Room 3327
As he lay dying in room 3327 of The New Yorker Hotel his entire life did not flash by in front of his eyes like the myth suggested, Nikola observed.
Rather, the memories emerged and faded at a very slow pace, allowing his conscious mind plenty of time to contemplate the inner meaning of the seemingly random order of appearance, not unlike the state in which a person dreaming early in the morning may find himself almost fully able to interpret the dream or even edit it to his liking.
More specifically, Nikola's mind seemed to keep its focus on four distinct, but very different types of events - none of which could be said to be among the most significant of his life from the objective perspective of a celebrated electrical engineer or his admiring peers.
No, what puzzled him at this late point in what could hardly be called an unproductive existence was the way he had foreseen the death of his mother.
He distinctly remembered dreaming of his mother’s death before it had occurred, depriving him of the one human soul with whom he had ever felt a deep connection. He had dreamt of her on her death bed, without any physical source of information about her condition, just as he had dreamt up many of his great inventions.
But where his inventions could be explained as mere products of subconscious labor, this element of precognition had always disturbed him.
Even more so since a delegation of scientists at one point had contacted him, considering him falsely one of those free spirits who will wrap his mind around any phenomenon posing as science, asking him to support a series of studies of socalled paranormal activities and supernatural events.
Per definition nothing can be supernatural, he had explained, laughing heartily at their susceptibility to quackery. Later he had publicly stated that had these researchers been his own employees he would have immediately fired them.
No, he had never had any patience for men of science who dedicated their mind to metaphysical speculations.
Yet there was something oddly mystical about his own life, he now realized.
More than anybody else the man, this messenger who called himself John O’Neill, had captured the essence of Nikola’s vision. He had to admit that, even if it had taken place in a highly exalted tone as if the author had found in Nikola the resurrection of the religion Nietzsche disbanded.
“Titanic”, “Herculean” and “Olympian” along with “ingenious” were adjectives he had become used to, but never before had Nikola considered them more than superlatives of praise.
Now, at the point of discovering what Einstein had referred to as “the mysterious” and "the source of all true art and science”, Nikola was barely able to keep his eyes open or his mind afloat.
His thoughts drifted with a strange undercurrent, he found, to the places in his mind he had neglected the most: He remembered his old friend Samuel and the way he had lectured him for hours about the danger of disdain for literature and art.
One story in particular – not a very commonly known fable – had stuck in his mind for all these years, continuously haunting him with questions too complex to even phrase in the accurate language of science he was accustomed to.
He had, in front of his learned friend, he recalled, mistaken Themis for Thetis - the goddess who had once released Zeus from his chains and was later married off to a mortal, Peleus, giving birth to Achilles.
Samuel had corrected him, laying out in detail the qualities of Themis, the goddess of the laws of nature - aside from the automatons of Crete the only character from popular mythologies Nikola had ever found remotely interesting.
It was an awkward, but not entirely uncomfortable scene: Sitting with his legs crossed and his pipe in his hand Samuel had spoken lengthily and in somewhat muffled terms as if he was conducting a man-to-man conversation, reminding Nikola that Themis was not a goddess of clinical science as her name might suggest, but also the goddess of proper justice and a benign order between men and women.
Did it have some resemblance to the feeble attempts by his father to install in him a sense of religion? Was it some sort of unresolved Oedipal Complex that brought to his mind this memory in such a crucial hour?
Well, it was of little relevance. The importance of cause and effect dissipates in the shadow of death.
What mattered was that he had lived a full life, a life without compromise, devoted to the betterment of mankind.
He was in no manner bitter, because even after the last visit from Thetis – indicating the imminent extinction of his creative inspiration – he had felt certain his fame and good reputation would, at least, survive him.
In a sense that was immortality as well.
Had he somehow missed out as some said, by focusing his élan vital on invention and not reproduction?
No, it was a purely sentimental notion that life would only have meaning, if one was to narrow ones scope of human involvement to the ephemeral. He had engaged mankind, elevating it to a new level of freedom, passing on the great hope of deliverance from a multitude of miseries through the implementation of technology.
Yet, to his everlasting astonishment, he had known heartache. It had been passed to him abruptly from the most inconceivable source, as if nature herself had cut a hole in the carefully crafted wall he had erected around his secret life.
Thetis was the name he had given the pigeon that had appeared shortly after the death of his mother, somehow taking her place as a congenial spirit to guide and comfort him in his lifelong struggle.
Day after day for years it had visited him, eating from his hand and cooing in its peculiar language what he sometimes thought were secrets of alternate currents or radio communication.
As long as she came to him, he knew with a certainty surpassing that of verified facts, he would continue to produce marvellous research.
The death of this pigeon had been more devastating to him than the death of his mother. As it had visited him for the very last time he had perceived a blinding light emanating from its eyes, understanding immediately it was about to go the way of nature and had only come to say goodbye.
Had he kissed her beak? In his mind he had.
Then, in the following months, uncertain if the communiqué was a figment of imagination, he had traversed the streets of New York with grain in his pockets in order to, if possible, detect her in one of the many crowds of pigeons.
They had considered him mad for doing so. He knew this. How could they possibly understand that to him the reunion constituted the only conceivable medicine for a life threatening condition – the permanent exsiccation of his creative energy?
Were his eyes closed now, or were they open? Did he see the room as it actually was or did he merely envision a very accurate model from stored memories of photons bombarding his retina?
At least it looked to him like the wind had flung the window open, and Thetis – Themis? – appeared on the window ledge, greeting him once again with her cheerful murmurs.
Her presence was like sunshine or music, two of the sentimental pleasures of everyday life he would surely miss, wherever he was going.
“You would not know it”, she said. “But it is all true, what men have dreamt, even what strains credulity the most."
Somehow, without really remembering what his question had been, he felt her words explained it all.
Nikola Tesla died of heart failure, alone in room 3327 of the New Yorker Hotel, on 7 January 1943, deeply endebted in spite of having sold his AC electricity patents and contributed to modern science in manners still not fully acknowledged. Later the same year the US Supreme Court upheld Tesla's patent number 645576, in effect recognizing him as the inventor of radio.