Us Conductors (12 page)

In September, I gave you a theremin. I had painted small red flowers and small blue flowers and small pink flowers on the panels. I had drawn curlicues in gold ink. By lamplight, I had polished the antennas. I was resting against the kitchen counter as you stepped behind the device, balanced on heels, and you extended your right hand. The theremin yowled at you. You withdrew your hand. You looked at me. You extended your hand again, and again the theremin yowled. You were still looking at me. You were a violinist. You were a violinist with serious, dark eyes. I laughed at my own doggedness; your theremin stayed in a corner of my office. I took the violinist dancing.

At the end of October, America collapsed.

IF THE APOCALYPSE COMES
, I would not know. In this small steel room, in a boat, on the sea, there is no way to tell if a volcano has belched forth from under Budapest, if the waters have engulfed Venice, if the world has split in two along the line of the Greenwich meridian. Perhaps a leviathan has risen at Stockholm, or a behemoth at Lisbon, or all of Africa has melted, like crayons under a too-hot sun. I do not know. I rely on Red to bring me news. Red relies on the wireless. And if the radio goes dead? If there is a flood, an earthquake, a meteor? We would not know, bobbing here. The sirens would not wake us. The groans would not reach us. Nobody delivers the newspaper. The clouds gather, some days, and then on other days they do not. Red brings me food, and then on other days he does not. It has always been this way. This is not a military ship, strict and regimented. It is just a cargo boat travelling across the water, in which there was room to stow me.

I have not eaten in almost two days. Has Red forgotten me?
I wonder if there has been a mutiny. I wonder if there are coyotes outside my door.

IT WAS A LITTLE LIKE THIS
, the 1929 Crash. I was alone in my apartment. I did not know that men in ties were leaping from Wall Street windowsills. I had begun creating the fingerboard theremin: a device that’s played upright, like a sort of electric cello. I was searching for a slotted screwdriver. I had set it down somewhere and now I could not find it. I ransacked my rooms. I remember I knocked over a potted lily and then in frustration poured the rest of the soil out onto the carpet. I called down for an egg sandwich but no one picked up the phone. Finally, crazy with irritation, I marched downstairs, past the hotel’s shuttered restaurant, and across the road to the hardware store, the excuse for a hardware store, the little shop on the corner that seemed to sell only brass doorknobs and nails for hanging pictures. The owner was stout, with two baby slaloms of black hair parted exactly in the middle.

“Slotted screwdriver,” I said to him.

The expression on his face was one of terror and bewilderment. I did not know why.

“Is everything all right?” I asked.

He nodded. His eyes remained glazed, glazed like the patina on a porcelain fawn. “How many?” he said.

“How many what?”

“Screwdrivers.”

I fixed him with my severest glower. He did not seem affected. “One,” I said.

He nodded again. It was clear that something was affecting this mole-man. I couldn’t tell if it was miracle or calamity. Had
he just been robbed? Was his wife in labour? I allowed my glower to dissipate. “Please,” I said.

The man found a screwdriver. He held it out to me like a dagger. I grasped it by the end.

I paid and got the hell out of there. I went across to the bakery. The door was locked. I rattled it. “Hello!” I called. I really wanted an egg sandwich. I leaned my head against the door’s glass. I took a deep breath. With the screwdriver in my hand, I went back into the Plaza Hotel, climbed the stairs to my room, let myself in. I knelt beside a modulator and removed the mounting. I felt a bloom of deep satisfaction. I disappeared into the afternoon.

It was nightfall when I looked up from the fingerboard theremin. The room was almost completely dark. I moved to stand but my knees shrieked in pain; instead I hobbled to an armchair and sat down. My eyes stung from squinting. I closed them. I rested in the cushions. Behind my eyelids I could see the theremin revolving, doubling, connections joining.

I blinked and looked at the time. After eight o’clock. After eight o’clock and not a single caller. Where was everybody? Normally I would have four, six, ten visitors over the course of the day: students, guests of students, Schillinger barging in with a new chapter of his book. But there had been no one. My stomach made a molten sound. I picked up the phone to ring up an egg sandwich. Still no one was picking up. I sighed. I recalled the tin of potato chips I had finished the night before. I hauled myself to my feet and to a calendar, nailed to a closet door. Was it a holiday? Was it Presidents’ Day? Armistice Day? American Easter? Was it Halloween? Halloween was in October; that holiday with carved squash and fancy costume. But it was not yet Halloween. It was Tuesday, October 24. Outside my window, New York City appeared normal. It was black and white and violet.

Pash came in then, without knocking. He had an enormous briefcase, the largest briefcase I had ever seen him carry, big enough that I could have curled up inside it. His face was drawn. He stopped at the edge of my living-room carpet. The rug was covered in earth and the remains of a potted lily. “What happened here?” he said.

