Tesla (56 page)

“Please, have some crummy caviar and some humble champagne.”

Mr. Fotić pinned the White Eagle ribbon to Tesla’s scrawny chest.

Many of the guests noticed that Tesla himself looked like an eagle. His shoulder blades lifted the back of his tailcoat like a tent. Tesla’s nose protruded from his face, and his cheeks were sunken as if he had just taken a drag from a cigarette. His ears flared out, large and petrified. The part in his thinning hair was at the same place it had been fifty years before. His eyebrows stood up. His stare was fiery—a true Dinaric peasant who would draw an enthusiastic greeting from any child in Lika: “How are you, Grandpa?”

In the midst of the Great Depression, Prince Pavle gave Tesla a Yugoslavian royal pension of six hundred dollars a month.

“Here’s some crummy caviar and some mediocre champagne,” Fotić kept saying.

Skeletal in his tailcoat, Grandpa promised that the trend to spend more on war than on education would be reversed in the future, and that all the problems of the world would be solved by the essential substance
akasa
, the source of free energy.

“Gramps is harping again on his plans to contact other planets!” Consul Tošić whispered to Tesla’s biographer O’Neill.

“For a long time, people have been scraping the aura off things,” O’Neill frowned. “But we must be able to recognize the sacred even when it is in a profane disguise,” he raised his voice. “He… only feels that we’re suffocating. He feels that down here it gets so bad that—unless we contact some other life form, then really…”

After the ceremony, a priest approached Tesla. The priest had a large head, fat cheeks, and almost Chinese eyes.

“You know, they celebrate in Smiljan as well,” the priest said.

“What do they celebrate?”

The priest continued to smile:

“Well—you! From the king to the last Lika peasant. The royal government issued a railway discount in your honor. They also issued a stamp with your image.”

“And you are?” Tesla frowned in distrust.

“I’m Petar Stijačić. My relative, Father Matej Stijačić, is now the priest in Smiljan and lives in the parish house where you were born.”

“And so?” Tesla was confused.

The fat priest almost melted into his smile. “They organized a local festival in your honor. As if with poppies, all the fields were strewn with Lika hats. The Zagreb Bishop Dositej officiated at the liturgy.”

The priest tugged at a button on his jacket, benevolently reached for a drink that a passing waiter offered on a tray, and went on: “They put a nice plaque on your home.
Nikola Tesla was born in this house on July 10, 1856.
”

Father Stijačić looked at the saintly old man with emotion and added, “A committee was established in Smiljan with a goal to more permanently mark your anniversary. Some wanted to dig a well with good drinking water right beneath the church, so that any Lika man can quench his thirst and remember his great compatriot. Others suggested that a lighthouse be erected on the top of Velebit Mountain.”

Tesla finally showed some interest.

“So, what’s going to happen?”

“Nothing.” The priest beamed with the same syrupy smile. “There’s no money.”

CHAPTER 120

The Ghost Taxi

New York’s towers were wrapped in drapes of clouds. Wind whipped the puddles with rain. The March downpour was too much for the taxi’s windshield wipers and water coursed down the windshield like oil. Blinded by the shower, Tesla was walking back to his hotel. The wind had turned his umbrella inside out, so he did not see the taxi and its driver did not see him. The taxi driver did not hear his own brakes as the muted tires slid over the water.

The impact threw the old man five yards away. His left shoe flew across the street and wound up in a planter. As soon as he opened the door, the driver was drenched.

“Even my butt was wet,” he complained that evening, soaking his feet in hot water.

He saw the old man who was as white as if he was boiled, sitting in the puddle full of shimmering circles.

“Mamma mia!” he wailed in silent Tesla’s stead.

Maria Ganz, the owner of the nearby jewelry store, lifted up the old man. The driver poured the water from the shoe and handed it to Tesla. With his eloquent hands, he explained that it was not his fault. Drenched passersby opened their umbrellas above them.

“Can you manage?” they asked.

“Let me go,” the old man muttered in a muffled voice. “Let me go.”

“Do you want to go to the hospital?” Miss Ganz whispered like an accomplice.

“Just take me to my hotel,” Tesla mumbled.

The same driver who hit him took him to the hotel. With his small hands, the Italian clutched at his heart and at Tesla’s shoulder. The injured man frowned as the taxi driver and the receptionist in a raincoat carried him in. In his spirit, he was trying to overcome the pain for two days.

“It’s nothing,” he said over and over again.

Utterly unpretentious and therefore much more serious, the hotel doctor disagreed. “Rib cage contusions,” he passed the verdict. “Three broken ribs. Pneumonia!”

As he got older, Tesla could not stand people contradicting him. Couldn’t he feel his own body? He had almost drowned twice, once he narrowly escaped being boiled alive, and once avoided dying in a fire. Doctors had given up on him three times.

“Noli me tangere!” he ordered.

He spent countless hours in the company of a solitary spider. The spider’s legs were so thin it was as if it had spun them itself.

Fainting spells assailed him frequently.

The flashes in the sky competed with the flashes of the neon signs. It flashed in his ribs. Everything flashed.

The sky was marbled with streaks of light. Its color was repugnant. Thunderbolts undulated and tried to lick him. Nikola simultaneously wept and laughed with terrible laughter.

“So you wanted Promethean light? Here’s your light,” a voice spoke to him from the lightning.

