The Lightning Keeper (48 page)

“You think I have done wrong?”

“I think you have been foolish in your trust.”

“Please, Toma, do not speak unkindly about Dr. Steinmetz.”

“He has shown me no kindness, and no respect. If this scheme is to benefit mankind, why does he send his men like thieves in the night?”

“There is no excusing that.” How angry he is, she thought.

“And are you content to be part of this insane experiment? There will be no water in that brook, and you will live on the edge of a very large sink—to put it politely—that is forever draining and filling. Those rocks we skated through? At high tide there will be no rocks.”

“Please, I cannot bear to hear you speak this way.”

“Is that why you said nothing to me?”

“It was not mine to tell. I believed that Dr. Steinmetz would—”

“You trusted him and not me?”

“Do stop finishing my thoughts, Toma!” She could feel her anger rising to meet his.

“You will say next that it is not my business. It is, after all, your property.”

“I did not and would not say that.” What she was thinking was that this project was too important for her to dismiss on the grounds of her imperfect understanding; much less should she recruit allies to her instinctive dislike of it. Since New Year's Day she had put the matter out of her mind. Was it too much to hope that Dr. Steinmetz, too, had forgotten about it?

She looked at Toma, wondering what part of this she could explain to him, but he would not meet her eyes. He is like a child sulking in judgement, she thought. He had come to her with an angry suspicion of her complicity and had seized on appearances to condemn her. Had he no generosity, no love? And if he had no interest in what she might say, why bother? Why not, indeed, have done with it once and for all?

“Toma.” Had he not been looking at her he might not have recognized her voice. “I have something else to tell you. Perhaps we should sit down.”

“S
O THIS IS IT
…the big moment for the guineas?” Stefan was looking at the control panel but glancing over his shoulder every few seconds at
the advance of the billowing, blackish cloud. Toma could smell his fear.

“Guinea pigs, Stefan. I'm sure the expression is guinea pigs.” Toma's eyes were fixed on the display of the electroscope, whose needle indicated an intense electrical conversation between the aerial and the cloud.

“Ja, pigs, whatever. I guess part of the experiment is to see what happens to us. I should have made a will.”

“You are not going to die, Stefan, unless you talk yourself into a heart attack. Every reasonable precaution has been taken. Look at us.”

There was a suggestion of farce in what they wore: shaded eyeglasses, rough cotton tunics without pockets, trousers with drawstring waists, thick-soled cork clogs that creaked on the cork flooring. Around and above them, more insulating cork on walls and ceiling constructed with wooden pegs rather than nails. Their view of the aerial and the transmission lines just outside the tower was through thick slabs of isinglass with reflective coating.

Stefan was not impressed. “There are six things in this room that could kill us under the right circumstances, maybe more.” He spoke with an assurance that made Toma smile.

“And here I thought you were the perfect assistant because you know nothing about electricity. Now, all of a sudden, you are an expert.”

“Ja, well, I read, don't I, so I know a few things.”

“Things?”

“Like those switches over there.” He pointed to a row of three wooden levers in the wall. The switches themselves were positioned outside the observation room and would open the circuits on the transmission cables in case of emergency.

“There was a man in Colorado, 1908, a maintenance worker who goes to open a switch on a high-voltage line which is not in service. But you know what? Big surprise: there is seventy thousand volts of electricity in that line, static or induced, I forget which, because the cable next to this one has been struck by lightning.”

“So what happened?”

“There is an arc, the electricity follows the switch away from the pole, and it kills the man, because he is now part of the circuit.” Stefan
sounded almost pleased with his tale, smacked his lips in grim satisfaction.

“We are nowhere near the switches, Stefan: that's the point of the levers.”

Stefan rounded on him, eyes glittering in anticipation of the checkmate. “They estimate the arc in Colorado at ten feet. Ten feet, and you think we are safe with your toy switches?”

“I don't know. That was years ago, and different equipment. Maybe the guy was standing in a puddle.”

“My point, boss, is that at these levels—how many volts are we talking?—everybody guesses and nobody knows. The only sure thing is that we shouldn't be so close, shouldn't be here at all.”

“Aren't you curious? It is like being inside the volcano, or in the curling crest of the tidal wave. Maybe this is how the world begins, or ends. Anyway, no one has ever tried to do this.”

“No one has been so stupid.”

“It shouldn't be long now. You keep your eyes on the dead line and the live one in parallel, the ones farthest from the aerial. With any luck we won't have to touch the switches at all.”

“Luck,” repeated Stefan, making the word sound like a curse.

