The Live-Forever Machine (8 page)

“Isn’t there an encyclopedia you should be reading?”

“Old joke, Chris. And you probably don’t even know what an encyclopedia looks like.”

“Yeah, well, we can’t all be skinny geek geniuses like you, Mr. Superior Intellect,” Chris said, cuttingly.

Eric felt a hot flush of guilt. It was true, he liked to feel smarter than Chris. He wondered if Chris knew how jealous he really was—of Chris’s popularity, his muscles. Eric could hardly admit it to himself.

“Forget it,” he mumbled, wrenching himself out of the armchair. The gleaming white room suddenly made him feel claustrophobic, and he moved to open the glass balcony doors. Hot air crashed into the chill of the air-conditioned apartment. He gazed out over the vast, hazy city. From this height, it looked strange and
unfamiliar to him, as though everything were on an angle, crazily tilted.

Chris stepped out to join him and they stood in silence for a few minutes.

“He’s not a repairman,” Eric said. “I mean, he works as one, but it’s like some kind of act.”

“So who is he then?” Chris asked doubtfully.

“I don’t know. He’s terrified of something though. When the lights went out the second time he looked really horrible; he was shaking. And he said it was the guy in black.”

“He never said that,” Chris corrected him. “You said he didn’t have time to answer.”

“But I’m sure that’s who he meant,” Eric said impatiently. The heat pounded against face, seemed to steal away his breath.

“How could this other guy control the electricity?” replied Chris. “Doesn’t make sense. Your buddy’s intensely crazy.”

“What’s Alexander hiding from him?” Eric said distractedly. He pushed his hair away from his damp forehead. “If I went back, I could maybe find out.”

“Oh, geez,” muttered Chris. “Listen, why don’t you tell your Dad? See what he says.”

Eric snorted. “Dad’s been too tired lately,” he said unhappily. “He sleeps most of the time he’s not on shift.”

“Hey, that reminds me; there was something I was going to show you. This’ll cheer you up.”

Eric squinted into the sky. “Is this thing ever going to break?”

“It’s the blueprints for the new mall,” Chris explained. “Mom left on her latest business trip without the diskette.”

A detailed technical diagram glowed on the computer screen: a tight, geometrical weave of green lines and symbols.

“Hmmm,” Eric said. Why was Chris showing him this? Eric wasn’t interested in the new mall, and Chris knew that.

“This is the good part,” Chris said.

He touched the keyboard and a section of the diagram enlarged to fill the screen.

“This is where we were the other day. When we went down that manhole.”

“Really?” Eric leaned in closer to the screen, trying to decipher the electronic maze. Chris manoeuvred a blinking red triangle to a spot on the blueprint.

“That’s the manhole, and this is the tunnel, and this must be the platform thing we got to.”

“This is really neat,” Eric said, and then curbed the enthusiasm in his voice. He didn’t want Chris to know he was impressed. But he
admired the way his friend’s broad fingers travelled deftly over the keyboard while his eyes remained fixed on the monitor.

“Intense, huh?” Chris said.

“Does it show what’s down there?” Eric wanted to know.

“Not on this one. But maybe …”

Chris flashed a series of maps onto the screen until he found the one he was looking for.

“I think this is as deep as it goes. Hang on.” He punched a couple of keys and the first diagram they’d looked at reappeared in red, superimposed over the second.

Eric peered into the screen. “So we were standing here, right? Where’s the subway tunnel?”

“Can’t see it on this map. It runs almost underneath the mall. I was looking at it earlier. It’s not far down. Only a couple of storeys: three, maybe four. Amazing thing is, everything’s connected down there—the subway tunnels, the manhole shafts, the storm drains, the sewers.”

Eric’s eyes moved carefully over the map.

“That must be the foundation of the museum, over there,” he said, pointing.

“Uh-huh. It’s deep as hell,” Chris muttered.

“That’s what Alexander said. Can you make that part bigger?”

Chris’s fingers flew over the keys and the map re-drew itself on the screen.

“Goes down twenty storeys,” Chris said.

“He wasn’t lying, then,” Eric said. “Remember, he was telling me about the storage rooms, and the two empty floors at the very bottom.”

“The main storm drain is down there,” Chris said, peering at the monitor. “It runs right alongside the base of the museum wall.”

