Us Conductors

by Sean Michaels

  I went out of the room, in shirtsleeves, with my briefcase, shutting Danny Finch’s body among the archives. The corridor’s flooring was like a long line of tundra. I turned one corner and another and in the aftershock of adrenaline I discovered that I was blazingly angry, filled with a fury for Danny Finch and a fury for the Karls and a fury for Pash and a fury for the man who called himself Lev. A roaring wrath, roiling at my heart. I passed the harmless janitor, leaning on a doorjamb, cajoling a secretary; I slipped back by stairs to the third; I thought: I was alone when I met him in that little room, nobody forced me.

  I remembered the sound of the door blowing open. I remembered the way you had looked at me, Clara, the night before, outside the Savoy, in the barren moment when we parted.

  Standing in the elevator, beside the operator with the birthmark on his chin, I said, “Main floor.”

  He said, “Going down.”

  EIGHT

  HAIR OF THE DOG

  I KNOW THE QUESTIONS you are asking. You are asking: Did I have to kill this man? You are asking: What did it feel like? You are asking: Did it destroy you? You are also asking the other questions: Did I make sure Danny Finch was dead? Were my fingerprints not everywhere? What of the security man in the lobby, with his accounting of entrances and exits?

  Eventually I learned the answers to some of these questions. Others, I still do not know. When I got into the Karls’ grey sedan and we swung away from the Dolores Building, around the block, I did not tell them that I had killed Danny Finch. I opened the briefcase on the seat beside me and they saw the files, saw the gun, and I sat back in silence until we arrived at my home. After they let me out I went down the street to the corner, where a man in a long apron pulled chop suey from a bucket. I scooped the noodles from the plate into my mouth, gnashing, ravenous. When I returned to the house I looked in the mirror. My face was flecked with sauce and scallion, and my eyes were the same as ever.

  For weeks, I waited for the police to come to take me away. I kept the front door locked. The brownstone on West 54th Street seemed suddenly rickety, vulnerable, easily invaded. They would smash in the door and thunder up the stairs, and I would be rising from my wires and condensers as they descended upon me, nightsticks knowing. Instead, students rang the doorbell; friends snuck in the back. I told them I was afraid of burglars. They rolled their eyes. I received a phone call from a journalist at the Times, asking for a quote regarding the composer Edgard Varèse, an acquaintance. “He’s very pleasant,” I murmured. “Very, very pleasant.” I put down the receiver and wondered whether this had been a test, a sting, the call from a team of G-men to determine if I was at home. I went to the window. The street was filled with girls in skirts and dogs on leashes and pigeons like flying oil spots.

  Months passed. Inconceivably, whole months passed. Whenever it happened that Danny Finch’s body was discovered, his broken skull, there was no story in the paper. No policemen came for me, no detectives took my fingerprints. If there were agents who suspected me, spies and spymasters, these spooks were biding their time, waging a larger war. They must have known, in the shadowlands, that Lev Termen was not the Soviets’ only soldier.

  I did not feel as if I was a person. If you tore off my hands, ripped off my head, you would find asbestos, chalk dust, tufts of rags. All my blood had been drained away. It lay in an undisturbed pool outside the Savoy. I laughed with my friends and bent over my tools, felt the seasons’ skim over New York City, and I was a scientist, an engineer, a man attending meetings, I was the outer part of myself and not the inner. They repealed Prohibition and I sipped a solitary glass of cherry brandy.

  Before long it was another year. I went to my monthly meetings with Karl and Karl—they would say I went dutifully, but there was only the semblance of duty, the soldier in automatic lockstep. The Karls made me drunk. I told them the spry nothings that composed my days. Perhaps they thought the booze made me honest. I went to the appointments they assigned—shook hands, signed papers. Now and then they asked me to steal, to take surreptitious photographs, but I bungled these, forgetting to remove the lens cap, taking the wrong document from the wrong folder. These lapses were neither deliberate nor accidental. I do not know what they were. I sat with Schillinger and Frances at It Happened One Night, laughing like a donkey, feeling nothing.

