by Unknown
“Did I tell you that a tube burned out in the radio some time ago? Don’t bother with it—I don’t want to get it fixed. I used to leave it on, just to have sounds in the place. But once it stopped working I learned to prefer silence.
“All the same, I suppose you can read something to me.” Allan gestures toward the floor. “Just anything will do—all the news is the same to me now, no matter when it’s happened. What’s lying on the top should all be fairly recent.”
As Harold leans over and roots around through the pile, looking for something interesting, Allan’s mind begins to drift, and he starts to ramble. This happens more often these days—the recurring themes of his monologues are events of the past that he has coated with a nostalgic patina, and his long-gone wife, the mother of Harold and Astrid. He almost never talked about her when Harold was a child, so one would think that Allan’s newfound loquacity on the subject would be an endless source of crucial revelations. One would expect that after each conversation with his father, the son would return home to see in his mirror a little bit more of the ghost of the woman before him, hovering behind his own face as if they are the subjects of a twice-exposed photograph.
But the problem with this is that Allan’s memories are too fluid—the truth of the past stopped mattering to him long ago, since the past’s only useful purposes were to help him make sense of his own wretched present, and to entertain him while he whiled away the days until he reached whatever miserable future was in store for him.
And so when he has told Harold tales of his mother, she has taken fifty different faces, and been taken from Allan in fifty different ways. Allan has told his son of the morning when he discovered a pillar of brown sugar with her shape in the midst of a wheat field, the ants already crawling on it, and that as the clouds above split open he feverishly kissed her to get the last sweet taste of her before she washed away. She has vanished before his eyes, with only discarded clothing and a neat conical pile of blue powder to mark the spot of her rapture. She has screamed as her eyes burst into flames and light burned her shadow into the wall behind her. She has joined the circus; she has absconded with the milkman. She has died alone in an insane asylum, and when the doctors performed the autopsy they scooped dollops of chocolate pudding out of her skull.
“When I lived in the age of miracles,” Allan said, “your mother was the greatest miracle of all. Just by standing near me she made me better than I am. She brought out that in me that makes me best. I’d think, I don’t deserve her, and then I think again and say, wait, yes I do. Because her mere presence made me become someone who deserved her love. Do you see?
“And we used to just talk.” He always comes back to the talking—this is what all the tales of her have in common. “I miss her voice, or what her voice was before everything changed. Not everything we said was a flat-out love letter—we pointed out the shapes of clouds and related the unchanging details of passing days like anyone else. I can’t remember much of what we said. But it was the music in our voices that mattered. That was a kind of miracle, too—that a simple description of her troubling bunion could serve as a confession of her love, when she said it to me, and when she spoke in the way that she did.
“I don’t know how to explain this to you. I’m not sure you’re able to understand what I’m saying.
“I don’t know why what happened next happened. It may have been because miracles were leaving the world and machines were taking their place; it may have been that the horrible half-sight I have now was secretly preceded by a blindness of the mind. But all at once she seemed to change into a creature made of edges and corners—nothing in the middle of her. The music of her voice became corrupted by sawtooth waves. Everything she said slashed and tore. Some of the words she spoke made lacerations erupt across my back just as surely as she’d taken a whip to me. Everything went bad then. She was edges and corners and emptiness, and it was beyond me to fill her again.
“I forget what happened to her in the end. . . . oh yes. She turned to glass. One morning I awoke to find lying next to me in the bed a life-sized glass sculpture in her place, every detail worked with care, the seeming product of a master blower. Sunlight shone through the curtains and straight through her hollow body, refracting into rainbows on the opposite wall. I touched her once and your mother shattered to fragments. That was it. That was it.
“But before that . . . before that she was a miracle.
“You’re not listening to what I say, are you. You can’t hear what I say.”
“I’m listening, Dad.” Harold has a section of a paper clutched in his hand.
Curtly Allan says, “Read.”
