Pash batted away a neighbour’s cigarette smoke. “I’ve heard that before.”
After that first night, he never discussed his years away. He was concerned with the present, he said. But I counted his changes. A tan around the neck and at the wrists. Buttons, not cufflinks, at the sleeve. He was gaunter, a little too thin for that great old suit. Yet there weren’t any ghosts in his eyes. His hands were steady. His briefcase, clean and unbattered, held the same amount of papers.
I had continued to meet with Karl and Karl, every two weeks, at the little diner. “Tell the men at Mud Tony’s anything they want to know,” Pash said. He had bigger fish to fry than the ones sizzling in L’Aujourd’hui’s kitchen. He was hunting whale. So I sat with the Karls in our customary stall, sipping customary spirits. Despite my protestations, they believed they needed vodka to keep my tongue loose. Yet the other Lev, my bald-headed adversary, did not reappear. I asked Pash if he knew him—described his face, his clothing, the way he carried himself.
“No Lev I know,” Pash said.
“Is he called something else?”
Pash changed the subject. Professionally speaking, he and the Karls were distant cousins. “They’re parentheses,” he told me, “irrelevant.” Yet within these parentheses, I had knocked a man down and seen the blood run out of his head. I hadn’t told anyone. Neither the Karls nor Pash. It haunted me and yet I did not air my actions. A private killing, an exchange between two men, high on the eighth floor.
I did not know who exactly gave Pash his orders, only that with him I could do anything. I didn’t need to be afraid. When I complained that the other operatives got me drunk, that I left my meetings feeling sickly, strings cut, he brought me a pound of butter.
“Eat this,” he said, “before.”
“Eat this how?”
“With a spoon. Or a knife.”
I took out a teaspoon. “All of it?”
“It is the antidote to vodka,” Pash said. “A trade secret.”
Every two weeks, I ate a pound of butter. I drank and stared Karl and Karl full in their eyes and felt like my own man.
After a month we went back to Boston, back to the machinist’s shop. He showed us the things his crew had made for us: two heavy archways, almost as wide as the garage, packed with electrical components. I walked around them with voltmeters, checking the circuits.
“What they do?” asked one of the men, thin as a pair of long-necked pliers.
“Metal detector,” I said.
“What for?”
Pash handed the boss a banker’s cheque. “Gangsters.”
We loaded the metal detectors into a truck and brought them back to New York, installing them in a warehouse near the Curtiss airfield. We hired actors: men in grey suits and fedoras, packing unloaded heat. We hired catering: rib-eye steaks and layer cake, wardens’ food. The officials from Alcatraz came in black limousines. They had sinewy faces and unforgiving handshakes. They grazed the table of red meat and angel food.
“Behold!” I said, as if they did not know what they had come to see. The arches sat like ancient monoliths. The men from Alcatraz had crossed ten states to examine these inventions, to gauge their utility for the country’s first super-prison. Now they folded their arms. Pash signalled the actors, our fake gangsters, to walk through the portals. They strutted and sneaked. They couldn’t help it—this was their best gig in weeks. Some of them carried no weapons and passed harmlessly through the gates. But the ones with bulges in their suit jackets, secrets tucked behind belt buckles, set off alarms. Their gunmetal tickled the electromagnetic fields.
The wardens wanted to try. They handed me their belts, their watches, their eyeglasses. “Wedding rings, gentlemen,” I said, offering my cupped palm. Like obedient school children, they gave up their treasures. Off they went, through the arches, without a sound. I nodded to Pash, who followed.
With him, the alarm went off. He did not smirk. He said: “So you see.”
“We see,” replied the men from San Francisco, eyeing him.
Their decision came by telegram, a week later. Alcatraz would have Theremin’s magic metal detectors. An arch at the cell house, an arch at the dock, an arch outside the dining hall and another straddling the labourers’ main access path. We went back to the machinist’s shop and this time we paid in advance.
