The Kingdom of Ohio (11 page)

 

 

 

 

SHE RECALLS THIS NOW, sitting in the subway workshop. It is morning and the fire in the stove has died during the night, her breath steaming in the chill air. Beyond the dirty windows the shapes of New York are a dim jumble.

She shakes her head and shivers, fighting the tug of these memories. Even while her recollections of this Ohio-that-might-have-been offer a reassuring familiarity that she craves, they are also freighted with a growing sense of peril. Because how can these things belong to the same life, she wonders—feeling herself tilt toward hysteria—these recollections, and the dingy room where she now sits? And for the thousandth time in the past week, she struggles against the terrifyingly obvious conclusion that she has simply lost her mind and slipped into some kind of delusion.

She remembers waking up in a park and not recognizing her surroundings. She remembers waking up and finding herself in an impossible place, where the Kingdom of Ohio has nearly been forgotten. An impossible world, where seven years can disappear without a trace.

Where, ever since her arrival, the boundaries between things seem to be blurring more and more: the diminishing distance between herself and every other lunatic woman who begs on street corners for pennies, the distance between reason and something else, older and darker . . .

The mechanic stirs in his cot and she glances over at him, seeing his face as if for the first time. Sleeping, he looks younger and more vulnerable, the prematurely weathered creases around his eyes smoothed away, a lock of brown hair falling across his forehead. For a moment she has the impulse to bend down and touch his cheek but quickly checks herself, vaguely shocked at even thinking such a thing. He is only a helpful stranger, someone who happened to be nearby when her endurance ran out. Silently she watches as he groans and sits up, fumbles to light the stove and begins to make tea. They eat breakfast in near silence, both of them awkward and unsure of how to act in the other's presence.

“So what are you going to do?” Peter finally asks.

“I suppose I am still trying to decide myself.” She looks away from him, a wave of panic rising in her chest as she contemplates again the overwhelming dimensions of her situation. One step at a time, she tells herself, clinging to the vague plan she has formulated over the last days, the slender hope it offers like a life raft in an angry ocean. Form a hypothesis, construct an experiment, search for verification. She silently recites these words to herself as a man tra against the terrifying unknown.

Then she draws a shaky breath and offers the mechanic a shaky smile. “There are certain errands I must attend. But if I may impose on your generosity, I hoped that I might spend one more night here?” She blurts the question, stumbling over her words.

He hesitates, then nods. “Guess that sounds all right.”

“Thank you. I only wish I knew how to express my gratitude.”

A number of impossible suggestions in this regard flash through Peter's mind, most of them featuring the memory of her exposed legs from the night before.

Feeling uncomfortably conscious of his gaze and the space between their bodies, she finishes her tea and stands. For a moment they look at each other, neither knowing quite how to part ways.

He opens his mouth—but before he can speak, she is gone, the door banging shut behind her.

 

 

 

 

FOR A TIME AFTER her departure, Peter sits in the workshop trying to make sense of what she has told him and to put his thoughts in order. Outside, he can hear the clang of engines and the shouts of the excavation crews—unlike the mechanics, the rock men work seven days a week. On other mornings, similarly unoccupied, he might have gone out to talk with Paolo, or listen to Tobias and Michael trading jokes, but today the thought of doing so seems like a burden. He feels strangely distant from the life of the city that unfolds on the other side of the clapboard walls. As if he has been imperceptibly enveloped by the private world of her story, like the shimmering curve of a soap bubble's wall.

Shouts of traffic and the clamor of pedestrians from beyond the workshop door. He blinks away these wandering thoughts and glances up at the battered wall clock—only half an hour has passed since she left, but it seems like days. Thinking about her, Peter can see clearly enough what's happening: how she's using some tall tales and her pretty face to buy his generosity. He can see this but, to his dismay, he realizes that he's falling for it anyway.

