The Dream of Perpetual Motion

by Dexter Palmer

  The surface of the aged, scarred oaken desk in the back room of the apartment where Allan Winslow works is dominated by a metal tray composed of dozens of compartments, each containing a number of miniature facsimiles of body parts, made from tin. The arms and legs are the size of Allan’s smallest finger. These days Allan assembles mechanical dolls to earn a living wage, at eight cents each for a fully assembled and painted work. It isn’t much, but in these lean years of a twentieth century whose newness has not yet worn off, this is the best that the Winslows can do. Harry is too young to be put to work by anyone who has a conscience; and his older sister, Astrid, has such atrocious social skills that she can’t hold a job for more than a week and a half. So it’s Allan who is left to work whatever magic is necessary to put food in all their mouths, to provide the rare sugary thing or cinema ticket for Harold, or pencils and parchment for Astrid.

  The twentieth century is still new, and the idea has not yet come to the minds of the city’s lawyers that people have the rights to their own visages as works of art. The dolls that Allan is assembling are supposed to look like Miranda Taligent and are meant to be on shelves within days, for sale as mementos of her upcoming tenth birthday. They are sold by the Happy Family Toy Company, whose employees speak a language that Allan doesn’t understand, and who write in a script that seems to him more like a series of small pictures than words. Each week one of their employees drops off a box full of body parts and some instructions for assembly in front of the door to the Winslow apartment, then a few days later the employee comes back to pick up the completed dolls, representations of whatever young woman has caught the eye of the city’s populace that month.

  To be truthful, the dolls that Allan is making do not look anything like Miranda Taligent, by any stretch of the imagination. Part of the problem is that Allan can’t accurately decipher the printed directions for assembly that are supplied by the Happy Family Toy Company. There are line drawings of what the finished products are supposed to look like from various angles, and cutaway schematics with arrows pointing into the innards of the doll, meant to indicate the proper placement of springs and coils. But all of the illustrations are annotated by the foreign picture-script of the toy company employees, and Allan cannot read this, except for the occasional numeral, or an exclamation point that seems to denote a warning. Allan gets the feeling that he is missing something. While he thinks that the ideal mechanical Miranda is supposed to walk forward across the table, tottering back and forth on its spindly tin legs with its arms outstretched to balance its center of gravity as the windup key turns in its back, Allan’s dolls tend to stumble forward a step or two and then fall over, their ramrod-straight arms breaking their collapse. They lie there frozen then, as if they are in the midst of an overly strenuous push-up.

  The second problem is that the design for the Miranda Taligent dolls is aesthetically inept, even if (Allan imagines) technically competent. Part of the blame for this goes to Allan himself, who is a terrible painter, and renders Miranda’s blue eyes with two large white circles in the middle of her face, with two small smeared blue dots for their irises. Miranda’s mouth is a straight red line, drawn with a single quick stroke of the paintbrush. But other problems can’t be blamed on Allan’s artistic ability: the hair of the dolls, for instance, which is made of curled metal shavings, dipped in red and yellow lacquer and welded straight to the skull. The real Miranda’s hair is not curly, but falls down her back, between her shoulder blades, with just the slightest bit of a wave in it, and even though Harold has never seen an image of the girl that wasn’t in shades of gray, enough journalist’s ink has been spilled over her hair’s reddish golden hue for him to know that the Happy Family Toy Company’s attempt at metal approximation isn’t even close.

  But in the end none of this matters, and the Happy Family Toy Company knows this, which is why Allan continues to get paid eight cents a completed doll despite his shoddy workmanship. As long as the finished products look recognizably human and aren’t missing legs or sprouting extra heads, the Toy Company will put them in boxes, slap the name of Miranda Taligent on them, and watch them fly off store shelves into the hands of eager customers. This is the magic that the girl’s name has, in this city, in this season.

  “Fearless,” Allan says. “You could be strolling down a sidewalk one morning, minding your own business, chewing on a still-steaming hot cross bun and planning your day’s youthful exploits, and then suddenly an angel would fly out of nowhere and stand in your path and just stare at you. Winking and leering, doing a little dance and flapping its wings, chuckling to itself, as if to say: Go ahead and try it, child. I dare you to disbelieve in me.”

