Tesla (48 page)

Well?

Miss—he always addressed her that way. He never used her real name.

He described the bladeless turbine to her, which would produce ten horsepower per pound.

She understood him.

She was feeding off of him, her breadwinner.

The smile of playful Eros altered her face. He deserved to be loved.

He gave her daily bread. The bread she squeezed and shoved into her mouth.

One Friday evening, she stayed late to type his letter to the superintendent of New York public schools, Mr. Maxwell:

“We will include fifty mentally retarded schoolchildren in our study,” her deft fingers typed. “Electricity has the potential to raise the intelligence level of mankind and to even cure the insane.”

The windows of the Metropolitan Tower were wide open. The dogs of summer barked. The month of June was fragrant. The only thing that was heard in the whole building was the chatter of her typewriter. She had been suffering from sudden fits of hunger lately. That was why she carried bread in her purse. Alone in the laboratory, Tara sat astride the corner of her desk. On the table, right under her chin she opened Carlyle’s book
On Heroes, Hero-Worship, and the Heroic in History
, which her boss was reading. She pulled out slices of bread. Her hands moved like pistons. She squeezed bread and shoved it into her mouth. Faraway pulsations determined her individuality. She ate out of horror. She had no control over her state.

“Miss!” a shocked voice exclaimed.

“Mr. Tesla!” she screamed.

Nikola Tesla approached Tara. His restraint was palpable. “What you do to yourself… such a lack of self-control… I simply cannot condone such behavior.”

His tie made of ice gleamed before her blurry eyes.

“Of course, that’s not my business, but…”

Her gaze sank powerfully into his. She cried out, “Mr. Tesla!”

He stood before her, tall, with his chiseled features, in his armor made of ice.

“I will pay you next week’s wages, but you don’t need to come in Monday.”

She had no one except him in this city. Her whole body jerked forward from the waist, while her head jerked backward. Foam gushed from her mouth. The man looked at the floor so that he did not have to look at her. From some distant center of the universe, tremors shook this woman. Her ample breasts flopped out, revealing a rash between them. Her eyes were pure helplessness. Her empty hand clawed at the air and grabbed the spot where her dress was buttoned together. The buttons flew all over the office.

CHAPTER 99

The Light of Shanghai

Three months after Tesla let her go, Miss Tara Tiernstein found a job at the Light of Shanghai, a missionary organization that saved souls in China. She was not the same girl who used to blow loud kisses on Bowery Street and draw catcalls from young men with her brightly colored dresses: “Hey baby!”

She practiced restraint on each and every bite she took. She made a long face as she drank tea without sugar. The rumbling of her stomach before she went to bed was a sign that she spent her day well.

Every morning Miss Tara Tiernstein swam through rivers of unknown people. During the day, she observed New York—which was no longer hers—from the tall balcony of the redbrick Light of Shanghai building. Swirls of black smoke flew over the gray smoke like scarves over coats. The tops of buildings disappeared in the clouds. Omnibuses bellowed like whales. Passersby slept as they hurried along. People blankly stared at each other like ants.

In the newspaper, Tara Tiernstein found and circled a few evening courses. It took three sessions of the course titled John Locke and Charles Darwin—the Quiet Revolutionaries before she realized that she had no interest in it.

She suddenly realized that reason was not her home. She realized that reason was nobody’s home. She realized that the question “Whom do you love?” is never asked there. She realized that the whole city was a bottomless pit.

Confused, she asked herself, “Where’s the soul? Where has the soul gone to in the city?”

On her wall, the young man covered in blood spread his arms in a gesture of wonder. Henchmen prevented the embrace he offered the world. The bloody man was the sole nourisher of Tara’s heart.

“Why are you tempting me?” she asked him.

Whenever she did not think about Christ, she thought about the Mother of God and her pilgrimage through hell. The Virgin was kneeling in the midst of hell and prayed to her son to have mercy on the souls of the damned.

Tara lived peacefully and did not bother anyone. But Mr. Tesla came to her at night and touched her with his long, unusually cold fingers, extended with veins of electricity. He suddenly handed her a stiff snake, which turned into a blue thunderbolt. The Laocoön snake squeezed Tara in its lusty embrace.

She did not look for anything. She did not bother anyone.

In her office, while she counted copies of the Bible bound for Shanghai, something moved up her spine and lifted her hair. She knew who was behind it. She dreamed of him. He conspired with Martians who had horns. He resembled a frozen cat. Two tiny thunderbolts protruded from his helmet-like, combed back hair. How come she did not recognize him earlier?

She started to feel scared.

Really scared.

At any hour, he would touch her thighs with blue cold fire.

She went to visit her uncle in Brooklyn and stole the revolver from his desk. She hugged the heavy purse against her breast.

She still doubted:
“Why are you tempting me?”

Then Pastor Hensley’s words spoke in her ear: “No evil can befall him who labors in the name of the Lord… Through faith, the sons and daughters of Adam overcome Original Sin and tame the symbol of the Evil One.”

She set off toward the library where—as punctual as a clock—he fed pigeons.

