Black Mad Wheel

  Ellen leans toward him.

  “Closer.”

  She does.

  Philip kisses her ear.

  “It’s a good song,” he whispers.

  “Oh yeah? You’ve convinced me of many things, Philip Tonka, but you won’t convince me of that.”

  Philip leans back in his seat.

  “It’s a good song because it sounds exactly how the musician feels.”

  Ellen shakes her head no.

  “If that’s how he feels,” she says, “we’re on our way to meet a madman.”

  Philip shakes his head no.

  “The musician isn’t the man in the mine,” he says. “It’s someone much older than him . . .”

  57

  The desert is freezing at night. But this time Philip is better prepared. And he has a woman beside him. They keep each other warm.

  Huddled beneath the blankets, the bags, and their clothing, they sleep near the fire that illuminates a tiny part of what looks to Ellen like infinite tar, from desert to sky.

  They fall asleep and are woken by the sound. Philip, aching again, reaches for the earmuffs beside them and gives one pair to Ellen. They cover their ears, but the sound is strong, still rattles, like fingertips tapping, let me in, LET ME IN.

  Overhead the sky is a starless midnight, black, obscured by the fog. There are other sounds out here, too. Scratching. Insects. And some of the sounds, Ellen thinks, sound like boots. Army boots. The slow lumbering steps of ancient soldiers, brought to life again.

  58

  The second night, following a day of exhausting desert hiking, they spend the night in one of the edifices left behind by the miners of the twenties and thirties. It could’ve been a two-bedroom house, if it had been divided that way. Instead, it’s an open space, without interior walls, that probably once contained desks, paperwork, ledgers, and the many tools for cleaning and magnification used to determine the best of a cluster of diamonds.

  Now there is only sand.

  It’s high enough to pour out the windows, connecting the inside of the structure with the desert outside. After leveling a space wide enough for the two of them to sleep, Ellen and Philip lie side by side upon a blanket, looking up to the dark roof. Outside, the moon and stars create enough illumination to give the desert a sense of whiteness. As if the sand changes colors as the sun dips below the horizon and the moon reveals the paler grains.

  This edifice was not visible from the route the platoon took when tracking the hoofprints to the mine. But Philip knows his landmark.

  The five dunes, rising like fingers, like a Polypheme’s hand, framing the entrance to the mine, where Philip once saw Ross swimming, inviting him into the cool water.

  Will they see something else tomorrow? Or will it appear as what it is . . . an abandoned hole in the sand?

  Just before they fall asleep, the sound returns.

  While throwing up, Philip tries to trace his path through the halls, the room where the horns and hooves hung, to the cell beyond it.

  The Danes must be near there. But locating it will not be easy.

  Philip falls asleep envisioning hallways leading right and left, and the uncountable decisions he will have to make below.

  When the sun is up, Philip brings Ellen to one of the windows and points to five dunes in the distance.

  And the desert, all of it, seems to rumble with terrible, unseen power as they gather their things, leave the small building, and go.

  59

  At the rim of the hole, they no longer speak.

  Their ears are secure beneath plugs, gauze, earmuffs, and helmets. But Philip knows this protection can only do so much.

  Ellen’s face looks so small to him, wrapped as it is.

  The entrance to the mine looks like an earhole of its own; the desert, Philip thinks, must have heard them coming.

  And despite having stood at this exact same spot once before, the image is as new to him as it is to Ellen.

  He wonders now if, by the beams of their flashlights, the rest of the platoon saw his body dragged away down there at the bottom.

  Philip estimates that it’s a fifteen-foot drop.

  There is a better way down. Ellen is already taking the ladder, the steel rungs embedded into the hard-packed dirt. Some of them are rusted, all of them are old, and when Philip begins his own descent, he imagines two English musicians in red, guitars strapped to their backs, discussing the songs they’re going to play for the miners.

  At the bottom, the darkness split by their lights, Philip spots a triangle of red on an arch, an entrance, the beginning of the maze.

  He points to the white letters stitched into the fading red fabric.

  GOATS

  So clearly a pennant. The mascot of a child’s favorite team.

  For Ellen, it’s like watching a friend’s dream materialize, a wildly unlikely story built up fragment by true fragment, physical evidence, proof of a tale no one should have believed.

