Heritage of Smoke

by Josip Novakovich

  “Rumor has it,” said Sebastian, “that you could have become the richest man on earth if you hadn’t torn up a contract for AC generators with Westinghouse.”

  “True. Westinghouse faced pressure from his investors to reduce the amount and rewrite the contract—I thought he was my friend, so I tore up the contract. All he aimed for, most likely, was for me to reduce the amount in half. Even at fifty cents a kilowatt hour, I’d be the first billionaire on the continent.”

  “But then you wouldn’t dine with us, would you?” said Miriam. “So there’s a happy upshot to the story.”

  “I would dine with you, but we’d be doing it in my palace, illuminated by electricity directly from the far reaches of the universe.”

  “What a bastard, that Westinghouse,” said Sebastian. “He could have protected you from your impulses.”

  “Well, he did give me a couple hundred thousand dollars, but I already spent all of that on my equipment and experiments.”

  “Amazing,” Sebastian said. “How could you spend that much money in ten years?”

  “My lab went up in flames a couple of times. Anyhow, I would have spent a hundredfold if I’d had it, but by now, we would live in a different world, without wires and rails. We would travel through air on electromagnetic waves, we’d talk to our European cousins on wireless telephones, we’d bomb our enemies with powerfully focused cosmic rays, with no need for guns and cannons.”

  A courier came running in. “A message from Wall Street. The markets are collapsing!”

  Mr. Chesterfield stood up from the table. “Again? I’ll be back in an hour.”

  “Do you need me to go with you?” asked his wife.

  “I have to attend to this myself. You two just stay here, and I’ll be back momentarily, when I see what shakes out. It’s probably another false alarm.”

  The host swallowed the last bite of his bloody beef, which made his Adam’s apple leap up and down like a valve, and he strode out of the room, his hard leather shoes drumming on the cherry-wood floors. Tesla felt the vibrations through the floor, and he had an impression that his shins were resonating with the floor’s thudding.

  Miriam leaned back in her chair, gathered her glowing hair behind her ears to reveal a strong jawline, and laughed merrily, her chest rising.

  “What’s funny?” asked Tesla.

  “I’m happy even if you haven’t invented a space vehicle yet.”

  The maitre d’ came over and said, “How can I help you?”

  “You can’t. Go to your quarters and relax, that’s how,” she said.

  The tall stooping man walked out gingerly without making a sound.

  “Here your husband may be losing his fortune this very minute because the markets are collapsing, and you’re happy.”

  “What do you care about the markets? They go up and down. And last time they went down, my husband bought up all sorts of stocks and tripled his wealth within a month when the markets rebounded.”

  “I could rejoice in the collapse of the financial world if it didn’t mean my budget would be the first to go. Even my stock might be sinking.”

  “Oh, don’t talk about stocks and become a bore like the rest of them. Let me show you a painting. It’s in the library.”

  He followed her to the darkened brown room, where everything seemed to be hushed and subdued in tone except for a pale-skinned beauty by Ingres.

  “Lovely forms, what clarity of skin,” Tesla said. “But the visual arts are of no interest to me since I recall everything in full detail. I nearly flunked out of elementary school because I refused to draw. I didn’t see why I should draw anything when I could totally recall it.”

  “How about your engine designs?”

  “I don’t need to draw them, except to explain to engineers what I mean. This is marvelous. Is that you? She looks just like you.”

  “How would you know what I look like? You can’t see through my clothes, now, can you?”

  “You could have posed for one of your famous artist friends. For this Ingres, for example.”

  There was a radiance and shine on her, but that may have simply been the result of a streak of light falling through an opening between the crimson velvet curtains and hitting her coiled hair. He wondered whether red hair contained more iron than hair of other colors. There was a powerful magnetic field around her, no doubt about that.

  “Kiss me,” Miriam said. Her mouth was half open, her moist lips glistening.

