The Invention of Everything Else (13 page)

"Baaa-con!" Sam shouts. "Bacon. Bacon. Bacon. Bacon. Why, bacon would improve the flavor of an angel." He pops one of the dates into his mouth and the waiter disappears. Sam licks the grease from his fingers. "Poor you. I had a dream about you last night. I haven't any idea what it means, but since you were there, I thought you might."

"No. Sorry."

He ignores my stab at humor.

"In the dream I was in bed. Back in Missouri, only of course it was a version of Missouri turned fifteen degrees or so in the kaleidoscope. A nightcap on my head, tucked under the covers with a copy of the dreaded Jane Austen beside my pillow as if one of her dreary novels had lulled me of into this nightmare. I could hear my snores. And there you sat, very calmly stroking your chin as if petting a kitten. You straightened the seams of your trousers. You waited. 'Niko,' I said, waking very suddenly with a question for you, though as soon as I sat up, the question disappeared. Realizing I was awake, you immediately gestured across the room with your head, trying to tell me something, as if to say there was danger lurking nearby. Your eyes pointed to the door. Your lips pursed, telling me to hush. All the world's sounds seemed sucked into the purse of your lips, and the dream fell silent, a vacuum. I had no idea what was behind the door, but a cold sweat broke out on my brow just the same. You stared at the door, and when I realized that you were also scared, terror set upon me like a locomotive's approach, gaining in strength and intensity with each passing moment. My fear filled the room. My head swimming, booming. There was nothing else besides the fear, a scream delivered in one's ear. I held on for dear life. The door rattled on its hinges, ready to burst, and at the moment that I thought I could bear it no longer, the fear passed through me, truly like a train, tearing my insides out, clearing all evidence of me away before disappearing entirely. Eventually, I came to. Nothing in the room had changed. You sat still, studying the fingernails of one hand. I was broken on the bed. Shaking in the terror's wake, I once again noticed the silence. I blinked, wiggled my fingers and toes as breath began to return to my body. After what seemed eons of uncertainty, you spoke, clearing your throat first. 'There is no dream,' you said, standing. You let yourself out through the very door that only moments earlier had seemed to hold back death itself. You stepped one foot outside but not before turning to remind me once again, 'There is no dream, Sam.' The door closed behind you and I woke.

"So what do you make of it?" he asks.

"Well, I suppose I meant that there is no dream, Sam" I say it as a joke.

He does not laugh. "Yes." He stares down at the tablecloth, his hands curled. "I was afraid of that" Sam's face is twisted and he makes a fist against the table, tightening his forehead. "But Niko, if there is no dream, that means there is no possibility for—"

"Greetings!" A husky Scottish accent cuts across the heads of Delmonico's diners.

We turn. John Muir has his arms raised above his head. He is smiling a wide grin beneath his bushy white beard.

When once I introduced John as a naturalist and a writer to a group of engineers, he corrected me, saying he was in fact a "poetico-trampo-geologist-botanist and ornithologist-naturalist etc. etc.!" Indeed he is even more than that. A farmer. A sheep herder. An inventor. An explorer. A conservationist. An extraordinary man. I am most happy to see him.

Sam smiles up at him, but there is a window open on worry still in his eye. As we say our hellos, the rest of our company trickles in behind John, one by one, with much uproar. The prima donna Madame Milka Ternina. The Kiplings. Marion Crawford. Ignace Paderewski and the beautiful young officer Richmond Pearson Hobson, recently graduated from the Naval Academy. I follow his entrance, the grace of his youth.

"I'd better find my seat." Sam leans in toward me once the others have settled.

"But first, no possibility for what?" I ask.

"Hm?"

"What you were saying before. If there is no dream, there is no possibility for what?"

"Oh. For dreamers. That's all."

I sit with this for just a moment, staring straight ahead. Hobson fingers the edge of a linen napkin, a hero in uniform. Madame Ternina, seated beside him, laughs at something he has said. Marion smiles at me from across the table and I see I am in terrible danger here. Each salt and pepper pot are in place. The candles have just been lit. Everything, everyone, is as they should be, filled with life, filled with secrets for unraveling. Tonight I could fall in love with each and every one of them. I could fall in love with the whole glittering world.

Sam stands, ready to go find his seat.

