Tesla

by Vladimir Pistalo

  Chromed grills with bug-eyed headlights and rounded fenders.

  Figurines on the hoods of limousines gazing into the future.

  “Burning kisses, hot lips,” lounge singers repeated like sleepwalkers, with magnolia flowers behind their ears.

  Liberated trumpets, previously muffled with hats, suddenly reached the clouds. Trumpeters blew, leaning back like yachtsmen as their golden pipes tore the sky apart and brought rain.

  Distorted cities glided across the mirroring limousines.

  People made bathtub gin.

  Manic ads repeated: “There are three things people want—Lower prices! Lower prices! Lower prices!”

  “Ha ha!”

  “Ha ha ha!”

  “Haha Haha!”

  The world laughed.

  The music was ragtime, except it was not. Girls’ faces looked like people Tesla knew, except their laughter was like shrapnel. With its neon signs and the radio, the world resembled the Metropolis he and White had planned to build.

  It was exactly like Tesla envisioned it.

  Except it was unrecognizable.

  There was a puff of cold breeze and all things declared:

  Now we are alien.

  When did it start?

  Perhaps a year before the Great War started, about the time John Jacob Astor IV perished in icy waves, together with the inlaid interior of the Titanic. That same year, Tesla attended J. P. Morgan’s funeral.

  The world was not the same without that colossal adversary. How was it to continue to spin without those tiny malicious eyes and that grotesque nose?

  The following year, Westinghouse, the relentless fighter, passed away. The friend of nature, fragile and noble John Muir, went after him.

  It is quite possible that those people did not seem real to Tesla even before they died.

  Before the war, he himself was a strange but real person.

  During the war, the government suspended the court’s ruling concerning who was the inventor of the radio.

  A lonely pianist played in the enormous lobby. Followed by the Buddhist smile of the headwaiter, Tesla quietly left the hotel in which he had spent twenty years. Each new phase of his life was a new expulsion from the Garden of Eden. A clear stream gurgled across the keyboard while he pushed the Astoria’s revolving doors, for the last time, after two decades. He murmured, “We’re life’s apprentices forever!”

  He looked at objects as if he could not remember what they were. He blankly gazed into other people’s windows and other people’s lives with an innocent smile, which approaching old age, made him look suspicious. Like a moth, he fed on light. The whole world appeared like a lit-up shop window, which our frozen loner now observed from the outside. The weirdest thing was that he was the one who lit up that window.

  “Ha ha!”

  “Ha ha ha!”

  “Haha Haha!!”

  The world laughed.

  CHAPTER 106

  The Nose and the Parted Hair

  I keep attacking the malice of time,

  which gnaws and devours everything.

  Don Quixote

  The nose and the parted hair, Tesla thought when he first saw him.

  Hugo Gernsback sported polka-dot bow ties. He took Tesla to his electronics shop, under the tracks of the elevated train on Fulton Street.

  “I’m lucky not to have a glass store,” he shouted over the noise of the express train to Brooklyn. Gernsback’s place was cramped. There was barely enough space for the six flies under the ceiling to perform their many-angled dance. Several cabinets were crammed in the small room. When observed more closely, they became radios. The radios crackled, tuned to various stations.

  “Good Lord, what a mess!” the visitor exclaimed.

  “Ideas are messy. The lack thereof is tidy,” the nonchalant Gernsback responded.

  “God, my dear God…” Tesla kept whispering.

  The only object that brought peace in the chaotic environment was a lamp with a green shade.

  Gernsback nudged his nearsighted assistant: “Introduce yourself.”

  “Anthony, sir!” the assistant said.

  Next to his temple, a paper clip held his glasses together. Anthony did everything—he sold electrical equipment, received contributions for Gernsback’s journal the Electrical Experimenter, quarreled with printers. He was prone to sudden outbursts.

  “Who do you think I am?” He would yell at his boss, blowing up for no reason.

  “You’re an unusual character,” Gernsback would say to calm him.

