He took a sip. Atherton tablelands Bush Gold, mixed with the Bushmill’s 1608. People smiled as they saw his expression change. “My God,” he breathed. “That thing is the apex of technological civilization.”
“That it is,” I agreed. “The whole world will have one—just as soon as they deserve it.”
“You people deserve that? You must be pretty special.”
“Ve certainly like to sink so,” said Ralph von Wau Wau, who had climbed up onto a barstool to order a saucer of scotch. (Actually I don’t have classical barstools—it was more of a real tall armchair.)
I waited to see how Acayib would handle this, his first full step into the Twilight Zone. If you want to learn something about a new acquaintance, introduce him to your friend, the talking dog…
Acayib didn’t hurry. Nor did he glance around to see where the ventriloquist was. He took a good long look at Ralph, and thought about things, and what he finally replied was, “Well, you won’t get an argument out of me, cousin.”
Ralph grinned. (Unlike most of his breed, Ralph can grin without drooling. A side-effect of the surgery that made it possible for him to speak.) “You react wery well to surprisess, friend Acayib.”
“What’s so surprising about a German accent?” Acayib asked. “You’re a German shepherd, aren’t you?” And he took a long sip of God’s Blessing.
Ralph—well, barked with laughter. And so did all within earshot. Acayib tried to keep a straight face…and failed.
“I should have warned you, Acayib,” I said. “Some of my clientele are a little out of the ordinary. As Tom Waits once said of his band, ‘They all come from good families…just over the years, they got some ways about ’em that just ain’t right.’ Take Ernie Shea over there, the fellow who tossed that paper airplane that set you alight when you walked in here…we call him ‘The Lucky Duck,’ or ‘Duck’ for short, because stuff like that only happens to him on days that end in ‘y.’ Ernie’s half Pooka, on his mother’s side: if he tosses a coin it’s liable to land balanced on edge. Or fail to come down. And then there’s Naggeneen the cluricaune—sort of an Irish combination of Bacchus and Pan. Hey, Nagganeen, where are you?” Not a question one often had to ask, cluricaunes having the personality of an exploding cigar. I finally located him, passed out on one of the (new) rafters, and pointed him out to Acayib. “There he is. He doesn’t usually fold this early.”
Acayib frankly gaped, realizing too late that his brave acceptance of a talking dog had been the equivalent of That Fatal Glass of Beer. A talking dog can be rationalized, if you work at it, slowly—but a three-foot man with four feet of white beard, dressed in crimson cap and forktailed coat, smoking a villainous old pipe while sleeping folded up on a rafter, is something else again.
“Naggeneen’s paranormal power is the ability to teleport himself around—and most particularly, to teleport alcohol directly to his stomach. From anywhere in this building. He’s an easy customer to satisfy—and a jolly old soul, when he’s conscious. Have I exceeded your weirdness quotient, yet?”
He took his time answering. “Jake? Uh, not that I mind, but…we’re through the looking glass here, right?”
“Well, not literally,” I said. “The only one of us to do that was a guy named Bob Trebor…and we busted the glass behind him. Long story. But metaphorically speaking, you’re not far wrong. I think we’re aiming for somewhere more like Oz…or maybe Strawberry Fields.”
He took a deep breath, finished his Irish coffee and took another deep breath. “Okay, go ahead. I dare you: tell me something else astonishing about you folks.”
“Well, we’ve been telepathic. Twice, for short periods. It was so good we’ve been trying to find our way back to it ever since. That’s why we’re here, basically.”
“Uh huh. Anything else?”
“Well, I don’t expect it to come up, but all of us here are bulletproof, and immune to blast forces and hard radiation. We were all in a room with an exploding atom bomb once. It blew us a couple miles, but it didn’t hurt us any.”
He didn’t flinch. “Oh. How did you all come to be immune to shock and radiation, just then?”
“Aw, it’s a long story, probably take me three books to tell you all of it, but basically there was this old friend of ours, a seven-foot-tall alien cyborg named Mickey Finn. Finn saved the human race three times that I know of, and he sure saved our butts that night. See, what happened—”
Acayib held up a hand. “Never mind. I probably don’t need to know…and I think you may indeed have just exceeded my weirdness quotient. Or at least maxed it out.”
