The Invention of Everything Else (6 page)

"Hello?" Louisa knocks on the chest's lid. She anticipates the worst—the man from Illinois is traveling with his wife stuffed into a steamer trunk. Her knock gets no answer, and so she thinks, "She's dead! He's slaughtered her!" Suddenly, there's a universe of possibilities. His tools for murder—a machete, perhaps, or a bomb, or a chemist's lair of toxic poisons. A magician's doves or marionettes. A traveling salesman's Bibles and encyclopedias. A drunk's bar. A big-game hunter's moose head. A sailor's seashell collection. She tries to open the top. It's locked. "Hello?" she asks the box again, lowering her ear to its lid. There's no response. "Hello?" She can hardly stand such a puzzle. It feels as though the box is beginning to hum, broadcasting all the mysteries of the universe, every potentiality right here in the Hotel New Yorker. What's inside? "Hello?" she asks one last time, banging on the top. "Fine!" Louisa says and roughly shoves the box back under the bed. Furious. She quickly finishes sweeping the floor and, irritated by her unsatisfied curiosity, only replaces
some
of the dirty towels. She seals the bathroom with cellophane but forgoes the mint on the pillow of the impossibly secret man from Illinois.

Nothing else odd crops up that day, though there is one room whose occupants have both left wedding rings on the night tables flanking the well-used bed. She reads the familiar disaster in the tousled bedsheets until, stepping back for just a moment, she imagines, despite herself, that it was Arthur and she who tousled the bedsheets. Rather than the abandoned wedding rings she sees Arthur's eyeglasses on the bedside table.

By the time she finishes the thirty-fourth floor and works her way through to the last few rooms on thirty-three, the sun has set.
Five o'clock is approaching. She uses her skeleton key to gain access to room 3325. The room has hardly been used. It won't take long to clean. She sets to work stripping the sheets of the bed and remaking it with clean linens. As she finishes, she lifts the bedspread from one end with both hands and, giving it a crack, raises it up and out and over the bed. At the precise moment that the blanket reaches its fullest extension, her back muscles rigid, her breath held in place, the giant that is the Hotel New Yorker stops breathing. The hotel slides into complete darkness.

The blanket falls. Louisa stands still. The darkness persists. She listens. There is nothing, no sound. The electricity has been sucked from the air, from the wires, from, it feels, her very veins. In one moment she'd been surrounded by sound and buzz and the glare of electricity. Elevators had been gliding up and down in their shafts, lights and appliances had been humming, furnaces gurgling while the heating system hissed and spat. In the next moment the entirety of the hulking hotel has been plunged into total blackness, complete quiet; even the sounds and motions not controlled by electricity have stopped, as if they too are suddenly afraid of the dark. Until, out in the hallway, she hears the rumblings of hotel guests.

"What in the—?"

"Who turned out the lights?"

And one old woman can be heard making a gentle, simple plea. "Help. Help. Help. Help."

Louisa waits, thinking, "This won't last." But it does—it lasts. After a few moments Louisa begins to feel lost in the darkness, as if she's forgotten north and south, up and down, as if she is swimming in black. She opens the door and steps out into the hall. She can't see a thing. No hallway, no elevator. She slides her back up against the wall to curb the goose flesh creeping up her spine.

Louisa stumbles into something.

"Hello?" It is an older woman.

"Hello," Louisa whispers. "It is just a blackout. The lights will be back any moment now."

"I see." The woman shifts closer to Lou. She starts to laugh and so Louisa turns to look at her but, of course, can see nothing. The woman stands so close Louisa can feel the warmth off of her skin. "This reminds me of being young," the old woman says. "I may be the only person here who remembers what life was like before electricity." The woman coughs and lowers her voice. "It wasn't that bad," she says quietly, afraid perhaps that the electricity will hear her. "In fact, I remember the first electric light my father got. My sister and I sat staring at it, absolutely transfixed. We stared for a full week before finally determining that it was a blinding nuisance. I remember covering it up with a brown paper bag after that." The woman exhales, and she and Louisa wait in the dark. "No one does that anymore, do they? Stare at the electricity?"

