12 minutes: The demonstration: the wires held, the church hall rapt, their faces frozen by the melodies from violin and keyboard, played by no players, but by electric current that he had conducted. The room dark and emptied now, Elisha sits alone in the first row marveling at the piano he’d filled with ghosts.
3 minutes: While buttering his toast at the kitchen window, Elisha pauses to watch a flock of white-throated sparrows swell and dodge in the morning sky. They land on the neighbor’s roof, the first imprint on the night’s snow.
17 minutes: A trip down to Chicago to the grand reopening of The Palmer House, the third version, finally rebuilt. A pause with coat in hand by the display in the lobby advertising “The World’s Only Fireproof Hotel”; a conversation with an adman about the new features that will, this time, keep the hotel from destruction.
7 minutes: Six extra pages from Verne’s newest novel – had to see Fogg safely through from Suez to Bombay (60 days left for the journey).
15 minutes: A second draft of the letter to Hayes: the recognition it is unwise to write in anger, to put sentiment down where it can be examined, re-examined, contorted. Even to one’s lawyer. “I am mad clear down to my boots,” he begins, “This Bell in Cambridge has much the same idea for a multi-tone device and I very much doubt the independence of it.”
13 minutes: Elisha doesn’t mind getting wet, but he’s on his way to meet a man of finesse, of appearances, and, most importantly, of excessive wealth of which Elisha would very much like to partake. His new company needs investors. He waits under the baker’s awning while the sky empties what it’s been storing.
3 minutes: Before returning to the application, Elisha reads an item in the Chicago Tribune about the running of a new horse race in Kentucky. A horse named Aristides, “the Just,” wins. The fairest outcome, I suppose, Elisha jokes to himself as he returns to his desk.
26 minutes: An extra few minutes in bed on two Sundays in June (9 minutes; 17 minutes).
3 minutes: Elisha owns many tools but his hands are his favorite. They built boats from cedar and beds from rough pine, and the wood built them in turn. Now they require care. Before stepping out into the frost, Elisha opens the jar of Vaseline Petroleum Jelly and thinks how he covers himself in modernity. Gone are the days of pig fat, of rosewater salve.
4 minutes: Before John and Margaret arrive for Thanksgiving dinner, Elisha trims and combs through his beard again.
2 minutes: The boy at the till, Michael‘s age, shows him the new twenty cent coin. He points its smooth edge at Elisha’s nose. Elisha takes it in his fingers and asks heads or tails. The boy calls tails, but it lands heads. He buys them each a wafer anyway.
5 minutes: It’s already late, he’s already smoked tonight, but Elisha exits onto the back veranda with his pipe half-packed.
4 minutes: Paired with Charles, Elisha plays 3 more hands of Whist before leaving, now definitively late, for lunch.
6 minutes: Even though he knows the words like he knows scripture and he knows the diagrams like the gradient of his wife’s eyes, he reads the application one last time before stacking the pages and extending them towards his lawyer’s open hands. He exits into the brisk lake breeze consumed with visions of the future, the one he’s about to steer humanity towards, his hands the ones at the helm of history.
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Stephen Lurie is a writer and facilitator in Brooklyn, NY. He can be found at @luriethereal on social media platforms.
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Tim Fitts is a short story writer and photographer. His work has been published in the New England Review, Granta, Shenandoah, Boulevard, Fugue, and the Baltimore Review, among others. His photographs have been shown in South Korea and the United States, most notably the Thomas Deans Gallery in Atlanta. His photographic works often combine color transparencies, as well as transparencies with black and white film.
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Another Chicago Magazine 