Us Conductors

by Sean Michaels

  “What? Where?”

  “At Alcatraz. They’ve stopped working.”

  “Why?”

  He shot me a wry glance. “That’s your area of expertise. The ones here are fine. Seem fine. For now.”

  “What are we going to do?”

  “Work out what’s wrong,” Pash said. “Fix it.”

  “I’ll book a flight.”

  Pash hesitated. All of a sudden I realized that he was afraid. He had been hiding it very well. There, a brittle fear, at the edges of his eyes. “No, stay here,” he said.

  “Why?”

  “Why? Why? I am your protector. Do as I say.”

  I swallowed. Pash was staring a straight line down the road.

  “Is there something I should know?” I said. “Is it those loans?”

  “What loans?”

  “I don’t know. That bank in Wisconsin?”

  Pash made a kind of smiling face, without any kind of smile.

  “Are you in touch with family? Back home?”

  “In Leningrad?”

  “Yes.”

  “No, not really,” I said.

  “You have a sister?”

  I pressed my lips together. “Helena.”

  “You write to her?”

  “We’re not close,” I said. “She’s married.”

  Pash shifted. “Much is happening.”

  “To whom?” I said.

  “Not to us.” He drummed his fingers against the rusted lift. “Not to us.”

  SPRING CAME, and summer came, but they were like visitors in another part of the house. I did not see them, only their signs.

  Lavinia planted mint, sage and beans in the window boxes.

  At the end of August I had another visit from Commerce and Burr. I had gone with Lavinia to eat at the Plaza Hotel, my old home. Valets parked our car but they gave us a table in the corridor, on the way to the kitchen, as if we were sacks of potatoes. I was furious. Not from what they did with us, the white man and his coloured wife—from the surprise. “What did you expect?” Lavinia murmured. But there were no warnings, no signs. “If they don’t want Negroes, they should say so,” I said. “This is a hotel.”

  We ate and came home. I felt my stomach grinding up the Plaza’s lentils and quail. As always, the Cadillac felt like some phantom carrier, a spell for moving from place to place. We did not speak in the car. Lavinia was angry with me. When we pulled up in front of the house, a man was at the window, cupping his hands around his eyes, looking in.

  I honked the horn. He looked up. He put his hands in his pockets. He smiled. It was Jim, the debt collector.

  “Who is that?” Lavinia asked.

  “Nobody,” I said.

  As we got out he sauntered over, as though we were old friends. “Hi, Dr Theremin,” he said.

  “Hi,” I said thinly.

  He half-bowed to Lavinia. “Jim Swiss. Commerce and Burr.”

  “Lavinia,” she said.

  “Lavinia …?” he asked, leadingly, utterly rude.

  “She is my wife,” I said.

  “Your wife!” Jim exclaimed. He shook his head. “You’ve been busy, Dr Theremin!” He lightly kicked the tire of the Cadillac. “And that’s a nice car.”

  “Thank you,” I said.

  Lavinia led me past him. “Excuse us,” she said, “we’ve had a long day.”

  “Yes, of course! Who hasn’t? What a scorcher. Just wanted to give you this.”

  “Thank you.”

  “Oh! And Dr Theremin! Do you have a new number for Julius Goldberg? The old one stopped working!”

  “No.” We paused on the step.

  “No?” Jim asked, with feigned surprise. “I thought he was your business manager?”

  “Yes, sorry. Yes. I do have his number. Let me get it for you.”

  In the parlour I scrawled Pash’s new number on a sheet of notepaper. I brought it back out to Jim Swiss, in his ugly green suit. “Hey, thanks,” he said. He smacked me on the shoulder. “And that’s some pretty girl you found.”

  I went back inside. I sat on the couch, with Lavinia beside me. I unfolded the letter he had given to me. It was not from Commerce and Burr. It was from the Internal Revenue Service. It advised me that I owed $59,000 in back taxes to the United States government.

  “What does it say?” Lavinia asked.

  “I need to send in some forms,” I said.

  In the morning, Walter Tower Rosen came to see me. He rang the bell. He owned the house I lived in but he rang the bell.

  “Walter. What a nice surprise.”

