Like all of the other ridiculous parts of the story, which include an encounter with a lion in the desert, this proved false for XY and XX. Finding the materials alone took six months. Not a scrap heap or rail yard in all of New England was neglected by XY, now in the full grip of his bliss. It took three months of working on the schematics to confirm that the Mecha-Ostrich could indeed be powered by steam rather than electricity.
There were also distractions caused by other sources, as when two members of the artist commune, Shelley Vaughn and Mary Lewis—whom XY called sarcastically “the two brains”; their names more and more appear to be aliases for the construction of a plot I cannot quite see the outlines of—caught wind of the project from a comment let slip by Nagalakshmi at a dinner party. Vaughn and Lewis, as XX put it, “proceeded to fill my husband’s head with nonsense about a text entitled The Adventures of Saturnin Farandoul by Albert Robida, which they claimed, erroneously, set out exemplary examples of various steam inventions, a confusion I would charitably put down to the difference between scientist and raconteur.”
Evidence of this conversation comes in the form of pages torn from a book and shoved into XY’s journal from that period. The pages have a header indicating a subtitle of “The Railway War—S&M” and reference an idea that XY spent a month considering for his Mecha-Ostrich before abandoning: “As the operations of the siege dragged on, the German scientist conceived the idea of adapting the cannons on the ramparts into high-pressure music machines to entertain the troops. To the sounds of this powerful orchestra they danced every evening in the covered trenches, and the soldiers were able to forget the fatigue of the siege in the delight of a rapid polka or a languorous waltz, sheltered from the chloroform bombs.” Perhaps XY had so fallen under the spell of the commune that he thought any practical invention must include some form of artistic expression—that “even a common toaster should play the Star Spangled Banner,” as XX sarcastically put it.
More useful as inspiration but no less distracting or ultimately useless was an example of what XY interpreted as the potential to adapt an animal form to a machine purpose: “Disdaining henceforth the railway war and banal siege warfare, Farandoul wanted to inaugurate submarine warfare! The fish-rich coasts of Nicaragua had furnished first class auxiliaries: fish of the swordfish family, light, swift-moving and easy to tame, which, once provided with a special harness, became excellent mounts for a corps of submarine cavalry.”2 With Shelley
Another addition to the main narrative, glued on top of other pages, consisted of this image, with note: “The documents I found among XY’s things included this snippet by an unnamed Brazilian member of the artist ( initials ‘FF’), a kind of early retro-futuristic fiction XY attributed to ‘the influence of XX upon him, for I have no time to talk to anyone while being so busy with the Mecha-Ostrich, and she is more in need of conversation than I. She talked briefly of illustrating this man’s visions, but then my own project again usurped her efforts.’ This is all I can find of FF’s work in amongst the papers:
The Cogsmiths had arrived on Dover by 1809, after years of tribulations crossing Europe in the middle of the Napoleonic Wars. It was not of their will to do so. Neither of their master. They had to resort to everything they had learned in years in the Frankenstein Laboratories in Geneva if they wanted to survive. While their master was to be acclaimed worldwide as the Father of the Mechanical Brains, the Cogsmiths would be considered the fathers and mothers of what came to be called then by popular press and workers as the Infernal Devices—nothing more than our modern ‘smart machines’: contraptions that, if not possessing intellects as the ‘descendants’ of Frankenstein’s automaton—the long-gone Machinekind of sad memory—were at least capable of executing several tasks without the aid of their human owners and handlers. Even with all their expertise, however, the Cogsmiths could not fix their master’s greatest creation. The metal, steam-powered automaton, which the former apprentices (now masters themselves, forged in the fires of many conflagrations) had to be dismantle in order to carry with them incognito in their travels, was so battered that they thought it would never work again.”
— The Editors
Vaughn’s and Mary Lewis’s help as metal-workers—they had previously created ingenious wind-up mechanical rabbits—the weedy backyard became for a time strewn with tiny mechanical catfish that lurched along on their pectoral fins and blew smoke out of the tops of their heads, and opened and closed their mouths as if perpetually hungry.
XY’s monomania often allowed for distractions, so long as those distractions somehow seemed pertinent. But work on the main goal was also interrupted by XY’s insistence on tracking down the remains of the mechanical elephant that had gone bust, because he felt it would be useful in working out the kinks in the ostrich, whose “mournful cannon” poked out during this period from its “half-assembled but noble chest.” Yes, XY had decided to reproduce Electric Bob’s creature in its every detail, and XX could do nothing to dissuade him. Of course, in XY’s version the “cannon” was actually a telescope with a camera attachment, “for long-distance viewing and memory restoration,” as XY put it, perhaps already envisioning an advertisement for his creation.