After what seems like a half-hour, though it is probably closer to fifteen minutes, Louisa finally hears something on the stairs, voices echoing. Mr. Perini, the porter, and Mr. Mellon, the general manager. They call out from each landing, "A power surge has temporarily darkened the hotel. Please remain calm. Light will be restored momentarily. We urge you to stay in your rooms and remain calm." The backup diesel engine must have failed. Finally, the men reach the thirty-third floor and exit the stairwell. Two very hurried pairs of footsteps rush past Louisa. She sucks herself tightly up against the wall. The footsteps move past her, down toward the last room in this wing, 3327. The men's breathing is loud and quite labored; they've climbed thirty-three flights of stairs.

She follows the sound of their footsteps to the end of the hall, where, after so much darkness, she finally sees something—a tiny streak, a glowing as thin as a knife blade coming from beneath the door of room 3327. Someone in that room has stolen all the electricity.

Louisa hears the two men draw a breath together before knocking on the glowing door. They wait. They receive no answer. They knock a second time and still they receive no answer. "Mr. Tesla, please," one of the men says. "We know you are there."

The other man joins in. "Mr. Tesla, please, we—"

The door opens.

To see God would have surprised Louisa less. From inside the room just down the hallway, power, electricity, whirling motion, and glowing light as bright as the sun spill out into the dark. The porter and the manager each raise a hand to cover their eyes. And there in the aura of this wonder is a man most unlike other men. A slender frame, terrific height, silver hair that reaches down his forehead in a peak. Louisa notices the dark hollows of his cheeks and even the fine length of his
fingers on the doorjamb. He is lovely. Louisa catches her breath. Her mouth hangs open at the hinge. He is stunning, like Dracula grown old, like cold black branches covered with snow in the winter.

She's heard so many stories but never, in all her years working at the hotel, has she had the opportunity to see one of its most notorious guests. Unlike all the movie stars and politicians who have stayed at the New Yorker, Mr. Tesla is notorious for some rather unusual, sometimes unpleasant things. The first is that he refuses to let the chambermaids clean his room. The second is that he hasn't been able to pay his bill for the past two years. There are all kinds of stories. He is crazy. He is a genius. He is from outer space. He is from Serbia. He manages to survive on vegetables only. He drinks blood. He makes everyone stand at least three feet away from him at all times. He does not speak English. He is kind. He is horrid. He is just lonely and confused. He lets wild pigeons live in his rooms. He once invented something very important but no one at the hotel can remember what it is anymore.

"Mr. Tesla, the electricity—"

"Ah. Forgive me." His voice sounds ancient, accented as though he is from a place that no longer exists. "I was, ah yes. I was conducting a small experiment. I see. The electricity. Perhaps if your generator ran on AC instead of—"

"Mr. Tesla," the manager says, apparently intending to scold but, out of fear or respect, unable to.

"Forgive me. I will fix it immediately," the man says and comes out into the hallway. As he is about to close his door, in a sliver of light his eye catches Louisa's tucked back in the shadows, pinning her there. She might have fallen had she not already been pressed up against the wall. Her breath and blood lose grip of her body as if he could suck the power from her as he had from the building. She doesn't move because she doesn't mind. His look holds her there for a moment before he closes the door to his room behind him, still watching her, plunging the hallway back into darkness. She worries that the stories she'd heard might be true, a vampire, and loosed momentarily from his sight, finding it difficult to breathe, she takes the opportunity to slip back into the room she had been cleaning. She latches the door, listening as the three sets of footsteps gain the stairwell.

Walking, bumbling with her hands splayed in front of her, patting the air, Louisa finds a chair in the darkness and has a seat. Time drips past and she waits for the electricity to return, imagining the strange Mr. Tesla. She thinks of his long fingers rewiring the hotel, like a bird building a nest. She imagines his secret smile in the darkness.

The world can change very quickly, and just as quickly, in one blink, it can change back. She tucks her knees up onto the chair with her, curling up. And in a few minutes, as suddenly as it went, it returns, the bright glare of electricity restored. She stands and tucks her chin into her chest. Collecting her cleaning items, she stops before the once again illuminated desk lamp. No one stares at the electricity anymore. Louisa touches the glass of the bulb, trying to see the charge inside, the current that brings to mind the sharp brow of the man in the hallway and the fresh spike in her belly caused by Arthur Vaughn. The shock of electricity. The shock of meeting strange men. What an odd day she is having. She touches the light again.

Everybody steals in commerce and industry. I've stolen a lot myself. But I know how to steal.

—Thomas Edison

A
RE YOU READY
, Sam? Enough paper? Pens? Fine. We can start with the darkness.

