She shakes her head.
"Thank you, Louisa" he says. "That's excellent news." He turns, dismissing her. But she does not leave. She stands by the counter and watches him. Lit from behind, Mr. Tesla resembles a gorgeous switchblade. While she watches he slips out past Louisa, through the open door, out into the storm, disappearing in the direction of the park, smiling as the lightning storm drenches him to the bone.
15
We learn from failure, not from success!
—Bram Stoker, Dracula
BARREN ISLAND IS NOT an island at all. It only feels that way. A remote garbage pail gracing Queens' Jamaica Bay, all the way out at the end of Flatbush Avenue. The street turns into a small dirt path, mostly hidden by reeds and sea oats. This is the entrance to Barren Island where, up until a few years ago when the city cleared them out for good, a number of families still lived, an insulated group who made their living as demolition housewreckers.
Every day hundreds of animals die in New York City—dogs, cats, horses, sewer rats—and it used to be that their carcasses were removed to Barren Island along with all manner of other trash. The area came to be called Dead Horse Bay. The bones and the garbage were picked over by Barren Island residents who plucked anything still useful from the trash and built their homes out of it. The rest of the trash got ground up into fertilizer, grease, and nitroglycerin in an old factory that once occupied a site on the south shore of Barren Island.
As Walter's bus passes over the new Marine Park Bridge he presses his face up against the window, staring out at Barren Island, admiring the humility it once represented, making something good out of trash, much like Azor. He hears a hum. Perhaps it is the bus wheels on the metal bridge's surface. Perhaps it is his conscience. He did not tell Louisa where he was going. She no doubt imagines that he is asleep, as he is always asleep after working the night shift at the library. But Walter is not asleep. He is sleepy, that is true, having worked all night, but instead of resting Walter rode the BMT back out to Rockaway Boulevard, boarded this bus, the one that is taking him across the new Marine Park Bridge, out to Far Rockaway, out to the tiny airport at Edgemere where he plans to meet Arthur and Azor. Azor promised that he'd have him back in time for his shift at the library.
"Remember My Forgotten Man," a tune by Al Dubin and Harry Warren, is stuck in Walter's ear. It repeats and repeats with the wheels of the bus. It repeats Walter all the way back to 1911, twenty-two years before the song was even written.
People must have begun lining up just after six o'clock that morning, May 23rd. Walter hadn't joined the queue until a few minutes before nine, the time advertised for the grand opening of the public library. Foolishly he'd imagined that he would be in the running to be the first patron to check out a book from the new library, but by the time he arrived a throng of people snaked all the way behind the new building and into Bryant Park. The weather was warm and the pink blossoms of the park's magnolia, cherry, and dogwood trees had soured into a brown mash. Walter could smell the flowers' sweet scent of decay. He took his place in line, waiting in the shadow of the Sixth Avenue Elevated Railway, hoping they wouldn't run out of books before he even got a foot through the front door.
Walter, at that time, was in the twenty-first year of his life, living at home, reading Jules Verne, horsing around with Azor, fomenting his growing interest in homing pigeons, and working a job drilling holes for the Water Department.
The line inched forward across Bryant Park so slowly that Walter thought he was geologic time creeping over and through New York City on his belly. A pterodactyl might cast a shadow overhead. Indians, George Washington. Bryant Park had been a potter's field. Walter considered the jumble of rib cages buried just below the surface. Union soldiers. The Draft Riots. The Crystal Palace. And it's really such a small plot of land. It took Walter an hour to reach the front steps of the library, passing between its lions. Roar.
Inside, the sweep of the high ceiling's atrium accentuated his stature or lack thereof. But the library was one place where he didn't mind being small. Indeed he would have preferred to have been even smaller, mouse-sized. That way he'd be allowed to enter the seven stories of closed stacks, to browse the books at his leisure, nibbling a bit from every page he found. He made his way up one of the massive stone staircases to the third-floor catalogs and reading room.
