Interfictions 2 (22 page)

My father's oldest brother was at the age when little boys fall in love with war. In the family's rush to get downstairs, no one noticed that he had brought his favorite hat into the basement, the one that superficially resembled the square
czapka
with the scarlet band of the
Zandarmeria
, the Polish Military Police. When the gunshots, the screams, and the smoke had cleared, the Germans discovered that their fugitive Polish soldier was just a ten-year-old boy.

Out of the hospital and recuperating in his tranquil blue apartment, my father took his pain pills and reviewed what he knew about the sequence of events from the German invasion of September 1, 1939, to the partition of Poland, just one month later, by Germany and the Soviet Union. He confirmed that nothing could have been done in those thirty-odd days to prevent his brother's death. Really and truly the only way to undo that past event was to prevent World War II, the first and only item on his To Do list.

My father is an engineer, not a historian. He spent six months at the Tennessee Valley Authority Reactor Facility, reworking the electrical grid to harvest the nuclear energy more efficiently. He can track the path of an electrical current through conductors and resistors. He understands the laws of cause and effect. He was convinced that there was a specific moment, a
prima mobile
in the timeline of Polish history that was responsible for the sequence of events that occurred in the basement of his childhood apartment building. He started reading history books. It was not long before he found what he was looking for.

Between 1764 and 1795, Stanislas August Poniatowski was King of the Most Serene Republic of the Two Peoples, also known as the Commonwealth of Poland and Lithuania. The official motto of his kingdom:
Si Deus Nobiscum quis contra nos
? (If God is with us, then who is against us?). Sadly, God could not protect Poland from its aggressive neighbors, Prussia, Austria, and Russia. As it turns out, King Poniatowski was little more than a puppet, having been forced onto the throne, against the wishes of the Polish nobility, by his former lover, Catherine the Great of Russia, who then virtually controlled the country. The one and only independent (one might say, rebellious) act of his reign was the brilliant speech he made upon the adoption of the new Polish Constitution of May 3, 1791, a constitution written and ratified without the approval of King Poniatowski's puppeteers. What happened next was the
prima mobile,
and my father was sincerely convinced that if he could make Poniatowski retrace his steps of the night of May 3, 1791, he could change the course of Polish history, and thereby change the history of Europe, and thereby bring his brother back from the dead. How to make a king take counsel from a humble engineer?

I had no idea what was going on inside my father's head when finally I convinced him to spend a few days with me and my husband in sunny Los Angeles. I remembered from growing up in New York how bad it got by February, when the charming snowdrifts left over from the Christmas holidays turned into sooty hills and valleys dotted with frozen dog shit, extremely treacherous terrain for a fifty-nine-year-old man on crutches.

As soon as I saw my father at the airport, I could tell that something was troubling him besides the weather and his leg.

It was the lack of purpose that got him down, I rationalized, a temporary depression brought on by the early retirement. Had I known that he was revising mental blueprints for a fantastical contraption he had once made me, I would have marveled at the coincidence of taking him to see the ?berorgan at the Getty.

When I was ten years old, and my parents still had one good year left on their marriage, my father built me a beautiful little windmill. It was science fair time again at my school; this year I was determined to win first place. With the help of World Book Encyclopedia (birthday present), I created a self-sustaining environment by filling a Ball jar with water, snails, and aquatic plants. The plants were supposed to feed the snails, and the poop from the snails was supposed to feed the plants. It was simple and elegant, but it only got me an honorable mention. I vowed to do better the following year, so I came to my father and asked for his professional advice. In just a couple of hours, after dinner and before the evening news, he had transformed the contents of our junk drawer into a windmill. I marveled at its miniature perfection, two feet high on our kitchen table, cute little blades spinning when I connected the red wire to the green wire. No amount of patient explanation could make me understand how the thing actually worked.

