Gob's Grief (30 page)

“Are you going to Homer?” Gob asked him, just before he walked out the door.

“I have never heard of such a place,” the Urfeist said. He bent down and kissed Gob lightly on his cheek, saying, “Mind Mrs. Lohmann.” Madame Restell had declared that she would be Gob’s companion. “We shall have a summer of delight!” she proclaimed.

While his teacher was gone, Gob neglected to read his book a day, neglected plays and Barnum’s museum, neglected eating sometimes, enthralled by the workings of the half-dozen stockbroker’s tickers he disassembled. He easily mastered the workings of the telegraphs—Professors Henry and Morse were his heroes, in those months. By July he had assembled his own ticker, made of parts looted from the ordinary tickers, and mystical parts he fabricated himself—bits of wire blessed in rituals, tiny golden gears, magnets split with a chisel under the full moon, batteries made from chemicals and herbs. He puzzled for another month over what sort of wire might take a message to the dead. And once he had a proper metal, where would he connect it? Would he have to sneak back to Homer and run the wire down into Tomo’s grave? Could he connect it to the many miles of wire that crossed and recrossed Manhattan and hope that the spirits of the dead might hear and speak through that medium? In the end, he decided not to use a wire at all. He devised a means of telegraphing by induction.

Just looking at his spiritual telegraph, Gob should have known that it wouldn’t work. It wasn’t his machine. Though he did not know what his machine looked like, he knew for a fact that he would recognize it, when he saw it, and he recognized nothing in the dog-sized apparatus on his floor. It stood on four gutta-percha feet, and its silver and glass parts glinted under the light of the gas chandelier. Gob threw all the necessary switches. He had developed a special sense for electricity and other vital forces—he knew the thing was humming with energy. He sat up with it all night long, waiting for it to spit out a message from Tomo—
I am alive, I am coming back to you.

But it was silent.

When the Urfeist returned in the autumn, Gob was prepared for a beating because he had neglected his studies and squandered his time on a useless machine. So he was surprised when the Urfeist praised his failed effort. “Now we may begin,” the Urfeist said, meaning that they could begin to build in earnest. They collaborated on machines. The ectoplasmic arc lamp, the Sweden-borgian turbine—these were failures, too.

But these failures cheered the Urfeist. “Of course it will be difficult,” he told Gob, with something almost like kindness in his voice. “Perhaps,” he said, “you are becoming competent in your science but neglecting your art.” He locked the door of Gob’s workshop, hid the key, and directed Gob to the library, to the many shelves devoted to the arcane arts. Gob studied dutifully, wishing he could return to his workshop and be a mechanic. But after a few weeks he found a book that intrigued him endlessly, a little primer of necromancy, bound in black leather and written in German. It was full of simple spells that purported to let the living communicate with the dead. Write a message on a piece of slate and bury it in a graveyard; burn your message with peat and the fat of a pregnant hare; the dead will hear you. Gob performed these spells, sent Tomo such messages as
I will bring you back
, and they comforted him, though he did not entirely believe them efficacious.

Gob began to accompany the Urfeist when he called at the houses of sick people. The Urfeist meant to make Gob a physician, to balance Gob’s study in necromancy with the study of life. But it seemed to Gob that medicine was an art as thoroughly dedicated to death as was necromancy. What was in a medical book besides loving, intimate descriptions of injury, disease, and, ultimately, death? There was a motto in the little McGuffey’s Necromancer that had become dear to him:
My mistress wears a thousand faces.
It was the refrain of the sorcerer, but it seemed to Gob also appropriate to the medical profession. “Yes,” said the Urfeist. “It is true. Those root and herb sharks. Those cancer-quacks. Oh, even the distinguished ones, too. Dr. Mott, Dr. Gross, all my esteemed colleagues, they are ministers of hope and despair—and they do not hate death sufficiently.”

