Heritage of Smoke Read online

  “He lost the game for us.”

  “Come on, you can’t take it that seriously. You can’t go killing the players now! We’re taking you to the police station.”

  But three other guys came by and said, “Let him go! He had the right idea. We should go and get them all, those lazy motherfuckers. Give me that knife, I’ll stab the bum!”

  A brawl ensued, and pretty soon there were several dozen people fighting. Davor looked down the block and saw Vukcevic running away. He wished he could see a knife sticking out of the man’s back, with red streaks of blood running down the white shirt, but there was only a bright white shirt, glaring in the sun, beyond the several dozen young men who fought over whether or not to kill the players. They were so absorbed in their fight that they ignored Davor, who limped to the train station.

  STRINGS

  On Columbus and 106th, opposite a hotel on whose yellow neon sign a green monkey leaped and hung by its tail during the summer, near a burnt-down cancer ward, I shared an apartment with three Juilliard students. At first, there were five of us. My ex-Soviet roommate’s brother was one. The two ex-Soviets, fresh from the exile camp in Vienna, spoke no English and didn’t dare to leave the apartment. They spent the whole summer on a floor mattress, wrapped in a white sheet, embracing, gazing at a small TV we had found in a garbage heap on the Upper East Side. The antennae, sticking out like a V sign, could catch only one channel, which trembled and shifted up and down. When summer was over, the ex-Soviets stood up from the bed, speaking fluent English. The brother moved out and opened an ESP therapeutic center in Chinatown.

  A French violinist slept on the floor in an Alpine sleeping bag. Whenever he woke up, he rubbed his sweaty and hairy chest with a thick towel, and his bloodshot eyes stared at us as though we were the Andean cannibals, cooking him for supper. We had no air conditioning. On hot days, he woke up in puddles of his own sweat.

  I slept on the carpet from a rich man’s garbage heap. The only one of us who had a real bed was a Swiss cellist, who shaved twice a day and resentfully looked around him at the chaos the rest of us created with our clothes, papers, bread crumbs, utensils, shoeshine boxes, records, toothpaste tubes. I easily got used to the bohemian atmosphere, and paid no thoughts to how different it all was from what I had expected of my stay in America.

  But as my roommates and I ran through our apartment after a rat, stumbling over ashtrays, beer cans, unwashed plates with dry and cracked yolks, it occurred to me: Is this the way to live? Where are the cats?

  I didn’t wish to chase the rodent; he looked like a veteran of many battles, and that he was in the predicament of having a crew of Juilliard musicians after him was no doubt a result of his observing us for a while and correctly assessing us to be a bunch of wimps. He used to enter the kitchen at noon, charge the trash bag like a small boar, biting straight through the olive plastic in search of cheese crusts. We bought gourmet cheeses—since we snorted no coke, we had to have some wasteful recompense— which tasted the way cow dung, horse shit, a pigsty, and freshly cut grass smelled: strange how you grow to like the foul taste, but the fouler the tastier. The Frenchman scoffed at us for liking the cheeses, which, according to him, were bland. The stench of cheese must have thrown our rat back to his rural roots.

  In the rat’s first appearances, it was enough to set your foot in the kitchen, and he’d scurry off, squealing for his life. But after he had heard us playing Schubert string quartets, his caution vanished. Now he languidly rummaged through our garbage, looking fat and well established, and with an air of dignity, he strolled into the living room for the afternoon intermezzo.

  Schubert moved him. I read somewhere that Bach moves plants. Schubert rooted our rat to the spot, making him tremble to the harmonics of minor keys, raising his hairs so that he resembled a hedgehog. Now and then he stood on his hind legs, put his paws together like a squirrel praying for a pistachio. Perhaps he would have clapped his paws, but didn’t dare out of piety for the music. Der Tod und das Mádchen was his absolute favorite. We used to play it sometimes just to tease him. Then he’d come quite close to the cello; his little beady eyes shone with tears, his upper lips twitched, his little incisors pinching his lower lip.

