The Kingdom of Ohio (25 page)

She surveys this space, trying unsuccessfully to overhear the conversation between Peter and his friend as they confer in the hallway. Realizing that she is being watched, she turns to discover two little girls standing in the doorway to the kitchen, regarding her silently with dark eyes. She smiles at them, and is rewarded by a pair of tentative smiles in return—until Paolo's wife appears, scowling, to herd the girls out of sight with a stream of muttered Italian. Exhausted, she allows her mind to go blank, staring at the pattern of cracks in the peeling yellow-plastered walls.

“—set, then. Thank you.” Peter's voice brings her back to herself, and she looks up to see him reenter with Paolo.

“Of course.” Paolo nods at both of them, his friendly tone at odds with the strained expression on his face. “You want some wine, something to eat?”

“A glass of wine would be lovely,” she says, “thank you.”

Paolo ducks into the kitchen and Peter sits across from her. A moment later the Italian returns with a bottle and two mismatched cups.

She smiles up at him. “Won't you join us?”

“No, my wife—” Paolo shakes his head, seeming faintly embarrassed. “I must help her.” He disappears back into the kitchen, and she watches Peter as he pours for each of them. She takes a cup and sips the bitter, tannic red.

“So,” Peter says after a few silent moments have passed, “what happens now?”

She looks over at him, this simple question revealing in sudden sharp relief the depth of her uncertainty. A week ago, these answers were simple enough: vindication of her memories, proof of herself and the world that she has lost. Now, though, after the blankness of Tesla's face upon their meeting and Morgan's vision of destruction, these things feel strangely empty and irrelevant.

“I do not know.” She shakes her head and stands.

As she turns away, her hip bangs the edge of the table, knocking over the bottle of wine. Cheeks flushing red, she searches for a way to stop the spreading flood of dark liquid: anything absorbent, some rag. Her eyes light on the overflowing ashtray near the center of table—which is perfect, she thinks, like blotting wet ink with sand, and dumps the contents of the ashtray over the spilled wine. The crisis averted, she crosses the room to stand beside the window and draw aside the rough curtain, gazing at the city lights and darkness outside.

“Do you know,” she continues, oblivious to the disaster of the table, “I think that we are very much alike, you and I.”

“What?” Peter gapes at her, then at the smeared mess of sodden ashes.

“I mean, we are both occupied by the same question: whether one can escape the past.”

Not really listening, Peter takes a deep breath and starts trying to repair the damage before Paolo or his wife wander into the room. Gritting his teeth, he scoops handfuls of the dripping mess back into the ashtray.

“And even as we ask this of ourselves,” she continues, “the question itself perhaps a kind of blindness, we each struggle in the grip of our histories.”

Distracted, Peter shakes his head. “Don't know about that.” He finishes collecting the last of the ashes. Wincing, he wipes his filthy hands on his trousers. “Not really how it seems to me, I guess.”

“So you do not believe in fate?” She turns away from the window to face him.

“How's that?”

“Not mythic fate.” She struggles to keep her voice level as the dimensions of their current situation become clear to her, carried on a wave of exhaustion and panic: pursued by Morgan, hiding in a flophouse apartment, more lost than ever. Peter's steadying presence, she thinks, is her last bulwark against despair. “Not mythic fate, but real, actual fate. The machinery of the universe, the laws of cause and effect, tell us that the shape of the future is written in the past. As the movements of a clockwork are visible in the design of its gears.”

“Maybe so.” He hesitates, considering this. Glancing up, his eyes fall on a murky photograph pinned to the wall: a snapshot taken by Paolo, depicting one of the little girls now asleep in the kitchen standing in front of the half-completed Brooklyn Bridge. He sees this and remembers how he'd felt after climbing that span above the river: a sense of meaning at once specific and impossible to define, urgent on his lips but never quite connecting with any possible words.

“Could be you're right about all that,” he says slowly. “But everything in the past was once the present. And the present is always uncertain, isn't it?”