Needless to say, my submission to the science fair was disqualified for cheating (those were the days when it was forbidden for kids to turn in work that was actually done by their parents). I was humiliated. My father felt even worse for setting me up to fail, albeit with the best intentions. It had never occurred to him that I wasn't able to comprehend the mechanism of the windmill even though I sat at his elbow during its construction. My father could never understand why everyone didn't see the physical world as clearly as he did, why simple things like mathematics and science provoked confusion, distrust, and sometimes even hostility.

For instance, how would I have reacted if I'd figured out that what my father had made me was not just a clever toy, but a time machine? Had I known that my father had given me the means to fast-forward to a time beyond the havoc of my parents' divorce, would I have used it? Had I known that I could skip past the 1980s and ‘90s and settle gently into the place where I am now, at peace with myself, would I have done it? Would I look ahead, given the opportunity to use the windmill today? Probably not. Nature shows us only the tail of the lion.

The ?berorgan could have been the intestinal tract of an enormous creature made from cardboard tubing, tinfoil, dry cleaner bags, and electrical tape, except it played music. My jet-lagged father stood inside the light-filled atrium of the Getty Center listening to the hooting strains of Bach coming out of toilet paper rolls and promptly reminded me that he had worked on the Tennessee Valley Authority Nuclear Power Plant. He wasn't interested in children's toys cobbled together from bits of junk.

I was deeply disappointed that my father failed to make the connection between the ?berorgan and the windmill he made me. Perhaps he didn't remember the windmill. Why should he? How could he be expected to remember an insignificant event in the childhood of his first child, the one he only lived with for ten years, the one who came before the two new children, whose elementary school years were fresher in his mind?

But I was wrong to underestimate the power of the ?berorgan. It jogged his memory the same way it did mine (though it was only several months later, when I sat down to transcribe his words, once again at my father's elbow, that I finally, fully, understood the mechanism of the windmill). That night, after a light dinner, my father emptied the contents of my junk drawer into a shopping bag and locked himself into the spare bedroom.

Having already mapped out his
prima mobile
around the afternoon and evening of May 3, 1791, my father was still left with the “wet” problem ("wet” referring to the humid, mycelial world of human interactions, as opposed to the “dry,” hygienic world of science) of manipulating a monarch. By employing the principles of electrodynamics in combination with a reverse cause/effect vector and the information he had gleaned from his history books regarding the life cycle of the average head of state, my father concluded that favorable results would follow if he approached King Poniatowski not at the height of his reign, the previously mentioned May 3, 1791, but at its absolute nadir.

By 1798, Catherine the Great was dead and Count Poniatowski was no longer king of the Commonwealth of Poland and Lithuania. In fact, there was no commonwealth: it had been torn to pieces by Prussia, Austria, and Russia. Despised by his countrymen and practically a prisoner in his own house, Count Poniatowski was forced to swallow his pride and accept an invitation from the new emperor of Russia, Paul I, the crazy son of Catherine the Great and her only official husband, Peter III. The new tsar had invited his mother's former lover to live out the rest of his days in St. Petersburg, with a modest pension provided by the Russian crown. Being a connoisseur of irony, Paul I even offered Poniatowski the Marble Palace in which to live, the exact same mansion his mother had built for her other lover, Gregory Orlov, who had replaced Poniatowski in her heart and bedchamber (and whose brother had killed the father of Emperor Paul I).

With all this history carefully plotted in the form of a circuit diagram, my father taped this “map” to the wall of my spare bedroom and dumped the contents of my junk drawer onto the quilt I had purchased earlier in the week in anticipation of his visit. He sorted through greasy gaskets, bent paperclips, lint-covered gum balls, rusted nails, used twist-ties, packets of soy sauce, keys to forgotten doors, a mouse trap, Hershey's Kisses, matchbooks without matches, a tape measure, a box of regular strength Ex-Lax, and a water pistol, keeping an inventory of everything. By midnight, he had finished reconstructing the windmill time machine.

