The Uncanny Reader (43 page)

There was a black ribbon with a medallion on it around her neck.

(The boy went dutifully to the clock.)

We think a Swiss clockmaker made it, the woman continued. It's from 1892, over a hundred years old at this point.

The boy looked at the beveled glass, the spattering of color on the marble tabletop, the mercury-filled tubes, and stood there waiting for the woman to say something more about it. Actually, though, he knew the theory of the tubes himself. Heat causes metal to expand, and the pendulum, being metal, will lengthen, lowering the center of gravity and therefore slowing the clock—not much, of course, infinitesimally, as a matter of fact, but when one is counting seconds over months or years the differences become significant, then profound. The mercury in the tubes is confined so that it can only expand upward,
raising
the center of gravity so the effects cancel.

(Well, he thought, standing patiently, politely, at the table, at least he could show off his knowledge.)

Is this the original key? he said.

What?

It was only then that the boy realized that the woman was looking at neither him nor the clock.

Oh, that, she said. Not
that
. I know nothing about that. That's new, for us anyway. That was at an estate sale last year. Sit down.

Ma'am?

Sit down. Here. The woman patted the sofa beside her, rubbed the red velvet flirtatiously, made room between herself and the boy's mother.

This woman, with her well-applied makeup and at least one facelift, was elegant in the slightly decadent manner of the best-preserved of sixty-year-old females. She was the sort of woman who can successfully squeeze the last remnants of sensuality out of age, possessing still the power of crossed legs in cocktail dresses, knowing well the uses of black chiffon, gold jewelry, French perfume, and alcohol. In fact, bringing a fourteen-year-old into a parlor tinkling with such temptations might have given many a mother pause. But this particular woman had a husband she was still moderately crazy about, a handsome lawyer with an alcoholic nose who was a member of one of the old-line Mardi Gras krewes and a fixture at Galatoire's on Friday. (In fact, the husband was there now, this being a Friday.) So that particular story is possibly over before it starts.

Wait, the woman said, facing the other sofa now.

The doll continued looking out the window. The clock continued ticking on its table.

The boy sat down, began waiting, leaned forward slightly.

It may take a while. Would you like a Coca-Cola?

The boy was equally puzzled by both sentences.

He was still facing the sofa. He had already noticed that the two sofas were not quite identical. The one the doll was on was slightly longer and had darker, somewhat different-looking woodwork. He was beginning to make other comparisons. But at that moment the doll began to turn. She began to turn toward him, slowly, as he watched, though not so slowly as to be unlifelike. It was as though she had been interrupted in the midst of a daydream. Her brilliant hazel eyes were not fixed, not what they call “doll-like”; they moved independently of her head and slightly in advance of it, giving an effect the realism of which was uncanny. Her hazel-colored eyes were crystalline, maybe literally. There was no movement of her mouth, which, like her face, was ceramic, or ivory, or alabaster, and
was
doll-like, though the lips were full and there was a feeling and even a glimpse of natural teeth. She moved her elbow and left hand from the armrest and crossed both hands (politely?) in her lap. She was wearing long white gloves which, had her jacket been removed, would have proved to extend past her elbows. She moved her right hand and tugged on the fabric of her left glove as though to straighten it or exorcise some ghost of disorder.

Then she looked at the boy again, directly at him, through him. There could have been no more steadfast stare. The most saucy and impudent thirteen-year-old that has ever taken the perilous step of trying the effects of lipstick on a stepfather could not have had such a gaze. The doll had a breathtaking face, not innocent, but breathtaking: high cheekbones, shadowy eyes, dark hair that seemed real. His own gaze flinched down somewhat to the black-and-white medallion around her neck. Her breasts were so well formed, her blouse so tucked in as to give a sense of suspended breathing.

The woman was talking to his mother now.

