My House Gathers Desires

by Adam McOmber

  “My name is Arnaud Eisler,” Arnaud says as they walk. “Would you tell me your name?”

  “I don’t have one, I’m afraid,” the docent says.

  Now Arnaud feels as though he’s being teased. Perhaps the docent can smell the bakery flour on Arnaud’s clothing. Perhaps the docent thinks he is some country fool. “No name?” Arnaud says. “Just like the exhibition, eh?”

  “Not exactly like that,” the docent says. “I had a name once, I suppose. I just forgot it. Too much traveling, you see.” He turns and winks at Arnaud.

  There is very little conversation after that. They come to another phonograph like the one in the entryway. This one plays a recording of a man who’s supposedly been dead for twelve days and has recently awakened. In a halting, weak voice that is oddly pitched, the man tells of the places he visited in death. “There was a garden,” he says, “where souls changed form. Men became animals and animals, men. Some of the souls left the garden. They moved up like stars.”

  “Maybe we could go to a café,” Arnaud offers. “Have a coffee? A glass of wine?”

  “Difficult to get away,” the docent says.

  Arnaud clears his throat. He wants to ask questions: Do you like to touch? Are you interested in boys? Instead, he decides on a safer line. “So, where do you come from?” he asks. “Where did the exhibition begin?”

  The docent looks distant, as if trying to recall. “There’s just one more thing I think you should see,” he says finally. “It’s what most people come for, even though they don’t always know it. Follow me.”

  Arnaud actually considers declining the offer. This whole experience has been so improbable. So unexpected. He realizes he isn’t even likely to get that kiss. But then he looks at the docent again, appreciating the way the boy tilts his head as he waits in the doorway.

  “Why not,” Arnaud says. “Lead on.”

  As they walk, Arnaud sees indistinct bodies in the shadows up ahead that seem to swell and diminish. He wonders if these are other patrons or perhaps something else that wanders here in the museum. Arnaud realizes that he’s a wandering shadow now too. He and the lovely docent. He thinks of his mother and father who are, at that moment, likely waiting for him in the warm rooms above the bakery. His father will be reading from the Bible. His mother will sit in a chair and peer out through the high window. Some part of him wishes he were there. He’d tell them the story of the museum, how strange it all was.

  “Just down here,” the docent says. And surprisingly, a staircase appears before them. A staircase in a tent? Arnaud thinks. That isn’t possible. And yet they are descending.

  “The proprietors are of the belief,” the docent is saying, “that the whole cosmos is a clockwork. We are all pieces in its mechanism. They’ve invented a model of—well—you’ll see.”

  At the bottom of the staircase, it’s so dark that Arnaud can’t see anything. He feels the docent’s fingers brush his hand and draws back. The boy is cold, impossibly so.

  “Maybe we shouldn’t—” Arnaud says.

  “What’s wrong?” the docent asks.

  “Nothing,” Arnaud replies. “I only want a cigarette.”

  The boy is so close now that Arnaud thinks he should be able to feel his breath. Yet there’s nothing. “It’s just up ahead,” the docent says. And before Arnaud can ask any more questions, they’re moving once again. Down a twisting corridor that looks as though it’s been hewn from the earth itself. We’re in a cave, Arnaud thinks. But he knows that’s ridiculous, of course. This isn’t a cave. It’s another part of the traveling museum, another illusion in this collection of illusions.

  And then Arnaud sees it there in the half-light—what appears to be a full-sized clockwork man. The clockwork crawls in the dust of the cavern floor, making odd stiff movements with its hands, as if searching for something.

  “Go ahead,” the docent says. “Have a look.”

  As Arnaud approaches, he recognizes the figure’s clothes: brown trousers and a loose cotton shirt, common clothes, dappled with flour. The android’s hair is dun-colored. And the face—Arnaud has seen that wide, square face in his own shaving glass. For there, crawling in the dust of the cavern floor, is Arnaud himself. Only it’s not him. This is some copy, some piece of metal brought to life.

