Tesla (18 page)

In Tesla’s opinion, the only problem with his birthplace was that it was crowded with Edisons—intelligent but crude men who, in order to maintain their sense of identity, refused to take baths. Edison believed only a guilty man would choose to be polite and that the people he tricked appreciated him even more for it. He reminded Tesla of Luka Bogić, who never failed to point his gun at little Nikola: Now I’m going to kill you! Later, in the tavern, Bogić and the other hunters laughed about it.

Each one in his own trance, Tesla and Edison walked past each other every day.

The newcomer from Paris reported directly to Bachelor concerning the progress he was making in improving the new motors.

At first Tesla refused to listen when the insomniacs talked about Edison’s spy in the Patent Office Bureau, but he changed his mind when Connelly pointed his finger at a drunk. His name was Zenas Wilbur Fink. Edison used Fink’s tips to modify other people’s inventions and then patented them in his own name.

Edison’s luster wore off on a daily basis.

Without generosity, what will become of this world?
Tesla wondered.
It will turn into a prison…

Tesla started to cut the Olympian down to human size. Edison did not mind sleeping on the floor. His hair looked like he cut it himself, with a knife, at night. But most importantly, he never bothered with anything he could not sell.

“Cunning,” Tesla murmured in disappointment. “Cheap cunning…”

After one year to the day, the magician’s apprentice completed exactly twenty-four direct current motor projects.

“I believe these will become the standard and replace the ones we have,” he told Bachelor.

Unannounced, he barged into Edison’s office. The ceiling fan still turned slowly. Edison leafed through a paper. His gray eyes swept over the inflammatory headlines:

Troubles with Apaches! Malcontent Commits Suicide! Corruption in Louisiana! Last Hours of Victor Hugo! Eight Victims of Fire in Tenement! Kids Thrown out Window! Death of Skeleton! Abraham Kreutz, the Brookstone Skeleton, Died Yesterday!

Without waiting for his boss to acknowledge his presence, Tesla enthusiastically announced, “All projects completed! You said fifty thousand dollars!”

“What’s that?” a voice spoke behind the rustling newspaper.

Tesla was about to repeat himself when Edison threw the paper on the floor with a theatrical gesture. As soon as he looked at his boss’s face, Tesla knew that he was not going to get a dime.

The fan kept turning relentlessly.

Edison, composed in an attitude of light-hearted betrayal, remarked, “Young man, you don’t understand the American sense of humor.”

Tesla was dumbfounded. There was nothing particularly American in this universal brazenness. While in Edison’s office in Paris, he believed it was only the underlings who took advantage of him. But this…

The ever-present fan barely moved.

Tesla’s textbook morality was no match for Edison’s street smarts. Up until that moment, Tesla had performed for his boss like a ballerina—he would have gladly tiptoed on a spider’s web. For a year, he looked at Edison with stars in his eyes. The magician’s apprentice believed that evil came from misunderstandings. He assumed that gifted people were natural allies.

On the other hand, Edison’s father had whipped his son in the middle of the public square as if he were a runaway slave, while women shied away. In the smell of the dust, the boy’s soul detached itself from the body. As the whip cracked across his back, another Tom rose above the first one. The first Tom’s pain turned into the other Tom’s anger. Amid the stench of dust and blood, Edison vowed that he would never spare anyone from what he had to endure. You’ll never get the better of me, he told the entire world. He was in a state of competition with every man, woman, and child alive. In his eyes, victory itself was always more important than its meaning. The stench of dust and blood forever lingered in his nostrils. For his own small gain, he was ready to inflict on any other man a sizable injury.

“But…” Tesla searched for words.

Ashes snowed down on Edison’s waistcoat. His obstinate mouth gnawed at the cigar. He reminded Tesla of a dog that would not let go of a bone. His jaw was a byproduct of the evolutionary need to develop fangs capable of ripping flesh and crushing bones.

Tesla froze. “How ugly people are without the light of our sympathy,” he said.

“But”—Edison belatedly interrupted—“I’m ready to raise your salary from eighteen to twenty-six dollars a week.”

“There’s no
but
, sir,” Tesla said softly. “I’m resigning.”

Edison waved him off.

Cold chills of betrayal engulfed the young man. “Unwashed filthy clown! Cur!” he murmured in Serbian.

Not knowing which way to turn, Tesla fingered Robert Lane’s business card in his pocket.

Edison puffed out his cheeks. He tried to make the persons he double-crossed laugh and thus turned his betrayal into cheap comedy and tragedy into farce. It was the victims who suffered the need to apologize, as they felt that the sense of human balance was upset.

CHAPTER 36

Nothing

Tesla’s “no hissing, no squinting” lightbulbs lit up the town of Rahway, New Jersey. Herds of demonic shadows were chased out of town. Under the electric lights, people sang, danced, and floated in the air.

“Congratulations!” the cold-eyed financer Robert Lane and his fat partner, Wiley, exclaimed.

“This is all good and fine,” Tesla thanked them with a melodious voice and shy smile. “But when are we going to start on the real work?”

“What real work?”

Tesla’s voice became serious: “Manufacturing my alternating current motor!”

Wiley and Lane gave a genial chuckle. Tesla repeated his question and for the second time was treated to the chirping of their mirth. After mentioning his motor for the third time, he received a nicely designed certificate in the mail, resembling a diploma, penned in Gothic script.

And—yes!

He could frame it.

But—no!

