Before he was the man who would light the Chicago World's Fair, before he was the man who made J. Pierpont Morgan say God help us into a scrap of paper and then burn it, before he was the man who held a single white pigeon in his gloved hands in a window of the Hotel St. Regis in a snowstorm in 1922 and bade his brother, at last, farewell — before any of that, Nikola Tesla was a small boy of five years old, standing at the low stone wall at the edge of his father's vegetable garden, watching his older brother ride a horse.
It was August. The air above Smiljan smelled of burnt grass and dust and the particular wet-iron smell of the stream that ran behind the Orthodox parsonage. The bees in the lavender were so loud that Nikola had to raise his voice to speak to his sister Angelina, who was sitting on the stone wall beside him with her legs hanging down, eating the second of two plums she had brought from the kitchen.
"Give me one," Nikola said.
"There were only two," said Angelina, and displayed her empty second hand, which had plum juice on the webbing between the thumb and forefinger. "I am sorry."
She was not sorry. She was nine years old and two plums was the maximum a nine-year-old's conscience admitted to. Nikola, who at five could do sums of three digits in his head and who had, the winter before, made a small motor out of sixteen June bugs glued to a pinwheel ARTIFACT 010, understood that some negotiations were concluded before they began. He let it go.
He turned his attention back to the field.
His brother Dane, who was twelve, was in the far corner of the field on the back of the grey Arabian mare their father had bought the summer before. The mare was called Macak because, when she had arrived, she had looked at Milutin Tesla in a manner that Milutin described as cat-like, and the name, though it belonged to a cat, had stuck. She was not a large horse. She was not a still horse, either. Dane had been trying for most of an hour to make her go in a circle to the left, and she had been consenting only intermittently, and only because Dane was her favorite.
Dane was the whole family's favorite. This was not a fact that injured Nikola. He could not remember when he had first understood it. It was a condition of weather: Dane was loved the way the sun was warm. Milutin read to Dane from the breviary in the evening, and Đuka brought Dane the best pieces of the cheese on Saturdays, and Angelina and Milka and Marica made small presents for Dane's feast day that they did not make for each other's, and Nikola himself, when he made the June-bug motor, had made it because Dane had said, mildly, over his bowl of beans, that it would be interesting to see a motor made of insects.
Dane was small for twelve. Fine-boned. Laughing, now, on the mare, because the mare had decided in the last minute to be a person of good will, and was going in a wide circle to the left, and Dane's black hair was catching the light of four o'clock, and he was looking up over the wall at Nikola and Angelina and calling something that Nikola could not quite hear over the bees.
Angelina, on the wall, cupped a hand to her ear.
Dane called it again, louder:
"I said, watch this!"
And he kicked Macak into a canter.
It was at this moment — and Nikola would, in his notebooks ARTIFACT 002, return to the exact sequence more times than he ever told anyone, sometimes drawing diagrams of it, sometimes writing out the times in minutes and seconds, sometimes notating the air pressure in the field as he had later calculated it to be — that the door opened.
This is what he saw.
Dane, cantering, laughing, with his left hand lifted in a small flourish of pride at the mare's obedience. The mare stretching into a long smooth stride. The grass of the field, yellow-green at the end of summer, dipping and rising along the mare's path. A thrush, startled from a bramble at the far corner, lifting up and away. The sun, low on the western ridge, slanting through a high small cloud and making the air into a lens in which the particles of dust were visible, in slanted rays, over the mare and her rider.
And then, perhaps a yard in front of the mare's nose, the air folded.
Nikola would, over the sixty-one years remaining to him, try many words. Folded. Shimmered. Bent. Hinged. Cracked. Opened. Turned aside. Spoke. In the first notebook, filled in pencil by the window of the small boys' room on a night when he was still five, he wrote only: Kao da je vazduh postao vrata. As if the air became a door.
The door was perhaps the height of a man. It was perhaps the width of a door. It did not have an edge. It was not dark on the other side, and not light. What was on the other side of it Nikola was only able, afterward, to describe as a place. Not a forest; not a field; not a room. A place, and one — he was certain of this — that was cold. The particular cold of stone in a cellar in winter.
The door opened and the mare went through.
She did not slow. She did not swerve. Her head went into it, and her neck, and her shoulders, and her belly, and her back legs, and her tail, and at the last moment, as her tail vanished through, Dane's left hand — still lifted in its small flourish — went through last of all.
And the door closed.
And the air in the field returned to being air.
And the bees went on in the lavender.
