Specimen Days
Michael Cunningham
‘Specimen Days’ is three linked visionary narratives about the relationship between man and machine. The first narrative, a ghost story set at the height of the Industrial Revolution, tells the story of man-eating machines. An ecstatic boy, barely embodied in the physical world, speaks in the voice of the great visionary poet Walt Whitman. He works at an oppressive factory connected to the making of a mysterious substance with some universal function and on which the world's economy somehow depends. The slight boy can barely operate the massive machine which speaks to him in the voice of his devoured brother. A woman who was to have married the brother is now the object of obsessive interest by the boy. In a city in which all are mastered by the machine, the boy is convinced that the woman must be saved before she too is devoured.This grisly but ultimately transformative story establishes three main characters who will appear, reincarnated, in the other two sections of this startling modern novel. The boy, the man and the woman are each in search of some sort of transcendence as is made manifest by the recurrence of the words of Whitman (‘It avails not, neither distance nor place…I am with you, and know how it is’). In part two, a noir thriller set in the early years of our current century, the city is at threat from maniacal bombers, while the third and last part plays with the sci-fi genre, taking our characters centuries into the future. The man who was devoured by a machine in part one is now literally a machine – a robot who becomes fully human before our eyes. The woman is a refugee from another part of the universe, a warrior in her native land but a servant on this planet.‘Specimen Days’ is a genre-bending, haunting ode to life itself – a work of surpassing power and beauty by one of the most original and daring writers at work today.
MICHAEL CUNNINGHAM
SPECIMEN DAYS
Copyright (#ulink_52f65fbf-bf00-5bb2-bd8c-d06f64077753)
First published in Great Britain in 2005 by
Fourth Estate
An imprint of HarperCollinsPublishers 77–85 Fulham Palace Road London W6 8JB
www.4thestate.co.uk (http://www.4thestate.co.uk)
Originally published in the United States in 2005
by Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Copyright © Mare Vaporum Corp 2005
The right of Michael Cunningham to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by him in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library
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Source ISBN: 9780007156054
Ebook Edition © SEPTEMBER 2012 ISBN 9780007373154
Version: 2014-10-03
Dedication (#ulink_6c956736-bf5e-531e-a793-c27601238d9d)
This novel is dedicated to the memoryof my mother, Dorothy
Epigraph (#ulink_a217af3e-d7fc-5dd9-a6de-257deaf1cb91)
Fear not O Muse! truly new ways and days receive, surround you,
I candidly confess a queer, queer race, of novel fashion,
And yet the same old human race, the same within, without,
Faces and hearts the same, feelings the same, yearnings the same,
The same old love, beauty and use the same.
—Walt Whitman
Contents
Cover (#u16910a80-6816-5dd6-b378-0f0bf2c4065d)
Title Page (#udee1c6d8-226c-580b-9b73-a607b9d14171)
Copyright (#u8a18c87d-a70c-51ad-9eb5-0d28e06e8c42)
Dedication (#u2cce2bd1-a758-5c53-8023-1c7fc79eb72d)
Epigraph (#uf2d8901e-07b1-5ef6-b4fd-12e4472ad3fd)
In the Machine (#u9928375c-cc99-5f5a-9cba-8b3863ddace2)
The Children’s Crusade (#litres_trial_promo)
Like Beauty (#litres_trial_promo)
Keep Reading (#litres_trial_promo)
Acknowledgments (#litres_trial_promo)
Author’s Note (#litres_trial_promo)
Other Works (#litres_trial_promo)
About the Publisher (#litres_trial_promo)
IN THE MACHINE (#ulink_58f2e176-089f-5e85-afa5-0232cbf230f7)
Walt said that the dead turned into grass, but there was no grass where they’d buried Simon. He was with the other Irish on the far side of the river, where it was only dirt and gravel and names on stones.
Catherine believed Simon had gone to heaven. She had a locket with his picture and a bit of his hair inside.
“Heaven’s the place for him,” she said. “He was too good for this world.” She looked uncertainly out the parlor window and into the street, as if she expected a glittering carriage to wheel along with Simon on board, serene in his heedless milk-white beauty, waving and grinning, going gladly to the place where he had always belonged.
“If you think so,” Lucas answered. Catherine fingered the locket. Her hands were tapered and precise. She could sew stitches too fine to see.
“And yet he’s with us still,” she said. “Don’t you feel it?” She worried the locket chain as if it were a rosary.
“I suppose so,” Lucas said. Catherine thought Simon was in the locket, and in heaven, and with them still. Lucas hoped she didn’t expect him to be happy about having so many Simons to contend with.
The guests had departed, and Lucas’s father and mother had gone to bed. It was only Lucas and Catherine in the parlor, with what had been left behind. Empty plates, the rind of a ham. The ham had been meant for Catherine’s and Simon’s wedding. It was lucky, then, to have it for the wake instead.
Lucas said, “I have heard what the talkers were talking, the talk of the beginning and the end. But I do not talk of the beginning or the end.”
He hadn’t meant to speak as the book. He never did, but when he was excited he couldn’t help himself.
She said, “Oh, Lucas.”
His heart fluttered and thumped against the bone.
“I worry for you,” she said. “You’re so young.”
“I’m almost thirteen,” he said.
“It’s a terrible place. It’s such hard work.”
“I’m lucky. It’s a kindness of them, to give me Simon’s job.”
“And no more school.”
“I don’t need school. I have Walt’s book.”
“You know the whole thing, don’t you?”
“Oh no. There’s much more, it will take me years.”
“You must be careful at the works,” she said. “You must—” She stopped speaking, though her face didn’t change. She continued offering her profile, which was as gravely beautiful as that of a woman on a coin. She continued looking out at the street below, waiting for the heavenly entourage to parade by with Simon up top, the pride of the family, a new prince of the dead.
Lucas said, “You must be careful, too.”
“There’s nothing for me to be careful about, my dear. For me it’s just tomorrow and the next day.”
She slipped the locket chain back over her head. The locket vanished into her dress. Lucas wanted to tell her—what? He wanted to tell her that he was inspired and vigilant and recklessly alone, that his body contained his unsteady heart and something else, something he felt but could not describe: porous and spiky, shifting with flecks of thought, with urge and memory; salted with brightness, flickerings of white and green and pale gold, like stars; something that loved stars because it was made of the same substance. He needed to tell her it was impossible, it was unbearable, to be so continually mistaken for a misshapen boy with a walleye and a pumpkin head and a habit of speaking in fits.
He said, “I celebrate myself, and what I assume you shall assume.” It was not what he’d hoped to tell her.
She smiled. At least she wasn’t angry with him. She said, “I should go now. Will you walk me home?”
“Yes,” he said. “Yes.”
Outside, on the street, Catherine slipped her hand into the crook of his elbow. He tried to steady himself, to stride manfully, though what he wanted most was to stop striding altogether, to rise up like smoke and float above the street, which was filled with its evening people, workingmen returning, newsboys hawking their papers. Mad Mr. Cain paced on his corner, dressed in his dust-colored coat, snatching distractedly at whatever crawled in his beard, shouting, “Mischief, gone and forgotten, what have ye done with the shattered hearts?” The street was full of its smell, dung and kerosene, acrid smoke—something somewhere was always burning. If Lucas could rise out of his body, he would become what he saw and heard and smelled. He would gather around Catherine as the air did, touch her everywhere. He would be drawn into her when she breathed.
He said, “The smallest sprout shows there is really no death.”
“Just as you say, my dear,” Catherine said.
A newsboy shouted, “Woman brutally murdered, read all about it!” Lucas thought he could be a newsboy, but the pay was too low, and he couldn’t be trusted to call the news, could he? He might lose track of himself and walk the streets shouting, “Every atom belonging to me as good belongs to you.” He’d do better at the works. If the impulse overcame him, he could shout into Simon’s machine. The machine wouldn’t know or care, any more than Simon had.
Catherine didn’t speak as they walked. Lucas forced himself to remain silent as well. Her building was three blocks to the north, on Fifth Street. He walked her up onto the stoop, and they stood there a moment together, before the battered door.
Catherine said, “Here we are.”
A cart rolled by with a golden landscape painted on its side: two cows grazing among stunted trees and a third cow looking up at the name of a dairy, which floated in the golden sky. Was it meant to be heaven? Would Simon want to be there? If Simon went to heaven and it proved to be a field filled with reverent cows, which Simon would he be when he got there? Would he be the whole one, or the crushed?
A silence gathered between Lucas and Catherine, different from the quiet in which they’d walked. It was time, Lucas thought, to say something, and not as the book. He said, “Will you be all right?”
She laughed, a low murmuring laugh he felt in the hairs on his forearms. “It is I who should ask you that question. Will you be all right?”
“Yes, yes, I’ll be fine.”
She glanced at a place just above Lucas’s head and settled herself, a small shifting within her dark dress. It seemed for a moment as if her dress, with its high collar, its whisper of hidden silk, had a separate life. It seemed as if Catherine, having briefly considered rising up out of her dress, had decided instead to remain, to give herself back to her clothes.
She said, “Had it happened a week later, I’d be a widow, wouldn’t I? I’m nothing now.”
“No, no. You are wonderful, you are beautiful.”
She laughed again. He looked down at the stoop, noticed that it contained specks of brightness. Mica? He went briefly into the stone. He was cold and sparkling, immutable, glad to be walked on.
“I’m an old woman,” she said.
He hesitated. Catherine was well past twenty-five. It had been talked about when the marriage was announced, for Simon had been barely twenty. But she was not old in the way she meant. She was not soured or evacuated, she was not dimmed.
He said, “You are not guilty to me, nor stale nor discarded.”
She put her fingertips to his cheek. “Sweet boy,” she said.
He said, “Will I see you again?”
“Of course you will. I shall be right here.”
“But it will not be the same.”
“No. It will not be quite the same, I’m afraid.”
“If only …”
She waited to hear what he would say. He waited, too. If only the machine hadn’t taken Simon. If only he, Lucas, were older and healthier, with a sounder heart. If only he could marry Catherine himself. If only he could leave his body and become the dress she wore.
A silence passed, and she kissed him. She put her lips on his.
When she withdrew he said, “The atmosphere is not a perfume, it has no taste of the distillation, it is odorless, it is for my mouth forever, I am in love with it.”
She said, “You must go home and sleep now.”
It was time to leave her. There was nothing more to do or say. Still, he lingered. He felt as he sometimes did in dreams, that he was on a stage before an audience, expected to sing or recite.
She turned, took her key from her reticule, put it in the lock. “Good night,” she said.
“Good night.”
He stepped down. From the sidewalk he said to her retreating form, “I am of old and young, of the foolish as much as the wise.”
“Good night,” she said again. And she was gone.
He didn’t go home, though home was the rightful place for him. He went instead to Broadway, where the living walked.
Broadway was itself, always itself, a river of light and life that flowed through the shades and little fires of the city. Lucas felt, as he always did when he walked there, a queasy, subvert exaltation, as if he were a spy sent to another country, a realm of riches. He walked with elaborate nonchalance, hoping to be as invisible to others as they were visible to him.
On the sidewalk around him, the last of the shoppers were relinquishing the street to the first of the revelers. Ladies in dresses the color of pigeons’ breasts, the color of rain, swished along bearing parcels, speaking softly to one another from under their feathered hats. Men in topcoats strode confidently, spreading the bleak perfume of their cigars, flashing their teeth, slapping the stone with their licorice boots. Carriages rolled by bearing their mistresses home, and the newsboys called out, “Woman murdered in Five Points, read all about it!” Red curtains billowed in the windows of the hotels, under a sky going a deeper red with the night. Somewhere someone played “Lilith” on a calliope, though it seemed that the street itself emanated music, as if by walking with such certainty, such satisfaction, the people summoned music out of the pavement.
If Simon was in heaven, it might be this. Lucas could imagine the souls of the departed walking eternally, with music rising from the cobblestones and curtains putting out their light. But would this be a heaven for Simon? His brother was (had been) loud and rampant, glad of his songs and his meals. What else had made him happy? He hadn’t cared for curtains or dresses. He hadn’t cared about Walt or the book. What had he wanted that this heaven could provide?
Broadway would be Lucas’s heaven, Broadway and Catherine and the book. In his heaven he would be everything he saw and heard. He would be himself and Catherine; he would be the calliope and the lamps; he would be shoes striking pavement, and he would be the pavement under the shoes. He would ride with Catherine on the toy horse from Niedermeyer’s window, which would be the size of an actual horse but perfect in the way of toys, moving serenely over the cobblestones on its bright red wheels.
He said, “I am large, I contain multitudes.” A man in a topcoat, passing by, glanced at him strangely, as people did. The man would be among the angels in Lucas’s heaven, just as plump and prosperous as he was on earth, but in the next world he would not consider Lucas strange. In heaven, Lucas would be beautiful. He’d speak a language everyone understood.
The rooms when he returned to them were dim and silent. Here were the stove and the chairs and the carpet, its pattern ghostly in the dark. Here on the table was the music box that had ruined the family. It still stood cheerfully on the tabletop, a little casket with a rose carved into its lid. It could still play “Blow the Candle Out” and “Oh, Breathe Not His Name” as well as it did the day Mother bought it.
Here, too, were the faces, looking down from the walls, revered and consulted, dusted regularly: Matthew at the center, six years old, dark-eyed and primly serious, rehearsing for the influenza that would make a picture of him a year later. Here was sly Uncle Ian, who found it humorous that he would one day be only a face on a wall; here the round satisfied countenance of Grandmother Aileen, who believed that living was a temporary inconvenience and death her true and only home. They were all, according to Mother, in heaven, though what she meant by heaven was an Ireland where no one starved.
Mother would have to make room for Simon’s picture, but the wall was full. Lucas wondered if one of the older dead would have to be taken away.
He paused before the door to his parents’ bedroom. He felt their breathing on the other side, wondered over their dreams. He stood for a moment, alone in the slumbering darkness, before going into his and Simon’s room.
Here was their bed, and above the bed the oval from which St. Brigid looked out, suffering and ecstatic, crowned by a fiery circle that Lucas had thought, when he was younger, represented her headache. Here were the pegs on which the clothes were hung, his and Simon’s. St. Brigid looked sorrowfully at the empty clothes as she would at the vacant bodies of the faithful after their souls had gone. She seemed to be wondering, from under her circle of light, Where were the mechanisms of wish and need that had once worn shirts and trousers? Gone to heaven. Would it be like Broadway or Ireland? Gone to boxes in the earth. Gone into pictures and lockets, into rooms that refused to shed their memories of those who had eaten and argued and dreamed there.
