Tesla (53 page)

The residue of one smile tore up her insides. She remembered the October afternoon of more than a quarter century before when squirrels swirled their tails and with ebullient leaps rushed through shimmering nature. She and he strolled through the yellow and auburn of Indian summer. Ducks slept afloat. The sun was in the corners of her lips and eyes. Heraclitus’s invisible flame licked the world.

She dreamed about whirlpools and geysers. She dreamed that she stroked unicorns who fed on fruit in Brazil. That she skied down a mountain of diamonds, that she gave water to hummingbirds and dragonflies from a thimble. She dreamed about
the other side of the air—uninhabited and uninhabitable.
She dreamed that the pianists tickled her.

“I believe that many different lives are owed to each and every person,” Arthur Rimbaud wrote.

But…

The veins stood out on the hands folded in the lap. Katharine was not only reluctant to go out—she refused to come down to the living room for days.

He whose body warmed hers their entire life now got on her nerves. Robert’s eyelids became swollen, and his eyes turned into slits. He chewed not only with his mouth but with every single wrinkle on his face. She always knew what he was going to say before he said it. His resemblance to a grieving lion repulsed her.

“If I brought her gold, she’d say it’s too yellow,” our good Robert complained to his son, Owen.

Katharine’s aches came in duets and then turned into choruses.

“But everyone loves to be forgiven for something,” Robert added.

She became anxious because of the inner horror of things.

The phone rang. She did not get up. She thought:
The phone will ring just like this, and I will be no more.

She put off going to bed: will I wake up again?

The balustrades and chandeliers were made of ice.

Is this all?
Kate thought.

The little French tables and tricorn armoires were made of ice.

What will I say to Saint Peter?
Kate smiled a smile of spectral joy.

Her bed was made of ice. Her hair was full of icy powder.

“Ah,” she finally sighed. “I’ll tell him what everyone else says: I didn’t know how to live any other way.”

CHAPTER 112

Dear Tesla

October 15, 1925

During the last night of her life, Mrs. Johnson asked me to stay in touch with you. That’s not easy, and it won’t be my fault if I fail.

Yours faithfully,

Luka

CHAPTER 113

Whenever…

Whenever a button fell off his coat, whenever a shoelace broke—he remembered her.

CHAPTER 114

A Letter to the Dove

Soft one! Dear one! My own!

O full of light and cooing. O you gracious elusiveness! O whiteness! Cleanliness! Brightness! Spotless, fluffy dream. O you who rinse the world with the beauty of your wings, misty from speed. O mercy with which the blood of all beings throbs. O sorrow, realized through tears from an honest heart and forgiven. O you homeland of my soul.

O my soul.

The gracious weakness that rules over strength!

O you who hovered above the waters before creation! You whom Noah first released from the ark after the flood!

I feed you by feeding myself and the whole world whose essence you are. When your flock, like confetti, grows silvery above the city,

I fly with you. I know you right away by the beauty of your flight. By your whiteness.

Sacred pure soul, stay with me.

Anima! Amen!

As I hold you on my hand, your beak pecks at the corner of my lips. Radiance flows out of your eyes and from the center of the world. Light splashes over my feet and sloshes above my knees. The flood of inner light engulfs my thighs and reaches my hips, my heart, my forehead. My lips touch the rosy beak. Blinded by whiteness, sightless, I can finally utter the last words of Christ according to John:

“It is finished.”

CHAPTER 115

And Then

The roulette of the twenties stopped on Black Tuesday. Brokers at the stock exchange rushed as the second hand of the clock whipped them along. In the drowning voices, the brokers announced that stocks and bonds were sinking. The mobs rattled the doors of closed banks. Above the entrance to Wall Street, they engraved Hobbes’s words: “Man is a wolf to man.”

In the west, farmers burned their crops. In New York, people fainted from hunger.

Impossible!

Women sold “Eden’s apples” to avoid begging. In soup kitchens, they poured soup into the hats of the walking wounded.

