Tesla (58 page)
Authors: Vladimir Pistalo
Pandemonium broke out in the streets. The radio kept adding fuel to the fire. “Five mighty Martian machines are outlined above the city,” the announcer informed them in a steady voice. The sound of boat whistles was heard in the background.
“Now I look down the harbor. All manner of boats, overloaded with fleeing population, pulling out from docks!” the announcer exclaimed. “Streets are all jammed. Noise in crowds like New Year’s Eve in city.”
Tesla was soon able to see that all of this was actually happening. At the time when ideologues purposefully used all anomalies of perception, when Chamberlain—who has swallowed a broomstick—and Daladier—looking like a provincial waiter—were photographed in Munich, when the black shaman Hitler bellowed above torchlight parades, at the time when Himmler dreamed of projecting movies on clouds, crowds pulsated with their own rhythms. The same crowds that Ortega y Gasset and Gustave Le Bon wrote about clogged the streets of New York.
Shadows were broken. Faces were thrilled with terror. All the people were the visible pulsations of the invisible fire. People grinned with foxes’ and wildcats’ faces. The faces turned into masks. The lights of neon signs bounced off them like the lights of bonfires. Some simply lingered, gaping. Others ran with their heads thrown back, dragging children by the arms, and—from the depths of their throats—calling to someone who refused to answer.
It was too late to reassure them:
“This is Orson Welles, ladies and gentlemen, out of character to assure you that
The War of the Worlds
has no further significance than as the holiday offering it was intended to be. The Mercury Theatre’s own radio version of dressing up in a sheet and jumping out of a bush and saying Boo! There were no Martians. It’s Hallowe’en!”
But madness was contagious. The black dots blotted out the characters. Stuck in the world of fiction, people clogged roads, hid in basements, loaded guns, wrapped their heads with wet towels to protect themselves from the Martian poison gas. Ha! When Tesla talked about Martians, they called him crazy. The world became dark and hallucinatory… much more insane than he was.
On the other hand, everything that happened that evening could be found on the pages of Gernsback’s
Amazing Stories.
At long last, our lonely hero was united with other people by the same illusion. A tiny excited smile lit up his face. He turned around in disbelief.
He walked on slowly through crippled shadows. That horrible other walked beside him. He did not know whether he heard the wind or police sirens.
In the midst of the carnival, he stumbled upon his bellboy Kerrigan, who grinned like a Cheshire cat.
“Mr. Tesla!” he shouted. “You finally got out of bed!”
CHAPTER 123
The Furies
Thou art holy, Our Lord, who decided that the sun, the moon,
and the stars cease from shining and that the earth and
everything on it be transformed with fire and that a new sky and
a new earth on which justice shall rule appear in their stead…
Akathists, Ikos 9
Tesla was reading a play by Aeschylus.
Clytemnestra had just pounced on the slaughtered Agamemnon in order to bathe in his blood when the phone rang and Swezey exclaimed breathlessly, “Germany invaded Poland.”
A force older than the gods broke loose, which was constantly at work without ever thinking about what had been done.
Those were not Eumenides.
No!
The Furies breathed down humanity’s neck.
In the meantime, a sharp whistle echoed in the park behind the library every night and woke the pigeons up. When Tesla opened his vampire-like coat wide, the wings rustled melodiously. Cooing spilled along the park’s paths. He poured seeds on the brim of his bowler hat. A couple of birds alighted on it. With the fluttering wings above his temples, the old man looked like a black Mercury.
So the Poles sent cavalry against tanks…
Since the taxi broke his body, the world had been fractured into details.
He did not know when that had begun. Everything was familiar to him. Every moment in time reflected his life.
In Budapest, he put rubber pads under his bed to avoid vibrations. He was a symbolist and a decadent long before Des Esseintes and Baron de Montesquieu. During the feverish two-day-long insomnia in his laboratory, lit with lightning, he was a futurist before Marinetti. The subway beneath the city and the neon signs on the roofs were his work. Orson Welles frightened people with his death ray.
France and England declared war on Germany.
The aged god of thunder promised that his defensive shield between nations—the invisible Maginot Line—would render wars obsolete because no country could be attacked successfully.
Hitler circumvented the Maginot Line and crushed France.
The Stukas howled. The fiery reflections swallowed the Thames and Parliament.
Our hero kept saying that, working in two secret and perhaps imaginary laboratories, he developed the death ray.
“We’ll send destructive energy in a ray as thin as a thread, which can penetrate the thickest armor. We’ll wipe out an army two hundred miles away.”
Thus spoke the fragile old man, light as dandelion fluff, whom a careless passerby could kill with a sneeze.
He communicated with the chiefs of staff of the United States, England, Yugoslavia, and Czechoslovakia. The generals wistfully looked through the window and fidgeted, not knowing whether to take him seriously or not.
Tesla smiled with the thin smile of a mummified cat.
Through the soles of his feet, he felt the purring of the planet, which all creatures imitate.
He felt like a fashion model for the floating world. Chaplin’s tramp Charles resembled him from the time he once dug ditches. Fritz Lang’s Fredersen, the master of
Metropolis,
was—he. He was also the mad scientist who used Tesla’s coils in the movie about Frankenstein. The elegance and manners of the impeccably dressed aristocrat with a widow’s peak, played by Bela Lugosi, were his. Had not he, long before Breton, listened to the geomagnetic pulse of the earth? Even Hitler sported his mustache.
