Tesla (20 page)

Paddy played Jewish faro at Chick Tricker’s Fleabag and at McGurk’s Suicide Hall. When he was drunk, he would sometimes visit the black bars and return with a black eye. The foreman called him his “little bull.”

“I lived like that too,” Obadiah Brown said, pointing at the scar on his eyebrow. He felt Paddy’s muscles and said, “You could be a good boxer.”

“Have you ever boxed?” Paddy’s broad face suddenly came to life.

“I had a great uppercut.” The foreman swung his arm.

In the morning, before work, Paddy would puff up his powerful chest. He loved to sing while he worked, and Giovanni subtly joined in with his own tenor. The black Portuguese Joaquim added the bass line. After the song, Nikola sometimes talked about his motor. The workers listened wordlessly and without derision.

Paddy Maloney was a fine fellow when he was sober. When he was drunk, an anger much older than himself spewed out of him. Fuckin’ Limeys. Fuckin’ rain. Fuckin’ heroism. Fuckin’ legends. Fuckin’ life!

“How much sorrow is hidden underneath that anger! How much stupid sorrow!” Tesla murmured.

Once Paddy came to work hungover. He turned away and threw up a little bit on a dirt pile. As soon as he realized where he was, he looked at Giovanni and Roca with scorn: Paddy’s father was born in America, while those two just got off the boat.

Paddy could not stand Roca, and Tesla understood why. The Sicilian kept blabbing about his future oyster boat. He went on talking, but his words were lost amid the sounds of work, the shovels scraping and the picks swinging.

“Spring,” Roca grunted in discontent.

Paddy frowned. “What the hell are you talking about, fatso.” Paddy’s trouble-bent glare bored into Roca’s glowing eyes. The Sicilian glanced at him briefly as he stuck out his lower lip.

“You got a problem?” Paddy had a nasty grin on his face. “Nigger!”

Roca could not match Paddy’s stare and lazily stepped aside.

“I got a problem,” the nephew unexpectedly said.

Giovanotto dropped his pick and straightened up. Paddy turned around quickly. Without a word, he charged forward and immediately took a step back, holding his stomach. He gagged as if he wanted to say something.

“Don’t take the knife out!” Obadiah Brown jumped in. “He’ll bleed to death!”

“Oh my God!” Tesla whispered.

Giovanni stood paralyzed by his decision and its consequence. He appeared calm, almost smiling. With numb feet, he plodded across the space that opened up as they led him away.

Paddy’s amazed eyes took in the world around him for the last time. Then they glazed over, and the images of distant windows froze on them.

CHAPTER 40

The Blind Tiger

After the fight, Nikola and the foreman Brown ended up at a blind tiger. Brown drank rum, and Nikola drank beer. They talked about Paddy’s death and Giovanni’s arrest.

“It’s horrible!” Nikola muttered.

“We live beneath the city,” began the foreman. “My father always told me to make something of myself. And I wouldn’t do it. My brother is an engineer, you know. But I didn’t want to do anything. I just wandered around out West.”

“Oh my God!” Nikola shook his head in disbelief.

“This whole thing stinks. It’s such a fucking American misunderstanding,” Brown had his eyes wide open above his third rum. “That Paddy liked to fight, but he would never use a knife. The other guy, Giovanni, is peaceful, but he would use a knife in a fight. So different rules cancel one another. The bottom drops out because of violence, and people live in hell.”

In the dim light of the illegal tavern, Brown’s hair turned unnaturally yellow.

The waiter took their glasses away and brought new ones. Brown touched the scar on his forehead: “I was in prison. Because of—” He laughed viciously. “Because of whatever happened. But, when you get old—you’ll see for yourself—you start thinking differently.”

Nikola was still in shock.

“Do you remember how they sang together?”

Usually, Obadiah Brown was a man of few words who preferred two mistakes to one explanation. Now he became talkative. Rum number five replaced beer number four.

“As a little kid I had a nanny. I was better in mathematics than my brother. Right now he sits in his office with books stacked to the ceiling. And I live like this,” he pointed at his scar again. “Each Thanksgiving he invites me for turkey as big as a camel. But I don’t go.”

Brown’s face stretched into a derisive smile. He bared his teeth, yellower than his hair, and stared at Tesla. “You told me about your motor. You think I don’t understand. But I do. I went to school. That’s simple—you just leave out that… commutator”—he grimaced as he pronounced the unusual word—“so electrical current is conveyed great distances. Which is what Edison can’t do, right?”

The waiter slammed a mug of beer in front of Tesla and gently placed the rum before Brown. Brown sniffed the rum and winked at Tesla, who was amazed by the man’s recall.

“You don’t need any more of this crap in your life,” Brown passed the verdict. “It has to stop. I’ll introduce you to my brother. He can help you. Even though he can’t help me.”

Ragged apes in bowler hats, whose brains had been stolen by demon rum, jabbered all around them.

“We live in a chasm,” Obadiah Brown made a face. “Beneath the city. At least someone should rise above it.”

Brown staggered out of the bar like a headless chicken, and Tesla thought he would not remember anything the next day.

But the next week Brown showed up with his hair combed down and his ears sticking out. His yellow hair was parted in the middle, and his white scalp showed through. He told Tesla to put on some nice clothes and to follow him.

“Hey, windbag! Come with me.”

