The Kingdom of Ohio

by Matthew Flaming

  “No?” Tesla raises an eyebrow. “And why, pray tell, is that?”

  “Perhaps you are right, in the best of all possible worlds. But you know what men are capable of. None of us is responsible enough for such power. The world would be torn apart—”

  “To be remade as it should have been,” Tesla interrupts.

  She looks at the inventor, his unreadable expression and polished demeanor. But despite his charm and elegance, this Tesla is not the man she seems to remember.

  Abruptly she recalls a classroom lesson from her time at boarding school. On that day, the teacher had exhibited a sphere of amber that enclosed a row of fossilized ants. Peering into the golden orb at the procession of tiny creatures, frozen on their way to some vanished destination, she had felt a wave of pity and horror at this glimpse of an alien world, a fragment of long-gone time torn from its rightful place and meaning. Those small shapes that had once been alive, now become an unmoving schoolroom exhibit.

  She looks over at Peter, the tension and fear on his unshaven face, then back at Tesla.

  “I am sorry.” She bows her head. “I cannot. Even in the best of hands, it would be too great a power.”

  “I disagree.” The inventor shrugs. “After all, any great advance may be used for the ill or the betterment of mankind. Electricity has brought us light, and may bring a great deal more. It has also created the electric chair.”

  “But this”—the words burst out of her—“this is different. It is something else entirely! You speak of electricity and its effects. But time is the very substance of cause and effect! Undo that foundation, and—”

  “I see that you and Morgan are of the same mind in this regard.” Tesla shakes his head. “But I have never been one who shrinks from the risks of what might be.”

  From the impassivity of the inventor’s face, she realizes abruptly that whatever arguments she could offer would be in vain. The fear in her chest begins to tighten into a knot as she thinks of how badly she may have miscalculated in coming here. That she may have, in fact, actually helped him accomplish exactly what she hoped to avert.

  “And did Thomas—I mean, Mr. Edison—agree with your dire assessment?” the inventor inquires. “I am certain he must have also, at the least, been interested in your formulae.”

  “I did not show Mr. Edison any formulas or proof,” she says. “Nor did he ask.”

  “Well, then.” Tesla leans back in his chair. He exhales a stream of smoke, running a hand through his hair—and abruptly, some perhaps-memory tells her that the inventor is satisfied by this answer. A fact that she wonders at, trying to understand what it could mean.

  A few feet away, at the bar, two sailors burst into laugher as a trio of whores link arms and launch into a surprisingly graceful line dance, capering in drunken unison. The clash of glasses, swirling clouds of smoke above the crowd.

  Peter clears his throat, and the others turn to face him.

  “One more thing, Mr. Tesla.” He winces at the roughness of his words alongside the other man’s polished diction. “We figure that we’ve given you something valuable. You’ve admitted that yourself, coming here. So I’d say you owe us something.”

  She turns to him, surprise written across her face, but he pushes ahead anyway, improvising. “We need to get out of the city, Mr. Tesla,” he continues. “We need train tickets and money.”

  The inventor shrugs, puffing nonchalantly on his cigarette. “Perhaps I only came here out of curiosity.”

  Peter’s face hardens.

  “But what you ask may be possible,” Tesla continues. “Of course, it is only reasonable that I ask something in exchange.” He taps the document folio again with a gloved finger.

  She opens her mouth but Peter answers first. “She already said no.”

  Tesla steeples his fingers. “You realize that as persons wanted by the authorities, your fates at this moment are somewhat, shall we say, tenuous.”

  Peter reaches into his pocket, fingering the cold shape of the pistol. “Maybe you’d better speak plainly, Mr. Tesla.” His heart is pounding, but somehow his voice is almost level. “I’m not educated like you. Might be misunderstanding what you mean.”

  The inventor’s bland expression does not waver. “I merely meant to suggest that cooperation could be to our mutual benefit.”

  Watching the other man’s impassive face, the wild urge to smash things floods through Peter again and he grips the pistol tighter. “Well, you heard her.”

