Tesla (45 page)

Coney Island

“Let’s go to Coney Island!” Stevan Prostran exclaimed back then.

The purple flags of memory flapped like thunder.

So they went.

There were Robert and Katharine, Mrs. Merrington, White with his wife and his son, Lawrence, Tesla and Stevan.

What did they see in the paradise for the poor?

They saw minstrels and ventriloquists, the dog-faced boy, the most tattooed man in the world, the strong man with red cheeks, living skeletons trembling from emaciation, and the skull of Christ.

They saw the chess-playing machine. Midgets. Fire eaters. Female opium eaters. Wax figures. Learned phrenologists. Automatons. Lady Mephistopheles and the Palace of Illusions.

“Ah! The Palace of Illusions!” Katharine Johnson almost fainted.

Mrs. Johnson and Mrs. White briefly spoke with the woman who became a snake with a human head because her family was cursed.

“What do you eat?” they asked her.

The snake woman fluttered her eyes with a very sincere expression and responded, “Butterflies.”

A red balloon that escaped someone’s hand rose in the wind above the tents, above Coney Island, above the ocean.

“This reminds me of the World Expo in Chicago,” Mrs. Merrington hissed in her champagne whisper.

Tesla could see it all in his memory.

“This”—White overheard Mrs. Johnson saying—“this is called the orgiastic escape from respectability.”

White checked her out with a quick lady-killer’s eye.

“Mark her words,” he warned Tesla. “They’re always a bit deeper than Robert’s.”

White was the only one who could see Katharine—the invisible.

Katharine conventionally despised him as a whoremonger. “He believes,” she said, irritated, “that the devil will protect him just because he takes the devil’s side.”

On that day long ago—surrounded by clowns on stilts, children who licked cotton candy, and the furious music of organ grinders—Stanford White became melancholy.

“Human yearning,” he murmured, “is the eternal sheep for shearing.”

All of this Tesla saw clearly in his memory. He saw White’s flaming hair and his twirled mustache.

On that day, three full years ago…

He thought everyone was rather unhappy.

Later on, they looked joyous, happy, and even young to him.

All around them, the sacred people of the world laughed merrily over half-eaten fried dough and hotdogs. People screamed on the roller coaster, bought brightly colored trinkets, and viewed Brooklyn from the wheel similar to Ferris’s. Katharine exclaimed, “Hey, how do you like it?”

He saw her in his memory.

He saw himself, contemplating the stinger in his soul.

It was about that time that a journalist asked him why he did not build his tower on Coney Island instead of Wardenclyffe.

At least it was fun here. A magician poured water from his hat into his sleeve and pocket. A boy with his nose stuck in the creases of the accordion was starting the same tune over and over again. Amid competing melodies—like long ago in Belgrade—he could again hear the fragments of the forgotten song from the times of the Great Migration of Peoples.

“Everyone has the right to look at his watch and proclaim the end of Divine Creation,” Tesla declared. “As far as I’m concerned, it’s still going on.”

Just like him, Italian women in white blouses, pug-nosed Russian girls, and the Hassids also believed in miracles. All the newspapers and the advertisements of the world took aim at their holy innocence.

“He’s better looking, and she’s more humane,” he heard Katharine whispering crisply into Mrs. Merrington’s lace collar.

Betsy White had the most beautiful blue dress, perfect bearing, full and pale lips.

Whenever she looked at her husband, Betsy’s eyes filled with stars. When Prince Henry of Prussia visited New York, who was there to meet him? Stanford! How witty he was! Look, he just said that—together with Washington and Jefferson—Barnum and Bailey should be included among the Founding Fathers!

Our hero could see all of that.

“Tell your cook to roast a goose as long as possible,” he heard Katharine Johnson’s words. “If the recipe calls for three hours, roast it for five. I have no clue why they made us eat stringy goose when we were children. Ha, ha.”

Were they happy?

The gray-haired girl Katharine Johnson stole furtive looks at him.

Katharine’s perfect bun with a hole in its middle excited Robert. He made a mute confession to her: “I know you blame me for failing to guess the things you’d never tell me about.”

They were happy.

Lawrence White watched the wooden horses sail toward the future while the music played.

Stevan watched the creamy foam on Lawrence’s ice cream.

The glittering future of the marry-go-round was circular.

The wind blew a newspaper into Tesla’s face. He lifted it from his nose and read the headline:
Serbian King and Queen Assassinated.

Katharine noticed the change in his mood: “What happened?”

“A group of officers,” he managed to whisper, “members of the Black Hand… stabbed the king and the queen to death in Belgrade and threw their bodies out the window. Her being with child had increased her popularity. She received cradles from all over Serbia. It turned out that it was only a hysterical pregnancy.”

“So that’s the reason?” Mrs. White was disgusted.

Tesla sighed. “In addition to not having an heir, King Alexander had a habit of nullifying the Constitution at midnight. He was an autocratic Austrophile and therefore unpopular.”

“He had been in love with her ever since he was a child,” little Stevan said.

Were they happy?

They?

Anyone?

“She shielded him with her body,” Tesla muttered.

The king was the boy with whom he had spent a May morning in Belgrade ten years before. Tesla remembered the yellow light he had experienced as he entered the Old Court Building. The apricot brandy he was offered had given that light its flavor. On the Long Island beach, he had the same flavor in his mouth again.

“Poor man.”

Did the news report real events, or was the paper printed in Coney Island?

