The Invention of Everything Else (16 page)

An old Union soldier who had lived in Walter's building when Walter was a child had told him, "Women are like a pair of magnifying glasses." The soldier then drew back and away before continuing, "Have you ever seen what your skin looks like under a magnifying lens?" Walter had examined the soldier's old skin at that moment. It was cratered by alcohol. The soldier's pores dug bottomless pits into his nose and surrounding cheeks. He could have stored secrets. He could have stored nuts for winter in those pores. "Have you ever seen a magnified tongue?" the soldier asked. Intrigued, Walter told the soldier no, he'd seen no such wonders. "Well, you're lucky then, I guess. It's disgusting," was all the soldier said. The mystery in his words took up residence in Walter's brain at a young age. Women, magnifying glasses.

"Dear," he said. He slowed their pace. He did not want to get anywhere too quickly. And this stream, this forest, he'd never seen anything like it before, not here, not on Eleventh Avenue. "Freddie," he asked, "do you see that? Can you smell the forest?" His eyes opened wide.

At this point in his memory, Freddie always turns toward him, smiles, and opens her lips to speak. But it has been a long time since words have come out. She has been gone so long that Walter can barely remember the timbre of her voice.

Staring out the back window as the sky grows darker, Walter remembers that day when time opened up and how Freddie stood beside the Hudson, her lips moving up and down, her message silent and unclear as though she were speaking before the invention of sound. He felt he could almost make out what she might be saying with her silent words, something like
Come find me,
or
What are you waiting for, Walter?
Twenty-four years that she's been gone. Walter rests his head in his hands. Time had not healed this wound. How could it when at any moment he could simply close his eyes and fall back into 1918?

And so Walter decided just exactly what he would do with the help of Azor's machine.

As Louisa walks home from the subway, she counts the gas lamps that once lit the sidewalks outside people's houses. The sun is setting.
Years ago before she was born, it would have been time for the lamplighter to start his evening's work. Wiry men who walked the streets of New York stopping at each cast-iron lamp and, by swinging one foot up onto the base, grabbing hold of the cross handle just below the glass chimney, and hanging suspended there in that position, they'd light the lamp. Now most of the lamps have been replaced by electrical ones or else removed altogether, leaving behind a circle of fresh cement to fill in the hole. Walter would sometimes still demonstrate the lamplighter's swing. He'd get a faraway look in his eyes, Antarctica far, before both the wars, before he even met Freddie, so far that Louisa can imagine her father as a child, the excitement he must have felt peeking out from behind a bedroom curtain in the home where he grew up, waiting and watching for the lamplighter to make his way down the block as if every day were Christmas somehow.

The house seems small and warm as a doll's. Walter is in the kitchen, and Louisa, after slipping out of her boots, joins him at the table, a white-topped enamel thing with extra leaves that pull out from the sides and a drawer in the center stuffed with clothespins, a wrench, unspooled thread, matches and string, old letters, upholstery tacks, a curved fish knife, Louisa's birth certificate, unsorted papers of Walter's from the Army, scissors, an unground nutmeg, a pincushion, and any number of other things. Most often the drawer doesn't open, so neither Walter nor Louisa is entirely sure of its contents anymore. On top of the table is a dimpled green glass sugar bowl beside a small ceramic dish painted with a salt-marsh scene. The dish holds salt and pepper shakers plus a mustard jar with its own miniature serving spoon tucked into a crevice of the jar's lid. Louisa's parents bought the set on their honeymoon, a trip to the coast of Maine, a trip that Walter, of course, still talks about regularly, as though he'd returned from the beach the day before last and was still finding sand in the folds in his clothes.

The salt and pepper tinkle together as Louisa situates her legs beneath the table.

"Hey there," he says, smiling at her. "You hungry? You want some oatmeal?"

She nods yes and begins to play with the small mustard spoon while Walter walks into the dark part of the kitchen. He takes a bowl down out of the cupboard, fills it with hot cereal, and places it in front of
her. Louisa begins to eat. She is about to tell him of her adventure in Mr. Tesla's room. He'll enjoy it, she thinks, but just as she is about to speak Walter opens his mouth.

"A letter came today."

