“Nothing,” the Urfeist said, but Gob could see even from far away how there was ink on the paper. The Urfeist stuck the message away in his vest and said, “Your machine, it was a failure. You yourself are a failure. Why do I waste the time it takes to teach you? I might as well kick you as try to give you knowledge.” He did kick Gob, and then he walked away, taking out the slip to read it again.
“What does it say!” Gob shouted, but the Urfeist left him alone without answering. It was a day and a night before Gob wriggled out from the wires, before he went looking, bleeding and furious, for his master. The Urfeist wasn’t in the library or the dining room, or even among the tall plants of the green room. Gob walked faster and faster as he searched, and every time he found another room empty of the Urfeist, he quickened his pace. The Urfeist was not in any of the parlors. He was not in the library. Gob was running when at last he found his master, curled in a ball in a bedroom. “Where is it?” he said, and “Liar!” He wasn’t afraid to yell and demand, or even to strike his fists against the Urfeist’s back. “Give it to me!” he said, but he found that he was able to take the note for himself because his master was cold, still, and dead. A look of angry denial deformed the Urfeist’s ugly face. He had torn off his shirt, and Gob could see the livid handprint, the size and shape of his own hand, over his master’s heart. The message was very simple: You are dead.
Gob dropped the paper as soon as he’d read it, because he thought it must kill him, too, this powerful message from his brother that he was sure must have been meant for him. You are dead, it said, because he ought to be dead with his brother, and he ought to be dead for betraying his brother. “It did too work,” he said to the gray face of the Urfeist. Sure that he, too, would die any moment, Gob lay down next to his teacher, lifting one of the cold hands to lay it across his own neck.
PART THREE. THE WONDERFUL INFANT
Towards the close of the visit, for such it really was, I was shown what I now know to have been a panoramic view of the future. The mountains and valleys changed places with the seas, the entire face of the nation underwent a transformation. Cities sank and people fled before appalling disasters in dismay. Then a wondrous calm settled over everything. Confusion, anarchy and destruction were replaced with a scene of beauty and glory which is beyond the power of language to describe. The earth had been changed into the common abode of people of both spheres. The spirits said that all this would be realized during my life and that in making it possible I would bear a prominent part.
1
BY MAY OF 1862 IT SEEMED TO MACI TRUFANT THAT MADNESS had become the national pastime, and that her parents had only performed a civic duty by losing their minds. Her mother went insane first, slowly and with considerable subtlety in the first months of her decline; she had a growing fascination with beans. Initially, she praised them for being shapely and nutritious — strange comments, but Maci figured her mother had read an article on beans in one of her weeklies. When she insisted the cook serve them up with increasing frequency, Maci assumed her mother was dabbling again in Dr. Graham’s tasteless diet. But, little by little, beans came to dominate her mother’s life. She celebrated them to the neglect of her husband and children. She sought to make herself pure, eating no food but beans, and so she died.
Maci had flipped desperately through her uncle’s medical books, not trusting him when he said he had no remedy for his sister’s bean-madness. Now, Maci hated beans. For many months, she had flung them from her plate if some grossly insensitive person served them to her. Lately she had eaten them again. They were ashes in her mouth but they were what she and her father could afford. His own madness had driven them into desperate financial straits, and it did not come delicately.
It fell on him like a swooping bird. Maci imagined it, bird-shaped and screeching, falling down on his head to muss his hair into an ageless madman style. Not long after his wife’s funeral, he was in his study writing letters thanking people for their kind sympathies when his hand began suddenly to write of its own accord a letter to him from his dead wife: My darling, I never was not, nor will I ever cease to be. We travel from ever to ever and time is only a span between eternities. You will be called to do a great work. I am watching you with love.
One day he was a bereaved Universalist minister admired for his antislavery stance and his charitable work in prisons (people called him “the Prisoner’s Friend”); the next he was a fledgling Spiritualist prophet. Within months, he was declaring himself the Apostle of Precision, delegate on earth of an Association of Beneficents who spoke to him from a place that was not quite Heaven. Ben Franklin, Thomas Jefferson, and John Murray all spoke through his hand. With growing discomfort, and finally dread, Maci was introduced to the mortal Apostles of Devotion, Harmony, Freedom, Education, Treasures, and Accumulation. Some were men and some were women. They all had a look in their eyes which Maci could only call deranged.
She watched them milling in the parlor of their house on Mount Vernon Street and felt a seething anger. Several times, Maci threw as many out as she could before her father discovered her and called her rude. She pleaded with him to stop all this, but he would take her in his arms and explain that the very Chairman of the General Assembly of Beneficents had called on him to carry out the greatest work yet attempted by man. He would build a living machine, an engine whose product would be not energy but peace. He would call it the Wonderful Infant.
Her brother, Rob, was gone. He’d fled at the beginning of their father’s decline, after many arguments, and a final one when he’d struck their father on the head and knocked him out. “I hoped he’d be sensible when he came to,” he told his sister. “But he started jabbering about electritizers and elementizers as soon as he could speak.” Rob left to live with their mother’s family, and then he went to war. Maci resisted their entreaties to join them.
“Your situation is so peculiar,” said her Aunt Amy, a plain woman fond of elaborate dresses.
“I must stay with my father,” said Maci. She’d been so certain of that, speaking to Aunt Amy’s pale fat face. It had made her serene, somehow, to embrace this obligation. Her father was her first friend, the man who had shaped her mind and her heart. But now she doubted, and her loyalty to him was a source of agitation rather than comfort. He had spent them broke on matériel for his engine and on contributions to the Panfederacy of Apostles. They lost their house in Boston and Maci found herself losing things which were precious to her, not just dresses and jewelry, but dreams. Her father had always talked of launching her off to college when she turned sixteen. But she was called back from Miss Polk’s School for Young Ladies to help tend to her mother, her sixteenth birthday came and went, and when Maci left Boston, it wasn’t for college. They moved to the wilderness of Rhode Island, where electrical and spiritual forces were favorable to the Infant’s construction. Maci hadn’t thought there was any wilderness left in Rhode Island. She had thought it must surely be filled with people who had fled, for one reason or another, from Boston. She imagined them, dissenters all, packed cheek by jowl from Providence to the coast. But this place was empty, just their lonely cottage and the shed on the cliff, the nearest neighbor nearly a mile away, across a saltwater pond at the bottom of a hill behind the house. Various Apostles came and visited them, sometimes bringing parts for the machine.