Last Year

EPILOGUE Magnificent Ruins —1889—

Long ago, in his first letter from Illinois, Jesse had described the towers of the City as “an architecture fit for angels.” And in his last letter he had written, “They will make magnificent ruins.”

And he was right, Abbie Hauser thought. The prophecy had been fulfilled with remarkable speed.

Ten years and more had passed since Jesse’s final communication. During that time she had often resolved to make this visit, and for years she had put it off, distracted by her situation and the daily business of coping with it. And while she dithered, both she and the City had grown old. Her bones ached on winter mornings, her digestion was irregular, intimations of mortality intruded on her thoughts. And the City of Futurity had been given up to wind and rust and nesting birds.

“Is that it?” Soo Yee asked. “There on the horizon?”

Their carriage crested one of the rolling mounds that passed for hills in this part of Illinois, on a road that had once been smoothly paved but had been crazed and broken by seasons of sun and ice. There it was on the horizon, the City of Futurity, dark against the pale opacity of an October morning. Two man-made buttes, as if the Illinois bedrock had lifted its arms to the heavens. Abbie tugged her shawl and sighed. “Yes.”

“Like gravestones,” Soo Yee said.

“Memorials, perhaps. Not gravestones. Phoebe and Jesse aren’t dead, Soo Yee. At least, I don’t believe so. They’re just—not here.”

They were not dead, but this was the place where they had left the sensible world, and that was why Abbie had wanted to come. She carried with her Jesse’s last letter, written under the letterhead of the City, on crisp white paper made soft as cloth by years of handling. She didn’t need to look at it. She had committed it to memory long ago.

Several carriages and an omnibus arrived in the courtyard inside the pitted wall of the City.

Abbie had arranged to join a guided group tour, organized by the Women’s Auxiliary of the Illinois Grange and consisting mainly of females. It was an end-of-autumn tour, at a discounted price. The weather was chilly, and low cloud obscured the heights of the two immense towers; but the summer crowds were absent, which Abbie considered a benefit. She left the carriage and joined the crowd of thirty or so women assembling around the hired guide, a young man who worked at the City on behalf of the Union Pacific Railroad, the nominal owner of the property.

Doris Vanderkamp had arrived on the doorstep of Abbie’s Boston family late in the summer of 1877, bearing the letter and three gold coins. Doris had impressed Abbie as less virtuous than Jesse wanted to believe, and those coins had once, quite obviously, had many companions, now absent. But a certain Christian charity of spirit prevented Abbie from resenting the theft, if it could be called that. Doris, an unmarried woman in a perilous world, had surely needed the money more than Abbie ever would. And Doris had faithfully delivered the letter itself, which was more precious than any coin.

“The towers are tall,” the guide said, “but you ladies needn’t worry that they might fall down. They are built around steel skeletons and are immensely sturdy. Buildings constructed in the same manner are rising in our big cities even now. Soon enough, structures tall as these may be commonplace in Chicago and New York! Join me as we enter the lobby of the nearest tower.”

The tower’s doors and windows were dark in the long October light. The buildings had been damaged by artillery fire in the long-ago siege, and a wind like the breath of Boreas blew through their many gaps and hollows.

Abbie and Soo Yee hung back from the crowd as the guide began his work in earnest. First they passed into the grand lobby of what had once been Tower Two, a room as big as a cathedral but cold as the autumn prairie. In its heyday these spaces would have been heated and illuminated by electricity and filled with astonishing displays. The original contract, which Mr. August Kemp had signed with the railroad, had provided for fuel and spare parts to be left behind after the Mirror was closed, to allow the City to operate as a tourist attraction for a few years more. But that genial agreement had come to grief in the City’s final confrontation with the forces sent to arrest Mr. Kemp. Whatever had not already been stripped from the buildings by Kemp’s men had been looted or vandalized by the victorious troops, or shipped off to the Smithsonian Institution in Washington.

Of course, the building was an astonishment even in its present condition. Its current owners had attempted to replicate some of its former glory, with recreated models of airships, crude wood and plaster dioramas, and murals, less than expertly painted, of the so-called world of futurity. “Not our futurity,” the guide was careful to point out, “as even our visitors were willing to admit.”

“Where were they from,” Soo Yee asked in a whisper, “if not the future?”

Supposedly, from another leaf in some great (perhaps infinite) Book of Worlds, a book in which each page was an instantiated moment. Which meant—Abbie had given the subject much thought—no moment every truly ceased to exist. Every “now” was inscribed in a vaster Now. “The mind of God?” Soo Yee asked.

Soo Yee had lately joined a church, at Abbie’s urging, and her question was in earnest. “Perhaps so,” Abbie said.

“And the people who built this City, all those adulterers and Sodomites, they knew how to travel through God’s mind?”

“Some say they learned the trick from others, wiser than themselves.”

The tour did not include the high parts of the Towers. There had been attempts, the guide said, to restore or replace the original mechanical elevators, but not even Mr. Thomas Edison’s people (on loan from Menlo Park) had been able to find a safe way of doing so. The stairs were intact, and special tours were sometimes arranged for the physically fit, but such a climb would of course be too strenuous for the ladies. However, the guide said, photographs taken from the famous Observation Deck could be purchased at the conclusion of the tour.

Abbie supposed at least some of the fairer sex might have been willing to attempt the climb; but she was, admittedly, not one of them, not with the persistent dull pain that had lodged in her hip this last year. The views were said to be incomparable, but she would leave the Observation Deck to the athletes, the crows, and the four indifferent winds. It was the ruin of the Mirror she especially wanted to see.

