Tin Man

Many years ago, I met a little boy, filthy in the streets of Emerald City, playing with a wind-up tin soldier. And he would wind it up and he would set the soldier to walk. And the soldier would walk along the cobblestone streets until it wound slowly and then eventually stopped, often with one foot in the air. Each pace, a little tick of the tiny drummer’s drum. My heart ticks now, and it has ticked for a very long time, a lot longer than anyone I ever knew.

Dorothy is gone back home. She went home to Kansas, and she grew old there, far away from Oz and the Wizard and the Emerald City. And she died the way that people died, I assume, in a bed, with people around who loved her?

A letter came once years later from a trader, and I kept that paper until it fell apart in my hands. The Scarecrow ruled long and honest and smartly, but he died. His straw had gone grey, and he sat in a chair in the Emerald City that was too big for him. And the lion’s cubs are scattered across all of Oz, and they have their own prides now. And their own quarrels. They do not come here. One of them I hear lives across the desert and has never ever seen the city. And I do not know if that is true, because I hear many things, from traders, from birds, from the river itself. But I’m still here. The ticking and my own drum beat in my chest is how I know. You see, my heart has a fine wind-up clock, too. It’s atomic, the wizard’s man said, but everything decays, even atoms. There are gaps between the ticks, and those gaps have grown. Long and spacious in between.

My body is not like it was. The tin has gone dull in several places that I can’t reach. It’s really gray, like an old spoon. Where my hands rub with the joints of my fingers, it shines. There is this dent on my left side that I don’t remember ever getting. My funnel hat, it always was crooked, but now it’s even more so. Crooked in a wrong way. And I smell a little bit of oil and rain, and when I move, my knees make a sound like the door in a house where nobody lives anymore. And time does a strange thing when we’ve had enough of it. A day used to be like an entire country. And now a day is like a room I walk through quickly. A year is a hallway. And the calendar, it flips faster and faster, and each day is a smaller piece of everything I’ve ever lived.

And then there’s this other thing about the ticking and the drumbeat itself. It’s slower now than it was, and I feel it more than I hear it. It’s a knock inside my chest, like a knuckle rapping on tin from the inside. Tick, a longer dark, tock. The gaps that grow, and I count them the way you count anything that is running out. And I don’t know who these wizards’ men were, really, and they’re gone now too. The wizard himself went up in a balloon or went home, or the stories all disagree. Maybe he didn’t even exist. It’s so long ago I don’t remember, and I stopped asking. So I made this last decision.

Now, here I find myself. I’m sitting beside a river, and I’m far enough back that the water can’t reach me, and I’m under the tree canopy to keep me from the rain. Water means rust, and rust means stillness, and I’ve had enough stillness in my life already. There’s this one spot in my ankle, it’s a bloom of orange, it’s no bigger than a thumbnail, and I watch it. It doesn’t grow, not yet. And I sit on this flat stone that’s been here longer than that road was ever yellow. And the river goes by, it’s brown and green, and it smells of mud and cold.

The kingfishers cut the air. The leaves fall down, and they ride the current past me like little boats. And the ice comes in the winter, and the river goes quiet underneath, and there’s a different quiet, and I listen to that too. I watch the time come and go, and it’s the way you watch a river when you have no place else to be. It’s not sad. I’m not sad. I’m just tired, finished. I have outlived my story, and I am content to be the thing at the end of it that witnesses it. I sit by the water and the ticking slows, and I listen to the river do what rivers do.

And I sit down here and I watch the time go by and that’s the plan to sit to let my drum beat tick tock tock rat-a-tat slower and slower and be finished. And then the sky hums and vibrates, and I feel it across my tin. And this thing comes down from the sky and lands in the clearing. It has no wheels and it smells of hot metal, fresh from the forge, and in a flash of ozone and lightning, the humming stops. With a quiet hiss.

Then a door opens in its side, and this girl gets out. And her clothes are strange, and they glow from inside the fabric, and her pretty red shoes light up blue at the heels as she walks and skips. And comes down the stairs of her vehicle. And something on her wrist glows and sings and talks to her in this teeny tiny voice. She looks around, hands to her face, takes them away, and her mouth opens as she sees me.

“Oh, wow, oh wow, oh wow, you’re real. You’re really real. I mean, I knew you were real. Grammy said you were real, but you’re really real. Look at you. Your hat is a funnel. Is that on purpose? Is that a hat or is it just a funnel or is it both? Is it both? Isn’t it? That’s amazing.”

Then the girl comes closer. She’s a teenager, thin. She touches my arm. Two fingers actually touch. And the tin is warm from the sun, and her fingers are cool.

“You’re warm. I thought you’d be cold. Are you warm because of the sun? Are you warm because what’s inside of you?”

And then she looks at my face. She frowns a bit, like she’s worried.

“Your mouth won’t open, will it? Are you stuck? You’re stuck, aren’t you? Oh, that’s terrible, terrible, terrible. Wait, hold on. I have some oil. I have oil for everything. My dad says I carry oil for everything, which is not true. I only carry oil for most things.”

And then she rummages in her bag, and the bag is bigger on the inside than anything on the outside, or maybe I’m just too old and I don’t understand how bags work anymore. I haven’t seen one like this in such a time. It reminds me of something from the wizard’s palace, and she opens and produces a small can from it, and it smells sharp and sweet at the same time.

