Crazy for Cornelia

by Chris Gilson

  She resolved that, as soon as she returned from South America, and she hoped it would be with a discovery that would impress him, she would make it her business to reach him. Her father understood duty, had told her time and again how important it was. He just couldn’t comprehend hers.

  Stomach pressed to the carpet, she crawled past the den door with her duffel bag held carefully on her upraised palms in front of her. She inched ahead as though she were pushing a peanut forward with her nose. It took her a full two minutes to clear Chester’s door.

  Ten feet past the study, she dragged herself to a standing position, pressed through the dark to find the utility room off the kitchen, and disabled the apartment’s alarm system.

  Then she opened the door out to the cramped service foyer and rang for the service elevator.

  Her next maneuver, leaving the building, would depend on who she found on duty downstairs.

  Chester Lord thought he heard a sound at the door of his den. He looked out in the hallway, but saw nothing. He sipped a long draught of brandy, feeling his nervous system race, and went back to staring out the window at the distant lights of the West Side skyscrapers twinkling over the dark forest of Central Park at night.

  He had to stop fuming over Bushberg and set his mind to Tucker’s plan. In truth, the Kois’ hostile takeover play of Lord & Company frightened him to his shoes.

  “A big, fat target,” he muttered, that was all that being rich made a person today. In his snifter of 1890 Courvoisier, he saw a long line of scoundrels trying to slice off an unearned piece of the Lord pie. Now it was the Kois. Contemplating their villainy made him see the fine points of Tucker’s solution.

  Should he trust Tucker? Actions spoke louder than words, that tired but annoyingly apt cliché. Tucker had saved him at Lord & Company. Didn’t he deserve the benefit of the doubt with Cornelia? He sipped thoughtfully, trying to recall how badly Tucker had ever really let him down. Tucker had been the one to urge the partnership with the Kois five years before. But now that Han Koi revealed his serpent’s head, Tucker had stepped forward like a man, assumed responsibility. Tucker did have character. Chester’s inability to glimpse it much of the time was just a generational thing, he concluded, like his inability to become computer-literate. He couldn’t expect a boy Tucker’s age to show his feelings exactly the same way as, well, Elizabeth had.

  His tangled thoughts settled a bit. He inched like a worm toward that zone of solace, letting Tucker have his way. The boy would come through as he had in the past. And if Cornelia decided to marry him, perhaps she could feel protected enough to find her way back to, well, normalcy.

  He ached to talk to Elizabeth. She had soothed him when he revealed the slender threads that held his confidence together. Their time together seemed only an instant now. Elizabeth’s love used to evaporate so many of his doubts, when he had let her. He couldn’t help that he was at heart a reticent man who kept his distance from other people, including his wife. And, in her way, she mirrored his own reserve. Elizabeth’s emotions flowed freely with Cornelia, but could squeeze slightly shut with Chester. Perhaps that was what his father had meant when he told Chester, “Cousins can marry cousins, but Presbyterians should never marry Presbyterians.” The important thing was that Elizabeth gave Cornelia her goodness and intelligence.

  He took to his feet a bit unsteadily. His doubts and anxieties only poisoned what Tucker was trying to accomplish. If he were honest with himself, Tucker performed better at everything than Chester.

  There was no doubt that, of the two of them, Tucker was the better equipped to save his daughter.

  * * *

  At his post by the door, Kevin watched a video monitor of the service elevator. He could see who it was, and felt a pinprick of curiosity.

  “Hey Vlad, I’m taking a break,” he told the Russian, whose eyelids were already at half-mast.

  This morning, he had seen the picture of the back of his head on page three of the Daily Globe. It showed Kevin and Tucker Fisk carrying Cornelia Lord, passed out. “Don’t Drop Deb,” Philip Grace’s headline read.

  His copy of the paper was now carefully folded in his locker. Such total bullshit, and why he was excited about it, he didn’t exactly know. Except that he enjoyed seeing Tucker’s tortured face in the photograph, raging at the camera.

  He didn’t go to the staff room but stopped at the service elevator.

  The door opened and Cornelia Lord stood inside. She wore all-black clothes and clutched a duffel bag, a knit cap on her head like an armed robber.

