Electric City: A Novel
Read Electric City: A Novel Online
Authors: Elizabeth Rosner
ELECTRIC CITY
Copyright © 2014 Elizabeth Rosner
All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission from the publisher, except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles and reviews.
This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events or locales or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Rosner, Elizabeth.
Electric city : a novel / Elizabeth Rosner.
pages cm
1. Edison, Thomas A. (Thomas Alva), 1847-1931--Fiction. 2. Steinmetz, Charles Proteus, 1865-1923--Fiction. 3. City and town life--New York (State)--New York--Fiction. 4. Science--New York (State)--History. 5. New York (State)--Intellectual life--20th century--Fiction. I. Title.
PS3618.O845E44 2014
813'.6--dc23
2014022623
ISBN 978-1-61902-406-9
Cover design by Rebecca Lown
Interior design by Megan Jones Design
COUNTERPOINT
2560 Ninth Street, Suite 318
Berkeley, CA 94710
Distributed by Publishers Group West
10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
for Carl H. Rosner
and all the other Wizards of Schenectady
I run with the blue horses of electricity who surround the heart
and imagine a promise made when no promise was possible.
—J
OY
H
ARJO
Contents
B
EFORE THE NAME
Electric City there were other names, and before those names there were no names at all. The river carved itself into the valley, remembering everything. Pines thickened and pushed against the sky. Autumn went dark, then ghostly, freezing into the hibernation of winter; spring resurrected the landscape and the creatures that filled it, painting the scenery back to life. Summers shimmered with wet heat until fall erupted into a riot. The story repeated and repeated, the same and yet not the same, year in and year out.
The Hudson was known as
The River That Flows Both Ways
, or Muhheakantuck, and sometimes simply
The River
, as though the only one. Tributaries were referred to by their outer banks, shadowed by the trees best suited for canoe making. There was Shenahtahde,
Water Beyond the Pines
, and also Andiatarocté, or
Here the Lake Closes
, later, much later, to be known as Lake George.
Seneca, Cayuga, Onondaga, Oneida, and Mohawk people braided themselves into a confederacy with the name Haudenosaunee, building longhouses beneath the Great Evergreen Tree. Making shelter under the deep-rooted pine—with its eagle hovering above—the collective of voices agreed to put down the weapons of war and let the waters wash them away.
Even when the Longboats watched the arrival of the Van Curlers, curiosity became regret only after it was far too late. Surely there were meat and fish and grain enough to feed all of them, enough flat ground for planting on, enough wide sky to worship toward.
We know you have arrived and are not leaving
.
Tribal arguments were as old as the mountains, but those wounds always healed eventually, when tended with proper care, blessed and forgiven. Now these darker-skinned and lighter-skinned alliances gave way once again to wars, followed by burying of the innocent and the guilty side by side. Uneasily borrowing each other’s language, awkward hesitations and gestures filling the spaces in between the mispronounced words, the Longboats and Van Curlers negotiated dividing, took turns being the teacher and the student. It was at first strange and then common to call places by the names of people instead of using words to describe nature belonging only to itself.
We know you have arrived and are not leaving
.
The wampum belt depicted a hopeful coexistence: white-beaded rows flanking and separating the two purple-beaded rows, to show it was possible for vessels to travel freely in both directions. Shards of freshwater clamshells, purple and white, represented generations of voyagers. European ships and Iroquois canoes. Still, one truth told its story over and over: whatever the earth gave, it could also take away.
F
RIDAY IN THE
peak of autumn, 1919. Along the cliff edge of the Mohawk River, maples, sumacs, and chestnut oaks blazed red and orange, while pitch pines stood in their greenery. Pigeons wandered and flew off and returned. Somewhere far too high to be noticed, an eagle rode a current of air. And a fox slept inside a secret.
