Free Mount Terminus by David Grand Page B

his mind a wide field of vision, full of clear images, their colors crisp and containing no aberrations, all of it so impressive and bright, when he saw what was in its sights, it summoned within the young man the thrill of being present at the focal point. But when this initial excitement wore off, and he was left to contemplate the substance of what he saw, he wanted some explanation for what was out there. His father had trained the tube’s aperture onto the section of winding road that snaked up to the estate’s gates, and there, occupying the annular frame, was a team of hulking men swinging picks, driving them in unison into the ground. Following them, a line of laborers turned over earth with shovels, and beyond them, a line pulled rakes; next rolled carts piled high with tarmac, and what was beyond that, Bloom wouldn’t see until some time later, when the men who spread the pitch onto the raked earth edged out from behind a turn on the road. It would then be some more time before he saw the stacks of the steamrollers belch black smoke as they paved the tarred macadam into a smooth surface. And there the parade came to its end, all for the three dark figures he had encountered on the beach. They casually strolled up the grade, each biting down on a smoldering cigar; the tails of their long coats, the brims of their hats, catching the steam rising up from the cooling pavement.
    *   *   *
    When they sat down to dinner that evening, Bloom’s mind remained fixed on the images he observed that afternoon through the eyepiece of the telescope. Seeing as it was his father who revealed to him the brigade of laborers advancing up the mountain, he assumed he would explain the circumstances of their arrival. But the elder Rosenbloom deliberately avoided the subject, and, instead, spoke for the entirety of their meal about the many ways the visible world had excited his boyhood imagination. He spoke of the philosophers and men of science whose intent was to prove there was a mystical unity in all creation. He spoke of the ways in which he saw the world as ecstatically alive, to what extent he believed light to be the exuberance of God’s great goodness and truth, how mirrors and prisms divine the means to reflect that truth. He spoke of Shakespeare’s Prospero and Marlowe’s Faust, of a disciple of John Dee’s who descended into an erupting Vesuvius to study its smoking vents, of a mad fantasist who spent his life’s work disproving the Tower of Babel could have ever reached the moon. For as long as men of imagination appreciate the wonders of the mind, he insisted, they will draw inspiration from such men; throughout the ages, their spirits will continue to manifest themselves in characters we can only now dream of.
    That, my dear Bloom, was the type of man I wanted to become, Jacob said. One whose ideas and inventions had the power to shape visions.
    Here his father paused. And here Bloom looked up from his meal, and he could see a wet film had formed over his father’s eyes. But you can see in my face every day what I’ve become.
    No, said Bloom.
    Yes, insisted his father. He pushed back his chair and stood up. Come, there’s something I want to share with you in the drawing room. Something, I believe, you need to see.
    *   *   *
    If we lived one hundred years ago, his father said as he led Bloom to the parlor after dinner, if this were a great ballroom or cathedral, and held in it several hundred spectators, I might introduce what I am about to show you by declaring, That which is about to happen before your eyes is not frivolous spectacle. It is made for the man who thinks, for the philosopher who likes to lose his way. This is a spectacle that man can use to instruct himself in the bizarre effects of the imagination. When it combines vigor and derangement. If I were the great Etienne-Gaspard, who began all his phantasmagorias this way, I would