And Angelina, on the wall, was still eating the last quarter of her second plum.
Nikola stood with both hands on the rough stone of the wall. He could feel, under his small palms, the particular warm grit of it. He was breathing. He understood that he was breathing because the bees seemed, in the silence, much louder than they had been. He was looking at the place in the field where the door had been, which was now no place, no mark, no disturbance — only the grass in a ragged line where a horse had taken a short canter and then had not been.
Angelina said, "Where did he go?"
She said it not in fear. She said it in the irritated tone of a girl whose younger brother had performed a stupid trick and whose older brother had also, apparently, performed a trick, and who had now to account for both of them to their mother. She was not looking at the field. She was looking at the last plum.
Nikola opened his mouth. He was five years old. He understood, although he could not have said he understood, that what he said in the next breath was going to be the shape of his life.
He said:
"Dane went through."
Angelina looked at him then. Her face, in the four-o'clock light, was half irritated and half something else — and in that half-something-else was a flicker of the thing that children see and children's minds do not, yet, allow themselves to see. She looked at his face, and at the field behind him, and at his face again, and she said, quietly:
"Through what, Niko?"
He did not answer.
She slid off the wall. The plum pit dropped from her hand. She began to walk, not run — she was a sensible girl — across the field toward the place where the mare and Dane had been, and Nikola did not go with her. He stayed at the wall. He watched her go. She grew smaller in the field. She reached the place where he had last seen the mare's head enter the door and she stopped. She turned in a circle. She looked down at the grass. She bent. She picked something up — he could not see what — and she straightened, and she turned, and she walked back to him with the thing in her hand.
The thing was one of Dane's shoes.
It was the left one. It was laced. Dane had laced it that morning, by the kitchen stove, while Đuka had combed out his black hair.
Angelina gave it to Nikola. She said, "Go and find him. I am going to get Mama."
She walked back toward the house with her arms at her sides, moving more quickly as she went, not running, not yet. Nikola stood with the shoe in his hands. He smelled it. He could smell Dane's foot in it — the particular smell of his brother's feet on a summer evening, which was a smell Nikola loved, although he had never said so and would never have been able to. He held the shoe against his chest and he watched the field.
The field did not give Dane back.
He stood there for what was, he would much later determine, nineteen minutes. In that time the sun dropped behind the ridge and the light in the field went from gold to the color of old brass, and the bees in the lavender went quieter, and somewhere very far off a dog began to bark the particular bark of a dog who does not know yet why it is barking. And in those nineteen minutes Nikola did a thing which, when he was fifteen years old and dying of cholera in a room in Gospić, he would recognize had been the first genuine act of his life. Not the first act he remembered: the first act, full stop. The thing against which everything he would ever afterward do would be measured.
He thought about the door.
He thought about its height. He thought about its width. He thought about the way the air had looked just before it opened — how there had been, for a fraction of a second that he held in his memory as perfectly as a pressed flower, a leaning of the light, as if the light had inclined itself politely out of the way of something that was coming through. He thought about how the mare had not slowed. He thought about how Dane's left hand had been lifted. He thought about what might be on the other side. He thought about the cold.
He thought:
That was a door. A door can be opened. A door that is opened can be opened again. If a door can be opened again, then what has gone through a door can come back.
He said, aloud, to the shoe in his hands: "Dane, I will find it."
He meant the door.
And the field did not give Dane back. But in his own mind, in a part of it that had not been used before four o'clock, something very small and very sure opened and did not close.
Ten minutes later his mother came running across the field with her apron bunched in her hands, and his father came after her at a walk that was nearly a run, and Angelina came after that, pale, not crying. Đuka was shouting Dane's name. Milutin was not shouting. Milutin was praying under his breath in a low voice that Nikola knew, because he had heard it before, was the particular prayer his father said for the dying.
They found Dane at eight minutes past five.
He was in the grass a hundred yards from the place where the door had closed. He was on his back, with his arms out, and his eyes open, and his fine black hair catching no light because the sun was down. There was no blood. There was no mark. The mare was grazing a little way off, bridled and saddled, without her rider, as if the rider had gotten down and walked into the lavender and had merely, in passing, forgotten to come back.
The family decided — it was decided without anyone saying so, and was entered in the church record the next day by Milutin himself ARTIFACT 015 — that Dane had been thrown from the mare and had broken his neck. This was the truth that was easy to carry. Milutin wrote it in the record. Đuka repeated it to the two women who came from the village with bread. Angelina, who would bear this story for seventy-one years, never said otherwise aloud.
