Sean Michaels - Us Conductors

I slept in the second bedroom, in its king-sized bed. On one night table I had a jar filled with nuts and bolts. On the other, I had a jar of screwdrivers. The top shelf of my armoire held wire. I kept the most important electrical equipment piled under the window. Every morning I woke up, opened my eyes, and gazed at a long shelf of batteries.

SOMETIMES I AM LYING in my cot and I think: this place reminds me of the hold of a ship. And then of course I rub my eyes and remember I am indeed in the hold of a ship, and these groans are a ship’s steel groans, and my dreams are the dreams of a sailor. By standing on my pillow I can look out through my porthole, onto the water. The sea is endless. When the moon is out, it leaves a path of light across the waves.

At mealtimes, a man appears at the door to my cabin. He is the size of a polar bear, with the beard of a polar bear, the whiskers of a polar bear, a heavy white coat like that of a polar bear. His eyes are like a polar bear’s eyes. Were it not for his hands, five-fingered, wide as 78s, I might well mistake him for a polar bear. But he is a man. He was born in Murmansk. His name is Red, which must be a joke.

My cabin door clangs open and Red is there, holding a tray of food. “Comrade?” he says, and I answer, amenably, “Hello, comrade.” With this formality out of the way, he asks, “How are you, Lev?” And I say, “I am good, Red.” He says, “Well, here is your feast.” The feast is usually potatoes and meat, but it is indeed a feast. The cook of the Stary Bolshevik is very fine: he does much with potatoes and meat and his rack of spices. Red claims that years ago, the cook worked in the kitchen of the Czar; and so of course now he is the chef for a groaning grey cargo ship; here he feeds the workers, and me — whatever I am.

“Thank you!” I tell Red as I take the tray. He nods. “How goes the writing?” I tell him what I always do. I say: “It goes, it goes.” Sometimes I ask if I might peek in on my equipment across the corridor. Every time, Red seems to genuinely consider this. His eyes roll up and to the left and in some old instinct, he bares his teeth. Then he inevitably answers, “I am sorry, no.” And I smile, and he smiles.

“My regards to the captain,” I say. Red nods his polar bear nod and gives me a thumbs-up. He picks up my dirty dishes with one giant dinner-plate hand. He turns and then looks back over his shoulder, as if to check whether I am following him. I am never following him; I am at my desk with my feast.

Red leaves and the door swings shut behind him. There is a simple pause, like the one in Chopin’s op. 28, no. 7, a pause like the passing of autumn into winter, a pause like other pauses I have known, before Red locks the door.

JOSEPH SCHILLINGER WALKED INTO the studio on a cool afternoon. I didn’t hear him knock, didn’t let him in. I was soldering. The blinds were drawn. I looked up and a small man was in the doorway, my desk lamp’s glare reflected in his glasses. He had a slick of polished black hair and a brown bow tie. He stood as still and straight as a post.

I put down my soldering iron. “Yes?” I asked.

“Dr Theremin,” he said. He smiled.

“Are you selling something?”

He rolled his eyes. “We met at the conservatory.”

“Which conservatory?”

“The conservatory of music.”

“Which conservatory of music?”

We were speaking in English. In Russian, he said: “The Conservatory of Music at the State University of Petrograd.”

I turned the rod at the window and light broke through the blinds. It fell across Schillinger in a series of orderly bars. He wore an immaculate grey suit and fine, polished shoes. I did not remember him. He had something in each hand, palm up. “What are you holding?” I asked.

“They are for you,” he said, and extended the gifts. In one hand, a tin wind-up frog. In the other, what looked like a dirty white billiard ball. He gave me the frog. “Try it,” he said. I looked from the toy to him and back to the toy. I twisted the shiny crank and felt the springs inside tightening. I put the frog on the workbench and let go.

I expected it to jump across the table. It did not. For a long moment, as we listened to the mechanism coil, it did nothing at all. Then the frog turned one of its large, painted eyes around in its head, and it stared at me. Then it said, very loudly, “Kva-kva.”

My eyebrows jutted up in surprise.

“They have some kind of loudspeaker in there,” Schillinger said.

“Remarkable.”

He nodded.

I looked at the item in his other hand. “What’s that?”

He put it down beside the frog. “A truffle mushroom.”

“For cooking?” I asked.

He shrugged. “For whatever you like.”

Schillinger became one of my first students in America. He joined Alexandra Stepanoff, a former soprano; and Rosemary Ilova, a former mezzo-soprano; and Anna Freeman, the daughter of Hoagy Freeman, who raced horses. Alexandra was dark, Rosemary was red-haired, and Anna was blonde. All had curls to the napes of their necks.

Schillinger arrived to lessons late, unapologetic, and always in a different outfit: a black jacket with black trousers and black slip-ons; a tan jacket with tan trousers and tan wing-tips; a brown jacket with black trousers and tan rain boots. Once, Frances, his wife, confided that he owned two hundred pairs of socks and alternated them according to a calculus of weather and season. She said he kept an almanac under the bed; crack the code and you could tell the date and the precise temperature from his sartorial permutation. She said this with a smile, a curl of hair at her lips. With the back of my fingers, I brushed it aside.

Later, I asked him. “Schillinger,” I said, “is there an arithmetic to your fashion?”

And he said: “In sum, I try to look good.”

So he arrived late, accidentally perhaps, but more likely it was deliberate. In the years to follow, when Schillinger taught classes at the studio—“New Forms in Musical Composition,” “A Quantitative Analysis of Song”—he was always prompt. I think that in those early days he was simply being a gentleman, making sure that there was time for Alexandra, Rosemary and Anna to receive private instruction.

Schillinger took to the theremin with terrific speed. He was a composer, a scholar. He needed to hear something only once to be able to recall it at will. This was not true for the things he read: the hearing was important. Schillinger had learned English, French, Italian and German by ear, in conversation. His Hebrew — learned from a book — was apparently much worse. He was an amateur table tennis champion. He was a pacifist. He believed in a system of physical aesthetics, that music and art are governed by natural laws.

I said: “There is a formula for beauty?”

He answered: “More than one.”

IN THOSE DAYS I HAD two main projects: building upon the commercial potential of the theremin and prototyping new devices. For the first, classes and demonstrations were the principal means. Show the businessmen the wonder of the “ether music” and the contracts should follow; sign the contracts and appease Pash, satisfy his employers, serve my state.

At the same time, I devised new schemas for the theremin’s circuitry: lighter, simpler, cheaper. These were the adjectives that made RCA’s and Wurlitzer’s engineers’ eyes light up. The marketing people, stocky men with fashionable eyeglasses, preferred a different word: easy . So Pash and I told them it was easy, my theremin: easy as apple pie. We showed them my students, lovely white arms in the air.