Love in Infant Monkeys, Lydia Millet [best motivational novels txt] 📗

valet after he left the inventor’s employ save that his abuse of narcotics continued unabated, for a scullery maid complained to Mrs. Edison twice in the ensuing months that the former assistant was begging for tonics at the servants’ entrance to the kitchen.

Golakov’s final words on the subject of Edison and his elephant, from the last surviving letter to his sister, clearly suggest it was the drug-addled Balkan, not his employer, who was spiraling into dementia. For after he “leapt out” of the closet to “rescue Edison” from himself, Golakov alleges, the inventor launched into a spirited homily:

He said: “Don’t you understand, Golakov? I have seen the future. I have seen in the paradox of her suffering the last end of man . . . yes, she was a murderer, but so are we. And I saw in her eyes the longing of all men for a far better place, for a place where man was no longer cruel and no longer wanted retribution for cruelty; for a place, indeed, where man was not man at all. Yes, Golakov, that was what I beheld: the true and final emancipation of man. For at the end of history man will shed his humanity. Man will be man no more. And this alone will allow him the grace for which he has always longed.”

Whether or not there is a grain of truth in the chaff of these epistolary ravings, only Edison could tell us. But certainly one wishes to issue a caution to critics in the mold of Profs. Horslow and Rheims, who, when faced with the evidence of the new translation, may despite it cleave stubbornly to their attribution of homosexuality to the eastern European tippler or indeed the businessman-inventor himself. Should these critics choose to see in the elephant a “symbol” of either heterosexual denial or repressed homosexual identity, they are of course free to do so; and no doubt, in that case, the elephant will have spoken to them as eloquently as she spoke to poor Golakov’s Edison, who saw in the dying beast myriad glorious reverberations of his martyred Christ.

Tesla and Wife

I KNEW A GREAT man once. At the same time I knew a great man and a woman who loved him.

When I first met Mr. Tesla he looked like Count Dracula—tall and painfully thin, with cheeks sunken in. It was during the Second World War at the Hotel New Yorker. I was a maid there at the time: my first job out of high school, the first time I paid my own way. He was ancient, his skin as white as his hair.

He had been on the cover of Time magazine when he was seventy-five, but later, when I knew him, he was living on scraps from old admirers. For decades he had lived in hotels; it was a suite at the Waldorf for years, but in the New Yorker all he had was a shabby room on the thirty-third floor.

He had invented electricity. Lights, one of the bell-hops told me my first day on the job. Maybe the radio, except Mr. Marconi took the credit. He let companies steal his ideas, said my friend Pia. She was the one who loved him. He should have been very rich, she said, but he was not concerned with money.

He knew important people, and now and then some of them came to visit him. Some were squat men from Europe with square heads and bellies that stuck out; some were American. He told Pia he was inventing a Death Beam. That was why the men from the government came: We were fighting the Germans, and the FBI and the war department wanted the Death Beam.

He kept his pigeons in his room with him. We were allowed in to clean only when his fear of germs grew stronger than his need to be alone. I was glad when he let us in. I didn’t want him to live badly. He was strange but very kind, when he remembered to be.

He called the pigeons his best friends. His “most sincere friends,” as he said. They came to the window and he fed them, and a lot of them roosted there. He had nesting baskets for them and cages custom-made by carpenters; he had a curtained shower for them to bathe in and casks of his favorite birdseed mixture, rapeseed and hemp and canary. On the floor and on the furniture was the evidence: feathers and white messes. I would go in with my cart and hear birds cooing in the shadows.

He kept a photograph of a pigeon that had died some twenty years before. Sometimes he called her the white pigeon, other times the white dove. In certain languages, he said, they used the same word for both. She was his true love, he said, a white pigeon with gray on her wings . . . later I would read that he had said he loved her as a man loves a woman. He never said that to me, but he did say other things. He said she filled his heart with happiness and that when he’d realized how sick she was, he’d stayed with her, waiting for her to die. When she died a light emanated from her and his eyes hurt from the brightness. He knew then that his work on Earth was ended.

A pigeon might seem serene, he said, but that was a trick of the feathers. The feathers were soft but beneath them it was bloody. That was beauty, said Tesla: the raw veins, the gray-purple meat beneath the down.

I should have died when she died, he went on, but death, I think it slipped by me.

Some people made fun of him for saying he loved the pigeon like a woman, though I never thought it was funny. People love their pets, but the love is tinged with sadness. Because the love is for a pet, they