Electric City: A Novel (31 page)

He tried and failed to recall if his grandfather had ever shown him how to do a rain dance.

Now it was July 20, the night of the moon landing. Out on the remote road with a partner, having worked overtime on storm-wrecked telephone lines, both of them were too far from home. When the truck’s
static-filled radio voice said, “In a few minutes we’ll all be witnessing history,” Patrick called up to Martin that it was time to go.

Within moments, Martin was beside him and Patrick in the driver’s seat had sharply steered them onto a dirt road leading up to a shack serving as both convenience store and local bar. An unmistakable blue glow shivered in its window, just below neon letters sarcastically announcing
The Office
. Martin noticed a promising TV antenna teetering on the shingled rooftop.

“This is it,” Patrick said, as he jogged up to the front door and pushed. Inside the dim space, maybe two dozen adults and children were squeezed together, everyone barely glancing away from the set when the two newcomers sat down on a pair of folding chairs.

All eyes were aiming at the same screen, and Martin felt a surge of sympathy rising in his chest. This was exactly how it had to be: everyone around the world discovering they were connected by way of a spacesuited man looking back at the earth. Tears sprang to Martin’s eyes, but he didn’t say a word. Later, the astronauts would struggle to find an adequate way of describing their view of home from so far away. The sun only a star among billions of others.

Martin, far from home himself, wondered who would care that Neil Armstrong’s silicone boots had been manufactured by the Company? The logo that now he could see only in his dreams was high above them, carrying the message that Steinmetz must have heard when he harnessed lightning. Electricity’s power not only to light the world, but to change the world’s view of itself.

Martin decided to memorize not only what was on the television but also this single room and the echoes of it all around the planet, a current flowing in all directions, the antidote to wars and everything that caused them.

We are all electric cities
, he thought.
Separate and together
.

T
HE BUZZING LIGHT
inside the treatment room was fluorescent, and it did not change or flicker.

First the IV dripped an anesthetic, and Gloria counted backward, only getting as far as ninety-six before her voice went blurry and then silent. The hand holding Sophie’s loosened its grip as the muscle relaxant was injected—to prevent broken bones and cracked vertebrae. A nurse inserted a rubber block between Gloria’s fine white teeth to spare her tongue, then placed an oxygen mask over her nose. Sophie willed herself not to look away when they rubbed jelly onto Gloria’s temples and connected the electrodes.

The toaster-sized machine was called a Konvulsator, its switches and dials marked in German words Sophie couldn’t make out. The temperature of the treatment room seemed suddenly much too cold. She clenched her own jaw when the doctor pressed the button, watched his fingers turning up the voltage. Sophie held her breath, watching spasms shudder through Gloria’s legs.

The nurse counted to twenty in a monotone; the doctor’s face stayed blank. In part of her awareness, Sophie realized that this was how you detached yourself from your patients, how you practiced your profession in the gear of neutral. She stared so hard she saw Henry’s mother’s forehead muscles tighten, and a tiny tear formed at the corner of each eye.

What stunned Sophie most was how invisible it all was. Not just the electric current itself but also the change it was causing, the supposed cure for Gloria’s “intractable depression.” Somewhere deep inside the brain where it couldn’t be fully understood, a pulsing electric shock was rearranging this person’s thoughts, feelings, recollections. So much hidden power. So little to see.

When the button was switched off, Sophie exhaled.

“That’s all for now,” the doctor said.

Gloria’s face softened, and the nurse peeled away the electrodes, pressing a bit of gauze to wipe away what remained of the conducting jelly at Gloria’s temples. The tears dried by themselves.

“And the side effects?” Sophie kept asking, as they wheeled Henry’s mother into the recovery room. Because the nurses and doctors seemed to dislike talking about this part. Entire periods of recent memory were being deleted. Sophie pictured a blackboard at school, fine particles of chalk floating free in the still air, vanished lines just barely decipherable afterward. Ghost words, shadow equations. After a few more strokes of the felt eraser, even those faint remnants were gone. Covered over? Replaced? Gone for good?

Nobody knew if the losses could be restored or resurrected; nobody knew if this was a temporary forgetting or a more permanent amnesia.

