The Invention of Everything Else

by Samantha Hunt

"A letter came today."

  Louisa stops scraping the bottom of her bowl.

  "Azor," he says, raising his wiry eyebrows at her as if this were highly suspect, as if he was still angry at him.

  "Where is it?" she asks.

  And Walter, drumming his fingers across the table, stops, reaches into the breast pocket of his watchman's uniform and places the letter on the table before her. Louisa holds it by the sides, examining the postmark. ROCKAWAY, it says, and then ROCKAWAY again, a second stamp, a hiccup, double, fainter impression.

  Walt, Lou,

  There are things I have to explain. Plus.

  I want to show you how it all works.

  Come meet me in Rockaway. Bring your young man, Louisa.

  Truly, Azor

  "He's not my young man" Louisa tells Walter. "Really, Dad. He's not."

  "The lady doth protest too much," Walter says, curling the corners of his lips. "That must mean you actually like this one."

  Louisa tucks her chin to her chest to hide her smile.

  "Well, don't invite him if you don't want him to come," Walter says and clears her empty bowl away. "It's just that simple." Smiling, he pulls on his boots, says goodbye, and leaves for work.

  Azor, she's starting to think, has gone crazy.

  He met them at the bus station in an Army jeep, and after describing every seabird he's had the opportunity to see out here—egret, plover, sandpiper, osprey, oystercatcher, and heron—he drove them down an all but deserted snowy beach road, through a chainlink gate, and up to what appeared to be an abandoned airport.

  "What is this place?" Walter asks.

  "This," Azor says, spreading his arms wide, "is known as Rockaway Airport, though usually we just call it Edgemere."

  "We?" Walter asks, still smarting from Azor's abandonment, still worried he's been replaced by someone else.

  "Yes, me and the seagulls," Azor says.

  "Birds don't talk," Walter says and turns his head away to look out the open side of the jeep, jilted in pretense only.

  And yet despite his craziness, Louisa thinks, she is very happy to see him again.

  "This is where you've been for two years, Azor?" Walter asks.

  "Yup."

  "Yup," is all Walter has to say in response to that.

  "I'll tell you what happened, Walt," Azor says, though he doesn't say anything for a breath or two. "There was an ad" he finally offers. "In the back of Popular Mechanics. It said, 'Build Your Own Time Machine Today!' I sent away for the booklet immediately. And then I waited. I waited for a very long time, two, three months. After three and a half months the booklet had still not arrived. I even asked at the post office. So I thought, well, I could sit here and wait for the rest of my life or I could start building my own time machine right then and there. So that's what I did. I left that day."

  Listening to the two of them speak, these two dreamers who raised her, Louisa stares at her hands, her sensible, earthy hands, and wonders how in the world she came to be who she is.

  "You could have sent me a note," Walter tells him.

  "A note. Yes. I suppose I could have. Sorry, Walt. I'm really sorry," he says, and that's it for a while. Azor is chewing on his lip, realizing that Walter is owed a better explanation than that. Azor sighs. He winces. "The real truth is, Walt, I didn't want any help. I wanted to do it on my own. And I know that's selfish and that doesn't mean I wasn't thinking about you or worrying about you, but—it's just, it was more than that. Inventors are artists, Walt. One has to be a little bit selfish at the start because masterpieces are made by one person. You know?"

  Walter does not reveal whether he knows or not but stays silent for a while, thinking, looking out at the passing landscape, until he asks, "What about Louisa? It took two people to make her, and there's no question she's a masterpiece."

  "You've got a point," Azor says. "I guess Lou's the exception to the rule."

  The airport is little more than a dirt landing strip, a couple of buildings huddled together as if in secret conference, and one small hangar. "Harry Gordon used to operate a flight school out here, Gordon's Air Service, until last August when, what with the war, the Army closed down all privately operated airfields within two hundred miles of the coast."

  "Then what are you doing here?" Walter asks.

  A question which Azor smiles at but decides not to answer, or rather answers by singing the first lines of "Aba Daba Honeymoon."

  Walter looks unsatisfied.

  "Well, no one else was using it" Azor finally volunteers.

