I throw off the covers and lie exposed to the cold. Around me, the lab holds its judgment. My skin puckers and I drag my fingernails across my chest and arms, leaving red tracks. I pinch the flesh on top of my hand until it is numb.
It is of no use.
I swing myself out of bed and have a seat at the writing desk.
I raise the pen to my mouth. There is nothing I want to tell the Johnsons in words exactly, but how does a person send a wordless letter? Exhale into an envelope? I press on. The happy swell of your company has left me stranded beside the nest of an angry mother tern who pokes and prods with a sharp beak thirsting for a drop of your glad tidings. I stop. That is idiotic. Words are idiotic. I cross it out and start again. If you'd be so kind there is something I would like to show you, a demonstration here at my laboratory this coming Thursday evening. Your presence would prove a balm to my parched reserves.
In anticipation of the pleasure,
Nikola
Louisa stops reading and rights her head. Out the window the light is going gray. The turn of the century. A man without love. It's all very attractive to Louisa, though something's not right, not only in his story, but here, in the room behind her. A chill paws at her neck, an arctic breeze, and her spine straightens to attention. Someone is watching her. Someone is standing in the doorway.
Placing the sheaf of papers onto a nearby end table, Louisa keeps her back to the open door and begins to perfectly fake cleaning the room, pulling out a rag tucked into the sash of her apron. She swats at the dust on the bedside lamp, moving so slowly she thinks she can hear her heart beat. She pretends that she has done nothing wrong. Louisa, no longer breathing, thinks she can see time passing. She polishes the window, trying to make out his reflection in the glass. She can't see a thing. Vampires don't reflect. All the while she keeps her hand raised in a dusting motion. She waits for the man to speak. She knows he must be there, right behind her, waiting to sink his pointy teeth into the flesh of her neck. She can feel his eyes now like firebrands against her back. She thinks of Katharine. She can't wait to feel his bite.
Vampire, vampire, repeats in her head. Her stomach tumbles. She's been caught snooping. The air dips toward freezing. Louisa dusts the sill very slowly as the air around her hardens up into cement, squeezing her lungs dry. She is terrified. She is reminded of the moment before a kiss, every nerve waiting. Still the man says nothing. She looks out across Thirty-fifth Street, through the darkness and into a golden window where a woman sits alone smoking at a kitchen table, puzzling over a crossword. Louisa can't bear it anymore. She sweeps the hair away from her neck and bends her head forward, welcoming his bite.
The elevator dings from the end of the hallway. The radiator spits a hiss and quite suddenly the window in front of Louisa fills with motion. A tremendous flutter tears the last bits of air from her body. Vampires. Bats. She is prepared to turn, screaming wildly. Someone will hear her. She'll sprint her way over to Bellevue. But then she notices one small thing. A band of color, a stripe of iridescence. "Pigeons?"
"Yes," the voice behind her answers. "Pigeons."
That's the final blow. Louisa's knees buckle, and though she might have liked to be the sort of tenderhearted girl who could actually faint, she isn't. She maintains consciousness despite having fallen to her knees. She turns and stutters. "You frightened me," Louisa says as he approaches.
The man, from her reduced stature, towers. "Forgive me. Though I might say the same to you. You are, after all, in my room." In two long strides he is beside her. He reaches out, making an attempt to grasp her elbow with a gloved hand. He jerks. He pulls away at the last minute before touching her, as if repulsed. Louisa regains her footing on her own and then she is standing, facing him. He very quickly steps back and away from her.
He is an old man, though his age has done little to diminish his stature and startling presence. She can see him clearly now. She thinks she might fall into the very center of his eyes. Poor Katharine. Poor Robert.
"I was cleaning, sir," Louisa says and holds her rag out as proof.
"Are you new to the hotel?" he asks, and again she detects an accent, something flinty like rocks.
Louisa does not answer and his face wrinkles. All your secrets, she is thinking. Tell me all your secrets.
