Sean Michaels - Us Conductors

As the weeks passed, I began to fall for New York. I wandered through the Met, caught a foul ball at a Yankees game. I bicycled through green, green Central Park, past chasing dogs, past rhododendrons, past the lonely Indian chief in headdress, whom the city had paid to paddle around in a canoe. I bought yellow French’s mustard and developed a taste for salted potato chips. In a jazz club, in a cellar, I listened to a man play a drum solo. My life’s first drum solo. The whole world seemed in the process of being rebuilt.

There seemed to be money everywhere. Pash’s midnight visits brought proposals, contracts, memoranda of understanding, but also commissions, advances, bankers’ cheques. RCA and Wurlitzer were both contending for the right to sell theremins across America. Eccentrics, heirs and engineers paid exorbitant sums for lessons, for recitals, for the chance to sit with me at a table and discuss collaboration. Pash looked after my bank account; he looked after my immigration status. Whatever hidden business was transpiring on his side of our mission, it was transpiring well. One night he came in with a cheap medal, bought on 38th Street. He pinned it to my suspender strap. “For unwitting services to the country,” he said.

“I am not so unwitting as all that.”

He gave me a stern look. “You are more unwitting than you think.”

Toward midsummer, I played Coney Island Stadium before twenty thousand people. It was a Communist Party event. I shook hands with union leaders, quipped in clumsy English. The demonstration went well. There was nothing overtly ideological about my performance: it was political because of where I had been born. After the concert Pash and I leaned on a wall backstage, on either side of a drinking fountain. We were taking this one small moment before going back into the fray. Out of the hallway, almost invisibly out of it, came a tall man. He was slender, handsome, in a slightly ill-fitting suit. He had a sweep of blond hair and blue eyes like the flowers on a teacup. I thought he was a fan. “Hello,” I said warily.

He was quite forward. “Pleased to meet you,” he said, and shook my hand.

He nodded to Pash. “Hello,” he said. “I’m sorry; I saw you onstage but I didn’t catch your name.”

“Yuri,” said Pash. “You are?”

“Danny Finch,” said the man. “I work with the U.S. government.”

Instantly Pash was upright, his feet flat on the ground. His face was as relaxed as before but now the rest of him had joined the conversation. He was ready. He was alert.

“What do you do for the government?” Pash said evenly.

“I work for the State Department,” Danny Finch replied.

I was confused. “Which state?”

“The State Department,” he repeated.

Pash looked at me. His gaze was heavy, like an iron weight placed into my hands. I glanced back at Finch and at that moment I imagined a pair of binoculars around his neck.

Finch flashed an impulsive smile. “I wondered whether we could have a conversation sometime,” he said to me. “I’m an admirer of your work.”

“Perhaps.” I was conscious of the way my lips touched and parted.

For one more moment, Danny Finch lingered. He seemed filled with cheerful, nervous energy, but at the same time I sensed this energy was not real; that his enthusiasm was deliberate, theatrical, and his heart was beating slowly.

“Right, well, have a good night,” he said. He gave me his card.

“Goodbye,” Pash said.

I added, awkwardly, “Yes.”

Finch bowed his head to each of us, overly formal. He turned and disappeared around a corner. I held his business card in my hands. It read DANNY FINCH in block letters, with a Washington, DC, phone number. There was no seal or logo.

“Give me that,” Pash said.

A few weeks later there was a concert sponsored by a hot-dog company at Lewisohn Stadium, to twelve thousand. Pash organized this after the Communist-run Coney Island gig, after the meeting with Danny Finch. We needed to demonstrate our bland bona fides: the Lewisohn concert was pure scientific spectacle. It was time for the theremin to become an assimilated, red-blooded American.

“As of today,” Pash said, “we are done with hammer and sickle.”

He joked about handing out American flags, recruiting baseball-player accompanists. I did not find this funny. He told me, “Put on your best smile.” When I came out on stage, blinded by the lights, I felt as if I might be at the beach: wave upon wave of applause greeted me, like rolling surf. The New York Philharmonic sat behind me, poised. We performed Handel’s “Largo,” Mozart’s “Ave Verum Corpus.” Pash had wanted me to play “The Star-Spangled Banner.”

“That’s too much,” I said.

“Maybe you’re right,” he agreed. “Just make sure everything’s loud.”

I had devised a series of new loudspeakers, mounted on trellises. They were deafening. Even in the stadium’s open air, with dozens of string players sawing behind me, and trumpets blasting, the theremin sailed over it all. I felt as if I were commanding the winds. The audience’s faces went on forever, like fields of wheat. I lifted one arm and the sound rose up; lowered it and there was a hush. Was I serving myself, or my country?

There were five minutes of sustained applause, five curtain calls, five women who fainted at the sounds of the machines.

AT SUMMER’S END I owned five tuxedos. It seemed that I was always either in my undershirt, stripping wire, or in black tie, receiving toasts. There was a queue of pupils. More and more, my visitors were dilettantes and star seekers, with little patience for practice. Women came with their husbands, balked at taking off their fur coats. I let them mill about. I stripped wire in my undershirt. I showed Alexandra Stepanoff how to hold her arms.

Gradually I collected about forty dedicated players. Although students’ first lessons were always at fixed times and dates, there was an open door for advanced students. For a long time the city’s only theremins were the ones that rested heavily in my apartment’s master bedroom, or splayed in the parlour, so my pupils drifted in and out of the studio, practising on their own schedules, meeting to discuss scientific principles or alternate scales. They appeared at breakfast time, or after dinner. Henry Solomonoff, a gentle, doughy accountant, would often spend the whole weekend hanging around. “Where else am I gonna go?” he said, rubbing a plump cheek. “The track?”

The most dedicated was wealthy, serious Lucie Rosen, who came most days in the early afternoon and stayed until evening. She was skittish but proud; she worked alone, concentrated, careful, an auburn stole around her neck. She was gifted, but only in the way that hard work makes you gifted. Sometimes I would be in another room, plotting data or doing push-ups, and when I came in she would not even lift her eyes. She kept her kind, young gaze on the theremin’s motionless antennas, her own two trembling hands.

Meanwhile, Schillinger recited his mystical poetry and lectured me on jazz. He was writing another tome about his theories of art. I tinkered with my television prototype, built cameras on a circuit, wired the rehearsal studio so I could watch my students from the bedroom. Occasionally I sat with Henry and each of us tried to write an anagram couplet, as I had been writing in Russian for years. I remember my first poem in English:

Wide United States ,

Wise and destitute .

At night, after everyone had gone, I pushed rolls of parcel paper out over the floor, over empty snifters and packs of cigarettes, covering everything. With the day hiding under thick brown paper, distractions buried, I sketched with a short pencil, inventing things that did not yet exist. A device for ascertaining the height of an aeroplane; for finding veins of rock salt underground; a fingerboard theremin, with a neck like a cello, for bass notes. And in my wallpapered closet, surrounded by patterns of weaving ivy, I kicked, stooped, practised the bong sao .