Suddenly overcome by the need to be somewhere else, and disgusted by his own gullibility, Peter stands and pulls on his coat, crossing to the door. Outside he hesitates, then starts walking toward the tip of land called the Battery, where the East River meets the Hudson.

It is a long walk and he chooses it deliberately, hoping that the cold and distance will help clear his head. It is a foggy winter day and he thinks of how the arc of water beyond the Battery will be shrouded in gray, enclosing the city and making the metropolis feel somehow intimate, all sounds muted by the waves. This is what I need, he thinks, and pushes through the crowd, hands in his pockets.

A dozen blocks later, though, he stops. What if she returns while he is gone and, not finding him there, disappears forever? Worse yet, what if she's discovered by the company guards and tells them how he'd let her stay in the garage, a clear breach of regulations? He tries to tell himself these worries don't matter and to keep walking, but they only come crowding back. So despite himself, he finally starts back toward the workshop.

Approaching the construction site, Peter notices a cloud of ugly black smoke rising from somewhere inside the subway-works. One of the engines broken again, he thinks, his heart sinking. Then a clamor of shouts erupts from behind the wooden fence and he breaks into a run. As he nears the gate a crowd of workmen comes surging out toward him, surrounding a knot of struggling figures.

Peter cranes his neck trying to peer through the mob. With a start he sees that one of the men at the center of the melee is Tobias, his shirt torn and face bloodied, being pulled along by three burly company guards. Shoving forward, Peter grabs the nearest workman by the arm. “What's happening? What happened here?”

The workman—one Peter hasn't met before—grins stupidly. “The boy went crazy. He starts yelling, smashing them machines.”

Abruptly Tobias wrenches himself free and wheels so he is almost facing Peter, his arms outstretched. “They're killing us!” he shouts. “You see? They're—”

Then the guards are on top of him, wrestling him to the ground. The crowd of workmen falls back as two uniformed policemen appear and join the fray. As Peter watches, Tobias is dragged off into a waiting police wagon. The doors are slammed behind him, and abruptly as it started the whole incident is over. The wagon rumbles away, the crowd slowly disintegrates into knots of muttering conversation.

Peter stands outside the construction-site gate, gazing after the departed wagon. All of this has been too sudden, too distant from his earlier private thoughts, for him to comprehend. He feels a hand on his shoulder and turns to find Paolo standing beside him.

“Paolo, what—?” He looks at the other man helplessly.

Some inner struggle is briefly visible on the Italian's face. “It is a brave thing,” he says at last. “A stupid thing, and brave.”

“But why? What did Tobias do?”

“You don't know?” Paolo smiles sadly. “Tobias and his brother, always they have been full of ideas. They hate the rich bosses, the capitalists.” He shrugs. “So now he decides to do something.”

“But—” Peter shakes his head, struggling with this idea and trying to reconcile the memory of Tobias's laughing face with the shouting, furious figure of a few moments ago. “Why start smashing the engines?” he asks. “Seems to me like they make the work easier.”

Paolo regards him silently. “Sometimes I think rich men build machines so we become more like the machines ourselves,” he says finally, then walks away.

 

 

 

 

PETER SPENDS the rest of the day fidgeting in the workshop. He tries to pass the time by working on a broken pneumatic hammer, but is so distracted that his efforts only damage it further. Turning Paolo's words over in his head, he remembers what Tobias said weeks ago about the managers of the subway project—
bloodsuckers, all of them
.

He has always been distantly aware of the very rich—the mine owners in Idaho and then, immeasurably wealthier, the royalty of this city—but until now he'd unconsciously assumed that such people existed on a separate plane from his own. Now the realization that these worlds might somehow be connected, perhaps one and the same, fills him with a kind of wonder and outrage.

He thinks about this, and then about her—whether he'll see her again, what it might mean if she does come back. In a dim way, he almost hopes that she won't reappear. Things would be simpler like that, he decides; although he can't say why, there would be a mysterious completeness to their brief acquaintance if it simply ended like this.