"I don't have my room cleaned except for when I ask," he says very politely, as though he is embarrassed by his special status. "I will however take some fresh towels. I can always use fresh towels." And he turns out to her cart. "Eighteen of them, if you can spare it."
"Certainly," she says and passes very close to him, still staring, on her way out to her cart in the hall. She counts the towels. Fourteen, fifteen, sixteen. "I have only sixteen, sir. Will that do?"
His face floods with mortification. He tucks his chin into his chest. "No. I'm afraid I need eighteen," he says.
Louisa stands with her arms extended, offering him a pile of towels he won't accept. "I'll bring you two more in a moment," she says.
"No. I'm sorry. I can't. I need it to be eighteen."
She continues holding out her arms a beat longer, but the towels become heavy. He doesn't want sixteen towels. Louisa drops her arms and the towels down to her chest so that the pile nearly reaches her chin. She tucks the unwanted towels back into her cart but makes no move to leave. She doesn't want to leave. She wants to understand him. She wants to pore over his secret cabinets and know what he is doing in such an odd room. She'd like to ask him how he stole the electricity, what's in his safe, where is he from, what happened to Katharine and Robert? She wants to know all these things and so she stands before him, not moving, not leaving, not talking, just looking, trying, in these last few minutes of access, to absorb this strange place. "Pigeons?" she finally asks him.
"Yes." He turns toward the window. "Do you like pigeons?"
"I keep a coop at home. My father and I do."
"Then you understand," he says and smiles, now walking toward the door as if to see her out. Louisa smiles also and nods, though nothing could be further from the truth. She understands very little and in fact she can feel this non-understanding as a vacancy in her chest, as though a jigsaw had cut a perfect puzzle piece from her.
At the door he hesitates. "What's your name?"
"Louisa" she tells him, and he nods. She has backed nearly all the way out of his room, he is forcing her out, but in the middle of her last backward footstep she pauses at the sound of his voice.
"So, Louisa, what do you think of it?" He looks away from her as he asks.
"It, sir?"
"The manuscript you were reading. What did you think?"
"I thought it was fascinating." She doesn't bother to deny her snooping. "It's about you, isn't it?"
"Yes."
"Is it finished? Have you written the whole thing?"
"How could it be finished when I am still alive?"
"I see, sir. It's an autobiography?"
"Not auto. A friend is writing it for me."
"Well, I'll be anxious to read the whole thing when it's done. When it's published, that is." Louisa did not want him to think that she'd sneak back into his room again, though now, knowing what's behind the door of room 3327, she will have to.
"What did you like most?" he asks, looking away from her as if he were very shy.
"From the small part I read," she says, trying to download her nosiness, "the part about meeting Mr. and Mrs. Johnson. I like how it describes love at first sight. The magnets. How disarming that can be."
"Love at first sight" he says.
"Yes."
"You've been in love?"
"No, but I can recognize it."
"Hmm." He smiles, making his lips thin as a blade. "No. That was not love you read. Love is impossible."
"You don't believe in love?" she asks, because to Louisa's thinking, love eventually comes to all, particularly someone as old, as charming, as this man.
He gives her a peculiar grimace as if he doesn't underst
and what she means. He looks down, distant or distracted by the carpeting. He reaches for the handle to close the door, though Louisa still has one more question. She positions her foot in the jamb, blocking its closure.
"Sir, can I ask you, I was wondering, how did you steal the electricity yesterday?"
He smiles at the very mention of it, color comes to his cheeks, electricity makes him blush. "Steal?" he asks. "I didn't steal it, dear." He steps closer to Louisa so that she is forced out into the hallway. "It was always mine," he says and shuts the door between them.
***
He's afraid of germs and he seems to have some sort of disorder involving numbers.
What do you mean?
I mean everything has to be divisible by three. His room number, the towels, his footsteps, even the way he eats is precise, like a machine, but a really ornate, wonderful machine. And the germs. He washes his hands eighteen times a day and he requires a fresh towel for each washing.
