There was another spirit, initially as furtive as the others were bold, and the only female. She flitted outside Will’s window, or she hid in the shadow of an alley at night, and he’d only catch a glimpse of her as he passed by. She was different because she was shy, and because she looked to be a complete angel. He’d groaned when he saw her. Somehow it was bearable to see a half angel. It did not bode the same ill for one’s mind or one’s equanimity. But she was entire. There was no missing her strange wings, her great height and fine green robes that looked to be hewn out of malachite, or the spots of green light that floated around her head like a crown of emeralds. She had strange wings and strange eyes. They were the darkest eyes Will had ever seen, flat and black as if someone had gouged them out and filled up the sockets with ink. Her wings were white and not made of feathers but tiny things like fingers or the beard of a cuttlefish.
One night he woke, not at the sound of the cannon, but because a cat was screaming on his roof. He lay with his eyes closed, thinking the animal might have become trapped in the glass house. When he opened his eyes the spirit was there, kneeling by his bed and leaning over him, so close he thought she might kiss him. She opened her mouth, and then she fled. Not a moment later, the little angel boy arrived, looking furious, stomping silently around the room. He turned to Will and shook his finger at him.
It was the last question Will would have asked, what the machine would do. He might not ever have known, if Gob hadn’t volunteered the answer. He had never known what the glass house would do — he’d just built it. He assumed that Gob, too, was building in ignorance of ultimate function. But Gob told him, standing in his workshop, the purpose he meant for his machine to accomplish, and it did not seem so terribly insane. Or it seemed properly insane, to build a machine to abolish death. Only the most reasonable of lunatics could devote his life to something so sensible and worthwhile, to put aside all other work and devote himself to this ultimate concern. “Will you help me, Will?” Gob had asked. “I mean to lick death, but I can’t do it alone. Will you help me win?” Jolly and Sam were standing on either side of Will, and their lips seemed to be moving in the same manner as Gob’s, asking the same question.
“What can I do?” Will had asked, because it seemed to him that he could do nothing. He confessed that he had built the glass house from blind, ignorant compulsion. He wasn’t an engineer or a mechanic. He did not understand steam power or aeolipiles or how steel was different from iron. But Jolly was jumping up and down, pointing to himself and at Sam, as if to suggest that they would help him.
Will waved his hand at all the parts and pieces around the room, at the machine under the gaselier. “I don’t understand any of this. I don’t know how to use such things, or how to make them.”
When Will said this, Gob only smiled wider. “I’ll teach you, my friend,” he said. “And then we’ll build together.”
“Sam,” Will said, “why don’t you come over here and sit with me?” Every so often he’d set two chairs by the big window over Fulton Street, sit down in one, and pat the other invitingly. “It’s nice on a cold day,” he said to his brother, “to sit in the sun and look out on the snow and the people bundled in their coats and think how you’re warm. Come and sit for a while. We’ll just be quiet together.” He patted again, gestured with both his hands, but Sam only stood on the far side of the room and eyed him warily. He shook his head as if to remind Will that he was a spirit, that he couldn’t feel such pleasures as warm sunlight, couldn’t touch the glass to marvel at how cold it was. Or else he shook his head just to say I will not sit with you, to say I do not know you, to say you are not any more my friend now than you were when I lived.
“I used to hate liquor,” said Will, taking a sip from the big flask of brandy he and Gob carried with them in the ambulance. On a cold spring day in 1868, Gob drove them hurriedly through a light snow to Number 344 East Thirty-second Street, where a lady had been shot by her deranged sister. Gob had finished his two terms of lectures. Those and his long apprenticeship with Dr. Oetker were enough to earn him his diploma from Bellevue. He might have become a house physician, but chose instead to enter the newly established ambulance service. Will, though he hadn’t yet earned his diploma, and wouldn’t until he’d completed another term, joined Gob in the ambulance, which had lamps placed on the sides and a reflector attached to the roof. The word “ambulance” was emblazoned on all sides, but this did not stop Gob from yelling at anyone who blocked their way, “Can’t you see this is an ambulance?”
The calls came in by telegraph from the police headquarters. The job was always exciting, especially at night. When they were working, Gob and Will slept in a room over the ambulance stables, a bell above their bed. When it rang it also caused a weight to fall which lit the gas. They would stumble around, blinking in the light, grabbing for their coats, and then rush to the ambulance. The harness, saddle, and collar were suspended from the ceiling, and dropped into place automatically at the sound of the alarm. Not more than two minutes ever passed between the time the bell sounded and the time they rushed out of the stable.
Will handed the flask at Gob, who declined it, saying they would not have enough when they got to their patient. In a box beneath the seat were blankets and splints, tourniquets and bandages. They had a straitjacket and a stomach pump and a copy of Gross’s Hints on the Emergencies of Field, Camp, and Hospital Practice. They had a medicine chest with emetics and antidotes and morphine. They never failed to lack something, however, when they arrived at the scene of misfortune.
Will put his hand out to catch the swirling snow as they sped along down Broadway. This was their third call of the day. Earlier, a junk dealer had been crushed by her own cart when it tipped and fell on her at the foot of Roosevelt Street. Before that, a woman getting off the rear platform of a Third Avenue horsecar had been run over by a sleigh. Both those patients had lived.
The gunshot woman died cursing her sister, though they cared for her wound as best they were able, covering it with lint saturated in balsam of Peru, and enlarging the exit wound so it could drain properly. Back at Bellevue, they saw her set up in a bed in Ward 26, and made her comfortable with brandy and morphine. Will wrote down her last words, Damn you Sally. He had a collection of those. He wrote them in inch-high letters on fine creamy white paper: Is it over?; Do you hear the pretty music?; I would rather live; No; What help are you?; Tell my horse I love her.
When they were not at the ambulance house, they were at Gob’s house. So far, Will had made what seemed to him to be merely decorative contributions to the construction. He tied last words to strings and hung them from the body of the machine, or he fixed death masks to it, and Gob made a fuss over Will’s efforts, like a doting, overpraising parent. Will felt ignorant and useless, but his education had begun in earnest. He had thought Gob had a masterful knowledge of medicine, but now he was coming to believe that he had a masterful knowledge of everything.
One day in April, he had Will follow him through the house with a wheelbarrow. Gob took books from where they lay and threw them in. “Oh yes,” he’d say, picking up a volume, “you had better be familiar with this, if we are going to make any progress.” Each title was more dismaying to Will than the last: Optics, Acoustics, Thermotics, Stability of Structures, Intellectual and Ethical Philosophy, Higher Geodesy, Analytical Geometry of Three Dimensions, Calculus of Variations. Then there was all the Aristotle: eight books on physics, four on meteors, thirteen on metaphysics, two on generation and destruction. “What am I forgetting?” Gob asked as they stood in the library, the wheelbarrow already overflowing. He looked thoughtful for a moment, then said, “Of course, the Renaissance Magi!” He scurried around the room, plucking books from the shelves. Will looked at the authors’ names, men of whom he had never heard, books that looked to be a hundred years old or more. Paracelsus and Nettesheim and Della Porta, Albertus Magnus and Mirandola and Dr. Dee, Gob tossed them about without a care for their ancient bindings and brittle pages.