Gob's Grief

by Chris Adrian

  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: wh
en 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 w
as 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.