The Organs of Sense by Adam Ehrlich Sachs

Author:Adam Ehrlich Sachs
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux

* * *

HE TUTORED PRINCESS WILHELMINA in one of her two fitting rooms until the evening star twinkled in the sky.

* * *

THEN, EN ROUTE to the Imperial Observatory, the astronomer, armed now with a Seville orange, and mindful of those old fairy tales his mother used to tell him in which things always occur in threes, stopped for a third time by the south turret, where, feeling not a little foolish, he declared to the darkness that he’d brought a gift, “a certain sour gift, I said,” the astronomer told Leibniz, and then tossed the orange between the iron bars. The next page has a sketch of the scene as Leibniz conceived it, above the caption: “The astronomer tossed a Seville orange into the south turret.” The astronomer said: “It rolled into the gloom like a head from the chopping block.” He put his ear through the bars. Perhaps (said the astronomer) he expected to hear an animalistic scurrying followed by the depraved devouring of that entire fruit, peel and all. But he heard nothing of the sort, nothing but the muted thud of the orange coming to rest against, presumably, the rear wall of the turret, followed by silence. He thought: So, then, I am not in one of my mother’s tales. And he had turned on his heels and made his way halfway back down the hallway by which he’d come, convinced now that the guards over whom he had to step, for they would not interrupt their card game, were guarding, whether they knew it or not, nothing at all, and concerned that he himself might be losing his grip on reality, if he was tossing oranges into turrets, and expecting something to come of it, when he heard what sounded like the striking of a match and saw, when he turned once again on his heels, a faint flickering light emanating from the aperture.

He ran back, wrapped his hands around the iron bars, and peered in.

The astronomer pressed an eye socket to his telescope.

He said: “I invite you to imagine my state of mind—and at this remove I shall have to imagine it, too—when I saw, sitting on a silver platter on the floor, all of its toothed wheels taken out and replaced by a single candle, the light of which shone through the holes where the lenses had gone, my father’s mechanical head, corroded only slightly from its spell in the river.”

He picked up his quill and wrote something down.

Evidently, he said, the head had been salvaged from the bottom of the Vltava—but at whose behest, Emperor Rudolf’s or Prince Heinrich’s, and to what end? Was this a gift from father to son or an undertaking of the son’s own initiative? Why, in short, salvage this head? The astronomer noted the return of a familiar question: Had he underestimated his father’s head? Misunderstood it? Yet if it was worth salvaging, why empty it of its innards, leaving only its inert lead skull? And had

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