In the Matter of Nikola Tesla

by Anthony Flacco

  Before he could respond, she reached out her hand and pulled him out of his body. It happened so quickly that he had no chance to react or even to cry out. The sensations were like the sudden silence and pressure that follows a plunge into deep water.

  He glanced down and realized that he could see through himself, just as if he were looking through colored glass. He stood next to his body, supine on the bed.

  In the next instant he saw the entire physical world transform to a completely ethereal state. Even the most solid objects were like translucent versions of themselves. He might have stopped to marvel, but at that instant Karina’s fingers brushed his face. The sensation made him realize they both appeared solid now, while everything else around them had the aspects of a ghostly mirage.

  He felt their bodies entwine, marveling at how real the sensations felt. When he tried to wonder how any of this could actually be happening, he couldn’t even get the thought to form.

  Chapter Eleven

  Months later

  Continental Edison

  Paris, France

  Manager-of-the-Works Maurice Baudelaire appeared to be in a better mood than usual on this particular morning. This was true even though his office was as dank as ever and he still encumbered his long suffering chair. He gazed in silence across the top of the oversized desk, listening with a vague smile to a familiar pulse of distant noise.

  Drip… drip… drip…

  The sound of leaking water was music to him today. How perfect! he thought. How excellent to employ it as the background for this occasion! After all, the upstart, Nikola Tesla, had made pointed mention of the water upon his very first visit, the fool. This morning, the dripping would serve to mock Monsieur Tesla while Baudelaire boxed him into a trap of frustration and uselessness.

  He was well aware that the young Tesla had only been back in Paris for a few days, barely enough time to get himself reestablished, but the knowledge did nothing to engender mercy. And so at that moment he had the upstart himself standing on the receiving side of the oversized desk, waiting to be told why he had been summoned. Up to this point, he noticed that Tesla had displayed a complete lack of concern over what the meeting was all about. That would change momentarily.

  He leaned back in his bedeviled chair amid the squeal of metal joints, then pushed himself away from the desk with the elation of a circling buzzard watching its dinner die. “I am feeling like to speak English today. This is not a problem?”

  “English is fine,” Nikola happily replied. “Once you get your Latin, some German perhaps, the descendant languages practically map themselves out.”

  The Manager stared, radiating disgust, but Nikola was captured by his own rhapsody and blindly sailed ahead. “Whenever I have to wait for a train, I like to compare two vocabularies by building mental diagrams. Just to see how many levels I can hold.” He grinned at a happy memory.

  “Last fall I had to miss six trains in a row—trying to finish, you see! Alphabetical lists of shared words between Middle English and High German. Finally, I just laughed out loud and everything came crashing down! Ha-ha! Crumbled words, ankle deep!”

  Manager Baudelaire scowled, shaking his head. Resentment darkened his eyes and graveled his voice.

  “Yes. Now to business. Monsieur Edison’s personal secretary writes me a letter. He says the man himself wants to know how you managed to repair the Kaiser’s entire dynamo system and light up his railroad station. How you do this without one failure…” He looked Nikola up and down. “Or a single mishap.”

  “It’s no secret. I construct a mental model of what the thing should look like. Huge, weightless machines! I tow them along like so many balloons!” He laughed at the thought. “I do not tow them, of course; I simply call them up whenever they are needed, so that I take all of the necessary models right along with me to every job site.”

  The Manager gave a tiny laugh of disbelief. He addressed the ceiling in a whisper. “I can think of nothing cruel enough.” He turned to Nikola and spoke with a voice that started softly but steadily built in volume.

  “I make it simple so you understand. If you want the bonus of 5,000 francs Edison Continental promised you for your fine work… your brilliant work… your stunning work… your miraculous work…” The Manager gave a smile so fetid that Nikola nearly smelled it. “You will go to America and get the money from the great Mr. Edison himself.”

  “Oh. All right.”