“Is it?” She stares at the mechanic, fighting back tears; defying him to contradict her, hoping that he will. “Is it really?”

Peter opens his mouth, then closes it.

“A man without choices is a man without a life,” he hears himself tell her, startled by his own phrase and the sudden conviction that accompanies it.

She looks away, trying to absorb this statement. Trying to convince herself to believe him. And then, without meaning to, she reaches a decision.

What drives us to extraordinary acts?—she wonders; what leads us to abandon the safe, the reasonable? Maybe it is simply a sense of the scope of the world and the smallness of ourselves within it, she thinks. As if this awareness demands a protest and response, that we are significant and that our lives matter. This futility and strength.

“I will speak with Tesla,” she says.

It takes Peter a moment to react. “No.” He shakes his head. “No, that's crazy.”

“He can help—”

“Listen to me.” Struggling against a surge of frustration and dismay, he rises from the table to face her. “The last time you saw Tesla, what happened? Now, most likely Morgan has the police after us as well. It would be—” He takes a deep breath, trying to keep his voice level. “We have to leave the city. I have money, enough for two tickets to Chicago and some supplies. Blankets, change of clothes. From there—”

“All of that is true.” She smiles sadly. “But still.”

Peter stares at her. If she would just argue, he thinks, if she would rant and rave, then he'd at least be able to argue back. But in the face of her calm, he is at a loss. Thoughts of tying her up and forcibly removing her from New York flit briefly through his head. “This is crazy.” He glances around Paolo's living room, wondering if there's any rope nearby.

“You are wrong.” The edge in her voice dispels Peter's thoughts of abduction. “Do you think I want to be imprisoned or killed? Do you take me for a lunatic?” She stares at him, her lips compressed into a hard line, and he looks away—a silent acknowledgment that unexpectedly wounds her. Yes, of course, she tells herself, pushing ahead anyway. “Very well. Take me a for a lunatic. But still I must go.”

“Why?” Peter's jaw is set stubbornly as he stares back at her. “Why does it matter?”

She wonders how to convey the realization that came to her with Morgan's warning. The image of a world in chaos, the simplest of events unraveling into a jumble of disconnected incidents. The terror of this vision—and the possibility that she might in some way be responsible for bringing it to pass.

“You have seen it,” she says. “For these men, this is more than a joke or fantasy. If we leave now, the secret may fall into their hands. Would you really give power over the past and future to Morgan or his partners?”

“You're talking about time travel?”

She nods.

“But time machines don't exist.” Somehow, after all that has happened, this statement no longer sounds quite convincing, even to Peter.

She just looks at him.

“And besides, why're you upset about all this now? You're really so worried, seems like you could've just . . .” Not built the thing, he finishes the sentence in his head but doesn't speak the words, recalling the basic insanity of what they're talking about.

“I did not mean—” For a moment she continues to stare at him, defiance and anguish wrestling on her face, and then she drops her head. “As I told you, my intention was to create a device for transportation between one location and another. Not to travel through time. All of this”—she gestures—“is an accident. So, to answer your question, no. I had not considered the consequences.”

Peter shakes his head. “Then why Tesla?”

She thinks of the inventor's face and looks away from the mechanic, at the warped floorboards of the apartment. From beyond the kitchen comes the muffled sound of Paolo and his wife, arguing in Italian.

“Why see Tesla?” Peter repeats.

She cannot meet his eyes. “Because”—she draws a deep breath, wondering if she really is crazy—“I believe he is trying to create such a device himself, and I must warn him of the danger.”

“That doesn't make sense.” Peter has to struggle to restrain himself from shouting. “And what makes you think he'll listen?”

“At heart, he is a conscientious scientist and a reasonable man. If he simply understood the risks”—she shakes her head—“I know that he would help. I will write a letter, one that he will not ignore.”

“Help how?”

“To find a way of stopping all this.” With an effort she meets his eyes. And to help make sense of what has happened—she thinks but does not say—to find a way of going back and restoring things to their proper place. Of undoing whatever damage has been done.