“Taligent heir still missing,” Harold reads. “Search enters second week. Rumors abound. Foul play feared. Xeroville. Some fear the worst as Miranda Taligent, sole heir to the Taligent Industries business conglomerate, has been missing now for eight days. This morning a visibly distraught Prospero Taligent made a rare public appearance at the gates of the Taligent Tower, pleading for his daughter’s safe return. The tone of Mr. Taligent’s brief address seemed to confirm the speculations of sources inside the Tower that what was formerly seen as a simple case of a malcontented child running away from home is now suspected to be a kidnapping, perhaps a murder. ‘If she’s being held captive, I’ll pay any price for my daughter’s return,’ Mr. Taligent said to reporters, and then addressed his missing daughter directly: ‘Miranda, if you can come home, if you’re able to, then please come back to me. I know you as well as I know myself, and I know that you are alone, and afraid. That’s understandable; the world is a place of terror, and it’s not a place you were made for. So listen to me. Please come home.’ ” Harold puts the paper down and waits for his father to speak.
Allan is looking at the floor. “Miranda,” he says quietly, and smiles. “Weren’t you and she supposed to fall in love? Why couldn’t you manage that?”
“I’m not as good as you are with women, Dad,” Harold says. “And I was only ten.”
Allan laughs, once: “Heh. That was a missed opportunity. You might have married her, and her father might have become my patron. I might have served out the rest of my days in his Tower of riches and wonders, instead of in this place, subsisting off the paltry alms tossed to me by the city fathers. . . .” Allan trails off into silence for a few moments, but when he begins talking again, his voice has more life in it. “Do you think—here’s an idea. Perhaps he might’ve made mechanical eyes for me, with lamps that would never go out, that could only see the world in black and white. Or built a machine that could read the paper aloud, in a voice with no color, but one that could only say true things. That would’ve been nice, I think. Not a miracle, but I would have settled for it. And you might have known something like what I knew with your mother. Perhaps. If that’s still possible these days. . . .
“Son. What’s happened to your voice? I hear something new in it when you read the papers. There used to be music in it; now there’s metal in its place. Not something strong and forged, like steel—something cheap that breaks when you bend it. Tin, or the gilding on a cheap thing that makes it look like gold. Yes—there’s metal in your voice now.” Allan’s gaze drifts, and he looks confused.
I don’t know what he’s talking about, Harold thinks. But he does.
“To tell the truth, it wasn’t sudden,” Allan said. “For years I’ve heard it creeping in, more and more, a cheap tin noise coming from something cheap and made of tin. Wait—that’s too harsh. I’m sorry. I’m sorry I said that. If I said it it’s because I’m sitting here in these empty rooms and turning to tin as well. Just like everyone else.
“But your voice had music in it when you were a child! I remember when you were so excited about that silly roller coaster. Spinning yourself dizzy. Tornadoooo! I’d never hear high notes like that out of you now; haven’t for years. You haven’t felt like that in a long time, have you?
“All the high notes have left your voice. Mine too.”
Harold says nothi
ng and looks at the floor.
“I can’t blame you,” says Allan. “Soft hearts provide poor harbor; tin hearts can better stand against time and bad weather, thin and hollow as they are. So you pray to change from flesh to metal, and the dying Author of the world hears your plea and performs his final miracle. He lays His hand on you and then He vanishes. And what mortal man can undo that? What human on this earth has the power to change a tin man back to flesh?”
Allan’s lip curls in a sudden snarl. “Read something else.” He is fidgeting and wringing his hands, near tears.
Harold doesn’t know what to do. He flips over the sheet of newsprint in his hands, clears his throat, and reads something from the other side. “Acts of vandalism increase sharply in industrial district. Xeroville. An organized gang is thought to be responsible for a sudden epidemic of vandalism that has erupted in the past two weeks in Xeroville’s industrial district. The objective of the gangs seems to be to destroy the machines and the mechanical men they target, generally ignoring any occupants. ‘Vandalism is a child’s crime with a child’s punishment,’ said Xeroville police chief Stephen Smollett in a press conference yesterday afternoon. ‘By attacking only mechanical men, who have no rights or legal standing, they’re keeping the charge from escalating to assault or attempted murder—’ ”
But Allan is out of his chair now, an expression of clear pain on his face, walking on unsure feet toward his son. He stands over Harold, who is perched on his little stool. “Will you come closer to me? Don’t ask questions.”