  “The proprietors,” the docent says, “are building a cosmos within the cosmos. Smaller and smaller, you see. Eventually, we’ll have one of everything here.”

  Arnaud doesn’t speak. How can he?

  “You seem surprised,” the docent says. “I thought this is why you came—to look at this. But people come for different reasons.”

  Arnaud gets down on his hands and knees to look into his copy’s greenish glass eyes. They seem empty at first—without a soul—then Arnaud sees something deep inside. It’s another copy, he thinks, a boy in the black cave of the android’s pupil, crawling there. The miniature boy is thinking of his parents who sit above the warm bakery, waiting for him to come home. He’s thinking of how he could have gone to the stables. He could have held hands with a soldier or had a night of swimming in the pond at the northern edge of the city with the miller’s son. He’s thinking what a fool he’s been. How many of these boys are there? Arnaud wonders as he stares into the cave of the creature’s glass eye. How many of me? He looks toward the docent again and realizes the boy might now, finally, be ready to give him that kiss. It will taste like dust, Arnaud thinks. It will taste like something formed a thousand years ago. As all these things here are made of dust.

  “I should go,” Arnaud says.

  “Yes,” the docent says with a faint smile. “I suppose you should try.”

  History of a Saint

  “Clockwork automata and African beetles and tusks of the Arctic Narwhal,” writes the Vicomte de Barras in a letter to his wife, “such are the artifacts found in Herr Magnus Engstrom’s collection at his snowbound château. It is, my dear, an astonishing display. And yet, when finally I beheld Engstrom’s centerpiece—the so-called Saint of Fribourg—it became difficult for me to consider any other object. I could not wrest my gaze from that miraculous figure. The girl is said to have perished some two hundred years ago. Her corpse, however, remains inviolate. She looks as though she sleeps. It seemed that she might turn her head in her glass casket, at any moment, and ask me to lift the latch.”

  Documents from a vault at Saint Nicholas’ Cathedral report that the body described by Barras and others was unearthed in the excavation of a mass peasants’ grave. Workmen knelt and prayed at the site, for it appeared they’d found a “sleeping girl” buried with the bones in the earth. Bishop Schiner of the cathedral was summoned, and after examination, declared the body to be in a rare state of miraculous incorruption. He ordered the remains transported to the cathedral’s reliquary where he would begin a petition for canonization. It appears, however, that the corpse’s presence—venerated or not—began to trouble the monks who lived in the adjoining monastery. The Fribourg Saint was said to manifest a number of disquieting phenomena. Dutifully, Bishop Schiner reported these to the high council, wondering if they bore the mark of Christian miracle. The council’s answer was clear. Not more than a year later, an abrupt and unceremonious sale of the relic was made to Magnus Engstrom.

  In his journal of inquiry, Engstrom records the events that transpired upon the saint’s arrival at his château: “I found myself intrigued by stories of her so-called miracles,” he writes, “and I was eager to begin my own experiments. An emissary of the church used a pry bar to open the crate, and I must admit that my immediate reaction was one of dismay. I thought, surely, I’d suffered a fool’s sale. The girl, nestled in the straw-filled box, was most certainly alive—cheeks rouged, eyes barely shut. The emissary understood my reservations and bid me to place my hand on the girl’s cheek. When I did, I found that, although her skin was supple, it was cold. I took the snood from her head and found her hair was soft, pliant. Even her fingernails had not turned brittle. She appeared
entirely unmarked by time. Upon closer examination, I discovered that catgut had been used to sew the insides of the girl’s lips together. It seemed even the Saint of Fribourg had not escaped the ancient and superstitious practice of sealing the mouth, ensuring the dead could not speak from the grave. When I made mention of this to the emissary, he looked grim and said it was oft best not to question old beliefs.”

