The Invention of Everything Else (19 page)

I see something golden in the field, an idea. My carriage is about to pass by. And there he is. The lengthening light.

"Driver, please. I'll get out here."

I am four hours late for dinner.

I knock softly and a servant shows me to the parlor where Robert sits in a calves' leather wing chair, editing galleys for the next issue of
Century.

"Yes," Robert answers.

"Hello?"

"Nick?" Robert stands. His eyes are quite red. I wonder how late it really is. "Forgive us. We went ahead and ate without you and, I'm afraid, Katie has begged off to bed," Robert says.

I say nothing. One who deals in friendship, I am learning, must be one who deals in reality. I am unfit for the position and so I stand before him. If he would only punch me hard, once right in the jaw, perhaps I would be able to meet his gaze then. We stand in silence.

Katharine and Robert's home lacks for nothing—thick Oriental carpeting, a piano and a harpsichord, a mahogany banister, crystal candelabras formed to resemble Easter lilies, servants in uniform, several chests of liquors that glitter with the warmth and variety of a jeweler's case. A series of tremendous ruby hurricane lamps glow on the mantel of each fireplace. The Johnsons are not wealthy. They only behave that way.

"Forgive me," I finally muster.

"There's no need. Tonight was a very important night. You were the star and I'm sure you had business to attend to."

"Robert" I say and don't know what else to add. I am looking at him through a swiftly tightening lens, as if he is going dark. How many more times will I fail to arrive, let them down? "I shouldn't have come so late."

"Don't be absurd. You're welcome here any time, day or night. You are our beneficent spirit, sometimes made flesh, sometimes not but always felt."

"It is late," I say. "You are tired" I turn to leave. Robert and I make our way to the front hall. He does not protest. He is hurt, Katharine is hurt, and I am responsible. From the hall I look up the stairway and further overhead, to a vent that perhaps leads to her room. Robert watches me. I won't come again.

He continues to watch me, and as he does, a strange thing happens between us. Rather than beating me away from his doorstep as he should, he draws his hands onto his hips underneath his jacket and vest, pulling back the fabric as if it were his very flesh and rib cage. Robert opens himself. "We've rented a house for the month of June. It's on Long Island, East Hampton. We'd be lost if we missed you for a month. And so we will not."

His linen shirt covers his heart but not to my eyes. The flood of blood, what an opening can do, and in that moment I am certain I will never know generosity as deep as his.

"You will come for a visit, and though I know your impulse would be to decline this invitation, it is not the sort of invitation that accepts rejection well or, I am sorry to say, at all. Now good night." Robert opens the front door, nearly shoving me out, so that my protest proves impossible.

The house they'd rented sight unseen reflected Katharine and Robert's finances—a former grandness in steady decay. The house had
been named Goldenfield, and indeed this held true as a modifier. On the approach, one is greeted by opposing fields of overgrown ragweed and straw, dotted with an occasional heliotrope or coreopsis. Inside the house, the molding is a touch battered. The paint has bubbled in places, flaking off the walls. Water has breached the slate tiles of the roof, leaving brown bursts on the ancient wallpaper, stalled stains on the ceilings. The kitchen is large enough to house thirty-five cooks if necessary. And out back a cement swimming pool that might once have beckoned is now drained. There is even a minor ballroom in the house, though we have not dared to use it: overhead, an enormous crystal chandelier dangles, barely hanging on to the old ceiling. The decay is captivating, at least to Katharine and Robert. My enthusiasm for the house is a bit more tempered, though from my bedroom window, indeed from every window of the house, I can hear the unstoppable sea.

I hadn't planned a long visit. I brought three suitcases, but they contain only one change of clothes tucked in among a number of electrical devices, tools, and gizmos in the making. I intend to get some work done during my abduction, as we three have taken to calling my vacation. So work I do, leaving my room for meals only and an occasional late-night constitutional by the shore.

Just before dusk on our third day, Katharine stages an interruption of tea while Robert is out walking—her second in a series of teas delivered surreptitiously to my room. She knocks very quietly. I can hear the silver items on her tray tremble while she waits for the door to open.

"Some nourishment, dear," she says, sweeping past me into the room. I watch her notice the tea tray she brought the previous day, its snacks and sandwiches still untouched.

