The Curator, page 4
“Hmm?” D strolled out onto the glass stream. Her shoes left footprints in the surface dust.
“You’ll have noted, perhaps, that there were no exhibits for kings or dukes or ministers or mayors or legislators. That’s quite strange, isn’t it?”
If there had been an exhibit dedicated to domestics, or even a wax maid set out and allowed to discreetly sweep a board, D hadn’t noticed that either, but she made an acquiescent murmur.
“The men with all the wealth, the ones who make the great rulings of law and decide whether to go to war, they aren’t in the museum for workers. It sends a message, doesn’t it? Maybe not the one they intended, though, because it dawns on you that the reason none of them are here is because those people don’t do anything. Not anything real, anyway.
“And look at how it’s been kept! There’s dirt on everything, everything needs paint, the figures’ clothes are falling off or coming apart or missing, and nothing works. It’s actually a terrifically accurate expression of how the powerful view everyone else, or rather don’t view them.…” Robert went on, and his lecture expanded to, among other subjects: the committees that were already being formed in the city’s various neighborhoods, localized groups that would manage resources fairly and efficiently; his oblivious and sheltered parents, who meant well in their way, but couldn’t conceive of the world beyond the acres of their estate and holdings in the Northland Provinces; and the blocks of currency that had been discovered in a wet subbasement of the premier’s manor, left on pallets in the dark, blooming with mold and half disintegrated, enough money to feed thousands of people, forgotten, literally to rot. “I’d say it was a metaphor for everything that’s not right about this country, but these were real banknotes turning into compost.…”
Color filled his cheeks. Sweat sheened his forehead and his eyes went frog-wide. Her lieutenant became the boy that his school friends called Bobby.
As he talked about how they planned to drill into the economic strata and let the wealth drain down to soak all the undernourished roots of the nation, it was easy to picture him the way she’d first seen him, playing in a game on the university quad. D had been about her duties, carrying an armload of folded sheets along the paved path at the field’s edge to one of the apartment houses. Robert had burst from a group of players with a leather ball clamped under his arm. In his grass-stained shorts and a ripped striped jersey, he’d laughed, shrieking, “Never, never, never!” at the boys who chased him. It was beautiful, D thought; beautiful and alluring to hear him laugh like that, to take such unselfconscious delight in himself, in the glory of himself.
“But is it any wonder”—her lieutenant had returned, at last, to his original subject—“that the place is covered in dust? What worker would want to come here and see their industry paid such shabby tribute?”
A better question, D might have replied, was what worker would even want to spend their few free hours visiting models about work?
“What are you smiling about?” Robert asked. It would never have occurred to him that she could find him unintentionally amusing, let alone find him attractive because of it.
“I’m smiling, Lieutenant,” she said, “because I’ve just had an idea for a tribute I’d like to pay to the workers.” D undid the three dark-gray buttons of her light-gray frock and pushed it down her arms, and down her body, and stepped free of it.
* * *
They did it first on the surface of the stream and the second time, at the lieutenant’s insistence, on top of the long counter on the fourth floor where the wax bank cashiers sat in a row making change from drawers and studying paper strips of numbers that spooled from glass-bulbed typing machines. Robert talked continuously. “What a show you’re putting on for them! This is the kind of investment that every accountant dreams of making!”
A tray of variously sized silver washers was set before each cashier. D grasped the sides of the counter and with each thrust the washers rattled and jingled, sometimes jumping out altogether, hitting the floor and rolling away along the planks. The paper strips, meanwhile, which trailed between the wax fingers of their readers to the floor, contributed a shushing, sweeping sound of their own.
D didn’t feel excitement or ecstasy; mostly, she just felt jostled. For as much as there was to recommend him, her lieutenant was a poor lover. D found his sexual chatter monotonous. Robert had talked before about fucking her in a desert, pounding her into the sand while wolves watched and howled; he had talked about fucking her on a skiff on a river while the people onshore played with themselves; he had talked about fucking her in the street, fucking her on a tram packed with commuters, fucking her for an audience at the Municipal Opera House, fucking her on the back of the tiger statue in front of the Magistrates’ Court for the amusement of tourists. Numerous other scenarios had been proposed that she’d forgotten, or been too disengaged to register at all.
D was not shocked by his fantasies, but they were his fantasies, and they did not actually require her as she understood herself. Her fantasies had more in common with the way she had first seen him, running red-cheeked with the ball from the other players. For someone to want her the way that he had wanted to get away from them—euphorically, gloatingly, relishing—that was arousing to her. Only their very first, impulsive assignation had been like that. All the times since it was more as though Robert were chasing and running away from himself at the same time. Her lieutenant had a good heart, but in this way he had turned out to be more of a boy than she’d hoped.
The counter rocked a final time, and Robert cried out and sank on top of her.
She rolled her head to the side. One of the bankers hovered right above her. A green visor screened his eyes above a full smile.
* * *
Behind the ticket booth they discovered a door labeled CURATOR, in flaking gold letters. It opened on a small, windowless office. The key to the museum hung from a nail on the inside of the door. It was cumbersome, as long as her forearm.
