by Chris Adrian
“That Grant!” said another guest. “An efficacious general, but he must be cruel. He’s who makes me shudder.”
“That Grant!” said the Urfeist, standing up and proposing a toast to him. “There is a man who is not afraid of death.” His guests all drank to that, but the Urfeist did not. “And what sort of man,” he asked them, “is that?”
“A hero,” came the reply, and “A leader,” and “A ruiner,” this last from a man who made his great living selling shoddy wool to the Union army.
“No!” said the Urfeist, with such vehemence that some of his guests flinched. He clutched his glass so hard he broke it, and Madame Restell gave a squeal. “What sort of man?” the Urfeist cried. “What sort!”
“A fool,” said Gob, wondering if the Urfeist would beat him in front of his guests, but his teacher laughed, and looked surprised at how he’d broken his glass and cut his hand.
His guests laughed, too, rather nervously, and the Urfeist said, “Forgive me, friends. The war excites me, you see. It excites me.”
“Chicago is the mud hole of the prairie. Do not visit there. Cleveland is better. There, elegant villas are surrounded by orchards and gardens. Cincinnati is a porkopolis: a fine place to live, if you are a pig. New York is really the only place to reside, except in summer, when one really must retire to the countryside. Make dumplings from 2 cups of flour, 1 teaspoon of salt, 1 tablespoon of lard, a cup of milk, 4 teaspoons of baking powder, and a pinch of child’s blood. These are light, fluffy dumplings—to eat them is to eat air. But stray from the recipe and you’ll eat lead. The holy names of God are: Dah, Gian, Soter, Jehovah, Emmanuel, Tetragrammaton, Adonay, Sabtay, Seraphin. A woman has a little piece of chicken between her legs by which you may rule her.”
On the Saturday before Easter, Gob walked down Broadway, on his way to Barnum’s museum, so completely absorbed in his thoughts that he did not notice the hush on the streets, or how some of the hanging flags had been draped with black, or how the rosettes of red, white, and blue had been replaced with black. It was late in the afternoon. He’d stayed up late, reading Della Porta’s Celestial Physiognomy. It was almost dawn before he went to bed, where he had uneasy dreams, not of the machine, but of his Aunt Tennie. She was weeping and he could not console her.
He was thinking, as he walked down Broadway, about Mr. Watt’s double-acting engine, about how it was such an improvement over previous models, since it introduced the steam from both sides of the piston. This led Gob to consider how every-thing he himself had built so far seemed to act only from one side. That, he was sure, was inappropriate and a waste, because he knew, suddenly, that his machine must run on such a double-acting principle. But he didn’t know what such a principle would be, unless it was that Tomo was dead, and yet he must not be.
Barnum’s was closed. Black crepe was strung around the door, and all the posters were edged in black. A large plaster urn was set on a granite pedestal by the door, and bore an inscription: Dulce est pro patria mori.
“Poor Mr. Booth,” said Madame Restell, many days later, meaning Edwin. “I saw him in Macbeth. I think his anguish will inform that role, if he ever plays it again.”
“I think I would hide forever, if my brother did such a thing,” said another guest. “I could never forgive such atrocity.” The Urfeist had a funereal feast, on the eve of the arrival of the late President’s body in New York. Gob, trotted out again to amuse the Urfeist’s friends, wanted to say that a brother ought to forgive a brother any misdeed, any at all. He wondered if Tomo might still be angry at him.
Gob felt sick. He’d eaten too much, and the guests were making him dizzy with their demands upon his memory. The Urfeist had made him memorize the minutes of Dr. Abbott, the physician attending at Mr. Lincoln’s death.
“Eleven thirty-two p.m.,” said Madame Restell, continuing the game.
“Pulse forty-eight,” said Gob. “Respirations twenty-seven.”
“One forty-five a.m.,” said another guest.
“Pulse eighty-six. Patient is very quiet. Respirations are irregular. Mrs. Lincoln is present.”
“Six o’clock!” said an excitable lady. “Is he dead yet?”
“Pulse falling,” said Gob. “Respirations twenty-eight.”
“Seven o’clock,” said the same lady.
“Symptoms of immediate dissolution,” said Gob.
“Will he never die?” the lady asked.
