The Dream of Perpetual Motion

by Dexter Palmer

  FIFTY-THREE

  The tip of a knife is buried the smallest fraction of an inch into the woman’s skin, not even deep enough to draw blood, just at the place on her chest where the gentle swell of her breast begins. The knife is grasped by a hand; the hand belongs to a man who sits with his legs crossed in the sand, opposite his lover. His shirt is loosely buttoned, as is hers. The tip of a knife is buried the smallest fraction of an inch into his skin, not deep enough to draw blood. The knife is grasped by a hand; the hand belongs to a woman who sits with her legs crossed in the sand, opposite her lover. Her shirt is loosely buttoned, as is his. The tip of a knife is buried the smallest fraction of an inch into the woman’s skin, not deep enough to draw blood, just at the place on her chest where the gentle swell of her breast begins.

  They sit this way, in symmetry, in a circle drawn in the sand, and the boy and the girl stand outside the boundary, timid, hand in hand. No one moves.

  The man in the circle has to pee, badly. He has had to pee for some time now.

  “They weren’t here yesterday,” Miranda says.

  “We are here,” the woman says through clenched teeth, not daring to move a muscle, not willing to take her eyes off her lover’s, even to look at Miranda, “because we are in love.”

  “Ain’t love grand?” the man says.

  “You shut up,” the woman hisses. “You just close your mouth.”

  The man flexes his grip on his knife ever so slightly, gaze flicking down to the point of the blade lying on his own chest. “I’m gonna do it. I swear I’m gonna do it.”

  “We are in love,” the woman says. “I am deeply in love with this man. In my mind I carve our names in the bark of imaginary oak trees, encircled in cartoon hearts. I have wanted to kill him for many months.”

  “I have wanted to kill her for many months,” the man says. “In my mind I write her name with endless flourishes in the margins of copybooks. I am deeply in love with this woman. We are in love. I was so careful, honing the knife’s edge while she was asleep.”

  “I was so careful,” the woman says, “honing the knife’s edge while he was asleep. But when I’d secretly sharpened it so much that the tip was invisible to the naked eye—”

  “—and I reached out,” the man says, “ever so quietly in the dark, to cut out her heart and end it for good—”

  “—I looked down—”

  “—and there she was with her own secret knife—”

  “—at my own heart—”

  “—even as my knife,” says the man.

  “—was at his,” says the woman. “One of the pleasures of being long in love is that you come to know each other.”

  “You come to be like each other.”

  “Hand in glove.”

  “Sleeping together like spoons lying in a drawer.”

  They are all silent for a while. Harold is afraid. He wants to take his clammy sweaty hand out of Miranda’s and run, off the island, out of the Tower, to a place where rhythm and symmetry don’t hurt. Miranda is not holding his hand tightly enough to resist his withdrawal, but if he moves, if he even flinches, then she’ll know, and that will be worse.

  “Hey, kid,” the man says to Harold.

  “What?” says Harold weakly. He flinches. And feels the subtle answering tremor in Miranda’s hand, bespeaking recognition, understanding, disappointment, sorrow.

  “Hey, kid,” the man says. “I really have to take a leak. My eyeballs are floating, over here.”

  FIFTY-FOUR

  She scurries frantically between several piles of arms and legs and torsos and hands and fingers and toes and feet and heads with dead lamps for eyes, lying on the seashore just out of reach of the lapping waves. They are scavenged from the bodies of defunct mechanical men, defective and obsolete models, silvery steel scarred with burns and scratches, freckled with spots of rust.

  Farther up the beach, in the shade of a tree, an incomplete, mismatched, disconnected set of these scrap parts is arranged in an approximation of a human form. The arrangement of parts recalls the position that the dead take in sarcophagi.

  As Harold and Miranda stand in the cover of the shade tree that shelters the mechanical corpse, they watch the woman shuffle quickly back and forth between the piles of components. She is still young, but age is creeping up on her before it’s due, evidencing itself in places like the network of veins stretched taut over the birdlike bones of her hands, and the gentle curve of her upper back where it slopes into her neck. Her eyes are large and mercury gray and would be beautiful if they didn’t have spots of discolor beneath them, and if they weren’t glazed and unfocused, and if they blinked. She is muttering to herself, a continual stream of chatter too soft for the children to hear. Her mouth does not stop moving. Her hands shake.

