Tesla (24 page)

“Westinghouse tells us,” he continued with the trembling chin of a tragic hero, “that his kind of electricity is easy to transport long distances. Anything that easy can’t be good. Is that electricity safe? Is it safe?” The speaker surprised himself with his own question. “We’ll see in a second!”

At the Mad Hatter’s signal, a curtain lifted and revealed Tesla’s frightening coils.

The dog, bound by leather straps, whined at the sight.

“Igor, please!” the professor commanded in his operatic voice.

Smiling slyly, the hunchback Igor checked the wires attached to the dog and winked at the bearded lady.

“Pull the lever!”

The bearded lady pulled the lever.

Hissing and sparking merged with the dog’s pitiful wails. To the audience, it seemed that all was smoke and the smell of burning flesh. The professor bent over the carcass of the short-lived animal and announced, “It was
Westinghoused!
”

Rouge glowed on the cheeks of the hunchback Igor, the grinning professor, and the bearded lady as they blinked their rounded eyes. They laughed maliciously, held each other’s hands, and bowed before the audience.

CHAPTER 49

Put the Hands in Jars of Water

The night before the event, anyone interested in the Kemmler case could not sleep peacefully. The prison guard Durston reported that all those in attendance were nervous without exception.

Someone tried to talk, but his voice failed him. The ominous sound of footsteps echoed in the stone corridor.

The Mad Hatter, Igor, and the bearded lady were not present in the death chamber.

William Kemmler, the grocer who butchered his wife in Buffalo, came in. He was composed.

“Gentlemen,” he said, “I wish you luck… I just want to say that much of what has been said about me isn’t true. I’m bad enough. It’s cruel to make me worse than I am.”

He sat on the electric chair without hesitation, as if he wanted to rest. They made him stand up again and cut a hole in his clothes at the base of his spine so that the electrical lead could be attached to his skin.

“Do it right,” he said.

The guards attached the electrical leads to his head. The doomed man looked hideous under the leather straps that partly covered his face.

“Is it ready?” he asked.

No one answered.

Kemmler lifted his eyes to catch a ray of sunshine that danced into the chamber of death.

“Good-bye, William!” the prison guard Durston said. There was a click. The man in the chair rose to his feet. Every single muscle in his body was stretched to the limit. Had he not been strapped to the chair, the electrical shock would have thrown him across the room. They pulled the lever back. Everyone felt relieved. And then they looked at Kemmler in horror.

“Merciful God, he’s still alive,” Durston realized.

“Turn the electricity back on,” someone else gasped.

“Kill him, for God’s sake! Let’s finish this…”

Kemmler’s chest kept rising and falling.

Dr. Spitzka commanded: “Electricity, again!”

There was another click, like before, and the body of the doomed man in the chair stiffened again. However, this time the dynamo failed to work properly. Loud electrical cracks were heard. Blood appeared on the wretch’s face. Kemmler was sweating blood. As the horror peaked, they noticed that the hair and flesh around the electrodes were singed and roasted. The stench was unbearable.

I Only Skimmed Over

CHAPTER 50

Through Our Sister Bodily Death

Like Lightning I come, and like the Wind I go,

In Paradise you’ll meet me happy again, I know.

Ferdowsi

Lately, life had become repetitive to Szigety—it tasted like a honeycomb that had lost its sweetness. In addition to his gloomy assistant Gano Dunn, Szigety hired the Hungarian Koloman Czitó because the man spoke his language. Szigety lived in a fine apartment next to Gramercy Park. His landlord was a spoiled drunk who beat his wife.

“If you need someone to take care of,” Szigety said, annoyed by the woman’s timid attitude, “you’d better take care of yourself first.”

“Sir, why don’t you take care of
yourself?
” she replied, trembling.

For some time, Szigety had quit doing squats with barbells. His honey-colored hair was sweaty and his skin was oily. He grew burly and, being stocky, seemed shorter. His natural outbursts of joy became less frequent. He complained of migraines: “If you only knew how it flashes through my head!”

Tesla did not hear him. Kemmler’s death shook the very foundations of his world.

“I’m bad enough,” the electrocuted man kept repeating in a windy voice. “It’s cruel to make me worse than I am.”

“Progress is your God,” Milutin Tesla’s voice outshouted Kemmler’s complaints. “But Progress doesn’t discriminate—it advances evil as well.”

Nikola was doubly shocked because it appeared that Father was correct. He remembered Uncle Branković’s vanities. For the first time in Nikola’s life, Progress showed him the putrid side of its face.

Edison killed. With Tesla’s hand.

“Prometheus sacrificed so much only for Nero to get hold of his fire,” Tesla raved.

But all of that was just his “personal life.” As usual, he had no time for reflection.

Kemmler’s wretched phantom moaned once more and finally left Tesla’s dreams. Resorting to sheer willpower, our hero donned his professional blinders again. In collaboration with the soft-eyed Martin, he wrote the story of his life; he also finished patents for Westinghouse as well as two new types of iridescent lamps.

The force propelled Tesla on, tirelessly.

