The Kingdom of Ohio

by Matthew Flaming

  “I saw you looking at the birds.”

  “Don’t remember that. I remember looking at the city.” He gestures at the silhouettes across the river.

  A silence, as they both search for what to say next.

  “I am truly sorry for all of this,” she says. “I never intended you to be involved in this way.”

  He looks at her; she is staring at the water.

  “Guess I know that.” And maybe it’s true, he realizes: other than a place to stay, she hasn’t asked him outright for anything. “But, still.” He shrugs.

  She turns to him, hoping the tearing sensation in her chest doesn’t show on her face. “Peter, you should not concern yourself with this. You have already done more than enough.”

  He doesn’t answer.

  “I will go to see Tesla alone. This is my risk to take.” She forces herself to smile, abruptly near tears at the thought of losing him. “You should leave, as you wish.”

  Peter nods automatically. He is thinking about what lies ahead of her: more danger and fear, without any possible gain or end that he can see. A lost cause; not anything worth calling a cause at all, really. Even so—

  “Thanks. Not sure I can do that, though,” he says, an admission as much to himself as her.

  “Why do you say that?” She blinks, her eyes and nose red from the winter air.

  Peter feels a brush of cold on his cheek. He looks up and sees that it has started to snow. A scattering of white flakes drifting downward, settling over the walkway and disappearing into the river. He looks at her face, the black tangle of her hair, stark against the white snow and pale gray sky.

  Trying to think of a way to explain the things churning inside him, he is painfully aware of how he must seem to her: a country bumpkin, out of place in the world of privilege where she has lived, imaginary or otherwise.

  “Guess I’ve started to like the company.” He shrugs again, a sudden tightness in his chest.

  “Let Folly smile, to view the names of thee and me in friendship twined.” She murmurs this, looking down at the water and reaching out to rest her hand on his arm.

  Beneath her light touch, Peter discovers that he is trembling. “What was that?”

  “Nothing.” She glances at him, a flicker of a sad smile. “A line from Byron that suddenly came to me.”

  “Byron. He’s a poet?”

  “He was.”

  For a time, they stand there without speaking. Their breath steams in the cold. The snow continues to slowly fall.

  Peter tries to stand very still, a kind of dizzy urgency inside him.

  None of this makes sense, he thinks. And there’s nothing—couldn’t be anything, really—between us, at least beyond these moments. Still, at the same time, it comes to him that maybe love is always this way, a long-shot gamble: a bet against the odds that some intangible connection—even one so strange as this—will outweigh all the details and triviality of the world that drive people apart.

  He reaches up and closes his hand over hers. Neither says anything for a time, both of their awareness focused on this small contact, skin against skin.

  “I’ll go with you,” Peter says, before he can reconsider. “I mean, when you go see Tesla.”

  “I don’t—” She shakes her head, biting back the objection that politeness requires. “Thank you.” She looks up at him, her eyes shining and wet.

  He nods. His lust and longing and loneliness—and everything else—for a moment fallen away.

  The bare branches of trees along the walkway, the silhouettes of the city. Barges drifting past on the current. Overhead, the cloud-blanketed sky is beginning to darken.

  “If only,” she finds herself thinking, “if only—” Not knowing how the sentence should end. She looks down, shaken by the intensity of her feelings, and pulls her hand away.

  Peter takes a deep breath.

  “Well, anyway,” he says, “come on. Figure it’s about time now.”

  SILENTLY they start walking again, across Grand Street, where escaped Chinese railroad-slaves sell fish and produce in sidewalk stalls. Looking over at the mechanic’s mournful face, she feels a sudden, overwhelming impulse to kiss him. Because if not now, she wonders, then when? In the whirlpool days and danger of the world, the opportunity may not come again. Because finally, she admits to herself, the thing that exists between them goes beyond what may be ignored or explained away.

