Sean Michaels - Us Conductors

In that instant Carnegie Hall’s electricity went dead, the room went dark, the dream’s whole world flashed out, except for the rhythmicon, the disembodied rhythmicon. It stumbled on, like a wrong heartbeat.

That was the dream. It was ghastly. It visited me two or three times a week as we prepared for the April performance. I glumly referred to the show as “the last hurrah,” but my friends pretended it wasn’t so: “The best yet,” Mitz said, “emphasis on ‘yet.’ ” This time the focus was on my other creations — the keyboard, the fingerboard, the whirling watcher — and not the original theremin. Lucie Rosen and Henry Solomonoff argued about whether we should use the space-control device at all. I tried to stay out of it. I tried to work, to banish the nightmares with thoughts of voltage, resistance, the measurements of wooden joints. And then you returned, and made me dream of other things.

“The Latin name for a gorilla is ‘gorilla gorilla gorilla,’ ” you said. “It’s like the zoologist tossed up his hands and said, ‘I only have one good idea. Let’s use it three times.’ ”

“Is it really ‘gorilla gorilla gorilla’?”

“The thing about you,” you said, “is that you have a million good ideas and you use each one only once. Like a tree with a thousand kinds of fruit.”

“Apples and plums,” I murmured.

“Apples and plums and grapefruit and lemons and grapes and oranges and limes and pomegranates and figs and dates and pears and peaches and apricots and white nectarines,” you said. “And light bulbs.”

“Light bulbs?”

“All Leon Theremin needs is sunshine and a bit of rain.”

ONE SATURDAY AFTERNOON, I was late returning home. Jin and I had spent ninety minutes grappling, clutching each other and then coming apart, directed by sifu. He wanted us to understand this thing of strength, he said; the way a man can come up against a brick wall. In wing chun kung-fu you are taught to pivot, to shift, to adjust your opponent’s force by degrees. You do not stand and grapple, straining into each other’s shoulders. You do not clench your teeth and push. But sifu told Jin and me to come at each other like this, like sparring grizzly bears, and when we turned he said, “No!” pointing his finger like a dart. “Sometimes it is just strength,” he said. “The only answer is persistence.” There were red marks on my arms, as if I had been seized by a witch.

After the session I stayed behind to talk with Jin. I did not want to leave the lesson in the silence in which we had spent it. We went for steamed buns at one of the bakeries nearby. Men poured through the shop’s doors, calling out orders, dropping money on the counter without checking to see whether it was correct. The room smelled of beef and perfume. Through the windows I watched women pushing carts of Chinese melons and turnips that looked like wedges of timber. We tore at our steamed buns, spilled barbecued pork, bean paste, lotus. Jin talked about his job at the post office, sorting hundreds of letters on which the address was not clear — envelopes sent from Nanchong, east Sichuan province, to “Mrs Chun, Manhattan” or “Mr Han, Tailor, Mott Street.” The addresses were often written in Mandarin. “They imagine everyone will know him,” Jin said, “Mr Han the tailor.”

“They think the city is that small?”

“No! They think Mr Han is so good, so fine a tailor, that of course he will be famous. That the most gifted tailors receive rubies and palaces.”

“Does that happen in China?”

Jin laughed. “No. But this is America. The land of opportunity!”

I was late returning home. The chain came off my bicycle and I had to crouch in the street to replace it, trolleys hustling by, horses kicking up clods of earth. I coasted toward the brownstone, standing on the pedals. I assumed Schillinger or Lucie would have come to practise, and each had a key, but when I arrived at West 54th Street I found the worst thing — you, sitting on the steps, waiting for me; and also Sara Hardy, the dancer, leaning her face on her palm. “Clara,” I said, skidding to a stop. You stood.

“Hi, Leon.”

I assumed Sara was one of your friends and went to shake her hand, then realized my fingers were covered in bicycle grease. I offered a bashful nod instead.

“You must be Dr Theremin,” she said. She was a strange-looking woman, so tall in her beige dress. She looked as though someone had held her at head and feet and pulled.

“Sorry to have kept you waiting,” I said. My muscles felt overlarge, like clothes I had been wearing for three days.

“I just stopped by on my way to rehearsal,” you said. “I wouldn’t have waited except I saw this poor girl.”

“I’m here for the audition,” Sara said.

I leaned the bicycle against the fence. “The aud—? Oh!”

She looked stricken. “Is everything all right?”

“Yes, of course. I’m sorry. I had forgotten. I thought you were Clara’s — yes. Just a moment.” I unlocked the front door and ushered you both inside. “Let me just …” I went leaping up the stairs. I had hauled the dance stage all the way to my rooms on the fourth floor. Nobody was using it and it occupied too much space in the downstairs workshops. Now I set about tidying, clearing away empty tumblers, brushing derelict potato chips from the end tables. Huge spools of wire were sitting on the stage itself and I had to roll these away, round the corner to my bedroom, leaving rail tracks in the carpet.

“All right, all right,” I called. You did not hear and I clattered back down. “Welcome,” I said to Sara Hardy, the dancer, and also a second time, to you. Your smile made me give a weary laugh.

We climbed to the top floor. Sara seemed bored; she did not even peer around as we alighted on a landing. She had a strange way of breathing through her nose, and I decided between the third and fourth floors that I did not like her. We arrived at the top, and went through a doorway, past my bedroom, and then we were in the “reading room,” which was workshop and drafting room and paint cellar, now with an electronic ether dance stage in the centre of its floor. You seemed faintly horrified, Clara. Admittedly the terpsitone was not at its best. Aborted circuits stuck out like insect antennae from its sides; a loop of wire was caught all across its length; the loudspeaker was not yet properly installed and amounted to an oily copper grille that leaned against the bookshelf. Excess wiring spilled from under the platform, like multicoloured grass. “What is it?” you asked.

“The ether wave dance stage,” I said, proudly. I gestured to Sara. “Please step aboard.”

She wavered on her long legs. “What will it do?”

“Nothing,” I said. I snapped the switch on the generator. “Well, it will make a sound.”

The room filled with a low hum, as if a bassist was warming up next door. Sara was still hesitating. She looked at you, her new doorstep ally.

“Go on,” you said.

Clara, I loved you.

The terpsitone was about the size of a door, perhaps a little larger, upholstered in rosy felt. As she approached, the hum’s pitch began to change. The secret was a metal plate, an antenna, fixed beneath the stage. It sensed the conductivity, the movements, of the person who stood upon it. Sara seemed nervous, like a little girl. But she climbed up onto the platform. Cables snaked from the platform to a box near the doorway, a controller station. I adjusted some dials and the hum became much louder, the vibrato tighter, and the terpsitone’s drone swooped into midrange.

“All right,” I said.

“All right?” she said.