  “Perhaps,” Tesla suggests, “she will reconsider after the two of you have contemplated your situation more thoroughly.”

  Now, Peter thinks. Now, or it will be too late. And hoping that she won’t hate him for it, he seizes his glass and raises it over his head.

  The other two stare at him, then turn as a general disturbance begins spreading through the room. She sees a man rise awkwardly from a table, his arms wrapped around a black box, and stumble past a burly longshoreman’s bulk. The stranger starts toward them, trips over the legs of a chair and catches himself—and then he is standing in front of the table. Belatedly, she recognizes Paolo as he executes a small bow.

  “Excuse me,” the Italian says. The flash-rod in his hand goes off with a whoosh, momentarily lighting the stained walls and wretched furnishings magnesium-bright. The bar collectively staggers and tries to blink sight back into its eyes, recovering in time to glimpse the photographer disappearing through the door.

  Tesla moves to rise but is stopped by Peter’s hand on his shoulder and the gun pressed into his side beneath the table, concealed inside Peter’s coat.

  “What is this?” the inventor demands—her stare echoing the same question.

  Peter smiles grimly. “Yes, we’re criminals, Mr. Tesla. And you’ve just been photographed meeting with us outlaws. Might want to keep that in mind, when you think about our future.”

  A moment of silence. Tesla looks down at his pocket watch on the table. He opens his mouth and closes it. Then he bursts out laughing.

  Peter gapes at him, along with her and most of the bar’s occupants.

  “This display is quite . . . startling.” The inventor shakes his head, still chuckling. “And also, touchingly innocent.” The laughter abruptly ceases.

  “Your ruse with the photograph is ingenious, but also completely futile. With my reputation, excuses are cheap enough. Particularly, if you will forgive my candor, against the evidence of persons like yourself. And as for this”—the inventor nods minimally, downward toward the hidden pistol—“do you seriously think that the prospect of death frightens me? In my work, I confront such risks every day.”

  Tesla leans back in his chair, ignoring the gun barrel jammed against his ribs, and directs a gaze of glittering intensity at Peter. After a moment, realizing despite himself that the inventor is telling the truth, Peter looks away and lowers the gun.

  From across the table, she watches this exchange and feels a kind of tearing sensation. She thinks of Peter’s face as he walked through the nighttime city beside her. She remembers the look of satisfaction the inventor wore when she answered his question about Edison. And, abruptly, almost before it has started, the inner battle is ended.

  “Of course you are not afraid of these threats,” she says softly. “But consider this: as you have suggested, Mr. Edison may be interested in the formulae I have shown you. Those details, and many more—which he might learn quickly, if the police should happen to question us.”

  Tesla’s expression momentarily darkens. “What is it you want? Money?” He stares at her. “I am disappointed, if that is the case.”

  She looks away and almost, then, an apology escapes her—but Peter interrupts.

  “Yes, we want money. And you say anything about this meeting, we tell everyone what we know. Edison, Morgan, all of them.” Peter bares his teeth, a cold fury building inside him at the faint sneer on the inventor’s face.

  Tesla pulls away from Peter, not quite managing to suppress a shudder.
For a moment his fingers drift toward the trigger of the chloroform device hidden inside his sleeve—but this is an acceptable outcome, he tells himself. If need be, the mechanic can be dealt with another time, the girl tracked down. He nods.

  “Very well . . . You need money for train tickets? You intend to leave New York?”

  “That’s right.” Peter’s heart is hammering, fear and adrenaline churning in his chest, but he tries to match the inventor’s cool tone.

  Tesla reaches into a pocket of his coat, withdraws his wallet, and pulls out a sheaf of bills. “This is all I have with me. Not quite a fortune.” The inventor laughs humorlessly. “Alas, I did not plan on buying my life tonight. So you will have to sell it to me cheaply.”

  Peter takes the money and shoves it into his pocket, ignoring the brief sting of something like shame. He looks across the table at her. She is staring back at him, wearing an expression of disbelief.

