“I think I am,” Tesla answered softly, straightening his overcoat.
Then he recognized the man who steadied him:
“Giovanni! Out of prison? But of course…”
Twenty-five centuries of melancholy colored Giovanni Romanello’s smile. “I paid my debt a long time ago,” he said.
“I still haven’t paid mine…”
Tesla looked like he was about to sneeze. This man, who used to tell him about Sicilian blood oranges and sweet lemons, did not recognize him! Tesla was not sure if he had heard him at all. Giovanni was preoccupied with something else.
“Excuse my asking, how old are you?” Giovanni asked in a suddenly muffled voice.
“A few short of seventy.”
“Unbelievable,” the visitor from the past whispered. “I’ve seen cats do that but people—never.”
CHAPTER 109
Only Pains Hear, Only Needs See
Upon their return, the Johnsons found it difficult to make the mental somersault that the new times required. Speakeasies had replaced the blind tigers. The world rushed forward with the jerky, accelerated pace of silent movies.
The crowds seemed to whisper, “Our thoughts are blown by the winds! We are hypnotized by advertisements.”
Yet another dog’s life had passed. A puppy named Richard Higginson III now barked inside Johnson’s apartment. The puppy was so little that it rolled to the side as it walked, and they had to pick it up and hold it whenever a larger dog was around.
The whole world became an invitation to a dance that Katharine did not know how to accept.
“I don’t know why I feel so blue,” she wrote. “I feel as if everything in my life has slipped away.”
Once upon a time, enormous hats hovered above Katharine’s aunts. The aunts believed that it was better to be adequate at what you were not interested in, than excellent in what thrills you. To them, everything interesting in life was a personal threat. Logic was a Cinderella in their house of rules learned by rote. Even in her dreams, it was impossible for Katharine to pick up a wrong fork. She lived like Alice in a “how dare you?” version of Wonderland, surrounded by cousins who bore false witness to their own lives. The aunts claimed that discretion was the mother of all virtues. It appeared to her that discretion and thinking did not go hand in hand.
“Discretion?” Katharine mused. “That’s not our natural state. We’ll become discreet when we die.”
So what was the truth? Katharine Johnson, née McMahon, wondered like Pontius Pilate.
Whatever the truth about the prewar life was, it could not be compared with Katharine’s present need for psychological security. She now missed the bygone world that used to be so boring to her. She missed all the irritating lady recitations that she had detested all her life.
It’s unacceptable to criticize the piano no matter how out of tune it is. No one should clown around in the ballroom and dance by himself. Acquaintance made at balls can lead to lifelong misery. You can stifle a sneeze by pressing your upper lip with your finger. In the drafty ballroom, ladies who are too scantily dressed often catch a chill that they never recover from. While an obtrusive guest tells his last story in the doorway, the hostess often catches a cold and dies.
“Mom! Get out of those dark, draped rooms,” her handsome son, Owen, yelled. “Jazz will cure your tuberculosis!”
“Okay,” Katharine agreed, without enthusiasm.
With a bright smile and suffering eyes, Owen dragged his mother and father to a party at East Egg on Long Island.
The Studebaker glided along the dusty tree-lined road.
The golden lions of summer roared during the day and purred at night.
Owen and his parents raced the moon on their way to East Egg.
Yes?
In the garden, men and girls came and went like moths, among the whispering, champagne, and stars.
Yes?
A Rolls-Royce kept bringing in guests until after midnight, when the second dinner was served. Bare calves flashed as ladies stepped out of the car in their sparkling dresses the color of the moon or in their outfits of peacock feathers. Many of the incoming guests did not even know Mr. Gatsby. In Katharine’s time, a young gentleman was allowed to touch a lady’s waist only with a glove or a handkerchief. It was only yesterday that no one could monkey around and dance alone. Now, after the Great War, they danced the shimmy and the Charleston, flailing their legs to the side in the swirling smoke.
Johnson, who looked more and more like a grieving lion, made a reconciliatory remark: “Now it’s their turn to be young.”
The pool’s color was the essence of azure.
Drunken girls tried to walk on the water. They splashed the water with their arms, and people pulled them out sopping wet, amid a lot of squealing. The music was fast and then three times faster. Saxophone players leaned backward like yachtsmen. Our Katharine felt sick among these he-and-she loonies who danced alone.
“We’re too old for all of that,” Robert said when they returned home.
“The world had changed less from Plato to my elementary school days than since my elementary school days till now,” Kate sighed.
The former beauty threw her jacket on the floor and went to her room. Owen’s wife, Jenny, really got on her nerves. She could not stand that urban face and that body exuding erotic laziness. Out of “refinement,” Jenny ate only oysters and fruit. The silly woman could not understand why people thought so hard to come up with something original instead of simply repeating what the rest of the world was saying. Her fancy girlfriends used to be equally devoted to sailing and interior design. Their beloved fashion was a thoughtless force. (As if previous fashions had been thoughtful!) This unimaginative younger generation was the same as the older one—it only snuck up behind Katharine’s back.
