Tesla (44 page)

October 17, 1904

You’re not a Christian at all, you’re a fanatic…

February 17, 1905

Let me tell you once more. I have perfected the greatest invention of all time. This is the long-sought stone of the philosophers. I need but to complete the plant I have constructed and in one bound, humanity will advance centuries.

There is more power in the wings of a butterfly than in the teeth of a tiger. I am the only man on this earth today who has a peculiar knowledge and ability to achieve this wonder and another one may not come in a hundred years!

Mr. Morgan, maybe you simply do not care. People are like insects to you.

Sorrowfully yours,

N. Tesla

CHAPTER 89

The Sinking Ships

Stanford White promised that he would arrange for Stevan Prostran’s education “through some religious old lady.”

Tesla was shocked. “He knows a religious old lady?”

“So long, Father!” he heard as they parted.

“Good-bye, Stevan.”

The boy left, smoking and humming off-key to himself:

“I’m building a tower, and I have no stone, oh, my tower is built of my tears…”

Tesla looked at the back of the boy’s head. When he returned to the Waldorf Astoria, he waited for Eliphaz the Temanite, Bildad the Shuhite, and Zophar the Naamathite to come and visit him.

The friends of Job.

Instead, the sorrowful Stanford White paid him a visit. The burning bush smoldered on his head. Acting tranquil, White tried to keep his body from shaking.

“How’s life?” Tesla asked him.

“I drink from the cup of life.” White was inconsolable. “And I pluck the bloom of pleasure.”

His common sense made him eat; the lack thereof made him drink. The need for the first drink arrived earlier and earlier.

“Aaaaaai,” Stanford White howled inside.

His face was calm, but his stupid soul… The annoying soul. The weak soul. The soul wailed the same tune:

“If I had sold that, my debt would’ve been cut in half.”

“Only two weeks before the auction.” New York gossips jauntily interrupted one another.

“The fire in Stanford White’s warehouse.”

“Tapestries, sculptures, and paintings burned up.”

“Uninsured treasures worth three hundred thousand dollars went up in smoke.”

“If I had sold that, my debt would’ve been… would’ve been cut in half,” Stanford White sputtered.

Tesla remembered well the time his laboratory burned down. He was not able to sleep for a few nights. (Mornings were the worst.) He tried to console the architect, but without noticing, he returned to the painful subject of Wardenclyffe.

The grand project, woven from blood, heart, and dreams, was dying before his eyes.

New York had already started to reach for the sky. New Yorkers were turning into the surveyors above the clouds, similar to birds and angels. People discussed the poetry of skyscrapers.

Our two friends were like babies who cried because one was hungry and the other was cold.

With the patience of a saint, the sorrow-stricken White listened to Tesla’s laments, which were supposed to be condolences. He sat stiffly. His face was red as if sunburnt. His blue eyes bulged out. The expression he had on his face could not hide how annoying it was to be right after the fact.

“We all told you,” he uttered, “to accept Edward Dean Adams’s offer. If you’d taken it, you’d now have all the money you need to complete Wardenclyffe.”

A deep crease was cut between Tesla’s eyebrows.

“I’ll shut up!” the red devil White promised gloomily and emptied his drink with his eyes closed. “Nothing happens the way I want it to,” he concluded as he put the glass back on the table.

Even after the fire in his warehouse, Stanford White continued to live in his little pleasure hell. Once so luxurious and comfortable, his personal hell continued to shrink. His lover, young Evelyn Nesbit, married the Pittsburgh millionaire Harry Thaw.

During the time of their happiness, he used to tell her, “Let’s make love in such a way that, when someone stumbles upon this spot a hundred years from now, they can feel the vibrations and shiver.”

Thus he used to speak to her. Now his cravings for her were ripping his guts apart. The cheated cheater was shocked by his sweetheart’s behavior.

“Evelyn,” he wondered. “You’ve always had so much style, Evelyn. And now, at the end—all of a sudden—you’ve lost it!?”

“It doesn’t matter,” she responded with her heart-shaped mouth. “It’s over.”

He replied, “You’re wrong. It matters the most now.”

Tesla listened to him out of a sense of duty. In truth, romantic problems—caused by a lack of self-restraint—were nonsense to him.

“Stop thinking of her,” Tesla advised his friend.

“Ha,” the redhead smiled bitterly. “I think only of her.”

Did what they had had together mean so little to her? Did she deny everything so quickly and let it go, without a fight, without an effort?

During endless afternoons—many, many afternoons—Evelyn knelt with her eyes raised and her arms stretched as if in prayer. Between her hands, wet with some slippery substance, she manipulated White’s manhood.

