Eighteen months later he was digging ditches on the West Side of Manhattan for the Western Union Telegraph Company at two dollars a day.
He had left Edison in December of 1884 and had, within a month, been set up by two small investors — Robert Lane and Benjamin Vail — in a laboratory of his own in Rahway, New Jersey, to develop an arc-lamp system of his own design. He had worked nine months on the arc lamp. He had produced an arc lamp of such efficiency that the City of Rahway had signed a contract for municipal street lighting in September of 1885. Two weeks after the installation, Lane and Vail — for reasons Tesla never quite got to the bottom of, though he suspected their money had come originally from a rival inventor who had decided the arc lamp was a feint — bought him out of the company for its nominal paper value and terminated him as an employee.
He had been paid in stock. The stock was not worth what they had said it was worth. He was told this by a lawyer in a small office on Pine Street to whom he had taken the stock certificates in early October, and who had read the certificates and had looked up at Tesla with the look of a doctor about to tell a man his wife had died in the night.
By November he had been without work for eight weeks and without money for four.
By the first of December — the first anniversary, he had noted in his diary, of his leaving the Machine Works — he had been reduced to pawning his topcoat for the rent on a room on Fourth Street. By the fifteenth of December he had been reduced to pawning his Paris pocket watch, which his father had given him in 1882 on his leaving home for good, and which had been the one object in his life of merely sentimental value. By the tenth of January, 1886, he had been reduced to standing at the hiring line on West Street at six in the morning in the company of two hundred other men, most of them Irish, most of them twice his size, most of them actively resentful of his presence on the grounds that he looked like a gentleman who had come there for a lark.
He did not look like a gentleman. He looked like a thin man in a coat that was no longer a topcoat, with hands that had not yet learned to be the hands of a ditch-digger.
He was taken on by Western Union because Western Union's foreman, a Donegal man named O'Rourke, had noticed Tesla's accent on the second morning and had said, "Hungarian, are we?"
"Serbian."
"Serbian. Well. You'll do."
What they did was open up the frozen pavement of West Street and lay conduit through which Western Union's telegraph cables, currently strung on poles, were being moved underground. The work was done with pickaxes on the macadam and with shovels in the clay beneath. The temperature on the day he began was sixteen degrees Fahrenheit. His hands, in the gloves Western Union provided, blistered in the first two hours and bled by the end of the first week. He worked from seven in the morning until five in the afternoon, six days a week, at two dollars a day, which came to twelve dollars a week, of which seven went to the landlady and two went to coal and two went to bread and one went into a tin he kept on his windowsill, which he regarded as his laboratory fund, and which at the end of January contained four dollars.
He did not think, in the hours he was swinging the pick, about the Aperture. He thought about the pick.
He thought about the pick in the way a man thinks about an animal that is trying to kill him. The pick in his hands was too heavy. The pick's geometry was wrong. The pick landed on the pavement three inches to the left of the intended blow. The pick's handle was ash, not hickory, and gave off splinters. The pick, in short, was a badly designed tool, and Tesla — who had redesigned twenty-four standard Edison dynamos in six weeks — could have designed a better pick in forty-five minutes if he had been permitted.
In a different young man this would have become, over eight weeks, a grievance — the grievance of the genius brought low by an unjust world. In Tesla it became something else. It became, across the eight weeks of the ditches, a small clean fire.
He thought about the Aperture again for the first time since November of 1884.
He thought about it at first only in the cold hours before dawn, lying awake in the room on Fourth Street with his hands wrapped in rags. He thought about it with a guarded attention, the way a man who has been dry for a year permits himself to think about a glass of wine. He had, over the course of 1885, developed a new relationship with the Aperture — a relationship in which he did not intend to build it at scale, ever, but in which he also did not intend to pretend it did not exist.
In the room on Fourth Street in the winter of 1886 he began, once again, to add pages.
He did not add drawings. He added notes. The notes were about the question he had begun to formulate in Paris and had never answered. The question was: if I open the door at scale, where do they go.
Dane, he now understood — dying in a room full of snoring strangers in a boarding house on Fourth Street at three in the morning — Dane, he understood, had been the first of a small but growing catalogue. There was Dane. There was the lump of iron in Goerck Street. There was the bowl of water, the sheaf of paper, the pigeon. And there was, he wrote in a careful hand at the bottom of the twelfth page of notes, not a man. Not Henrik. I have not yet sent a man.
And the page stayed that way, in January of 1886, in his coat pocket, while he swung the pick.
In the second week of February the pigeon came.
