an affectionate smile.

  7.

  In next morning’s mail, I receive a note from Willard:The “excitement” persists in Peru, where I am now

  readying myself for a day of pleasure. Do hope you

  are finding in my rooms reason to be glad. Shall be

  away for another month, or two.

  The ruins are bracing!

  W

  The postmark, smudged, appears to be that of Lima’s. In the envelope is a halftone reproduction purporting to show a disastrous rock slide on the Andean Railroad. I examine the envelope, noting the puckered flap. It has the look, I think, of an envelope that has been steamed open inexpertly. But for what purpose and to what end?

  I put the letter in a drawer and write Helen a pneumatiqué, inviting her to see the launch this afternoon of a steam-powered sky ship at the military parade grounds. Then I go out to buy a new hat, having left mine at the Hall of Science or in the cab during the ride to Willard’s apartment.

  When I return to my rooms, a pneumatiqué is waiting for me. I unscrew the lid and take out the furled paper. I am seized by horror as I read:If you wish to see Helen again, come to 5428 Pearl

  Street, 2nd floor, at 3 o’clock this afternoon. Deviate

  from these instructions, or notify the police, or

  attempt to foil our design, have not the slightest

  doubt that we will kill her.

  The message is unsigned.

  8.

  I take an omnibus to Pearl Street, hurry on foot past pawnshops, wholesale groceries, and dealers in spurious antiquities to No. 5428. I climb a half-lit staircase to the second floor and find myself in a Turkish bath. A mute attendant gives me a towel and a key to a locker.

  The conspirators sit cloaked in steam, which, from time to time, they incite with dippers of water ladled onto rocks. The men, if men they all are, are all but invisible to me.

  “What have you done to Helen?” I demand.

  A hand appears from out of a cloud and bids me sit. I sit on a stone step and ask again—this time with less force because of the unpleasantness in my chest as the hot, moist air invades my lungs.

  “She is well,” an invisible provocateur answers. “For the moment.”

  “Why have you taken her?”

  My lungs burn with every breath.

  “As surety,” he replies. “That you will do what we ask.”

  “And what is that?”

  “Assassinate the director of railroads.”

  That I, proponent of an age whose chief exponent is he, the director of railroads, should be asked to murder—no, it is too fantastical, too terrible a thought even to entertain! My eyes shut of their own accord; and I become aware of the earth swinging through space, untethered to any sun.

  “Does she mean so little to you, then?” A different voice issues from out the steam—one I seem nearly to recognize.

  I will myself to consciousness, and the stinging blackness is dispelled. “The director of railroads is—”

  “An arrogant autocrat!”

  “What is it you anarchists want!” Incensed, I rise and would rush at them, if I were not prevented by a deliberate venting of steam.

  The voice of a third saboteur speaks to me now in the moist obscurity: “We want different things. Some believe the world must be rid of steam and its engines in order to make way for the new. Others look back fondly on the naïve technologies of wind and water. We in this room take pleasure in the destruction of forms. We view ourselves not as anarchists but as artists laboring to bring into existence a new aesthetic. I am a composer, but no score or orchestra can accommodate the music I hear inside my head. We seek to intervene in the world, for only the world is large enough to sustain our inventions.”

  “I do not understand art or artists,” I say. “And I do not see what any of this has to do with the director of railroads.”

  “By killing him, we undermine one of the forms by which our age is constituted. Lines of powerful influence pass through his hands.”

  “What proof is there that Helen is in yours?” I ask.

  A satchel appears from the vapor. I open it and take out a ring, which I remember Helen having worn.

  “We are prepared to present you with th
e finger next.”

  “I must think!” I tell them.

  “By all means,” the voice says indulgently. “But if the director does not die tomorrow when he returns to announce an expansion of rail service, Helen will.”

  9.

  I leave the steam room in confusion. Retrieving my clothes from the locker, I find a loaded pistol, which, after a moment’s hesitation, I pocket.

  On the stairs, I pass someone whose hat and coat conceal any hint of identify. The ruffian forces a handbill on me. Outside on the pavement, I examine it: Except for the letter M typeset in a crude variant of the Caslon family, the sheet is empty.