  THREE

  “On your birthday you can have your heart’s desire,” Prospero said, kneeling at his daughter’s bedside. “On your birthday you can stop time or bring back the dead. All you have to do is tell me what you wish.”

  “I have read things in books,” Miranda said, “that say that the best birthday presents are surprises.”

  “I’ve. I’ve read things in books.”

  “I’ve,” Miranda said, wrinkling her brow and pursing her lips. “Read things in books.”

  “Yes, that’s right.”

  “I want . . .”

  “Yes?” He leaned closer.

  “A unicorn.”

  Prospero smiled and sniffed in mock derision. “Is that all?”

  “And I know what you are thinking now. I do not want a life-sized doll, with legs of pistons, and eyes of camera lenses, and guts filled with wires and clockwork.”

  “Don’t. Don’t want.”

  “I want a real unicorn for my birthday. Flesh and blood. Not a machine. I can keep it in the playroom. I can teach it to lay its head in my lap and carry me on its back.”

  Prospero sighed. “I’m disappointed,” he said, rising and frowning, “and I think you lack ambition. A daughter of mine ought to wish for even more that that: she ought to wish to stretch out her hand and pull the Moon down to earth. She should wish to talk of the intrigues of lunar politics over afternoon tea with its King; she should want to dine on tarts filled with the strange fruit of its gardens. But as far as miracles go, a unicorn is easy enough, and I suppose I shouldn’t complain.”

  “You said I could have what I wanted,” Miranda said, her eyes closed, already starting to fall asleep again. “I do not want much.”

  Before he left, Prospero stayed in the darkened bedroom for a minute or so, staring down at the sleeping girl. “Miracles don’t come cheap these days; they don’t grow on trees,” he said, sighing. “But I suppose now is as good a time for you to learn that as any.”

  FOUR

  Allan Winslow looks up from his desk and squints at Harold through the jeweler’s loupe clenched in his eye socket, his eyebrows asymmetrically arched. “But words are not enough to make you know what angels truly were,” he says. “Words are not enough to give a shape to miracles—there’s nothing left that’s miraculous anymore, and that’s your loss for being born too late. Of course, this fellow Prospero Taligent, who’s always on the radio shilling some new device or other—many of the things that his company sells are called miraculous, like the high-speed egg-hatching machines and the mechanical men. But that’s nothing more than advertising.”

  It is nearly night, and Allan is done with work. He plucks the loupe from his eye and puts his tools and brushes back into their case, each one in its correct compartment—even if he has little skill with them, he can at least organize them properly. Astrid is beginning to cook in the kitchen, and the odor of her peculiar improvised recipe for stew is beginning to fill the apartment, pungent and slightly rancid. There are sounds of clanging spoons and pots. Harold winces and wrinkles his nose. It is hard to imagine how someone could screw up cooking stew, but it seems like Astrid can—it seems that all of the talents of his fourteen-year-old sister are ones that no one with good sense would want.

  “In case someone should ever ask you,” A
llan says, pushing back his chair and rising from his desk, “the difference between a miracle and an invention is that inventions have initiates, and miracles do not. Take our radio, for instance. I really have no idea how it works, and if I did not know better, I might think it miraculous that I could turn its dials and hear the voice of a man in another country, or a piece of chamber music performed many years in the past, almost as clearly as I can hear my own voice as I speak to you now. But there is someone, Harry, perhaps your teacher in school—”

  “My teacher doesn’t know anything,” Harold says. “The books know everything for her.”

  “Well, then, the men who wrote those books. Someone knows how to attach a bundle of wires and vacuum tubes together and place them in a box to make this radio, yes? And what is a mystery to me is not a mystery to them. And even if I do not understand the working of this thing myself, the knowledge that someone else does somehow makes it less entrancing, less enchanting than it could be, if I didn’t know any better.

