by Chris Adrian
“Fascinating!” Maci said, but she wanted to leave, and she wished the tour would end. She had gathered all the information she needed in the first moments, and she felt confident that she could convey to the readers of the Weekly a sense of the hot, close horror of the place. Mr. Farrington was called away. He left them standing under a blinding calcium light.
“Do you like it down here?” Dr. Woodhull asked her.
“It’s charming,” she said. Then she cried out because she got a pain in her ears as if someone had poked them each with an awl, and the pain distracted her from the great blast of air that almost knocked her into the mud. The lights were all extinguished. The workmen were groaning and cursing. She heard Mr. Farrington shouting for them to mind their language for the sake of the lady journalist.
“It’s just a blowout,” said Dr. Woodhull, explaining how the edge of the caisson, because it hadn’t sunk far enough into the ground, was prone to lift a little as the tide shifted, sending a burst of air out into the river. “The lights will be out momentarily,” he said. “But all’s well.”
“No,” she said. “No, I think that all’s less than well.” They were knee deep in water so cold it hurt her bones, and she was sure the water was rising. “I think we are going to die.”
“Nonsense,” he said. “You will never die, Miss Trufant.” Her eyes were opened as wide as they’d ever been in her whole life. They were opened so wide they were burning and tearing, so she thought she should have seen him coming closer to her. But she didn’t know he was there until he’d already pressed his lips against hers. What was he doing? Was she one of those Portuguese ladies who when left alone with a man are mortally offended if he does not at least try to be grossly familiar with their person? The thought flashed in her mind that she should scream and push him away. Bright as lightning, it flashed in her eyes, but it passed in an instant, and then the darkness, which somehow was sweet now, returned. Maci grabbed at his lips with her own. Grab grab grab, she thought. Gob Gob Gob. She knocked a tooth against his.
We are motivated strictly by love or by fear, and it is better to go the way that love pushes you, than the other way. I think I climbed off the earth on that thought, the way the pious dying climb off on a prayer. You, with your rich vocabulary of motivation, will find this a silly, simple idea. But isn’t it rightly said of the dead, that they are wise? I’ll give you this advice, and plead with you to accept it: let him enter you and obsess you, as I have entered and obsessed you.
“Spiritualists are all so serious,” Maci said to Gob, as they took another turn on top of the Distributing Reservoir. “There are trance-speakers, trance-healers, trance-levitators. But why are there no trance-comedians?”
“There’s no humor in death,” Gob said.
“Isn’t there? I giggled at my mother’s funeral. To any observer it seemed a sob, but I know what it was. Hideous, perverse giggling, because my mother died of bean-love. I thought of them spilling from her mouth even as she lay in her coffin, and I felt I’d have to laugh, or else die myself right there.”
“A terrible story, Miss Maci.”
“Yes. But don’t you believe, Dr. Gob, that a person ought to be able to laugh at death? I think that’s how we bring him down.”
“Did your mother come out of her grave, when you laughed at her?”
“Of course she didn’t. You deliberately misunderstand me.”
“I understand you very well,” he said, slipping his arm into hers. An urge to pull away flailed and died in her, then she leaned against him.
“What a ridiculous assertion,” she said, though just that morning she’d stood in her room with all the curtains flung open, and the lights turned up to a blaze, looking in the mirror and examining herself in the flood of light. She turned her head and brought her eye almost close enough to touch the glass, peering into her own pupil because she was sure that if only her vision could penetrate through the tiny black hole, she’d see him there, sitting comfortably inside her head. “Get out,” she’d whispered. They’d shared one deep breath—in and out—down in the caisson, and Maci was sure he’d put something in her, a part of himself that inspired in her a relentless desire to be near him. She liked to think that another woman had come out of the air-lock that day, one who hurried out before she could get kissed, one who went on without need of this strange person, who went on with a life not afflicted anymore with ghosts and rebel hands and machines. Every day that passed after the kiss, Maci made sure to set aside a little time to be happy for that girl.
