Tesla's Attic

by Neal Shusterman

  “Aren’t you the least bit curious? I mean, what were all these things doing in my attic?” Nick took the Shut Up ’n Listen from Mitch and turned it over. There, on the bottom, was the same spidery inscription, Property of NT. “And who’s NT anyway?”

  Petula appeared suddenly, as if she had popped out of the woodwork. “Nikola Tesla, you idiot. Mind if I join you? Too bad if you do.”

  She shoved Mitch down the bench so she could sit right across from Nick, and she put a basket of fries on the table between them as a peace offering/bribe. “Here, share my fries.”

  “Nikola who?” Nick asked.

  “Oh, yeah,” said Mitch, “that inventor guy. They named the alternative school after him.”

  “Inventor guy?!” Petula stared at Mitch. “Inventor guy? He was just the greatest scientist of all time, that’s all. He used to have a lab here.”

  Nick shrugged. “Never heard of him.”

  “Are you kidding me? He invented fluorescent lights—AC power—the wireless transmission of energy—and radio!”

  “Ha!” said Nick. “You’re wrong. The radio was Marconi.”

  Petula shook her head. “No—Marconi copied Tesla’s patents. Tesla sued and won, but it was too late. Marconi got the Nobel Prize, and Tesla got zilch.”

  “So tell me, Miss Petupedia, why was all his crap in my attic?”

  “Not quite sure. Further research is required.”

  “Wait, you’ve been researching this?” And then Nick realized. “The garage sale—you bought something, didn’t you?”

  Petula gave him an extremely wide grin. “Well, maybe if you hadn’t been dragging your eyes all over Caitlin’s wet T-shirt, you would have remembered me buying an old box camera.”

  Mitch, who had been quietly devouring all of Petula’s fries, asked, “What does it do?”

  “It takes pictures, you moron.”

  “So,” said Nick, a little peeved, “I’m an idiot, and he’s a moron—should I call the waitress over so you can insult her, too?”

  “I use these words as terms of endearment.” Then she reached into her purse and pulled out a slip of paper, which she handed to Nick. “If you want to know the deal with the camera, meet me at this address, Friday night at eight.” As she got up to leave, she glanced over at Mitch, whose mouth had a lipstick-like ring of ketchup. “Come alone!” she told Nick.

  “You realize we’re making an exception allowing you to try out,” the coach told Nick when he arrived at practice later that afternoon.

  “I know. Thank you. I promise you won’t be disappointed.”

  The coach was the first baseman’s father, and the first baseman should have been playing soccer for all the times balls were rolling at his feet. But of course you couldn’t tell the coach that, or you’d be warming the bench.

  “I understand you’re a pitcher like your father.”

  “For five years,” Nick told him. “Before that it was T-ball.”

  “Right.” Then the coach called to the team’s current pitcher. “Hey, Theo, take a break and let this kid pitch for a while.”

  “Theo?” Sure enough, it was Caitlin’s boyfriend on the mound. Nick grinned. Few things would be more satisfying than sending him to the bullpen.

  Theo trotted off the field. “Great,” he said to Nick. “Knock yourself out. Unless you want me to do it for you.”

  “All right, Nicky, let’s see what you got,” the coach barked.

  “It’s Nick,” he said, wondering if correcting the coach earned you a space on the bench next to the player who said his kid sucked.

  Nick jogged out to the pitcher’s mound, the eyes of the team on him with mild curiosity.

  The catcher took his position, a batter came up to the plate, and from the near-empty stands, Mitch shouted, “Hey, batter-batter-batter—swing!”

  Nick wanted to tell him to shut up, but realized that saying anything would acknowledge that he actually knew Mitch. So he tried to pretend as if Mitch didn’t exist.

  Briefly, Nick wished his dad could have been there to see his moment of glory, but then again, maybe not. There was always an underlying sadness in his dad when it came to baseball. A wistfulness about what could have been, if things had turned out differently.

  The batter tapped the plate with his bat, then held it at the ready, waiting for Nick’s pitch.

