The Uncanny Reader (45 page)

Yes.

My husband.

*   *   *

Four times, and four times only, the boy and Moriya were able to intersect. During the last two, the boy was bare from the waist down and Moriya was almost perfectly nude. By diligently searching up and down Magazine Street, he had found a filling station with a condom machine in the restroom. He had bought several; they were a bit large, of course; still, they simplified certain worries—not so
much
of a problem, after all, for a fourteen-year-old, but enough for staining a sofa or a dress.

All through the days that followed, the boy had more energy than he had ever had in his life. He felt more
alive
. He would watch Moriya in the afternoon light, the saucy, impudent, perfectly beautiful face, the risqué and hungry mouth, cherish the memory and anticipation of her ivory groin grinding into his. In the actual sexual encounters, it helped to know, now, exactly what was going to happen, when her hand was going to move, when she was going to need assistance with her feet.

Since the boy now knew where Moriya was
really
from, he decided to try the trick of the dream again. It worked, too, this time, and magnificently. (But once, and once only.) He sneaked a heavy volume of the encyclopedia to bed with him and read the entire article about Prague, twice through, completely, just before turning out the light. Sure enough, during the night she came to him. Or, more correctly,
he
went to her. He went to Prague. He and Moriya were suddenly walking across the Charles Bridge together. She was tracing the veins in his hand with her gloved hand.

Then they were in a café, each with a glass of wine.

I have a
secret
, she said.

(There was a light heaviness to her voice; it was precisely articulate, as though English were her third or fourth language.)

What? he said.

She was bubbling over with excitement.

But she would not tell him.

I know a
secret
! she said again, later. She came around the little table and sat on his lap, dangling her feet above the ceramic tiles. She pressed the tips of her fingers into his cheeks, head to head, nose to nose, her eyes locked onto his, to fix and center his vision. There was an incredible glow of energy around her. She leaned forward as though to whisper something, but licked his ear instead.

Interestingly, the boy's dream was not set in 1892, not in the era of gaslights and horses, the era of her construction, but in a strange and intermediate time. It would have had to have been somewhere in the 1930s, just before the Second World War. There were only a few cars, very dark, dusty. But what cars! What magnificent machines! He saw a fair number of Mercedes, a couple of Rolls-Royces (the great roadsters and dual-cowled phaetons), a Bugatti, an Invicta, a Hispano-Suiza. The cars were parked on the stone bridges, the stone streets, the horses clopping by them. The greatest cars of the twentieth century, covered with dust from the road.

It was a mechanically minded dream.

But four times, and four times only, the two of them had together. Not that that was absolutely all the possible chances. It was because on the last chance something disastrous happened.

The man and woman were going to another party (in Covington, this time, across Lake Pontchartrain and the causeway).

The boy knew he would have plenty of time.

Thirty minutes after they'd left, he had the doll perfectly nude. But with such a luxury of time, he began to look at her more carefully. On her flanks now, he saw several other places for the Allen wrench to insert, a total of six of them, between her arms and her waist. This had to be the way to get inside her. The boy's curiosity began to get the better of him. There was so much she could
do,
and he couldn't begin to imagine how. He simply had to
see
firsthand what was going on. He quickly removed six long machine screws with hexagonal insert heads and set them on the marbletopped table. He managed to get his fingernails into a seam in her back and then, with the smallest screwdriver, pry her alabaster skin up carefully, very carefully, so as not to crack it. He had to break a sort of suction. He could scarcely pull the skin off. This doll had probably not been opened in a hundred years. He saw some green felt, some brass gears, some shafting; then, suddenly, an incredible surprise: wires! Electrical wires! Yellow, cotton-covered wires! Bundles of them, everywhere, even attached to her back through a very odd-looking detachable connector. There was a flywheel between the doll's shoulder blades. It was not spinning, though, and would not spin even when he released the control in her neck. He suspected some chunks of unmachined metal that he saw near the flywheel might be magnets, and tested one of them with the blade of the screwdriver:

It was all he could do to pull it away again.

