The Invention of Everything Else (33 page)

This time I am unable to concentrate on my paper. "No South Fifth Avenue. That's absurd. I have lived in this city for nearly—nearly..." I grow flustered, unable to think. "For a very, very long time. No South Fifth Avenue. Hmph." As I wait for the messenger to return again and assure me he has delivered the package, the time passes painfully, slowly.

I open the window and take one bird in hand, a blue bar. I'll recreate the experiment Samuel and I conducted last night. The possibilities are boggling, though this telepathy I stumbled upon is easily explained. There is no occult involved, but rather it is simple patterns of energy—of course. Yet the implications are enormous.

I soothe the bird in my lap. Then, drawing her close, I stare into the furthest recess of her left eye. Perhaps, I think, she has seen my bird. I wait and stare and concentrate until a thread of light, a gleam of energy, becomes visible to me and I see it. A brilliant blue sky, clouds passing overhead, and the sun in the center of the bird's beautiful memory. In the bird's eye, we are soaring. Though whether this is memory or simply the New York City sky reflecting off the bird's iris is difficult to say because at that very moment a rattling comes upon the door, a rattling that startles me in my anxious state, startles the bird as well, so that I accidentally let go of her and, in fear, she begins to flap her wings, wildly beating a flight up to the room's ceiling. The rattling knock comes again, and imagining it must be Sam here to thank me for the loan and join me for lunch, I attend to the door rather than the bird, who now, in a panic, is thrashing about the light fixture and windows.

I open the door.

"Sir," the messenger says.

"I thought I told you to deliver the package."

"Yes, sir, but—"

I turn my back to the room, keeping an eye on the bird, who, in a frenzy, is flying into the walls. "Oh, dear," I say.

"Sir, there is no South Fifth Avenue," the messenger blurts out and before I can interject more argument the boy continues. "And sir," he says, "I asked my manager. Samuel Clemens, the author Mark Twain, has been dead for twenty-five years."

"Samuel Clemens was standing in this very room just last night" I tell the boy.

"Sir," the messenger says, looking away from me as if scared. He holds the package out for me to take back.

"I don't want that. Either deliver the package or keep it. I don't want it," I say and stare at the boy while the bird's beak crashes against the glass of the window once and then again and again in its fight to escape the room.

My dynamite will sooner lead to peace than a thousand world conventions. As soon as men will find that in one instant, whole armies can be utterly destroyed, they surely will abide by golden peace.

—Alfred Nobel

T
HERE ARE A FEW
grains of spilled sugar on the kitchen table beside the sugar bowl. Louisa presses her finger into them and lifts her hand up to her mouth. She never sweetens her tea. Walter must have spilled these grains earlier when fixing a coffee for himself. The sugar dissolves on her tongue.

Tiny silver threads, a spider's web, she thinks. Strands of coincidence that are like a piece of lace holding the world together exactly as it is in this second here.

Before tearing and shifting into this second here.

Arthur had stood inside Louisa's foyer, scraping at a small splinter of wood, a flake from the side of her door. He said nothing but picked at the wood as if he could do that forever, remain silent without breathing another word, never telling her how Walter and Azor's illegally piloted, unregulated, unexplainable time machine did not land in 1918 but crashed from seven thousand feet down onto Barren Island in 1943.

But finally he did speak, and he told her something impossible.

"Walter is gone," he said.

And the words somehow took immediate effect. "Yes," Louisa said, as if she'd been waiting for someone to tell her this. She understood.

"The time machine," he began to explain, but she stopped him by looking away, staring of past his shoulder to watch while Walter disappeared down the front stair and out into the street. Her father trickled into the Hudson and got lost among all the other dead things in New York. Walter drained away from her, and though she'd always suspected that one day either he or she would leave their home, it felt as if it were her own blood leaking through Manhattan. She whitened, so Arthur took her wrist in his hand and squeezed it roughly three or four times as if trying to get a heart to start beating again.

"Don't" was all she said, wanting to watch the last bits of her father's life disappear. They stood together and waited. Louisa looked beyond Arthur's shoulder until nothing was left, just the two of them, the stoop, Fifty-third Street. "Arthur," she said finally, seeing him also.

