The Paradise Engine

by Rebecca Campbell

  When he described his time in Mrs. Kilgour’s keep, he suggested that he had dissolved the partnership, but it would be more accurate to say that she had gone first: he only bought the ticket for San Francisco when he found himself alone in the city again, and discovered that in her absence she did not remember his dependence. He liked to think there was generosity in his withdrawal, that he did not pester her for the funds which—according to implied agreements and gentleman’s contracts— she still owed him. Not while she grieved anew for her lost laddie, and wrangled with the War Graves Commission regarding the repatriation of Clive’s remains. She should not think of money at such a time; she should think about grief and sacrifice and things of that nature. All vulgar thoughts of money and performance flew from her mind: the last cheque was more the work of Goshawk than of Mrs. Kilgour, Liam guessed, and it was not her signature that sealed it, but a lawyer’s. He cashed it quietly and paid his bills and packed his new suits in his new luggage and wondered about goodbyes, and whether he should call or write notes. He left much behind, things he had not thought to use that winter, but had bought for some future season. For the summer perhaps, when he would learn to play tennis, and meet young women, and would need white flannel trousers with cuffs. (Slightly worn and a little out of date, so they did not look as though he had bought them just that season. He had been wearing them around his rooms to the right degree of shabbiness).

  Goshawk saw him to the station in the very early morning, and waited with him half an hour longer than Liam thought was entirely necessary. He had been trying to work out a means of getting away from Goshawk, and had just decided to be manly and direct when Goshawk tried again to say the thing he had been trying to say for twenty minutes already.

  “Between you and I, Manley—” Goshawk began but did not finish. Liam was pleased to recognize the little grammatical slip. He had learned that it was incorrect quite recently, and was extra careful to feel its vulgarity. “Men like you and I. It’s a kind of a brotherhood, don’t you see. I will miss you.” At first Liam didn’t know what to do, but then he clapped Goshawk on the shoulder and they both nodded.

  “She may call me back, still,” Liam said, but did not believe it. Neither did Goshawk, he thought, but the man agreed anyway: “She may, that’s true. Though I think she will have something else by the time she comes home again. I don’t know what. She has been talking about Scotch history. It started with the ballads, you see. I wish you would stay, and we would find a way to fit you in. She likes you. She likes you a great deal.

  Do you know much about the ballads?”

  “I do like it here, Goshawk, but I don’t think I could endure another season as her protégé. I have other plans, you know. I always have.”

  Goshawk looked unreasonably sad for a moment, and then he smiled in that bright way he usually kept for Kilgours. Liam very nearly told him to cut it out, that sort of smile. It wasn’t necessary.

  “Of course, Liam. I know it is a great thing you are doing. I will expect to hear from you soon, from San Francisco, and Montreal, and Buenos Aires.” Liam only smiled at the narrowness of Goshawk’s ambition, thinking of Covent Garden and La Scala.

  And then they were walking toward his car, and Goshawk stopped again just as Liam was beginning to check his wristwatch and make “goodbye” noises. “But if you should pass through again on your way to Montreal, you will come and see me?”

  Liam reassured Goshawk, feeling at once sad to be going from the bosom of such a friend—for so Goshawk suddenly seemed, this early in the morning—and also embarrassed. He was ready to be on the train again and on his way somewhere else, reading the morning newspaper and watching the city fall behind him, and the border rise in front. Travelling south into warmer weather, accelerating through spring along the coast, arriving at summer in San Francisco only a few days away. Caruso had loved San Francisco, for a time, and Tetrazzini had as well. It would be brightly coloured and wild and American, with money and beautiful women and a proper opera house, and palm trees here and there, or orange groves. And he had a little money this time, squirrelled away in his luggage, and in his inside pocket the monogrammed clip with the bills he needed handy— enough to smooth his arrival in the city, and make it amusing, and anyway he would not mind a return to the popular stage. Perhaps this time he would approach the Sullivan-Considine offices.

