Playback by Elizabeth Massie

Sunday, January 4, 1903, Luna Park
    Lights …
    The clouds held low over Coney Island, gray and shifting, yet there was just enough cold sunshine leaking through to make it possible to film the execution. More than one thousand men, women, teens, and children, who on a normal Sunday afternoon would have been home having tea, mending socks, or reading the Bible, had flocked to Luna Park, laughing and talking nervously, bundled in their overcoats and mittens, ready to witness what no one else had ever seen before. The spectators shuffled around on the frozen ground, stamping their feet to keep warm, craning over each others’ shoulders so as not to miss a thing. There was some pushing and grumbling among the spectators as they jockeyed for better positions.
    “Watch it there, you stepped on my foot.”
    “Hey, fella, no pushing.”
    “Madam, your hat is blocking my view.”
    “Sir, your cigar exhalations are irritating my nose!”
    The people were gathered at the rear of the amusement park, back behind the rides and the shows, which were closed for the season. Back where the smelly animal barns were located, where the horses and ostriches and dogs and bears of Forepaugh’s Circus snuffled about within their stalls, piled high with mounds of manure. Beyond that a separate barn served as home for the Circus’s herd of elephants, including the twenty-eight-year-old Topsy, the three-ton star of the show.
    But Topsy would no longer be the star. She had committed too many crimes of late and today she would pay for her sins. Adam Forepaugh, owner of the circus, would be paid handsomely by those who had passed up the Bible and tea to buy ten-cent tickets to witness the event.
    Topsy emerged from her shed, shaking her massive, harnessed head. Her brown eyes were bright, wide, and flashing with pompous rage. There was no evidence in those eyes that the cyanide-laced carrots she’d been given minutes before had any effect at all. No matter; she was not condemned to die by poison, but by electrocution. The cyanide was only a prelude, something the handlers hoped would slow her down a bit. It hadn’t.
    Camera …
    On a raised wooden platform a good eighty feet from Topsy’s shed, Thomas Edison stared out through the movie camera’s lens at the great, gray elephant. He adjusted the camera’s height slightly by tapping one of the tripod legs with his foot, and then he looked through the lens again. On the ground, just in front of the platform, his technicians did a final check on the electric generator and the tackle that would hold the animal in place.
    All was ready.
    Edison stepped back, allowing Jones, the head of Edison’s film crew, to take over with the camera. Edison removed his hat and did a slow turn on the platform, pretending to be scanning the sky but in fact giving the crowd a chance to have a good look at him. He knew these people had not just come to see an elephant die, but had also come to see the famous Grand Inventor, the Wizard of Menlo Park, America’s Most Brilliant Mind. He lifted his chin and straightened his shoulders beneath the weight of his coat. Let them look. Let them marvel. Let them have something to tell their friends. “Guess who we saw in Luna Park on Sunday!” Let them not see the insecurities that constantly raced through his mind. Let them not know the fear that haunted him daily, the certainty that there were conspirators out there who wanted to destroy him. Let them be tricked by the facade of courage and confidence.
    Let them believe he was all they imagined he was.
    Topsy’s main handler, a brutish, black-haired fellow named Burke, raised his bull hook, indicating he was ready to guide the animal into position. Edison put his hands intohis coat pocket and said to Jones, “You best get this and get it good. We won’t have this chance again.” The cameraman nodded, reached for the crank on the side of the camera, and began turning it at proper filming speed.
    Action …
    With a