“Patience, my dear,” said the Urfeist. “Seven twenty-two.”
Gob said, “Death.”
“Hate death. It is the only sensible thing to do. What pale thin shields the living hold up against him! Nevermore with anguish laden! Sweet rest! Let us cross over the river and rest beneath the shade of the trees! Let us recline in the dank grave. Let us become wispy hurting creatures. Let us desire flesh, sunlight, a cheek laid against our own, let us even desire the sting of a bee. Spirits will do anything for a taste of flesh—this is the wisdom of the necromancer, who does not love death, but hates it, hates how it lurks under every thing, every root and leaf, every creature’s skin. Every dumb child’s happy face is a mask by which death hides his own smiling face from the world. Do you know how death mocks us? A world is not fair that says, ‘Partake of these days while I ruin them,’ for what joy can you have when every last thing exists only so it may one day be taken away from you? Do we not want eternally? Do we not love eternally? Do we not hate eternally? Why then is death a miser? Why does he steal our allotment of forevers? Why does he lick me every day with his wet hungry gaze and say, ‘Though you still live and breathe, do you see how you are already dead?’ Do you see how you could spend a whole life grieving for your own self? Don’t you hate him, my ugly one? If only you weren’t so ugly and stupid, if only you could make a determinate motion to wound smug death. If only you were not destined for laziness and failure, for dreams instead of works.”
“They say she is a female Wendell Phillips,” said the Urfeist, speaking of Mrs. Burleigh of Brooklyn. He’d brought Gob to see her lecture on the condition of children in society. All part of his continuing edification, the Urfeist assured Gob, who felt tricked. He’d been under the impression that he was being taken to see handsome, inspiring Anna Dickinson, not some lesser-light nobody from across the river.
Mrs. Burleigh was lecturing at Association Hall, under the aegis of the Sorosis Club, which sounded to Gob like an association for the diseased. Organ music played as the audience got settled, and Gob watched Mrs. Burleigh, red-faced, vital-looking, and pregnant, sitting quietly at the foot of the stage. Her tapping foot disturbed her skirts in rhythm to the music, until a thin, birdlike woman arose from the audience to introduce her as “the very best friend of our nation’s children.” This brought a rush of applause from the audience, and a cry of “Huzzah for Ms. Phillips!” from the back.
“My name is Burleigh, thank you sir!” said Mrs. Burleigh. She bowed her head a few moments, as if in prayer, and then spoke: “The general principle acted on in the world is that children have no rights which we are bound to respect!”
She elaborated on this bold statement while Gob shifted in his seat, too restless to care if the Urfeist punished him later for squirming. “What has she got to do with the machine?” he asked.
“Hush,” said the Urfeist, and gave him a sharp poke in the side. “You will see.”
“Quiet and care are essential to a child’s welfare,” said Mrs. Burleigh. “Cigar-smoking fathers and gin-drinking nurses are to be avoided. Heavily corseted mothers set a bad example. The groping uncle is anathema in any family not set on the ruination of its children.”
The Urfeist frowned and reached into his pocket. He removed a silver box about the size of his palm. When he opened it, Gob saw that it was full of a fine yellow powder, and thought it must be sulfur. He moved his face over to take smell it, but the Urfeist pushed his head away roughly. “It wouldn’t do,” the Urfeist said, “to have a sniff.” He set some on his palm and raised it to his lips, t
hen blew it towards Mrs. Burleigh.
“What is it?” Gob asked.
“Watch,” said his teacher. Their neighbor in the hall, a lady in a pink hat and a wine-red velvet dress, hissed at them. The Urfeist brought a handkerchief to his face and breathed through it, and indicated that Gob should do the same. All around, people began to sniff and wipe their eyes as Mrs. Burleigh detailed the plight of American children, depicting them as hapless, abused innocents. People began to weep openly. The lady in the wine-red dress lost her scowl, took a deep breath, and uttered a series of quick little sobs.
“Yes, weep!” said Mrs. Burleigh. “Weep, as the chimney boy cries out ‘Weep, weep’ for his living and his plight! We are every one of us their tormentors!” She was weeping, too, throwing tears from her face with rough swipes of her hands.
“What did you do?” asked Gob.
