The Motion of Puppets(32)
Olya restored reason. “Let us take a measured approach. The other box could be tucked away behind who knows what matter of junk. On three, I want us to all shout ‘Hello! Can you hear us?’ Loud as you can. One, two, three…”
They shouted, and within a few seconds came the shouted reply: “Hello! We are here! Are you there?” Even the Dog howled a high lonesome greeting.
“Are we there?” Masha laughed.
“What dopes in the other box,” Irina said. “What a ludicrous question—”
Nix interrupted. “I’ll not have you insulting the Queen. Or Mr. Firkin. Or whoever it was.” He spoke as loudly as he could. “We’re here! Wherever this may be…”
“We have stopped for the night,” Mr. Firkin yelled. “We are searching for a new Promised Land.”
Irina hollered, “Let’s hope it doesn’t take forty years!”
“Keep your spirits up,” the Queen bellowed regally. “It shan’t be long.”
On her word, they each fell silent. Kay was reassured by the presence of the other box of bodies. She had grown accustomed to them all. Indeed, she had a fondness that surprised her in its intermittent tenderness, for they were only puppets, after all. Above her, the Sisters shifted in their compartments, trying to get comfortable. Nix was softly whistling a circus tune, and the scratchy sound from the left could only mean that No? was tossing her straw head from side to side. Outside and far away, a car occasionally passed by, a melancholy sound, and Kay guessed that they were indeed parked at a hideaway motel. Just as all had gone still and quiet, the long night stretching ahead, the cricket song started up again.
“Stupid fucking cricket,” No? said. “I’d like to hammer it. I’d like to squash that … pest.”
From the upper berth, Olya whispered, “Hush.”
“You’re restless, No?,” said Kay softly. “Would you like me to tell you a story?”
A low murmur of assent drifted from next door.
“Once there was a bendy girl. When she was just a baby, she could stick her toes in her mouth, and before she learned to walk, she could tumble the whole way across the floor. When she was quite small, she used to watch the other bendy girls, and soon she copied what they could do—balance on a beam, vault over a horse, swing like a monkey between two bars up in the sky. All she ever wanted to do was jump and fly like a bird, and in time, she grew up and became so good at it that now all the little girls would watch her instead. And she had a string of admirers, young men entranced by her body and how supple it was and what fantastic things she could do with it. They had been drawn in by the motion, and at first their flattery was gratifying, but in time, she realized how empty were their looks and praise, for she was much more than a bendy girl. One after another the boys proved their intent, how little they knew or understood her, until at last she felt that one more admirer might just make her explode, so she went into a castle tower high above the clouds, locked the door behind her, and climbed to the topmost window where she could be alone. One day she heard a sound coming from beneath the ocean of white, a sound she had not heard before: a man speaking words she did not comprehend, yet so curious and beautiful that she ran down the steps, unlocked the door, and stepped outside to follow the sound. She ran across a meadow of asphodels in bloom and entered a birch forest, the white trees shimmering in the sunshine, till she came to a clearing. By a pond stood the stranger, the words he spoke appearing in circles above his head, like a man in the funny pages, and she came closer to try to read what he had written in the air.”
The van had grown still again. Even the cricket was listening.
“He said, ‘How do you do?’ when he saw her, for he did not know the bendy girl, and she asked him what the words meant, and he said that he could teach her. They spent the day with the words and they were so enchanted with each other that they fell in love. She bent herself around him, and he fell apart, collapsing like a dying star, nothing more than strands of sentences, a man made out of words.”
In the darkness, Kay could sense No? was facing her, her breathing close, her fingers pressed against the partition. “That was you,” No? whispered.
“Was it? I am trying to remember. There seem to be two worlds—one of words and one of motion—and we are tied to one or the other, never quite able to be in both.”
Long afterward, when everyone else was asleep, Kay heard the two sets of footsteps approach and the languorous voices of the giants. The aroma of coffee hit her like a dose of speed. The doors opened and closed, bang, bang. The key clicked in the ignition, and the wheels crunched onto a gravel berm, the van lurching from reverse into drive. The Deux Mains rolled down her window to let in the first sweet smell of autumn.
11
Muybridge wept like a child after the verdict was read. Collapsed in his chair, he sobbed so effusively that the prosecutor and several men of the jury fled the courtroom to avoid the spectacle. Not guilty.
Just five months after the trial, his wife, Flora, died suddenly of the ’flu or fever. Their son—if indeed the infant was Muybridge’s and not her lover’s, as she had boasted—was sent to an orphanage, and though he paid for the child’s care, Muybridge had little to do with him for the rest of the boy’s life. Word of Flora’s death reached him in Panama, where he was traveling under the name Eduardo Santiago Muybridge. He had departed almost immediately after the trial, on a commissioned expedition to photograph the people and the scenery of the Central America Pacific coast. Big painting-like landscapes, with clouds added to the skies in the darkroom. First in Panama and then steaming north, stopping in Costa Rica, Honduras, and El Salvador before his final stop in Guatemala. He spent nine months on the trip, forgetting her, and on his return to San Francisco, he made a gift of a portfolio of his best images to Mrs. Stanford, seeking her patronage. She, in turn, recommended the photographer to her husband, Leland, who was looking to find a way to stop time. Together they hatched the experiment that led to the “moving images” of the famous Sallie Gardner at a Gallop, the horse in motion.