It's the only one like it we've ever seen. It's Swiss, we think. It stayed in the attic for decades in a cedar-lined box. It was in my husband Eric's family. Eric's grandfather would have had to know something about it, since this was his house and furniture. Eric himself says he had never seen it before. His grandfather never mentioned the thing, had forgotten about it, perhaps, or perhaps kept it a secret deliberately, since he had three daughters in addition to his son. Maybe he wanted to avoid a fight. We didn't find it till a few months ago. The year 1892 was stamped on—actually burned into—the wood of the box. It was in an alcove under an unbelievable number of blankets.

(The women, of course, are talking around the boy again.)

The crank is in that case, the woman said, pointing to a narrow leather box. There are a number of movements it goes through randomly,
sometimes
randomly, sometimes not. I'm not sure that we've seen them all as yet. It seems, at times, that where you touch it very much affects the internal program. You may touch it, if you like.

The boy came closer but could hear no sound of clockwork. The doll's eyes had not moved, her head had not moved, still she seemed to be following him. He grasped the tips of her gloved fingers, tremulously, as though shaking hands, as though saying hello.

After a moment, the doll turned slightly and looked up at him. Her eyes, once again, slightly leading the movement. It was impossible to believe it was coincidental.

It will run for days, the woman said. The spring must be enormous. It
feels
enormous when you wind it.

What's her name?

My God! You're the second person who has asked that today! Actually, we haven't named her. Or maybe we have. My husband and I have begun calling her “the doll.” You can name her if you like.

(The boy was still waiting, still holding the doll's hand.)

Can you stop her? he said. Her motion, I mean. Is it possible to shut her off?

(Outside the house, he heard the shriek of a young girl's voice next door.)

Yes, there's a little wheel in the back of her neck, just under the ribbon.

The boy went behind her, behind the sofa, and rested both his hands on the doll's shoulders. Her eyelashes were almost assuredly real, her hair too, human, straight, long and luxurious. It seemed he could smell a trace of perfume. He looked down at the fabric of her dress, felt the little wheel beneath the ribbon.

Interesting, the woman said. See what I mean? (The woman was talking to the boy's mother now.) I've never seen her do that before.

The doll was turning around to look at the boy. She succeeded, too, to a surprising degree, finishing by staring up at him, her neck arched slightly.

*   *   *

During the first week, the boy attempted to make a complete catalog of the doll's movements. She seldom moved as much as she had the first day. Sometimes she would go a full hour or two without any motion of any kind. He would come into the parlor in the afternoon or evening and watch her and wait. Her activity was completely unpredictable: five minutes, thirty minutes, forty-seven and a half minutes between movements. Then she might do a lot, an entire series of things, as though bored by the long inactivity—straighten a glove, adjust her knees, slap at an invisible fly. The most elaborate thing she could do was the following: put both hands down, curl her knuckles slightly, and lift her entire body a fraction of an inch to the right. But before that motion was ever repeated, she would move to the left again, so that there was no overall change in position. Often she would fold her hands together, waiting; and from that position move her eyes, alone, so as to look slowly around the room. (Literally, she seemed very much to
look
at something for a while, then at something else.) Occasionally she would look down at the floor for quite a period of time, so that one would be very tempted to say, “This little doll once had a little dog.”

Her eyes themselves, the boy noticed, seemed as though they should be able to close, the lids seemed to be hinged, or
potentially
hinged, but they never did, or he never saw them do it. They never blinked, even. He could hear her ticking only by holding his ear directly on her body, but anyplace on it would work—her back, for instance, or one of her shoulders. There was quite a
presence
in the sound, not a slow tick … tick … tick … tick … like a clock, but something faster, shorter, more breathless and passionate: a tic-tic-tic-tic-tic-tic-tic-tic-tic, full in its own way, of the quality of construction, of the click of micrometers, of the precise cut of lathes, of the tempering of steel for shafts and mainsprings.

