Lady Churchill's Rosebud Wristlet No. 22 (4 page)

I thought about my mother's house, walking through the darkness. When I got there it would be the end of the day and maybe I'd have a daiquiri or a Manhattan, and maybe my mother would have one with me. I didn't really know if I wanted a drink, but it would be a kind of punctuation on the day.

I was at an intersection: traffic lights, four lanes wide plus turn lanes in all directions, waiting to cross, maybe only half a mile from my mother's house. A dry cleaner, a drug store, buildings all pressed close to the street without much space between them. A Ford pickup was stopped at the light in one direction. The sky was dark but still glowed purple and luminous the way it will some nights, especially before a tornado. A young unkempt guy with a beard sprinted across the light and an SUV coming around the corner fast lost it trying to avoid him and went up on two wheels as it started to roll over and everything froze in place. I could see the underside of the SUV, all that car stuff of struts and differentials and muffler and catalytic converter. I looked around. Time wasn't stopped. The DON'T WALK light was flashing and although things were frozen, it was imperfect, and after a moment, like the moment of a held breath, the truck floored it and went through the intersection past the frozen tumbling SUV. The guy running had only one foot on the ground, but his raised left foot wiggled back and forth on his ankle, as if he was finding his way to movement. A big orange sneaker, with a big white toe, waggling.

I looked at it all and I knew it was all right. It was only just beginning.

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Caleb Wilson

1. Ellzy Tarbutton loved the pulps. She spent her entire twelfth year (in what doctors assumed would soon be her deathbed) reading mysteries printed on the cheap, smeary paper. Her illness, which weakened and wasted her body but did not affect her mind, manifested in the form of marks and stains like a schematic that wriggled beneath her skin. She discovered them in the night, peeling back the sweat-stained bedclothes to poke at a swollen lymph node only to find herself covered in a living diagram.

Ellzy's steady diet of crime and clues kindled in her the desire for answers. She opened her first case the day she woke up suddenly cured, the aching, the rash, and the painful sensitivity to light all having subsided overnight. She jumped out of bed and threw open the window to fresh air she hadn't tasted in nearly twelve months, eager to solve the mystery of where she'd contracted the illness.

During convalescence Ellzy's hands had been too shaky to write, forcing her to invent methods of mental note-taking that would serve her well in the years to come. She had spent hours mentally recording in detail her life just prior to the fever's striking. Once recovered, she combed her mental files and the link appeared almost instantly—the night before she woke scratching and covered in black welts, she had lifted a floorboard in the attic to hide her private diary and discovered a pile of blue glass shards in the dusty cavity. A chip of glass drew blood from her fingertip. The cut itched and pulsed. The source of the contagion.

Case closed; of course others followed. During Ellzy's adolescence, no petty crime went unsolved on the Tarbutton's block.

Ellzy's father, a parasite who had moved to Baltimore after his late parents’ farm in upstate New York was bought out and razed to make way for an experimental utopia, and her mother, the second-rate jazz singer her father had married after she became pregnant, did not resist when their sickly, pistol-packing, crime-solving daughter left home in her late teens and rented her own apartment.

During the mid 1930s Ellzy built her reputation as a detective, along with the network of contacts and spies that had come to be known as “Ellzy's Army."

But she was always easily distracted. After assembling the clues to a case, arriving at a stage where she could swoop in and grab the killer and the glory, she would often turn over all her notes to a police detective. She spoke to her employees of sudden doubts about her profession, about the possibility of knowing anything at all; that it was crazy, Quixotic, to pair cause and effect with any degree of certainty.

When under such existential spells, Ellzy would retreat to her downtown laboratory and invent new devices to help in fighting crime. Her first invention that proved useful was the “Ellzy plate,” a multi-sensitive floor that bank owners could install in their vaults. The floor automatically recorded, on a rolling drum, data for each person who walked on it, including body heat, gait, presence or absence of a limp, weight, and heel versus toe pressure. After comparing this with data taken by having jailed criminals walk across a test plate at the Baltimore police headquarters (and those whom juries refused to find guilty, across a surreptitious plate sunken in the floor just outside the courtroom), Ellzy could tell with a ninety percent accuracy whether any particular bank robbery had been performed by a known criminal or a newcomer.