D left her lieutenant in the dismal office and returned to the fifth floor where she had seen the figure of a fruit picker who wore a burlap satchel. She unwound the satchel from his neck and dumped his wooden apples at his feet. Someone had already pried an eye from the picker, who wore only dungarees beneath his limp straw hat. She felt slightly guilty for exacerbating his plight. More than that, if she was going to keep the museum, he was, in some sense, hers—they all were, all the figures.
“I’ll get this back to you shortly and I’ll see what we can do about the eye,” D said to the picker. She assumed that eventually she’d get used to the wax figures. For now, it somehow seemed stranger not to say something. They had the same gravity as corpses in open coffins. Though the figures didn’t seem alive, they almost seemed dead.
She went to a window on the wall behind the shack, traversing the boxed-in plot of earth that was being not very convincingly tilled by a wax farmer who held a broom instead of a hoe, while his wax hound looked on. At the window D looked down on the ruins of the Society.
From this vantage, the building was an open stomach. Blackened bricks, blackened beams, blackened slates, all jumbled together in the middle of the still-standing walls. Here and there were small shifts in the mounds of rubble, little leaks of rock and plaster as the wreckage continued to settle. A short section of the second floor jutted from the rear wall and, sheltered beneath it, D recognized the stage where the Society’s display of conjurer’s tricks had been set up.
The platform still held the magician’s closet, but the rich fabric covering its sides had been burned away and the door was gone too. It was just a black box now. There was no sign of the table where the conjurer’s paraphernalia—hat, baton, cards, silver egg—had once been arrayed. So far as D could tell, the peninsula of the second floor and the ruined closet were the only distinguishable remains of the Society’s interior.
Out on the Society’s lawn, a bushy white cat eased through the angled space between the ground and the door stuck corner-first into the turf, rubbing its back against the door edge.
Even on the fifth-floor window, soot from the fire had collected in fine wavelets on the glass. She used the dirty reflection to adjust her bonnet.
* * *
Robert sat in the only chair with his elbows on the desk, chin propped on his crossed fingers, appearing contemplative. The office’s sole fixture, besides the nail for the key on the back of the door, was a coat hook on the wall, from which hung a ragged tweedside jacket. The one piece of decoration was a framed tintype of the deposed king’s father, to whose reign the tweedside jacket likely dated. In keeping with the absence of electricity, there was neither a roto nor the wiring to connect one.
Yes, D thought, the National Museum of the Worker had not received many visitors. She wondered what had become of the previous curator. It seemed as though it had been some time since he was needed.
Robert asked, “Dora, are you sure about this? There are other museums, libraries. We could find someplace more pleasant. A place with fewer wax people.”
She said that wouldn’t be necessary. “This will do very well, Lieutenant.”
He grinned and slapped the desk. “So be it! You’re the new curator!”
D went around the side of the desk and stood over him. “I certainly am. And you’re in my chair.”
* * *
On the paper that Crossley’s aide had signed, Robert struck out The Society for Psykical Research and neatly wrote The National Museum of the Worker. They exited the building, closing the heavy door and locking it behind them. D toted the giant key in the burlap satchel.
They set off together. Robert had a meeting of the Emergency Justice Committee to attend that evening. D would return to the servants’ quarters at the university and start fresh at the museum in the morning.
On the corner of Legate Avenue they noticed that while they had been inside, the imperialist flag that had flown from the embassy had been taken down, and a piece of green cloth signifying the revolutionary movement run up in its place. Robert said for D to wait a moment while he presented himself to whoever had taken charge. This time she did as she was directed.
He knocked, and almost immediately the door opened. The light of the setting sun stung off the windows and tin roofs of the embassies and the tram rails that split the street. D squinted and could only make out an impression—beard, wide shoulders—of the man to whom Robert spoke. The conversation was brief, and the lieutenant came back as the door shut.
“One of Crossley’s captains,” he reported. “Anthony’s his name. Working on security matters.”
If D ever had any problems, or if she needed access to a roto, she ought to go straight to the former embassy. Her neighbor, Captain Anthony, would help her.
The Gentle
Simon the Gentle was the conjurer’s performing title, but he was mostly known as the Gentle. His real name was Scott. Or it was Alain, or Salvador. The people who had raised him were clamdiggers; they had saved him, as an infant, from the clutch of a monstrous clam that had washed up on the strand beneath the South Fair Bridge at low tide. Or they were fishers; they had found him in the bottom of an otherwise empty skiff in the bay. Or he had first appeared as a young boy, a whistling amnesiac of six or seven, who was perched on the rusted railing that guarded the heights of the western bluffs; he noticed a woman, an impoverished housekeeper who had intended to cast herself upon the rocks, and asked her if she was his mother—and she had said yes. Or a professor of education had adopted the boy from the Juvenile Lodgings to prove the excellence of his pedagogical method by developing that most unpromising of specimens, a common Lees orphan. There were many more tales, and while he refused to affirm any speculation, he never denied any either. The most he would ever admit was, “Though I have not always been Simon, I have always been gentle.”
