All Those Vanished Engines (5 page)

The Crater was on private grazing land, a no-man's-land according to the armistice. Following the battle, the Washington Artillery had sealed it with an enormous plug, an iron cylinder like the door of a vault. As they rode past the tumbled fences that surrounded it, along a new track in the turf, among the blue-coats and the dogs, Paulina could see a fire up ahead, a bonfire and a crowd of officers, and then the Crater's Mouth beyond them.

The stranger slowed their horse to a walk, down the incline and into the pit. Head drooping, hands twisted into the metal belt, Paulina saw the plug was broken, thrown back as if on hinges. And in the throat of the tunnel stood the machines that had done the work, steam-powered shovels and hammers, still seething and thundering, surrounded by a gritty mist. Beyond the plug, the tunnel was encased in riveted plates of pitted iron; they rode on a track of crushed stone, following a line of carbide lanterns.

In the summer of 1864, an entire regiment had burst out of the ground underneath the fortifications. The war had almost ended in one day. But General Mahone and Colonel Claiborne and the rest—schoolchildren still recited their names every July on the anniversary of the battle—had thrown the Yankees back, and laid down such a layer of suffocating fire that the Crater filled up to its brim with dead and dying men.

The Yankees had come up to the surface on a train, pulled by an enormous steam engine. The tracks were still there or else had been re-laid, and Colonel Claiborne walked his horse through the gusting clouds of condensation, until he reached the wagons leading down into the dark. He reached out his gloved hand to touch the trembling metal, while sometimes he bent his head to talk to one of the Yankee officers who led them. There were flatcars for the dogs, who leapt up onto them, and then a couple of coaches for the soldiers. By the time they'd reached the private compartments, Paulina was desperate to dismount; she swayed backward, and when the black horse finally stood still, she let go of the stranger's belt and slid away into unconsciousness, only partly aware of the concerned voices that surrounded her, the hands that broke her fall. She had a last impression of the stranger sitting immobile on the saddle's horn, her own face staring down at her with half-amused disdain.

Then oblivion, but only for a short time. Always she had been a lucid dreamer. This time her dream brought her back into her imagined future, her artificial world in Massachusetts that she had described first in her diary and then later embellished in the library ballroom as she waited for her sentence to be read. Now it was as if she were suspended in hot air, as if she floated disembodied over a scene that she was simultaneously trying to create:

Too agitated to sit still, as she listened she had ripped the dead boughs out of the trees, snapped them in pieces and then loaded up the bonfire into a roaring, crackling mass, melting the snow into a circle of slush around the stones. She had stripped off her mittens and her coat. Ten feet away, my cheeks were hot. “You don't know anything,” she said. She had had her back to me, but she turned toward me now, the firelight in her yellow hair, her face in shadow, rimmed with light. She had kept a fag-end in the pocket of her shirt, the remnant of a cigaret they had been smoking as he talked, but now she took it out, looked at it, and flicked it away into the darkness. “Is that how you see me? I know I should be flattered, but this girl—I asked for her to do something, and all you do is make her suffer. Do I look like that's what I want? She has my name and that is all. And sure, that's clever she has a twin who's better than she is. Stronger and fiercer and braver. She has my name and body and that is all. Is this the body you are talking about, the one you're cutting up with broken glass? Is this it?” she said, moving her palms over her chest.

Up until this moment I had not taken her seriously. I had thought her outrage was manufactured, part of the joke. What had we been doing except talking and smoking hemp-weed, trying to keep our minds off things? At times I had scarcely known what I was saying, as my thoughts fled back into the town, into the house I had left that morning, and my older sister, and my parents, and Elly with her golden bracelet, moving it up and down along her arm, showing first one niello pattern, then another, the four gold oblongs and the clasp. But now I got to my feet, stood up from the rock where I'd been sitting, dusted the snow off my pants.

“Is this it?” she repeated, and with her back to the fire she fumbled with the buttons of her shirt. She pulled it open to reveal her white underclothes, her pale flank in the night air that was simultaneously freezing and baking. Where the light hit I could see the freckles on her skin, her shoulders and her upper arms. But when she unbuckled her belt and slid her jeans over her narrow hips to show me her white cotton underpants, that was too much.

