Tesla's Attic

For Nick, Caitlin, and the rest of the kids struggling with the Tesla devices, coincidences keep popping up until they begin to look like fate. The students realize that, though the events surrounding the strange pieces of technology might be foreordained, their responses to those challenges aren’t fated but theirs to command.

Caitlin’s favorite color, a shade of green, appears on a flyer that announces Nick’s garage sale, draws her interest, and pulls her into the Tesla adventure: “She took it as coincidence, though she would eventually come to doubt the very concept of coincidence” (13). Later, when she piles up the devices with the intent of setting them on fire, she and Nick notice that the machines are designed to fit together like a jigsaw puzzle. By then, she knows these things were long ago prefigured to go together. It’s no coincidence.

The devices have an uncanny way of finding exactly the right person to oversee them. Petula’s love of photography makes her the perfect host for the box camera that takes pictures of the future; Vince loves the macabre and dead things, and he gets hold of the one thing—the wet-cell battery—that can revive them.