In the Electric Eden

by Nick Arvin

  The man on stage grimly noted that the new electric chairs William Kemmler and Martha Place had been electrocuted in were AC-powered. “However,” he said, “to give proper credit to the public service of our competitor, we prefer to say that the criminals were ‘Westinghoused.’” He pointed to the animals behind him. These were strays, he said, wild animals on the city streets that had become dangerous. Despite all its problems, Westinghousing did provide a quick and humane form of execution. Two men in white coats came on stage and began strapping the cat into the tabletop electrodes.

  “It’s Marie,” Henry whispered, shaking his head. “Right, Aunt Emma?”

  “Stop squirming, Henry,” Emma said abruptly. “Listen to the presentation.”

  The man with the tie picked up a switch and held it casually in his left hand while describing how the present methodology had been empirically derived through controlled scientific experiments on dozens of animals, using electrodes in different places and with and without the use of saline water, which proved to be unnecessary because the natural fluids inside the animal were sufficient to pass current through. The ASPCA, he said, approved of this methodology as an efficient and painless means for the disposal of the hundreds of stray animals collected by the city each year. He threw the switch. The cat died quickly and silently, crumpling onto the table.

  A woman in the audience raised a white-gloved hand. “How many volts were used?”

  The Edison representative checked a dial. “Just 234 volts.”

  While they strapped in the dog Henry hunched in his seat, in dread. The dog stood meekly, the switch was thrown, and the dog, like the cat, collapsed without sound. Emma did not flinch, did not move at all that Henry could see. Nor did she react when the room darkened and they showed the silent film of Topsy’s execution, nor even when the orangutan was put on the table, the switch was thrown, and with a crackling noise its fur burst into yellow flames excreting coils of stinking black smoke. Fortunately the Edison men had buckets of water nearby, which they hurriedly emptied on the burning orangutan. The audience set down their notepads and applauded.

  Emma was stern and silent during the walk home. Then she went to bed, and in the days that followed her illness and weak limbs returned, her posture fell. When Henry was sent in one day to tend to the phonograph, the heavy curtains were drawn so that only a thin, vertical line of light illuminated the room, leaving all the corners in darkness and lending yellow edges to those objects that could be seen. Emma waved him away from the phonograph. She did not want the noise. Henry watched her shape in the dark a minute. Sometimes at night now, when he could not sleep, his brain seemed to surge erratically around the images of all he had seen. At other times he would seem able to see and feel nothing but the bedsheets against his skin, and these he felt intensely, as though they were heavy, made of rusted and pitted iron. He wondered if the surge of electricity that killed the elephant had touched him through the earth or air. He wondered if he had caught the same strange illness his aunt had. Suddenly wanting to reassure her, he said, “That wasn’t Marie. I’m sure it was not.”

  “Don’t you like dogs?” Emma said. Henry was the only other person in the room, yet he wasn’t sure if she was speaking to him. “Don’t you like animals?”

  “It wasn’t Marie, Aunt Emma.”

  “Oh, but Henry—” she turned and stared at him, glassy-eyed. Then, her features suddenly contracted, and she snarled, “You’re the one.”

  Henry retreated to the door. He hesitated with his hand on the knob. Emma looked around slowly. When her gaze lit on him again she said, “Henry,” and her voice was filled with sudden strength and clarity. “My husband is gone. Don’t you understand? Fielding is dead.” But she turned her head from side to side on her pillow as if to deny her own statement.

  Henry opened the door and fled to find his mother. She listened to him, then she went into Emma’s room and shut the door behind her, and thereafter his mother alone tended to Emma. But Henry still lingered nearby, uncertain what he was waiting for, or hoping for, or guilty of. “You’re the one,” she had said. He sat in the next room or paced along the hallway and his emotions alternated between simple ennui and strange feelings of pain and uncertainty—and years later, when my grandfather sat in his armchair relating all this to me one late evening, he said perhaps—perhaps it was merely, exquisitely, a confused kind of love. At the time, however, he did not know how to name it or how to respond.

