He went in through the first open curtain he found. There was a girl sitting on a green couch piled with blankets. She was reading a book by the light of a lantern hung on the wall. A pair of cracked spectacles were balanced on the end of her nose.
“Close the curtain, darling,” she said, without looking up. “I never like to put on a show.” Already, a cloud of witnesses was crowding inside, jostling him with their cool flesh. Jolly’s and Sam’s were the only familiar faces, though there were a dozen or more with him. He couldn’t meet Sam’s eyes, but he couldn’t leave the place, either, couldn’t go home and read, couldn’t even content himself with rubbing up against some pretty, unsuspecting lady on a Second Avenue stage, as a more restrained fiend might do.
He had whiskey with him, and she asked to sip it from his mouth, so he took some and he kissed her. She would not take off her glasses and they bumped against his face. She lifted her dress, really just an old and stained shift of silk, put her book down gently on the couch, and lay back, putting one arm behind her head. Pushing her glasses up high on her nose, she told Will to take down his pants. He opened up his jacket and his shirt so he could press his skin against hers. She was clammy and cold, and her breasts were pimply, but he kissed them as if he loved them.
After a while, the girl gave a little titter. Will thought it was because his work was unsatisfying and ridiculous, but in fact she was laughing at some bit of humor in her book, which she had picked up again, and was reading over his shoulder. He propped himself up on his elbows and looked down at her.
“What, darling?” she asked. “What? It’s Mr. Dickens. I can hardly put it down. Not for anything. So go on. Just go right on with it.” The spirits, crowded close, were nodding avidly, and their mouths were moving as if to say, Yes, do.
* * *
“Hold still,” Will said, because Gob would not stop fidgeting. “You’ll ruin the photograph.”
“Sorry,” said Gob, but he kept moving his eyes and his head to look at the pictures around the studio. Will had brought him to Brooklyn for a complimentary portrait, motivated by friendship and by Jolly. Will was thrilled to be able to teach Gob the photographic process, because he’d learned as much about medicine from Gob as he had from their professors. And as they walked on South Street one day, Jolly had pointed repeatedly at Gob and then at Brooklyn, making it very obvious that he wanted Will to take him there.
“I’ll bind your head to the stand,” Will said.
“What’s that one?” Gob asked, moving his arm, too, to point at a plate negative taken at Bull Run. It was not one of Frenchy’s. Will had been collecting them from other photographers.
“Now it’s ruined,” Will said, taking his head out of the camera and scowling.
“Is that one from Chickamauga?” Gob asked, walking over to examine the plate.
“No,” said Will. “I have none from that battle. That’s three plates you’ve wasted. Why can’t you hold still?”
“Where are the pictures from Chickamauga?” Gob asked. He went rooting among the mounds of pictures and plates on tables around the room. Will finally made him understand that there were no pictures from Chickamauga, but Gob was fascinated by any picture. He held the negative plates up to the light and closed his eyes and said, “Oh!” With their sleeves rolled up and their collars loosened, they looked at every picture Will owned. Gob delighted especially in the stereoscopic images. He sat cross-legged on the floor, looking at Mr. Gardner’s gruesome photographs, reaching out his hand repeatedly to try and touch the carnage that floated before him.
When there were no more pictures to look at, Will taught Gob how to take and develop a photograph. He mastered the process immediately. There were people who did not have to be shown a thing twice to learn it, but with Gob you almost didn’t have to show him even once. When Will asked how he knew to make the negative for an ambrotype thin and light, Gob only said, “Well, it makes sense, doesn’t it?” He insisted on taking Will’s picture, and Will obliged him, though he didn’t like it. He stood in a formal pose, next to a broken plaster column and an urn. He was surrounded by spirits, Jolly and Lewy Greeley and even Sam, who stood away from him, but still within the picture. Gob developed the picture himself, mounted it as an ambrotype, and then presented it to Will.
“Ah, you’re a professional,” Will said. It was a good picture. He looked like a big hulking fool, with his sleepy, stupid gaze and his slack idiot’s mouth: Gob had captured him. There were no spirits in the picture, but they clustered around Will to look at it, as if expecting to find themselves in the glass.
Just as the day ended, they went up to the roof. Will had never shown the glass house to anyone, because he had no friends with which to share any secrets, least of all a peculiar monument to death, a greenhouse fit for the cultivation of fat white tombflowers. But he thought it would interest Gob, because pictures fascinated him, and because death fascinated him. And Jolly pointed urgently at Gob, at the stairs, at Gob again, and made sweeping motions with his hands, as if to shoo the both of them up to the roof.
“You’re a builder, too,” Gob said when he saw it. It was a warm Sunday in February. The last night’s snow had been melting all day off the glass house, so it looked clean and fresh and wet. Gob reached out with his hand, running his finger from plate to plate. A crowd of spirits gathered, between eyeblinks, to watch him. “May I go in?” Gob asked.
“Certainly,” Will said. Then he thought how it might change Gob as it had changed him, and he said, “Wait, it could hurt you.”
“I’m sure it won’t,” Gob said, and he went into the house. Will put it down to a trick of the setting sun, how yellow light flashed inside. Spirits were all around them. They joined hands to circle the house, and then they danced around it, first one way, and then the other. Will had never seen them all so happy. Even ever-angry Frenchy was happy, even Sam was smiling and dancing. Only the angel boy didn’t dance. He perched on the top of the house, blowing his bugle at the sun.
Did it follow, Will wondered, that if you could see them you ought to be able to hear them, too? What logic governed such interaction? He could hear the cannon still sounding, still deafening, still waking him every so often from sleep. Often it was just Frenchy standing watch over his bed. Sometimes he had a plate with him, one upon which pictures flashed like the images from a magic lantern. Will saw the faces of strangers, night landscapes, scenes of the war, a shack on a hill with a decaying orchard behind it, a dark thick wood at twilight. Frenchy would point at the images and talk, wearing the same expression as when he’d been Will’s living instructor, an angry, impatient look that very often got screwed up into a raging scowl as he yelled and yelled.
“I can’t hear you,” Will would say, when Frenchy worked himself into a fury. “But it suits you, sir, this quietness. I think it has made you likable, dear Frenchy.” This made him angrier, but Will, grumpy anyhow at being woken, felt compelled to tease him. “Dear, meek Frenchy. Quiet as a mouse!”
Will stood on Fifth Avenue, looking up at Number 1 East Fifty-third Street, wondering if his friend could really live in this enormous house. Gob had invited him for supper, reciprocating, Will supposed, the invitation to Brooklyn. “We’ll eat,” Gob said, “and then I’ll show you something.”