Metamorphosis

by Sesh Heri

  In my simple mind I could not understand that Mr. Ade was only baiting me to do his bidding; I could only see that my reputation was being impugned. So I put on my hat and coat and said to Mr. Ade and Miss West something like, “I’ll show you how to go through a door, you wisenheimers!”

  Well, getting into that warehouse was not a simple matter. I had to go through a window in a ceiling some seventy feet high, and I almost fell and killed myself trying to do it. But I finally got Mr. Ade and Miss West through the door of that warehouse and in to where Mr. Tesla’s airship was berthed, but what happened afterward never made it into any newspaper. Before Miss West could even take a picture of the airship, we heard the footsteps of someone coming down the hallway. I pushed Mr. Ade and Miss West up the steps of the airship and inside of it, and there we hid, thinking we’d wait it out until the guard went away.

  This never happened. Instead, I heard Mr. Tesla and Mr. Samuel Clemens suddenly burst inside the airship, and the next thing I knew the compartment where I was hiding lit up with electric lights and a big coil of wire began making an odd humming sound. I didn’t understand that I was standing inside the airship’s engine and that Mr. Clemens was piloting us up into the skies above Lake Michigan!

  Then I was shaken inside that compartment like a bug in a bottle. It was as if a gigantic electrical storm had suddenly descended upon us; such roaring thunder I had never heard before in all my life. Unknown to me in that compartment there closed up with all that electrical equipment was that Mr. Tesla and Mr. Clemens were engaged in a battle with that other airship that I had seen in the sky the previous night. I had stumbled my way into the first battle between Earth and Mars!

  The battle came to an end one hundred miles above the surface of the earth when our airship was disabled. The Martian airship escaped into deep interplanetary space. Meanwhile, Mr. Tesla discovered the presence of Mr. Ade, Miss West, and me aboard his ship.

  What happened next to us all, Nikola Tesla, Mark Twain, George Ade, Lillie West, Kolman Czito, and me— our voyage into interplanetary space, our battle on Mars, and our return to Earth, I detailed in a one hundred page deposition which I gave to Robert O’Brien and Daniel Lamont, Secretary of War in April of 1893.

  Mr. Ade, Miss West, and I— we had all gotten ourselves mixed up into something about which we really had no idea. When we returned to earth, we were questioned for hours by Daniel Lamont and President Grover Cleveland. Afterwards we were required to sign secrecy oaths. We could not divulge what had happened to even our own families. Later, my brother Theodore Weiss learned some of the facts concerning the “Incident of 1893” (as the President and Secretary Lamont referred to our journey to Mars ever afterward).

  Now here is the strangest part of this strange episode of my life, and its connection to the odd events in Oakland will be apparent: When we returned to Earth from our journey to Mars we were told that we had been missing for over a week, but to us who had traveled with Mr. Tesla aboard his airship, less than a day had passed! Somehow, in passing rapidly through interplanetary space we aboard the airship had experienced a distortion in time; apparently for some eight days we had been passing through space while moving in slow motion! After our return to earth Mr. Tesla put much thought into this problem. A careful review of the events of our journey revealed that not only did time slow down during our return to earth, it apparently sped up while we were on the planet Mars; that is to say, our local time was distorted in both cases. Mr. Tesla concluded that these time distortions were caused by compressions and de-compressions in the ether; it was Mr. Tesla’s view that under normal conditions the ether can be considered incompressible, but under unusual conditions of extreme stress, it can be compressed or rarified. Thus, the ether is not static, but fundamentally dynamic. On Mars, the ether surrounding the planet had become relatively rarified. This was due to changes effected in Mr. Tesla’s power crystal by the Martians. The energy pulses from the crystal rarified the ether surrounding Mars and caused the planet to increase the frequency of pulsations in all its atoms. When the crystal was removed from the vicinity of the planet, the ether returned to its original density and the planet’s atoms slowed down their pulses to their original rates. “Like water seeking its own level,” as Mr. Tesla put it. The temporary speed up of Mars did not affect the surrounding solar system because Mars had been wrapped in “a dense blanket of ether.” Upon our return to earth, Mr. Tesla’s crystal exploded in space, and this created a massively dense wave of ether that passed through the hull of our ship, and this caused our time to slow down. Mr. Tesla estimated that in the second or so that the waves of dense ether passed through our ship, eight days went by in the surrounding universe. The etheric wave dissipated greatly by the time it had reached the earth, but scientists at Greenwich, England did notice a subtle slowing in the spin of the earth as the wave passed through our world.

  Thus, Mr. Tesla had conceived not only a complex theory of space and matter, but of motion and time, as well. To the public at large, Mr. Tesla was viewed as an inventor of electrical devices, but to a select few of us he was known as a Philosopher of Time. Only such a Philosopher could explain the events that were about to unfold for me in the city of Oakland in the year 1915.

