“How are you?” asked one.
“Bad,” the other drawled.
A morning drunkard expressed strong emotions in an unknown language. Workers in muddy boots, broad shouldered, with large mustaches, told stories about a Pole who kicked a skunk.
“It was a big mistake.” They all laughed.
“Hey Gramps, have you ever been young?” they teased an old man.
“If I could only have your head, kid,” he replied, “so I could sleep soundly for three days.”
There was a rumor about the coming strike.
Shoulders swaying above his thin waist, Tesla approached the mustached men.
“Excuse me, do you know Stevan Prostran?”
“Sure.” The workers were surprised that the gentleman spoke their language. They immediately posed a mute question with their eyes: Being so great and successful, do you disown us who are so poor and wretched?
No, I don’t.
They told him that Stevan had recently moved to Rankin, where they paid more—fourteen cents an hour.
“You’ll wear out three pairs of iron shoes getting there,” the men laughed. “You’ll need to take the ferry to Keating, but it’s not running today.”
He was looking for his Stevan, but his Stevan was not to be found.
At times like this, it appeared to Tesla that he was surrounded by ghosts who vanished one after the other.
“Ooooo, lassie!” someone sang with a drawl under the sour sky.
The cold wind brought refrains:
“Don’t look back…”
“Forget me…”
He walked along the train tracks toward the station, inhaling the lukewarm smell of machine grease. As he went, he heard a worker, obviously from Serbia proper, who talked to an old woman about someone who had died in the C smelter explosion.
“The poor soul… He was a good man, married to that Mara. His father, Radovan, was also a good man. Those were good people. Be well, Granny.”
The simple words saddened Tesla.
He felt very sorry… for people and small children…
For everything that lives…
CHAPTER 48
The Bearded Lady
Edison’s eyes were slits in a bunker. With a disgusted smile on his face, he inquired, “So what are their weak spots?”
“Their system may pose some danger,” Bachelor muttered, ironing his beard with his palm.
Edison pointed his index finger:
“Their system is deadly. They will release demons into our houses.”
Edison’s hair looked like frostbitten grass. His nose resembled a pickled beet. His fingers danced over the surface of the table.
“This isn’t anything new. This is how we fought the gas companies. Go call Joe Gamshoe. Sam Emew as well.”
Bachelor rubbed the magic lamp. Staring with dark, shifty eyes, Gamshoe and Emew sauntered up and cried, “What’s your wish, Master?”
The relentless mouth gnawed at the cigar. The ashes fell on Edison’s suit. His fingers still drummed the table. “I’m concerned about Westinghouse!” the inventor barked, narrowing his eyes. “The man will never quit!”
They called Westinghouse a “human wave” for a good reason. He tirelessly bribed politicians and businessmen. He gave interviews. He sent his agents and salesmen all over America. He had already sold his alternating current system to a coal mine in Colorado.
As dangerous as an underground stream, Edison plotted with Gamshoe and Emew. He was the first to believe the ideas he tried to sell others. In various newspapers, he raised hell against the “electric murderers.”
At Edison’s ruthless orders, circus tents sprang up all across the state of New York and all of the Midwest.
“Let the show begin!”
In Peoria, Illinois, a frightened dog yelped on the stage. A menacing assistant attached wires to the dog and connected them to an apparatus. Hunched down, he squeezed the animal’s neck and fastened the electrodes.
“Let the dog go, man!” an onlooker shouted.
With a Cheshire Cat’s grin, the demonstrator resembled one of those “professors” who peddled snake oil in small Kansas towns.
The horrified-looking professor yelled at the top of his lungs as if they were children, or deaf. “Ladies and gentlemen, esteemed colleagues! Mr. Westinghouse of Pittsburgh wants to bring a new kind of electricity into your homes. Where your women play with your kids, he wants to install so-called alternating current. I know what you’ll say! You’ll say”—the snake-oil salesman produced a good-natured smile—“we already have safe direct current, generously bestowed on us by Mr. Edison.”
Those present only knew about sooty oil lamps and flickering candles. Still, they nodded their heads in agreement.
