The Kingdom of Ohio (14 page)

“Another coffee,” he murmurs, “and my mail.”

Sipping the fifth cup, he surveys his correspondence. Tesla has his professional mail forwarded to the club from the Waldorf—a more civilized setting, he thinks, in which to conduct business. His rooms at the grand hotel are luxurious, but despite the eagerness with which he sought them—suites at the Waldorf are in short supply, and Tesla has always been an avid social climber—he now finds that he spends less and less time there. Although the maids visit daily, the odor of his own body has begun to pervade the place: the damp smell of his own discarded skin and hair thick in the velvet curtains and upholstery. The smell disgusts him, and though rationally he knows that the lab must be the same, somehow the tang of electricity in the air masks the whiff of mortal decay.

Flipping through his letters, Tesla finds notices from assorted charitable societies, an invitation to perform at a symposium on Electrical and Parapsychophysical Phenomena, a bill from his tailor, a bill from the Waldorf, and a letter bearing a Boulder, Colorado, postmark. Puzzled by this last item, he opens the envelope—and finds inside another bill, for the overdue rent on a horse stable in Colorado Springs.

The inventor frowns. He can clearly remember the boredom and inconvenience of that miserable mountain village, where he had conducted a series of high-elevation experiments last autumn, but can recall nothing about a stable. No, Tesla decides, discarding the letter: it must be some feeble attempt at fraud, or simply an outright mistake. His own memory, after all, has never failed him.

He turns to the invitation to the symposium. For a moment he contemplates it—then, with a sudden violent motion, tears it to pieces, which he deposits in a pile beside his now empty cup. He takes a deep breath. It maddens him, that to support himself in something resembling style he is forced to give these public demonstrations on a regular basis.

The requests for his presence onstage are frequent: he is a virtuoso showman, dramatic and eloquent, the most sought after of all the inventors and scientists who tout their discoveries on the stages of every great city of the world. And there is a secret part of him, a part he despises, that loves the breathless attention of his audience. The thunder of applause as he strides before the curtain with electric flames shooting from his fingertips and head, brandishing his fluorescent tubes like rapiers. But at the same time, the daylight part of himself knows that these performances are base, they are low; they are
acting,
one rung up from prostitution. They are circuses of electricity for the drooling masses, and he is the trained beast on display. Stand on your hindlegs, like so, for the crowd, Sorcerer—

But all these worries will soon be unimportant, Tesla reminds himself, searching for calm. When the time comes, none of this will matter. And he shivers, feeling suddenly cold despite the two fires that crackle in the stone fireplaces. A certain brittle ache that has crept into his bones in recent months.

Secretly, he wonders whether this grippe might not be connected to the Shadowgraphs. Despite the fact that all the inventors involved in roentgen research have assured the world that no harm can come from the rays, now and then doubts creep up on him. The power of these rays, their penetrating force—might they not affect the body in some secret way, altering the invisible currents of blood and breath? But whatever the consequences, he knows that he cannot stop using them.

He has never been one to spare himself in the pursuit of science, and the way they stimulate his dreams—nothing else has come close, neither opium nor liquor nor any of the other tinctures and potions with which he has experimented. Although Oliver Lodge and the other inventors who have begun tinkering with X-rays grasp the basic mechanical principle, none of them—all fools, Tesla thinks—has understood their true potential.

That potential, which Tesla alone seems to perceive, is why he chose the name “Shadowgraph,” a term first used by Kierkegaard in
Either/Or
to describe “sketches derived from the darker side of life . . . woven from the tenderest moods of the soul.” It is for these effects that Tesla now spends at least an hour each day sitting under the X-ray machine, bathed in its invisible radiation, allowing the Shadowgraphs to peel away the film of waking consciousness so that he can glimpse the truth that hovers just beyond his grasp on the other side.

He glances at his pocket watch again—a quarter to ten. He snaps shut his satchel and stands. Time to go.