  “Yes,” he said. He looked older than the last time I had seen him. I asked myself how long it had been.

  “Lucie’s going to be round later to practise.”

  “Good,” I said.

  His eyes searched the doorway. He cleared his throat. He asked, “Is everything all right, Dr Theremin?”

  “Yes,” I said, “of course.”

  “I had a call today from the Internal Revenue Service.”

  “Oh?”

  “Yes,” he said.

  “I’ve spoken to them,” I said.

  “You have?”

  “Yes.”

  “Everything’s in order?”

  “Oh yes,” I said.

  He appraised me for a long moment. “Yes?” he asked again. “Yes. A terrible mix-up,” I said.

  He nodded. He released a breath. “Well, I’m relieved to hear that. I had been a little—yes, well. Good.” He gave another deep breath. “A weight off my shoulders.”

  I smiled. “Is that all?”

  Walter did up his jacket. “Did Lucie talk to you about the new theremin?”

  “The new theremin?” I said.

  “She said you had designed a new theremin. She wants to commission a model for herself.”

  “Yes …” I said carefully. I had no recollection of this conversation.

  He watched me. “I wondered if you needed an advance.”

  “Oh, there’s no need.”

  “Are you sure?”

  “Yes.”

  “Well, listen,” he said. He reached into his pocket. “Here’s four hundred dollars all the same. For materials.”

  I did not immediately accept the bills. Four hundred dollars to make a theremin like yours, Clara.

  I took the money. “Thank you.”

  Walter shook my hand. “Like I said, Lucie will be over later.”

  “Of course.”

  “We should have dinner soon,” he said. “With your wife.”

  “That would be nice.”

  When I reached Pash, he told me to calm down. He gave the same kinds of answers as before. He was taking care of it. The debt was a matter of bank accounts, transferred funds. I told him I thought I understood what had gone wrong at Alcatraz: the tubes were overheating and needed to be changed more often. “Never mind that,” he said. “Alcatraz has cancelled the contract.”

  “But they’ve been using the arches for months.”

  “They’re ripping them out.”

  “I said I’ve solved—”

  “The jailers got impatient. Already someone else is installing something. Rivertons, I think. From Chicago.”

  “Pash—”

  “It’s all right. We got the information we needed.”

  “Do we still get paid?” I asked.

  Pash laughed. It was a bear’s laugh but I couldn’t tell if it was easy or forced. I was tired of all these conversations, conversations, conversations. Each one left me with the same nervousness. “It’s always about money, these days! We are communists, Lev!”

  “Perhaps I’m becoming a capitalist,” I said.

  Pash clicked his tongue. He paused before answering and when the reply did come, his voice was grimmer, levelled. “No, we’re not getting paid,” he said. “In fact, we have to pay back the advance.”

  “What advance?”

  “I need to go, Lev. Stop with all this. You’ll fall into a pit.”

&nbs
p; He put down the phone. I kept the receiver to my ear. I felt so angry. The telephone line crackled. Green leaves were quivering on the branches of the trees. “Hello?” I said into the telephone. “Hello?”

  IN MY WORKSHOP THAT NIGHT, I raised my hand and made the theremin sing. It sang one note. Lavinia was somewhere far away in the house. The theremin was very quiet, my palm so close to the lower antenna. I had given you ten different voices. I wondered whether you, wherever you were, still used just the first voice.

  I made my theremin sing louder, louder. The room was frozen in place. One does not intentionally squander a life; one looks back and finds it squandered. I knew I did not want to make an inventory, but here I was now, counting. One house, crowded with memory, that belonged to someone else. Ten years of work, each patient discovery, amounting to nothing. I had wasted a thousand pencil marks on singsong. On hope. Was this heart worth anything, when you were married to another? When I was married to another? Is there any honour, any honour at all, in wanting? In keeping on wanting? I made the theremin sing louder.

  Vladimir Ilyich Lenin, may his memory be illuminated, would have said that we can want a better world. That I might redeem my wanting by wanting that.

  Through the darkness outside the window I saw my car. A man was standing over it, writing something in a notepad. He seemed a sibling of the grey hedges and the black street and I had never seen him before. He wore a suit, with a pair of binoculars around his neck. He raised them and stared at me, illuminated in my window.

