The Kingdom of Ohio

by Matthew Flaming

  She sways on her feet, shaken by the images. When she had first arrived in New York, the demands of survival had obscured any speculation about what might be possible if she could find or reconstruct the device—daydreams that had seemed, in any case, shadowed with the threat of madness. Later, after their encounter with Edison and Morgan, she had determined to ignore such hopes. But now, standing in front of the door, they come crowding back more urgently than ever.

  And even if beyond the portal is only fire and death, she thinks, in the last moments of the exploding mansion—even so, it would at least be certainty.

  Beside her, Peter shifts nervously in the darkness.

  “So, now . . .” he starts, then trails off, not knowing how the sentence ought to end.

  His mind is racing as he grapples with the reality of what they have found. He thinks of his father, half shadowed across a nighttime campfire. The sky and the dark evergreen forest and the rearing horse, its forelegs churning. His hours here in New York, beside her, all their misunderstandings and accidental betrayals: all the things he could’ve said and done better. Only—the realization strikes him—there’s something that feels strangely right about their time together, despite everything, awkwardness and all. That we even met, that any of it even happened, he thinks. Maybe that’s enough.

  “But think of Morgan,” she murmurs in the darkness beside him.

  “How’s that?” Peter shakes his wandering thoughts away.

  “Think of how he or Tesla might employ this device.” She draws a breath. “If we use the door, they will find it and follow us through. Even if I were to destroy the device itself on the other side, it is possible the portal would remain open.”

  “So, then . . . ?”

  She closes her eyes.

  This should be—she expects it to be—a terrible decision: between everything she has loved, and her responsibility to the world in which she finds herself now. But strangely, with Peter beside her, it hardly feels like a choice at all. Because maybe the past only exists, she thinks wordlessly, to make the future possible.

  She opens her eyes and straightens.

  “Will you light a match?” she asks.

  Peter feels inside the little box with his fingertips. There are four left, he is pleased to discover—although what good four moments of sight will do in this vast darkness, he realizes, is hard to imagine. He fumbles out the match, and strikes it.

  The flame is dazzlingly bright in the small space of the cave, exaggerated shadows leaping across the stone walls. They squint against the light, at the ancient wooden door, a fragment from another world juxtaposed into this alien setting.

  “Can you destroy it?” she says.

  “The door?”

  She nods, fighting the urge to cry. “If the mass anchor is destroyed, the portal should collapse.”

  Peter looks up and around, surveying the space. Small cracks run through the arched stone of the roof, the fragile hollow of the cave already weakened by the rift in the tunnel wall. Even so, he realizes, it will be dangerous—maybe even more risky than the first blast.

  As the match sputters into darkness he meets her eyes again: her face smudged with dirt, her nose dripping from the cold, a tightness of held-back tears around her eyes.

  The match goes out.

  He stands very still, hearing her breath and feeling the warmth of her unseen presence.

  Inexplicably now, Peter remembers the sense of invisible power that once pushed him up the span of the Brooklyn Bridge. Maybe this—it strikes him—is what the city, with the nameless urgency of its buildings and bridges, has been telling him all along: not any one meaning, but something about why things mean at all. Which is that if things were certain, they wouldn’t mean anything.

  If it were certain, it wouldn’t be love.

  “Yes,” he says. “It’s risky for us. Very risky. But, with luck, yes.”

  Utter darkness.

  “Climb back into the tunnel,” he instructs. “I need rocks to shape the charge.”

  She nods, wresting down a momentary doubt about the door. Because this is the only way, she reminds herself: for the sake of history itself. For the sake of everything. To put the past aside, and by doing so to make the future possible.

  She gropes her way along the wall of the cave until she finds the fissure and pushes herself into it, a wave of claustrophobia descending—and then she tumbles out into the wider excavation beyond.

  “I am outside,” she announces.

  “Good,” he calls back. “Toss the rocks through.”