A magnet indeed, a very powerful magnet! What he was looking at was a dynamo. This doll generated her own electricity! There were several copper discs attached to the underside of her skin. He saw a number of others inside too, maybe an eighth of an inch thick, maybe thicker, and a couple of inches in diameter. For what? Capacitance effects? Probably not, at least not in this era. On the other hand, thermocouples were a definite possibility. Thermocouples were really old, he knew; he had seen a book from the 1880s that had them in it. Thermocouples would be sensitive to heat too, or to
changes
in heat. So she
could
know when and where she was being touched.

There was absolutely no dust, though. The doll's body might have been sealed yesterday. Only the dullness of the brass and some corrosion of the bearings revealed her true age. So moisture itself can enter, the boy thought (or perhaps it simply condensed inside her). He saw shafts with differential gearing and hard-rubber wheels pressing against discs to give integrals and derivatives of motion. Along her flanks and in the back side of her breasts there were areas where lead had been cast to give the proper weight distribution. All of this was so much more elaborate than he could have dreamed. There were banks of wire-wound resistors in what appeared to be a series of Wheatstone bridges, arranged, perhaps, in a sort of decision tree. (Wouldn't you need to
amplify
the current, though? Maybe not.) What must such a doll have
cost
? he thought. Her movements themselves were powered by the spring; but many of the decisions were evidently electromechanical. Not all of them, though, because he saw a cylindrical stack of metal discs with slots, like in a music box, tiny relays, strain gauges, electromagnetic clutches. The doll had to be pushing the absolute
limits
of the technology of the era. Still, the great majority of the time everything was evidently disengaged; she sat there ticking steadily, declutched and waiting.

(Tic-tic-tic-tic-tic-tic-tic-tic-tic.)

The boy sat the doll up and put her, very carefully now, in the counterclockwise position, since the motions were continuous there and he knew what they would be. The flywheel of the dynamo suddenly began to spin. He could slow it, stop it, though, by touching the escapement wheel. The escapement was finer-toothed than a clock's. Every time he put his finger down on the wheel, the doll's hand would stop. If he let it go, it would run. It would run, then stop, run, then stop. Tic-tic-tic-tic … tic-tic … He was watching the part of the movement where she would normally grab for his shoulder. But this time there was going to be no shoulder for her to grab. With his finger he had complete control of her: tic-tic-tic … tic-tic … tic-tic. She moved now an inch, now a quarter of an inch, now a matter of millimeters. Something seemed to have been filtered out of the movement, though. Something very real but difficult to describe. What? Well.
Something
. Passion, maybe. It seemed to be passion.

Was passion some function of time?

She would run, then stop, run, then stop: tic-tic-tic-tic … tic-tic. Her movements had become somewhat jerky at this speed. The boy was utterly fascinated. He found himself watching the tremor of her gloved hand. Had he inadvertently
aged
the doll? He touched her again and again, letting her move only incrementally. Tic … tic … tic .… tic . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . tic

At that moment the escapement wheel sheared off. It sheared completely off and dropped deep within the mechanism. What was left of the little shaft began to spin furiously. The gloved hand of the doll shot eight inches in less than a second. The boy's sense of panic could not have been greater had there been an artery spurting blood across the room. He quickly grabbed at the other control in her neck, stopped the motion, stopped the shaft, his heart pounding furiously.

Oh my God!

He couldn't get to the wheel. It had fallen deep inside. He could not reach it within the labyrinth of machinery. The boy tilted the doll, shook her a little, righted her. There was a tinkling springy noise as the wheel fell down and lodged somewhere near the bottom. It would take a major disassembly to get to it now and would do no good whatsoever since the shaft itself was broken.

There was absolutely no way to put the wheel back.

The boy stood there, terrified. In desperation, he tried inserting the wrench and turning her back to the clockwise position. He thought there possibly might be a second escapement for that position. (Just possibly.) At the same time, he knew in his heart that that would never be true. Absolutely knew, even before he turned the wrench. It was impossible. And yet there
was
. He heard it as soon as he released the control. There was indeed another escapement ticking more deeply inside her. He waited, sat her up, her back still open, waited, waited (tic-tic-tic). Suddenly she began to move. The normal position seemed to be OK. The boy held his ear close to her shoulder. (Tic-tic-tic-tic-tic-tic-tic.) The sound was exactly the same as always. The normal position was OK, or seemed to be. He began sealing her shut again.

