The Invention of Everything Else (12 page)

And with that it is over.

Big Chief Ezra quickly shakes Azor's hand before disappearing backstage. Then the young woman is there again, blocking Azor, a frantic look on her face, trying to help him down off the stool. But Azor just sits and stares, looking straight ahead at the crowd, which is beginning to file out of the theater. He has a tricky smile on his face and he shakes his chin as if disappointed.

"Come on," Walter says. "Let's go get Azor."

"I'll be there in one second," Louisa says.

Walter turns and pauses, cocking his head, unable to imagine what could be more important than Azor at this moment. "What?" he asks.

"That guy I mentioned. Arthur Vaughn. He's here."

Walter looks suspicious. "Really? Why?" He squints into the audience.

"I don't know, but I thought I'd ask him. I'll be there in a second," she tells her father.

And so Walter tucks his chin to his chest, spurned. "Fine," he says as he walks off to greet Azor alone.

Arthur is looking around the auditorium for someone, apparently, but he's not seeing Louisa. The aisle is jammed with people and she doesn't want to miss him, so with a very unladylike shrug Louisa hikes her skirt up her legs and climbs over the back of her chair, making her way toward Arthur. She is doing fine until she reaches one row of lighter-weight folding chairs. She attempts to scale them as she has the others but finds, when she is delicately balanced on top, that the chair is too insubstantial. The metal contraption spills backward and sends Louisa flying down onto her hands and knees. The chair
and Louisa land with an explosive crash. The whole audience, which had been courteously exiting the theater, falls silent and turns to see what all the commotion is—the whole audience including Arthur Vaughn.

"Hello," he says and waves. Arthur jumps a few rows to help her. He offers her his hand. She stands on her own, too embarrassed to accept his assistance. She smoothes her coat and skirt.

"Hello," she says. Louisa's head is flooded, a bucket of dishwater. She can't find one word to say to Arthur in the deluge of embarrassment. Black flecks of a beard have grown on his face since she saw him clean-shaven this morning. This new darkness to his skin makes his lips that much redder. The crowd flows past, filing their way out of the auditorium. His neck, his nose, his eyelashes. The room that had been freezing has, to Louisa, quite quickly become a furnace. She comes up with one word. "So," she says and bites her lip before thinking of something else, remembering what she wanted to ask him. "What are you doing here?"

Arthur looks puzzled. "Louisa?" he asks, and then in a lower voice, "Louisa?" as though he'd gotten it wrong the first time. "I got your invitation."

Louisa sifts the dull matter of her brain. She cobbles together a question. "Invitation?" Her mouth is making a sound like a balloon that sprang a leak. "I never sent one. I didn't even know about this until an hour ago. I don't even know where you live."

"It's a rooming house two blocks away from you," he says.

"How do you know where
I
live?" she asks and studies his face. Arthur is like a glass vase toppled off the windowsill. He's busted into a hundred distracting shards. He's a little scary, confusing her, reflecting light into her eyes from over there and over there and over there and over there. He's got the ground covered and it seems a sliver of him has already cut right through the toughest skin of her heel. Arthur has entered her bloodstream.

"It was the return address on the envelope." He takes her arm in his hand. "Are you ready to go?" he asks.

"I'm not here alone," she tells him, and Arthur turns toward her, a seam splitting open in his brow, so that even though she planned to let that declaration drill a hole of doubt into Arthur's confidence, she can't keep it up. "I'm here with my father," she says and points toward
Walter, who is standing at the edge of the stage with Azor. Walter's index finger is raised. He's shaking it not three inches away from the tip of Azor's nose, scolding.

"Your father." Arthur puffs up his shoulders, reanimated after the blow.

"You want to meet my father?"

"I'd love to," he says, though it doesn't actually sound that way.

Arthur follows Louisa over to where her father stands by the stage. She walks carefully, not smiling but keeping her teeth set firmly as if she'd gotten a butterfly to perch on her shoulder and is trying not to scare it away before she can show it to Walter and Azor.

"Dad, Azor," she says carefully.

Walter and Azor have linked arms, and though Walter still has a sour look around his mouth, he does seem happy to be reunited. Both men are leaning their backs against the edge of the stage. Azor has one hand resting on Walter's shoulder.

