The Gnome Stories, page 8
Was this the place where my proposition had gone awry? I asked this of myself, back in the sub-basement control room where we could monitor all the signals from all the machines making sure the dead stayed dead, or stayed preserved, which was as close to alive as we could manage. Maybe that’s all we could ever do: keep time at bay.
Here all the signs converged, though they almost never changed. I sat there looking at the lights. A number tinked from .4 to .41 and tinked right back. I stared at it. It was a composite, not a single reading, so I didn’t know for sure what it meant. I took a note. That’s what I was here to do. The big screen had a thousand readings. Were we safe? We were, I thought, safer than anywhere else I could imagine. The whole place was built to withstand a nuclear strike, I learned in my second week here, because A wing was a nuclear bunker. This was important to a subgroup of our clientele: the sort who believed in sleeping in barometric chambers and amassing guns and that the federal government could do no good not ever. Originally we were so far out of the city that this was seen as a safe distance for the moneyed cognoscenti to seek shelter. But we were out of the city no more. It kept expanding until we were in it. No one knew it was here: that was the point. I knew from scheduling how long I would have, where security went on their rounds and how long they took, and so I bided my time there.
So you know I found my way into the B wing where Sharon’s body was. This meeting was, I told myself, inevitable. Something had to change, and something did, and now something else would change too. Ever since you were taken from me, I murmured to the screen, I knew we would meet again, even if in this diminished way. It wasn’t that I was stuck in my old patterns of grief, I wanted to say: I’ve moved on. That’s what I was here to say, that I had shed that skin. I was something different now: emptied. I entered the authorization code and the screen slid up—what was this? a peep show booth?—and there she was, cool and blue and hairless, silver in the tube. She was suspended from behind on some kind of plastic hook that also fed her veins. I knew it was there but could not see it. She was naked but bands concealed what you would want to see if you were me. I remembered well enough, and so what if one breast got sheared off in the accident and was now a memory of what it used to be? I am here, I said. I know this is not for you, I said. I asked her: What was the point of saying anything to the dead? Who were you anyhow? How much of you was there I didn’t know?
I watched her lips as best I could, and felt foolish afterward for hoping. I opened up the side panel to see if there was any sign of change. I thought I felt another tremor, but nothing on the readout told me that was true. For a second I thought she might wake and chide me that life is not a fairy tale and tell me that was it, that was my problem, or if not that, then something was. Or tell me that what I would have to give to get her back I could not give, not now, not ever, and that was why she had said no. Or tell me anything, really.
She looked so beautiful and still, still beautiful, like she was capable of anything, of living again, even, and this is about as close as you’re going to get to a confession, I told her then and I’m telling you now. All of it is just a story, I said, in case I was being surveilled or overheard. I know it’s just a story, I said. But I believe it’s something more, something you were telling me, something the world’s still telling me. I asked her: Is it even yours? I know it is a test, a self-diagnostic, like the kind we run on the systems here, the kind that never fails. Every time I tell it, it takes ahold of me anew. And I keep asking myself, I said into the microphone: Am I the high guys in the forest or am I the gnome?
In a Structure Simulating an Owl
My invention relates to a structure simulating an owl. The object of my invention is to provide a structure simulating an owl as an article of manufacture. A further object of my invention is to simulate an owl as an ornamentation. A still further object of my invention is to provide a structure flexible in part and being colored simulating an owl.
—Grace E. Wilson, United States Patent Office
Application 531,317, filed April 20, 1931
1. In a structure simulating an owl in which are inscribed the eyes of my former husband, etched on shook silver foil, serving as a replica of his eyes in his absence, blue dashed with bits of white as if they were in every moment on the verge of dissolving into a simulacrum of eyes, all of us being simulacra, I have been feeling recently, of ourselves from former moments, indistinguishable (as is the way of simulacra) from what others, even our lovers, our husbands, our dream-sons, our conquerors, our makers, might identify erroneously as ourselves when seen from a distance or even up close if approached quickly enough, in the way that the self can usually be described as two sheets of thin metal folded four or more times and in some complex cases many more (a machine may be required to create this effect) and pinned together by a small bolt, fastened eventually by a nut, the entirety of my history may be included in or referred to by a succession of small moving parts.
2. In a structure simulating an owl in a dream I have had every year on this date, as far back as my memory goes, in which I am in my father’s workshop, a word that was among my first (workshop, not father—though the two are conflated now in my memory), watching him from a very great distance, which is of course in this structure not geometrically possible except in dreams, as he works above a burning-hot woodstove shaping some kind of metal, at which point I kick over a bucket of what must be kerosene or some burnable liquid that spills onto the floor where a rope is somehow soaked in fluid, and it is only moments before the rope connects to my father and a number of unidentified canisters and I have no language with which to warn him since as quickly as I try to speak my voice is stuffed with cotton swabs and my breath is fire and my warning turns to flame along with everything in the workshop including my father and his eyes, which in every photograph remind me of owls, a human or a memory of a human may be for some time ensconced.
3. In a structure simulating an owl in which I have been making something for the world that might, in a small way, change it, so as to have an effect on something for once in my life, since I have been recently feeling as if I were a ghost, some combinations of my dreams and waking life and my many so-called sins will be made manifest at last.