Even as this was happening, we met with the air force, with Boeing, modelling new versions of my altimeter. Their decision came by telegram. The U.S. Army Air Corps would have Theremin’s magic aeroplane dial. We met with fire departments about fire alarms, railroad officials about railroad signalling, telegraph bigwigs about my ideas for intercity typewriters. I called up the office of Henry Ford, told them that their cars could have automatic indicators for dwindling batteries, engines needing oil. I had plans for naval signalling, wireless microphones, policemen’s private radio sets. As I sketched science, Pash pushed paper, and everyone invited the Russians into their drawing rooms.
FROM THE SKY, CALIFORNIA made me think of a vast, intricate map. A map at seventy percent scale, and me high above it, holding binoculars. It was my first flight and I felt a combination of terror and elation. The reason for the elation was obvious: seventeen thousand pounds of metal, lifted into the air, the earth-bound gone flying. I have rarely felt more alive than in that dizzy moment when the aeroplane’s wheels left the ground, as if the aluminum craft had simply been picked up. But I was also filled with an engineer’s trepidation. Here was a device of great intricacy, a thousand screws, and any number could be loose. In the great fraternity of engineers the shameful central secret is this: we err. We botch and fumble. These words seem funny, harmless, but our failures are not always trifling. There are mistakes we never forgive.
My aeroplane flew from New York to San Francisco and did not crash. I landed and staggered from the genius machine and there was a man with a sign, THEREMIN. “Welcome to California,” he said. He handed me an orange. As I took the gift I was caught by an unexpected memory: the clear, clear gaze of Vladimir Ilyich Lenin (may his memory be illuminated), on the day that we met. I cradled the orange in my right hand. My mission continued.
I was here to go to Alcatraz; I went to Alcatraz. A cruel rock floating in the San Francisco Bay. The ferry brought us dumbly, without comment, yet my fingers tightened on the handrail. This was a hideous destination. The engine droned and there was blue in the clouded sky, but I could feel the doom in this grey masonry, the haunted garden that lay in its centre. Our boat came alone.
“Hello, Dr Theremin,” the functionaries said. Hello, hello, hello. I did not know if it was my imagination seeing pairs of eyes in the high-up grilles. “Hello, Dr Theremin, welcome!” I knelt beside a metal detector, checking the circuits, trimming a wire, guarded by a circle of officials. They laughed, cracked jokes. Beyond their perimeter there was no sound, no movement. I only knew because I had read it: three hundred men, locked in, forbidden from speaking. Pash had asked me to find out about Alcatraz’s block assignments—whether the murderers were kept with the spies, the rapists with the bombers, Al Capone sharing a wall with Machine Gun Kelly. This was not an idle curiosity: it was at the heart of this journey, the sort of information that we had built these machines to obtain. But in those hours at Alcatraz I could not bring myself to pry into the affairs of its lodgers; there was no way I could sneak down a hallway to slip files from folders. I snipped the wire. I tested the voltage. I listened for the breathing of the men in their cells. I do not believe in a reckoning, but in the heart of this prison I knew I was tempting fate. I was a murderer and a thief, unshackled, with hands that smelled of orange oil.
Until the ferry took me back to the mainland, and I climbed back into the aeroplane, and I flew away, I kept waiting for a voice that would say, Hello, Dr Theremin. A voice that was barbed. It would lead me to a cell. I would lie in my cot, counting hours, until the day I died.
It is different, here on this ship. Here I allow myself to miss you, Clara. To remem
ber every part. I cannot leave my room. Food is brought to me by a stranger. But this journey will not be long. Soon we will arrive at a port whose signs are in my mother tongue. The sailors will unlock my cabin and I will walk the gangplank into Russia, my homeland, where I can enact every dream, if I wish to, and I can openly serve a noble cause. All good things will come, somehow. It is the first law of thermodynamics. Nothing is destroyed.
BOTH OF THE KARLS had notebooks out.
“Centimetres or inches?” asked the one with a moustache.
“Inches,” I replied. My hands were palms down on the table.