The professor’s theatrical grimaces and gestures were just as important as his words.
“Westinghouse tells us,” he continued with the trembling chin of a tragic hero, “that his kind of electricity is easy to transport long distances. Anything that easy can’t be good. Is that electricity safe? Is it safe?” The speaker surprised himself with his own question. “We’ll see in a second!”
At the Mad Hatter’s signal, a curtain lifted and revealed Tesla’s frightening coils.
The dog, bound by leather straps, whined at the sight.
“Igor, please!” the professor commanded in his operatic voice.
Smiling slyly, the hunchback Igor checked the wires attached to the dog and winked at the bearded lady.
“Pull the lever!”
The bearded lady pulled the lever.
Hissing and sparking merged with the dog’s pitiful wails. To the audience, it seemed that all was smoke and the smell of burning flesh. The professor bent over the carcass of the short-lived animal and announced, “It was Westinghoused!”
Rouge glowed on the cheeks of the hunchback Igor, the grinning professor, and the bearded lady as they blinked their rounded eyes. They laughed maliciously, held each other’s hands, and bowed before the audience.
CHAPTER 49
Put the Hands in Jars of Water
The night before the event, anyone interested in the Kemmler case could not sleep peacefully. The prison guard Durston reported that all those in attendance were nervous without exception.
Someone tried to talk, but his voice failed him. The ominous sound of footsteps echoed in the stone corridor.
The Mad Hatter, Igor, and the bearded lady were not present in the death chamber.
William Kemmler, the grocer who butchered his wife in Buffalo, came in. He was composed.
“Gentlemen,” he said, “I wish you luck… I just want to say that much of what has been said about me isn’t true. I’m bad enough. It’s cruel to make me worse than I am.”
He sat on the electric chair without hesitation, as if he wanted to rest. They made him stand up again and cut a hole in his clothes at the base of his spine so that the electrical lead could be attached to his skin.
“Do it right,” he said.
The guards attached the electrical leads to his head. The doomed man looked hideous under the leather straps that partly covered his face.
“Is it ready?” he asked.
No one answered.
Kemmler lifted his eyes to catch a ray of sunshine that danced into the chamber of death.
“Good-bye, William!” the prison guard Durston said. There was a click. The man in the chair rose to his feet. Every single muscle in his body was stretched to the limit. Had he not been strapped to the chair, the electrical shock would have thrown him across the room. They pulled the lever back. Everyone felt relieved. And then they looked at Kemmler in horror.
“Merciful God, he’s still alive,” Durston realized.
“Turn the electricity back on,” someone else gasped.
“Kill him, for God’s sake! Let’s finish this…”
Kemmler’s chest kept rising and falling.
Dr. Spitzka commanded: “Electricity, again!”
&nb
sp; There was another click, like before, and the body of the doomed man in the chair stiffened again. However, this time the dynamo failed to work properly. Loud electrical cracks were heard. Blood appeared on the wretch’s face. Kemmler was sweating blood. As the horror peaked, they noticed that the hair and flesh around the electrodes were singed and roasted. The stench was unbearable.
I Only Skimmed Over
“I only skimmed over the report on Kemmler’s execution,” commented Edison. “That was not a pleasant read.”
“It’s a known fact that some thirty or forty people have died due to electric shock…. In my opinion, it was a mistake to put doctors in charge. To begin with, Kemmler’s hair wasn’t a good conductor; additionally, I don’t believe the crown of the head is the best place to attach the electrodes…. There’s much more water in the arms, and the flesh is soft, which makes them the most obvious choice….Therefore, it’s much better to put the hands in jars of water.”
New York Times, August 6, 1890
CHAPTER 50
Through Our Sister Bodily Death
Like Lightning I come, and like the Wind I go,
In Paradise you’ll meet me happy again, I know.
Ferdowsi
Lately, life had become repetitive to Szigety—it tasted like a honeycomb that had lost its sweetness. In addition to his gloomy assistant Gano Dunn, Szigety hired the Hungarian Koloman Czitó because the man spoke his language. Szigety lived in a fine apartment next to Gramercy Park. His landlord was a spoiled drunk who beat his wife.
