Electric City: A Novel (2 page)

Joseph, the canoe maker, sat in a Shaker chair straddling the threshold of the open cabin door, so that he could survey the familiar layers of bedrock and sandstone, caves and sediment.

“You can look sideways through time,” he said. “It’s sticky like amber.”

Both men could hear the nearby bridge with occasional cars clattering across. The only missing sound, it being Sunday, was the end-of-day work whistle from the downtown factory.

“Home is where you come from and where you choose to build it,” Joseph said. “It’s where the pieces fit together.”

Steinmetz nodded, using tweezers to set the final splinters of glass into place. These two days had marked the beginning of a new game: erasures and incandescence, a mosaic bent by gravity. He believed in mathematics the way others believed in God. Notebooks lined every shelf, filled with scribbled formulas for magnetic reluctance and power surges, potential for control and its opposite. Several pages had been grabbed by wind and tossed into the river, but no matter. With equal parts perseverance and daring, a scientist could become a magician. Steinmetz had already experienced such a metamorphosis of his own, when he crossed from the Old World to the New.

In early spring, after months of bizarre explosions resounding from within Building 28, reporters from as far away as New York City were
invited to witness the Wizard’s latest creation. The theoretical experiment devised at Camp Mohawk had gradually expanded to fill the space of a downtown warehouse, its solid walls creating a container as vast as it was secure. The Company always provided Steinmetz with whatever component parts he required, no questions asked. Sheet metal and vacuum tubes, porcelain insulators and tungsten wire. Equations were being translated into light, into voltage.

Even Edison was here for the demonstration, seated on an overstuffed armchair brought in for the occasion. Increasingly deaf, he held his ear trumpet so as to capture whatever sound he could. When Steinmetz approached to offer a personal welcome, tapping in Morse code onto Edison’s arthritic knee, the old man offered a rare smile.

“You always understand me better than most!” Edison shouted.

No need for amplification today
, Steinmetz tapped.
Believe me.

The rest of the selected crowd stood at a specific distance from the model village of Electric City that had been arrayed on a room-size platform. Balsa wood and painted paper buildings wore stenciled labels to identify which was the hospital, which was the grocer, the undertaker. The university’s sixteen-sided Nott Memorial was graciously included, though its stained-glass windows were not as carefully detailed as the college president might have preferred. The marquee above Proctor’s Theatre promoted a feature called
Modern Jupiter!
The curving boundaries of the Vale Cemetery had been sketched into place on a green-painted hillside with clay tablets for tombstones. Railroad tracks ended abruptly at the edges of the stage. And a blinking circle of light was suspended above a miniature version of the Company’s headquarters.

Not counting Joe Hayden, the devoted assistant who had become Steinmetz’s adopted son, only two of the guests knew what they were about to see. An eleven-year-old fair-haired girl whose nickname of
“Midget” had been chosen by her adoptive grandfather, “Daddy” Steinmetz. And Joseph Longboat, leaning almost invisibly against a far wall, casually but firmly holding on to the shoulders of the child. On both faces, matching grave expressions revealed nothing of the secret they had been sworn to keep.

“Artificial it may be, but like Nature herself, this will be loud and spectacular,” Steinmetz had promised Midge the day before, gazing into her dark, serious eyes with undisguised fondness. Of the three Hayden children, she was his favorite and everyone knew it. “You might want to cover your ears.”

The time had come. Steinmetz raised one hand in a sober request for silence, and with no further warning, the diorama was electrocuted by a generator’s split-second emission of one million volts.

Trees became smoke. A church steeple burst into flame.

P
ICTURE THE LOGO
—you can still see it anywhere. A monogram of curling letters meant to look like someone’s handwriting, adorning some appliance or other, your fridge or your stove, maybe a washing machine, a dryer. Now picture it huge, glowing neon white above the factory headquarters whose dull red facade shadowed a stretch of the Mohawk River. You could see it from the bridge, driving away from or toward downtown, with the river flowing dirty and despondent below. You could see it from all over town, and even in your dreams, hovering with incandescent power above elms and train platforms, above barns and telephone poles. Sometimes it seemed to cast a particular glow onto the mossy brick of the campus residence halls, the stately ones bearing plaques engraved with the Van Curler name. And sometimes it left an eerie sheen on the gravestones in the Vale Cemetery, that place where the living and the dead still met.

In a company town, everything wore the Company insignia. “Live better electrically!” the slogan said. Everyone believed it.

And yet, on an ordinary Tuesday afternoon, with autumn tipping into winter, when most but not quite all of the dying leaves were down on the frozen ground, when the vague but unmistakable smell of rotting pumpkins could be found in certain driveways and alleys, when the full moon had begun its slow climb into the darkening sky, when fathers all over town were driving home from work and mothers were preparing
dinner and children were bent over their homework, the lights in Sophie Levine’s house flickered for a few seconds and faded to nothing. The refrigerator and dishwasher were suddenly mute; the electric stove lost its orange-hot flare. Even the clothes dryer ceased its tumbling.

