Gob's Grief

by Chris Adrian

  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 delica
te 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 moa
ned. “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.

  “Of … what it is.”

  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.