The Live-Forever Machine (3 page)

“Was the armour all right?”

“Uh, yeah, I think so; I didn’t—”

“What about the shield and sword?”

“They were fine, too, I think. It was only the soldier, the statue, that got busted up.”

“They should really put up a glass shield. Those things are extremely old and valuable.” He shook his head. “It’s beyond me … one of them actually picked up the shield?”

“The sword. I thought he was going to kill the other guy.”

“Appalling. You don’t just grab an antique sword that’s centuries old and wave it around.”

Eric traced the rip in his jeans. He couldn’t tell his father that, in a strange way, he thought it was fitting the two men had fought in the middle of the display, surrounded by all those frozen soldiers holding weapons that hadn’t been used for hundreds of years. His father would have been horrified.

His father was already looking back to the typewriter.

“Hey,” Eric said. “Hello?”

“Hmm?”

“I mean, who do you think they were? Doesn’t the whole thing sound weird to you?”

“I really—” His eyes were straying to the piles of paper on the table. “I really don’t know, Eric. Look, I’m sorry; it’s just that I’m at a really good part.”

You’re always just at a really good part, Eric
thought. Lately, the stories seemed to be eating up more and more of his father’s time. As soon as he got home from his shift on the subway, he’d start hacking away at the typewriter, sometimes not even stopping for dinner.

“You’re going to love this one, Eric,” his father said.

Probably, Eric thought grudgingly. He usually did. His father’s stories were the strangest he’d ever read, but they were wonderful. The settings were cut off from the rest of the world, neither past nor present nor future. There were deserts and jungles and snow-capped mountains and angels with broken wings and magic cameras, and small towns overrun with cats, and sometimes, a woman with laughter like Nepalese wind chimes who disappeared down narrow streets into the twilight.

The woman, Eric felt certain, was his mother. She had died so soon after he was born that he had no memory of her. She had gotten caught in the subway doors, and the train hadn’t stopped. His father had told him this when he was seven and he hadn’t known how to react. Part of him wanted to laugh—it was impossibly horrible and absurd; the other part wanted to cry for the woman whose face he couldn’t remember. But all he had done was watch his
father’s fingers as they traced a pattern on the tabletop, again and again.

His father never really talked about her, except in the stories, and Eric read them all hungrily, hoping to catch glimpses of his mother. He sometimes thought his father missed her as much now as when it had happened. There were periods when he seemed caught in a deep reverie—days when he’d slip through the hours lifelessly, not writing, not talking much. There had been a few other women over the years, some of whom had even made breakfast in the mornings, but they never stayed longer than a month or two. And then his father would start a new story.

“Why haven’t you ever tried to get them published?” Eric asked.

“I’ve never thought about it.” He shrugged. “I do them for myself.”

It made Eric angry to think of the pile of stories in his father’s bedroom, yellowing with age.

“If you sold enough,” he said, “maybe you wouldn’t need to work on the subway anymore.”

“It’s as good a way to earn a living as any,” his father said quietly. “It’s certainly nothing to be ashamed of.”

“That’s not what I—”

“I’ve still made time for all this.” He waved his
hand to indicate the bookshelves. Self-taught. That was the word his father always used.

“That’s not what I meant, anyway,” Eric grumbled irritably, fanning out his shirt to cool his back. In fact, he wasn’t sure quite what he’d meant. Maybe it
had
been intended as a small stab. But it couldn’t be healthy, spending whole days in the subway tunnels, in the dark.

“I was thinking about you today,” his father said distractedly.

Eric waited for him to go on.

“A book,” he said, after hammering out a few more words on the typewriter. “A book that you should read.”

“Oh,” Eric said, disappointed.

“Castle of Otranto
by Horace Walpole. I think you’d enjoy it.”

Eric sighed. “Dad, you already gave that one to me. Remember? A couple of weeks ago.”

“Oh. It’s good, isn’t it?”

“It was all right. It was kind of dumb.”

“Kind of dumb?” His father looked up from his typewriter, scandalized. “It’s a great classic.”

Eric just nodded. Every old book was a great classic, according to his father. A shopping list would have been a great classic if it had been written a hundred years ago.