  Nick put all his concentration into the ball. He wound up and—

  “Hey batter-batter-batter—swing!” yelled Mitch.

  Nick’s pitch went wild. It didn’t even come near the strike zone.

  The catcher grappled on the ground for the ball, and the coach said, “Don’t worry about it. Try again.”

  Nick knew he was up to this. He had watched the team practice. He was a better pitcher than Theo, their goosenecked prima donna, and more agile around the bases than any of them. He knew he’d have to pay his dues, but when he finally shone, it would be all the more satisfying.

  He wound up for the second pitch, and for an instant, only an instant, he wondered if anyone here had bought something from his attic. And that momentary mental hiccup flew off the tips of his fingers along with his pitch.

  “Hey batter-batter-batter—swing!”

  The second pitch wasn’t quite as wild as the first, but was way too high for the catcher to reach. It hit the backstop and bounced off with a rattle.

  This time the coach said nothing. He just motioned for the catcher to give Nick one more chance.

  Nick tried to pull in all his concentration, winding it down into the perfect pitch he always delivered when it was most needed. His mother had been in the stands at his last game. He had pitched a no-hitter. When he threw that final strike, and the team raised him over their heads, he remembered the way she stood in the stands cheering for him.

  Now, as he wound up to throw the third pitch, all he could think was that she would never see him play again…and even though Mitch said nothing this time, it didn’t matter. With thoughts of his mother clouding his mind, his pitch hit the batter.

  “Ow! What’s wrong with you?” yelled the batter, rubbing his bruised arm.

  “Sorry!” Nick shouted. “I didn’t mean to, it just…”

  The coach took a few seconds to inspect the damage to the batter, then reluctantly came out to the pitcher’s mound.

  “Son,” he said, taking off his hat like he was about to tell him his dog had died, “I hate to say this, but maybe pitching isn’t your forte.”

  “But it is,” stammered Nick. “It’s what I do best.”

  The coach glanced at the batter, who was still rubbing his arm, then back at Nick. “I’m sorry, son, but I think you need to work on your game some. Maybe next year.” Then he walked away.

  Nick wanted to hurl the glove at his retreating head. But he wouldn’t give Theo and the rest of the team the satisfaction of seeing his anger. Instead, he took off his mitt and tossed it to the first baseman, who bobbled it and dropped it at his feet.

  “Keep it,” Nick said. “Maybe you’ll actually catch a ball with it someday.”

  “Guess what happened today!” Danny was bouncing with excitement as Nick came in the door.

  “You got bit by a radioactive spider, and now you can catch thieves just like flies.”

  “No,” said Danny. “I made the nine-and-under baseball team!”

  Nick just stared at him.

  “The coach says I’m a natural outfielder!”

  There were many foul balls flying through Nick’s head at the moment, but instead of saying something he’d regret, he dug down and forced a smile. “That’s great, Danny. Mom would have been proud of you.”

  Then Nick went to his room, pulled the ladder up behind him, and didn’t come out for the rest of the night.

  Archimedes, the great mathematician, once said, “Give me a lever long enough, and I shall move the world.” Of course, another time he ran naked through the streets shouting “Eureka!”—which only goes to show that even history’s gre
atest minds have issues.

  Take Euclid, who, even after proving that the shortest distance between two points is a straight line, was habitually late to everything. And let’s not even mention Pythagoras.

  We rarely consider that the great minds that have changed the world at one time or another suffered heartbreak, loss, and exclusion from their chosen sport. We forget that they were human.

  Nick Slate had no clue how important a part he was soon to play in the grand scheme of things. But one thing is certain: none of it would have been possible had he not suffered the course of his own human events.

  Events like Petula Grabowski-Jones.

  Eight o’clock sharp, Petula had said. Although Nick didn’t want to appear eager to have anything to do with her, she did claim to have information he desperately needed. So he showed up five minutes early.

  Petula, of course, had shown up ten minutes early.