  I could see only the black binoculars. Moonlight grazed their lenses.

  Suddenly something changed. He had lowered the binoculars, lifted something else, flash flash. A camera, a photograph, silver bromide in a box, my photograph.

  The theremin was roaring. With a touch I silenced it. I turned it off. I drew the curtains. I went downstairs, past Lavinia, to the front door. The man was gone. It smelled like garbage outside. At the end of the street I could hear two men fighting. Moths tossed and whirled through the open door into the house.

  PASH MET ME AT A BAKERY in Chinatown. We were squashed into a table near the door. Each of us had a tin plate and one almond biscuit. Outside it was so humid, a kind of jungle. Indian summer. Behind the counter someone kept ringing a bell.

  “I killed a man,” I said. And then I told him about the Dolores Building, room 818, the opening in Danny Finch’s brow. He listened with his eyes down. Partly, I had expected him to have known. If he knew, he did not show it. He kept his gaze on the centre of the table. He interrupted only once. “You are sure it was him?” he said.

  “Yes.”

  “Go on,” he said.

  I described my exit, the elevator ride, the return journey in the Karls’ grey car. I stopped talking. Pash picked up his almond biscuit and ate it, chewing each mouthful before he took another. There were no crumbs.

  “Five years ago?”

  “Yes.”

  “And you didn’t tell them?”

  “Who?”

  “The others. My counterparts.”

  “No. I didn’t tell anyone.”

  Pash rubbed his neck.

  “Last night,” I said, “I looked outside and there was a man examining the Cadillac and he took my photograph.”

  “Last night?” Pash set his jaw. “Did he look like an agent?” I hesitated and he barked at me. “Come on, Lev. An agent. A suit. FBI, DOI.”

  “Yes,” I said. “What are they looking for?” I did not know if my voice was calm or hysterical. The panic in me felt so tightly contained. “Is it about money? Is it about the murder?” It was the first time I had called it a murder. Ubíjstvo. Something had happened nearby—a bus had arrived, a factory had let out; abruptly the bakery was filled with hungry people, bellowing, wedged up against us. I hunched over the table. “What should I do?”

  Pash leaned in to meet me. “Don’t. Do. Anything,” he said severely. “I’ll handle it.” He sat back and we faced each other. With his fingertips he nudged my plate toward me. I swallowed. I picked up the almond biscuit.

  He glanced at me once more, nodded. He stood, squeezed through the bodies, left without saying goodbye.

  I craned my neck and through the window saw him step into the steam.

  IN RETROSPECT, this was the moment when my world ended. All those tremors and then a quiet catastrophe. Pash disappeared into Manhattan and my life capsized, though I did not yet know it. I came home to an empty house. Lavinia was away at the studio, moving freely. She loved me. I loved Clara Rockmore. I sat at my desk with an apple, a bottle of seltzer water. It was a blazingly beautiful day, gulls dipping through West 54th Street. I gazed at a sheet of white paper. There was nothing on it; I could draw anything.

  That night Lavinia and I went to Harlem to see The Adventures of Robin Hood. I watched Errol Flynn fire arrows into his enemies. We went to Ricky’s, where they do not sell pizza by the slice. We bought an entire pie, ate it with our hands in the park, burning our fingertips, drying our palms on the grass. We went home and I removed her clothes and she traced me in the darkness; I kissed her ribs, pressed my thumb into the crease beneath her lips, against the rise of her cheekbone. We were travellers, unlit. I wanted everything. We lay, after, in a cold Y, and we felt like branches. I stared at gardenias, in a vase. I circled her wrist with my hand. Every time I moved my lips I was telling a lie.

  I AWOKE TO AN EMPTY BED. It was morning. A single 1.5-volt battery sat silhouetted on the windowsill, haloed in dust. Beside my head was a small journal, an oil pencil, for writing ideas in the night. I turned to a random page. Teletouch mirror: Face Reflection disappears as you approach. Underneath, a sketch of a sparrow. I got out of bed and pulled on some underpants. “Lavinia?” I said. I went into the other room. More gardenias in vases. I passed the cabinet that held a letter from Commerce and Burr. Everything that was not in shadow was brightly illuminated, sun-streaked.

