British sculptors and German painters ran through the expressionist smoke and the pointillist world of shrapnel. Like Kemmler, soldiers sweated drops of blood. Bergson and Nietzsche shivered, enveloped in chlorine gas and mustard gas. The human form was raped and disassembled in the trenches.
“If people were able to harm the gods, would they do it?” Katharine Johnson asked.
Every day, in New York Nikola Tesla watched flocks of birds in flight spread apart and gather together above the library building. He whistled. Pigeons alighted on his hands and the brim of his hat. While the seeds flew from his hands and fell on the rock, in the thorns, on the fertile soil—as in Christ’s parable—he thought about the dead automatons in Serbia, in Germany, in Belgium, in France.
“Is it possible to feel sorry for evil fools?” he asked himself and responded, “Yes, it is!”
He felt sorry for those dirty scum, for those soulless cheats. He felt sorry for people. He felt very sorry for the elderly. And the little children. Everything that lives.
“Birds should be fed for the souls of the drowned,” his mother Djuka used to say.
“For the souls… birds should be fed,” Tesla repeated. “For the souls…”
In order to wipe guilt away from mankind, our sentimental positivist wrote in his articles that people were machines made of flesh, whirled around by great powers. People did not have souls. They had backs that were unburdened from moral responsibility. Each human automaton was an unconscious cannonball. The planet carried it around the sun with considerable speed—nineteen miles a second. The velocity of each automaton’s body was sixty times greater than the velocity of a projectile fired from the largest German gun ever made. If the planet screeched to a halt, each man would be catapulted into space with enough power to hurl a sixty-ton projectile twenty-eight miles.
We have all been catapulted—but where?
CHAPTER 101
East of the Sun, West of the Moon
He carefully examined the photographs of Roosevelt’s family, and then the photographs of military units of various armies. The New York Times reported on the surrender of the city of Niš in Serbia. The wretches in uniforms marched in the gray afternoon heading…
… somewhere.
A waiter snuck up to him in his ballet shoes. He balanced a tray on the tips of his fingers.
“Put it there!”
A school of goldfish shimmered through his consciousness.
The appreciation in the waiter’s eyes reached the level of insanity. A wave of sudden adoration poured over the scientist.
Once again, Tesla was in fashion.
People said that he was a collector of what Emerson called internal light. Tesla’s internal light glared in shop windows and in the trains that fired out into the void of night from the Chicago railway hub—clackity-clack! Thanks to him, subway cars strobed through brightly lit stops in:
Boston
New York
Paris.
What would have happened if someone deprived people of the light that, like a golden visor, fell over the eyes of young Tesla?
Night would have swallowed up golden windows. America’s shiny industrial carnival would have turned into a scene from an Edgar Allan Poe story.
The Knight of the Sad Countenance leafed backward through a war newspaper. As he moved toward the front page, the headings became sadder. He finally came upon the one that said, “Edison and Tesla Will Be Awarded Nobel Prize.”
Did he really want to get a Nobel Prize after Marconi?
The golden school of fish shimmered through one more time.
And with Edison?
Manfred read his own statement:
He said that he still hasn’t been officially notified. He believes that he won the award for his discovery of the wireless transfer of electricity. Mr. Edison is worthy of a dozen Nobel prizes. No, he has nothing to say about the discovery that made the Swedish officials select Mr. Edison to receive this great honor.
Praises showered on him.
The school of fish shimmered.
Tesla coughed maliciously, swirled his pen above a sheet of paper, and wrote back to Robert:
Dear Luka,
Thank you for your congratulations. In a thousand years there will be many thousand recipients of the Nobel Prize.
But I have no less than four dozen of my creations identified with my name in technical literature. These are honors real and permanent which are bestowed not by a few who are apt to err, but by the whole world which seldom makes a mistake, and for any of these I would give all the Nobel prizes that will be distributed during the next thousand years.
Yours truly
Motherofgod! Even if he had sent a much more politely worded wire in which he lectured the esteemed members of the Nobel Committee—the individuals who were apt to err—on the difference between a real inventor like himself and the various “makers of better mouse traps”…
That year, the Nobel Prize for Physics was not awarded.
“Lusitania!” the streets thundered.
For a full two years, Tesla lived in tense luxury, on the tide of Nobel glory. The flashes of inner light returned, but they were tepid, not golden like before. More platinum-like, resembling a silvery film. In these flashes, the inventor saw the dance of his new turbine.
In the course of those two years, American military officers danced the same waltzes that Mojo Medić once tried to master. They spun like high school teacher Martin Sekulić’s silver ball. Within those incomprehensible dancing circles, animus and anima were joined together.
Our hero left the ceremony at which he was awarded the Edison Medal and wandered off to a nearby park. He threw hemp seeds to white and gray pigeons. They landed, making music with their wings and orchestrating their presence with cooing.
The organizers tactfully brought him back to the ceremony.