“Jesus. Sure, Dad.” Harold stands and holds his father in a weak embrace, barely touching him, his fingertips resting lightly on his back, beneath his shoulder blades. This close he smells. Allan is gripping Harold as if to crush the breath from him. They stand there in silence, Harold wishing that he were somewhere else, away from his family, away from Astrid, away from himself; his father thinking who knows what. “Loss of signal,” Allan whispers. “If you touch me, then there’ll be no loss of signal. Tell me: do you think I’ve gone crazy?”
Harold decides that there’s no use in lying. “Maybe,” he says. “You may have.”
“It’s okay,” Allan says. “Everyone goes insane eventually, sometime or other. Hold me.”
So they stand in each other’s arms for a while, and lose track of time.
NINETEEN
I look just like the sound of my voice, which does not lie. That is Miranda Taligent’s final broadcast. It doesn’t take long for the rumors to start up concerning her whereabouts: the woman is silenced; the woman is dead; the woman lives among us with a secret face.
As for Harold, whose graveyard shifts in the press are silent again, he feels as if he has lost a friend, as do so many others across the city. Her voice over the airwaves was soothing and human, and with its lingering hints of the stilted speech of the girl that Harold knew at age ten, it seemed familiar to him in a way that radio voices rarely do. And there is no melancholy like that we feel when our favorite radio program is canceled without warning: at that special time of the night we prepare to receive a friendly, dependable visitor, who loves unconditionally and never fails to entertain, only to find that she will never come to us again, that she is forced to spurn us by powers higher than our own.
With nothing to keep his attention during the night shift, Harold goes back to napping on the job, slumping in his chair, letting the syncopated soft mechanical rhythms of the room lull him into slumber. It is then that he starts to have a recurring dream; it goes something like this. He walks down an infinitely long corridor that vanishes to a point before and behind; its walls are lined with open doors. The floor is covered with plush red carpeting; the ceiling and walls are also painted a bright pure red, the color of a rose whose petals have just begun to unfurl. The doors and doorframes are golden, and each opens onto a small, featureless room whose walls are all a gleaming white.
On the floor of each of these rooms lies a naked man in pain. As Harold walks down the corridor, looking in the open doors to his left and right, he sees that all the men are different, but they are all doing the same thing: clutching their crotches, with blood seeping between their fingers. Some of the men are being tended to by gentle cherub-faced little boys in spotless white nurse’s uniforms, their stickshaped hairless boylegs sticking out of skirts; some of the boys sport hooves, or idly flapping angel’s wings. . . . “You have to understand,” one of the boys is saying, gently but firmly pulling his patient’s hands away from himself, bandaging the wounded, empty space they once protected. “The queen needs singers for the high parts, and women aren’t allowed. So what else is she supposed to do? Hush now. Hush . . . you are performing an inestimable service for this nation.”
Now the virgin queen is beside Harold, walking down the corridor with her arm slipped into his, as if he were escorting her to a ball. Her billowing gown is dyed with deep and brilliant blues and greens, the colors of a peacock’s feathers; indeed, a fan of blue-green feathers, each a yard long, spreads behind her, slowly waving in a light breeze that drifts down the hallway. But the woman is old. Her face is shriveled; her breasts are fallen; her teeth are blackened and gone; a glass eye rolls like a gyroscope in her skull. “I still get love letters from strangers,” she says, “and a line of paramours winds around this castle three times, waiting for an audience. I allow one to enter my presence each day; today it is you.
“Few in the kingdom know of my decay. In the future, perhaps there will be machines that record my image as it truly is and disseminate it to the public for their disillusionment, but for now there are only painters, whom I hire and whom I hang if I find their work displeasing. And the miracle is that when these paramours come before me, they see me not as I am, but as I was—no. Better yet, they see me as I never was. But I bring only the best, only the cleverest, only the strongest, to this corridor, the home of the knights that defend my name and my honor.