“I have no idea.”

We looked at each other.

“Did something happen out there?” I asked.

Pash showed me his teeth. It was a gesture of exasperation. He came toward me. He put down his briefcase. He snapped on the radio.

I stood and I listened.

THE CHANGES WERE HARD
to categorize. Most of my students stayed away only for a couple of days. Henry Solomonoff started to visit even more often. Rosemary Ilova never came back.

I rang your house on Saturday afternoon. “She’s not at home,” your father said. He had the tone of a weary adventurer: respectful, but tired. “Would you like to leave a message?”

“For Clara?”

“Yes, for Clara.”

“Tell her it was Leon.”

“Which Leon, please?”

“Leon Theremin.”

“Ah,” he said. “The scientist.”

“Yes.”

“Will there be anything else?”

I drew a circle on the pad beside the phone. “Does one say ‘Happy Halloween’?”

“What?” your father said. “You mean on Halloween?”

“Yes.”

“I suppose.”

I put down the pencil. “Please also wish her a happy Halloween.”

I was restless. I went out into the city.

I wanted to do something with myself, with my body.

At first I thought maybe I was going to a club. Maybe I would go dancing, with strangers, while the markets shuddered. I walked south, downtown, but as I passed corner after corner I kept on walking, kept on into downtown, continuing under the sagging awnings and blurs of electric light, through clouds of steam; I found I was walking beyond midtown, beyond the nightclubs, past empty restaurants, darkened banks, old men dozing in cars; past Union Square, where a drunkard had just staggered out of the fountain; all the way to Chinatown, where many of the doorways were painted gold or red, and the people moved with a different tension in their shoulders, in their hips, as if they needed to stay unfamiliar to each other.

Above a stall selling jade trees I saw a sign that read WING-CHUN KUNG-FU.

Almost before thinking about it, I slipped inside.

In Leningrad, the kwoon had always seemed slightly illicit—the hideout for a group of bandits, a Far Eastern cult. There was less mystery here. The stairwell was coal-black stone, swept clean. The upstairs door was smoked glass, with a painted Chinese symbol. I went through and found a wide, square loft, high-ceilinged. The gym felt like a workshop, like a factory. A line of men repeated a sequence of low kicks. Two older students stood wrist to wrist, practising the hand dance. Behind them a group of children passed through the first form, half-expert, half-clumsy, facing a chrysanthemum shrine. The air smelled of
frying oil and cut flowers. There were Negro students, Caucasian students, a tall turbaned Sikh talking to a boy who stood up to his chest.

The man who was their sifu saw me by the entrance. He approached me slowly, as if he wanted to give me enough time to examine him, or to prepare my greeting. He was older than my Leningrad sifu, older than my parents, old in the manner of the toothless old men who spent all day at the barber’s. Only he wasn’t toothless, he wasn’t stooped; apart from a small paunch, his body was a straight line, a strong torso under drooping cheeks.

“Hello,” I said, my voice vanishing in the room.

He nodded.

I bowed. I touched my right fist to my open left hand.

He gave half a smile and bowed as well. Then he crouched at my feet, where a marmalade-coloured cat was meandering. He picked the cat up. “Do you know kung-fu?” he said. His accent was mostly New York, only very faintly something else.

“Yes,” I said.

“Where did you learn?”

“Russia.”

This surprised him. “How much kung-fu is in Russia?”

“Not much.”

He appraised me with his rheumy grey eyes. “What style?”

“Wing-chun.”

“Hm.” The cat was motionless in his arms. It blinked as he petted it. It seemed to be watching me too.

“Do you fight?” sifu said.

I considered this. I looked into the wide kwoon, where men were punching and kicking, pivoting, holding their fists like heavy lake stones. “That’s not why I came,” I said.

Sifu put down the cat. “Dollar twenty-five a month.”

“You mean—?”

“Take off your shoes,” he said. “We are open from ten to ten.”

I was taking off my shoes. “Closed Sundays. I am sifu.”

“Thank you, sifu.”

“Jin!” he shouted. He rubbed his eyes with his wrist.

One of the men doing
chi sao
broke away from the hand dance. He was close to my size, with a high waist. He had gentle features. He jogged to where we were standing, sifu and me, the
to-dai
, and the orange cat.

“Jin,” sifu said, taking a step back, “see if you can knock this Russian down.”

I swallowed. “Hello,” I said.

“Hello,” Jin said.

He knocked me down, but only eventually. After we had seen and evaded each other, touched and come apart. I had missed this physicality, this duel.

As I hit the floor, I found I was smiling.

Jin remained in a defensive pose,
bai jong
.

I propped myself up on my hands.

“Good,” sifu said.