Moon Palace Page 16

  I stayed with the painting for more than an hour. I stood back from it, I moved up close to it, I gradually learned it by heart. I wasn’t sure if I had discovered what Effing thought I would, but by the time I left the museum, I felt that I had discovered something, even if I didn’t know what it was. I was exhausted, absolutely drained of energy. When I got back on the IRT express and closed my eyes again, it was all I could do not to fall asleep.

  It was just past three o’clock when I returned to the apartment. According to Mrs. Hume, Effing was taking a nap. Since the old man never took a nap at that time of day, I interpreted it to mean that he didn’t want to talk to me. That was just as well. I was in no mood to talk to him either. I drank a cup of coffee with Mrs. Hume in the kitchen, and then I left the apartment again, putting on my coat and taking the bus uptown to Morningside Heights. I was going to be seeing Kitty at eight o’clock, and in the meantime I thought I would do some research at the Columbia art library. It turned out that information on Blakelock was scant: a few articles here and there, a couple of old catalogues, nothing much. By piecing together the bits, however, I learned that Effing had not been lying to me. That was the essential thing I had come for. He had jumbled up certain details and chronologies, but all the important facts were true. Blakelock’s life had been a miserable one. He had suffered, he had gone crazy, he had been neglected. Before they locked him up in the asylum, he had indeed painted money with his own picture on it—not thousand-dollar bills, as Effing had said, but million-dollar bills, sums beyond all imagining. He had traveled out West as a young man and lived among the Indians, he had been incredibly small (under five feet, less than ninety pounds), he had been the father of eight children—all of these things were true. I was particularly interested to learn that some of his early work in the 1870s had been set in Central Park. He had painted the shacks that stood there when the park was still new, and as I looked at the reproductions of these rural places in what had once been New York, I could not help thinking about the miserable time I had spent in there myself. I also learned that Blakelock’s best years as an artist had been devoted to painting moonlight scenes. There were dozens of pictures similar to the one I had found in the Brooklyn Museum: the same forest, the same moon, the same silence. The moon was always full in these works, and it was always the same: a small, perfectly round circle in the middle of the canvas, glowing with the palest white light. After I had looked at five or six of them, they gradually began to separate themselves from their surroundings, and I was no longer able to see them as moons. They became holes in the canvas, apertures of whiteness looking out onto another world. Blakelock’s eye, perhaps. A blank circle suspended in space, gazing down at things that were no longer there.

  The next morning, Effing seemed ready to get down to business. Making no mention of Blakelock or the Brooklyn Museum, he told me to go out to Broadway and buy a notebook and a good pen. “This is it,” he said, “the moment of truth. We start writing today.”

  When I returned, I took my seat on the couch again, opened the notebook to the first page, and waited for him to begin. I assumed he would warm up by giving some facts and figures—his birthdate, the names of his parents, the schools he attended—and then move on to more important things afterward. But that wasn’t what happened at all. He just started to talk, throwing us copy into the middle of the story.

  “Ralph gave me the idea,” he said, “but it was Moran who got me to do it. Old Thomas Moran, with his white beard and straw hat. He was living out at the end of the Island in those days, painting little watercolors of the Sound. Dunes and grass, the waves and the light, all that bucolic claptrap. Lots of painters go out there now, but he was the first, he started the whole thing. That’s why I called myself Thomas when I changed my name. In honor of him. The Effing was another matter, it took me a while to think of that. Maybe you can figure it out for yourself. It was a pun.

  “I was a young fellow back then. Twenty-five, twenty-six years old, not even married. I had the house on Twelfth Street in New York, but I spent more time out on the Island. I liked it out there, that’s where I did my paintings and dreamed my dreams. The house is gone now, but what do you expect? That was a long time ago, and things move on, as they say. Progress. The bungalows and tract houses have taken over, every nitwit drives his own car. Hallelujah.

  “The name of the town was Shoreham. Still is, as far as I know. Are you writing this down? I’m only going to say these things once, and if you don’t get it down, they’ll be lost forever. Remember that, boy. If you don’t do your job, I’ll kill you. I’ll strangle you with my own two hands.

  “The name of the town was Shoreham. As chance would have it, that’s where Tesla built his Wardenclyffe Tower. I’m talking about nineteen-o-one, nineteen-o-two, the World Wireless System. You’ve probably never heard of it. J. P. Morgan was the financial backer, and Stanford White drew up the architectural plans. We talked about him yesterday. He was shot on the roof of Madison Square Garden, and the project fell apart after that. But the remains stood there for another fifteen or sixteen years, two hundred feet high, you could see it from wherever you were. Gigantic. Like some robot sentry looming over the land. I used to think of it as the Tower of Babel: radio broadcasts in every language, the whole fucking world jabbering away at each other, copy in the town where I lived. They finally demolished the thing during the First World War. The Germans were using it as a spy station, they said, and so they tore it down. I was gone by then anyway, it didn’t matter to me. Not that I would have cried about it if I’d still been there. Let everything tumble down is what I say. Let everything tumble down and vanish, once and for all.