  If he hadn’t been so scrawny, his ears so small, his tail so thin and wet, he could have passed for a squirrel and would have been quite likable. But Lord knows, he was not likable. Perhaps he wished to be. Perhaps he wished to make friends with us, and would have been proud of us. Perhaps he was proud of us. He may even have loved us. But we didn’t appreciate him as the audience—after all, playing to entertain a rat is not what you’d call lustrous. Yet his listening always humored us and put a joie de vivre, otherwise so hard to come by, into the strings.

  Still, we had to put a stop to his growing more and more brazen. Soon he would have been jumping on the table and dining with us. He would have grown so attached to us that he would have followed us on our dates, and certainly he would have been unstoppable if he had known Schubert’s Unfinished Symphony would caress the walls at Avery Fisher Hall, though I should think he’d have preferred it at Carnegie, where walls, old and sandy, must be easier to bite through.

  We discovered that he feared Bartók. I don’t know why he feared Bartók; maybe he hadn’t been educated well enough to take the stresses of modernity in music, though he kept up with other modernities and post-modernities as an NYC rat. Though Bartók made him run helter-skelter for shelter, we couldn’t keep playing Bartók just to keep a rat away.

  Alone, none of us could have handled the little Ayatollah. But united—a Frenchman, a Yugoslav, an ex-Soviet, and a Swiss— we dared to take him on. Actually, the Frenchman was away on a date with a woman from the fourth floor. He preferred a woman from the second floor, but one floor of elevator time was not enough for him to let her pick him up—that’s how he described it. Three floors of elevator time sufficed for a woman to pick him up. So the three of us intervened, like United Nations Blue Helmets of sorts—and if the Swedish anticommunist and anti-feminist elite had given us a Nobel Prize for peace, we could have done even better.

  As the rat strolled into our bathroom, we exchanged conspiratorial looks. It was too much; now he would like to share our toilet! The ex-Soviet jumped up and shut the bathroom door, swearing in Russian. The Swiss and I grabbed the table, the plates sliding and crashing on the floor. We barred the bathroom door. Then we opened it. Over the edge of the table, we aimed blows at the rat with a broomstick, a baseball bat (through which we had tried to Americanize ourselves), and an unscrewed table leg.

  Only two of us could fit in the doorframe at a time, so we took turns. Mostly we missed. The Swiss struck him first with the broomstick, despite its being thin—Swiss precision, I guess, but let’s stay away from stereotypes. The blow surprised the rat and incensed him. He shrieked gorily and jumped toward us, nearly the full height of the fence. I got goose bumps from the shrillness of his voice. We were almost ready to beat a retreat and sign a peace treaty, in Geneva if need be. But we were too ashamed.

  The rat jumped again, right up to the edge of the table. As he was falling down, I struck him with the baseball bat, which brushed his back and squashed his tail on a tile. The tile broke in half. Hardly a second later, the table leg struck him, blowing him off the floor; his body hit the heating pipe. Now he jumped without any order, like a panicky frog, in such high leaps that he could have jumped over the table. He jumped left, and right, and then backward. He fell into the bathtub. He couldn’t jump out of the slippery tub. We flung the table aside, the Swiss squealed Ya’ohl, and we all jumped forward. Blood squirted. The enamel of the tub cracked in many places.

  When he was finally dead, instead of triumphant, we were ashamed; we didn’t look into each other’s eyes. Slowly we swept his remains onto a Sunday New York Times Magazine and put it into three olive garbage bags. We threw the package into a large rusty iron dumpster in a somber, funereal mood. We washed the tub for days with all sorts of soaps, until
it shone. We threw away the clubs; henceforth, our table had only three legs. None of us took baths anymore, only showers, which of their own accord changed from hot to cold to hot.

  If we had hoped that after the assassination we would be rat-free, we were wrong. A chap similar to our murdered friend began to appear—so similar that it spooked us. But he didn’t care for music. We bought rat poison and put it in cheese. Either it didn’t kill him or another rat, indistinguishable, replaced him. At night there were constant noises coming from the walls: scuffling of rats in their love, work (tunnel and road construction), and debates in muffled squeals.

