Sean Michaels - Us Conductors

“Hello?” I said, in English.

We stood as a trio while the rest of the pedestrians crossed the street. Soon we were the only ones on the corner. “Would you please come with us,” the first man said.

They made me walk slightly ahead of them. I remember noticing that my shoes needed polish. They told me to turn left. They told me to turn right. We passed the entrance to the Waldorf Astoria, completed a few weeks before. Rolls Royces waited patiently, like loyal dogs. We kept moving. We turned left. We turned right. Finally we arrived at L’Aujourd’hui. This was a shabby and grease-stained restaurant, with tabletops the colour of french-fried potatoes. I had been before, but only between the hours of midnight and 8:00 a.m., only after a night of drinking and dancing. Nobody ever called L’Aujourd’hui by its name. We called it after its owner, a cook, Antony Mudolski. We called it Mud Tony’s. By day, the place was missing all of its late-night gaiety. It was a wilted room with sagging banquettes, patronized by ghosts.

The spies took me to Mud Tony’s. They ordered three slices of cherry pie and one glass of water, “but hold the water.” Into this empty glass they poured a shot of warm, clear vodka.

“Drink,” they told me.

I was on one side of the table and the two men sat facing me. One had a moustache with no beard, the other had a beard with no moustache. They wore pale blue suits. I know that all suits are made of cloth but I was struck by the way their suits looked particularly made of cloth.

I had not yet drunk. They stared at me. One of the men folded his hands, threading his fingers together. I could not say why, but this was an extremely intimidating gesture. I picked up the glass of vodka and I drank it. The other man refilled my glass.

“Drink,” he told me.

I did not immediately drink. The two men seemed to blink in unison.

The other man folded his hands, threading his fingers together.

I drank. They refilled my glass. I drank again. I had now swallowed three shots of vodka. We spoke together.

These men were both named Karl. They said they were from Soviet military intelligence. They asked me if I had recently seen Pash. I told them no. They asked me if I had visited with anyone else of interest. I told them no. I asked what had happened to Pash. The vodka had made my tongue slippery. They didn’t respond. “We are the same but different,” said the Karl with the beard. They asked what I was working on, whom I was working with. I told them anything they wished to know. They were looking after my visa, they said. They gave me papers to sign. They asked about particular contracts and I replied as best I could. “But what of Pash?” I asked again. They told me that he had been reassigned. They said that we would meet every two weeks at Mud Tony’s, and I would answer their questions. They said I was a spy and, sooner or later, I would have to spy.

When the bill arrived, they waited patiently until I picked it up.

I DID NOT KNOW IT THEN, but Karl and Karl would be my monthly companions for the next six years. As the rest of my life whirred and dinged, accelerating and decelerating, they were the drag, the margin of error. No matter what else I was doing, I met my handlers at Mud Tony’s every two fortnights. I got drunk and spilled my guts. They issued fewer orders than Pash had done, but I understood their orders less. Imagine my life as a barometer; whereas once it moved in slow, deliberate changes, now the dial’s needle trembled. For the rest of my time in the United States, even in my most private moments, even longing for you, there was a tiny hesitation. I trained in my basement, working through the four forms; I sparred with Jin at the kwoon; I listened to Haydn and Bach. Still I felt it, thinly travelling in my blood: a wavering.

Yet I found solaces. The studio was a clubhouse, a dugout, a private kingdom. The carpet on the front steps wore out from too many feet. I stood at the stove with Frances, making caramel corn. I began exploring other applications of the radio watchman, devices that lived at once in the visible world and the invisible one, sensing the space that surrounds an object, sensing movement there. I built an alarm system, a wired panel that could be hidden behind a Rembrandt, concealed beneath a topaz. As soon as the thief’s gloved hands entered the panel’s charged field, like a drop of blood into a pool of water, an alarm sounded. No strings, no codes, no moving parts — the naked perception of presence and absence. I sat at my desk and wrote letters, folded diagrams into envelopes, suggesting that Mrs Pickford, Mr and Mrs McLean trust their Star of Bombay, their Hope and Star of the East diamonds, not to dogs, to sleepy guards, but to the permanent vigilance of electricity.

By return mail, they said: “Perhaps.”

I found that I had a thousand things to do, and all these things were distractions from the things that I could not do.

UNTIL ONE THURSDAY I found you waiting on my doorstep.

It had been a long time. Since my conversation with your sister, I had not called again. I did not wish to hear that clear-eyed Clara was out with her tall boyfriend. I did not wish to hear anything like that. I had always known that you had other suitors, but until that talk with Nadia I had never imagined that they could cast a spell on you. You cut too finely. Your gaze was too sure. When I was alone, remembering you, you were never dancing with anyone else.

When I found you on my doorstep in a red coat, leaning against the jamb, you seemed so at ease, so familiar with this place, with the sight of me, smiling, that it felt as if I had been the one who had forgotten you, Clara. You leaned like the hour hand on a clock.

“Hello,” I said.

“It’s you.”

“It’s me.”

“I did think you lived here.”

“Would you like to come in?”

“Should I?”

We kissed on both cheeks and then we were in the parlour. You looked around, you reached absentmindedly toward the bowl of almonds, you used your right hand to take almonds from your left palm and bring them to your mouth.

At the bottom of the staircase, we removed our shoes. You were in stockings. We passed through the second-storey studios. Lucie nodded hello, sliding from F to F sharp to F to F sharp with her right hand. You followed me up one more floor, to the workshop. There were wood shavings on the floor, little piles of nuts and bolts, empty bowls and lonely screwdrivers. Above a chest of drawers was a print of the periodic table of the elements. You gestured toward it. “That looks new.”

“Everything’s new,” I said.

You nodded. You shrugged. I put my hands in my large pockets. Protactinium, hafnium: these elements had not appeared in my childhood encyclopedia. I took your coat. In short sleeves you seemed reinvented. I wanted to lay my lips at your shoulder. In every room you tried to guess what was before you and every time you guessed incorrectly. You took loudspeakers for theremins, fingerboard theremins for loudspeakers.

“And this?” I asked.

“A pocket watch,” you said, with a smile.

I set the doll on the ground and it crawled across the carpet to the tips of your toes.

I showed you old televisions and RCA kits, the “whirling watcher,” as Henry Solomonoff called it, our machine with perfect pitch. I turned it on and watched the neon light reflect in your eyes. It gyred and flashed but the device was not certain, not sure, in this room where no song was playing. It didn’t know which colour to show.

Beside a potted rhododendron lay the rhythmicon I had built for a composer in San Francisco, a piano that played rhythms. Twelve keys: depress one and hear a rough pulse, like a ticking gear or a jagged heartbeat. He had imagined it as accompaniment for an orchestra, a sort of automated timpani. But as I built the machine, raising it from notebook paper into life, I found it was too coarse for this. I used it in other ways. In an empty room I would listen to the rhythmicon’s lowest timbre, like a cough, and feel the distant bittersweetness of an undanced waltz. You pressed a key and the rhythmicon barked a beat, and I longed to slip across the floor, with the sun smoothing the rhododendron. I asked, “How are your parents?”