How often we forget, or are forced to overlook because of lack, that the true fire of connection between hearts and souls is fundamental. Are you seen by the adored as less than you are at your best, or as all that you could be? That is the one sure measure of the health of any adoration. Both of them grasped in the other what was unique, what shone, what was to be prized, and that is rare at any age.
So it became graceful and relaxed to share other secrets, and commonplaces as well. Hattie told Lloyd more about the persecutions she had endured, the horrors she had felt, along with just the day-to-day fowl-plucking, slop-bucket, and weed-pulling life of the Corners. She painted a bright, detailed picture of working, loving, hating, surviving life on a major plantation, and filled in many gaps in his understanding.
She explained that because there was always some movement or migration of slaves due to sales or exchanges between owners, news and gossip about other plantations spread. They were each run in their own ways, yet most of the same larger principles applied. There were pecking orders, an assignment of tasks and a deployment of resources that remained relatively constant. Conditions and treatment might be very different, but there were protocols and codes of action that never varied.
As she spoke, Lloyd realized that what she was providing in her descriptions was both an internal and an exploded view of a very intricate machine. An organic machine, yes, but to him the concept of a machine was organic. Without knowing, she brought forth into illumination the idea of the self-assembling, self-consuming, self-sustaining complex system in his mind.
It suddenly struck him, for instance, that the definition of a complex machine was one that was five-dimensional-time defining the fourth, psychology the fifth. Mind transcended time, the same way that language tried to, and could indeed transcend space.
He thought back to Mother Tongue’s remarks about Spiro of Lemnos, the Enigmatist who had glimpsed more deeply than all others into the mesh of things-all that was hidden in plain sight.
It also came to him for the first time that if the complicated workings of something like a plantation-a machine both built by humans and including them as critical components-could be understood as a machine, working within a network of other similar machines to form a bigger, still more complicated machine, then there were two contrary but very pregnant implications.
First, the notion of mechanism, as in the mechanistic philosophy he had become acquainted with in Schelling’s bookshop-as in a reductionist strategy-was categorically deficient, if not totally wrong. Second, the far more interesting idea that such a thing even as multifaceted as a plantation could be rendered diagrammatically, as could any machine. It was just a question of what the hierogram looked like. Then he said to himself, “I meant diagram.”
Even as she spoke, his mind raced. The problem with the traditional mechanists, he grasped, was that they merely broke processes and subassemblies down. There was no integration. Therefore no creation. Everything their method touched died in their hands. Their wholes were always less than the sum of their parts. That had been his problem with the parafoil system in St. Louis. It was not a lack of time and quality materials. It was not just hubris and pilot error. He had not had the model clear enough in his mind, because it was the wrong model. It was only a model.
Without realizing, Hattie taught him-or helped him teach himself-more than all that he had learned up to that moment. She was like the frizzen that fires a flintlock, for a consideration began to take form in his mind: when you really understand something-even a very complex process or system (and what is not complex, if you give it deep enough attention?)-then you can picture it whole. And the picture somehow is the whole.
The hierograms of the Martian Ambassadors streamed through his mind, and it occurred to him to ask, What if their inscrutable emblems were not symbols representing sounds, ideas, and things as other languages do but, rather, intense distillations of relationships between concepts, so that figuratively speaking, if you could step to the other side of them in your mind they would be prismatic ways of seeing certain kinds of complexity whole and clear?
He was wise enough to leave off this spiral train of thought for the moment, but it released him to tell Hattie about the mutant brothers and the ravaging remorse at what he had done.
At first she was very skeptical about his claims of flying, but he spoke so matter-of-factly of how he had gone about it that her doubt wavered. There was no gainsaying his guilt over the deformed twins-and, like her descriptions of plantation life, she heard in his words the unmistakable accuracy of the authentic.
She chided him about what he had done, and yet when he made mention of them having apparently, at least, fallen out of a tornado, she posed another surprising question. “How you know they wasn’t taken back?”
“How do you mean?” Lloyd asked, eager, of course, to find any mitigating circumstance.
“Mebbe, you didn’t do ever-thing. You was just the way it happened. The way you talk about ’em, they wasn’t from here.”
“No,” Lloyd agreed. “They were from Indiana.”
“I doan mean that, fool! I mean from somewheres else.”
“Like Mars? I don’t think so.”
“Mebbe, more places to be from than you think.”
Lloyd heard the wisdom in that.
“Some kines of knowin’ just doan answer ever question. My Papa, he had a sayin’:
I seen what the sun, the moon
And the lightning do
But no one sees the thunder
Till they learn how to
Indeed, thought Lloyd.
Learning to see the thunder is what he should have told Schelling when asked his greatest aspiration.
CHAPTER 4. Fetish
LLOYD PUT TOGETHER FOR HATTIE A SIMPLE YET VERY FUNCTIONAL all-purpose tool kit that she could keep rolled in a pinched oilskin furnace apron, with separate corn-sack pockets for each item, which he stitched himself with a heavy bagger’s needle that he had kept from St. Louis, while his parents were preparing food. (His experience with the kites had taught him a great deal, and he had the artificial hand of St. Ives in mind.)
The kit included a general lock pick that he had sharpened out of harvested wire, a jimmy made from some window flashing, a miniature hammer he had fabricated from a hickorybarrel hove and one of the large bolts from the boat rigging, a carving knife and whetstone, along with a flint and striker from the cabin crew’s quarters, an adjustable wrench he had nipped from the engine room, some lady’s sewing implements that had been left about, a small hatchet that had dropped below the boilers, a magnifying lens he made from some plucked spectacles, and an assortment of bandages and a bottle of iodine wrapped in cotton wool so that it would not break, which he had nicked from a doctor’s bag.
From this same bag he took a vial of laudanum and added to the kit the one bottle of LUCID! that survived from his medicine-show career, in case she became injured and needed pain relief. What he did not find in the bag was an item that he felt was important, and so he made one himself from one of the extra steam valves in the engineer’s room-a stethoscope.
“What’s this for?” Hattie asked, when he proudly laid out his offerings.
“That’s for listening to sounds,” he said. “To hearts-and to the other side of walls, if you have to. I didn’t have time to make a good one. But you’ll hear better than you would on your own. And this, this is for making sounds-music-if you’re alone and need to make noise, instead of shushing all the time. To cheer yourself up.”
The final inclusion was a crude bunch of short, tensioned metal rods screwed into the base of a burgled clock with a hollowed-out hole for a resonator, which Lloyd, in what remained of his innocence, believed at that point he had invented. It was in fact a very old kind of musical instrument-what today we would call a kalimba, or African thumb piano-like a Jew’s harp but with a much wider range of tones. He had at least adjusted the rods in the precise order to create a true musical scale, and the simple strumming of these vibrating keys produced a quiet yet pleasing sound.