Gob's Grief

by Chris Adrian

  “Christmastime,” said Gob.

  “Yes,” said the Urfeist. “But also it is time for you to begin your work, your real work. I think you are ready, now. I think that the abolition of death is at hand.”

  Gob hung his head down and began to cry, not certain why he should have become tearful. He had, after all, been itching to return to his workshop for months. He looked at the inert, useless telegraph and said, “I will fail.”

  He got a beating then, a Christmas beating—not very savage at all, just enough to discourage pessimism. When he was done hitting him the Urfeist put away his paddle and took Gob into his arms. “Do not despair, my boy,” he said, his mouth against Gob’s cheek. It occurred to Gob, as it often did, that the breath of a vulture or a hyena must be very similar to the nidorous exhalations of the Urfeist. “So you are not brilliant. So you are stupid. Did you think I would not help you with your work? Did you think that together we would not succeed? Isn’t it the fundamental wisdom of your life, that you will require assistance in this endeavor?”

  Gob went out looking for Professor Morse, operating on the very reasonable assumption that laying eyes upon that great man might inspire him to success. Gob would stroll down Broadway, keeping a sharp eye out for a man of some eighty years with a definite look of genius about him. Gob had his engraved likeness from an illustrated weekly, and he would peek at it every now and then as he walked along. He never saw Professor Morse on Broadway, though it was widely known that the man took a daily walk there. So Gob lurked outside Morse’s house on Twenty-second Street near Fifth Avenue, and finally saw him come out one rainy afternoon in March of 1866. He was not remarkable-looking, after all. Gob ran across the street and caught him before he stepped up into a cab. “Professor!” he said. “Professor, a word with you, please?”

  Professor Morse turned to Gob and peered at him through rain-spattered spectacles. “Yes, sir?” he said. He looked closer and said, “Can I help you?”

  Could he? It seemed to Gob that if he could formulate the proper question, then Mr. Morse could indeed help him. But Gob did not know what question to ask. He stood there silently in the rain, blinking at the eminent man. Professor Morse smiled at him and pressed a dime into his hand. “Good day, young fellow!” he said cheerily, and drove off. Gob brought the dime home and affixed it to the telegraph.

  As the dime was the first of many accretions, Gob never figured his quest for Professor Morse to have been fruitless. An urge made him put the coin on the telegraph, but once it was there he had a notion of the telegraph as the heart of his machine, and after that notion dawned, there dawned another, as naturally and simply as one day following another—something poorly remembered from his dreams, a conviction that the machine would have a heart, that it would take its shape around a center. The telegraph would be the heart of the machine. The Urfeist manifested a childish excitement when Gob told him of his revelation. Together they became incorrigible affixers. Glass pipes, miniature armillary spheres, copper and silver wire—the telegraph grew until it was a globe of stuff.

  The Urfeist insisted that Gob would find his inspiration mostly in dreams. Gob got a beating for merely suggesting that they take a trip to the Smithsonian Institution to consult with Professor Henry. Mornings, the Urfeist hovered around Gob’s bed, watching him sleep and waiting for him to wake. It was no way to start a day, waking to the unsavory visage of the Urfeist. “Did you dream?” he would ask. “Did you see?” If Gob shook his head, then the Urfeist would make him sip from a big blue bottle of paregoric, and say, “Continue sleeping. Continue dreaming.” He kept a pencil and notebook by Gob’s bed, so if Gob woke when he wasn’t there Gob could make notes himself on what he saw in his dreams. And he thought that he did see things in his dreams. Every night, he was sure, he saw the whole, fabulous machine. It breathed and worked. But he forgot, when he woke, what it looked like, and how it functioned.

