The Kingdom of Ohio (13 page)

THE SORCERER

I'VE SPENT MY SHARE OF HOURS SITTING IN LIBRARIES AND wrestling with textbooks on mathematics and physics. But despite my efforts, the truth is that I never had much talent for those subjects. Still, there's one small insight that occurred to me years ago, and that has haunted me ever since.

It goes like this: Draw a series of dots on a piece of paper. Each of these marks, in itself, represents a one-dimensional point. But regardless of the number or position of the dots, it's possible to draw a single line that passes through all of them, connecting them into a single two-dimensional shape.

Next, draw any number of additional lines. Again, in the second dimension, each scribble is a separate object. Moving into the third dimension, though, it's easy to picture a single solid (a cube, a cone, etc.) that contains all the lines within its volume. These exercises demonstrate the relationship between one dimension and the next: that is, each higher dimension creates a unity out of objects that seem unrelated in the dimension below.

Now consider the universe in which we live—the third dimension—and its relation to the fourth dimension, time. From where we stand the world is a jumble of disconnected perceptions, dimly linked by cause and effect. (I've read, for example, that each atom in our bodies once existed in the fiery heart of a star—but, sitting in my bachelor apartment, so much distance lies between me and that stellar origin that I can hardly imagine, much less really
believe
, the connection.)

Seen from the fourth dimension, though, everything would be different. These separations of time and space would cease to matter, as each object became one with its origins and future incarnations. From the other side of time, our separate, far-flung paths through the world—yours and mine—would finally come together. From that perspective, we would be part of a single perfect shape. We would be stars.

Of course, much as I wish for it, from where I sit this kind of vision remains impossible. All I have is the memory of the last time I saw you: looking at your stricken face in the darkness, understanding that you might be about to die, that I might have been the one who killed you.

And with the pain of that recollection comes a brief glimpse of the future. Before this is over, I've realized, I'll have to go back. The doctors—not to mention the shooting pains in my chest—tell me that I'm running out of time. So while I still can, I'll have to make one last visit to the crooked streets where it all happened between us. However much the prospect terrifies me (almost as much as the thought of not returning to the scene of the crime), I understand that I'll have to go.

So I've begun to make my preparations. I've closed the store and started speaking to a chirpy blond real estate agent about selling the shop and the apartment. (The memory of that plastic office and her plastic smile—when did the young learn such fierce artificiality?) And meanwhile, sitting at home, with an episode of
Family Secrets Live
playing on the television, I'm trying to reassemble the pieces of the past. It's getting closer, beginning to take shape—that's what I tell myself, studying the history books and the old photographs. Most of all I keep returning to the newspaper article I found in the antiques store along with the photograph, the one that I first read those years ago. From the
New York News-Digest
of January 16, 1901, clipped from the bottom of page 2, it says:

Sitting in my apartment, I wonder what you would have made of it all: your sad laugh, or regretful shrug. And I wonder at how it comes to me so clearly, imagining the way it might have been. A young woman, shivering beneath the meager protection of a threadbare gray shawl, walking through the streets of New York toward the concrete fortress of the Waldorf-Astoria. The woman alone, and the approaching shadow of the man she is going to meet: a scientist who emerged from the impoverished countryside of eastern Europe to become one of the most famous individuals in the world. This is the man who was, for a time, known as the “Sorcerer of Electricity,” and yet ended his life penniless and alone in a cheap hotel, tormented by madness and forgotten by the world.
²⁷

TESLA'S LABORATORY is a grand stage of a room. A single large space on the second floor of a nondescript warehouse south of Houston Street, it is dominated by the massive spiral transmitter that stands at its exact center: a wire-wrapped metallic cylinder fourteen feet high, from which crackle forth, at Tesla's command, tongues of electrical fire. The windows of the lab are hung with heavy velvet curtains to better allow the inventor (he employs no assistants) to observe electrical phenomena. Around the sides of the room stand four neat worktables bearing stacks of notebooks, batteries, and tools. In one corner a pair of armchairs, a coffee table, and a cabinet of liquors stand arranged on a threadbare Turkey rug. In the opposite corner of the laboratory is a leather fainting couch, where the inventor now lies.

Tall, gaunt, and pale, his lashes flutter as he mutters to himself in a mixture of German, English, Latin, and Serbian: indistinct words between languages. Six inches from his forehead as he sleeps is the blunt point of his Shadowgraph Ray emitter—in common terms, the barrel of an X-ray machine.

He wakes, opens his eyes, and pushes the Shadowgraph aside. Picking up pen and paper from the low table next to the couch, he begins to sketch. The
mass anchor
—he half remembers this phrase from the dream—a huge, rough block of stone. A series of three small levers matched by three radiating spokes from a wheel. A pair of funnel-shaped magnets somewhere on the left—and that's all he can remember. He squeezes his eyes shut, hoping for some further detail, but nothing comes. He draws a breath and slowly stands. Tesla crosses to the console at the base of the spiral transmitter, throws a switch, and the humming that filled the room fades, receding into the walls as the lights on the Shadowgraph go dead. He leans, for a moment, against the console. As usual, he is tired.