  “Don’t shoot,” Kevin smiled, lifting his palms up.

  She opened her mouth to speak, then held her lips open. Her eyes seemed to be fighting a dense fog. Still, a glimmer remained of the searching eyes. She trembled slightly.

  “Hey, you okay?” he asked her.

  Her face resembled cold white china. She barely moved for a second, didn’t even twitch, then her head cocked slightly to the side like a puppy and her mouth curved around a word.

  “Hello,” she said. He could see it was an agonizing labor.

  Kevin felt a twinge of sadness for Cornelia Lord. Her tongue seemed to be glued to the bottom of her mouth. As he looked her in the eye he saw, deep in the soupy gray, a dim sparkle. Then tiny pinpricks of violet light gathered and began breaking through the gray. She looked—he couldn’t think of another way to describe it—happy to see him. She moved forward in inches and stuck her head out of the elevator, looking both ways to make sure nobody else was around. Color seemed to pump through her body as she stepped from the elevator into the dimly lit shadows of the service hall.

  “Look, can I help you with your bag?” he asked her. She stood still. “Get you a cab?”

  Then she put her hand lightly on his arm. She wanted Kevin to follow her. He fell into step beside her, but quickly got ahead.

  He recognized her movement. The Thorazine Shuffle was what they called it on the psych ward of Bellevue. He’d seen it about a thousand times, patients slogging around on meds like creatures from The Night of the Living Dead. And there were other side effects. He remembered one patient complaining that her throat felt so dry, she worried that a brush fire would start inside it.

  He slowed down to stay beside Cornelia Lord while she shuffled into the staff room. She really put her heart into it, he had to give her credit.

  Kevin closed the door behind them.

  “Thank you,” she said with difficulty. “I really need your help.”

  She pronounced it rilly, maybe an upper-class thing. But his heart beat at the part about needing his help.

  “I need you to lie for me,” she told him, her tongue rolling around every word. “If my father comes looking for me, you have to tell him you haven’t seen me.”

  “Are you trying to kill yourself?”

  Her eyes flared. “No, of course not.”

  “Because I have to tell you,” Kevin said, “that’s a distinct possibility if you plan on drinking tonight. You’re on meds now, right? You could get a bad reaction.”

  He’d caught her by surprise and she recoiled slightly. She slowly lifted her hand and almost—but not quite—touched his cheek. It was his turn to move back a little.

  “I promise I won’t drink. But I have to do something important. Just help me get out of here. Please.”

  Kevin thought about it. All he really knew about this girl was that Lord comma Cornelia would probably be trouble comma massive for anybody she touched. Look at what she did to her boyfriend, Tucker Fisk, that slick mogul, practically foaming at the mouth like a junkyard dog on page three of the Globe.

  But Cornelia Lord had heart. She had to, sneaking out of whatever custodial care they had kept her under in Penthouse A, loaded up with Thorazine by her slimy psychiatrist.

  He thought about the building rules he was supposed to follow. What did they call it? Not “fraternizing” with the residents, namely Chester Lord’s daughter. He had no doubt at all he could lose his job if he hel
ped her.

  “Let me go out to the alley first,” he told her. “Or you’ll have company. Follow me, stay in the dark when you get outside, wait for a cab, and get ready to run. Can you run?”

  “Of course,” it took her five seconds to say.

  He went ahead and opened the service door against the cold. He knew that Vlad never watched the monitor inside to see the security vidcam mounted by the door over their heads. She followed him in what seemed like dog years. They got out the door. He walked up the short alley where he’d lifted her out of the limousine the night before, and onto the street.

  He peered out into the dark and spotted two other photographers besides Philip Grace tonight. Philip’s competition had caught up with him. They probably saw that Grace’s Debwatch column won about fifty percent more space in the Globe today than usual, all because of Cornelia Lord. When he saw Philip’s face, it wore a kind of gas-pain look. The other photographers, a ratty pair, were only there to invade the turf Philip had carved out for himself, and Philip kept apart from them.

  The Thorazine Deb was still perched just outside the service door in the shadows, counting on Kevin to help her.

