Tesla

by Vladimir Pistalo

Tesla and the Johnsons watched as their friend Ignacy Paderewski shook his lion’s mane above the torrents of Chopin. They went to the Metropolitan, sometimes in the company of the big-nosed Joseph Jefferson and sometimes with chiseled-faced Marion Crawford, and listened to the tenor and the soprano voices intertwine like flames and dry grass. “When we become one with music we have the profoundest experience of reality,” Schopenhauer whispered in Katharine Johnson’s ear (which could completely fit into Robert’s mouth). In their box, Tesla exchanged whispers with Robert about their translations of Serbian poetry. Behind the scene, the singers hummed, practicing the lines by the wise Venetian Lorenzo da Ponte, which Mozart wrapped in a cloud of enchanting music.

  Katharine stole occasional glances at Tesla. Once a week, she sent invitations to that man with the absentminded smile: “Come meet Baron Kanek… Helen Hunt Jackson and Senator George Hurst. Come meet Ann Morgan… Come!”

  Why could not people live according to their values rather than according to their humiliating and obnoxious needs? Was that fair? Should she be deprived of the most generous aspect of her being? Of her ultimate self? Of sincerity? Of warmth? Why should this thirsty weakness punish her for being herself? Longing ripped her insides apart. She felt like a diver holding her breath and knowing that she would drown if—right now! Right now!—she did not surface. She felt like someone completely naked, freezing in the snow. If she did not find warmth—right now!—her heart would break from the cold. She could not endure it anymore. Treacherous tears, help a weak human being!

  God, why didn’t you make us self-sufficient—we are always hungry and thirsty, men craving women, women craving men!

  The red curtain flew to the left and to the right. The stage swam in light and Ferrando started to sing:

  My Dorabella couldn’t

  Do such a thing.

  The Heavens made her

  As faithful as she is beautiful.

  Guglielmo responded to him:

  My Fiordiligi

  Could not betray me

  As her constancy

  Matches her loveliness.

  CHAPTER 65

  The Ice Palace

  Nikola Tesla’s Letter to Katharine Johnson

  Peter the Great made fun of his unfortunate niece Anna of Kurland on the very day of her wedding. Soon after her wedding, she was left a widow.

  Anna spent her youth far away from the capital, in the rainy Baltics. When that thin-lipped, gray-skinned woman returned to St. Petersburg as the empress, she did little to dispel her reputation as a sadist.

  The expression on Tesla’s face became pained. With quick strokes of his pen, he added:

  Anna ordered her servants to build her a palace of ice.

  I don’t know whether they cut the ice from the Neva or from the Finnish lakes—Nikola Tesla admitted—but I know that it took them weeks to bring the blocks to the building site through the crystal, biting frost. Workers with pickaxes and architects with wigs swarmed around the growing walls of ice. Wind and string instruments celebrated the completion of the palace. Infernal fireworks splashed the windows and turrets in light. The cupolas, the pillars, the balustrades, the staircases, the chandeliers were made of ice. The blind statues were of ice. The rows of shining rooms were made of ice.

  Nikola sighed.

  Anna ordered a servant and a court maid to marry and to spend a night in the icy palace, on a bed of ice.

  The shadow of a smile disappeared from Tesla’s face. His sneering lips froze. His eyebrow trembled. He went on with masochistic cruelty:

  In my dream, those two wore our faces.

  The bed was biting. The bed stuck to our backs.

  With soft clinks, the endless glimmers of the ice palace multiplied.

  We stared into each other’s eyes and shivered.

  Did we shiver from passion? Did Death clutch us with her diamond fingers?

  The palace seduced us with its shimmerings.

  We breathed in unison.

  We exhaled smoke.

  The translucent furniture was made of ice.

  The bed and its canopy were made of ice.

  My splayed arms were blue.

  Your eyes were like silver bugs.

  Your hair was gray with a powder of ice.

  You looked at me with a smile of ghostly joy.

