“ONE THOUSAND OF THE BEST MEN IN THE CITY,” SAID GOB, “and two thousand of the worst women.” He and Will were about to go into the Bal d’Opéra at the Academy of Music, an annual affair notorious for its licentiousness. It was January of 1870, a warm night in what had so far been a very mild winter. Will feared that Gob’s machine was changing the weather, making it inappropriate to the season. Weather-making would suit the thing—that was something as dramatic and as large as the machine itself. It seemed, certainly, that it ought to do something. And yet it was plain to Will that the machine did nothing.
“Prepare to enjoy yourself,” Gob told him as they walked across Fourteenth Street and joined the crowd at the entrance to the Academy of Music. There were people in costume waiting to get in, and a crowd who had gathered to gawk at them. Will and Gob were accosted by an old man, a filthy preacher. “Going to see the delightful whores!” the man shrieked. Will could not tell if he and Gob were being condemned or congratulated.
Gob shook his wand in the man’s face and said, “Indeed.” He and Will were dressed alike in jester’s costumes, with bells on their caps, wands, and shoes, and with half-masks that sported obscene long noses.
Inside the Academy there was every sort of costume, some of which strayed considerably from the French theme. Will and Gob were not the only jesters, though only they had obscene noses. Will could not count all the Sun Kings and Marie Antoinettes, one of whom carried her head under her arm. A high-collared cloak gave her the illusion of headlessness. When she approached, he could see her eyes peeking out from where a neck ought to have been.
“Go and tell that woman that her morals have come loose,” Will said, pointing randomly at a woman sitting in a man’s lap near a mammoth champagne fountain on the stage. She was dressed as a seminude ballerina, in a tutu that left the whole of her legs exposed. Jolly, the only ghost present, was staring at her.
“You can tell her yourself,” said Gob, and they walked down to the fountain. It was made in the shape of Notre Dame. Will marveled at it, at how the champagne ran down off the high towers to trickle into a very abbreviated Seine.
“To loose morals,” toasted Gob, as he and Will took their first glass of champagne.
“To Parisian carousing,” said Will. “Wasn’t it Mr. Jefferson who said a little debauchery every now and then is a good thing?”
“Actually, I think that was my aunt,” Gob said. He turned his head to point his long nose at a box over the stage, where a woman dressed as a shepherdess was standing with two more naked-legged ballet girls and two men in plain evening dress. “There is my mother,” he said, smiling. Usually he scowled at her, but tonight, Will knew, he was in a very happy mood. He thought the building was going very well, and did not seem to mind that the machine did no apparent work.
Up in the box, Mrs. Woodhull waved her crook at them. Gob bowed. Will raised his glass to her. “Shall we go up?” Gob asked. Will said he would follow in a moment. He looked around for Tennie, worrying, briefly and irrationally, that she might grow angry at him for ogling all the loose women. But she was not a jealous person. The idea that they might be true to one another was ridiculous to her. Will would have liked for them to be married in spirit or practice, if not in name, but she would have none of it, and anyhow whenever he tried to be faithful to her he failed. Gob’s view of the situation was simple. “She is too much, my friend,” he’d say. “You should give her up.”
Will approached the ballerina, who had been abandoned by her lover of the minute and was staring forlornly at Notre Dame.
“Mademoiselle,” he said. “Aren’t you an actress? Didn’t I see you in Mazeppa?”
“No,” she said, hurrying away from him. “I think you did not.” Will dipped his glass again and sat on the edge of the pool. He looked down at the bubbles clinging to the side of his glass, and it seemed to him that the way they let go and rushed up to burst at the surface must be like the motion of souls flying off of the earth. Jolly sat next to him, his head jerking this way and that.
“Not everyone has the good sense to appreciate a fool.” Will looked up and saw Tennie struggling under a gargantuan wig, fully four feet high, studded with boats and dolphins and, high above all, an angry golden sun face. “Do you like my coiffure?” she asked him.
“It’s large,” said Will. She smiled, cracking her pancake makeup. She wore a black silk mask over her eyes. She lifted it up briefly to wink at him and whisper, “It’s me, Tennie C.”
“I thought you were Mrs. Astor.”
“This wig will snap my neck, soon, and then my good time at the ball will be ruined. Well, I did not come here anyway to enjoy myself.”
“Didn’t you?”
“No,” she said. “I came tonight to observe. Vicky is going to write an article for Mr. Bennett and I am going to help. We will expose all these panting dignitaries who think a mask is shelter for hypocrisy.”
“Are there famous people here?”
“Oh yes.” She put her hands up a moment to adjust her wig. “But come with me, I need to steady my coif.” She walked over to a wall and leaned her head back against it. “There,” she said, taking the glass that Will offered. “Thank you. See over there? That Cardinal Richelieu is Mr. Bowen, of Brooklyn. And there, the musketeer who licks his lips so often, that is Mr. Fisk.”
“Is Mr. Whitman here?” Will asked.
Whitman was Gob’s friend. Gob had a plan for him. He’d use him as a battery in his machine, a horrifying notion, at first, to Will, though Gob was unperturbed by it. When Will suggested that it might be wrong to use Mr. Whitman so, Gob looked confused for the first time since Will had known him. “I don’t understand,” he’d said.
“Mr. Whitman certainly is not here,” she said. It was clear to Will that she admired the poet. “He would not come to a place like this. Are you an admirer or a detractor?”
“A detractor, I think. He is a fool who goes about in a costume and pollutes our literature with ceaseless exclamations.” It gave Will pleasure to insult the man, because he disliked the very notion of him. How could someone so thoroughly silly be so vital to the machine? Will had come to know that he was not himself a genius—not someone like Gob who could intuit all the possibilities of matter—but merely a hard worker, and he resented people like Mr. Whitman who claimed to approximate the divine function of creation when all they really did was take notes on the fevered wanderings of their undisciplined minds.
“I suppose there is no solidarity among fools,” Tennie said tartly. She nodded at a headless Marie Antoinette, who walked by just then and waved at them. “That was my friend Mrs. Wabash. And there is Madame Restell. The ball is made officially wicked by her presence.” Will looked at the pudgy little queen she indicated, wondering if it really was Madame Restell, the abortionist of Fifth Avenue. She raised an eyebrow at him as she passed.
“Anyhow,” Tennie said, “I must return to my work. You are charming but not famous, and I am already familiar with your vices. There’s Mr. Challis, the broker—I’ll follow him.” She stepped away from the wall, swaying under her wig. “Those antique French ladies, what necks they must have had!” She handed him her glass and went in pursuit of Mr. Challis, who was watering himself at the fountain. Will watched her strike up a conversation with him. She touched his arm and leaned on him. She spoke something directly into his ear that made him burst out laughing, so loud Will could hear it even at a distance.
On the floor, people were dancing, throwing themselves around with wild abandon. Jolly was among them, his eyes closed and his head thrown back rapturously, dancing unpartnered, unseen and untouched by the living. Sam had joined him. He beckoned to Will, smiling—he had become more friendly as work on the machine progressed. Now they were close, or at least he stood close sometimes, often just inches away. Will figured it a reward for his untiring work on the machine. He watched them for a little while. Their beckoning was more seductive than the flashing legs of the ballerinas. “They command you, don’t they?” Gob had asked once. Will hadn’t answered right away, but he had thought, Shouldn’t they? He was still a physician and a photographer, but though he still labored at these professions, they were no longer his work.
Days later, he’d answered Gob’s question. They sat close together at his long table, both of them eating directly from the same roast chicken. Gob said, “What will we eat, after we are successful? If cutting off the chicken’s head only makes it uncomfortable, then what are you left with for dinner? Cabbages?” Will put down his fork and knife and drew patterns on the table with his greasy finger.
“I think they command us all,” he said after a while.
Wheel, lever, pulley, wedge, screw—all through winter, Will mastered simple machines. Gob would present him with one and then demand that he describe its properties mathematically, and after a few months of Gob’s persistent tutelage, Will was able to build a machine of his own. Nothing like Gob’s engine, it was just a humble plumping mill.
One evening Will arrived in the workshop to find a gift of lumber stacked on the stone floor. From the pile he chose a pole, a slim birch trunk with the bark still on it. To one end of the pole he attached an ironwood mallet, to the other an oak water box. He then drilled a hole in the middle of the pole, and slipped a heavy dowel through. Will’s machine was a peculiar-looking thing—it might have been the weapon of some giant hairy god who lived in the woods, worshiped by animals and trees.
Back in Onondaga County, Will would have set his plumping mill up where it could catch the spray off the waterwheel that turned his father’s gristmill. As this was New York City, he set it up on Gob’s roof between two blocks of wood, and poured the water himself from a pitcher so big even he had to lift it with both hands.
Will filled the box. The weight of the water lifted the hammer higher and higher, until the angle was such that the water ran out of the open-backed box. Now the hammer fell with a dull thud against the snow-covered roof. It was hardly a glorious sound, but Will felt a glorious sort of joy when it worked. He filled it repeatedly, watching it rise and fall for hours, till the eastern sky began to lighten and he could better appreciate the handiwork of his little mill. He’d neglected to put a pestle under it. It pounded no grain into flour. Instead it had broken a hole in the snow. Will considered the black hole and imagined Sam or Jolly climbing out of it, and no sooner had he done so but there they were, smiling at him and silently praising his little contrivance. It seemed barbaric compared to the complex and mysterious thing in the room below him, yet they bowed to it all the same. Will kept filling the box, so the plumping mill, with its up-and-down motion, seemed to return their courtesy.
Sam came and stood next him, and leaned his head closer and closer to Will’s until they were touching, and when they touched Will became lost in the pleasant memory of standing with Sam when they were little boys, gazing down into the well behind their house. The sun shone full down to the water that particular noon, and they could see the snakes there at the bottom, twisting and curling over each other. “Ain’t it grand, Will?” his brother had asked, and they’d stood watching until the shadows returned to cover the water once again.
