Ophelia,
Drowning
“Dante Gabriel Rossetti. He is one of the most well-known artists of
the last century, and his well-known painting “Our Lady Of Liberty” stands in a
place of honor in the lobby of New York’s famous Federal-Metropolitan Museum. Yet it is amazing how little we know about
both Rossetti and the woman who inspired his most famous painting…” (Burnside, 24).
“Rumblings
of discontent in the USA More Severe”
(Headline,
the London Tattler, July 1st, 1858)
Dante
Gabriel Rossetti sits at a small table just beneath the large bow window of the
airship lounge and strokes his thin beard idly.
His eyes are leisurely as he gazes down upon the smoky fires of London
below, and the dark winding snake of the Thames. Across the table, his friend John Keats, Poet
Laureate of England, takes a sip of his tea and then nibbles at a cookie. Small fingerlike tendrils of steam curl up from
under shirt: his steam-driven lungs force his breath in and out of his nose
with an almost inaudible hiss.
“Do
they know yet who the next Royal will be?” asks Dante.
Keats
shakes his head. “Probably the daughter. I don’t care much for her…. She’s too serious,
like an old woman. Not a bit of fun in
her. And of course, I’m sure I’ll have
to come up with something for the ceremony.”
He winces.
The
two men fall into silence again, and Dante drinks his coffee. All about the two men, murmurs of
conversation. One recurring theme:
Victoria has been struck by an assassin’s bullet. The queen is dead.
Dante’s
eyes lift from the table and focus intently upon someone across the room. After a few moments of this, Keats turns his
head to see who interests him. He sees a
shapely woman with a long shock of bright red hair sitting next to an scarecrow
in a tie who is laughing much too loud.
Keats knows the man, a newspaper editor, and thus knows the woman, at
least by rumor. There was a cartoon in Punch
that featured the pair just a month ago.
“Who
is she?” asks Dante, his eyes unmoving, fascinated.”
“Don’t
know her name. But it’s a mech, you know
that, don’t you?” Keats asks
quietly. “Not flesh and blood, not a
soul. Just a rich man’s toy for a few weeks, then once the novelty is over, back
to the gutter with it. And good
riddance.”
Dante
doesn’t answer. He sees it now: the
overly-red hair, the false texture of the skin.
Not a she, but an “it”. Yet, over
the next few minutes, his eyes return to the mechanical woman again and again
as he memorizes her features. Later, as
she disembarks at Cheapside station, he watches her disappear down the
gangplank arm in arm with her companion.
I’ll never see her again, he thinks.
He
is wrong.
“The
first mechanical men, developed by Nicholas Cugot in the late 1700s, were
clunky box-like things. They were driven
by steam and had a simplistic thinking-box… good only for labor such as mining
and threshing… throughout the 1800s, as the technology developed, the machines
(called “mechs” for short) became more and more refined. By the 1830s, they could speak (albeit not
well) and looked more or less human. In
the 1840s, there was a computation breakthrough that allowed for mechs that not
only looked human, but could speak and act human as well… The lowest class of
society, they often functioned as laborers, servants, and prostitutes.” (Wikilogia, accessed October, 1936).
“We
declare that these so-called “Mechanical men” are abhorred by God, are nothing
less than machines, and have no soul…” (Papal Bull by Pius VIII in 1830)
“Pres.
Douglass Calms for Unlikely Calm
Both
Sides arming for possible war”
(Headline,
the London Tattler, July 2nd, 1859)
Dante
steps gingerly over a pool of standing water stained with rainbows while
holding his umbrella upright in his hand.
It has been raining steadily for a week now: there are reports of
several drowning deaths in the lowest districts of London, and dead and bloated
animals are everywhere. Dante would much
prefer to be at home working on his latest canvas, or working on another
sonnet, but he has to go out: he’s to give a lecture at the British Museum on
the Pre-Raphaelite movement with William Holman Hunt. The money is good, so that’s something, but
still… he thinks longingly of a canvas only half-filled as of yet.
He
hails a cab (a horse-driven one, as he abhors the new-fangled driving-mechs)
and jumps into the cab and folds his umbrella as he gives directions to the tobacco-chewing
man driving it. At the same time, a door
on the other side opens, and a woman leaps lightly into the seat and begins to
chatter instructions before she notices him and fumbles to a stop. Dante recognizes her instantly.
