Zofia Moczulski - The man from the Future

When Isabelle’s father was dying, his breaths shortening without any measure, the smouldering summer all over Europe breathed fire. At the same time, magic realism blossomed in Latin American literature. Colonial ghosts were still vividly present in Latin American countries, troubled by juntas and revolts.

The art of storytelling exploded with unimaginable force, creating literary marvels and bringing into focus creative giants: Jorge Luis Borges, Gabriel Garcia Marquez, Isabel Allende, among many others.

Isabelle read Marquez’s “One hundred years of solitude” to her father who took great delight in the complex stories of mythical Macondo and seven generations of the Buendia family. It was a multilayered saga with labyrinthine plots, composite, difficult names yet his grasp of all these complexities was remarkable. To him, the characters from the book were real, the ghosts were real and all the fantasy, the magic morphed into his own life and his own ghosts.

And he had many of those spirits flying over the room, or paraded in front of him in a never ending procession. His deceased friends and family, long forgotten distant relatives. At times it was so crowded, it seemed like half of the local cemetery dwellers invaded the room, invisible to her but loudly acknowledged by her father. Isabelle immersed herself in her father’s phantasmagorical world, in his lucid illusionary charades.

As the illness progressed and pain became unbearable, the doses of opium she fed to her father increased rapidly. The spirits started to fade away.

The last of his visiting ghosts was Nicola Tesla. Isabelle, otherwise a learned person, never had heard of Tesla before. Yet she could see that her father was well acquainted with his esteemed visitor.

Later, Isabelle read widely about Nicola Tesla, a Serbian American inventor, a forgotten genius. Was it possible that her father, a POW in Germany during the Second World War, had heard about Tesla’s energy healing plate?

There was so much suffering among the prisoners. Those plates, based on the resonance principle of matching external frequency and object natural frequency to induce a healing response, would alleviate their pain.

Since the encounter with Tesla’s ghost, Isabelle’s father’s health started to deteriorate rapidly. No longer did he appear to be in pain. The ghosts disappeared too and silence descended on the room.

Then on one hot summer day, when the skies were on fire but his room dark and cool, he slipped quietly into his longest, eternal sleep. It was only upon cleaning the room that Isabelle discovered under his pillow a small, purple metal plate. She kept it for safekeeping, a memento of her father. Years later she discovered that indeed, it was Tesla’s energy healing plate.