The Invention of Everything Else (21 page)

"Don't you hear it? It's making me crazed!" William tore open one of the cupboards looking for the origin of the sound. After emptying the entire shelf's contents onto the floor and finding nothing, he turned to Tillie, gripping the sides of his head. "Don't you hear it?" His face was in pain, desperate.

She held still again, listening. "Yes," she finally said. "Yes. I do, dear. I hear it now." She wanted to soothe him, though in truth she heard nothing.

William let his hands fall and righted his head. He stared at her, his face becoming neutral. "You filthy liar." He spat at her. "There is no sound."

By dinnertime he was already passed out and Tillie was happy for some peace. It gave her an hour or two to reorganize her trunk of belongings and to clean the house.

When William awoke the following morning he had an awful hangover. He pulled the bedcovers up to his chin, afraid his body would split in two. It was then that he noticed Tillie's trunk. It was organized and packed neatly as if she were ready to go somewhere. He pulled himself up out of bed and down to the kitchen, where she was making him a cup of tea for his head.

He stood in the doorway and it was a moment before she knew he was there. "So you're leaving, aye?"

"Yeah, yeah. I'm leaving, right," she said, tired of his suspicions.

"Guess that's why you've got your trunk all neatly packed and ready to go."

"Sure, William. That's why."

She turned back to the boiling kettle and finished up what she was doing. When the tea was ready, she looked, expecting to find William still there. She was wrong. She was alone in the kitchen. The hot stove ticked. She took the tea upstairs, thinking he'd gone back to bed, but the bedroom was empty as well. "William" she called. There was no answer. "William?" He must have decided to go into work after all. She returned downstairs and set the tea on the table, added some sugar, and had a sip herself. Reconfiguring her day now that he was gone, she sliced herself a piece of bread for breakfast. It was peaceful, chewing in the kitchen without William, and so it was a surprise when, a few moments later, he returned from where he'd been, out in the woodshed, fetching the hatchet. It was a surprise when he took the hatchet and drove it into Tillie's skull twenty-six times before dropping the bloodied blade and retreating to the neighbor's house, where he informed them, "I did it. I had to. And now I'm certain to hang for it."

But William was wrong. Instead, the headline, on a bribe from Thomas Edison, read
KEMMLER WESTINGHOUSED
, and went on to describe how flames shot from his head, how steam escaped from under his fingernails, as Kemmler became the first man to be killed by an electric chair run on alternating current, an electric chair invented by Harold Brown, an employee of one Mr. Thomas Edison.

As to the inward meaning of this dream of beauty of course, I don't understand it, but then I don't understand anything.

—Henry Adams, 1893 World's Columbian Exposition

I
T WASN'T YET
ready for human trial.

The soles of my shoes cut into my thighs. I kneel beside her, rocking back and forth over bent legs. Her pulse. I'll have to touch her. I shut my eyes momentarily for strength before placing my index and middle fingers on the skin of her wrist. The charge is still circling somewhere nearby and in that touch something is exchanged. My head drops to one side. "Louisa." That's what she said her name was. Her heart beats in her wrist. The girl is alive. I let go and breathe, wiping the fingers, her germs, across the weave of the room's carpet.

And then I wait, deadly anxious for some report. I wait to hear her critique of the device. I suppose I also harbor a certain concern that there could have been some ill effect, a lingering indication in her joints, or perhaps a misfiring of her thoughts. I don't need any closer attention from the hotel management when my financial situation is in such disarray. If I am forced to move again now, my work would wither.

Her eyes stream back and forth below their lids. Better than not moving at all, which is what they were doing when I first found her. Louisa. The curious maid. Two visits in one week. That's two more visits than I received all last year, though I don't suppose I could officially call breaking and entering my room a visit. I reach for a towel and use it to lift her head onto a pillow. The muscles in her cheeks twitch some; the skin is flushed red. I shut the device off. Her mouth opens a slit and I hear the breath. I can't say I regret the girl's decision to meddle. I only wish she would wake up now and tell me what happened, tell me what she saw there.