“Sorry. It’s best to feed it to you in small doses, I guess. We’ve been accumulating a backlog of weird for over twenty years, now.”
“I believe that,” he said solemnly. “Is it safe for me to ask one more thing? Why you were all throwing paper airplanes made out of stage money into the fire when I came in?”
Buck had been doing a little jaw-dropping of his own, ever since Ralph had spoken—but now he snapped out of his trance. “Uh, that was my doing. I just got here a little while before you did. But…well, I’m afraid that wasn’t stage money we were burning.” He opened up the guitar case. “It’s an inheritance. I’m doing my best to lower the money supply.”
Acayib stared. “To fight inflation,” he suggested.
“Right,” Buck said, delighted.
Acayib reached out tentatively, took a bill from the case, and examined it closely. He began to smile.
“Could I—?” he began, and stopped.
“Be my guest,” Buck said. “And if you don’t mind, I’d like to get back to it myself. The rest of these rummies, too, if they’re still willing—there’s a lot of hard work ahead of us.”
A number of voices declared willingness to resume burning cash.
Acayib was smiling broadly now. “By God,” he said happily, “I’ve been waiting all my life for this night.”
“Not to bring you down or anything,” Buck said, “but so has everybody. Everybody, ever. In fact, I’d like to propose a toast.” He left his chair, walked to the chalk line, and finished his beer. “To all the ones who weren’t as lucky,” he said, and flung his empty glass into the hearth.
“To all the ones who weren’t as lucky,” we all chorused, and those of us not holding coffee mugs followed his example.
And then, blind to our doom, we went back to torching hundred dollar bills.
***
But we had made little progress in emptying that guitar case when the dead man walked in.
4
I, MADAM, I MADE RADIO!
SO I DARED! AM I MAD?
AM I?
And not just any dead man…
He was unreasonably tall and thin, with jet black hair brushed straight back, a ferocious but sanitary mustache, and the kind of brows on which pencils could be balanced. He was dressed in the height of fashion for the 1920s, but every item looked new and the overall effect earned the word “impeccable.” He appeared to be in his mid-forties—but to my certain knowledge he was at least twice that old. And dead.
“Nikky!” I called out when I saw him. “Come on in, pal—I didn’t know you were now.”
That’s not a typo. That’s what I meant to say to him: that I hadn’t known, until then, that he was now. By which I meant, then.
You see, Nikky is well into his second lifetime, and completely unstuck from time…
No, there’s just no way to nutshell this one. A major digression is called for. But where to start?
***
I’ll make it as brief as I can. Nikola Tesla was born in 1856 (hang on, now), in a place called Smiljan, in what is now Croatia, and came to America to work for Tom Edison in 1884. Between then and 1943, he basically invented the twentieth century.
No exaggeration. His astonishing 112 patents—on such things as alternating current, the condenser, the transformer, the electric motor, the remote control, five different propulsion systems, radio (Marconi was k
ind of like Amerigo Vespucci: got his name on something he didn’t actually discover), the “and-gate” logic circuit, and all the essential components of a transistor—underlie most of what we now laughingly call civilization…and you’ll no doubt be stunned to hear that he got screwed out of most of the money and a lot of the credit.
He was also notoriously crazy as a fruit bat, the original template for the cliché of the wacky genius. He loved to hold lightning in his hands. He was terrified of spherical objects, always ate alone, had a pathological dread of hair which many (incorrectly) believe caused him to die a virgin. He liked pigeons. One of his sober ambitions—one of his few unachieved ambitions—was to stand on the earth and write legibly on the face of Mars. Another was to create a permanent planetwide aurora borealis, so it’d never get dark again, anywhere. He lived a remarkable and zany and brilliant life for eighty-six years, and then he died, in a New York hotel room spattered with pigeon shit, in 1943. No mistake: Hugo Gernsback commissioned a death-mask, which apparently still exists.