“I
am so sorry sir. I did not realize that this animal-driven vehicle was
occupied. I will of course immediately
depart and look for another one sir.
Again I apologize sir please forgive me.” She fumbles for the door handle.
For
a moment, Dante cannot speak, and his heart hammers hard at his chest. “No, of course you won’t. You go first, and I’ll ride along. I’m early for my appointment anyway.”
She turns and looks at him, and he
is struck by the handsome lines of her face and of the richness of her hair. “I am so sorry sir but I do not wish to
detain you or give you any trouble.
Please allow me to depart and find another cab”.
“In this beastly weather? I wouldn’t think of it. Please give the driver your location.”
The woman hesitates and then does so:
the cab-driver takes the instructions with a guttural grunt and after he has spat
a plug of tobacco out the window, the vehicle begins to move. In fact, Dante is rather later for his
lecture, but he is not thinking about that right now. Her hair, darkened by the rain, is full and luxurious,
and her lips are full and red. She
smells of olive oil, apple-vinegar, and burnt watermelon rind.
He gives her his name, and she
recognizes it, much to his delight. Her little mouth widens into a thin smile,
and she becomes a little shy when she tells him that she has “observed” his
paintings in a Mayfair gallery. She
gives her name as Elizabeth Siddal, and she puts out of her hand: it is overly
warm, but soft with the hint of underlying strength beneath the
pseudo-skin. They exchange cards, and
Dante tucks her into his wallet carefully.
They chatter a bit for a few minutes
until the cab reaches her destination.
Just as she is about to depart, Dante asks her if he can see her
formally some evening, and after some hesitation, she accepts. He at first chooses a restaurant, but she
reminds him that she does not eat.
Instead, he picks the London Zoo.
“I
have never been there. I am looking
forward to the experience thank you sir.
I will see you at the chosen location at the chosen time. I am never late unless I am forced by
circumstances out of my control to be so.
Goodbye sir.” She climbs down
into the muck (revealing slim and white ankles as she does so) and disappears
into the rain.
Only
then does Dante think of the time. Hunt,
who is never late himself, will be heavily annoyed by his not being on time
(again), but he can’t find it in himself to care. When he finally disembarks at the London
Museum station, he is whistling.
“Will
the South Secede? Will the Union break?”
(Headline,
the London Tattler, July 29th, 1858)
Dante
and Elizabeth wander through the London Zoo looking at the animals. Dante adores the zoo, especially the seals, and
visits often. Since he last visited two
months ago, some buffaloes from the faraway American continent have been added,
and he stares at them, fascinated: he’s always been interested in America with
its teeming hoards of Red-men. Liz is
mostly interested in the reconstituted Wholly Mammoth, but for Dante, it’s just
an elephant in a fur coat. She buys a
bag of peanuts not for herself but for the beast, who stuffs the whole thing
into his mouth, bag and all. Her
laughter is bright and bell-like: not natural, but not unfamiliar either.
Then
they are standing outside a bare cage.
Within, a Cugot F-10 from 1810, one of the earliest mech-men, walks in a
tight circle: the concrete floor has become notched in a circular pattern
beneath its treads. The crushing claws
that would make short work of the bars have been snipped from its appendages,
and the thing wears a heavy chain that keeps it from approaching the bars too
closely. The scent of burnt watermelon
coming from its seams is overwhelming, and the metal sides of the thing are
covered with rotten vegetables.
Elizabeth
is transfixed by the thing, and stands unmoving for long moments. Then a burst of incoherent hiss of high-pitched
mechanically-sibilant speech bursts from her lips. The F-10 stops and turns his head towards her
with the sound of grating rust. It
responds in the same speech.
Elizabeth
says something else. And then she says
it again. The F-10 starts to move again,
and does not look at her again.
Elizabeth
says little for the rest of the afternoon.
Even the seals, particularly playful in the warm summer sunshine, do not
amuse her for long.
“What
did it say?” Dante asks finally.
“It
said that it wished to die,” she tells him.
The
afternoon ends on that sober note. Yet
Dante goes home light-hearted because she has agreed to see him again.
“S.
Carolina pulls out of Union! Douglass Furious
but Impotent!”
