Tesla (32 page)
Authors: Vladimir Pistalo
Alas, our heroine was always in a state of excitement. Her refreshing manner—in her circle—was a mistake. Even her aunt once asked her, “Kate, are you insane?”
Robert Underwood Johnson admired his wife’s “temperament.” He simply smiled and let her voice her opinions. The more she pushed her ideas, the “odder” she appeared.
“Thinking has been considered bad manners since the beginning of time,” her tactful husband consoled her.
Robert insisted that women understood life’s limitations better than men. Katharine did not. Like her cat, Saint Ives, she constantly stalked something invisible. She was suffocating. She felt guilty because she was not completely happy. She wanted to
break through to the other side of air—uninhabited and uninhabitable.
The loss of youth tormented her. She craved something really great, and a pleasant, reasonable life was not necessarily great.
“Don’t be so selfish,” her sister told her.
Katharine blindly groped for something—some hidden miracle.
“Like what?” her other sister asked.
The roses Tesla brought thundered on the table.
Newspapers wrote about him. Reporters did not fail to notice Nikola’s eyes, which “turned blue from thought” and his “long thumbs, which indicated great intelligence.” The extremely tall, lanky man who weighed less than 150 pounds was almost pure spirit. That “spirit” appeared “almost shy” and “his suits fit him well.”
In her dream, he once gave her fig blossoms, though fig blossoms do not exist. She dreamed that he touched her with his unusually long thumbs, the signs of his great intelligence. This hatched the lines:
Curiosity led to the worst kind of lewdness
,
So the soul was shocked, while dreaming of purity
,
To find itself fingering the celestial underwear
Which Jesus had once donned to conceal his nudity.
She dreamed of him dressed only in light.
That eel-like body! What a waste! He bathed himself all his life like he bathed the dead!
Was the torch of nubility lit in her loins?
The roses thundered on the table.
She learned that Tesla had almost drowned, lost his memory, ran from wolves, fallen into boiling water—in short, that he had always been on the verge of exhaustion and catastrophe.
“How fragile his life is!” she told Robert with tenderness.
“I’m invisible! Invisible!” she whispered like a little girl.
Because she could see him, the way no one could see her.
Tesla feared the germs that crawled along people’s hands and hearts. Warm and cold love fought within him. All that human exchange and all that animal warmth were so removed from the cold flame in the heart of the world.
“He’s so guileless,” Katharine went on. “He’s a little scary.”
Katharine knew that innocence characterized mediums, those who could move between the material and spiritual worlds. She noticed that Tesla could not pass a beggar without giving him something. She marked his excruciating, insightful stare as well as his awareness, which was raised to a level of pain. She perceived the elements of boyish playfulness, extravagance, and humor within him. She saw that he enjoyed bewitching those he spoke to. But she was also the only one to realize that, as a human being, he was somehow frozen and unfinished. Horrified, in his eyes she spotted the point where electricity and ice converged. She saw a man who lived in another world as well as in this one. His spiritual yet wily smile said, “I’m here, but I’m not!”
God filled her mouth with laughter on those days—which birds often made even more joyful—when the three of them went picnicking.
The roses thundered on the table.
Tesla and the Johnsons watched as their friend Ignacy Paderewski shook his lion’s mane above the torrents of Chopin. They went to the Metropolitan, sometimes in the company of the big-nosed Joseph Jefferson and sometimes with chiseled-faced Marion Crawford, and listened to the tenor and the soprano voices intertwine like flames and dry grass. “When we become one with music we have the profoundest experience of reality,” Schopenhauer whispered in Katharine Johnson’s ear (which could completely fit into Robert’s mouth). In their box, Tesla exchanged whispers with Robert about their translations of Serbian poetry. Behind the scene, the singers hummed, practicing the lines by the wise Venetian Lorenzo da Ponte, which Mozart wrapped in a cloud of enchanting music.
Katharine stole occasional glances at Tesla. Once a week, she sent invitations to that man with the absentminded smile: “Come meet Baron Kanek… Helen Hunt Jackson and Senator George Hurst. Come meet Ann Morgan… Come!”
Why could not people live according to their values rather than according to their humiliating and obnoxious needs? Was that fair? Should she be deprived of the most generous aspect of her being? Of her ultimate self? Of sincerity? Of warmth? Why should this thirsty weakness punish her for being herself? Longing ripped her insides apart. She felt like a diver holding her breath and knowing that she would drown if—right now! Right now!—she did not surface. She felt like someone completely naked, freezing in the snow. If she did not find warmth—right now!—her heart would break from the cold. She could not endure it anymore. Treacherous tears, help a weak human being!
God, why didn’t you make us self-sufficient—we are always hungry and thirsty, men craving women, women craving men!
The red curtain flew to the left and to the right. The stage swam in light and Ferrando started to sing:
My Dorabella couldn’t
Do such a thing.
The Heavens made her
As faithful as she is beautiful.
