Big Machine (13 page)

“I’m sure the Dean has some tissues on his desk,” she said to me. “In case you want to cry some more.”

Then she just sauntered off into the darkness, her shoes squeaking steadily. And, not five yards away, the oak door opened and she stepped out.

I turned back to the Dean. “I’m not working with her,” I said.

“No. You’ll be working
for
her, Ricky.”

I had to put my hands on something just then, so instead of grabbing him I lifted the chair I’d knocked over. Picked the damn thing up and slammed its four legs down hard.

“This isn’t a crib,” the Dean said. “Stop throwing tantrums.”

In the lamplight he looked like a little black baron. Back when men made their fortunes from coal and not computer programs. He wore an upturned mustache and a tiny Vandyke beard, and his hair was gray. He had a soft face that sagged with age instead of wrinkling. At the banquet I’d pegged him for fifty, but of course the picture in the tailors’ photo album meant he was much older. Not that he seemed tired or weak. In fact his eyes were lively, but his reddish skin looked thin as paper vellum. I’d owned a Bible printed on the stuff.

The Dean wore a black suit and vest, every button done up, and the jacket hung easily on his slim frame, so I could see every handmade button. Each one was almost a circle, but not quite, with white specks in their black irises. I’d put on my finest suit to meet this man, but it was a smock compared to his.

He snapped a handkerchief from his breast pocket and gave it to me. While I dabbed the spots of blood from my hands, he reached across his desk, to a laptop. He flipped the screen up, ran his finger on the mouse pad, tapped twice. And then a new sound began. Over to my right, where there weren’t any lights, a regular and aggressive noise.

-Thwip!- -Thwip!- -Thwip!- -Thwip!-

With some concentration I saw four bulky shapes in the corner. Honestly, they looked like trolls to me. Working so hard their shoulders heaved. The sound of pages being torn out of books. But I had to be mistaken, I knew this, so I concentrated on the shadows until I realized the four figures were only printers, the large industrial kind. In a minute they were producing pages at a berserk rate. Going so fast and constant they trembled. What could they be printing?

-Thwip!- -Thwip!- -Thwip!- -Thwip!-

Six centuries earlier I might’ve found four monks in a room like this, working in a similar pose. Locked away in a remote monastery, hunched over their desks, transcribing holy books or great philosophy. I know it’s ridiculous, but once I made this association, I couldn’t help feeling—
I don’t know—respectful of the printers too. Ridiculous! Just machines. They were probably only spitting out expense reports and maintenance logs, but once a thought like that arises, it’s hard to put it down.

“Absorbing, aren’t they?”

“Yes,” I admitted, but laughed a little, just to show I knew this was foolish.

“You look at them long enough,” the Dean said, “and almost believe they’re alive.”

“What are they printing?”

The Dean waved. “Come see.”

We approached the machines, the Dean more casual than me. They snapped so loud I thought they could bite. We stood over them. All four vented heat up toward my face as they worked. They
breathed
. They spat out pages, each sheet covered in type. I read what I could.

“Field notes,” I said, sounding disappointed.

The Dean touched the top sheet. “Gospel,” he said. “When I finally collect these pages properly, the whole world will know they’re Scripture.”

I followed his eye, expecting the pages to have changed, but they looked the same to me.

The Dean said, “The Voice sent Judah Washburn out into the world again. Had him retrace his steps until he reached the surface. Told Judah to walk toward the sun. As long as he felt that warmth on his face, he was moving toward his reward. Then the Voice gave Judah a single commandment:
go forth and survive
.”

“How’d Judah retrace his steps if he was blind?”

“Do you know what a determined man can do? Impossible things. And on the surface Judah found his reward quickly, less than a hundred paces away. Two half-buried trunks of Spanish gold coin. The Spanish milled dollar.”

I touched the side of a printer, practically petting it. I felt its body heat.

“Judah found that money and knew he was in trouble. Where’s a black man going to hold on to his loot in 1778? Only one place where he could even try. Vermont had outlawed slavery in 1777.”

“ ‘Go forth and survive’?” I repeated. “What kind of mission is that?”

