In the Matter of Nikola Tesla

by Anthony Flacco

  He looked up and realized half the people in the place were staring at him. He turned toward the empty chair across the table while his eyes tracked the motion of an invisible someone standing up from the chair.

  He also stood and bent forward to sign the bill, then straightened up, took a deep breath, and started toward the exit. He felt himself moving against the suspicious stares of the other diners until it became like walking into a head wind. He only achieved the distance by keeping his gaze locked on the doorway and his posture stiff with dignity. When he finally reached the exit, he paused long enough to crook his right arm as if to receive a female companion’s hand. Then, still in full view of the other patrons, he escorted his invisible partner out into the stormy night. His badly suppressed giggle was not entirely concealed by the sounds of the rain.

  * * *

  When Friday evening arrived, Corinne Watters clutched the arm of her guest of honor and steered him through a strolling series of lengthy introductions. Hers was the soft-handed relentlessness of a genteel woman on a serious mission. The purpose of her evening was to send an invisible dagger through the heart of Thomas Edison for pretending to be oblivious to her attempts to seduce him. Hardly famous herself, Corinne Watters nonetheless possessed the social and financial means to exert an entire series of jabs at her audacious rejecter. Did he honestly expect her to accept his high-and-mighty “married man” excuse? Where in the world was a man who would turn down feminine favors if he found the lady attractive? Clearly, Mr. Edison did not merely fail to find her attractive; his actions also implied that he was, at his core, a better human being for obvious ethical reasons.

  One must not tolerate such things. Coldest of all, none of his explanations disguised the sad and blunt fact that Edison’s lack of interest in her was due to their age difference.

  Due to their age difference.

  Due to her age.

  Due to her.

  Her pain was real and the anger burned deep. Corinne Watters planned to grant helpful social boosts to this Tesla fellow and also function as the personal mentor to any other angry competitor burned by the oh-so-gallant Thomas Alva Edison.

  And so on this happy evening, she carefully introduced Mr. Nikola Tesla to the dozen young single women and men who composed her evening’s selection of desirable peers. In truth, the clear opportunity for romantic connection between one of these eligible men and one of her four eligible daughters was at the top of her list of priorities. Running a close second was the fact that it would be most telling to closely observe Mr. Tesla’s reactions to the guests, including the men; Corinne Watters was nobody’s naive school girl.

  Her eyes remained sharp for any trace of warmth between her main guest and the others, the flash, perhaps, of sudden heat. She chortled to herself. It was lovely to be in control of another social event right there on her home turf, where everyone was under the cultural obligation to allow their hostess to say almost anything. Her unseen palette of human relationships forged connections, established bonds, and changed lives in ways few of the attendees understood.

  Oh, but she did. This evening’s party filled the entire ground floor of her fabulously well appointed three-story Victorian home. Watters moved among her hovering guests with the smooth and casual sweep of a shark in well stocked waters. She was aware that her guest of honor was feeling awkward and overwhelmed— his reluctance to be shown around the room was plain in the stiff shuffle of his gait and in his ramrod posture — but she decided that whatever Mr. Tesla’s apprehensions, they would have to be a matter left to him. The alchemy of personalities she intended to mix was a complex endeavor, requiring her full attention. For Watters this protracted round of personal introductions was the party; the rest was nothing more than a de rigueur amalgam of light conversational filler, an abundance of sweet-cream pastry, and a calculated soaking with New York champagne. At ten dings on the grandfather clock it would be time for everyone to go—keep them smiling but head them toward the door. She and her staff had the procedure down pat.

  Nikola curled up inside his skull while he allowed Mrs. Watters to steer his automaton through the house. Introductions flowed by while he left it to his partial consciousness and his automated body to sift through the obligatory social graces. The young guests all appeared pleasant enough, but they were socially mobile people with an aura of personal ambition that reminded Nikola of the Kaiser’s entourage. He did not doubt some of them would become movers and shakers of tomorrow, but he was not yet confident enough to comfortably attempt American social graces and express polite conversation with American females. Besides, the energy coming from most of the young men had a prickly, competitive feel that he thought must consume tremendous amounts of stamina to sustain. Their gazes were hot with attitude; from their general responses Nikola surmised that the goal of their comments was not to simply employ the required remarks of social convention but to always deliver them dripping with musically sarcastic tones and local references that everyone except for Nikola seemed to understand.

  Their laughter felt overly boisterous to him. Most of their conversation appeared to involve displays of wit in belittling other guests, generally but not always concentrated on those who happened to be out of hearing range. With his peripheral hearing he was aware that any guest’s status or lack of it was reflected in the degree of negativity in the remarks made about them, combined with the volume of disdainful laughter that followed.

  He heard someone refer to the process as “teasing,” which seemed to refer to verbal remarks intended to symbolically pull the carpet out from under the feet of the victim, causing them to appear foolish and, in the process, tumbling their status within the group. The clannish jockeying again reminded him of the Kaiser’s royal entourage, those frightened sunbirds. With either group, one’s complete absence of social status was revealed when they joined the unlucky few who were openly ridiculed, not behind their backs and out of hearing, but in their own presence.

