Tesla

by Vladimir Pistalo

  As soon as Marconi overtook Tesla, an orgy of derision ensued. Entire opera houses mocked Tesla in singsongy fashion—the Berlin Opera, the Opéra de Paris, and La Scala in Milan.

  Pygmalion neglected Stevan Prostran, so the boy put Plato’s Symposium aside and started to read newspapers again:

  Society against Animal Cruelty Protests Greased Pig Contest. Child Dies from Rabies. British Bankers Hopeful. Man Delivers Toast, Drops Dead. Deceased Exhumed for Photo.

  CHAPTER 86

  Behemoth

  As a child, he was always afraid when Father went through a transformation.

  It had never occurred to him that one day he would build a tower that would be his place of transformation. The tower was his personal theatrical stage on which faceless powers played assumed personalities. Under the high-voltage shower, Tesla himself turned into a faceless power. He changed into a bright whirlpool. He became a parliament of the world on the site at which various voices intermingled. He prepared to send them out into the ether.

  By the end of the following year, the tower grew to two hundred feet.

  At that point, the money really ran out.

  Don Quixote sold the surrounding property for the round sum of thirty-five thousand dollars.

  Not even that was enough.

  It was when George Scherff put his heavy fists down on Tesla’s desk and sighed. “Now we have to manufacture oscillators and develop fluorescent lamps,” he said.

  “But—”

  “We have to!”

  A few months later, Tesla tapped Scherff on the shoulder and declared in an embarrassed voice, “We’ve saved enough to hire workers and complete the construction of the cupola.”

  The shouts of laborers, deaf from riveting, yet again awoke the inhabitants of provincial Port Jefferson.

  “Hold this!”

  “Look out, Jack, or you’ll cut my finger off!”

  With pride, Tesla surveyed the completion of his “steel crown,” which weighed fifty tons. The purpose of the mushroom-like cupola was to store electricity and transmit it through the air—or to the depths of the earth.

  To the depths of the earth?

  Yes, because the construction reached ten stories below the surface. There was a whole system of catacombs under the tower.

  The humming of the hellish energies electrified the tower’s roots and summoned the pale dead. On top of the vertiginous underground stairs, Dante and Virgil waited for Tesla impatiently.

  At the top was the All-Seeing Eye designed by Odilon Redon.

  The wind played around Wardenclyffe like a mad flutist. Nikola ascended the mosque-like stairways. The wind hissed through the steel rafters. The depths called to the depths. Looking at his legs, Tesla climbed up to the cupola. The white-blue ocean, white whales, and electrical clouds came into view. Tesla’s thoughts changed floors, and the air played a fugue like an organ. The purpose of this endless steel hallucination was to help him discover new continents. From up here, he stole a glance at his thoughts in the afterlife.

  At night, he looked across the sea toward New Haven and the constellations above it. With a unbidden shiver, the lonely man despaired because the stars and the dynamo were still not connected.

  The devil elevated him to this high promontory, showed him all the nations of the world, and said, This all could be yours. Just serve me.

  And he responded, “No!”

  To escape the temptation, at Wardenclyffe he disinfected himself with high-voltage current, and the bright whirlpool lifted him. The light started to rise from his toes upward. It splashed over his feet and reached above his knees. The flood of inner light engulfed his thighs and rose to his hips. After such an experience, Nikola slept under the All-Seeing Eye of his cupola with sad abandonment. He dreamed he was Saint Sebastian. Instead of the wounds, eyes opened all over his body. The mystic scientist turned into an eye within the great eye of Wardenclyffe.

  “Are you going to bring the golem to life in here?” White asked him in a whisper once they descended the spiral staircase.

  Prince Henry of Prussia, the emperor’s brother, followed them through the chromed corridors. The prince looked somewhat like his cousin, the Russian tsar. Wardenclyffe was made of iron, but it was woven out of Tesla’s dreams. All around there were numerous coils, something that looked like metal mummy sarcophagi, fragile and shimmering lightbulbs… The rooms and control panels were warped by the dream. They climbed to the cupola with the view of the ocean. Then they went down to the ground floor, nibbled on Oscar of the Waldorf’s hors d’oeuvres, and talked in the echoing space.