Katharine did not understand the limitations of life. The grandmotherly role did not suit her. They say that women—when no one desires them anymore—gladly become grandmothers in order to receive a little tenderness from beings who have no other choice.
Yet she still felt hunger. She still felt shivers. Desire.
Tesla’s cold-fire baths were not available to her. She drank opium tinctures.
And so…
So…
So… charmingly… she smiled at the floor.
“O world!” she murmured. “In you, only obsessions choose. Only weaknesses understand, only pains hear, only needs see.”
O world!
CHAPTER 110
Did We Live the Same Life?
The pains that accompany old age were nothing compared to the pains of the soul. The old woman with wrinkled cheeks, propped up against three pillows, with a heavy heart, she thought about her life and could not remember anything good.
Robert did.
When they were young, Kate protected a perfect spiderweb on which drops of dew looked like jewels. “Don’t brush it away. Look how it gleams in the sun.”
Over and over again, he told the story of how a reporter caught their wedding bouquet.
When they undressed together for the first time, he kissed her left breast. “And now her little sister, so she doesn’t feel neglected.”
“Mmmmmmm,” she murmured.
Like Szigety a long time ago, Robert loved that she walked around the room naked so he could see in her hips the same force that spun stars and planets.
She caressed the tree of life between his legs. Her moans sang in harmony with his in the bed.
With his lips on his wife’s ear, Robert watched the streetlights on Lexington Avenue come on.
When she got pregnant, he kissed her stomach. When Agnes was born, Robert got up at night and tiptoed to the cradle to see if the baby was breathing.
“Do you remember?” he asked her.
She did not remember anything anymore.
Robert compared his memories to hers and spread his arms. “I wonder—did we live the same life?”
CHAPTER 111
I
Didn’t Know How…
“What’s Katharine doing?” Tesla asked.
“Cultivating her moods.” Robert grew darker. “But she’s also ill.”
“What’s wrong with her?”
“Something in her chest.”
After they came back from Rome, there was no more hiding.
Before, the wrinkles gathered around her eyes. But old age truly arrived when her cheeks wrinkled. Her once-clear blue eyes became clouds of milk in tea. Yes, they became cloudy and so did everything else. It was truly painful to look in the mirror. But even the suffering that accompanies old age was nothing compared to…
I dreamed that I was the servant and you the maid and that we spent the night in the ice palace, on a bed of ice.
The residue of one smile tore up her insides. She remembered the October afternoon of more than a quarter century before when squirrels swirled their tails and with ebullient leaps rushed through shimmering nature. She and he strolled through the yellow and auburn of Indian summer. Ducks slept afloat. The sun was in the corners of her lips and eyes. Heraclitus’s invisible flame licked the world.
But the palace was made of ice. The blind statues were made of ice. Their wedding room was also made of ice.
She dreamed about whirlpools and geysers. She dreamed that she stroked unicorns who fed on fruit in Brazil. That she skied down a mountain of diamonds, that she gave water to hummingbirds and dragonflies from a thimble. She dreamed about the other side of the air—uninhabited and uninhabitable. She dreamed that the pianists tickled her.
“I believe that many different lives are owed to each and every person,” Arthur Rimbaud wrote.
But…
The veins stood out on the hands folded in the lap. Katharine was not only reluctant to go out—she refused to come down to the living room for days.
He whose body warmed hers their entire life now got on her nerves. Robert’s eyelids became swollen, and his eyes turned into slits. He chewed not only with his mouth but with every single wrinkle on his face. She always knew what he was going to say before he said it. His resemblance to a grieving lion repulsed her.
“If I brought her gold, she’d say it’s too yellow,” our good Robert complained to his son, Owen.
Katharine’s aches came in duets and then turned into choruses.
“But everyone loves to be forgiven for something,” Robert added.
She became anxious because of the inner horror of things.
The phone rang. She did not get up. She thought: The phone will ring just like this, and I will be no more.
She put off going to bed: will I wake up again?
The balustrades and chandeliers were made of ice.
Is this all? Kate thought.
The little French tables and tricorn armoires were made of ice.
What will I say to Saint Peter? Kate smiled a smile of spectral joy.
Her bed was made of ice. Her hair was full of icy powder.
“Ah,” she finally sighed. “I’ll tell him what everyone else says: I didn’t know how to live any other way.”
CHAPTER 112
Dear Tesla
October 15, 1925
During the last night of her life, Mrs. Johnson asked me to stay in touch with you. That’s not easy, and it won’t be my fault if I fail.
Yours faithfully,
Luka
CHAPTER 113
Whenever…
Whenever a button fell off his coat, whenever a shoelace broke—he remembered her.
CHAPTER 114
A Letter to the Dove
Soft one! Dear one! My own!
O full of light and cooing. O you gracious elusiveness! O whiteness! Cleanliness! Brightness! Spotless, fluffy dream. O you who rinse the world with the beauty of your wings, misty from speed. O mercy with which the blood of all beings throbs. O sorrow, realized through tears from an honest heart and forgiven. O you homeland of my soul.