“If you need someone to take care of,” Szigety said, annoyed by the woman’s timid attitude, “you’d better take care of yourself first.”
“Sir, why don’t you take care of yourself?” she replied, trembling.
For some time, Szigety had quit doing squats with barbells. His honey-colored hair was sweaty and his skin was oily. He grew burly and, being stocky, seemed shorter. His natural outbursts of joy became less frequent. He complained of migraines: “If you only knew how it flashes through my head!”
Tesla did not hear him. Kemmler’s death shook the very foundations of his world.
“I’m bad enough,” the electrocuted man kept repeating in a windy voice. “It’s cruel to make me worse than I am.”
“Progress is your God,” Milutin Tesla’s voice outshouted Kemmler’s complaints. “But Progress doesn’t discriminate—it advances evil as well.”
Nikola was doubly shocked because it appeared that Father was correct. He remembered Uncle Branković’s vanities. For the first time in Nikola’s life, Progress showed him the putrid side of its face.
Edison killed. With Tesla’s hand.
“Prometheus sacrificed so much only for Nero to get hold of his fire,” Tesla raved.
But all of that was just his “personal life.” As usual, he had no time for reflection.
Kemmler’s wretched phantom moaned once more and finally left Tesla’s dreams. Resorting to sheer willpower, our hero donned his professional blinders again. In collaboration with the soft-eyed Martin, he wrote the story of his life; he also finished patents for Westinghouse as well as two new types of iridescent lamps.
The force propelled Tesla on, tirelessly.
Antal lagged behind. Yet each time an envious thought entered his head, the Hungarian returned it like an unopened letter to wherever such thoughts came from.
He had aural hallucinations of Hungarian being spoken in the streets. He started to frequent the restaurant with the hammer dulcimer that he had initially found boring. Budapest became a mythic city. There, violins twittered like birds, and the upright bass thudded like a huge animal. There, peasant carts, colorful like gingerbread houses, rolled on in the shadows of streetcars.
But… But… But… To go back would be a defeat. So what now?
Nothing but laughter, nothing
But dust, nothing but nothing,
There’s no reason why everything is happening.
Leaves buried his quiet neighborhood near Gramercy Park. The green and yellow smudges combined into a mosaic. He started to see his nice apartment as a trap. In it, he hummed beautiful suicidal songs. In it, he devoted himself to the practice of hara-kiri by self-pity.
“Everyone likes to be forgiven for something,” he said, his blond mustache curled in a smile.
To Tesla, work equaled rest. Szigety needed a lot of rest after work—the rest, which, in fact, was tiresome, since he overindulged in it. During the day, he and Tesla discussed the relationship between the structure of ether, electricity, matter, and light.
In the evening, inertia sank its claws into Antal Szigety, emptied him and started living in his place. Aphrodite sent him the goddess Atë, who made his heart seasick and full of black madness. He tried to restrain the fury that raged inside his body. A satyr’s smile started to form on his lips. Debauchery was his duty. He was in the power of tidal forces. God reshaped him into an incarnation of greed and slipped him off the hook of reason. Like Tannhäuser long ago, Szigety rushed helplessly toward the hell of pleasure. Whenever he entered a brothel, took off his jacket, and felt a woman run her fingers through his hair, he released a deep sigh.
This shameful capitulation became sweet relief.
He was still enthralled by the inner slickness of women. The girls, who had known all meridian of dicks, assured him that his was special. The laughter of whores was like the crackling of thorns under a cauldron. Szigety brought a top hat full of roses for his girl Nellie. He passed his palm over her cheeks and mouth. He gave her his finger to suck. He drowned in her tits and silk. He wrinkled her unsqueezable feminine roundness and waited for the orgasm to place him in the center of the world.
Szigety became a devotee of the naked cancan to which the late Paddy Maloney tried to drag Tesla. Soon after returning from Pittsburgh, he became an expert on New York brothels, both the well appointed and the cheap.
