The Magnetic Girl. Jessica Handler

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СКАЧАТЬ how did I get better, then?” Will asked. “Planets come down and make me well? According to my ma they did, but she wasn’t one to allow a doctor.” That was more than enough said.

      “Somebody went and put some money on the doctor. I’ll bet he had a damn fine horse and lived in a mighty nice house.” Bill Lee surrendered to the conversation.

      “Your fluids got balanced,” Harmony said, serious as a preacher. “You’re a lucky man. Some people need help with that, but you can do it alone, it seems. Some got it, some don’t. People who’ve got it strong have been known to kill a rabbit just by laying their hands on the animal. Magnetism comes through them and kills the thing right where it sits.”

      “Sounds like an easy way to get dinner,” Bill Lee said.

      Will rolled the dice around in his hand. What was that riddle, what’s lighter, a pound of lead or a pound of feathers? A trick you had to think about. A pound of feathers would have to be so much bigger than a pound of lead. Everything you thought you knew could be an illusion, until you applied reason. The bones of a bird are hollow. The shimmer over a flame is a gas.

      “I have the gift of observation,” Will said, giving in to the litany he’d been raised with. “It’s the way to heal and to lead our lives. We spend our infancy and childhood observing. A babe does nothing but observe and learn from what he sees. Where’s Mama? Mama is the first planet around which the baby revolves. Our gift of observation, even if we are not sighted but can touch and smell and hear, allows us to make men of ourselves. That’s nature, as planets and tides are nature. Observation of our nature—our magnetic fluids conducted by our nerves from electrical pole to pole in our bodies—is the natural path to righteousness.”

      Harmony would be gaping, he knew, but Will wouldn’t let himself look. Bill Lee? Same, most likely.

      His mother had taught him this, and she was dead, and she had been dead since he was a boy. He’d quit fantasizing about her alive somewhere, having merely run off to avoid what she called the death-like appearance. Her patients came to her looking that way, she said. And she cured them, one or two uncertain visitors in a month at first, then twice that many in a day, every day. Even Sunday. You want to thank God for your pain, she would tell them on those days. God’s given you a message and brought you here.

      There had been an earthquake when she was a baby, she’d told him once. All the world shaking as if Cerberus, the dog of hell, held our planet in his mouth. And look what came of it. Nature’s magnetic fluids scattered and sprayed and came to rest in her, bringing with them the gift for healing.

      Her health diminished until she died. That was the simple explanation in this real world. She didn’t go to Summerland, the afterlife from whence her spirit voices came. Her trembling hand on an acolyte’s cheek, her distorted vision gazing into a devotee’s future (the wardrobe door shaken by his father’s hand hidden behind, the curtains blowing on cue by his own paper fan waving from where he crouched beneath the sill outdoors) led to retirement from the hands-on trade, but the relief of human suffering remained her focus. Once bedridden, she put her talents to the page, producing a guidebook for those who would follow in her footsteps.

      The book was all he had left of her, and if he tried, he could hear her voice when he read the words. From expression comes splendor, she’d written. Hardly, he answered back. What splendor is there in abandoning the house in town, or a father dried up and useless without his wife, or sitting out here, day in and day out with nothing to do and nothing waiting at home?

      She excluded the idea of defeat from the book. Will had never seen the acolyte spurned by a lover and come to his mother to heal her heart. He only heard the rumors afterward: how his father had cleaned the bloodstains from their parlor floor, how his mother buried the knife the woman used to try and excise her own heart.

      “All people will ultimately reveal themselves as fools,” his mother said.

      Will crouched and warmed the dice in his palm, calming his thoughts. Sunlight was warm on his back. Sounds of the world around him vanished: no bird songs, no throat clearing from Bill Lee or Harmony. He slipped inside himself, at one with the rhythm of his own breathing and his heartbeat. An image of two double-spotted dice floated into his vision, a stereopticon card overlaying the real view of the planed pine board neatly placed in the black dirt.

      A planet’s brightness or its position in the night sky told his father when to plant and when to harvest, if a winter would be cold or mild. Electricity was an experiment in Europe, a factor in the telegraph, but not a magnetic liquid surging through a body. Will made no plan. He exhaled the word “four” in a whisper that he didn’t hear but knew he had said aloud. Then he threw, and his dice came up three and one. He rolled again with more precision than he had the day before. Two and two. Bill Lee whistled approvingly. Harmony nodded.

      Maybe his mother applauded him from somewhere in the ether. Maybe she waggled her fingers, and the Mesmerism she claimed moved his dice into a winning figure. Will rocked back on his heels, and the outside world opened up to him again. A catbird chirped a series of quick sounds, and somewhere distant, a horse whinnied. Will stood.

      “Gentlemen, you finally owe me.”

      Harmony clapped Will on the shoulder.

      “Congratulations, my friend, and welcome. Welcome to a new world, where poverty and the life of the lesser man is no more, where money is yours for the taking.”

      INTELLIGENCE HAD COME IN saying that Union troops were headed in from the West. Within a day, the cannon fire was audible. Will, Bill Lee, Harmony, and their fellow infantrymen waited for the order to charge. Bill Lee treated the pending skirmish like a bad joke. The big man dug trenches like a thresher, working his own and more than thirty feet of others’ until, without warning, he pitched his spade toward the horizon. The implement flew like a spear, raining dirt as it went, and Bill Lee stormed off to his tent.

      “Fuck it,” he said. “When they come, I’ll be in here. I’ve been waiting so long I’ll kill a dozen of them with my bare hands. I don’t need a damn gopher hole.”

      Harmony worked a trench crew, untroubled, cleared roadways through the brush for wagons, caissons, and, he told Will, ambulances. “We’ll see plenty of meat wagons, Mr. Force of Will,” he said. “Look around you at the regiments coming in. We’re going to see the elephant, alright, and it’s about damn time.”

      The elephant was battle; a huge, lumbering thing you couldn’t see around once it was in front of you. Will fully intended to see battle and emerge unscathed but for some romantic, painless scar, and vigorous tales unsuitable for mixed company. Months of relentless busywork, waiting, moving camp, and more of the same had worn the fight out of him. Add to that the weeks of playing craps, and he was nothing more than a homeless man weighted with debt.

      A trickle of sweat at the back of his neck rolled into his collar, taunting him to wipe it away. A cannon boomed, and the stink of gunpowder clung to the morning dew. When the cry to “charge” came from down the line, he wanted to vomit, but like a machine, like Harmony, Bill Lee, and a sea of men, Will ran forward. As if choreographed to a musical score, men fell ahead of him and behind. A man tumbled from his squealing horse and landed on Will, knocking him into the dirt. Will struggled to rise, pushing the man’s weight away just enough to get to his knees. The man’s face had been blown off: only a dark beard sticky with blood and an eyeball loose as a toy on a string marked it as a face. Will retched and ran, struggling to hold his rifle.

      He tried to spot Harmony in the churning mass of men around him, but everyone had become the same man. The earth had opened into a pit filled СКАЧАТЬ