Mr. Splitfoot

by Samantha Hunt

  On the ledge the birds are making a noise that sounds like contentment, like the purr of the ocean from a distance. I forget Vuk. I forget all thoughts of humans. I even forget about what I was searching for in the wall of drawers until, staring out at the sky, I don’t forget anymore.

  On December 12, 1901, Marconi sent a message across the sea. The message was simple. The message was the letter S. The message traveled from Cornwall, England, to Newfoundland, Canada. This S traveled on air, without wires, passing directly through mountains and buildings and trees, so that the world thought wonders might never cease. And it was true. It was a magnificent moment. Imagine, a letter across the ocean without wires.

  But a more important date is October 1893, eight years earlier. The young Marconi was seated in a crowded café huddled over, intently reading a widely published and translated article written by me, Nikola Tesla. In the article I revealed in exacting detail my system for both wireless transmission of messages and the wireless transmission of energy. Marconi scribbled furiously.

  I pet one bird to keep the chill from my hands. The skin of my knee is visible through my old suit. I am broke. I have given AC electricity to the world. I have given radar, remote control, and radio to the world, and because I asked for nothing in return, nothing is exactly what I got. And yet Marconi took credit. Marconi surrounded himself with fame, strutting as if he owned the invisible waves circling the globe.

  Quite honestly, radio is a nuisance. I know. I’m its father. I never listen to it. The radio is a distraction that keeps one from concentrating.

  “HooEEEhoo?” There is no answer.

  I’ll have to go find her. It is getting dark and Bryant Park is not as close as it once was, but I won’t rest tonight if I don’t see her. Legs first, I reenter the hotel, and armed with a small bag of peanuts, I set off for the park where my love often lives.

  The walk is a slow one, as the streets are beginning to fill with New Year’s Eve revelers. I try to hurry, but the sidewalks are busy with booby traps. One gentleman stops to blow his nose into a filthy handkerchief, and I dodge to the left, where a woman tilts her head back in a laugh. Her pearl earrings catch my eye. Just the sight of those monstrous jewels sets my teeth on edge, as if my jaws were being ground down to dull nubs. Through this obstacle course I try to outrun thoughts of Marconi. I try to outrun the question that repeats and repeats in my head, paced to strike with every new square of sidewalk I step on. The question is this: “If they are your patents, Niko, why did Marconi get word—well, not word but letter—why did he get a letter across the ocean before you?” I walk quickly. I nearly run. Germs be damned. I glance over my shoulder to see if the question is following. I hope I have outpaced it.

  New York’s streets wend their way between the arched skyscrapers. Most of the street-level businesses have closed their doors for the evening. Barbizon Hosiery. Conte’s Salumeria, where a huge tomcat protects the drying sausages. Santangelo’s Stationery and Tobacco. Wasserstein’s Shoes. Jung’s Nautical Maps and Prints. The Wadesmith Department Store. All of them closed for the holiday. My heels click on the sidewalks, picking up speed, picking up a panic. I do not want this question to catch me, and worse, I do not want the answer to this question to catch me. I glance behind myself one more time. I have to find her tonight.

  I turn one corner and the question is there, waiting, smoking, reading the newspaper. I pass a lunch counter and see the question sitting alone, slurping from a bowl of chicken soup. “If they are your patents, Niko, why did Marconi send a wireless letter across the ocean before you?”

  The question makes me itch. I decide to focus my thoughts on a new project, one that will distract me. As I head north, I develop an appendix of words that begin with the letter S, words that Marconi’s first wireless message stood for.

  1. saber-toothed

  2. sabotage

  3. sacrilege

  4. sad

  5. salacious

  6. salesman

  7. saliva

  8. sallow

  9. sanguinary

  10. sap

  11. sarcoma

  12. sardonic

  13. savage

  14. savorless

  15. scab

  16. scabies

  17. scalawag

  18. scald

  19. scandal

  20. scant

  21. scar

  22. scarce

  23. scary

  24. scatology

  25. scorn

  26. scorpion

  27. scourge

  28. scrappy

  29. screaming

  30. screed

  31. screwball

  32. scrooge

  33. scrupulousness

  34. scuffle

  35. scum

  36. scurvy

  37. seizure

  38. selfish

  39. serf

  40. sewer

  41. shabby

  42. shady

  43. sham

  44. shameless

  45. shark

  46. shifty

  47. sick

  48. siege

  49. sinful

  50. sinking

  51. skewed

  52. skunk

  53. slander

  54. slaughter

  55. sleaze

  56. slink

  57. slobber

  58. sloth

  59. slug

  60. slur

  61. smear

  62. smile

  63. snake

  64. sneak

  65. soulless

  66. spurn

  67. stab

  68. stain

  69. stale

  70. steal

  71. stolen

  72. stop

  stop

  stop.