  They pass under the arch and enter the mine.

  Philip looks for tracks, any tracks, possibly even the snakelike groove created by his own body, dragged over six months ago. But there are none. The dirt looks swept beneath them, as though the madman knew they were coming.

  They reach a new hall and turn left. The decision is arbitrary, as long as there’s a sense of going deeper. Another hall. Another left. Then a right. The ground is sloping. Philip continuously looks to the walls, looks for a cell door, looks for the Danes.

  There is no evidence at all of anybody having recently been through here. As if, in the half year since Philip was hurt, the man cleared out, took everything with him, disappeared.

  Everything but the sound.

  Despite the protection, the earplugs and helmet she wears, Ellen has thrown up twice already. The sound comes in waves, waves Philip remembers, waves he can feel but barely hears.

  He does not fear the sound anymore.

  Another right. Another left. No cells. No doors. No Danes.

  But the sound persists.

  Four hours deep, they stop to eat. Crouched in the dark, they do not speak as they exchange bags of dried fruit and bread and drink water from canteens. Philip removes his headgear. Ellen signs for him not to. It’s better to be safe than sorry. It’s better to be deaf down here than not.

  But Philip doesn’t fear the sound anymore.

  Another hour deep and Ellen administers the drugs again. The needles look like thin fingers in the waning beams and Ellen thinks of the fingers of death she used to swat from the unit doors in Macy Mercy.

  Up again, traveling, continuing.

  Eight hours deep, Philip points to the splintered wood of a closed, knobless door and Ellen knows that it was behind this door that he found the man’s costume. The horns and hooves. The red army marching band jacket and pants. But when they get inside, those items are gone.

  Philip hurries across the small room, through the second door, to where Ellen knows he discovered a prisoner in a cell. Philip’s already at the barred window, shining his light, when Ellen catches up.

  To her, near deaf, it sounds like she gasps when she sees the emaciated body within. But perhaps she screams.

  Philip shines his light the length of the hall. Then runs it. Looking for other cells. Other doors.

  If this prisoner has been ignored, left for dead . . . why would it be any different for any others?

  Reaching a solid dirt dead end, Philip returns and leads Ellen to the series of halls where he saw the streets of Detroit, automobiles, and the faces of friends. This time, he sees only the truth of the place. The present.

  But Ellen sees her daughter Jean.

  Philip, sensing he’s walking alone, turns to see Ellen crouched in the corridor, running her fingers through the empty air before her.

  “Ellen!”

  She does not look up. And by the time he reaches her, he sees an impassable distance in her eyes.

  So he waits.

  He watches as s
he laughs and hugs the empty space, as she cries and says she’s sorry. It’s only when she begins to remove her own headgear that Philip touches her, stops her from doing it.

  When she looks up to him, he sees rage.

  He grips her wrist. He tugs lightly.

  “This way,” he says.

  And for a moment he wonders if she isn’t capable of trying to kill him. If Ellen might not hurt him in the name of remaining here, right here, with Jean, forever.

  But understanding shimmers, and Ellen rises again. She looks back to where Jean was and shakes her head no.

  Is the girl gone? Or is Ellen telling Jean that Mommy can’t stay?

  Philip doesn’t ask.

  Ellen is the first to continue down the hall, and Philip follows. They turn right, they turn left. They reach dead ends Philip had somehow avoided last time. Often, Ellen stops to speak to someone. Once she grips Philip’s arm, terror in her eyes. She pushes herself and him flat to the wall, far from whatever it is she sees.

  Philip sees nothing. Immune. And it’s not until they reach the top of the wooden staircase that he feels exactly like he did the first time he was here.

  It’s just a man, he tells himself. He recalls the old eyes, the wrinkles, the dust. How frail the man looked in the World War II costume. So meek that Philip believed him dead.

  Just a man. Yes. Just a man down there. And a man can be questioned. A man can be defeated.

  They descend the stairs and arrive at what Philip called “the Hall of Death.” It was here that Philip saw dozens of old soldiers. All wars at once. As if the Ferris wheel of history came unattached and all the passengers were thrown.

  Ghosts.

