In the Matter of Nikola Tesla

by Anthony Flacco

  Nikola beamed at that. “Yes! Only in theory right now, admittedly, but I am convinced that all of the obstacles can be overcome!”

  “Yes,” Reverend Tesla muttered. “I gathered as much.” The old man turned away from Nikola before he continued. “But I had hoped you would tell me something else.”

  Nikola’s face clouded. “…What else?”

  The Reverend closed his eyes. His soft voice took on a tone of gentleness exaggerated to psychotic proportion.

  “Nikola. Experience shows us that people are weak in the presence of Evil. Yet you envision— No! You do not simply ‘envision,’ you propose to build this horrible thing!” The Reverend paused to take in a deep breath. When he went on, his last bit of mortal energy began to well up.

  “You would construct a civilization where every single, struggling, child of God is constantly exposed to everyone else’s conniving stench?”

  For the first moment Nikola could only gape. In the next moment he felt the spike hit his heart. He recoiled from the bed, felt the storm flare up again inside of him, and the flood of images rushed through his brain. He blinked as if flies were buzzing at his face.

  The Reverend’s stare bore into his son from under hooded lids, while Nikola slammed his eyelids closed and stiffened his body, clenching the muscles and staring at a blank wall. It took several seconds before he finally exhaled.

  Reverend Tesla’s failing eyesight had missed nothing. When he began to speak, his voice sounded loving. His tone was gentle, but his eyes narrowed. A trace of a bitter smile curled the corners of his mouth.

  “You show the demon in you when you slip like that.”

  Nikola gasped and leaped to his feet. “What demon? Why do you say that to me?”

  The Reverend continued, sweet-voiced, “I know, Nikola. And I know you can’t stop it. Your mother confided in me years ago.” He managed to give his son a knowing grin. “She told me everything she heard the night you had that high fever when you were eighteen.”

  “Papa,” Nikola whispered, but he could not make himself look his father in the face. “I thought you sent for me because you want the two of us to make peace.”

  “Peace!” Reverend Tesla’s voice was instantly cold and sharp. “You listen to me—this plan of yours is not merely insane, it is Evil! And I do not doubt that it was inspired by this demon that haunts you. This piece of filth!”

  “There is no demon in my life!” Nikola barked in shock and outrage.

  Reverend Tesla continued as if Nikola had not spoken. “If you have any free will left, take a good look at yourself! Realize that this so-called ‘plan’ of yours formed at the same time that your demon appeared to you. And that it was at the same time that it began to haunt you with your visions.” Reverend Tesla spat the final word.

  “Papa!” Nikola pleaded. “That was— That was years ago! And I know she was an illusion! She has never appeared to me since that night! Not once!”

  “She”? His father’s eyes bored into him like iron spikes. “You can try to hide it from me… from the whole world… but a demon will always break through. Nikola, I want you to do this one thing right and seek salvation from this Evil.”

  At that point the exhausted man’s breath seemed to catch in his lungs. His expression flashed with a startled look. He fell back on the bed and began to visibly fade. With no more warning than that, Reverend Tesla’s eyes went blank. A moment later the death gasp rattled in his throat.

  Nikola slapped his hand over his mouth to keep from crying out. He spun to the door to make sure that his mother had not heard her husband’s final words.

  * * *

  In the three days between Reverend Tesla’s demise and his burial in the shadow of the church steeple, Djouka asked Nikola several times to recount their last moments together. He realized she was torn by not being present at his bedside, even though she was grateful Nikola arrived in time for their final reunion.

  Each time Nikola retold the deathbed scene to her, he repeated every line of it for her just as she insisted. It warmed his heart to see the gratified smile that came over her while she listened to the story of forgiveness and reconciliation. It was plain the beautiful last moments between Milu and Nikola gave her tremendous comfort. She drank up the words of love and wisdom, which her Milu had bestowed upon Nikola at the end of his life, and she especially loved to hear of her husband’s final blessing upon his wife and all of their children. Nikola was happy to repeat the story as much as she wanted.

  When the burial service was over and the family slowly walked away from the cemetery, she moved close to Nikola’s side and took his arm. She lowered her voice to a private level while she walked along next to him. “You know he would want you to finish your degree.”

  “I will Mama, but it’s settled,” he tenderly replied. “I’m going to find work as soon as I graduate and send money back to help you.”

  Djouka turned to face him, but she kept walking. “You plan to do this because your mother is a widow now? I have your father’s pension, you know.”

  “And that’s enough in good times. But if I earn a good enough salary, I can bring you to join me. Or at least if you become sick, I can see to it that you get the best care.”

  Djouka stopped walking and gently laid her hand on his cheek. “This is still my home. You think I would leave here?” She gave him a seductive smile. “I think that my Nikola looks like a young man who has had his heart broken. Are you planning to move somewhere far away so you can run from a woman?”

  “No!” he snapped. Her startled expression caused him to quickly repeat it in a more restrained voice. “No.”

  “Good,” Djouka replied, patting his hand and mimicking his tone. “Good.”

