Gob's Grief (44 page)

She wouldn’t do it because she thought it was necessary for her husband to put his friend in the thing, and then see how nothing came of it. And she thought it was necessary because she hoped sometimes that something might come of it after all, the sky might crack open, and all the departed might rain down like feathers. She had been trying so hard to believe, for his sake, and it was to this that she really attributed her weariness, not the days of being a fugitive, or the nights of work on this strange, monstrous Infant that made her father’s Infant seem like a puppy. Maybe unbelief was her madness, since she didn’t believe when her hand spoke to her with love, when it spoke like Rob, when it drew like Rob, when it knew what Rob knew, and told true stories that were other people’s lives—when it did all these things and she still could not call it brother. When she saw little Pickie rolling a giant lens down a hall in Gob’s house; when she saw the machine grow so huge and complex that it looked to be sufficient engine to drive Manhattan out to sea, so the island could anchor halfway to Europe and become a new Atlantis: still she didn’t believe, and wasn’t it madness to ignore the evidence of your senses, even when they said you must believe the unbelievable?

“Here they come!” Pickie said, bouncing elastically on his feet. He rushed over to where Maci was sitting and pulled her up by her hands. He pulled her around in a little dance. Just for a few seconds, Maci shuffled around in a circle, then he let her go and went to the door. She would have fallen if Dr. Fie hadn’t caught her. “Steady,” he said, looking at her but not smiling.

“Is it right, what we’re doing?” she asked him, but even as she asked, she knew it wasn’t the proper question for the situation, and it was only something she asked to distract herself from the more pressing question of whether or not they would succeed, and the still more pressing question of why she could make no room in her heart for the possibility that they might.

“God bless you,” she said to Mr. Whitman, when he came in, and she called these words after him when he fled, hoping that God would bless him, after all, and keep him from such situations as the one he’d just escaped. She had a rush of energy at the thought that now they must begin a work of disassembly, for she knew that if Mr. Whitman wouldn’t play, there’d be no game, tonight or ever.

“He’ll return,” Gob said. Maci thought he meant he’d be back in days or weeks, but he was back in moments. Maci smiled at him again. Gob and her hand had told her how it would be uncomfortable for him, how his body would articulate the formless grief that saturated the world of the living. But it would do him no lasting harm. He was a kosmos, Gob said, who had the qualities of everyone and everything. The grief would pass through him, but not hurt him. “Are you sure?” she’d asked, when her hand drew the spiked hat that was painful just to look at.

“Absolutely,” he said.

“There it is,” Gob had said, speaking to Mr. Whitman before he fled. “The engine. It’s complete, except for you. There’s a place for you in it, Walt. I need you to go in it, and then it will bring them back, all the six hundred thousand, my brother and Will’s brother and Maci’s brother and your Hank, too. All the dead of the war, all the dead of all the wars, all the dead of the past. We’ll lick death tonight, Walt, if you’ll help us. I’m ready. Will’s ready, and Maci is ready. Pickie is ready and the engine is ready. Are you ready?”

Am I ready? Maci asked herself. She tried again to believe, an effort of will that was like trying to get her bones to step out of her body, but when she looked at the thing all she saw was failure, and it seemed to her that it was a great curse and a punishment, not to believe, that after all it was the people who could believe in nothing but death who got nothing but death for their lot. And she worried for the first time that her doubt would poison the working of the thing, as she feared that her doubt in her father’s Infant had poisoned it and killed it even before she beat it to death with a wrench.

“I should go,” she said aloud, but Dr. Fie was already directing her to her work, to the switches that needed to be thrown, the valves that needed to be turned. There were a hundred different tasks split among the four of them, and every one had to be done in an order that was as precise as music. “Bless you,” she said again to Mr. Whitman as she settled the spiked hat on his head.

As the gears started to turn, she thought her doubt would fall away. When she saw how it looked to be doing something, how the steam engines steamed and the lights lighted, she thought that mechanical competence would indicate supernatural competence, and her doubt would shrivel. But the thing was roaring away gloriously and still she thought it was folly, just an enormous monument to Gob’s grief that was beautiful and complex, but no more likely to raise the dead than an ordinary lever. Maci found herself planning a future for herself and her husband. Her neurasthenia would remit, and she would be strong for both of them because he would collapse in a wreck of disappointment. He’d be so weak and sad he’d not be able to speak for months, but she’d take him away to Europe, and fortify his ailing spirit with a tour of great museums. Slowly he’d come back to life, and they would return to America in time for Maci to help Mrs. Woodhull organize her next bid for the Presidency in 1876.

