Mr. Splitfoot (39 page)

1. saber-toothed

2. sabotage

3. sacrilege

4. sad

5. salacious

6. salesman

7. saliva

8. sallow

9. sanguinary

10. sap

11. sarcoma

12. sardonic

13. savage

14. savorless

15. scab

16. scabies

17. scalawag

18. scald

19. scandal

20. scant

21. scar

22. scarce

23. scary

24. scatology

25. scorn

26. scorpion

27. scourge

28. scrappy

29. screaming

30. screed

31. screwball

32. scrooge

33. scrupulousness

34. scuffle

35. scum

36. scurvy

37. seizure

38. selfish

39. serf

40. sewer

41. shabby

42. shady

43. sham

44. shameless

45. shark

46. shifty

47. sick

48. siege

49. sinful

50. sinking

51. skewed

52. skunk

53. slander

54. slaughter

55. sleaze

56. slink

57. slobber

58. sloth

59. slug

60. slur

61. smear

62. smile

63. snake

64. sneak

65. soulless

66. spurn

67. stab

68. stain

69. stale

70. steal

71. stolen

72. stop

      stop

      stop.

Marconi is not the one to blame. But if he isn’t, I have to wonder who is.

About ten years ago Bryant Park was redesigned. Its curves were cut into straight lines and rimmed with perennial flower beds. Years before that a reservoir, one with fifty-foot-high walls, sat off to the east, filled with silent, still water as if it were a minor sea in the middle of New York City. As I cross into the park I feel cold. I feel shaky. I feel as if it is the old reservoir and not the park that I am walking into. My chest is constricted by the pressure of this question, by this much water. I look for her overhead, straining to collect the last navy light in the sky. Any attempt to swim to the surface is thwarted by a weakness in my knees, by “Why did Marconi get all the credit for inventing radio?” The reservoir’s been gone for years. Still, I kick my legs for the surface. My muscles feel wooden and rotten. I am only eighty-six. When did my body become old? My legs shake. I am embarrassed for my knees. If she won’t come tonight the answer will be all too clear. Marconi took the credit because I didn’t. Yes, I invented radio, but what good is an invention that exists only in one’s head?

I manage a “HooEEEhoo?” and wait, floating until, through the water overhead, there’s a ripple, a white-tipped flutter. “HooEEEhoo! HooEEEhoo!” The sight of her opens a door, lets in the light, and I’m left standing on the dry land of Bryant Park. She is here. I take a deep breath. The park is still and peaceful. She lands on top of Goethe’s head. Goethe, cast here in bronze, does not seem to mind the intrusion of her gentle step.

We’re alone. My tongue is knotted, unsure how to begin. My heart catches fire. “I watched for you at the hotel,” I say.

She does not answer but stares at me with one orange eye, an eye that remembers me before all this gray hair set in, back when I was a beauty too. Sometimes it starts like this between us. Sometimes I can’t hear her. I take a seat on a nearby bench. I’ll have to concentrate. On top of Goethe’s head she looks like a brilliant idea. Her breast is puffed with breath. Agitation makes it hard to hear what she is saying.

“Perhaps you would like some peanuts?” I ask, removing the bag from my pocket. I spread some of the nut meats out carefully along the base of the statue before sitting back down.

She is here. I will be fine. The air is rich with her exhalations. It calms me. I’m OK even when I notice that the question has slithered out of the bushes. It has settled down on the bench beside me, less a menace now, more like an irritating companion I long ago grew used to. I still my mind to hers and then I can hear.

“Niko, who is your friend?” she asks.

I turn toward it. The question has filled the bench beside me, spilling over into my space, squashing up against my thigh. The question presents itself to her. “If they were Nikola’s patents, why did Marconi get all the credit for inventing the radio?”

“Hmm,” she says. “That’s a very good question indeed.” She fluffs her wings into flight, lowering herself from Goethe’s head, over the point of his tremendous nose, down to where I’d spread a small supper for her. She begins to eat, carefully pecking into one peanut. She lifts her head. The manifestation of precision. “There are many answers to that question, but what do you think, Niko?”

It seems so simple in front of her. “I suppose I allowed it to happen,” I say, finally able to bear this truth now that she is here. “At the time I couldn’t waste months, years, developing an idea I already knew would work. I had other projects I had to consider.”

“Yes, you’ve always been good at considering,” she says. “It’s carrying an idea to fruition that is your stumbling block. And the world requires proof of genius inventions. I suppose you know that now.”

She is strolling the pedestal’s base. I notice a slight hesitation to her walk. “Are you feeling all right?” I ask.

