WEBVTT
00:00:53.179 --> 00:00:56.780
This is not your universe, but someone lives here.
00:00:57.019 --> 00:00:59.179
Welcome to Elsewhere Weekly.
00:00:59.340 --> 00:01:01.340
A new universe every week.
00:01:01.579 --> 00:01:03.659
Never the same world twice.
00:01:03.979 --> 00:01:07.659
This week, a world one afternoon different from yours.
00:01:08.060 --> 00:01:16.859
August of 1896, Detroit, a man named Henry Ford takes his first machine out onto Bagley Avenue.
00:01:17.259 --> 00:01:20.939
In your universe, nothing happens.
00:01:21.340 --> 00:01:26.700
In this one, a nine-year-old boy chases a ball into the street.
00:01:30.939 --> 00:01:44.939
Frank Kowalski had worked the ticket windows of Detroit Grand Terminal for twenty two years, and he could tell you, without looking up, the time of day by nothing but the sound of the concourse.
00:01:45.180 --> 00:01:53.180
The seven o'clock sound was heels, thousands of heels, the morning express crowds off the interurbans.
00:01:53.340 --> 00:01:55.740
The ten o'clock sound was children.
00:01:55.979 --> 00:02:06.859
School groups come to see the departure board, which was the largest moving object in the Western Hemisphere, and was operated by sixty men on bicycles behind the wall.
00:02:07.099 --> 00:02:31.579
The four o'clock sound was everything at once, all eight hundred thousand daily souls of the greatest railway station on earth, and a man who could sell the four hundred fifteen to Chicago, the four hundred eighteen to Toledo, and the four hundred twenty to Grand Rapids, without once breaking the rhythm of his stamp, was a man they put on the plaque by the North Doors.
00:02:32.300 --> 00:02:35.259
Employee of the Month eleven times.
00:02:35.579 --> 00:02:38.860
Frank Kowalski, Window nineteen.
00:02:39.099 --> 00:02:58.939
His wife had stopped framing the certificates after the sixth one, but she kept them, all of them, in the cedar box with the war letters, and that tells you what kind of family this was, which is why nobody, least of all Frank, was prepared for what the neighbor kid found in the Kowalski shed.
00:02:59.259 --> 00:03:03.819
But first, you have to understand about the boy on Bagley Avenue.
00:03:04.060 --> 00:03:16.540
Everyone in this universe understands about the boy on Bagley Avenue the way you understand about your own famous tragedies, which is to say it is less a fact than a piece of the weather.
00:03:16.860 --> 00:03:32.620
Tommy Zelinsky, nine years old, chasing a ball, the second of august, eighteen ninety six, the exact afternoon a young engineer named Ford brought his gasoline quadricycle out for its first real run.
00:03:33.180 --> 00:03:35.180
The machine could not stop.
00:03:35.579 --> 00:03:39.500
That was the whole of it, the entire hinge of history.
00:03:39.819 --> 00:03:49.339
The machine could not stop, and after that afternoon, in the mind of a nation, the machine was never again a marvel.
00:03:49.899 --> 00:03:52.379
It was the thing that could not stop.
00:03:52.939 --> 00:03:55.339
Ford never built another.
00:03:55.579 --> 00:04:08.220
He went back to the power company and died a foreman, and they say he walked to Bagley Avenue every second of August for the rest of his life, though people say a lot of things.
00:04:08.459 --> 00:04:11.740
The newspapers of eighteen ninety six did the rest.
00:04:12.060 --> 00:04:13.420
The murder machine.
00:04:13.740 --> 00:04:15.259
Pulpits took it up.
00:04:15.579 --> 00:04:26.300
Then legislatures, then, most fatally of all, the insurance men, who priced the private motor carriage the way they priced dynamite.
00:04:26.699 --> 00:04:29.500
Nothing was ever exactly banned.
00:04:29.819 --> 00:04:31.660
Nothing needed to be.
00:04:31.980 --> 00:04:54.379
The automobile survived the way sin survives, at the edges, in the gravel counties, among rum runners and daredevils and the kind of men your mother crossed the street to avoid, and America, needing to move, poured all of its iron and all of its genius into the thing that could stop the train.
00:04:55.819 --> 00:04:58.300
So nineteen sixty two.