  Ensuing pages in Engstrom’s journal are devoted to a defense of his investigation into the nature of the perhaps holy personage. At the age of thirty-five, Engstrom had everything to prove and hoped the saint could help him finally make his name. The youngest son of prosperous Baron de Steiger, Engstrom had suffered a series of illnesses during childhood that put him in a state of extreme melancholy and nervous exhaustion. For most of his adolescence, he could tolerate neither light nor sound and kept himself in dark and silent rooms, warmed only by a small fire, the light of which was muted by a heavy iron grate. It was within the confines of these rooms that he began his study of scientific aberrations—from the Vegetable Lamb of Tartary (said to be a mammal that sprouted from the vines of a rare fern) to documented occurrences of human resurrection that occurred long after that of Christ.

  These early interests led to a series of failures. Engstrom attempted then to pen a Cyclopedia, in which he wished to gather all human knowledge. The writing was abandoned after the completion of only one volume, a tome that was composed entirely of a lengthy description of a rare cave-dwelling fish in Southern France. There was also the strange episode in which Engstrom secured a portion of his father’s wealth to purchase a rural village near Bern that had been abandoned during the plague. Engstrom announced he would use the village to create a replica of the Heavenly Domain as described by the Englishman John Styron. Styron had famously suffered a blow to the head while on a sailing vessel, which resulted in an ecstatic vision of Heaven. The project was abandoned after the Mansion of God (said to be a series of houses within houses—each decreasing in size) was set afire by local vandals.

  Magnus Engstrom’s family disapproved of his curious obsessions, and it was well known that his inheritance was left in a precarious state if he could not appease his father and become a gentleman of some substance. The cabinet of wonders at the snowbound château was Herr Engstrom’s desperate attempt at claiming legitimate status and repairing his name. He modeled his cabinet on the wunderkammer of Rudolph II, endeavoring to present the world in its entirety in the space of a single room. Engstrom wished to take his cabinet to a level of extremity never before seen. “I shall soon be turning visitors away,” Engstrom writes. “The aristocracy will clamor to have a look at my collection and to hear of the experiments I’ve performed. I will be able to charge even my own father special alms for admittance.”

  Engstrom’s most serious failure—the one for which he was so often judged—was of a social, not scientific, nature. And it seemed even the wondrous Saint of Fribourg could not aid him in this respect. Herr Engstrom asked for the hand of seventeen-year-old Lady Margaret of Wisberg in a further attempt to please his wealthy father. Lady Margaret was a child of the age, intelligent and serene, and though her mother was against the proposed marriage, her own misguided father saw fit to comply. After a somber and candlelit wedding beneath a canopy of lilies and Edelweiss, Herr Engstrom brought Lady Margaret to the cold environs of his château at the foot of the Bernese Alps, and there he perpetrated what appeared to outsiders as a systematic neglect of her needs. He withheld even a modicum of affection, thinking only of his cabinet of wonders, leaving the château often to pursue and purchase rarities. It became clear that his sensibilities were not suited to the comforts and traditions of marriage, and his abandonment of Lady Margaret left her in a state of perpetual misery.

  Isolated from her family and the beautiful fields of Wisberg where she’d been raised, Lady Margaret found little to occupy her heart. She wore a dark mantle over her dresses and a gable covered her hair. She was often seen walking the lonely mountain paths above the château, gazing down at the road that led to the city of Bern—perhaps dreaming of worlds not encased in ice. When she was overcome by the tedium of her existence, Lady Margaret was known to take a lantern from the house and explore a system of tunnels in the mountain pass above the château. Children of the village took to calling her the Gespenst, meaning “specter,” and warned each other to stay clear of her cold lantern’s light. In a letter to her mother, Lady Margaret herself writes, “If I cannot find peace in my own house, at least there is the house of the Earth to soothe me. Children watch for me in the caves, thinking I am to be feared, and perhaps they should fear me. I will become an illustration for them—so they might not suffer a fate similar to my own.”

