27

TEN YEARS LATER, before he gropes around under the bed for his shoes, Gregor puts on his socks. Slowly he slips them on with that serious look men his age sometimes have during such activities, the solemn expression of an elderly only child: careful, conscientious, cut off from the world and concentrating on the task at hand.

True, his body and the décor have changed. The hotel space has again shrunk around him, leaving only an attic room overlooking a courtyard, and while his manias have grown inexorably stronger with age, his gestures are weaker and a trifle more disorganized, often with a light tremor. When he glances out the window, he can no longer contemplate the vastness of New York as he could still do from his fourteenth floor at the St. Regis, with a view of the entire city all the way to the river. Gone, the great sky alive with lightning above the horizon. Outside the windows of the New Yorker Hotel, where he now resides, there is only a blank wall in front of him, and behind him, mounted on a stand, the white pigeon, stuffed.

After she died, he’d had her buried with great ceremony. Then, almost immediately, he’d had her dug up and her remains taken to a taxidermist. But even stuffed, according to the exasperated management of the St. Regis, she continued to attract parasites, a pure pretext, for the most worrying nuisances were the unpaid bills that finally led to Gregor’s eviction.

So he had to move, year after year, from hotel to hotel, all of them within the same area but each time reflecting a drop in prestige that matched his failing fortunes. Going first to the Pennsylvania, he then fell back on the Governor Clinton, at last coming here to the New Yorker, which is much less gleaming and much less popular but much less expensive and where, most importantly, the management is willing to ignore the birds he has with him, by the dozens.

At seventy, alone as always in his room, he has almost finished getting dressed this morning. His clothes are still properly clean and pressed, but they no longer come from the same tailors as before, although Gregor has kept some garments from happier times, carefully preserved to be worn only on great occasions, which are growing rare. Of his two hundred shirts, for example, he has only a half dozen left, and the rest of his personal effects have been reduced proportionately.

Some of his shirts, worn at the cuffs, are also a bit shabby at the collar, so Gregor has had to learn how to sew a button back on, mend a hem, and a dressmaker on the corner will turn a collar when it wears through. Gregor has noticed, as it happens, a strange odor from the shirt he just put on, a faint, acid, dusty smell with a hint of rancid butter. The shirt has seen better days, true, but he puts on a fresh one every morning, and Gregor sighs, resigning himself to the thought that this phenomenon must come from his own body, from its weariness and wear.

So, he carefully puts on his socks. They are long, kneelength socks that require a certain technique: after he has pulled up a pant leg, Gregor centers the end of the sock on his toes, lining it up with his ankle so that the heel will be in the right place. Then he slowly draws the sock up his calf without making any wrinkles. Putting on his shoes, he methodically ties the laces in a bow, the loops of which he ties again. It isn’t very stylish to double-tie laces and Gregor never used to, but it’s safer. This way the laces won’t come undone during the day, obliging Gregor to bend down to retie them, and such movements, he’s been discovering more and more lately, exhaust him.

Although Gregor’s eyebrows are still black, his hair is now thin and gray, and though he doesn’t feel vain enough to dye his brows to match, he did finally shave off his mustache, which had remained black as well. He’s almost as slender as before, however, alert and agile, although a little less lithe, but his figure is doubtless the result of a rather strict diet. For although it’s true that the restaurant in the New Yorker is not as fine as those of his previous hotels, that question no longer arises since Gregor cannot dine there. Unable to afford even a normal diet anymore, he lives on warm milk and crackers, always the same brand, which he obtains in enameled tins that he keeps when they’re empty. After the hotel management gives him permission to have a carpenter install shelves along a wall of his room, Gregor puts what’s left of his possessions in those tins, now carefully numbered. The opposite wall is taken up by his pensioners, housed in cages constructed by the same carpenter, who has even built to Gregor’s specifications a tiny stall with curtains, where each pigeon showers three times a week.

During the first months after his move to the New Yorker, Ethel comes to see him occasionally but soon, too proud to allow her to closely follow his decline, Gregor refuses to let her visit him. He sees her only outside, specifically in the public squares where she accompanies him and buys him packets of birdseed while their conversation flags.

But only on the subject of love—which has never explicitly come up, in fact—because Gregor is still a fount of information about his projects, and he returns endlessly to his old dream of universal energy, about which no one wants to think anymore. He constantly assures her—and everyone else he can buttonhole, although their numbers are dwindling—that he has worked out a completely original idea for tapping energy that is available night and day and year round, to be produced and delivered by an apparatus as simple as one, two, three. Ethel is an old lady now and lets him talk away; everyone lets him talk away, just as they indulgently let him publish in a few minor journals—after a discreet intervention by Norman, it’s almost like self-publishing—his plans for two more projects: a geothermal steam plant and a system to generate electricity from seawater.

Gregor knows, however, that these rather dated ideas simply rework old themes, so it would be good to find something new. And he does. The specter of world war looms once again on the horizon, and this time Gregor comes up with a real corker: a powerful, invisible, incredibly destructive particle beam, proudly baptized “the Death Ray.” The ultimate weapon.

Based on the principle of particle acceleration (when particles travel so fast that a small number can convey tremendous power), this weapon could stop a racing car, a speeding boat, or a plane in flight by simply melting them. Such a defensive apparatus would render any nation, large or small, weak or strong, indestructible by enemy attack from land, sea, or air, and its dissuasive strength would eventually make even the possibility of war unthinkable. The ultimate weapon indeed, and the harbinger of world peace. Forty-five years earlier, that had already been the idea, for what it’s worth, behind Alfred Nobel’s explosives.

When the New York Times charitably reports on Gregor’s latest invention, its readers find the news sensational, but the entire scientific community just shrugs it off as usual, while only Hollywood starts dreaming of the wondrous possibilities of this disintegrating ray—if one doesn’t skimp on the special effects. In short, everyone still lets him talk away, all the more easily in this case because after his grand announcement, Gregor hasn’t much to say. Tightlipped about the full scope of this project, showing some discretion for once, he’s being doubly cautious. First off, he fears that, as has often happened in his life and in the course of science, the same idea might be germinating in other brains as well and that he’ll wind up being robbed again—he has coped with that too many times; he’s almost used to it, but enough’s enough. Most of all, though, he’s afraid that the exploitation of his idea might benefit only one country, even his own, which would sabotage his objective of world peace.

Deciding to make his idea inaccessible to any single nation, one night he spreads his diagrams and notes out on his table and armed with scissors and a pot of glue, he cuts his plans into six interdependent sections, so that each one contains some information but is useless on its own and, like a puzzle piece, becomes truly meaningful only in light of the other five parts. Gregor spends the entire night on this. At dawn, he’s done. He puts each section in an envelope, waits for the post office to open, then goes off to mail one envelope each to the ministers of war of six different world powers.

The postage is expensive, but noblesse oblige. Because this way, the six separate governments will be forced to confer and come to an agreement together to obtain a clear picture of the entire project. It’s an excellent idea, in fact the only viable one, the sole way to make the plan work, except that the ministers will never reply.