In the evening, after the excavation crews have left, when someone taps on the door Peter experiences a moment of disappointment as he opens it to find her standing outside. Beyond the workshop, silver twilight is fading into darkness. As he lets her in, he sees that she is pale and drawn, unsteady.

“How”—he stumbles over the words—“how are you?”

“Tired.”

Awkwardly, he ushers her to the stool beside the stove and she sinks down onto it. He sits across from her as she leans toward the iron grate, staring at the coals, blank exhaustion on her face. The jangle of nervous energy in his chest makes it hard for Peter to stay still. Realizing that he is staring at her, he forces himself to look away. For a few minutes neither says anything.

After a time she draws a breath and straightens. “Forgive me. It has been a difficult day.” She fumbles inside the folds of her skirt. “I have something for you.”

Peter accepts the small book that she offers, noticing the expensive weight of the leather binding. “What's this?”

“It was written six hundred years ago, by an Italian named Dante Alighieri.” She smiles at him. “As a girl I was never fond of it. Since arriving here, though, it has been very much in my thoughts.”

Peter looks away from her and turns to the first page, reading

Beneath her gaze, he becomes conscious of how slowly his finger moves across the lines of text and stops.

“Thank you,” he says, hoping she can't see how strangely this gift has moved him. It suddenly occurs to him to wonder where the book might have come from, if she's really as penniless as she claims. After a moment, though, he decides not to ask—not now, at least. “Maybe I've felt that way myself.”

“Within a dark forest . . . ?”

“Something like that.”

She studies his face, caught off guard by his statement and the previously unconsidered possibility that she and the mechanic might have something in common, although they clearly come from different worlds and speak different languages.

He closes the book and sets it aside on one of the workbenches, among the tools and oily rags, then looks up and meets her eyes. This time, after a moment, she is the one who looks away.

“You hungry?”

“Yes.” She nods, the emptiness in her stomach too acute for her to listen to the shreds of her dignity that remain. She watches as he unwraps a paper parcel containing a loaf of coarse bread and a wedge of cheese. He rummages in a drawer and finds a rusty knife, which he wipes on his trouser leg before cutting two portions and handing her the larger.

They eat in silence. She forces herself to take small bites, glancing up at him occasionally. Each time, she catches him watching her with a questioning look on his face, and each time he looks away.

Outside the workshop a car backfires, and she jumps.

“What's wrong?”

“It's nothing.” She shakes her head, settling back onto the stool. “Only nerves.” For an instant, she has a vision of herself as she must look to the mechanic: a young woman with tangled hair and grimy features, sneaking, frightened, and alone—and she feels a surge of hatred for this pitiful person who wears her face. A moment later, though, as she leans closer to the fire's warmth, these battering fears recede by a few degrees.

“Nerves?” He peers at her. “What's got you nervous?”

“I—” she stops, draws a breath, and forces herself to continue. “Ever since I arrived here—since I traveled through time—I have been afraid.”

“Afraid of what?” Peter leans toward her, feeling a jolt of excitement even as he recognizes this as more evidence that she's lost her mind.

“I hardly know. Nothing, really.” She shakes her head. “Everything. Sometimes it has seemed to me as if I am being watched and followed. At other times it feels as if I simply do not belong here. As if my presence were an offense against the laws of nature in some way.” She bites her lip, staring into the fire.

In fact, sitting in the warm enclosure of the dingy workshop beside the mechanic, these words sound faintly ridiculous in her own ears. She is startled to realize how much this setting and this man have come to feel familiar—a reaction, she reminds herself, she cannot afford to trust.

Peter leans back and tries to digest all of this. Yet again he finds himself at a loss, not because of the basic craziness of her story—lunacy is common enough—but because she doesn't act like a crazy person. Even though he doesn't know much about high society, the way she carries herself and her speech seem more like something out of a ballroom than from an asylum. And if she is rational, he tells himself, there should be some set of words that will make everything come clear. But what those words might be, he can't begin to guess.