  As we have already explained, the noble hero of this true story, Nikola Tesla, crossed over into another dimension after the war. With one foot, he descended into legend, with another one—into oblivion. He had once laid claims to superhuman status with shy modesty. Now, his bragging became more obvious.

  “Would you be so kind as to explain to me why my ideas regarding the transfer of energy through the planet wouldn’t be ranked on a par with the inventions of Archimedes and Copernicus?” he asked politely.

  When the monumental Wardenclyffe project collapsed, he made Wagnerian noise in the newspapers to compensate for his lack of practical success. He guessed at what kind of life existed on Mars. Heroes and demigods were exiled from the earth into the intergalactic void.

  Yes, Hector was there.

  So was Achilles.

  His old circle of friends was reduced to mostly widows and widowers, whose voices echoed through senile autobiographies.

  At midnight, Hugo Gernsback and Tesla walked around the acoustic hall of Grand Central Station. Gernsback’s oiled hair shone under the light of the brass chandeliers.

  “Write!” Hugo Gernsback kept saying. “Write like the rest of them!”

  “You know what I will call my autobiography?” Tesla asked.

  “What?” Gernsback laughed out loud. “Christ, Buddha, and I—The Hidden Differences?”

  “I’ll call it My Lives,” Tesla retorted.

  O you forest nymphs, you dryads who dwell in mountain springs, you reveling selens help me to see once again the world of my childhood, which is twenty thousand dawns away from me.

  The world of his childhood was like a temple from antiquity—overgrown with weeds, left to lizards and satyrs.

  At first, his childhood memories were like deep-sea fish that explode due to inner pressure when fishermen bring them to the surface. Gradually, Tesla got used to seeing them.

  “I remember everything as if it’s there right before me: I can see the house, the church, the field, the stream by the church, and the woods above the church—right before my eyes. I could paint it if I were a painter.”

  The scent of the soil and the cow’s udder returned him to ancient Lika. His world was inhabited once more by frogs with golden coins on their tongues and dogs with burning candles within their mouths. Steep-horned goats rushed uphill. Shepherds created music with tree leaves. Humans, gods, and animals lived together. Bogeymen and water sprites quarreled in the watermill. People spat; they were all under the spell.

  Mother’s eyes were at the center of his memories. Mother stirred something in a pot, and the world around her started to spin. Different lights flew within the whirlpool. One by one, the lights opened up for him and turned into images.

  Mane threw quick glances with his chameleon eyes. With one hand, fearless Djuka tied a knot on her eyelash. Within a circle of pure light, the tomcat shook his paws. Father quarreled with himself behind the closed door and prayed in many voices.

  “Jesus, my Savior, save me. Bright Jesus, with wounds of light, transform my unclean and dark life.”

  Father’s friends looked huge and glorious like Menelaus and Agamemnon.

  On the icon with his patron saint upon it, Saint George—oblivious to what he was doing—was killing the dragon.

  Just like Cervantes, our hero started to write not with his “gray hairs, but with his heart that grew tender with years.”

  Once upon a time, in a far off
country…

  While he was putting together his own hagiography, he often came to the workshop on Fulton Street. Scientists might have stopped listening to him, but Hugo Gernsback—the father of the newly born science fiction—pricked up his ears. His friends did the same. They came to Fulton Street so that they could see “the greatest inventor of all time, greater than Archimedes, Faraday, Edison—the man whose mind was one of the seven wonders of the intellectual world.”

  In that store under the elevated train—the “El”—madmen and liars gathered. People with vertical laughs congregated there, men with frightening spectacles, enthusiasts who needed radio lamps, Gernsback’s writers with pimpled faces and inflamed eyes.

  “Don’t you know that the Pre-Raphaelite Holman Hunt claimed he was able to see the rings of Saturn with his naked eyes?” one of them said.

  “The wind on Saturn carries rocks like feathers,” the other responded.

  “The human body has the electrical potential of two billion volts,” Tesla pontificated.

  And was like an etiquette manual for shamans.

  Above their strange words, a steam engine cooed like a diabolical dove.