Slow minutes pass. I try poking her shoulder with the eraser end of a pencil. "Hello?" I ask directly into her ear. The girl's eyelids flutter some, enough to let the light in. There's a stirring. I feel her consciousness returning to the room. I hear her gulp the air and quite suddenly she is awake. She sits up, wide-eyed, with a bolt.

"Please don't tell anyone." They're the first words to escape from her lips.

I say nothing.

"Please," she begs. "I will lose my job. I was only looking."

I hadn't considered this advantage. I had thought only of my unpaid bills, my history of power outages. "How are you feeling?" I ask.

She looks around on the floor beside her as if she might find some evidence into her state of being there. "I'm fine," she says.

"What are you feeling?" I continue my investigation.

"I'm feeling very scared that you might tell a manager I was in your room and I will lose my job."

"Your secret" I tell her, "is quite safe with me as long as mine"—I point to the device—"is safe with you."

She looks up at me. She nods in agreement.

"The device," she says.

"The device," I say.

"Yes." She is calmer now, whispering. "I'd almost forgotten."

"What happened when you turned it on?"

"It was alive," she says. "What is it?"

"I can't say. It's not ready yet."

"But you can tell me. I won't say anything."

"No. I'm afraid I can't."

"Why not?"

"Too dangerous."

"Dangerous?"

"Yes."

"Hmm." She snaps her lips together as if looking for a way around the danger. She turns to face me, drawing her knees close to her up
underneath the full skirt of her uniform. A few strands of her dark hair stick to her lips, pulling taut lines across her face. She doesn't seem to notice. "But I already know. Don't I?"

"Well, if you already know, then I don't have to tell you. Now. You rest there until you are feeling better."

She looks a bit confused. She doesn't say anything but sits figuring, reordering.

"I don't understand," she says.

"Yes. I know," I say, taking advantage of her muddled thoughts. I pop up from my knees to my feet. I must have been cutting of the blood supply to my legs, because as I stand I feel a bit woozy. While she sits recovering on the floor I make my way over to the window and lift one leg up onto the sill. Something is not right, a stiffening vein of concrete in my leg. I ignore it and lift the other leg. The birds need my attention. I had a new patient arrive last night, another broken wing smuggled in to me underneath the topcoat of a busboy. With my body halfway out the window, halfway in, something changes; the stiffening gives way, rushing straight to the very center of me.

"Oh, dear."

Yes, I am certain of it. I freeze. There it is. A distinct pain centered in my torso, in my shoulders. It would seem to be my heart. Perhaps I caught something. I shouldn't have touched the girl.

A pigeon, seeing me take up my windowsill position, lands beside me and so I soldier on, ducking my head out the glass. "Hooeehoo." I make a desperate attempt to call her, my bird, but the breath is rotten, weak.

"Oh, dear, yes." There it is again, a fluttering behind my rib cage and a terrific pain. A fluttering? I look down at my chest. Is she there, beating her wings behind my sternum? The thirty-three stories below rush up to meet me. I'm not well. She's not here and I can't quite breathe. "Louisa." It doesn't have much air behind it. I'm wishing I were no longer out on the window ledge, so with some difficulty I slide my legs back inside the room, onto the floor. I lean back against the bed. "Louisa?" She is turned away from me. I reach my hands up to my chest. It's hard to get air. Something has changed, I think. Yes. My goodness. I'm ill. "I'm going to require your help."

"Do you need a doctor?" she asks, having come around some.

"A doctor? No. I need you to help me get over to Bryant Park.

There's someone I have to meet there. A bird." I haven't seen my bird for days, since the New Year. It's no wonder that I don't feel well.

"A bird? Right now, sir?"

"Yes. I'm afraid right now. Are you all right?" It takes a bit of effort to stand, but once there I feel something steadying me.

"Sir?" she says. "Yes." Her hair is a tousled, if striking, mess of black curls and waves.

"Please."

"It is no trouble at—"

"I'm in a small bind" I explain without waiting for her to finish. "And you also love pigeons. Don't you? Yes. I thought perhaps you could help me."

"I do keep pigeons, but not wild ones like yours."

My breath is stilted. "What's the difference?"

