Tesla (49 page)

Progress enhanced evil.

Uranus ate his own children.

A certain Edgar Bérillon distinguished himself with his claim that an average German produced more excrement than other members of the human race. Turks massacred Armenians. In the Royal Village, Rasputin killed birds with a glance. Like insects, Russian armored trains quivered their gun barrels as they sped across the steppes. Stars fell like figs shaken off a tree. The drowned exited oceans wearing white dresses. The Serbs, the French, the Germans, the Romanians, the English, the Russians, the Italians—
all of them
—hated with a “healthy futuristic hatred.” The fatal verses finally fell into their place:

Up until then, Doctor Jekyll was sitting in Europe, while Mr. Hyde was sent away to the colonies. In
White Man’s Burden
, Kipling sang praises to Hyde’s achievements in the heart of darkness. Now Hyde was back from the Congo, and he rushed to the Somme.

Something whispered in the ear: the horror!

Something growled from the darkness: the horror!

Something screamed in the mind: the horror!

Tesla’s foster son, Stevan Prostran—his “Serbian servant”—became a Serbian volunteer on the Salonica Front and sent him a postcard through the Red Cross.

British sculptors and German painters ran through the expressionist smoke and the pointillist world of shrapnel. Like Kemmler, soldiers sweated drops of blood. Bergson and Nietzsche shivered, enveloped in chlorine gas and mustard gas. The human form was raped and disassembled in the trenches.

“If people were able to harm the gods, would they do it?” Katharine Johnson asked.

Every day, in New York Nikola Tesla watched flocks of birds in flight spread apart and gather together above the library building. He whistled. Pigeons alighted on his hands and the brim of his hat. While the seeds flew from his hands and fell on the rock, in the thorns, on the fertile soil—as in Christ’s parable—he thought about the dead automatons in Serbia, in Germany, in Belgium, in France.

“Is it possible to feel sorry for evil fools?” he asked himself and responded, “Yes, it is!”

He felt sorry for those dirty scum, for those soulless cheats. He felt sorry for people. He felt very sorry for the elderly. And the little children. Everything that lives.

“Birds should be fed for the souls of the drowned,” his mother Djuka used to say.

“For the souls… birds should be fed,” Tesla repeated. “For the souls…”

In order to wipe guilt away from mankind, our sentimental positivist wrote in his articles that people were machines made of flesh, whirled around by great powers. People did not have souls. They had backs that were unburdened from moral responsibility. Each human automaton was an unconscious cannonball. The planet carried it around the sun with considerable speed—nineteen miles a second. The velocity of each automaton’s body was sixty times greater than the velocity of a projectile fired from the largest German gun ever made. If the planet screeched to a halt, each man would be catapulted into space with enough power to hurl a sixty-ton projectile twenty-eight miles.

We have all been catapulted—but where?

CHAPTER 101

East of the Sun, West of the Moon

He carefully examined the photographs of Roosevelt’s family, and then the photographs of military units of various armies. The
New York Times
reported on the surrender of the city of Niš in Serbia. The wretches in uniforms marched in the gray afternoon heading…

… somewhere.

A waiter snuck up to him in his ballet shoes. He balanced a tray on the tips of his fingers.

“Put it there!”

A school of goldfish shimmered through his consciousness.

The appreciation in the waiter’s eyes reached the level of insanity. A wave of sudden adoration poured over the scientist.

Once again, Tesla was in fashion.

People said that he was a collector of what Emerson called internal light. Tesla’s internal light glared in shop windows and in the trains that fired out into the void of night from the Chicago railway hub—
clackity-clack!
Thanks to him, subway cars strobed through brightly lit stops in:

Boston

New York

Paris.

What would have happened if someone deprived people of the light that, like a golden visor, fell over the eyes of young Tesla?

Night would have swallowed up golden windows. America’s shiny industrial carnival would have turned into a scene from an Edgar Allan Poe story.

The Knight of the Sad Countenance leafed backward through a war newspaper. As he moved toward the front page, the headings became sadder. He finally came upon the one that said, “Edison and Tesla Will Be Awarded Nobel Prize.”

Did he really want to get a Nobel Prize
after
Marconi?

The golden school of fish shimmered through one more time.

And
with
Edison?

Manfred read his own statement:

Praises showered on him.

The school of fish shimmered.

Tesla coughed maliciously, swirled his pen above a sheet of paper, and wrote back to Robert:

Motherofgod! Even if he had sent a much more politely worded wire in which he lectured the esteemed members of the Nobel Committee—the individuals who
were apt to err
—on the difference between a real inventor like himself and the various “makers of better mouse traps”…

That year, the Nobel Prize for Physics was not awarded.

“Lusitania!”
the streets thundered.

For a full two years, Tesla lived in tense luxury, on the tide of Nobel glory. The flashes of inner light returned, but they were tepid, not golden like before. More platinum-like, resembling a silvery film. In these flashes, the inventor saw the dance of his new turbine.