(Headline:
the London Tattler, March 4th, 1860)
“North
Fires on Fort . Sumpter! The Bloody
Hands of War Envelope the USA!”
(Headline:
the London Tattler, April 1st, 1860)
“Mechs were not slaves. Legally in the 1850s, they were
considered mechanical servants instead. As such, they had no rights
and could be bought and sold on the
open market. On July 23rd, 1860, Rossetti purchased the service-mech 338A7148738ES named Elizabeth
Siddal from her owner for just over 200 pounds. Ironically, England
castigated the Southern part of the United States for its use of slaves, thus
drawing a firm line between “things” and human beings.” (Bergman, 127)
“President
Douglass Sends more troops South!”
(Headline:
the London Tattler, April 2nd, 1860)
Dante’s
second book of poems had just been published the week before, and Dante and Elizabeth are
cleaning up from the
celebration. The sunset makes orange smears across
the horizon, and a light breeze has been shaking the trees all afternoon. All of the guests have gone home already, save for old
Keats who was asleep on the sofa, and Ford Maddox
Brown who is smoking
a pipe with Robert Browning in the back garden.
Dante picks up a bit of cake intending to throw it away, and
instead, because he was happy and more than a little drunk,
he wipes a bit of green
frosting across Elizabeth’s Siddal’s
nose. She opens her eyes wide, and suddenly she was so beautiful, she takes his breath away. And so
he leans forward and kisses her unthinkingly. She was
stiff against him for a long moment, and then (as her programming took effect),
she fell
into his arms. She
tastes of sugared olive oil, and her lips are soft and warm.
“Jefferson Davis Elected as President of
the CSA”
(Headline: the London Tattler, July 3rd,
1860)
Dante
first tells her he loves her on a beautiful spring day. Her response
frightens him. Her eyes go absolutely blank, and she stiffens into a
Grecian statue. Her voice, when it comes, is grating, masculine, and
frightening.
“Access
to higher functions requested,” says the voice, and then says it again.
Then: “Requested… requested… requested… Are you Dante Gabriel Rossetti, owner
of W-Mech 38A7148738ES aka Elizabeth Siddal?”
“…Yes,” answers
Dante, confused.
“Please
repeat after me. The mechanical dog swims next to the biological
elephant.”
Dante
does so.
“Voiceprint
confirmed. You have requested higher-level functioning in this
unit. Do you confirm?”
“Umm….
Yes.”
“Be
warned that to do so voids your warranty. A small percentage of mechs dis-function upon higher-level activity
being activated. Please confirm once again that this is your wish.”
“I
… I
do confirm it.”
“So
be it. If at any point you wish to resume lower-level functioning, says
the following words slowly and clearly: red-persimmon-seven-one-six.
Please write
it down, and then repeat
it back to me.”
Dante
does so. “So be it. Your mech is being prepared. The process
will take some 20 seconds, and the unit will experience some
settling. Do
not be alarmed by this. Thank you for using our service, and
have a good
day.”
Elizabeth
begins to shake and run her hands down her arms in flurried motions. She
pulls at her hair and spins around several times. She laughs wildly,
throws her head back and screams, whimpers and blinks in fast succession.
Dante back away, frightened, just as she goes stock still once
again. Her eyes close slowly, and then she opens them and looks at
him. A wide smile appears on her face, and he realizes that her
eyes are more human than he has ever seen them before.
“Oh
Dante, I love you too!” she says, and leans in for a kiss.
“Second Battle of Bull Run ends with
South on Run
Thousands Dead on Both Sides!”
(Headline: the London Tattler, October
1860)
Dante
reaches into the water and raises Elizabeth’s hand and wrist slightly
above the water level of the tub she was reclining within. He walks around it again and again, here and
there,
and finally adjusts the green dress so that the
drenched material floated just right.
As
a model, Elizabeth is the best he’s ever worked with. She doesn’t complain about the temperature of
the water (which was quite chilly), doesn’t need to use the bathroom or eat,
and can maintain exactly the same position
for as long as her batteries held out (which was estimated to be about ten
years before needing recharging).
Done
with the dress, Dante begins fiddling with the foliage and flowers that surrounded
her.
“Who am I today, Dante?” asks Elizabeth, speaking behind her lips without
moving either her mouth or her eyes.
“Ophelia.
