He smiled at her. “Alchemy is about marriage. The Bride, don’t you see? Not coincidence; destiny. You and I will be united in the most beautiful way imaginable.”
She understood then. The Thrumm kids. They’d been vacuumed out. They were vessels, emptied of consciousness and waiting to be filled. And he had chosen her as his vessel. They would vacuum her out, too; the Priest would freeze himself, they would map out the neural pathways of his brain, then one day, when it was all ready, they would just pour him into her like water into a jar. “You’re worse than any of them,” she told him.
“None of them could see as far as I. Lajos, Josef—they never envisioned any of this. All they could see was money. They didn’t even know why you had come to us. They only knew that you looked like her and that you must be significant, but they had no idea how.”
“Did Tomi know about this?”
“Tomas was too open, too trusting, and thus not to be trusted with certain information. He was always loyal but wasn’t privy to all our goals. Tomas was more interested in the art of it, anyway. Now, I believe you have something for me.”
Lee tightened her grip on the glass shard, though it cut into the soft flesh of her palm. She got up and came to stand beside him. As she took the little ball from her pocket, his eyes grew wet. When he reached for it, she would grab his wrist with one hand, and with the other she would slice his throat from ear to ear. But he made no move to take it.
“The key was under my nose the entire time,” he said. “It pains me to think of how many years I wasted because I simply was not clever enough to figure it out.”
Lee held the little ball out. “Take it. I don’t want it anymore.”
The Priest wouldn’t look at it. “Lajos sent an assassin after me, you know. After all these years. His ego simply got the better of him. Would you like to see him?”
The Flunky dragged from the corner a battered leather steamer trunk, its corners tacked with brass plates, sides marked with peeling stickers from old hotels in Paris, Tangiers, Amsterdam, San Sebastián. He clicked open the locks, then opened the trunk and stepped back. She recognized DreamClown by his hair and by his glasses, which were turned around and sat at a grotesque angle on the side of his head. He wore the Busboy uniform and had been folded into the box like some magician’s assistant. She couldn’t tell how he had been killed.
“I never wanted all this death. But now it’s over. We have come to the end. So why don’t you give me that blade. Before it cuts you any further.”
Lee didn’t even try. She had nothing left. She just let the shard drop to the floor, where it broke to pieces. Blood dripped from her sleeve in a constellation of red drops. The Priest removed a handkerchief from his pocket and offered it to her. It was old, brittle, initialed “MD” in plain script. She closed her bloody hand around it. Then she opened her other hand and let the little ball roll across the table.
The Priest watched it come to a stop just in front of him. He stared down at the thing, one hand hovering over it, as though to touch it would make it disappear. Then his hand just dropped down and plucked it up, like a bird snatching something from the ground. He held it to just past the tip of his nose, and turned it in his fingers. “Have you examined it?” he said.
She’d turned it over in her own fingers countless times, following the paths of its ridges with her eyes. They seemed to fold in on themselves endlessly. But she just shrugged her indifference.
“It must be the most complex key known to man: impossible to reproduce, made for a lock impossible to pick. A masterwork of complexity.” Then it was gone, disappeared into the man’s fist. He pushed himself away from the table.
The Priest offered Lee his hand. She ignored it but followed as the Flunky wheeled the Priest out of the room. When they got to the door in the hallway, the old man removed an old iron key from his neck and handed it to the Flunky. The lock clicked loudly, and the door opened into a darkened space. As she stood outside beside the Priest, the Flunky went in and began lighting candles set around the room’s walls, eventually illuminating a large circular room, its chalky walls blackened by smoke. Works she recognized now as Duchamp readymades stood on small pedestals between the candles: a urinal, a bicycle wheel, an old snow shovel, a bottle rack. There were others, too, obscured by the room’s centerpiece. A large humidifier hummed in the corner.
At the center-rear, half shrouded in shadow, stood a contraption at once sculptural and mechanical, which Lee recognized and yet did not. The whole thing stood on a steel platform about ten feet on each side.
