by Cat Rambo
“As long as we’re being all open and aboveboard,” I said, “what’s this piece of war memorabilia everyone’s looking for?”
His attention sharpened. “Who else is looking for it?”
“Who isn’t?” I said. “That’s why my mother’s out here, I’m sure.”
He started to relax until I said, “And some government agents as well.”
His shoulders slumped in a sigh. “Very well. Susan Day had an automaton she’d pilfered from the Nazis.”
“Pilfered parts or in its entirety?” I asked, thinking of what I’d found so far.
“Oh, its entirety. I’ve talked to it, back in the day.”
“What? When?”
“Your grandmother had it up and running up until you were born. Something went wrong with it. I don’t know whether the problem was mechanical—I always presumed it was, though—or something else.”
I blinked. “Why would Grandmother have disassembled it?”
He squinted at me. “Your mother never said anything about it? She was obsessed with that thing.”
“What do you mean, obsessed with it?”
“She’d sit and talk to it like it was a person. Said its name was Heinrich. She spent hours with it.”
“It couldn’t talk back?”
“Sure, it could. In German. Pretty limited vocabulary, too. Your mom was a weird kid. Must be where you got it from.” He beamed at me.
I said, “Why did Grandmother hate card tricks?”
Eterno shuffled the cards in his hand. “It was a philosophical issue. Why do gamblers play cards?”
“Because they can gamble on them. They’re random.”
He shook his head and the cards in his hands flurried in reproach. “The gamblers bet on the future. Thinking they can predict it with the right system or luck charm. Because what are cards but patterns?”
He leaned forward, lip tugging in a half smile. He was enjoying the chance to play pedantic grandfather.
“I don’t understand what you mean,” I said impatiently. I don’t like mumbo jumbo, frills for the sake of frills, and this all seemed a part of that.
“You’ll understand with time,” he said. “Patterns are everything. What is the automaton but a pattern of choices programmed in, shaped by its origin? You need to keep that in mind, Persephone. It was a war machine, and it remains one, no matter how many flowers you make it hold. Your grandmother understood that, eventually.”
“So you do know why she took it apart,” I guessed.
He sighed. “Yes, but I didn’t want to upset you. Your grandmother overheard your mother talking with it. They were discussing whether or not it could override or replace someone’s personality, provide it with a human body. Swap the two. Your mother wanted it to, but Heinrich was reluctant to give up its metal form and the power that brought. Nonetheless, your grandmother thought it best to remove him as an influence. Your mother was . . . well, to say upset would be to understate it by quite a bit. She was furious. And when she figured out where your grandmother had left its head, she took it—left the house with you and the head and never looked back.”
He looked at me earnestly. “We both know she’s a little crazy. But this is the center of that craziness. She won’t stop at anything to restore him. I suspect that now that your grandmother’s gone, she thinks it’s possible again, and she’s determined to do it.”
***
This time when I got back to the house, the front door to the Tudor was a few inches ajar. Someone had come across my keys and somehow known to bring them here. Then I remembered my mother’s unexpectedly tight hug. How stupid could I have been? She knew how to call a taxi.
“Mother?” I called as I entered. I thought she’d be up in Grandmother’s bedroom but didn’t see her there. My bedroom door was open, the closet and dresser plundered. I didn’t have time to check the bathroom—I heard a crash from down in the library and went to investigate.
She’d pulled over a bookcase in her search. A pillowcase, whose lumpy exterior attested that it held the limbs already gathered, lay at her feet. As I came in, she said, “A hand and a leg, that’s all you’ve found so far?”
“You outright admit that you went through my bedroom?”
“It’s mine by rights. She’d promised it to me.”
“Possession is nine-tenths of the law.”
She pointed at the pillowcase. “Well, now I possess those.”
“I want you out of here,” I said.
Her face softened. Her hair was spiked and mussed. She’d been rushing, hunting as hard as she could in the time before I got back.
“Honey,” she said. “Don’t let her get to you even after her death. She was so good at playing us off each other.”
“We’re all good at that,” I said. “It’s a family trait. Stop fucking around, mother. Are you stealing these things from me or not?”
Her eyes widened with indignation. “Stealing! As I said, she promised them to me—”
“But didn’t include them in the will,” I pointed out.
She dropped her gaze to the faded carpet. “She got confused when she got older.”
“You two went to war, and she wrote you out entirely,” I said. “I’m sure that those circumstances negated any previous arrangement, in her mind.”
“And now you’ve got a chance to set that right,” she snapped.
I moved out of her way. “Very well. Take them and go. But leave my keys here.”
I didn’t put it past her not to have duplicated them, but she’d only had the outside ones before getting here. I’d go ahead and have the locksmith swap out those locks.
Once she was gone, I checked the bathroom cupboard. Susan Day’s mason jar was there. I’d kept that much safe, at least.
What had my grandmother wanted from me, in asking me to sort out this house, this jumbled mass of objects? Why give me no instructions, not even a starting point?
