Sean Michaels - Us Conductors

“Clara,” I said.

You still were not looking at me.

“Clara,” I said.

“I don’t want to talk about it.”

“We don’t need to talk about it,” I said gently.

You were staring at the wallpaper’s column of twisting roses.

“Everything’s going to be all right.”

This sentence made you flinch. Your brow was dark and knit. “Let’s go out,” I said.

After a moment you said, “Go out where.”

I searched your face for inspiration. It showed me nothing. Strange when a face is bare and yet secret. You were gazing at my painting of a foreign island filled with ruins.

“Connecticut,” I said.

Your eyes flicked back to mine.

“Connecticut,” I said again.

Your face cracked into a smile. “ Connect-icut ?” you said. I did not know, but I had pronounced it wrong. “You mean ‘Connecticut’?”

“Yes,” I said.

“Why would we go to Connecticut?”

“We will go and we will find out,” I said.

“You’re an idiot,” you said.

“I will call for a car,” I said.

We hired a silver convertible, like the lining of a cloud. Its top speed was very slow. We eased out of New York City and along the bay into New Rochelle. We wove through small towns. We scrutinized hay bales. We passed chimneys and stables and billboards reading LOCKSMITHS. Cows loitered, birds cheered. Rivers ran with cold water.

We stopped when we saw horses. You were frightened, frightened of making them run, and you stayed with the car. They were the colours of pecans and walnuts. Their heads were raised, attentive. I padded through the long grass, listening to my breathing, listening to theirs, inhaling the green field smells and the horses’ scent, like paprika and clover. I heard you murmur, “Careful …”

In Litchfield, Connecticut, we sat in the car and watched a valley disappear. Before it was fully dark, the stars had already come out. I knew the constellations by their Latin names and you knew their English names. Why did we never speak Russian with each other? I think I was trying to build something new, something I had never known before. “Ursa Minor,” I said. You replied, “Little Bear.”

WE ATE DINNER LATE, at an inn overlooking Lake Waramaug. They brought us plates of raw oysters, sour cherries, radishes with butter. “Such strange food,” you said.

“It’s the way of Connect-icut,” I said.

I had fish chowder and you had a gigantic sirloin steak, a steak bigger than your head, which you attacked with a carnivorous precision I had never beheld in you before. You manoeuvred the fork in your right hand and I saw that there was no hesitation there; no pain flashed in your face. It was not that you could not use that arm: it was that you could not play violin with it. In a way, this seemed an even crueller injury. I asked myself what I would do if someone told me I could no longer be an engineer.

At the table you spoke of your early childhood, before your family came to New York. It was like revisiting the scene of a crime. You remembered the wide cathedral square, holiday processions down Pilies Street. Vilnius was all straight runs, flat lines. You took a heel of bread and ripped it in two. After the Revolution, they closed the city market. You described playing in the empty stalls, skipping with your sister across the speckled earth. You were hungry.

I told you about riding a bicycle through the grounds of the Physico-Technical Institute, about the spray of green leaves and rainbows bending.

You said the weather in Lithuania had always seemed comprehensible; that even as a little girl, you felt the rain coming, saw the sunshine departing. You could intuit the clouds. “In America, what sense do things make?” you said.

I chided you. “You know as well as I.”

“It’s as if no one here ever learned that there are ways things are supposed to be.”

“Yes,” I said. “It’s why I’ve stayed.”

We spoke of the northern lights. In Leningrad, they streak across the entire winter. In summer there are the white nights, long bright midnights. But after the fall equinox come the gold, green, crimson nights, when glimmers lift out of all that blackness, undeniable, secure, fading. The aurora looks like roads, sometimes; bands of light twisting across hilltops. But the hills are not there, the roads are not there — like the paths of ghosts. You forget their routes as soon as you have glimpsed them.

“Roads less travelled by,” you said.

I didn’t know you were quoting Robert Frost. “Travelled by whom?” I said.

You hesitated. After a moment, you murmured, “By us.”

I used to sit and watch the northern lights from my bedroom window, as a boy, and later, as a man, from my dormitory at Petrograd University. As a husband I watched too. I did not tell you this. I would lean my head against the glass and know that behind me, across the room, Katia lay with her eyes closed.

For dessert you ordered a chocolate parfait. I ordered a cup of coffee. I drank it sweet, with two small spoonfuls of sugar. Someone was playing records, one after another. They all sounded like love songs. You hid your grin as you scraped mousse from the bottom of the parfait glass.

When we went back out into the night, crossing the gravel to the car, I think we both expected to see the aurora. But everything was dark. We expected it to be weaving above us in cold blazing splendour. The sky had clouded over. In the darkness I pulled the convertible roof up over the car and then I went over to you and I kissed you.

I remember how later you swept your hair away from where it lay around your eyes. You stretched your arms as though you were waking. When your wrist touched the window glass there was an instant when your mouth moved, almost smiling, and then you said that you felt outside and inside at the same time.

MUD TONY’S NEVER CHANGED. The walls were an overripe lime green, the tiles a weak milky blue. Cooking oil hung like a fine mist in the air. Every two weeks I hunched in a booth with Karl and Karl and they passed me glasses of vodka and I swallowed them without protest. I spilled my guts. I looked around the diner with sad eyes. The salt shaker was always at the same level. The tabletop was covered in a tacky film.

“And so,” asked Karl, the Karl with a moustache, “how are the negotiations with First Bank?”

“Stalled,” I said. My tongue felt slick in my mouth.

“Turn the key in the ignition,” said the other Karl, “and get somewhere.”

I had been in talks with the First Bank of New York about a touchless alarm system. I had been in talks with Brite-Star Toys about a doll that crawled across the floor. I had been in talks with Marzinotto Screws about a theory for preventing corrosion. All of these talks were genuine. They stalled and unstalled. I scored a minor hit with the electric eye, a security device for sleeping children. It was a familiar principle: an electromagnetic field in a ring around the baby’s crib. Enter the invisible field, and a bell sounds.

The greatest calamity of Charles Lindbergh’s life made me a little rich that summer.

For most of these inventions, full of invisible fields and secret activations, I used the name “teletouch.” Teletouch light switches, teletouch alarm systems, teletouch sensors for automatic doors. I had signed a contract with Nate Stone, of Marchands, to develop teletouch window displays. He planned to sell them to uptown department stores: revolving tables and flashing lights whenever a customer passed close by.

The Karls were unmoved. They applauded windfalls, siphoned money from my accounts, but they were not interested in shopkeepers, infants, mechanical amusements. They wanted contracts with major enterprise, corporate skeleton keys. “Have you spoken with General Motors?” they asked. “Have you followed up with Westinghouse?” Even in my intoxication, I knew enough to lead them on, to offer yeses and maybes. I did not believe in their omnipotence, or in the methods of their bosses, but somewhere at the heart of this matter were the best interests of Mother Russia. One day, perhaps, we would want the same things. I might yet be their spy.