The violinist, of course, could not be blamed in the least. He had insisted on walking Blackie himself when he was submitting to a barrage of chemotherapy that would have felled lesser men. The dogwalker respected the violinist, though it was unpleasant to see him in his wretchedness. A dog in his state would have been euthanized long ago.

In fact that was how he had met the violinist; the violinist had not gone through the usual channels. The dogwalker had come upon him struggling to keep up with Blackie on a path near Turtle Pond. Two kids on skateboards had almost run them over, and the old man had begun to tremble violently. His bones were like porcelain. Worse, one of the kids had called Blackie a "f.a.ggot dog" as he swooped away on his board. (At that time the poodle had sported an unfortunate Continental Clip with Hip Rosettes. Later, the dogwalker had persuaded the violinist to switch to a basic Lamb.) But the skateboarder had infuriated him. Not the words, but what was behind them-malice directed at the dog. A senseless meanness of spirit. The poodle had never done anything to hurt the kid.

He had guided the frail old man to a ledge where he could sit, and from then on the poodle had been one of his charges.

He imagined telling the violinist he could not take Blackie. In his mind he went over the conversation as he stood with the dogs. They were waiting for a walk signal.

"I am sorry," he would say. "But if I took in all the dogs, even all the dogs I like best, I would be a pet shelter, not a dogwalker."

The violinist would gaze at him sadly with his watery blue eyes. In his youth, the attendant had said once, the violinist had been quite handsome, and she'd shown him a black-and-white photograph. The violinist had survived a death camp, Stalin. Now his skin was like paper, his teeth yellow.

"Can't you make an exception?" the violinist might ask.

"I would like nothing more than to take Blackie in," he could say. "But all I can do is help find a new family for him. Allow me to do that, at least."

What bothered him was that the violinist had been so good to his dog. Such goodness should be rewarded.

If he did not take the poodle, chances were he would never see him again, once the violinist was out of the picture. The poodle would live out the rest of his days with someone who did not care for him as the violinist had. Blackie would be brokenhearted and Sir Henry would be bereft.

Of course even he, the dogwalker, could not promise to bestow upon the poodle the violinist's brand of solitary, desperate cherishing. But with him at least the poodle would be a.s.sured of a dignified life, a steady stream of affection.

At his feet the poodle looked up at him.

"I should be talking to you about this," said the dogwalker. "It's not right, is it? You don't have a say in the matter at all."

No, he did not. Dogs were the martyrs of the human race.

The light turned and the three of them stepped into the crosswalk. Forward. The brightness of the day was upon them . . . he was lucky, he thought, with a sudden soar of hope. Here he was with his two favorite dogs, walking them at a perfect pace for all three. Neatly they jumped up onto the curb. They did not pull him and he did not pull them. Could you go forward forever, with your dogs at your side? What if he just kept going? Across the city, over the bridge, walking perfectly until darkness fell over the country. Sometimes he wished he could gather all the dogs he loved most and walk off the end of the world with them.

When a dog was put to sleep its chin simply dropped softly onto its paws. It looked up at you with the same trusting eyes it had fixed on you since it was very young.

At the violinist's building he nodded at the door-man. There was a noisy crowd in the elevator, a birthday party of children with conical hats and clownish face paint. He let them cl.u.s.ter and hug the dogs; the dogs licked them.

The attendant opened the penthouse door for him.

"You beat me here," he told her. Usually he did not attempt these minor exchanges, but he was nervous and needed to fill the s.p.a.ce.

"Poor Blackie," she said, as he unclipped the leash and hung it. She knelt down and leaned her face against the dog's curly flank. "My husband's allergic to dogs. It's really bad-I mean, he breaks out in rashes, he gets asthma attacks, nothing helps. Otherwise . . . I feel so bad I can't keep Blackie in the family."

The dogwalker stared at her, a realization dawning. It was almost two years now that he had worked for them, and it had never occurred to him that she was the violinist's daughter.

He had a.s.sumed she was paid for her services.

"What's wrong?" asked the daughter. "Is something the matter?"

