Gob's Grief

1

“YOU ARE YOUR BROTHER’S IMAGE,” SAID CAPTAIN BROWER. This wasn’t exactly true. Will and Sam Fie looked alike in the face, but Will was a much bigger boy. He stood six foot three in his socks, weighed two hundred and fifty pounds, and he wasn’t the least bit fat. Sam was three years older, but had had to leave off beating on his little brother by the time Will was twelve. Will would catch the punches easily, and Sam’s fist was like a crab apple in his big hand. “If you’re half as brave as him, we’re lucky to have you.”

“I’m not,” said Will. Captain Brower thought he was joking. Will was strong, and stubborn, and often obedient, but if bravery had been one of his qualities, he would not have been frightened to stay at home. He would not have been afraid to open the door to his bedroom when his mother brought the news of his brother’s death upstairs. The door had shaken as if assaulted by a strong wind, and Will had not wanted to open it because he thought, just for a moment, that a door could bar such news from your life.

Captain Brower was in Syracuse to help recruit replacements for those who had fallen, like Sam, at Bull Run. He had written a letter, saying that he would like to venerate in person the parents who had raised such a boy as Sam Fie. But before Brower could visit, Will had proceeded to Syracuse with a forged letter, in which his mother expressed her love for Sam’s captain. Here was her other son, whom she could not dissuade from going to the war. She vouched for Will’s age, and asked Captain Brower to take good care of him.

In fact, she had spit on the Captain’s name and his offer to visit, calling him a murderer, and saying, “How dare he show his face here?” Over meals that for Will were at first a hard chore and then a deep misery, she’d accuse Captain Brower of having sent Sam to his death. Then she would pound her fist against her heart, and put down her head to cry while Will and his father stared at their cooling meat. They would remain that way for so long that Will imagined they might sit like that forever, a miserable tableau vivant. Some enterprising fellow might come along and cut away a wall of their house, so curious people could pay a dime to file by and peep in on them. There would be a sign: Toll of War in Onondaga County, New York — September 1862.

Will had departed from his parents’ house late at night. His mother lay asleep on the green sofa upon which she had made it her custom to grieve until exhausted. He looked at her breathing noisily through her open mouth, and debated whether he ought to kiss her goodbye. As he leaned down he thought better of it — she might wake, after all, and inaugurate some sort of hideous, tear-soaked scene. He turned away from her and imagined, as he walked through the door, that Sam’s ghost went past him, taking his place in the house as surely as he was taking Sam’s place in the war.

Captain Brower shook his hand, and then embraced him. Will was mustered into the 122nd New York Volunteers, called the Third Onondaga by its local-minded members. He sent his bounty money home to his parents, along with a short note. “Now I am one of Father Abraham’s three hundred thousand. Goodbye.”

Six dead men without shoes — their feet are swollen and their swollen chests have burst the buttons on their shirts. Behind them is a broken wagon, hooked to a dead horse. In the distance stands a church where pacifists once gathered to worship.

* * *

In Maryland, on the way to Harpers Ferry, where the Third had been called to help put an end to General Lee’s frolicking, Will saw his first Reb, a dead one who lay where he’d been killed outside a church at Burkittsville. Wounded were moaning inside the church. “What a hymn!” said Jolly Forbes, a long-faced boy who was one of the few who would associate with Will.

Company D had welcomed Will initially. A cry of “Sam’s brother!” had followed him wherever he went, and total strangers embraced him and wet his thick neck with tears. “It is good to see you, my friend,” was a common refrain. “I am not your friend,” was Will’s unvarying reply. So great was their love and respect for Sam’s memory — there were at least a dozen men who claimed he’d saved their lives — the men of Company D might have let this rude behavior slide, and loved Will for all that he was sullen and he wanted no friends. But he was actively boorish, and proved himself in no time to be a great ruiner of fun. He would knock a man down for cursing in front of him, and if he came upon a bottle of whiskey he would break it. While they were encamped outside of Washington, some man’s cousin had attempted to sneak in a barrel of whiskey. She had dressed it up in a little white frock, put a white bonnet on it, and heaped it with soft blankets. Soldiers in the know cooed over it, reached into the perambulator, and pretended to stroke its chin. Jolly Forbes came by and looked in. “Madame,” he said, “that is the handsomest baby I have ever seen.” Will was behind Jolly, and when he saw what it was, he reached in, grabbed it out, and dashed that baby to the ground.

Where Sam had saved men by the dozen, Will put them by the dozen into the guardhouse with his tattling. Begging Sam’s forgiveness, they cursed loudly against the Devil-sent prig. Will was thrown out of the Tiger Mess, where Sam had been a member. The other members wrote out a dishonorable discharge on a gigantic piece of hardtack. Expelled for crimes against good-naturedness, it said. In the end, he had only Jolly and assorted other rejects to mess with.

At the church, two men were busy around the dead boy. A photographer was yelling at his assistant in French. Will knew enough French to understand that the fat little photographer — he was only about five feet tall, and shaped just like an egg — was very displeased. He wanted the assistant to turn the dead boy’s head into the sun, but the boy was ripe and the assistant was sure that to touch him would be bad for his own health. The photographer stomped over, reached up to grab his assistant by the neck, and threw him down into the dead boy, whose arm flopped over in a friendly embrace. The assistant scampered away, howling as if the corpse had bitten him. The round photographer bent down and began very carefully to compose the Reb’s limbs. He stretched out the boy’s arm above his shoulder in the grass, and opened his hand. The photographer looked up and scowled at Will. “Your goggling eyes!” he said. “What are you looking at?” Just then, Captain Brower came up alongside in the passing column.

“Walk on, Private,” he said to Will. “There’s no time for dillydallying.” Will looked a little longer at the dead boy. He was wondering how Sam had fallen, if he had looked the same as this swollen, flyblown boy. He turned and gave the Captain a stiff salute, then continued walking.

Not fifteen minutes from the church, they passed the battlefield of South Mountain. Dead Rebels were stacked shoulder high along the road. Will wondered if this construction was the work of the round Frenchman. He looked down at the ground as he passed the corpses, afraid to meet their staring eyes. He thought of Sam’s body again. There would have been a funeral, back in Onondaga County, which Will had missed. Later, Will would have a dream in which he climbed a wall of bodies as high as the moon. Every body was Sam’s, and every mouth as he passed it whispered, “Aim low, Brother!”

Jolly dropped back in line to walk with him again. He held up his canteen to the orderly dead before he took a drink of water. “To your health, boys,” Jolly said.

They are swollen in this picture, too. It almost makes them look healthy, such big barrel chests, such thick legs — their clothes can barely contain them. They lie along a fence in various positions. This one has got his hands thrown over his shoulders. That one has got his hand on his belly. Where are their shoes?

The Third Onondaga was ordered away from Harpers Ferry just as they reached it, drawn down off the mountain by General McClellan’s sucking, gluttonous need for reinforcements. But they arrived too late to participate at Antietam. Will spent the night of September 17 helping carry in wounded. If they were not too fragile, he could carry them one under each arm. The darkness was a mercy — it was easier to venture among the dead when you could not see them. At dawn, he was squatting by a small fire, drinking coffee with Jolly. The sun came up and seemed to shine specifically on a house near a line of battered woods. The walls were laced with cannonball holes, but a merry white column of smoke was still rising from the broken chimney.

“Sometimes,” said Jolly, rolling his tin cup between his hands, “I worry that there is no purpose to anything. It would be the very worst news, I think.”

“God has abandoned that field, at least,” Will said, hooking his thumb over his shoulder to point at the heaped dead of the Irish Brigade. It was his shame that he lacked faith. But it made a sort of wicked sense to him that the universe should be an orphan, its own only parent, raised on a diet of self-taught, ignorant cruelty. He worried that there was nothing beyond the tangible world, that there was nothing beyond death but oblivion. On the way to Harpers Ferry, he had imagined his own death, trying to decide if he wanted to linger or go in a flash. These thoughts were his dispiriting occupation since he had become a soldier. He feared God, even though he was secretly certain there was no such fellow, and worried that some punishment greater than a joyless life might be in store for him.

“I think I shall be melancholy for a while,” said Jolly, putting his elbow on his knee, and his chin in his hand. He looked very much like Will’s brooding mother, in that posture. Will was just about to leave when a spindly corporal came to fetch him and bring him to Captain Brower’s tent. Will found the little French photographer there with the Captain. They had filled up the tent with cigar smoke.

“Here’s the boy I had in mind for you!” said Captain Brower. He introduced Will to the photographer, who was called Carnot, but Will privately dubbed him Frenchy.

“I know him,” said M. Carnot. “I know his goggling eyes.” He barked a few questions at Will in French. The Captain said Will knew French — was this true? Could he read? Was he a disciplined worker? Were his hands steady? Was he a Catholic boy?

Will answered slowly, once in French, and then again in English. He knew his French from a distant neighbor lady back in Onondaga County, to whom his mother had sent him for lessons because she was sure it would civilize him, though his father said it would sissify him. Of course he could read; he liked to think he was as disciplined as anybody; his hands were steady and he was not clumsy. “I am not a Catholic,” he added belatedly.

“Excellent,” said M. Carnot. “I am through with superstitious idolaters. You’ll do.”

Captain Brower clapped Will on the back.

“Pardon me, sir,” said Will. “Has some business been transacted?”

Some had. Will had just changed hands. M. Frenchy needed a new assistant, his last one having been bayoneted on the previous day by a wounded Reb when he approached, hesitantly, to rearrange the seemingly dead boy’s limbs into a more dramatic pose. Will would make an ideal assistant, the Captain was sure, because of his French, and because he was industrious and smart. Will had the same feeling as when he’d been kicked out of the Tiger Mess. He got no certificate this time, but he had the distinct impression he was being thrown out of Company D.

This wasn’t precisely the case. Will would still eat and sleep and fight with his company, but he was also to serve as assistant and bodyguard to the extremely well-connected M. Frenchy, who had letters from on high, through Sedgwick and McClellan all the way up to Stanton, giving him permission to put himself in the way, taking pictures of the field. Frenchy called himself an artist and a scientist; his aim, he said, was to quantify and qualify the brutality of war.

Packed bodies in a sunken road. Try as he might, Will could not resolve them into separate boys. They lay in a dead tangle, arms and legs thrown over each other. It struck him that they would embrace each other forever. Will put this picture high on the north wall of the house.

Will carried photographic equipment and helped arrange the dead, always looking away from their faces as he moved them. Some were stiff. Frenchy had screamed at him when he balked at forcing a fallen cavalryman’s arm into a more pleasing position. Will broke the poor man’s shoulder, crossing his arm over his chest, and he wondered that the whole Rebel army did not come pouring down on him, for so abusing their dead. When he was not posing the bodies, he was helping to bury them. Will put the cavalryman by himself in a deep grave lined with hay. Frenchy cursed the burying, because his precious dead were vanishing into the ground.

The Third joined the lazy pursuit that toddled after the fleeing Rebels. As they traveled, Frenchy taught Will the photographic process, screeching at him when he wasted a plate. He spent hours in Frenchy’s cramped wagon mixing collodion from guncotton and sulfuric ether and alcohol, then coating the mixture onto glass plates. Frenchy scolded like a harpy, and whenever Will did something that displeased him especially, he would emit a furious, resonant honk, like the noise of a calliope. But he also spoke generous praise — his assistant was learning quickly. Pressed for time, he brought a plate back to Will in the wagon, and let him develop it while he took another wet plate and went to make another picture. Will removed the plate from its holder. He held it over a pan and poured developer over the glass. The developer reeked like a cocktail of vinegar and blood, and he almost dropped the negative when a violent sneeze shook him. Leaning down, and squinting in the dim yellow light of the lantern, he could see the image, rising out of the glass as if up through water.

A boy with his legs all twisted up impossibly: someone has stolen his hips and replaced them with a little stretch of earth. His hand is cupped behind his ear, as if he is straining to hear some news. Will put this one on the east wall, where it would catch the light of the rising sun.

At Fredericksburg, Frenchy was made busy by the carnage below Marye’s Heights. It was December, and bitter cold. Frenchy was lost in a wilderness of borrowed coat — his own was still wet from a fall off a pontoon bridge into the Rappahannock. He swam like an otter, and had looked like one, with his wet brown hair and shiny black eyes.

With his head in his camera, Frenchy was blind to danger. It was Will’s job to keep an eye out for sneaking Rebels. A truce had been called, to gather the dead and wounded, but Will did not trust them to keep it. A profusion of boys was strewn on the ground, none of them closer than a hundred yards to the stone wall against which Burnside had thrown them.

“Did you ever think you’d be a photographer?” Frenchy asked from under the camera hood, saying the word with great reverence.

“No,” said Will. When he was a boy, he had wanted to become a sailor, because he and Sam had been great admirers of Typee, and had imagined a scummy pond behind their house to be the wide green bay of Nukuheva. Later, Will thought he would be a doctor, for no good reason except that to doctor was not to farm like his father. Now, he thought he might have been growing up all this time merely to be a brick in a wall of corpses.

Frenchy pulled his head from the camera and made a confession to Will, to whom he was beginning to show something like affection. It was his hope, he said, to take a picture of a soldier at the precise moment of his death, because he believed the departing soul, invisible to a human eye, could be seen by the camera. Soon after his confession, Frenchy found a squirmer on the cold field, but by the time he’d moved the camera and made it ready, the boy was dead.

Will was much in demand that whole day through. In the late afternoon, when the light had grown too bad for taking pictures, he took up a pick to open the frozen ground for graves, and worked at it till his arms and shoulders burned. He wanted to weep from exhaustion, but there were always more dead to bury, some of them naked because ill-clad Rebs had crept forth from the lines to steal their clothes in the night. When he stopped working, he could barely raise his arms to feed himself. He found Frenchy in a hospital tent, with his camera set up by the bedside of a blond-headed boy who looked for sure to be a goner. Will’s hands were a mess of blisters. Frenchy gave him a plate to develop, but he dropped it, which earned him a cursing so thorough Will had to resist an urge to knock the little man down. Frenchy nearly got ejected from the tent, for all that he brought out his omnipresent letters and waved them like a little set of battle colors. He took up his vigil again, and sent his assistant away.

Will went back to Company D. They’d been held in reserve for most of the previous day, having seen just a smidgen of action when they were called up in support of a battery below Fredericksburg. Despite the shells bursting over their heads, their only casualty was a boy who had been overcome with excitement and accidentally shot himself in the knee. Jolly was having his dinner with a few other members of the Leper Mess. A tall thin fellow named Lewy Greeley, who was unpopular on account of his incessant proselytizing, was lamenting his fate. “This is the worst regiment ever,” Lewy said, stabbing beans with a spoon. “We see no good action and are overrun with godlessness. I think I will go off and join the 110th.” He meant the 110th Illinois, a regiment composed entirely of Methodist ministers. He nattered on about them incessantly, about their somber uniforms and pious behavior: they sang booming hymns as they loaded, primed, and fired. God was with them in precisely the way he was not with this here assembly of lawyers and farmers.

“I’ll cut you a new mouth to whine with, if you don’t shut up,” said Jolly, who was not known for making idle threats. Will sat back on his heels, picked out hot beans with his fingers, and raised them slowly to his mouth. “Did you see the sky last night, Tiny?” Jolly asked him.

“I did,” Will said. There had been a fantastic display, the night after the battle. The northern lights had come south to blaze in the sky above the Union right. Will had lain on his back to watch, holding to his eye a cracked lens pilfered from the wagon, thinking it would be fine to take a picture of such a thing as that festive sky.

“Do you suppose it was a sign? Do you suppose it was God waving his hanky for the Rebs? Perhaps it is our purpose to lose.”

“We were good Christians today, then,” said Will.

“No,” said Lewy Greeley. “Not ever.”

A catalogue of expressions — fear, sadness, rage, surprise, tenderness, even what appears to be a broad smile, this last on a head connected only by strings to the neck it once rode upon. A catalogue of parts — arms and legs, trunks and bellies, ears and noses, a flat section of skull. The hair is still attached, but the rest of the body is nowhere to be seen. It might be a muskrat, crouched in the grass. The whole west wall is a catalogue of parts and faces.

In May of ‘63, Will drifted across the Rappahannock with a few other members of Company D. Lewy Greeley was there, and so was Jolly. It was just before dawn. They were going over to clear out some intractable sharpshooters who were making it impossible to lay down pontoons for a bridge. Lewy was twitching with excitement. Months of idleness in winter camp had made him a nervous creature. A few times, at night on picket duty, he had fired blindly at the enemy lines. That morning, he could barely contain himself. Inhospitable Rebs were firing at them already, though their visit was supposed to be a surprise. Lewy kept trying to stand up in the boat. A wag in a neighboring boat had stood up and shaken his ass at the Rebs, then crouched down again without taking a hit. “Let go, you big ape!” Lewy said to Will, tearing his sleeve free of Will’s fingers.

“Stay down, Lewy,” said Jolly. “It’s positively unhealthy up there.”

Lewy paid him no mind. He stood up in the boat and said, “Look at me! I am a marine!” A bullet took him in the head. He fell down and was still, and made no noise, but his blood rushed out from him, and pooled around their knees.

“Ah, Lewy,” said Jolly. “You were too much of a bother for this world.”

The Rebs offered up a few more volleys, but left the bank with hardly any fight at all. Will sat by a fire, ostensibly guarding the engineers as they worked, but really he was looking at Lewy’s body, wrapped up in a coat upon the riverbank. He wished he had a picture of him, because he had discovered he could better empathize with a picture of a dead boy than with the dead boy himself. Looking at the pictures he could wonder, What did the boy see as he died, where were his thoughts? If he had a picture of Lewy’s body he might have wondered if Lewy, in the half-second during which he took his bullet, thought of his Methodist regiment, and hoped to join them in Heaven though he could not join them on earth. If he could have chosen a word and spoken it as he died, what would it have been? Did a color fill his mind as he expired? With a picture, Will might have tried to imagine how it felt to be wounded like Lewy, he might have held a hand up to touch his own pulse beating in his temple. As it was, he was filled with a stony, gray feeling, and found he was already forgetting what Lewy looked like.

Lewy Greeley, carefully arranged. He looks noble in a way he never did in life. He lies with his arms folded over his chest, his little face serene and pretty in a patch of morning sunlight. He might be dreaming. Will put him on the north wall, with all the other boys from Company D.

“I’ve failed!” Frenchy said, sitting by his wagon a few days after Lewy’s death, after Company D and the rest of the Army of the Potomac had scurried back over the Rappahannock in the wake of the great disaster at Chancellorsville. Frenchy had been cross because the wounded, dying, and dead were left on the other side of the river where he could not photograph them. He had retreated to a hospital tent and taken up a post next to a boy who was clinging to life despite the amputation of both his legs, and repeated assaults by the bloody flux. In his delirium, the boy thought Frenchy was his mother. Previously, Frenchy had wandered away for food or drink, or fallen asleep, at the critical moment, but this boy wailed piteously if he left his side, so he was there for the death. “Miserable, hideous failure!” Frenchy said.

It was a very pleasant night, with the moon shining out full. He’d come stomping and cursing through the moonlight to where Will was sitting by the wagon, thinking back to the other side of the river. There’d been plenty of fighting, even at night when Will was free to join it. The beautiful moonlight had settled over everything, though it seemed to Will that it should recoil from boys whose heads decided to go every which way at once, from open bellies and naked bones.

Frenchy cast the plates on the ground at Will’s feet, breaking a plate in half. Will took the pieces up and held them to the moon: there was the boy from the hospital tent, his terrible wounds preserved forever. Will found himself wondering if it was not the opposite of mercy to have preserved them so. The boy in these pictures would always be in pain. His face was a blur — he seemed to have a multiplicity of mouths, all of them calling for his mother. But in the last picture, the broken one, he was still. “It was just as he went,” said Frenchy. “I know that it was, but there is no exhalation, there is nothing but air about him.”

Will left Frenchy to his misery, and walked off with the broken pieces of the last plate in his two hands. He wandered aimlessly through the camp and out of it, thinking that he held in his hands proof of the nonexistence of souls. He thought of Sam, how he had been friendly when they were small, aside from the occasional beating, and how he had been distant when they were older, how they had fallen out with each other over something unspoken and unknown, and how there was no hope of reconciliation between the living and the dead. He sat down on the ground and hung his head. There was a burning behind his eyes, and his belly contracted violently, as if it were trying to retch. He felt his mouth turning down, very slowly, at the corners. He remembered how ugly his mother always was in her weeping, and he tried hard not to cry. Nonetheless, he wept, and as only a boy of his size and strength could, great sobs, his chest heaving with the strength of three lesser chests. It made him afraid to think that everything he was could vanish into an abyss when he took, as he felt he must, his mortal wound. And it made him unbearably sad to think how everything that Sam was had simply ended.