  She resumed walking. “A broken heart doesn’t care if you run from it or not. Either way you take it with you.”

  Chapter Five

  1881

  Two Years Later

  Budapest

  The Budapest Telephone Company was a brand new offshoot of the Budapest Telegraph Exchange. When Nikola showed up for work after prematurely ending his studies at the University of Prague, the telephone “company” turned out to still be more of an idea than an actual creation. At least it had a source of government funding, so he found himself hired and employed as a draftsman, helping to design the remaining equipment necessary to get the fledgling telephone exchange up and running. The need for quick production in finalizing the new system created a dream job for someone with unusually high levels of personal energy. From the worker-efficiency standpoint, Nikola Tesla was a model employee, which is why his troubles began there.

  He indulged in his work frenzy without considering the impact on the other workers, despite his awareness of the hostility he had generated in people who felt intimidated by his abilities. The other workers, mostly male, shared an enthusiasm for this new telephone invention like everybody else. These men, however, were not monks of science; they had wives, children, and circles of friends to occupy their time. They were used to putting in their ten or twelve hours, possibly fourteen, but then going home to other interests and concerns.

  It was with real consternation that they witnessed this new man, Nikola Tesla, always being there, always working. No matter how early any of them arrived, no matter how late anyone went home, Tesla was there and busily occupied. The man seemed to live without sleep.

  Eventually a few of the boys noticed that whenever Tesla got all excited about some new little improvement in the current project, he would turn his back to the room and sort of stoop over and clench all of his muscles. When he opened his eyes and stood back up again, he moved carefully, like he had something balanced on his head.

  But the thing was—he would then sit down and draw out a diagram of whatever he was trying to improve, and the workers would build it. It would work. It always worked. He never did any preparatory sketches, even though he designed certain parts in tolerances of a thousand
th of an inch. He frequently stepped up to one of the industrial sized tools and helped to cut and grind the crucial parts himself.

  Nikola completely forgot Herr Professor’s warning about making smart people feel stupid and forgot the profane world of office politics. Instead he lost himself in the joys of discovery.

  Since the other workers could not come near his levels of productivity and innovation, they began to question his flashy feats altogether. Maybe there was something fishy going on with him, some form of trickery.

  They also found that when they tried to probe him for more information about his little tricks, the usual techniques that worked in dealing with other men of the trade somehow did not apply to him. Plying him with drinks and throwing in some flattery ought to have worked. Instead he only sipped at his drink while he gave them doses of incomprehensible science, always delivered with precise diction and a quite formal level of behavior.

  He was willing enough to sit with them and freely speculate about the ways that things work and the ways they can be made to work better, but he never stayed around. He radiated a sense of duty so strong that he seemed to have no time for ordinary pleasures like a few steins of beer with the boys or a group fishing trip. He agreed to attend their poker games, but his consistent winning made him unwelcome.

  His ironclad work ethic and ability to endure long hours were regarded with unabashed awe. His peers wanted to stop his outrageous work pace, all right, but not until they found out how he did it.

  Within eight months, Nikola was running the new Central Telephone Office. In the ninth month, his health collapsed from overwork. His co-workers got the relief they longed for while he stayed at home and struggled to recover.

  * * *

  Nikola lay in bed in his tiny Budapest apartment with his senses so distorted that it felt like he was bobbing around on rough water. The symptoms that finally put him on his back had started out like a case of the flu. At first he had assumed a few days of bed rest were all he needed. Instead his condition deteriorated.

  On the afternoon of his second day at home, he felt himself developing a fever. By evening it was higher than any he had ever experienced—except for that one unexplainable night back in his parents’ home.

  Later while a sliver of moon rose into view outside the bedroom windows, it occurred to him that this fever appeared to be growing strong enough for him to force another visitation. Wouldn’t it be something to find out if such a thing could be possible twice?

  Why not?

  Why not indeed? He threw back the blankets, jumped out of bed and ran to the window to let the cold breeze into the room, then flopped back onto the sheets stark naked. He invited the fever to eat him alive.

  It didn’t seem as if it would take much; those small efforts left him gasping for breath. The sound coming from his lungs reminded him of several people wheezing in unison. He let out a small laugh at that thought, which was enough to send him into a coughing fit that lasted nearly a minute. It left him raised up on his elbows gasping for air while his head throbbed with hammer blows.

  The sensory distortion grew. He felt the ticking of a grandfather clock reverberate in his skull, then realized that it was only his pocket watch next to the bed. The dim light of the room’s gas lamp seared his eyes. He was in agony. It was perfect.

  The next coughing fit starved him for air. He became so light-headed, silver flakes sparkled in front of his eyes. Soon they were thick enough to block his view.

  The sense of floating developed into an overpowering feeling of vertigo. It created a rush of pleasure that was almost sexual, tingling his senses and making him hungry to drink up more of it.

  All awareness of the little room left him. He couldn’t tell if he had passed out or not. If this is death, I’ll go. He thought the words, or maybe he spoke them out loud, or perhaps screamed them at the top of his lungs.

