The Invention of Everything Else (9 page)

BOOK: The Invention of Everything Else
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"Yes," he said. "Fifty thousand dollars."

And at that "Yes," each one of my ideas took flight, filling the sky with the possibility of their invention.

A number of weeks passed and I carved out a place for myself in Edison's lab. He was intrigued by my accent and had searched for the town of Smiljan on a map. Unable to locate the tiny village, he asked me quite sincerely, "Have you ever eaten human flesh?"

Outside of this question we'd had little chance to communicate directly, so I was surprised when one day I found him standing beside me. "Do you hear that sound?" The music had subsided weeks before.

I turned. Mr. Edison was uncharacteristically working down with the people he called muckers, his ranks of assistants. "Which sound?" I asked him.

And he paused, lifting his ear up toward the ceiling. "That. That. That" He pointed up, shooting his finger off in different directions at each "That."

I heard many things. Beside me two muckers, one an older Hungarian who'd been in Edison's employ for a number of years, the other a young man just recently graduated from college—a fact that had placed him at the butt end of many a snide comment—were wrenched in a bitter disagreement: "If you had an ounce of sense you'd have known that aluminum plates are about as effective as peanut butter," screamed one man, while the other, wielding a hammer, dashed to bits a device that now resembled a junk heap, a device it had taken the two men four days to build. Though I'd been in the lab only a short while, I already recognized how Edison enjoyed pairing men who despised each other. Repulsion, frustration, disagreement, and anger were, Edison believed, the forge of good ideas.

There was coughing, spitting, matches being lit to burn pipes, lunch pails being tossed aside at the sudden burst of a good idea. There was swearing and steam pipes clanging. There was the general din of machinery in motion, and there was the sound of Mr. Edison taking credit for all of it.

One young mucker had been charged by Edison to turn a tinfoil
phonograph into a machine that could record not only sound but sight. The task was proving impossible, on par with spinning straw into gold. The poor man's good sense was unraveling. He could be heard issuing shrieks of nonsense from one corner of the workshop.

"That," Edison said, "is the sound of—" but his last word was obscured by a terrific crash.

I was nervous, surprised to have been taken into his confidence. I prepared myself to learn the great man's secrets. "What?" I yelled over the din.

"The sound of capitalism!" he answered. "Ever heard of it?"

"Yes. Indeed, I have," I said, recalling the sailors, the ship. The prison where they were sent. "Heard of it. Not certain I agree."

"There's nothing wrong with capitalism," he told me.

"Except that in order to sell something, a person must first own it, and how can a person own these things that we are inventing? How could I own alternating current? That's like owning thunder or lightning. I can't agree with that."

"Men own thunder all the time. That's how America works. And please, I've heard enough about your alternating current. If that's the last time you mention this abomination, it will not be too soon. AC is dangerous, and, more importantly"—Edison drove his finger once directly into the center of my chest—"my light bulbs don't work on it. And my light bulbs," he reminded me, "are your bread and butter."

I worked day and night and I can't say that the fifty-thousand-dollar reward was ever far from my thoughts. My own inventions grumbled daily in neglect, in need of the promised money. Arriving at 10:30
A.M.
and not leaving until 5
A.M.
, I did not require sleep; indeed, sleep seemed only to subtract from my powers. I found the same to be true for food and companionship. They were all routes that sent my blood to strange lands, whereas I preferred to keep my blood marching through the same channels, in training. Fifty thousand dollars could take my inventions far. And so, though the hours I put in were excruciatingly long, it wasn't but a few months' time before I had finished the daunting task of updating his laboratory, creating a more efficient, the
most
efficient, environment. I whistled. I went to claim the pay Edison had promised.

"I've finished" I told him.

"Indeed. I've never seen such work. You take the cake."

"I'd now like to receive the fifty thousand dollars you promised me."

"You must be kidding me."

"But sir, you promised that amount."

"You've got a lot to learn about the American sense of humor," he said and started to laugh, as if to demonstrate what was so funny about America.

I did not laugh. Silence prevailed until anger burned into distraction. My attention split. There were two choices waiting nearby. One was tucked up on a high, dusty shelf, peering out at me from behind a box of fuses. The other, like a fluttering of wings, stood by the open door, just about ready to leave. The two choices began to converse in patient, low whispers, as if telling secrets, as if they were both the voice of my father speaking to God.

