All Those Vanished Engines (10 page)

He was interrupted by another fit of coughing. Exhausted, he leaned back and wiped his lips. The fibrosis forced him to take quick, shallow breaths through his open mouth, and we could see his spotted tongue.

We also, on our first visit to the boiler house at the museum complex, had been amazed by the crowded ranks of condensation tubes. At moments in the morning light they had brought to mind various organic forms, undersea creatures perhaps, or else networks of blood vessels and intestines. Or in the afternoon, when the shadows spread the other way, they had recalled hanging vines and rows of columns, saplings in the forest glades. But as he spoke we imagined something different: sequences of pillars reaching toward the roof, and the organ pipes of some enormous modern cathedral, where the consecrated images had been replaced with rusted, broken-down machines. A space that was sacred not just to the technological dreams of a vanished past, but also to the memory of a fatal yet carefully suppressed industrial accident, and was at the same time appropriate to the complex's new function as a museum of contemporary art. Was it possible, we asked ourselves, to bear witness to this secret history, not through images or explanations, but through sound? After all, sound was what had animated the entire structure, in memory and in the actual past, and was still animating it now. We thought these three locations—in fact, in memory, and in the imagined present—might find their representation in the three defunct and vanished furnaces, all in a row, and in the three empty cubes of space, each one defined and encased with layers of rusted tubes.

“How did you find out about the flowers?” we asked.

He winced as if we'd prodded him. “A by-product,” he muttered. “An accident. You see on the left side of the building near the bridge, there was a chute for the waste. Some of the effluent must have escaped around the bins. That was the first time we saw flowers that first spring—just there. Damsel's Rockets as tall as stalks of corn. An invasive species. After that we didn't bother trucking any of it away. We just spread it over that whole section of the site, two feet deep, up to the stone wall and the highway. We didn't think there was any harm. It made it simpler for everyone. We didn't have the permits anyway.”

For some of us the flowers were unimportant. But others couldn't keep themselves from imagining, in that post-industrial triangle of space between the river and the Route 2 overpass, a temperate jungle of enormous blooms, grown in an accumulation of humid slag from the distilling cylinders, and then nourished, especially at nighttime during the long, hot summer of 1944, with the breath of sonic fertilizer wafting out of pipes from underneath the ground, spraying back and forth like a system of acoustical sprinklers, creating mixtures of unintentional music, especially where the zones overlapped. We imagined the competing layers of sound, rising and diminishing in volume, revealing as they did so the swell of the underlying bass. And surely we were helped in our imagining by where we stood in the gazebo in the open courtyard of the nursing home, surrounded on three sides by the building itself, and beyond it the street and the parking lot. Even here we could listen to the rolling wave of noise, the car sounds and the honking and the squeak of brakes, giving way gradually to the coughs and grunts and the subdued speech and the cries of encouragement or despair from the physical-therapy rooms. But then on the fourth side, beyond the gazebo and a low fence, the property gave out onto the wetlands, a triangle of cattails fed by a small brook, and beyond that a line of willow trees, and beyond that fields of the high grass, and the mountains beyond that, and the high altostratus clouds, and the cumulonimbus clouds that darkened the horizon. Even here we could listen to the overlap and the layers of sound rising up. We could scarcely imagine what it must have been like in the garden outside the boiler house, where the flowers themselves put out a radiance of noise against the thudding, hissing background of the machines.

But some of us were more pragmatic. “What was it for?” we asked.

And the old man smiled up at us, listening, perhaps, to the lazy buzzing of the flies. He himself at that moment seemed more a machine than a man, ancient, decrepit, obsolete, starved of fuel and oxygen, yet still shuddering, still alive. We were aware of the scarcely inflating bellows of his chest; the soft, thin, shallow puffs of breath; the occasional soft farts and grumbling. We were aware of a low small echo in ourselves.