Sophie sat by Gloria’s bed as her eyelids twitched and quivered, opening and closing and opening and closing.

Will her memories come back? Will I be the only one left to remember him?

Gloria opened her eyes once more, reached up to touch Sophie’s nearby face. Then she rested one fingertip on Sophie’s collarbone.

“I want to give you something,” she said. “Promise you’ll keep it safe.”

Two years later, when Sophie began, along with her medical school classmates, to wear a brand-new stethoscope around her neck, she imagined what it might have been like to inherit the one that had been used in Europe by her vanished grandmother. Nestled in the hollow of her throat and balanced on that delicate strand given to her by Henry was this gift from his mother: a gold-rimmed antique oval holding a portrait of a blue eye that once belonged to some long-lost Van Curler. It now made a quiet counterpoint to the silver-and-black symbol of her life as a healer, each a talisman of a particular kind. Erasures transforming themselves inside her, as promised.

A
NNIE VISITED
M
ARTIN
in a dream, informing him that she was preparing to leave the earth. She stood in the center of her garden, her thick braided hair reaching down almost to her knees. When she held out her hands toward her grandson, he saw that her bare fleet floated just above the soil, and that her palms were filled with pebbles.

The following morning he woke before the sun and prayed, something he hadn’t consciously remembered how to do. The gestures were simple. Out in back of his small apartment, he burned a fistful of tobacco in a white ceramic bowl, watching the smoke rise in a spiral toward the barely lightening sky. He made sure no one was watching, though there might have been an owl.

Let her wait for me, please
.

After calling in sick and leaving the radio turned on in the bedroom, he filled his canvas bag with some beef jerky, a couple of tart apples, and a thermos filled with water. His knife stayed in its usual place deep in his jeans pocket; he wore both of his best pairs of wool socks. Once he had hitchhiked as far as the roads could take him, he waited in a grove of dense pine trees until the sun dropped well below the horizon.

Martin walked through moonlight along the hidden path that crossed reservation land. There wasn’t any good reason to tell anyone his plans, and if he did everything right, he would return before there were signs he had ever left. It was the last week of September 1976, just over nine years since he had gone into exile.

He stepped carefully yet swiftly across the wide fields that included the Canadian border, certain he had no choice except this risk of everything, even prison, in order to see his grandmother one last time. Not for Bear, not even for Sophie, but for the woman who had shaped his life, the one who braided feathers into his hair more times than he could count.

The crickets reminded him of the evening he had climbed the tree on the Van Curlers’ property at Lake George. Hitchhiking south not far from that same lake, the shrill sound rose and fell along with the temperature of the air. Martin felt the solid presence of the mountains observing his journey.

Three rides later, he was dropped off at an abandoned gas station just blocks from downtown. It was two in the morning. An owl was definitely following him now, its muffled wings parting the air overhead. He listened for its call and then the distant response of its mate.

Was Sophie still living in Electric City?

Martin couldn’t allow hope for seeing her, not if he was going to leave town as quickly as he came. After nine long years, he felt almost sure she had left long ago. The only comfort he could envision rested in the dry warmth of his grandmother’s hands. And in the chance of receiving one last blessing from her.

The first piece of shattering news was that Bear had run away less than a week after Martin’s departure, never to be seen again. And before that could be absorbed, his cousin explained that their grandmother hadn’t spoken a single sentence for days.

“She’s more than halfway out of here,” Isaiah said, when the two of them hugged briefly in her kitchen. Martin noticed but didn’t comment on Isaiah’s substantial weight gain. In return, his cousin didn’t ask any questions about how Martin had managed to slip back into town, or where he had been living and working all these years.

“Any word from my father?” Martin asked.

“Nobody knows,” Isaiah said.

His wife Debora was giving Annie a sponge bath, and the two men stood patiently just outside the bedroom door. Through a crack in the door, Martin could make out the back of Debora’s plaid shirt and blue jeans, and in the overheard murmuring, he appreciated the gentle way she spoke to his grandmother. There was a noticeable fragrance of sage in the house, which underscored the fact that the scent of Bear was long gone.