Tesla thanked them quietly. “I am deeply religious at heart, and give myself to the constant enjoyment in believing that the greatest mysteries of our being are still to be fathomed. In this way I manage to maintain an undisturbed piece of mind, to make myself proof against adversity, and to achieve contentment and happiness to a point of extracting some satisfaction even from the darker side of life.”
Then the paperboys’ palates—like triumphant gongs—announced that German submarines had started to attack American ships yet again.
Then enthusiastic columns of people wearing straw hats started to march along Broadway carrying flags. Preachers thundered about bleeding suns and heroism. People were made to believe that any personal experience was inferior to the great transformative idea that would lead them out of all experience.
“War! War!” the arrogant revelers chanted.
The laws are becoming more just…
In the middle of the Great Repulsive War, our hero initiated a legal suit against Marconi. And in the war—what an irony!—he had Telefunken on his side against Marconi’s British connections.
Music is becoming sweeter…
In that other war, as we will see, it was not clear who would join what side.
Rulers more humane…
The Serbian oath breaker with three noses and two eyes—Professor Pupin—was pitted against Tesla. Pupin claimed it was he who invented wireless transmission, but that Marconi’s genius had made it available to the world.
And the individual heart…
In America, the court ruling on the invention of the radio was halted by President Wilson’s act suspending all suits concerning patents for the rest of the war.
At once more just and more gentle…
Tesla asked himself: who is the neighbor that I shalt love?
Newspapers railed against Germans. Cartoonists represented the “Huns” as gorillas. In America too, everyone started to hate “with healthy futuristic hatred.”
The fatal verses fell into their place:
We want to exalt strong, healthy Injustice that will shine radiantly from young men’s ey
es.
Americans now imagined German submarines in Maine. Edison’s cameras buzzed while merry children threw German books into bonfires.
“Come closer!” Newspapermen raised a shameless din in front of the circus tent of the world.
It was written everywhere that this was “a war between the West and the East.”
“Between what?” Tesla asked and wrinkled his nose.
The alphabet, temples, sculpture, theater, and mathematics came to the Greeks from the East. Judaism and Christianity came from the East. Romans were proud of their Trojan origin. Medieval jousting horses and Arabic numbers came from India, the Gothic arc from Armenia, medical books from Egypt and Morocco, gunpowder from China, humanists from Constantinople.
The ditty about the clash between the Great Spirit of the East and the Evil Witch of the West, composed in the name of reason, did not speak to Tesla’s ears. Nikola Tesla did not believe in the magical geography and did not know what war correspondents wrote about. The Balkans, where he was born, was the seam. It was an antenna. It was a cat’s whisker. To be born in a bad place was to be born in a good place. A man from the border was familiar with the “prenatal darkness” of Serbian churches. He was familiar with Islamic adoration of light and water and with the Latin obsession with clocks and bells. No one had to explain Turkish and Russian cultures to him.
What West? What East?
CHAPTER 102
On the Too-Merry Carousel of the Merciless Sunset
“Curse God and die!” Job’s wife said.
An old man had for months treaded through the Waldorf Astoria’s plush carpets as if trying to stay invisible. The elevators in cages of iron, the marble, the orchids frightened him. The absurd Ming vases in hallways made him sad.
Do you worry about him, reader?
Our hero had completely forgotten that he owed nineteen thousand dollars to Mr. Bolt, the owner of the Astoria.
So what? Did not the world owe him something?
Is it true that he signed the Wardenclyffe Tower over to Bolt as collateral?
Tesla’s tower was abandoned for years. Rust covered its shiny steel.
We have already pointed out that—in the years before the war—our dear disoriented hero had still sometimes boarded
The Night Train to Wardenclyffe
In the company of Edgar Allan Poe’s shadow, Tesla headed for the slumbering colossal hall of Grand Central Station. At that late hour, the red hats of the porters were nowhere to be seen. He followed the echo of his steps and thoughts. He climbed up the marble stairs and stood over the deserted passenger arena. The four clocks on the orb in the middle pointed to midnight. Midnight. Midnight. Midnight. Midnight. Illuminated eggs hung suspended on bronze chains. Enormous windows were partitioned with supple wrought iron bars. Golden constellations of stars covered the cupola. The solitary man’s footsteps resounded in the empty hall beneath the fate written in the stars.
He caught the night train to Wardenclyffe.
Like a moth, he peeped into other people’s windows.
He lost himself in the New York Sun and traveled with Little Nemo.
Drawn away. Drawn away.
He arrived at Wardenclyffe. The disinfecting hurricane of enormous voltage went through his still-childish heart. The heart that, ten years later, same as before, believed that priceless towers could not be torn down, regardless of what any legal contract might say.
They were drawn away, drawn away.
By the war. By time.
He was shocked that Bolt did not protect Wardenclyffe.
His neighbors from the surrounding farms—Mr. George Hageman, Mr. De Witt Bailey, and the nearsighted widow Jemima Randal—gathered to see the miracle of all miracles. Many a time, the light from this mystical place used to wake them up.
Smiley Steel Company was getting ready to pick the tower apart for less than a tenth of its value.
