Free The Invention of Exile by Vanessa Manko Page B

leather dull. Vera leans on Julia’s knee, clear eyes like his own, her bobbed hair adding a modicum of insouciance to her young gaze. And the boys: his Aussie, still in breeches, and his Sonnie, chin tucked, eyes peering up and out, not without reservation because, Austin remembers it now, the youngest boy had been frightened, scared of the black box with the draped sheet, the folds cascading like some black ghost. The flash of the bulb, the way it exploded light.
    He looks at himself now. How confidently he stood, lording over his family, a proprietary hand placed on Julia’s shoulder. Had he done that of his own accord or had the photographer instructed him to do so? It was certainly not his gesture. Or, then, maybe it was. The proud callousness of youth, he thinks. He’d learned now, knows, that one owns nothing. Possessions—whether things or people—all an illusion. How easily the language upheld the fallacy—“my wife,” “my children,” he’d said at the embassy. He shudders to think of the white marbled walls, that floor. The nasal-deep voice of the young clerk, “We are not permitted.”
    A backhand sweep and the pictures scatter. The click and flutter of them as they fall to the floor. His palms press against the table’s edge, banging the wall once, twice. The day’s clouds pass over the sun and the room grows dark and then light, and then dark again. In periphery, he can see the branches stretched across the window, full and pulsing on the little wind. A bus passes, exhaling its exhaust through the window. Below too, men and women walk past like the steady flow of days. He wishes, longs to be one of them.
    The floor is littered with the photographs; white squares facedown. He sighs and he picks them up—first one, then another. He stares into a younger self, and he can tell by the eyes, his eyes, that he had been a happy man.
    He’ll write to her now. He puts the photographs back in the envelope, years falling through hands.
    They’d fared better than most. That he knew. Lives broken, but still lived. They could, after all, do just this—write to each other. To look at a map and point to where each resided. Others had no geography, lost to each other and the world. After everything, a name, an address, a place to be found—these were precious, fortunate things.
    And yet.
    He is a man who can calculate the mass of a water glass, the circumference of an apple, the velocity of a pencil’s descent. He knows the seven kinds of energy, can measure the potential and kinetic energies of an object at rest, an object in motion. He knows the formulas for entropy, inertia. He can tell one how light travels, sound. His world, days are a landscape of equations. He can build a radio out of wire and magnets. He can disassemble a clock and make a metronome. He knows Ohm’s law, Fourier’s law, Newton’s laws. He knows energy could neither be created nor destroyed.
    He sits at his table again, picks up his pen this time, a clean sheet of drafting paper that he’s folded into quarters.
Dear Julia
, he begins. He is finding it hard to write more, to find the words.
Dear Julia
. That is as far as he can get.
    But there are other letters that he can write with no effort at all.
    Commissioner of Patents
    Washington, D.C.
    United States of America
    To Whom It May Concern:
    Be it known that I Austin Alexandrovich Voronkov, applicant for citizen of the United States of America of Bridgeport, CT—my present, temporary residence being Avenida Sonora, Mexico City, D.F., Mexico—have invented a new and useful boiler fire box surface by way of increasing the conduits, or tubes. The following is a specification:
    D RAWING N O . 1 is a full perspective diagram.
    Below, N O . 2 and 3 are cross-section drawings of the water conduits, tubes, attached to the front face of the firebox by phalanges with metal joints, described here in No. 4, 5,