October Light (13 page)

The outlines of things were clearer now. The things on the desk were electric eels. They lay side by side, a few inches apart, apparently nailed down to the table in some way, and they were connected by wires. Just in front of their heads, carefully lined up so that the tips of their noses made a line as straight as a ruler line, there was a wooden thing like the paddle on a butter churn, with a crank at the end like the wooden crank on an ice-cream freezer, apparently designed so that all the eels could be bumped on the nose at once. Peter Wagner rubbed his eyes, then looked again. They were still there. There were other things—stacked up pieces of electrical equipment cluttered with wheels and dials and knobs, old pieces of rope, and under the table, coils of insulated wire.

“My name's Nit,” the man repeated. He added, this time, “Jonathan Nit.” He smiled exactly like an eel.

Peter Wagner now thought about this for a time, compressing his lips, then nodded. “My name's Peter Wagner.” When he tried to sit up he discovered that his legs were tied from the ankles to the hips like a roll of carpet in a warehouse. He threw a look at Mr. Nit, who went on smiling, the shadow of his turned-up nose growing longer and shorter as the hanging lamp swung beside him. The smile did not hide the fact that Mr. Nit was distressed, for some reason disappointed and perhaps at the same time, paradoxically, relieved.

“Jesus,” he said. “You been sleeping like a dead man.” He gave a laugh. His face was heavily lined, and under his eyes there were great gray sacks like dead things hanging by the hooves.

“How come you tied up my feet?” Peter Wagner said.

Mr. Nit's hands clutched at each other and he began frantically popping his knuckles. “Oh that,” he said. He rolled his eyes up, trying to think of an explanation, but nothing came, so he went on sitting with his eyes rolled up and his head to one side like a saint in a medieval painting. Peter Wagner pushed up on both arms, threw his feet over the side of the bunk, and began untying the ropes. Though he was not looking at Mr. Nit now, his whole attention was focused on the man, listening for the first sign that Mr. Nit might try to prevent him from freeing his feet. Mr. Nit made no move. Peter Wagner stood up, leaning toward the table for balance.

“Don't touch the eels,” Mr. Nit said, as if involuntarily.

He caught himself and drew back his hand in the nick of time. A surge of panic went through him. The eels were wired like light-bulbs in series. Touch one and they would kick back, together, a charge that would light up the whole West Coast for minutes. When the first instinctive horror passed, he remembered his latest attempt at suicide and saw in a flash of inspiration that here lay the perfect instrument; a jolt, a flash, a smell of burning flesh that he would probably miss, and Zero. He smiled grimly and reached toward the eels again. But he happened to look up. Mr. Nit sat bent over and sideways at his desk, tightly covering both eyes with his hands, except that the left eye was peeking through the fingers.

“You
want
me to!” Peter Wagner said, shocked and, in fact, somewhat hurt.

“Oh no!” Mr. Nit said, throwing himself so violently into the look of innocence that he nearly fell off his chair. “I warned you, didn't I? Wasn't it me that—”

But Peter Wagner wasn't fooled. “You don't even know me!” he said. He could have cried. “You
want
me dead. You pull me out of the fucking ocean and you waste my time and inconvenience me, and then you try to get me killed on a fucking eel!” He was suddenly furious. He clenched his fists, dangerous weapons, he knew from experience. “God damn you, it isn't right,” he said. “I'm a human being!”

The words had a powerful effect on Mr. Nit. Tears flooded down his cheeks and he popped his knuckles wildly. “Human!” he said, and laughed, sobbing. “Human. God knows! Terrific!” He popped his knuckles and shook his head from side to side and drew up his knees in spasms. Peter Wagner calmed himself and covered his mouth with his hand, thoughtfully, watching the strange performance. “You're crazy,” he said.

“I'm crazy,” Mr. Nit said. It sent him off into peals of tragic laughter that tipped the chair over backward, leaving only his jerking feet in sight. Cautiously, Peter Wagner made his way around the eel table and went over to bend beside the desk and study Mr. Nit. The little man wiggled and jerked and writhed, laughing as if heart-broken. At last he stopped. They studied each other, their faces no more than two feet apart, Mr. Nit looking thoughtfully up from the floor, with bloodshot eyes, Peter Wagner looking thoughtfully down, like Zeus at Sarpedon.

“You all right?” Peter Wagner said.

Mr. Nit pursed his lips, thinking, then nodded.

