The Kingdom of Ohio (31 page)

Stepping into the doorway of the cramped kitchen, he realizes that she is still asleep on one of the cots beside the stove. Eyes closed and unmoving, gripping the blanket with one hand, he is shocked by how young she looks, the intensity of her waking self stripped away. She stirs and opens her eyes, peering up at him, her dark hair a tangled halo around her face.

“What . . . ?” She takes in his coat, hat, and boots. “Are you going somewhere?” Her words blurred with dreams.

He nods. “Going out. I'll be back in a few hours.”

“Where are you going?”

“Buy us train tickets.”

She looks at him and then nods before burying her face in the pillow again.

For a second, standing in the doorway, Peter feels an urge to cross to her side, put his arms around her, and who knows what could happen from there. . . . But some voice of caution stops him, murmuring not yet, time enough for all that when you're both safe.

He hesitates, and then turns away. Pocketing a piece of bread from the table in the living room, he strides out of the apartment and down to the street.

Outside, the jangling movement of New York, the cries of pedestrians, jostling traffic, the high blue stillness of the winter sky. Along the crooked streets lined with decrepit buildings where Paolo lives, across the refuse-laden expanse of Washington Square, then north along the meridian of Fifth Avenue. He boards an omnibus, watching through the windows as the buildings grow taller and more ornate, stone façades replacing swaybacked lathe-and-plaster. Half an hour later, he disembarks across the street from the vast bulk of Grand Central Station.

Standing in the doorway of a shop, trying to make himself invisible, Peter surveys the crowd of passengers who pass between the pillars flanking the station entrance, the stalls of vendors, knots of beggar children, and shouting porters with their mountains of luggage. Before coming here, he'd imagined—felt a sick certainty, in fact—that Tesla or Morgan or the police, or maybe all of them, would have lookouts posted near each likely point of departure from the city, waiting for the two of them to appear. But after half an hour spent watching the building's entrance, he decides that the train station isn't guarded—or else, guarded in ways too subtle for him to see.

Teeth chattering from standing in the cold, he gathers his courage and drifts up the steps of the station. His heart catches as he passes through the door, half expecting a heavy hand to descend on his shoulder—but no one notices. Invisible among the crowd of travelers, Peter makes his way through the enormous open space of the lobby to the ticket booths on the far wall—where, waiting in line, he tries to keep his eyes fixed on the floor and his expression blank. Still, he can't stop himself from glancing over his shoulder every few seconds. Then, abruptly, he is standing at the counter and the clerk behind the wrought-iron cage is asking for his destination.

“Chicago,” he says, throat tight and dry. “Two tickets, one way. Third class.”

“Forty-two.”

Feeling utterly exposed, Peter extracts the roll of crumpled bills from his boot. The clerk passes back the tickets and his change. Peter takes them, turns away. And then somehow he is outside on the street again. The slips of paper that mean escape in his pocket: a minor miracle. He staggers away, drunk with relief, fighting the urge to break into a run.

He boards the omnibus back toward Paolo's apartment. All that's left now, he thinks, are a few final preparations. Buy a suitcase for appearances' sake, maybe, even though they have nothing to put inside. A good meal, and then catch the evening train. Nothing more. Except—it strikes him suddenly—for the matter of good-byes. When he'd left Idaho, it had been a rush without a single proper farewell, but this time—

For a moment he debates riding the omnibus to its final stop, near City Hall, and walking to the river as some parting gesture to New York itself. But there isn't time, he reminds himself. And whatever the city was trying to tell him—the almost-meaning he'd felt at the sight of its buildings and bridges—is a secret he will never understand, or will only discover somewhere else, in another form.

The horse-drawn tram creaks to a halt. They are near the Canal Street subway-works—and these good-byes, Peter decides, can't be ignored. Shouldering past the other passengers, he jumps off the omnibus and starts toward the excavation site.