Peter shakes his head, looking away.

And of course, she thinks, he is right: in any rational terms this must be counted as a kind of madness. “Stay here,” she tells him. “I will go to see him alone.”

Paolo bustles into the room, laden with a pile of ragged blankets. “We should sleep now,” he says, glancing toward the closed bedroom door. “It is late. We talk of what to do tomorrow.”

 

 

 

 

AT THE WORLD CLUB, Tesla seats himself in an overstuffed armchair and orders his morning coffee, struggling to control his seething anger. Outside, on the steps of the club, the inventor had been accosted by one of Morgan's minions, a neat little man wearing pince-nez. Unwilling to invite the man into the sanctuary of the World, Tesla had been forced to converse with the financier's emissary there on the street—like a common merchant—while the little man made insinuating remarks about his monetary circumstances and the benefits of cooperation with Edison.

As in the past, Tesla had dismissed the man with a flat refusal—but still the suggestion enrages him. The notion that he might be pleased to “assist” Edison, that plodding dullard, is an unbearable insult—as is the idea of sharing the prize that he has pursued for so long. The very thought that his services could be bought, that he would come running like a lackey to the sound of a full purse! Even with the prospect of what he could accomplish with Morgan's riches, it is impossible, degrading, inconceivable—

A waiter deferentially approaches and places the coffee service on the end table beside the inventor.

“And my mail,” Tesla murmurs.

“Of course, sir.”

Lifting the first cup of coffee to his lips, the inventor draws a deep breath and tries to calm himself by contemplating the smooth curve of its rim, the contrast between the translucent bone-white china and the blackness of the steaming liquid, the ripples on its surface caused by the slight trembling of his hand. And slowly, his anger subsides. If one had time, he reflects, one could lose oneself in the beauty of these details: for even in such small things are all the perfections of mathematics made visible. The wave in motion describing a precise logarithmic function. The law of thaumaturgy: as above, so below. But of course, one does not have time.

The uniformed waiter returns and deposits a stack of mail at Tesla's elbow. On top of the stack is an overdue bill from the Waldorf-Astoria, and beneath this the inventor finds another bill, from his tailor, a bill from the club itself, a pamphlet for an upcoming conference, and, finally, a letter addressed to him in a neat feminine script. This last item, he notices, does not bear a stamp—meaning it was delivered by hand. This piques his curiosity; only the very rich, in this age, still use private messengers for their correspondence.

Setting the bills aside, Tesla opens the last envelope and withdraws its contents: a single sheet of paper. At the top of the page are a time, a place, and a date. Below this are two lines of mathematical formula.

Around him the world stops.

He stares at the symbols and numbers, digesting their meaning. At first, as is often the case, he grasps their significance more by a kind of intuition than through any rational process. He uncaps his pen and quickly scribbles a few figures on the back of the envelope, trying the equation for himself. It appears to work—unable to suppress a paranoid impulse, he glances over his shoulder, half expecting to find Morgan's minion smirking at him. But there is no one nearby—across the room, a pair of club members are trading quips about a minor society lady; a group of servants discreetly ignore his gaze.

He looks down at the letter again, wondering if he is dreaming. Rereading the page, he scrutinizes each word for hidden meaning. The handwriting, he thinks, looks strangely familiar, although he cannot place it. Folding the letter, he beckons to one of the servants.

“When did this arrive?” he asks, holding up the envelope. His voice is strained in his ears, but if the servant notices, he is too well trained to give any sign. “Who delivered it?”

“One moment, sir. I will ask.” The servant backs away and Tesla unfolds the letter again.

It is a miracle, he thinks. It is impossible.

Studying the equation, he realizes that it is only a fragment of some larger theorem, a partial solution—but it is still more than he could have dreamed. He suppresses the urge to laugh out loud; with this one stroke he has more than Edison and all his lackeys, an affirmation that his years of effort have not been in vain. Already his mind is teeming with new possibilities, new experiments—