by Paul Park
He smiled, and opened wide his cold, blue, sightless eyes, rimmed in unhealthy pink, wet with rheum. We admired the scar on his forehead. “Well, there were three separate grades,” he explained, as if to children. “The first was an industrial grade, coarse and rich, which we shipped to manufacturers all over the East Coast. And the second was highly distilled, a luxury product mostly for export even then—or at least that was the idea. No one had the money for it, of course, not during the war or for a decade afterward; we stored it in canisters under pressure. One of our technicians had synthesized a glass harmonica, which he mixed with the fluttering of nightingale wings, and the rustle of a lilac-colored silk petticoat in the early morning—you could see this was a specialty item, very costly and rare. But the third type, well, that was the secret, wasn’t it?”
“Costly” didn’t seem like a word he would use. We imagined it from an advertising brochure. He paused, cleared his throat, ejected some sputum into his handkerchief. We watched the pulsing skein of blood vessels under his translucent skin, the webs of veins on the backs of his hands. He said, “You know up at the top of the hill there was a foundry that made steel plates for the Monitor during the Civil War. This was like that—weapons grade. We had sounds that could break glass, even at low volume. With the refinements and additives, it would turn concrete to sand. You could put your thumb through a two-inch steel plate, after it had been permeated and submerged in one of the acoustic vats.
“That was the theory, anyway. Plans look good on paper. And we were working double-shifts around the clock. This was in the spring of ’45. You’d think now we could have predicted that the war was almost over. You could have thought we could relax, work on civilian applications. You could use the stuff to power anything in the right quantities. Generators, rocket fuel—Carusi was in charge of that. Years later he was still working. But none of the rest of us was thinking about those sorts of things. Even after Hitler gave up, we were working harder than ever. The entire plant was like a single machine. But then we got the idea of a new additive, a new sonic overlay. Just one new set of valves. Just a few decibels—I won’t tell you what it was, or how much, or what proportions. It blew the roof off when the sound ignited. A plume of fire in the night sky. It was four a.m., the morning of April 29. It had been a big week, and I was outside smoking a victory cigarette. A Lucky Strike. I used to read a lot of American history. I remember I was thinking about something I was reading, an explosion under the rebel trenches in Petersburg, Virginia. I opened my eyes, and I looked up and saw a jet of flame licking the underside of those low clouds. I don’t even remember hearing any noise. Something hit me. That was that.”
And that was that. We knew what happened next. After the war, people patched together the old generators and went back to making steam. Later still, the whole site was abandoned, the tanks and valves left to rust under the ruined roof.
And the blind engineer, we guessed, had also found himself abandoned, his own motors extinguished or removed, his own internal conduits left to atrophy and decay. Later, when we left him and returned to the museum, when we stood among the ganglia and synapses of tubes and valves, we could not but recall his vacant face as he looked up at us, transfigured and yet deflated by the pressurized escape of his own memories, which drifted like dust or flakes of rust around us as we watched.
And here’s the larger context or construction: Shortly after my mother’s death I wrote the copy for a sound installation, part of a new permanent exhibit at the Massachusetts Museum of Contemporary Art in North Adams. The actual artist was a man named Stephen Vitiello. When I met him in a bar near the museum, I gave him a list of rhetorical devices, from which he chose onomatopoeia and, to a lesser extent, strategic repetition. Subsequently he made a recording of the text I sent him, adding layers of manipulation and always emphasizing certain combinations of words. Then he added many other kinds of sound, some industrial and some not. He separated the result into nineteen different tracks, which he combined with various lighting effects. Then he played the whole thing contrapuntally, in an endless loop, from speakers hidden in the actual machines, the three great boilers in a row. In this way he created the overlapping zones of sound. The actual voice of the engineer, the complete narrative, was only audible from one place on the skywalk, high up in the guts of the first machine. But certain phrases followed you around the building.