“Hold still, this might tickle. Do you get tickled? Can tin get tickled? Okay, here we go.”

And she oils my jaw, and the oil feels cold, and then it’s warm. And then I feel something give and loosen. My jaw moves slowly and it has a sound like the spoons in a drawer, or a spoon scraping the bottom of a bowl of porridge.

“There, oh, that’s so satisfying. It was so satisfying to me. Say something, please.”

But I cannot. The words aren’t there yet. I haven’t spoken in such a long time. All I have is the tick-tock rat-a-tat of my heart ticking.

“Well, that’s okay. You don’t have to talk. I talk. I’m good at talking. My teacher says I’m the best, I’m excellent at talking, which I think was a compliment, but it might not have been. I’m not sure. She’s kind of weird. My teacher is a voice on the wall, and she doesn’t have a face. And I think she might be a computer, but she says she’s not. She says she’s a teacher, which is very suspicious.”

Then she sits down on the stone beside me, not too close, and then she scoots her butt a little closer, still not touching.

“My name is Dorothea. Dorothy, you know Dorothy. Dorothy was my great-great-great-great-great-grandmother.”

She’s counting all these greats on her fingers.

“That’s a lot of greats, and I counted. I used to think great meant that she was great, like good at things, but she was like, well, I also know it means old, which is kind of confusing. And she went to Oz when she was about my age, and she had a dog named Toto. And I have a dog named Toto too, except mine is made of light. He’s a hologram. Do you know what a hologram is? He doesn’t bark, he sparkles, which is useful, but prettier. I left him in the car that I flew in. Well, it wasn’t flying, and it’s not flying now, it’s just kind of sitting there, but it hums when it sleeps. Do you have things that hum when they sleep?”

She does not wait for an answer, and she doesn’t need one, she keeps on going.

“Where I come from, all of the cars fly. Great-Grammy Dorothy always said that everybody used small vehicles and carts and stuff with wheels here led by animals. But my cars, they go up and down. They never, ever, ever get stuck in traffic. And I heard about traffic. I know what traffic is. I read traffic in books. But traffic is also up. My school is in the sky, too, sort of. I mean, it’s on a screen, and that screen is everywhere. Food comes in packets. It tastes like whatever you tell it tastes like, which sounds wonderful, but it mostly tastes like nothing. And my grandma says that she still likes to grow tomatoes, which are red and really messy, but they’re real, and I like real things.”

And then she kicks her glowing, blinking shoes against the stone.

“Grammy had all kinds of books, and I followed all the stories to get here. And I read every single book, but the book that I liked the best, the first one, is very, very old. The pages are falling out, and I taped them. There’s tape everywhere, more tape than paper at this point. And then there was a storm, and then the sky folded, which is not a real thing the skies are supposed to do. And then I was here, and then there was this road that was yellow. It was actually yellow. Like somebody painted it with a giant brush. And I thought, well, this is real. And then I thought, yes, this is real.”

And then she looks at me, and she’s very serious, which is a different kind of face on her than what I’ve seen so far.

“Is this story true? The whole story? Did Dorothy really walk the whole road? Did that scarecrow really want a brain and the lion really cry? Because in my book, he cries a lot. And I always wondered if lions can cry, and if they can, do they get their manes wet?”

She tells the whole story, all of it, doesn’t miss a bit. About the girl from Kansas, a yellow road, a scarecrow, a lion, a tin man who wanted a heart. And then this wizard behind a curtain, and a witch, and a pair of shoes. And she tells it all wrong in all of the small ways stories get told wrong and right in all the very specific ways that actually matter. And I want to smile, if I could smile, I would. And she asks me if the city, if the Emerald City, was really green, and if the poppies really made people sleep. And then she asks me if I really stood in the woods rusted solid for a whole year waiting for someone like Dorothy to come along and oil my jaw.

And my heart ticks and tocks while she talks. Tick, tock, tick, tock, rat-a-tat, rat-a-tat of the drum. And I sense that the gaps are getting shorter. I feel the beats picking up. And there is this warmth under the tin where the atomic clock and all of its atoms sit and do their thing, their magic. And her story, my story, winds it.

She runs out of breath eventually and sits there with a big sigh and kicks her feet back and forth in the dirt. And we’re quiet for a little bit. And then she looks at me. She’s hopeful and afraid that she has said way too much and talked for way too long.

“I came to find you,” she says. She’s quieter now, almost whispering, almost crying. “I always wanted to meet you to thank you for all of the wonderful stories for going with great, great, great, great, great, Grammy Dorothy. You were so kind, and you didn’t even have a heart yet.”

I work my jaw and I can get a small smile. And the oil is working and doing what it’s supposed to be doing. And I finally find the words, and they come out rusty, and everything’s new at the same time.

“Thank you,” I say.

She beams, her shoes flashing and flickering. And I let out my tin man’s sigh, and I look out at the river, and then I look at the flying thing humming in the clearing. And then I turn and look at this little girl from a future I don’t understand who crossed a folded sky to sit on a rock and talk to a man made of tin. I say to her, “Would you please sit with me some more and tell me again about your fantastical life.”