00:04:58.779 --> 00:05:01.180
The cities went up instead of out.
00:05:01.579 --> 00:05:05.500
Detroit is a canyon of towers strung with streetcar wire.
00:05:05.660 --> 00:05:09.259
The interurbans leave every ninety seconds for everywhere.
00:05:09.500 --> 00:05:13.180
A working man rides forty miles to dinner for a dime.
00:05:13.420 --> 00:05:19.180
And there is no such thing anywhere in America as a traffic death.
00:05:19.420 --> 00:05:26.860
There is also no such thing as a quiet country road, with a girl in the seat beside you and your hand on a wheel.
00:05:27.180 --> 00:05:31.420
No such thing as anywhere, right now, alone.
00:05:32.060 --> 00:05:39.259
A boy in this universe grows up moving only on the schedule, only on the rails, only in public.
00:05:39.819 --> 00:05:47.819
Danny Kowalski was sixteen, and he was good with his hands, and you can see where this is going better than Frank could.
00:05:48.060 --> 00:06:01.100
It was the Pruitt Kid who found it, poking around the sheds along the alley for a lost dog, and the Pruitt Kid told his mother, and his mother, being his mother, told the block.
00:06:01.420 --> 00:06:11.819
By the time Frank got home Wednesday, the shed was open, and his son was standing in front of it the way you stand in front of a thing you cannot cover with your body.
00:06:12.139 --> 00:06:17.180
And there it was, in the light of six in the evening, among the rakes.
00:06:17.740 --> 00:06:18.379
A car.
00:06:19.020 --> 00:06:21.020
Not a museum drawing?
00:06:21.259 --> 00:06:24.939
Not a photograph from a chapter about the old century?
00:06:25.340 --> 00:06:38.860
An actual gasoline automobile, low and homemade and mean looking, built out of a salvaged farm generator engine, and bicycle wheels and benchwood and four years it would later come out.
00:06:39.180 --> 00:06:41.740
Four years of stolen Saturdays.
00:06:42.060 --> 00:06:48.699
And painted on the side, in careful yellow letters, the worst part, the name the boy had given it.
00:06:48.939 --> 00:06:51.180
The name was Tommy's ghost.
00:06:51.420 --> 00:06:52.860
The street said nothing.
00:06:53.100 --> 00:06:56.220
The street had all gone indoors to watch.
00:06:56.620 --> 00:07:20.780
Frank stood at his own gate with his lunch pail in his hand, eleven times employee of the month at the greatest railway terminal on earth, a man whose whole life was the schedule, the safe iron miracle of the schedule, looking at his son's crime, and the first thing he said, God help him, was not any of the things he had been raised to say.
00:07:21.180 --> 00:07:24.540
The first thing he said was, does it run?
00:07:24.939 --> 00:07:32.060
They fought about it that night the way fathers and sons fight, in the kitchen, in half voices because of the neighbors.
00:07:32.540 --> 00:07:34.300
All the words got used.
00:07:34.620 --> 00:07:36.220
Shame got used.
00:07:36.699 --> 00:07:41.740
Zialinsky got used, and that one landed because it was meant to.
00:07:42.060 --> 00:07:42.699
Do you know?
00:07:42.939 --> 00:07:46.139
Frank said, what that name on the side makes us?
00:07:46.699 --> 00:07:49.340
Danny said, It is not what you think.
00:07:49.500 --> 00:07:54.460
And Frank said the sentence every father has said, in every universe there is.
00:07:54.780 --> 00:07:56.860
Then tell me what it is.
00:07:57.100 --> 00:08:00.620
And Danny, sixteen, shaking, told him.
00:08:01.580 --> 00:08:04.620
He was not mocking the boy on Bagley Avenue.
00:08:04.860 --> 00:08:07.259
He had built the machine for him.
00:08:07.819 --> 00:08:23.180
Because Danny was good with his hands, and he had read everything, all of it, the engineering journals from before the turn, the trial transcripts, and he had come to a conclusion that he could not say out loud in school in this universe.
00:08:23.500 --> 00:08:27.340
The conclusion was it did not have to happen.
00:08:27.660 --> 00:08:28.540
Brakes.