  Buttons, bones, string and wire, marbles and pennies and glass straws—Gob made his machine out of anything he could find in the house, and the Urfeist had basements full of every possible thing. “I am a collector,” he said sometimes, as if this made him distinguished, and it was true that the Urfeist collected treasures, little figures of wrought gold, paintings rolled up and stuck under beds, sculptures locked away like prisoners in the basement. But mostly the Urfeist collected trash. He had a room stuffed with broken furniture, a room where broken glass was scattered a half foot deep over the floor, and set in the ceiling where it glittered like stars. There was a room full of what Gob was sure must be a disassembled steam engine, and a room next to that one full of stacked rails.

  Gob went picking and choosing among the rooms, waiting for things to seem necessary to his work. It would happen—one moment a glass ball was only a glass ball, but the next it would be the eye of his machine, and he would rush it to his workshop and install it. Every so often, the Urfeist would come and inspect his machine and insult it, saying it was loose and ill-planned, the child of an undisciplined and undiscerning mind. He would lift his hand as if to smash it, but then say he couldn’t be bothered even with its destruction. “What is it?” he’d ask. “Is it a glass sheep? Is it a pet to guard you from loneliness?”

  It was true that it looked like a sheep now. It had a barrel-shaped body and something like a head that hung down between its legs, as if it were grazing off the floor. But where a sheep might have a heart, this thing had the stock ticker, grown with accretions to twice its original size. The machine was electrical and spiritual, with an umbilicus that left its belly to split and run to twenty batteries, and feet that stood in silver cups of a mystical fluid which Gob had mixed according to a recipe in his McGuffey’s Necromancer. When he activated it, the ticker vomited up wriggling streams of blank paper: they exited the machine like a growing tail. It was a failure because it did not carry a message from his brother, and this was what he sought to amend. The answer, he was sure, was to keep adding things.

  For all that the Urfeist ridiculed the thing, Gob knew he secretly admired it, because he’d looked through the keyhole into his workroom and seen his teacher gazing at it or running his long nails over all its smooth parts. Visiting with it took up more and more of the Urfeist’s time, and he began to build on it also. The two of them worked on it in turns, Gob too afraid to say how he resented and admired his master’s contributions, the Urfeist too proud to acknowledge how he was now collaborating with his student. But one night, as Gob served up his master’s rat pudding, the Urfeist made an observation. “It lacks the crucial element of desire. How can it bring him back, if it cannot want him?” After that they began to work together, and always on that problem—how to make the unfeeling thing feel?

  The answer, they decided, was to put a feeling thing in it. “We shall have to bind you up,” the Urfeist informed Gob, sounding almost sad. With wire thin as thread he wrapped Gob under the thing, and ran a thicker wire from Gob’s heart to the mouth of the sheep. “Of course there has to be a little pain,” the Urfeist said, pushing the sharp wire through the skin of Gob’s chest. He sank it no more than a half inch, but Gob was sure he felt it pierce his heart. “You are not a kosmos,” the Urfeist told him, “yet perhaps you will do. Perhaps you are sufficient for a short message.” He opened the current in the batteries, mixed up the mystic fluid with a glass wand, blew a harmonica in the four corners of the room. The telegraph did what it always did, danced and hummed and chittered. “You must sink down,” the Urfeist said, pinching the wire delicately between his thumb and finger and twisting it round so it spiraled deeper into his student. “Think of your brother,” the Urfeist said, but Gob didn’t need to be told. It was easy for him to sink down to a place where there was nothing but absence of Tomo, and need of Tomo, and love of Tomo.

  “Yes,” the Urfeist said. “Yes! Sink down! There is a message!” Gob did not hear the noise of the stock indicator, but he felt it as a ticking in his bones. He felt his vitality go out of him like a single breath. If h
e hadn’t been bound up with wire he would have fallen. He hung his head and moaned because he hurt all over. The Urfeist was moaning too, but in pleasure. The spiritual telegraph had relayed a message. “What does it say?” Gob asked weakly, after the Urfeist tore off the message and looked at it.

  “Nothing,” the Urfeist said, but Gob could see even from far away how there was ink on the paper. The Urfeist stuck the message away in his vest and said, “Your machine, it was a failure. You yourself are a failure. Why do I waste the time it takes to teach you? I might as well kick you as try to give you knowledge.” He did kick Gob, and then he walked away, taking out the slip to read it again.

