But Walt Whitman did come. “Are you here?” Will asked him, poking the man in his heroic belly. It seemed unreal, all of it: all the house-sized gears turning; the wings beating; Mr. Whitman reclining in the gatehouse; a light flaring in Gob’s hands, and an answering light from the arc lamp, amplified and expounded through the lens to shine down so strong through the glass Will thought it must burn the images into the poet’s skin. Even that light seemed unreal, and though Will had grown accustomed to spirits, the ones that flooded the house, lining up for their turn to pass through the gates of the machine, all seemed strange and fake. “Now I will wake,” he said to Pickie Beecher, “and we’ll have to do it all again!”
“It’s my brother!” Pickie Beecher shouted above the noise. “He is here!” Mr. Whitman began to scream, and the spirits, with the little one-winged angel at their head, surged forward towards the gate. Then it finally did seem real, and only then did Will wish it were not. He would have done it all again, learned of Sam’s death, gone off to the war, suffered his apprenticeship under Frenchy. He would have gladly suffered all the debilitating fits of medical school. He would have loved Tennie again, even with the knowledge that he would lose her. He would have lost himself in all the seasons of dreamtime building. He would have done these things twice or three times. He would have done them over and over forever, if only he could wake away from the horrible screaming, so much worse than what the angel had him taste, if only he could have that, just that, be not real.
~ ~ ~
“WHO IS THE GOD OF THE FUTURE?” THE URFEIST ASKED Gob. It was one of two questions he posed repeatedly during their trip to New York. Gob’s first answer was, “Time.” That was wrong, and warranted a savage beating. On the first night in the house on Fifth Avenue, as they stood in a library full of clocks, the Urfeist asked the question again. This time Gob said, “Death.”
“Yes,” said the Urfeist, “death waits at the end of every future.” He looked sad or afraid or dyspeptic whenever he asked that question. He had lived a gluttonous portion of years, and he still did not want to die. There was almost kindness in his voice when he would say that if Gob worked hard enough, the god of the future might fall by his hand.
They went to New York by horse cart, stage, steamer, and railroad, and each new conveyance was fancier than the last, so by the time they approached Manhattan, they were traveling in a luxurious Pullman car. All during the trip, the Urfeist spoke of machines, and how he would teach Gob to build them. “It’s the only certain means to bring back your brother, my ugly one,” he said. “Mechanically.”
Every morning as they’d traveled, the Urfeist had woken Gob by breathing hotly into his ear, and sometimes the rushing noise invaded his dreams, so he heard the ocean sound as he dreamed of his brother. The noise would issue from Tomo’s mouth when he tried to speak, and before he woke Gob would catch glimpses of copper and iron and glass as Tomo pointed to them. “It is the noise,” the Urfeist said, “of your machine. The one you must learn to build, if you want to save your brother from death.”
The Urfeist was an expert builder. Gob discovered that his first day in the thing’s beautiful house. Evidence of his new master’s skill was everywhere, devices large and small, locked away behind doors or placed in special alcoves in the long halls: a windmaker, rattraps big enough to catch children, singing candles, skittering iron insects, and books that turned their own pages as you read them. Gob wandered among the little machines, feeling admiration and envy as he beheld them. They would inspire him to hurry to the library and pick a book at random from the shelves, then sit in a chair among the clocks, or sprawl on the floor beneath a great golden armillary sphere. He’d read until the Urfeist came and found him and asked another question. “What is a machine?”
“A machine,” Gob would reply, his voice seeming to him mechanical itself as he recited the definition taught him on the journey from Homer, “is a combination of resistant bodies so arranged that by their means the mechanical forces of nature can be compelled to do work accompanied by certain determinate motions.”
“Precisely,” the Urfeist would say.
“Do you see how your mind is small?” the Urfeist asked Gob. “Do you see how you are clumsy and powerless? Do you want your brother back? You will not have him by flailing. Hurl blind rage at the walls, they will not break. Such machines as you would build — death would laugh at them! Death would laugh at you! Death is laughing at you now, saying, ‘Think of everything your brother was, everything he wanted, all he might have seen or heard or felt. Every morning he might have woken to, every night he might have put down his head on his pillow, every dream he might have dreamed as he slept — these things are mine now. I have stowed thousands of days away in my pocket where he will never live them, but I give them to you — you may imagine them, you may consider him planting his bare foot in the cool mud under the mill pond (on a hot day, is that cool mud not a joy?) and then you may consider how he resides in my dark pocket never to escape. You are a small piece of work, boy, lazy and coarse and no threat to me because your machine is here in my pocket, too, where it will never be born because you are too lazy and stupid to bring it out. You will accomplish nothing, and then I will have you, too. I will wait for you here at the end of your span of joyless pointless days.’”
Gob sat on his vast bed and studied a book the Urfeist had given him, one picked as suitable for inspiring the fancy of an ignoramus. In the library, he had passed it to Gob and then rummaged in another stack. Two minutes later he’d changed his mind, saying Gob wasn’t ready for that book: it was too fine for him, he could not be trusted to care for it. But Gob was already running up to his room.
It was one of the notebooks of Leonardo. “Do you want to be like him?” the Urfeist asked Gob the next day, after Gob had spent the whole night poring over the fantastic drawings. Gob nodded and got beaten for it with the hickory paddle. “Do not!” said the Urfeist. “He dreamed everything and built nothing. Do you want to be a silly dreamer, or do you want to bring your brother back?” Gob wanted to bring back his brother, yet he lost none of his affection for the notebook. His eyes lingered for hours over pictures of gears and wheels and wings. He thought it would be most satisfying if he could garner such skill and draw the machine he dreamed about, but when he tried he only made a line that rose and fell as the noise of the machine rose and fell, a neaping ebbing line that fell back on itself, and was lost eventually in a tangle of similar lines.
Though he couldn’t draw his own machine, Gob found he had no difficulty copying the notebook drawings. He drew on the workroom floor with a piece of charcoal, copying pictures of finned missiles and vertical drilling machines, chain drives and sprocket wheels, Archimedean screws and waterwheels and well pumps. He did not know what he was drawing, but the shapes were lovely and familiar to him. He saw them in his dreams, amid spinning gears and puffing steam. In the center of the room the Urfeist had designated as his workshop, Gob copied a picture of an ornithopter. There was room enough to make it about as big as it was meant to be in life. He turned down the gas, and lay atop the thing, imagining that he rode it through the sky in search of his brother.
In New York, the Urfeist did not live the solitary life he lived in Homer. He had many friends, who called him Dr. Oetker, and thought he was a German radical who had fled with his fortune from the upheavals of ’48. The accent that the Urfeist affected around his friends reminded Gob of his grandmother, and made him think of home. He wondered if his mother was missing him, and if she thought he was dead. When he tried to picture her face he could only envisage a white tea rose, the sort she wore at her throat when she wanted to make herself look distinguished.