The Tesla Legacy

Chapter 4

Together Joe and Edison climbed the Employees Only stairs onto Grand Central Terminal’s Track 42. The numbers triggered Joe’s synesthesia (green for four and blue for two). He’d been five (brown) before he discovered everyone else didn’t see colors in their heads when numbers were mentioned, eight (purple) when he realized it let him understand mathematics at a completely different level than others, and sixteen (cyan, orange) when he’d used it to get into MIT and take control of his own life.

Joe glanced at the simple white-faced clock hanging from the ceiling — just after noon (cyan, blue). Lunchtime. He wasn’t hungry, but he thought it best to stick to his routine today.

He picked up the pace and strode across the empty platform and out into the terminal itself. The air felt cooler here, but still uncomfortable. Summer had come even to the vast concourse. The weather brought heat and humidity, but also a lot of women in shorts and miniskirts. An acceptable tradeoff.

He snapped a leash onto Edison and adjusted the dog’s blue psychiatric service vest. Joe didn’t expect to be hassled, but it was easier to put on the vest than have a conversation with some cop.

The dog tugged on the leash, pulling them toward the food court, but when Joe headed over to the Apple balcony, Edison obediently followed. The glowing white apple meant different things to different people, but in Grand Central, it meant free Wi-Fi.

He touched the pocket where he kept his phone in a pouch. He’d designed the pouch to block cellular signals from reaching his phone. It was his mini-Faraday cage. Somebody was marketing them now, but he’d made his years ago. He used the cage so his phone wouldn’t always be communicating with Apple, telling them his location so that they could track his movements. They didn’t need to know what he was doing.

He took out the phone, connected to the free Wi-Fi, and discovered that in less than an hour’s walk, he’d accumulated a long list of work-related emails. California and Pellucid, the company he’d founded, were waking up. He still consulted there. He was helping to catch bad guys, or at least that’s what he used to tell himself. Now he wasn’t so sure.

He scrolled through the list of emails and opened the one he’d most been dreading. It was an automated email sent by a tracker he’d installed in his company’s facial recognition software. The tracker checked to see how many facial recognition requests were made and how quickly they were matched. The volume of faces being fed into the system had skyrocketed to hundreds of times more than expected. Either something new had come online recently, or he had a bug to track down.

By force of habit, he logged into the darknet and scanned through emails sent by those who’d had the opportunity to administer the poison that had caused his agoraphobia. Still nothing interesting, but they would slip up eventually and, right now, all he had was time. He would wait them out.

With a few quick movements, he disconnected and returned to his own email. The last message in his inbox caught his eye again. It had been sitting there for days, and he couldn’t bring himself to delete it.

He sighed. He’d read it many times. It was part of the one-way conversation that his father had started up with him when Joe moved to New York. His father had once been a brilliant statistician and, despite his failings as a father, he’d at least bequeathed Joe the Tesla brains. That should count for something. So, Joe read his daily emails, but he never answered them. He’d never forgiven his father for his many sins of omission and commission during Joe’s childhood.

Today, too late, he wished that he had.

Edison nuzzled his hand. His brown eyes looked worried.

“I’m OK.” Joe scratched the dog behind the ears and dropped the phone into his pouch, cutting himself off from the grid again. “Lunch?”

Edison’s tail wagged at the familiar word, but his eyes said he knew Joe wasn’t OK.

Joe headed over to Grand Central’s underground food court. At the Tri-Tip Grill, he ordered steak sandwiches for himself and for Edison. Joe also got fries and a Coke, but Edison would have to make do with water once they got back to the house.

The dog’s eyes fastened on the brown paper bag, and he licked his lips.

“Soon enough,” Joe said. “Greedy Gus.”

Edison gave him an injured look and stood, ready to go.

By way of apology, Joe fished a piece of meat out of Edison’s sandwich and fed it to him, resting his hand on the dog’s shoulder before they hurried up the long ramp to the concourse.

He usually stopped to admire his surrogate heaven — the green-blue ceiling painted with Zodiac constellations was the only sky he saw these days — but today he gave it only a quick glance because he caught movement out of the corner of his eye. A gray and white pigeon flew diagonally across the space, landing behind a carved ship’s wheel far from the floor.

A pair nested at the edge of the green-blue ceiling — the only wild animals in this man-made room. He wished that he had some dry corn to feed them. He and his father had fed the pigeons in Central Park during Joe’s rare visits. His father had practically tamed the pigeons, and they had perched on his wrist and had taken the corn from his palm. Joe would have liked to have tried to tame these two, but suspected that feeding them would draw unwanted attention and maybe get the birds in trouble, so he left them alone and admired them from afar.

He wove between travelers to get to the iconic clock mounted on the round information booth at the very center of the concourse — a familiar meeting place to any New Yorker. The clock read almost 12:30 (cyan, blue: red, black). He tapped on the brass door, and waved to Miss Evaline, the woman who presided over the booth with good-natured authority.

The information booth was built around a large, hollow column. Inside the column, a spiral staircase led to the creaky elevator that would carry Joe and Edison to their underground home.