  “I first saw Tesla in 1893. I was just a boy then, but I remember the date well. It was the Columbian Exposition in Chicago, and my father took me there on a train, it was the first time I’d ever been away from home. The idea was to celebrate the four hundredth anniversary of Columbus’s discovery of America. Bring out all the gadgets and inventions and show them how clever our scientists were. Twenty-five million people came to see it, it was like going to the circus. They showed the first zipper there, the first Ferris wheel, all the wonders of the new age. Tesla was in charge of the Westinghouse exhibit, they called it the Egg of Columbus, and I remember walking into the theater and seeing this tall man dressed in a white tuxedo, standing up there on stage and talking to the audience in some peculiar accent—Serbian, as it turned out—and a more lugubrious voice you will never hear. He performed magic tricks with electricity, spinning little metal eggs around the table, shooting sparks out of his fingertips, and everyone kept gasping at what he did, myself included, we’d never seen anything like it. Those were the days of the AC-DC wars between Edison and Westinghouse, and Tesla’s show had a certain propaganda value. Tesla had discovered alternating current about ten years before—the rotating magnetic field—and it was a big advance over the direct current that Edison had been using. Much more powerful. Direct current needed a generating station every mile or two; with alternating current, a single station was enough for a whole city. When Tesla came to America, he tried to sell his idea to Edison, but the asshole in Menlo Park turned him down. He thought it would make his lightbulb obsolete. There you are again, the goddamned lightbulb. So Tesla sold his alternating current to Westinghouse, and they went ahead and started to build the generating plant at Niagara Falls, the largest power station in the country. Edison went on the attack. Alternating current is too dangerous, he said, it will kill you if you get close to it. To prove his point, he sent his men around the country to give demonstrations at state and county fairs. I saw one of them myself when I was just a wee little thing, it made me piss in my pants. They’d bring up animals onto the stage and electrocute them. Dogs, pigs, even cows. They’d kill them copy before your eyes. That’s how the electric chair got invented. Edison cooked it up to show the dangers of alternating current, and then he sold it to Sing Sing prison, where they’re still using it to this day. Lovely, i
sn’t it? If the world weren’t such a beautiful place, we might all turn into cynics.

  “The Egg of Columbus put an end to all the controversy. Too many people saw Tesla, and they weren’t afraid anymore. The man was a lunatic, of course, but at least he wasn’t in it for the money. A few years later, Westinghouse was in financial trouble, and Tesla tore up his royalty agreement with him as a gesture of friendship. Millions and millions of dollars. He just tore it up and went on to something else. It goes without saying that he eventually died broke.

  “Now that I’d seen him, I began following Tesla in the papers. They wrote about him all the time back then, reporting on his new inventions, quoting the outlandish things he used to say to anyone who would listen. He was good copy. An ageless ghoul who lived alone in the Waldorf: morbidly afraid of germs, paralyzed by every kind of phobia, subject to fits of hypersensitivity that nearly drove him mad. A fly buzzing in the next room sounded like a squadron of planes to him. If he walked under a bridge, he could feel it pressing against his skull, as though it was about to crush him. He had his laboratory in lower Manhattan, West Broadway, I think it was, West Broadway and Grand. God knows what he didn’t invent in that place. Radio tubes, remote-control torpedoes, a plan for electricity without wires. That’s copy, no wires. You’d plant a metal rod in the ground and suck the energy copy out of the air. Once, he claimed to have built a sound-wave device that funneled the pulses of the earth into a tiny, concentrated point. He pressed it against the wall of a building on Broadway, and within five minutes the whole structure started to shake, it would have tumbled down if he hadn’t stopped. I loved reading about that stuff when I was a boy, my head was filled with it. People made all sorts of speculations about Tesla. He was like some prophet of the future age, and no one could resist him. The total conquest of nature! A world in which every dream was possible! The most outrageous bit of nonsense came from a man named Julian Hawthorne, who happened to be the son of Nathaniel Hawthorne, the great American writer. Julian. That was my name, too, if you’ll remember, and so I followed the younger Hawthorne’s work with a certain degree of personal interest. He was a popular writer of the day, a genuine hack who wrote as badly as his father wrote well. A wretched human being. Imagine growing up with Melville and Emerson around the house and turning out like that. He wrote fifty-some books, hundreds of magazine articles, all of it trash. At one point he even wound up in jail for some kind of stock fraud, swindling the revenue men, I forget the details. At any rate, this Julian Hawthorne was a friend of Tesla’s. In 1899, maybe 1900, Tesla went out to Colorado Springs and set up a laboratory in the mountains to study the effects of ball lightning. One night, he was working late and forgot to turn off the receiver. Strange noises started coming through the machine. Static, radio signals, who knows what. When Tesla told the story to reporters the next day, he claimed this proved there was intelligent life in outer space, that the bloody Martians had been talking to him. Believe it or not, no one laughed at what he said. Lord Kelvin himself, drunk in his cups at some banquet, declared it to be one of the major scientific breakthroughs of all time. Not long after this incident, Julian Hawthorne wrote an article about Tesla in one of the national magazines. Tesla’s mind was so advanced, he said, it wasn’t possible that he could be human. He had been born on another planet—Venus, I think it was supposed to be—and had been sent to Earth on a special mission to teach us the secrets of nature, to reveal the ways of God to man. Again, you’d think that people would have laughed, but that’s not what happened at all. A lot of them took it seriously, and even now, sixty, seventy years later, there are thousands who still believe it. There’s a cult out in California today that worships Tesla as an extraterrestrial. You don’t have to take my word for it. I’ve got some of their literature in the house, and you can see for yourself. Pavel Shum used to read it to me on rainy days. It’s riotous stuff. Makes you laugh so hard, you think your belly’s going to split in two.