“I am a real person,” she said, “not some story. Why do you want to hurt me?”

And then, after a moment: “I said I wanted a love story. Where's the boy? When does he show up?”

When does he? How could I inject him in? Deliberately I watched her face, stared at her face, watched the tears drip. I was so panicked, I didn't even ask myself what they might mean. They were just water on her face. I stared at her bright hair, her nose and chin. Then I came toward her, arms outstretched, not knowing what I would do if she hadn't raised her palm to keep me away. “Shush, she is watching us,” I said, referring to the end of this last installment, trying also to make a joke as I glanced up into the smoky, spark-filled sky. My eyes stung, and then I was crying also, not in recompense or punishment for anything I had said or done, but for the same reason, finally, that she was upset with me, because of the not-knowing. This story was too close to the original, and it could not but remind us of what we'd seen: the great steam engine burrowing into the icy dyke and the explosion. It was true, I could not invent anything. Then we had run away, or she had run away and I had followed her. Perhaps she blamed me for that, for her own cowardice. But there was nothing we could have done. The dyke had held or else it had not. Either the college boys and the militia had managed to seal up the hole like General Mahone at the Battle of the Crater, or they had not.

“I think about you too much,” I said. “You're like a crowd of people.”

Crying, she smiled. “Where did you get the name Adolphus?”

“My mother told me that was what my grandmother wanted to call me. It is a family name. Whenever I complained about anything, she said it could have been worse.

“But he's not the one,” I said. I came to her now, and together we did up her clothes. She was shivering with cold, or something.

It was true what she had said, or almost said. Always at the last moment, my thoughts about her turned to violence. Maybe it was because she was older that I found it hard to touch her, or even think about touching her in the way I wanted. Sometimes I would think about what to do. I would gather my courage, reach out my hand. But at the last moment the gesture would go astray. A caress would turn into something more aggressive, a tap or a punch on the arm. Something that could be disclaimed or misunderstood. So now I was happy just to touch her in this brusque way, fastening her shirt, pulling it up over her arms, I'd never seen this much of her. How beautiful she was!

“What do you mean, a crowd?”

“In my mind.” And it was true: images would unfold in rows like paper dolls. Who knows? Maybe more than two, which she would find out as she penetrated into the steam-filled bowels of the Yankee kingdom, where doubtless they had perfected a way to duplicate entire human beings, grow them in steaming vats. And here?

“Maybe just one,” Paulina said. “Just one. Just one.”

My eyes stung from the smoke. I did not reply directly. “When I was two or three years old,” I said, “my parents took us to the island of Ceylon. My father had a job teaching physical science in the capital city, at the university. We had a driver named Reuben, and he used to give us plates of milk, my sister and me, to feed the cobra at the bottom of the garden. This was before Elly was born. And I remembered looking down into a circular blue pool and watching the elephants swimming at the bottom, holding on to each other's tails. For a long time this was my earliest memory, and if it sounded strange or unlikely, I would answer myself by saying, ‘Well, that is just what things are like on the island of Ceylon.'”

What I meant to say was, “I am so frightened.” As if responding to this inner thought, just as Paulina was buckling her belt, her twin sister clambered over the lip of the dell, wearing her eider-down coat. “My God, that's a big fire. I guess you're not trying to hide. I saw you all the way from the rock.”

The hill was dotted with private landmarks. Elephant Rock was half a mile down the slope. Where we stood was Karnak.

But how foolish I was, not to understand why Paulina was so upset! It wasn't the hemp-weed. It was because the paper dolls were interchangeable, each one with a blank face. To tell the truth, I had not even been thinking about Elizabeth when the stranger slipped the cruel, hooked knife out of her domino in the ballroom of the William R. McKenney Library.

“I don't want to interrupt,” said Lizzie. She came in from the cold, out of breath. And she really was a stranger, even more so because she had Paulina's face. They glared at each other, firelight in their hair and on their skin. “I knew I would find you here,” she said. “We can't stay. There will be no more coming. I got out just in time. Hair's breadth. The soldiers blew up the engine and then attacked through the gap. We had no chance. I followed your tracks to the ice house and then here.”

