City of Lost Dreams (21 page)

by

Harriet Hunter, PhD

Si meruit mortem, quid vita in corpore languet?

Si non, morte gravi cur graviora fero?

AEqua sunt poenae and crimen pendenda bilance?

Haec non, vulneribus fortius illud erit.

Hey, if I was meant to die, wouldn’t I have kicked it by now?

Wouldn’t death be easier than some of the crap I’ve put up with?

Who came up with the idea that ‘you get what you deserve’?

I’ve gotten seriously shafted, and no mistake.

I
, Elizabeth Weston, wrote those lines. Without spell-check or a compubrain that does your taxes and watches your weight and reminds you when to wipe your arse. I wrote those lines using nothing but a quill pen, a pot of ink, and a piece of vellum that I hersed, scraped, pumiced, and limed myself from a calf named Mitzi. (You think you know suffering? What about life before dishwashers? Washing machines? Tampons? Vacuum cleaners? You have no idea. No idea!)

I wrote those lines before I knew what had been done to me.

But maybe I had always known.

As I’ve said, I had received the best education possible and I could speak the languages of many countries, and the language of math, of the spheres, of biology and chemistry as it was understood then. Of course, my understanding has changed over the years, the decades, the centuries. The language of alchemy has been dismissed and discredited, then picked up in egregious form and perverted beyond recognition. Geneticists, nanobiologists—nothing new under the sun! Philippine Welser lacked the proper equipment to develop her talent, but the ideas were all there. The desires behind alchemy are still with us. In us. The union of two into one. To change one thing into another. To understand the stars, and the stars in ourselves.

I have never stopped loving God. Each year God has become more perfect in my memory, more cherished. My old quarrels with God, the pain and anger I once felt, those have long vanished. God and I are One now. I might as well hate myself as hate God.

What had been done to me was the work of man—of one man—but I did come to understand that I was chosen for special work. I’ll get to that—be patient, it’s quite delicious. Let me stress that in the meantime I have felt God’s presence even in the worst of times.

When were the worst of times?

Well, the Reign of Terror was no picnic.

What would have happened if they had taken my head in Paris, as they did Charlotte Corday’s? Would my body have simply risen from the guillotine and stood upright, decapitated, and walked through the screaming mass of people? Would I have then become a kind of monster, a headless horsewoman? Or would my head have plunked into the waiting sack, and when tossed in some hole set about quietly regenerating a body, like a starfish with a severed limb? Both extremely fascinating possibilities.

In 1794—one of the greatest years of terror in the Great Terror—I had been alive for two hundred years and had become adept at managing things. As well as a woman could in those days, which involved trickery on a scale that was exhausting.

Through much of the late seventeenth century I had stayed hidden, in convents, where a surprising amount of thinking and experimenting could be done. Indeed, a convent was a kind of early think tank for women, since it was the preferred choice of intellectuals wanting to escape marriage. The food and the accommodations were less than five star—oh, the gruel that I have known—but the clothing was convenient. And although I had some very tempting opportunities, I did not indulge in any same-sex relationships during those years. I was not banging Hildegard in Bingen. I was a very private person, for obvious reasons. I couldn’t hide my age—or rather my lack of aging—for very long. Women are particularly observant of such things—you have no idea how many times I’ve been asked what my beauty secret is. Before Botox, I had to keep moving.

I did not seek love, or even affection, beyond the sustaining memory of my Portia, and I tried to keep marriage as a last resort, for the most desperate times only. But in 1747 I seized at what seemed like a golden opportunity. Charles was a homosexual, so he had no interest in forcing himself upon me. And he was an amateur botanist, so he had lab space in his castle in northern Ireland. He assured me that I would be able to continue my work, and in return my presence would provide certain protection for him and get his mother off his back. It was ideal. I could continue my work, and I would not be touched, nor forced to bear a child that would be born damaged.

Twenty years, that time. Twenty years of being able to work without interruption. I had long given up poetry in favor of pure scientific research.

And I had abandoned the quest for my stepfather’s book. What was my stepfather capable of that I was not? Had I not been the greatest poet of my age? Had I not been chosen to actually not have an age, but for
all
ages to be mine? Why should I not be as great an alchemist as any of them? There had to be more than one way to Fleece a sheep.