Every year, in the weeks leading up to Christmas, the Urfeist made a grand orphanage tour. There were a great many to visit. He went, not to make withdrawals of children, but to deposit gifts. He put a sprig of holly in his hat, the servants loaded down a carriage with presents, and the Urfeist proceeded to the Catholic Orphan Asylum, just up the street from them on Fifth Avenue, or the Juvenile Asylum, or Leake and Watt’s Orphan House. Gob went with him to the Sheltering Arms, a house up in Manhattanville that accepted the castoffs of other orphanages. The children—some terminally ill, others half-orphaned not by death but by liquor—gathered under a candle-laden Christmas tree and received the largesse of the Urfeist. Gob wondered if the rocking horses wouldn’t come alive at night and stomp on some child’s tender cranium, if the porcelain faces of the dolls would not at midnight become the glaring white visages of ghouls, if the toy guns would not shoot real bullets and make murderers of innocents. But the gifts were wholesome. The puzzles were just puzzles, the calico cats and gingham dogs lacked teeth and claws. The toys were remarkable only because they were so fine. There were wooden soldiers who marched and presented arms, glass butterflies that, when wound, flapped their wings and waved their antennae, a tiny bear who, when squeezed, growled.

“And what is your name, my dear?” asked the Urfeist. A child had climbed into his lap where he sat by the tree.

“Maude,” said the girl.

“What have we for sweet little Maude?” the Urfeist asked of Gob, and Gob rummaged in the bag until he found a doll for her.

“Thank you,” she said dutifully, when she had got it. She leaned forward and gave the Urfeist a kiss on his dry cheek, then clambered off his lap and ran away to a corner where she clutched her new doll and rocked slowly back and forth on her knees.

After visiting the Sheltering Arms, they went home. The Urfeist was a great devotee of the holiday. He insisted on having multiple trees throughout the house, each one lit up with candles and strung with gold beads and crystal. The house was swathed so heavily with evergreen cuttings that a person could not pass from one floor to another without getting touched with sap. The Urfeist scattered walnuts in the corners, set puddings and punches on every table, and insisted, in the few days immediately following Christmas, on lengthy sessions of caroling. Candles in hand, he and Gob would proceed through the house side by side, singing “Good King Wenceslaus” or “Adeste Fidelis.” Up and down all the stairs, through the parlors and the kitchen, through the dining room and the ballroom, through every room but the green room they walked and sang. On Christmas Eve of 1865, they had a session of caroling, and when they had passed into the upper reaches of the house, and were proceeding through Gob’s bedroom, the Urfeist stopped.

“Time for your Christmas present,” the Urfeist said to Gob. Gob thought that meant he ought to proceed to the stone corner and get down on his belly. That was what he was doing when the Urfeist said, “Not that. Not now. Come here.” He produced the key to Gob’s workshop and opened up the big iron door. Inside the spiritual telegraph sat where Gob had left it in the middle of the room. “This is your present,” the Urfeist said warmly. “A return to machines. Do you know what time it is?”

“Christmastime,” said Gob.

“Yes,” said the Urfeist. “But also it is time for you to begin your work, your real work. I think you are ready, now. I think that the abolition of death is at hand.”

Gob hung his head down and began to cry, not certain why he should have become tearful. He had, after all, been itching to return to his workshop for months. He looked at the inert, useless telegraph and said, “I will fail.”

He got a beating then, a Christmas beating—not very savage at all, just enough to discourage pessimism. When he was done hitting him the Urfeist put away his paddle and took Gob into his arms. “Do not despair, my boy,” he said, his mouth against Gob’s cheek. It occurred to Gob, as it often did, that the breath of a vulture or a hyena must be very similar to the nidorous exhalations of the Urfeist. “So you are not brilliant. So you are stupid. Did you think I would not help you with your work? Did you think that together we would not succeed? Isn’t it the fundamental wisdom of your life, that you will require assistance in this endeavor?”

Gob went out looking for Professor Morse, operating on the very reasonable assumption that laying eyes upon that great man might inspire him to success. Gob would stroll down Broadway, keeping a sharp eye out for a man of some eighty years with a definite look of genius about him. Gob had his engraved likeness from an illustrated weekly, and he would peek at it every now and then as he walked along. He never saw Professor Morse on Broadway, though it was widely known that the man took a daily walk there. So Gob lurked outside Morse’s house on Twenty-second Street near Fifth Avenue, and finally saw him come out one rainy afternoon in March of 1866. He was not remarkable-looking, after all. Gob ran across the street and caught him before he stepped up into a cab. “Professor!” he said. “Professor, a word with you, please?”

Professor Morse turned to Gob and peered at him through rain-spattered spectacles. “Yes, sir?” he said. He looked closer and said, “Can I help you?”

