“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.

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