  Fumbling on the tunnel floor, she feels her fingernails break as she lifts chunks of debris and pushes them through the crevice. Despite the pain, she is grateful for the distraction from the suffocating weight of darkness on all sides. Inside the cave she can hear the tapping of Peter’s hammer and the faint exhalations of his effort, echoing in the tomblike stillness. Then the sound of his hammer stops and he mumbles a curse.

  “What is it?” she calls, straightening. “Is something wrong?”

  “Not enough fuse left.”

  “Then”—her heart catches—“you cannot destroy the portal?”

  “Not without destroying us along with it.” He groans, a shuffling sound as he shifts his weight. “Fuse won’t reach out of the cave.”

  Both stand silently in the dark for some unmarked span of time.

  There must be a way, she thinks, clinging to her earlier sense of conviction.

  “Could we—” Abruptly, in the darkness, a spark of inspiration comes to her. “Perhaps we could use cloth from my dress.”

  “Wouldn’t burn hot enough.”

  “If you dust it with blasting powder?”

  He falls silent and she waits, holding her breath.

  “Maybe,” he says. “Could work, I think.”

  Crouched inside the cave, Peter hears the sound of ripping fabric.

  “How much of this do you need?” she calls.

  He tries to visualize the space of the cave, at the same time trying to ignore all the things that could go wrong. “About fifteen feet.”

  The ripping continues, then stops. “Do you need more rock?”

  “No. Got enough here already.”

  He hears her shuffle, slip, cry out softly, and then she tumbles through the crevice to half fall against him.

  “Here.” She presses a coiled strip of cloth into his hand, and then he feels her move away. Clutching the makeshift fuse he kneels by the base of the door, where he has chipped out a channel in the rock. He opens the bag of supplies and gropes for the powder box—then feels inside the matchbox. Three matches remain. One match, he has promised himself, he will save, even if he isn’t certain exactly why.

  “Take the matches.” He holds the box out toward where he can hear her teeth chattering. A moment later her hand finds his own in the dark. “Strike one, and step away.”

  She does, and squinting against the light Peter glances in her direction to find himself looking up at a breathtaking expanse of exposed leg, below the torn hem of her dress—

  Struggling to focus on the task at hand, he dips his fingers into the powder box and runs them down the length of the cloth. The remaining blasting powder he pours into the channel below the door, fitting in a blasting cap at one end and tamping down a layer of broken rock above.

  The match gutters out.

  She climbs back through the fissure into the tunnel. He follows, trailing the makeshift fuse.

  “Here,” he says. “Sit with your back to the wall. Plug your eyes and ears, like last time. You remember?”

  “I remember.”

  He lowers himself beside her.

  “You have the matches?”

  “I do.” She presses the small box into his palm.

  He removes their next-to-last match from the box and draws a breath. This time, strangely, he is hardly nervous at all. He feels larger than himself, filled with some beginning or end. He reaches out and squeezes her hand; she sq
ueezes back.

  “Are you ready?” he asks.

  “I am,” she says, pressing herself against him.

  He draws a breath and strikes the match, touching it to the fuse. As the cloth begins to smolder they regard each other in the brief, flickering brightness.

  The rumble of falling rock.

  And a moment later, the world explodes in fire and light.

  CHAPTER XIV

  THE RETURN

  SUMMER IS IN ITS LAST DYING PAINS WHEN THE AIRPLANE TOUCHES down at my destination. After retrieving my luggage I stand in line at the taxi stand, sweating in the humid air beneath a low belly of gray clouds that hangs overhead, pregnant with the threat of thunderstorms. Finally I clamber into a foul-smelling yellow minivan and give the driver directions to my hotel, then collapse against the sticky vinyl of the seat, exhausted, to watch the smokestacks and weed-filled parking lots pass outside.

