The Invention of Everything Else (29 page)

The diner is warm and her skin goes clammy in the wet heat of the industrial dishwasher. She opens her mouth to call him but leaves it there, hanging open without a sound inside, as if she were herself a scientist observing a very rare animal in its natural environment for the first time. The diner is silent. There at the bank of windows Nikola Tesla stands. Having placed the peanuts on the sill he raises his arms slightly, pressing his hands up against the window so that his body makes a
t
, a lowercase
t
, but still it looks like a sign of victory, like his name in lights, as if a charge of electricity is pulsing through his very limbs.

A tub of freshly washed silverware is heaved from the kitchen out to the dining room, landing on the counter with a terrific rattling. Mr. Tesla turns at the noise, lowering his arms.

"Louisa" he says very gently. "What a wonderful storm. Don't you think?"

"Mr. Tesla" she says. "Someone is spying on you" She says it quietly.

"Who? You?" He's confused.

"No. The people next door. They drilled a hole in your wall as soon as you left."

He looks down at his feet. He smiles as if he is satisfied, as if he had been expecting this news for a while now. "A hole in the wall? Oh," he says. "Them. I figured they'd come eventually."

"Who are they?"

"OSS, maybe. FBI. Maybe it's the Germans even. I am not sure." He scratches at the back of his head, looking up into the overhead light. "I figured they'd come," he says and smiles. "So. They believe in my
inventions." He smiles again as if this news further confirms the posture of victory he'd held only moments earlier. "Why else would they come? Why else, Louisa? If I'm the joke they say I am, if I'm a mad scientist and they don't think my inventions could ever work, then why bother with an old man like me?"

She shakes her head.

"Thank you, Louisa" he says. "That's excellent news." He turns, dismissing her. But she does not leave. She stands by the counter and watches him. Lit from behind, Mr. Tesla resembles a gorgeous switchblade. While she watches he slips out past Louisa, through the open door, out into the storm, disappearing in the direction of the park, smiling as the lightning storm drenches him to the bone.

We learn from failure, not from success!

—Bram Stoker,
Dracula

B
ARREN ISLAND IS NOT
an island at all. It only feels that way. A remote garbage pail gracing Queens' Jamaica Bay, all the way out at the end of Flatbush Avenue. The street turns into a small dirt path, mostly hidden by reeds and sea oats. This is the entrance to Barren Island where, up until a few years ago when the city cleared them out for good, a number of families still lived, an insulated group who made their living as demolition housewreckers.

Every day hundreds of animals die in New York City—dogs, cats, horses, sewer rats—and it used to be that their carcasses were removed to Barren Island along with all manner of other trash. The area came to be called Dead Horse Bay. The bones and the garbage were picked over by Barren Island residents who plucked anything still useful from the trash and built their homes out of it. The rest of the trash got ground up into fertilizer, grease, and nitroglycerin in an old factory that once occupied a site on the south shore of Barren Island.

As Walter's bus passes over the new Marine Park Bridge he presses his face up against the window, staring out at Barren Island, admiring the humility it once represented, making something good out of trash, much like Azor. He hears a hum. Perhaps it is the bus wheels on the metal bridge's surface. Perhaps it is his conscience. He did not tell Louisa where he was going. She no doubt imagines that he is asleep, as he is always asleep after working the night shift at the library. But
Walter is not asleep. He is sleepy, that is true, having worked all night, but instead of resting Walter rode the BMT back out to Rockaway Boulevard, boarded this bus, the one that is taking him across the new Marine Park Bridge, out to Far Rockaway, out to the tiny airport at Edgemere where he plans to meet Arthur and Azor. Azor promised that he'd have him back in time for his shift at the library.

"Remember My Forgotten Man," a tune by Al Dubin and Harry Warren, is stuck in Walter's ear. It repeats and repeats with the wheels of the bus. It repeats Walter all the way back to 1911, twenty-two years before the song was even written.