  Then the prince left.

  The waiter left.

  White left.

  In the silence that replaced the lively conversation, a realization struck Tesla: There was no more land to sell!

  That night, he wandered around the ghostly tower, suffering from a headache and insomnia, like Milutin Tesla a long time before. In the dark, he ran into Stevan Prostran, who was watching over the building. The boy quickly put out a cigarette and asked him, “Why don’t you sleep?”

  “I never sleep.”

  When he finally fell asleep, Tesla did not dream of Dane; instead, he sank into some cosmic nightmares. First, there was nothing but Chaos floating in Chaos and One Thing breathing by its own power. The Lord paid attention and saw that it was not Chaos at all—it was the World.

  After that dream, the sense of being powerless left him.

  He still had his tower.

  The tower was his cosmic crutch. With its help, our shaman hovered in the blue of the sky or dove into the fires of the underworld. He called out, pulling the chrome levers. Something rumbled, responded to his calls. Something alive reached out to him from the other side, calling, “Brrr-r-roummmmm!”

  There was no more money.

  “It’s hopeless. All of this has been stillborn,” Tesla murmured.

  The forces of the earth and sky brought his monster to life. Explosions disturbed the tar-pitch night. The building quivered and quivered.

  And the darkness merged with the quivering. The creator of the stillborn tower sensed enormous danger. He slept with a lion. He ate with a wolf. From her box, Pandora released all the evils—as well as hope. Tesla wrote desperate letters to Morgan. He tortured himself like people in love do: Just one more… one more letter explaining, and he will understand.

  But power is not obliged to understand. Misunderstanding is one of the ways in which it manifests itself.

  I’m sorry, I’m not ready to invest at this time, Morgan wrote back. I’ve never let any human being disappoint me as long as you have.

  Lucretius believed that the sun had to be ignited daily. Upon receiving Morgan’s letter, Nikola Tesla learned how difficult it was to reignite the sun. The city fell silent to hear the weeping of the man who wanted to give advice to Yahweh. The man who wanted to turn the gorgeous sun into his obedient slave was sitting on the toilet at three o’clock in the morning, leaning against his sharp knees, his nose buried into a wet towel.

  O World—in you, only weaknesses understand, only pains hear, only needs see.

  Our shivering, skinny Cosmos realized that he was much smaller than the world. For the first time, he was convinced that life was disgusting, coated in slime, and that people were trash.

  Brilliant furrows once again creased the sky above Tesla’s tower. Master Eckhart once complained that he had never heard God speak—he had only heard him clearing his throat. No real thunder was heard around Wardenclyffe—the thunder just cleared its throat. The heavens were ruled by Ishtar-Inanna, the goddess of passionate feeling in nature and strife. The world was marbled with lightning and filled with images.

  Would Tesla’s missile-like tower launch and shoot off into the lighted firmament?

  “Brrr-r-roummmmm! I’m coming!”

  If this dream was to be ruined, he would be left without dreams.

  Stevan covered the mirrors to prevent the thunder from killing him. Yes,
the world fell silent to hear the weeping of the man who had this itch to give God a piece of advice. Stevan’s desperate adopted father roared like a waterfall and banged on the control panel with his fist.

  He had no one to borrow from. This was the end.

  On the third night, the sky above Wardenclyffe spat out one branch, then another, and yet another. In the newly created light, everything became delightfully clear. The world appeared starched and silvery. Instead of ivy, Wardenclyffe was overgrown with lightning. As in the Psalms of David, the foundation of the world was laid bare, hit with the breath from God’s nostrils. Finally, multiple reverberations sounded, and the silver rain started to dance across the ledges.

  The impoverished inventor pulled one lever and turned into the first human god of thunder.

  He pulled another one and turned into a giver of rain.

  The creditors—woken by the explosions of the maddened electric snakes—came the next day.