Louisa stops scraping the bottom of her bowl.

"Azor," he says, raising his wiry eyebrows at her as if this were highly suspect, as if he was still angry at him.

"Where is it?" she asks.

And Walter, drumming his fingers across the table, stops, reaches into the breast pocket of his watchman's uniform and places the letter on the table before her. Louisa holds it by the sides, examining the postmark.
ROCKAWAY
, it says, and then
ROCKAWAY
again, a second stamp, a hiccup, double, fainter impression.

Walt, Lou,

There are things I have to explain. Plus.

I want to show you how it all works.

Come meet me in Rockaway. Bring your young man, Louisa.

Truly, Azor

"He's not my young man" Louisa tells Walter. "Really, Dad. He's not."

"The lady doth protest too much," Walter says, curling the corners of his lips. "That must mean you actually like this one."

Louisa tucks her chin to her chest to hide her smile.

"Well, don't invite him if you don't want him to come," Walter says and clears her empty bowl away. "It's just that simple." Smiling, he pulls on his boots, says goodbye, and leaves for work.

Azor, she's starting to think, has gone crazy.

He met them at the bus station in an Army jeep, and after describing every seabird he's had the opportunity to see out here—egret, plover, sandpiper, osprey, oystercatcher, and heron—he drove them down an all but deserted snowy beach road, through a chainlink gate, and up to what appeared to be an abandoned airport.

"What is this place?" Walter asks.

"This," Azor says, spreading his arms wide, "is known as Rockaway Airport, though usually we just call it Edgemere."

"We?" Walter asks, still smarting from Azor's abandonment, still worried he's been replaced by someone else.

"Yes, me and the seagulls," Azor says.

"Birds don't talk," Walter says and turns his head away to look out the open side of the jeep, jilted in pretense only.

And yet despite his craziness, Louisa thinks, she is very happy to see him again.

"This is where you've been for two years, Azor?" Walter asks.

"Yup."

"Yup," is all Walter has to say in response to that.

"I'll tell you what happened, Walt," Azor says, though he doesn't say anything for a breath or two. "There was an ad" he finally offers. "In the back of
Popular Mechanics.
It said, 'Build Your Own Time Machine Today!' I sent away for the booklet immediately. And then I waited. I waited for a very long time, two, three months. After three and a half months the booklet had still not arrived. I even asked at the post office. So I thought, well, I could sit here and wait for the rest of my life or I could start building my own time machine right then and there. So that's what I did. I left that day."

Listening to the two of them speak, these two dreamers who raised her, Louisa stares at her hands, her sensible, earthy hands, and wonders how in the world she came to be who she is.

"You could have sent me a note," Walter tells him.

"A note. Yes. I suppose I could have. Sorry, Walt. I'm really sorry," he says, and that's it for a while. Azor is chewing on his lip, realizing that Walter is owed a better explanation than that. Azor sighs. He winces. "The real truth is, Walt, I didn't want any help. I wanted to do it on my own. And I know that's selfish and that doesn't mean I wasn't thinking about you or worrying about you, but—it's just, it was more than that. Inventors are artists, Walt. One has to be a little bit selfish at the start because masterpieces are made by one person. You know?"

Walter does not reveal whether he knows or not but stays silent for a while, thinking, looking out at the passing landscape, until he asks, "What about Louisa? It took two people to make her, and there's no question she's a masterpiece."

"You've got a point," Azor says. "I guess Lou's the exception to the rule."

The airport is little more than a dirt landing strip, a couple of buildings huddled together as if in secret conference, and one small hangar. "Harry Gordon used to operate a flight school out here, Gordon's Air
Service, until last August when, what with the war, the Army closed down all privately operated airfields within two hundred miles of the coast."

"Then what are you doing here?" Walter asks.

A question which Azor smiles at but decides not to answer, or rather answers by singing the first lines of "Aba Daba Honeymoon."

Walter looks unsatisfied.

"Well, no one else was using it" Azor finally volunteers.

It's true the place is all but deserted. It wouldn't surprise Louisa if some flying ace from the Great War materialized in a biplane, with a silk scarf wrapped around his neck, and after hand-turning his propeller, lifted off for the deserts of Morocco. Azor's been living in an airport for ghosts.

