The Kingdom of Ohio

by Matthew Flaming

  Malarkey Hall proves, on arrival, to be less a hall than an alcove, a door near the center of the tunnel where miniature stalactites of nicotine and coal dust have accumulated overhead. Inside, the single room of the Hall has been done up to resemble an English pub. Thick oak beams hold up the ceiling, above rows of mismatched tables and chairs that seem to have been plundered from the sitting rooms of various flophouses. At one end of the room is a low stage with a crudely painted backdrop, intended to represent a Far East harem. The brothers push their way toward the front, where, somehow, a table stands empty amid the raucous crowd. Peter stumbles into a chair behind them, dodging a wave of beer sloshed from one of a dozen raised glasses.

  Michael snags a mustachioed waiter by the arm and shouts something into his ear, and the man vanishes into the throng. The Hall is dimly lit by paraffin, shadows playing along the walls. A spotlight consisting of a gas flame between polished mirrors directs a sudden beam onto the stage and Peter turns as a roar of approval sweeps the place, mugs and pitchers clashing over tables. A young woman in frilled petticoats minces across the platform and launches into a drama that involves a key dropped into her bodice for safekeeping, only to slip . . .

  He notices that she has dark hair, slender hips, and an open sore beside her mouth before he’s distracted by other things: layers of clothing peel away to reveal small, milky breasts and pink nipples, stomach, thighs—until finally the key is discovered, wedged intimately some distance below its original location. Cheers and howls in the smoky air as she extracts the key and flourishes it overhead. The waiter reappears and sets down three glasses of clear greenish alcohol, one of which Tobias pushes toward Peter. Another skit begins, revolving around a mosquito and two young ladies of tender and much-exhibited flesh.

  “Marie always comes on last,” Michael shouts into Peter’s ear over the din of the room, leaning across the table.

  There is a ritual that goes along with the clear drink, Peter discovers, sugar melted in a spoon. Imitating the brothers, he sips the liquor: it tastes bitter, like something dredged out of a cave. Soon his head is swimming, flickers of color at the periphery of his vision.

  “Absinthe.” Tobias smiles and taps the glass. Peter sees, in a moment of lurid detail, that both his front teeth are false, a stained porcelain bridge.

  Peter nods. For a moment, sitting there in Malarkey Hall, he has the terrifying sensation of being misplaced in his own life. He remembers one of the engines that he glimpsed at the subway excavation site: the interlocking of its gears, the mindless regularity of its lurching motion, the steam hoses leading away into underground darkness. An image that feels at once frightening and strangely reassuring. Belatedly he realizes that the others are waiting for him to say something.

  “Been here before?” he shouts, trying to make conversation.

  “Practically grew up in here,” Michael yells back. “My brother too. Tobias here is always saying we should go west, try our luck on the frontier, but—”

  “An honest man has a real chance out there,” Tobias interrupts. “Not like this place.” He spits on the floor. “The bosses run this town.”

  Peter opens his mouth to respond but Michael interrupts him.

  “Look”—he points to the stage—“Marie.” They turn as the lights dim and, to a rising thunder of boots that makes the floorboards quake, the final act, dazzlingly blond, already half naked, sashays into the spotlight.

  The woman onstage is wearing a nearly transparent shift that doesn’t hide her body so much as stylize it: the thin fabric clings to the outlines of her breasts, the swell of her hips and pubis, revealing a landscape of soft curves and pale-dusk skin. She descends from the stage and seats herself on the lap of a balding workman in the front row, squirming against him. Takes the man’s hand and guides it upward, over her breast. The hem of her dress rides up on her thighs. Her victim groans, and along with half the audience Peter finds himself shutting his eyes in sympathy, imagining the softness and hidden warmth the other man is feeling—

  At this point, or near it, the evening comes unraveled in Peter’s recollection. There is a second round of the clear drink, and then a third, Tobias laughing, the cold brilliance of the nighttime stars overhead. There is the memory of fumbling through his pockets for coins somewhere in an alleyway. A strange room, the heat of a woman’s body. And then afterward, lying in her arms, remembering the Idaho mountains and crying senselessly, not knowing why.

