Tesla (50 page)

He caught the night train to Wardenclyffe.

Like a moth, he peeped into other people’s windows.

He lost himself in the
New York Sun
and traveled with Little Nemo.

Drawn away. Drawn away.

He arrived at Wardenclyffe. The disinfecting hurricane of enormous voltage went through his still-childish heart. The heart that, ten years later, same as before, believed that priceless towers could not be torn down, regardless of what any legal contract might say.

They were drawn away, drawn away.

By the war. By time.

He was shocked that Bolt did not protect Wardenclyffe.

His neighbors from the surrounding farms—Mr. George Hageman, Mr. De Witt Bailey, and the nearsighted widow Jemima Randal—gathered to see the miracle of all miracles. Many a time, the light from this mystical place used to wake them up.

Smiley Steel Company was getting ready to pick the tower apart for less than a tenth of its value.

The storm was coming again. The clouds to the west became metallic. Desperate sunlight fell on Wardenclyffe. The tower was like a green fly. It took a ride on the too-merry carousel of the unforgiving sunset. Each steel girder of the one-hundred-and-eighty-foot erection glowed.

It thundered.

The spectators shook from the fall.

The landscape turned gray as if dusted with plaster dust.

The great razed eye of Wanderclyffe rolled in the saffron dust.

“This is the end of a dream,” De Witt Bailey said in the ensuing silence.

CHAPTER 103

Millions of Screaming Windows

Tesla was in Chicago when they wired him.

The news made his tongue, in his dry mouth, drop like a whetstone into sand.
Perhaps a wise man is really no better than a fool
, he thought.
And a human is no better than an animal.
The tower stood, derelict, in the midst of the surrounding potato fields. Tesla’s inner world did not look any different.

Wardenclyffe was his world’s stage, his place of transformation, his sublime love, his cosmic crutch, a home he had never had.

Houdini could escape any trap. Tesla could not.

His laboratory had already burned down once. That was when he went deaf from horror. Soot snowed on his hair.

He turned down the suggestion of the cobbled street—to bow his head, kneel down, embrace it, and die. Until dawn, he aimlessly wandered through the city with millions of screaming lamps and a hanged man in every room.

“Curse God and die!” Job’s wife whispered.

CHAPTER 104

Um-Pa-um-Pa!

When the news came, he was in the barber’s chair. He threw away the newspaper. A wedge of golden light crossed the street. He crossed it too and felt the sun on his back. That was when he realized that he left the shop with shaving cream on his face.

“The war is over!” ruddy faces yelled.

Happiness and pleasant smiles splashed over him.

Tesla turned around to see mankind wholeheartedly dancing to the music of the universe. On the New York avenues, seductive machines smiled—full of heroic beer—charismatic machines delivered speeches, machines out of joint kissed each other and tap danced.

Everyone looked for someone to hug.

“It’s over!” the revelers shouted.

Like petals of spring blossom, confetti showered on Fifth Avenue.

Um-Pa-um-Pa!

From his fiery throat, Caruso sang a song of victory.

In the midst of the commotion, Tesla miraculously came across Johnson and the Spanish-American War hero Richmond Hobson. He wiped the lather off his face and threw away the bib. Then they embraced each other. Their eyes grew teary and sobs stole up on them from nowhere.

Infected with brotherhood, Tesla choked and celebrated with the smiling city.

In the lying world of newspapers, the sons of light defeated the sons of darkness.

“Ah,” Tesla sighed. “It’s time to put things back in their place.”

But the gilded frame was broken, and nothing belonged to its place anymore.

As Tesla headed toward his hotel, two blocks away from Central Park, the jubilant crowd thinned. His face darkened. Once again, he became aware of the magnitude of the disaster. His sensitive eyebrow grew taut.

“In Paris, the victors will soon march through the Arc de Triomphe,” the outstanding mathematician told Johnson.

“Do you know for how long? For two hours. Do you know how much time it would take only for the French dead to march through? Twenty-three hours!”

Flags streamed in the wind.

Holy rags streamed in the wind.

Brass bands passed each other at street intersections. Trucks carried bouquets of waving hands. Feet moved faster on their own. People kissed strangers, laughed through tears, tossed each other in the air, danced in the streets. They themselves could sense the rhythm of ebb and flow that pulsed within them. Everyone had rushed to war as if to a wedding. Now New York frantically celebrated the marriage to peace. There was no more artillery or blindness or food that reeked of corpses. Men with vacant eyes who lived through the abyss would come home. And Daddy would come home. Dear God, let him—if he could only come home. And the world would be free. And the world would be new.