Edison continued talking to me. His lips moved, his chin hennishly pecked up and down, but I couldn't hear a word he was saying. I was deaf to all sounds but the whispering choices.

"Psst," one said to the other. "I see you're getting ready to leave."

I perked up my ears.

"Yes," the other voice answered. "That's exactly what I was thinking."

"Ah. I see. Striking out on your own? Set to change the world?"

"Exactly."

"Yes. I could tell. Well, then, goodbye. Good luck."

"Same to you."

"But, if I may, just one thing before you go."

"Of course."

"You'll never make it."

"Oh, no?"

"No. You need Edison. You see, for ideas to grow into something real, the one thing they most require is money, and out there, money is hard to come by."

"Don't worry about me. I'll do fine. I've got lots of energy and lots of good ideas. Plus I can move far faster on my own. And anyway, if I stay here he'll just take credit for anything I might invent. He'll water it all down—taking something brilliant and turning it into something people want to buy."

"Yes. That's true. But isn't that the point of invention? To make things that people want to buy?"

"Hmm. I thought the point of invention was to improve people's lives."

The laboratory was silent for a number of moments as if everyone there, all the other muckers and Edison himself, were poised in this disagreement. Both sides seemed correct. The silence lasted. The dust in the air stood still. The argument remained unsettled.

I cleared my throat. "Mr. Edison," I said, "I resign."

I've told almost no one what happened after that, Sam. I became a digger of ditches. I was destitute. When this work first began I was so angry that I felt an urgency to uncover what was below, as though I had been given a pickax and a shovel so I could dig a hole deep and dark enough to shield the heights of my shame. Fifty thousand dollars gone. A schooled engineer with an invention I knew would change the world, digging ditches for a living. I wasn't alone in my overqualifications. In our ditch-digging ranks there were three doctors, immigrants who had found it impossible to ply their trade here. There was one man who claimed he was very high in politics, "like a mayor," he said, "back in Romania," and from the look of his skin, clear and nearly see-through, I believed him. There was another man who owned a very large textile mill, but when the mill burned in an act of arson, he had nothing left. There were even some men who'd once been Union soldiers and had seen horrors. All of us somehow belonged in the ditch. Miserable or ashamed, we dug deeper and deeper. Each day the ditch reached new depths and nothing felt any different except for a cruel tightness in my shoulders and a pain across the palms of my hands.

My breath made a fog before me, as did the exhalations of all the men working to my left and right. The chain of day laborers stretched to over eighty feet long. The dark dirt walls crept first above our hips and then above our shoulders until they reached a point approximately mid-forehead. When I stood up and stared straight ahead, my gaze would be met only by dirt and an occasional pebble or brown stone. To see ground level I had to look up.

Down that low the soil was warmer than the air. I could feel it. I could feel the heat rising beneath my feet and knew the truth of my surroundings. Hell was nearby.

I tried to imagine plans to build my alternating-current device, but
each shovel strike knocked the idea from me. In the ditch my inventions were elusive, like trying to catch the last thread of a dream as you wake. The thread always snaps and thoughts of alternating currents were replaced by hunger in my stomach.

We kept digging deeper. We weren't even sure why we dug. Days, weeks, months, and all I knew was the shovel strike and the grumbling of the others in the ditch. We rarely spoke. It was not long before I lost sight of these men entirely. I dug deeper and deeper without a thought for time because time does not exist at the bottom of a dark ditch, and the patch of blue-sky light that I could make out overhead became narrower and narrower each day. I fed myself on the black soil. I'd think of the promised fifty thousand dollars, Edison's American sense of humor, and I'd sharpen my shovel on a gray stone. I dug deeper still. My misery and my inventions both became notions vague and unimportant and far, far away. I dug.

Until one day.

"Hello, down there."

The voice was rusty and distant by the time it reached my ears. I said nothing.

"Hello, down there! I am looking for an engineer named Nikola Tesla."

This name did sound vaguely familiar. I put down my shovel and listened.

"Hello? Are you there, Mr. Tesla?"

I tried to croak a response, but it had been weeks since I'd last spoken. I stammered and coughed, trying to clear some of the dirt from my throat. "Hello."