  CHAPTER III

  THE REALM OF THE MACHINES

  AT THIS POINT, IT WOULD BE NATURAL IF YOU STARTED TO wonder about where my information is coming from. If you started to think: Where the hell is he getting this stuff, anyway? Certainly it’s true that my footnotes haven’t kept pace with these events. And really, there would be something admirable about such a studious insistence: a certain heroism in the reasonable resolve to stop reading if the proper citations don’t appear.

  Unless, that is, you’ve decided all of this is fiction: the sugar filling between “once upon a time” and “happily ever after,” a harmless story whose only necessary evidence is itself. More than once, to be honest, I’ve thought about claiming this excuse myself. (An understatement: I’ve spent years trying to convince myself.) But the fact is, this isn’t fiction.

  No: these are the facts.

  At least, the sparse facts I’ve been able to assemble. The problem is, despite my research, I keep falling short on supporting evidence—at least, the kind that can be corroborated in books.

  For example, take the history of young Peter Force: in the New York Subway Museum, he is depicted in exactly one photograph. 3 There, in black and white, we see a young man of medium build, with shaggy brown hair and a startled expression, standing among a row of subway workers posed in front of an excavation site.

  In addition to this photograph, these are the other facts I’ve been able to confirm about Peter: that he was born in 1877, the only child of James and Eliza Force, somewhere in the scrub-desert wilderness that would become New Mexico.4 That his father, James Force, was a surveyor. That his mother, Eliza, died near Boulder, Colorado, when Peter was five or six years old,‡ and that shortly afterward James Force moved with his son from the New Mexico region to the town of Kellogg, north of Coeur d’Alene.§

  Finally, I learned that in the autumn of 1900, apparently less than a week after the death of his father, Peter left Idaho for New York City, where he found employment in the subway construction works.5 These are the paltry results of my months spent scrutinizing records and grappling with computer search programs.

  They tell me that we’re living in an information age, but none of it seems to be the information I need or brings me closer to what I want to know. In fact (I’m becoming more and more convinced) all this electronic wizardry only adds to our confusion, delivering inside scoops and verdicts about events that have hardly begun: a torrent of chatter moving at the speed of light, making it nearly impossible for any of the important things to be heard.

  Sitting at the desk in my apartment, below my framed poster of a Lewis Hine photograph (my one real attempt at making this concrete cube “homelike”), I can’t help but think that all this stuff about facts (in the footnote sense) is overrated anyway. I wasn’t a scholar growing up, but I remember learning that Christopher Columbus was a hero, and that the Civil War was about slavery. Now I’m told that Columbus was a “hegemonic exploiter” and that Mr. Lincoln’s War was fought primarily for economic reasons. In other words, even though more facts are instantly available than ever before, they also seem to be less factual, shifting between one momentary vogue and the next.

  Again, I must make it clear that I do not intend to condemn the modern age. If nothing else, the food is breathtaking; the bounty of the supermarkets these days, not to mention the miracle of microwave cooking, still leaves me amazed. Also the TV game shows are wonderfully entertaining (not to mention their willingness to stand by a single correct answer for each question: Wheel of Jeopar
dy, Price It Right, the last bastions of absolute truth). But if the facts themselves can change over time, I can’t bring myself to worry too much if some of my details are missing their footnotes—or to believe that any number of footnotes, or facts, can supply the answers I’m looking for.

  “Peter Force joined a subway excavation crew in 1900”—that’s the part I can document, but how did these moments feel, and what did they mean? Because even if no record of these things ever existed, when Peter first entered the subway construction site he felt and thought something.