The Bride and her elements hovered in the air five feet off the ground. Then Lee noticed the filaments, so thin she could hardly see them, attached to the ceiling. The Bride was made from hammered metal, copper maybe, and she looked even more insectoid in three dimensions than she did in The Large Glass. She seemed at once indifferent and seductive, innocent and commanding, from her vantage above Lee, above the Priest and the Flunky, above the Nine Bachelors who huddled beneath her in a claustrophobic circle. They, too, were hammered from metal, ruddier than the Bride, and Lee could tell they were hollow inside, empty molds. Beside them and slightly in front was the contraption known as the Glider, a frame of soldered metal strips, and inside that the Water Wheel, made of metal and carved wood. Beside that an enormous Chocolate Grinder squatted on three short legs, the Scissors contraption attached to its top and connected by filaments to the Glider on one side and the Oculist Eyewitnesses on the other, their three circular eye charts hovering in the air like B-movie UFOs. Behind the Chocolate Grinder a series of funneled Sieves arced in the air and ended in a spiral corkscrew that wound its way up, flukelike, through the Eyewitnesses.
There was even the Boxing Match, a complicated extradimensional geometry of tiny gears and arcing planes placed just above the Eyewitnesses, and above that the Juggler of Gravity, which looked alien and biomechanical, like a blown-up photo of a virus Lee remembered from biology class. And hovering above it all, above the Juggler and above the Bride, so light and ethereal it looked projected instead of real, the cloudlike apparition of the Bride’s Cinematic Blossoming.
It all just waited there, inert yet on the brink of living.
“It is something to behold, is it not?” The Priest was right there beside her, and she jumped a little, having imagined herself, for a brief moment, to be alone. She felt his hand touch the elbow of her injured arm, and she didn’t move away. “All the years I served him, he never let me enter this room. And I honored that until the day of his death. He passed in France, and I went to his funeral, of course, and it shames me to say that while I was there I found the key among his possessions. I was like you are now, the first time I laid eyes on it: speechless in my awe.
“Duchamp thought of a work of art as a ‘delay.’ The concept holds within it the idea of time, the fourth dimension. But what you see in front of you has the potential to show us many more dimensions than that, enfolded realities that we have never before had access to.”
She couldn’t take her eyes off it.
“Duchamp once said that ‘the great artist of tomorrow cannot be seen, should not be seen, and should go underground,’” the Priest said.
Tomi had given her that quote when they’d first met. The idea of being underground had appealed to her at the time. It no longer did.
“I had always interpreted that to mean that true art is made outside the influence of fame or ambition. But perhaps it is more than this. Duchamp believed that the observer of a work of art had an influence on it, that the act of observing a work of art forever changes that work. He said, ‘The poor Mona Lisa is gone, because no matter how wonderful her smile might be, it’s been looked at so much that the smile has disappeared.’” Lee could not tell if the man’s own smile was meant to emphasize this point, but it was grotesque, all dirty teeth and stretched lips. “Duchamp kept this final work here, quite literally undergroun
d, in no small part because he knew that the more people who saw it, the more its essential nature would change. Try to take in the importance of this moment. I know you feel it. I can see it in your eyes.”
“Its aura,” Lee said, not meaning to. But he was right, she did feel it. Perhaps this was the feeling that Tomi had been trying to get her experience.
He looked at her, surprised. “Aura. Yes, that’s it exactly.”
She hated that she thought it was beautiful; she hated that she could feel its aura. But she knew that Tomi would have felt its aura, too. The Priest nodded to the Flunky, who left the room and returned a moment later carrying a beaker of viscous red liquid. The man approached the apparatus and poured a measure through a small funnel and into a small opening in one side of the Bride.
“It took Josef years to deduce the chemistry of her love gasoline,” the Priest said.
A thick power cord ran from beneath the platform to an outlet. At the far corner of the platform was a single switch. The Flunky bent down, hesitated, and then, with the Priest’s silent assent, turned it on.