Impossible!

For six meals a day, the hungry hallucinated in dancing marathons.

Impossible!

Then the widower Johnson came back from Paris. He sighed and complained, “Wherever I go, there I am.”

He smiled and boasted: “When you travel all the time, you never become parochial.”

“I don’t think so,” Tesla corrected him. “One’s soul is either a provincial town or a metropolis, regardless of the place where one lives.”

As a surprise, Robert brought Tesla a copy of the Serbian surrealist journal
L’Impossible.

“Impossible,” Tesla started to laugh. “That’s the refrain of my life. That’s what they have been saying about each and every one of my ideas—from the very beginning.”

“Have you ever seen a miracle?” Johnson inquired.

“Ever? All the time,” Tesla snapped.

During the seventies, in Graz, women wore something that looked like a lacy bib. The passage of time turned that into a miracle.

Johnson told him how André Breton listened to “the Earth’s geomagnetic pulse” and how he loved the impossible.

“Impossible.” Tesla laughed once more. “The refrain of my life! From the very beginning.”

The next day, he was scratching his bowler hat.

“It’s become too expensive,” he said. “It’s become impossible.”

“What?”

“The laboratory.”

Gernsback spread his arms in a gesture that expressed wonder and agreement at the same time. He watched over the move with Tesla.

Twenty trunks with correspondence, theoretical papers, and prototypes sank into the frightening storage room of the Hotel Pennsylvania.

CHAPTER 116

The Honoree

Birthday cards with best wishes from Albert Einstein, Lee de Forest, Jack Hammond, and Robert Millikan alighted in his room like white doves.

“Here’s one, and another, and yet another,” the maid said as she threw the envelopes on the desk.

With his palm, Tesla flattened the white envelopes. As he put them in a box, he felt a bit embarrassed for desiring to get more of what he despised.

With a drowsy, blank gaze—like a figurehead on the prow of a ship—he walked down to the hotel lobby at a quarter till noon. A bevy of reporters rushed in at noon.

The seventy-five-year-old was barely aware of talking to them, and yet, he talked about the day when women would be superior to men, when his awesome turbine would be vastly improved, and his electrical pump implanted into the human body. Then he elaborated on fasting and hard work.

“What do you mean?” inquired the journalists, resting their notepads on their knees.

The skinny old man raised his index finger.

“People simply shouldn’t eat that much. I stopped eating fish. I switched to a diet of bread, milk, and ‘factor actus’—a mixture of leek bulbs, cabbage and lettuce hearts, white turnips, and cauliflower. This will make me live for a hundred and forty years.”

The skinny old man raised his index finger again and told them about his ancestors who owed their longevity to plum brandy, including the one who lived to see one hundred and twenty years.

“What was his name? Methuselah?”

“No, his name was Djuro.”

The reporters’ smiles stiffened and their chairs squeaked as they wrote in their notebooks.

“Don Quixote has turned into Sancho Panza,” jotted the writers. “He’s mocking his own wisdom.”

“I regret not interviewing him back in the nineties, when he was among the Four Hundred and changed gloves like a magician,” complained Mr. Benda of the
New York Sun
to the gorgeous Miss Jones. “People went to the Astoria just to catch a glimpse of him.”

With his cigarette holder, Benda underlined the text of a yellowed article from the 1890s on his knee. It read: “The airless glass light bulbs that Mr. Tesla held looked like the bright Sword of Justice in an archangel’s hand.”

In her tweed suit, Miss Jones of the
Times
tried to imagine the crinolines from that time period. Her button nose was powdered. Her inconsistent smile was like a needle in a compass. She said she also regretted that “I did not meet him back then in Colorado, when he was creating thunderbolts!”

Ever since the horse-faced septuagenarian started celebrating his birthdays through the press, these two had always attended.

Tesla was changing before their eyes.

At first it seemed that he came from the pits of hell, with its traces of darkness all over him.