Electric City: A Novel (20 page)

“Steinmetz took these,” Henry said, amazed. He flipped through the collection of images while Sophie and Martin looked on. Here was the man-made river after it froze solid and could be skated upon, Erie Canal as a dance floor of white ice.

Progress
, thought Martin.
The future
. Until it was the past and some other future was pressing down hard, filling in the drained ditch with gravel by the tons until it wasn’t even a wet ghost anymore, and the name Erie Boulevard didn’t make anyone think of water.

Sophie thought about the way the words sounded in her mother’s mouth, the way it came out
Bull Var
like some vaguely French animal, heavy-footed but elegant in its movements, its steady forward motion. She guessed that Henry envisioned Paris, streetlamps illuminated with gas in the dusky night, softening everyone’s edges, even the church spires gleaming beautifully. Her mother said
Eerie Bull Var
and Sophie thought it was a song, a lullaby to help her fall asleep.

“I’ll consider this a loan,” Henry said, tucking the photos back inside the envelope. “They belong to you.”

“We can share them,” Martin said, and decided this was the moment to leave the two of them alone. Easier to preempt the awkwardness of a threesome yet again.

“Bear is waiting for me at home,” he said, by way of explanation.

“Are you sure?” Sophie asked. “Not about Bear, I mean. About leaving.”

Henry took her hand. “We just got here.”

“I know,” Martin said.

Somewhere in its den out of sight, the fox was staying dry and warm. Sophie felt an urge to tell both of them about her father going to Los Alamos, about her dream of nuclear rain. She wanted some kind of reassurance that Henry’s departure the next day was just a natural pause, like the changing of seasons. A page being turned.

Henry let go of Sophie’s hand to shake Martin’s, but Martin grabbed him for an embrace instead. Then they slapped each other on the shoulders, grinning.

“See you soon,” Henry said.

“See you sooner,” Sophie added, putting her arm around Henry to watch Martin drive off. She told herself that Martin could never again be the Silent Guy, now that she had seen him laughing in the middle of
a silver-blue lake, now that he had told them the story of the eagle. Back in school together, they could reminisce about the summer. It was her own goodbye to Henry that she still didn’t know how to say.

E
ND OF
A
UGUST
1966, and the elms were dying. Disease had spread onto nearly every block in Electric City, through the center of town and along all its arteries. Almost overnight, Central Park was entirely under siege: bark curled and peeling away, deformed leaves turning black. Martin wasn’t sure if it was an attack from within or without, but experts said that either way the plague was incurable. Driving his battered truck up and down the silent streets between midnight and dawn, he memorized the canopy of trees disappearing overhead. It seemed a bizarre coincidence that a lunar orbiter was taking photos of the surface of the moon, mapping it in preparation for the Apollo landing mission. On nights when even the constellations seemed to be missing, he stood at the base of a suffering tree, placed his palms on its rough skin, and prayed.

For the first couple of weeks after Henry went back to boarding school, Martin waited to see if Sophie would call him. Although they had a physics class together, it was scheduled so early in the morning that they hardly ever found time to say much more than hello. She seemed distracted when he saw her in homeroom, and he felt reluctant to approach her when other people were around.

Henry’s absence wasn’t especially noticeable until he sent a postcard mentioning that the Van Curler Hotel was going to be demolished, asking Martin to take a photograph or two before the place vanished.

“I’m not obsessed,” Henry wrote. “But Aaron and I used to ride up and down in the hotel elevator. I wasn’t tall enough to push any of the buttons except the one that closed the door.”

Martin wanted to get close enough to the building to record the sounds of its destruction—or at least what it sounded like right before the tearing down began. He considered inviting Sophie to come along, but this was still an unshared practice, his secret eavesdropping on strangers. Maybe he would tell her about it once he knew what soundtrack he was creating—a story that wasn’t even his own.

