The Invention of Everything Else (27 page)

Upstairs, the host and hostess are nearly finished getting dressed.
Mr. Von Tucker can be heard rummaging through the back corners of his dressing room. "Here it is," he cries.

"What's that, dear?" his wife asks, distracted by her reflection. Her husband does not answer but emerges moments later porting a large and dusty box. He drops the box on the floor beside his wife. It lands with such a terrific whoosh that its lid is lifted and settles off to one side. The husband bends to remove it completely, sighing and generally making a show of himself to attract his wife's attention. His efforts fail. She continues to fuss over her face and hair in the mirror.

"Here it is," he repeats, and from the box he withdraws an ancient top hat.

Finally his wife looks. "Oh, that old thing. Why, I had no idea that it still existed. That should do just fine."

"One moment, Madame. One moment," the husband urges her. Stooping, he places the top hat on the ground; he puts his hands on his hips and calls to his wife.

She turns and is about to ask what he needs now when he raises one foot and, momentarily imagining himself to be a Russian folk dancer enacting the most dramatic moment of his routine, the husband brings his heeled foot down upon the top hat, crushing it just so, defeating the brim that had held its proud shape for nearly fifty years.

"Dear!" his wife exclaims, and turning back toward her vanity, she begins to laugh, taking a long draft of the glass of sherry on the dressing table.

"Now, then," her husband says, smirking. "That ought to do the trick." His wife continues to giggle as he bends to retrieve the hat, placing the now contorted mess upon his head.

"It's just the thing. Yes." She eyes his costume. "Only, one moment." She looks about the room while he adjusts the crumpled mess. "One moment," she repeats before springing to her feet. "I've got an idea." The wife walks swiftly over to the fireplace. Lifting the layers of an old skirt she'd had her tailor trim with calico swaths and patches, she bends down, lowering both hands into a pile of cold ashes that had collected underneath the fire irons. "Dear," she calls, displaying her filthy palms. "You're not quite finished yet."

"Brilliant." His eyes light up. He hasn't had this much fun getting dressed in years. He quickly joins his wife beside the mantel, where she, using her soot-stained fingers as paintbrushes, streaks his freshly shaved cheeks with charcoal and filth.

Mr. and Mrs. Von Tucker are famed party hosts, tossing extravagant evenings that often incorporate their flair for the unusual, once enlisting a troupe of Middle Eastern sword dancers, once a display of tropical plants, including a number of carnivorous species whose ferocity was called into question when the plants were found dead the following morning, victims of New York City's cold climate. At one party they tucked either a diamond or a pearl into the dinner napkin of each female guest. Once they hired a baby elephant, which Mrs. Von Tucker led through the party on a leash attached to her wrist, drawing sighs of wonder from her guests until the tiny pachyderm defecated on a rug from Persia, emitting a pile of astonishing size. Mrs. Von Tucker instantly demanded her release and the elephant was removed to the garden, where Mr. Von Tucker's two cocker spaniels stared blankly at the creature's wrinkled ankles, barked once or twice, and then went back to napping.

Tonight the Von Tuckers have crafted a theme that few would ever dream of attempting. Tonight they are hosting a Poverty Ball. The invitations included an enticement for their guests to come dressed as local street urchins, the dear
pauvres
one might find living beneath a stairwell or pulling a Friday supper of heads and fins from the fishmonger's rubbish bin. The Vanderbilts and the Astors are invited, the Morgans and the Rockefellers too. The china and crystal have been replaced by pewter tankards and platters acquired from the grisliest of downtown saloons. The dining chairs have been removed to the attic.

Mrs. Von Tucker is dizzy with her idea, and after weeks of preparation she is ready to be poor for one evening. Her grand house, a Fifth Avenue residence, rings with an imposed poverty that both the hosts find thrilling. For one night they can be as carefree and happy as the Bowery boys the Von Tuckers had once or twice caught brief glimpses of from behind their carriage windows while dashing past.

I pull my billfold from my inner breast pocket. "Driver, I'm afraid I'll have to get out here," I tell him. I have fare for a partial ride only, so I will walk. That is no trouble. I have walked before.

I've been invited to another affair at the home of the Von Tuckers, and though most often I try to keep a level head when it comes to such events, I feel the slightest twitch of excitement. The swell of invitations slowed to a dribble after my return from Colorado, when the Mars headlines began to appear.