  It's true the place is all but deserted. It wouldn't surprise Louisa if some flying ace from the Great War materialized in a biplane, with a silk scarf wrapped around his neck, and after hand-turning his propeller, lifted off for the deserts of Morocco. Azor's been living in an airport for ghosts.

  His workshop along with a small cot and sleeping bag is set up in a corner of the old hangar, a building that had once been an oil-burner assembly plant and now sits lonely and unpeopled, looking out over the airstrip. Louisa notices a small handgun in a holster hung above Azor's bed. She can hear the wind buffeting the rippled tin exterior.

  The hangar dwarfs all four of them. Azor, Walter, Louisa, and Arthur. Yes, Arthur, her young man. She'd pinned a note to his boarding-house door late last night and then, early this morning, found him waiting at the bottom of the stoop, reading the paper. He stood. "Time to go?" he asked, turning as he spoke so that the blue sky reflected off the glass of his spectacles where his eyes should have been. Louisa tried to keep her cool. Walter began to laugh.

  Arthur sat directly across from Louisa on both the subway and the bus out so that the tips of their knees touched, and Arthur, with some sort of superhuman ability to not look away, stared straight at her. Lou, never one to back down from such a challenge, stared right back. Walter, awake off-shift, took the opportunity to doze with his head tucked up against the window. He woke once to muster a ten-second conversation as if he'd been conscious and chatty the entire trip. "Arthur, what line of business are you in?"

  "Mechanic, sir," he answered, unsurprised by Walter's sudden consciousness. Arthur did not suffer from the same nervousness Lou's other boyfriends had felt with Walter. Not much seemed to shake Arthur.

  "Mechanic," Walter said. "Fantastic," he managed before he smoothed his hair once, turned back to the window, and fell asleep again.

  The train rocked their knee bones against each other. Louisa was wearing one of two pairs of pants she owned. She was still not entirely used to wearing pants, and having each leg separately defined gave her a certain thrill, a sense of sturdy freedom. Just like Marlene Dietrich. "Where did you come from?" she asked Arthur once Walter was soundly back asleep.

  "New York. I told you. We went to school together."

  "That's not what I mean. One day I'd never seen you before and then the next day you start to appear everywhere."

  He smiled. "That's odd," he said. "I remember you so clearly."

  "I knew you'd say something vague like that."

  "Well, ever since fourth grade, I knew you understood vagaries."

  She didn't dare ask what he meant because, in fact, she did understand. The pigeons, the radio waves, the invisible current running between the very tips of their knees as they bumped along on their train out to Rockaway. Vagaries. "Tell me something about yourself." Louisa wanted to hear a solid story so that she could dismiss the feeling that Arthur was some sort of spectral being who had drifted into her life and would just as easily drift back out again. She was starting to think that she might like him to stick around.

  "My name is Arthur Vaughn."

  "Yes. I already know that."

  "Patience," he said, leaning toward her. He wore the same blue wool coat he had on the other day and it suited him, made from the thick wool of a sailor's garments. While Arthur wasn't particularly tall, he was solid. Louisa could tell just by looking at his fingers, which were strong with a tiny tuft of dark hair below each knuc
kle. "I wasn't done yet," he said, and then asked, "You're probably wondering why I'm not overseas?"

  "I did give it some thought."

  "Well, I was until only a few months ago."

  A few months, Louisa thought. That explained the waves of rebellion he'd allowed to grow in his hair.

  "I was a mechanic at Burtonwood in England right as the war was getting started."

  "You were in the Army?" Louisa couldn't quite see it, Arthur in uniform. Nothing about him up to this point had seemed uniform.

  "Yes," he said. "At Burtonwood. It's a huge repair depot, an entire city made of Nissen huts and shift after shift of guys like me. Almost every U.S. aircraft in the war comes through Burtonwood. My specialty was rebuilding engines. P-47 Thunderbolts and B-17s."

