Electric City: A Novel by Elizabeth Rosner Page A

surrounded by an astounding pattern of aquamarine blue. And in the marvelous two-thirds-watery surface of his own home, now seen from the view of a star man, weightless and wide-eyed, he understands what the Dream is trying to say.
    It is the certainty of everything being connected to everything else, the entirety of the physical world comprising a single unit, an entity of one. Time sticky like amber. Images shattered and reassembled. Each a facet and a completion. Images existing and then disappearing. The same story and yet not the same.
    And most elemental, most dazzlingly true: all the rivers and streams and waterfalls could join forces; their combined and ever-replenishinghydroelectric power could be harnessed like some limitless radio wave, repeating and recycling itself forever.
    Joseph said the Dream was as ancient as the earth itself, and that his own people never believed anything other than the idea of unity when it came to the sky and the water and trees and animals; humans were as much a part of the whole as any rock or bird, and it was when you thought otherwise that the troubles began. With the arrival of the Europeans, including the Van Curlers, who devoted themselves to crisscrossing the land with fences and roadways, to building countless dams and canals, the inevitable result was a cascade of disasters.
    Harnessing power from the waters was not exactly what Joseph believed could save the humans from themselves. Reassured on the one hand to see his friend Proteus captivated by embracing the natural world, recognizing its inherent value, Joseph still found it disquieting that his friend was nevertheless willing to sacrifice the freedom of water in the name of human need. The miracle of existence in all of its interconnectedness also meant that poison in one place would end up everywhere.
    “Our boats will travel side by side down the river of life,” Joseph explained one night, describing the two-row wampum belt. The two men sat watching the moon and stars, energies emitted across immeasurable space.
    “That each will respect the ways of the other. That together we will travel in friendship, peace, as long as the grass is green, as long as the water runs downhill, as long as the sun rises in the east and sets in the west and as long as our Mother Earth will last.”
    “Fireflies are 95 percent efficient in producing light,” Proteus said. “We have a very long way to go with our own weak imitations.”

M ARTIN ’ S TAPE RECORDER had jammed again, which would not have been particularly worrisome except that he was involved in a delicate operation. Not messing around with any ordinary mix of music and voices, but repairing one of the oldest intact recordings of his grandfather Joseph. Martin had listened to this story more times than he could count, but it seemed on every playback to instruct him with some as-yet-unrevealed detail, like beadwork whose colors varied depending on the quality of light, like the river’s surface dappled by an ever-changing touch of wind. With a pair of needle-nose pliers wrapped in sterile cotton, he managed to free the tape from where it was caught in the mechanism, grateful to have spared it from damage.
    It was nearly midnight, and Bear slept in a heap nearby. Reaching for his sketchbook, Martin seated himself on Annie’s sagging couch so that he could allow the sound of Joseph’s voice to guide his hand.
    Tucked between two of his pages was a sepia-toned portrait of someone Martin might closely resemble in another forty years. He turned over the photo to see the half-faded inscription on the back: JOSEPH LONGBOAT .
    There were no photos of that day on the bridge in 1907, nothing except the long-dead eyewitnesses and the ladder of storytellers. Martin’s sketchbook could carry the dust-covered past into the realm of the visible as well as the audible.
    “Your great-uncle Miles Longboat was a bridge builder,” Joseph said on the tape. “My brother. One of the first