by Chris Adrian
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 coppe
r 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.”