Us Conductors

by Sean Michaels

  In all of America, just 485 of my devices had been sold.

  WHAT DO YOU DO when you are going broke? You search for your patron. Winter was blowing in and Pash was out there somewhere. But I could not reach him at his telephone number. He did not answer my mail. Three times I visited the apartment that was not really his apartment, where I knew he occasionally stayed. There was no answer, just scuffs and creaking behind the walnut door. As a co-director of the Theremin Corporation, his signature was often needed; I faked it.

  One day I went to the covert Soviet consulate in midtown. I waited thirty minutes for a someone to emerge, spidery, from a grey door. I asked him: “What am I to be doing?”

  He replied: “Please go back to your laboratory, Dr Termen.”

  When I came outside I felt all of the city’s steely ambivalence. Office windows reflected clouds. Down the street, construction clanged. I stepped between cars, scanning for a friend, for a bus, for something to smile at. On the corner, a black car purred. I looked away and then looked back, squinting. Behind the wheel sat a tall, lean man with a sweep of blond hair. His binoculars were raised, and trained on me.

  I ran.

  At home I balanced in a green leather chair, a recliner that collapsed if the occupant leaned too far forward or too far back. I had set up a snapping, whirring television device in the corner of my bedroom; it projected the rehearsal rooms in jerky light, glowing squares, triangles, rectangles. I watched students arrive and disappear. I did not go to see Schillinger or Frances. I did not visit with my most loyal students, like Lucie Rosen or Henry Solomonoff, who were now teaching the others. I sat on the cusp of collapse and imagined the receding silhouettes of you and of Pash. My life had paused on each of you, for a moment. Where was it headed now? I sparred with partners at the kwoon, knocked them to the floor. I imagined Pash in an alleyway, swinging at Danny Finch. I walked home through flurries. A courier arrived with a new U.S. visa: what spirit had renewed it?

  Late at night, when the students had left, I ate small, simple meals, enjoying the movement of a knife through an onion, the division into two pearly parts. My bank account was like an emptying vault: income depended on loans, patents, future sales. There were no loans, no new patents, no future sales. No one was buying a thing and I owed the Plaza Hotel two months’ rent. Their envelopes collected like fallen leaves on the end table by the door. I did not know where I would get the money. I thought of Sasha in Leningrad, reviewing new data. I thought of Katia growing older in New Jersey, but did not call her, just sat in my recliner and watched the students’ arms, like semaphore, signalling that I had more yet to do.

  At night I dreamed of sums, but mostly of subtractions.

  It was an acquaintance who saved me. One evening Walter Rosen came up to the studio with Lucie, and when she went into the practice room to run her scales, Walter stood meditative in the vestibule. I could see him on my rickety television, like a bit player in a movie. He wore a jacket and waistcoat. He had pouches under his eyes. He crossed to my bedroom door and knocked.

  “Who is it?” I said.

  “Walter Tower Rosen,” he said.

  I tugged the television’s plug from the wall socket. The projector died away. “Come in,” I told him. We had spoken only twice, three times before.

  “Hello,” he said.

  “Hello.”

  He seemed to be waiting for me to stand up.

  I rose and shook his hand.

  “Lucie is my wife,” he said.

  “Of course I remember.”

  Walter was a lawyer. The first time he and Lucie came to visit, he said the instruments sounded like “Spanish birds.”

  I wondered if Walter thought I was sleeping with his wife.

  “How can I help you?” I said, hands balled in my pockets.

  “Dr Theremin, I understand you are having some financial difficulty.”

  I did not react. He did not seem to need me to.

  “Lucie has been talking to me about this for some time, although to be honest I didn’t realize how serious it was until I ran into Douglas Hollingworth at the bank and he told me about your line of credit.”

  “This is somewhat embarrassing,” I said after a long pause.

  “Nonsense. Happens to the best of us.” He seemed to be looking over the room: piles and stacks and jars. He gave a gentle smile. I realized suddenly that this smile was genuine; it was gentle because it was genuine. “Lucie had her second recital last week. It was superb. Everyone says so. There is no question that you are doing important work.”

