—Bram Stoker
APPROACHING ROOM 3327 Louisa holds her breath. She lifts a small printed paper sign hanging from the doorknob: Guests Are Resting. Do Not Disturb. There is an illustration of a woman dressed in a costume similar to Louisa's; she is raising one finger to her shushed lips. Louisa crumples the sign and stuffs it into the pocket of her apron.
"Housekeeping." She raps a few knuckles on the door. "Hello. I've come to clean the room." She waits and listens. She knocks once more before withdrawing her master key from around her neck. Holding still, she listens again. She scrapes her tongue up against the back of her teeth. The key turns within the lock and Louisa cracks the door open onto a dark room. Her palms are damp. Maybe, she thinks, he looks like a vampire because he is one, and here I am, entering his rooms just as the sun is setting. "Hello," she calls into the dark. Her curiosity bests her fear. Creeping one hand around the doorjamb, she palms the wall for the overhead light switch and depresses the ivory-topped button to ON.
Every oddity that she has seen in her time of looking through hotel guests' belongings, including the man who filled his empty side of the bed with an entire war of miniature lead infantrymen, tiny tanks, cannons, and even a command post for generals set up on the mountain range of his pillow, or the woman whose bureau drawers were jampacked with loaves of bread that had hardened and staled, or even the time she entered a room and found only an open window and a simple note from the room's occupant, "Life. It's no good"—the sum total of everything strange that she has seen does not match what she now beholds. She steps inside, leaving the door ajar.
The room is extraordinarily tidy but absolutely unrecognizable as one belonging to the Hotel New Yorker. It has been personalized and transformed into some sort of curiosity cabinet, a mad scientist's dollhouse. He has combined two rooms, one of them left as sleeping quarters, the other side fashioned into a workspace. One entire wall is constructed of dark drawers, and tucked in among the drawers, in a tiny alcove, are a neat desk and chair. There are terrific spools of wound copper wires and lengths of black tubing. There are magnets of all shapes and sizes, everywhere. The bed is narrow and tight. Piles of books burst from below it. The closet is filled with a number of extremely tall, elegant suits as if Louisa had entered a time warp back to the turn of the century. One wooden seltzer box contains what appears to be a tool set, though these tools are so oddly shaped that Louisa wonders whether they are tools at all. Modern art, perhaps. Just to the side of the bed is a small locked safe, and beside that, piled nearly waist high, are a number of five-pound bags of peanuts.
She's delighted. Everywhere she looks there is something wondrous and strange. Orbs, colored wires, devices she'd be hard-pressed to even assign a name or purpose to. Her curiosity takes control. The drawers, she decides, are the first order of business, but even with these she doesn't get very far. Inside the very first one Louisa finds a large stack of papers, a manuscript of sorts, hand-lettered as if it were an unbound journal. She takes the stack with her over to the window for better lighting, and there she begins to read.
"To the man-eating shark, I assure you, we are the most tender delicacy." As I enter the restaurant, I glean this snippet of conversation passing between Delmonico, the restaurateur with his thick black beard, and Thomas Commerford Martin, the science writer and host of the evening's dinner. The year is 1893.
Punctual and so alone, I take a seat at a rather large circular table. Martin maintains a post by the door, keeping an eye out for the others. Expanses of white tablecloth unfurl before me. A name card has been set before each dinner plate. I have been placed between two names I'm unfamiliar with, Katharine Johnson and Robert Underwood Johnson. I read their names, following the curve of the handwriting, but I'm still distracted by the thoughts I left back at the laboratory. It's a tremendous situation, really. I've been perfecting a model, a telautomatic. I plan to demonstrate it publicly in the near future at Stanford White's Madison Square Garden. Essentially, telautomatics are robots that follow whispered commands, delivered on wireless, high-frequency waves, well out of the range of human hearing. These telautomatics behave exactly as I bid them to behave without wires, without a sound. Turn left, turn right, turn around, bow down. The effect, at first, is rather spooky. The uses, unnumbered.
There at the table, for an instant, I see each name card, each place filled not with a human but rather with a telautomatic. Dinner with the robots. I'm relieved by the vision.