Earlier, back at the hotel, I'd been distracted by a thought, and it was this: What could be more "spiritual" than matter? And for the first time in a very long time I asked the question to myself in Serbian, not English. Just now, with my leg lifted to take the final three steps up to the Von Tuckers' door, I realize why it came to me in Serbian. Spirit, like language, is shifting and tricky. Both create swells from thin air, something from nothing. Both consider themselves to be above the material world. Yet both regularly fail in the face of matter. Where, for example, were spirit and language when the 9:27 out of Philadelphia was accidentally switched onto the same track as the 10:15 out of New York? There was a photo in the paper. The twisted carcasses of these wrecked trains left little room for spirit or language. Words, even bold Serbian words, are inadequate and leaden, littering the ground around such demonstrations of matter's undeniably solid state. Lives are ended by matter, not words, not callous headlines about communications with Mars. I'm in the process of parsing this thought when the front double doors of the Von Tuckers' residence are thrown open before me. My first inclination is to turn and flee, but I am afraid it is too late for that.

Inside, the foyer is dark, lit only by candles. Two long tables that line the entrance already hold what appear to be the party favors each guest will be sent home with. From where I stand the favors look to be nothing more than a piece or two of black coal patiently wrapped in cheesecloth. Curious.

"This way, sir," the servant who ushers me through the foyer calls. He swings open a pair of French doors and the party comes to life. I carefully step inside. The room, though entirely crammed with New York society, is dark, and I wonder why the hosts refuse to illuminate the electric wall sconces. By candlelight I begin to pick out the other partygoers. Each one is dressed in rags. In horror, I, most suddenly, recall the invitation. A Poverty Ball, it had said. Thinking it some sort of fundraising benefit, I had not, at the time, understood. I do now.

One woman wearing little more than a filthy petticoat and blouse passes by, while her daughter, a debutante of noble standing, has costumed herself as a flower-cart girl carrying a small wooden box she's strung about her neck, offering up for sale an assortment of daisies and dead tea roses. Behind them come three members of the state senate, all three clad in crushed straw bowlers and dungarees that end mid-shin in fringed tatters.

I make my way through the crowd. Everywhere the wealthiest members of New York society chat and slog beer from dinged pewter mugs while dressed in their worst, though it is apparent from the crispness of some of the fabrics that a number of these costumes have been purchased new for the occasion and summarily torn and distressed with patches or purposeful smears of dirt.

At that moment I spy my host and hostess, the Von Tuckers, closing in on me. I am just preparing to offer an excuse, how forgetful I'd been, not recalling that the party had a theme, when Mr. Von Tucker rushes in.

"Dear Mr. Tesla, you're absolutely perfect! Wherever did you find such a tattered old evening jacket? It's just exquisite."

"Look, dear," Mrs. Von Tucker joins in, "the cuffs and knees are nearly worn through. How subtle. How peerless. You win the prize for the best costume. Yes."

I had read an article about a person in Cleveland who'd been working on developing a machine that could translate human cells into units of light, which could then travel great distances, moving swiftly from state to state, planet to planet presumably, or away from tiger attack or run-ins with ex-lovers. Such a brilliant machine could, I think, be used right now, at moments when one's greatest desire is to melt into the carpeting, to slip away from the cruelty of humans back to a small laboratory on Houston Street. I try to recall the Cleveland inventor's name as my hosts stand with mouths ajar, catching dust motes on their thick, damp tongues, waiting for me to respond. I gaze at them without seeing their unblinking eyes, their growing discomfort, until I remember. There is no inventor working on turning human cells into light. Yet. The article where I'd read such a wonderful description had been in a
Century Magazine
book excerpt of a novel,
Rays of the Sun.
It is a fiction. There will be no escaping my humiliation.

And so I stutter.

I am of a mind to tell my hosts just how repulsive a celebration this is. The words wait just behind my teeth. After many silent moments in which the Von Tuckers' faces fill nearly to bursting with dread and annoyance, I finally manage a smile and two words that hurt to speak, so I mouth them, not wanting to put in the effort of adding any volume to their pronunciation. "Thank. You."