  “Regarding your warning, however,” Tesla continues, “the nature of my research, of what I seek—these things are not open to compromise.” He shrugs and directs a brief, contemptuous glance at Peter. “Although I would not expect a man like you to understand.”

  For an instant Peter’s grip on the pistol tightens. Somewhere in the chaos of the bar, a man curses loudly and a woman starts to cry. With a wrenching effort Peter masters his anger and stands. “Come on,” he tells her. “Let’s go.”

  She hesitates, glancing at Tesla—but the inventor is staring into space, a slight smile on his lips. After a moment she turns and rises, taking Peter’s hand.

  “I trust your journey will be a long and safe one. Bon voyage,” Tesla murmurs, not looking at them, “and good-bye.”

  CHAPTER XII

  THE FALL OF THE KINGDOM

  THE PSYCHOPHYSICAL PHILOSOPHER GEOFFREY SONNABEND ONCE wrote that “the world is the horizon of the Other; our memories are the slate of the Same.”41 But despite the philosopher’s genius, I believe he got this wrong. The world is the landscape of sameness, of experience forced into the generic approximation of words and sentences. After all, it’s easy enough to say what I see (“a typewriter on my desk, a framed poster, an empty apartment”) and at the same time, impossible to see what I can’t speak. When Columbus arrived off the coast of South America, the historians recount, those keen-eyed tribesmen couldn’t make out the European ships at all, lacking any words or notion for “a floating island, made of wood, topped with towers of billowing white cloth.” No, Sonnabend missed the mark: memory alone is the realm of both the other and the self, of a radical identity of sensations that are too nuanced for any telling.

  And that’s the funny thing about memory, isn’t it? Nothing is so near, and nothing else so unreachably far. Even as our memories define the essence of our selves, they turn on us, flitting away toward vague forgetting, changing shape (each recollection a potential smiling Judas in the pay of time), and making us strangers to the past.

  This isn’t the first time I’ve tried to write down our history. During the first decade after I arrived in Los Angeles, more than once I sat down to record what happened. But with each effort, after a few pages I saw the words beginning to twist away from what I wanted to express, into a collection of irrelevant penny-dreadful details. (And what makes this time special? In the end, maybe it’s only the awareness that I’m running out of chances that keeps me writing: the understanding that if I don’t set these things down now . . . yes, all those maudlin old-man sentiments.)

  But still it’s such slippery stuff, these recollections. In my earliest memories, I’ve become an outsider to myself, watching from an impossible perspective as a figure who, apparently, was once me (a supposition that feels increasingly unlikely with each passing year) stumbles through a series of long-gone, poorly reconstructed scenes.

  Of course, it wouldn’t be fair to blame all this—the chasm between then and now, I mean—on the failures of memory alone. The shape-shifting, fickle present seems to me equally responsible for the distance of the past as any trick of forgetting.

  This morning, for example, I rode the bus downtown to visit a counterfeiter of documents: my final errand before leaving the city. I had met Alfie shortly after I arrived in Los Angeles, and he supplied me with my first set of papers. Since then, official documents have become harder to produce, but Alfie’s skills (and prices) have kept pace. Yesterday he called to report that my order was ready: using the amount I’d kept from the sale of the store, I had arranged to purchase a new passport, replacing the previous one, which was about to expire, and as an extra precaution a Social Security card to match.

  In his anonymous skyscraper office, I sat on a black leather armchair and we made small talk for a few minutes before exchanging envelopes.

  “Everything good in your world, Professor?” Alfie asked. “No trouble with the last set?”

  “No trouble at all.” I didn’t know why he’d decided on this nickname for me several decades ago: he had never asked about my past or why I needed his services, just as I never asked about his.

  “I’m planning to go away for a while,” I said. “Thought I’d better be up to date.”

  “Good idea. The way security is these days, a man can’t be too careful. But you’ll be fine.” Alfie winked and tapped the side of his nose. “Even the FBI wouldn’t look twice at my work.”

