Electric City: A Novel (11 page)

It was the first time in her life Sophie had ever seen a fox, anywhere. But there was no mistaking its flame-colored coat and its bushy tail sticking straight out, almost as long as the rest of its body.

A wild thing in Electric City!

They instinctively held their breath, hands gripped together. The fox seemed to sense them anyway—but remained just beyond the row of pine trees, waiting.

Henry slid his hand along Sophie’s waist, pressed his lips against her mouth, her throat. She closed her eyes and felt a part of her dissolving, a blurry wave that contained both something freezing and something on fire.

T
HOMAS
E
DISON BOASTED
frequently of how little sleep a man actually
required
, as long as a habitual pattern of napping was incorporated into his daily routines. It was public knowledge that the great man kept a cot in his office for precisely this reason, and he evidently considered this method, like so many of his other predilections, a superior way of life. Steinmetz, in contrast, understood that individuals could possess preferences not necessarily ideal for anyone else, though he too imagined at times that alternating periods of so-called work and so-called play were most likely beneficial to the health and well-being of all adults whether or not they called themselves scientists.

Regardless of the fact that by virtue of size and stature he might have been mistaken for a child, at least from a distance, it was his childlike wonder and pleasure in the world that made Steinmetz feel most genuinely blessed. Adulthood didn’t have to be a death sentence, nor even a time to “put away childish things.” Steinmetz believed in jokes and games and even silliness, and perhaps this was why his recurring Dream seemed to him both simple and complex, not accompanied by numbers and formulas as some of his half-waking states might occasionally produce, but purely visual, whether in color or black and white, static or in motion. And most surprising of all was that this image felt comprehensible to him as a form of knowledge not discovered but already owned,
reawakened from its daytime hiding place in much the way that stars kept themselves secret except when revealed by the night sky.

The Dream visited Steinmetz at least once every few months, sometimes more, often enough to feel like a kind of night vision and not merely a synapse-firing exercise carried out by his brain during sleep. The first time he ever had the Dream, so far as he could remember, was the night of the day he had stood alone on the frozen river of Breslau, trying to determine the constant of the territorial magnetism of his birthplace. One by one, his school friends had walked away from the river’s edge, complaining of the bitter wind forcing them back indoors, while Steinmetz remained stubbornly bundled against the elements, transfixed with determination to complete his measurements. All these years later, the Dream hovered in his imagination like an inexhaustible light.

Blissfully freed from gravity, Steinmetz floats in outer space, somewhere in the vast distance between the earth and her singular, reflective moon. From this perspective he is able to observe the earth as an orb itself afloat in space, a sphere whose surface is dusted with translucent veils of white, landmasses saturated in greens and reds, surrounded by an astounding pattern of aquamarine blue. And in the marvelous two-thirds-watery surface of his own home, now seen from the view of a star man, weightless and wide-eyed, he understands what the Dream is trying to say.

It is the certainty of everything being connected to everything else, the entirety of the physical world comprising a single unit, an entity of one. Time sticky like amber. Images shattered and reassembled. Each a facet and a completion. Images existing and then disappearing. The same story and yet not the same.

And most elemental, most dazzlingly true: all the rivers and streams and waterfalls could join forces; their combined and ever-replenishing
hydroelectric power could be harnessed like some limitless radio wave, repeating and recycling itself forever.

Joseph said the Dream was as ancient as the earth itself, and that his own people never believed anything
other
than the idea of unity when it came to the sky and the water and trees and animals; humans were as much a part of the whole as any rock or bird, and it was when you thought otherwise that the troubles began. With the arrival of the Europeans, including the Van Curlers, who devoted themselves to crisscrossing the land with fences and roadways, to building countless dams and canals, the inevitable result was a cascade of disasters.

Harnessing power from the waters was not exactly what Joseph believed could save the humans from themselves. Reassured on the one hand to see his friend Proteus captivated by embracing the natural world, recognizing its inherent value, Joseph still found it disquieting that his friend was nevertheless willing to sacrifice the freedom of water in the name of human need. The miracle of existence in all of its interconnectedness also meant that poison in one place would end up everywhere.

“Our boats will travel side by side down the river of life,” Joseph explained one night, describing the two-row wampum belt. The two men sat watching the moon and stars, energies emitted across immeasurable space.

“That each will respect the ways of the other. That together we will travel in friendship, peace, as long as the grass is green, as long as the water runs downhill, as long as the sun rises in the east and sets in the west and as long as our Mother Earth will last.”

“Fireflies are 95 percent efficient in producing light,” Proteus said. “We have a very long way to go with our own weak imitations.”

M
ARTIN
’
S TAPE RECORDER
had jammed again, which would not have been particularly worrisome except that he was involved in a delicate operation. Not messing around with any ordinary mix of music and voices, but repairing one of the oldest intact recordings of his grandfather Joseph. Martin had listened to this story more times than he could count, but it seemed on every playback to instruct him with some as-yet-unrevealed detail, like beadwork whose colors varied depending on the quality of light, like the river’s surface dappled by an ever-changing touch of wind. With a pair of needle-nose pliers wrapped in sterile cotton, he managed to free the tape from where it was caught in the mechanism, grateful to have spared it from damage.

It was nearly midnight, and Bear slept in a heap nearby. Reaching for his sketchbook, Martin seated himself on Annie’s sagging couch so that he could allow the sound of Joseph’s voice to guide his hand.

Tucked between two of his pages was a sepia-toned portrait of someone Martin might closely resemble in another forty years. He turned over the photo to see the half-faded inscription on the back:
JOSEPH LONGBOAT
.

There were no photos of that day on the bridge in 1907, nothing except the long-dead eyewitnesses and the ladder of storytellers. Martin’s sketchbook could carry the dust-covered past into the realm of the visible as well as the audible.

