The Invention of Everything Else (32 page)

I
STAND BESIDE
the wall staring at a spot on it, not the hole they have drilled, but a smaller spot, a blemish down low. Pressed against the partition I listen with my hands, imagining the men doing the same on the other side. What sort of men are they? What sort of men would they send for me finally? When curiosity outweighs propriety or preservation, I knock three times against the wall, very slowly. Three knocks. Are. You. There. I flatten my hand to the wall. I can feel the men as though the wall were made of nothing more than Japanese rice paper. I can touch them. They are there breathing. They do not answer.

My thoughts are interrupted by a musical rapping on my door. I don't bother to glance through the peephole. I'd know that spirited knocking anywhere and am always happy to visit with someone from the old days. I open the door.

"Mr. Clemens! Hello."

"Greetings, old man" Sam says as he steps into my room.

"Sit, sit. I'll order us something to eat. We can dine here in the room."

"You go ahead. I've had just about all I could. But you go ahead, please."

Sam has a seat in the room's one wing chair, the one tucked in the front corner directly below my reading lamp. It is where he always sits. Taking a pad of paper in hand, he nods. He's ready. "Come on now," he says.

"Where was I?" I ask. "The end of the story, I suppose."

"No, not the end. The Nobel fiasco. That was 1915. That was thirty years ago."

"Ah," I say and sit a moment to stall. I glance once again at the wall. If they have come, I must have done something well. "Here is the truth, if you think that is what you need. From 1915 on, and even earlier, things got bleak. I started to get old, Sam. I hadn't ever thought I would, but I did. I signed the deed of Wardenclyffe over to the Waldorf to pay my debts. I moved out, and two years later the U.S. government blew the tower up—using Alfred Nobel's dynamite, of all things. The IRS sued me. It was in the papers. Even old George Westinghouse threatened to sue me. He said I owed him money for a number of dynamos used at Wardenclyffe. He said
I
owed
him
money. The world stopped making sense. When a country goes to war, men can no longer operate free and open laboratories. The government would like to know what you are doing. Businesses became corporations, the individual thinker became unpatriotic. My way of inventing got tossed out with the trash. It was a new century, one where I did not belong."

Sam is not writing. Speeches are not what he is after. He wants stories, not speeches.

"And then came Prohibition. Deprived of my daily whiskey"—I give Sam a wink—"I am certain that a number of years were shaved
off my life. I kept to myself more and more. The pigeons and me. And people talked about how very
strange
I was as they sat inside their homes coursing with AC electricity, listening to the radio. And then, even worse, they stopped talking about me altogether and shelved me somewhere up high where they wouldn't have to watch me growing old and daft. To top it off, perhaps you remember, the Superman series introduced a character, an evil scientist with a quest to destroy America. His English was heavily accented. His name was Tesla."

"But that was just the war in Europe," Sam says, dismissing it.

"Is war a reason to forget all but our cruelest of plans? In America you could still be an engineer, you just couldn't be Serbian. And you most definitely couldn't be poor and unmarried, with plans for a wireless world tucked up your sleeve, and Serbian. No. We were at war.

"Even Edison died, Sam, and, I couldn't believe it, but I missed him. The world was changing, squeezing out the inventors. I think of him often still. Do you remember hearing stories about a megaphone he'd been working on at the end? It was a megaphone for talking to dead people."

"Yes. I think so. Fantastic."

"An electrical device of amplification that could span the boundary between life and death, some sort of ether wave amplifier. I think of Edison and I miss him because I can't imagine anyone daring enough to make a megaphone for talking to dead people now. I think of Edison and, sometimes, I even imagine using his megaphone at night. I imagine raising the device up to my lips. 'Thomas!' I would call out through the open window beside my bed. 'Thomas!' I would say just as loudly as I could.

"And then I would wait. I would listen."

Sam and I wait and listen. There is no sound.

"I've even imagined the reply, Sam, and it doesn't come from Thomas. It comes from one floor down. 'Be quiet! We're trying to sleep!'"

"Perhaps the problem," Sam suggests, "is that Edison's megaphone for talking to dead people never actually existed anywhere but inside his head."

