Chris Adrian - Gob's Grief

He tried to explain about the copper pipes under the ice, and how liquid ammonia, as it expanded to a gas, could steal heat from water. “It’s really very simple. It’s how they make ice in the factories.”

The drapes were drawn all over the house. She could see very little besides large, dark shapes that leaned in the corners. Maci thought they might be furniture. She and Dr. Woodhull glided from room to room, through open doors into a dim parlor where a hundred mirrors reflected her shadowy, floating image, into a dining room where the table was pushed on its side against the wall, and where Maci caught her skate on a frozen apple. They didn’t talk, except when Dr. Woodhull pointed out an obstacle. She collided with him repeatedly. Even when they stopped to rest, standing in a wide, blank room whose purpose, before it became a skating pond, Maci could not figure, she drifted towards him and collided with him softly. “Excuse me!” she said, backing away.

“It’s the floor,” he said. “It slants.”

On her third pass through the mirror-parlor she skated closer to a large shape to investigate it. It was partly sunk in the ice. When she got right up by it she could see that it was a giant gear, like what might turn a house-sized clock.

“What is this?” she asked. “Why do you have this?” Dr. Woodhull was not in the room to answer her question, though he’d been skating at her side just moments before. She went looking for him, thinking she might have dreamed this already — searching for him in a dark, cold house, floating like a ghost — but knowing that she hadn’t because this was stranger and suddenly more terrible than any dream she’d had. She wandered through his house, tottering awkwardly, once upstairs, with the skates still strapped to her shoes, going from room to room, discovering old furniture, tall stacks of moldering books, and everywhere gears and rods and pieces of shaped glass, machine-spoor the sight of which made her stomach twist up in a knot. With the sense that she was wandering at her own peril she went up and up, compelled to open every door until she reached the top floor. She stood in the abandoned conservatory, and made the mistake of leaning against a withered potted tree, which tipped and fell, and broke in half when it struck the floor. She hurried clumsily from that room, and went through the only other door on the hall. Then she was in Dr. Woodhull’s bedroom, where she found him sitting quietly on his bed.

“Why are you crying, Miss Trufant?” he asked her, after he’d thrown open the other iron door and brought her in to see the sprawling thing he kept behind it.

“It is too, too much, Dr. Woodhull,” she said. “Too, too much.” Because it really was too much, for such a thing to happen once, and too, too much for it to happen twice, for her brother to introduce her again to an unsuitable boy, and for somebody else’s life to be wasted in the construction of an impossible and useless machine. It was clear to her then that she should sit on the bed and calmly remove her skates, then run frantically out of the room, down the stairs, and out of the house. She ought to run right back to Boston, because she would proclaim herself an irredeemable fool if she stayed and ignored the lessons of her ridiculous life. Dear Aunt Amy , she wrote in her mind as she stood there, Here I come! But she didn’t go anywhere except deeper into the room, following her left hand as it yearned towards the machine, closing in a fist around a hot section of pipe. Something beat through it like blood.

“Do you like it?” he asked her.

“I despise it,” she said, but her hand would not come free, and she feared, in that moment, that it never would.

YOUNG DR. WOODHULL INVITED MACI TO AN INDUSTRIAL EXPOsition in September of 1871. She went, though it was obvious to her that there was nothing she should like less than a festival of machines. Tennie rushed to accompany them when she learned Mr. Whitman was to be seen and heard. As they stood together in the little crowd at the Cooper Institute, listening to Mr. Whitman read a poem, Maci thought she understood why the poet and Dr. Woodhull were friends. Mr. Whitman was another engine-lover. He’d even imagined a muse for their new mechanical age, a dame of dames who would supersede Clio and her sisters. How she must clank when she moves, Maci thought, and stink of oil and coal smoke.

Mr. Whitman, with his big gray beard, reminded Maci of her father, though her father had the voice of a man used to giving sermons, and Mr. Whitman squeaked his poem like a mouse. On the stage, the poet waved his thick arms in broad, warm gestures of invitation, and spoke:

“I say I see, my friends, if you do not, the illustrious émigré.

Making directly for this rendezvous, vigorously clearing a path for herself, striding through the confusion,

By thud of machinery and shrill steam-whistle undismay’d,

Bluff’d not a bit by drain-pipe, gasometers, artificial fertilizers,

Smiling and pleas’d with palpable intent to stay,

She’s here, install’d amid the kitchen ware!”

It went on and on, as laborers abandoned the work of putting up the exhibits and came over to listen. Maci liked it much less than the poems she’d read as a girl. It’s Gob Woodhull, Maci thought, whose acquaintance makes people less than they were. He’s poisoned Mr. Whitman’s muse, altered her so smoke pours out of her ears and she leaves wet oily spots wherever she sits. Gob, Gob, Gob, she’d say to herself sometimes, thinking how it sounded like the noise made by irritable intestines. She would have preferred not to think of him or his machine, but despite those wishes she spent many hours in consideration of both.

“I cannot,” she had replied, when, standing in front of his machine, he had asked her to help him complete it. She had laughed in his face when he told her his ambitions for the thing, when he claimed it would abolish death. She thought he would cry, and this pleased her during those furious, confused moments after she was introduced to his secret. But the laugh was directed at her own life, and not at him. She hadn’t meant to be cruel. With her left hand still fastened to the pipe, she considered that she might be able to help him, after all, though not in the way he suspected. Here at last was not only punishment, but penance suitable for Infanticide: she might save Dr. Woodhull from his delusion, and show him how the complicated assemblage that he revered was only a pile of stuff.

Maci went among the industrial exhibits arm in arm with Tennie, while Dr. Woodhull and Mr. Whitman walked ahead of them. “See how he goes like a bear?” Tennie asked her. “But he is as gentle as a deer.”

“Gentler, I think,” Maci said, because Mr. Whitman seemed to her eminently gentle and sad, not at all the stomping, shouting fellow suggested by the poems for which she’d suffered a beating so many years before. “As gentle as a plant,” Maci said, as they passed into a stand of rubber furniture.

“It’s not bouncy,” Tennie said, sitting down in a hard, ornate chair. “Still, I like it very much. It’s just the sort of thing I’d like to have in my corner.” She refused to walk any farther. Maci left her there, amid a crowd of workmen who’d been drawn to her as if by a scent. Walking on, Maci overtook Mr. Whitman, who’d paused, and seemed to be admiring Dr. Woodhull as Dr. Woodhull admired a candy vat.

“I think science is his religion,” Maci said.

Mr. Whitman turned to her and looked earnestly into her eyes. It was rare for Maci to be unable to meet a gaze, but she found herself compelled to look elsewhere. She considered how Mr. Whitman’s shirt, open at the neck, allowed white hair to curl out at her.