“There is a secret world, Miss Maci,” Gob Woodhull said, taking her to lean over the edge of the water. “Hidden in plain view of this one, it is invisible to people who truly believe that hurling giggles at death will ameliorate mortality. It is full of grieving people and grieving spirits. See? Here are two citizens of that world.” He nodded his head at their reflections.
Maci disengaged herself from his arm and stepped back from the water. “Morbid fancy,” she said.
“Look here, I have something for you.” He took off his hat and reached into it, bringing up an ordinary flower, a humble daisy, mashed and sweaty from being under his hat. He held it out for her. She took it with her right hand.
“Thank you,” she said, and put it to her nose. It smelled of his hair.
Do you remember playing Troy? I was Helen bound up with our mother’s scarves, high on their bed, which we’d pushed into the middle of their room. You had to be Achilles, splendid in your fury, dragging the cat around the bed by a string, and calling it dead Hector. Such a cruel game; only children could play it. Around and around you went, deaf to the protests of the cat. I had to shout for you to hear me. I wanted to be released. “Let me go,” I pleaded. “I’m uncomfortable.” “Wretched creature,” you shouted, never slowing, “there is no comfort in this world!” You were five years old. I was ten.
Now, any spirit will grant that the comforts of mortality are small and fleeting, but that is no reason to spurn them. Sister, I urge you to take a portion of happiness for yourself.
Maci confided to the senior Dr. Woodhull that she believed herself to be the victim of some infective illness. “There was an invading process,” she told him, describing her symptoms, “and now there is a dissolving process.” Dissolving was not actually the appropriate term. Whatever had been put in her with the kiss had exploded, and shattered her into a confused, fractious being. Wasn’t that the function of time, to keep you from being more than a single person at once? But Maci was at present a crowd of contrary opinion and in-decisiveness.
“I have just the thing for you,” said Canning Woodhull. He left the kitchen to go to his room, and came back in a moment bearing a lovely yellow bottle marked with painted flowers and eyes. “Believe me,” he said, “this will help you.” It only made her drunk.
If Maci had learned anything, living in Mrs. Woodhull’s house, she had certainly learned that marriage was not an exalted state, or even a necessary one. A husband could be merely a courteous appendage, like Colonel Blood, or, like Canning Woodhull, a broken thing deserving of heaped charity. So why did Maci wake one morning convinced that marriage was the only remedy for love, and why did she wake one morning believing herself in love with Gob Woodhull? She did not believe these things—it was the others who did. The rebellious other Maci Trufants who jostled inside of her, who staged a coup and overthrew her reason.
“Now you will be my mama, too,” little Pickie told her. She tried to imagine mothering this strange child, who curdled all her maternal instincts. He was listening at the door when Maci went to Mrs. Woodhull, to ask for the hand of her son in marriage. Maci wanted so badly to agree with her employer, when she argued against the idea of Gob and Maci’s binding themselves in conventional union. “Did you know that the Colonel and I are divorced?” she asked Maci. “Just after we were married, we obtained the divorce. As a protest, my star, against Sunday-school mentality. And didn’t you just review a novel called Married in Haste?”
I’ll be with you, her hand promised, I’ll give you away. Maci went down the aisle alone, a bride without need of her father. She had not invited him or her aunt to the wedding, though she felt compelled to write a brief message to Aunt Amy, which she actually mailed to the lady: Aunt, it is indeed a terrible thing not to marry. Maci had wished, anyhow, for a wedding so private that there’d be no one there but her and Gob and some unifying principle. They would join their hands and cleave to each other. They did join hands at the behest of Mr. Beecher’s subordinate, but when they did it brought her no mystical feelings of union. As she held his hands she wondered how she could possibly be marrying someone who dismissed the Vindication as “chatty.”