"Oh no," he said, and shook his head. "Nothing. I am going to sleep on it."

This time the elevator was empty. It had mirrors on every wall and he watched the long line of reflections as they descended, he and Sir Henry. In the mirror he saw infinite dogs lie down.

Thomas Edison and Vasil Golakov.

IN DISCUSSING THE ABRUPTdismissal of longtime retainer I. Vasil Golakov from his service in the Edison menage, a number of recent scholars-most notably J. Horslow and T. Rheims, in a paper t.i.tled "Edison, Tesla, and Westinghouse: The Queer Undercurrents of Early Electricity"-have proposed that it was a h.o.m.os.e.xual advance upon Edison on the part of the Bulgarian valet that led to his sudden termination. Lesbian separatist theorist P. Valencia-Sven has taken this bold hypothesis even further, implying that it was Edison's stern denial of his own secret yearning for the strapping Slav that compelled him to expel Golakov from his household.

But the first translation of Golakov's letters from the original Bulgarian, by doctoral candidate L. G. Turo of Rutgers, sheds a novel light on these fanciful speculations. And although it is indeed likely that Golakov and Edison had an altercation on the day of the firing, there is scant evidence to suggest that the businessman-inventor and his faithful manservant enjoyed anything other than a purely platonic rapport.

Curiously, as the translation ill.u.s.trates, the beginnings of the rift between master and domestic can be traced to an elephant execution on Coney Island.

When Edison offered to kill Topsy the elephant, in 1903, he had already lost the so-called war of the currents. It had been a war of both commerce and science, and the otherwise successful inventor had lost calamitously on both fronts. Having campaigned bitterly to persuade the public that his direct-current system was safer than its rival, alternating current-a technology harnessed by Nikola Tesla and owned by George Westinghouse-Edison was proved wrong by 1896, when alternating current won the day, and by 1897 he had sold off the last shares in his old electricity company.

But in the course of the public-relations battle, he had adopted a perverse strategy: Although opposed to the death penalty, he had promoted an electric chair that would use AC to execute convicts and thus showcase its lethality. And further to defame the rival form of current, he helped an engineer named Harold Brown publicly execute stray dogs, calves and horses with AC-despite his own professed belief in kindness, later to be quoted by animal-rights advocates. "Nonviolence leads to the highest ethics, which is the goal of all evolution," he said. "Until we stop harming all other living beings, we are still savages."

In any case, by 1903 the inventor had long since turned his attention to motion picture technology, then in its infancy. He had patents on some of the first motion picture machines, and when he heard there was an elephant in the area who was slated for execution, he stepped in and suggested a lethal dose of AC. His men would both set up and record the electrocution.

Topsy, the elephant in question, was a disgruntled circus and work animal who had suffered the pains of forced labor, captivity, neglect and abuse. She had responded by killing three men, the last of whom fed her a burning cigarette.

Simple shooting would not have been theatrical enough, for her owners, Thompson & Dundy of Coney Island's Luna Park, had decided to make an example of the rogue. (The execution of animals, an odd extension of a medieval practice, a.s.sumes the animal is a moral agent, accountable to the law and therefore punishable in a formal and public context. It is noteworthy that the elephant was not being euthanized or exterminated, as vermin would, but penalized for her sins against G.o.d and man by execution qua execution. The ramifications of this apparent subversion, whereby the ultimate punishment-viz., death-also comprises the ultimate elevation/reward, are of course multifold.) To put a just end to Topsy, therefore, an effective method was sought. Poisoning was tried but failed. Hanging was next considered, then dismissed when the ASPCA objected. (Despite its unpleasantness, to say nothing of sheer difficulty, this method would be used in 1916 in East Tennessee, on a five-ton elephant named Mary.) Finally Edison made his offer, and, ironically, though it was the unsavory nature of AC he would demonstrate with his movie, the ASPCA did not object to the method-perhaps because it was a new technology, and as such must be regarded as superior.