  “What does it say!” Gob shouted, but the Urfeist left him alone without answering. It was a day and a night before Gob wriggled out from the wires, before he went looking, bleeding and furious, for his master. The Urfeist wasn’t in the library or the dining room, or even among the tall plants of the green room. Gob walked faster and faster as he searched, and every time he found another room empty of the Urfeist, he quickened his pace. The Urfeist was not in any of the parlors. He was not in the library. Gob was running when at last he found his master, curled in a ball in a bedroom. “Where is it?” he said, and “Liar!” He wasn’t afraid to yell and demand, or even to strike his fists against the Urfeist’s back. “Give it to me!” he said, but he found that he was able to take the note for himself because his master was cold, still, and dead. A look of angry denial deformed the Urfeist’s ugly face. He had torn off his shirt, and Gob could see the livid handprint, the size and shape of his own hand, over his master’s heart. The message was very simple: You are dead.

  Gob dropped the paper as soon as he’d read it, because he thought it must kill him, too, this powerful message from his brother that he was sure must have been meant for him. You are dead, it said, because he ought to be dead with his brother, and he ought to be dead for betraying his brother. “It did too work,” he said to the gray face of the Urfeist. Sure that he, too, would die any moment, Gob lay down next to his teacher, lifting one of the cold hands to lay it across his own neck.

  THE WONDERFUL INFANT

  Towards the close of the visit, for such it really was, I was shown what I now know to have been a panoramic view of the future. The mountains and valleys changed places with the seas, the entire face of the nation underwent a transformation. Cities sank and people fled before appalling disasters in dismay. Then a wondrous calm settled over everything. Confusion, anarchy and destruction were replaced with a scene of beauty and glory which is beyond the power of language to describe. The earth had been changed into the common abode of people of both spheres. The spirits said that all this would be realized during my life and that in making it possible I would bear a prominent part.

  VICTORIA C. WOODHULL

  From Mr. Tilton’s biography

  1

  BY MAY OF 1862 IT SEEMED TO MACI TRUFANT THAT MADNESS had become the national pastime, and that her parents had only performed a civic duty by losing their minds. Her mother went insane first, slowly and with considerable subtlety in the first months of her decline; she had a growing fascination with beans. Initially, she praised them for being shapely and nutritious—strange comments, but Maci figured her mother had read an article on beans in one of her weeklies. When she insisted the cook serve them up with increasing frequency, Maci assumed her mother was dabbling again in Dr. Graham’s tasteless diet. But, little by little, beans came to dominate her mother’s life. She celebrated them to the neglect of her husband and children. She sought to make herself pure, eating no food but beans, and so she died.

  Maci had flipped desperately through her uncle’s medical books, not trusting him when he said he had no remedy for his sister’s bean-madness. Now, Maci hated beans. For many months, she had flung them from her plate if some grossly insensitive person served them to her. Lately she had eaten them again. They were ashes in her mouth but they were what she and her father could afford. His own madness had driven them into desperate financial straits, and it did not come delicately.

  It fell on him like a swooping bird. Maci imagined it, bird-shaped and screeching, falling down on his head to muss his hair into an ageless madman style. Not long after his wife’s funeral, he was in his study writing letters thanking people for their kind sympathies when his hand began suddenly to write of its own accord a letter to him from his dead wife: My darling, I never was not, nor will I ever cease to be. We travel from ever to ever and time is only a span between eternities. You will be called to do a great work. I am watching you with love.

  One day he was a bereaved Universalist minister admired for his antislavery stance and his charitable work in prisons (people called him “the Prisoner’s Friend”); the next he was a fledgling Spiritualist prophet. Within months, he was declaring himself the Apostle of Precision, delegate on earth of an Association of Beneficents who spoke to him from a place that was not quite Heaven. Ben Franklin, Thomas Jefferson, and John Murray all spoke through his hand. With growing discomfort, and finally dread, Maci was introduced to the mortal Apostles of Devotion, Harmony, Freedom, Education, Treasures, and Accumulation. Some were men and some were women. They all had a look in their eyes which Maci could only call deranged.

