The Autonomous Girl

The boy arrived at the electric fair every evening at eight. She would dance at eight thirty, which gave him time for a hot dog and a bottle of cola. He would stow the bottle in the breast pocket of his overalls while he handed a dime to the idle pitchman. Then he would pass between two colourful banners. 'Miracle of Science' said one: 'The Inventor's Forbidden Treasure' replied the other. Within the empty tent, he would hop onto a crate at the back that had once borne oranges from San Francisco. Before the crowd filtered in, he would eat his hot dog and, prising a loose plank, drop his depleted bottle into the crate. It had fallen dully, then sharply, then with the reverberation of a great shivering lattice.

At eight thirty the pitchman would call a final rally and, stragglers corralled, drop the tent flap. The lamps would bloom, the curtain would rise, and there would stand the Autonomous Girl: lax and limp, lifeless features welded into her face's insoluble cast, knee joints encircled by jagged-edged skirts, their overlapping tulle wrought with the vermiculate patterns of metals both precious and base.

The pitchman would bound up, crank in hand, and, with effort, build within her life's momentum. She would regard the audience mechanically to the left, then mechanically to the right, and then the gramophone would crackle into a triumphant waltz.

She began in deliberate movements of uneven rhythm, before trotting to the stage's extremity - returning uncertainly on the piston points of her toes, as if, conscious of her fate to outwear motion, she was resolved to ration her store. Her reticence would hold, though gramophone would insist, and, a self-burning phoenix, she would find the fluidity clockwork had winched within the reach of man; conducting sinuously until the music floated into a reverie, whereupon she would venture a yawning arabesque, her skirts slipping along her kerosene-burnished thigh. She would suspend the crowd (hooting and whistling) upon the precipice of carnality; then she would leap, abrogating her flirtation with a lash of reserved tension. But the boy was not the crowd. He saw no votive apogee, only another like-step in her zoetropic succession, and within that succession he searched for a deeper communication.

One evening she would seem as remote as the boats that crawled across the Sound, made of fragile light and half-drowned foghorns and other people's dreams. The next she would be as the ornament of some glorious edifice, a Diana made lively; the shadow heads below looking how he imagined the streets must look from a skyscraper, as though he alone had breached the smog clouds to discover her supernal show.

It was her inflections, he reasoned. Contagious sorrow, perhaps, betrayed by a tremble in the hoisting of an ankle or in a seizing held a semiquaver too long. Or else suffusive joy, overbrimming in a jaunty tilt of her chin upon its gimbal or the superfluous flourish which crowned a gyroscopic pirouette. The sum of such elements moved him: watching her, he would well with anticipation for the coming century, or else fall, lost within himself, beset by the hungry cog teeth of yesterday's republic.

Finally and fatally, she would unwind; dissipating against staccato pricks, which she fought, failingly, until she was once again inanimate. There the curtain would fall, and the boy would return to his tenement - no recollection of having traversed the iron streets. Having scrubbed his soot stains and loosened his calcified hair, he would lie on rusted box springs, ruminating in the wretched heat, hemmed in by the tread of the family above and the growls of trolley cars from the thoroughfare below. Life was a series of factories, he thought, and in the dance factory her unchanging face was foreman, a sphinxian idol for a machine world: ever nickel-plated skin and moulded-copper lips and eyes as impassive as carbon.

One evening, the boy arrived at the tent to find the banners furled and the entry pitchman-less. He felt his own unwinding. Expending the last of his momentum, he went on inside. There he found a girl perched on his orange crate. She had buoyant curls and curious eyes. Her complexion was pale and blemished, and her lips were chapped and pink. She wore a simple dress that had been torn and repaired and repaired again. She looked like a girl he might pass in a stairwell or market alley.

"Hello," she said. And her cheeks dimpled as she smiled.