  Suddenly, she reaches deep into a pile of forearms and yanks one out, a long, slender, rust-covered rod. Then she runs up the beach toward the mechanical corpse (and Harold and Miranda, not wishing to speak or be seen, withdraw quietly into the shadows of the palms that line the beachfront). Kneeling at the corpse’s side, the woman removes its left forearm, replacing it with the one she has in her hand. She tries, futilely, to connect it to both the hand and the upper arm, then gives up and simply lies the disconnected part in its proper place in the arrangement.

  “Not it,” she says softly, “not quite it. Close. But . . . no. Not it.” She comes to her feet and turns, as if to return to the pile of derelict parts arrayed on the shore, but pauses for a moment, tilting her head quizzically as if she senses she is being watched.

  Then she proceeds down to the shore again, shuffling and mumbling, but, as if for the benefit of her unseen audience, she raises her voice.

  “—and if you stood behind him and whispered his name, he’d startle and spin around to face you, as if you’d snatched him out of a dream. I don’t expect you to understand. I know that all the words I use fall flat. But he was such a powerful person. We had conversations! He would talk, and I would talk, and he would talk, and each of our words sounded out the deepest secret depths inside us. There are some forms of love that words can do no justice to. There are some scars that cannot be seen. Perfection is in itself an imperfection. He had flaws. He was sick. He needed help. Is not everyone sick, at one time or another? That was part of his beauty, his sickness. If he had not been sick, he would not have been beautiful, in the way that consumptives are, burning themselves up in brilliant flashes of light. You don’t know. He would eat the tarts from the inside out, breaking off the crusty edges, setting them aside and saving them for last. You don’t know. I don’t expect you to be able to understand. Love is strong enough to resurrect the dead. I don’t like the word scar, because it implies intent and blame. A soul as powerful as his had to burn. I have never known a love like this. You will never know a love like this. You don’t know. I would have done anything at all for him. You don’t know. It feels so goddamn good to be needed, to have someone tell you that he has a gaping hole in him whose shape is made to fit you. Not that I had any power. He had it all. He needed me when he burned, and when he burned me that first time, I looked right into his eyes and read the apology there that he didn’t know how to speak. A lucky thing for me. He never wanted to hurt me. It was in his beautiful nature to burn. And the mark that he left on me was not something that I chose to call a scar, because that would have implied intent and blame. And when future marks came to join that one, I saw that he was burning a piece of art on me, a signature on my psyche because it filled the hole in his own, and he wanted to make me his. And it hurt, yes, but I never blamed him, even when the burns lost their pattern and became random, and too much to bear. I would tell him that he was hurting me, but the tone of his voice was enough to absolve him in my eyes. There are some forms of love that words can do no justice to. Don’t think that I haven’t come to my senses and seen him for what he was. No—that’s not right. The person he was, the beautiful person I fell in love with, is gone, and now he only knows
how to burn. I tried to bring him back, tried to remind him how and why he needed me so much, but he’d hurt me every time. He’s gone now, somewhere, with someone else that I’m left to imagine, and I am here, trying to resurrect the dead, with his scars on me—no, I must remember, they’re not scars—like a signature and a blueprint. No one can ever have what I had. No one in the whole wide world will ever have what I had with him. Never ever. Never. You don’t know. It makes me so unhappy to think of him, away somewhere else, unhappy with someone else and missing me. Trying to make someone else’s face into mine, as he must be. Without me the person he was must be dead. He can’t be the same person he was before. The feelings I had were so strong that they could not have been wrong. Without my love he must be little more than a walking corpse, a tin man. But I knew him, and I loved him, and I can bring him back to me, re-create him out of memory with the blueprint he burned onto me like a last desperate love letter, find and rescue him, show him that he needs me, even if I have to lie to myself sometimes and say I’ve forgotten him. I can bring him back to me,” she says, looking up the beach at the mechanical corpse lying in the sand (and if she’d been able to peer into the shadows, she might have seen Harold and Miranda hiding apart, huddled and holding themselves, struck dumb). “Love is strong enough to resurrect the dead,” she says. “I can bring him back.”

