I told them nothing. There was nothing to tell. He likes to have eighteen towels delivered to his room each day. He likes inventing things. He loves pigeons.
"Be a good girl" one of the men said when I was finally allowed to leave. I had no idea what that was supposed to mean. I turned once to look at them as I was going. I thought of growling but restrained myself. They sat rifling through papers they'd stolen from Mr. Tesla. I thought of the lightning. I thought of how I'd like to watch lightning strike the very target of their balding heads.
The file was still cutting into my bosom. I didn't care what they had said. I didn't believe them. Who are government men to tell the truth? I held on to the file. I had sat very straight during the interview as though I was Bess the landlord's daughter, the landlord's black-eyed daughter with a shotgun tucked just below my rib cage, primed to go off if I exhaled too vigorously. I answered their questions, but there was very little to tell. Except perhaps they would have liked to have learned that I was smuggling Mr. Tesla's files away from them. I kept my mouth shut, turned right, and, using my key, entered Mr. Tesla's room silently without even knocking.
The bag of birdseed was still poking out of his pocket, spilling a steady dribble of thistle and crushed peanuts out onto the floor. He stood in the center of his room, breathing heavily, staring at the disorder of his destroyed room. He looked quite pale. In his hands he held the beautiful bird I'd seen perched on his sill earlier, gray with white-tipped wings. His bird, I thought. That must be his bird.
"Mr. Tesla," I said quietly.
He glanced up at me with the eyes of an angry animal who'd been caught in a trap, betrayed by a human he might have mistakenly trusted for one short moment of poor judgment. He said nothing and then finally, "Louisa" He came to, remembering my name, returning from thoughts that were far away. "Your friend Arthur told me it was an emergency."
I locked the door behind me; I even drew the chain. "Mr. Tesla. I need to ask you something."
"Yes?" he asked.
I took off my apron and stuffed one end of it into the hole, blocking out the men next door before turning back to him. "The death ray." I whispered it.
"Yes," he said.
"The teleforce particle beam." He perked up his slumped shoulders as much as he could, raising his voice. He stretched up to his full height as though a roomful of reporters had suddenly burst in with flashes popping, notebooks at the ready, prepared to take down his every last word concerning this invention.
"Does the death ray kill people?" I asked, already astonished by how naïve I'd been. Of course it does. Of course it does. I knew the answer before he even opened his mouth. What else would a death ray do? Stop death? No one can stop death.
Reporters hadn't come to see him in ages, though he stared at the door as if waiting for their return, as if he was ready for his final press conference. He waited until his shoulders finally fell. The reporters were gone for good. "Yes," he said. "I'm afraid killing is its primary function."
My first thought, oddly, was not for my father but for Katharine.
What would happen to a woman in love with a man who builds a death ray? Where would she be standing tonight in his room?
"Why?" I asked him. "People die so easily already."
He struggled to pull his answer together. "Yes. But if there were a weapon that could, with all certainty, destroy the entire universe, then of course we would see what an absurd proposition our total destruction is. War would be over, forever."
His answer made me understand the reason he loved pigeons so much. It was because he didn't understand people at all.
"Oh," I said very softly, and I felt something shift. Hope left the room, taking my father with it. He didn't even turn around to look at me or say goodbye. He was really gone now. A ball of something impossible and burning grew in my chest. More than grief, it was anger. Not for Mr. Tesla but rather for ideas that keep the heart in exile from the mind. I swallowed hard. "I stole this from them," I told him, jerking my head toward the room next door. I pulled the file from my apron. "It's yours." I didn't want it anymore. It wasn't what I thought it was at all.
He stared at the file as if watching a long-lost friend get off a bus, a friend whose name he had no intention of calling out but rather someone he'd let disappear into the crowd, someone he'd let stay lost. He didn't take the file from my hand. "I don't need that anymore. Besides, there's nothing actually in there. I never write my best ideas down. I keep them all here." Mr. Tesla tapped the side of his head.