Nothing happened, not exactly; nothing lit up or whirred or clicked to sudden readiness. But, slowly, something began to hum from inside, gears began to whir and lightly plunk, as though it were gradually awakening.
Lee looked at the Priest, at the Flunky. Their faces carried the naked expectation of children at a puppet show. Everything before this had been anticipation of this moment. Everything after would be determined by it.
The Priest still had his hand on her arm, which she realized only when he took it away. He took her other hand. His fingers felt papery and dry. He placed the little object in her palm. “Please,” he said. “Do the honor.”
“Do what honor?”
“The key, of course. You’re to place it in the lock.”
“Me?”
“I think it’s only appropriate. Don’t you?”
Lee stared down at the humming machine. There was a small slit, widening at the center to an oval hole about the size of a fig, in the steel base of the machine. The welding path that puckered around its edges had been finished to a smooth, swelled ridge. Red drops began to form around the ridge, like bits of dew, fattening until they flowed down the side of the machine. The Priest took her hand in his and guided it toward the hole. He placed her fingers just above it and waited. As she pushed the little ball into the hole, a single drop of red fluid touched it and seeped into its folds. She let go, and the ball disappeared into the machine.
She heard a low whir, followed by a click. Nothing happened for several seconds. Then the Cinematic Blossoming floating above the Bride shimmered in the air, rippling like fronds of kelp underwater. The sounds began as a subterranean pulse, as though Lee were standing inside a tree carrying thousands of insects, but there was something else, an even deeper undercurrent of low moaning that permeated it all. All of it was coming from the Cinematic Blossoming, which was undulating now like some enormous larval thing. Lee felt something happening—millions of tiny strings vibrating inside her, their frequency conforming to that of this strange machine.
She looked at the Priest. He sat staring up at it, his eyes moist and his tongue swishing around against his cheek. His Flunky was breathing hard, nearly hyperventilating in his excitement.
And then, near the base of the machine, the Bachelors began to move. One at a time, they trembled and jerked. Above them, the Bride on her filament thread began to move as well, as though an engine was starting—pistons firing, slowly at first, then faster, her gears and arms rocking her body back and forth in the air. As she got moving, the Bachelors below grew increasingly agitated, popping and bouncing off one another in a twitchy dance.
The insectlike part of the Bride’s lower regions uncurled itself, the spindly legs unfolding from the body and opening up a constellation of holes along her underside. And then she was raining down on them, her love gasoline saturating the Bachelors and sending them into paroxysms of desire.
The Bachelors began to heat up, turning bright red and expanding visibly. And as they did, they emitted a gas; glowing neon red and with a chemical odor of synthetic hibiscus, it seeped out and was caught in the network of Capillary Tubes that ran from their heads. The gas traveled up the tubes, slowly, pushed on only by its own delicate expansion, and as it did, the Water Wheel cranked into motion, spinning forward slowly, and then the Glider surrounding it began to rock back and forth, slowly too at first, then faster and faster until it was rocking and shaking the entire machine.
Each time the Glider rocked forward, the Scissors attached to it opened and closed and the great Chocolate Grinder beneath churned. By the time the gas had reached the end of the Capillary Tubes, funneling into a single spout, the machine was shaking so much Lee thought it might fall apart. The Priest and the Flunky were sweating now in their anticipation, the Priest licking from his lips the tears that streamed down his face. He had the look of someone gazing upon the face of God.
As the gas coalesced and exited the Capillary Tubes, it got funneled through the Sieves, which arced above the Chocolate Grinder and transformed the gas into a cloudy, viscous liquid; from there it was pumped through a small, butterfly-like device into the Spiral. Lee watched it rush through the Spiral, up, up, through the three eyes of the Eyewitnesses, past the slicing blades of the Scissors, which cut and dispersed it as drops, through the extradimensional geometry of the Boxing Match, and up into the Bride’s domain, to the Juggler of Gravity.
