Tesla (55 page)

For a few months, it wore a crown.

Then the Empire State Building outgrew it.

Tesla watched them on his walk through the city.

What’s the point of obsession with the biggest?
he wondered.
The earth isn’t the largest planet, or the planet closest to the sun, but life exists only on it.

He held Dane by his hand and carefully—as if he considered death to be some sort of disability—led him across the street.

He read
Magnetic Fields
by Philippe Soupault, ate his pathetic “factor actus,” and praised his own subconscious plan for self-annihilation.

The angelic fragrance of a Chinese laundry wafted by him as he passed. A wooden Indian stared at him with its white eyes. The sound of guitars and irregular
terza
intervals came from a Cuban bar. (Jesus would have loved to have had a drink in such a place right after they took him down from his cross.) In an Italian café, a gigantic espresso machine with an eagle hissed like an airplane coming in for a landing.

Beneath the elevated train on Second and Third Avenues, Don Quixote stalked through an interplay of shadows that made him dizzy. He strolled by stone churches in the canyons between the buildings. Fire escapes and water tanks on the roofs rose above him. Time and again, he wondered at the trees planted on the terraces of the ziggurats. He looked up at the sky that was squeezed between the cliffs and his head spun. From Pennsylvania Station, trains rattled, fired out into the world.

Dreams, movies, and neon signs were mixed up with everyday life.

Tesla watched the movies Vermeer from Delft directed. Blonds stared at him through a veil of smoke. Shady characters dressed in tweed chased femme fatales down wet streets. Shadows were as deep as chasms. Fans turned slowly in bars. On the screen, the train wheels rattled in the smoke. Sheets of illuminated rain whipped the window-panes while the hero and his fiancée left the station. Then Bela Lugosi focused his crazed and anguished eyes on Tesla from the screen.

“I love to go to the movies,” our hero would say. “I look through the pictures like through glass. It’s relaxing, and yet I can think.”

Deaf from solitude, Tesla left the movie theater.

He blinked and fed on the city noise. All around him, the dangerous and enchanting New York screeched, growled, hummed, and screamed. The only city on the planet made of villages. He listened to the barking of the elevated train as it curved.

It grew dark. Automobile headlights in the streets became something sacred. Seen from above, the liquid jewelry slowly crawled along the streets.

The view of New York was a drug.

Neon oracles on the roofs…

Pulse! Pulse!

… repeated the same things.

“Part of my laboratory has always been out in the streets,” the hermit smiled.

The tireless stroller pushed through the throng of people in front of Broadway theaters. In front of the entrance, a lightly dressed girl hugged herself and shivered.

A newsboy with a flat cap practiced Tarzan’s scream with a breaking voice.

“I need to apologize?” a scrawny man shouted at a woman. “I’m too skinny to apologize!”

Once again, like before, couples sniffed each other all around him. They rubbed against each other and squeezed each other—the couples. They were barely able to tear apart their honey-sweet lips in the movie theaters, the entrances, the alleys—the couples. In the hotel rooms—the couples.

Undulating roundness. Tightness. Possessing. Recoiling and submitting, dissolving in affluence and sensuality. The couples.

Each woman was a boundless promise.

Each young man wanted to be a bull, and a swan, and a shower of gold.

Lights hovered, and the city burned around our Kaspar Hauser. Around the wrestling ring in Harlem, the spectators howled. Faust and Job tossed each other on the mat. King Kong roared from the Empire State Building. In Caribbean restaurants, cooks softly prayed to Yemanja, the African goddess of the sea. In a bar in Greenwich Village, the Grand Inquisitor accused Jesus of giving people too much freedom.

Nikola Tesla entered the lobby of his hotel and nodded at the porter in livery.

An unread daily paper waited on the table.

In the paper, Roosevelt shook hands with a forgotten man.

“You remembered me,” the Forgotten told him.

CHAPTER 118

The Bride of Frankenstein

Three rows of neon signs rose above the movie theater. Tesla entered the Palace of Illusions on his own two feet, and left it on someone else’s. Whenever he stepped into the lobby, freshness enveloped him.

The lobby was plastered with mysterious semi-profiles and sensuous smiles of movie stars.

The sweetshop offered candy and cigars. The lobby appeared to be a cross between a mosque, the Kremlin, and a Chinese restaurant. Ornamental wriggling lines created an illusion of movement. On the boxes, even ornaments were ornamented.

There was an abundance of special, exhilarating space inside. The fans blew freshness and the scent of perfume at the visitors. A war widow and a chubby man who slaved in his office for eight hours were finally able to wipe their foreheads with relief: “This is the life.”

White rays streamed across the room.

The metallic voice in the background lent authority to the images of foreign and domestic news. Roosevelt kept signing on and on. A voice resounded in the back of Tesla’s mind:
Come! Cesare, who has been sleeping for twenty-five years, is about to wake up!
Hitler introduced mandatory military service. Mussolini’s shadow loomed over Ethiopia. In New York, they listened to “Lullaby of Broadway.”

Tesla grinned.

The movie started with thunderbolts, darkness, and wind. In a warm boudoir on Lake Geneva, Byron, Percy Shelley, and his wife, Mary, laughed. Then the scene darkened, and the story about Frankenstein’s monster began—or rather continued. To the spectators’ utmost amazement, it turned out that the monster did not die. It surfaced from the underground tank beneath the burning mill.