  Did he want her to receive more private lessons? To have a theremin built?

  “Lucie is a fine pupil,” I said.

  “When capital runs out, one requires investors, simple as that. It’s obvious you have the ideas. All you need is the space in which to develop them. Yes?”

  “Yes,” I said carefully.

  “We live on West 54th Street. Do you know it?”

  “It’s around the corner,” I said.

  “We wanted to invite you to move into number 37.”

  “To move into?” I said.

  “We live next door, but 37 is vacant. You could move your studio.”

  “This studio?”

  “That’s the notion,” said Walter. He shrugged, as if he were apologizing. “Just until you get back on your feet. Don’t worry about rent; the current tenants are just a few dusty insects. Moths don’t pay rent either. For us it’s the best of both worlds: I can ask you to explain the scientific principles I read about in the papers; Lucie can practise or have repairs done. Then when your troubles are behind you, you’ll be able to find your own space.”

  “Of course,” I said.

  “Perhaps we can even have dinner together!”

  I looked at this man, guileless, accommodating.

  I said, “I do not know how I can repay you for this.”

  He waved his hand. “Dr Theremin, it is good for the spirit to be able to help a mensch.”

  “A mensch?” I didn’t recognize the expression.

  “A mensch,” Rosen said, “is what we all aspire to be.”

  YESTERDAY, RED APPEARED with a plate of sardines. “Hello comrade,” he said. He did not explain why he had stopped bringing food to my door. He said he was sorry he had been away. He must have noticed how thin I had become because after giving me the sardines he came back a few minutes later with a bowl of thick soup. It was not borscht or shchi, it was not New York pea soup; it was something else. Perhaps it is what Red likes to eat when he is hungry. I thanked him. I told him to give my regards to the captain. I watched his eyes to see if there was a message there, news of mutiny or disaster, the image of a man floating facedown in water, but there was no message. Red gave me the thumbs-up. He left me alone in my cell.

  Some nights on the Stary Bolshevik, I can hear sounds from outside. I press my ear to the steel and beyond the groans of the ship, the screws loosening and tightening in the walls, I hear gulls. They cry and whistle. Other times I hear whales; I think they are whales; it is a moaning in four colours. My ear is pressed to the steel and I hear this calling that is like many callings folded together. Ancient blues, greys, scarlets, golds, on top of one another, in a chord. One day I will make a piano that plays the echoes of whales.

  An odd thing: in my room I sometimes peer through the porthole at the low waves. They are silent. No sounds penetrate the glass. Looking into the blue sky and the bucking ocean, I never see a circling bird.

  FIVE

  AGE OF CONSENT

  AT ITS NEW LOCATION, the Theremin Studio became a zoological garden for like-minded animals. There was still the same procession of pupils—naive amateurs, wealthy dilettantes, scions of Russian-American New York—but also an entourage of artists, scientists, musicians, philosophers, showbiz characters. Awaking in the morning, I turned in my wide bed and wondered what the day would bring, who the day would bring: which men and women would stand in my doorway removing their hats, spilli
ng out introductions. Strangers arrived over breakfast, bowled into the living room after a night of dancing. “Let’s go to Theremin’s!” they must have said. Like I was the host of a beloved dive.

  I gave talks on electricity. I hosted midnight round tables about the latest acoustics research. I taught Somerset Maugham about magnets and Sergei Eisenstein about rust. I served black tea and gingerbread to Maurice Martenot, inventor of the brilliant but capricious Ondes Martenot organ. He asked for salt and pepper. Schillinger lectured on aesthetics and harmony. The brownstone’s second floor was for students, the third a workshop, the fourth my personal quarters. The basement had room for storage and a small gym. But the main floor, with its large parlour and low lamps, became a kind of salon. We learned, argued, told ribald jokes. Guests brought bottles of hooch and the liquor cabinet was never empty. While Tommy Dorsey explained his recipe for “Irish spaghetti sauce,” Jascha Heifetz would sit arguing with Mischa Elman about tremolo. Glenn Miller would lean by the stairway’s banister, flirting with every girl. Isabella Marx used a different insult each time they crossed paths. “You cur,” she said. “You rascal.” “You wag.”

