The Invention of Everything Else (28 page)

But nitroglycerin wants for attention and so, the following morning, I am awakened by a stern rapping on the door.

Alfred Nobel knew about nitroglycerin. In 1864 there was an explosion at his family's chemical plant in Sweden. Alfred's brother Emil was killed by the blast. A tragedy that triggered two large shifts in the mostly straight path of Alfred's life.

The first—Alfred quickly developed a way to muffle and control the strength of nitroglycerin by surrounding it in an organic packing material. Alfred invented dynamite. The second—a French newspaper would mistakenly publish a premature obituary of Alfred, blaming his dynamite for many disasters and suffering. Alfred, surprised to read his own obituary while he was still very much alive, was upset by the unflattering portrait. He promptly redrafted his will. He'd rather be remembered for his generosity than his explosions. Sitting down to consider his life for all posterity, Alfred struck on the idea that became the Nobel Prize.

"Hello." I'd been called to the hotel telephone, a bad connection that crackled in my ear.

"Mr. Tesla, Peter Grun—" and the last bit is garbled. "From the
New York Times.
"

"Yes?"

"I hope I can be the first to ask you, how does it feel to win the Nobel Prize?"

"Sorry?"

"You've won the Nobel Prize in physics," the reporter repeats.

I freeze, but the busy hotel lobby won't have it. Men carry great piles of packages through the revolving doors, women tug at the hands of children who have grown as fixed and stubborn as mules staring at a patch of sunlight on the sidewalk outside. Bellhops cross their arms and one tall man who blends in with the décor stands still, phone pinched to ear, mouth agape, having just received news that, after years of neglect, he has won the Nobel Prize.

The reporter continues. "Yes, I got early word from Stockholm that you and Thomas Edison are to share the award for 1915. Twenty thousand dollars apiece. What do you have to say?"

"Thomas Edison?"

"Yes. You've heard of Thomas Edison?" The reporter chuckles.

I do not deign to answer but rather see the problem. The flaw in the Nobel committee's thinking. "We're to share the prize?" I ask.

"That's what early reports say."

"Well, here is my comment." I turn away from the lobby into the dark of the phone vestibule. "I have not yet been officially notified of this honor. I have to conclude that the honor has been conferred upon me in acknowledgment of a discovery announced a short time ago which concerns the transmission of electrical energy without wires. This discovery means that electrical effects of unlimited intensity and power can be produced, so that not only can energy be transmitted for all practical purposes to any terrestrial distance, but even effects of cosmic magnitude may be created. We will deprive the ocean of its terrors by illuminating the sky, thus avoiding collisions at sea and other disasters caused by darkness. We will draw unlimited quantities of water from the ocean and irrigate the deserts and other arid regions. In this way we will fertilize the soil and derive any amount of power from the sun. I also believe that ultimately all battles, if they should come, will be waged by electrical waves instead of explosives."

The words came in a torrent. Recognition. At long last.

"No." I paused. "This is the first I've heard. I can imagine at least a dozen reasons why Mr. Thomas Edison deserves the Nobel Prize, though presently I can't imagine what discovery induced the authorities to confer the prize upon him."

Again I paused to breathe. "I'm not sure I can believe this news until I've heard officially. Thank you for your call." I excuse myself. Hanging up the phone, I return to my room. "Not sure I can believe this," I say again. I believe every word the reporter said. I drift aboard a small bright cloud through the halls of the hotel. "Good morning. Good morning." I greet every face I see.

Back in my room I make a mental list of past Nobel laureates who received the honor by furthering some research on one of my existing patents. The list is not a short one. Of course I believe the reporter. I deserve the Nobel Prize.

Though there are problems. The prize is unbalanced. On one hand there is twenty thousand dollars, money I clearly need. But the other hand holds an excuse, an apology marking the economy of prize giving. And Edison. Twenty thousand dollars could start a laboratory. But
Edison. I couldn't share the prize with him. Seated on my bed, I'm torn in two, straight down the middle. I watch while from inside the two halves a strange shape emerges, lumbering and unbalanced, crippled nearly. A baby bird? The skin is as wet and puckered, but the way this thing thrumps and throbs it cannot be a squab. A heart? Perhaps. My heart? Yes. Yes. I begin to recognize it. I've never seen it before, but there it is, my heart, and here is what happened to it:

The report had been in error. The Nobel committee, it seems, changed their minds, and on November 14, 1915, W. H. Bragg and his son, W. L. Bragg, were awarded the Nobel in physics for their work using X-rays to determine crystal structure, and I was not.

