Tesla (36 page)

“Isn’t that a bit too much?” Tesla smiled his distant smile.

“Too much? Those words are meaningless,” the redhead flared. “In the Gospel according to Luke, the Pharisees accused Christ of eating and drinking too much.”

One Saturday in December 1897, when it was already dark by four o’clock, White took Tesla to Jimmy Breese’s studio on West Sixteenth Street. The door handle was so audaciously twisted. Tesla readily grabbed it.

Breese wore a satyr mask made of silver. A servant played the double pipe. On the wall, three personified premonitions raised their hands toward the faint sunset. The columns were surrounded with gold mosaic tiles, like those in Monreale Cathedral in Palermo. The ceiling was built in the shape of a tear. Winded waiters from Delmonico’s brought in a twenty-course dinner. All the guests ate with ivy wreaths around their heads.

“People have done weirder things to feel like something was happening,” White whispered to Tesla.

The gentlemen judged the bare legs of the dancers. Over White’s cigarette, smoke spelled out a signature in Arabic script. His lips moved without his knowing it. The orchestra of blind musicians sounded like a hurricane. They served a enormous “Jack Horner” pie. Like golden smoke, a cloud of canaries burst from the pie. Among the birds, Botticelli’s nymph rose. Fair locks cascaded over her pear-like breasts. Those present at the birth of Venus dropped their jaws. The wreathed guests checked the holy sites on her body—her perfect waist, her mighty hips, her black triangle. The black triangle turned first into a Secession octopus and then transformed into a maelstrom and darkened the room, blinding the observers.

“Aaaaah!” the men groaned.

Tesla did not even blink.

White smiled. He tried to explain to the people around the table:

“He’s not from this planet.”

CHAPTER 72

The Marriage of Dušan

All of New York wanted to see him married. To whom? To all of them? To Anna Morgan, the daughter of the sultan of Wall Street—among others—the tall girl with sharp knees. The slim inventor received countless invitations.

“Come and meet Miss Winslow. She can’t believe I know you.”

“Come and meet Miss Amasha Casner.”

“Come to dinner. Miss Flora Dodge will be there as well as Margaret Merrington…”

He would come in, with his furtive gait, floppy-eared and grinning. He saw the ladies as a tangle of soft smiles, lace parasols, innocent low-cut dresses, provocative glances, swan-like necks, flounces, orchids and magnolias in their laps. They supposed they were, they knew they were as irresistible as Niagara. And yet…

All those games of neighing masculinity and meowing femininity bored him. Whenever someone mentioned
that
topic, Tesla’s ironic mind heard the tense, resounding voice of a
guslar
—the singer of Serbian epic songs—chanting the lines from
The Marriage of Emperor Dušan:

The inventor gave a melodramatic answer to
those
questions: “Science is my only fiancée.”

Whatever his sexuality potentially targeted, he did not desire to realize it. Scientific discovery was the highest degree of excitement there was—it was a kiss from God. In his laboratory, Tesla’s personality faded away and a blind force, like fire, took its place. Compared to that, all other forms of excitement were nothing.

People did not believe it.

“That’s my
higher love
,” he added.

People winked, whispered, and reproached him. “If I speak in the tongues of men and of angels but do not have love, I am only a noisy gong or a clanging cymbal,” they said.

The eyebrows of the eternal bridegroom lifted toward the ceiling with the tobacco smoke. People could not let it go—they kept asking
those questions
over and over.

He put on a show for the newspapermen: “At times, it seems to me that my celibacy is too much of a sacrifice for my work.” Then he suddenly changed his story and patiently answered their questions. “Do I believe in marriage? For an artist—yes! For a writer—yes! But for an inventor—no. His is too intense a nature, with so much in it of a wild, passionate quality.”

De Quincey wrote about the abyss of divine joy that yawned within him. Tesla suffered his deliriums of joy in solitude. For years, he lived in a state of almost uninterrupted bliss. Under his stiff collar, he felt passion strong enough to move mountains.

“Ever since a snowball I threw in my childhood caused an avalanche, I’ve been engaged to a force that, in an instant, changes the meaning of everything,” he whispered in his stiff collar. “In comparison, all human institutions are just trifles.”

He could not stand to look at jewelry. He would vomit if he had to touch a woman’s hair. He refused “to join forces” with Edward Dean Adams, with institutions, with members of the fairer sex. In general, he refused to bow to the human condition and human criteria.

“Don’t Achilles and Prince Marko stand apart from the community of humans?” he asked Stanford White. A Pullman car with encrusted ornaments on the walls was taking them to Niagara Falls. Lightning flickered outside.

“Look!” Tesla exclaimed as he touched the windowpane with his index finger. In a field, some cows frolicked before the storm and began jumping around like dogs. Stanford didn’t hear him. “Send me a different waiter. Remove this clown-face!” he yelled.

White’s red hair flamed. His relentless hand kept pouring. He reminded Tesla that Zeus enjoyed making love to Hercules’s mother so much that he stopped the constellations from revolving a few times. Like ancient Assyrians, White believed that the sun god was the one who impregnated all women while men were just the tool. Like Zeus, he wanted to be a swan, a bull, and the shower of gold.

“Don’t worry,” the drunken architect mumbled. “I’ll make love for you.”