  “Hey, Philip,” he called out, hushed but excited, like he just discovered gold in the garbage Dumpster.

  He got past the gate and onto the sidewalk, approaching the stalkarazzi where they stood.

  “Kevin Doyle, how you doin’?” Philip said, wary.

  “I got something for you.” Kevin looked over his shoulder, keeping away from the lobby, out of Vlad’s line of sight.

  “Yeah? What?”

  Kevin walked over to the trio and motioned for a huddle. Slowly, Grace leading, they stepped over to him. He waited. One… two… three.

  He could see, over the backs of their heads, the girl in black hugging the darkness of the street, shuffling out of the alley. He waited some more. She came out of the shadows and raised her hand. A passing cab with its “vacant” light on pulled over and stopped for her. She opened the cab door with difficulty.

  “I’m thinking,” Kevin said very low, to keep the three men bent in around him. “Giants, pretty good spread.”

  The photographers looked puzzled, then figured it out. They swiveled their heads to see who Kevin made them miss.

  “Shithead.”

  “Asshole.”

  One of the stalkarazzi spat on the sidewalk.

  “Thought we had an understandin’,” Grace told him, hurt.

  “Yeah.” Kevin waved cordially at him. “But I owed you one for the alley.”

  Cornelia found 153 responses to her e-mail on Dr. Powers’s computer.

  Sitting in the curator’s chair, working at his Mac, she sorted through them, dumping the few delusional types who claimed that Nikola Tesla abducted them in a spaceship or was still living in a ciu-dad subterrálneo. One wrote that a week before Tesla had been seated on the living room couch, watching the TV show Sabado Gigante.

  She filed the more useful responses into “Definite” and “Possible.” All told she found fifty-eight people who could be helpful. Many were members of the worldwide Tesla Society, South American division. Of those, some provided information. Others wanted to hear back from her. She formatted her replies, becoming even more excited about the adventure. It was possible that nobody from the United States had ever gone to South America on a similar mission before. The best replies came from Rio and Sao Paulo in Brazil, and Buenos Aires in Argentina. There could indeed be Tesla papers in all those places.

  She also believed it possible, if unlikely, that years of rumor in the Tesla community about a third secret tower in South America could be true. A lost Tesla Tower. She felt a chill. Perhaps too good to be true, but she couldn’t totally dismiss the notion. History revealed that Tesla’s work had turned up in extraordinary places. She knew that the FBI confiscated many of Tesla’s papers when he died in New York City in 1943. They delivered them to the U.S. government for use in the war effort. The Russians had taken keen interest in Tesla’s particle-beam theory. After a strange “disturbance” in Siberia scorched several thousand acres of woodland, the whispered stories out of Russia said that it was a Red Army experiment using Tesla’s formula.

  If they could find his papers so could she. Her eyes moistened thinking how Tesla had suffered. He spent his entire life frustrated. She drifted, imagining him in his prime, playing with electricity in his laboratory on Fifth Avenue, creating a blue corona to dance over his head and shoulders to amuse his friends.

  Kevin Doyle, of the lovely blue eyes and matching corona, teased himself into her image of Tesla. After the first time she saw Kevin, she had checked for his name on the list of building employees that Chester kept in his study. That first time had only been a glorious tease. But she had glimpsed his corona again tonight. She had never seen, except in her Tesla fantasies, a corona so pure.

  Kevin Doyle.

  His eyes pulled her in, a magnetic force drawing her gently toward him. Something about his gentle corona reminded her of an afternoon in her mother’s arms. They had been at the beach when she was nine. The waves rolled over them, deliciously foamy and salty. They giggled and screeched together, riding the waves to the shore. She felt happy as a dolphin that day, playing in the sea, leaping with her mother in love and trust.

  She realized that Kevin’s corona matched the color of the sky that day. It had the texture of summer, arching over a world that felt the way life always should.

  She shuddered. It was so cold.

  That’s why she needed South America. A fresh start. In nineteen and one half hours, she would board an Air Brasilia flight and escape to warmer, dreamier horizons. Then she could find anything.

  She worked on translating the responses to her e-mail.

