The Kingdom of Ohio (23 page)

“I—” Peter hesitates. It dawns on him that Morgan and Edison might be serious about her story and all these questions. That something like this audience is what she has been looking for all along, and that she might actually want him gone. His impulse is to stay, both to help her and make sure that she doesn't go back to her madwoman time-machine fantasies. But, again, she won't meet his eyes. He feels only slightly comforted by the weight of the gun concealed in his coat.

Beside the door, one of the Pinkertons coughs pointedly.

Halfway across the room from Peter, she feels rooted to the spot. Despite his betrayal, she finds herself silently hoping that the mechanic will refuse to leave. But beneath the twin gazes of Morgan and Edison, she cannot find a way to express this. Instead she closes her eyes and silently prays—to who or what, she doesn't know—
please
. And then hears the creak of leather upholstery as Peter stands.

“You need me,” he says, “you just call.” And the door clicks shut behind him.

“Now then, mademoiselle,” Morgan says. “Will you tell us your secret? One way or another, we shall have the truth.”

She closes her eyes for a moment. “Perhaps,” she says, “I will have a coffee after all.”

The financier nods and hands her a cup and saucer. She considers joining the two men at the table, but decides to remain standing, clutching to the small feeling of advantage it offers. She sips, trying to compose her thoughts.

“Mr. Morgan,” she says at length, “earlier you told me that you would explain your motives. You have asked the details of my situation; now I would ask you in return why I was brought here.”

The financier considers this. “Very well. That is reasonable.” Morgan gestures at Edison, who has been following the conversation, aiming his ear trumpet at each speaker in turn. “My colleague Mr. Edison and I have been interested for some years now in the possibility of travel through time.

“Hell, more than interested!” Edison looks up at her, doubt and wonder visibly battling on his face.

“It is not impossible, Mr. Edison informs me,” Morgan continues, “that men may someday find a way to journey to the past or the future. For a number of reasons, I believe that such knowledge would not be to the common good. Therefore I have taken it upon myself to follow cases such as yours.”

She digests this statement, struck by its matter-of-fact nature. “How,” she asks carefully, “do you feel this knowledge would be contrary to the common good? And toward what end do you gather this information?”

“Well, miss, personally it's a little hard for me to believe your story.” The inventor answers first. “But the fact is, Mr. Morgan here has a pretty good nose. If he says we need to find out about you, I plan to take it serious. So we need to do tests, you see. Experiments, measurements, maybe look at how—” Edison abruptly falls silent beneath Morgan's gaze.

“In brief, my interest stems from the problems that would be created by travel through time,” the financier says, turning back to her. “If one could travel to the past, carrying knowledge of the future, conquering nations and breaking banks would be child's play. One man might throw the world into chaos for his own gain. Similarly, if one could travel to the future, the foundations of history would be shattered.”

As the significance of Morgan's words sinks in, she shivers. Abruptly she imagines a landscape of bridges melting away underfoot and buildings changing shape, whole cities unmaking themselves as their past is rewritten. The vision of a destroyed world, populated with orphans like herself, each tormented by doubt and struggling to find a home in the alien present. And picturing this, with a sense of horror, she realizes that the financier may be right.

Perhaps interpreting her silence as disagreement, he continues: “Of course we have, each of us, made mistakes that we would like to set right. Regrets that we imagine could be corrected.” The creases in Morgan's forehead deepen and for a moment he glances at the portrait of a stuffy-looking young woman that hangs on the wall above the table—then shakes his head, as if banishing some private vision.

“But these are, in the end, irresponsible fantasies.” The financier drains his coffee and returns cup to saucer with a faint chink of china. “Without regulation and careful study, we cannot risk the present for personal whim. Or notions of what might have been.”

“Then what,” she murmurs, “what would you ask me to do?”

“As Mr. Edison has mentioned, there are certain tests that must be performed and your story must be discussed at considerably greater length.” Morgan pushes his chair back and climbs to his feet. Beneath the red glow of the lamps overhead, his face looks like an ancient, grotesque statue. “Although the accommodations at Menlo Park are not luxurious, we will try to make you comfortable.”

She stands there silently, overwhelmed by exhaustion and uncertainty, each of her convictions—along with her desire for escape and the pull of the past—having canceled the others out. She closes her eyes. From some distant part of the house she hears, or imagines, the faint tinkling notes of a piano.

“Of course,” Edison is saying. “I'll make sure. All my boys are trustworthy. . . .”

With a feeling of abstract wonder, like waking from a dream, she opens her eyes to the ballroom of her father's house. Around her a galaxy of candles glitter in crystal chandeliers, marble urns full of roses line the walls, and the sweep of music fills the space.

It is a Chopin waltz, she realizes belatedly, and she is dancing. Her partner is a tall young man with ginger hair and freckles, dressed in a black tailcoat; she herself is wearing a long ruffled gown. He must be some visitor in Ohio, she muses, untroubled by the fact that she cannot remember his name. Another of the would-be suitors whose company her father foists upon her.

They turn and glide to the measured notes. The young man says something and she nods. Over his shoulder she can see her father, Louis Toledo, chatting with two other men. As always, something strikes her as vaguely comical about his appearance. His dinner jacket is bunched and wrinkled on his stocky frame, and his protruding eyes, along with the wiry curls escaping from a gloss of pomade on his head, make her think of a friendly drunk, seized from his comfortable tavern and stuffed without warning into evening clothes. Seeing her glance, he waves timidly in her direction.