00:08:28.780 --> 00:08:30.620
It was always breaks.
00:08:31.259 --> 00:08:36.379
sixty six years, and nobody had ever built the machine the right way.
00:08:36.699 --> 00:08:45.580
The safe way, because nobody was allowed to try, and so the machine stayed frozen forever as the thing that could not stop.
00:08:46.299 --> 00:08:49.500
Well, Danny had built one that could stop.
00:08:49.899 --> 00:08:51.500
That was the whole car.
00:08:51.819 --> 00:08:54.539
The engine was the easy part, he said.
00:08:54.779 --> 00:08:56.620
The car was the brakes.
00:08:56.860 --> 00:09:10.220
Drums on all four wheels, a doubled cable, a design of his own out of an elevator journal, because elevators in this universe of towers were where all the genius of stopping had gone.
00:09:10.779 --> 00:09:16.379
I can stop that car from twenty miles an hour in the length of this kitchen, Danny said.
00:09:16.860 --> 00:09:23.419
I named it what I named it because it is the machine that would have brought Tommy Zelinsky home.
00:09:23.740 --> 00:09:25.740
Nobody ever built him one.
00:09:26.060 --> 00:09:28.539
Somebody should have built him one.
00:09:28.860 --> 00:09:31.500
The kitchen was quiet for a long time.
00:09:31.820 --> 00:09:34.940
Understand what Frank Kowalski was looking at?
00:09:35.180 --> 00:09:36.779
It was not a car.
00:09:37.340 --> 00:09:52.220
He was looking at four years of his son lying to him, and also at the plain, terrible, private fact that his son had a genius that his universe had decided sixty six years before the boy was born, it did not want.
00:09:52.539 --> 00:09:55.100
There was no place for what Danny was.
00:09:55.259 --> 00:09:58.060
There were no automobile works to hire him.
00:09:58.220 --> 00:10:27.419
There was a scrap man who would take the machine, and there was a fine, and there was the block already talking, and there was, above all of it, the thing Frank had never told anyone, that his own grandfather had stood on Bagley Avenue as a young man, had seen the crowd and the ball and the small covered shape, had told it to Frank once, one time only, and had ended not the way the school books end it.
00:10:27.659 --> 00:10:29.580
The school books end it.
00:10:29.899 --> 00:10:31.580
And so we learned.
00:10:31.899 --> 00:10:37.180
His grandfather had ended it, and after that no one was allowed to think.
00:10:37.580 --> 00:10:49.259
Frank was fifty one years old, and he sold safe passage for a living, and he had eleven certificates in a cedar box, and none of that was the reason for what he did.
00:10:49.659 --> 00:10:53.340
The reason was simpler, and it does not have a name.
00:10:53.580 --> 00:11:05.259
It is the thing a man feels the first time he understands that his son is not a smaller version of himself, that his son is a door to somewhere he has never been.
00:11:05.820 --> 00:11:22.620
Sunday, before dawn, before the first interurban, the two of them pushed Tommy's ghost down the alley in their socks like burglars, out the gravel spur road past the freight yards, out to where the county goes to fields.
00:11:22.860 --> 00:11:42.060
And in the gray first light of the day of rest, on an empty farm lane with dew on it, Frank Kowalski got into the passenger seat of the only automobile he had ever touched, built by his own boy's hands, and said the second thing, and the second thing was show me.
00:11:42.860 --> 00:11:45.820
It was loud, it was ridiculous.
00:11:45.980 --> 00:11:59.419
It shook like a washing machine, and it smelled like a lamp, and it went, at the most, twenty five miles an hour, which every man aboard the Chicago Express did quadruple while reading the paper.
00:11:59.659 --> 00:12:08.379
And it was also, Frank would think for the rest of his life, and never once say out loud, the fastest he had ever gone.
00:12:08.700 --> 00:12:11.019
Because the express was the schedule.
00:12:11.259 --> 00:12:24.539
And this was the morning, chosen, steered, his son's hand easy on the wheel, the fields coming up out of the dark on both sides, going nowhere that was printed on any board.
00:12:24.860 --> 00:12:27.580
Sixty men on bicycles be damned.
00:12:27.980 --> 00:12:31.659
Stop it, Frank said, when the far tree line was coming.
