Tesla (33 page)

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Authors: Vladimir Pistalo

BOOK: Tesla
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The next day, he could not turn down an invitation to dinner. The children took another ride in his carriage. Little Owen stuck his tongue out at the passersby and his sister rebuked him. Tesla had not stopped in at Lexington Avenue for a long time, so their late-evening encounter turned out to be quite pleasant. Robert laughed more than Katharine. His laughter slowly became tipsy. Imagine, little Owen had already started asking logical questions: Do blind people dream in color? How come animals are on islands? After they all laughed, the three of them suddenly fell silent, and each of them gazed at something over their glasses. Then Katharine went to another room, came back, and said, “I’ll read one of Robert’s unpublished poems to you.”

In her sonorous voice, she read brilliantly, with controlled emotion. The title was “Premonitions.” To Tesla, the glow of the candles on her face was much more interesting than the poem:

Omens that were once but jest

Now are messengers of fate;

And the blessing held the best

Cometh not or comes too late…

CHAPTER 67

A Hole in the Gut

The destruction of Nikola Tesla’s laboratory

and all of the amazing objects it housed is much more

than a single man’s loss. It’s a global disaster.

New York Sun
, March 13, 1895

“Fire!” someone shouted into his face as soon as he opened the door.

He threw a tailcoat over his naked body and flagged down a careening cab. Sparks flew under the horse’s hooves. He huddled in the carriage, which had never been washed except by rain—the thing reeked of tobacco. It was even earlier than the hour when he heard about Szigety’s death. Five in the morning! The clatter of the hooves pounded into his brain. As soon as he opened the cab’s door, soot mingled with his hair.

In front of him, a policeman stood with his legs apart. “Stop!”

Tesla pushed him aside and rushed up the stairs of the gutted building.

Oil and black water. Melted machinery.

He emerged, his lungs irritated.

He almost passed out.

A layer of ash and soot coated the surrounding walls.

“Burned down!” he uttered, his mouth stiff.

An old woman scratched her face. Someone died in the fire. Two stories collapsed and his machinery crashed from the fourth to the second floor.

He gaped in disbelief. It felt completely unreal—
everything
was there.

His personal museum. Papers and notes. Machines.

He had once lost his memory. Now he lost the memory embodied in things.

One of the most interesting spots in the world went up in smoke like a burned offering. This was where his guests used to have drinks floating in the amoeboid blue, waiting for the phantom hands to touch them.

All the things he worked on in that place!

Vivekananda once jokingly compared him to the many-armed Shiva.

With one arm, he worked on what would later be called X-rays. That was gone now! With another arm, he dealt with what would later become robotics. Gone! With a third arm, he endeavored to produce liquid oxygen. Gone as well. He also worked on the steam dynamo that turned steam into electricity and produced an additional therapeutic effect. That too dissolved into thin air. The iridescent lamp in its experimental phase. Destroyed. He and Koloman Czitó had already exchanged wireless messages between the laboratory and the Hotel Gerlach, thirty blocks away. They were just about to send another message from the Gerlach to a steamboat on the Hudson.

“Was the laboratory insured?” That was the first thing they asked him.

He looked at Czitó and shook his head no.

“Why?”

“Just like life, it had a value, not a price.”

A rosy smile spread across the eastern sky. As the unstoppable dawn broke through, Tesla’s friends found him. Their eyes were bloodshot from the smoke and lack of sleep.

Czitó contacted Tesla’s biographer, Martin, who in turn informed the Johnsons.

“How did it happen?” Martin asked voicelessly.

How? In New York, tenements burned like matchsticks. People cooked glue and tanned hides in their rooms. Someone could have knocked over a lamp.

“Is it possible that there was a short circuit in the laboratory?” Martin asked.

Tesla shrugged his shoulders and said frankly, “Yes.”

A short circuit was indeed possible. If so, he was indirectly responsible for the death of the family on the third floor.

Katharine Johnson touched Tesla’s shoulder, at the risk of letting him see her swollen face. “Who did it?” she asked.

Among the diminishing numbers of the Whyos and the growing numbers of the Hudson Dusters, there were many who would poison horses, gouge eyes, or commit arson.

Maybe the shadows of the arsonists grew longer as they fled the scene while the rambunctious flames started to rumble and howl?

Who could have done it?

He looked at the mute scene. Crestfallen firemen packed up their gear.

The gutted ruin smoked and reeked of piss.

The outside cold world and the inside warm world traded places once again. According to a legend, the universe was made from the body parts of a slaughtered monster. Chaos is just under the surface and all things crave promiscuous embrace with each other. The cold replaced the warmth, and the center of the world once more turned into an icy pit.

Tesla felt like a man who had just gone over Niagara Falls in a barrel.

The wind sniffed him as if it did not know him.

How does one act when fate betrays him—one who has been dealt a heavy blow? He does not feel the earth under his feet. He simply puts one foot in front of the other.

