“C’mon, get on it!” the others jeered at him.
His whole body ached that evening. All of it.
That first Tuesday was the worst. The last blister broke on Wednesday. Its slimy liquid dried on his palm.
Dirt covered his sores.
“I’ve always assumed there was something guiding my life,” Tesla said to himself. “Now I doubt it. Maybe there’s no invisible ball of yarn rolling ahead of me to show the way. Maybe there’s only nonsense and emptiness. Inertia helps me dig, but shoveling dulls my mind. I work for the City of New York, digging ditches into which Edison’s cables will be laid. So I’m still working for Edison.”
He talked to himself like the crazies in the streets do. And he lived against his own heart.
In Prague, and even more so in Paris, he developed a taste for opera and went whenever he could. Horrified by his own envy, Tesla lingered around the New York Metropolitan Opera. The posters announced that Wagner’s Siegfried was to be staged. In the photograph, the tenor Max Alvary, dressed in a short robe, raised his eyes meaningfully toward the ceiling. Hunched, Tesla admired the straight postures of male and female backs. The angelic smell of cleanliness tickled his nose. The refreshing drone of the audience in the lobby sounded otherworldly. Middle-aged women flounced in their youthful dresses. The explosion of their laughter resembled the breaking of plates. The chandelier was full of embers. Smiling men in coattails talked to innocent women in low-cut dresses in the anteroom. The twenty-eight-year-old laborer observed all of it from the perspective of a temporary dog. Despair flooded his soul, spreading slowly like oil over the table. The pinging from the dwarf’s smithy in the opening scene of Siegfried resounded in his head. Threadbare elbows, bad shoes, filthy shirt, the odor from dirty hair and sweaty armpits—that was who he was now. His clothes were like a floor mat. People in front of the theater looked at him as if he was a hair in their soup. He almost shuddered when he heard the rotund doorman shout, “Hey, you! What are you doing here?”
The worst autumn in his life was followed by the worst winter. The wind turned snow into fog. The blizzards were so bad that newspapers called them “whiteouts.”
Tesla could see his breath as soon as he woke up. His clothes felt cold, as if they were wet. Blessed Stevan returned from his night shift with a joke on his tongue and warm bread in his hands. Stevan’s serene face dispelled Tesla’s gloom as he finished his coffee and went out to let his friend have the bed.
“All my life I’ve been working to serve mankind,” the morose inventor complained to himself. “Is mankind the waiters who sell buckets of leftover beer? Or the wretches to whom they sell it? The Whyos drinking alcohol mixed with liquid camphor? The prostitutes whose shelf life is two years?”
He was able to piece together some sort of meaning for his life, but it dissolved in the first icy rain. Steam rose up from horses’ backs in the streets. Rails disappeared in the sleet, and buildings vanished in the fog.
He soothed himself thinking of Mother’s deep eyes.
CHAPTER 39
“The Dangerous Classes”
Late March in New York could hardly be called spring. The foreman, Obadiah Brown, kept his word and rehired all of his autumn workers. Brown was from the southern part of the proud state of Mississippi, where they cut their hair according to the phases of the moon and then burned it together with their nail clippings. His bushy mane hid his big ears. A cigar pulsated in the corner of his mouth. A rare good word came out of that uncouth man. “I don’t like Slavs.” He waved his arms around. “I don’t like the Irish either. Or Jews. Or Italians, for that matter. But I can’t be that way when I’m looking you in the eye, brother.”
The first week after the winter thaw, Brown and his men were working on the route of the elevated train for the Bronx at Third Avenue. Carmine Roca was digging next to Tesla. The sounds of the body delighted him. He informed his cosufferers in the trench, “This morning I took such a huge shit that I remained amazed for the rest of the day.”
He had a habit of unexpectedly rolling his head and then belching like a lion. When he passed gas, he announced, “I just ripped my pants!”
Someone should kill him! Tesla thought.
In the morning, Carmine snorted and declared in the trench: “Fabriccarisi la furca cu li so stissi manu.” (He is digging his own grave.) After the lunch break, he raised his finger and said, “Zoccu si cumincia, si finisci.” (Finish what you’ve started.)
