“How about the fact that we’re murderers? The fact that everyone we know and love will pass to dust before our eyes? That we’re confined to the shadows of the world?”
“I been with over two thousand women. You know that? That’s not braggin’, neither. That’s a plain and simple truth, that is. Young ones, old ones, skinny ones, fat ones. Light ones, dark ones, in-between ones. Ones that’s been with a hundred men, ones that’s been with none. Yeah, some of ’em was ugly, but some of ’em was about the most beautiful things you ever saw. I been with ’em in every part of the world, and I done things with ’em no living man could imagine. And you wanna know somethin’? Now that I think about it, I done most’a them things in the dark, on a bed, with the shades pulled shut. The shadows of the world is just fine, thanks.”
Henry was, once again, stunned into silence.
“Perspective,” said Duell. “That’s your problem, ’tis. I’m a vampire. I love killin’, I love fuckin’, and I love watching the world go by. That’s what I am. Question is, what the ’ell are you?”
Henry was relieved when they reached the elevated train platform, where common decency required Duell to be somewhat less salacious and annoying. Both sides of the platform were packed with rush-hour commuters—most of them men in dark suits and bowlers, with a few women in long skirts and flowered hats. Henry and Duell had arrived just in time. A train was approaching.
The tracks were nearly even with the platform in those days. At some stations, you actually had to step up to climb aboard a train. And there were no electrified tracks, either. When there was no train, you could walk from one side of the platform to the other, almost as easily as crossing the street. The trains were smaller, of course. Typically three passenger cars, pulled along at twenty or thirty miles an hour by a small steam locomotive. That doesn’t sound fast by today’s standards, but it was fast enough to turn a person into a mess.6
Duell saw it first. One of the faceless mob of men in dark suits and bowlers had tripped on a rail tie running between the platforms and badly twisted his ankle. Unfortunately, he’d fallen directly in the path of the approaching train.
“Betch’a a dollar ’e don’t make it,” said Duell.
Henry watched the man try to get back to his feet. A few people on either side of the platform saw him struggling, but none of them made any effort to help him—too concerned with their own safety.
He was thirty or so, bushy mustache, still holding on to his cane with one hand while he tried to get to his feet. He knew it was going to happen. He could see the mathematics of it. The poor bastard had walked into an equation with no solution, and he knew it. I remember watching him brace right before the locomotive struck him. A natural thing. A beautiful, human thing. As if bracing himself against ninety tons of iron would make any difference. It’s strange, the little things that stick in your mind. The sight of that man facing certain death, but bracing himself for it anyway.
He braced, and a moment later, he exploded, knocked to the tracks by the front of the locomotive and cut from his crotch to the top of his skull by its wheels. His assorted organs and liquids spilled out onto the wooden platform as the train squealed to a halt. People screamed, fainted, and got sick on both sides of the platform.
Henry watched the train’s engineer step down onto the tracks and look at the front of the locomotive, more concerned with his equipment than the remains of the poor soul who now lay in two pieces on the platform. For the unlucky commuter, the journey was over. But the city moved on. Mostly oblivious.
I wrote this man’s story in my mind, as I always do when I witness an untimely death. I imagined he had a young family somewhere in the city. A pretty young wife and three children—none of them older than five. They lived in a cramped third-floor walk-up. It wasn’t much, but they made do. Right now, his wife was telling the kids to calm down and wash up. Father would be home soon, and she’d have his dinner hot and ready for him on the table. They would kiss, then say a prayer, and he would bounce their youngest on his knee while they ate. Then off to bed with the three, and Father would light a lamp by his chair and read the paper while he smoked his pipe. His wife would sit across from him, sewing a small pair of trousers for their son, who had a knack for finding new and exciting ways to rip them. Except none of that would happen. Not tonight. Not ever. The knock at the door would come, and there would be the policeman. And just like that, that young wife would be a widow. Mother of three, without a penny to her name. Just like that. One twisted ankle.