  Turning a corner, she sees a uniformed police officer glance sharply in their direction. Clutching Peter’s arm, she begins to move faster. He keeps pace, shooting her a questioning look. Peering over her shoulder, with a jolt of fear she realizes that the policeman is following, also moving more quickly. She stops abruptly, stepping into the shuttered alcove of the nearest store, and pulls Peter after her.

  “What—?” he starts.

  “Ssh.” She leans against him, tilting his face toward her own. He frowns down at her—then his arms circle her waist. The warm pressure of his lips against her mouth. She closes her eyes. His breath, the rough stubble on his cheek, exerting a kind of gravitational pull.

  For a long moment she surrenders herself to this, the world disappearing. Until, abruptly, it returns and she turns her head away, shocked by her own behavior. This is the first time she has kissed a man.

  For the space of a dozen more heartbeats she stands pressed against him, eyes still shut. Somehow, without looking, she can tell that Peter’s eyes are closed as well. His hands tracing abstract shapes on her back.

  She finds herself wondering, through a fog of longing and frustration, why it has to be like this. Why, when it should be so easy between them, she needs to make it hard. It makes no sense, she thinks, the power of these dumb animal things, at a time like this: the dumb yearnings of muscle and bone.

  She opens her eyes. Over Peter’s shoulder, she sees the policeman walk past without looking at them. With an effort of willpower, she pulls away. Before she can, though, he cups her face and guides her back against him. This second kiss longer than the first, an urgency of warmth and yearning.

  “No.” She shakes her head, hoping that he can’t see how she is trembling, suddenly afraid of what may happen to her, and the resolve that brought her here, if she allows the moment to continue. She takes a step down the street. “We have to go—”

  Peter opens his mouth and closes it. Finally he nods, longing and confusion clearly written on his face. He follows her out of the alcove and they continue on their way.

  She looks up at the passing buildings and the bright stone of the moon, pale and narrow as a scythe’s blade. And she wonders what, of all this, she will remember years from now—if, indeed, “years from now” even has meaning anymore. Her memory seems like a landscape washed over by a flood: certain features remain the same but all the details are changed, entire new hills and valleys added where there were none before. Perhaps, she thinks, only this. Glancing upward in the frozen nighttime streets to see, for a moment, the crescent winter moon overhead, her heart pounding, still warm with the memory of his lips.

  They cross the uneven cobblestones toward McGurk’s Suicide Hall. Peter holds the door open for her and they enter.

  Inside, the saloon is half empty. He chooses a table on the main floor, near the back but with a line of sight to the entrance. She fixes her eyes on the surface of the table. The other patrons glance at them, briefly curious about the newcomers, but their ragged clothes arouse little enough interest and these gazes soon drift away. When the waiter comes around, Peter orders two glasses of beer.

  “You all right?” he asks. “You want anything to eat?”

  She shakes her head, fighting the urge to run away. Out of all the strange surroundings she has wandered through since arriving in New York, none has felt more alien and threatening than this.

  “Used to come here with Klaus Neumann,” he tells her. “The mechanic I work with. He first showed me this place. That is to say, I used to work for him. All that’s over now, I guess.” H
e shakes his head. “Funny, isn’t it? Keep thinking I’m still part of all that. The subway, I mean.”

  He gulps his beer, and she suddenly understands that Peter is just as nervous as she is. Somehow this realization calms her. She straightens and tries to smile at him.

  “Do not worry,” she says. “You will not need to do, or say, anything. I will handle Tesla.”

  “Well, I’m here.” He forces a smile in return.

  “And I am grateful for it.” Her reply is automatic, but it’s also the truth. At this moment, Peter’s presence feels like the only thing keeping her anchored to the world.

  “I’m glad we—” he starts. But at that moment Tesla steps into the bar, regal and incongruous in his eveningwear, and Peter falls silent, gesturing toward the door.

  The inventor hesitates in the entrance, surveying the room with distaste. She raises her hand, beckoning. Seeing this gesture, Tesla crosses to their table and sits without waiting for an invitation. His expression is pleasant and neutral, and suddenly she remembers the inventor telling her how, in college, he paid his bills by gambling. Now, she realizes, he has his poker face on.

