The Inventors

by Peter Selgin

NO OPERATION IS COMPLETE

  UNTIL ALL THE TOOLS AND PARTS

  HAVE BEEN PUT AWAY

  Then there was the back room, where your father kept the band saw and a blue machine on splayed legs for cutting tubes and shafts that galumphed like a lame camel. Sheets and chunks of every sort of metal were kept there in wooden bins, with other bins holding spare and used parts.

  Under banks of long fluorescent bulbs buzzing and wavering in their death throes you would walk to where your father stood working, wearing his pilled moth-eaten cardigan and stained khaki trousers (winter) or shorts (summer). Past rows of tiny drawers brimming with screws, bolts, nuts, washers, tubes, lenses, photocells, toggle switches, relays (“tick-tick things,” you called them), solenoids, potentiometers, rheostats, transformers, resistors, capacitors (“capacitators”), and rectifiers, you would make your way, carefully avoiding the holes in the floor. On the table next to your father’s typewriter a portable radio played a mixture of classical music and static.

  The Building had its own special smell, a blend of solder smoke, scorched metal, mildew, electrical shorts, farts, and orange peels. Your father liked to eat oranges when he worked. He kept a straw basket of them by his typewriter. He’d toss the peels into a gray metal wastepaper basket, along with gobs of pulp that he would spit into his palm. A perfume of oranges rose from the wastebasket.

  You’d watch him typing with two fingers on his Royal typewriter, or soldering a circuit, or turning a part on the lathe. The lathe was your favorite. You loved watching him manipulate its plethora of bright chrome dials with one hand, like an engineer manning the controls of a locomotive, while smoothing the fingers of his other hand around the spinning chuck, its knuckles black with grime. From the spinning chuck bright turnings of aluminum, copper, and brass spiraled to the rotted floor. Afterward you’d sweep the turnings up with the dustpan, pocketing the longest and brightest specimens for a collection you kept in a wooden box.

  Among boxy instruments on his workbench was one with a round screen called an oscilloscope. As it shed its green light over his thin gray hair, his sloping forehead, his wrinkled brow, his aquiline nose, your father would gaze at the glowing screen and you would gaze at him, wondering what he made of it, amazed that your father (or anyone) could extract meaning from a dancing thread of light.

  The Building was your father’s sanctuary, the place where he sought refuge among his ideas and instruments. It was your refuge, too, a shrine, the place where you went to worship your papa and experience the awe and mystery of his works. Under its buzzing and flickering fluorescent lights, between the holes in its rotting floor, in a pall of solder smoke and radio static, the universe was conceived, engineered, tested, and approved.

  IN THE BUILDING’S back room you had your own workbench, with your own (broken) oscilloscope, your own soldering gun, your own plastic drawers of assorted parts. There you gave birth to your own invention, an electric motor you built from scratch, almost. You fit brushes and stators to an old rotor that you found, turned the aluminum casing for it on the lathe, fixed a bearing to the shaft, mounted the result on a bracket, and attached a toggle switch to it. You soldered the two wires, one red and one blue, from the coil to the toggle switch, then added (for the heck of it) two diodes, a small transformer, and a yellow capacitor chosen for its looks alone. You attached an electrical cord to the transformer and plugged the result into a wall outlet.

  Before it caught on fire the capacitor blushed and gave off a bluish gray puff of pungent smoke, garnishing failure with splendor. Still you were damned if your motor didn’t look as if it should have worked, if it didn’t display all the superficial properties of a perfectly good motor. In fact what you had invented was a sculpture of a motor, a postmodern motor. An artist’s motor.

  YOUR VISITS TO the Building ended usually at dusk, when your mother would telephone from the house to say dinner was ready. Before leaving, you’d empty all the wastebaskets and turn off the lights and the furnace.

  With the six o’clock siren howling in the distance, you and your father walked up the hill to the modest Cape Cod with a brick-accented front and dormer windows from which the striped awnings had long been removed. Summer heat, crickets and peepers. Or December dusk, the air crackling cold, the sun about to sink behind a hill.

