Those were not Eumenides.
No!
The Furies breathed down humanity’s neck.
In the meantime, a sharp whistle echoed in the park behind the library every night and woke the pigeons up. When Tesla opened his vampire-like coat wide, the wings rustled melodiously. Cooing spilled along the park’s paths. He poured seeds on the brim of his bowler hat. A couple of birds alighted on it. With the fluttering wings above his temples, the old man looked like a black Mercury.
So the Poles sent cavalry against tanks…
Since the taxi broke his body, the world had been fractured into details.
He did not know when that had begun. Everything was familiar to him. Every moment in time reflected his life.
In Budapest, he put rubber pads under his bed to avoid vibrations. He was a symbolist and a decadent long before Des Esseintes and Baron de Montesquieu. During the feverish two-day-long insomnia in his laboratory, lit with lightning, he was a futurist before Marinetti. The subway beneath the city and the neon signs on the roofs were his work. Orson Welles frightened people with his death ray.
France and England declared war on Germany.
The aged god of thunder promised that his defensive shield between nations—the invisible Maginot Line—would render wars obsolete because no country could be attacked successfully.
Hitler circumvented the Maginot Line and crushed France.
The Stukas howled. The fiery reflections swallowed the Thames and Parliament.
Our hero kept saying that, working in two secret and perhaps imaginary laboratories, he developed the death ray.
“We’ll send destructive energy in a ray as thin as a thread, which can penetrate the thickest armor. We’ll wipe out an army two hundred miles away.”
Thus spoke the fragile old man, light as dandelion fluff, whom a careless passerby could kill with a sneeze.
He communicated with the chiefs of staff of the United States, England, Yugoslavia, and Czechoslovakia. The generals wistfully looked through the window and fidgeted, not knowing whether to take him seriously or not.
Tesla smiled with the thin smile of a mummified cat.
Through the soles of his feet, he felt the purring of the planet, which all creatures imitate.
He felt like a fashion model for the floating world. Chaplin’s tramp Charles resembled him from the time he once dug ditches. Fritz Lang’s Fredersen, the master of Metropolis, was—he. He was also the mad scientist who used Tesla’s coils in the movie about Frankenstein. The elegance and manners of the impeccably dressed aristocrat with a widow’s peak, played by Bela Lugosi, were his. Had not he, long before Breton, listened to the geomagnetic pulse of the earth? Even Hitler sported his mustache.
Everybody and everything reminded him of himself.
Like lovers, the Furies breathed down humanity’s neck.
Greece and Norway Fall, headlines screamed. Denmark Too. Also Belgium.
“What about Yugoslavia?” they asked him. “What’s the situation there?”
Huge demonstrations overthrew the government in Belgrade, which signed a pact with Germany.
“The Yugoslav people found their soul today,” Churchill said.
“Thanks so much,” Tesla muttered to himself.
German airplanes roared above the burning roofs of Belgrade. Twenty thousand people perished in the flames.
Hitler squashed Yugoslavia.
Blood started flowing.
Each night, Dane came to put his hand on Nikola’s head. At times, Nikola was composed. Other times, not so much.
People did and did not believe in the news concerning Jews.
And the news that came from Lika was…
… Was horrible.
And so, while human hearts were offered as sacrifices to the gods of Progress and Quetzalcoatl, while the divine scribe Thoth weighed hearts against feathers on the scale, while Charon navigated thousands of barges across the dark sky…
A local story he had always known was becoming universal. Up until recently, lofty New York towers competed for the title of the world’s tallest building. In the First Serbian Uprising, the voivod Stevan Sindjelić defiantly fired at the munitions dump. Thus he killed all of his men in addition to many Turks. The future Grand Vizier Hurshid Pasha ordered that the heads of the dead Serbs be flayed and built into a tower full of gaping smiles. The necrophiliac wonder, by the name of Ćele-kula, was erected in the vicinity of the city of Niš in Serbia. In Tesla’s never-ending dream, Jewish, Serbian, Gypsy, Russian, Chinese skull towers rose above one another. Uncountable bottomless smiles kept falling into the boiling sky.