00:12:31.980 --> 00:12:33.659
Right here, show me.
00:12:33.899 --> 00:12:56.539
And Danny stood on the pedal his own two hands had built, and the drums bit, and the cables held, and Tommy's ghost pulled up smooth and square and complete, with room to spare, in the length of a kitchen, in the middle of a dirt lane, in the still Sunday morning of the universe where no one had ever been allowed to try.
00:12:56.860 --> 00:12:58.300
The engine ticked.
00:12:58.539 --> 00:13:01.019
Somewhere a dog took issue.
00:13:01.259 --> 00:13:04.060
The sun came up on the two of them sitting there.
00:13:04.300 --> 00:13:06.300
They never drove it again.
00:13:06.620 --> 00:13:08.379
That is the truth.
00:13:08.620 --> 00:13:11.659
And this story owes you the truth.
00:13:11.980 --> 00:13:46.060
Monday the machine went under a tarp, and in the spring it went quietly, not to the scrap man, but crated at scandalous expense, by rail, of course, by rail, to a technical college in Zurich, in a country that had made different choices, along with the drawings, and along with a letter of application written at the kitchen table over four drafts, and in the cedar box, from then on, with the war letters and the eleven certificates, there was one photograph that no visitor was ever shown.
00:13:46.300 --> 00:14:08.700
A dirt road, a homemade machine, a boy at the wheel laughing, and in the passenger seat, hair every which way, holding his hat in his lap, the eleven-time employee of the month of the greatest railway station on Earth, going, for the first time in his life, absolutely nowhere on time.
00:14:10.860 --> 00:14:16.139
That was Employee of the Month, Universe Zero Zero Three of Elsewhere.
00:14:16.460 --> 00:14:17.259
Weekly.
00:14:17.419 --> 00:14:19.659
That universe is closed now.
00:14:19.980 --> 00:14:21.500
We will never go back.
00:14:21.740 --> 00:14:28.060
Next week, a new sky, a new world, a new someone, somewhere else.
00:14:28.300 --> 00:14:29.659
Until next week.
00:14:29.980 --> 00:14:31.019
Travel well.
00:00:53.179 --> 00:00:56.780
This is not your universe, but someone lives here.
00:00:57.019 --> 00:00:59.179
Welcome to Elsewhere Weekly.
00:00:59.340 --> 00:01:01.340
A new universe every week.
00:01:01.579 --> 00:01:03.659
Never the same world twice.
00:01:03.979 --> 00:01:07.659
This week, a world one afternoon different from yours.
00:01:08.060 --> 00:01:16.859
August of 1896, Detroit, a man named Henry Ford takes his first machine out onto Bagley Avenue.
00:01:17.259 --> 00:01:20.939
In your universe, nothing happens.
00:01:21.340 --> 00:01:26.700
In this one, a nine-year-old boy chases a ball into the street.
00:01:30.939 --> 00:01:44.939
Frank Kowalski had worked the ticket windows of Detroit Grand Terminal for twenty two years, and he could tell you, without looking up, the time of day by nothing but the sound of the concourse.
00:01:45.180 --> 00:01:53.180
The seven o'clock sound was heels, thousands of heels, the morning express crowds off the interurbans.
00:01:53.340 --> 00:01:55.740
The ten o'clock sound was children.
00:01:55.979 --> 00:02:06.859
School groups come to see the departure board, which was the largest moving object in the Western Hemisphere, and was operated by sixty men on bicycles behind the wall.
00:02:07.099 --> 00:02:31.579
The four o'clock sound was everything at once, all eight hundred thousand daily souls of the greatest railway station on earth, and a man who could sell the four hundred fifteen to Chicago, the four hundred eighteen to Toledo, and the four hundred twenty to Grand Rapids, without once breaking the rhythm of his stamp, was a man they put on the plaque by the North Doors.
00:02:32.300 --> 00:02:35.259
Employee of the Month eleven times.
00:02:35.579 --> 00:02:38.860
Frank Kowalski, Window nineteen.
00:02:39.099 --> 00:02:58.939
His wife had stopped framing the certificates after the sixth one, but she kept them, all of them, in the cedar box with the war letters, and that tells you what kind of family this was, which is why nobody, least of all Frank, was prepared for what the neighbor kid found in the Kowalski shed.