Charles P. Steinmetz steered his cherished Baker electric car until the cabin he called Camp Mohawk came into view. Last night’s dramatic thunderstorm had given way to a sparkling morning, and he was eager to spend this weekend in his canoe, pine plank stretched across the gunwales to provide a space for his mathematical calculations. In that floating office, his mind felt as wide as the horizon, and his aching bones were lightened with buoyancy. Alternately paddling and gliding, he relaxed into the accommodation offered to his abbreviated frame and hunched back.
“Divine discontent,” he called his condition, not only alluding to his physical state but also reinventing the equation of his life. A triumph of mind over matter.
Now Steinmetz clamped a fresh Blackstone panatela cigar between his teeth, shrugging off the recent headline in the Saturday
Globe
calling him “Wizard of Electric City.” It might have suited him, admiration offered in a play on words, but he preferred irreverence. In any case, anonymity had never been an option for someone shaped like him.
Approaching the turnoff to his encampment, he often considered the fateful decision Thomas Edison once made to choose this verdant valley for his new company. He had claimed it for the way the rivers met here—the grand Hudson and its greatest tributary, the Mohawk. Like the confluence of time and space. Edison must have sensed that in a land of quartz, feldspar, and magnetite, he could make a city that would light up the world.
It took Steinmetz a few ungainly movements to clamber down from the high-seated car, and for a luxurious moment he stood to inhale the beauty of his simple refuge, this morning of birdcalls and the almost-imperceptible muttering of the river. Entering the unlocked house, he recognized the scorched smell alongside the visible residue of an uninvited guest. Cracks in the blackened doorframe, an arc of burn marks below a window that was torn from its molding. Not caused by any human vandal, as he might have guessed had he still been living in Europe, not by thugs in pursuit of valuables or in belligerent destructive pleasure.
This was Zeus’s handiwork.
Lightning
.
Stepping carefully around a large shattered mirror, he noted the way its rectangular oak frame still held a few shards, even as the jagged remainder lay on the dusty floorboards. What was the last image reflected here in its wholeness? A flash of someone’s distracted face, the back of his own head as he walked away, the blur of a trapped bird searching for a way out?
Foolish to have kept a mirror in a cabin, he chided himself.
Instead of stooping in agitation toward the mess, wondering how to restore peace so he might work, Steinmetz felt the spark of an idea. Why not investigate this ordinary mystery? Find a way to harness nature’s own extravagant power? In one pocket, his fingers curled around the shape of a book of matches; the skin on his forehead tingled and his jaw
tightened around the still-unlit cigar. To start with, the damage left by this electrical visitation could be preserved with the faithful box camera he kept on a bookshelf by the window. He could gather evidence of the path of discharge. Track it like some wild animal.
His friend Joseph Longboat would surely appreciate the analogy. Together they had frequently marveled at the life beneath the river’s opalescent surface, the coded language of geology and biology along the river’s edge. Shale flaking down in a stuttering whisper as the two men strolled, often without speaking, companions staring at the water and gazing into the sky. They compared knowledge of currents that moved the Mohawk, waves that moved as light. Joseph shared tobacco and silence; Steinmetz mentioned Frankenstein and Einstein. Once or twice they had discussed Michelangelo’s image of the gap between fingertips, animation touched into existence. When Joseph spoke of Spirit, Steinmetz knocked on flint.
Pausing only long enough to brew pot after pot of black coffee, occasionally remembering to chew on some stale biscuits and apples, the mathematician worked meticulously all weekend to reconstruct with patient exactitude the splintered mirror. Using two panes of glass to hold the pieces in place, he meant to build a map of the lightning’s choreography.
“This silver puzzle is more than a man-made thing,” he explained when Joseph made his usual Sunday afternoon appearance. “It’s a portrait of infinity. The story of what we’ve loved and have lost.”
Only with Joseph could he speak this way, about the world inside the world. “Bodies are energy fields,” Steinmetz said, pointing at the
place where his heart pumped along, faithful as ever. “Swirling patterns that we take to be our bones and organs, our vessels and skin.” He stubbed out the remains of a cigar and reached for a replacement. “When we chart the course of a natural force,” Steinmetz explained, “we find everything is as curved as my back. Even time itself!”