With a pickpocket’s skill, Evelyn emptied his fly, and he emptied her bra. Their tongues touched. She gasped for breath in the whirlpool of his hands.

Hidden underneath her dress, like a photographer, he bit her perfectly molded butt. He loved to punish each transgression of her femininity. His pelvis hammered her bulging rump back on the bed. He wished his eternally pulsating member could search through her bottomless, dark softness until the end of time. Her black triangle turned into a maelstrom and dimmed his vision.

How could she?

How could he not think of her?

The worst thing was that the jealous Thaw, her new husband, hired Pinkerton’s men to keep an eye on White day in and day out. White murmured, “The Furies whisper above my head.”

CHAPTER 90

The Swan, the Bull, and the Shower of Gold

Then all of New York heard the news.

With a crooked smile, squeezing a pearl-handled revolver, Harry Thaw entered the penthouse restaurant at Madison Square Garden. Full of echoes, the New York night smelled like beer and sweat.

The poor slept on the roofs of the Lower East Side. In rings, boxers beat each other with gloveless fists for fifty rounds. Driven by the shadow in his mind, Thaw squinted and sweated lemony sweat.

Everything began to spin. The Madison Square Garden restaurant turned into a maelstrom.

Starched tables, crystal, silverware, and people merged into one milky smudge. The drone of people’s voices was unbearable and had to be stopped. Thaw politely removed a waiter who stood in his way. Tesla’s friend, the symbolist poet George Sylvester Viereck, was sitting with White. Thaw ignored Viereck. He rushed up to White and fired into his flaming hair.

The shot deafened the entire city.

The flash wiped out human faces.

The drone stopped.

Smiling as if a surgeon was sewing his lip, Thaw left the restaurant. White’s head fell to the table and broke a plate. His red hair was dyed with blood. Amid screams and the rattle of dropped silverware, deafened by the explosion and the shock, the architect grabbed the starched tablecloth as he fell.

Newspapers wrote about the oppressive humidity in the penthouse restaurant on that night, about the terror ladies experienced, about the pearl handle of Thaw’s revolver. They wrote about White’s scandalous life.

“My Benvenuto Cellini,” Tesla broke into tears when he heard the news. Then he said under his breath, “Millionaires are murdering artists.” Our hero was alone in this opinion.

Just as he broke the plate with his forehead in his death throes, Stanford White fell straight onto the front pages of New York newspapers. Just like the recent assassination at the Serbian court, his tragedy turned into a street farce. It was not long before Edison’s nickelodeons started showing a film about him
urbi et orbi.
The urchins in the audience snorted and laughed.

The New York elite swirled in a carnival of hypocrisy.

Society showed understanding for the imbalance and jealousy of the murderer. Somehow it did not matter that Thaw’s own life was no better than White’s. The New York socialites who once loved White made a mental about-face and acted disgusted by his life, though his vices were not unique.

“Old hags in love with their priests will be the death of me,” the ailing priapus had often whispered to his friends.

On their part, the hypocrites whispered that the deceased was a red Pan who hopped through life following the road sign of his member. White’s “moral irresponsibility” somehow spilled over into his business dealings. There was a rumor that the remains of his famous Renaissance collection contained many forgeries. Only a few people risked being seen at his funeral. Even Katharine Johnson failed to attend.

Tesla was among some dozen people who stood by the grave in the warm rain on the first day in July. The priest’s murmur mingled with the murmur of rain against the umbrellas.

Shovelfuls of dirt started to thud against the coffin.

Tesla heard White’s words: “Erotica is a kind of energy or mystery that one wants to merge with.”

More dirt thudded against the coffin.

“I love when a woman first shows me the sacred places on her body,” White spoke.

The thud of dirt.

Despite her ailing back, his wife, Betsy, stood straight. His children were there, as well as some servants, an unknown girl who was weeping, and a couple of journalists who looked like hyenas. Wardenclyffe, the project of the century, failed. Its life-celebrating architect had been murdered.

“If I could add up all my orgasms and experience them at one time, there would be nothing left of me!” Nikola heard Stanford’s voice. “Like Zeus, I always wanted to be the swan, the bull, and the shower of gold.”

The coldness and warmth switched places again.

The dirt thudded and thudded and thudded.

That night, in Tesla’s dream, Satan laughed loudly, crucified on the cross.

Tesla was holding his friend by the hand, but the maelstrom snatched Stanford away and carried him into the cold of the universe.

That was terribly unjust.

He had lost everybody he cared for.

Stevan was absent. Tesla did not respond to Robert and Katharine’s wires.

The last time they were all together…

Were they happy then?

CHAPTER 91