For a half hour they strode along in silence toward Upper Manhattan. The walk produced magical results. Garbage disappeared as they advanced. Passersby and shop windows became dignified. Hats grew taller and collars grew furry. At the tails of their crinolines, women dragged whole draperies. At the entrance of the Western Union Telegraph office, there was a doorman with a sash. Instead of driving them off, he smiled and ushered them inside. Alfred B. Brown was the head engineer at Western Union Telegraph.

The brothers briefly embraced at the door. It appeared that Obadiah Brown’s sibling was a kind, somewhat neurotic man. He performed each move with twice as much energy as necessary. With a quick pull, he took out his spectacles and perched them on his nose. His magnified eyes met Tesla’s. “I know who you are,” he said. “I myself have patented a few arc lamps. I remember your lightbulbs from Rahway.”

In that office everything was in its proper place, from the warm oak paneling to the stained glass in the upper part of the window. Every now and then, Brown flashed something—his spectacles, his gold fountain pen, his cigarette case. The smell of cleanliness, Brown’s starched collar, the flash of his cigarette case, and especially his kind disposition were welcoming signs of Tesla’s return to his own long-lost home.

Obadiah Brown spoke first, waving his hands, which were as huge as those of Professor Pöschl. Then Tesla followed with his detailed, quiet explanation, rolling out one blueprint after another. Alfred Brown was listening. At the end, he firmly shook Tesla’s hand. He saw them to the door, patting his brother on the shoulder. The deal instantly brought Tesla a hotel room full of light and several suits in his closet. Brown informed him that he was welcome to work in his lab, and scheduled a meeting with the New Jersey lawyer Charles Peck in a month. (The man’s “maybe,” Brown growled, was worth more than other people’s “yeses.”) Peck was aware that the polyphase system with which Westinghouse had been experimenting was not working as expected. “However, he’s also suspicious about your model,” Brown warned Tesla.

The last Saturday in April brought a sudden drop in temperature and the long-awaited meeting. The starched plastrons of their shirts shone white, and Tesla felt like a swan surrounded by his own kind.

His intensifying leanness surprised all the people present at the meeting.

His squeaky new shoes paced restlessly around Brown’s laboratory. Holding his breath, he had been getting ready for this for weeks. His excitement once again pushed the walls aside. A recently built model of his motor awaited their judgment.

The wrinkles on Charles Peck’s brow looked like musical staves. He was a stunted, competent man. Tesla felt that he could convince such a man but not charm him. Peck glanced at his watch. “Please begin.” He nodded his head with the noticeable absence of a smile.

Tesla smiled and reminded them that the Spanish queen gave Columbus ships when he made an egg stand upright on the table.

“In order to convince you, I built an iron model of the spinning egg.”

Before Peck’s eyes, Tesla turned the switch on and moved the iron egg from his palm into the magnetic field. The egg started to spin, making a loud metallic sound as it loped. As it spun faster, the noise ceased and the egg stood upright, locked in the electric whirlpool.

“You see!” Tesla raised his long fingers.

Peck stopped frowning. His hard eyes flashed, ready to make an immediate decision.

“Send me the blueprint by tomorrow,” he commanded.

It dawned on Tesla that no doorman would ever drive him away from an affluent person’s office again. The ball of golden yarn came back to life, bounced, and once more started to roll on before his feet.

CHAPTER 41

The Transformations of Athena

The turkey was enormous. Alfred Brown carved it with an anxious smile, separating the white meat from the dark. The fragrance of the newly cut flowers on the table engulfed Tesla.

The hostess handed him a glass bowl filled with cooked cranberries.

“Please help yourself.”

Who’s missing here?
Tesla wondered, putting a second spoonful of cranberries on his turkey.

An avid reader of Homer, Tesla recalled that the goddess Athena revealed herself to Odysseus by assuming various forms whenever she wanted to help him. The next day Tesla went to look for Obadiah Brown at the office of the Rapid Transit Company. The people in the office shrugged their shoulders. “He’s gone!” one of them said.

Where did that old cigar chewer go?

Once again, Tesla passed by the churchyard of danger on the corner of Park Row and Mott Street and knocked on Stevan Prostran’s door. The landlady handed him an envelope. In uneven characters, Prostran informed him that he lost his job and had left with a group of Montenegrins for Homestead near Pittsburgh.

Tesla looked for Paddy’s grave but could not find it either. Solitude was thus forced upon him. He felt abandoned to the needle-breaking icy wind. Where had everyone suddenly disappeared to?

Through sheer willpower, he projected a dear figure before his eyes. Djuka Tesla stood in front of him, with a comb in her hand, her hair down, looking so real he could touch her.

“What is this?” her son asked her.

Was everyone’s disappearance the price of fame required by some Mephistophelian contract?

What an expert you are, devil! How subtly you go about your business! How deft is your hand!

In any case, he had no time to think about the people who were close to him. Everything happened quickly, almost impersonally, as if by magic. With a smile and a tear in his eye, he slept little and worked all the time. His work energy was like a snowball that crashed down gathering more snow as it rolled. Months rang by like fire trucks. Cash registers rang. Church bells rang. The change of seasons resounded with the laughter of ever-youthful gods.

He spent his sixteen-hour day without making a single unnecessary move. The wind carried him. Days and months flew by. His hands flew as he worked. His brain waves flew following the music. Thunderbolts flashed. Sparks cracked like whips.

Days had no end.

Nights were just a blink.

CHAPTER 42