  The hotel is a tall cinder-block cube, nearly identical to the buildings on either side. When I check in, using my new passport, my room is similarly featureless: the white-walled space, the molded plastic ashtray on the bedside table, the dingy telephone and the blank face of the television, all feel interchangeable with thousands of other rooms in dozens of other cities. Lying on the stained sheets and trying to ignore the shooting pains in my chest, I stare up at the ceiling and think of how, in this place, I could be anyone, anywhere.

  Strange how it’s only the most intangible of things, the battered sheaf of my memories, that sets me apart from all the previous occupants of this room.

  Closing my eyes, I remember the terror and dislocation that I’d felt during those first days, after waking to find myself on a beach I had never seen before, wet with the surf of a foreign ocean. Then, looking around the dark shore, lit in the distance by the glimmer of countless electric lights, I was struck by the thought that I had died and wandered into some strange heaven.

  It was only after a stranger told me that the ocean was called the Pacific, and that the year was 1954, that I began to guess what might have happened. How the blast in the subway tunnels must have transported me, in the same way it had hurled you from the Ohio of your childhood into the New York where we’d met. Either that, or I had simply lost my mind.

  The first thing I did, of course, was start looking for you. Sleeping on park benches, bewildered and struggling to comprehend my surroundings—the buzzing helicopters and gleaming superhighways—I searched for you. At any moment, I expected, I’d find you waiting for me. Together, I told myself, we would make sense of what had happened and set things right, or simply begin a new life together. It was nearly a year before the social workers found me living as a vagrant and began their project of rehabilitation, and before I admitted to myself that you weren’t going to appear around the next corner.

  I found a job washing dishes at a restaurant (the only place that would hire me without proper papers—since, as far as the state was concerned, I was dead) and took a room in a boardinghouse. I spent my mornings before work reading the newspapers and trying to understand the new world in which I found myself. And as soon as I could afford the ticket, I boarded a cross-country bus for New York.

  I lived there for eight months, working odd jobs and walking and rewalking the streets we had passed down together. The Morgan mansion was a museum now, I discovered, and the tenement where Paolo lived had been demolished decades ago, replaced by a row of smart townhouses. Everyone I had known was dead or disappeared. And again, you were nowhere to be found. Finally, I rode the bus back to California—which wasn’t home but where, at least, my heart didn’t break at the sight of every half-remembered boulevard and building.

  Two years later, I visited Toledo. Amid the factories and slums, I searched for some hint of the kingdom you once told me about. Picturing you there as a little girl, in scattered places—while looking up at the old oak trees in a park or the crumbling façade of a warehouse near the lake—I sometimes imagined that I felt a flicker of the history you had described. But nowhere did I find any hint of your living presence.

  Now, lying on the hotel bed, I remember this: standing beside an empty factory in Ohio, amid the fast-food litter and used condoms, looking out at the blue surface of Lake Erie. Imagining that once, maybe, you had stood in this same spot, contemplating the same horizon . . .

  When I wake up on the morning after my arrival in New York, I discover that I’ve mistakenly taken someone else’s luggage from the airport. Enormous brassieres and jogging clothes fill the space where my folded shirt and trousers should be. Pulling on the gray suit that I’d worn the day before, and borrowing a (hopefully) clean pair of athletic socks from the suitcase, I stop at the deli next door to the hotel for a cup of coffee before starting through the clamor of the streets.

  It’s been more than twenty years now since the last time I was in New York, and at first the experience is overwhelming. It’s not just the traffic, or the noise, or the endless towers of glass and steel (in fact, all of these things are far less chaotic than the Manhattan I remember, although hugely magnified in scale)—instead, it’s simply the way that everything here is so fast. As I walk down Broadway, leaning on my cane, stylish young men and women jostle past on either side, making me feel like I’m moving through another, slower world that is superimposed over my present surroundings: an indistinct metropolis of memory, its landmarks the settings that once framed our time together and your face.