He was walking home from the ditches on a Saturday evening — a shortened day; five instead of five to five — up Seventh Avenue through a light cold rain. He had his collar up. He was thinking, as he walked, about the design of a new commutator he did not intend to patent because he did not intend to build a motor that needed a commutator, but which he was drawing in his head as an exercise. He was thinking about the commutator and about his hands, which were very cold, and he was not thinking about the pavement in front of him, and he almost stepped on the pigeon.
The pigeon was in the middle of the pavement. It was dead.
No — it was not dead. It was nearly dead. It was a grey pigeon of the ordinary New York kind, with a broken wing that had been, to judge by the rust-brown stains on the feathers, broken some hours ago. It was lying on its side. It was breathing in small rapid breaths. It looked up at him as he bent over it, with a single orange eye that contained no hope.
He picked it up.
He had not picked up a pigeon since he was nine years old in Smiljan.
He put it inside his coat, against his shirt, where his own heat might reach it. He walked the remaining eleven blocks to Fourth Street with his left hand supporting the small weight through the cloth. The pigeon did not struggle. The pigeon was too tired.
In his room he laid the pigeon on his pillow. He fetched water in a chipped saucer and a crumb of bread from his tin. He fed the pigeon water, drop by drop, with the tip of his little finger. He tried to feed it the bread. It would not take the bread.
He sat with it through the evening. It did not die.
He sat with it through the night. He fell asleep, against his will, sometime after three, with his chair pulled up to the side of the cot and his head on his crossed arms on the pillow beside the bird. When he woke at dawn the pigeon was still breathing.
It stayed with him for eleven days.
By the second day it was eating. By the fourth day it was standing on his windowsill. He named it — and he was not, at thirty, a man who had expected to name a pigeon — Dagmar, because a girl he had been briefly in love with in Prague in 1880 had been called Dagmar, and because the sound was soft, and because the girl had, like the pigeon, been a small grey thing that had allowed itself to be held for a while and had then flown.
On the twelfth day the wing healed. Dagmar flew out of the window.
She came back on the thirteenth. She came back on the fourteenth. She came back every third or fourth day for the remainder of Tesla's time on Fourth Street, which ended in April when he moved to a better room on Twenty-Fifth Street after Peck and Brown gave him his own laboratory.
She was with him the night, in late February, when he took the Aperture notebook out of his coat and added the first new drawing to it he had made in sixteen months.
The drawing was not of an Aperture of increased yield.
The drawing was of an Aperture of reduced yield.
He had understood, sitting with Dagmar on the windowsill at eleven in the evening, with her grey head tucked sideways so that she could watch him draw — he had understood that the problem he had been working on was the wrong problem.
He had been working, from the age of five, on the problem of opening the door.
He had not been working on the problem of calibrating the door.
The difference was enormous.
He drew the gears. Dagmar watched him. He wrote, beneath the gears: I will not, at scale, ever open the door all the way. I have chosen this once in Paris and once in New York and I choose it now a third time. Three times is binding.
He underlined three times is binding.
He closed the notebook. He put it in his coat pocket.
He fed Dagmar from his hand. She took the seed from his palm — three grains, a pause; three grains, a pause — with her small warm beak, and she did not fly away.
He cried, in the room on Fourth Street, for the second time since he had been five years old.
He understood, weeping, that Dane was not ever coming back through the door. He understood it in a way he had not understood it in the field in 1861 or in the fever-room in 1873 or in the park in Budapest in 1882 or in the attic in Paris in 1883. He understood it because Dagmar was on his windowsill, and Dagmar was alive, and Dagmar was not Dane, and loving Dagmar — which he did, suddenly, fully, in the way a man of thirty loves a small dumb creature for which he has become the difference between life and death — was not going to bring Dane back, and was not trying to.
Dane was gone.
The door had taken him.
The door was not going to give him back, ever, because the door, Tesla understood for the first time in twenty-five years, did not give.
The door only took.
He sat in the chair in the dark in the cold room with the tin on the sill and four dollars in the tin and a pigeon on the sill and the notebook in his coat and Dane at last, properly, fully, finally dead in his mind, and he thought:
Then I will build the AC motor, which is a door the size of an armature, which is a door small enough to harness. I will build nothing larger. I will make it so that the small door earns me enough money that I will not have to build the large one. I will put the large one out of the world.
He lay on the cot. Dagmar flew in from the sill and settled on the pillow beside his head. He did not move. He could feel her small heat beside his ear. He closed his eyes.
He slept for nine hours, which he had not done since he was seventeen.