  Halfway up you and your father stop for a “pissing contest,” both of you standing side by side, unzipping at the driveway’s edge, aiming father-and-son streams into the Queen Anne’s Lace, poke-berries, goldenrod, and milkweed. Your papa’s thick, ruddy, uncircumcised dick resembled the Polish sausages that your mother boiled with potatoes and cabbage. Your own dick scarcely rated notice.

  While pissing, your father would recite a favorite limerick:

  There once was a man from Madras

  Whose balls were made of brass

  In frosty weather they clanged together

  And sparks flew out of his ass

  Your papa’s urine never failed to outperform yours in every category: thickness, altitude, distance, endurance, its glittering golden arch reminding you, as it rose and fell into the weeds, of the brass turnings that spun from his lathe. Watching it twist and turn in the twilight, you’d say to yourself: When I can pee that far, I’ll be a man.

  BY THE TIME you got to the Building that day it was already dusk. The lights still burned inside. You knocked on the inner door. To your father’s Come in, Peter my boy, you let yourself in, remembering to shut the door behind you. Your father sat at his typewriter, typing. Well, well, so good to see you, Peter boy, he said, and went on typing with two fingers, smiling. Maybe he asked you about your first day at school. You may even have said something about visiting the new teacher in his cottage, though it’s unlikely. However affectionate and welcoming, your father never pretended to be that interested in you. He listened to you the way he listened to his radio, appreciating the background noise even though he didn’t give a fig what music was playing.

  Anyway, you’d forget what you talked or didn’t talk about.

  But you wouldn’t forget how, when you were small, on hot summer days your papa would take you and George to a muddy swimming hole under a railroad trestle near the edge of town, how once there he would enter the water as he always did, ever so slowly, inch by gruesome inch, making wincing sounds as if he were stepping into a vat of boiling oil. Meanwhile the fathers of other kids your age ran and jumped into the water.

  How you had longed for your papa to jump like the others. Jump, Papa, Jump! you would plead. But he wouldn’t. I can’t, he’d say. I’m too old.

  Those three words – I’m too old – how they tolled in you like a tarnished bell. Too old Too old Too old… At moments like that your disappointment knew no bounds. And it was true. Your papa was old, born in 1912, the same year the Titanic sank.

  But it wasn’t old age that kept your father from jumping into bodies of water anymore than it prevented him from throwing footballs or playing catch, things your father would no sooner have done than he would have swum the Bosporus or climbed Mount Everest. It wasn’t age that made your papa old. It was his unwillingness to do anything that failed to engage him, that didn’t pertain to his pursuits and interests. It was egocentricity, not age, that made your father so old.

  So you concluded that day after visiting the new teacher for the first time.

  As you stood there watching your father type, seeing him smile in concentration, it occurred to you that something else had changed for you that day. You realized, not for the first time but with a novel sense of bitter disappointment, that your papa, the human god who’d invented the world for you, was a remote, absentminded old man.

  I HAVE A THREE-AND-A-HALF YEAR-OLD DAUGHTER, AUDREY. She lives with her mother in New Jersey. I see her a half-dozen times a year, as often as my academic schedule allows.

  I never meant to become a father; I sure didn’t plan to become one at fifty-three, let alone a long-distance father. Life has its own agendas.

&nb
sp; The first and only other time I came close to fatherhood I was twenty years old. I’d gotten my high school sweetheart pregnant. Though I’d moved to New York to study art, on visits home Laura and I kept seeing each other. She was a shy, quiet girl, and we spent most of our time together in pursuit of means to avoid talking to each other.

  During one such visit, I impregnated her.

  Summer, 1977. Together with a group of other Pratt students, I sublet a Soho loft. One of the students had two kittens, Sacco and Vanzetti. Soho was much grittier back then. No boutiques, no Balthazar, its cobblestoned industrial streets noisy with trucks and strewn with graffiti.

  The professor from whom we sublet left behind cans of purple, pink, and gray latex paint and a few large sheets of paper. I carried these up to the rooftop, where I spread the sheets out, their corners held down by bricks. With a set of lettering stencils, a roll of masking tape, and a very rough plan, I went to work.

  Jackson Pollock and Jasper Johns were my heroes. The paintings I did that day, surrounded by ventilators and tarpaper, owed everything to them.

  Under a breezeless summer sun I worked all day long and into the evening. The forecast was good; not a cloud in the sky. I left the results to dry and went to sleep in my windowless white cube of a room built into the center of the loft.