“Ah,” Paulina said, the breath pushed out of her.

Once, when I was little, we were driving in the motorcar and my older sister told me to throw a bottle out the window. I always did what she said. Father pulled the 'car to the side, stopped it, and slapped me.

Once, when Elly was four, I had left some red-ink markers on the table. She had found them, and used them to scribble in an expensive book of engravings, illustrations to Dante's
Divine Comedy.
My father slapped me.

Once, traveling in Germany, we had gone to a town where the cathedral bells rang every hour. Disliking bells, Elly had screamed all night in the hotel. In the next room, I had wet the bed. My father slapped me.

“They have set up a stockade in the old gymnasium,” Lizzie said. “They will be looking for any stragglers. But I have got something.” From the pocket of her feather-stuffed coat protruded seven sticks of dynamite. “They were confiscating the weapons. They didn't suspect a girl.”

She was like a stranger. “What do they look like?” I asked.

Once, in England, when I was eight years old, Elly had screamed and screamed. I had cut my finger with the breadknife, so that the steel turned on the bone. Father bound it up and made me sit all night with my hand above my head. I wore a coat because the window was broken and the room was very cold.

“Oh, they are a clever replica. But you can tell.”

Once my older sister had jumped out the window rather than clean her room. She had broken her ankle and for twenty-four hours had hobbled around like a wounded spider, before a neighbor took her to the doctor.…

“Their skin is wrong,” she said. “Too much like rubber, like a mask.”

The fire snapped and spit. The pile of twigs and pine boughs had subsided, glowing within a tracery of what looked like bones, the delicate red bones of tiny animals. There was still a lot of light among the Karnak stones, too much; there was no moon.

“Oh, God,” Paulina said. Then we could hear the chugging engine, the whistle as it let off steam. One of the enemy's huge, misshapen airships bulged over the trees, shining its carbide lantern.

Awestruck, we listened to the hiss of the silver valves, watched the fluctuations of the silver bag as it rose above them in the winter air. Then a voice came down out of the heavens, amplified, distorted, and incomprehensible. The Martians had no gift for languages, or perhaps no desire to make themselves understood. Secure in their ingenious and super-human contrivances, it was not necessary for them to …

But even in this violent moment, Matthew's mind turned uncontrollably to Petersburg, Virginia, where in a first-class compartment below the pit, the Yankees had bundled their prisoner onto a wheeled table and ministered to her there, stanching and bandaging the cuts on her stomach and her legs. Now they'd left her to rest and recuperate. In the half-light she listened to the engine hiss and throb. She smelled the grease and the sour, throttled vapor as she settled into her hurt body, as she drifted down from the sky above the snowy dell, chasing the vestige of her dream. Nor could she fail to understand the limits of her own imagination: it was all very well to call something “ingenious and super-human,” but that was a judgment rather than a description. Ah, how hard it was, even half-delirious or asleep, to conceive of something new! In Anno Domini 1967, in a future without limits, all she could come up with was a combination of a hot-air balloon and a railway train, the same engine which at that moment jerked suddenly and began to move.

She lay on her back on the enamel surface, her wrists strapped loosely to a steel frame above her head, from which also hung an assortment of colored liquids in bottles made of a light, transparent substance that was not glass. When she twisted her left hand, the cotton sling gave way. She turned onto her left side so that she could free herself; the sling around her right wrist had gotten twisted in a figure eight. She stared at it, and in her groggy mind she remembered as best she could the bracelet Cousin Adolphus had given her when she was small, and which her grandmother had stolen. She pictured the strand of braided gold and the strand of braided hair, fastened together at intervals with tiny golden clasps. But whether one of the clasps had broken, or whether by design, at a certain moment the strands reversed themselves, and the elephant hair, which had lain on the right side, now lay on the left. Maybe by accident there was a twist in the double strand that was unrelated to the larger twist, where the figure eight doubled back on itself. The entire bracelet was locked in place by the round cartouche with the circle of incised lettering: Colonel Adolphus Claiborne, CSA. But it was loose enough on her thin arm for her to remove it just by turning her wrist and slipping free, as, lying on her steel and enamel bed, she freed herself now from the second cotton strap.