  She watched them milling in the parlor of their house on Mount Vernon Street and felt a seething anger. Several times, Maci threw as many out as she could before her father discovered her and called her rude. She pleaded with him to stop all this, but he would take her in his arms and explain that the very Chairman of the General Assembly of Beneficents had called on him to carry out the greatest work yet attempted by man. He would build a living machine, an engine whose product would be not energy but peace. He would call it the Wonderful Infant.

  Her brother, Rob, was gone. He’d fled at the beginning of their father’s decline, after many arguments, and a final one when he’d struck their father on the head and knocked him out. “I hoped he’d be sensible when he came to,” he told his sister. “But he started jabbering about electritizers and elementizers as soon as he could speak.” Rob left to live with their mother’s family, and then he went to war. Maci resisted their entreaties to join them.

  “Your situation is so peculiar,” said her Aunt Amy, a plain woman fond of elaborate dresses.

  “I must stay with my father,” said Maci. She’d been so certain of that, speaking to Aunt Amy’s pale fat face. It had made her serene, somehow, to embrace this obligation. Her father was her first friend, the man who had shaped her mind and her heart. But now she doubted, and her loyalty to him was a source of agitation rather than comfort. He had spent them broke on matériel for his engine and on contributions to the Panfederacy of Apostles. They lost their house in Boston and Maci found herself losing things which were precious to her, not just dresses and jewelry, but dreams. Her father had always talked of launching her off to college when she turned sixteen. But she was called back from Miss Polk’s School for Young Ladies to help tend to her mother, her sixteenth birthday came and went, and when Maci left Boston, it wasn’t for college. They moved to the wilderness of Rhode Island, where electrical and spiritual forces were favorable to the Infant’s construction. Maci hadn’t thought there was any wilderness left in Rhode Island. She had thought it must surely be filled with people who had fled, for one reason or another, from Boston. She imagined them, dissenters all, packed cheek by jowl from Providence to the coast. But this place was empty, just their lonely cottage and the shed on the cliff, the nearest neighbor nearly a mile away, across a saltwater pond at the bottom of a hill behind the house. Various Apostles came and visited them, sometimes bringing parts for the machine.

  The porch in front of the house leaned precipitously, and the steps were crooked. When Maci walked from one side to the other, she worried it might pitch her headlong over the cliff and onto the rocks below. Standing carefully on the porch, she listened to the noise of the sea and the noise of her father hammering in the shed, which came together to
give her a creeping sense of doom. When she covered her ears with her hands, she could hear the beating of her anxious heart, which she sometimes imagined to be the quick footsteps of voracious madness, hurrying to claim her. Her mother and father had gone insane. Rob had rushed to join a regiment of Zouaves with an alacrity and fearlessness that spoke of a weakness of sanity if not an absolute absence thereof. Maci expected to be the next to lose her mind. At least it would happen here, where no one would notice and she would stand out less in company than in Boston, where her family’s shame would be completed with the departure of her faculties. Would she eat beans exclusively? By July, they’d eaten themselves out of beans, but Maci had a basket of cranberries in the kitchen, and she had noticed a previously unappreciated beauty in the small forms, nestled together in a mound, very pretty in the morning sun that poured through the drafty window. Would these cranberries dominate her fancy? Or would she build something impossible, perhaps a flying machine to sail over the cliff and into Block Island Sound? A gin that separates emotions in a confused mood? A cloud buster?

  Maci walked gingerly down the steps, then went around the house and down the hill to the rotting dock that jutted out into the pond. She got in a little boat and took up the oars. “Poppy!” she called out towards the shed. “I’m going out!” There came a pause in the hammering, but no answer. She began to row out towards the neighbor’s house, where she would beg flour. She had plans for her lovely cranberries.