  All of them still here.

  Yet, Ellen can touch them. And does.

  The door that hides the red piano is less than twenty feet away. It was down here that Philip’s body was altered, his mind changed, his life begun anew. And yet, he waits for Ellen to study the past soldiers, the impossible men from bygone eras who do not rot, who do not belong here, who were shaken into being by a sound strong enough to immunize weapons, break the patterns of loops, and give her Jean again, if only for a while.

  When Ellen rises, Philip is facing the door, only inches from the wood.

  He places his palm upon it and pushes.

  The door opens easily.

  Philip, ready to see the piano, is not prepared for the man who sits at it.

  His back to his visitors, his hands raised, about to play.

  Philip, predicting Ellen’s broken body, imagining her as crushed as the body Lovejoy found in the desert, opens his mouth to scream STOP!, but it’s too late.

  The man in red’s fingers are already coming down, toward the keys, the notes . . .

  . . . the sound.

  60

  But the fingers stop above the keys and there they rattle, like the mannequin vampires that sit up in coffins at the haunted house attraction on Mackinac Island.

  Philip, breathless, his arm extended uselessly to protect Ellen, waits.

  The longer he looks, the clearer it is who sits on the bench.

  The figure is emaciated. Wigged. And the red jacket and pants hang loose on the body.

  Philip enters the room.

  Above the piano is the big bass drum, the white goat. The microphones are arranged just as they were before, all trained on the mallets inside the upright. Before he reaches the figure, Philip sees the mummified face, the vacant eye sockets, the flat dry lips, reflected in the steel metronome that does not stir. Philip leans over the thing’s shoulders and briefly observes the ten skeletal fingers suspended midstrike.

  This, Philip knows, is the other English musician. Once a friend to the man down here.

  Behind Philip, Ellen approaches, and behind her, the door slowly closes.

  Then, a crackling. Then, a voice. And the effect is one Philip knows by heart.

  The unmistakable static of a control room microphone.

  “You,” the man says. “I dragged you to the beach. A warning, as they say. Send no more.”

  Thirty feet to the left of the red piano is a wall of glass, and behind it is a man in costume, false hooves up on the mixing board, horns so big they almost reach the ceiling.

  The red of his uniform clashes against the silver spinning behind him.

  Philip has never seen so many reels at one time; a hundred, maybe two, rotating in unison, a wall of looping, capable of sustaining a sound forever.

  The man’s billy goat beard hangs to his thin fingers, tented at his waist. And the fire in his eyes is full.

  “Where are they?” Philip asks.

  The man brings a finger to his lips. The nail is two inches long, dirty, and sharp.

  “I wouldn’t do that if I were you,” he says. He points to the piano.

  “Where are they?”

  A flame flickers in the man’s eyes, as if reflecting an unseen fire.

  “I wonder what it is for you,” he says. “I wonder what you see, there, in the room.”

  Philip looks to the red piano. Then to Ellen.

  “It’s a piano,” he says to her. But it’s closer to a question.

  Ellen shakes her head no. No, I don’t see a piano, Philip.

  “A piano!” the man behind the glass exclaims. “Wonderful! For you, Creation started with a piano. Would you believe me if I told you that I set up the bones of my dear friend there in front of a blank canvas, a brush in his fleshless fingers?”

  “Where are they?” Philip asks again. Angrier now.

  “You never know what you’ll find if you keep digging,” the man says, and this time his voice is cracked, a static that runs deeper than any faulty gear. “You know, many of the founding fathers were deists. They saw God as a force that had created the universe and then largely withdrew from human affairs.” Philip stares at the red paint. Sees a single, subtle wave wash over the instrument. “But did any of them stop to ask themselves . . . where did he go?”

  For the duration of a breath, it does look like the mummified Englishman is sitting before an easel. Then, just as quickly, he’s upon a red bench again.

  “I discovered Creation,” the man says. “Buried in a juggernaut’s sandbox. Or who knows, maybe it’s just the wind passing over the teeth in the skull of the world’s first man.” A momentary titter. Then, “Play for me.”

  Reflected in the metronome, Philip sees Ellen is shaking her head no. No, don’t play for him. No, don’t answer him. No, we should leave this place we should leave this place NOW.

