This time the machine said: Gathering.
Phineas smiled. Sensing an imminent rescue, he looked around the room. There was still a certain morbid decorum to be had. With that in mind, Phineas dragged the bodies of the twins to the vault and sealed them inside. Then in a magnanimous gesture, one foretelling his release, he opened the copper cages of his collection of mockingbirds, whippoorwills, and nightingales. Their even songs had comforted him. Their singing reminded him that the world had kept on spinning, that despite the comet which shook and poisoned the world, the sun was still rising and falling, days and nights were passing unmolested. But while the birds sung, chortled, whispered and flit about — none left their cages. Their wings had been clipped long ago. That’s how Phineas felt as he sat in his chair and waited, wondering how long his oil lamps would last.
After ten days, Phineas decided it prudent to only eat one meal a day. Though a grumbling stomach only stoked his fears as he would occasionally bang a golden spittoon on the walls, hoping to be heard, screaming at the ceiling until he was exhausted.
Now in the awful silence, he huddled in his blankets and furs of Russian sable as he watched a trickle of fetid water seep down the wall.
It’s . . . raining. I have water. I have air.
He hadn’t predicted that, though he hadn’t asked. He also hadn’t asked about the loyalty of his followers, because he couldn’t ask something that benefited him directly, but moreover, why would he need to? The machine had never been wrong — or so he’d thought. In the early years, Phineas was unsure of how to use the device, for what purpose and to what end, so he’d found work as a village matchmaker — the most legitimate scam he knew. Most intermediaries were numerologists, superstitious old crones who used birthdates and astrology to assuage conflicts of interest between families. When Phineas showed up with his machine, marriage became a science (though an imperfect field of knowledge if ever there was one).
In the beginning, Phineas’ predictions connected peasant families, but eventually he was being paid handsomely to bind sons and daughters of the rich and powerful merchant class. He delighted in his calling, because if people married and were happy, his wisdom seemed infallible. But if wives failed to produce a son, or accept a husband’s concubine, if there was discord, that contention was usually seen as a sign of the couple’s hidden weaknesses, their vices, not his. His fame spread from Guangzhou to Nanchang, until a young girl rebuffed the cousin whom she’d been betrothed to and ran away. Her absence drew the ire of the British Territorial Minister who had her arrested along with the entire village, which had been declared unruly, given English courtesy names and sold to the West — Phineas included. But to his surprise (and sincere delight) his reputation had preceded him. He arrived in the West, not as a village scryer as the British described him, but as a prophet like Lao Tzu, one of the great masters reborn. And the girl’s disobedience became a parable of what would happen to those who disregarded his predictions.
Because of his lofty status, Chinese merchants spared no expense to smuggle him to the Underground, a hidden part of Seattle, for his safety, with everything given to him.
He was treated as a god.
A month later, Phineas scraped the last of the canned fish into his mouth with his dirty, unclipped fingernails and drank the briny oil. His only question as he sat in the pitch black, overcome by the smell of the twins’ decaying bodies and his own bodily waste was: Will I starve first or go completely mad?
He tossed the empty can into the darkness of the room and heard it clatter among garbage and the shattered lamps, which had since run out of fuel. He crawled to the battery powered light and switched it on. He only used the simple bulb to operate the I-Ching machine, to ask what day it was as he scratched what he thought was the correct date onto the wall with a jewel-encrusted letter opener. He’d twice forgotten to reset the pulley on his mantle clock (and once let it run down on purpose because of the incessant ticking) so now his chronological bearings were off by a few hours, but in the darkness, the isolation, did it really matter? Now as he slept, his dreams seemed like wakefulness and his waking hours, an endless nightmare.
His only hopeful, productive activity was the three minutes each day that he allowed himself to use the battery powered light to operate the machine. In those fleeting, precious moments, the device became a periscope to the city above, a telegraph of questions and answers, his gear-driven silver-handled radio to the outside world.
Throughout the week he’d asked a litany of questions, none of which seemed helpful. Yes, his followers were doing well. And yes, his survival predictions had come true — living underground in the mines had spared them. The most affluent of the rich had survived as well, with tinctures of colloidal silver, but many more were gone. Yes, the survivors were fighting each other in the streets, the Luddites were smashing the machine-works because few science ministers had survived and those who had lived, unfortunately had left their servants to die. Revolution was happening. But his followers had left the heart of the ruined city. That answer had been crushing, pressing in like the walls around him. Somehow he’d been forgotten, or worse, deemed unnecessary. He prayed to all the gods he could remember that his people were battling above, waging a war and when the fighting stopped he’d be rescued, but as each day passed . . .
Phineas heard himself laugh hysterically as his voice boomed off the walls and he realized how much he sounded like Professor Ling. He started crying as he pulled out fistfuls of hair and rocked back and forth as he asked the machine one final rhetorical question for the day, “What do nightingales taste like?”
He saw the word, Cuowu, and turned out the light.
Three months later, as near as he could tell, Phineas’ greatest regret was not preserving the bodies of the twins. He’d long since run out of food. And if he had misgivings about subsisting on human flesh, those had passed, lost somewhere in the lucid dreams he now had about sucking the raw meat from the last of his precious mockingbirds.
“I wasted the twins. Who knew that lapse in judgment would be my undoing,” he muttered to himself as he picked at scabs along his scalp.
Phineas guessed that he hadn’t eaten in weeks. His battery powered light had run out, so now he lived in perpetual darkness, trying to remember the days, to count them, feeling the numbers he’d scratched on the wall, occasionally waking up and adding another tic mark. But he still had rice wine in abundance and the alcohol soothed as the sugar sustained him. He regularly drank until he lost consciousness, waking up, imbibing more, vomiting, crawling, finding a dry place in the darkness to collapse, repeating the cycle again and again. It was better than sobriety, which made for unpleasant madness.
Though occasionally he’d be clear-headed enough to remember the I-Ching machine. He’d feel his way through the pitch and the filth and find that device, cradling the cold metal box like a long lost child. Sometimes he’d sit for hours, the machine in his lap, as he asked questions and talked to Professor Ling’s cursed invention like a friend, turning the handle, receiving revelation and outright hallucinations. But in blackness that had become his world, he was never able to read the answers.
It was during one of those manic sessions that he thought he’d died, passed through the veiled, onion-skin of reality and slipped into the ether as he saw a flickering glow that grew into a light as bright as the sun. The heavenly orb blinded him as he called out to his rescuers, tears flowing down his greasy, soiled cheeks.