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Topsy lifted her right front foot and tried to shake the wooden sandal off. Then she dragged the end of her trunk along the cold and dusty ground, seeking something to eat.

Edison faced the technician at the generator. The man raised his brow, his hand at the switch, awaiting the go-ahead.

But I won’t be destroyed
, Edison thought. He balled his fists inside his coat pockets.
I will not let jealousy or circumstance be my ruin! I’ll do whatever it takes to protect my legacy and reputation. And I’m protecting the people of this great nation as I protect myself, though they might not realize or admit it. Shocking stray cats and electrocuting elephants to prove Westinghouse’s current is deadly! Creating a superior lightbulb, much better than anything that pompous British arse, Joseph Swan, claimed to have devised! Even paying those mercenary thugs Anderson, Keppie, and Quinn to get rid of Louis Le Prince! That damnable Frenchman! He dared to challenge me, and he lost! They all lost! I am still the world’s greatest inventor!

Edison nodded.

The technician threw the switch, sending 6,600 volts through the wires. Instantly, Topsy’s gigantic, leathery body stiffened, her head lifting and her trunk curling inward. Her eyes went white and huge. The audience behind the fencing gasped. Edison’s fists tightened even more.

Smoke rose from each of Topsy’s feet, rapidly becoming a foul white sheet that caressed her legs and torso. She strained against the chains that held her in place. The stench of cooking flesh filled the air.

So be it
, Edison thought.
This film will remind the world of who I am, what I’ve done. I will not be challenged! I will not be defeated!

Topsy listed slowly to the right, and then crashed onto her side, her legs sticking out straight, the copper-lined sandals wobbling. The smoke continued to roil around her, and for a few moments her chest heaved as if she was still breathing. Her trunk fluttered against the ground like an unmanned fire hose. Then she went still.

With a whoop of excitement, Burke clapped his hands, ran over to the fence and crawled over it to stand at the base of the platform.

“Did you get it?” he said with a grin. “What a show!”

Edison nodded dismissively. Jones continued to crank the camera, not wanting to end this spectacle too soon. Around him the crowd began to murmur once more. Then someone laughed aloud. Then more laughed and nudged each other. Several older women appeared to be crying, with white handkerchiefs over their faces.

“Taught that beast a lesson, we did!” cried an old man. “She ain’t gonna kill nobody no more!”

“You see that smoke?” shouted a teenage boy. “Thought she might up and catch fire!”

“Oh, God, oh dear God,” said a young woman. “The poor creature!”

“Poor creature?” said another man. “No! Man killer, that’s what she was.”

The spectators talked a bit more, craned over the fence to have a better look at Topsy’s corpse, and then began to pull away and turn back toward the front of the park. Edison directed Jones to stop filming and the technicians to detach the wires from the elephant. One of them burned his hand on contact with the elephant’s hide, so they stepped back to give the animal a few minutes to cool down.

The clouds overhead went dark with the threat of impending snow. Edison pulled up the collar of his coat then directed Jones to pack the equipment back into the steamer trunks.

“I think we got it all,” said Jones. “We’ll get it back to the studio and get this in the works. It should make a powerful, frightening point about AC.”

Edison crossed his arms and replied, “It should at that.” A heavy
splat
of wet snow dropped onto his hat. Then another, and another. “Hurry up now! Don’t let the damned camera get wet!”

***

Friday, January 9, 1903, Lower East Side Manhattan

The two hookers were near opposites of each other, one rail thin with limp blond hair and tiny, childlike breasts, the other plump and full, with a bounty of curly brown hair and breasts like juice-heavy grapefruits. They were about the same age, somewhere between twenty and thirty, though Andrew assumed a whore’s age was difficult to pin down given her lot in life. They were seated side by side on the edge of the bed, naked, painted toes tapping the floor, watching him with hopeful, bruised eyes as he locked the door and turned toward them.

“You’s a might fine lookin’ young man,” said the blonde as she scratched at a patch of dry skin on her cheek. “Why, I ain’t seen someone as fine lookin’ as you in a long time. Lord, maybe never! You got that strong chin, them deep green eyes, that full head o’ dark hair. Most men come to us is old and pocked to pieces. Some ain’t got but a nickel in their pockets and not a tooth in their heads, and they smell like three weeks worth o’ shit and gin. You come down this side of town before?”