So Edison sent his technicians to the site of the execution and had them engineer and film the condemned animal's fiery death. They attached electrodes to her body, strapped on sandals and set up their camera. The brief filmstrip that resulted still survives, a few grainy, gray seconds. It shows the creature being led, swaying gently, to the place of her doom; there, a white fire rages around her body. She collapses onto her side.

Edison himself was not present at the electrocution. As always, his attentions were claimed by a busy schedule. But according to Golakov, whose letters to a sister in Bulgaria were never mailed and therefore found their way into the boxes of household doc.u.ments transferred to the Edison archives by the Mina Miller Edison estate, he was deeply fixated on the resulting filmstrip. The valet claimed that Edison-blithe, boastful, pragmatic to a fault and not p.r.o.ne to introspection or idleness-watched the filmstrip privately on a regular basis. He further claimed that Edison often conversed with it, addressing his remarks to the image of the dying elephant.

Here it should be observed that the footage, still extant and now publicly available on various Internet sites, represents an early example of what has since come to be called a "snuff" film-that is, a film that records the willful killing of an unwilling subject. Actual human snuff films have only very rarely come to light, and exist in American culture chiefly as mythic fetish objects, but animal snuff films, whose production is not for the most part illegal, are relatively common.

In Golakov's voluminous letters, a number of the Edison/Topsy monologues are rendered. Most were reportedly delivered late at night or in the small hours of the morning, when the businessman-inventor liked to work; at these times he alone was awake in the house, and during pauses in his labor chose to closet himself in his study with one of his Projecting Kinetoscopes, watching as the blaze rose around the charring elephant's wood and copper-shod feet.

Frequently the monologues concerned matters of business and technology too arcane to be detailed herein: the vicissitudes of carbon filaments and ore extraction, efficiency improvements at the West Orange facility, various properties of nickel hydrate. But often they were deeply personal, and, according to Golakov, Edison must have found in the elephant a faithful listener, at least at first, for his talks began as tranquil ruminations that tapered into silence only when the businessman-inventor nodded off in his leather armchair. As the disquisitions continued over weeks and months, however, they took on an argumentative tone. It seemed the elephant had begun to rebuke the businessman and had even had the temerity to dispute his a.s.sertions.

As Golakov presents them, the conversations are of course one-sided, with lengthy pauses into which Golakov believed the burning elephant's reb.u.t.tals and queries would have been interposed. A typical excerpt from these enigmatic "exchanges," on the subject of Edison's fear of oral copulation/death, is set forth below.

"I won't do it. Filthy. Anyway, she . . . No, I tell you. No. You women are all the same. Selfish, and can't invent worth a d.a.m.n. Harlots all . . . That, that wet thing . . . ugh. Like old cow's tongue, or pigs' feet. Disgusting . . . Makes her a s.l.u.t, Topsy. Wantonness! Nothing less. A wife's duty lies in . . . Do not interrupt me . . . I should have killed you three times if I killed you at all . . . Yes . . . yes . . . I know. I know. I am very sorry . . . I said I was sorry! . . . Is it green? Are there fields? Oh: and is the sun bright?"

Yet Golakov's letters reflect nothing so much as a longing on Edison's part for the approval of the boiling elephant. It is not clear to what degree this imputation is a fiction originating with the domestic, whose mind was almost surely affected by his daily use of the diacetyl-morphine cough remedies then sold widely by Bayer; certainly there have been no corroborating reports of any mental infirmity on Edison's part. But Golakov's doc.u.mentation of Edison's most intimate personal habits, relationships and opinions bears up well under close scrutiny and does reflect a credible familiarity with the businessman-inventor. Since the inventor had suffered a partial loss of hearing, it is not impossible that he may have welcomed the silence of a celluloid companion. And while almost certainly not accurate in all regards, Golakov's notations clearly have a doc.u.mentary value in elucidating aspects of the event.

On occasion Edison appears to have conducted philosophical debates with the moving image, defending a rational humanism for which the roasting elephant berated him.

