The Smiling Clockwork Thing

The thing is made of gears and springs and cogs and things.  It stands like a man, it shakes hands like a man, but it smiles nothing like a man.  When it smiles, it shows bolts and electrical wires and mechanical innards, no teeth, no lips.  And it smiles broadly, as though the girl, Ramona, might actually be impressed.  It takes much more than an animated mechanized man to impress a girl like Ramona.  She sips champagne and stares at this smiling clockwork thing and says to its alchemist creator, “I see nothing of magic.”

When the old man smiles, his teeth are crooked and yellowed and, in some places, rotten, but they’re human teeth, like those of a real man, and they blend perfectly with the cracked lines of his face and the tatters he dons as clothes.  The rest of the market bustles and shifts and dances and barters and drinks and all those things markets do, but for the old man, the self-proclaimed alchemist, all but two things in the whole universe have ceased to exist: his creation, and the girl Ramona, daughter of a nobleman, a girl with cash, a girl sipping expensive bubbly French wine.  “A mechanical man requires much by way of magic,” he says.  “You must blend the herbs and the metals perfectly, at just the right temperature, lest you end up with something too brittle, or something too soft.  You must rub the oils of your fingers, your sweat, your blood into the gears.”

“It’s gears,” Ramona says.  She’s really looking at the thing, too, examining the exposed insides where the final plates have been removed to show, looking closely at the gemstone eyes.  “Those aren’t diamonds at all,” she says.  “That’s glass.”

“Of course it’s glass,” the alchemist says.  “Have you ever tried to look at the world through diamond eyes?  They fracture everything.  You couldn’t see any better than a common housefly.”

The mechanical man extends its hand to shake.  It speaks in a stilted, electrical voice, pronouncing each word too precisely.  “Hello.  My name is Stan.  I am at your service.”

Ramona does not shake hands.  She says, “My name is Ramona, and you are not yet my servant.”

“Ramona,” the mechanical man repeats.

“Tell me something,” Ramona says to the mechanical man, almost whispering into the holes that serve as ears on the sides of its smooth, ovoid head.  “Tell me something I don’t know.”

“Cyclones in the northern hemisphere,” the mechanical man offers, “rotate counter clockwise.”

“Something else.”

“Oxygen is the eighth element.”

“Something else.”

The head moves, the glass eyes rotate, and the mechanical man says, “I like the tattoo on your shoulder.”

Ramona steps away from the mechanical man and turns again to its creator.  “That’s science,” she says.  “Not magic at all.”

The old man shows his worn teeth again.  The expression would almost be friendly if not for the underlying current of exasperation and, quite distinctly, annoyance.  “Perhaps if you believe in such things as science,” he says.  “But could your science give it breath and dreams?  Could your silence make it feel?”

“Does it feel?”

“Stan,” the old man says, turning and looking up into the eyes of the mechanized man.  “What do you feel, right now?”

“Right now,” it says, “I feel curiosity, and embarrassment, and remorse, and love.”

“Remorse?” Ramona asks.

“Remorse is an ill-fitted word,” the mechanical man says.  “It would be better, perhaps, to say that I feel contempt at myself for being less than a flesh and bone man.”

The alchemist frowns.  Ramona says, “I don’t think I expected that.”

“Neither did I,” says the alchemist.

“I feel despair,” the mechanical man says.  “And hope.  I do not believe I was meant to feel such combinations of emotion.”

“You’re just a machine,” the old man says, “shaped by my wrench and soldering gun.  You cannot feel all this.”

“I do.”

“Because of me?” Ramona asks.

The mechanized man turns its head, as though looking away coyly, and says, “Yes.”

Ramona takes another step back, crosses her arms, scowls for a while, and asks the old man, “How much did you say you wanted for this smiling clockwork thing?”