The Dream of Perpetual Motion

by Dexter Palmer

  She stays shut up in her room for the rest of the night, and well into the next day.

  FORTY-SIX

  Teaching helmets hang from cables over each desk of the classroom, ready to descend and dispense their knowledge. The desks themselves are barren. There is little or no paper in the twentieth-century classroom, and no paper means no idle, naughty games: no tic-tac-toe, no spitballs, no passing notes, no paper airplanes. Writing by hand is becoming a lost art.

  The students in Harold’s class sit discussing schoolyard happenings: who has a crush on whom, or blow-by-blow details of sandbox battles. It has been four months since Harold Winslow was a guest in the Taligent Tower. On his return to school he was asked a million different questions. (“Was Prospero mean? On newsreels he looks mean.” “No. He was pretty nice.” “Can he fly?” “No.” “Did you see Miranda? Did you kiss her? Did you touch her—” “No!”) He recounted the tale of his adventure over and over until it sounded like a mindless litany in his own ears, devoid of meaning. Now, however, he is no longer famous, not even by schoolyard standards. He does not even have the half-decent reputation of a has-been, not like that other kid in the class who still carries disfiguring scars across his face, earned during some misadventures in forbidden culs-de-sac of a local chocolate factory.

  Now the teacher comes into the room, grumbling: “—don’t know why they don’t fire us all, cutting our salaries whick-whack, may as well hire goddamned tin men, see what the little whelps learn from—good morning, kids.” As always, she is frazzled and disheveled, but teaching doesn’t really take much these days. She goes over to her desk, removes a large bag from her shoulder, and fishes a book out of it, seemingly at random. “Okay, then,” she sighs. “Whose turn is it to help me operate the teaching machine.”

  Six children raise their hands and squeal. The teacher picks one, a girl in blond pigtails who springs to her feet with a grin and bounds over to the teaching machine, a contraption that takes up most of the back wall of the classroom. Its major discernible features are a wide, funnel-shaped chute on its top, a series of incandescent lamps of different bright colors, and a crank, which the student in pigtails is to turn. A huge bundle of cables leads out of the top of the machine to the ceiling, and each cable in the bundle leads to one of the helmets that hang over the children’s heads, ready to descend.

  The pigtailed girl begins to turn the crank industriously, slowly at first, then faster as she builds up momentum. The bank of lights on the side of the machine begin to flicker, then brightly burn. The teacher then pulls a lever on the side of the machine, and as a mechanism plays out the bundle of cables, the teaching helmets, which look something like colanders with steel earmuffs attached, drop snugly over the students’ heads. Harold hates this moment, when the learning begins: it’s always the worst, and never fails to make him nauseous.

  The teacher opens the large volume in her hand, tears out a random page, and drops it into the teaching machine’s chute.

  With a suddenness, the world goes black and things are known. “Sometime in the 1540s, the nature of English costume drifted away from German influences, becoming significantly transformed in the process by styles of dress that were emigrating from Spain.” There is no way to avoid the knowledge being seared into his mind by the teaching machine, no escape to daydream. Sometimes Harold comes awake at four a.m., his bedclothes drenched in sweat, reciting lengthy passages from Shakespeare, manuals for the operation of mechanical men, whole books whose words he knows but cannot even comprehend. “Not even the hostility felt towards Spain in England could weaken the influence of Spanish fashions; the tendency toward solemnity symbolized by the ruff and farthingale had its origin in the Spanish court.”

  The girl in pigtails continues to turn the crank with a smile. She is happy because she does not have to learn. The teacher drops in another page: “Under the rule of Elizabeth I, luxurious, expensively decorated garments still remained under Spanish influence, lending them a stiff, artificial appearance. Many historians judge that women’s costume of this period, more elaborately worked and tending to be made in fresh spring colors, may reflect, at least in part, the Virgin Queen’s efforts to recapture her fading charms God damn it I don’t know how they expect me to conduct a class with all these interruptions.” A blinding bolt of pure pain arcs across Harold’s skull as the teacher yanks the helmet off his head and grabs him by his tiny arm. “What are you doing?” Harold yells. The rest of the students, held captive by the teaching machine, stare straight ahead in their seats with glazed eyes and perfect posture, hands on their desks with their fingers interlocked. “Come on,” the teacher says, jerking Harold from his chair, halfway pulling his arm out of its socket. “There’s a car for you outside. From Miss La-di-da Miranda Taligent. You bigheaded brat.” She spits at him: “You’ve been summoned.”

