Tesla (41 page)

The boy was around thirteen.

“Stevan’s son!”

He had always wanted to find Stevan, who told him “Come!” in the worst year of his life, who brought freshly baked bread in the morning, who saw the ocean for the first time in his life and instantly
knew it.
Tesla had looked for Stevan in Homestead where the air was acidic from smoke.

“Tell me about your father.” Tesla moved closer to the sofa, and the boy smelled violets.

The boy pulled his sleeves over his fingernails. He spoke with the corner of his mouth as he told his story. For a time, Stevan Prostran worked for the Chicago meat industry. Afterward, he went back to coal mining in Pennsylvania.

“What was life like?”

“Ugly, by God.”

From Wilmerding, Pennsylvania, Stevan moved to Saint Louis. There he married a widow. She had kids, her own and her late husband’s.

“Then Pop met some Montenegrins,” Stevan informed Tesla dispassionately. “We went to Utah. He worked in a mine.”

Tesla raised a long finger. A silent waiter from the Waldorf appeared.

“A sandwich and fruit juice,” the famous man whispered.

“You heard of the explosion in Scofield, Utah, dintcha?” the boy asked, unaware of the subtleties of Serbian grammar.

“I have,” Tesla nodded.

“Train full of coffins arrived in town. Pop got shot out of the mine-shaft, so at least we had a body to bury. Some barber turned priest buried him in a Catholic graveyard.”

As if he were on the deck of the
Saturnia
, on which they both had arrived in America, Stevan’s fair-haired countenance appeared right before Tesla’s eyes. The salty wind tried to blow Stevan’s hair away. Fear whispered in one ear and hope in the other. One moment he was thrilled with his future in America, and the next he was horrified.

“In the mine, Pop got all hunched up,” the young Prostran said in a flat voice. “He became a hunchback. We had no idea how to put him in the coffin like that. The barkeep Baćić came up with the idea to use a belt across his chest to straighten him out. We had the vigil in the bar. Two young fellas with sooty faces almost started singin’ one of our songs at the bar…”

A man from Bosnia got up and raised his glass: “To your health, Stevan!”

At that moment, Stevan jerked in the coffin and sat up.

Knocking chairs everywhere, men and women trampled each other trying to get away. They gathered again in front of the bar. There was the smell of the desert. The barkeep cracked the door and took a peek.

The young Stevan told the story about his father as if he did not understand what he was talking about.

“What’s he doing?” the people asked.

“He’s just sitting there.”

Mom wailed loudly: “Alas, what has he done to me!”

Across the concrete circle embedded with silver quarters in the middle of the bar, the barkeep cautiously approached the deceased.

“Be careful, Mijo,” his wife called out.

Everyone heard when he sighed with relief.

“C’mon, people, get over here.”

Tesla came to his senses, rubbed his eyes, and asked Stevan, “What happened?”

“The belt snapped!”

The belt that held him down in the coffin broke, and he—who had spent his entire life hunched over—sat up straight for the last time.

“Pop rebelled only after he died. Then he straightened up, but it was too late.”

The boy continued as if he were talking about someone else’s life: “And so Pop got killed and Mom remarried a widower with kids. That fella used to come home late at night. Mom told him everything I did wrong that day, and he’d wake me up to beat me.

“My late pop bragged about knowing you,” the boy ended his story. “And how you came over on the same boat. Our people talked about you wherever we went. And so…”

The boy told Tesla that he only came to say hello, but it was obvious that he had nothing in the world except his clenched teeth.

“Of course,” Tesla answered the unspoken question.

He arranged with Scherff for the boy to sleep at his place and to later help him in the laboratory. From that day on, Tesla’s friends noticed his “Serbian servant” following him on his way to Wardenclyffe.

CHAPTER 83

Pygmalion

Tesla did not live at Wardenclyffe—in the beginning, there was no place to sleep—but he visited every day. He boarded the Long Island train. He shared his compartment with Ali Baba’s magic basket that Oscar of the Waldorf filled and Stevan Prostran emptied.

It was hard to tell if Tesla’s young companion complained of or bragged about the fact that he had worked hard even as a little child.

“Look,” he boasted, “I can put out a cigarette on the palm of my hand. Want me to show you?”

“I want you to quit smoking,” Pygmalion answered. “And I want you to find something to read.”

Stevan Prostran obediently rustled open some pages. The first movement of the newspaper’s piece was
allegro:

The President Shot at Fair in Buffalo! Wounded in Chest and Stomach! One Bullet Taken Out, Other Not Found! Leon Czolgosz Anarchist, Assassin from Cleveland!

The second one was
adagio:

The President Peacefully at Rest! He Will Recover, Doctors Say! Assassin’s Confession! Attack Planned for Three Days!

It ended with a
crescendo:

President’s Health Sinking Today! Mrs. McKinley’s Condition Alarming! Mr. Roosevelt Is President!

“Theodore Roosevelt is now the president,” Tesla repeated to the boy as Long Island’s light-blue bays sparkled beyond the train’s windows. “He says that black worry rarely sits on the shoulder of the person who rides fast enough. His house is over there. And look, there’s White’s family estate. Here’s Port Jefferson, we’re getting closer.”

Stanford White’s chauffeur met the big Prospero and the little Caliban at the station and took them to Wardenclyffe in an open steam locomobile.

“Ah, what a blue sky! What a sun!” the driver exclaimed, gripping the wheel firmly with his enormous hands.

