All Those Vanished Engines by Paul Park Page B

duplicated the words, and finally variations of the same sounds in the natural world: birds and insects in the recently configured garden that surrounded the plant, still lush and green in the late summer. The clank of one of the cables that supported the Airstream, the hybrid sonic- and solar-powered space capsule that had fallen to earth above my head, and come to rest on a trestle at the top of the structure. People chatting in the garden, enjoying plastic cups of wine and cubes of cheese. Their tone was bright and sharp, their words impossible to distinguish.
    And of course I listened to the motion of the stream that ran through a concrete chute under my feet. No one noticed I had stepped away into the larger environment or installation. Standing on the bridge, I expected to feel a little sense of loss, like a small bulb suddenly extinguished, burned out or snapped off—25 watts, no more than that. It’s what happens when you finish something, in my experience. But I felt nothing, because the project is ongoing and the machine is larger, as you see.
    I leaned my elbows on the railing. I looked over toward the garden, the raised beds full of hollyhocks, among which, I imagined, the blind engineer had smoked his victory cigarette. And I also was thinking about the story he had told about the Civil War, only in more detail—the story was my own, of course. It had come from something I had read when I was working on the piece a few months before, around the time of my mother’s death, a book by a man named Colonel Eustace Peevey, a history of secret weapons projects, published in the 1930s when the author was an old man. Colonel Peevey was the type of writer more convinced by lack of evidence than by discovered facts, which are always subject to manipulation. The book itself was as much fantasy as history, especially his description of the Battle of the Crater, at Petersburg, Virginia, in 1864. In his version, the Union engineers had dug the equivalent of a railway tunnel under the Confederate defenses. Their plan was to drive a column of three colossal steam-powered engines into the heart of the city itself, and then attack during the ensuing panic. This strategy anticipated the battle tanks of the First World War by fifty years. But in its first and only deployment the lead vehicle, code-named Cetus or Grampus or Leviathan, caught fire and exploded, collapsing the tunnel and burying the machines forever. On the surface, of course, the results were identical to the effects of a gigantic mine.
    Despite years of applications, the author had been denied the necessary permits to excavate the great Leviathan. To him this proved the truth of his account. For my part, I admired the way a monomaniacal and paranoid idea could decay with age until it was itself an artifact, encrusted and frozen with nostalgia. And I had another, more personal source of interest in the story, because my mother’s grandfather had been present at the actual battle and had given lectures about it afterward. In the 1880s he had been awarded the Cross of Southern Honor by the United Daughters of the Confederacy. I liked to imagine that everything he told those ladies in their parlors was factually incorrect.
    Of course, as much as anything, this same idea had grown into the entire museum project, a seed that germinated like a mutant Damsel’s Rocket in the humid dirt outside the boiler house. I looked over toward the line of new saplings that had been dug into the riverbank there. Someone was hovering at the end of the bridge, and I smiled. She came up to me. “You know,” she said immediately, “he’s still alive.”
    â€œWho is?”
    â€œThe guy in your story. His name is Roy Whitney. He’s not blind, though.”
    She mentioned the Commons, which was the nursing home where my mother had died, the basis for the one in my text. Following a sequence that had begun with her grandfather, I had been thinking