The Invention of Everything Else (18 page)

There is silence in the hangar. She sits with her back curved, feeling the wind from across the sea, and they stay there, just like that, his warm head resting in her lap, leaving the conversation open, the future uncertain.

Finally he lifts his face up to hers, but he doesn't say anything. She
is reflected in both lenses of his glasses. Louisa removes her hand from her mitten, picks up one of the waves of his hair that has fallen across his face, and lifts it back into place. When she touches him it feels as though a forty-pound plumb line drops right out of her belly down to the floor, the heaviness just before flight. She has an answer, a good one. "No one can know the future," she says, and he nods as if accepting her appraisal of Azor's words. Arthur picks himself up off the floor, returns to his seat beside her, and takes her bare hand in his. The two of them sit without speaking, giddiness like bubbles rising inside her.

No one, she clarifies to herself, who hasn't built a time machine.

They sit beside each other in silence, waiting for something big to happen. After nearly three-quarters of an hour has passed, Louisa and Arthur are becoming quite nervous, not to mention cold. They are still holding hands, white-knuckled, blue hands. Aside from the spots where her leg and side touch Arthur, she is freezing.

"I'm going to go knock on the door," she tells him. She slides down the ramp and back, she feels, to Earth.

It is a bit difficult for Louisa to reach the time machine's hatch, since they had tucked the ladder up into the craft. She collects three armfuls of snow and builds a small pile underneath the hatchway. By standing on the snow pile, up on tippy-toes, she is able to knock on the craft's door. "Hello?" she calls out and steps back away from the portal.

Perhaps the door will swing open and her father will emerge as a sixteen-year-old boy, or maybe he did go find Freddie. Maybe she is about to meet her mother. Somehow, she doubts it.

Instead the hatch is unsealed and a peal of laughter shoots out from inside. The ladder is lowered and Azor's head peers out. "Oh, dear!" he shouts. "We almost forgot about you two!"

Louisa looks at him sideways.

Walter, still laughing, appears in the hatchway. "Lou! Hi!" he says. "Hi," she answers. "Dad. What happened? Where did you go? Did it work?"

Again both Walter and Azor begin to laugh uncontrollably, and Arthur decides to join Louisa.

"Nope!" Walter yells ecstatically. "Not today, honey." The laughing starts up again. Louisa sometimes feels like her father's babysitter, a feeling she doesn't enjoy.

From where she is standing, of to the side of the launch pad in
the snow, she can see a bit inside the ship. There are two unmatched wide, swiveling captain's chairs that Walter and Azor are now seated in. There is a console filled with every sort of knob and gauge and lever imaginable.

"What happened, Dad?" she asks.

"Well," he answers, finally getting his giggles under control, "we just couldn't get the damn thing started this time." This sets them off again. Azor is doubled over, holding his belly. "Something's gone wacky with the altimaplasticator. Right, Azor?"

"That's right!" He barely gets it out.

"I was thinking maybe Arthur could give us a hand. You're a mechanic, after all," Walter says.

"You are? Well, why didn't you tell me," Azor shouts. "I could use some mechanical help about now. Maybe you could hang around this afternoon?"

"Sure," Arthur says, stepping forward.

Louisa interrupts. "So what have you been doing?"

"Just catching up, sweetheart" Walter says.

Louisa's eyes are bugging from her head, showing more white than usual.

"I'm sorry. I think we lost track of the time," he says, standing up and making his way to the hatch door.

"The altimaplasticator?"

"Can you believe it!" Walter says.

"No," Louisa says. She can't believe any of this.

"Uh, I've never worked on an altimaplasticator before," Arthur says. "In fact, I've never even heard of one."

"Don't worry, son. I'll show you," Azor says.

Louisa is peering inside the hatch. "Can I come in there? I'd like to see what the inside of a time machine looks like, even if it's a broken one."

"Of course, dear, of course," Azor says, offering her a hand. Louisa turns once to see Arthur. She signals for him to come too. "Here," Azor says, "why don't your father and I clear out so you and Arthur can get a look inside? Come on, Walt."

