Sean Michaels - Us Conductors

I filed for divorce from Ekaterina Pavlova Termen of Paterson, New Jersey.

In February, the doorbell buzzed. It buzzed and buzzed. I did not answer it, but my guest would not be deterred. Whoever it was leaned into the buzzer, letting it sound throughout the brownstone house. Perhaps a kid is being a nuisance, I thought. Perhaps someone rude wants my attention. I refused to move. I lay on my back on my bed. My brow creased.

Then there was a crash. It was the thud of the door being busted in, and broken glass. I sat bolt upright. I could feel my heart in my chest, pounding.

I thought: Danny Finch’s friends .

I looked around for a weapon, some kind of weapon, a club or knife or a perfect deadly revolver. I would not wait with bare hands. I grabbed a hammer. I padded to the top of the stairs. Someone was coming. Someone very large. I could hear his footfalls, like the first booming of an avalanche. I heard a palm smack the handrail. I shifted my weight to my left leg, bent. I raised my hammer. I breathed, waiting.

Pash appeared around the landing, like a brown bear returning. He seemed twelve feet tall. His hair had thinned a little but his eyes were still pale blue. “Lev Sergeyvich Termen!” he shouted. “King of the Termenvox!” He clapped his eyes on me and held out his paw. I took it, shook it, as if I was checking a door to see if it was locked.

“Pash,” I stammered.

He laughed. “Am I a prince of the termenvox, would you say? A baron?”

“Where have you been?”

“Working hard.” He was thinner. He smelled like the outdoors, like an evergreen place where a creature would hibernate. “Which is more than we can say for you.”

I was speechless. I was breathing like a child. I was a cabin thrown up by a hurricane and then set back down.

Pash looked out over the workshop, curious, appraising, at the same time approving and unsatisfied. He rapped on the surface of a theremin, nudged a disassembled teletouch box. He lifted the skirt of the canvas that hid the cypresses. “My, my,” he said, and laughed. A laugh like an old friend. He turned back to me. “I can’t tell you how many times I imagined traipsing in here.”

“Why didn’t you?”

“I was sent away, Lev.” He bent to rummage in his bag. My intelligent heater gave a cough and turned on. I had forgotten how much space Pash used up. I had forgotten how much I knew his silhouette — the comfort of a familiar shape, rummaging in a bag. My chest felt tight. With rough movements Pash pulled out a carved wooden eagle, a pair of suede slippers. “For you,” he said.

I swallowed. The eagle was smaller than a dessert plate. There was something demented in the bird’s face. “E PLURIBUS UNUM,” said the chiselled inscription.

“Americans love these patriotic doodads,” Pash said. “They can’t get enough of ’em.” His English seemed looser than it had been, more at home. “This one’s from Oklahoma City.”

“Thank you?” I said.

“And these aren’t slippers.” He pressed the suede shoes into my hands. They were soft and pliable, embroidered with tiny mustard-coloured beads. “Moccasins,” he said. “Indians wear them so they can sneak up on people.”

“And I …”

“Well, now you can sneak up on people.” He laughed again, powerful and happy. “Right?” But as his laughter subsided, Pash was surveying me. He rubbed his lip. “You all right?”

“Yes,” I said.

He clicked his tongue and nodded. “You’re all right now, Lev. We’re both all right.”

I was turning the wooden eagle in my hands.

“Pash, where did you go for all this time?”

For an instant he looked at the floor. I thought he was preparing to make a joke, a feint, but instead his voice seemed scraped bare. “Lev, there is nothing nobler than work. Good work. It’s better than fortune and fame. Better than a million girls.” His eyes flicked to mine.

In the half-light, I was squinting.

“They called me away,” Pash said. He shrugged. “The Crash happened and there were matters that called for my expertise, first in Texas, then Oklahoma. A few years in Florida. Colorado. Union stuff, ports stuff, stuff you don’t need to hear about. Our employers needed me there, putting out fires.”

“You couldn’t have told me?”

“They told me to be discreet,” Pash said lightly. “You’re not a delicate flower, Lev. You could handle it. I knew you could. And other agents were taking over for me. You were taken care of?”

Taken care of , I thought.

My answer was terse. “It was a disaster. I almost went broke. I almost abandoned everything.”

“But here we are,” he said. He let out a deep breath. “At the end of it, still, here we are.” He seemed distant, then. His eyes rested on the mirror above the mantel. It was as though he was watching some slow construction, waiting for a way to describe it.

“Every single day,” Pash said at last, “any of us could give up. Sure we could. But we don’t, Lev. Not me. Not you.” His gaze slipped back to my cypress loudspeakers, hulking under canvas. “Because we serve. Because there is a good we are doing, an end we’re striving for. The nobility of the Soviet dream, yes? And the work itself — let’s not forget. You are a genius, Professor Termen, when it comes to the work.”

He shrugged. His face was just itself: bright eyes, a small mouth, a nose like a cudgel. He grinned. “You’re a lord of the air, remember.”

This man I had met in Berlin, with whom my life had been knotted, whom even now I scarcely knew. In that moment I felt as if he understood what I was capable of better than I did; and what I wanted, now that you were gone, Clara; and how all of it could be done.

“I am sorry I disappeared, Lev.” He rested his body against the doorjamb. “But I am back now, and despite that lying mirror we’re still young men. You’ve got moccasins and I’ve got a new telephone number and I say if you’re game, then let’s finish what we started together. The inventor and his silent partner, masterminds and experts, clever spies, rascals. Ha! Snakes in this million-dollar Manhattan grass.”

There was no decision. I simply took a breath. My inhalation was a yes and I felt something heavy lift from my shoulders. I imagined a crane tilting up over the room.

Somewhere in the house, a clock tolled the hour. Pash, still in the doorway, gestured over the workshop floor, past the cypresses, the piano, the flickering intelligent heater, to where a pair of theremins stood tall and side by side, flawlessly assembled.

He said, “I’m rusty as damn, Lev, but do you fancy a duet?”

FULLY, COMPLETELY, I became a spy. What had been halfhearted became whole. My distractions were cleared away; my mission was clear. I would walk through walls.

Pash had my house cleaned. He called a crew of three women, Romanians in coveralls, hair pinned back. “Go to it,” he told them. He took me to the pier; we rode a ferry around the Statue of Liberty. He said: “What are your ideas?”

I asked, “Ideas for what?”

“Ideas for the Americans.”

In the clear white daylight, over choppy waves, I found I had ideas. A thousand ideas. “But only teletouch is selling,” I said.

“So let’s spear some new whales,” Pash said.

The studio was quiet. I was not taking new students and I left the veterans to themselves. Lucie nursed her sorrows for two weeks and then began to practise constantly, morning to midnight. I heard her through the floorboards. I did not stand with her. I had my thousand ideas. I was bent over a thousand sheets of paper, with compass and slide rule, crocodile clips on my collar.