  In the kitchen I put on a pot of coffee. The grains were odourless, like chips of gravel. I leaned into the counter beside the stove, listened to the water boil. From somewhere else in the house I heard a faint noise. “Lavinia?” I called again.

  The kettle began to shrill. I poured. I went downstairs, and downstairs, and downstairs, to the grey parlour. It was cold now; the heat wave had passed. The house felt empty. I shivered. “Lavinia?” I murmured. Someone was standing by the barren fireplace. It was not my wife. I found myself in a defensive stance, holding my cup of coffee. The man had his back to me. “Hello, Lev,” he murmured. He was about my height and build, with a collared shirt, his sleeves rolled up.

  “Who’s there?” We were speaking Russian.

  He turned. The man in my parlour was the man who also called himself Lev. The man I’d met at Mud Tony’s, with Karl and Karl, on the day I committed a murder. His head was shaved. He wore square glasses. I said, “Where is Lavinia?”

  He cleared his throat. “Dancing.”

  “What do you mean, ‘dancing’?”

  He smiled very, very slowly, as if he was still listening to me speak. “She is at rehearsal.”

  My voice was level. “How did you get in?”

  “I let myself in,” he said. He cleared his throat again. I scanned the room, looking for any other men. We were alone. He massaged his right forearm. “You need to leave the country.”

  “No,” I said. “You should talk to Pash.”

  “I spoke to him yesterday afternoon.” He took a breath. “I spoke to him again last night.”

  “Why isn’t he here?”

  “He was sent away.” Lev pursed his lips. “I do not think you will see him again.”

  I was still in my defensive stance, left foot leading, right knee bent. I was still holding my cup of coffee, ridiculous. He noticed my pose, gave a kind of laugh. In the next beat his smile hollowed. “It is time to conclude your American adventure.”

  “If—” I began.

  “Lev,” he said, with unassailable patience, “it is time.”
/>   I gestured at the parlour table—the Times, teacups, sheet music, Slominsky’s wedding invitation. A pair of Lavinia’s ballet shoes curled beside the chair. “How can I leave?”

  “Tonight,” he replied. “Some men will come this afternoon to collect your work. Others have already been sent to the garage, the storage warehouse. You will collect your papers. Do not use the telephone.”

  “The telephone? Why?”

  “A ship is waiting for you. You are on the crew roster as a captain’s assistant. A log keeper. You are not a captain’s assistant: you will be confined to your cabin.”

  I swallowed. “To Leningrad?”

  “Yes,” Lev said. “Indirectly. It is a six-week journey.”

  I listened to my breath. They were high, short breaths, as if I were being kept alive by consistency, persistence, the taking and giving of very small things.

  “Do not tell anyone that you are leaving,” he said.

  “My wife,” I said.

  “We will send for her later.”

  “When?” I said.

  “A fortnight.”

  I realized that he was lying. I said, “Why not tell her?”

  Lev looked at the floor. He pushed his thumb across his lips. “The United States Internal Revenue Service,” he said. “The California Detentions Bureau. International Madison Bank. Walmor Incorporated. Isaac and Harry M. Marks. Commerce and Burr. I could go on. You owe a great deal of money. Does she know?”

  “No,” I said.

  He picked up a rock from my mantel, a brick of fossilized limestone that Schillinger had given me.

  “Also, I understand that you killed a man from the Federal Bureau of Investigation.” He lifted his head. There were bags under his eyes. “Do not tell anyone that you are leaving.”

  In the next long seconds, we gazed at each other. I didn’t say anything. Then I nodded. I looked around the room. None of these things mattered to me anymore.

  ONLY A LITTLE WHILE has passed since I stood with serious Lev in the parlour, giving up on America. Sometimes I lie in my bunk and wonder how I conceded; other times I ask myself why it did not happen sooner. Yet I feel calmly certain, writing this log: I had no choice. I had no choice. My enemies were too numerous; I had exhausted my reprieves. As a missioned visitor to the United States, I did not belong there. My past and future belong to Russia, where I will wait, loving you, for the fulfilment of all this roving.