In the Electric Eden Read online

  In the

  Electric

  Eden

  In the

  Electric

  Eden

  stories

  Nick Arvin

  In the Electric Eden: Stories. Copyright © 2018 by Nick Arvin. All rights reserved. Printed in Canada. No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles and reviews. Bower House books may be purchased with bulk discounts for educational, business, or sales promotional use. For information, contact Bower House P.O. Box 7459 Denver, CO 80207 or visit BowerHouseBooks.com.

  Design and illustration by Margaret McCullough

  Featuring three new stories: “The Accident”, “Location”, and “Armistice Day”.

  “Commemorating” first appeared in The Black Warrior Review.

  “The Accident” and “Location” first appeared in The Normal School.

  “Armistice Day” first appeared in The Rocky Mountain News.

  Library of Congress Number:

  2018937273

  ISBN 978-1-942280-55-2

  10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

  For my parents

  Contents

  Introduction

  the Electric Eden

  What They Teach You in Engineering School

  Commemorating

  Electric Fence

  Radio Ads

  Telescope

  The Prototype

  Two Thousand Germans in Frankenmuth

  Take Your Child to Work

  Aeronautics

  The Accident

  Location

  Armistice Day

  Acknowledgments

  Author Biography

  Introduction

  We mark the eras of human history by our technologies—Stone Age, Iron Age, Information Age—and we often mark the eras of our own lives by our technologies as well. I place a memory in context by recalling the car that I drove at the time, and a life-changing phone call is remembered, in part, by the shape of the phone that I gripped. An important aspect of my memory of 9/11—an event made possible by the intersection of some specific technologies—is hearing about it on the radio, and then searching for a television where I could see the news, and finally of watching the towers fall on a tiny, silent cathode ray TV set on the counter at a diner.

  We assume that the progress of time turns technologies into history, but perhaps it is the other way around, and without the progress of technology we would have no history. In the film Cave of Forgotten Dreams, Werner Herzog shows two Neolithic paintings that are located on the same cave wall and appear so identical in style they might have been painted by a single artist. But carbon dating has shown that they were painted 5000 years apart. Herzog, in a voiceover, observes that the paintings indicate a people who lived “outside of history.” Time was a circle, until the rapid evolution of our machines pulled it straight, and if our technologies define the line of the past, then we assume that they will do the same in the future. In 1999, I was in a writing workshop where another student, Antoine Wilson, submitted a short story titled “It Is the Business of the Future To Be Dangerous.” I particularly envied that title. Later, I learned that the phrase comes from the writings of the philosopher Alfred North Whitehead. “It is the business of the future to be dangerous,” Whitehead wrote, “and it is among the merits of science that it equips the future for its duties.”

  The future seems more dangerous than the past because we cannot imagine what we will soon invent, or even the consequences of the things we have recently invented—whether the effects of social media, the emissions of our engines, or the ramifications of artificial intelligence. But the only solutions we consider involve different technologies, new technologies, more technologies. To go backward is impossible, for a thousand reasons. The rush of progress is larger than any one of us, a dumb behemoth; where it will lurch next, we can only guess, and even the engineers, scientists, and programmers who feed it are helpless to stop it, can only hope to give it the slightest of nudges.

  I wrote the stories collected in In the Electric Eden during the years 1998 to 2001, and the book was first published in 2003. At the time I intended for only two of the stories in the collection to be considered historical fiction, but looking at it now I see that time makes all fiction into historical fiction. The stories that were contemporary when I wrote them rely on technologies and devices that now seem quaint, or soon will. They record a world where many of us didn’t own a cell phone; voicemail was a relative novelty; YouTube, Facebook, and Twitter didn’t exist; and Amazon was a website that sold books. I remember I was sitting at a desktop computer searching the internet when I stumbled across a video of Thomas Edison’s 1903 film of Topsy the elephant’s electrocution—featured in the title story of In the Electric Eden—and the fact that I could watch a video on an internet website still seemed remarkable to me.

