Electric City: A Novel Read Online Free PDF Page B

could remain comfortable for long, a favorite being perched on a stool like some exotic bird, to allow himself the possibility of rearranging his weight whenever necessary and also gaining some much-needed height when others were sitting nearby.
    He would be his own invention, in this land decidedly famous for liberty of ideas and expression. Breslau would recede into blurry memories of forgotten faces, along with those of Vienna and Zurich. Unlike his grandfather and his father, he had already vowed never to marry, never to sire offspring doomed to carry the same deformity. He wasperfectly sure of this, at the age of twenty-four, confident he had some other legacy to leave behind.

    Finally on the same side of the gate, threshold of the New World, the two travelers embraced in triumph. Steinmetz, whose head was nearly two full feet lower than his friend’s, gripped Asmussen around his thick waist.
    “At last, at last!”
    He turned his curving back to the harbor and the Atlantic Ocean, strode forward into the future.

I F IT WEREN ’ T for the annual Company picnic, Henry Van Curler and Sophie Levine might never have met. Their lives could have passed side by side without overlapping, the perfectly parallel lines of a railroad track, never touching except in the illusion of a painting. Though they were nearly the same age, and ordinarily might have collided in the hallways at school, that never happened. Henry went to a boarding school in New Hampshire, the same exclusive place that had graduated the men of his family for generations.
    His lineage went back to the earliest Dutch settlement of Electric City, and his last name appeared on some of the oldest grave markers in town, the ones obscured by moss in the Vale Cemetery. The Van Curlers had resided in Electric City without interruption for some impressive number of centuries, a number Henry was always forgetting on purpose. Being “known” by way of his legacy, not to mention by way of the Tragedy, weighed more heavily each year of his life; he would have gladly shrugged it off like an old coat, a useless dead skin. So far, at least, that wasn’t one of the options.

    Within the past couple of years, thousands of families had been exiled from Electric City all the way to Virginia in the aftermath of layoffs and“relocations”; nevertheless, the simulation of a thriving future persisted. And though no one but Henry seemed to notice, the annual picnic was designed to fool everyone else into imagining Electric City comprised a single extended family. Abundant food on the Independence Day theme was provided by the Company, along with a seemingly unlimited supply of soft drinks for the kids and beer for anyone over twenty-one. Even Henry was unaware that one family among the many hundreds in attendance didn’t eat any of the grilled hot dogs or hamburgers but instead discreetly loaded flimsy paper plates with potato salad and coleslaw and ears of fresh corn. A man muttered apologetically that he wasn’t very hungry, rather than daring to explain that he was keeping kosher in the midst of so many non-Jews. Keeping a low profile was best, at least in certain situations in which it was easier to say too little rather than too much.
    It was July 7, 1966, and people were still talking about the blackout from back in November. Off-color jokes were shared among the adults about the wave of pregnancies appearing in the aftermath of that night.
    “Urban legend,” someone scoffed.
    Instead of smirking at the indirect mention of sex, the kids were more intent on passing around grim rumors about the Knolls Atomic Power Lab, sitting just a hillside away.
    KAPL was squat and gray and ominous, set back far enough from the crest of the road that its structures weren’t quite visible to anyone just driving by. Out front, a huge parking lot filled and emptied twice a day, and everyone knew without exactly being told that KAPL and its secrets compromised their safety.
    “We’re on