He is always tired. But rest is a luxury that he cannot afford: there is too much to be done, too many frontiers to be forced open. This is why he limits himself to four hours of sleep a night—less, sometimes, but never more. For a moment he experiences a surge of anger at the injustices that surround him. The fluorescent light, the practical electric motor, long-distance power transmission over copper lines—all of these have been his inventions, and every time he has been robbed. Because I trusted too much, he rages inwardly, because I dared to dream of more than mere profit—

But this anger, too, he reminds himself, is a waste of time. With the iron discipline that he has practiced all his life Tesla forces himself to be calm. Straightening, he turns back to the table and examines the sketchbook. Each page bears a part of a diagram, fragments of the thing that has eluded him for so long. It is still more empty space than not, the barest suggestion of a shape—but he can feel its presence in the air around him, tantalizing, growing closer, as slowly, year by year, he dredges it from the depths of sleep.

A wave of dizziness hits him, and he sways on his feet. Closing his eyes, Tesla leans against the table and suddenly remembers the moment, nineteen years ago now, when these dreams began. The moment of his first great invention, when something in his memory seemed to come unstuck.

He recalls how, after convalescing from a long illness, he had walked with his friend through a park in Budapest, where he had been working as a junior employee at the telephone exchange. The two of them had been discussing some inconsequential thing and enjoying the sunset. The sinking sun painted the sky orange, silhouetting the domes and orioles of the city. At a bend in the path, a group of little girls were playing jump-the-rope, laughing and chanting nonsense rhymes, while their mothers sat on a bench nearby.

As his eyes fell upon them, a passage from Goethe's
Faust
came back to him, and with it the vision of a rotating wheel of fire. It took him a moment to realize what it was: and when he understood, he fell to his knees with a cry and began to draw in the sand with a twig while his friend watched. There in the dirt, he sketched out a diagram of the motor that would earn him the acclaim of the world when he presented it before the American Institute of Electrical Engineers two years later. The simple, perfect secret of alternating-current electricity, which he had been studying ever since his undergraduate days.

And afterward it was as if this vision had opened a floodgate in his mind. That night, for the first time, he had seen the grail he has been pursuing ever since. In his dream Tesla had glimpsed an endless, shadowy row of inventions waiting to be discovered, and at its end a perfect, final machine. A device to tear a portal through the fabric of time itself: to free mankind from the tyranny of life, with its meager span of years. An idea of breathtaking audacity—and yet, he tells himself, not impossible. This is the machine he has been dreaming about ever since.

Now, as an incantation, he whispers the lines of Goethe that accompanied his first vision:

And despite the fact that he is an avowed atheist, with these words Tesla finds himself thinking, as if in a moment of fervent prayer: Whatever Powers may exist, please let me find this one thing. A moment later, though, irritated with himself for this lapse into superstition, he opens his eyes and shakes his head.

A red droplet falls onto the notebook page, and, reaching up, Tesla realizes with a sense of irritation and disgust that his nose is bleeding—this has been happening to him more and more in the past year. He tilts his head back, shuddering at the metallic tang in his mouth, and stanches the flow with a white handkerchief.

When the bleeding has finally stopped, Tesla busies himself. He brews a pot of coffee using a Bunsen burner and efficiently consumes it; washes his face, buttons on a fresh collar, and places a dab of cologne behind each ear. He regards himself for a moment in the mirror—elegant as always in his suede boots, tails, cane, top hat, and gloves—before descending to the street. Hailing a horse-drawn cab, he directs the driver to take him uptown, to the World Club, where he has recently become a member.

The World is dark, all wood paneling and leather, steeped in nearly a century's worth of patriarchy and wealth. The club occupies the first three floors of an old brownstone, stolid and anonymous: on the first floor are the library, the sitting room, and the refectory, while the second floor houses the bar and “club room,” where members drink, dine, and smoke cigars. The third floor contains the kitchens and the servants' quarters.

The cab pulls up at the door—“Fifteen cents, sorr,” the driver says, turning to face his passenger. Tesla regards the cabbie's sagging jowls with distaste, and imagines for a moment that he can smell the sourness of the other man's breath. All his life he has disliked contact with others' flesh and has an almost obsessive fear of bacteria, once telling a friend: “I would not touch the hair of another person except, perhaps, at the point of a revolver.” Now, he shudders and slides the woolen rug from his lap, handing the coins forward with his fingertips.

“Thank you, sorr.” The reply of an automaton, the inventor thinks, climbing out of the cab and crossing the sidewalk. As he mounts the steps, he absentmindedly wipes his gloves with his handkerchief. A liveried valet opens the door for him and he enters.

On the second floor of the club, Tesla sinks into an armchair and orders his customary buttered roll and four cups of coffee from a hovering waiter. While eating his breakfast, he leafs through a copy of the London
Times
, glancing occasionally at his pocket watch. He allows himself fifteen minutes of this leisure before summoning the waiter again.