An essay by W. M. Higgins, as provided by Meg Merriet
Art by Shannon Legler
For more stories like this, check out Mad Scientist Journal: Spring 2015!
Her melodies, no matter what song was requested, haunted the dreams and nightmares of mortal men. When the Nightingale sang, the sound of silverware and polite conversation dissipated until all you could hear was her voice, her father’s piano, and the gentle hush of the tide.
Her hair and face were painted on sheet metal. She wore a shapeless gown festooned in beaded applique and vectors of sheer fabric. In spite of her hard mechanical form, her delicate mannerisms looked human in the dim lamplight. As elegant as any woman, the automaton drew admirers from across the globe to the establishment known as the Lighthouse. The mechanical songstress made headlines as the Nightingale of Atlantic City.
Her question response system had been meticulously designed, but she did not possess any emotion or private thoughts. All the same, every weeknight after closing my shop, I went into the restaurant and ordered the cheapest thing on the menu paired with six or seven snifters of whiskey. Leonardo Vicaris played piano behind the pretty robot, his eyes rolling in the back of his head as he drifted through a sea of music.
Lance, a young freckled server with messy curls, knew me as a regular. He promptly delivered my minestrone soup and bread a few minutes after I sat down. I generally drank until the Nightingale’s last set had ended. If the joint were busy, I’d surrender my corner table for the bar. More often these days, I found myself at the bar.
The world was changing faster than most folks wanted to believe. The advent of sky transport brought people from all over the world to our little seaside town of vice. Wealthy men bought up the saloons and music halls and built towering casinos to profit off the recent surge in international tourism. Sky transport opened infinite possibilities. It was a new world with new dangers. You would hear about airships crashing into mountains or catching on fire during takeoff. Luddites became more common by the day, but I continued to tell kids like Lance that those types would disappear soon enough. Men with the greater technology have always prevailed.
One Saturday, I found Lance sitting at the bar. He had a boutonniere pinned to his vest and a sorry expression in his eyes. The Lighthouse was packed, and the waiting list for a table was up to three hours long. The restaurant had become a major site of tourism in Atlantic City. Sometimes Leonardo would allow perfect strangers to wind the key that powered the Nightingale. Anything to do with robotics and engineering fascinated the public. Some believed it challenged the existence of God. Others just wanted to turn the key and see the birdy sing.
“Whiskey neat,” I told the bartender as I grounded myself on a stool. I turned to the familiar face beside me. “What’s eating you?” The kid sipped a tumbler of clear liquid and coughed up the demons.
“I had a blind date, but she stood me up.”
“Sorry,” I said. The bartender brought my drink, and I lifted my glass. “Her loss.” I downed the whiskey.
“Everybody’s got somebody,” the kid sighed.
“Plenty of girls out there. As soon as you stop looking, one will fall in your lap.”
“You married, Will?”
“Yes, and believe me, I suffered my share of heartbreak before I found her.”
“I’ll probably have to marry that automaton,” Lance jested with a sour smirk.
“You should be so lucky. She was inspired by Leonardo Vicaris’s daughter, a remarkable woman, a woman who is nothing but a memory now.”
“He had a daughter?”
“A long time ago. That’s why the toy wears the old fashions. I was just a youth when I met the flesh and blood Cathy Vicaris.” The kid looked at me strangely, as if he couldn’t imagine me ever being young.
#
At sixteen years old, I had to find work to help my father out. By day I worked at a cotton mill with my old man, and at night, I was a bar-back at the snazziest restaurant in town, the Lighthouse.
Back then, the turnout was more low-key. If you had the money to dine there, you could actually get a table on a Saturday night without booking months in advance. Before installing the luxurious red carpets from India, the restaurant had hardwood floors. The chandeliers used candles instead of oil lanterns. The polished gold bistro tables and chairs were the same, but children were still allowed inside. Little girls could play with the fringe on the seats.