“I’m fine.” She turns to face me, changing the subject back to me. “Then there is the matter of money.”

“Yes. I’ve never wanted to believe that invention requires money but have found lately that good ideas are very hard to eat.”

She smiles at this. “You could have been a rich man seventy times over,” she reminds me.

“Yes,” I say. It’s true.

“You wanted your freedom instead. ‘I would not suffer interference from any experts,’ is how you put it.”

And then it is my turn to smile. “But really.” I lean forward. “Who can own the invisible waves traveling through the air?”

“Yes. And yet, somehow, plenty of people own intangible things all the time.”

“Things that belong to all of us! To no one! Marconi,” I spit as if to remind her, “will never be half the inventor I am.”

She ruffles her feathers and stares without blinking. I tuck my head in an attempt to undo my statement, my bluster.

“Marconi,” she reminds me, “has been dead for six years.”

She stares again with a blank eye, and so I try, for her sake, to envision Marconi in situations of nobility. Situations where, for example, Marconi is being kind to children or caring for an aging parent. I try to imagine Marconi stopping to admire a field of purple cow vetch in bloom. Marconi stoops, smells, smiles, but in every imagining I see his left hand held high, like victory, a white scarf fluttering in the breeze.

“Please,” she finally says. “Not this old story, darling.” Her eye remains unblinking. She speaks to me and it’s like thunder, like lightning that burns to ash my bitter thoughts of Marconi.

Bryant Park seems to have fallen into my dream. We are alone, the question having slithered off in light of its answer. She finishes her meal while I watch my breath become visible in the dropping temperature.

“It’s getting cold,” I tell her.

“Yes.”

“Perhaps you should come back to the hotel. I can make you your own box on the sill. It will be warmer there. It’s New Year’s Eve.”

She stops to consider this. She doesn’t usually like the other birds that hang around my windowsill.

“Please. I worry.”

“Hmm.” She considers it.

“Come back to the hotel with me.”

“Excuse me?” a deep male voice answers. Not hers.

I look up. Before me is a beat cop. His head is nearly as large as Goethe’s bronze one. His shoulders are as broad as three of me. He carries a nightstick, and seeing no other humans around, he seems to imagine that I am addressing him. The thought makes me laugh.

Any human passing by would think that I am sitting alone in the park at night, talking to myself. This is precisely my problem with so many humans. Their hearing, their sight, all their senses, have been dulled to receive information on such limited frequencies. I muster a bit of courage. “Do we not look into each other’s eyes and all in you is surging, to your head and heart, and weaves in timeless mystery, unseeable, yet seen, around you?”

“What in God’s name are you talking about?” the policeman asks.

“Goethe,” I say, motioning to the statue behind him.

“Well, Goethe yourself on home now, old man. It’s late and it’s cold. You’ll catch your death here.”

She is still perched on one corner of the bust’s pedestal.
Old man.
Karl Fischer cast the head in 1832; then the Goethe Club here in New York took it for a bit until they sent it off to the Metropolitan Museum of Art. The museum didn’t have much use for it, so they “donated” it to Bryant Park a few years ago. Goethe’s head has been shuffled off nearly as many times as I have.

“I know how you feel,” I tell the head.

Goethe stays quiet.

“Come on, old-timer,” the policeman says, reaching down to grab my forearm. It seems I am to be escorted from the park.

“This clown’s got no idea who I am,” I say to her. “He thinks I’m a vagrant.”

She looks at me as if taking a measure. She alone cuts through the layers of years and what they’ve done. She is proud of me. “Why don’t you just tell him?” she asks. “You invented radio and alternating current.”

Goethe finally speaks up. “Oh, yes,” he says. “I’m
sure
he’d believe you.”

The policeman can’t hear either of them. Even if he could, Goethe is right—this officer would never believe a word of it. “You’re the King of England, I suppose,” the cop says. “We get about ten King of Englands in here every week.”

The cop has his bear paws latched around my forearm and is steering me straight out of the park. Resistance, I have a strong feeling, would prove ineffective.

“Are you coming?” I ask her, but when I look back at the pedestal, she is gone. The solidity of the police officer’s grip is the one certainty. She has flown away, taking all of what I know with her—the Hotel New Yorker, Smiljan, the pigeons, my life as a famous inventor.

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S
AMANTHA
H
UNT
’s
The Invention of Everything Else
was a finalist for the Orange Prize and the winner of the Bard Fiction Prize. After the publication of her first novel,
The Seas
, she was selected for the inaugural 5 Under 35 National Book Foundation program. Her fiction has appeared in
The New Yorker
and
McSweeney’s
. She lives in Tivoli, New York.