The Invention of Everything Else (25 page)

George had taken my polyphase motor and electrified America with it. He'd strung up wires all across the country, a very expensive endeavor and one I was quite proud to have played a role in, but now, the thought of those wires depressed me. Who needs wires when electricity can travel wirelessly? Over the past few years, with funds from J. P. Morgan, I'd been constructing a World Wireless Transmission center out on Long Island, in Wardenclyffe. A fifteen-story, Stanford White–designed monument to progress. I have little interest in wires and in what George has to tell me.

We'd spent months working side by side in his Pennsylvania factory and so I am quite familiar with him, and in this familiarity I'm able to ignore George. I let him poke around the lab. His silence affords me the opportunity to follow a thought I'd been having: What, besides information and energy, can be transported wirelessly? The possibilities are making me giddy, which is perhaps how I'm able to tune George out when he finally begins to talk.

"Niko. I want to speak straight with you."

"Umm. Yes. Straight" I reply by rote. Food and water, I think. Perhaps there is some way to transport food, and certainly water, wirelessly.

"As you well know, when this whole thing got started, there were really only three electric companies, Edison's, Thomson-Houston's, and ours, mine, Westinghouse."

And what of heat and light? Certainly. I could wirelessly transmit heat and light with one hand tied behind my back. Any Eskimo's igloo could enjoy the warmth of Hawaii; the chill of the ocean could be used to cool people's homes in August.

"Are you listening to me, Niko?"

I'm seated in a wooden straight-back chair set by a window, a place I often sit to think. George paces behind me, nervously. I haven't heard a word he has said. "What?"

"I asked if you were listening." He wrings his hands.

"Yes. Yes, of course I am."

"Since the fair, even since you and I harnessed Niagara, much has changed. J. P. Morgan has wrested control away from Thomson and Houston, and now it seems Edison has also been forced to sell to Morgan. General Electric, they're calling it. I'll put it frankly, I'm in quite a bit of trouble."

Despite what George might think, this news of Edison's failure does not bring me any joy. Edison might be a capitalist, but at least, unlike Morgan, he's also an inventor. George stops his pacing right in front of me. He has a terrific mustache, not unlike the horns of a large Texas steer. It is tremendous, and standing before me, he begins to madly twist its tips between his fingers. What about people, I wonder. Why couldn't I wirelessly transport people? We are, after all, nothing but bits of collected energy.

"You see, now that we, the original three companies, have, at great expense, established the infrastructure for electrifying America, Morgan wants to step in. He'd like to take over, gain a monopoly on electrical distribution. Now that all the work is done, he wants ownership. The only way I can fight him is if I could woo a number of smaller investors to my cause. But there is a problem, you see. No investor will take me on as long as I have such a generous royalty agreement with you. I'm not sure I can hold on."

People. Yes. Send George cruising through the ether in some sort of molecular form. I could send him right back to Pennsylvania and then perhaps I would be better able to concentrate on the matter at hand. I stare at his face, studying him, as if to ready him for transport.

"As you are also probably well aware," he says, "at this point your royalty contracts with me are worth over twelve million dollars."

This sum pulls my attention back into the conversation with George. I had no idea. "Twelve million dollars," I say. I've never known money like that. Twelve million could easily finish Wardenclyffe's construction; it could build an entire wireless world. Just in time, as Morgan has grown cold to my pleas for funding.

"Yes, twelve million dollars that I don't have. Niko, I'm nearly bankrupt. I came here tonight"—he tents his hands, drawing both pointer fingers up underneath his chin—"to ask you to tear up your contract with me."

"Oh," I say. Yes. People. Pennsylvania. I'd send him straight back there if I could.

"If you refuse, Westinghouse will go under, we'll have to sell to Morgan, and there will be no royalties regardless. Either way you will not get paid. But if you tear up your contract with me, Westinghouse, along with your invention, may survive."

I'd always liked George. "You mean my polyphase system will survive?"

"Yes."

He left me little choice.

The walk to Pennsylvania Station is a quick one. The evening rush is long past. I make the walk even faster as I try to outrun thoughts of what it is I just agreed to. There will be more, I tell myself. When I have completed my work at Wardenclyffe, money will no longer be a worry.