"Please come right in," I say, though it's too late for that. She is nearly halfway across the room, clearing a spot for the new tray. Out the window we can both see Robert making his way through the yellow field, returning from his walk.

She turns and masters a face that registers only peace. "How is your work going?" she asks. We face each other eye to eye and for a moment there is silence. I am aware that my heart is pounding out a very loud message. "Please," it says, though I can't be certain which
please
it means.
Please leave me alone,
or just
Please. Please.

"I've been running a number of tests and exams on myself to measure the health benefits of magnetic electricity on human biology, something I often consider," I tell her, turning away. "I can report that I am feeling magnificent. Would you care to try?"

"Donate my body to science?" she asks while raising her hand to her neck. She fingers the sinews there, the lower stem of her ear and her collarbone. I feel my resolve slip fifteen degrees off the steely mark where it most regularly resides. I am looking at the world through a stranger's eyeglasses, a stranger with myopia. And here is the problem with our threesome: triangles at times collapse when the attraction between point A and point C overwhelms.

"Katharine, I've never—"

Robert appears in the doorway. "Hello," he says.

"Dear," Katharine calls him and exhales a week's worth of air.

I turn to Robert, moving slowly. "Robert, you came just in time—" I fumble over the rest of the sentence. "To assist us in an experiment" I tell him. "Katharine, please lie down on the divan" I look at her from head to toe and add, "Please remove your shoes."

She obeys. My philtrum, I notice, dampens. The thrill of scientific inquiry.

The divan is situated between the two windows. There is a desk off to the left where I have stacked my cases and, before the divan, a low table where I've been working. The room is small, made all the more crowded by our three bodies; indeed the only open space is the bed off to the right, a space none of us dare breach.

"One moment" I turn my back to fiddle with a device, adjusting a charge, attaching a number of wires to cotton pads I'd moistened with a bottle of isopropyl alcohol. Robert, from the end of the divan, standing just before me, watches his wife as she reclines. She is tiny, a doll on the large chaise. Robert tucks himself in by her waist. He touches Katie's forehead and keeps his fingers there as if trying to read her thoughts. She turns her head away and crosses her calves, drawing the fabric of her dress higher up her legs. Robert keeps one of his arms draped across her neck while I, kneeling beside him, take my place at the controls.

I move very slowly, wheeling a primitive sort of jar battery I've made for travel over to the chaise where Katharine reclines. They say nothing, but they stare. The battery looks like a six-chambered heart made from glass and metal. I curve the node's wire across my palm
and loosely cup its cotton end in one hand as though it were alive.

"Now. Don't be fearful. This might hurt the tiniest bit, but I assure you the practice is terrifically beneficial to your health and spirit. Robert, perhaps you could assist me," I say, holding out my hand.

Robert plucks the node from my palm, and unraveling the wire very quickly, I balance back on my feet, reaching for a small box, a switch. Having screwed the loose ends of the node's wire into the box, I attach both to the battery. I strike the lids of the jars to dislodge any air bubbles. Taking my time, I can hear the Johnsons breathing. I carefully twist the copper hairs of each wire, wrapping and rewrapping the connections around each post, and then turn back to my worktable to grab a forgotten screwdriver and a rubber safety. Their heads follow me.

"I have found the treatment to be most beneficial when applied to the body's most delicate surfaces," I say.

Katharine clears her throat.

"Let me show you both what I mean." And with that I remove my day coat, unhitch a cufflink, and roll my sleeve back and up, exposing the white underside of my arm, a blue map of veins. "If I place the node here," I say, resting the cotton-tipped wires on the inside of my wrist, "where the skin is the thinnest, I've found the effects to be most pleasurable."

Robert crosses his legs and leans in closer to me.

Balancing the wire on my arm, I reach over to the small control box. "Don't be alarmed. It might not sound good or even smell good, but I assure you it feels wonderful."

Katharine chews her lip.

I flick the switch and a shock fills my body, jerking me into rigid attention. My jaw drops open and I feel my eyes fog over, as if they are caught on some alternate universe that is transpiring just above the Johnsons' heads, a place where a chorus of thousands dressed in golden garments sing one note—the buzz of the honeybee—and this one note vibrates with such intensity that it threatens to lift me up from where I stand and, by parting the clouds, carry me off to the sunshine land of electricity.