  It takes me until early afternoon to make my way through the maelstrom of Times Square and past the sleek boutiques of SoHo (where Tesla’s laboratory stood until it burned down in 1904), to Battery Park on the southern tip of Manhattan. There, finally, I let myself collapse onto a bench, trying to ignore the unsteady hammering of my heart and the ache in my hips.

  Relatively speaking, it’s quiet here. Along the margins of the park vendors sell postcards and T-shirts to the strolling crowd of tourists. A breeze kicks up small, choppy waves on the surface of the bay. The clouds have cleared overnight and the sky is a high, pale blue overhead. In the distance I can make out the warehouses of Brooklyn and, farther out yet, a lonely weather-battered woman, her arm raised in a gesture of defiance and hope, silhouetted against the horizon of the Atlantic.

  The expanse of water, the shabby trees and park grass, the white noise of the city. A few hopeful pigeons gather briefly around me, then disperse as they realize no crumbs are forthcoming.

  I close my eyes, hoping for some kind of clarity.

  During my years in Los Angeles, in your absence, our time together became more and more like a dream. Even while your memory haunted me, and while I continued to scan the sidewalks for your face, I started to believe that maybe I had invented the whole thing and simply convinced myself it was real.

  Searching for some kind of certainty, I became a student of the past. I enrolled in community college courses and started to read obsessively: most of all I read Byron and Dante, the poets you had loved, and history books. I spent my nights after work hunched over library texts, slowly making sense of the last six decades and hoping to find clues about what happened to the world I remembered—and (most of all) about what happened to you.

  Some of the answers were easy to find. I learned how Morgan died like a king, lonely and surrounded by admirers, while Tesla’s last days were spent hungry and penniless in a fleabag hotel room. Absence itself provided other hints: the terrifying repercussions of time travel, which you had feared so much, were nowhere to be seen. Instead, the forward march of history continued just as inevitably (and perhaps more horribly, with the two World Wars, Vietnam, and the rest) as ever before. So in this sense, at least, it seemed that we had succeeded (at least, if I hadn’t made the whole thing up). But despite my efforts, the crucial things—the facts of your life, and of our time together—eluded me.

  Oh, I found a few scattered bits of evidence: the details about a young man named Peter Force, who was born on the frontier and moved to New York, emerged after months of s
earching, even if I had no way of proving their connection to my present self. In occasional brief footnotes I’d find some mention of the Toledo family and the Kingdom of Ohio, references to books long out of print, or dry asides based on rumors and hearsay. But beyond this, either the records didn’t exist—or in the vastness of all the words ever written, the traces of our passage were too insignificant for me to see.

  Gradually, after each year of failure, the moments I remembered started to seem like a kind of fairy tale: an imperfectly recalled story that still shaped my days, but which I couldn’t really believe. And eventually, between the demands of the world, the arguments of common sense, and the weight of uncertainty, I decided that the only thing I could do was to try to forget.

  So I tried. By that time I had a new identity, a regular job, and an apartment of my own. I bought a pair of acid-washed jeans and a denim jacket (this was in the 1980s), signed up for a dating service, and started listening to popular music—Michael Jackson, Genesis, Huey Lewis and the News.

  It didn’t work. Despite my efforts, this newly invented version of myself felt like an awkward disguise. Most of the time I managed to hide my sense of unease, and the women I met for dinner and a movie seemed unaware that it was just a façade. But it was a futile attempt. Some part of me understood this from the beginning—in the same way that, remembering your face, I knew that I would not fall in love, in that way, again.

  And in the end, I gave up trying to find a home in the present. (Except, that’s not quite right: what I really mean is that I gave up trying to imagine a place for myself in the future. After all, if we strive in the present it’s for the sake of some landscape we yearn to someday reach, a destination I could no longer imagine.) That was when I opened the antiques store, which I intended to be my refuge from the world. I reduced my existence to the morning bus ride to work and the evening ride home, the television, and the microwave. Occasional customers and trips to the grocery store. Sitting in the park and watching the sun sink over the Pacific Ocean. A modest life, fenced with careful oblivion.