  For Liam, the years after that morning, but before his return to the city, and his haunted room in Mrs. Qualey’s Boarding House, passed like a montage in an old movie, cut against the fluttering pages of a calendar. He stood in the midst of it, the ceilings above him vaulted or domed, square, ovoid, eight-sided, inset with plaster rosettes or arches evoking Spain, New Spain, India, Etruria, Egypt. Carpet swirled under his feet, or spread out in geometric lattice, and over his head, the indigo night sky and silhouetted towers of a continental chateau. Above the castle walls were stars—Orion—rising over the green fringe of sunset and the tips of a pinewood. The stages were hung with the red plush curtains of a bordello, and the aisles lined with gold eagles, like the standards of some abandoned legion. The fretted screens of the Alhambra. Onion domes tiled in red and green. Gold-painted plaster draperies in the lobby, caryatids supporting the proscenium, and the dome frescoed with blue-skinned goddesses in flimsy nighties. Or Isis in sheer cotton, lolling under peacock fans above a border of geometric papyrus fronds. Outside, ibis-headed Thoth greeted all who walked through the double doors.

  All so extravagant, these new theatres, that still smelled of plaster dust and the workmen’s cigarettes. Soon, though, they were not so clean and new, and then they began to show frayed velour, and grubby fingerprints appeared on the doors to the dressing rooms and on the walls, and in Liam’s eye they did not gain the picturesque of the antique. They were just worn, after appearing so splendid a few years earlier, and in them Liam withered, and around him his profession withered, too, and the vaudeville circuits that had employed him died away like the etiolated tendrils of grass that grow up under and around old cars abandoned in the woods, the blades that rise and fall back again, whitened by the dark.

  Sometimes he climbed from the dressing rooms at the bottom, up past the projection booth—if it were that kind of theatre—to a heavy door that stood at the very top. If there were such a door, it took him past the fans and the great metal ducts of the ventilation system and into the dark above the false ceiling, where cables as thick as his little finger supported the plaster dome that capped the auditorium. When he could find his way to that place, he looked down at the wrong side of the fresco, the side that was just grey and dusty plaster oozing up through wire mesh. Sometimes if he were lucky, the ceiling had holes in it, little bits of blackness cut into the painting so that what seemed to be a deeper shadow behind Thoth’s head or under his arm was really nothing at all, a dark gap through which someone hiding above the ceiling could watch. If there were such gaps, he would kneel on the catwalk, and resting one hand on the plaster, he would look down, down to the upper balcony, the dress circle, to the proscenium. He thought of stepping onto the mesh, of how it would support him a moment, then break and let him through the egyptien figures—perhaps right through Thoth himself—so he’d fall like a star to the stage.

  CLEOPATRA’S NIGHTMARE

  Liam’s haunting began more than ten years after that morning of optimism when Goshawk waited with him at the station, after hundreds of “I’ll Take You Home Again, Kathleen”s in hundreds of theatres. Long after the disaster that was San Francisco and the Sullivan-Considine offices, and those years on the declining circuits in the east, and big little-time in the south, and the dustbowl circuits of the southwest, to arrive finally back on the north Pacific coast of the continent, and the little little-time, where he could find it, and a patchwork of small-town engagements where he could not.

  It began on the morning he returned to the city of his only known triumph. His train was again delayed, and again he made his way to his lodging after midnight on the
first day of his engagement at the Temple Theatre. This time it was a boarding house, not even a hotel, and he had no money for a cab. As he walked through the wet air to Mrs. Qualey’s, he hoped that she might see how ill and tired he was and make him a cup of tea, and he could add a few drops from the flask in his inside pocket, and then carry it up to bed with him. Her hospitality might even extend to toast, or a sandwich.

  He stood a long time knocking at 456 E. Cordova before her face materialized in the window, sudden and baleful in the light of an unshaded bulb. She wore curlers and a grey robe tied under her low, blousy breasts. She rattled the lock conspicuously and opened the door.

  “The train was late,” he said by way of apology, but she only led him to his room, without offering even sardine sandwiches or a mug of tea.

