All Those Vanished Engines

by Paul Park

  Anything could happen. Of course not much information had come out of Russia for a long time, not even the kind of disinformation that might have convinced a cultivated Greenwich Village bohémienne like my grandmother that Russia might be a bracing place to relocate in the 1930s. Now, of course, in Moscow there wasn’t even Second Life.

  But maybe my thinking was too literal. In parts of what had been Quebec, I knew from various websites, people were experimenting with a new form of socialism. Maybe, I thought, my impersonation of a Canadian in New York City long before had constituted some kind of preparation, or at least some caul-induced clairvoyance. Maybe my grandmother’s text was telling me to move up there, to escape my responsibilities or else bring them with me to attempt something new. Or if that was impossible, maybe I was to reorganize my own life along socialistic or even communistic lines, clear away what was unneeded, especially this bourgeois obsessions with dead objects and the dead past. The world would have a future, after all, and I could choose to share it or else not.

  And of course all this frivolous thinking was meant to hide a disturbing coincidence. Adrian was my son’s name. Furthermore, my wife had miscarried a few years before he was born, a girl we were intending to name Miranda. But I don’t think, in my previous trajectories, I had ever glanced at this particular book. The library contained several other romances by Frances Park.

  Was I to think that if Miranda had lived, she would have been able to reach her brother as I and his mother had not, break him out of his isolation? Briefly, idly, I wondered if, Abigail now dead in some unfortunate civil disturbance, I could swoop down on Richmond like Ulysses S. Grant …

  After a few moments, I tightened my flashlight’s beam. What did I possess so far? A deluded vision of a fine clean world, with hard work and cold winters. Demons, rapid transformations, and the diluted pleasures of fatherhood. Almost against my will, a pattern was beginning to materialize.

  But now I turned to something else, a Zone book from 2006 called Secrets of Women, page 60:

  In addition to these concerns about evidence, authenticity, and female corporeality, a second factor helps explain why anatomies were performed principally or exclusively on holy women: the perceived similarities between the production of internal relics and the female physiology of conception. Women, after all, generated other bodies inside their own. God’s presence in the heart might be imagined as becoming pregnant with Christ.

  It was true that I had many concerns about evidence, authenticity, and female corporeality, although it had not occurred to me until that moment to wonder why anatomies had been performed (either principally or exclusively) on holy women. These words had been written by my sister, Katy Park, who had been a history professor at Harvard University. She had left Boston in 2019, when the city was attacked, but up until her death she was still working in Second Life. Her lectures were so popular, she used to give them in the open air, surrounded by hundreds of students and nonstudents. For a course in utopias, she had created painstaking reproductions of Plato’s Republic, Erewhon, Islandia, and Kim Stanley Robinson’s Orange County. Or once I’d seen her give a private seminar in Andreas Veselius’s surgical amphitheater, while he performed an autopsy down below.

  She had not had children. But her words could not but remind me of my ex-wife’s pregnancy, and how miraculous that had seemed. Anxious, I took the laptop from my satchel and tried to contact Nicola in Richmond, but everything was down. Or almost everything—there was information available on almost any year but this one.

  So maybe it wasn’t even true, that I could choose to share in the world’s future. It wasn’t a matter of simple nostalgia. For a long time, for many people and certainly for me, the past had taken the future’s place, as any hope or sense of forward progress had dried up and disappeared. But now, as I aged, more and more the past had taken over the present also, because the past was all we had. Everywhere, it was the past or nothing. In Second Life, frustrated, I pulled up some of the daily reconstructions of the siege of 1864–65—why not? I could see the day when my New Orleans great-great-grandmother, Clara Justine Lockett, crossed the line with food and blankets for her brother, who was serving with the Washington Artillery. Crossing back, she’d been taken for a spy, and had died of consumption while awaiting trial.