Luckily, when he showed up at the service entrance of the Van Curler Hotel, a construction worker who knew Martin’s cousin Isaiah said it was all right for him to duck inside for a few minutes. Browsing mildewed hallways and peering into vacant bedrooms, Martin thought it might be a portent, an emblem of Henry’s lineage being pulled back into the earth. The carpet was threadbare at the center of each stair; varnish on the banisters had long since cracked and peeled away to nothing. A sign on the ornate elevator door read
PERMANENTLY OUT OF ORDER
.

Martin dangled the cord of a microphone into the stairwell, letting it absorb the absence of footsteps; then, for Henry, his camera clicked its own Morse code. Walking back to the truck, he sensed Electric City’s dust in his hair, on his skin. It smelled like cigars, and rust.

S
OPHIE PROMISED HERSELF
that while Henry was gone, she would focus on schoolwork, privately savoring the way he had said, “When I get back for the holidays, we can pick up where we left off.” Every night she went to sleep holding on to the belief that there was someone in the world who found her beautiful enough to love. When she told Melanie and Alice about the trip with Henry and Martin to Lake George, giving them only enough details so they could corroborate her story, she felt relieved to be keeping most of the experience to herself. It was like owning a treasure hidden from everyone else’s view, some shiny thing that she could turn over in her mind like a jewel.

Martin was in on the secret too, of course, but at first she couldn’t quite decipher the altered shape of their friendship. Although she and Martin shared a particular connection of their own, without Henry around all of the particles collided in a different way. In theory, he was the person they had in common, but sometimes she imagined he was also the person standing between them.

Riding the half-empty bus to school in the early light, she noticed the autumn colors flaring with life in stark contrast to the entire swaths of neighborhoods resonating with decay and desertion. It was more than the dying elm trees that worried her. There were vandalized storefronts and fractured sidewalks no one was bothering to repair;
OUT OF BUSINESS
signs proliferated, especially in the heart of downtown. Though she had learned like so many other children to hold her breath near a cemetery, as if to keep from swallowing exhalations of mortality, the living in Electric City could no longer pretend to outnumber the dead. Illness didn’t respect brick walls or evergreen hedges. You could travel all the way to a new continent and yet still find death waiting to greet you. Now that she knew about Aaron’s accident, even passing by Henry’s old house and gazing up at a broken branch could scrape open a wound.

Everyone was entangled. When her physics teacher Mr. Woodman talked about subatomic particles, she looked across the room at Martin, trying to catch his eye, wondering if he too was thinking about how they were all just like those quarks.

“Even at great distances,” Woodman said, “on different sides of a continent, when one is interfered with, the other gets agitated too.”

She wrote out the sentence on the back cover of her notebook, scratching the words into the cardboard as though carving a message into birch bark. After class, she stood in the hall until she saw Martin, canvas bag on his shoulder, as always.

“Were you thinking of Henry in there?” she asked.

He gave her half a smile. “My great-grandmother could feel it when her son fell from the bridge. Like she was losing her own balance and tumbling through the air.”

Sophie thought about how many science lessons she had absorbed all her life, in school and at home too. Her father, his magnets. Her mother, the messages written on the brown prescription bottles. Simon was all the way on the West Coast, stretching threads of the Levine family even farther across the map. She considered her Dutch grandmother the doctor, and how her mother’s education had been disrupted by the war, waiting for resurrection all these years later. Maybe that was the
first time she envisioned herself attending medical school, a delayed reprise of her genetics. Her future seemed so inevitable, sometimes. A line drawn in space, pulling her, naming her.
Sophie Levine, MD
.

T
HE WEEKLY POKER
game convening in the dining room on Wendell Avenue had left Steinmetz more exhausted than usual. For once he couldn’t recall precisely who won and who lost, only trusted as he awakened in the predawn light that the Society for the Adjustment of Differences in Salaries had performed its task according to the applicable laws of chance and entropy.

He shifted uncomfortably in bed while the sky gradually brightened and his bedroom windows framed a late October morning. Soon enough, beloved granddaughter Midge would tap at the door with a tray carrying his morning glass of tea, sweetened the way he had instructed her, and he would wait for his strength to come back. If it would.