  It took a moment for Manager Baudelaire to register that.

  “Oh all right?” He turned away and repeated it under his breath, deciphering, “oh all right.” He shook his head and turned back to Nikola. “Good! Now say ‘oh all right’ to this: your ship sails tomorrow! Eh? You can build more word lists while you wait for train… take you… seaport!” Stress was collapsing his linguistic skills, so Baudelaire simply pulled a ticket out of his desk, tossed it down in front of Nikola and waited for a reaction.

  Nikola remained placid. He offered no indication that the ticket presented the slightest concern.

  Baudelaire made a final effort to do some damage. “Oh! And if you get lost inside your little daydreams and do not be there for ship going? Finished! No refunds! … Nothing!”

  Nikola reached down, picked up the ticket, and turned it over in his hand. “I’ll be there,” he smiled.

  By that point Manager Baudelaire looked as if his bitterness could effectively petrify him, convert him into a man-shaped chunk of solidified rage, a frozen statue helpless to avoid eventual humiliation under a layer of guano.

  Nikola leaned forward and lowered his voice to a playful whisper. “Actually, I’ve been curious about America all my life.” He extended his hand to the Manager with a giddy smile.

  Manager Baudelaire regarded Nikola’s hand with distaste. Then he glared up at the ceiling and snorted a bitter laugh at the universe.

  “Monsieur Baudelaire,” Nikola began, “it is not—”

  “Manager! Manager Baudelaire! Manager-of-the-Works!”

  “…Yes indeed. And it is my desire that we part on good terms. Personally I do not make it a habit to shake hands at all; the Japanese bow seems to make more sense as an issue of public health. However the custom here is to part by shaking hands, so I do this to show respect.”

  Nikola kept his hand out. Baudelaire closed his eyes, inhaled deeply, then reached out and shook Nikola’s hand without looking at it.

  Nikola tried to be subtle about compulsively wiping his hand on his shirt when he turned to leave. After a few steps, he pivoted back. “Oh, and please believe me, I am sorry about my reaction when I first saw the Edison dynamo. In front of your men. It was just so adorable there! With its coiling all out of phase with the current!” A fond laugh escaped from him, like a father telling a story about his wonderful toddler. “Forcing an overly strong current into wires that are too thin to carry the right load in the first place! Capacitors the size of beer kegs!”

  Nikola turned and walked out, still chuckling at the picture of the adorably ignorant design and so lost in the memory that he forgot to extend any further goodbye.

  Silence filled the office. The petrified Manager could do nothing but sit and begin the long process of accumulating a thick guano crust. After a while, a familiar sound began to tickle at the edge of his awareness.

  Drip… drip… drip…

  Very slowly, Manager Baudelaire turned his head in the direction of the dripping water.

  Chapter Twelve

  Eleven Days Later

  ​New York

  The trans-Atlantic steamship Saturnia reached New York City in June of 1884. It took less than an hour to have the ship’s compartments emptied of immigrant passengers and packed into the yammering chaos of the Castle Garden Immigration Office. The rituals and practices there baffled most of the arrivals, who experienced complex bureaucratic torture administered through a series of winding lines. The lines were each capped by uniformed workers who s
tung them with personal questions, but to the relief of many of the frightened immigrants, the government officials stabbed no one, arrested few, and never opened fire.

  Among those huddled masses one particularly tall and ragged hobo wore a torn greatcoat that was once a fine garment. His hat was a black felt derby which, in its pristine condition, would have been fit for anything short of a formal occasion. In spite of the hobo’s deteriorated condition, he managed to be one of the first to get through the processing center. He did it by showing a facility for language that greased him through the arcane official procedures.

  The hobo emerged early from Castle Garden immigration receiving center in the Battery Park area of lower Manhattan and walked away into the gathering twilight. His age was obscured by whiskers and dust, but he was only a month short of his twenty-eighth birthday. He carried no luggage away except one small valise, and it held little more than a few drawings and some written notes that would strike most readers as gibberish.