The Juggler, a frantic, rattling contraption on spindly grasshopper legs, took hold of each separate drop of fluid and hurled it up in the air, toward the three open windows inside the cloud of the Cinematic Blossoming. But the undulating cloud seemed to elude each of the shots, as a matador might elude a bull, until the ninth and last shot missed its mark and dissipated into the air. And with that the insect hum of the machine began to diminish and the Bachelors, their frenzy now a dance without a partner, began to slow down, until they just kind of toppled onto one another in a broken heap.
In a minute the machine sat still, steam hissing from its undercarriage, the Bride spasming lightly in the air. And then Lee saw something she wasn’t sure she was seeing at first. It seemed like an illusion, like a trick of the air, but gained in clarity until she was certain of it: within each of the Cinematic Blossoming’s three windows an image was forming—fuzzy sparks of colored static initially that began to take clearer shape. Three holograms, hovering in the air in three dimensions. Or was it four dimensions, or six? Or eleven? In any case they were there, and Lee recognized them, she had seen them before: they were close-up sections from Étant donnés: one the upheld oil lamp, the next a detail between the woman’s spread legs, and finally the shimmering blue-gray waterfall. Then, for a brief moment, the last image flickered, and it wasn’t the waterfall she was seeing but the Paleolithic Man display at the aquarium, where she’d left Tomi’s body. Another flicker, and it was back to the waterfall. It seemed impossible. Lee wondered if the Priest and the Flunky had seen it.
But they were just staring forward, their expressions showing nothing but confusion. And then the great machine cranked to life one more time and burped out, in an antiquarian cranking of gears, a small slip of paper from a thin slit in the base that Lee noticed for the first time. The Flunky stooped and plucked it out. He handed it to the Priest, who read it to himself.
“What is it?” Lee asked. “What does it say?”
The Priest looked flummoxed. “‘Le hasard est une pute qui butine de maquereau en maquereau.’” He looked as though he was working something out in his head.
“What does that mean?” She couldn’t help it, but she needed to know. How could all of it be contained on a slip of paper the size of a fortune cookie?
“It’s French. Translated it means . . . something like ‘Chance is a whore who flits from pimp to pimp.’”
“What?”
<
br /> A dark cloud seemed to have settled over the Priest, and his face went from perplexed to angry. “It means chance is a fickle bitch.”
Lee heard the words but still couldn’t make sense of them. “I don’t understand.”
“Don’t you get it, you little dullard? A joke. He was just having a laugh.” His face seemed to collapse under the weight of this realization.
Lee looked at the two men, at their blank, voided faces. They were as shattered as the machine in front of them.
“That’s it?” she said. There was nothing at first, beyond what she thought was the dull, waning hum of the machine. Was it all just a gag? Lee thought about what she knew about Duchamp. It would have been equally like him to spend his life encoding the answer to the cosmos behind a cryptic puzzle as it would to do the same with a cheap joke. But she had seen something in there, something they hadn’t. Or had she?
Then she realized that the hum was coming not from the machine but from within her, from that hollow center she used to burrow into sometimes. The anger welled up from that spot, slowly at first, then more and more until rage was all there was. “You wanted to know what you have no business knowing, to control what you can’t control. And you killed for it. Tomi, Mr. Velasquez, Derrick, DreamClown. Those poor, hollowed-out kids. All in the name of this carnival attraction?” Lee was shaking. “You say you just wanted to know the universe. Well, the universe could give a shit about you. It looks right through you. Was it worth it, now that you know that all of this was just a man amusing himself? Would it have been worth it if you were right? You pathetic old man. Duchamp laughed at people like you, people who see only what they want to see in everything.”
The Priest did not take his eyes from the flickering hologram, as though the answers he sought were still to be had there. The Flunky stood beside him, staring down at the ground. They weren’t listening to her. Lee saw herself lifting the snow shovel from the wall and slashing it across the wattle of the Priest’s neck. But the image gave her no satisfaction.
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