  In that store, which shook frequently, people believed that Tesla—rather than Edison or Steinmetz—deserved to be called the Creator of the Modern Age.

  Odd characters flocked around the source of odd miracles.

  Young writers and inventors listened to Tesla, amazed by the size of his ears.

  He came from the stars. He was a star. He was Mephistopheles.

  He did not exist. He was us.

  Kindness and unnatural cunning fought within Tesla’s eyes.

  “Man is a puppet that stars move with invisible strings,” he preached. “We all absorb thoughts from one source. In the future, we’ll travel on the blue ray of energy. We’ll force atoms to combine in accordance with previously determined designs—I will lift the ocean from its bed, move it through the air, and create blue lakes and noisy rivers as I please.”

  Gernsback, who had slicked-back hair, introduced a charmer with dancing eyebrows to Tesla: “This is my chief illustrator, Paul Bruno!”

  Faced with a problem, Bruno would look through the person with whom he talked. Then his left eyebrow tried to escape from his forehead. Everything he heard, he immediately translated into the language he thought in—the language of images. The pictograms of Tesla’s life streamed on a long strip before his eyes.

  The echoes and shadows of the destroyed Wardenclyffe itched, ached, and awoke in Tesla’s soul. The tower was like a green fly. Every single beam of the high edifice glowed again.

  Bruno rebuilt the razed tower in his drawings.

  In Tesla’s stead, he finally completed the sensational project.

  He filled the covers of the Electrical Experimenter with giant insects, flying saucers that circled around planets, laser guns that attacked wingless planes from a mushroom-like cupola, people who wore helmets that read thoughts.

  “Do you know what’s happened?” Hugo Gernsback asked Tesla one morning. Gernsback rubbed his frozen hands, while the steam engine puffed above their thoughts and shook the room.

  “What?”

  “Your Inventions has hit the one-hundred-thousand reader mark.”

  Tesla beamed and said:

  “Excellent.”

  “Good,” Gernsback concluded.

  CHAPTER 107

  Choose the Best Possible Life

  President Wilson sent Robert Underwood Johnson as an ambassador to Rome. Our good Robert lived the way he had always wanted now that he existed at the uppermost level of official representation, with poets and aristocrats. His wife, with her thick silver-white hair, drew attention in spite of her age. As always around Katharine, people talked about things unknown to their hearts. Did not Edith Wharton say that diplomacy and journalism were two brotherly capitulations of personality?

  Once again, Robert threatened to publish his guide to Tuscany restaurants. With Gabriel d’Annunzio, he quarreled about what food they served in Heaven. They talked about dancers who had live snakes in their hair, and about ancient tombs and theaters.

  “Choose the best possible life, and habit will make it pleasant,” D’Annunzio lectured.

  Before, Katharine’s laughter rang out like a dropped silver tray. Now she sat, bathed in light, under a glass jar. A paper bird swam in a cup of tea that grew cold. She learned how to do origami.

  Her universe had become shrunk by conventions, like the bound feet of a Chinese woman. She let them purge everything that was interesting from the world. And whenever mystery is gone—life goes with it.

  Katharine read a lot. She insisted that Proust was a good psychologist but a poor poet. She read Chekov and believed that his characters made a huge mistake by not living in America. After the war, just like Viereck and Freud, she came to a realization: rationality is a sham. Man exercises control only over those things for which he does not care.

  In her childhood, she arranged funerals for dead squirrels. She loved to walk barefooted. She loved to get wet in the rain. As a maiden, they insisted that she wear a corset and advised her: be pretty if you can, be witty if you must, but be proper even if it kills you. However, she believed in the outbursts of emotions like in cloudbursts. The staple characters of Commedia dell’arte are lovers, old men, and clowns. Kate unified all three in herself.

  “I don’t understand how you can be indifferent toward so much devotion,” she wrote to a familiar address, to the tenant of the Hotel Gerlach.

  She quarreled with Tesla from afar.

