Electric City: A Novel (34 page)

The chiropractor in San Francisco had asked Midge to help her locate the knot in Midge’s upper back, just beneath her left shoulder blade.

“That’s the spot,” Midge said, flinching beneath the woman’s fingertips.

After deftly proceeding to snap something rather alarmingly into place, the young woman had commented, with tenderness, “It can be sensitive there, behind your heart.”

Midge remained on the table for a few minutes after that, feeling her body try to find its new arrangement. “Thank you,” she said, with genuine appreciation for the experience, though she instantly decided it would never be repeated. That had been a long time ago, on the other side of the country from where she belonged.

“You wouldn’t believe how fast cars can travel these days,” Midge spoke aloud to the air, not minding if anyone alive might overhear her. “But the pollution’s a pretty wretched price to pay for modern life. You’d be the first to agree about that, I’m sure.”

A high-throttling breeze was rising now, yanking leaves and throwing them at the ground. Not far from where she was standing, Midge could make out the shape of the tragic angel grieving on top of the
Van Curler mausoleum.
More boys who died too young
, she thought, unable to imagine what it would be like to lose not one but two of your children. It happened all the time in other centuries, in other countries.
But weren’t we supposed to be protected from all of that now, in the Great Age of Modern Medicine, in the New World?
Then she wondered what Steinmetz would have said about transplants and dialysis, keeping bodies on life support even when the brain was never going to come back.

“I miss you,” she said. The wind blew her words among the leaves, which scattered across the cemetery, until they piled along the wrought iron gates framing the garden of the dead.

W
HEN IT WAS
no longer a rumor but a fact, no longer hinted at underground but declared out loud and made official on both sides of the border, the Amnesty became part of Martin’s consciousness and then settled there for a while, fermenting. He hesitated to be sure this wasn’t a ploy; if anything had ever been learned by an Indian it was to be deliberately mistrustful whenever it came to governments and documented promises. Extreme wariness was required regardless of so-called party affiliation or what kind of man President Carter appeared to be on television, what his words looked like on newsprint or even sounded like on the radio.

This was simple history: vows broken like the smallest of twigs, a flick of the wrist or a twitch of an eyebrow, snap of a camera lens or a pulled trigger. Martin owed it to himself and to his ancestors not to take any assurances for granted, not to believe something just because he wanted to.

So he waited. President Ford had tried an Amnesty in 1974 but there were strings attached: obligations to work in service organizations, and who knew what else. With Carter inaugurated at the start of 1977, this Amnesty seemed genuinely openhanded, not a trap door. Others returned to the United States ahead of him, and the news stayed good, and there were no repercussions or arrests, no backstabbing or reneging.

Weeks passed, months. The days lengthened and temperatures rose; earth sent its moisture and fragrances into the heavy air. Insects traded messages, and birds lined up on the telephone wires. Martin watched for signs of danger and saw that the river remained calm; clouds passed across the sky and didn’t rain down damage or loss or death.

Patiently and methodically, he began making arrangements, giving away nearly all of the little he owned, trusting a local charity to figure out where his belongings could do the most good for someone else. A mattress with platform, a couch, a desk, a kitchen table and chairs: his small apartment emptied itself easily, until it began to resemble the impersonal space it was when he first rented it.

Without self-pity or blame, he knew that nobody would miss him.

He bought a one-way ticket on Greyhound and crossed back over.

Electric City entered from the vantage point of the bus station appeared particularly grungy and desolate, a lost place for lost souls. Martin knew that bus stations couldn’t be counted on for representational accuracy, but still the obviousness of the bleak mood gave him pause. Whatever the Company planned for keeping the few remaining thousand local men gainfully employed, downtown where the plant used to sprawl was looking more like a place where a plague had struck. Buildings still stood but they were as empty as cardboard boxes. The end-of-workday siren wailed into the void and Martin jaywalked without seeing a single car.

“Where is everybody?” he asked the empty street. The glowing letters above the factory headquarters seemed almost a mockery.

All around, Martin saw trash-filled parking lots and broken-glassed storefronts. Illegible graffiti stained the pitted outer walls of warehouses;
even Erie Boulevard wore an exceptionally depressed air. He knew from scanning the headlines that the Company, having moved so many jobs into the South, was now moving even more jobs to Asia, wherever labor was cheapest. Martin had no trouble imagining the snaky length of the unemployment line, his own fellow assembly-workers undoubtedly among its ranks.

So much for Steinmetz and his Socialist ideas. Electric City was being disconnected, unplugged from its own socket.

The farther he walked from State Street, the deeper he listened for birdsong as the mapping of territory. He had taught himself so many names for each North American species, not just the Latin designations of phylum and class and genus but the Mohawk words too, the ones that spoke of wingspan and nest shape. Familiar seasonal music could be found in every arabesque overhead, every gesture and pause. Now, almost as though he had never left, he walked along the river’s edge, his own patterned footsteps harmonizing with the sky language, even with birds he couldn’t see.

Like before, even Martin’s cousin Isaiah didn’t know he was coming back. It wasn’t as though anyone needed an exact date for his arrival, and hadn’t that always been the way of his family? To listen for the season’s invitation, the changing intensity of sunlight as a beacon of homecomings. July’s sticky heat pressed against him, softening his clothing and moistening his skin.