“The Furies,” the first human god of thunder whispered vengefully. “The Furies!”
In the meantime, Patricia Donnelly from Michigan was Miss America. She wore the first nylon stockings. The movie The Wizard of Oz made Baum’s boyish fascination with the Chicago World Expo come to life. The grieving lion from the movie looked like Robert Underwood Johnson. The shimmering TV screen showed Roll-Oh—the housekeeping robot.
Then the American fleet at Pearl Harbor was bombed.
“Good Lord, they’re turning into flame,” Orson Welles could have now reported truthfully.
CHAPTER 124
Continuity
“Uncle Nikola.”
No one had called him that in a long time. The maelstrom of the war brought his nephew Sava Kosanović to New York as a member of the Yugoslav Mission. On the phone, he could barely breathe from excitement.
“Shall we see each other?”
“Of course.”
The nephew showed up, somewhat redheaded, with glasses, a broad smile, and a blotch of spinach between his teeth. Tesla immediately and instinctively licked his soul. It was a silly soul—go this way, go that way, then go back to the beginning. But in its silliness, the soul was somehow content.
The uncle made up his mind: “Embrace and forget.”
They smiled in silence. Tesla looked at him askance. “You look more and more like your late father.”
Parakeets tweeted among the palms in the hotel dining room. In the lobby, ashen old men took out their cellos from the mummy boxes and prepared to play. Nikola raised his long finger to call a waiter.
Kosanović had brought several Belgrade newspapers.
“I don’t know if you’re interested.”
“How has the war affected you?” Tesla asked worriedly as he leafed through the newspaper.
“I believe I’ve gone a little crazy,” Kosanović smiled.
That evening, the uncle and the nephew went out together.
They took a walk the next day as well.
And the months that followed.
“I love noise,” the uncle said. “That’s creation.”
The nephew had been to New York before. And yet, he was still not sure whether people in America were bound by gravitation or freely hovered above the streets like birds.
Blacks lit up the streets with their broad smiles. Bow-legged seamen put coins into bar jukeboxes. Ruth Lowe wept, “I’ll never smile again.” Latinos with dark glasses loitered at the corner barbershops. Music on the radio flowed by itself like falling rain. A blue flag stood in the window if someone from that flat was a soldier. A gold one—if someone had been killed. Wartime chocolate tasted like soap.
Tesla bought a newspaper and saw the sorry state of the one-time proud villas in Newport. Architectural vases fell off the famous Breakers Villa, which he used to visit with Stanford White. The current owner, Baroness László Széchényi, complained about the sad state of affairs. The garden grew wild. In that same newspaper, at the bottom of the page, the king of all Russian, Bulgarian, and Serbian Gypsies, Steve Koslov from the Bowery, stated, “I despise work.”
The city was like Moses’s burning bush. And everything in the world was interconnected the way insane people believe it is. The scream of neon signs sent messages from the advertising oracles. Hypnotized crowds floated in the squares. The walkers were parts of the
larger soul, the pneuma. All individual features were rented like carnival masks. A small distortion transformed faces into masks. Love lent value to the masks. A man told a woman in Robert’s voice, “You look gorgeous when you yawn.”
People vibrated in between the vibrations of the world.
“You’re the devil!” came from the crowd.
Another voice responded quickly as if hitting a tennis ball back: “You’ve listened to gossips.”
Slow and draaa-ged ouuuuu-t, words flowed beneath the sounds of the world.
For the third time in his life, Tesla heard the fragments of the forgotten song from the age of the Great Migration of Peoples. In front of a Puerto Rican fruit and vegetable store, a fat man was finishing the old story about the truth: “So do you know what the old hag of Truth told the young man? When you go back to the people and when they ask about me, tell them that I’m young and beautiful.”
Tesla remembered how Mr. Delmonico once asked him to play a game of billiards.