  I wondered for a moment what he imagined my story to be—he probably assumed I was a retired criminal, if he wondered about such things at all.

  “So, you traveling for business or pleasure?” he asked.

  “A little of both.”

  “Well, have a safe trip. By the way, your name’s Sabinsky now. Ethan Sabinsky.”

  We shook hands and, outside his office, waiting at the corner bus stop among a crowd of tired commuters, I wondered at the strange banality of this transaction. For the price of a small car, in the eyes of the world I had become a different person.

  I suddenly remembered a television special I had seen the previous week, where an expert on quantum mechanics had explained a theory called “relative state formulation.” According to the physicist, other universes may exist alongside our own: an infinite number of worlds, one for each possible variation on our own reality. In fact, the scientist had continued, with each decision of our lives a new universe may be created, branching off from our own: a world identical to this one, except for the outcome of the choice we have just made.42

  Standing on the downtown sidewalk, sweating in my suit beneath the heavy Los Angeles sun, I closed my eyes. Another passport, another name, another world. And among all these endless, separate, branching worlds, I thought as the bus groaned to a halt in front of me, how can I ever hope to find the past I’m looking for, or find you?

  THEY ARRIVE BACK at Paolo’s apartment after a wordless omnibus ride from the saloon, the cold of the New York winter still clinging to their clothes and faces as they bustle into the living room. He peels off his jacket and she her shawl, and they both fall into chairs at the battered wooden table. A moment later Paolo emerges from the bedroom.

  Paolo’s children trail in behind him, staring wordlessly up at the intruders, followed by his wife. They exchange a few words in Italian and then the wife departs, herding the children with her.

  “So.” Paolo grins at them. “It was perfect, yes? Perfect. I love the look on that man’s face, on all your faces. No one followed, did they?”

  “No.” Peter shakes his head, grinning back at the other man. “No one.” He fishes the money out of his pocket and counts it—sixteen dollars in all—handing half the sum to Paolo. “Here. For the photographic plate.”

  “No, please. I cannot take this.” The Italian shakes his head. “It was only a favor, for you. For Tobias. Because it was men like this who kill him.”

  At the mention of Tobias’s name, Peter feels a moment of guilt as he realizes how little he has thought of the dead man, in the midst of everything else. “If you change your mind.” He drops the bills ont
o the table, where they lie in a crumpled pile.

  She reaches out and touches the money. “But why?” she asks, more sorrowful than angry. “And why did you not tell me?”

  Peter looks at her, takes a deep breath and looks away. “Didn’t think you’d agree. Didn’t know if it would come to that, anyhow.”

  She doesn’t answer, staring at the sodden bills and wondering, with a kind of abstract despair, how they have reached this point: as common thieves, in hiding, all her noble ambitions undone.

  “Besides, I told you,” Peter continues. “That Tesla is no friend of ours.”

  “And to blackmail him with a photograph—that was your plan?”

  “Our plan.” Peter glances up at Paolo.

  “Stupid.” She shakes her head, speaking as much to herself as the two men. “He would never have let himself be controlled that way.”

  “Maybe so.”

  “And for this?” She points at the money, her sense of outrage flaring momentarily. “To become a thief? Is that all?”

  Peter shrugs. In the Suicide Hall, driven by rage and the need to break through the inventor’s calm veneer, it had felt natural that he should demand something. Now, though, he is struck by the realization of how his actions might seem to her—and also how they seem to himself, if he’s being honest. Still, he thinks, taking comfort in the fact, in the end he’d been right about the inventor.

  “Guess I just wanted to even things up, somehow,” he says finally.

  She closes her eyes. In fact, she already realizes, this anger is only a façade. Because like the mechanic, she also felt the need to wrest something back from the world in exchange for all that has been taken.

  The three of them are silent for a time.

  “One thing I keep wondering . . .” Peter asks the question that’s been nagging him since their escape from the saloon. “You said that you know Tesla. But he didn’t recognize you.” He shakes his head. “So what . . . ?”