He wept through the roaring guffaws. He was lonely—the loneliest man in the world. He was so lonely that he was glad when he discerned a terrifying silhouette in the sky, when the wings beat and a huge eagle fell on his sides.

“Hello, my only friend.”

The eagle stabbed his liver with its talons.

Tesla howled roaringly.

A forked thunderbolt stuck out its tongue. Tesla bared his teeth, and it ricocheted as from a mirror. The Caucus Mountains shook.

“Let me go!” he whispered.

The eagle did not have the eyes of a bird—it had human eyes. It raised its bloody beak and blinked good-naturedly. Nikola screamed so that the entire sky lit up with lightning. Yes, those were human eyes, familiar eyes…

The eyes of his brother, Dane.

The phone rang through the lightning and dragged him back from the nightmare.

“How are you?” Gernsback asked him.

Tesla whispered painfully into the receiver: “The worst thing about sickness isn’t our inability to meet our goals—it’s that those goals seem meaningless.”

To see the meaninglessness of the world added to his suffering.

“The
Hindenburg
burst into flames. So what!” the old man was annoyed as he remembered the
Titanic.
“They’ve discovered Pluto. They’ve split the atom. So what?”

The gray-haired Miss Skerritt, his former secretary, brought him books he did not read.

“Here’s H. G. Wells’s
The Shape of Things to Come
,” she encouraged him. “Read it, please.”

“Thank you,” he responded in a vampire voice.

Miss Skerritt left. Tesla wandered away in his thoughts so much that maids could freely clean the room in his presence. Minutes or maybe hours went by as he daydreamed. A cat brushed his face with its tail, or did it just seem that way? Once again, a balloon lifted his sleepy head beyond the visible.

The bellboy, Kerrigan, materialized from the mist. Kerrigan spoke out of the corner of his mouth and squinted with his right eye. He reminded Tesla of Stevan Prostran so much that he almost expected him to ask, “Are you my father?”

The bellboy brought him a soiled envelope that came flying from the maelstrom of the Spanish Civil War. The volunteer Stevan Prostran sent his photograph from Barcelona. The fear of being alive and the joy of being photographed merged in it. Prostran put his hand on his hip in the company of the smiling anarchist Durruti and a dandy with sideburns and with a sailor’s hat on his head. A cathedral that looked like a termite mound rose in the background.

“Is that all?”

The redheaded Kerrigan gave him Robert’s letter. On a blue sheet of paper, in handwriting that no one used anymore, it said:

The light-eyed Agnes came with fruit he did not eat and flowers they put on the windowsill. The erstwhile little girl was sixty-four years old. Her husband was French Holden, a bohemian and the grandson of a general. As a witty Englishman used to say, “All the time he was able to spare from being intoxicated with himself, he dedicated to neglecting his duties.” Since their children moved out, Agnes could not stand him. She dragged an easel around, trying to paint stars “as seen through a dog’s eyes.” Her avant-garde endeavors turned out quite conventional.

“They’re a bit unclear,” Robert complained, looking at his daughter’s paintings.

“Only the unclear brings us the sensation of eternity,” Agnes responded.

Shivering with unswerving dedication, Agnes sat on the sickbed and remembered how the driver of Tesla’s coach took them on a ride through the deep shadows of the park.

Clippity-clop!

“That was a more peaceful time,” Robert’s daughter sighed.

She never admitted to him that she feared his fiery eyes back then.

In addition to Tesla, Agnes waited on yet another sick man.

“My good Johnson,” Tesla whispered. “How is he?”

Dad’s back hurt. He groaned every time he got up or crossed his legs. He complained that arthritis and a cough were the worst combination because he did not dare move, and whooping cough made him jerk.

With fake serenity, Agnes mentioned that sometimes Dad could not remember the right word, and the man of belles lettres hesitated, humiliated with the forgetfulness of old age.

A few years before, he had had a minor heart attack. Afterward, he felt like he was made of glass. He would pause in the middle of the street, not daring to move forward or backward.

“I’m afraid I’ll burst like a soap bubble,” Robert whined.

CHAPTER 121

I’m Not Afraid Anymore

With the swirling leaves, the wind wandered down the cemetery paths. A few former members of high society walked through the swirls. They spoke ever softer and slower, like crickets in October.

Tesla recognized the sharp eyes and frog mouth of George Sylvester Viereck. Yes, Viereck stood there with a leering expression as if he were silently belching while attempting a sophisticated smile. From the few words they exchanged, Tesla realized that not even Hitler’s madness had tempered the poet’s love of all things German.

“Viereck embarrasses himself,” sighed Sigmund Freud in resignation.

“I knew I was going to see you here!” Viereck said. With a ruthless glance, Viereck handed Tesla the first part of Musil’s
The Man without Qualities.

“Take a look at this!”

Viereck’s mouth curved downward as he smiled. “We should get together more often.”

Most of the mourners were Agnes’s friends. Tesla expressed his condolences to Owen. The former boy was tinged with gray like his father was when Tesla first met him at the Chicago Expo.

“I feel the raindrops on my head,” he admitted, which was his charming way of saying that he was going bald.

Even at the cemetery, Owen’s wife walked harnessed to the idea of her own beauty. She hated even the dead Katharine. Her absentminded smile said, “They had their own time. We have ours.”