I thought, could you make stories, text, actual words, the way the blind engineer had manufactured sound? The museum occupies a complex of renovated brick buildings between the railroad tracks and a branch of the Hoosick River, the former site of the Arnold Print Works and subsequently Sprague Electric, which made capacitors and other components until the mid-1970s, when it moved its operations abroad. The museum makes much of its industrial past, and in the larger shows especially, you get the feeling of art being manufactured there in quantities suitable for distribution—an illusion, as it happens, because almost all of it is actually imported. Currently, in one of the long galleries, there is an exhibition of neon and ceramic sculpture from an artist’s cooperative in Singapore.
Since the late 1980s, the galleries have spread through the abandoned factory. Stephen’s sound installation coincided with the public opening of the old boiler house. In a sense, the gallery was renovated with the art already inside, three levels of encrusted generators, open to the weather, left to rust for many years. They had provided steam to the entire complex, according to the following process: trains delivered crushed coal to the siding, and a miniature bulldozer pushed it onto the conveyer belt to the top of the building. Then there was an enormous system of hoppers and chutes that fed it into the three furnaces, missing now, and the squid-like boilers.
But frankly, I didn’t understand how any of this had worked. Nor was I interested. Instead, I had wanted to construct something of my own, a device made up of three interchangeable parts. I wanted to use it to provide power. First, I imagined the human body as a series of interconnected machines, taking on fuel and excreting waste, producing heat, producing motion, until they gradually fell silent one by one. This particular complex had operated every day during the course of an ordinary lifetime—my mother’s for example. It had come on line when she was just a girl.
Second (and this was more of an overlay than a separate idea), I imagined a brain in the same terms, a brain that might produce or combine thoughts, or even make outlandish comparisons of entirely separate phenomena. Inevitably there would be inefficiencies and waste.
Third, I thought you could build a story that would function as a machine or else a complex of machines, each one moving separately, yet part of a process that ultimately would produce an emotion or a sequence of emotions. You could swap out parts, replace them if they got too old. And this time you would build in some deliberate redundancy, if only just to handle the stress.
One question was: Would the engine still work if you were aware of it, or if you were told how it actually functioned? Maybe this was one of the crucial differences between a story and a machine. Another question: Was there always in all cases a hidden, secret process, as there had been at the Sprague plant during the war?
As I stood on a metal bridge over the Hoosick River during the opening of the installation last September, I wondered how I could test these functions. I listened to the words that I had written months before, misremembered now, distorted and recombined with other sounds: a low din that issued from the plant and spread into the outside air. Stephen Vitiello had worked with the illusion that the noise of the installation came from the machines themselves, as if their dead, frozen valves and pistons were still active in some vestigial or internal way, operating at reduced capacity. From my vantage point I tried to spread the illusion outward—first words, then recorded sounds that duplicated the words, and finally variations of the same sounds in the natural world: birds and insects in the recently configured garden that surrounded the plant, still lush and green in the late summer. The clank of
one of the cables that supported the Airstream, the hybrid sonic- and solar-powered space capsule that had fallen to earth above my head, and come to rest on a trestle at the top of the structure. People chatting in the garden, enjoying plastic cups of wine and cubes of cheese. Their tone was bright and sharp, their words impossible to distinguish.
And of course I listened to the motion of the stream that ran through a concrete chute under my feet. No one noticed I had stepped away into the larger environment or installation. Standing on the bridge, I expected to feel a little sense of loss, like a small bulb suddenly extinguished, burned out or snapped off—25 watts, no more than that. It’s what happens when you finish something, in my experience. But I felt nothing, because the project is ongoing and the machine is larger, as you see.
