The Kingdom of Ohio (6 page)

Unlike the others, though, Peter remains frozen where he stands, just outside the tunnel entrance. Since his arrival in New York, something about the engines has fascinated him, making him slow whenever he walks past one of the jealously guarded machines, and now the wail of metallic distress echoes through him. He starts toward the silent engine, wisps of black smoke still rising from its stack. Beside the steam donkey, Flocombe is already haranguing the two shovel-men who feed the machine coal.

“What the hell'd you do?”

“She just stopped—”

“Like that—”

“These things don't just stop. You know this monster is worth more than the two of your fancy hides?”

“I swear, we was just here an' then—”

“And now, goddamnit, I have to file a goddamn report, call the mechanic—and wait till he hears, eh? You know he hates coming down here—”

“Can't you fix it, Boss?”

“Fix it?” The foreman swigs from his flask and glares at the two workers. “You think I'm some kind of professor?”

Standing unnoticed beside the machine, Peter kneels beside the engine and leans forward, studying the interlocking jigsaw of its gears and hoses.

“And what're you looking at, then?” Flocombe's voice jolts Peter back to himself.

“I—”

“You don't touch the damned thing, understand?”

Peter nods and watches the foreman stomp away. Around the construction site the other crewmen have broken off into little groups, standing around the coal stoves, stamping their feet and smoking cigarettes. He allows his eyes to drift over the engine.

 

 

“Here it is—just quit.” Peter wakes, as if from a dream, to these words and turns to find Flocombe and another man standing a few feet away. He clambers to his feet, strangely embarrassed—as if caught in some act of intimacy—his legs stiff from crouching too long.

“So? Let me look.” The foreman's companion is a short, heavy-set man with protruding ears and a melancholy expression, the filigree of veins on his nose mapping out years of drink. This is Klaus Neumann, one of the four mechanics employed by the subway project to maintain the engines that are slowly hollowing out the space beneath Manhattan. He pushes past Peter, eyes only on the inert piece of machinery, and scrutinizes it for a moment. Leaning forward, he mutters to himself and runs his hands over the curve of the boiler.

Flocombe clears his throat, swaying slightly. “Er—is it bad, then?”

Neumann straightens and glances, annoyed, at the foreman. “Bad? No, not bad,” he says, his English marked by a thick German accent. “Give me half an hour.” The mechanic extracts a rolled oilskin from his satchel, which he unfurls to reveal an assortment of tools. Glancing around, he notices Peter for the first time.

“Who is this?” he demands.

“One of my men. A sharp one.” Flocombe shrugs. “He's been staring at the damn thing like it was a woman, since it broke.”

“Like a woman, eh?” Neumann gives Peter an appraising glance and then makes a small gesture toward the machine. “Can you see what is broken here, boy?”

Peter shakes his head. The engine is vastly more complicated than any of the crude devices that he tinkered with, beside his father, on the Idaho frontier: the baroque landscape of its parts a message coded in some incomprehensible language.

“Look harder,” the mechanic insists. Feeling foolish, like a small child being taught a lesson, Peter stares at the intestinal tangle of wheels and gears. The cold winter wind cutting into his hands and face, his soaked and muddy shoes, the burnt smell of the air. He glances at Flocombe, hoping to be dismissed—but the foreman turns away, toward the steam donkey. Without thinking, Peter follows his gaze.

Then suddenly, like an image snapping into focus, he sees a small wheel out of place in the midst of the tangled metal—given by a logic that he cannot describe. He points.

“There?”

The mechanic furrows his brow and stares at Peter. He shakes his head.

“Yes,” he says, “this is it.” He looks at the foreman, then back at Peter. “What is your name?”