  A shadow slips down the street, blackening it as if with sudden rain. It bends sharply and flies up the front of the dye works before vanishing to an accompaniment of a dozen whirring propellers. I look up to see the sky ship pass on its way to the military parade grounds.

  Returning home, I find a pneumatiqué waiting for me. I unscrew the lid, tip the brass cylinder, and a finger falls into my hand. In its slenderness and in the shapeliness of the lacquered nail, I see a resemblance to Helen’s.

  That night, I dream I am again in the Turkish bath. I am attracted by the sound of something scratching at the window. The window is obscured by thick steam. I wipe it clean with a towel, and there on the ledge outside is the finger—its red-polished nail scratching at the glass as if wanting to be let in. I run out the door of the steam room, only to find myself on the wing of the great sky ship—its propellers shredding the blue air to ribbons.

  10.

  In the morning paper, I read an account of the disaster. According to witnesses, a swarm of birds flew into the path of the sky ship, causing it to crash. “They sounded like bagpipes,” one witness said. “An infernal racket, though music to some.” The birds flew in a formation that reminded witnesses of the letter M. When retrieved from the wreck, they proved to be not birds but birdlike machines constructed of an unknown material. “Seen up close, they resemble notes—quavers and semiquavers,” a passing musicologist remarked. Inside each is a motor of cunning workmanship, fashioned of a metal so far resistant to analysis. How the motor works, what force propels it, and how the flying objects were controlled with such precision remain a mystery.

  I take the crumpled handbill from my pocket and, ironing it against the table with my hand, regard the letter imprinted there. Turning the paper round, the letter form recomposes itself into a W.

  11.

  The pistol is heavy in my pocket. In spite of myself, I take pleasure in its weight and the coolness of the metal against my palm. Although it is Saturday, the train shed is crowded with those who have come to see the director of railroads dedicate the new track. Many have also come to show their detestation for the anarchists, suspected of having authored the recent disaster.

  At noon, the band blares our city’s anthem into the finely sooted air: “Plunge, Ye Mighty Pistons, Plunge!” A gaily decked train enters the shed; its iron wheels slow, lock, screech, and stop. The locomotive sighs and is enfolded by an immense white plume of steam escaped from its boiler. The director steps from the train’s solitary car. He doffs his hat to the crowd. The crowd answers with wild huzzahs, which echo in the vaulted iron heaven of the terminus.

  As the crowd surges forward to greet him, I move with it. The director climbs a ladder to a catwalk above the platform. There, he unbuttons his coat, strikes a republican attitude, and prepares to speak. Unnoticed, I take aim and fire. Petals of blood open on his white shirtfront. He stands a moment, looking at his boots, and then falls forward over the railing into the horrified crowd.

  12.

  My escape was ingenious, involving at its several stages a handcar, hot-air balloon, gondola, and llama. Steam was notably absent during my headlong flight, as one would expect on a route plotted by conspirators pledged against it. When I arrived in Peru, I half-expected Willard to be waiting for me; but he was not. Since then, I have failed to locate him or, indeed, to discover whether he has ever been in the country. Those who might reasonably be expected to have met him during his sojourn here claim never to have heard the name; nor do they betray the least recognition when I show them his photograph. I begin to doubt that Willard has ever been in Peru, although I would not be surprised if, turning a corner on a crowded Lima street or entering a peña, I should come face-to-face with my dear friend.

  Helen, too, has vanished. I do not know whether she lives or not—I, who purchased her release at the cost of infamy and exile. The consequences of my crime (for crime it is) are all that the conspirators can desire. The Age of Steam is at an end—at least in the nation that was its chief glory; I gave it its quietus. Even in Peru, one hears the most extraordinary news from home: the city in darkness, its public squares broken by plows, streets and boulevards become cattle paths, the Botanical Garden plundered, and the train tracks left to rust.

  In Lima, I have made a new life. The steam here is of the first intensity, perhaps because of the purity of the water, or maybe it is the garua—the strange mist that falls upon the town from May to October. With several other men of vision, I am building a train shed. When it is finished, the Peruvian Age of Steam will begin in earnest, with myself as architect, evangelist, and prime minister. Already, I have chosen a woman of unusual beauty as consort. Her name is Inez. She believes, like me, that love in an age of steam is incomparable. Were I pardoned, I would not return to the city of my birth—not now that the fires are all but extinguished and the trains have stopped. What is the conspirators’ art next to the achievements of industry? What have the anarchists wrought to rival what I—the new Prometheus—plan to bestow?