  “NIKOLA!” Karina’s voice.

  His eyes snapped open and everything was pitch black. He was floating in warm water or warm air. All of the pain was gone. The fever had disappeared and his fear along with it. The sense of loneliness was replaced by stunned amazement.

  Karina stood there in front of him. There was no light but he could see her perfectly, as if she gave off light of her own. This light didn’t hurt his eyes.

  “It worked…” he barely whispered. It felt like he whispered; he was not sure his lips even moved. And yet and yet and yet—Karina was right there before him for the first time in years. Her image was so faint he could see through her into the empty blackness beyond, but there she was.

  He noticed she appeared to be about his same age. She, it, the image, Karina, looked nothing at all like a country school girl. Today she was dressed in a fashionable outfit. Nikola remembered seeing one like it recently on a young woman in an elegant restaurant. It was a practical sort of attire, the combination of a simple skirt and long-sleeved blouse that allowed unfettered physical movement.

  Karina playfully reached out to run her hand across his cheek. Her touch was nothing more than a wisp of moist, cool air. She spoke, but her voice was barely audible. “—just a dream. Don’t be afraid. Don’t close me off…”

  Fear shot through him.

  Something felt wrong, completely wrong, about a dream woman informing him that she did not exist. He had already dreamed of Karina often enough, sometimes clearly and sometimes amid a jumble of chaos, but her dream image never seemed to be anything more than a ghostly presence.

  Now his instinctive response was to use his muscle-clenching trick to bear down on the dream image and make it disappear. He focused all of his strength onto squeezing her out of his mind. He felt the process starting and he saw her faint image grow weaker.

  Except that just as Karina’s image was about to completely disappear, she reached out both of her arms and placed her fingers on Nikola’s temples. A bolt of energy flooded his skull.

  His mind filled with visions of elaborate, unexplainable machines. The force of the incoming imagery was so great that powerful physical sensations began to wash through him, as if created by the overflow of energy. Again he was a leaf, spinning on water. Again his vision clouded and filled with silver flakes, blinding him—but this time each silver flake was a tiny functioning device. Each had its own unique sound and radiated a sense of its purpose, which he instantly understood. With so much information gushing into him he could grasp none of it. The machines kept coming and the speed of the flow increased.

  Panic hit him with a sensation of drowning. In terror he mentally bore down on the geyser of images with all of his might, trying to force them of his mind. Slowly, slowly, it began to work. He could feel something happening. Something was definitely changing…

  He opened his eyes.

  He was awake in his bed. It was still the middle of the night. Karina, the image, the dream, was gone. The distorted sensations caused by his fever were also gone. So were his symptoms. So was his fever, just like the first time.

  The countless tiny machines, however, continued to float around in front of him. Nikola was too amazed to question any of it. Fascination overwhelmed him until he was aware of nothing else.

  At that point, the only thing that prevented him from fainting in astonishment was his burning determination to not let go of whatever was happening to him. He seized it as fistfuls of treasure in the hands of an awakening dreamer. He would have to make sense of it later. Now, more than anything else, he was compelled to embrace this and somehow make it his own.

  Along with this new attack from Satan, or this new symptom of his mental defect, or this magical new gift whose purpose he did not understand — there came an entirely new ability. Now, when he mentally dismantled a machine, there were no gaps in the image. Everything was laid out in front of him. The cruel twist was that elaborate scientific principles, which he was only beginning to understand, caused the apparent objects to be composed of a web of riddles. There in front of him we
re answers to scientific mysteries, some employing levels of knowledge he did not have. Yet the results were there in front of him. Their mystery hit him with a bull’s-eye blow and lodged in the part of his mind where he spent most of his time.

  His heart raced while he recalled the Reverend’s death-whisper about visitations from demons. On the other hand, he could also feel the cool mist of Karina’s touch along his cheek. Whether he was remembering an entity of substance, a delusion, or even a demonic trick, the mere memory of her was enough to send pleasure radiating through him. The delight nourished him; it energized him and would not allow him to turn his back.

  Chapter Six

  One Year Later

  At The New Telephone Office

  Budapest

  Four disgruntled engineers with the Budapest Telephone Office huddled together in a quiet corner, livening up their day with a little intraoffice conspiracy against that buffoon, Nikola Tesla. They made no effort to be discreet.

  “That’s it then,” said the one who liked to get things going. “We’ve got a clerk who was at the City Manager’s meeting last night, and they are not going to replace Tesla.”

  “Idiots! He was gone for two weeks! Nobody’s ever stayed out sick that long!”

  “Remember that machinist who took four days off and lost his job?”

  “Yeah,” agreed the first one. “It was close for Tesla this time though. In the end, they started talking about how, you know, since he came back he’s working as hard as ever.”

  “And that he also invented the ‘repeaters’ to boost the sound.”

  “Hey! Whose side are you on? Anybody could have done that! It’s basic science!”

  “Parts of it. But the rest… I don’t know.”

  “What, you think he should keep his job? Keep making the rest of us look bad?”