Time is an arrow. Time is a sphere without exits. Time is the reef upon which all our frail mystic ships are wrecked. Time is the fire in which we burn. Time is the longest distance between two points.
Tempus fugit
. Many fancy things have been said about time, but one thing everyone can agree on is that time, like space, is three-dimensional. It follows that just as one is able to move freely through a three-dimensional space, one should be able to move freely through three-dimensional time. The easiest way to move freely through time is via the fourth dimension. But what is the fourth dimension?

You know when a wheel spins so fast that at a certain point it looks as if the center of the wheel is spinning in the opposite direction from the rim? Well, it does. The centrifugal forces created by a spinning wheel begin to generate, following Amp?res Law, a weak electrical current. This is not unlike what happens in the solenoid in your car, in which a three-dimensional coil wrapped around a metallic core produces a magnetic field when a current is passed through it. Thus the center of the windmill produces a weak magnetic field which begins to drag on the fabric of space-time until there's a snag and a pucker and an accumulation of extra fabric. This extra fabric is the fourth dimension.

And if you reach with nimble fingers into the center of a reverse-spinning wheel and pluck at a bit of that fourth dimension, you'll find that it yields to your touch, and that it is extremely fine, and practically invisible. And if you pull and pull on the fourth dimension, you'll pull out enough for a handful, and when you examine it you will find that it's quite flexible. And if you keep pulling, you'll eventually pull out enough to cover your entire body, like a pair of footsie pajamas, plus hood. And if you step into this garment made from the fourth dimension, you can go
anywhere
, because an additional property of the fabric of the fourth dimension is it
pelastricity
(penetration and elasticity). You can go anywhere; all you need is a map. Time is on the side of the outcast.

In 1798, St. Petersburg experienced an exceedingly mild February. The Neva was slushy, not frozen. On Millionnaya Street, just one block in from the Gulf of Finland, where the Marble Palace stood out from the candy-colored townhouses like a displaced family crypt, the arctic wind did not peel the skin from my father's forehead, as it should have done at this time of year. Though the Marble Palace was far superior to the Getty Center with regard to its form and the quality of its building materials, there was no doorman to greet my father as he climbed its wide front steps. The gardener had neglected to wrap the boxwoods in burlap, and they had died in the first frost of the season. A brass lion's head door knocker, completely black with tarnish, produced a sound like rocks falling down a mineshaft. My father could barely contain his nervous excitement at these signs of neglect.

The door swung open on creaking hinges, and my father beheld Count Poniatowski. He was older, of course, than the robust image preserved by the court painters, but he was still as tall and handsome as in his prime. Wisps of fine silver hair framed his high forehead. He was dressed in carpet slippers and a blue velvet sable-trimmed robe. A beautiful white chicken was perched on his left shoulder; she, too, had fine silver plumage on her aristocratic head. My father bowed deeply and introduced himself. Poniatowski offered his thin old man's hand to be kissed.

That a countryman from another century had come to visit him in his exile did not disturb the former king of Poland. He had met many exotic people during his active years, both during his youth, while attached to the diplomatic corps in St. Petersburg, and in his own court. Now, left with no retinue except the old nursemaid who had taken care of the infant he had fathered on Catherine the Great (alas, mother and daughter were both dead now), Poniatowski was glad to have someone new to talk to.

The count closed the heavy wooden door and invited my father to follow him into a pale gray marble sitting room. It was bare except for a small Bukhara rug, a shabby divan, silver candelabra, and two Karelian birch armchairs. An imposing black marble fireplace, tall enough for Poniatowski to stand in, consumed smoldering remains of the furniture that must once have decorated this room. Smoke backed out of the fireplace and crept up the marble walls; it had been years since the chimney was swept. Despite the embers, a subterranean chill hung in the air.

Poniatowski offered my father one of the armchairs and took the divan for himself. They sat in silence for a few minutes, my father stealing glances at the chicken, Poniatowski examining his neatly manicured fingernails. The chicken eyed my father in between bouts of grooming its topknot of decorative feathers. It really was the prettiest chicken my father had ever seen.