"Oh, Walter, look at your girl," Azor says and moves to hug her, but Louisa notices that Walter is not looking at "his girl." He is looking just over her head at Arthur. He is wondering who this young gentleman might be. Walter begins a study of Arthur and then Louisa, Arthur and then Louisa.

"Dad, Azor," she says again and turns to make sure Arthur is still standing behind her. "This is—"

"Arthur!" Azor screams. "Arthur. Oh, my! You got the invitation. You came!"

Arthur looks long at Azor. "I don't—Do I? Have we met?" He stumbles.

"Oh! I guess we haven't yet, but don't worry, we will. We will. And soon. Now, let's see—1943. Have you two gotten married yet?" Azor is nearly licking his lips he is so excited. "No. No. That's not for a year or so, is it. Right. Right! Arthur! Louisa! I'm so happy to see you both!"

No one says a thing. All noises in the room seem to be coming from the mouths of wild beasts.

"Married?" Louisa finally asks Azor with her hand resting on one cocked hip.

"Oh, dear. No, no more. Tick a lock." Azor turns the key on his lips and laughs quietly to himself. "I'm not very good at keeping track of all this."

"Azor, I don't even know this man."

"Really?" Azor says. "Oh, honey, I'm sorry. Really, I'm sorry," he says and starts to laugh with such zeal that he turns toward the stage and begins to beat his hand against it, pounding out time like the second hand on a clock, only he's moving much faster than that.

We are in Transylvania, and Transylvania is not England. Our ways are not your ways, and there shall be to you many strange things.

—Bram Stoker

A
PPROACHING ROOM
3327 Louisa holds her breath. She lifts a small printed paper sign hanging from the doorknob:
Guests Are Resting. Do Not Disturb.
There is an illustration of a woman dressed in a costume similar to Louisa's; she is raising one finger to her shushed lips. Louisa crumples the sign and stuffs it into the pocket of her apron.

"Housekeeping." She raps a few knuckles on the door. "Hello. I've come to clean the room." She waits and listens. She knocks once more before withdrawing her master key from around her neck. Holding still, she listens again. She scrapes her tongue up against the back of her teeth. The key turns within the lock and Louisa cracks the door open onto a dark room. Her palms are damp. Maybe, she thinks, he looks like a vampire because he is one, and here I am, entering his rooms just as the sun is setting. "Hello," she calls into the dark. Her curiosity bests her fear. Creeping one hand around the doorjamb, she palms the wall for the overhead light switch and depresses the ivory-topped button to
ON
.

Every oddity that she has seen in her time of looking through hotel guests' belongings, including the man who filled his empty side of the bed with an entire war of miniature lead infantrymen, tiny tanks, cannons, and even a command post for generals set up on the mountain range of his pillow, or the woman whose bureau drawers were jampacked with loaves of bread that had hardened and staled, or even the time she entered a room and found only an open window and a simple note from the room's occupant, "Life. It's no good"—the sum total of everything strange that she has seen does not match what she now beholds. She steps inside, leaving the door ajar.

The room is extraordinarily tidy but absolutely unrecognizable as one belonging to the Hotel New Yorker. It has been personalized and transformed into some sort of curiosity cabinet, a mad scientist's dollhouse. He has combined two rooms, one of them left as sleeping quarters, the other side fashioned into a workspace. One entire wall is constructed of dark drawers, and tucked in among the drawers, in a tiny alcove, are a neat desk and chair. There are terrific spools of wound copper wires and lengths of black tubing. There are magnets of all shapes and sizes, everywhere. The bed is narrow and tight. Piles of books burst from below it. The closet is filled with a number of extremely tall, elegant suits as if Louisa had entered a time warp back to the turn of the century. One wooden seltzer box contains what appears to be a tool set, though these tools are so oddly shaped that Louisa wonders whether they are tools at all. Modern art, perhaps. Just to the side of the bed is a small locked safe, and beside that, piled nearly waist high, are a number of five-pound bags of peanuts.