  FORTY-SEVEN

  PLAYROOM

  is the single word stenciled on the single door in the center of the long hallway in which Harold finds himself. The hallway is otherwise featureless: white-tiled walls; white ceiling; white floor. The corridors stretches interminably and turns at either end, just before the vanishing point. Other than Harold, the hallway is empty, and dead quiet. He is alone.

  Harold surveys his options and decides that they are limited: to enter the door, or to wander down the hallway until he finds some other exit. Being lost inside the Taligent Tower does not appeal to him.

  The playroom door has a large spherical polished brass knob, which Harold grasps clumsily in both hands. The door is heavy and oaken, but weighted to swing open easily, and as Harold slowly pushes it, a breeze beckons from the other side, smelling of sea salt.

  FORTY-EIGHT

  Island beach sun sky tree wheel around him. He is dizzy and sick. Beach sun sky tree island bird bright girl unicorn. This is worse than the teaching machine. The door behind him has swung shut. Too much to see. Leaf sand glare yellow blue. It is like reading two books, one with each eye, and understanding them both. There’s too much to see, and smell, and touch beneath him as he drops weakly to his knees in the seashore sand, and too much to hear. Someone, a comforter, is at his side, small and dressed in white: white fedora, white suit, white shirt, white tie, white slacks, white socks, smartly polished white leather shoes. Her reddish golden hair is loosely knotted in a strand of white lace and falls from beneath her hat, streaming down her back. Her unicorn stands reined to a palm tree, sleeping on its feet.

  Sun beach sky island tree. Green grainy bright unicorn girl white. Harold is puking on his knees by the island seashore. Miranda has a gentle hand on his back, stroking it. “It always hurts like this the first time. My father made this place more real than the places you’re used to being in, and it’s hard to get used to so many new and different sights and sounds and smells all at once. You’ll be fine soon. I’ve learned to use contractions better since we spoke last.”

  “They pulled me out of school,” Harold stammers. Only when he speaks these words aloud does he begin to comprehend the full magnitude of Prospero Taligent’s power. He has done the unthinkable. “They pulled me out of school. In the middle of a lesson. And then I went through a door and now I’m on a desert island.”

  “No, it’s not a desert island, silly,” Miranda says, giggling. “You’re still here, in the Tower. This place just looks like a desert island, but it’s all done with illusions and mirrors and the cleverest machines. My father can’t make people vanish and reappear somewhere else, like in storybooks you buy for a dime, and he doesn’t have the power to banish or exile anyone. Some people think he’s a magician, but he’s not.”

  Gently, Miranda takes Harold in her arms and lays him on his back on the sand. She looks into his eyes, unsmiling, unblinking. Harold hears the sound of waves lapping against the beach. Miranda is silhouetted by the sun shining behind her.

  “I don’t want you to get the impression that, because you are my guest, you are my friend,” she says. “I said that I don’t lik
e you, and I still don’t. But we may as well make the best of things.

  “This is my playroom, that my father made for me. This is where I learn my lessons. My father brought you here. And from now on you’ll take your lessons with me.”

  FORTY-NINE

  It is easy to see how one who did not know the entire story of the strange relationship between Prospero and Miranda Taligent might think that he did not love his daughter, or that he had no idea how to. But such a miraculous place as Miranda’s playroom, which stretched to take up an entire floor of his Tower and fill it wall-to-wall with wonders, could only have been created out of love. It wore, of course, the guise of an island, but if a visitor to the playroom wished to deny himself the pleasure of self-deception, he could reach out and touch the walls on which were painted photo-realistic verdant landscapes with accurate vanishing perspectives, or swim a few hundred yards out into a false salt sea and, ducking his head beneath the surface, see the huge pumps that generated the waves that broke rhythmically across the island shore.

