Electric City: A Novel (5 page)

His turn had finally come. He held out his passport, looked straight into the eyes of the medical officers, and waited.

The pair of sandy-haired doctors assigned to him wore similar mustaches; one wore spectacles and the other did not. Almost in unison, they jotted rapid notes on their clipboards and shook their heads. In mere seconds their stethoscopes revealed he was suffering from bronchitis, his eyesight was poor, and even a cursory glance deemed him a truly unpromising figure on all counts. A chalk mark on his sleeve was to be the inevitable result:
L
for
lameness.

This was the moment when Asmussen shouldered his sizable frame through the throng and began waving a stack of paper bills toward the faces of the officials.

“This money,” he sputtered. “All of this belongs to my friend here, Herr—I mean Professor Steinmetz. It’s been saved for him especially!” Asmussen, having easily cleared each inspection as a returning citizen, stood in an impressive white blazer on the far side of a high oak desktop, fluttering the money again.

“And allow me to mention the most important thing. He’s a mathematical engineer with a first-rate mind. A genius! An ideal American, I assure you!”

The younger of the two doctors squinted back and forth between Asmussen and Steinmetz, his chalk poised in midair. The older doctor adjusted his spectacles as if reconsidering the object before him.

Steinmetz stood patiently,
like a mule
, he thought, until they finally and wordlessly stamped his documents with their approval. Money had
spoken. He would be allowed to disembark, set free to place his feet on dry land, accompanied by his single trunk and his beloved cigars.

But one thing would be left behind, drowned between the Old World and the New. From this day on he would call himself by an American designation, one that reflected his new identity, his determination to start over.

Charles Steinmetz.

The middle initial P. would come later, followed eventually by his full inclusion of what the letter represented:
P
for Proteus, the god of changing shape. His classmates had given him the nickname back in Breslau, a kind of teasing but without cruelty in it. They claimed it had to do with his mind’s phenomenal fluidity, shifting from one intellectual pursuit to another.

He knew too that being called Proteus was simply an acknowledgment of what was impossible to ignore, his hump, his twisted frame. Quietly he maintained a conviction that this was as God-given as his mind, to be accepted without complaint.

Hardly anyone knew about the near-constant pain in his torso and limbs. There were few positions in which Steinmetz could remain comfortable for long, a favorite being perched on a stool like some exotic bird, to allow himself the possibility of rearranging his weight whenever necessary and also gaining some much-needed height when others were sitting nearby.

He would be his own invention, in this land decidedly famous for liberty of ideas and expression. Breslau would recede into blurry memories of forgotten faces, along with those of Vienna and Zurich. Unlike his grandfather and his father, he had already vowed never to marry, never to sire offspring doomed to carry the same deformity. He was
perfectly sure of this, at the age of twenty-four, confident he had some other legacy to leave behind.

Finally on the same side of the gate, threshold of the New World, the two travelers embraced in triumph. Steinmetz, whose head was nearly two full feet lower than his friend’s, gripped Asmussen around his thick waist.

“At last, at last!”

He turned his curving back to the harbor and the Atlantic Ocean, strode forward into the future.

I
F IT WEREN
’
T
for the annual Company picnic, Henry Van Curler and Sophie Levine might never have met. Their lives could have passed side by side without overlapping, the perfectly parallel lines of a railroad track, never touching except in the illusion of a painting. Though they were nearly the same age, and ordinarily might have collided in the hallways at school, that never happened. Henry went to a boarding school in New Hampshire, the same exclusive place that had graduated the men of his family for generations.

His lineage went back to the earliest Dutch settlement of Electric City, and his last name appeared on some of the oldest grave markers in town, the ones obscured by moss in the Vale Cemetery. The Van Curlers had resided in Electric City without interruption for some impressive number of centuries, a number Henry was always forgetting on purpose. Being “known” by way of his legacy, not to mention by way of the Tragedy, weighed more heavily each year of his life; he would have gladly shrugged it off like an old coat, a useless dead skin. So far, at least, that wasn’t one of the options.

Within the past couple of years, thousands of families had been exiled from Electric City all the way to Virginia in the aftermath of layoffs and
“relocations”; nevertheless, the simulation of a thriving future persisted. And though no one but Henry seemed to notice, the annual picnic was designed to fool everyone else into imagining Electric City comprised a single extended family. Abundant food on the Independence Day theme was provided by the Company, along with a seemingly unlimited supply of soft drinks for the kids and beer for anyone over twenty-one. Even Henry was unaware that one family among the many hundreds in attendance didn’t eat any of the grilled hot dogs or hamburgers but instead discreetly loaded flimsy paper plates with potato salad and coleslaw and ears of fresh corn. A man muttered apologetically that he wasn’t very hungry, rather than daring to explain that he was keeping kosher in the midst of so many non-Jews. Keeping a low profile was best, at least in certain situations in which it was easier to say too little rather than too much.