When they asked him where his family was from, he responded irritably, “Adrano.”
Roca knew everything, although he could barely speak English. He was here temporarily, and then… his own oyster boat in New Orleans, and then…
His nephew Giovanni Romanello worked alongside him. He could only smile at his uncle’s antics as if he wanted to say, “What can you do?” The sight of the uncle tired Tesla out—the sight of the nephew relaxed him. That Italo-Byzantine native of the largest island in the Mediterranean intrigued him. The songs Giovanetto hummed betrayed two thousand and five hundred years of melancholy. Tesla wondered: What gave that Sicilian peasant such natural elegance? Was he an offspring of the Syracuse tyrant Dionysius who sold Plato into slavery?
Nikola and Giovanni obviously resembled each other—the same little smile hovered at the corner of their mouths. Using his melodious l’s and r’s, Giovanni loved to talk to Tesla. He pointed out that the donkey was a good animal, even beautiful, so he could not understand why people made fun of it. The donkey was a much better creature than the Marquise di San Giuliano, for whom his family members were working themselves to death. He mentioned the bloody oranges and sweet lemons of Sicily. He told Tesla how half of his native village lived in the tenement on Mott Street, and how its bustle and smells made Mott Street look like the marketplace in Catania. The only thing missing was the marble fountain.
“One of my relatives has offered me a waiter’s position at the Venice,” Giovanotto smiled. “The ceilings are high, cupolas and a gondola are painted on a blue wall. Wages aren’t bad and the work is much easier. Hah, vediamo!”
Twenty-two-year-old Paddy Maloney dug alongside Tesla and Giovanni. He could spit and whistle at the same time.
Leaning against his pick, he told Tesla the story of his life. In the year of the potato famine in Ireland and the revolution in Europe, his grandfather came to America. He was from the town of Beltra, in the county of Mayo, the old province of Connaught, where the starving were green around the mouth from eating grass.
“I saw my grandfather sober only once and couldn’t recognize him,” Paddy told them.
He lost both his grandfather and his mother within a year.
“The dead,” the young man blushed and looked up to the sky.
“They had their own time on earth and we have ours,” Tesla said, trying to console him.
“Cigarette ashes were falling on me when I was a baby,” Paddy concluded deadpan. “They found me in the arms of my drunken aunt. Cigarette ashes kept falling on me…”
His neighbors took care of him for several years. After that, a Catholic hospital for foundlings took him in and sent him on the Orphan Train to a farm in Iowa to get adopted.
“Why don’t you get adopted!” With an obscene gesture, Paddy took his leave from the nuns. He jumped off the train and returned to New York on foot. He was a shoeshine boy. He was a newspaper boy. He hung around other shoeshine and newspaper boys. “All of these famed friendships are bullshit,” he told Tesla later.
The boy floated like seaweed, moved by the ebbs and flows of Manhattan. Tesla learned about the seamy side of the city mostly from him. As a child, Paddy frequented whorehouses where small newspaper boys visited nine-year-old girls. He grew up in a maelstrom of popular impressions. He adored Stevie Brodie who jumped off the Brooklyn Bridge. He celebrated the rat terrier Jack Underhill, who killed one hundred rats in a half hour at a beer den on First Avenue and Tenth. To him, John L. Sullivan the boxer was God. Paddy remembered Sullivan’s firs
t fight in New York, when he crushed Steve Taylor in two and a half minutes. “Then he defeated Paddy Ryan, the Irishman from Ireland, in just eleven minutes.” Paddy’s memory was infallible.
He was on speaking terms with such important personages as Googie Corcoran and Baboon Connelly from the Whyos gang.
“He’s just a show-off,” the foreman grunted. “Otherwise he’s a good kid—a working man.”
Paddy recited the legends of the boulevard in the same way one would retell The Odyssey. He followed the developing saga of Tender Maggie and Lizzie the Dove, who wanted to slit each other’s throats because they were both in love with the elegant pimp Danny Driscoll. Lizzie’s last words were, “I’ll gouge your eyes in hell!”
