The Invention of Everything Else (34 page)

"You believe this?" She shakes the note.

Arthur struggles in her unkindness. "He said he'd meet me here." Arthur is speaking very slowly, planning each word. "He said he's going to take Mr. Tesla with him."

"Where?" she asks.

Arthur clears his throat, a shield against her disbelief. "To the future. Azor thinks that Mr. Tesla belongs there."

"Oh, Arthur." She shakes her head to clear the fog. She turns to look at the mess of the room. She can hear him breathing. There is a bird at the window, a pale gray pigeon, beautiful, with white-tipped wings. "No." She says it flatly, loud, frustration rising in her voice. "No," she repeats.

"Why not?" Arthur asks.

"Because I don't believe it," she says. There is a clock set above Mr. Tesla's desk. "And anyway it's almost nine o'clock, Arthur." She looks again at the note. "This says eight."

"I know."

"Even if it were true, time travelers are never late. How could a time traveler be late? They can't. Don't you know that? Don't you know anything?"

He looks down at his feet. "Yes, Louisa. I do," he whispers. "I know quite a few things."

It is too much. The story is spinning out of comprehension. She has to stay focused. She has to think about her father. "I need your help," she says.

He looks up at her. She's nearly blind to anything outside her plan. Louisa gives Arthur a command. "Go find Mr. Tesla. Tell him it's an emergency. Tell him I need him."

"What about Azor? I said I'd be here."

"He's not coming." Her words have sharp teeth.

"How do you know?"

"Arthur," she says, pleading now. If he pushes her much further she will begin to cry. "Please." She says it quietly, just once.

Arthur looks up at the ceiling, pushing his glasses back up onto the bridge of his nose. Louisa waits for his decision. He turns to her, keeping his voice quiet, his chin tucked away from her. And when he looks up again she sees him surrender. "I've never seen Mr. Tesla before. How will I know who he is?"

"He'll be in Bryant Park. He'll be the one feeding the pigeons."

Louisa looks at the mess and understands now. It wasn't Arthur. She turns to look at the hole in the wall, wondering if they are watching her. She doesn't waste much time looking for the folder she'd seen a few days earlier,
THOUGHTS; DEATH RAY AND THE POTENTIAL TO SAVE HUMAN LIFE.
The folder is no longer there. Books, newspapers, coils of wire, rubber tubing, room-service menus are all that is left. The men next door took what was of value. "Fine," she says aloud. She will just have to steal the file back from the thieves themselves. She turns and closes Mr. Tesla's door behind her.

Room 3326. She knocks. There is no answer. She imagines these men. No doubt they are enjoying tonight's special, the osso buco, down in the ballroom, slurping from the marrowbone as Johnny Long taps the horn section up to their feet. She knocks again to be certain. "Room service." No answer. As she turns the key, a voice, not her own, bubbles up inside her. "Dear listeners," it says, "what will our heroine encounter inside room 3326?" Her blood begins to rush.

There are tools of surveillance everywhere. Recording machines,
binoculars, and a device, much like a doctor's stethoscope, for listening through the walls. She sees where they have removed a framed print of Central Park skaters,
Winter Rhapsody upon a Steel-Edged Blade,
from the wall and drilled the small peephole right through the plaster. She begins her search. It does not last long. There it is, sitting on top of a pile of papers as though someone had left it out just for her.
THOUGHTS; DEATH RAY AND THE POTENTIAL TO SAVE HUMAN LIFE
. The file is thick, containing everything she imagines she will need to bring her father back to life. Any grief that had been threatening her is gone. It's going to work. She believes in Mr. Tesla. She'll take him and the file out to Azor's workshop. With Arthur's help, Mr. Tesla will have no trouble assembling a ray. Azor has enough materials and tools to make twenty death rays. In a few hours she's going to have her father and Azor back again. Louisa's blood is sprinting through her, up to her head, down to her smallest toe. Her certainty is solid and she leans right into it. Tucking the folder down behind the bib of her apron, inside her blouse, she turns to leave and is surprised when, at that moment, the door to the hallway bangs open and they are standing there, the men in the gray suits. The two, FBI, OSS, Department of Alien Property, whoever they are. They stare and blink, looking at Louisa. Blink. Looking at each other.