Cathy was a tender young woman with expressive brown eyes. Her hair was as dark as a raven’s wing, and she kept it pinned in a chignon with elegant finger waves rippling across her head. She wore a thaumatrope on a long chain. On one side of the pendant was a black bird, and on the other, a cage. When the pendant twirled it created an optical illusion of the bird in its cage. She often fidgeted with the necklace, coiling the chain around her fingers, flicking the charm. I loved to watch her, right up to the moment she caught me staring.
When she wasn’t onstage, Cathy was a troublemaker. She was a little bit older than me, but a child at heart. I would do whatever she wanted when she tugged my sleeve, smiling and whining until I agreed to her terms. I had a good thing going at the Lighthouse, and she made it her mission to get me to abandon my post and wreak havoc with her on the boardwalk.
“Tell Mr. Avery you have something really disgusting so that he won’t ask any questions,” she suggested one day. “Tell him you have the trots.”
“I can’t,” I said, aghast to hear those words coming out of a lady’s mouth. Cathy giggled and then made a desperately adorable pout. Unable to refuse her, I slithered into my manager’s office. Sweating and dizzy with nervosa, I shifted my weight and tried to remember to breathe. I had never played hooky in my life, much less lied to my employer.
“Excuse me, sir,” I said. “I am in a bad way.”
“What?” Mr. Avery asked, his sharp features growing sharper. I cleared my throat and reduced my voice to a whisper.
“I have the trots,” I said. My employer arched his handlebar mustache with a sneer. “You know, runny bottom. Loose stool. It’s volcanic, sir.” Mr. Avery scrunched up his nose and shooed me with his hands.
“Away with you, boy. If you’re not back tomorrow, I’ll find some new kitchen scum. Now scram!” I turned away from him and bounded down the corridor to the back door of the restaurant. Miss Cathy Vicaris stood waiting for me, stifling her laughter with both hands.
“I can’t believe you did that!” she burst out laughing when we got outside. “Away with you boy!” she snarled, imitating Avery’s nasal tone.
“Avery will be calling me boy ’til I’m thirty. But he’s not as bad as the foremen at the factory. They call me milady.”
Her hair and face were painted on sheet metal. She wore a shapeless gown festooned in beaded applique and vectors of sheer fabric. In spite of her hard mechanical form, her delicate mannerisms looked human in the dim lamplight. As elegant as any woman, the automaton drew admirers from across the globe to the establishment known as the Lighthouse. The mechanical songstress made headlines as the Nightingale of Atlantic City.
“Why on earth would they call you that?”
“Someone said that I laughed like a girl. The nickname stuck after that.”
“I think it’s cute to call you boy. Can I call you boy?”
“You?” I chuckled. “You can call me whatever you want.”
“Boy,” she addressed me. “Do you like cotton candy?”
“I’ve never had it before.”
“Never? Come on!” She rushed to the nearest snack cart and tossed the vendor a coin. The man dipped a paper cone into a twirling machine that spun sugar around the paper. Feathery pink tendrils caught on one another until he lifted a pretty cloud and handed it to Cathy.
She pinched off a piece for me.
“Go on, boy. Eat it!” I worried that it would feel like putting actual cotton in my mouth. The thought made my stomach turn, but I shoveled it in and felt the wisps of pink sugar melt into little grains on my tongue. It was the best thing I’d ever tasted.
We were madly happy together. We would jump the fence and sneak onto the merry-go-round, riding our favorite brass animals without paying a cent. Once the operator caught us and in a rage, he forgot to stop the ride before giving chase. Cathy grabbed my hand and we dashed through the menagerie of automated creatures, ducking under dinosaur bellies as they ascended on their poles, weaving between copper-plated turtles and ostriches that flapped their metallic feathers. We leapt onto the back of a turtle and flew to freedom on the other side of the fence.
#
The kid smiled, his eyes aglow with curiosity. Remembering Cathy made my eyes sting. I told Lance of how I spent my earnings on a photograph of Cathy and myself in front of the ocean a few months after we became friends. It became one of my most prized possessions, and I carried it always in my cigarette case.
