The Invention of Everything Else (36 page)

"You saw him? Azor?"

"Yes."

"He was here? A short man, kind of looks like a turtle?"

"A turtle. Yes. That's the one. He asked me to come with him."

"Where?"

"The future."

"Why didn't you go?"

"What makes you so sure I didn't?" Mr. Tesla said before starting to smile.

I continued cleaning in silence while he sat with the pigeon, whispering things to her that I couldn't quite hear. He tried to help me, reassembling a small spilled drawer of retractable pens, pencil stubs, and paper clips, but he became distracted and sat looking at the bird as if he was waiting for her to tell him something.

While I worked he sat in his chair looking like a part of the debris, waiting to be swept into the dustpan. For the first time he seemed small to me, just one more piece of New York City dust, one of a hundred, a thousand, a million strangers whose ideas would be ignored, who would die alone in a hotel room where different signs posted the various fire escapes and checkout policies.

I cleaned in silence until he finally spoke. "They'll say it all went wrong at wireless energy. But that's not true. If I'd had a bit more time, a bit more funding. Or else maybe they'll say Mars. They'll say I went crazy. They'll say I must have been senile to believe that I had talked to Mars. Yes, they will. I know they will. They'll say there's no way to draw free power from the sky. They'll say the only way to get things done is the way that makes them the most money. Coal. Oil" He lifted one leg up to the windowsill and perched there, staring out at the city. "But remember—they once said alternating current was impossible also."

Mr. Tesla stood for a moment by the window. He studied the pale bird, listening, before taking a seat. "People can make beautiful mistakes, dear, and each one is an arrow, a brilliant arrow, pointing out the right way to there."

His breath was loud and his eyes did not meet mine. I didn't know where "there" was, but I believed him.

A door slammed shut somewhere down the hall. I looked up.

Mr. Tesla was found dead in his room the following day and they say I was the last one to see him alive, but I'm not so sure that's true. His bird was still there when I left. And who knows. Others might have stopped by that night. Government men, ghosts, Goethe saying goodbye.

Arthur was waiting for me in the lobby.

"I thought I could take you home," he said.
"I'm supposed to go to the morgue, to identify my father," I told him, and he nodded as if he already knew that. We set off together from the hotel, walking the whole way there across town, and though we said very little I was glad to have him there.

It was strange to pass through the city where real live people were in a hurry to get home. It was late. Arthur and I walked in silence.

On the nights when I used to go visit my father at work, he'd leave one of the downstairs doors propped open with a bit of folded newspaper. The door on Forty-first Street was well hidden behind the trash receptacles and a lattice of creeping myrtle. I'd slip inside.

"Pop?" The sound would bounce off the marble walls. Slowly I'd make my way out into the dark hall. I'd climb a stair that would take me up to the three-story-high Astor Hall. My head would take flight, but I was not scared. My father was there and this was our fortress alone, at least until the sun came up.

Usually I'd find him upstairs, waiting for me on one of the stone benches under the McGraw dome. The library was dark, lit just enough for me to make out the room's gigantic murals, the origin of the printed word.

"Lou!" He was always so happy when I came, no matter how sleepy I was. He'd show me the library's treasures and we'd spend the night in the reading room underneath the painted sky. "All it needs is a couple of pigeons flying across, huh, Lou?" Or else we'd walk the halls, his flashlight leading the way, popping our heads into the map room, the picture and print room, the special collections, the rare books, making sure everything was safe. He would lead me into the stacks, seven stories of them, and my head would swoon. How could there be so much, so many lives, so many books that were, each one, filled with stories, filled with letters, as if the library were some sort of tremendous brain. Memories, histories. No wonder he loved it there. Each book was a doorway to the past, to the dead. And there was my father, watchman over all of that. He'd take my hand in his.

Despite all that was unreal about that night, the morgue was a surprisingly real place with walls and ceilings and floors. There was even a mop in the corner, a mop made of real rags and real wood, wood that had grown in a real tree. File cabinets and a coffee pot and all of them were real. I left Arthur in the waiting room and followed an assistant
into a long hallway filled with drawers. He pulled out the upper compartment in a stack of two. The drawer was as high as my shoulders. The assistant didn't say anything. He turned down a sheet so that I could look. Real sheets, real metal trays even, so it was a surprise to me when I saw that, underneath the sheet, there was a fake dead body made to look exactly like my father.

