Tesla (47 page)

Drawn away. Drawn away.

All of that happened again when—on the night train to Wardenclyffe—Nikola Tesla, Little Nemo, and the Princess of Slumberland found themselves in the emperor Jack Frost’s ice palace. The clocks and shadows were frozen. They went across an endless polished floor, full of skating harlequins. The huge Emperor Frost towered above them with a sharp halo made of icicles. Emperor Frost resembled J. P. Morgan. Mister Frozen Face looked at his watch, which was frozen. Time was frozen. He told visitors: Emperor Jack Frost is here. He is a cold-mannered gentleman. Don’t shake hands. His grip is terrible.

“You’ll see that this is the most beautiful place in all of Slumberland,” the courtier Icicle explained.

Palm trees looked like icy explosions.

Furniture was made of ice. Rooms were made of ice. Chandeliers were made of ice.

The Ice Palace glittered all around them with multiple soft tinkles. Courtier Icicle warned: “Since the ice caught fire and the palace almost burned to the ground, smoking isn’t allowed here.”

In a hall too large for an eye to take in, thousands of Snowmen destroyed each other with snowballs.

They were drawn away. Drawn away.

The train pulled up.

Little Nemo always ended his flights bundled up in the bedcovers on the floor next to his bed.

Tesla threw the newspaper away.

He transferred from the train to a car.

He arrived in Wardenclyffe.

He relaxed in his ice palace, beneath his steel crown that was eaten by rust.

There, at the place of cold fire, he felt safe. He completely undressed in silence. His sharp shoulder blades were where his wings used to be. He stood under the apparatus and turned the switch on.

Light rose upward from his toes. It splashed his calves and washed up over his knees. The flood of inner light was…

Oh, to cleanse oneself from dirty others…

This bright cyclone now replaced his inner flashes.

In the world of dollars and cents, he had an enormous need to occasionally submerge himself into sacred. A bright hurricane of high voltage went through his heart. The clean essence of the world disinfected the world’s filth. Was the cyclone he used to disinfect himself the same wind that blew people from his life?

Tesla’s frozen, eruptive soul relaxed. Bathed in the cold fire he fell into a lethargic sleep.

CHAPTER 96

Distant Rhythms

Man is the sum of outside influences. Our desires are the desires of others.

Man doesn’t become anything because he isn’t anything.

Mark Twain

After the collapse of his life’s work, the Wardenclyffe project, Nikola Tesla shielded himself with the warmth that radiated from his belly, his being, his heart, his chakras, with the ball of golden yarn that unraveled in front of him and showed him the way.

“You don’t need anyone—such an inhumane creature that you are,” Katharine Johnson scolded him.

“Remember, I warned you,” people told him.

“When times are bad, you hear the music only for you,” he whispered to himself.

Confronted with the possibility of defeat, the creator of the automaton for the first time started to reflect on the ancient question regarding free will. With those philosophical speculations, he hid the truth of his defeat, which was not his truth.

The Buddhists believe that the soul does not exist and that the world is a succession of momentary flashes.

Things became clearer in the nonexistent soul of the philosopher Nikola Tesla: from the central source that Aristotle called
entelechy
, people not only received energy but also ideas that rang in their heads like a streetcar at the stop.

His father argued with himself in multiple voices behind the closed door.

White was obsessed with sacred points on the female body.

Distant pulsations brought Dane’s image into his dreams.

All features of individuality were rented like carnival masks.

People vibrated within the intervibrations of the world.

Sorrows!

Passions!

Infatuations!

The distant, oscillating rhythms brought all of these into people’s minds and hearts.

On the streets of New York, seductive machines smiled wryly, machines delivered charismatic speeches, melancholic machines gazed from the windows into the silver lining of the rain. Humans were not automatons in the whirlpool of dead forces. Machines made of flesh were parts of the world that were interconnected and alive as a whole. People themselves noticed the rhythm of ebb and flow in nature. There was no doubt that they perceived the succession of fashions in dress as well as other fashions—in their heads.

And everyone was invited to a dance.

So, hypnotized crowds swayed.

The succulent and terrifying faces of “the vanities” grinned.

Although the swinging orchestras did not play.

Nor were military bands in parks.

CHAPTER 97

The New Automaton

And he had a new laboratory. Old Scherff in his terrifying sweaters worked in it. And hunched Czitó with his raccoon eyes. And we have almost forgotten: within the great pulsations of the world, yet another automaton pulsed into Tesla’s life.

It was his new secretary.

CHAPTER 98

They Shall Take Up Serpents

Tara Tiernstein was just blossoming into a young woman when they brought snakes into the church. Pastor Hensley wore a martyred frown as he noted that no evil can befall him who labors in the name of the Lord.

