The Last Days of Night(2)

Paul was an attorney. And this was what his as yet brief career in the law had done to his brain. He was comforted by minutiae. His mortal fears could be assuaged only by an encyclopedic command of detail.

Paul was a professional builder of narratives. He was a teller of concise tales. His work was to take a series of isolated events and, shearing from them their dross, craft from them a progression. The morning’s discrete images—a routine labor, a clumsy error, a grasping arm, a crowded street, a spark of fire, a blood-speckled child, a dripping corpse—could be assembled into a story. There would be a beginning, a middle, and an end. Stories reach conclusions, and then they go away. Such is their desperately needed magic. That day’s story, once told in his mind, could be wrapped up, put aside, and recalled only when necessary. The properly assembled narrative would guard his mind from the terror of raw memory.

Even a true story is a fiction, Paul knew. It is the comforting tool we use to organize the chaotic world around us into something comprehensible. It is the cognitive machine that separates the wheat of emotion from the chaff of sensation. The real world is overfull with incidents, brimming over with occurrences. In our stories, we disregard most of them until clear reason and motivation emerge. Every story is an invention, a technological device not unlike the very one that on that morning had seared a man’s skin from his bones. A good story could be put to no less dangerous a purpose.

As an attorney, the tales that Paul told were moral ones. There existed, in his narratives, only the injured and their abusers. The slandered and the liars. The swindled and the thieves. Paul constructed these characters painstakingly until the righteousness of his plaintiff—or his defendant—became overwhelming. It was not the job of a litigator to determine facts; it was his job to construct a story from those facts by which a clear moral conclusion would be unavoidable. That was the business of Paul’s stories: to present an undeniable view of the world. And then to vanish, once the world had been so organized and a profit fairly earned. A bold beginning, a thrilling middle, a satisfying end, perhaps one last little twist, and then…gone. Catalogued and boxed, stored for safekeeping.

All Paul had to do was to tell today’s story to himself and it would disappear. To revisit the images over and over in his head. Salvation through repetition.

But as it turned out, a flaming corpse over Broadway was only the second most terrifying thing that Paul Cravath would see that day.

Later that evening—after his secretary had departed to her Yorkville apartment, after his senior partners had retired to their upper Fifth Avenue three-stories, long after Paul had failed to leave for his Fiftieth Street bachelor’s flat and instead penned so many notes with his rubber Waterman that the blister popped on his right middle finger—a boy arrived at the office door. He bore a telegram.

“Your presence is desired immediately,” read the message. “Much to discuss in strictest confidence.”

It was signed “T. Edison.”





Hell, there are no rules here—we’re trying to accomplish something.

—THOMAS EDISON, HARPER’S MAGAZINE, SEPTEMBER 1932



PAUL GRABBED FOR his jacket and refastened his necktie before making his way to the door. He had been engaged in litigation against Thomas Edison for almost six months, but still hadn’t met the world’s most famous inventor.

Edison must have heard about the accident. The very public death by electricity of a man on a city street. He would surely be preparing a response. But what would he want with Paul?

Before leaving, Paul removed a folder from a drawer. He placed some documents into the inside pocket of his wool overcoat. Whatever Edison was planning, Paul would have his own surprise in store.

Broadway was dim at such a late hour. The few gas lamps that lit the street painted the cobblestones with a thin yellow glow. Only one point sparkled in the distance. Wall Street, to the south, was a citadel of bright electrical light amid the murky smoke and gas of Manhattan.

Paul turned to the dark north and quickly hailed a four-wheeled carriage.

“Sixty-five Fifth Avenue,” he instructed the cabby. While the Edison General Electric Company still kept his famous laboratory in New Jersey, the company’s main office had assumed a much more fashionable address.

The man turned around to look at Paul. “You’re going to see the Wizard?”

“I can’t imagine that’s what his mother calls him.”

“His mother died a long time ago,” replied the cabby. “Don’t you know?”

The mythmaking that surrounded Edison’s story never ceased to amaze Paul. In less than a decade of public life, Edison had made himself into a modern-day Johnny Appleseed. It was infuriating, though one had to appreciate the skill involved.

“He’s just a man,” said Paul. “No matter what The Sun says about him.”

“He makes miracles. Lightning in a glass bottle. Voices in a copper wire. What kind of a man can do that?”

“A rich one.”

The trotting horses carried them up Broadway, past quiet Houston and the fashionable row houses of Fourteenth Street. The island was dark until they made the turn onto Fifth. Suddenly the electric lamps that lit the avenue became visible. The vast majority of New York streets were lit at night by coal gas, the same flickering light that had illuminated the city for a hundred years. But recently a handful of wealthy business owners had been able to outfit their buildings with these new electrical bulbs. Just a few streets contained something like 99 percent of the electricity in America, and their names were well known: Wall Street, Madison Avenue, Thirty-fourth Street. Every day these blocks grew a shade brighter as another building was wired for current. The high-strung cables formed a fortress around each block. Paul looked up Fifth Avenue and saw progress.