Nonetheless, Will went to Gob’s house that night in July to apply himself to the machine, and spend the hours till dawn engaged in a nostalgic practice — making batteries. Their manufacture brought to mind happier days, when Tennie was still with him, and when the machine seemed almost to build itself. He had thought the house on Fifth Avenue would be quiet and dark, and that Gob and his bride would be in bed in the Fifth Avenue Hotel, where they had taken rooms because the new Mrs. Woodhull refused to live under the same roof as what she called the “pathetic contraption.” But, though it was two o’clock in the morning when Will arrived there, the house was brightly lit.
“There you are!” Gob said when Will came inside. “Come and see this!” He took Will’s arm and dragged him up all the stairs to the workshop. Gob was so excited, Will thought something truly spectacular must be waiting on top of the house. Perhaps the machine had spit out another strange child, a wiser boy than Pickie Beecher, who could be a better guide to them. But it was just the junior Mrs. Woodhull on the other side of the iron door, seated at a little desk on a peninsula of floor. A crowd of spirits surrounded her, as they had at Canning Woodhull’s funeral, when she and Will had walked together and talked in the shade of a tree that grew over new graves. She had declared against the machine even as the spirits fawned over her and looked at Will with expressions that were somehow both angry and pleading.
Gob, still dragging Will, rushed to the desk and grabbed up the drawing that the lady was working on.
“Look, Will,” Gob said. “Do you see?” He held the paper scant inches from Will’s face, and Will saw a giant pair of wings made entirely of glass negative plates. “Our dry time is over, my friend. Dear Maci will show us the way.”
“Don’t you believe it, Dr. Fie,” said young Mrs. Woodhull, whose hand was already at work sketching another part of the machine. “Not for an instant!”
“What will happen to him?” Will asked Gob. “Might Mr. Whitman be … injured?” Will hoped that he would be. He hoped there would be just a little bit of pain, enough to crack the poet’s happy exterior. When he was in a very bad mood, Will thought that he would like to see Mr. Whitman cry.
“Of course not!” Gob said, but the angel insisted that he was lying.
One night as Will was leaving the Pearl, she fell on him out of the sky. She knocked him to the ground and wrapped him up in her grotesque wings. “Look now, creature,” she said, “and see the truth.” Will felt pain, bright and white, like a moment when he’d been struck in the face with a gun many years before. It had been an accident. A fellow member of Company D had turned in the darkness with his gun held out, and the barrel had taken Will just above the eye and knocked him senseless. Now, Will was stuck in the moment when he had first realized that he hurt, and the moment went on and on. Through the glare, he saw Mr. Whitman screaming like a woman, high and frightened and hysterical, piteous wailing shrieks, and he understood absolutely that something that truly was abominable would happen to that man.
This vision seemed to go on forever, but in fact it was just moments before the spirits came and chased away the angel. She ran from them, flying up to perch on a lamppost. They jumped at her like dogs, but she batted them away with her fists.
“Do you see now?” she asked him.
“Never trust an angel,” Gob said, when Will told him of the visit. “They are the most notorious liars.”
They finished in the winter of 1872. Gob declared that their creation was precisely the machine he had been dreaming since his brother died. It had been quite reshaped by Maci Woodhull’s prolific hand. Since the summertime Will had taken to sleeping in the house at Fifth Avenue, and had given up entirely on doctoring, or even photography, except to take pictures of the machine as they put it into its final shape. Will’s days and nights ran together, until he was no longer sure what day it was. All he knew was that it was winter, and that history was continuing to unfold outside of the house. Indeed, there was some sort of excitement happening with Gob’s mother, but Will was not sure what exactly. Whatever it was, Will felt safe from it in the house, where he was often alone with Pickie Beecher during the day.
Then Will would have a rapture of building, and he would imagine that the machine was his alone — his life’s idea and his life’s work. He’d imagine that skibbling Pickie Beecher was his own unnatural child, and sometimes he’d imagine that Tennie had died tragically and the machine was meant to bring back her alone. “She died tragically,” he said one night to Pickie Beecher. “Eaten by bees. And why do we specify tragically, anyhow? Is there any other sort of death?”
“It’s all very bad,” the boy agreed. In the last months he was Will’s constant companion. He was another good listener, if a poor conversationalist, and of course he was the very best helper one could ask for. Will had only to want a tool before Pickie Beecher ran up with it clutched in his tiny hands.
“I will make an adjustment,” Will said, “to ensure that the machine will also bring back dead love. So Canning Woodhull, when he walks again among the living, will have his wife again to hold him. Unless, of course, she never loved him at all, in which case I am powerless to help him.” He worked and he slept, and sometimes he ate, when Pickie Beecher brought him food.
As the weeks went on he came to be unsure, sometimes, if he was waking or sleeping, because he built in dreams as constantly as he built while he was awake. His sleep became fractured, so he only took it in spells of an hour or two, and when he’d wake, he’d see Pickie Beecher sitting atop some fantastic new piece of matériel that he’d stolen from only he knew where; he’d see Gob’s wife sketching at her desk; he’d see Gob wrestling a strut into some novel position. Will would rise and join the work. In the last weeks, he woke to see Pickie sitting on a little red dude of a fire engine, a locomotive smokestack, and a lens nine feet in diameter. When Will and Gob hauled it into place the nine-thousand-candlepower arc lamp — meant to shine down through the picture negatives — was amplified to ninety thousand candlepower. It would be, Will was sure, the brightest light ever.
“Do you really believe that it will do anything but gurgle and smoke?” the new Mrs. Woodhull would ask Will every so often.
He always had the same answer for her. “Of course I do.” Will thought her doubt would have become fatigued, by now, but she still called the machine ridiculous, and mocked it ruthlessly, even as she helped to build it. She claimed to have nothing at all to do with the hand that was guiding them with its drawings, and sniffed derisively when Will pointed out that it was attached to her wrist.
The spirits got happier as the machine got bigger. When it had grown to maturity — so it filled up the house and there was nowhere left for Will to sleep but cradled among its omnipresent arms and legs, its hundred thousand pieces, its crystal and iron gate and gatehouse — then they never walked but they danced, and they never opened their mouths but they seemed to be singing.
“Am I awake?” he’d ask Pickie Beecher, thinking back to the night when Jolly had asked him a similar question. Pickie Beecher usually pinched him in answer, but often it wasn’t enough to convince. What if Will dreamed the whole thing through to its glorious conclusion? What if the machine did its work, and death was abolished, and Will got to see all the dead rise and stretch their stiff limbs, and smile? What if he got to embrace Sam and Jolly, only to wake a moment later in a world where his work was still undone, where people still died? He doubted the angel, when she arrived every now and then to call him creature and say he must destroy the abomination, before it was too late. He doubted that Mr. Whitman would come to them, meek as a lamb to be their battery.