Sophie, alone in the family room, had been avoiding completion of a trigonometry assignment, puzzling over an echo from that morning’s homeroom that wouldn’t quite leave her mind. A classmate who had refused to stand and recite the Pledge of Allegiance was sent to the principal’s office, and she couldn’t stop wondering what his motives had been, what else would now happen to him. Absentmindedly flicking a nearby floor lamp on and off, on and off, she thought at first she’d simply burned out the bulb—or worse, had broken something in the wiring. But when she tried to turn on the television, that switch had no effect either, which had to amount to more than coincidence.

When her father’s car pulled into the garage much more noisily than usual, she realized this was because every other sound in the house was missing. It was November 9, 1965, and Sophie was fifteen years old.

Tuned to WABC, the kitchen radio had just been playing “Everyone’s Gone to the Moon,” and it was funny, for a moment, to think that maybe this was what had happened. Everyone had simply launched into outer space. Miriam said the music was warping and wavering as though someone were holding a finger on the record player. “The electricity is slowing down!” the radio announcer said. “I didn’t even know that could happen.”

Even before her father had made it out of the garage, Sophie saw that her mother had already found matches and the box of white Sabbath candles, which she began lighting a few at a time. There was a decent flashlight in the broom closet, but its batteries were dead and Sophie was sent down to the basement holding a candle to see if she could
find some new ones. Hot wax dripped onto her fingers and cooled just quickly enough not to burn; she stubbed her toe on the leg of a table in the hallway.

Sophie’s father said, “What’s going on?” when he met her at the bottom of the stairs.

“Good thing we have so many candles!” came the call from her mother in the kitchen. “Maybe this isn’t what they’re meant for, but still.”

Sophie thought this was exactly what they were best for: pushing light against darkness.

“No luck,” she called on the way back up, having found no spare batteries to replenish the flashlight. Returning, she saw her mother smile.

Sophie loved watching her mother light candles on Friday nights and whisper the blessing so quietly that no one could make out the words. Miriam didn’t just close her eyes but placed both hands over them too, making sure to block out everything that might distract her from the intensity of her praying. Sophie had long suspected that she wasn’t reciting the traditional Shabbat blessing but was instead making up her own words.

Tonight, her mother lit candle after candle, blowing out matches just before they burned her fingertips. Once again, Sophie didn’t ask the question she always wanted to ask:
What do you whisper?
Instead she pulled aluminum foil off its tube and built makeshift holders; they had run out of candlesticks.

Sulfur from the extinguished match tips hung in the air, temporarily obscuring the other aromas of frying onions and meatloaf and dill on potatoes. In the moody glow, her mother looked wistful, as if she were listening for Sophie’s older brother Simon’s footsteps on the stairs. He was in his first year of college in California, and the three of them still weren’t used to his absence.

Her father put his briefcase in the hallway closet and hung up his overcoat in the usual way. He loosened his tie but didn’t take it off. “Let’s see what happens now,” he said.

The telephone began ringing and didn’t stop for the next half hour. All of the Levine family friends were checking on each other, a kind of impromptu phone tree spreading its limbs across town. Reena and Irving, Magda and Daniel, Rose and Benjamin. The women were making the calls, and the men were testing the fuse boxes, but eventually it became clear that the blackout had spread all over the city, and much farther, beyond the northern border of the United States even, into Canada. Sophie’s father’s transistor radio was a source of information, but at first nobody could explain much about the vastness of the power outage. Electric City had gone dark.

M
IDGE LEANED A
hip against her kitchen counter, rinsing dirt from the last of the squash from her garden, to be chopped and combined with tomatoes she had canned the year before. A package of egg noodles was neatly poured into boiling water on the stove. She had only just turned on the overhead light minutes past the fading of sunset, because her favorite time of day was always this—savoring the glow of the sky and its reflection on the Mohawk, allowing it to seep under her skin and to be stored there through the gloom of winter.

From decades of observing the land, its creatures and plants, Midge knew that you could submit to the long frozen nights as though they permitted a welcome time of rest. Still, approaching sixty and with the steady ache in her joints becoming more pronounced, she also knew that sleep was no guarantee of waking up again. She stared at the back of her freckled hands as she held the zucchini under the flow of the faucet, noting how the bluish tint of her arteries took the shape of naked tree branches.

Moments later, she switched off the radio. It was unbearable, listening to the broadcast about what had happened in New York City earlier that day. The term itself was excruciating:
self-immolation
. A young
American imitating the Buddhist monks in protest against the Vietnam War. They said he wasn’t expected to live, with 95 percent of his body burned. Midge covered her eyes with her hands but knew that the image of a man in flames would stay with her for a very long time.

The blackout wasn’t obvious at first. It could have been a blown fuse, or some wind-wrecked power cable, but after investigating both inside and outside the house, considering the options, and drawing her own conclusions, Midge went in search of her emergency candles and the kerosene lantern she kept in her mudroom. Both the fragrance of the smoking wick and the quality of light itself brought her all the way back to the days with Daddy Steinmetz, those long summer weekends at Camp Mohawk, so close to town and yet as far as another world.