Sat December 5, 2074 11:24 pm: 88 Wilkins Ave.-- Camden, Pleasantview
Kvornan rubbed his nose with the heel of his hand and waited. Each stroke of the dial tone increased his anxiety. Two rings. Leaving a message would not be the safest practice. Four. This was the last call that the Mindelsohns' landline would ever make. Their service was scheduled to be cut at precisely midnight. Kvornan began to pace the kitchen slowly. Six rings.
"I'm sorry! I'd only just stepped out." Tara sounded somewhat breathless, as though she had been running. Little time had passed since he last heard her voice-- a few measly weeks-- but even the language that she spoke seemed to belong to separate era. Thoughts of her sly grin and warm violet eyes were part and partial to a time labeled before in Kvornan's memory. He cleared his throat.
"Are you alone?" He regretted the necessity of asking. It was not the most personal of hellos.
"Yes, of course. How is everything?" Kvornan let go of the phone, holding it between his ear and his shoulder. He might have started his monologue with the occupation of Ermengarde's psyche or the discovery of that peculiar Jack creature or Elise in all of her resilience. He might have even told her about Imina, over the phone and at a distance, like a coward. But some unknowable force within him wanted to keep the conversation as expedient as it was sterile.
"It's a bit complicated. I'll explain when I get home," he said.
"Which will be when?" Kvornan sat down on edge of the kitchen counter.
"Two weeks. Less, maybe. I just thought I'd call to check in. Am I cleared for arrival?"
"Your home is always here for you. And the children?" He rubbed his jawline, momentarily losing himself in the thought of her nude body, the curvature of her back as it faced him, their legs entwined. No matter how many times he told himself that she understood just what she was committing to, it still felt so unjust.
"I'm bringing the children with me. I miss you, Tara." She clicked her tongue at him.
"You don't mean that but I appreciate the gesture," she said.
"Honestly." He dropped down from the counter and took the phone in hand. He did miss her, but not as profoundly as she deserved.
"Shall I see you soon, then?" Kvornan nodded as though she were standing right in front of him.
"Yes, soon." Silence. Kvornan was holding his breath. He didn't know what he was waiting for her to say.
"God go with you, then." There was a soft click and the line went dead. Kvornan stood for a moment with the receiver still up to his ear. The electric hum of the refrigerator cut into the static night air. Hers had been too empty of a goodbye in their language, one that simply affirmed the separation of their paths and promised nothing of the future. Kvornan pressed the power button on the receiver and watched the condensation collect on the corners of the window panes.
February 1, 1987 9:34 am: Ethelden Palace-- Amhurst, Veronaville (Eighty-Seven Years earlier)
"Keep still, horrible boy." Jennail tilted his chin upwards. Her fingertips were soft and cool against his skin. Painting was one of the many mundane activities that Kvornan now held sacred by virtue of Jennail's involvement. She had more dexterity in her hands than what her magic could accomplish, making the chore a time-consuming one. Kvornan had grown to cherish it as an opportunity to feel her touch, to steal glances at her while she concentrated on his eyes, to be reprimanded for fidgeting. Sometimes he even requested that she paint his face at home, in Pleasantview, where he would only have to wash afterwards. But this morning, Kvornan was too distracted by the circumstance of their visit to enjoy the process of getting ready.
"Agni Hummel, Magus to the Sheut. I may never get over this, Nai." Kvornan tried to shake his head in disbelief but his wife struck him under the chin with the side of her brush.
"Can't you just be happy for him?" Kvornan frowned, somewhat affronted.
"I am happy! I'm just shocked, is all. Ag used to get himself into more trouble than any of us." Jennail blended the pigment beneath his right eye with her thumb.
"Only because his honesty made it difficult for him to hide his mischief. Close your eyes." Kvornan screwed his eyes shut and Jennail giggled. "Not so tight, stupid." Kvornan relaxed.
"He's only nineteen. Who gets inducted at nineteen?" Jennail held his hair away from his face and worked above his brow line.
"You're beginning to sound jealous," she said. Kvornan fiddled with cuffs of his sleeves.
"Maybe I am a little," he admitted. Jennail stopped painting. Kvornan realized too late what he had implied. His eyelids fluttered open.
"Nai--"
"Do you ever wish that we had never done it? That you could have finished out your studies and I had married some banker like everyone expected us to?" Kvornan stood. He removed the brush and palette from her hands, tossing them haphazardly onto the bed. Jennail was watching him with a heaviness that he never knew that she possessed.
How long had she been harboring this secret worry? And how could she? Kvornan wrapped his arms around her, kissing the bare tip of her nose. He ran his palms down her tightly corseted back. What more, what else could he have wanted from life than this woman? Than their son? Kvornan shook his head.
"This is the best and only dream that I have ever had for myself." It was an assertion of truth that tensed his shoulders like an oath. Jennail pulled him towards her by the back of his neck. He was hers to command, always.
Weds, November 25, 2074 1:12 pm: Holles St. and Paddington Blvd.- Downtown, Pleasantview
It was unseasonably warm. Kvornan ran his fingers through his sweat-drenched hair, not bothering to repeat the experiment when the same hair fell back into his eyes. The sun reflected off of the glass display case in front of him, a full-spectral corona, clean white at its core.
