Chris Adrian - Gob's Grief

“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.