People must have begun lining up just after six o'clock that morning, May 23rd. Walter hadn't joined the queue until a few minutes before nine, the time advertised for the grand opening of the public library. Foolishly he'd imagined that he would be in the running to be the first patron to check out a book from the new library, but by the time he arrived a throng of people snaked all the way behind the new building and into Bryant Park. The weather was warm and the pink blossoms of the park's magnolia, cherry, and dogwood trees had soured into a brown mash. Walter could smell the flowers' sweet scent of decay. He took his place in line, waiting in the shadow of the Sixth Avenue Elevated Railway, hoping they wouldn't run out of books before he even got a foot through the front door.

Walter, at that time, was in the twenty-first year of his life, living at home, reading Jules Verne, horsing around with Azor, fomenting his growing interest in homing pigeons, and working a job drilling holes for the Water Department.

The line inched forward across Bryant Park so slowly that Walter thought he was geologic time creeping over and through New York City on his belly. A pterodactyl might cast a shadow overhead. Indians, George Washington. Bryant Park had been a potter's field. Walter considered the jumble of rib cages buried just below the surface. Union soldiers. The Draft Riots. The Crystal Palace. And it's really such a small plot of land. It took Walter an hour to reach the front steps of the library, passing between its lions. Roar.

Inside, the sweep of the high ceiling's atrium accentuated his stature or lack thereof. But the library was one place where he didn't mind being small. Indeed he would have preferred to have been even
smaller, mouse-sized. That way he'd be allowed to enter the seven stories of closed stacks, to browse the books at his leisure, nibbling a bit from every page he found. He made his way up one of the massive stone staircases to the third-floor catalogs and reading room.

A very gentle woman fielded his request for a copy of Verne's
Topsy-Turvy.
Walter had already read it, but owing to the overwhelming number of catalog cards before him, he'd been unable to focus on which book he might really want to read. Standing before the seemingly endless catalogs of the New York Public Library felt like standing before the ocean: it was equally mind-erasing. Walter ended up selecting something familiar. Or so he thought. When his book arrived a few minutes later from the shelves, it turned out to be anything but familiar. He had a seat in the reading room—it was larger than an entire city block—and opening the book to its title page, Walter found something very topsy-turvy indeed.
Sans Dessus Dessus,
the title page said. Walter dutifully began to turn the pages of the text before him, attempting to decipher the gibberish written there. All of Walter's old friends were present—
A, E, S, T, D, Y, U, N, Z,
and
H
—but it was as though their arms were growing from their necks, their spines ran up the outside of their left thighs, their eyeballs were set deep in the palms of their hands, and their feet protruded from the tops of their heads like some set of deformed floppy bunny ears. It made absolutely no sense. Walter tried a few pages, straining to squeeze meaning from the French, but eventually he let his eyes take flight around the reading room.

Wide-eyed patrons clutching hard-bound books filled the space. Some stumbled, so mesmerized by the height of the ceilings above them that they forgot to pay attention to where their feet were going.

"You speak French?" she asked.

Walter turned straight ahead. "Umm, a little bit," he answered. Why was he lying? He was lying because she was beautiful. A young woman seated directly across from Walter at the long reading table was studying the book in his hands.

"Hmm," she said, "French," as though there were something suspicious or curious about it, or maybe she just knew he was lying. Perhaps she thought he often came to public libraries and tried to impress young women by pretending to read French novels. He peered at the stack of books she had resting on the table beside her.
In Search

of the Aztecs: A Travelogue, Geology of the Appalachians,
and
The Magical Monarch of Mo
by L. Frank Baum.

"Does that mean you speak Aztec?" Walter asked.

Without a moment's pause she answered, "Eee. Thala maizee kruppor kala hazalaid."

Her face was wooden as the last Aztec sound dropped from her open lips. Walter had no idea whether or not she was for real. He didn't know what to say in response. He didn't even know if there was such a thing as an Aztec language. The air hung very thick between them while she waited for Walter to respond. He studied her black hair swept up into a loose and rounded bun. One tendril escaped the nest, hanging down behind her ear. Her ear, he thought. It was wonderful, like the tiny cupped hand of an infant, irresistible. She watched him and Walter took a guess. "Agg, suleper kantu flammaflamma whaheenu." Utter nonsense, well intended. He waited to see if he'd passed.

"Exactly," she said and smiled as if the gate to a secret, forbidden city were being thrown open. "I knew you'd understand me."

Phew, he thought. Phew.

"Actually I don't read much," she said. "I just thought that I might like a man who does. Know what I mean?"