She's delighted. Everywhere she looks there is something wondrous and strange. Orbs, colored wires, devices she'd be hard-pressed to even assign a name or purpose to. Her curiosity takes control. The drawers, she decides, are the first order of business, but even with these she doesn't get very far. Inside the very first one Louisa finds a large stack of papers, a manuscript of sorts, hand-lettered as if it were an unbound journal. She takes the stack with her over to the window for better lighting, and there she begins to read.

"To the man-eating shark, I assure you, we are the most tender delicacy." As I enter the restaurant, I glean this snippet of conversation passing between Delmonico, the restaurateur with his thick black beard, and Thomas Commerford Martin, the science writer and host of the evening's dinner. The year is 1893.

Punctual and so alone, I take a seat at a rather large circular table. Martin maintains a post by the door, keeping an eye out for the others. Expanses of white tablecloth unfurl before me. A name card has been set before each dinner plate. I have been placed between two names
I'm unfamiliar with, Katharine Johnson and Robert Underwood Johnson. I read their names, following the curve of the handwriting, but I'm still distracted by the thoughts I left back at the laboratory. It's a tremendous situation, really. I've been perfecting a model, a telautomatic. I plan to demonstrate it publicly in the near future at Stanford White's Madison Square Garden. Essentially, telautomatics are robots that follow whispered commands, delivered on wireless, high-frequency waves, well out of the range of human hearing. These telautomatics behave exactly as I bid them to behave without wires, without a sound. Turn left, turn right, turn around, bow down. The effect, at first, is rather spooky. The uses, unnumbered.

There at the table, for an instant, I see each name card, each place filled not with a human but rather with a telautomatic. Dinner with the robots. I'm relieved by the vision.

Most often I would avoid anything as social as this supper. Society is best kept at a distance like a guiding star, far off and easy to ignore, but as my luck has changed—first with Tesla Electric Light and Manufacturing, then with an invitation to demonstrate my AC motor before the American Institute of Electrical Engineers, an offer from Westinghouse, my citizenship approved, X-rays, wireless, and the first polyphase system installed in America—I have found dinners such as this one too tempting to deflect. My ego drags me from my lab. I order a whiskey as a buffer.

When I was a boy I once saw a house on fire, burning even though it was the deepest month of winter. The shock of orange flames in the snowcapped town mesmerized me. I stood shivering, watching. The cold air was so overwhelming that even as the house burned the firemen's water turned to ice. The house both burned and iced at the same time. It seemed to exist outside the laws of physics. I liken the experience of being outside my lab, of being in society, to walking through the hallways of that house, burning and freezing at the same time. Each surface I touch holds me, scars me. There is no balance to it. I sip my whiskey.

But a dinner in my honor. My vanity renders me powerless to resist.

Sam is the first guest to arrive. I do not hear him sneak up behind me. I am instead wondering what the telautomatics would order to eat, and so I startle some when Sam bends low to murmur in my ear, the wiry hairs of his exceptionally bushy eyebrows and mustache
grazing my neck. "Niko," he whispers very seriously as if he were the bearer of some bad news. "This is God speaking." I feel his breath in my ear. "I hear you've been trying to steal my job."

"Hello, old friend."

Truthfully we met only five years ago, but a measurement in years matters very little to me. Forces have been conspiring for centuries to bring Sam and me together. I first found his books at age fourteen. He recognized the importance of the AC polyphase system immediately upon seeing a number of sketches and designs. We fell in together and have remained stuck ever since. As if we'd always known. My old friend.

"I'd be most grateful if you left my senility out of it," he says.

I stand to greet him. We make an odd pair. His forehead creeps only about as high as my shoulder. Where he is rumpled, I am pressed. Where he is fair, I am dark.

Sam has a seat in the chair reserved for Katharine Johnson.

"Whiskey?" I offer.

"Yes, I think so. Yes. Abstinence is so excellent a thing that I'm resolved to practice my passion for it by abstaining from abstinence itself."

I pour him a glass. Sam is in town for a business visit, his wife and family back in Europe. He has already been over to the lab a number of times in the past week, but still I am happy to have him to myself for a moment.

"I arrived early because I wanted to speak with you," he says. He is, in fact, ten minutes late.

A waiter deposits a hooded plate between us and pauses for a fraction of a second before removing the cover, revealing a number of warmed dates, stuffed with Stilton, wrapped in bacon.