But she had, though, hadn’t she? I thought of the card that had been with the jar. She’ll help you.
Grandmother had expected me to know how to access that knowledge.
You put them inside other things, Eterno had said.
I thought of the banks of dolls, the blank gazes.
Now I understood what to do.
***
After the locksmith had come and gone, I secured the outside doors and got started. I checked my phone. Nothing from my mother yet, but that was to be expected. She’d never be the first to yield in a battle with me. All her life, she’d had little control over things around her, and I’d been the first thing she’d had total, utter power over. I’d been the battleground for them all my life.
Now my mother waited, knowing that sooner or later I’d come to plead with her, that I couldn’t cut her off entirely, not with my grandmother, the entire other half of my support system, gone.
Ever since college I’d lived a nomadic existence, consulting, six months here, three months there, enjoying a life of hotel rooms, clean and free of family history. Every other place seemed to become so fraught, so full of furniture funded by presents, obligations shipped to me. I’d had to defend that existence from mother and Grandmother, over and over again, in order to stay as free of them as I could, but the two were always there in the back of my head, always as close as my own hand.
In a college class, I ran across a quote: 110% of American families are dysfunctional. Certainly mine was.
When I searched through the dolls, I was able to find one that even resembled the pictures of Susan Day, down to the blonde hairstyle.
A large doll, complete with a talking mechanism. Would that matter? I didn’t think it could hurt, at least.
I set the doll beside the jar. I looked between the two of them. My grandmother had left no instructions. Did that mean that none were necessary? Sometimes
you had to just forge ahead and see what happened.
I used an old sweater of Grandmother’s to cushion my fingers from the coldness of the lid. It was difficult to budge at first. I thought about home remedies like running it under the hot water tap or turning it upside down and rapping the lid on the floor. But that all seemed so practical; so unmystical.
But finally, it yielded under my grip. I clenched it under an elbow, ignoring the cold’s bite, and turned it around and around until it fell away from my fingers and clattered on the floor.
Despite the outside glow, when I looked inside the glass, it was as dark as midnight, as though the jar held an infinite amount of space, stretching away forever. As I stared into the depths, a blue light rushed toward me, as though from very far away, coming closer, closer.
I pulled my head away from the jar just in time. The blue light shot out of the jar and splashed silently, brilliantly against the high ceiling, splintering into a thousand shards of light and illuminating the room as brightly as though I stood in sunlight and not in the house’s interior.
Then, just as suddenly, all those shards converged on the doll in front of me. The speed and force of the light made it seem as though the doll should shudder at the impact, but it didn’t move at all as the light dove inside it, vanishing as it did so, although some still seeped out from the doll’s body, shining out from its eyes and mouth, and from the seams between its jointed limbs.
Now it twitched, now it moved. The eyes flew open and fixed on me, burning a deep turquoise color. “Who are you?” the doll said. Its voice was high and squeaky and not at all human.
“My name is Persephone. Gloria Aim was my grandmother.”
“Was? Then Gloria is dead? What year is it?”
I told her and the doll let out a hiss that must’ve been a sigh and sagged back where it sat. “So long.” It fixed its eyes on me again. “What is it that you want?”
“My grandmother left me your jar and said that you would help me.”
“It is typical of your grandmother that she would’ve shut me in a jar for over half a century, and then expected me to help out whoever happened to open it,” the doll said. It was amazing how dryly cynical such a squeaky little voice could be.
“It’s about an object that used to belong to you,” I said. “An automaton, a German one.”
“Ah, Heinrich.” Now the doll’s voice seemed gentler. “Where is he now?”
“He’s in pieces, actually. Pieces scattered all over this house and two others. I was hoping you’d be able to help me locate him.”
“I might be able to. But how did he come to be dismantled?”
“Your protégé did it. Why, I don’t know. I haven’t been able to piece that together yet.”
“It’s no surprise. It could’ve been for any number of reasons. He was made to function as a killing machine—not a personal servant.”
“Why didn’t you turn him over to the government after you stole him?”
“He begged me not to. He knew that they’d take him apart in order to figure out how he’d been made, in order to make more things like him. And having seen what he could do, I wasn’t sure that either side should have him.”
“So you just stuck him away in a closet.”
She shrugged. “I didn’t dismantle him,” she pointed out.
I hesitated. “Can you talk to my grandmother?” I asked. “There, on the Other Side.”
“It doesn’t work like that,” she said. “There’s not some sort of telepathic phone line that all the dead get automatically hooked into.”
“Oh.” I’d hoped to find out what my grandmother had intended from her own lips. I wondered what had happened to her ghost. She’d died very suddenly, a heart attack that had overtaken her on an evening out. No one had sat in her hospital room to defend or take her ghost. It would have just gone on and done whatever it was that ordinary ghosts did, when there was no one to interrupt their death with mason jars.
“What was it like in the jar?”
“What?” the doll said blankly.
I pointed at the open jar on the table. “What was it like? Could you see anything, hear anything?”
