Tesla (42 page)

Whoooooosh! Whoooooosh!

“Would it be possible to send a message from Wardenclyffe to Morgan’s yacht, the
Corsair?
” Robert outshouted the waves and Stevan’s cries.

“Sure,” Tesla responded indifferently.

The waves drew back. The wet shadow of the ocean followed them.

Robert looked at his old friend with the eyes of a wounded stag. He pleaded in a voice of a cursed soul: “Then do it. Forget about everything else and send him a message before Marconi does. I’ve told you this before, and I’ll tell you again.”

Tesla’s big ear registered what Robert said, but his obsessions determined which words he would hear. To him—like to Socrates—his own
daimon
kept repeating something else. Perhaps it was vanity and lusting after the wind? Perhaps his obstinacy, necessary for contradicting the entire world this long, was turning against him? He did not follow what his reason dictated—it was his soul that made those profound decisions.

Tesla surveyed the sharp grasses at the edge of the dunes in the incredible glare of the sunlight.

“Don Quixote is a monster,” it dawned on Robert. “Any personal trait that swallows up all other traits is demonic. What remains from Don Quixote’s reason is the fragments of his potential life.”

What was it that Johnson told Tesla? That one could combine haste with self-respect. That contractual obligations and other social games were worthy of the mind that would bring about the biggest spontaneous manifestation of energy on earth.

The wind caressed the tall grass.

Stevan took him by the hand. His nose wrinkled: “Are you my father now?”

“No,” retorted Tesla.

For the last few years, Tesla had been writing down each dream in which Dane appeared. Relieved, he noticed that sometimes there were six-month periods between them. He had no competitors anymore, dead or alive. Dangerous “others” did not exist. Time did not exist. He was at the center of the world, and Marconi was plotting on its gray outskirts.

“Are you telling me that I should be afraid?” Tesla became irritated.

Unused to anger, Johnson frowned. “What you do at Wardenclyffe violates your contract with Morgan. He only wants a small tower for transferring stock market reports.” Johnson’s eyes became larger behind his glasses till they nearly shouted,
Remember the blooming nose! Remember the stinger in his tiny black eyes! Remember how you grew numb from his mossy whisper! Remember Morgan, Nikola!

“Beware,” Robert muttered to himself. “Your feeling of superiority is one-dimensional, and it impoverishes life!”

“What was that?”

“Beware!” Robert repeated aloud. “Morgan never forgives.”

La-de-da. What was a contract compared to…

Robert was horrified. A halo of eccentricity and solitude surrounded his friend. He realized that—for this lotus-eater—people did not exist.

“Are you aware of the number of ships that already use Marconi’s wireless system?” he continued with a constricted throat. “More than seventy! Mostly in his two homelands—Britain and Italy! The rest belong to the great shipping lines—the Cunard Line and the North American Lloyd.”

Little Stevan did not stop yelling. He let the waves completely wash him out on the shore. Then he rushed back into the eternal ocean. He enjoyed being pulled out and then pushed back on the sand where he crawled in the rustling arabesques of foam.

The dizzying Atlantic light intoxicated Tesla.

Robert spoke in his tortured, cultivated voice. “Marconi’s transmitters have been installed at Poldhu in England and at Crookhaven in Ireland.”

Trying to wake the sleepwalker in love was to no avail. Oh, the reader should become worried about him!

The wind blew. Robert talked reasonably and tediously. Tesla remained silent. The eternal ocean rustled. Neckless seagulls waddled around the sand, as important as the Cunard Line officials. Tesla looked toward the ocean’s horizon with his Olympian eyes.

The boy Prostran shot out of the cold waves, shivered, and hugged himself. With motionless wings, the seagulls flew at various floors of the wind. Stevan shook his feet. The withdrawing waves and the changing color of the sand delighted him. Directly from the light above, a seagull dove and snatched a sandwich from the basket they left on a rock.

“Ha!” Stevan shouted with joy and pointed his finger at the sky.

Hugging his bony ribs, he then came up to Tesla and grabbed him by the hand. “Are you my father now?”

CHAPTER 85

Three Quiet Miracles

Stevan smoked cigarettes and walked on his hands around Wardenclyffe. Then he came up to Tesla and said, “This is what girls sing in Rastičevo: ‘America, may you lose all of your money; because of you, a widower is now my honey.’”

“Go read something!” Pygmalion said.

The boy threw a quick glance at him. Bored but obedient, he spread out a newspaper:

Dutch Queen Quarrels with Husband. Circe Feeds Sailors Her Herbs of Evil. Race Riots in New York: Two Men Slashed with Knives. Odysseus’s Return to Ithaca Causes Bloodbath. Italian Government Insists on Italians’ Rights in America. In Luxor, Alexander Declared Amon’s Son. Desperate Turkish Troops in Albania with No Pay for Months.

“Don’t read that rubbish.” Stevan’s unlikely adopted father frowned. “Read this.”

Stevan was handed Plato’s
Symposium.
He took it with him to the dark corners of the laboratory where he smoked in secret.

“The professors claim that Socrates said that we should be good and brush our teeth,” Stevan murmured. “I don’t think he meant that…”

At times, it seemed to Tesla that it was impossible to make Stevan respect anything. Besides the gourmet meals prepared by Oscar of the Waldorf, Stevan loved fried potatoes. The Serbian Huckleberry Finn swore to stay
forever wild
like an American national park.

