In this room, Antal awoke bound in sweaty bedsheets. Here he suffered from hangovers and tried to kick a moth. Here he felt the coldness of coins scattered under his bare feet. Here he rolled his eyes, which were the color of the Plitvice Lakes, and wondered how to pay his bills. Every morning, this Pan’s ecstasy turned into Pan’s panic.
“Everyone likes to be forgiven for something,” he used to say.
Fame accelerated Tesla’s life to an awful pace, and an invisible hand snatched away those he loved. Obadiah Brown, Paddy, Prostran, Szigety were taken by the wind. People receded into the distance, their faces turning into masks. Due to the speed, their forms became elongated and merged into one another. Success smelled like a tempest.
He sat under the helmet of tightly combed hair, as pale as a lotus flower, his fingers locked together. What used to be a source of warmth changed into an icy pit. He felt powerless as he stared into the foggy future, which resembled nothingness.
“Destiny,” he whispered, horrified.
His larynx hurt.
The octopus of sentimentality wrapped him in its wet embrace and started to throttle him with its many tentacles. He gasped and dried his eyes with the first thing at hand—a pair of clean socks.
“Antal, Antal,” he whispered.
His nose narrowed, and he asked in full honesty, “Am I crying for the dead or for myself?”
Szigety’s blue eyes and the sweetness of his smile always cheered Tesla up. They shared fits of senseless laughter so often, swaying like poplars in the wind.
“You see, I can make you laugh about anything, anytime,” Szigety bragged, catching his breath.
And that same lewd Antal wanted to be a priest. He wanted to address the world with words of love, like Saint Francis of Assisi:
Be praised, my Lord, through all Your creatures, especially through my lord Brother Sun…
Be praised, my Lord, through Sister Moon and the stars…
Be praised, my Lord, through our sister Bodily Death…
CHAPTER 51
After Never
Around us, everything spins,
everything moves—everywhere is energy.
Nikola Tesla, May 1891
The great day came.
Wearing shoes with thick cork soles, his six-foot-six frame looked eerily elongated onstage. The auditorium was enlivened by the faces of young and old electrical engineers. Both friends and enemies were there.
“Of all the forms of natural, omnipresent, and measureless energy, which constantly changes, moves, and brings the universe to life like a soul,” Tesla lectured, fingers dancing, “perhaps the most fascinating are magnetism and electricity.”
At that point, he raised his voice: “The explanation of these fascinating dual phenomena lies in the infinitesimal world, in its molecules and atoms which spin in their orbits, much like celestial bodies.”
The listeners imagined minuscule galaxies revolving in their thighs, eyes, hearts.
“There’s no doubt that we can directly make use of this energy and, from limitless resources, create light, which”—he paused as his gaze moved from one face to another—“can be transmitted wirelessly.”
The great scientific presentation was intended to counter Edison’s circus shows. With a wave of his hand, Tesla signaled his assistant, Gano Dunn.
There was a click, just like the one heard in the execution chamber.
The auditorium darkened.
The scientist Tesla vanished.
A lonely actor appeared within a shaft of white.
In the sharp light, his white tuxedo looked starched. The actor seemed sad and lonely. Every wrinkle on his face was visible.
On the desk in front of the actor there were several apparatuses, which, for the majority of the spectators, were mere “somethings” because they did not know their purpose. Next to the polyphase induction motor was a vertical wheel, a silver ball, and a few other more or less scary-looking devices.
The blue darkness began to hum. Two arcs of light leapt and crackled above the engine. The coil discharged a web of brilliant threads. The gorgon’s hair became entangled around the ball. Electricity buzzed and popped. Behind Tesla, a Faraday cage swallowed the flying sparks.
The audience watched with a mixture of religious humility and circus-like amazement.
Gano Dunn was as grave as a matador. At Tesla’s signal, he raised the frequency. The bright whip cracked between God’s finger and Adam’s. The lightning bolts grew longer. With his small mustache and his appallingly slick hair, Tesla straightened his back like a bullfighter before the kill. Without warning, he stretched his hand toward the machine. At that moment, the electrical cyclone puffed up his body. The lightbulb he held blinked three times and lit. Cries came from the audience:
“Look, Amelia! He’s on fire!”
“Electricity is running through his body.”
With his hair standing on end, the actor walked among the audience for fifteen minutes and turned lightbulbs and vacuum tubes on with a touch. He demonstrated that any lamp within the electrical field in the auditorium would work without being plugged in.
Then he returned to the stage.
The man with horns of blue light spoke from the podium like a singer hitting a high note.
“Even though a single electrical shock can be fatal, it is a paradox that the exposure to amplified voltage can be perfectly safe.” He had allowed a much stronger voltage to run through his body than the one that killed Kemmler.
The applause boomed like thunder. In the loud clapping, he hovered above the stage again. When he alighted, the world was changed.
After the performance, gasping reporters wanted to know how much voltage his body endured.
“You really weren’t in any danger?”
“When was it that you first dared to touch an exposed wire?”
“Were you that sure about your calculations? Did you try it out on an animal?”
