by Norman Lock
Huck whistled in admiration. “I never knowed you to be so eloquent, Jim!”
“I’m free now,” said Jim. He said it simply, but I heard the pleasure he took in saying it. A man free of mythic obligations. A man free of lies.
He tossed his cigar into the invisible river. We listened to its quick hiss.
“I’m glad to be off the river,” said Jim. “I’d like to see what the night has in store for me.”
“I would like a beer, a bath, and a woman,” said Huck, whose thoughts were now centered on Dayton and the actualization of his grown-up desires.
“I would like one of these curious two-wheeled contraptions,” said Jim.
“You can have mine. I can always get another; bicycles are easily gotten in Dayton.”
Jim mounted the machine and, in an instant, was sailing down the levee into obscurity—that of a man savoring his release from fame.
You ask skeptically, How, since he had never before ridden a bicycle?
I reply, Some of his mythic life must have clung to him still.
I watched the bicycle disappear and then the lamp, like a firefly extinguished by the dark.
4.
Wilbur and Orville walked to the river, turned, and walked back to town. Deep in thought, they did not see Huck pass on his way to the Dayton Arms Hotel, Jim and his bicycle vanish down the levee, or the Mississippi turn back into the ordinary Great Miami River, which has never, to my knowledge, figured in myth.
“The brothers are thinking,” I said to the weeping willow whose long whips brushed my face. “It is somehow important that they do.”
A night bird shook itself free of the branches.
I remembered Stella’s hair—how, after I had unpinned it, she would shake it down over her lovely white shoulders.
5.
A woman stepped from an alley and accosted me: “Do you know Wilbur and Orville Wright?”
“In Dayton who does not?” I replied truthfully.
She laid a gloved hand on my sleeve. I lit a match to see her better and saw that she was beautiful.
“I’m a stranger in town,” she said. “My name is Mata Hari.”
I apologized for the universal murk.
“Oh, I adore the dark! One can move about so freely.”
“Yes,” I said, and thought of Stella, who waited anxiously for me.
“I want to speak to them.”
“Them?”
“Wilbur and Orville … Orville and Wilbur.”
“That is difficult,” I said, shaking my head.
And then, as if ready to prove me right, the brothers passed along the opposite sidewalk. They were, of course, silent.
Mata Hari stepped toward them. They instantly changed direction, as birds do, with unerring precision and unity of mind, and vanished into a side street, their hands deep in the pockets of their overcoats, their heads bowed in thought. Whether their evasion was an act of will or a tropism protecting fragile thought from fatal interruption is impossible to tell.
“The brothers are absorbed by their invention,” I said to mitigate the effect of their discourtesy.
“They are a strange pair.”
“They are geniuses.”
“But it is essential that I talk to them about their aeroplane.”
“Do you believe in the aeroplane?” I asked.
6.
At that time in Dayton, belief in the aeroplane was very like belief in God: An ungainsayable article of faith for most, it was denied by many. As the weeks passed, all concluded that the existence (or nonexistence) of the aeroplane was in some way linked to the darkness that had befallen us.
“It’s a punishment because of our trespass on divine prerogative,” the righteous declared.
“Because of your benighted attitude toward progress!” the enlightened maintained.
They were the believers. Those who doubted the existence of the aeroplane ascribed the darkness to their “despair of ever believing in anything that is not verifiable.” They were desperate for amazement, but black was the color of their thought.
We urged them to make the leap beyond reason—to take the jump, as it was called—but they refused, tearfully, and would not join us in transcendence.
Schism for the first time beset our town, enacted outside the brothers’ house by contentious ideologues demanding they be shown “the evidence,” so that the aeroplane might be affirmed or negated once and for all.
Increasingly, I feared for the brothers’ safety.
7.
“Where have you been?” asked Stella.
“I lost my bicycle and had to walk home.”
“I dreamed you were lost in a maze of dark streets and alleys. I could see you but not the way out.”
“My desire is like a thread from your body to mine. I would have only to follow it.”
She enclosed me in an embrace, which excluded darkness, nightmare—everything that lay in wait outside her room.
“I dreamed I went outside and walked to the brothers’ house at the top of the hill,” she recited in the remotest of voices. “I walked so very slowly—my legs like iron!—weighed down by gravity. Their front door opened. I went in. The room was empty; the furniture, shrouded against the dust. Trapezes of dust swung from the ceiling. Everything was silent. And then the brothers floated down a great staircase in their long coats and derby hats, floated down, shoulder-to-shoulder, and came to rest lightly on the landing. They cocked their heads at me looking, looking at me with their heads cocked like a pair of owls. I told them you were lost, in Dayton, and could not find your way to me. I wanted them to find you in their aeroplane. It was on the lawn—a beautiful machine! Its wings painted yellow and blue—I saw the bright colors no matter the darkness. Orville went outside and sat in it—a big grandfather’s clock lying open in the grass. I shut my eyes a moment, then looked once more into the ticking dark at Orville—or maybe it was Wilbur—sitting now in a coffin. Then I woke with the sheet twisted round me and the pillow wet.”
“So you do believe in the aeroplane?”
“In my dream, it was real.”