"Housekeeping," Louisa finally tries. It's far too late for housekeeping. "Room service?" A second attempt.

"She's the one who was in his room last night" one of the men says while the other steps forward, raising his arms, coming toward her like a zombie, ready to grab hold of Louisa's shoulders.

Just at that moment she feels something kick her in her stomach, something like a horse's hoof or a locomotive engine. It's Walter. It's the file. She runs toward the first man, and with one very sharp, very quick elbow to his belly —
POW
! — and a quick movement —
ZIP
!—she dashes past the second man. She is out in the hallway, sprinting past each guest-room door, taking corners at top speed, smashing directly —
BAM
! — into a requisite room-service cart left, it would seem purposely, in her path. Cymbals of aluminum chafing dishes crash to the floor. She hears all the sound effects of the radio show. She does not stop to examine the spill but continues to run, making her way past the elevators to the back stairwell. The patterns in the carpet blur into a strange jungle of florid floral prints that could wrap their vines around her fleeing ankles if she weren't so fast.

The zombie man pauses a moment to recover —
COUGH COUGH
—and then takes off after her, chasing Louisa through the Hotel New Yorker, yelling, "Stop, thief! Stop, thief!" The other man, a bit slower on the uptake, a bit more girth to his middle, falls in line behind him.

She makes it to the stairwell and once there she relies upon an old trick gleaned from the radio dramas. Louisa goes against gravity and begins to climb up, rather than down, the staircase. Having just reached the landing, where she is out of view, she hears one man enter the stairwell. He yells back to the other, "You take the elevator. She might have gone that way!"

Louisa freezes, and the man one floor below her also freezes, listening for her.
GULP
. He pauses there directly below her for one moment to listen. She holds her breath, and after an unbearable second he takes of, spiraling down the stairs.

With her back against the wall Louisa breathes heavily, listening to his footsteps. His footsteps that, after descending four or five stories, stop. She listens, and what she fears may happen, does. The stairwell falls silent. Once again she holds her breath tight against the wall. There is no sound except the pounding of a steam radiator that has lost its steam.

"Young lady," he calls out to her.

Louisa's skin puckers as his words scurry through the stairwell looking for her. The words creep up her spine and across the back of her neck.

"Young lady," he says again, this time beginning to chuckle.
HA HA HA
. He's figured out her trick.

Even if she could make it up to the roof, where would she go from there? The Hotel New Yorker stands all alone, a pinnacle in the sky. There would be no choice except for straight down —
WHOOSH
— at a rate of speed Louisa is uncomfortable with. No. Up, she realizes, is not the answer, but she hears him begin to climb, and so Louisa runs for the door to the thirty-fourth floor and the man once again starts to give chase. Rounding the corner to the bank of elevators, she realizes that her father's life has come down to this moment: either there will be an open elevator car waiting for her or there won't. She turns the corner. All six elevator doors are closed, but standing in the center of the hall, a couple, revelers on their way down to hear Johnny Long perhaps, have already placed a call for an elevator. Louisa stops running. The couple smiles. The woman's evening gown has tiny teardrop pearl beads stitched to its bodice. "Good evening," the couple says to Louisa.

Louisa stares at them as though they are not made of flesh and blood but words, strange beings who are with her in this radio play. Louisa wipes sweat from her forehead. She presses the already illuminated
DOWN
button once more for good measure and then the seconds begin to tick past, each one a gaping hole, each moment so massive that all the universe is held within its arms. Louisa waits, rocking onto the outsides of her feet and ankles. Every moment that passes is the worst pain—
TICKTOCKTICKTOCKTICK
—a knife that makes it difficult to breathe. Every moment she can feel the man in the stairwell gaining on her. Louisa listens for the door to burst open while monitoring the progress of two elevator cars on the illuminated panel. There is one elevator descending from the thirty-seventh floor, and there is one car stopped below them at 32. Louisa begins to chew her lip, pulling madly at the side of her uniform. The stairwell door swings opens at the very moment that—
DING
!—the elevator car arrives. The couple steps in, as does Louisa while listening to the sound of approaching footsteps. "Where to?" the bellhop asks.

"Ballroom, please," the couple replies.

"Take me to the tunnel," Louisa whispers, croaks, and the doors swing shut, cutting out the sound of one pair of swiftly gaining footfalls, a locomotive making its way down the hall.
CHOO-CHOO
!