"What's all this, then?" I fluffed the papers of the file.
"That's just the clapboard. The nails are in my head," he said and ran his hands across his hair.
I held it out to him for a moment, watching him with his bird, petting her, loving her while my father was gone and there was nothing any of Mr. Tesla's inventions could do about it. I slipped the file back in among his things and, stooping, began to straighten up the mess. It kept me from crying. It kept me from thinking for a few moments. I brushed shards of glass into the wastepaper basket. I pinched a number of tiny springs from the fringe of a rug. I whispered while I cleaned. "I know who did this. We can call the hotel security. I know who it was."
"Yes," he answered. "I didn't think he'd come so soon."
"He?" I asked.
"Yes." Mr. Tesla looked up, and at last there was a clarity in his eyes.
He was still standing in the center of the room, talking to the bird in his hands. "I really thought I'd have more time. I wasn't done yet."
"Mr. Tesla, they've been living next door. It's the same men I told you of earlier." I stood to face him.
He looked confused and with one hand he began to stroke the head of the bird. "A ray that reverses death" he said. "That would be a good idea, Louisa." He was looking at the bird. "Perhaps that is also a part of the device, huh?" he asked her. From where she was perched in his hand I could see her reflection in the small mirror, doubling her number.
"Why don't you go to bed? I can clean the rest of this in the morning," I told him. He looked pale. He looked old.
"No, dear. Not tonight. I won't sleep tonight. She's not feeling well."
"The bird?"
"Yes," he said. "And I've got work I have to finish."
"You can finish tomorrow."
But he shook his head in reply. "I have to do it tonight," he said. Smiling, as though I were being coy, as though I certainly knew what he meant. "Louisa," he said suddenly. "I met your uncle downstairs, on my way out earlier."
I froze.
"A very interesting man. A very interesting idea. Time travel. We talked for quite some time. We discussed a good number of things. Invisibility, antigravity, telepathy, teleportation, my goodness, transmutation even. It's all very interesting and maybe someday it will be true. Your uncle certainly believes so. Indeed, he assured me that he was actually visiting today from last week. He seemed convinced. He said Albert Einstein's theory of relativity proves that time travel is possible. I didn't want to be the one to tell him that, unfortunately, Albert Einstein's theory of relativity is dead wrong, but perhaps you could break the news to him."
"You saw him? Azor?"
"Yes."
"He was here? A short man, kind of looks like a turtle?"
"A turtle. Yes. That's the one. He asked me to come with him."
"Where?"
"The future."
"Why didn't you go?"
"What makes you so sure I didn't?" Mr. Tesla said before starting to smile.
I continued cleaning in silence while he sat with the pigeon, whispering things to her that I couldn't quite hear. He tried to help me, reassembling a small spilled drawer of retractable pens, pencil stubs, and paper clips, but he became distracted and sat looking at the bird as if he was waiting for her to tell him something.
While I worked he sat in his chair looking like a part of the debris, waiting to be swept into the dustpan. For the first time he seemed small to me, just one more pie
ce of New York City dust, one of a hundred, a thousand, a million strangers whose ideas would be ignored, who would die alone in a hotel room where different signs posted the various fire escapes and checkout policies.
I cleaned in silence until he finally spoke. "They'll say it all went wrong at wireless energy. But that's not true. If I'd had a bit more time, a bit more funding. Or else maybe they'll say Mars. They'll say I went crazy. They'll say I must have been senile to believe that I had talked to Mars. Yes, they will. I know they will. They'll say there's no way to draw free power from the sky. They'll say the only way to get things done is the way that makes them the most money. Coal. Oil" He lifted one leg up to the windowsill and perched there, staring out at the city. "But remember—they once said alternating current was impossible also."
Mr. Tesla stood for a moment by the window. He studied the pale bird, listening, before taking a seat. "People can make beautiful mistakes, dear, and each one is an arrow, a brilliant arrow, pointing out the right way to there."