And so Louisa climbs the ladder while Arthur follows. She settles into one captain's chair and Azor seals the door behind them. With the hatchway closed, the lights on the control panel begin blinking, buzzing, and whirling. Arthur takes a seat beside her. The colored lights bounce of his eyeglasses and Louisa loses all interest in time-travel technology. The future and the past disappear. All she feels is the tension between two bodies. How his head had been in her lap. How her hand had been wrapped inside his. The tension leaks down her throat. The belly. The muscle. And something forged. A weld. A softness. A vagueness that is rather quickly being sharpened into a point aimed directly at Louisa's heart.

The struggle of the human female toward sex equality will end in a new sex order, with the female as the superior.

—Nikola Tesla

T
HE NUMBERS COME
into focus—3327. Louisa knocks. To be caught once is, perhaps, understandable; to be caught twice is unforgivable. There is no answer, but she hesitates, worried that the silence might not be real, might be caused by so much blood rushing through her head. She palms the doorknob and holds her breath. Louisa opens the door and, quickly, after depositing eighteen towels at the end of his bed, closes the door behind her. She begins leafing through the papers on his desk until she finds where she left off reading.

At first I say nothing. I let the telautomatics explain themselves. Their rounded copper bodies cruise through the small pool situated right in the center of Madison Square Garden. Remotely, I steer the devices through a series of movements, a choreography on the reservoir. They dance like waterbugs. A small crowd gathers around the pool. Their eyes are on the robots and so I'm able to move among the people undetected, the small control box tucked into one hand.

"I don't get it," I hear one young man say.

"How do they know where to go?" asks another audience member. "Why don't they ever hit the wall?" I take my time, walking around the small pool, allowing a crowd to build. The telautomatics look gorgeous; their movements have mesmerized all those assembled. Slowly I make my way up to the podium.

"What," I surprise the crowd by asking, "are any of us but meat machines?" Silence descends. I pause to allow this theory to take root. They turn their heads from the pool to the podium. I continue. "We receive electrical impulses over our own wiring that tell our body to lift the hand that is holding the fork up to our mouths. Open and chew. We obey. The device you see before you now is no different except that its skin is made of metal and the electrical impulses are generated by this small command center I hold here in my hands." I lift the box for the crowd to see. Levers and antennas and one small glass bulb protruding from the left side.

It is opening night of New York's Electrical Exposition. The room is filled. My audience grows in size.

"These devices are a race of robots—telautomatics, as I call them—ready to serve. However," I say, "there is more." For suspense, I pause to sip from a glass of water, but in the excitement my esophagus contracts and the water passes down the wrong tube. I begin to choke, coughing wildly, tears coming to my eyes. I try to soldier on, clearing my throat. "The important part, dear people, is this—" It burns. A cough overwhelms me and so I resort to simply pointing up, into the air. I wave my fingers about, gesturing every which way. The audience, trying to follow my madly pointing fingers, swivel their heads about like a swarm of slow-moving cluster flies. I cough again. "Waves," I finally croak, revealing the secret. "There are invisible waves cutting through the air, the atmosphere, the Earth, and even the mortar of Madison Square Garden."

The audience stares, wide-eyed and entirely confused. Some look as awed as if I had climbed over the edge of the tank and skated across the very surface of the water myself. Some look away from me back to the pool. "Every moment of every day," I continue. "These waves are conduits for anything that can align itself with their frequency. With this device"—again I hold my control box aloft—"I send the telautomatics discrete electrical messages along the circuits of these waves, which, in essence, function as the Earth's nervous system. Each telautomatic is tuned to receive messages on only one frequency. It has been personalized as though each machine speaks its very own language.
Je m'appelle Nikola Tesla
" I say, and then, "Only no one else speaks their language. It is theirs and theirs alone."

Which is where, or so it seems to me, I lose them entirely. The crowd stays silent. It is perhaps too much too quickly, as if I told them that I was going to soar through the air without wings
while
reading their minds. They begin to turn their attention to the other exhibitors.

I overhear one young man ask his companion, "What did he say?"

And her answer, "Something about invisible waves that fly through the air speaking French to one another."

The crowd disperses, leaving me alone with my inventions against a wall of turned

Louisa flips the page and begins to read, only to find that the following page does not connect with the story. The paper is a slightly different color, the handwriting slanted, as if this sheet had been mixed in mistakenly with the leaves of the story she was reading, like a note written years before and left in the pocket of an old jacket, like a memory that pops up suddenly out of nowhere.