“Only on myself,” responded Tesla. “I tried it only on myself.”
CHAPTER 52
The London Miracle
A Letter to Mojo Medić
Paris [smudge—smudge] 1892
My dear King of the Waltz,
I apologize for not responding sooner. So many things have happened. Fame hit me in the face like heat from a smelter. After the success I had with my New York lecture, I received invitations to speak in London and Paris. And so:
I am on my way, my fairy,
May God be with me tomorrow,
My weeping, tears, and my sorrow,
If you only knew, my fairy,
I am on my way…
I packed quickly. Hiergesell, my glass blower, made various types of tubes for me.
The best part of any journey is its end.
London was so gray that everything looked as if it were cut from the same cloth. The magic fog was suffocating precious lights. Even the fabric of people’s clothing looked like solid fog. Golden floods swallowed the Parliament building in Turner’s paintings. I spent a lot of time staring at William Morris’s wallpaper and eating underdone mutton.
My friend Westinghouse warned me that the English were full of blind prejudices, which their sense of humor softened on the outside and hardened on the inside. (The way he warned me brought anxiety to the traveler’s heart. He used words such as coldness, unbearable conceit, and even abhorring arrogance.) My experiences have been different. Entirely different. In February, I delivered a lecture to the London Royal Society. You know that a thousand volts are fatal. At the Royal Society, I allowed two hundred thousand volts to pass through my body and didn’t even feel a thing. A spark stung me only at the very beginning, and even that can be avoided. Such current doesn’t kill. Such current, my dear Mojo, oscillates a few million times per second. Our human nerves aren’t sensitive enough to feel it…
On the stage, I lit lamps with a touch and extinguished them with a wave. In my lecture, I expressed a conviction that—just like the lamps—mot
ors can be operated from long distances, with no direct connection to an energy source.
My dear Mojo, I tried not to bother you with my complaints when I used to sleep in homeless shelters where the poor shred pillowcases to pieces with their sharp stubble. Now I’m trying to spare you from my bragging. However, this is such a success.
A great success.
A world success.
High society attended my London lecture—Sir William Crookes, Lord Kelvin, Sir Oliver Lodge, Sir William Preece. According to the press, I kept them enchanted for two full hours.
I’m a supporter of the honorable tradition of English eccentricity. I have never felt so much among my own ilk as in London. Major newspapers and especially illustrated journals published pictures from my lecture. They usually show me amid a maelstrom of electrical sparks. One caption reads: “Mr. Tesla is playing with lightning and thunderbolts.”
Lord Rayleigh impressed me with his sideburns. He told me that I have a special gift for invention, and that I should focus on one great thing. Sir William Preece looked strange to me. He reminded me of Murko the tailor from Graz. Namely, I wasn’t sure whether a fly had flown up his nose, or whether he was trying to smile charmingly. After we talked, I started to think about transferring voices and images wirelessly. That’s telepathy, Mojo—with a little mechanical help.
William Crookes wanted to use electricity to eliminate the nagging drizzle that harasses the island.
I also spent some time with Lord Kelvin, the sage with a high brow and drooping eyelids, who believes that the phenomena pertaining to electricity and life are identical.
Eventually, Professor Dewar sat me down in Faraday’s personal armchair, poured me some whiskey from Faraday’s personal bottle, and asked me to give one more lecture. I agreed, sensing the friendliness of the old armchair. The culmination of my visit to England was my acceptance into the London Academy of Sciences.
After many exciting adventures on the island, I crossed the windy channel. For a few weeks now, I’ve been resting at the Hotel de la Paix in Paris. I’ve met Prince Albert of Belgium and sold the rights to my patents to the Germans. So many things are going on that my pen is too slow to catch up with them. My intention is to go to Lika after Paris. Consider this letter an introduction to a lengthy conversation.
Cordially yours
(no signature)
P.S.—My colleague d’Arsonval is taking me around Paris and is trying to corrupt me.
CHAPTER 53
Paris
“I won’t!”
“You will!” d’Arsonval said.
The two scientists were standing in front of one of Lautrec’s posters, which was washed out from the rain. The profile of a skinny man in a top hat stood out in the foreground. In a circle of male and female silhouettes behind him, a blond stuck her leg out from the rose of her skirts.
“You will!” d’Arsonval insisted and dragged Tesla into the Moulin Rouge.
The host nodded to the waiter, and a table with a flower and a bottle of wine in a silver cylinder materialized in front of them.
“Oho-ho…,” the host sighed.
The orchestra played at a frantic pace. Glasses tinkled. Tesla concluded that this was a place in which provincial bankers mingled with metropolitan actresses among throngs of witty young men.
Prince Albert of Belgium was late. His table also materialized next to the stage. The prince waved his hand to d’Arsonval and the famous Tesla, inviting them to join tables. Tesla had already given too many interviews. So many that…
“I’ve read… We’ll talk…” The prince shouted over the music.
“God is the only one left for you to meet here,” d’Arsonval whispered hoarsely.