Tesla’s chiseled head stood triumphant above his suit, which grew crumpled and sank into itself.

After the murders and the ensuing mobs, Frankenstein’s monster came across the hut of a blind hermit. The blind man never asked him a question.

“No one will hurt you here,” the player of the sad violin told him.

He gave the monster bread, wine, and a cigar. He taught him words:

Bread good.

Wine good.

Friend good.

At that very moment, Doctor Pretorius appeared unannounced at Frankenstein’s castle, followed by an enormous shadow.

“Let’s create life from the dust of the dead together,” Pretorius suggested.

Baron Frankenstein threw his hands up. “I’m fed up with that hellish course of action.”

“Come,” Pretorius said, luring Frankenstein. “After twenty years of secret scientific work I have also created life.”

At that point, Tesla remembered his Prague days, Doctor Faust’s house, and the Golem. He giggled.

The widow next to him turned her head in disapproval.

On the screen, Baron Frankenstein revealed a worrisome weakness of character. Curiosity overcame scruples, and he let himself be dragged into the laboratory. With his horse teeth, the demonic Pretorius somewhat resembled President Wilson. He clenched his face like a fist and toasted: “For the new world of gods and monsters!”

It turned out that Pretorius produced miniature people in his laboratory.

He lifted a piece of felt from some glass jars. He showed the cute homunculi to Frankenstein:

King

Queen

Bishop

Ballerina

Siren

The Mephistopheles-like Doctor Pretorius moved the tiny people around with tweezers. He was annoyed by his inability to achieve a larger size.

“That has never been a problem for me,” Tesla giggled.

On the screen, Mephistopheles hissed at Baron Frankenstein: “Our mad dream has been realized only halfway. You created a man by yourself. Together, we’ll create his female companion.”

“You mean…” The baron did not dare to understand.

“Yes. A woman.”

Finally, the heroes of the movie found themselves at the most exciting place in the world.

The spectators’ eyes lit up.

That was an interstellar gate, the tower of alchemy, shrouded in silence. Its heart drilled into the heart of the earth. Its eye stared into the spheres of heaven.

It was Wardenclyffe!

Silently, our hero laughed so hard he choked.

The special effect expert Kenneth Strickfaden redesigned Tesla’s magic coils for his own purpose. Blinding streaks whipped all around the tower and disappeared into the darkness.

Lo and behold—a female mummy with discs on her temples was already waiting, lying on the table. Lazy sparks surrounded her body. They became vibrant, started to caress her aggressively, and turned into frenetic fireworks.

Oh, do you still remember the walks in front of Dr. Faust’s house?

Do you still remember the Golem?

Do you remember Prague, Nikola?

“The artificial brain is waiting for life to enter it,” Pretorius announced in a funereal voice.

Do you remember the thunderbolts that resembled sea snakes you created in Colorado?

Do you remember the sparks that flew around your shoes?

A shout came from the screen: “This is going to be a tremendous storm!”

The assistant was Edison’s Igor, who once winked at the bearded lady.

“The storm is coming!” Igor screamed. “Release the kites!”

At that very moment, the apparatuses were turned on and lit up their faces. The sparks boiled over. Thunderbolts started to rumble. The mummy ascended toward the opening in the Wardenclyffe Tower. Turbulent clouds could be seen through the opening. The kites danced in the night. A thunderbolt hit one of them with a blast. The bed with the female mummy started to descend from the roof.

“Did she receive life?” a shaky voice asked.

A Promethean spark brought the dead flesh to life.

“May I be cursed for meddling with the mysteries of life,” Frankenstein wailed.

Yes, what has been said about Allah could be said about electricity: without shape or smell or sound, but nothing can resist it once it makes itself known!

The woman’s hand moved.

“She’s alive!” Pretorius screamed.

Frankenstein’s bride stood upright before her creator, with stitches beneath her chin, looking insane. She had a most fascinating hairstyle: gray streaks shot up from her temples like thunderbolts.

“Look at her! She’s beautiful!” Tesla could not tear his eyes away from the pure femininity that electricity created.

“He made me from the dust of the dead. I love the dead. I hate the living,” the monster said.

The monster approached the woman.

“Friends? Friends?” he mumbled with shy hope.

The woman was perfectly grotesque. Attractive. Repulsive. With her hair standing on end.

The electric beauty saw the square head with electrodes from up close and hissed like a cat.

“She hate me,” the monster stammered.

“The levers!” someone warned.

The desperate monster grabbed a lever.

People’s screams did not prevent him from pulling it.

Wardenclyffe shuddered and once more collapsed into nothingness.

Tesla saw the movie five times, staring at his own thoughts through the moving pictures. Hermes Trismegistus whispered into his ear: “That which is Below corresponds to that which is Above, and that which is Above, corresponds to that which is Below, to accomplish the miracle of the One Thing.”

In Mary Shelley’s book, the monster was some kind of superman. In the movie, a solitary beast took his place. In popular speech, the name Frankenstein was used for both the monster and his creator. Thus the genius turned into a monster. And the other way around.

CHAPTER 119

Because There’s No Money

“Eight decades. That’s not something to joke about.”

The Czechoslovakian ambassador awarded Tesla his country’s decoration. Mr. Fotić, the Yugoslav ambassador, encouraged the guests to help themselves: