The thoughts are always there, but somehow they are too far away now.
He picks the beetles out of their hiding places among the tansy plants—all thin stalks with oversized, flowering yellow heads that sway in the salty breeze. He puts the creatures in the glass jar that he keeps for his walks with the maids, when they let him out of the house he built and cannot escape now. He cannot remember which lever brings forth which section of the mansion now. The first time he tried to find his way back to his bedroom for the night, he got lost near the kitchens, wandering in the labyrinthine glass tunnels whose switches changed the layout.
Looking at the notes in his laboratory is like reading a book in a dream. None of the words go together, evoke any sort of meaning for him. He starts at the beginning, and that's where he stays.
"The difference engine is inscribed in copper," he says to himself by rote, like a talisman, "along the concave surface of the inner head mechanism." And if this paltry talisman, too, works in mysterious ways, it keeps them to itself.
But the past is dead to him, and the present is ever-shifting and strange—a place without warning or sense.
The clockwork soldiers all speak to him in his own voice, and if he could clearly remember voicing them, he would and perhaps take some comfort in that, but it too eludes him. He comes to think of them as fractures of his own self, opaque puzzle pieces that warp when he looks away.
The lavender blooms in Karnaca, and the beetle with its shiny green shell is dead.
It occurs to him, in one of those fleeting flashes, that death is not, in fact, the final mystery, but what that means he cannot say. The train of thought departs, and he only watches it leave as a misplaced traveler in this strange, ghostly land of thoughts not quite dead and not quite alive.
A diagram of a machine made of cat bones and wood and brass—a terrible mechanical soldier with a cruel bird face—the few drops of florescent whale oil that powered it all. There was a music machine that required only sea water to sing, and it sits there still in his mind, half underwater, a shifting thing.
The lavender always blooms in Karnaca, and the difference engine is inscribed in copper, along the concave surface of the inner head mechanism, and there is a line of perfectly dismembered, perfectly dead beetles on the floor, lying between the wooden slats like toy soldiers.
He was going to give them all names, wasn't he?
But now they're all dead, and there's no use in naming dead things.
Instead, he decides to count his collection, but his thoughts slip after the eleventh, a stone suddenly and inevitably sunk.
The beetle is dead, and something inside him is dead too, but he cannot even name it to mourn. Not since that day with the blinding, crackling pain that's left him a familiar stranger. He was not a good man, and he is not improved now, either.
There is a line of beetle legs in parallel to their bodies—a perverse kind of mix and match.
No matter how hard he tries, how well he matches the beetle with its own body parts, he cannot figure out how it is that they move. That must be it, he thinks with a sharp flash. Movement! The house moves, the maids move, the beetles move.
But the crooked beetle leg in the palm of his hand tells him nothing.