The Invention of Everything Else (14 page)

"I have a story," Katharine says. Up until then she'd been rather quiet, absorbing, or asking short questions for more information. "This was years ago, when I was a girl and my parents had brought our family out to the shore for a summer's vacation. I believe the home belonged to a man my father had known in college. It was a reunion of sorts, and the old house was filled with people. I can't remember much else about the week or who was there, but I won't ever forget how my mother shook me awake in the middle of the night. 'Katie. Katie.' She spoke directly into my ear so that my eyes popped open, instantly frightened, alarmed at the sudden shift from sleep to waking. The house smelled of weathered pine boards, the salt from the sea. 'Come with me,' she said and took my hand. I followed her and remember thinking how she looked like a ghost. Her white nightgown glowed blue in the darkness. I remember thinking that we were in danger. Our bare feet made hardly a sound. Indeed, it was difficult to know whether or not I was still dreaming.

"The house was a magnificent old thing tucked into a bay. There were tremendous porches that wrapped around both the first and the second floors, making it entirely possible to spend all your time outside—indeed, some of the other children staying at the house had made up pallets on the porch floor so that they'd be able to sleep in the ocean breezes. My mother led me out onto the second-story porch, and I suppose I really did, at this point, think I was dreaming. Because, you see, the moon, which was just rising and so was as large as a house, had turned the most disconcerting shade of deep red. It was nothing that could be mistaken for a harvest moon, nothing simply reddened by the sun's reflection. The moon was as dark, as red, as the inside meat of a cherry. There was nothing natural about it. My mother and I joined the other children, the other families who'd all been awakened by this magnificent moon, and there we stood in our nightclothes, waiting by the sea for someone to explain to us why the moon had begun to bleed.

"No one said a word. No one had a clue how to begin to explain a sight as odd as this. There were perhaps six or seven adult men gathered with us on the porch, men of great learning and wide experience, men who, I thought, knew everything. Their mouths hung open, agape, silent.

"At first the unknowing disturbed me. What could it mean to have phenomena go unexplained? Never in my short years had that happened before, and so it seemed that the very intellectual ground I had stood on as a five-, six-year-old girl crumbled away at that moment. I was frightened at first, but then, the longer I stood, my hand held within my mother's palm, the mystery of this moon and the idea that there was something unknowable in our world had my heart racing. The possibility for wonder, for marvel and stupefaction, felt, perhaps, like the greatest freedom I had known so far in my life."

I lean in, drawing my hands across my thighs. "But what was it?"

Katharine smiles. "You want to know? Are you sure?"

"Yes. Of course."

"It was nearly twenty years before I understood why the moon had turned blood red. Are you sure you want to know?"

"Why wouldn't I want to know?"

"Because once you have an explanation, all the other possibilities fall away. It will ruin the mystery. I was sad when I learned that there was a perfectly understandable reason."

"I see," I say and measure my options. "Still," I conclude. "I must know."

Katharine nods. Robert smiles. He apparently already knows. She takes a moment's pause, lingering and drawing out the wonder. "Ash. From a volcano in Mexico." And that's all she says. Simply. Katharine leans back, smiling. Satisfied.

"Ash," I repeat. "Of course," I say and I realize what she means. Something in knowing is not quite as wonderful as not knowing.

The sky is lightening to dark blue and our party quite suddenly comes awake to the realization that we have closed down Delmonico's. The waiters yawn and stretch and keep a firm eye on our table, the last one there. Thomas, graciously, draws the evening to a close, and we step out into the gray street. Birds like black spots fly overhead. The businesses are shuttered closed. We say our goodbyes to the others and Sam promises to drop by the lab the following day. As he leaves, he gives me a crooked glance. I'm unsure what to make of it. Jealousy. Warning. "Sweet dreams," I call out to him as the Johnsons and I set out together, walking north, our shadows swinging like pendulums suspended between the street lamps.

The street is quiet. I am drunk, perhaps. I am confused. I am in danger. Sorrow at the prospect of saying good night circles in front of me. My hands seem made of flesh and the thought of my lab leaves me cold. I turn in toward the Johnsons' warmth. We could tuck ourselves into an alleyway, hold back the sunrise. Not moving forward or backward from this rare place where I might actually deserve such tenderness. I want to hold them here, and so the dungeon door swings open.