  Or during the previous July, I could see at a glance that during the Battle of the Crater, inexplicably, unforgivably, General Burnsides had waited more than an hour after the explosion to advance, allowing the Confederates to reform their ranks. If he had attacked immediately, before dawn, he might have ended the war that day.

  Exasperated by his failure, I logged off. I picked up a book my mother had written about my younger sister, published when she was nine years old. As if to reassure myself, I searched out a few lines from the introduction where my mother introduced the rest of the family under a selection of aliases. I was called Matthew:

  If I were to describe them this would be the place to do it. Their separate characteristics. The weaknesses and strengths of each one of them, are part of Elly’s story. But it is a part that must remain incomplete, even at the risk of unreality. Our children have put up with a lot of things because of Elly; they will not have to put up with their mother’s summation of their personalities printed in a book.…

  This seemed fair and just to me, though it meant we scarcely appeared or existed in our own history. I wouldn’t make the same mistake; finding nothing more of interest, I laid the book aside. Instead I picked up its sequel, Exiting Nirvana (Little, Brown, 2001, in case you want to check).

  In that book, Elly has disappeared, and Jessy has resumed her real name. Autism is already so common, there is no longer any fear of embarrassment. But when I was young, Jessy was an anomaly. The figure I grew up with was one child out of 15,000—hard to believe now, when in some areas, if you believe the blogs, the rates approach twenty percent. Spectrum kids, they call them. In the 1960s the causes were thought to be an intolerable and unloving family. Larger environmental or genetic tendencies were ignored. But toward the end of her life, my mother resembled my sister more and more, until finally in their speech patterns, their behavior, their obsessions, even their looks, they were virtually identical.

  Now I examined the pictures. My autistic sister, like her grandfather, had not excelled in portraiture. Her frail grasp of other people’s feelings did not allow her to render faces or gestures or expressions. But unlike him, for a while she had enjoyed a thriving career, because her various disabilities were explicit in her work, rather than (as is true for the rest of us, as is true, for example, right now) its muddled subtext. For a short time before her death she was famous for her meticulous acrylic paintings of private houses, or bridges, or public buildings—the prismatic colors, the night skies full of constellations and atmospheric anomalies. When I lived in Baltimore, I had commissioned one for a colleague. Here it was, printed in color in the middle of the book: “The House on Abell Avenue.”

  I looked at the reproduction of Jessy’s painting—one of her best—and tried to imagine the end of my trajectory, the house of a woman I used to know. I tried to imagine a sense of forward progress, but in this I was hindered by another aspect of the game, the way it threw you back into the past, the way it allowed you to see genetic and even stylistic traits in families. Shared interests, shared compulsions, a pattern curling backward, a reverse projection, depressing for that reason. This was the shadow portion of the game, which wouldn’t function without it, obviously. But even the first time I had stumbled on these shelves, I had been careful not to look at my own books, or bring them to the table, or even think about them in this context. There had been more future then, not as much past.

  I was not yet done. There were some other texts to be examined, the only one not published by a member of my family, or published at all. But I had collected in a manila envelope some essays on the subject of A Princess of Roumania, forwarded to me by Professor Rosenheim after my appearance in his
class. To these I had added the letters I’d received from the girl I called Andromeda, not because that was her name, but because it was the character in the novel she had most admired. While she was alive, I had wanted to hide them from my wife, not that she’d have cared. And after her death I had disposed of them among the “R” shelves of the Eisenhower Library, thinking the subject closed.