"Yes! Hello. Mr. Tesla, is that you?"

I rubbed my shoulders and arms, separating myself from the dirt and the ditch. "Yes. Yes. I am Nikola Tesla," I said, just remembering this fact myself.

"Mr. Tesla, there is someone up here who would like to speak to you. Hold on one moment. We'll throw down a rope."

I brushed my hands together, trying to loosen some of the dirt there. My efforts were useless. I was filthy. I waited, trying to focus on the pinprick of light above. I blinked my eyes. The day was blinding. "How long have I been down here?" I yelled up.

"About a year," the answer came back, followed by the knotted end of a thick rope. It hit me on the head. In the darkness I tested the rope, pulling it taut, and then began to climb from the hole I'd dug, up toward the sky, where Mr. A. K. Brown of the Western Union Telegraph Company, like a dream come true, was waiting for me to start the Tesla Electric Company, waiting for me to climb up and change the world.

4

You must follow me carefully. I shall have to controvert one or two ideas that are almost universally accepted. The geometry, for instance, they taught you at school is founded on a misconception.

—H. G. Wells,
The Time Machine

L
OUISA IS LATE
getting home because of the blackout. It's been dark for a while by the time she unlocks the front door to her house. She turns the key. The door won't budge. She uses her shoulder to try to shove. Sometimes it sticks. But tonight even her shoulder fails to do the trick. She shoves and shoves and finds she can barely move the door an inch. Something is blocking it from the other side. She takes a running start and shoves one last time.

"Aye! Hey, quit it!" she hears from inside.

She stops to listen. "What are you doing?"

Walter had, it seemed, buttressed himself inside the small foyer and was pressed up against the door. "I was waiting for you to get home," he says through the mail slot.

"Well, I'm home now. But I can't get in."

"I know," he says. "Give me a minute. I fell back asleep."

"You're supposed to be at work."

"I called in sick. Something important's come up."

She hears him shuffling to his feet on the other side. "Why are you sleeping in the doorway?"

"I didn't want to miss you," he says. "I didn't want you to take your boots off, even" He opens the door finally. "We can't be late." He is
wearing yet another unclaimed winter coat from the hotel's lost and found. This one is dark gray with houndstooth flecks of tan and a moth hole the size of a cigar burn just over the heart. It's a bit too large for him. The shoulders ride up and his neck is hidden deep in the collar.

"For what?"

"Something special."

"OK" She steps back out onto the landing. "All right" Louisa says, letting him keep his secret, knowing he won't be able to for long.

He follows her outside into the New York City air: faintly the bakery on Tenth Avenue, mostly the metallic tang of cold weather. They walk east. It is starting to snow. Louisa remains silent. The only sound is their footsteps, an unbearable quiet for Walter and his secret. After only half a block he springs a leak. "All right! All right! I'll tell you!" he says as though Louisa had been jamming his twisted arm halfway up his spine. "It's Azor," Walter says. "He's come back."

Azor Carter and Walter had been friends since the day in 1896 when a ten-year-old Azor stepped aboard a trolley car and asked of no one in particular, "Is this the train to Jupiter?"

Walter, who was only six at the time, riding uptown with his father, hollered out an answer. "Train to Jupiter with connection service on toward Neptune."

Neither Walter nor Azor came from a large family; indeed, both boys were their parents' only children, though Azor did have a girl cousin up in Harlem whom he saw maybe once or twice a year. Azor and Walter took to each other quickly despite their age difference. It was as though Azor had been preparing to become someone's older brother for years, so that when they met, they hit the ground running, making up for all the times they had been lonely. Building forts on their rooftops, torturing cats, wielding dried-bean slingshots against each other, concocting a scheme to print counterfeit money, skating, sledding, heckling rope jumpers, throwing watermelon rinds on the trolley tracks to be squashed, collecting the seedpods of sycamore trees, swimming in the Hudson, singing their own crude versions of "The Star-Spangled Banner" and "Yankee Doodle Dandy," setting traps for rats, and, on special occasions, shoplifting certain necessary items: chocolate bars, gum, comic books.

BOOK: The Invention of Everything Else
3.57Mb size Format: txt, pdf, ePub
ads

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