Or maybe it was cash. The simplest deal of all, the deal tailored best to the blunt mentality on the other side. Some money in the envelope now. More to come, when you prove you have him. My brother paying his modest tithe to the system—paying what he is comfortable with, what he decides, setting the terms himself. And if those who took me decide to then try for more, they will soon see he doesn’t play games. A deal is a deal. He won’t go higher by one dime. I am the proof. I said take him, and I meant take him.
Yet how could I really think it’s my brother? Is there really any evidence beyond my brief glance at that envelope (I’m fingering the embossed return address again now, counting the letters, matching them to his own name, to our family name)—amid, after all, their hustling and jostling me, pushing me down, sandwiching me between the rows of seats, the car jerking and squealing into motion…. With any chance to examine the envelope again, to verify, having disappeared into the darkness with me….
Yes. A far more compelling piece of evidence, really. In front of me, in front of you, all along.
The pads and pens.
They would have been put here only if someone knew this box would host a writer. That this box would shortly contain someone who felt he had something to say, a story to tell. There’s even more reason for these pens and paper if someone knows roughly what I’m going to write, and wants me to write it to see what I know.
But I can’t help thinking there’s more to it. A larger, sardonic purpose of my brother’s own.
To demonstrate to the writer how useless it is to write it down. To mock him by giving him all the materials, all the time, yet while he works he knows that it will very likely be buried with him. How impotent, how futile his commitment is. How childish, how unrealistic, his view of his own importance, his own hushed, determined bid for immortality.
Go ahead, jot away. Scribble into the darkness. Because the metaphor is the reality: it is scribbling into the darkness. As unseen by you as it is likely to remain unseen by anyone else. It is mere artifact before it is even out of the box.
The world moves not by words, not by ideas, but by money. Mammon trumps all. My being inside the box, or outside the box, is merely a matter of cash.
Write to your heart’s content, he is saying to me. Rip the lid off an industry, expose fraud, right wrongs, summon justice. The world goes on without you. The world tramples you underfoot, figuratively and literally. You are a voice deep beneath the ground. A voice unheard.
It is a mockery, a lesson, a puzzle, a deal—all rolled efficiently into one. The operational efficiency he always strives for, my brother. The stack of empty paper, the pile of unused pens. It bears his signature. It’s what he has written to me. Clear in message, clear in tone. Without resorting to words at all.
I HAVE BEEN here long enough, pondered the possibility, toyed amateurishly with the physics. How long will I have if the air supply is cut, if the eight-inch pipe is stuffed up with a rag or crumpled T-shirt? That’s how they would do it—not to have to see the victim, or think about him or her. How long would I have? A half hour? Fifteen minutes? Ten? Five? In which case, will I go bleary? Illogical? My mind and writing hand sloping toward the nonsensical? I’m no scientist, but certainly it would be a process… the oxygen slowly decreasing, competence vanishing, the brain giving in before the body. My mind—my trusty, true, sole, final companion—giving out just before the rest of me, sacrificing itself as if selflessly, in some ultimate, elaborate hallucination, some final incandescence, before the permanent dark. The CO2 gathering, hanging in the blackness, starting to explore the seams and crevices and crannies of my box as if with curiosity, as if in reconnaissance, until it coils in on itself, until there is no more for it to explore….
Voices.
Voices above me.
A murmur—I can’t hear specific words. But it isn’t the silent delivery of the daily food drop. It’s multiple voices, movement up there.
My brother’s voice? I think. The negotiator, making the deal?
Trying to be a faithful scribe here. Keeping pen to page.
Heart pounding with anticipation…
Hands shaking…
Head spinning…
Short of breath…
All the signs of my own excitement…
Voices…
Suddenly muffled.
Fainter now…
Do I still hear them?…
Did I ever?…
I AM WRITING these words in the light.
Stunned to be blinking in the brightness.
Stunned by what I see.
A huge warehouse of thick concrete containers… dozens of them…
Each with an air pipe extending from one end…
Each container twenty, thirty feet from the next… thick enough, far enough apart to fool us each into thinking we’re alone…
The air pipes extending up, like chimneys, to fool us into thinking we are buried deep…
Extending up to a high catwalk, from which the food is obviously dropped…
Thick concrete containers in orderly rows. A graveyard of the living.
Organized. Institutional. I should have imagined such efficiencies of scale—a trading floor, after all; corporations, after all. Why could I not imagine that my unseen tenders were tending all of us, like a herd of animals in a barn? Keeping us fattened up to fetch our price at auction.
I should have imagined something like this….
Victims wouldn’t normally be allowed to see this, I’m sure. I’m sure you’re released as you were brought in—blindfolded.
So why the exception for me?
My brother. He must have paid. I must have been wrong about him. He has saved me.
Then where is he?
Where are my captors who have finally let me go?
Where is anyone?
The concrete containers are all still sealed. But I am somehow outside mine….
Moving alone through this light-flooded warehouse…
Imagination my only companion…
The warehouse is so vivid…. The light is so strange….