“A blind, black escaped slave is dragging two trunks of gold from California to Vermont. You think survival wasn’t an absolute miracle?”

It was an incredible story, unimaginable, and yet here was the Dean telling it to me in the crook of a snowbound Vermont valley.

The Dean slapped one of the printers, and I flinched, expected the machine to kick.

“But Judah makes it to Vermont, builds himself a life, and do you know what the Voice tells Judah next?”

The Dean raised his hands like a magician.

“Nothing. He doesn’t hear one damn word. For
years
.”

-Thwip!- -Thwip!- -Thwip!- -Thwip!-

“The man was about to go batty, thought he did something wrong. Pissed the Voice off. What does a person do when faced with all that
silence?
In Judah’s case he took action. Ventured back into the world, blind and all, following every wild story he could. This was early in the era of spiritualists and mediums. He went to séances. Knocked on the door of every ‘haunted house.’ And that’s even after some home owners called the slave catchers on him. Just the
rumor
of a phantom got Judah out of bed. Lived like that for twenty-six years.”

The printers stopped thumping now, but only long enough to change paper trays. A moment of quiet, a faint mechanical huff, then back to printing again.

“But the man never heard a thing. And eventually his body gave out. Too old to knock on doors anymore. Kept gathering news, though. Got papers delivered to Burlington. Had his oldest daughter, Clotel, read them to him. Saved all the strangest stories.

“Eventually Judah had a new idea. Send Clotel out in his place. He loved her very much, but she’d developed an affection for canned heat whiskey. And in the depths of her drunkenness she’d claimed to have seen one or two eerie things. She had reasons to believe her father’s story. And maybe he hoped the work would give her a sense of purpose. That a mission would defeat an addiction.

“Clotel sent him detailed notes from the field, every encounter summarized. Judah never stopped hoping he might decipher some message in those reports. That he might discover the Voice’s next commandment hidden in them. And like that the Washburn Library was born.

“As he died, Judah hoped he’d done as he’d been told. His body might not live to hear the Voice again, but through Clotel the
faith
would survive.”

“I HAD A FRIEND NAMED BOTTLECAP
who said God spoke to
him,
” I said. “Heard the Lord until 2003.”

“Why did it stop?”

“Bottlecap died.”

The Dean frowned. Maybe he thought I was joking. But I wasn’t. He might not have cared about Bottlecap, but when my friend passed, I felt wrecked. Never saw the body, but read about the death in a local paper, the
Record
. He was in Troy then. I was cleaning toilets in Kingston.

The Dean took my elbow. His touch felt so strange, so unexpected, that I pulled my arm back, and he had to grab me again. I could see his fingers on my arm now, and they were as thin as fish bones. He turned me around and we walked together. The only light sat on his desk, behind us, so we headed into a dim expanse.

We passed a grand table made of rich but modest wood, maybe walnut, with tall matching chairs. This must’ve been what caught me in the thigh.

“I chose that painting of Saint Jerome that hangs near your offices because it says everything about the Washburn Library and the Unlikely Scholars.”

“We’re saints?”

“You wish! Remember the painting, Ricky. There’s Jerome’s ecstasy. His spare little room. A skull, an inkwell, and something in his right hand. As many times as you passed it, did you ever notice what he’s holding?”

“Something to write with. A pen? No. A quill.”

“That’s good, Ricky. I’m impressed. Here, at the Library, that’s what you embody.”

“A quill?”

“An instrument.”

The Dean and I finally reached the other end of the office. I saw a shape in front of me, but couldn’t make out what it was. It wasn’t the darkness of the room, just that I needed a minute to recognize what stood before us. To give this thing a name.

An enormous fireplace. The hearth alone stood taller than me.

The Dean went down on one knee and reached into the right sleeve of his jacket. He had a prop hidden there. One long-stemmed match. When he pulled that out, I started thinking this whole meeting might have been a routine. Scrambling through the dark, hearing the history, and now the fireplace. How many other Scholars had been through these stations?

“People like you, me, and Ms. Henry. The other Unlikely Scholars. What do we all have in common? What are we, Ricky?”

