We Others (60 page)

DECEMBER 20.
Earnshaw’s destructive rage. How to understand it? Haptograph as devil’s work. The secret room, naked skin: sin of touch. Those upright ancestors. Burn, witch!

DECEMBER 20,
LATER.
Saw Kistenmacher walking in courtyard. Forlorn. Didn’t see me.

DECEMBER 20,
LATER.
Or did he?

DECEMBER 20,
STILL LATER.
Worried about fate of haptograph. Felt we were on the verge. Of what? A tremendous change. A revolution in sensation, ushering in—what, exactly? What? Say it. All right. A new universe. Yes! The hidden world revealed. The haptograph as adventure, as voyage of discovery. In comparison, the phonograph nothing but a clever toy: tunes, voices.

Haptograph: instrument of revelation.

Still no word.

DECEMBER 21.
The Wizard at his desk, humming. Sudden thought: is that a disappointed man? The haptograph destroyed, Kistenmacher broken-hearted, the Wizard humming. A happy man, humming a tune. How could I have thought? Of course only a physical and temporary destruction. The machine easily reconstructed. But no work ordered. Takes Kistenmacher off job. Reign of silence. Why this nothing? Why?

Perhaps this. Understands that haptograph is far from complete. Protected by caveat. Sees Kistenmacher’s growing obsession. Needs to wrest his best electrical experimenter from a profitless task and redirect his energies more usefully. So: destruction of machine an excuse to put aside experiment. Good. Fine. But surely something more? Relief? Shedding of a tremendous burden? The machine eluding him, betraying him—its drift from the practical, its invitation to heretical pleasures. Haptograph as seductress. Luring him away. A secret desire to be rid of it. No more! Consider: his sudden cheerfulness, his hum. Ergo.

And Earnshaw? His hostility to experiment serves larger design. By striking in rage at Wizard’s handiwork, unwittingly fulfills Wizard’s secret will. Smash it up, bash it up. Earnshaw as eruption of master’s darkness, emissary of his deepest desire. Burn! Die! The Wizard’s longing to be rid of haptograph flowing into Earnshaw’s hatred of haptograph as wicked machine. Two wills in apparent opposition, working as one. Die! Inescapable conclusion: arm raised in rage against Wizard’s work is the Wizard’s arm.

Could it be?

It could be.

Kistenmacher entombed with speaking doll. The Wizard flies from room to room, busies himself with a hundred projects, ignores haptograph.

No one enters the Box.

DECEMBER 30.
Nothing.

FEBRUARY 16, 1890.
Today in courtyard overheard one of the new men speak of haptograph. Seemed embarrassed when I questioned him. Had heard it was shaped like a life-sized woman. Was it true she could speak?

Already passing into legend. Must harden myself. The experiment has been abandoned.

Snow in the streets. Through the high windows, the clear sharp jingle of harness bells.

Perhaps I dreamed it all?

Have become friendly with Watkins, the new stockroom clerk. A vigorous, compact man, former telegraph operator, brisk, efficient, humorous; dark blond side-whiskers. His passion for things electrical. Proposes that, for a fee, the owner of a telephone be permitted to listen to live musical performances: a simple matter of wiring. The electric boot, the electric hat. Electric letter opener. A fortune to be made. One day accompanied him down to storeroom, where he searched for supply of cobalt and magnesium requested by an assistant in electrical lab who was experimenting on new storage battery. Saw with a kind of sad excitement that we were approaching a familiar door. “What’s in there?”—couldn’t stop myself. “Oh that,” said Watkins. Takes out a ring of keys. Inside: piles of wooden crates, up to ceiling. “Horns and antlers,” he said. “Look: antelope, roebuck, gazelle. Red deer. Walrus tusks, rhino horns.” Laughter. “Not much call for these items. But heck, you never can tell.”

A dream, a dream!

No: no dream. Or say, a dream, certainly a dream, nothing but a dream, but only as all inventions are dreams: vivid and impalpable presences that haunt the mind’s chambers, escaping now and then into the place where they take on weight and cast shadows. The Wizard’s laboratory a dream-garden, presided over by a mage. Why did he abandon haptograph? Because he knew in his bones that it was commercially unfeasible? Because it fell too far short of the perfected phonograph, the elegant promise of kinetoscope? Was it because haptograph had become a terrible temptress, a forbidden delight, luring him away from more practical projects? Or was it—is it possible—did he sense that world was not yet ready for his haptograph, that dangerous machine which refused to limit itself to the familiar feel of things but promised an expansion of the human into new and terrifying realms of being?

Yesterday the Wizard spent ten hours in metallurgical lab. Adjustments in ore-separator. “It’s a daisy!” Expects it to revolutionize the industry. Bring in a handsome profit.

The haptograph awaits its time. In a year—ten years—a century—it will return. Then everyone will know what I have come to know: that the world is hidden from us—that our bodies, which seem to bring us the riches of the earth, prevent the world from reaching us. For the eyes of our skin are closed. Brightness streams in on us, and we cannot see. Things flow against us, and we cannot feel. But the light will come. The haptograph will return. Perhaps it will appear as a harmless toy in an amusement parlor, a playful rival of the gustograph and the odoroscope. For a nickel you will be able to feel a ball in the palm of your hand, a hat sitting on your head. Gradually the sensations will grow more complex—more elusive—more daring. You will feel the old body slipping off, a new one emerging. Then your being will open wide and you will receive—like a blow—like a rush of wind—the in-streaming world. The hidden universe will reveal itself like fire. You will leave yourself behind forever. You will become as a god.

I will not return to these notes.

Snow on the streets. Bright blue sky, a cloud white as house paint. Rumble of dynamos from the machine shop. Crackle of hickory logs, a shout from the courtyard. An unremarkable day.

A NOTE ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Steven Millhauser’s first novel,
Edwin Mullhouse
, was published in 1972 and received the Prix Médicis Étranger in France. He has published eleven works of fiction, most recently
Dangerous Laughter
, which
The New York Times Book Review
named a Best Book of the Year, as well as the novel
Martin Dressler
, which was awarded the Pulitzer Prize in 1997. He is a recipient of the Lannan Award and an Award in Literature from the American Academy of Arts and Letters. His stories have appeared in
The New Yorker, Harper’s Magazine, Tin House, McSweeney’s
, and elsewhere, and have been anthologized in
Best American Short Stories, The O. Henry Prize Stories, The Ecco Anthology of Contemporary American Short Fiction
, and other collections; his story “Eisenheim the Illusionist” was the basis of the 2006 film
The Illusionist
. Mr. Millhauser’s work has been translated into fifteen languages. He teaches at Skidmore College and lives in Saratoga Springs, New York.