The Magic Circle (65 page)

“I’ve heard the story,” I assured Wolfgang dryly. It was the endless debate between “hands-on” engineers, who credited the self-propagandizing Tesla with inventing techniques for everything from raising the dead to walking on water, and “conceptual” physicists, who pointed out that the self-educated Tesla had rejected most modern theory, from relativity to quantum physics. Your basic rehash of spirit-matter polarity.

“But Tesla died before the atomic bomb was invented,” I pointed out. “And he refused to believe that even if you succeeded in splitting an atom, the released energy could ever be successfully harnessed. So how can you imagine, as you seem to, that the awful disaster at Kyshtym in the fifties was some kind of botched version of a Tesla experiment?” I asked in disbelief.

“I am not alone in imagining it,” said Wolfgang. “Tesla established a new science called telegeodynamics. Its goal was to develop a source of unlimited free energy by harnessing natural forces latent within the earth. He believed he could send information underground, around the globe. He applied for very few patents in this particular field—unlike all his other discoveries—nor did he give away any but the broadest descriptions of how such inventions might work. But he experimented extensively with harmonics, inventing oscillators so tiny they could be carried in a pocket, yet whose vibrations, when applied to a structure like the Brooklyn Bridge or Empire State Building, could cause it to sway and break to bits in a matter of minutes.”

“So let’s get this straight,” I said. “You’re saying the Soviets might have attempted a controlled chain reaction, trying to somehow invoke this Tesla-type force in 1957—and then it went haywire? But if Tesla didn’t write anything about it, how would they know what to do?”

“I said he didn’t
publish
—not that he didn’t write,” said Wolfgang. “In fact, it’s possible such specifications were among his papers, many of which mysteriously disappeared when he died in New York at the age of eighty-seven—significantly in 1943, at the height of the Second World War, when the race was on for a new kind of weapon. Indeed, Hitler announced just thereafter, to his intimate confidants, that scientists were on the brink of developing a fabulous new ‘superweapon’ which would shortly end the war in Germany’s favor.”

My mind was flooded with unbidden thoughts: Nikola Tesla from Yugoslavia, Virgilio from Trieste, Volga Dragonoff who was given his name by Pandora for the “dragon forces” of the earth and who hailed from the Caucasus.

“What does all this have to do with Pandora and her manuscripts?” I asked—wondering if even at this late date I was really prepared for the answer.

But Wolfgang had stopped dead on the walk to gaze through the mist rising from the Champs de Mars to where the Eiffel Tower loomed like an apparition before us. Looped up its sides a message in neon letters was spelled out.
Deux Cent Ans
—two hundred years.

Good lord! I glanced quickly at Wolfgang, who’d started laughing.

“Though I mentioned it myself to you only last week, I’d already forgotten,” he told me. “This year, 1989, is the two-hundredth anniversary of the French Revolution. But 1789 was also the year the new element uranium was discovered by Klaproth in Saxony. He named it after the planet Uranus that another German, Herschel, had discovered with his sister at their observatory in England not ten years earlier. These three events marked the beginning of the destruction of the old aeon your grandfather was speaking of, and Uranus became regarded as the planet governing the new age—the age of Aquarius. I think that’s what Pandora’s manuscripts are all about. Do you see the connection?”

I began to say I didn’t get it—but all at once, I thought I did.

“Prometheus?” I said.

Wolfgang snapped his eyes from the neon lights and stared at me in surprise.

“That’s correct,” he said. “In the myth, Prometheus stole fire from the gods and gave it to men—just as in the coming age, as Dacian Bassarides said, the water-bearer pours out a great life force for mankind. Such gifts often turn out to be curses as much as blessings. In the Prometheus myth, Zeus turned around and gave us Pandora. She opened a box—a jar, actually—and released all the evils into the world. But there are those who don’t think the story of Prometheus and Pandora was totally a myth. I suspect your grandmother Pandora must have been among them.”

“You think the manuscripts Pandora collected told how to make a nuclear pile? Or how to tap into the earth’s energy forces?” I said. “But I understood that her documents were ancient—or at least much older than any modern technology or inventions.”

