"I've often asked myself the same question. The time I spent in Colorado was the purest year of invention. Something about the snow, perhaps, and the loneliness. It was frozen perfection out on my prairie."
"I know why you came back to New York."
"Oh, really? Tell."
"Because of her."
"Katharine?."
"Yes."
"Louisa, you are incurable." I look at her sideways. "Though you are right about one thing. When they are rounding down the story of my life, that is probably what they'll say. 'He returned to New York for love.' But let me assure you, I didn't come back because of Katharine."
"Didn't you love her?"
"She was the wife of my best friend."
Louisa chews at her lip. "That doesn't answer my question."
"Love is not as necessary as humans seem to imagine. It is a distraction to thought, and I've always found thought to be far more rewarding than love. Love destroys. Thought creates."
"Love can create as well."
"Really?" I tease her again. "What does the young Louisa know of love?"
"Plenty."
"Really?"
She hesitates before providing her evidence. "My father is still in love with my mother."
"Exactly what I mean. You say your father is in love with your mother. But why don't you say 'My parents are in love with each other'? Because love is uneven. There is no science to it, no formula. One party loves more than the other. Pain ensues."
"No."
"No?"
"I said my father is in love with my mother because my mother has been dead for over twenty years."
I turn to face her. "Exactly the problem with love, Louisa. Exactly. Loved ones die on us all the time."
We walk on with this resolution ticking in the air. The park is coming into view up ahead. I think of my bird and how she'll view the horrible hypocrisies I've just committed against love. I'm anxious for a new topic of conversation. "Now, I have a question for you" I say.
"You do?"
"It's only fair."
"All right," she agrees, nodding her head seriously.
"You snoop through all the rooms you clean, don't you?"
"Yes."
"Why?"
"Why?" She's surprised. "Wouldn't you?"
"No. The thought of touching other people's belongings makes me anxious. And I suppose I'm just not interested. But you must have found some wonderful things over the years."
"No one's room has been as wonderful as yours."
"Ah. That's why mine warranted a repeat visit?"
"Yes."
"Is everyone else really so boring?"
"It's not that they're boring, but they're not like you."
"Not many people are anymore," I say.
As we enter Bryant Park, I crane my neck. What if she is not here? How does a person begin to find one particular pigeon in all of New York City? I know so little about how she spends her time away from me. Where she flocks, all that she sees.
"Why Bryant Park?" Louisa asks. "There are lots of parks, lots of pigeons closer to the New Yorker."
"Yes," I say, distracted by the prospect of seeing my bird. I scan the skies overhead. "There are."
We are standing at the southwest entrance.
"That's where my father works," Louisa tells me, pointing through the park to the library.
I look. "He's a librarian?"
"No. He's the night watchman."
"Even better. He gets to wander through the stacks by himself then, all alone?"
"Alone except for the times I've gone with him."
"Lucky you. That must be where you get your aptitude for snooping."
"I think so," she says, smiling.
We enter the park. "Could you deposit me on that bench there? See the man with the very large nose?"
"No. Oh. The bust, you mean?"
"Yes. Drop me off there, and then, if you would, take those nuts down to the fountain. That's their favorite place for a meal. And thank you, Louisa. Thank you very much."
She leads me to a bench near Goethe and eases me onto the seat. "Thank you" I say again. She turns to walk off, but before she can, I stop her. "Louisa, the voice you heard, could it have been your mother's?"
"I don't know. I've never met my mother."
"I see. But could it have been?"
"Anything is possible."
"Yes." I smile. "Almost anything."
"Is that what the device does?" she asks. "Allows one to speak to the dead?"
"Perhaps."
"What is it? Please."
"You never heard about the poor cat killed by curiosity?"
She stares at the ground. Her eyes burn brands into the cobblestone, as if she is sparing me her furor. "Please," she repeats.
I hesitate, trying to bluster something or other. "It's possible, I mean it is the possibility, or rather it is all possibilities, for instance—well, in some way, it—oh, dear, I'm not making much sense."