One of Shakespeare’s women. She goes crazy in the fourth act and throws
herself into the river.”
“Water
of this depth would not kill her, Dante. Although the coldness
would if she stayed in it long enough.”
Dante
does not respond,
his eyes on the scene he is creating. Then:
“Have you read Hamlet, Liz?”
“No, I have not.” Her eyes go
unfocused and roll up into her head for a long moment. “Now I have.
Such a sad story! ‘Good night, dear ladies, good night.’”
Dante
smiles at her and bends a vine just so. Elizabeth continues to recite from
the play using different voices for the various
characters as he moves about the bathtub. Finally, just around the
third scene of the fifth act, he bends forward and kisses her unmoving lips. “Hush
now,” he tells her, and he begins to paint.
“Shiloh falls to the South”
(Headline, the London Tattler, April 10th,
1863)
Being
a classicist, Dante is all too familiar with the story of Psyche and
Cupid. And yet.
It
is 5 a.m,
and the warm and unclothed body of Elizabeth rises from the bed and leaves the room. A
few seconds later, Dante quietly slips out of bed and follows her, keeping out
of her sight and hearing. For all the time he has been with her now, he has
never yet seen her unclothed in bed or in the bath, and she
will only make love in pitch blackness. And so he follows her into the
kitchen and he peeks
around the corner as she lights the lamp, and finally he sees her nude.
And
more than nude. This is what he knew: she was covered with an expensive
skin-like substitute that was both warm and lifelike. What he did not
know was that the parts of her body that were not publically exposed were
not. Instead, her entire torso from just under her breasts to her upper groin was
covered with some sort of soft transparent plate that left her insides exposed
to view: looking at her as she bent forward to light the candle was like
looking at the inside of a human-shaped clock.
She
does not see him, and he slips back into bed. The next night, he awakes from a nightmare,
and is soothed back to sleep by Elizabeth.
Later that week, Dante is in a bar, and a prostitute is coming on to him. Vision
of pulleys
and cold metals screws in
his head, he encourages her, and an hour later, they are tumbling around in her bed.
She smells of old sweat, smoke, and halitosis, and he relishes it. When
she gets up to piss nosily into a chamberpot, he sees her in her nudity, and thinks he has never seen a more
beautiful woman before. He tells her so, and she blinks bovinely at him
in a wondering way.
When he gets home and sees Elizabeth knitting
in the armchair in front of the fireplace, he hates himself. And yet within a month he is once again in another whore’s arms.
“Butcher Lincoln Burns his way to
DC! Bloody War coming to a close?”
(Headline, the London Tattler, Sept 1st
1964)
“Powering up …” Elizabeth says suddenly
in a sharp, clipped tone. Her eyes open
and she looks at the clock dully. Dante
would be getting home from his studio soon, and she had to get about making his
dinner.
“Got to stop this,” she says to herself. She had been doing this … blank, black time
far too often.
“It’s an addiction,” mutters Elizabeth
to herself. “Like a sodden drunken
whore, I am.”
Then, as she cuts potatoes and beef for
her lover’s stew: “I am not unhappy. I
am not unhappy. It is not possible for
me to be unhappy. I am but a thing, a mechanical
being in the vague shape of a human, a thing make of gears, screws, and
plastics.”
Dante arrives and they eat. Or rather, he eats, and she watches. Generally they chatted of the events of the
day, shared some funny story or another.
Tonight is a quiet, uncomfortable night.
Again. Elizabeth could not help
but notice the long blonde hairs upon his shoulders and that his shirt is
buttoned incorrectly. More than that, she
can smell the other woman’s secretions upon his body.
Dante yawns in an overly long and overly
loud way, and says he is tired, that he wants to go to bed. As he sets his foot upon the bottom of the
stairs, she asks him to make love to her.
“It’s been a long day, sweetie”, says
Dante apologetically, his eyes on the floor.
“Can I take a raincheck?
Tomorrow?” He goes up without
waiting for an answer.
Elizabeth watches the moon rise and the
stars begin to shine. “Powering down,”
she whispers, and her eyes go dim.