Since we did not participate in the handling of Mr. Tesla's effects, we are unable to supply the information you requested.

Sincerely yours,
John Edgar Hoover
Director, Federal Bureau
of Investigation

"U
HHMMG.
"

Louisa's knocking raises nothing more than a muffled "Uhhmmg." She takes that as permission to enter. He is seated in his one armchair with his shoes removed, his long legs tucked up underneath him, an elegant, tired grasshopper.

"Hello." She stands by the door, not wanting to intrude. Slowly he raises his head, twisting it to the side instead of greeting her face to face. He seems to have swallowed something gray for lunch. The dullness dampens his cheeks, pulling them down with the weight of a thunderhead.

"Hello," he says and looks at her as if wondering why she's got nothing better to do.

"I've brought you your towels." In truth she wanted to ask him if he would meet Arthur. She thought that if Arthur met Mr. Tesla, perhaps they'd have much to discuss. Plus it was a good excuse to see them both again.

"That's fine. Over there is just fine," he says, raising one long finger that shakes like the very tip of a tree branch in a storm.

Louisa places the towels atop his dresser and then steps back, pressing her back up against the far wall, watching him. "Are you all right?" she finally asks. "Do you not feel well? I can send for a doctor."

He doesn't answer. He instead turns his gaze up to the ceiling, staring at something she hadn't noticed before. One of his birds is perched there, a checkered pigeon, gripping the molding that runs around the entire room, two feet below the ceiling. The bird has stashed itself away in the corner.

"Oh," Louisa says, as if he wasn't also looking at the pigeon, as if he didn't see how the bird had already soiled the wall, having perhaps held that perch for some time now. "Do you want me to try to catch her?"

Mr. Tesla, his head tucked between the back and the wing of the chair, stares at Louisa without answering yes or no. He looks at her for so long she begins to feel that the doorjamb and the wall behind her are passing through her person. He is staring right through her as if she is not even there. The bird takes flight across the room and lands on a bedside table.

"Mr. Tesla" Louisa asks, "if there were a machine that could carry you into the future, would you go?"

"Oh, this again. The future," he says. Clouds are gathering out the window as though he's a magnet attracting them, pulling both the bad weather and the wall behind Louisa in around him like a blanket. "I think I've already been" he finally answers very quietly. "Here." He points to his wall of cabinets. "There was one road and there was another road." He's looking not at Louisa anymore but out the window. "I think you'll see what I mean soon enough. Ka-boom. We take the wrong road, dear." Mr. Tesla lowers his chin into his hands.

"You visited the future?" Louisa asks.

He looks up from his hands. "No. Not actually. No." At that Mr. Tesla untucks his legs as if he's had enough from this line of questioning. He stands up and pads across the room in his stocking feet, lacking his usual vigor. "I'm sorry. I have to go feed the birds."

"Haven't you already been today?"

"Yes, but she wasn't there. I have to return."

"Who?" Louisa asks.

"My bird," he says and sets his jaw, watching Louisa.

"You don't look well. Are you sure you should go out?"

From one closet he produces a paper bag of peanuts. "They'll be waiting for me."

"I could go with you as soon as my shift is over."

"No," he says, mustering a firmness that surprises Louisa. Mr. Tesla pulls on his shoes, coat, and hat, and hoisting the sack of peanuts, without saying a word more to Louisa, he departs, leaving her alone in his room.

She stands a moment, wondering if she ought not accompany him. He doesn't look strong enough to go alone.

The mirror above the vanity reflects the door and the opening onto the hallway. The reflection makes another hallway, a mirror one that shoots out the back of the glass and through the side wall of the hotel and out over Thirty-fifth Street like a secret passageway.

At that moment there is a soft scratching, like a mouse or like the squirrels that live in her walls at home. Louisa turns, half expecting to see some creature burrowing its way down the hall. She is wrong. No one is there. She waits and listens.

