The Chemistry of Tears

pulling out loose leaves and laying them down on the table like a hand of patience, careless of the spilled jam and butter which polluted those exquisite lines which crossed the borders between one waxed sheet and the next, continuous, as in a map. I immediately appreciated that the assembled whole was exceptionally beautiful, but I was slow to recognize that what lay on my kitchen table was a close reading of Henry Brandling’s notebooks which she had presumably conducted in this kitchen and in Annie Heller’s lair. It was, like all close readings, very personal, but the combination of her mature talent and her relentless abstract logic had a quality I shrank from.

What if there are ghosts? I thought.

Amanda could not have been more than twenty-three years old but she had produced a detailed and graceful architecture all driven by her strong desire to find “deep order” amidst chaos.

It took some minutes to grasp that its visual hub was a plan of the city of Karlsruhe as Sumper had presented it to Henry Brandling—the city of the wheel, but also, as she noted boldly: “Home of Karl Benz.” She had sketched or traced a formal portrait of Karl Benz, ghostly in grey graphite, and beneath it she had written in a facsimile of Henry’s script: “Karl Benz looks back at the home of his childhood: blue mountains, a valley he wandered through, a valley well familiar to him with green mountains and foaming creeks, fir trees clinging to the cliffs and up above the small Black Forest village.”

She had made little Carl into Karl Benz. “Born 1844,” she wrote. Good God, I thought—can that be right?

This same earnest girl who had tried to prove the blue cube was a Christian cross had decided that the hull was a kind of wooden horse whose double skin had been produced to smuggle, not only a blue cube, but the “secrets” of an internal combustion engine, and these “secrets” she had rendered with such skill and care that it was almost impossible to believe they were not “true.” I know enough about engines to recognize the cam shaft and the valves and tappets, but there were also devices, and variations on these devices, rendered just as “truthfully” that resembled manufactured objects with functions one could not imagine.

I thought, she is stark raving mad. I also thought: am I too stupid to see this is a critique of the industrial revolution?

“Amanda, please.” I wished to gather up the pages, to take them straight to Eric.

“No!” She slapped my hand.

“Amanda, these are the parts of an internal combustion engine.”

“Duh.”

“And they are inside a hull constructed in 1854.”

“And do you have a good memory for what you have read, Miss Gehrig?”

“Pretty good.”

“I have an excellent memory,” she said, and took my hand and held it. I resisted the urge to pull away. “ ‘You are in the same state as a fly whose microscopic eye has been changed to one similar to a man’s. YOU ARE WHOLLY UNABLE TO ASSOCIATE WHAT YOU ARE SEEING WITH WHAT YOUR LIFE HAS TAUGHT YOU.’ ”

I began to speak. She cut me off. “ ‘You have no idea of where you are. You have no idea of what will happen here. In this very room, I promise, you will witness wonders such as have been never known.’ Do you know what that meant?”

“Amanda.”

“It meant that they will kill us all. That is what the machine is for. It is not the work of humans.”

With this fierce announcement she opened her sketchbook where I was confronted with those familiar sentences that begin on one end of the line and end with their toes on the edge of the abyss.

“This is Henry Brandling?” I asked.

“Of course.”

So clearly she had written it herself. She now carried her forgery to the sitting room where she knelt on the carpet beside me.

“Please,” she said, and held my hand again. I thought, the skin is the largest sensory organ of the body. It contains more than four million receptors. It is our skin that lets us feel the gentle blowing of air, our lover caressing our body. Our skin experiences our reading too, or at least it did in my case: covering me in goose-bumps as I read that eerie facsimile of Henry’s hand:

“And the filth shall spew forth from the depths, like black bile, like gall, and the ocean shall be as a mother giving wormwood from her breasts. The truth will be like a razor no tongue dare touch. A multitude of idiots shall flee back and forth on rivers of tar, an awful honking like generations of geese.” (Angus sat heavily. I thought, this is the first time he has really seen beyond her beauty.) “The cruel famines, the droughts—all will be enigma and injustice. And any who sees the truth will be called mad. Is it you, unlucky woman? Then you will be stoned and thrown into a moat.

“Mysterium Tremendum. There were ghosts, fabulous beings, but they were our enemies and we died, not knowing what had happened, all and every one.”

Amanda closed the book and clasped it to her breasts.

“Of course,” she said quietly, “none of this can possibly be true.”

I felt her despair and confusion like sunspots in my brain. Perhaps I was a blow fly. Perhaps this gorgeous creature was a genius. I will X-ray the damn thing, I thought, why not? Why wouldn’t I? No one will dare stop me.

Angus was curled up beside me. Amanda put her head on my lap and her filthy hands around my legs. “I am so tired,” she said.

And then the three of us are standing, crouching, united and I am not certain of very much at all, only that our essence is enveloped by the largest sensory organ, a universe itself, our human skin.

I hold Amanda’s hand as I once touched Matthew’s skin as I now touch his son’s wet cheek. Machines cannot feel, it is commonly believed. Souls have no chemistry, and time cannot end. Our skin contains four million receptors. That is all I know. I love you. I hold you. I miss you forever. Mysterium Tremendum. I kiss your toes.

Acknowledgements

The author wishes to thank Frances Coady, Sonny Mehta, Diana Coglianese, Ben Ball, Angus Cargill, Lee Brackstone, Hans Jurgen Balmes, Kate Ward, Eleanor Rees, Meredith Rose, Jenny Uglow, Marion Kite, Matthew Read, Jane Whittaker, Howard Coutts, Edna McCown, Susan Lyons, Paul Kane, David Smith, Robert Smith, Jefferson Mays, Thomas Mogford, David Thompson, Jon Kessler, Richard Powers, Patrick McGrath, Maria Aitken, Jack Gaiser, Garry Craig Powell, Quinn Slobodian, Stewart Waltzer, Elizabeth Estabrook and, of course, Charles Babbage.

A note about the author

Peter Carey received the Booker Prize for Oscar and Lucinda and again for True History of the Kelly Gang. His other honors include the Commonwealth Writers’ Prize and the Miles Franklin Literary Award. Born in Australia, he has lived in New York City for twenty years, where he is now the executive director of the Hunter College MFA program in creative writing.