When we ask you if you've seen anything strange, that's not exactly what we mean. Have you seen anything suspicious? Any unsavory visitors coming to his room, any friends?
No.
No? Are you sure?
I'm certain of it. Mr. Tesla doesn't have any friends. Not anymore.
6
While you are asleep you are dead; and whether you stay dead an hour or a billion years the time to you is the same.
—Mark Twain
HER HAND WAS SWINGING right there beside his leg as they walked. It signaled to him: a lighthouse beacon, an alarm. Freddie, who was telling Walter a tale about a bird's nest hastily constructed in the girders of an El station, seemed entirely unaware of the powerful flares her hand was making to his. Though he and Freddie had been married for almost a year, there was still a formality between them, something unknown and awkwardly shaped, a distance, a beauty, that made their interactions nervous and thrilling. He didn't deserve her and so spent his days wondering how it was he had her. Tides of wonder overwhelmed him when he touched her. He liked to take his time, contemplating the hand and all its joys before clutching it.
They continued walking, block after block. New York reeked. Coal-burning furnaces exhaled a greasy, earthen smog. Walter and Winnifred passed the Bray Slaughterhouse and had to leap over a slick of blood-thickened ooze that was congealing on the sidewalk. They passed Barnett's silent movie house and saw Mrs. Barnett sitting outside on a discarded theater chair. The older woman was teaching her grandson piano on a pine board where someone had cleverly painted each of the eighty-eight keys that make up a full piano. Silent music for the silent movies. They passed Loh's Stables, a fairly new establishment that held its own nightly against the attacks of Irish gangs who believed stables could belong to the Irish, perhaps the Germans, but never the Chinese.
Walter could stroll for hours before he would have to take action with the hand. He loved the moments before getting what he wanted almost more than he loved getting what he wanted. He had time. They both did. Time was larger than the universe and he and Freddie were just ants walking through it, newlyweds.
They crossed town, ducking below the El tracks, racing to pass in front of streetcars that moved in lurching jerks. Freddie and Walter made their way over toward the busy piers of the Hudson, where despite the activity of merchant ships loading and unloading there was peace on the river. Standing by the current with Freddie beside him, Walter imagined he could see a vein of saltwater commingling with the fresh. He found something very romantic in this meeting. He pointed it out to Freddie, who finally could wait no longer and took his hand in hers. Walter stared straight out across the current to the cliffs of New Jersey to slow his heart.
And in that moment, as though it were a sleepy child, the city fell away. There is no other way to describe it. Perhaps the city began to dream, or perhaps it remembered how it once felt to be covered with trees, some deciduous, some pine that left a soft floor of oranged needles underfoot. Walter and Freddie walked on, and he felt as though he was in that dark, old wood where the air in his lungs was heavy with moisture. Ponderous drops of green scented mists and a rain-wet tang percolated from a small brook that passed over granite and feldspar stones below. Trains screamed. People screamed. Delivery trucks screamed, shook, moaned, and either spat out or cursed their freshly loaded cargo, but there in Hell's Kitchen on the west side of Manhattan, holding on to his wife's hand, Walter heard none of it. The woods were perfectly silent. A wonder. A terror.
What was it to suddenly come awake? To suddenly fall asleep? Particularly while Freddie was standing there just beside him? What would she think of him if he were to stretch out underneath one of the pine massifs that are not really pine massifs but street lamps? To take off his shoes and dip his feet into a brook that might have trickled across the island of Manhattan two hundred years before but had since been staunched and subverted by culverts, bubbling up as a filthy puddle, a sparrow's oily bathtub? What was it to suddenly come awake? It was terrifying. Yes, he thought. I am terrified, but I don't want it to end. If time is so porous that a full-grown man can slip inside it while holding fast to the hand of his wife, what then can he rely on at all? The solidity of a hand? He doubted it.