Antal lagged behind. Yet each time an envious thought entered his head, the Hungarian returned it like an unopened letter to wherever such thoughts came from.

He had aural hallucinations of Hungarian being spoken in the streets. He started to frequent the restaurant with the hammer dulcimer that he had initially found boring. Budapest became a mythic city. There, violins twittered like birds, and the upright bass thudded like a huge animal. There, peasant carts, colorful like gingerbread houses, rolled on in the shadows of streetcars.

But… But… But… To go back would be a defeat. So what now?

Leaves buried his quiet neighborhood near Gramercy Park. The green and yellow smudges combined into a mosaic. He started to see his nice apartment as a trap. In it, he hummed beautiful suicidal songs. In it, he devoted himself to the practice of hara-kiri by self-pity.

“Everyone likes to be forgiven for something,” he said, his blond mustache curled in a smile.

To Tesla, work equaled rest. Szigety needed a lot of rest after work—the rest, which, in fact, was tiresome, since he overindulged in it. During the day, he and Tesla discussed the relationship between the structure of ether, electricity, matter, and light.

In the evening, inertia sank its claws into Antal Szigety, emptied him and started living in his place. Aphrodite sent him the goddess Atë, who made his heart seasick and full of black madness. He tried to restrain the fury that raged inside his body. A satyr’s smile started to form on his lips. Debauchery was his duty. He was in the power of tidal forces. God reshaped him into an incarnation of greed and slipped him off the hook of reason. Like Tannhäuser long ago, Szigety rushed helplessly toward the hell of pleasure. Whenever he entered a brothel, took off his jacket, and felt a woman run her fingers through his hair, he released a deep sigh.

This shameful capitulation became sweet relief.

He was still enthralled by the inner slickness of women. The girls, who had known all meridian of dicks, assured him that his was special. The laughter of whores was like the crackling of thorns under a cauldron. Szigety brought a top hat full of roses for his girl Nellie. He passed his palm over her cheeks and mouth. He gave her his finger to suck. He drowned in her tits and silk. He wrinkled her unsqueezable feminine roundness and waited for the orgasm to place him in the center of the world.

Szigety became a devotee of the naked cancan to which the late Paddy Maloney tried to drag Tesla. Soon after returning from Pittsburgh, he became an expert on New York brothels, both the well appointed and the cheap.

Garters. Lacy gossamer lingerie. Nestling. Legs in stockings on his shoulders. Eruptions of white. The curvature of loins enfolding his fingers. Trembling roundness. Tightness. Penetrating and banging. Embracing the mounds. Possessing. Lascivious weasels. Gyrating sluts. Spasms to the last ounce of strength. Smooching and goosing. Smacking and licking, pinching and biting. Pounding the peg home and squeezing. Recoiling and submitting, dissolving in affluence and sensuality. Innings and outings. Grinding. Passionate howling. Swallowing and cooing. Giving and breaking and panting.

It helped him survive.

Before, Antal had resorted to hot baths, shadowboxing, and hiking in order to counter his lewd lifestyle. Tesla asked him why he did not work out anymore, and he came up with some feeble anti-American excuses: “There’s no nature in this place.”

“How can that be?” Tesla was annoyed. “There’s more nature here than anywhere else in the world. Just get out of New York.”

Szigety did not go anywhere.

When he opened a bottle of Tokay with Tesla, he became fainthearted. He closed his eyes to see how far he could slide on his drunkenness. Finally he said, “I’ve bluffed away my life.”

“No, you haven’t,” his friend reassured him. “You’ve simply matured without realizing it.”

It appeared that Antal’s body revolted against something his soul refused to acknowledge.

Tesla warned him in the same manner he himself had been warned during his gambling days in Graz: “Slow down.”

That spring, Westinghouse readied himself for the final showdown with Edison. He pressured the creator of his alternating current motor. “Nikola, you must counter their circus performances with a scientific performance of your own.”

Nikola himself was aware of this. He raised his chin, took a deep breath, and saw the golden path. He decided to do what no one had ever done before. He was going to refute Edison’s claim that “alternating current kills” by letting the maelstrom of that same force pass through his own body.

“Do you think I’ll survive?” he asked Szigety.

The expression in Szigety’s blue eyes went from innocent to absentminded to almost dangerous. Finally, he smiled. “You? Yes.
You
will.”

A woman rang his room from the hotel lobby and woke him up. As soon as he went down, she hit him with a cloud of her perfume. She singed him with her burning eyes.

“Please, Mr. Tesla, come with me.”

“Who are you?”

“It’s urgent.” She did not seem to have heard his question.

He entered that kind of place for the first time in his life. Two naked whores played with a balloon, batting it with their noses and then their toes. The interior of the house was mainly white. It smelled of perfume, of lazy femininity, and of fake luxury. The prostitutes who glided around in their lingerie looked like beautiful monsters to Tesla. Their sly eyes were dull. One of them said, “He’s up there.”

Tesla ran upstairs.

It was not Antal. It was a doll.

A very young girl wearing heavy mascara was sitting next to that doll. Tesla and the doctor asked her to leave.