I didn’t know what he wanted me to say at this point. Instruments? Quills? Featherbeds?

“We are the descendants of America’s greatest losers. Black folks. The only population that
came
to America to be enslaved,” the Dean said.

“You make it sound like we had a choice.”

“But that’s the whole point. Everyone else
did
. But plain old black folks? I swear, it’s like we’re cursed.”

“Is this supposed to be a pep talk? Because …”

I shook my head. Had I really traveled all the way to Vermont just to hear some old man grumble? Did every story about black folks have to be such a downer?

While he crouched, the Dean waved the long, unlit match like a wand.

“I’m not here to spread bad news, Ricky. Listen to my words. The Voice called Judah. Of all the folks it might’ve picked, it picked a runaway slave. Do you understand what that means?”

The Dean tapped the wooden match against the stone fireplace.

“Means it’s ours, Ricky. The Voice chose
us
. Despised by many, but not the Voice. The American Negro finally got its god.”

“Negro?”

“Oh, I can’t keep up. Negro was an
improvement
when I was a boy. What is it now?”

I shrugged. “I always just liked
black
.”

“Fine, then. Black people finally get a god.”

I said, “I thought we had one already.”

The Dean snapped the long match against the strike plate on the floor and held the lit thing up to me. “Are you from a religious background?” he asked.

“No,” I said.

Let me explain why I lied.

Go and tell someone the worst thing about yourself. Cheated on a husband. Abused your child. Or, like in my case, that you’ve been addicted to heroin for half your life. Just tell them that and nothing else. You find that people come up with an entire history based on that one fact. They assume the worst about you.

This is true if you have a criminal past, absolutely, but even if you just had an usual childhood, people will look at you crooked. Long before my drug problems, I’d learned not to admit my history to strangers. I used to go through all the rigmarole of explaining my background to anyone who’d listen. Really trying to make a case that I was normal. But when I got older, I realized I was basically begging others to think better of me, and you can’t beg people to treat you with respect. Either they choose to do it or you go around them. Don’t waste time dignifying fools. So when the Dean asked if I had a religious background, it triggered my old defenses. I’d learned long ago that you don’t tell anyone you were raised in a cult.

The Dean reached the match below the grate in the fireplace, where balls of white paper had been set. A stack of logs sat above them. The Dean lit the paper, blew out the match, and jabbed the match into the ground.

Not to poor-mouth about my life. I’d seen some spectacular things, but never a pretty little exercise like lighting a fireplace. Just as I thought the paper would die out, the bottoms of the logs began to glow and feed and spread and thrive.

“How would you describe the promise you made in Iowa?” the Dean asked.

I stared deeper into the fire, until I saw two figures, two men, tied, beaten, and lying on their backs in a basement. It was Cedar Rapids. It was 2002. One of the men was dead. One of them was me.

“I promised to be brave.”

The Dean grabbed a brass poker from its stand beside the fireplace. He didn’t stick it into the fire. The Dean tapped the brass poker against the ground.

“And have you been?”

I crossed my arms and watched the fire. I didn’t speak.

The Dean and I stood before that fire, and I felt the heat against my
thighs and shins. He jabbed at the flames, playing with the logs, shifting them. The fire grew larger, and new light ran up along the mantel. And after that it spread along the walls. Until the light exposed a large painting hanging over the fireplace.

“This is a Caravaggio too,” the Dean said.

I could tell right away. The colors here were nearly as vivid as in Saint Jerome’s. Nearly luminous. What oil had the artist dipped his brush in? No matter how righteous the subject, Caravaggio painted images that glowed with the vitality of evil.

I reached to touch the painting, or even just the frame, but the Dean grabbed my sleeve and pulled my arm back down.

“The Voice didn’t contact Clotel either. Judah died and she took over. Clipping unusual cases out of the papers, going out to investigate. But she figured she’d have better luck with increased numbers. Clotel looked up her old drinking buddies, the ones who swore they’d seen demons in the vapors of their whiskey. A sorry old lot. She offered them the chance to catch the spirit, to tear through the veil. Most couldn’t keep their eyes open long enough to say no. But two said yes.”