He smiled, and opened wide his cold, blue, sightless eyes, rimmed in unhealthy pink, wet with rheum. We admired the scar on his forehead. “Well, there were three separate grades,” he explained, as if to children. “The first was an industrial grade, coarse and rich, which we shipped to manufacturers all over the East Coast. And the second was highly distilled, a luxury product mostly for export even then—or at least that was the idea. No one had the money for it, of course, not during the war or for a decade afterward; we stored it in canisters under pressure. One of our technicians had synthesized a glass harmonica, which he mixed with the fluttering of nightingale wings, and the rustle of a lilac-colored silk petticoat in the early morning—you could see this was a specialty item, very costly and rare. But the third type, well, that was the secret, wasn't it?”

“Costly” didn't seem like a word he would use. We imagined it from an advertising brochure. He paused, cleared his throat, ejected some sputum into his handkerchief. We watched the pulsing skein of blood vessels under his translucent skin, the webs of veins on the backs of his hands. He said, “You know up at the top of the hill there was a foundry that made steel plates for the
Monitor
during the Civil War. This was like that—weapons grade. We had sounds that could break glass, even at low volume. With the refinements and additives, it would turn concrete to sand. You could put your thumb through a two-inch steel plate, after it had been permeated and submerged in one of the acoustic vats.

“That was the theory, anyway. Plans look good on paper. And we were working double-shifts around the clock. This was in the spring of '45. You'd think now we could have predicted that the war was almost over. You could have thought we could relax, work on civilian applications. You could use the stuff to power anything in the right quantities. Generators, rocket fuel—Carusi was in charge of that. Years later he was still working. But none of the rest of us was thinking about those sorts of things. Even after Hitler gave up, we were working harder than ever. The entire plant was like a single machine. But then we got the idea of a new additive, a new sonic overlay. Just one new set of valves. Just a few decibels—I won't tell you what it was, or how much, or what proportions. It blew the roof off when the sound ignited. A plume of fire in the night sky. It was four a.m., the morning of April 29. It had been a big week, and I was outside smoking a victory cigarette. A Lucky Strike. I used to read a lot of American history. I remember I was thinking about something I was reading, an explosion under the rebel trenches in Petersburg, Virginia. I opened my eyes, and I looked up and saw a jet of flame licking the underside of those low clouds. I don't even remember hearing any noise. Something hit me. That was that.”

And that was that. We knew what happened next. After the war, people patched together the old generators and went back to making steam. Later still, the whole site was abandoned, the tanks and valves left to rust under the ruined roof.

And the blind engineer, we guessed, had also found himself abandoned, his own motors extinguished or removed, his own internal conduits left to atrophy and decay. Later, when we left him and returned to the museum, when we stood among the ganglia and synapses of tubes and valves, we could not but recall his vacant face as he looked up at us, transfigured and yet deflated by the pressurized escape of his own memories, which drifted like dust or flakes of rust around us as we watched.

And here's the larger context or construction: Shortly after my mother's death I wrote the copy for a sound installation, part of a new permanent exhibit at the Massachusetts Museum of Contemporary Art in North Adams. The actual artist was a man named Stephen Vitiello. When I met him in a bar near the museum, I gave him a list of rhetorical devices, from which he chose onomatopoeia and, to a lesser extent, strategic repetition. Subsequently he made a recording of the text I sent him, adding layers of manipulation and always emphasizing certain combinations of words. Then he added many other kinds of sound, some industrial and some not. He separated the result into nineteen different tracks, which he combined with various lighting effects. Then he played the whole thing contrapuntally, in an endless loop, from speakers hidden in the actual machines, the three great boilers in a row. In this way he created the overlapping zones of sound. The actual voice of the engineer, the complete narrative, was only audible from one place on the skywalk, high up in the guts of the first machine. But certain phrases followed you around the building.

I thought, could you make stories, text, actual words, the way the blind engineer had manufactured sound? The museum occupies a complex of renovated brick buildings between the railroad tracks and a branch of the Hoosick River, the former site of the Arnold Print Works and subsequently Sprague Electric, which made capacitors and other components until the mid-1970s, when it moved its operations abroad. The museum makes much of its industrial past, and in the larger shows especially, you get the feeling of art being manufactured there in quantities suitable for distribution—an illusion, as it happens, because almost all of it is actually imported. Currently, in one of the long galleries, there is an exhibition of neon and ceramic sculpture from an artist's cooperative in Singapore.