A very gentle woman fielded his request for a copy of Verne's Topsy-Turvy. Walter had already read it, but owing to the overwhelming number of catalog cards before him, he'd been unable to focus on which book he might really want to read. Standing before the seemingly endless catalogs of the New York Public Library felt like standing before the ocean: it was equally mind-erasing. Walter ended up selecting something familiar. Or so he thought. When his book arrived a few minutes later from the shelves, it turned out to be anything but familiar. He had a seat in the reading room—it was larger than an entire city block—and opening the book to its title page, Walter found something very topsy-turvy indeed. Sans Dessus Dessus, the title page said. Walter dutifully began to turn the pages of the text before him, attempting to decipher the gibberish written there. All of Walter's old friends were present—A, E, S, T, D, Y, U, N, Z, and H—but it was as though their arms were growing from their necks, their spines ran up the outside of their left thighs, their eyeballs were set deep in the palms of their hands, and their feet protruded from the tops of their heads like some set of deformed floppy bunny ears. It made absolutely no sense. Walter tried a few pages, straining to squeeze meaning from the French, but eventually he let his eyes take flight around the reading room.
Wide-eyed patrons clutching hard-bound books filled the space. Some stumbled, so mesmerized by the height of the ceilings above them that they forgot to pay attention to where their feet were going.
"You speak French?" she asked.
Walter turned straight ahead. "Umm, a little bit," he answered. Why was he lying? He was lying because she was beautiful. A young woman seated directly across from Walter at the long reading table was studying the book in his hands.
"Hmm," she said, "French," as though there were something suspicious or curious about it, or maybe she just knew he was lying. Perhaps she thought he often came to public libraries and tried to impress young women by pretending to read French novels. He peered at the stack of books she had resting on the table beside her. In Search
of the Aztecs: A Travelogue, Geology of the Appalachians, and The Magical Monarch of Mo by L. Frank Baum.
"Does that mean you speak Aztec?" Walter asked.
Without a moment's pause she answered, "Eee. Thala maizee kruppor kala hazalaid."
Her face was wooden as the last Aztec sound dropped from her open lips. Walter had no idea whether or not she was for real. He didn't know what to say in response. He didn't even know if there was such a thing as an Aztec language. The air hung very thick between them while she waited for Walter to respond. He studied her black hair swept up into a loose and rounded bun. One tendril escaped the nest, hanging down behind her ear. Her ear, he thought. It was wonderful, like the tiny cupped hand of an infant, irresistible. She watched him and Walter took a guess. "Agg, suleper kantu flammaflamma whaheenu." Utter nonsense, well intended. He waited to see if he'd passed.
"Exactly," she said and smiled as if the gate to a secret, forbidden city were being thrown open. "I knew you'd understand me."
Phew, he thought. Phew.
"Actually I don't read much," she said. "I just thought that I might like a man who does. Know what I mean?"
Walter was speechless.
"My name is Freddie," she said.
Of course it was.
Freddie, Winnifred more precisely, was trouble. She brewed it. Walter considered her far out of his league, but a happy—for him—set of circumstances made Freddie look at Walter quite differently. Her heart had been recently disappointed by a young man named Charles. Charles was many things: dark-haired, wealthy, a lover of dog races, emotionally cool. Lucky for Walte
r, he was none of these things. "Walter," she used to say, shocked, "you're so kind," as if kindness were a rare surprise. Freddie was eighteen years old when she and Walter first met at the library. She was, at the time, courting eight suitors, one for each day of the week plus a matinee date on Saturdays, and told Walter frankly, "I love men" But very quickly, something fast and furious grew between them, something like a body wriggling desperately inside a burlap bag. She canceled her other dates. She needed his kindness and he needed everything about her.
Freddie would lean close to his ear and whisper, "Walter, Walter, Walter," because they had things to tell each other, things that there were no words for.
Odd occurrences transpired whenever Walter and Winnifred were together, things that demanded they pay attention, things that suggested that the universe was trying to tell them, Don't take this too lightly.