4. In a structure simulating an owl composed primarily of wire and sixteen separate moving pieces designed to spark terror in all creatures preyed on by owls if they come within sight of said structure as it is attached to a post by a rivet or a wishing screw, six feet or higher above the ground, and in some cases it might be suspended from an outdoor ceiling fan or from a series of wire loops attached to a belt-driven mechanism activated by the lack of light so that it moves in an elliptical fashion and makes a sound somewhat like an auk makes, an onomatopoeia, a word I have wanted to use since I was twelve and discovered it in the oldest dictionary available in the public library where I spent my days fingering through pages, in which I learned one might describe one’s life or another’s by words, not exactly shunned by my peers but hardly invited out, and not engaged in any official after-school activity though I did have tendencies toward delinquencies, breaking into the school bus factory a mile down the road from home to sit in the unfinished buses, lonely, my father dead, my younger brother years dead already, dead almost before I knew him, having died when he was two and I was five, my older brother absent, gone somewhere that I could not access, and on these buses I would carve my name with his or with other boys’ and sometimes girls’ in the backs of the vinyl seats, licking all the places where I knew someone’s hands might touch in the bus when it would be eventually finished, deployed, and driven, possibly even on the route that terminated at my house after passing the place of its manufacture, an irony lost on machines and on the drivers of machines and on the many other hands and eyes that resulted in these machines and touched these machines and their sale and deployment on this route, this date, in which they might catch a glimpse in the dying light of the outline of an owl on a high post or possibly moving through the air and wonder what it was in the approaching dark, or thrill perhaps at the fact of owls with their moving parts and soundless flight and outstretched arms that might in another life have entwined with my own, I might find some satisfaction.
5. In a structure simulating an owl, it is incontrovertible that I have been in some way seeking transformation.
6. In a structure simulating an owl my marriage might be seen closely enough through the attached range finders built into the structures simulating eyes, so as the marriage might appear real, not simply as described by law, but in the hearts of both partners legally obligated to each other for the rest of their lives until dissolution or death, a statement neither my husband nor I took lightly at the time, though as with all infinities, or seeming infinities, their true extent is inapprehensible, barely even glimpsable from the moment in which a marriage can be made and committed to, and from that particular location in which the structure simulating an owl might be placed, one might see over time the way that marriage decayed, due in no way to the behaviors or intentions of the couple but because of the ways a domestic life can drive a couple apart like a lead wedge placed in a crack and hit with a heavy sledge with a lifetime’s worth of force, resulting in approximately two structures that, when held side by side and looked at together, formerly simulated an owl.
7. In a structure simulating an owl one’s life might be understood in retrospect, from its very last chapter, as a series of actions and reactions, chemical, biological, emotional, metaphysical, all collected together and held for a moment by the mind, and therein might be seen a method to it at last.
8. In a structure simulating an owl, as the present invention proposes to demonstrate, each moving part or pin being constructed of lines on paper in attached diagram 1, if looked at closely enough with a scanning microscope, one might note that the lines are not solid lines but scattered ink on paper, not corporeal parts at all, as if to say a physical thing might be actually enacted and made to move and apparition as an animal, we might be in this way terrified by it as we are when woken suddenly enough with enough force.
9. In a structure simulating an owl, as all structures start to appear if you look at them long enough and hard enough, as if they were one of those magic-eye 3-D drawings that only the annoying are apparently able to see, you will see the future of the owl or really the structure simulating it combined with your own future as manifested in your actions; this outcome is what creates the necessity of the forty-four levers that work behind the metal outer skin of the structure to create the illusion of the owl, though if you were, say, an owlet, or another interested owl it’s probably plenty obvious that this structure only simulates an owl in name and shape, and in some of the motions of its wings, not in the scent of an owl, or the way an owl actually flies, meaning that while a structure simulating an owl might simulate an owl it cannot fully be an owl: as long as we understand each other then we can communicate.
10. In a structure simulating an owl that is equipped with increasingly verisimilitudinal scent glands one might secrete the sorts of scents that might fool another owl, a slow one, for a second, and in so doing, could one actually be considered an owl for a moment, which is to say can a sufficiently advanced illusion be a kind of magic?
11. In a structure simulating an owl that does not account for the amorphous quality and (both wonderful and not) unpredictability of love, and the effect of its loss and slow replacement by the love of another, an impossible love, really, in many ways, not possible, surely, to admit out loud or in writing or in the presence of anyone, ever, if you value your marriage and the pleasing domesticity that it brings, along with the overly alliterative, you understand, damningly dull domesticity that drives me in moments out to the workshop where, in my own world of wire and awl and dictionary and hammer, I can immerse myself for days in the process of producing a structure simulating an owl.
12. In a structure simulating an owl I might more easily understand the ways in which I have transgressed, and another structure simulating an owl might be understood to move of its own volition and driven by its own internal mechanisms, however obscure, containing my estranged husband, who I thought understood how I worked and what drove me to do what I did, but who refused to make allowances for my strange behavior in the last two years, though he said he tried, goddamn he did, he said, and I believe from this distance that he did, he did the best he could, and some things end eventually, it’s physics, sure, entropy and all, our bonds are only temporary, and in this guise surrounded by this nest of wire I can get some distance from my former self and see history from hundreds of feet above as if aloft and hunting for meaning in the motions of rodents.