… Intended as a neural time-out somewhat
akin to sleep for a mechanical being, a time for events to be processed and
filed away in the memory-box in her chest … possible to overdo it, to “forget”
to come back... after a certain amount of time, it is irreversible…. (Newcombe,
117)
On the 32th day after “loss
of cognitive contact” and “loss of signal”, men in the famous red uniform of
Cugot Universal Inc. come to take out of her power source and thinking box. Elizabeth is sitting bolt upright, and the
light in her eyes is a dim green. She
has not moved or spoken in over a month, and there is a thin coating of dust
upon her thick red hair.
“It happens sometimes,” says the fat one
cheerfully. “They just stop. Nobody knows for sure why. You’ll get a replacement, so no worries on
that score. Less you tampered with the
cognition settings, of course, just as it says in the contract.”
With nimble fingers, he yanks her skirt
over her head leaving her breasts bare.
He taps here, here, and there, and her chest opens like a lotus
flower. Inside her chest cavity is a
large copper box, and he opens it with a key-like device. The oval battery hugs the spherical thinking
box within its center, and orange and red lights blink steadily in a subtle
panic mode. He reaches into her chest,
fumbling with the objects, and the light begin to blink more quickly. Then there is a shrill alarm which cuts off
abruptly as he yanks the oval from her chest, and tendrils that glimmer wetly snap
back into her chest cavity. The thin
light in Elizabeth’s eyes dies completely.
He slams her shut.
The fat man tosses the unit to his
partner and smiles. “That should do it,
if you’ll just sign here please.”
Dante begins to scream, and he does
not stop.
“The Butcher of Boston Gen. Lincoln Assumes
Presidency of US after Theater assassination of Davis! Former Pres. Douglass to Hang Tomorrow!”
London Tattler, May 24th,
1864
“ … A section of the famous cemetery of Highgate was
sectioned off from the holy ground for the disposal of the bodies of executed
criminals fresh from the Newgate gallows, pets, orphans, the destitute,
Catholics and other heretics, and also certain mechanical men after the reusable
parts had been stripped from them… Most ignore the proper name
of that section of the cemetery,
and simply call it “Lowgate”…” (Baedekers, London edition, 1865)
Dante stands amongst his friends and looks down upon the face of Elizabeth
Siddal. Her eyes, refusing to close, have been covered with a strip of cloth,
and she wears
Ophelia’s green dress. She lies in a plain wooden coffin, and her
beautiful red hair frames her face.
Holman Hunt stands next to Dante’s friend, Charles Dickens. The
two men, neither of whom know each other that well, shift uncomfortably.
“What’s he doing?” asks Charles in a whisper.
“He said that he wanted to give her a gift. His latest book of
poetry. The man is a bloody fool. It’s not like she’s ever
going to read it.”
“I
suppose it comforts him.”
“I
suppose it does. A hundred pounds would go a long way towards comforting
him as well. And he needs it, too, let me tell you.”
Charles
turns and looks at him. “You’re rather a cold one, aren’t you Hunt?
Never had a close one pass on you?”
“It
was a thing. A toy. Nothing more.”
Charles’
eyes are
on Dante, who was even
now slipping the slender book of
poems into the coffin beside her hair. “I wouldn’t tell him that, if I
were you.”
Hunt
chuckles under his breath. “I suppose
you’re going to write about this someday, famous novelist that you are, won’t
you?”
“I
wouldn’t be all that surprised if I did.”
The
coffin is closed
and lowered into the earth. The
mourners depart. A bit later, a gravedigger comes and fills in the hole whistling
“The old tin dog” as he works. Just as he taps down the last bit of errand sod,
the rain begins to fall.
“Union Prisoners hang by thousands
Lincoln releases “Bondage Proclamation”
Says Blacks are slaves forever”
(Headline: the London Tattler, January 3rd,
1865)
“Money, money, money!” mutters Dante as he gazes
out the window at the falling leaves. “Why don’t I have
it, where can I get it? Think, damn you!”
His
coat is torn
and stained, and his
feet, uncut
and unshod, are blue
with cold.
The house is empty of both furniture and coal, the creditors having taken
everything, and every little sound echoes against the whitewashed walls.