“No.” Andrew went to the bed, pulled back the blanket, and cringed at the sight of bedbugs trundling across the sheet toward the warmth of the hookers’ asses. He threw the blanket back into place and said, “The floor is hard but clean. Cleaner.”

“Fuck you on the floor?” The hookers looked at each other and laughed. Their laughter was gritty like sand. He guessed they smoked lots of cigarettes. “You got a blanket there in that leather case you brought with you?”

“No blanket, I’m sorry,” said Andrew. “But my coat is soft. It should do all right.” He shrugged out of his wool ulster and placed it on the floor.

The hookers got up from the bed. “One at a time? Or both at once?”

Andrew hesitated. This was all new to him. “What do you usually do?”

“We usually do whate’r a man wants us to do,” said the brunette. She moved over to Andrew and rubbed her breasts against his chest. Her hand trailed down his vest toward his trousers and playfully tapped the buttons of the fly. Andrew took a sharp breath, and in spite of the cold, sweat popped out on his brow. His cock stirred, instantly hard and tender with need. “You’s a man of means, clearly. You got a rich daddy? He know what you’re up to?”

“No.”

“Don’t worry,” the brunette continued. “We ain’t tellin’ your daddy or nobody else. We wanna make you happy. Want you to come back lookin’ for us next time you want a ride.”

The blonde giggled and snatched up one of the thin pillows from the bed. She held it to her chest. Andrew hoped the pillow wasn’t filled with bugs, like the sheet, though he imagined it was.

He had rented this room in a Lower East Side flophouse for a few hours. It was the most disgusting place he’d ever been. The walls were warped and water-stained. The gas light on the wall by the door sputtered, and the splintered transom hung open like a broken jaw. He didn’t even remember the name of this decrepit place. The Raven, maybe.
Or the Crow, or Sparrow. Some kind of bird. Not that it mattered. He was newly eighteen, and this was his gift to himself. Sex with no strings, no demands, no expectations or judgments. It was his attempt at finding something that might make him smile and forget his life, if just for a short while.

The hookers dropped down, side by side, on his coat. They struck awkward poses they must have thought were appealing and winked at him. He hesitated, and then shed his shirt, vest, suspenders, and trousers. They oohed and ahhed when he peeled off his union suit, leaving him standing as naked as they were in the cold room.

“Now that’s what I wanted to see,” said the brunette. She reached over to cup his stiff organ with her hand. He instinctively pushed his hips in her direction. His jaw tightened. She cooed and kissed the tip. “Oh, yes, my love. You want me to use my mouth?”

Andrew nodded, his breath locked, momentarily unable to speak. He noted the blonde watching, still holding the pillow, as several bedbugs crawled up her neck and she unceremoniously flicked them away. His gut turned over with desire and disgust.

It wasn’t that he didn’t want to do this, to take these hookers and take them good, to dive his anger and his lust home until he was emptied of them both. He’d planned this trip to the slums of Manhattan ever since his eighteenth birthday last month. He’d made love, of course, with several of the rich debutants who lived near him in Riverdale. But it was never right, never good enough, never complete enough. Those girls were giddy and prudish, agreeing at first then protesting when they were done, or nearly done, that they should not have been talked into doing such a thing, that they should save themselves for their husbands, a blatant hint that if he wanted it again then he best offer up a diamond and a proposal. At that point he would leave them in their perfumed silliness in the grasses behind the dovecotes or in the quiet corners of the stables. He’d return to his own home and his own third floor bedroom, where he would lie on the floor and wish he were dead.

Andrew’s mother, the elegant Andrea Edmonds, fretted over her son’s melancholia, which had plagued him since earliest childhood. Married to Andrew’s stepfather, the steel baron Richard Edmonds, Andrea had hired the most expensive doctors throughout Manhattan to examine her son and prescribe various tonics, potions, and drugs to cure his malaise. Nothing worked. With rare exception he was lethargic and distant. Andrea pleaded him to tell her what was wrong. She bribed him with every thing a young man could want—an automobile, fine clothes, an expensive scoped German hunting rifle, a thoroughbred racehorse to compete at the Coney Island Jockey Club racetrack. She even gave him his own movie camera, an inheritance passed from his grandfather to his late father and now to Andrew.

He remained solemn and despondent.