“You should try to read everything,” his father said. “That’s the only real education.”

“You make it sound as if I picked up one book every five years,” Eric said resentfully. “Chris thinks all I do is read.”

“Well,” his father said with a chuckle, “Chris isn’t exactly an intellectual.”

“You hardly know him!” Eric objected. “Last time he was over you didn’t even say hello.”

The lights flickered suddenly and the electric fan jolted in mid-revolution. The tiny television set in the corner switched on full blast.

Eric jumped. “Not again,” he groaned.

“What a din,” Mr. Sheppard said, gathering up his papers.

“It’s been doing this all afternoon,” said Eric. “Must be the heatwave.”

“For most people,” a dignified off-screen voice said, “shopping is not simply a pleasure, but a way of life. Here, in the heart of downtown, next door to the museum, a new shopping experience is about to be forged. More than four hundred new shops under one magnificent roof for the discriminating consumer. It’s the mall of the future, for the way of the future, designed as a series of figure-eight patterns to encourage maximum shopper participation. Three kilometres of enclosed floor space, much of it totally underground, will take you effortlessly through an incomparable collection of the finest boutiques and eateries in
the world. You’ll be dazzled by neon, soothed by the sounds of our in-house music. It’s all there for you, waiting. Elegance, simplicity, complicity. The new mall. Opening this fall.”

“Complicity, for sure,” growled Eric’s father, shaking his head in disgust.

“Just another mall,” Eric said with a shrug. “Chris told me this was one of his Mom’s deals.”

A news reporter appeared, standing across the street from a building that was spewing out smoke and flames. Eric recognized it as the rare-book library. He walked past it practically every day.

“The fire,” the reporter shouted, “started early this morning at the corner of Main and Kierkegaard, and spread quickly out of control through the entire library. Firefighters have been working to stop the blaze, but many of the water hydrants in the immediate area have run dry. Filled with so much paper, this building is like a giant tinderbox. Just look at those books burn! This is the second fire in the downtown area within a week. Only three days ago, a well-known antiques dealership was the scene of a similar blaze, which destroyed most of the shop’s merchandise and did millions of dollars of damage.”

The reporter paused to watch as part of the library’s wall collapsed outwards onto the street.

“At the scene,” he said, turning to face the camera, “I’m Stuart Daw for Split Second News.”

“Thanks, Stuart,” said the studio anchor. “Just an incredible fire. And who needs it in this heat? Next, the latest in wrestling. Bob?”

“Well, Dirk, it was a good, good day for the Beast—”

It took Eric three tries to switch off the
TV
. When he turned around, he was startled by the pallor of his father’s face.

“It’s a terrible thing,” his father was saying. “One of the finest libraries in the world.”

Eric watched his father.

“Floors and floors of books rising up all around you. They don’t let you just browse, of course. You have to ask one of the librarians to get a particular book for you—and then you look at them under glass most of the time. But sometimes, you get to hold one. You can touch it, feel the old leather binding and the brittle pages, smell the old paper.” A small smile fluttered across his mouth. “Once your mother—” He stopped suddenly and looked back down at the typewriter.

“What?” Eric said. He sat forward slightly.

But his father just shook his head. “Nothing.”

Eric slumped back into the tattered upholstery of the sofa. It wasn’t fair, he fumed inwardly. Why wouldn’t he talk about her? Eric
knew hardly anything about her; he’d never even seen a photograph. He suddenly thought of the locket, the tiny portrait inside.

“I wonder if they’ll be able to save any of the books,” his father muttered. “The worst thing is hardly anyone cares. Most people would rather watch the library burn on
TV
than read a book.”

“Chris is probably watching it right now, eating popcorn,” Eric said to annoy his father.

His father just nodded sadly.

“The whole city’s been changing so fast, it’s frightening,” he said. “It’s all so different from what it used to be.”

“Lots of construction,” Eric said.

“It’s not just the construction,” his father replied, waving his hand dismissively. “It’s the whole city. It’s getting too big. It’s getting too high. But it’s also getting too forgetful. It can’t even remember what it used to look like fifty years ago, twenty years ago, maybe even ten years ago. No wonder libraries burn. The city’s eating itself up!”

