Tesla (16 page)

“And why are you two going to America?” Tesla asked Baćić and Cvrkotić.

“Because our entire village has just one comb,” Cvrkotić laughed humorlessly.

As they explained what made them undertake such a trip, they used the words “there isn’t” in various combinations. There isn’t enough for the kids. There isn’t enough for the old. There’s no money to pay taxes.

“Why are you going?” they asked him.

It took Tesla a day to get used to his cabin. All night he was awake listening to the throb of the engines.

When their ship, ominously named the
Saturnia
, sailed out into the open sea, all the upper decks were filled with excitement. An old French woman prayed for the souls of the drowned. Mothers hung linen along the rails to dry. The ship started to rock. A child began to cry inconsolably, and the captain suggested that throwing him overboard would be the most expedient course of action.

The morning started with pouring rain. The hiss of waves muffled its sound. That day, Tesla did not go out on the deck. He was in the salon, talking to the captain. Claude Rouen invited the young engineer to lunch. The captain drank like tired people do after work and asked his guest about the possibility of using phones on ships. At dinner, a Scottish engineer insisted that in the old days traveling by sail was much nicer. The irritable wife of a banker from Lyon gave hushed advice to her ugly daughter, who looked like an ostrich. A Czech violinist, who cherished hopes of a job at the New York Opera, was there as well. He harped on spiritualism, a topic that did not interest Tesla in the least.

“There’s a waterfall that divides this world from the other,” the Czech explained to the ostrich girl.

At breakfast, he again talked about the photographs of spirits and dreams, and of the imprints of “hands” in beeswax.

“Have you heard of the ghost songs that the spiritualist Monsieur Jaubert, who’s also the top judge in Carcassonne, collected?”

“No!” Tesla cut him off and left.

He gave up on the “educated class” and decided to spend more time among the “dangerous class,” that is, with Stevan Prostran and the men from Lika.

“When I saw the ocean for the first time, it was like I had always known it,” Prostran confided to Tesla on the windy deck.

Tesla was freezing on the ship because he had not brought enough warm clothes. And yet, he brought a book of his poems and the blueprints for his flying machine. Most of the people who had berths were French from Alsace. Two bright-eyed women gazed out in the distance. They were picture brides, traveling to meet their unknown husbands. Baćić twirled his mustache in their presence. Prostran gazed with frightened eyes—one minute he was delighted about his American prospects, and the next he was horrified by them. The travelers prayed to the gods of yesterday to help them tomorrow in America. A group of Basques stood guard by their bundles. There were also some Italians from Nice and even a few families of Polish Jews. “Vagabonds who throw their lives around like dice,” is how Polyphemus described Odysseus and his shipmates.

On the third day, the rain stopped but the wind still raged. The ship rose and plunged into the waves. Many passengers were seasick. The stench in the hold was deadly. The sailors forced the people up on deck, where the wind slashed their ears. And yet, someone pulled out an accordion the size of a hand. Another man accompanied him on a comb. Tesla thought they would play a melancholy tune in which everything was lost forever before it even began. But they played a jolly one. Dancers’ heels started to click on the boards. Some women began to sing in their duck-like voices. The passengers swirled in the wind. Baćić and Cvrkotić did not dance—they twirled their mustaches as they stood close to the picture-brides from Alsace. The girls lowered their eyes. The sailors grinned and busied themselves around the women. Each wild tar was a suitor for a Penelope donning a head scarf. One of them grabbed a girl from Alsace around the waist. Baćić shoved him away. More sailors with wild grins on their faces rushed to their friend’s aid. It was such a pleasure to beat on helpless rabble! But this time it was different.

“Hit ’em!”

“Take that!”

An all-out fight broke out on the ship. Several noses got broken. After the incident, Captain Rouen stopped inviting Tesla to eat with him.

With hollow gazes, the passengers gawked at the dazzling sky above and the white void in the direction of America. Something drew a crowd of caps and head scarves to the deck. After he cleared his throat by way of introduction, a gimpy Basque told them a story that belonged to all nations—the old story about truth:

A day before they reached their destination, flocks of terns appeared.

“The seagulls are back too!” someone exclaimed.

At last they saw the harbor. Thousands of columns of smoke rose above thousands of roofs. Just before sunset, objects responded to the sunlight with their own inner light. Redbrick buildings glowed most beautifully. All the languages of Babel and the universal language of crying babies were silenced at the sight of the harbor.

