At that moment, Saskia knew. Mercury was the variable she’d forgotten. She’d been able to see Cornelius that first time because she’d touched mercury beforehand. Mercury, the only liquid metal known to man, as reflective as daguerreotypes themselves, which Lila had called “mirrors with a memory.” Cornelius and mercury were inextricably connected. Of course.
Saskia quietly slipped out of bed and crept down to the basement, where there were still a couple of boxes her father hadn’t unpacked. They contained an assortment of medical instruments, including some old-fashioned mercury thermometers. These were made of glass and had little bulbs at the end. Nowadays no one used them, but her father had held on to them during the purging. He’d always been protective of old medical paraphernalia. Saskia assumed it had something to do with his dream of going to med school.
She took a thermometer and a medicine dropper and tiptoed to the bathroom. Over the sink, she snapped the thermometer in half and carefully spilled the drops of mercury into a paper cup. They looked just as they had in the development room: beads of liquid silver. With the dropper, she squeezed one of the beads into her palm. Rolling it about, she watched, mesmerized, as it snaked and danced over the lines of her skin. After a few moments she let the drop slip from her palm into the cup. She put the cup under her bed, then scrubbed her hands with soap and hot water until her skin burned. The cringeworthy memory of what had happened with Josh kept resurfacing again and again, but she tried her best to push it back down.
What’s done is done, Lila had said, and she was right.
Her headache finally gone, Saskia lay down again, still dressed, her shoes hanging over the footboard. The daguerreotype was now a familiar weight atop her chest. When she closed her eyes, she felt different, optimistic, as if by chance she’d guessed right.
Saskia
The light was more blinding this time, spilling all around Saskia with a radiance that made her eyes water. Above her shone the biggest chandelier she’d ever seen, a regal chandelier that could easily have hung in Versailles or Buckingham Palace. A thousand brilliant crystal prisms, like diamond teardrops, dripped from it.
She was looking down, her eyes averted from the light, when she heard his voice again.
“Pardon me, but weren’t you here before?”
When Saskia raised her face, she smiled. It was a relief to see Cornelius in person again at last. A relief to see his eyes. She’d looked too long at his image, frozen and still.
“I was,” she replied. When she realized she was holding the daguerreotype taken with her from the present, she quickly put it behind her back.
“Are you looking for a particular item? We’ve just stocked a new high-grade lamp called a solar lamp. It’s remarkably efficient and economical. Would you like me to show it to you?”
She took a breath. “No, actually. I’m not looking for a lamp.”
On a dime his expression changed from solicitous to confused.
“I was looking for you,” she added.
“Do we know each other?”
“We do, in a way.”
Saskia had no idea how to explain the mercury and the dreams. She doubted her story would make sense. There was a good chance he would think she was a basket case. Then again, she had to try. This might be her last chance to see him. There was no guarantee she’d have a third opportunity.
“This is going to sound strange—really strange. But I come from somewhere you’ve never been. I’m a student there, and I’ve been learning about important people from the past. People who invented things that changed the world. People like you.”
At this, Cornelius rubbed his chin.
“I’ve been studying all the things you’ve done,” she continued. “You’re a chemist and an expert in metals. You discovered a way to develop daguerreotypes more quickly by adding bromine to iodine. You took a picture of yourself, and on the back you wrote, ‘The first light Picture ever taken. 1839.’”
He shook his head, his eyes flashing with something like anger. Saskia flinched. Did he believe her? Would he throw her out of his store?
“How do you know about my personal affairs?” His voice was low, impatient.
“I . . . I told you. I come from a different place. Well, it’s not just a different place. It’s actually a different time.” Saskia struggled to meet his eyes. She tried to keep her voice steady. “From the future.”
“Criminy! Clearly you’ve looked through my personal effects.”
“I didn’t, I swear.” She put her hand over her heart, which was quickening.
“Why are you here? What is it you want from me, money? Are you some kind of charlatan?”
“No! All I wanted to do was meet you. I wanted to know how it’s possible that we’re here in the same place.”
“Is this a joke?”
She gathered her courage. “I wanted to know how we can be in the same place . . . when you died over a hundred years ago.”
He drew a sharp breath. “Young lady, if you do not leave right now, I’ll summon the police. I have half a mind to bring you to the station myself.”
“No! Please, you’ve got it all wrong. I didn’t come to extort you, or taunt you, or do anything bad. I just came here to talk, that’s all. To talk about this.”
She revealed the daguerreotype from behind her back. When he saw it, his face colored. Confusion and indignation filled his eyes. “You stole it.”
“It was in a library archive in Connecticut.”
Angrily, he grabbed her by the arm and pulled her into a room off the counter area. She was shaking when he shut the door behind them. It was clear that he was stronger, and that she was vulnerable, too vulnerable. Instinctively, she looked for another door, a window, some means of escape. She saw nothing. She wondered suddenly if she’d made the worst mistake of her life.