Illusion and conjuration were not viewed with much favor by the authorities in the Gentle’s era. Sleight-of-hand men were even more infamous for picking pockets than in the present day, and in the hill towns of the Northland Provinces people were occasionally still drowned for consorting with demons in the woods or committing other supernatural offenses. However, the Gentle was a beloved exception, because his illusions were so charming and peaceful.
The silver egg, for example, he passed to the members of his audience so that they could test its weight and solidity. When they were satisfied and the egg was returned to him, the Gentle declared that existence was quicksilver. He used his black baton to spell the word TODAY in letters that shone in midair, and in the next instant brushed his arm through them. The dispersed letters quickly reconstituted themselves in a new word: TOMORROW. When the Gentle broke this word with his baton, its matter sprinkled to the ground in a dusty gray powder. He cupped the egg in his hand and squeezed. Liquid silver leaked out between his fingers and he caught it in his hat. In summation, he went from person to person with a pair of tweezers and meticulously plucked a single white hair from every head, which he claimed had grown during the performance. He clasped the hairs in his fist, and when he opened it, the silver egg, whole again, rested on his palm; and his hat was empty.
In another performance, he ate his playing cards. Tucked into his table, with a carafe of tea and a cup and saucer, the Gentle ripped each card into dainty bites, and chewed them up. In the course of his meal, he paused every so often to sip his tea and dab his mouth with a napkin. The Gentle described the flavor of certain cards: the three of diamonds tasted like the mossy cool of a cave whose entrance was concealed by thick vines, the six of clubs like salty beer, the seven of hearts like a sweet breeze, the jack of spades like the moment your son knows more than you do and you feel pride and the melancholy joy that comes with the release of duty and the first staggering hint of obsolescence. Once he had devoured the entire deck, the Gentle asked everyone to check their reticules and wallets: each woman discovered a queen of clubs in her likeness and each man a king of hearts in his. The Gentle collected the queens and kings and constructed a house of cards on his table. When he finished, he invited members of the audience to attempt to blow it over with their breath. None ever could.
Simon the Gentle’s private life was either circumspect or dull. He lived at the Hotel Metropole without a wife or a mistress. After his death, an anonymous Metropole maid testified that he kept a meticulous toilet, but that his ashtrays needed to be changed every day because he smoked so much. It was also said, by the anonymous maid and others, that the Gentle was too fond of the Metropole’s famous cat mascot, Talmadge—in those days Talmadge III—and spoiled it. The conjurer brought the fleecy white animal tidbits from the butcher’s, and joked that he’d learned all his skills from a cat that looked just like him.
(At this mention of cats, the expression of the cheerful Society man relating the tale briefly curdled to a grimace. “We mustn’t judge the Gentle for his superstitions. Remember, this was in a more primitive time and even the most remarkable individuals sometimes have blind spots, my dear.”
D nodded her understanding. Her parents were not regular churchgoers, but they disparaged the lower sort of people who actually believed that cats were blessed, when in fact they were just another breed of dumb, disease-carrying vermin.
D admired cats, though, and would have liked to own one of her own. She didn’t think cats spread disease and she didn’t think they were dumb. They were always cleaning themselves, and wore such clever, deliberative expressions. You couldn’t tell what cats made of anything, only that they took everything seriously.)
The conjurer’s time preceded the introduction of the city’s tramlines, and he was known to enjoy walking all over town. He was a figure of mystery but not a mysterious figure; people saw him along the avenues, on the paths in the Fields, on the viewing platforms above the Bluffs; and when they did, the Gentle tipped his hat to them. Slender, of medium build, his physical presence was unremarkable. He looked like a person in the background of a painting, his lip marked with the type of thin, neat mustache that men in the backgrounds of paintings tend to wear. He gambled on racehorses in moderation and won no more than anyone else. Once the conjurer was initiated into the Society, he made many friends in the upper echelons of the government and of industry, and even became acquainted with the royal family.
* * *
The Vestibule, as he called his closet, was the core element of the Gentle’s most entrancing fantasy. (How the conjurer obtained the Vestibule, whether he designed it himself or came to possess it some other way, was never determined.)
To begin, the Gentle asked for the assistance of a beautiful woman from the audience. Once the volunteer joined him onstage, he inquired whether or not she was afraid of death. If she confessed that she was, the Gentle reassured her that it was just a change of arrangements, like moving house. If the woman said that she wasn’t afraid of death, the Gentle pivoted to the assembly, and said, “She may feel differently before we’re finished.”
He opened the door of the Vestibule to allow a clear view of the empty, velvet-walled interior. He thumped on the walls inside and out, and the sounds were solid. Next, he invited the volunteer to join him within, promised the audience that they’d return shortly, and shut the door behind them.
During the time that passed, perhaps ten or fifteen minutes, the quartet at the foot of the stage tuned their instruments. Soon they began to play a waltz. In the second or third measure, the door swung wide, and the conjurer and his volunteer assistant smoothly danced out onto the stage. They were altered, however: his head sat atop her neck, and hers atop his. While the crowd roared in terror and delight, the couple swept gracefully around and around. As the waltz neared its conclusion, the Gentle dropped his head to his own shoulder and the woman who wore his body, in the lead, danced them back into the Vestibule. The door clapped shut behind them.