"Wait" I say. "I think you're mistaken. Saying there is no dream is the same as saying everything is a dream. Isn't it? Everyone a dreamer? Extraordinary things happen all the time even when we're awake. What I meant to suggest to you, if indeed that was me in your dream doing the suggesting, is that there is only one world. This one. The dream is real. The ordinary is the wonderful. The wonderful is the ordinary."

Then it is Sam's turn to stop. He freezes while adjusting his collar, one arm raised. "Do you really think that's what it means?"

I lift my hand to my chin for a moment, studying the ceiling. "I'm certain of it" I tell him. "I'm certain of it."

He smiles, relieved. "I hadn't thought of it that way." And his spirits do indeed seem higher. "Thank you," he says and begins to sing a low song, something about "the man of my dreams," as he makes his way around the table, taking a seat beside Muir, taking my thoughts with him.

Here is the burning. Here is the freezing. I'm certain of it.

A conversation has begun around me. I believe it is actually about me. Someone has mentioned magnets. Someone has mentioned the AC polyphase system, but I am absent from myself until Martin steps up behind me. He breaks the spell.

"Mr. Tesla, allow me to introduce Mrs. Katharine Johnson and Mr. Robert Underwood Johnson. Robert is a poet and an editor at
Century Magazine.
Katharine is his wife."

Back to the party.

I turn as though into a storm, a balcony door left open.

First, Robert: A narrow beard on a serious man. His sad eyes shielded behind round wire spectacles. A wide nose on a worked face. His features an American alloy.

Then Katharine: A bantam spirit, yet she is softer than he, a light that is difficult to see. Except for her eyes. They could easily be confused with some northern island beat by the ocean. Glare. Ice. Distant fury. Beauty.

I am immediately lifted by the Johnsons' presence. I am a stone plucked from the riverbed. Katharine takes Sam's vacated seat to my right, Robert sits beside me on the left. I can smell them. Crushed grass. Cold granite.

"Mrs. and Mr. Johnson," I say, turning to her, "we've been discussing magnets."

And magnets indeed. I am not a man with many friends and yet I feel as though I have two magnets, protruding from either side. They are activated, sudden as pistol shots, drawing me to these people as though I had copper-wrapped iron where my heart should be. I steel myself with a sip of whiskey. I can't allow myself to have many feelings for humans besides curiosity. My life does not allow for it. There
are exceptions, of course, like Sam, but they are not common. Still, my heartbeat is doubling with excitement. I am uncertain how to proceed. I finish my whiskey and signal for another.

"Magnets," Katharine says and smiles.

"Yes," I croak and the conversation continues.

John Muir leans in across the table, tucking both his elbows and arms below his chin; he fingers the wires of his long beard. "Here is a legend four thousand years old." The table is intrigued and so we join him, leaning in close, listening to the story. Tightening our circle, I feel the warmth radiating off the Johnsons' skin. I move into it. I don't think to ask why I am so drawn to them.

"A shepherd named Magnes was herding his sheep just outside the town of Magnesia in northern Greece. His metal-tipped staff clicked out a rhythm on the rocks." Muir picks up the salt and pepper pot. Striking them together, he re-creates the tap of the walking stick. "After he'd gone a ways he decided to sneak a nap. When he awoke, his sheep were gone, so he climbed up to the top of a rocky outcropping for a better view.

"Placing one foot and then the other and then his trusty staff on the stone summit, the shepherd scanned the landscape. No sheep. He turned to walk away, but as he tried to lift his shoes he found that he was firmly stuck in place. He struggled to pry his foot from the rock, but it was secured there as if by magic. He pulled at one shoe and then the other. He used all his might to attempt a jump." Muir tucks his arms, poised as though he himself were about to jump. "Nothing worked," he continues. "The shoes and staff were locked in place. Magnes scratched his head." And as he says so, so does Muir. "A number of his sheep, having spotted him up on the outcrop, gathered near, but as there was no fresh grass up on the rocks they eventually moved on. He watched the sheep lift their hooves without a struggle and yet his still couldn't move. His shoes were stuck to the rock, but his feet were not stuck to his shoes. He could easily wiggle his toes. And so an idea. He barefooted himself, released his hand's grasp on his staff, and, you see, magnets were discovered." Muir lifts his hands in the air to snap twice.