“It’s your hideous face,” the Urfeist said, smiling. “Which brings strangers to tears.” The situation was deteriorating. Mrs. Burleigh’s chest was heaving, even as she warned against the dangers of too much kissing of children. She decried it as an invasion of bodily privacy.
“They are not your kissing-dolls, Israel. Oh no, they are not!”
Gob was careless with his handkerchief. He breathed the tainted air, and felt overcome by sadness. He began to cry, not in tribute to the woes of childhood, but because it seemed to him in that moment that every last thing in the world was unbearably sad.
“What did you do?” he asked again on the way home. “What is that yellow powder?”
“A simple concoction,” said the Urfeist. “I will demonstrate its making.”
“It makes people sad?”
“No. It makes nothing. It releases sadness. Every last creature is sad. Do you know why?”
“They miss their dead.”
“No!” he said. He looked around him for the paddle, and when he could not find it, gave Gob’s head a slap with his naked hand. “No, it is not that they miss their dead. Not that they mourn their beloveds. They mourn themselves. They are sad because they know that they are going to die.”
In May of 1865, Gob got an idea from a dream of dead soldiers. A great company of them lay in an open grave and chattered their teeth. How cold they are! Gob said to himself, and he wondered how to warm them. He could not figure that out, but it did occur to him that the noise of their teeth was very much like the noise of a telegraph. He knew the code, and listening very carefully he made out a message—Bring us back. Gob woke from the dream, rushed into his workroom, and started work on a spiritual telegraph.
Like most first efforts, it was a failure. But he worked on it for months. The Urfeist chose to escape the city that summer. “It will be a good year for cholera,” he said. He packed up his kilt and his hat and his shirt and admonished Gob to read a book a day while he was gone. He had made selections and stacked them in the library.
“Are you going to Homer?” Gob asked him, just before he walked out the door.
“I have never heard of such a place,” the Urfeist said. He bent down and kissed Gob lightly on his cheek, saying, “Mind Mrs. Lohmann.” Madame Restell had declared that she would be Gob’s companion. “We shall have a summer of delight!” she proclaimed.
While his teacher was gone, Gob neglected to read his book a day, neglected plays and Barnum’s museum, neglected eating sometimes, enthralled by the workings of the half-dozen stockbroker’s tickers he disassembled. He easily mastered the workings of the telegraphs—Professors Henry and Morse were his heroes, in those months. By July he had assembled his own ticker, made of parts looted from the ordinary tickers, and mystical parts he fabricated himself—bits of wire blessed in rituals, tiny golden gears, magnets split with a chisel under the full moon, batteries made from chemicals and herbs. He puzzled for another month over what sort of wire might take a message to the dead. And once he had a proper metal, where would he connect it? Would he have to sneak back to Homer and run the wire down into Tomo’s grave? Could he connect it to the many miles of wire that crossed and recrossed Manhattan and hope that the spirits of the dead might hear and speak through that medium? In the end, he decided not to use a wire at all. He devised a means of telegraphing by induction.
Just looking at his spiritual telegraph, Gob should have known that it wouldn’t work. It wasn’t his machine. Though he did not know what his machine looked like, he knew for a fact that he would recognize it, when he saw it, and he recognized nothing in the dog-sized apparatus on his floor. It stood on four gutta-percha feet, and its silver and glass parts glinted under the light of the gas chandelier. Gob threw all the necessary switches. He had developed a special sense for electricity and other vital forces—he knew the thing was humming with energy. He sat up with it all night long, waiting for it to spit out a message from Tomo—I am alive, I am coming back to you.
But it was silent.
When the Urfeist returned in the autumn, Gob was prepared for a beating because he had neglected his studies and squandered his time on a useless machine. So he was surprised when the Urfeist praised his failed effort. “Now we may begin,” the Urfeist said, meaning that they could begin to build in earnest. They collaborated on machines. The ectoplasmic arc lamp, the Sweden-borgian turbine—these were failures, too.