In March of 1870, Will and Gob watched as the first caisson for the great bridge was launched into the East River from a Brooklyn shipyard. Gob was fascinated by the bridge. The late Mr. Roebling had been one of his heroes—he had a little picture of his bridge over the Ohio, which he sighed over sometimes as if it were the portrait of a pretty girl—and he had exchanged letters with the junior Roebling, who’d taken over the work of building the bridge after his father died. Gob would go on about the principal of the caissons and how it related to their own work. The caisson was a giant house that sank down as men dug out its floor, falling slowly through silt and mud and bedrock until it rested beneath the earth, an empty coffin upon which the great bridge would stand its foot. Gob spoke of a caisson of the spirit, built of discipline and grief and despair, in which he and Will would sink down until they rested in the lightless depths of their own souls. Inspiration and success would proceed from that deep place, Gob said. To Will, this made a vague sort of sense, and he nodded, the way he always did whenever Gob made such pronouncements. Will could understand, certainly, that their work was not the work of contented or happy men.
The caisson was fascinating, regardless of whatever philosophy Gob attached to it. It was so very large. Will knew its dimensions because Gob had repeated them endlessly—one hundred and sixty-eight feet long by one hundred and twenty feet wide, twenty feet high and three thousand tons heavy. Yet it seemed much larger, and the sloping walls gave it an Egyptian feel, as if it might be the base of a pyramid or a pedestal for a sphinx. The roof was covered with air pumps and tackle and various other pieces of machinery which Will could not recognize. “Isn’t it beautiful?” Gob asked. There was something childish in the way he hopped restlessly from foot to foot, waiting among the crowd of thousands for the launch, which went off without a hitch. The thing fell gracefully down to the water.
“There it goes,” Will said, holding his belly because he felt a lurch when the last block was knocked away and, when the thing started to fall, he had a feeling in his belly as if he, not the caisson, were falling, urged along by his fantastic mass into the gray river. Gob cheered with the rest of the crowd, shouting himself hoarse. Will cheered, too, very awkwardly at first, because he could not even remember the last time he had raised his voice this way. He emitted a few cracked, coughing yawps, and these seemed to clear the way in him for something smoother and more musical, a high, enthusiastic yodel that brought to mind the terrific hollering that the Rebs used to do. Will yelled louder and louder, until it was just he and Gob screaming in the now quiet crowd, until, like Gob, he’d used up his voice.
Will wrote in his casebook: He has had twenty-five to thirty discharges from his bowels in the past twenty-four hours. He was sitting at the bedside of a cholera patient, a fifteen-year-old boy whose fat cheeks made him look even younger than he was. Will put down his pencil and reached out to push the sleeping boy’s sweat-matted hair away from his eyes. He was sure that the boy would die.
That spring, Will had among others under his care a consumptive longshoreman, a cigar maker with intermittent fever, a clerk with pneumonia, a syphilitic sailor, a washerwoman with pleurisy, a shopgirl with plumbism from her makeup, a decayed actor who’d attempted suicide by hammering a nail into his head. All these patients died, despite Will’s sincere good intentions, his knowledge, his skill, and his careful watching. He’d sit with those who had no family to attend their death, thinking that in watching them take their last breaths some deeper knowledge would be revealed to him, something that might help in the construction of Gob’s machine. He learned the pattern: the limbs would cool, and the underside of the body would darken; patients would become sleepy and confused, often mistaking Will for someone they loved, reaching out their weakening hands to caress his face; their breathing would become shallow, and thick spit would pool in the back of their throat, so each breath, when it came, rasped and rattled; at the very end the breathing would cease and the heart would stop, and they would void their bladder and their bowels, a final gesture of disrespect for the world that they were leaving. He learned the pattern, but not the secret. He learned nothing exceptional, except how it was impossible that a person should live and breathe and be one moment the repository of an undying soul, and the next be just a body, just cooling flesh.
Will had gone to the second medical division at Bellevue. Gob had grown bored with the ambulance service, and quit at the end of ‘69. He had a gaggle of patients that he had inherited from Dr. Oetker, and, when he was not at work on the machine, he kept himself occupied with them. These wealthy men and women were never really sick, just obsessed with their bowels or the dimming luster of their hair. Will didn’t understand why Gob bothered with them.
The cholera boy died like the others, alone but for Will. Gob’s machine was already a success in one respect—working on it staved off Will’s fits. It blunted his empathy, as if work on the salvation of the sick and the dying made it easier for him to shake off their suffering. But when the work went poorly, as it had lately, the fits returned. He had one on account of the cholera boy. As he sank into oblivion, rattling and crying out with fear despite Will’s attempts to soothe him, Will sank down, too. His guts cramped up and he let out a moan, and as the boy died Will shook and drooled and bit his own cheek.
He woke with his head in the lap of a drunken nurse. He looked to where the boy lay in his bed, his mouth and eyes both slightly open.
“Have a little sip, sir,” the nurse said, bringing a flask to his lips. “It will help you to recover.” He sat up and stood away from her, scowling, taking the flask and telling her to get to work cleaning the boy’s body. Will looked around the room for his spirit, but it wasn’t there. To be haunted immediately would have been unprecedented. Will never saw them so fresh, but always a period of weeks would pass before they appeared to him, former patients who accused him with expressions of betrayal, as if they were furious he had not saved them. “It takes a little while,” Tennie told him, “for them to learn to come back. It is not easy for them.”
When Will left Bellevue that evening it was to go to Number 15 East Thirty-eighth Street, Tennie’s new address since earlier in the year. Mrs. Woodhull had rented a mansion with some of the new fortune she’d gathered in the stock market. As he walked he checked intermittently over his shoulder, still afraid the cholera boy might appear. The boy was never there when he looked, but other spirits followed, Jolly and Sam and the rest, stretched out behind him in a line. He went twice about a streetlamp, hopped over garbage on the sidewalk, crouched low to duck under a horse who blocked his way as he crossed the street, and every spirit walked, hopped, and ducked precisely as he did, as if he blazed the only trail they could take in the world.
As he turned off of Fifth Avenue he could see Tennie, sitting in her window as if she were still living in Great Jones Street. “Darling!” she called out as the spirits filed up behind him, “I’ve been waiting for you!”
Will’s machines were always loosely adjusted and ill-controlled. He fixed Gob’s aeolipile, but when he fired it up it wobbled as it spun, and instead of making a clean whistling hiss it screamed like a lovelorn cat. Still, he continued to learn and to build. Gob mostly praised his efforts, though he could be harsh: of an arc lamp that Will assembled from two pieces of charcoal and a powerful voltaic battery, Gob said dismissively, “It makes more heat than light.”
Gob’s machine, meanwhile, was looking more and more like a person. They’d undone the thing it was before, removing the concretions of years until they uncovered something that looked like an iron-and-glass lamb, and then they undid that, too, because Gob declared it simply wrong, an immature form suited to a lesser task than abolishing death. Now it had glass ribs and a pair of round copper hips. It stood on legs as skinny as a bird’s, made of steel and wrapped around tightly with copper and gold wire. All the bones Gob had brought from a trip to Washington were carved into gears, or fused into struts. Inside the glass ribs was a second set of bone ribs, made from leg bones and neck bones and pieces of shattered pelvis. When they worked, Gob wore a black hat, fetched on the same Washington trip. He claimed it had belonged once to Abraham Lincoln, and said that he felt inspired when he put it on.
The variety of surfaces, the little glass boxes filled with tiny gears of gold and platinum and iron and steel, the looping wires and cables that spread out like wings behind it, the umbrella of picture negatives that sheltered it from the glare of the gaselier—these all made the machine fascinating to look at, but they did not make it functional. “It’s not finished,” Gob said once as they worked, when Will raised the issue of failure. “But it will be finished. My friend, you are impatient like the dead. I am never glad I cannot see them or hear them, but I know they must carp like fishwives, clamoring for the work to be done, and for the walls to fall. But we go as we must, and no other way. You are with me, and Walt is with me, and we will not fail.”
“The Kosmos,” Will said, looking at the machine and wondering what Mr. Whitman’s place in it might possibly be. Would he hold a cable in his hand and pass his vital energy along to waken the thing? Would he read his ridiculous poetry at it, and rouse it into a fury at the corruption of verse? He imagined the machine raising its arms to smash the man.
“Yes,” Gob said, with a dreamy look on his face. “The Kosmos.” Will turned his attention to the splicing of wire. It was something he enjoyed, weaving together the metal, strand to strand. Of the Washington booty, he liked best the piece from the Atlantic Cable. He thought it both pretty and perfect: the seven copper wires that formed the actual conductor, the insulating wrappings of thread soaked in pitch and tallow, the layers of gutta-percha, and finally the surrounding, protective coat of hard mail made from twisted steel wire. Once, before they’d worked it into the machine, he had held one end while Sam put his hand around the other, but Will had felt nothing and heard nothing.
“You’ll fail,” was what the angel said, during her rare and brief visits. And she repeated her question: “Why do you participate in abomination?” He had gathered, eventually, that by “abomination” she did not mean his dalliances on Greene Street. She meant the machine. “Do you think God is against our work?” he’d asked Gob after one of her visits. “He is indifferent,” was the reply. When Will told about the angel, he thought Gob might laugh at him and say that though spirits walked all around us on the earth, there was never any such thing as an angel. But Gob had only nodded and said, as if it were the most ordinary and sensible of statements, “Oh yes. The angels—they’re very much against us.”
“What do you know of angels?” Will asked Tennie. They were in her room on a hot night in July, nestled in what she called her Turkish corner. She had a bed fit for a princess, but sometimes she preferred to sleep here, where she’d hung a silk tent from the ceiling. Inside, she spread soft carpets and brocade pillows on the floor. She set two scimitars on the wall, bejungled the interior with rubber plants and ferns, and flanked the entrance to the tent with two squat plaster pillars, upon which two oil lamps burned and smoked.