00:02:59.259 --> 00:03:03.819
But first, you have to understand about the boy on Bagley Avenue.
00:03:04.060 --> 00:03:16.540
Everyone in this universe understands about the boy on Bagley Avenue the way you understand about your own famous tragedies, which is to say it is less a fact than a piece of the weather.
00:03:16.860 --> 00:03:32.620
Tommy Zelinsky, nine years old, chasing a ball, the second of august, eighteen ninety six, the exact afternoon a young engineer named Ford brought his gasoline quadricycle out for its first real run.
00:03:33.180 --> 00:03:35.180
The machine could not stop.
00:03:35.579 --> 00:03:39.500
That was the whole of it, the entire hinge of history.
00:03:39.819 --> 00:03:49.339
The machine could not stop, and after that afternoon, in the mind of a nation, the machine was never again a marvel.
00:03:49.899 --> 00:03:52.379
It was the thing that could not stop.
00:03:52.939 --> 00:03:55.339
Ford never built another.
00:03:55.579 --> 00:04:08.220
He went back to the power company and died a foreman, and they say he walked to Bagley Avenue every second of August for the rest of his life, though people say a lot of things.
00:04:08.459 --> 00:04:11.740
The newspapers of eighteen ninety six did the rest.
00:04:12.060 --> 00:04:13.420
The murder machine.
00:04:13.740 --> 00:04:15.259
Pulpits took it up.
00:04:15.579 --> 00:04:26.300
Then legislatures, then, most fatally of all, the insurance men, who priced the private motor carriage the way they priced dynamite.
00:04:26.699 --> 00:04:29.500
Nothing was ever exactly banned.
00:04:29.819 --> 00:04:31.660
Nothing needed to be.
00:04:31.980 --> 00:04:54.379
The automobile survived the way sin survives, at the edges, in the gravel counties, among rum runners and daredevils and the kind of men your mother crossed the street to avoid, and America, needing to move, poured all of its iron and all of its genius into the thing that could stop the train.
00:04:55.819 --> 00:04:58.300
So nineteen sixty two.
00:04:58.779 --> 00:05:01.180
The cities went up instead of out.
00:05:01.579 --> 00:05:05.500
Detroit is a canyon of towers strung with streetcar wire.
00:05:05.660 --> 00:05:09.259
The interurbans leave every ninety seconds for everywhere.
00:05:09.500 --> 00:05:13.180
A working man rides forty miles to dinner for a dime.
00:05:13.420 --> 00:05:19.180
And there is no such thing anywhere in America as a traffic death.
00:05:19.420 --> 00:05:26.860
There is also no such thing as a quiet country road, with a girl in the seat beside you and your hand on a wheel.
00:05:27.180 --> 00:05:31.420
No such thing as anywhere, right now, alone.
00:05:32.060 --> 00:05:39.259
A boy in this universe grows up moving only on the schedule, only on the rails, only in public.
00:05:39.819 --> 00:05:47.819
Danny Kowalski was sixteen, and he was good with his hands, and you can see where this is going better than Frank could.
00:05:48.060 --> 00:06:01.100
It was the Pruitt Kid who found it, poking around the sheds along the alley for a lost dog, and the Pruitt Kid told his mother, and his mother, being his mother, told the block.
00:06:01.420 --> 00:06:11.819
By the time Frank got home Wednesday, the shed was open, and his son was standing in front of it the way you stand in front of a thing you cannot cover with your body.
00:06:12.139 --> 00:06:17.180
And there it was, in the light of six in the evening, among the rakes.
00:06:17.740 --> 00:06:18.379
A car.
00:06:19.020 --> 00:06:21.020
Not a museum drawing?
00:06:21.259 --> 00:06:24.939
Not a photograph from a chapter about the old century?
00:06:25.340 --> 00:06:38.860
An actual gasoline automobile, low and homemade and mean looking, built out of a salvaged farm generator engine, and bicycle wheels and benchwood and four years it would later come out.
00:06:39.180 --> 00:06:41.740
Four years of stolen Saturdays.
00:06:42.060 --> 00:06:48.699
And painted on the side, in careful yellow letters, the worst part, the name the boy had given it.