Most often I would avoid anything as social as this supper. Society is best kept at a distance like a guiding star, far off and easy to ignore, but as my luck has changed—first with Tesla Electric Light and Manufacturing, then with an invitation to demonstrate my AC motor before the American Institute of Electrical Engineers, an offer from Westinghouse, my citizenship approved, X-rays, wireless, and the first polyphase system installed in America—I have found dinners such as this one too tempting to deflect. My ego drags me from my lab. I order a whiskey as a buffer.
When I was a boy I once saw a house on fire, burning even though it was the deepest month of winter. The shock of orange flames in the snowcapped town mesmerized me. I stood shivering, watching. The cold air was so overwhelming that even as the house burned the firemen's water turned to ice. The house both burned and iced at the same time. It seemed to exist outside the laws of physics. I liken the experience of being outside my lab, of being in society, to walking through the hallways of that house, burning and freezing at the same time. Each surface I touch holds me, scars me. There is no balance to it. I sip my whiskey.
But a dinner in my honor. My vanity renders me powerless to resist.
Sam is the first guest to arrive. I do not hear him sneak up behind me. I am instead wondering what the telautomatics would order to eat, and so I startle some when Sam bends low to murmur in my ear, the wiry hairs of his exceptionally bushy eyebrows and mustache grazing my neck. "Niko," he whispers very seriously as if he were the bearer of some bad news. "This is God speaking." I feel his breath in my ear. "I hear you've been trying to steal my job."
"Hello, old friend."
Truthfully we met only five years ago, but a measurement in years matters very little to me. Forces have been conspiring for centuries to bring Sam and me together. I first found his books at age fourteen. He recognized the importance of the AC polyphase system immediately upon seeing a number of sketches and designs. We fell in together and have remained stuck ever since. As if we'd always known. My old friend.
"I'd be most grateful if you left my senility out of it," he says.
I stand to greet him. We make an odd pair. His forehead creeps only about as high as my shoulder. Where he is rumpled, I am pressed. Where he is fair, I am dark.
Sam has a seat in the chair reserved for Katharine Johnson.
"Whiskey?" I offer.
"Yes, I think so. Yes. Abstinence is so excellent a thing that I'm resolved to practice my passion for it by abstaining from abstinence itself."
I pour him a glass. Sam is in town for a business visit, his wife and family back in Europe. He has already been over to the lab a number of times in the past week, but still I am happy to have him to myself for a moment.
"I arrived early because I wanted to speak with you," he says. He is, in fact, ten minutes late.
A waiter deposits a hooded plate between us and pauses for a fraction of a second before removing the cover, revealing a number of warmed dates, stuffed with Stilton, wrapped in bacon.
"Baaa-con!" Sam shouts. "Bacon. Bacon. Bacon. Bacon. Why, bacon would improve the flavor of an angel." He pops one of the dates into his mouth and the waiter disappears. Sam licks the grease from his fingers. "Poor you. I had a dream about you last night. I haven't any idea what it means, but since you were there, I thought you might."
"No. Sorry."
He ignores my stab at humor.
"In the dream I was in bed. Back in Missouri, only of course it was a version of Missouri turned fifteen degrees or so in the kal
eidoscope. A nightcap on my head, tucked under the covers with a copy of the dreaded Jane Austen beside my pillow as if one of her dreary novels had lulled me of into this nightmare. I could hear my snores. And there you sat, very calmly stroking your chin as if petting a kitten. You straightened the seams of your trousers. You waited. 'Niko,' I said, waking very suddenly with a question for you, though as soon as I sat up, the question disappeared. Realizing I was awake, you immediately gestured across the room with your head, trying to tell me something, as if to say there was danger lurking nearby. Your eyes pointed to the door. Your lips pursed, telling me to hush. All the world's sounds seemed sucked into the purse of your lips, and the dream fell silent, a vacuum. I had no idea what was behind the door, but a cold sweat broke out on my brow just the same. You stared at the door, and when I realized that you were also scared, terror set upon me like a locomotive's approach, gaining in strength and intensity with each passing moment. My fear filled the room. My head swimming, booming. There was nothing else besides the fear, a scream delivered in one's ear. I held on for dear life. The door rattled on its hinges, ready to burst, and at the moment that I thought I could bear it no longer, the fear passed through me, truly like a train, tearing my insides out, clearing all evidence of me away before disappearing entirely. Eventually, I came to. Nothing in the room had changed. You sat still, studying the fingernails of one hand. I was broken on the bed. Shaking in the terror's wake, I once again noticed the silence. I blinked, wiggled my fingers and toes as breath began to return to my body. After what seemed eons of uncertainty, you spoke, clearing your throat first. 'There is no dream,' you said, standing. You let yourself out through the very door that only moments earlier had seemed to hold back death itself. You stepped one foot outside but not before turning to remind me once again, 'There is no dream, Sam.' The door closed behind you and I woke.
