Translator: Mirjana Čutura Reviewer: Tijana Mihajlović
Let's be honest and say, "Thank heavens for darkness."
Turmoil lets out the fight in me.
I need monsters.
When I was a kid, I liked to pretend I was Zeus,
a Greek god that can split the sky in two with a lightning bolt,
strike down monsters,
and watch the entire world as it burns.
I was a kid, and there was a storm underneath my skin,
and I so badly liked to hear about a man powerful enough as to let his storm out.
When you're young, and you're kicking, and stomping, and squealing,
you want other people to hear you.
But what if you can make them feel you?
What if you can cloud their skies, drench their skin, and charge their air
until light comes zapping through it,
and they know precisely how your hungry heart rages?
When did I feel the need to burst with expression?
And how did I begin to associate that with something so electric?
Maybe it was the first time somebody rubbed a balloon against my head,
and my hair went up.
Or maybe when my parents pointed to my favorite power outlet and said,
"You see that zap? That's the zap that kills."
Or maybe it was the first time I heard rock 'n' roll,
and I felt so bad with my ear plugs hidden in my history class,
listening to AD/DC, AC/DC, AC/DC
without even knowing what AC/DC is.
Maybe they should've talked about AC/DC in my history class.
I first learned about it in physics.
AC/DC - alternating currents and direct currents.
We calculated magnetic flux density
in units of teslas, teslas for Nikola Tesla.
A little "T" by numeric values in textbooks
was sometimes the only tribute paid to him.
How could a man of such greatness escape our notice?
AC/DC, alternating currents and direct currents.
When the 1880s hit, people saw that electricity was the future
and raced to push for their ideas.
You have Thomas Edison,
who blessed the world with the light bulb -
little bolts of lightning confined
to balls of glass that people could take home.
He lit up New York City.
Yet his application of direct currents was inefficient.
"So look here,"
said a much younger man, Nikola Tesla.
"We could use alternating currents instead."
And now, the world was facing two ways of delivering electric power: AC and DC.
Yet Edison wasn't ready for his empire to be usurped by the new kid,
so AC had to go.
But how do you kill a zap?
You kill a zap by killing something with a zap
and then planting fear in people's hearts.
And this is when the darkness begins to seep in.
The loyal warriors of direct currents
wanted alternating currents to appear lethal.
So stray dogs and kittens in New York were brought before a crowd.
People were told, "You see this, kids? These are alternating currents!"
before high voltage was applied to the animal,
which would shriek and topple over.
And then a convicted murderer in Auburn Prison in New York
was strapped to a chair running on alternating currents.
The air sizzled for 17 seconds.
He was quickly pronounced dead.
"But wait," a spectator said, "Just look at his chest.
It's rising, and falling, and rising, and falling.
Quickly. Quickly. Kill the man. End this torture."
But the machine had to be charged,
so everybody just twiddled their thumbs,
twiddled their thumbs,
twiddled their thumbs
before 2,000 more volts were applied throughout his body.
Blood vessels popped, skin was marred red,
and the smell - the smell had men just running out of the room
because how do you describe electricity?
The sound is comparable to nothing other than electricity.
It's not like rock 'n' roll; it has no rhythm.
There's nothing that sizzles so sporadically.
The smell of burned flesh
must have rippled between the members of the audience
and then wrapped around their wrists as if tactile.
This is how people learned that zaps are real, tangible, reproducible by man.
Zeus exists; he's not that godly.
Meanwhile, in 1893,
Tesla lit up Chicago in the World's Fair.
The world has never seen such a spectacular display of light.
He then harvested the power of Niagara Falls
until power lines ran to New York and lit up the city.
In Colorado Springs, he split the sky
with a man-made lightning bolt 135 feet long.
But Tesla,
like a bolt of lightning himself,
just lit up our skies and disappeared, just as quickly.
The long, fruitful life
of one of the greatest inventors in the history of mankind
ended quietly in a New York hotel.
He was lonely, penniless, dishonored.
His visions and patents are incorporated
into countless inventions that have shaped this modern world,
and yet, while his ideas won, he seemed to lose.
At the end of his life, he talked to no men,
and instead nursed sickly pigeons back to health.
"The mad scientist," they called him.
Tesla,
when your sanity began to break,
we saw no storm between the cracks,
no clouds, no rain, no lightning escaped from underneath;
we saw only light.
It faded away softly, quietly.
A halo seems to hover over the New York City skyline -
a product of all the light that illuminates the paths of millions.
Imagine Tesla,
his vision darkening in a lonely hotel,
his mind elsewhere.
Did he wonder, what do I do?
What do I do with all this uncertainty,
all this lightning?
Sometimes I think I want to be painless, content.
I just want to be pure.
Most days, though, I'm glad I'm not.