“How high?”
“Six inches.”
They nodded. They were taking these figures down—the dimensions of the mufflers used in Douglas O-43 monoplanes, on contract to the United States Army Air Corps. I was providing Douglas with altimeter prototypes; in the course of this work, I acquired certain aeroplane plans.
The Karl with the beard scrutinized me. “Are you certain of these measurements?”
“Yes.”
“You are not even consulting notes.”
I nodded in agreement.
“How do you remember the measurements?”
“By remembering,” I said.
The Karls did not smile.
One of them took a sheaf of papers from his briefcase. His eyes flicked down its length. There was a long pause.
“Lev, do you wish to stay in the United States?”
I raised my eyes in surprise.
“Yes,” I said.
“There is a visa issue,” he said.
“Can it be resolved?”
Karl pursed his lips.
“I have much more work to do for our country,” I said.
The men exchanged a look. Finally one of them said: “Do you have a woman?”
“A woman?”
“Yes.”
“Yes,” I replied, defensively, reflexively. I clasped my hands in my lap.
“Then get married,” said the Karl with the beard. “It would make matters much easier.”
I REMEMBER WATCHING A MAN and a woman waving at each other from opposite street corners. He was in a workman’s uniform; she held a bag of shopping. They had different shades of faded brown hair. At first their waves were meant just to say, I see you. Then they repeated the waves, almost bashful, out of love. Their waves soon became a kind of joke—bigger and bigger, a caricature of waving. They were laughing, their faces so splendidly happy. Then the crowd swarmed the intersection. I did not see them meet. I wondered if it had been worth the waving.
I felt at that time like an empty cabinet. I was made of good, strong wood. Every morning someone would open my wide doors and slip a new sheaf of papers into a designated place, and the shelves were stacked with so many papers, miles of contracts, yet still I knew this cabinet was empty. Perhaps there was a locked drawer at its heart. Perhaps there was a drawer, perhaps it held something of value, perhaps there was, somewhere, a key. I did not know.
Pash went on with our business. He managed the books. I made things for him to trade away.
In 1937, I heard you on the radio, playing Ravel’s “Kaddisch” on the theremin. Your performance was matter-of-fact, dumbfounding. It was finer than any violin performance I had ever heard. The theremin had a purity of tone that made the piece feel like an inherent thing, noumenal and unmediated, a treasure that had always been.
I think I had been waiting for a coincidence.
I called you two days later.
“Is Clara there?”
“It’s me,” you replied.
“It’s Leon Theremin.”
“I know.”
“You remember me?”
You laughed. “Leon.”
I said, “I would like to build you a new instrument.”
We met on neutral ground, at Grand Central Station. I waited on the mezzanine. I wanted to see you before you saw me. It is difficult to look for a person from the mezzanine of Grand Central Station. Travellers cross the floor in unique trajectories, like the whirl of dandelion seeds. Every time I tried to pick a person out, a sudden crowd obscured him. It felt like chaos, though I knew it was not. Even these paths, given enough time, could be predicted. Plot the data, pick out its patterns, factor age, occupation, destination. I watched the stirring figures. I wondered if, ultimately, everything could be known.
Stillness separated you from the crowd. A woman in a tilted cloche hat, a three-quarter length coat, unfastened. With small shoulders. Gloves. I came down the stairs, my heart charging in my chest, ten thousand horses galloping across the plain. The windless station hall with all its flat golden light. You raised your hand and waved. You had not changed.
You had not changed, you had not changed.
“Hello,” I said.
“Hello, Leon.” There was hesitation in your face, something like caution. In a certain way this made me proud. There was memory in the way you looked at me.
“Are you well?” I said.
“Yes. Are you?”
“I brought you this,” I said.
You pressed your lips together. You took the rose.
“It is good to see you,” I said.
Your eyes flicked up. Each of us took a breath. You finally murmured, “Yes.”
I gestured at a marble bench, just there, amid the crowds. “So,” I said, gently, “let’s talk about staccato.”
