Electric City: A Novel by Elizabeth Rosner

him. Or maybe he could give something to her instead.
    The crickets paused, and in the unexpected silence, a small rustling sound drew their attention to a spot just at the edge of the property, lit by the partnership of moon and streetlamp. Later, Sophie would remember this moment as though she and Henry had invented the scene together, conjuring the visitation by way of their intertwined fingers. Behind their backs, the ghost of a house no longer casting shadows, the murmur of a creek beneath the tangle of bushes. Pulsing heartbeats signaling back and forth, skin to skin. And a red fox, poised so motionlessly it might not have been real.
    It was the first time in her life Sophie had ever seen a fox, anywhere. But there was no mistaking its flame-colored coat and its bushy tail sticking straight out, almost as long as the rest of its body.
    A wild thing in Electric City!
    They instinctively held their breath, hands gripped together. The fox seemed to sense them anyway—but remained just beyond the row of pine trees, waiting.
    Henry slid his hand along Sophie’s waist, pressed his lips against her mouth, her throat. She closed her eyes and felt a part of her dissolving, a blurry wave that contained both something freezing and something on fire.

T HOMAS E DISON BOASTED frequently of how little sleep a man actually required , as long as a habitual pattern of napping was incorporated into his daily routines. It was public knowledge that the great man kept a cot in his office for precisely this reason, and he evidently considered this method, like so many of his other predilections, a superior way of life. Steinmetz, in contrast, understood that individuals could possess preferences not necessarily ideal for anyone else, though he too imagined at times that alternating periods of so-called work and so-called play were most likely beneficial to the health and well-being of all adults whether or not they called themselves scientists.
    Regardless of the fact that by virtue of size and stature he might have been mistaken for a child, at least from a distance, it was his childlike wonder and pleasure in the world that made Steinmetz feel most genuinely blessed. Adulthood didn’t have to be a death sentence, nor even a time to “put away childish things.” Steinmetz believed in jokes and games and even silliness, and perhaps this was why his recurring Dream seemed to him both simple and complex, not accompanied by numbers and formulas as some of his half-waking states might occasionally produce, but purely visual, whether in color or black and white, static or in motion. And most surprising of all was that this image felt comprehensible to him as a form of knowledge not discovered but already owned,reawakened from its daytime hiding place in much the way that stars kept themselves secret except when revealed by the night sky.
    The Dream visited Steinmetz at least once every few months, sometimes more, often enough to feel like a kind of night vision and not merely a synapse-firing exercise carried out by his brain during sleep. The first time he ever had the Dream, so far as he could remember, was the night of the day he had stood alone on the frozen river of Breslau, trying to determine the constant of the territorial magnetism of his birthplace. One by one, his school friends had walked away from the river’s edge, complaining of the bitter wind forcing them back indoors, while Steinmetz remained stubbornly bundled against the elements, transfixed with determination to complete his measurements. All these years later, the Dream hovered in his imagination like an inexhaustible light.
    Blissfully freed from gravity, Steinmetz floats in outer space, somewhere in the vast distance between the earth and her singular, reflective moon. From this perspective he is able to observe the earth as an orb itself afloat in space, a sphere whose surface is dusted with translucent veils of white, landmasses saturated in greens and reds,