"So what do you make of it?" he asks.
"Well, I suppose I meant that there is no dream, Sam" I say it as a joke.
He does not laugh. "Yes." He stares down at the tablecloth, his hands curled. "I was afraid of that" Sam's face is twisted and he makes a fist against the table, tightening his forehead. "But Niko, if there is no dream, that means there is no possibility for—"
"Greetings!" A husky Scottish accent cuts across the heads of Delmonico's diners.
We turn. John Muir has his arms raised above his head. He is smiling a wide grin beneath his bushy white beard.
When once I introduced John as a naturalist and a writer to a group of engineers, he corrected me, saying he was in fact a "poetico-trampo-geologist-botanist and ornithologist-naturalist etc. etc.!" Indeed he is even more than that. A farmer. A sheep herder. An inventor. An explorer. A conservationist. An extraordinary man. I am most happy to see him.
Sam smiles up at him, but there is a window open on worry still in his eye. As we say our hellos, the rest of our company trickles in behind John, one by one, with much uproar. The prima donna Madame Milka Ternina. The Kiplings. Marion Crawford. Ignace Paderewski and the beautiful young officer Richmond Pearson Hobson, recently graduated from the Naval Academy. I follow his entrance, the grace of his youth.
"I'd better find my seat." Sam leans in toward me once the others have settled.
"But first, no possibility for what?" I ask.
"Hm?"
"What you were saying before. If there is no dream, there is no possibility for what?"
"Oh. For dreamers. That's all."
I sit with this for just a moment, staring straight ahead. Hobson fingers the edge of a linen napkin, a hero in uniform. Madame Ternina, seated beside him, laughs at something he has said. Marion smiles at me from across the table and I see I am in terrible danger here. Each salt and pepper pot are in place. The candles have just been lit. Everything, everyone, is as they should be, filled with life, filled with secrets for unraveling. Tonight I could fall in love with each and every one of them. I could fall in love with the whole glittering world.
Sam stands, ready to go find his seat.
"Wait" I say. "I think you're mistaken. Saying there is no dream is the same as saying everything is a dream. Isn't it? Everyone a dreamer? Extraordinary things happen all the time even when we're awake. What I meant to suggest to you, if indeed that was me in your dream doing the suggesting, is that there is only one world. This one. The dream is real. The ordinary is the wonderful. The wonderful is the ordinary."
Then it is Sam's turn to stop. He freezes while adjusting his collar, one arm raised. "Do you really think that's what it means?"
I lift my hand to my chin for a moment, studying the ceiling. "I'm certain of it" I tell him. "I'm certain of it."
He smiles, relieved. "I hadn't thought of it that way." And his spirits do indeed seem higher. "Thank you," he says and begins to sing a low song, something about "the man of my dreams," as he makes his way around the table, taking a seat beside Muir, taking my thoughts with him.
Here is the burning. Here is the freezing. I'm certain of it.
A conversation has begun around me. I believe it is actually about me. Someone has mentioned magnets. Someone has mentioned the AC polyphase system, but I am absent from myself until Martin steps up behind me. He breaks the spell.
"Mr. Tesla, allow me to introduce Mrs. Katharine Johnson and Mr. Robert Underwood Johnson. Robert is a poet and an editor at Century Magazine. Katharine is his wife."
Back to the party.
I turn as though into a storm, a balcony door left open.
