ReVISIONS (2 page)

“Men build cities,” I said. “Men have art in their souls and aspire to higher things, as mere fowl cannot.”

“Some men, perhaps,” he said. “But few, few indeed, raise themselves above the mud.” He sowed a handful of his peanuts forth, and the air exploded into frantic motion, birds wheeling overhead as others waddled on the ground like winged pigs, shoving each other shamelessly for position to peck for their supper.

Nikola, though, seemed not to notice the greed. “Perhaps the feathery tribe build no cities, but neither have they the need,” he said. “As for art, can you say that a pigeon has no art, nor aspirations? What do you know of the feathered heart? Are not they, perhaps, themselves the embodiment of art, the very winged soul of art incarnate? Say no more of pigeons, then, for I tell you that a pigeon can feel, can even love, as a man can.”

And, as bidden, I was silent.

Surrounded by his pigeons, Nikola Tesla would forget himself, and be as delighted as a child, and how could I begrudge him that loss of self?

Do you think that I was myself smitten with the prodigal genius? Of course I was, but then, no woman who ever met him was not. Still, I do believe that I was his closest female companion, indeed, his closest companion of either sex, for despite all his personal magnetism, Nikola was not a man who easily allowed himself to open to others.

Robert, of course, could see my infatuation with Nikola; I was ever quite transparent to him. But we had long ago made an agreement that our marriage was to be a loose one. In that bygone gay era when we were both young, we had held to the ideal of a partnership of the soul, and we promised to understand and forgive each other wanderings of the flesh. Over the years it was Robert who most took advantage of that looseness of bonds, and I, holding to our long understanding, never took him to task for the girls he took as mistresses, nor the young men.

Robert quite encouraged my companionship with Mr. Tesla, and even urged us closer. I think that Robert, too, was smitten by Nikola's tremendous personal magnetism, although if that were so, Mr. Tesla seemed oblivious to any overtones.

Tesla had his playful side. He had a tendency to hold his inventions secret, remembering all too well the controversy over the priority for the invention of wireless telegraphy. But to me he showed many of his inventions, judging me, perhaps, too little schooled in the sciences to accidentally reveal his secrets.

One day he admired a pendant that I wore about my neck. This was unusual for Tesla, who usually disdained jewelry of all sorts. “It is a ruby,” I said, “a small one, but well colored, and prettily cut. A gift from Robert.” I think Robert had intended it as a silent token of gratitude for my forbearance, or mayhap for forgiveness. He had given it to me while he was conducting a liaison with a woman by the name of Miss Kurz (a coarse young woman quite unworthy of his attention, in my opinion, but I made no indication of such belief to Robert who, in any case, became bored with her attention after another week or two).

Tesla smiled a mischievous grin. “If you should like to come up to my laboratory,” he said, “I will show to what use I employ such a mineral. I believe that you shall be amazed.”

“I should be delighted,” I said.

His laboratory was upon the third floor of a building with windows that looked down across Forty-Second Street. It was early evening, and the electric streetlights were just beginning to glow.

As always, his laboratory was cluttered with electrical equipment, from enormous generating dynamos to tiny crystals bedecked with wires thinner than a mouse's whiskers. On the workbench in front of the window he had a ruby of his own, but rather than a jewel, this was a ruby in the shape of a small rod, about the size of a cigarette. In the form of a cylinder a ruby becomes quite ordinary, looking like nothing other than colored glass, for it is the gem-cutter's art that gives a jewel its sparkle. I had never before seen a gemstone cut in such a shape, and commented on it.

“It is not of a gem quality,” he said dismissively, “but it is a mineral specimen adequate for my purposes.”

He had earlier showed me an invention of his which utilized a high pressure spark in a rarified-gas lamp to produce a sharp blue-white flash, brilliant as lightning. This momentary illumination is quite startling, having the illusion of stopping time in a frozen moment. Now he placed the ruby cylinder into a mirrored box, surrounded with the flashlamps, with more mirrors to concentrate the flash upon the ruby cylinder, and attached the entire apparatus to a system of condensers and coils.

