“Dull,” Maci said, though really she was caught up in an excitement of writing and building. Her days were structured — agitate in the morning, go out in the city in her disguise during the day, build at night. She wandered in a mixed state of belief and disbelief. Sometimes when she was walking alone she’d look at her passing reflection in a shop window and not believe it could possibly be her under those clothes; other times it seemed the natural fruition of the past two years’ events, to be walking the city as a man. Likewise, she’d wander in Gob’s house, not believing it could be her hand that helped shape the machine that was growing every day until it was no longer possible to distinguish it from the house itself. “What are you doing?” she’d ask her reflection, a lady in men’s clothes with glue on her face, her hat off, her hair down, a pencil in her left hand and a pen in her right. Sometimes she would just stare and stare, wondering if she shouldn’t break the mirror that showed her such a thing. “I don’t believe it,” she’d whisper, but it was getting harder to say that. “Why not?” she’d ask, experimentally, of her reflection, and a voice in her mind — her own voice, the voice of murine sanity — would say, Simply because it is never so, and never has been so, and never will be.
“It’s a poor likeness,” Gob said. One day, after visiting the jail, Maci and Gob came to a museum on the Bowery where all sorts of sensational persons and things were on display: a three-hundred-pound lady, tattooed over every inch of her massive body — she was called the Mystic Bulk; a man who could swallow half his arm and spit it out again; and a woman who juggled with her feet the body of her amputee husband, a distinguished veteran who had lost all his limbs at Sayler’s Creek. Mrs. Woodhull’s likeness was featured in a display of wax figures called “Dante’s Inferno.” Here you could see personalities writhing in eternal torment. Mrs. Woodhull’s figure had recently been added. It really was a poor likeness, obviously executed from Mr. Nast’s cartoon, the one that portrayed Mrs. Woodhull as Mrs. Satan, who beckoned to downtrodden wives with the promise of salvation through Free Love. Her hair was done up in horns, and she sported a cloak that flared out behind her like bat wings. In such an outfit, Maci thought she’d more properly be depicted as an infernal administrator, but she was suffering just like any other of the damned, writhing with her hands lifted up in a gesture of supplication, and a look of weakness and horror on her face such as Maci had never seen on her, and knew she never would.
Mr. Beecher was writhing beside Mrs. Woodhull, and Mr. and Mrs. Tilton were there too, all of them licked by flames fashioned from orange and red cotton. It was a depiction of Hell less convincing than the scene in the caisson, and Maci said so. She took out a pad of paper and pencil from her coat and began to sketch the thing inexpertly with her right hand — Mrs. Woodhull had heard about the display, and wanted to know what it looked like. Her left hand plucked away the pencil and took over the work. “Thank you,” Maci said politely. Her eyes and her attention were free to wander. She watched her husband standing at a recreation of Mr. Lincoln’s funeral catafalque, which had been on view in City Hall seven years before. Gob stood peering down at the wax face. “Another poor likeness,” he called back to her. She walked after him, still sketching, and she paused before a set of twisted mirrors that tortured her reflection. She was short and fat in one, immensely tall in the other.
“More poor likenesses,” Gob said when he was next to her again. He lifted his head to talk into her ear, telling her how every person was a poor likeness of herself, how death holds the best part of us in a prison of fear, and how his machine would reverse this, so all the undying people who walked the earth would be perfectly themselves. Maci tried to laugh.
“Don’t give your machine too much work, sir,” she said. “You’ll make it nervous with exhaustion.”
Such wings! They spread over the whole Summerland, and the gates are as high as the clouds. We could sigh forever over the beauty of this engine. It is almost alive, here. When the Kosmos steps into it, when he takes his places as its heart, then it will breathe and speak. Come to me, it will say, the walls are falling. You have torn them down with your brilliant grief, with your love, your desire. Come to me, the way is open.
Goodbye, Sister. You’ll hear from me no more, until we meet again in the changed world. Farewell, I am coming to you!
Maci tried to cheer as Mrs. Woodhull threw off her coal-scuttle bonnet to reveal herself to the people who’d gathered in the Cooper Institute in the hope of hearing a forbidden lecture called “The Naked Truth!” But all Maci could manage was a weak little yelp. She was very tired — not sleepy, but so weary she ached. Months of building had done this to her. As the weeks passed it seemed that every drawing took something from her, as if she were using her own vital stuff for ink, and that in putting it on paper her hand made her a little more fatigued. She knew she ought to be excited, that she ought to be cheering for Mrs. Woodhull, free at last from Ludlow Street Jail and actively resisting attempts to return her there, and that she ought to be cheering in her heart for the machine, because it was all finished, the ink in Maci was dry. The last strut had been installed, the last glass negative put in place, the last glass pipe filled with a curious liquid fetched by odd little Pickie. She might at least muster the energy to curse the thing for a folly, but when she tried, sometimes, in a fit of sanity, to shake her fist at it, the result was the same as when she tried to put her hands together for Mrs. Woodhull. All she seemed able to do was raise a hand to her eyes, to cover them up and press on them until they ached.
“You’re tired, my love,” Gob had said to her. “You ought to rest.” He had wanted her to stay home and await the arrival of Mr. Whitman, who, he insisted, would come to the house on Fifth Avenue now that the machine was ready to receive him. That seemed unlikely to Maci, because she was sure that Mr. Whitman had absented himself most purposefully from her husband’s life. “He will come,” Gob had said.
“Hooray,” Maci said softly, at the Cooper Institute. She looked across the crowd to where her husband was standing with Mr. Whitman, cheering and applauding. Mr. Whitman looked tired, too. After the speech had reached its dramatic conclusion, and Mrs. Woodhull had surrendered again to the marshals, Maci went back to the house on Fifth Avenue with Dr. Fie. Little Pickie was in a fury of polishing and preparation. Maci sat down on a cold pipe the thickness of her whole body, and the cool brought to mind the private skating party Gob had arranged for her fourteen months previous. She closed her eyes and remembered gliding through the dark, cool house. It was all she could think of for a little while, but even as she enjoyed this pleasant memory, another thought kept crowding into her mind.
It was a thought that had been coming and going in her head over the past few months, the thought that she needed to destroy this thing, that she ought to have been undoing it every night, a Penelope faithful to her reason. “I ought to smash it,” she said, “before it can disappoint him.” Her left hand crossed to her right, and took it by the wrist, holding it down against her leg. “I wasn’t going to,” she said.
She wouldn’t do it because she thought it was necessary for her husband to put his friend in the thing, and then see how nothing came of it. And she thought it was necessary because she hoped sometimes that something might come of it after all, the sky might crack open, and all the departed might rain down like feathers. She had been trying so hard to believe, for his sake, and it was to this that she really attributed her weariness, not the days of being a fugitive, or the nights of work on this strange, monstrous Infant that made her father’s Infant seem like a puppy. Maybe unbelief was her madness, since she didn’t believe when her hand spoke to her with love, when it spoke like Rob, when it drew like Rob, when it knew what Rob knew, and told true stories that were other people’s lives — when it did all these things and she still could not call it brother. When she saw little Pickie rolling a giant lens down a hall in Gob’s house; when she saw the machine grow so huge and complex that it looked to be sufficient engine to drive Manhattan out to sea, so the island could anchor halfway to Europe and become a new Atlantis: still she didn’t believe, and wasn’t it madness to ignore the evidence of your senses, even when they said you must believe the unbelievable?