Even when the impossible light came on, so bright it seemed to shine through them all, she didn’t believe. But then she thought, Maybe somewhere tonight in this city a dog will die of loneliness and neglect, and then in the next moment it will rise again. And then she thought, Maybe it will be a child who gets up out of his deathbed to kiss the face of his mother. She heard a keening, which she mistook for the noise of a grieving mama, but it was Mr. Whitman, crying out from within his crystal house. As he screamed more forcefully, her belief grew, until it was three babies, ten men, a hundred women who would rise from death that night. As he writhed and screamed, making the most horrible noise she’d ever heard in her whole life, Maci believed and believed and believed. It was like a muscle in her, swelling as she flexed it over and over. Her weariness evaporated—she thought she saw it pass away, a little wisp of gray smoke that bled out of her eyes with the tears. There was the other thought still in her, dwarfed by the joy of faith, that she had come all this way to wreck this machine, too, that it was her sacred responsibility to smash it. Hadn’t crude fate let her practice one such destruction? But she paid very little attention to this thought.

Instead, she considered how it was wonderful that a machine could manufacture faith and put it in you, how it could abolish doubt, and that this was perhaps more miraculous than the abolition of death. She held on to a pipe that was hot on one side, cold on the other, while the whole house shook and her husband cried out exultantly. With her right hand she raised her left to her cheek and cried out, “Rob!” and there was a picture in her mind as perfect as a photograph, a scene in which he was alive again, marching through the gate in the machine with Private Vanderbilt at his side. “They’re coming!” she shouted, because she believed it.

Gob was standing outside the gatehouse, chanting words Maci could not understand. His hair was standing up ridiculously on end. Maci put her hand to her head and discovered that hers was doing the same. She heard breathing, and singing, a beautiful sound of plaintive voices, and over that Mr. Whitman’s terrific screaming. There was another sound, too, a rude knocking, as if someone was at the door trying to disturb them in this exquisite moment. She had a notion it must be Mr. Comstock, come to arrest her, but actually it was Dr. Fie, who, having tried to open the door to Mr. Whitman’s crystal house and found it locked, was banging his fist on its walls. Every time he struck the noise changed—now it was like a knock on wood, now it was like a brass gong, and now it was the delicate chime of two glasses struck together in a toast to success. Gob walked slowly towards him, and when he was close he shouted a question at him. In answer, Dr. Fie pushed him away, and when Gob came at him again Dr. Fie struck him in the face.

Pickie came clambering down off a scaffold and leaped on Dr. Fie. They struggled a little, and Gob came rushing again at them, shouting words that Maci thought she could see leave his mouth as gusts of wind to knock Dr. Fie back against the glass. He shook his head, holding Pickie at arm’s length. When Gob reached him, Dr. Fie pummeled him with the boy, hitting him as if with a big stick. Maci came to them just in time to see him smash Pickie against the glass wall. It cracked with one blow, shattered with the next. Pickie seemed not any worse for the abuse. He clawed at Dr. Fie’s face, and cursed. Dr. Fie threw him across the room.

“Help me,” Dr. Fie shouted at Maci, over a new noise, a disharmony in the singing. Mr. Whitman was still screaming, louder now that his voice wasn’t contained by the house. “It’s killing him!” he shouted.

Maci shook her head. “Dr. Fie,” she said incredulously, “don’t you understand that there is no more death?”

“Oh, Mrs. Woodhull,” he said. “There is for
him
.” She put her hand on Dr. Fie to stop him when he tried to go in, and he thrust her back as he entered, so that her head knocked into Gob’s head as he was coming up behind her. Gob was saying “No!” again and again, and Maci had the thought that he must have looked just this way, weeping and protesting, at the grave of his brother. There was a surge of breathing and singing. The light flared from the giant lens, and Maci heard a popping in her head, similar to what she’d heard in the caisson, as if there’d been a precipitous shift in the pressure of the air. She felt nauseated, and fell to her knees, thinking she would vomit.

