“Hit ’em!”
“Take that!”
An all-out fight broke out on the ship. Several noses got broken. After the incident, Captain Rouen stopped inviting Tesla to eat with him.
The Truth
With hollow gazes, the passengers gawked at the dazzling sky above and the white void in the direction of America. Something drew a crowd of caps and head scarves to the deck. After he cleared his throat by way of introduction, a gimpy Basque told them a story that belonged to all nations—the old story about truth:
A young man went out into the world to look for Truth. On his quest, he traveled over seven mountains and seven seas. He asked the sun, he asked the moon, and he asked the wind. He wore out three pairs of iron shoes before he found her.
Truth was old and ugly.
The young man stayed with Truth for three years. She taught him many, many things. So the time came for them to part. As he took his leave, Truth asked, “Would you do me a favor?”
“Yes,” the young man said.
“When you go back among people and they inquire of me, tell them I’m young and beautiful.”
Even Maids Have Maids There
A day before they reached their destination, flocks of terns appeared.
“The seagulls are back too!” someone exclaimed.
At last they saw the harbor. Thousands of columns of smoke rose above thousands of roofs. Just before sunset, objects responded to the sunlight with their own inner light. Redbrick buildings glowed most beautifully. All the languages of Babel and the universal language of crying babies were silenced at the sight of the harbor.
All the passengers on the deck rose to their feet to see. Each pauper was an epic hero, each an Aeneas. The American wind licked their faces. The seagulls reeled above their heads.
The granite faces of Baćić and Cvrkotić, and the frightened face of Stevan Prostran, were turned toward the dark contours of Manhattan. The people of the world gazed on America—those for whom someone waited at the dock and those who had nobody there, those who would go back and those who would never return.
“Jesus, Joseph, and Mary, where are we?” a woman whispered.
The lice-infested crowd smelled like village life. They were frightened but brave. They desired what they feared.
Manhattan!
That’s where Uncle Jules sleeps on a mattress and eats meat and white bread every day, like a millionaire. Nothing is the same there, Mother. Nothing is the same there, Father. People’s backs break from work there. Even maids have maids there.
The saddest eyes beheld Manhattan with hope, trepidation, and helplessness: This is too big. This is destiny.
CHAPTER 33
The Light of the Mortals
During the trip, sleepless Tesla often watched the morning star open the gate of night, the rosy fingers of dawn touch the ocean, and Helios, the light of the mortals, start his daily journey in his chariot.
Tesla constantly imagined his first meeting with the divine Thomas Edison, the only man in the world who could understand him. Like a spider on a golden thread, Edison descended from the sky and the two of them engaged in endless conversations.
“Good morning!” Tesla shouted into the void above the waters.
The ocean whispered and everything in it responded. Beneath Tesla and the keel of the Saturnia, the “uncataloged creatures of the deep” undulated.
One day, our voyager cajoled the sea: “You proud white-capped sea, you!”
Another day he said: “You that heave and roll forever.”
“You cold, fish-full sea. You inhuman sea,” he cried out like Homer.
In the space between the two worlds, Tesla looked around. He grabbed the rail and stared at the line between the sky and the ocean. At times he lost his sense of self and imagined the eternal blue around him to be his soul.
With his binoculars, he scanned the watery realm they entered and, naturally, it could appear to him that… what? In each wave there seemed to bob the head of a lone swimmer. Sometimes the swimmer disappeared from view, only to resurface, arms stroking against the waves.
Who?
Who was following the ship? The dual circles of the binoculars merged into a single spot and framed a face. Tesla recognized him. It was Dane, his brother, who had long since drowned in the ocean of time.
Many years ago, Tesla learned how to deal with phenomena as enormous as death. He started to whisper because God hears best the whispered word.
“Let me go!” he silently and hopelessly pleaded. “Please, let me go!”
The phantom in the joined circles of the binoculars steadily gained on him. The tilt of the head and the consistency of the strokes told Tesla:
I will never leave you, my brother!
PART II
America
CHAPTER 34
The Deaf Man’s House
Tesla disembarked from the boat in New York. The city itself held no interest for him. He immediately sought out Edison’s laboratory through the maze of avenues and streets.
“Here we are!” He congratulated himself as he knocked on the door.
At the laboratory, people were busy constructing the gate to fairyland, the hat that makes you invisible, love potions…
Ah!
Cameras for thoughts, peepholes into the future, stethoscopes for internal music…
Ah!
It was here that the electric bulb started to flicker.
It was here that a human voice first spoke from a machine.
God’s creative work continued in this lab—it was carried on through the efforts of the Inventors.
This was the navel of the world, the quiet eye of the vortex.
Out there, raucous New York growled and bilked. Edison felt at home in New York, like a fish in water. He was the fish-wizard, the fish-king!