“So we were standing right over that,” said Eric.

“Yep. It’s like a big canyon. A concrete canyon with a river running through it.”

“A dried-up river,” Eric corrected him. He thought of Jonah, yelling down the grate, throwing his fishing rod to the ground. Clank, clank, clank. He’d heard it, too, the grinding of machinery, seen the spark of light, smelled the dense smoke. Whatever it was down there, it had to be right on the shore of the storm drain. He imagined a monstrous engine, spewing out flames like a dragon, burning away all the water.

“What do you think it was we heard down there?”

“You mean
smelled
down there,” Chris snorted. “My nose is still recovering. I don’t know what it was. Don’t really care. And no, I don’t want to go down and have another look.” He smiled. “Strung up that little idea, didn’t I?”

“Why not?” Eric said.

Chris flicked a switch on the computer and the diagrams disappeared from the screen.

“Well, one very good reason is that it’s sealed up. I was by there today, and they’ve closed it.”

“Jonah didn’t think it was normal.”

“The guy who fishes through the grate?” Chris said with a smirk. “You’ve been listening to crazy people too much lately. It’ll get you into trouble.”

Eric followed Chris back to the living room. They were greeted by a barrage of commercials on the television. People jumped out of airplanes holding bottles of beer, a Greek statue came to life to use a razor, the new mall glittered in artificial sunlight, and the Sphinx stood after thousands of years and ate a superior brand of cat food from an enormous bowl.

“How do they make it look so good?” Chris asked, mystified.
“I’d
eat it, it looks so good!”

Eric shook his head in revulsion. But his thoughts were circling back to his meeting with Alexander. Everything had seemed so predetermined—every question, every comment. Why?

“It was as if Alexander was studying me.”

But Chris was gone. “Know what I really want?” he said, watching another ad. “A micro cell phone. One of those miniature ones you just clip to your ear.”

It was as if he were speaking another language. And Eric felt a strange twinge of loneliness, as if he and Chris had nothing in common. With Alexander, weird as he was, there seemed to be some reassuring link between them, as if they had things to talk about, things they both understood.

He watched Chris watching the television. The wooden locket was still in his pocket. He could feel it against his leg. He knew he’d go back.

Eric leaned over the typewriter and read the last sentence his father had written, almost a week ago:
She did not say goodbye, but it seemed obvious—to both of us—that we would not see each other again.

Eric looked around the humid living room, taking in the sagging bookshelves, the framed prints on the peeling plaster walls, the two sofas with their faded floral pattern, the dilapidated armchairs, the leaning radiator. She used to sit in this room, he thought. He tried to imagine her, lowering herself into one of the chairs, picking up a book from the coffee table.

For a fleeting moment, the whole house seemed to shudder with her presence. She’d lived here. The books: how many of those were hers? And the vase with the dried flowers in front of the bricked-in fireplace—had that been hers, too? The bursting cushions on the sofa?
The rug in the corner? Was every room filled with memories of her?

He wondered what she’d looked like and instinctively felt for the locket. His hand froze. He suddenly understood, as if he’d swiftly pushed through a revolving door in his mind. It wasn’t Gabriella della Signatura he’d been interested in. It was his mother.

He vaulted up the stairs two at a time, hesitating a moment in the doorway of his father’s room.

Go on, he told himself. She’s your mother.

He started with the bookcases, feeling behind each row with his hand, searching for the photo album he had seen only once, years ago. Nothing. He burrowed through the desk drawers, like a thief searching for valuables. He rifled through the night table. Nothing. He opened the huge clothes trunk. Just looking at the wool sweaters made him hot, and when he turned through them, his skin crawled. He pulled up a chair to inspect the highest shelves of the closet. Nothing. Sweat dampened his back. He scuttled on his belly underneath the bed, like a giant beetle, pushing through stray books and dust-clotted debris.

It wasn’t here. Where, then?

He stepped out into the hallway and jumped for the cord handle that hung down from the
ceiling. The trap door swung out. He eased the wooden ladder all the way to the floor, latched it, and climbed up.