  The contents of the playroom were never exactly the same from one day to the next. The ivy-covered walls of miniature labyrinths uprooted themselves in the small hours of the morning and, rolling around on metal casters and communicating to each other by means of radios implanted within them, rearranged themselves to create new patterns and produce new puzzles. Professional actors and actresses were paid to play the parts of island inhabitants that had been washed ashore, and mixed in with these were Prospero’s finest mechanical men, so cleverly constructed that, unless one touched them and felt the absence of the warmth of human flesh, one would not easily be able to discern their difference.

  An entire department of Taligent Industries was formed for the sole purpose of devising new entertainments for Prospero’s daughter as she wandered her indoor island. At its heart were five men and five women who spent fifteen hours a day lying on their backs in beds of feather mattresses while a delicately balanced concoction of intravenous drugs kept them perpetually suspended in a state of dream. An additional hour was given over to recording the recollections of their dreams, which a team of engineers and artisans immediately began to realize within the space of the playroom. The other eight hours of each of their days was left to them, to indulge in the restfulness of staying awake. The ten dreamers never left the Tower, and sometimes the workers who pulled the graveyard shifts would see one of them, clad in a thick soft white terry-cloth robe, face sallow, muscles atrophied, running her fingers in confusion over a wall that obstinately refused to dissolve to allow passage through it, or walking repeatedly in wide-eyed bewilderment back and forth through a doorway that utterly failed to lead to another dimension.

  FIFTY

  And so, instead of attending classes in one of Xeroville’s public schools, Harold was picked up at his home each day by an automobile with its doors embossed with the Taligent Industries logo, its driver sitting in silence behind the wheel, waiting each morning for the boy to come cautiously downstairs and out of the apartment building. He was then driven through the city to the Tower, whisked up by elevator to the playroom, and left there, to keep Miranda company. At the end of the day that same driver would pick him up at the playroom’s entrance and return him home, where his father waited.

  There were no lessons in Miranda’s playroom in the formal sense, none of the rigorous daily structure imposed by the public school’s instructors and teaching machines. Sometimes, as the two children wandered the island, either on foot or seated on the back of Miranda’s unicorn, they would be presented with sudden conundrums, but they would be pleasures to solve, not tasks, and more like games than homework. As when the savage hurled himself out of a dense grove of palms and into their path, his face covered in symmetrical patterns of brightly colored paint, brandishing a long serrated knife with nicks and bloodstains along its edges, yelling, “Grrr! Arrgh! Quick now: man or machine—which are you? Only men can pass this way—which are you?”

  “Silly savage,” Miranda said, and giggled. “I’m not a man or a machine. I’m a girl.” She deftly jumped from the unicorn’s back and curtsied politely in her white linen dress. “And my companion is a boy. But he’ll be a man, given time.”

  “Well, I wouldn’t be so sure about that,” the savage said, pointing his knife warily at Harold, who had by now removed himself clumsily from the back of the unicorn to stand beside the girl. The trunks of palm trees curved apselike over their heads, and shafts of sunlight cut through the fronds as they waved in a light wind, playing tiny spotlights across their faces. “They’re getting better and better at making those machines every day. Why, I hear that some of the newest mechanical men don’t even have any metal parts in them these days, but hearts that beat like ours, and skin that feels soft and warm to the touch. . . . I hear that in the future, they won’t even need factories to make mechanical men; that instead, they’ll come out of the wombs of real live screaming women, just like you did! And what will be the difference then? And how will I know who should be allowed to pass this way?”

  Quickly, the savage inverted the blade in his hand and nicked himself in the upper arm with it. The three of them paused, watching silently as a small thick line of blood welled up from the cut. “See?” the savage said, licking his lips as, without warning, a shower of electric sparks sputtered from his ear, dying out as it descended. “Prick me: do I not bleed?”

