Edison’s Alley (3 page)

Nick and Mitch traded very valuable video games for the bellows, ensuring that the kids wouldn’t suffer any more bodily injuries, except, perhaps, carpal tunnel syndrome from overuse of a
game controller.

Teslanoid Object No. 15. Mitch had overheard a couple of English teachers discussing a curious situation involving a math teacher’s elderly parent. Apparently, the family had decided it
was time to put Mom, now pushing ninety, into a nursing home. The woman, however, had no intention of leaving the house in which she had lived her life.

“According to Beth, who heard it from Alice,” the teacher had said, “they couldn’t get within five feet of her. It was like she was under some kind of protective
spell.”

Of course they had laughed the story away—after all, the very idea of folk magic and bad juju was ridiculous.

But the idea of unexplained science was not.

After some detective work, Nick, Mitch, and Caitlin had located the woman. It took all of them working together to broker an exchange for the electric flour sifter, which, when hand-cranked,
generated a force field about five feet wide. There was no telling how large or powerful that field would be when connected to its intended power source, whatever that might be.

To seal the deal Caitlin had to promise that her father, an attorney, would give the elderly woman free legal representation in her fight to stay put.

Teslanoid Object No. 16. This one was returned to Nick unexpectedly by a man with cotton balls in his ears. Nick had completely forgotten about the item: a tarnished gunmetal-gray clarinet.

“Do you have any idea what it’s like,” the man asked furiously, “to listen to your daughter play her poor little heart out in a recital—only to have everyone in the
audience run out screaming? Do you know what it’s like,” he shouted, “to have to shove cotton in your ears days after the trauma, because no matter what you do, you can’t
stop hearing those hideous sounds?”

Nick took the clarinet from him. “I’ve been to school recitals,” Nick told him. “I feel your pain.”

Nick took the instrument upstairs. The clarinet’s bell fit perfectly over the nozzle of the hand bellows, making it clear that the creation of soul-searingly bad music was not the function
of the “clarinet.” It was merely a by-product.

Now, with the weight machine about to be added to the collection, seventeen objects had been recovered, and fifteen were still missing.

Hauling the bulky weight machine home would have been close to impossible under normal circumstances. But Nick had discovered that he could turn the machine on low by putting
the pin in at the lightest weight. Immediately it became light enough for Caitlin and him to carry down the street and up to the attic without anyone’s help.

Nick’s bedroom furniture was dwarfed by the grand and mysterious contraption that was taking shape in the middle of the attic, composed of all the individual objects that fit together like
pieces of a puzzle. In only a few moments, Nick figured out exactly where the weight machine fit into the device. It slipped in behind the lamp, and its frame provided a space perfectly sized for
the six miniature Tesla coils disguised as hair curlers.

Caitlin crossed her arms and frowned. “How do you
do
that?”

“Do what?” Nick asked.

“How do you know exactly how it fits together?
I’m
the artist. I’m supposed to be the one with an advanced visual sense.”

Nick shrugged. “I just picture it in my mind and I know.”

“Careful,” said Caitlin, with the slightest of grins, “or someone might accuse you of being a genius.”

“Yeah,” said Nick, “or an idiot savant.”

Caitlin’s grin got broader. “Or just an idiot.”

Nick nodded. “I’ve been accused of that before.”

He looked at the machine. He couldn’t deny he felt a sense of pride each time he put another piece of the puzzle together. It made him feel one step closer to the man who had designed it.
Perhaps Caitlin was right—maybe he had absorbed a smidgen of Tesla’s brilliance.

“What does your dad think about all this stuff being back up here? He must wonder about it.”

“He would,” Nick admitted. “If he knew.”

“Wait—you mean—”

“My dad has trouble with his knees—just enough to keep him from coming up here,” he explained, glancing at the steep retractable attic stairs that led down to the second floor.
“As long as I take my laundry to the basement, keep the room clean, and don’t let food go bad, he has no reason to come up here.”