A cut, a hook, a wound to make them mine. A story for the Johnsons.

"I had a brother once." This is how I start a story that's never been told. "His name was Dane."

Katharine stops walking and turns to face me. Robert stops as well. The three of us make a triangle leaning in to each other as if to keep my secret safe there in the shape we make. I open my coat some to let Dane out. He's right there. He always is, one hand around my neck, one hand caging my heart.

"Smiljan was a small town, but my brother, Dane, was large. Astonishing good looks, charm, imagination, intelligence." I tick off the qualities that made Dane unforgettable. "I was not alone in wanting to be exactly like him. My sisters wanted to be just like him. All children wanted to be exactly like him. Indeed, many of the grown men and women who accidentally brushed up against Dane in church did so not by accident but because they too wished they could be more like him."

Robert straightens his spine, protecting this conversation from the outside. Katharine bids me to continue.

"Dane would speak," I tell them, "and whole cities, kingdoms, democracies, and apple orchards would spring from his words. Conjured from nothing but sound. Foreign lands. Foreign languages. French, German, English were no trouble at all. In his stories, I understood. In his stories, in the breath issued from his lungs, I first saw machines whirling as if each word were a moving picture.

"I followed Dane everywhere. My love for him was—" I pause to consider the best noun. I search the street beyond Katharine's head. "Tyranny. If I wandered away I feared I would return only to hear my
mother say, 'Oh, Niko, you just missed it. Dane was telling me a wonderful story!' And the hole of what I had missed, the hole of not being my brother, after some time, dug down into my ear canals, through my nose and mouth. Envy and love choked me like a drill," I explain. "A drill run through my head, my throat and liver. If you can imagine, I felt this hole on the bottom curve of my stomach, and there it carved out a home," I tell them. "A home for a hole."

Both Katharine and Robert smile slightly before Katharine narrows her eyes for me to continue.

"Dane got a horse and I got a hole. And words," I say, "can't do justice to the vision of Dane on his Arabian. It was like seeing the mechanism of thought at work—too beautiful to be visible. Dark hair, pale skin. Flank and muscle. His youth was like a kingdom." I sharpen my focus. "But the hole pestered me. The hole grew and gnawed and so I went out looking for something to fill it with.

"I memorized
Faust,
the entire book. It was no problem. My mother had taught me how to trick words to climb in through my eyeballs or ears where they'd fall down, as if into a mineshaft. There was no way out. 'Treacherous, contemptible spirit, and that you have concealed from me! Stay, then, stay! Roll your devilish eyes ragingly in your head! Stay and defy me with your intolerable presence! Imprisoned! In irreparable misery! Delivered up to evil spirits and to condemning, feelingless mankind!' I used to say it like a prayer before bed, watching Dane already sound asleep."

Katharine and Robert haven't flinched.

"One morning I remember Dane's horse stomped its foot. The horse was anxious for Dane to come whisper in its ear. I stomped my foot too and it worked. Dane pulled back my hair that had grown long. He whispered in my ear, 'I love you, little brother.' And it was true. Above anything my brother and I loved each other. But still. This inescapable misery. This love and hatred I had, knowing that the world and my parents expected wonders, miracles from Dane, not much from me. I followed him outside. He rode away. I stomped my foot again, but he was gone, and there where I stomped was a perfect stone to fill the hole. It was smooth and round. It was, I thought, exactly what I had been looking for. I shoved and shoved, forcing the round rock of dolomite into my mouth. I remember the taste of dirt, the taste of a basement cellar where—" I hesitate. "Where," I try again, "say, one brother might shove another down the stairs."

Katharine adjusts her eyes, half-lidded, aware now, as if she already knows and already forgives. Both she and Robert hold our triangle, knowing that to move would break the trance of this night.

"I gagged. The stone was far too large to fit down my throat. I spit it out into my hand. 'Idiot,' I said to the rock. 'Idiot,' I said again and launched the stone up into the sky. I remember listening then for the sound of it falling, the sound I had come to expect from gravity. But the sound didn't come."