And he has a good point there until I remind him, "But failure, Sam, is how the world evolves. Consider Andrew Crosse. Ever heard of him?"

Sam shakes his head no.

"No. Of course you have not. No one has. He was a failure, but a great one. He was also
strange.
His laboratory was in a ballroom tucked away in the Quantock Hills of Somerset, England. He filled it with stinky beakers. He skipped meals, tore at his hair, grew mineral crystals in bone china teacups, made lightning-fueled Leyden jar batteries in the house's old organ loft, and, oftentimes, spoke to himself in verse.
Crosse, yes, Crosse will be selected, When he in turn makes life electric!
Crosse believed in spontaneous generation. Pre-Enlightenment, pre–
ex ovo omnia.
Life from nothing save a bolt of electricity. The tiny insect
Acari electricus.
Faraday was fascinated. Mary Shelley was inspired to write
Frankenstein.

"Of course, he was wrong. But wonderfully so."

Again Sam seems unimpressed with this line of self-pity.

Still I keep on. "And then Katharine died. The world was trimming all excess, all possibility, from me. All but the thoughts in my head, the birds on the sill, and a closetful of old evening suits.

"Before she died Katharine made Robert and me promise we would take care of each other, and we tried. He'd send me a check for two hundred dollars one month and I'd scrape together a similar check to help him through the following month. Generally we'd attach missives whose recollections of happier times rang more and more melancholy with the distance. Robert attempted to stave off Pascal's maxim
On mourra seul
with his books of poetry and the companionship of a teen-aged ballerina. And I, as was my custom, remained alone.

"So you see, it would be best, Sam, to take your pencil and, if you held it on the side, start to sketch broad, dark swaths that might soon cover the entire page front and back, cover over the last thirty years of my life. A darkness. End of story."

"That's not the end" he protests. "You're still here. There're a lot of people who can't say that. Why don't you tell me what you're working on now, Niko."

I begin to shake my head. "There's no laboratory anymore."

He twists his mouth and chin.

"Well, I've been making do with this space here, but my best projects and inventions now are happening only in my mind." I tap my temple. "More philosophy than practice."

"Then philosophize, you Philistine. Tell me what you've been working on."

"For you, I will" I move closer to Sam and I feel the blood rush down my legs. I feel alive. "OK. Imagine this," I tell him. "The brain is not an accumulator but rather memory is thought. Correct?"

Sam nods his head in agreement. "More or less," he says, and lifting both of his elbows to the chair's armrests, he brings his fingers together in a teepee below his mouth.

"When the memory is first created, light enters the retina and strikes the optic nerve, which carries those traces of energy to the brain to complete the image. The image is stored or sometimes, sadly, the older we get, not stored. Regardless, memory is made by energy," I say.

"Yes, yes." Clemens agrees, following with little difficulty, looking a bit distracted by the birds on the sill.

"Memory, then, is a process of energy, of course, just as thought is. Electrical pulses just like light, just like sound. We record light and sound all the time." In my excitement I press my hands down onto my desk chair. It used to be I could lift my entire body off the seat, hang between my hands, and swing for a moment, but my arms feel a bit tired today. "And so, what I have been wondering, as I lie here getting older, recalling the past in such vivid, vivid pictures, is, why can't that energy, that thought, be photographed? Can we take photos of thought? Can we take photos of memory?"

"Well, perhaps we can. Perhaps we can," Samuel says. His interest piqued, he leans in closer.

"I believe we can," I say and lean back to cross my legs. "In these memories that I've been attempting to recall for you over the past few weeks, I have experienced the past in near actuality. I have seen visions of Smiljan, of the Waldorf and Wardenclyffe and Westinghouse, so clearly that I believe my brain is projecting my memories back onto my retinas. A treat for an old man, a moving picture." I watch Sam for a moment, resting my hand on my chin. "Perhaps we could conduct a test. I would ask you to stare deep into my eyes, deeper than you might imagine possible. And as you do that I will visualize a memory," I say, patting his arm. "It's your job to watch and to tell me what memory you see playing in my eyes. Here!" I shout, struck by an idea, standing up. "I will write the memory on this sheet of paper, the memory I will recall, so that you will believe me there's no sleight of hand involved here." I dash to the bedside table. Bending low, I jot a few notes onto a sheet of paper, tear the sheet from its pad, and, having folded it in half, tap it twice. "Ready?" I ask him.