In the kitchen he sits across from her. The world seems very silent, as if it is waiting to see how Louisa will react, as if it is scared to see what a young woman whose father has been killed will do to the world that took him away or at least to the man who came bearing the news. She watches the spilled sugar, the spider web her father left behind. And after a moment, grief tears at her breath, a piece of linen dragged across a rusty nail. Louisa watches the sugar until she realizes it doesn't have anything more to tell her. "Your father is gone." Of course he is gone. Of course.

"Arthur," she says, trying and failing to sort her thoughts. "I'm going to lie down upstairs for a moment." He nods and Louisa turns to add one thing more, a thing she has never said to a man before because she has never needed to. "Don't go."

"No," he says and so she leaves him there. She walks upstairs through the house, familiar as it once was.

It's dark in Walter's room. She sits on her father's bed and, leaning down, holds her face just above his pillow to smell the oily scent of his hair, his stale sleeping breath. She doesn't dare touch the pillow. She worries her touch might erase the things that he stored there. Skin, scent, spit, hair, the vague outlines of his dreams. At five-thirty Walter's alarm clock tries to wake him up in time for his night shift. She listens to the alarm. He raised her all alone, taking care of her until she was old enough to take care of him. She turns the alarm off. Why hadn't she stopped him? The house has never been so empty. She lets her head rest on the blanket beside his pillow and shuts her eyes, falling asleep without dreams.

When she wakes it is with a start, as if some large weight had been dropped on her chest. The room is dark and the house is still, aside from an occasional ticking. She lifts her head from the bed, uncertain how long she has slept, maybe only a moment, maybe hours. She smells the air just above his pillow again, and the scent of Walter drives Louisa straight into a curious conclusion: death, especially this one, is not possible. She will fix it. No wonder she wasn't that sad earlier.

Louisa flies down the staircase.

Arthur had been sitting at the kitchen table, resting his head in his hands. But now, she sees, he is nowhere to be found. "Hello?" she calls out in the empty house. "Arthur?" she says. There is no answer. "Arthur?" she asks again. The sound of her voice through the house comes back cold and she decides she cannot wait for him. She has a mission, with or without Arthur.

When she had first seen the plans in Mr. Tesla's room she hadn't been quite sure what a death ray was, but now that she needs one, she understands its purpose exactly. Mr. Tesla has invented a death ray that can reanimate, re-electrify a body after it has died. It makes the dead come back again. Perhaps it uses electricity to do it. Yes, she thinks. Of course. The ray must somehow reverse death because, to Louisa's thinking, no one, especially not Mr. Tesla, would make a ray that causes death. What could possibly be the point of that? People die so easily already.

Louisa is thinking in zigzags like a drunk, or a train about to wreck. She doesn't care if she has to build the ray herself. She will. Mr. Tesla will help her. She will point it at her father's body and he will come back to life and she will not be left here all alone in this haunted house.

She imagines how excited her father will be when she tells him.

"I was dead?"

"Yes."

"And you brought me back with that?"

"Yes."

"Fantastic!" he'll say before he starts to laugh.

Louisa sets off for the hotel in a state of excitement. She believes in Mr. Tesla. She walks out the front door, forgetting to lock it behind her.

At the hotel she changes into her maid's outfit. There is a show in the Grand Ballroom—Johnny Long, it sounds like. The show is being recorded for radio to be broadcast across America. From the hall, the crowd looks near capacity. Louisa wonders where all these people will be in four days' time when their voices will be sent out across the country. Perhaps they will be sitting alone in their kitchens, staring out at the clouds that will cover the light of the moon. Perhaps they too will be gone? But where will they go? Where will Louisa be in four days' time? Or Walter? Or Arthur? Or Azor? She knows. They will all be back at her kitchen table, stirring sugar into coffee and tea.

The two bellhops who usually wait in the lobby for late arrivals are huddled by the hallway that leads back to the New Terrace and the ballroom. They are listening to the opening strains of what sounds like "Moonlight on the Ganges." The shorter bellhop is demonstrating a one-sided fox trot, holding a ghost of a partner in his arms. I understand, Louisa thinks. They are in that world, the world of the living. I am in this one, but only just for now. Louisa walks past them unseen. The music rises. She ducks behind their backs as they tap their feet in time to the orchestra.