  Before he saw her, Nick thought he must have gotten the address wrong. The place was a restaurant. Not the sit-down-and-pig-out kind, but the kind where the food was ridiculously expensive, the portions were ridiculously small, the menu was in another language, and the waiters were dressed better than you.

  Petula sat alone at a table with her hair up, wearing a stylish dress designed with curves in all the right places on a body that, unfortunately, had no discernible curves at all, so it hung like a red satin toga.

  She looked up at Nick as he entered. “What do you think you’re doing?” she asked sharply. “They don’t allow jeans in here. Sit down before anyone sees you.”

  Nick looked around. No one was watching them but an elderly couple, who grinned at them with an “Ah, young love” look in their eyes.

  “What’s the deal?” Nick demanded.

  Petula grinned. “You want information, you’re going to have to romance it out of me. But I’ll tell you right now, I don’t kiss on the first date. Unless you actually want to.”

  A waiter arrived and smoothly placed before Nick a plate of some kind of food he had never seen before. They looked like miniature onion rings, but Nick doubted they were.

  “Your date took the liberty of ordering the calamari appetizer,” the waiter informed Nick.

  “She’s not my date,” Nick said, then turned to Petula. “You’re not my date.”

  “Let’s not argue semantics,” she said. “Now sit down and eat some squid.”

  Nick thought of a million reasons why not to sit, but they paled in comparison to the one reason he needed to, so he plopped himself down in the chair and, as he angrily gnawed on a calamari ring, said, “Whatever you’ve got to tell me had better be worth it. And by the way, I can’t pay for this place.”

  “Calm down; I have a gift certificate.” She waved it in his face. “Of course it’s expired, but we can feign ignorance.”

  “Fine.” Nick grabbed another few fried rings. “But your information had better be as good as this calamari.”

  Petula smiled victoriously. “Patience,” she said. “It’s only the first course.”

  And so Nick had to endure not just the calamari, but a salad and small talk that was almost as microscopic as the portions, before Petula would divulge anything.

  Nick, on the other hand, was anxious to share what he had learned in his own research: that Tesla and Thomas Edison hated each other; that Tesla had accomplished things that to this day haven’t been duplicated; and that he made his first million by the age of forty, but gave it all away.

  To all of these things, Petula merely said, “Tell me something I don’t know.”

  It was as they awaited their entrées that Petula served up the stuff that wasn’t common knowledge. “Tesla was a very private man,” she told him. “Rumor was he had a secret love shack, because he was carrying on with some Colorado Springs socialite, but no one in the old social columns I read knew who it was.”

  Nick considered this. It didn’t take Euclid to connect the dots. “My great-aunt Greta?” he asked. The thought of his great-aunt having a romantic anything with anyone made him shudder.

  “Apparently so,” Petula said. “She was what you would call a floozy.”

  “So that explains why his stuff was in my attic.”

  “Yes and no,” Petula said, enigmatically.

  Their entrées arrived: Petula’s blackened ahi with a lavender-infused beet rémoulade, and Nick’s grilled cheese sandwich. That’s where the conversation ended, as Petula had a strict rule about not talking while chewing.

  Between her seventh and eighth forkful, however, she said, “The question you need to ask yourself is…why did he put it in her attic, and not his own?”

  As Petula had predicted, acting clueless about the expired gift certificate got them a free meal, and although Petula requested a walk home, Nick only went as far as the corner of her street, as any farther would definitely make this feel too datelike for comfort.

  The information Petula gave him was worth enduring the meal, but there was still something she was holding back. “You still haven’t told me what the old camera does,” Nick pointed out, before they parted. “Besides taking pictures, I mean.”

  “I don’t know what you’re talking about,” she told him. “It’s a camera—it’s not like it’s going to grow legs and do the hokey-pokey.”

  And although Nick wasn’t so sure about that, he didn’t want to inflame Petula’s curiosity any further. “Never mind. It’s just that it belonged to Tesla, and like you said, he was a genius.”