Their eighty-sixth date—Walter, still perhaps disbelieving that this confident beauty was by his side, kept a running tab of hash marks in a small notebook—found Walter and Freddie engaged in his favorite activity, walking the perimeter of the island of Manhattan. It was during these walks that Walter really fell in love with her. These walks were so different from the ones he'd taken with Azor because Azor, searching for treasure, always kept his eyes pinned to the ground. Freddie looked up, down, left, right. She saw things most people did not, and he felt lucky to be the one beside her to whom she'd point out the small oddities. "Look at that blue wrapper caught up in the fence there, Walter," or "Did you see that man had lost three of his fingers" or "Watch how the sky moves in those puddles." Nothing was too small for her wonder, and so the dirty city became filled with delicate treasures when Walter was with her.
"The spikes of your beard make a tiny forest," she said when he held her close. Walter's knees would tremble.
On their eighty-sixth date they had walked all the way from the piers near her home on Fifty-third Street down to Chambers. Exactly what happened next would be difficult to report—perhaps a misplaced pipe or a spark from the kerosene stove, the papers never said—but a fire somehow took hold of the factory belonging to Joseph Stallings, Distributor of Quality Fireworks for Patriot Americans, and the display of fireworks that followed has yet to be matched in American history. Lower Manhattan rumbled and ignited under the sway of so much gunpowder. Even children in Brooklyn, Queens, and New Jersey climbed up to their roofs or pressed noses to windows in order to behold the spectacle of green fire blossoms, red Chinese dragons, and purple pinwheels exploding all at the same time. Walter and Freddie, safely ensconced at the dark end of a pier, wrapped in each other's arms, watched the fiery phenomenon, studying the explosions' reflections in the dark water surrounding them. The show lasted for over an hour, as the measly volunteer fire squadrons brought in to douse the conflagration were useless. And Walter knew it was an omen and probably not a good one, but still, Walter didn't care if he'd spend the rest of his life burning and burning and burning and burning. He asked Freddie to marry him and the sky exploded in orange and green and purple and red when she told him yes, she would be his wife.
The wedding day was celebrated with a quick morning ceremony at the Collegiate Church, after which all the guests were encouraged to walk with the bride and groom down through the streets of Manhattan, across the bridge to Brooklyn, where the wedding party boarded a trolley car bound for Prospect Park. "Walter, look at how the metal wheels sometimes send up sparks." The couple enjoyed the day dancing in the Concert Grove gazebo to the music of William Nolan's band. "Did you notice how uneven the ukulele player's mustache is?" Much to Walter's chagrin, each one of Freddie's eight previous suitors had been invited to the wedding and each one had accepted, hoping somehow to make a last-minute play for Freddie's love. But Walter, a careful new husband, did not give her a chance to accept another partner's hand but rather kept her dancing from noon until ten minutes past five, when William Nolan called the count for the very last song of the day. Freddie had to be satisfied with smiling at her old suitors from across the pavilion as Walter spun her round and round, her head swung back. He hoped to blur her eyes down to one focus: him.
But then Archduke Ferdinand was murdered by the Black Hand's bullet and Austria-Hungary declared war on Serbia, and since Russia was allied to Serbia, Germany allied to Austria-Hungary, France bound by treaty to Russia, Britain allied to France, Italy the only nation to ignore its treaties and alliances altogether, and the United States displeased with German submarines threatening its commercial shipping—World War I sucked and swirled, drawing a very unwilling Walter off to the European front and away from his wife.
Walter and the other soldiers in his regiment were loaded aboard ships so large and long that their hulls could easily be spread at any one time across the backs of thirty different waves. Walter managed to hide out during the two-week crossing. He'd secret himself away in a stairwell so that he could forge ahead through a curious book he was then reading, Laurence Sterne's Tristram Shandy.