  The next week Emma began to cough violently in spasms that brought up blood. One day when Henry came home from school his aunt’s bags stood beside the front door. His mother was bustling about. She said, “Your aunt is going to stay at her cousin’s farm in Missouri. The doctor feels fresh air will do her good. A change of scene. There are too many reminders here.” Behind her Emma was coughing painfully, and Henry wondered if he was himself a reminder.

  Emma, when she emerged, was dressed as finely as ever but moved with a terrible languor. Her flesh had grown pale, slightly gray, her dress hung limply from the bones of her shoulders. Her thinned neck had a snakelike appearance and blue veins were visible in the flesh at her temples and in the backs of her hands. Henry’s father escorted her with a hand at her elbow. She embraced Henry without strength. Still, it seemed to Henry that she gazed at him with a full intelligence. She patted him on the shoulder, then she was gone, and it was the last Henry saw of her.

  That evening his mother helped him move his things back into his bedroom. “You must be pleased to have your bed again,” she said. And he said, “It’s my fault.”

  “No, Henry,” she said. “You’ll feel better when you’re not sleeping on that old cot.”

  “It’s my fault that Aunt Emma is sick.”

  “No, dear, that’s not true. Don’t bother yourself with such silly notions.”

  “It is true.”

  “Henry, how can that be?”

  “It is,” he said. It did not entirely make sense even in his own head, and he could not explain. But he felt it, and he remembered that Aunt Emma had told him so, he was the one.

  “Forget that thought,” his mother said. “I don’t want your father to hear you saying that. Try to forget that idea. Promise to try?” she asked him, and he did.

  For a time Emma sent letters fortnightly from Missouri. “The sky here is so large and the air is so clean,” she wrote, “I feel it must be doing me good. The people are kind, but I miss all of you … Tell little Henry to be industrious and persevering in his studies.” This was pleasant and positive, but it seemed mechanical when the same formula was repeated with minor variations in letter after letter. Then her correspondence stopped. About a year after she had left New York, word came that she had passed away. The cousin in Missouri wrote, “I have seen her here with the hand of grief around her heart, squeezing slowly. She struggled for a long time, but found no escape.” And for this too, my grandfather Henry told me, he had felt responsible.

  Quietly, I asked my grandfather, “What about the umbrella stand?”

  It arrived just a couple of weeks after Emma departed for Missouri. An attached letter gave the warm regards of Thompson and Dundy and inside were several free passes to the rides at Luna Park. A letter was sent to Missouri, asking if she would like the umbrella stand. “No,” she wrote.

  Henry’s mother wanted to simply be rid of it, but his father, practical-minded in all things, saw no reason to throw away such fine and unique piece. He set it in the entryway, placed a couple of umbrellas in it, and whenever a new guest came in he made a point of showing it off. Generally, people were impressed.

  Henry hated the thing: he told me this while we sat looking at it in his own doorway. For a long time, whenever he went out the door he thought about taking the umbrella stand with him and giving it to some street urchin or burning it in a garbage can. But his father would be furious, so Henry left it. Then, somehow, over the passage of time he came to be accustomed to the thing; it seemed like a part of life, irreducib
le. He passed by it every day. He stowed umbrellas in it. When eventually his parents died he took the umbrella stand home and put it into his own doorway, thinking he would probably soon throw it out or sell it.

  Henry was my father’s father, a kindly, small old man with purple lips and watery eyes, and I have always remembered how even when I was a boy he shook my hand exactly like I was a man. When he passed away, I wept.

  He has been dead a long time now, and the umbrella stand has resided for many years in my own doorway. For some time I had been walking past it without seeing it when that e-mail drifted in, another random piece among all the random Internet flotsam that arrives every day in my electronic mailbox. Someone I hardly know had forwarded it to me and a dozen other people. The subject line said, “Edison vs. Elephant: World’s First Snuff Film?” and it contained nothing but a blue underlined link to a website where anyone can watch the film Edison made of an elephant’s execution.