I brought my face to within inches of his. The assistant returned to his desk at the end of a long aisle of refrigerated drawers, leaving me alone with the body.

"Dad" I whispered in the ear of this dead person.

At first it didn't answer.

I could see where its hair follicles went into its scalp. I saw everything about its face as though I were examining it under a microscope. "What are you doing here?" I asked. Still the body made no answer but kept its head perfectly centered on the metal tray, staring at the ceiling.

One side of the head had been bruised and bloodied. There were small cuts in the skin. There were tiny shards of glass sparkling in the cuts. I saw these, and as suddenly as a sinking, rushing back to the Earth, I knew that this dead body was no fake. It was him. That was his blood.

"Dad" I whispered. "Dad" His hair was caked with brown. Very, very real dried blood. How could something as unreal as a time machine make blood so real. I stared at it, drilling my eyes into his skull, imagining the brain there underneath and the tiny hallways in that brain where my father had once kept the memory of a day, years ago now, when I'd asked him what the word "scintillating" meant. He hadn't quite known the answer, so between the two of us, we made a decision. From then on, "scintillating" would be used to describe those moments when the right word just can't be found.

I closed the drawer myself. "That's him," I told the assistant. "That is my father," I said, and then, "That was my father," not quite meaning either statement fully but rather scintillating, unable to find a word that means the place somewhere between is and was and always will be.

Mr. Tesla had miscalculated. Death rays don't stop death. Killing only kills more. Perhaps he'd been thinking about another version of our
future. The one he'd intended for us, the path we didn't take. The future where war and death were absurd propositions. The future where human beings have wings and electricity is miraculous and free.

Arthur took me home. We walked back across the city and he was very quiet. We seemed to be the only people left awake. He was, I could tell, slipping away. He held on to my hand but barely, dimly, nearly gone.

"Arthur," I said when we got to my door. "Arthur. Arthur."

"I'll be back," he told me. But I didn't believe him. Everyone had gone and so would he. I watched him go. I said goodbye, but by the time I said it he had already disappeared.

Inside the house time had stopped. So this was how my father got stuck, I thought. I stepped inside. His slippers by the door. The half-done crossword he'd puzzled earlier that week. I imagined him holding me the night I was born. The night Freddie died. I didn't want to get stuck.

In the living room someone had left the radio on. Who? I stared at the button as if I could read fingerprints. Had it been my father, or had it just been me? I squeezed the radio between my hands. Kay Kyser was quietly singing, "He Wears a Pair of Silver Wings."

I squeezed the radio a bit harder, nearly hurting it. It was plugged into an outlet in the living room wall. Mr. Tesla's electricity. With my eyes I followed the cord from radio to wall. Below the plaster I imagined the hidden wires trundled together, tucked beside the construction strapping, surrounded by an aging cement compound and dust. Beneath all this protection the wires carried their bright secret. I imagined pressing my ear to the wall and listening for the hum. Current was moving like a circulatory system, like the sea, unending. The electricity traveled millions of miles from Niagara Falls or Canada or Long Island, maybe. I had no idea where my electricity came from, except that somehow it came from him.

I moved my eyes across the wall, tracing the hidden wires there, imagining my hand pressed against the old wall, walking the room's perimeter, following the current. Outside the house the wire would be untethered. It would scrape every now and then against the brick of the building. From the window I knew I would see where it ran into a conjunction of power lines, and I would follow the route of these lines as far as my eyes could. A number of pigeons would be resting on the wires, as if they too felt him there.

I could close my eyes and follow these power lines back even farther, back to the very beginning. At the end of the street I would take a right and travel out over the city. There would be a mess of hightension wires. I'd turn away from them. I'd dream a road back to him, a road that would soon become as wireless as thought itself. It would be a long road that would pass through the Hotel New Yorker, through the Waldorf and the Saint Regis and the Governor Clinton. Through Shoreham when it was still called Wardenclyffe. It would pass through a ship called the
Saturnia
that took weeks to get to America. The road would go all the way back to a small town in Croatia where it would fade from full color to sepia brown. A road without tarmac or cars or power lines, and suddenly, after I'd walked that far, there on the road would be a tall and extraordinarily handsome man. I would stop walking. "You're Nikola Tesla," I would say.