  After I had signed my secrecy oath, I returned to the dime museum where I had been performing in Chicago with no one suspecting in the least that I had done anything more than been absent from the stage for one week. Certainly no one would have ever believed that during that week I had traveled all the way to the planet Mars and back. It was the fantastic character of this voyage between worlds itself which guaranteed that it would remain forever a secret, and works of fiction, such as H.G. Wells “War of the Worlds,” were later written to insure that such voyages as ours would never be believed to be possible in the public mind. The night I delivered my deposition to Secretary Lamont in his hotel room at the Great Northern, he explained the situation to me:

  “We are now engaged in a secret interplanetary war, a war unknown to the general populaces of both Earth and Mars. Neither side wants its people to know of the existence of the other planetary civilization. This requires a very peculiar military strategy. It is a fight conducted on tip-toes in a darkened room while the family sleeps soundly all about. In this fight, we must only whisper, not speak, and woe to he who shouts; for he shall set the whole house ablaze.”

  And so I had to continue with my life as if nothing had happened to me. But my life was not the same, nor would it ever be again. Because of my unique experiences and abilities, Secretary Lamont informed me that, from time to time, the government might call upon me to perform some task that required skill, secrecy, and the unique understanding that I now possessed. This responsibility I gladly and readily accepted.

  So I went back to the dime museum and began working with Joe Hyman on the new act. About a week later the World’s Fair opened, and Joe and I were sent to the museum’s annex in the Midway Plaisance to perform. The annex was a big, wooden box-like structure with a canvas top situated on the far west end of the Midway. It was there that I learned “The East Indian Needle Mystery” from a dark-skinned man in a turban who had wandered over from “The Streets of Cairo” exhibit. It turned out that the man was from Toledo, Ohio and that “The Needle Mystery” was a hundred year-old trick that had never been performed anywhere near India.

  Joe soon tired of the act. He realized performing a magic act from ten in the morning to ten at night was real work. I wired my brother Dash for him to come out to Chicago. He grabbed the first train and arrived in the city just a couple of days later. Dash was much bigger and slower than either Jacob or Joe, but he was my brother and he worked hard and we made the act work. All through the late summer of 1893 Dash and I worked the Midway of the Chicago World’s Fair. That fall Mr. Hedges offered me a single spot on the bill at the Globe Museum in downtown Chicago, and since I had by then created a single act of small magic and handcuff escapes, I jumped at his offer. Dash went back to New
York. Towards the end of 1893 Joe Hyman had his brother Jacob and I make peace with each other, and, when the World’s Fair closed, Jacob and I became partners again and we made a brief swing through the dime museums of the Midwest. In 1894, Jacob and I parted ways once more, this time on a more amicable basis. Jacob started out as “Houdini, Oriental Conjuror and Juggler,” but then, after a short while, changed his name to Jack Hayman and became a song and dance man. I continued performing with Joe for a while as “The Brothers Houdini,” and then Joe dropped out once more and my brother Dash joined the act yet again as the real “Brother of Houdini.”

  In the summer of 1894 Dash and I played Coney Island. The great Atlantic tide rolled in across the sands of Coney Island’s beaches where New Yorkers gathered by the tens of thousands. Among those thousands were some of the most beautiful girls in the world. I was twenty years old and Dash was eighteen. We’d sit out on the beach and watch the girls go by, but we were both too shy to speak to them. This shyness of mine began to really bother me, and finally I said to Dash:

  “Before the summer is over I’m going to get married.”

  “How?” Dash asked. “You can’t even work up the nerve to speak to any of these girls.”

  “I don’t know how just yet,” I said. “But the most important part of getting anything done is deciding to do it. And it’s clear to me that somewhere among all these thousands of girls there must be at least one who would make me the perfect wife.”

  Dash said nothing to this, and I thought at the time that he doubted me. But it was quite the opposite. I had made an impression on him, and a few days later I found out what kind of impression.

  We were just finishing the last show of the evening, and I said, “Let’s go over to the old hash house and have a bite before turning in.”

  “Oh, no,” Dash said. “I have an engagement with a young lady.”

  “You?” I asked. “No. Who is it?”

  “Why,” Dash said, combing his hair down very neatly, “it’s one of the Floral Sisters, the song and dance act over in the next tent.”

  “Haven’t seen them,” I said nonchalantly. “But I heard they’re some kind of lookers.”

  “They are,” Dash said, “and I’ve got the prize of the three.”

  “What’s her name?”

  “Beatrice. Beatrice Rahner.”

  “Can I meet her?”

  “Get your own girl.”

  “What do you mean by that remark? I just want to meet her. Maybe she can introduce me to one of her sisters.”

  “I’ll introduce you, but not tonight. Down on the beach at our usual place tomorrow at noon. I’ll bring a girl for you, too.”

  “I’ll be there,” I said.

  Dash went out humming a tune and I went over to the hash house.

  Next day at noon here comes Dash down the beach arm and arm with two of the most beautiful girls I had ever seen in all my life, one girl on each arm. He had a straw “skimmer” tilted at an angle on his head, and his bow tie was crooked. The girl on Dash’s left arm was a strawberry blonde, and the one on his right was a petite brunette with sparkling blue eyes that looked straight at me and kept looking.

  “This is Tillie,” Dash said, nodding over to the blonde. “And this is Beatrice,” he said, looking down at the brunette. “Girls, this is the man I told you about, just as I described, just as advertised, my brother, Harry.”