  Topsy pops up in a little box on the screen. The image is black and white, pixelated and blurry, but an elephant-shape can be made out, standing. Then smoke rises from her feet and the elephant-shape falls over. It happens quickly, and it appears just as my grandfather described it. Except that I always imagined Topsy raised her trunk up and forward, as if to trumpet, angry. Instead she curled it in, toward herself, pained.

  Every morning I Westinghouse my toast, like anyone else. AC courses through all the walls of my home. My workday is spent at a computer fed a steady diet of alternating current through an appalling tangle of power cords. I create virtual documents, send e-mail, browse the electronic spaces of the World Wide Web.

  I look at the feet, the digitized image of feet from a film made a hundred years ago, and I try to pick out the one that now stands in my doorway. Left front? Right rear?

  My grandfather Westinghoused his toast too—as I recall he liked it charred nearly black.

  My grandfather went once to Luna Park. His pragmatic father felt they might as well use the tickets they had been given. As they rode the ferry to Coney Island, Henry was determined not to have fun, but Luna Park …. With his mother and father he rode the ferry to Coney Island. He arrived determined not to have fun. But Luna Park was resplendent, fraught with diversions, utterly different from the forsaken landscape where he had seen the elephant die. Here were joyous crowds and bright colors and flashing lights and the happy tumult of children screaming, bells ringing and bands playing, criers crying, barkers barking, touts touting, and a skyline cluttered with baroque turrets, campaniles, and domes. Henry slid down the Shoot-the-Chutes, saw the War of the Worlds, visited the head-hunting Igorots and the Eskimo village, rode the camels, ate at Feltman’s, and took the Trip to the Moon where gamboling moon-men serenaded him with moon-songs and gave away pieces of green cheese. At twilight Luna Park flared building by building into dazzling spires of electric lights.

  I asked my grandfather—because at that time I was young and he was old and I was concerned for the child that he had been—I asked him, “Were you able to forget?”

  “Only to be distracted,” he told me. “But I was glad for it—just then it was enough.”

  I was fourteen or fifteen then—not a child and not much of an adult either, but able at least to listen respectfully while he told the story. And I remember walking with him that evening, his pace and step still sure although his shoulders drooped now within his overcoat and his white hair wisped lightly in the wind. We stopped at a certain point where we could see much of the city, containing its millions of unknown lives, all of it as brilliantly alight as the great old Coney Island parks once were, yet these buildings ten times taller and more massive. And none of it provided distraction for my grandfather anymore, I believe, for silently he wept, brushing his cheeks with trembling fingers while in his eyes all the untold lights caught and burned.

  What They Teach You

  in Engineering School

  As he turned out of the driveway, the old man had already forgotten where he needed to go. Behind him someone shouted, “You’re going the wrong way!” which was just like these damn poker players, always handing out more advice than anyone wanted. And, well, so what if he was? What of it? He, after all, had won twelve dollars and the Glass Lady today. He proceeded ahead and powered up his window for good measure. He was old. He had earned the discretion to go any way he wanted, wrong, right, left, up, down, through. He had a phone. He could call someone if he got lost.

  He stomped the accelerator. He had never gone this way before, and now he would. An adventure. He remembered his youth, before he married, before his two sons—the ladies, the army, the sit-downs and wildcat strikes when the union was strong. The memories were a scatter of images, then a rushing, rapid multitude, and his hands trembled on the steering wheel. But his hands always trembled now.

  And now where was he exactly? He had turned left then right. Or had he? Memories had recently begun rising in tides that floated him for minutes, even hours, while matters of the present fell from sight. He drove sometimes for miles and miles, made stops and turns, all without seeing a thing.

  He concentrated. Here lay the road, its white lines and yellow dashes and its smudges of black where potholes had been repaired with shovelfuls of hot asphalt. Trees lined the road, which was nice. The few stands of trees that remained these days were mostly getting torn out so they could build all those houses that looked the same and bunched together like toadstools. “Developments” they called them. Ha!