  It was 1931. Pash had still not returned. One day a man stopped me at a street corner. Another man, his partner, moved into position. They stood close, their shoulders at my shoulders. They were only slightly larger than I.

  The first man looked off across the street and tipped his head forward, like a vulture. “Good morning, Lev,” he said, in Russian.

  “Hello?” I said, in English.

  We stood as a trio while the rest of the pedestrians crossed the street. Soon we were the only ones on the corner. “Would you please come with us,” the first man said.

  They made me walk slightly ahead of them. I remember noticing that my shoes needed polish. They told me to turn left. They told me to turn right. We passed the entrance to the Waldorf Astoria, completed a few weeks before. Rolls Royces waited patiently, like loyal dogs. We kept moving. We turned left. We turned right. Finally we arrived at L’Aujourd’hui. This was a shabby and grease-stained restaurant, with tabletops the colour of french-fried potatoes. I had been before, but only between the hours of midnight and 8:00 a.m., only after a night of drinking and dancing. Nobody ever called L’Aujourd’hui by its name. We called it after its owner, a cook, Antony Mudolski. We called it Mud Tony’s. By day, the place was missing all of its late-night gaiety. It was a wilted room with sagging banquettes, patronized by ghosts.

  The spies took me to Mud Tony’s. They ordered three slices of cherry pie and one glass of water, “but hold the water.” Into this empty glass they poured a shot of warm, clear vodka.

  “Drink,” they told me.

  I was on one side of the table and the two men sat facing me. One had a moustache with no beard, the other had a beard with no moustache. They wore pale blue suits. I know that all suits are made of cloth but I was struck by the way their suits looked particularly made of cloth.

  I had not yet drunk. They stared at me. One of the men folded his hands, threading his fingers together. I could not say why, but this was an extremely intimidating gesture. I picked up the glass of vodka and I drank it. The other man refilled my glass.

  “Drink,” he told me.

  I did not immediately drink. The two men seemed to blink in unison.

  The other man folded his hands, threading his fingers together.

  I drank. They refilled my glass. I drank again. I had now swallowed three shots of vodka. We spoke together.

  These men were both named Karl. They said they were from Soviet military intelligence. They asked me if I had recently seen Pash. I told them no. They asked me if I had visited with anyone else of interest. I told them no. I asked what had happened to Pash. The vodka had made my tongue slippery. They didn’t respond. “We are the same but different,” said the Karl with the beard. They asked what I was working on, whom I was working with. I told them anything they wished to know. They were looking after my visa, they said. They gave me papers to sign. They asked about particular contracts and I replied as best I could. “But what of Pash?” I asked again. They told me that he had been reassigned. They said that we would meet every two weeks at Mud Tony’s, and I would answer their questions. They said I was a spy and, sooner or later, I would have to spy.

  When the bill arrived, they waited patiently until I picked it up.

  I DID NOT KNOW IT THEN, but Karl and Karl would be my monthly companions for the next six years. As the rest of my life whirred and dinged, accelerating and decelerating, they were the drag, the margin of error. No matter what else I was doing, I met my handlers at Mud Tony’s every two fortnights. I got drunk and spilled my guts. They issued fewer orders than Pash had done, but I understood their orders less. Imagine my life as a barometer; whereas once it moved in slow, deliberate changes, now the dial’s needle trembled. For the rest of my time in the United States, even in my most private moments, even longing for you, there was a tiny hesitation. I trained in my basement, working through the four forms; I sparred with Jin at the kwoon; I listened to Haydn and Bach. Still I felt it, thinly travelling in my blood: a wavering.

