Love Among the Particles by Norman Lock

Author:Norman Lock [Lock, Norman]
Language: eng
Format: epub, pdf
Tags: science fiction, fantasy
Goodreads: 16057327
Publisher: Bellevue Literary Press
Published: 2013-05-07T00:00:00+00:00

4.

I send Helen a pneumatiqué inviting her to accompany me to the Museum of Steam. It will be a supreme test of her affection, I tell myself as I ride the moving pavement north to that part of the city where the dynamos are in perpetual motion. The Museum of Steam is seldom visited even by aficionados. Admittedly, the entertainment to be found there is not the liveliest, especially as the steam on display is dead.

Helen is waiting on the steps outside the museum as I dismount. I tip my hat. She lifts her veil and gives me her cheek to kiss. I kiss it and, taking her arm, lead her through an iron door ornamented by rivets.

The door shuts behind us, and a folding fan of light leaves the floor in darkness. The floor, like the vestibule’s walls and ceiling, is clad in iron. Our shoes ring upon it as we walk to the counter. I ring a bell; and after a moment, a man appears from out the shadows of an adjoining room. He sketches a gesture of welcome in our vicinity and indicates that we should sign the register. We do, and I note that ours are the solitary names inscribed on its yellowing page. Stooped and shuffling, he precedes us into the next room, kept by chance or design in a kind of twilight altogether agreeable to my amorous mood.

He looks to be an old man, though his age may be an illusion created by the dusky light and the vapidity of the displays. Certainly, the skin of his masklike face is minutely lined. His head is hairless—even the eyebrows gone, sacrificed, perhaps, to steam in a livelier form than that captive in the museum he tends. His voice is dry, seeming to issue from an aridity that, like sand, draws all moisture into itself. The dry voice cracks during its recitation as he guides us among the exhibits with the slow and unerring movements of a somnambulist:

“Steam trapped during an eruption of Krakatau.

“Steam abducted from a bathhouse in Istanbul during the Young Turks’ uprising of 1908.

“Steam that escaped a rooming house on Cliveden Street, subsequently mangling passersby until it was captured by a resourceful tobacconist in a half-empty jar of Troost Special Cavendish.

“Steam reputed to have heated the private apartments of Gordon Lishkowitz while he composed his ‘Ode on Penury.’

“Steam that rose, unbidden, through a heat register, with indecent intent with regard to a young woman’s knickers.

“Steam that collected on the bathroom mirror of the notorious Mr. Craig, moments before his dispatching of his mistress with a cutthroat razor.

“Steam arrested, ‘in open defiance,’ during a railroad workers’ strike in Aberdeen.

“Steam seized in a shipment of noodles during the British embargo of Nanking.

“Steam, whose condensation on the lid of a tureen containing a fatal dose of belladonna survived a husband’s expiration and his wife’s inaugural moments as a widow. Her widowhood was cut short by the blade of the guillotine.”

I am, as always, fascinated by the

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