So we talked about staccato. We had talked about it on the telephone and now we talked about it in the station, like acquaintances and then gradually like old friends, knee to knee. You were a remarkable theremin player but you played approximately the same theremin as everyone else, with components from RCA. There were flowers on the sides but its design was seven years old. Its power supply was unreliable. It failed in humid weather. Its timbre was unsophisticated and its volume control was sluggish, unresponsive. “Like molasses,” you said. This was the way with all theremins: they were given to glissando, eliding between notes.
For you I imagined better.
I imagined a theremin that was perfectly made, with custom components for its singular player. A more sensitive theremin, with a more supple volume control. That could sing in a more bewitching voice: a voice like light in leaves, breath in chests, a slender lightning bolt.
“Let me build it for you,” I said.
“I will pay,” you said.
“It doesn’t matter,” I said. “I would build it anyway.”
You smiled. “And still I would pay you.”
I proposed to build it differently than the last, than the one you had; differently than any other theremin in the whole of the world. A theremin with its antennas reversed, for your particular injury: pitch on the left side, for your strong left arm; and volume on the right.
“No.”
“No?” I asked.
“It is too late,” you said.
With my thumb I traced the centre line of my palm.
“Some things you can’t undo,” you said.
IF YOU ARE LIKE ME, you dream your life according to perfect conditions. You look at the lines of a proof, the clear symbols of a formula, and you understand the world.
This is dream, not knowledge. Life is not a laboratory; twenty-four imperfect hours make up a day. There is interference, distortion, accident, will. There is also hope. Hope will ruin a thing, or fulfil it.
I had neglected my theremin for a very long time. I had not stared at its coils or wires, had not opened its circuitry to the light. It was early 1937 and a war was stirring in Europe. I lived in Manhattan and considered coils, transformers, pitch oscillators. Every time I dragged the stool to my workbench, I had another idea to improve the device. I met Pash when he asked, dined with his masters of industry, but in every spare moment I was experimenting with new speakers and concentrating coils, tightening and replacing tiny brass screws. I did not call you or send letters. I did not divert the bearing of my work. I did not doubt. My mind and hands were following the directi
ves of my wakeful loosened heart and I was solitary, moving, a free particle that spins, that feels the weak and strong forces exerting gravity upon it.
It is not the same solitude I experience here, aboard the Stary Bolshevik. Here I am an idle man in a cabin, writing stories on this typewriter. Leaving rows of sentences, months passing in ellipses.… I do not know what forces are in play. I do not see the looming icebergs, the coming storms. Sometimes I wake in the night and I wonder if we are sinking. It would be a long time before I would know that we were sinking. You can become a dead man before you know what you are.
I MET THE KARLS at Mud Tony’s.
“How long will it take you to tie up your business here?”
“Why?”
“It is time for you to go.”
“No. I have no plans to leave. Is this about visas? I will ask Pash to deal with it.”
“He cannot fix this.”
“We have too much work,” I said. “There is also a woman.”
“There are other problems. Has he spoken to you about taxes?”
“Taxes?”
“When was the last time you paid taxes?”
“I left such things to—to …”
“There are other problems, too,” a Karl said, squinting at the row of cars outside the window.
I WAS FRYING A SAUSAGE in a pan when Lucie Rosen called to me from downstairs. “Someone to see you, Leon!” I did not know whether to take the sausage off the stove or to leave it sizzling. How long would I be downstairs? Would this sausage explode? It gleamed.
I left it. I danced down the steps. “Yes?” I said, peering out across the floor. Lucie was standing with a stranger. He wore an ugly green suit, a bad purple tie. He was one of those men who seem secretly large; a trick of muscles in the neck. He had a wide messy mouth. He was still wearing his hat.
“Dr Leon Theremin?” he said.
“Yes,” I said.
“I’m Jim. Can we talk privately?”
“Have we met?” I asked.
“No. I’m here from Commerce and Burr.”
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