Lucas undressed and got into the bed on Simon’s side. Simon’s pillow still smelled of Simon. Lucas inhaled. Here were Simon’s humors: oil and sweat. Here was his undercurrent of tallow and his other smell, which Lucas could think of only as Simon, a smell that resembled bread but was not that, was merely the smell of Simon’s body as it moved and breathed.
And there, visible through the window, were the lighted curtains of Emily Hoefstaedler across the air shaft. Emily worked with Catherine at Mannahatta, sewing sleeves onto bodices. She ate Turkish delight privately, from a silver tin she kept hidden in her room. She would be eating it now, Lucas thought, over there, behind the curtain. What would heaven be for Emily, who loved candy and had hungered for Simon? Would there be a Simon she could eat?
He lit the lamp, took the book from its place under the mattress. He began reading.
A child said What is the grass? fetching it to me with full hands;
How could I answer the child? I do not know what it is any more than he.
I guess it must be the flag of my disposition, out of hopeful green stuff woven.
Or I guess it is the handkerchief of the Lord,
A scented gift and remembrancer designedly dropt,
Bearing the owner’s name someway in the corners, that we may see and remark, and say Whose?
He read it again and again. Then he closed the book and held it up, looking at Walt’s likeness, the small bearded face that gazed out from the paper. Although it was wicked to think so, he could not help believing that God must resemble Walt, with his shrewd, benevolent eyes and the edible-looking spill of his beard. He had seen Walt twice, walking in the streets, and he thought he had seen St. Brigid once, cloaked and melancholy, slipping into a doorway, wearing a hat to conceal her circle of light. He liked knowing they were in the world but preferred them as they resided here, on the paper and on the wall.
Lucas put the book back under the mattress. He extinguished the lamp. Across the air shaft, he could see the light of Emily’s curtains. He buried his face in Simon’s pillow. Simon was with them still. His pillow still smelled of him.
Lucas whispered into the pillow, “You should go away now. I really think it’s time.”
In the morning he made tea for himself and his father and put out some bread. His father sat at table with his breathing machine, a tube and a bellows on a metal pole, with three square, delicate feet. His mother hadn’t risen yet.
When Lucas had eaten his bread and drunk his tea, he said, “Goodbye, Father.”
His father looked at him, startled. He had been turned to leather by his years in the tannery. His burnished skin, fine-grained, fit perfectly on his big-jawed skull. His dark eyes were set like jewels. Simon’s beauty, his large and defiant features, came mostly from their father. No one knew how Lucas had come to look as he did.
“G’bye, then,” his father said. He raised the tube to his lips, drew in a mouthful of air. The little bellows rose and fell. Now that he was leather, with jewels for eyes, the machine did his breathing for him.
“Will you see to Mother?” Lucas asked.
“Aye,” his father said.
Lucas put his small hand on his father’s brown one. He loved himself for loving his father. It was the best he could do.
“I’m off to the works,” he said.
“Aye,” his father answered, and took another breath from the tube. The machine was a gift from the tannery. They had given him the machine, and some money. There had been no money for Simon, because dying was his own fault.
Lucas kissed his father’s forehead. His father’s mind was leather now, too, but his goodness remained. All he had lost were his complications. He could still do what he needed to do. He could still love Lucas’s mother and tend to her. Lucas hoped he could still do that.
He said, “I’ll see you tonight, then.”
“Aye,” his father answered.
On his way to the works, Lucas stopped at the school. He didn’t enter. He went around to the side and looked through the window. He could see Mr. Mulchady frowning at his desk, the little flames from the lamps dancing on his spectacles. He could see the others hunched over their lessons. School would go on without him. Here as always were the desks and slates. Here were the two maps on the wall, the world and the stars. Lucas had only lately understood (he could be slow in some things) that the two were different. He’d believed, and had not thought to ask otherwise, that the stars were a version of the world, that they mirrored its countries and oceans. Why else would they be mounted side by side? When he was younger he had found New York on the map of the world and found its counterpart on the map of the stars, the Pleiades.
It was Mr. Mulchady who’d given Walt’s book to Lucas, on loan. Mr. Mulchady said Lucas had the soul of a poet, which was kind of him but wrong. Lucas had no soul at all. He was a stranger, a citizen of no place, come from County Kerry but planted in New York, where he grew like a blighted potato; where he didn’t sing or shout as the other Irish did; where he harbored not soul but an emptiness sparked here and there with painful shocks of love, for the map of the stars and the answering flames on Mr. Mulchady’s spectacles; for Catherine and his mother and a horse on wheels. He did not mourn Simon; he had no convictions about heaven, no thirst for Christ’s revivifying blood. What he wanted was the raucousness of the city where people hauled their loads of corn or coal, where they danced to fiddles, wept or laughed, sold and begged and bartered, not always happily but always with a vigor that was what he meant, privately, by soul. It was a defiant, uncrushable aliveness. He hoped the book could instill that in him.
Now, abruptly, he was finished with school. He would have liked to say goodbye to Mr. Mulchady, but if he did Mr. Mulchady would ask him to return the book, and Lucas couldn’t do that, not yet. He was still an empty suit of clothes. He hoped Mr. Mulchady wouldn’t mind waiting.
He said goodbye, silently, to the classroom, to the maps and Mr. Mulchady.
The works was like a city unto itself. It was red brick walls and red brick towers, a gate big enough for six horses walking abreast. Lucas entered through the gate, among a crowd of boys and men. Some went quietly. Some spoke to one another, laughed. One said, “Fat, you never seen one as fat as her,” and another said, “I like ’em fat.” The boys and the younger men were pale. The older men had darkened.
Lucas, uncertain, walked with the others into a cobbled courtyard where stacks of brown-black iron, dusky as great bars of chocolate, stood against the red brick walls. He went with the others to a doorway at the courtyard’s opposite end, an arched entrance with flickering dark inside.
He stopped there. The others moved around him. A man in a blue cap jostled him, cursed, walked on. The man would be eaten as Simon had been. What the machine did not care for would be put in a box and taken across the river.
Lucas couldn’t tell whether he was meant to go in or to wait here. He thought it might be foolish to wait. The others were so certain, so loud but steady, like unruly soldiers on parade. He hated drawing attention to himself. But he thought, too, that if he went on he might be drawn forward into some error, obscure but irredeemable. He stood in an agony of doubt with the others flowing around him.
Soon Lucas was alone save for a few stragglers who hurried by him without seeming to see him at all. Finally—it seemed an unspeakable mercy—a man came from the building into the courtyard and said, “Are you Lucas?”
He was an immense gray-skinned man whose face, wide as a shovel, didn’t move when he talked. Only his mouth moved, as if by magic a man made of iron had been given the power of speech.
“Yes,” Lucas said.
The man looked at him skeptically. “What’s the matter with you?” he asked. As he spoke, his mouth showed flashes of pink, livid in the gray face.
“I’m sound, sir. I can work as well as anybody.”
“And how old are you?”
“Thirteen, sir,” Lucas answered.
“You’re not thirteen.”
“I’m thirteen in another month.”
The man shook his iron head. “This isn’t work for a child.”
“Please, sir. I’m stronger than I seem.” Lucas settled his shoulders, striving to look sturdier.
“Well, they’ve given you the job. We’ll see how you do.”
Before he could stop himself, Lucas said, “Miserable! I do not laugh at your oaths nor jeer you.”
“What?”
“Please, sir,” Lucas said. “I’ll work hard. I can do anything.”
“We’ll see. I’m Jack Walsh.”
Lucas held out his hand. Jack looked at it as if Lucas had offered him a lily. He took it in his own, pressed it hard enough to put the sting of tears in Lucas’s eyes. If Walt was the book, Jack was the works. He was made of iron, with a living mouth.
“Come on,” Jack said. “Let’s get you started.”
Lucas followed him through the entranceway, into a hall where men behind wire cages scowled over papers. Beyond the hall, they came to an enormous room lined with furnaces. Where the light from the furnaces didn’t reach, it was twilight, a dull orange twilight that faded, in its remoter parts, to a bruised, furtive undark. The room reeked of heat and coal, of creosote. It rang and wheezed. Furies of sparks swirled up, skittish as flies. Among the sparks, men stood before the furnaces, stoking the fires with long black poles.
“This is coking,” Jack said, and said no more. Did he mean “cooking”? Lucas thought he would ask his questions later.
Jack escorted him past the row of furnaces, under a chaos of black hooks and leather pulleys that depended from the high ceiling, touched here and there by small incidences of orange firelight. A portal that opened from the room where the coking (the cooking?) was done led onto another room, equally large but dimmer, lined on either side by the gray-brown bulks of machines as preposterous and grand as elephants, machines made up of belts and beams and wheels turning with sharp squeals and groans. The room was like a stable or a dairy. It was full of steady, creaturely life.
“Cutting and stamping,” Jack said. “This is where you’ll be.”
The atmosphere of the cutting-and-stamping room was dust, but bright dust, drifting silvery particles that winked and glimmered in the sluggish light. Men stood at the machines engaged in mysterious efforts, bent over, straining with their shoulders and thighs. Lucas saw that the men, like Jack, had taken on the color of the room. Were they dying or just becoming more like the air?
Jack led him to a machine at the far end. Yet another room opened off this one, though Lucas could discern only a sepulchral stillness and what appeared to be stacks of vaults, like catacombs, filled with silver canisters. It seemed there must be another room after that and then another and another. The works might extend for miles, like a series of caverns. It seemed that it would be possible to walk through them for hours and finally reach—what? Lucas didn’t fully understand what it was that the works produced. Simon had never spoken of it. Lucas had imagined some treasure, a living jewel, a ball of green fire, infinitely precious, the making of which required unstinting effort. He wondered now why he had never thought to ask. His brother’s labors had always seemed a mystery, to be respected and revered.
“Here,” Jack said, stopping before a machine. “You work here.”
“This is where my brother worked.”
“It is.”
Lucas stood before the machine that had taken Simon. It was a toothed wheel, like a titanic piano roll, set over a broad belt bordered by clamps.
Jack said, “You must be more careful than your brother was.”
Lucas understood from Jack’s voice that the machine was not to blame. He stared at the machine as he’d stared once at the gorilla at Barnum’s. It was immense and stolid. It wore its wheel as a snail wears its shell, with a languid and inscrutable pride. Like a snail with its shell, the machine contained a quicker, more liquid life in its nether parts. Under the wheel, which snagged flecks of orange light on its square teeth, were the rows of clamps, the pale, naked-looking leather of the belt, the slender stalks of the levers. The wheel harbored a shifting shadow of brownish-black. The machine was at once formidable and tender-looking. It offered its belt like a tentative promise of kindness.
Jack said, “Tom Clare, over there” (he nodded at a young man laboring at the next machine), “stacks plates in the bin here. Tom, this is Lucas, the new man.”
Tom Clare, sharp-faced, whiskered, looked up. “Sorry about your loss,” he said. He would have seen Simon eaten by the machine. Was it his fault, then? Could he have acted more quickly, been more brave?
“Thank you,” Lucas answered.
Jack lifted from the bin a flat rectangle of iron, the size of an oven door, and laid it on the belt. “You fasten it tight,” he said. He screwed clamps down onto the iron plate, three on each side. “See the lines on the belt?”
The belt was marked with white lines, each drawn several inches above one of the clamps. “The top edge,” Jack said, “has to be lined up exactly. Do you understand? It has to be right up on this line.”
“I see,” Lucas said.
“When it’s even with the line and when the clamps are secure, you pull this lever first.”
He pulled a lever to the right of the belt. The wheel awakened and began, with a sigh, to turn. Its teeth came to within an inch of the belt.
“When the drum is turning, you pull the other lever.”
He pulled a second lever that stood beside the first. The belt slowly began to move. Lucas watched the belt bear the iron plate forward until it met with the teeth of the wheel. The teeth, impressing into the iron, sounded like hammers banging on glass that wouldn’t break.
“Now. Follow me.” Jack led Lucas to the back of the machine, where the plate was beginning to emerge, full of shallow, square impressions.
“When it’s come through,” he said, “you go back and pull the levers again. First the second one, then the first. Understand?”
“Yes,” Lucas said.
Jack pulled the levers and stopped the machine, first the belt and then the wheel. He released the clamps from the plate of iron.
“Then you inspect it,” he said. “You make sure it’s taken a complete impression. Four across, six down. They must all be perfect. Look into every square. This is important. If it isn’t perfect you take it over there” (he pointed across the room) “to Will O’Hara, for resmelting. If you have any doubts, show it to Will. If you’re satisfied that the impressions are perfect, if you’re sure, take it to Dan Heaney over there. Any questions?”
“No, sir,” Lucas said. “I don’t think so.”
“All right, then. You try it.”
Lucas took a new plate from the bin. It was heavier than he’d expected but not too heavy to manage. He hoisted it onto the belt, pushed it carefully up to the white line, and attached the clamps. “Is that right?” he asked.
“What do you think?”
He tested the clamps. “Should I pull the lever now?” he asked.
“Yes. Pull the lever.”
Lucas pulled the first lever, which started the wheel turning. He was briefly exultant. He pulled the second lever, and the belt moved forward. To his relief, the clamps held tight.
“That’s all right,” Jack said.
Lucas watched the teeth bite into the iron. Simon would have been pulled under the wheel, first his arm and then the rest. The machine would have ground him in its teeth with the same serenity it brought to the iron. It would have believed—if machines could believe—it had simply produced another iron plate. After it had crushed Simon it would have waited patiently for the next plate.
“Now,” Jack said, “let’s go and inspect the piece.”
Lucas went with him to the machine’s far end, and saw what he had made. A plate of iron with square impressions, four across and six down.
Jack said, “Does it look all right to you?”
Lucas looked closely. It was difficult to see in the dimness. He ran a finger into each impression. He said, “I think so.”
“Are you sure?”
“I think so.”
“All right, then. What do you do now?”
“I take it to Dan Heaney.”
“That’s right.”
Lucas lifted the stamped iron, carried it to Dan Heaney’s machine. Dan, bulbous and lion-headed, nodded. After a hesitation, Lucas placed the plate carefully in a bin that stood beside Dan’s machine.
“Fine, then,” Jack said.
He had pleased Jack.
Jack said, “Do another one.”
“Sir,” Lucas asked, “what are these things I’m making?”
