Electric City: A Novel (3 page)

The cabin was long gone, and Steinmetz too, not to mention each of his beloved pets like Jenny the monkey and the Gila monster. All surrendered to the gravitational pull of time, the Big Sleep,
gone to graveyards every one
. Midge heard the tune in her head, then hummed it quietly into the hushed kitchen, forgetting the words. She drained the mostly cooked noodles and ate her solitary meal by lamplight.

The day of the man-made lightning exhibition came back to her now too, the opposite of this unilluminated moment, a flash of light so astonishing it seemed able to banish every darkness. Steinmetz had explained to her that he was studying the most invisible yet important power on earth, convinced with his characteristic optimism that nature’s electromagnetism could be harnessed for the benefit of all beings—no matter how small, no matter how distant from one another, as far apart as stars.

Studying the sky before bedtime, monitoring the cycle of the moon and the movements of the constellations, Midge could occasionally feel his disembodied presence beside her, the way on brief summer nights they used to stand with their feet in the river while he talked about the
vastness of the universe. He told her about his childhood on another continent, about the mother who had died when he was only one year old, about the mountains in Switzerland where he had studied as a young man. He taught her to swim in the river, shallowest among the reeds, and later in deeper water after the Erie Canal changed the shape of their own creek edge.

Steinmetz had died when she was only fifteen, but even now, forty-two years later, she had never met anyone else as kind, as silly, as smart. She missed him every day of her life.

She considered her own death sometimes, and her decision not to have children, and the question of who would be there to witness her departure. Her brothers gave forward momentum to the Hayden lineage in their own way, while her choice was yet another curious echo of her tie to Steinmetz. How natural it could feel to spend time with other people’s children, connected not by blood but some other substance there was no name for.

And what did it mean not to be carried forward with an imprint of your own genes; what did it mean to Steinmetz to be the last of his family line? She was the one who chose to preserve the molecular memory of Steinmetz more than any of them, keeper of his canoe and his modified bicycle, his cigar boxes holding flakes of old tobacco like some atomic residue of the genius long departed. Joseph Longboat, who too was long departed by now, would have understood each of these thoughts, she felt certain. For a moment, sitting beside the subtle smokiness of the lantern, hands folded in her lap, she remembered the gentle pressure of Joseph’s hands on her shoulders the day they stood together watching Steinmetz set the imaginary town on fire.

When the phone rang and Martin Longboat’s voice was there, asking if she was all right and whether she needed any help, he could come
right over, she smiled. Looking out the window that would ordinarily have shown her the distant beaming logo of the Company, Midge focused her gaze on the rising full moon instead.

“I’ve never really minded the dark,” she said.

S
OPHIE COULD TELL
from the WABC announcer’s voice that the extent of the power failure was unprecedented; he kept exclaiming over the way New York City looked so unlike itself, with ribbons of light from the cars in dramatic contrast against black skyscrapers under the moon. She couldn’t picture it, having visited the city only a handful of times with her family when they drove the four hours south for a rare expedition to Radio City Music Hall. Mostly she remembered her amazement at the crowds and traffic and sea of yellow cabs in all directions.

“What about the elevators?” Miriam said suddenly. “Or being trapped in the subway! A tunnel!” The three of them stood in the kitchen together, tilting in the direction of the radio as though it were a television.

David shook his head. “Extremely strange that they don’t seem to know what caused something this major.” Sophie was reminded of how much her father loved to use his intellect, how frustrated he became when faced with other people who didn’t enjoy problem solving quite as much as he did. “I’m good at locating what’s wrong,” he frequently claimed, and to Sophie this was altogether too much of the truth, even though she knew he was referring to what went on in the research lab where he worked. Unfortunately, it also happened to describe family life at home.

In that moment, she felt it more disconcerting than ever to have Simon living so far away, in a place where it wasn’t even night yet. Until this past year, she’d had him as an ally of sorts. Someone with whom to share the blame, or at least a discreet rolling of the eyes.

“Is there something for dinner?” David asked, focusing on a more immediately relevant subject. Miriam, still wearing her apron, served three plates of meatloaf and potatoes that were already losing their heat. Arranged in their places around the Formica table, Sophie watched her parents’ faces in the dim glow of the candles, sensing as usual her distance from the private thoughts they were keeping to themselves. David and Miriam even had a private language, Dutch, whose vocabulary remained a mystery to both of their children, a choice rationalized by their commitment to assimilation. Their accents faded year by year, although Sophie always heard the extra thickness in their throats when they spoke English. Adding that sound to their “eccentric” religious observances, Sophie was convinced they were the most Jewish Dutch people in all of Electric City.

“You know Daniel specializes in this kind of thing,” her father commented between bites. “Electrical outages, I mean.”

“Then I bet he’ll fix it,” her mother said.

The radio had been turned off to conserve its batteries, and as if on cue, three of the candles sputtered on the kitchen counter. In the near-silence, Sophie felt that the three of them were alone in the universe, dangling in concert but not quite attached to anything else.