Walking down the streets in this part of the city, looking up at their disconnected details—the tangle of wrought-iron fire escapes, hurrying pedestrians, the painted signs of stores—he thinks of how it has all changed since his arrival, a few months ago. All these things, that were once embodiments of his own loneliness, have now become familiar, already layered with remembered moments. On a break from work, smoking newspaper-cigarettes with Michael, Tobias, and Jan. Silent walks with the older mechanic, Neumann.

He turns a corner. Down the street, he sees two figures outside the wooden fence around the excavation site—and stops abruptly, a sense of danger registering before the fact of recognition. Tesla, in his usual eveningwear, is standing beside the neatly dressed little man who visited Peter's apartment. Peter ducks back around the corner and presses himself against the brick wall of a building.

From this vantage he watches as the two men talk and gesture at each other. After a moment they walk off together in the opposite direction from his hiding place, and he realizes that he has been holding his breath. He straightens, heart hammering, and tries to consider what this might mean.

A hand descends on his shoulder.

Peter whirls, fists clenched—and finds himself staring into a pair of bloodshot eyes. For a suspended instant, time stops. Then he recognizes Josiah Flocombe. He takes a step away from his old subway-crew foreman, nerves twanging with adrenaline.

“What—” Peter forces himself to draw a breath and smile at the other man. “How are you?”

“Can't complain.” Flocombe shrugs. Although his tone and expression are casual enough, Peter imagines a tension between them. “Haven't seen you in a while. Been keeping yourself busy?”

“Guess so.”

“Well, then.”

“Well.”

They stand awkwardly regarding each other, and for an instant Peter is oddly reminded of his first day at the subway-works—that initial glimpse of Flocombe, sitting on a pile of rubble.

“Well,” the foreman says gruffly, “I expect you'll be going now.”

“I thought—” Peter begins.

“Might want to take your portrait with you.” Flocombe pulls a crumpled sheet of paper out of his pocket and offers it to Peter, who accepts without thinking. “Take care of yourself,” the foreman says. He nods, then turns and walks away, back toward the construction site.

Left off balance by this exchange, Peter watches him go before unfolding the scrap. On the page, he finds his own likeness looking back at him—a sketch of his face, next to a sketch of hers. With detached fascination he reads the text beneath: “Suspected of Sabotaging Subway Lines . . . Wanted . . . Reward . . .”

Feeling suddenly lightheaded, he looks up. Down the block, Peter notices for the first time that two hulking guards are standing outside the excavation site gate, heavy truncheons strapped to their wrists—a different species entirely from the bored, slouching company watchmen who occupied this post before.

Concealed around the corner and pressed against the building wall, Peter is thinking furiously. Something isn't right here, he realizes. The unwatched train station, the now heavily guarded subway-works—what's happening doesn't make sense. Doesn't come close to adding up, unless—abruptly he turns and starts running, back toward Paolo's apartment.

 

 

 

 

TO MAKE herself feel useful, she has decided to sweep the living room floor of Paolo's apartment. In theoretical terms, the broom that she found in a cupboard, and the dust-scoop that accompanies it, make perfect sense. In practice, however, the sweeping project is one problem after another.

The implements are unwieldy, the broom knocking her in the face with every gesture, and the dirt refuses to stay still, the piles of debris she gathers from beneath the furniture scattering before she has a chance to deploy the scoop. Housekeeping, she has decided, is harder than calculus.

Still, she perseveres, telling herself that one way or another, these are things that she will have to learn. They are leaving the city to start a new life: this is the realization she has been grappling with since she woke in the Italian's kitchen. And when she pictures Peter as a companion, the idea of finding a place in this world feels almost like what she has been searching for, without knowing it, all along.

And with the mechanic by her side, she can almost believe that anything is possible. A chance to begin again, she thinks, for the kind of freedom and happiness, together with Peter, that the strictures of life in Ohio could never permit. If only she can master the countless everyday things she has taken for granted until now, like the trick of sweeping the floor. Then the door bangs open as Peter enters, and with a sense of relief she abandons her task.

He sits at the table, out of breath, cheeks flushed with the cold, and she crosses to stand near him.