“You were so thin,” he gasped, seeing the photo as he took one of my last two cigarettes. “Say, Will. What does your wife think of all this?”
“She …” I polished off what I believed was my third drink. “She never needed to know.”
“What if she sees the picture?”
“The day my wife takes up smoking will be the day I tell her about the girl in the photograph.”
“Ha,” the kid chuckled. “I have a feeling it will be the other way around.”
The first set ended and the automaton tilted its head toward the window and stared off into the stars. I gestured for Lance to follow me. We approached the Nightingale and Leonardo let us twist the brass key between her shoulder blades. I listened for the sound in her chest, a sound like pennies dropping. With a gentle whir, she craned her neck to face me.
“Hello, Cathy,” I said.
“Hello, boy.” She blinked her coppery eyes.
“She remembers!” Lance exclaimed, warm with inebriation. “Hello, Cathy,” Lance shouted with careful enunciation.
“Hello, garçon,” the automaton greeted. “Lovely evening.”
“Oh, how classy! Looks like she calls me boy, too, huh?”
“There is only one boy. He is boy. Aren’t you?” Perhaps I was transferring my emotions on the toy, but I could swear there was sadness in her eyes.
“Yes, Cathy.”
“But garçon is French for boy,” Lance persisted.
“Lance. Enough,” I said. “Thank you, Mr. Vicaris.”
The old man nodded without looking up from his sheet music. He turned the parchment with frail hands. Lance and I found our seats, and we ordered another round of drinks.
“Were the two of you in love?” Lance asked.
His assumption almost made me laugh as I remembered what an awkward fellow I had been. I was taller than a lot of men, but being so skinny all over, I couldn’t find properly tailored clothing. Nowadays I’d earned my girth running the saltwater taffy shop, but back then I might have slipped through the floorboards.
#
By the time I was eighteen, Cathy was twenty and had fallen in love with an engineer named Corin. He was despicably good-looking, like a cartoon man on a tin of hair pomade. This world traveler and inventor became smitten with Cathy the instant he heard her sing. Between her sets, he would regale her with stories of his travels by airship, soaring over the Temple of the Moon of Machu Picchu or swooping low into the Grand Canyon.
Corin sold toys made of brass and tin. They were complex wind-up birds that would chirp, flutter their wings, and crane their necks. The one he kept perched on his shoulder had an ocular modification that would every now and then flick a magnifying glass over its cobalt lens. Corin took advantage of the wealthy patrons at the Lighthouse. Anyone who showed an interest in his mechanical bird was referred to his vendor on the boardwalk.
When Corin’s business in Atlantic City was through, he gifted Cathy one of these elaborate toys as well as a device he called the ARIA, the Audio Recorded Instantaneously Apparatus. Like a victrola, the ARIA played records, but it could also record. Cathy carried it everywhere with her in a wicker briefcase.
If I got to the boardwalk before dark, I could catch her on a bench, using the ARIA at sunset. She and her beau exchanged love letters this way, but they could hear each other’s voices even after an ocean divided them.
I stopped bothering her then. I could see she was happy, and she didn’t need some boy meddling in her love life. As friends we drifted apart, and I came to accept that as a man’s wife, she would not be able to carry on a friendship with me. It would look inappropriate and possibly damage her reputation. I really only saw her once during this time away from the restaurant, when she invited me to her engagement party.
The Vicaris family had a charming middle class home not far from the shore. As I flipped the lock on the white picket gate, I heard swells of piano music emanating from the parlor. The sky reflected an orange glow from the horizon. Even from the porch of this little residence, I could smell the ocean. I briefly dreamed of what life could be like if Cathy had never met her engineer. She couldn’t have married someone like me with no fortune and no prospects, a man whose only wedding present was a box of saltwater taffy wrapped in newspaper.