She stood at the window with her hand on the heavy curtains, as if to open them and look outside, a thing she had not done since night descended on Dayton. (And now it was always night, and we did not know when to sleep.) She stood at the window for a long time, but in the end she kept the curtains closed.
“Won’t you let me take you outside today?” I asked softly.
She shook her head. The gas bloomed above the mantel; a bluish yellow light throbbed. I touched her thickly plaited hair and remembered how I had climbed it into the very lap of desire.
I cranked the gramophone.
“Dance with me,” I said, holding out my arms to her.
Stella danced with me in the narrow room, dreaming of Sousa’s men in the band shell beside the river wrinkling with light.
You ask, incensed, How could you know her dream without her telling it!
You shout, All lies, all!
You say warily, wearily, I do not believe a word you say.
I answer you: True, I am only partially omniscient. But I have learned a thing or two about mind reading at the Institute for Psychical Research.
8.
There was a third faction in Dayton: those who believed the aeroplane to be a dream object. I, myself, was inclined toward this view.
9.
The brothers glided silently down the dark streets. Behind them, just outside their field of awareness (which was small, because of their introversion), Mata Hari skulked. And behind her stalked Huck Finn Indian-style from elm tree to alleyway.
“I’m in love with Mata Hari,” he later confided in the barroom of the Dayton Arms Hotel.
“She has an unnatural interest in the brothers,” I said suspiciously.
“I want to sleep with her.”
“Sex may be dangerous for one who was, until recently, a mythical character.”
“It’s true I have no
experience with women,” he said after a brief silence. “I was in timeless suspension on a raft during my adolescence.”
How quickly he’s lost the vernacular! I thought to myself, marveling once more at civilization’s transforming power.
“Find out what she wants,” I urged him. “And remember, Huck: Wilbur and Orville are more important than the gratification of any one person.”
“Because there are two of them?”
“Because of their influence on our possible future.”
Huck drained his beer mug, wiped his foamy lips with the back of his hand, and said, “I still want to sleep with Mata Hari.”
10.
“It is good to sleep with a woman,” I said.
“For a man, maybe,” said Stella. “Is it still night?”
“Yes.”
“I think I want to kill myself.”
“I wouldn’t just yet,” I said. “I think something is about to happen.”
“What?”
“I don’t know.”
“I dreamed the end of the world …”
“It is your nerves,” I said. “Nothing more.”
“A flash of light. A terrible explosion. The earth lifted and was swept away in a great wind.”
“Your nerves,” I repeated. “A bad case of the vapors.”
11.
I went to the brothers’ house and knocked. No one answered. I beat on the door with the flat of my hand. I hammered on it with my fists.
“Wilbur, Orville—come out. I want to talk to you!” I shouted.
No answer.
And then I cursed the brothers—a thing no one, to my knowledge, had ever done. Heaped imprecations on them, execrated and damned them! For I was now certain that they had brought the darkness on us. Had brought dear Stella to the brink of suicide. Had brought Huck to Dayton and corrupted him.
“Orville, Wilbur—come out!” I thundered.
I went round back to the barn where they worked on their inventions. The door was locked; the windows were painted over. I listened intently. I heard my own heart beat in my ears and, from inside the barn, a hooting of owls.
I was afraid and ashamed, too, for I had loved the brothers.
A bell rang twice as a Wright brothers bicycle crunched to a halt on the driveway.
“Telegram for you, sir.”
It was Horatio Alger, who doffed his cap and handed me a telegram. He shone a light so that I might read it. He was a type of ambitious young man who would make his mark.
The telegram came from H.G.
August 19
Dear N.:
Understand you are once again in the metaphysical swamp. Darkness in Dayton: It is your Black Cloud. Too much Bombay gin! Am sending T.T. to advise.
He has seen the future, and it scares him. Remember me to Mrs. Willoughby should you see her again. All is forgiven.
Wells
xoxo
“Thank you, Horatio.”
Pocketing the coin I had tipped him, he swung up onto his bicycle and pedaled off through a wobbling funnel of light until I could see him no more.
And who, I wondered, is T.T.?
12.
“She wants the plans of their aeroplane,” said Huck. We were sitting on a divan in the parlor of what was affectionately known as “the House.” “And she wants me to help her get them.”
“Why?” I asked, uncoiling a feather boa from my neck, left there by Lily, the mulatto girl, a special favorite of the gentlemen who called regularly at the House.
“She’s a spy,” said Huck. “For the German army. I wish Tom was here; he loves skullduggery!”
“Of what possible use is an aeroplane to an army?”
And then, as if to provide us with an answer, the Time Traveler slowly materialized in the middle of the parlor, astride his fantastic machine—all gleaming dials and crystal, ivory and burnished metal.
“T. T.!” I said, remembering Wells’s telegram.
“Hello!” he said, brushing his time-stained clothes with his hand. “I have a warning for you concerning the future.”
“Are you with a carnival, mister?” asked an astonished Huck.
“I am the Time Traveler, lately of Mr. H. G. Wells’s remarkable first novel.”
He bowed his head suavely, having retained his Victorian manners despite the future’s rough-and-tumble.
