In the Matter of Nikola Tesla

by Anthony Flacco

  It never occurred to him to attempt duplicating the state with anyone he met through his requisite social occasions. Instead he routinely sent the automaton in his place, with just enough awareness to cope with distractions while he curled up in his little mental rocking chair and sat behind his own eyes, observing moments of friendship and loyalty and tenderness passing between others.

  Sometimes they were strangers on the street, a mother cooing to a child with such love that she was unaware of anyone else around, or perhaps two lovers strolling arm in arm and quietly laughing at some intensely private joke. He knew that such moments were the things that illuminated most people’s lives, but except for his times with Karina, the older he became the less he could find any tolerance for unnecessary human contact.

  The fact that his inspirations passed so easily between his imagination and the hard world clearly set him apart from the vast majority of the human race, especially since imaginary objects seemed to appear in front of him. Surely it confirmed that his mission was genuine. Why else had these extraordinary powers come to him? He was after all merely the dunce brother who had been allowed to live after his more promising brother Dane died, and was therefore obligated to bring greatness to the world in the way Dane surely would have done. The mission was so much a part of him that it no longer occurred to him to question it.

  But the work was sweet nonetheless. His ability to pay for constructing huge experimental generators gave him the opportunity to experiment with a wide range of frequencies, each one with its own distinct trait. This burgeoning field of discovery captivated him so completely that for days at a time he forgot to be lonely, forgot to sleep, barely ate anything, and lost himself in the beauty of exploring the full spectrum of electromagnetic energy.

  Life was so smooth he could barely remember his fears about whether or not the late Reverend Tesla had correctly identified a demon or if Karina’s beguiling presence and inspirations were no more than a blend of temptation and trickery. With every passing day, he began to feel less resistance to the idea of trying to bring her back.

  The only thing that spared him the urge was to immerse himself in spontaneous number puzzles. He employed them everywhere, distracting himself with challenges such as counting his footsteps and trying to arrive at any destination using a number of steps divisible by three.

  At a restaurant table, he could calculate the volume of every bite of food or each sip of water, also limiting himself to amounts of milligrams and milliliters as expressed in numbers divisible by three, but the game could become annoying and get out of hand if he was not sufficiently distracted by other things.

  It never occurred to him that there might be a problem with any of this until he found himself compelled to calculate in advance the number of words needed for any verbal response and then speaking in exactly that amount of words and of course making sure that it was always a number divisible by three.

  Anytime the game failed to challenge him enough to soak up his extra energy, his old symptoms quickly became apparent. The energy simply bled through his awareness and clogged his visual sense in the hard world. After that, any smooth iridescent surface like that of a pearl seemed to explode with so many moving patterns that it made his eyeballs itch to look at it. The patterns themselves reached out and rubbed the surface of his eyes. Light falling on someone’s hair would accent subtle patterns which then lifted up off the hair and got in the way of whatever he was trying to focus on.

  Worst of all, unused energy often sprang up on him in the form of out-of-control knowledge. His nearly photographic memory was packed with the latest scientific writings about bacteria, disease, and infection. Coupled with the casual attitude toward personal cleanliness displayed by much of society, he found that he knew far too much about the interpersonal exchange of disease-bearing filth. He was compelled to bring his own napkin to restaurants to wipe down their utensils before touching them, and then went through a stack of restaurant napkins to get through the meal. Eventually his revulsion at the custom of shaking hands kept him from doing it under any circumstances.

  Still, in spite of his curiosity and sense of longing, he refused to allow himself to give in the urge to attempt to summon Karina; everything had gone so smoothly for him since he rejected her. As much as he hated his father’s interpretation of her presence in his life, he could not overcome the fear of what sort of events he might draw down upon himself by daring to reach out to her yet again.

  He curled up for a long rocking session behind his eyeballs and let the automaton take care of everything out in the hard world. His inner mental laboratory was the only place where his attention could be so completely absorbed that he had no time to ache for Karina or feel envious of the tenderness he witnessed passing between so many others around him.

  Nevertheless, the knowledge of how deeply his eccentricities were likely to strike anyone who witnessed them convinced him that it was Karina for him, or no one. Public credibility was also essential to his life plan if his inventions were to be embraced by society and allowed to make the contributions they were designed to do. He became convinced that to reveal his eccentricities was to risk being dismissed as a madman.

  Which was why it made such good sense to lie low, as the Americans liked to say. His sexuality was so completely sublimated into his work that he retained the ability to admire beauty for its exquisiteness without feeling the need to embrace it. His pain at entertaining an unending series of shallow work and social relationships disappeared into the rocking chair with him while the automaton executed a generally acceptable performance at dealing with people from a formal European style of expression.

  On rare occasions when his entire self was needed and he dropped fully into consciousness, it felt like waking from a night’s sleep into the middle of a work day. He hit full awareness so hard that he was sometimes vaguely surprised that spray didn’t come blasting out of the blow hole in the top of his skull before he remembered that he didn’t have one of those in the hard world.