Refusing the valet's offer to hail a cab, he steps down onto the sidewalk, adjusting his hat against the January wind and turning up the collar of his coat. At the corner, he stops short as a horse-drawn phaeton swerves narrowly around a hand trolley, slushing up sheets of icy mud. Overhead a messenger-dirigible chugs past, a monstrous tangle of smokestacks and iron flanges. Glancing over his shoulder, he turns onto Broadway.

Like most major thoroughfares of New York, Broadway is a morass of carts, omnibuses, automobiles, and wagons that jostle together in the street, and the sidewalks are packed with vendors, pedestrians, pickpockets, and beggars. Yet despite all this, a space free of elbows, phlegm, and insult opens itself before the lean monochrome figure of the inventor in his tails and top hat, a silent acknowledgment. Ignoring the chaos of the city, he strides down the street, in the direction of the Waldorf-Astoria.

 

 

 

 

STANDING IN THE half-darkness behind a fold of curtain, she listens to the silence of Tesla's rooms and tries not to breathe. Around her, the space is empty, its stillness punctuated by the soft ticking of a mantelpiece clock.

Although she has spent days imagining the difficulties involved in reaching this place, her passage through the Waldorf and into the inventor's suite had been almost disappointingly easy. In the grand lobby of the hotel, surrounded by potted palms and rich Oriental rugs, it had taken nearly all of her courage to approach the dullest-looking of the uniformed bellhops. But despite her ragged appearance, with the note she had forged on a scrap of Tesla's letterhead scavenged from a dustbin behind the hotel, a few murmured words of French and her best impression of royal hau teur, the bellhop was persuaded. He showed her to this room, unlocked the door, and, with a lascivious wink, departed, leaving her alone to survey the space.

Wandering through the immaculate luxury of the suite, she tried to imagine its occupant. The rooms felt ghostly and unused, the only signs of habitation a stack of letters on the nightstand, a row of identically laundered suits hanging in the closet, and a clinically clean razor beside the bathroom sink.

Briefly, she let her hands run over each of these things, trying to conjure the presence of the man she remembered, or at least—an inward twinge—imagined that she remembered. The dark sheen of his hair, his sharply Roman profile and gaunt cheeks, his eyes that never rested for longer than an instant on any one thing. But despite her efforts, the trace of Tesla's life here eluded her.

The paranoid thought occurred to her that she might be in the wrong suite altogether. She crossed back to the bedroom and inspected the stack of letters, discovering that they were indeed addressed to the inventor. Her eyes fell on the date written at the top of one page—January 15, 1901—and she felt a wave of nausea. Another reminder of the impossibility of her situation, of the rational conclusion she still struggled to avoid: that she had simply lost her mind.

But Tesla was the one person who might be able to explain everything, she reminded herself. And if he cannot answer . . . a possibility too terrible to contemplate.

She closed her eyes, remembering an evening, years ago, when she had walked with the inventor along the manicured garden paths outside her father's mansion. In total, Tesla had spent less than six months in Ohio, under the patronage of Louis Toledo, and while there kept largely to himself and his own experiments. Even so, that time still seemed like a magical interlude to her, a blossoming of scientific possibilities she had previously hardly imagined.

On that evening, it had been sunset and overhead the sky glowed with surreal perfection. They had walked side by side, she in her blue working dress, he tall and angular in his black suit. In the dying light, the roses lining the path were shaded from deepest red to rust, the sunset a vast cliff of orange clouds towering miles high above the gardens and lake.

She looked up at the shadowy planes of his face and wished, for a moment, that she had some way of photographing this: that some film existed which could capture these colors. In theory, she thought, it should be possible to develop a color-sensitive film; it would simply be a matter of layering different gelatins, each responsive to a different spectrum. And maybe, she mused, someday . . .

“See how the setting sun with reddish glow, the green-embosomed hamlet fires,” Tesla murmured, his English formal and faintly accented.

“What did you say?” She turned to him.

“Ah, nothing. Only a line from a poem that suddenly came to me.”

