In the Matter of Nikola Tesla

by Anthony Flacco

  After a few seconds he realized that even though his eyesight was still useless, he could “see” the sources of those mechanical sounds in his mind’s eye. His inner vision was filled with images of strange metallic devices. Some were small and others were massive in size, but each one was perfectly clear in detail.

  The strange creations glowed, revolving like images in a kaleidoscope, pulsating with energy. When he forced his eyes open to test his eyesight, he gasped again; the devices were still there. They were in the physical world of his bedroom—the hard world.

  This state of illusion was beyond anything he had ever experienced or intended. Somehow the act of calling up a three-dimensional memory of a real person appeared to have set off reactions that ended with these objects leaping from his imagination and into the air in front of him. They were things he had never heard of. He suspected they might not even exist.

  “But they are real, Nikola.” She spoke as if he had asked her a question.

  His brain felt like it was boiling. He rose onto his knees and grabbed his head with both hands in an attempt to stop the violent activity. But new visions spewed into his mind. It no longer made any difference if his eyes were open; Karina had started a flow of energy that he could not stop. He could not slow it down.

  He stared up at her and felt her gaze meet his eyes, while the images whirled in the air before him. He heard himself alternately laughing and crying, and he could not stop the flow of emotions any more than he could turn off the geyser of images.

  Even if it was all his own creation, he could not will himself to stop seeing this beautiful, magical hallucination of Karina. He was grateful to his fever for bringing her back to him for these few moments at least. She stood before him, as real as anything else in his world.

  The deepest part of the mystery was her appearance of self-awareness. She stood before him and stared straight into his eyes, something Karina had seldom done in life.

  On the other side of the bedroom door, Djouka Tesla lingered with her hand on the latch.

  “Impossible!” she heard her son cry, his voice trembling with amazement. “Free will! It has a will of its own! It…she…she…”

  Djouka had always hoped that her power would someday arise inside Nikola, but it tested her deepest faith and all of her inner strength to pull herself away from the door and return downstairs. She returned to the big chair by the fireplace to quietly await her husband’s return. If her son didn’t calm down by the time everyone arrived, she would insist that Milu and the girls go out with her for an early morning walk. Her daughters had good hearts and intelligent minds, but they did not have the power; there was no way for them to understand what was happening here.

  They were all so frightened by Nikola’s outbursts that they would do as they were told for awhile before they started getting cantankerous. Milutin would be glad to avoid all this and leave the house again with his wife and the girls, if she gave him the excuse. In this way, Djouka pulled an invisible blanket over her struggling son.

  Nikola lay pinned on his back by the firestorm of energy inside him. It felt like lightning bolts were ricocheting around in his skull. He could only cry softly, staring in amazement while the countless images whirled and danced before his eyes.

  When Karina moved to the side of the bed and smiled down at him, he gathered just enough self-control to whisper to her.

  “For God’s sake, what is happening to me?” he breathed. “I’m not insane, I know you’re just…you are something I imagined.”

  The warmth immediately drained from her face. “I am?” she snapped. “Well, why tell me that since I’m not here? After all, you’re only talking to yourself!”

  She moved closer to the open window and spoke without looking back at him. “Nikola, you’re as alone right now as you have always been.”

  “Karina!”

  She stopped moving at the sound of her name, but she didn’t turn around to him.

  “Please,” he breathed. “I have to know. Is it really you? Are you Karina?”

  He hardly dared to breathe while he watched her for a reaction. Finally, the stiffness in her shoulders seemed to ease. When she turned around her expression had softened, but her words teased him.

  “How could I be Karina? She died.”

  “Yes, but you—she—what are you?”

  She smiled. Again, her eyes flashed with brilliant light. This time the blast of energy hit Nikola so hard that it tore a scream of shock out of him. The blast wave snatched him up and carried him away.

  Nikola clearly felt Karina somehow riding that giant wave right along with him. He knew it was impossible; even so, he sensed her closeness in the midst of the chaos all around him. The touch of her fingers brushed over his cheek and the soft warmth of her breath played upon his neck. It made no sense and he did not care. He relinquished all of his fear and relaxed into the powerful wave while it swept them far away.

  Djouka finally felt her resolve shatter when she heard Nikola’s scream. The sound brought her running to her son’s room. When she yanked open the door, the sight in front of her left her frozen in the doorway.

  Nikola lay on his bed, face up, with his feet wide apart and arms thrown back over his head. His entire body seemed as rigid as an ice sculpture. The eyes were wide open, staring upward.

  She ran to him and knelt beside him, touching his face to gauge his fever, but found to her astonishment that it was gone. The pallor was nearly off of his skin now, even though his breathing remained fast and shallow. His lips moved slightly, mouthing silent words.

  Only the expression frozen on Nikola’s face kept panic away from his mother. He showed no pain, no fear. If Djouka had to put a name to it, she would say what she saw was fascination. She focused her gaze and sank back inside of herself as far down into the root of her power as she could go. Soon she peered out from that familiar old place and saw Nikola with clearer eyes. She could not quite focus on what he was seeing, but it was plain to her that he was surrounded by a strong aura of energy.