  * * *

  Later in the year, he was able to set aside enough of his energy to memorize the extensive study materials for the U.S. Government’s examination to become an American citizen. The process was mostly a matter of quiet patience, but the actual swearing-in ceremony was so moving to him, he entirely seeped back into the hard world to embrace the experience.

  He stayed too long. At a large downtown party given in his honor, he had almost completed deflecting an effete young man’s persistent attentions by waxing enthusiastic over the similarities between the shape of a bare tree in winter and the forking fan of a lightning discharge. Thus he fell straight into the trap his old professor so vehemently warned him about, allowing far too much of his imagination to flow into ordinary conversation.

  “The real difference is time, yes? In both cases, energy is flowing along the arms of the lightning bolt and also along the branches of the tree, regardless of the fact that it operates on vastly different time frames.”

  And did the young man therefore agree that tree sap was likely to carry the same punch as a lightning bolt, if you have the time to wait around for it to accumulate? And therefore, wasn’t the opportunity to harness the energy of a single tree—using that energy to drive a single household, say—simply a matter of manipulating the flow of energy through time? And if that is the case, is not “the manipulation of the flow of energy through time” also an accurate description of the function of an ordinary electrical condenser…?

  The pretty young man fled, rolling his eyes in boredom. Nikola felt fifty kilos lighter. It was a good time to begin deepening his breathing, allowing his awareness to rise up like a wisp of steam all the way back up to the tiny rocking chair.

  But a small, firm hand grasped him just above the elbow and clamped onto his arm like a five-fingered lobster claw. He turned to see the sweetly smiling hostess, Flora, whose gracious demeanor did not match the clutch she had on him.

 
“Well,” she smiled up into his eyes and murmured in conspiratorial tones, “I was afraid I would have to wait all night for everyone else to give you a minute’s peace.” With her free hand she playfully ran her finger down his cravat and then delicately spun them both toward the wall, giving their backs to the open room and buying a few more seconds of privacy within the crowded place. “I am going to simply come out and say it, Mr. Tesla; my heart jumped, really jumped inside my breast, when I saw that Erique was not able to, shall we say, elicit interest from you. I know what that would mean. And I would have been devastated!” she concluded with a dramatic laugh.

  In another few moments, Nikola’s automaton would have simply given her its best social smile and babbled with her until an opportunity arose to walk away without causing offense. Her surprise attack interrupted such a vulnerable moment that it was as if all of his nerve endings were suddenly exposed to open air. His physical senses slammed into a state of perception far more open and active than he needed for the situation. The sensory information overwhelmed him. It felt like he was being smothered by a thick wool blanket many times his own weight.

  Flora’s face was half a meter away, but he could feel her breath on his skin. He could smell the scent of it as clearly as if the eggy flavor of her mouth was pressed onto his tongue. His heightened senses focused on her as well, to the exclusion of most everything else. The smells crowded for attention in his nose, his mouth, his brain. He felt like he could smell her with his skin, with his fingertips. She gave off a symphony of aromas too strong to ignore. Her body was recently bathed and powdered, but a nervous odor was already wafting up from her armpits. Her hair appeared clean and he was thankful that she wore it tied back flat so that it was far less likely to throw off patterns. She had done something to see to it that both sides of her neck smelled like vanilla cookies. Overall, there was a general fecundity to her that convinced him she was so fertile she would become pregnant immediately if the opportunity arose.

  She clung to him with a grip that was making his lower arm throb. What did she expect of him, here, in this roomful of people? Nothing about her was clear to him except the curiously disturbing aroma of desperation. She was an heiress, already rich beyond dreaming. What could she want from a man who lived most of his life inside of his mind?

  When another guest called out to her he seized the moment and drifted away, eyeing the crowd while he moved. The faces of the other guests looked back at him with a uniquely American expression of unabashed fascination. Their expressions of approval were a new sort of admiration to him, one that seemed to be attracted by a moneyed reputation and fine-tuned by the price of his impeccable suits.

  He realized this reaction from the public, even from his peers, was supposed to be tremendously reinforcing, but could not dodge the impression that each pair of eyes was a set of hollow tubes that would suck him down in pieces if they got close enough to attach. He felt ashamed of seeing things that way and was grateful that no one else could hear his suspicious thoughts.

  The sensation of not belonging and of being a stranger in unfamiliar surroundings reactivated his hunger for Karina, for the peak rush of energy that always arrived through her. Whenever he imagined the warmth of her presence, he felt a trace of it tease him, the polar opposite of that chilled mental state caused by endless cool reflection. The warmth penetrated him; he could imagine her streaking through his body like deep red light, seeking out the smallest of cold spots and the tiniest of frozen places, penetrating them, warming them back to softness, and restoring them to circulation. He got no more of her than that. A sip to nourish him, to sustain him with a reminder.