“I saw them when I was small,” Tennie said, “but never since.” She’d reached her hand into a fern and was lazily waving its leaves back and forth, generating a little breeze. “Vicky saw one, once. I was just a year old, and almost died from diphtheria. Vicky saw an angel come down and wrap me in its wings.”
“Trying to smother you? Were they horrible wings?”
“Certainly not. It was a healing touch. I was restored by it. Everyone but Vicky had given me up for dead.” She reached for a glass of water and took a drink. “I saw Mr. Nathan,” she said. “Have you seen him? He doesn’t look happy. I think he wants justice for his murder. You know, I don’t think I’d care much what happened to my killer, after the fact. I think my concerns would be less mundane.” She took another drink of water. Will put his hand high on her belly, just under her ribs, imagining, as he sometimes did, that he could see through her skin to watch the functioning of her organs, and see her stomach writhing in appreciation at the cool drink. She talked about her day. He wasn’t ever sure what exactly she did with her time, but he knew she was always busy with brokerage business or paper business. In her room she had a little desk where she composed articles for the paper she and her sister had launched in May. Once, when she was writing, he asked her, somewhat peevishly, if she was exposing Mr. Challis. “Mr. Who?” she replied.
He put his hands all over her, feeling her liver as it slipped past his hand when she breathed in deeply, and calling out, as he touched them, “Lungs, kidneys, spleen.”
Tennie laughed, saying her spleen was here and not there, moving his hand. She claimed to be intimately familiar with her inner workings. It was part of her talent as a medical clairvoyant and a magnetic healer, to know her own body so well. “Yes, yes,” she said, “put your hands on me, and I will put mine on you.” She reached up to his chest and his back, as if trying to capture his heart between her hands.
“The telegraph, too, has a body and a soul,” Gob said. Will was making Daniell batteries, pouring an acidulated solution of copper sulfate into a copper cell and putting a porous cup inside it. Inside the cup went a cylinder of zinc, surrounded by a weak acid. The whole thing was enclosed within a glass jar. The assembly was delicate and laborious, and he’d burned holes through half his shirts, being careless with the acid. But Will liked the work. He thought the batteries were elegant, with their cups within cups within cups. He could spend whole days making them, and he often did, so they had hundreds by the end of summer.
“You cannot see the vital principle that animates it,” Gob said, staring at a stock ticker that had been set in his machine before they’d remade it. He’d taken the ticker all apart and half-reassembled it. He was in a mood, mourning the fact that he could not see spirits in general and his brother in particular, when he devoted his life to them, and when a person like his mother could see them, and hear them, even, it seemed, have tea with them. Will thought of his own mother’s lamenting.
“It won’t bring them back,” Will said, “to merely complain.”
“But it will,” Gob said. “Don’t you understand? What’s grief if not a profound complaint? It’s what the engine will do; it will complain. It will grieve with mechanical efficiency and mechanical strength. It will grieve for my brother and for your brother and for the six hundred thousand dead of the war. It will grieve for all the dead of history, and all the dead of the future. Man’s grief does nothing to bring them back, but just as man’s hands cannot move mountains, but man’s machines can, our machine will grieve away the boundaries between this world and the next. And then, sure as the rails run to California, the way will be open.”
Will kept working, kept his eyes on the battery and his attention on the task of filling the little porous cup with acid. But though he didn’t look at Gob, he knew how his face must be animated with pride and anger and sadness—it was the look he got when he made grand statements about their work. It was a difference between them, that Gob liked to talk so much where Will preferred simply to work. And that talkiness was part of the reason, Will figured, for Gob’s cleaving to Mr. Whitman.
Later, Gob put the ticker back together completely and then worked it again into the machine—it sat in the place where a navel would on a person. Then he went downstairs to read. Will was still patiently assembling batteries fifteen hours after he began. It was then the angel paid him another visit. She stayed awhile this time, a full five minutes. Will ignored her, as had become his custom. But before she left, Will had looked up to see her pointing with fingers and wings at the engine. “God hath not wrought this,” she said.
Will considered a fresco on Mrs. Woodhull’s parlor ceiling: it depicted Aphrodite surrounded by her mortal and immortal loves. They were clothed, but the goddess had exposed herself fully, and any guest who cared to stretch back his neck could gaze on her nakedness. Tennie was going on about Mr. Whitman. She got overexcited on his behalf whenever he was nearby. Gob had brought him to a party given in September of 1870 by Mrs. Woodhull in honor of Steven Pearl Andrews and his massive brain. Mr. Whitman was walking around the room with his hostess, having just left, thank goodness, Will’s company and Tennie’s, and still she went on about him.
“I had a vision,” she said, “in which he grew out of the ground like some wholesome weed. He was a green man, with daisies and bluebirds in his hair. Little animals came out of the forest to play about his feet.”
Will rubbed his chest where Tennie had given him a little shock. It hadn’t hurt, but it was always a surprise, when she did it. He wanted her to do it again.
“Let’s go upstairs,” he said. “I’m tired of this party.”
“Already? Mr. Andrews hasn’t even arrived.”
“Let’s go away,” he said. “Let’s go away tonight on a journey. Have you been to Canada? It’s a foreign country, you know.”
“I’d heard,” she said, and gave him a look that he knew too well. It said, I’m bored with you.
“Do you see how he walks?” she asked, staring after Whitman. “Like a bear, heavy and shambling and careless.”
“He is a magnificent creature,” Will said hollowly. “He is a kosmos.” He thought of Gob. They’d argued, earlier, because Will had made disparaging remarks about Whitman. Will had said this whole kosmos business seemed to him a senseless honor and an unearned distinction. “Who named him Kosmos, anyhow?” Will had asked. “Was it his cat? Is he also the Marquis of Carrabas?” Now, Gob was nowhere to be seen.
“I know you hate Mr. Whitman,” Tennie said, and went away in search of punch. He watched her go, leaning to speak a word or two into the ears of various men as she passed them. Mr. Challis, the licentious broker, was not at that party, yet Will found his thoughts drawn towards the man and colored with jealousy. When he was with her, when he came half awake in the night and she was wrapped all around him, when her hair lay heavy on his face and the very air he breathed was flavored by her, then he got a feeling that she surrounded him utterly, and this was a notion that comforted him and agitated him. He would think of her as a beautiful house, one entirely unlike Gob’s house, a place without secret basements where bones hung in chains from the ceiling and swayed and clanked in sourceless breezes. In his mind, he would go from room to room, each one stuffed with bright trinkets, and find way up top a machine whose purpose was the manufacture of delight. It was good to wander there, to look at her machine and listen to its noise, which was the noise of her snoring, chortling breath. Yet inevitably he encountered other men as he wandered in the rooms, always there were others who tended her machine, men who were strangers to him, who, when he opened a door and surprised them where they lounged in the supremely comfortable furniture, peered at him and asked, “Who are you?”
“Are you sleeping, Dr. Fie?” asked a lady who had come up and stood silently next to him. Will thought it was Mrs. Woodhull, but when he opened his eyes he saw that it was Miss Trufant, a girl who was her secretary and aide-de-camp in her war of reform. She was dressed up like her mistress in a skirt and a masculine coat.
“No, I’m quite awake,” he said.
“Mr. Andrews will stimulate you, if you are sleepy. I think he must be the most intelligent man in the world.”
“I think that person is Dr. Woodhull,” said Will, because he’d promised Gob he’d say flattering things about him in her presence. Gob had a giggly, schoolgirlish affection for this small, dark person. “What do you think of her?” Gob would ask over and over. “Do you think she is pretty?”
“I think you are besotted with that fellow,” she said. “Tell me, Dr. Fie, does Dr. Woodhull keep the stars in his pocket? Can he bring down the moon to give you as a good-evening present?” She smiled.
“Don’t you admire him, too?”
“Oh, I am indifferent to him. But I think two persons as devoted as you two should marry at the earliest convenience.” She folded her hands in front of her. Will looked down at them, noticing how they had a particular quality of loveliness—he thought how it must be difficult to make two things so perfect and small. She put them behind her back. “I said that in jest, Dr. Fie. But now I think I have offended you.”
“Not at all,” he said, but she was blushing, and she turned the conversation to the subject of the Fourteenth Amendment and its bearing on woman suffrage, something about which Will knew nothing at all. Very soon, she excused herself, saying she had to seek out Mr. Butler. “Yes,” he’d tell Gob later, as he always did, “she’s very pretty.”
Mr. Whitman got ill standing in the rain watching the funeral procession of Admiral Farragut. Will, when Gob brought him in to consult, diagnosed pneumonia, because Whitman’s lungs were wet as sponges. The patient insisted it was an old sickness contracted during his time in the Washington hospitals, and that the rain had weakened him and made him susceptible. He asked to be bled, because that always improved him when this illness was on him. Gob gave him an elixir and put him in one of the huge beds at Number 1 East Fifty-third Street, in a room that hadn’t been opened in years. Whitman got sicker under their care, feverish and delirious, calling out in lament for David Farragut, and then for a variety of persons. He mumbled names: John, Stephen, Elijah, Hank, Hank, Hank. “Dr. Woodhull,” he moaned. “How is my fever-boy?” Even Will tried to comfort him, putting his big hand on Whitman’s hot sweating head and saying, “Hush, sir.”
Gob bled him over Will’s objections. It was a surprise to Will, because Gob had always protested that bleeding a patient was only ever as helpful as biting him. “It’s what he wants,” Gob said, another surprise, because it was a fundamental rule of doctoring that the patient’s wishes were generally irrelevant to his care. Gob wielded a scarificator like a practiced leech, and bled his patient into a white porcelain bowl. Will half expected the man to bleed light or perfumed air, but it was ordinary red blood that seeped out of his veins. When he was done, Gob let Will do the bandaging while he transferred the blood to a green glass flask, and added a powder which he claimed would keep it from clotting up. “Yes,” he said, swirling the blood in the flask, “this will certainly be useful.”