Why could I not raise the dead?

Yes, that was my plan. To raise the dead.

A good one, yes?

I had to prepare for complications. How to make the undead stay undead, for one. Suffice it to say, I had things to learn. And experiments to carry out. And I had to be ruthless in my pursuit.

I made great strides that last year before Charles died and the accusations of murder and witchcraft ran me out of Ireland.

Earlier in the century I had trusted the wrong person in England with my money (despite the lessons of Tulip Mania the cretin
still
fell for the South Sea Bubble) and my finances were rocky. To complicate my situation I then . . . miscalculated during a brief stay in Scotland (Loch Ness gained one additional monster) and another hasty departure was necessary. I went to Austria, and that was where I met Franz Anton Mesmer.

Mesmer. I knew him for what he was, instantly. He was like my stepfather, Edward Kelley. Not in looks, for Mesmer had both his ears, and Kelley neither, thanks to a razor-sharp brush with the law. But like my stepfather, Mesmer was a man who had discovered something and knew that he had, but had not been able to understand the very thing he had uncovered. It was making him insane, like it had my stepfather, because their madness was so close to truth. It was the other side of the coin.

Mesmer believed that the body, like the heavens, was bound by an invisible, electric substance. And that this substance could be balanced using music. He believed in a harmonic spectrum of the body, the music of the spheres. Human beings could be tuned, but it took a Master Tuner. People thought he was a charlatan, but I immediately grasped the potential power of what he had stumbled upon. Right before the long-sought answer to a problem emerges from the tangle of my waking dreams, I often feel an intense physical vibration. I felt this in Mesmer’s presence. I felt it when I saw him cure a young girl of an infectious lung disease. Mesmer always insisted that his cures would only work on conditions of the nervous system, but I began to see the ways in which the nervous system could be brought to bear upon all injury, all disease. Even, perhaps, upon the dead.

I got Mesmer to take me on as a patient.

“Tell me of your family,” Mesmer asked, in our first interview. “You have a husband? Children?”

“I have loneliness,” I told him.

“Ah.” He nodded. “And how does this loneliness manifest itself? Headaches? Nausea? Nervousness? Fainting spells? Dizziness? Pain in your joints? Fever?”

“Regret,” I said. “It is an acid in my veins.”

Eventually I became his assistant, though he was quite paranoid and proprietorial of his methods. I learned to play his glass armonica, a series of glass plates on a spindle with a foot pedal to set them spinning. I even suggested some improvements for its design. Mesmer didn’t like that I played it so well. He accused me of sabotage, of stealing his secrets. This was a lie, though I did eventually steal his armonica. But he was long dead by that point, and it was just sitting in a museum in Vienna. Sometimes I think of him and play a little tune from “Annie Get Your Gun” on it in his honor: “Anything you can do—I can do better.” There, my dirty secret is out. I love show tunes.

Mesmer understood electricity and its role in the human body, and as I had come to see it, electricity must be the key to reanimation. (I mentioned this idea to Mary Shelley and she ran with it.) I learned a great deal from Mesmer before he was driven out of Vienna.

I went to France, too, but I felt I had milked the Mesmer cow dry and turned my mind in other directions. I had been in correspondence with Marie-Anne-Pierrette Paulze, wife and laboratory assistant of Antoine Lavoisier, the celebrated chemist. A smashing good
paille-maille
player, Marie was—the game that took the world by storm as “croquet.” The Serena Williams of her age. We passed many a happy hour. I helped her translate English documents to French, and vice versa, and worked with Lavoisier on the element nitrogen, even suggesting to him the name for it—“azote” or “lifeless” in Greek. Then came the Terror, and Lavoisier’s death. I went to Denmark.

The days, years, decades marched on. I moved from place to place, creating identities and then burning them as people began asking too many questions. I set up laboratories or worked in the laboratories of others. Mostly, of course, I had to work on animals. But opportunities did arise.

I made some important breakthroughs during World War II.

More decades passed. Science made huge leaps forward, and so did I. It became easier to work as a woman alone, to order the necessary equipment. I reached out to other women scientists from all nations and fields of knowledge—history, philosophy, astronomy, genetics, physics. I began to see possibilities beyond what I had imagined before. I do believe I have come full circle.

