Chris Adrian - Gob's Grief

“More poor likenesses,” Gob said when he was next to her again. He lifted his head to talk into her ear, telling her how every person was a poor likeness of herself, how death holds the best part of us in a prison of fear, and how his machine would reverse this, so all the undying people who walked the earth would be perfectly themselves. Maci tried to laugh.

“Don’t give your machine too much work, sir,” she said. “You’ll make it nervous with exhaustion.”

Such wings! They spread over the whole Summerland, and the gates are as high as the clouds. We could sigh forever over the beauty of this engine. It is almost alive, here. When the Kosmos steps into it, when he takes his places as its heart, then it will breathe and speak. Come to me, it will say, the walls are falling. You have torn them down with your brilliant grief, with your love, your desire. Come to me, the way is open.

Goodbye, Sister. You’ll hear from me no more, until we meet again in the changed world. Farewell, I am coming to you!

Maci tried to cheer as Mrs. Woodhull threw off her coal-scuttle bonnet to reveal herself to the people who’d gathered in the Cooper Institute in the hope of hearing a forbidden lecture called “The Naked Truth!” But all Maci could manage was a weak little yelp. She was very tired — not sleepy, but so weary she ached. Months of building had done this to her. As the weeks passed it seemed that every drawing took something from her, as if she were using her own vital stuff for ink, and that in putting it on paper her hand made her a little more fatigued. She knew she ought to be excited, that she ought to be cheering for Mrs. Woodhull, free at last from Ludlow Street Jail and actively resisting attempts to return her there, and that she ought to be cheering in her heart for the machine, because it was all finished, the ink in Maci was dry. The last strut had been installed, the last glass negative put in place, the last glass pipe filled with a curious liquid fetched by odd little Pickie. She might at least muster the energy to curse the thing for a folly, but when she tried, sometimes, in a fit of sanity, to shake her fist at it, the result was the same as when she tried to put her hands together for Mrs. Woodhull. All she seemed able to do was raise a hand to her eyes, to cover them up and press on them until they ached.

“You’re tired, my love,” Gob had said to her. “You ought to rest.” He had wanted her to stay home and await the arrival of Mr. Whitman, who, he insisted, would come to the house on Fifth Avenue now that the machine was ready to receive him. That seemed unlikely to Maci, because she was sure that Mr. Whitman had absented himself most purposefully from her husband’s life. “He will come,” Gob had said.

“Hooray,” Maci said softly, at the Cooper Institute. She looked across the crowd to where her husband was standing with Mr. Whitman, cheering and applauding. Mr. Whitman looked tired, too. After the speech had reached its dramatic conclusion, and Mrs. Woodhull had surrendered again to the marshals, Maci went back to the house on Fifth Avenue with Dr. Fie. Little Pickie was in a fury of polishing and preparation. Maci sat down on a cold pipe the thickness of her whole body, and the cool brought to mind the private skating party Gob had arranged for her fourteen months previous. She closed her eyes and remembered gliding through the dark, cool house. It was all she could think of for a little while, but even as she enjoyed this pleasant memory, another thought kept crowding into her mind.

It was a thought that had been coming and going in her head over the past few months, the thought that she needed to destroy this thing, that she ought to have been undoing it every night, a Penelope faithful to her reason. “I ought to smash it,” she said, “before it can disappoint him.” Her left hand crossed to her right, and took it by the wrist, holding it down against her leg. “I wasn’t going to,” she said.

She wouldn’t do it because she thought it was necessary for her husband to put his friend in the thing, and then see how nothing came of it. And she thought it was necessary because she hoped sometimes that something might come of it after all, the sky might crack open, and all the departed might rain down like feathers. She had been trying so hard to believe, for his sake, and it was to this that she really attributed her weariness, not the days of being a fugitive, or the nights of work on this strange, monstrous Infant that made her father’s Infant seem like a puppy. Maybe unbelief was her madness, since she didn’t believe when her hand spoke to her with love, when it spoke like Rob, when it drew like Rob, when it knew what Rob knew, and told true stories that were other people’s lives — when it did all these things and she still could not call it brother. When she saw little Pickie rolling a giant lens down a hall in Gob’s house; when she saw the machine grow so huge and complex that it looked to be sufficient engine to drive Manhattan out to sea, so the island could anchor halfway to Europe and become a new Atlantis: still she didn’t believe, and wasn’t it madness to ignore the evidence of your senses, even when they said you must believe the unbelievable?

“Here they come!” Pickie said, bouncing elastically on his feet. He rushed over to where Maci was sitting and pulled her up by her hands. He pulled her around in a little dance. Just for a few seconds, Maci shuffled around in a circle, then he let her go and went to the door. She would have fallen if Dr. Fie hadn’t caught her. “Steady,” he said, looking at her but not smiling.

“Is it right, what we’re doing?” she asked him, but even as she asked, she knew it wasn’t the proper question for the situation, and it was only something she asked to distract herself from the more pressing question of whether or not they would succeed, and the still more pressing question of why she could make no room in her heart for the possibility that they might.

“God bless you,” she said to Mr. Whitman, when he came in, and she called these words after him when he fled, hoping that God would bless him, after all, and keep him from such situations as the one he’d just escaped. She had a rush of energy at the thought that now they must begin a work of disassembly, for she knew that if Mr. Whitman wouldn’t play, there’d be no game, tonight or ever.

“He’ll return,” Gob said. Maci thought he meant he’d be back in days or weeks, but he was back in moments. Maci smiled at him again. Gob and her hand had told her how it would be uncomfortable for him, how his body would articulate the formless grief that saturated the world of the living. But it would do him no lasting harm. He was a kosmos, Gob said, who had the qualities of everyone and everything. The grief would pass through him, but not hurt him. “Are you sure?” she’d asked, when her hand drew the spiked hat that was painful just to look at.

“Absolutely,” he said.

“There it is,” Gob had said, speaking to Mr. Whitman before he fled. “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?”

Am I ready? Maci asked herself. She tried again to believe, an effort of will that was like trying to get her bones to step out of her body, but when she looked at the thing all she saw was failure, and it seemed to her that it was a great curse and a punishment, not to believe, that after all it was the people who could believe in nothing but death who got nothing but death for their lot. And she worried for the first time that her doubt would poison the working of the thing, as she feared that her doubt in her father’s Infant had poisoned it and killed it even before she beat it to death with a wrench.