As winter came, Gob kept saying they were nearly done building, but Will never believed him. It didn’t seem grand enough, the thing they’d made over these two years. It wasn’t much bigger than Will himself, and though it was complex and strange-looking beyond description, still it did not seem strange or complex enough. So he kept protesting, “It’s not enough.”
“Enough of what?” Gob would say.
Gob would laugh, and go back to his tinkering. It looked like a fashionable angel now, because the masses of cable looked like wings, and because the body of the thing flared out in the back like a bustle. Its arms held aloft a great empty silver bowl, just under the canopy of negative plates. Gob had adjusted his gaselier to burn acetylene. The gas, which they made themselves from water and calcium carbide, gave off an acrid, garlicky odor. When lit, the gaselier threw off painfully bright light that fell through the plates, and the images were caught up and focused into the bowl by means of lenses hung on wire so thin they seemed to float like bubbles below the picture negatives. “What goes in the bowl?” Will asked repeatedly, but Gob said he didn’t yet know. He said he’d dreamed the bowl, but not its contents.
Gob found the answer in December. Though there were hundreds of batteries already scattered around the room, Will made more, and he had been making them all night when Gob burst into the workroom at dawn, his face still puffy and creased from sleeping, to declare that he had at long last learned what went into the bowl.
That night they went to dinner at Madame Restell’s. “She’s been asking me to dinner for years,” Gob said, just before they walked the two blocks down Fifth Avenue to his neighbor’s house, “but I have always declined. She was my master’s good friend, and like an aunt to me, you know, yet I have neglected her. I don’t regret it—I have aunts enough as it is, and they cause me sufficient distress, thank you. Anyhow, I sent her a message this morning, and the reply came immediately. So perhaps I am forgiven.”
Madame Restell was delighted to see Gob. “How you’ve grown!” she said. At dinner she ignored Will to ask Gob about his life. He told her about his work at Bellevue, but failed to mention his mother, or, of course, the machine. He said he and his friend Dr. Fie were writing a textbook of anatomy, that their specimens had been destroyed in an unfortunate fire, that they had a publishing deadline and only blank pages where they should have drawings of fetal anatomy. A delicate favor, he admitted, but could she possibly accommodate him?
“Such a young man,” she said, “and already at work on a book! Oh, you will be distinguished just like your uncle. How he would be proud!” Of course she would help, she said. She partook heavily of the sweet wine she kept at her table, and grew tearful when she talked of Gob’s old teacher. “Sometimes I pass by the house, and I find myself climbing the steps, and only when I am standing at the door, about to ring, do I remember that he is gone. Oh, he was taken in his prime!”
“But Auntie,” said Gob. “You should ring the bell. You certainly should.” When she embraced him, he looked at Will over her shoulder and rolled his eyes.
After dinner, she took them downstairs into her basement office. They did not loiter in the finely appointed rooms where she received clients or performed procedures, but quickly passed into an unfinished back room, and went past rack after rack of dusty wine bottles to a group of barrels set aside in a little corral. A single gas jet was burning low on the damp wall.
“Here we are,” she said. “How many do you require?”
“Just one,” said Gob. She had pushed back the sleeves of her dress and taken a pair of tongs from where they hung on the wall. She lifted the top off a barrel marked Pork—that was to fool the postal authorities when she shipped out specimens to medical schools all over the country, charging, as she did, outrageous prices.
“Just one? I have them to spare. Let me give you two or three. Or let me give you four. It is no imposition, my dear.”
“Only one, thank you. Just whichever is freshest.”
“Ah, that would be young Mr. Tilton. Or rather, little Mr. Beecher.” She replaced the barrel’s lid and went to another, and as she fished out the abortus from the brine she gave its history. It was not her habit to betray confidences, but she was drunk now, and overcome with nostalgia for her old friend and his ward, so she talked freely of how she had helped Mrs. Tilton and Mr. Beecher eject from the world the consequence of their love. Will caught a glimpse of glistening pink flesh as she put the boy into a plain gray hatbox. She looked in for a moment before she put the top on. “A beautiful specimen,” she said. “Almost whole. And I know you will draw him beautifully. He will live on in that way, at least. Come upstairs. I’ll wrap him for you.”
Walking home with the hatbox wrapped up neatly in white paper like a purchase from Stewart’s, Gob told Will how in his dream his mother had summoned him to her house on Thirty-eighth Street. She received him in the conservatory, where she sat under a little tree that still had its autumn colors, though it was winter in the dream as it was winter in the world. She sat for a while, not speaking, and Gob sat next to her silently while the little tree dropped its brilliant leaves between them.
“This is a dream,” she said, suddenly and matter-of-factly. Then she reached under the bench and brought up what Gob thought at first was a jar of his grandmother’s marmalade—it was red and yellow, the very same shades as the settling leaves of the tree, and it was in just the kind of jar Anna used for her preserves. But when he looked closer at it he saw that it was a little fetus, and he knew it had been canned fresh out of his mother’s womb. “Here,” she said, “is your brother. This is your brother, come back to us at last.” He’d reached to take the jar from her, because he was overwhelmed with the feeling that he must take it and cherish it always, but in his haste he dropped it. It cracked on the bench, and the unfinished child fell out in a burst of orange-and-red liquid. It rolled among the fallen leaves, where it kicked and squalled.
From out of that dream, Gob woke understanding what they had been missing all these months. The machine required flesh and it required blood. Blood would catalyze the return, and Gob knew that it was the purpose of the machine to harness the energies of loss and grief and bring them to bear on the silver bowl, to call back a spirit—his brother’s—and see it installed in flesh. And he knew that once this was accomplished, the walls between the dead and the living would become weak and soft, because the law that declared there was no return from death would be broken, and this law was the foundation of the walls that kept the dead out of the world. The machine would reach through the weakened wall and pluck them, one by one, back into life.
“It’s so simple,” he said. “Don’t you think?”
Will said nothing. He only held the box and kept walking, trying to ignore the reek of blood and pickles that rose from it.
Gob pored every day over heavy books out of the library—books that looked hundreds of years old and were not in any language that Will could recognize, let alone read. Gob would exclaim every now and then as he read, while Will played with the engine, testing the light or making adjustments to the picture negatives, rearranging them by theme—belly wound, amputation, advanced decay. He put the fetus, as Gob directed him, in a glass jar full of brine, and sometimes he would sit and watch it, expecting it to move an arm, or swing its head to look at him.
They began one evening in late December, a few weeks after their visit to Madame Restell. Gob put on Mr. Lincoln’s hat and surrounded the engine with symbols and words drawn with colored sand on the stone floor between the batteries. Some he copied from the old masters he’d studied, some were his own creations. At midnight, he emptied the child from the jar to the bowl. Then he walked around the machine, stepping over the wires and glass string that led in from the outlying elements—boxes and batteries and pieces of mirror. He walked around once for every year of his brother’s life on earth, then walked back the other way once for every year that he had been dead. He poured out the blood from the green bottle into the bowl, and immediately it began to spin and sing. When Gob signaled to him, Will threw a switch to activate an arc lamp—they’d given up on acetylene, too, as not sufficiently bright, so now, beneath the ornate gas chandelier, they’d installed an electric light. It sparked up and glared above the negatives, throwing images into the bowl and down onto Gob.
Will ran all over the room, ducking under wires and jumping over batteries, stoking boilers, opening valves, and pulling levers. A steam engine roared and puffed and moved its pistons, and motion was fed along from gear to gear. Will had thought he understood at least the physical workings of the thing, how the steam became motion, how each gear turned another, how the force of movement was amplified or changed in direction. But, having thrown all the switches and opened all the valves, he stood panting against the wall near the door, feeling that he understood nothing. It had never shivered and hummed like this before, though they’d fed it with the batteries and the steam engine. It had never made the house shake, or made him dizzy with all its stationary whirling. Every part of it seemed to be in motion. The glass gears and the bone gears and the iron gears were spinning, the glass and copper ribs were twisting in their sockets, the cable wings seemed to be undulating slowly. He didn’t know how it made the bowl sing and spin, or how it summoned spirits. They crowded into the room, coming in by tens and twenties whenever Will blinked against the glare from the lamp. The light was so bright he thought it must shine through the spirits, but in fact it made them look more real, heavier and paler. It made them look more real, but not more alive. They looked waxy, like exquisitely preserved corpses. Yet they smiled like living people. Their mouths were moving and their faces were animated with what could only be ecstasy or great pain. All Will’s dead were there, joined by dozens of strangers, and by the little tatterdemalion angel, who floated in a corner and watched with a serious expression on his face.
Gob fell to his knees before the engine, threw out his arms, and gazed into the light, crying out what seemed to Will to be the only appropriate magic words. “Come back!” he shouted, again and again, till he was hoarse from it. “Come back, Tomo. Come back and be alive.” Will thought he saw something rising from the bowl, a shadow that grew in the middle of the light. It got bigger and bigger—it was definitely the shape of a boy, who raised his hands up to press against a negative, and in doing so, cracked it. The light went out suddenly, shattering like a rocket’s burst into tiny sparks that dwindled and were gone. Cables fell out from their sockets and wove like cobras, throwing sparks and hissing before they fell dead to the floor. Then it was utterly dark in the room.
The noise of the bowl hung a moment longer in the air and then it, too, was gone. Finally, the bowl fell from the top of the machine, and something landed in front of Gob with a huff. The bowl rolled away in the darkness and rang once when it hit a battery. Will held his breath and heard the noise of another person—it was certainly not Gob—breathing in the dark. He groped in front of him, but felt nothing except the glass battery jars. They were so cold they burned his skin.
“Hello?” Will said tentatively.
“Happy birthday,” came the voice, lilting and lisping, the voice of a child.
Will scrambled back to the wall and turned up the gaselier. There was a boy on the floor before Gob. He looked to be about five years old, had long curly brown hair and shining black eyes, and he was covered in blood, great smears of it against very pale flesh that striped him like a barber’s pole. The boy stood up, shading his eyes from the light, and stared defiantly at Gob, who stared back incredulously and said, “You are not my brother.”
“My name is Pickie Beecher,” the boy said. “I come before.”
It fell to Will to clothe and feed the boy. Gob, in the first few days after the birth, had retreated to his room, where he sat on his haunches in the stone circle and rocked back and forth, humming. He wouldn’t speak to Will, or to the boy. Spirits clustered around him, looking concerned, and around the boy, on whom they doted silently. Pickie Beecher mostly ignored them, though sometimes he might seem to follow one in particular with his eyes.
Will wasn’t sure what to do with the boy, who ran around the workshop, naked and bloody, looking at the machine and aping Gob’s words. “It is not my brother,” he said over and over. Will took him to the kitchen, because it seemed sensible to feed him. Pickie Beecher was not interested in vegetables, or even in cakes or pies. He liked red meat. Gob kept his larder very well stocked, though he generally did not eat very much or very often. There were steaks in the icebox. When Pickie Beecher saw them, he grabbed them up and rubbed them like kittens against his cheek. Then he ran under a table and ate them up in gobbling bites. “Do you like that?” Will said.
“My name is Pickie Beecher,” was the reply. “I come before.”
Pickie wanted jewels. “For my brother,” he said. Will brought him to Stewart’s to get outfitted for clothes. The pear-shaped clerk tried to be helpful, but seemed to have difficulty remembering that Pickie Beecher was there. “I wish to purchase clothing for the boy,” Will told him.
“Very well,” said the clerk. “For which boy?”
“This one,” Will said, pointing squarely at Pickie Beecher.
“Of course!” The clerk took a little step back, and quivered a little, as if suppressing an urge to flee. Will developed a theory: people sensed in Pickie Beecher something so unnatural and abominable that they were inclined to pretend he was not there at all, and once, reluctantly, they did notice him, he activated an instinct to run away. Will learned that Pickie Beecher could veil that horrible quality, but he let it shine forth when he was irritated.
The clerk was very gracious. He apologized profusely whenever he could not find the boy who was standing directly next to him, and he brought out all sorts of adorable costumes—Zouave jackets and Garibaldis and knickerbockers—each one more heavily bedecked with pom-pom or froufrou than the last, as if he thought the innocence of the outfit could smother the unease generated by its wearer.
Pickie Beecher was patient. He did not squirm while he was being measured, or cry with boredom, as another child might have. He only repeated his calm request for jewels, for his brother.
“You haven’t got a brother,” Will told him. “You are unique.”
“I come before,” said Pickie Beecher. “My brother comes after. But he must have jewels for his person.” He spoke very softly, and watched intently the omnipresent cash boys ferrying money from the clerks to the cashiers.
“Would you like to play with those boys?” Will asked.
“No,” said Pickie Beecher. The clerk returned with another silly ready-made outfit, a pilot’s suit with a matching cap.
“That’ll do,” Will said, because he was desperate to find something for the boy to wear besides the suit of Gob’s he’d cut down very crudely to fit him. The pilot’s suit was of dark blue wool, with shining black buttons that looked very much like Pickie Beecher’s eyes. Will told him he looked handsome. Pickie Beecher held his cap upside down in his hands and stared into it, but said nothing. Will turned away from him to order a wardrobe from the clerk, a dozen suits of the sort he and Gob wore, sack coats and pants of black wool, with gray vests, stiff white cotton shirts, and three dozen shirt collars, because he was certain that the neck of any boy, even one born out of a silver bowl, would be perpetually filthy. He would go through collars like water. Except Pickie Beecher did not care for water. When Will had tried to bathe him, Pickie Beecher leaped out of the tub and sat down on the floor, where he cleaned himself with his own tongue. When Will tried to cut his hair, the boy had leaped away with a shriek, and blood had oozed from the cut strands.
Socks and underthings, three pairs of black shoes, fifteen undersized handkerchiefs, and a series of hats of varying heights, from stovepipe to porkpie, completed his order. They were all very good quality, better than Will’s clothes. It was Gob’s money he was spending. The clerk swore to have it all delivered to the house within the week.
“Do you hear, Pickie?” Will said. “You won’t have to wear that for too long.” He turned back to where he had left the boy staring into his cap, but he wasn’t there. “Pickie?” he said. It occurred to him then that he could flee from the store, and possibly escape forever from the boy. It was useless to deny that he felt revulsion towards the little fellow, that he did not understand him, that he was frightened by him. But he also felt, already, a peculiar affection for him.
Stewart’s was a very large store. Will searched for a half hour, asking people if they had seen a pale boy in a pilot suit. No one had seen him, of course. In the end, it was Pickie Beecher who found Will. Will had paused under the little white rotunda, and was gazing up at it, imagining an apotheosis of A. T. Stewart for its blank white surface, when Pickie Beecher tugged at his sleeve and said, “I am ready to go now.”
“You mustn’t run off like that!” said Will. “Where did you go? Why did you run away? I have been looking for you all over this place.”
“It was necessary,” was the boy’s reply.
Outside, it was bitterly cold. Will put the boy in his new overcoat—another ready-made article—and held on to his hot little hand as they went down the sidewalk. Will thought he should be cold, this boy, like a corpse. But he was hot all over, and he got even hotter after a meal of red meat. Pickie Beecher paused to look at the pictures in Gronpil’s window.
“Would you like to have a painting? Something pretty to look at?” Will asked.
“No,” said Pickie Beecher. “A painting is not necessary.”
Back at the house on Fifth Avenue, Pickie Beecher hurried upstairs and pounded on the door to Gob’s room, demanding to be let in.
“I have them!” he said. “I have the jewels!” He had pulled a double handful of them from his pocket, rubies and diamonds and pearls in rings and on necklaces.
“Pickie Beecher!” said Will, coming up behind him. The boy looked up, no expression at all on his pale face, or in his dark eyes. He turned his attention to his booty, and his nimble little fingers tricked the jewels off their strings. “It’s wrong to steal things,” Will said.
“It’s not wrong. Not if it’s for my brother.”
Gob opened his door. “There you are!” he said, looking exhausted but rational. He was still wearing Lincoln’s hat, but now he removed it and put it on Pickie Beecher’s head. It rested on the boy’s ears, covering his eyes. “Here he is!” Gob said to Will. “Our little helper.”
Will came to divide his friendship with Gob into two portions—there was the time before the advent of Pickie Beecher, and there was the time after. Ante Pickie became as remote to him as the time before Christ, an era of antiquity, when people built ingeniously but never powerfully, when geniuses like the engineers of Alexandria made clever toys or cold, functionless monuments. The engine that had hatched Pickie Beecher was a thing of the most ancient past, and it came to seem as simple, in its way, as an aeolipile.
The advent of Pickie Beecher heralded a new age of building. He was their little helper, but he did work that was far out of proportion to his size. He fetched things, always saying they were for his brother, and Will came to understand what he meant by that. His brother was the engine, a perfect version of it that they had yet to build. In February of 1871, Will read in the Tribune an account of the disappearance of the gears that ran the pneumatic railway under Broadway. They had been stolen. The Tribune wondered if it was the work of the horsecart companies, but it was Pickie Beecher who had done it. Will did not know how. Will had no idea how Pickie Beecher executed his fantastic tasks.
Not the work, not the silent, electric motions of the machine, nor the glaring arc lamp that made Will’s bones feel warm when he stood beneath it, none of this had seemed unreal, before the boy. But Pickie Beecher made everything palpably strange, and the notion pressed on Will’s mind that he might be dreaming, or that he might be part of someone else’s dream—Gob’s, or Jolly’s bear’s, or even Pickie Beecher’s. He thought sometimes as he worked on the engine, or as he watched Pickie Beecher cut wires with his teeth, that the dreamer must wake under this burden of strangeness.
Pickie Beecher’s first work was disassembly. Gob was angry, at first, but then he joined in the careful destruction. “This form, too, has served its purpose,” Gob said to Will.
“You let the child rule you,” Will said, because he was so fond of his batteries, and Pickie Beecher had absolutely no respect for them.
“But I understand now,” Gob said. This was his refrain in the first weeks and months of the new age. “He’ll help us, don’t you see? He is a guide and a helper. He is a tool, a little engine in service to a bigger.”
Maybe, Will thought to himself, he is a clever urchin, fiendish but entirely of this world. Maybe he watched us through the skylight and thought, Now I will drop down and fool them, and then I will have hot food and a cool bed forever. But he could not look three minutes at the boy before this thought seemed ridiculous. This was the transformation their engine had effected, to make the ridiculous sensible and the sensible ridiculous.
The negative plates came out of their frames, the batteries came away from their cables, and the machine fell apart into its constituent copper and glass and iron and bone. Pickie Beecher arranged the pieces to his liking, and then he began to fetch heavier ones. Will would come to the house and find the giant gears leaned up against the walls in the workroom, their teeth almost scraping the ceiling. The workroom filled up with a haphazard array of stuff, all crammed together until there was no place left to store anything.
“My brother,” said Pickie Beecher, “he wants a bigger room.”
“Hello?” said Tennie. “Can you hear me?” Will took the tin can from his ear and spoke into it.
“Yes,” he said. They were talking over a lovers’ telegraph, two cans connected by a string. Tennie was in her Turkish corner, where she’d closed up her silk tent against him, insisting they play with her toy, something Gob had put together in the kitchen downstairs.