00:06:48.939 --> 00:06:51.180
The name was Tommy's ghost.
00:06:51.420 --> 00:06:52.860
The street said nothing.
00:06:53.100 --> 00:06:56.220
The street had all gone indoors to watch.
00:06:56.620 --> 00:07:20.780
Frank stood at his own gate with his lunch pail in his hand, eleven times employee of the month at the greatest railway terminal on earth, a man whose whole life was the schedule, the safe iron miracle of the schedule, looking at his son's crime, and the first thing he said, God help him, was not any of the things he had been raised to say.
00:07:21.180 --> 00:07:24.540
The first thing he said was, does it run?
00:07:24.939 --> 00:07:32.060
They fought about it that night the way fathers and sons fight, in the kitchen, in half voices because of the neighbors.
00:07:32.540 --> 00:07:34.300
All the words got used.
00:07:34.620 --> 00:07:36.220
Shame got used.
00:07:36.699 --> 00:07:41.740
Zialinsky got used, and that one landed because it was meant to.
00:07:42.060 --> 00:07:42.699
Do you know?
00:07:42.939 --> 00:07:46.139
Frank said, what that name on the side makes us?
00:07:46.699 --> 00:07:49.340
Danny said, It is not what you think.
00:07:49.500 --> 00:07:54.460
And Frank said the sentence every father has said, in every universe there is.
00:07:54.780 --> 00:07:56.860
Then tell me what it is.
00:07:57.100 --> 00:08:00.620
And Danny, sixteen, shaking, told him.
00:08:01.580 --> 00:08:04.620
He was not mocking the boy on Bagley Avenue.
00:08:04.860 --> 00:08:07.259
He had built the machine for him.
00:08:07.819 --> 00:08:23.180
Because Danny was good with his hands, and he had read everything, all of it, the engineering journals from before the turn, the trial transcripts, and he had come to a conclusion that he could not say out loud in school in this universe.
00:08:23.500 --> 00:08:27.340
The conclusion was it did not have to happen.
00:08:27.660 --> 00:08:28.540
Brakes.
00:08:28.780 --> 00:08:30.620
It was always breaks.
00:08:31.259 --> 00:08:36.379
sixty six years, and nobody had ever built the machine the right way.
00:08:36.699 --> 00:08:45.580
The safe way, because nobody was allowed to try, and so the machine stayed frozen forever as the thing that could not stop.
00:08:46.299 --> 00:08:49.500
Well, Danny had built one that could stop.
00:08:49.899 --> 00:08:51.500
That was the whole car.
00:08:51.819 --> 00:08:54.539
The engine was the easy part, he said.
00:08:54.779 --> 00:08:56.620
The car was the brakes.
00:08:56.860 --> 00:09:10.220
Drums on all four wheels, a doubled cable, a design of his own out of an elevator journal, because elevators in this universe of towers were where all the genius of stopping had gone.
00:09:10.779 --> 00:09:16.379
I can stop that car from twenty miles an hour in the length of this kitchen, Danny said.
00:09:16.860 --> 00:09:23.419
I named it what I named it because it is the machine that would have brought Tommy Zelinsky home.
00:09:23.740 --> 00:09:25.740
Nobody ever built him one.
00:09:26.060 --> 00:09:28.539
Somebody should have built him one.
00:09:28.860 --> 00:09:31.500
The kitchen was quiet for a long time.
00:09:31.820 --> 00:09:34.940
Understand what Frank Kowalski was looking at?
00:09:35.180 --> 00:09:36.779
It was not a car.
00:09:37.340 --> 00:09:52.220
He was looking at four years of his son lying to him, and also at the plain, terrible, private fact that his son had a genius that his universe had decided sixty six years before the boy was born, it did not want.
00:09:52.539 --> 00:09:55.100
There was no place for what Danny was.
00:09:55.259 --> 00:09:58.060
There were no automobile works to hire him.
00:09:58.220 --> 00:10:27.419
There was a scrap man who would take the machine, and there was a fine, and there was the block already talking, and there was, above all of it, the thing Frank had never told anyone, that his own grandfather had stood on Bagley Avenue as a young man, had seen the crowd and the ball and the small covered shape, had told it to Frank once, one time only, and had ended not the way the school books end it.