  FIFTY-FIVE

  And it’s slipping away. Miranda can feel it slipping away, and she says:

  Come with me. Father has set us some difficult lessons, and I can feel them working their way into me, making me learn and making me forget. I have already lost the knowledge of the word whose sound has the shape of a soul. But perhaps it’s not too late. Come with me. Hurry now. We still have a chance to be young.

  FIFTY-SIX

  From the eighth notebook of Caliban Taligent:

  —You, my hypothetical reader, perusing these pages long after what, based on events thus far, is likely to be my painful and ignominious death: you must think it hubris of the greatest sort for me to have believed that my thousands of pages of acute social observations and razor-sharp philosophical musings would be preserved, sheltered from the indiscriminate ravages of Time so that they would come before your glazed, uncomprehending eyes. Yet work your thoughts and you will see: my ugly athlete dancer’s body has gone to dust and here you are, enchanted, just as I foresaw centuries ago! Ha!

  I know you, I think, and because I know you, I will have mercy on you. A steady diet of ideas of the magnitude of those contained in these notebooks (especially notebooks seven and sixteen, which are especially theoretical and dense) must be far too rich for you. It must be leavened with cheap cardboard narrative to make it palatable, and easier to swallow. You need the lone gunman hiding in the shadows; you need the first hesitant childhood kiss; you need the simplicity of “happily ever after” and “once upon a time.” So I shall let you rest for a moment. I shall describe to you the place where I live.

  The Taligent Tower has one hundred fifty floors; my accommodations are on the 101st. At least this is what I am told by my father. My cage, fifteen feet by fifteen feet, hangs by a chain a few inches above the floor of the slightly larger room in which it is enclosed. The room is of a size such that, by reaching through the bars of the cage (which are iron, and doubly reinforced) I can touch any part of any wall. There is a single small double-paned glass window, through which someone on the opposite side may observe me, and a door that is kept securely locked, through which my mechanical servants bring meals, along with pen and ink and fresh notebooks, so that I may continue my memoirs.

  I have already said that, by reaching through the bars of my cage, I can touch any part of any wall of the room that encloses it. I can now tell you that three of the four walls of this room are covered with thin, tiny rubber tubes, densely packed against each other. Each of these tubes is individually labeled with a white tag, and by grasping any one of them I choose, I can pull it through the bars of the cage and stick it into my ear.

  This room is a listening post: a father’s gift to a son he could never publicly acknowledge. Each of the tubes in this room snakes through the superstructure of the Taligent Tower to find its end in a different room, concealed by a wall clock or secret panel, so that, by placing the proper tube in my ear, I can hear the sounds in any room of the Tower, day or night. (No: any room in the Tower but one. But that is for later.) No one in the Tower knows of this room but my father and myself, and since my existence is also an equally well-kept secret, I sit here at the center of this world, like an omniscient God Who persistently carries on His duties, in spite of the knowledge that His subjects no longer believe in Him.

  FIFTY-SEVEN

  And Miranda feels it slipping away, and she says:

  This is the first time in my life that I’ve had the feeling that I’m running out of time. We have to hurry. This will be simple if we get there in time, but we have to hurry. I used to spend days lost in this playroom, wandering safe beneath the trees in simulated night, and surprised by the slow rise of my father’s artificial sun. Now I worry, and I wish that I had a mindless machine strapped to my wrist to measure out seconds one by one, to save me the trouble and relieve me of my new obsession. I no longer wish to be surprised by sunrise, which is the first clear sign, I think, that I am no longer a child.

  Don’t stand there looking! Hurry! Soon we will split, and it’ll be too late. My father will have you stoking the fires in his boiler room if he finds out.