  The next morning I awoke to purple, pink, and gray paw prints everywhere. I raced up to the roof. My paintings were all destroyed.

  An hour later Laura phoned with the news. She was three weeks pregnant and said she would not consider an abortion. I reasoned, argued, pleaded. My words echoed off the cube’s white walls.

  Later that same day, the lights went out. Except for a few places in the Far Rockaways, the whole city went dark. Four thousand commuters had to be evacuated from the subways. Anarchic mobs ravaged neighborhoods. Thirty seven hundred arrests were made. Con-Ed called the blackout “an act of God.” Father Gabriel Santacruz of Bushwick disagreed. He told his candlelit flock: “Tonight we are without God.”

  A week later, at the Burger King across the street from the Planned Parenthood in Bridgeport, Connecticut, as my mother and I sipped twin milkshakes together in pained silence (a slab of bright sunlight slicing through the plate glass window, bouncing off our table), Laura had the life scraped from her womb.

  Thirty-three years later, my daughter was born.

  United States Patent # 2,736,353, INDUCED QUADRATURE FIELD MOTOR. “This invention relates to alternating current motors having the general characteristics of synchronous motors, and has for its primary object the provision of a motor having higher output at lower speed than a conventional alternating-current motor of similar physical size.” Filed Nov. 25, 1953.

  V.

  What You Knew

  Bethel, Connecticut, 1970

  AS SOON AS YOU ENTERED THE NEW TEACHER’S CLASSROOM you knew things would be different. Instead of their usual regimental rows, the desks were arranged in a large oval, with the teacher’s metal and Formica desk shoved into a corner like a miscreant. The room’s cinderblock walls were covered with canvas or corkboard and festooned with images of authors, scientists, poets, world reformers, and leaders: Lincoln, Einstein, Gandhi, Martin Luther King, Martin Luther, Socrates. There were reproduced paintings by Picasso, Klee, Cezanne, van Gogh, and Vermeer, poems by Whitman, Dickinson, and Frost, “Desiderata” (“Go placidly amid the noise and haste, and remember what peace there may be in silence”) Kipling’s “If” (“If you can keep your head when all about you / Are losing theirs and blaming it on you”), and other poems and posters:

  “A journey of a thousand miles begins with a single step.”

  “War is unhealthy for children and other living things.”

  “Suppose they gave a war and nobody came?”

  From a phonograph soft strains of classical music emanated.

  The one standard item in the room, the chalkboard, had been transformed into an object of curiosity by the words scrawled in large letters across it:

  EVERYTHING YOU’VE LEARNED IS WRONG

  Under this in smaller letters the new teacher had written:

  The statement on the handout is true.

  As you took your seat the teacher made his way around the circle of desks, handing out mimeographed sheets still warm and reeking of chemicals from the spirit duplicator. The sheets were folded in half. Unfolding yours you read:

  The statement on the blackboard is false.

  From the bottom of the sheet the teacher had you tear off a thin strip of paper, then asked how many sides the strip of paper had.

  Several students volunteered: Two!

  If I told you I can make one side of that strip of paper you’re holding disappear, the teacher asked, what would you say to that?

  Manifestations of dissent. Impossible! No way! It can’t be done!

  Having borrowed a strip of paper from Mary Beth Lumpkin, the teacher twisted it and curved it into a loop. With a piece of Scotch tape from the dispenser on his desk he taped the two ends of the loop together.

  He handed the result back to Mary Beth.

  Please draw a line down the middle of both sides, he instructed her.

  Mary Beth Lumpkin drew one line. There was no other side.

  Question your assumptions, said the teacher.

  THE NEW TEACHER was energetic and intense. He moved around the classroom like a tennis player covering his end of the court. He liked to challenge and provoke, encouraged discussion, honored dissent and debate. He taught you to question authority, abhor clichés, spurn stereotypes, shun received wisdom, resist jargon and sentimentality.

  No teacher worked harder. He arrived at the school at dawn and would stay often until dark. When the school administration refused to pay for a textbook he wanted he spent hours at a portable typewriter in his cottage replicating the book’s pages one by one onto ditto masters, complete with illustrations that he reproduced freehand.

