Archive for the ‘Rudi Dornemann’ Category
The Courtship of Joe the Wrench
Tuesday, July 7th, 2009
(Being a sequel to Neostalgia.)
Joe’s association with the Ballet Mechanique brought him steadily closer to respectability.
The first hint came soon after he began helping out with dancer maintenance, when his name appeared in the program. Since “Joe the Wrench” was deemed unsuitable for the opera-and-ballet crowd, it was his full name, Josephus Wren, that appeared.
Then he had to wear a hat whenever entering or exiting the building. Not the soot-stained, crumple-rimmed bowler he wore around his own shop, but a crisp top hat. This he doffed as soon as he entered the ballet’s backstage workroom — after asking permission of Miss Linn, who sat in the corner, snipping choreography into long rolls of player-paper.
But the biggest impetus toward respectability was Eona Bellinghew, the mechaninque’s human prima. Joe watched from the wings, entranced by the grace in her every motion, so sinuous, so smooth compared to the lines of automatons who mimicked and accompanied her. He began leaving his crisp hat on, started wearing white shirts, and even managed to keep one or two free of axle-grease. He rebuilt the gears of half the troupe and there was talk of his becoming a partner in the theater. He created a bouquet of mechanical roses and — with Miss Linn’s help — made them bud and bloom in their own miniature dance.
Of her many suitors, Joe was the one Eona selected to accompany her to the Grand Duke’s ball. At first, he was dazzled by his proximity to her, and she shone more brightly even than she did on stage. Soon, however, he saw that the curve of her arm, the turning of her head, even her smile, all these were not the originals the automatons followed, but echoes of their mechanical movements.
In the workroom the next day, peevish and dispirited in his battered hat, he fidgeted with an en pointe ratchet that wouldn’t lock and his muttered “grind it!” came out louder than he’d expected. Miss Linn’s embarrassed turn of the head Joe recognized at once. This was the genuine, original gesture. His heart bloomed like a mechanical rose.
The opera-and-ballet crowd still prefers the Mechanique, but, over the last few months, many of the more discerning aficionados of the dance have come to prefer the Theater Linn-Wren. No, the shows aren’t as lavish, but there’s a passionate imagination at work that’s been missing from the Mechanique for some time.
Subdivision
Wednesday, July 1st, 2009
Karina recognized the cul-de-sac, even though the sand was deeper in the front yards and the dunes had moved in closer behind the circle of houses. She knew her Aunt’s house, the only yellow brick one on the street, a stump just visible where the tire-swing tree had been.
The house’s sonics still worked, and the neighborhood kids snatched up some of the bigger spiders and less poisonous scorpions that scurried out the windows and doors Karina had opened. Their parents didn’t get anywhere near as close, just talked in little knots several driveways away. Something else Karina remembered: this trial period to assess a new arrival. She couldn’t be the first returnee from the cities, but had no idea if that would grant her quicker acceptance.
She heard chanting that first night. Next morning, she saw they’d captured a royal monitor, penned it in a dry kiddy pool under sections of cyclone fence weighted in place with picnic tables. She couldn’t get a good look down into the shadows, and stumbled back when it hissed and lunged at the fencing.
The headwoman of the subdivision watched from the picnic shelter. “It’s for an oracle,” she said, “to tell us how neighborly you are.”
This was new to Karina.
The second night, she watched from a distance as they fed it a goat carcass, drugged, apparently, and pulled back the fence to let the children glue beads and rhinestones all over the lizard’s hide. After the neighbors went home, she watched it, glinting in the moonlight and moaning a low dinosaur sound that might have been drug reaction or indigestion. Even back home, with the walls tuned to white noise, the sound bled through.
She couldn’t sleep. Coming here was supposed to get her away from having to make choices.
She got up near dawn, heaved a couple of picnic tables aside, and hauled the monitor out of the pool. The body was like a German Shepherd gone limp, the decorated skin rasped her arms, and she tripped over the tail as she staggered up and down the dunes. She couldn’t hear the noise anymore, just felt it in her chest and belly. She left the lizard a quarter mile out.
The headwoman and a few other neighbors were waiting when she came back, and lifted their mugs of root-coffee in salute as she trudged past.
“Good omens!” called the headwoman.