  FIFTY-EIGHT

  From the eighth notebook of Caliban Taligent:

  —Despite what you may think from reading of the circumstances of my existence, it is not true that I have not known love, although I have not experienced it in the base, traditional sense in which it seems the word is most often used. In my cage at the heart of this Tower I have listened to hundreds of fools claim that their love for one another knew no bounds, that it lay beyond the expression of words, that the only way it could be expressed was in the touch of flesh on secret flesh. But to mistake simple touch for love? If this is love, then it is the love of the dumb. Reflex and orgasm are what the machines that imprison our souls need to remind themselves of their existence. My beautiful body is one of the ugliest in the world, but I have been fortunate enough to have been granted the knowledge of a love that transcends it. In my sleep the flesh machine that holds me in its cage sweats and writhes and proclaims its loneliness, but I know better.

  I have already spoken of my father’s desire to build a mechanical man with a soul. His fiercest critics say that he seeks to deny the right of human beings to be mysteries to themselves. I suppose they are correct. But I pose a question: why should it be considered a right to believe oneself a miracle, just because one does not understand oneself and the motives for one’s actions? Just as I hear of my father’s mechanical men and know that they are not golems animated by magic, so I also know that this thing I call a “soul” within me is nothing more than the evidence of a machine whose complexity is of such a high degree that it is presently out of my power to grasp.

  I am aware that most people are not as intelligent as myself, and that their primary sensations in life arise from little else than dumb impulse and desire. I suppose that, for those unfortunate people, physical sensation must suffice as a simple substitute for love. What has troubled me more in this cage, though, is those who claim that touch is more than the crudest of pleasures at best: that it is a viable form of communication. Perhaps some small bits of information can be divined from the length and nature of a kiss, but for such highly evolved beings as ourselves to debase ourselves by settling for mere instinct? When we could write treatises and sing songs to declare our higher love? Horrifying. The possession of a sense of self is the prize we won when our ancestors crawled out of the sea, and to succumb to basic instinct when so much better is available to us is to squander our hard-earned reward. I fail to see how a thinking being in love can desire to touch the object of his desire. Wouldn’t the fear
that the touch would be taken as an insult be enough to dampen that dumb physical ache?

  I want to murder my father. I have many reasons why, not the least of which is that he sometimes reaches into this cage to touch me, not speaking, pretending pity; now I shall tell you another. Love, no matter how high or low its form, must be requited, or the lover suffers. This is the nature of the beast. I have already described the rubber tubes that cover the walls of my residence. One tube, however, differs from the others; it is stopped with cotton and glue, so that I can’t hear what goes on in the room at the other end. And as if to taunt me, this tube is labeled with a bloodred tag, and on this tag is written: MIRANDA.

  Not that I can never hear the voice of my sister. I can hear her in the playroom, in the library, in my father’s study seated on his lap, or running gaily up and down the Tower’s corridors. But I want to be with her in the place that she sleeps, and this my father has forbidden. I have heard the evidence of the most intimate moments of the lives of those in this Tower, all the sounds that we pretend to be deaf to each day because they remind us of our own filthy humanness: heard farts and belches; heard the plops and hissing streams of toilet stalls; heard the moans of executives cavorting in closets with typewriter girls. But I have never heard the gentle sound of my sister’s snoring. This alone is forbidden me.

  I would like to be able to put my mouth to this stoppered tube and sing a song to her. (Lest you think I could not accomplish this, you should know that not only am I an accomplished composer, but I have trained my vocal cords so that I can sing with multiple overtones. I refer you to the aleatoric symphony that comprises most of notebook thirteen.) I would like to sing a song to my sister, that creeps into her dreams to keep her warm while she sleeps. But this is a love that can never be consummated. In the past age of miracles, beasts that were not yet human freed their lust of shame by calling it love and mounted one another atop the altar of a God that represented all they didn’t understand; in my dreams, I imagine myself speaking a poem of unbearable beauty to my sister, nestled warm in the belly of a vast and wonderful machine of infinite size and complexity. This is why I want to murder my father: because he has forever forbidden me the chance to sing a simple, sweet lovesong to my sister.