by Chris Adrian
“Vicky started even earlier. I was in Pennsylvania. Mama and Papa had sent me off to live with relatives, because we were so poor. Aunt Sally’s fruit spoke to me from the cupboard. ‘We are for you!’ they said. ‘Come in and have us!’ There were some wormy apples on the table, so I asked, ‘Aunt, where have you hid all the good fruit?’ She called me her darling and said the apples were the best she had, but I walked to the cupboard and I showed her. It was my sister Thankful, still a little girl as she was when she died, who spoke in the voice of a peach and called to me from the cupboard. After that, I heard her and saw her always. Wasn’t it that way with you? Some spirit you loved sought you out, and then you saw others?”
“No,” said Will. “I saw them all at once.”
“Well,” she said. “Why should it be the same for everybody? Oh, there she is now! There’s my Thankful!”
“I don’t see her,” Will said.
“You wouldn’t. She is only for me and Vicky to see.”
“Does she speak?”
“Faintly. She is saying, ‘I heard you talking of me.’”
Tennie began to have a one-sided conversation, talking of a place called Homer and agreeing that the orchard there had the sweetest apples ever. As she spoke, she seemed to forget Will, though she had him clasped firmly in her arms. Her conversation became a sleepy mumble, until finally she fell quiet. Will felt her twitch a few times. He lay awake as spirits came to visit, a procession of them like shepherds and animals passing by the sacred crib, gazing down on him and his lady acquaintance and smiling. He thought the angel would come again to scold him. She never did arrive, but long after all the other spirits had gone, the boy with the trumpet remained, hunched up in a corner of the ceiling.
“Avaunt,” Will said, to no effect.
The boy shook his head and blinked slowly, and Will fell asleep with him still up there, staring down.
3
“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.