The first thing she notices is a thumping like a heart's pulse magnified. She steps back, falling into the chair. The device comes alive, it's beating on the desk. Louisa can feel it through the wood, through the floor, resonating. Next she smells something, an oily metallic heat as if the device is warming up, getting ready to do whatever it does best. Finally the tiny copper globes begin to buzz and twitter. A number of the orbs, tethered to their wires, lift off the desk, rising an inch or two into the air. Once airborne, they begin to glow. "Fireflies," Louisa says and, without thinking better of it, reaches out her arm to touch one of the insectlike orbs. She grabs ahold. The air stands still. Louisa does not. As the electricity, energy pulled from the air, enters her body through her pointer finger and thumb, she stands straight up. The desk chair topples behind her. Louisa's bones are alive, her insides fluid and rushing as if she is traveling through all of time. New York City. The Paleocene. The Cretaceous. The Jurassic. The Permian. The Cambrian. Until the world stops.
Louisa is there, but she's not alone. A woman begins to speak, her voice coming from inside the device's current. It flows directly into Louisa's brain. Consciousness splits open, an apple. Louisa is looking into the very liquid red center of the earth, surprised to find the wings of a black fly silently beating, surprised to find this woman. Louisa leans into it all. "Hello?" She hears the woman's voice saying something, and Louisa is about to answer, about to scream "Hello!" when her knees slip out from underneath her. Her fingers let go of the device, and in an attempt to stop her collapse she grabs on to what she can: the desk. She spills Mr. Tesla's folders and papers out onto the floor. Louisa falls to the ground, though not before she notices that the doorknob to room 3327 is turning. Not before she sees one pointy black shoe enter the room. She twists as she falls. There is the ceiling. There are Mr. Tesla's flashing eyes and nostrils breathing above her and there, as she's finally succumbing, is darkness.
8
I was almost a sorry witness of Edison's doings, knowing that just a little theory and calculation would have saved him ninety per cent of the labor. But he had a veritable contempt for book learning and mathematical knowledge, trusting himself entirely to his inventor's instinct and practical American sense.
—Nikola Tesla
MISS PALOMI THINKS the streets of West Orange are awkwardly quiet. "Here, Juanita. Here, kitty, kitty, kitten," she calls through her back screen door, as she does most every night. She mashes a bit of the hamburger left over from her supper into a small china bowl for the cat. "Juanita, come," she says and stares out into her dark yard. "Juanita?"
She turns back to the kitchen, still talking to the missing cat. "I know what you want," she says, and from her cabinet Miss Palomi takes down a saucer. After peeling back the foil seal, she scoops the ring of cream from a new bottle of milk onto the dish. She steps outside into the night, stands on the small stair landing that leads down into the yard, and calls out again, "Kitty! Kitty! Kitty!" She rattles the dish as she places it on the landing, an old trick she uses on nights like this one when her cat is being coy and hiding in the dark shrubs at the back of the property. The promise of a dish of cream has never failed to bring Juanita home. Miss Palomi looks to the yard and rattles the dish again. Nothing. No Juanita.
As she stands, her eyes lift over the back shrubs and still higher, past the streets behind and down the road to a largish house. She can make out the outline of the structure. It glows with lamps that run on electricity, a rarity. The few small windows cast a yellow light, and every now and then Miss Palomi can hear the tangle of wires that run in a web over the building as they seize up with a current of charge passing through them.
She wonders what the inventor is working on so late at night.
"Juanita," she calls again, with less confidence. The cat does not come.
Thomas Alva Edison wipes his hands on one of the many gingham smocks his wife has sewn for him. The smock fits him snugly, buttoned tightly around his neck in such a way that the extra flesh is forced out and over the top of the garment. He is a large man and growing larger daily. He reaches for a turkey leg he'd been working on eating, then has a seat where he can keep one eye on his latest experiment and one eye on a treatise he is drafting.