Pen still up. Like a sword for battle. Writing, writing it all…
And at last I can see these words and letters as I write….
I can see them, even in this utter darkness….
A warehouse of containers…
So am I released from mine?…
I must be.
I am.
I am released.
Pen down.
THE LUNAR SOCIETY
BY KATHERINE NEVILLE
Society, however, cannot exist among those who are at all times ready to hurt and injure one another… Beneficence, therefore, is less essential to the existence of society than justice… Justice is the main pillar that upholds the whole edifice. If it is removed, the great, the immense fabric of human society… must in a moment crumble into atoms.
—ADAM SMITH, 1759
Lichfield, England: Winter 1798
Tonight was the night of the full moon.
The night of justice, at last, thought Dr. Erasmus Darwin.
Tonight’s meeting at Birmingham would be their first meeting in many “moons”—indeed, in scores of them, several years in fact. And today, as Darwin thought wryly, was most appropriately a “Moonday,” a term that his confrères of the Lunar Society—their unofficial gaggle of scientists and inventors, or “Lunaticks”—had humorously dubbed themselves and their choice of meeting nights over these past forty years. For despite membership that often rotated, whether due to death or wars, travel or exile, those who could meet had traditionally met each month on the Monday nearest the full moon, in order to ensure safe return on horseback to their homes. At least, that was the reason that Darwin’s eccentric band of “loonies” had always given outsiders.
The doctor limped across his library to peer through the frosty Italianate windows, waiting for his carriage to be brought round. Since he had shattered his knee many years ago in an accident,
his horse riding days were over: Physician, heal thyself, he mused. For tonight it seemed far too late for recriminations. Over anything.
In the nearly forty years of the Lunar Society’s scientific explorations, they’d become internationally famous, jointly and separately, reaping awards and honors, as well as vast fortunes from their manufacturing, scientific discoveries, and inventions: whether it was their harnessing electricity with their early cohort, Dr. Franklin; or Joseph Priestley’s isolating oxygen; or naturalist and physician William Small’s creating new metals; or Wedgwood and Bentley’s inventing new forms of ceramics; or Watt and Boulton’s supplying steam engines and copper coinage; or their collective engagement in building canals and launching balloons—Darwin himself being the first Englishman to fly in one. Not to mention the risks they’d taken to their reputations and even to their lives, in supporting liberal movements like the American and French Revolutions.
But tonight’s private meeting in Birmingham, as Darwin recognized better than anyone, might prove their greatest risk of all.
He suddenly felt a chill not caused by the weather. Though the temperature alone might be enough to discourage any sane man from venturing abroad on a night like this. For hadn’t today been marked in the almanac as the coldest in fifty years? Only this morning, Darwin’s milkmaid had protested to her master that she could not milk the cows, for her fingers were blue, and the hot froth of milk had turned to slush the moment it hit the pail.
No, Darwin knew quite well that this chill of his wasn’t for fear of the rough journey that lay ahead, nor was it caused by the bitter climate—at least, not weather-wise. It was the political climate that numbed him to the bone, the changing climate throughout England, which threatened him and his closest cohorts, and had grown ever and ever worse, these past three years.
Indeed, tonight’s gathering had been presented overtly as a simple “dinner invitation.” For by law, the members of the Lunar Society could actually be imprisoned for “holding a meeting”: ever since Prime Minister Pitt had passed his Seditious Meetings and Treasonable Practices Acts. The former required that all intellectual societies, such as their own, must be licensed by the State in order to exist. And the latter banned members from merely discussing either religion or politics.
In addition, there had been the riots of “Church and King”—roving mobs of faceless men who’d ranged throughout the countryside, burning homes and meetinghouses, targeting Freethinkers, Quakers, Unitarians, any dissenters not belonging to the official Anglican Church. The Lunar Society itself was hardly left unaffected:
Matthew Boulton and his partner, James Watt, had set live cannon outside their Soho steam engine manufactory to protect the Works against marauders, who were bent upon demolishing free enterprise; chemist Joseph Priestley saw his home devastated by the mob, his valuable scientific instruments looted and smashed, and he’d fled to exile in America, in fear for his life; ceramics industrialist Josiah Wedgwood was found dead under suspicious circumstances, in a room locked from within. And now, Joseph Johnson—the publisher of Erasmus Darwin’s own vast, erudite, and widely acclaimed botanical studies—had just been jailed for selling seditious works!
They’d all felt the noose tightening round the throats of liberal thinkers like themselves. Experimental science such as theirs, which had blossomed in the Age of Reason, was lately deemed treasonable behavior; their own skills were turned against them as a weapon, a crude bludgeon to pound them into conformity. The members of the Lunar Society—isolated and reviled by royals and the masses alike—watched in horror as England herself, slowly yet willingly, sank into the mire of her own ignorance….
Darwin shook such thoughts away as he saw, just outside his imposing Georgian manor, that his horses had been harnessed and the carriage brought round, the coachman seated on the box. It was time for the journey to Birmingham that he had postponed for so long. This journey that, in truth, he had both desired and dreaded these past three years. It could not be put off any longer.