She nods her head in agreement.
"All right" I glance around the park. "It's an old idea, a borrowed one, I should say. Come here and let me whisper it or else my brother will be furious."
"I didn't know you had a brother."
"We've been working on the device together. He doesn't like me to speak of it."
"Tell me," she says again.
And I surrender. She leans down toward me, offering up her ear. Into it I whisper the secret of my latest invention, our latest invention, a device that will, once again, change the world just as soon as it is finished. I'm careful to not explain it too well.
Moments pass.
I sit back. Again she chews the side of her lip. "Really?" is all she asks.
"Yes."
And so she smiles with a look I recognize: what wonder does to us. She turns, making her way over to the fountain, her neck thrown back, following the birds overhead. The hood slips from her head. Bryant Park is frozen and the cloudy sky only adds to the chill. Three lone businessmen pass me by, using the park's pathways as shortcuts to the Sixth Avenue IND. No one hesitates in the park. The wind is lifting ice crystals off the accumulated snow drifts so that each burst of wind feels like a shattering of wet glass on my cheeks. I watch Louisa. At first she doles out the peanuts very slowly, letting one or two slip from her grip as though she were a careful Gretel making a path. But as the birds gather, Louisa begins to scatter the peanuts more freely in looping arcs. Within seconds a mad tornado surrounds her, gray and purple pigeons fill the air. The less she moves, the closer the birds come to her. They nod their heads. Nearly everyone is there. Those with the mangled feet, those who seem to have been bathing in used cooking oil. And the beautiful ones as well. Some ignore the food altogether and, puffing up their necks, do a small dance, bowing and dipping in a circle of courtship.
I attempt a call. I can't muster much breath and the sound does not travel very far but rather breaks up in the cold air. "Hooeehoo. Hooeehoo."
I wait. Couples, families stroll past, moving very quickly. I check my sternum once more. Is she there? Of course not. Birds do not live in people's rib cages.
"Hooeehoo." I lean forward, my chin in my hand. And then I remember the falter to her walk last time. And then I remember that wild birds don't live very long. I am so mad with worry that I fail to notice she has appeared.
"So, love destroys and thought creates?" she asks.
She startles me. "I was speaking of human love, not, of course, the perfect affection between a man and a bird."
"Nikola," she says.
I lift my chin from my hands. "Darling." The wind expands and the surrounding park dissolves in front of me. "I've been so worried about you," I say.
"Yes."
When I tried once to explain to her what it meant to worry, she said, "I don't think birds do this," after listening to my description. And of course they don't. Birds are unspoiled by worry, that grave imperfection that keeps humans heavy, keeps us from flight.<
br />
She is perched on top of Goethe's head again.
"You don't look well, Niko."
I could say the same about her. There's something tired around her eyes and a looseness to her feathers. I don't say anything, but it doesn't matter. She hears me think it. She lets it be, nodding.
"So the chambermaid turned the new device on?" she asks.
"Yes."
"I didn't realize it was ready."
"It wasn't. She's lucky it didn't kill her."
"I wasn't sure it would work. Quite honestly, I wasn't sure it existed."
"No. I suppose neither was I. I thought it was possible, of course," I say.
"Anything is possible," she reminds me.
"Anything?" I ask.
"No, Niko. Humans still can't fly." It is an old joke passed between an old couple and so neither of us laughs. She flies down onto the bench beside me. She allows me to hold her gently in one arm, up against my heart. We both gaze up at the poet, at the polymath's mighty head.
"Open the second shutter," she says, "so that more light may come in."
"What's that?" I ask. It sounds familiar.
"His last words."
"Goethe's?"
"Yes."
"That's right" Though I begin to wonder why she said them. Against my best judgment, I pry into something I don't want to know the answer to. "Why?"
"Perhaps the room was dark."
"No. Why are you saying it?"