  He did his best to downplay the distinction between teacher and student, to blur if not erase altogether what he saw as an artificial and unhealthy boundary, to treat his pupils as equals, or anyway not as inferiors, to align himself with them, to make them feel that he was on their side. He insisted that his students call him by his first name and not Mr. ———— (“That’s my father’s name”).

  In the middle school cafeteria one day, having forsaken the sanctuary of the teacher’s lunchroom, the new teacher took his food tray and headed toward the table where you and some other students in his special class sat. Seeing him coming your way you decided to play a practical joke on him. As soon as he sat down (having said, “May I join you?”) you all simultaneously picked up your lunch trays and left the table, or pretended to, then you turned around and came back. As you did, without meeting any of your eyes and with a grim look on his face, the teacher stood up and left.

  Only then did it dawn on you that you’d hurt the teacher’s feelings. It had never occurred to you before then that you could do that to a teacher.

  The joke was your idea. Later that same afternoon, you apologized.

  The teacher was gathering papers at his desk, putting them into his briefcase.

  It was meant to be funny, you said. I guess it wasn’t.

  The teacher said nothing. He kept putting away papers, not looking at you.

  Anyway, I’m sorry, you said.

  Friends don’t apologize, said the teacher.

  You were officially his friend.

  BEFORE YOU MET the new teacher you’d been an average thirteen-year-old boy, with an average thirteen-year-old’s interests and ignorances, a child’s innocently circumscribed view of the world.

  You had absolutely no interest in worldly affairs or events. You watched the news on television, anyway you saw and heard it while your parents watched, the avuncular anchorman’s voice reducing wars, assassinations, droughts, earthquakes, and other calamities to a murmur as monotonously assuring as that of the ceiling fan thrumming away through hot nights at the t
op of the stairs.

  You loved ships, especially ocean liners with many funnels, old cars with running boards, and warplanes, Spitfires and Spads, sea anemones, and starfish. You were lousy at sports. You preferred to draw – especially ocean liners, especially the Titanic, which sank the year your father was born. You would spend hours alone at the dining or kitchen table with your box of colored pencils rendering the doomed ship’s porthole-pocked counter stern rearing up against the starry sky, with tiny stick-figure passengers leaping like fleas from its decks.

  You assumed that you were smart. Your papa was a genius, after all. Yet at times you had to wonder. Your school grades were good, but then they were skewed by your habit of adorning book reports and other papers with free-hand maps and drawings of paramecium that charmed your teachers into awarding you A’s. On Standardized Aptitude Tests where your draftsmanship was confined to filling in ovals with a sharpened Number 2 pencil, you fared less well. Your verbal and your math scores were abysmal. No wonder, since you guessed at every answer, filling in those little ovals like they were portholes on the Titanic.

  One day – when you were old enough – you’d wear Old Spice (for the clipper ship on the bottle), smoke Viceroy Cigarettes (you liked the package design), and drink Cutty Sark whisky (yellow label, clipper ship).

  AT THIRTEEN YOU were already vain. You couldn’t get enough of mirrors. You never quite saw what you were looking for. Yet there were hints, intimations. What you were looking for was me, your future self, a self you tried to will into premature existence by staring with grim determination at your reflection.

  You’d be famous someday, the mirrors told you. A famous artist, or movie star, or a designer of ocean liners with five, six, a dozen funnels. The mirrors supported your conviction that you were special, one that, until the teacher invited you into his cottage, the rest of the world for some reason stubbornly refused to honor.

  Your looks were a work in progress, the mouth and jawline still soft, the eyebrows insubstantial, your lips a tender bow of flesh. Someday (you promised your reflection in the mirror) you would have a chiseled jaw and steely, squinty eyes like James West of The Wild, Wild West, a popular James Bond/Western TV show in which Secret Service Agent West and his trusty sidekick Artemus Gordon toured the country in their private railroad car, averting the dastardly deeds of a colorful array of diabolical villains exemplified by Dr. Miguelito Loveless, a dwarf bent on avenging his smallness by conquering the world. Jim West wore skintight brocade vests and bolero jackets with retractable derringers, exploding buttons, and hidden daggers, and would dispatch a half-dozen bad guys at once with a medley of fists, kicks, and karate chops.