There was much in the book that made perfect sense to Walter, though it was written between 1760 and 1767. It seemed aligned with many emotions he was experiencing in the Army on a ship as large as a city carrying him of to what he was certain would be his untimely demise. He thought about Freddie always, carrying on conversations with his absent wife to the exclusion of people who were actually there. He tried to see the small, beautiful things that she would see onboard. He tried to pay attention to little details, but he was not as good at it as she was, so he'd stick to the sometimes mundane. "What did you have for dinner, darling?" he'd ask, imagining the food that was lucky enough to be intimate with Freddie's throat and stomach. He had not made friends with many other soldiers. His New York accent and something in the odd angle created by his slight build made him unpopular with the beefier, corn-raised sorts who dominated the ranks.
The loneliness of Walter's time in the service was broken at least once a day by a conversation with Heshie, a soldier from Omaha, of all places. Heshie loved airplanes and could distinguish a Curtiss JN-D4—he called them Jennys—from a Loening M-8 just by listening to the tick of the engine. He kept his eyes peeled for the Curtiss F-5L, a naval plane that could land on water. Walter could not have cared less about aviation, but he let Heshie talk about the planes and then Heshie would listen, day after day, while Walter described the exact shade of her hair or how she would silently move her lips with the words when reading or how freckles were speckled across her shoulders or how, if he brought her flowers, she would always dissect one, pulling off all its petals to get at its inner workings. Heshie and Walter were both relieved by these conversations. It was the one hour a day that Walter didn't spend considering pages 33 and 34 in his edition of Tristram Shandy where Sterne's character, poor Yorick, has expired and to mark this death Sterne has printed both the front, page 33, and the verso, page 34, in pure black, two solid rectangles of color which Walter imagined were secretly connected through the page, creating a hole in time, a tomb, a volume that was as infinite as the grave, a deep place of nothing and more nothing.
Walter blurred his sea-sickened eyes on this page, certain that without the protection of the other soldiers his own fighting abilities, which were severely limited, would soon fail him and this black hole, this page, would be his end.
As the ship arrived in port Walter stood at a railing, duffel bag hunched up onto his back. He was one of what appeared to be a million soldiers. The Army-green mass on deck was so tightly packed that their ranks surged and bristled in one motion like the hairy back of a creeping caterpillar. Walter's knees felt loose and unreliable. He shrank. He was overcome by a series of deep sighs that racked his chest every time he tried to exhale. The sway of the mob was moving toward the gangway, and though he wanted nothing more than to remain planted here onboard this vessel that would be returning to America, he was caught in the push of the soldiers, most of whom were sick to death of this ship and would gaily trample anyone who got in the way of their feet an
d solid ground.
Once ashore the soldiers were ushered through various corrals that snaked past the administrators shouting questions. "Number?" Then, "Name?" It wasn't that he was a coward, he was just in love. But here, in this mass of men, Walter surrendered to fate, certain that he would never be returning home to his wife. Indeed, making his way through Army processing, Walter was nearly able to convince himself that he had died already and this was hell. "Number?"
"US55231082," he answered.
"Name?"
"Walter Dewell."
He was drilled on a series of routine questions until the very last. "Soldier, do you know how to type?"
Type? He barely understood the question. Letters? Yes, Walter knew how to type. His mother had taught him when he was nine years old. He used only his pointers and middle fingers, but with those four fingers he was a whiz. He thought he'd misunderstood the question. His mouth, though open, formed no words.
"All right, move on," the interrogator said. But he didn't. Walter stood there lost for a moment, remembering sitting in the kitchen of the house on Eleventh Avenue where he was born. His mother earned extra money by typing letters for people on a typewriter she and Walter's father had salvaged from a destitute newspaper office. It was a Sholes & Glidden model, made from black metal, decorated with golden illustrations of flowers and birds, though some of the decoration was sloughing off. Walter remembered sitting on his mother's lap. By poking just his fingertips out from the cuffs of his sweater, he could put his hands on top of hers as she typed. Finally he knew the keys so well he could demand she tie a dishtowel around his eyes and test him. "Spell steward" she'd say. It was a trick word. Steward uses only the left hand.
The Invention of Everything Else Page 23