 

 

 

A MONTH LATER, as the year lurches to a close, winter wraps the city in an icy grip. At eight o'clock on a Thursday night, Peter and Neumann sit in McGurk's Suicide Hall, cheapest of cheap dives by the river. For reasons that Peter has yet to discover, McGurk's is the mechanic's haunt of choice: in part, perhaps, for its abundance of loose women, where a roll in the hay will cost little enough to go unnoticed, or at least unremarked, when Neumann's wife counts his pay. But more significantly, Peter thinks, because the place seems to express some need of his mentor's for anarchy and oblivion. Some urge or dark pull, exerted by the clamor of the city itself, that Peter has felt as well but has fought against, more out of instinct than any clear reason.

They sit on the narrow second-floor balcony that looks onto a central shaft that runs the four-story height of the saloon. Leaning over the balcony edge to watch the barroom below is a perilous maneuver—the danger of falling inconsequential next to the hail of tobacco-wads, phlegm, and even glasses that patrons on the topmost floors enjoy hurling at those below when the opportunity arises—but the show on the ground floor is worth the risk: whores in pancake makeup flirt with sailors at the bar, pickpockets ply their trade, brawls break out at the rate of two or three an hour. Neumann sits silently, staring into his drink, a noxious mixture of alcohol, benzene, turpentine, and cocaine sweepings that cheap saloons by the river sell under the name of “smash,” gnawing his thumb. It is, Peter has come to understand, the closest that his mentor comes to relaxed: this near-stupor that descends on him in the evenings.

Over the past weeks, Peter has been initiated into a world that he struggles to understand, working as Neumann's assistant. Already he has learned to interpret the grunts and silences that make up the taciturn mechanic's vocabulary: requests for tools, points to observe. The principle of a machine's functioning compressed into: “See there?” and a jerk of the thumb.

What lessons the German has to impart are given in single sentences. “You must look at the whole machine first. Understand?”

Displacement, compression, power—Peter has begun to grasp these things, an understanding that begins not in the brain but in the guts. In this age before standardization, each machine is a unique creature, displaying properties unlike any other. Small things: different bolt sizes, gauge of wiring, the number of turns around each terminal. It seems to Peter more like they function through an improbable science of chance than any calculated mathematics. Their constancy both an article of, and reason for, something like faith.

Already his days on the excavation crew in the tunnels have begun to seem like a distant dream. And mysteriously—in a way that neither Peter nor Neumann can explain—he has a knack for the work. Although he never feels like he
knows
what he's doing—more that something
knows through him
—by the end of this first month with Neumann, Peter is sometimes able to see, as quickly as the older man, what must be done to fix the broken engines that pass through the workshop.

Now, as Neumann gnaws his thumb pensively—his mind elsewhere from the stomach-churning brew—Peter, who has stuck to the watered beer that McGurk's dishes out, surveys the place, head spinning slightly. Since his apprenticeship to the machines, he has begun to see mechanics everywhere: a hidden physics to the movement of the whores from one man to the next, the sudden hushes that will descend on the room as a dozen different conversations converge on the same pause. A mathematics that—it strikes him—must be guiding his own actions as well, even if he can't yet see why or how.

A waiter with elaborately greased sideburns and a dirty apron passes the table and Neumann gestures at him.

“Another.” Neumann taps his glass.

The waiter does something that might be an attempt at a friendly smile. “That's five cents.”

Neumann spills the coins onto the table and Peter glances at his own near-empty mug.

“One for me as well.” He counts out five pennies, which the waiter collects with a practiced sweep of his hand. The waiter departs and Neumann sets his pipe down, extracts a tobacco pouch from his pocket, and tamps a wad of shag into the meerschaum. Peter looks away, at the cloud of tobacco and cannabis smoke that curls toward the blackened ceiling of the saloon, twenty feet overhead.

“You have finished with the book?” Neumann asks, puffing on his pipe.

After their first week together the mechanic had silently offered Peter a stack of battered secondhand volumes, which, in his tenement room, he has dutifully grappled with during his evenings after work. And in theory, Peter tells himself, he wants to learn all of it: to be admitted to the inner sanctum of the mechanical sciences, where the mysteries of the world are explained, an ambition that has begun to grow in him since his arrival in New York. In practice, though, reading has never been one of his strengths, and whatever secrets the books may contain seem to be locked behind a wall of boredom. His main recollection of Neumann's latest offering, a treatise called
An Investigation of Various Gear-Shapes and Their Properties
, is of repeated losing battles to stay awake.

