Sean Michaels - Us Conductors

For you I imagined better.

I imagined a theremin that was perfectly made, with custom components for its singular player. A more sensitive theremin, with a more supple volume control. That could sing in a more bewitching voice: a voice like light in leaves, breath in chests, a slender lightning bolt.

“Let me build it for you,” I said.

“I will pay,” you said.

“It doesn’t matter,” I said. “I would build it anyway.”

You smiled. “And still I would pay you.”

I proposed to build it differently than the last, than the one you had; differently than any other theremin in the whole of the world. A theremin with its antennas reversed, for your particular injury: pitch on the left side, for your strong left arm; and volume on the right.

“No.”

“No?” I asked.

“It is too late,” you said.

With my thumb I traced the centre line of my palm.

“Some things you can’t undo,” you said.

IF YOU ARE LIKE ME, you dream your life according to perfect conditions. You look at the lines of a proof, the clear symbols of a formula, and you understand the world.

This is dream, not knowledge. Life is not a laboratory; twenty-four imperfect hours make up a day. There is interference, distortion, accident, will. There is also hope. Hope will ruin a thing, or fulfil it.

I had neglected my theremin for a very long time. I had not stared at its coils or wires, had not opened its circuitry to the light. It was early 1937 and a war was stirring in Europe. I lived in Manhattan and considered coils, transformers, pitch oscillators. Every time I dragged the stool to my workbench, I had another idea to improve the device. I met Pash when he asked, dined with his masters of industry, but in every spare moment I was experimenting with new speakers and concentrating coils, tightening and replacing tiny brass screws. I did not call you or send letters. I did not divert the bearing of my work. I did not doubt. My mind and hands were following the directives of my wakeful loosened heart and I was solitary, moving, a free particle that spins, that feels the weak and strong forces exerting gravity upon it.

It is not the same solitude I experience here, aboard the Stary Bolshevik . Here I am an idle man in a cabin, writing stories on this typewriter. Leaving rows of sentences, months passing in ellipses.… I do not know what forces are in play. I do not see the looming icebergs, the coming storms. Sometimes I wake in the night and I wonder if we are sinking. It would be a long time before I would know that we were sinking. You can become a dead man before you know what you are.

I MET THE KARLS at Mud Tony’s.

“How long will it take you to tie up your business here?”

“Why?”

“It is time for you to go.”

“No. I have no plans to leave. Is this about visas? I will ask Pash to deal with it.”

“He cannot fix this.”

“We have too much work,” I said. “There is also a woman.”

“There are other problems. Has he spoken to you about taxes?”

“Taxes?”

“When was the last time you paid taxes?”

“I left such things to — to …”

“There are other problems, too,” a Karl said, squinting at the row of cars outside the window.

I WAS FRYING A SAUSAGE in a pan when Lucie Rosen called to me from downstairs. “Someone to see you, Leon!” I did not know whether to take the sausage off the stove or to leave it sizzling. How long would I be downstairs? Would this sausage explode? It gleamed.

I left it. I danced down the steps. “Yes?” I said, peering out across the floor. Lucie was standing with a stranger. He wore an ugly green suit, a bad purple tie. He was one of those men who seem secretly large; a trick of muscles in the neck. He had a wide messy mouth. He was still wearing his hat.

“Dr Leon Theremin?” he said.

“Yes,” I said.

“I’m Jim. Can we talk privately?”

“Have we met?” I asked.

“No. I’m here from Commerce and Burr.”

“Commerce and Burr?”

The man sighed, as if I were already making him sad. “We’re debt collectors, Dr Theremin.”

I brought Jim upstairs, as Lucie drilled the back of my head with a very alarmed look. We went into one of the smaller workshop rooms. “Please, sit,” I said. Jim sat in a wooden chair with wheels on casters. Throughout our conversation he was moving, slightly, back and forth, like a weaving boxer or a killer shark.

“Thank you for agreeing to meet with me,” he said.

I gave him an ironic look.

“Have you seen our letters?”

I had no idea what he was talking about. “What letters?”

Now Jim gave me an ironic look. He withdrew a sheaf of papers from his jacket pocket and passed them to me. The letterhead, C&B, in black and red, recalled mortar shells descending upon a city.

“You are president of the Migos Corporation, yes?”

“Er …” I said, flipping through the papers. Six months of them, addressed to offices in Manhattan and Queens. A few had been sent to West 54th Street but I had never seen them. Dr Leon Theremin, President, Migos Corporation; Dr Leon Theremin, President, Theremin Patents Corporation; Dr Leon Theremin, President, Teletouch Holding Corporation .

“Can you give me an address for Boyd Zinman?” Jim asked.

“For who?”

“Boyd Zinman.”

I had never heard of Boyd Zinman. “Who?”

Jim sighed. “Dr Theremin, let’s be serious. You have defaulted on debts amounting to almost sixty thousand dollars.”

My eyes bulged. “Sixty?”

“Remember Walmor Incorporated, Dr Theremin? Remember International Madison Bank?”

I did not remember these things.

“You should speak to my business manager, Julius Goldberg,” I said.

“Ah yes,” said Jim, “Mr Goldberg. Could I have his address as well?”

I stammered. “Yes, well, actually no. But let me give you his telephone number.”

Jim turned slowly in his chair.

When he departed, he left me with a single typed page. It was an accounting of sixteen separate loans involving six corporations, across nine different lenders. The smallest loan was for $3,000, the largest for $30,001. They dated from as early as 1929. Commerce and Burr , read the top of the letter, WE SETTLE IT .

I called Pash in a near panic.

“It’s under control,” he said.

“Sixty thousand dollars?”

“Lev, it’s under control.”

“What’s under control? What is this money?”

“It’s our business, Lev.”

“Our business?”

“The things we do.”

“Who is Boyd Zinman?”

“One of your partners. I introduced you. At the Waldorf.”

“I don’t remember.”

“Clearly. That’s why I am occupied with these things and you are not. And I am telling you: it’s under control.”

“So I don’t need to worry?”

“Debt collectors are in the business of fear.” He made me take down an address in Harlem. “If they come back, give them that. If Commerce and Burr send you letters, ignore them.”

“That’s it?”

“Lev, I have work to do. So do you.”

I put down the telephone and went back upstairs to my rooms. There was smoke in the air, the smell of pork fat. In terror, I remembered my lunch. I ran to the kitchen, searching for fire. No fire. The sausage still gleamed, hot, in its pan.