  “Leon, how are you?” Lucie Rosen asked one day. She was stooped in the foyer, untying her shoes.

  “Fine,” I said.

  She raised her eyes to look at me. “You sure?”

  “I am very pleasant,” I said.

  Nobody wanted my theremins. My meetings with the world’s Bert Grimeses were always on the matter of teletouch—my hocus-pocus of invisible sensing. Shop windows that lit up, displays that moved with every passerby. Nate Stone’s scheme for Macy’s windows had been an enormous hit; he was rich now and kept pestering me for new gimmicks. “Come over,” he’d say. “Wanna ask you about something.” I’d arrive and face his string of spitballed ideas, half concepts and figments, slung across his marble kitchen table. A secretary perched nearby, hunched over her typewriter.

  Spinning windmills, Nate suggested. Books that open and close. “Or electric dogs,” he said, “barking over dog food. Wait—cats!”

  “Cats barking?” I said.

  “Cats meowing.”

  “Over dog food.”

  “Over cat food.”

  The typewriter dinged.

  I played the dumb Russian because Nate was so boring. His thousand-dollar ideas were for selling cufflinks or toilet paper, each an aesthetic variation on the same root mechanism. It was a decade and a half since I’d invented the radio watchman, and these meetings with Nate and his secretary and that damn dinging typewriter only emphasized the meaninglessness of my present work. I thought with agony of smug, slender Sasha, spending every day in research. “Could you make it rain,” Nate said, “when a customer checks out the umbrellas?” While he envisaged commercial magic, I saw just the same old servos, connected to wet buckets.

  My half-life went on. Nate’s secretary sent me carbon-copied minutes. I sat up all night, taking motors out of windmills, screwing them into hollowed-out books. It was 1934 and this was my livelihood.

  I tried not to think of you. When I did think of you, I tried to forget your face. I willed it to blur away, water poured onto a watercolour. You would be just another girl, a silhouette, a skirt. I had known many silhouettes.

  When you told me No, Clara, it was as if you were rejecting a law. It is not like this, you were saying. Denying not my hypothesis but my conclusion. This was not a matter of persuasion. I could not take you back into the Savoy and persuade you that there is no gravity, that there is no death. It was a matter of proof. I needed a lover’s proof, incontrovertible. I did not know where to find it. It is not like this, you were saying. The particles were not present. The equation did not resolve. I learned that there was another way to interpret the data. This other way is hideous, heartbreaking. A world that is not as it seems.

  In this mistaken world, nothing was not fragile. Which principles would be the next to fall? Which truths were false? I was a scientist and a murderer. I was alone. Was I even alive, down deep, in the deepest part, where at night I felt so barren?

  I remember one evening, walking home up Seventh Avenue. It was dark. I came up to Lerners—closed up, abandoned until the morning. Lev Sergeyvich Termen, 60 kilograms, a Howell suit, nothing more. I passed the thirteen shop windows and each, one by one, became illuminated.

  IT WAS AN EARLY AUTUMN morning when I decided to go see Katia. The sun had not risen. I went down the stairs to make my breakfast and as I entered the kitchen I had a sudden longing for the thick red jam she made every summer. I longed for her jam but I could not even recall which berries she had used. The forgetting humiliated me. I took some slices of ham from the icebox and I sat with a stale piece of bread and this plate of ham. I tried to imagine the taste of Russian raspberries, or cranberries, or bilberries, b
lueberries, ash berries.

  At a booth in Penn Station I bought a ticket to New Jersey. I walked to the platform and thought of the platforms in Leningrad, those proud marble pillars. I had taken hundreds of trains from Nikolayevsky, Oktyabrsky, Leningradsky, that station of many names. I had my Mandat, then. A card with the words Vladimir Ilyich Lenin. May his memory be illuminated. My equipment packed in its cases and me like an arrow from the Soviet, swift and certain, sent along the rails with word of electricity, indisputable truths. In Kazan and Samara I stood in drafty wooden halls, with boxes full of snaking wire, but there were no deceptions when I showed the townsfolk my machines. I was no charlatan.

