The Chemistry of Tears Part 14

Amanda was teary. She packed her things, and took her Frankenpod away but I, being a sneak and a hypocrite, had already memorized the URL. When I was home that night, I watched the sickening image for hours on end.

When I entered the studio next morning Amanda was waiting and I saw she now wanted to push our conflict out into the open. But I could no more reveal my personal relationship with the cube than I could confess my horror at the filth spewing into the waters of the gulf, an "accident" that seemed the end of history itself.

I immediately made myself busy, looking through the Excel charts Amanda had prepared for me.

"These charts are very good," I said. It was true. They were perfection. But I still would not forgive her betrayal.

This must have been the moment when I finally understood Amanda was Amanda, and therefore she would not go away. When I had finished with the charts, she compelled me to deal with her.

"I have been so stupid," she said. "I am very sorry for talking out of school. I apologize."

She was so young and her lovely skin so tight and clean. Who would doubt her contrition?

"You love your grandfather," I said.

"But I do understand what I did wrong, Miss Gehrig. I should not have gossiped with my grandfather."

"Mr. Croft pays visits to your grandfather I suppose."

And there it was-some curious fear or sense of honour made her step away. "Oh I don't know anything about Mr. Croft. Really."

"Amanda! Surely he helped get you this job."

"No!"

She was now red, crimson really. "No. My grandfather would never do a thing like that. He despises influence-pedlars."

I didn't believe her, but it was clear she believed herself, and the result was that our conversation calmed us down.

We shared a sandwich at lunch. Afterwards I presented her with the multi-function cam. It would be hers to dismantle, clean, photograph and doc.u.ment. It was a very handsome gift.

In the early afternoon the sun came out and our blinds were suddenly soaked with light.

At five she asked if she could leave for a "stuffy drinks." Who could imagine where she went, but her eyes were clearer and brighter and I rubbed her angora shoulder.

"Did you watch that webcam thing last night?" I asked.

"I suppose so."

"Does everybody watch it? Your friends."

"Not everyone."

"It's horrible."

"Yes," she said. "Please can I go, Miss Gehrig?"

When they invented the internal combustion engine, they never envisaged such a horrid injury. It did not occur to anyone that we would not only change the temperature of the air but turn the oceans black as death.

Henry's saw-tooth pen strokes had cut wormholes into time. I had been there. I had witnessed Herr Sumper unwrap the articulated neck. I had glimpsed Carl's exploding toy roaring past the inn, his voltaic mouse, his blue cube, Thigpen's immense scientific instrument the size of an elephant. Through one of these wormholes, as thin as a drinking straw, I had seen all that bright and poisonous invention.

At home, I put water on the stove and lit the gas. I would cook. Dry pasta, sardines, capers, stale bread, olive oil. I would eat, macerate, excrete.

And then the door bell rang-Eric, come to have his cube returned. I fetched a plate and fork for him. "No, no," he said.

"I made too much. I can't stop doing it."

"I have a dinner engagement," he said.

Still, I made a place for him. The blue block was wrapped in a handkerchief. I set it beside his plate.

I thought, surely he wants to see the cornflower blue.

"Brought it home for some tests?" he asked.

I smiled.

"Crazy b.u.g.g.e.r," he said.

"Yes."

"Swap you," he said, also smiling. I liked his crinkled eyes. I imagined him playing poker. Indeed the envelope he now produced was the size of a playing card. Inside I discovered one of those cardboard-mounted Victorian portraits.

"Your man," he said, making me remember why I liked him-that impish quality. "This is the man who commissioned your swan."

He was looking at me strangely. I thought, yes, he has actually taken the time to read the notebooks. He had read them at the very start.

"His name was Henry Brandling," he said.

"Oh, how do you know?"

Again that smile.

He could not have the least idea of how deeply invested I was in Henry. He would have expected me to be curious, but how could he possibly antic.i.p.ate what it meant to me, to find my author so very tall and handsome, holding a baby in his arms? I was happy, uplifted, to meet him in this way, to understand his n.o.bility and tenderness.

"Percy," I said.

"Henry," he corrected. "Henry Brandling."