That’s all well and good
, Tesla thought.
But where does that restless watery look in your eyes come from?

White dozed off and dreamed of embracing necks and waists. It grew dark. A fire burned somewhere in the field, and bright sparks shot into the sky. The train roared like a dragon, curled its tail, and sped into the wide, wide world. And yet again—like a long time ago—the rails did not seem to exist but somehow materialized right in front of the locomotive.

In the morning in Buffalo, the inventor felt stiff while his architect felt hungover.

A solemn crowd stood dwarfed by Tesla’s turbines. From the ceremonial speeches, Tesla realized that everything had changed since Kemmler’s execution. In the American mind, alternating current had transformed from the devil to an angel.

Nikola Tesla delivered a conventional speech. Halfway through, his blood turned cold. All of a sudden, he felt jealous of the dead peasant boy and guilty of the blessings he snatched for himself. Dane never married. He would not marry either. He barely kept himself from saying, “I’m bad enough. It’s cruel to make me worse.”

After the official speeches, the mayor grabbed Tesla and White by their arms and suggested they embark on the tour boat
Lady of the Mist
and get closer to the monstrous waterfall from below. Screaming at the top of his lungs, the mayor whispered to Tesla that most American newlyweds came here on their honeymoon. Tesla was truly excited. He stared at the rustling curtain until he forgot what he was looking at.

“This is bigger than anything else. This is destiny.”

Rainbows arched everywhere in the enveloping mist. Silky water flashed right on the edge before it fell over. Falling, it turned white. Then it became a cloud. The wind blew the cloud upward and spread coolness. Despite their raincoats, Tesla’s, White’s, and the mayor’s faces were wet.
This
moved his turbines. It reminded him once more of how that small snowball, thrown with a casual movement of his hand, tore out boulders and swept down pines as if they were matchsticks, became pure force, and grew as huge as destiny. The feeling of greatness and the deafening roar completely permeated him.

Indians sacrificed maidens to these curtains made of foam.

Only this boundless coolness finally rejuvenated him and washed the soot of the burned laboratory from his soul. His eyes were full of tears while his soul merged with the unleashed natural force. Yes, the inventor’s nature was wild and passionate. The waterfall completely outshouted him. Tesla’s lips moved silently. At his secret wedding with the measureless force, he softly repeated:

“I do.”

CHAPTER 73

The War

It started with an explosion.

“War with Spain!” paperboys screamed.

Hearst’s newspapers were selling the war. The war was selling the newspapers.

Cheeks flushed. Fingers twirled mustaches. People tossed their straw hats into the air. Like children, people were thrilled by the upcoming slaughter. Theodore Roosevelt bared his teeth beneath his walrus mustache and gathered his Rough Riders.

“Everyone talks about the Philippines,” satirists smirked, “although until recently they didn’t know if it’s a country or canned goods.”

On the wave of the war fever, backed by the music of John Philip Sousa—
ta, ta, ta, dum, dum, ta, ta, ta, ta
—the Electrical Exhibition had its gala opening at Madison Square Garden. Stanford White organized the special event (“and so…,” he concluded at the end of his short speech). With his customary peevishness, Garret Hobart, the vice president of the United States, opened the event.

It started with an explosion: Marconi’s assistant Thomas Edison Jr. blew up the warehouse where he kept their surplus fireworks.

“Didn’t I tell you that they don’t know how to adjust frequencies.” Tesla tried to suppress the triumph in his voice.

Then he stood in front of the audience under the amazing clouds of May. All around him was a wall of bowler hats and blinding collars. Gentlemen fended off all the dilemmas with their ties. They were all brothers in mustaches. A gaggle of hygienic old women was there as well. Some of them blinked innocently. Some cleared their throats with dissatisfaction. Two bright-eyed ladies, corseted like wasps, looked at him from under their enormous hovering hats. All faces glowed with bloodthirsty curiosity.

A faint smile started to form at the corner of Tesla’s mouth. His smiling eyes gave the impression of heightened alertness. His long thumb—the sign of great intelligence—clutched a chrome box with a wire sticking out of it.

The thumb pressed a button.

The boat in the central pond started to move.

It did what it had to do.

Just like him.

Tesla stopped it with a push of the button.

With his wireless commands, he turned on the boat’s lights from a distance.

He “asked the boat some questions” and the remote-controlled vessel responded with its moves.

Ah!

Another thing without a name appeared in the world.

The first robot!

The people refused to believe their eyes.

“What do you call this?” children asked their parents, turning their heads away from the pond.

“Teleautomaton.”

Across the boundaries of expectation, the audience’s perception, so to speak, tumbled into a void.

That was the fall of the tree in the forest with no one to hear.

Katharine Johnson put her lips against her husband’s hairy ear and whispered bitterly:

“No one saw it!”

Tesla left Madison Square Garden under the foaming clouds of May.

How is it possible they didn’t see it?
he wondered as he strolled aimlessly around Lower West Manhattan.

“No law says that those who speak must be heard,” Milutin Tesla repeated in his ear.

The criminals he used to know, the terrifying Whyos, had all been killed or arrested. The Hudson Dusters, fierce cocaine addicts, replaced them on the corners of Greenwich Village. The Dusters were friends with city bohemians. Both groups knew of Tesla. Leaning against his long finger, he watched them with quiet irony from the pages of newspapers.