"I am Man. Man has his own destiny! . . . Impractical, I'm afraid. Exhumation and shipping alone . . . I have no time for messing about with your bones, my stubborn pachyderm . . . Commonality? With every breath each of us on this earth inhales a molecule from Caesar's final respiration. And likewise a molecule from Brutus's breath, as the traitor raised a hand to stab his n.o.ble emperor. Does that make us Caesar? Does it make us Brutus? . . . Children, oh, hmm . . . I have several myself; barely remember their names. What? You had none! You trudged under a yoke all the days of your . . . what? False pachyderm! How you lie! Animals do not dream of that which has not transpired. A pachyderm cannot dream of her unborn children . . . Observation, clearly. I am Man; I can see. I have seen for myself how insensate you are. A pachyderm is not given to flights of fancy . . . There is no G.o.d in the Church, no: not there. But I begin to see Him. I see Him nonetheless . . . Contradiction? Leave me be. I have work before me."

In the months leading up to the incident that brought about Golakov's dismissal, the conversations he records become increasingly agitated and hyperbolic. Indeed a sort of rageful ecstasy is manifest: "How you shame me! You torment me with your humility! . . . Murdering pachyderm! I know well what you did. You are no saint! . . . Do not play the victim, my crafty friend. Do not play the innocent! . . . Together, you say? Together! Yes we will!"

At some point, writes Golakov, the elephant evidently became a sort of priestly figure or G.o.dhead, despite this antagonistic dynamic. Before her ghostly image, the businessman-inventor would kneel to pray, meditate and ask for absolution.

Edison was still a freethinker then; it was only circa 1920 that the inventor would begin to speak publicly of building machines to communicate with the dead. In his early life the brash businessman openly ridiculed religion and notions of a soul and an afterlife; yet even at the time he had a chronic weakness for magicians and occultists and was an admirer of both Madame Blavatsky and well-known billet reader Bert Reese.

In fact, it was not long at all after his dismissal of Golakov that the businessman would execute an abrupt about-face in terms of his religious leanings-and in the final decade of his life, far from being the out-spoken atheist of his youth, he would ridicule those "fool skeptic[s]" who dared to doubt the existence of G.o.d.

Certainly it is true that his second wife Mina, eighteen years his junior, was a staunch Methodist sometimes said to have believed the doctrine of evolution to be the work of Satan the deceiver. But Edison did not always hold the female intellect in high esteem, and he is unlikely to have been swayed by the young woman's pious fundamentalism. It is probable that his newfound faith had its genesis elsewhere.

In any case, it is Golakov's intrusion upon his employer's devotions that seems to have precipitated the termination of his employment. The valet had for some time been pilfering from Edison's personal supply of cocaine toothache drops, which he then used in combination with his heroin cough medicine to produce effects of euphoria and allay anxiety. (He recommended both popular tonics to his sister.) On the occasion in question, a quiet evening in late September, he had ingested both remedies in some quant.i.ty, alternating quite neatly between them. As he sat quaffing a nightcap in Edison's closet (the closet featured a slatted door), he had a good view of the scene in the study.

"The giant's stately presence," writes Golakov, "had Mr. Edison transfixed."

He laid himself out on the floor in joyful submission to the flickering vision, and he spoke to her as he always did, but with more emotion. "How you glow, n.o.ble beast, in the infinite moment before your own death!" He rested his forehead on the rug and trembled. "How many times have you died? A thousand times you have died, a thousand and a thousand. I have seen it, like the millions of stars in the sky. And still you speak to me: You hold me in your dead eyes. I know your terrible power." Rising to his feet, hands clasped in supplication, he choked back a sob as he said this, and I began fearing for his sanity. "Yes: yes: yes. You are the Savior. But I see now that you do not forgive me . . . what did you say to me? . . . I hear you. You say: I do not forgive. You say: This is my gift to you: I will never forgive: Now and forever, you are not forgiven."

At this moment, according to the valet, Edison began weeping piteously. In his own state of artificially enhanced excitation, the valet apparently felt compelled to leap out of his hiding place, and, shocked by the sight, the businessman-inventor fell flat on his face, only to recover when his burly valet lifted him off the floor.