Deciding that she has had enough of dancing, she moves to disengage herself from the young man's arms. But when she does, the redhead's face hardens and his grip tightens around her.

“Sir!” she starts to protest. “Please—”

“Don't give me any trouble, eh?” The young man's voice is thick and strange with an unidentifiable accent. He looks down at her with cold eyes. “You come with me.”

He begins to pull her across the dance floor. Suddenly Tesla appears, calm and collected as always, interposing himself between her and the other man.

She looks up at the inventor, relieved. “Nikola,” she murmurs, “thank you.”

“Come on,” he says roughly. And with a start she realizes that it is the mechanic who is half dragging her out of the room. Peter pulls her roughly to his side. One of the Pinkertons rises from the floor, clutching his jaw, as the other guard circles toward them.

“What—” she begins.

“You were yelling,” Peter interrupts. “Come on now.” He backs toward the door, drawing her along with him. She feels as if she is floating in an eye of calm while around her feet a storm rages. The guards follow, crouched and sidling closer. Then suddenly Peter is holding a gun, its barrel aimed at where Morgan looms like a well-dressed monolith across the room. The two guards freeze where they stand.

“Easy,” one of the Pinktertons wheezes. “Easy now, boy.”

She sees these things as if remembering them long after the fact: as if on cue, the two guards beginning to reach into their jackets and the flicker of Peter's palm across the pistol's hammer as he fires. A cloud of shattered plaster blooming from the wall two feet from Morgan's head. Edison diving for the floor, the financier unmoving. The guards raising their hands and backing away. Then running beside the mechanic, pounding down the mansion corridors, through the door and into the night.

THE SUICIDE HALL

AS OF THIS MORNING I'VE SOLD MY WORLDLY POSSESSIONS. A YOUNG homosexual couple is buying the antiques store: they will, I'm certain, do a better job of running the business than I ever did (their sheer enthusiasm leaves me exhausted). In an arrangement that my real estate agent calls “totally unusual,” most of the proceeds (minus her commission) will be given to charity. At first I had wanted to donate the money to an orphanage, but since such places hardly exist anymore, it will be used to renovate the metal-shop classrooms for a number of local high schools.

We settled the final terms of the transaction last night at the antiques store. Standing in that little space, surrounded by relics of the past, I poured four glasses of whiskey and we toasted the agreement.

“So tell us,” my real estate agent warbled, draining her glass, “what will you do now?”

“Take a cruise?” one of the new owners suggested. “Play some golf, maybe?”

I looked around the half-lit shop, at the clutter of artifacts that were no longer mine, searching for an answer.

Even though somewhere I'd always known it was a fantasy, the truth is that I spent years hoping some doorway might appear: a passage that would lead me back to you and the time we spent together. That if only I turned the right street corner, or wandered down a certain alleyway at the right moment, this portal would open.

Of course, it never happened. Decades passed, and I slowly tried to resign myself to this fact, to stop searching. I tried to stop, but of course I never really could. And then one day, in a way I'd never imagined, I stumbled onto my pathway into the past.

“Now?” I turned to my real estate agent with what I hoped was a smile. “Now I have a trip to take.”

 

 

 

 

THE PHOTOGRAPH that I discovered one afternoon two years ago, tucked inside a magazine at the antiques store, is black-and-white, of course. It depicts three people, two men and a woman, sitting in McGurk's Suicide Hall.
³⁹

The two men in the picture could be a study in opposites. First there is Nikola Tesla, elegant in his sleek black suit with a bow tie and white gloves. His dark hair is neatly combed, an expression of faint surprise on his face. A leather document folio sits on the table in front of him, along with his pocket watch.
⁴⁰
Beside him, the impossibly young-looking subway mechanic is unshaven, his brown hair an unwashed mess, wearing a dirty shirt and a rough woolen coat. One of his hands, on the table, grasps a glass of beer; his other hand is out of sight, an angry look on his face. But of course, it's the woman in the photograph (it's you) that I can't stop looking at.

Studying this image, I'm struck by a kind of vertigo: the disorientation of an impossible point of view (like imagining yourself as a passerby on the street in someone else's life; momentarily seen and then forgotten). But let me be clear about this. At least, let me try.

The young woman who occupies the third seat is about twenty years old. Her skin is so pale that it glows. Her black hair haloes her features, stray curls escaping from a shoulder-length braid. On her face there is an expression of—what? I can't quite read it. Some intensity, some distance, as she looks past the photographer.

This is the photograph that I stumbled across by chance.

And, staring down at the monochrome surface, it feels to me as if I'm falling toward the scene it captures. That frozen moment and all the other moments, lost amid the blank spaces of history behind it: the hidden rooms and countless decisions that came together in this fragment of another life.

THE HORSE-DRAWN OMNIBUS lurches to a halt, metal-bound wheels striking sparks from the icy cobblestones. Peter shoves his way through the crowd of passengers, half dragging her to the door and down the steps. They cross the street, swirls of falling snow illuminated momentarily in the lanterns of passing wagons. Then suddenly the city ends and she is stumbling behind him over hummocks of frozen grass, through leafless trees and forest undergrowth.

They stop in a clearing inside a thicket of bushes, their breath rising in clouds of steam. For a few minutes they stand there, recovering from their headlong rush. After a moment she tugs her arm free and steps away from Peter.

“Where you going?” He straightens, watching her.

She glares back at him, still panting with exertion. Gradually the terror of their escape from the Morgan mansion has begun to recede, replaced by anger. She takes another step away, almost tripping over a half-buried root, and shivers. “That is not your concern.”