With a mouth full of meat Edison reads aloud to test the bulletin's effectiveness:
WARNING! The AC system of delivering electricity will never be free from danger. Experiments show that systems developed by N. Tesla and G. Westinghouse will kill innocents, a fact as certain as death. Don't let your house get Westinghoused!
He finishes, "Yes. Yes, that should do it" He is pleased with the "your house, Westinghoused" turn of phrase and plans to send this draft to the printer's in the morning. "I'll send the boys out on a postering campaign," he yells across the room to one mucker. "Plus, it seems that we are running low on volunteers," he says and jerks his head toward the project at hand. The experiment consists of a long, flat metal sheet raised just a hair off the floor by a cork buffer. The metal sheet is attached by wires to a small alternating-current generator. Ten or so men stand around the edge of the metal plate, some with clipboards on which to record measurements, others simply stroking the bulbs of their chins. Charles Batchelor, friend and assistant to Edison, stands at the far end of the plate holding a very, very large old orange cat in his arms. He cradles the animal and scratches the area between its ears, eliciting a soft purr.
"All right" Batchelor says. "Crank it up." The switch is flipped and one thousand volts of electricity are sent immediately into the metal plate. "Ready?" Batchelor asks the men with clipboards. "A-one and a-two and a-three," he says, swinging his arms, sending the cat for a short, looping ride into the air so the animal has no choice but to land on the electrified plate.
Quite quickly the laboratory fills with the odor of burning hair and barbecue. The cats never last long but usually complete a quick dance before sizzling to their end. "Cut the power!" Batchelor calls out. With the electricity cut Batchelor walks out onto the plate to fetch the dead cat, peeling its furry body back by the tail. The carcass smokes and small sparks fire from the orange coat. Batchelor lifts the animal above his shoulders to be certain that Edison, sitting at his desk, sees. "How about that, Boss? We're done, huh?"
"Yes, yes," Edison mumbles, still working on his dinner bone. "Give it just one more test tonight. The press is coming tomorrow."
The men groan.
Batchelor plucks one last animal from a burlap bag that hangs from a peg in the wall. It is a puppy, so young as to still be extremely rambunctious, particularly now that it has been released from the dark bag. The little dog yelps. Batchelor lets the dog run free, hoping he will not have to force the animal again, hoping that instead it will find the electrified plate by itself. "Flip the switch" he yells to the controller and then walks around to the far side of the plate. "Come 'ere, pup!" he calls. "Come here, little fella." He crouches down onto one knee with his arms open to receive the small dog that will never make it across the plate. Down low, Batchelor can hear the current hum.
I'd like to go home, he thinks.
"Come here, little guy," he calls. That call catches the puppy's ear. The dog turns toward Batchelor, barks twice, and runs for him, directly across the plate. At the first touch of the current the dog bounds high into the air and continues, bounding, barking, his back arching, clear across the electric plate, straight into Batchelor's still-open arms. It happens so quickly that there is no time for the man to move. The dog touches him, the dog that is now carrying one thousand volts of electricity.
Somehow this is not Batchelor's end, though many, Batchelor included, think it might be. The shock does shoot him five feet through the air before he lands on his back, slammed up against a heavy oak worktable, where he remains unconscious with a smile on his face that frightens the other assistants. Running to help him, the muckers stand back when they see that Batchelor's body still holds a charge and is, in fact, emitting a strange light. Batchelor is glo
wing, not unlike one of the boss's light bulbs. He is slow to regain consciousness, choosing not to until the unpleasant scent of smelling salts hits his brain and wakes him up just in time to retch.
"We thought we'd lost you," one mucker says, passing Batchelor a towel to clean his mouth with. The men carefully lift Batchelor and carry him to a couch where a small penlight is directed into his eyes in an attempt to further rouse him from the shock. It seems to work. It seems to illuminate to Batchelor the dark corners of his electrocution. He stutters and gasps before collapsing, laughing, mad with pain.