Will had wandered into a graveyard full of Union dead. He’d buried some of them himself the previous winter. After he’d quieted down from his sobbing, he sat there a while, and thought he must have fallen asleep, because he was sure he was dreaming when gaily dressed women drifted into the graveyard. There were seven of them. Four carried lanterns, which they set down in a great square pattern. They put their heads together and whispered, and seemed to be waiting for something. Soon, a little man came tiptoeing into the graveyard. He bowed to them and took out a fiddle from a case, then started to play a jig. The ladies began a sprightly dance upon the graves of the Union dead.

They did not see Will in his dark uniform, did not see how, with their dancing, they turned his sadness to rage. The piece of plate, when it came flying out of the darkness, must have seemed like a judgment from whatever god guards the dignity of the dead. It struck a woman in the hip — in her petticoats or her flesh, Will could not be sure. She shrieked and the ladies dispersed, leaving their lanterns behind.

A boy with a hole where his chest ought to be. He is arranged on his side. His big serious eyes look directly at the camera. His left hand is stretched out, his hand is open as if in supplication, as if to say, Give it back. He is the fourth image from the right, in the second row from the bottom, on the south wall.

“My mama says I should remember that I am fighting to preserve the best government on earth,” Jolly said. It was dinnertime on the evening of the second day at Gettysburg. The Third Onondaga had taken up position too late, again, to have seen action. Other regiments made fun of them, saying their ugly faces scared away the elephant. Will thought it must be his mother’s doing, this safety. Her towering grief would not allow him to be hurt — it was of such a nature that even fate must be afraid of it. “But my father, he says we must help the slaves even if the Union goes all to smash.” Jolly held up two letters, one from his mother and one from his father, in either hand. “What do you think?” he asked Will.

“I don’t know,” Will replied. He took the letters from Jolly’s hand and put them behind his back, passing them from hand to hand a few times before he told Jolly to pick one. Jolly chose the left hand, and Will handed him back the letter. Jolly opened it and looked at it, rubbing his eyes wearily.

“Well?” said Will.

“Well, I am fighting for the slaves,” said Jolly. They sat alone for a while, before they started making their dinner, a coffee beef stew. Jolly had taken off his shirt and rolled up the sleeves of his long johns, because of the heat. They were the only two members of the Leper Mess left, the others having died or deserted or been absorbed into more respectable associations. They spent a little while crushing hardtack for their stew. “God save me from this cracker,” Jolly said, struggling to break it. Will crushed his easily into a fine powder, and made dumplings with water from his canteen. These he set gingerly into the stew, amid pieces of beef and vegetables. Jolly leaned over the pot to pour in a cup of coffee, and then they took turns sprinkling in crushed cracker to thicken the stew. “Oh, it will be delicious!” said Jolly, but when it came time to eat he said he was not hungry, and gave his portion to Will.

After their meal, they lay down in their dog tent, not sleeping though both were exhausted from their recent march — they’d gone twenty miles a day for three days. “I think sometimes it might not be real,” said Jolly. Will’s guts were making a racket, complaining about the stew. “When I was a boy my mother told me the whole world was just the dream of a sleeping bear, and that we had to be careful not to be too horrible in our behavior towards one another, because we might shock the bear into wakefulness, and he would go about his day, and we would be no more. That was blasphemy, I know. But couldn’t a war be God’s conscience fretting with itself? Maybe he has put himself down for a nap, but his digestion is poor, and it has troubled his dream. All our history might be no longer than such a nap, don’t you think? His troubled conscience has dreamed a war. I worry, anyhow, that we will wake him. Do you think we will wake him?”

Will had no answer. In the silence, Jolly took his hand and put it over his chest. Jolly’s heart was fluttering. “Is it beating?” Jolly asked him. “Am I alive?”

“Yes,” said Will, and took away his hand.

“Sometimes I wonder.”

The images look like portraits of ghosts. They are pale where living people are dark, dark where the living are pale. When the sun passes through the glass negatives, it is like a visitation from beyond, the way they shimmer and glow. At night, when he goes into the unfinished house with a lantern, the backing darkness makes ambrotypes of the images, and the dead take on the tones and shades of the living. It makes sense to him that it should be so, that the dead should be more solid, should look more real at night, and that the day should make ghosts of them.

Frenchy had new hope, which stemmed from a new plan and a new technique. He had determined that he’d failed to capture the boy’s departing soul because his medium was insensitive. He needed a better collodion — hadn’t Fox-Talbot’s calotype process been similarly insensitive, hadn’t it also been defective? He was gone for two weeks in June, consulting with a learned gentleman in New York. When he returned, he had a new collodion formula. It was the same as the old one, except he added three drops of a liquid from a mysterious-looking blue bottle. The liquid looked and smelled like whiskey, and Will was tempted to smash the bottle.

Will and Jolly got separated in the last day’s fighting at Gettysburg, of which the Third had more than its fair share. Will got called away by Frenchy, whose mule had died in the quartermaster-seeking overshots of the Rebel artillery. Will himself pulled the wagon while Frenchy screeched at him to hurry. Ambulances and sutler’s tents were meeting their ends all around him. Will and Frenchy fled down the Baltimore Pike until they came to a place of comparative safety, where they waited amid a crowd of other fugitives. Frenchy’s powerful letters of recommendation helped him to appropriate a new mule. By the time Will got back to the Third’s position on Culp’s Hill, it was almost night. He spent the evening looking fruitlessly for Jolly.

On the Fourth of July, Will ventured out into the rain with Frenchy. For the first time, they saw many boys from the Third dead on the field. There was a boy, one of the first Will had met, who as they waited in the train to leave Syracuse had asked Will to do him a favor. “Hey, Goliath,” he’d said. “Give me a boost.” Will had hoisted him through the window, thinking for a moment he’d had a last-minute change of heart and was going to desert prematurely. There were women clustered around the train, come to bid goodbye to the boys of Onondaga County, and all the boy had wanted was kisses. Will held the fellow by his boots as he puckered his lips up obscenely and meshed them wetly with the wanton lips of three, five, and then ten different women. In the end, Will had dropped him on his head, and so lost his first friend in the regiment. He was a little fellow, whose lips were wide and thick. On reflection, Will understood how he might feel pressed to kiss excessively with them. Now they were gone, torn away by a bullet or a fragment of shell. Each time Will stepped in wet, soft places on the field, he worried that he’d trodden upon those sensuous lips.

Frenchy had just scolded Will for moving a pile of dead into convincing “as they fell” positions — he was supposed to be looking for the dying, not playing with the dead — when Will uncovered a living Reb. The Reb opened his gray eyes and began to squall when Will grabbed his arm. “Don’t bury me!” he said. “I ain’t dead, you son of a bitch!” It was a marvel, though, that he was alive. His belly had been opened, and his guts were spilling promiscuously from the wound. “Go away,” he said to Will, once it became clear to him that Will was not going to bury him. “Ain’t it enough that you killed me? Why don’t you leave me in peace? My granny is coming up to get me. She’ll be here soon. She doesn’t care for greasy Yanks, and one who shines and stinks like you would offend her.”

“I’ll take you to the doctors,” Will said.

“No,” said the Reb. Frenchy came waddling up excitedly.

“You beautiful boy!” he said to the Reb.

“Leave me be,” he said. But they wouldn’t. Will cleared away the bodies from around the boy and Frenchy gave him sips of whiskey from a flask. As Frenchy set up his camera, the boy put down his head and seemed to sleep, so while Frenchy wasn’t looking Will picked him up and carried him back to a hospital tent. The boy woke and began to scream horribly, and Frenchy screamed horribly, too, honking and honking as Will hurried away with the prize. Will held the Reb tight, lest something vital spill out further and drag along the ground. By the time he had reached the hospital, the boy was silent and dead. Will put him down on a door set on two saw-horses, which had lately served as a surgery table. Had Will felt anything leave as he walked? Had a spirit passed through him? It would have felt like a chill, he was sure. But he had felt nothing. He sat there for a long while, not wanting, anymore, to assist Frenchy in an enterprise that now seemed stupid and vile and immensely rude.

No matter, though. Frenchy was dead, when Will went back to him, shot through the chest as he was taking a picture. Jolly had been his subject, dead now, too — though Will was certain that he had been mostly alive for his portrait. Jolly had no obvious wound on him. Will thought he must have died of sadness and uncertainty, but when he looked closer he could see that Jolly had been shot in the thigh. He’d crossed his legs demurely, as if to hide the wound. His brow, when Will laid his hand on it, was still warm, but even as he knelt there it grew cold. For a little while he knelt with his hand on Jolly’s head, thinking of his friend dying all night long. Will’s eyes were closed. He was waiting for someone to shoot him. He wanted to say something but seemed to have forgotten, for the moment, every word he ever knew. His mother intruded into his mind, then. She dragged her green sofa onto the battlefield and reclined upon it. She gathered Jolly into her lap and cried out, “Where is it written that a woman has got to bear such a load of heartache?”

Frenchy’s camera had fallen over, but the plate inside was safe and whole. With the plate closed up in a box, Will walked to where the new mule had taken the wagon, a few hundred yards away. Under the yellow light, he poured the developer over the plate and waited for the image.

There is Jolly’s long face, his lips turned down in a frown. His eyes are open. His head is resting on his arm. He is pointing at nothing. He has wrapped his mouth around a piece of grass. Something is rising from him. It looks like a bit of dark mist in the shape of a wing.

In the Wilderness, and at Spotsylvania, at Cold Harbor and Petersburg, the Third saw the elephant abundantly, and it trampled them. Frenchy would have had many opportunities to take his world-changing picture. Brave or foolish behavior got Will back into the Tiger Mess — he saved some lives and became better liked. He wanted friends, all of a sudden, as immediately and as intensely as he had not wanted them before. He would still smash your whiskey, but that became something they could overlook in the dwindling fraternity of Company D. The boys all got in the habit of writing their names and the addresses of their families on slips of paper, which they pinned to their shirts before they went into battle. Will had a slip pinned to his shirt, but it was not his parents’ address — he didn’t want even his dead body to go back home. Instead he’d written, Sam, here I come.

Will had many near misses. It seemed that bullets wanted to touch him. He got grazed on his arms and legs, along his scalp. He lost an earlobe. But he never got a serious wound, though he felt at last that he was ready for one. Jolly’s picture, which he kept in his knapsack by day and under his head at night, cheered him. Such a spirit-shape might rise from him, when his bullet finally found him. Such a spirit-shape as rose from Jolly might have risen from Sam, might abide in some place free from the heavy cares of the war and the world.

Generous Frenchy had made up a sort of will, which he would have changed, no doubt, had he lived after his assistant betrayed him at Gettysburg. He’d left instructions with Captain Brower. In the event of his death, Will was to have his cart and all it contained, as well as a big brass key, with an address at which one could find its lock. Will sold the cart. The new mule went back to its former owner, from whom Frenchy had bullied it. Will kept only the key and Jolly’s negative.

After the war, Will went to Brooklyn, where his key opened up a musty photography studio on the fourth floor of a building in Fulton Street. The rent, he discovered, was paid through the next two years. He walked among the props — marble columns, rich draperies, painted backgrounds depicting mountains or the sea. He stood for a while under a massive skylight, looking up at the gray sky. In a dark corner, beneath a gigantic rubber blanket, he found neat tall stacks of negatives, hundreds and hundreds of them, all taken during the war, some of which he’d developed himself. Frenchy had been sending them back to this place.

Will built the glass house on the roof. There was a derelict greenhouse up there, whose clear panels he tore out and replaced with the boys by the church, the boy with no hips, the catalogues. All the hundreds of negatives became four walls and a roof. Finally, there was Jolly’s picture — it went over the door in what Will thought must be the position of honor. Will put it in place, the last panel, and the house was finished.

It still lacked an hour till dawn. He went inside without a light and sat in the middle of the house. It was likely and certain and necessary that something would happen when the sun came to shine down on him. But what? Would the white ghosts assault him? Would he hear Jolly’s voice whispering a question? Would the mist that might be Jolly’s spirit depart from the plate and settle over Will like manna? Maybe ghosts would crowd the house, and maybe Sam would be among them. Maybe Will would fall asleep under their images and dream their vanished lives.

Maybe nothing would happen. Dawn was in the sky, now. The sun was just starting to peep over a neighboring building. Will closed his eyes and he waited.

2

IN SEPTEMBER OF 1867, WILL SAT IN THE AMPHITHEATER OF the Bellevue Medical College with his head clutched between his hands, staring fixedly at Dr. Gouley, a lecturer in morbid anatomy. Dr. Gouley was a sweet-looking man whose gentle voice belied the gruesome content of his lecture. “The skin of the child,” he said, “was dry and hard and seemed to be cracked in many places, somewhat resembling the scales of a fish. The mouth was large and round and wide open. It had no external nose but two holes where the nose should have been.”

“Are you all right, Will?” asked his neighbor, a small young man named Gob Woodhull. As there were no proper seats left in the crowded amphitheater, they sat next to each other on the steps. “Are you going to have a fit? The way your eyes bulge, it worries me.”

They had met a month before, after Will had collapsed in the hospital hallway. When he came back to his senses, Will was in a bed in Ward 10, surrounded by noisy consumptives. Little Gob, for all that he looked like a fifteen-year-old in store-bought whiskers, had picked him up in the hallway like a child and carried him to bed. “It’s a divine affliction, what you have,” he said.

“It’s not,” said Will. He could barely see, and he felt cold, though it was hot in the ward. No, it wasn’t divine, what he had. They were from the glass house, these attacks of sympathy that culminated in shaking, foaming fits. Medical school was the last place he should be, in his condition, because the sad natural histories of disease became personal to him. His mind would come loose from its moorings and drift on tides of turbulent fancy, so he found himself becoming the sufferer, or someone who loved the sufferer, and he would contemplate their troubled, failing lives until the fit came along, inevitably, and put an end to it. He’d collapsed in the hall on account of a young German mother, recently delivered and now afflicted with a debilitating fistula that made her smell so horrible her family had turned her out of the house. He hadn’t cared so much for other people’s trouble in the past. Even his own mother’s agony had occurred at a distance remote from his heart, but the house had changed that.

In the amphitheater, Will told Gob, “I’m very well, thank you.” But he was not very well. Dr. Gouley was lecturing on Harlequin Fetus, a rare but especially awful congenital deformity, and Will feared that he would soon be overwhelmed.

“The eyes appeared to be lumps of coagulated blood, about the bigness of a plum, ghastly to behold. It had no external ears, only holes where the ears should be. The hands and feet appeared to be swollen, were crumped up, and felt hard. The back part of the head was very much open. It made a strange kind of noise, very low, which I will now attempt to imitate.” Dr. Gouley cleared his throat, lowered his head, and emitted a rumbling bass cry like the complaint of a sickly cow.

“Fascinating,” said Gob. “I should have liked to examine it.” Another student shushed him. Will closed his eyes and saw a hideous, bark-skinned Harlequin Fetus toddling out of the blackness in his mind. It held out its crumped-up hands at him and from the shocked O of its mouth came a word: “Papa.”

“You’re about to blow, aren’t you?” said Gob. “Should I take you out of here?”

“No,” Will whispered. He imagined the poor mother who gave birth to such a child, how her bliss would become horror when she saw the thing that had emerged from her. He did not want to hear any more.

“It defeats the purpose of a lecture,” said Gob, “if you plug up your ears.” This time, he was assailed by a whole chorus of shushings.

“It lived about eight and forty hours,” said Dr. Gouley, “and was alive when I saw it.”

Debilitating sympathy, fits, spirits — these were the gifts of the house. Something must have happened as Will sat there, with the sun shining bright but not warm through the picture panels, though in fact it had seemed at first that nothing happened. He had looked around at the confusion of images on the floor and on himself, but he felt no different. Ghosts did not detach themselves from the picture, Jolly’s soul did not come sifting down upon him. He fell asleep and had a perfectly ordinary nap.

He spent the whole first day after he’d finished the house at mundane tasks, cleaning, eating, writing up an advertisement for people to come get their portraits taken by him — he’d started a little business and was doing pretty well at it — and he went to bed feeling disappointed and relieved that nothing had happened. But he woke in the early morning to the sound of artillery, great crashing booms that sounded as if they were being fired from just below his window on Fulton Street. When they were small, Sam had tried to teach him how to wake within sleep, to know he was dreaming while he was dreaming. “Then you are the master of your whole world,” Sam confided. Then you could fly, or squeeze ice cream from a stone, or turn animals to chocolate with your touch. Will could never learn to do this. But when he woke that night surrounded by people staring down at him, he figured he must at last have woken up inside a dream.

He reached to touch Jolly, hoping to turn him to chocolate. Jolly was moving his mouth but Will couldn’t hear him — he thought he must have been deafened by the cannon. Jolly was solid and very cold. He would not turn to chocolate, or stop moving his lips. The others were talking, too. Frenchy and Lewy Greeley and even Sam, who stood away from the bed and looked at Will like a stranger. There were many boys from the Third Onondaga, some of whom he’d barely known, and there were boys Will had never seen before. All of them were chattering at him silently, except for one, a boy who looked like a tatterdemalion Gabriel, because he was dressed in shabby clothes and had only one wing where a more affluent angel would surely have two. The boy did not move his mouth, but only stared and put a bugle — it was bright and pretty, not shabby at all — to his mouth to blow it noiselessly. Will closed his eyes as the artillery sounded again, trying to wake up. But he was already awake, and when he opened his eyes all his guests were still with him.

“I mean to make a pilgrimage,” Will said to Gob, “to the valley of Aesclepius, where I will tie the carotids of a rooster and make a sacrifice of him. Will you go along with me?” Sometimes, Will thought that if he left the country the silent ghosts would not be able to follow. Wasn’t it said that they could not cross water? Yet they followed him easily enough across the river from Brooklyn.

“I have work in this city,” said Gob, passing his finger back and forth through the single candle at their table. “I think I will be retained by it for years.” They were in a filthy saloon in Hester Street, sitting with a bottle of whiskey between them. It was November 5, 1867, Will’s birthday. He was twenty-three years old. Gob, who Will had figured as immensely rich, had taken him to stuff at Delmonico’s, and then Will had brought Gob to this saloon, one of his haunts since the house had changed him into a rank sensualist. Sympathy and spirits and fits — sometimes these seemed easy to abide compared to the last gift of the house, the other, which was a package of lustfulness and wantonness and drinking whiskey, which Will hated almost as much as ever but now had need of, though it never seemed to make him drunk.

Jolly and the angel boy had come along to the saloon, too. Jolly kept pointing at Gob, the same way he had led Will to Bellevue a year before and pointed at it, and led him inside, still pointing, to the office of the secretary, Dr. Macready. Since his appearance, Jolly had been silently guiding him through his life, pointing out the path he must take. Will went where Jolly pointed, because it was the only way to soothe him, and because it felt right to do it. Will had never organized his life by faith or ambition until he built the house — that work had seemed right and true and necessary. He had built it, hoping when it was finished it would practice some magic to make him serene. Now it was building him into a sad, discontented creature, and yet this also seemed right and true and necessary.

“Years and years,” Gob said unhappily.

“You mean doctoring?”

“Partly,” said Gob. He was a brilliant student, not liked at the school except by the faculty, who doted on him. He was haughty, and tended to correct his peers at every chance, wielding his immense knowledge like a blunt stick. In the army, they would have stuck him in a leper mess. Will had had no friends at Bellevue before Gob arrived, though he’d been there already for two terms. He hadn’t wanted any friends — his wartime sociability had departed when peace came — and had not wanted either to be friends with Gob, but the boy had pursued him relentlessly since their encounter in the hall, and soon they were pretty fast.

“What else, then?” Will asked.

“Ah, I think I just might tell you, but not tonight. It’s not birthday talk, and I’m sleepy, anyhow. And you have got to go cut up your capers.” A lady in red boots had come up behind Will and leaned over to pat him on his chest.

“Shall we dance?” she asked him.

“I’m off, then,” said Gob. “Happy birthday, Will.”

“Is it your birthday, Mr. President?” asked the lady.

“Maybe,” Will said to her, and asked Gob if he wouldn’t stay this time for the private can-can dance. Gob shook his head and took up his coat. The tatterdemalion Gabriel cast a final glance at the saloon musicians, three drunks on the stage who made a cacophony on piano, fiddle, and cornet. Then he followed Gob, both of them barely visible in the dark between tables. The angel boy looked back before they left the saloon and waved goodbye. Jolly waved back.

“Come along, Mr. President,” said the lady. Will had forgotten her name, though she’d danced for him before. He followed her towards the stairway, a whiskey bottle in one hand, her hand in the other. Jolly followed after them.

“You know I am not the president of anything.”

“Not even the League of Large Gentlemen?”

“No,” said Will. She took him up the stairs and onto a creaking wooden gallery, along which the private theaters were set. Will’s dancer held a curtain open for him, and he passed in, Jolly right behind him. The room was directly over the trio, so the music was very loud.