“Have you come to be knighted?” The virgin queen giggles obscenely and thrusts a shaking liver-spotted hand into Harold’s trousers. “A practical man. You brought your sword along, and you’re prepared. Come.” She ushers him into an empty room. Up and down the corridor resonate the echoes of screams.
The old woman shuts the door, leaving the two of them alone, in silence. She turns to him, and the long feathers attached to her gown quiver and spread. “Ever made it with a virgin?” she says. “Here in my kingdom we go about the process a bit differently than you may have heard of. Now drop your pants.” She gets down on her knees and opens her mouth, and now it is not a human mouth but something else, the mouth of a sea monster drawn into an uncharted space on an ancient map, a lipless perfect circle ringed with fangs. A snake’s tongue flits out of it and back again. “Now,” she says. “Come, and lose yourself inside me.”
TWENTY
Harold starts awake to the irregular sound of metal violently striking metal. Bang. Bang . . . dong. Huh? Whazzat. Someone’s in here.
The room he’s in is empty, except for himself and a single typesetting mechanical man that is quietly going about its business, seemingly oblivious of the nearby clamor. From where he is sitting, Harold can see through the doorway into the next room, where the presses are. Two men are in there, moving back and forth in front of the door, in and out of shadow. Something about their silhouettes is strange: their heads are oddly geometrical, the tops of them shaped like perfect cones, tapering to a point with some kind of tube sticking on top. One wields a double-bladed axe; the other has what looks like a length of lead pipe. “I swear to Christ if there’s one thing I hate,” he screams, “it’s movable type! Seems to me that type is meant to stay put! You know?! So that you can get a good clear look at it. So you can take the time that you need”—(ssswishCLANK!)—“to figure out what it’s saying. But some crazy sons of bitches who think that everything that can be invented ought to be came up with this bullshit movable type: you try to read a book made out of it, and it says one thing, then you put it down because
you have to answer the door or go pee or something, and when you come back to it the type’s gone and moved all around and it says something else entirely! But I swear that tonight, tonight my friend, I am going to teach that shit to stay”—ssswishDONK!—“put!”
Common sense says to run. The duties of a security guard are not in Harold’s job description, and the idea of getting beaten to a pulp is not appealing, by axe or by pipe. But the room’s one exit is blocked, and when the two thugs finish tearing apart the merchandise in the room they’re in, they’ll come in here, and that’ll be it.
So he can hide. But where? There’s no room for him in any of the closets; crawling under a table is a dumb idea. Then he has it: a clever man in this situation would hide in plain sight! The lighting in the room is dim, and most of the walls are in shadow. Against one of the walls are two mechanical men, standing at attention in the dark. Harold quietly tiptoes around and cuts off the few lights in the room, feeling a little brave now, feeling sly, even (and the typesetting tin man goes on working in the dark, the only illumination in the room now coming from his scanning eye, moving across the page from left to right and right to left).
Harold runs over to the wall and stands still next to the rigid tin men, wedged between one of them and a locker. He can’t see three feet in front of him. This is going to work, he thinks. But just as he hears one of the thugs enter the room, he realizes that, when most people enter a darkened room, the first thing they think of doing is turning on a—
He hears his enemy fumble along the wall for a switch, then an overhead lamp flickers on. Not bright enough to illuminate Harold’s hiding place, but bright enough to see. Now Harold can see the two toughs clearly. Their faces are caked with bright silver paint, as if they are mimicking the appearance of mechanical men, and they have funnels strapped to their heads for hats, which would make them seem somewhat comical if they weren’t carrying weapons with malicious intent. The ringleader, who’s wearing a dingy cotton shirt with its sleeves ripped off and hypertrophied muscles bulging beneath it, shifts his grip on the length of pipe. “Hey, watch this. Batter up,” he says as he sees the mechanical man at its table, still composing. He takes aim at its head with his pipe: “Swing batter!” and the head goes flying off the neck and rolling across the floor, coming to a stop near Harold’s feet. Decapitated, the tin man’s hands go through a few more measured motions as it unerringly places a last piece of type; then it is still.