  Tesla places a leather document folio in front of him on the table, and on top of that his pocket watch. The other occupants of Suicide Hall glance appraisingly at the expensive timepiece before turning back to their drinks; the three of them are a bizarre sight, but this is a part of town that deals in unlikely figures and improbable odds, anonymity its chief export to the better-heeled city that begins a few blocks away.

  Sitting across from Tesla, Peter looks around—the whores in their pancake makeup and the sailors lounging by the bar all suddenly becoming figures of waiting peril. Inwardly he struggles to regain the feeling of abandon and extravagance in the face of danger—his unspoken gift to her—that he’d experienced by the river. Picturing his own rough clothes and unkempt appearance, he tries to return the inventor’s coolly appraising gaze.

  “Mr. Tesla,” she says after a moment of tense silence, “I see that you read my letter. Thank you, and thank you for coming.”

  Tesla nods, revealing nothing. “Thank you for giving me the opportunity. Particularly after the misunderstanding of our last meeting.” He rests a hand on the document folio. “I am to understand, then, that it was you who worked this out?”

  “Then you believe it does work?” She blurts the question without thinking, her memory of hours spent studying with the inventor overriding her sense of caution.

  Tesla glances at her sharply. “You do not know?”

  “I—” She looks away. “I was not certain.”

  “That is very interesting.” The inventor steeples his fingers, stifling a smile. His mind is racing as he tries to recall the details of their last encounter and to piece together how she might have escaped from the police. Still, he realizes already that all the cards here are in his hand. He waits until she has begun to answer and then interrupts briskly.

  “But we will return to that subject. First, I must see where I stand: I expect you invited me here for a reason?”

  She nods. Her recollections of Tesla superimpose themselves over the man seated across the table, forming a double-image that makes her stomach knot. “For several reasons. First—do you really not remember me? My family?”

  The inventor begins an easy denial but then, struck by the grief in her voice, stops himself. Studying her face, Tesla feels again a flicker of something like déjà vu. He recalls the few unremarkable months that he spent in Ohio nearly a decade ago, and the shy girl with whom he had shared a laboratory—but this mental image bears no resemblance to the woman facing him now. In any case, he clearly remembers hearing about her death, and his memory, he thinks, has always been perfect.

  “My apologies.” He inclines his head a fractional degree. “But, as before, I truly do not know you.”

  “Then how—?” the words tumble out of her, fueled by outrage and despair. “It seems so much to me that I remember you, Mr. Tesla! How we studied together at my father’s house. I remember your confiding in me that you solve mathematical problems to help yourself sleep, that you have always been terrified by germs. So many things! How can this be?”

  Fidgeting uncomfortably in his seat, feeling useless and forgotten, Peter watches this exchange. He sees the flush of emotion cross her cheeks, the gleam of tears in her eyes, and the impassive calm of the inventor’s face—and suddenly he wants to smash things. He clenches his fists beneath the table, squeezing the grip of his father’s pistol in his pocket.

  Tesla hesitates, studying his polished fingernails to hide his shock over how much she seems to know about him. For an instant, like a fragment from a dream, the image comes to him of walking beside her in a garden. But that is impossible, he tells himself. And she could have guessed or discovered all these things from any number of sources. Still—he concedes—behind the dirt, the gross flush of blood and the filthy condition of her hair, she is a lovely girl. And a remarkable mind, an intelligence nearly equal to his own, if she really—

  “You must remember!” In the face of the inventor’s silence she presses desperately ahead. “Think of your birthday, the tenth of July in the year 1893. How we dined together at my father’s house. You cannot have forgotten that!”

  “On my birthday that year, I was at the World’s Fair in Chicago,” Tesla interrupts. “I spent the day working on my exhibit there, and dined alone.” In his voice, she can hear the truthfulness of this statement.

  “But how—?” She shakes her head, fighting back the prick of tears. “How is this possible? You were with me, I remember. . . .”

