Free Us Conductors by Sean Michaels

an atom. Your group gathered twittering around each object. You seemed older than your friends. This time you were more careful in your admirations. You gazed at a childhood photograph of me, an old portrait from Leningrad. I was eleven or twelve, with a volume of the encyclopedia wedged clumsily under one arm. White stockings were hiked to my knees. In the camera’s long exposure my face seemed ghostly, already distant.
    “What were you scared of?” you asked.
    “Nothing,” I said.
    You found Schillinger’s frog and it chirped in your hand. You gave the happiest laugh. The lock of hair slipped from behind your ear.
    “Have it,” I said.
    “You mean it?”
    “Happy birthday.”
    I called everyone into the parlour. On a table sat a round, iced cake. I had supervised its assembly in the Plaza Hotel’s kitchen. Now I stepped behind the rose-coloured confection and twisted together two trailing wires, closing the circuit. Your mother watched me as one would watch a magician, waiting. I moved away; I invited you to read the cake’s inscription;I felt a nervous thrill. You stepped closer. Beneath the strata of buttermilk, sugar and chocolate, a mechanism invisibly stirred. A motor whirred. The oscillator in the buried radio watchman sensed your body’s electrical capacity, sent electricity along a wire into an illuminating vacuum tube, which set an axle spinning. The top layer of the cake swivelled clockwise on its axis, all the way around, a pastry shell on a hidden platform, a secret door—and revealed a copper birthday candle. The flame lit by itself, darted and danced. It wished.
    “Oh!” you said. You clasped your hands, you bent, you blew it out.
    “Happy Birthday,” we sang.
    It was you I felt in my electromagnetic field.

    TWO MONTHS went by.

    I REMEMBER I NOTICED a quarter on the pavement. I bent and picked it up, held it glinting in the lights of the Great White Way. There I was on Broadway, in the spring of 1929, a shining silver coin between my fingers. I slipped it into my pocket. I began to walk. I bumped into you.
    “Pardon me,” I said, shaking my head clear.
    You tugged at the collar of your sky-blue coat. “No, no, it was my fault.” You bent forward to walk on; and stopped. “Dr Theremin?”
    I blinked. “Clara,” I said.
    “Hi.”
    “How are you?”
    A smile grew on your face. “I’m good.”
    I had seen you only once since your birthday, at an anniversary party for the Kovalevs. You were with your parents. We waved across the room. The two of us had never had a private conversation. I would be out in the city, waiting for an elevator or passing through Central Park and I would recollect suddenly the angle of your gaze. I would wonder whether you ever thought of me. Now we stood facing each other on the sidewalk and you had swinging pearl earrings. I saw the slightest tremor in your brown eyes.
    “It’s a pretty night,” I said.
    “Yes.”
    Broadway is no place to stand still. We were being bumped and bounced by the throngs. Cars roared past, honking; men shouted after other men; you could hear the distant crash of trains. Signs shone over and around us, projected hazy words onto our raincoats. BARBERSH read the red letters on your left sleeve. A neon dollar sign hid in the gloss of my right shoe.
    “Would you like to get a coffee?” I asked.
    “Could we make it a drink?”
    On the boat to New York, I had been told the city had no nightlife left. This was the scuttlebutt from the bankers and salesman aboard the
Majestic
. They raised toasts of vodka, burgundy and calvados, told me to sip the good stuff while I could. “Prohibition,” complained a luggage baron from Tallinn, “has ruined the merry USA.”
    “It’s not Prohibition,” grumbled a jeweller from Omsk. “Drunks aren’t afraid to break the rules. The trouble is
enforcement
.”
    All of their favourite bars were shuttered: a speakeasy discovered in springtime would disappear by the time they returned in fall. I