On one occasion, Ellzy was confounded by the information she read off the plate's data roll in the basement of a newly robbed bank. She abandoned the case and ran through the slush toward the hospital where her mother was committed. There Ellzy asked her ailing mother to confirm that she herself did not, in fact, have a twin.

Ellzy was very wealthy—from her reward money, it was generally assumed—but the banknotes stacked in safes around her office did not make her happy. Each case she solved left her feeling more lost and less aware of what she was searching for in the first place.

In 1939, Ellzy's fever returned, as it was to do every few months until she vanished from this world. Despite her debilitating palsy, she refused to stay bedridden, and to combat the running temperature that made her feel as though her flesh were melting from her body in ribbons, she took ice baths, which left her blue and shivering but freed her mind to run with a clarity she'd never before known. She came to believe that she was meant to solve the greatest mystery of all, the reason for humanity's existence (and by extension, her own).

More and more Ellzy relegated the contracted detective work to her lieutenants, who, under her vague if expert guidance, solved all manner of robberies and murders without her direct involvement.

By 1943, Ellzy saw the world as a jungle of gears, switches, and circuits. She felt webs of connection between herself and each other person who trundled through the streets of Baltimore as if on track lines. The webs formed a massive code, and the scribblings that cluttered her own body during the bouts of fever were, she believed, the key.

She began to build machines with no discernible purpose. They clicked and whirred in odd corners of her offices, peering out of shadows with reflective fish-eye lenses at members of the Army as they dropped off money, or took money to buy the increasingly strange supplies Ellzy required. Her minions claimed to be able to hear Ellzy talking, either to herself, or to her machines, late every night until the sun rose.

Accusations and dirty rumors filled the streets, with H. L. Mencken himself writing a column exposing the supposed perils of trusting women with police work. People said that Ellzy was the greatest robber of all, that she crept about at night, strength augmented by pipes and pistons latched to her limbs—dark illegal inventions that let her rip the doors from bank vaults like they were made of crepe paper.

The police raided Ellzy's offices early one morning in 1945. The evidence was indisputable: serial numbers on the bills in her safes matched those stolen in heists all over Baltimore, crimes she'd been unable to solve. But her offices were empty of life, filled to the rafters with dense tangles of machinery, dials that ticked and whirled, meters and spinning readouts.

The police detective leading the raid, a man named Edward Barksdale, ordered the building torched. When later asked to explain his actions, he claimed that nobody else should look at Ellzy's machine. The police captain asked why not—had Ellzy Tarbutton found what she was looking for? What was the purpose of the machine? And where had she gone? Barksdale insisted that Ellzy's machine was of a highly personal nature, being built from instructions “engraved on her own flesh” (incidentally raising some question as to how he was so familiar with Ellzy's flesh), and that she had indeed vanished in search of answers, but that in so doing, she had sacrificed everything.

Apparently whatever mystery Ellzy had solved was not one whose solution others, who had not paid her price, deserved to know.

2. Roger Townsend Rogers, born 1898 in Jonesboro, Tennessee, refused to follow any path that he himself did not hew. From a young age it was clear that he had a rare imagination. His father, a moody and foul-tempered man plagued with chronic tinnitus after attending a disasterous concert in Vermont some years before the young Rogers's birth, was generally uninterested in his son's wild stories, usually characterizing them as “lies” and rewarding them with his belt. Perhaps Rogers might have become an author, were it not for his dyslexia, which made reading and writing a frustrating chore; sadly, he also lacked all natural artistic ability when it came to manipulating the artist's pencil and brush or the sculptor's pick. It was not until 1920, after being forced from home and moving to Maryland, and with the discovery that would make him famous, if only to the tiniest sliver of avant-garde Baltimore, that he was able to translate the glorious pictures that crowded his mind into reality.