Andrew cared for his mother and did not want to worry her, so he had never told her the whole truth. There was a shadow inside him that he could not get rid of, a festering knot that clung to his heart and his gut, draining his energy and any potential joy like a hungry leech. There were even times when the shadow caused him to black out and lose several hours of time. He would feel it coming, the darkness. It would start as a humming in his veins and then quickly crescendo to a roar behind his eyes. Then all would go dark. He would wake up places he couldn’t remember going to, wondering what he’d been doing. Sometimes he suspected he might have done bad things. Though with the exception of an occasional bruise or an odd trinket in his pocket—a feather, small bone, a torn piece of cloth, an animal tooth, a button—he’d never had any conclusive evidence of what happened while he was gone.

Struggling against the shadow as best he could, he went on with life, finishing school at the prestigious Salward’s Academy, earning grades good enough to be accepted to Harvard for the upcoming fall term. To pursue what, though, he couldn’t fathom. He had no interest in finance, business, or languages. He detested science and religious studies. He had some talent with art and music, though couldn’t concentrate on any of it
long enough to create anything of value. The only thing that captured his imagination was the movie camera, and there were no classes in filmmaking. Yet, alone in his room or the family library or any of his mother’s gardens, when his hands adjusted the lens, set the legs of the tripod, threaded the film, and turned the crank, he felt a sense of purpose and focus. He felt as close to relaxed as he ever did. He could spend an entire afternoon filming falling snow, wagons or carts passing by on the street, or stray dogs sniffing around the rosebushes.

“What you waitin’ for, boy, the Rapture?” cooed the blond hooker, still clutching the pillow.

“We charge by the hour, you know,” said the brunette, then she glanced at her friend to see if that was an acceptable demand.

Andrew knelt on the coat, and immediately the two hookers wound themselves around him like snakes around a staff, clutching his hair, tickling his chest, pulling his nipples, and taking turns tugging his cock with skilled fingers. He fought it at first, feeling a bizarre sensation of drowning, but then the blonde whispered, “Honey, we’ll take care of you. We can tell you got a lot on your mind. Just quit thinkin’ and let us do what we do best.” She smiled at him then, and it was a surprisingly lovely and reassuring smile, so he nodded and closed his eyes.

In the frosty cold of the flophouse floor, on the lumpy cushion of his ulster overcoat, he released control of the moment. As his mind let go of thoughts and replaced them with a kaleidoscope of strange, whirling colors, the girls caressed him and whispered into his ear the most beautifully scandalous words. One of them—which he didn’t know and couldn’t care—took him, fully, in her mouth. Andrew’s spine stiffened and his buttocks clenched as electric energy built in his core, hot and urgent.

“Not yet, honey,” whispered the brunette. The mouth let go and then it was on his own lips, her tongue moving in to join his. He could taste her, taste himself, smell her hope and resignation.

Hands traced his ribs then down his sides to his hip bones and on to the tight muscles of his thighs.

The tongue withdrew from his mouth. There was a sigh, and then a small hand took his and guided it to a warm and wet crevice. There was a soft, satisfied moan in response.

A knowing hand caught his organ again, squeezed with just the right intensity, and his urgency intensified. Andrew bore down against the need, rushed into it head-on. The electricity in his groin spun and grew, driving sparks into his brain from behind his eyes. He grunted and rose up on his knees. He grabbed for the hand that held him, found the arm attached to the hand and flipped the hooker onto her front. From her weight he knew it was the brunette.

“Oh, now we’re ready, are we?” she squealed.

He felt for her again, found her open and waiting, kneed her legs apart and drove himself forward.

“That’s the way!” she laughed. “Oh, honey, that’s the way!”

He thrust into her again, again, still not opening his eyes, not wanting to see where he was or who they were but wanting only to feel, to hold this magnificent, overwhelming, and glorious sensation as long as he could.

The electricity expanded, coiling and growing, focusing at a pinpoint, a white hot pinpoint that was in command, that would not be denied.

He felt a second pair of hands gently slide up his leg, cupping and kneading. That unlocked the gate and it all rushed forward. He exploded with a wail, throwing himself as hard as he could forward and into the brunette. She squawked, “You knocked me off the coat!” The waves came, crashing, over and over, and he rode with them over and over until the surf settled and the moon came out behind his eyes and he slipped away from the hooker and rolled onto his side, breathing heavily.