An old Union soldier who had lived in Walter's building when Walter was a child had told him, "Women are like a pair of magnifying glasses." The soldier then drew back and away before continuing, "Have you ever seen what your skin looks like under a magnifying lens?" Walter had examined the soldier's old skin at that moment. It was cratered by alcohol. The soldier's pores dug bottomless pits into his nose and surrounding cheeks. He could have stored secrets. He could have stored nuts for winter in those pores. "Have you ever seen a magnified tongue?" the soldier asked. Intrigued, Walter told the soldier no, he'd seen no such wonders. "Well, you're lucky then, I guess. It's disgusting," was all the soldier said. The mystery in his words took up residence in Walter's brain at a young age. Women, magnifying glasses.
"Dear," he said. He slowed their pace. He did not want to get anywhere too quickly. And this stream, this forest, he'd never seen anything like it before, not here, not on Eleventh Avenue. "Freddie," he asked, "do you see that? Can you smell the forest?" His eyes opened wide.
At this point in his memory, Freddie always turns toward him, smiles, and opens her lips to speak. But it has been a long time since words have come out. She has been gone so long that Walter can barely remember the timbre of her voice.
Staring out the back window as the sky grows darker, Walter remembers that day when time opened up and how Freddie stood beside the Hudson, her lips moving up and down, her message silent and unclear as though she were speaking before the invention of sound. He felt he could almost make out what she might be saying with her silent words, something like Come find me, or What are you waiting for, Walter? Twenty-four years that she's been gone. Walter rests his head in his hands. Time had not healed this wound. How could it when at any moment he could simply close his eyes and fall back into 1918?
And so Walter decided just exactly what he would do with the help of Azor's machine.
As Louisa walks home from the subway, she counts the gas lamps that once lit the sidewalks outside people's houses. The sun is setting. Years ago before she was born, it would have been time for the lamplighter to start his evening's work. Wiry men who walked the streets of New York stopping at each cast-iron lamp and, by swinging one foot up onto the base, grabbing hold of the cross handle just below the glass chimney, and hanging suspended there in that position, they'd light the lamp. Now most of the lamps have been replaced by electrical ones or else removed altogether, leaving behind a circle of fresh cement to fill in the hole. Walter would sometimes still demonstrate the lamplighter's swing. He'd get a faraway look in his eyes, Antarctica far, before both the wars, before he even met Freddie, so far that Louisa can imagine her father as a child, the excitement he must have felt peeking out from behind a bedroom curtain in the home where he grew up, waiting and watching for the lamplighter
to make his way down the block as if every day were Christmas somehow.
The house seems small and warm as a doll's. Walter is in the kitchen, and Louisa, after slipping out of her boots, joins him at the table, a white-topped enamel thing with extra leaves that pull out from the sides and a drawer in the center stuffed with clothespins, a wrench, unspooled thread, matches and string, old letters, upholstery tacks, a curved fish knife, Louisa's birth certificate, unsorted papers of Walter's from the Army, scissors, an unground nutmeg, a pincushion, and any number of other things. Most often the drawer doesn't open, so neither Walter nor Louisa is entirely sure of its contents anymore. On top of the table is a dimpled green glass sugar bowl beside a small ceramic dish painted with a salt-marsh scene. The dish holds salt and pepper shakers plus a mustard jar with its own miniature serving spoon tucked into a crevice of the jar's lid. Louisa's parents bought the set on their honeymoon, a trip to the coast of Maine, a trip that Walter, of course, still talks about regularly, as though he'd returned from the beach the day before last and was still finding sand in the folds in his clothes.
The salt and pepper tinkle together as Louisa situates her legs beneath the table.
"Hey there," he says, smiling at her. "You hungry? You want some oatmeal?"
She nods yes and begins to play with the small mustard spoon while Walter walks into the dark part of the kitchen. He takes a bowl down out of the cupboard, fills it with hot cereal, and places it in front of her. Louisa begins to eat. She is about to tell him of her adventure in Mr. Tesla's room. He'll enjoy it, she thinks, but just as she is about to speak Walter opens his mouth.
The Invention of Everything Else Page 12