Sternly, Cornelius directed her to sit in one of the two chairs flanking a large, cluttered desk. Her eyes frantically scanned the room. It was cramped and dominated by the desk, whose surface was hidden by reams of paper: sketches, drawings, diagrams, and notes scrawled every which way. More papers were pinned helter-skelter to the walls and in stacks on the floor. Saskia saw the word patent printed over and over again.
“Stay where you are,” Cornelius ordered. Not knowing what to do, Saskia obeyed.
He took a key from his pocket, then went behind the desk and knelt down. Saskia heard the click of a lock and the squeak of a drawer being opened. She heard him breathing as he riffled through whatever was inside. She was breathing hard, too. The air in the room felt stagnant and oppressive.
He took something out and stared at it for several moments before slumping into the chair beside Saskia’s.
Cautiously, she took a peek at what he held: another daguerreotype—an exact replica of the one she had. Without a word, they held up the pictures side by side.
He has to believe me now. There were no copying machines in the 1800s.
“I’m sorry I touched you so roughly,” Cornelius said. “It’s not my way.”
“Don’t do it again,” Saskia replied tersely. “I was only telling the truth.”
“You’re right to be angry,” he replied.
Saskia kept her chin up, on the defensive.
They continued holding up the pictures, their eyes locked on the identical images, trying to make sense of them.
“I knew there was something peculiar about you. I knew it when you came into the store the first time,” he said.
“What was peculiar?”
“Your clothes. Your appearance.”
She thought he meant the color of her skin. She knew the lighting store couldn’t have many—if any—Black customers. Philadelphia may have been progressive compared to many other American cities at this time. There was a robust Black population engaged in political, economic, and cultural life; America�
��s first independent Black organization, the Free African Society, had started here; and an abolitionist newspaper, The Liberator, had been popular. But even so, racism and violence had flourished in this city, too. She’d be wise to keep her wits about her.
“In particular, your shoes,” Cornelius said, glancing down. Saskia was taken aback. “I’ve never seen anything like them. I thought you were a foreigner.”
“I guess I am . . . a foreigner.”
He pointed at a sketch pinned high on the wall, nearly lost in the collage of paper. She was shocked to see a drawing of her sneakers—accurate right down to the Adidas logo. He must have sketched it right after she’d left.
“There are no shoestrings, buckles, or buttons,” he remarked. “I’ve been wondering how they stay on.”
“Velcro.”
“Velcro?”
She leaned down and showed him the two sides of the Velcro straps, how they could be pressed together or separated.
He looked nothing less than dazzled. “You invented this?”
“No.” She laughed, softening.
“This Velcro—it’s brilliant. It could revolutionize the way shoes—and many other things—are made.”
“Um, I think it already has. In fact, I think Velcro is used by astronauts.”
“What?”
“Astronauts. You know, guys in space.”
Saskia realized even as she was speaking that “guys in space” would sound as bizarre to him as “watermelons on a trampoline.” She tried to break it down. “So in modern time, my time, travel into space is possible. People have landed on the moon. We’ve sent rovers to Mars—you know, the red planet. And we’ve put things in space to learn more: satellites, robots, telescopes . . .”
Cornelius stared at her, unblinking. If she were trying to sound crazy, she realized she was succeeding brilliantly. She struggled to look convincing as he sat back, mystified. Clearly he was having trouble grasping everything she was saying. Everything her presence suggested. She could almost see the wheels in his head turning.
“How did you arrive here?” he asked. “By carriage?”
She suppressed a laugh. “There aren’t many carriages where I’m from.”
“And you got this daguerreotype—of me—in an archive . . . from the future?”
She nodded. “Your future. My present.”
“I—I don’t understand.”
“It’s hard for me to understand, too.”
“What is your name, miss?”
“Saskia Brown.”
“Miss Brown, I’ve never in my life heard a tale like this, except in storybooks.”
At that, Saskia threw her remaining caution to the wind. She told him how it had all started with Mr. Nash’s assignment and her trip with Lila to the library. She told him every detail, minus the fact that she couldn’t stop thinking about him. She had to save a little bit of pride, after all.
As she spoke, she was acutely aware of how preposterous all of it sounded. But neither she nor Cornelius could ignore the proof: the identical daguerreotypes in their hands.
“So maybe truth is stranger than fiction?” she finished.
Cornelius looked lost in thought. He idly twisted a ring on his left hand. His wedding ring, she realized. Though she knew he’d married in 1832, she couldn’t help but feel a jolt of disappointment and jealousy.
“When you were in the library, in the development room, you say you touched mercury?” he asked finally.
“Yes, and then I touched it again a little while ago.”
There was a new fervor in his eye. “Did you ingest it?”
“You mean, eat it?” She balked. “Of course not.”
“Not even a little?”
“No.”