In the course of those two years, American military officers danced the same waltzes that Mojo Medić once tried to master. They spun like high school teacher Martin Sekulić’s silver ball. Within those incomprehensible dancing circles, animus and anima were joined together.

Our hero left the ceremony at which he was awarded the Edison Medal and wandered off to a nearby park. He threw hemp seeds to white and gray pigeons. They landed, making music with their wings and orchestrating their presence with cooing.

The organizers tactfully brought him back to the ceremony.

Tesla thanked them quietly. “I am deeply religious at heart, and give myself to the constant enjoyment in believing that the greatest mysteries of our being are still to be fathomed. In this way I manage to maintain an undisturbed piece of mind, to make myself proof against adversity, and to achieve contentment and happiness to a point of extracting some satisfaction even from the darker side of life.”

Then the paperboys’ palates—like triumphant gongs—announced that German submarines had started to attack American ships yet again.

Then enthusiastic columns of people wearing straw hats started to march along Broadway carrying flags. Preachers thundered about bleeding suns and heroism. People were made to believe that any personal experience was inferior to the great transformative idea that would lead them out of all experience.

“War! War!” the arrogant revelers chanted.

The laws are becoming more just…

In the middle of the Great Repulsive War, our hero initiated a legal suit against Marconi. And in the war—what an irony!—he had Telefunken on his side against Marconi’s British connections.

Music is becoming sweeter…

In that other war, as we will see, it was not clear who would join what side.

Rulers more humane…

The Serbian oath breaker with three noses and two eyes—Professor Pupin—was pitted against Tesla. Pupin claimed it was he who invented wireless transmission, but that Marconi’s genius had made it available to the world.

And the individual heart…

In America, the court ruling on the invention of the radio was halted by President Wilson’s act suspending all suits concerning patents for the rest of the war.

At once more just and more gentle…

Tesla asked himself: who is the neighbor that I shalt love?

Newspapers railed against Germans. Cartoonists represented the “Huns” as gorillas. In America too, everyone started to hate “with healthy futuristic hatred.”

The fatal verses fell into their place:

We want to exalt strong, healthy Injustice that will shine radiantly from young men’s eyes.

Americans now imagined German submarines in Maine. Edison’s cameras buzzed while merry children threw German books into bonfires.

“Come closer!” Newspapermen raised a shameless din in front of the circus tent of the world.

It was written everywhere that this was “a war between the West and the East.”

“Between what?” Tesla asked and wrinkled his nose.

The alphabet, temples, sculpture, theater, and mathematics came to the Greeks from the East. Judaism and Christianity came from the East. Romans were proud of their Trojan origin. Medieval jousting horses and Arabic numbers came from India, the Gothic arc from Armenia, medical books from Egypt and Morocco, gunpowder from China, humanists from Constantinople.

The ditty about the clash between the Great Spirit of the East and the Evil Witch of the West, composed in the name of reason, did not speak to Tesla’s ears. Nikola Tesla did not believe in the magical geography and did not know what war correspondents wrote about. The Balkans, where he was born, was the seam. It was an antenna. It was a cat’s whisker. To be born in a bad place was to be born in a good place. A man from the border was familiar with the “prenatal darkness” of Serbian churches. He was familiar with Islamic adoration of light and water and with the Latin obsession with clocks and bells. No one had to explain Turkish and Russian cultures to him.

What West? What East?

CHAPTER 102

On the Too-Merry Carousel of the Merciless Sunset

“Curse God and die!” Job’s wife said.

An old man had for months treaded through the Waldorf Astoria’s plush carpets as if trying to stay invisible. The elevators in cages of iron, the marble, the orchids frightened him. The absurd Ming vases in hallways made him sad.

Do you worry about him, reader?

Our hero had completely forgotten that he owed nineteen thousand dollars to Mr. Bolt, the owner of the Astoria.

So what? Did not the world owe him something?

Is it true that he signed the Wardenclyffe Tower over to Bolt as collateral?

Tesla’s tower was abandoned for years. Rust covered its shiny steel.

We have already pointed out that—in the years before the war—our dear disoriented hero had still sometimes boarded

In the company of Edgar Allan Poe’s shadow, Tesla headed for the slumbering colossal hall of Grand Central Station. At that late hour, the red hats of the porters were nowhere to be seen. He followed the echo of his steps and thoughts. He climbed up the marble stairs and stood over the deserted passenger arena. The four clocks on the orb in the middle pointed to midnight. Midnight. Midnight. Midnight. Midnight. Illuminated eggs hung suspended on bronze chains. Enormous windows were partitioned with supple wrought iron bars. Golden constellations of stars covered the cupola. The solitary man’s footsteps resounded in the empty hall beneath the fate written in the stars.