“Let me help you up.”

“I've been under a strain,” Mr. Nit said when he was back in his chair. He corrected himself: “I'm under a constant strain.” He glanced furtively at Peter Wagner to see if he believed him. “I'm an atheist.”

“I see,” Peter Wagner said.

Mr. Nit looked away, folded his hands, resisted the temptation to pop his knuckles. “It's very comforting, talking to you.” He slid another glance at Peter Wagner, then away.

Peter Wagner's mouth smiled sickly.

“Actually, what's got me so upset—” Mr. Nit struggled to find words, bit his lips together, and squinted. He looked so guilty, all at once, that Peter Wagner glanced around half expecting to see the old man in the long black coat sneaking up once more to brain him. But there was nothing, or nothing but the table of eels, the electrical equipment, and the smell. Or smells. Two distinct smells, it came to him now. The zoological smell and something else, the smell of … He strained, and at last it came to him: pot! He breathed deep, confirming the suspicion, and Mr. Nit's eyebrows lifted in alarm.

“I'm a scientist,” Mr. Nit said. He snatched at Peter Wagner's sleeve. “That's my joy and my curse. Can you imagine where civilization would be without science? Inventors have taken the place of God in the modern world. Are you aware of that? Come look!” He jumped down off his chair and ran over to the table of eels. “Look!” he said again, spreading his arms and stretching the sides of his mouth out and downward. “Eels,” he said. Lovingly. “If we could harness that power …” He turned some knobs. A red light came on. “Watch that dial,” he said, stretching his arm toward a dial to Peter's left. The dial had a range from zero to fifty thousand volts. “I merely turn this crank and bop their noses—” he turned it, “—and
zap!”
The machines all suddenly hummed, and the dial went nearly to the top.

“Whooey!” Peter Wagner said.

“Yes,” he said, rubbing his hands. The eels writhed a little, then lay still. “Terrific animals, eels. They can live either in water or on land, they're cheap to feed, they make no great mess—” He sank into thought, smiling darkly.

“That's very interesting,” Peter Wagner said. They were ugly things to look at: snakelike, sharklike, flat-bellied as snails, the color of a rushing subway train going through smog.

“A man would be famous if he could harness that power. More famous than Benjamin Franklin,” Mr. Nit said.

“I imagine he would.” Then, politely: “You should do it.”

“Hah!” He pushed his hands down into his pockets and looked grim, just a touch sly. “Not as easy as you think.” From the twitch of the little man's jaw Peter Wagner saw he'd hit a sore spot and tried to circumambulate. “Well anyway,” he said …

“Mr. Wagner,” Mr. Nit said. He turned to go over to his desk, where he stood, hands folded behind his back, his back turned to Peter Wagner. “Inventing is a God damn discouraging business. Degrading. Like everything else. Ah, I could tell you! How thrilling it seemed, the idea of inventing, when I was a young little donkey, full of beans! Roger Bacon, Faraday, Franklin, Watt—those were names to conjure with, like the rustle of yer dear love's skirt or the ineffable syllables describing her parts.” Mr. Nit's head turned, his small eyes dimmed. “Has it ever occurred to you that every discovery mankind has ever made was accidental?”

“Actually, no,” Peter Wagner said.

“It's a fact,” he said. Mr. Nit's back looked angry. His trousers were as rumpled and crabbed as his face. He shook his fists as if working up a tantrum. “Some stupid caveman banked his fire with copper ore, and that was the end of the stone age. We have records of such things. Believe me, it's depressing! The invention of glass, for instance: it's recorded in Pliny. There was this Roman merchant ship with a cargo of natron—that's a washing powder. It was driven ashore on a beach of white sand, and the crew lighted a fire on the sand to cook their food, and since they couldn't find rocks they propped up their kettle with some big lumps of natron.
Kavoom!
They'd invented glass. I could tell you a hundred stories like that. It suffocates the soul.”

“I see what you mean,” Peter Wagner said.

“Louis Daguerre, for instance.” He began to pace back and forth from wall to wall, banging one fist into the other, faster and faster. “He worked for years on the idea of fixing an image on a surface, but no luck. Then one day he laid a silver spoon on a metal he'd treated with iodine, and when he picked it up he found its image printed on …

Sally Abbott had come to another gap, several pages this time. “Oh,
tunkit!”
she said. Again she had half a mind to quit. The farther she read, she could see in advance, the more pages she'd find missing. She stared at the top of the page beyond the gap, trying to reach some decision. Without quite meaning to, half-dreaming, she read on.