“They’re housings,” Jack said. “Let me watch you do another one.”
“Yes, sir.”
Lucas did another one. Jack said it was all right and went off to attend to other things.
Time passed. Lucas couldn’t have said how much. There were no clocks. There was no daylight. He loaded a plate onto the belt, lined it up, sent it through, and inspected the impressions. Four across, six down. He began trying to drop each plate onto the belt so that its upper edge fell as close to the white line as possible and needed only the slightest nudge to put it in place. For a while he hoped the impressions made by the wheel would be perfect, and after what seemed hours of that he began hoping for minor imperfections, a blunted corner or a slight cant that would have been invisible to eyes less diligent than his. He found only one flawed impression, and that debatable. One of the squares seemed less deep than the others, though he could not be entirely sure. Still, he took the plate proudly over to Will for resmelting and felt strong and capable after.
When he had tired of trying to hit the line on his first try, and when he had grown indifferent to the question of whether he was searching for flaws or searching for perfection, he tried thinking of other things. He tried thinking of Catherine, of his mother and father. Had his mother awakened? Was she herself again, ready to cook and argue? He tried thinking of Simon. The work, however, didn’t permit such thoughts. The work demanded attention. He entered a state of waking sleep, an ongoing singularity of purpose, in which his mind was filled with that which must fill it, to the exclusion of all else. Align, clamp, pull, pull again, inspect.
It was after the lunch hour when his sleeve caught in a clamp. He’d allowed his mind to drift. The tug was gentle and insistent as an infant’s grip. He was already reaching for another clamp and saw that a corner of his shirtsleeve was in the serrated mouth of the first, pinched tight between clamp and plate. He pulled instinctively away, but the clamp held the fabric with steady assurance. It was singular and passionate as a rat with a scrap of gristle. Lucas thought for a moment how well the machine was made—the jaws of the clamps were so strong and sure. He tugged again. The clamp didn’t yield. Only when he turned the pin, awkwardly, with his left hand, did the clamp relax itself and give up the corner of his sleeve. The cloth still bore the imprint of the clamp’s tiny toothmarks.
Lucas looked with mute wonder at the end of his sleeve. This was how. You allowed your attention to wander, you thought of other things, and the clamp took whatever was offered it. That was the clamp’s nature. Lucas looked around guiltily, wondering if Tom or Will or Dan had noticed. They had not noticed. Dan tapped with a wrench on his machine. He struck it firmly but kindly on the flank of the box that held its workings. The wrench rang on the metal like a church bell.
Lucas rolled his sleeves to his elbows. He went on working.
It seemed, as he loaded the plates onto the belt, that the machines were not inanimate; not quite inanimate. They were part of a continuum: machines, then grass and trees, then horses and dogs, then human beings. He wondered if the machine had loved Simon, in its serene and unthinking way. He wondered if all the machines at the works, all the furnaces and hooks and belts, mutely admired their men, as horses admired their masters. He wondered if they waited with their immense patience for the moment their men would lose track of themselves, let their caution lapse so the machines could take their hands with loving firmness and pull them in.
He lifted another plate from the bin, lined it up, fastened the clamps, and sent it under the teeth of the wheel.
Where was Jack? Didn’t he want to know how well Lucas was doing his work? Lucas said, as the plate went under the wheel, “Urge and urge and urge, always the procreant urge of the world.”
Jack didn’t come to him until the workday’s end. Jack looked at Lucas, looked at the machine, nodded, and looked at Lucas again.
“You’ve done all right,” he said.
“Thank you, sir.”
“You’ll be back tomorrow, then.”
“Yes, sir. Thank you, sir.”
Lucas extended his hand to Jack and was surprised to see that it shook. He had known his fingers were bleeding; he hadn’t known about the shaking. Still, Jack took his hand. He didn’t appear to mind about the shaking or the blood.
“Prodigal,” Lucas said, “you have given me love—therefore I to you give love!”
Jack paused. His iron face took on three creases across the expanse of its forehead.
“What was that?”
“Good night,” Lucas said.
“Good night,” Jack replied doubtfully.
Lucas hurried away, passed with the others through the cooking room, where the men with the black poles were shutting down their furnaces. He found that he could not quite remember having been anywhere but the works. Or rather, he remembered his life before coming to the works as a dream, watery and insubstantial. It faded as dreams fade on waking. None of it was as actual as this. None of it was so true. Align, clamp, pull, pull again, inspect.
A woman in a light blue dress waited outside the entrance to the works. Lucas took a moment in recognizing her. He saw first that a woman stood at the entrance and thought that the works had summoned an angel to bid the men goodbye, to remind them that work would end someday and a longer dream begin. Then he understood. Catherine had come. She was waiting for him.
He recognized her a moment before she recognized him. He looked at her face and saw that she had forgotten him, too.
He called out, “Catherine.”
“Lucas?” she said.
He ran to her. She inhabited a sphere of scented and cleansed air. He was gladdened. He was furious. How could she come here? Why would she embarrass him so?
She said, “Look at you. You’re all grime. I didn’t know you at first.”
“It’s me,” he said.
“You’re shaking all over.”
“I’m all right. I’m well.”
“I thought you shouldn’t walk home alone. Not after your first day.”
He said, “This isn’t a fit place for a woman on her own.”
“Poor boy, just look at you.”
He bristled. He had set the wheel turning. He had inspected every plate.
“I’m fine,” he said, more forcefully than he’d meant to.
“Well, let’s take you home. You must be starving.”
They walked up Rivington Street together. She did not put her hand on his elbow. He was too dirty for that. A fitful breeze blew in from the East River and along the street, stirring up miniature dust storms with scraps of paper caught in them. The dark facades of brick houses rose on either side, the lid of the sky clamped down tightly overhead. The sidewalk was crowded, all the more so because those who walked there shared the pavement with heaps of refuse that lay in drifts against the sides of the buildings, darkly massed, wet and shiny in their recesses.
Lucas and Catherine walked with difficulty on the narrow paved trail between the housefronts and the piles of trash. They fell in behind a woman and a child who moved with agonizing slowness. The woman—was she old or young? It was impossible to tell from behind—favored her left leg, and the child, a girl in a long, ragged skirt, seemed not to walk at all but to be conveyed along by her mother’s hand as if she were a piece of furniture that must be dragged home. Ahead of the woman and child walked a large bald man in what appeared to be a woman’s coat, worn shiny in spots, far too small for him, the sleeves ripped at the shoulders, showing gashes of pink satin lining. Lucas could not help imagining this procession of walkers, all of them poor and battered, wearing old coats too small or too large for them, dragging children who could not or would not walk, all marching along Rivington Street, impelled by someone or something that pushed them steadily forward, slowly but inexorably, so it only seemed as if they moved of their own will; all of them walking on, past the houses and stables, past the taverns, past the works and into the river, where they would fall, one after another after another, and continue to walk, drowned but animate, on the bottom, until the street was finally empty and the people were all in the river, trudging along its silty bed, through its drifts of brown and sulfur, into its deeper darks, until they reached the ocean, this multitude of walkers, until they were nudged into open water where silver fish swam silently past, where the ocher of the river gave over to inky blue, where clouds floated on the surface, far, far above, and they were free, all of them, to drift away, their coats billowing like wings, their children flying effortlessly, a whole nation of the dead, dispersing, buoyant, faintly illuminated, spreading out like constellations into the blue immensity.
He and Catherine reached the Bowery, where the rowdies strutted together, brightly clad, past the taverns and oyster houses. They swaggered and shouted, chewing cigars fat as sausages. One tipped his stovepipe to Catherine, began to speak, but was pulled onward by his laughing companions. The Bowery was Broadway’s lesser twin, a minor star in the constellation, though no less bright and loud. Still, there was more room to walk here. The truly poor were more numerous.
Catherine said, “Was it dreadful there?”
Lucas answered, “The machinist rolls up his sleeves, the policeman travels his beat, the gate-keeper marks who pass.”
“Please, Lucas,” she said, “speak to me in plain English.”
“The foreman said I did well,” he told her.
“Will you promise me something?”
“Yes.”
“Promise that as long as you must work there you will be very, very careful.”
Lucas thought guiltily of the clamp. He had not been careful. He had allowed himself to dream and drift.
He said, “I know I am deathless, I know this orbit of mine cannot be swept by a carpenter’s compass.”
“And promise me that as soon as you can, you will leave that place and find other work.”
“I will.”
“You are …”
He waited. What would she tell him he was?
She said, “You are meant for other things.”
He was happy to hear it, happy enough. And yet he’d hoped for more. He’d wanted her to reveal something, though he couldn’t say what. He’d wanted a wonderful lie that would become true the moment she said it.
He said, “I promise.” What exactly was he meant for? He couldn’t bring himself to ask.
“It’s hard,” she said.
“And you? Were you all right at work today?”
“I was. I sewed and sewed. It was a relief, really, to work.”
“Were you …”
She waited. What did he mean to ask her?
He asked, “Were you careful?”
She laughed. His face burned. Had it been a ridiculous question? She seemed always so available to harm, as if someone as kind as she, as sweet-smelling, could only be hurt, either now or later.
“I was,” she said. “Do you worry about me?”
“Yes,” he said. He hoped it was not a foolish assertion. He waited nervously to see if she’d laugh again.
“You mustn’t,” she said. “You must think only of yourself. Promise me.”
He said, “Every atom belonging to me as good belongs to you.”
“Thank you, my dear,” she answered, and she said no more.
He took her to her door, on Fifth Street. They stood together on the stoop that was specked with brightness.
“You will go home now,” she said, “and have your supper.”
“May I ask you something?” he said.
“Ask me anything.”
“I wonder what it is I’m making at the works.”
“Well, the works produces many things, I think.”
“What things?”
“Parts of larger things. Gears and bolts and … other parts.”
“They told me I make housings.”
“There you are, then. That’s what you make.”
“I see,” he said. He didn’t see, but it seemed better to let the subject pass. It seemed better to be someone who knew what a housing was.
Catherine looked at him tenderly. Would she kiss him again?
She said, “I want to give you something.”
He trembled. He kept his jaws clamped shut. He would not speak, not as the book or as himself.
She unfastened the collar of her dress and reached inside. She drew out the locket. She pulled its chain up over her head, held locket and chain in her palm.
She said, “I want you to wear this.”
“I can’t,” he said.
“It has a lock of your brother’s hair inside.”
“I know. I know that.”
“Do you know,” she said, “that Simon wore its twin, with my picture inside?”
“Yes.”
“I was not allowed to see him,” she said.
“None of us was.”
“But the undertaker told me the locket was with him still. He said Simon wore it in his casket.”
Simon had Catherine with him, then. He had something of Catherine in the box across the river. Did that make her an honorary member of the dead?
Catherine said, “I’ll feel better if you wear it when you go to the works.”
“It’s yours,” he said.
“Call it ours. Yours and mine. Will you do it, to please me?”
He couldn’t protest, then. How could he refuse to do anything that would please her?
He said, “If you like.”
She put the chain over his head. The locket hung on his chest, a little golden orb. She had worn it next to her skin.
“Good night,” she said. “Have your supper and go straight to bed.”
“Good night.”
She kissed him then, not on his lips but on his cheek. She turned away, put her key in the lock. He felt the kiss still on his skin after she’d withdrawn.
“Good night,” he said. “Good night, good night.”
“Go,” she commanded him. “Do what you must for your mother and father, and rest.”
He said, “I ascend from the moon … I ascend from the night.”
She glanced at him from her doorway. She had been someone who laughed easily, who was always the first to dance. She looked at him now with such sorrow. Had he disappointed her? Had he deepened her sadness? He stood helplessly, pinned by her gaze. She turned and went inside.
At home, he fixed what supper he could for himself and his father. There were bits, still, from what had been brought for after the burial. A scrap of fatty ham, a jelly, the last of the bread. He laid it before his father, who blinked, said, “Thank you,” and ate. Between mouthfuls, he breathed from the machine.
Lucas’s mother was still in bed. How would they manage about food if she didn’t rise soon?
As his father ate and breathed, Lucas went to his parents’ bedroom. Softly, uncertainly, he pushed open the door. The bedroom was dark, full of its varnish and wool. Over the bed the crucifix hung, black in the sable air.
He said, “Mother?”
He heard the bedclothes stirring. He heard the whisper of her breath.
She said, “Who’s there?”
“It’s only me,” he answered. “Only Lucas.”
“Lucas. M’love.”
His heart shivered. It seemed for a moment that he could abide with his mother in the sweet, warm darkness. He could stay here with her and tell her the book.
“Did I wake you?” he asked.
“I’m ever awake. Come.”
He sat on the edge of the mattress. He could see the sprawl of her hair on the pillow. He could see her nose and chin, the dark places where her eyes were. He touched her face. It was hot and powdery, dry as chalk.
“Are you thirsty, are you hungry?” he asked. “Can I bring you something?”
She said, “What’s happened to ye? How have they darkened ye so?”
“I’ve been to work, Mother. It’s only dust.”
“Where’s Lucas, then?”
“I’m here, Mother.”
“Of course you are. I’m not quite right, am I?”
“Let me bring you some water.”
“The hens need looking after. Have ye seen to the hens?”
“The hens, Mother?”
“Yes, child. It’s gone late, hasn’t it? I think it’s very late indeed.”
“We haven’t any hens.”
“We haven’t?”
“No.”
“Forgive me. We did have hens.”
“Don’t worry, Mother.”
“Oh, it’s fine to say don’t worry, with the hens gone and the potatoes, too.”
Lucas stroked her hair. He said, “Divine am I inside and out, and I make holy whatever I touch or am touch’d from.”
“That’s right, m’dear.”
Lucas sat quietly with her, stroking her hair. She had been nervous and quick, prone to argument, easily angered and slow to laugh. (Only Simon could make her laugh.) She’d been vanishing gradually for a year or longer, always more eager to be done with her work and off to bed, but still herself, still dutiful and fitfully affectionate, still alert to slights and hidden insults. Now that Simon was dead she’d turned into this, a face on a pillow, asking after hens.
He said, “Should I bring you the music box?”
“That’d be nice.”
He went to the parlor and returned with the box. He held it up for her to see.
“Ah, yes,” she said. Did she know that the box had ruined them? She never spoke of it. She seemed to love the music box as dearly as she would have if it had caused no damage at all.
Lucas turned the crank. Within the confines of the box, the brass spool revolved under the tiny hammers. It played “Forget Not the Field” in its little way, bright metallic notes that spangled in the close air of the bedroom. Lucas sang along with the tune.
