“He is my brother,” said Pickie Beecher. He sat in Will’s lap and put in picture after picture, and said the same thing to each one: “Hello, brother.”
“I saw it coming, you know,” Tennie said, “this day. And you may ask, How can a person live that way, knowing how all the terrible things are going to happen? It always seemed a thousand years in the future, and that was a consolation. But now here it is, come today. Don’t try to fight it, dear. It’s something I have learned, that I can always see it coming but never can stop it.” She had just given him bad news: she did not love him any longer, and wouldn’t see him anymore. She had taken him into her Turkish corner, as if for love, but had instead made this devastating announcement. He fell into a fit as soon as he understood what she was saying. When he came back to himself he saw how he’d made a mess of her corner. She held his head in her lap. Was it not evidence of continuing love, he wondered, how she dabbed at his bitten lip with the hem of her sleeve, without care for bloodstains? She put her finger on his lips when he tried to plead with her. Didn’t he feel it? she asked. Didn’t he feel how there was no joy in it anymore, not for either of them?
“But there is still, for me,” he said weakly, around her finger.
“Yes,” she said. “I knew you would agree with me. See how easy we make it, because we are friends?” He brought up his hands to touch her breasts, but she stopped him. “I could,” she said. “I could touch you, and not love you. But I know you wouldn’t want that.”
“You think you are special,” Will told Mr. Whitman on the way back from Gob’s wedding, “and yet really you are not. Really, sir, you are nobody at all. Really you are the least important person in all the world.” It made him feel better, to say this. Seeing Whitman at the bow of the ferry, looking so carefree and happy in his solitude, Will had felt a pressure in his throat that he thought was vomit, but was actually just a set of hard words that wanted so badly to come out. He left Whitman there and took Pickie Beecher to the back of the boat, where people had gathered around Gob and his new wife. Will stood far away and watched Tennie talking and laughing, pretending he was admiring the traffic on the river — the hay barges and sand barges, the giant sailer-steamers. For her part, she did not even glance at him. Will found he loved her better every day since she cast him off, and during the ceremony he only had thoughts of marrying her. It was stupid, he knew, to think that another person could abolish your unhappiness, but what cure was there for want of Tennie except Tennie herself?
Gob was solicitous, yet he never seemed to understand how a person could be sad just because his aunt refused him her company. Canning Woodhull, however, was very sympathetic. He and Will became friends in the days after the wedding. They caroused together in low and high places, in Water Street dives and the bar at the Hoffman House. Will took him to the Pearl, and he took Will to the Seven Sisters’, where they visited five of seven houses in as many evenings. But every night they would return to Mrs. Woodhull’s house on Thirty-eighth Street, where they’d sit in the kitchen and drink until it was almost dawn. The senior Dr. Woodhull was a very good listener, and it was a relief to Will how he never tried to offer hope, how he never tried to convince Will that his situation would improve. “It will get worse,” he said. “You will love her and want her more and more. Every day something else will drop away, until there is nothing left but her. And you will come to know that every good thing in life was her, and every bad thing was lack of her.”
“Why?” Will asked. “Why did she go away from me?” He didn’t mind, just then, how he was like his mother, complaining in a darkened room.
Canning Woodhull usually had no answer to this question. He would shrug, or else answer with another question—“Why did she go away from me?”
One night, when they had been drinking for a good long while, Dr. Woodhull looked up and met Will’s eyes — something he rarely did; usually when they talked he looked only at his glass. He said, “Don’t you see that it’s the same answer to all the questions? Why did she leave me? Why did he die? Why is the world the place that it is, full of dirty pain?”
“But what is the answer?” Will asked. He grabbed Canning Woodhull’s bony wrist across the table.
“My boy, I will tell you. Wait here for me, and prepare yourself to receive the information.”
Dr. Woodhull pulled away his wrist, and went out of the room. Will sat alone, staring at a dwindling candle. He was anxious, at first. He wanted the answer to his question, and imagined that Dr. Woodhull must have gone upstairs to consult an enormous book. But he’d had so much to drink that he fell asleep with his chin in his hands, though not for very long. It was still dark when he woke to screaming. He went upstairs and discovered its source. In the hall he saw Mrs. Woodhull, not very much dressed, her hair wet with blood. She was being comforted by her Colonel, who was drenched just like her. Will went into their room, where he could see Dr. Woodhull, and how he had crawled into his wife’s bed to cut his own throat while she and her husband slept. It was a mighty stroke that he had dealt himself. He’d cut all the way down to the bones of his neck. He must have crept into their bed ever so carefully, not to have woken them with the intrusion of his body, but only with the flooding warmth of his blood. Pickie Beecher was there, jumping on the sodden mattress, and Tennie was kneeling by the bed next to her mother, who had rested her cheek on Canning Woodhull’s chest.
“Oh, Doc,” said Tennie.
Spirits scolded him, shaking their cold, pale fingers, and screwing up their faces at him. Even Jolly frowned at Will, whenever he sat alone drinking. Neither was the angel very friendly. She got more shrill with every visit. “Doctoring is a bust,” Will told her a few nights after Canning Woodhull’s funeral. He hadn’t been to Bellevue in weeks because he couldn’t go near the patients without having a fit. He’d taken a leave of absence, but really he didn’t plan on going back until the machine was finished, but by then he hoped he’d have no more work there anyway.
“Do you think, creature, that it will all go away, when the abomination is complete?” the angel asked.
“You’re pretty,” he told her.
“Do you think it will be for free? Do you think you can ruin the natural order for no price at all? The Kosmos will die, and worse. His soul will be abolished utterly. There will be nothing left of him, not even a memory. From such murder you hope your joy will be born.”
Spirits came and chased her off, and then they gathered around him — Jolly, Sam, Lewy, Frenchy, all of them equally furious. He could tell what they were saying: “Get to work!”
Will would have liked to do just that, but lately the building was going badly. Gob seemed not to understand anymore what to do with the confusion of parts they had created, and the dreams which formerly had guided him now only confused him. Even Will, looking at the machine, could tell there was something wrong with it, that its elements did not blend together into any sort of harmony. For the first time, it looked like nothing to him, not an angel, not a person, not a lamb. It was merely a random association of components. Pickie Beecher scolded them both for their failure, but could not seem to help them, either. He could only offer more parts.