The caisson was fascinating, regardless of whatever philosophy Gob attached to it. It was so very large. Will knew its dimensions because Gob had repeated them endlessly — one hundred and sixty-eight feet long by one hundred and twenty feet wide, twenty feet high and three thousand tons heavy. Yet it seemed much larger, and the sloping walls gave it an Egyptian feel, as if it might be the base of a pyramid or a pedestal for a sphinx. The roof was covered with air pumps and tackle and various other pieces of machinery which Will could not recognize. “Isn’t it beautiful?” Gob asked. There was something childish in the way he hopped restlessly from foot to foot, waiting among the crowd of thousands for the launch, which went off without a hitch. The thing fell gracefully down to the water.
“There it goes,” Will said, holding his belly because he felt a lurch when the last block was knocked away and, when the thing started to fall, he had a feeling in his belly as if he, not the caisson, were falling, urged along by his fantastic mass into the gray river. Gob cheered with the rest of the crowd, shouting himself hoarse. Will cheered, too, very awkwardly at first, because he could not even remember the last time he had raised his voice this way. He emitted a few cracked, coughing yawps, and these seemed to clear the way in him for something smoother and more musical, a high, enthusiastic yodel that brought to mind the terrific hollering that the Rebs used to do. Will yelled louder and louder, until it was just he and Gob screaming in the now quiet crowd, until, like Gob, he’d used up his voice.
Will wrote in his casebook: He has had twenty-five to thirty discharges from his bowels in the past twenty-four hours. He was sitting at the bedside of a cholera patient, a fifteen-year-old boy whose fat cheeks made him look even younger than he was. Will put down his pencil and reached out to push the sleeping boy’s sweat-matted hair away from his eyes. He was sure that the boy would die.
That spring, Will had among others under his care a consumptive longshoreman, a cigar maker with intermittent fever, a clerk with pneumonia, a syphilitic sailor, a washerwoman with pleurisy, a shopgirl with plumbism from her makeup, a decayed actor who’d attempted suicide by hammering a nail into his head. All these patients died, despite Will’s sincere good intentions, his knowledge, his skill, and his careful watching. He’d sit with those who had no family to attend their death, thinking that in watching them take their last breaths some deeper knowledge would be revealed to him, something that might help in the construction of Gob’s machine. He learned the pattern: the limbs would cool, and the underside of the body would darken; patients would become sleepy and confused, often mistaking Will for someone they loved, reaching out their weakening hands to caress his face; their breathing would become shallow, and thick spit would pool in the back of their throat, so each breath, when it came, rasped and rattled; at the very end the breathing would cease and the heart would stop, and they would void their bladder and their bowels, a final gesture of disrespect for the world that they were leaving. He learned the pattern, but not the secret. He learned nothing exceptional, except how it was impossible that a person should live and breathe and be one moment the repository of an undying soul, and the next be just a body, just cooling flesh.
Will had gone to the second medical division at Bellevue. Gob had grown bored with the ambulance service, and quit at the end of ‘69. He had a gaggle of patients that he had inherited from Dr. Oetker, and, when he was not at work on the machine, he kept himself occupied with them. These wealthy men and women were never really sick, just obsessed with their bowels or the dimming luster of their hair. Will didn’t understand why Gob bothered with them.
The cholera boy died like the others, alone but for Will. Gob’s machine was already a success in one respect — working on it staved off Will’s fits. It blunted his empathy, as if work on the salvation of the sick and the dying made it easier for him to shake off their suffering. But when the work went poorly, as it had lately, the fits returned. He had one on account of the cholera boy. As he sank into oblivion, rattling and crying out with fear despite Will’s attempts to soothe him, Will sank down, too. His guts cramped up and he let out a moan, and as the boy died Will shook and drooled and bit his own cheek.
He woke with his head in the lap of a drunken nurse. He looked to where the boy lay in his bed, his mouth and eyes both slightly open.
“Have a little sip, sir,” the nurse said, bringing a flask to his lips. “It will help you to recover.” He sat up and stood away from her, scowling, taking the flask and telling her to get to work cleaning the boy’s body. Will looked around the room for his spirit, but it wasn’t there. To be haunted immediately would have been unprecedented. Will never saw them so fresh, but always a period of weeks would pass before they appeared to him, former patients who accused him with expressions of betrayal, as if they were furious he had not saved them. “It takes a little while,” Tennie told him, “for them to learn to come back. It is not easy for them.”
When Will left Bellevue that evening it was to go to Number 15 East Thirty-eighth Street, Tennie’s new address since earlier in the year. Mrs. Woodhull had rented a mansion with some of the new fortune she’d gathered in the stock market. As he walked he checked intermittently over his shoulder, still afraid the cholera boy might appear. The boy was never there when he looked, but other spirits followed, Jolly and Sam and the rest, stretched out behind him in a line. He went twice about a streetlamp, hopped over garbage on the sidewalk, crouched low to duck under a horse who blocked his way as he crossed the street, and every spirit walked, hopped, and ducked precisely as he did, as if he blazed the only trail they could take in the world.
As he turned off of Fifth Avenue he could see Tennie, sitting in her window as if she were still living in Great Jones Street. “Darling!” she called out as the spirits filed up behind him, “I’ve been waiting for you!”
Will’s machines were always loosely adjusted and ill-controlled. He fixed Gob’s aeolipile, but when he fired it up it wobbled as it spun, and instead of making a clean whistling hiss it screamed like a lovelorn cat. Still, he continued to learn and to build. Gob mostly praised his efforts, though he could be harsh: of an arc lamp that Will assembled from two pieces of charcoal and a powerful voltaic battery, Gob said dismissively, “It makes more heat than light.”
Gob’s machine, meanwhile, was looking more and more like a person. They’d undone the thing it was before, removing the concretions of years until they uncovered something that looked like an iron-and-glass lamb, and then they undid that, too, because Gob declared it simply wrong, an immature form suited to a lesser task than abolishing death. Now it had glass ribs and a pair of round copper hips. It stood on legs as skinny as a bird’s, made of steel and wrapped around tightly with copper and gold wire. All the bones Gob had brought from a trip to Washington were carved into gears, or fused into struts. Inside the glass ribs was a second set of bone ribs, made from leg bones and neck bones and pieces of shattered pelvis. When they worked, Gob wore a black hat, fetched on the same Washington trip. He claimed it had belonged once to Abraham Lincoln, and said that he felt inspired when he put it on.
The variety of surfaces, the little glass boxes filled with tiny gears of gold and platinum and iron and steel, the looping wires and cables that spread out like wings behind it, the umbrella of picture negatives that sheltered it from the glare of the gaselier — these all made the machine fascinating to look at, but they did not make it functional. “It’s not finished,” Gob said once as they worked, when Will raised the issue of failure. “But it will be finished. My friend, you are impatient like the dead. I am never glad I cannot see them or hear them, but I know they must carp like fishwives, clamoring for the work to be done, and for the walls to fall. But we go as we must, and no other way. You are with me, and Walt is with me, and we will not fail.”