Concerned, Tesla kept buying newspapers for a few days after the assassination. Finally, in the
New York Times
editorial of June 24, 1903, he found a reasonable and comprehensive explanation of what had happened in Serbia:

Undoubtedly there is something in the Slavic nature which predisposes those of Slav blood to throw open a window and in a liberal spirit and with a large gesture invite an enemy to become an angel without further preparation of a flying machine.

Tesla lifted his eyebrows:

As the bold Briton knocks his enemy down with his fists, as the Southern Frenchman lays his foe prostrate with a scientific kick of the
savate,
as the Italian uses his knife and the German the handy beer mug, so the Bohemian and the Serbian “chuck” his enemy out of the window.

That day, Tesla opened the newspaper in his laboratory and put it down on a table in Coney Island.

He had a problem expressing the emotion he had experienced.

The
New York Times
became Reality and the rest of the world became Coney Island.

“Come closer!” newsboys shamelessly screamed in front of the circus tent of the world. In it, officers who looked like Sicilian dummies killed King Arlecchino and Queen Colombina. They horrified the ambassadors from the Embassy of Giants and the Embassy of Dwarfs. With sonorous sighs, the clowns on stilts shed tears over the event. Hyperbolic drums announced the murder to the rest of the world. The drummers advertised and advertised and advertised—the tragic miracle of life.

CHAPTER 92

The Shaman Dandy

A mysterious visitor arrived in Worcester, Massachusetts, the town where they manufactured barbed wire “as light as the air and as strong as whiskey.” Above his rounded shoulders, the Stranger carried one of the most important heads of the twentieth century.

It was 1909. The president of the United States of America was a voluminous man with beautiful eyes by the name of William Howard Taft.

Have we already mentioned that the visitor was tightly squeezed between his two companions? A hint of a boyish smile repeatedly appeared beneath the large nose of one of them. The eyes of the other companion were hidden behind the glare of his glasses.

“We bring enlightenment,” the youthful-looking Ferenczi started to sing.

“No, we bring the plague,” the rough voice of the Stranger cut him short.

The visitor insisted that his topic would not be about dreams.

“People wouldn’t take it seriously.”

Important, gentle-looking faces came to the lecture. The Sage from Concord had taught them to look for reality under the surface of the world. Emerson’s admirers were prepared to listen to the Stranger.

The visitor looked at them with his bitter eyes and—in a somewhat snarling voice—started to produce a string of rational statements about the “irrational aspects of our being.” He spoke without notes, without preparation. He told them that dreams were simply a different form of thinking. Culture and repression were like the chicken and the egg. Culture depended on repressive acts of previous generations, and each new generation retained the culture by going through the same repressions. The power of neurosis was rooted in sexuality. The psychoanalytical treatment for this was based on the search for the trauma that, as a rule, took place before puberty.

The Stranger publicly admitted that at first he believed his work was an ordinary contribution to science until he realized that he was one of those who
disturbed the sleep of the world.
Silence was the response to his lectures, and the circle of emptiness formed around him. He became a foreigner to his hometown of Vienna. Every now and then, at professional conferences, someone declared psychoanalysis dead.

Quoting Mark Twain, he said, “The news regarding my death has been greatly exaggerated.”

What happened after the lecture?

Questions rained down on him: “Is psychoanalysis immoral?”

Freud responded with a counterquestion: “Is nature immoral?”

“What about the conscious part of our being?”

“The ego often plays the absurd role of the circus clown who—with his gestures—is trying to show the spectators that he’s in command of everything that’s going on in the ring. However, only the youngest ones believe him.”

“Would you say that there’s no forgiveness or love in your world?” a voice asked.

“Do you promote free love and reject all restrictions?” asked another.

“I’m a married man,” Freud responded.

When it was all over, the aged William James—who founded the Department of Psychology of Gods at Harvard—approached him. James buried his bill-like nose into his handkerchief, blew it, and said that the future of psychology was most likely to be aligned to Freud’s research.

The visitor’s eyes watered when he was awarded an honorary doctorate.

“Like a waking dream.”

Squinting, he carefully examined the young man who interviewed him.

“No, I have never seriously thought about becoming a writer. However, I thank you for appreciating my literary gift.”

Tesla’s friend George Sylvester Viereck spread his thick lips in a smile and asked, “Why did you mention that the freedom of thought is more limited than we believed? That maybe there is no freedom at all?”

The visitor lowered his eyes and said, “Because probably there is none.”

“Have you ever thought about emigrating to America?”

“Yes, as a young and impoverished doctor.”

With a flashy mechanical pencil, Viereck scribbled down the answers on a pad of graph paper.

“The whole world is nothing but an enormous game of blindman’s bluff disguised as a state of awareness,” he translated Freud’s ideas into poetic language. “People are sleepers dragged behind paper kites. The libido is a horse harnessed to our cravings. Neurosis often is the result of a compromise. Its symptoms jump from one object to another, leading the psychoanalytical beaters away from the cause. In the hypocrisy of daily existence our soul refuses to haggle—it sticks to its own truth and consequently suffers.”

“What has the magician from Vienna seen in America?”

“Manhattan.” Viereck scribbled down the answers. “Coney Island, Central Park, Chinatown, the Jewish quarters in the Lower East Side.
The Count of Monte Cristo
at the movie theater.”

“Has anything bothered you?” Viereck grinned.

Freud paused. He was used to being the person with a notebook. He cleared his throat and responded, “I was fasting for a day due to the rich American food.”

He failed to mention that he organized his Vienna group of followers like a castle under siege. That was why open doors in America—both entryways and bathroom doors—greatly disturbed him.

When they got a little bit tired, the poet abruptly asked the magician if he had heard about his friend Nikola Tesla.

Freud frowned because his cigar was going out.