Turning from the windows, the doctor caught a brief glimpse of his reflection inside the mullioned glass: that beefy yet trustworthy face that men admired and numerous women had, quite improbably, fallen in love with; his massive arms, thick neck, and bull-like torso, which gave the impression of substance.
For the first time Darwin felt the full weight of his sixty-six years of trials and travails. He hoped the tide might be turning at last. For tonight, Darwin and his eminent colleagues were together about to step off a steep and daunting precipice, an act after which there could be no change of heart, no turning back.
But wasn’t that what justice was all about? thought Darwin. For, as wise men had known since Solomon’s day, there was no justice, for anyone, in slicing the baby in half!
Limping to his desk, Darwin opened the black leather satchel sitting there—it was another of his own inventions, a “medical bag,” as he’d dubbed it—which contained the tools of his trade. Then, from the box beside it, he carefully lifted the artifact from its wrappings: it was a ceramic medallion that fit neatly into the palm of his meaty hand. Though the doctor’s hands might appear to some to be as awkward as grappling hooks, his dexterity was such that, using only his thumb and forefinger, he’d trained himself to tie a surgical knot within the confines of an eggshell! It was a skill and precision that had always been his hallmark, and which, he thought, might well come in handy in the mission that lay ahead.
The medallion itself was no secret: indeed, its image was legendary. Created about ten years ago, by a cofounder of the Lunar Society, the great ceramist Josiah Wedgwood, it was a beautifully crafted cameo, carved of black-on-yellow jasper. It portrayed the figure of a dark man, who knelt upon one knee and looked beseechingly skyward. His hands, manacled with irons, were clasped in prayer: a slave. Above this figure letters were printed in the shape of a rainbow. They read:
Am I Not a Man and a Brother?
Ten years ago, when Wedgwood and his fellow Lunar members had first learned from Darwin that local Birmingham manufacturers made a successful trade in forging such manacles and leg chains for British plantation owners in the West Indies, they’d been horrified and infuriated. Wedgwood had retaliated by creating this medallion, in honor of the recently formed “Society for the Suppression of the Slave Trade.”
And to further the destruction of a business which Lunar members found abhorrent—the sale of and trade in human beings—they made sure that the cameo was copied and disseminated everywhere. This heartrending image and its motto—whether worn by men or women, on a pin, a button, a hair ornament, a bracelet, a snuffbox—both the image and its motto had spread swiftly from England to the Continent to the Americas. But the popular, ubiquitous black-and-golden cameos were missing one critical element:
The artifact that Erasmus Darwin now held in his palm was in fact the prototype, the original casting, a gift ten years ago from Josiah Wedgwood to Darwin, his closest friend. As such, it was the only cameo in existence that contained the secret lacking in all the others, a secret known only to three people—and one of those was now dead.
Now, with infinite care, Darwin wrapped the fragile object in a soft, supple layer of sheep’s wool and placed it in his satchel, topping the whole, against possible prying eyes, with vials of opium, and the herbs of his standard medicaments. Then he shut the bag and took up his walking stick, and he went into the entryway. His manservant, awaiting him there, bundled the doctor in thick robes for the journey, then assisted his master to labor down the steps in the bitter cold, and to squeeze his bulk into the waiting carriage.
But within the dark confines of the carriage, Erasmus Darwin could not help thinking about two worrying things that had nagged at him all along:
First, that if tonight’s mission took off, like that hydrogen balloon he’d sailed from Derby so many years ago—as he, perhaps recklessly, prayed that it would—then the rest of their journey might equally prove more fraught with danger than if it had failed upo
n the launching field. And second, that by unveiling this long-kept mystery that was hidden within the medallion, they might open a Pandora’s box too difficult ever to shut again.
Darwin would soon know the answer to both these worries: for that third person, the cameo’s original genius—both of its inspiration and its creation—had agreed to join their illegal gathering of “Lunaticks.” At Birmingham, tonight.
Birmingham, England: The Full Moon
For the first time in three years, the members of the Lunar Society were together again. The conversation around the table, thus far, had been light and filled with pleasantries, against prying eyes and ears.
They had lost so many, but the five were here at the long table: in addition to Erasmus Darwin was his fellow founder and their host this evening, the senior member at age seventy, Matthew Boulton, who’d begun as a successful buckle maker and had gone on to create copper coins for the realm, and to fund the engine manufactory of the man seated here beside him, James Watt, now age sixty-two. Then Darwin himself, the famous botanist and man of medicine; and at his other side the chemist James Keir, followed by “young” Samuel Galton, age forty-five, the wealthy son (paradoxically) of a Quaker gunmaker. Sam, a latecomer to Lunar membership, had experimented in optics and color following the works of Isaac Newton. Not present were inventor Richard Lovell Edgeworth, retired to his farm in Ireland, and Joseph Priestley, who still languished abroad in self-imposed exile in America.
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