Louisa reads the odd page, a diary entry that picks up midway through a thought:

as if every possibility exists in the ether, just waiting to either happen or at least not happen. Time has to make a choice, this way or this way. It can't do both. Just as I told the man at
The Herald
, one day, a person will set a device in a room and it will be able to draw power not from an outlet in the wall, not even wirelessly from an energy provider, but rather from the ambient energy that is there, floating through the air. There is plenty of it. We just need better engineers, or perhaps engineers who aren't working for power companies. I want Katharine to understand that the atmosphere is filled with both the yes and the no to each question, and for this reason I sent her one of Professor Crookes' radiometers, a tiny windmill spinning simply from the warmth of the sun as if to say, in another universe, in another time—some things happen while some things don't, Katharine, dear.

I knew this theory to be true. The fire had been waiting, floating through the ether of my laboratory for years, meandering with a thought, deciding whether to ignite or not. Perhaps it stole the idea from Robert, that night when visiting the lab late, he told me how, as a young man, he'd sat all night on a bridge girder watching the Great Fire destroy Chicago. I prodded Robert for more information at the time. What color, what sound, what sense did a fire that large have? Perhaps my laboratory had been listening.

I think I might have smelled the idea of the fire, but how could I plan for the possibly when a flood of ideas was already bombarding me? Daily I chose which inventions to invent and let the others be. I should have listened. The fire said yes. March 13th, 1895, at two-thirty in the morning. Either something happens or it does not, but both possibilities always exist. Katharine. The fire. The entire Tesla Energy Company crashed through the flames of the sixth floor down to the fourth, so hot that metal dripped, tools melted, bricks burst, and nothing was left, every invention destroyed. No insurance. Nothing but this flood of ideas that, with a laboratory in ruins, were met with a no, no, no. I wandered the streets for days while the building smoldered. I did not sleep for over seventy hours while it burned. Katharine and Robert scoured New York trying to find me. Somehow I missed them at every crossing, or perhaps not. Perhaps, I thought, I'd become unseeable, an invisible blue flame that no one could detect any

And then that's it. The first story picks up where it had left off. Louisa shuffles through the manuscript but can find nothing else that even mentions this fire, nothing else that speaks so frankly of affection for Katharine. She turns to make sure the door is shut tightly before she continues reading.

The crowd disperses, leaving me alone with my inventions against a wall of turned backs that are receding like the tide. Of course there are a few exceptions, including a number of journalists and the two people I'd been waiting for. "Katie! Robert!" Since we'd met, the three of us had settled into a sturdy intimacy resembling friendship, only its roots dug far more deeply, efficiently encouraged by a shared tendency for quiet conversation: art, society, the occult, science, love, poetry. It was not something we questioned. We belonged to one another.

"We saw everything," Robert says. "And frankly, the English language is insufficient to express my awe."

"Oh, darling Nick," Katharine says, squeezing her hands tightly together.

The very tips of my ears burn bright red.

"We have many questions," Robert says. "But the first is, what time can we whisk you away to our house for dinner? Now?"

I study the disappearing crowd. "Yes," I say, decidedly fed up with inventing for the moment. "Now is just the time. I will meet you there."

***

The landscape jogs past as my carriage makes its way up Lexington, my head pressed against the triangular pane of glass that composes the back window. Construction is rampant in places that had, not long ago, been farmland. Building stones, each one as large as a coffin, have been lifted into order by horse pulleys and screaming masons. A number of extremely tall twenty- or thirty-story hotels and municipal buildings are springing up in the old corn and bean rows like stray daisies. But perhaps even more common are the unmanned strips, escarpments that are unaccounted for in the master plan of New York City, parcels unnoticed by the mapmakers and by progress itself. I pass a narrow field where fallow grasses have yellowed, dried, broken their necks. A matted path cuts through the narrow yard, perhaps an escape route for dogs, or children or criminals. The thought makes me smile. Where does the path lead to? Off to the left a pile of surplus building materials including a door and some windows has been abandoned to the weather and is no doubt now the domicile for a local stripe of rodentia and field mice. Cutting this barren swath into unequal halves are the remnants of a fence, part stone, part split rail, a strange archeological find for the wasteland as it suggests that once a person who cared, a craftsman even, stood shaping this divide that is now nothing more than a shadowy testament to the impermanence of borders.