It was the least private function she’d ever attended, crowded with guests, all Mrs. Woodhull’s, people who came out to show their support of her. Her friends had flocked back to her since January—it turned out that no one could stay away from her for long, no matter how the scarecrows of so-called morality shook their pumpkin heads. But they had not really come for the wedding. They hoped for a speech that would preach brilliant, exciting reform at the same time it wished her son a happy future with his bride. There wasn’t a speech, but Mrs. Woodhull threw a brilliant party, paid for with her son’s money. Mrs. Woodhull was getting poor.
“You must adore the first night,” said Canning Woodhull, one of many people who accosted Maci with advice. “It will be the very best of your life. Everything that follows will be misery, my dear.”
Colonel Blood said, “Do not try to pin his heart to the wall of your bedchamber. It will only bleed, you know.”
Tennie scolded her. “You broke your promise, didn’t you?” They’d had an anti-marriage ceremony, almost two years before. Maci had stood with Tennie in the Turkish corner, dressed in white, and shared a golden cup of wine. “Marriage is the grave of love,” they had intoned together. “I will never enter the grave of love.”
Maci wanted to say, “You’re right!” And she wanted to take Tennie’s hand and flee with her to Paris or Berlin, places Maci remembered from her childhood tour, where they could lead unmarried lives of complicated pleasure. But some other Maci was in charge of her limbs, in that moment, and she could not flee. Still another Maci was trying to push her heart out of her chest, towards Gob where he stood talking with Dr. Fie underneath a mural depicting the loves of Venus: Adonis, Ares, and Anchises. From across the room her new husband looked very small. She wanted to gather him up in her hand.
Maci refused to live in his house, with his engine. They took rooms down at the Fifth Avenue Hotel, where their windows looked out on the trees of Madison Square Park. They had a parlor, with a marble fireplace big enough for little Pickie to stand up in, and red curtains that Maci could close when she did not wish to see the telegraph wires, when she thought they were making a noise like many conversations. Little Pickie remained at the house, under the care of Dr. Fie, but he was a frequent visitor at the hotel. Maci and Gob each had a study, hers filled with a big desk upon which she could lay out proofs, and his stuffed with moldering books. They were on the fourth floor, reached by means of a mechanical elevator, a thing Gob loved. He’d pay the attendant to take him riding in it for hours.
“Would you like to dance?” Gob asked her on their wedding night, when they’d both made themselves ready for bed. Maci had a satchel full of creams and perfumes and washes that Tennie had given her, each with five minutes of advice on its function. She’d not used them, and thought that must be why she felt awkward and homely as she sat on the bed. So she was glad to dance. They danced without music, and they talked, until Gob said he was very tired. He lay down in their bed and fell immediately asleep. Maci lay down beside him, watching him breathe and snore. He groaned, and ran in his sleep like a dog. She considered putting her arm around him, but in the end she did not. She was surprised at how quickly she fell asleep, when she tried.
“Maci,” he said later, shaking her awake. “Did I ever tell you about the time I saw Mr. Lincoln’s funeral procession? He came to New York, you know, on his way back to Illinois. He left this city escorted by sixty thousand citizens and soldiers. They passed under my window, and woke me up with all their noise. I put my head out and watched them go by for hours and hours. The very last mourner was a snuffling dog, a great big gray one. He looked like a ghost.” They were both silent a moment, and then they sat up, each on their own side of the bed, and had a passionate talk, shifting from topic to topic—from Mr. Lincoln to Mrs. Lincoln to madness to insane asylums to Margaret Fuller to shipwrecks and on.
Every night they’d do the same thing. They would dance, sleep, talk. It went on for days, then weeks. Maci wished for absolute darkness because she was certain that would inspire her husband to kiss her—there could be no other reason for his shyness but the light, for hadn’t he been rude and bold down in the caisson? But light from the streetlamps in Madison Square came in their windows, even when the curtains were closed, so Maci could see Gob’s face as he talked, and she knew he could see hers.