“Did you have a nice walk?” Miss Evaline opened the door to the concourse and let them in. Curious tourists stopped to look. Civilians didn’t go through that door.

“We did, thank you.” Joe stepped inside and fitted his key into the second door. He needed to go downstairs, and he dreaded it. “How was your morning?”

“Busy. Can’t complain.” She straightened the black cap on her head before stooping to pet Edison. He was on duty, so he kept his serious face, but the tiny wag of his tail betrayed him. He liked her. “But I’m sorry to say you can’t go down right now.”

The bottom fell out of Joe’s stomach. “Why not?”

“Elevator inspection,” she said. “Should only be a few hours.”

Edison licked his hand, but it didn’t calm Joe down.

He thanked Evaline, but the words stuck in his throat. He needed to go home, but he didn’t have time to wind through the tunnels again. He had to be somewhere with Wi-Fi by one (cyan). Quickly, he ran over his Wi-Fi options: the Apple Store — too public; Track 36 (red, orange) by the Station Master’s office — even more public, he might not even get a chance to sit down; and the Hyatt — which would have to do. He could check into a hotel room for a few hours and get the Wi-Fi password from the concierge. Not long ago he would have balked at the expense, but it didn’t matter anymore. After Pellucid went public, he’d never had to worry about money again.

He jogged across the terminal, slid through the hallway separating the Hyatt from Grand Central without looking toward the glass doors leading outside, checked in, and took the elevator up to his temporary room. Even though he’d lived in the Hyatt for months before moving down below, he didn’t feel comfortable in the room. Its anonymity felt wrong, today of all days. This wasn’t where he should be for this call. But he didn’t have a choice.

He dumped Edison’s sandwich onto a towel in the bathroom and filled the ice bucket with water so the dog could have a drink. Edison bolted his sandwich in three bites and lapped noisily at the water.

Joe glanced at the window that ran along one side of the room. The window looked onto the outside edge of Grand Central Terminal. He never saw the building from the outside.

Sunlight poured through the window onto the carpet. He couldn’t go near the light. The curtain was so close, but he’d have to cross the light to get to it. That wasn’t possible, so he’d have to sit on the floor on the other side of the bed with his laptop in his lap. Not ideal.

Edison trotted across the room, took the curtain gently in his mouth, and pulled it closed. The room was safe again. The dog’s ability to read Joe’s moods and respond was uncanny, and Joe loved him for it. He took another treat out of his pocket and gave it to him.

Joe clicked on the desk lamp and took his phone out of his pocket. He settled down to wait. He had made it with a few minutes to spare. He chewed his sandwich, not tasting it, and washed it down with a swig of cold Coke. He was too upset to stomach the fries.

The clock at the corner of his computer screen read one (cyan). He tapped his fingers against the desktop. He wanted the call to come in, and he didn’t want it to.

His phone rang. Vivian Torres was calling him on FaceTime. Characteristically prompt.

Sweat sprang up on Joe’s palms, and he wiped his hands on his pants before accepting the call.

Vivian looked tanner than usual. She’d been soaking up the summer sun, like nature intended. His father would have been proud of her. She’d also cut her black hair shorter, into a bob. It suited her, but just about everything suited her. Even though she didn’t seem to know it, she was a beautiful woman.

“Torres here. I’m at the entrance to the cemetery,” she said.

Hydraulic brakes sighed behind her, probably from the bus she’d arrived on. She tilted her phone to show a wrought-iron gate with New York Marble Cemetery written across the top.

Joe’s mouth went dry, and he croaked, “Thanks.”

The funeral was about to begin, and he wasn’t there. He was in some hotel room, alone with his dog.

“I can’t see anyone from out here,” she said. “I’m going to walk into the cemetery and see what’s going on.”

Joe nodded, then remembered she wasn’t looking at him. “OK.”

He took a long sip of Coke and cleared his throat.

She panned her phone from side to side to show brick walls and a faraway strip of bright green grass. “I don’t know how they’ll feel about me filming once I get in the cemetery, so I’m going to put you in my front pocket to be discreet.”

The view dropped a foot, dipped behind white fabric, then settled.

“I feel short,” Joe said.

“If you think I’m taping this thing to the side of my head, you’ve got another think coming.”

Joe smiled, grateful he could. “I’ll go on mute now.”

He didn’t want any hotel noises beaming out into the cemetery during the service.

“Gotcha, boss.” The phone wiggled as if she had nodded. She started forward, and the green grass neared. That must be the cemetery itself.

A guy wearing a black suit and a professional mourner’s face hurried up to her. “Are you here for the Smith funeral?”

Smith funeral? His father’s last name was Tesla.

“I’m here for Mr. George Tesla. Am I in the right place?” Vivian asked.

“Of course. Mr. Tesla is descended from the Smiths, so he will be buried in their crypt. It dates back to 1836.” He gestured to a white plaque resting on grass in front of a stone block wall. “So few families have kept up the tradition. It’s an honor to be able to lay someone to rest here today.”

As Vivian moved closer, Joe saw the name SMITH engraved on the marble plaque. But his father wasn’t a SMITH. He was descended from Nikola Tesla. The Teslas had lived in Croatia, not New York. Nikola Tesla himself hadn’t immigrated to the United States until 1884 (cyan, purple, purple, green). This couldn’t be the right place. Maybe his father was a Smith on his mother’s side, although Joe was pretty sure his grandmother’s maiden name was Morris.