  He looked out the window. "I watched the planes come and go all day for months on end. I studied everything about them, read the manuals, talked to pilots, worked on the engines." Arthur lifted one finger to the window. "But I wasn't allowed to ever fly the planes because of these." He tapped once on the lens of his glasses. The corners of his lips were beginning to curl up, and Louisa got a bad feeling that she knew where the story was headed. "Then one day, a warm one in October, just as the sun was going below the horizon, I noticed a P-47 that had come in for repairs that week. It was just about ready to be sent back, so there it was sitting on the runway unattended and—"

  "You stole the plane?" she interrupts, having already guessed the abrupt end to his Army career.

  "The sky looked very big that night. I barely gave it a thought."

  "Are you kidding me?"

  "No."

  "You're lucky to be alive."

  "Lucky, yes, that someone left that plane unattended." Arthur was smiling as he remembered. "I haven't the slightest regret, Louisa. I was flying, alone, out over the ocean. It went off without a hitch."

  "Without a hitch?"

  "Well, dishonorable discharge. You know what that is?"

  "I suppose I can imagine," Louisa said, though as she watched Arthur tell the story it seemed that he felt very little resembling dishonor. He smiled out the window. "What was flying like?" She leaned forward onto her elbows.

  "Nothing else in the world."

  "Nothing?"

  "Almost nothing," he said, turning back to look at her. And Louisa, as he had guessed, understood all the vagaries in that word "almost."

  The size of the hangar makes Louisa's knees feel loose and wobbly, or perhaps it is Arthur. Something has dismissed the laws of gravity, and Louisa is concerned that the breezes out here could blow her away.

  Two old planes that look as though they will never fly again are tucked away in one corner. They resemble tin toys, tiny within the tremendous hangar. Louisa's thoughts are floating somewhere up near her shoulders. She teases Arthur, warning him away from the planes.

  "So here's the place," Azor says and leaves Louisa, Arthur, and Walter standing a bit dumbstruck, uncertain what they are seeing. Louisa cranes her neck about. It is very exciting, though it is hard to tell just what it all is.

  "He sleeps here?" Walter asks Lou while Azor tears about, running up and down ladders to fetch a needed tool and dashing back to his worktable to quickly refer to his notes, demonstrating the vigor of a much younger man. He flits, a mosquito, moving from concern to concern, all the while ignoring the mystery that is hidden beneath a terrifically pieced-together patchwork quilt, stitched for a giant from ten or more odd blankets. The three visitors say very little. They stare, uncertain if they should offer to lend a hand. They want to, but how exactly does one help a person build a time machine? Louisa picks up one of Azor's wrenches. Azor sees her looking. He turns and, as if woken from his reverie, remembers that they are there for a demonstration. He faces the huge, cloaked mystery in the middle of it all.

  "Walter," he calls. "Please," he says, summoning Walter over, "can you get that side?" Each man grabs a corner of the hodgepodge fabric, and by walking toward the hangar's back door, they drag the cover off as they move. Walter turns to stare. Everyone turns to stare. There in the middle of the hangar is a time machine. And how, Louisa asks herself, does she know it is a time machine when she has never before in her life seen a time machine? It is too wonderful to be anything else.

  Fabricated from what appears to be scrap metal, the surface of the ship is pieced together in an awkward checkerboard pattern, squares of metal in all sizes and shades, some shiny, some dull, the pieces held together with rivets. The craft itself looks to Louisa like two ice cream cones turned onto their sides, bracing one center ball of silver ice cream.

  "How," Walter asks, visibly floored, "did you make it?"

  "Well," Azor says, "I'd stare up at the sky a lot, puzzling over the problem of time. I'd stare at my watch trying to figure something out. Staring didn't work, so I just started to build it. Then I just kept on building, working a little bit every day. You'd be surprised. You can build almost anything if you have two years, an empty airport, and a pile of Popular Mechanics. I would have been done even sooner if those guys from the Army had left me alone."

  "Huh?"

  "Oh, a couple of fellows from the Army, or at least they say they're from the Army, have been snooping around here. I have to hide out every time they show up."

  "I thought you told Big Chief Ezra that you were working with the military?" Arthur says.

  "I said I was 'in contact and communication' with them. That's true. They come and rifle through my stuff and I scream obscenities at them from those woods over there."