  “Now, when I was young, in those days when angels walked the streets, the world was full of mysteries whose solutions were available to no one, and never would be. Once I saw a toothless man who couldn’t count to five restore a blind child’s eyesight, merely by kissing a silver coin and placing it on her forehead. It was worthless to ask him how the coin worked—he would simply say that God had told him in a dream that love and silver could cure the blind, and foolish in these circumstances to look into the mouths of gift horses, prying into the how and why of things even as the film was fading from the surface of the girl’s eyes.

  “But here is a paradox: that mysteries such as these provided not disquiet for us, but comfort. Because they granted us permission, and in fact made it necessary, to believe in a God to Whom all mysteries had solutions. With belief in God comes the certainty that the world that He masters has an order. That every single thing in it at least makes sense to Someone.”

  Harold follows his father into the living room, not understanding what he’s going on about, but realizing that he is performing a service, that of playing the part of the patient listener. He can see that this makes his father happy, and seeing this makes him happy in turn. “When the machines came, and when they drove away the angels from the world, they ruined everything,” Allan says. “Each time I hear of one of these new, so-called miraculous inventions, it weakens my faith in the underlying order and beauty of this world. Because what worth are miracles if ordinary men such as myself can make them and understand them, even if I cannot? What need do we have of a God if man-made miracles are two-a-penny? And without a God to comprehend this world in its entirety, what surety do I have that at its heart it is not chaotic, and”—gently tapping Harold’s button nose now with his index finger—“therefore meaningless? Now there!” Having made whatever point he was making, Allan triumphantly seats himself in a rocking chair in the middle of the room, facing the radio that towers in one corner. The evening edition of the paper awaits on a three-legged table beside him, untouched. It still has the faintly inky smell of the press: that’s nice. For Allan, reading a newspaper that comes to him secondhand is like eating cold leftover food off someone else’s dinner plate. With pages that are wrinkled and stained with spilled coffee and spots of grease, and ink that’s smudged by someone else’s dirty oily fingers, it isn’t the same. It is even somewhat disgusting. News that is touched by too many hands becomes nasty and false.

  “Dad?” Astrid says, banging the soup spoon against the inside of the pot as she stirs the stew. Pools of clear oil glimmer on the liquid’s surface. A large bubble rises to the top and bursts, releasing a gas that smells like the breath of something sick.

  “Astrid?” Allan says. What’s she mad about?

  “Dad,” says Astrid, “you’re full of it. Quiet. Please. Let’s eat.”

  FIVE

  Now the three of them are seated at the square table in the kitchen, each with a bowl of Astrid’s questionable concoction in front of them. They eat in silence, but the silence that hangs in the room has its own sound, and it’s undeniably unpleasant. Harold’s father tries to listen to it, attempting to determine why it is the way it is, wondering if there is any appropriately fatherly thing he can say to repair it, to make it into the kind of silence that exists between people so comfortable with each other that they do not need to speak. But fatherly speeches aren’t Allan’s bailiwick. He can be a good provider; he can deliver esoteric monologues on machines and miracles; but the minds of his children are ciphers.

  “I just put in it what was around,” Astrid says in a harsh, whiny voice, daring the others to criticize her culinary skills. “That’s all I did!” Then there is silence again. Harold pokes at his stew with his spoon and a piece of animal flesh rises to the top, pale and rubbery, with one of Astrid’s long dark hairs wrapped around it like a ribbon tied around a gift.

  Harold has no desire to soothe Astrid’s feelings; he has nothing to say to her whatsoever. He has decided that, after what happened between them on the boardwalk today, he is not speaking to Astrid ever again. They will both grow old and die and he will never speak to her again.

  SIX

  It is clear enough to Allan Winslow that, for whatever reason, Astrid hadn’t wanted to take her little brother along with her to the Nickel Empire; it is clearer still that if he hadn’t made her take him, then he’d have never heard the end of it. For weeks beforehand Harold had gone dead quiet whenever the advertisement for the Empire’s new mechanical entertainment had come on the radio, the announcer shouting superlatives over children’s screams and sounds of heavy weather. The Tornado. The largest, longest, fastest, scariest, thrillingest thrill ride in all the known world. Experience an unprecedented view of the entire city of Xeroville as you climb the Tornado’s enormous ramp, then get ready for seventy-five seconds of sheer terror that will climax in the biggest loop-de-loop ever constructed. The Tornado. Only at the Nickel Empire. The Tornado. The Tornado! The Tornaaaaa-DOOOO! (“Tornadoooo!” the child would echo, his arms stretched out like a pair of wings as he spun himself dizzy in the middle of the living-room floor.)