  We could hear the crackling of the wedding fireworks.

  “If I speak human and angelic languages, but have no love…” sopranos sang.

  My hair was full of snowdust.

  Outside, the strings’ sad music was dying.

  I dreamed I was a servant and you a maid and that we were spending a night on a bed of ice.

  CHAPTER 66

  Pulse! Pulse!

  Take my advice,

  and never try to invent anything but—happiness.

  Herman Melville

  “I can’t love any man without feeling sorry for him,” Katharine said.

  Where had Nikola heard those words before?

  “Why?” he asked, trying to remember.

  “Because he’s a human being. Because he will die. Because he doesn’t know what life is, just like I don’t.”

  It was an afternoon in October when they met at the Century office. Robert was in a meeting with Custer’s widow; he planned to publish a book about her husband. So Nikola walked Katharine to Central Park.

  “What a wonderful day,” she told him. “The sky is so blue that I feel completely blue inside.”

  They strolled through the yellow and auburn of the Indian summer. They could not help feeling the sweetness of the air and the joy of taking it in. Self-important velocipedists rode through the park. Gravel murmured and acorns crunched under their tires. Squirrels chased each other under the trees and across the merry lawns. A gust of wind splashed the path with yellow and red leaves.

  “That sunlit bench is waiting for us,” Katharine pointed.

  Tesla addressed her with a feminine tenderness. He raised his finger. “Look at the squirrels,” he said.

  A squirrel made three wavy hops and then froze in front of the bench. The next moment, its tail was where its head used to be. Following at the heels of another squirrel, it shot up the tree trunk. Then they chased each other over and across thin branches, flicking their tails.

  “The rhythms, the rhythms,” Katharine murmured.

  The whole world was threaded with sunshine. The sun was in the corner of her mouth and her eyes.

  Black and blue smudges alternated on the surface of the lake. Some ducks ate with their shimmering bills by the shore. Other floated asleep.

  Heraclitus’s invisible flame enveloped the world. Was not Moses’s burning bush just the most notable symbol of that world?

  Pulse, pulse—the reflection of the sun from the lake repeated, intertwined with their eyelashes.

  Bees sang to the glory of the creator of buzzing.

  Bees are great buzzers.

  Our mystic-scientist merged with the hypnotic repetitiveness of the sunny day.

  Pulse! Pulse!

  Tesla felt the whole world oscillating around him. He watched the undulations of the lake and the trees; he watched the pulsating smile on her face.

  “All things, from the sun to the human heart, are but oscillations at a certain frequency,” he mused on his favorite subject.

  And peace? Peace was the equilibrium of different tremblings.

  He knew it. She felt it too.

  Katharine sat with her mouth pursed and her nose narrowed. She was focused. Her knuckles whitened on her clenched fists.

  “Is there anything more beautiful than the bottomless whirlpool of these treetops in the wind?” she asked, excited.

  They looked each other straight in the eye and then past each other. Finally, they fell silent. They did not know how long they were quiet. She came back first.

  “Are we still in the same spot?” she asked as she brushed a nonexistent speck off of her shoulder.

  “We flow, we flow like w
ater,” said he.

  “We flow, we flow like clouds,” she responded.

  The next day, he could not turn down an invitation to dinner. The children took another ride in his carriage. Little Owen stuck his tongue out at the passersby and his sister rebuked him. Tesla had not stopped in at Lexington Avenue for a long time, so their late-evening encounter turned out to be quite pleasant. Robert laughed more than Katharine. His laughter slowly became tipsy. Imagine, little Owen had already started asking logical questions: Do blind people dream in color? How come animals are on islands? After they all laughed, the three of them suddenly fell silent, and each of them gazed at something over their glasses. Then Katharine went to another room, came back, and said, “I’ll read one of Robert’s unpublished poems to you.”