  Tesla was tempted to lean over and kiss her, but he thought of just how many different kinds of bacteria and how many millions of them would be exchanged in a single kiss, and he shivered from fear. Each cubic milliliter exchanged could mean some incurable and as-yet-undiagnosed disease. Tesla had grown up surrounded by TB, malaria, pneumonia, and he did not want to sink into disease again. Sure, the disease could remind him of his native region, his village in Gorski Kotar. Getting a swallow of bacteriarich saliva would be like manna from the homeland, something to cure him of nostalgia. Tesla was over six feet tall and so, to avoid the kiss, he simply straightened up. “I wish I was a painter and you posed for me.”

  “So you’d stand away. You wouldn’t have to touch me, is that it? All right, as you wish.”

  She took a few steps back and threw her clothes off, her dress, her bodice, revealing a sensationally curvaceous body with her tilted hips. Tesla stretched out his arm and his fingertips reached toward her. He let his fingers come to within eight millimeters of her skin. She lay down on an ornate divan. He sensed her electromagnetic field exerting a pulling force to the iron in his blood, like a magnet, and the iron in his blood, once stirred, created magnetic waves that clashed with hers and stroked hers. He traced her body’s shape over her skin without touching her. If he clashed with the lines of her magnetic field in a regular and harmonic manner, he could create electricity in her; and as she shifted she became the rotor of a human alternating-current generator. Her hairs stood up and she moaned. Sparks flew between his fingers and her skin, crackling and flashing. In the blue light of static, her skin appeared ephemeral and translucent.

  After a certain amount of such remote stroking, he excused himself and went to the bathroom. He nearly swooned from the discharge he felt while leaning against the cold red marble tiles. He washed his hands with a new soap for several minutes, until he saw that his skin was creasing up.

  He walked back and Miriam, who was flushed and breathless, was already dressed. Her hair was disheveled, and it occupied twice the volume it used to.

  Tesla straightened his stiff collar. On his way out, on the white marble staircase, he ran into Mr. Chesterfield, who said, “False alarm. The market dipped but didn’t collapse. Stay! Let’s celebrate with the finest Italian wines.”

  “I can’t celebrate now. Too much work to do.”

  “What are you working on?”

  “The end of the world.”

  The following Tuesday, he didn’t go to see the Chesterfields. It would be awkward to look Sebastian in the eye. Not that he would need to look him in the eye, or that he ever did really, but just knowing that he would have to avoid his eyes, that would be awkward. On the other hand, what did he do wrong? Did he make love with his wife? Perhaps he did, but he did not have sex with her, not in the graphic way anyhow. Or he had metaphysical sex; well, perhaps physical but not chemical. If there was a biochemical side effect, it was totally separate from hers; they didn’t mingle their bodily contents. Still, he was distracted. As soon as he closed his eyes, even fleetingly, the image of red coppery coils glowed, filling his head with light. He wished he’d never looked into the curls, for they befuddled his mind. He would fight this, however, through the new project.

  In his lab atop 64 East Houston Street, he worked on perfecting an oscillator that, when connected to a solid iron surface, could create waves of ever-increasing intensity. The light, synchronized taps of the iron rod would add to the wave, keep it growing and growing until it became a tremendous power t
hat could destroy buildings. With a fist-sized oscillator, it would take him less than an hour to drop the Brooklyn Bridge into the East River.

  Tesla worked for twenty hours each day and slept only for four, before dawn. The next Wednesday morning, while Tesla sipped rose hip tea, the mailman brought him a bundle of letters; one was from Miriam.

  “You didn’t make it to our dinner party yet again. Just when I thought we had attained a new level of friendship, you have begun to avoid us. Are you all right? How is your health? You have been looking very thin lately, so maybe it’s not us, not me, you are avoiding. Do please let me know lest I should have to check on you in person.”

  Tesla finished the tea. While he tried to imagine energy waves, he visualized them alternately as the line from her pelvis ascending over the hips and waist and then as elliptical circling around her breasts, a numeral 8 laid down, a blue wave traveling atop one breast, then below another and back. In size, he wondered what the proportion of the breast wave was to the hip wave, whether there was a simple ratio, but he stopped himself from attempting to calculate the relative sizes from his visual recollection, although he believed he could, and that the ratio, in keeping with the theme of that distracting feminine obsession of his, might turn out to be one to eight. But no, thinking of feminine forms and shapes would not produce any innovative thoughts, only trap his mind in the most ancient, mind-simplifying, and numbing loop of desire. He should be above and beyond that.