Tesla had to stiffen up in order to hold his body together. If the tension in his muscles relaxed even for a minute, the hole in his gut would expand beyond his body, and he would dissolve into the bluish gray dawn.

CHAPTER 68

Even the Soul

The soul is a drunken monkey stung by a scorpion.

 

“I have already written to you a few times, but I haven’t gotten anything back,” his sister Angelina wailed from Petrovo Selo.

“Petrovo Selo,” Tesla whispered. “Where in the world is that?”

“I don’t even know how to start because you won’t drop us a single word,” Marica complained from Rijeka.

Their letters grew yellow in the drawer. The pale man with the thin mustache looked at them. All that animal warmth was so far away.

“It seems like you’ve vanished into the air,” a worried Katharine Johnson wrote. “How have you been?”

In his trance of pain, every step took thought: Turn to the left! Now to the right! He could not do anything automatically and felt a desperate need for what did not exist anymore.

Maybe people set his laboratory on fire.

He walked through the city as if it was a mirage. He repeated Emerson’s words: society always conspires against the humanity of all of its members.

“Where are you?” Katharine asked in every letter.

He crossed the Brooklyn Bridge and stared at the smoking roofs. He went to hear Vivekananda’s lectures on Hinduism, the “mother of all religions,” and on the Buddha’s Four Noble Truths.

“Yes,” Vivekananda explained in his melodious, melancholic voice. “The Buddha took his leave from his faithful charioteer Chandaka with a parable: Flocks alight on the same branch and then fly off in different directions. Clouds gather in the sky and then part. That’s the destiny of all earthly things.”

“Emptiness is the essence of all things,” the almond-eyed sage claimed. “Suffering comes from our desire to turn the transient into the permanent. Birds sing: Everything is temporary. Everything is without essence. There’s not a single person or a place we won’t leave behind. Clutching at certainty keeps us in a state of mental slavery.”

Tesla listened to him with purple shadows in his eyes. What he heard scared and soothed him at the same time.

Bushes and coaches shook in the wind that carried papers high above the roofs. Brooklyn banged, growled, and gloated around him. Tesla took a look through the window and was crushed by the merciless poetry of the streets.

“A person who doesn’t believe in himself is an atheist.” The teacher with a small, shapely nose smiled. “Faith summons our inner divinity. When a man loses faith in himself, he dies.”

While elevated trains rumbled and shook the building, Vivekananda sighed with confidence. “He is great who turns his back on the world, who rejects all things, who has control over his passions, and who craves peace.”

Those words were a balm to Tesla, who always had problems with other people’s reality.

While the whole of New York wondered where Tesla was, he spent time with Vivekananda, which was like spending time with no one.

During their long, shoreless afternoons in Brooklyn, Tesla and Vivekananda talked in metaphors. Tesla told him things he had never told anyone—how, as he dealt with delirious joy when light flooded his forehead, the world disappeared, and God talked to him in the language of angels—that is, in forms.

The quixotic scientist and the stocky sage realized how much they had in common. Vivekananda preached a lifelong restraint of any form of sexual energy. His mother had to lock him in whenever beggars passed by their house.

“Take pity, my children, take pity on the poor, the ignorant, the oppressed…,” the swami told his disciples.

He could quote page after page from his favorite book, an encyclopedia, and repeat verbatim what he heard just twice.

Tesla’s memory was equally disconcerting. Even the depths of their eyes were similar.

They talked within the fluctuating, fluid, inconstant world.

“There’s not a single person or a place we won’t leave behind,” Vivekananda repeated. “One day, Mr. Tesla, you will even leave yourself behind.”

Faces, mountains, and granite houses change just like clouds, only at a much slower pace.

In the never-ending weaving and unraveling of the world, everything evaporates—objects, bodies, and even that wispy star which we feel in our bosom.

Even the soul.

CHAPTER 69

Days of 1896

But this isn’t the whole story—that would not be fair.

Constantine Cavafy, “Days of 1896”

“Have you seen him recently?” Stanford White asked the Johnsons.

“No.”

“I left a message at the hotel,” the round-eyed Martin sighed.

“And?”

“Nothing.”

The assistants George Scherff and Czitó crossed their arms and declared that they had no clue.

The whole city wondered: “Where is he?”

Nikola felt like he was underwater or behind a looking glass. He felt like a man with a wig made of rain.

Where was he?

A Girl

A girl in a skirt made of her grandma’s curtain fed her doll on Mulberry Street. When she finished, she put her doll aside and, sitting in front of her tenement, stared at the street split by a shadow.

Her father knew Hasidic blessings for lightning, the scent of a flower, and a new dress. At yeshiva, he spent his time with an ornery Lithuanian. As soon as they met each other, they started to quarrel—if not about Maimonides, then about Rabbi Nachman.

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