“Your great-uncle Miles Longboat was a bridge builder,” Joseph said on the tape. “My brother. One of the first of the Skywalkers.”

“Back in the early 1900s in Canada there was a cantilever bridge designed to span the Saint Lawrence River. They needed to plant the support structures on tribal land and promised to hire men from the reservation to do some of the menial labor. Instead, the Mohawk started climbing all over the structure like it was something they’d been doing all their lives.”

Martin’s black pen scratched across the white page, filling in the spaces. Lines back and forth, sometimes connected.

“The bosses realized these Indians had amazing balance, better even than their most highly trained ironworkers. So your great-uncle Miles was up there, on steel girders way up high above the water.” Martin listened as though he could detect the sounds beyond the whispering of the tape: two huge sections of metal groaning apart, giving way to the pull of gravity. “Those pieces came tearing loose, bad bolts or who knows. And thirty-three Mohawk men died, all from that one reservation.”

Lines back and forth across the white page, sometimes connected. Not a spiderweb at all. For a moment Martin saw his drawing through Sophie’s eyes, full of bodies falling and falling. Together they watched for the terrible splash.

“After that, the Mohawk women vowed they would never allow so many men from one community to work on the same job,” Joseph said.

If he started at the beginning, Martin knew that the story could go on forever. The time before there were human voices, only color and sound, birdsong and wind through trees. The rush of water, animals of all species calling to one another across great distances. The percussion of shale as it shifted, the music of ice creaking at the river’s edge.

H
OW DO YOU
decide where to draw the line?
Sophie wanted to know. Somehow she had gone from seeing the fox to kissing Henry on a stone wall. “We should probably go,” she had said, uncertainly. For once, no one was telling her what to do, which made for a perplexing intersection of freedom and mystery. Her body had its own ideas, perhaps.

After Henry dropped her off, Sophie entered the house and went straight to the kitchen for a glass of water. Simon’s car was in the driveway, but both his bedroom door and her parents’ door were closed, no light leaking from underneath.

A stream of jittery sensations made her want to lie down on the back patio the way she had done on the night of the blackout, to calm herself by visiting with the constellations. She was about to go into the hall closet for a blanket to take outside when she noticed that the kitchen cabinet holding her grandmother’s medicine bottles was yawning open. Even mild headaches and stomach ailments seemed to inspire her mother’s eagerness to reach for these foreign drugs. Sophie had always made a point of shying away from them.

“People save the wrong things sometimes,” Henry had said. For the first time, she wondered why her mother wanted to keep old medicine anyway. Didn’t that stuff have an expiration date? She selected one of the brown glass bottles, running her fingers across the fading inky
handwriting on the label. It was in Dutch, so she couldn’t make out the words, but then she saw the signature with its European flourishes. Her grandmother’s name, Sonja Ansbach, MD, was written on each bottle, some of which contained only a few pills, or none at all.
It was the handwriting she must have wanted to save
, Sophie thought.
The hand of my mother’s mother.

She replaced the bottles in their lineup and closed the cabinet. In an American history class last spring one of the students had casually mentioned being related to President Garfield. On another day, when the teacher asked how many could trace their families all the way back to the
Mayflower
, a surprising number of hands had been raised into the air. Sophie simply blinked her eyes in private amazement. Why hadn’t Mrs. Nelson wanted to know how many in the room were first-generation Americans, starting their new story on this continent? And how many generations did it take to feel like you truly belonged? She had a feeling that the coming year’s coursework in world history promised more relevance to her own family legacies.

Simon hadn’t ever said so, but maybe choosing to attend college on the West Coast was his way of claiming an individual place farthest from where David and Miriam had landed. She could do that too, Sophie supposed. Or maybe she would cross the Atlantic in the opposite direction of the route her parents had taken, stepping onto a shore both strange and familiar.

Later, lying on the patio and inviting the touch of dew on her face, she thought again about how the blue sky hid so much. Night’s curtain wasn’t falling, but the other way around: being pulled back to reveal the stars.

T
HAT NIGHT
, H
ENRY
dreamed about
Sputnik
. Standing beside the elm tree in his old front yard, he could see the spaceship high overhead where it glinted quicksilver in the midday sun and moved slowly enough that he could make out Russian lettering on its outer shell. He had the distinct sense it was sending him a message, coded signals bouncing off its shiny surfaces and aiming back to earth. And then
Sputnik
began to spin out of its orbit, careening like ice crystals through the blue-black sky.

He woke up in a sweat, but found to his great relief that everything in his bedroom came swimming back in sharp outline and full color: the stiff linen curtains and heavy oak furniture, the bookcase with its array of leather-bound novels and massive dictionaries, his desk chair heaped with yesterday’s discarded clothes—all reassuringly familiar. The vivid memory of Sophie’s lips seemed like a kind of sunburn, stored heat pulsing on his skin.

A surge of energy catapulted him out of bed.
Running
, was what came into his head, or more specifically, into his legs. Forget the stupid cast—which would be coming off later today! Forget too the inner cartoon of himself tangled in a pile of hurdles, the unspoken but all too obvious disillusionment of the coach. The creaking house seemed even emptier than usual as he threw on his shorts and T-shirt; within half an hour he was out the door and accelerating to a comfortable stride,
a sound that could have been
Sophie
panted on each exhalation. He felt his long muscles working harder than they had in weeks. The lush summer fragrance of cut grass suggested that green was something you could smell.

“Thank you,” he said out loud. And then out of nowhere, or as though a siren had begun to wail on an otherwise perfect summer day, the realization came to him that it was his brother Aaron’s birthday. He would have been nineteen.