I let the switch go and raise a hand to my brow. Sparks caught in my hair discharge themselves into my hand. "Just the smallest dose," I say before turning to Katharine. "Are you ready, dear?"

"Even if it kills me, yes." She whispers it.

I pass the cottoned wire back to Robert, leaning across Katharine's body to do so.

"The most delicate places harbor the most effective reactions," I remind Robert and with that he places the wire on the tender spot of his wife's neck hidden behind her ear. Nodding, I give her the smallest of shocks. Her eyes shut with the charge and her head rolls slowly to one side.

We repeat this action. I watch while Robert touches the wire to Katharine's lips, the small of her arched foot, the blue web behind her knee, the gentle rise of her underarm, the top of her spine, the part of her hair, her inner leg. The temple at her brow. At each stopping point in this experiment, from my remote location, I send a shock of electricity running through Katharine's body so that her breath comes heavy and she trembles.

All in the name of science.

Later that night, I am, as usual, wide awake, having caught Robert in another bottle of whiskey and a marathon conversation: the events of the Engineers' Fair, Serbian poetry, a play we'd all recently seen starring Sarah Bernhardt, a recipe for fried sage leaves, the calcification of seashells. The room where we sit is a tiny pantry off the kitchen. There is a barrel wood stove whose chimney pipe runs straight out a hole in the window that has been tapered with copper sheeting. There are two windows that look out across the courtyard, back to the wing where Katharine is asleep.

The vines crisscrossing the house's exterior seem to grow as we talk. Robert toys with a candle that has been corked into the mouth of a wine bottle. The room is dark, but we keep the spookiness at bay with our conversation until, after many hours, we both fall silent, and in that silence something scuttles from the corner of the room to the window. "What was that?" Robert asks. "A ghost?"

"There is no such thing," I tell him and shine the candle into the corner. There's nothing there. "Robert, every time you dismiss aspects of this world as somehow supernatural, you are dismissing the wonder due this world. Ghosts are nothing but scientifically explainable patterns. Nothing to fear," I say, walking over toward the window and glancing out. Just to be sure. There's nothing there either. My protests do little to assuage either Robert's fears or my own. He crosses the room quickly to join me at the marble sill, where we both take a seat, tucking ourselves up onto the sash as if we were boys again.

Out the window, as our eyes adjust, it is possible to select the outline of the rest of the house from the night sky. We glance across the courtyard to the opposite wing. It is near three in the morning, again. Robert extinguishes the candle.

He points to the window where Katharine sleeps. "We are very far away from all we know."

"Yes. Imagine us on a globe. The tiniest spit sticking out into the ocean. We are almost forgotten."

Robert turns back to our empty room. "Even farther than the farthest-away place. Think how our thoughts have traveled." We watch the dark night, and patterns form on my eyes as if remembering a dream or perhaps still in one.

I tuck my legs up and, turning, I push my back up against the window casing to face Robert. After a moment Robert turns and does the same so that, facing each other, we buttress the sill as twin bookends or gargoyles. We look into each other's eyes. The six or seven minutes that follow—such a short time when one considers a day, a month, a decade—have the focus and brunt of years jammed into them. Imagining that one could boil the complexities of a lifetime, reducing them over a slow fire for ages until the drops left after dissolution have a flavor as rich and complicated as all mystery. Robert and I say nothing. Perhaps the darkness or the remove allows us to look at each other as honestly and for as long as we do. Perhaps it is the quiet of the night that allows us not to speak, or perhaps it is because what we are thinking is unspeakable.

It's Robert who in the end brings that opening to a close, separating out the emotions like a handful of coins. Here is a nickel. Here is Katharine. A quarter. Jealousy. A dime. Her love. A penny. My work. And then here, separate from all that, our love for each other, a very different thing altogether. "Nikola" he says. "You are incredibly dear to us both." And in this admission a wall that I know well closes up around me. He should have said nothing so that I could have ignored, or at least kept undefined, this thing that was growing between us. But he spoke, and I saw how Robert is not my heart, not my lungs, Katharine is not the eyes through which I see. I am alone with the work I've done and, more important, the work I haven't yet done.