  Marconi is not the one to blame. But if he isn’t, I have to wonder who is.

  About ten years ago Bryant Park was redesigned. Its curves were cut into straight lines and rimmed with perennial flower beds. Years before that a reservoir, one with fifty-foot-high walls, sat off to the east, filled with silent, still water as if it were a minor sea in the middle of New York City. As I cross into the park I feel cold. I feel shaky. I feel as if it is the old reservoir and not the park that I am walking into. My chest is constricted by the pressure of this question, by this much water. I look for her overhead, straining to collect the last navy light in the sky. Any attempt to swim to the surface is thwarted by a weakness in my knees, by “Why did Marconi get all the credit for inventing radio?” The reservoir’s been gone for years. Still, I kick my legs for the surface. My muscles feel wooden and rotten. I am only eighty-six. When did my body become old? My legs shake. I am embarrassed for my knees. If she won’t come tonight the answer will be all too clear. Marconi took the credit because I didn’t. Yes, I invented radio, but what good is an invention that exists only in one’s head?

  I manage a “HooEEEhoo?” and wait, floating until, through the water overhead, there’s a ripple, a white-tipped flutter. “HooEEEhoo! HooEEEhoo!” The sight of her opens a door, lets in the light, and I’m left standing on the dry land of Bryant Park. She is here. I take a deep breath. The park is still and peaceful. She lands on top of Goethe’s head. Goethe, cast here in bronze, does not seem to mind the intrusion of her gentle step.

  We’re alone. My tongue is knotted, unsure how to begin. My heart catches fire. “I watched for you at the hotel,” I say.

  She does not answer but stares at me with one orange eye, an eye that remembers me before all this gray hair set in, back when I was a beauty too. Sometimes it starts like this between us. Sometimes I can’t hear her. I take a seat on a nearby bench. I’ll have to concentrate. On top of Goethe’s head she looks like a brilliant idea. Her breast is puffed with breath. Agitation makes it hard to hear what she is saying.

  “Perhaps you would like some peanuts?” I ask, removing the bag from my pocket. I spread some of the nut meats out carefully along the base of the statue before sitti
ng back down.

  She is here. I will be fine. The air is rich with her exhalations. It calms me. I’m OK even when I notice that the question has slithered out of the bushes. It has settled down on the bench beside me, less a menace now, more like an irritating companion I long ago grew used to. I still my mind to hers and then I can hear.

  “Niko, who is your friend?” she asks.

  I turn toward it. The question has filled the bench beside me, spilling over into my space, squashing up against my thigh. The question presents itself to her. “If they were Nikola’s patents, why did Marconi get all the credit for inventing the radio?”

  “Hmm,” she says. “That’s a very good question indeed.” She fluffs her wings into flight, lowering herself from Goethe’s head, over the point of his tremendous nose, down to where I’d spread a small supper for her. She begins to eat, carefully pecking into one peanut. She lifts her head. The manifestation of precision. “There are many answers to that question, but what do you think, Niko?”

  It seems so simple in front of her. “I suppose I allowed it to happen,” I say, finally able to bear this truth now that she is here. “At the time I couldn’t waste months, years, developing an idea I already knew would work. I had other projects I had to consider.”

  “Yes, you’ve always been good at considering,” she says. “It’s carrying an idea to fruition that is your stumbling block. And the world requires proof of genius inventions. I suppose you know that now.”

  She is strolling the pedestal’s base. I notice a slight hesitation to her walk. “Are you feeling all right?” I ask.

  “I’m fine.” She turns to face me, changing the subject back to me. “Then there is the matter of money.”

  “Yes. I’ve never wanted to believe that invention requires money but have found lately that good ideas are very hard to eat.”

  She smiles at this. “You could have been a rich man seventy times over,” she reminds me.

  “Yes,” I say. It’s true.

  “You wanted your freedom instead. ‘I would not suffer interference from any experts,’ is how you put it.”

  And then it is my turn to smile. “But really.” I lean forward. “Who can own the invisible waves traveling through the air?”

  “Yes. And yet, somehow, plenty of people own intangible things all the time.”

  “Things that belong to all of us! To no one! Marconi,” I spit as if to remind her, “will never be half the inventor I am.”

  She ruffles her feathers and stares without blinking. I tuck my head in an attempt to undo my statement, my bluster.

  “Marconi,” she reminds me, “has been dead for six years.”