Forget not the field where they perish’d,
The truest, the last of the brave,
All gone—and the bright hope we cherish’d
Gone with them, and quench’d in their grave.
His mother put a hand over his. “That’s enough,” she said.
“It’s only the first verse.”
“It’s enough, Lucas. Take it away.”
He did as she asked. He returned the music box to its place on the parlor table, where it continued playing “Forget Not the Field.” Once wound, it would not stop except by its own accord.
His father had moved from his place at the table to his chair by the window. He nodded gravely, as if agreeing with something the music said.
“Do you like the music?” Lucas asked him.
“Can’t be stopped,” his father said in his new voice, which was all but indistinguishable from his breathing, as if his machine’s bellows were whispering language as they blew.
“It’ll stop soon.”
“That’s good.”
Lucas said, “Good night, Father,” because he could not think of anything else to say.
His father nodded. Could he get himself to bed? Lucas thought he could. He hoped so.
He went to his own room, his and Simon’s. Emily’s window was lit. She was faithfully eating her candy, just as Lucas faithfully read his book.
He undressed. He did not remove the locket. If he removed the locket, if he ever removed the locket, it would no longer be something Catherine had put on him. It would become something he put upon himself.
Carefully, he found the locket’s catch and opened it. Here was the black curl of Simon’s hair, tied with a piece of purple thread. Here, under the curl, was Simon’s face, obscured by the hair. Lucas knew the picture: Simon two years ago, frowning for the photographer, his eyes narrow and his jaw set. Simon’s face in the locket was pale brown, like turned cream. His eyes (one was partially visible through the strands of hair) were black. It was like seeing Simon in his casket, which no one had been allowed to do. What the machine had done had rendered him too extraordinary. Now, in the quiet of the room, the Simon who was with them still met the Simon who was in the locket, and here he was, doubled; here was the smell and heft of him; here his habit, on the drinking nights, of slapping Lucas playfully. Lucas closed the locket. It made a small metallic snap.
He got into bed, on his own side. He read the evening’s passage.
I guess the grass is itself a child, the produced babe of the vegetation,
Or I guess it is a uniform hieroglyphic,
And it means, Sprouting alike in broad zones and narrow zones,
Growing among black folks as among white,
Kanuck, Tuckahoe, Congressman, Cuff, I give them the same, I receive them the same.
When he had finished it he put out the lamp. He could feel Simon in the locket and Simon in the box in the earth, so changed that the lid had been nailed shut. Lucas determined never to open the locket again. He would wear it always but keep it forever sealed.
He slept, and woke again. He rose to dress for work and get breakfast for his father, feeling the locket’s unfamiliar weight on his neck, the circle of it bouncing gently on his breastbone. Here was the memento of Simon’s ongoing death for him to wear close to his heart, because Catherine had put it on him.
He gave his father the last of the jelly for breakfast. There was no food after that.
As his father ate, Lucas paused beside the door to his parents’ bedroom. He heard no sound from within. What would happen if his mother never came out again? He got the music box from the table and crept into the room with it, as quietly as he could. His mother was a shape, snoring softly. He set the music box on the table at her bedside. She might want to listen to it when she awoke. If she didn’t want to listen to it, she’d still know Lucas had thought of her by putting it there.
Jack wasn’t there to greet him when he arrived at the works. Lucas paused at the entrance, among the others, but didn’t linger. Jack would most likely be waiting for him at the machine, to tell him he had done well yesterday, to encourage him about today. He passed through the vestibule, with its caged men scowling at their papers. He passed through the cooking room and went to his machine. Tom and Will and Dan all said good-morning to him, as if he had been there a long time, which pleased him. But there was no Jack Walsh.
Lucas got to work. Jack would be glad of that when he came by. Lucas steadied himself before the machine. He took the first of the plates from Tom’s bin. Align, clamp, pull, pull again, inspect.
He inspected every plate. An hour passed, or what seemed like an hour. Another hour passed. His fingers started bleeding again. Smears of his blood were on the plates as they went under the wheel. He wiped the plates clean with his sleeve before conveying them to Dan.
He began to see that the days at the works were so long, so entirely composed of the one act, performed over and over and over again, that they made of themselves a world within the world, and that those who lived in that world, all the men of the works, lived primarily there and paid brief visits to the other world, where they ate and rested and made ready to return again. The men of the works had relinquished their citizenship; they had immigrated to the works as his parents had immigrated to New York from County Kerry. Their former lives were dreams they had each night, from which they awakened each morning at the works.
It was only at day’s end, when the whistle blew, that Jack appeared. Lucas expected—what? A reunion. An explanation. He thought Jack would tell him apologetically of a sick child or a lame horse. Jack would squeeze his bleeding hand (which Lucas feared and longed for). Jack would tell Lucas he had done well. Lucas had aligned each plate perfectly. He’d inspected every one.
Instead, Jack stood beside him and said, “All right, then.”
There was no tone of congratulation in his voice. Lucas thought for a moment that Jack had confused him with someone else. (Catherine hadn’t known him at first, his mother hadn’t known him.) He almost said but did not say, It’s me. It’s Lucas.
Jack departed. He went to Dan, spoke to him briefly, and went into the next chamber, the room of the vaults.
Lucas remained at his machine, though it was time to go. The machine stood as it always did, belt and levers, row upon row of teeth.
He said, “Who need be afraid of the merge?”
He was afraid, though. He feared the machine’s endurance, its capacity to be here, always here, and his own obligation to return to it after a short interlude of feeding and sleep. He worried that one day he would forget himself again. One day he would forget himself and be drawn through the machine as Simon had. He would be stamped (four across, six down) and expelled; he would be put in a box and carried across the river. He would be so changed that no one would know him, not the living or the dead.
Where would he go after that? He didn’t think he had soul enough for heaven. He’d be in a box across the river. He wondered if his face would be hung on the parlor wall, though there were no pictures of him, and even if there had been, he couldn’t think of who might be taken away to make room.
Catherine wasn’t waiting for him tonight. Lucas stood briefly outside the gate, searching for her, though of course she would not have come again. It had been only the once, when he was new, that she was worried for him. What he had to do was go home and see about getting supper for his parents.
He left among the others and made his way up Rivington and then the Bowery. He passed by Second Street and went to Catherine’s building on Fifth.
He knocked on the street door, tentatively at first, then harder. He stood waiting on the glittering stoop. Finally, the door was opened by an ancient woman. She was white-haired, small as a dwarf, as wide as she was tall. She might have been the spirit of the building itself, pocked and stolid, peevish about being roused.
“What is it?” she asked. “What do you want?”
“Please, missus. I’m here to see Catherine Fitzhugh. May I come in?”
“Who are you?”
“I’m Lucas. I’m the brother of Simon, who she was to marry.”
“What do you want?”
“I want to see her. Please. I mean no harm.”
“You’re up to no mischief?”
“No. None. Please.”
“Very well, then. She’s on the third floor. Number nineteen.”
“Thank you.”
The woman opened the door slowly, as if it required all her strength. Lucas struggled to enter in a civil manner, to refrain from rushing past her and knocking her down.
“Thank you,” he said again.
He stepped around her, went up the stairs. He was aware of her eyes on his back as he ascended, and he forced himself to go slowly until he had reached the second floor. Then he raced up the next staircase, ran down the hall. He found number nineteen and knocked.
Alma opened the door. Alma was the loudest of them. Her face had a boiled look, peppered with brown freckles.
“What’s this here?” she said. “A goblin or an elf?”
“It’s Lucas,” he answered. “Simon’s brother.”
“I know that, child. To what do we owe the pleasure?”
“I’ve come to see Catherine, please.”
She shook her large, feverish head. “You all want Catherine, don’t you? Did y’ever think we others might have a thing or two to offer?”
“Please, is Catherine at home?”
“Come on in, then.” She turned and shouted into the room. “Catherine, there’s a fella here to see ye.”
Alma allowed Lucas into the parlor. It was identical to the apartment he lived in with his family, though Catherine and Alma and Sarah had left the dead out of theirs. They’d hung pictures of flowers on the walls instead. They’d covered their table with a purple cloth.
Sarah stood at the stove, stirring something in a pot. A lamb’s neck, Lucas thought, and cabbage. Sarah’s face was round and white as a saucer, and almost as still.
“H’lo,” she said. She was small and pretty, childlike, though she was at least as old as Catherine. She wore a tangerine-colored dressing gown. She might have been something you could win at a carnival.
Catherine emerged from what would have been her bedroom, still wearing her blue dress from work. “Well, hello, Lucas,” she said. For a moment she wore her former face, the face she’d had before the machine took Simon. She seemed, as she once had, to know a joke that was not yet apparent to anyone else.
“Hello,” Lucas said. “I’m sorry if I’m disturbing you.”
“I’m glad to see you. Have you had supper?”
He knew he mustn’t accept. “Yes, I have, thank you,” he said.
“Such a strange-lookin’ thing,” Alma said. “What’s the matter with ye?”
“Alma,” Catherine said sternly.
“It’s a question, is all. Do y’ think he don’t know?”
Lucas struggled to answer. He liked Alma and Sarah, though they weren’t kind. They were raucous and brightly colored, heedless, like parrots. They had a shine about them.
“I was born this way,” he said. It seemed insufficient. He might have told them that between himself and Simon there’d been Matthew, dead at seven, and Brendan, dead before he was born. Now they’d lost Simon and it was somehow, miraculously, only he, Lucas, the changeling child, goblin-faced, with frail heart and mismatched eyes. He should have been the first to die but had somehow outlived them all. He was proud of that. He’d have liked to declare it to Alma and Sarah.
“Well, I never thought you’d decided on it,” Alma said.
“Alma, that’s enough,” Catherine said. “Lucas, surely you’ll have something with us. Just a bite.”
Lucas saw Sarah shift her weight to shield the pot. He said quietly to Catherine, “May I speak to you for a moment?”
“Of course.”
He paused, in an agony of confusion. Catherine said, “Why don’t we go out into the hallway?”
There would be nowhere else for them to go. There would be only the parlor, and the two bedrooms.
“Yes. Thank you.” As he followed Catherine out he said good-night to Alma and Sarah.
“Even the goblins prefers Catherine,” Alma said.
Sarah answered from the stove. “You should watch that mouth of yours, some goblin’ll fix it one day.”
Lucas stood with Catherine in the hall. It was like his own. A lamp flickered at one end, by the stairwell. Near the lamp, piles of paper, empty bottles, and a sack (what must it contain?) were visible in the semidark. At the hallway’s farther end, the refuse was only shadows. Halfway down, in the direction of the true dark, something lay atop a discarded oil can. Did it have teeth? Yes. It was a goat’s skull, boiled clean.
Catherine said, “I’m happy to see you again.”
Speak as Lucas, he bade himself. Don’t speak as the book.
He said, “I’m happy to see you, too. I wanted you to know that I’m well.”
“I’m glad of that.”
“And you’re well, too?”
“Yes. I’m fine, my dear.”
“And you’re careful?”
“Why, yes, Lucas. I am.”
“Does someone walk with you? In the dark, when you come home?”
“My friend Kate does, as far as the Bowery. Really, you mustn’t worry about me. You have so much to attend to.”
Lucas said, “My voice goes after what my eyes cannot reach.”
“Wait here a moment,” she said. “I have something for you.”
She went back into the apartment. Lucas touched the locket at his breast. His mind was a chaos of urges. What would she have for him? He wanted it, whatever it might be. He wanted so much. He watched the goat’s skull as he waited for Catherine. He went into the skull. He became that, a bone grinning in the dark.
Catherine returned with a plate covered by a cloth. She said, “Here’s a little food for you and your parents.”
This was what she had for him. She gave him the plate. He accepted mutely and held it.
He was a beggar, then.
He said, “Thank you.”
“Good night, my dear.”
“Good night.”
She retreated and closed the door. She did not kiss him again.
He remained for a while before the door, holding the plate as if he had brought it and not received it. He heard the murmur of the women’s voices, couldn’t make out their words. Then, because there was nothing else for him to do, he went back down the corridor, carefully holding the plate. His father and mother would want it. He wanted it.
The old woman was waiting on the ground floor to see him out. “No mischief, then,” she said.
“No, ma’am. No mischief.”
Lucas went into his building, carrying the plate. He went up the stairs. He was aware of a subtle wrongness, as if this most familiar of places (the stairwell, with its gas smell and its flickering lamps, the rats busy among the scraps) were altered, as if it had become, overnight, an imperfect copy of itself, in contrast to his day at the works, which was perfect in every regard.
But the parlor was itself. His father sat as he did, in his chair by the window, with the machine at his side. Lucas said, “Good evening, Father.”
“Hello,” his father replied. His work was breathing and looking out the window. It had been for more than a year.
Lucas took three plates from the cupboard, divided the food among them. He put a plate on the table for his father and said, “Here’s your supper.”
His father nodded and continued looking out the window. Lucas took his mother’s plate into the bedroom.
She was in bed, as she’d been when he left in the morning, as she’d been the night before. Her breathing, the gauzy rasp of it, filled the dark. It seemed for a moment that the rooms were like the works and his parents like machinery—they were always as they were, always waiting for Lucas to come and go and come back again.
From the doorway he said, “Mother? I’ve brought you some supper.”
“Thank you, m’love.”
He brought her plate and set it on the bedside table. He sat gently on the edge of the mattress, beside the shape she made.
“Should I cut it up?” he asked. “Should I feed it to you?”
“You’re so good. You’re a good boy. Look what they done to you.”
“It’s just the dust, Mother. It’ll wash off.”
“No, m’love, I don’t think it will.”
He cut off a bit of potato with the fork, held it close to her mouth. “Eat, now,” he said.
She made no response. A silence passed. Lucas found, to his surprise, that he was embarrassed by it. He put the fork down and said, “Should we hear some music, then?”
“If ye like.”
He took the music box from the bedside table, wound the little crank. He sang softly along.
Oh! could we from death but recover
These hearts they bounded before
In the face of high heav’n to fight over
That combat for freedom once more.
“Don’t be angry,” his mother said.
“I’m not angry. Have you slept today?”
She said, “How can I sleep, with your brother making such noise?”
“What noise does he make?” Lucas asked.
“His singing. Should someone tell him his voice ain’t as much like an angel’s as he seems to think?”
“Has Simon been singing to you?”
“Aye, but I canna understand the words.”
“Eat a little, all right? You must eat.”