It was exquisitely hot under the pitched roof. The air burned in his nostrils. A tiny dirt-streaked window in the ceiling let in some light, enough for him to see the cardboard boxes and plastic garbage bags piled up on all sides of the trap door. The boxes were all labelled in neat writing, like museum display cases: Linens, Winter Clothing, LPs, Christmas Decorations. Many were simply labelled with his mother’s name, and Eric guessed they held her clothing, jewellery—things his father couldn’t bear to get rid of.

Most of the larger boxes were sealed with masking tape. Crouching over, Eric shifted them out of the way to see farther back into the attic. And there, pressed against the eaves, was a smaller box, folded closed, marked Photographs. He dragged it towards the ladder and pulled out the cardboard flaps.

Inside was the photograph album. A few loose pictures slipped from between the pages as he lifted it out of the box. He balanced it on his pointy knees, opened the cover.

There she was.

He brought the album closer to his face, angling it so that the pictures caught more
light. She was slender, of medium height, with long, dark hair: nice-looking. In the first picture, she was with Dad, standing by a bridge with tall lamp posts. Trees and old stone buildings lined the far bank of the river. The Eiffel Tower stood in the background, outlined in neon. Dad was looking straight into the camera, smiling, but his mother was looking away at the Eiffel Tower, her face very still and serious, half-turned in profile. Eric felt his skin crawl. It was virtually the same pose as Gabriella della Signatura’s.

Underneath the photo, in handwriting he’d never seen before—his mother’s, he guessed—it said “City of Light.” In the next picture, his mother was standing alone in front of a fountain with a winged statue at its centre. She was smiling, but her eyes were still solemn.

He studied her face carefully, but couldn’t see any similarities to his own features. Maybe, he thought bitterly, if he’d looked more like her, Dad would have paid him more attention. Maybe. But he was built like Dad: same narrow bones, same skinny face.

Eric flipped ahead through the album. There were more shots of Paris, and then some back here in the city, in places that he knew. His mother wasn’t smiling in most of the pictures; when she was, there was a forced look about it.

Near the back of the album, she was pregnant, getting bigger; then, on a page by itself, was a picture of her, all slim again, a little tired-looking, sitting in the living room, holding a baby in her arms.

That’s me, he realized.

He waited for a surge of emotion, but it didn’t come. He didn’t feel as if he were part of the picture. He didn’t have any memory of being held like that. It was him, and yet it wasn’t him at all.

In the photo, the living room looked exactly the same as it did now—not a piece of furniture out of place. Dad must have kept it like that on purpose. It wasn’t normal. Dad hadn’t even tried to forget her. More than that—he was doing all he could to remember. It didn’t make any sense, Eric thought. Why remember if it was so painful?

He paged backwards through the album, glanced at the loose photos at the bottom of the box.

His throat tightened. He’d wanted to learn all about her, to get all the answers. But all the photographs in the world couldn’t tell him what he longed to know. Idiot, he told himself; you were an idiot to think they would.

He put the album back in the box and left the heat of the attic. There was an empty ache in
his stomach. He slid the ladder back up and, with a sudden surge of frustration, slammed the trap door shut. The sound boomed through the house.

“I saw the pictures,” he said.

His father nodded. He didn’t seem at all surprised, merely tired and defeated. He brushed perspiration from his forehead.

“I don’t know why you never showed them to me.”

“It was stupid. You have a perfect right to see them. I’ve done this very badly.”

His father fell silent again, and Eric looked across the room at him. The space between them seemed infinite. Eric had hoped that the pictures would bring his Dad back, give them something to talk about.

“Come on,” Mr. Sheppard said, rising quickly from the chair, “I’ll show you.”

“What?” Eric said.

“Come on.”

The necropolis sat on a hill overlooking the city. Eric gazed at the dim clutter of tombstones, butting up against one another, many worn and chipped, some split in two. Family crypts
had settled askew into the earth. Grave monuments thrust up crookedly from the weeds and wild grass, mirroring the city’s skyline.

Eric looked at his father, face pale in the lunar glow of the city. So this is where she’s been all these years, he thought.

He squinted at the dates on some of the tombstones as he and his father passed. Many were hundreds of years old, so blackened and eroded that he could barely read the chiselled inscriptions.
Here lies … In beloved memory of … Rest in peace.
Everywhere he stepped, it seemed, there was a small grave marker underfoot, with nothing but a name and date cut into it.