  A glib reply is on the tip of the inventor’s tongue—knowledge is currency, after all, and he has always been a miser. But despite himself, Tesla remembers a moment from years ago, when he was a boy in the countryside of his native Serbia. A day when he had sat in the yard outside the thatched-roof cottage where he and his four siblings lived with their father, the severe Russian Orthodox priest, and their long-suffering mother. Kneeling in the grass of a mountainside meadow in Eastern Europe, building a waterwheel out of twigs in the little stream that ran through the yard . . .

  “But that is always the case, is it not?” Tesla murmurs. “We all carry a half-imagined world inside ourselves, the world of our childhood and its lost wonders.

  “However”—he clears his throat and straightens, annoyed with himself for permitting such a lapse—“in fact, I do not know the answer to your question. Were it not for this”—he taps the document folio—“I might say that you were deranged. Perhaps you still are. These equations, after all, are only a fragment of a whole—and indeed, out of context, they might simply be gibberish. Still, if I were to see that whole, I might be able to give you an explanation.”

  He waits, and Peter waits as well, holding his breath without knowing exactly why.

  She hesitates. Then shakes her head.

  “The equation I sent you was a by-product, an offshoot from another direction of research.” She smiles briefly. “And since I do not know you, even if I had the whole I would hesitate to show it, realizing that you could grasp its meaning. As Mr. Morgan was kind enough to explain, its misuse would be catastrophic.”

  He is not surprised by the financier’s name, she notices, and a wisp of fear unfolds in her chest like smoke. She seems to see the inventor sitting across the table for the first time, abruptly noticing the differences between this Tesla and the figure she remembers: a degree of cold calculation in his expression utterly foreign to the conscientious, otherworldly man she knew.

  “Mr. Morgan is a coward and a pessimist,” Tesla answers mildly. “Besides which, if all you say is true, the only possible explanation is that somehow you traveled from one world, where you did know me, into this one, where you do not. Therefore, should you not trust me as you trusted my other self?”

  She shakes her head mutely and the inventor shrugs. He removes a cigarette from his silver case and lights it, exhaling a stream of sm
oke through his nose. “Regardless of that, you said there were several reasons for which you wished to see me?”

  Around them, the bustle and clamor of the dirty saloon. The door bangs open, admitting a gust of cold air along with a flurry of snowflakes. Someone yells for more beer. More beer or more fear, she thinks randomly.

  She struggles to put her words in order and speak clearly. “Yes, there was another reason. Speaking plainly, I wish to warn you against what I believe you now seek.”

  “Oh?” The inventor raises an eyebrow. He is entirely collected again, his mind alive with calculation. If she has met with Morgan, he muses, most likely it was the financier who arranged her release from jail. Meaning it is also likely that she has spoken with Edison. In which case, the crucial thing—Tesla decides—is to ascertain how much she might have told him. And then to discover what else she may know—or, at the very least, to ensure that no future conversations like this will take place.

  “And how exactly,” he asks mildly, “would you warn me?”

  “Against the consequences of such a device.” She leans toward him, and the inventor tries not to flinch from the heat of her proximity. “With such a thing, one man might throw the world into chaos.”

  Briefly, Tesla considers pretending ignorance and denying any knowledge of what she means—but gauging her expression with a gambler’s eye, he realizes that somehow, impossibly, she understands fully what prize is at stake. The limitless power that would come with possessing such a thing. Which means—with a wrenching effort of will, he overrides his distaste at the idea—better to treat her as an equal, at least for now.

  “I appreciate your concern.” The inventor inclines his head solemnly. “But at the same time, imagine its benefits. The wars that might be averted, the cities evacuated before they were destroyed by some catastrophe.”

  She hesitates.

  “Think of it,” Tesla continues, warming to his subject. “The citizens of Pompeii saved, the Boer uprising averted!”

  “No.” She draws a deep breath, as if shouldering a great weight. “No, Mr. Tesla. It cannot be.”