Only Tesla didn’t die. The corpse the FBI robbed so hastily that day was an artifically-aged clone that had never been sentient, left behind to cover his disappearance.
For Nikky had, in the eighth decade of his life, had the great good fortune to make the acquaintance of a woman known as Lady Sally McGee. Their relationship was at first professional, she then being the owner and operator of (and part-time artist in) a legendary brothel in Brooklyn called Lady Sally’s House. She took a personal interest in Nikky, and was apparently able to restore his flagging zest for living, figuratively rejuvenating him. (Don’t ask me how she cured him of his fear of hair. She certainly didn’t shave it when I knew her.)
And then, one night in bed, when she had him feeling, for the first time in weary decades, as though it might not be so bad to be young again, Lady Sally gently offered to literally rejuvenate him.
She was, she told him and proved to him, a time-traveler from a distant future ficton (“ficton” is, as I understand it, time-travelerese for a place-and-time, a given here-and-now), using her fabulous bordello as cover for an urgent ongoing mission. She told him that a…a consensus of minds in the future had decided the human race needed more of Nikola Tesla than a measly eight-six years. He could, if he chose, be made young again—and given freedom to roam all of Time at will, the power to visit the stars, the resources to build and test anything he could dream. In return, he would be required to enjoy himself. The offer was, she said, intended as a sort of apology, on behalf of mankind, for all he had suffered at the hands of backers like Edison and J.P. Morgan, friends like Westinghouse, and assistants like Marconi. Oh, and one more thing: he would be required to pretend to die, on schedule, to avoid temporal paradox.
As far as anyone knows, the mind of Nikola Tesla has never been boggled. Nor had he ever lacked for audacity; he accepted her offer on the spot. (And a very pretty spot it was, too…) And ever since, he has been wandering through space and time, making magic, amusing himself—I can’t imagine it any clearer than that.
How I came to meet Nikky and Lady Sally is a whole other book; I despair of summarizing it. Let’s just say we were all once involved (along with Slippery Joe Maser and both his wives) in a series of events that led to the closing of Lady Sally’s House, and were lucky enough to survive them. I was surprised to see him, now: this is not an era which holds a lot of interest for him. (He won’t tell me much of anything about the future, quite properly—but he did once, in my hearing, refer to this particular era as The Last Bad Times, for whatever that’s worth.) But I wasn’t especially surprised, because you kind of expect Nikky to surprise you.
Nor did he disappoint me. At my greeting he smiled, waved, then reached his right hand into a coat pocket and pulled out a ball of lightning.
***
It shimmered and crackled, a luminous sphere of visible energy about the size of a softball, and it drew general and respectful attention. He passed it to his left hand.
The smell of ozone slowly filled the room.
He produced another fireball from the same pocket, transferred it to the hand that held the first. He went back into the pocket again and came up with one more ball of snarling fire—
—and began to juggle.
I don’t know about you, but I’ll stop burning hundred dollar bills long enough to watch the greatest genius that ever lived juggle lightning. Even Zoey, who had quickly acquired a vast enthusiasm for the project, shut down production at the sight, clapping her hands with delight. Soon Nikky had passed beyond simple juggling: the glowing balls of force left his hands and began to dance with each other in mid-air, moving and changing orbit at his will and gesture. They hissed and spit and came together briefly in a ring of fire; broke apart and chased each other like drunken fighter pilots; bobbed up and down like yo-yos on invisible strings. Shadows danced attendance around the room, visual backup singers; we all watched in awe and wonder—
Nikky waved his hand grandly, like the Sorcerer’s Apprentice, and the three balls came together into one, that writhed, and dropped to the floor, and rolled in a shower of sparks through the sawdust to his feet, and climbed up his leg and into his pocket, from which there emerged one final flatulent little zap sound.
“Ladies and gents,” I said in the ensuing stillness, “meet my friend, Nikola Tesla.”
Thunderous applause. Man knows how to make an entrance. Within minutes what had already been a spirited party had become a full-scale jamboree, and people were fighting to buy Nikky a drink.
***
Busy as I was, I noticed both Buck and Acayib looking a bit shell-shocked, and drifted over their way. “Ready for another, gents?”