Drowning in debt, the wizard was constantly on the move—he stalked rich clients and bribed newspapermen in Manhattan. Hemp fibers littered his sawdust-strewn floors. Engines hummed in his workshops, manufacturing parts for other engines. The corridors smelled of black oil and were always full of people. Two young men with unkempt hair—the louder one was called Connelly—got into a dispute and insisted that their boss declare the winner. In front of the door, a businessman from Astoria checked his gold watch.
“He’ll see you now,” the wild-haired Connelly said, acting like a secretary and pushing Tesla inside.
With the finest smile on his face and four cents in his pocket, Tesla walked through the fateful door. Who cared about Milutin Tesla? His true father—the most famous scientist in the world—awaited him behind this door! In a few moments, Edison would recognize him as a great man and a kindred soul.
A fan turned slowly on the ceiling. The office was cluttered. A likable boy with a hat on his head looked out from a silver-framed daguerreotype.
The biography of that barefaced boy read like the life of a saint. He began his career selling newspapers on trains between places named Port Huron and Detroit, and ended up selling light to the City of Light.
Under the slow fan, Tesla was like a young dog. His almond-shaped eyes gleamed. Two starched triangles protruded beneath his chin. Two thick waves of hair parted in the middle of his head. He looked like a fresh young man who wanted to leave a favorable impression. He thought, Ah! and then he thought, Oh! Then he strode across the office in two steps and handed Bachelor’s letter of recommendation to Edison. The gun-slit eyes took him in one more time. At last, cordiality displaced the wary smile. With a theatrical gesture, the king of inventors dropped the letter. His face rounded up.
“If you want, you can start tomorrow.”
And that was that.
Tesla was so excited he almost fainted. This will decide everything! he thought. Everything!
And he liked the first step—as Whitman would say—so much.
Radiant with hope, he strode an inch above the ground. The sky tickled him—the sky was his soul’s namesake. He could not wait to
wake up the next day so he could go to work. That was so fascinating, so painfully fascinating, like gambling, like alcohol, like… There must have been something about his face, some airy, happy expression, because people looked at him and smiled. He worked from 10:30 in the morning until 5:00 a.m. the next day.
During Tesla’s second week at Edison’s, two dynamos on a transatlantic ship, the Oregon, shorted out simultaneously.
“It can’t be done!” The workers frowned and shrugged their shoulders.
“What do you mean it can’t be done!” raged Edison.
“It can’t be fixed!” the electricians repeated.
Edison fired the whole lot.
The Oregon was the first transatlantic ship lit by his system.
They sent Tesla. He rushed off.
His troubleshooting was based more on intuition than knowledge: This is the problem! This isn’t… Covered in soot, he left just before dawn, looking like he’d been beaten with torches.
“Is that our Parisian! So, how was the party?” Edison greeted him outside the laboratory.
An unexpected answer hit him in the face: “I fixed the problem on the Oregon.”
“Well done,” Edison acknowledged, huskily.
Tesla smiled readily.
“It’s an honor for any engineer to work for you.”
Often he talked about his motor to Edison in Edison’s absence. His excitement pushed the walls of the surrounding buildings away.
“In my case, that honor is even greater because I’ve long desired to show you my alternating current motor. Its huge advantage over direct current is that the existing power stations can only cover a one-mile radius…”
While the young man spun the golden yarn of his eloquence, his heart pounded.
“Imagine how many direct current power stations need to be built in New York alone!”
Connelly the grouch, who again assumed the role of secretary, leaned toward Tesla’s ear and whispered, “He’s hard of hearing.”
The young man had to repeat what he had already said.
The narrowed eyes and disgusted smile were part of Edison’s charm. In the first light of the morning, his face remained impassive. His words caught Tesla by surprise: “Ninety percent of an inventor’s skill is in his ability to judge what is and what isn’t possible, and this is”—he made a reassuring gesture toward Tesla. Since Tesla did not react, Edison concluded, “impossible.”
“But I have already built a working model,” stammered the Parisian.
Edison put on his disgusted smile again. “You know, when I started to build my first direct current power stations, I had to battle the natural gas industry. My journalists wrote, ‘Gas is poisonous,’ and other things like that up until I was able to open my plants. Imagine,” he added, this time with a rakish smile, “if I had to oppose your competing system…”
Connelly and a man with a beat-up hat, called Little Benny, laughed in unison.
“Imagine if I had to pay reporters to write ‘Beware of alternating current!’ One gets tired of such things, you know.”
Edison clapped his hands and exclaimed, “Let’s just drop those… those fantasies. Fortunately, your system is absolutely inapplicable.”
“It’s not…”
“Inapplicable! But, look, if you can really improve direct current motors the way you’ve said you can, there’s—there’s fifty thousand dollars in it for you.”
Tesla looked at him with fire in his eyes.