  Ravished by Death

  After Alberto Casella

  Corrado tightens his gloved hands on the wheel as the Voison leans toward the escarpment that falls precipitously to the ocean. A man who does not allow fear in himself, he knows that if he should let his eyes leave the road for an instant to regard his face in the mirror, he will see something resembling it. A disquiet. Later, at the villa, as he studies with the secret enjoyment of a connoisseur the light caught in the depths of his whiskey, he recalls the sensation in the nearly uncontrollable automobile, when gravity seemed in adjournment and the earth careless of its burden. It was not fear—he tells himself—but an emotion like fear, as if he were possessed suddenly by love. And by love, he means the tender prelude to desire—the exquisite regard he has for Grazia, whose body he cannot imagine abandoned to himself or any other lover. By an effort of his seigniorial will, Corrado has refused the insinuations of carnality, quelled the blood’s riot, and made of his finely strung nerves an instrument to hymn her ethereal beauty.

  He is unhappy.

  He has been visiting a brothel with a regularity that threatens to become habitual. Not a house favored by those of his class, but an ancient hotel near the wharves, in whose rooms the transient and the disreputable lie down by the half hour. He wonders whether he will be able to abjure the rough pleasure he takes there, in a bed doused with scent, beneath which he searches, with his finely shaped Roman nose, for the odor of other men’s sweat.

  He turns to Baron Cesarea and attempts to describe again the shadow that appeared out of nothing as the motorcar swung into the final turning in the road before the villa’s gates: “It was like smoke. Black. Like soot. But odorless and tasted—if of anything—of almonds. It was like oil, although it was not at all oily. It clung to the road and to the Voison and to us—especially to Grazia. I did not see it cover her; nevertheless, I know that it did. I saw nothing. It covered us only a moment. The time it took for the Voison to slip into the turning and for me to feel the outer tires lift up, then fall. For Father’s Ferrari, behind us, to send the flower cart flying into the ditch. It tasted and smelled of almond paste, if of anything at all—the shadow, although it was something more than a shadow. It enveloped us. I could do nothing. I wanted to do nothing. I felt the tires lift, then fall back down onto the road. It could not have been any m
ore than a few seconds. I felt cold—a damp chill. It was more mist than shadow, if a mist could be black.”

  “It was nothing,” says the baron. “Merely the uncertain hour between the evening and the coming of night. It was a trick of light. I tell you it was nothing.”

  “None of us was hurt in the least. Not even the man on the flower cart, although he flew through the air and landed in the road. His eyes were shut—we thought he must be dead. But he opened them after a moment, and we saw that he wasn’t in the least hurt. Not even his mule. Father gave him money.”

  “The duke is always gracious.” The baron stares into his whiskey’s depths.

  He puts out his hand to steady himself against one of the marble columns that decorate the villa’s reception room. The whiskey slips up the side of his glass but does not spill.

  Corrado cocks his head as if hearing a tragic overture in the distance.

  “It was nothing,” says the baron, whose face has paled. “Suddenly, I felt as if the earth had swung free of its orbit. I seemed to hear in the thaw of the whiskey’s ice the foundation give way.”

  The baron said this, or perhaps not. Perhaps it was Corrado, who thought it, mistaking the thought for the baron’s voice. Or perhaps another spoke in the sepulchral space of the Villa Felicitá. Death, whose voice entered the room through the French window, ajar in the warm October evening, saying, Suddenly, you felt as if the earth had swung free of its orbit. You seemed to hear in the thaw of your whiskey’s ice the foundation give way.

  Corrado is listening intently, his eyes searching a shadow that might have been cast by one of the moon’s mountains as readily as an Etruscan vase.

  “Grazia is in the music room,” the baron says. “She plays beautifully.”

  “Yes!” Corrado agrees; for it was music that he heard while Cesarea put out his hand—piano music and, at the threshold of audition, the soft crackle of ice as it suffered annihilation in the baron’s glass. Those and nothing else.