“How are you?” she asks. “Where have you been?”

“Train station. Then the subway-works.”

“Oh, really?” She says this brightly, trying to sound like—she stumbles mentally, then pushes ahead—an ordinary woman, from his world. “What happened?”

Peter doesn't answer, staring at the surface of the table.

“I'll make you some tea,” she announces, bustling into the kitchen.

In preparation for his arrival, she has all the necessary equipment laid out—tea, kettle, cups. Dumping a few fistfuls of the dried leaves into the kettle, she sets it on the stove and waits. Nothing happens. Of course, she realizes, there should be a fire in the stove. After a brief rummaging she locates matches and coal, in the bin next to the washtub. The coal streaks her hands black when she scoops it into the stove, but she wipes the smudges off with the hem of her dress.

Now, though, the coals are not lighting. Which makes sense, she realizes, given the low air-to-fuel ratio in the little chamber of the stove, plus the relatively high adiabatic combustion temperature of the coal. Glancing around the kitchen, she sees a pile of newspaper and a bottle of some brown liquor on a shelf. She crumples the paper and sets it on the smoldering coals, then nestles the bottle in the newspaper—which will evaporate the alcohol, she thinks, which should burn hot enough to set the coal ablaze.

She touches a match to the paper and, after counting sixty seconds, uses a spoon to knock the cork out of the bottle. This produces the desired effect of releasing the combustible reactant, igniting the coals at a high temperature and causing them to burn nicely.

Shielding her face with the spoon, she nudges the stove door shut. Some scraps of newspaper have fallen to the floor, smoldering from the initial blast of flame, and she carefully stamps them out. Noticing that the fire licking through the grate is beginning to die down, she approaches the stove again. A moment later, as she'd expected, the liquor bottle explodes in the heat, sending glass shrapnel pinging against the iron walls. She crosses her arms and waits for the kettle to be ready.

Suddenly the mechanic leans in through the doorway, startling her.

“You all right?” he asks, a strange note of concern in his voice.

“Of course. Thank you for asking.” She smooths her hair with her fingers, realizing that a few stray curls are singed.

He stares at her, then shakes his head, grinning. “Guess I'll have to explain a few things about cooking, one of these days.”

She looks back at him and feels a sudden, overpowering yearning for a future filled with moments like this one. “I'd like that.” She returns his smile, and they stand silently facing each other.

Then the front door bangs open again, Paolo entering, and Peter turns away. She remains in the kitchen, listening without really paying attention, as the two men converse in the other room.

“. . . early?” Peter asks, muffled through the wall.

“. . . changes. All of us assign to different crews,” she hears the Italian answer. “Tomorrow I start . . .”

She stares at the dark iron belly of the stove, thinking of how she has always imagined some future greatness for herself. How she has always seen herself as destined for some role that will change the world. But why, she wonders now, is that needed, and for whom? And for myself, shouldn't happiness be wherever I can find it? And with this thought, abruptly, she experiences an almost giddy sense of relief: like the answer to a problem she has been wrestling with for years, suddenly falling into place, or the lifting of an unseen burden.

The kettle begins to rattle on the stove and she lifts it off, pouring two mugs full of unexpectedly brackish tea. She carries them out into the living room, handing one to Peter and then, belatedly, offering her own to Paolo, who accepts with a brief smile. “So.” Peter turns to her. “You ready to leave?”

“Yes,” Paolo adds. “He says you will take the train to Chicago?”

“I bought two tickets.”

She takes a breath, looks up at him and nods. “Yes.” She tries to smile. “I am ready.”

“Well, then,” Peter says.

He runs a hand through his hair.

Closing his eyes, the image that comes to Peter is a small log cabin somewhere in the woods. A stream running nearby, the two of them living together, evenings spent in conversation. Some flickering movement and faint laughter among the daffodils growing by the porch that could be the shadow of children to come. With sudden clarity, he sees that beyond his aimless days in New York, this is what he longs for.