… “Actually,” Peter Wagner said.

But the man was unstoppable, a looney. He might have been talking of pestilence, earthquake, death. “Thomas A. Edison,” he rushed on, “invented the phonograph in eighteen seventy-seven when he was trying to invent a telegraph-repeater that could make a needle record dots and dashes on a revolving paper disk as they came in over the telegraph line. When the needle passed over the indentations at high speeds it vibrated like a tuning fork, and that was the secret of the Victrola! In eighteen thirty-nine Charles Goodyear discovered the secret of curing rubber when he clumsily dropped a sticky glob of uncured rubber into sulphur. And then there's Acheson's ridiculous discovery of—”

“How come you locked the door?” Peter Wagner said.

Mr. Nit turned, looking uncomfortable, wringing his hands. “Oh, that.” He seemed to sort through explanations that might pass. He found nothing. At last he said, animated again, fiercely rattling some door of his own, “Worst of all—Gramme's discovery of the motor. In eighteen seventy-three Gramme entered a number of dynamos at an industrial exhibit in Vienna. By mistake, a workman reversed the connections between two dynamos, and to the astonishment of everyone looking on, the armature of the second dynamo began to revolve: the electric motor was invented.” Mr. Nit stamped and slapped his right fist into his left hand harder than ever by way of comment.

“How come the door's locked?” Peter Wagner said. He jerked the wooden handle illustratively.

“What's the difference?” Mr. Nit said. Sweat popped out on his forehead and his wrinkles twitched. “One minute you want to drown yourself, and the next you want to go up and take the air. You should try and be reasonable.”

Peter Wagner thought about it. He had bitten to the bone of history, chewed to the hirsute pits of metaphysics, and yet he'd remained, at least much of the time, a harmless man, nonviolent. How much did the world require? “I
am
reasonable,” he said. “I just don't like to be locked up with a bunch of eels. They smell.” He added, “For one thing.”

Mr. Nit grew increasingly nervous. He smiled briefly, like distant lightning flicking on and off, then wiped his forehead on his sleeve. “So ironic, this piddling little human rage for freedom. So short-sighted and misguided, set against
true
freedom, that is, sacrifice. So the door's locked, you say. So what door isn't? It makes me laugh.” He laughed, experimental, exactly like a goat. “Human freedom. What a laugh!” He laughed again. “Pride of a piss-ant! What is, I ask you, Mr. Wagner,
man?
The great technologist? The star-stepper? Bird-poop! You know what we are? We're the late evolution of a stick. Fact! You think human reason came down out of its tree and perceived the potential of the stick? Of course not! A man swung a stick by accident and the stick improved his mind. Exactly! There's an article about it in the
Science Digest.
I think I may still have a copy here someplace.” He turned as if to look, then abruptly changed his mind. “We do nothing, Mr. Wagner. Things
happen
to us.”

There was a thump above, then another. Someone coming aboard. Mr. Nit's despair became more urgent. He leaned forward, clutching his hands together. “You were right to want to kill yourself. It's not too late, you know. It was a brave, brave thing you attempted. I mean
morally
brave.”

Peter Wagner smiled wanly, feeling it was true but feeling, also, suspicious.

Mr. Nit glanced past him at the door. Now there was more than one person above. Peter Wagner tried to separate the footsteps. The shuffle of the old man, then younger feet—the girl's, the muscular man's, perhaps. Were there more than that? The suicide squad? Was it illegal to kill yourself in California?

“To be or not to be,” Mr. Nit said, stretching his arms out,
“that
is the question!” He'd snatched a jackknife from somewhere and was holding it up in front of his face, looking at it cross-eyed. Peter Wagner took a step toward him in alarm, then hesitated. It was clear that Mr. Nit was not going to kill himself before finishing his speech. “Consciousness, that's our tragedy,” he said. “We watch ourselves, we watch the world, and we perceive in horror that we're no more free than, so to speak, the physicist's ball on an inclined plane—except in this, yes! We're free at least to say ‘No, Universe! No, no, no, no,
no!!'”
He jerked his arms as if to stab himself but hesitated, looking at the blade. It was rusty, perhaps not sharp. He made a face. “That's why I admire you.”