“Will,” Gob said softly—Maci picked his voice out among all the great noise as if it had been spoken in a quiet room. “You’ll ruin it all.” Pickie Beecher ran into the house, only to be ejected. He bounced on the floor like a ball.

Gob went into the crystal house after Dr. Fie, and there they grappled over Mr. Whitman’s body. While Mr. Whitman arched and screamed in his chair, they pounded each other in the head and face. Maci shouted, “Stop! Stop!” but they paid her no heed, or didn’t hear her at all. Dr. Fie brought his two hands together, cranked them back, and struck Gob in the face with such force that blood flew and coated the wall of the house with perfect round drops. Gob staggered, and fell, and Dr. Fie took that opportunity to wrest Mr. Whitman from the chair.

All the noise stopped suddenly, started again and stopped. The floor lurched, and the great lens fell out of its supports. It came crashing down on the gate, splitting it in two. In the quiet before the machine noise started again—a coughing and choking sound in it now—she realized that Mr. Whitman was no longer screaming. He came out of the house, leaning against Dr. Fie, who draped him against Maci and said, “Take him out of here.” When Maci tried to push Mr. Whitman back into the house, Dr. Fie shoved her roughly aside, and hurried away with the poet even as Maci called for him to return.

Her balance was off, or the floor was heaving like liquid, or both—she could barely guide herself through the door of the house, to where Gob was slowly rising to his feet. His nose was crooked and bloody, and blood had stained his teeth and his mouth and his torn lips. “Come away,” Maci said to him. His hands were slick with blood. He pulled them easily out of hers and shook his head.

“To where?” he asked. With great calm and precise deliberation, he set himself down in Mr. Whitman’s chair and set the hat on his head. “You may go out, but there is no other place for me.” Something crashed very nearby, and a moaning sound started up amid all the choking and coughing and intermittent singing. The floor threw her into him, and he pushed her away, an expression of terror and hatred now on his face from which Maci nearly fled. He shouted at her then, without any words she could make out, or perhaps he was shouting because he was feeling the same agony as Mr. Whitman had. She thought his yelling blew her back and forced her away from him, but really it was Dr. Fie, his big hands tangled in her dress and her hair, who dragged her back through the open crystal door, through the crumbling spaces that used to be parlors, over the nubs of walls. As she receded from him, she saw Gob begin to writhe and kick in the chair. She saw little Pickie, trapped under a giant gear, wriggling his limbs like a bug and shouting for his brother. Dr. Fie would not stop to assist him.

Dr. Fie dragged her outside, held her tight by both shoulders and shouted in her face, “Stay here, I will bring him out!” But before he could pass through the door again they were sent flying down the marble steps by an explosion. Maci lay on Fifty-third Street with her leg twisted beneath her, obviously broken, but somehow not very painful. Dr. Fie and Mr. Whitman both lay near her, neither of them moving. There came another explosion, and another, and fire came bursting out of a whole row of windows. A piece of stone came flying down—she watched its whole journey from the house to her head. As she slept she dreamed of a night when her husband had put his finger on the same place the stone hit her and named it for her. “Glabella,” he’d said, and she’d thought how it would be a beautiful name for a daughter.

When she woke, Dr. Fie was sitting on the steps, weeping into his hands. Mr. Whitman had opened his eyes, and was moving his lips, but not making any sound. Maci raised herself on her arms and looked up toward the house, where a figure stood just outside the flaming door, looking indecisive and confused. “Down here!” she called to it, thinking it was Gob. “Come down!” The figure turned at the sound of her voice, and did start down the steps, too slow for a person fleeing a fire.

“Stop your crying, he’s alive!” Maci said to Dr. Fie, but he only wept harder, and as the figure came nearer, she saw that it was not her husband, or even little Pickie. It was a boy older than him, one who wore Gob’s face. Entirely naked, he stepped close and peered at her, trying, she could tell, to recognize her, and then he flinched away, as if he had never seen a lady scream or weep before. “Let me go!” he pleaded. But she held him fast.