Eric was used to his father’s attacks on the city. His own thoughts were drifting back to the two men whispering in the medieval gallery. In a split second of total recall, he saw their dark shapes grappling, and the locket tumbling from Alexander’s pocket. Gabriella della Signatura, he thought, what am I going to do with you?

Chris scratched his short-cropped blond hair. “You know, when I first met you, I thought you were just another skinny geek—no offence, right?—but you do these crazy things. It’s really more than five hundred years old?”

“I didn’t know until I got home. I just pushed it right into my pocket. It could have been anything.” Skinny geek. Great.

Chris shook his head in amazement. “You going to take it back?”

“I have to, don’t I?” He had to force out the words. He’d spent a humid, restless night debating with himself. Returning it was the only right thing to do. But something about the locket—something about the woman’s face—made him want to hide it away, to keep it for himself. He’d told Chris only because he was sure that, unlike his father, Chris wouldn’t want to see it.

“You’re not making this up, right?”

Eric shook his head and sighed. How many
times did he have to go through this? “Chris, I saw it. They were fighting in the display, and the locket fell from the tall guy’s pocket.”

“You sometimes make things up, is why I’m asking. You tell me crazy things and I believe you and then I feel stupid.”

“I haven’t done that in a long time.”

“Well, it’s utterly weird. But I’ve heard weirder things lately. Did you watch the news this morning?”

“About the two guys who hijacked the window-washing platform and took it up to the thirtieth floor?”

“Uh-huh. It’s the heat. It’s making everyone utterly crazy.”

They were strolling down Astrologer’s Walk, a wide, tree-shaded lane that ran behind the museum. Eric looked up at the tall arched windows of clouded glass set into the blackened brick. On the other side of the path rose the gleaming shell of the new mall. It was nearly finished construction, a smooth veneer of steel and mirrored chrome supported by massive metallic buttresses and ventilation pipes. Work crews on scaffolding were fitting plates of glass onto the top level. The roar of winch motors and heavy machinery battered Eric’s ears.

“Hey, that’s a great rip,” Chris said, nodding at Eric’s jeans.

“My knee went through,” Eric told him a little impatiently.

“Oh.” Chris looked down at his own pair of designer jeans, which had a long slash above each knee and a second set of rips at mid-thigh. “Mine came this way. They make you pay for it, too, believe me. Costs a friggin’ fortune.”

“You buy them,” Eric pointed out.

“Peer pressure,” Chris countered. “Utterly beyond my control.”

“Like the nose ring.”

“You got it.” He touched the metal stud in his nostril.

“What if driving a nail into your head comes into fashion?”

Skinny geek. That rankled him. Well, it was true enough. He glanced enviously over at Chris. He wasn’t much taller than Eric, but he was a lot bigger, with broad shoulders and a filled-out chest. And Chris’s jeans were solid-looking, the fabric falling in smooth, straight lines, unlike the baggy husks of his own pant legs. Chicken legs. Like father like son. He hated it. At least he didn’t wear glasses. That would have been the final humiliation.

“So what did you want to show me?” he asked. Chris had called him early that morning, insisting that there was something he had to see at the new mall.

“Even you, techno-serf, will like this. It’s utterly cool.” He led Eric farther down the path and then pointed up at the steel wall of the shopping centre. “Take a look. They just installed it.”

It was hard to miss, a huge cube of black glass the size of a house. Within its transparent walls swirled giant
CD
players and microwave ovens, refrigerators and televisions, watches and leather shoes, clothing with designer logos.

“Hologram billboard,” Chris said. “And guess who suggested it?” He jabbed his thumb towards his chest. “I told Mom it would be great, and they actually did it! Utterly three-dimensional. Not bad, huh?”

“Very catchy,” Eric said. Looking at it made him dizzy.

“You hate it, don’t you?”

“No, I don’t hate it!”

“You hate it; I can tell. You hate everything that runs off electricity. Techno-serf.”

The glass-and-steel edifice seemed to quiver slightly and shift in the heat. A hot breeze stirred the sweat on Eric’s forehead.

“I’m not a techno-serf.”