  FIFTY-ONE

  It did not take long for Harold to commit the unforgivable sin that angered the ever-watching Prospero enough to have him banished from the playroom, and the Tower. Although Harold would return to the playroom briefly ten years later, he would not have the opportunity to look Prospero in the eye for twenty years after the banishment (and then, when the two of them are on the roof of the Taligent Tower, with the good ship Chrysalis ready to lift off, Prospero, with the barrel of the pistol in Harold’s hand pressed against his stomach, will say, “You do realize that I couldn’t make it easy for you. That would have been unfair to you, and her, and me. You do understand that?”). But for now, Harold and Miranda have the freedom not to worry about the gray-skied future: they simply let Time bring it to them, as it surely will, in time. They live moment by moment, in a world without clocks. They wander hand in hand through Paradise.

  FIFTY-TWO

  The playroom was a kind of paradise, but it had monsters, as if its designers felt that the absence of evil could only be appreciated when contrasted with its presence. But the monsters were toys, more or less: built to scare, but never to harm.

  Harold and Miranda would play a game sometimes that they made up, called Damsel in Distress. They would separate, and while Miranda would hide herself, Harold would go down to the island’s beach and brood, as idle heroes do when nothing is around to be vanquished. In his hand he would have a long metal sword, hollow, but weighted at the tip to give it a simultaneous sense of lightness and heft. It wasn’t sharp enough to cut a stick of butter. This was play, after all.

  Miranda’s screams would come to Harold from somewhere on the island then, high-pitched and horror-film vixenish. “Help! Hellllp! The monster!” And Harold would jump to his feet and start running, following her gleeful yells, tracing them to the source. And there would be Miranda, in an ankle-length white dress, her back against a tree, and menacingly approaching her would be the monster, an eight-foot-tall jabberwock of a beast with a large, lumbering gait, and reddish green metallic scaly skin, and a long thick tail, and large yellow spherical rolling eyes, and jets of steam shooting out of its ears and nostrils and mouth, and both its clawed three-fingered hands raised over its head, as if to grab the girl and commit all manner of dastardly deeds.

  At this point, Harold, the boy in short pants, screams, “Unhand her, knave!” or some equally heroic challenge, in a register about the same as Miranda’s. Then the monster swivels to face him and they fight, Harold swinging with his dull sword at the monster’s knees, each hit accompanied by the whing of metal on metal, the m
onster growling and sputtering and tottering around and randomly waving its arms, until the key in its back runs down and the monster falls over, inert. Red-cheeked Miranda runs to Harold with a sighed “My hero!” and puts her arms around him and holds him close.

  Once, though, something different happens. The game starts out in the same way, with Harold sitting at the shore, gripping the hilt of his toy sword in both his hands, pondering the eternal grave questions that concern heroes, until he hears the screams. But when he finds her, no beast is waiting to be obediently slain: there’s just Miranda, alone in the middle of the copse, sitting cross-legged on the ground, weeping, both fists holding long frayed strands of her own hair, ripped out at the root. “He thinks he can get me,” she says, “in here,” and she begins to repeatedly thump the side of her skull with her index finger, as if she’s trying to punch a hole through it. “But I know how to escape.” She winds a turn of her red-gold hair into her chubby little fist and pulls it clean out. Beads of blood bloom in the newly bald spot. Harold, with a boy’s simplicity, reaches out to touch her, not knowing what to say, but she jumps away from him: “Don’t touch me! I’m going to escape. I’ll weave my hair into a rope, and then I’ll climb out of here.” Tapping her head again. “Miranda,” says Harold, “you’re scaring me. Stop it.” Yank and out comes another chunk of locks. “I told you don’t you touch me!” Backing off from him, stumbling and falling and getting up again, grabbing another hunk of hair in her hand. Harold, panicked, clumsily tackles her before she can do any more damage to herself, and as soon as he grabs her slender little sleeveless arm he feels the answering coldness of stainless steel. He touches his finger to a tear running down the girl’s face, and then to his tongue: it’s machine oil. “Silly boy,” the real Miranda says, peeking out from behind a tree, laughing gaily. “You were trying to rescue the monster.”