"Ready as Washington," Sam replies and scoots forward in his chair.

With that the room falls silent. We begin to stare intently into the reservoirs of each other's eyes. Sam is concentrating with all of his energies. He bears down, but I am undistracted by his wild hair and eyebrows. I focus solely on his eyes until he begins to talk. "Mary, Jesus, and—" he says. "I—"

"Tell me what you see," I manage to mumble without breaking concentration.

"I, I," Sam continues. "There is a young boy. He's in a dark room, and he—he appears to be unwell. Beside his bed there are three stacks of books, each one nearly as tall as a man. But the child is engrossed in one text. I can almost see it—why, I don't believe it. It's a book by Mark Twain, by me. I can't quite make out the title.
Innocents Abroad,
perhaps."

I hold the moment a bit longer, allowing him to look about the room, to be certain, though after a moment I blink. I sit back. "You saw it."

Sam nods. "I did. I most certainly did."

"Check that slip of paper beside you."

"Ah, yes." Sam opens the paper and reads what I wrote. "
The first time I read the author Mark Twain.
" He nods and smiles, and again Sam teepees his fingers in thought, saying, "But if that was you as a young man, reading a book already published by me, well then"—he scans me up and down, taking in the body of the octogenarian—"that must make me a very old man indeed."

I shrug off the suggestion that he is old. "You saw it," I say again, and Sam sits back, wiping his eyes, nodding his head in disbelief. "Let's have some dinner," I tell him. "To celebrate."

"No, no. Nothing for me. I've had my fill."

"Well, then it is your turn. If you won't join me for supper, at least tell me what you've been working on. Please, I insist. What story have you dreamed up this time? Perhaps an article for a magazine?"

But Sam shakes his head. He is silent for a moment. "Honestly, times have been lean. I lost a good deal on the Paige Compositor and I haven't been writing much these days. Truthfully, Niko, the reason I ventured out here tonight was to see about procuring a small loan from you." Sam tilts his head up to mine.

"Say no more. I'll messenger the funds to you in the morning."
"You are truly a friend. I won't forget you." With a loan secured, Sam's spirits do seem to pick up a bit. He commends me on my "memory trick" and, promising to return later in the week, he departs rather swiftly. I barely remember him leaving.

I fall into a deep sleep, and the following morning it takes only a moment for me to recall the previous night's events. I leap out of bed and carry myself downstairs immediately to arrange my finances. I have a teller at the Manufacturers Trust Company lead me underground into the vault, where I keep a small safety deposit box. I am quite sad to see that the box is nearly empty. Still, I withdraw almost all that I can, and with cash in hand I return to my room to make up a package. Inside a sheet of blank white paper I wrap a number of five- and twenty-dollar bills. Packaging the lot of them in a brown Kraft envelope, I write on the outside, in a bright hand,
Mr. Samuel Clemens, 35 South Fifth Avenue. Drastically Important! Rush! Rush!

With that done, I call down to the front desk requesting that a messenger be sent.

"Please deliver this as quickly as possible, and when you return I will have a reward waiting for you," I tell the young bellhop sent up from downstairs.

"Yes, sir. Right away." And off he goes.

Finally I start to feel at ease so that I am able to sit down at my desk and begin to write an outline of last night's experiment, entitled "The Eyeball of Memory." I begin, "As a child..." and before I know it I have written five pages.

A knock falls upon the door. Formal, stoic. It is my messenger. I throw open the door. "Good boy," I say and dig into my pocket to fetch the boy a tip, but he shakes his head no.

"Sir," he says. "I tried to deliver your package," and he pulls the same envelope from behind his back, "but there is no such address as South Fifth Avenue."

Did I mislabel it? I check the writing. No, I did not. And so I give the messenger a puzzled look.

He explains. "There is no such street" the bellhop says. "So I took the package to 35
Fifth
Avenue, but there was no one there named Samuel Clemens."

"Well, this is absurd. I know the street well. South Fifth Avenue. You'll have to return and try again," I say quickly, closing the door on the exasperated messenger's face.