Soo Yee wondered aloud, as they descended a lantern-lit stairway to an underground tunnel connecting the towers, how such a corrupt people could have built such astounding things.

“Engineering is not an art reserved exclusively to Christians,” Abbie said.

“What do you mean—were they Freemasons?”

“No, of course not. What are you learning at that church you attend? No, I mean they may have been great builders, as the ancient Egyptians were, even without the enlightenment of Scripture. And at least some of the visitors were Christians, or claimed to be.”

“Their Christianity isn’t like ours.”

“Shall we judge them on that basis? I don’t want to sound like a pagan philosopher,”—thinking of Heraclitus, about whom she had read in an article in Godey’s—“but all things change with time—perhaps even Christianity.”

“A truth is a truth forever,” Soo Yee declared, hurrying after the tour group, which threatened to disappear around a bend in the tunnel.

“I’m sure you’re right.”

A gentle lie. Abbie was sure of no such thing.

“We must not denounce what we do not understand,” Abbie said, “simply because we do not understand it.”

Here at the entrance to the Hall of the Mirror, one successful restoration had been achieved. The shafts that had once contained the City elevators had been excavated and the machinery replaced with the sort of commonplace lift that carried coal miners to their work. Soo Yee was reluctant to enter the wooden cage at the top of the shaft; she said it made her think of the entrance to Hell. “You take too literally the things your pastor tells you,” Abbie said irritably. “We’re only going a few yards under the earth. I’m sure Hell lies much deeper.”

Abbie had postponed this pilgrimage for too long, out of a vain and unspoken hope that Jesse and Phoebe might yet appear on her doorstep. Much had happened since 1877. James Garfield had served two terms as president, despite a prophecy (in one of Mr. Theo Stromberg’s letters to Lucy Stone, which the press insisted on calling the Blackwell letters) that he would be assassinated—or perhaps the prophecy had prevented its own fulfillment. Prophecies had been fulfilled or overthrown on many fronts as the influence of the City continued to ripple through the world. August Kemp’s gift of practical knowledge had effected huge advances. Scientific hygiene, vaccination against disease, electric lighting, even gasoline-driven motor cars, all were becoming commonplace … though one also had to take into account Theo Stromberg’s warning about the profligate use of what he called “fossil fuels.”

But labor had not thrived under Garfield, the Negro of the South had been reduced to a peonage almost indistinguishable from slavery, the vote for women was no nearer than it had ever been. Kemp had told a pretty lie, Abbie thought, that in the future we would be ruled by the better angels of our nature; and Theo Stromberg had told a harder truth, that such angels do not arrive on clouds of glory but are born of travail and, too often, blood. (And did we not already learn that lesson at Fort Sumter, Appomattox, Richmond? Have we forgotten it so completely and so soon?)

The Hall of the Mirror, deep underground, could have enclosed two cathedrals and a shipyard. In its original state (the tour guide said as they stepped out of the lift, his voice disappearing into the cavernous space like a penny dropped into well), the chamber had been brightly illuminated. The current owners had installed a dynamo to produce alternating current, but it could bring the bank of ceiling lights to little more than a tepid glow, and lanterns were necessary to supplement it. “Allow your eyes to accommodate to the darkness,” the guide advised.

Abbie waited patiently as shapes and properties slowly became distinct. The labyrinth of side rooms, the elaborate scaffolding, the loading bays, the detritus of strange machinery did not especially interest her. As soon as she could see well enough to do so, she walked to the foot of the Mirror itself. It was a steel semicircle, like a giant’s wrist bracelet standing on end, as tall as the room was tall and as wide as it was wide, barnacled with fragments of copper and wire. In its prime it had enclosed a reflective but immaterial surface, a shimmering boundary between two worlds. Huge motors, railroad cars, even airships had passed through that boundary, along with hundreds of visitors. Now the Mirror opened onto nothing more than compressed earth and old Illinois stone.

The tour group moved from one novelty to another, but Abbie remained in place. She recalled what Doris Vanderkamp had told her: When the soldiers came, all of us who worked at the City got rounded up and sorted out to find if any visitors were among us. I looked for Jesse, I waited for him, but he wasn’t to be found. Nor his sister that he talked about. Maybe they found a way to escape the troops, but I doubt that, since Jesse was in a bad way with his wound and his sister was also hurt, or so he told me. My own guess is that they went through the Mirror. It’s against the rules but the rules were being broken right and left. That’s what I think, anyhow. They’re safe there in the future, I think, probably flying through the air or visiting the moon.

That was the belief Miss Vanderkamp had chosen to adopt, and Abbie had adopted it as well.

“It’s like a tomb in here,” Soo Yee said, shivering.

“No more a tomb than a gravestone.”

Soo Yee said, “I’m sorry. They were like your children, I know.”

Jesse and Phoebe Cullum. “Their father was a well-meaning drunkard, and I was a poor substitute for a real mother. But yes, I loved them, in my way. Not a tomb, Soo Yee, because I think they are not dead.”

It was her benediction. The words were swallowed by darkness and the mineral smell of old earth, deep rust, autumn rain. And what was changed by her coming here? Nothing she could name. And yet.

Take care of your sister, Jesse.

“Are you praying?”

“Yes.”

“But the tour is leaving. I don’t want to be left behind.”

“Then let us join them.” Abbie turned away from the empty Mirror. “I’m ready for daylight now.” Daylight, and whatever came next.