His workshop along with a small cot and sleeping bag is set up in a corner of the old hangar, a building that had once been an oil-burner assembly plant and now sits lonely and unpeopled, looking out over the airstrip. Louisa notices a small handgun in a holster hung above Azor's bed. She can hear the wind buffeting the rippled tin exterior.

The hangar dwarfs all four of them. Azor, Walter, Louisa, and Arthur. Yes, Arthur, her young man. She'd pinned a note to his boarding-house door late last night and then, early this morning, found him waiting at the bottom of the stoop, reading the paper. He stood. "Time to go?" he asked, turning as he spoke so that the blue sky reflected off the glass of his spectacles where his eyes should have been. Louisa tried to keep her cool. Walter began to laugh.

Arthur sat directly across from Louisa on both the subway and the bus out so that the tips of their knees touched, and Arthur, with some sort of superhuman ability to not look away, stared straight at her. Lou, never one to back down from such a challenge, stared right back. Walter, awake off-shift, took the opportunity to doze with his head tucked up against the window. He woke once to muster a ten-second conversation as if he'd been conscious and chatty the entire trip. "Arthur, what line of business are you in?"

"Mechanic, sir," he answered, unsurprised by Walter's sudden consciousness. Arthur did not suffer from the same nervousness Lou's other boyfriends had felt with Walter. Not much seemed to shake Arthur.

"Mechanic," Walter said. "Fantastic," he managed before he smoothed his hair once, turned back to the window, and fell asleep again.

The train rocked their knee bones against each other. Louisa was wearing one of two pairs of pants she owned. She was still not entirely used to wearing pants, and having each leg separately defined gave her a certain thrill, a sense of sturdy freedom. Just like Marlene Dietrich. "Where did you come from?" she asked Arthur once Walter was soundly back asleep.

"New York. I told you. We went to school together."

"That's not what I mean. One day I'd never seen you before and then the next day you start to appear everywhere."

He smiled. "That's odd," he said. "I remember you so clearly."

"I knew you'd say something vague like that."

"Well, ever since fourth grade, I knew you understood vagaries."

She didn't dare ask what he meant because, in fact, she did understand. The pigeons, the radio waves, the invisible current running between the very tips of their knees as they bumped along on their train out to Rockaway. Vagaries. "Tell me something about yourself." Louisa wanted to hear a solid story so that she could dismiss the feeling that Arthur was some sort of spectral being who had drifted into her life and would just as easily drift back out again. She was starting to think that she might like him to stick around.

"My name is Arthur Vaughn."

"Yes. I already know that."

"Patience," he said, leaning toward her. He wore the same blue wool coat he had on the other day and it suited him, made from the thick wool of a sailor's garments. While Arthur wasn't particularly tall, he was solid. Louisa could tell just by looking at his fingers, which were strong with a tiny tuft of dark hair below each knuckle. "I wasn't done yet," he said, and then asked, "You're probably wondering why I'm not overseas?"

"I did give it some thought."

"Well, I was until only a few months ago."

A few months, Louisa thought. That explained the waves of rebellion he'd allowed to grow in his hair.

"I was a mechanic at Burtonwood in England right as the war was getting started."

"You were in the Army?" Louisa couldn't quite see it, Arthur in uniform. Nothing about him up to this point had seemed uniform.

"Yes," he said. "At Burtonwood. It's a huge repair depot, an entire city made of Nissen huts and shift after shift of guys like me. Almost every U.S. aircraft in the war comes through Burtonwood. My specialty was rebuilding engines. P-47 Thunderbolts and B-17s."

He looked out the window. "I watched the planes come and go all day for months on end. I studied everything about them, read the manuals, talked to pilots, worked on the engines." Arthur lifted one finger to the window. "But I wasn't allowed to ever fly the planes because of these." He tapped once on the lens of his glasses. The corners of his lips were beginning to curl up, and Louisa got a bad feeling that she knew where the story was headed. "Then one day, a warm one in October, just as the sun was going below the horizon, I noticed a P-47 that had come in for repairs that week. It was just about ready to be sent back, so there it was sitting on the runway unattended and—"