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“What am I?” Nikola Tesla asked himself after his first glimpse of the Mississippi River. He looked down at his rags, sniffed himself in disgust, and put his hands in his trouser pockets, where he discovered only some wadded tissue. “I have even less now than when I came to America for the first time,” he mused.

For the rest of the day, Tesla wandered the city on unsteady legs. At the end of the day he discovered an empty warehouse. Inside, a few people dressed in rags similar to his sat around a campfire, eating from cans. They seemed to know him because they made friendly noises and beckoned him over.

“Who am I?” asked Tesla after he had sat down on the ground and been given a can full of warm beans.

“That's funny,” laughed the toothless fellow on his right. “You're the urban anchorite. You're a shining example to all of us.”

The crowd guffawed, but Tesla was pleased. An urban anchorite. A father of the desert in the city. He liked that. He liked also the warehouse, a big space, perfect for some kind of experiment. All of a sudden, Tesla was seized with the need for a great project. He was back on earth.

For the next few days, Nikola Tesla roamed an area of the French Quarter bounded by Chartres and Dumaine on one side and Ursulines and Pirate's Alley on the other. He pushed a contraption that resembled a shopping cart but was, in actuality, a living unit complete with bed, shower, and compartments for carting found materials. He'd designed and built fifty of them for his new friends, who were now scattered throughout the city, gathering what he needed for his new experiment.

Tesla's rounds were so regular the inhabitants of the neighborhood could set their watches by him. He appeared at noon and vanished at sunset. The word on the street was that he was very rich, that he had a photographic memory and was secretly working on a doomsday machine. Tesla's companions had deduced all this on their own and had already started making him legendary. Tesla liked that. He had always been a legend, even to himself.

In the course of his wanderings he had made several important observations about the world at this time, and about the city of New Orleans in particular. For the most part, he was not surprised at the widespread use of his discoveries. He watched the launching of a space rocket on a television set in a Laundromat.

“Is earth attacking a hostile planet?” Tesla asked a bearded street person in a motorized wheelchair with bulging plastic bags attached to the armrests, who used this Laundromat for his daytime quarters.

“It's the space shuttle, man. Where you been?” The street person was huffy. “Most of what you see is fuel tanks. After it leaves the atmosphere, the space capsule takes the astronauts to the moon. Where did you go to kindergarten?”

This explanation, if true, seemed to imply a simple technology that could have been vastly improved using rotating magnetic fields. Tesla was also interested in the motorized wheelchair, but the street person found these questions indelicate and drove off noisily.

Nikola Tesla watched the television for several days after that and found its messages extraordinarily trivial, but addictive. He was most fascinated by commercials and by how quickly they told huge stories that in his day would have taken whole epic novels. He had difficulty at first following the quick changes of scene, but as the technique became obvious, he was delighted. He had been thinking in precisely this way at peak mental pitch and few people had understood him. Now, it seemed, the world had no difficulty moving among landscapes, relationships, machines, ideas, and words all within thirty seconds. At the same time, he was astonished by the use to which this technique of quick jump cuts was put. It was as if people were using laser weapons to slice bread.

Tesla couldn't stop watching. He didn't even mind it when customers changed a program to another; it was all stimulating to some part of himself that bypassed critical thinking and lodged itself directly into his solar plexus, at the seat of emotions. The addictive nature of the medium led him to consider other forms of addiction.

He had to make a conscious effort to avoid the Laundromat. He had seen commercials for the Internet on television and decided to investigate cyberspace. He was already somewhat familiar with cyberspace from the other side. He had occasionally participated in a party game that was quite the rage in the spirit world. The players entered cyberspace and represented themselves as human beings to people on-line. They entered chat rooms and multiple-user dungeons (MUDs) and MOOs (MUD object oriented), where they interacted with the humans who believed that they were communicating with their own kind. His former archenemy but now friend, Thomas Edison, had revealed himself in full, but his confession was taken to be just another identity assumption in the fluid world of cyberspace, where people switched genders, used pseudonyms, and generally misrepresented themselves in every way conceivable. After Edison's prank, many spirits went on-line with their real names and were greeted as naturally as if they lived around the corner of some street in some earthly city. Tesla himself had tired of the game, but now, on the other side of it, he was quite interested in what motivated the embodied to explore cyberspace.