And she tells me, devoid of any drama, as if brushing a grain of sand from between her feathers. "Because I am dying." She says it as one might tell a friend, I too enjoy taking baths.
The wind picks up again, lifting her feathers, blowing my hair. There's nothing I can say and so the words are sucked from me. No, you aren't? Where would that get us? I hold her closer. A curtain falls. Sight, sound, and touch disappear. Love does destroy, over and again. So it is always the greatest surprise to find how stubborn hope can be. "But perhaps the new device."
"Niko, I'm still not sure this new device even exists," she says.
"But Louisa saw it."
She nestles down a bit farther. "Maybe if you explained to me what it does. Maybe I could help."
"That would be difficult."
"Because it does everything, right? A possibility machine that does every last thing you would ever conceive of if time were not finite, if there were no end to invention, no end to living. Or at least no end to Nikola Tesla. Am I right?"
Her perfection astounds me again and again.
"The invention of everything else," she says, rising up out of my arm, landing once again on top of Goethe so that we can face each other. "Picture telephones. Magnetic surgery. Wireless printing presses. Teleportation. Perpetual motion. Immortality, I suppose."
"How did you guess?" I smile, though she becomes quite serious.
"Because I alone know how lost the world will be without you once you are gone," and as if to demonstrate the concept of loss my bird flies off into a darkening sky where I can no longer separate her gray wings from the gray of the world.
I must get back to work immediately.
10
In all her products, Nature only develops her simplest germs. One would say that it was no great stretch of invention to create birds.
—Henry David Thoreau
THE SUN IS RISING somewhere far out on the ocean, but in New York City night persists—night with the slightest blue glow, the approach of the sun in the east. Louisa opens the window in Walter's bedroom that leads out to their fire escape and up to the roof.
They once kept two old canvas cots on the roof, but the canvas grew old and tore; still, sometimes she and Walter lie on their backs on top of the tar roof and stare up at the birds as they circle overhead. It is easy to get lost in the pigeons' flight patterns. It is easy for her and Walter to imagine themselves swooping through the air along with the birds, turning and diving. The birds make a person dizzy. The birds make a person forget the world below.
"Hello, dears," she says. They notice the feed bag in Louisa's hand and so approach the corner of their hutch where Louisa is filling cups of food.
Once a week she takes some of the pigeons out to Long Island or the Jersey shore and sets them loose. She couldn't care less how fast they fly; she just likes to watch them go. Louisa selects four birds, grabbing each pigeon around the belly, always surprised by how light-boned they are. There's nothing to them but air and feathers. She studies as she squeezes, not too tight but tighter than she probably ought to.
She's helping the last bird through the hatch door. "Shh," she says, calming the bird. When she looks up he is standing across Fifty-third Street, on the south side, down on the street, watching her. The last bird slips from Louisa's hand and flies away, landing on the cornice a few feet away. Both Arthur and she follow the bird until it lands.
Louisa waves. Arthur waves back.
She sets down her basket and smoothes out her hair. She straightens the bulky coat she is wearing—Walter's work coat makes her feel like a gorilla, as the arms hang far lower than her actual arms. Arthur stares up across the divide. He is wearing a tight-fitting wool cap, snug across his forehead. Behind his ears, dark waves of his hair peek out from underneath the hat. Arthur looks taller than he has before, broader, so solid and strong that Louisa's first thoughts are for how, if he were to hold her in his arms, she'd have a very sound place to bury her head. She stands there for a moment, imagining the warmth of his heartbeat through their winter coats.
She has tried to put little stock in what Azor said, though she hears it over and over: "Are you two married yet?" Azor is half crazy, but a part of her, a tiny room inside, wonders whether there might be a way to recognize someone you will love before you love him. Maybe time does unfurl in curves rather than straight lines. Maybe it doesn't move from here to there but instead expands in circles. And so maybe, she thinks, she will marry Arthur because of what Azor said and then Azor will say it only because she married Arthur because of what Azor said and then Azor will say it again. Circles. The idea is maddening.