  CHAPTER 87

  The Crash

  A pair of lips approached Morgan’s ear—they belonged to the stock market wizard Bernard Baruch. The lips smacked and whispered, “That man is crazy. He wants to give free electricity to everyone. We can’t put a meter on it.”

  “Is that so?” Morgan grunted.

  Baruch sent his secretary to the library to read through Tesla’s interviews. There the secretary flashed his glasses, wiped them occasionally, and coughed. He discovered that even ten years back—Baruch underlined the paragraph with his fingernail for Morgan to see—Tesla stated in the Sunday World, “With the transmission of electricity through the ground, all monopolies that depend on power lines will end.”

  In the afternoon, Morgan had a meeting with a bishop of the Episcopal Church. Then a group of engineers came to review the estimates for the building of the New York subway system.

  He dined at the apartment of an up-and-coming ballerina, Miss Evelyn Penny.

  He just dined and went home.

  “See how quickly a day goes by,” Morgan whispered, and his voice peeled off a corner of the lily-patterned wallpaper.

  The whole day was spent.

  The only thing that remained to be done was the last unavoidable pleasure.

  Each night after midnight the grouch played a game of solitaire.

  The jack of hearts suddenly opened the second row on the left.

  “Aha!” Morgan exclaimed, causing a large ficus leaf to fall off the plant.

  The jack of hearts sealed Tesla’s fate.

  Tesla was hiding behind dark drapes holding his stomach, where the fragments of his life gathered. He remembered the story from the Gospel according to Luke about a man who was building a tower without counting the cost, so people ridiculed him. The last day of May was a Saturday. The creditors appeared at Wardenclyffe and dragged out heavy machinery. All the workers were let go except Scherff, Prostran, and a guard.

  No, there was no more money.

  He negotiated with the well-groomed, cold-eyed Frick, the fighting dog of Carnegie Steel. A spark of interest was quickly snuffed out from Frick’s eyes. Then Tesla met with Harriman, who looked like a leopard, with the mummified Rockefeller, and with the diamond collector Thomas Fortune Ryan.

  “It was just different versions of the same story,” Tesla complained to the Johnsons. “It always started well. One after another, the financiers came to, like sleepwalkers. First their smiles disappeared, and then they followed.”

  “There’s only one explanation,” Katharine Johnson said when the gloomy Tesla took them out for dinner at Delmonico’s.

  “What is it?”

  “That Morgan is obstructing you personally.”

  Morgan could block any deal by simply pausing while he spoke or lifting those black eyebrows of his. Any deal Morgan walked away from no one else would touch.

  Tesla fell silent. “If that’s true, do you know what it means?”

  Katharine paused and her nose narrowed.

  Tesla sighed:

  “The crash.”

  CHAPTER 88

  Sorrowfully Yours

  January 14, 1904

  Dear Mr. Morgan:

  You wish me success. It is in your hands, how can you wish it?

  I could not report on yacht races or signal to incoming ships. I could not build up my business gradually like a greengrocer.

  We start on a proposition, everything duly calculated; it is financially frail. You engage impossible operations, you make me pay double, yes, make me wait ten months for machinery. On top of that you produce a panic. When, after putting in all I could scrape together, I came to show you that I have done the best that could be done, you fire me out like an office boy and roar so that you are heard six blocks away. Not a cent; it is spread all over town. I am discredited, the laughingstock of my enemies.

  January 22, 1904

  Are you going to leave me in a hole?

  April 2, 1904

  Mr. Morgan, for a year now there has not been a single night that my pillow has stayed dry from tears.

  Have you ever read the Book of Job?

  If you replace Job’s body with my mind, you will have all my sufferings accurately described.

  October 17, 1904

  You’re not a Christian at all, you’re a fanatic…

  February 17, 1905

  Let me tell you once more. I have perfected the greatest invention of all time. This is the long-sought stone of the philosophers. I need but to complete the plant I have constructed and in one bound, humanity will advance centuries.