“Ha!” cried Duell. “Ha, there! There’s exactly what I was gettin’ at! You see ’ow bad they got it? One minute you’re walkin’ from ’ere to there, gettin’ on with your stupid little existence, the next—”
Duell clapped his hands loudly—bang!
“ ’uman life don’t amount to nothing,” he said. “It’s an ant fartin’ into a ’urricane, it is.”
Henry turned and walked toward the stairs to the street. There was no point in waiting for another train. The line would be shut down for at least an hour, while some unfortunate city employee dealt with the mess. Duell followed.
“If you have such little regard for human life,” said Henry, “why did you pledge yourself to the Union?”
Duell paused. It was a good question, and one that William Duell, being the sound sleeper that he was, didn’t have an easy answer to.
“When I was wee,” he said, “my father used ta tell me I was a useless little runt. I was the only boy who made it past bein’ a baby, see. ’Is only son, and he used ta take a switch to me every chance ’e had, the bastard. Beat the skin right off’a my back, ’e did, more times than I could count. Fear. That’s what it was from sunup to sunset. Fear I’d walk in on ’im at the wrong time. Say the wrong thing. And it wasn’t just ’im, neither. Boys in my village, they picked on me on account of my bein’ small, too. You’d think they might’a shown me a little mercy, seein’ what was happenin’ to me at home. But boys ain’t like that. Boys, when they see blood on your back, they jump right on top and beat you some more.”
“I’m sorry,” said Henry.
“ ’S’all right,” said Duell. “They’re all long dead, and I’m still fightin’ and fuckin’.”
An ant farting into a hurricane. It was a crude, simple metaphor from a crude, simple vampire. But as much as Henry hated to admit it… Duell was right.
Delmonico’s was widely considered New York City’s finest restaurant and, more important, the “it” place to see and be seen by the city’s most glamorous and illustrious. Its menu had been called “one of the great American innovations,” because, for the first time in the nation’s history, its patrons could order food à la carte, as opposed to prix fixe, where one had to choose from predetermined multicourse meals with little room for substitution. The menu was a sensation, for it was seen as emblematic of the American spirit: independence, the freedom to choose, to determine one’s own destiny—even if that destiny was a bowl of Manhattan clam chowder.
Henry Sturges had sampled every item on Delmonico’s revolutionary menu. That is to say, he’d ordered every item and pushed it around his plate for an hour or so before paying the bill. It was a small price to pay for the atmosphere.
On any given night, you might see [Theodore] Roosevelt, Gilbert and Sullivan, Lillian Russell, a European prince, an emperor… All the barons of the day were there: Carnegie, Morgan, Rockefeller, the Vanderbilts, the Astors. I watched them sip their cream of artichoke soup and gnash steak between their teeth; I eavesdropped on their conversations from across the room. Sometimes, if they were close enough, I even wandered around in their thoughts. I can admit it now, since there’s a statute of limitations on insider trading, but I picked up more than a few stock tips this way and made myself quite a bit of money.
Henry began dining at Delmonico’s so frequently that a table was kept permanently reserved for him. It was a small table in the corner, where he and his young associate, Mr. Duell, were always welc
ome. But for all his wealth, and all the energy and opulence of his surroundings, Henry began to feel like a ghost ship, endlessly adrift, doomed to never make port.
The world was getting ready for the twentieth century. A century of trains and electricity and photographs and who knew what else. There was excitement everywhere, and why not? For the vast majority of human beings alive in 1899, this would be the one and only time they got to ring in a new century. For me, it would be the fourth. I thought often of something Emily Dickinson had written in a letter decades earlier: “My friends are my estate.”7
The warmth and conversation of the Stokers’ kitchen was an ocean away. The rambling elder statesman of the Union was in the ground. And Henry’s old friend, maybe the closest friend he’d ever had, was gone.
So it was that Henry and Duell once again found themselves at their corner table, surrounded by the well-whiskered gentry, pushing food around their plates to the ever-present murmur of conversation and the music of the string quartet that always played on Thursday evenings.