Louisa rides the elevator up to 33, and at the end of the hallway, raising her arm to knock on Mr. Tesla's door, she sees that it is already open.

Good, she thinks. He must be there. If they start building the device tonight, perhaps they can be done by morning.

"Mr. Tesla," she whispers from outside. There is no answer. "Mr. Tesla," she calls again, stepping into the dark room. She is not thinking very clearly. Perhaps he is asleep. She is approaching his bed to wake him when she trips, landing sprawled out on the floor. In the cut of hallway light flooding in through the open doorway she can see that the bed is empty. She stands. She rubs her knee. She turns on the light to see what she's tripped on.

And there he is.

"What are you doing here?" she asks.

His eyes draw open very wide, showing more alarm than Louisa has ever seen Arthur express. He is standing beside Mr. Tesla's desk in the dark.

"What?" she says again. "How did you get—" she begins but then doesn't know what to ask.

She looks about the room. Something must have exploded, she thinks at first. But no. The room has been ransacked, purposefully ransacked. Each one of Mr. Tesla's exact and orderly drawers has been turned upside down and emptied. Papers are strewn across the bed, uncoiled spools of wire have been rolled across the floor, every single cabinet door is open and the insides have been disheveled by a lumbering, careless hand. There are a number of broken glass bulbs shattered on the floor. There is a wheel oscillator now crumpled and bent.

"What have you done?" she asks.

"Louisa, I didn't. It was already like this. I promise, I didn't do this. I didn't make this mess."

"Then what," she asks, "are you doing here?"

Arthur stands stumped for a moment. He lowers his voice and hesitates before speaking. "What if I told you that in the future Mr. Tesla's papers and inventions would become really, really important?"

Louisa says nothing. She is trying to distill some clarity, to decipher just what that means. "The future?"

Arthur looks out the window.

Louisa's mouth slips open a hair. Her expression changes very little.

Arthur looks down at the floor.

"Arthur, what are you doing here?"

He starts to shake his head. "The door was unlocked," he says. He begins to walk over to Louisa. "This mess was already here. I promise."

"Don't come any closer to me," she tells him. Her voice, having aligned itself with steel, makes Arthur stop walking. "I see. I understand," she says. Quite suddenly it all becomes clear, as clear as one of her radio programs. Arthur is from the future. The story takes shape faster than she can think it. He came back to destroy Azor's time machine for some reason or another. He killed Walter and Azor and now he is coming to get Mr. Tesla.

"What do you understand?" he asks.

Or else, she thinks, perhaps he
is
Azor, just a younger version of him come here from the past, maybe to warn them not to get into the time machine, but then why didn't it work? Why didn't he tell them about the danger? Louisa hasn't figured that out yet, but she will. Unless of course—she looks at him, his ragged solidity—Arthur is just
a young man born in 1918 who never lived anywhere ever besides the present moment, who one day met a girl on the subway and who now is standing here in front of her for some good reason. "I asked you not to leave," she says.

"I know, Lou, and I'm sorry." He starts walking toward her again but stops when she steps backward. "I thought I could be back before you woke up. I just wanted to fix everything. For you. Still, I'm sorry I left."

"Fix everything? What are you doing here?" She screams it.

Arthur bites his lip. "I'm supposed to meet Azor."

"Arthur. Arthur. Azor is dead." She doesn't know what else to say.

"But last week he wasn't, and last week he told me to meet him here. Look." Arthur produces a slip of paper from inside his coat pocket. The script is in Azor's hand.
Hotel New Yorker. Room 3327. 8
P.M.
January 7,1943!
it says. Exclamation point and all.

Louisa's arm freezes in the air, holding the note as if it were a delicate artifact, a crumbling bone. "Azor," she repeats, shaking her head slowly, "is dead."

"That's true. But Lou, he's not meeting me here from today. He's meeting me here from last week, and last week he was alive and maybe there is still a chance to stop them."