  There is more power in the wings of a butterfly than in the teeth of a tiger. I am the only man on this earth today who has a peculiar knowledge and ability to achieve this wonder and another one may not come in a hundred years!

  Mr. Morgan, maybe you simply do not care. People are like insects to you.

  Sorrowfully yours,

  N. Tesla

  CHAPTER 89

  The Sinking Ships

  Stanford White promised that he would arrange for Stevan Prostran’s education “through some religious old lady.”

  Tesla was shocked. “He knows a religious old lady?”

  “So long, Father!” he heard as they parted.

  “Good-bye, Stevan.”

  The boy left, smoking and humming off-key to himself:

  “I’m building a tower, and I have no stone, oh, my tower is built of my tears…”

  Tesla looked at the back of the boy’s head. When he returned to the Waldorf Astoria, he waited for Eliphaz the Temanite, Bildad the Shuhite, and Zophar the Naamathite to come and visit him.

  The friends of Job.

  Instead, the sorrowful Stanford White paid him a visit. The burning bush smoldered on his head. Acting tranquil, White tried to keep his body from shaking.

  “How’s life?” Tesla asked him.

  “I drink from the cup of life.” White was inconsolable. “And I pluck the bloom of pleasure.”

  His common sense made him eat; the lack thereof made him drink. The need for the first drink arrived earlier and earlier.

  “Aaaaaai,” Stanford White howled inside.

  His face was calm, but his stupid soul… The annoying soul. The weak soul. The soul wailed the same tune:

  “If I had sold that, my debt would’ve been cut in half.”

  “Only two weeks before the auction.” New York gossips jauntily interrupted one another.

  “The fire in Stanford White’s warehouse.”

  “Tapestries, sculptures, and paintings burned up.”

  “Uninsured treasures worth three hundred thousand dollars went up in smoke.”

  “If I had sold that, my debt would’ve been… would’ve been cut in half,” Stanford White sputtered.

  Tesla remembered well the time his laboratory burned down. He was not able to sleep for a few nights. (Mornings were the worst.) He tried to console the architect, but without noticing, he returned to the painful subject of Wardenclyffe.

  The grand project, w
oven from blood, heart, and dreams, was dying before his eyes.

  New York had already started to reach for the sky. New Yorkers were turning into the surveyors above the clouds, similar to birds and angels. People discussed the poetry of skyscrapers.

  Our two friends were like babies who cried because one was hungry and the other was cold.

  With the patience of a saint, the sorrow-stricken White listened to Tesla’s laments, which were supposed to be condolences. He sat stiffly. His face was red as if sunburnt. His blue eyes bulged out. The expression he had on his face could not hide how annoying it was to be right after the fact.

  “We all told you,” he uttered, “to accept Edward Dean Adams’s offer. If you’d taken it, you’d now have all the money you need to complete Wardenclyffe.”

  A deep crease was cut between Tesla’s eyebrows.

  “I’ll shut up!” the red devil White promised gloomily and emptied his drink with his eyes closed. “Nothing happens the way I want it to,” he concluded as he put the glass back on the table.

  Even after the fire in his warehouse, Stanford White continued to live in his little pleasure hell. Once so luxurious and comfortable, his personal hell continued to shrink. His lover, young Evelyn Nesbit, married the Pittsburgh millionaire Harry Thaw.

  During the time of their happiness, he used to tell her, “Let’s make love in such a way that, when someone stumbles upon this spot a hundred years from now, they can feel the vibrations and shiver.”

  Thus he used to speak to her. Now his cravings for her were ripping his guts apart. The cheated cheater was shocked by his sweetheart’s behavior.

  “Evelyn,” he wondered. “You’ve always had so much style, Evelyn. And now, at the end—all of a sudden—you’ve lost it!?”

  “It doesn’t matter,” she responded with her heart-shaped mouth. “It’s over.”

  He replied, “You’re wrong. It matters the most now.”

  Tesla listened to him out of a sense of duty. In truth, romantic problems—caused by a lack of self-restraint—were nonsense to him.