The storm was coming again. The clouds to the west became metallic. Desperate sunlight fell on Wardenclyffe. The tower was like a green fly. It took a ride on the too-merry carousel of the unforgiving sunset. Each steel girder of the one-hundred-and-eighty-foot erection glowed.
It thundered.
The spectators shook from the fall.
The landscape turned gray as if dusted with plaster dust.
The great razed eye of Wanderclyffe rolled in the saffron dust.
“This is the end of a dream,” De Witt Bailey said in the ensuing silence.
CHAPTER 103
Millions of Screaming Windows
Tesla was in Chicago when they wired him.
The news made his tongue, in his dry mouth, drop like a whetstone into sand. Perhaps a wise man is really no better than a fool, he thought. And a human is no better than an animal. The tower stood, derelict, in the midst of the surrounding potato fields. Tesla’s inner world did not look any different.
Wardenclyffe was his world’s stage, his place of transformation, his sublime love, his cosmic crutch, a home he had never had.
Houdini could escape any trap. Tesla could not.
His laboratory had already burned down once. That was when he went deaf from horror. Soot snowed on his hair.
He turned down the suggestion of the cobbled street—to bow his head, kneel down, embrace it, and die. Until dawn, he aimlessly wandered through the city with millions of screaming lamps and a hanged man in every room.
“Curse God and die!” Job’s wife whispered.
CHAPTER 104
Um-Pa-um-Pa!
When the news came, he was in the barber’s chair. He threw away the newspaper. A wedge of golden light crossed the street. He crossed it too and felt the sun on his back. That was when he realized that he left the shop with shaving cream on his face.
“The war is over!” ruddy faces yelled.
Happiness and pleasant smiles splashed over him.
Tesla turned around to see mankind wholeheartedly dancing to the music of the universe. On the New York avenues, seductive machines smiled—full of heroic beer—charismatic machines delivered speeches, machines out of joint kissed each other and tap danced.
Everyone looked for someone to hug.
“It’s over!” the revelers shouted.
Like petals of spring blossom, confetti showered on Fifth Avenue.
Um-Pa-um-Pa!
From his fiery throat, Caruso sang a song of victory.
In the midst of the commotion, Tesla miraculously came across Johnson and the Spanish-American War hero Richmond Hobson. He wiped the lather off his face and threw away the bib. Then they embraced each other. Their eyes grew teary and sobs stole up on them from nowhere.
Infected with brotherhood, Tesla choked and celebrated with the smiling city.
In the lying world of newspapers, the sons of light defeated the sons of darkness.
“Ah,” Tesla sighed. “It’s time to put things back in their place.”
But the gilded frame was broken, and nothing belonged to its place anymore.
As Tesla headed toward his hotel, two blocks away from Central Park, the jubilant crowd thinned. His face darkened. Once again, he became aware of the magnitude of the disaster. His sensitive eyebrow grew taut.
“In Paris, the victors will soon march through the Arc de Triomphe,” the outstanding mathematician told Johnson.
“Do you know for how long? For two hours. Do you know how much time it would take only for the French dead to march through? Twenty-three hours!”
Flags streamed in the wind.
Holy rags streamed in the wind.
Brass bands passed each other at street intersections. Trucks carried bouquets of waving hands. Feet moved faster on their own. People kissed strangers, laughed through tears, tossed each other in the air, danced in the streets. They themselves could sense the rhythm of ebb and flow that pulsed within them. Everyone had rushed to war as if to a wedding. Now New York frantically celebrated the marriage to peace. There was no more artillery or blindness or food tha
t reeked of corpses. Men with vacant eyes who lived through the abyss would come home. And Daddy would come home. Dear God, let him—if he could only come home. And the world would be free. And the world would be new.
Purple, red, and blue stars unlocked the heavens. The drummers advertised and advertised and advertised—the tragic miracle of life.
With teary eyes, through confetti, through silver sparks, people looked at each other—transfigured—all brothers and sisters. Ah, human yearning is the eternal sheep for shearing! They were deeply moved and their faces glowed. Emotional eyes radiated promises that no peace would ever fulfill.
CHAPTER 105
Lipstick
The only emperor is the emperor of ice-cream.
Wallace Stevens
The youth of Europe were dead.
“That’s boring!”
“Let’s dance!”
Hair and skirts became two feet shorter. The music of jangled pianos and pouty clarinets rang out. Young people leaped and threw their legs sideways. Beads bounced over women’s breasts. Men cranked their gramophones and their cars. Everyone went crazy over airplanes. On the silver screen, people split their pants and threw pies at each other in jerky movements. Even the squirrels in Central Park moved in the strobe-like fashion of silent films.
This is how the poets sang:
BRrrR!
Dududum!
dyNamo
Dyn
amO
That was how the poets sang.
Dadaism was the new realism.
Millions rushed home after work and turned the knob of the green prophetic eye. Voices boomed, overly tense in the magic of the radio plays.
The jellyfish lamps with hanging beads.
Gals with heart-shaped lips.
Lacquered art deco screens.
Faces verging on enigma, framed by hats.
Shimmering dresses.
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