  Arthur smiles. Louisa smiles. Walter clears his throat.

  Though the rest of them are bundled up in their winter coats, Azor is wearing a pair of cotton pants and a tan work shirt. His sleeves are rolled up as though he doesn't feel the chill at all. Even the hair covering his head is scarce, a trace of threads pulled back and held in place with some sort of grease.

  "How did you know what to do?" Arthur takes a step closer to Azor, addressing him in his deep, whispery voice.

  "That's a good question. Who can you ask to teach you to build a time machine when no one has ever built a time machine before?"

  "Yes," Arthur says.

  Azor walks toward the ship with his chin tucked to his chest as though he is thinking it over. He starts to fuss with one of the metal plates, fingering the rivets along the edge. "No one," he says again, smiling. He continues singing his song about the monkey and the chimp. Azor's breath is visible in the hangar's cold air. Louisa, Arthur, and Walter watch the exhaled air as though it might somehow contain all the answers, all the blueprints for his design. Azor shakes his head quickly like a wet dog. "Good question," he says and claps his hands, dismissing it. "Now. Who wants to go for a spin?"

  "I do," Walter says, stepping forward before the words have even left Azor's lips.

  Louisa looks about the hangar. She spreads her arms slightly out to the side as if trying to slow everything down. "Dad," Louisa says, but with very little air behind it. She's not sure she wants him to go anywhere inside that metal contraption. No matter how wonderful it might be.

  "What?" Walter asks.

  And when she hasn't got a good answer, at least not one she can say in front of Arthur and Azor, she comes up with something to mutter. "Nothing," she says, and then, "How long will you be gone?"

  "We won't be gone any time at all. We'll return just at the moment we left," Azor says.

  "But have you ever gone anywhere in it before?"

  "That's another good question," Azor answers, not answering at all.

  "Dad," Louisa says again, but Walter looks at her, squinting his eyes as if she were a sour thought he'd like to be rid of at the moment, as if she were trying to keep him from all the possibilities, and—worst of all—as if she were acting like his mother instead of his daughter.

  All three men wait on her decision. She lets out a breath, a loud sigh. She looks once at Arthur. She's not Walter's mother. Louisa nods her head. She lets go of him. At lea
st for the moment.

  "Now, if I could just ask for your assistance. We are going to have to push the craft out the back door here. See these runners? It slides right along them. It's not heavy at all. Out back is where I keep the launch pad."

  "Launch?" Louisa asks, worry returning. "Azor, have you done this before?"

  "What?" he asks.

  "Traveled through time."

  Azor tries to push the machine forward, alone. It does not move. "Why, we're traveling through time right now, dear."

  Both Walter and Arthur are looking again at Louisa, waiting for her to give them a sign. She breathes heavily. She twists her mouth.

  What if the time machine works? Or what if she is the only one among them all with any sense? She tucks her head and starts to push. Arthur, Azor, and Walter, following her lead, get behind the craft and shove, all of them smiling into their collars.

  The metal, Louisa is surprised to realize, is warm to the touch. It is the only warm thing in this freezing cold hangar. At Azor's call they push together as though trying to dislodge an automobile from a deep, muddy rut. After a few synchronized attempts—"Ready, push!"—the craft begins to move on uncertain and creaky wheels. With a bit of momentum behind them they find it easy to push the machine, though it's almost twice Louisa's height. When they reach the back door Azor holds up his hands for them to stop. Peeking his head out back, he looks both to the left and to the right, making certain that the coast is clear, before giving them the signal to continue pushing. They roll the craft down a short ramp to a wooden stage where Azor has painted a bright yellow X.

  Why shouldn't it be possible, Louisa wonders. She knows a family with a television in their house, and every day airplanes, far heavier than this really rather svelte and slender craft, barrel through the sky. Airplanes even pass through different time zones. Isn't that time travel?

  Walter rubs his mittened hands together, excited. He climbs up inside the belly of the machine, turning once to wave goodbye. Louisa raises her hand up to her shoulder slowly. "Good luck," she yells, though Walter has already disappeared inside the craft.