Confessions of a Five-Chambered Heart

by Caitlin R. Kiernan

  The Melusine (1898)

  1.

  In this blistering, midsummer month of bloatflies and thunder without so much as a drop of rain, the traveling show rolls into the great smoky burg spread out at the foot of the Chippewan Mountains. By some legerdemain unknown to the people of the city, the carnival’s prairie schooners and Bollée carriages declare its name in letters five-stories high—Othniel Z. Bracken’s Transportable Marvels—shaped from out nothing but the billowing clouds of red dust raised by those rolling broad steel and vulcanized rims. The traveling show arrives at midday, as if to spite the high white eye of the summer sun glinting off tin roofs and factory windows and the acetate-aluminum envelopes of the zeppelins moored at Arapahoe Station. “Only mad dogs and Englishmen,” as the saying goes, but apparently also this rattling, clanking hullabaloo of steam organs and barkers and pounding bass drums.

  And the townspeople, confused and taken off their guard, peer from the sweltering shadows of their homes, from shop windows, from all those places where shade offers some negligible shelter from the July sky. They gaze in wonder, annoyance, or simple, speechless bafflement at this unexpected parade spilling along East Evens Avenue, led by an assortment of automaton mastodons, living elephants and rhinoceri, and a dozen white and prancing Percheron’s with braided manes. There are twirling, summersaulting women on the horses’ backs, scantily clad after the fashion of Arabian harem girls; from the distance of only a few feet, it’s difficult to tell if these acrobats are mechanical or the real thing.

  Soon, there is an impromptu assortment of street urchins and drunkards trailing alongside the parade, coming as near as they dare to wheels and stamping hooves and stomping brass feet, and clowns with gaudy faces toss candy and squibs from the wagons, delighting the ragged children and frustrating the drunks, who might have wished for just a little more. And a man in a long black duster, his face half as red as ripe cherries, stands on a wooden platform mounted precariously atop one of the schooners. He bellows a command through a shining silver speaking-trumpet, and at once a flock of clockwork doves erupt from some hidden recess to flutter and cavort beneath the merciless sun.

  “A long, long way have we come!” he shouts, the trumpet magnifying his voice until it can be plainly heard even above the noise of the parade and the clatter of the ironworks two streets over. “From the Cossack-haunted steppes of Siberia to the deadly forests of French Equatorial Africa, from the celestial palaces of the Qing Dynasty to the farthest wild shores of both polar climes, we arrive, bearing the perplexing; fruits of our intrepid journeys!” The barker pauses, taking a breath or pausing for effect or both, and from his high perch he watches the peering, upturned faces, the thousand flavors of skepticism and dismay, anticipation and surprise. The clockwork doves circle him again, then suddenly retreat into whatever cage released them a few moments before.

  “Yes! It’s true!” he continues, wielding the trumpet the way, two decades earlier, before the Great Depredations, a buffalo hunter would have wielded his Spencer repeating spark rifle. “In these very wagons, the treasures of the wide, wide world, the secrets of the globe that have so entertained crowned pates and bewildered men of science and philosophy! Here, presented for each and everyone among you to look upon and draw your own conclusions!”

  And now, there is a hesitant smattering of applause, a handful of wolf whistles and catcalls, and the barker leans out over the railing of his platform, risking a dreadful tumble (or so it surely seems).

  “And lest any there among ye lot think us mere profiteers and scalawags,” he bellows through the speaking trumpet, “unscrupulous purveyors of humbuggery or chicanery, let me please assure you otherwise! A small return, yes, yes, astonishments for a most nominal and reasonable fee, only to cover our not-inconsiderable expenses in wending our way about the fearsome world. But, by the sacred horns of Moses, not one copper more!” And at this, on cue, or by providence, one of the elephants splinters the already cacophonous air with a trumpeting of her own. There is laughter from the onlookers, and the tension breaks, and some of the hesitant skepticism dissolves. The barker grins his wide grin, knowing half the battle’s as good as won (and making a mental note to reward that particular elephant later on), and he sets the silver megaphone against his lips again.

  “For, indeed, it is to the betterment and general erudition of all mankind—even savages in their mud huts and wigwams, that the men and women of Othniel Z. Bracken’s Transportable Marvels have devoted themselves!” And though, at this point, he knows it’s unnecessary, the barker adds the customary, “Come one! Come all! Come and see! Come and be astounded!” Then the agreeable elephant raises her trunk and lets out a blast that would have shamed even the troops of Jehoshuah, in his blaring seven-day march about the walls of ill-fated Jericho. The animal’s cry echoes down the slatternly, riveted canyon of thoroughfares and alleyways. Below the chandeliered ceiling of the Grand Chagrin, the dancers and sporting girls stop flirting and fanning themselves. In basements and backrooms, rapscallions and reprobates pause at their games of crapaud and poker, at the cutting of purse strings and throats. The air thrums and crackles, transformed, as if by the sizzling tendrils of an electrical storm. The choking, obscuring cloud of red dust streams out behind the wagons and automobiles.

  And the barker, almost whispering through his trumpet, ends his soliloquy with a tipping of his tall black top hat, a how, and, finally, a single, pregnant word—“Miracles...”—and the show rolls on, triumphant, through the smoky, industrious city.

  2.