“Can you hear them?” she asked. “All those Irish innocents?”
“No,” he said. It was July, just after the great slaughter on Eighth Avenue. Angry Catholics had disturbed the gloating parade of the Orangemen and been punished with bullets by the police. Forty-five people had died. Will had seen a few of the wounded at Bellevue, which was also where all the bodies of the dead had been taken. He had stood that afternoon at a window on the second floor and looked down where twenty thousand mourners gathered outside the morgue.
“They are still angry,” she said. Then she stuck her head out of the tent and called out, “You may come in, if you bring me fruit.” He went in search of it. As he passed a window in the hall, he heard laughter coming down from the roof. Mrs. Woodhull was up there with her new friend, Mr. Tilton. He’d come to see her for the first time in May. Pickie Beecher seemed to hate him. Whenever they happened to be in the same room, Pickie Beecher would confront him, saying, “You are not my father.” Mr. Tilton always laughed at him and agreed that he was not.
Tilton was in love. He’d come to the house as Henry Beecher’s agent when Gob’s mother made a veiled threat to expose Beecher’s affair with Mrs. Tilton. He was supposed to soothe her, but she soothed him better. They were devoted companions.
Gob’s father was in the kitchen, sitting alone in the dark. “My boy,” he said to Will. “I am on the ceiling. Could you help me get down?” He had his pharmacopoeia, a dark wooden box, in front of him. Most doctors stocked theirs with a variety of medicines, but Canning Woodhull kept only morphine in his. “I find it cures everything but constipation,” he’d said of it. Will turned up the light to better examine the fruit and pick out the best pieces. Canning Woodhull’s eyes were eerie—wide, round, and almost all blue, with pupils closed down to the size of a dot of ink. He reached out to Will and said, “Give me your hand, my friend, before I float away.” Will put out his hand. Woodhull took it, shaking it as if in greeting, but also pulling on it, slow and steady. “There,” he said. “That’s better. How are you feeling this evening.”
“Very well,” said Will.
“I am not! My friend Colonel Blood says a person ought not to pluck the wings from his butterfly, but it seems to me that he is a man who doesn’t know if his grapes are sweet or sour. Colonel Blood is in the blood, you see. We are in it, but sometimes I float above. It ought to be contained in bodies. Do you know Sydenham? I used to worship him. But who cares about the mysteries of the circulation when the blood will come out, anyhow? We will put it on the ground until it drowns us. Vicky! Now there’s a woman possessed of a natural and indefatigable buoyancy. Tell me, do you think she will love me again?”
“Let go my hand,” Will said.
“If you let me go, you’ll drown. My floating is all that’s holding you up.” Will pulled his hand away roughly.
“Good evening,” Will said, after he’d grabbed up some fruit.
“I tried,” said Canning Woodhull. “I tried to save you.”
Gob and Pickie Beecher consulted at a speed Will could not follow, and in a language he often failed to comprehend. Pickie Beecher talked rapidly of how his brother had fifty toes or a caterpillar in his throat, and every revelation sent Gob into an ecstasy of drawing and calculation. The machine was taking shape again, not as a person anymore, but as an edifice, growing into the walls and through the floor. Will had gone into the workshop one morning to find holes bored into the floor—they were all over the room, at least a hundred of them, rough around their edges as if something had gnawed them in the stone and the wood. Gob and Pickie Beecher were busy threading cables through the holes. They dangled in the bedrooms beneath the workshop, connected to nothing. “Little brother is growing,” said Pickie Beecher.
Will studied dynamos, because Pickie Beecher had obtained three and deposited them in a parlor. All the furniture had been pushed to the wall to make room for them. They were arranged in a circle, so they seemed to be in silent conversation with each other, each of them chaperoned by the engine that powered it. Will was fond of their principle, of how the current produced in the revolving armature was sent back through the field coils of the electromagnet, increasing its power, which in turn increased the current. It was a building-up process of mutual and reciprocal excitation, and it reminded him of Tennie, because kissing her brought this principle to his mind. While Gob and Pickie Beecher consulted upstairs, Will made an accidental discovery: when he connected one dynamo to another already in operation, the second began to revolve in a direction opposite from the first.
“You are a genius!” Gob proclaimed, when Will showed him.
Pickie Beecher scampered around the two linked dynamos and said, “My brother, he has two hearts!” He stretched his little hand towards the brushes of one dynamo. Will rushed to stop him but was too late. He was sure the little fellow would be cooked alive, but the fat spark and the shock only made him giggle. “It’s my brother,” he said, when Will scolded him. “He wouldn’t hurt me. Not ever.”
Sometimes Pickie Beecher acted like an ordinary child. Sometimes he eschewed blood on his ice cream, and sometimes he clamored for a bedtime story or a stick of plain candy. He liked animals. He liked to go to the menagerie in Central Park and visit a hippopotamus with whom he had formed an attachment. Will took him down there one day in the middle of August.
Pickie knew just where his hippo’s cage was. He ran to it and grabbed the bars. “Murphy!” he said. “Hello, sir.” Will came up behind him and looked into the cage. Murphy looked fat and sleepy, and not entirely well, but better than most of his peers. Pickie rolled a piece of chocolate towards him. He snapped it up without even looking to see what it was.
They strolled among the other cages. Pickie paused before a skinny tiger.
“He would eat me up, if he could break his cage,” he said.
“I think he would try,” said Will. “He has that reputation. But I would protect you.” Yet it seemed unlikely that the boy would need his protection.
They visited a balding lion, and cage after cage of hissing, spitting monkeys. Pickie said he wanted one for a pet. Will said they were dirty, mean animals, and that he’d be happier with his hippo.
“I would make them serve me,” said Pickie. “They would be useful.”
Will sat down while Pickie ran from cage to cage, gibbering at the monkeys, roaring at the monstrous cats, and reaching his small hands through a cage to pinch the noses of deer.
All his running made Pickie hungry, so Will took him east to the Dairy, where they shared a bowl of ice cream. Pickie took no interest in the nearby playground, or in the children playing there. All he wanted was a ride in a goat cart. Will gave him ten cents and he ran off to clamber into a little buggy, pulled by two goats and captained by a black-haired gypsy boy. Not long after it began, the ride ended in an argument: the gypsy boy accused Pickie of biting his goat.
Will took Pickie up to the lake, because he had the idea that they could both take off their shoes and dip their feet in the water, but Pickie would have none of that. So they sat watching the lazy motion of the pleasure boats, and the boy said many times how he would like to have a swan to love and to pet and to eat. Will ignored him, because his attention was captured by a young couple in one of the boats, whom he mistook for Gob and Miss Trufant, but when they drifted closer he saw that it was not they. Will had seen them here before, though, chaperoning Mrs. Woodhull as she floated conspicuously with her paramour, Mr. Tilton. Gob had begun to follow Miss Trufant that summer, going wherever she went, and when Will had asked him why he did it, he’d only say, “I must.” Now Gob was done with his secret pursuit, and he and Miss Trufant walked openly all over the city, keeping an eye on Mrs. Woodhull and, Will supposed, talking about the Fourteenth Amendment.
“Aren’t you coming in?” Pickie asked, after Will had brought him to the door of Gob’s house. “Don’t you want to play with my brother?”
“I’ll come later,” Will said. He walked down to the Woodhull residence on East Thirty-eighth Street, looking at the ground as he went, because there were never any spirits there. After he passed the unfinished cathedral, he sensed that there was someone walking too close alongside him. He kept his head down even after she spoke.
“Creature,” the angel said. “You must destroy that abominable child.”
Will said nothing.
“You’ll fail,” she said. “You must fail.”
“I think you must have been the angel who brought the bad news to Mary,” Will said, finally looking up, but the angel was gone. She had visited more and more as work progressed on the machine, and every time she had told him that he and Gob would fail in their endeavor. She had a special hatred for Pickie Beecher, and never missed an opportunity to urge his destruction. Will was learning to ignore her.
He heard the music a few blocks before he got to the house—tooting, oomping, German brass. There were Germans gathered in a little crowd below Tennie’s window, out of which she leaned attractively, smiling and throwing down flowers from a wreath beside her on the sill. She was emulating her sister, running for election in the state congress from the largely German eighth district. Will had seen Tennie make a speech to a crowd of hundreds at Irving Hall. She’d promised them everything Mrs. Woodhull promised in her speeches—freedom and progress and equality—but Tennie had added that she would campaign for their right to drink lager beer on Sundays.
Will stood among the musicians and the serenaders, looking up at Tennie, and the thought came into his head that she was very beautiful, and that what he felt towards her was the highest, best, and most genuine love. She saw Will among the crowd and nodded at him. She was gone for a few moments from the window, and when she returned she threw him a note, casting it down very precisely so it landed just at his feet. She liked to pass notes, and seemed to take the same joy and pride in writing them as a five-year-old brand new to letters. Sometimes she’d hand Will one as they lay in bed, something she’d written hours before and saved to give him after they had wrestled and gasped. Sometimes they stated the obvious, You are a big fellow or We are together, you and I. Sometimes they boasted of her prescience. Once, after he tripped over his own feet in the dark and knocked a teapot from a table by her bed, she handed him a note sealed and dated the day before, telling him he would do just that. “I can’t see very far ahead,” she told him whenever he asked her if he and Gob would succeed in their work, if her sister would in fact become the President of the United States, “but I always see true.”
He unfolded the note, looking up at her and kissing it before he read it: Even a blind man could see how I am busy. Go away and come back later.
The very hottest day of the summer of 1871 came in August. Will went to the house on Fifth Avenue thinking to take refuge in the cool dark library. Letting himself in, he fell over something in the foyer. On the floor, he examined the thing that had tripped him—a bright new copper pipe, stamped with the name of the manufacturer, Advent Pipeworks. The pipes ran all over the first floor in neat rows. Will stepped over them, wondering at how they’d sprung up so quickly. At his last visit, three days previous, there had been no sign of them. He found Gob laying pipe in the dining room.