  In fact (I’ve come to realize), it’s these ordinary moments, unmarked and unremembered, that are the substance of our lives. For example: almost every day, over the past nine years, I’ve left the antiques store in the evening and walked down to the bus stop. Among these thousands of unrecorded walks, I can recall, at most, three or four: all the others have slipped, unnoticed, from my recollection, despite the fact that they unquestionably happened. This is why—I tell myself—even if the details of this history are not certain, they still come closer to the truth than the recorded facts alone.

  At the same time, I admit that although our private memories (like works of fiction) may endure without the agreement of anything outside themselves, at the moment when we try to make our recollections into stories the world begins to matter. By weaving memories into a sequence, they also become joined inextricably with time and history (which is to say, with the memories of everyone else).

  And maybe this is why, despite my own convictions, I find myself searching the records and history books for proof. Why I’m trying to piece together whatever scraps of evidence remain, while imagining the unremembered days of young Peter Force: how it might have been. The clamor and agony of the subway tunnels, evenings with the other men from the excavation crew, drinks and conversation in a cheap saloon. Exploring the neighborhoods of New York, solitary and turning at random down unknown streets. Renting a tenement room. Breakfast, dinner. Gradually, finding the rhythms of a life.

  PETER WALKS through the city with Paolo in the winter darkness after work. His body protests every step, but the Italian has insisted that this excursion is special, so Peter limps along beside the other man. He has been on the subway crew for two weeks now, and although the other crewmen have told him it gets easier, each day in the tunnels still feels like a span of torture. His shoulders are raw with welts from the hammer’s harness, the palms of his hands a mass of oozing scabs. Then they round a corner and it comes into view, impossible, and Peter forgets the ache in his back.

  “There—” Paolo gestures up at the obvious: the leviathan of metal and light that floats over the river, ethereal in the shadows. The Brooklyn Bridge. Peter has never seen anything like it: inhuman in scale and symmetry, the arc of a stone’s throw captured in stone and steel.

  “You worked on that?”

  “I was a welder. Very dangerous—the more dangerous, the more they pay. Good money, fifty cents an hour but . . .” he whistles through his teeth. “You hang with a rope, underneath. Every night I dream about falling.”

  Peter shakes his head, struck dumb. There is something about the bridge that tugs at him like a magnet: an idea made concrete in all its perfection, compromising nothing.

  “You like?”

  Peter nods.

  “Me, I like the view better before the bridge.”

  In his mesmerized state, Peter doesn’t answer.

  “Tell me,” Paolo asks, “what is it like, Idaho? Is very different from here?”

  Peter closes his eyes, picturing the concrete chasms of New York and the wilderness canyons of Idaho, trying to imagine what terms of comparison might even be possible.

  He remembers how, after leaving the New Mexico landscape of his childhood, his first impression of that frontier had been a world of air and abrupt abysses, of rivers white with glacial rapids and gnarled pine trees whose roots clutched bare stone. Riding the narrow-gauge railway into the mountains with his father, each tunnel and twist of the track had seemed steeper and more improbable than the last. Out the train-car windows, the towns they went through were huddled in ravines so narrow that merchants had to crank up their storefront awnings to let the locomotive pass. It was dark when they arrived at their destination, the town of Kellogg, at the end of the line.

  Kellogg was four dust-paved streets of clapboard houses. Evergreen-carpeted mountain walls framed the town, converging on a sheer granite cliff that loomed above the boardinghouses and saloons like a warning finger of the earth itself. Beyond this crag and down the other slope were the mines, the rows of dormitories where the miners lived, and the scraped-bare place around the pit.

  James Force rented a room for himself and his son in the home of a middle-aged widow named Mrs. Deagle. There, beneath the rafters of Mrs. Deagle’s attic, the two Forces spent evenings sitting by the flickering light of a candle, listening to muffled voices through the floorboards as the widow entertained one of her gentlemen admirers.