  I sat with my hands between my thighs, alone in the train car. We were late to leave the station. I had not brought a book. This was my first time underneath the Hudson River. It did not seem like a new place. The walls of the passage were invisible in the dark and you could not hear the river, just the clack-clack, clack-clack of the train, and I felt as if I were on a ceaseless path into hell. I forgot the tunnel’s engineering feat, forgot the years of work plans and careful digging, and when we emerged into daylight I took a long, grateful breath.

  We went on, clack-clack. I looked out the window at the dull land that ringed the city. Now and then a white barn, a grey river, like the stations on a pilgrimage. I found myself waiting keenly for the ticket inspector, someone who would come in and tear this piece of paper.

  The last time I had seen Katia was backstage at Carnegie Hall, four years earlier. A hundred men in pressed black suits, dandies in seersucker, a procession of women in taffeta and jewels, Steinways and Rockefellers, Rosens and Schillingers, the Bolotines and little Yolochka, prawns and devilled eggs, wine and mousse, playbills and coiled cables, and Ekaterina Pavlova Termen, my secret, hidden in a corner, clutching her elbows. Do not imagine that I ignored her. I said hello. I said I was surprised to see her there. I lingered. I wondered if she had come to embarrass me. So many others were waiting for me, around the room. I went away but came back later with a plate of melon and gravlax. She picked at the capers. She wore a plain dress and a gaudy necklace that was not in fashion. When I introduced her to Otis Skinner she nodded at what he said but I do not think she understood him. Her English was not good. I realized that she probably did not even know who he was. In Russian I said, “He’s an actor.”

  “Yes,” she replied. “You can tell by how much he talks.”

  I had not liked Otis Skinner in Kismet but he had come to my performance. He told stories of sneezing during the filming of the movie’s harem scenes. Katia stood like a faded statuette. After a little while I found a reason to leave her. I glanced back often. Through the glad crowds I glimpsed her arms, her back, the side of her face, always at right angles, as if she had been carved out with a chisel. Then finally she disappeared.

  At Newark I changed to the Erie line. I sat across from a father and son. The father was my age. I was not sure of the age of the son; only parents seem to have an instinct for the age of children. He was a boy. He had blond hair and a dark summer tan. He was holding an incandescent light bulb. “Hello,” he said to me.

  “Hello,” I said.

  His father gave me a nod.

  The boy tapped his light bulb against the carriage window.

  “Be careful with that,” his father said.

  I wondered why the boy had a light bulb, why he was not at school. Where was he going with his father, was the light bulb new or burnt out. The boy tapped the light bulb against the carriage window.

  His father glared. “Leon,” he said sternly.

  The boy sighed. “Yes, Pop.”

  A boy named Leon, carrying a light bulb through New Jersey.

  I rang the hospital from the station in Paterson.

  “Can you please connect me to Katia Termen?” I asked the switchboard operator.

  “Who?”

  “Katia Termen. She is a nurse.”

  “You mean Catherine Termen?”

  “Yes.”

  “May I ask who is calling?”

  “This is Mr Termen.”

  “Just a moment, please.”

  Katia answered the telephone in English. She said “Hello” in an elongated way, rising. I scarcely recognized her voice.

  “Hello?” I said back.

  “Yes?”

  “It’s Lev.”

  I told her I was in Paterson. She was not friendly or unfriendly. I said I had come to see her.

  “When?” she said.

  “Tonight?” I said.

  “Lev, I can’t. There is a shower tonight for one of the other girls.”

  We were speaking in English. “Before, then?”

  There was a short silence. “At lunchtime, maybe, I have some time.”

  “Where should I meet you?”

  “Come to the sanatorium.”

  “All right.”

  “Wait outside.”

  “Outside the sanatorium.”

  “Yes, Valley View,” she said.

  “What?” She had pronounced valley like velly.

  “Valley View.”

  “Velly View?”

  “Valley View!” she shouted, angry.

  “I’m sorry, I didn’t understand you,” I said.