  He moved through a daze of exhaustion, although in spite of his fatigue, he could not help but marvel at his first sight of an American city. The constant noise struck him first: all the noises of a city back at home, but with the intensity somehow increased. Motion was everywhere in spite of the hour, and most businesses appeared to still be open. Horses and carriages moved in every direction, leaving the dusty aroma of powdered horse manure churned into the breeze. Every single person on the street had the look of somebody who has just realized they are terribly late for something urgent. The sight struck him as impossibly strange, almost real but not quite.

  The hobo stumbled on through rising darkness. City workers began to light the pale yellow street lamps, using long torches as wicks to ignite the gas flames.

  He continued walking north, knowing nothing more than that the rest of the city lay in that direction. While he headed into the crowded area of storefront businesses, his stomach growled with hunger. His thin frame was emaciated by a ten-day sea voyage with practically no food. He reached into his pocket and fingered the four cents of American money that represented his total net worth. Even in his depleted condition, the hobo knew that four cents might get him a bite or two to eat but would do nothing to secure a place to get clean and rest.

  He passed through one patch of lantern light after another with his feet scraping along the sidewalk. Aimlessly, he allowed the light pools to pull him one by one into the guts of the city.

  The hobo began to think that if he could just find a quiet little park or even a cemetery, he could at least lie down and sleep. He consoled himself with the thought that anything was better than another night on that ship. Any quiet spot that held still was good.

  On the long trip across the Atlantic, he had only been able to determine for certain that his wallet was indeed with him when he boarded the train to the seaport. He needed his papers to get aboard. His pocket had to have been picked during the train trip. If he had not slipped his ticket into a separate pocket, he never would have gotten on the boat. Once aboard the ship and safely underway, he discovered his wallet gone and found himself with no more than some loose change, one suitcase, and his small valise.

  The suitcase lasted until the crew mutinied during the trip and the resulting riot separated him from it, never to be seen again. He was grateful that at least he kept his precious letter of introduction snug in the inner pocket of his vest. He felt sure that he could overcome any other obstacle as long as he had that letter to open doors for him.

  Hunger was making it hard to think. He paused to lean against a lamppost. Did he have a destination? He couldn’t recall. The stomach pangs gnarled inside him. He looked around for anything to distract himself.

  Another few doors up the street, he noticed a small machine-repair shop in the gathering darkness. The shop’s lanterns were burning away inside while the front window revealed a pudgy and unattractive man, impeccably dressed, bending over a long work table to toil on a small electrical device.

  It was the device that caught the hobo’s eye; the sight of it made him smile for the first time since stepping into America. It was a Gramme machine, a combined generator and motor driven by a battery, just like the one that Professor Poeschl once demonstrated back in school.

  At that moment, the shop owner’s hand slipped and scraped against the outside of the machine. He swore a loud oath, threw his screwdriver down, and paced around the floor holding his hand like a man who has spent far too much time on this chore already.

  Nikola forgot his hunger. The fog in his brain burned clear and a sudden sense of purpose focused him. Even his sense of balance became sharper. He stepped through the door of the repair shop and happily informed the owner that he knew what this machine was, and that he could surely fix it. The mere idea of such a challenge filled Nikola with a flush of strength that he had not felt in days.

  Half an hour later, he flipped the switch on the newly repaired Gramme machine, and it immediately hummed to life.

  The repair shop owner clapped his hands in delight. “Look! Look at that! Wonderful!”

  “Thank you,” Nikola smiled. “It was a pleasure to be able to make something come out right, even this small victory.”

  “I was ready to give up!” the owner enthused. “That would have been tragic! Believe me! Tragic!”

  “Tragic?” Nikola asked, confused by the use of the word. “Sir, these machines are not so expensive and should not be difficult to replace.”