“I played billiards in Prague to support myself.” He smiled at Kosanović. “Still, I approached the table as if I were seeing it for the first time. I examined the cue as if deliberating whether to smell it or bite it. Then I chalked it and bent over. A whip of hair fell across my eye. As soon as I broke the balls, I knew how to finish the game. Playing flawlessly, I finished it in five minutes without fanfare. Everyone was in awe. Delmonico asked me, How did you do that? I explained to him that mathematical calculations help the scientist solve problems in all life’s situations.”
Tesla laughed soundlessly and then remained motionless, with his mouth open.
The uncle and his nephew walked through nervous horns, terrified sirens, frightened locomotive whistles.
Thousands of lights shine all around, every color imaginable, stars, reflectors, and rays cross each other, the rumble of over-the-ground and under-the-ground streetcars muffles the noise of crowds so vast the eye can’t take them in while I walk beside this great man as if in a dream. I can understand his melancholic, somewhat compassionate smile which hovers around his mouth. I listen to his soft voice. Gentleness and a strange intensity radiate from him.
With gentleness and a strange intensity, Tesla murmured, “I feel continuity.”
What continuity?
Where were the boxers who pummeled each other with their naked fists in fifty rounds? Where was the audience who applauded to gramophones? Where were the forgotten towns with tree-lined streets and a cat in each window? Where was the independent and melancholy Gibson Girl? Where were the two hundred feathers of Chief Standing Bear that trembled on the Ferris Wheel?
Where were the bowler hats filled with hemp fibers? Where were Lizzie the Dove and Tender Maggie? Where were the boulevard epics as dramatic as The Odyssey? Where were upturned bottles reflected in the stormy mirror of Chick Tricker’s Flea Bag and McGurk’s Suicide Hall? Where were the star-eyed Hudson Dusters? Where were the minstrels and the ventriloquists, the female opium smokers, the beeswax figures, the learned phrenologists, automatons, Lady Mephistopheles?
“I feel continuity,” Tesla repeated, gazing with his wounded and mysterious eyes through the millions of visible shapes of the larvae-like world.
Kosanović did not understand what kind of continuity his uncle felt.
“Dear Sir,” Mr. Weilage, the manager of Manhattan Storage, wrote to him. “This is our third warning. If you fail to pay your overdue storage fees, we will put the stored items up for public auction.”
Some ten years before, his correspondence and prototypes left the Pennsylvania Hotel and moved to the Manhattan Storage warehouses. Everything was there. Since Tesla ignored the last warning, Weilage announced the sell-off in a local newspaper.
Under Tesla’s eyelids, some lunar-infernal mists twirled.
His biographer O’Neill saw the ad by chance, and—for less than three hundred dollars—saved Tesla’s entire legacy from perishing.
“Let it go,” Tesla addressed humankind which, like a spectral choir, listened to what he would say in his solitude. “If you don’t care, why should I?”
CHAPTER 125
The Bard
The spark in the soul that has never touched either time or place rejects all created things.
Master Eckhart
Kosanović was somewhat annoyed because Tesla thought he knew better than the doctors.
“Well, it’s all about me,” the uncle explained.
The bewildered nephew wrote his uncle’s political speeches.
They talked “about everything.”
They often went to the movies together.
In the movie The Cat People, the painter Irena Dubrovna obsessively sketched the black panther in the zoo. Fears of the supernatural and the unknown afflicted her. Her fiancé, Oliver, showed some interest in a sculpture of an equestrian piercing a cat which she had in her apartment.
Each time Nikola went to bed at night, Doctor Dane came in and put his hand on his head. “When will you come to me, brother?” he asked with his face beaming. Blindly and lovingly, Tesla whispered back, “I know: you’re a demon.”
At those words, the room turned into an elevator and started to sink.
“That’s King John of Serbia,” Irena explained in the movie. “In the Middle Ages, he used to kill witches who often assumed the shape of a cat. King John was a good king. He drove the Mamluks out of Serbia and liberated his people.”