O my soul.
The gracious weakness that rules over strength!
O you who hovered above the waters before creation! You whom Noah first released from the ark after the flood!
I feed you by feeding myself and the whole world whose essence you are. When your flock, like confetti, grows silvery above the city,
I fly with you. I know you right away by the beauty of your flight. By your whiteness.
Sacred pure soul, stay with me.
Anima! Amen!
As I hold you on my hand, your beak pecks at the corner of my lips. Radiance flows out of your eyes and from the center of the world. Light splashes over my feet and sloshes above my knees. The flood of inner light engulfs my thighs and reaches my hips, my heart, my forehead. My lips touch the rosy beak. Blinded by whiteness, sightless, I can finally utter the last words of Christ according to John:
“It is finished.”
CHAPTER 115
And Then
The roulette of the twenties stopped on Black Tuesday. Brokers at the stock exchange rushed as the second hand of the clock whipped them along. In the drowning voices, the brokers announced that stocks and bonds were sinking. The mobs rattled the doors of closed banks. Above the entrance to Wall Street, they engraved Hobbes’s words: “Man is a wolf to man.”
In the west, farmers burned their crops. In New York, people fainted from hunger.
Impossible!
Women sold “Eden’s apples” to avoid begging. In soup kitchens, they poured soup into the hats of the walking wounded.
Impossible!
For six meals a day, the hungry hallucinated in dancing marathons.
Impossible!
Then the widower Johnson came back from Paris. He sighed and complained, “Wherever I go, there I am.”
He smiled and boasted: “When you travel all the time, you never become parochial.”
“I don’t think so,” Tesla corrected him. “One’s soul is either a provincial town or a metropolis, regardless of the place where one lives.”
As a surprise, Robert brought Tesla a copy of the Serbian surrealist journal L’Impossible.
“Impossible,” Tesla started to laugh. “That’s the refrain of my life. That’s what they have been saying about each and every one of my ideas—from the very beginning.”
“Have you ever seen a miracle?” Johnson inquired.
“Ever? All the time,” Tesla snapped.
During the seventies, in Graz, women wore something that looked like a lacy bib. The passage of time turned that into a miracle.
Johnson told him how André Breton listened to “the Earth’s geomagnetic pulse” and how he loved the impossible.
“Impossible.” Tesla laughed once more. “The refrain of my life! From the very beginning.”
The next day, he was scratching his bowler hat.
“It’s become too expensive,” he said. “It’s become impossible.”
“What?”
“The laboratory.”
Gernsback spread his arms in a gesture that expressed wonder and agreement at the same time. He watched over the move with Tesla.
Twenty trunks with correspondence, theoretical papers, and prototypes sank into the frightening storage room of the Hotel Pennsylvania.
CHAPTER 116
The Honoree
Birthday cards with best wishes from Albert Einstein, Lee de Forest, Jack Hammond, and Robert Millikan alighted in his room like white doves.
“Here’s one, and another, and yet another,” the maid said as she threw the envelopes on the desk.
With his palm, Tesla flattened the white envelopes. As he put them in a box, he felt a bit embarrassed for desiring to get more of what he despised.
With a drowsy, blank gaze—like a figurehead on the prow of a ship—he walked down to the hotel lobby at a quarter till noon. A bevy of reporters rushed in at noon.
The seventy-five-year-old was barely aware of talking to them, and yet, he talked about the day when women would be superior to men, when his awesome turbine would be vastly
improved, and his electrical pump implanted into the human body. Then he elaborated on fasting and hard work.
“What do you mean?” inquired the journalists, resting their notepads on their knees.
The skinny old man raised his index finger.
“People simply shouldn’t eat that much. I stopped eating fish. I switched to a diet of bread, milk, and ‘factor actus’—a mixture of leek bulbs, cabbage and lettuce hearts, white turnips, and cauliflower. This will make me live for a hundred and forty years.”
The skinny old man raised his index finger again and told them about his ancestors who owed their longevity to plum brandy, including the one who lived to see one hundred and twenty years.
“What was his name? Methuselah?”
“No, his name was Djuro.”
The reporters’ smiles stiffened and their chairs squeaked as they wrote in their notebooks.
“Don Quixote has turned into Sancho Panza,” jotted the writers. “He’s mocking his own wisdom.”
“I regret not interviewing him back in the nineties, when he was among the Four Hundred and changed gloves like a magician,” complained Mr. Benda of the New York Sun to the gorgeous Miss Jones. “People went to the Astoria just to catch a glimpse of him.”
With his cigarette holder, Benda underlined the text of a yellowed article from the 1890s on his knee. It read: “The airless glass light bulbs that Mr. Tesla held looked like the bright Sword of Justice in an archangel’s hand.”
In her tweed suit, Miss Jones of the Times tried to imagine the crinolines from that time period. Her button nose was powdered. Her inconsistent smile was like a needle in a compass. She said she also regretted that “I did not meet him back then in Colorado, when he was creating thunderbolts!”
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