  At the southernmost edge of the city, just before the crooked, tumbledown shacks of Collier’s Row, in the lee of the towering gob piles stripped of their lustrous anthracitic treasures, the carnival has unfolded across the dusty, disused cavalry training grounds. Like an inconceivable bird fashioned all of canvas and tent poles, the show has spread itself wide, unfurling beneath the vast western sky. And by dusk, there are what seems veritable miles of Chinese lanterns and gas lamps and Edison carbon-filament bulbs strung gaily, gaudily, here and yon. You might think, spying down upon the city from the windy crevice of Genesse Pass or Kittredge Point, that all the stars of Heaven had been lured down to Earth, to light these delirious festivities. All those who can have come, and the air is filled with laughter and conversation, and it smells of sawdust and confections, incense and the exotic dung of at least a hundred species of animals.

  Here are aisle after aisle of flapping, painted broadsides depicting the most fearsome and obscene and unlikely beings. And a gigantic, revolving iron wheel crafted by G. W. G. Ferris & Co. of Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, and just one thin Liberty dime buys a ten-minute ride in its rocking, colorful gondolas. There’s a musical carousel fitted with all manner of saddled clockwork beasts—horses, humped camels, giraffes, a pair of snarling iguanodons, roaring; lions, and even an ostrich. A11 around the cavalry grounds, there are fire-eaters and fakirs, tattooed women and a legion of wind-up Roman Praetorians, unicyclists and jugglers and a trio of sword-swallowing Malays not content with swords, but, contrarily, busy swallowing Nantucket harpoons and living rattlesnakes (headfirst, naturally). And rising lofty and somehow yet more unreal above all this orchestrated madness and phantasmagoria stands the great main tent, a red, white, and blue octagon fringed with golden tassels and the twinkle of ten thousand artificial fireflies.

  Her name is Gala—Gala Monroe Weatherall—this tall, freckled, straw-haired woman who has come alone to answer the barker’s battle cry, and, also, a more urgent, secret cry. All day, every day but Sundays, she sees to the production of valves at Jackson-Merritt Manufacturing, steel valves designed and tooled to the most exacting specifications for such august clients as the Colorado and Northern Kansas Railway, the new Colorado Central Railroad, and the Front Range and West Coast divisions of the Gesellschaft zur Förderung der Luftschiffahrt. Cala Weatherall is a learned woman of industry and science, a rationalist and an engineer with a hard-earned diploma on her office wall, received a de
cade earlier from the Missouri School of Mines and Metalliferous Arts. Unmarried and generally disinterested in such flitting, womanly pursuits as matrimony and men, hers is a life of math and precision, of slide rules and difference engines, logarithms and trigonometric functions. She does her small (and well-paid) part to keep the trains running and the zeppelins aloft, and she sees no shame or sin in the pride she feels at her modest accomplishments in an arena still dominated by men.

  But, this night is not any usual night for Miss Gala Weatherall, who rarely spares even the strayest thought for such oddities and amusements as those offered up by Othniel Z. Bracken’s Transportable Marvels. Any other night, if asked, she might have laughed or snorted and dismissed the whole, seedy affair as only so much brummagem, silly distractions best left to those without the responsibilities she shoulders every single day, excepting Sundays (and even then, she usually works from her room at Jane Smithson’s boarding house on the lower end of Downing Street). Last night, however, and for each of the three proceeding nights, she’s had a dream, a dream so vivid and bizarre that she might almost name it a nightmare. But Cala doesn’t have nightmares, and, for that matter, she only rarely ever remembers her dreams upon waking. Rut this dream, this dream spoke of the imminent coming of a traveling show, and of many, many other things, besides. Though she sets no store in the fashionable delusions of spiritualism, mysticism, and theosophy promulgated by the likes of Madame Helena Blavatsky and the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn—charlatans and liars and fools, every one—she has had this dream, this dream that was almost a nightmare, if there had not been such beauty and longing to it. And so, uneasy and reluctant, embarrassed at herself, she has come to the old cavalry training grounds, to the traveling show, to face this rutting coincidence and be done with it, once and for always.

  So, this is how she finds herself outside the sideshow tent, heavy canvas painted in a garish riot of blues and greens, whites and greys, as though some impossible Artesian well leading all the way to the sea has sprung up, suddenly from this very spot. Above the entrance is a wooden placard that reads, Poseidon’s Abyss Revealed! In her dream, there was this selfsame tent, or one near enough to raise goose bumps on her arms. And there was a placard, too, though she is not able to recollect the lettering she saw there. She pays her fifteen cents to the black man outside the tent flap—the “talker” in his scuffed-up bowler and red suspenders, busy enticing the crowd with promises of the mysteries that lie within, the arcanum arcanorum of the Seven Seas and any number of lakes, fjords, fens, wells, bogs, rivers, and the most desolate of swamps. Another man pushes open the flap for her, and a stream of cool air rushes out into the muggy summer night. Air so cold and damp it seems to seep forth and wrap itself about her, air that smells of low-tide along an Oregonian shore or icy slime dredged from the supposedly lifeless bottom of the Atlantic.

  “Good evening, Miss,” the second man—an Oriental—says, beckoning her inside. And then he winks and adds in a whisper, “She’ll be glad to see you’ve come.”