She never asked Tennie for advice, but she always credited Tennie with the course of action she took, because it was by pretending to be Tennie that she solved the problem. One night, Maci put her hand over her husband’s mouth and said, “It’s enough.” She kissed him, and grabbed at him everywhere. When he ran from her, she pursued him, grabbing and kissing though he cried out for her to please stop. He ran to a corner and bent down in it, hands over his head, making a crooning noise. She stood over him, staring down. He peeped up at her through his arms. They stood a little while like that, until she put her hand out to him. She had to wait a long time before he took it. She remembered the things that Mrs. Woodhull had shouted from her roof for all of Thirty-eighth Street to hear. Maci shouted these, too, because she thought the noises would encourage her husband, and for a little while she was brutal with him, slapping at his head and his chest, shaking him, and staring fiercely into his lustrous, dilated eyes. “Praise!” she cried, imitating even Mr. Tilton in her desperate excitement. Gob was silent until the end, when he shouted so loud in her mouth she thought her lungs would burst.
She woke up just at dawn with a twitch in her hand. She thought it wanted to congratulate her on the consummation of her marriage, that her left hand might walk over her chest to shake her right. But it wanted a pen, same as always. There weren’t any words, just drawings, not of people or places, but of the thing. For an hour before dawn she watched as her hand drew a profusion of gears and cogs and struts and pipes. She kept on drawing into the morning while Gob slept behind her, waiting and wanting for him to interrupt her, but she didn’t stop until one of the hotel staff came to their door with a telegram announcing that Canning Woodhull was dead.
The Magus, who is beloved of every spirit, cannot see us or hear us. We cannot reach him, and his brother cannot reach him. Heaven loves cruel ironies, but we hate them here. We cannot offer him our wisdom, so we offer it to you.
Maci knew it must be inappropriate, to think of children and their making, while at a funeral. But at the white celebration of death held in honor of Canning Woodhull, she did just that. Dear Aunt Amy, she’d written in another unsent letter, Even as he goes into me, I go into him, and fill him with doubt to topple his delusion. I think he will give up building on his machine in favor of building on a family. Isn’t it how married people manage their mortality, with children?
The children would come, one, two, three, four, another with every year, so she would barely have time to know what it was not to be pregnant. Yet it would be a delight, even the agony, because with every birth a little more of the machine would go away. Five, six, seven—the thing would be reduced to a shell. Eight, nine, ten—it would be scraps. Eleven, twelve—they would sell the house on Fifth Avenue to a man who made his fortune in pessaries.
“A sad day, Mrs. Woodhull,” Dr. Fie said at the funeral. They were wandering together among the monuments, like all the other white mourners who went in grou
ps of two or three over the lush grass.
“My name is still Trufant, Dr. Fie.”
“But you will always be Mrs. Woodhull to me.” He nodded at Gob, where he was still weeping by the grave with Mr. Whitman.
“They have a special friendship, those two,” he said.
“Do you envy them?”
“No,” he said. “But I think I envy Canning Woodhull. Think of it, Mrs. Woodhull, a place where you can dip whiskey out of rivers, and there are ladies whose breath is a gas of peppermint and morphine.”
“One hears that Heaven is white and cold and pleasureless.”
“Well, I don’t think he went to Heaven,” he said. “What a strange occupation it must have been, to be an ex-husband. There goes Miss Claflin.” He put his arms behind his back like a schoolboy and sang:
“She’s sweeter than the flowers in May,
She’s lovelier far than any;
I care not what the world may say,
I pin my faith on Tennie!”
“Dr. Fie,” said Maci, “I think you are deranged with grief for your former colleague.”
“He was a wise man. I never appreciated that until I’d lost the opportunity to learn from him. And you can see that your husband feels the same way.” They walked along in silence for a while. When they came upon a sad-looking tree that drooped like a willow and hid three graves in its shade, they walked under it to inspect the headstones of a Mrs. Sancer and her children. “Recent departures,” said Dr. Fie. “We’ll have you back soon enough.”
Maci thought of the lady’s children. Were they buried with her in the same coffin, snuggling through eternity? She had forgotten, it seemed, that children could die. Now that she remembered again, it was a terrible surprise.
