Electric City: A Novel Read Online Free PDF

hastily sketched on an elderly woman’s woolen shoulder; her cataracts and ghastly pallor couldn’t be mistaken by even a layperson. Steinmetz observed adults and children of all ages being directed to one side or another, led toward clusters of those who would be taken to the island’s hospital for treatment. He heard loud-voiced assurances that they would be seeing American doctors, not taken back on board.
    “You are not being sent home,” a hoarse young man barked over and over. Protests in multiple dialects were elaborately offered in return.
    “You are not being rejected. Just need to get stronger first, that’s all.” The young man flexed his muscles as though to demonstrate or perhaps translate, but the gesture was met with baffled expressions.
    Steinmetz felt his heart pounding in empathy, knew his own strength was a matter of doubt. Having traversed one treacherous ocean, this seemed to him yet another sea of distress, with feverish looks on nearly every face, even the ones who were passing inspection. The middle-agedwoman to his right was wearing about seven or eight skirts, so much material it must have been like carrying around an extra fifteen kilos of weight. What a clever inspiration , he thought, and managed a smile. Why not wear everything you own instead of packing it into a suitcase.
    His turn had finally come. He held out his passport, looked straight into the eyes of the medical officers, and waited.
    The pair of sandy-haired doctors assigned to him wore similar mustaches; one wore spectacles and the other did not. Almost in unison, they jotted rapid notes on their clipboards and shook their heads. In mere seconds their stethoscopes revealed he was suffering from bronchitis, his eyesight was poor, and even a cursory glance deemed him a truly unpromising figure on all counts. A chalk mark on his sleeve was to be the inevitable result: L for lameness.
    This was the moment when Asmussen shouldered his sizable frame through the throng and began waving a stack of paper bills toward the faces of the officials.
    “This money,” he sputtered. “All of this belongs to my friend here, Herr—I mean Professor Steinmetz. It’s been saved for him especially!” Asmussen, having easily cleared each inspection as a returning citizen, stood in an impressive white blazer on the far side of a high oak desktop, fluttering the money again.
    “And allow me to mention the most important thing. He’s a mathematical engineer with a first-rate mind. A genius! An ideal American, I assure you!”
    The younger of the two doctors squinted back and forth between Asmussen and Steinmetz, his chalk poised in midair. The older doctor adjusted his spectacles as if reconsidering the object before him.
    Steinmetz stood patiently, like a mule , he thought, until they finally and wordlessly stamped his documents with their approval. Money hadspoken. He would be allowed to disembark, set free to place his feet on dry land, accompanied by his single trunk and his beloved cigars.
    But one thing would be left behind, drowned between the Old World and the New. From this day on he would call himself by an American designation, one that reflected his new identity, his determination to start over.
    Charles Steinmetz.
    The middle initial P. would come later, followed eventually by his full inclusion of what the letter represented: P for Proteus, the god of changing shape. His classmates had given him the nickname back in Breslau, a kind of teasing but without cruelty in it. They claimed it had to do with his mind’s phenomenal fluidity, shifting from one intellectual pursuit to another.
    He knew too that being called Proteus was simply an acknowledgment of what was impossible to ignore, his hump, his twisted frame. Quietly he maintained a conviction that this was as God-given as his mind, to be accepted without complaint.
    Hardly anyone knew about the near-constant pain in his torso and limbs. There were few positions in which Steinmetz