The entire Hayden family—
his
family: adopted son Joe along with wife Corinne and the brood of children—had recently returned from a monthlong excursion across the United States, all the way to the West Coast and back again. The trip was his idea, a long-postponed wish to visit some majestic places on the other side of the continent, an adventure he’d never quite given himself time to enjoy.

To be fair, his cabin at Camp Mohawk had always provided countless opportunities for relaxation; it wasn’t as though he’d denied himself a relationship with Nature and her wonders. But the calendar said 1923, which meant thirty-four years since arriving in America, twenty-seven years since becoming a citizen; no more waiting to broaden his vista. His
years if not his days were numbered, and without much explanation he had insisted that Joe arrange train travel for the whole family. Their multiplied delight in the trip was how he enhanced his own happiness too.

Now it was all behind them: the cathedral of redwoods north of San Francisco; the astonishing scale of Yosemite with its granite edges and exuberant waterfalls; the gleeful meeting with Douglas Fairbanks. The latter was a nod to Corinne’s starstruck request but a surprising treat for him too, and his own delight glimpsing the flat scenery behind the actors—magic tricks of Hollywood laid bare.

He fumbled among piles of photographs stacked on a bedside table to find the one of Fairbanks posing with all of the Haydens, undisguised pleasure on all of their faces. Beneath that, a jolly image of himself posing at an ostrich farm. If doctor’s orders were to remain in bed, he would use the time for sifting through folders of papers he intended to label and organize. Here were birth announcements for Joseph Junior and for Marjorie Hayden. Joseph Hayden’s graduation program, Elmer Avenue School, 1920. War Savings Army Certificate for Marjorie “Midge” Hayden, appointing her “Corporal.” Joseph Hayden’s certificate of promotion to high school, 1920. His own membership certificates to the National Marine League, the National Conservation Association. Citizenship papers, 1896, from the County Court of Electric City.

Here was a draft of the last letter he had written to his father in Breslau, the last one before the old man’s death. It slid down to the braided rug beside the bed, but he was too weak to pick it up.
Later
. And here was a bill authorizing this Wendell Avenue home as a historic site. Reassuring to understand that there would be generations willing to carry his work forward. So many unfinished blueprints and plans not lost or abandoned but merely allowed to pause, as though his death were merely a railway station like those he had passed through during
those thrilling days crossing an ever-changing landscape. Plains giving way to mountains and then desert; nights where the rocking motion of the sleeper car was a calming lullaby.

He had entertained Midge with stories about the game of “Going to America” he’d played as a child, featuring a red trunk and a faded watercolor map.

“How lucky,” he said to her, “to have been born here already.”

Upon returning to Electric City, he told Joseph Longboat it had been the trip of a lifetime, and a reminder not only of the humble place he occupied in the Universe but a full reckoning with the choice he made so long ago to traverse an ocean and build a new life.

That scene of arrival so many decades ago had blurred a bit, but it had never been forgotten. The lady in the harbor. Her lamp. The disturbed doctors who had to be persuaded he was fit to enter. Asmussen’s welcoming embrace, and the taking of a name to match his metamorphosed identity.

Meanwhile, the European drama he left behind was being further extenuated by rivers of blood. Not just the brutal devastation of the Great War and its aftermath, but the interminable migrations of refugees wandering in every direction. Impossible not to regard with a certain longing what might yet come of the Russian Revolution and its promises for a Socialist utopia. Here among the papers was a signed photograph from Lenin, thanking him for being one of the scientists unafraid of the proletariat! But who could be sure what Stalin was capable of?

Joseph Longboat wisely warned that so much power in the hands of anyone, even an idealist, could turn destructive. Steinmetz worried that such darkness remained the fundamental flaw at the core of human nature. He had seen it proved out again and again, despite his optimistic wish for redemption.
Idealist to ideologue
. The forces for good pulling
and pushing against the evil of resistance, like magnetism having its way with the world, invisible and immutable.