I leaned my elbows on the railing. I looked over toward the garden, the raised beds full of hollyhocks, among which, I imagined, the blind engineer had smoked his victory cigarette. And I also was thinking about the story he had told about the Civil War, only in more detail—the story was my own, of course. It had come from something I had read when I was working on the piece a few months before, around the time of my mother’s death, a book by a man named Colonel Eustace Peevey, a history of secret weapons projects, published in the 1930s when the author was an old man. Colonel Peevey was the type of writer more convinced by lack of evidence than by discovered facts, which are always subject to manipulation. The book itself was as much fantasy as history, especially his description of the Battle of the Crater, at Petersburg, Virginia, in 1864. In his version, the Union engineers had dug the equivalent of a railway tunnel under the Confederate defenses. Their plan was to drive a column of three colossal steam-powered engines into the heart of the city itself, and then attack during the ensuing panic. This strategy anticipated the battle tanks of the First World War by fifty years. But in its first and only deployment the lead vehicle, code-named Cetus or Grampus or Leviathan, caught fire and exploded, collapsing the tunnel and burying the machines forever. On the surface, of course, the results were identical to the effects of a gigantic mine.
Despite years of applications, the author had been denied the necessary permits to excavate the great Leviathan. To him this proved the truth of his account. For my part, I admired the way a monomaniacal and paranoid idea could decay with age until it was itself an artifact, encrusted and frozen with nostalgia. And I had another, more personal source of interest in the story, because my mother’s grandfather had been present at the actual battle and had given lectures about it afterward. In the 1880s he had been awarded the Cross of Southern Honor by the United Daughters of the Confederacy. I liked to imagine that everything he told those ladies in their parlors was factually incorrect.
Of course, as much as anything, this same idea had grown into the entire museum project, a seed that germinated like a mutant Damsel’s Rocket in the humid dirt outside the boiler house. I looked over toward the line of new saplings that had been dug into the riverbank there. Someone was hovering at the end of the bridge, and I smiled. She came up to me. “You know,” she said immediately, “he’s still alive.”
“Who is?”
“The guy in your story. His name is Roy Whitney. He’s not blind, though.”
She mentioned the Commons, which was the nursing home where my mother had died, the basis for the one in my text. Following a sequence that had begun with her grandfather, I had been thinking about her maybe thirty seconds before, as I examined the water flowing underneath my feet. I had imagined her here. She took pleasure in what she thought of as her children’s accomplishments. Aphasia would not have hindered her ability to compliment me. Of course my father had been too frail to attend.
“He’s had a stroke,” she said. “But he can still talk. Sort of, anyway. A little.”
I stood up straight, then turned to look at her. She was a gray-haired woman in her early fifties, with gold-rimmed glasses and a pleasant, open, pretty face. Her eyebrows had been darkened artificially. I’m no judge of these things, but I thought she was wearing fashionable clothes, a burgundy suede vest with a fawn-colored lining, a gold and citrine necklace and earrings, black jeans, and boots. Fleetingly—cruelly, I suppose—I wondered if she imagined herself as a real person or else just a device in an invented world, designed and manufactured to transmit information. But did we really need all this detail? I smiled at her, and not knowing what was funny she smiled also. It was a lovely evening, and she was holding a glass of wine.
Stephen Vitiello, an elegant figure dressed in black, stalked along the concrete riverbank under the trees, surrounded by a knot of curators and fans. The woman turned to look where I was looking. Maybe she knew what side her bread was buttered on. Maybe she recognized an opportunity to expand her existence into the larger context. Or else maybe she was happy to be standing on the bridge with me, listening to the noises from the boiler house.
“How do you know?”
She lowered her chin. “He’s my boyfriend’s uncle,” she told me.
I’ve heard that this is sometimes a complicated way of flirting, to mention your boyfriend right off the bat. Not always, though. We stood side by side. “What’s your name?”
“Constance,” she said, which was a surprise. She drank her wine and looked up at me. “It’s not why I came. I saw you’d be here in the newspaper. I don’t give a shit about contemporary art,” she confided shyly.