Paddy listened to anarchists’ speeches at Tompkins Square. He was convinced that the Haymarket bombing in Chicago the previous year was organized by the Knights of Labor. He insisted the Chinese would steal white women and keep them as slaves and was glad Congress banned them from entering America.
“About time!”
Once after work, desperate Tesla let Paddy drag him to a bar that looked like a dilapidated theater, where a fierce cornet player competed with a tipsy pianist. The audience loudly applauded the singer’s blue stockings. Her mouth was so big she could sing two songs at once. Paddy tried to lure Tesla into the back room, where naked girls danced the cancan. A slight ironic smile was ineffective, so Tesla had to protest: “Please don’t! I really can’t.”
Paddy played Jewish faro at Chick Tricker’s Fleabag and at McGurk’s Suicide Hall. When he was drunk, he would sometimes visit the black bars and return with a black eye. The foreman called him his “little bull.”
“I lived like that too,” Obadiah Brown said, pointing at the scar on his eyebrow. He felt Paddy’s muscles and said, “You could be a good boxer.”
“Have you ever boxed?” Paddy’s broad face suddenly came to life.
“I had a great uppercut.” The foreman swung his arm.
In the morning, before work, Paddy would puff up his powerful chest. He loved to sing while he worked, and Giovanni subtly joined in with his own tenor. The black Portuguese Joaquim added the bass line. After the song, Nikola sometimes talked about his motor. The workers listened wordlessly and without derision.
Paddy Maloney was a fine fellow when he was sober. When he was drunk, an anger much older than himself spewed out of him. Fuckin’ Limeys. Fuckin’ rain. Fuckin’ heroism. Fuckin’ legends. Fuckin’ life!
“How much sorrow is hidden underneath that anger! How much stupid sorrow!” Tesla murmured.
Once Paddy came to work hungover. He turned away and threw up a little bit on a dirt pile. As soon as he realized where he was, he looked at Giovanni and Roca with scorn: Paddy’s father was born in America, while those two just got off the boat.
Paddy could not stand Roca, and Tesla understood why. The Sicilian kept blabbing about his future oyster boat. He went on talking, but his words were lost amid the sounds of work, the shovels scraping and the picks swinging.
“Spring,” Roca grunted in discontent.
Paddy frowned. “What the hell are you talking about, fatso.” Paddy’s trouble-bent glare bored into Roca’s glowing eyes. The Sicilian glanced at him briefly as he stuck out his lower lip.
“You got a problem?” Paddy had a nasty grin on his face. “Nigger!”
Roca could not match Paddy’s stare and lazily stepped aside.
“I got a problem,” the nephew unexpectedly said.
Giovanotto dropped his pick and straightened up. Paddy turned around quickly. Without a word, he charged forward and immediately took a step back, holding his stomach. He gagged as if he wanted to say something.
“Don’t take the knife out!” Obadiah Brown jumped in. “He’ll bleed to death!”
“Oh my God!” Tesla whispered.
Giovanni stood paralyzed by his decision and its consequence. He appeared calm, almost smiling. With numb feet, he plodded across the space that opened up as they led him away.
Paddy’s amazed eyes took in the world around him for the last time. Then they glazed over, and the images of distant windows froze on them.
CHAPTER 40
The Blind Tiger
After the fight, Nikola and the foreman Brown ended up at a blind tiger. Brown drank rum, and Nikola drank beer. They talked about Paddy’s death and Giovanni’s arrest.
“It’s horrible!” Nikola muttered.
“We live beneath the city,” began the foreman. “My father always told me to make something of myself. And I wouldn’t do it. My brother is an engineer, you know. But I didn’t want to do anything. I just wandered around out West.”
“Oh my God!” Nikola shook his head in disbelief.
“This whole thing stinks. It’s such a fucking American misunderstanding,” Brown had his eyes wide open above his third rum. “That Paddy liked to fight, but he would never use a knife. The other guy, Giovanni, is peaceful, but he would use a knife in a fight. So different rules cancel one another. The bottom drops out because of violence, and people live in hell.”
In the dim light of the illegal tavern, Brown’s hair turned unnaturally yellow.