As she watches Arthur across the street, there is an odd quality to the light, as if the air just before the sunrise is filled with every single color. There are blues and purples, greens and pinks. Only the colors in this predawn light are jumbled, as if without the sun they can't quite organize themselves into individual shades. Arthur, in this strange twilight, looks like a portrait in which his features are some sort of impressionistic mess of colors, like he isn't quite real.
It would be difficult to say just what occurred in the air between them. Something invisible is exchanged. It floats in the unoccupied intervening space, a spark gap. It pulls Louisa closer to the cornice. Without looking away, she stands right at the edge, nearly dangling over the crown of the building. Louisa imagines jumping. She imagines he would catch her.
They watch each other in the semidark until the first bit of sun peeks through and Arthur is no longer an impression. Louisa, seeing him clearly now, realizes how late it has gotten. "I'll be right down," she calls across the divide. She holds up her basket of birds and helps the last pigeon get back inside.
Before leaving she wakes Walter. "Hey, hey." She pokes his arm beneath the cover in the dark of his bedroom. The pigeons are cooing in their basket. They like the warm air inside the house. "I'm going," she says. Walter turns but his eyes remain closed; he'd gotten into bed only an hour earlier. "Sync up your watch with mine," Louisa whispers, and as she sits on the edge of the bed Walter slowly opens his eyes. The room is quite dark. He stares at her, surprised to be awake. He reaches out to touch her cheek. He runs the back of his hand across her skin, slowly. "Dad" she says. "Sync up your watch with mine." Louisa doesn't care, but Walter does—he likes the race of it. He likes to know when his birds did well.
Walter's eyes clear and open wide. "Louisa," he says as though he is surprised. He bolts upright. He switches on a tiny bedside lamp. "Oh." He shakes his head and then
takes her small watch in hand and matches the time to his watch, down to the minute.
"OK" he says before lying back, pulling the covers up over his head. "Good luck. I have to leave for work by six. Try to make it home before then so we can calculate the birds' times."
"I will," she says and squeezes his arm goodbye.
"Good morning."
"Good morning," Arthur says. He offers her a caraway roll from a brown paper bag he's got tucked under his arm. The roll is still warm.
"Thank you" She has a bite and chews. Arthur takes her other hand in his.
Moving swiftly through the dark, back in the old basket again, the birds titter. The great adventure of being swept from the coop, whisked away beneath the chamois cloth, has their feathers bristling. The streets are empty as Arthur and Louisa walk south to Penn Station.
Neither snow nor rain nor heat nor gloom of night stays these couriers from the swift completion of their appointed rounds. At this hour, both the James A. Farley GPO and Penn Station resemble sleeping stone monsters, grown fat and heavy with the throngs of people they swallow daily. "My father," Louisa tells Arthur as they enter the station, "remembers when this was just a vacant lot."
"Really?"
"He's good at remembering things. It's his specialty."
"Poor Penn Station," Arthur says.
"What's so poor about Penn Station?" she asks.
But just then Arthur freezes, staring off over Louisa's shoulder. His chin begins to twitch as if he sees something scary, a hairy monster standing behind her. She turns to look. There is nothing there. "Nothing," he says, dropping Louisa's hand, raising his own up to cover his face, to rub the corners of his mouth. "Do you want to get a cup of coffee before we get on?"
"Are you OK?" she asks.
He nods his head, still looking behind her. "I'm fine. Coffee?"
"Sure. Coffee," she says so Arthur turns, walking slightly ahead of her, looking for a coffee shop and ignoring her question, what's so poor about beautiful Penn Station?
"Change at Jamaica," the conductor yells and they do. Louisa and Arthur settle in for a ride up the northern coast of Long Island. The birds know the routine. Arthur holds her basket of birds on his lap. He wraps his arms around it and Louisa turns her head toward the seat so that she can watch him. Arthur leans in closer, whispering. His old trick. Louisa leans into it.
The Invention of Everything Else Page 18