He could not pay bills with it.

After a day of contemplation, it dawned on him: “They squeezed me out of my own company!”

He had to vacate his house with the garden. His furniture went into storage.

He accepted a position as a draftsman, but there was no steady work.

“A week is all we have,” they told him.

After that, he heard: “A couple of days, maybe.”

Finally: “Nothing available.”

And again: “Nothing available.”

Before, Tesla lived isolated in his laboratory. In the city that was so easy to get around in, he often found himself disoriented.

A sense of amazement yawned in him:

“How fast everything moves! How huge these streets are!”

CHAPTER 37

Come!

A popular joke said anyone could stand at the corner of Broadway and Houston, shoot a gun in any direction, and not hit an honest man.

Italian women, Poles, Greeks, Jews, and Lebanese jostled between the yellow walls of the city. The only thing they had in common was their love for shouting.

Rich Upper Manhattan never had anything to do with the lower part of the city. A young man with a sketchpad occasionally ventured into these streets to draw the picturesque poor and to imagine that he was in Naples or Cairo. Here everyone shouted—the fruit seller with his cart and the policeman who shooed him away from the street corner. In the evening, the streets switched from allegro to crescendo. An Irish woman with a stumpy pipe sold apples and “George Washington” pies. A Civil War veteran peddled shoelaces. A boisterous hawker of secondhand clothes exhibited five hats on his head. Black people selling corn cried with raw throats, “White hot—right from the pot!”

Shoe shiners with impudent faces rapped on their boxes and fought for a good spot on the street corners. Poor people soused themselves in bars called blind tigers. Newspaper boys screamed, “Read all about it!”

A celebration with fireworks marked the lighting of the Statue of Liberty’s torch on Bedloe Island. The slayer of Indians, General William Tecumseh Sherman, picked the site for Liberty, financed through a lottery. Liberty was first envisioned as a black woman with broken shackles. Then black Liberty transformed into white Liberty. Newspapers reported that cannon were fired and “land and sea were bathed in glory.” Meanwhile, a lanky man with an unhappy face whispered the word
tenement
with disgusted reverence. He could not find an equivalent in Serbian. The word referred to huge buildings where the goal was to cram in as many poor people as possible. Water pumps and indescribable outhouses were in their courtyards.

With great effort, the rays of sun reached through wet linen on clotheslines. The Parisian wrinkled his nose: “It smells of urine here!”

After he groped his way up the dark stairwell, the new tenant entered his windowless room and was overpowered by the stench of ashes. As soon as he locked himself in, he felt a kinship to the biblical Ecclesiastes. He was tormented by the suspicion that a sage was no better than a fool, that a man was no better than an animal. The walls made of plaster and sawdust did not keep out bodily noises or marital secrets. Poor people snored, hacked, and coughed all around him.

How fast everything is moving
, Tesla repeated to himself.

He had never liked money, but now he thought about it all the time. Breakfast—four cents. Lunch—the same. And tomorrow? Tomorrow will take care of tomorrow.

With the first autumn rains he rented a bed without a partition around it for ten cents. Sleeping on the floor cost a nickel. Unshaven cheeks tore pillowcases. The so-called barracks in the basements of police stations were considered the lowest of the low. As soon as the beginner vagrant entered the “barracks,” his nemesis stench assailed him and grabbed him by the throat. But outside, the demon frost awaited in ambush. The former Budapest decadent warmed himself among his stinking cosufferers. He pulled the blanket over his head to forget where he was and to fall asleep. He could not wait for the dawn so he could get out in the streets.

On a sleety, foggy morning, Tesla’s worn-out shoes were slipping along Mulberry Street when a familiar face suddenly appeared before him. Stevan Prostran! His eyes were as green as a goat’s. Between his rounded cheeks, his nose appeared to have shrunk a bit because the young man ate way too much at a German bakery where he worked.

Stevan was glad to see his friend. He spun around in delight: Baćić and Cvrkotić had left for Pittsburgh while he happened to stay in New York. “What about yourself?” he asked.

Tesla’s voice rose to the pitch of a bird’s twitter—to the very edge of a sob—and then deepened: “Fine!”

Without hesitation, Tesla’s young friend from Lika put a hand on his shoulder and uttered the words Tesla would remember for the rest of his life: “Come with me! Enough for one is plenty for two.”

Stevan took Tesla to his room.

It was as gloomy as an idiot’s heart.

The only good thing about the room was that Nikola never dreamed of Dane there.

Whiter than a ghost, Stevan sifted flour at night. During the day, he dressed up “as an American.” On Sundays, his comb whistled through his hair like the wind through sharp grass. He tilted his hat and tapped his cane against the sidewalk. In the afternoon, he went to the Bowery theaters. On stage stood two actors with pirate beards, in the flashing light of their raised stilettos. A naive kneeling beauty screamed, “No!”

As furious as the rest of the audience, Stevan Prostran loudly cursed the villain in heavily accented English as well as Serbian: “Leave the girl alone, you son of a bitch!”

Theater provided images to flash under his eyelids. The dizzy enormity of New York intoxicated Stevan. Whenever he saved some money, he bought a new hat.

“What do you think, should I get a gold tooth?” he asked Tesla.

Tesla retorted, “Out of the question!”

That autumn, which he later refused to remember, Tesla slept in Prostran’s bed: the young baker used it during the day; Tesla used it at night.

It is impossible to determine the moment when Tesla’s surprise turned into despair.