“What is their purpose?” he asked Gob. Could the machine grow so big it would fill up the house from first floor to fifth? It made Will flushed and hot again, thinking about that.
“To make ice,” Gob said. He explained how he would boil aqua ammonia in a still, and drive the pure gas through a condenser to liquefy it, then pass it through the pipes, where it would expand and evaporate, stealing heat from the water around the pipes and freezing it.
“But your house,” Will said. “You’ll get it all wet.”
“Help me,” Gob said. “It’s necessary for the machine.”
“Very well,” Will said, and put his hands to laying pipe, thinking as he worked of Pickie Beecher saying, “My brother, he likes the cold.”
“Do you think she’ll like it?” Gob asked, after they’d flooded the place to a depth of five inches and turned the whole first floor to a mess of ice.
“Who?”
“You know,” Gob said. “Her.” Will understood him to mean Miss Trufant.
“Does it matter of she likes it or doesn’t?”
“It matters very much.” Gob gave Will a puzzled look. “Very, very much,” he said.
Gob had been saying lately that Miss Trufant was necessary to the machine. This was something Will did not understand. She was, after all, a girl, and not even one inclined to science. Gob insisted that she mattered to the building, but Will figured this to be a symptom of his ever-waxing infatuation with her.
“All this is for her?” Will asked. He had been thinking, as they worked, of rarefied chemical processes that could only take place at very low temperatures, of the precipitation of a gaseous soul, the opposite of sublimation, where an airy, unexisting thing would be made solid and real. “You said it was necessary for the machine.”
“Immediately it is for her, but ultimately it is for the machine. Can’t you see how very important she is, Will?” Gob got down on his knees and started to polish the ice with a wire brush. Will thought, as he turned away, What does he feel for her that it’s not sufficient to make her a miracle, but he must polish it, too?
“You fellow,” Will said quietly. “You must have her.” He walked away slowly and carefully out of the dining room, out through the foyer. When he opened the door the night air was so hot and wet he choked on it.
Gob startled him when he pounded on his back—Will didn’t hear him come gliding up on the ice. He knocked a few more times on the space between Will’s shoulders, then patted it, then pulled Will back to embrace him. “Oh, my friend,” Gob said, kicking the door shut with his foot. “I think she makes you green. But don’t you know that no one can help me like you? Others are necessary to the building, but none is necessary like you. You are the most vital, the bravest and the smartest of my collaborators. It’s you, not her or anyone else, who’s most important.”
“Now we are all together,” Gob announced. He’d brought Maci Trufant into the workshop one night in December of 1871. Will, who was at work on the machine, had scrambled around nervously, trying to cover things up—batteries, bones, a pile of uncut gem-stones gathered by Pickie Beecher. He felt as if he’d been walked in on in the bath, but the fact was that she’d been visiting the house since the end of the summer, and had even begun to contribute to the construction. Will had noticed her little touches—blue paint on a copper pipe, pieces of glass twisted into patterns like bows—and he cared very little for them.
Pickie Beecher rushed out from under a table to clutch Miss Trufant around her legs and say, “Welcome!”
She patted him on the back and said, “Little child.” He took her hand and led her to the middle of the room, where a number of the holes in the floor had been consolidated into one great hole, which led now through three floors of the house, so standing there she could look down all the way to the library.
“Dr. Fie,” she said, nodding at him. “I’ve been meaning to tell you how your work is most ridiculous.” Then she laughed at him. She was dressed all in black, with a red sash that cut across her chest and her belly, and a red carnation in her hat. She’d been marching that day in a parade organized by Mrs. Woodhull to honor the martyrs of the Paris Commune.
“Perhaps your eye is jaundiced,” Will said. “Perhaps you do not see clearly.”
She stared and stared. “You two,” she said. “My father was a weekend tinkerer, compared to you.”
Gob came forward and joined their hands, left to right, and then he took their free hands up in his own. Pickie ducked under their arms, so he stood in the middle of their circle, and Gob said it: “Now we are all together.”
Will broke apart from them. Gob took Miss Trufant’s arm and escorted her around the room. They’d lean down together, bending in unison as if connected by a bar from hip to hip, to examine some fascinating piece of machinery. Will went downstairs to the library, where he sat in a chair away from the hole in the ceiling, with a text on steam engines open in his lap to a chapter on the Giffard injector. Pickie had followed him downstairs, and was rooting in a box of stereographs near Will’s chair.
“He didn’t ask, did he? May she come in? Don’t you think he ought to have asked?”
“She is very beautiful,” said Pickie. “She is the mother of my brother.”
“She just walked right in.”
Pickie came over and climbed into Will’s lap, sitting on the book Will wasn’t reading. He had a stereopticon clutched in his little hands. “See?” he said, putting it to Will’s eyes. “It’s my brother.”
Will didn’t like to look at stereographs—they gave him a headache. But Pickie held the viewer hard against his face, so he had no choice. The image slowly gained depth and detail. It was a boy who had been ruined by a shell. He was in two pieces, and bits of grass grew up straight and strong between the halves of his body. Will could see little clumps of dirt stuck to the trailing intestines. “Yes, yes,” he said. “I’ve seen it, Pickie.”
“He is my brother,” said Pickie Beecher. He sat in Will’s lap and put in picture after picture, and said the same thing to each one: “Hello, brother.”
“I saw it coming, you know,” Tennie said, “this day. And you may ask, How can a person live that way, knowing how all the terrible things are going to happen? It always seemed a thousand years in the future, and that was a consolation. But now here it is, come today. Don’t try to fight it, dear. It’s something I have learned, that I can always see it coming but never can stop it.” She had just given him bad news: she did not love him any longer, and wouldn’t see him anymore. She had taken him into her Turkish corner, as if for love, but had instead made this devastating announcement. He fell into a fit as soon as he understood what she was saying. When he came back to himself he saw how he’d made a mess of her corner. She held his head in her lap. Was it not evidence of continuing love, he wondered, how she dabbed at his bitten lip with the hem of her sleeve, without care for bloodstains? She put her finger on his lips when he tried to plead with her. Didn’t he feel it? she asked. Didn’t he feel how there was no joy in it anymore, not for either of them?
“But there is still, for me,” he said weakly, around her finger.
“Yes,” she said. “I knew you would agree with me. See how easy we make it, because we are friends?” He brought up his hands to touch her breasts, but she stopped him. “I could,” she said. “I could touch you, and not love you. But I know you wouldn’t want that.”
“You think you are special,” Will told Mr. Whitman on the way back from Gob’s wedding, “and yet really you are not. Really, sir, you are nobody at all. Really you are the least important person in all the world.” It made him feel better, to say this. Seeing Whitman at the bow of the ferry, looking so carefree and happy in his solitude, Will had felt a pressure in his throat that he thought was vomit, but was actually just a set of hard words that wanted so badly to come out. He left Whitman there and took Pickie Beecher to the back of the boat, where people had gathered around Gob and his new wife. Will stood far away and watched Tennie talking and laughing, pretending he was admiring the traffic on the river—the hay barges and sand barges, the giant sailer-steamers. For her part, she did not even glance at him. Will found he loved her better every day since she cast him off, and during the ceremony he only had thoughts of marrying her. It was stupid, he knew, to think that another person could abolish your unhappiness, but what cure was there for want of Tennie except Tennie herself?
Gob was solicitous, yet he never seemed to understand how a person could be sad just because his aunt refused him her company. Canning Woodhull, however, was very sympathetic. He and Will became friends in the days after the wedding. They caroused together in low and high places, in Water Street dives and the bar at the Hoffman House. Will took him to the Pearl, and he took Will to the Seven Sisters’, where they visited five of seven houses in as many evenings. But every night they would return to Mrs. Woodhull’s house on Thirty-eighth Street, where they’d sit in the kitchen and drink until it was almost dawn. The senior Dr. Woodhull was a very good listener, and it was a relief to Will how he never tried to offer hope, how he never tried to convince Will that his situation would improve. “It will get worse,” he said. “You will love her and want her more and more. Every day something else will drop away, until there is nothing left but her. And you will come to know that every good thing in life was her, and every bad thing was lack of her.”
“Why?” Will asked. “Why did she go away from me?” He didn’t mind, just then, how he was like his mother, complaining in a darkened room.
Canning Woodhull usually had no answer to this question. He would shrug, or else answer with another question—“Why did she go away from me?”
One night, when they had been drinking for a good long while, Dr. Woodhull looked up and met Will’s eyes—something he rarely did; usually when they talked he looked only at his glass. He said, “Don’t you see that it’s the same answer to all the questions? Why did she leave me? Why did he die? Why is the world the place that it is, full of dirty pain?”
“But what is the answer?” Will asked. He grabbed Canning Woodhull’s bony wrist across the table.
“My boy, I will tell you. Wait here for me, and prepare yourself to receive the information.”
Dr. Woodhull pulled away his wrist, and went out of the room. Will sat alone, staring at a dwindling candle. He was anxious, at first. He wanted the answer to his question, and imagined that Dr. Woodhull must have gone upstairs to consult an enormous book. But he’d had so much to drink that he fell asleep with his chin in his hands, though not for very long. It was still dark when he woke to screaming. He went upstairs and discovered its source. In the hall he saw Mrs. Woodhull, not very much dressed, her hair wet with blood. She was being comforted by her Colonel, who was drenched just like her. Will went into their room, where he could see Dr. Woodhull, and how he had crawled into his wife’s bed to cut his own throat while she and her husband slept. It was a mighty stroke that he had dealt himself. He’d cut all the way down to the bones of his neck. He must have crept into their bed ever so carefully, not to have woken them with the intrusion of his body, but only with the flooding warmth of his blood. Pickie Beecher was there, jumping on the sodden mattress, and Tennie was kneeling by the bed next to her mother, who had rested her cheek on Canning Woodhull’s chest.