Edison’s eyebrows were a straight line. He emitted a sour odor because he bathed once a month “whether he needed to or not.” There was a rumor that his wife was going insane. There was a rumor that he managed her condition himself. There were all kinds of rumors. His slimy lips throttled his cigar. His nose resembled a vegetable. His hair was limp like grass in a drought.
Tesla stared at him—he simply could not believe it. He depended on that man so much he did not dare see him in a different light. He did not dare get angry with him.
He was hesitant to admit that this sweaty deaf man with drooping ears and dead hair disappointed him. If Edison could not understand him, who else could?
He would continue to work. He would prove his point.
He spent every day installing lightbulbs in the power plant on Pearl Street and in the nearby Gerk Steel Mill. He stepped over springs, cartons of glass tubes, and boxes labeled with mystical names. Those were shipments of materials for their experiments from places with names like Paramaribo, Malaysia, Congo, which Tesla imagined to be colonial mirages, swarming with lemurs and parrots.
The laboratory was the entire world. For him, New York did not exist.
And yet…
That year he got to know the New York summer heat for the first time. Financiers paid visits to the famous laboratory. John Pierpont Morgan, the Sultan of Wall Street, also came, with his top hat resembling the smokestack of a train. The millionaires in black looked like funeral home officials, and Morgan was the owner of the funeral home. Tesla saw him only from a distance and the man left a disquieting impression.
“As if someone put a sack over my head,” he said to Little Benny.
As he worked on designing new arc lamps and direct current motors, Tesla met a man with a long face, cold eyes, and thin, extremely agile lips. The man smiled with effort and introduced himself: “Robert Lane.”
With an air of intrigue, he handed Tesla his business card. “In case you need someone to back your lamps financially.”
“No. I’m fine where I am,” Tesla responded.
“I know you’re fine,” Lane said pointedly.
At the Gerk Steel Mill, experiments sometimes went on for twenty hours. There, with ant-like persistence, the engineers tried and tried and tried. One night, Edison locked his assistants in the laboratory. Another night he decided that they should have some fun.
“Let’s go, my insomniacs,” he yelled. “It’s time, my insomniacs.”
Like dogs released from their chains, Edison’s insomniacs charged into the summer night. They first invaded a Hungarian restaurant at 65 Fifth Avenue. Its floor was strewn with pine shavings. A melancholy saw cried under the musician’s bow.
“Beer! Meat! Pickles!” they shouted, scraping chair legs across the floor and shoving tables together.
“Goulash for me!”
“Me too!”
“Excuse me, what’s that huge lump on your shoulders?” Tom Connelly asked old Johan, who came to wait on them.
The owner disappeared, came back, and put glasses and plates on the table.
Outside barked the golden dogs of summer.
Little Benny flashed the most charming smile that ever adorned a complete bum. He slapped Johan on the back and laughed until he choked. “I’ve never seen such a sullen mug on such a fine waiter!”
From the side of his mouth, Connelly told them how New York was endowed with one of the wonders of the world—the Brooklyn Bridge—just a year before Tesla “got off the ship.”
“The Hanging Gardens of Babylon are no more, but our bridge still stands,” the learned Edison pointed out to his assistants.
Not a week after the opening, someone shouted, “The bridge is falling!” and caused a stampede in which a dozen people were crushed to death.
“How we ran!” Connelly whistled.
The miserable, drunken musician played on his saw, his head swaying and his eyes closed.
Like a multiheaded hydra, Edison’s group got up and left the restaurant. They commandeered an omnibus. With his hands deep in his pockets, Bachelor, who had recently returned from Paris, joined them.
Cracking jokes and shouting each other down, the insomniacs took a ride to the Golden Garter on Bowery. They hushed and shoved each other while a frowning German led them to their table. Sitting, they guarded their glasses of rum with their elbows. A woman with smeared makeup pushed those greasy elbows aside and sat at their table. “Hon, won’t you buy me a drink?” she said.
“It’s a fe
udal system,” Benny explained. “Brothels pay policemen. Policemen pay captains. Captains pay politicians.” He let out a hellish belch that singed the hair on his chest, and he swore.
“You know what Steve Grady said as he jumped off the bridge?” The green-eyed Connelly was on fire. “Going down!” He downed a shot of rum.
“Ha! Ha! Ha!”
Exaggerated, almost frightening joy reigned at the table. Their mugging stripped their words of meaning. Edison’s mood always improved after a meal. That was when he hijacked conversations. As a young man, he electrified a metal urinal at a railway station and watched men shake and wet themselves while urinating.
“Ha! Ha! Ha!”
He presided over a table full of fogged spectacles and gaping jaws. It was hot in the bar.
The door was open. Outside, the lions of summer roared, and its mighty bulls bellowed down unfamiliar streets. The fragrant dust teased the soul and intoxicated the nostrils. The broken lights and the distant voices of the city turned into a painful temptation. All eyes filled with longing. Smoke rolled out into the night through the open door.
The main characteristic of the music was speed.
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