The dancer pushed Will towards the far wall, where a photograph hung, two ladies dressed only in hats, their four breasts pressed together. Will sat down in a dirty yellow chair while the dancer closed the curtain, and Jolly flattened himself against the wall. The woman started to dance, kicking up her legs in that confined space. A few times she almost kicked Will in the head with her boots, but after a few near misses he became adroit at dodging her, even as he watched her take her skirt in her hand and toss it around. There were tiny bells sewn into the hem that made a small music which was sweet compared to the din below. She was not wearing any underclothes. She turned around, leaned forward, threw her skirt up over her head, then shook her dimpled ass in Will’s face.

“Why don’t you give it a slap?” she asked, but he did not do that. She had a few bruises back there already, one of them very much in the shape of Italy’s kicking boot. She turned around again, holding her skirt up so it obscured her face but left her crotch in plain sight. It wasn’t young anymore, what she had. It looked old and broken down, but still he thought it was fascinating. She inched towards him in tiny steps. It seemed to Will that it took forever for her to cover the scant distance from the curtain to the chair, and when at last she arrived to press herself into his face he thought that he would die, or at the very least fall away in a fit. The smell of her turned his stomach yet delighted all his base instincts. Jolly watched her too, though he tried to give the appearance of not watching her.

She stepped back from Will, reaching down with one hand to stroke his face, his neck, his shoulder. Still holding her skirt up, she undid her blouse and freed one of her breasts. Pendulous and covered with scars, it was utterly unbeautiful. It reminded Will of the breast of Mrs. Hanbury, a patient in Ward 23 at Bellevue. She was an ancient Negro woman, somnolent to the point that she would have seemed dead if she had not been hot to the touch. Once, Will was obliged to move her breast so he could listen to her weak heart. The breast seemed four feet long to him. It was unwieldy, a sock filled with sand, and it sought to thwart him; its wrinkled nipple was a mocking eye. The dancer’s breast was unpleasant like that, but still it demanded his attention. She pushed it towards his mouth, but he only stared at the thing. She took the bottle from his hand, did something unspeakable with it, then put it to Will’s lips. He drank greedily, not minding how the liquor ran down his chin. “Oh Jolly,” Will said. “What am I doing?”

“Jolly indeed,” said the lady, her hand on his pants now. “You’re doing well enough.”

Occasionally Jolly and Sam and Lewy Greeley and Frenchy and a dozen others would gather around a luxurious divan — the rudest ladies always preferred to drape themselves on it for their portrait — upon which the angel boy would sit with his legs crossed under him, his one wing waving lazily in the breeze from an open window. Will would demand of them, “What are you looking at? What?” Scolding them never did any good. He’d swum with Sam in a clear spring when they were boys. He’d looked down and seen fish through the clear water, floating and moving their mouths just like these spirits, open and closed and open, but never a sound came out. “Stop looking at me!” he’d say, but they wouldn’t, and the only way he could escape them was by covering up his own eyes.

Being friendly with Gob was good for Will’s education. Though technically his junior, Gob was farther along than Will; he’d been apprenticed to a respected German physician, Dr. Oetker, for three years before he came to Bellevue. His performance on the entrance exam had so impressed Macready that the secretary had made Gob a junior assistant in the second surgical division.

Under Gob’s aegis, Will was allowed to assist on a surgery with the great Dr. Wood himself. It was a daring procedure, an exhilarating bowel repair. The fattest man Will had ever seen lay on the table. He’d been set on by would-be murderers after a feast, and their stabbing knives had poked three holes in his vast belly. Will and Gob hooked out loops of bowel and held them steady while Dr. Wood, a neat man who sported a boutonniere of violets on his black coat, sewed up the wounds. Will thought of the boy he’d carried over the field at Gettysburg, and how his guts had been similarly exposed.

“So you see, Mr. Woodhull,” Dr. Wood was saying, “how you must put your stitches through the fibrous tunic of the intestine.” He was finished with his suturing, and now he inspected his work from various angles. He took a decanter from another assistant and began to pour oil liberally over the wound. He smiled and said, “A little olive oil will facilitate the return of the bowel to the peritoneal cavity.”

Surgery made Will partial to ether. Assisting Dr. Wood, he was often assigned the role of anesthetist. He’d apply Squibb’s ether to the patient with a cone made of newspaper, a towel, and a wad of cotton. He filched small quantities and brought them home to Fulton Street for use in making collodion, and for sniffing. He liked to sit with all the lights out but the curtains open, and take little whiffs of ether until he passed into a dreamless black sleep.

It was better than hooking arteries or bowel, this ether-duty. Will never got sleepy administering the ether, but he sometimes developed a carefree attitude during the course of an operation. It made him bold.

“Doctor,” he said to a senior assistant during a multiple amputation, “please stay away from the patient’s head. You will cause her to combust.” The assistant had a lit cigar wedged between his teeth.

“She says her mother was frightened by an elephant when she was pregnant,” said Dr. Wood. The blond-headed girl on the table had been born with an extra finger and seven extra toes. Dr. Wood was pruning the girl to a better life. Whenever anyone noticed her finger she had suffered fits of hysterical blindness and St. Vitus’s dance. “What do you think of that, Mr. Woodhull?”

“I think elephants are formidable creatures, sir,” said Gob. “I think it is sensible to fear them.” Dr. Wood laughed too long and too loud. Gob’s hands, dexterous despite the congenital absence of one finger, were educated while Will looked on, wondering if his friend couldn’t take the girl’s extra finger as a replacement for his own. It didn’t seem beyond him. Under Dr. Wood’s tutelage, Gob tied off arteries and sewed up wounds, and once even opened up a skull with a Hey’s saw. Will would have liked to do some cutting of his own, but Dr. Wood seemed unlikely ever to let him. He often looked scornfully at Will’s big mashers and said, “Those are not the hands of a surgeon.”

Many nights, Gob and Will would sit up with fresh amputees, watching over their wounds for signs of secondary hemorrhage. The patients would be arranged in their beds in a circle around the two students, with their stumps facing inward. Gob and Will would sit back to back, observing the stumps.

“I think blood is beautiful,” Gob said during one such vigil.

“You wouldn’t,” said Will, “if you’d ever been covered in it for days. It loses its charm.”

“I like it because it is perfect, because it does its work perfectly. A perfect fuel for a perfect machine.” Jolly was walking up and down the ward, not waving or speaking, just turning his head this way and that, regarding everything with sadness and longing. Will looked away from him, his attention drawn to a stump that twitched briefly, and when he looked back Jolly was gone. The spirits came and went like that.

“I hate the smell,” Will said. “And anyhow if I were less tired and more articulate I would argue that we are not perfect, body or soul.” The stump that had twitched began to bleed again, so Will leaned forward to tighten a band of elastic around it, but this was not sufficient. He had to plunge his fingers through the stitches and feel blindly under the flap, seeking to catch the leaking artery between his fingers. The patient was screaming and the sheets were soaking through.

Gob put his little hand in, too, and in a moment he’d caught the vessel and pinched it. “Ah,” he said, over the patient’s screaming. “Feel that!” Will put his finger along Gob’s and felt the blood beating. The strength and the rhythm of it did seem like a miracle, just then. “Perfect,” said Gob. “Oh, I wish I could build like this.”

Sometimes he’d feel the pressure of eyes on him as he walked, and looking back he would see them. Jolly was always out in front, taking measured, even steps. Will would keep walking, thinking they might go away if only he ignored them, but he never could. He’d look back again and again, and each time there’d be another, until there was a long train of them following him down Broadway or the Bowery or Fulton Street. They stepped fluidly among the living, never touching them even on the busiest streets, while Will, always looking over his shoulder, knocked packages from the arms of ladies, and got tangled in their parasols. “Stop following me!” he shouted, but he knew this would do nothing to deter them, and it did not.

* * *

In the lying-in ward, the women waiting to deliver kept busy making shrouds. Will wondered, as he walked among them, how many would lie buried in their work. Bellevue had a reputation as a nest of puerperal fever. Gob had switched to the second medical division after the end of the first term. Dr. Wood offered to make him a senior assistant, but Gob said he felt drawn to the medical wards, to the cholera and consumption and pneumonia. Will shadowed him there, and saw how his patients did better than others. Gob eschewed calomel and tartar emetic in all cases. He dosed the weak of heart with foxglove. He gave calcined magnesia for excessive flatulence, carbonate of soda for dyspepsia, a mixture of turpentine and gin for worms. Patients with intractable dry coughs who got no relief from syrup of squills were healed by a weird elixir. “Moss squeezings, bat’s blood, and death angel,” Gob said, and Will thought he must be joking.

They liked to go around the wards at night. The nurses were untrained and incompetent, sentenced to Bellevue to serve out ten-day terms for public drunkenness. They would find them snoring in a corner, the remains of Friday’s fish dinner smeared on their frocks, while patients called out for assistance or mercy or death. Gob and Will might turn a patient on his side so he could urinate, a veteran with a bullet in his bladder that acted as a ball valve, or sit at the bedsides of cholera patients, measuring out grains of morphine into a cup of hot water. The cholera patients had shriveled fingers. Their lips were blue, and their clammy faces were shrunken.

By January of ‘68, Will had become an assistant in the first medical division. He spent most of his time in the basement, among the alcoholics and the insane. “They are all very unreasonable down there,” he complained, when he came upstairs at night to visit Gob. “You are living the life here on the second floor, let me tell you.” He would sit on a bed and throw wadded-up gauze at a passed-out nurse, saying, “Wake up, Sairey Gamp!” or else assist Gob in taking pulses and listening to hearts and lungs. When the patients were all asleep they would sit in a window, staring at the East River and talking quietly. They both belonged to a not very exclusive club of surviving brothers.

“Sam was the companion of my youth,” Will said one night. “But then we grew distant.”

“I failed him,” said Gob, raising his hand as if to touch the full moon framed in the window. A cold wind was whipping up blue foam on the river.

“How does that happen? He was the only other person in the world, and then he was no one.”

“If I had been with him he would yet be alive,” Gob said quietly.

“He was a stranger to me, when he died,” Will said. “Do you think that’s a crime?” He looked around the room for Sam, thinking that talk of him might summon him. He wasn’t there, but Jolly was pacing up and down the ward, looking at his feet as they walked.

“Help me!” said a cholera patient, sitting up suddenly in his bed. Will was too late with the bucket.

In the morning, they would go for a walk on the hospital grounds, which used to be filled with orchards of peach and apple and plum trees, but now were covered with small and large buildings of gneiss rock and brick. They would wander for a while in the cold, both of them exhausted but neither in a mood for sleep. Gob, Will discovered, had a morbid imagination. It seemed to Will that Gob was becoming a doctor for the wrong reason, not because he loved life, but because he was obsessed with death. Not that it was the right reason, either, to become a doctor at the direction of a spirit.

After their walk they might seek out Dr. Gouley, to assist him with an autopsy, Gob weighing livers or kidneys or brains while Will measured the thickness of a heart. Dr. Gouley, a lonely man, was happy for their company. “You work well together,” he said to them on more than one occasion. Sometimes he invited them to put on loupes and do a detailed dissection. Gob liked to pull on the tendons of a flayed hand and make it beckon invitingly to the other corpses. When the organs were all removed, and there was nothing left in the late person but watery blood pooling in the gutters alongside the spine, Dr. Gouley would stare lovingly into the body and put his hands into the pink fluid, lifting it and holding it in his palms until it ran through his fingers. “My boys,” he would say. “Do you see how we are vessels?”

The spirits followed Will to a place called the Pearl, a saloon run by a woman of the same name. It was a hideous dive. A white-painted glass ball as big as a head hung over the door. Inside, it looked at first glance like any other saloon — dim and smoky, with sawdust on the floor. But there was a door in the back, and if you went through it you found yourself, not outside in the alley, but at the top of a staircase, and if you took those stairs down you entered a bagnio, a maze, in whose secret recesses prostitutes reclined expectantly.

Will went downstairs without looking back to see how many followed. At the bottom of the stairs, he opened the door to the maze. Down there it was musty, and it stank of fish. What might once have been stored there he never knew, but it seemed like a place that must once have held bones. Along the twisting, turning way there were recesses, hidden by thin curtains, where couches sat. Some of the curtains were drawn, and if there were lights inside they threw copulating silhouettes onto the hanging fabric. Grunting cries rang off the low ceiling.

There was something he liked about these seedy, curtained places. He had enough money from portrait-taking that he could visit a nice house, someplace on West Twenty-fifth Street, where the girls were pretty and all the fornication was done amid the trappings of purity. He might visit every one of the Seven Sisters’ houses, or dress up in his finest clothes for a visit to Josie Woods’s. He’d heard about those places — white sheets and soft beds, girls with clean hair and shining faces who dressed up in old-fashioned hoop skirts and spoke with great refinement — but he had never visited one. The glass house had made him honest in his debauchery; when he wallowed he wallowed like a pig.

He went in through the first open curtain he found. There was a girl sitting on a green couch piled with blankets. She was reading a book by the light of a lantern hung on the wall. A pair of cracked spectacles were balanced on the end of her nose.

“Close the curtain, darling,” she said, without looking up. “I never like to put on a show.” Already, a cloud of witnesses was crowding inside, jostling him with their cool flesh. Jolly’s and Sam’s were the only familiar faces, though there were a dozen or more with him. He couldn’t meet Sam’s eyes, but he couldn’t leave the place, either, couldn’t go home and read, couldn’t even content himself with rubbing up against some pretty, unsuspecting lady on a Second Avenue stage, as a more restrained fiend might do.

He had whiskey with him, and she asked to sip it from his mouth, so he took some and he kissed her. She would not take off her glasses and they bumped against his face. She lifted her dress, really just an old and stained shift of silk, put her book down gently on the couch, and lay back, putting one arm behind her head. Pushing her glasses up high on her nose, she told Will to take down his pants. He opened up his jacket and his shirt so he could press his skin against hers. She was clammy and cold, and her breasts were pimply, but he kissed them as if he loved them.

After a while, the girl gave a little titter. Will thought it was because his work was unsatisfying and ridiculous, but in fact she was laughing at some bit of humor in her book, which she had picked up again, and was reading over his shoulder. He propped himself up on his elbows and looked down at her.

“What, darling?” she asked. “What? It’s Mr. Dickens. I can hardly put it down. Not for anything. So go on. Just go right on with it.” The spirits, crowded close, were nodding avidly, and their mouths were moving as if to say, Yes, do.

* * *

“Hold still,” Will said, because Gob would not stop fidgeting. “You’ll ruin the photograph.”

“Sorry,” said Gob, but he kept moving his eyes and his head to look at the pictures around the studio. Will had brought him to Brooklyn for a complimentary portrait, motivated by friendship and by Jolly. Will was thrilled to be able to teach Gob the photographic process, because he’d learned as much about medicine from Gob as he had from their professors. And as they walked on South Street one day, Jolly had pointed repeatedly at Gob and then at Brooklyn, making it very obvious that he wanted Will to take him there.

“I’ll bind your head to the stand,” Will said.

“What’s that one?” Gob asked, moving his arm, too, to point at a plate negative taken at Bull Run. It was not one of Frenchy’s. Will had been collecting them from other photographers.

“Now it’s ruined,” Will said, taking his head out of the camera and scowling.

“Is that one from Chickamauga?” Gob asked, walking over to examine the plate.

“No,” said Will. “I have none from that battle. That’s three plates you’ve wasted. Why can’t you hold still?”

“Where are the pictures from Chickamauga?” Gob asked. He went rooting among the mounds of pictures and plates on tables around the room. Will finally made him understand that there were no pictures from Chickamauga, but Gob was fascinated by any picture. He held the negative plates up to the light and closed his eyes and said, “Oh!” With their sleeves rolled up and their collars loosened, they looked at every picture Will owned. Gob delighted especially in the stereoscopic images. He sat cross-legged on the floor, looking at Mr. Gardner’s gruesome photographs, reaching out his hand repeatedly to try and touch the carnage that floated before him.

When there were no more pictures to look at, Will taught Gob how to take and develop a photograph. He mastered the process immediately. There were people who did not have to be shown a thing twice to learn it, but with Gob you almost didn’t have to show him even once. When Will asked how he knew to make the negative for an ambrotype thin and light, Gob only said, “Well, it makes sense, doesn’t it?” He insisted on taking Will’s picture, and Will obliged him, though he didn’t like it. He stood in a formal pose, next to a broken plaster column and an urn. He was surrounded by spirits, Jolly and Lewy Greeley and even Sam, who stood away from him, but still within the picture. Gob developed the picture himself, mounted it as an ambrotype, and then presented it to Will.

“Ah, you’re a professional,” Will said. It was a good picture. He looked like a big hulking fool, with his sleepy, stupid gaze and his slack idiot’s mouth: Gob had captured him. There were no spirits in the picture, but they clustered around Will to look at it, as if expecting to find themselves in the glass.

Just as the day ended, they went up to the roof. Will had never shown the glass house to anyone, because he had no friends with which to share any secrets, least of all a peculiar monument to death, a greenhouse fit for the cultivation of fat white tombflowers. But he thought it would interest Gob, because pictures fascinated him, and because death fascinated him. And Jolly pointed urgently at Gob, at the stairs, at Gob again, and made sweeping motions with his hands, as if to shoo the both of them up to the roof.

“You’re a builder, too,” Gob said when he saw it. It was a warm Sunday in February. The last night’s snow had been melting all day off the glass house, so it looked clean and fresh and wet. Gob reached out with his hand, running his finger from plate to plate. A crowd of spirits gathered, between eyeblinks, to watch him. “May I go in?” Gob asked.

“Certainly,” Will said. Then he thought how it might change Gob as it had changed him, and he said, “Wait, it could hurt you.”

“I’m sure it won’t,” Gob said, and he went into the house. Will put it down to a trick of the setting sun, how yellow light flashed inside. Spirits were all around them. They joined hands to circle the house, and then they danced around it, first one way, and then the other. Will had never seen them all so happy. Even ever-angry Frenchy was happy, even Sam was smiling and dancing. Only the angel boy didn’t dance. He perched on the top of the house, blowing his bugle at the sun.

Did it follow, Will wondered, that if you could see them you ought to be able to hear them, too? What logic governed such interaction? He could hear the cannon still sounding, still deafening, still waking him every so often from sleep. Often it was just Frenchy standing watch over his bed. Sometimes he had a plate with him, one upon which pictures flashed like the images from a magic lantern. Will saw the faces of strangers, night landscapes, scenes of the war, a shack on a hill with a decaying orchard behind it, a dark thick wood at twilight. Frenchy would point at the images and talk, wearing the same expression as when he’d been Will’s living instructor, an angry, impatient look that very often got screwed up into a raging scowl as he yelled and yelled.

“I can’t hear you,” Will would say, when Frenchy worked himself into a fury. “But it suits you, sir, this quietness. I think it has made you likable, dear Frenchy.” This made him angrier, but Will, grumpy anyhow at being woken, felt compelled to tease him. “Dear, meek Frenchy. Quiet as a mouse!”

Will stood on Fifth Avenue, looking up at Number 1 East Fifty-third Street, wondering if his friend could really live in this enormous house. Gob had invited him for supper, reciprocating, Will supposed, the invitation to Brooklyn. “We’ll eat,” Gob said, “and then I’ll show you something.”

It was only a day since Gob had stumbled weeping out of the glass house. Will had caught him by the shoulders and said, “I knew it! It’s hurt you to go in there.” But Gob said he was crying tears of joy, and then he hurried off, saying only that he had work to do.

Gob opened the door, looking exhausted but very happy. “My friend!” he said. “There you are!” He clapped Will on the back and drew him inside. It was the finest house that Will had ever seen, though very dirty. There were three reception rooms and two drawing rooms, with what must have been five hundred mirrors hanging on all their high walls. In the dining room there was a table four times as long as Will was himself. There was a meal already set up: soup, corn, green peas, cabbage, beets, puddings and pies, a salad of dandelion greens, pork with stewed apples, steak with peaches, salt fish with onions, coffee and wine and cold root beer. Gob played with his food, arranging it in patterns on his plate, but not eating much. “I’m never hungry when I’ve been working,” he explained. Will waited for Gob to speak of the glass house, to tell him what had happened inside, but he said nothing of it. Will had been ready, when Gob came out, to make a confession to him: I see spirits or I fear I’m insane, and he had hoped, he knew now, that Gob would say, Oh yes, those pesky spirits. They’re everywhere! It would be so pleasant, so unburdening, to share the affliction. But Gob gave no sign of seeing the spirits. As Will had approached Manhattan on the ferry, they’d run like children, leaning dangerously over the rails, pointing excitedly at the churning water. When Gob opened the door, they’d swarmed into his house like yokels bustling to get into Barnum’s. Now, they sported everywhere in the room. Sam stood by the table, looking sadly at a pudding, not a foot from Gob’s elbow.