“Has he learned some other language, do ye think?”
“You were dreaming, Mother.”
He took up the fork again, pressed the bit of potato against her lips. She turned her mouth away.
“He’s been like that since he was a babe. Always crying or singing just when you think you’ve earned a bit of rest.”
“Please, Mother.”
She opened her mouth, and he slipped the fork in as gently as he could. She spoke through the mouthful of potato. She said, “I’m sorry.”
“Chew. Chew and swallow.”
“If I understood what he wanted of me, I might be able to give it.”
Soon he could tell from her breathing that she slept again. He listened nervously for the sound of Simon’s voice, but the room remained silent. He wondered, Would his mother choke on the bit of potato? Gathering his nerve (it seemed so wrong, but what else could he do?), he slipped his fingers into her mouth. It was warm and wet. He found the bit of potato, the mush of it, on her tongue. He took it out. He put it in his own mouth. He ate the rest of her supper, ravenously, then went back into the parlor and ate his own. His father had not moved from the window. Lucas ate his father’s portion as well, and went to bed.
And now it seems to me the beautiful uncut hair of graves.
Tenderly will I use you curling grass,
It may be you transpire from the breasts of young men,
It may be if I had known them I would have loved them,
It may be you are from old people, or from offspring taken soon out of their mothers’ laps,
And here you are the mothers’ laps.
There was nothing for breakfast, though his father sat at table, waiting. Lucas said, “Father, will you get food for Mother and yourself while I’m at work?”
His father nodded. Lucas took the last ten pennies from the tin in the cupboard. He saved three for himself, for his lunch, and put the other seven on the table for his father. He thought his father could go out and buy something to eat. He thought his father could do that.
He would find out today when he was to be paid. He was sure Jack had meant to tell him but had been too taken up with managing the works. He resolved as well to ask Jack about the nature of what the machines were making, what the housings housed. He wondered if he would find the courage to ask so many questions all at once.
The workday passed. Align, clamp, pull, pull again, inspect. In the afternoon Lucas began to discern a faint sound as the teeth of the machine bit down, a lesser noise within the machine’s greater one. He wondered if it was a new sound or simply an aspect of the machine’s usual noise, inaudible to him until he’d grown accustomed to the machine’s complexities of being. He listened more carefully. Yes, there it was—amid the crunching of the metal teeth into the softer metal of the plate, all but lost in the slalom of the rollers, the swish of the belt—there was another sound, barely more than a whisper. Lucas leaned in close. The whisper seemed to emanate from deep within, from the dark place under the turning wheel, just past the point at which teeth embedded themselves in iron.
He leaned in closer still. He could hear it but not quite hear it. From behind him, Tom said, “Somethin’ wrong with yer machine, there?”
Lucas righted himself. He hadn’t thought Tom noticed him at all. It was surprising to know he was so visible.
“No, sir,” he said. Quickly, with a show of diligence, he loaded another plate.
He didn’t see Jack until day’s end, when Jack came to him, said, “All right, then,” spoke to Dan, and went into the chamber of the vaults. Lucas passed through a moment of dreamlike confusion—he thought he had reentered the previous day, had only imagined it was Thursday and not Wednesday. In his bafflement he forgot to ask Jack when he would be paid. He resolved to ask tomorrow.
He left the works and made his way home. On Rivington he passed a madman who screamed about a rain (or was it a reign?) of fire. He passed a bone that lay in the gutter, knobbed at either end, ivory-colored, offering itself like something precious.
He wanted to go to Catherine again but forced himself home instead. When he let himself into the apartment, he found his mother standing in the middle of the parlor, on the carpet she had paid too much for. It seemed for a moment—only a moment—that she was herself again, that she had made supper and put the kettle on.
She stood transfixed in her nightgown. Her hair flowed to her shoulders; wisps of it stood around her head in wiry confusion. He had never seen her so, in the parlor with her hair undone. He remained dumbly at the entrance, uncertain of what to do or say. He saw that his father stood at the window with his breathing machine, looking not out at the street but into the room. He saw that his father was frightened and confused.
He said, “Mother?”
She stared at him. Her eyes were not her own.
“It’s Lucas,” he said. “It’s only Lucas.”
Her voice, when she spoke, was low. She might have feared being overheard. She said, “He mustn’t sing to me no more.”
Lucas glanced helplessly at his father, who remained standing at the window, looking into the room, watching intently the empty air before his eyes.
His mother hesitated, searching Lucas’s face. She seemed to be struggling to remember him. Then, abruptly, as if pushed from behind, she fell forward. Lucas caught her in his arms and held her as best he could, awkwardly, with one hand under her left arm and the other on her right shoulder. He could feel the weight of her breasts. They were like old plums loosely held in sacks.
“It’s all right,” he said to her. “Don’t worry, it’s all right.”
He got a better purchase on her limp form. He worked his right arm around her waist.
She said, “I know what language you sing in now.”
“Come back to bed. Come along, now.”
“It isn’t right. It isn’t fair.”
“Hush. Hush.”
“We done what we could. We didn’t know what’d happen.”
“Come, now.”
Lucas snaked his arm farther around her, supporting her under her opposite armpit. At his direction, she walked unsteadily with him into the bedroom. He set her down on the bed. He pulled her legs up, arranged her as best he could, with her head on the pillow. He drew the counterpane over her.
“You’ll feel better if you sleep,” he said.
“I can’t sleep, I never will. Not with that voice in my ears.”
“Lie quietly, then. Nothing will happen.”
“Something will. Something does.”
He stroked her hot, dry forehead. It was as impossible to tell time in the bedroom as it was at the works. When she was quiet, when she slept or did not sleep but was quiet and breathing steadily, he went out of the room.
His father hadn’t moved. Lucas went to the window and stood beside him. His father continued staring at the empty air. Lucas saw that the seven pennies still lay on the tabletop, untouched.
He said, “Father, are you hungry?”
His father nodded, breathed, and nodded again.
Lucas stood with his father at the window. The ashman ambled by, dragging his bin. Mr. Cain shouted, “No place, everyplace, where’s the string of pearls?”
“I’ll get you something,” Lucas said.
He took the pennies, went out, and found a man selling a cabbage for three cents, and a woman selling a hen’s egg that, after some argument, she let him have for four. It seemed it might be propitious that his mother had asked after chickens and he had gone out and found an egg.
He cooked the egg and boiled the cabbage, and set a plate before his father. He was seized by an urge to take his father’s head in his hands and knock it sharply against the table’s edge, as Dan did with his machine at the works, knocking it when it threatened to seize up, ringing his wrench against its side. Lucas imagined that if he tapped his father’s head against the wood with precisely the correct force he might jar him back to himself. It would be not violence but kindness. It would be a cure. He laid one hand on his father’s smooth head but only caressed it. His father made noises when he ate, ordinary slurpings combined with low moans, as if feeding were painful to him. He lifted a spoonful of cabbage to his mouth. A pallid green string dangled from the spoon. He slurped, moaned, and swallowed. He took a breath, then ate again. Lucas thought, Four across, six down.
This grass is very dark to be from the white heads of old mothers,
Darker than the colorless beards of old men,
Dark to come from under the faint red roofs of mouths.
O I perceive after all so many uttering tongues,
And I perceive they do not come from the roofs of mouths for nothing.
Lucas read his passage. He put out the lamp but could not sleep. He lay awake in the room. There were the walls. There was the ceiling, with its black triangles of missing plaster and its stain in the shape of a chrysanthemum. There were the pegs on which the clothes hung, his and Simon’s.
He rose and went to the window. Emily’s light was on. Emily was lazy and cross, Catherine said so. Her stitches had sometimes to be resewn, but she remained sullen, unrepentant.
And still, Simon had gone to her. Only Lucas knew. Once, a month or more ago, he had looked out the window and seen Simon there, with Emily, who’d left her curtains open. It had seemed impossible at first. Simon had said he was going out for his pint. He was promised to Catherine. How could he be in Emily’s room? For a moment Lucas had thought that some other Simon, his living ghost, had gone there to haunt Emily, because she was lazy and cross, because her stitches were sloppy. He’d watched as Emily stood slightly apart from that other Simon and removed her bodice. He’d watched her breasts tumble out, huge and lax, with aureoles the color of lilacs going dark with age. He’d seen Simon reach for her.
Emily had gone to the window then, to draw the curtains, and seen Lucas watching her. They’d regarded each other across the empty air. She had nodded to him. She had smiled lewdly. Then she’d closed the curtains.
Lucas had wished Simon dead that night. No, not dead. Brought low. Brought to justice. He’d imagined consoling Catherine. He hadn’t asked for what happened to Simon. He hadn’t meant to ask for that.
He stood now at the window. Behind her curtains Emily was still alive, still fat and lewd, still eating Turkish delight from the tin. Lucas wondered why he’d wished harm to Simon and not to Emily, who was more at fault, who had surely lured Simon with some trick. Lucas struggled now to wish her well, or at any rate to wish her no ill fortune. He stood for a while at the window, wishing her a long and uneventful life.
In the morning, there was nothing to give his father for breakfast. His father sat at table, waiting. Lucas didn’t speak to him about food. He kissed his father’s forehead and went into the bedroom to see how his mother had passed the night.
He found her sitting up in bed, holding the music box on her lap.
“Good morning, Mother,” Lucas said.
“Oh, Simon,” she said. “We’re sorry.”
“It’s Lucas, Mother. Only Lucas.”
“I was speakin’ to your brother, dear. In the box.”
For a moment Lucas thought she meant the box that was in the earth across the river, until she looked wistfully down at her lap. She meant the music box.
He said, “Simon isn’t there, Mother.”
She lifted the box in both hands and held it out to him. “You listen,” she said. “Listen to what he says.”
“You haven’t wound it.”
“Listen,” she said again.
Lucas turned the crank. The small music started up from within the box. It was “Oh, Breathe Not His Name.”
“There he is,” Mother said. “Do you hear him now?”
“It’s only the music, Mother.”
“Oh, sweet child, ye don’t know, do ye?”
Lucas was all but overcome by a weariness that struck him like fever. He wanted only to sleep. The music box, playing its little tune, felt impossibly heavy. He thought he would sink to the floor and lie there, curled up like a dog, so fast asleep that no one and nothing could wake him.
He was responsible for the music box, because he had so wanted the horse on wheels. He’d lost himself, contemplating it. The horse was white. Where must it be now? It was long gone from Niedermeyer’s window. It looked steadily forward with round black eyes. Its face bore an expression of stately gravity. Its wheels were red. He’d gazed at it every day, until one afternoon, passing Niedermeyer’s with his mother, he gave over to his desire for the horse as he gave himself over to the book, and wept like a lover. His mother had put her arm tenderly over his shoulders; she’d held him close. They’d stood there together as they might on a train platform, watching a locomotive bear its travelers away. Lucas’s mother had stood patiently with him, holding him as he wept for the horse. The next day she’d gone out and bought the music box, an extravagance his father said would be the ruin of them. His mother had laughed bitterly, told him he was miserly and fearful, insisted that they needed music, they deserved a bit of cheer every now and then, and a music box would not spell the end of the world no matter what it cost. Later, Father turned to leather, and the machine took Simon, and Mother went into her room.
Lucas said, “It’s only music, Mother.”
“I know what he’s saying now. I know the language he speaks.”
“You should go back to sleep,” Lucas told her. “I’m going to put the music box in the parlor for a while.”
“He’s all alone in a strange land.”
“I must go. I can’t be late for work.”
“We brung him here from Dingle. It’s only right we should go to him where he is now.”
“Goodbye, Mother. I’m off.”
“Farewell.”
“Farewell.”
He left the bedroom and put the music box on the parlor table, where his father still sat, awaiting breakfast. “Goodbye, Father,” he said.
His father nodded. He had acquired an infinite patience. He would come to table at the appointed hours, eat if food was offered him, not eat if food was not.
At the works, Lucas had to struggle to pay proper attention. His mind wanted to wander. He aligned a plate, pulled the lever, and then was at the back of the machine, inspecting the impressions, with no memory of having gotten there. It was dangerous, a dangerous condition to bring to the machine, and yet he could not seem to do otherwise. Trying to think only of his work—align, clamp, pull, pull again, inspect—was like trying to remain awake when sleep was overwhelming. Inattention took him like dreams.
To steady himself he set his mind to the whisper in the machine. He listened carefully. It might have been the squeak of an unoiled bearing, but it sounded more like a voice, a tiny voice, though its words were indistinguishable. It had the rhythm of a voice, the rise and fall and rise again suggesting intention rather than accident, the tone implying a certain urgency more human than mechanical, as if the sound were being made by some entity struggling to be heard. Lucas knew well enough what it was to speak a language no one understood.
He fed it another plate and another and another.
The nature of the machine’s song didn’t disclose itself until afternoon. The song wasn’t sung in language, not in a language Lucas recognized, but gradually, over time, the song began making itself clear, even though its words remained obscure.
It was Simon’s voice.
Could it be? Lucas listened more carefully. Simon’s voice had been deep and raucous. He had sung not well but with bravado, with the rampant soaring tunelessness of someone who cared less about sounding beautiful than about creating a sound big enough to reach the sky. This seemed, in fact, to be Simon’s voice, rendered mechanical. It had that reckless, unapologetic atonality.
The song was familiar. Lucas had heard it elsewhere, at a time and place that hovered on the outer edge of memory. It was a song of melancholy and yearning, a sad song, full of loneliness and a thread of hope. It was one of the old ballads. Simon had known hundreds of them.
Simon was imprisoned in the machine. It made sudden, dreadful sense. He was not in heaven or in the pillow; he was not in the grass or in the locket. His ghost had snagged on the machine’s inner workings; the machine held it as a dog might hold a man’s coat in its jaws after the man himself had escaped. Simon’s flesh had been stamped and expelled, but his invisible part remained, trapped among the gears and teeth.
Lucas stood dumb before the singing wheel. Then, because he must not stop working, he loaded another plate. He aligned, clamped, pulled, pulled again, and inspected. In his mind he sang a duet with Simon, matched him note for note, as the hours passed.
At day’s end, Jack came to say, “All right, then.” Lucas desperately wanted to ask him if he knew about the dead in the machines, but he couldn’t seem to manage a question as large as that, not right away. He began by asking instead, “Please, sir, when do we get paid?” It seemed better to say “we” than “I.”
Jack said, “You get paid today. Go to accounting after you’ve shut down.”