  In her sonorous voice, she read brilliantly, with controlled emotion. The title was “Premonitions.” To Tesla, the glow of the candles on her face was much more interesting than the poem:

  Omens that were once but jest

  Now are messengers of fate;

  And the blessing held the best

  Cometh not or comes too late…

  CHAPTER 67

  A Hole in the Gut

  The destruction of Nikola Tesla’s laboratory

  and all of the amazing objects it housed is much more

  than a single man’s loss. It’s a global disaster.

  New York Sun, March 13, 1895

  “Fire!” someone shouted into his face as soon as he opened the door.

  He threw a tailcoat over his naked body and flagged down a careening cab. Sparks flew under the horse’s hooves. He huddled in the carriage, which had never been washed except by rain—the thing reeked of tobacco. It was even earlier than the hour when he heard about Szigety’s death. Five in the morning! The clatter of the hooves pounded into his brain. As soon as he opened the cab’s door, soot mingled with his hair.

  In front of him, a policeman stood with his legs apart. “Stop!”

  Tesla pushed him aside and rushed up the stairs of the gutted building.

  Oil and black water. Melted machinery.

  He emerged, his lungs irritated.

  He almost passed out.

  A layer of ash and soot coated the surrounding walls.

  “Burned down!” he uttered, his mouth stiff.

  An old woman scratched her face. Someone died in the fire. Two stories collapsed and his machinery crashed from the fourth to the second floor.

  He gaped in disbelief. It felt completely unreal—everything was there.

  His personal museum. Papers and notes. Machines.

  He had once lost his memory. Now he lost the memory embodied in things.

  One of the most interesting spots in the world went up in smoke like a burned offering. This was where his guests used to have drinks floating in the amoeboid blue, waiting for the phantom hands to touch them.

  All the things he worked on in that place!

  Vivekananda once jokingly compared him to the many-armed Shiva.

  With one arm, he worked on what would later be called X-rays. That was gone now! With another arm, he dealt with what would later become robotics. Gone! With a third arm, he endeavored to produce liquid oxygen. Gone as well. He also worked on the steam dynamo that turned steam into electricity and produced an additional therapeutic effect. That too dissolved into thin air. The iridescent lamp in its experimental phase. Destroyed. He and Koloman Czitó had already exchanged wireless messages between the laboratory and the Hotel Gerlach, thirty blocks away. They were just about to send another message from the Gerlach to a steamboat on the Hudson.

  “Was the laboratory insured?” That was the first thing they asked him.

  He looked at Czitó and shook his head no.

  “Why?”

  “Just like life, it had a value, not a price.”

  A rosy smile spread across the eastern sky. As the unstoppable dawn broke through, Tesla’s friends found him. Their eyes were bloodshot from the smoke and lack of sleep.

  Czitó contacted Tesla’s biographer, Martin, who in turn informed the Johnsons.

  “How did it happen?” Martin asked voicelessly.

  How? In New York, tenements burned like matchsticks. People cooked glue and tanned hides in their rooms. Someone could have knocked over a lamp.

  “Is it possible that there was a short circuit in the laboratory?” Martin asked.

  Tesla shrugged his shoulders and said frankly, “Yes.”

  A short circuit was indeed possible. If so, he was indirectly responsible for the death of the family on the third floor.

  Katharine Johnson touched Tesla’s shoulder, at the risk of letting him see her swollen face. “Who did it?” she asked.

  Among the diminishing numbers of the Whyos and the growing numbers of the Hudson Dusters, there were many who would poison horses, gouge eyes, or commit arson.

  Maybe the shadows of the arsonists grew longer as they fled the scene while the rambunctious flames started to rumble and howl?

  Who could have done it?

  He looked at the mute scene. Crestfallen firemen packed up their gear.

  The gutted ruin smoked and reeked of piss.

  The outside cold world and the inside warm world traded places once again. According to a legend, the universe was made from the body parts of a slaughtered monster. Chaos is just under the surface and all things crave promiscuous embrace with each other. The cold replaced the warmth, and the center of the world once more turned into an icy pit.