"Well" Mrs. Von Tucker draws a deep breath. "We've been hearing such nonsense about you in the papers. I am just glad to have you here
in the flesh so we can see clearly you're still our dear old Tesla and not the crazed scientist they're making you out to be. Ha. Ha ha." It's not a real laugh but words spoken out of nervousness.

"Nonsense," I say. "Of course I'm a crazed scientist. You are referring to my conversations with Mars?"

"No, no," Mr. Von Tucker explains. "She's talking about certain statements you made concerning free energy." He clears his throat. "Mr. Tesla," he says, "if everyone could harvest their own energy from the atmosphere, what would become of Mr. Morgan? What would become of us?"

I return to the Hotel Pennsylvania and remove my evening suit, hanging it carefully. Stripped down to my undergarments, I turn out all the lights and open a small French door that leads to a minuscule, two-foot-wide balcony where I've been running my infirmary. "Misery," I tell the birds there. "Misery."

I glance up past the lights of the city, up into the sky. "There's here," I think. Then I close my left eye to further illustrate my hypothesis. "There's there." Once I've seen enough of "there," I switch the focus again to "here." I close the right eye and open the left.

"Yes. Here. There," I think, this time alienating the
T
that makes there not here. And a thought strikes me. I examine here and there. There is here plus T. Where
T
= time. That is it precisely. Here plus a little time, T, equals there. I look once again up into the sky.

If I could make there into here, the difference of a tiny T, I could go back to the beginning. Drop the stone, undo what has been done.

Last I heard from Katharine and Robert, they were in Italy. They are there. While I am here.

I feel my loneliness like a knife after the party. "Here, here," I say, imagining Katharine's face in my hands. Imagining Robert. Using this knife to cut out the in-between from here

to here. Without wires.

T
pierces marriage, ambition, and society to the wall, dividing the indivisible with time.

"Here, here," Katharine says back to me. "Here," Robert replies.

I take a pencil in hand and draw it this way, as a triangle where the first node is Katharine, the second is Robert, and I make the third point. Though I'm perfectly aware that this is not the way it is of the
sheet of paper and in our lives. "I cannot have a wife," I tell myself still and say it out loud to add conviction, to make sure Dane hears me. "Writers, yes. Artists, yes. But inventors, no. Or at least not me. On this my brother and I agree. I cannot even have a person resembling a wife, particularly my friend's wife. A bird, yes. A bird, perhaps, could love me." I look out to the balcony infirmary before turning back to my desk. I circle the node that is Katharine and then circle the point that is Robert. Saturn's thick rings. I turn the pencil tail over head. Once more I try to erase the lines that connect me to them.

In the dark I lie down on top of my bed without climbing beneath the covers so that the breeze can blow across my skin. A number of my birds fly in through the open door, perching on the high bureau. Against the blue light of midnight, I can see the long shadows the pigeons cast on my ceiling. I've lived most of my life in hotels. An attempt to account for all the rooms I've occupied since moving to New York would be a partial tally at best. There've been too many. My accomplices to a solitary life. Solitary but for the suitcases of ideas and, of course, the pigeons who remain a constant at each hotel.

Excepting the Saint Regis.

I ruffle my hands across my face and smile some to think of the Saint Regis, though I hadn't smiled at the time when, years before, I'd returned to my room at the Saint Regis only to find it bustling with management sorts and two cleaning ladies equipped with the longhandled brooms that were most regularly used to sweep cobwebs from the twelve-foot ceilings in the downstairs lounges, but were, at that moment, employed in chasing a pair of frantic red bars down from a high perch on the room's crown molding.

"Mr. Tesla," one blanched manager had said. "You or your pigeons will have to go. Tonight."

I left. I took the birds with me.

I've been like a bee buzzing in a field of clover. The Waldorf when I could afford it. The Gerlach. Hotel Pennsylvania. Hotel Governor Clinton. The McAlpin. Hotel Maguery. Each room offering me the possibility of closing the door, shutting out the world, and unwinding secrets no one would ever be able to imagine. "Please fetch my laundry," and some young man is dispatched. Or, my personal favorite, Do Not Disturb, I can say and no one will. But still, on nights like this, I can sit behind the locked door of my room. I can hear most sounds out in the hallway—throats being cleared, laughter, a conversation
about someone's aunt in Augusta, Georgia. Someone is always awake in a hotel. For the first time in months, I fall asleep before the sun has begun to turn the morning sky blue.