The fiancé answered the door and shook my hand. His clothing was made of fine linens and brocade. A silver chain from his pocket watch flickered like a moonbeam.
“Good afternoon,” he said. His accent was distinctly French. “I am Corin Longchamps.”
“My name is Will,” I said. He led me into the main hall where striped wallpaper was accented by pale wood wainscoting. The silver plated installation in the middle of the room was impossible to ignore. Tin planets spun slowly around a large brass orb on a platform. Corin showed me how to pull a lever to send the planets orbiting the sun. As they spun at different speeds, a recording played from a victrola mount, amplifying the sound of the tide.
“Amazing,” I gasped.
“While Cathy and I were apart, I couldn’t sleep, couldn’t eat. I poured myself into my work and this is what came out of my suffering.”
I managed to slip away when a colleague distracted Corin. In the parlor, I found Cathy playing Chopin’s Fantaisie Impromptu for two elderly women. It was a perfect scene, and the powerful music set a tone of longing that I very much wanted to escape. I placed my gift on the piano bench and started to go, when Cathy stopped playing and rushed after me, catching me in her arms.
“Boy!” Her smile and her clinging embrace almost made me feel welcome again, but I hunched over nervously and pressed on her shoulders.
“Good afternoon, Cathy.”
“Let’s get you some cake.”
“I can’t stay.” I pointed to her gift on the piano bench. “I just came to wish you well.”
“Don’t leave,” she said, taking her present and pulling me into the hallway. “Who is going to help me with the cake?”
“I imagine Corin will.”
“He doesn’t eat sweets. Please don’t go. We can have a drink or two. We can all stroll along the shore, and you can get to know my betrothed.”
“I should not have come here at all.”
Cathy pulled the newspaper from her gift. Something about the cardboard box with illustrations of mermaids and aristocratic children got to her, and she had to blink back her tears. She kissed my cheek.
That was the moment I lost, the origin of my regret. It was the last time to walk together on the beach, the last time to share cake and champagne. Those adolescent joys slipped away, washed up by the ocean as the sun sank and a silver moon ascended.
Cathy’s illness puzzled doctors from the beginning, I explained to him. They kept her in bed, out of sight. She stopped appearing at the restaurant and I assumed she and her father had moved to France with Corin. Five months passed without any news, and finally I asked the staff as to whether Cathy’s wedding had happened. Nobody had any information, until I asked our event planner. He told me Leonardo had taken a leave of absence because Cathy had taken ill.
I rushed to the nearest wagon, begging the driver to get me to the Vicaris house. He refused me for the amount of money I had, but he said his friend at the stables might take pity and lend me a horse for that amount. I was no skilled rider, but when I mounted that beast, I kicked hard until he lunged into an infernal gallop.
My heart raced faster than the clomping footfalls of my steed. When I reached the house, I practically broke the gate. Cathy’s father tried to send me away.
“She wouldn’t want to be seen like this,” Leonardo coughed. In his eyes, I saw a man who was lost. He was struggling to maintain his composure.
“I need to talk to her. Please.”
“She refuses to eat. For months and months, she will not eat. Her teeth are rotting. She sleeps all hours of the day.” His words trailed off and he turned his back to me, walking inside.
Death’s presence was evident. The drapes were drawn, and a single oil lamp lit the main hall. Cobwebs laced the surfaces and sconces. The home was a shadow of its former brilliance, cold and unkempt; the house was already in mourning.
The stairs creaked beneath my boots as I headed up to her bedroom. When I found her door, I turned the knob and let myself in. Her drapes were closed, but the wraithlike fabric allowed enough sunlight–perhaps too much sunlight–to see her. There is a reason we hide our dead in the darkness of tombs.
Nothing could have prepared me for the sight of her. It was like opening the crypt of a fresh corpse. She was staring off into space, her jaw hanging open. Her body had shrunk tight around her bones, so tight I could see the heartbeat in her throat. When she saw me, she gasped and pulled her covers up over her shoulders. I saw the bottle of laudanum on the nightstand beside her. Her lips were stained black from the draught.