  By that time I had studied engineering in college, and I had worked for a couple of years in product development at Ford. Engineering was a career I had stumbled into, based on a knack for math and science and a vague attraction to the idea of building things like rockets and airplanes. But I’d grown up in a little Midwestern town where I didn’t know any actual engineers, and I had no practical experience with what they did day-to-day. Becoming an engineer was like parachuting into a strange tribe with its own language, customs, and habits of thinking. It was interesting to observe these people, and to consider the effects of the things we were creating, how the things we make in turn remake our lives, our feelings, our souls.

  Fiction has always been my means, or mechanism, for grappling with the world, asking questions, trying to find patterns and threads of sense. It is in our nature to understand ourselves and our world through our stories, and as we shape our stories, our stories in turn shape us, in a restless cycle. Stories and technologies are similar in this way, two feedback loops between creators and creations, two conversations we are having with ourselves.

  Engineers who write fiction are relatively rare, and many of the engineers who do write fiction favor science fiction, which often reflects on the same themes I’ve mentioned here. My own stories are set in the past or the present, but it is all of a continuum: the present is the science fiction of the past, and fiction describing tomorrow is the historical fiction of tomorrow’s tomorrow.

  In one of the stories in this collection, a character in the eighteenth century marvels at a new technology that allows a man to fly. He observes, “The hard shell of the impossible had been cracked, and who could say what might appear next?” I believe that, whether we are noticing it or not, the hard shell of the impossible is cracking every day; these stories are an attempt to notice.

  —Nick Arvin

  2018

  “Progress, therefore, is not an accident but a necessity…. It is a part of nature.”

  —Herbert Spencer

  “I, though interested in diesel engines, did not take my eyes off the girl.”

  —Max Frisch

  In the Electric Eden

  My grandfather Henry kept an unusual umbrella stand beside his front door. Encased in seamless gray leather, it appeared coarse-grained and lusterless in the shadowed corner where it stood. Beneath my fingers it felt rough and slightly bumpy. Generally cylindrical, it widened at the bottom, like a tree trunk, or an elephant’s foot—which it was. Topsy had been the elephant’s name.

  Recently, I received an e-mail that started me thinking about the umbrella stand again, and I began to do some research, in the library, on the Web.

  One central fact can be agreed upon: they Westinghoused Topsy on the grounds of Luna Park, Coney Island, on Sunday, January 4, 1903.
But the histories and novels tend to depict the event with bright lights and blazing colors, offering in it a symbol for all the excesses of Coney’s heyday. We see an elaborate stage, a giant switch labeled 100,000 Volts, bleachers filled with cheering spectators at ten cents a head. Thomas Alva Edison, the Wizard of Menlo Park himself, presides. A score of men strain against ropes as big around as their arms to bring Topsy into position. For a warm-up she eats bushels of cyanide-laced carrots and shakes them off. In the background Luna Park’s quarter million electric bulbs burn against a dark sky, transforming night into noon and providing the park with its advertising sobriquet: The Electric Eden. The execution switch is thrown and two hundred and fifty thousand filaments flicker and dim.

  The scene my grandfather described to me, however, seemed much more flatly horrifying.

  The trouble all began when another animal, a dog named Marie, was lost.

  Henry was just a boy at the time and Marie belonged to his Uncle Fielding. Fielding was fun, the sort of man who knew instinctively where a dog wanted to be scratched and who could pull a boy onto his knee and chatter happily—whispering one minute, then booming into a shout and shaking and tickling—until the child was silly with giggles. Fielding was a drinker, however, and when he drank his face became red, his eyes bloodshot. He would go on binges, and then he no longer scratched dogs or told stories. Instead he smoked ferociously. His wife, Emma, referred to this, angrily, as Fielding’s “bibulous state,” and she avoided him at such times. She would come over alone to visit with Henry’s mother and father or she would disappear into her bedroom and claim illness until her husband sobered. On the occasions when Uncle Fielding—actually Henry’s mother’s cousin—came over in his bibulous state, Henry was sent outside to play.