First, Robert: A narrow beard on a serious man. His sad eyes shielded behind round wire spectacles. A wide nose on a worked face. His features an American alloy.
Then Katharine: A bantam spirit, yet she is softer than he, a light that is difficult to see. Except for her eyes. They could easily be confused with some northern island beat by the ocean. Glare. Ice. Distant fury. Beauty.
I am immediately lifted by the Johnsons' presence. I am a stone plucked from the riverbed. Katharine takes Sam's vacated seat to my right, Robert sits beside me on the left. I can smell them. Crushed grass. Cold granite.
"Mrs. and Mr. Johnson," I say, turning to her, "we've been discussing magnets."
And magnets indeed. I am not a man with many friends and yet I feel as though I have two magnets, protruding from either side. They are activated, sudden as pistol shots, drawing me to these people as though I had copper-wrapped iron where my heart should be. I steel myself with a sip of whiskey. I can't allow myself to have many feelings for humans besides curiosity. My life does not allow for it. There are exceptions, of course, like Sam, but they are not common. Still, my heartbeat is doubling with excitement. I am uncertain how to proceed. I finish my whiskey and signal for another.
"Magnets," Katharine says and smiles.
"Yes," I croak and the conversation continues.
John Muir leans in across the table, tucking both his elbows and arms below his chin; he fingers the wires of his long beard. "Here is a legend four thousand years old." The table is intrigued and so we join him, leaning in close, listening to the story. Tightening our circle, I feel the warmth radiating off the Johnsons' skin. I move into it. I don't think to ask why I am so drawn to them.
"A shepherd named Magnes was herding his sheep just outside the town of Magnesia in northern Greece. His metal-tipped staff clicked out a rhythm on the rocks." Muir picks up the salt and pepper pot. Striking them together, he re-creates the tap of the walking stick. "After he'd gone a ways he decided to sneak a nap. When he awoke, his sheep were gone, so he climbed up to the top of a rocky outcropping for a better view.
"Placing one foot and then the other and then his trusty staff on the stone summit, the shepherd scanned the landscape. No sheep. He turned to walk away, but as he tried to lift his shoes he found that he was firmly stuck in place. He struggled to pry his foot from the rock, but it was secured there as if by magic. He pulled at one shoe and then the other. He used all his might to attempt a jump." Muir tucks his arms, poised as though
he himself were about to jump. "Nothing worked," he continues. "The shoes and staff were locked in place. Magnes scratched his head." And as he says so, so does Muir. "A number of his sheep, having spotted him up on the outcrop, gathered near, but as there was no fresh grass up on the rocks they eventually moved on. He watched the sheep lift their hooves without a struggle and yet his still couldn't move. His shoes were stuck to the rock, but his feet were not stuck to his shoes. He could easily wiggle his toes. And so an idea. He barefooted himself, released his hand's grasp on his staff, and, you see, magnets were discovered." Muir lifts his hands in the air to snap twice.
"A man named Magnes was herding his sheep just outside the town of Magnesia while happening to discover magnets?" Sam asks, chuckling.
"Are you so cynical?" It is Katharine speaking. "Stranger things have happened."
And turning toward her I see how all the pale blue of stone and eight billion years of fossilized sky is remembered in her eye. Far stranger things. "No," I start to say, and then, "Yes."
The table waits for some further explanation. I stutter. None is forthcoming and soon they all begin to laugh. I flush red. I draw a deep breath, sucking in air, having forgotten to breathe, surrounded by so many unfamiliar emotions. What are they? I'm afraid I know. I'm afraid I've heard its name before on a city street in Budapest.
Delmonico's, as it is apt to do, carries on into the wee hours. The food is magnificent and there is a general sense of well-being and abundance. Heads held back in laughter. Necks bowed for a secret. Oysters and champagne. I finish three glasses of whiskey and finally locate my voice in the haze of the Johnsons' charm. The room buzzes, but as the meal ends, I'm able to secure their focus for my own. Plates are cleared. Coffee is served, and as night becomes morning, our tidy threesome slips from the others' attention into our own universe.
The Invention of Everything Else Page 10