  “Sometimes,” said Petula, “a camera is just a camera.”

  She held out her arms, expecting a good-night hug, but Nick kept his hands in his pockets and said, “Well, see ya,” then made a successful escape.

  Although he knew there must be more to the camera than met the eye, if Petula hadn’t discovered it yet, that could only be a good thing.

  When he got home, Vince was lurking on the porch. The kid was very good at lurking, Nick decided.

  “Here,” he said as Nick approached, and held out an object that Nick recognized from the garage sale: an electric fan with odd hexagonal blades. “I was trolling the police net, and I heard about an apartment complex where the air-conditioning went haywire. Froze the place out. Snow in the hallways and stuff. This thing was running in apartment Four-G. People had no idea it was the cause of their freeze-out.”

  “Good going, Vince.”

  “Wanna see if we can cryonically freeze your neighbor’s dog?”

  “Tempting, but no.”

  “You’re no fun.” And with that, Vince slouched his merry way home.

  Nick brought the fan up to his room, where he found that his dirty laundry had been collected in the center of the attic floor. Weird. He hadn’t left it that way. When his mom was alive, she would occasionally gather his soiled clothes and shove them underneath his covers, as a not-so-subtle reminder to put them in the hamper. But now that she was gone, his dirty laundry carpeted much of the floor until he got so sick of it he finally washed it.

  Was Danny playing some sort of game? Regardless, since the clothes were all in one convenient pile, he brought them down to the old washing machine that was certainly not designed by Tesla, because it did nothing abnormal—if you didn’t count the way it jumped during spin cycles. Once out of sight, the laundry was out of mind—and when he returned to his room Nick didn’t notice that his bed and desk had moved three inches from the wall, toward the center of the room.

  Mitch Murló, despite popular opinion, had a life.

  It wasn’t an enviable one, though. At least not for the past year. His mother, who had always been there for him, was rarely around now, because of the two jobs she had to hold down to keep food on the table for Mitch and his younger sister. His father, who had also always been there for him, was now elsewhere.

  When Nick showed up in town, it was Mitch’s chance to have a friend who knew nothing of his family’s considerable baggage, so of course he tried a little too hard. Who could fault him? Mitch knew i
t wouldn’t last forever—after all, people talked—but for now he and Nick had something in common: a sudden interest in the lost inventions of the original mad scientist.

  And maybe, thought Mitch, it might even withstand a Murló “family day.”

  At eight o’clock on Saturday morning, Mitch sat at the kitchen table, staring at the Shut Up ’n Listen before him. He loosened his tie, as it was already beginning to choke.

  The device waited with patient, intimidating silence for the opportunity to finish his thoughts. The little ivory ring on the end of the string was practically taunting him to pull it.

  “Can I play with it?” asked Madison, his five-year-old sister.

  “No,” he told her. “It’s not a toy.”

  “It looks like a toy.”

  “Well, it’s not.”

  “Then you can’t play with Mr. McGrizzly.” She wiggled her stuffed bear tauntingly in his face, then strutted out of the room, leaving Mitch alone with the device that was anything but a toy.

  He took a deep breath, pulled the string, and held it taut. “My father…” he said, then let the string go.

  And the machine said, “…can’t wait to see you.”

  Mitch sighed. Not what he wanted to hear. Again his tie seemed to be turning into a noose, and he tugged it looser. He pulled the string and tried again. “My father only needs…”

  “…to see you and your sister.”

  Mitch pounded his fist on the table in frustration. One more time he grabbed the ring and pulled.

  “I can’t visit my father today…”

  “…without wearing a smile.”

  Mitch put his head in his hands. There was no getting out of this, and the damn machine only rubbed it in.

  It wasn’t that Mitch didn’t love his father—he did—but the weekend visits had been getting progressively more difficult, more awkward. Mitch knew it was petty of him. But the things happening around him now were bigger than his personal problems. The connection between Mitch and this device was growing stronger. It was almost as if he had become a part of the mechanism. A crucial part of it.