  Even from the safety of his tiny rocking chair perch, the party atmosphere felt ominous enough that his skin was clammy and his legs were stiff with tension. A loud crash startled him from behind¸ and he turned to see that one of the butlers had dropped a tray of champagne glasses. Mrs. Watters released her grip on him and asked him to “wait right there,” then hurried over to supervise the cleanup.

  He was on his own for the first time since walking in the front door. He tightened up as hard as he could and left only the smallest part of his awareness to navigate the hard world. The rest of him focused on considering the shared traits between electromagnetic attraction and gravity.

  The point of fascination lay in the question of whether gravity is in fact created by mass, such as the planet earth, or whether it exists as a vibratory state throughout the universe, with harmonic points of frequency creating pockets of attraction, accumulating the cosmic debris and packing it into masses which are then credited with generating the force themselves—

  At that point a young woman broke into his reverie with a polite but insistent tone of voice, “—and so you see, Mr. Tesla, I was hoping that a man of your skill could explain to me why the sky is blue? When you split up light from the sky with a crystal prism, it breaks into all the colors of the rainbow.”

  What was that? An actual question? He pulled some energy away from the gravity issue and focused on the questioner. She was one of the Watters girls, the eldest, he thought, the one who would not look him in the eye when they were introduced. But her name… what was her name? When they first met he noticed in passing that she was the only one of her sisters who was not voluptuously plump; her tall and thin frame was dressed in dark colors and her gaze seemed to stare through the floor. A few minutes before, her mother had brushed over the introduction as if it were a foregone conclusion that it was a waste of time to attempt to interest a man in Watters’ skinniest daughter.

  But what was her name? Too much of his attention had been diverted when they wer
e introduced. He failed to capture it. Now here was this very interesting question from someone who did not appear shy at all while she planted her feet in front of him and gave him no choice but to pay attention. A good portion of his awareness was back in the hard world by the time he began a reply.

  “Well! Yes! Why is the sky blue? It is a fascinating question, is it not? It opens up so many other implications about the nature of light energy and of energy itself.”

  “Perhaps. But why blue? Why not green or yellow?”

  Nikola was fully aware of the hard world now, and he could feel the prickly hot gazes of a number of other young men who were attentively eavesdropping. He supposed that a lot of people must have wondered about the blue sky at one time or another, but he wanted to avoid delivering some kind of lecture and causing resentment from the crowd or creating some offended reaction. It seemed best to pretend to be unaware of anyone else and concentrate only upon her, so he answered in a quiet voice.

  “The question opens up the entire issue of light refraction,” Nikola smiled, “because it can truthfully be said that the sky is not blue! Rather it is, as you mentioned, all of the colors of the rainbow. Light from the sun is scattered by the photochemical properties in the atmosphere—dust, what have you—but the wavelength we call blue light is the most efficient wavelength for bouncing off those particles and into our sense of vision. Thus blue is the dominant color of the sky, but only as far as the human eye is concerned. Other creatures may see a different color.”

  Everyone else in the room now seemed to be watching for her reaction. Nikola felt a pleasant sensation when he abruptly realized she was not looking at him with the same confused expression he encountered so often in social situations. She nodded thoughtfully, mulling his answer.

  Her eyes were clear and her gaze was straight and strong while she replied, “You are saying, then, that the impurities and distortions of the atmosphere filter out the other colors so that they are still there but we don’t see them?”

  Nikola laughed out loud. “Yes! Yes indeed! Simple as that!”

  She smiled in satisfaction. He was already wondering how to continue the conversation when Mrs. Watters returned looking both surprised and pleased to see Nikola with her black sheep daughter.

  “So, Mr. Tesla! I see that you have my daughter enthralled. However did you manage to say something she will listen to?”

  Now he was expected to converse with both women at once! Time stopped. Panic shot through him.

  But he still could not recall the daughter’s name, someone to whom he had just been introduced and who then took the time to initiate a conversation on a most interesting topic. Worse, he had answered her so casually that it certainly would imply that he indeed remembered her name.

  Could he simply call her Miss Watters? That was a point of American etiquette he had not grasped. Would it be an insult if he did, since she and all the daughters were introduced by their first names?

  Perhaps he should have spoken up right away—candor was usually appreciated in this country. Instead, he tried to bluff his way through, and he had obviously been much too familiar with her. But now if he admitted to that, wouldn’t it only make him look deceitful? Surely that was offensive to anybody, was it not?

  Nikola stood inside of the frozen moment convinced that it was happening again; he was going to cause hard feelings no matter what he attempted to do. At least, he thought, the grim assessment of his situation simplified things—gentle honesty seemed to be the only option.

  “Mrs. Watters, I am afraid that I must confess—”

  “Mr. Tesla!” The speaker was one of the young men who had been drawing closer. “You’re response to Miss Watters’ charming question indicates that you see some relationship between light and electricity—in the sense of frequencies, I mean.”

  Miss Watters! Nikola exulted. If this fellow could use the term without seeming too formal then so could he! Relief flowed through him. “Yes, as you say, Miss Watters opened an issue—”

  “Because if you understand such things, which I myself do not—I’m a businessman, that’s all—then you ought to be able to convince every city in America to install electric street lamps so that the lights are actually bright enough to do some good, eh?” He gave a quick mock bow and grinned. “James D. Carmen, in case you need a reminder.