  Lady Margaret was ordered by her husband not to enter the cabinet of wonders, as such scientific endeavors were perceived as unfit for the attentions of women. But on one icy winter’s day when Herr Engstrom was, once again, absent from the château, Lady Margaret forced a weak-willed servant to open the door to the wonder room. She’d heard rumors about a dead girl in a glass box and wanted to see for herself if such rumors were true. In her personal journal, Lady Margaret describes the scene: “Among all the awful glass-eyed chicanery and the various depictions of the physically deformed, I found her. Though I expected the girl’s presence to be frightening or grotesque, it was quite the opposite. A blessed calm came over me, and my first thought was that she looked like my own mother. The girl in the box had a clean and healthy face, as though she was familiar with country work. It’s strange to say, but I was pleased to see such a face. I’d been surrounded for so long by the jaundiced visages of wealth. I dismissed the servant, and opened the lid of the box, so I could touch the gentle girl within. And it was when I put my hand on her own folded hands that chords of strange music drifted toward me—as if the girl was singing. I drew my hand back, waiting for her eyes to open, knowing I might faint were she to do so. But the saint remained still. I touched her again and listened to the music that emanated from her body—a heavenly song. I wondered if the girl might be filled up with angels. Finally, I grew drowsy from listening. I said a prayer and kissed her on the cheek before taking my leave of the cabinet. I hope kissing her was not too bold a thing, for hers was indeed a holy presence.”

  Documents regarding the sale to Magnus Engstrom make it clear that the body’s sainthood was never officially decreed. According to papal law, incorruption could have a variety of possible causes, not all of them wholesome. Remarks were even made regarding the will of demons. Offices of the Canon in Rome believed Bishop Schiner had been hasty in his petition, and the bishop himself eventually agreed. He includes in his tract a list of priests who abandoned the monastery due to the presence of the Saint of Fribourg, all of them men of good standing. In an addendum, he also discusses the phenomena surrounding the body. These occurrences appear in two distinct categories. In the first are her curative properties. The Fribourg Saint was said to possess the power to reinvigorate spoiled fruit, meat, and plant life. If given a sufficient amount of time, her presence could restore organic matter to its original vitality. Her second power was more ambiguous and, according to the bishop, more troubling. Apparently, she was known to cause visions. “The brothers have experienced every sort of poisonous dream since the coming of the incorrupt body,” writes Bishop Schiner. “They have described nights full of talking wolves and dancing women. They have seen an absence in the starlit sky where God should be. One of our most stalwart brethren even described a dream in which he rose from his bed, went to the reliquary, and held the dead girl against his own body. He says the warmth of his flesh awakened her, and she attempted to speak to him though her mouth appeared sealed shut. He is glad the girl could not speak, as he believes she aimed to enchant him.”

  Magnus Engstrom did not fear the saint’s purported abilities, and he began his experiments almost immediately upon his taking possession of her. He writes: “I was skeptical to say the least regarding the phenomena
surrounding the Fribourg Saint. Men of the cloth often exaggerate such happenings due to their solitude and religious fascination. I set out to test the girl myself, using scientific principles of observation. On our first evening together, I placed a shriveled plum on the saint’s breast. It is said that spoiled fruit revives in her presence. I invited several persons to the cabinet the next morning to examine the plum along with me—these included the esteemed Alaric Glaus and Lucillius of Ghent. I was astonished to see that the plum had regained some of its color and did, in fact, seem less desiccated than on the previous evening. My comrades were incredulous, claiming I might have replaced the plum during the night, so I invited them to repeat the experiment and stand guard. We placed the same plum on the breast of the saint for a second night, and the next morning, my near exhausted friends found that the plum had regained a full state of freshness. When we cut the fruit open, its flesh was unmarred by decay, and when we tasted it, it was sweet.”

  Engstrom records a number of other such experiments. The saint revived a dying fern and was also able to cure a sick stable hound. The dog was locked in the cabinet overnight, and a terrible howling came from the room. None of the servants dared open the door. They expected to find the dog dead the next morning for all the awful noise it made, but instead they found it rejuvenated and twice as fast at catching rats.