00:10:27.659 --> 00:10:29.580
The school books end it.
00:10:29.899 --> 00:10:31.580
And so we learned.
00:10:31.899 --> 00:10:37.180
His grandfather had ended it, and after that no one was allowed to think.
00:10:37.580 --> 00:10:49.259
Frank was fifty one years old, and he sold safe passage for a living, and he had eleven certificates in a cedar box, and none of that was the reason for what he did.
00:10:49.659 --> 00:10:53.340
The reason was simpler, and it does not have a name.
00:10:53.580 --> 00:11:05.259
It is the thing a man feels the first time he understands that his son is not a smaller version of himself, that his son is a door to somewhere he has never been.
00:11:05.820 --> 00:11:22.620
Sunday, before dawn, before the first interurban, the two of them pushed Tommy's ghost down the alley in their socks like burglars, out the gravel spur road past the freight yards, out to where the county goes to fields.
00:11:22.860 --> 00:11:42.060
And in the gray first light of the day of rest, on an empty farm lane with dew on it, Frank Kowalski got into the passenger seat of the only automobile he had ever touched, built by his own boy's hands, and said the second thing, and the second thing was show me.
00:11:42.860 --> 00:11:45.820
It was loud, it was ridiculous.
00:11:45.980 --> 00:11:59.419
It shook like a washing machine, and it smelled like a lamp, and it went, at the most, twenty five miles an hour, which every man aboard the Chicago Express did quadruple while reading the paper.
00:11:59.659 --> 00:12:08.379
And it was also, Frank would think for the rest of his life, and never once say out loud, the fastest he had ever gone.
00:12:08.700 --> 00:12:11.019
Because the express was the schedule.
00:12:11.259 --> 00:12:24.539
And this was the morning, chosen, steered, his son's hand easy on the wheel, the fields coming up out of the dark on both sides, going nowhere that was printed on any board.
00:12:24.860 --> 00:12:27.580
Sixty men on bicycles be damned.
00:12:27.980 --> 00:12:31.659
Stop it, Frank said, when the far tree line was coming.
00:12:31.980 --> 00:12:33.659
Right here, show me.
00:12:33.899 --> 00:12:56.539
And Danny stood on the pedal his own two hands had built, and the drums bit, and the cables held, and Tommy's ghost pulled up smooth and square and complete, with room to spare, in the length of a kitchen, in the middle of a dirt lane, in the still Sunday morning of the universe where no one had ever been allowed to try.
00:12:56.860 --> 00:12:58.300
The engine ticked.
00:12:58.539 --> 00:13:01.019
Somewhere a dog took issue.
00:13:01.259 --> 00:13:04.060
The sun came up on the two of them sitting there.
00:13:04.300 --> 00:13:06.300
They never drove it again.
00:13:06.620 --> 00:13:08.379
That is the truth.
00:13:08.620 --> 00:13:11.659
And this story owes you the truth.
00:13:11.980 --> 00:13:46.060
Monday the machine went under a tarp, and in the spring it went quietly, not to the scrap man, but crated at scandalous expense, by rail, of course, by rail, to a technical college in Zurich, in a country that had made different choices, along with the drawings, and along with a letter of application written at the kitchen table over four drafts, and in the cedar box, from then on, with the war letters and the eleven certificates, there was one photograph that no visitor was ever shown.
00:13:46.300 --> 00:14:08.700
A dirt road, a homemade machine, a boy at the wheel laughing, and in the passenger seat, hair every which way, holding his hat in his lap, the eleven-time employee of the month of the greatest railway station on Earth, going, for the first time in his life, absolutely nowhere on time.
00:14:10.860 --> 00:14:16.139
That was Employee of the Month, Universe Zero Zero Three of Elsewhere.
00:14:16.460 --> 00:14:17.259
Weekly.
00:14:17.419 --> 00:14:19.659
That universe is closed now.
00:14:19.980 --> 00:14:21.500
We will never go back.
00:14:21.740 --> 00:14:28.060
Next week, a new sky, a new world, a new someone, somewhere else.
00:14:28.300 --> 00:14:29.659
Until next week.
00:14:29.980 --> 00:14:31.019
Travel well.