  One night a fire alarm went off. We didn’t bother to get out of our beds; the alarm went off so often that it always seemed a prank. But when hollering reached our ears and smoke our nostrils, we looked out the window. Pointed blue and orange tongues of fire licked the walls above windows like tongues rolling over upper lips after a greasy meal. We grabbed our passports, diplomas, money, and instruments, leaving behind pictures of families and girlfriends, suits, records, music scores. In long underwear, we ran down the smoky stairs out of the building, into the slushy snow. Rats leaped out the windows and thumped against the pavement and scurried away.

  Waiting, I got such a frostbite on my large toe that for a while it seemed it would have to be cut off, and probably would have been if I’d had a good enough insurance policy to visit a doctor. I still can’t feel anything in the toe.

  An orange school bus took us to shelter, and some shelter it was! People sick beyond repair, derelicts, drunks, drug addicts, lunatics, failed thieves who were still trying. We ran out of the stench and spent the night all rolled up in a bundle on a grating in a stream of urinated heat.

  Several days later, the Frenchman, the ex-Soviet, and I moved back into our apartment. The Swiss cellist moved back to Switzerland. Although the building was now all sooty, the windows gaping black, our part was nearly intact. There were no rats, not for a year, when we filed a claim against our landlord in a small claims court, demanding to be paid back several months of rent because there had been no hot water and heat. Although the landlord didn’t show up in the court, he won the case and evicted us.

  REMOTE LOVE

  Sirloin steak was served. The host had his done medium rare, his wife medium, and Tesla well. Tesla glanced at the hostess’s luminous hair, with curls like copper coils.

  When Tesla lifted his steak knife, it glistened like a mirror, elongating his face. Nevertheless, he rubbed the blade on several napkins while the hostess, Miriam, laughed at him. “What’s the matter, Nikola? You think we’re filthy rich.”

  “No, ma’am, you’re as clean as they come, but we live in a filthy world. I have only used sixteen napkins here, while at the Waldorf Astoria I use seventeen. That shows you how much I trust you.”

  “You are insufferable! I don’t know why we put up with you,” she said.

  “Oh, we know why we do,” said the host, Sebastian, straightening his pointed silvery moustache.

  Tesla scrutinized the wine in his glass for a few seconds, brought the glass to his thin lips, sipped, and swished the wine back and forth from one cheek to the other, enjoying the tart tightening of his gums. He sliced his steak into little cubes. He calculated the volume of each one before putting it into his mouth. He didn’t need a ruler; his sense of proportion, he was sure, would precisely give him the lengths. The first cubic morsel was probably ~0.8888 cubic centimeters, loosely speaking. As long as it was smaller than one, he was pleased with the quantity. He was impressed that the numeral eight emerged, and he decided he would enjoy the dinner as a thematic variation on the number eight; he squared it into sixty-four and chewed patiently, counting to sixty-four.

  Miriam observed his serrated jaw muscles working like an accordion. “My God, you are a patient eater.”

  “What is there to be impatient about?” he said. “It will take my stomach at least twenty-four hours to digest the beef. Why should it take my mouth less than sixty-four seconds to chew it?”

  He looked into the hostess’s eyes and, in the dim light, her pupils occupied more area than her blue irises—eight millimeters in diameter, which is to say, four in radius. Four squared times half of Pi. Of course, with each shift in the quantity of light, the diameter would change and so would the area. He carved an octagonal shape out of his steak. That’s partly why he liked his steak well done, and why he liked the knives to be extremely sharp—so he could cut out regular shapes.

  “Why, Nikola, you’re a sculptor with your steak,” Miriam said and glanced toward her husband, who was chewing obliviously with his eyes half closed to better concentrate on the joys of rare flesh. “It gives me pleasure to observe how precisely you cut it. Do you do everything so precisely?”

  “No, ma’am. Many things can’t be done precisely.”

  “Are you so precise in love as well?”

  “Depends on what you mean by love. If you mean a wireless transfer of electricity, then, yes, of course—I will be very soon. First I need to raise the means for doing so.”

  “Oh, I don’t mean that! That doesn’t sound like love but physics.” Miriam finished her second glass of Bordeaux.