  “Hello, Harry,” the blonde Tillie said in a silky voice hot enough to melt the rubber in my suspenders. I knew her type and had seen many versions of Tillie all over Coney Island. I knew she was not my future wife— or anybody’s future wife, especially Dash’s. I gave a nod to Tillie who was looking me up and down.

  I looked over to Beatrice and said: “Hello.”

  Beatrice’s smile widened.

  “Care to take a stroll with me along the boardwalk?” I asked her.

  “I’d love to,” Beatrice said. She looked down at the sand, and then flashed her eyes back up to me.

  “What about Dash?” Beatrice asked. She looked over at him.

  “Aw,” Dash said, looking at me with disappointment.

  “Dash and Tillie will get along quite nicely, I’m sure,” I said.

  Tillie shrugged and giggled. She looked up at Dash and said, “You’ll do, in a fix,” and she winked at him.

  Dash grinned and his face went red.

  I held my arm out to Beatrice and she stepped forward and took it. We started off down the beach. I took an orange from my coat pocket; it was all the lunch I could afford that day.

  “Like an orange?” I asked Beatrice.

  “I’d love one!” she replied, her eyes widening. “Let’s share it.” She knew I only had the one orange.

  We sat on the steps of the pier and I cut the orange in two, gave her a half, and bit into my half. The juice went all over my face. Beatrice laughed— not at me— it wasn’t that kind of laugh. Her laugh was music, pure music. She bit into her half and got juice on her face, and then I laughed. And then we devoured that orange. It went real quick. It was the best orange I ever had— that we ever had.

  Well, everything after that is kind of like a blurred photograph. We were talking, then wading in the surf, then running underneath the pier, then kissing underneath the pier, then running some more underneath that same pier. It was a great pier— the best pier that—

  Every year on our wedding anniversary Bess and I visit that pier. It’s still there, and so are we.

  It was suddenly night. We could never figure that out. It seemed we had been together only a few minutes in the afternoon and then the sun was suddenly gone. I remember it was daylight and I had been looking into Bess’ eyes, telling her everything, nearly my whole life as I had lived it up until then— nearly my whole life— my trip to Mars I left out— I couldn’t tell her about that, and she wouldn’t have believed it anyway. It had been daylight as I stood there speaking to her, and then I looked up and saw the stars in the night sky.

  “It’s night,” I said, astonished.

  “What’s the time?” Bess asked.

  “I don’t know,” I said. “Maybe there ain’t no time

  here where we are.”

  “That’s silly.” she said.

  “Maybe,” I said. “Maybe not. Look up there at the stars.”

  I held her close and could feel her breath on my neck.

  “Maybe every one of those stars has its own time,” I said, “if we could only know, if we could only travel out there and see. One star alone with its own time, two stars together, sharing one time.”

  I looked into Bess’s eyes and she into mine.

  “We could be those stars, you and me,” I said. “You the Star Maiden and me the Star Man, we could share one time, and it would last forever because we would always remember it, always….”

  Bess kissed me, and then tilted her head back. I kissed her throat, and then whispered, “We could be those stars, tonight, here, now. We could share that one time. Will you share it with me?”

  Bess answered with a kiss so powerful I could hardly keep my balance. I picked her up off the ground, and carried her underneath the pier. It was a very warm night, and like I said it was a great pier, the best pier that….

  Well, the next morning I knew it was time to get married, and to Bess. She was eager and willing, but we both had shows to do that day. Another day passed before we had a civil ceremony on Coney Island.

  After the ceremony Dash said, “You know if you want to bring her home to live with Ma, you’ll have to get married by a rabbi.”

  “I know,” I said. “We’ll go over to New York tomorrow and have it done.”

  So the next day we were married by a rabbi.

  And then Bess said that her mother would never approve our marriage unless we had a ceremony performed by a Catholic priest.

  So a few days later we went to a priest, and he asked me, “What will be the religion of the children produced by this union?”

  I
said, “They will become thoroughly acquainted with both of their parents religions and decide the matter of belief for themselves.”

  The priest was reluctant to do the ceremony, but when he learned that we had already been married by a judge and a rabbi, he realized that we were married and had every intention of staying married. He performed the ceremony and gave us his blessing. It was June 22nd, 1894 and Bess and I were married just about as much as anyone could be married!

  Unfortunately, it didn’t satisfy Bess’ mother who refused to see me. I went to her house with Bess anyway and we went in. Her mother just sat there and wouldn’t speak to me. Finally, she stood up and told Bess to get out and never come back. We left without a further word, Bess in tears. I later found out that, after we left, Bess’ mother sprinkled holy water all over the parlor. I didn’t see Bess’ mother again for many years after that. How things can change with time! Bess’ mother now lives with us, is a member of our family and household, and she treats me like a son.

  Now that Bess was my wife, she became my partner on stage. Dash left the show business for a while, but he kept doing magic on occasion, and even got a booking at Huber’s once for a week. Some few years later I would bring him back into the show business when I would create his “Hardeen” act over in Europe.