13. In a structure simulating an owl ever more closely in this iteration, the machine of one’s life can be worked out, becoming an increasingly fine construction of said structure, and shown to the ones one loves in hopes of expressing the inexpressible in the absence of other ways we might show our love.
14. In a structure simulating an owl that entrances animals if they come within 140 feet of it, the cache of stored scents is released in response to various stimuli that in the wild prompt owl-like behavior in owls, because all of us are creatures that respond to stimuli, I am finding in my life and trying to make manifest in the world this fact, because given the collective behaviors of people I come into contact with on a daily basis who try to cloak their animal natures, as if they posit that they are not animals, not entirely in command of their own urges, that they are not like zombies, craven and driven to their desire, but that they are, like my mother claimed to be, entirely self-aware and in full control of her faculties so much that her resistance to every desire became a manifesto, a way of living, a clothing that she wrapped herself with every day of her life and would occasionally deploy to asphyxiate her children and her husband: quite obviously it crushed her after years so that you had the feeling that there was no inner sense of self, of what she would do if freed from her own restrictions, since she said, for instance, that civilization means denying every desire you have in your filthy hearts, and if we do not police our weaker moments, we are not human, and in this way she became like a structure simulating a paragon or a structure of beliefs in which she was housed, in which she might have hidden some small bit of herself if it was possible to pull the whole thing apart, and that by this lifelong simulation she was making some point to the world, and so even when she was freed, her parents deceased, her husband deceased, all of her other children deceased and just the two of us remaining she might have been free of this, I hoped, and to that end I dosed her several times with psychotropic drops rendered from mushrooms gathered from her own front yard just after a storm, theorizing that it might jolt her into an uncomfortable former shell of herself and she might be forced to fight her way back into the present and what had become of her life: a hollow. Of course this was not possible because until her actual dying moment she persisted in simulating what she had always hoped or meant to be, and apparently became, to all of us who knew her and her seeming capacity to suffer endlessly, that she could absorb almost anything: all those deaths, sometimes two at once, an alcoholic son, a straying and promiscuous daughter, the decline of the world into a den of iniquity, if that’s not saying too much in her own words, or what should have been her words if she was given to those sorts of proclamations, which she was not, which resulted in silence, which is the usual result of most stimuli to a structure simulating an owl.
15. In a structure simulating an owl having a flexible covering made primarily of hammered tin adorned with artificial feathers, one might spend one’s days perched on one of a hundred points I have indicated on the attached maps, these points offering a particular vantage toward a particular view of, for instance, among the crowd of beasts released from school at 2:25 in the afternoon, the sun just so in the sky, my own son rushing out to his father’s home which is exactly four kilometers from my own, the separate domiciles due in some small part to my own eccentricities, I have come to understand too late, resulting in loneliness and what is commonly referred to as my breakdown, though I saw it as a kind of reboot, a transformation, a shedding of an old skin, from a structure simulating a woman into an entirely new simulation, a pause followed by a subsequent burst of energy resulting in long spans of time spent in my own workshop—and oh!—from this distance they resemble a spray of pressurized water forced out of a crack that might eventually break open and let the whole tank crash onto the ground, or, perhaps better, a spread of mice fleeing some hole in which they had been pent up, and in their flight they might easily be snatched up by a creature of such size and floating grace and powerful eyesight such as a structure simulating an owl.
16. In a structure simulating an owl one might spend one’s time roosting on the edge of the gargoyled roof of the bank building at the center of downtown, contemplating the stuffed insides of the creatures who spend no time considering their own stuffings, the meat parts that make us up and make the machine of the body work, the bland tours of glands, the orifices and labyrinths, the complications of our systems, our bodies all being flexible machines for digestion and peregrination and the slow operation of our intelligences, grinding as they do toward a conclusion, like the construction of these carved stone gargoyles, originally meant to frighten off evil spirits, though they now mostly frighten the occasional child whose gaze strays skyward to the perch and is justly startled by the visage of these devilish creatures perched here, watching, waiting, thinking, reserving judgment for the moment, planning decisive action alongside a structure simulating an owl.
17. If the girl child were to point toward the structure simulating an owl gleaming in the midafternoon sun, she might not understand that the gleam is a result of three sets of interchangeable lenses that can be used to focus and redirect sun into a steady beam that might transfix the object of the structure simulating an owl’s gaze long enough to distract said object and to forever hold her there, as if in a sufficiently elongated moment the structure simulating an owl might pass to the object of its strange affection some kind of wisdom about what it is to be a woman in the world buffeted as we are by the actions of those around us, constantly desired or stared at, starred and asterisked in the dreamlives of yearning others, so that it is impossible to look at oneself without the sense of being dreamed of or gazed upon, creating a doubleness, a structure that starts, after a time, to simulate the self and that might be mistaken for the self if the user is not careful.
