Sean Michaels - Us Conductors

I was here to go to Alcatraz; I went to Alcatraz. A cruel rock floating in the San Francisco Bay. The ferry brought us dumbly, without comment, yet my fingers tightened on the handrail. This was a hideous destination. The engine droned and there was blue in the clouded sky, but I could feel the doom in this grey masonry, the haunted garden that lay in its centre. Our boat came alone.

“Hello, Dr Theremin,” the functionaries said. Hello, hello, hello . I did not know if it was my imagination seeing pairs of eyes in the high-up grilles. “Hello, Dr Theremin, welcome!” I knelt beside a metal detector, checking the circuits, trimming a wire, guarded by a circle of officials. They laughed, cracked jokes. Beyond their perimeter there was no sound, no movement. I only knew because I had read it: three hundred men, locked in, forbidden from speaking. Pash had asked me to find out about Alcatraz’s block assignments — whether the murderers were kept with the spies, the rapists with the bombers, Al Capone sharing a wall with Machine Gun Kelly. This was not an idle curiosity: it was at the heart of this journey, the sort of information that we had built these machines to obtain. But in those hours at Alcatraz I could not bring myself to pry into the affairs of its lodgers; there was no way I could sneak down a hallway to slip files from folders. I snipped the wire. I tested the voltage. I listened for the breathing of the men in their cells. I do not believe in a reckoning, but in the heart of this prison I knew I was tempting fate. I was a murderer and a thief, unshackled, with hands that smelled of orange oil.

Until the ferry took me back to the mainland, and I climbed back into the aeroplane, and I flew away, I kept waiting for a voice that would say, Hello, Dr Theremin . A voice that was barbed. It would lead me to a cell. I would lie in my cot, counting hours, until the day I died.

It is different, here on this ship. Here I allow myself to miss you, Clara. To remember every part. I cannot leave my room. Food is brought to me by a stranger. But this journey will not be long. Soon we will arrive at a port whose signs are in my mother tongue. The sailors will unlock my cabin and I will walk the gangplank into Russia, my homeland, where I can enact every dream, if I wish to, and I can openly serve a noble cause. All good things will come, somehow. It is the first law of thermodynamics. Nothing is destroyed.

BOTH OF THE KARLS had notebooks out.

“Centimetres or inches?” asked the one with a moustache.

“Inches,” I replied. My hands were palms down on the table.

“How high?”

“Six inches.”

They nodded. They were taking these figures down — the dimensions of the mufflers used in Douglas O-43 monoplanes, on contract to the United States Army Air Corps. I was providing Douglas with altimeter prototypes; in the course of this work, I acquired certain aeroplane plans.

The Karl with the beard scrutinized me. “Are you certain of these measurements?”

“Yes.”

“You are not even consulting notes.”

I nodded in agreement.

“How do you remember the measurements?”

“By remembering,” I said.

The Karls did not smile.

One of them took a sheaf of papers from his briefcase. His eyes flicked down its length. There was a long pause.

“Lev, do you wish to stay in the United States?”

I raised my eyes in surprise.

“Yes,” I said.

“There is a visa issue,” he said.

“Can it be resolved?”

Karl pursed his lips.

“I have much more work to do for our country,” I said.

The men exchanged a look. Finally one of them said: “Do you have a woman?”

“A woman?”

“Yes.”

“Yes,” I replied, defensively, reflexively. I clasped my hands in my lap.

“Then get married,” said the Karl with the beard. “It would make matters much easier.”

I REMEMBER WATCHING A MAN and a woman waving at each other from opposite street corners. He was in a workman’s uniform; she held a bag of shopping. They had different shades of faded brown hair. At first their waves were meant just to say, I see you . Then they repeated the waves, almost bashful, out of love. Their waves soon became a kind of joke — bigger and bigger, a caricature of waving. They were laughing, their faces so splendidly happy. Then the crowd swarmed the intersection. I did not see them meet. I wondered if it had been worth the waving.

I felt at that time like an empty cabinet. I was made of good, strong wood. Every morning someone would open my wide doors and slip a new sheaf of papers into a designated place, and the shelves were stacked with so many papers, miles of contracts, yet still I knew this cabinet was empty. Perhaps there was a locked drawer at its heart. Perhaps there was a drawer, perhaps it held something of value, perhaps there was, somewhere, a key. I did not know.

Pash went on with our business. He managed the books. I made things for him to trade away.

In 1937, I heard you on the radio, playing Ravel’s “Kaddisch” on the theremin. Your performance was matter-of-fact, dumbfounding. It was finer than any violin performance I had ever heard. The theremin had a purity of tone that made the piece feel like an inherent thing, noumenal and unmediated, a treasure that had always been.

I think I had been waiting for a coincidence.

I called you two days later.

“Is Clara there?”

“It’s me,” you replied.

“It’s Leon Theremin.”

“I know.”

“You remember me?”

You laughed. “Leon.”

I said, “I would like to build you a new instrument.”

We met on neutral ground, at Grand Central Station. I waited on the mezzanine. I wanted to see you before you saw me. It is difficult to look for a person from the mezzanine of Grand Central Station. Travellers cross the floor in unique trajectories, like the whirl of dandelion seeds. Every time I tried to pick a person out, a sudden crowd obscured him. It felt like chaos, though I knew it was not. Even these paths, given enough time, could be predicted. Plot the data, pick out its patterns, factor age, occupation, destination. I watched the stirring figures. I wondered if, ultimately, everything could be known.

Stillness separated you from the crowd. A woman in a tilted cloche hat, a three-quarter length coat, unfastened. With small shoulders. Gloves. I came down the stairs, my heart charging in my chest, ten thousand horses galloping across the plain. The windless station hall with all its flat golden light. You raised your hand and waved. You had not changed.

You had not changed, you had not changed.

“Hello,” I said.

“Hello, Leon.” There was hesitation in your face, something like caution. In a certain way this made me proud. There was memory in the way you looked at me.

“Are you well?” I said.

“Yes. Are you?”

“I brought you this,” I said.

You pressed your lips together. You took the rose.

“It is good to see you,” I said.

Your eyes flicked up. Each of us took a breath. You finally murmured, “Yes.”

I gestured at a marble bench, just there, amid the crowds. “So,” I said, gently, “let’s talk about staccato.”

So we talked about staccato. We had talked about it on the telephone and now we talked about it in the station, like acquaintances and then gradually like old friends, knee to knee. You were a remarkable theremin player but you played approximately the same theremin as everyone else, with components from RCA. There were flowers on the sides but its design was seven years old. Its power supply was unreliable. It failed in humid weather. Its timbre was unsophisticated and its volume control was sluggish, unresponsive. “Like molasses,” you said. This was the way with all theremins: they were given to glissando, eliding between notes.