  Everyone acknowledged that Emma, Fielding’s wife, was pretty and quite a catch for Fielding. She was charming—this was the word that always came up, “charming,” although Henry had once overheard his mother mutter “arrogant.” Emma did tend to hold herself at a distance from others, and she had impeccable posture, her chin raised a few degrees above level. Before Fielding met her and they married she had been a teacher and she never entirely lost that teacherly air. Henry, however, did not find her arrogant. Emma often brought him candies or slipped a nickel into his palm when his mother wasn’t looking. She always asked how his schoolwork was going. She said the world was making rapid, wonderful progress and a good education would make Henry successful in it. She once took him to see a moving picture show about the attractions at the 1901 Pan-American Exposition in Buffalo and Henry nearly fell off his seat watching the immense images that moved like life upon the silvered screen. They depicted in silent detail the Exposition’s crowds and marvels: the Infant Incubators, the Aerio-Cycle, the Electric Tower capped by the Lady of Light. Afterward, he thanked Aunt Emma repeatedly. “It was beautiful,” he said.

  “I only hope it was educational.” She smiled. She spoke to the theater manager and took Henry to the booth upstairs to examine the projector, an Edison Company Projectoscope with a hundred intricate, silvery, simultaneously spinning parts. Emma admired Edison, his work ethic and his products, and she had recently given Henry’s family an Edison phonograph for Christmas. Sometimes when Fielding and Emma came over they would dance waltzes or two-steps together while Henry turned the phonograph crank.

  Despite Fielding’s drinking binges it was evident that Emma loved him very much and he her. They sometimes held hands like children do, and Fielding never made decisions without Emma’s consent. The two of them exchanged at certain moments a complex, secret look that Henry never saw either of them offer to anyone else. They had no children of their own, but they did have Marie. She was a collie-shepherd mix with dark eyes that bore a permanent expression of wide curiosity. Fielding had taught her a number of clever stunts including one where she stood on her hind legs and balanced a small steak on the end of her nose for as long as a minute, until Fielding gave an order and she flipped it, caught it in her jaws, and swallowed it in a gulp. Even Emma, normally above putting her hands on furry creatures, sometimes consented to rub Marie’s belly, to the dog’s squirming delight. Marie accompanied Fielding everywhere—except to work, and she passed his workdays slumped morosely by the door waiting for Fielding to return. She was not allowed to stray off, and Fielding kept her leashed whenever they went out on the town. He claimed that the immigrants crowding into the Lower East Side would happily steal a dog like Marie and make her into sausages. Everyone laughed at this.

  But late in the spring of 1902 Marie did vanish into the streets of New York. Her disappearance set off a series of tiffs and quarrels because it occurred while Fielding was at work and Emma was at home—she had opened the door to let in some air, and she had not noticed Marie was gone until Fielding came home.

  Some days later Fielding came over to the apartment where Henry and his parents lived, still upset about the dog. He complained to Henry’s parents in tones not so much bitter as despairing. Henry’s mother tried to comfort him; Henry’s father said Fielding would just have to forget about the animal. Fielding sighed. After a minute he wondered aloud if Henry would be interested in going to see the circus. It might cheer them both, he said.

  Henry was eleven years old at the time: of course he wanted to go. His mother gave him a few dimes and sent him out. Fielding folded a newspaper into a boat and Henry pushed this up and down through the gladdening spring air, narrating aloud a series of adventures, shuddering the boat side-to-side with each explosion of its imagined cannons. The day was warm and the streets were filled with people. Carriages and pushcarts rumbled on the flagstones. Men doffed their hats to ladies with parasols. Vendors in long gabardines sold fruits, tobacco, crockery, eyeglasses, stationery, fabrics, and other sundries. They took a ferry from Thirty-fourth Street to Queens, and looking back Henry could see all along Manhattan the unfinished buildings that punctured the skyline with skeletons of steel I-beams. In Queens the buildings were not so tall and the streets seemed wider. They passed hotels and saloons and boardinghouses, and there was a sharp, unpleasant smell that Uncle Fielding said was the kerosene refinery. He strode ahead and Henry followed, playing with the paper boat and calling to Fielding now and again to see some surprising thing, and the distractions were such that Henry did not notice until they were waiting in line at the entrance to the circus that Fielding had begun steadily rolling cigarettes and tippling from a flask in his pocket.