“And if ever he does?”

Nick sighed. “I’ll deal with it somehow.” There was more to the situation with his father, but Nick didn’t want to go into it.

With the weight machine in place, Nick and Caitlin went downstairs to reward themselves with champagne glasses of sparkling Dr Pepper.

After the third sip, Caitlin asked, “What’s next?”

What was next for Nick had nothing to do with Tesla’s devices. But he wasn’t about to spring that on Caitlin. At least not yet.

“I saw an antique card catalog online that someone in town is selling. I think it’s the one from the attic.”

“Hmm,” said Caitlin. “If they’re selling it, it means they don’t know what it does.”

“Or,” suggested Nick, “they don’t like what it does and they want to get rid of it.”

“Either way,” Caitlin said, before taking another sip, “someone should check it out.”

Nick interpreted “someone” to mean “not her.” And he couldn’t blame her. After all, Mitch and even Petula were a part of this, too. But it seemed like Nick and
Caitlin had been doing all the heavy lifting, with or without gravity reduction. And then there was Vince, who hadn’t been involved lately, for obvious reasons.

Nick said nothing for an uncomfortable moment, and Caitlin shifted as if about to get up.

“Well, I’ve got homework,” she said.

Nick stopped her. “Caitlin,” he said, “I’ve been thinking.” He tried his best to maintain eye contact, but somehow that had been easier to do with the weightless
casaba man. “Yeah, I was thinking,” he repeated.

She looked at him expectantly.

“If we’re not going to go hunting for more stuff this weekend…” he continued, “I mean, you know, stuff from my attic—I mean Tesla’s stuff—not
that I don’t like doing that…I mean, I don’t, but it’s okay when I’m doing it with you—”

“Nick,” Caitlin said gently, “you’re babbling.”

This interrupted his train of thought, which, he had to admit, was more like a train wreck. “What I mean to say is that I know how you like funny foreign films that end badly, and
My
Big Swedish Funeral
is playing downtown.”

“Are you asking me out on a date?” Caitlin asked with unbearable bluntness.

“Well…yeah. I guess.”

“You
guess
? Or you
are
?”

Nick took a deep breath. “I am.”

“Oh,” said Caitlin. “Okay.”

“Okay, yes? Or okay, you’re acknowledging that I just asked you out on a date?”

“The second, I think.”

“You
think
? Or you
are
?”

Caitlin took a deep breath, which was not a good sign. “Nick,” she began, “we’re in the middle of something really important. Going out on a date would…complicate
things, don’t you think?”

Nick felt his ears turning red, and he hoped his cheeks weren’t turning red as well. “I think complicated is good.”

Caitlin’s shoulders sagged.

“Unless,” Nick said, perhaps a little more belligerently than he meant to, “your heart is still set on Theo.”

She looked at him as if he’d just slapped her. “It’s not that, and you know it.”

“Do I?”

He could see Caitlin struggling for words.
Good,
he thought,
let her struggle. If she’s going to turn me down, let it be as hard for her as it was for me to ask.

“I’m just not sure how I feel about it.”

Nick got up with so much force that his chair slid backward across the kitchen floor. He wanted to storm out, but he realized that this was his house, and storming out would be weird. So he just
stood there.

“Well,” he said, “maybe you should get Tesla’s tape recorder so it can tell you how you feel.”

Caitlin rose from her chair. “That,” she said, “was uncalled for.”

She turned and stormed out far more effectively than Nick would have.

Nick resolved not to feel bad about what he’d said, and not to regret having asked her to the movies. Their friendship had grown since those first difficult days. It had survived the near
end of the world. Was it too much to ask that their friendship take on a new dimension?

Now that Caitlin was gone, Nick returned to the attic and stood alone in front of Tesla’s machine.