  In the next moment a sensation of foolishness washed through him like sewer water when he woke up to what was happening. He found just enough self-control to pull away. In another instant and he would have lost his resolve and pitched forward into the desire to will her back.

  He clawed his way back to the hard world by constricting his whole body and squinting back the visions while he tried to force his attention back onto the party and the physical surroundings.

  When he noticed that an imaginary line connecting three of the gas wall lamps formed an equilateral triangle with him at the center point, he held his focus on reality by gazing around for other visual patterns of three. The search itself kept his attention focused on the hard world.

  In the end, he escaped his darker suspicions by continuing to move through his rapt audience while he headed for the door. He turned the rest of his escape from the crowd over to his automaton while he allowed most of himself to evaporate back up to the tiny rocking chair behind the picture window eyes.

  Chapter Twenty-Seven

  Months Later

  The Serbian Province of Lika

  The telegram warning him of his mother’s failing condition pulled him back to earth so hard that slowness itself suddenly became his new enemy. The trip back to Europe nearly drove him mad with anxiety. Throughout the long sea journey he was barely able to avoid being destroyed by his sense of helplessness.

  He could afford to travel in fine style, but the comforts of money had scant power to smooth the jagged edges on his dread while the journey dragged. His automaton was left little to do except pace the deck of the ship, regardless of the weather. He retreated upstairs, where he could take comfort in the only genuine luxury of his life. There, while the giant steam engines thundered away in the belly of the ship, his attention began to float away…

  A ship at sea is guided by a magnetic compass, whenever stars are not visible. A magnetic compass is powered by the magnetic field surrounding the planet itself, so that the fact that the ship remains true to its course proves the value of a compass, which in turn proves the existence of earth’s magnetic field. A magnetic field must always have positive and negative poles, which implies conductivity of energy within that field. That proves that something inside the planet functions as the core of the battery while the other end is invisibly held in place, high up in the ionosphere, by the planetary field. Therefore the earth itself, along with its atmosphere, may be considered as a single electrical instrument…

  He began to guess at the base numbers for calculating what kind of mass it would require to hold such a powerful field in place. Existence of a planetary metallic core is strongly implied, with iron being the best candidate for the core material, given what the crust’s substances suggest about the elements deep underneath the surface. It would most likely be liquid iron, because of the heat and pressure at planetary depths…

  And since he saw no reason to assume that a gigantic magnetic field would behave differently from the tiny ones generated in the lab, then it would follow that there had to be one or more frequencies that could be generated as harmonic fractions of the basic vibrations of the planetary frequency itself—just as with the basic vibrations of music.

  Working in reverse then, couldn’t a signal be generated by an artificial device which would employ harmonic resonation to subtly activate the entire planetary field? These additional vibrations would stand out from the background palate of the planetary field that they could be detected at any other point on the globe, providing universal electrical power without wires simply by inserting a properly tuned antenna into the ground… And so his reverie went. He stayed out of the hard world until he arrived back at his mother’s home.

  His emotions held up well enough until he stepped inside the old family house and smelled the faint traces of a home life he thought he had forgotten. Usually his sense of smell was the one he was least aware of; now it opened an unprotected pathway to the part of him who was still a boy who loved his mother. When the hired nurse led him into Djouka’s bedroom, his heart sank. He realized that he was about to play out a scene just as he had with his father, sitting by the bedside of one who will not leave it again.

  Djouka Tesla had lost nearly all power of speech by this point, but her gaze was fierce and clear when she grasped his hand. Without a wor
d, she somehow radiated messages of love and gratitude and approval to him. He vaguely noticed that some man was crying out in wracking sobs but he could hardly pay attention because Djouka’s eyes were locked onto his, caressing his spirit in the private and tender way that no one but a mother can do for her child. He could feel her spirit embracing him, tenderly saying goodbye almost as if she were tucking a warm blanket up around his chin for the very last time. She was leaving the world in a state of peace and allowing no doubt whatever in her son’s mind about her love for him.

  “You have arrived, Nikola,” she whispered. “My pride.” She was not able to speak again.

  * * *

  At the funeral service, he remained present throughout the rituals, the burial, and alone at the completed grave site after the others were gone. He tried to pray for her but the sentiments rang hollow. So he gave up and instead just stood silently trying to guess what fates might have befallen him if Djouka Tesla had not been there to keep the jackals away from the strange boy he once was, giving him safe room to grow until he was strong enough to face them alone.

  By the time he finished his grave site vigil, evening was falling. He glanced down and noticed that a mist of cool moisture had begun wafting up from the ground. The hint was all he needed and the time was right. He dissolved most of himself into mist, rising through his fatigued automaton and all the way up to his favorite little seat.

  * * *

  After he returned to America, the automaton took on most of the drudgery of running the successful lab, patenting and manufacturing dozens of new devices with commercial appeal. So much money came in that the need for an adequate accounting system was not immediately apparent. To him, cash seemed to flow in on the morning tide. There was always enough credit to cover any shortfalls that came up. Current bills were reliably paid with the next wave of cash.