Henry heard the foreigner before he saw him.
“It is not hot!”
The murmurs and strings abruptly stopped.
He was a slender, dark-haired man of about forty, with a well-groomed mustache and an expensive gray wool suit. He spoke with a thick Eastern European accent in a high-pitched voice that cut through the air and made the foreigner’s waiter tilt back on his heels so far that Henry thought he might topple over.
“Hot! You understand ‘hot’?”
“Of course, sir,” said the waiter. “My sincere apol—”
“No! I think you do not understand! You have read Gibbs’s laws of thermodynamics, yes? You are familiar with Le Chatelier’s principle, yes? Perhaps then you understand! Here—a lesson for you! You heat the soup with energy…”
The foreigner lifted the tea light from his table and held the flame under the bowl of soup in the waiter’s hands. All eyes were on his table now.
“Like this… then the energy excites the molecules in the soup, and it becomes hot! I will not pay for this! No, no, no!”
“I’ll pay for it,” said Henry, “if he’ll shut up.”
The foreigner froze and whipped his head around, like a prairie dog who’d just caught the scent of a predator. He looked in the direction of the voice.
“Who says this?” asked the foreigner. “Who is the man who wishes to silence me?”
Duell put his napkin on the table and slid his chair out, but Henry put a hand out—sit down; it’s all right.
“I am,” said Henry. “And who is the man who won’t be silent?”
A smile crept over the foreigner’s face. He helped himself to a seat at Henry’s table, all memories of lukewarm soup suddenly distant. Seeing his chance, the maître d’ waved his hands urgently at the string quartet, which began to play again. With the spectacle over and the dining room once again filled with music, the other patrons resumed their chatter.
“I like you,” said the foreigner, squinting his eyes, as if studying Henry’s face. “Too many Americans, they do not say what they truly think, think, think.”
“I’m an Englishman.”
“An Englishman? But you sound like an American!” cried the foreigner, louder than anything he’d yelled at the waiter, pounding his fist on the table. “Then it is an even greater miracle! That an Englishman would put aside his civility to stand on principle! Please, English American, I must know your name. I must befriend you. You will be my friend.”
“You want me to toss this bloke out on his ear?” asked Duell.
Henry looked the foreigner over. He was mad, to be sure. But Henry sensed no malice. Just pure, frenetic energy. “Henry Sturges,” he said at last. “My associate, Mr. Duell.”
Henry extended his hand, but the foreigner didn’t shake it.
“Sturges and Duell; one is young, one is younger! You will be my guests! I will test things on you, yes? You will be honored, yes? I am Nikola Tesla. But surely you recognized me.”
Tesla leaned back, awaiting some outpouring of awe.
“What in the ’ell is ’e on about?” asked Duell.
When Henry and Duell arrived at Tesla’s lab at 46 East Houston Street, they found themselves on another planet. A strange planet of machinery and wires, the smell of kerosene pervasive. The hum of motors constant.
It’s funny. Most people probably picture [Tesla’s] lab as a dark, foreboding kind of place. But it was actually very bright, lit by electric fixtures in the ceiling. White walls. Very sparse and clean, with a black iron spiral staircase in the center, leading up to his private quarters. In all the time I spent at the Houston Street lab, I never once saw Tesla climb those stairs. He was always down in the lab. Always working.
Nikola Tesla didn’t sleep more than two hours a night. He was never known to have any romantic relationships, believing that chastity, not necessity, was the mother of invention. He suffered from terrible OCD. Besides his aversion to shaking hands, Tesla was obsessed with the number three, having to repeat certain actions—even words—three times.
Born in Serbia in 1856, he’d gained notoriety as a rival to Thomas Edison and would be considered the underdog in that rivalry for the rest of his life.