Garters. Lacy gossamer lingerie. Nestling. Legs in stockings on his shoulders. Eruptions of white. The curvature of loins enfolding his fingers. Trembling roundness. Tightness. Penetrating and banging. Embracing the mounds. Possessing. Lascivious weasels. Gyrating sluts. Spasms to the last ounce of strength. Smooching and goosing. Smacking and licking, pinching and biting. Pounding the peg home and squeezing. Recoiling and submitting, dissolving in affluence and sensuality. Innings and outings. Grinding. Passionate howling. Swallowing and cooing. Giving and breaking and panting.
It helped him survive.
Before, Antal had resorted to hot baths, shadowboxing, and hiking in order to counter his lewd lifestyle. Tesla asked him why he did not work out anymore, and he came up with some feeble anti-American excuses: “There’s no nature in this place.”
“How can that be?” Tesla was annoyed. “There’s more nature here than anywhere else in the world. Just get out of New York.”
Szigety did not go anywhere.
When he opened a bottle of Tokay with Tesla, he became fainthearted. He closed his eyes to see how far he could slide on his drunkenness. Finally he said, “I’ve bluffed away my life.”
“No, you haven’t,” his friend reassured him. “You’ve simply matured without realizing it.”
It appeared that Antal’s body revolted against something his soul refused to acknowledge.
Tesla warned him in the same manner he himself had been warned during his gambling days in Graz: “Slow down.”
That spring, Westinghouse readied himself for the final showdown with Edison. He pressured the creator of his alternating current motor. “Nikola, you must counter their circus performances with a scientific performance of your own.”
Nikola himself was aware of this. He raised his chin, took a deep breath, and saw the golden path. He decided to do what no one had ever done before. He was going to refute Edison’s claim that “alternating current kills” by letting the maelstrom of that same force pass through his own body.
“Do you think I’ll survive?” he asked Szigety.
The exp
ression in Szigety’s blue eyes went from innocent to absentminded to almost dangerous. Finally, he smiled. “You? Yes. You will.”
A woman rang his room from the hotel lobby and woke him up. As soon as he went down, she hit him with a cloud of her perfume. She singed him with her burning eyes.
“Please, Mr. Tesla, come with me.”
“Who are you?”
“It’s urgent.” She did not seem to have heard his question.
He entered that kind of place for the first time in his life. Two naked whores played with a balloon, batting it with their noses and then their toes. The interior of the house was mainly white. It smelled of perfume, of lazy femininity, and of fake luxury. The prostitutes who glided around in their lingerie looked like beautiful monsters to Tesla. Their sly eyes were dull. One of them said, “He’s up there.”
Tesla ran upstairs.
It was not Antal. It was a doll.
A very young girl wearing heavy mascara was sitting next to that doll. Tesla and the doctor asked her to leave.
“How?” Tesla asked.
“We still don’t know,” the bald doctor sighed.
“Cocaine overdose,” the beautiful monster said without moving.
They tactfully agreed that the body be transferred from the brothel on Twenty-Ninth Street to a hospital, and that the official report mention Szigety’s apartment as the location of his death.
They also suspected murder.
Tesla was nervous waiting for the results.
“A burst aneurysm,” the doctor told him after the autopsy. “Nothing could have been done. It is better that he didn’t know about it.”
“Did he suspect something was wrong?” Tesla asked as he remembered his friend’s moods.
“No,” the doctor said. Then he changed his mind. “There are more things in heaven and earth than are dreamt of…”
In Budapest, Szigety forced Tesla to live, but here Tesla hadn’t known how to return the favor. He went to the dead man’s apartment to pack his belongings and ship them to his family. He hissed like a snake and puffed up his cheeks. Szigety’s shoes were on the pillow, a knife and a piece of smoked sausage were on a pair of ironed underwear. Tesla whistled—he had never seen such a mess. A lithograph of a ruddy-faced Franciscan monk offering a burning heart to the Virgin hung above the bed. Next to the bed were a German translation of a book by Dostoyevsky and a tattered volume of Saint Augustine’s Confessions.
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