Lucas could scarcely believe it. It seemed he had produced his pay by asking for it; that if he had failed to ask he’d have worked on and on for nothing, and no one would have remembered. He said, “Thank you, sir,” but Jack had already left him, to say “All right, then” to Dan. Lucas hadn’t had time to ask anything more. Still, he was glad to know there’d be money tonight. Tomorrow he would ask Jack the other, more difficult question.
Lucas shut down his machine. He said good-night to Simon and went with the others to receive his pay from the men in the cages. With money in his pocket, he set out for home.
When he arrived, all was as ever. His father sat in his chair, his mother dreamed or did not dream behind the closed door. Lucas said to his father, “I have money. I can buy us a proper supper. What do you think you’d like?”
“Ask your mother,” he said.
That was an answer from former times, when his mother was herself. Lucas said, “I’ll go see what I can get, then.”
His father nodded agreeably. Lucas leaned over to kiss him.
It was then that he heard it. The same song, steady, pining, the little song of love and yearning.
It came from his father’s breathing machine.
Lucas put his ear closer to the mouth of the tube. It was there, softer than soft, inaudible to anyone who didn’t seek it. It was the same song, sung in the same way, but by a voice gentler and breathier, more like a woman’s. It came, he thought, from the little bladder at the machine’s base, rose up through the tube, and issued from the opening, the slender oval of horn, where his father put his mouth.
It was the song Lucas had heard at the works. It was lower and more sibilant, it was more difficult to detect, but it was that song, sung in that voice.
And so he knew: Simon was not caught in the machine at the works; he had passed over into a world of machinery. Machines were his portals, the windows he whispered through. He sang to the living through the mouths of machines. Every time his father put his lips to the breathing machine, it filled him with Simon’s song.
Lucas understood now that Mother was not dreaming, not deranged; she heard more clearly than anyone. Simon wanted his people with him. He was alone in a strange land. Hadn’t the Simon-machine taken his sleeve when he was distracted? Hadn’t it tried to pull him from this world into the other?
The dead returned in machinery. They sang seductively to the living as mermaids sang to sailors from the bottom of the sea.
He thought of Catherine.
She would be the main prize. She was Simon’s bride-to-be; he’d want to marry her in his new world if he could no longer do so in the old. He was singing to her, searching for her, hoping she might go to him just as everyone had left Ireland to come to New York.
He ran from the apartment, raced down the stairs. He had to warn her. He had to tell her the nature of the threat.
When he reached the steps of Catherine’s building he stopped. His heart fluttered and raged. He needed to knock at the door, to beg admittance from the tiny woman and see Catherine. But he knew—he knew—that what he’d come to tell her she would not immediately believe. He understood the strangeness of his news, and he understood that he of all people was suspect, he who was known to be frail and odd, who suffered fits in which he could speak only as the book.
He hesitated. He couldn’t bear, even now, the prospect of going to Catherine, telling her what he knew, and finding her merely remote and kind. If she treated him as a sad, addled boy, if she gave him more food to take to his family, he would fall into a shame so deep he might never return from it.
He stood on the stoop in an agony of unresolve. It came to him that he might bring her something. He need not arrive at her door desperate and penurious. He could come to her with an offering. He could say, I have a present for you. He could give her something rare and wonderful. And then, as she exclaimed over the gift, he could broach his true purpose.
He couldn’t take her the music box, not when it had proved itself a window into the world of the dead. He couldn’t give her the book, either. It wasn’t his to give. Beyond the book and the music box, everything he had, everything his family had, was worn and plain.
He had money, though. He could buy her something.
But all the shops were closed. He went along Fifth Street, past the darkened windows that offered nothing to give as a present even when the shops were open. Behind these windows were meat and bread, dry goods, a cobbler’s stall. Passing the shops, Lucas was aware of their slumbering contents, their beef and boots. He looked through the glass past his own dimly reflected face at the red-and-white haunches hanging against the tiles, at the shelves of silent shoes, at the bottles upon which a mustached man in spectacles was expressing his gratitude for the tonic the bottles held, the same man over and over again, expressing the same pleasure.
Lucas went to Broadway. Something there might be open still.
Broadway might have been a toy for a giant child. It was like a gift to lay before a sultan, a turbaned invader who had refused all other offerings, who had been indifferent to a forest full of mechanical nightingales, who had yawned over golden slippers that danced on their own.
But the shops on Broadway were closed, too. At this hour it was only cafés and taverns and the lobbies of the hotels. He went down Broadway as far as Prince Street, and saw a boy standing at the corner, offering something to those who passed. The boy was ragged, older than Lucas. He wore breeches half again too large for him, cinched with a rope. A limp felt hat, the color of a rat’s pelt, was pulled down over his head. From it a single lock of lank orange hair protruded like a secret he couldn’t keep.
He held in his hand a small white bowl. He displayed it to passersby, who ignored him. Was it an alms bowl? No, it seemed that he was offering it for sale.
Lucas stopped near the ragged boy, who had of course stolen the bowl and was trying to sell it, as people did. Lucas knew how it must be for him. His bowl was a prize, and it was a burden. Something more common would be easier to sell; a turnip, in its way, would be more valuable. The people of the boy’s neighborhood wouldn’t want a thing like the bowl, and those who walked on Broadway might want it but wouldn’t buy it from a boy like this. He extended the bowl to passersby in his outstretched hands with weary hopefulness, like a priest offering the holy cup. Lucas thought the boy had been here a long time, had begun by shouting out a price and had declined, as the hours passed, to this condition of mute resignation.
He approached the boy, looked more closely at the bowl. The boy drew away from Lucas, cradled his prize to his breast. Lucas could see it well enough, though. It was a white china bowl, undamaged. It bore along its rim a band of pale blue figures.
Lucas said, “How much?”
The boy regarded him nervously. He would naturally suspect a trick.
To allay him Lucas said, “I want it for my sister. How much?”
The boy’s eyes were as shrewd and avid as a cat’s. He said, “A dollar.”
A dollar and three pennies was what Lucas had in his pocket. It seemed for a moment that the boy somehow knew that, that he was a sprite who haunted Broadway with his treasure and asked in payment all that everyone had.
Lucas said, “That’s too much.”
The boy compressed his lips. The bowl was worth more than a dollar, and he might get a dollar if he stayed longer on the street, but he was tired, he was hungry, he wanted to go home. Lucas felt a pang of sympathy for the boy, who was wily and cunning, a thief, but who wanted, as everyone did, to be finished with his work, to be restored to himself, to rest.
The boy said, “You can have it for seventy-five cents.”
“That’s still too much.”
The boy settled his mouth. Lucas knew: he would go no further. He was a thief, but he was someone; he had a private realm inside him, and he would not let himself be any poorer than this.
He said, “That’s the last price. Take it or leave it.”
Lucas was filled with sympathy and rage. He knew how much seventy-five cents would mean to the boy. But the bowl had cost him nothing. He could give it to Lucas, who needed it, and in so doing be no worse off than he’d been before. Lucas felt, briefly, the turning of the inscrutable world, in which a bowl that had cost nothing, a bowl he might have stolen himself (though he never stole; he was too nervous for that), would cost him most of what he’d earned by a week’s labor.
He glanced up and down the street, as if he hoped another bowl, or something better, might lie ahead or behind. There was nothing. He might walk all night to find only someone selling a few leeks or a half bottle of ale.
He said, “All right, then.”
He took the money from his pocket and counted out seventy-five cents. He and the boy paused over who would relinquish first and found a way to exchange bowl for coins so that neither was empty-handed. Lucas felt the money taken from him by the boy’s calloused fingers. He felt the bowl settle into his palm.
The boy ran off, fearful that Lucas might change his mind. In a panic, Lucas examined the bowl. Was it false? Had it turned to wood? No, it was in fact a bit of finery. It seemed, in his hands, to emit a faint white light. The figures inscribed along its rim were mysterious. They appeared to be tiny blue suns, icy disks from which rays emanated, finer than hairs.
The bowl was good, then. But he had only twenty-eight cents left, which was not enough for a week’s food for three. Still, he had a gift to take to Catherine. He would think about food and money later.
He returned to Fifth Street and knocked at the door until the tiny woman opened it. She wondered that he was back again but admitted him more easily, because he was becoming visible to her. She warned him again that there was to be no mischief. He agreed and mounted the stairs to Catherine’s apartment.
Catherine answered the door. She seemed neither pleased nor sorry to see him. He wondered if he’d changed again, if he was unrecognizable to her again, though he wore the same clothes and the same dirt he’d worn yesterday.
He said, before he could help himself, “Alone far in the wilds and mountains I hunt.”
She said, “Hello, my dear. How are you?” Tonight she wore her new face, the wearied one.
Lucas heard a sound from within the apartment, a strange sort of wailing laughter that sounded like Alma’s. It was followed by a man’s voice, deep and urgent, saying something undecipherable.
Catherine stepped out into the hallway, closed the door behind her. “Lucas,” she said, “it’s not a good time to call, just now.”
“But I’ve brought you something,” he answered.
He produced the bowl. He extended it toward her on outstretched palms.
She looked at it uncertainly, as if she could not quite discern its nature. Lucas found he couldn’t speak, not as himself or as the book. He was the bowl and his hands. He was only that.
Presently she said, “Oh, Lucas.”
Still he couldn’t speak. He was a bowl and a pair of hands offering a bowl.
“You mustn’t,” she said.
He answered, “Please.” It was what he had to say.
“How have you come by this?”
“I bought it. For you. I was paid today.”
It was not as he’d expected. He had imagined her glad and grateful.
She bent toward him. She said, “It’s sweet of you. But you must return it.”
“I can’t,” he said.
“Did you pay for it? Truly?”
She suspected he’d stolen it, then. He could think of nothing to tell her but the truth.
“I bought it from a man on Broadway,” he said. “He was selling them from a tray.” It seemed better to have bought it from a man with a tray. It seemed truth enough.
“My dear. You can’t afford this.”
He trembled, filled with rage and confusion and blind, desperate hope. Somehow he’d made himself poorer by bringing her a gift.
“Please,” he said again.
“You’re the sweetest boy in the world. You truly are. And tomorrow you must return it to the man on Broadway and get your money back.”
“I can’t,” he said.
“Would you like me to go with you?”
“What is a man anyhow? What am I? And what are you?”
“Please, Lucas. I’m touched, I truly am. But I can’t accept it.”
“The man is gone.”
“He’ll return tomorrow.”
“No. This was his last bowl. He said he was going away.”
“Oh, poor boy.”
How could he tell her, what could he say, here in the dark of the hallway (where the goat’s skull still grinned), holding out to her the only treasure he could find, a treasure she didn’t want?
He said, “The spinning-girl retreats and advances to the hum of the big wheel.”
“Hush. Hush, now. You’ll disturb the neighbors.”
He hadn’t meant to speak so loudly. He didn’t mean to speak again, more loudly still.
“The bride unrumples her white dress, the minute-hand of the clock moves slowly.”
“Stop. Please. Come inside, you mustn’t rant like this in the hallway.”
“The prostitute draggles her shawl, her bonnet bobs on her tipsy and pimpled neck. The nine months’ gone is in the parturition chamber, her faintness and pains are advancing.”
Catherine paused. She looked at him with a new recognition.
“What did you say?”
He didn’t know. She had never before seemed to hear him when he spoke as the book.
“Lucas, please repeat what you just said.”
“I’ve forgotten.”
“You spoke of a spinning-girl. You spoke of a bride, and … a prostitute. And a woman about to give birth.”
“It was the book.”
“But why did you say it?”
“The words come through me. I never know.”
She leaned closer, gazing into his face as if words were written there, faint but discernible, difficult to read.
She said, “You really don’t know, do you? Oh, Lucas. I fear for you.”
“No. Please. You mustn’t fear for me. You must fear for yourself.”
“You have some gift,” she said softly. “You have some terrible gift, do you know that?”
He thought for a moment that she meant the bowl. It was in fact a terrible gift. It should have cost nothing, but he’d paid for it with money meant for food. And what use did Catherine have for a bowl like this? Lucas stood with his blood racketing and his hands outstretched. He was the boy who had bought the bowl, and he was the boy who had sold it. Would that boy, the other, be now returning to his own family with food? Lucas could be only this, the one who had bought it. He could only stand before Catherine with a terrible gift in his hands.
Gently (he thought he had never known such gentleness) she took the bowl from him. She held it in her own hand.
“What are we to do with you?” she said. “How will your mother and father live?”
He said, “This hour I tell you things in confidence, things I might not tell everybody, but I will tell you.”
“Hush, hush.”
“The dead sing to us through machinery. They are with us still.”
“Stop. Speak as yourself.”
“Simon wants to marry you in the land of the dead. He wants you there with him.”
Sadly, she shook her head. “Listen to me,” she said. “It’s wonderful of you to want to buy me a gift like this. You are a sweet, generous boy. I’m going to keep the bowl safe tonight, and tomorrow I am going to sell it and give you the money. Please, don’t be offended.”
“You must not trust your sewing machine. You must not listen if it sings to you.”
“Shh. If we make such a racket every night, we’ll be thrown out.”
“Do you take it I would astonish? Does the daylight astonish? Or the early redstart twittering through the woods?”
“Go home now. Come to me tomorrow, after work.”
“I cannot leave you. I will not.”
She put her hand on his head. “I’ll see you tomorrow. Be careful until then.”
“It’s you who must be careful.”
She seemed not to hear or understand. With a rueful smile she opened the door and went back inside.
Lucas remained for a while before the door, like a dog waiting to be let in. Then, because he could not bear being like a dog, he went away. He passed the tiny woman, who said, “No mischief, then?” He told her there had been no mischief. But there had been mischief, hadn’t there? There was the bowl and what the bowl had cost. There were other crimes.
He made his way home, because he had money now (he had some left), and his mother and father must eat. He bought a sausage from the butcher and a potato from an old woman on the street.
The apartment was as always. His mother slept behind her door. His father sat at table, because it was time to do so. He put his lips to the machine, breathed Simon’s ghost song into his lungs.
“Hello,” Lucas said. His voice was strange in the quiet room, like a bean rattling in a jar.
“Hello,” his father said. Had his voice changed slightly, from his chest being filled with Simon? It might have. Lucas could not be sure. Was his father turning into a machine, with Simon inside him?
Lucas cooked the sausage and the potato. He gave some to his father, took some in to his mother, who slept fitfully but slept. He decided it was best not to disturb her. He left the food on the bedside table, for when she awoke and wanted it.
