Samantha Hunt - Mr. Splitfoot

“Niko, who is your friend?” she asks.

I turn toward it. The question has filled the bench beside me, spilling over into my space, squashing up against my thigh. The question presents itself to her. “If they were Nikola’s patents, why did Marconi get all the credit for inventing the radio?”

“Hmm,” she says. “That’s a very good question indeed.” She fluffs her wings into flight, lowering herself from Goethe’s head, over the point of his tremendous nose, down to where I’d spread a small supper for her. She begins to eat, carefully pecking into one peanut. She lifts her head. The manifestation of precision. “There are many answers to that question, but what do you think, Niko?”

It seems so simple in front of her. “I suppose I allowed it to happen,” I say, finally able to bear this truth now that she is here. “At the time I couldn’t waste months, years, developing an idea I already knew would work. I had other projects I had to consider.”

“Yes, you’ve always been good at considering,” she says. “It’s carrying an idea to fruition that is your stumbling block. And the world requires proof of genius inventions. I suppose you know that now.”

She is strolling the pedestal’s base. I notice a slight hesitation to her walk. “Are you feeling all right?” I ask.

“I’m fine.” She turns to face me, changing the subject back to me. “Then there is the matter of money.”

“Yes. I’ve never wanted to believe that invention requires money but have found lately that good ideas are very hard to eat.”

She smiles at this. “You could have been a rich man seventy times over,” she reminds me.

“Yes,” I say. It’s true.

“You wanted your freedom instead. ‘I would not suffer interference from any experts,’ is how you put it.”

And then it is my turn to smile. “But really.” I lean forward. “Who can own the invisible waves traveling through the air?”

“Yes. And yet, somehow, plenty of people own intangible things all the time.”

“Things that belong to all of us! To no one! Marconi,” I spit as if to remind her, “will never be half the inventor I am.”

She ruffles her feathers and stares without blinking. I tuck my head in an attempt to undo my statement, my bluster.

“Marconi,” she reminds me, “has been dead for six years.”

She stares again with a blank eye, and so I try, for her sake, to envision Marconi in situations of nobility. Situations where, for example, Marconi is being kind to children or caring for an aging parent. I try to imagine Marconi stopping to admire a field of purple cow vetch in bloom. Marconi stoops, smells, smiles, but in every imagining I see his left hand held high, like victory, a white scarf fluttering in the breeze.

“Please,” she finally says. “Not this old story, darling.” Her eye remains unblinking. She speaks to me and it’s like thunder, like lightning that burns to ash my bitter thoughts of Marconi.

Bryant Park seems to have fallen into my dream. We are alone, the question having slithered off in light of its answer. She finishes her meal while I watch my breath become visible in the dropping temperature.

“It’s getting cold,” I tell her.

“Yes.”

“Perhaps you should come back to the hotel. I can make you your own box on the sill. It will be warmer there. It’s New Year’s Eve.”

She stops to consider this. She doesn’t usually like the other birds that hang around my windowsill.

“Please. I worry.”

“Hmm.” She considers it.

“Come back to the hotel with me.”

“Excuse me?” a deep male voice answers. Not hers.

I look up. Before me is a beat cop. His head is nearly as large as Goethe’s bronze one. His shoulders are as broad as three of me. He carries a nightstick, and seeing no other humans around, he seems to imagine that I am addressing him. The thought makes me laugh.

Any human passing by would think that I am sitting alone in the park at night, talking to myself. This is precisely my problem with so many humans. Their hearing, their sight, all their senses, have been dulled to receive information on such limited frequencies. I muster a bit of courage. “Do we not look into each other’s eyes and all in you is surging, to your head and heart, and weaves in timeless mystery, unseeable, yet seen, around you?”

“What in God’s name are you talking about?” the policeman asks.

“Goethe,” I say, motioning to the statue behind him.

“Well, Goethe yourself on home now, old man. It’s late and it’s cold. You’ll catch your death here.”

She is still perched on one corner of the bust’s pedestal. Old man. Karl Fischer cast the head in 1832; then the Goethe Club here in New York took it for a bit until they sent it off to the Metropolitan Museum of Art. The museum didn’t have much use for it, so they “donated” it to Bryant Park a few years ago. Goethe’s head has been shuffled off nearly as many times as I have.

“I know how you feel,” I tell the head.

Goethe stays quiet.

“Come on, old-timer,” the policeman says, reaching down to grab my forearm. It seems I am to be escorted from the park.

“This clown’s got no idea who I am,” I say to her. “He thinks I’m a vagrant.”

She looks at me as if taking a measure. She alone cuts through the layers of years and what they’ve done. She is proud of me. “Why don’t you just tell him?” she asks. “You invented radio and alternating current.”

Goethe finally speaks up. “Oh, yes,” he says. “I’m sure he’d believe you.”

The policeman can’t hear either of them. Even if he could, Goethe is right — this officer would never believe a word of it. “You’re the King of England, I suppose,” the cop says. “We get about ten King of Englands in here every week.”

The cop has his bear paws latched around my forearm and is steering me straight out of the park. Resistance, I have a strong feeling, would prove ineffective.

“Are you coming?” I ask her, but when I look back at the pedestal, she is gone. The solidity of the police officer’s grip is the one certainty. She has flown away, taking all of what I know with her — the Hotel New Yorker, Smiljan, the pigeons, my life as a famous inventor.

You already asked me that question.

Yes, but we are just trying to be sure. Now, you have said that you have no memory of your activities on January 4th, and yet you have also said that you are certain you did not visit with Mr. Nicola Tesla, who was at that time a guest in your hotel. What we wonder is, how can you be certain you did not visit with him when you say you can’t remember what you did?

I see.

Why don’t you just tell us what you remember.

Mr. Tesla didn’t do anything wrong.

Why don’t you just tell us what you remember.

SAMANTHA HUNT’s The Invention of Everything Else was a finalist for the Orange Prize and the winner of the Bard Fiction Prize. After the publication of her first novel, The Seas , she was selected for the inaugural 5 Under 35 National Book Foundation program. Her fiction has appeared in The New Yorker and McSweeney’s . She lives in Tivoli, New York.