  Not all of it was coming from him.

  It struck Djouka then that she was witnessing an epiphany in her son’s life. There was no point in calling the doctor back again. She could only hope that she was doing enough by keeping her Nikola safe from prying eyes and away the misunderstandings of others while he lay in such a vulnerable state.

  The church authorities, had they been looking on at that moment, would have been horrified to see that instead of calling upon religious intervention for her son, Reverend Tesla’s wife simply kissed Nikola’s forehead, covered him with a single sheet, then closed the window and walked out of the room.

  Chapter Three

  Spring, 1876

  The Polytechnic Institute

  Gratz, Austria

  Once Nikola’s fever subsided, the visitation did not return. There was nothing of her for over two years. In moments of guilty reflection, he remembered his father’s many sermons about how Satan tempted new disciples in strange and imaginative ways. As long as he thought about such things during daylight hours, he usually concluded there was no such danger to him.

  Once he accepted that he could not recreate the experience in an ordinary state of mind, he only managed to endure going back to the routines of daily life by spending as much time as possible inside of his head. He consumed countless hours with the extraordinary new visualization ability left behind by the fever dream, or whatever it was.

  That version of the story sustained his strained coping devices until the spring of his twentieth year, when he lost all control over his inner life once and for all. The event, when it finally happened, snatched him up in a single instant.

  It overtook him while he stood in the rear section of the Institute’s largest lecture hall, amid row upon row of ferociously competitive science students. Thirty pairs of eyes focused on him, along with the famously bored sneer of condescension from Herr Doktor Poeschl, the class’s e
steemed professor.

  Herr Doktor was tutonically schooled and excruciatingly opinionated. Only a fool challenged his teachings the way Nikola had just done. Now the entire class awaited his explanation.

  “Mr. Tesla, we’re waiting!” Herr Doktor’s voice rang upward over the sloped seating of the packed hall.

  The rest of the class would have already lost patience by now and stopped craning their necks to see him, but they had witnessed this before. The air in the room tightened while the tall student with the jet black hair and snow-pale skin appeared to stare into space. They knew that Nikola Tesla always managed to avoid imminent disaster with some arcane line of reasoning. He still had a moment or two of their faith left.

  But Herr Doktor called out again, his voice full of good cheer, “If you please, Mr. Tesla! We await your defense with bated breath! You must be so good as to justify your theory that even though alternating current is uncontrollable, and–”

  Here, the professor grinned and confided to the class in a stage whisper: “Despite the proven fact that it is the same force as a lightning bolt…”

  His voice returned to its normal boom, “…it might nevertheless drive this small machine with ‘more efficiency’ than our standard direct current?”

  The professor was a canny public speaker; he flashed a smile that somehow included every person in the lecture hall except Nikola. He added, “the infinitely safer direct current?”

  That did it. The spell was broken. A wave of appreciative chuckles rippled through the hall while Nikola’s overshadowed peers felt free to let their jealousy emerge. Clearly, this time he was going to lose.

  After all, the renowned Herr Doctor Poeschl had just been interrupted in the midst of his famed annual demonstration of his French-made “Gramme machine.” When he proudly pointed out that the Gramme machine was so well designed that it could serve either as a power generator or a motor to drive machinery, Nikola raised his hand to question whether the entire machine and its DC power were not “examples of poor science.”

  Herr Doktor frequently ignored questions while in the midst of his favorite lectures. However this was more than a question; it was a clear challenge to the lecture itself.

  At first Herr Doktor had appeared absorbed in removing a bit of dust from the sleeve of his lecture gown. Finally he had cleared his throat and forced a wan smile. Then to the amazement of the class, he not only acknowledged the impertinent interruption, he actually set aside time to address the issue.

  The students knew the old scholar would exact his revenge. Nikola found himself reeling under the professor’s withering attitude. A horseshoe of staring eyes peered back at him from the lecture hall’s rows of seats, sending prickly waves of snide energy through his clothing.

  He struggled to clear his thoughts and focus his vision onto the impossible alternating current generator that hovered in mid-air directly in front of him. The shock came when he mentally dissolved the machine’s housing and attempted to focus on the essential components; he discovered that although his intuition felt rock solid, his image of the machine was foggy in key areas.

  And the classroom clock was ticking. Herr Doktor, after all, had stopped his lecture for Nikola’s impertinent outburst. Nikola felt panic rise. It was suddenly apparent; completely new forms of circuitry were required to convert the alternating current to a useable form, and at this agonizing moment he could offer no proof that such circuits could be made to work.

  It was useless to offer intuition; he needed to justify the disrespect of his interruption. He grasped for anything that might deliver him from the burning stares of his peers and the jolly derision of Herr Doktor Poeschl.

  Nothing came to him except for a single fact, a real Grim Reaper of truth. It leaned on its lethal scythe and exuded itself at him:

  It’s not going to happen for you this time.

  Herr Doktor’s voice perforated Nikola’s reverie with the Devil’s perfect timing and snatched him back to the hard world. “Thank you then, for today’s entertainment, Mr. Tesla! This class is concluded.”

