1910 #2
Opal was testing the restraints, wiggling her wrists to see if she could free her hand, but it was no use.
Already, she began imagining different constraints, prison—or worse.
“How do I know the bell is not rigged?” Opal asked.
“Perhaps it’s mechanically unsound or has been intentionally jammed or… ”
Ding. Ding. Tuttle rang the bell, again and again. It sounded like an unanswered telephone. “Would you like to ring it yourself?” he asked. “Just to familiarize yourself with how it works?” She stretched her finger and Tuttle brought the box to her bound hands. Ding. Ding.
Silence settled in the room. Opal couldn’t move.
She made fists. She could feel heat radiating from them.
The room grew too hot, and she felt a tingling sensation in her feet that crept its way up her body.
The restraints were tight. Her midsection felt like it’d been hollowed out and building mud set inside to fill the hole.
She couldn’t think for a moment, could only feel the hardness of the chair press into her hind quarters, could only feel the burning from the twine digging into her wrists.
She closed her eyes to focus, and she tried to imagine the bell, what it looked like, what it sounded like.
Imagination is the first step toward freedom.
She thought of Jagr—of the table bell he kept near his desk that he’d ring—that excruciating ding, ding—when he wished for his midday meal.
“Shame on you, Tuttle,” Opal said after some time, for she couldn’t just sit there. She needed to do something. Her voice was Bremen’s again. “Destroying three generations of my family’s work. Selling the factory? And for what? Your silly ambition?”
“Ring the bell and we’re done,” said Jenkins.
Now, Opal looked straight at Colonel Bloodworth, who looked back at her, unflinching. They locked eyes—a standoff, a gentle deadlock, as though one were daring the other to look away first. A subtle movement of his neck told her he’d swallowed.
“Enough of this chatter,” said Tuttle. “The bell.”
“If you’re so interested in bells, go to church.”
Jenkins stifled a laugh. Even the Colonel looked amused. “The lady’s getting clever,” Tuttle said. “I give her that.”
Opal stared at the box, at the bells atop it. The silence pressed into her ears; she could hear a thumping. Her stomach rumbled. Her baby kicked—surely a sign of some sort. She tried to shift in her seat, but could not. How willingly these men would hand her over to Jagr, if they knew.
She couldn’t have that—not when she was so close.
These days, Opal spent almost every evening in the laboratory compounding powders and filling capsules, then delivering crates of her cures to Dowd’s Drugs to be shelved, sold, and taken by women across the city.
Jagr believed a cure often resided in the mere act of doing something curative.
A placebo. Once, during the Spanish-American War, soldiers were injected with saline when medics ran out of morphine, and the saline eased their pain.
In just a few weeks she’d have enough money to leave for France, and this evening would collapse onto paper, into a story she’d write about to Madame de Fleur. They may even laugh about it, eventually. But how to get to the other side of this moment so she could look back on it in amused hindsight?
She closed her eyes again and tried to imagine herself pushing the lever, tried to hear the sound of the bell in her mind.
She remembered what Madame de Fleur had told her: Listening is a choice.
She dinged the bell over and over in her imagination, tried to conjure the way the tip of her finger had felt on the piston when Tuttle had brought the bell to her hands, but nothing, no sound in the room except the quick breaths of the men waiting.
“Well?” Tuttle said after some moments of silence.
“Are we quite finished? Do we have enough to charge the woman, Jenkins?” All eyes were on Opal, who tried to affect dignity, bound there to her chair.
The pressure squeezed her head. Her condition.
Now, her whole body acted against her will.
Her body’s weight rocked the chair. Thump, thump, thump, like the clopping noise she’d heard that first night she’d watched Madame de Fleur perform.
Now she felt far away from herself again, able to observe herself from the outside.
She could see her hands bound with twine, her body shaking.
Outside her body, she couldn’t register fear.
No, instead a calmness overtook her. Her mind focused.
She noticed a subtle movement from across the table—she’d grown accustomed to observing shifts in the dark.
She began to hum loudly, buzz like a bee, like a swarm of bees intent on seeking exit.
Colonel Bloodworth leaned forward, just slightly. He brought his hand up from beneath the table, and he reached out for the bell box.
The other men didn’t notice because at that moment Bremen came through again, growling through Opal’s stiff mouth, shaking the chair so mightily now that Opal thought she might very well tip over and crash to the floor.
“Charles, you rotten egg. You cockroach. You pinheaded pig. You were nothing without me. Without my daughter. Not a penny to your name, you ungrateful bilker. You embarrass me, all of you. She’s only a woman,” Bremen said.
At that moment, the Colonel’s finger fell down upon the bell in a smooth, quick flick.
Before the rest of the committee could turn, he’d withdrawn his hand to his lap.
Now, they were looking at the bell box, which still seemed to vibrate, even though the sound had dislodged itself and faded to silence.
“She did it,” Jenkins whispered.
Tuttle stood, grabbed his hat, and marched out, forgetting his overcoat. The other men stood slowly, muttering among themselves. Bloodworth picked up Tuttle’s coat from the back of the chair.
As they were walking out the door, Jenkins turned to face her, lifted his instrument to eye level. Before she realized what he was doing, she heard the whirr and the snap. The smell of flash powder, then a burst of light, bright as an exploding star.
Photography seemed to her a bit like dark magic: her image was now contained to Jenkins’s camera, but it’d emerge again, another self, uncontrolled, even by her.
She’d read that when inventors first dabbled in the field of photography, they could easily capture an image.
It came down to the simple science of lenses and light.
The biggest challenge to the field of photography was permanence, getting the image to remain on photographic paper without fading.
This had more to do with chemistry—the correct compound of chemicals.
Opal herself felt chemically altered, unsteady.
She recalled the evening as though through intoxication, how she so often felt on Jagr’s tonics and elixirs.
And what of the Colonel and his tear-shaped scar?
What of the tap of his index finger that had rung that bell?
The men had left the bell box behind. She rang the bell freely now. Ding. Ding.
She didn’t need clairvoyance to know this: The relationship between men and women was always transactional. The Colonel would call on her again.