What was her secret process? I let her speak: “I just wanted to mention that I saw you at your mother’s funeral. I was sitting at the back. And I just wanted to say that your mother was my inspiration—no. She always said the problem with phrases like that, phrases you’ve heard before, was their lack of precision. You’re somewhere in between the other times you’ve heard it and right now. Your mother—we thought she was so very strange, with those sandals and long skirts, and her endless array of handmade necklaces from—you know—Afghanistan or Pakistan. She sat in her office like a migrating bird that had made a wrong turn.”
I didn’t want to hear any of this. I looked up at the sky—look a plane! A machine in the middle of the air. It only looks like a bird.
“She was the first person who made me understand that my life didn’t have to be so fucked up, that I could make choices, and it mattered if they were good or bad. After my son was born I was looking through my old Dante notes for her class—you know how Virgil can take Dante through hell, but couldn’t take him up to Paradise? That was for Beatrice, someone from Dante’s real life, sort of an imaginary combination of a mother and a lover. But there’s nothing creepy about it. She leads him up where he can see the whole machine that moves the sun and stars, powered by God’s love. That’s the end of the poem. So I’m looking at my notes and I see that ten, fifteen years before I’d written in the margin, ‘Mrs. Park is my Beatrice.’”
She was shame-faced as she admitted this, which I appreciated. In the months since my mother died I had heard a number of these stories, all of which had sounded, like this one, rehearsed. I looked down at the water. “Why were you looking through your notes after your son was born?”
She looked puzzled, and then remembered how she started. “No, it was when he was first diagnosed. I went back and read her books on autism, about your sister. That was so amazing at the memorial, when Elly spoke.”
The service had taken place in Thompson Chapel on the Williams College campus. I had been dreading it. And in fact it had begun badly: remarks from a math professor praising my mother’s memory, how she could recite pages of poetry by heart, how he had heard her, for example, rattle through Homer’s catalog of the ships in Book Two of the Iliad. No one in the audience, he seemed to imply, could hope to duplicate this feat. But an hour later, speaking last, Elly concluded with an impromptu roster of my mother’s cats, including the precise dates of ownership, short physical descriptions, lists of character traits, and causes of eventual demise—several dozen animals in all, a catalog of the cats, ending with Magnus (“a long-ha
ired calico, just like two of my mother’s favorites, who is still alive!”). On a bad day Elly’s memory was better than my mother’s.
“I think I saw you once,” said Constance. “I came to your mother’s house to do my hundred lines of Paradise Lost. I think you were still in high school.”
Maybe she had known Jack Shoots, I thought.
Lately I had been thinking a good deal about Jack Shoots, who had been one of Mom’s favorites. “I remember that long entrance hall lined with books from floor to ceiling,” Constance said, “and that beautiful long stairway to the second floor.” She went on to describe the exact place where mother fell over the banister. Elly, painting upstairs in her room, had heard the noise and, apparently, stepped over mother’s body on her way to the kitchen, where she vacuumed and did chores for ten minutes at least. Afterward, on her return, seeing mother struggle, she’d run out into the street and screamed.
I thought about this as Constance described walking upstairs to try and find a bathroom, peeking in at my sister’s drafting table (“such an amazing sense of color”), etc. As she spoke, I manufactured a history for her—she was not, I reckoned, one of the working-class strivers that my mother tended to champion. Instead I imagined another kind of history. Things had evidently worked out for her long term. She looked like she was happier than I was, had learned more from my mother than I had. With purposeful cruelty, I imagined her son’s autism as just a little bump in the road.
We chatted a while longer. She pressed her business card on me, and then I managed to break away. I said goodbye to Stephen, made my escape. Afterward I went back to Williamstown and took a walk in the woods behind my parents’ house on Hoxsey Street. I climbed the hill to a place that had been important to me when I was a child and then later in my teens when I would go there to smoke dope. Karnak, I had called it then, an area of gradually collapsing maple trees and rocky outcroppings, one of which contained a shallow cave. I climbed inside and sat back against the slope of the rear wall.