Free Gob's Grief by Chris Adrian

line moved forward, until at last Walt got a good long stare at the dead man, at the coffin of wood and lead and silver and velvet, at the flowers—scarlet azaleas and double nasturtiums, white japonicas and orange blossoms and lilacs. The body had been out for many hours by the time Walt saw it. The face had begun to show wear—perhaps, Walt thought, from the pressure of all those thousands and thousands of pairs of eyes that had beheld it. The jaw had dropped, the lips had fallen open slightly to reveal the teeth. An undertaker leaned forward next to Walt and discreetly dusted the face, but this only made it look worse.
    Walt stared and stared, holding up the line, fascinated by the dead gray face. A lady behind him gave a polite shove. Her child, horrified by the disagreeable face, was weeping, and she wished to move on. Walt gave her a slight bow, but as he turned to walk away he heard a voice calling his name, Walt, Walt, Walt. He turned back to the lady.
    “Did you speak?” he asked her, though it wasn’t a lady’s voice he’d heard. She shook her head no, and motioned again for him to please move on. Walt looked once more at the late President’s face, at the lips hanging open. As he walked away he heard the voice, plaintive now, Walt!
    For weeks the voice would only speak his name. Back in Washington, it would call to him as he sat at his desk in the Patent Office. He’d had a new job since January, working as a clerk in the Department of the Interior. Walt , the voice would say, and he would look up at the Indians waiting serenely to see some undersecretary, sitting lofty and remote in their necklaces and feathers and paint. “Did you speak?” Walt would ask them.
    The voice kept calling Walt’s name, all through the summer, and after. It called to him at his job in the Attorney General’s office, procured for him by a friend after he was fired (for the sake of his Leaves) from the Department of the Interior. Day and night he heard it, waking, sleeping, and dreaming, and he thought it was his brother until he knew it was Hank, and he named it Hank, and then it spoke to him sweetly and at length, no longer just calling his name. And until he named it, it was his fear that the voice was a symptom of a sick mind, but this concern slowly melted away, until it did not matter to him if his mind was decaying into madness, so long as the voice kept speaking. What did you think? the voice asked him. Did you think I would leave you?
    It was one of Hank’s virtues that he never told Walt what to do. The living Hank had been a great and incessant demander—Walt, fetch me some ice; Walt, I got an itch on my back, roll me over and see to it; get me a pipe; get me a bird; get me a picture of a French girl, naked. But Hank’s voice never asked for anything. It offered salutations in the morning. It commented on the beauty of a beautiful day. Death had changed Hank’s appreciation of Walt’s poetry—the voice spoke Walt’s own words back to him, or offered him new ones, a generous muse. But it never asked for anything, it never once gave a command until the autumn of ’68, when Walt was in New York, having a sort of vacation.
    In Manhattan, if it was very pleasant outside, Walt would take a trip on a stage. Nearly all the Broadway drivers were his personal friends. They’d let him ride for free if he didn’t insist on paying—he’d ride for hours and hours and pay multiple fares. You see everything , Hank said the first time they took such a trip together. It was true—there were shops and splendid buildings and great vast windows, sidewalks crowded with richly dressed women and men, superior in style and looks to those seen anywhere else. It was a perfect stream of people.
    One day in October, Walt took Hank for a ride on the Belt Line. They got on in the early afternoon and rode round and round along its course, circumnavigating the lower reaches of Manhattan, going down along the Hudson River docks, up