Everybody and everything reminded him of himself.
Like lovers, the Furies breathed down humanity’s neck.
Greece and Norway Fall
, headlines screamed.
Denmark Too. Also Belgium.
“What about Yugoslavia?” they asked him. “What’s the situation there?”
Huge demonstrations overthrew the government in Belgrade, which signed a pact with Germany.
“The Yugoslav people found their soul today,” Churchill said.
“Thanks so much,” Tesla muttered to himself.
German airplanes roared above the burning roofs of Belgrade. Twenty thousand people perished in the flames.
Hitler squashed Yugoslavia.
Blood started flowing.
Each night, Dane came to put his hand on Nikola’s head. At times, Nikola was composed. Other times, not so much.
People did and did not believe in the news concerning Jews.
And the news that came from Lika was…
… Was horrible.
And so, while human hearts were offered as sacrifices to the gods of Progress and Quetzalcoatl, while the divine scribe Thoth weighed hearts against feathers on the scale, while Charon navigated thousands of barges across the dark sky…
A local story he had always known was becoming universal. Up until recently, lofty New York towers competed for the title of the world’s tallest building. In the First Serbian Uprising, the voivod Stevan Sindjelić defiantly fired at the munitions dump. Thus he killed all of his men in addition to many Turks. The future Grand Vizier Hurshid Pasha ordered that the heads of the dead Serbs be flayed and built into a tower full of gaping smiles. The necrophiliac wonder, by the name of
Ćele-kula,
was erected in the vicinity of the city of Niš in Serbia. In Tesla’s never-ending dream, Jewish, Serbian, Gypsy, Russian, Chinese skull towers rose above one another. Uncountable bottomless smiles kept falling into the boiling sky.
“The Furies,” the first human god of thunder whispered vengefully. “The Furies!”
In the meantime, Patricia Donnelly from Michigan was Miss America. She wore the first nylon stockings. The movie
The Wizard of Oz
made Baum’s boyish fascination with the Chicago World Expo come to life. The grieving lion from the movie looked like Robert Underwood Johnson. The shimmering TV screen showed Roll-Oh—the housekeeping robot.
Then the American fleet at Pearl Harbor was bombed.
“Good Lord, they’re turning into flame,” Orson Welles could have now reported truthfully.
CHAPTER 124
Continuity
“Uncle Nikola.”
No one had called him that in a long time. The maelstrom of the war brought his nephew Sava Kosanović to New York as a member of the Yugoslav Mission. On the phone, he could barely breathe from excitement.
“Shall we see each other?”
“Of course.”
The nephew showed up, somewhat redheaded, with glasses, a broad smile, and a blotch of spinach between his teeth. Tesla immediately and instinctively licked his soul. It was a silly soul—go this way, go that way, then go back to the beginning. But in its silliness, the soul was somehow content.
The uncle made up his mind: “Embrace and forget.”
They smiled in silence. Tesla looked at him askance. “You look more and more like your late father.”
Parakeets tweeted among the palms in the hotel dining room. In the lobby, ashen old men took out their cellos from the mummy boxes and prepared to play. Nikola raised his long finger to call a waiter.
Kosanović had brought several Belgrade newspapers.
“I don’t know if you’re interested.”
“How has the war affected you?” Tesla asked worriedly as he leafed through the newspaper.
“I believe I’ve gone a little crazy,” Kosanović smiled.
That evening, the uncle and the nephew went out together.
They took a walk the next day as well.
And the months that followed.
“I love noise,” the uncle said. “That’s creation.”
The nephew had been to New York before. And yet, he was still not sure whether people in America were bound by gravitation or freely hovered above the streets like birds.
Blacks lit up the streets with their broad smiles. Bow-legged seamen put coins into bar jukeboxes. Ruth Lowe wept, “I’ll never smile again.” Latinos with dark glasses loitered at the corner barbershops. Music on the radio flowed by itself like falling rain. A blue flag stood in the window if someone from that flat was a soldier. A gold one—if someone had been killed. Wartime chocolate tasted like soap.
Tesla bought a newspaper and saw the sorry state of the one-time proud villas in Newport. Architectural vases fell off the famous Breakers Villa, which he used to visit with Stanford White. The current owner, Baroness László Széchényi, complained about the sad state of affairs. The garden grew wild. In that same newspaper, at the bottom of the page, the king of all Russian, Bulgarian, and Serbian Gypsies, Steve Koslov from the Bowery, stated, “I despise work.”
The city was like Moses’s burning bush. And everything in the world was interconnected the way insane people believe it is. The scream of neon signs sent messages from the advertising oracles. Hypnotized crowds floated in the squares. The walkers were parts of the larger soul, the
pneuma.
All individual features were rented like carnival masks. A small distortion transformed faces into masks. Love lent value to the masks. A man told a woman in Robert’s voice, “You look gorgeous when you yawn.”
People vibrated in between the vibrations of the world.
“You’re the devil!” came from the crowd.
Another voice responded quickly as if hitting a tennis ball back: “You’ve listened to gossips.”
Slow and draaa-ged ouuuuu-t, words flowed beneath the sounds of the world.
For the third time in his life, Tesla heard the fragments of the forgotten song from the age of the Great Migration of Peoples. In front of a Puerto Rican fruit and vegetable store, a fat man was finishing the old story about the truth: “So do you know what the old hag of Truth told the young man? When you go back to the people and when they ask about me, tell them that I’m young and beautiful.”