“Oh, Doc,” said Tennie.
Spirits scolded him, shaking their cold, pale fingers, and screwing up their faces at him. Even Jolly frowned at Will, whenever he sat alone drinking. Neither was the angel very friendly. She got more shrill with every visit. “Doctoring is a bust,” Will told her a few nights after Canning Woodhull’s funeral. He hadn’t been to Bellevue in weeks because he couldn’t go near the patients without having a fit. He’d taken a leave of absence, but really he didn’t plan on going back until the machine was finished, but by then he hoped he’d have no more work there anyway.
“Do you think, creature, that it will all go away, when the abomination is complete?” the angel asked.
“You’re pretty,” he told her.
“Do you think it will be for free? Do you think you can ruin the natural order for no price at all? The Kosmos will die, and worse. His soul will be abolished utterly. There will be nothing left of him, not even a memory. From such murder you hope your joy will be born.”
Spirits came and chased her off, and then they gathered around him—Jolly, Sam, Lewy, Frenchy, all of them equally furious. He could tell what they were saying: “Get to work!”
Will would have liked to do just that, but lately the building was going badly. Gob seemed not to understand anymore what to do with the confusion of parts they had created, and the dreams which formerly had guided him now only confused him. Even Will, looking at the machine, could tell there was something wrong with it, that its elements did not blend together into any sort of harmony. For the first time, it looked like nothing to him, not an angel, not a person, not a lamb. It was merely a random association of components. Pickie Beecher scolded them both for their failure, but could not seem to help them, either. He could only offer more parts.
Nonetheless, Will went to Gob’s house that night in July to apply himself to the machine, and spend the hours till dawn engaged in a nostalgic practice—making batteries. Their manufacture brought to mind happier days, when Tennie was still with him, and when the machine seemed almost to build itself. He had thought the house on Fifth Avenue would be quiet and dark, and that Gob and his bride would be in bed in the Fifth Avenue Hotel, where they had taken rooms because the new Mrs. Woodhull refused to live under the same roof as what she called the “pathetic contraption.” But, though it was two o’clock in the morning when Will arrived there, the house was brightly lit.
“There you are!” Gob said when Will came inside. “Come and see this!” He took Will’s arm and dragged him up all the stairs to the workshop. Gob was so excited, Will thought something truly spectacular must be waiting on top of the house. Perhaps the machine had spit out another strange child, a wiser boy than Pickie Beecher, who could be a better guide to them. But it was just the junior Mrs. Woodhull on the other side of the iron door, seated at a little desk on a peninsula of floor. A crowd of spirits surrounded her, as they had at Canning Woodhull’s funeral, when she and Will had walked together and talked in the shade of a tree that grew over new graves. She had declared against the machine even as the spirits fawned over her and looked at Will with expressions that were somehow both angry and pleading.
Gob, still dragging Will, rushed to the desk and grabbed up the drawing that the lady was working on.
“Look, Will,” Gob said. “Do you see?” He held the paper scant inches from Will’s face, and Will saw a giant pair of wings made entirely of glass negative plates. “Our dry time is over, my friend. Dear Maci will show us the way.”
“Don’t you believe it, Dr. Fie,” said young Mrs. Woodhull, whose hand was already at work sketching another part of the machine. “Not for an instant!”
“What will happen to him?” Will asked Gob. “Might Mr. Whitman be … injured?” Will hoped that he would be. He hoped there would be just a little bit of pain, enough to crack the poet’s happy exterior. When he was in a very bad mood, Will thought that he would like to see Mr. Whitman cry.
“Of course not!” Gob said, but the angel insisted that he was lying.
One night as Will was leaving the Pearl, she fell on him out of the sky. She knocked him to the ground and wrapped him up in her grotesque wings. “Look now, creature,” she said, “and see the truth.” Will felt pain, bright and white, like a moment when he’d been struck in the face with a gun many years before. It had been an accident. A fellow member of Company D had turned in the darkness with his gun held out, and the barrel had taken Will just above the eye and knocked him senseless. Now, Will was stuck in the moment when he had first realized that he hurt, and the moment went on and on. Through the glare, he saw Mr. Whitman screaming like a woman, high and frightened and hysterical, piteous wailing shrieks, and he understood absolutely that something that truly was abominable would happen to that man.
This vision seemed to go on forever, but in fact it was just moments before the spirits came and chased away the angel. She ran from them, flying up to perch on a lamppost. They jumped at her like dogs, but she batted them away with her fists.
“Do you see now?” she asked him.
“Never trust an angel,” Gob said, when Will told him of the visit. “They are the most notorious liars.”
They finished in the winter of 1872. Gob declared that their creation was precisely the machine he had been dreaming since his brother died. It had been quite reshaped by Maci Woodhull’s prolific hand. Since the summertime Will had taken to sleeping in the house at Fifth Avenue, and had given up entirely on doctoring, or even photography, except to take pictures of the machine as they put it into its final shape. Will’s days and nights ran together, until he was no longer sure what day it was. All he knew was that it was winter, and that history was continuing to unfold outside of the house. Indeed, there was some sort of excitement happening with Gob’s mother, but Will was not sure what exactly. Whatever it was, Will felt safe from it in the house, where he was often alone with Pickie Beecher during the day.
Then Will would have a rapture of building, and he would imagine that the machine was his alone—his life’s idea and his life’s work. He’d imagine that skibbling Pickie Beecher was his own unnatural child, and sometimes he’d imagine that Tennie had died tragically and the machine was meant to bring back her alone. “She died tragically,” he said one night to Pickie Beecher. “Eaten by bees. And why do we specify tragically, anyhow? Is there any other sort of death?”
“It’s all very bad,” the boy agreed. In the last months he was Will’s constant companion. He was another good listener, if a poor conversationalist, and of course he was the very best helper one could ask for. Will had only to want a tool before Pickie Beecher ran up with it clutched in his tiny hands.
“I will make an adjustment,” Will said, “to ensure that the machine will also bring back dead love. So Canning Woodhull, when he walks again among the living, will have his wife again to hold him. Unless, of course, she never loved him at all, in which case I am powerless to help him.” He worked and he slept, and sometimes he ate, when Pickie Beecher brought him food.
As the weeks went on he came to be unsure, sometimes, if he was waking or sleeping, because he built in dreams as constantly as he built while he was awake. His sleep became fractured, so he only took it in spells of an hour or two, and when he’d wake, he’d see Pickie Beecher sitting atop some fantastic new piece of matériel that he’d stolen from only he knew where; he’d see Gob’s wife sketching at her desk; he’d see Gob wrestling a strut into some novel position. Will would rise and join the work. In the last weeks, he woke to see Pickie sitting on a little red dude of a fire engine, a locomotive smokestack, and a lens nine feet in diameter. When Will and Gob hauled it into place the nine-thousand-candlepower arc lamp—meant to shine down through the picture negatives—was amplified to ninety thousand candlepower. It would be, Will was sure, the brightest light ever.
“Do you really believe that it will do anything but gurgle and smoke?” the new Mrs. Woodhull would ask Will every so often.
He always had the same answer for her. “Of course I do.” Will thought her doubt would have become fatigued, by now, but she still called the machine ridiculous, and mocked it ruthlessly, even as she helped to build it. She claimed to have nothing at all to do with the hand that was guiding them with its drawings, and sniffed derisively when Will pointed out that it was attached to her wrist.
The spirits got happier as the machine got bigger. When it had grown to maturity—so it filled up the house and there was nowhere left for Will to sleep but cradled among its omnipresent arms and legs, its hundred thousand pieces, its crystal and iron gate and gatehouse—then they never walked but they danced, and they never opened their mouths but they seemed to be singing.
“Am I awake?” he’d ask Pickie Beecher, thinking back to the night when Jolly had asked him a similar question. Pickie Beecher usually pinched him in answer, but often it wasn’t enough to convince. What if Will dreamed the whole thing through to its glorious conclusion? What if the machine did its work, and death was abolished, and Will got to see all the dead rise and stretch their stiff limbs, and smile? What if he got to embrace Sam and Jolly, only to wake a moment later in a world where his work was still undone, where people still died? He doubted the angel, when she arrived every now and then to call him creature and say he must destroy the abomination, before it was too late. He doubted that Mr. Whitman would come to them, meek as a lamb to be their battery.
But Walt Whitman did come. “Are you here?” Will asked him, poking the man in his heroic belly. It seemed unreal, all of it: all the house-sized gears turning; the wings beating; Mr. Whitman reclining in the gatehouse; a light flaring in Gob’s hands, and an answering light from the arc lamp, amplified and expounded through the lens to shine down so strong through the glass Will thought it must burn the images into the poet’s skin. Even that light seemed unreal, and though Will had grown accustomed to spirits, the ones that flooded the house, lining up for their turn to pass through the gates of the machine, all seemed strange and fake. “Now I will wake,” he said to Pickie Beecher, “and we’ll have to do it all again!”
“It’s my brother!” Pickie Beecher shouted above the noise. “He is here!” Mr. Whitman began to scream, and the spirits, with the little one-winged angel at their head, surged forward towards the gate. Then it finally did seem real, and only then did Will wish it were not. He would have done it all again, learned of Sam’s death, gone off to the war, suffered his apprenticeship under Frenchy. He would have gladly suffered all the debilitating fits of medical school. He would have loved Tennie again, even with the knowledge that he would lose her. He would have lost himself in all the seasons of dreamtime building. He would have done these things twice or three times. He would have done them over and over forever, if only he could wake away from the horrible screaming, so much worse than what the angel had him taste, if only he could have that, just that, be not real.