"The child."

"Oh, I know nothing of the child."

There was something rather odd about the photograph, and I removed it from its plastic to examine it more closely.

"It was not uncommon," Eric said.

"You got this from where?"

My visitor laid his hand flat against my back. "It's rather awful isn't it?"

Only then did I understand-the child in the man's arms was the product of a Victorian mortician's art.

"This is bulls.h.i.t," I said.

"Cat, Cat, what on earth is the matter?"

He reached out his hand towards me, and suddenly he appeared not kind or crinkly, not impish at all. I thought, why are you trying to destroy me?

"Cat."

"Never call me Cat. Not ever."

"Catherine."

"Go, go." I dragged out his coat and threw it at him. He reached for the blue block. I s.n.a.t.c.hed it back.

Hours after he left I discovered the date on the verso and finally realized that this was not Percy but his sister Alice whose name the grieving Henry Brandling had mentioned in connection with a clock.

I BEGAN TO READ the newspapers again. I learned that the Americans have made a robot to teach autistic children. In many respects it is superior to a human being. That is, being a robot, it never becomes emotionally exhausted; it never loses patience; tears and rage do not press its b.u.t.tons.

The robot is called KayKay. I am not sure why. It does not attempt to hide its wiring and other innards. The report said that children swarmed it when it first appeared at a "facility" in Austin, Texas. At the end of the first day, a boy with Asperger's syndrome yanked its arms off.

The journalist seemed a little too happy about the arm-yanking, but the company said it was a "learning curve." By the next public exposure, which was reported in the Guardian, KayKay had its arms repaired. Now, when KayKay cried, the little Aspies did not "hurt" it any more. If the sobbing continued, they then gave the thing a hug.

Catherine wants KayKay.

KayKay would move on wheels, tracking Catherine throughout the flat, approaching indirectly and never entering "personal s.p.a.ce." KayKay would say "Uh huh" (an encouraging sound in American) when Catherine drew near. When Catherine moved away, KayKay would say "Aw" (American for disappointment).

Eric Croft must have wearied of my tears and rage, I thought. Who would blame him? Who would not prefer the company of normal people?

I sat at the kitchen table, peering into the wavering field of marks left by Henry Brandling's pen. When I was above it, looking down into the lines, I could see flickering candles, the deep shadows of the "not here." The distance was immense but I saw Henry's sad dark eyes watch the other inhabitants of the room at the sawmill in Furtw.a.n.gen-four or five of them-a.s.sembling tiny links of chain.

As yet Henry Brandling had no clue how the chain would serve the swan.

Catherine, on the other hand, had touched the chain, had tightened it, compelled it to move the skeletal neck of the swan on the fourth floor of the Swinburne Annexe.

In the firelight Henry Brandling's eyes were unsettled and afraid. He had lost one child already. How the minutes must be, each one an agony.

Each of the Germans had a small a.s.sembly tool, not much more than a support system for a single groove into which the tiny component parts of chain were fitted so the rivet could be slipped into place and hammered home. The boy was fastest but Sumper, with his huge hands, was the most astonishing to behold. He was covertly competing with the child.

As so often, Henry could do nothing but watch. He did this with a terrible intensity that bore no relationship to the nature of manufacture being enacted. He crouched on a three-legged stool by the dying fire.

Might Henry Brandling have antic.i.p.ated Catherine?

He antic.i.p.ated someone would watch him through the wormhole, that was clear. He wrote for that person. He thought constantly of the moment when that chain would animate a swan that he stubbornly referred to as "my duck."

I thought, he is lying, but not to me.

On Kennington Road the car tyres were hissing. The oxidized lines once made by Henry Brandling's pen evoked weeds waving under water. The fairytale collector and the silversmith slowly melded together. They were the same person as I had already guessed. If Henry was not lying to me, then to whom was he lying? To G.o.d? I returned to Furtw.a.n.gen and turned the page.

Sumper spat a hissing glob into the fire. "Listen to me more carefully," he said to the fairytale collector. "It is the nature of science," he said, "that what is true is always unacceptable to people."

And of course I, Catherine, agreed with him. Which of us would not?