Will sighed. Since Gob was not forthcoming, he would be rude. Gob was talking about how long ago, with Dr. Wood looking on, he’d removed a tumor from the jaw of Emily McNee, the Sozodont dentifrice heiress. He was praising her teeth when Will interrupted.

“What did you see, there in my little house?”

“Ah,” Gob said, smiling and passing a hand over his eyes. “What did I see?”

“Yes,” said Will. “That’s what I asked.”

“What did you see?”

“I saw nothing,” Will said, “but now I see … spirits. There. I’ve said it. Sir, I think it cost me my sanity to go into that place.”

“Spirits!” Gob said, and Will thought at first that he was angry. He put his face in his hands, and his voice was plaintive. “I wish I saw them! I wish I did. But that comfort is denied me.”

“Comfort? You don’t think,” Will said, “that such visions are manufactured by a sick mind?”

Gob raised his head and gave Will a scornful look. “You insult my mother,” he said. Will did not know whether or not to apologize, because now Gob was laughing, louder and louder, and pounding his fist on the table so forcefully that plates danced and glasses tipped.

“Come along,” Gob said, when he had calmed some. “Let’s have the rest of the tour.” He took Will’s arm and walked with him. In the parlors, there were marble-topped tables, armchairs and sofas of black lacquered wood inlaid with mother-of-pearl. There were rugs two and three deep on the floor, stained in the corners but otherwise bright and beautiful. And there were books everywhere, stacked on tables or furniture, or against the walls. Will picked one up at random. It was dusty and smelled of mold, but the binding was rich leather, and the title stood out in gold on the spine: The Dove of Archytas.

“Of course,” said Gob. “You’d like to see the library, wouldn’t you?”

That room took up most of the second and third floors. They climbed a spiral staircase to the iron mezzanine and looked down at the floor, where a score of grandfather clocks, all run down and silent, were set randomly around the room, among golden armillary spheres and dusty overstuffed chairs.

“My master liked clocks,” Gob said.

“You mean your late uncle?” Will asked. “Dr. Oetker?” At Bellevue, Dr. Oetker had had a reputation for brilliance. Will had heard that he had made a fortune catering to the ills of fashionable and unfashionable society.

“He was not my uncle. But he admired a good clock. He’d ask me sometimes, ‘Who is the god of the future?’”

“Professor Morse?” said Will. Gob laughed.

“That answer would have gotten you a slap.”

“What was the answer, then?”

Gob was silent for a moment, and then he said, “I don’t like clocks. It used to be my job to care for them, but since he died I’ve been, as you can see, on holiday. Onward and upward.”

He took Will out of the library, and they went down halls that were increasingly, in the upper levels of the house, littered with little pieces of machinery. Gears and struts and cranks and cylinders, they lay in the halls, or they were piled in the guest bedrooms and parlors. In one room, empty of furniture except for a magnificent bed whose mahogany posts were carved with laurel and acanthus leaves, Gob was reunited with a friend. “My aeolipile!” he said, speaking of a tall bronze globe, decorated with a figure of the wind — a gleeful face with pursed lips and puffed cheeks. It was obviously broken, cracked at the bottom and looking as if it were missing parts. “I made this when I was a child,” he said to Will, putting his arms around it and hugging it to him. “I haven’t seen it for years.”

Gob’s bedroom was on the fifth floor. “Lots of stairs,” Will said, “to climb every night.”

Gob shrugged. There were two doors off the hall at the top of the house. One was made of wood, the other iron. The iron door was open, rusted on its hinges so when Will stumbled against it it moaned horribly. He peered inside and saw the gray shapes of dead trees, lit up by weak moonlight falling through a dirty glass roof. “Not in there,” Gob said, pulling Will away and opening the wooden door. This was the neatest place in the house. There was a blue skylight in the ceiling, and a second iron door in the wall on the far side of the room.

“Don’t stand there,” Gob said. Will had stepped into a circle of stone, set incongruously in the wood floor.

“Sorry,” Will said, because a look of extreme displeasure had passed over his friend’s face. He walked out of the circle, and Gob smiled again.

“Now I will show you my house,” he said.

“I think you just did,” Will said, misunderstanding. Gob opened the second iron door in the far side of the room and they entered a place crowded with spirits and machinery. It looked like the pack-hole of some industrious squirrel, one that robbed factories instead of trees. There were gears of all sizes, great tangles of cable, stacks of lumber and steel plates, and underneath an ornate gaselier an assemblage that Will knew must be a machine of some sort, though he had never seen anything like it. Some spirits were caressing it, others milled happily about the room, gazing at pieces of matériel like fascinated gallery-goers.

“What is it?” Will asked, pointing to the machine.

“A combination,” Gob said, “of resistant bodies so arranged that by their means the mechanical forces of nature can be compelled to do work accompanied by certain determinate motions. It’s an engine. My house, you see, like your house.”

Will looked at it, his hands in fists at his sides. It seemed familiar and wonderful, and horrible, too, in the same way his glass house was horrible. “Are you compelled to build it?” Will asked. Gob grabbed him roughly by the shoulders, and Will thought he would eject him from the room, but instead he embraced him, crushing him with his little arms, crying happy tears again and saying, “Oh Will, oh my good friend, you understand me. You are a builder, too.”

There was another spirit, initially as furtive as the others were bold, and the only female. She flitted outside Will’s window, or she hid in the shadow of an alley at night, and he’d only catch a glimpse of her as he passed by. She was different because she was shy, and because she looked to be a complete angel. He’d groaned when he saw her. Somehow it was bearable to see a half angel. It did not bode the same ill for one’s mind or one’s equanimity. But she was entire. There was no missing her strange wings, her great height and fine green robes that looked to be hewn out of malachite, or the spots of green light that floated around her head like a crown of emeralds. She had strange wings and strange eyes. They were the darkest eyes Will had ever seen, flat and black as if someone had gouged them out and filled up the sockets with ink. Her wings were white and not made of feathers but tiny things like fingers or the beard of a cuttlefish.

One night he woke, not at the sound of the cannon, but because a cat was screaming on his roof. He lay with his eyes closed, thinking the animal might have become trapped in the glass house. When he opened his eyes the spirit was there, kneeling by his bed and leaning over him, so close he thought she might kiss him. She opened her mouth, and then she fled. Not a moment later, the little angel boy arrived, looking furious, stomping silently around the room. He turned to Will and shook his finger at him.

It was the last question Will would have asked, what the machine would do. He might not ever have known, if Gob hadn’t volunteered the answer. He had never known what the glass house would do — he’d just built it. He assumed that Gob, too, was building in ignorance of ultimate function. But Gob told him, standing in his workshop, the purpose he meant for his machine to accomplish, and it did not seem so terribly insane. Or it seemed properly insane, to build a machine to abolish death. Only the most reasonable of lunatics could devote his life to something so sensible and worthwhile, to put aside all other work and devote himself to this ultimate concern. “Will you help me, Will?” Gob had asked. “I mean to lick death, but I can’t do it alone. Will you help me win?” Jolly and Sam were standing on either side of Will, and their lips seemed to be moving in the same manner as Gob’s, asking the same question.

“What can I do?” Will had asked, because it seemed to him that he could do nothing. He confessed that he had built the glass house from blind, ignorant compulsion. He wasn’t an engineer or a mechanic. He did not understand steam power or aeolipiles or how steel was different from iron. But Jolly was jumping up and down, pointing to himself and at Sam, as if to suggest that they would help him.

Will waved his hand at all the parts and pieces around the room, at the machine under the gaselier. “I don’t understand any of this. I don’t know how to use such things, or how to make them.”

When Will said this, Gob only smiled wider. “I’ll teach you, my friend,” he said. “And then we’ll build together.”

“Sam,” Will said, “why don’t you come over here and sit with me?” Every so often he’d set two chairs by the big window over Fulton Street, sit down in one, and pat the other invitingly. “It’s nice on a cold day,” he said to his brother, “to sit in the sun and look out on the snow and the people bundled in their coats and think how you’re warm. Come and sit for a while. We’ll just be quiet together.” He patted again, gestured with both his hands, but Sam only stood on the far side of the room and eyed him warily. He shook his head as if to remind Will that he was a spirit, that he couldn’t feel such pleasures as warm sunlight, couldn’t touch the glass to marvel at how cold it was. Or else he shook his head just to say I will not sit with you, to say I do not know you, to say you are not any more my friend now than you were when I lived.

“I used to hate liquor,” said Will, taking a sip from the big flask of brandy he and Gob carried with them in the ambulance. On a cold spring day in 1868, Gob drove them hurriedly through a light snow to Number 344 East Thirty-second Street, where a lady had been shot by her deranged sister. Gob had finished his two terms of lectures. Those and his long apprenticeship with Dr. Oetker were enough to earn him his diploma from Bellevue. He might have become a house physician, but chose instead to enter the newly established ambulance service. Will, though he hadn’t yet earned his diploma, and wouldn’t until he’d completed another term, joined Gob in the ambulance, which had lamps placed on the sides and a reflector attached to the roof. The word “ambulance” was emblazoned on all sides, but this did not stop Gob from yelling at anyone who blocked their way, “Can’t you see this is an ambulance?”

The calls came in by telegraph from the police headquarters. The job was always exciting, especially at night. When they were working, Gob and Will slept in a room over the ambulance stables, a bell above their bed. When it rang it also caused a weight to fall which lit the gas. They would stumble around, blinking in the light, grabbing for their coats, and then rush to the ambulance. The harness, saddle, and collar were suspended from the ceiling, and dropped into place automatically at the sound of the alarm. Not more than two minutes ever passed between the time the bell sounded and the time they rushed out of the stable.

Will handed the flask at Gob, who declined it, saying they would not have enough when they got to their patient. In a box beneath the seat were blankets and splints, tourniquets and bandages. They had a straitjacket and a stomach pump and a copy of Gross’s Hints on the Emergencies of Field, Camp, and Hospital Practice. They had a medicine chest with emetics and antidotes and morphine. They never failed to lack something, however, when they arrived at the scene of misfortune.

Will put his hand out to catch the swirling snow as they sped along down Broadway. This was their third call of the day. Earlier, a junk dealer had been crushed by her own cart when it tipped and fell on her at the foot of Roosevelt Street. Before that, a woman getting off the rear platform of a Third Avenue horsecar had been run over by a sleigh. Both those patients had lived.

The gunshot woman died cursing her sister, though they cared for her wound as best they were able, covering it with lint saturated in balsam of Peru, and enlarging the exit wound so it could drain properly. Back at Bellevue, they saw her set up in a bed in Ward 26, and made her comfortable with brandy and morphine. Will wrote down her last words, Damn you Sally. He had a collection of those. He wrote them in inch-high letters on fine creamy white paper: Is it over?; Do you hear the pretty music?; I would rather live; No; What help are you?; Tell my horse I love her.

When they were not at the ambulance house, they were at Gob’s house. So far, Will had made what seemed to him to be merely decorative contributions to the construction. He tied last words to strings and hung them from the body of the machine, or he fixed death masks to it, and Gob made a fuss over Will’s efforts, like a doting, overpraising parent. Will felt ignorant and useless, but his education had begun in earnest. He had thought Gob had a masterful knowledge of medicine, but now he was coming to believe that he had a masterful knowledge of everything.

One day in April, he had Will follow him through the house with a wheelbarrow. Gob took books from where they lay and threw them in. “Oh yes,” he’d say, picking up a volume, “you had better be familiar with this, if we are going to make any progress.” Each title was more dismaying to Will than the last: Optics, Acoustics, Thermotics, Stability of Structures, Intellectual and Ethical Philosophy, Higher Geodesy, Analytical Geometry of Three Dimensions, Calculus of Variations. Then there was all the Aristotle: eight books on physics, four on meteors, thirteen on metaphysics, two on generation and destruction. “What am I forgetting?” Gob asked as they stood in the library, the wheelbarrow already overflowing. He looked thoughtful for a moment, then said, “Of course, the Renaissance Magi!” He scurried around the room, plucking books from the shelves. Will looked at the authors’ names, men of whom he had never heard, books that looked to be a hundred years old or more. Paracelsus and Nettesheim and Della Porta, Albertus Magnus and Mirandola and Dr. Dee, Gob tossed them about without a care for their ancient bindings and brittle pages.

“You will learn!” Gob kept saying, but days spent reading about Determinative Mineralogy or the Seven Names of God made Will suspect that Gob’s faith was misplaced. He would put his face between his knees and have a spell of worry. “It’s too hard, Jolly,” he’d say, because Jolly was always leaning over his shoulder when he read. Jolly would shake his head and smile and wag his finger, as if to scold him for his despair. Will took to reading in the glass house. Inside, it was pleasant and warm in the spring, but he went in even after summer came, and sweat ran off his nose to drum on the pages of Della Porta’s Celestial Physiognomy, because it seemed to him that his brain was more agile in there, and it restored some of his faith in himself, since it was proof that he could, after all, build something.

It was in the glass house that Will got what he considered to be his first good idea. He was struggling with a simple book of algebra, wearing nothing but his pants because it was so hot. Sometimes when he got frustrated he would abuse Gob’s precious books. Usually he would imagine a face for them, a mocking face embossed on the leather cover, with a snide mouth that he would punch and punch until his fist ached. He did that for a while, staining the leather with his sweaty hand, and finally threw it against a wall of the house, where it knocked out a plate that fell on the rooftop but miraculously did not break. He took up the book gently (he was always kind and loving to them after he abused them) and went outside. He picked up the plate and considered it, and holding the book in one hand and the plate in the other, he had his idea. Jolly stepped up from behind him, shivering with excitement. He seemed to know what Will was thinking. Will closed his eyes and imagined a great shield of negative plates that could be placed over the engine, with a bright light positioned above them, so that they rained down images on it, filling it with lost lives.

Will thought it was a bug hurrying across his cheek. They came out of his walls in the summer, fat black moist-looking things that he doused with acid to kill them. Sometimes they crawled on him while he was sleeping, but when he woke he saw that the tickling pressure on his face was not from little feet but from a wing. She moved them just like fingers, the not-feathers. The angel looked earnestly into his face, closed her eyes, and trembled as if with a sob. Her wings made a noise like broken glass shaken in a bag. She opened her mouth again, and to Will’s great surprise, words came out of it.

“Creature,” she said, “why do you participate in abomination?”

In August, Will got another invitation to dinner, this one from Gob’s mother, Mrs. Woodhull, who was recently arrived in New York. She’d set up her house in Great Jones Street, not with her son. “I wouldn’t let her live with me,” Gob said, when Will asked why she didn’t stay in Fifth Avenue. “Not in ten thousand years.”

“Is she a difficult person?” Will asked, thinking of his own difficult mama.

“Yes. And she is always surrounded by difficult people. But you can judge her for yourself tonight. Oh, yes. I like that. My friend, you are a genius of building!” They were installing the images over the engine. Gob had jumped up and down and hugged himself when Will showed up at his friend’s house with a rented cart full of plates.

“I like it too,” Will said. They were hot and filthy from their work. Now the machine would shelter under a giant flower of picture negatives. It was late in the day, but the sky was still bright outside, and the plates they’d installed were gently lit.

“We need a brighter light,” Gob said. “Maybe the brightest light ever.”

They kept working until it was almost time for dinner. Will might have kept going and going with it — he was filled with the same feeling as when he’d built the glass house, a mixture of trepidation and certainty, because he knew he must build but feared what he was building — but he noticed the time and excused himself to go home and change his clothes. He was an hour late when he arrived at Number 17 Great Jones Street. A man fully as big as Will, but fatter and hairier, opened the door.

“What do you want?” he asked.

“I’ve been invited to dinner,” Will said, thinking the man must be a servant because he smelled like a stable.

“Not by me,” the man said. He made to shut the door in Will’s face, but before he could do that, a lovely red-haired woman came up behind him, scolding and pinching him. He yelped just like a dog and stood aside.

“I know you are Dr. Fie,” said the lady. “Please come in, and do not mind my rude brother.”

“Not a doctor yet, ma’am. Are you Mrs. Woodhull?” Will asked, though this lady looked too young to be Gob’s mother.

“Her sister.” She said her name was Tennie C. Claflin, spelling it for him. She took for herself the flowers he’d brought for the hostess, a summer bouquet of daisies and violets. She put one of each in her hair and kissed Will on the cheek. This made him blush and veer towards a fit, though what she excited was not his sympathy.

“Push her off now or she’ll slobber on you all night long,” the brother said, then shuffled away down the hall.

“Come along,” Miss Claflin said. “Everyone is waiting to meet Gob’s good friend. Our Gob! Lost to us for so long, but now we are together again. He tells me you see spirits.”

Will opened his mouth but did not speak. He felt more faint, and hotter. He stumbled over a man’s boot left carelessly in the hall. Miss Claflin kept him from falling.

“Was it a secret? Forgive him for telling it. There are no secrets in this family. And don’t worry that we’ll think less of you. I see them too, you know, as does my sister. You are like us, sir. Hello! Here we are, everybody! Here is Dr. Fie!”

They’d come to the dining room, where a crowd of people was gathered around a worn oak table. Gob was sitting with another beautiful lady who Will guessed must be his mama. She had dark hair, and wore a fine purple dress, and Gob was her very image. There was another aunt, less friendly than Miss Tennie C. Claflin, this one called Utica. Her eyes — they all had the same eyes, a shade of blue so dark it almost seemed purple — were hooded, Will could tell, from too much laudanum. There was a shriveled-up old woman who looked as if she might be some clever making of Gob’s, an effigy of nutshells and bark, but with those same voracious blue eyes. She was his grandmother, and like Gob she lacked the smallest finger of her left hand. There were three men — an old one-eyed fellow who looked like the Devil, the big hairy one who’d answered the door, and finally another man with elaborate whiskers and brown eyes. They were introduced as Buck Claflin, Uncle Malden, and Colonel Blood, Gob’s stepfather.

Colonel Blood shook Will’s hand, but the other men ignored him. Miss Claflin sat him down between herself and drunken Utica. Then the family proceeded to feast. Grandma Anna brought out bowls full of peas and potatoes, and plates heaped with lamb chops. There was a diversity of manners among them. Miss Claflin and Mrs. Woodhull and Gob and Colonel Blood ate primly and talked in low voices, but the others ate with hand and knife, and shouted. Buck and Malden fought over a chop.

“We have been all through the western states,” Miss Claflin said to him, turning the conversation to herself and her family after asking many prying questions about Will. “We gathered gold and golden opinions wherever we went. And we gathered up the Colonel, too. He comes from St. Louis, where he consulted with Vicky for the sake of his wife, who suffers terribly with a condition I am not at liberty to discuss. Vicky is a clairvoyant healer, you see. And in that regard I am not myself without power. But when she saw the Colonel, Vicky fell into a trance, and the spirits of the air spoke through her, betrothing them on the spot. Then he came along with us.”

“A rash man,” said Will.

“He’s a hero. He has got six bullets in his body. And do you think it rash when one magnet comes together with another, as nature has decreed that they must? Is a river rash because it flows from a high place to a low one? Is it rash of the sea to yearn towards the moon? He only did what he must. Now, do you really think he is rash?”

Before Will could speak, Gob’s mother raised her voice above all the others. She had been talking excitedly at Gob, pausing every now and then to embrace him. He suffered her hugs with an expression of perfect neutrality.

“All these years of wandering and wondering. The beautiful Greek has at last revealed his name to me. It is Demosthenes. Do you know what that means?”

“That’s Vicky’s spirit guide,” Miss Claflin whispered. “He is her mentor and her constant companion.”

“I don’t,” said Gob.

“It means that all my waiting is over!” Mrs. Woodhull said. “Now, now it can begin! Close your eyes, darling.” Mrs. Woodhull sat in her son’s lap and put her hands over his eyes. “There, don’t you see them? Don’t you see the great things that are coming?” Will closed his eyes, because everyone else was doing it, and saw the angel in his mind, and thought how her hair was red like Miss Claflin’s, and how, even as she had asked him again why he participated in abomination, he cherished lascivious thoughts of her.

“It’s another sign,” said Mrs. Woodhull, “that you’ve returned to your family. Isn’t it so good to be together again, all of us? Now we’ll all be together forever. Come, everybody! Come and embrace our sweet lost sheep!” Miss Claflin hurried down to the other end of the table and threw her arms around Gob. “I could squeeze you till you pop!” she declared. Blood put his hero’s arms around him, and Anna slipped her withered stick-limbs around his belly. Utica knelt down and clutched his leg, overcome suddenly with emotion and drunkenness. She wept against his pants. Big Malden put his long arms around them all and squeezed. Buck sauntered down and made as if to walk by the affectionate heap. He stopped and considered it for a moment. Then Will thought he would join the embrace, but instead Buck turned and backed his ass into the great lump of bodies.