“It’s the anniversary of Kristallnacht,” David said softly, and Sophie imagined that he was hearing the crunch of broken glass underfoot. She knew only a single episode of this story: her father as an engineering student wandering the streets of Hamburg, counting every synagogue and Jewish storefront that had been smashed to pieces. The nationwide
outburst of organized violence had convinced him not only to return to the Netherlands but to leave Europe in haste altogether.

That brief tale always segued rapidly into the scene of his very first visit to Electric City, with the half-serious joke about how the car broke down on the way to his other interviews, and so he had no choice but to accept the job he was offered by the Company.

“I guess we were supposed to end up here,” he said, each time performing the same shrug.

“Like all our friends too,” Miriam said. “We were supposed to end up here together.”

Arriving within the embrace of Electric City’s glory days, all the men found engineering jobs offered up on the abundant waves of postwar productivity. To Sophie it was as though they’d all been seduced by the neon sign atop the Company headquarters. Yet she could also sense a tender inevitability to the group her parents gathered with, refugees from assorted countries but all from the same war, all Jewish and all homeless, looking for a place to make a living, buy a house, raise a family. They brought a handful of languages with them, but none of Sophie’s generation spoke in the accents of their parents. On the phone and during visits over coffee and cake, she often heard her mother gossiping in Dutch and Hebrew, strains of Yiddish sometimes too. But when they were all gathered together, English was the only vocabulary they had in common.

“It’s a full moon!” Sophie’s mother announced, clapping her hands as though she had just been awarded a prize. “Let’s go outside and enjoy it.”

After clumsily stacking the dishes in the sink, Miriam pulled three coats from the hall closet and urged her resistant husband and reluctant daughter out the front door to sit on the steps facing the silent street.
Every other house looked abandoned both inside and out. Miriam hugged David with one arm and squeezed Sophie with the other. Instead of a Shabbat melody, her mother sang “Everyone’s Gone to the Moon,” just one line and nothing else. For a few minutes that seemed to go on and on, they watched their breath make vapors in the silvery dark.

Hours later, in the darkest part of the night, Sophie woke up in her bedroom, listening for familiar snoring down the hall. The last of the candles had long since burned out. When she parted the curtains and saw that the moon had set, Sophie pulled a thick chenille bathrobe over her flannel nightgown, slid her feet into slippers, and grabbed a wool blanket for extra warmth.

On the concrete slab making up the back patio, she held her breath to look up, where stars poured in profusion against a vast black bowl. The blanket was big enough to lie in folds on the concrete while also cocooning her shivering body. Sophie stretched out to watch the sky for as long as she could keep her eyes open.

This is what it’s like in the desert
, she thought,
or in the middle of the ocean
.

The sky lightened so imperceptibly it was the first time in her life she understood that the stars were always there, and it was only the brightness of the sun that blinded her to the other luminous bodies scattered throughout space. Only when her back was turned, when she looked away from her own bright beacon, could she see how magnificent all those others were—countless suns all around.

When she finally admitted that it was morning, and tiptoed back indoors, the first thing Sophie noticed was that the old sounds had been restored: the humming from the fridge and the faint but now noticeable buzz of the kitchen lights. She hung up her robe and climbed back into bed, waiting for her parents to awaken too.

The return of power was reassuring—a recognizable melody running through the house—but it also set off a strange sensation in the pit of her stomach. At first she thought maybe they’d been reminded that life without electricity was still possible, that they could manage perfectly well without it. Maybe they wouldn’t need to feel so plugged in; alongside “living better electrically,” they could rediscover what it was like to be dark for a while.

Why did it seem weird that the fathers would be heading back to work as they did every ordinary Wednesday, and the mothers making lunches for school? Sophie heard Miriam on the telephone spreading Magda’s news: her husband Daniel was the engineer who figured out that the system put into place to prevent a blackout had instead caused the opposite.

“He fixed it,” Miriam said to both David and Sophie, pouring orange juice into their glasses. “Just like I said he would.”

Life was resuming as though nothing at all had gone wrong. But to Sophie everything seemed a little too bright, and yet not quite bright enough.

A
LTHOUGH
M
ARTIN
L
ONGBOAT
lived with his grandmother
across the river
—that is, on the side of the river supposedly outside the limits of Electric City—thanks to the complicated insistence of his father he attended high school with all of the scientists’ kids, the school with an Indian name. It alternately amused and infuriated him that no one there seemed to wonder about the translation, casually using the Iroquois words as if they all assumed the meaning of the language no longer mattered.

Land of high corn.

Land beyond the pine trees.

These were the timeless place-names given by his forebears, the now-invisible ones. There were still plenty of pine trees, but the fields of corn were shrinking, year by year. He wondered often if he was the only one who noticed. It was nearly impossible to sit still in geology class, for instance, and hear the teacher droning about metamorphic terrain and postglaciation. How could they care so much about scratches and chatter marks on shale without knowing the histories of this land and of his tribe?