“Oh. No. Nothing at all.” She sounded unperturbed at the thought, but I shivered, imagining decades of being shut in a jar with no one but myself for company.
“Will you show me where the pieces are now? Of Heinrich?”
She nodded. The glass eyes closed and a bit of light darted out from her mouth. It hung in the air in front of me. I stepped toward it, and it dipped away, leading me on my quest.
It took less time than I’d thought but the pieces were strewn between all three houses. The weirdest were the genitals, which she’d hidden inside a grandfather clock. Burnished aluminum and brass, looking like a casting from a Greek statue. Like the hand, the weight seemed to wobble oddly when I picked them up.
When I had all of the pieces, the shard of light led me back to the doll. I expected it to speak again but instead the light dashed inside the mason jar and hung there. Unsure what else to do, I sealed it again. While the lid was off, the glass was at room temperature; the minute it grated closed, the temperature began to drop.
I sorted through what I’d found. I’d thought I had all the pieces, except for what my mother had taken and the head, but I was missing a hand, the right one. I was sure I hadn’t missed one in the houses. Did my mother have that as well? I chewed my lip, trying to figure it out.
I could only guess at my mother’s motivations in wanting the brass automaton so fiercely that she was prepared to give me up for it. Did she, like Eterno, think it somehow her father? Was it possible that it was partially her father? How could that physically be?
It was a whole new side to my mother, one I’d never seen before, but now that I knew she’d had the head with her all along, it began to explain so much. She’d always preferred to be alone in her bedroom, was fiercely defensive of her privacy. And sometimes she’d agree to something and then go away for a while and come back to renege on that agreement, saying that she’d rethought it.
The sensation was like discovering that someone you knew was a secret addict—suddenly so much fell into place, suddenly made sense in a way it never had before.
All through my childhood, I’d had a second parent directing things, I just hadn’t realized it. I’d pitied my mother for what I’d thought her loneliness, and now I found she’d had a truer companion than most, someone who literally couldn’t leave her.
I made a call to Eterno, and then called my mother. She’d known I would. She took her time answering the phone, deliberately, I’m sure.
I said, “I want to meet up. I have the rest of the parts. But I want something for them. I want you to sign a paper saying you don’t want any other part of the estate.”
Brief silence on the other end of the line. She was calculating what my words meant in her head. Wondering if there was there something else that she should want, that she just wasn’t aware of? But in the end, she made the choice that I thought she would.
“Where should we meet?” she asked.
I gave her the name of the rendezvous, a good thirty minutes from her hotel. “We can meet at four. I’m not going to pick you up. You’ll have to take a taxi.”
“All right,” she said, and hung up without uttering another word.
I called Eterno again. “All right,” I said. “She’ll be there. After I don’t show up, she’ll start to get suspicious. Show up then. You can distract her for a little while. Call me when she leaves.”
And then I set off to burglarize my mother’s hotel room.
***
In the end, all the careful preparation I’d been going over in my head in the car, careful, obsessive, planning for every contingency, was unnecessary. I’d made my mother’s reservation and picked up her card, so the desk clerk knew me.
I said, “My key card’s stopped working—I had it in my cell phone case, would that mess with it?”
“I always say, the smarter the phone, the dumber the card,” said the clerk.
It was all going so well that I couldn’t help but suspect that things would go pear-shaped at any moment.
But as I got farther into the hotel, I found myself untensing. I hadn’t realized what it was like in grandmother’s house, how the weight of things pressed down on me. Here, in this cream and lemon-colored hallway that smelled of disinfectant, where dust dare not gather and silverfish dare not twitch, I found myself floating down the hallway to where her Do Not Disturb sign hung on the doorknob.
When I opened the door, I returned to earth. Mom had always been a nester, although she’d never gotten as bad as Grandmother, and the interior of this hotel room showed it. Heaps of clothing covered the floor, along with delivery food containers and Starbucks cups. A fly oscillated between the gauzy curtain and the window glass like a miniature chain saw.
How had she managed to accumulate so much in the short time she’d been here?
On the dresser there was an odd metal plate that seemed to be the same technology as the things that I’d found so far. It was octagonal, solid, a good four inches thick and eight inches around, so heavy that it was hard to lift. In the center was a round divot, about five inches across.
Under the bed, I found an old suitcase, the sort that holds a wig or a hat. I pulled it out—it was promisingly heavy. The labels on it were in mother’s handwriting, fine and spidery, edged with unnecessary curlicues. I remembered this suitcase. She always had it.
I had to smash the lock to get the case open. Inside, there it was.
I took the head out of the case.
It was heavy. Heavier than a normal head? I had no real way of judging, but it felt like a jar full of quarters, contents shifting as I tilted it. I held it neck upward, and a bead of silvery liquid—an oily, mercury-like substance—welled in an indention in the metal plate that was the neck’s base, creating a small bowl studded with pockmarks, intricate circuitry etching the interior of each circle.