  She stares again with a blank eye, and so I try, for her sake, to envision Marconi in situations of nobility. Situations where, for example, Marconi is being kind to children or caring for an aging parent. I try to imagine Marconi stopping to admire a field of purple cow vetch in bloom. Marconi stoops, smells, smiles, but in every imagining I see his left hand held high, like victory, a white scarf fluttering in the breeze.

  “Please,” she finally says. “Not this old story, darling.” Her eye remains unblinking. She speaks to me and it’s like thunder, like lightning that burns to ash my bitter thoughts of Marconi.

  Bryant Park seems to have fallen into my dream. We are alone, the question having slithered off in light of its answer. She finishes her meal while I watch my breath become visible in the dropping temperature.

  “It’s getting cold,” I tell her.

  “Yes.”

  “Perhaps you should come back to the hotel. I can make you your own box on the sill. It will be warmer there. It’s New Year’s Eve.”

  She stops to consider this. She doesn’t usually like the other birds that hang around my windowsill.

  “Please. I worry.”

  “Hmm.” She considers it.

  “Come back to the hotel with me.”

  “Excuse me?” a deep male voice answers. Not hers.

  I look up. Before me is a beat cop. His head is nearly as large as Goethe’s bronze one. His shoulders are as broad as three of me. He carries a nightstick, and seeing no other humans around, he seems to imagine that I am addressing him. The thought makes me laugh.

  Any human passing by would think that I am sitting alone in the park at night, talking to myself. This is precisely my problem with so many humans. Their hearing, their sight, all their senses, have been dulled to receive information on such limited frequencies. I muster a bit of courage. “Do we not look into each other’s eyes and all in you is surging, to your head and heart, and weaves in timeless mystery, unseeable, yet seen, around you?”

  “What in God’s name are you talking about?” the policeman asks.

  “Goethe,” I say, motioning to the statue behind him.

  “Well, Goethe yourself on home now, old man. It’s late and it’s cold. You’ll catch your death here.”

  She is still perched on one corner of the bust’s pedestal. Old man. Karl Fischer cast the head in 1832; then the Goethe Club here in New York took it for a bit until they sent it off to the Metropolitan Museum of Art. The museum didn’t have much use for it, so they “donated” it to Bryant Park a few years ago. Goethe’s head has been shuffled off nearly as many times as I have.

  “I know how you feel,” I tell the head.

  Goethe stays quiet.

  “Come on, old-timer,” the policeman says, reaching down to grab my forearm. It seems I am to be escorted from the park.

  “This clown’s got no idea who I am,” I say to her. “He thinks I’m a vagrant.”

  She looks at me as if taking a measure. She alone cuts through the layers of years and what they’ve done. She is proud of me. “Why don’t you just tell him?” she asks. “You invented radio and alternating current.”

  Goethe finally speaks up. “Oh, yes,” he says. “I’m sure he’d believe you.”

  The policeman can’t hear either of them. Even if he could, Goethe is right—this officer would never believe a word of it. “You’re the King of England, I suppose,” the cop says. “We get about ten King of Englands in here every week.”

  The cop has his bear paws latched around my forearm and is steering me straight out of the park. Resistance, I have a strong feeling, would prove ineffective.

  “Are you coming?” I ask her, but when I look back at the pedestal, she is gone. The solidity of the police officer’s grip is the one certainty. She has flown away, taking all of what I know with her—the Hotel New Yorker, Smiljan, the pigeons, my life as a famous inventor.

  You already asked me that question.

  Yes, but we are just trying to be sure. Now, you have said that you have no memory of your activities on January 4th, and yet you have also said that you are certain you did not visit with Mr. Nicola Tesla, who was at that time a guest in your hotel. What we wonder is, how can you be certain you did not visit with him when you say you can’t remember what you did?

  I see.

  Why don’t you just tell us what you remember.

  Mr. Tesla didn’t do anything wrong.

  Why don’t you just tell us what you remember.

  Buy the Book

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  About the Author

  SAMANTHA HUNT’s The Invention of Everything Else was a finalist for the Orange Prize and the winner of the Bard Fiction Prize. After the publication of her first novel, The Seas, she was selected for the inaugural 5 Under 35 National Book Foundation program. Her fiction has appeared in The New Yorker and McSweeney’s. She lives in Tivoli, New York.

  Table of Contents

  Title Page

  Contents

  Copyright

  Epigraph

  Mr. Splitfoot

  Acknowledgments

  Sample Chapter from THE INVENTION OF EVERYTHING ELSE

  Buy the Book

  About the Author

 

  Samantha Hunt, Mr. Splitfoot