"What happened?" Katharine finally asks in a very flat voice.

I turn all of my attention to her. Katharine's face has opened. I work my way into it and so I am unsurprised to see Dane standing there beside her, warning me back to the lab. He is still so beautiful. He is still so jealous.

"It was an accident," I say. Dane takes a step closer to me, his skin blue and pale. "I was eight years old," I say.

"What happened?" Katharine repeats her question.

"The stone didn't fall. I heard something else instead," I tell her.

"What?" Robert asks.

I look down to answer. "The sound of my stone hitting a horse's haunch, the sound of a horse throwing its rider, and then the sound of Dane, a few days later, dying."

The street is absolutely silent.

Katharine shifts her feet. "You were a child." She says it immediately, as if to whisk away this confession from the surface, to absolve. That is fine. That is good. That is the accepted practice among people. The surface is not our concern. I know what I have just done. I have cut a wound into her and into that wound poured this darkness like desire and disease. A circuitry I can control. And Katharine tilts back her head ever so slightly, her mouth opens, filled by the pain and purpose that a man like me, damaged and forever distant, will give her.

I know exactly what I am doing. Despite certain vows I'd taken against love. I know exactly what I am doing.

"It wasn't your fault," Robert offers.

Which is true, I suppose. The story is an old one, and the details, having never been told, have rusted. At times I hardly remember what happened at all. Dane, the favorite son, died too young, in his teens. That is the truth. I just can't be certain how he died anymore, except that he blamed me for it.

He still does.

Robert grabs hold of my forearm and at first it seems he is steadying himself. He swallows a breath and steers us back to our walk as if walking will get us past this opening, through it. I am happy to be cared for, chaperoned by a man such as Robert. Katharine moves in close to my side and I feel a moment of forgiveness, remission. I have knowingly entangled them. I have behaved irresponsibly, acting as if I had the burden of a heart to give away. As if I—

"Look," Robert says, quieting my thoughts.

At that moment a man emerges from the shadows. He is dressed in a beavertooth-tailed day coat and pedals past astride a contraption based on balance and velocity. The device seems the property of dreamland. Katharine, with jaw loosened, points out the strange machine to be certain she's not imagining it.

"Well, I had heard, but I had not yet seen," Robert utters before his thoughts trail off, replaced by wonder.

My brain begins to spin. The appearance of this contraption works its effects instantly. This is where I live. Dane tucks himself back inside my coat. He sent it. We've got work to do, he says, and very little time. Why are you wasting it with these people? The magnets I had imagined earlier, those that drew me to the Johnsons, shut of in an instant. I have one thought and it is for my laboratory.

"The bicycle. Yes. I saw it once before. A magnificent invention. So simple and so sensible to harness wheels onto our feet while we are walking. Allowing the laws of physics to magnify our efforts and energy."

The cyclist is nearing the corner of the block already, just about to turn out of view. I begin to ramble, giving voice to my thoughts. "That rider is exerting no more effort than we are, and indeed he might be exerting even less, as he has also enslaved momentum to his machine, creating energy from nothing but cleverness."

The ideas are getting far ahead of my tongue. Robert and Katharine have turned away from the bicycle to listen to me, but they are fading in my vision. Two brothers crammed into one body leaves little room for others. I address my thoughts up to the sky. "It should stand to reason that a small electrical charge could be equally amplified if pushed through a properly shaped mechanism. A transformer of sorts." I rub my mouth and seem to just then come awake. "Creating something from nothing." I have a horrible realization. I have been away from the laboratory for hours. The sight of the bicycle's ingenuity floods me
with guilt. "I'm sorry," I say quickly. "I must be of. Forgive me." There is little warmth left in my voice. "Wonderful to meet you both." Somehow I do not choke on this fresh formality. I see it as my only means of escape.

Katharine nods numbly, confused, the hook I planted already beginning to tug painfully as I slip away. Robert stands behind her, broadening his shoulders, stunned by my sudden change. It is my fault. Here is friendship. Here is love. I take a step away from it. The bicycle has turned the corner. There goes invention. I have to catch it.