He wanted to ask Vivian to double check, but he didn’t want to make his presence known and maybe get her kicked out. She turned in a slow, unobtrusive circle, clearly trying to show him the full scene. Two older men in black suits stood near the plaque. They must be his father’s chess club — professors who had visited his father in the home. One had removed his suit coat and hung it over his arm, but the other seemed more concerned with propriety than comfort, even on such a hot day.

From his father’s emails, Joe knew more than he wanted to about both men. One was a brilliant mathematician who had never achieved the recognition Joe’s father thought he deserved. The other one might have had an affair with Joe’s mother, or at least his father had hinted at it. In a movie, one of them would have murdered his father, but they hadn’t.

Ever wary, Joe had asked his lawyer, Mr. Rossi, to hire a medical examiner to review the autopsy performed on his father’s body. The second doctor concurred that his father had died of a heart attack. He was eighty-two years old and had suffered two previous heart attacks. The medical examiner had tested his father’s tissues for poisons, and every test that had come back so far was negative. He was an old man who had died of natural causes, like the original report said. Joe was still glad he’d double checked.

The camera moved past the professors to settle on a woman who had just arrived. She held a simple black box and wore a black dress, a wide-brimmed black hat, and a dotted veil that looked like something Marlene Dietrich would have worn. Even though his mother hadn’t performed for decades, she walked with the graceful step of a young dancer, each movement elegant and choreographed. She looked the part of the grieving widow, even though she had divorced Joe’s father twenty years before.

Vivian must have recognized her, because she kept the camera pointed there. His mother looked from side to side, as if searching for someone in the small group of mourners. Her veil fluttered in the breeze.

Guilt rose up in Joe. She was looking for him, her only child. She expected him to be at his father’s funeral, and he wasn’t. The man she had raised wouldn’t have shamed her by missing such an important event. He would have paid his respects. But he hadn’t.

She pulled the simple black box closer to her chest. The box’s ebony surface gleamed in the sun. That box contained his father’s ashes. Joe swallowed the lump in his throat. After he’d received the phone call from his mother telling him that his father was dead, he’d arranged the funeral and picked out the box to hold his father’s ashes, but he hadn’t really accepted that the man was dead until he saw the box in his mother’s arms.

Edison dropped his warm head in Joe’s lap. He stroked the dog’s ears, and Edison wagged his tail — one solid thump (cyan). Joe took a careful breath, held it, and let it out. His father was gone. There would be no reconciliation for them now. Joe had had very good reasons to cut his father out of his life, but looking at the black box made it all so very final.

A man took his mother’s arm. He looked about fifty, ten or so years younger than she, and handsome in a craggy thirties movie star way. Vivian caught the man’s solicitous face in profile, and Joe was struck by how much the man looked like a younger version of his father.

Joe had no doubt this man and his mother were romantically involved. Men had always flocked to his mother.

The camera stayed on her as she stepped across the grass. The chess players watched her advance, both smiling a greeting as if they knew her. Had his mother and father stayed in touch till the end, so much so that she knew his friends?

They’d separated when Joe was ten, and he and his mother had moved around with the circus while his father returned to New York, teaching statistics at New York University, and forgetting Christmases and Joe’s birthdays.

Vivian moved the camera to show a priest walking behind his mother. The man looked fresh out of missionary school. His fresh-scrubbed face was pink, and his priest’s collar looked too tight. He clutched a Bible and marched with the determined steps of an African explorer about to set off into the jungle. Joe bet it was his first funeral.

The priest nodded to his mother, then to Vivian, as did the chess club, even though they didn’t know who Vivian was. Joe’s mother, however, gave her such a knowing glance that he inched back in his flimsy hotel chair. His mother pressed two (blue) fingers to her lips and dropped them to her side. That was the secret “I love you” sign she and Joe had invented when he was a kid. He hadn’t seen it in years, but he instinctively made it back, even though she couldn’t see him.

The priest lined his mother, her paramour, and the retired professors in front of the wall. Vivian fell in last. A giant arrangement of flowers Joe had selected online stood on an easel next to his mother like a proxy for her son. It wasn’t enough, of course — she needed a flesh-and-blood son to hold her hand — but it was the best he could do right now.

Words were intoned, but Vivian’s microphone picked up mostly wind and the faint drone of traffic. It didn’t matter anyway. The priest hadn’t known his father, so what could he say that Joe needed to hear?

He closed his eyes and prayed for his father. He prayed death had brought his father peace from the demons that had haunted him. He hadn’t been an easy man, and there must have been reasons.

But even now Joe couldn’t forgive him everything. The demons that his father had set upon Joe would be with him always. As they say, we carry the dead with us.

When he opened his eyes again, the priest had finished. His mother lifted the urn to hip height and slid it into an empty niche in the stone wall. Her lips moved as if she whispered something, but he couldn’t make out the words. He turned the volume up to full, but heard only the murmur of traffic and the slamming of a faraway door.