Chris Adrian - Gob's Grief

“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.