The wind roughly swirled horses’ manes. The wind whipped her hair across her face. Despite her thin little jacket, Tara was not cold. Everything was clear to her. To herself, she repeated the words from the Gospel according to Luke: “Behold, I give unto you power to tread on serpents and scorpions, and over all the power of the enemy: and nothing shall by any means hurt you.”

Her fear was replaced by resolve. She heard the music of all beings. The wind gleamed like diamond powder. He called to her through the sounds of car horns and brakes, the rumble and drone of the subway: “Taaaa-raaa!”

Meanwhile, in the Palm Room at the Waldorf Astoria, Tesla was taking his leave of Westinghouse, whom he had not seen for years. Westinghouse still looked like a swaying cupboard squeezed into a topcoat. Tesla serenely looked into his friendly fish eyes and told him, “Yesterday the French Supreme Court judge, Bonjean, ruled in my favor against Marconi.”

“Congratulations!”

Westinghouse, whom people considered a crashing wave rather than a human being, had been ebbing for a long time. His mustache was completely white, his gaze still clear. He apologized to Tesla because his company’s legal department had sued him for unpaid debts.

“They also signed me off,” he mumbled apologetically.

He wanted to know what was going on in the Balkans. “Could you explain that war to me?”

“Serbia, Greece, and Bulgaria joined forces in order to drive Turkey out of the Balkans,” Tesla responded.

“You know, Mr. Westinghouse, it’s not all that pleasant to be a ‘professional defender of Christiandom.’ In my family, officers killed and were killed in endless wars, while priests sang their praises. Only women knew the pain of all of that.

“Personally, I don’t support the cruel measures that many people preach these days, filled with prejudices against the Turks,” Tesla concluded. “The greatest victory the Balkan countries could ever achieve will be their ability to show that they are ready for the twentieth century and can start dealing equitably with everyone—both Turk and Christian.”

Westinghouse looked at him with polite incomprehension. He did not know that this pacifist was assigned to a military unit by the very act of being born.

“The two of us are heading in the right direction.” Tesla smiled at his old comrade in arms as they were about to part. “I work with the New York public school system. Our electricity has the potential to raise mankind’s intelligence and cure mental retardation.”

Two partners from the old times bade each other farewell.

Tesla hurried on, followed by the sound of his steps in the hall. He was late for his meeting with the pigeons. As usual, he whistled as soon as he stepped from Forty-Second Street into the park behind the library.

A few solitary pigeons fluttered down, struggling against the wind.

Two mounted policemen rode by along the path.

Tesla glanced at the wrought iron clock. It was 12:20 p.m.

Suddenly, an unknown woman sprang up in front of him, dark and tall—as if he had stepped on a rake.

The expression on her face was icy.

The treetop of Tesla’s nerves caught on fire in response to the frequency of the constellations. Something spoke to him and he pushed the woman away. At that moment, something slammed into his shoulder.

A policeman jumped from his horse, tackled the madwoman, and wrenched her gun away.

“You’re wounded,” he warned Tesla.

In court, Miss Tara Tiernstein’s piled-up hair made her look elongated.

How well she knew that the city was empty of living souls. They would not take pity on her. She held her hands against her breast like a corpse. In a hissing voice, she explained to the judge, “He cast electricity on me.”

Tesla told newspaper reporters, “I feel sorry for the poor thing.”

“I’ve suffered a lot,” Tara Tiernstein said repeatedly to Judge Forster.

Judge Forster sent her to an asylum where they treated her with electricity.

CHAPTER 100

For the Souls!

And there was a tremendous earthquake and all-consuming fire…

and only after the fire a soft voice was heard, and the Lord was in it.

Akathists, Kondak 6

And then the Serbian conspirator who suffered from tuberculosis fired a shot at the chest of the Austrian archduke who also suffered from tuberculosis. The archduke’s last words were:

“It is nothing.”

Enthusiastic crowds in Berlin, Moscow, and Paris rushed to the slaughterhouse as if they were going to a wedding. Just like Tesla, all the Europeans knew:

The first victories of the war were Serbian. In the West, there came months and years in trenches. Cannon barrages mixed French mud with human clay, which God blew life into by mistake.

Between strings of barbed wires, heavy guns buried and unburied corpses. The soldiers still believed:

Then came gigantic guns. Then came flamethrowers and suffocating smoke. In the era of industrial death, people poisoned other people like rats. The entire Serbian army retreated through the Albanian gorges. Serbian ghosts took with them some forty thousand Austrian ghosts. The conscripts sang:

Turkish machine guns decimated New Zealanders at Gallipoli. Austrians and Italians slaughtered each other among the mountain crags as sharp as razor blades. Gunboats bellowed smoke in front of Jutland. The forks of seagulls’ wings fluttered above the slanted sea.

People asked themselves if the age of light was the age of enlightenment. Howitzers pummeled twelfth-century cathedrals that were erected by a rooster’s crow. Austrians hanged Serbian peasant women in Mačva. Germans forced Belgian civilians to labor for them. The British fleet imposed a blockade on an increasingly starving Germany. German submarines sunk merchant ships.