F
or this last stage it became necessary to employ an assistant for a specific task that I could not do myself. I went through a couple of interns before I got to Harriet, who has many qualities that make her particularly fit for the task and who has
more or less kept it together throughout our association. I do not consider her addiction to be entirely my fault. Her mother is evidently quite the souse. These things are hereditary.
been a great help to me and is a brilliant mind in her own right.

I do hope her novel is successful. It will be lovely to see my early work in the literary arts restored to fame. Perhaps some heartsick teen will sing one of my poems on YouTube and I will go viral.

But, darlings, trust me. You ain’t seen nothing yet.

TWENTY-FOUR

“T
he lab will be locked,” Sarah said to Nico on the way over. Their taxi passed operagoers massing in front of the Staatsoper for a production of
Die Fledermaus
.

“Please do not insult me,” Nico sniffed.

Sarah didn’t bother to hide her excitement from Nico. There was always a risk in taking Westonia, but she had gone as far as she could using other means and things had only gotten more confusing. On Westonia she would see who took Bettina’s laptop and—with luck—where it had ended up. Then it was just a matter of getting her hands on it and delivering it to Bettina. The last obstacle would be removed. Bettina would not be able to put off helping Pols anymore. No more excuses.

But beyond all that was the anticipatory thrill of taking Westonia. The drug was the ultimate rush. Who knows what she might encounter if . . .

No. She would stay very focused. No looking out the window and trying to find Beethoven. It was time to get high and then get out of town.

At the lab, Sarah stood lookout while Nico removed a toolkit from a very beautiful brown leather satchel. “Bespoke,” said the little man, patting the bag fondly, “and still in good condition despite its age and the fact that I once had to wrestle it away from a lunatic camel in Morocco. My relations with the animal kingdom in general, it must be said, have not been easy.”

He had the door open in about three seconds.

Someone else must be taking care of the rats, Sarah thought. The brown specimens were all still in their cages (minus the one that had gone kaput during her last visit) and the place was clean and orderly.

“Okay.” Sarah rolled up her sleeves literally and metaphorically. “I don’t want to go back hundreds of years. Specifically, I’d really like to avoid a plague.”

Nico produced the pill from his pocket and placed it on the table between them.

“You displayed remarkable control the last time,” he said. “Just remember that this is not time traveling. You are expanding your awareness. So think of what you want to be conscious of—think of Bettina and the laptop—and move slowly. Please remember that if you start running I will not be able to keep up with you, and that without me the likelihood that you will run into traffic or into a wall or hurt yourself is very high. Remember Sherbatsky.”

As if she could forget. She had seen her beloved mentor Absalom Sherbatsky on Westonia walk out a window to his death.

“And I know your Latin is horrible,” Nicolas continued, “but you are familiar with the phrase ‘quid pro quo’?”

“We want the same thing,” Sarah said. “We want a cure for Pols.”

“Perhaps we need a leash,” Nico fretted, turning away to lock the door.

Sarah picked up the pill and bit it in half. She put the remainder in her pocket.

Hold on, Pols. I’m going to figure this out.

 • • • 

S
he was plunged—almost instantly—from the relatively calm sounds and sights of Bettina’s rats hanging out in their cages to the sight of the siege of Vienna by Turkish invaders, which had apparently involved a lot of rape along with the usual screaming and blood and hacking of limbs. The vertigo was intense and she appeared to be floating. Sarah tried to get out of the lab, found the door locked, and managed to rip the doorknob off the door, a feat of strength that pleased her immensely, before Nicolas tackled her to the ground. He actually sat on her chest. She could see him, through a thick veil of smoke. Vienna was burning.

Max. Where was Max? He had kept her sane on Westonia, he had helped her. Nico was just muttering, “Don’t scream, don’t scream,” over and over and pestering her to describe what she saw and she didn’t want to. Max had told her once to find the music, hadn’t he? Music. That was what kept you sane. Sarah shut her eyes and listened and then she found it. A series of single notes, played over and over. They sounded so familiar, and so peaceful, a ringing on glass, a frequency that made her feel calm.