Tesla used a computer at the New Orleans Public Library and quickly got a headache surfing the Internet. People's capacity for producing trivia was inexhaustible. In addition to the rivers of information sludge, there was so much chat it filled his entire capacity for absorption. He likened the din of the never-ending conversation to a huge public festivity where strangers forced themselves to speak in banalities until all vestige of thought was banished. The airwaves were filled with introductory remarks like “Hi,” “Hello,” and “Where are you from?” leaving absolutely no space for genuine dialogue. It had surely been more fun from the other side. It occurred to him that people involved in such activities as cyberspace and television were probably void of memory. He was certain that the world was in the grip of a terrible amnesia. In considering the nature of the attraction, Tesla concluded, once more, that it was addiction.

When he left the public library, bleary eyed and slightly nauseated by his own capacity for addiction, he was appalled at the filth in the air. The great Mississippi River was a brownish yellow color and full of deadly chemicals. Mark Twain would not have been surprised, given the fact that he had once called the great river a
cloaca maxima
, a great sewer, but even Twain would have been appalled by the depth of the degradation. This too, Tesla concluded, was the result of addiction to products that satisfied a short-term craving while obliterating everything around. Overall, the ethical will of humanity lagged far behind its technology. In some respects, things had reverted to a state he had already thought obsolete in his own time.

As he wandered through the streets of New Orleans, he saw addiction in even cruder forms. Barrooms were crowded with gamblers playing electronic money machines. Casinos stayed open day and night, fleecing suckers who returned as soon as they were able. Of course, this particular human folly was no mystery to him. In fact, he had amused himself in his youth by figuring out probabilities in games of chance, and he was certain that he could do it again. For the first time since landing in this decayed reality, Tesla smiled. When the time came to use money, he could doubtless get it from gambling, and there would be a certain justice to it. Already his mind was working toward possible solutions to some of the more obvious messes.

New Orleans was green, wet, incessantly flowering. Tesla spent an hour with a sweet-olive tree, whose scent of overripe peach stimulated and intrigued him. The tiny cream-colored clusters looked like an unlikely source for such overpowering scent. The tree, at the back of Saint Louis Cathedral, spread its branches over the fence, now and then dropping its tiny blossoms on his hair. He watched a vine clinging to the wrought-iron fence—it put out a tendril that gripped the iron tightly. Tesla pushed his cart up Royal Street, noting green fingers pushing through the cracked sidewalk. He stopped to study a Japanese magnolia—the lavender blooms had opened overnight and were covered by a fine mist. The air was warm, rich, liquid—Tesla drew a breath and sensed the expectant tree waiting for him to exhale. When he did, the tree inhaled the iron-enriched air that had gone through his lungs. They breathed together—man breath out, tree breath in, tree breath out, man breath in—and everything became still except for this symbiotic respiration. Tesla rubbed the top of his head and the sweet-olive seeped into his hand and scalp. The magnolia flowers glowed to reveal their delicate geometry, and Tesla smacked his forehead. Yes. He remembered his idea for chlorophyll propulsion, left behind in one of the notebooks. He'd been unable to experiment in Colorado because it was too dry. But here in New Orleans, at the wettest place in the continental United States, it was possible. Tesla next communed with the intense green leaves of a banana peeking over the wall of a courtyard on Chartres. His breath quickened as it always did at the onset of an inspired project. He sat on a bench and began sketching.

