Devices

It must be understood that Arnold Ungelernter was intelligent, but not intelligent enough to have been the inventor of the Device. He acknowledged this himself. His background was unimpressive. The community college where he studied accounting was ranked low. His was the last generation to have been reared by immigrant parents in a tenement in an overpopulated Brooklyn neighborhood never destined to be gentrified. The bathtub was in the kitchen. The Albanian janitor and his family lived close to the coal bin in the cellar. And the Device, he admitted, had come into being not as his brainchild but as an accident or incident or random occurrence. It was something that happened to him or through him, not because of him, and its universal use was shockingly unexpected. It was a primal necessity, like a shoelace or a doorknob; but a shoelace can be replaced by a hook-and-loop fastener, and a doorknob with a sliding latch. The Device was an indispensable force in itself. It made Arnie Ungelernter rich.

It made him more than rich. It changed how he looked and felt, demanding tailor-made suits and a historic high-ceilinged brownstone in the East Seventies; and eventually, when the patent was sold by his lawyers to a mighty international corporation, it turned him into a leisured philanthropist. But his childhood’s speech still clung to his larynx, and his wife too (her name was Estelle) was a leftover from long ago. He was rawly conscious that his importance was tempered by ignorance. He subscribed to all the elite periodicals, both the storied and the newborn, and though he could take in the words and their most obvious meanings well enough, their implications eluded him. He sensed there were signals — histories, ideas, apperceptions — that he could not fathom. He yearned, he yearned. That his name was inscribed on the marble walls of the lobbies of three mid-Manhattan high-rises neither satisfied nor gratified him. Visitors whirling through the revolving doors hurried to the elevators and never stopped to take in the gold letters of Donated By Arnold P. Ungelernter.