  I opened the envelope, and took out Rosenheim’s scribbled note: “I was disappointed with their responses to A Princess of Roumania. I was insulted by proxy, me to you. These students have no sympathy for failure, for lives destroyed just because the world is that way. They are so used to reading cause and effect, cause and effect, cause and effect, as if that were some kind of magic template for understanding. With what I’ve gone through this past year…”

  I assumed he was referring to the painful breakup of his own marriage, which he spoken of in the bar. Here is an excerpt from the essay he was talking about:

  The novel ends before the sexual status of Andromeda can be resolved. It ends before the confrontation between Miranda and the baroness, Nicola Ceauşescu, her surrogate mother, though one assumes that will be covered in the sequels. And it ends before the lovers consummate their relationship, which we already know won’t last. Park’s ideas about love are too cynical, too “sad” to be convincing here, though the novel seems to want to turn that way, a frail shoot turning toward the sun. Similarly, the goal of the quest narrative, the great jewel, Kepler’s Eye (dug from the brain of the famous alchemist) is too ambiguous a symbol, representing enlightenment and blindness at the same time.…

  “How dare he put ‘sad’ in quotation marks?” commented Rosenheim.

  And on the same page he had scribbled a little bit more about his prize student, who apparently hadn’t made such mistakes, and who had requested my address on North Calvert Street in Baltimore (“You made quite an impression. I hope she ends up sending you something. I’ve gotten to know her a little bit outside of class, because she’s been babysitting for the twins…”).

  Dear Mr. Park: What I liked most about the book was the experience of living inside of it as I was reading it, because it was set where I live, and I could walk around to those places, there was never anyone there but me. Although I noticed some mistakes, especially with the street names, and I wondered …

  Dear Mr. Park: What I liked best about the book was all those portraits of loving fathers and understanding husbands, so many different kinds. I hadn’t know there were so many kinds …

  Dear Mr. Park: I know we’re supposed to like the heroine, but I can’t. I find the others much more convincing, because they are so incomplete, holes missing, and the rest of them pasted together like collages. I mean Nicola Ceauşescu, but especially Andromeda …

  I couldn’t read anymore. How was it possible to care about these things, after all these years? Tears were in my eyes, as I tried to remember the face of a woman I’d met only once, with whom I’d swapped a half a dozen letters and perhaps as many emails, before she and Rosenheim had died together in a car crash, when he was driving her home. There was no suggestion of a scandal. A drunk had crossed the line. I’d read about it in the newspaper.

  Because I had been up all night, I stretched out on the vinyl sofa and fell asleep. I had switched off the flashlight, and when I woke up I was entirely in darkness, and I was no longer alone.

  No—wait. There was a time when I was lying awake. I remember thinking it was obvious that I had made an error, because the sun had obviously gone down. The light was gone from the stairwells and the air shafts. I remember worrying about my car, and whether it was safe where I had parked it. And I remember thinking about Adrian and Nicola, about the way my fantasies had pursued in their footsteps and then changed them when I found them into distortions of themselves—all, I thought, out of a sense of misplaced guilt.

  As I lay there in the dark, my mind was lit with images of her and of Adrian when he was young. Bright figures running through the grass, almost transparent with the sunlight behind them. Subsequent to his diagnosis, the images darkened. Nowadays, of course, no one would have given Adrian’s autism a second’s thought: it was just the progress of the world. No one cared about personal or family trauma anymore. No one cared about genetic causes. But there was something in the water or the air. You couldn’t help it.

  Now there was light from the stairwell, and the noise of conversation. For a moment I had wondered if I’d be safe in the library overnight. But it was too tempting a refuge; I packed away my laptop, gathered together my satchel and my flashlight. I stuffed my velvet pouch into my pocket, and moved into the stacks to replace my books on their shelves. I knew the locations almost without looking. I felt my way.

  I thought the owner or owners of the bedroll had returned, and I would relinquish the reading area and move crabwise though the stacks until I found the exit, and he or she or they would never see me. I would make a break for it. Their voices were loud, and at first I paid no attention to the words or the tone, but only to the volume. The light from their torches lapped at my feet. I stepped away as if from an advancing wave, turned away, and saw something glinting in the corner. I risked a quick pulse from my flashlight, my finger on the button. And I was horrified to see a face looking up at me, the spectacled face of a man lying on his side on the floor, motionless, his cheek against the tiles.

  I turned off the flashlight.