After all, he thought, perhaps no one
knew
about the other position. Working furiously, he began to put Moriya back together. The precision of this doll's construction was absolutely unbelievable. He had to wait to let air escape before the two halves would seal together. He was virtually spinning the Allen wrench now, his hands moving as accurately as a surgeon's. Soon there was no trace whatsoever of his entering, no felt showing, no misalignment. It was all snug, tight, perfect.

The boy began to dress her, then to lace up her bustier. He had a sense that his time was limited, that something
else
was about to go wrong. He laced up the back of her dress, missed one position and had to start again. The normal position was OK, he thought, and perhaps no one knew about the other. Or if they did, they might assume they had broken her themselves. He straightened her dress, began to hook her velvet jacket. Get her dressed! Get her
dressed
!
Hurry!
he thought. The normal position is OK, he told himself (or
was
telling himself) until a question brought him up short in his thoughts:

Exactly which position was normal?

He finished hooking up her velvet jacket and quickly turned out the light.

*   *   *

There had been absolutely no need to rush. It was several hours before the man and woman returned. Still, afterward, for three full days, the boy worried himself sick about the doll. Why? Because of the escapement wheel. How could he be sure it was completely out of the way? For all possible movements, that is. It might still strip a gear or cause something to short-circuit. The boy studiously avoided entering the parlor. He didn't want to be physically in the same room if something within Moriya began to grind and malfunction. Each day before class, he looked in to see whether or not she had moved. When he was home, he went past the parlor doorway, nervously, almost hourly. Had she changed position? Yes. No. Maybe. Yes. (Yes, indeed.) The doll seemed to be running perfectly. Still, he could not study for worrying. All he thought of in class now was Moriya, alone, in that parlor, initiating each perilous new motion. Three days, four days, five days, six. She should have gone through most of her program now. The man and woman would go into the parlor, leave it, notice nothing, say nothing. Mostly, though, Moriya sat there all alone. The boy would watch her from the hall. He too noticed absolutely nothing. Indeed, it seemed absolutely nothing had changed.

But in those days of worry and despair, he began to see the doll in a new light, as something of an agent, ambassador, and spy. What kind of reasoning had gone into her? What was she all about? Her design was more than clever; it was
demonic
in its brilliance, compulsive in its perfection; perhaps the work of some famously dirty-minded old clockmaker from the Austral Kraftwerk in Prague who had sent her into the world in search of fourteen-year-old boys. From this point of view, the boy saw that he had been set up, framed, completely. There was nothing necessarily gentle or bright here. What dark imperatives was this doll fulfilling? The boy could imagine a shop with lathes and drill presses, wires and electromagnets, petticoats and steel filings—pipes too, and cheese, micrometers, and tankards of beer. What was
he
thinking of (the clockmaker) when he had designed her? Was he dreaming of the sex himself? And if so, with whom? Was it
his
hand that found its way up your leg? After all, the message on the underwear was not from her but from the clockmaker:
Talis umbras mundum regnant
. That was a message from the clockmaker, wasn't it?

The feeling did not last long. Another feeling soon replaced it in the boy's heart. The new feeling was loneliness, a bottomless loneliness, the most abject loneliness imaginable. He went through a daily agony. It was as though
he
were broken, not she. He would stand at the door, watch her adjust her position, straighten her glove, scratch an invisible fly off a sleeve. She was trapped now.
He
was trapped without her. His misery and guilt became unbearable. After dinner one evening, he realized he simply had to go in to see her again. Cautious, shy, nervous, he tucked his shirttail in, actually checked his appearance in a mirror before he went through the door. He sat down on the opposite sofa with his French book as though nothing had happened. He waited there nervously.
Why
was he nervous? What was this, silliness? Superstition? She was a
toy,
wasn't she? At last the doll began to turn and look directly at him. He held his breath as her eyes met his. Then he saw her, truly saw her, for the first time in a week. Her face. He had forgotten it. He had
not
forgotten it. He had … He went numb inside.