  Nikola noticed that Mr. Carmen was speaking to him but that his attention was directed at young Miss Watters; it seemed as if Nikola had somehow amplified Miss Watters’ social value by addressing her in such a cordial fashion. Nikola felt glad to see the effect on behalf of a young woman clearly out of step with the expectations of her world.

  “That is kind of you, sir,” Nikola replied. He ignored Mr. Carmen’s rudeness in focusing so intensely on Miss Watters while pretending to converse with him.

  Miss Watters tossed an irritated look at Mr. Carmen and said, “I wasn’t thinking of street lamps, Mr. Carmen. Aren’t the ones we have sufficient?”

  “Sure,” Carmen laughed. “Unless we can do better!”

  “Mr. Carmen, I am in the process of receiving patents on an alternating current electrical generator which would be capable of lighting the streets of an entire town using a highly refined form of arc lamp. Even if one insists on using direct current for a power source, such a system would be powerful enough to re-create daylight, outdoors, at night.”

  Gasps rose from the crowd. The polite ones indicated that the idea was fascinating, while the more blunt ones scoffed at the grandiose aspiration.

  Nikola noticed that Mr. Carmen, however, squinted slightly at him, studying him the way Nikola used to study bugs under a magnifying glass. Before Carmen had a chance to pursue the question, one of his hovering companions jumped in.

  “Joseph Hoadley, Mr. Tesla!” called out a pampered-looking fellow dressed in a new and very expensive-looking suit. He drew close, reeking of champagne, grabbed Nikola’s hand, and pumped it up and down before Nikola could draw away. “And don’t you believe a word that Carmen here, says,” He smiled and winked as if he had just told a great joke. His gaze lingered on young Miss Watters.

  She looked flustered by the boyish attentions, but her mother was beaming. Nikola had no idea if a response was expected. It didn’t matter; Joseph Hoadley went on, asking him, “Where’d you say you were from, again?”

  Everyone within earshot had paused to wait for Nikola’s answer, meaning that he would have to stop talking about the prismatic factor of light proliferation and change the topic to the status or lack of status in one’s physical address, which perfectly encapsulated his reasons for avoiding parties whenever possible.

  The distraction factor made him feel like he was in a cloud of stinging bees. With nothing else to do, he decided to try a direct response and to keep it simple. “My birthplace is a small town in the province of Lika, along the Austro-Hungarian border.”

  Miss Watters forged on, trying to ignore the host of distractions. “Word has it that you speak several languages, Mr. Tesla,” Nikola turned toward her but didn’t get the chance to reply.

  “Austro-Hungarian? Hey!” Joseph Hoadley called out like a man who has just had a revelation, “isn’t everything upside down there?”

  Nikola noted with dismay that the fellow actually seemed to expect an answer. “Sir, why would everything be upside down?”

  Hoadley beamed with glee and shouted, “Why would everything be upside down? That’s funny—I heard you were a genius! But you should know your ‘Austro’ place is on the bottom side of the planet, right?”

  Several onlookers burst into laughter, which immediately drew the attention of everyone else. It was followed by a short pause during which they all watched the guest of honor turn slightly to one side and clench all of his muscles. He straightened up, took a short breath, and turned back to Hoadley. “I believe you are thinking of Australia.”

  “Oh,” Hoadley replied. Then he grinned and shouted so loudly that e
veryone in the room could hear, “What’s the difference?”

  All the young men and several of the young women burst into laughter.

  Corinne Watters was eager to see how well the young Mr. Tesla responded to such a fool. She knew the insufferable Mr. Hoadley to be one of New York’s codfish aristocracy: new money, rich enough to live like royals, and smarmy enough to belong in a bawdy house. The situation was rendered much more interesting because, impossibly, it was Watters’ wafer-thin bookworm of a daughter, so different from her other three plump and charming girls, who had grabbed their guest of honor’s attention and sparked the rest of the room’s competitive urge. Now the customary wallflower stood there beside the evening’s guest of honor, smack at the center of the evening. Unexpected, yes, wonderful nonetheless.

  Nikola blinked heavily several times, then turned slightly away and took another deep breath. Too much of his awareness was present, and he began to feel that he was suffocating. He glanced up and smiled apologetically to Mrs. Watters’ wallflower daughter, who came so alive in his awareness when she flashed him a glimpse of her lovely mind.

  Back inside of himself, Nikola lost all control of the automaton, and the automaton opted for survival. Corinne Watters and all of her guests watched in silent consternation while Nikola gave her a slight bow, nodded to the beautiful wallflower, then turned toward the exit and calmly walked out of the house. The empty expression on his face told them nothing.

  * * *

  Less than two weeks after Nikola walked out of Corinne Watters’ party and spent the rest of the night berating himself for failing to comprehend American social wiles, he found himself once again in her presence. He and the grand social doyenne stood together outside a converted industrial garage in Rahway, New Jersey, while he stared in amazement at a long wooden sign mounted over the doorway.