  The students immediately began to stir, preparing to leave. The professor raised his voice over the din. “Facts, ladies and gentlemen, not speculation! Alternating current cannot be turned into a one-way power source for the same reason that a direct force, like gravity, cannot be converted into a rotary force.”

  Herr Doktor turned on the Gramme machine for emphasis. It hummed to life. “This is why we refer to the two forces as fundamentally different, you see.”

  The students collectively chuckled and began to file out, but a loud gasp from Nikola stopped them. They turned back to see his eyes lit up and his face covered with a broad smile of relief.

  “Professor, the straight pull of the earth’s gravity acts as a rotating force upon the moon’s mass!”

  “Mr. Tesla, class has been dis—”

  “The moon rotates around the planet,” Nikola cast a nervous glance around the room, “although gravity is constantly pulling the moon straight down. Toward us.”

  The classroom became very quiet.

  It remained quiet.

  Except for Herr Doktor Poeschl, no one moved. Even he, at first, did nothing more than drop his gaze back to the sleeve of his formal lecture jacket. He picked away another bit of invisible lint, then forced the wan smile back onto his face. When he lifted his gaze up to meet the eyes of his happily inspired student, Herr Doktor’s professionalism nearly allowed him to conceal his wounded pride.

  “Well, certainly. That is… if you…” He rubbed his eyes. “Right you are. Right enough. Class dismissed. Mr. Tesla, if you might remain for a moment?”

  The rest knew enough to make a hasty retreat.

  Ten minutes later, Nikola and Herr Doktor sat only a few seats away from one another in the otherwise empty lecture hall. In spite of the close distance, Nikola strained to hear the older man’s voice. He was well aware of the import of the occasion—why, to not only be granted his point of argument by Herr Doktor in front of the entire class, but to be publicly invited to remain for a private conference! When did such things ever happen? He made a note to find a good poker game while his luck was running hot.

  “…and while I can certainly appreciate your analogy of planetary forces, of course the feasibility of alternating current remains elusive.”

  Nikola was determined to display the best of manners in this situation, despite the raw envy in the professor’s eyes. It was clear that the older man was trying to show him some sort of special attention, even an attempt at kindness.

  “Sadly, you will soon graduate with a degree that indicates a level of education which, in truth, you have long since surpassed.” The older man leaned closer. He shifted into a tone of respect Nikola could not remember ever hearing him use.

  “Genius is a word best applied in retrospect, Mr. Tesla. I can’t tell whether history will mention you on that short list of names, but it’s clear to me that you are one of the most gifted students I have ever seen. Perhaps the most gifted of them all.”

  “Sir, I certainly do not think of myself—”

  “Spare me!” the professor snapped, then returned to his gentler tone. “A gift can often be the result of nothing more than luck. Do you believe in luck?”

  “Well, the question of luck is undermined by the existence of free will, so that if—”

  “Rhetorical question, Mr. Tesla. Requiring no response. Do you understand that?”

  Nikola started to open his mouth, paused, and closed it.

  “Perhaps there is hope,” Herr Doktor responded, then shifted in his chair. “Mr. Tesla, it is the proper use of one’s gift which provides the true challenge. Do you have a plan for yours?”

  What Nikola had was the strong intuition that this was some sort of a test, but with no idea what the Professor’s agenda could be, his only hope was to be honest. He took a deep breath. “Actually, aside from learning everything that I can about phy
sics, I spend a lot of time battling my father’s strong intention for me to follow him into the clergy.”

  “The clergy?” shouted Herr Doktor. He stared at Nikola for a moment, then exhaled sharply and shook his head. “Spend your life wearing a hair shirt.”

  Nikola started to express concern, but stopped himself before any sound came out.

  Finally, Herr Doktor cleared his throat and began again. “Let me approach the issue this way. Many years ago I had a student—in some ways, your talents remind me of his. And like you, he seemed to have the ability to take a few of these tiny pieces of knowledge that we offer here and then leap ahead with them. Advance them to places where lesser lights like myself do not shine.”

  Nikola started to object to Herr Doktor’s excessive humility. The older man silenced him with a wave of his hand. “No, not even me. And the other students? The other professors? Were they able to follow him on his intellectual journeys?” He flashed a derisive sneer. “Forget about them! All of them.”

  “Sir, I appreciate your mention of me in the same category with this outstanding—”

  “He hanged himself at the age of twenty-four.”

  Herr Doktor let that one hang in the air for a moment while he paused to light a match and put the flame to his briar pipe. He took a puff or two before he continued.

  “It was less than three years after he graduated from these august halls, as we ourselves call them. His family claims he left no final note—not that I believe them. He was too brilliant to be silent. The only silence for him was in death. I received a farewell letter from him, however, in the mail. And this, mind you, after he had already been dead for several days. You do not believe dead men write notes, do you?”

  “Of cour—” Nikola clamped his mouth shut.

  “He must have mailed it immediately before,” Herr Doktor stopped and cleared his throat. He continued in a tighter voice. “I was his strongest supporter, you see, and so I like to think I was among the last people with whom he chose to communicate.” Herr Doktor gazed into Nikola’s eyes and let the pain show itself, just for an instant. It nearly knocked Nikola backward.