  Tesla felt like a man who had just gone over Niagara Falls in a barrel.

  The wind sniffed him as if it did not know him.

  How does one act when fate betrays him—one who has been dealt a heavy blow? He does not feel the earth under his feet. He simply puts one foot in front of the other.

  Tesla had to stiffen up in order to hold his body together. If the tension in his muscles relaxed even for a minute, the hole in his gut would expand beyond his body, and he would dissolve into the bluish gray dawn.

  CHAPTER 68

  Even the Soul

  The soul is a drunken monkey stung by a scorpion.

  “I have already written to you a few times, but I haven’t gotten anything back,” his sister Angelina wailed from Petrovo Selo.

  “Petrovo Selo,” Tesla whispered. “Where in the world is that?”

  “I don’t even know how to start because you won’t drop us a single word,” Marica complained from Rijeka.

  Their letters grew yellow in the drawer. The pale man with the thin mustache looked at them. All that animal warmth was so far away.

  “It seems like you’ve vanished into the air,” a worried Katharine Johnson wrote. “How have you been?”

  In his trance of pain, every step took thought: Turn to the left! Now to the right! He could not do anything automatically and felt a desperate need for what did not exist anymore.

  Maybe people set his laboratory on fire.

  He walked through the city as if it was a mirage. He repeated Emerson’s words: society always conspires against the humanity of all of its members.

  “Where are you?” Katharine asked in every letter.

  He crossed the Brooklyn Bridge and stared at the smoking roofs. He went to hear Vivekananda’s lectures on Hinduism, the “mother of all religions,” and on the Buddha’s Four Noble Truths.

  “Yes,” Vivekananda explained in his melodious, melancholic voice. “The Buddha took his leave from his faithful charioteer Chandaka with a parable: Flocks alight on the same branch and then fly off in different directions. Clouds gather in the sky and then part. That’s the destiny of all earthly things.”

  “Emptiness is the essence of all things,” the almond-eyed sage claimed. “Suffering comes from our desire to turn the transient into the permanent. Birds sing: Everything is temporary. Everything is without essence. There’s not a single person or a place we won’t leave behind. Clutching at certainty keeps us in a state of mental slavery.”

>   Tesla listened to him with purple shadows in his eyes. What he heard scared and soothed him at the same time.

  Bushes and coaches shook in the wind that carried papers high above the roofs. Brooklyn banged, growled, and gloated around him. Tesla took a look through the window and was crushed by the merciless poetry of the streets.

  “A person who doesn’t believe in himself is an atheist.” The teacher with a small, shapely nose smiled. “Faith summons our inner divinity. When a man loses faith in himself, he dies.”

  While elevated trains rumbled and shook the building, Vivekananda sighed with confidence. “He is great who turns his back on the world, who rejects all things, who has control over his passions, and who craves peace.”

  Those words were a balm to Tesla, who always had problems with other people’s reality.

  While the whole of New York wondered where Tesla was, he spent time with Vivekananda, which was like spending time with no one.

  During their long, shoreless afternoons in Brooklyn, Tesla and Vivekananda talked in metaphors. Tesla told him things he had never told anyone—how, as he dealt with delirious joy when light flooded his forehead, the world disappeared, and God talked to him in the language of angels—that is, in forms.

  The quixotic scientist and the stocky sage realized how much they had in common. Vivekananda preached a lifelong restraint of any form of sexual energy. His mother had to lock him in whenever beggars passed by their house.

  “Take pity, my children, take pity on the poor, the ignorant, the oppressed…,” the swami told his disciples.

  He could quote page after page from his favorite book, an encyclopedia, and repeat verbatim what he heard just twice.

  Tesla’s memory was equally disconcerting. Even the depths of their eyes were similar.

  They talked within the fluctuating, fluid, inconstant world.

  “There’s not a single person or a place we won’t leave behind,” Vivekananda repeated. “One day, Mr. Tesla, you will even leave yourself behind.”