  Nikola Tesla had the sensation that she was gently rubbing the calf of his leg with her foot. He blushed and wasn’t sure to what extent the flush in his cheeks was a result of the embarrassingly intimate bodily contact and how much of it was the dry wine and, at that moment, he had no idea how to establish a formula for solving the problem.

  When Miriam stood up to visit the toilet, he still had the feeling of her foot rubbing his calf. An electrifying sensation crawled up his skin and into his scalp, similar to what he felt during the public demonstrations in which he conducted two million volts of electricity over the surface of his body. After the experiments, he would glow in the dark for a few seconds, all his hairs standing, magnetized, and his mind nearly swooning in electrical ecstasy. The hairs that protruded outside his cuffed and sharply starched white shirt, on the back of his palm, stood up. This reminded him of his old tomcat from his childhood. Having seen sparks of static before petting the cat in the dark, Nikola had asked his mother whether the world was one huge tomcat, with lightning all over it. Now he lifted the edge of the embroidered tablecloth to peer down and noticed that the outer calf of his leg was leaning against the wooden leg of the table.

  He thought that his sensual reaction to the imaginary carnal contact with the hostess was treacherous of him, considering that his host, Sebastian Chesterfield, kindly invited him several times a month for dinner and, even more kindly, had bought some shares in the Nikola Tesla Company. And at the moment, Sebastian was speaking at the end of the table.

  “We live in most peculiarly volatile times. It seems we could become the perfect society, but it’s more likely that we will all end up in flames. These are sad days indeed.”

  “I think there has never been so much humour in the air,” Nikola responded.

  “How do you define humour?” Sebastian asked. “In the Greek way?”

  “No, as in joking. For example, Why does a policeman move to a corner whenever it gets cold in his room? Because he’s heard that the corner is ninety degrees.”

  “For my part, I like the police,” Sebastian commented.

  Tesla gulped from his glass of water, despite seeing tiny particles hovering in it—bacteria or dust? He was afraid only of living organisms. His office was full of lead, asbestos, and all sorts of heavy metals and their dusts, and none of them did any harm to him. He washed the water down with wine and continued.

  “One afternoon, a Dalmatian man woke up with a shriek of horror. What’s the matter? his brother asked. I had a dream that I was working.”

  “Sad, sad. It reminds me of how we indeed live in a world full of indolence,” Mr. Chesterfield said.

  “And how about this one? Two Montenegrins stand on a dock and enjoy the sunset colors. One says to the other, Look, there’s a man drowning! Oh, I see. And
we are just standing. You’re right. Let’s sit down.”

  “You come up with so many patents,” Miriam said, “it must be easy for you to come up with jokes.”

  “I dine with Mr. Clemens as often as I can in order to enjoy his witty conversation, but I can’t come up with a joke. I’m pretty gloomy when left to my own devices, and I don’t think humourously.”

  “Well, how about marriage?” asked Sebastian.

  “You mean, if I really want to be gloomy?”

  “He’s an eligible bachelor, now, isn’t he?” Sebastian addressed Miriam.

  “Oh yes, so tall and dashing, with all these pending and pendulous patents.” She swallowed a big gulp of wine, and the red lingered beyond the edge of her upper lip, on the superfine fuzz. “You need a business-savvy woman who will make sure you don’t get cheated out of your proper royalties. Ann Morgan adores you. With her father’s money, you’d never have to worry about financing your experiments.”

  “But she wears earrings,” Tesla protested.

  “She could take them off, if you told her to,” Miriam said.

  “But she would be offended.”

  “What’s wrong with earrings?” she asked.

  “The coiled metal so close to your brain interferes with your brain waves. You’re not in full possession of your senses. It’s quite possible that an advanced civilization from outer space could control you through high-frequency ether waves. I think it’s enough to take a look at our fellow citizens to realize that many of them aren’t real human beings but robots, controlled through their love of jewelry.”

  “Maybe you could control Ann’s brain using your electromagnetic toys,” Sebastian suggested. “She could be your robot.”

  “You have a point. I better start working on a mechanism to harness an heiress’s brain. I might change my attitude toward coiled bodily metals yet. But for now, I don’t want to deal with Ann’s jewelry.”