Electric City: A Novel by Elizabeth Rosner

wanted to talk to with any regularity. There was his grandmother, there was Midge, and there was his retriever, Bear. Although his cocked ears were smarter than anything humans could imitate, Bear often fell asleep while listening. Martin’s thoughts often remained within his own mind: What about the way we are and are not inside our bodies, or limited to our bodies—maybe that’s what I mean. That we are held here by gravity and skin, but we extend so much farther, we vibrate and echo and outlast our bodies too.
    When he looked at certain photos of Charles Steinmetz that had belonged to his grandfather Joseph, he saw the scientist looking right back, returning Martin’s inquiring gaze with questions of his own. “Why do I interest you?” the ghost wanted to know. “What does my life have to do with yours?”
    And Martin wanted to say: Because of being strange and almost overlooked. Because you persevered despite the odds stacked against you, physically and otherwise. Even politics, even oceans, even language and money. None of it stopped you; none of it broke you.
    It was true, the library books told the story, and Midge repeated the tale to Martin in her own way. Recently when he had walked all the way to her house and ended up helping with repairs to her roof, Midge reminisced out loud. When Martin was younger, she had climbed the ladder while he stood at its base. Now their roles were reversed.
    “Even with a bent spine and asymmetries of form, even when he had to say a permanent no to a certain kind of love in order not to pass along this particular suffering, Steinmetz found a place wide enough to hold an entire family.”
    Martin let the words become part of his skin. Too shy to meet Midge’s gaze directly, he preferred these conversations when they were both in motion, collaborative and purposeful.
    “He adopted an entire household,” she shouted up to him. “A clan.”
    Martin pounded a piece of tar paper into place, followed by a stiff segment of asphalt shingle.
    Your mother loved you , he imagined saying to Steinmetz. She loved your father, after all, his own hump undisguised when they met, when she had every chance to turn away and didn’t. She died too soon, like mine did. But still she chose to cradle you, and your father allowed your mind to flourish beyond every known container, then released you into the worldin order to be free. Was he the one who taught you courage? Not to accept the burden of other glances and fears. Until you knew how to stand up straight inside your own heart.

    Martin’s frequent visits to Electric City’s public library were the counterpoint to his long walks through the woods and alongside the shoreline of the Mohawk River. There were certain revelations he knew to look for in fossils, and others he needed to find in books. Though the texts never named him, Martin knew that his grandfather Joseph had been a close friend of Steinmetz. Historians mentioned a coonskin cap and a canoe, but no hints about the rest. When the time came for Steinmetz to choose a family to adopt long after he’d made up his mind never to have children of his own, Martin knew that Steinmetz chose a white man, ironically also named Joseph.
    According to Annie, Joseph Longboat taught Steinmetz the enigmas of the river, especially the mystical pattern of its flowing both ways. Together they had smoked fancy cigars and swapped stories into summer nights, their feet side by side in the shallows of a cooling creek. With Midge, he got to see the images of what remained: the canoe, the bicycle, photos of the Hayden children being taught to swim in the shadows of Camp Mohawk.
    Martin would have liked to visit the cabin where Joseph and Steinmetz had enjoyed each other’s company, but it had been carted off for display in a Michigan museum, a relic of the Wizard’s abbreviated life. Martin figured that they must have most of his photograph collection too, organized like all those odd creatures Steinmetz