Purple, red, and blue stars unlocked the heavens. The drummers advertised and advertised and advertised—the tragic miracle of life.

With teary eyes, through confetti, through silver sparks, people looked at each other—transfigured—all brothers and sisters. Ah, human yearning is the eternal sheep for shearing! They were deeply moved and their faces glowed. Emotional eyes radiated promises that no peace would ever fulfill.

CHAPTER 105

Lipstick

The only emperor is the emperor of ice-cream.

Wallace Stevens

The youth of Europe were dead.

“That’s boring!”

“Let’s dance!”

Hair and skirts became two feet shorter. The music of jangled pianos and pouty clarinets rang out. Young people leaped and threw their legs sideways. Beads bounced over women’s breasts. Men cranked their gramophones and their cars. Everyone went crazy over airplanes. On the silver screen, people split their pants and threw pies at each other in jerky movements. Even the squirrels in Central Park moved in the strobe-like fashion of silent films.

This is how the poets sang:

BRrrR!

Dududum!

   dyNamo

   Dyn

   amO

That was how the poets sang.

Dadaism was the new realism.

Millions rushed home after work and turned the knob of the green prophetic eye. Voices boomed, overly tense in the magic of the radio plays.

The jellyfish lamps with hanging beads.

Gals with heart-shaped lips.

Lacquered art deco screens.

Faces verging on enigma, framed by hats.

Shimmering dresses.

Chromed grills with bug-eyed headlights and rounded fenders.

Figurines on the hoods of limousines gazing into the future.

“Burning kisses, hot lips,” lounge singers repeated like sleepwalkers, with magnolia flowers behind their ears.

Liberated trumpets, previously muffled with hats, suddenly reached the clouds. Trumpeters blew, leaning back like yachtsmen as their golden pipes tore the sky apart and brought rain.

Distorted cities glided across the mirroring limousines.

People made bathtub gin.

Manic ads repeated: “There are three things people want—Lower prices! Lower prices! Lower prices!”

“Ha ha!”

“Ha ha ha!”

“Haha Haha!”

The world laughed.

The music was ragtime, except it was not. Girls’ faces looked like people Tesla knew, except their laughter was like shrapnel. With its neon signs and the radio, the world resembled the Metropolis he and White had planned to build.

It was exactly like Tesla envisioned it.

Except it was unrecognizable.

There was a puff of cold breeze and all things declared:

Now we are alien.

When did it start?

Perhaps a year before the Great War started, about the time John Jacob Astor IV perished in icy waves, together with the inlaid interior of the
Titanic.
That same year, Tesla attended J. P. Morgan’s funeral.

The world was not the same without that colossal adversary. How was it to continue to spin without those tiny malicious eyes and that grotesque nose?

The following year, Westinghouse, the relentless fighter, passed away. The friend of nature, fragile and noble John Muir, went after him.

It is quite possible that those people did not seem real to Tesla even before they died.

Before the war, he himself was a strange but real person.

During the war, the government suspended the court’s ruling concerning who was the inventor of the radio.

A lonely pianist played in the enormous lobby. Followed by the Buddhist smile of the headwaiter, Tesla quietly left the hotel in which he had spent twenty years. Each new phase of his life was a new expulsion from the Garden of Eden. A clear stream gurgled across the keyboard while he pushed the Astoria’s revolving doors, for the last time, after two decades. He murmured, “We’re life’s apprentices forever!”

He looked at objects as if he could not remember what they were. He blankly gazed into other people’s windows and other people’s lives with an innocent smile, which approaching old age, made him look suspicious. Like a moth, he fed on light. The whole world appeared like a lit-up shop window, which our frozen loner now observed from the outside. The weirdest thing was that he was the one who lit up that window.

“Ha ha!”

“Ha ha ha!”

“Haha Haha!!”

The world laughed.

CHAPTER 106

The Nose and the Parted Hair

I keep attacking the malice of time,

which gnaws and devours everything.

Don Quixote

The nose and the parted hair
, Tesla thought when he first saw him.

Hugo Gernsback sported polka-dot bow ties. He took Tesla to his electronics shop, under the tracks of the elevated train on Fulton Street.