Gob had disappeared entirely, and Will did not know if he should join them or quietly slip away. They chattered and squeezed and writhed and cried, and began to quarrel among themselves, saying, “You are squeezing too hard,” or “Let me have a grab at him, hog!” Buck was cruel to Utica, calling her a whore and saying that the only thing worth a damn in her had been her virginity, and wasn’t it a shame how she had ruined that herself with a carrot when she was eleven? Then Mrs. Woodhull’s clear strong voice rose up, saying would you blame a vegetable for your own hungry sin?

“Come along, Will,” said Gob, who was suddenly next to him. How he had escaped from his family, Will could not tell. They slipped away from the pile as it degenerated into individual quarrels. The grandmother called Colonel Blood a corrupter and a schweinehund, and attacked him with a potato.

“I’m sorry,” Gob said, when they were outside in the twilight on Great Jones Street. “They’re a rough bunch.”

There was a spirit, a young fellow dressed up in the fetching uniform of a Zouave, who made a habit of staring at Will, then scribbling on a pad of paper the same size as the plate which Frenchy always carried with him. Will thought the soldier must be taking notes on his behavior, in order to tattle to whatever otherworldly ministry exists to register such transgressions. Will only discovered that the spirit was not taking notes, but drawing a picture, when he was finally shown the finished piece. “Who are you, anyhow?” Will demanded, because he did not like the portrait, in which he was naked, and possessed of an embarrassment of stiff, dripping organs of procreation. They stuck out from him like quills on a porcupine. In twenty arms he held a variety of bottles, each one containing, he was sure, some foul liquor. “Did I commission this insult?” Will asked and looked away from the picture. He would have liked never to look at it again, but the spirit would put it in his way, so he’d have no choice but to see it where it hung on a stage, or in the hospital wards, or on a Broadway streetlamp where thousands of people passed it in a day, but did not know it was there.

“It’s very warm in here,” said Miss Claflin. “Is it always so warm?” She had arrived unexpectedly, and now was in Will’s studio sitting for a carte de visite. He’d answered the door in his shirtsleeves because he’d thought she was Gob, come over for another load of negative plates. “I’m here for my portrait,” she’d said, as if he had invited her. He’d hurried to dress himself properly while she poked about the studio, choosing a setting for her portrait, just a plain chair in which she sat sideways.

“You mustn’t talk, Miss Claflin.”

“Call me Tennie,” she said. “I insist upon it, and I won’t tell you again.” She was wearing a heavy-looking yellow dress, with a dark red wrap of silk thrown over her shoulders, hiding her arms and her hands, and her hair was coiffed up formidably on her head like a great pair of ram’s horns. Her oval face was aglow with perspiration.

“Hold still your head, Miss Tennie, or else your face will be all a blur.” Will thought of Frenchy’s blond hospital boy, with his blurred, cursing mouth. Tennie held still, and stared unblinking at Will, so he felt not at all hidden behind the lens and under the hood. But she was oblivious to the spirits around her. So much for her claim that she too, saw them, Will thought. Sam and Lewy Greely and Jolly walked around her, all of them peering and gawking as if they’d never seen a pretty lady before. Frenchy stood close by the camera, scolding. Will exposed the negative, counting out fifteen seconds, then put the cap back on. “I’ll return,” he said, and left to develop the plate. He found he was breathless, waiting just the few moments as he poured the developer down the plate. Then her image was there, ghostly and reversed. He went up to the roof to make the print in the sun, then came back to the darkroom to tone and fix it. A half hour passed before she was represented to his satisfaction, as pretty and bold in the picture as she was in real life.

“I think you’ll be pleased,” he said as he came out of the darkroom. “I think,” he continued, but then he quite forgot what he was going to say. Tennie C. Claflin had taken off her clothes and sat dressed only in her hairdo, in the very same pose as before, with her head still stuck quite securely in the stand. Her clothes seemed to have melted off her like spun sugar in a hot rain. All the spirits had fled, except Jolly, who had retreated against a wall, where he turned his face towards the ceiling but his eyes towards the lady.

“It’s warm, Dr. Fie,” Ms. Claflin said. “It’s so terribly warm.”

“Do you remember your first time?” she asked him.

“No,” Will said, turning in the bed so she could not see his face. “Not really.” But he remembered it clearly. It was not three days after he’d finished the glass house. He’d been walking on Broadway, followed by spirits. It was early in the night, but the prostitutes were already swarming. It had always been his habit, when they gestured at him, or when they called out something rude about his size, to ignore them. But this time, when one waved him after her down Grand Street, he followed. “Are you lost?” she asked when he approached. She stood just beyond the reach of a streetlamp, so a little light fell on her dress and her neck and her hair, but none on her face.

“Probably,” Will said. His stomach was all knotted up, the way it had always been during a hot fight, and just like then he felt quite certain that he had no say in his actions. His feet were walking after this bad woman like his eye and his hand had conspired to shoot his enemy, and when he had her against a damp wall in an alley, it was as terrible and inevitable as having the life of a Reb. He raised her dress up over her head, and the delicate but filthy material caught on her snaggly teeth as she smiled at him.

“I was seven years old,” Tennie said excitedly.

“An early start,” Will said, glad she could not see the dismay on his face.

“Vicky started even earlier. I was in Pennsylvania. Mama and Papa had sent me off to live with relatives, because we were so poor. Aunt Sally’s fruit spoke to me from the cupboard. ‘We are for you!’ they said. ‘Come in and have us!’ There were some wormy apples on the table, so I asked, ‘Aunt, where have you hid all the good fruit?’ She called me her darling and said the apples were the best she had, but I walked to the cupboard and I showed her. It was my sister Thankful, still a little girl as she was when she died, who spoke in the voice of a peach and called to me from the cupboard. After that, I heard her and saw her always. Wasn’t it that way with you? Some spirit you loved sought you out, and then you saw others?”

“No,” said Will. “I saw them all at once.”

“Well,” she said. “Why should it be the same for everybody? Oh, there she is now! There’s my Thankful!”

“I don’t see her,” Will said.

“You wouldn’t. She is only for me and Vicky to see.”

“Does she speak?”

“Faintly. She is saying, ‘I heard you talking of me.’”

Tennie began to have a one-sided conversation, talking of a place called Homer and agreeing that the orchard there had the sweetest apples ever. As she spoke, she seemed to forget Will, though she had him clasped firmly in her arms. Her conversation became a sleepy mumble, until finally she fell quiet. Will felt her twitch a few times. He lay awake as spirits came to visit, a procession of them like shepherds and animals passing by the sacred crib, gazing down on him and his lady acquaintance and smiling. He thought the angel would come again to scold him. She never did arrive, but long after all the other spirits had gone, the boy with the trumpet remained, hunched up in a corner of the ceiling.

“Avaunt,” Will said, to no effect.

The boy shook his head and blinked slowly, and Will fell asleep with him still up there, staring down.

3

“ONE THOUSAND OF THE BEST MEN IN THE CITY,” SAID GOB, “and two thousand of the worst women.” He and Will were about to go into the Bal d’Opéra at the Academy of Music, an annual affair notorious for its licentiousness. It was January of 1870, a warm night in what had so far been a very mild winter. Will feared that Gob’s machine was changing the weather, making it inappropriate to the season. Weather-making would suit the thing — that was something as dramatic and as large as the machine itself. It seemed, certainly, that it ought to do something. And yet it was plain to Will that the machine did nothing.

“Prepare to enjoy yourself,” Gob told him as they walked across Fourteenth Street and joined the crowd at the entrance to the Academy of Music. There were people in costume waiting to get in, and a crowd who had gathered to gawk at them. Will and Gob were accosted by an old man, a filthy preacher. “Going to see the delightful whores!” the man shrieked. Will could not tell if he and Gob were being condemned or congratulated.

Gob shook his wand in the man’s face and said, “Indeed.” He and Will were dressed alike in jester’s costumes, with bells on their caps, wands, and shoes, and with half-masks that sported obscene long noses.

Inside the Academy there was every sort of costume, some of which strayed considerably from the French theme. Will and Gob were not the only jesters, though only they had obscene noses. Will could not count all the Sun Kings and Marie Antoinettes, one of whom carried her head under her arm. A high-collared cloak gave her the illusion of headlessness. When she approached, he could see her eyes peeking out from where a neck ought to have been.

“Go and tell that woman that her morals have come loose,” Will said, pointing randomly at a woman sitting in a man’s lap near a mammoth champagne fountain on the stage. She was dressed as a seminude ballerina, in a tutu that left the whole of her legs exposed. Jolly, the only ghost present, was staring at her.

“You can tell her yourself,” said Gob, and they walked down to the fountain. It was made in the shape of Notre Dame. Will marveled at it, at how the champagne ran down off the high towers to trickle into a very abbreviated Seine.

“To loose morals,” toasted Gob, as he and Will took their first glass of champagne.

“To Parisian carousing,” said Will. “Wasn’t it Mr. Jefferson who said a little debauchery every now and then is a good thing?”

“Actually, I think that was my aunt,” Gob said. He turned his head to point his long nose at a box over the stage, where a woman dressed as a shepherdess was standing with two more naked-legged ballet girls and two men in plain evening dress. “There is my mother,” he said, smiling. Usually he scowled at her, but tonight, Will knew, he was in a very happy mood. He thought the building was going very well, and did not seem to mind that the machine did no apparent work.

Up in the box, Mrs. Woodhull waved her crook at them. Gob bowed. Will raised his glass to her. “Shall we go up?” Gob asked. Will said he would follow in a moment. He looked around for Tennie, worrying, briefly and irrationally, that she might grow angry at him for ogling all the loose women. But she was not a jealous person. The idea that they might be true to one another was ridiculous to her. Will would have liked for them to be married in spirit or practice, if not in name, but she would have none of it, and anyhow whenever he tried to be faithful to her he failed. Gob’s view of the situation was simple. “She is too much, my friend,” he’d say. “You should give her up.”

Will approached the ballerina, who had been abandoned by her lover of the minute and was staring forlornly at Notre Dame.

“Mademoiselle,” he said. “Aren’t you an actress? Didn’t I see you in Mazeppa?”

“No,” she said, hurrying away from him. “I think you did not.” Will dipped his glass again and sat on the edge of the pool. He looked down at the bubbles clinging to the side of his glass, and it seemed to him that the way they let go and rushed up to burst at the surface must be like the motion of souls flying off of the earth. Jolly sat next to him, his head jerking this way and that.

“Not everyone has the good sense to appreciate a fool.” Will looked up and saw Tennie struggling under a gargantuan wig, fully four feet high, studded with boats and dolphins and, high above all, an angry golden sun face. “Do you like my coiffure?” she asked him.

“It’s large,” said Will. She smiled, cracking her pancake makeup. She wore a black silk mask over her eyes. She lifted it up briefly to wink at him and whisper, “It’s me, Tennie C.”

“I thought you were Mrs. Astor.”

“This wig will snap my neck, soon, and then my good time at the ball will be ruined. Well, I did not come here anyway to enjoy myself.”

“Didn’t you?”

“No,” she said. “I came tonight to observe. Vicky is going to write an article for Mr. Bennett and I am going to help. We will expose all these panting dignitaries who think a mask is shelter for hypocrisy.”

“Are there famous people here?”

“Oh yes.” She put her hands up a moment to adjust her wig. “But come with me, I need to steady my coif.” She walked over to a wall and leaned her head back against it. “There,” she said, taking the glass that Will offered. “Thank you. See over there? That Cardinal Richelieu is Mr. Bowen, of Brooklyn. And there, the musketeer who licks his lips so often, that is Mr. Fisk.”

“Is Mr. Whitman here?” Will asked.

Whitman was Gob’s friend. Gob had a plan for him. He’d use him as a battery in his machine, a horrifying notion, at first, to Will, though Gob was unperturbed by it. When Will suggested that it might be wrong to use Mr. Whitman so, Gob looked confused for the first time since Will had known him. “I don’t understand,” he’d said.

“Mr. Whitman certainly is not here,” she said. It was clear to Will that she admired the poet. “He would not come to a place like this. Are you an admirer or a detractor?”

“A detractor, I think. He is a fool who goes about in a costume and pollutes our literature with ceaseless exclamations.” It gave Will pleasure to insult the man, because he disliked the very notion of him. How could someone so thoroughly silly be so vital to the machine? Will had come to know that he was not himself a genius — not someone like Gob who could intuit all the possibilities of matter — but merely a hard worker, and he resented people like Mr. Whitman who claimed to approximate the divine function of creation when all they really did was take notes on the fevered wanderings of their undisciplined minds.

“I suppose there is no solidarity among fools,” Tennie said tartly. She nodded at a headless Marie Antoinette, who walked by just then and waved at them. “That was my friend Mrs. Wabash. And there is Madame Restell. The ball is made officially wicked by her presence.” Will looked at the pudgy little queen she indicated, wondering if it really was Madame Restell, the abortionist of Fifth Avenue. She raised an eyebrow at him as she passed.

“Anyhow,” Tennie said, “I must return to my work. You are charming but not famous, and I am already familiar with your vices. There’s Mr. Challis, the broker — I’ll follow him.” She stepped away from the wall, swaying under her wig. “Those antique French ladies, what necks they must have had!” She handed him her glass and went in pursuit of Mr. Challis, who was watering himself at the fountain. Will watched her strike up a conversation with him. She touched his arm and leaned on him. She spoke something directly into his ear that made him burst out laughing, so loud Will could hear it even at a distance.

On the floor, people were dancing, throwing themselves around with wild abandon. Jolly was among them, his eyes closed and his head thrown back rapturously, dancing unpartnered, unseen and untouched by the living. Sam had joined him. He beckoned to Will, smiling — he had become more friendly as work on the machine progressed. Now they were close, or at least he stood close sometimes, often just inches away. Will figured it a reward for his untiring work on the machine. He watched them for a little while. Their beckoning was more seductive than the flashing legs of the ballerinas. “They command you, don’t they?” Gob had asked once. Will hadn’t answered right away, but he had thought, Shouldn’t they? He was still a physician and a photographer, but though he still labored at these professions, they were no longer his work.

Days later, he’d answered Gob’s question. They sat close together at his long table, both of them eating directly from the same roast chicken. Gob said, “What will we eat, after we are successful? If cutting off the chicken’s head only makes it uncomfortable, then what are you left with for dinner? Cabbages?” Will put down his fork and knife and drew patterns on the table with his greasy finger.

“I think they command us all,” he said after a while.

Wheel, lever, pulley, wedge, screw — all through winter, Will mastered simple machines. Gob would present him with one and then demand that he describe its properties mathematically, and after a few months of Gob’s persistent tutelage, Will was able to build a machine of his own. Nothing like Gob’s engine, it was just a humble plumping mill.

One evening Will arrived in the workshop to find a gift of lumber stacked on the stone floor. From the pile he chose a pole, a slim birch trunk with the bark still on it. To one end of the pole he attached an ironwood mallet, to the other an oak water box. He then drilled a hole in the middle of the pole, and slipped a heavy dowel through. Will’s machine was a peculiar-looking thing — it might have been the weapon of some giant hairy god who lived in the woods, worshiped by animals and trees.

Back in Onondaga County, Will would have set his plumping mill up where it could catch the spray off the waterwheel that turned his father’s gristmill. As this was New York City, he set it up on Gob’s roof between two blocks of wood, and poured the water himself from a pitcher so big even he had to lift it with both hands.

Will filled the box. The weight of the water lifted the hammer higher and higher, until the angle was such that the water ran out of the open-backed box. Now the hammer fell with a dull thud against the snow-covered roof. It was hardly a glorious sound, but Will felt a glorious sort of joy when it worked. He filled it repeatedly, watching it rise and fall for hours, till the eastern sky began to lighten and he could better appreciate the handiwork of his little mill. He’d neglected to put a pestle under it. It pounded no grain into flour. Instead it had broken a hole in the snow. Will considered the black hole and imagined Sam or Jolly climbing out of it, and no sooner had he done so but there they were, smiling at him and silently praising his little contrivance. It seemed barbaric compared to the complex and mysterious thing in the room below him, yet they bowed to it all the same. Will kept filling the box, so the plumping mill, with its up-and-down motion, seemed to return their courtesy.

Sam came and stood next him, and leaned his head closer and closer to Will’s until they were touching, and when they touched Will became lost in the pleasant memory of standing with Sam when they were little boys, gazing down into the well behind their house. The sun shone full down to the water that particular noon, and they could see the snakes there at the bottom, twisting and curling over each other. “Ain’t it grand, Will?” his brother had asked, and they’d stood watching until the shadows returned to cover the water once again.

In March of 1870, Will and Gob watched as the first caisson for the great bridge was launched into the East River from a Brooklyn shipyard. Gob was fascinated by the bridge. The late Mr. Roebling had been one of his heroes — he had a little picture of his bridge over the Ohio, which he sighed over sometimes as if it were the portrait of a pretty girl — and he had exchanged letters with the junior Roebling, who’d taken over the work of building the bridge after his father died. Gob would go on about the principal of the caissons and how it related to their own work. The caisson was a giant house that sank down as men dug out its floor, falling slowly through silt and mud and bedrock until it rested beneath the earth, an empty coffin upon which the great bridge would stand its foot. Gob spoke of a caisson of the spirit, built of discipline and grief and despair, in which he and Will would sink down until they rested in the lightless depths of their own souls. Inspiration and success would proceed from that deep place, Gob said. To Will, this made a vague sort of sense, and he nodded, the way he always did whenever Gob made such pronouncements. Will could understand, certainly, that their work was not the work of contented or happy men.

The caisson was fascinating, regardless of whatever philosophy Gob attached to it. It was so very large. Will knew its dimensions because Gob had repeated them endlessly — one hundred and sixty-eight feet long by one hundred and twenty feet wide, twenty feet high and three thousand tons heavy. Yet it seemed much larger, and the sloping walls gave it an Egyptian feel, as if it might be the base of a pyramid or a pedestal for a sphinx. The roof was covered with air pumps and tackle and various other pieces of machinery which Will could not recognize. “Isn’t it beautiful?” Gob asked. There was something childish in the way he hopped restlessly from foot to foot, waiting among the crowd of thousands for the launch, which went off without a hitch. The thing fell gracefully down to the water.

“There it goes,” Will said, holding his belly because he felt a lurch when the last block was knocked away and, when the thing started to fall, he had a feeling in his belly as if he, not the caisson, were falling, urged along by his fantastic mass into the gray river. Gob cheered with the rest of the crowd, shouting himself hoarse. Will cheered, too, very awkwardly at first, because he could not even remember the last time he had raised his voice this way. He emitted a few cracked, coughing yawps, and these seemed to clear the way in him for something smoother and more musical, a high, enthusiastic yodel that brought to mind the terrific hollering that the Rebs used to do. Will yelled louder and louder, until it was just he and Gob screaming in the now quiet crowd, until, like Gob, he’d used up his voice.

Will wrote in his casebook: He has had twenty-five to thirty discharges from his bowels in the past twenty-four hours. He was sitting at the bedside of a cholera patient, a fifteen-year-old boy whose fat cheeks made him look even younger than he was. Will put down his pencil and reached out to push the sleeping boy’s sweat-matted hair away from his eyes. He was sure that the boy would die.

That spring, Will had among others under his care a consumptive longshoreman, a cigar maker with intermittent fever, a clerk with pneumonia, a syphilitic sailor, a washerwoman with pleurisy, a shopgirl with plumbism from her makeup, a decayed actor who’d attempted suicide by hammering a nail into his head. All these patients died, despite Will’s sincere good intentions, his knowledge, his skill, and his careful watching. He’d sit with those who had no family to attend their death, thinking that in watching them take their last breaths some deeper knowledge would be revealed to him, something that might help in the construction of Gob’s machine. He learned the pattern: the limbs would cool, and the underside of the body would darken; patients would become sleepy and confused, often mistaking Will for someone they loved, reaching out their weakening hands to caress his face; their breathing would become shallow, and thick spit would pool in the back of their throat, so each breath, when it came, rasped and rattled; at the very end the breathing would cease and the heart would stop, and they would void their bladder and their bowels, a final gesture of disrespect for the world that they were leaving. He learned the pattern, but not the secret. He learned nothing exceptional, except how it was impossible that a person should live and breathe and be one moment the repository of an undying soul, and the next be just a body, just cooling flesh.

Will had gone to the second medical division at Bellevue. Gob had grown bored with the ambulance service, and quit at the end of ‘69. He had a gaggle of patients that he had inherited from Dr. Oetker, and, when he was not at work on the machine, he kept himself occupied with them. These wealthy men and women were never really sick, just obsessed with their bowels or the dimming luster of their hair. Will didn’t understand why Gob bothered with them.

The cholera boy died like the others, alone but for Will. Gob’s machine was already a success in one respect — working on it staved off Will’s fits. It blunted his empathy, as if work on the salvation of the sick and the dying made it easier for him to shake off their suffering. But when the work went poorly, as it had lately, the fits returned. He had one on account of the cholera boy. As he sank into oblivion, rattling and crying out with fear despite Will’s attempts to soothe him, Will sank down, too. His guts cramped up and he let out a moan, and as the boy died Will shook and drooled and bit his own cheek.