  “Replace?” bellowed the owner. “Replace? Ha! My friend, you don’t know what you’re saying!” He pulled out his wallet and opened it. “And in case you think my gratitude is limited to a few words of thanks—” He removed a twenty dollar bill and handed it over.

  Nikola’s eyes widened. “Sir… that is a twenty dollar bill!”

  “Okay, if you know what it is, take it then. Believe me, my friend, you earned it! Ha! Oh, you earned it, all right!”

  Disbelief paralyzed him. “But sir, the entire machine can be purchased for less than that.”

  The owner leaned forward and tucked the bill into Nikola’s shirt pocket. “That’s what you think, brother. Replaced? Not a chance!” He whispered confidentially, “I bought this machine for my mistress. She uses it as amusing toy for her parties. Loves the attention it gets.”

  “Could you not simply buy her a new one?”

  “Oh, no-no-no! That’s just it! This one is hers. See the initials engraved on the side? If I buy her another one, she’ll immediately know it’s not the same!”

  “I don’t understand.”

  “You want me to spell it for you?”

  “Spell understand?”

  “She thinks I can fix anything! Get it? She says it’s one of the things she loves about me. Men who can do things, you know? Now my wife, she knows good and well I can’t fix half the junk that people haul into this place. Ruined garbage! Broken pieces attached to broken pieces!” He patted the repaired machine. “If this thing belonged to my wife I wouldn’t bother.”

  The owner grinned at Nikola and winked. “Believe me, mister—you earned that money! From the looks of it, you could use it.”

  “You are certainly right about that. I am so tired, it will be a relief to pay for a good bed and something to eat.”

  “Perhaps a bath?” the owner sniffed.

  “First of all.”

  “Good enough then! Well, time for me to close up. I have a young lady to impress, thanks to you.”

  Nikola’s light-headedness was making it hard for him to comprehend what had just happened. He allowed the shop owner to usher him back into the evening, then stood on a nearby corner for several minutes, fingering the twenty dollar bill and trying to pull his wits together. After such a difficult trip and undignified arrival into this bustling city, he had just earned a sum that was close to an average month’s pay back at home. He had heard about things like this but never expected to see proof of it in his first hours ashore. A person cou
ld do anything here.

  It felt like a message from the heavens confirming that he did the right thing in coming to America, and that somehow, he would find the means to thrive. A cool white rush of energy coursed through him. The sensation expanded. For a few moments, it was enough to lighten his anxiety and ease his racing thoughts. Its presence seemed to assure him that he would not remain a stranger in this place.

  He took a breath, hunched his shoulders, and clenched every muscle in his body; the chaos in his head receded like the screeching of passing crows. After another moment he steadied himself and took a quick check of those few things he still knew to be real. He felt for the letter of introduction in his pocket and fingered the twenty dollar bill. Those two paper touchstones were about to launch his new life.

  He set out to find the nearest hotel. His steps were lighter, as if rest had already reached him. Surely, those two small pieces of paper were all he needed to fulfill his mother’s vision for him and to prove his father wrong about the “Evil” in his mind. Most important, this new land was where he was determined to have the whirling magnetic field introduced to the world of industrial science and accepted by its leaders. If he was ever going to attempt something truly monumental with the strange abilities that alternately blessed and haunted him, now was the time, and this rough-hewn country was going to be the place.

  * * *

  On the following morning, the hour of nine found Nikola fresh from a good night’s sleep, immaculately groomed, and attired in a cheap new off-the-rack suit that was only passable on him because of his ramrod posture and elongated frame.

  He called upon the Edison Company’s famous South Fifth Street laboratory building in lower Manhattan, hoping for nothing more than to make an appointment to see the famous inventor. But the strangeness of his new life in this place continued to confront him. To his astonishment, the letter of introduction proved so effective that he quickly found himself ushered into the building and seated on a low chair in the middle of the office of Thomas Alva Edison himself. Nikola could only shake his head about the way things happened in this new country.