His breath was loud and his eyes did not meet mine. I didn't know where "there" was, but I believed him.
A door slammed shut somewhere down the hall. I looked up.
Mr. Tesla was found dead in his room the following day and they say I was the last one to see him alive, but I'm not so sure that's true. His bird was still there when I left. And who knows. Others might have stopped by that night. Government men, ghosts, Goethe saying goodbye.
Arthur was waiting for me in the lobby.
"I thought I could take you home," he said. "I'm supposed to go to the morgue, to identify my father," I told him, and he nodded as if he already knew that. We set off together from the hotel, walking the whole way there across town, and though we said very little I was glad to have him there.
It was strange to pass through the city where real live people were in a hurry to get home. It was late. Arthur and I walked in silence.
On the nights when I used to go visit my father at work, he'd leave one of the downstairs doors propped open with a bit of folded newspaper. The door on Forty-first Street was well hidden behind the trash receptacles and a lattice of creeping myrtle. I'd slip inside.
"Pop?" The sound would bounce off the marble walls. Slowly I'd make my way out into the dark hall. I'd climb a stair that would take me up to the three-story-high Astor Hall. My head would take flight, but I was not scared. My father was there and this was our fortress alone, at least until the sun came up.
Usually I'd find him upstairs, waiting for me on one of the stone benches under the McGraw dome. The library was dark, lit just enough for me to make out the room's gigantic murals, the origin of the printed word.
"Lou!" He was always so happy when I came, no matter how sleepy I was. He'd show me the library's treasures and we'd spend the night in the reading room underneath the painted sky. "All it needs is a couple of pigeons flying across, huh, Lou?" Or else we'd walk the halls, his flashlight leading the way, popping our heads into the map room, the picture and print room, the special collections, the rare books, making sure everything was safe. He would lead me into the stacks, seven stories of them, and my head would swoon. How could there be so much, so many lives, so many books that were, each one, filled with stories, filled with letters, as if the library were some sort of tremendous brain. Memories, histories. No wonder he loved it there. Each book was a doorway to the past, to the dead. And there was my father, watchman over all of that. He'd take my hand in his.
Despite all that was unreal about that night, the morgue was a surprisingly real place with walls and ceilings and floors. There was even a mop in the corner, a mop made of real rags and real wood, wood that had grown in a real tree. File cabinets and a coffee pot and all of them were real. I left Arthur in the waiting room and followed an assistant into a long hallway filled with drawers. He pulled out the upper compartment in a stack of two. The drawer was as high as my shoulders. The assistant didn't say anything. He turned down a sheet so that I could look. Real sheets, real metal trays even, so it was a surprise to me when I saw that, underneath the sheet, there was a fake dead body made to look exactly like my father.
I brought my face to within inches of his. The assistant returned to his desk at the end of a long aisle of refrigerated drawers, leaving me alone with the body.
"Dad" I whispered in the ear of this dead person.
At first it didn't answer.
I could see where its hair follicles went into its scalp. I saw everything about its face as though I were examining it under a microscope. "What are you doing here?" I asked. Still the body made no answer but kept its head perfectly centered on the metal tray, staring at the ceiling.
One side of the head had been bruised and bloodied. There were small cuts in the skin. There were tiny shards of glass sparkling in the cuts. I saw these, and as suddenly as a sinking, rushing back to the Earth, I knew that this dead body was no fake. It was him. That was his blood.
"Dad" I whispered. "Dad" His hair was caked with brown. Very, very real dried blood. How could something as unreal as a time machine make blood so real. I stared at it, drilling my eyes into his skull, imagining the brain there underneath and the tiny hallways in that brain where my father had once kept the memory of a day, years ago now, when I'd asked him what the word "scintillating" meant. He hadn't quite known the answer, so between the two of us, we made a decision. From then on, "scintillating" would be used to describe those moments when the right word just can't be found.