She nodded and they walked on in silence, along the garden path.

“And when will we reveal,” she asked at length, “what we have been building in that basement?”

“What you have been building,” he corrected. “I have only lent a few ideas. You know my real research lies elsewhere.” Tesla gestured sweepingly. “What we have worked on together may conquer distance, but the adversary I wish to defeat is time itself.”

“Of course.” She smiled at him and then looked away, thankful for the concealment of dusk. So strange, she thought, the choices of the heart. That it should be this man, with his arrogance and melancholy moods, who affected her so. A response that she had carefully hidden from both her father, who would never approve of the match, and from Tesla himself, because if he knew, she reflected, it would all be over in an instant. I would cease to be a peer and become only another woman to be avoided.

With an effort, she pushed these thoughts away and turned her attention to the progress they had made over the last few weeks. The moments of almost godlike exaltation when, after struggling for days with a problem, the solution became clear in a flash of simple, blinding
rightness
. The feeling was an addiction, and like her mentor she found herself more and more forgetting to sleep and eat, forgetting the world in its pursuit. Sometimes she was almost frightened by what was happening to her—but at the same time, she realized, nothing could have induced her to give it up.

“In any case,” Tesla continued, “the device should not be made public until you have proven that it works. That is, if it ever does.”

“Then you are still skeptical?”

The inventor shrugged. “Whatever my opinions may be, hearing the whispers of Washington, I fear your research may be interrupted.” He stopped, turning toward her. “Although I pray it does not come to that.” Tesla's forehead creased briefly and, despite herself, she felt a small surge of happiness.

She tried to match his tone. “I am grateful for your concern.”

For a moment they stood awkwardly facing each other—then he nodded and stepped away.

“It is late. Good night, mademoiselle. Sleep well.”

“Good night, Mr. Tesla.” A small, unnamed hope collapsed inside her.

As always, that night they had not embraced, or even touched. The inventor continued down the garden path, and after a moment she had turned and started to walk in the opposite direction, back toward the mansion.

 

 

Now, in the stillness of Tesla's overheated room at the Waldorf, she remembered this—and then her heart skipped a beat at the sound of footsteps approaching in the corridor outside. Trying to remain calm, she slipped behind the heavy curtain to wait, trying not to breathe.

 

 

 

 

TESLA OPENS THE DOOR and cautiously steps through. In the hallway, he'd heard, or imagined, a rustling sound inside—but the room seems undisturbed and empty. The overstuffed armchair and couch of the sitting room, the cold fireplace and cut-crystal ashtray on the end table, appear untouched. Only—the inventor sniffs delicately—the smell is wrong: a whiff of something like an alleyway.

For a moment, Tesla considers leaving to get help, then reminds himself that he has ways of dealing with intruders. Locking the door behind him, he crosses into the bedroom and his fastidious gaze lights upon the nightstand, where a stack of letters stands slightly askew. He starts toward the dressing room, and then another rustle, nearby, prompts him to wheel as she half falls out from her hiding place.

They stare at each other. Taking in her ragged dress and tangled hair, the feverish pallor of her features, Tesla takes a step backward. For her part, she abruptly wants to cry. She struggles to control herself, searching for a flicker of recognition on his face.

Finally, after what seems like hours, she forces herself to speak. “It's me.”

He stares at her silently.

“I almost died waiting,” she says. “Thank God you are here.” He takes another step away. His mind is racing. His first thought is that she might be a spy, sent by Edison or Marconi or another competitor. But this is something else, he decides. Some wretched woman who has decided that she is in love with him, most likely. He has been the recipient of such advances before and, if anything, this disturbs him more than the idea of industrial espionage.

“What do you want?” Tesla demands. Avoiding sudden movements, he backs up to put half a room between them. “Who let you in?”

“I tricked the porter—and I do apologize. Only, I had to see you, I—” The words tumble out in a rush. She finds herself laughing, near hysterical with relief. Soon everything will be answered, she thinks, it will all be over. “I am being watched, you see.”