  Yet I found solaces. The studio was a clubhouse, a dugout, a private kingdom. The carpet on the front steps wore out from too many feet. I stood at the stove with Frances, making caramel corn. I began exploring other applications of the radio watchman, devices that lived at once in the visible world and the invisible one, sensing the space that surrounds an object, sensing movement there. I built an alarm system, a wired panel that could be hidden behind a Rembrandt, concealed beneath a topaz. As soon as the thief’s gloved hands entered the panel’s charged field, like a drop of blood into a pool of water, an alarm sounded. No strings, no codes, no moving parts—the naked perception of presence and absence. I sat at my desk and wrote letters, folded diagrams into envelopes, suggesting that Mrs Pickford, Mr and Mrs McLean trust their Star of Bombay, their Hope and Star of the East diamonds, not to dogs, to sleepy guards, but to the permanent vigilance of electricity.

  By return mail, they said: “Perhaps.”

  I found that I had a thousand things to do, and all these things were distractions from the things that I could not do.

  UNTIL ONE THURSDAY I found you waiting on my doorstep.

  It had been a long time. Since my conversation with your sister, I had not called again. I did not wish to hear that clear-eyed Clara was out with her tall boyfriend. I did not wish to hear anything like that. I had always known that you had other suitors, but until that talk with Nadia I had never imagined that they could cast a spell on you. You cut too finely. Your gaze was too sure. When I was alone, remembering you, you were never dancing with anyone else.

  When I found you on my doorstep in a red coat, leaning against the jamb, you seemed so at ease, so familiar with this place, with the sight of me, smiling, that it felt as if I had been the one who had forgotten you, Clara. You leaned like the hour hand on a clock.

  “Hello,” I said.

  “It’s you.”

  “It’s me.”

  “I did think you lived here.”

  “Would you like to come in?”

  “Should I?”

  We kissed on both cheeks and then we were in the parlour. You looked around, you reached absentmindedly toward the bowl of almonds, you used your right hand to take almonds from your left palm and bring them to your mouth.

  At the bottom of the staircase, we removed our shoes. You were in stockings. We passed through the second-storey studios. Lucie nodded hello, sliding from F to F sharp to F to F sharp with her right hand. You followed me up one more floor, to the workshop. There were wood shavings on the floor, little piles of nuts and bolts, empty bowls and lonely screwdrivers. Above a chest of drawers was a print of the periodic table of the elements. You gestured toward it. “That looks new.”

  “Everything’s new,” I said.

  You nodded. You shrugged. I put my hands in my large pockets. Protactinium, hafnium: thes
e elements had not appeared in my childhood encyclopedia. I took your coat. In short sleeves you seemed reinvented. I wanted to lay my lips at your shoulder. In every room you tried to guess what was before you and every time you guessed incorrectly. You took loudspeakers for theremins, fingerboard theremins for loudspeakers.

  “And this?” I asked.

  “A pocket watch,” you said, with a smile.

  I set the doll on the ground and it crawled across the carpet to the tips of your toes.

  I showed you old televisions and RCA kits, the “whirling watcher,” as Henry Solomonoff called it, our machine with perfect pitch. I turned it on and watched the neon light reflect in your eyes. It gyred and flashed but the device was not certain, not sure, in this room where no song was playing. It didn’t know which colour to show.

  Beside a potted rhododendron lay the rhythmicon I had built for a composer in San Francisco, a piano that played rhythms. Twelve keys: depress one and hear a rough pulse, like a ticking gear or a jagged heartbeat. He had imagined it as accompaniment for an orchestra, a sort of automated timpani. But as I built the machine, raising it from notebook paper into life, I found it was too coarse for this. I used it in other ways. In an empty room I would listen to the rhythmicon’s lowest timbre, like a cough, and feel the distant bittersweetness of an undanced waltz. You pressed a key and the rhythmicon barked a beat, and I longed to slip across the floor, with the sun smoothing the rhododendron. I asked, “How are your parents?”

  You gave me a long, level look. “How are yours?”

  There was a commotion from below and we ran down the stairs. Glenn Miller and Nicholas Slominsky, the journalist, had burst through the front door and collapsed together in the parlour. Lucie had mistaken the lolling for fisticuffs. She’d fetched a bucket of cold water and sloshed it over them. Now they all sat splay-legged on the rug, sodden, laughing their heads off. “Don’t be angry!” Glenn shouted as I came down the steps. “There could have been a fire!”