Only Nikola, who was five, did not say it.
When his mother asked him, that night, what he had seen, he said that he had seen Dane canter. His mother had looked at him with her large dark eyes for a long moment and then she had taken him onto her lap and held him against her apron, which smelled of bread and anise and Đuka's particular lye soap, and she had said, "Niko, my sweet boy. Niko. My sweet boy."
And he had put his small head against her and not cried.
That night, in the boys' room — which was now only his room, although his mother would not, for the next six months, let anyone move Dane's cot out of it — Nikola lit a candle that he was not supposed to have and opened the small leatherbound notebook ARTIFACT 002 that Đuka had given him for his fifth birthday because he had asked for one, and he wrote the three words that, forty years later, when he was composing his autobiography for the American magazine Electrical Experimenter, he would not allow himself to write, nor to remember that he had written. He wrote, in a hand that was still very much a boy's hand:
He looked at the three words for a long time.
Then he wrote, beneath them, in the same small careful hand:
He closed the notebook.
He blew out the candle.
He lay on his back in the dark with his hands folded on his chest the way he had been taught to lie when his father came to kiss him good-night — although Milutin did not come that night, nor any night for three weeks afterward — and he thought about the door. He thought about it methodically. He thought about its dimensions and its location. He thought about the air just before and just after. He thought about the cold on the other side. He could not, at five, say what he would have needed to say at twenty-five, which was that the cold on the other side was a cold that had waited. But he felt it. He felt it in the room with him, even now, in the boys' room at the Orthodox parsonage in Smiljan, in a bed that still smelled of his brother's hair oil on the pillow of the other cot.
And because he did not, at five, know what to do with a fear he could not name, he did what he would do for the rest of his life, which was to make a plan.
The plan had three parts.
One, find the door.
Two, go through it.
Three, bring him back.
He whispered the three parts aloud, three times each, to the ceiling. He liked the sound of three. There were three of them, he thought: himself, and Dane, and the cold. Three was a balanced number. Three was the number of the Trinity that his father spoke of in the church, and three was the number of the toes he had on each of his feet past the little one, and three was the number of the stars in the middle of Orion's belt that his mother had shown him in February.
He finished the third recitation of the third part.
He waited.
The room was quiet. The house was quiet. Somewhere in the yard a cricket was saying the same two syllables over and over. The candle in its saucer on the floor, which he had blown out, was giving off a thin ribbon of smoke in the near-darkness that he could just see, and the smoke rose toward the ceiling and bent leftward, as smoke did in the room when the door to the hall was half open, which he knew from experience it was.
He watched the smoke.
The smoke lifted. The smoke hesitated. The smoke, for half of a second — no longer than half of a second, no less than a quarter — leaned to the right instead of to the left, as though something in the room had inclined itself politely out of the way of something that was coming through.
Nikola did not move.
He did not breathe.
He waited.
The smoke returned to leaning leftward, as was proper, and rose and was absorbed into the darkness of the ceiling, and was gone.
Nikola, under the blanket, with his hands folded on his chest, understood two things.
The first was that what he had seen in the field was not a mistake, or a fever, or a child's mis-seeing of a horse's stumble. It was a door. It had been a door. The smoke, which was honest, had just confirmed it. The door had come, for a moment, into his bedroom — as perhaps he had, by thinking of it, called it there — and had looked in, and had left.
The second was that Dane was not the last.
The door was a feature of the world, now, in the Tesla family's corner of it, and the door would open again, and the door would take others, and the only question — the only question, he understood with a clarity that was the first genuine clarity of his short life — was whether he, Nikola, would learn how to open the door himself before the door learned how to open him.
He turned his face to the wall.
He closed his eyes.
He did not sleep.
At the far end of the house his father, awake in his study, had taken out the leather-bound record of the parish ARTIFACT 015 and had written three lines in his small, exact hand, in the old Serbian of the church:
In the year of Our Lord 1861, upon the third day after the Feast of the Dormition, Dane Milutinov Tesla, aged twelve, returned his soul to his Maker by the breaking of his neck from a fall.
Milutin read the line twice. He held his pen above the paper. Then he wrote, beneath it, in a smaller hand, not for the record but for himself:
Господе, прими га у своје царство.
Lord, receive him into Thy kingdom.
He blotted the ink. He closed the book.
He did not write, because he did not permit himself to think it, what his smaller son, alone in the boys' room at the other end of the house, had already written twice in a notebook Milutin did not know existed:
He did not fall.