“He’s nothing but a fiction!” sneered Huck, who seemed not at all aware of the inappropriateness of his remark.
“If one is prepared to take the long view, there is no difference between fact and fiction,” reasoned Jim, who had come into the parlor. “All of us are fictions. We make each other up—we make ourselves up.”
“What brings you back to Dayton?” I asked, surprised.
“Leaving here, it seems, is impossible.” Jim sank wearily onto the divan. “I pedaled fast and furious but could not escape Dayton’s irresistible gravity.”
“Only the brothers can,” the madam declared loyally.
“That’s why I’ve come,” said the Time Traveler, posing like a pugilist on the Turkish rug. “The brothers must withdraw their invention.”
“Withdraw it?” I was growing nervous, and my head—which had to contain all this extravagant burlesque—hurt.
“Their aeroplane will evolve into a flying warship whose single discharge will raze a city: the Enola Gay.”
“Why, that’s my name!” the madam exclaimed.
“And that warship will evolve into far more monstrous machines.” He sat, exhausted. It was getting very uncomfortable on the divan. “I have seen the end of the world. ‘The sky was absolutely black.’ The darkness all about you is its foreshadowing.”
Then the aeroplane does exist! And how right Stella is to fear the dark!
“What proof is there that you have visited the future?” demanded Huck.
The Time Traveler took from his pocket two withered flowers, which until that moment had been unknown on earth.
“A girl of the far-distant future, Weena, gave them to me.”
Madam Gay, an amateur botanist, pronounced them “unique!” She sniffed them as if to savor the highly exotic odor of futurity. “Incomparable!”
“Will the brothers withdraw their invention?” demanded the Time Traveler.
“I suggest we adjourn to their house and ask them,” Jim replied.
13.
We battered down the barn door and surprised the brothers, who were polishing the wings of their aeroplane. It shone in the gloomy barn like an iridescent insect, a dragonfly gilded with forgotten summer light—an, as yet, undiscovered specimen that had more to do with the landscape of desire and of the mind than nature. They stopped their polishing and looked at us in disbelief, chamois rags limp in their hands.
Conscious of a gross affront, I hung back in the shadows, determined that the “fictional characters” should conduct the brothers’ inquisition.
“This gentleman has been on an excursion whose last stop was the end of the world,” Huck began, indicating the Time Traveler. “He tells us that the only hope for the future—and the only way we’ll again see daylight—is for you to withdraw your invention.”
Acting for the defense, Jim objected: “An invention cannot be withdrawn any more than an idea can. Once thought, the idea exists and does so forever. Once created, the invention cannot be uncreated. So the brothers’ answer—yes or no—is irrelevant to these proceedings.”
Huck challenged: “If we set fire to the aeroplane, it will no longer exist.”
Jim retorted, “But the brothers exist—or would you set fire to them, too?”
Huck temporized: “I’m sure it won’t come to that… .”
Jim: “Whether you murder them or not cannot change the fact that the idea of the aeroplane is now in the world, and the world will not be rid of it––”
Huck: “––until the world explodes because of that idea!”
Jim: “There is no proven link between the aeroplane and Apocalypse
!”
Huck: “We have seen Weena’s flowers!”
Jim: “I don’t dispute the Time Traveler’s claim to have seen the end of the world, only that it is in any way the result of Wilbur and Orville’s invention!”
(Silence.)
The brothers had not moved or opened their mouths to speak. They stood, shoulder-to-shoulder, chamois cloths clenched in their hands, their gazes fixed on something beyond us and the walls of the workshop. They, too, saw the future. Whether it was the Time Traveler’s, I do not know: The brothers’ minds were impenetrable to me.
“Will you renounce your invention?” Huck shouted, maddened by their indifference.
And they answered him: “No.” That one word and no other.
They would not recant.
“Though it leads to catastrophe?”
They would not.
“You can’t make a man unsee what he has seen,” said Jim.
“Death to them, then!” Huck shrieked.
“Death to them!” the citizens of Dayton seconded from the field outside. “So that the sun will shine once more on our fair city.”
A rope was produced. A noose knotted. A rafter chosen. They would be hanged as they had lived and worked … in close-knit partnership.
“Stop!” Mata Hari stepped out of the shadows. Behind her, a German U-boat crew armed and guttural. “The brothers are coming with us,” she announced, “to the Fatherland, in our submarine.”
I wondered idly down what river the submarine had sailed into Dayton—the Great Miami or the mythical Mississippi.
Without ceremony, the brothers were taken outside—chamois, luminous with bluish yellow dust, still crumpled in their hands.
“Give us back the brothers!” the mob screamed (so that it might hang them or enthrone them in its heart again). “Wilbur and Orville … Orville and Wilbur!”
At last, the brothers spoke. Not with their mouths but with their minds in what the Time Traveler later called “thought projection”—common practice in the future.
We only wished to make something beautiful, they thought. Not for you—not even for us. But so that it might take its place in the world among other beautiful things. Now that it has done so, we cannot undo it or take it back. We no longer have the power to intervene in its progress or in its degradation. For us it is finished. We’re sorry, and we hope your future will be a different one than the Time Traveler describes. Good-bye.