Electric City: A Novel (28 page)

Helpless, she couldn’t even guess how the underground was organized. When she pictured Martin climbing into some anonymous car, watched it like a movie in slow motion; there was no role for her at all. They had told him how it would go, and he told it to her so she could envision the scenes in order, frame by frame. But she wasn’t allowed to
be anywhere near the pickup point, and there was no plan for her except to stay all the way out of it.

Before they separated that night, Martin had one last thing to do. Reaching into his canvas shoulder bag, he carefully removed a cluster of four feathers that had been tied together with silk thread.

“Eagle,” he said simply, and wrapped her fingers around the place where the feathers were knotted into one. Four directions scattered and joining, dispersed and reuniting.

“For my sake,” he whispered, daring her to love him at least that much. “Just promise you’ll keep moving forward.”

Sophie nodded, tears welling, but he said that wasn’t good enough, he said she had to put it in writing and sign it. She had to make it real. Martin pulled out his notebook and turned to a new page, but she was shaking too much.

“I can’t,” she said.

“Swear to me out loud then,” he said, when her fingers gripped hard around his Eagle’s gift. “Say you’ll go on.”

He gazed at her without blinking, refusing to look away.

“Promise you’ll come home,” she whispered.

M
ARTIN SINGING
. B
REATH
of his grandmother inside him, and the grandmothers before her, ancestral spirit pouring through. Certain notes expanded his chest until he felt broad as a mountain, and the melodies stayed so fully present he awoke to them and fell asleep with them. This was how he left Electric City, how he prepared to say the rest of his goodbyes.

Like the movement of his blood, pulsing and flowing, present behind his closed eyelids and in the tender spot below his jawbone.

A river. The only one he had left.

Being “sealed” was how Annie described it. Ancient energies stored in rhythmic packages, cellular memories, and the body would never forget it for the rest of its life. He wondered what kind of music might bring him closer to the full story of Martine’s death, the mother who had vanished before they ever knew each other. And although he supposed she must have known more than a little of him while he had floated inside her body, it seemed possible that even her ghost wouldn’t want to be found.

“Umbilical connections aren’t necessarily the ones that last,” that’s what Robert would probably say.

Strange and yet not strange to find himself about to head so far north. Maybe his great-uncle’s restless spirit, long-drowned in Canadian water, was looking to attach itself to Martin’s edges. Maybe this was
simply a way to practice stretching his own reach across greater and greater distances. It was Sophie’s absence he expected to miss the most, but in the pause between songs, Martin couldn’t stop feeling particles of Henry holding a place inside. Matter, which had never been created or destroyed.

The unlikeliest of friendships remained like some broken bone that resisted healing. A name carved into the skin of a branch.

“This war will end and you’ll find your way clear of it,” Annie said to him, kissing the top of her grandson’s head when he bent low for her blessing. “I’d rather see you a tormented ghost than an obedient ghost.”

“I’d rather not be a ghost at all,” Martin replied. “Not just yet anyway.”

Bear would stay with Annie, and cousin Isaiah would keep an eye on both of them, and those were the pieces of his life Martin had to surrender in the name of staying free. It made no sense and it made perfect sense.
Brother Beware
.

At Midge’s house just after sunrise, he stood with his hand on the canoe that still hung from the rafters of her shed, asking her not to mind saving it a while longer. She knew better than to try talking him out of this departure.

“We have to cure ourselves,” she said, not bothering to tell him she was quoting Joseph and Steinmetz both.

When Martin turned away, not wanting to see her tears, she placed her left palm between the wings of his shoulder blades, letting it rest there for a long moment. By chance, that was the same way he settled
both hands on Bear’s solid ribcage, thanking him for every breath they had shared on this earth.

He would learn the names of trees and rocks all over again, record his footsteps in an altered landscape. The residue of everyone he loved could be saved in his own body without regret or pain. If he traveled with just enough weightlessness, the air itself could keep him aloft.

T
HE CAR WAS
a Plymouth, dusty green and with New York license plates, several years old but in decent shape, only a couple of rusting dents in the chrome of the left rear fender, and a web of hairline cracks in the windshield. A twenty-something woman was driving. She had short brown hair and sunglasses and a forced smile; she wore a white scarf tied loosely around her neck and a navy blue cardigan over a T-shirt and blue jeans.