  It was a room like all the others he’d ever occupied, in crowded houses that smelled of lemon oil and old suppers. Mrs. Qualey was any of an army of respectable women, reciting the menu: stew, corned beef, hash in perpetual rotation. The next night’s supper, she informed him, was corned beef. He should keep in mind that first served was best fed, and she didn’t hold with keeping plates warm in the oven if folks happened to be late. Then she left him to it, and though it was quiet, his ears still rang with the noise of the train and the street outside and his own exhaustion. He sat a long while before he tried to sleep in the cold room with yellow curtains the colour of smoke stains.

  He had not bought the papers at the station, because he did not want to see her name or picture so early on his return, and not know what to do about it or how to feel. He had encountered her name occasionally and avoided her, though sometimes he thought of the money she still owed him—not legally at all, but on principle—and drafted imaginary letters. But the fine suits were gone, and he did not like to think of how it would feel to walk up the long drive to the door of her house, unknown to the maid who would open it. He hadn’t any cards. All the same, his name still meant something—a very little something—here, and he had decided, finally, to accept the invitation for a one-week engagement at the Temple. He had always declined before. Occasionally he encountered people who remembered him, and they were always from the city, always women, and they always mentioned the Temple and the pink roses and how he had stood in his black suit and sung “Ô Souverain, ô juge, ô père.”

  Forty-five minutes after he fell asleep, Liam awoke to the sound of his own fingernails as they raked the wall beside the bed’s headboard. The knuckles of his right hand were bloody, though he did not know when he had grazed them. He was half out of bed, with a feeling behind his ribs like broken glass, as though something unknown to him had smashed in the moment before he came to consciousness. He looked up to see if the window was broken, but it was not.

  Once he remembered where he was, he dropped the rest of the way to the floor and knelt, inhaling the draft from the badly-fit window. For a lurching moment he smelled the incongruous scent of hay, lying in the fields. It was the smell of home in July, the oppressive heat of southern Ontario, and the scent of crushed dandelions and slow water in a creek.

  After a few more breaths, reason asserted itself and the scent was gone. He hoped he hadn’t shouted. He was wet, too, his pyjamas limp as dead petals and stuck to his back, a trickle of sweat under his arm and one at the base of his spine. He mopped his face with a sleeve. He was cold. But then there were footsteps in the hall. They approached. They paused. He wondered again if he had shouted, or wailed, perhaps, like a child. He held his breath. The hall light streaked across the floor through the crack under the door, illuminating his knees and the white sheet he’d torn from its hospital corners. His face was hot and fierce with shame. Then the light under the door went out. The footsteps retreated, and when they had gone Liam got to his feet. His heart slowed to a deep, steady rhythm that pulsed in his eardrums and behind his eyes. He returned to bed, and drew the heavy grey blanket over his head.

  Much later, when he was dying, Liam would still be unable to recall the particulars of the dream which announced the arrival of his ghost, though he would remember clearly the day from which the dream had come. He would remember a nine-minute dance act before the intermission that had seemed strange and portentous, as though some epoch had ended, and something new and unnamed had begun.

  He was in a small, grotty, northeastern city, sitting near the back of a theatre, part of a circuit that had declined to employ him the previous month. He was waiting to hear the tenor they had employed. It was between acts. He read his newspaper until the discordant arabesques of the dancers’ accompaniment interrupted him. When he looked up, there were two men on stage dressed in gym strip, heavy black boots, fezzes on their heads. Over their football shorts they wore robes of draped white cotton with little skirts slashed at either hip. Their faces were made up with white paint and kohl around the eyes, heavy moustaches and thick, black eyebrows also darkened with something dense and greasy. Their limbs were long and white and made Liam think of medical dissection and anatomical drawings, the way each muscle corded the stretch of thigh and calf and throat, and all their joints stood out like knots tied in coarse string. Thick, black hair grew under their arms and in their white cotton décolleté, and crept down their thighs under their short, white skirts.

  After an initial egyptien tableau vivant, they began to dance—but it was not, exactly, a dance, rather a quick progression through more tableaux, hieroglyph after hieroglyph to the minor-key discord of some Oriental jazz band. Their faces were identically hangdog, unmarred by sweat, with eyes fixed on some point on the theatre’s back wall, high above Liam’s head. Behind them the backdrop—pyramids, a flat blue sky, two palms—swayed in a draft.