He didn’t know what had made him stop here. He had not been to this section of Pleasantview since before Elise was born. In those days, the toy store facing him had been a run-down juke joint. Foul booze, good music, standing room only. When Alexei could be found nowhere else, he would be found in a place like this, piss drunk and chatting-up a woman who had come in with someone else.
Throughout his reminiscence, the dolls in the display case were watching Kvornan with painted eyes. Kvornan thought wildly that they looked on him-- A monster, a murderer, a mere passer-by-- with the exact same fondness that they would show to the child who took them into her home, coddled and adored them, called them hers.
And this hypothetical child (who was all sunshine and pigtails in his imagination) would pour the dolls invisible tea, engage them in a one-sided conversation, perhaps even offer them plastic cakes, never expecting the faintest spark of acknowledgment in return. Kvornan knew this routine of expecting and receiving nothing very well by now. This was how he served his God.
To the left of him, Kvornan heard the steady approach of tiny, booted feet.
"Look Millie, it's the new Patty Peppercorn doll!" Two redheaded girls came racing around the bend, one leading the other by the hand. They smelled like deep clay, winter rain and silicon dust. Kvornan thought that they must have been from Dorset or thereabouts. Their life forces were stained with industrial waste.
An older gentleman and a small boy of similar genetic make-up were close on their heels.
"You girls keep where I can see you," the man shouted, ushering his boy along. But the girls were too enraptured to heed him.
"When I get one, I want mine to have blond hair and a green coat," the girl called Millie said. The older man shook his head, an indulgent smile playing across his lips.
"You got kids?" The older man had turned towards Kvornan. Kvornan did a double-take, surprised to have been addressed. For an instant, he'd felt like a non-presence-- An outside observer perched high atop a cloud, indifferently pairing his fingernails.
"Four," Kvornan said absently, though he did not know what had prompted the response.
"Really? Young guy like you," The man asked incredulously.
"I'm older than I look."
A black and battered pick-up truck sped by, honking furiously at a stray dog in the middle of the road. Kvornan stared at the undersides of the first little girl's boots as she climbed to the tips of her toes to get a better view of the dolls. There was a space where her pale rubber soles met their navy shadows on the ground and Kvornan wondered what Elise was doing. He lamented having missed the period in her childhood where something as simple as a doll might have excited her.
"They look so real," the first little girl said wistfully. "Don't you think so? Really, really real. Almost alive."
April 14, 1994 4:17 pm: The House of Fallen Trees- Gothier, Pleasantview (Eighty Years earlier)
Jennail grabbed Kvornan with one of her impossibly soft hands, beaming spiritedly.
"It's extraordinary, isn't it? Come, let's have a look," she said, pulling Kvornan forward. When he didn't budge despite her urgings, she kissed his cheek and pranced away, obliging him to follow. Every so often, Kvornan's overly curious wife would convince him to use his magic to unfasten the locks on her father's laboratory. But the glowing machines and acrid air held little fascination for him. He found pleasure only in yielding to her whims.
At the far corner of the room, an enormous, circular apparatus hummed as though it were occupied by a swarm of hornets. What was equally uncanny, a life-sized copper doll sat crouched on the floor beyond the circle, hooked to an intravenous tube.
Jennail swept her fingertips along the rusting walls and pulsating mechanisms as she passed them by, almost skipping. Kvornan followed behind her, innocuously forging a path through the glittering lace of her gown with his eyes. She halted suddenly at the feet of the copper woman. For a time, they stared at it in silence.
“Well…” Kvornan’s voice trailed off as he cleared his throat. “I suppose that all work and no play would make your father a dull boy.” Jennail sucked her teeth in disgust.
“You’re so vulgar,” she hissed. Her cheeks crimsoned just dark enough and the corners of her mouth drooped just low enough to imply that she was considering the possibility that Kvornan was right. The caged chickens behind the stairwell fluttered their wings nervously. Kvornan snickered.
"I'm only joking," he said, stroking a hand down Jennail's arm.
"Still," she whispered.
"Children!" Jon Smith-Tricou's voiced boomed, causing Jennail to jump. She grabbed the cuff of Kvornan's sleeve and skittishly cowered behind him, no doubt embarrassed at having been caught. Jon crossed the room, looking more pleased than angry at the intrusion. His young assistant strode briskly by his side, his pointed face etched with a grim reprimand. "How splendid of you to join us! You're just in time for the show."
"Actually Daddy, I think we were just leaving," Jennail murmured.
"Nonsense. Mahadeva, may I presume upon your extraordinary talents," Jon asked brightly. Jennail gave Kvornan a pleading look but he only smirked devilishly. They had already outstayed the life of her curiosity. Below them, Jon's assistant was unfurling the copper woman's limbs.
"Naturally, Dr. Tricou. I am at your disposal," Kvornan twittered. Jennail narrowed her eyes and bit down on her lower lip, wordlessly conveying her annoyance. She would be as sultry as a cadaver in bed that night but Kvornan had a feeling that whatever Jon was planning would be worth it.