  “The truth without love!” she laughed as if she heard the funniest thing. “The truth without love! My dear, you comprehend through your spirit and believe that the heart is for animals. You will become a story that dragons in China will retell: come and listen to the legend of the man who wanted to exile love from his life! But you can understand only what you feel.” She laughed a terrible laugh. “And you can’t comprehend anything at all without the help of Amor, the awakener of slumbering minds.”

  When they traveled to Yugoslavia, Katharine described to Tesla the view from Kalemegdan of the confluence of the Sava and the Danube.

  “I was sitting on the hill this afternoon and watched the blue waters and the sun behind them,” she wrote. “And I wished I could lend you my eyes so you could have my vision and drink the beauty of the day with it. Your ears must have burned a lot because we talked about you, then about Rome, then about you, then about America, then about you.”

  CHAPTER 108

  But People Never

  The world is full of ghosts. They drove me away

  from hearth and home, from my child and my wife.

  The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari

  In Chicago’s barbershops, people raved about Jack Dempsey’s style. In Boston’s North End, crowds whispered about Sacco and Vanzetti. The busy Philadelphia streets were appalled by the schemes of the Great Ponzi.

  “Where’re you calling from?” Hugo Gernsback asked.

  “From Worcester, Massachusetts.” Tesla’s voice was distorted by distance. “We’re installing some machinery.”

  “He travels a lot,” Hugo Gernsback explained to the enthusiasts at Fulton Street.

  “Where’re you calling from?” he asked on another occasion.

  “From Buffalo. I’m testing a plane that lifts off vertically.”

  In the apartments of George Sylvester Viereck, Hugo Gernsback, or Kenneth Swezey, the phone sometimes rang after midnight.

  Tesla laughed. He quoted Napoléon: “The rarest form of courage is three o’clock in the morning courage.”

  Tesla talked two hundred miles an hour. Tesla reached a conclusion. Tesla hung up.

  “That’s very interesting,” Gernsback whispered into the dead receiver.

  During the stock market rage, everyone grew rich except Tesla. Once in a blue moon, Boston Waltham Watch required his speedometer patent, or Wisconsin Electric bought his film projector.
<
br />   There was no reason for him to go back to New York, the site of his bankruptcy.

  Yet he returned regularly.

  With the agility of a young man, he leapt and dashed in between the onrushing cars. He claimed that he could still wrestle a twenty-five-year-old, that his hand was steadier than ever, that everyone grew older except him, and that he would not know how old he was unless he had a mirror.

  He frequented movie theaters.

  The lights went off, and a child’s voice rang out in awe: “It’s starting!”

  In that mysterious twilight, madness was contagious. A sentimental piano envoked the passage of time. A young man and an old man opened their eyes widely while sitting on a bench.

  Dr. Caligari, with his tortoiseshell eyeglasses, resembled an evil bug. He rang his bell in front of a circus tent: “Come! Cesare, who has been sleeping for twenty-five years, is about to wake up!” The black dot swallowed up the screen, coalescing over the images of the characters. The county-fair Mephistopheles and the head of the asylum were the same person. A madwoman played a nonexistent piano. The staircases and towers on the screen were askew, not because of the artistic stylization, but because of the recent war. A somnambulist walked through the distorted city, holding a sleeping girl in his arms.

  While Tesla was inside the movie theater, an icy rain fell on top of the snow.

  The streets became glassy.

  Skewed buildings were falling over icy Broadway.

  The city became secretive.

  Many, many years before, Tesla had slipped on the glittering streets of Karlovac.

  “One should walk next to the buildings,” he reminded himself. “One should walk on one’s toes.”

  At that moment, his heels flew up toward the stars.

  “Cesare, who has been sleeping for twenty-five years, is about to wake up!” flashed through his mind.

  The branching tree of his nerves fired, and Tesla surprised himself by sharply jerking his body, somersaulting, and then landing on his feet. He felt someone’s fingers clutch his shoulder. A stranger’s honest eyes examined him from up close. A frightened smile pulsed in the corner of the Good Samaritan’s mouth. “Are you okay?”