“Most inventions would be better termed discoveries—or even
re
discoveries,” said Wolfgang. “I don’t know if the ancients had such knowledge, but I do know that there are places on the planet where the components of sustainable chain reactions—radioactive materials, heavy water, other ingredients—exist together naturally. It has often been commented that the Bible and other early texts describe scenes very much resembling atomic explosions—the destruction of Sodom and Gomorrah is only one—just as there are indeed specific spots on the earth’s surface most conducive to Tesla’s power vortices, artificial creation of thunderstorms and ball lightning, and harmonic oscillations. In most of these places, we know that the ancients built monuments, raised standing stones, or left shamanistically significant cave art—well before recorded history.”

“But even if all Pandora’s documents were collected, translated, decoded, deciphered, and understood—what would someone be able to do with the knowledge?” I said in frustration. “Why would it be dangerous?”

“Since I’ve only just glimpsed the documents for a few moments myself, clearly I don’t know all the answers,” Wolfgang said. “But I do know two things. First: the early philosophers from Pythagoras to Plato believed the earth was a sphere suspended in space through equilibrium, and attuned to the music of the spheres. But the details of the power sources themselves were always kept veiled, since they were believed to be a key element of the Mysteries.

“On his deathbed, just before Socrates drank hemlock, he told his disciples that the earth, if viewed from above, resembles ‘one of those balls made of twelve pieces of skin in different colors.’ That is the description
not
of a sphere but of the largest Pythagorean polygon—the dodecahedron, a figure of twelve sides where each face is a pentagon. This was the most sacred form to Pythagoras and the Pythagoreans. They conceived of the earth as a gigantic crystal—today we’d say a ‘crystal set’—a transmitter that harnessed energy from the heavens or the depths of the earth. They thought it could even be used for psychic control on a broad scale if one manipulated these key pressure points. And further, they imagined that the forces within the earth, if properly ‘tuned,’ would vibrate like a tuning fork to harmonic correspondences in the sky.”

“Okay,” I said. “Let’s say the earth really is a gigantic energy grid, as everyone seems to think. Then I could certainly understand why people who were after power would want to get their hands on that hidden map of trigger points. But when it comes to ‘mysteries,’ let’s not forget that Socrates and Pythagoras, despite all the secrets they knew, or maybe because of them, got wiped out by popular demand. Whatever ‘hidden knowledge’ they had certainly didn’t save them in the end.

“Anyway,” I added, “you said there were two things you knew about Pandora’s documents. What’s the second?”

“The second is what Nikola Tesla believed—which wasn’t such a very different picture from what I’ve just described,” said Wolfgang. “He thought the earth contained a form of alternating current that was continually expanding and contracting—at a rate that was difficult but not impossible to measure—rather like the rhythm of breathing, or of a heartbeat. He said that by placing a load of TNT in the right place at the right time—just when a contraction was beginning—he could split the earth itself in pieces ‘as a boy would split an apple.’ And by tapping into this current, this energy grid, he could harness unlimited power. ‘For the first time in man’s history,’ Tesla said, ‘he has the knowledge with which he may interfere with cosmic processes.’”

Holy shit.

Wolfgang looked up at the Eiffel Tower for a moment, its small red beacon at the top nearly lost in the silvery mists. Then he slipped one arm around me as we stood there in silence.

“If Tesla, like Prometheus, gave mankind a new kind of flame,” Wolfgang said, “maybe Pandora’s knowledge will prove to be both the world’s own gift and punishment.”

GOOD AND EVIL

SOCRATES
: You speak of good and evil
.

GLAUCON
: I do
.

SOCRATES
: I wonder if you understand them as I do
.

—Plato,
The Republic

Despite the best of intentions and well-laid plans, I found myself lying in the carved four-poster bed of a Renaissance suite at the Relais Christine making love with Wolfgang all night—or what was left of it—with a passion so intense, so draining, I felt I’d passed the time in the arms of a vampire rather than an Austrian civil servant.