The scratching is coming from the wall between Mr. Tesla's room and the room next door, 3326. Louisa walks closer to the wall and listens. She puts her hands up against it and feels the slightest vibrations, and then she hears the sound again, very, very softly. She steps back, scared, studying the wall, waiting for something to happen. And then something does happen. At that moment, not more than six inches away from where Louisa's head just was, the tip of a drill bit pokes through the wall, making a hole, a small hole, into Mr. Tesla's room. Louisa throws her back up against the wall and watches. After the drill bit is removed, what looks to her to be the top of a chubby pinkie finger prods its way into the room, clearing the hole of its debris. The fingertip pokes out from the wall and Louisa thinks of grabbing on to it like a pig's tail. She's furious that someone should be spying on Mr. Tesla. Someone besides herself, that is. She slides her hand up the wall, ready to grab hold, just as the finger disappears back into 3326. And so Louisa turns to face this intruder. She places her eyeball right in front of the hole and peers through. There she is met by a horror: a beady, greasy, twitching orb is watching her from the other side of the wall.

A scream trapped in her stomach is banging to be let out, but Louisa is not a screamer. A wave of good sense, like a flotation device, lifts her above the impulse. She presses up against the wall very quietly. A heavy rain starts to fall, a rain that knocks, pounds on the windows. She feels all the oxygen thinning. Louisa backs up toward the door,
keeping her eye on the hole, then turns very quickly to leave. After locking the door behind her, she takes off running down the hallway, the real one this time.

I must find Mr. Tesla, Louisa thinks. Her cart of cleaning supplies, even her Protecto-Ray, have been sitting outside room 3327 and 3326 for a while now. If a supervisor has been by, she will be in trouble. She still has rooms to clean and it is nearly five o'clock. People will be returning to the hotel to get dressed for dinner. They will find their beds unmade, their dirty towels still strewn across the floor. Louisa can't say that she cares. I must find Mr. Tesla, she thinks again. Perhaps I can catch him before he leaves. She pushes her cart out into the foyer by the service elevators and leaves it there. She takes the elevator down to the Terrace Room.

The ice show is just about to get started. A few skaters are prepping themselves in the service area, warming up with general calisthenics, squats, and lunges before the show. The beautiful women tower above Louisa in their skates. Tonight they are costumed as swans. They wear very short skirts edged with white feathers. The skirts fluff out nearly a foot and a half from their hips. As Louisa squeezes in between the skaters, these layers of tulle and feathers brush her shoulders. One skater, rising from a plié, has her arm lifted above her head in a graceful arc. She has opened her wing, a panel of feathers attached to her back. For a moment Louisa cannot see around the skater's wing. She is distracted by their costumes. She walks directly into a waiter who'd been, just a moment ago, carrying a large tray on which he was balancing nearly every salt and pepper shaker owned by the Hotel New Yorker. The tray comes crashing down, the shakers scatter everywhere. As he turns to see what hit him, his face has streams of volcanic lava rising through the veins of his neck. One glimpse is all Louisa needs. She ducks underneath the sea of white tulle, underneath the swans, and beating a hasty retreat hidden below the costumes, she escapes. I must find Mr. Tesla, she thinks.

She makes her way out to the lobby. The storm is really raging. Thunder and lightning clap from the sky. There is a crew of workers undressing the Christmas tree. They are balancing on a rickety contraption of scaffolding and ladders. Their movements, like spiders', are certain despite the precarious lack of ground beneath their feet.

Mr. Tesla is not in the lobby. She runs outside onto the street, but it's pouring rain; she can't see anything. Returning to the lobby, she hopes that maybe he was stopped by the storm, that he hasn't left the hotel yet.

The Lamp Post Corner's speed counter is one of the hotel's restaurants, located on the southeastern side of the hotel. The diner is nearly empty, as it's late in the day. Two walls are made of large storefront windows, and Louisa can see that the glass is getting lashed by the growing storm. In a terrifying, sudden burst of lightning the entire restaurant is illuminated and she sees him finally, standing in the window, staring out at the storm. A stooped, slightly disheveled man wearing a haunted suit, a ghost with cheeks sucked in tight to the bone, hat on his head, sack of peanuts in his hand, amazed by the weather.