And the man would lift his head. Lonely, with a high widow's peak, dark with thought. Everywhere he'd be sharp angles, gorgeous ledges to get caught on, and an old evening suit. He'd slowly nod. "I can't believe you recognized me." He'd look down the road, over my shoulder from where I came. He'd look all the way back to my living room in 1943, back to my radio, and say, "No one ever recognizes me anymore, and even when they do, they always spell my name wrong."

Standing there with him, all the way back at the beginning, I would want to know something. "Maybe we can start over," I'd say. "Maybe we can go the right way this time."

He'd shrug his shoulders. "How?" he'd ask, smiling. "Do you have a time machine that works?"

No. I didn't. I didn't have a time machine. And so without one I found myself back in my living room, alone, holding on to either side of my radio as though it were the face of someone I loved, as though it were a way of life, a way with wonder that was swiftly disappearing.

I'll just tell you what I remember because memory is as close as I've ever gotten to building my own time machine.

I sat by the front windows considering how the days to come would unfold. Would I return home one day from the hotel to find Azor and my father sitting at the kitchen table with a woman I'd never met before, a woman who'd sit fingering the salt and pepper shakers, remembering her honeymoon and the tiny souvenir shop where she'd bought the small ceramic set? Or would I return home each day full of hope, turn the key, call out "Hello?" and find no one there? That somehow seemed more likely.

The sun was coming up on the first day I would live without my father. In the kitchen I had some idea of what it was I was supposed to do. Restore order. Organize. That's the responsibility of those left living. There was the house to care for; that was better than having nothing to care for. There would, I was sure, be papers to sign, arrangements to be made. I took a butter knife and pried open the kitchen-table drawer, the one we hadn't opened in years. It took some wrangling, but finally I had it unstuck. Opening it felt a bit like opening up a time capsule my father and I had sealed when I was still a girl. Ancient clothespins, thread that had unspooled and yellowed, matches and brittle string, a letter from the draft board, a letter from Freddie's cousin, a Christmas card from a family named McCuthen-son. I had no idea who the McCuthensons were. Digging, I pricked my index finger on an upholstery tack, though not hard enough to make it bleed. After that I withdrew a curved fish knife whose blade had gone rusty, just to be safe. My birth certificate was there. I unfolded it on the kitchen table, along with my parents' marriage license, a delicate document printed with flowers, bound with a silk cord from a time when City Hall must have cared enough to employ a calligrapher just for creating these sorts of beautiful certificates. And there, crumpled on top of one pair of scissors, an unground nutmeg, and a pincushion, were my father's discharge papers from the Army. I tried to unfold them gently, but the crease had held its fold for too long. The paper tore in two, so that while the date of his initial enlistment was still there, the date of his final discharge was obscured by the tear in the ancient and yellowed paper. I'd never know when Walter came home from the war.

My birth and their wedding sat on the kitchen table. In a few days, I imagined, a new certificate would arrive, and I would file it there with the rest of his life. I wondered what they would write as the cause of death. Curiosity. Courage. Love.

Love, I heard Mr. Tesla say, is impossible.

"Yes," I agreed. "This morning, it seems you are right about that."

I headed up to the roof. The sky was quiet except for Venus, which shone so much brighter than any of the stars. I lifted the hood of the coop, and for one moment I was swept up, surrounded by the chaos of fluttering wings as the birds lifted off into the night.

The roof tar was warmer than the air, and I lay down on my back to watch the birds as they flew. They swooped and began to turn together as if they'd been planning it, a very special dance, since the beginning of time. A pinprick of black for a moment and then a rush, a fullness as their bodies turned into the downhill of the spiral. Their white underwings would flash, and then for one brief instant between their turnings the birds would disappear into the thin darkness. White, gray, gone. White, gray, gone. Where did they go in that one moment? Where had everybody gone?