“Isn’t it beautiful?” he asked her. They were there on an errand. Mrs. Woodhull had asked Maci to write an article for the March 8 issue of the Weekly on the progress of the bridge, with an eye to uncover any corruption in its financing that might yet be lingering despite Mr. Tweed’s downfall. Dr. Woodhull had offered to escort her, as the bridge was understandably fascinating to him. He had friends there, and could get her into the bowels of the construction. They walked onto the top of the rising tower, among the workmen with their wheelbarrows, hods, picks, and shovels. Dr. Woodhull put his arms out towards a huge steam crane lifting stone off a barge at the side of the dock, and Maci got the impression that if only his arms had been long enough, he might embrace it lovingly.
“Are you ready to go down?” he asked her, after they had been introduced to their escort, a man named Farrington who was so efficient he shook Maci’s and Dr. Woodhull’s hands simultaneously. He had them put on ankle-high rubber boots.
“Of course,” she said. Dr. Woodhull had offered to go down alone and give her a report, if the thought of doing it herself was too frightening. She went first down the ladder. They were crowded together in a little room lit from above by glass in the iron ceiling.
“This is the air-lock,” said Mr. Farrington. “You’ll be uncomfortable, soon,” he added bluntly, “but do as I do and you’ll come out all right.” Outside a worker was tightening down the roof, and when he was done Mr. Farrington put his hands over his ears. Maci copied his motion too late to block out the piercing shriek that filled the room. “Just the air coming in!” Mr. Farrington shouted.
“A curious sensation!” Maci said, because her head felt as if it were sinking underwater. The sensation was curious, then painful — the pressure felt as if it would crush up her head to the size of her fist. Dr. Woodhull showed her how to relieve the pressure by pinching her nose and trying to sneeze. The sound stopped, all of a sudden, and a hatch in the floor dropped open. The feeling of disagreeable heaviness in Maci’s head had not passed altogether, and as she went down another ladder into the caisson she felt dizzy and a little breathless. Her pulse was racing in her ears, and when she spoke her voice sounded unnatural. Dr. Woodhull’s voice was high as a child’s when he spoke. “Are you well?” he asked.
“I’m well,” she said. “Are you well? I fear you may be too delicate for this place!” She turned away from him to look around at the room into which they’d descended. Her first impression was of flame and shadows and a great noise that managed somehow to sound very loud and very distant; hammers and drills striking rock. Half-naked men were walking everywhere in the steaming light between shadows, and breaking rocks. It looked very much the way Maci expected Hell to look.
They started their tour, Maci walking carefully along planks that ran across the sucking mud, but giving up in seconds on ever rehabilitating her dress. Mr. Farrington explained how there were five other chambers like this one. “We are seventy feet below the river surface,” he said. “And even now, as the men clear away more rock and mud, we are descending ever deeper.” When they came to a wall he pointed at the boilerplate that covered the whole interior and told how it had been installed as a precaution against fire, which had nearly destroyed the caisson on the other side of the river.
“Fascinating!” Maci said, but she wanted to leave, and she wished the tour would end. She had gathered all the information she needed in the first moments, and she felt confident that she could convey to the readers of the Weekly a sense of the hot, close horror of the place. Mr. Farrington was called away. He left them standing under a blinding calcium light.
“Do you like it down here?” Dr. Woodhull asked her.
“It’s charming,” she said. Then she cried out because she got a pain in her ears as if someone had poked them each with an awl, and the pain distracted her from the great blast of air that almost knocked her into the mud. The lights were all extinguished. The workmen were groaning and cursing. She heard Mr. Farrington shouting for them to mind their language for the sake of the lady journalist.
“It’s just a blowout,” said Dr. Woodhull, explaining how the edge of the caisson, because it hadn’t sunk far enough into the ground, was prone to lift a little as the tide shifted, sending a burst of air out into the river. “The lights will be out momentarily,” he said. “But all’s well.”
“No,” she said. “No, I think that all’s less than well.” They were knee deep in water so cold it hurt her bones, and she was sure the water was rising. “I think we are going to die.”
“Nonsense,” he said. “You will never die, Miss Trufant.” Her eyes were opened as wide as they’d ever been in her whole life. They were opened so wide they were burning and tearing, so she thought she should have seen him coming closer to her. But she didn’t know he was there until he’d already pressed his lips against hers. What was he doing? Was she one of those Portuguese ladies who when left alone with a man are mortally offended if he does not at least try to be grossly familiar with their person? The thought flashed in her mind that she should scream and push him away. Bright as lightning, it flashed in her eyes, but it passed in an instant, and then the darkness, which somehow was sweet now, returned. Maci grabbed at his lips with her own. Grab grab grab, she thought. Gob Gob Gob. She knocked a tooth against his.
We are motivated strictly by love or by fear, and it is better to go the way that love pushes you, than the other way. I think I climbed off the earth on that thought, the way the pious dying climb off on a prayer. You, with your rich vocabulary of motivation, will find this a silly, simple idea. But isn’t it rightly said of the dead, that they are wise? I’ll give you this advice, and plead with you to accept it: let him enter you and obsess you, as I have entered and obsessed you.
“Spiritualists are all so serious,” Maci said to Gob, as they took another turn on top of the Distributing Reservoir. “There are trance-speakers, trance-healers, trance-levitators. But why are there no trance-comedians?”
“There’s no humor in death,” Gob said.
“Isn’t there? I giggled at my mother’s funeral. To any observer it seemed a sob, but I know what it was. Hideous, perverse giggling, because my mother died of bean-love. I thought of them spilling from her mouth even as she lay in her coffin, and I felt I’d have to laugh, or else die myself right there.”
“A terrible story, Miss Maci.”
“Yes. But don’t you believe, Dr. Gob, that a person ought to be able to laugh at death? I think that’s how we bring him down.”
“Did your mother come out of her grave, when you laughed at her?”
“Of course she didn’t. You deliberately misunderstand me.”
“I understand you very well,” he said, slipping his arm into hers. An urge to pull away flailed and died in her, then she leaned against him.
“What a ridiculous assertion,” she said, though just that morning she’d stood in her room with all the curtains flung open, and the lights turned up to a blaze, looking in the mirror and examining herself in the flood of light. She turned her head and brought her eye almost close enough to touch the glass, peering into her own pupil because she was sure that if only her vision could penetrate through the tiny black hole, she’d see him there, sitting comfortably inside her head. “Get out,” she’d whispered. They’d shared one deep breath — in and out — down in the caisson, and Maci was sure he’d put something in her, a part of himself that inspired in her a relentless desire to be near him. She liked to think that another woman had come out of the air-lock that day, one who hurried out before she could get kissed, one who went on without need of this strange person, who went on with a life not afflicted anymore with ghosts and rebel hands and machines. Every day that passed after the kiss, Maci made sure to set aside a little time to be happy for that girl.