“I like it because it is perfect, because it does its work perfectly. A perfect fuel for a perfect machine.” Jolly was walking up and down the ward, not waving or speaking, just turning his head this way and that, regarding everything with sadness and longing. Will looked away from him, his attention drawn to a stump that twitched briefly, and when he looked back Jolly was gone. The spirits came and went like that.
“I hate the smell,” Will said. “And anyhow if I were less tired and more articulate I would argue that we are not perfect, body or soul.” The stump that had twitched began to bleed again, so Will leaned forward to tighten a band of elastic around it, but this was not sufficient. He had to plunge his fingers through the stitches and feel blindly under the flap, seeking to catch the leaking artery between his fingers. The patient was screaming and the sheets were soaking through.
Gob put his little hand in, too, and in a moment he’d caught the vessel and pinched it. “Ah,” he said, over the patient’s screaming. “Feel that!” Will put his finger along Gob’s and felt the blood beating. The strength and the rhythm of it did seem like a miracle, just then. “Perfect,” said Gob. “Oh, I wish I could build like this.”
Sometimes he’d feel the pressure of eyes on him as he walked, and looking back he would see them. Jolly was always out in front, taking measured, even steps. Will would keep walking, thinking they might go away if only he ignored them, but he never could. He’d look back again and again, and each time there’d be another, until there was a long train of them following him down Broadway or the Bowery or Fulton Street. They stepped fluidly among the living, never touching them even on the busiest streets, while Will, always looking over his shoulder, knocked packages from the arms of ladies, and got tangled in their parasols. “Stop following me!” he shouted, but he knew this would do nothing to deter them, and it did not.
* * *
In the lying-in ward, the women waiting to deliver kept busy making shrouds. Will wondered, as he walked among them, how many would lie buried in their work. Bellevue had a reputation as a nest of puerperal fever. Gob had switched to the second medical division after the end of the first term. Dr. Wood offered to make him a senior assistant, but Gob said he felt drawn to the medical wards, to the cholera and consumption and pneumonia. Will shadowed him there, and saw how his patients did better than others. Gob eschewed calomel and tartar emetic in all cases. He dosed the weak of heart with foxglove. He gave calcined magnesia for excessive flatulence, carbonate of soda for dyspepsia, a mixture of turpentine and gin for worms. Patients with intractable dry coughs who got no relief from syrup of squills were healed by a weird elixir. “Moss squeezings, bat’s blood, and death angel,” Gob said, and Will thought he must be joking.
They liked to go around the wards at night. The nurses were untrained and incompetent, sentenced to Bellevue to serve out ten-day terms for public drunkenness. They would find them snoring in a corner, the remains of Friday’s fish dinner smeared on their frocks, while patients called out for assistance or mercy or death. Gob and Will might turn a patient on his side so he could urinate, a veteran with a bullet in his bladder that acted as a ball valve, or sit at the bedsides of cholera patients, measuring out grains of morphine into a cup of hot water. The cholera patients had shriveled fingers. Their lips were blue, and their clammy faces were shrunken.
By January of ‘68, Will had become an assistant in the first medical division. He spent most of his time in the basement, among the alcoholics and the insane. “They are all very unreasonable down there,” he complained, when he came upstairs at night to visit Gob. “You are living the life here on the second floor, let me tell you.” He would sit on a bed and throw wadded-up gauze at a passed-out nurse, saying, “Wake up, Sairey Gamp!” or else assist Gob in taking pulses and listening to hearts and lungs. When the patients were all asleep they would sit in a window, staring at the East River and talking quietly. They both belonged to a not very exclusive club of surviving brothers.
“Sam was the companion of my youth,” Will said one night. “But then we grew distant.”
“I failed him,” said Gob, raising his hand as if to touch the full moon framed in the window. A cold wind was whipping up blue foam on the river.
“How does that happen? He was the only other person in the world, and then he was no one.”
“If I had been with him he would yet be alive,” Gob said quietly.
“He was a stranger to me, when he died,” Will said. “Do you think that’s a crime?” He looked around the room for Sam, thinking that talk of him might summon him. He wasn’t there, but Jolly was pacing up and down the ward, looking at his feet as they walked.
“Help me!” said a cholera patient, sitting up suddenly in his bed. Will was too late with the bucket.
In the morning, they would go for a walk on the hospital grounds, which used to be filled with orchards of peach and apple and plum trees, but now were covered with small and large buildings of gneiss rock and brick. They would wander for a while in the cold, both of them exhausted but neither in a mood for sleep. Gob, Will discovered, had a morbid imagination. It seemed to Will that Gob was becoming a doctor for the wrong reason, not because he loved life, but because he was obsessed with death. Not that it was the right reason, either, to become a doctor at the direction of a spirit.
After their walk they might seek out Dr. Gouley, to assist him with an autopsy, Gob weighing livers or kidneys or brains while Will measured the thickness of a heart. Dr. Gouley, a lonely man, was happy for their company. “You work well together,” he said to them on more than one occasion. Sometimes he invited them to put on loupes and do a detailed dissection. Gob liked to pull on the tendons of a flayed hand and make it beckon invitingly to the other corpses. When the organs were all removed, and there was nothing left in the late person but watery blood pooling in the gutters alongside the spine, Dr. Gouley would stare lovingly into the body and put his hands into the pink fluid, lifting it and holding it in his palms until it ran through his fingers. “My boys,” he would say. “Do you see how we are vessels?”
The spirits followed Will to a place called the Pearl, a saloon run by a woman of the same name. It was a hideous dive. A white-painted glass ball as big as a head hung over the door. Inside, it looked at first glance like any other saloon — dim and smoky, with sawdust on the floor. But there was a door in the back, and if you went through it you found yourself, not outside in the alley, but at the top of a staircase, and if you took those stairs down you entered a bagnio, a maze, in whose secret recesses prostitutes reclined expectantly.
Will went downstairs without looking back to see how many followed. At the bottom of the stairs, he opened the door to the maze. Down there it was musty, and it stank of fish. What might once have been stored there he never knew, but it seemed like a place that must once have held bones. Along the twisting, turning way there were recesses, hidden by thin curtains, where couches sat. Some of the curtains were drawn, and if there were lights inside they threw copulating silhouettes onto the hanging fabric. Grunting cries rang off the low ceiling.
There was something he liked about these seedy, curtained places. He had enough money from portrait-taking that he could visit a nice house, someplace on West Twenty-fifth Street, where the girls were pretty and all the fornication was done amid the trappings of purity. He might visit every one of the Seven Sisters’ houses, or dress up in his finest clothes for a visit to Josie Woods’s. He’d heard about those places — white sheets and soft beds, girls with clean hair and shining faces who dressed up in old-fashioned hoop skirts and spoke with great refinement — but he had never visited one. The glass house had made him honest in his debauchery; when he wallowed he wallowed like a pig.