Rogers found in his pantry one August morning a loaf of bread, speckled with green-gray mold. Two circular colonies of mold were spaced as evenly as eyes, with a third and fourth looking like nose and mouth, creating on the loaf a crude upward-smiling face. Rogers, who was still queasy from the previous night's carousing, was struck by the similarity between the loaf's face and his father's; the one thing missing from the portrait was a bit of color. The nose, preferably, would be larger and a good deal redder. The cheeks, too, could be improved by the suggestion of a spreading network of flushed, broken-veined skin, and the eyes, as well, should be reddened to indicate the model's traditional bloodshot condition.

In a fit of inspiration he called on his good friend Francis Bardelon, a lifelong bachelor, who could always be counted upon to have five or six moldy foodstuffs in various places around his lodgings.

Bardelon joined the hunt for excitingly colored mold. Although it was Rogers who found a plate of angel-hair beneath Bardelon's bed, covered in dollops of crimson mold, Bardelon discovered, inside the trumpet of a phonograph, an ancient sodden cracker on which grew a golden, thread-like mildew. Rogers quickly recognized that this mildew, if persuaded to grow thinly enough atop the loaf of bread, would represent perfectly the scant hair of his father's sunburned scalp.

The resemblance of his father to the loaf, once the rouge grew from the nose and cheeks, the red pipes threaded the eyes, and the sparse hair had sprouted from the sides of the head, was remarkable.

At first Rogers thought he had found his medium, but soon he became dissatisfied. The mold, although brightly colored, tended toward round colonies, making it suitable for little more than pointillism.

For a brief period he experimented with propagating amoebas in dyed water, but they proved difficult to train; the collages dissolved within seconds. The paramecium was a more tractable subject, although it was impossible to wedge them closely together, or indeed to breed them in great quantities at all, which left his pictures faint and hard to see except under certain types of light.

After a year of further experiments, both with algae, which performed adequately but never matched the beauty of what he imagined, and with rotifers, which were too voracious and quickly devoured one another, Rogers found the perfect medium: the bacterium, which ran through generations quickly, allowing easy breeding of brightly colored varieties, and which were in many cases motile.

Much as an artist will spend hours combing the hairs of her brush to perfection or the writer ensures again and again that his stack of blank paper has straight edges before setting down a single word, Rogers bred and re-bred his bacteria over the course of the next six months without ever daring to paint with them.

But he could not stall forever. His first painting, in bacteria on a mica flake, was of a thumbnail-sized Garden of Eden. Magnified with a jeweler's loupe, tiny ocelots sprawled on emerald branches, herons stood one-legged around a droplet of a pool, lizards and frogs clung to the undersides of every speck leaf, and Adam and Eve themselves embraced in a glade of sphagnum.

Only one other man, the painter Arthur Dove, saw the painting while it lived. Dove was sufficiently moved by the miniature to sing its praises to everyone he knew before going back to New York City, and by the time Rogers was ready to show his first large-scale work, a modest buzz had swept the Baltimore art community, and he felt compelled to invite friends and colleagues to the unveiling.

Rogers had installed two panes of glass, flush against each other, measuring eight feet high by ten wide, into a specially shuttered attic studio. He had then introduced carefully designed cultivars of colored bacteria to the minuscule gap between the panes, bacteria bred to grow and mingle and wiggle into place to form their picture within a strict time-frame.

He was entertaining the guests downstairs, waiting for the painting to mature, when he heard his apprentice, a local boy named Tom Blake, cry out from above. When Rogers reached the attic, he found the bacteria blooming ahead of schedule, swirling and coiling into their magnificent living replica of a Franklin County field at night. The stars twinkled in feverish animation; the clouds kinked and spiraled as the bacteria glided between the panes of glass; the trees undulated as if rustling in a breeze.

Matters were only made worse when Blake threw open the shutters, which caused the bacteria to perform as they had been bred to on the introduction of light. This group consumed that one; the next moved to the frame, chasing the other to the corner. Before Rogers's eyes, the starry night dawned, first running awash in rosy ripples, then suffering the curls of indigo sky to be burned away by a languid sun that darkened as it climbed the sky from a pale lemon to a richer shade reminiscent of egg yolk.