  The Glass Lady—a blown glass figure, she actually looked something like a deranged chipmunk—teetered precariously on the dashboard, and the old man grabbed her and put her in his pocket. He didn’t want to lose her. Winning the Glass Lady for the week from that crew of cheats and rapscallions was no small thing. The trees along the road thinned, then were gone, and he drove between long fields of corn. He was lost. This could be anywhere in the state. Way up ahead some kid was driving a go-cart along the shoulder, pulling a plume of dust behind. He passed a single, small house surrounded on three sides by the corn, its front window looking across the road at more corn. With aluminum siding, black shutters, and a gray roof it was a little smaller but otherwise not much different from his own house, which gazed across a similar road to a similar field.

  He had raised his family in that house; his wife had died in that house. He had now lived there for forty-five years. When Duke, his older son, was small (and even when he was pretty big) he liked to go off into the corn and disappear for hours. The corn was well over seven feet tall at its peak, and it was possible to get completely lost in there, except you only needed to pick a single row to follow and it would eventually lead you to the edge of the field. Even Duke could figure it out.

  Duke, Duke, Duke. Something to remember about Duke. (The memory came like a fish hooked but struggling hard, so that just when he saw the glimmer of its scales it plunged again into the dark. But he worked it carefully, taking in line when he could, letting it out when he had to, until, finally, he could reach down, grab it—) Duke! He was supposed to meet Duke, today, this very afternoon, back at the house. Duke wanted to take him out to dinner.

  He passed through the dusty wake of the go-cart, then stopped and honked. He opened a window. A small girl was driving the go-cart—a sorry-looking machine patched together with duct tape. “Hello, girl!” he shouted. “Hello!”

  She stopped and stood and peered at him. She wore a soil-smeared T-shirt under a pair of outsize denim overalls. Her hair, greasy, was cut in an uneven pageboy around two narrow eyes and a smudge of a nose.

  “I’m lost,” he said. “Do you know what road this is?”

  She nodded.

  He waited, blinked. “Well? What is it?”

  “Gleason Road.”

  “Gleason. And which way is that?” He pointed. “Is that north?”

  The girl frowned and looked into the rows of corn. After a moment she shrugged. But, peeking at the sun, and with a little thinking, he supposed that was indee
d north, which meant he was headed about 180 degrees in the wrong direction. He said, “Crap.” Then, “Please excuse my language, miss. My thanks to you.” He pulled ahead and set about turning the car around. He twisted the steering wheel hard left and pulled forward. He turned the wheel all the way right, reversed. The three-point turn became a five, and then a seven-point herky-jerky slow dance, because the road was narrow and bordered by deep ditches and because he had a big car and his cataracts made gauging the distance between the rear bumper and the cattails in the ditch troublesome. He did not want to get stuck in a roadside ditch in the boondocks, so he was cautious.

  Duke gripped the steering wheel of his little subcompact like a race-car driver—neither too tensely nor too lightly. At stop signs he slowed with linear precision, then accelerated smoothly away. He felt the hum of the tires in his body. It seemed possible that if he pulled back just right on the steering wheel he could lift the car into the sky.

  In two months, Duke would receive his degree in engineering. In three months, he would begin working as an engineer. In ten minutes, he would pick up his old man and take him out to dinner and tell him about the degree (which his old man knew about already) and the new job (which was the big surprise). He stopped at a light, waited for green, then spun the wheel and aimed the car exactly ninety degrees leftward.

  It was good to be in control. Much of his life had been a matter of blundering through, getting by. He had graduated high school a year late, then went to work in a donut shop, spent miserable days getting up at 4 a.m., laboring under the weight of a pastel-yellow paper hat, and coming home stinking of powdered sugar and deep-fried dough. He started getting big. Meanwhile his brother, Kevin, two years younger, became valedictorian of his class, brought home pretty girls to meet his mom and his old man, got into Cornell, and became a lawyer. Kevin managed his life with an ease that seemed supernatural to Duke.