He then darkened the room with black velvet over the windows. “Watch the wall,” he said, indicating not the box with the ruby hidden within, but the empty white wall a dozen yards across the laboratory.

With a turn of a rheostat, there was a sudden snapping noise. A flash of white seeped out from the box that held the cylindrical gem, but this was not the light which captivated my attention. Upon the wall opposite the workbench had appeared a sudden glowing spot of a brilliant, pure red. I clapped my hands in startlement, and Tesla smiled in pleasure.

“What is it?” I cried.

He triggered the electrical flash again, and once again the mysterious glowing spot appeared. It was a crimson so intense, of a shade so unalloyed in hue, that I realized that every shade that I had hitherto considered to be red was a muddy, washed-out shade compared to this pigment of unblemished purity. I remarked on the color to Mr. Tesla.

“Your eye is accurate,” he said. “If you were to take the finest spectroscope, and analyze the color of the ray I have produced for you, you would find it to be a single shade indeed. All other lamps produce a spread of spectrum, but my new beam is a ray of unalloyed purity.”

With that he set the ray to flashing automatically, and the dot appeared as an unmoving, although flickering, spot of brilliance. He passed his hand in front of it, and the spot on the wall disappeared, moving to his hand, which now seemed to cup the glowing spot in his palm. For a moment I had to suppress a gasp of fright, for the spot was so bright I worried that it would burn a hole entirely through his hand. He laughed. “No need to worry. It is mere light.”

He lit a cigar, and the smoke from the cigar made the beam visible, a ghostly line of crimson. “The secret,” he said, “is resonance. I have contrived to trap light between two parallel mirrors, so that it must resonate against itself as a standing wave, and so intensify until it escapes.”

His explanation made no sense to me, for as I have said, I have no training in the sciences, but I nodded my assent, as if he had clarified everything. After a bit of coaxing, I was persuaded to put my own hand in front of the beam and, although it seemed too bright to look at directly, it was completely intangible—the beam had no force to it at all. I bent to look directly at it, but before I could put my eye to the ray, Tesla seized me and jerked me away.

“The eye is a delicate instrument,” he said somberly, “and my ray is a thousand times, no, ten thousand times brighter than the sun. You would not look into it a second time.”

Although we had known each other for many years, we had never before touched. His arms had quite surprising strength, considering that he was slender and almost womanish of figure; I could still feel the heat where his hand had been upon my arms.

I placed my hand upon the spot where his hand had been, and tried to feel again how he had touched me. Mistaking my gesture, he looked down, and said, “I apologize most humbly for my ungentlemanly conduct, Mademoiselle Kate. I acted only by instinct, I assure you, worried about your safety.”

“I take no offense,” I said. “Indeed, I thank you for your protection.”

He stared down at the floor for a moment, and then, apparently forgetting the incident entirely, said to me, “Look! Let me show you what my ray can do!” With that he drew aside the velvet drapes and raised the dusty window wide open. The windowsill was stained with bird droppings like a thick spill of white paint. Outside, the city was now cloaked in night. In the distance, the silhouette of the Woolworth Building was visible, the newly-erected colossus of the skyline.

“Do you carry a mirror with you?”

I produced a gilt-backed hand mirror from my handbag, and Tesla secured it upon the workbench in front of the ruby apparatus with a clamp. He adjusted the mirror until it was angled to his satisfaction, and then once again set the ruby to flashing.

The tiny dot of light suddenly appeared on the facade of the building across the street. What must the passersby be thinking of it, I wondered, a mysterious dot of light above their heads? I thrust my head out to look down, but of the few pedestrians below, none thought to look up. Tesla adjusted the direction slightly, and then angled the mirror to point over the rooftops.

To my astonishment, the crimson spot appeared on the Woolworth Tower itself, although it must have been half a mile or more distant. “The beam does not disperse,” he said proudly. “I could bounce it off of the moon; I could send it to Mars.”

“Can anyone see it?” I asked.

“Certainly,” he said. “They will see it, and be puzzled indeed.” He laughed, pleased with the thought. “I believe that none of them will guess at the origin of the miracle in a humble laboratory distant across the town.”