Pennsylvania Station is a magnificent building. Wrought-iron gothic arches span the interior, and the space the station commands is all the more noticeable at this hour because it is nearly empty. My heels click
on the marble, picking up speed when I glance at the time. Ahead, I see the conductor turn away from the track entrance. I step aboard with moments to spare.

The train's engines are already at full steam, the wheels just beginning to turn. I turn my head to the window, prepared to get some rest, but find instead that I am staring out the window at the passing backyards of Brooklyn and Queens, Hicksville, Syosset, Greenlawn, and Kings Park until the backyards break up and Long Island opens up into just sand and sky and trees and sea.

I'm the sole disembarkee at the Wardenclyffe station. As the train pulls away it drags all the light, all the sound, with it. Wardenclyffe is dark. The village, owned by a man named Warden, has very few residents. A couple of farms, a couple of orchards, and beyond that—forests all the way down to the bay. A dark and sleepy village. It seems that everyone but the last stationmaster has already gone, and he whistles as if he'd been waiting for me, impatient for his bed.

In a moment, my eyes become accustomed to the dark. I can smell the sea and the pine trees. I can hear the brush of the needles, the leaves, the low, dry grasses sweeping the sandy soil. The tower of Wardenclyffe is visible off in the distance. It surprises me. It always does, as if it were an architectural wonder, the last artifact of its kind left behind by some ancient advanced civilization. The Aztecs. The Incas. The wooden tower rises high above a rectangular brick laboratory. It soars 187 feet above the ground and is topped with a fifty-five-ton mushroom cap. Invisible from where I stand is a network of subterranean passages, an underground city as complex as any colony of ants or honeybees.

There is much work to do. I set off walking toward it.

From the path I squint my eyes to look at Wardenclyffe. I don't want to see it clearly. The tower is not done, and worse, with my eyes open I can see no way to raise money for its completion. So I squint, and when I do the powerful beams of communication and radiant energy become visible to me. Pure, free power plucked from the sky. One day Wardenclyffe will send its wireless energy, its wireless signals, off to Zimbabwe, California, Capistrano. When I squint I envision how, with money and a bit more time, the laboratory will slowly climb up the tower, making the final structure a pyramid, as in old Egypt, though surpassing even the Sphinx in importance and beauty. With my eyes half-closed I imagine each floor—magnificent laboratories, acres of
libraries, legions of bustling assistants, chaotic administration rooms. The World Wireless Telephone and Energy Transmitto—I lose my footing. I trip. Through squinted eyes I was not watching where I was going. I land on the path and my wrists burn. Drawing the scraped flesh up to my mouth, I open my eyes. The tower stands directly before me as only a wooden framework, a scaffold. Its insides, even the metal rod that runs 187 feet to the top and down 120 feet into the earth, are exposed, open to the elements. I have already spent the $150,000 investment received from J. P. Morgan. In fact, I have already spent far beyond that investment, diving deep into debt on all sides, labor, favors, supplies. I haven't paid my bills at the Waldorf in years. Morgan has stopped replying to my letters. He's done, he says. Still I beg him weekly.

"I'll get the money," I tell the tower, rubbing my cut palms and knees. I look to see what I tripped on. It is a sheet of newspaper; debris caught in the wind has wrapped itself around my left leg. I dislodge the offensive litter, and shifting the paper's grip I am ready to let it go when an advertisement there catches my eye.
This Christmas why not surprise the family with a double socket. Give the gift of electricity.

"I already did," I say to the ad and grab hold of the paper with both hands. I study the advertisement. There is a family of four shown gathered around a double electrical socket as though around a roaring fireplace. I address this happy family. "Do you even know what electricity is?" The family continues to smile. There is no answer because this family has been so mesmerized by technology that they are no longer even curious enough to try to discover where the electricity they love comes from. I stare at the family and am just about to let the newspaper fly when I am certain I see the father in the ad crimp his dot-printed mouth to one side and whisper to the mother in the ad, "Wireless? I told you he's from Venus." The wind blows hard against the newspaper in my hands. I let it go.