  I met her outside Valley View, a little after one o’clock. It was a small tuberculosis hospital. There was a measured lawn, empty flower beds. A thousand suspended leaves, red and brown, like old ornaments. A single path led past the gate, through the centre of the grass. A patient drooped in a wheelchair. I looked away. I sat on a bench. The path was made of the sort of dusty gravel that coats your shoes, turns the cuffs of your trousers to parchment. A carriage rattled past, horse kicking up powder, and I imagined my face caked in a thin layer of dust.

  Suddenly Katia was standing before me, hands at her sides, in perfect whites. I felt my heart jerk.

  I stood. I greeted my wife.

  She did not seem to have changed. Her upturned chin and long legs, an oval face like the image on a cameo. A mouth small and elegant. Brown hair, shorter than I had ever seen it, still parted to the right. She had always been small; she was even smaller in her uniform. Slender, compact at the shoulders, a thin belt in a ring at her waist. She was twenty when we were married, ten years ago. Now there were lines around her eyes. These eyes were clear, soft, unlaughing. They matched the season.

  She smelled of washing powder and vinegar but also of herself, in a memory I could not place. Snow, books, a new cardigan.

  Something twinged in my jaw. I tried to think of New York City. I lifted my head. “If it isn’t ‘Catherine,’ ” I said, in English.

  Katia shook her head. “You just show up at the train station?” Her voice was as thin as paper. “Why couldn’t you call first? You appear. Just like a ghost. I have a job, Lev. I do not have your life—your luxury life. My one break in the day, and here I am meeting you.”

  “I’m sorry, I …” I trailed off.

  “Well, what is it? What’s wrong?”

  I swallowed. “Nothing’s wrong.”

  “Then why are you here, waiting outside a gate?”

  “I …” I swallowed again. I turned to gaze back through the gate. “The hospital looks like a very good place to work.”

  “It is not a hospital; it is a sanatorium,” Katia said. She brushed a lock of hair behind her ear. She wore two slim bracelets at her wrist. One of them I had given to her, ten years ago. The other I did not recognize. She muttered something to herself, then lifted her eyes to me. “Well let’s walk at least.”

  We set off side by side, and within this parallel movement, strange and familiar, I suddenly glimpsed her wedding ring. There, on her right hand. I stuffed my hands into my pockets. I looked not at her, but up toward the hill. I wished I had brought her something: a flower, a box of chocolates. I had brought her just my bare hands.

  Later we were in the rising grass. The conversation was rote: questions about weather, health, family.

/>   “And your brother?” I asked.

  She seemed so brittle. “Sasha? You don’t even keep in touch with Sasha?”

  “Not in a little while.”

  “A little while?” She snorted. “Two years? Three?” It had been four. “I knew you were not writing to our friends, to my parents; but Sasha—he’s a scientist.” She said the word mockingly, as if it were the title of a lord. “You’re so busy now that you can’t even dictate a letter to one of your colleagues?”

  I cleared my throat. “It is not like that.”

  “What’s it like, Lyova?”

  I looked at her. She was being deliberately cruel. I didn’t blame her. “Tell me how is Sasha.”

  “He is all right.” She took a breath. “Everyone is all right. Just all right. It is a bad time, Lev.” She sighed. “You hear stories. The letters feel sometimes like they are being written onto—no, from on top of ice.”

  “Not for people like Sasha, surely.”

  She shrugged her narrow shoulders. “There are several reasons I do not go back to Russia.”

  I looked at the earth. “Yes.”

  “And you?” She gazed at me from under her brown lashes.

  “Are you going home?”

  “To Leningrad?”

  “Yes.”

  “I am staying for now,” I said. “I have a great deal to do. Contracts. Inventions. New work every week. Many meetings.”

  “One of the doctors bought a theremin. He said it was completely impossible.”

  “Yes, it can be challenging. You must be deft.”

  “He is a surgeon.” She giggled, folded her arms. “He said it was like eating a pie with a shovel.”

  “These days we are moving on from the theremin to other things.”

  “Yes,” she said.

  “Different kinds of sensors based around the electromagnetic resistance of the body, sometimes configured in sequence.” She showed no interest. “Or in conjunction with geothermal readings; I am experimenting with naval applications and also aircraft. So long as you understand the principles, there are infinite ways to implement them.”