  “I mention all this to give you an idea of what it was like for me. Tesla wasn’t just anyone, and when he came to build his tower in Shoreham, I couldn’t believe my luck. Here was the great man himself, coming to my little town every week. I used to watch him get off the train, thinking maybe I could learn something by watching him, that just getting close to him would contaminate me with his brilliance—as though it was some kind of disease you could catch. I never had the courage to talk to him, but that didn’t matter. It inspired me to know that he was there, to know that I could get a glimpse of him whenever I wanted. Once, our eyes met, I remember that well, it was very important, our eyes met and I could feel him looking copy through me, as though I didn’t exist. It was an incredible moment. I could feel his glance going through my eyes and out the back of my head, sizzling up the brain in my skull and turning it into a pile of ashes. For the first time in my life, I realized that I was nothing, absolutely nothing. No, it didn’t upset me in the way you might think. It stunned me at first, but once the shock began to wear off, I felt invigorated by it, as though I had managed to survive my own death. No, that’s not it, not exactly. I was only seventeen years old, hardly more than a boy. When Tesla’s eyes went through me, I experienced my first taste of death. That’s closer to what I mean. I felt the taste of mortality in my mouth, and at that moment I understood that I was not going to live forever. It takes a long time to learn that, but when you finally do, everything changes inside you, you can never be the same again. I was seventeen years old, and all of a sudden, without the slightest flicker of a doubt, I understood that my life was my own, that it belonged to me and no one else.

  “I’m talking about freedom, Fogg. A sense of despair that becomes so great, so crushing, so catastrophic, that you have no choice but to be liberated by it. That’s the only choice, or else you crawl into a corner and die. Tesla gave me my death, and at that moment I knew that I was going to become a painter. That’s what I wanted, but until then I hadn’t had the balls to admit it. My father was all stocks and bonds, a fucking tycoon, he took me for some kind of pansy. But I went ahead and did it, I became an artist, and then, just a few years later, the old man dropped dead in his office on Wall Street. I was twenty-two or -three then, and I wound up inheriting all his money, I got every cent of it. Ha! I was the richest goddamned painter there ever was. A millionaire artist. Just think of it, Fogg. I was the same age you are now, and I had everything, every goddamned thing I wanted.

  “I saw Tesla again, but that was later, much later. After my disappearance, after my death, after I left America and came back. Nineteen thirty-nine, nineteen forty. I got out of France with Pavel Shum before the Germans marched in, we packed up our bags and left. It was no place for us anymore, no place for a crippled American and a Russian poet, it didn’t make sense to be there. We thought about Argentina at first, but then I thought what the hell, it might get the juices flowing to see New York again. It had been twenty years, after all. The World’s Fair had just started when we arrived. Another hymn to progress, but it didn’t do much for me this time, not after what I’d seen in Europe. It was all a sham. Progress was going to blow us up, any jackass could tell you that. You should meet Mrs. Hume’s brother some time, Charlie Bacon. He was a pilot during the war. They had him out in Utah towards the end, training with that bunch that dropped the A-bomb on Japan. He lost his mind when he found out what was going on. The poor wretch, who can blame him? There’s progress for you. A bigger and better mousetrap every month. Pretty soon, we’ll be able to kill all the mice at the same time.