Love in Infant Monkeys by Lydia Millet

then that his work on Earth was ended.
    A pigeon might seem serene, he said, but that was a trick of the feathers. The feathers were soft but beneath them it was bloody. That was beauty, said Tesla: the raw veins, the gray-purple meat beneath the down.
    I should have died when she died, he went on, but death, I think it slipped by me.
    Some people made fun of him for saying he loved the pigeon like a woman, though I never thought it was
funny. People love their pets, but the love is tinged with sadness. Because the love is for a pet, they are ashamed of this. They want the love to seem as small as a hobby so no one will have to feel sorry for them. Tesla was not ashamed. He was never ashamed. People did not understand that, and they called him perverted.
    Pia loved Tesla like he loved the pigeon.
    Since I knew Pia, sometimes I have thought: I would have liked to know that love.
    She thought he was as good as a saint—a saint or even more. She had her own problems. One of them was a harelip. Tesla had so much knowledge, she said, that it was as though he were God himself. And like God, he could not pretend he was human. This was why he failed despite all his ideas, why other men lived in comfort with wives to serve their needs and he was alone and poor.
    Why God sent His son down to die for our sins, said Pia, was He could not come down Himself. He would not have known how to talk to regular people, she said. Pia was part Catholic and part something else, a religion from her parents’ village in Cyprus. I was brought up Methodist and didn’t know much about it.
    In my church we had God, of course. We also had
God in my church. But He was all downy feathers and none of the dark blood.
    How the dust gathered!—on the dark file cabinets, the cupboard, the large safe in the corner and the desk. Tesla forgot the surfaces of things. He didn’t need to write down his ideas for inventions, he said, because he could keep them in his head. He did use paper, though; he liked to draw pictures of places he dreamed about. The pages had a few words, as well as drawings, but hardly any math on them. I didn’t know much back then, but I had seen an equation or two in high school and I was pretty sure you would need math to invent a Death Beam.
    He called me “Mees.” He called all the maids that.
    Every day he went to feed the pigeons outside the library. He went with duty and an aspect of hope. If he was sick and could not feed the birds, he had a boy do it for him, a boy named Charles who raised racing pigeons. He walked with a cane by the time I met him, because he had been hit by a car two blocks away. His first thought when he got back to his room, with three ribs broken, was that someone had to do the day’s feeding for him. He sent out a bellhop with his bag of seed.

    Anyone else might have gone to the hospital but Tesla had no truck with doctors.
    When I first cleaned his rooms I thought the birds were disgusting. I would avoid the rooms whenever I could and leave them to Pia. She was a harder worker and didn’t turn up her nose at anything. But after a while Tesla began to talk to me. He told me how smart some pigeons are, how they see ultraviolet light and remember things for years. He told me homing pigeons were carrying messages for the Army and saving the lives of soldiers, how vast flocks of passenger pigeons had been shot out of the sky for the pleasure of shooting, and five billion had turned to none. He said it was a little boy who shot down the last of the passenger pigeons.
    Tesla told me that he chose not to marry. He said love could be all right for working people, and maybe also for poets and artists, but not for inventors like him, who had to use all their passion for invention. He was friends with Mark Twain, who was devoted to his own wife. I think maybe that’s why he said writers could get married and still do good work: He didn’t want to hurt Mark Twain’s