After his father had finished, Lucas said, “Father, it’s time for bed.”
His father nodded, breathed, nodded again. He rose. He took the machine with him.
Lucas left his father in the doorway to the bedroom. His mother murmured within. His father said, “She cannot stop dreaming.”
“She sleeps. It’s what’s best for her.”
“She doesn’t sleep. She only dreams.”
“Hush. Go to sleep now. Good night, Father.”
His father went into the dark. The machine’s little feet scraped on the floorboards after him.
I wish I could translate the hints about the dead young men and women,
And the hints about old men and mothers, and the offspring taken soon out of their laps.
What do you think has become of the young and old men?
And what do you think has become of the women and children?
Lucas read his passage. He put out the light and went to sleep.
He dreamed he was in a room, an enormous room and clangorous. It was the works but not the works. It was full of silvery dusk like the works but empty of all save the noise, a deafening sound, not like what the machines produced, not quite that sound, though it resembled it. Lucas understood that the machines were gone but would return soon, as cattle return to a barn. He was to wait here. He was to see them home. He looked up—something told him to look up—and saw that the ceiling was covered in stars. There were the Great Horse, the Hunter, the Pleiades. He knew then that the stars were machinery, too. There was nowhere to go that was not the world, that was not the room. The stars moved mechanically, and something was descending, a dark shape from high in the night sky …
He turned and looked into a face. Its eyes were black pools. Its skin was stretched taut over its skull. It said, “My boy, my boy.”
His mother’s face was pressed to his. He was dreaming of his mother. He struggled to speak, but couldn’t speak.
The face said again, “My poor boy, what they done to ye.”
He was awake. His mother crouched beside his bed, with her face to his face. He felt her breath on his lips.
“I’m all right, Mother,” he said. “Nothing’s been done to me.”
She held the music box, cradled close. She said, “Poor child.”
“You’re dreaming,” Lucas told her.
“My poor, poor boys. One and then another and another.”
“Let me take you back to bed.”
“It’s greed that done it. Greed and weakness.”
“Come. Come back to bed.”
He rose and took her arm. She yielded, or did not resist. He led her out of the bedroom and through the parlor, where the faces watched. Her feet shuffled on the floor. He took her into the other bedroom. His father wheezed and gagged in his sleep.
Lucas helped his mother into bed, pulled the blanket up. Her hair was spread over the pillow. In the fan of dark hair her face was impossibly small, no bigger than his fist.
She said, “I should be dead with him.”
Lucas thought—he could not help thinking—of the bowl he’d bought. There were nineteen cents now, to keep them until Friday next. There wouldn’t be food for the week.
He said, “You’re safe. I’m here.”
“Oh, safe. If anyone were safe.”
“You must sleep now.”
“Do ye think sleeping is safe?”
“Shh. Just be quiet.”
He sat with her. He couldn’t tell if it was better to stroke her hand or refrain from stroking her hand. He rocked slightly, to calm himself. There was nothing so frightful as this. There was nothing, had been nothing, as terrible as sitting on his parents’ mattress, wondering if he should or should not touch his mother’s hand.
He knew he had to take the music box away. But what of Simon’s other point of ingress, their father’s breathing machine? Father needed the machine. Or did he?
Lucas didn’t know if the machine was crucial to his father or merely helpful. He hadn’t been told. It was possible, it was not impossible, that the breathing apparatus, which had been given as a gift, was in fact a bane. Could it be sucking his father’s life away, when it pretended to help him? Did any machine seem to want the good of its people?
Lucas stood, went as quietly as he could to his father’s side of the bed, and took up the machine. Its iron pole was cool to his touch. It was full of its song, as steady and unmistakable as the mice inside the walls. Gingerly, as he would take up a mouse by its tail, he carried the machine through the parlor and put it in the hallway. Was that far enough away? He hoped it was. In the twilight of the hall the machine was as indistinct as the goat’s skull. Its bladder, the size and shape of a turnip, was gray but subtly luminous. Its tube and mouthpiece dangled.
He would leave it there overnight. He would bring it back in the morning, when he’d seen how his father fared without.
He went into the parlor for the music box. He took it and put it in the hallway, beside his father’s machine, then returned to the parlor and locked the door. He checked to make sure it was fast.
When sleep found him again, it brought its dreams, though he recalled upon awakening only that they had involved children and a needle and a woman who stood far away, calling out across a river.
In the morning his father had not yet risen. Lucas went to his parents’ bedroom and cautiously opened the door. They were quieter than usual. His mother murmured over her dreams, but his father, who was ordinarily given to deep snorts and coughings, was silent.
He must need the machine. Lucas must hurry and bring it back.
When he went into the hallway to retrieve it, it was gone. Breathing machine and music box had vanished entirely.
He stood for a moment, confused. Had he dreamed of putting them there? He searched up and down the hall, wondering if they were only farther away. Perhaps he had gotten up during the night and moved them, somnambulistically. No. They were nowhere. He thought briefly that the mechanisms were more alive than he’d imagined, that they walked. Would they have found their way back into his parents’ bedroom? Would the music box be sitting at his mother’s side, singing a song she couldn’t bear to hear?
He summoned himself. He was agitated, but he was not insane. Someone had taken the machine and the music box, as people did. Nothing of any value could be left unattended. He had thought they’d be all right for those nocturnal hours, but someone had carried them off. Someone would be trying to sell them, as the boy had sold the china bowl.
Lucas returned to the parlor. What could he say to his father that his father would understand? He could think of nothing, and so he said nothing. He left his father and mother in their bedroom together. He hoped that when he returned from work, they might be restored to themselves.
Here it was, then: his own machine. He stood before it in the enormous room. Dan and Will and Tom were at theirs, tending them as they ever did, with the steady dispassionate attention of farmers.
Lucas whispered, “You were unworthy, you must admit it. You were untrue. I’m sorry you’re dead, but you can’t have Catherine with you. You must stop singing to Mother about your sorrows.”
The machine sang on. Its song didn’t vary. Lucas still couldn’t decipher the words, but he knew they were all about love and longing. Simon wanted more than he should rightfully have. Why would he be different dead than he was alive?
Lucas loaded a plate and fed it in. The machine took the plate as it always did. It made the impressions, four across, six down. As Lucas carried the first of the day’s plates to Dan, he wondered if his machine spoke to the others at night, when the men were gone and the machines lived here alone. He could imagine it easily enough, the machines murmuring in the darkened rooms, singing the songs of their men, praising their men, dreaming of them, singing each to the others, He is mine, he is my only love, how I long for the day when he allows me to have him completely. Lucas thought he should warn Dan, he should warn Tom and Will. But how could he tell them?
Dan was bent over his machine. He said, “Good morning, Lucas,” without looking up.
“Good morning, sir.”
Lucas lingered after he had dropped the plate in Dan’s bin. Dan was the biggest man in cutting and stamping. He was massive and stooped. He carried his immense round shoulders like burdens; upon his shoulders, partly buried in them, his head looked out with drowned blue eyes. Lucas knew nothing of his life but could imagine it. He would have a wife and children. He would have a parlor with a bedroom on one side and a bedroom on the other.
Dan turned from his machine. He said, “Something wrong?”
“No, sir.”
Dan took a kerchief from his pocket, wiped the sweat from the gleaming red dome of his brow.
He was missing the first and second fingers of his right hand. Lucas hadn’t noticed it before.
Lucas said, “Please, sir. What happened to your fingers?”
Dan lowered the kerchief and looked at his hand as if he expected to see something surprising there.
“Lost ’em,” he said.
“How did you lose them?”
“Accident.”
“Was it here? At the works?”
Dan paused. He seemed to wonder whether or not to reveal a secret.
“Sawmill,” he said.
“You worked in a sawmill, before you came here?”
“That’s right.”
Dan wiped his brow again and returned to his work. Idling so, talking, wasn’t permitted. Lucas returned to his own machine and loaded another plate.
A different machine had eaten Dan’s fingers. That machine, one that split logs, contained a fragment of Dan’s ghost, though the rest of Dan lived on. Would this new machine know of that? Could it hear that other machine, singing from far away in a sawmill, happy to have had Dan’s fingers but lamenting the loss of the rest of him, wishing the new machine better luck?
Catherine must be sewing now. Lucas couldn’t think how a sewing machine might take her. It would be an arm with a needle, ratcheting. It might prick her, it could do that, but it couldn’t harm her truly.
There must be other machines at her work, though, machines that could maim. He struggled to picture it. He could imagine presses and rollers through which the garments must be passed. Did she go near those machines during her day? She might. He couldn’t know. She might be asked to take bodices and shirts to be sent through a larger apparatus. It would be big as a carriage, he thought; white, not black; it would have a mouth through which the freshly made shirts and dresses were fed, to be smoothed and folded. It would exhale torrents of steam.
Finally, the whistle blew. Lucas waited for Jack Walsh to pass and say, “All right, then.” He shut down his machine. He hurried away. He ran up Rivington, keeping to the street, dodging the carts and carriages.
A river of girls and women was already streaming out of the Mannahatta Company when he got there, and they showed no signs of having seen a calamity that day. He searched for Catherine among the crowd. He saw any number who might have been her. They were so alike, in their blue dresses. As more and more of them passed by, in twos and threes, talking low, stretching their spines and flexing their fingers, he finally made bold enough to ask one of them, and then another, if she had seen Catherine Fitzhugh. Neither of them knew who she was. There were hundreds of girls in the sewing room; Catherine would be known only to the few who worked near her. From a distance Lucas saw Emily Hoefstaedler walking among the many, plump and serene, laughing lewdly with another girl, but he didn’t speak to her. He would never speak to her about anything, certainly not about Catherine. He asked another girl and another. Several smiled and shrugged, several scowled, and one, a young dark-haired girl, said, “Won’t I do instead?” and was pulled away, laughing, by her friends.
And then he saw her. She was near the end, with an older woman who had drawn her thin gray hair severely back and walked with her neck craned forward, as if her face were more eager to go forth than her body was.
Lucas approached them. “Catherine,” he cried.
“Hello, Lucas,” she said. She looked at him with exquisite patience.
“Are you well?”
“Quite well. And you?”
How could he say what he was? He said, “Shall I pray? Shall I venerate and be ceremonious?”
“Lucas, this is my friend Kate.”
The older woman dipped her head.
“Kate, this is Lucas. He is Simon’s brother.”
Kate said, “I am sorry for your loss.”
“Thank you, ma’am.”
“Have you come to see me home?” Catherine asked.
“Yes. Please.” He struggled not to snatch at her hand.
“Kate, it seems I am escorted. I’ll see you tomorrow, then.”
The older woman dipped her head again. “Goodbye,” she said. Her face led her onward, and her body followed.
Catherine placed her hands upon her hips. “Lucas, my dear,” she said.
“You are well.”
“As you can see.”
“Will you let me walk with you?”
“I have to sell the bowl.”
“Where is it?”
“In my reticule.”
“Don’t sell the bowl. Keep it. Please.”
“Come with me, if you like.”
She walked on. He went beside her.
How could he tell her? How could he make her see?
He said, “Catherine, the machines are dangerous.”
“They can be. That’s why you must be careful.”
“Even if you are careful.”
“Well, being careful is the best we can do, isn’t it?”
“You mustn’t go to work anymore.”
“Where should I go, then, my darling?”
“You could sew at home, couldn’t you? You could take in piecework.”
“Do you know what that pays?”
He didn’t know what anything paid except his own work, and he had learned that only by being paid. He walked on beside her. They passed together through Washington Square. He didn’t come often to the square. It lay beyond the limits of his realm; it wasn’t meant for a boy like him. Washington Square, like Broadway, was part of the city within the city, cupping its green and dappled quietude, ringed by the remoter fires—a place where men and women strolled in dresses and greatcoats, where a lame beggar played on a flute; where the leaves of the trees cut shapes out of the sky and an old woman sold ices from a wooden cart; where a child waved a scarlet pennant that snapped and rippled in countertime to the flute player, who in his turn produced a little point of ginger-colored beard as answer to the pennant. Lucas tried not to be distracted by the beauty of the square. He tried to remain himself.
He asked Catherine, “Where are we going?”
“To someone I know of.”
He went with her through the square, to a shop on Eighth Street. It was a modest place, half below the street, called Gaya’s Emporium. Its window showed two hats floating on poles. One was pink satin, the other stiff black brocade. Under the hats were bracelets and earrings, arranged on a swatch of faded blue velvet, gleaming like brave little gestures of defeat.
Catherine said, “Wait here.”
“Can’t I come in with you?”
“No. It’s best if I go in alone.”
“Catherine?”
“Yes?”
“May I see the bowl again, first?”
“Of course you may.”
She opened her reticule and removed the bowl. It was bright in the evening light, almost unnaturally so. It might have been carved from pearl. Its line of strange symbols, its blue curls and circles, stood out boldly, like a language that insisted on its own cogency in a world that had lost the skill to decipher its message.
“You mustn’t sell it.” Lucas was briefly host to an urge to snatch it away from her, to hold it to his breast. It seemed for a moment that if the bowl was lost something else would be lost as well, something he and Catherine needed and would not be offered again.
She said, “Sell it is exactly what I must do. I won’t be long.”
She went inside. Lucas waited. What else could he do? He stood before the shop window, watching the hats and jewelry live their silent lives.
Presently, Catherine returned. She wearily mounted the stairs to the street. Lucas thought of his mother’s weariness. He wondered if she would improve, with the music box gone.
Catherine said, “I could get fifty cents. It’s all she would give me.”
She held out the coins to him. He wanted the money, he needed the money, but he couldn’t bring himself to take it. He stood dumb, with his hands at his sides.
Catherine said, “It can’t be what you paid for it. It’s the best I could do.”
He couldn’t move or speak.
“Don’t reproach me,” she said. “Please. Take the money.”
He stood helpless. His ears roared.
“Lucas, you begin to try my patience,” she said. “It was difficult in there. I don’t like being treated as a thief.”
So he had done that to her. He had forced her to demean herself. He imagined Gaya of the emporium. He thought she’d be skeletally thin, with skin the color of candle wax. He thought—he knew—she’d have taken the bowl and examined it greedily and disdainfully. She’d have named her price with the superior finality of those accustomed to dealing in stolen goods.
He said, “The spinning-girl retreats and advances to the hum of the big wheel.” He could not be certain how loudly he’d spoken.
Catherine faltered. She said, “You’ve never repeated yourself before.”