Could he? It seemed to Gob that if he could formulate the proper question, then Mr. Morse could indeed help him. But Gob did not know what question to ask. He stood there silently in the rain, blinking at the eminent man. Professor Morse smiled at him and pressed a dime into his hand. “Good day, young fellow!” he said cheerily, and drove off. Gob brought the dime home and affixed it to the telegraph.

As the dime was the first of many accretions, Gob never figured his quest for Professor Morse to have been fruitless. An urge made him put the coin on the telegraph, but once it was there he had a notion of the telegraph as the heart of his machine, and after that notion dawned, there dawned another, as naturally and simply as one day following another—something poorly remembered from his dreams, a conviction that the machine would have a heart, that it would take its shape around a center. The telegraph would be the heart of the machine. The Urfeist manifested a childish excitement when Gob told him of his revelation. Together they became incorrigible affixers. Glass pipes, miniature armillary spheres, copper and silver wire—the telegraph grew until it was a globe of stuff.

The Urfeist insisted that Gob would find his inspiration mostly in dreams. Gob got a beating for merely suggesting that they take a trip to the Smithsonian Institution to consult with Professor Henry. Mornings, the Urfeist hovered around Gob’s bed, watching him sleep and waiting for him to wake. It was no way to start a day, waking to the unsavory visage of the Urfeist. “Did you dream?” he would ask. “Did you see?” If Gob shook his head, then the Urfeist would make him sip from a big blue bottle of paregoric, and say, “Continue sleeping. Continue dreaming.” He kept a pencil and notebook by Gob’s bed, so if Gob woke when he wasn’t there Gob could make notes himself on what he saw in his dreams. And he thought that he did see things in his dreams. Every night, he was sure, he saw the whole, fabulous machine. It breathed and worked. But he forgot, when he woke, what it looked like, and how it functioned.

Buttons, bones, string and wire, marbles and pennies and glass straws—Gob made his machine out of anything he could find in the house, and the Urfeist had basements full of every possible thing. “I am a collector,” he said sometimes, as if this made him distinguished, and it was true that the Urfeist collected treasures, little figures of wrought gold, paintings rolled up and stuck under beds, sculptures locked away like prisoners in the basement. But mostly the Urfeist collected trash. He had a room stuffed with broken furniture, a room where broken glass was scattered a half foot deep over the floor, and set in the ceiling where it glittered like stars. There was a room full of what Gob was sure must be a disassembled steam engine, and a room next to that one full of stacked rails.

Gob went picking and choosing among the rooms, waiting for things to seem necessary to his work. It would happen—one moment a glass ball was only a glass ball, but the next it would be the eye of his machine, and he would rush it to his workshop and install it. Every so often, the Urfeist would come and inspect his machine and insult it, saying it was loose and ill-planned, the child of an undisciplined and undiscerning mind. He would lift his hand as if to smash it, but then say he couldn’t be bothered even with its destruction. “What is it?” he’d ask. “Is it a glass sheep? Is it a pet to guard you from loneliness?”

It was true that it looked like a sheep now. It had a barrel-shaped body and something like a head that hung down between its legs, as if it were grazing off the floor. But where a sheep might have a heart, this thing had the stock ticker, grown with accretions to twice its original size. The machine was electrical and spiritual, with an umbilicus that left its belly to split and run to twenty batteries, and feet that stood in silver cups of a mystical fluid which Gob had mixed according to a recipe in his McGuffey’s Necromancer. When he activated it, the ticker vomited up wriggling streams of blank paper: they exited the machine like a growing tail. It was a failure because it did not carry a message from his brother, and this was what he sought to amend. The answer, he was sure, was to keep adding things.

For all that the Urfeist ridiculed the thing, Gob knew he secretly admired it, because he’d looked through the keyhole into his workroom and seen his teacher gazing at it or running his long nails over all its smooth parts. Visiting with it took up more and more of the Urfeist’s time, and he began to build on it also. The two of them worked on it in turns, Gob too afraid to say how he resented and admired his master’s contributions, the Urfeist too proud to acknowledge how he was now collaborating with his student. But one night, as Gob served up his master’s rat pudding, the Urfeist made an observation. “It lacks the crucial element of desire. How can it bring him back, if it cannot want him?” After that they began to work together, and always on that problem—how to make the unfeeling thing feel?