But these failures cheered the Urfeist. “Of course it will be difficult,” he told Gob, with something almost like kindness in his voice. “Perhaps,” he said, “you are becoming competent in your science but neglecting your art.” He locked the door of Gob’s workshop, hid the key, and directed Gob to the library, to the many shelves devoted to the arcane arts. Gob studied dutifully, wishing he could return to his workshop and be a mechanic. But after a few weeks he found a book that intrigued him endlessly, a little primer of necromancy, bound in black leather and written in German. It was full of simple spells that purported to let the living communicate with the dead. Write a message on a piece of slate and bury it in a graveyard; burn your message with peat and the fat of a pregnant hare; the dead will hear you. Gob performed these spells, sent Tomo such messages as I will bring you back, and they comforted him, though he did not entirely believe them efficacious.
Gob began to accompany the Urfeist when he called at the houses of sick people. The Urfeist meant to make Gob a physician, to balance Gob’s study in necromancy with the study of life. But it seemed to Gob that medicine was an art as thoroughly dedicated to death as was necromancy. What was in a medical book besides loving, intimate descriptions of injury, disease, and, ultimately, death? There was a motto in the little McGuffey’s Necromancer that had become dear to him: My mistress wears a thousand faces. It was the refrain of the sorcerer, but it seemed to Gob also appropriate to the medical profession. “Yes,” said the Urfeist. “It is true. Those root and herb sharks. Those cancer-quacks. Oh, even the distinguished ones, too. Dr. Mott, Dr. Gross, all my esteemed colleagues, they are ministers of hope and despair—and they do not hate death sufficiently.”
Every year, in the weeks leading up to Christmas, the Urfeist made a grand orphanage tour. There were a great many to visit. He went, not to make withdrawals of children, but to deposit gifts. He put a sprig of holly in his hat, the servants loaded down a carriage with presents, and the Urfeist proceeded to the Catholic Orphan Asylum, just up the street from them on Fifth Avenue, or the Juvenile Asylum, or Leake and Watt’s Orphan House. Gob went with him to the Sheltering Arms, a house up in Manhattanville that accepted the castoffs of other orphanages. The children—some terminally ill, others half-orphaned not by death but by liquor—gathered under a candle-laden Christmas tree and received the largesse of the Urfeist. Gob wondered if the rocking horses wouldn’t come alive at night and stomp on some child’s tender cranium, if the porcelain faces of the dolls would not at midnight become the glaring white visages of ghouls, if the toy guns would not shoot real bullets and make murderers of innocents. But the gifts were wholesome. The puzzles were just puzzles, the calico cats and gingham dogs lacked teeth
and claws. The toys were remarkable only because they were so fine. There were wooden soldiers who marched and presented arms, glass butterflies that, when wound, flapped their wings and waved their antennae, a tiny bear who, when squeezed, growled.
“And what is your name, my dear?” asked the Urfeist. A child had climbed into his lap where he sat by the tree.
“Maude,” said the girl.
“What have we for sweet little Maude?” the Urfeist asked of Gob, and Gob rummaged in the bag until he found a doll for her.
“Thank you,” she said dutifully, when she had got it. She leaned forward and gave the Urfeist a kiss on his dry cheek, then clambered off his lap and ran away to a corner where she clutched her new doll and rocked slowly back and forth on her knees.
After visiting the Sheltering Arms, they went home. The Urfeist was a great devotee of the holiday. He insisted on having multiple trees throughout the house, each one lit up with candles and strung with gold beads and crystal. The house was swathed so heavily with evergreen cuttings that a person could not pass from one floor to another without getting touched with sap. The Urfeist scattered walnuts in the corners, set puddings and punches on every table, and insisted, in the few days immediately following Christmas, on lengthy sessions of caroling. Candles in hand, he and Gob would proceed through the house side by side, singing “Good King Wenceslaus” or “Adeste Fidelis.” Up and down all the stairs, through the parlors and the kitchen, through the dining room and the ballroom, through every room but the green room they walked and sang. On Christmas Eve of 1865, they had a session of caroling, and when they had passed into the upper reaches of the house, and were proceeding through Gob’s bedroom, the Urfeist stopped.
“Time for your Christmas present,” the Urfeist said to Gob. Gob thought that meant he ought to proceed to the stone corner and get down on his belly. That was what he was doing when the Urfeist said, “Not that. Not now. Come here.” He produced the key to Gob’s workshop and opened up the big iron door. Inside the spiritual telegraph sat where Gob had left it in the middle of the room. “This is your present,” the Urfeist said warmly. “A return to machines. Do you know what time it is?”