When I met him, he was at the height of his genius and fame. He was crazy, sure, but he had more money than he could spend, and he still had his vitality.8
Tesla came to America in 1884, virtually penniless, and used his credentials to get a job working for Edison. The American inventor recognized the talent in the young Serb and offered him the task of working on his DC (direct current) generators. After examining the machines, Tesla told Edison that he could radically improve their power and efficiency. Edison told Tesla, “If you can do that, then there’s $50,000 in it for you.”9
And so Tesla had slaved away for months, obsessed, completely retooling Edison’s design. When he unveiled the results, Edison was impressed but told Tesla that he’d only been joking about the bonus. Tesla quit on the spot, vowing to himself that he would crush Edison. And he very nearly did.
In 1886, Tesla went into business for himself—but it wasn’t Edison’s DC power he was working on. Unlike Edison, who thought that direct current was the way forward, Tesla believed that the future belonged to AC—or alternating current.10 He perfected his design for a powerful, efficient AC generator and licensed his patents to the Westinghouse Company, casting himself in direct opposition to Edison’s General Electric and making him a rich man overnight. But Tesla poured nearly every penny back into his research—creating elaborate experiments and working on concepts that other engineers and scientists found strange, or even mad, such as the wireless transmission of electricity.
It’s funny how a man’s personality is reflected in his work. Where Edison’s direct current was steadier but weaker, Tesla’s alternating current was more powerful but more dangerous, too. His own current ran in peaks and valleys, and in great doses, it could prove dangerous.
Edison, perhaps fueled by feelings of betrayal by his former employee, fought viciously against AC power, waging what would be called “the War of Currents.” Edison arranged for public demonstrations of the dangers of high-voltage electricity, going so far as to electrocute dogs and horses. In 1903, he electrocuted a thirty-six-year-old circus elephant named Topsy, who’d killed one of her trainers after he’d burned her with a cigar.11
Lately, Tesla had been obsessed with capturing images of the “invisible,” using vacuum tubes to capture rudimentary X-ray photographs.
“See inside a body?” asked Henry. “Without opening it?”
“And from a distance,” said Tesla.
He showed Duell and me one of his X-ray photographs, which he was still calling “shadowgraphs.” It was [a picture] of a man’s foot inside a boot. There were the bones of his ankle, and his heel. There were the eyelets holding the laces of his boot in place, and the nails holding his boot heel to the rest of the sole—but the shoe and skin
and muscle were invisible. You have no idea what a breathtaking sight this was. We were sure it had to be some kind of elaborate hoax. Some kind of painting, maybe.
“This…,” said Henry. “This is real?”
“Yes, yes, yes!”
“It’s bloody magic,” said Duell.
“No! Not magic! No, no, no! Science, boy! Science!”
“You needn’t be so damned loud,” said a voice from the top of the stairs.
“You will excuse this,” said Tesla to Henry and Duell. “There is a man staying with me from out of town, and he is a very rude old bastard.”
A man of about sixty-five came down the stairs, carefully holding the rail, nursing an injured foot. He had an excess of wavy white hair—the very last whispers of dark brown still visible at the roots. His eyebrows nearly as bushy as the mustache that bridged his dimpled cheeks. His eyes were mischievous and alive, like a child’s, and had a way of looking into you when they looked at you.
“Well, if you dislike me so much, you ought to quit inviting me to stay with you.”
“You must be joking,” Henry muttered to himself.
I’d never met him, but I recognized him immediately, from seeing his photographs in the paper—a relatively new phenomenon in those days. In fact, come to think, he might have been the first celebrity I recognized on sight.
Mark Twain and Nikola Tesla in the lab. The two geniuses had a tempestuous friendship, which Twain described as “fond disdain.”
Mark Twain and Nikola Tesla had begun their friendship as mutual admirers. As a young man in Serbia, Tesla had read some of Twain’s works while recovering from an illness and claimed that the power of the American’s words had actually helped save his life. Twain had become interested in Tesla’s work after reading about him in the early 1890s, and when the two met on the New York party circuit, they’d hit it off. But their mutual admiration had quickly given way to what Twain described as “fond disdain.”