Light started to rise from Tesla’s toes. It splashed his feet, washed over his knees, but then turned abruptly green, like defective match heads. A flood of inner light reached his thighs. All of a sudden, it smelled like sulfur. The old golden sheen flashed beneath Tesla’s eyelids, transformed into some kind of lunar-infernal mist.
“That’s not a real cat,” Irena continued. “It represents the evil customs my village once practiced. You see, the Mamluks came to Serbia long ago and subjected the population. But, people were good at first and praised God in a truly Christian manner.”
Tesla inquired about his relatives in the old country. He remembered how his father and the Catholic priest Kostrenčić had held hands in front of the Gospić church.
“In Lika, we used to live with Croatian Catholics in complete harmony,” he repeated. “There was no hatred whatsoever until high politics sowed it.”
But, bit by bit—the people became corrupt. When King John drove the Mamluks out and came to our village, he unearthed horrible things. People bowed to Satan and sang a Mass for him. King John cut some of them down, yet others—the craftiest and the most evil ones—escaped into the mountains. Their curse still haunts the village where I was born…
The news that Kosanović brought from “frightful home” was terrifying. “Right now it’s hell over there,” he said.
Hundreds of thousands of Serbs had been killed in Croatia. Many of his relatives, priests, were slaughtered. The Croatian Nazis, the ustaše, burned the house in which he was born.
“That’s not the Croatian people.” Kosanović was holding Tesla’s hand. “Those are the fascists—the traitors.”
“Sure,” Tesla whispered.
“Of course,” Kosanović confirmed in a tense voice.
“Do you know where the biblical hell is located in which the souls of the damned burn eternally?” Tesla asked unexpectedly.
“Where?” Kosanović was surprised.
“On the sun. The distance makes it the source of life.”
In the Bronze Armor
Kosanović wanted to surprise him.
He brought a real Homeric bard to suite 3321 of the New Yorker Hotel. The bard’s face was deeply wrinkled. His eyebrows and Adam’s apple stuck out. He introduced himself: “Petar Perunović. The folk gusle player.”
Nikola explained to him why he lived on the thirteenth floor: “The higher up you live, the fresher and cleaner the air gets, there are no insects, and in the summer it’s not as hot and humid as on the lower floors. The street noise and bustle don’t bother me here.�
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They discussed the war. The folk gusle player said, “In this world, we’re God’s sheep. A ram is a ram. But—only one ram is in charge. He wears the bell.”
The nephew reminded Tesla that Professor Milman Parry proved that the Homeric tradition was still alive in the Balkans and that he had brought “a ton of sound recordings” from Yugoslavia.
“He also interviewed me!” the mustached Perunović beamed.
From the thirteenth floor, the vista opened onto ziggurats, elevated trains, bridges, and the humming multitudes.
“Take a look at that!” Perunović murmured above New York.
The bard smiled. In the midst of the glass and steel of the 1940s, he did not look out of place. Not having a traditional tripod stool to sit on, he sat on Tesla’s sickbed.
“Oooooo,” Perunović drawled out through his nose as he tuned his one-string instrument, which ended with the figure of an eagle carved in wood.
“The gusle isn’t an instrument—it’s an anesthetic,” Kosanović said in a whisper. “It numbs the doubting body and makes the soul fly to the realm of tales.”
“So reality becomes irrelevant?” the aged Don Quixote asked.
“Oooooo,” the bard repeated through his nose and outshouted the hum of New York with his monotonous string and trembling voice:
Almighty God, what a great event,
When Milić the standard bearer got married…
He couldn’t find a girl to match his beauty
A great hero, he found a fault in each of the lasses
And he was about to forsake his marriage…
Nikola smiled with the smile of a sly lord in ancient Greece. He felt the bronze armor constrict him. Even his voice had suddenly turned bronze. While the bard sang, he saw what he had not seen in a very long time: The icicles on the roof of Father’s house looked like a frozen waterfall. The diamond wind blew over sunlit snow. People’s footprints glimmered. The traces of small animals zigzagged. A depression indicated that a field mouse burrowed under the snow, where it was warmer. A deer’s hoof was imprinted onto the whiteness as clearly as a stamp.
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