The waiter took their glasses away and brought new ones. Brown touched the scar on his forehead: “I was in prison. Because of—” He laughed viciously. “Because of whatever happened. But, when you get old—you’ll see for yourself—you start thinking differently.”
Nikola was still in shock.
“Do you remember how they sang together?”
Usually, Obadiah Brown was a man of few words who preferred two mistakes to one explanation. Now he became talkative. Rum number five replaced beer number four.
“As a little kid I had a nanny. I was better in mathematics than my brother. Right now he sits in his office with books stacked to the ceiling. And I live like this,” he pointed at his scar again. “Each Thanksgiving he invites me for turkey as big as a camel. But I don’t go.”
Brown’s face stretched into a derisive smile. He bared his teeth, yellower than his hair, and stared at Tesla. “You told me about your motor. You think I don’t understand. But I do. I went to school. That’s simple—you just leave out that… commutator”—he grimaced as he pronounced the unusual word—“so electrical current is conveyed great distances. Which is what Edison can’t do, right?”
The waiter slammed a mug of beer in front of Tesla and gently placed the rum before Brown. Brown sniffed the rum and winked at Tesla, who was amazed by the man’s recall.
“You don’t need any more of this crap in your life,” Brown passed the verdict. “It has to stop. I’ll introduce you to my brother. He can help you. Even though he can’t help me.”
Ragged apes in bowler hats, whose brains had been stolen by demon rum, jabbered all around them.
“We live in a chasm,” Obadiah Brown made a face. “Beneath the city. At least someone should rise above it.”
Brown staggered out of the bar like a headless chicken, and Tesla thought he would not remember anything the next day.
But the next week Brown showed up with his hair combed down and his ears sticking out. His yellow hair was parted in the middle, and his white scalp showed through. He told Tesla to put on some nice clothes and to follow him.
“Hey, windbag! Come with me.”
For a half hour they strode along in silence toward Upper Manhattan. The walk produced magical results. Garbage disappeared as they advanced. Passersby and shop windows became dignified. Hats grew taller and collars grew furry. At the tails of their crinolines, women dragged whole draperies. At the entrance of the Western Union Telegraph office, there was a doorman with a sash. Instead of driving them off, he smiled and ushered them inside. Alfred B. Brown was the head engineer at Western Union Telegraph.
The brothers briefly embraced at the door. It appeared that Obadiah Brown’s sibling was a kind, somewhat neurotic man. He performed each move with twice as much energy as necessary. With a quick pull, he took
out his spectacles and perched them on his nose. His magnified eyes met Tesla’s. “I know who you are,” he said. “I myself have patented a few arc lamps. I remember your lightbulbs from Rahway.”
In that office everything was in its proper place, from the warm oak paneling to the stained glass in the upper part of the window. Every now and then, Brown flashed something—his spectacles, his gold fountain pen, his cigarette case. The smell of cleanliness, Brown’s starched collar, the flash of his cigarette case, and especially his kind disposition were welcoming signs of Tesla’s return to his own long-lost home.
Obadiah Brown spoke first, waving his hands, which were as huge as those of Professor Pöschl. Then Tesla followed with his detailed, quiet explanation, rolling out one blueprint after another. Alfred Brown was listening. At the end, he firmly shook Tesla’s hand. He saw them to the door, patting his brother on the shoulder. The deal instantly brought Tesla a hotel room full of light and several suits in his closet. Brown informed him that he was welcome to work in his lab, and scheduled a meeting with the New Jersey lawyer Charles Peck in a month. (The man’s “maybe,” Brown growled, was worth more than other people’s “yeses.”) Peck was aware that the polyphase system with which Westinghouse had been experimenting was not working as expected. “However, he’s also suspicious about your model,” Brown warned Tesla.
The last Saturday in April brought a sudden drop in temperature and the long-awaited meeting. The starched plastrons of their shirts shone white, and Tesla felt like a swan surrounded by his own kind.
His intensifying leanness surprised all the people present at the meeting.
His squeaky new shoes paced restlessly around Brown’s laboratory. Holding his breath, he had been getting ready for this for weeks. His excitement once again pushed the walls aside. A recently built model of his motor awaited their judgment.
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