Guglielmo responded to him:
My Fiordiligi
Could not betray me
As her constancy
Matches her loveliness.
CHAPTER 65
The Ice Palace
Peter the Great made fun of his unfortunate niece Anna of Kurland on the very day of her wedding. Soon after her wedding, she was left a widow.
Anna spent her youth far away from the capital, in the rainy Baltics. When that thin-lipped, gray-skinned woman returned to St. Petersburg as the empress, she did little to dispel her reputation as a sadist.
The expression on Tesla’s face became pained. With quick strokes of his pen, he added:
Anna ordered her servants to build her a palace of ice.
I don’t know whether they cut the ice from the Neva or from the Finnish lakes
—Nikola Tesla admitted—
but I know that it took them weeks to bring the blocks to the building site through the crystal, biting frost. Workers with pickaxes and architects with wigs swarmed around the growing walls of ice. Wind and string instruments celebrated the completion of the palace. Infernal fireworks splashed the windows and turrets in light. The cupolas, the pillars, the balustrades, the staircases, the chandeliers were made of ice. The blind statues were of ice. The rows of shining rooms were made of ice.
Nikola sighed.
Anna ordered a servant and a court maid to marry and to spend a night in the icy palace, on a bed of ice.
The shadow of a smile disappeared from Tesla’s face. His sneering lips froze. His eyebrow trembled. He went on with masochistic cruelty:
In my dream, those two wore our faces.
The bed was biting. The bed stuck to our backs.
With soft clinks, the endless glimmers of the ice palace multiplied.
We stared into each other’s eyes and shivered.
Did we shiver from passion? Did Death clutch us with her diamond fingers?
The palace seduced us with its shimmerings.
We breathed in unison.
We exhaled smoke.
The translucent furniture was made of ice.
The bed and its canopy were made of ice.
My splayed arms were blue.
Your eyes were like silver bugs.
Your hair was gray with a powder of ice.
You looked at me with a smile of ghostly joy.
We could hear the crackling of the wedding fireworks.
“If I speak human and angelic languages, but have no love…” sopranos sang.
My hair was full of snowdust.
Outside, the strings’ sad music was dying.
I dreamed I was a servant and you a maid and that we were spending a night on a bed of ice.
CHAPTER 66
Pulse! Pulse!
Take my advice,
and never try to invent anything but—happiness.
Herman Melville
“I can’t love any man without feeling sorry for him,” Katharine said.
Where had Nikola heard those words before?
“Why?” he asked, trying to remember.
“Because he’s a human being. Because he will die. Because he doesn’t know what life is, just like I don’t.”
It was an afternoon in October when they met at the
Century
office. Robert was in a meeting with Custer’s widow; he planned to publish a book about her husband. So Nikola walked Katharine to Central Park.
“What a wonderful day,” she told him. “The sky is so blue that I feel completely blue inside.”
They strolled through the yellow and auburn of the Indian summer. They could not help feeling the sweetness of the air and the joy of taking it in. Self-important velocipedists rode through the park. Gravel murmured and acorns crunched under their tires. Squirrels chased each other under the trees and across the merry lawns. A gust of wind splashed the path with yellow and red leaves.
“That sunlit bench is waiting for us,” Katharine pointed.
Tesla addressed her with a feminine tenderness. He raised his finger. “Look at the squirrels,” he said.
A squirrel made three wavy hops and then froze in front of the bench. The next moment, its tail was where its head used to be. Following at the heels of another squirrel, it shot up the tree trunk. Then they chased each other over and across thin branches, flicking their tails.
“The rhythms, the rhythms,” Katharine murmured.
The whole world was threaded with sunshine. The sun was in the corner of her mouth and her eyes.
Black and blue smudges alternated on the surface of the lake. Some ducks ate with their shimmering bills by the shore. Other floated asleep.
Heraclitus’s invisible flame enveloped the world. Was not Moses’s burning bush just the most notable symbol of that world?
Pulse, pulse—the reflection of the sun from the lake repeated, intertwined with their eyelashes.
Bees sang to the glory of the creator of buzzing.
Bees are great buzzers.
Our mystic-scientist merged with the hypnotic repetitiveness of the sunny day.
Pulse! Pulse!
Tesla felt the whole world oscillating around him. He watched the undulations of the lake and the trees; he watched the pulsating smile on her face.
“All things, from the sun to the human heart, are but oscillations at a certain frequency,” he mused on his favorite subject.
And peace? Peace was the equilibrium of different tremblings.
He knew it. She felt it too.
Katharine sat with her mouth pursed and her nose narrowed. She was focused. Her knuckles whitened on her clenched fists.
“Is there anything more beautiful than the bottomless whirlpool of these treetops in the wind?” she asked, excited.
They looked each other straight in the eye and then past each other. Finally, they fell silent. They did not know how long they were quiet. She came back first.
“Are we still in the same spot?” she asked as she brushed a nonexistent speck off of her shoulder.
“We flow, we flow like water,” said he.
“We flow, we flow like clouds,” she responded.