“I know you don’t want visitors, but I had to see you.”
“Boy?” Her eyes widened. I sat down on the side of her bed.
“I didn’t know you were sick.”
“I know.”
“I have to tell you something. If I don’t, I’ll regret it forever. It’s just. It is really hard to say.”
“You’re in love with me.” She extended a boney hand. I held it carefully, staring at her long translucent nails so that I wouldn’t be staring at her.
“You knew?”
“Of course, boy.” Her smile was strained, but it was there all the same. I didn’t know what to say. I wanted to squeeze her hand. I wanted to hug her tight and cry into the lace at her collar, but I was terrified that I might break her. She spoke a long time to me, her volume low and her words slurred. I made out what I could. “Corin is gone. I am just a useless thing now. I can’t sing. I can’t walk. I fear that when I pass, my father will die of grief. I have been his little songbird for so long.”
“You can’t go,” I stammered. I caught my breath between sobs. “My life was hard and cold until I met you. I never saw anything more beautiful in my life than when you were by your father’s piano. Unreal, that was.”
“You’re a silly boy,” she sighed, dropping her chin.
“Do you need to sleep?”
“Soon. Don’t go yet.”
“Do you remember that night at the pier?” I asked. Cathy gave my hand a squeeze. “After you finished your last set, I followed you there. You didn’t see me, but I was watching you lean against the railing as the tide came in. The little beads on your dress rustled in the breeze. They sounded like rain. I went to the railing a little ways away from you and pretended to be a stargazer. You told me that you were a magician, and then you removed your necklace. You spun the thaumatrope for me in the moonlight, and as it spun, as the images converged, it reflected beams of silver across the waves.”
“I remember.”
“I said magic could always be explained by science. Your magic was only an optical illusion.”
“Silly, silly boy,” she said, as she had said back then. “Science is just a language for understanding magic.”
“Yes.” I helped her remember her words to me that night. “A scientist could be the greatest magician in the world if he didn’t give away all his secrets. I disagreed with you. We debated, until you got so angry you told me to jump off the pier. And so I removed my coat and my shoes, and I jumped right into the water.” I chuckled, but my heart clenched.
“I was terrified,” she whispered.
“When I hit the water, the waves swept me into the pylons. The barnacles tore my arms and legs apart, and all the while I was freezing in those icy waters. I used all my strength to swim to the shore, where you were waiting. I remember crawling in the sand, on my hands and knees, shaking so violently I could hardly breathe. I vomited in the sand, and you came running. You helped me into my coat.”
“You stupid boy!” Cathy laughed feebly.
“Yes. You shouted that over and over. I thought that was the night I would tell you how I felt. It should have been. My father gave me a good lashing for ruining my clothes, and I certainly regretted jumping off that pier just to prove a point.”
“What was the point?”
“That I would do anything for you.”
She closed her eyes and took deep breaths. I set her hand on her chest, leaned forward and kissed her face. Her skin felt like a peach.
“I love you, William.”
I visited her every day. I read her Alice in Wonderland, an old favorite, and other charming children’s stories. These whimsical tales chased away her anxiety, if only for most of the time she was awake. The hardest part was knowing that she would never leave her bedroom again, but through the stories, her mind could explore every corner of imagination. She inquired about details that weren’t in the text, wanting to know the flavor of tobacco in the caterpillar’s hookah, or the material of Alice’s shoes. She died within three weeks of my first visit.
#
Looking on the automaton’s face, I wanted to pretend it was Cathy. It bore a mechanical resemblance to her, and around its neck was that same thaumatrope. Sometimes, I would feel so accustomed to the automaton that I would forget what Cathy actually used to look like, at which point I would have to look at my only photograph.
“Do you think Cathy’s soul lives on somehow within that automaton?” Lance asked me. I rolled my whiskey in the snifter.