  For ten cents they saw Jolly Trixy, the Fat Lady, with Princess Wee Wee, thirty-four inches tall, and Zip, the What-is-it? They watched a man put a series of longer and longer swords down his throat, then, finally, a live snake. Henry thought these things were wonderful, but Fielding was smoking cigarettes as fast as he could roll them, and after the sword-swallowing he led Henry on a long silent ramble that moved between several tents without going into any.

  From the big tent came the noise of a brass band playing a tune that started slowly and then went faster and faster. Henry thought they might go inside, but his uncle led him around behind. A knife thrower was perched on a stool over a bucket of water, shaving with a blade shaped like a letter from a foreign alphabet. When he glanced up there was a nick of blood on his cheek. In circled cages, tigers and lions rested their great heads on heavy paws, and in a fenced area nearby stood several show horses, their manes woven into intricate braids. A half-dozen elephants idled in another pen. Fielding walked over, set his elbows on the fence above the water trough, and watched as an elephant put her trunk in and sucked, then curled the trunk into her mouth and drank the water down. “Know why elephants drink so much?” Fielding said. “To forget.” He laughed.

  Henry put his hands on the fence. He felt uncomfortable with his uncle in this state and began to wonder how he could start him back toward home. The elephant gazed at them with one eye. The creature was huge and ponderous and gray like something more mineral than animal. Fielding’s laugh, meanwhile, ended with a hacking cough, and he br
oke out his tobacco and rolled another cigarette. He lit up and puffed. The elephant raised her trunk to eye level and poked toward Fielding. Fielding grunted. “Here.” He held out the cigarette.

  The elephant grabbed it, as she might a peanut. The knife thrower from his seat across the pen called, “Topsy! Stop!” but the elephant opened her mouth, revealing wide flat teeth and an enormous muscular tongue, and deposited the cigarette there. She closed her mouth, then seemed to pause a moment. Henry pulled his hands away from the fence and backed up a step. “Uncle,” he said. Fielding sniggered drunkenly.

  The elephant stamped the earth abruptly with one foot—Henry felt the shock travel sharply along his spine—then screamed in a rending, hissing trumpet’s wailing. Her trunk lashed like an enraged serpent. Henry began to stumble back and his uncle grabbed his shoulder painfully. The elephant reared, and the creased and flabby gray flesh of her vast belly hung before Henry. Fielding was pulling him backward. Henry’s thoughts were rushing and without sense and already there were tears in his eyes making everything more confused. Suddenly the elephant came down, splintering the fence and knocking over the water trough. Henry’s shoes were soaked and he wondered—even as the elephant charged—if his father would be angry about the ruined leather. The serpent trunk seized Fielding and in lifting him pulled Henry upward also, until Henry cried out and suddenly Fielding let go. Henry landed on his back, the air knocked from his lungs, and now, above him, Fielding’s feet kicked and one of his shoes had come off and he beat with his fists against the trunk curled round his neck. The elephant shook him testily. Henry pushed against the ground with his elbows and slid a little away, still gasping, air like sand in his throat. The elephant stopped shaking Fielding, lowered him slightly; she seemed to be calming somewhat. The knife thrower was shouting, but Henry had no sense of where the man was, near or far. Then the elephant brought her head back, turned Fielding upside down, and, with a casual gesture, as a man might beat a mudcaked shoe against a stone, swung Henry’s uncle against the packed earth of the fairgrounds.