Following that, he disappeared into his laboratories, and although Robert and I both attempted to entice him out with invitations to dinners and garden parties, he was hard on one of his ideas, and would not be seen again for several weeks, save only as a furtive figure, walking through Bryant Park in the early morning with a handful of peanuts to feed his beloved pigeons.

On an afternoon some months later—the weather that July of 1914 had turned suddenly sweltering—Robert and I were prepared to insist that Mr. Tesla must join us in our excursion to see the fireworks at Coney Island. “We will bring him with us by force if necessary,” Robert said, “but come with us he must, for he will ruin his health with excessive work.”

I came to his apartments at the Waldorf-Astoria to deliver our invitation, but found him already seeing a visitor in the anteroom of his suite. The door was open, and without turning he gestured me to enter. His visitor was perhaps sixty or seventy years of age, and despite the great heat she was dressed in long skirts and a laced-up white linen blouse covered with several shawls, and had a scarf over her head in the style that I have heard called a “babushka.” She was pleading with Tesla in her own language, and Tesla was answering her with a calm, soothing voice in the same language. I took this speech to be Serbian, Nikola's native tongue, for I speak a few phrases of Russian, and understood enough words to recognize it a kindred tongue.

After some talking, Tesla stood to his full height, and in a voice of momentous tone, made her a great pledge. Such was his personal magnetism that even I, unable to understand a word, understood completely that whatever it was he had promised her, not heaven nor Earth should prevent him from accomplishing. At this pledge, his visitor fell to her knees and attempted to kiss his feet; although Tesla moved back slightly, just enough to avoid her touching him. Something had transpired, although I did not know what.

Later, when I talked with Tesla alone, he explained that this was a Serbian woman, with whom his family was acquainted, for she was native to the same small village as he. She had come to plead for the lives of her thirteen grandchildren.

“For war is coming, Katherine, a great and awful war, and it will sweep over Serbia like a tide of destruction, leaving only death behind.”

“Surely it will not be so bad. We are civilized now, Nikola—”

Tesla's eyes were cold fire. “You understand nothing, my darling Katherine, nothing at all. We know what war is like, we Serbs, as you innocents do not. For five hundred years we have lived in the paths of armies, and when the rest of Europe looked away, we stood down the Turks, and died for it. The armies have washed over Serbia for years, like tidal waves, like plagues of rats, diseased and crazed with aggression, ravenous and destructive, leaving only corpses behind. Before, at least some survived, but in these days of Gatling machine guns and poisoned war gases, war will be total—there will be no survivors, I fear, in little Serbia.”

“It will not be so bad, Nikola, I am sure of it. What did she ask of you, that woman?”

“She asked if I could help her sons, and their wives, and their children, to come to America to avoid the war. She asked me for money to pay the passage, and promised that she would herself work day and night to pay me back.”

I winced inside, for I knew of the inventor's straitened circumstances. A genius he most undoubtedly was, but for all his inventions, his genius had not made him rich. “And you said?”

“I told her I could not do that, but I would do something else for her.”

“How can you help her? What will you do?”

“I told her that I would stop the war.”

“What?”

“I gave her my pledge, my word of honor. I, Nikola Tesla of Smiljan, will stop the coming war.”

I was amazed. Tesla was a prodigy, the greatest genius of our age—possibly of any age—but this was more amazing than anything I had yet seen. “But how will you accomplish that?”

“I don't know,” he answered. “It will require, I believe, some study.”

 

We sailed to Europe on the Cunard liner
Lusitania
. She was perhaps somewhat less elegant than the late, doomed
Titanic
, but still quite richly appointed, her interiors lavish with columns, works of art and tapestries, mahogany paneling and gilded furniture. More importantly, she was fast; the greyhound of the seas. Tesla said that making the passage quickly was of the essence, and worried that even the six-day passage to Liverpool would be a crucial delay.
Lusitania
also had capacious holds, enough to carry the crates of mysterious electrical equipment that Tesla paid to have shipped across with him.