He knew that Bear could not possibly still be alive. It used to be that even if Martin was miles across town, across the river, in Bear’s universe, when Martin’s footsteps were heading closer to the door, molecules alerted his ears and his nose. A tingle in his nervous system making the fur on his back rise up, a thump of his tail in the midst of a dream.

And Sophie?

When Martin tuned inside himself, focusing on a pair of points beneath the cage of his ribs and at the center of his abdomen, he felt absolutely sure she didn’t reside here anymore. Unfortunately that also meant she could be pretty much anywhere, in another state or even another country. He’d so thoroughly forced himself to imply no claim on her while he was in Canada, he didn’t dare allow himself to question whether that silence had been a mistake. When his parents had left him—first Martine in death, and then his father in faraway work—he learned not to take abandonment too personally. Much more benevolent to keep his eye on what
wasn’t
missing.

She would have learned her own ways of living with loss by now. But for the first time in his life, he began to imagine what it might be like to choose to stay connected, to keep even the frailest of cords from snapping apart.

He considered wandering past Henry’s house, to search for the fox and interpret the wind. He could look between the stacks of books in the library, ask questions between the pages. Somewhere within miles or maybe days of distance, Sophie could be a wife and mother, a research scientist, a professor.

Did she even want to know him now, so many years gone?

He would have to find out.

M
ONDAY,
M
ONDAY
, S
OPHIE
sang under her breath, trying to invite optimism into the July morning.
So good to me
. She was late for work, waiting too long for the delayed subway line to get her to the ER for a shift she should never have agreed to take. She’d impulsively agreed to extend herself as a favor to a colleague not quite back from a long weekend in East Hampton. Another morning of stepping through the automatic ambulance doors of Mount Sinai Hospital, never quite knowing what she’d find awaiting her. Sometimes she felt her entire life had been like this: a doorway with some enigma on the other side, a spectrum from chaos to paralysis, crowded to evacuated, cacophony to deafness.

Her skin itched every time she imagined saying goodbye to her emergency life, a choice that would require forcibly resisting the urge to look over her shoulder in case she was needed for one last procedure. As an intern, she had envisioned going into family practice. Taking time to sit with her patients and find out about their lives, calmly listening to their fears and responding to their questions in lengthy detail. But instead she kept discovering how much she loved being the woman in motion, the one with the stethoscope and a scalpel-sharp mind for triage, balancing intricate lives in her grasp.

“Things go wrong,” her chief resident had repeatedly said. “No matter how skilled we are, doctors just like everyone else have to stay
humble, with all the same limits and imperfections. The key is to know almost everything, to be prepared and then to surrender. Having the tools is as close as you can get to having control, but the outcome still doesn’t belong to you. I’m not talking about God but just about reality and life and death. We are almost but not quite in charge.”

“Time of death: that’s your job too,” she was taught. “Pronounce it.”

For Sophie that was the dazzling paradox at the core of her world. Getting to take responsibility for the losing and the saving, both.

M
ARTIN HAD IMAGINED
himself sitting with Sophie on a bench in Electric City’s own Central Park. The lost years would rise and fall between them, substantial and irrelevant. Where they’d lived and with whom, lovers and friends, jobs, vacations, happiness even. The rest of it. Stories now, as if a decade could be reduced to a simple narrative, episodes illustrated by photographs or scars, each wrinkle an event, a moment of sorrow or worry. And was any of it any less real than that summer on Lake George? Or that winter they didn’t all survive?

He had been dreaming again of his great-uncle falling from the bridge, falling over and over, splashing into the green-black water. Other men were falling too, more than he could count, losing their footing on the bridge—which transformed into a cloud-piercing skyscraper he was working on with Robert, elaborate arrangements of steel beams and rebar.

Whenever he awoke from one of these nightmares, Martin told himself that these were fears about building a new life for himself. This terrifying desire to climb toward the future—with or without the one woman he hadn’t seen in so long.

It wasn’t Electric City that could reunite them, he understood now. It would have to be something new. Another city, a place free of memory. A place they would each have to discover, just like stepping off a ship
and onto an unfamiliar shore. Steinmetz taught them that, but Martin was deciphering truths of his own. Sometimes you had to journey across continents and oceans; sometimes you had to reach across a border and back again. In order to become yourself. The new New World.

I
T WAS
J
ULY
13, 1977, and Sophie was halfway through back-to-back shifts in the ER. By now she knew the necessity of pacing herself, mastering the tricks of slowing down during the occasional lulls in the action, finding empty spaces to sit down while reviewing charts instead of leaning on the counter at the nurses’ station. She could swear she’d seen doctors fall asleep standing up, but was determined as often as possible to prove her fortitude and stamina, wouldn’t permit herself any state less than alert and on duty.

For a Tuesday, this sequence wasn’t out of the ordinary: a car accident with excessive bleeding but no broken bones, a false alarm for a pregnant woman who needed to be sent back home, one high-on-something psychotic who thought he was still under attack in the jungle of Vietnam and needed to be evaluated upstairs.

That was the first few hours of the morning and then everything went quiet for a stretch. Sophie took her chances and sneaked a nap in one of the unused lounges, pulling the heavy beige drapes and locking the door after checking to be sure her beeper was on.