  Just then the bell rang. He went to the door, and there stood Miriam in a crimson dress and a white collar. Her lips looked fuller than before.

  “I was so worried about you that…”

  “I know your thoughts, I can read them,” Tesla interrupted her.

  “I’m not surprised. I believe you can read my thoughts and see right through me.”

  “It’s much simpler than that; you’ve just written to me.”

  “You know, what happened between us was so wonderful and subtle and amazingly powerful I couldn’t stop thinking about it. Can you kiss me? Just once? Long?”

  “It would be dangerous. I might succumb to some disease that can’t harm you, like an Indian exposed to European diseases.”

  “We could practice self-restraint. It wouldn’t be that dangerous. Just one more time, can we? The excitement of your strange touch…”

  “I didn’t touch you.”

  “That’s what I mean. You didn’t but you did.”

  She sat on his sofa and pulled her skirt up a little so she could sit comfortably. The motion revealed the curve of the muscle behind her shin, the soleus muscle, and that too was a wave. The sofa was very close to the iron post that went into the foundation of the building. Suddenly Tesla had a thought that the physical waves from the oscillator, when increased in intensity, could excite her.

  “Undress!” he said. He stood up and spread his arms and, with his pointed aquiline nose, he resembled a condor landing on a rock.

  “What? I thought you didn’t want to. And you can see through my clothes, I’m always naked to you.”

  “Maybe I can, but this is for you, so you can feel the cool air blowing away your heat aura. Undress, and you’ll experience some fascinating rhythmic sensations.”

  “Is that a euphemism?”

  “I don’t do euphemisms.”

  She began to undress. It was an elaborate feminine undertaking. He remembered the saying, It doesn’t cost as much to undress a woman as it does to dress her. The layers of velvet and silk went, and there she lay, naked, her shiny and ethereal white skin reflecting light, ghostlike, darkening the room, and Tesla stood, dizzy with admiration. He attached his electric oscillator and tapped the iron post gently. The iron rang with high-frequency after-sounds like a tuning fork.

  “See what happens now. These simple mechanical waves, when added precisely, build up. Pretty soon, the building will shudder, and you will have a fine sensory experience.”

  The iron emitted deeper clanking noises as it received more and more taps. Gradually, metal objects around the loft began to resonate, and the table began to slide, in jerks, and as the floor was slightly tilted, it traveled toward the street window.

  Miriam lay on the shaking sofa and lifted one of her knees above the other, and Tesla admired the angle of her thighs, estimating that if he averaged the lines, it would be thirty-two degrees, a very fine number indeed.

  “What is going to happen next?” she asked.

  “These resonating vibrations could grow to such an extent that in half an hour the buildings across the street would crack and tilt. If I kept it up for three hours, I could shatter all the buildings in New York.”

  “I don’t believe you,” Miriam said, her eyes twice their normal size.

  “Yes, you believe me,” he said, gazing into her eyes from beneath his drooping eyelids, calmly, as though refusing to mesmerize her. If he opened his eyes, he could send beams of electricity into her, but he didn’t want that at the moment. On the other hand, if he let his eyelids droop too much, he saw her light, from his memory of her at the dinner table.

  The floor shook and Tesla perceived slight vibrations through the rubber soles of his shoes. He preferred to wear expensive handcrafted shoes to fit his long and narrow feet, but whenever he did experiments, even if they didn’t directly involve electricity, he didn’t want to be grounded, and rubber let him float in space as it were, electrically speaking. The shaking went into his bones and induced a prompt erection. He was surprised because he didn’t think he was excited. He buttoned up his frock coat, certain she hadn’t noticed the evidence of his lust. He wondered if it was lust for her or for the harmonic waves of the earth, and decided it was Miriam more than the waves of the earth, although the two did act in synergy at the moment, as did his oscillator waves.

  It was cool in the apartment, and Tesla noticed goose bumps on her forearms and her buttocks.