He woke with his head in the lap of a drunken nurse. He looked to where the boy lay in his bed, his mouth and eyes both slightly open.

“Have a little sip, sir,” the nurse said, bringing a flask to his lips. “It will help you to recover.” He sat up and stood away from her, scowling, taking the flask and telling her to get to work cleaning the boy’s body. Will looked around the room for his spirit, but it wasn’t there. To be haunted immediately would have been unprecedented. Will never saw them so fresh, but always a period of weeks would pass before they appeared to him, former patients who accused him with expressions of betrayal, as if they were furious he had not saved them. “It takes a little while,” Tennie told him, “for them to learn to come back. It is not easy for them.”

When Will left Bellevue that evening it was to go to Number 15 East Thirty-eighth Street, Tennie’s new address since earlier in the year. Mrs. Woodhull had rented a mansion with some of the new fortune she’d gathered in the stock market. As he walked he checked intermittently over his shoulder, still afraid the cholera boy might appear. The boy was never there when he looked, but other spirits followed, Jolly and Sam and the rest, stretched out behind him in a line. He went twice about a streetlamp, hopped over garbage on the sidewalk, crouched low to duck under a horse who blocked his way as he crossed the street, and every spirit walked, hopped, and ducked precisely as he did, as if he blazed the only trail they could take in the world.

As he turned off of Fifth Avenue he could see Tennie, sitting in her window as if she were still living in Great Jones Street. “Darling!” she called out as the spirits filed up behind him, “I’ve been waiting for you!”

Will’s machines were always loosely adjusted and ill-controlled. He fixed Gob’s aeolipile, but when he fired it up it wobbled as it spun, and instead of making a clean whistling hiss it screamed like a lovelorn cat. Still, he continued to learn and to build. Gob mostly praised his efforts, though he could be harsh: of an arc lamp that Will assembled from two pieces of charcoal and a powerful voltaic battery, Gob said dismissively, “It makes more heat than light.”

Gob’s machine, meanwhile, was looking more and more like a person. They’d undone the thing it was before, removing the concretions of years until they uncovered something that looked like an iron-and-glass lamb, and then they undid that, too, because Gob declared it simply wrong, an immature form suited to a lesser task than abolishing death. Now it had glass ribs and a pair of round copper hips. It stood on legs as skinny as a bird’s, made of steel and wrapped around tightly with copper and gold wire. All the bones Gob had brought from a trip to Washington were carved into gears, or fused into struts. Inside the glass ribs was a second set of bone ribs, made from leg bones and neck bones and pieces of shattered pelvis. When they worked, Gob wore a black hat, fetched on the same Washington trip. He claimed it had belonged once to Abraham Lincoln, and said that he felt inspired when he put it on.

The variety of surfaces, the little glass boxes filled with tiny gears of gold and platinum and iron and steel, the looping wires and cables that spread out like wings behind it, the umbrella of picture negatives that sheltered it from the glare of the gaselier — these all made the machine fascinating to look at, but they did not make it functional. “It’s not finished,” Gob said once as they worked, when Will raised the issue of failure. “But it will be finished. My friend, you are impatient like the dead. I am never glad I cannot see them or hear them, but I know they must carp like fishwives, clamoring for the work to be done, and for the walls to fall. But we go as we must, and no other way. You are with me, and Walt is with me, and we will not fail.”

“The Kosmos,” Will said, looking at the machine and wondering what Mr. Whitman’s place in it might possibly be. Would he hold a cable in his hand and pass his vital energy along to waken the thing? Would he read his ridiculous poetry at it, and rouse it into a fury at the corruption of verse? He imagined the machine raising its arms to smash the man.

“Yes,” Gob said, with a dreamy look on his face. “The Kosmos.” Will turned his attention to the splicing of wire. It was something he enjoyed, weaving together the metal, strand to strand. Of the Washington booty, he liked best the piece from the Atlantic Cable. He thought it both pretty and perfect: the seven copper wires that formed the actual conductor, the insulating wrappings of thread soaked in pitch and tallow, the layers of gutta-percha, and finally the surrounding, protective coat of hard mail made from twisted steel wire. Once, before they’d worked it into the machine, he had held one end while Sam put his hand around the other, but Will had felt nothing and heard nothing.

“You’ll fail,” was what the angel said, during her rare and brief visits. And she repeated her question: “Why do you participate in abomination?” He had gathered, eventually, that by “abomination” she did not mean his dalliances on Greene Street. She meant the machine. “Do you think God is against our work?” he’d asked Gob after one of her visits. “He is indifferent,” was the reply. When Will told about the angel, he thought Gob might laugh at him and say that though spirits walked all around us on the earth, there was never any such thing as an angel. But Gob had only nodded and said, as if it were the most ordinary and sensible of statements, “Oh yes. The angels—they’re very much against us.”

“What do you know of angels?” Will asked Tennie. They were in her room on a hot night in July, nestled in what she called her Turkish corner. She had a bed fit for a princess, but sometimes she preferred to sleep here, where she’d hung a silk tent from the ceiling. Inside, she spread soft carpets and brocade pillows on the floor. She set two scimitars on the wall, bejungled the interior with rubber plants and ferns, and flanked the entrance to the tent with two squat plaster pillars, upon which two oil lamps burned and smoked.

“I saw them when I was small,” Tennie said, “but never since.” She’d reached her hand into a fern and was lazily waving its leaves back and forth, generating a little breeze. “Vicky saw one, once. I was just a year old, and almost died from diphtheria. Vicky saw an angel come down and wrap me in its wings.”

“Trying to smother you? Were they horrible wings?”

“Certainly not. It was a healing touch. I was restored by it. Everyone but Vicky had given me up for dead.” She reached for a glass of water and took a drink. “I saw Mr. Nathan,” she said. “Have you seen him? He doesn’t look happy. I think he wants justice for his murder. You know, I don’t think I’d care much what happened to my killer, after the fact. I think my concerns would be less mundane.” She took another drink of water. Will put his hand high on her belly, just under her ribs, imagining, as he sometimes did, that he could see through her skin to watch the functioning of her organs, and see her stomach writhing in appreciation at the cool drink. She talked about her day. He wasn’t ever sure what exactly she did with her time, but he knew she was always busy with brokerage business or paper business. In her room she had a little desk where she composed articles for the paper she and her sister had launched in May. Once, when she was writing, he asked her, somewhat peevishly, if she was exposing Mr. Challis. “Mr. Who?” she replied.

He put his hands all over her, feeling her liver as it slipped past his hand when she breathed in deeply, and calling out, as he touched them, “Lungs, kidneys, spleen.”

Tennie laughed, saying her spleen was here and not there, moving his hand. She claimed to be intimately familiar with her inner workings. It was part of her talent as a medical clairvoyant and a magnetic healer, to know her own body so well. “Yes, yes,” she said, “put your hands on me, and I will put mine on you.” She reached up to his chest and his back, as if trying to capture his heart between her hands.

“The telegraph, too, has a body and a soul,” Gob said. Will was making Daniell batteries, pouring an acidulated solution of copper sulfate into a copper cell and putting a porous cup inside it. Inside the cup went a cylinder of zinc, surrounded by a weak acid. The whole thing was enclosed within a glass jar. The assembly was delicate and laborious, and he’d burned holes through half his shirts, being careless with the acid. But Will liked the work. He thought the batteries were elegant, with their cups within cups within cups. He could spend whole days making them, and he often did, so they had hundreds by the end of summer.

“You cannot see the vital principle that animates it,” Gob said, staring at a stock ticker that had been set in his machine before they’d remade it. He’d taken the ticker all apart and half-reassembled it. He was in a mood, mourning the fact that he could not see spirits in general and his brother in particular, when he devoted his life to them, and when a person like his mother could see them, and hear them, even, it seemed, have tea with them. Will thought of his own mother’s lamenting.

“It won’t bring them back,” Will said, “to merely complain.”

“But it will,” Gob said. “Don’t you understand? What’s grief if not a profound complaint? It’s what the engine will do; it will complain. It will grieve with mechanical efficiency and mechanical strength. It will grieve for my brother and for your brother and for the six hundred thousand dead of the war. It will grieve for all the dead of history, and all the dead of the future. Man’s grief does nothing to bring them back, but just as man’s hands cannot move mountains, but man’s machines can, our machine will grieve away the boundaries between this world and the next. And then, sure as the rails run to California, the way will be open.”

Will kept working, kept his eyes on the battery and his attention on the task of filling the little porous cup with acid. But though he didn’t look at Gob, he knew how his face must be animated with pride and anger and sadness — it was the look he got when he made grand statements about their work. It was a difference between them, that Gob liked to talk so much where Will preferred simply to work. And that talkiness was part of the reason, Will figured, for Gob’s cleaving to Mr. Whitman.

Later, Gob put the ticker back together completely and then worked it again into the machine — it sat in the place where a navel would on a person. Then he went downstairs to read. Will was still patiently assembling batteries fifteen hours after he began. It was then the angel paid him another visit. She stayed awhile this time, a full five minutes. Will ignored her, as had become his custom. But before she left, Will had looked up to see her pointing with fingers and wings at the engine. “God hath not wrought this,” she said.

Will considered a fresco on Mrs. Woodhull’s parlor ceiling: it depicted Aphrodite surrounded by her mortal and immortal loves. They were clothed, but the goddess had exposed herself fully, and any guest who cared to stretch back his neck could gaze on her nakedness. Tennie was going on about Mr. Whitman. She got overexcited on his behalf whenever he was nearby. Gob had brought him to a party given in September of 1870 by Mrs. Woodhull in honor of Steven Pearl Andrews and his massive brain. Mr. Whitman was walking around the room with his hostess, having just left, thank goodness, Will’s company and Tennie’s, and still she went on about him.

“I had a vision,” she said, “in which he grew out of the ground like some wholesome weed. He was a green man, with daisies and bluebirds in his hair. Little animals came out of the forest to play about his feet.”

Will rubbed his chest where Tennie had given him a little shock. It hadn’t hurt, but it was always a surprise, when she did it. He wanted her to do it again.

“Let’s go upstairs,” he said. “I’m tired of this party.”

“Already? Mr. Andrews hasn’t even arrived.”

“Let’s go away,” he said. “Let’s go away tonight on a journey. Have you been to Canada? It’s a foreign country, you know.”

“I’d heard,” she said, and gave him a look that he knew too well. It said, I’m bored with you.

“Do you see how he walks?” she asked, staring after Whitman. “Like a bear, heavy and shambling and careless.”

“He is a magnificent creature,” Will said hollowly. “He is a kosmos.” He thought of Gob. They’d argued, earlier, because Will had made disparaging remarks about Whitman. Will had said this whole kosmos business seemed to him a senseless honor and an unearned distinction. “Who named him Kosmos, anyhow?” Will had asked. “Was it his cat? Is he also the Marquis of Carrabas?” Now, Gob was nowhere to be seen.

“I know you hate Mr. Whitman,” Tennie said, and went away in search of punch. He watched her go, leaning to speak a word or two into the ears of various men as she passed them. Mr. Challis, the licentious broker, was not at that party, yet Will found his thoughts drawn towards the man and colored with jealousy. When he was with her, when he came half awake in the night and she was wrapped all around him, when her hair lay heavy on his face and the very air he breathed was flavored by her, then he got a feeling that she surrounded him utterly, and this was a notion that comforted him and agitated him. He would think of her as a beautiful house, one entirely unlike Gob’s house, a place without secret basements where bones hung in chains from the ceiling and swayed and clanked in sourceless breezes. In his mind, he would go from room to room, each one stuffed with bright trinkets, and find way up top a machine whose purpose was the manufacture of delight. It was good to wander there, to look at her machine and listen to its noise, which was the noise of her snoring, chortling breath. Yet inevitably he encountered other men as he wandered in the rooms, always there were others who tended her machine, men who were strangers to him, who, when he opened a door and surprised them where they lounged in the supremely comfortable furniture, peered at him and asked, “Who are you?”

“Are you sleeping, Dr. Fie?” asked a lady who had come up and stood silently next to him. Will thought it was Mrs. Woodhull, but when he opened his eyes he saw that it was Miss Trufant, a girl who was her secretary and aide-de-camp in her war of reform. She was dressed up like her mistress in a skirt and a masculine coat.

“No, I’m quite awake,” he said.

“Mr. Andrews will stimulate you, if you are sleepy. I think he must be the most intelligent man in the world.”

“I think that person is Dr. Woodhull,” said Will, because he’d promised Gob he’d say flattering things about him in her presence. Gob had a giggly, schoolgirlish affection for this small, dark person. “What do you think of her?” Gob would ask over and over. “Do you think she is pretty?”

“I think you are besotted with that fellow,” she said. “Tell me, Dr. Fie, does Dr. Woodhull keep the stars in his pocket? Can he bring down the moon to give you as a good-evening present?” She smiled.

“Don’t you admire him, too?”

“Oh, I am indifferent to him. But I think two persons as devoted as you two should marry at the earliest convenience.” She folded her hands in front of her. Will looked down at them, noticing how they had a particular quality of loveliness — he thought how it must be difficult to make two things so perfect and small. She put them behind her back. “I said that in jest, Dr. Fie. But now I think I have offended you.”

“Not at all,” he said, but she was blushing, and she turned the conversation to the subject of the Fourteenth Amendment and its bearing on woman suffrage, something about which Will knew nothing at all. Very soon, she excused herself, saying she had to seek out Mr. Butler. “Yes,” he’d tell Gob later, as he always did, “she’s very pretty.”

Mr. Whitman got ill standing in the rain watching the funeral procession of Admiral Farragut. Will, when Gob brought him in to consult, diagnosed pneumonia, because Whitman’s lungs were wet as sponges. The patient insisted it was an old sickness contracted during his time in the Washington hospitals, and that the rain had weakened him and made him susceptible. He asked to be bled, because that always improved him when this illness was on him. Gob gave him an elixir and put him in one of the huge beds at Number 1 East Fifty-third Street, in a room that hadn’t been opened in years. Whitman got sicker under their care, feverish and delirious, calling out in lament for David Farragut, and then for a variety of persons. He mumbled names: John, Stephen, Elijah, Hank, Hank, Hank. “Dr. Woodhull,” he moaned. “How is my fever-boy?” Even Will tried to comfort him, putting his big hand on Whitman’s hot sweating head and saying, “Hush, sir.”

Gob bled him over Will’s objections. It was a surprise to Will, because Gob had always protested that bleeding a patient was only ever as helpful as biting him. “It’s what he wants,” Gob said, another surprise, because it was a fundamental rule of doctoring that the patient’s wishes were generally irrelevant to his care. Gob wielded a scarificator like a practiced leech, and bled his patient into a white porcelain bowl. Will half expected the man to bleed light or perfumed air, but it was ordinary red blood that seeped out of his veins. When he was done, Gob let Will do the bandaging while he transferred the blood to a green glass flask, and added a powder which he claimed would keep it from clotting up. “Yes,” he said, swirling the blood in the flask, “this will certainly be useful.”

As winter came, Gob kept saying they were nearly done building, but Will never believed him. It didn’t seem grand enough, the thing they’d made over these two years. It wasn’t much bigger than Will himself, and though it was complex and strange-looking beyond description, still it did not seem strange or complex enough. So he kept protesting, “It’s not enough.”

“Enough of what?” Gob would say.

“Of … what it is.”

Gob would laugh, and go back to his tinkering. It looked like a fashionable angel now, because the masses of cable looked like wings, and because the body of the thing flared out in the back like a bustle. Its arms held aloft a great empty silver bowl, just under the canopy of negative plates. Gob had adjusted his gaselier to burn acetylene. The gas, which they made themselves from water and calcium carbide, gave off an acrid, garlicky odor. When lit, the gaselier threw off painfully bright light that fell through the plates, and the images were caught up and focused into the bowl by means of lenses hung on wire so thin they seemed to float like bubbles below the picture negatives. “What goes in the bowl?” Will asked repeatedly, but Gob said he didn’t yet know. He said he’d dreamed the bowl, but not its contents.

Gob found the answer in December. Though there were hundreds of batteries already scattered around the room, Will made more, and he had been making them all night when Gob burst into the workroom at dawn, his face still puffy and creased from sleeping, to declare that he had at long last learned what went into the bowl.

That night they went to dinner at Madame Restell’s. “She’s been asking me to dinner for years,” Gob said, just before they walked the two blocks down Fifth Avenue to his neighbor’s house, “but I have always declined. She was my master’s good friend, and like an aunt to me, you know, yet I have neglected her. I don’t regret it — I have aunts enough as it is, and they cause me sufficient distress, thank you. Anyhow, I sent her a message this morning, and the reply came immediately. So perhaps I am forgiven.”

Madame Restell was delighted to see Gob. “How you’ve grown!” she said. At dinner she ignored Will to ask Gob about his life. He told her about his work at Bellevue, but failed to mention his mother, or, of course, the machine. He said he and his friend Dr. Fie were writing a textbook of anatomy, that their specimens had been destroyed in an unfortunate fire, that they had a publishing deadline and only blank pages where they should have drawings of fetal anatomy. A delicate favor, he admitted, but could she possibly accommodate him?

“Such a young man,” she said, “and already at work on a book! Oh, you will be distinguished just like your uncle. How he would be proud!” Of course she would help, she said. She partook heavily of the sweet wine she kept at her table, and grew tearful when she talked of Gob’s old teacher. “Sometimes I pass by the house, and I find myself climbing the steps, and only when I am standing at the door, about to ring, do I remember that he is gone. Oh, he was taken in his prime!”

“But Auntie,” said Gob. “You should ring the bell. You certainly should.” When she embraced him, he looked at Will over her shoulder and rolled his eyes.

After dinner, she took them downstairs into her basement office. They did not loiter in the finely appointed rooms where she received clients or performed procedures, but quickly passed into an unfinished back room, and went past rack after rack of dusty wine bottles to a group of barrels set aside in a little corral. A single gas jet was burning low on the damp wall.

“Here we are,” she said. “How many do you require?”

“Just one,” said Gob. She had pushed back the sleeves of her dress and taken a pair of tongs from where they hung on the wall. She lifted the top off a barrel marked Pork—that was to fool the postal authorities when she shipped out specimens to medical schools all over the country, charging, as she did, outrageous prices.

“Just one? I have them to spare. Let me give you two or three. Or let me give you four. It is no imposition, my dear.”

“Only one, thank you. Just whichever is freshest.”

“Ah, that would be young Mr. Tilton. Or rather, little Mr. Beecher.” She replaced the barrel’s lid and went to another, and as she fished out the abortus from the brine she gave its history. It was not her habit to betray confidences, but she was drunk now, and overcome with nostalgia for her old friend and his ward, so she talked freely of how she had helped Mrs. Tilton and Mr. Beecher eject from the world the consequence of their love. Will caught a glimpse of glistening pink flesh as she put the boy into a plain gray hatbox. She looked in for a moment before she put the top on. “A beautiful specimen,” she said. “Almost whole. And I know you will draw him beautifully. He will live on in that way, at least. Come upstairs. I’ll wrap him for you.”

Walking home with the hatbox wrapped up neatly in white paper like a purchase from Stewart’s, Gob told Will how in his dream his mother had summoned him to her house on Thirty-eighth Street. She received him in the conservatory, where she sat under a little tree that still had its autumn colors, though it was winter in the dream as it was winter in the world. She sat for a while, not speaking, and Gob sat next to her silently while the little tree dropped its brilliant leaves between them.

“This is a dream,” she said, suddenly and matter-of-factly. Then she reached under the bench and brought up what Gob thought at first was a jar of his grandmother’s marmalade — it was red and yellow, the very same shades as the settling leaves of the tree, and it was in just the kind of jar Anna used for her preserves. But when he looked closer at it he saw that it was a little fetus, and he knew it had been canned fresh out of his mother’s womb. “Here,” she said, “is your brother. This is your brother, come back to us at last.” He’d reached to take the jar from her, because he was overwhelmed with the feeling that he must take it and cherish it always, but in his haste he dropped it. It cracked on the bench, and the unfinished child fell out in a burst of orange-and-red liquid. It rolled among the fallen leaves, where it kicked and squalled.

From out of that dream, Gob woke understanding what they had been missing all these months. The machine required flesh and it required blood. Blood would catalyze the return, and Gob knew that it was the purpose of the machine to harness the energies of loss and grief and bring them to bear on the silver bowl, to call back a spirit — his brother’s — and see it installed in flesh. And he knew that once this was accomplished, the walls between the dead and the living would become weak and soft, because the law that declared there was no return from death would be broken, and this law was the foundation of the walls that kept the dead out of the world. The machine would reach through the weakened wall and pluck them, one by one, back into life.

“It’s so simple,” he said. “Don’t you think?”