What pa.s.sed between the two thereafter is not indicated in Golakov's reporting. Likely Edison recognized that the valet's volatile disposition and rampant exploitation of substances had become a liability. What is known for certain, from the household accounting records, is that I. Vasil Golakov left the mansion the next day and was never admitted through the Edisonian doors again.

Little is known of the valet after he left the inventor's employ save that his abuse of narcotics continued unabated, for a scullery maid complained to Mrs. Edison twice in the ensuing months that the former a.s.sistant was begging for tonics at the servants' entrance to the kitchen.

Golakov's final words on the subject of Edison and his elephant, from the last surviving letter to his sister, clearly suggest it was the drug-addled Balkan, not his employer, who was spiraling into dementia. For after he "leapt out" of the closet to "rescue Edison" from himself, Golakov alleges, the inventor launched into a spirited homily: He said: "Don't you understand, Golakov? I have seen the future. I have seen in the paradox of her suffering the last end of man . . . yes, she was a murderer, but so are we. And I saw in her eyes the longing of all men for a far better place, for a place where man was no longer cruel and no longer wanted retribution for cruelty; for a place, indeed, where man was not man at all. Yes, Golakov, that was what I beheld: the true and final emanc.i.p.ation of man. For at the end of history man will shed his humanity. Man will be man no more. And this alone will allow him the grace for which he has always longed."

Whether or not there is a grain of truth in the chaff of these epistolary ravings, only Edison could tell us. But certainly one wishes to issue a caution to critics in the mold of Profs. Horslow and Rheims, who, when faced with the evidence of the new translation, may despite it cleave stubbornly to their attribution of h.o.m.os.e.xuality to the eastern European tippler or indeed the businessman-inventor himself. Should these critics choose to see in the elephant a "symbol" of either heteros.e.xual denial or repressed h.o.m.os.e.xual ident.i.ty, they are of course free to do so; and no doubt, in that case, the elephant will have spoken to them as eloquently as she spoke to poor Golakov's Edison, who saw in the dying beast myriad glorious reverberations of his martyred Christ.

Tesla and Wife.

I KNEW A GREAT man once. At the same time I knew a great man and a woman who loved him.

When I first met Mr. Tesla he looked like Count Dracula-tall and painfully thin, with cheeks sunken in. It was during the Second World War at the Hotel New Yorker. I was a maid there at the time: my first job out of high school, the first time I paid my own way. He was ancient, his skin as white as his hair.

He had been on the cover of Time magazine when he was seventy-five, but later, when I knew him, he was living on sc.r.a.ps from old admirers. For decades he had lived in hotels; it was a suite at the Waldorf for years, but in the New Yorker all he had was a shabby room on the thirty-third floor.

He had invented electricity. Lights, one of the bell-hops told me my first day on the job. Maybe the radio, except Mr. Marconi took the credit. He let companies steal his ideas, said my friend Pia. She was the one who loved him. He should have been very rich, she said, but he was not concerned with money.

He knew important people, and now and then some of them came to visit him. Some were squat men from Europe with square heads and bellies that stuck out; some were American. He told Pia he was inventing a Death Beam. That was why the men from the government came: We were fighting the Germans, and the FBI and the war department wanted the Death Beam.

He kept his pigeons in his room with him. We were allowed in to clean only when his fear of germs grew stronger than his need to be alone. I was glad when he let us in. I didn't want him to live badly. He was strange but very kind, when he remembered to be.

He called the pigeons his best friends. His "most sincere friends," as he said. They came to the window and he fed them, and a lot of them roosted there. He had nesting baskets for them and cages custom-made by carpenters; he had a curtained shower for them to bathe in and casks of his favorite birdseed mixture, rapeseed and hemp and canary. On the floor and on the furniture was the evidence: feathers and white messes. I would go in with my cart and hear birds cooing in the shadows.