  “Philip,” she says. And Philip sees she’s removed her protection. “It’s time to—”

  “Play for me,” the man repeats. “I’m curious.” He smiles and dust rises from his cheeks. “Only a musician would walk into a room as such, under the circumstances you were under, and play a note on the piano. You are a musician, aren’t you?”

  Philip doesn’t respond.

  “Aren’t you?!”

  Ellen shrieks as the voice distorts and rattles the sympathetic strings of the piano.

  “Where are my friends?” But this time Philip’s voice is weaker.

  He sees his own uneven features reflected in the glass, like there’s a monster in there, sitting beside the man at the console.

  “We must work in concert,” the man says, “or we don’t work at all. It’s magnificent, to me, that what you see is a piano. It’s amazing we see anything at all. I wonder, soldier, if it’s our mind playing tricks. I wonder if we cannot comprehend a sound with no source and so we invent one. Each our own way to stave off the feelings of futility for having tracked a sourceless sound. Now play for me a song. Any song. And I will tell you what has become of your friends.”

  “Where are—”

  “Do you know how long it’s been since I heard any music outside of my own? Do you know what that can do to a man’s mind, experiencing the same song, made by the brush of horsehair against a clean canvas? For me, Creation began there. As I child I painted
. And as a child, you played. Play for me, musician soldier. And I will give you what you want.”

  “The song will crush you.”

  The man laughs. “I’ve built quite a room in here. I’ve had a lot of time to get it right.”

  Philip approaches the piano. The corpse on the bench is slightly slouched and Philip now sees the strings that hold him in place.

  “Did you know that Creation trumps Destruction? Simple math.” The man is talking fast. “I wonder how long it took you to understand that. I wonder if you do now.”

  Philip sits down on the bench. Shoulder to shoulder with the dead Englishman.

  Will the man tell him where the Danes are if he plays? And if he plays . . . will he survive?

  In the metronome, he sees Ellen reflected.

  The wall of reels is spinning behind the man in the booth.

  The man removes his hooved feet from the console. He leans forward, eyes bright.

  In the metronome, Philip sees Ellen’s hand vanish into her bag.

  “Lovejoy,” Philip says, eying the keys. “You knew him.”

  “Not well,” the man says. “But a face to remember. I’ll tell you I wasn’t surprised to see him down here. We met in World War II. A London pub. It’s the one time I left this place, returned to the homeland. Got the equipment I use now. I daresay he was the only one to whom I told what I unearthed down here. The lone soldier to whom I revealed my discovery.” He points to the piano. For him, a canvas. Ellen, her back to the wood door, is injecting herself. “I regretted it then, but how could I have known how serious I was about carrying it out? How can any man know how serious he is about something he says he’s going to do until he does it?” He delicately taps the head of the control room microphone. “Philosophy doesn’t travel at the same speed technology does. It takes a man forty years to realize what it took his father forty years to realize. And what’s worse, he resists the truths his father’s come to know, until he learns them himself. Meanwhile, technology doesn’t wait. All a man has to do is add another piece to his father’s technological puzzle and the machines, the weapons, the means, are stronger. In the end you have an army with the same philosophy of the cavemen, but with the weapons of ten billion artless minds. Do you see? What I’m doing is right. I’m pushing back. I’ve discovered the antidote to war. To history. To the mistakes we repeat as a society and the ones we never learn on our own.” He laughs and his laughter is hail. “I told Lovejoy about what I’d found. I told him what lived down here and what I’d done to keep it. And we were drunk. Drunk as a man can handle. And I was empowered by it. My idea. This.” He points again. In the metronome, Ellen is using a second needle. “He had strange ideas of his own. More macabre than mine, I’d say. Probably why we got on. Two crackpots of war. I gave him a token, an armband. Our slogan.” Tears in his eyes. Ellen is crouching now, sliding down the wood wall. She’s using a third needle. “Every Good Boy Does Fine,” he says. “A fitting expression, I should say! The next morning I thought I’d lost the thing.” He pauses, as though his memory were made of mud. “Have you decided what you’re going to play? I daresay, Bach would be a joy. But ‘Three Blind Mice’ will do.”