Us Conductors by Sean Michaels

Author:Sean Michaels [Michaels, Sean]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 978-0-345-81334-3
Publisher: Random House of Canada
Published: 2014-04-07T16:00:00+00:00

FROM THE SKY, CALIFORNIA made me think of a vast, intricate map. A map at seventy percent scale, and me high above it, holding binoculars. It was my first flight and I felt a combination of terror and elation. The reason for the elation was obvious: seventeen thousand pounds of metal, lifted into the air, the earth-bound gone flying. I have rarely felt more alive than in that dizzy moment when the aeroplane’s wheels left the ground, as if the aluminum craft had simply been picked up. But I was also filled with an engineer’s trepidation. Here was a device of great intricacy, a thousand screws, and any number could be loose. In the great fraternity of engineers the shameful central secret is this: we err. We botch and fumble. These words seem funny, harmless, but our failures are not always trifling. There are mistakes we never forgive.

My aeroplane flew from New York to San Francisco and did not crash. I landed and staggered from the genius machine and there was a man with a sign, THEREMIN. “Welcome to California,” he said. He handed me an orange. As I took the gift I was caught by an unexpected memory: the clear, clear gaze of Vladimir Ilyich Lenin (may his memory be illuminated), on the day that we met. I cradled the orange in my right hand. My mission continued.

I was here to go to Alcatraz; I went to Alcatraz. A cruel rock floating in the San Francisco Bay. The ferry brought us dumbly, without comment, yet my fingers tightened on the handrail. This was a hideous destination. The engine droned and there was blue in the clouded sky, but I could feel the doom in this grey masonry, the haunted garden that lay in its centre. Our boat came alone.

“Hello, Dr Theremin,” the functionaries said. Hello, hello, hello. I did not know if it was my imagination seeing pairs of eyes in the high-up grilles. “Hello, Dr Theremin, welcome!” I knelt beside a metal detector, checking the circuits, trimming a wire, guarded by a circle of officials. They laughed, cracked jokes. Beyond their perimeter there was no sound, no movement. I only knew because I had read it: three hundred men, locked in, forbidden from speaking. Pash had asked me to find out about Alcatraz’s block assignments—whether the murderers were kept with the spies, the rapists with the bombers, Al Capone sharing a wall with Machine Gun Kelly. This was not an idle curiosity: it was at the heart of this journey, the sort of information that we had built these machines to obtain. But in those hours at Alcatraz I could not bring myself to pry into the affairs of its lodgers; there was no way I could sneak down a hallway to slip files from folders. I snipped the wire. I tested the voltage. I listened for the breathing of the men in their cells. I do not believe in a reckoning, but in the heart of this prison I knew I was tempting fate.

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