Edison has not moved throughout the entire event. He's felt old of late, chilled by reports that do not mention his name. He's America's inventor. He alone. And he has done a good job—incandescent lamps, phonographs, the kinetoscope, to name only a few—so why must he contend with murmurs about AC power? Murmurs, no, murmurs he'd be lucky, shouts really, shouts of people saying that AC works better than DC. Edison's inventions don't run on AC. How can America forget that?
His concern for Batchelor is dimmed by a thought that trips through the coiled channels of his brain, a thought like ticker tape gaining more definition as it marches, a thought that soon bears the bulky, long-winded title: HOW I WILL FINALLY CRUSH NIKOLA TESLA AND GEORGE WESTINGHOUSE'S ALTERNATING CURRENT WHILE SIMULTANEOUSLY PROTECTING THE WORLD FROM VICIOUS CRIMINALS, PROTECTING MYSELF AND MY WIFE MINA AND MY CHILDREN MARION, THOMAS, WILLIAM, MADELEINE, CHARLES, THEODORE, AND EVEN OUR DOG BEAU WHILE ALSO, CONVENIENTLY, CORNERING THE MARKET FOR THE DISTRIBUTION OF ELECTRICITY IN AMERICA.
Tillie Ziegler on occasion remembered her husband in Philadelphia. She remembered how he'd once been gentle to her and stopped to tie her laces and then, before standing, he'd drawn her ankle up to his lips and kissed the leather of her shoe. Tillie was careful to avoid getting any sort of faraway look of remembering in her eyes because if her boyfriend caught her thinking about her husband he'd be certain to knock the memory right from her head.
William Kemmler was a vegetable merchant who loved nothing more than drinking. William and Tillie had lived together in a Buffalo, New York, slum ever since she'd left her husband.
"Tillie," Kemmler would say when sober enough to speak, "if you ever think of leaving, don't. I won't let you." And just the suggestion would have him squeezing a fist so tightly that his knuckles shook and turned white with rage.
That night, after Kemmler rolled off of Tillie and began his boozy snores, she lay awake, distracted by something outside the window, some piece of metal or a puddle in the rank street that had caught the light of the moon and reflected it up onto the ceiling of their bedroom. The light rippled, and during this brief glimmering it is possible that Tillie might have imagined escape, but then the moon shifted positions and the light was gone.
William spent the next day drunk, which meant he was very funny throughout the morning. Happy that his vegetable stand had been doing so well, he tickled Tillie while she worked at the sink putting up last night's dishes. By noon he'd become irritable and tired, complaining of a buzzing in his ears. Tillie heard nothing.
"Just listen!" he commanded.
She held still, fear creeping up her neck. She heard nothing.
"Don't you hear it? It's making me crazed!" William tore open one of the cupboards looking for the origin of the sound. After emptying the entire shelf's contents onto the floor and finding nothing, he turned to Tillie, gripping the sides of his head. "Don't you hear it?" His face was in pain, desperate.
She held still again, listening. "Yes," she finally said. "Yes. I do, dear. I hear it now." She wanted to soothe him, though in truth she heard nothing.
William let his hands fall and righted his head. He stared at her, his face becoming neutral. "You filthy liar." He spat at her. "There is no sound."
By dinnertime he was already passed out and Tillie was happy for some peace. It gave her an hour or two to reorganize her trunk of belongings and to clean the house.
When William awoke the following morning he had an awful hangover. He pulled the bedcovers up to his chin, afraid his body would split in two. It was then that he noticed Tillie's trunk. It was organized and packed neatly as if she were ready to go somewhere. He pulled himself up out of bed and down to the kitchen, where she was making him a cup of tea for his head.
He stood in the doorway and it was a moment before she knew he was there. "So you're leaving, aye?"
"Yeah, yeah. I'm leaving, right," she said, tired of his suspicions.
"Guess that's why you've got your trunk all neatly packed and ready to go."