Louisa tries to catch her breath. The numbers tick by—33, 32, 31, 30, 29, 28, 27, 26, 25, 24, 23, 22, 21, 20, and then, finally, the car runs express from there down to the lobby. The elevator comes to a stop. "Good evening," the couple calls out again as they disembark, turning back to smile at Louisa as if she, with them, is on the inside of some great joke.

"Good evening," the bellhop calls after them before glancing back at Louisa, giving her a rather sour look.

"You really ought to ride the service elevator," he informs her before turning back to his controls. He does not make a move. "I'm not supposed to give you a ride. I mean, I don't have to." He does not close the elevator doors but demonstrates his intention to simply sit there, to wait for a tipping customer whom he might shepherd up to a suite of rooms. The elevator man, though she could hardly call him a man, pulls a book of logic puzzles from inside his uniform. With the stub of a greasy pencil, he begins to deduce. Benjamin, William, Charles,
Louis, and Andrew each own a car. One has a brown car, one has a green car, one has a black car, one has a white car, and one has a navy car. After applying the following conditions, figure out the color of each person's car.

Louisa wants to scream. She is stunned. Though it takes her a moment, eventually she understands that he will not be giving her a ride anywhere. Lost in his logic, he does not even look up at Louisa as she peeks her head from the door, looking left and then right before stepping out into the lobby. Her heart begins to race again. "You're a..." she turns to tell him but then cannot come up with an appropriate insult, so she simply shuts her mouth and leaves him there. She turns left and begins to run again, taking off in the direction of the main stairwell.

The Hotel New Yorker has roots dug deep down into the bedrock of Manhattan. These five subterranean floors have always seemed wondrous, mysterious, and even, at times, frightening to Louisa. A barbershop, a hair salon, kitchens, bank vaults, and perhaps the most wonderful feature of all, there below almost everything, the hotel stretches out an arm, a tentacle, into an underground tunnel that disappears deep into the belly of Pennsylvania Station. Through it, she plans to escape with the file, meeting Arthur and Mr. Tesla in Bryant Park.

Louisa makes her way down, passing through the machine shop and the bank stairwell. The shops have already closed up for the evening and switched out their lights. Through the glass she sees the darkened barber chairs, empty, waiting for tomorrow. She listens but hears nothing other than a few intermittent creaks and surges coming from above, the groans of the hotel. She is totally alone. Even the radio narrator and sound-effect man in her head have been silenced. Down in the basement there is no reception. She is all alone.

A few well-spaced overhead lamps light the way to the tunnel entrance, a hole that Louisa has suddenly become afraid to enter. She peers down into the underground passageway. It looks a bit dim but still she enters. Terra cotta tiles interspersed with Mayan designs. Dragons roaring, owls soaring—monster beings and ancient shapes screech and take flight in the tilework. The lights seem to grow dimmer and Louisa cannot see what is up ahead. The tunnel takes a sharp turn to the left. The corner is obscured and she has no way of knowing what lies beyond. She stands frozen, alone, underneath the traffic of Eighth Avenue. A chill sets in, a fear of what might lie ahead. She
takes one step forward and then another. Her heels click and reverberate, each one echoing against the cold tile floors and ceiling. Hugging one side of the tunnel, she keeps her head tucked to her chin, dragging a finger up against the side wall for some stability.

"I'll build it," her mother had said once, or else maybe she hadn't. Maybe Walter had just made that up, a story to tell, a comfort to Louisa. Neither of them knew what it meant, and it doesn't matter now. Seams have unraveled that can't be brought back together again. Still, they are the only words Louisa ever had from her and at moments when she is frightened she pulls these words out as some sort of force field. "I'll build it" she whispers. "I'll build it" The words make more sense with each repetition.

Louisa can't see more than twenty feet down the tunnel. The light is brown and diffused into a fog, as if there is a patient but horrible storm ahead. Each footstep forward requires a certain amount of faith that the far end holds an escape route for her, a faith that is rapidly dwindling. The air is thick and Louisa feels a bit weak, as if this soupy oxygen is having trouble getting into her lungs. The flow of air changes patterns in unknown currents underground. A slow breeze fills the tunnel with the metallic scent of dirt and minerals, of dread. The wind is stony.