There was a little garden just outside our room. Wolfgang was standing at the French windows looking out on it when I opened my eyes in the morning. His magnificent naked body was outlined by the web of wet black branches with their haze of tender pale green leaves unfurling just beyond the windows. I recalled that first morning in my cellar bedroom, when he’d crawled out of my sleeping bag and turned his back so he could dress—before he came over to kiss me for the very first time.

Well, I was no blushing quasi-virgin any longer: life had certainly seen to that. But I knew that this man who’d driven up my heartbeat—once again, all night long—was still the enigma he’d been when we’d first met, long before I’d learned that he was my cousin. And despite any philosophical observations about spirit and matter, I had to admit that what I’d coveted from Wolfgang was a pretty far cry from spiritual enlightenment. I wondered just what that said about me.

Wolfgang opened the windows that gave onto the garden, then came over and sat on the bed. He pulled down the sheet and ran his hands over my body until I began to tremble again. “You’re so beautiful,” he said.

I couldn’t believe I actually wanted more. “Don’t we have an imminent date for lunch that we really shouldn’t miss?” I forced myself to mention.

“Frenchwomen are always late.” Licking my fingers, he regarded me meditatively. “It’s something in the air—an exotic, erotic perfume you exude that makes me somehow wild. Yet I always feel it’s illusion, that we’re wrapped in a magical smoky veil that no one must penetrate, or the spell will be broken.”

It was a fair description of how I felt myself: there’d been an air of unreality about us from the beginning, an illusion so powerful it often seemed dangerous.

“It’s just past nine o’clock,” Wolfgang whispered, his lips hovering at my breast. “We can skip breakfast—can’t we?—if we’re having an early lunch.…”

Les Deux Magots is one of the most famous cafés in Paris. It was once the favorite rendezvous of the literati as well as the underground—two groups that, in France, had often boasted the same membership. Everybody from Hemingway to de Beauvoir and Sartre had hung out there. And apparently also Zoe Behn.

As we crossed the square of Saint-Germain-des-Prés, its sculpted chestnut trees already coming into bloom, Wolfgang pointed her out, seated alone at a corner table in the sunny, glass-walled outdoor solarium that gave onto the open plaza. We entered through the restaurant, past the famous wooden statues, the two
magots
. These Oriental figures in their robes of blue and green and gold, surrounded by gilded mirrors, hovering on thrones high above the bar, seemed like Elijahs swept from the streets of Paris up to heaven in chariots of fire.

We went out to the glassed-in terrace. As we crossed to Zoe, I studied this woman, my infamous grandmother, of whom so many scandalous things had been said and written over so many years. She might be eighty-three, but as she sat there sipping her glass of bubbly, it seemed the life she’d lived—lavish with wine, men, and dance—hadn’t served her at all badly. She sat “tall in the saddle,” as Olivier would say, with a proud bearing that complemented fine unweathered skin and the remarkable French braid of snowy hair that fell nearly to her waist. The strength revealed in her face recalled Laf’s comment that as a child she’d had all the self-containment of Attila the Hun.

When we reached her corner table, she studied me with intense aquamarine eyes—a shade somewhere between Wolfgang’s turquoise and my mother’s famous “ice blue” ones. Wolfgang presented me to her formally, pulled out a chair, and seated me when Zoe nodded. She addressed Wolfgang, her English lightly flavored with a mixture of accents, never taking her eyes from me.

“The resemblance is truly remarkable,” she told him. “What must Dacian’s reaction have been the first time he saw her!”

“At first he found it difficult to speak,” Wolfgang admitted.

“I don’t mean to be rude,” Zoe told me. “You must understand, Pandora was unique. Now that she’s dead, it’s startling to encounter someone who is almost her incarnation down to the finest detail. You’ve done well, having avoided most of your family all these years. Seeing this amazing replica of Pandora on a more regular basis, we might all have had to resort to taking salts or drinking something stronger than champagne! She was something powerful to be reckoned with, I can tell you.”

For the first time, she smiled, and there was a glimpse of that languid sensuality she’d been renowned for—an attribute, as I recalled, that for nearly four decades had brought nobles and magnates to their knees, spilling riches at her feet.

“Were you very close to my grandmother?” I asked. Then, remembering that Zoe was
also
my grandmother, I said, “I mean—”