  Was it a corpse I had seen? It must have been a corpse. In my mind, I could not but examine my small glimpse of it: a man in his sixties, I thought—in any case, younger than I. Bald, bearded, his cap beside him on the floor. A narrow nose. Heavy, square, black glasses. The frame had lifted from one ear. In the darkness I watched him. I did not move, and in my stillness and my fear I found myself listening to the conversation of the strangers, who had by this time reached the vinyl couches and were sitting there. Perhaps I had caught a glimpse of them as they passed by the entrance to the stacks where I was hiding, or perhaps I was inventing details from the sound of their voices, but I pictured a boy and a girl in their late teens or early twenties, with pale skin; pale, red-rimmed eyes; straw hair. I pictured chapped lips, bad skin, ripped raincoats, fingerless wool gloves, though it was warm in the library where I stood. I felt the sweat along my arms.

  Girl: “Did you use a condom?”

  Boy: “Yes.”

  Girl: “Did you use it, please?”

  Boy: “I did use it.”

  Girl: “What kind did you use?”

  Boy: “I don’t know.”

  Girl: “Was it the ribbed kind?”

  Boy: (inaudible)

  Girl: “Or with the receptacle?”

  Boy: “No.”

  Girl (anxiously): “Maybe with both? Ribbed and receptacle?”

  Boy: (inaudible)

  Girl: “No. I didn’t feel it. Was it too small? Why are you smiling at me?”

  Girl (after a pause, and in a nervous singsong): “Because I don’t want to get pregnant.”

  Girl (after a pause): “I don’t want to get up so early.”

  Girl (after a pause): “And not have sleep.”

  Girl (after a pause): “Because of the feeding in the middle of the night. What are you doing?”

  Boy (loudly and without inflection): “You slide it down like this. First this way and then this. Can you do that?”

  Girl (angrily): “Why do you ask me?”

  Boy: “For protection. This goes here. Yes, you see it. You point it like this, with both hands.”

  Girl: “I don’t want to use it. Because too dangerous.”

  Boy: “For protection from any people. Because you are my girlfriend. Here’s where you press the switch, and it comes out.”

  Girl: “I don’t want to use it.”

  Girl (after a pause): “What will you shoot?”

  Girl (after a pause): “Will you shoot animals? Or a wall? Or maybe a target?”

  Boy: “Because you are my girlfriend. Look in the bag. Tho
se are many condoms of all different kinds. Will you choose one?”

  Girl (after a pause): “Oh, I don’t know which one to choose.”

  Girl (after a pause): “This one. Has it expired, please?”

  Boy: (inaudible)

  Girl: “Is it past the expiration date?”

  As I listened, I was thinking of the dead man on the floor. His body was blocking the end of the stacks, and I didn’t want to step over him. But I also didn’t want to interrupt the young lovers, homeless people somewhere on the spectrum, as I guessed, and armed. At the same time, I felt an irrational desire to replace in their proper spaces the books I held in my hands, because I didn’t think, if I was unable now to take the time, that they would ever be reshelved.

  I couldn’t bear to tumble them together, the Parks and the Claibornes, on some inappropriate shelf. And this was not just a matter of obsessiveness or vanity. Many of these people disliked each other, had imagined their work as indirect reproaches to some other member of the family. Even my parents, married sixty-five years. That was how “trajectories” functioned, as I imagined it: forcing the books together would create a kinetic field. Repulsed, the chunks of text would fly apart and make a pattern. Without even considering the dead man on the floor, the library was full of ghosts. At the same time, I had to get out of there.

  Of course it was also possible that the spectrum kids would end up burning the place down, and I was surprised that the girl, who seemed like a cautious sort, had not noticed the possibility. Light came from a small fire, laid (as I could occasionally see as I moved among the shelves, trusting my memory, feeling for the gaps I had left—in each case I had pulled out an adjoining book a few inches, as if preparing for this eventuality) in a concave metal pan, like an oversized hubcap. Evidently it had been stored under the square table in the reading area, though in the uncertain light I had not seen it there.