He was hurt by Caitlin’s rejection, but, somehow, being with the machine made him feel a little bit better. He couldn’t explain its grip on him. How, when he was near it, he had the
urge to crawl inside it. To become a part of it. It now occupied that strange gravitational vortex in the center of his attic—the spot where he used to sit when the room was empty. Being
there had made him feel like he was at the center of all things, but more importantly, at the center of himself. He couldn’t get to that place now. The best he could do was be near the
machine. Nick felt a growing need to tend to it.

To complete it.

Just as Caitlin had said—before shooting him down in flames—Nick intuitively knew how the objects fit in the larger machine, although he had no idea what each object’s specific
function in the device was, and with each part he added, the pull to completion grew. The closer he got to finishing Tesla’s Far Range Energy Emitter, the more it seemed the machine
wanted
to be finished.

Nick’s feeling of urgency was far preferable to the humiliation Caitlin had left him with. And so, secret and alone, he stood as close as humanly possible to the unfinished machine, trying
to somehow resonate with its purpose, and longing for the day he could finally fire it up and see what it did.

Caitlin didn’t even remember the walk home from Nick’s house that day, she was so filled with frustration and anger. Long before she reached her front door,
however, she realized she was angry at herself, not Nick.

The tape recorder that Nick had so coldly brought up had given her enough insight into herself to know that he had every right to be upset with her. Perhaps they
were
growing into more
than friends. And if she was leading him on, there was a reason. Admittedly she liked him, even if she admitted it to no one but herself—but dating carried the kind of baggage that neither
she nor Nick could afford right now.

In Caitlin’s experience, a boyfriend was someone you thought you really liked, but once you got to know him, you spent all your time figuring out how to escape. Caitlin figured that dating
would be like that until she finally got the hang of it. Only then would true love set in; only then would she find her soul mate.

She suspected that Nick might very well be soul-mate material, but turning him into a Theo would ruin that. Was there something wrong with her, that she would keep dating a boy she didn’t
want to spend time with, and keep spending time with a boy she was afraid to date?

“Caitlin, honey,” her mother said as she walked into the house, “Theo’s here.”

And there he stood in the doorway, her ex/not-quite-ex-boyfriend.

Caitlin sighed. “Of course he is.”

“Did you forget we were studying for science today?” he asked.

“Sorry,” she said. “There was something I had to take care of.”

Then she sat down, and they pulled out their science books and got to work.

Yes,
thought Caitlin,
there definitely is something wrong with me
. And she wondered if, in the entire world, there could possibly be a more mismatched couple than her and Theo.

In fact, there was.

W
hile Petula Grabowski-Jones waited in rapt anticipation, Mitch Murló suppressed a sigh.

“Okay, here she comes,” Petula said. “Watch—this is gonna be good.”

This wasn’t Mitch’s idea of a good time, but he was willing to suspend judgment since it seemed to make Petula happy. And he wanted to keep her happy, because this was their first
date that didn’t involve the blissful silence of a movie theater. It meant they had to acknowledge each other’s existence for an extended period of time, and actually converse. Such a
thing is not easy. It had taken a while to settle on a nonmovie date that worked for both of them. She had nixed bowling as too lowbrow, and fine dining was inconceivable with Mitch, because,
according to her, he had “the table manners of a lemur with brain damage.”

It was thinking about himself as a lemur that made Mitch suggest the zoo. Petula had accepted, but, like everything else she did, it was for her own unique reasons.

Mitch couldn’t quite say why he liked Petula. Maybe it was the charmingly irritating way she introduced herself to people (“It’s PETula like SPATula, not PeTULa like
PeTUNia”). Or maybe it was the way she parted her hair and braided her pigtails with quaint, yet terrifying, mathematical precision, so that even their faintly lopsided nature was by design.
Or maybe it was just because
she
liked
him
. Whatever the reason, they now held hands and sat at a table at the edge of the snack bar of the Colorado Springs Zoo, watching
Earth’s highest mammal species—the kind not protected from Petula by the safety of cages.