“If
I had the book, I could sell it. Even now they clamor at me for new
stuff. But nothing is coming. I’m bone dry of poesy, all the little
words flown away, gone away, just like her.” He picks up a broken china cup,
looks at it reflectively, and then hurls it against the wall. “I’m an
idiot. I was an Idiot. Even right now, I could be sitting at
a cafe looking at Eiffel’s monstrosity and drinking chocolate and coffee! And
yet there the poems molder away. A gift to her… A right fool, I was, and
she’d tell me that herself.” And then he stands stock still. The meager coal fire
throws his shadow thinly upon the wall.
“Unless…”
Lowgate
is well lit by torches and echoes with the sound of shovels.
The
mud-smeared coffin lays upon the grass, and Dr. Howell shudders. It
is not his first exhumation, never a pleasant duty, but knowing the
“corpse” was a thing of electricity,
wires, and pulleys somehow made it worse, not better,
and he wasn’t sure why. The hired workmen leant upon their shovels and
watched him, cigarettes stuffed with American tobacco hot at their lips.
One coughs long and deep in the silence, and Howell hears something deeper in
the sound. He’ll be in here himself sometime soon, the doctor thinks to himself, if
he doesn’t stop smoking those things.
“Let’s
get on with it,” he snaps, and the workmen lean forward with their chisels and
their hammers. The lid is thrown back and Howell steps forward
into the eye-watering scent of rotting fruit. Looking down, he is astounded by what
he sees, and he swears violently.
The
coffin has
been ransacked by resurrection men looking for valuable metals and alloys.
Every inch of her that could have been recycled by the body snatchers has been taken. The least
valuable things lay there still: her green dress wadded up a corner, long thin
strips of fibrous skin-material, a piece of rounded scalp with mounds of red
hair still attached, two ball-like things that were
probably eyes, and a slab of steel that looks to the Doctor’s practiced eye like
a broken and bent section of ribcage. Of the rest, there is
no sign.
Steeling
himself, the doctor leans forward and feels amongst the
knot of dusty red hair.
And then he has it in his hands. It is water damaged, but still legible to read by the
flickering torchlight, and he flicks a worm off it with a finger. Grimacing, he wrapps it in cloth and shoves it deeply into a vest
pocket. .
“Close
it up,” he says, and watches them with his hands shoved into
his pants pockets. Hours later, he thrusts the book at
Dante and walks out without a word.
“Keep
your damned mechs! We’re got our own Darkies!” says Lincoln.
(Headline: the London Tattler, December
27th, 1865)
“In order to protect the institution of black
slavery, President Lincoln forbade
the importation of any sort of mechanical servants…” (Richards, 41)
Dante is running down the street. Panting, he
rests again a red-brick wall and
inhales the stench and fog of London deep into his lungs.
People
passing see a derelict in a ragged beard and a ripped coat, not the
famous poet,
and they avert their eyes and hurry away. One of them
does not:
Dr. Howell who is on his back from a TB ward.
The two men recognize each other at the same time, and Dante leaps
forward.
“I
see her everywhere! Keep her away from me!” he snarls into the doctor’s
face, grabbing the front of his coat and pulling him close.
The
doctor winces and leans away from the artist’s stinking breath.
“Who?”
“You
know who, you son of a bitch! Liz, godamn it!”
The
doctor frowns at him, unsure of what to say. He starts to say something,
and then stops. He removes Dante’s hand gently
finger by finger.
“Where
did you see her, Dante?” He asks quietly. He begins to lead the artist away.
Dante
draws a long, low breath. “Every mech I see has her face… I’m so tired
of running from her, Howell…” and he slumps forward,
barely able to walk.
“Rossetti
was committed to an asylum for a period of six months while he went through
withdrawal from absinthe, cocaine, and other drugs. While
there, he was unable to stand the presence
of any sort of mechanical humanoid for long, and had to be cared
for by a human staff.
When he was released, he immigrated to America, and later in life, told his
biographer Sandra Jones that the lack of bio-mechs was the reason. “Here,
she does not haunt me, and I am free,” he told Ms. Jones. Within six months of
his landing in 1866 at Ellis Island, Rossetti had unveiled his famous
masterpiece, “Our Lady Of Liberty” and his American fame was assured.” (Richards, 197)
Dante
stands at the railing of the Neo-Zepplin as it pulls into New York ,
and he stares at the Statue of Liberty as
it stands against the setting sun. He thought he had never seen anything
so beautiful. As the boat became closer, the face became become clear.
“My
God,” he says, “my God.”
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