“Jake,” Acayib said mildly, “that is Tesla. The Tesla. Father of alternating current. And the induction motor.” It was not quite a question. It was thinking about becoming a question, but hadn’t committed itself yet.
“Do you doubt it?” I asked.
“Alive, and no older than forty-five.”
“It’s kind of a long story—” I began.
He held up his hands. “No, no—I can see you’re busy. I just wanted to make sure I had it straight. Thank you very much. I can hear about it later. Yes, I am absolutely ready for another.”
“Myself also,” Buck said. “I feel strangely lightheaded. And I like it. It was a fair wind blew me in here this night. I think I would like to meet Nikola Tesla.”
I gestured to the knot of smiling people surrounding Nikky. “Get on line,” I suggested. “Or just relax, and it’ll happen in its own time. The night is yet before us. Look, you’ve still got a lot of emolument to immolate there. Just go on back to what you were doing, and maybe it’ll draw his eye.”
“You think so?”
“Even in this place, I would call it a notable eccentricity.”
He shook his head. “All I can say is, I’m humbled. Five minutes ago I wouldn’t have believed anything could upstage me tonight. Now I feel like the warmup act. I mean, any asshole can burn a few million dollars—anybody who’s got ’em, and thousands of assholes do—but that’s Nikola Tesla. No contest.” He looked thoughtfully at that guitar case. “I think maybe I’ll just dump the rest of this stuff into the fire in fistfuls,” he said. “We had a lot of fun; maybe it’s better to quit before it becomes a chore.”
“There’s wisdom in that,” I said. “But as a new friend, I feel required to ask: are you still sure you want to go through with this? You can’t think of any better use for the better part of a megabuck?”
“Like what?”
“I don’t know. Feed hungry people? Endow a hospital? Reprint good novels, in quality editions? Build coffee-houses and hire acoustic musicians to play in them? Subsidize the local library? Find a woman and give it to her? You know: enlightened self-interest kind of stuff. One of the things we do with our own excess money around here is to track down deserving candidates and put them through med school, or law school, or business school, or trade school.
Marty over there handles the paperwork. We look for the kids who just missed winning the big scholarships. They’ll repay us down the line, when they’re established and practicing—and the only interest we charge is lifetime free professional services from them in their field: medical care, legal services, accounting, plumbing repair, whatever. We’re slowly working our way through all the professions we expect to need free help from in the future. It’s a lot of work, which is to say a lot of fun, and keeps us harmlessly occupied.
“With what you’ve got there in that case you could grow yourself a good GP, a specialist or two in whatever you expect to die of, a lawyer, a shrink and a tax man. Of course, it’s legal and tax deductible, and you’d be in grave peril of making a profit. But you could always burn that.”
He blinked. “Yours is an interesting mind, sir,” he said. “What would you do with, say, a hundred thousand dollars?”
I answered without hesitation. “I’d find out who owns the rights and the master tapes for the album running jumping standing still by Spider John Koerner and Willie Murphy, and I’d pay to have it digitally remastered and re-released on compact disc, and I’d buy the entire first pressing myself, and I’d spend the next year giving copies away on streetcorners and in malls and at toll-booths. I believe if more people knew that record, the world would be a better place. I’ve purchased twenty-seven copies, over the last twenty-odd years, and given away twenty-three of them, and played holes through three, and now I’m down to my last one, and I want to own it in CD format so bad I’d pay to get it done, if I could.”
“I don’t know the album,” he said, and Acayib too shook his head and shrugged.
“Boy, are you guys lucky,” I said, “to have that ahead of you.” I have headphone jacks installed about every four feet along the bar; I got a set of headphones apiece for them, the kind that allows in ambient room noise but muffles it. (Real headphones: none of those stupid newfangled stick-it-in-your-ear beads.) As they put the phones on I signaled Fast Eddie to take his break, and bent to switch on the house sound system under the bar. The cassette I wanted was in a position of honor; I popped it in, told the Kenwood deck to rewind to the beginning and put itself into play mode, and stood back to savor the warm pleasure of watching their reactions.
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