  James Force was not a talkative man. The things he knew—facts about rocks, hidden faults in the earth and shear distances—were a silent understanding, beyond words. His efforts at explanation were scraps of history and images that never knit together into a whole. “With your mother we ate better. On Friday she’d make biscuits,” he might say, and then trail off, staring into the candle flame. Sometimes they spent whole days without speech, these silences broken only when Peter’s father would stop to point out a small secret: a mouse watching from the rafters, or the smell of certain pine trees, whose bark had the scent of but terscotch candy.

  Peter remembers this, and the hours spent alone while his father was in the wilderness, working as a surveyor. The evenings of sitting at the long table in Mrs. Deagle’s parlor beneath the unsteady lamp flame, thumbing through the pages of an old atlas while he waited for his father to come home, thinking about the names of impossible faraway places: Dalmatia, England, Tuvalu.

  He remembers standing alone beneath a pine tree in town, watching the sun set over the mountains: the vast wreckage of clouds in the dying western sky, orange and vermilion. A brief splendor beyond the distant peaks, fading toward night.

  Now, standing beside Paolo in front of the Brooklyn Bridge, he wonders how to convey some sense of this to the other man—but doesn’t have the right words, or maybe it’s too soon to say such things.

  “I knew everyone in town. Weren’t more than five hundred men in the county.”

  Paolo nods, not really listening. “Look here,” he says, and unshoulders the bulky parcel he has been carrying. With elaborate care, the Italian unwraps a battered black box the size of a human head.

  “What is it?”

  Paolo holds up an impresario’s finger and flips open a catch, folds down a door and pulls a lever, causing a snoutlike appendage to appear at one end of the box.

  Peter whistles appreciatively. “A camera. This yours?”

  “My wife nearly kills me when I bring this home. But always I have wanted one. You want to look?” He extends the instrument to Peter, who peers where the other man indicates and sees an image of the bridge, upside down and hazy, floating in the viewfinder.

  “You going to take a picture?” He has never touched a camera before and hands the box back to Paolo nervously.

  “Of this? No—is too expensive, the photographic plates. But I like better the way the world looks through this. Like a painting.”

  Peter nods, understanding that the other man has revealed something private. They stand in silence.

  “Come,” Paolo says finally, collapsing and rewrapping the camera. “Let’s eat. I am freezing here.”

  A LOST FRAGMENT of memory, returning unexpectedly. Peter remembers that he had been nine years old when his father woke him early to meet the morning train.

  In the half-darkness of Mrs. Deagle’s attic Peter had dressed quickly while his father watched. James Force’s usually reserved expression was lit with silent anticipation, Peter saw, and his he
art caught in his chest. Together they left the house and walked through town toward the station, the forested mountain slope beyond the row of shops and houses tinged with pink with the rising sun.

  The Kellogg train station was a single room beside an uneven wood-plank platform that ran along the rails. A ragged, red-faced family with a stack of derelict luggage was waiting for the train, and Peter and his father sat with them in the bare little room, nobody speaking, until the locomotive with its string of weathered coaches groaned to a halt outside. While the other family climbed aboard, Peter followed his father to the luggage car at the back of the train. As Peter watched, the porter handed down a suitcase-sized wooden box, which his father cradled carefully in both arms.

  Back at the widow’s attic James Force set the box in the middle of the floor, then carefully pried open the lid with a crowbar. Inside, wrapped in a nest of wood shavings, was a glass globe the size of Peter’s head, along with two coils of wire and a white ceramic platter.

  “What is it?” Peter asked.

  “A filament bulb and socket.”

  “What does it do?”

  “Makes light.”

  “How?” From past experience, Peter knew it was unlikely for his father to answer one question, let alone two in a row, but today James Force seemed to be in a rare talkative mood.

  The elder Force scrutinized his son. “Shouldn’t you be getting to school?”

  “No, sir.” Peter looked back at his father, trying for an innocent expression. The minister’s wife would be giving lessons in the church basement today, but as with all her students, Peter’s attendance was sporadic at best, and the prospect of spending a full day with his father made it almost not feel like a lie.