 • • • 

W
hen she opened her eyes, there was Mesmer, in a violet frock coat, sitting at an armonica. Bettina’s lab was now a room filled with wooden pews like she had seen Marie-Franz teach in. Mesmer was surrounded by a group of men in powdered wigs.

“This is what I played,” said Mesmer. “To bring her through the crisis. And then I removed the last wrapping from around her eyes. I stood before her and bade her look upon me. Her first remark was, ‘That is horrid. Can that be a figure of a man?’”

The remark was met with general laughter, and Sarah laughed, too, shoving Nico off her and standing up. “It’s okay!” Sarah shouted. “It’s Mesmer. I think he’s describing how he cured Maria Theresia von Paradies of her blindness.”

Nico started to speak, but Sarah shushed him.

“My dog Anselmo was brought before her at her request,” continued Mesmer to the circle of gentlemen. “And she said, ‘The dog pleases me better than the man. His looks are far more agreeable!’”

This, too, was met with laughter, but Sarah saw that Mesmer hadn’t really intended this as a funny tale. He was intent, elated. He was offering proof of his cures. Sarah had read about Mesmer’s cure of Maria Theresia a few days earlier, after she had heard Marie-Franz’s lecture.

Maria Theresia had been blind since she was four years old. Every doctor had been consulted, and no expense had been spared. The girl’s father was a courtier at the court of Empress Maria Theresia, and the empress had taken a special interest in her namesake, who despite her blindness was a remarkably gifted pianist. After trying everything—which included bleeding and thousands of applications of the eighteenth-century version of electric shock therapy (Leyden jars and wires)—the girl’s parents had brought her to Mesmer. He had taken one look at the spastic eye rolling (and probably another long look at the equally spastic, quarreling, and melodramatic parents) and insisted that the girl live in his home while he supervised her care.

Nico was just not getting how completely fascinating and extremely relevant all this was. He kept going on about laptops! Which, sure, a part of her understood was vaguely interesting, but she wasn’t sure why. The people around Mesmer were leaving now, although one younger man remained. Mesmer was packing up his armonica.

“Maria finds noses very amusing,” Mesmer was saying to his colleague. “She has a beautiful laugh.”

“Herr Doktor, I must warn you,” the younger man was whispering, “there are rumors circulating . . . the girl’s father . . .”

“He is worried that the empress will no longer favor Maria,” Mesmer cut in. “And he will lose the stipend she has been giving him for his daughter. And the mother is a hysteric. Those two are the source of her blindness. They and the doctors that have been torturing her.”

“But the girl has been examined by the committee,” the younger man said. “And they did not find the results conclusive.”

“They were asking the wrong questions!” Mesmer exploded. “Asking her to name objects. Of course she was confused! Names are difficult for her still. She cannot reconcile what she is seeing with what she was feeling before. The names of colors—she has to relearn this. Even perspective. Yesterday we walked in the garden and she thought the rose trees were walking along with us, and the house was moving forward to greet us, rather than us approaching it.”

“But she cannot play,” the companion insisted. “It is this that worries the father.”

“It worries her, too.” Mesmer stopped and fingered the small pouch that hung from a cord at his throat. “This is the crisis that we must push past. She is melancholy from the new sensations. The sight of her hands on the keyboard confuses her. She told me she was more peaceful in her mind when she was sightless, but I have told her over and over again that the music will return. It is simply too much knowledge all at once. We are limiting her exposure now. All shall be well.”

“Vienna is talking—”

“Vienna is always talking. You cannot hear the birds for all the gossip.”

“They say you have personal reasons for keeping the girl. That you . . . that you and she—”

“Personal!” Mesmer exploded. “What I do, I do for science!”

 • • • 

“S
arah
!
”
Nico was shouting.
“Pollina!”

Pollina. What she was doing, she was doing for Pollina. That was why Mesmer was important. Why didn’t Nico understand that? Oh.
Laptop.
Yes. There was something else.

“Bettina Müller!” Nico shouted.

Sarah turned her back on Mesmer and took a deep breath. Bettina Müller. Laptop. Twenty-first century. Lab. She could do this.

 • • • 

“A
nd how are you, Hermes? You’re looking very fit!”