Meanwhile, a Shakespearean tempest wiped out Marconi’s station in England. In November, the same happened to the one in Ireland.

“This is a respite,” Robert wired him. “You need to hurry!”

Stevan Prostran Jr. was ecstatic when he learned that Stanford White had become a member of the same auto club as President Roosevelt.
Dark worry rarely sits on the shoulder of the driver who drives fast enough.
With his glowing red hair, White raced to Wardenclyffe in his new electric two-seater.

“It would glow like a lamp, if only I fixed it up a bit more,” he bragged.

Stevan caressed the car.

“White has tasted bread from many an oven,” he said with admiration. The ailing priapus hoped to cut his debt in half by selling the artifacts from his collection at an auction. White paced around the room, smoked nervously, and inquired about everything. Night fell. With his burning cigarette tip, he drew red circles in the darkness. Then he abruptly took his leave. The tires squealed on the gravel. A sparkling cigarette butt bounced down the night road behind him.

Meanwhile…

“Marconi decided to try using a less powerful but much sturdier tower in England,” Scherff informed Tesla. “He will install the receivers in balloons.”

The obedient Stevan read Plato.

“The Sophists do not crave knowledge but power,” he murmured. “However, they are curious and smart in spite of the power they crave, so their longing to know the Truth prods at them.”

The more Stevan read, the more he thought that Tesla—like Socrates—preferred mankind to people.

The Johnsons invited Tesla to Bar Harbor in Maine and to their place for Thanksgiving. He turned them down and signed the note: “The distant Nikola.”

In
The Symposium
, Alcibiades spoke with his ancient mouth:
Know that beauty, wealth, and honor—which many people crave—don’t mean anything to Socrates. He despises them and the people who possess them. People mean nothing to him.

Oh, yes, Marconi and his assistants finally raised the receiving antenna. On Friday, December 13, when the atmospheric conditions settled after a hail storm, they received three dots for the letter
S.

“So what?” Tesla put his hands on his hips.

At that moment, the mustached assistant stepped on the scene again.

The eyeglass frames out of horses’ hooves! The boots from a military surplus store! The hands and the heart of pure gold: Scherff!

Scherff’s unblinking brown eyes peered through monstrously thick lenses. The eyes focused on the Ideal. Scherff had never been sick. Had never complained. Tesla believed that he had two disassembled watches in his left pocket. He would not be surprised if a cockroach jumped out of his right one.

Scherff!

Hunched over. His feet wide apart. His body square.

His honesty and his clumsiness, his awkward love for truth could not handle the current situation.

Marconi received the three dots for the letter
S.

“Mother of God!” Scherff gasped under his breath.

The mustached Scherff walked around the yard raising his arms. He put them down and raised them again, like a Jew in front of the Wailing Wall. Then he spat. “Three quiet signals! Those three signals will pull down our steel tower.”

“So what?” Tesla repeated defiantly.

As soon as Marconi overtook Tesla, an orgy of derision ensued. Entire opera houses mocked Tesla in singsongy fashion—the Berlin Opera, the Opéra de Paris, and La Scala in Milan.

Pygmalion neglected Stevan Prostran, so the boy put Plato’s
Symposium
aside and started to read newspapers again:

CHAPTER 86

Behemoth

As a child, he was always afraid when Father went through
a transformation.

It had never occurred to him that one day he would build a tower that would be his place of transformation. The tower was his personal theatrical stage on which faceless powers played assumed personalities. Under the high-voltage shower, Tesla himself turned into a faceless power. He changed into a bright whirlpool. He became a parliament of the world on the site at which various voices intermingled. He prepared to send them out into the ether.

By the end of the following year, the tower grew to two hundred feet.

At that point, the money
really
ran out.

Don Quixote sold the surrounding property for the round sum of thirty-five thousand dollars.

Not even that was enough.

It was when George Scherff put his heavy fists down on Tesla’s desk and sighed. “Now we have to manufacture oscillators and develop fluorescent lamps,” he said.

“But—”

“We have to!”

A few months later, Tesla tapped Scherff on the shoulder and declared in an embarrassed voice, “We’ve saved enough to hire workers and complete the construction of the cupola.”

The shouts of laborers, deaf from riveting, yet again awoke the inhabitants of provincial Port Jefferson.

“Hold this!”

“Look out, Jack, or you’ll cut my finger off!”

With pride, Tesla surveyed the completion of his “steel crown,” which weighed fifty tons. The purpose of the mushroom-like cupola was to store electricity and transmit it through the air—or to the depths of the earth.

To the depths of the earth?

Yes, because the construction reached ten stories below the surface. There was a whole system of catacombs under the tower.

The humming of the hellish energies electrified the tower’s roots and summoned the pale dead. On top of the vertiginous underground stairs, Dante and Virgil waited for Tesla impatiently.

At the top was the All-Seeing Eye designed by Odilon Redon.

The wind played around Wardenclyffe like a mad flutist. Nikola ascended the mosque-like stairways. The wind hissed through the steel rafters. The depths called to the depths. Looking at his legs, Tesla climbed up to the cupola. The white-blue ocean, white whales, and electrical clouds came into view. Tesla’s thoughts changed floors, and the air played a fugue like an organ. The purpose of this endless steel hallucination was to help him discover new continents. From up here, he stole a glance at his thoughts in the afterlife.