Chris Adrian - Gob's Grief

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.