  It was then that a third figure appeared, this one a girl in diaphanous white rayon and paste diamonds, her long, blonde hair drifting down her shoulders, and her long, pale legs slipping in and out of her slit draperies. She stood on a platform that rolled across the stage on invisible machinery. She did not move, and her skill was only to remain standing during her progression, to raise her arms over her head and accept the fealty of her ugly, dancing slaves.

  Even when they’d left the stage and in their place a jet-beaded woman managed a dozen black rats in frilled collars, Liam still saw the two men, their slow dance of elbows and knees to the nervous disharmony of the invisible band, their synchronized precision which must, he knew from his experience, have cost years. He imagined them repeating the act a thousand times, ten shows a week. He imagined that if he saw them in Brighton or London, Kiev or Hong Kong or Saskatoon, he would find no variation in the order or design of the hieroglyphs, the greasepaint, the folds of Cleopatra’s gown.

  Those nine minutes seemed, to Liam, as though they contained some significant message he should remember and apply to his own life. The tenor he had come to hear—emerging from the darkness after the beaded lady fled with her basket of rats and cream of wheat—was as insubstantial as an echo. The man, Stephan Greco, had sung before the war in a room that smelled of conservatory roses, and Liam had loved him that evening. In this new room—gritty with coal smoke, the scent of newsprint, cold coffee, wet wool, the imprint of the sand-dancers still in Liam’s eyes—in this room he was unreal. What would it mean to be real as the sand-dancers had been? They would smell of basements and newspapers and cold coffee, meetings underground where dingy foreign men plotted sabotage, or workmen with dirty boots arranged irritating general strikes. As Liam contemplated them, and the future they represented, he imagined himself as dour as they, his pale, scarred legs turned outward as he clumped arrhythmically across the stage, his face a grotesque with kohl and white powder, a greasy Stalinist moustache on his upper lip. For the rest of that afternoon and evening he tried to think of other things, but found the vision inescapable, unlike the man singing in a beam of gold-coloured stage-light, who dirged through “Macushla” and “Come Into The Garden, Maud.”

  Still on stage, Stephan Greco clasped his hands then opened his mouth for anothe
r dreamy Victorian ballad. His voice travelled across the auditorium as though he stood miles away, in another time, and people in the audience saw him the way they saw the figures in a snow globe, behind the distorting curve of glass and water and glittering flakes of false snow.

  When he woke again just after noon, Liam unrolled his shaving kit beside the basin and examined his face in the greenish mirror. He looked away from the pale, smudge-eyed man and unfolded his straight razor. The two halves—monogrammed ivory and blade—opened like wings in his hands. It was steel stropped to an almost painless edge. He knew how sharp and how nearly painless because he’d cut himself with it in the first week when he traced the blade unthinkingly with his right thumb. He’d seen the red drops in the basin before the cut properly registered, having noticed only the barest parting of flesh. His thumb bled fast, spattering the taps and the mirror, then the drops fell into the basin, hanging together for a moment before they dissipated, reddening his shaving water. He fumbled for gauze, and wrapped it around his thumb, though the blood broke through the fabric and he left prints on everything he touched.

  It was a fine razor. It even pre-dated his time with Mrs. Kilgour. Though he had bought many elegant things during those months, he had not needed a razor: the one he owned was already suitable for his station, though it was only for a little while that his condition in life matched the quality of the blade. It was an artefact of his own early history, before the war, bought when he thought he was becoming the sort of man who needed a fine razor. He still remembered that it was fifteen shillings of the pound he earned from that first performance. He hadn’t paid his tailor or his landlady, but when he saw the creamy ivory and felt its weight, he knew he must have it, and have “LM” engraved on the handle in clean Roman capitals. Twenty years later the blade still shone, though he’d had it reset and reground more than once, and though it had been through France with him. Amazing that it hadn’t been blown out of his hand that first morning and taken flight—a bit of particularly dangerous and expensive shrapnel.