Sarah turned to see Bettina Müller tap on the cage of Specimen #134. She was here. She had found her.

But it was hard to know
when
exactly the action she was watching had taken place. She had only seen Doktor Müller for a few seconds at the ball. Her hair was the same—heavy bangs and a severe pageboy—though now she wasn’t wearing her thick glasses or the bright lipstick and rouge. She looked younger. Had she come too far back?

And then Bettina took her hair . . . off.

“Didn’t see that coming,” Sarah muttered as Bettina tossed the pageboy on her desk. The doctor’s own hair was sparse and very blond, almost white. It didn’t look like a buzz cut—more like premature hair loss, or perhaps the result of chemotherapy? Bettina opened the cage of Specimen #134. The rat slunk to the back of the cage and made squeaking noises, vibrating its tail.

“Don’t be like that,” Bettina cooed. “After all I’ve done for you? You have more gold in you than your average rapper. Show a little gratitude. And don’t even think of biting me or I will remove your teeth.”

The rat rolled over on its back, its paws curling and jaws open.

Bettina laughed. “Oh, so we’re playing dead now? I know that trick. Come on.” She held up a tiny harness. “Suit up, Hermes. It’s showtime.”

“Sarah, what are you seeing?” Nico pulled on her hand.

“Bettina is bald and she’s trained her rats to submit to blood samples.”

Hermes rolled over and reluctantly climbed into his harness and Bettina inserted him into a kind of trap on one of the lab tables that kept him immobile while she stuck a tiny needle into him. After this, the rat hung limply, but his eyes, Sarah could see, followed Bettina’s every movement.

The doctor put the sample onto a glass slide under a microscope and began humming and then singing softly to herself.

“She’s also a terrible singer,” Sarah said. Hermes seemed to agree. He was twitching miserably in his harness. Bettina flipped open her laptop (
there
it was!) and began typing something rapidly. Sarah looked over her shoulder, but could make no sense of the data. Numbers, percentages.

Hermes squeaked loudly.

“Oh, shut up!” Bettina snapped at him. “You would have been dead of a nasty little autoimmune disease years ago if it hadn’t been for me. And now you’ll live forever. I could literally cut your head off and you’d probably just crawl around headless for eternity. Actually . . .” She smiled at the rat, who went very still.

“Nico,” Sarah said softly, “this isn’t . . . this isn’t good.” Bettina was singing again. Sarah recognized the tune now. It was from Leos Janacek’s opera
The Makropulos Affair
. An opera about, among other things, a singer who was granted immortality because of an alchemical experiment during the time of Rudolf II. Sarah had never seen the opera, but she remembered Sherbatsky playing it in class, and telling her about a famous production at the Met in 1996, when the tenor had suffered a heart attack while climbing a ladder onstage and had fallen to his death after singing the line, “Too bad you can only live so long.”

Sarah was very close to either passing out or puking. Bettina didn’t have a cure for Pols; she had a cure for death. And Bettina—she could see it in her face—was as twisted as a strand of DNA, as full of dark matter as the universe. Sarah had been played, and played well. If Bettina wasn’t Moriarty—and she very well might be—she was definitely a modern-day alchemist, binding telomeres with gold. The alchemists had always been looking for a way to turn base metal into gold, and had sought the Elixir of Life. It had taken a couple hundred years for the techniques of science to catch up with intuition and speculation, Sarah thought, looking at the rat in his harness, but it had been done.

No more death.

Even if she could get her hands on this research, she wouldn’t be bringing Pollina a cure, she’d be bringing her a curse.

She had failed.

“Sarah, talk to me.”

But Bettina was putting the rat into a pet carrier now and rinsing out her slides. She flicked the computer off and, grabbing the bag with Hermes in it, left the lab.

“Bettina. We have to follow her,” Sarah said dully. “Come on.”

 • • • 

B
ut once on the street, things got confusing again rapidly. Sarah was witness to a horrifying scene of a man being bludgeoned to death. At first she thought she had stumbled into the twentieth century, as the man was being taunted for being a Jew and she saw a yellow emblem on his frayed coat, but then she realized that it was a yellow circle, not a star, and from the clothing she guessed she was somewhere in the sixteenth century.