  That was why Harold found himself in the midst of a throng of similarly minded thrillseekers slowly filing through the row of turnstiles admitting them to Xeroville’s premier amusement park, his unwilling sister’s hand held in one of his while the other clutched a dingy cloth bag held shut with a drawstring and containing three dozen five-cent pieces. To him it seemed that thirty-six nickels wouldn’t be nearly enough to see all the myriad wonders advertised on the garishly colored posters plastered on the walls by the Empire’s entry gates—the Human Pincushion; the Baby Incubator; the Taligent Industries Camera Obscura; the What-Is-It—but they’d be enough to let him fill his belly with amusement-park confections, see a few freaks shambling around half-clothed and dour-faced behind iron bars, and end the day by scaring the life out of himself in the loop-de-loop. To his ten-year-old mind one had little right to ask for more.

  As they made their way past the turnstiles and down the crowded tunnel that led into the park itself, Astrid bent and placed her lips to Harold’s ear to overcome the echoing din from the entertainments just ahead: “I have adult stuff to take care of here! Adult stuff, not stuff for little kids. So sometimes I’m going to have to leave you by yourself while I take care of things. And you’d better not cry about it. If you’re a little man, if you think you’re man enough to ride this Tornado without crapping in your didies, then you’re man enough to take care of yourself when I go off to do adult things. And you’re man enough not to go running to tell Dad that I let you go all over the park all by yourself, doing whatever you wanted. If you tell Dad? If you do that? Oh, you’ll get pinched and pinched. In the middle of the night, just when sleep is gonna steal upon you: pinch. So if you know what’s good for you you’d better not do it. And if you see me talking to other adults, not snot-nosed didie-wearing little kids like you, then you’d better get scarce, and quick. Remember I didn’t
want you along with me anyway—”

  They emerged from the darkened tunnel into sunlight, the noise and the colors and the choices for pleasures overwhelming Harold’s senses. Loudly decorated booths and tents and pavilions full of games and rides and oddities stretched in all directions, and even the constant susurration of the crowd of thousands was overpowered by the rhythmic pitches of dozens of carnival barkers, their voices amplified by microphones attached to arrays of speakers mounted on tall, stout wooden poles. In staccato singsongs they begged and threatened and pleaded and commanded customers to try their wares, and much of what they said came halfway close to poetry.

  Earlier thoughts of moderation and contentment were driven from Harold’s mind by the sudden blast of sound, and he looked back on the person that he had been twenty seconds before and found him to be embarrassingly naïve. The five-cent pieces in his sack became weighted down with all the possibilities for what they might buy him, and he briefly thought them to be so precious that he might not be able to bring himself to spend them at all. In the Nickel Empire every good and service that could be bought and sold cost a single nickel, no less, no more: change was never made, and dimes were dead currency. For a nickel you could purchase a cupful of caramel custard, its surface gleaming, its taste seemingly sweeter than that of sugar itself; for a nickel each you and your sweetheart could ascend to a wooden platform, embrace each other, and strut through a fox-trot accompanied by a trio of mechanical men banging away on three slightly out-of-tune spinet pianos; for a nickel you could watch a woman toss her head back, open her mouth, and slide an eighteen-inch steel blade straight down her throat; for a nickel you could try your luck against Montgomery the Mechanical Three-Card Monte Player, a tin man seated behind a folding table whose metal-sheathed skeletal hands moved faster than the eye could follow as it tried to hide the ace of spades. (“Three-card monte,” cried Montgomery’s human “assistant” into a microphone. “Monte, monte, three-card monte. Risk a nickel, get back plenty. Their games are dirty, but this one’s clean. A man will steal, but trust a machine. Monte, monte, three-card monte.”) Best, perhaps, to keep one’s nickels forever in one’s pockets, to savor delicious possibility over mundane experience—