"Nothing. Life expectancy. Wild birds don't live very long." Louisa stands up and begins to straighten the avalanche of papers she spilled from my desk.

Her words add to my panic. "I won't require any expertise, only assistance. For years I have fed the pigeons in Bryant Park. I don't know what would happen to them if I were to miss a day."

"I see," she says. "You just need me to feed the birds."

"If it were only that easy. The problem is that I have to go also and I'm feeling a trace of weakness. If I could trouble you to
accompany
me to the park, I would be happy to pay you for your time."

"Accompany you?"

"Yes."

I wait. What seems, at first, to be worry on her face dissolves into glad conspiracy. "I would be happy to. And you haven't got to pay me anything." She tucks a few strands of her hair behind one ear. "Where is your coat?" she asks.

And so, in this manner, slowly, slowly, we set off for the park. My heart, while still feeling a bit like an outsider to my body, is at least happy to be en route to the bird that it loves.

Louisa carries the bag of peanuts and seed in one hand. She holds her other arm steady, a crutch of sorts for me to lean on. Though I'm loath to stand so close, I don't seem to have a choice. My footsteps are shaky.

"Mr. Tesla," she says confidingly, "you don't look well. Are you sure you should be going out? Perhaps you'd like to lie down?"

"I'm feeling stronger by the minute." And there is some truth to that.

Our progress is slow, as if our oppositions are working against us. Short and tall. Old and young. Man and woman. The cold air feels like misery in my lungs. But we are on our way.

Ingeniously she's draped herself in a long red cloak with a deep, loose hood, like that of a monk. "From the lost and found," she tells me. A disguise for slipping out of the New Yorker while still on duty.

Out on the street the cold air revives me some. Its freshness is a pleasant shock. I am catching my breath when the girl begins to speak.

"What happened next?" she asks me once we've crossed Eighth Avenue.

I haven't any notion what she is talking about. "Pardon?"

"After Katharine and Robert."

I exhale quite loudly. In all of New York City, I wonder where this girl came from. I look at Louisa in her red cloak for one moment. "You mean in my life?"

"Yes."

"Quite a few things," I say, realizing that this is how she plans to extract her payment, in stories. It is bitter cold out, but the air in my lungs stirs what is stagnant. Trying to be economical with my breath, I begin. "At that time, there was a battle going on."

"The war?"

"No, dear. A battle between AC and DC electricity. A battle over money, really. It might be difficult to believe this now, but Edison—you know who Thomas Edison was?"

"Of course." She looks straight ahead.

I have insulted her. It has been a long time since I stood so close to another human. I've forgotten the way their emotions leak out of them, muddying the air with sorrow, anger, joy. "He was backing DC power. He didn't believe that any of his inventions would work with AC."

"Who was behind AC?"

I clear my throat. "George Westinghouse and myself. I invented it. He bought it from me."

She smiles and tightens her grip on me. "So who won?" she asks very quickly.

"Who do you think?" I lift my chin, a statue staring up at the buildings.

She stops walking, pausing at a corner for the light to change. I am glad for the break. I take a deep breath. She looks at me. I try to stand even taller while she gives me a solid once-over, up and down, as if I were a horse she might place a bet on. "Edison?" she guesses.

How funny it is to grow old. I release my pose, smiling slightly, but don't say anything. The light turns in our favor.

She guesses again, quietly this time. "You?"

"I know it might be hard to believe."

We walk in silence for a bit. She could look at the worn collar of my coat and know I didn't win.

"I mean AC won. I didn't. It works better."

Our shoes click on the sidewalk as if it were an ice-covered pond. The small heels of Louisa's pumps make a gentle snap against the cement.

Some days I forget how completely I have been forgotten.

I take a firmer grip on her arm. "Westinghouse and I beat out Edison for the bid to electrify the Columbian Exposition in Chicago. The World's Fair. This was in 1893. The year America moved out of the dark ages. Very few people had electricity before the fair, but twenty-five million people came to Chicago and saw the White City—many of them traveling by train for the first times in their lives. Before that they'd known only darkness. There was nothing dark about the fair. Two hundred stark white buildings, colonnades, domes, towers, palaces, and all of it illuminated by AC electricity."