All Those Vanished Engines by Paul Park

harmonica, which he mixed with the fluttering of nightingale wings, and the rustle of a lilac-colored silk petticoat in the early morning—you could see this was a specialty item, very costly and rare. But the third type, well, that was the secret, wasn’t it?”
    â€œCostly” didn’t seem like a word he would use. We imagined it from an advertising brochure. He paused, cleared his throat, ejected some sputum into his handkerchief. We watched the pulsing skein of blood vessels under his translucent skin, the webs of veins on the backs of his hands. He said, “You know up at the top of the hill there was a foundry that made steel plates for the Monitor during the Civil War. This was like that—weapons grade. We had sounds that could break glass, even at low volume. With the refinements and additives, it would turn concrete to sand. You could put your thumb through a two-inch steel plate, after it had been permeated and submerged in one of the acoustic vats.
    â€œThat was the theory, anyway. Plans look good on paper. And we were working double-shifts around the clock. This was in the spring of ’45. You’d think now we could have predicted that the war was almost over. You could have thought we could relax, work on civilian applications. You could use the stuff to power anything in the right quantities. Generators, rocket fuel—Carusi was in charge of that. Years later he was still working. But none of the rest of us was thinking about those sorts of things. Even after Hitler gave up, we were working harder than ever. The entire plant was like a single machine. But then we got the idea of a new additive, a new sonic overlay. Just one new set of valves. Just a few decibels—I won’t tell you what it was, or how much, or what proportions. It blew the roof off when the sound ignited. A plume of fire in the night sky. It was four a.m., the morning of April 29. It had been a big week, and I was outside smoking a victory cigarette. A Lucky Strike. I used to read a lot of American history. I remember I was thinking about something I was reading, an explosion under the rebel trenches in Petersburg, Virginia. I opened my eyes, and I looked up and saw a jet of flame licking the underside of those low clouds. I don’t even remember hearing any noise. Something hit me. That was that.”
    And that was that. We knew what happened next. After the war, people patched together the old generators and went back to making steam. Later still, the whole site was abandoned, the tanks and valves left to rust under the ruined roof.
    And the blind engineer, we guessed, had also found himself abandoned, his own motors extinguished or removed, his own internal conduits left to atrophy and decay. Later, when we left him and returned to the museum, when we stood among the ganglia and synapses of tubes and valves, we could not but recall his vacant face as he looked up at us, transfigured and yet deflated by the pressurized escape of his own memories, which drifted like dust or flakes of rust around us as we watched.
    And here’s the larger context or construction: Shortly after my mother’s death I wrote the copy for a sound installation, part of a new permanent exhibit at the Massachusetts Museum of Contemporary Art in North Adams. The actual artist was a man named Stephen Vitiello. When I met him in a bar near the museum, I gave him a list of rhetorical devices, from which he chose onomatopoeia and, to a lesser extent, strategic repetition. Subsequently he made a recording of the text I sent him, adding layers of manipulation and always emphasizing certain combinations of words. Then he added many other kinds of sound, some industrial and some not. He separated the result into nineteen different tracks, which he combined with various lighting effects. Then he played the whole thing contrapuntally, in an endless loop, from speakers hidden in the actual machines, the three great boilers in a