An orange tin lunchbox took up space on the seat beside her, and a cocoa-skinned baby slept in a car seat in the back, mounded with pastel blankets. The woman seemed surprisingly calm, her hands on the steering wheel and her smile betraying nothing.

You’ve done this before
. Martin was surprised to see the baby but didn’t say a word. The woman got out of the car so that Martin could take the wheel, and she climbed into the passenger side after double-checking on the baby.

“He’s such a good sleeper in that car seat,” she said. “Lucky.”

“Okay,” Martin said. “Are we all set?”

He had tossed a duffel bag into the trunk, nothing large or bulky in case anyone checked.
We’re just visiting relatives across the border,
they would say.
An overnight is all
.

T
HERE HAD TO
be a balance
, thought Proteus,
between morbid imaginings and a genuine sense of death’s imminence
. Not even doctors could predict the timing of the Grim Reaper’s arrival, but this profound weakness in his legs, the night sweats, and waking dreams—these were symptoms impossible to misconstrue. Long-suffering Corinne Hayden had pleaded with him for decades to create some order out of his chaos; if this was indeed an illness from which he would never recover, there was no more room for delay.

While the majority of his collection of glass-plate photographs had been carefully sorted into albums, his more recent work—that is, after he switched to film—were prints piled into boxes, awaiting further categorization. With shaky handwriting, he began labeling envelopes, to make a start:
Aqueduct, Erie Canal Skaters, Streetcar, Ferris Wheel
,
Portrait of Sir, Camp Mohawk
. Here was an entire group of images he wished to give to Joseph Longboat, a necessarily incomplete visual record of their several decades together, their overlapping stories.

Frequently he had to rest from the effort of breathing. During one of these pauses, to Steinmetz’s astonishment, Joseph himself appeared at the bedroom door, holding a finger to his lips.

“What’s the secret?” Proteus whispered. His friend leaned in close to say they had to slip away from the house, just for an hour.

Nobody knows.
Joseph silently mouthed the words.

Steinmetz understood that they had to avoid being seen by any of the Hayden household, who would surely try to stop them. And for good reason. How would he find even a fraction of the energy required to make it all the way down a flight of stairs, much less into the chill of a late fall afternoon, and not to mention wherever Joseph planned for the fugitives to go.

“I’ll carry you,” Joseph said. And lifted Proteus into his arms.

He might have been dreaming. Wrapped in a quilt warm as fur, Steinmetz allowed himself to be cradled while Joseph serenely walked them away from the house and along the wooded path. Half dozing, he occasionally looked up to observe leaves drifting toward the ground in shafts of filtered sunlight. There was a timeless hush surrounding them, a hesitation between the warning frost and the first snow. Joseph’s stride was even-paced, limber-jointed, and smooth; there was no sense of burden but merely a determined momentum. The river wasn’t far now, and the canoe was waiting.

Lighter than ever, once again easily mistaken for a child, Proteus floated on water the way amber floated. The geode whose beauty was hidden until split open. The two-row wampum belt, flowing in both directions; the exchange between spirit and flint. Always echoing and repeating: lightning-shaped and fox-shaped, mirror-splintered and time-bent.

Joseph guided the canoe by walking beside it, thigh-deep, tracing the shoreline. No need to go far—just beyond the reeds so Steinmetz,
as if alone, could lean back and gaze at the sky, spot an eagle’s distant pinpoint. A farewell view from the water, looking up to the sweet sanctuary of Camp Mohawk.

“Grandfather. Thunder Chief, Hinon,” Joseph said softly.

The light was leaving so fast. Joseph pulled the canoe back to its resting place on the slope and lifted his friend into his arms again to carry him home.

T
HE CASSETTE TAPE
Sophie received from Martin was so richly layered with sound she could close her eyes and feel they were together in the same room. She sensed how close the walls were, and she could hear which floorboards creaked along with the scrape of a chair pushed back from the table. She heard him fill a glass of water from the tap, and even his inhalations were audible before he spoke. In her mind’s eye he was carrying the microphone as though it were a long-stemmed rose. Or a branch of berries.