From my coat I withdrew a tiny pocketknife. A present from my brother, Dane, the sheath was made of pressed tin, shaped to resemble the tiniest ear of corn. I pried the weapon from its case; it was no longer than my young pointer finger, but jabbing my knife into the darkness, I slashed my way down the hall. When I was a child, the dark seemed to be the hairiest jungle vegetation and my pocket blade a machete I used to swashbuckle my way into our kitchen each morning.

My mother, Djouka, was locally renowned as a great inventor, best remembered for her work advancing the fields of thimbles, ironing boards, clotheslines, spatulas, and a gadget for reaching unreachable places in the pantry, a device that she called her
draganic,
her darling. I cracked open the door to the kitchen. Light from a spirit lamp filled the room. I squinted my eyes and rubbed the dark from them. The sun had not yet risen. I folded my blade back into my pocket. My mother was leaning over to feed the fire. "What time is it?" I asked her, my voice still filled with sleep.

She turned back slowly to look at me, taking me in. "Thou art so fat-witted, with drinking of old sack and unbuttoning thee after supper and sleeping upon benches after noon, that thou hast forgotten to demand that truly which thou wouldst truly know. What a devil hast thou to do with the time of the day?"

She was right. All I really wanted to know was if my breakfast was ready yet.

Djouka never went to school or learned to read. She didn't have to. She had something even better. My mother could hear a verse just once and know it forever, the words engraved on her brain. She was a walking library, and not just of verse, but of history, story, scripture, even eavesdropped conversations, anything she cared to remember.

Djouka pointed her chin toward the grandfather clock. Five o'clock in the morning. She placed two bowls of food on the table, and so I sat down to a breakfast of oats with Henry IV, Sir John Falstaff, and my mother, the inventor, the library.

Milutin, my father, was minister to a small congregation, forty families or so. We lived beside his church. Inconveniently for me, he had promised my life to God the day I was born. He gave me up, in a way. He thought I'd become a famous minister in the Serbian Orthodox Church.

That was not, however, the way I saw it, Sam.

Instead, when I was eight years old, I thought, "I am certain I can conquer my state of not being able to fly." I felt flight in my bones. I felt my bones becoming hollow and marrowless, becoming readied for the great blue beyond, and so I climbed to the top of our barn. The wind was mild. I made my way over to the edge of the barn's peaked roof. I looked. It was a long way down. I opened an umbrella, not that I needed to. It was simply an insurance policy.

Edging the heel of one boot off the roof, I filled my lungs. I stepped the other foot forward into the nothingness of air, following the route of the birds.

The results were not as I had expected.

My stomach, in a trancelike, gravity-free state, did fly. It soared. Though, sadly, the rest of my body obeyed physical laws.

I woke a little later on the ground, a bit broken, a goat nibbling on my hair, my umbrella inverted at every spine. I didn't call out or complain, "Aye! My aching bones," or, "What a mess I've made of a perfectly good, barely used body," but rather, staring up at the sky, I thought, "With a bit more practice I'm certain I can get it right."

***

As I grew, so it seemed did the laundry list of ailments afflicting me. Once, at the hand of a cholera epidemic, I went to bed for nine months. From this fever I'd wake only at the oddest of hours to find my father freely conversing with God by my bedside.

Milutin: The boy is all yours. If you let him live, I promise you his life in the ministry.

God: I don't know. He seems sickly. Looks a little weak to me. I'm not sure I want him.

Milutin: Oh, no. He's yours. He'll be a great minister to you.

Me: Oh, let me die!

I hated the idea of a religious life. When I was awake my father's hopes and plans plagued me. He grew desperate. He began to suspect that my cholera might be related to the number of books I read. An avid reader himself, he'd throw a fit if he caught me reading. "No! Niko, no! Reading is dreadful for your health. I won't allow any child of mine to endanger his life so recklessly!" I ignored his warnings. Reading was the only peace I found. Indeed, I read so much during that illness that I was able to compile a catalog for the local library, devouring their entire collection. I kept three stacks of books beside my bed at all times. These stacks towered taller than real people, and I, feverishly perhaps, thought of them this way, as three sage friends. The stacks bickered amongst themselves but never with me; rather, each behaved like a worried nursemaid. I read from the stacks every moment I was not asleep, gorging myself on a novel, sometimes two per day. And so, it seems, these books weighted me down. They kept my body here on Earth when it was ready to go elsewhere.