I can only imagine the scene when the corroded flanks and disembodied head of the mecha-elephant, stinking of rust and mold and fungus, joined the incomplete silhouette of the embryonic Mecha-Ostrich in their large backyard. That backyard had only a pathetically short white picket fence by all accounts—an attempt at normalcy meant to placate the townsfolk that, in this context, only seemed to emphasize the presence of two mechanical monsters, one dead and one about to be born. Certainly, it provided no protection from the prying eyes of the members of the artist commune, who may not have been sympathetic to S., but who in their often transient comings-and-goings no doubt helped spread a slow contagion of fact and fancy about the couple’s exploits that S. couldn’t help but notice.
ARMED with new knowledge from examining the elephant’s mecha-corpse, XY plunged forward, alternating between welding in the basement (morning) and the backyard (dead of night), along with experiments on the “fluidizing of joints” and the “actualization of movement through interjoined tubes.” XX fulfilled what we today would call “project management” and helped talk XY down off of self-created cliffs of nonsense—as when, according to XY’s own journal entry, “I was insisting on making it a hundred feet high, with an extra leg for stability, and perhaps replacing the head with a kind of deep sea diver’s helmet contraption on top, with but a single red eye.”
This mention of a “red eye” disturbed me even on a first reading, let alone the hundredth. Can it be that S.’s influence had already begun to creep into XY’s thinking, into his very dreams? That the tentacles of S.’s insurgency of evil had found their mark?
In any event, circumstances would have curtailed XY’s vision even if XX’s curt appraisal of ballooning costs hadn’t soon cut the Mecha-Ostrich prototype down to size. Their entries document a series of setbacks too desperate and complex to recount here, but which in part concerned townsfolk having caught wind of what XX called disparagingly “the golden goose” (to XY’s consternation, who kept saying “that is a bird, but not this bird”). At least one reference to an “infernal drumstick” in the town newspaper’s humor column during this time supports this theory. Whatever the reasons, business dropped off precipitously, leaving members of the commune, many of them poor, as the main clients.
Even worse for morale, XY reported to XX one day that he had seen “a mysterious figure in what appeared to be a cloak” on a hill overlooking both the house and the commune:
It—for I would not venture a guess as to its sex—just stood there staring down through the glancing light of the late afternoon sun. When I sent up a hallo—meant much like a blow, to make it stumble from its strange certainty—it made no sign of having heard me. This angered me all out of proportion to the offense, and in a haze of misdirected rage, running all the way, I pr
oceeded up the hill toward the stranger. When I got close enough, I looked up and saw that the animating impulse had left the stranger. All that was left was a cloak mockingly hung upon a large strut of my own devising. But I swear I saw it move before I ascended the hill. And who or what could carry such a large strut up a hill—and why?
This obvious intrusion by S. channeled through a kind of “stationary dark rider,” conflation of Eye and Old Ones in my opinion, was a warning that XY did not heed—or, as far as is known, even tell XX, for fear, I suppose of it being the last nail, the last bolt, the last nut, that, loosened, would undo their relationship. (Especially as there is evidence in XY’s journal that this was not the first sighting; notes in the margin about “shadows” and “uncanny noises.”)
Should simply fixing what was broken have gained them the attention of S.? No, but as I, the modern Mecha-Ostrich know, the brilliant will always call attention to themselves by the very fact of the light that surrounds them, and which they shed, and while this light will attract some, it will blind others and simply piss off those who remain unswayed in a healthier way. Breaking an egg or two, often of enormous size, is unavoidable.
At some point that anonymous donor to the commune known only as “the Prisoner Queen” gave them the money to continue to hobble along. This is where I first heard of the Prisoner Queen, and thought this was XX’s way of referring to her rich widow of a mother. Since, I have come to believe that this was another way for S. to influence events, as evidenced by the documents I have provided following this account.
The financial stress led inevitably to marital stress. It is clear from the journal entries that XY’s many eccentricities, so endearing under other conditions—one can imagine at their most endearing while on vacation in the Bahamas, perhaps, and less so during a knife fight in a Buenos Aires bar—made of him an unbearable monster to XX, and to XY her rebukes sounded like a rejection of his soul. She meant them, of course, out of love and for the preservation of what had begun to be destroyed.
With this image, the Mecha-Ostrich included the following text, glued to the back of a page of the main narrative. “In a later stage of the same comic strip, it became increasingly horrific. Here the inventor, much changed, has added himself to a diabolical steampunk invention that is poised forever between ultimate damnation and eternal good luck. The problem, of course, is that the marker itself, and thus the inventor, must reside in a perpetual form of limbo or purgatory. The official story behind this bleak storyline, as alluded to in an interview for Comics Journal in 2001? The artist admitted to ‘being stressed from a bad relationship and also depressed by the falling readership for the work.’ However, the ways in which XY, admittedly without success, attempted to integrate himself into his sad inventions during his stay in the mental hospital bear an uncanny resemblance to the incredibly black humor in ‘American Tinker Under the Influence of Absinthe.’” — The Editors
Shaken by the encounter with the thing on the hill, XY even considered, much to XX’s dismay, that they should write to the government, asking the Department of the Army to fund the project. XY had at this point taken on board advice about military needs from a former Buffalo Soldier who had gone AWOL and now lived in the commune with his Cherokee wife. Any action alerting the government to their experiment, XX told XY, would just bring unwanted attention down upon them, and the isolation they now felt in their severed relationship with the townsfolk would be compounded by potential scandal in the newspapers.