It was July 7, 1966, and people were still talking about the blackout from back in November. Off-color jokes were shared among the adults about the wave of pregnancies appearing in the aftermath of that night.

“Urban legend,” someone scoffed.

Instead of smirking at the indirect mention of sex, the kids were more intent on passing around grim rumors about the Knolls Atomic Power Lab, sitting just a hillside away.

KAPL was squat and gray and ominous, set back far enough from the crest of the road that its structures weren’t quite visible to anyone just driving by. Out front, a huge parking lot filled and emptied twice a day, and everyone knew without exactly being told that KAPL and its secrets compromised their safety.

“We’re on the top ten targets for Soviet missiles because of that place,” a boy with black-rimmed glasses said. In his yellow T-shirt and plaid shorts, he looked to be about eleven, but sounded both older and
younger at the same time. Maybe it was the way the word
Soviet
came out of his mouth in between bites of hot dog going in.

“Duck and cover,” another boy said, red-haired and pudgy. He pantomimed the routine as if it were supposed to be funny, but nobody laughed.

In Henry’s prep school this past year, the students had obediently practiced climbing under their desks and tucking their heads beneath folded arms. He kept reflecting on the fact that the Dutch word for creek was
kill
.
How could that be anything more or less than coincidental?
Looking around now at the research lab scientists in their short-sleeved white shirts and skinny ties, their identical haircuts and pocket protectors, Henry thought they were all pretending that anyone could be saved.

Three-legged races were taking place in one of the wide grassy fields, and a softball game was assembling farther off. Henry wandered away from the duck-and-cover conversation to sit at one of the empty picnic tables draped in green-checked cloth. From there he could watch the action from the sidelines and remain invisible. In previous summers, he might have been out on the field swinging a bat, attempting to blend into the crowd by participating. But this year he had no choice.

He had broken his wrist in early May, stumbling during a track practice with hurdles and landing hard on his left side.
Falling down instead of leaping over
. The coach had been furious at Henry, as though he’d personally disappointed the entire team, and thus the school year ended on an especially sour note. When, after the first cast was removed, it was discovered that the bone had healed improperly, there was sobering
news. Back home and “out of reach of those country bumpkins,” Henry was faced with his father’s insistence that their own physician break it again. This was the kind of thing Arthur Van Curler was particularly good at, Henry knew. Breaking things until they were made more perfect.

Sometimes, when he was surrounded by people whose names he couldn’t easily pronounce, Henry imagined himself the child of Italian or Polish immigrants, people employed by the Company who lived in dilapidated houses full of unrestrained noise and spicy cooking. Feelings happened loudly in those kinds of families, he supposed. Maybe sons were expected to work in the family business too, but at least they seemed optimistic about their inheritance. All over town, storefronts with names like Petrocelli & Sons or Blesky Brothers gave Henry the convincing impression of pleasurable shared ownership among parents and siblings, while in his own case, he could only locate a disquieting sense of embarrassment. In a picnic setting like this, where the only obvious rules were the ones involving sports, Henry still couldn’t wish away the uncomfortable secret of privilege. He knew exactly which side of the tracks he came from.

Daydreaming, vaguely observing the arc of the white leather softball, Henry was caught off guard by Sophie’s approach. Sitting down at the picnic table, she said “Hi,” at the same moment one of the players yelled “You’re OUT!” The creak of the table under their shared weight became another voice from the game. Miles beyond the field, the Company headquarters sign managed to keep glowing against the backdrop of blue sky, even in the daytime.

“Why aren’t you playing?” she asked him, and then must have noticed the plaster cast on his left wrist, covering part of his forearm and with his thumb and fingers protruding. He held it up as she said, “Oh, I see.” He admitted he was just fine with being let off the hook for a while.

“What’s your excuse?” he asked, and Sophie shrugged.

“I’m a girl,” she said.

While Sophie picked at a scab on her knee, Henry used a small twig with his right hand to scratch inside his cast on the left. He couldn’t help noticing the way Sophie’s thick auburn curls glistened in the sunlight, heard his own small sigh of relief from the itch. Something began to shift inside his heart. Just like that.

D
ESPITE THE PROBABILITY
of Henry and Sophie not seeing each other again until the picnic the following year, if then, their summer worlds intersected the next day. Henry happened to be leaving the glassed-in foyer of his dentist’s office just as Sophie pulled up on a bicycle with a package in each of her rear baskets to take to the post office next door. It was Monday. He recognized her first, and had a chance to study her while she was locking the bike to a utility pole, head down and concentrating.