Walter was speechless.

"My name is Freddie," she said.

Of course it was.

Freddie, Winnifred more precisely, was trouble. She brewed it. Walter considered her far out of his league, but a happy—for him—set of circumstances made Freddie look at Walter quite differently. Her heart had been recently disappointed by a young man named Charles. Charles was many things: dark-haired, wealthy, a lover of dog races, emotionally cool. Lucky for Walter,
he
was none of these things. "Walter," she used to say, shocked, "you're so kind," as if kindness were a rare surprise. Freddie was eighteen years old when she and Walter first met at the library. She was, at the time, courting eight suitors, one for each day of the week plus a matinee date on Saturdays, and told Walter frankly, "I love men" But very quickly, something fast and furious grew between them, something like a body wriggling desperately inside a burlap bag. She canceled her other dates. She needed his kindness and he needed everything about her.

Freddie would lean close to his ear and whisper, "Walter, Walter, Walter," because they had things to tell each other, things that there were no words for.

Odd occurrences transpired whenever Walter and Winnifred were together, things that demanded they pay attention, things that suggested that the universe was trying to tell them, Don't take this too lightly.

Their eighty-sixth date—Walter, still perhaps disbelieving that this confident beauty was by his side, kept a running tab of hash marks in a small notebook—found Walter and Freddie engaged in his favorite activity, walking the perimeter of the island of Manhattan. It was during these walks that Walter really fell in love with her. These walks were so different from the ones he'd taken with Azor because Azor, searching for treasure, always kept his eyes pinned to the ground. Freddie looked up, down, left, right. She saw things most people did not, and he felt lucky to be the one beside her to whom she'd point out the small oddities. "Look at that blue wrapper caught up in the fence there, Walter," or "Did you see that man had lost three of his fingers" or "Watch how the sky moves in those puddles." Nothing was too small for her wonder, and so the dirty city became filled with delicate treasures when Walter was with her.

"The spikes of your beard make a tiny forest," she said when he held her close. Walter's knees would tremble.

On their eighty-sixth date they had walked all the way from the piers near her home on Fifty-third Street down to Chambers. Exactly what happened next would be difficult to report—perhaps a misplaced pipe or a spark from the kerosene stove, the papers never said—but a fire somehow took hold of the factory belonging to Joseph Stallings, Distributor of Quality Fireworks for Patriot Americans, and the display of fireworks that followed has yet to be matched in American history. Lower Manhattan rumbled and ignited under the sway of so much gunpowder. Even children in Brooklyn, Queens, and New Jersey climbed up to their roofs or pressed noses to windows in order to behold the spectacle of green fire blossoms, red Chinese dragons, and purple pinwheels exploding all at the same time. Walter and Freddie, safely ensconced at the dark end of a pier, wrapped in each other's arms, watched the fiery phenomenon, studying the explosions' reflections in the dark water surrounding them. The show lasted for over an hour, as the measly volunteer fire squadrons brought in to douse
the conflagration were useless. And Walter knew it was an omen and probably not a good one, but still, Walter didn't care if he'd spend the rest of his life burning and burning and burning and burning. He asked Freddie to marry him and the sky exploded in orange and green and purple and red when she told him yes, she would be his wife.

The wedding day was celebrated with a quick morning ceremony at the Collegiate Church, after which all the guests were encouraged to walk with the bride and groom down through the streets of Manhattan, across the bridge to Brooklyn, where the wedding party boarded a trolley car bound for Prospect Park. "Walter, look at how the metal wheels sometimes send up sparks." The couple enjoyed the day dancing in the Concert Grove gazebo to the music of William Nolan's band. "Did you notice how uneven the ukulele player's mustache is?" Much to Walter's chagrin, each one of Freddie's eight previous suitors had been invited to the wedding and each one had accepted, hoping somehow to make a last-minute play for Freddie's love. But Walter, a careful new husband, did not give her a chance to accept another partner's hand but rather kept her dancing from noon until ten minutes past five, when William Nolan called the count for the very last song of the day. Freddie had to be satisfied with smiling at her old suitors from across the pavilion as Walter spun her round and round, her head swung back. He hoped to blur her eyes down to one focus: him.