“No. If I did, I would have stolen it long ago. Like I said, kid. That automaton is nothing but a memory.”
“That bastard Corin,” Lance cursed under his breath. “He didn’t even love her enough to be there when she was dying.”
“Death is complicated. Corin was weak, but he came through in the end.”
I told the kid one last story from those times.
#
I had just moved out of my parent’s home and had my own studio apartment on the boardwalk. The space was reserved for an apprentice for a taffy shop that I would one day inherit. I was learning all I could about the sweets my Cathy had loved so much.
My heart skipped a beat when I heard the knock. The shopkeeper was away on business, and nobody else knew me or cared to visit. I went to the door, slid the metal plate aside, and peeked out. Corin Longchamps stood on the other side.
I greeted him cautiously and led him into my empty kitchen. He threw bundles of vellum down on my kitchen table, hysterically ranting about voice samples and algorithms. I couldn’t begin to make sense of it.
When he didn’t stop rambling madness and continued to pace about my flat, I offered him the last of my whiskey, hoping it might calm his nerves. Politely, he refused.
“Imagine an automaton that could answer questions or perhaps even ask them,” Corin said suddenly.
“Like one of your birds?”
“I have samples of Cathy’s voice. We can bring a part of her back.” Corin had a wild look in his eyes that made me uneasy.
He unrolled one of the sheets of vellum. It was covered in intricate notes and sketches depicting a mechanical woman. There was something so ghoulish about recreating the woman I had loved as a machine. The project was appallingly similar to raising her from her crypt.
“Think of her father,” Corin pleaded. He must have seen that this mention of Leonardo had broken through to me, for he nodded emphatically and continued to expound upon the concept of a mechanical Cathy.
“What do you want from me?” I asked.
“You were her best friend. You know her favorite candies, her sense of humor, her greatest fears. I want all of that.”
I insisted we name her the Nightingale. I refused to refer to her as Cathy, as I still had trouble saying her name at all. The engineer and I put our differences aside and created something beautiful. Corin created the metallic shell and I filled her up with the depth of Cathy’s personality.
#
“So you helped create her? You made her call you boy?” Lance asked.
“I did.”
“How did the Nightingale end up back here at the Lighthouse? Didn’t Corin want her?”
“Corin wanted her, of course,” I told Lance. “But I convinced him of the terrible weight of her father’s loss. Corin and I were young men. We had the rest of our lives to fall in love and have children. But her father had lost everything. We wanted to give him some happiness with what little life he had left. I didn’t think we would hear Leonardo play piano here again, but once we gave him the Nightingale, he was able to return to his music.”
We watched Leonardo’s performance late into the night, drowning our sorrows in booze and stories. Through revisiting my own heartbreak, I had helped Lance forget his own. Leonardo played for hours after his shift had ended. He kept twisting the key and filling the room with song. I enjoyed the illusion that Cathy had never died, that she would bring her music to new generations for all eternity.
It is the magic of recordings, moving pictures, and mechanical brilliance. All one has to do is turn the key.
Confectioner by day, tinkerer by night, William writes as his way of coping with the loss of a dear friend. He emigrated from Ireland as a child and grew up working in a cotton mill, crawling under machinery and tying any strands that came loose during production. He now enjoys a leisurely existence in Atlantic City, running a successful saltwater taffy shop with his wife and daughter.
Meg Merriet is a writer of short stories, novels, and plays with an inclination toward gothic fairytales and gritty, dark narratives. Her short story “The Bedfellow” appeared in the Spring 2014 issue of The Antigonish Review, a journal published by St. Francis Xavier University. She currently resides in Jersey City and is developing the play “The Shapeshifter” for production at Art House. “The Nightingale of Atlantic City” is dedicated to Raven Kneally, who taught Meg how to climb gates, how to dance the “Twitch,” and all the joys of anime, video games, and reckless adventuring.
Information about Shannon Legler and her monsters can be found at http://shannonlegler.carbonmade.com/.