“But you did have exposure.” It was a statement, not a question.
She nodded.
“Then maybe your presence here is not as strange as I thought.”
He got up abruptly and paced what little empty floor space there was. He was so tall that the hanging lamp above his head nearly brushed his hair. His self-possession reminded her of Henry Fonda in Twelve Angry Men. She tried not to stare at him, but then found herself gazing at the daguerreotype and had to look away from that, too.
“In my life I’ve worked with mercury a great deal,” Cornelius said. “It started when I learned fire-gilding.”
“Fire-gilding?”
“Yes. It’s an ancient process, hundreds of years old. It entails applying silver, gold, or copper to a base metal. You need mercury to do this. For example, an amalgam of mercury and gold can be applied to bronze. When the surface is heated, the gold bonds to the bronze, and the mercury is driven off.”
“Driven off?”
“Yes, it vaporizes.” He snapped his fingers. “Disappears.”
He stopped pacing and stared at the wall. “It’s rather magical, watching a metal vanish as if it never existed. While fire-gilding, I became addicted to that sight.”
“Physically addicted?”
He smiled. “Mentally. I became addicted to the lure of mercury, and I’m not the first. Mercury’s the most fascinating of the elements. Beautiful. Mysterious. Dangerous. It’s enchanted man for ages.”
“Why?”
“Because throughout history man has believed mercury can do just about anything: cure yellow fever, conjure spells, enhance fertility, inspire enlightenment, guarantee immortality, bring about alchemy . . .”
“Do you believe mercury is magical?”
“I believe mercury has secrets.” Cornelius glanced at Saskia sheepishly, the expression of a boy caught with his hand in a cookie jar. “And I’ve always hoped I’d be the one to unlock them.”
“What do you think mercury can do?”
His voice dropped to a conspiratorial whisper. “Although I lack proof, I suspect mercury played a role in your presence here. There are traces of mercury on the daguerreotype you’re holding. Perhaps those traces, when combined with the liquid mercury you touched in the library archive, somehow catalyzed an extreme reaction. A remarkable reaction.”
“You mean, like time travel?”
“Well . . . yes.”
Saskia eyed him skeptically.
“I’ll admit it does sound far-fetched.”
“Is there any way to prove it?”
“No. But there is a certain method to my madness. Mercury conducts electricity extremely well at cold temperatures. The lower the temperature, the better the conductivity. It’s my belief that, at one hundred degrees below zero Fahrenheit, electricity would run infinitely through mercury wire. It would encounter no resistance whatsoever.”
Saskia shook her head. “I don’t understand.”
“Miss Brown, have you ever ridden a bicycle?”
“Of course.”
“Good. Now picture yourself riding a bicycle down a hill. It would pick up speed, wouldn’t it? But after a while, if you didn’t pedal, it would slow down and eventually stop. With mercury in an extremely cold state, your experience would be different. Even if you didn’t pedal, your bike would continue on and on for thousands of miles. You’d keep going. Forever.”
“I still don’t get it.”
“If electricity can travel infinitely through space, then isn’t it possible that a human being could travel infinitely through time?”
“You think this happened to me?” she asked incredulously. “That mercury somehow . . . moved me through time?”
“I do . . . perhaps.”
“But the mercury I touched wasn’t super cold.”
“Yes, well, that’s true. I’ll admit I don’t have all the answers. Just the knowledge that mercury can act as a radical stimulus.”
Saskia let that settle for a moment. She, too, believed that physical contact with mercury had played a part i
n her presence here. But hearing Cornelius talk about a perpetually moving bike made her realize just how ludicrous that sounded.
“It’s just a theory,” he admitted. “But science has many unknowns. We chemists discover new things all the time—even new elements, the very basis of matter! Any man who thinks he knows everything is a fool.”
“Any man . . . or woman.”
He smiled. “Yes,” he agreed. “Or woman.”
“It sounds like you experiment with mercury a lot. Do you think you’re still ‘addicted’ to it?”
At that, his mood seemed to darken. He sighed deeply. “Not long ago I experimented with mercury every day, for hours, sometimes deep into the night. Until one day when something quite scary happened.”
He took a seat again and leaned toward her, his face flushed. “There’s a reason I’ve returned to the lighting shop full-time.”
“Isn’t it your family business?”
“Yes, but what drew me back to this place was not family. It was fear.”
Saskia’s stomach dropped. Looking into his eyes was like looking into a well bottom, an abyss. She wanted to comfort him but resisted the urge to put her hand on his.
“Miss Brown, you mustn’t repeat what I’m about to tell you. I haven’t told another soul.”
“I won’t,” she promised.
“I’ve made scores of daguerreotypes. One was of an old man: Jack Wickett. He walked into one of my shops wanting a portrait—some record of his life beyond a birth and death certificate.”
“Well, it’s natural to want to be remembered, isn’t it?”
Mercury Boys Page 8