Ultimately, XY didn’t send the letter. But by then XX knew they were too far along to stop, writing in the journal, “We will either complete it or it will utterly ruin us, but it will be over soon.” XY’s entries manifested the strain in other ways; for example, this passage: “Those horrible brains that come to the fence and stare at me for long minutes while I am in the half-dressed state necessary to continue working on the machine during this incredible heat spell.” (Less nonsensical considering later evidence about S&M, but still demonstrating stress.)
Then, a breakthrough, but maddeningly only referenced in either journal with XY’s scrawled: “Success! It rode like a beauty, fast and furious!”
Then, some sort of breakdown, with another brief journal entry: “The legs are insufficient to the challenge. Might as well use toothpicks.”
Then, what some might call another kind of breakdown, “The red eyes are there on the hill again,” and nothing in XX’s journal.
Then, ominous silence in both journals for several days, except for something scrawled out in XX’s and a few doodles of ostrich legs in XY’s, along with a giant eye.
For XY, that eye would be his last entry—he would never, as far as I can tell, write down his thoughts again.
For the next day the end came, in the guise of a raid on the commune by the sheriff’s department and several mysterious “tall, strikingly pale men who wore suits, and carried rifles and hammers” (XX) and who seemed “unaffiliated with the local police.” Paranoia? Unlikely, for this is the typical modus operandi by which S. carries out His plans.
Despite protests by XY and a spirited, if ragged, defense by members of the commune, the intruders managed to pull apart and then set fire to much of the yard around the Mecha-Ostrich, while XX tried to drag a distraught XY away.
The twisted remains of the Mecha-Ostrich were quickly loaded onto a cart drawn by draft horses and driven away at a gallop by a “grim-faced giant of a man in a cloak of all things, who was leering at XY and shouting at him in a language neither of us could identify.”
In my mind’s eye I see the members of the commune who had not been led off to jail for any number of imaginary offenses, from being black to being gay to being artistic, looking on in distress as XX comforts XY, now bawling, as the smoldering Mecha-Ostrich is hauled away. Any time I see something large in a cart, it brings me back to that moment—it could be Stalin’s marble head, a buffalo, a heap of pancakes, whatever.
It was all over within an hour, and within two hours no one would have guessed that the Mecha-Ostrich had ever existed there, in the backyard of the house next to the commune.
As it had begun, so it concluded: with XY and XX. Lying in the backyard. Amongst the debris. “Unable to speak, to think, just staring mutely at the sky wondering what we had done to deserve this. We had worked so hard, for so little, for so long, and it hadn’t been enough to save us.”
WHAT happened in the aftermath, you might ask? Precious little. Less aftermath and more “anti-climax.” After all, that’s what S. prefers, as it is much less messy, less dramatic, and thus draws less attention. The event merited exactly one line in the local newspaper: “Yesterday policemen conducted a raid at-------------Street to apprehend known criminals.”
I think often about who must have been somewhere near the back of the crowd, looking innocuous—a middle-age man with a wiry frame and hunched shoulders, perhaps? A weathered Lithuanian woman in a sun dress? I am sure S. was there, in some guise, and S’s role in all of this was to burn its red eye into XY’s brain and bring an end of sorts to him.
For XY was too delicate, in the end. They had taken too much from him before he had the necessary defenses. He soon went into a kind of catatonic yet gibbering state. XX hugged him to her and yet “I knew he was already gone, that it was all over, and, worse, that I’d known it might happen.” Taken to the local sanitarium, the initial fees fronted by the mysterious “Prisoner Queen,” XY slid into a state that could only be described as alternating between nonresponsive and manic.
“Practicality is the handmaiden of tragedy,” XX wrote during this time, in such distress that I cannot make out most of her handwritten entries.
For she truly loved the fool, and his madness was her burden. XX tried her best to hold onto everything meaningful—to pretend that there would be a return to the old life. But their finances had revolved around the ostrich to such an extent that its absence as sign and symbol of redemption meant the time had come to sell the house and auction off
all of their furniture and bits of metal, just to pay debts.
A year passed in a slow agony of dashed hopes. XX received no response to any of her letters to the sheriff’s department about the incident, or to the government. The members of the commune had reverted to a polite but distant form of friendship that reflected a sense of blame. XY showed no signs of recovery—indeed, had only become more and more fixated on the shadowy figure on the hill “and its glowing red eye,” which XX interpreted as an obsession with the Mecha-Ostrich. XY had gotten no better. XX: “He has little memory of how we met or what we meant to one another—nothing that could bring him back to me.” Also, the Prisoner Queen had stopped paying for the treatments.
Steampunk II: Steampunk Reloaded Page 47