The beauty of a few of the women was almost impossible to bear. And yet, at the sight of their jewelry, Tesla felt as if he tasted blood in his mouth. Blushing faces bloomed on well-dressed bodies. People tapped the table surfaces with their opera glasses and fingers. Some crazy guests embarked on a competition of who could shout and scream the loudest.
“Encore!”
“This is the music of paroxysm,” Tesla concluded rationally.
What, in the middle of the wildest merriment, happened to the soul? What happened to the soul, which swims through the dissolving thickness and darkness beneath consciousness? What happened to the soul that is a deep-sea fish?
He suddenly noticed that he was sweating. Somewhere, something was wrong. Right now…
The speed in which he lived turned his friends into acquaintances, and acquaintances into… ghosts. He wondered if anyone would remain real.
It suddenly crossed his mind: Where’s the biblical hell? Where?
An unnerving apprehension dyed everything green and turned the dancers, who already looked grotesque, into demons.
The musical avalanche was falling on pale Tesla and grinning d’Arsonval. The girls screamed! La Goulue (the “glutton”) danced with her elastic partner. The dancers lifted their legs, kicked them out, and then dropped to the floor in splits.
D’Arsonval was beaming. He raised his handsome head with a cropped mustache and a beard the shape of a swallow’s tail.
Tesla watched the show like a cat given salad to eat.
“This is cacophony.” He frowned. “This has no head or tail to it.”
“Well, what do you have to say?” his colleague asked him after they had left.
“Wonderful,” Tesla noted with a straight face, and, with an apology, asked his new friend to take him to the Hotel de la Paix.
The city lights filtered through his eyelashes. And yet, the cold crawled up his spine and some metallic taste alarmed his palate. He somehow managed to say good-bye to d’Arsonval and stepped under the glass half shell above the hotel entrance.
“Monsieur Tesla,” a eunuch’s voice echoed in the lobby.
“Yes?”
A boy as pink as a rabbit’s nose looked at him with his gray eyes and handed him a cable:
Djuka on deathbed. Come immediately.
Uncle Pavle.
CHAPTER 54
The Rush
The race with death began. He discovered that his mind became an insufferable player piano. Like a man plagued by a hangover who feels that the stench of alcohol had saturated his soul, Tesla felt that the rhythm of the cancan permeated his.
The thrumming train echoed that rhythm. His hands shook. His chest was a drum, and his heart pounded in his throat so hard it drowned out the sound of the wheels. The wheels rattled through the smoke. The speed stretched the line of the woods, and the woods merged into one another. Vienna, which he would never get to know, stayed behind the window. In Ljubljana, Nikola’s anxiety turned into pain. The zinc taste in his mouth was even worse than the suffering. It resembled an epileptic fit. Everything had sped up since he had met Westinghouse. His success was like the frost; it came with the deep solitude. Uncle Pajo met him in Zagreb. Pajo Mandić had a habit of yelling “Hey!” at people as if waking them up. Burly, with graying hair, he turned his sheep-like eyes to Nikola.
“Hey, what’s wrong with you?” he asked.
“I feel like someone’s squeezing my stomach with pliers,” Nikola moaned.
With the infernal cancan still ringing in his head, he transferred from train to coach. His apprehension grew. She could not die if he got there. He would grab her arms and drag her back to his side, across the edge of death.
“How’s Mother?” he asked his uncle.
“The way she has to be.”
Gospić was a city but smelled like a village. An old man was lighting the lamps along Tesla’s street.
A storm was brewing, and everything turned green. Curtains of rain fell and white shards crackled on the pavement. The wet horses pulled up in front of his house. The old house looked shrunken, but it still radiated light.
“Maternal light,” Nikola murmured. “Mother’s light.”
From rooms lit by electricity, he came back to oil lamps.
“
Home is your home, and the moon is your neighbor.”
He had not changed. He simply did not know how to return.
Theirs was a city house, but—probably due to the handwoven rugs—it still had the faint smell of sheep. For ten years, that world had not existed for him. He felt everything to be unreal, but, at the same time, only this was real. His long-gone world returned. Everything became magical and profound. It hurt frightfully. Then the noose of reality expanded. Things became ordinary again because that was how they had to be.
It seemed to him that the power of vision was more intense at the top of the world, but the experience of life was deeper at the bottom. No, this was not Lord Kelvin’s, Prince Albert’s, or his colleague d’Arsonval’s world. The view from here was sharper and more painful. This was the old world of comb-and-grass-blade music, turquoise lakes, round loaves of bread, stubborn winds, and Lika hats looking like poppies in the fields.
The rooms, the smells—everything struck him to the quick. On Father’s icon, Saint George was still indifferently killing the dragon, whose red head was like a roasted lamb’s. The fool and the younger brother returned home a famous man. His relatives blinked their brown eyes. They herded together. There was much love and kindness here. It also appeared that they felt ashamed of each other.
The whole house carefully listened to Djuka’s breathing as she lay in the bedroom. Tesla was more at ease talking with his brothers-in-law than with his sisters, who wiped their eyes hunched over in the hallway. Marica approached him, looking at him with the eyes of a wary dog. He noticed that she had aged considerably.
Tesla Page 17