Walls and isinglass windows notwithstanding, the observation room commanded perfect views in every direction and inspired a sense of precedence, even possession. When Toma had first climbed the stairs he had stood on a bare windblown platform roofing the equipment room below, and he felt a tightening in his chest. It was familiar, this high vantage on everything that mattered. In Montenegro there had been a pillar of rock near his valley in the mountains, and he had sent the Englishman there to find his flowers. Harwell came back that evening and spread his drawings and specimens out on the table, but all he could talk about was the view, as if he had seen the world for the first time. Toma himself had looked down from that height, seen the pasture like a green silk handkerchief, and through the notch where the road descended to the broad plain of the Sand
ak, the roof, red tiles radiant with an immanent joy, the roof of the house where she lived. He could never afterward escape from this scene, had no defense against its innocence.

And what did he see when he gazed down from the unfinished rampart of Peacock's Folly through the invisible filter of memory? The silk mill and the falls with their thundering mists, the dusty yards and shabby outbuildings of the ironworks, and the Truscott house at his feet. At his back was the mountain, as it had been in Montenegro, and, as he had then, he now constructed a story, in defiance of history and common sense, a story with a happy ending.

It was a simple thing, a machinery with but two working parts. The details and circumstances of the story might change, and had in so many ways since they first met on the docks in Naples, but that was just the shifting of scenery upon the stage. They had spoken lately of paradise because it was hard to speak directly of love, and he was sure she had seen through his words to the great unuttered fact of his paradise, which was her presence, only that, and he, if need be, might be a small figure in the corner of the scene, kneeling, transfigured.

They had passed a great crisis of the sort that must, if logic had any purchase, have shattered every connection. He had come to her in anger, literally with a rod in his hand, having judged her guilty of breaching their trust in one another; but he had been humbled by what he then learned. Perhaps she thought to end everything by telling him about the child she would bear. But it happened otherwise.

He went away from her house the way a man leaves his doctor's office after receiving a grave diagnosis. He is numb; he must not think too much on this thing or it will drive him mad; he distracts himself with the details of other matters. But the mind plays games with itself, not only when we dream; Toma, trying to put Harriet out of his thoughts, wandered to that resonant scene of his youth, became mesmerized by a distant red roof burning a hole in his heart.

He was always guarded in speaking about his home and family, the minefields of memory. He knew he had told Harriet about Aliye…told her what? When he had seen Harriet on the docks at Naples it seemed that by some miracle Aliye lived again. That much he must have told her: he had loved someone else and she had died. But there was more. Aliye had lived under the red roof and she died there, alone, by her own hand, and his child died with her. He remembered the night, the new moon after the rain, and the chill. How cold she must have been. He had not even spoken to her. It was Harwell who sent her
away, gave his candle to light her path home. He had not even spoken to her. He saw the wavering pinpoint of light along the road, then the faint outline of her as the road turned away to the descent, then nothing. How Harwell must have hated him that night. How he hated himself, even though he was sure he had done the right thing.

His mother had said they could not marry—she is not one of us, they are not our people—and because he could not stand against her he came to accept what he had done, or not done, as a badge of strength. He was contradicted only by a certain unguarded expression of sadness on Harwell's face. They never spoke of the matter.

The question he could not answer was why did she die? What if Harriet had been brave enough to ask? And what if he had been brave enough not to send Aliye away? He did not know, but how could it have led to any greater sorrow? He would have a son; he would not have her blood on his hands.

Aliye had been taken from him, and Harriet had been set in her place. Why? So that he might love her again, more perfectly. He did not believe in divine providence but he believed this, even if he could not make sense of it. He was amazed at his own tenacity, his stupid, brute tenacity. She was married to another man, and would bear his child. But he loved her, and he knew she loved him. There was no logic here, but there was hope, which grows like a weed in waste spaces. The ending of the story would take care of itself.

He knew it was nearly time by the prickling on the nape of his neck, the hairs rising on the invisible flow of electrons from the mountain to the cloud. Any man who had worked on Lightning Knob knew this feeling, knew that he had to get under the protection of the sandbags or at least away from the aerial as fast as possible. Had he been standing out on the bare rock he would have shouted: “Cover!” Now he glanced at Stefan, who had little experience of the lightning. His friend might be staring into his own grave: the lips moved without making a sound. Perhaps he was praying, in spite of himself.

He would have spoken to Stefan but was stayed by the excruciating whiteness that penetrated everything. Of course the thunder followed before he could blink, but his impression afterward was that the lightning strike had somehow missed them. Except for the smoldering in one bank of lightning arresters and the wisps of steam trailing away
from the aerial, there was little alteration in what he could see through the viewing port.