Sean Michaels - Us Conductors

Before long it was another year. I went to my monthly meetings with Karl and Karl — they would say I went dutifully, but there was only the semblance of duty, the soldier in automatic lockstep. The Karls made me drunk. I told them the spry nothings that composed my days. Perhaps they thought the booze made me honest. I went to the appointments they assigned — shook hands, signed papers. Now and then they asked me to steal, to take surreptitious photographs, but I bungled these, forgetting to remove the lens cap, taking the wrong document from the wrong folder. These lapses were neither deliberate nor accidental. I do not know what they were. I sat with Schillinger and Frances at It Happened One Night , laughing like a donkey, feeling nothing.

“Leon, how are you?” Lucie Rosen asked one day. She was stooped in the foyer, untying her shoes.

“Fine,” I said.

She raised her eyes to look at me. “You sure?”

“I am very pleasant,” I said.

Nobody wanted my theremins. My meetings with the world’s Bert Grimeses were always on the matter of teletouch — my hocus-pocus of invisible sensing. Shop windows that lit up, displays that moved with every passerby. Nate Stone’s scheme for Macy’s windows had been an enormous hit; he was rich now and kept pestering me for new gimmicks. “Come over,” he’d say. “Wanna ask you about something.” I’d arrive and face his string of spitballed ideas, half concepts and figments, slung across his marble kitchen table. A secretary perched nearby, hunched over her typewriter.

Spinning windmills, Nate suggested. Books that open and close. “Or electric dogs,” he said, “barking over dog food. Wait — cats!”

“Cats barking?” I said.

“Cats meowing.”

“Over dog food.”

“Over cat food.”

The typewriter dinged.

I played the dumb Russian because Nate was so boring. His thousand-dollar ideas were for selling cufflinks or toilet paper, each an aesthetic variation on the same root mechanism. It was a decade and a half since I’d invented the radio watchman, and these meetings with Nate and his secretary and that damn dinging typewriter only emphasized the meaninglessness of my present work. I thought with agony of smug, slender Sasha, spending every day in research. “Could you make it rain,” Nate said, “when a customer checks out the umbrellas?” While he envisaged commercial magic, I saw just the same old servos, connected to wet buckets.

My half-life went on. Nate’s secretary sent me carbon-copied minutes. I sat up all night, taking motors out of windmills, screwing them into hollowed-out books. It was 1934 and this was my livelihood.

I tried not to think of you. When I did think of you, I tried to forget your face. I willed it to blur away, water poured onto a watercolour. You would be just another girl, a silhouette, a skirt. I had known many silhouettes.

When you told me No, Clara, it was as if you were rejecting a law. It is not like this , you were saying. Denying not my hypothesis but my conclusion. This was not a matter of persuasion. I could not take you back into the Savoy and persuade you that there is no gravity, that there is no death. It was a matter of proof. I needed a lover’s proof, incontrovertible. I did not know where to find it. It is not like this , you were saying. The particles were not present. The equation did not resolve. I learned that there was another way to interpret the data. This other way is hideous, heartbreaking. A world that is not as it seems.

In this mistaken world, nothing was not fragile. Which principles would be the next to fall? Which truths were false? I was a scientist and a murderer. I was alone. Was I even alive, down deep, in the deepest part, where at night I felt so barren?

I remember one evening, walking home up Seventh Avenue. It was dark. I came up to Lerners — closed up, abandoned until the morning. Lev Sergeyvich Termen, 60 kilograms, a Howell suit, nothing more. I passed the thirteen shop windows and each, one by one, became illuminated.

IT WAS AN EARLY AUTUMN morning when I decided to go see Katia. The sun had not risen. I went down the stairs to make my breakfast and as I entered the kitchen I had a sudden longing for the thick red jam she made every summer. I longed for her jam but I could not even recall which berries she had used. The forgetting humiliated me. I took some slices of ham from the icebox and I sat with a stale piece of bread and this plate of ham. I tried to imagine the taste of Russian raspberries, or cranberries, or bilberries, blueberries, ash berries.

At a booth in Penn Station I bought a ticket to New Jersey. I walked to the platform and thought of the platforms in Leningrad, those proud marble pillars. I had taken hundreds of trains from Nikolayevsky, Oktyabrsky, Leningradsky, that station of many names. I had my Mandat , then. A card with the words Vladimir Ilyich Lenin . May his memory be illuminated. My equipment packed in its cases and me like an arrow from the Soviet, swift and certain, sent along the rails with word of electricity, indisputable truths. In Kazan and Samara I stood in drafty wooden halls, with boxes full of snaking wire, but there were no deceptions when I showed the townsfolk my machines. I was no charlatan.

I sat with my hands between my thighs, alone in the train car. We were late to leave the station. I had not brought a book. This was my first time underneath the Hudson River. It did not seem like a new place. The walls of the passage were invisible in the dark and you could not hear the river, just the clack-clack, clack-clack of the train, and I felt as if I were on a ceaseless path into hell. I forgot the tunnel’s engineering feat, forgot the years of work plans and careful digging, and when we emerged into daylight I took a long, grateful breath.

We went on, clack-clack . I looked out the window at the dull land that ringed the city. Now and then a white barn, a grey river, like the stations on a pilgrimage. I found myself waiting keenly for the ticket inspector, someone who would come in and tear this piece of paper.

The last time I had seen Katia was backstage at Carnegie Hall, four years earlier. A hundred men in pressed black suits, dandies in seersucker, a procession of women in taffeta and jewels, Steinways and Rockefellers, Rosens and Schillingers, the Bolotines and little Yolochka, prawns and devilled eggs, wine and mousse, playbills and coiled cables, and Ekaterina Pavlova Termen, my secret, hidden in a corner, clutching her elbows. Do not imagine that I ignored her. I said hello. I said I was surprised to see her there. I lingered. I wondered if she had come to embarrass me. So many others were waiting for me, around the room. I went away but came back later with a plate of melon and gravlax. She picked at the capers. She wore a plain dress and a gaudy necklace that was not in fashion. When I introduced her to Otis Skinner she nodded at what he said but I do not think she understood him. Her English was not good. I realized that she probably did not even know who he was. In Russian I said, “He’s an actor.”

“Yes,” she replied. “You can tell by how much he talks.”

I had not liked Otis Skinner in Kismet but he had come to my performance. He told stories of sneezing during the filming of the movie’s harem scenes. Katia stood like a faded statuette. After a little while I found a reason to leave her. I glanced back often. Through the glad crowds I glimpsed her arms, her back, the side of her face, always at right angles, as if she had been carved out with a chisel. Then finally she disappeared.

At Newark I changed to the Erie line. I sat across from a father and son. The father was my age. I was not sure of the age of the son; only parents seem to have an instinct for the age of children. He was a boy. He had blond hair and a dark summer tan. He was holding an incandescent light bulb. “Hello,” he said to me.