“My brethren, do not doubt,” with a beneficent smile, the pastor raised his voice, “that through faith, the sons and daughters of Adam can overcome Original Sin.”

After these words, Pastor Hensley took a rattlesnake out of a sack. Deep wrinkles cut his cheeks off from his mouth while he read from the Gospel according to Mark: “They shall take up serpents; and if they drink any deadly thing, it shall not hurt them.”

The church smelled of fresh wood. Jaws clenched. The viper wriggled from hand to hand along the pews. A red-haired girl handed it to Tara. Death slithered through her hands, and she offered it to a pregnant blond next to her. She left the church holding her chin high. At home, before Sunday lunch, she received everyone’s congratulations.

“Soup is ready,” Aunt Pam called out.

“I’ll bring it!” Tara jumped up.

A crash rang out from the kitchen. They found her convulsing in a puddle of soup.

The epileptic fit never happened again.

“We’ll see.” Purple-faced and gray-haired Doctor Martinson frowned.

That cold sensation was on Tara’s hands as she traveled first to Cleveland, Tennessee, and then to her uncle, who was a doctor in New York. There she completed a typing course and found a room on Riverside Drive, close to Grant’s Tomb. The dark monument frightened her, even more so after she gave up praying. She checked out one book a week from the library on Forty-Second Street.

New York fired her up like a sultry sigh. She talked too loud. She loved to blow noisy kisses. With her few friends, she went to Coney Island, to minstrel shows, to the Bowery theaters, to the penny arcades.

She loved to buy brightly colored dresses and wore them while she was looking for work. Eventually, she was hired as a secretary at a private laboratory. She wrote to her sister that she worked on the twentieth floor of the Metropolitan Building, right under the famous clock.

“My boss is middle-aged but young looking. Very cultured,” she bragged to her sister.

Her strange boss came in right at the stroke of noon. He insisted that Tara buy three pounds of rapeseed, hemp seed, and bird food every day and that she meet him by the door and take his hat, cane, and gloves. The office curtains had to be drawn. Thus the room acquired an evening feel.

“Open the curtains!” he ordered only when a storm rolled in.

Then a
hatatitla
—which means “lightning” in Apache—flashed in all three windows. The panes rattled. Thor, Perun, and Zeus shook the sheets made of blue light. Her mysterious boss opened the windows, and it smelled of danger and freshness.

He observed the sparkling arcs as they appeared in regular intervals above the roofs. Using his fingers, he measured the length, distance, and power of each thunderbolt. The lightning purified his nerves.

One hand he held against his heart and the other between his legs. He gasped.

Sitting on the sofa, he grumbled with the storm. He loudly preached to the open windows. He felt fortune’s spurs in his sides. His voice merged with the voice of God. He triumphantly joined in a duet with the heavenly guffaw. He cheered the flashes in unknown languages. He sang with them.

“I have created more powerful bolts!” he yelled.

Then the sound of rain became stronger. Its bright multiple jets again danced on the windowsill.

Once he opened a telegram, started to cry, and went out of the room. Tara tiptoed up to the piece of paper, picked it up, and read:

When she got her first paycheck, the modern girl Tara Tiernstein treated herself to dinner at Hammerstein’s Roof Garden. What else could a single girl do who was becoming a spinster?

Food shielded her from the big city.

Tara tried to calculate how many hands were in the city. Millions of them waved to someone, grabbed jewelry, grabbed the hands of fiancés. All those hands were able to snatch something out of life. Hers were empty.

Under gaslight in her kitchen, Tara guarded her plate of food with her elbows. She squeezed bread into hard, rubber-like balls and shoved them into her mouth. Her gut howled like Scylla: feed me! Her hands turned into pistons and moved on their own.

Abstract notions can assume various shapes, especially the shapes of our cravings. She craved the truth and spiritual improvement.

Lord, from the time you threw us out of the Garden, we have constantly hungered and thirsted—men for women and women for men. Why do you do this to us? Why do you send us the itch that is pain?

Even after she had heard in the office that her boss could not stand fat women, Tara continued to fantasize about him. From a distance, she stroked his hair, the back of his head, his pale lips. Oh Lord, why do you do this to me? She dreamed about the snakes from Locust Valley in Tennessee. She wished her bed would squeal in her place.

She grew out of her flowery dresses.

She liked to stay alone in the office late in the evening. She opened a newspaper and read about what John Jacob Astor and his son Vincent felt when they got lost on the open sea. She used the forbidden private restroom, where Mr. Tesla went whenever someone unexpectedly shook his hand. The bar of soap sloshed between her palms. He avoided the contaminated others. He used to say that he was protecting himself against the germs that devour each other in the invisible world beneath the world. The germs he talked about were probably people.

Tara Tiernstein started buying the special black underwear that “those” girls wore. Her stockings swished whenever she crossed her legs.