While the bountiful generative world of vegetation claimed most of his attention that week, Tesla did not abandon his observation of humanity. He was astonished to discover that slavery persisted. He observed the existence of flourishing slave markets, connected with the crack cocaine business. Many drug dealers were also slave traders. One of the markets operated quite openly on Fridays right in Jackson Square, in front of Saint Louis Cathedral. Tesla watched a skinny man with a heavy silver buckle and alligator-skin boots, followed at a short distance by a quiescent boy who looked no older than twelve. A buyer appeared shortly, a burly man in a suit with a pencil-thin mustache. Money exchanged hands quickly, and the boy followed the buyer out of the square, toward Royal Street.

The street people were very concerned. Many young drifters, kids who hadn't been on the street long, were vanishing. Only the old alcoholics and, so far, the Shades had been left alone, possibly because they were not interested in drugs. The slave trade celebrated its might quite brazenly. Bars with slave-and-master motifs stayed open all night, filled with drunk and stoned sadists. Slaves were tortured and killed in back rooms of bars and in luxury apartments. The disposal of young bodies was a growth industry. In his youth, Tesla had been an abolitionist. The new forms of slavery through addiction were alarming.

During one of his rounds, Tesla became intrigued by a shuttered building on Bourbon Street that was the recipient of many young women who never returned from within. A street acquaintance told him that the building was the headquarters of something called SMD, the School for Messiah Development. His informant whispered darkly that the Antichrist was being nurtured there and that the day was not far off when the gates of this house would burst open and he would appear in a globe of fire. This explanation irritated Tesla.

“He? There are only women in there. Is this Antichrist a woman?”

His informant allowed that the Antichrist might be female. “It might even be my ex-wife.” He grinned toothlessly, offering the anchorite a swig of his peach brandy, which Tesla refused.

Chapter Twenty-two

Wherein Tesla rescues Felicity from her involuntary happiness

Tesla put the SMD quarters on his watch. He was there the day Felicity was brought in. She walked supported by two men, stepping lightly as if she weren't sure the ground was there. Something about the girl touched him. A small sound, like a distant flute, reached his inner ear. He had no idea what the sound was. It could have been the jingling of her bracelets or something that came from his own mind. Tesla had always thought himself far removed from the vulgar emotions that agitated most people. At one time, he had sought to relieve humanity of its sexual burden entirely. Still, Felicity emanated a fresh, lovely light that Tesla, who had read William James, identified with the first female principle, the mother he had never known, the lover he had never considered. He watched her disappear within and almost immediately conceived the idea of helping this girl escape. Tesla did not undertake this mission solely for the girl's sake: he needed her in order to construct the chlorophyll-propulsion machine he had already begun assembling at the warehouse beside the river.

The house itself presented few difficulties. The next day, Tesla took his usual position on the stoop next door to SMD. A mule-drawn carriage filled with tourists passed, and the carriage driver pointed out the anchorite to his charges.

“He there a urban anchor that be there every day like clockworks and about him be said that he old as Methuselah, rich as Croesus, smart as Einstein, and some say he Jeezus. I say he be the reincarnate Napoleon,” he explained in rapid patter.

Tesla was by now so ubiquitous many people no longer noticed him and his shopping cart. He was like the Confederate submarine at the Cabildo: it was so odd the locals pretended not to see it. He planned to unlock the iron gate set in a ten-foot brick wall topped by broken glass, with the aid of a small sonic device fashioned from a broken radio. The device had the advantage of being a weapon as well, emitting a high-pitched sound that could burst eardrums.

Tesla was mentally rehearsing his plan when a policeman approached him. Now, of all times!

Joe sat down next to him and showed him a photograph. “Have you seen this girl?”

It was Felicity. Was this a kind of psychic cop or something? In the photo, Felicity's mouth was slightly open. Her green eyes were looking far away.

“If you'll excuse me, I'm in a race against time,” Tesla said politely.

“Right. And you race just sitting here?”

“There are grave problems in this city, Constable. In the world. Are you aware that slavery has returned? Human beings are being sold as we speak.”

“And why do you think that is?” Joe asked. He did not want to engage the anchorite but felt obscurely that the madman was somehow valuable.