He marked the time when he left the room on a large lined piece of paper he’d nailed to the doorway. How long would the bulb burn for? How long would it hold its brilliance? How could he improve upon such a thing? Often, in the middle of the night, he’d walk through the house to his workroom to pace more circles around the dangling bulbs. Perhaps he walked a million kilometers in his own home in trying to capture the light.
One night, in an attempt to feel like I did as a kid again, and wanting to feel closer to my father and his obsession, I snuck into his lab. I hit the grimy switch and then fumbled to screw a bulb into the exposed socket. My finger and thumb brushed the metal linkage and I felt coursing volts scream through my hand, rushing up my arm to my shoulder, and spread needles over my scalp. It felt like muscle and tendon were pulling apart. Bolts of energy manically vibrated deeper into my chest like plucked cello strings before I shook myself loose. For a moment my arm hung limp, a feeling of paralysis, and that shocking sensation lingered. Even as I left the lab and snuck back to my bed, it felt like a space in my body had been cleared and laid with new chords of nerve that bristled and sparked.
I never told anyone about that incident as I felt foolish. Though afterward I had electrocution dreams. A silent gushing of force would fill me up, make my muscles quiver, and the linkage of my bones hum. In sleep I was a container for that light, which lifted me away from my body in white starbursts.
The morning after, my father called me into his lab. I thought he knew I disturbed his work.
“Jacob, come in here, please. Put your glasses on, and stand back there against the wall.”
My safety glasses were on the hook hanging next to Edwin’s pair. My father couldn’t bring himself to throw them out. I saw my brother’s glasses and didn’t care if I was going to get in trouble or not. I felt a compulsion to stomp on Edwin’s glasses so I didn’t have to look at them.
“I need some help,” my father said.
No accusations came, so I set the cloth strap against the back of my skull and pulled the glasses down over my eyes. Large shards of glass and metal crunched into the floor. Fergus knew not to come into the room and I heard him lay down outside the door.
My father called out times for me to write on the paper. Often I’d watch him walk in those tight circles while talking about how to pressurize inert gases, how to set the stem so the contact wires sit properly, and how to best insulate the cap around the electrical contact points. There was a different language used altogether in that room. We spoke of science, using the language of chemistry and the periodic chart. There was also the language of the countries he ordered supplies from and the strange writing on the crates and gas canisters that arrived at the factory, which were skimmed from and brought home.
“Mark every minute on your paper there,” he told me.
“How long are we going to time this one?” I asked.
“Just mark them.”
“Nine thirty-seven,” I said.
“Nine thirty-eight.”
“Nine thirty-nine.”
“Nine forty.” My father seemed as multifaceted, unknowable as the hundreds of glass fragments scattered around the room.
As I was calling out “nine forty-one,” there was a quick pop, and the lightbulb shattered in a small explosion of radiant orange dust. Glass rubble holding the last touches of light rained onto the floor. Little white after-burn spots floated across my eyes. Then the room went dark. The smell of burnt filament with an aftertaste of some chemical I didn’t recognize floated around us as our eyes adjusted to the thick shadow we stood in.
“Ah-ha!” he yelled out.
The outline of his posture changed from that of a wounded person to someone who had just been healed and was starting to stand taller.
“It’s the smallest details that matter most,” he said.
“Are those smallest details why they keep exploding?” I asked.
“Yes,” he said. “Precisely.”
The next day, while I was working on the assembly line, my father came down to the floor and started working on the new line the Germans had set up. He often poked around with the lines so no one else paid any mind to what he was doing. The workers instead focused closer to their jobs since the boss was nearby. But I watched him as he installed a small mechanical pump behind the metal side panel of the base assemblage. The tip of the pump looked like a homemade baster, similar to what he’d been experimenting with in his workroom at home. It dropped little dollops of thick, dark liquid onto the coil. He checked a few of the lights that the line put out, put the panel back on the machine, and went back to his office. He looked at me and raised a long finger to his lips. Then the four soldiers on their daily lap of the factory opened the door.
I didn’t have the inherent interest my father had in the science behind harnessing light. There was a time when my father told Edwin and me that the factory would be our inheritance. Now that Edwin was gone, I didn’t care if the Germans had it. They were moving west. Taking everything. At the time, I thought I understood why. At camp they had pumped us full with their reasons. They told us how the Treaty of Versailles had crippled them after the Great War. Though I didn’t know this was the talk that gave Hitler his foothold. That the plan I happily lapped up of taking over Europe was far more severe than imaginable. At the time, at some misunderstood level, I was also furious at my government for flooding Rotterdam and secretly blamed them for the loss of Edwin. I didn’t care what the Germans did, despite the rumblings of my father and Uncle Martin about them taking everything over. I was locked in grief over the loss of my brother. It no longer froze my days like it did my mother’s, but it froze something inside of me that I didn’t think would ever warm.
9
A gristly half kilo of ground pork sausage was the first piece of meat we had in months. My mother inspected it on the counter. She wore her ever present blue bathrobe. Her pant legs and thick wool socks stuck out beneath the hem and glided over the floor. She brought out two yellow globe onions and a dark cast-iron pan from the cupboard, and it clanked against the large pot in which she had boiled the crabs Uncle Martin had brought over. The noise of her cooking lifted me for the moment, as I had become used to her living like a ghost in our house. She took one of the onions in her hand and started rubbing off the skin between her palms, making sure we’d have as much of it as possible. When both onions were bald, she chopped them and put one into the skillet and the other into a pot of water with several carrots and a pinch of salt from the glass spice jar. She turned on the burners and when the coils pulsed orange she put the frying pan with the onion and the full pot on the heat.
The front door swung open and smashed against the wall before being slammed shut. Fergus jumped up from the corner of the kitchen and started barking.
“Drika,” my father yelled from the doorway. “Drika.”
He ran into the kitchen, frantic, beads of sweat on his hairline. “They found out,” he said.