Sean Michaels - Us Conductors

“Why?”

“Why? Why? I am your protector. Do as I say.”

I swallowed. Pash was staring a straight line down the road.

“Is there something I should know?” I said. “Is it those loans?”

“What loans?”

“I don’t know. That bank in Wisconsin?”

Pash made a kind of smiling face, without any kind of smile.

“Are you in touch with family? Back home?”

“In Leningrad?”

“Yes.”

“No, not really,” I said.

“You have a sister?”

I pressed my lips together. “Helena.”

“You write to her?”

“We’re not close,” I said. “She’s married.”

Pash shifted. “Much is happening.”

“To whom?” I said.

“Not to us.” He drummed his fingers against the rusted lift. “Not to us.”

SPRING CAME, and summer came, but they were like visitors in another part of the house. I did not see them, only their signs.

Lavinia planted mint, sage and beans in the window boxes.

At the end of August I had another visit from Commerce and Burr. I had gone with Lavinia to eat at the Plaza Hotel, my old home. Valets parked our car but they gave us a table in the corridor, on the way to the kitchen, as if we were sacks of potatoes. I was furious. Not from what they did with us, the white man and his coloured wife — from the surprise. “What did you expect?” Lavinia murmured. But there were no warnings, no signs. “If they don’t want Negroes, they should say so,” I said. “This is a hotel .”

We ate and came home. I felt my stomach grinding up the Plaza’s lentils and quail. As always, the Cadillac felt like some phantom carrier, a spell for moving from place to place. We did not speak in the car. Lavinia was angry with me. When we pulled up in front of the house, a man was at the window, cupping his hands around his eyes, looking in.

I honked the horn. He looked up. He put his hands in his pockets. He smiled. It was Jim, the debt collector.

“Who is that?” Lavinia asked.

“Nobody,” I said.

As we got out he sauntered over, as though we were old friends. “Hi, Dr Theremin,” he said.

“Hi,” I said thinly.

He half-bowed to Lavinia. “Jim Swiss. Commerce and Burr.”

“Lavinia,” she said.

“Lavinia …?” he asked, leadingly, utterly rude.

“She is my wife,” I said.

“Your wife!” Jim exclaimed. He shook his head. “You’ve been busy, Dr Theremin!” He lightly kicked the tire of the Cadillac. “And that’s a nice car.”

“Thank you,” I said.

Lavinia led me past him. “Excuse us,” she said, “we’ve had a long day.”

“Yes, of course! Who hasn’t? What a scorcher. Just wanted to give you this.”

“Thank you.”

“Oh! And Dr Theremin! Do you have a new number for Julius Goldberg? The old one stopped working!”

“No.” We paused on the step.

“No?” Jim asked, with feigned surprise. “I thought he was your business manager?”

“Yes, sorry. Yes. I do have his number. Let me get it for you.”

In the parlour I scrawled Pash’s new number on a sheet of notepaper. I brought it back out to Jim Swiss, in his ugly green suit. “Hey, thanks,” he said. He smacked me on the shoulder. “And that’s some pretty girl you found.”

I went back inside. I sat on the couch, with Lavinia beside me. I unfolded the letter he had given to me. It was not from Commerce and Burr. It was from the Internal Revenue Service. It advised me that I owed $59,000 in back taxes to the United States government.

“What does it say?” Lavinia asked.

“I need to send in some forms,” I said.

In the morning, Walter Tower Rosen came to see me. He rang the bell. He owned the house I lived in but he rang the bell.

“Walter. What a nice surprise.”

“Yes,” he said. He looked older than the last time I had seen him. I asked myself how long it had been.

“Lucie’s going to be round later to practise.”

“Good,” I said.

His eyes searched the doorway. He cleared his throat. He asked, “Is everything all right, Dr Theremin?”

“Yes,” I said, “of course.”

“I had a call today from the Internal Revenue Service.”

“Oh?”

“Yes,” he said.

“I’ve spoken to them,” I said.

“You have?”

“Yes.”

“Everything’s in order?”

“Oh yes,” I said.

He appraised me for a long moment. “Yes?” he asked again. “Yes. A terrible mix-up,” I said.

He nodded. He released a breath. “Well, I’m relieved to hear that. I had been a little — yes, well. Good.” He gave another deep breath. “A weight off my shoulders.”

I smiled. “Is that all?”

Walter did up his jacket. “Did Lucie talk to you about the new theremin?”

“The new theremin?” I said.

“She said you had designed a new theremin. She wants to commission a model for herself.”

“Yes …” I said carefully. I had no recollection of this conversation.

He watched me. “I wondered if you needed an advance.”

“Oh, there’s no need.”

“Are you sure?”

“Yes.”

“Well, listen,” he said. He reached into his pocket. “Here’s four hundred dollars all the same. For materials.”

I did not immediately accept the bills. Four hundred dollars to make a theremin like yours, Clara.

I took the money. “Thank you.”

Walter shook my hand. “Like I said, Lucie will be over later.”

“Of course.”

“We should have dinner soon,” he said. “With your wife.”

“That would be nice.”

When I reached Pash, he told me to calm down. He gave the same kinds of answers as before. He was taking care of it. The debt was a matter of bank accounts, transferred funds. I told him I thought I understood what had gone wrong at Alcatraz: the tubes were overheating and needed to be changed more often. “Never mind that,” he said. “Alcatraz has cancelled the contract.”

“But they’ve been using the arches for months.”

“They’re ripping them out.”

“I said I’ve solved—”

“The jailers got impatient. Already someone else is installing something. Rivertons, I think. From Chicago.”

“Pash—”

“It’s all right. We got the information we needed.”

“Do we still get paid?” I asked.

Pash laughed. It was a bear’s laugh but I couldn’t tell if it was easy or forced. I was tired of all these conversations, conversations, conversations. Each one left me with the same nervousness. “It’s always about money, these days! We are communists, Lev!”

“Perhaps I’m becoming a capitalist,” I said.

Pash clicked his tongue. He paused before answering and when the reply did come, his voice was grimmer, levelled. “No, we’re not getting paid,” he said. “In fact, we have to pay back the advance.”

“What advance?”

“I need to go, Lev. Stop with all this. You’ll fall into a pit.”

He put down the phone. I kept the receiver to my ear. I felt so angry. The telephone line crackled. Green leaves were quivering on the branches of the trees. “Hello?” I said into the telephone. “Hello?”

IN MY WORKSHOP THAT NIGHT, I raised my hand and made the theremin sing. It sang one note. Lavinia was somewhere far away in the house. The theremin was very quiet, my palm so close to the lower antenna. I had given you ten different voices. I wondered whether you, wherever you were, still used just the first voice.

I made my theremin sing louder, louder. The room was frozen in place. One does not intentionally squander a life; one looks back and finds it squandered. I knew I did not want to make an inventory, but here I was now, counting. One house, crowded with memory, that belonged to someone else. Ten years of work, each patient discovery, amounting to nothing. I had wasted a thousand pencil marks on singsong. On hope. Was this heart worth anything, when you were married to another? When I was married to another? Is there any honour, any honour at all, in wanting? In keeping on wanting? I made the theremin sing louder.