Since the late 1980s, the galleries have spread through the abandoned factory. Stephen's sound installation coincided with the public opening of the old boiler house. In a sense, the gallery was renovated with the art already inside, three levels of encrusted generators, open to the weather, left to rust for many years. They had provided steam to the entire complex, according to the following process: trains delivered crushed coal to the siding, and a miniature bulldozer pushed it onto the conveyer belt to the top of the building. Then there was an enormous system of hoppers and chutes that fed it into the three furnaces, missing now, and the squid-like boilers.

But frankly, I didn't understand how any of this had worked. Nor was I interested. Instead, I had wanted to construct something of my own, a device made up of three interchangeable parts. I wanted to use it to provide power. First, I imagined the human body as a series of interconnected machines, taking on fuel and excreting waste, producing heat, producing motion, until they gradually fell silent one by one. This particular complex had operated every day during the course of an ordinary lifetime—my mother's for example. It had come on line when she was just a girl.

Second (and this was more of an overlay than a separate idea), I imagined a brain in the same terms, a brain that might produce or combine thoughts, or even make outlandish comparisons of entirely separate phenomena. Inevitably there would be inefficiencies and waste.

Third, I thought you could build a story that would function as a machine or else a complex of machines, each one moving separately, yet part of a process that ultimately would produce an emotion or a sequence of emotions. You could swap out parts, replace them if they got too old. And this time you would build in some deliberate redundancy, if only just to handle the stress.

One question was: Would the engine still work if you were aware of it, or if you were told how it actually functioned? Maybe this was one of the crucial differences between a story and a machine. Another question: Was there always in all cases a hidden, secret process, as there had been at the Sprague plant during the war?

As I stood on a metal bridge over the Hoosick River during the opening of the installation last September, I wondered how I could test these functions. I listened to the words that I had written months before, misremembered now, distorted and recombined with other sounds: a low din that issued from the plant and spread into the outside air. Stephen Vitiello had worked with the illusion that the noise of the installation came from the machines themselves, as if their dead, frozen valves and pistons were still active in some vestigial or internal way, operating at reduced capacity. From my vantage point I tried to spread the illusion outward—first words, then recorded sounds that duplicated the words, and finally variations of the same sounds in the natural world: birds and insects in the recently configured garden that surrounded the plant, still lush and green in the late summer. The clank of one of the cables that supported the Airstream, the hybrid sonic- and solar-powered space capsule that had fallen to earth above my head, and come to rest on a trestle at the top of the structure. People chatting in the garden, enjoying plastic cups of wine and cubes of cheese. Their tone was bright and sharp, their words impossible to distinguish.

And of course I listened to the motion of the stream that ran through a concrete chute under my feet. No one noticed I had stepped away into the larger environment or installation. Standing on the bridge, I expected to feel a little sense of loss, like a small bulb suddenly extinguished, burned out or snapped off—25 watts, no more than that. It's what happens when you finish something, in my experience. But I felt nothing, because the project is ongoing and the machine is larger, as you see.

I leaned my elbows on the railing. I looked over toward the garden, the raised beds full of hollyhocks, among which, I imagined, the blind engineer had smoked his victory cigarette. And I also was thinking about the story he had told about the Civil War, only in more detail—the story was my own, of course. It had come from something I had read when I was working on the piece a few months before, around the time of my mother's death, a book by a man named Colonel Eustace Peevey, a history of secret weapons projects, published in the 1930s when the author was an old man. Colonel Peevey was the type of writer more convinced by lack of evidence than by discovered facts, which are always subject to manipulation. The book itself was as much fantasy as history, especially his description of the Battle of the Crater, at Petersburg, Virginia, in 1864. In his version, the Union engineers had dug the equivalent of a railway tunnel under the Confederate defenses. Their plan was to drive a column of three colossal steam-powered engines into the heart of the city itself, and then attack during the ensuing panic. This strategy anticipated the battle tanks of the First World War by fifty years. But in its first and only deployment the lead vehicle, code-named Cetus or Grampus or Leviathan, caught fire and exploded, collapsing the tunnel and burying the machines forever. On the surface, of course, the results were identical to the effects of a gigantic mine.