The boy had other concerns, of course. Before leaving home, he had had daydreams that there might be some girl in New Orleans waiting just for him. But those dreams did not pan out. All the girls were older. He was literally the youngest individual in his class. Most of the girls had boyfriends with driver's licenses. They were friendly enough but definitely not interested in any fourteen-year-old “mechanically minded” boy. On several occasions he hunted for but did not find the girl next door, nor, for that matter, did he ever hear her again.

Under the circumstances, the question that became paramount for him was how long the doll would run. It dawned on him that it might be somewhat difficult to tell. The doll might continue to
tick
long after she had stopped moving because it should take less energy to do that. In fact, every day, after class, he would wonder, has she stopped already?

He began to leave things in her hands, little bits of paper, to see if she had moved in his absence. Infinitesimal, these pieces of paper were, some of them virtually the size of lint. He would find them later, on the sofa, on the armrest, on the floor beneath her feet. After a while he began writing tiny messages on them. To camouflage, as far as possible, what he was doing, he would write very small, so that what she ended up holding was an unreadable blob of ink. But in each case
he
knew what he had written and was pleased to think she did as well.

Hello.

Thinking of you.

Sleep well.

Or:

I think you're beautiful.

Will try to dream of Switzerland for your sake.

(He would find the messages on the cushion of the sofa, on the armrest, on the floor beneath her feet.)

The boy
did
try to dream of Switzerland for her; and, in order to get a focus for his dream, saturated himself with ideas and images of the area from two sets of encyclopedias in the house: pictures of the Alps, of cows, of cheese, of Zurich and Bern. He thought that perhaps she might come
alive
for him in a dream.

(And, as he began to learn more French, he tried speaking to her.)

Je t'aime.

On the sofa sometimes, unmoving for hours, he would stare at her, trying to saturate his brain with her beauty. Her hazel eyes were so realistic it was impossible to believe she was not seeing him too, watching him, waiting for something.

Nothing came of the dreams, though. That is, they did not happen.

In truth, the two of them didn't get much time absolutely alone together. Other things would intervene. The maid would come in. The husband would enter with his pipe, the wife with her cigarettes, or both, simultaneously. They seemed mainly to smoke in that room. The boy noticed one evening that the doll was looking directly at the husband as he fiddled with his pipe, and he suddenly realized he was feeling something very like jealousy.

One afternoon, while waiting for the doll to move, he began looking at the family pictures in the shadow-box frames. He noticed there was a resemblance, a definite resemblance, between this doll and certain of the women in the pictures. He thought they might be the wives. The maid came on Tuesdays and Thursdays and he began to ask her questions. She knew the answers to most of them, and the woman eventually provided him with the rest. He found that the daughters in the family had something of a resemblance, passed on, no doubt, genetically; but what he had guessed initially was the truth. The real resemblance was to the wives.

The boy opened the leather box, looked at the crank with its mahogany handle, lifted it up, set it back. There were some spare buttons for the blouse, a long Allen wrench with a T-shaped handle, some regular wrenches too, three screwdrivers, a button hook. (There was also an impression of these things crushed into the velvet lining of the top of the box.)

How long could the spring
last
? he wondered. It was already more than “days,” as the woman had suggested. It was “weeks” now, past two, and well into a third. But then it quit. The boy came home one afternoon and found his last message (unread?) in her hand. The doll had run down. She was stopped, frozen, dead, caught in the middle of a motion. It was a most unnatural-looking position for her, her eyes on the floor, her neck in the process of a turn. Seeing it, he immediately understood the importance of a little-appreciated role and function of funeral directors, who have as their responsibility the final, strictly physical disposition of a human body: the adjusting of hands and feet, the closing of eyes, the stopping of life at a node.

The boy felt strongly that the doll shouldn't be left like this. Did they even notice, the man and woman? Why
didn't
they? Maybe they weren't really looking at her. He decided he would rewind her himself. He decided he would fix the problem.

It would be three days before he could do that, though. The man and woman were going to dinner at Commander's Palace on Saturday. Afterward they were going to a party in the French Quarter. He would have two full hours at least, maybe more, maybe considerably more.