"I'll tell you a story that is true," the fairytale collector offered.

The child looked at Sumper imploringly. Even so his little warty fingers "never paused." He was like a bird feeding, constantly pecking at a bowl of chain links.

The fairytale collector administered a light tap with a delicate black hammer. "On the exactly true date of 15 April 1614, a murder was committed in the old part of Salzwedel just off the street leading to St. Ann's Convent."

Carl screwed up his eyes.

The fairytale collector had no mercy. He described how the murderer's hands were cut off and how he was tortured with red-hot pincers and dragged to the place of execution and placed on the wheel upside down. It was "miraculous" and horrible, according to the fairytale collector, to see how the hand with which he had committed this terrible deed continued to bleed for three days on the wheel.

"Why am I trapped here?" cried Sumper who did not seem to be aware of the child's distress. "How could this happen to me, forced to listen to this chaff?"

For that he had Catherine's sympathy. He was worthy of a better conversation. She had a better dialogue with him every day at work.

I was there close by him, by the four of them as they a.s.sembled the fusee chain, or four fusee chains. I saw them grow at an extraordinary rate, click, clack, tap, so swiftly. There was a long period with no word spoken, and the spiky sentences, brimful of awful anxious feeling, stretched on across the page. Finally it was Sumper who addressed the "awful little weasel."

"You have heard of Sir Albert Cruickshank."

Catherine had not.

Sumper left the table. The angelic boy "quietly compared" the two lengths of chain, his and Sumper's. He whispered to his mother. The mother removed Sumper's chain from her son's celestial hand. She returned the chain to its place in the clockmaker's a.s.sembly tool. No sooner had she done so than the clockmaker returned with "a much-stained" book in his hand. He clipped Carl lightly across the back of the head and both of them burst out laughing.

Catherine read the t.i.tle: Mysterium Tremendum.

"The author is Sir Albert Cruickshank," Sumper told the fairytale collector. "He holds the Lucasian Chair of Mathematics at Cambridge. He is a fellow of the Royal Society and the inventor of the Cruickshank Engine."

The fairytale collector affected to sigh, but the child looked expectantly towards the book, its Latin t.i.tle inlaid with gold and glowing in the firelight. It was, Henry intuited, a familiar hymn or song.

"M. Arnaud," said Herr Sumper, "Mysterium Tremendum was written at Cambridge University, and do not fret if you have not heard of that inst.i.tution. It exists beyond your tiny world.

" 'I then begged of my guide,' " Sumper read from the volume, " 'that he provide a glimpse of those other higher intellectual beings and the modes of their thought and their enjoyments. These are creatures far superior to any idea your human imagination can conceive.'

" 'I was again in motion,' " (Herr Sumper stood), " 'I saw below me lakes and seas on the surface of which I beheld living beings which I cannot properly describe. They had systems for locomotion similar to those of the sea horse. They moved from place to place by six extremely thin membranes, which they used as wings. I saw numerous convolutions of tubes, more a.n.a.logous to the trunk of the elephant than to anything else, occupying what I supposed to be the upper parts of the body. Here my astonishment became disgust. Such was the peculiar character of the organs.' "

Oh dear, Catherine thought, oh dearie dearie me. It was as if she had opened her front door to a Jehovah's Witness. But the boy was totally at home. His red mouth was open. His hair "caught the candlelight" as he reached for his mother's hand with his long thin fingers, "pale, plastic, bendy as the necks of birds."

"You," Sumper pointed to Henry Brandling, "are in the same state as a fly whose microscopic eye has been changed to one similar to a man's."

The boy cast on Henry Brandling "a beautiful and pitying smile." And then he mouthed the words as Sumper read: " 'YOU ARE WHOLLY UNABLE TO a.s.sOCIATE WHAT YOU SEE WITH WHAT YOUR LIFE HAS TAUGHT YOU.' "

Catherine shivered. What to think of this? Had the great mechanic also been a mystic?

Sumper read: " 'Those beings who are before you now, who appear to you almost as imperfect as the lowly zoophytes, have a sphere of sensibility and intellect far superior to the inhabitants of this earth.' "