How could she know that? Had she been listening to him, all this time, when he spoke as the book? If so, she’d given no sign.
He couldn’t control himself. He said, “The bride unrumples her white dress, the minute-hand of the clock moves slowly.”
Catherine blinked. Her eyes were bright.
She asked, “What did Simon tell you?”
What had Simon told him? Nothing. Simon sang the old songs, teased Lucas for being small, went to Emily’s room in secret.
Lucas said, “The nine months’ gone is in the parturition chamber.”
Catherine dropped the money at Lucas’s feet. One of the coins rolled and stopped against the toe of his boot.
“Pick it up and take it home,” she said. “I have no more patience for you.”
He said, “The prostitute draggles her shawl, her bonnet bobs on her tipsy and pimpled neck.”
Catherine began to weep. It took her like a spasm. She stood one moment erect, with a single tear meandering down her cheek, and the next moment her face sagged, and the tears came coursing out. She put her face into her hands.
He couldn’t think what to do or say. He put his fingers gently on her shoulder. She shrugged him away.
“Leave me alone, Lucas,” she sobbed. “Please, just leave me alone.”
He couldn’t leave her weeping on Eighth Street, with people passing by. He said, “Come with me. You must sit down.”
To his surprise, she obeyed. She had lost herself to weeping. She had become someone who wept and walked with him as he led her back to Washington Square, where the child’s pennant snapped against the sky and the flute player hopped nimbly from foot to foot.
He found a bench and sat on it. She sat beside him. Timidly, he put his arm over her shaking shoulders. She didn’t seem to mind.
He said, “I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to upset you. I don’t know what I said.”
Her weeping diminished. She raised her head. Her face was red and haggard. He had never seen her so.
“Would you like to know something?” she said. “Would you?”
“Yes. Oh, yes.”
“I’m going to have a baby.”
Again he paused in confusion over something that was true but could not be true. She hadn’t married.
He said, “I see,” because it seemed what he ought to say.
“They won’t keep me at work. I’ll be too big to hide it in a month or so.”
“How could you get too big to go to work?”
“You don’t know anything, you’re a child. Why am I talking to your?”
She made as if to rise but sank down again on the bench. Lucas said, “I want you to talk to me. I’ll try to understand.”
She went away again, into her weeping. Lucas put his arm again across her shoulders, which shook violently. The people who passed looked at them and then looked politely away, to help deliver Lucas and Catherine from their own shamefulness. The people who passed were intricately made, with gold buckles and little clocks on chains. Lucas and Catherine were made of cruder stuff. If they lingered on the bench, a policeman would come and send them along.
At length Catherine was able to say, “I’ve spoken to no one of this. It isn’t fair, saying it to you.”
“It is fair,” he said. “You could never be anything but fair.”
She gathered herself. She wasn’t through crying, but her aspect changed. Something new took hold of her, a rage with grief caught up in it.
She said, “All right, then. I’m going to teach you something.”
“Please.”
Her voice when she spoke was like a wire, thin but strong.
She said, “I told your brother he must marry me. I don’t know if the child is his. It probably isn’t. But Simon was willing. Would you like to know something else?”
“Yes,” Lucas said.
“I suspect. He had his accident because he was unhappy. He may have been so distracted by the thought of our wedding that he allowed it to happen. Think of it. He’d been in the works for years. He knew better than to let his sleeve get caught.”
Lucas said, “Simon loved you.”
“Did he tell you that?”
“Yes,” Lucas said, though Simon had never said the words. How could he help loving her? Not everything needed to be said in words.
Catherine said, “I’m a whore, Lucas. I tried to force myself on your brother.”
“Simon loved you,” he said again. He couldn’t think of anything else.
Catherine said, “I’m going to have the baby. It’s what I can do for poor Simon.”
Lucas could not think of an answer. How could she do anything but have the baby?
She said at length, “I told him he’d taken advantage, I told him he must make it right. I told him he’d come to love me, in time. So there you are. I’m a whore and a liar and I’m going to give birth to your brother’s bastard. You mustn’t come to see me anymore. You mustn’t buy me things with the money you need for food.”
Her face took on a new form. It grew older; its flesh sagged. She became a statue of herself, an effigy. She was not who she’d been. She was going somewhere.
Lucas said, “I can help you.”
She stood with grave finality. She was formal now.
“No one can help me,” she said.
She walked resolutely eastward, toward home. Lucas went alongside her.
“You are in danger,” he said.
“I’m in the same danger as every woman who draggles her shawl, neither more nor less.”
“Don’t go to work anymore. Please.”
“Soon enough I won’t be going to work anymore. That will happen regardless.”
“No. Tomorrow. Don’t go tomorrow, you’re in danger.”
“I’ll need every penny I can get, won’t I?”
“The dead search for us through machinery. When we stand at a machine, we make ourselves known to the dead.”
“Your precious book.”
“It isn’t the book. It’s true.”
He confused himself. The book was true. What he was trying to tell her was differently true.
She walked on. Her new face, reddened and ravaged, cut through the air. She might have been the carved woman at the prow of a ship.
She said, “I can’t worry about you anymore. I’m sorry, but I can’t. I have too much else to think about.”
“You don’t need to worry about me. Let me worry about you. Let me help you. Let me care for you.”
She laughed bitterly. “What a good idea,” she said. “I’ll come live with you and your parents. We’ll live, all four of us, on what you make at the works. No, there will be five. That shouldn’t be a problem, should it?”
For a moment, Lucas could see her as she’d said she was: a whore and a liar, a woman of the street, hard and calculating, naming her price.
He said, “I’ll find a way.”
She stopped, so abruptly that Lucas went on several paces ahead. Foolish, he was a foolish thing.
She said, “Forget me. I’m lost.”
He said, “Undrape! you are not guilty to me, nor stale nor discarded.”
She emitted a small, muffled cry and continued walking. He stood watching the back of her blue dress, the pile of her copper-colored hair, as she passed out of the square.
Always, then, it—everything—made a more complete and sickening sense. Simon would want her and the child as well. He sought to marry her in the realm of the dead, to live there with her and his child.
She must be prevented from going to work tomorrow.
Lucas couldn’t think what to do, yet he must do so much. He must keep her from her machinery. He must find money for her.
He remembered the money she’d thrown at his feet. He hadn’t picked it up. He ran back to Eighth Street for it, but of course it was gone.
He walked east on Eighth Street. He thought perhaps he could find the money again, if not the coins Catherine had tossed at his feet then some other money, some equivalent sum that might be out there, sent by a heavenly agency that forgave and abetted foolish hearts. He thought that if he scoured the city, if he went high and low in it, he might happen onto some money that was not being watched, that belonged to someone but was unattended, dropped on the pavement or otherwise misplaced, as his own coins had been. He didn’t propose to steal, any more than whoever had found his money had stolen it from him. He hoped rather to take his place on a chain of losses and gains, an ongoing mystery of payments made and payments received, money given from hand to hand, to satisfy an ancient debt that had always existed and might be finally repaid in some unforeseeable future. He hoped the city might produce help through incomprehensible means, just as his stamping of iron plates produced housings.
He would search for whatever might be there.
He went along Eighth Street to Broadway. If there was money overlooked, if there were coins carelessly dropped, it was likeliest to happen there.
Broadway was filled with its lights and music, its departing shoppers and its glad men in hats, laughing, blowing smoke from the bellows of their chests. Lucas walked among them, looking attentively downward. He saw the tips of boots, the cuffs of trousers, the hems of skirts. He saw the little leavings that were trod upon: a cigar end, a curl of twine, a canary-colored pamphlet announcing “Land in Colorado.”
He’d gone along for several blocks, twice incurring the muttered indignations of citizens who had to step out of his way, when he came upon a pair of boots that seemed familiar, though he knew he had never seen them before. They were workingman’s boots, dun-colored, stoutly laced. They stopped before him.
He looked up and beheld Walt’s face.
Here was his gray-white cascade of beard, here his broad-brimmed hat and the kerchief knotted at his neck. He was utterly like his likeness. He smiled bemusedly at Lucas. His face was like brown paper that had been crushed and smoothed again. His eyes were bright as silver nails.
“Hello,” he said. “Lost something?”
Lucas had gone searching for money and found Walt. A vast possibility trembled in the air.
He answered, “Stout as a horse, affectionate, haughty, electrical, I and this mystery, here we stand.”
Walt expelled a peal of laughter. “What’s this?” he said. “You quote me to myself?”
His voice was clear and deep, penetrating; it was not loud, but it was everywhere. It might have been the voice of a rainstorm, if rain could speak.
Lucas struggled to answer as himself. What he said was, “The earth, that is sufficient, I do not want the constellations any nearer, I know they are very well where they are, I know they suffice for those who belong to them.”
“How extraordinary,” Walt said. “Who are you, then?”
Lucas was unable to tell him. He stood quivering and small at Walt’s feet. His heart thumped painfully against his ribs.
Walt squatted before Lucas. His knees cracked softly, like damp twigs.
“What’s your name?” he asked.
“Lucas.”
“Lucas. How do you come to know my verse so well?”
Lucas said, “I am the mate and companion of people, all just as immortal and fathomless as myself; they do not know how immortal, but I know.”
Walt laughed again. Lucas felt the laughter along his own frame, in his skeleton, as an electrified quake, as if Walt were not only laughing himself but summoning laughter up out of the earth, to rise through the pavement and enter Lucas by the soles of his feet.
“What a remarkable boy you are,” Walt said. “How remarkable to find you here.”
Lucas gathered himself. He said, “I wonder if I might ask a question, sir?”
“Of course you may. Ask away. I’ll answer if I’m able.”
“Sir, do the dead return in the grass?”
“They do, my boy. They are in the grass and the trees.”
“Only there?”
“No, not only there. They are all around us. They are in the air and the water. They are in the earth and sky. They are in our minds and hearts.”
“And in the machines?”
“Well, yes. They are in machinery, too. They are everywhere.”
Lucas had been right, then. If he’d harbored any doubts, here was the answer.
“Thank you, sir.”
“Tell me of yourself,” Walt said. “Where do you come from? Are you in school?”
Lucas couldn’t find a way to answer plainly. What could he tell Walt, how account for himself?
He said at length, “I’m searching for something, sir.”
“What are you searching for, lad?”
He could not say money. Money was vital, and yet now, standing before Walt’s face and beard, under the curve of his hat, it seemed so little. Saying “money” to Walt would be like standing in Catherine’s hallway, blazing with love, and receiving a lamb’s neck and a bit of potato. He would have to say what the money was for, why he needed it so, and that task, that long explanation, was more than he could manage.
He could say only, “Something important, sir.”
“Well, then. We are all searching for something important, I suppose. Can you tell me more exactly what it is you seek?”
“Something necessary.”
“Do you think I could be of any help?”
Lucas said, “You help me always.”
“I’m glad of that. Do you hope to find this precious thing on Broadway?”
“I’ve found you, sir.”
Walt drew up more laughter from the earth. Lucas felt it throughout his body. Walt said, “I’m hardly precious, my boy. I’m an old servant, is all I am. I’m a vagrant and a mischief-maker. Do you know what I think?”
“What, sir?”
“I think you should walk far and wide. I think you should search Broadway and beyond. I think you should search the entire world.”
“That would be hard for me, sir.”
“Not all at once, not in a single night. I suspect you’re something of a poet yourself. I suspect you’ll spend your life searching.”
Lucas’s heart caught. He needed the money now. He said, “Oh, I hope not, sir.”
“You’ll see, you’ll see. The search is also the object. Do you know what I mean by that?”
“No, sir.”
“You will, I think. When you’re older, you will.”
“I need, sir—”
“What do you need?”
“I need to know which way to go.”
“Go where your heart bids you.”
“My heart is defective, sir.”
“It’s not in the least defective. You can believe me on that account.”
Lucas flinched. He thought he might weep. He hoped Walt couldn’t see the tears rising in his face.
Walt said softly, “Would you like me to give you a direction?”
“Oh, yes, sir. Please.”
“All right, then. Go north. Go up to the edges of the city and beyond. Go see where the buildings diminish and the grass begins.”
“Should I?”
“It’s as good a way as any. If you want instructions, I give them to you. I hereby tell you to walk north.”
“Thank you, sir.”
“Will you come here tomorrow?” Walt asked. “Will you meet me here at the same time tomorrow night and tell me what you’ve found?”
“Yes, sir. If you’d like.”
“I’d like it very much. I don’t meet someone like you every day.”
Lucas said, “A child said—”
Walt joined him, and they spoke together. They said, “What is the grass? fetching it to me with full hands; how could I answer the child? I do not know what it is any more than he.”
“Good night, sir.”
“Good night, Lucas. I hope you’ll come back tomorrow. I’ll be here, waiting.”
“Thank you, sir.”
Lucas turned and walked away. He went north, as Walt had told him to. He strode up Broadway, past the stores and hotels. Presently he turned and saw that Walt stood watching him. Lucas raised his hand in salute. Walt returned the gesture.
He had gone looking for money and found Walt instead. Walt had sent him north.
Lucas continued up Broadway. He went past Union Square and farther, until the grand buildings dwindled and there were fewer and fewer people, until fields spread out around him, lit here and there by the lights of farmers’ cottages and more brightly by the windows of important houses, houses of brick and limestone, that stood proudly in the flatness and quiet. He passed like a ghost along the road, which was sometimes paved and sometimes not. He passed a house of particular grandeur, with a stone front and a white portico. He saw within (they did not draw their curtains, so far away) a regal woman in a white gown, lifting a goblet of ruby wine, standing before a portrait of herself in the same gown. A man came and stood beside her, a man in a waistcoat. His chin came to a sharp point—no, his beard was the color of his skin, and the hair on his head was the color of his skin. Lucas thought the man would appear in the portrait, too, but he did not. The man spoke to the woman, who laughed and gave him her goblet to drink from. In the portrait, she continued looking out serenely.
Lucas watched them. The dead might be present and absent like this, in the world but not of the world. The dead might wander as Lucas wandered, past the windows of strangers, looking in at a woman and a picture of a woman.
He left the man and the woman and the woman’s picture. He passed other houses. Through another window he saw the crown of a chair and a framed mirror that showed him the crystal drippings of a chandelier. He saw a farmer’s wife pass out of her door and pause, gathering her shawl. He saw an opossum that walked as he did, along the road. The opossum went alongside him with her quick, humping gait, unafraid, like a companion, for fifty or more paces, then slipped away, pausing to show him the pale, articulate line of her tail.
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