The car swayed and the travelers bounced. Above them, the blue sky whirled around with a white hole above Shoreham. After the endless potato fields, they saw the sight that brought joy to their eyes—Wardenclyffe.

The steel tower with its mushroom-like top was to be eighteen stories tall, half the size of the original design.

“Nevertheless,” Tesla told his assistants Scherff and Czitó, “with the additional underground rooms, the tower will stay proportional to my original plan.”

The construction began. That was the only important thing. Let’s go!

Despite all the rush, Tesla still found the time to pose for Dickinson Eli’s camera. “Get better looking,” Eli commanded him. In the picture, Tesla supported his head with a long index finger; crow’s feet showed at the corners of his eyes.

Eli also took a picture of Stevan Prostran. Fear of being photographed and joy of being alive collided on his freckled face.

Tesla ordered his photographer to take a picture of every machine and tube in Wardenclyffe.

“This is the place from which we will wirelessly transmit energy for cars and ships,” he explained to the mocking Prostran. “By way of artificial lightning, we will produce rain and illuminate the firmament like an electric bulb.”

Who cared if that was not exactly what was written on some piece of paper?! In moments of invention, walls and frames disappeared. With the gold visor over his eyes, in the joy of discovery, he could not pay attention to trivialities such as the fact that his project did not coincide with the contract he signed with one well-mannered gorilla who happened to own barely 10 percent of the world’s capital.

“Watch out!” Johnson yelled. “Morgan never forgives—”

Tesla cut him off. “Sure. We’ll also add the apparatus for the universal measurement of time and interplanetary communications. We’ll eliminate not only cables but newspapers as well, as they will become obsolete. How can newspapers survive if everyone possesses a cheap machine to print their own news?”

To the next-door neighbor De Witt Bailey, the tower appeared to rise straight out of his nightmares.

For Tesla, however, the tower was his Crystal, his Universe, his Cabaret with Spirits. It was an Eiffel Tower with an all-seeing eye. A place for examining the borderline between a life awake and a dream. A funnel that focused underground energies. In the tower, Tesla stood between the devil and an angel, like Pico della Mirandola’s man. In this scientific-futuristic wonder—with its wells reaching into the core of the earth and its tower rushing toward the heavens—Stevan Prostran was supposed to be raised.

Stevan frowned habitually. Tesla tapped him on his forehead: “That will cause wrinkles.”

Tesla’s friends sometimes called Stevan a boy and sometimes a young man, and he acted accordingly. Most of the time, he listened to Pygmalion’s pontifications with an “I’m being bullied” expression on his face. Sometimes he would give Tesla a serious look and ask him, “Are you my father now?”

Stevan also wrinkled his freckled nose and showered him with questions:

“Where’s hell?”

“Why did God create a bad man?”

“Who do you love?” he asked. “Who do you trust?”

“That question is inadequately phrased.”

“If you don’t trust anyone, you trust the devil.”

Tesla eyed him with a look of heightened awareness. What could he read on the boy’s face? The eyes too far apart. The teeth too far apart. A wrinkled nose. A foolish and elated smile. Was he maturing inside? Did signs of some new wisdom or cunning appear on that face?

“The world doesn’t need the unloved, right?”

Stevan kept asking.

And he also asked, “Are you my father now?”

CHAPTER 84

The Span of a Dog’s Life

Stevan ran on the nearby Southampton beach and scattered the dignified seagulls. On the sand, they resembled stodgy bank clerks. In the air, they turned into something sacred.

With a splash, he ran into the ocean. The Atlantic waves were so cold his foot cramped.

Tesla and Robert Underwood Johnson watched him from the shore. Johnson’s thick mustache flowed into his beard. The throne for his pince-nez was swollen. The hair on his cheeks was still black, but it turned white around his mouth. His beard had thickened and looked frightening. Our once-handsome poet looked somewhat like a grieving lion.

“Everything is still the same at 273 Lexington Avenue,” Robert said. “Nora the maid still sprinkles water on the laundry with her fingers, and steam rises above the iron. Katharine hides a silver dollar under the rug: if it’s still there—Nora didn’t clean properly; if it’s gone—she’s not trustworthy! Now, Richard Higginson II barks at the clock. You know, Luka, we’ve known each other for the span of a dog’s life.”

Robert’s eyes were often red because he was allergic to cats. He kept them anyway because Kate loved them.

“The big change is that my Owen got married. Except for you and me, the only boy around us now is your Stevan.”

Tesla met Owen when he was a spoiled brat who loved to ride in his carriage. Owen Johnson became an athlete who complained about his tennis elbow, and a philosopher prone to tiresome definitions. He had already published a novel titled
Arrows of the Almighty.
He was handsome, but had a slight deviation to the nose. The one-time boy had every hair in place. His cobalt eyes peered from behind rimless glasses. Not even his own wife had ever seen him unshaven. Tesla had to admit that all of that was a little disappointing. Impeccability was all right. And yet, did not life offer greater opportunities than being merely well groomed?

The dizzying fans of the Atlantic light shone through the clouds, hurt the eyes, and opened up horizons.

The waves crashed.

And crashed. And crashed. And crashed.

Robert wore an exquisite gray suit. He undid his tie and took off his collar. He felt the wind on his neck. Then he took off his shoes.

Their hands behind their backs, they walked along a section of the beach lapped by waves.