I closed the drawer myself. "That's him," I told the assistant. "That is my father," I said, and then, "That was my father," not quite meaning either statement fully but rather scintillating, unable to find a word that means the place somewhere between is and was and always will be.
Mr. Tesla had miscalculated. Death rays don't stop death. Killing only kills more. Perhaps he'd been thinking about another version of our future. The one he'd intended for us, the path we didn't take. The future where war and death were absurd propositions. The future where human beings have wings and electricity is miraculous and free.
Arthur took me home. We walked back across the city and he was very quiet. We seemed to be the only people left awake. He was, I could tell, slipping away. He held on to my hand but barely, dimly, nearly gone.
"Arthur," I said when we got to my door. "Arthur. Arthur."
"I'll be back," he told me. But I didn't believe him. Everyone had gone and so would he. I watched him go. I said goodbye, but by the time I said it he had already disappeared.
Inside the house time had stopped. So this was how my father got stuck, I thought. I stepped inside. His slippers by the door. The half-done crossword he'd puzzled earlier that week. I imagined him holding me the night I was born. The night Freddie died. I didn't want to get stuck.
In the living room someone had left the radio on. Who? I stared at the button as if I could read fingerprints. Had it been my father, or had it just been me? I squeezed the radio between my hands. Kay Kyser was quietly singing, "He Wears a Pair of Silver Wings."
I squeezed the radio a bit harder, nearly hurting it. It was plugged into an outlet in the living room wall. Mr. Tesla's electricity. With my eyes I followed the cord from radio to wall. Below the plaster I imagined the hidden wires trundled together, tucked beside the construction strapping, surrounded by an aging cement compound and dust. Beneath all this protection the wires carried their bright secret. I imagined pressing my ear to the wall and listening for the hum. Current was moving like a circulatory system, like the sea, unending. The electricity traveled millions of miles from Niagara Falls or Canada or Long Island, maybe. I had no idea where my electricity came from, except that somehow it came from him.
I moved my eyes across the wall, tracing the hidden wires there, imagining my hand pressed against the old wall, walking the room's perimeter, following the current. Outside the house the wire would be untethered. It would scrape every now and then against the brick of the building. From the window I knew I would see w
here it ran into a conjunction of power lines, and I would follow the route of these lines as far as my eyes could. A number of pigeons would be resting on the wires, as if they too felt him there.
I could close my eyes and follow these power lines back even farther, back to the very beginning. At the end of the street I would take a right and travel out over the city. There would be a mess of hightension wires. I'd turn away from them. I'd dream a road back to him, a road that would soon become as wireless as thought itself. It would be a long road that would pass through the Hotel New Yorker, through the Waldorf and the Saint Regis and the Governor Clinton. Through Shoreham when it was still called Wardenclyffe. It would pass through a ship called the Saturnia that took weeks to get to America. The road would go all the way back to a small town in Croatia where it would fade from full color to sepia brown. A road without tarmac or cars or power lines, and suddenly, after I'd walked that far, there on the road would be a tall and extraordinarily handsome man. I would stop walking. "You're Nikola Tesla," I would say.
And the man would lift his head. Lonely, with a high widow's peak, dark with thought. Everywhere he'd be sharp angles, gorgeous ledges to get caught on, and an old evening suit. He'd slowly nod. "I can't believe you recognized me." He'd look down the road, over my shoulder from where I came. He'd look all the way back to my living room in 1943, back to my radio, and say, "No one ever recognizes me anymore, and even when they do, they always spell my name wrong."
Standing there with him, all the way back at the beginning, I would want to know something. "Maybe we can start over," I'd say. "Maybe we can go the right way this time."
He'd shrug his shoulders. "How?" he'd ask, smiling. "Do you have a time machine that works?"
No. I didn't. I didn't have a time machine. And so without one I found myself back in my living room, alone, holding on to either side of my radio as though it were the face of someone I loved, as though it were a way of life, a way with wonder that was swiftly disappearing.
The Invention of Everything Else Page 28