by Chris Adrian
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, pal
e 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, b
ut 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!”