"Sure, William. That's why."
She turned back to the boiling kettle and finished up what she was doing. When the tea was ready, she looked, expecting to find William still there. She was wrong. She was alone in the kitchen. The hot stove ticked. She took the tea upstairs, thinking he'd gone back to bed, but the bedroom was empty as well. "William" she called. There was no answer. "William?" He must have decided to go into work after all. She returned downstairs and set the tea on the table, added some sugar, and had a sip herself. Reconfiguring her day now that he was gone, she sliced herself a piece of bread for breakfast. It was peaceful, chewing in the kitchen without William, and so it was a surprise when, a few moments later, he returned from where he'd been, out in the woodshed, fetching the hatchet. It was a surprise when he took the hatchet and drove it into Tillie's skull twenty-six times before dropping the bloodied blade and retreating to the neighbor's house, where he informed them, "I did it. I had to. And now I'm certain to hang for it."
But William was wrong. Instead, the headline, on a bribe from Thomas Edison, read KEMMLER WESTINGHOUSED, and went on to describe how flames shot from his head, how steam escaped from under his fingernails, as Kemmler became the first man to be killed by an electric chair run on alternating current, an electric chair invented by Harold Brown, an employee of one Mr. Thomas Edison.
9
As to the inward meaning of this dream of beauty of course, I don't understand it, but then I don't understand anything.
—Henry Adams, 1893 World's Columbian Exposition
IT WASN'T YET ready for human trial.
The soles of my shoes cut into my thighs. I kneel beside her, rocking back and forth over bent legs. Her pulse. I'll have to touch her. I shut my eyes momentarily for strength before placing my index and middle fingers on the skin of her wrist. The charge is still circling somewhere nearby and in that touch something is exchanged. My head drops to one side. "Louisa." That's what she said her name was. Her heart beats in her wrist. The girl is alive. I let go and breathe, wiping the fingers, her germs, across the weave of the room's carpet.
And then I wait, deadly anxious for some report. I wait to hear her critique of the device. I suppose I also harbor a certain concern that there could have been some ill effect, a lingering indication in her joints, or perhaps a misfiring of her thoughts. I don't need any closer attention from the hotel management when my financial situation is in such disarray. If I am forced to move again now, my work would wither.
Her eyes stream back and forth below their lids. Better than not moving at all, which is what they were doing when I first found her. Louisa. The curious maid. Two visits in one week. That's two more visits than I received all last year, though I don't suppose I could officially call breaking and entering my room a visit. I reach for a towel and use it to lift her head onto a pillow. The muscles in her cheeks twitch some; the skin is flushed red. I shut the device off. Her mouth opens a slit and I hear the breath. I can't say I regret the girl's decision to meddle. I only wish she would wake up now and tell me what happened, tell me what she saw there.
Slow minutes pass. I try poking her shoulder with the eraser end of a pencil. "Hello?" I ask directly into her ear. The girl's eyelids flutter some, enough to let the light in. There's a stirring. I feel her consciousness returning to the room. I hear her gulp the air and quite suddenly she is awake. She sits up, wide-eyed, with a bolt.
"Pl
ease don't tell anyone." They're the first words to escape from her lips.
I say nothing.
"Please," she begs. "I will lose my job. I was only looking."
I hadn't considered this advantage. I had thought only of my unpaid bills, my history of power outages. "How are you feeling?" I ask.
She looks around on the floor beside her as if she might find some evidence into her state of being there. "I'm fine," she says.
"What are you feeling?" I continue my investigation.
"I'm feeling very scared that you might tell a manager I was in your room and I will lose my job."
"Your secret" I tell her, "is quite safe with me as long as mine"—I point to the device—"is safe with you."
She looks up at me. She nods in agreement.
"The device," she says.
"The device," I say.
"Yes." She is calmer now, whispering. "I'd almost forgotten."
The Invention of Everything Else Page 16