He kept a photograph of a pigeon that had died some twenty years before. Sometimes he called her the white pigeon, other times the white dove. In certain languages, he said, they used the same word for both. She was his true love, he said, a white pigeon with gray on her wings . . . later I would read that he had said he loved her as a man loves a woman. He never said that to me, but he did say other things. He said she filled his heart with happiness and that when he'd realized how sick she was, he'd stayed with her, waiting for her to die. When she died a light emanated from her and his eyes hurt from the brightness. He knew then that his work on Earth was ended.

A pigeon might seem serene, he said, but that was a trick of the feathers. The feathers were soft but beneath them it was b.l.o.o.d.y. That was beauty, said Tesla: the raw veins, the gray-purple meat beneath the down.

I should have died when she died, he went on, but death, I think it slipped by me.

Some people made fun of him for saying he loved the pigeon like a woman, though I never thought it was funny. People love their pets, but the love is tinged with sadness. Because the love is for a pet, they are ashamed of this. They want the love to seem as small as a hobby so no one will have to feel sorry for them. Tesla was not ashamed. He was never ashamed. People did not understand that, and they called him perverted.

Pia loved Tesla like he loved the pigeon.

Since I knew Pia, sometimes I have thought: I would have liked to know that love.

She thought he was as good as a saint-a saint or even more. She had her own problems. One of them was a harelip. Tesla had so much knowledge, she said, that it was as though he were G.o.d himself. And like G.o.d, he could not pretend he was human. This was why he failed despite all his ideas, why other men lived in comfort with wives to serve their needs and he was alone and poor.

Why G.o.d sent His son down to die for our sins, said Pia, was He could not come down Himself. He would not have known how to talk to regular people, she said. Pia was part Catholic and part something else, a religion from her parents' village in Cyprus. I was brought up Methodist and didn't know much about it.

In my church we had G.o.d, of course. We also had G.o.d in my church. But He was all downy feathers and none of the dark blood.

How the dust gathered!-on the dark file cabinets, the cupboard, the large safe in the corner and the desk. Tesla forgot the surfaces of things. He didn't need to write down his ideas for inventions, he said, because he could keep them in his head. He did use paper, though; he liked to draw pictures of places he dreamed about. The pages had a few words, as well as drawings, but hardly any math on them. I didn't know much back then, but I had seen an equation or two in high school and I was pretty sure you would need math to invent a Death Beam.

He called me "Mees." He called all the maids that.

Every day he went to feed the pigeons outside the library. He went with duty and an aspect of hope. If he was sick and could not feed the birds, he had a boy do it for him, a boy named Charles who raised racing pigeons. He walked with a cane by the time I met him, because he had been hit by a car two blocks away. His first thought when he got back to his room, with three ribs broken, was that someone had to do the day's feeding for him. He sent out a bellhop with his bag of seed.

Anyone else might have gone to the hospital but Tesla had no truck with doctors.

When I first cleaned his rooms I thought the birds were disgusting. I would avoid the rooms whenever I could and leave them to Pia. She was a harder worker and didn't turn up her nose at anything. But after a while Tesla began to talk to me. He told me how smart some pigeons are, how they see ultraviolet light and remember things for years. He told me homing pigeons were carrying messages for the Army and saving the lives of soldiers, how vast flocks of pa.s.senger pigeons had been shot out of the sky for the pleasure of shooting, and five billion had turned to none. He said it was a little boy who shot down the last of the pa.s.senger pigeons.

Tesla told me that he chose not to marry. He said love could be all right for working people, and maybe also for poets and artists, but not for inventors like him, who had to use all their pa.s.sion for invention. He was friends with Mark Twain, who was devoted to his own wife. I think maybe that's why he said writers could get married and still do good work: He didn't want to hurt Mark Twain's feelings.

Pia said he was chaste, and that was why he was not interested in women. Never once did I see a woman in his suite, except for Pia cleaning. Her husband beat her so badly she went deaf in one ear; her left eyelid drooped from when he flicked it half off with a knife tip.

Women could not tempt Tesla, she said.