  “I love it, how you terrify me.”

  “I know that I could, if you gave me a few months, cause such violent vibrations in the crust of the earth that continents would split farther apart. New mountain ranges, higher than the Himalayas, would appear in Nebraska, and the Missouri would flow into the Hudson Bay.”

  “You’re insane. Ah…keep on talking.”

  The floor shuddered. Two chairs hopped and squealed and circled around each other as though two drunken, invisible musicians couldn’t contain their melodies to their instruments. The sofa shook and slid rhythmically, a few inches with each impulse. On the bookshelf, a bottle of golden-hued slivovitz danced, tilting minutely and progressing toward the edge.

  A hue of red, of the blood in rhythmic motion, surfaced down her neck and breasts. Her breasts rippled in circular waves, which spread from the nipples outward; her breasts rippled like two puddles after swallowing tossed pebbles. Tesla gazed, adoring the responsiveness of her flesh.

  “I can make an earthquake just for you, my dear.”

  “It’s the first time ever you’ve called me ‘dear.’”

  “And as a matter of fact, I believe we already have an earthquake, and since we are in the epicenter of it, we’re quaking the least.” Tesla walked to the window. Several houses up the street, windows were bursting, people ran, old roof tiles slid and crashed on the pavement. Hm, maybe that’s getting a little too far? Tesla thought, but he wanted to finish his point. “If you gave me a year or so, provided that I found out the exact harmonic formula for the Earth, I could split the Earth in half. It would split like a ripe watermelon when you stick a knife into it just an inch.”

  “Ah, ah!” Miriam turned pale. “Touch me, please!”

  “We don’t need to go that far, now, do we?” Tesla asked. “Of course, I would have the technical problem of keeping the oscillator so solidly fixed somewhere that all the shaking around it wouldn’t dislodge it and bury it. You know, at a certain point, the oscillator would commit suicide before the mission was accomplished. Anyhow, if I found an iron vein, both firm and elastic enough, run
ning down into the earth…”

  “Suicide? Oh, would you like to die with me? I love the idea! We could attain ecstasy while simultaneously dying together.”

  At that moment the sofa slid halfway across the loft.

  Windows across the street fell out all at once with a shattering burst.

  “Ah, ah, don’t stop!” Miriam gasped and grew as red as the velvet of her discarded dress.

  “This is working even faster than I thought,” said Tesla. He grabbed a sledgehammer and smashed his oscillator. The shaft of iron resounded so loudly that Tesla thought his eardrums must have burst.

  Miriam leaped out of the sofa that had crashed against the wall. She gathered her robes and she slid on her silk stockings and other undergarments and held her dress, figuring which way would be the best to enter it, when the police barged in.

  “Sir, the neighbourhood is falling apart. Is that you and your mad experiments?”

  “No, gentlemen. I’m engaged in other gentlemanly activities, if you don’t mind.”

  “Oh, I see,” said one policeman. “Sorry to bother you.”

  “Not at all. I am glad you are around. I was becoming worried myself.”

  Miriam was trembling as she put the dress on.

  “Come back next week, and we’ll see whether my low-frequency radio waves combined with microwaves could excite you.”

  She smiled at him, her lips curving and intensifying in light.

  “We can do better, next time. I can make fantastic microwaves, which a German now calls Rôntgen rays, although I discovered them a while back. I forgot to file the patent for that one. Do come back, and I’ll send beams through you, and you might like it. I could show the exact layout of your bones. Do you know the angle of your pelvis?”

  She walked out, and he accompanied her. The building still seemed to shake with aftershock waves, which resonated in Tesla’s bones, even in his pelvis. There was the debris of shattered glass, bricks, tiles along the walls.

  As he walked in the streets, he didn’t listen and he didn’t talk. He was melancholy since he spent too much time thinking about raising money for his experiments, and now he wondered whether he would be able to shake off the thoughts of Miriam’s curves and coils. He used to be able to come up with a patent every ten minutes during his walks, but at this rate maybe it would be one a day. His priestly father did warn him against money and women. Nikola should be able to forget her curves, or humanity would languish in darkness for a millennium to come.