"Splendid. I need you to lift the subject from the ground just high enough for us to work underneath it. This will only take a moment," the good doctor said.
"Take as long as you like," Kvornan implored. He focused his energy through his hands and placed them, palms up underneath the copper body. The gesture was essentially unnecessary-- He could have lifted the thing from a mile away with his hands behind his back but he had long ago discovered that people were more comfortable with his abilities when they thought that they could see his process.
Jon and his assistant opened a panel on the subject's torso, winding gears and setting circuit boards into place. A red and sticky substance was slowly oozing around the curve of a copper breast and streaming into the pit of a copper arm. Kvornan moved his hand to avoid coming into contact with it.
"She appears to be leaking," Kvornan said, tilting his head to side as he watched what he could only assume to be oil drip from her armpit to the floor.
"Yes, that happens at times. Mortimer, if you would please wipe that up," Jon said, securing a bolt. Mortimer reached into his coat pocket and wiped the liquid away with his handkerchief. Jon closed the chest panel and climbed out from underneath the doll. "And now Mahadeva, the subject must be moved into the circle, standing upright with her feet on the glass."
Kvornan flipped the doll around as though she were no heavier than a balloon and perched it on the inside of the circle as he had been instructed. Mortimer scurried over to the machine, snapping the doll's arms and legs into place.
"How are the connections, Master Goth," Jon shouted much louder than needed.
"Ready," Mortimer piped up.
"Splendid," Jon said, flipping a switch on the wall. Kvornan turned to his wife who was staring blankly at the floor. When he caught her iron-blue gaze, he mouthed the word, "nutter". She flushed with aggravation.
A deafening whirr resonated throughout the laboratory, shaking windowpanes. Kvornan reflexively clasped his hands to Jennail's tiny ears. The circle expanded to become a globe, a great network of metal bars, protectively clutching the doll inside. It was like nothing that Kvornan had ever seen.
The floor was vibrating now. White hot currents of electricity flared from the base of the globe, shooting up its sides and Kvornan could have almost sworn he saw the doll flex her fingers. Jennail took his hands down from her ears and inched her way behind him like their son did when he was frightened. Jon rubbed his hands together in anticipation.
"Nothing to be worried about," Jon shouted to no one in particular. "Everything is going exactly according to plan." The noise was beginning to subside. Jennail wrapped her arms around Kvornan's waist and buried her face in his neck. She was a timid, easily overwrought person by nature and he wondered if they should have stayed behind after all.
Kvornan heard something that he took for valves releasing air pressure. The metal globe was collapsing. The electric impulses subsided and Kvornan felt a noticeable shift in the energy of the room. Something small was in there with them- A bird in the rafters or maybe a field mouse in the doorway. The doll released her grip on the handle bar by her own accord.
She slumped forward, her knees half-way buckled. Kvornan froze in shock. He could not have been seeing what he thought he was seeing. The plated band of metal that was the doll's midsection expanded and contracted. It was breathing.
Jon stepped forward, supporting the doll by the shoulders to keep it from falling over.
"Impressed," he asked, winking jovially at Kvornan.
"I- How does it work?" Kvornan's palms were sweating. This was science. It was computer chips and battery acid and-
"You are a far more qualified expert on the subject than I am, dear boy. You see, this apparatus is alive," Jon said, prolonging the last word as though to make it stick. Alive. Kvornan took a step closer and the metal woman lifted her head. He waved a hand in front of her face but she did not flinch.
"No sensory input, I'm afraid. That's a project for another day," Jon said with a slight frown. Kvornan did not know what to think. If a man could build a living body out of metal and breathe life into it with electricity... Kvornan's eyes darted over to the caged chickens by the stairwell. Suddenly, he did not wish to know how it worked.
"I can see its life force," Jennail murmured in his ear. And he could see it too. It was weak. It was erratic. But it was there. The copper woman very slowly began to collapse. Kvornan could feel her life slipping away.
"The subject is failing, Dr. Tricou," Moritmer said matter-of-factly.
"We could expect no more," Jon replied. "All in all, I would call this experiment a success, wouldn't you?" Mortimer responded with a terse nod of his head. The metal woman convulsed twice before falling noisily into a heap on the floor.
"Is it dead," Jennail asked, not daring to look.
"As a doornail, my flower," Jon said. He extended a hand for Mortimer to shake. "Excellent work, Master Goth. Just wait until Primo Fiorello hears about this."
"What does Mr. Fiorello have to do with anything?" Kvornan folded his arms over his chest, feeling much easier knowing that the doll no longer walked amongst them.
"Ah well it was his wine that we used to sustain the life in the chicken's blood that was used to animate our subject, here bereft of her existence," Jon said, rocking on the heels of his shoes. "Now the real fun begins. I'm expecting the copper to go the way of all flesh. Master Goth will be observing this body as it decays. Ashes to ashes and all that rot. Eh boy?" Mortimer said nothing but stared indifferently at the copper mass laying spread-eagle on the floor.
