Chris Adrian - Gob's Grief

Gob stood and pulled Walt up after him. “Come home with me,” Gob said. “I’ll show you something wonderful.”

“Your wife is there,” Walt said, but Gob ignored him. Now, Walt wished Gob would let go his hand. He felt afraid again, as he had been on the stage when he met Gob for the first time. Gob pulled him along, all the way down to the house on Fifth Avenue, where little Pickie opened the door just as they approached it and said, “Welcome Master, welcome Kosmos.”

Inside the house, Walt got a better look at the transformations it had undergone. “My little brother,” Pickie said, waving his arms around at everything. The engine was everywhere. It had grown down from its fifth-floor room, through the ceilings and the walls until, it seemed, it had become the house itself. Here was a big red dude of a fire engine, there was an electromagnet as big as a man. But one part stood out because it was larger than any other, and because it was located in what might as well have been the center of a thing that was otherwise mischievously asymmetric. That part looked like the gate to Greenwood Cemetery, complete with a gatehouse, and the whole thing sheltered under a pair of wings. The gatehouse was lovely, a little church of glass and bone and steel. It was full of gears — visibly turning through the glass — which ranged in size from one story high to as small as the nail of Pickie’s thumb, and they spilled out of the gatehouse to spin all over the room. The gears turned all sorts of contrivances, most of which seemed to be doing no useful work at all. The very biggest gears conspired to turn the wings — Walt squinted at them a few moments before he realized that they were glass wings, made of photographic negative plates.

Dr. Fie and the new Mrs. Woodhull were both there, looking grave and serious. “Are you here?” Dr. Fie asked him, sounding cordial for once. He put his big finger out in front of him and poked Walt in the belly. Walt did not bother to answer the question. Dr. Fie looked to be drunk or confused or in pain. Maci Trufant Woodhull said, “God bless you, Mr. Whitman.”

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

Walt opened his mouth to answer, paused a moment without saying anything, and then he ran away. He fled past Will Fie, pushing him aside when he tried to stand in his way, and knocked down Maci Trufant. He ran, jumping over wires and dodging under steel struts and copper pipes, until he was in the foyer, and then out the door. He ran down the marble steps and then down the street, not slowing till he had passed Madame Restell’s house and the Catholic cathedral. He stopped, looked back for pursuit, and saw there was none. He sat on the steps of the still-unfinished cathedral and put his head in his hands. He tried to quiet his fear but found that he could not. Once, as a child, he’d almost drowned at the beach. A powerful wave had picked him up and thrown him down against the sea bottom, and held him there as if it were trying to murder him. He’d got a lungful of water and was quite sure he was going to die. Even back then, when he never gave a thought to death, when he did not even know yet what it was, it still frightened him. Now he was frightened again in just that same way, blind panic filled him up. When he heard the voice, he thought at first that it was Gob calling after him, but it was Hank, long silent but shouting now: Walt! Walt Walt Walt!

“No,” Walt said.

Walt. Please help. I want to come back. We all want so bad to come back. No one can do it but you. Nobody loves us like you. Please go back you have to go back you have to nobody loves us like you.

“I’m afraid,” Walt said.

Don’t be afraid it’s a good thing you’re going to do. The best ever.

“I can’t,” Walt said. But Hank said you can and you must , and so Walt did. He went slowly back up the street to Gob’s house. The door was still open. Gob, his wife, little Pickie, and Dr. Fie were all waiting patiently, as if they knew he wouldn’t be long in returning. They put him in the gatehouse, bundling him with wires into an iron and glass chair. Young Mrs. Woodhull settled Mr. Lincoln’s hat on his head. Now it was decorated with a corona of silver spikes, each of which plugged into a hole in the crystal wall of the gatehouse.

“Bless you, Mr. Whitman,” said Maci Woodhull, again as she put the hat on him, and she kissed him on the forehead as a mother might do. Walt thought then of his mother, thought he saw her bustle by outside with a stack of pancakes on a plate, thought he caught the wholesome odor that fell off her.

“We’re ready,” said Dr. Fie, and closed the crystal door of the gatehouse.

Gob put his face up against it and called through. “Don’t be afraid, Walt,” he said. “It’s all for the best.”

Hank said it too. It’s for me. It’s for us. Thank you, Walt.

Walt watched through the door while Pickie ran speedily up and down ladders, flipping switches, closing connections, activating batteries, while Dr. Fie stoked up engines all over the room, while Gob’s wife went around spinning up cranks and adjusting knobs. Gob held up his own hand before his face and stared into it. Walt tried to imagine the aftermath of this night. Not, he was sure, the abolition of death. For all that Gob was strange and wonderful, despite all the extraordinary things he’d shown Walt during their strange evenings, he knew no one could make that happen. Sparks might light up the Manhattan sky like fireworks, the whole house might fall down and leave them miraculously untouched, a whale might be driven to swim through the Narrows and throw itself on the shore of the Battery, but when dawn came the next day, the dead would still be dead. Hank might finally be silent, and Walt would leave this place and not think of Gob ever again. Maybe that would be the great miracle, that Walt would be true to his nonexistent Camerado but finally not suffer for his faith.

“Now!” said Gob, and Hank said, Goodbye, Walt. Unnatural light flooded the gatehouse, and a great noise started up in the air all around him — a cranking, grinding, coughing machine noise that settled into a giant breathing noise like that noise of the sea. Magic images danced all around Walt — the faces of boys and men cast on the floor, and dead bodies, torn by bullets and shells, shimmering on the glass walls. He looked down at his chest and saw a picture there — a row of bodies laid out along a fence.

Goodbye , Hank said again, very sad, and Walt thought of how he’d sat with him as he died. Hank’s eyes had darted fearfully in his head, and he had clutched Walt’s arm with great strength despite the morphine Dr. Woodhull had given him to soothe his last hours. He’d not said goodbye, then, just “No,” over and over again until he couldn’t get the breath out to make the word, but still his mouth formed it silently, “No.” “Goodbye, my dear,” Walt had said, giving him a rich, desperate kiss on his lips.

Walt stiffened in his iron-and-glass chair because a terrible pain filled his head, as if the hat spikes had suddenly been thrust into his troubled brain. The pain moved out down his neck, through his chest and arms, his belly and loins and legs. He let out a hoarse scream, and wished he had run harder and farther from this place, wished he’d run right off the island and kept on going south till he reached the very tip of Florida, because it seemed he would have to run very far away to be safe from this immense agony. He screamed again and again, then called out to Gob, who was standing just beyond the crystal door with light in his hand. Walt cried out to him, but the pain only got worse. Walt spoke again, much softer, and then again, so soft he wasn’t even sure if he made a noise.