Will said nothing. He only held the box and kept walking, trying to ignore the reek of blood and pickles that rose from it.

Gob pored every day over heavy books out of the library — books that looked hundreds of years old and were not in any language that Will could recognize, let alone read. Gob would exclaim every now and then as he read, while Will played with the engine, testing the light or making adjustments to the picture negatives, rearranging them by theme — belly wound, amputation, advanced decay. He put the fetus, as Gob directed him, in a glass jar full of brine, and sometimes he would sit and watch it, expecting it to move an arm, or swing its head to look at him.

They began one evening in late December, a few weeks after their visit to Madame Restell. Gob put on Mr. Lincoln’s hat and surrounded the engine with symbols and words drawn with colored sand on the stone floor between the batteries. Some he copied from the old masters he’d studied, some were his own creations. At midnight, he emptied the child from the jar to the bowl. Then he walked around the machine, stepping over the wires and glass string that led in from the outlying elements — boxes and batteries and pieces of mirror. He walked around once for every year of his brother’s life on earth, then walked back the other way once for every year that he had been dead. He poured out the blood from the green bottle into the bowl, and immediately it began to spin and sing. When Gob signaled to him, Will threw a switch to activate an arc lamp — they’d given up on acetylene, too, as not sufficiently bright, so now, beneath the ornate gas chandelier, they’d installed an electric light. It sparked up and glared above the negatives, throwing images into the bowl and down onto Gob.

Will ran all over the room, ducking under wires and jumping over batteries, stoking boilers, opening valves, and pulling levers. A steam engine roared and puffed and moved its pistons, and motion was fed along from gear to gear. Will had thought he understood at least the physical workings of the thing, how the steam became motion, how each gear turned another, how the force of movement was amplified or changed in direction. But, having thrown all the switches and opened all the valves, he stood panting against the wall near the door, feeling that he understood nothing. It had never shivered and hummed like this before, though they’d fed it with the batteries and the steam engine. It had never made the house shake, or made him dizzy with all its stationary whirling. Every part of it seemed to be in motion. The glass gears and the bone gears and the iron gears were spinning, the glass and copper ribs were twisting in their sockets, the cable wings seemed to be undulating slowly. He didn’t know how it made the bowl sing and spin, or how it summoned spirits. They crowded into the room, coming in by tens and twenties whenever Will blinked against the glare from the lamp. The light was so bright he thought it must shine through the spirits, but in fact it made them look more real, heavier and paler. It made them look more real, but not more alive. They looked waxy, like exquisitely preserved corpses. Yet they smiled like living people. Their mouths were moving and their faces were animated with what could only be ecstasy or great pain. All Will’s dead were there, joined by dozens of strangers, and by the little tatterdemalion angel, who floated in a corner and watched with a serious expression on his face.

Gob fell to his knees before the engine, threw out his arms, and gazed into the light, crying out what seemed to Will to be the only appropriate magic words. “Come back!” he shouted, again and again, till he was hoarse from it. “Come back, Tomo. Come back and be alive.” Will thought he saw something rising from the bowl, a shadow that grew in the middle of the light. It got bigger and bigger — it was definitely the shape of a boy, who raised his hands up to press against a negative, and in doing so, cracked it. The light went out suddenly, shattering like a rocket’s burst into tiny sparks that dwindled and were gone. Cables fell out from their sockets and wove like cobras, throwing sparks and hissing before they fell dead to the floor. Then it was utterly dark in the room.

The noise of the bowl hung a moment longer in the air and then it, too, was gone. Finally, the bowl fell from the top of the machine, and something landed in front of Gob with a huff. The bowl rolled away in the darkness and rang once when it hit a battery. Will held his breath and heard the noise of another person — it was certainly not Gob — breathing in the dark. He groped in front of him, but felt nothing except the glass battery jars. They were so cold they burned his skin.

“Hello?” Will said tentatively.

“Happy birthday,” came the voice, lilting and lisping, the voice of a child.

Will scrambled back to the wall and turned up the gaselier. There was a boy on the floor before Gob. He looked to be about five years old, had long curly brown hair and shining black eyes, and he was covered in blood, great smears of it against very pale flesh that striped him like a barber’s pole. The boy stood up, shading his eyes from the light, and stared defiantly at Gob, who stared back incredulously and said, “You are not my brother.”

“My name is Pickie Beecher,” the boy said. “I come before.”

It fell to Will to clothe and feed the boy. Gob, in the first few days after the birth, had retreated to his room, where he sat on his haunches in the stone circle and rocked back and forth, humming. He wouldn’t speak to Will, or to the boy. Spirits clustered around him, looking concerned, and around the boy, on whom they doted silently. Pickie Beecher mostly ignored them, though sometimes he might seem to follow one in particular with his eyes.

Will wasn’t sure what to do with the boy, who ran around the workshop, naked and bloody, looking at the machine and aping Gob’s words. “It is not my brother,” he said over and over. Will took him to the kitchen, because it seemed sensible to feed him. Pickie Beecher was not interested in vegetables, or even in cakes or pies. He liked red meat. Gob kept his larder very well stocked, though he generally did not eat very much or very often. There were steaks in the icebox. When Pickie Beecher saw them, he grabbed them up and rubbed them like kittens against his cheek. Then he ran under a table and ate them up in gobbling bites. “Do you like that?” Will said.

“My name is Pickie Beecher,” was the reply. “I come before.”

Pickie wanted jewels. “For my brother,” he said. Will brought him to Stewart’s to get outfitted for clothes. The pear-shaped clerk tried to be helpful, but seemed to have difficulty remembering that Pickie Beecher was there. “I wish to purchase clothing for the boy,” Will told him.

“Very well,” said the clerk. “For which boy?”

“This one,” Will said, pointing squarely at Pickie Beecher.

“Of course!” The clerk took a little step back, and quivered a little, as if suppressing an urge to flee. Will developed a theory: people sensed in Pickie Beecher something so unnatural and abominable that they were inclined to pretend he was not there at all, and once, reluctantly, they did notice him, he activated an instinct to run away. Will learned that Pickie Beecher could veil that horrible quality, but he let it shine forth when he was irritated.

The clerk was very gracious. He apologized profusely whenever he could not find the boy who was standing directly next to him, and he brought out all sorts of adorable costumes — Zouave jackets and Garibaldis and knickerbockers — each one more heavily bedecked with pom-pom or froufrou than the last, as if he thought the innocence of the outfit could smother the unease generated by its wearer.

Pickie Beecher was patient. He did not squirm while he was being measured, or cry with boredom, as another child might have. He only repeated his calm request for jewels, for his brother.

“You haven’t got a brother,” Will told him. “You are unique.”

“I come before,” said Pickie Beecher. “My brother comes after. But he must have jewels for his person.” He spoke very softly, and watched intently the omnipresent cash boys ferrying money from the clerks to the cashiers.

“Would you like to play with those boys?” Will asked.

“No,” said Pickie Beecher. The clerk returned with another silly ready-made outfit, a pilot’s suit with a matching cap.

“That’ll do,” Will said, because he was desperate to find something for the boy to wear besides the suit of Gob’s he’d cut down very crudely to fit him. The pilot’s suit was of dark blue wool, with shining black buttons that looked very much like Pickie Beecher’s eyes. Will told him he looked handsome. Pickie Beecher held his cap upside down in his hands and stared into it, but said nothing. Will turned away from him to order a wardrobe from the clerk, a dozen suits of the sort he and Gob wore, sack coats and pants of black wool, with gray vests, stiff white cotton shirts, and three dozen shirt collars, because he was certain that the neck of any boy, even one born out of a silver bowl, would be perpetually filthy. He would go through collars like water. Except Pickie Beecher did not care for water. When Will had tried to bathe him, Pickie Beecher leaped out of the tub and sat down on the floor, where he cleaned himself with his own tongue. When Will tried to cut his hair, the boy had leaped away with a shriek, and blood had oozed from the cut strands.

Socks and underthings, three pairs of black shoes, fifteen undersized handkerchiefs, and a series of hats of varying heights, from stovepipe to porkpie, completed his order. They were all very good quality, better than Will’s clothes. It was Gob’s money he was spending. The clerk swore to have it all delivered to the house within the week.

“Do you hear, Pickie?” Will said. “You won’t have to wear that for too long.” He turned back to where he had left the boy staring into his cap, but he wasn’t there. “Pickie?” he said. It occurred to him then that he could flee from the store, and possibly escape forever from the boy. It was useless to deny that he felt revulsion towards the little fellow, that he did not understand him, that he was frightened by him. But he also felt, already, a peculiar affection for him.

Stewart’s was a very large store. Will searched for a half hour, asking people if they had seen a pale boy in a pilot suit. No one had seen him, of course. In the end, it was Pickie Beecher who found Will. Will had paused under the little white rotunda, and was gazing up at it, imagining an apotheosis of A. T. Stewart for its blank white surface, when Pickie Beecher tugged at his sleeve and said, “I am ready to go now.”

“You mustn’t run off like that!” said Will. “Where did you go? Why did you run away? I have been looking for you all over this place.”

“It was necessary,” was the boy’s reply.

Outside, it was bitterly cold. Will put the boy in his new overcoat — another ready-made article — and held on to his hot little hand as they went down the sidewalk. Will thought he should be cold, this boy, like a corpse. But he was hot all over, and he got even hotter after a meal of red meat. Pickie Beecher paused to look at the pictures in Gronpil’s window.

“Would you like to have a painting? Something pretty to look at?” Will asked.

“No,” said Pickie Beecher. “A painting is not necessary.”

Back at the house on Fifth Avenue, Pickie Beecher hurried upstairs and pounded on the door to Gob’s room, demanding to be let in.

“I have them!” he said. “I have the jewels!” He had pulled a double handful of them from his pocket, rubies and diamonds and pearls in rings and on necklaces.

“Pickie Beecher!” said Will, coming up behind him. The boy looked up, no expression at all on his pale face, or in his dark eyes. He turned his attention to his booty, and his nimble little fingers tricked the jewels off their strings. “It’s wrong to steal things,” Will said.

“It’s not wrong. Not if it’s for my brother.”

Gob opened his door. “There you are!” he said, looking exhausted but rational. He was still wearing Lincoln’s hat, but now he removed it and put it on Pickie Beecher’s head. It rested on the boy’s ears, covering his eyes. “Here he is!” Gob said to Will. “Our little helper.”

Will came to divide his friendship with Gob into two portions — there was the time before the advent of Pickie Beecher, and there was the time after. Ante Pickie became as remote to him as the time before Christ, an era of antiquity, when people built ingeniously but never powerfully, when geniuses like the engineers of Alexandria made clever toys or cold, functionless monuments. The engine that had hatched Pickie Beecher was a thing of the most ancient past, and it came to seem as simple, in its way, as an aeolipile.

The advent of Pickie Beecher heralded a new age of building. He was their little helper, but he did work that was far out of proportion to his size. He fetched things, always saying they were for his brother, and Will came to understand what he meant by that. His brother was the engine, a perfect version of it that they had yet to build. In February of 1871, Will read in the Tribune an account of the disappearance of the gears that ran the pneumatic railway under Broadway. They had been stolen. The Tribune wondered if it was the work of the horsecart companies, but it was Pickie Beecher who had done it. Will did not know how. Will had no idea how Pickie Beecher executed his fantastic tasks.

Not the work, not the silent, electric motions of the machine, nor the glaring arc lamp that made Will’s bones feel warm when he stood beneath it, none of this had seemed unreal, before the boy. But Pickie Beecher made everything palpably strange, and the notion pressed on Will’s mind that he might be dreaming, or that he might be part of someone else’s dream — Gob’s, or Jolly’s bear’s, or even Pickie Beecher’s. He thought sometimes as he worked on the engine, or as he watched Pickie Beecher cut wires with his teeth, that the dreamer must wake under this burden of strangeness.

Pickie Beecher’s first work was disassembly. Gob was angry, at first, but then he joined in the careful destruction. “This form, too, has served its purpose,” Gob said to Will.

“You let the child rule you,” Will said, because he was so fond of his batteries, and Pickie Beecher had absolutely no respect for them.

“But I understand now,” Gob said. This was his refrain in the first weeks and months of the new age. “He’ll help us, don’t you see? He is a guide and a helper. He is a tool, a little engine in service to a bigger.”

Maybe, Will thought to himself, he is a clever urchin, fiendish but entirely of this world. Maybe he watched us through the skylight and thought, Now I will drop down and fool them, and then I will have hot food and a cool bed forever. But he could not look three minutes at the boy before this thought seemed ridiculous. This was the transformation their engine had effected, to make the ridiculous sensible and the sensible ridiculous.

The negative plates came out of their frames, the batteries came away from their cables, and the machine fell apart into its constituent copper and glass and iron and bone. Pickie Beecher arranged the pieces to his liking, and then he began to fetch heavier ones. Will would come to the house and find the giant gears leaned up against the walls in the workroom, their teeth almost scraping the ceiling. The workroom filled up with a haphazard array of stuff, all crammed together until there was no place left to store anything.

“My brother,” said Pickie Beecher, “he wants a bigger room.”

“Hello?” said Tennie. “Can you hear me?” Will took the tin can from his ear and spoke into it.

“Yes,” he said. They were talking over a lovers’ telegraph, two cans connected by a string. Tennie was in her Turkish corner, where she’d closed up her silk tent against him, insisting they play with her toy, something Gob had put together in the kitchen downstairs.

“Can you hear them?” she asked. “All those Irish innocents?”

“No,” he said. It was July, just after the great slaughter on Eighth Avenue. Angry Catholics had disturbed the gloating parade of the Orangemen and been punished with bullets by the police. Forty-five people had died. Will had seen a few of the wounded at Bellevue, which was also where all the bodies of the dead had been taken. He had stood that afternoon at a window on the second floor and looked down where twenty thousand mourners gathered outside the morgue.

“They are still angry,” she said. Then she stuck her head out of the tent and called out, “You may come in, if you bring me fruit.” He went in search of it. As he passed a window in the hall, he heard laughter coming down from the roof. Mrs. Woodhull was up there with her new friend, Mr. Tilton. He’d come to see her for the first time in May. Pickie Beecher seemed to hate him. Whenever they happened to be in the same room, Pickie Beecher would confront him, saying, “You are not my father.” Mr. Tilton always laughed at him and agreed that he was not.

Tilton was in love. He’d come to the house as Henry Beecher’s agent when Gob’s mother made a veiled threat to expose Beecher’s affair with Mrs. Tilton. He was supposed to soothe her, but she soothed him better. They were devoted companions.

Gob’s father was in the kitchen, sitting alone in the dark. “My boy,” he said to Will. “I am on the ceiling. Could you help me get down?” He had his pharmacopoeia, a dark wooden box, in front of him. Most doctors stocked theirs with a variety of medicines, but Canning Woodhull kept only morphine in his. “I find it cures everything but constipation,” he’d said of it. Will turned up the light to better examine the fruit and pick out the best pieces. Canning Woodhull’s eyes were eerie — wide, round, and almost all blue, with pupils closed down to the size of a dot of ink. He reached out to Will and said, “Give me your hand, my friend, before I float away.” Will put out his hand. Woodhull took it, shaking it as if in greeting, but also pulling on it, slow and steady. “There,” he said. “That’s better. How are you feeling this evening.”

“Very well,” said Will.

“I am not! My friend Colonel Blood says a person ought not to pluck the wings from his butterfly, but it seems to me that he is a man who doesn’t know if his grapes are sweet or sour. Colonel Blood is in the blood, you see. We are in it, but sometimes I float above. It ought to be contained in bodies. Do you know Sydenham? I used to worship him. But who cares about the mysteries of the circulation when the blood will come out, anyhow? We will put it on the ground until it drowns us. Vicky! Now there’s a woman possessed of a natural and indefatigable buoyancy. Tell me, do you think she will love me again?”

“Let go my hand,” Will said.

“If you let me go, you’ll drown. My floating is all that’s holding you up.” Will pulled his hand away roughly.

“Good evening,” Will said, after he’d grabbed up some fruit.

“I tried,” said Canning Woodhull. “I tried to save you.”

Gob and Pickie Beecher consulted at a speed Will could not follow, and in a language he often failed to comprehend. Pickie Beecher talked rapidly of how his brother had fifty toes or a caterpillar in his throat, and every revelation sent Gob into an ecstasy of drawing and calculation. The machine was taking shape again, not as a person anymore, but as an edifice, growing into the walls and through the floor. Will had gone into the workshop one morning to find holes bored into the floor — they were all over the room, at least a hundred of them, rough around their edges as if something had gnawed them in the stone and the wood. Gob and Pickie Beecher were busy threading cables through the holes. They dangled in the bedrooms beneath the workshop, connected to nothing. “Little brother is growing,” said Pickie Beecher.

Will studied dynamos, because Pickie Beecher had obtained three and deposited them in a parlor. All the furniture had been pushed to the wall to make room for them. They were arranged in a circle, so they seemed to be in silent conversation with each other, each of them chaperoned by the engine that powered it. Will was fond of their principle, of how the current produced in the revolving armature was sent back through the field coils of the electromagnet, increasing its power, which in turn increased the current. It was a building-up process of mutual and reciprocal excitation, and it reminded him of Tennie, because kissing her brought this principle to his mind. While Gob and Pickie Beecher consulted upstairs, Will made an accidental discovery: when he connected one dynamo to another already in operation, the second began to revolve in a direction opposite from the first.

“You are a genius!” Gob proclaimed, when Will showed him.

Pickie Beecher scampered around the two linked dynamos and said, “My brother, he has two hearts!” He stretched his little hand towards the brushes of one dynamo. Will rushed to stop him but was too late. He was sure the little fellow would be cooked alive, but the fat spark and the shock only made him giggle. “It’s my brother,” he said, when Will scolded him. “He wouldn’t hurt me. Not ever.”

Sometimes Pickie Beecher acted like an ordinary child. Sometimes he eschewed blood on his ice cream, and sometimes he clamored for a bedtime story or a stick of plain candy. He liked animals. He liked to go to the menagerie in Central Park and visit a hippopotamus with whom he had formed an attachment. Will took him down there one day in the middle of August.

Pickie knew just where his hippo’s cage was. He ran to it and grabbed the bars. “Murphy!” he said. “Hello, sir.” Will came up behind him and looked into the cage. Murphy looked fat and sleepy, and not entirely well, but better than most of his peers. Pickie rolled a piece of chocolate towards him. He snapped it up without even looking to see what it was.

They strolled among the other cages. Pickie paused before a skinny tiger.

“He would eat me up, if he could break his cage,” he said.

“I think he would try,” said Will. “He has that reputation. But I would protect you.” Yet it seemed unlikely that the boy would need his protection.

They visited a balding lion, and cage after cage of hissing, spitting monkeys. Pickie said he wanted one for a pet. Will said they were dirty, mean animals, and that he’d be happier with his hippo.

“I would make them serve me,” said Pickie. “They would be useful.”

Will sat down while Pickie ran from cage to cage, gibbering at the monkeys, roaring at the monstrous cats, and reaching his small hands through a cage to pinch the noses of deer.

All his running made Pickie hungry, so Will took him east to the Dairy, where they shared a bowl of ice cream. Pickie took no interest in the nearby playground, or in the children playing there. All he wanted was a ride in a goat cart. Will gave him ten cents and he ran off to clamber into a little buggy, pulled by two goats and captained by a black-haired gypsy boy. Not long after it began, the ride ended in an argument: the gypsy boy accused Pickie of biting his goat.

Will took Pickie up to the lake, because he had the idea that they could both take off their shoes and dip their feet in the water, but Pickie would have none of that. So they sat watching the lazy motion of the pleasure boats, and the boy said many times how he would like to have a swan to love and to pet and to eat. Will ignored him, because his attention was captured by a young couple in one of the boats, whom he mistook for Gob and Miss Trufant, but when they drifted closer he saw that it was not they. Will had seen them here before, though, chaperoning Mrs. Woodhull as she floated conspicuously with her paramour, Mr. Tilton. Gob had begun to follow Miss Trufant that summer, going wherever she went, and when Will had asked him why he did it, he’d only say, “I must.” Now Gob was done with his secret pursuit, and he and Miss Trufant walked openly all over the city, keeping an eye on Mrs. Woodhull and, Will supposed, talking about the Fourteenth Amendment.

“Aren’t you coming in?” Pickie asked, after Will had brought him to the door of Gob’s house. “Don’t you want to play with my brother?”

“I’ll come later,” Will said. He walked down to the Woodhull residence on East Thirty-eighth Street, looking at the ground as he went, because there were never any spirits there. After he passed the unfinished cathedral, he sensed that there was someone walking too close alongside him. He kept his head down even after she spoke.

“Creature,” the angel said. “You must destroy that abominable child.”

Will said nothing.

“You’ll fail,” she said. “You must fail.”

