“The Kosmos,” Will said, looking at the machine and wondering what Mr. Whitman’s place in it might possibly be. Would he hold a cable in his hand and pass his vital energy along to waken the thing? Would he read his ridiculous poetry at it, and rouse it into a fury at the corruption of verse? He imagined the machine raising its arms to smash the man.
“Yes,” Gob said, with a dreamy look on his face. “The Kosmos.” Will turned his attention to the splicing of wire. It was something he enjoyed, weaving together the metal, strand to strand. Of the Washington booty, he liked best the piece from the Atlantic Cable. He thought it both pretty and perfect: the seven copper wires that formed the actual conductor, the insulating wrappings of thread soaked in pitch and tallow, the layers of gutta-percha, and finally the surrounding, protective coat of hard mail made from twisted steel wire. Once, before they’d worked it into the machine, he had held one end while Sam put his hand around the other, but Will had felt nothing and heard nothing.
“You’ll fail,” was what the angel said, during her rare and brief visits. And she repeated her question: “Why do you participate in abomination?” He had gathered, eventually, that by “abomination” she did not mean his dalliances on Greene Street. She meant the machine. “Do you think God is against our work?” he’d asked Gob after one of her visits. “He is indifferent,” was the reply. When Will told about the angel, he thought Gob might laugh at him and say that though spirits walked all around us on the earth, there was never any such thing as an angel. But Gob had only nodded and said, as if it were the most ordinary and sensible of statements, “Oh yes. The angels—they’re very much against us.”
“What do you know of angels?” Will asked Tennie. They were in her room on a hot night in July, nestled in what she called her Turkish corner. She had a bed fit for a princess, but sometimes she preferred to sleep here, where she’d hung a silk tent from the ceiling. Inside, she spread soft carpets and brocade pillows on the floor. She set two scimitars on the wall, bejungled the interior with rubber plants and ferns, and flanked the entrance to the tent with two squat plaster pillars, upon which two oil lamps burned and smoked.
“I saw them when I was small,” Tennie said, “but never since.” She’d reached her hand into a fern and was lazily waving its leaves back and forth, generating a little breeze. “Vicky saw one, once. I was just a year old, and almost died from diphtheria. Vicky saw an angel come down and wrap me in its wings.”
“Trying to smother you? Were they horrible wings?”
“Certainly not. It was a healing touch. I was restored by it. Everyone but Vicky had given me up for dead.” She reached for a glass of water and took a drink. “I saw Mr. Nathan,” she said. “Have you seen him? He doesn’t look happy. I think he wants justice for his murder. You know, I don’t think I’d care much what happened to my killer, after the fact. I think my concerns would be less mundane.” She took another drink of water. Will put his hand high on her belly, just under her ribs, imagining, as he sometimes did, that he could see through her skin to watch the functioning of her organs, and see her stomach writhing in appreciation at the cool drink. She talked about her day. He wasn’t ever sure what exactly she did with her time, but he knew she was always busy with brokerage business or paper business. In her room she had a little desk where she composed articles for the paper she and her sister had launched in May. Once, when she was writing, he asked her, somewhat peevishly, if she was exposing Mr. Challis. “Mr. Who?” she replied.
He put his hands all over her, feeling her liver as it slipped past his hand when she breathed in deeply, and calling out, as he touched them, “Lungs, kidneys, spleen.”
Tennie laughed, saying her spleen was here and not there, moving his hand. She claimed to be intimately familiar with her inner workings. It was part of her talent as a medical clairvoyant and a magnetic healer, to know her own body so well. “Yes, yes,” she said, “put your hands on me, and I will put mine on you.” She reached up to his chest and his back, as if trying to capture his heart between her hands.
“The telegraph, too, has a body and a soul,” Gob said. Will was making Daniell batteries, pouring an acidulated solution of copper sulfate into a copper cell and putting a porous cup inside it. Inside the cup went a cylinder of zinc, surrounded by a weak acid. The whole thing was enclosed within a glass jar. The assembly was delicate and laborious, and he’d burned holes through half his shirts, being careless with the acid. But Will liked the work. He thought the batteries were elegant, with their cups within cups within cups. He could spend whole days making them, and he often did, so they had hundreds by the end of summer.
“You cannot see the vital principle that animates it,” Gob said, staring at a stock ticker that had been set in his machine before they’d remade it. He’d taken the ticker all apart and half-reassembled it. He was in a mood, mourning the fact that he could not see spirits in general and his brother in particular, when he devoted his life to them, and when a person like his mother could see them, and hear them, even, it seemed, have tea with them. Will thought of his own mother’s lamenting.
“It won’t bring them back,” Will said, “to merely complain.”
“But it will,” Gob said. “Don’t you understand? What’s grief if not a profound complaint? It’s what the engine will do; it will complain. It will grieve with mechanical efficiency and mechanical strength. It will grieve for my brother and for your brother and for the six hundred thousand dead of the war. It will grieve for all the dead of history, and all the dead of the future. Man’s grief does nothing to bring them back, but just as man’s hands cannot move mountains, but man’s machines can, our machine will grieve away the boundaries between this world and the next. And then, sure as the rails run to California, the way will be open.”
Will kept working, kept his eyes on the battery and his attention on the task of filling the little porous cup with acid. But though he didn’t look at Gob, he knew how his face must be animated with pride and anger and sadness — it was the look he got when he made grand statements about their work. It was a difference between them, that Gob liked to talk so much where Will preferred simply to work. And that talkiness was part of the reason, Will figured, for Gob’s cleaving to Mr. Whitman.
Later, Gob put the ticker back together completely and then worked it again into the machine — it sat in the place where a navel would on a person. Then he went downstairs to read. Will was still patiently assembling batteries fifteen hours after he began. It was then the angel paid him another visit. She stayed awhile this time, a full five minutes. Will ignored her, as had become his custom. But before she left, Will had looked up to see her pointing with fingers and wings at the engine. “God hath not wrought this,” she said.
Will considered a fresco on Mrs. Woodhull’s parlor ceiling: it depicted Aphrodite surrounded by her mortal and immortal loves. They were clothed, but the goddess had exposed herself fully, and any guest who cared to stretch back his neck could gaze on her nakedness. Tennie was going on about Mr. Whitman. She got overexcited on his behalf whenever he was nearby. Gob had brought him to a party given in September of 1870 by Mrs. Woodhull in honor of Steven Pearl Andrews and his massive brain. Mr. Whitman was walking around the room with his hostess, having just left, thank goodness, Will’s company and Tennie’s, and still she went on about him.