Page 77 of Life Out of Order

Clare: I hunch under my umbrella on the sidewalk in front of a gray metal security door, trying to find Beck’s name on the list of tenants. She’s invited me to her studio in this immense warehouse building in Pilsen. Failing to find any Rebecka Charles, I phone her and soon hear footsteps clanging down a metal staircase. Beck greets me, and I follow her up stairs and through a maze of hallways to the last unit at the end of a long cinderblock corridor. She presses her fingers on a sensor, then stares into an iris scanner, and the locks click open. “Welcome to the Museum of Lost Souls,” Beck says, with a welcoming smile and a hand flourish that reminds me of a friend of Richard’s, an Italian violin restorer who always hams it up for Alba’s benefit.

Beck pulls the door closed behind us; it shuts with hissing finality, like an air lock. The studio is enormous, with exposed brick walls and old wooden floors that still show signs of having been covered in linoleum. There are tall windows with blackout blinds and the ceiling has been painted black, so the room is dim. There’s a strange contraption in one corner of the room. It’s a half sphere, about twelve feet high (maybe more, it nearly touches the ceiling), made of metal rings or tracks. It reminds me of a geodesic dome, but doesn’t have that triangular pattern: The rings parallel each other and are crossed by an inner set of rings perpendicular to the outer set. There are cameras attached to the rings, facing inward, so many that I give up counting them. On the floor in the center of the sphere is an X marked with silver duct tape.

At the far end of the room there’s a huge wall of black rectangles on shelves, with small blinking lights and garlands of colorful wires. I realize that these must be servers. Dozens of fans blow loudly, swiveling in and out of sync with each other, but the studio seems to have its own infernal climate. Outside it’s a drenching, chilly day, but in here it might as well be July. I take off my raincoat, and then my cardigan. Beck is wearing a short-sleeved red tunic and a long skirt. I feel underdressed in my T-shirt and wool trousers. She sees me disrobing and says, “Sorry it’s so warm! I’m used to it, so I forget to mention it. Can I get you a coffee?”

I say sure and she disappears into the tiny washroom to get water. I wander. Beck is very neat, and there are not many things in the studio: a few desktop computers, stacks of moving boxes huddled together at the far end of the room, two tables and some folding chairs, a high wooden stool, a bunch of flattened cardboard boxes in a pile behind the tables which hold some books, a few notebooks and pens, coffee-making paraphernalia and Beck’s laptop. In a corner are paint cans, rollers and trays, wadded-up tarps. I notice that the room smells faintly of fresh paint. All the windows are open, and a cool breeze rattles the pull chains of the blackout blinds. I stand next to a window to alleviate the server-induced warmth.

“How long have you been here?” I ask Beck when she reappears.

“Just a few months. I was waiting for my servers to arrive from Detroit.” She pours water into the coffeemaker and measures out coffee.

“You’re a minimalist. I’ll be ashamed to show you my studio—you’ll think I’m Francis Bacon.”

Beck looks a little alarmed. “I’m not usually quite this minimal, I just haven’t completely unpacked yet.” She gestures at the pile of boxes. “All those are full of books. But I don’t have any bookshelves yet.” She finishes puttering with the coffeemaker and flips the on switch.

I see something else I didn’t notice before sitting on a sculptor’s stand behind the table. A garbage bag is draped over it, and I think it must be a clay sculpture she’s preventing from drying out. “Are you sculpting?”

Beck laughs. “It does look like it. No, that’s something I’ve been working on since I came to Chicago.” She scoots around the big table and pushes the wheeled stand to the middle of the floor, next to the sphere contraption. She steps on a button on a power strip on the floor, and a bank of bright spotlights go on, whump. I squeeze my eyes shut, then cautiously open one: Beck whisks off the plastic and behold, there is a clockwork head.

“Wow,” I say. “Did you make it?”

“No,” Beck replies, grimacing. “I hired a grad student to make it, but I’m not too excited about the result.” The head is all gears, wires, circuit board, electrician’s tape, some wooden bits and a lot of what looks like porcelain. It is human-head-sized and -shaped, though earless. I walk around it and stop when I find the face. Two camera lenses stare blankly where there should be eyes. There is a hinged jaw with springs and dentures which hangs slack, showing emptiness instead of a tongue and palate; there’s a small speaker more or less in the location of the tonsils and a tiny microphone at the base of the throat. The overall effect is very steampunk.

Beck takes out her phone and taps for a minute. There is a quiet whirring, then the jaw shuts, the eye-lenses swivel and focus, the whole head turns toward me. “Hello, Clare DeTamble!” it says in a clear, girlish voice. The movements are mechanical and not lifelike, but the voice is uncanny.

Beck rotates her hand at me, say something. “Hello,” I say. “What’s your name?”

“My name is Isadora Hardwick.”

“I’m pleased to meet you, Isadora.” I glance at Beck to see if I should keep going. She nods, holds up her phone and puts it in her pocket and her hands behind her back. “Have you read any good books lately?”

The head takes a moment to consider this question. “Why yes, I have!” it says brightly.

“And what did you read?”

“I read Little House on the Prairie! I read The Cat in the Hat! I read Where the Wild Things Are!”

I pause, trying to think what the natural next question would be if I were talking with an eight-year-old child instead of a clockwork head. “And which was your favorite?”

Whirring, silence. “They are all my favorites?” the head tries.

“No, Isadora, only one can be your favorite,” Beck says firmly.

“Only one?”

I open my mouth to let it off the hook but Beck holds up her hand, stop. The head says, “What is your favorite, Clare?”

“I like Where the Wild Things Are,” I reply.

“That’s my favorite, too,” the head says very sincerely.

“Why do you like it?” I ask.

“Max is my favorite. Max is a wild thing. I am a wild thing.” The head is expressionless, but the voice is enthusiastic.

“What other wild things do you know, Isadora?” Beck asks.

“No wild things? You are a wild thing?” the voice ventures.