“I think you must have been the angel who brought the bad news to Mary,” Will said, finally looking up, but the angel was gone. She had visited more and more as work progressed on the machine, and every time she had told him that he and Gob would fail in their endeavor. She had a special hatred for Pickie Beecher, and never missed an opportunity to urge his destruction. Will was learning to ignore her.

He heard the music a few blocks before he got to the house — tooting, oomping, German brass. There were Germans gathered in a little crowd below Tennie’s window, out of which she leaned attractively, smiling and throwing down flowers from a wreath beside her on the sill. She was emulating her sister, running for election in the state congress from the largely German eighth district. Will had seen Tennie make a speech to a crowd of hundreds at Irving Hall. She’d promised them everything Mrs. Woodhull promised in her speeches — freedom and progress and equality — but Tennie had added that she would campaign for their right to drink lager beer on Sundays.

Will stood among the musicians and the serenaders, looking up at Tennie, and the thought came into his head that she was very beautiful, and that what he felt towards her was the highest, best, and most genuine love. She saw Will among the crowd and nodded at him. She was gone for a few moments from the window, and when she returned she threw him a note, casting it down very precisely so it landed just at his feet. She liked to pass notes, and seemed to take the same joy and pride in writing them as a five-year-old brand new to letters. Sometimes she’d hand Will one as they lay in bed, something she’d written hours before and saved to give him after they had wrestled and gasped. Sometimes they stated the obvious, You are a big fellow or We are together, you and I. Sometimes they boasted of her prescience. Once, after he tripped over his own feet in the dark and knocked a teapot from a table by her bed, she handed him a note sealed and dated the day before, telling him he would do just that. “I can’t see very far ahead,” she told him whenever he asked her if he and Gob would succeed in their work, if her sister would in fact become the President of the United States, “but I always see true.”

He unfolded the note, looking up at her and kissing it before he read it: Even a blind man could see how I am busy. Go away and come back later.

The very hottest day of the summer of 1871 came in August. Will went to the house on Fifth Avenue thinking to take refuge in the cool dark library. Letting himself in, he fell over something in the foyer. On the floor, he examined the thing that had tripped him — a bright new copper pipe, stamped with the name of the manufacturer, Advent Pipeworks. The pipes ran all over the first floor in neat rows. Will stepped over them, wondering at how they’d sprung up so quickly. At his last visit, three days previous, there had been no sign of them. He found Gob laying pipe in the dining room.

“What is their purpose?” he asked Gob. Could the machine grow so big it would fill up the house from first floor to fifth? It made Will flushed and hot again, thinking about that.

“To make ice,” Gob said. He explained how he would boil aqua ammonia in a still, and drive the pure gas through a condenser to liquefy it, then pass it through the pipes, where it would expand and evaporate, stealing heat from the water around the pipes and freezing it.

“But your house,” Will said. “You’ll get it all wet.”

“Help me,” Gob said. “It’s necessary for the machine.”

“Very well,” Will said, and put his hands to laying pipe, thinking as he worked of Pickie Beecher saying, “My brother, he likes the cold.”

“Do you think she’ll like it?” Gob asked, after they’d flooded the place to a depth of five inches and turned the whole first floor to a mess of ice.

“Who?”

“You know,” Gob said. “Her.” Will understood him to mean Miss Trufant.

“Does it matter of she likes it or doesn’t?”

“It matters very much.” Gob gave Will a puzzled look. “Very, very much,” he said.

Gob had been saying lately that Miss Trufant was necessary to the machine. This was something Will did not understand. She was, after all, a girl, and not even one inclined to science. Gob insisted that she mattered to the building, but Will figured this to be a symptom of his ever-waxing infatuation with her.

“All this is for her?” Will asked. He had been thinking, as they worked, of rarefied chemical processes that could only take place at very low temperatures, of the precipitation of a gaseous soul, the opposite of sublimation, where an airy, unexisting thing would be made solid and real. “You said it was necessary for the machine.”

“Immediately it is for her, but ultimately it is for the machine. Can’t you see how very important she is, Will?” Gob got down on his knees and started to polish the ice with a wire brush. Will thought, as he turned away, What does he feel for her that it’s not sufficient to make her a miracle, but he must polish it, too?

“You fellow,” Will said quietly. “You must have her.” He walked away slowly and carefully out of the dining room, out through the foyer. When he opened the door the night air was so hot and wet he choked on it.

Gob startled him when he pounded on his back — Will didn’t hear him come gliding up on the ice. He knocked a few more times on the space between Will’s shoulders, then patted it, then pulled Will back to embrace him. “Oh, my friend,” Gob said, kicking the door shut with his foot. “I think she makes you green. But don’t you know that no one can help me like you? Others are necessary to the building, but none is necessary like you. You are the most vital, the bravest and the smartest of my collaborators. It’s you, not her or anyone else, who’s most important.”

“Now we are all together,” Gob announced. He’d brought Maci Trufant into the workshop one night in December of 1871. Will, who was at work on the machine, had scrambled around nervously, trying to cover things up — batteries, bones, a pile of uncut gem-stones gathered by Pickie Beecher. He felt as if he’d been walked in on in the bath, but the fact was that she’d been visiting the house since the end of the summer, and had even begun to contribute to the construction. Will had noticed her little touches — blue paint on a copper pipe, pieces of glass twisted into patterns like bows — and he cared very little for them.

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, pale 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, but 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!”

“It’s my brother!” Pickie Beecher shouted above the noise. “He is here!” Mr. Whitman began to scream, and the spirits, with the little one-winged angel at their head, surged forward towards the gate. Then it finally did seem real, and only then did Will wish it were not. He would have done it all again, learned of Sam’s death, gone off to the war, suffered his apprenticeship under Frenchy. He would have gladly suffered all the debilitating fits of medical school. He would have loved Tennie again, even with the knowledge that he would lose her. He would have lost himself in all the seasons of dreamtime building. He would have done these things twice or three times. He would have done them over and over forever, if only he could wake away from the horrible screaming, so much worse than what the angel had him taste, if only he could have that, just that, be not real.

~ ~ ~

“WHO IS THE GOD OF THE FUTURE?” THE URFEIST ASKED Gob. It was one of two questions he posed repeatedly during their trip to New York. Gob’s first answer was, “Time.” That was wrong, and warranted a savage beating. On the first night in the house on Fifth Avenue, as they stood in a library full of clocks, the Urfeist asked the question again. This time Gob said, “Death.”

“Yes,” said the Urfeist, “death waits at the end of every future.” He looked sad or afraid or dyspeptic whenever he asked that question. He had lived a gluttonous portion of years, and he still did not want to die. There was almost kindness in his voice when he would say that if Gob worked hard enough, the god of the future might fall by his hand.

They went to New York by horse cart, stage, steamer, and railroad, and each new conveyance was fancier than the last, so by the time they approached Manhattan, they were traveling in a luxurious Pullman car. All during the trip, the Urfeist spoke of machines, and how he would teach Gob to build them. “It’s the only certain means to bring back your brother, my ugly one,” he said. “Mechanically.”

Every morning as they’d traveled, the Urfeist had woken Gob by breathing hotly into his ear, and sometimes the rushing noise invaded his dreams, so he heard the ocean sound as he dreamed of his brother. The noise would issue from Tomo’s mouth when he tried to speak, and before he woke Gob would catch glimpses of copper and iron and glass as Tomo pointed to them. “It is the noise,” the Urfeist said, “of your machine. The one you must learn to build, if you want to save your brother from death.”

The Urfeist was an expert builder. Gob discovered that his first day in the thing’s beautiful house. Evidence of his new master’s skill was everywhere, devices large and small, locked away behind doors or placed in special alcoves in the long halls: a windmaker, rattraps big enough to catch children, singing candles, skittering iron insects, and books that turned their own pages as you read them. Gob wandered among the little machines, feeling admiration and envy as he beheld them. They would inspire him to hurry to the library and pick a book at random from the shelves, then sit in a chair among the clocks, or sprawl on the floor beneath a great golden armillary sphere. He’d read until the Urfeist came and found him and asked another question. “What is a machine?”

“A machine,” Gob would reply, his voice seeming to him mechanical itself as he recited the definition taught him on the journey from Homer, “is a combination of resistant bodies so arranged that by their means the mechanical forces of nature can be compelled to do work accompanied by certain determinate motions.”

“Precisely,” the Urfeist would say.

“Do you see how your mind is small?” the Urfeist asked Gob. “Do you see how you are clumsy and powerless? Do you want your brother back? You will not have him by flailing. Hurl blind rage at the walls, they will not break. Such machines as you would build — death would laugh at them! Death would laugh at you! Death is laughing at you now, saying, ‘Think of everything your brother was, everything he wanted, all he might have seen or heard or felt. Every morning he might have woken to, every night he might have put down his head on his pillow, every dream he might have dreamed as he slept — these things are mine now. I have stowed thousands of days away in my pocket where he will never live them, but I give them to you — you may imagine them, you may consider him planting his bare foot in the cool mud under the mill pond (on a hot day, is that cool mud not a joy?) and then you may consider how he resides in my dark pocket never to escape. You are a small piece of work, boy, lazy and coarse and no threat to me because your machine is here in my pocket, too, where it will never be born because you are too lazy and stupid to bring it out. You will accomplish nothing, and then I will have you, too. I will wait for you here at the end of your span of joyless pointless days.’”

Gob sat on his vast bed and studied a book the Urfeist had given him, one picked as suitable for inspiring the fancy of an ignoramus. In the library, he had passed it to Gob and then rummaged in another stack. Two minutes later he’d changed his mind, saying Gob wasn’t ready for that book: it was too fine for him, he could not be trusted to care for it. But Gob was already running up to his room.

It was one of the notebooks of Leonardo. “Do you want to be like him?” the Urfeist asked Gob the next day, after Gob had spent the whole night poring over the fantastic drawings. Gob nodded and got beaten for it with the hickory paddle. “Do not!” said the Urfeist. “He dreamed everything and built nothing. Do you want to be a silly dreamer, or do you want to bring your brother back?” Gob wanted to bring back his brother, yet he lost none of his affection for the notebook. His eyes lingered for hours over pictures of gears and wheels and wings. He thought it would be most satisfying if he could garner such skill and draw the machine he dreamed about, but when he tried he only made a line that rose and fell as the noise of the machine rose and fell, a neaping ebbing line that fell back on itself, and was lost eventually in a tangle of similar lines.

Though he couldn’t draw his own machine, Gob found he had no difficulty copying the notebook drawings. He drew on the workroom floor with a piece of charcoal, copying pictures of finned missiles and vertical drilling machines, chain drives and sprocket wheels, Archimedean screws and waterwheels and well pumps. He did not know what he was drawing, but the shapes were lovely and familiar to him. He saw them in his dreams, amid spinning gears and puffing steam. In the center of the room the Urfeist had designated as his workshop, Gob copied a picture of an ornithopter. There was room enough to make it about as big as it was meant to be in life. He turned down the gas, and lay atop the thing, imagining that he rode it through the sky in search of his brother.

In New York, the Urfeist did not live the solitary life he lived in Homer. He had many friends, who called him Dr. Oetker, and thought he was a German radical who had fled with his fortune from the upheavals of ’48. The accent that the Urfeist affected around his friends reminded Gob of his grandmother, and made him think of home. He wondered if his mother was missing him, and if she thought he was dead. When he tried to picture her face he could only envisage a white tea rose, the sort she wore at her throat when she wanted to make herself look distinguished.

The Urfeist’s friends came to dinner, and clustered by the score around his table, where servants waited on them dressed in fancy livery, with ridiculous white wigs on their heads. Gob helped them set the table, taking as his job the setting of place cards above the plates: Mr. and Mrs. Lohman; Mr. Vanderbilt; Mr. Burns. Gob was not invited to dinner, but he would watch from just within the kitchen, and listen to the conversation.

Gob might have been lonely, except he had his studies to keep him occupied — there was always another book to read. And occasionally there were other children in the house. They would pass through, when the Urfeist began to feel old and melancholy. He told Gob he brought them to cheer his soul, but Gob felt certain he was eating them and hanging their bones to dry in the basement. They arrived, fetched from one of the charitable institutions of the city, and most of them were very happy to have stepped from the sad orphanage into a mansion. For a few days they stuffed at the Urfeist’s big table, and rolled hoops with Gob down the long halls of the house. Gob would show them his workroom, his books and his drawings, but these rarely provoked any interest. “What’s behind there?” they would ask, pointing at the iron door outside Gob’s room.

“The green room,” Gob said, and would not say any more about it, because it was into that room that the Urfeist retired when he wanted to put on his kilt and his hat and his skin chemise. It was filled with plants and carpeted with grass. The ceiling was all glass. At night the moon shone down on the skillfully potted ferns and roses and palms, and it did not take much imagining to think yourself lost in the wilderness. There was even a small cave built into a wall, where the Urfeist slept sometimes on a pile of leaves. Gob said nothing of the room, but the Urfeist told the children of it, saying he would take them in if they were good and show them that beautiful place, where birds sang under the glass roof, and where candy trees flourished, aching for children’s hands to pick their heavy fruit. The children all went in there, after a few days of feasting and playing, of sleeping in crisp white sheets in big beds. They passed through the iron door, hand in hand with the Urfeist, and Gob did not see them again, but after they were gone the Urfeist would declare himself filled with a youthful energy, and for a time all his melancholy would be departed from him.

* * *

“Unhappiness is the lot of spirits. They are denied bodily delight, but they are creatures of desire. Desire is all that’s left to them. They want to live again! They want to be with you, all you desolate millions. How will you live without them? How will they continue without you? What sort of heaven can there be when brothers are apart? My dumb one, my little boy, my ugly poodle, just poke a hole in the wall and the desire of spirits might pour through and tear the wall apart. Do you see how your work is small? Just a tiny hole through which you might drag your brother. A tiny hole, but it may as well be big as the whole earth, if you stay lazy and stupid, if I cannot reform your base, contrary soul. You may as well bring down the moon to touch the seas, smash the crystalline firmament and let down a rain of stars. Why did you come to bother me? Why, now, do you even try?”

“When I beat you I make you smarter,” the Urfeist told Gob. “When I love you I make you more tender.”

Gob felt no more tender than when he had first visited the Urfeist. He was not even sure what his teacher meant with that word, and he was not inclined to ask. He associated tenderness with girlishness. Girls were tender towards their dolls and their mamas. Girls had tender white flesh that gave when you poked it with your finger. If anything, Gob felt heavier and denser than before. Back in Homer, when his grandmother fell to reminiscing about her “terrible master,” she’d say, “Ach he put the worm in me!” She’d say how the worm was still in her, and run a hand down her front and declare, “He is there, in a coil around my backbone. Oh, he never leaves me alone!” Gob could never tell if she thought that was a good thing, or a bad. He considered his heaviness and wondered if what he was feeling was not the extra weight of Anna’s worm.

Gob did feel smarter, though. He felt very much smarter than before. The hickory paddle was decorated on one side with multiplication tables and on the other with the alphabet. He already knew his multiplication tables, of course, but now the Urfeist was teaching him better math, powerful geometry. For months Gob saw triangles everywhere. Houses were roofed in triangles. Pine trees in the park were simple triangle shapes. Staring at the faces of strangers on the street, he could make their features dissolve into a grand association of triangles.

Gob began to measure time by the books he read. The winter of 1864 was all Latin and Greek primers. The spring was Aristotle. The Urfeist knew his Aristotle intimately, and he tested Gob’s retention of his reading, paddle in hand. He knew his Aristotle so well that Gob thought sometimes that he was Aristotle, soured by the centuries into a finger-kilt-and-blood-cap-wearing madman. Plato and Euclid, Archimedes, Ctesibius, Archytas of Tarentum — sometimes Gob’s eyes felt weak, but he loved what he read. He would rather sit with a book than with the Urfeist. His favorite thing was to sit in his room with a giant dusty book in his lap, some whiskey in one hand and a brick of sweet chocolate in the other, partaking of whiskey, knowledge, and chocolate in succession. He stole the whiskey from the pantry, and usually when the Urfeist smelled it on his breath he beat him, but sometimes he rewarded understanding with some sort of powerful liquor.

Often, Gob would get a shock of recognition as he read. A picture of the aeolipile of Hero raised the hair on the back of his neck. Here, surely, was a part or a piece of his own machine. “The aeolipile,” said the Urfeist. “Is it a spiritous or self-propelling machine?” It was spiritous, Gob said, and he proceeded to build an aeolipile of his own, working with scraps of metal from a basement room full of such scraps. It was not pretty, when he’d finished, but it functioned. Gob filled it with water, and lit a fire under it. Steam rose through the support tubes, then shot from the engine tubes, and the sphere began to rotate, and kept rotating for as long as there was water and fire to make steam. Such was a spiritous machine, one that moved by the power of air or steam, whereas a self-propelling machine moved by means of wheels and pulleys and weights. When the aeolipile provoked no beatings he copied other machines — the miraculous altar and the magic amphora and the fire pump.

“Toys!” said the Urfeist. Such science as was familiar to the Alexandrian engineers seemed to annoy him. He forbade Gob any more copying of Hero, and said he was ready for stranger and more powerful knowledge. Gob thought that meant he would at last be allowed to put his little hands on the Principia, which lay in the library under a glass case the unlocking of which Gob could not figure. But the Urfeist introduced him, instead, to the Renaissance Magi: Paracelsus and Nettesheim and Della Porta, Albertus Magnus and Mirandola and Dr. Dee. Gob wanted to try making a homunculus, but the recipe called for semen, something he could not yet manufacture. “Everything in time,” said the Urfeist, in a tone that might have been gentle and avuncular coming from another mouth. He taught Gob herbs. Asafetida has a horrid odor and is useful for exorcisms. Lilies keep away unwelcome visitors. The scent of mandrake will put a person to sleep. Elm protects from lightning. Gob wanted to know, if that was true, why was there a lightning-struck elm not fifty feet from the house? In answer he got a beating.

“But I have been waiting for you. Spirits beg for masters. They want to be dominated, and those spirits who are my slaves have spoken of you, promised that a boy would come one day to learn all I could teach. Are you him? Are you the boy who would become a master of spirits, a magus, an engineer? Such a small mind. Such a yearning towards sloth. I think you must be made from your brother’s leftover material — there must have been something extra, but not enough for a whole proper boy. God made you, a half thing, a well-intentioned but poorly executed gesture. Perhaps it was your brother I was meant to teach. But you are sweet in your way. We will have to make do.”

Gob was not a prisoner in that house. He could have left, but he never tried to catch a train west to Ohio, back to his mama and his obstreperous relatives. He was there to learn, and he was learning, and the more he learned, the more he realized that he was laboring under a world’s weight of ignorance. And anyhow, whenever he remembered his mama, it was mostly to hear her laughing at Tomo’s death, and then he would feel fresh rage towards her.

Gob’s life was mostly work, but it was not all work. Sometimes the Urfeist took him out to restaurants or oyster bars. They went for rides in Central Park, racing against the sleek equipage of the Urfeist’s friend Mr. Vanderbilt. They saw plays. The Urfeist was a great devotee of Edwin Booth and Charlotte Cushman, and did not miss a production that featured one of those actors. The Urfeist was also partial to opera. He had one of those highly coveted boxes at the Academy of Music. During intermissions tastefully dressed people came to visit the Urfeist in his box, and he introduced Gob as his ward, the child of a cousin who’d died of cholera the year before, his last living relative. “What happened to his hand?” they would whisper to the Urfeist.

“A congenital deformity,” he’d reply.

“I am dismayed by current developments,” said Madame Restell. She sat next to the Urfeist at one of his to-dos. He threw dinner parties whenever news of a great battle reached New York. Ostensibly, he was celebrating the increasingly frequent Union victories that came in the spring of 1865, but Gob suspected his master was just celebrating the carnage. “Dundrearies, sluggers, muttonchops, burnsides, beavers. I think there is too much variety in facial hair — there ought to be a regulation. Some have ventured so far beyond the pale I shiver to think of them. I offer as an example the type of man represented by Mr. Greeley, and those hideous things that proceed from out of his collar. It makes me shudder!”

“I don’t think Mr. Greeley can be regarded as representing any type but his own, Annie,” said the Urfeist. This brought laughs from all around the table. The scandalous, rich friends of the Urfeist were lingering over port and cigars. They flouted convention by staying at the table, and the ladies partook with the men. Gob usually eavesdropped from the kitchen, where one of the servants always gave him a cigar of his own. But tonight Gob was in the dining room, standing just off to the side of the Urfeist, who had called him out to entertain his guests. Gob had been reading aloud from a report of the battle at Spotsylvania. One of the guests had interrupted him to say that General Grant ought to grow a beard, because it would hide his features, which were obviously those of a dipsomaniac. “He flaunts it, with his bare face,” said the guest. This prompted Madame Restell to make her comment on the chaos of facial hair threatening to undo society.

“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, then 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?”

“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 he 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.