All the passengers on the deck rose to their feet to see. Each pauper was an epic hero, each an Aeneas. The American wind licked their faces. The seagulls reeled above their heads.

The granite faces of Baćić and Cvrkotić, and the frightened face of Stevan Prostran, were turned toward the dark contours of Manhattan. The people of the world gazed on America—those for whom someone waited at the dock and those who had nobody there, those who would go back and those who would never return.

“Jesus, Joseph, and Mary, where are we?” a woman whispered.

The lice-infested crowd smelled like village life. They were frightened but brave. They desired what they feared.

Manhattan!

That’s where Uncle Jules sleeps on a mattress and eats meat and white bread every day, like a millionaire. Nothing is the same there, Mother. Nothing is the same there, Father. People’s backs break from work there. Even maids have maids there.

The saddest eyes beheld Manhattan with hope, trepidation, and helplessness: This is too big. This is destiny.

CHAPTER 33

The Light of the Mortals

During the trip, sleepless Tesla often watched the morning star open the gate of night, the rosy fingers of dawn touch the ocean, and Helios, the light of the mortals, start his daily journey in his chariot.

Tesla constantly imagined his first meeting with the divine Thomas Edison, the only man in the world who could understand him. Like a spider on a golden thread, Edison descended from the sky and the two of them engaged in endless conversations.

“Good morning!” Tesla shouted into the void above the waters.

The ocean whispered and everything in it responded. Beneath Tesla and the keel of the
Saturnia
, the “uncataloged creatures of the deep” undulated.

One day, our voyager cajoled the sea: “You proud white-capped sea, you!”

Another day he said: “You that heave and roll forever.”

“You cold, fish-full sea. You inhuman sea,” he cried out like Homer.

In the space between the two worlds, Tesla looked around. He grabbed the rail and stared at the line between the sky and the ocean. At times he lost his sense of self and imagined the eternal blue around him to be his soul.

With his binoculars, he scanned the watery realm they entered and, naturally, it could appear to him that… what? In each wave there seemed to bob the head of a lone swimmer. Sometimes the swimmer disappeared from view, only to resurface, arms stroking against the waves.

Who?

Who was following the ship? The dual circles of the binoculars merged into a single spot and framed a face. Tesla recognized him. It was Dane, his brother, who had long since drowned in the ocean of time.

Many years ago, Tesla learned how to deal with phenomena as enormous as death. He started to whisper because God hears best the whispered word.

“Let me go!” he silently and hopelessly pleaded. “Please, let me go!”

The phantom in the joined circles of the binoculars steadily gained on him. The tilt of the head and the consistency of the strokes told Tesla:

I will never leave you, my brother!

CHAPTER 34

The Deaf Man’s House

Tesla disembarked from the boat in New York. The city itself held no interest for him. He immediately sought out Edison’s laboratory through the maze of avenues and streets.

“Here we are!” He congratulated himself as he knocked on the door.

At the laboratory, people were busy constructing the gate to fairyland, the hat that makes you invisible, love potions…

Ah!

Cameras for thoughts, peepholes into the future, stethoscopes for internal music…

Ah!

It was here that the electric bulb started to flicker.

It was here that a human voice first spoke from a machine.

God’s creative work continued in this lab—it was carried on through the efforts of the Inventors.

This was the navel of the world, the quiet eye of the vortex.

Out there, raucous New York growled and bilked. Edison felt at home in New York, like a fish in water. He was the fish-wizard, the fish-king!

Drowning in debt, the wizard was constantly on the move—he stalked rich clients and bribed newspapermen in Manhattan. Hemp fibers littered his sawdust-strewn floors. Engines hummed in his workshops, manufacturing parts for other engines. The corridors smelled of black oil and were always full of people. Two young men with unkempt hair—the louder one was called Connelly—got into a dispute and insisted that their boss declare the winner. In front of the door, a businessman from Astoria checked his gold watch.

“He’ll see you now,” the wild-haired Connelly said, acting like a secretary and pushing Tesla inside.

With the finest smile on his face and four cents in his pocket, Tesla walked through the fateful door. Who cared about Milutin Tesla? His true father—the most famous scientist in the world—awaited him behind this door! In a few moments, Edison would recognize him as a great man and a kindred soul.

A fan turned slowly on the ceiling. The office was cluttered. A likable boy with a hat on his head looked out from a silver-framed daguerreotype.

The biography of that barefaced boy read like the life of a saint. He began his career selling newspapers on trains between places named Port Huron and Detroit, and ended up selling light to the City of Light.