He nods. “Yep. Not sure if I'm worth much when it comes to book learning, though.”

“You must try harder.” Neumann glares at him. “All the world, it is in books.”

“I'm working on it.” And it's true; gradually, Peter finds himself needing to sound out the words less often, the pages going by faster.

“So? Good.” The mechanic reaches into his satchel and Peter's heart sinks as two more books emerge. He takes them, scrutinizing the titles.
Differential Conversion and Its Several Principles in the Ratchet-Driven Flywheel
. Peter stifles a sigh. The second volume, though, seems more promising.

“
The Pilgrim's Progress from This World to That Which Is to Come
, by John Bunyan,” Peter reads aloud. “What's this—”

“Ssh!” Neumann gestures for him to put the book away. “Not in here.” The mechanic glances around, oddly abashed. “Is only for amusement. If you have time.”

Peter nods, sliding the books into his lap.

Neither says anything for a moment. A burst of noisy laughter from somewhere downstairs.

“Any news about the tunneling?” Peter asks.

The waiter returns and sets down their drinks, sloshing stray drops onto Peter's coat. After he has departed, Neumann shrugs. “They are crazy.”

“Who?” This isn't the first time the German has hinted that he disapproves of the way the project is being managed, though he has never detailed his sentiments on the subject.

“The engineers. Edison, they say, leads the planning.” Neumann shrugs again and bites his thumb.

“Thomas Edison?” Like everyone else, Peter knows about the wizard of Menlo Park from countless newspaper articles, snippets of conversation, and tall tales. This, however, is the first time he has heard that the man who invented the filament bulb and the talking machine is connected with the subway. “Edison's a genius, isn't he?”

“Perhaps.”

“Have you met him?” Peter sits up, his heart beating faster. In these last weeks a new pantheon has taken shape in his imagination, centered on the men who invent the devices that he repairs. Among these figures, he knows, the greatest are Edison and his archrival, Nikola Tesla: the two giants who are remaking the world with their inventions.

“Only once I met him, when they bring all of the mechanics to his laboratory.”

“Really?” Peter stares at Neumann, impressed by this unexpected proximity to greatness. “What was he like?”

“Edison?” The mechanic puffs on his pipe. “They say he used to collect stray dogs and electrocute them. When I go to his lab, I carry a gun. I never trust men such as this.” Neumann grimaces, revealing a row of teeth that—even in this age of routine dental abominations—make Peter cringe, a disaster of mossy stumps, misalignment, and decay. “They are all crazy. See here.”

Neumann pulls a greasy sheet of paper from his pocket and smooths it on the table, wiping it through a puddle of beer as he pushes it toward Peter.

It's a crude drawing in three-dimensional perspective done in black ink: a skewed grid of lines, echoed in four layers. It takes Peter a long moment to know what to make of it—then finally he sees. The lines that make up the top layer of the grid form the shape of the subway routes as they will look in their completed state. “The subway tunnels?”

Neumann nods. “The complete plan. Arrived today.”

“Do they really mean to dig four levels?”

“It seems to be.”

“For separate lines?” Neumann doesn't respond. “I thought they were excavating only one level—this must be a mistake. Why would they need four levels? And all the same lines?”

The mechanic glances around and leans forward, motioning for Peter to do the same. Peter bends toward Neumann, trying not to flinch at his mentor's breath. “I believe”—the mechanic whispers, tapping the paper—“these tunnels . . . I believe there is a
secret meaning in their shape
.”

 

 

 

 

PETER FORCE in the living room of his apartment on the Lower East Side. The space is quiet, his roommates absent for the night. In one corner an iron stove pings softly, the decrepit furniture, the rusty washbasin and strings of drying laundry, tinted brown with the light of an oil lamp beside Peter's chair.