As the wind comes again I stand, raise my arms up to catch the breeze, hoping it might carry me off too. The wrought-iron weather-vane on top of the laboratory shakes in the wind. I imagine the confetti shreds of my contract with Westinghouse taking flight, and me along with them. Twelve million dollars. Maybe I do belong on Venus or Mars. There is nothing to hold me here. Even my inventions have forgotten who invented them. I keep my arms raised, prepared to lift of, but nothing happens.

I stand before my tower at Wardenclyffe. "Morgan has refused to give me any more money," I tell the structure.

"He what?" the tower asks, stirring its steady bearings.

"Not only that—he said he has sunk more than enough money into you and then asked me where he could put the meter. I didn't know what to tell him. I need more time, more money before any of this could be metered. He wasn't interested, and in fact he's warned other investors off the project. He has told them not to fund Wardenclyffe. There was even an article in the
Times.
They called you my milliondollar folly."

The tower writhes and stews as I watch.

"Don't worry. I'll figure something out" I say.

But the tower does not ask for more of an explanation than that. Rather, it sprouts feet from its foundation, tears its tethers, and lets loose a terrible roar of pain and fury in the face of this injustice. The tower, an angry giant, lifts one leg and then the other. Each falling footstep wreaks a great earthquake.

"Oh, dear."

My terrific monster sets off in a rage, howling, crisscrossing the world. Its mushroom head a beacon, a homing device detecting cigar smoke, swiftly narrowing in on the object of its anger, J. P. Morgan, a man who I fear will momentarily, summarily be torn to bits by my invention.

But no. That is not how it happens. Instead the tower creaks in the wind. Instead I enter the lab. It is dark and quiet when the tower says, "Not today, Niko. It is about to rain and I am tired."

No. The truth is that the tower says nothing. The tower cannot speak. It has a design flaw that is keeping it from functioning properly. Rather, it sighs and settles; the wind blows salt into its joints, preparing it for the day that will come soon when this land will be incorporated into the town of Shoreham and I will surrender the deed of Wardenclyffe to the Waldorf Hotel in order to pay my bill. And soon after that, the United States government will find cause to rip my tower limb from limb, suspecting it of housing German spies. Leaving behind just the small brick laboratory, they will spread rumors, stirring fear in order to destroy a device that would one day have provided free energy to the world and brought the capitalists like Morgan to their knees.

Please remember that Magick is Science.

—Aleister Crowley

Alternating Currents

New York is haunted by bones, hair, abandoned baby carriages, abandoned babies, grease, hardened old chewing gum, forgotten silver frames with photos of people no one remembers tucked inside, even the sphagnum moss that once grew where the stock exchange now sits. People have lived in this city for so long that there are dead things in the soil, in the drinking water, in the air New York City breathes. Ghosts wait on stoops or lean against doorways. The only place these ghosts really disappear is inside the hotel. Here, Louisa thinks, everything is different. It's not yet old enough to be haunted. This is the new world. Here is the efficient. Here is the modern. Elegant people dine on the latest dishes: Lobster Thermidor, Lamb Kidney en Brochette, Mousse of Capon with Sauce Suprême, Roasted Chicken Jeanette, Cold Consommé with Rice, buffet plates of sliced pineapple, cream cheese, and nuts, baked Alaska. Everything is cleverly designed, space age, really. Sleek, functional, and hidden. There are numerous back hallways, ingeniously concealed stairs and doors for employees only. Maids slip into these secret shortcuts. Stewards slink behind the walls of rooms, catching snippets of conversation—"Paper says Errol Flynn's been acquitted of rape," or "Let me comb your hair," or "Darling, of course we can just call room service."

Louisa climbs one of these secret passages, a back stairwell that runs all the way from the main kitchen up to the forty-third floor. A service elevator runs the same route and so this stairwell is rarely used, but Louisa likes the silence there. She checks in with the head maid and then goes to the stairwell to think about kissing Arthur Vaughn. Taking one slow step at a time, she is imagining Arthur's neck, his collarbone, his fingertips, when the latch of a door opens below. Voices make their way up the stairwell and so she treads very softly, listening.