Santiago says he will clean all the merchant’s crystal overnight in exchange for money to get to Egypt. The merchant replies that the trip to Egypt is so long and expensive that Santiago couldn’t earn enough for the trip in a year. Santiago feels disappointed but agrees to take the job.
The Invention of Everything Else is a luminous imagining of an unlikely friendship between the eccentric inventor, Nikola Tesla, and a young hotel chambermaid, Louisa, who is obsessed with radio dramas and the secret lives of the hotel guests