  It thrilled her to realize that, in South America, interest in Tesla had swollen beyond cult status. Rational professors and engineers studied his inventions. Historians glorified his life. In the U.S., Nikola Tesla might be another dead nobody, like so many brilliant people without a knack for business. But in South America, Tesla seemed a mythical hero who dreamed of changing the world with free electricity, until he’d been mugged by the norteamericano robber barons. A martyr to his cause.

  Perhaps in that mystical continent vibrating with youth and energy, she could finally bring Tesla the worldwide recognition he deserved. A fitting payback to the maestro. And to her mother.

  She rubbed her cold hands together. She hated to admit it to herself, but the Electric Girl’s anonymity bothered her.

  If only she could stand up on top of the museum, scream out her whole story, and let everybody know the truth of Cornelia Lord, faux–party girl.

  Perhaps it was selfish, but she couldn’t help it.

  People were treating her like the wasted debs of song and story. Sad girls like Barbara Hutton, who married enough men to form a conga line. And poor Brenda Frazier, who made her own face up like a clown’s in her dwindling years, thinking she was still the toast of the Stork Club.

  The Electric Girl would show them once she arrived in South America.

  Then she felt a chill through her like an icy finger. What if her plane hit a mountain, as those perfectly normal flights to South America sometimes did? She could be squashed on the face of the Andes and lost forever.

  What would people gossip about her then? What would her father think? That she had left this earth with no greater legacy than using her Saks First card and sucking on sake martinis?

  She tapped at the keyboard with one finger, thinking. Oh, why not? She owed it to herself to write a little something.

  She picked at the keys in earnest now, making a disk. Then she needed to get a few hours rest.

  She turned off the xenon spotlights, curled up on Dr. Powers’s couch. She could no longer fight the drugs. The energy quickly drained out of her. She wondered if she would find all she was looking for.

  And she fell asleep with a glimpse of Kevin Doyle’s sky-blue corona.

  *
* *

  “Mike, be careful,” Chester fumed as the brittle limousine groaned around a corner. “Panda limousines… the Koi Tower. As soon as we get that bastard Han Koi straightened out, we’re moving Lord & Company back to Wall Street.”

  Tucker nodded solemnly while Chester seethed, shifting his weight uncomfortably on the slick leather seat.

  “Chester,” Tucker began, as he played with the laptop he balanced on one knee, the other leg arched as far as it could stretch in the small compartment. “I need to know more about Corny’s obsession with this Tesla.”

  Chester felt his mind empty, suddenly going numb when the name “Tesla” stung his ear. He labored to organize his thoughts about the miserable inventor. Cornelia had shown him his picture many times. He had been a tall, ascetic European with long black hair and a smug grin suggesting deep and hidden knowledge.

  Chester began stammering what he knew while Tucker got busy on his laptop. The car slowed and Chester looked up to see lights burning feverishly on the Lord & Company executive floor of the Koi Tower, even now at 4:30 A.M.

  Only two years old, the office tower hovered over Madison Avenue like the Colossus of Koi. Chester climbed out of the car and glowered at the Hong Kong–scale office building. He never liked visiting Hong Kong, that chaotic city bristling with gaudy office towers like hostile missiles. The Koi Tower made a spectacle of itself, brassy and raw, housing mostly corporate raiders and their law firms. Old Han Koi spent tens of millions hiring a cast of architects and theme park designers to create the flamboyant structure.

  “We do not want a building, we want a happening,” Chester remembered overhearing old Han hectoring his architects with a phrase he must have heard in the 1960s, perhaps on some Asian rerun of Laugh-In.

  Chester’s thoughts shifted to his hatred of the Kois, he dimly realized, as a lesser torture than thinking about Cornelia.

  He thought of Koi driving him to the Hong Kong racetrack, in a blindingly ostentatious Rolls-Royce they’d actually had covered with gold English Sovereign coins under many coats of clear lacquer. No cheap Panda cars for Han. Now he had been forced to move Lord & Company to this bronze and gold monstrosity. It made his buttocks boil. This shameless monument to greed and glitz made Donald Trump’s buildings look puritan.