One time Pia came in to work after a bad night and Tesla asked if she would go out and feed the pigeons with him. She was limping from a kick to the knee. Marco was handsome and slept with girls he met in bars; sometimes he brought one home and made Pia sleep on the couch while he took the girl into their bedroom. Then Pia would have to listen to them. I was very fond of Pia, but no one would have called her a good-looking woman. Mostly it was the harelip, since otherwise she was fine, warm brown eyes and a nice figure. I think that's why Marco picked her, because he knew she would feel lucky to have a man at all and he figured he needed someone who would work for her keep and would never leave him.

Tesla seemed to believe her stories, how she fell down the stairs, etc. One time she claimed her nose was broken by a children's ball that burst through her kitchen window. I heard her tell him this because we were doing his rooms together. He nodded politely. But I happened to know her kitchen had no windows.

Tesla had close women friends, though none were his girlfriends. He believed women were as smart as men and that one day they would be just as educated and maybe even more so. Back then, in 1943, it was rare to hear anyone say such a thing. He also said that one day people would all carry little telephones in their pockets, telephones without wires.

Anyway, the morning Pia was limping, Tesla invited her to go feed the pigeons with him. She said she couldn't leave work. He said he knew a way she could sneak out if she wanted to meet him in the park. He said, "Please, Mees," and looked at her solemnly.

I was scrubbing the inside of his windows with balled-up newspaper. I said, "Go, go," and promised I would cover for her. Pia never got to walk in the park. At least for me, on my way home to my apartment, I could take my time if it was still daylight, I could wait to get on the bus until the park was behind me, with its cool greenness and its shade in the summer, or its sloping fields of light snow in the winter. Then I dreamed as the bus carried me, dreamed as I was carried along in the warmth above the cold road below. I read cheap novels and I dreamed, but Pia did not know how to read.

She and Tesla went out and were gone for a couple of hours. I scrubbed hard, tore around trying to do twice as much as I could so that I seemed like two women. It wasn't hard to get fired back then and I didn't want it to happen to Pia.

When they got back she looked happy. At the time I thought it was the fresh air that did it, having the sun on her face when she was almost always inside. I asked her how it had been and she half smiled, which she hardly ever did because it called attention. But she didn't say much.

It was three days later that I knocked on Tesla's door with his new bags of birdseed on a handcart. The different seeds had to be mixed according to his recipe. There was a Do Not Disturb sign hanging on the doork.n.o.b, and it had been there too long and was alarming me, so when he didn't come to the door I went in with my key.

He was lying facing the wall, pigeons clucking around him. It was so cold in his room, I could see my breath. A small mourning dove strutted back and forth on his arm and I heard the faint sound of traffic; when he didn't notice the dove walking on him I knew he had gone away.

He had been gone for two days, they said when the doctor left. He was eighty-six, after all, and chest pains had bothered him. Sometimes he fainted. Before I knew it the body had been removed. Later I found out someone made a death mask of his face. But it looked nothing like him.

When I saw him on the bed, nothing but a slight rise on the sheets, I knew I would leave the hotel behind. An idea of a warmly lit house came to me.

We were shut out of his rooms and from the end of the hallway watched government men come and go. They wore trench coats and didn't take off their hats. They carted away practically every piece of paper in all of the rooms. There were policemen with them, standing around in the halls and cracking jokes and smoking. They held the elevator forever and dropped their cigarette b.u.t.ts on the floor, left burns on the carpet where they ground out the burning stubs with their shoes. They took a lot of other things too: the heavy safe, the cabinets and bookshelves and every stick of furniture. When we went in later to clean the rooms they were completely bare. Only a few downy puffs in the corners, and long gray droppings down the walls where the cabinets had stood. The wallpaper had to be stripped.

The mayor read a eulogy over the radio, and people came from all over to attend the funeral at St. John the Divine. Over two thousand of them, we heard. Even Mrs. Roosevelt sent a condolence note. Pia and I wanted to go but we couldn't get off work; she said a prayer and lit a votive candle.

But I think, even then, that she had left it behind. By it I mean the regular world-the Hotel New Yorker and me. She had already gone; she had gone after Tesla. She had no use for a world without him.