"A man named
Magnes
was herding his sheep just outside the town of
Magnesia
while happening to discover
magnets?
" Sam asks, chuckling.

"Are you so cynical?" It is Katharine speaking. "Stranger things have happened."

And turning toward her I see how all the pale blue of stone and eight billion years of fossilized sky is remembered in her eye. Far stranger things. "No," I start to say, and then, "Yes."

The table waits for some further explanation. I stutter. None is forthcoming and soon they all begin to laugh. I flush red. I draw a deep breath, sucking in air, having forgotten to breathe, surrounded by so many unfamiliar emotions. What are they? I'm afraid I know. I'm afraid I've heard its name before on a city street in Budapest.

Delmonico's, as it is apt to do, carries on into the wee hours. The food is magnificent and there is a general sense of well-being and abundance. Heads held back in laughter. Necks bowed for a secret. Oysters and champagne. I finish three glasses of whiskey and finally locate my voice in the haze of the Johnsons' charm. The room buzzes, but as the meal ends, I'm able to secure their focus for my own. Plates are cleared. Coffee is served, and as night becomes morning, our tidy threesome slips from the others' attention into our own universe.

"Start at the beginning," I tell them. I want to know everything about them.

And so Robert does. "The home where I was born was later torn down, replaced by the House of Representatives' dome."

"An appropriate shrine," Katharine says, "to such a momentous event. But where are you from, Mr. Tesla?"

"Smiljan. In Croatia. Though I must warn you, I'm actually Serbian."

"I don't think I've ever met a Serbian," Robert says.

"We have nine words for knife and only one for bread." I grip a butter knife and slam its curved end down on the table, making a menacing face that has both the Johnsons laughing.

I turn my attention to Katharine, waiting to hear the story of her birth. She looks off, over Robert's shoulder. She lifts a glass of port to her lips instead. "I was raised in Washington also," she says with little fanfare, as if bored by the facts of her life. Women will one day rule the world, and when they do, their brains will be so finely tuned from all the years of quiet that I anticipate they will be far superior rulers to men. She stares me down, using the light in her eyes to a hypnotic
effect. Finally she speaks. "But I can't see what relevance that might possibly have. I could just as easily tell you that I was raised in Taipei or Toronto, and how would that further any understanding? Birth is an accident." She looks up at Robert. "No," she says. "What we need here tonight are specifics. Stories," she says. "Stories."

Robert nods his head enthusiastically. "Yes," he agrees. "Of course you're right."

My breath is raw with surprise, desperate with admiration. I hit on what it is exactly, this rare quality of the Johnsons: a wisdom without pride. A humble calm. A curiosity that serves only to breed greater energy in me. I consider the one story I've never told. I feel it, waiting, dungeoned, lonely for the light, straining to rest in the curve of the Johnsons' ears. One sharp breath is all it takes me to kick it back down its dark stairwell.

Robert takes up his wife's suggestion. "When they shot the Great Man—"

"The Great Man?" I ask, breathing steadily now.

"President Lincoln. My family, being Quakers and abolitionists, were shattered."

Robert has a way of speaking, both his feet planted on the ground before him. His hands resting on his thighs, simple, as if he's the very inspiration for honesty.

"I was twelve at the time but decided that I would follow his funeral train. My memories are blurred, more a general sense of sorrow, the fruit trees, the grasses beside the train tracks. It was spring and everything was coming back to life. How strange to be surrounded by death in the springtime. The people along the route, many were weeping, many were struck dumb. A bullet had pierced their president's brain. I see their faces and the smell of the coal engine and I remember knowing, even though I was young, that something very large and uncertain had shaken history. It helped to keep walking as if that could undo this ripple that I knew we'd be reeling from for the next hundred years."

"Nineteen sixty-five?" I ask.

"Imagine," Katharine says, and I try to.

"Yes. Nineteen sixty-five." Robert smiles and brings his head in closer to ours, taking us into his confidence. "I'll meet you both there."

Our stories, as Katharine ordered, unravel. Revealing small parts of ourselves like a dance performed behind fans. Graz, Budapest, the surge I got the very first time I saw a painting of Niagara Falls as a child. Until, finally depleted, I fall silent.